Encounters at the End of the World

We saw Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog tonight. It was a very interesting , if a bit unfocused doc about Antarctica and the researchers and explorers who go there, to the end of the earth, as they describe it and why. All of them seemed to be people who had either always or late in life begun to avoid mving through normal normal channels. They are all people who brought themselves to mroe and mroe desolate locales, as if searching for the blankest wasteland, the closest place to a blank page, an empty white spot on the map, perhaps to see themselves better, without the distractions or distortions of normal social life, perhaps to see themselves completely unadorned with pre-exiting social ideas, and some f them seem to want to see the world more clearly by traveling to its most forbidding, least inhabited place, the last place left untouched by human hands, to understand man's effect on the world, and his place there. It's not really clear what his point was with the movie; in Grizzly Man he made a film about a misguided nature conservationist who tries desperately to believe that nature is pure, and inherently meaningful, and ultimately wound up failing to imprint a western, human conception of 'meaning' on something far beyond man's scope. It's not clear if Hezog made this movie because he feels these researchers have a less deluded idea of nature, if they succeeded where Timothy Treadwell failed, or if he is also mocking them. His narration is so heavy, bleak and Teutonic, it always sounds like he's making fun of the person speaking, or perhaps himself.
I love watching movie with Beans, and I love going to dinner, where we can feel anonymous in a crowd, our little conversation made private by the drowning rush of babble around us, and talk about books and movies together at dinner. She's so smart, and not just academically, rigorously smart, but unaffectedly curious and thoughtful. She's just as smart, as educated, as socially-concerned and as disinterested in academia, as me. Intellectually we're on not just a level playing field, but we have the same level of interest in the game: as as enjoyable, cooperative activity.