LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMP Talk |
by Bill Sievert |
A Technologically Illogical Future
The movement by several state legislatures to slam the brakes on motorists who use hand-held cell phones is good news to me. A couple weeks ago, I got quite a scare when a teenager barely avoided crashing her car into mine as she raced out of a parking lot without looking at the street. Even after she screeched to a halt an inch from my driver's side door, she refused to acknowledge her failure to pay attention. In fact, as she waited for me to pass by, she never skipped a beat in her chattering and giggling into the phone. Perhaps she was afraid that, if she apologized, she would get a piece of my mind about the use of cell phones by driversand people in a lot of other situations. Two summers ago, this column first discussed the unpleasantness of those who disturb the peace of the rest of us by engaging their cell phones on the beach, in intimate restaurants and especially in movie houses. The problem has since become so commonplace in theaters that I now often wait six months to rent a new film rather than pay top dollar to have my concentration disrupted by rude folks who can't resist the call of technology. It's not only young people who are at fault. One of my worst run-ins came a couple months ago during a screening of Memento. The plot is complicated enough without having to listen to an elderly, frail-looking man in front of me hollering into his cell phone. At first, I thought the call he received might have been an emergency, but he failed to leave his seat and persisted in a loud voice for several minutes: "I don't know what time it's over!" he yelled. "Well, we could just pick up a roasted chicken for dinner! Or did you say you want to cook?" When I threatened to have him thrown out of the theater, he threatened back: "You get a manager, and I'll kill you!" Just what I wanted to hear during a tense murder mystery, a death threat. If he had killed me, he probably would have defended his action based on his First Amendment right to telecommunications portability. He might even have won acquittal. The basic problem is that, in a quest for technological advancement, human beings often forget to be logical about the consequences of their creativity. One of this summer's major motion pictures addresses the issue so well that a trip to the Cineplex to see it is actually worth the intrusions of ringing cell phones. The movie is A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and it's one of the finest major-studio films to come along in years. Having accepted Stanley Kubrick's challenge to take on his beloved but unfulfilled project, Steven Spielberg succeeds in bringing A.I. to the screen in a manner that befits the legacies of both filmmakers. We experience a haunting new chapter in Kubrick's dark vision of a dangerous future (2001... and A Clockwork Orange), a world in which humanity is losing its soul to its own cleverness. Yet we rarely lose sight of Spielberg's cautious optimism that something good can happen despite man's frightful conflicts with his machinery. At a moment in the movie when our nerves have been rattled by human unkindness, Spielberg serves up some of the golly-gee optimism of The Wizard of Oz, a film to which A.I. repeatedly pays homage. The sight of young David (Haley Joel Osment) and his smart little bear pal Teddy skipping confidently along a perilous path behind Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) is a delight to behold. While the sets in A.I. are sumptuously surrealistic, Spielberg often allows them to look like stage sets. The visual approach is a wonderful throwback to an era before filmmakers shot on exotic locations or used whiz-bang special effects to create their looks. Here, Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminksi and the wizards at Industrial Light Magic employ colorful but simple staging techniques to wrap us in the bubble of each strange new place we visit. This is particularly true of the fantastic Rouge City, the Emerald City of the future. For all the references to and inspiration from great movies of the past (those aforementioned, plus the director's own E.T. and Close Encounters), A.I. takes us places we've not been before. The film also raises enough questions about the nature of life and planetary survival to keep us thinking for a long time. The most impressive aspect of A.I. is the astonishing acting of Haley Joel Osment. This young man, wonderful in The Sixth Sense, takes us so deeply into the cyber-character of David that one may begin to wonder whether Osment himself is quite human. His performance practically demands to be rewarded with the Oscar for best leading male performance. In a supporting role, Jude Law rips up the screen as Gigolo Joe, a dashing dandy of a "mecha" (mechanical man). Spielberg has said that it will be several more years before Hollywood technicians can create credible human-like characterseven robotic oneswith computers. Still, that day is fast approaching, and I am grateful that film viewers in the future will be able to look back at these performances by Osment and Law to see what human actors actually were capable of doing without gimmickry. The human fascination to replace itself with gimmickry is what this film is all about. Ultimately, A.I. is more tragedy than comedy; the tension in its humor sparks mostly nervous laughter. Particularly disturbing is the second of the film's three chapters, when David is left to his own devices to survive a "Flesh Fair." Who exactly are the bad guys here? Are they the strange "mecha" robots who have been produced to outnumber human beings? Or, are the real villains the human leaders of a sad grass-roots movement to preserve organic people on a planet ever less hospitable to them? A.I. left me both exhilarated and a little melancholy, saddened by how fast time passes (even a millennium or two is but a moment in the grand scale the movie proffers) and how little time our species may have left. For all of mankind's advancements in knowledge, our lasting legacy might be as perishable as snow on a sunny day. Oh well, one brief day at a time. Today I must struggle with some advanced technology of my own, a new computer. I swear that my old Windows 95 software allowed me more choices with fewer procedures than does my new improved ME (Millennium Edition). Then again, this computer can do many things my old one couldn't. For one, it can "burn CDs." But why would I want to do that? As an advocate of free expression (except by cell phone), I would no sooner destroy musical recordings than I would burn books. Perhaps I need to read a few more pages of ME's owner manual before technology completely overtakes my senses. Bill Sievert was last seen downloading all his old 1995 software into his new 2001: A CyberSpace Odyssey model computer. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 11, No. 9, July 13, 2001. |