The Matrix

The Matrix raised many questions about reality and the manipulative powers of technology, which I similarly plan to use in my final film creation. In the same way that the "Agents" function in The Matrix, as a government that has come into power because they were more powerful and able to use human bodies as batteries for their existence, I plan to portray the U.S. government as sucking the life out of the young minds of American children in order to fuel their own operations in efforts for world domination. Neo plays the role of world savior because he "The One" who will see through the technology and be able to read the Matrix world, manipulating it to his will. This type of control over the technology could only be aquired by a human. I often found with the films in this class that humanity suprassed its trials or that humans over came the invasive technology they created, just as Neo over powers the Agents. I wonder why humans continue to create technology, that they eventually simply have to fight down or destroy in many cases in order to proctect the human race. It makes me think if we CAN stop ourselves or if the possibilities and unknowns, even if the poorer outcome seems inevitable, are too tempting to stop and ourselves. If the inevitability of our technology overpowering the human race becomes statistically inevitable like, for instance, global warming, would people respond to it and begin to prevent the destructive powers of technology? Or, as with global warming, because technology (like pollution) has been on a gradual decrease and the reprecussions have been seemingly insignificant in comparison to the positive contributions techonology has played in society, will be sit by and watch our own computers destroy us.

The Matrix opens many intersting questions, and addresses a similar, yet still serious issue of whether humans will continue to be able to control out machines. I think the control is completely possibly, but whether we begin to see how necessary it is to take statistics or even these types of creations of the imagination (these movies) seriously, and watch ourselves--that is another question. Whether we will understand the subtle signs and be able to be moderate with our power, seems inevitably to indicate that we will not because history shows that humans want power, world domination, not in fictiosn and movies, but in reality, in war.

If we create machines to function like the human mind, then they too will find the need for domination, greed, and power, just as humand kind historically has proven to suffer. Therefore, humanity's greed and un-checked progress with technology seems to predict that we will create machines that think like us, and in our most advanced moments, act like us, and find a way to conquer the human body, just as it shows to do in The Matrix.

Truman Show

The issue in The Truman Show that applied most to this class, I think, was the problem with reality verses performance. For the actors/actresses on the show, their work was their life, and this is often the case with work-aholics. However, their work was a life, not just life in that it consumed all of their time and mental energy, but that it was their only life-the family, friends, home, etc. In the movie, no other life is revealed for these people. It is odd because so much of the town in the show is a set, unreal, yet these actors and actresses that have a permanent role in the show have to live it as if it were real. They miss out on reality as much if not more than Truman. I know we have discussed how the show is real-life for Truman, therefore he is the only true aspect of the show-the only thing that is truly interesting for that reason. However, his concept of reality is so off base that he is not exactly real, or he is not exactly contemporary American possibly. It would be more like watching a man in a foreign space, speaking English, and living in a very old/traditional town. But, his world lacked many realities such as sponteneity, exploration, true coincidence and pure free will. In that way Truman sounds like a slave. But, back to my concern with the actors/actresses. They have the knowledge of what the real world is like, looks like, acts like. It is never discussed whether they leave the set or not, but they are not sheltered like Truman. Therefore, they are aware of all the falsity and inaccuracy in this created world and life, making work not just life or a lifestyle, but a fake, unreal life, false to the real world. How or why would these people choose this world? Perhaps they desire the money, the fame, but this created world is obnoxiously fixed and fake to the point that it appears that the actors/actresses have become a kind of brainwash case convinced that the life they lead is good and noble. The life they lead preserves a lie, and imprisons a man, an American (emphasis on the freedom of Americans), in a dome for his whole life, for entertainment!

Conceiving Ada

This film, for me, was the most complicated in the ways it used technology because it made some leaps that I think were not entirely accounted for. Specifically, the use of an agent, the bird Charlotte, to move through time, bringing Ada's time to life, back into action for Emmy to interact with. However, I do not think this jump hurt the film much because the key was the interaction between Emmy and Ada, which gave the film its meaning. In the end Ada is not sure that she wants a half life in the year 2000, 166 years in the future. The legacy of her brilliance and the continuation of her studies becomes less important to Ada as she lies on her death bed, contemplating her life. The importance of the technology, more than being able to contact the past, is the steps that have all lead up to where the world is headed. Ada's creation of tech. language such as the word "system" was a significant contribution to the direction people took when approaching computer language and coding. Similarly, the ground breaking leaps Emmy appears to be making with her knowledge will impact the future of technology. The connection between these two women is a symbol of the connections between the past and the present through technology. Their live interaction demonstrates how the past actually impacts the future and how the future shines a light back on the past revealing more about the past via what resulted from it. The film shows how people like Ada started and knew they were doing something important, without being able to see the fruit of their knowledge. This retrospective look speaks to the present, reminding the brilliant minds of today, or even people with just a good idea that ideas and beginnings like Ada's can change the future of society and the world, perhaps not in this lifetime, but eventually everybody's contribution has some impact on the way people see the the world, and what the future will become.

Johnny Mnemonic

What interested me most about Johnny Mnemonic was the ghost inside the computers. If a person had complete access to all information in a computer, he/she could help guide as the computer ghost does in the movie. Actually, as I am reflecting, of course people have access to all information stored on computers, which is a very scary concept. In the movie the ghost is a woman, the former CEO of Pharmacom, who died and, according to some 2006 legal citizenship order, gained a second existence in the computer. In the case of the computer ghost, she can only share information with people who are on/at computers; where as the people with access to computers today can retrieve the information and use them in the real world.
It seems ambiguous who the ghost means to help in the movie, though the main cause it to make sure the cure becomes available and that Pharmacom does not hide or destroy it. Today, the people given permission, I suppose, such as CIA/FBI, to access all information in order to benefit society and serve people. I think this is a more utopian view of accessing knowledge, and though not much in the film appears utopian in the least, I would argue that the spirit installed into the computer benefitted all involved in the movie, for the benefit of society. I do not know how personal information is used by those privileged to it today; I hope for the best. But once anyone can access the information, it becomes vulnerable to hackers and people who would use it against the benefit of humanity. It is an interesting issue I think has not been broached in class because it looks at a more beneficial aspect of a concept that absolutely has negative aspects, but what great changes and advances do not have an other side to them. This is not a new concept, information being accessible to unwanteds, but the more we depend on technology the more gets put in computers and the more vulnerable we all are to the misuse of information far beyond ID theft and any consequences we experience today. The more information is used to benefit society, the more vulnerable society is the its exposure, as we have already shown in this class.

Total Recall

During class discussion, I admit, I was frustrated by any presumptions about what was or was not real or a virtual reality, just as I was frustrated by my classmate's assurance that Harrison Ford's character in blade runner was a replicant. I think these aspects of the films are meant to be ambiguous and leave interpretation up to the viewer. It is reassuring, I suppose, to look online and see that a director or producer had the intentions that the viewer interpreted (correctly therefore); however, as with literature, the final product and the experience of the viewer/reader contains the ultimate meaning. I am sure it is quite a challenge for a producer to create the exact effect he/she aims for, and intentional or unintentional ambiguity often adds, rather than detracts, from the meaning contained in a film. Many concepts can be defined by what they are not, which has come into hand when looking at cyborgs versus humans. We tend to say cyborgs are not human because they are part machine, but then ask if a human that is part machine is necessarily a cyborg.
In Total Recall, I found that Verhoeven left so many hints and clues as to whether or not Doug was in reality or virtual reality, that he surely must have meant to leave his audience pondering. I do not think any determinations can be proven. In the end Doug comments on the blue sky on mars just as the Recall scientists remark about blue skies on mars being part of his implant. However, before visiting Recall Doug dreams about the woman who is the same exact woman who is in the rest of the movie on mars. This glitch removes, for me, the possibility of a disconnectedness between his ordinary life before Recall and his virtual or real reality on mars after Recall. Likewise, Sharon Stone's character, especially when she appears in his reality or virtual reality, meaning to bring him back to reality with the Recall doctor, persuades me to believe that Doug was not stuck in a virtual reality he was creating himself, but rather that in this futuristic world Doug is a super-secret agent.
When I first saw Total Recall as a kid with my dad, I watched it like a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie in which the bad guess try to disguise themselves and ruin the hero by making him believe it was all virtual reality, a dream. As a student, closely watching the film, I am still more persuaded by my initial reaction, than to believe that his virtual vacation that he bought from Recall created this experience and that after the two weeks he will be living with his wife as a construction worker, with these fond memories implanted in his mind. That does not seem to satisfy anything, or fit with the movie. The two possibilities I deem fathomable are that Doug never enters virtual reality, and Total Recall is more of a James Bond flick, or that the entire movie is the dream from start to finish in which he is given fictitious identity with a wife and a job to make his entire experience more real and believable. But, my second possibility has the same consequences as the one I removed. How can Doug return to whatever life he starts out in, after his two week experience in virtual reality, if he dreams and believes his wife wasn't his wife, and that he loves this woman on mars? If the virtual reality experience is supposed to blend in with reality, be nearly indistinguishable from real memories, then the experience should not be so different or detached, or completely alter Doug's reality so that when he wakes up he has to separate it as a different life or just a movie he watched in which he is the star. As I said, it obviously is a frustrating circumstance for me, and I do enjoy it because it provokes thought, criticism, and theory, as any good work of art ought to, even if it does star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Blade Runner

In class last week several people expressed certainty about Deckard's being a replicant based on references online and to Ridley Scott's own words. One of the premises used to support this argument, or statement, referred to the unicorn dream; however, we never discussed, and those people never revealed, what they thought that dream actually signified. I suppose the dream is there as an answer to the actual question, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" If Ridley Scott chose to use Deckard's dream as the answer, then Deckard is an android and the answer is "no," which leads to more questions than answers.

However, the unicorn dream may actually be calling attention to the question, not answering it. In drawing the audience into the question of whether or not Deckard is human, Ridley Scott portrays him dreaming, and a dream about a unicorn can not be an implanted memory because that is not a real-world/life image. Therefore, if Deckard is human his dream signifies the greater distance between humans and cyborgs by calling attention to the originality of a human dream vs. the unknown of what happens to an android when it sleep. Or, if Deckard is actually a replicant, the dreams signifies that cyborgs do not dream of electric sheep. I think an alternate title for the movie could have played with the title of the book more, saying something like, "What if Androids Dream of Unicorns?" Although, that would ruin the ambiguity about Deckard's identity, it more precisely addresses what this concept insinuates. What is the difference between an android, specifically the replicants in Blade Runner, and a human being? Why, for my part, was I so unsure of Deckard's origins?

I do not know if Ridley Scott meant the audience to know one way or the other, and though I realized the question was there, I did not draw any conclusions from the imagery in the movie. I saw that Deckard had a rare human ability to recognize replicants, something a cyborg could be programmed to be able to do. I saw that he had a strange attraction for Rachel, even though he knew she was a cyborg. He apparently felt that being a cyborg, or non-human, did not diminish her value or potential for humanity, emotions and love. However, he showed strong emotions towards her, a human quality. He was weaker than the other cyborgs, but maybe he was just an older model. He did not have a fear of death as the other cyborgs, the Nexus6 generation, had to fear, and those specifics were never clarified. If Deckard could be seen as a human, his dream calls attention to the question about the differences between android and human; however, even as a human, his actions and attraction to replicants suggests a close link between man and robot. The human body is "created," given that it develops into the grown-up shapes that the replicants are originally produced as, but the organs and functions of the body, given time to learn, develop, and experience, are all the same yet unique for each body, human or replicant. A cold, reserved person may seem more mechanical than a four-year-old android, and an android left to live as long as it will would, according to the movie, become unidentifiable as an android. Therefore, the unicorn dream does seem to answer the question, that, whether Deckard is human or not, androids are not so different from human beings that they dream of electric sheep. And , if Deckard is meant to be a replicant, then they not only dream of real sheep, but dream of creations of the imagination like unicorns, which suggests the infinite potential of the human body once endowed with life, human or non-human, to create, imagine, and be like-human.

All of this seems to lead to more questions such as how much "life" do we endow into robots, machines, computers? How like-human are machines; how like-machines are humans; how valued will/should human creation and imagination be when machines have their own minds to create unicorns and dream; how do we make machines that dream and do we want to? And, can any of these questions be answered?

Tron

The issues of corporation, originiality, and individuality, as presented in Tron, have become prominent in our world of technology. I wish I had the background knowledge to throw out names and company names as we did in class; however, the everyday consumer sees the limits (in selection) in technology consumerism when shopping for a computer, an ipod, or any technological-breakthrough product. Tron made me think about the authors, the creators of technology, and in thinking of names mentioned in class, the big names, I am sure there are hundreds of names lost in the process of production and sales that are the artistic inspiration and originiality behind the progress of technology, even behind the big names. Just as in THX1138, today names are lost, individuality blended behind the black and white brief-case-like laptops everyone carries around. Come to think of it, we all have a "screename" or some chosen expression of our identities on computers (that usually includes a number or two) that comes to represent the individual like a number among millions online, like THX1138. However, the names we give ourselves represents the individual behind it, just like a name, allowing individual expression and identity to continue to exist in a digital world.
The world in Tron, in incorporating reality and humans into the world of systems, bites, and programs, presents a concern for the individual and his/her ownership of ideas, while at the same time representing individuals within technology. This correlation between people in the real world and pieces of a system inside the computer relates the concept of how the user impacts and individualizes the piece of that system he/she controls. Representing the pieces inside with the same actors that play characters on the outside expresses an ownership and the reponcibility of a "user" to his/ her program. This connection not only accomplishes recognition for creators and artists, but suggests a greater meaning behind what people put into machines and computers. The pieces of an individual that they put into a creation(specifically into a computer) are still representative of the individual, whether digitized or still inside a person's head as an original idea. In this light, the representation of an individual as the pieces he she controls, as a user, in the computer, conveys a close connection between people and programs, one that would encourage people to express themselves through computers, computer games, and digital technology.