The future, as a concept, is one of the most compelling ideas we have: the past can be reflected on, the present is before our eyes, but the future is where our hopes and dreams, as well as our fears and nightmares, reside. As it is imagined in science fiction, it is a world of dystopias and utopias, of world-ending apocalypses and of new vistas for human thriving. It is almost a spiritual realm, incorporeal while at the same time very real. What we put our faith in, what we believe in, is what we hope will deliver the future we desire.
Technology and the Future
Technology is closely connected with the future as the propellant that pushes us forward as well as the source of what we desire or fear to meet in that future. Given how closely allied technology, the future, and our spiritual sensibilities are, it is no wonder that when a new technology comes along that shows some promise, so much soon becomes expected of it. When inevitably those expectations are not realized, at least not as quickly as we had hoped, the initial enthusiasm flags and we realize we have completed yet another boom/bust cycle based on technological hype.
Reading old interviews that focus on predictions about technology, such as this one with Bill Gates, gives you a sense of how these hype cycles play out, standing at a safe distance in the future they were anticipating. In many cases, a technology that is successful ends up taking a more mundane role in the world than the initial hype would lead you to expect, becoming so ubiquitous that it fades into the background, part of the technological scenery too familiar to take notice of. At one time CD ROMs were an exciting development; the ability to distribute data on the order of hundreds of megabytes opened seemingly unlimited new possibilities for games, multimedia, entire encyclopedias on a disc! Word processors and spreadsheets were once exciting new ideas, with many competing products vying in the marketplace. Today “word processor” basically means Microsoft Word, and “spreadsheet” means Excel, both of which are widely used but do not generate much buzz.
In other cases we have a tortoise and hare situation: the hype far outruns the reality, but the reality steadily trods on after the hype has exhausted itself. The dot com bubble was driven by unrealistic short-term expectations about internet commerce, yet it was not wrong to believe that the internet was the future. The hype around cryptocurrencies has recently been given a dunking in cold water; whether that means that a fad has ended or whether we are still headed for a world where some form of digital currency is our standard means of exchange remains to be seen.
Dreams That Don’t Die
There is a kind of technology hype that is generated by ideas so compelling that they are able to endure multiple hype cycles and resurrect, phoenix-like, in a new incarnation, once technological advances have brought us a little closer to the dream. Artificial Intelligence may be the quintessential example of technology driven by such dreams. AI is currently enjoying a rebirth, a springtime after the AI winter; see, for example, the popularity of machine learning algorithms. We dream of robot servants and maybe robot friends, and even if right now we must be satisfied with ML driven recommendation engines, that is just another step on the road to having tea with C3P0.
Next to AI, Virtual Reality may be the most compelling idea of the technological imagination. The idea of a world parallel to our own is nothing new to humanity, which has dreamed of faery lands, gloomy underworlds and golden paradises since its beginnings. These ideas have a technological counterpart in the idea of a world within the machine, in which our mundane reality is replaced with one built by our own imaginations.
Also like AI, VR is again generating interest after its initial wave of excitement during the 90’s. Back then we had the Virtual Boy; today we have the Oculus Rift. Today we have Ready Player One, then we had The Lawnmower Man.
Virtual Realities and Lawnmowers
1992’s The Lawnmower Man is an interesting piece of media from that decade for a number of reasons. Briefly, it is a science fiction horror film starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, featuring extended scenes of computer generated imagery. These CGI scenes are meant to portray the virtual world of VR, and although comically primitive by today’s standards they were likely impressive to viewers of the time.
Note that while I am not going the summarize the plot in any detail, neither am I going to try to keep spoilers out of this discussion.
The World Within the Machine
The Lawnmower Man is another entry in the canon of what could be considered a micro-genre of sci-fi movies about “the world within the machine,” films that attempt to present the (at the time) new realm of computing technology as a world apart from our own, obeying its own logic. Other examples would be Tron and The Matrix.
While not terribly successful in terms of the common criteria for movie watching, The Lawnmower Man is interesting as an attempt to imagine how we would experience and interact with this other world. While the CGI looks primitive and cartoonish to us today, used as we are to the current sophistication of digital imagery, it was created at a time when there were few precedents, and the creators made some interesting choices in imagining what this purely digital world would look like.
The virtual world is depicted as something similar to the way we might conceive of a world inhabited by incorporeal souls, no longer tethered by the physical constraints of mundane reality. This is a world in which you inhabit a body that is not bound by gravity or the rules of solid bodies, a body that can fly and morph its shape, floating through a landscape of geometric shapes or undulating seas of some reflective substance.
There is even a cybersex scene, depicted as two bodies melting into each other. The lover’s amorphous bodies, once melded, form into a dragonfly-like creature. Here, the body is merely a representation or symbol of the mind, rather than its embodiment.
CGI and Symbolism
It is interesting how films in the “world within the machine” genre generally have religious overtones. As mentioned above, the idea of uploading one’s mind into cyberspace has some of the connotations of spiritual transcendence, of rising above the limits of physical reality and attaining a spiritual existence in which mind has mastery over matter.
The character of Jobe—pronounced like the Biblical Job and played by Fahey—is something of a holy fool, an innocent and helpless gardener in the care of a sadistic priest. Jobe eventually ascends to godhood through the use of nootropic drugs and connection to the world of virtual reality. The ascension of Jobe is also a fall, going from the innocence of an angel to the usurping will-to-power of a Lucifer. There is even a crucifixion scene in the denouement, where Lawrence, played by Brosnan, and the cybergod-Jobe face off in the cyber realm.
Aside from being an example of early computer animation used in film, as well as an early attempt at portraying a virtual reality, there are a few other interesting bits of trivia related to this film, which we will turn to next.
Stephen King
How did a horror movie about VR get the innocuous title of The Lawnmower Man?
If you are a Stephen King fan, you might recognize the name as identical to the title of a short story included in his first collection of short fiction, Graveyard Shift. The original is a classic King story, combining the familiar, the uncanny and the horrific. It contains nothing related to VR. So are the duplicate titles merely a coincidence?
In fact, a little internet research will show that there is no coincidence: the rights to make the original story into a film were acquired, but instead of doing a direct, or even indirect, adaptation, the film makers instead decided to make a film based on a screenplay by the name of CyberGod—a title much better suited to the actual content—while retaining the title of the King story. They actually were able to incorporate pieces of the original story into the resulting film, but the connection remained loose, so much so that King himself successfully sued to have his name removed from the credits.
Jaron Lanier
I’m the sort of person who likes to know how things were made, and so I’m also the type of person to sit through the credits after watching a movie, looking at all of the job titles of the people involved in its creation.
While watching the credits scroll by for Lawnmower Man, I noticed a “Special Thanks” section, with the name Jaron Lanier at the top. The name was familiar to me as someone who has authored a number of books, one of which I have read (You Are Not a Gadget, 2011).
Lanier is an interesting guy with some interesting things to say about technology and society and the like. One of the areas that he is most closely connected with is VR—in fact, he invented the term and is considered the founder of the field, so it was not surprising to find his name used in connection with this film. It turns out that the creators of Lawnmover Man were aware of his work and it served as an inspiration for the film, and so this movie could be considered a bizarre mashup of Lanier and King.
The Mind’s Eye
One more interesting tidbit about the film: there was a series of art films released in the 90’s, known as the Mind’s Eye series, that were basically a showcase for displaying what was possible with CGI at the time. Because this was a fledgling art, the films were assembled from whatever examples of computer animation were available, and so the second entry in the series, Beyond The Mind’s Eye, included sections from The Lawnmower Man.
(As a bonus bit of trivia, the music video for Pantera’s cover of the Black Sabbath song Planet Caravan includes scenes from Beyond the Mind’s Eye. Apparently someone thought that the theme of panspermia fit with the lyrics.)
Conclusion
Can I recommend The Lawnmower Man to a contemporary audience? Not without reservation. It could be fun for someone who enjoys horror-tinged sci-fi, someone interested in CGI and how it has advanced, or someone who, like myself, is interested in how movies of the time portray the beginnings of the technological revolution we are currently enveloped in, and how nascent technologies such as VR were understood and depicted in media. Just be aware that this is a film with, as of the time of writing, a 37% on rottentomatoes.com.