Total Recall-totally hilarious

Although I could not make sense of the Rheingold reading, I did find some interesting things to observe about Total Recall, a movie which wasn’t as heinous as I imagined it would be. Actually, it was somewhat amusing.

I was struck by the use of technology in the beginning of the film to achieve the soothing and picaresque. Instead of living my a lake, Sharon Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger can just hit a button and all of a sudden they are breakfasting in view of a lovely, natural lake setting. While in many of the films we’ve viewed so far technology is viewed as ethically questionable, this use seemed rather pleasant.

The use of technology becomes unsettling when Quaid goes to visit the Recall Memory Services. They promise a “perfect” vacation with their memory implant, telling Quaid that he can avoid all the pitfalls and inconveniences of a real-life vacation. My question is, though, why would you want to miss those inconveniences? No human experience is completely perfect and one of the best nights of my life was the night I got lost walking around Venice.

I notice this movie, despite its age, encapsulates some fairly universal themes, namely the struggle for power. There were two scenes I thought were interesting for this reason. The first is when Quaid gets to the station on Mars and there is a sudden attack by insurgents. This reminded me a great deal of the situation and instability in Iraq. The scene is in Cohagen’s office, when the camera pans in on the goldfish. He, the master, drops some food in their bowl and they come running (or swimming rather), completely under his control.

The other thing I was intrigued by was the struggle to tell the real from the unreal. I felt this was enforced in the movie through lighting, sound, and in vast, industrial looking scenery.

Bladerunner

The idea that the body is no longer a sanctuary is demonstrated in the film Bladerunner and in the article, “Cyborging the Body Politic.” The film demonstrates the evasive nature of science concerning the human body. Tyrell, the company portrayed in the film, created part human/part machine creatures and then left them to their own devices, forcing them to deal with their defects on their own. I particularly liked the quote from the Dery article on page 235: “We are entering a colonialist phase in our attitudes to the body, full of paternalistic notions that conceal a ruthless exploitation carried out for its own good.” The use of the term colonialist demonstrates a separation between the body from the mind and the emotions, as though the science we inflict on our bodies is not inflicted on ourselves but on some entity separate from our true self. I believe we are all cyborgs because as soon as we put anything in our bodies, slather cream on our faces, or poke holes through our skin, we are less human and more creation. People walk around with heart monitors in their chest, fake eyelashes on their eyes, and steel rods in their spines. Whether or not these make us machines is debateable, but they do make us less human. We could also consider ourselves cyborgs because of the mechanical actions we adopt. Like a robot, many of us simply go through the motions without really thinking or feeling, whether it’s taking a shower and getting ready for work or being an employee.

Tron: The creative spirit in other areas

I'm so not a sci-fi, person. The people that know me refer to me teasingly as a technical wizard.
I didn't have as much trouble following Tron as I did TXH-1138 and I'm almost reluctant to admit that I really enjoyed the lecture on Wednesday. I think the guest speaker had a lot to do with it because he was someone I could relate to. I have several friends who survived the dot com boom and I work closely with a couple of them on the volunteer organization I'm involved with here in DC and in Chicago. Check it out at www.onebrick.org The idea of the creative vs. the corporate really resonated with me because I see it at work in our organization and it's something that comes up all the time. At heart, we are a grassroots organization but in the last couple years we generated enough interest to attain the sponsorship of a corporation in upstate New York. They have brought a decidedly corporate attitude to our little garage shop organization. Then again, we weren't so little when they came to us. By the time we got their attention we were in three cities and had about 20,000 volunteers in the combined databases. So it's never a quick fix when someone proposes to spend $1,000 of our budget even though we have the money to spend. My friend and one of the co-founders is always telling us it's just easier to keep the budget skinny than it is to try and trim it at some later date.

As we've recruited and looked for people to take on administrative duties I notice most of the people who are interested in taking on these responsibilities come work in a corporate environment and/or hold MBA degrees. So even from our own people there is the pressure to spend money, institute structural changes, etc. that more closely resemble a corporation v. a nonprofit organization. What has also always interested me about the structure of our organization is that it runs, essentially, like a business and it lacks the undesireable attributes (disorganization, lack of funding, poor staffing, etc.) of the typical nonprofit. One of the things I thought of when Michael was talking about Google and Craigslist is that while these two organizations have managed to retain the creative spirit, the creative spirit essentially is the spirit of its top leaders and if so many organizations change over time, it is often due to change in leadership. Right now we still have the original founders at the helm but I wonder if our organization will be able to sustain its momentum if those three people are no longer able to be involved. My boyfriend worked for MBNA when it was one of the most profitable companies in the country. But despite its size, the energy and the direction came all from one man: Charlie Cauley the CEO and founder. When MBNA was bought out by Bank of America, Charlie retired and the company is no longer the same.

I know I've gone on a tangent, but I did want to get to Tron. During our talk on Wednesday I also wondered about how suitable the creative personality would have been in distributing this technology to the masses. Artists are creative, but not necessarily practical. Would we be able to buy a personal computer for $300 if it had been left up to just the artist?