Your Time Will Come, Virtual Boy
Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal, huh?
X:> Matrix/Virtual_Bodies_of_Lawnmower_Men.exe
Note: Nothing I say in this blog applies to Japan. They's crazy.
If this were a standard bitingly cynical pop culture blog about the film The Lawnmower Man, I would probably spend my time musing on why Pierce Brosnan chose to perform every scene as if he had just snorted a rail of coke backstage, or deciphering Jeff Fahey’s bizarre interpretation of how to perform as a mentally-disabled character, or perhaps even itemizing the ways in which the film is one of the most strikingly homoerotic science fiction films ever made.
But it isn’t! This is an academic bitingly cynical pop culture blog. That being the case, what can this film tell us about the intersections of humanity and technology in contemporary culture?
The Lawnmower Man is a film made in 1992 cresting off of a wave of heightened interest in what I’ll refer to as ‘classical virtual reality.’ In the late ’80s and early ’90s it was widely thought that we were on the cusp of a new age of highly immersive, interactive technology. I recall every vision of futuristic entertainment involving bulky head-mounted displays and plated gloves more suited to operating a blowtorch than simulating reality. As Anne Balsamo says in her article on the subject, the buzzword was “experience:” it’s “a new kind of theatrical entertainment experience” and we have to “experience it live.” The idea wasn’t to watch it was to be in (now there’s a gender-loaded distinction…). Since then, the technology has stagnated, with mass-marketed exponents like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy failing catastrophically and more advanced units being simultaneously massively expensive (Balsamo quotes one unit as costing $250 000 in 1991) and unable to provide satisfactorily visceral experiences. Our fantasies of disembodiment continue unabated as evinced by films like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky, but we have largely left behind for the moment the belief that such advances will come in the immediate future. We are content to live our second lives at a point of remove from the screen.
This why I refer to the cyberspace The Lawnmower Man envisages as ‘classical VR.’ At the time of its creation, highly realistic computer simulations (a la Star Trek‘s holodeck) were thought of as a relatively distant fantasy, but we were eager enough to submerse ourselves in primary-coloured unrealities of the sort we see in The Lawnmower Man‘s groundbreaking FX. It’s unconvincing, but somehow more convincing than the holodeck because we had all seen demonstrations of actual machines capable of producing the basic experiences shared by Jobe and Peter in the film:
From the film
From the DOS Lawnmower Man videogame
Thus, the events seemed closer to imminence than in films which posited graphics “even better than the real thing.” These days, the conceptual view The Lawnmower Man has of VR seems very much of its time, and thus dated. One sequence that I found intriguing, however, was Jobe’s rampage through town. The majority of our conceptualizations to date about using VR to “escape from conventional reality, a way out for those who confront the severe limitations reality imposes in the form of corporate ideology, determining social structures, and the physical body itself” (Balsamo again). Yet here we have Jobe bringing cyberspace into the ‘reality’ of the film; impressed as we were in 1992 by the film’s effects, no one was even slightly misled by the ‘fire’ Jobe uses to ignite the abusive priest. Instead, cyberspace ceases to be a safety net and becomes instead a part of everyday experience. That its power is wielded by a psychopath is a danger inherent to any object or concept in real life.
I think that says something more about what we deal with today than much of the rest of the film. For every World of Warcraft shut-in there are a million others who spend more time in the real world, and the contemporary virtual realities of handheld computers and digital interfaces are always with them. The lawnmower man is in our heads…
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X:> Homoeroticism.exe
We go now to a braver future, where our love dares speak its name...
