The most terrifying commercial I've seen in a long time is an advertisement for the newest "Droid" techno-gizmo. I freely confess that I don't know what "Droid" is, though from what I've seen, I gather it's the latest and raciest in a seemingly endless line of palm-held gadgets designed to lure us away from life into a pseudo-realm of puerile, onanistic fantasy.
Anyway, in the commercial, a young guy, early twenty-ish, sits at a conference table in his office building, surrounded by his co-workers, his boss standing at the head. Our hero whips out his "Droid" and begins fooling with it. As his fingers fly ever faster over the crotch-sized keyboard, a startling, CG-assisted transformation takes place: his hands and forearms turn to shining, chrome-plated cables, and before you know it, man has become part-machine. As he completes his task and rests back in his chair, the voice-over intones: "Turning you into an instrument of efficiency."
What are we to make of this? To begin with, the masturbatory appeal of the pitch is unmistakable, with a presumably pleasurable physical transformation obtained via the agency of one's own hand. At the same time, the voice-over converts erotic pleasure into yet another business protocol: hearkening back to the efficiency system of Frederick Winslow Taylor, this commercial defines the ideal worker as the man who buries his individuality (and sexuality) in the routinized performance of corporate labor. To put it simply: you jerk off, the Company makes a killing. Work, in this commercial, is literally transformed into a fetish; sexual arousal and fulfillment arise not from human contact but from contact with, indeed inseparability from, the machine.
All of this is horrifying enough. But when you add to it the fact that the "Droid" into which our satiated worker turns strongly resembles the soulless killing machines of the Terminator movies, we've left the realm of horror and entered that of absolute, totalitarian nightmare. This commercial implies--and from what I've seen on the street and in the classroom, it's not far off--that people want to be turned into Terminators, want to surrender their humanity in the interest of corporate profit, want to lose their identity, their heart, their spirit. The Terminators are precisely what I've described above: mass-produced slave labor employed by the ultimate faceless corporate entity, the military computer Skynet; their sole reason for existence, their sole source of pleasure (if they can be said to desire or experience pleasure at all) lies in carrying out Skynet's merciless, murderous dictates. The Terminators are out to kill the human race--and they do so with perfect efficiency.
It makes me want to ask: this is what we long to become? This is our evolution as a species? This is the end of human life?
On second thought, I guess it might be.
Showing posts with label fantasy versus reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy versus reality. Show all posts
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Troubled Dreams
As summer winds to a close and the school year looms, I treated myself to a film I'd heard only good things about: Inception. I'm happy to report that the reviewers didn't lie; it's a great film, one of the best sci-fi films I've seen in a while. Maybe not quite Blade Runner or Alien quality, but right up there.
Inception is the kind of science fiction I like best: the kind that wears its science (and its fiction) lightly, with whatever visionary elements it introduces operating in the service of an investigation into what it means to be human. The film takes place in a time that could be our own, with one small but significant exception: a technology (or technique) exists whereby individuals called "extractors" can enter other people's dreams to steal information. The story revolves around the efforts of one extractor, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, to perform a reverse (and, most people believe, impossible) operation: to implant an idea in a dreamer's mind, a process called "inception." I won't go into the details of why or how he does this; suffice it to say that in order to make the implanted idea stick, he and his assistants reason that they have to go deeper into the dreamer's mind than a single layer of dreaming, not only into a dream within a dream but into a dream within a dream within a dream. Needless to say, this leads to some very cool and creepy stuff where the edges of reality and fantasy blur and nothing is quite what it seems.
Inception is full of startling, Matrix-generation visuals, where dream burglars scamper about ceilings and walls and entire cityscapes unfurl from sand and surf. But at its heart, it's not about the mind-blowing images or mind-bending plot but about two of the most basic human emotions: guilt and grief. During an early experiment in the construction of dream-worlds, it turns out, DiCaprio's wife came to doubt the reality of reality, with devastating results--and DiCaprio's character is hounded by the belief that it was he who led her down this path. Thus when he (and we) enter the dream-world, we're entering the world of trauma: a place of frozen time and deadly distortion, a place where early, awful events have produced demons from which the dreamer can neither escape nor awake. To its considerable credit, the film mostly suggests these horrors rather than divulging them; I kept waiting for the monster to pop out of the closet, but it never does. And in that sense, one is left at movie's end with an uneasy feeling akin to the characters': there's no simple resolution, no quick catharsis, just a sinking realization that the real work has yet to be done.
Maybe I saw Inception at just the right time, given my recent thoughts about reality versus fantasy, the actual against the virtual. Maybe I was drawn to it because it resembled some of my own recently published fiction, such as Your Name Here. Or maybe, in the larger sense, I saw it at the right time of life: smack in the middle, when I'm thinking about how my past has shaped my present (and how it will continue to cast its shadow on my future). Whatever the case, I know this film--like a dream--will stick with me for a long time.
Inception is the kind of science fiction I like best: the kind that wears its science (and its fiction) lightly, with whatever visionary elements it introduces operating in the service of an investigation into what it means to be human. The film takes place in a time that could be our own, with one small but significant exception: a technology (or technique) exists whereby individuals called "extractors" can enter other people's dreams to steal information. The story revolves around the efforts of one extractor, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, to perform a reverse (and, most people believe, impossible) operation: to implant an idea in a dreamer's mind, a process called "inception." I won't go into the details of why or how he does this; suffice it to say that in order to make the implanted idea stick, he and his assistants reason that they have to go deeper into the dreamer's mind than a single layer of dreaming, not only into a dream within a dream but into a dream within a dream within a dream. Needless to say, this leads to some very cool and creepy stuff where the edges of reality and fantasy blur and nothing is quite what it seems.
Inception is full of startling, Matrix-generation visuals, where dream burglars scamper about ceilings and walls and entire cityscapes unfurl from sand and surf. But at its heart, it's not about the mind-blowing images or mind-bending plot but about two of the most basic human emotions: guilt and grief. During an early experiment in the construction of dream-worlds, it turns out, DiCaprio's wife came to doubt the reality of reality, with devastating results--and DiCaprio's character is hounded by the belief that it was he who led her down this path. Thus when he (and we) enter the dream-world, we're entering the world of trauma: a place of frozen time and deadly distortion, a place where early, awful events have produced demons from which the dreamer can neither escape nor awake. To its considerable credit, the film mostly suggests these horrors rather than divulging them; I kept waiting for the monster to pop out of the closet, but it never does. And in that sense, one is left at movie's end with an uneasy feeling akin to the characters': there's no simple resolution, no quick catharsis, just a sinking realization that the real work has yet to be done.
Maybe I saw Inception at just the right time, given my recent thoughts about reality versus fantasy, the actual against the virtual. Maybe I was drawn to it because it resembled some of my own recently published fiction, such as Your Name Here. Or maybe, in the larger sense, I saw it at the right time of life: smack in the middle, when I'm thinking about how my past has shaped my present (and how it will continue to cast its shadow on my future). Whatever the case, I know this film--like a dream--will stick with me for a long time.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Is This the Real Life, or Is This Just Fantasy?
I've been posting a lot recently about the distinctions we draw--or fail to draw--between reality and fantasy. Two incidents from my vacation indicate why this discussion matters.
Incident One: I'm walking down Bearskin Neck, the peninsula that juts into Rockport Harbor, with my wife and kids. In front of us, two teenage girls are walking side by side--and each of them is texting, presumably to someone else, someone not present. They're standing inches from each other: from a real person, a real friend, a real relative, a real presence. They could have been talking to each other, putting their arms around each other, or simply enjoying the sights, sounds, and other sensations of a seaside town at night. But they, like a whole generation of young people, prefer to remove themselves from real life and to enter a fantasy world of virtual experience.
Incident Two: I'm sitting on the sand watching my wife and kids play on the raft anchored a hundred yards off the shoreline of Rockport's Front Beach. (That's at low tide; at high tide, the raft is more like three hundred yards away. I know from swimming out there with them in water that couldn't have been more than 60 degrees.) In front of me, a man sits beside his eight-year-old daughter, who's collecting beach glass. She scampers about the beach excitedly, returning to him every few moments to show her newest treasure, to ask him where she can keep it safely, to encourage him to join her. But he doesn't join her, doesn't respond to her queries, barely registers her presence. Why? Because he's fooling with some handheld wireless device, some I Touch or Black Pod or whatever the hell, the entire time. (We're talking a good hour, not just minutes.) Here's a guy with a beautiful daughter, a happy, bubbly kid who actually longs to spend time with him, on a weekend at the beach--and he'd rather monkey around with some damn fool device that takes him either hundreds of miles away, to whoever on earth he's communicating with, or (even scarier) into the timeless, placeless realm of cyberspace, with its "apps" and buttons and icons and droids unanchored to anything real, anything actually there. And this isn't a teenager--this is a grown man, an ostensible adult, choosing, once again, fantasy over reality.
When my kids came back to shore, I climbed the rocks with them. The rocks were hard, and hot, and occasionally hazardous. But they were real, and I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything.
Incident One: I'm walking down Bearskin Neck, the peninsula that juts into Rockport Harbor, with my wife and kids. In front of us, two teenage girls are walking side by side--and each of them is texting, presumably to someone else, someone not present. They're standing inches from each other: from a real person, a real friend, a real relative, a real presence. They could have been talking to each other, putting their arms around each other, or simply enjoying the sights, sounds, and other sensations of a seaside town at night. But they, like a whole generation of young people, prefer to remove themselves from real life and to enter a fantasy world of virtual experience.
Incident Two: I'm sitting on the sand watching my wife and kids play on the raft anchored a hundred yards off the shoreline of Rockport's Front Beach. (That's at low tide; at high tide, the raft is more like three hundred yards away. I know from swimming out there with them in water that couldn't have been more than 60 degrees.) In front of me, a man sits beside his eight-year-old daughter, who's collecting beach glass. She scampers about the beach excitedly, returning to him every few moments to show her newest treasure, to ask him where she can keep it safely, to encourage him to join her. But he doesn't join her, doesn't respond to her queries, barely registers her presence. Why? Because he's fooling with some handheld wireless device, some I Touch or Black Pod or whatever the hell, the entire time. (We're talking a good hour, not just minutes.) Here's a guy with a beautiful daughter, a happy, bubbly kid who actually longs to spend time with him, on a weekend at the beach--and he'd rather monkey around with some damn fool device that takes him either hundreds of miles away, to whoever on earth he's communicating with, or (even scarier) into the timeless, placeless realm of cyberspace, with its "apps" and buttons and icons and droids unanchored to anything real, anything actually there. And this isn't a teenager--this is a grown man, an ostensible adult, choosing, once again, fantasy over reality.
When my kids came back to shore, I climbed the rocks with them. The rocks were hard, and hot, and occasionally hazardous. But they were real, and I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything.
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