Doc Corner: The retro hippy futurism of 'Spaceship Earth'
Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 11:07AM By Glenn Dunks
Would you believe that I also dream about documentaries? You probably would. We surely all dream about movies in some form. Well, just a few weeks ago I found myself awakening after a dream about a (non-existent) documentary that went back to the first ever series of Big Brother and interviewed the participants—none of whom I would know or have any sort of facial recognition of as I surprisingly did not watch turn-of-the-century Dutch TV—about living in isolation and what we could all learn while in our own contemporary COVID-19 isolation.
At the time it struck me as actually quite an interesting concept, a rare occurrence of wishing I had any inclination towards actually making documentaries instead of simply watching them. I needn’t have spent the mental energy. While crass reality television isn’t the theme of Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, what it is about is the futuristic science experiment of the early 1990s known as Biosphere 2, a trial in inter-planetary life preservation that began rather improbably with a San Franciscan experimental avant-garde art troupe and ended, somehow just as improbably, with Steve Bannon.
