Fantastic Fungi

The beautifully crafted documentary Fantastic Fungi – The Magic Beneath Our Feet, by Louie Schwartzberg, serves as a paean to the often-underappreciated mushroom. Using immaculately constructed computer animated graphics, eye-popping time lapses and sumptuous photography, Fantastic Fungi does in fact manage to deliver the ‘magic beneath our feet’ through our very own TV screens. Neither animal nor vegetable, the mushroom has defied easy classification, despite many attempts by mycologists over the years. In 1767, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, published the 12th edition of his Systema Naturae. Frustrated by attempts to categorize the notoriously unclassifiable fungi, he banished a diverse selection of fungal groups to a species he called Chaos fungorum. For me, this tale speaks to the riotous marvel that is the fungal world. In conversations between scientific researchers, enthusiastic amateurs and avant-garde experimenters, fungi are at the leading edge of discovery: the quintessence of science. Discoveries, broad in place and time, are difficult to attribute to a single person; the scientific enterprise is as much about the network of learning and sharing information as it is about singular individuals. With the Internet, the distribution of information and communication is much easier. And as the film reminds us, the structure of mycelium is much like the Internet and the sharing of knowledge. However, despite a wide cast, the documentary rests much of its narrative drive around Paul Stamets – the voice of mushrooms. His 2008 TED talk, ‘6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World’, has been viewed over six million times. As a key communicator, passionate advocate and autodidact, Stamets is the epitome of an amateur scientist. This is not intended on my part to be a slur, but rather a compliment; ‘amateur’ of course comes from the Latin amare: ‘to love’. His passion infuses his work, and this film, with the spirit of enchantment and discovery – prime movers in any approach to science. Using interviews with chefs, mycologists, foresters, psychologists and psychiatrists, the documentary deftly weaves a tale of the ways in which fungi play an inextricably important role in our lives, our cultures, our medicines and our relationship to the natural world. The grand molecular decomposers of nature, fungi are given an almost mystical and sentient acclaim in the film – which may put some serious-minded viewers off. Yet as a documentary film for public consumption, Fantastic Fungi doesn’t quite untether itself from reality, but rather presents unique ideas as an invitation into discovery. This is in part due to the fact that Stamets is a masterful communicator and interviews well. Whether you like him or not, he is undeniably engaging. As he says early on in the film,