I first encountered “Surrogates” when one of the curvy blondes hired to cripple the intergalactic young brains at New York Comic Con handed me a black postcard featuring an evenly tanned, non-bald Bruce Willis. Bruce also appeared to have a metal neck. Hm. I turned it over, read the marketing copy, and immediately decided that this movie was about Facebook. Yeah, that Facebook.
Then the preview began to show, and the posters of pulchritudinous people with titanium endoskeletons started to pop up in subway stations. And I would point to them and turn to whomever I was with and casually say, “Oh that’s that movie about Facebook.” Most of them assumed I was joking or were just plain confused. By all appearances, this was an action movie, not a montage of Jesus-fish wall graffiti and What Lawn Ornament Are You? results. (Flamingo, if you were curious.)
Having now seen it, I hold my ground: this movie is about Facebook. (OK, and Twitter and Second Life and WoW, etc.)
The concept itself, however, I’d come across in The Time Before Facebook, in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, which I had been reading just as Facebook was trickling its way to the Midwest. The book housed about 10 pages devoted to the hypothetical rise and fall of the hypothetical video-phone. There’s a great little synopsis at conversationalreading.com, which I’ll copy here:
Basically it works like this: First consumers flock to the technology. However, they soon notice the drawback — now the person you are talking to on the phone can see you…[C]onsumers develop horrible complexes about appearing ugly on their video phones. Soon new technology enables users to “upgrade” their appearance, and this idea runs away until eventually there is an entire industry built around providing fake appearances to hardwire into video-phones. At this point people realize that for all intents and purposes they’re right back where they started, voice-only phone communication, and the bottom drops out of the video-phone market.
Apparently, Mr. Wallace saw it when he wrote this way back in 1994-that technology was allowing people to carefully manipulate and craft their outward appearances. He saw how easy it was for the Marketing Gods to pray on our vanities.
These days, Facebook is the ultimate tool for persona-honing. We can choose our most flattering picture. We can fake our interest in soccer. We can de-tag that one photo where we’re violating the coat rack. We can elicit desired reactions from peers with carefully vague status updates. Moreover, we can present ourselves how we want to be seen, and almost believe that it’s true. And that’s what “Surrogates” is all about, underneath the action.
I should probably talk about the movie now.
It is not the future; it is an alternate history, and it's now. Technology has evolved that lets us sit in a chair all day and control our better-lookin' mechanical selves, remotely enjoying all the senses (except maybe taste?) that we'd enjoy if we were using our actual bodies. Your "surry" can look however you'd like it to look. Most people have chosen to look like Mario Lopez. I guess flawless and vacant is totally in. Murder rates have plummeted to almost non-existent. War has essentially become an awesome, expensive game of multiplayer Halo.
There's also a small Ving-Rhames-helmed percentage of the population that has resisted. They live in a roped-off section of town called "The Human Quarter" or something nauseatingly cornball like that. They're hairy and poor and they're ugly and they don't get invited to anything these days. But they insist that surrogacy is evil and they wave sticks around and promise Revolution. Psshh. Yeah right, Humans. What match are you for human-controlled robots?
Well, now something strange is going on. The humans might have a weapon of some kind. A very dangerous one. For the first time in many years, the police have a 187 on their hands. Somehow, some rogue human zapped a surrogate with some Trekish contraption, overloading its circuits and killing its controller. (In Facebook terms, this would be like someone spamming your wall until you die, bleeding from the eyes.) And that person who died just happens to be the son of the inventor of surrogate technology, Mark Zuckerberg Emilio Canter. (They didn't actually give him a first name on IMDB, so I'm just going to call him "Emilio.")
So Bruce Willis gets put on the case: Where did this weapon come from? And how do the "Meat Bags" have it, when it's way too advanced for them? I mean, they're just silly humans!
Just as he's digging in, though, Bruce becomes involved in a dangerous chase. In the process, his surrogate is destroyed by the population of the Human Quarter and he's nearly killed by the zapper thing. Hospitalized, he's forced to drop the case. But c'mon. It's Bruce Willis. He's not giving up that easy. I mean, haven't they seen the Die Hards?
In the course of all this, though, he is becoming increasingly conflicted about his own surry. He hasn't seen his beloved wife in forever. Just her goddamn robot. His son died years ago in a car accident, and this is how his wife is dealing with it. She hides behind her veneer. He thinks that she shouldn't though. You can read it in his eyes when he wanders into his son's old room and caresses his little baseball glove. Then he just goes all Zach Morris on her later, as they argue in her workplace: "Baby, I want you. This isn't you. Come back to me." But she's all like "This is better." and just "unplugs" mid-conversation. (Which makes for intriguing possibilities in connubial exit behavior. Because, really, what do you do? Continue to talk to this powered-down hot robot?)
You can probably see where this is all headed. Leather jacket comes out. Bruce Willis goes vigilante. Zuckerberg goes bananas. There's a Revolution. There's a Conspiracy. A Personal Epiphany. A Ticking Clock. A Decision. A Dramatic Climax, and then--what's that I hear? Laughter? From everyone in the theater? Whoops, I don't...uh...I don't think that was supposed to be funny.
But it kinda was.
"Surrogates" takes itself way too seriously. It wants to be an allegory with guns like "The Matrix" was an allegory with guns. There are even what could be construed as nods to "The Matrix"--the style of running in the chase scenes, the leather jacket on the "free" character vs. the suits on the surrogates, the bolt-belching ray gun, the angle of recline in the sim chairs--but the coherence of the film's world couldn't approach the level of "The Matrix." There were too many questions, too many improbabilities, and thus the alternate universe appeared thrown together. When that happens, "dramatic" becomes "ridiculous."
The movie's ambitions are laudable. It's helping to get across an important message about remembering who we are and the necessity for real human connection, but it could've maybe done without the tired end-of-the-world framework. Perhaps a more even-handed, cerebral approach should be employed when implying that we'd be better off without our online communities. But then probably no one would've seen it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go post this review and wait for people to tell me they care, or at least that I'm wrong.
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