Just about every person who participated in the Biosphere 2 experiment -- and subsequently the new documentary about it, called Spaceship Earth -- talks about the scientific goals of their undertaking. As noble as these scientific aspirations were for the project, it’s pretty clear that they were secondary to more emotional and psychological interests. One of the eight members who volunteered to live inside an airlock-sealed facility for two years -- they called themselves biospherians -- recalls her first thoughts just after the door to the outside world was shut and locked on day one. She describes turning on the rain in the vegetation section of the biosphere and gaining a sense of peacefulness. She wanted to wash the air, to wash out the impurities of the world she left behind and "begin anew." She soon discovers, as do we, that it's not easy to begin anew when messy interpersonal human dynamics are involved.
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Much of the negative criticism for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s American Dharma is aimed at Morris not challenging his subject enough on his beliefs. Steve Bannon, the right-wing luminary and short-lived White House Chief Strategist to Donald Trump – just a few of Bannon’s many roles on the world stage – is allowed to present himself as a towering figure of great foresight and heroism, the critics claim. What these critics have forgotten (or possibly don’t know), is that direct confrontation isn’t Morris’s preferred mode of operation. He’s said as much in a recent interview about American Dharma:
“I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much. You create a theater, a gladiatorial theater, which may be satisfying to an audience, but if the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it. In fact, it’s the way to destroy the possibility of ever hearing anything interesting or new. I guess I don’t believe in them.”
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