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Podcast 34 discusses two
new SciFi DVDs, but neither of these is really suitable for teaching in
secondary school. So why cover these? Well, because every teacher knows
that the vast majority of Science Fiction films the students watch will
be from the local DVD library.
This podcast looks at two
DVDs with ratings or content that make their display in a middle secondary
high school unlikely (certainly in this town)
and asks, with a cry of despair in the voice, how SciFi students can
be supported to apply both a knowledgeable SF filter and a critical media
literacy perspective to their home DVD nights.
This podcast relates to
the 'Ghost in the Shell' theme area of the mySF Project: the study of human
/ machine interaction.
Surrogates,
directed by Mostow
The first of two linked
titles is director Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates (2009). Even though
it has such a spooky and Science Fictional title, Surrogates (Mostow,
2009) is just exactly the dictionary definition, it is about substitution.
The surrogates are plastic and metal substitutes for people. They are driven
by, inhabited by, voiced by actual people somewhere else, through a remote
telepresence system. So, while the plastic substitutes might harken back to
Westworld (Crichton, 1973), A.I. (Spielberg, 2001) and
Bladerunner (Scott, 1982), as noted by Pollard (2010) they are not in
the least similar. The substitutes have no intelligence and no independent
thought. They are just empty vessels that can move around and can only act
because they are driven by remote humans.
The surrogates were
developed to assist the disabled but have become a standard for all work.
The actual workers control the surrogates from couches with metal hoops
quite like those that made Brigitte Helm robotic, in Lang's Metropolis
(1927).
Into the world of
Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) comes a large problem in the shape of a
weapon developed by a defence contractor that wipes the controlling
mechanism of the surrogate as well as killing the human controller back on
their couch, a demise perhaps borrowed from the much stronger film
Brainstorm (Trumbull, 1983) and William Gibson's Black Ice from
Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995).
Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) was
based in a graphic novel but substantially reworked for the screen. Mostow
and others saw the use of substitute people that do all the actual work as
the philosophical argument behind the narrative. Mostow claims
Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) as a "metaphor for life in the digital age".
Everything can be done online and this means that "on
a human level we’re far more disconnected because we’re not really
interfacing with people in person any more” (Cistarto, 2010).
A few critics note the extrapolation of "how we interact with social
networking sites" to the premise of the wholesale use of surrogates in all
societies as fascinating and a worthy critique of a "dark, futuristic
reality" (Mellini, 2010). But even supporters of aspects of the narrative
were left with doubts.
A distraught FBI agent played by Bruce Willis beats a surrogate until its
plastic face drops away, apparently causing no pain to the human operator
running it remotely. Yet the surrogate has a use for sexual pleasure, so the
ability of the surrogate to transmit feelings is difficult to discern. The
surrogates have made crime disappear but as Pollard (2010) points out, why
can't criminals use surrogates to rob banks? Indeed, the narrative turns on
one human controller who takes control of several surrogates, using them for
a hare-brained, demolish-the-world scheme.
For this viewer, the stupidest idea was the use of a surrogate by the FBI to
sit on a stool and watch a dozen monitors at once while the controller was
in Miami. Why on Earth would the controller need a robot to sit and watch
screens? Why aren't the screens available to the controller in Miami without
having a silly metal being sit on a stool all day? These obvious questions
were not addressed.
The future world of Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) has seen remarkable
advances in the realm of machine movement, but nothing else. Surrogates
drive cars or trucks or planes: an expensive and ludicrous technology when
the transport itself could be piloted by the human controller with much
greater ease, without the plastic pal sitting there.
The director claims working on the movie has made him rethink time 'plugged
in', away from family and friends (Neal, 2010). As with so many of the
lesser SciFi narratives, Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) is a cautionary tale
designed to discuss the dangers of ubiquitous technologies, linked, Mostow
says, to the role of the ancient Greek play helping society address its
anxieties. This would be part of the Frankenstein Complex, the fear of the
created machine, except the machine is just a dumb shell, a moving
mannequin, never more than a mask.
There are some neat aspects of the narrative, such as the different motives
for using the weapon that kills surrogate and controller together, as well
as the final ethical question seen when Bruce Willis (in a female surrogate
shell) hovers its finger over a button that will disable all surrogates. The
sets, makeup and extras are memorable, also. The students would have loved
the helicopter crash where Bruce Willis' surrogate (a hairy and younger
version of Bruce) has an arm ripped off but still leaps about playing
container parkour, armless and gushing green goop.
Summarising the point of view of the text
In Unit 3 of
Switched on!: Developing language using media texts, the authors Clothier and Donohue (1998) suggest that students should be
asked to summarise the point of view on the major issue in the film in a
single sentence (Clothier & Donohue, 1998, p148), such as, "People rely on
technology too much", or some such . Students would then debate the merits
of their single sentences, compare them, and refine them collaboratively. A
follow-up question would be, 'In what way has this film influenced your own
point of view on the issue?'
Both brief tasks are suitable for Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) and it
is likely the narrative will provide useful discussions, especially as the
tendentious exhortation against technology is quite a common message,
especially amongst the very many DVDs that arrive warning of genetic
engineering, fiddling about with time, wrecking the environment, trying to
make intelligent machines and generally doing anything with scientific
technology apart from things we know are safe, such as the internal
combustion engine.
The conservative nature of Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) will certainly
be felt, but it may take more coaxing to see the missed opportunities of
this narrative, such as the need for direct human contact, the changes to
society as humans use technology to communicate and act, and the destruction
of established norms as humans become drivers of a vast fleet of plastic
shells designed to simulate and improve upon current society.
Gamer,
directed by Nevildine and Taylor
The second DVD offering noted here, Neveildine and Taylor's Gamer (2009)
shares some concerns with Surrogates (Mostow, 2010).
Both narratives deal with a near future world. While Surrogates (Mostow,
2010) displays a future that has made astonishing gains in robotics and
telepresence systems, but very little else, Gamer by Nevildine and Taylor
(2009) depicts enormous breakthroughs in nanotechnology, with major
diminutions in everything we know as the civil society.
In this near future, convicted murderers can opt to take part in a media
event called Slayers. Well, they do not really take part. Actually, it's
their drivers that run them. They are
just
meat puppets for gamers
running their bodies.
Before discussing Gamer (Nevildine & Taylor, 2009), it is necessary to turn
aside to the Science Fiction narrative device of nanotechnology. I doubt
MIT's Eric Drexler would have guessed the impact on Science
Fiction caused by the publication of The Engines of Creation (Drexler,
1987). Drexler gave SF an extraordinary new problem solver: machines that
could do almost anything, at a molecular level, following rules to
self-replicate and change atomic structure from the bottom up, according to
understandably vague instructions somehow passed to these tiny marvels. The
main impact was a new way to solve SciFi problems - just use nanotechnology
to explain this marvel or this plot twist.
I followed Nanotechnology in SciFi for several years, through the guidance
of Gail at Gaslight Books <www.gaslightbooks.com.au>,
collecting Nanodreams (Elliott, 1995) and Nanotech (Dann & Dozois, 1998) as
well as dozens of novels in which nanotech plays a fundamental role, the
most influential of which was the Greg Bear story 'Blood Music' and then the
novel of the same name (Bear, 1985). Bear's wonderful smart cell societies
could not really be called nanotechnology, but that did not matter, the idea
was the most important thing: life is really about the atomic, molecular and
cellular level. These are the building blocks for everything else, so,
controlling the building machines at this level could create … anything.
The planet Venus was demolished by nanomachines, they came in from the Moon
and destroyed the Earth, they built communication satellites from asteroids,
they created a planet like an even-more-intelligent bee hive, they
downloaded memories of a serial killer into an indestructible murderer, they
made Terminators impossible to terminate, they rebuilt beings in any form
from sunlight and stray atoms ...
nanites colonised my grandmother!
In Gamer (Nevildine & Taylor, 2009), nanomachines make people into receivers
for commands they cannot disobey. The introduction of nanites into the brain
causes a controlling mechanism for all behaviour to be constructed so that a
remote player can control all actions of the subject. This is the stuff of
the Heinlein puppet-masters, the Pod people, the anything makers, perhaps
even the very stuff of legend that made earlier times believe chameleons ate
air and mushrooms self-replicated in nothing at all.
The nanite controllers are essential for two massive games, 'Society' and
'Slayers'. The former is a Sim City kind of activity with sex, terrible
music and uncomfortable clothes. The 'Slayers' game is a first-person
shooter with real bullets and real prisoners killing each other, a familiar
idea for several SF narratives including The Running Man (Glaser, 1987).
Gamer
(Nevildine & Taylor, 2009) follows one murderer being played in the
'Slayers' game, a tough
ex-military sort forced into shooting his comrade and now the only survivor
of over twenty Slayer games. When he escapes he searches for his beautiful
wife, who is being played as a meat puppet in Society. In this near future
dystopia people are either played, giving their bodies up to be used by
others, or those with enough resources stay home and play through other
bodies.
The film has a good deal of violence, some slightly interesting sets
reminiscent of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971), a predictable
story but some interesting moments courtesy of Michael C. Hall of Dexter
fame who plays Ken Castle, the inventor of the brain nanotechnology and the
world's richest man. The best five minutes of Gamer
(Nevildine & Taylor, 2009) for me was the song-and-dance routine near
the climax when a team of killers from the Slayers game dance an excellent
'I've got you under my skin' led by a crooning Hall.
The information dump near the resolution of the narrative tells us that
while nanomachines are receivers for all those played in Slayers and
Society, the evil genius has the only nanomite transmitter and it is his
ambition to have the whole world walking lock-step to his instructions.
There are several, severe problems in Gamer (Nevildine & Taylor, 2009)
including the simplistic model of receiver and transmitter that just does
not make sense, but there are also some interesting technical aspects of
this film. One of these aspects was the use by the crew of hand-held digital
cameras for the gritty and jerky war scenes. Another was the vision of a
future teenager in his bedroom controlling our hero Slayer with virtual
reality gloves, surrounded by a wrap-around video screen. The vision of
future control technologies would make a worthwhile talking point for high
school students, but this movie could not be shown in schools due to its
severe violence, exploitative sex scenes and sheer lack of anything worthy
to contribute to the theme of the human interface with the machine.
Academic Steven Shaviro has written a long essay based around Gamer on his
blog site (Shaviro, 2009) and has followed this with lectures on the film.
He makes several points in his essay and one of these is the film's attempt
to criticise the commercialisation of violence while the film itself is
patently commercial, selling itself through its long scenes of gunfire and
massacre. He argues it is possible to see an extrapolation of current
society's online entertainment in Gamer (Nevildine & Taylor, 2009) with some
confusion between the real world and gamespace. Shaviro believes the movie
to be, "somewhere between an allegory, and a
concrete exemplification, of the way that, today, value is extracted from
circulation (especially media circulation) as well as from direct
production" (Shaviro, 2009). The leftist interpretation of Gamer is
interesting reading and draws in many sources of value for those interested
in political Science Fiction, but for my part I was astonished to see how
much could be wrung from the desiccated corpse of an obvious, shallow and
derivative pot-boiler.
Both Surrogates
(Mostow,
2010) and Gamer (Nevildine & Taylor, 2009) are interested in the role of the
individual in a near-future society changed fundamentally by technological
innovation. Both are very much the sort of movie that high school students
borrow from DVD libraries or watch online. They may be in the Thriller or
Science Fiction sections of the DVD shop, but both employ familiar Science
Fiction tropes to focus on individual will and technological mediation.
Both
have been recommended to me by students because I teach Science Fiction.
After I watched the movies I grieved that the students had not distanced
themselves sufficiently from the movies to apply either scientific scrutiny
or critical analysis to the texts, as both or either filter may have altered
their recommendations.
Scientific scrutiny does not mean analysis of nanotechnology but rather
scientific consistency. Any number of scientific wonders may be found in SF,
but the audience requires the use of the wonder to be logical. Students are
excellent at grasping inconsistencies when discussing a film, but they do
need their attention focused on
the point to see the problem. For instance, in Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) why
do people have their surrogates at their homes and not their workplaces? Why
would a person running a remote system have that device travel through busy
transport for hours just to arrive at their work? Why not just jump into a
surrogate stored and used at their workplace, eliminating transport needs?
And in Gamer
(Nevildine & Taylor, 2009) how can a human body
function if its perceptions can only receive and not transmit back
information to its controller? If pleasure is transmitted back to the
player, why is pain not transmitted? It is
suspected by this writer that the many SF films watched at home do not
receive this kind of analysis.
SF: commercial products of popular culture
In Targeting Media: Television and Film by Lopez, Perrine and Wood (2000),
many criticisms of Science Fiction texts are found. Science Fiction films
are "rarely intellectual" but instead are "commercial products of popular
culture" (Lopez, Perrine & Wood, 2000). They note that "many recent science
fiction films …question the concept of what it means to be human, or what it
ought to mean" and these questions are "explored through the interaction of
humans with human-like robots". They go on to state that, "a major appeal of
the science fiction genre has always been the representation of exciting,
high tech and action-filled worlds populated with clearly defined heroes and
villains. These simple morality plays, where evil is punished, and bravery
and ingenuity always triumph, provide solace for the audience in the
frequently unjust real world" (Lopez, Perrine & Wood, 2000, p138).
Based on Gamer (Nevildine & Taylor, 2009) and Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) such an overview of the Science Fiction genre is understandable. In many ways both these texts focusing on the human/machine interface are simple and predictable. After all, both have villains seeking to destroy the stability of their world through a vast, technological intervention and both villains are beaten by the determination, will and courage of a male hero seeking freedom for himself and others. This can be seen as classic, comic-book adventure. Yet, as seen through the discussion, both texts can be used to discuss significant contemporary issues: the dependence of the modern world on the technological surrogate for human interaction, and the division of the modern world into those who employ the technological interfaces and those who are coerced and oppressed by them.
To deal with Science Fiction as genre Lopez, Perrine and Wood suggest the
use of a word pyramid. In this exercise a class of students is divided into
pairs and each pair is given a sticky note and told to come up with the best
one word to describe science fiction films. The pairs then combine into
fours to agree on the best word until "the whole class is to decide on one
word" (Lopez, Perrine & Wood, 2000, p138). It is likely the authors might
have expected the word 'prophetic' to arise for the entire genre.
In a Masters thesis for Brigham Young University, Bradley Moss addresses the
role of the secondary student analysing film in class and watching films at
home. He warns that without a framework for viewing texts (and Moss used
Teenage Films for his Action Research) there could be dire consequences, "if
students are not trained in decoding skills for media, the many and repeated
viewings of media will place students in a position where media is
constructing their reality" (Moss, 2009). Students need to be aware that
"media encounters are conversations in which they are actively engaged,
therefore media education should stress that audiences are participants in
and constructors of the meanings of media texts".
Moss adopts a model of critical media literacy found in Kellner and Share
(2007), where "teachers become cultural workers involved in citizen
education working towards the ultimate goal of revealing the structural and
ideological forces that influence everyday life" (Moss, 2009). Students and
teachers are required to share power to "uncover truths of media
representation" (Kellner and Share, 2005, in Moss, 2009).
Moss argues that students see films in their homes as entertainment and
those in class as educational. When watching a hired DVD for entertainment
students are Spectators. Spectatorship involves the passivity of the viewer
in a pleasurable imaginary state so that they "will not be aware of the
values communicated by the film text" (Moss, 2009).
But Moss' research shows the divide of Spectatorship and media literacy is
not always so sharp and clear. This was seen through interviews with
students after
they
completed
a film course with Moss.
Students noted their
perceptions had changed. Students said they looked 'deeper' into the film,
"what the film means" (Moss, 2009).
Moss does not claim this influence was due to his exercises and activities
at school. Instead, he believes the students are expressing a new way of
watching films he calls functional media literacy skills. This functional
literacy relates to an understanding of how the film was made, of the camera
angles and placement of the dynamic figures in the frame. Moss notes with
disappointment that this functional literacy does not relate to the
"meanings or intents of the author per se, or the power structures behind
the creation of film and perpetuation of media representations" (Moss,
2009). Students have understood elements of functional media literacy and
can use these understandings when sent out to make a short digital video,
but this limited literacy does not extend to analysing texts "based on their
own experiences and understandings outside the classroom" (Moss, 2009,
p100).
It is very difficult to inculcate critical media literacy and even more
difficult to assess to what extent this literacy may be employed outside the
classroom. However, Moss puts forward a plan to support critical media
literacies through focusing on genre. He asks his students why a genre
should continue to be interesting, "Why, if we know what a film contains,
are we interested in watching it?" (Moss, 2009). Instead of asking the class
to come up with one descriptor for a genre using the Pyramid method
suggested by Lopez, Perrine and Wood, (2000), Moss seeks a list of genres
and sub-genres, to encourage specificity. He also suggests individual
practise where students are shown "three short film clips from films of
different genres" (Moss, 2009). The students are to identify the genre, two
or three icons of that genre, two or three archetypes, and two to three
"rituals of each genre shown in the film" (Moss, 2009). Students can be
assessed "through their participation in class discussion and activities" as
well as "their written response to the film genre clips" (Moss, 2009).
Most important to Moss was the students' own film-making. Adapting this to
the Science Fiction genre, students would be asked to create a storyboard
for a scene of less than two minutes . The scene must have "at least one
icon, one archetype and one ritual" from the SF genre. The students bring
their group scripts to the teacher for a story conference and "students can
be assessed on their participation in story conferences with the instructor
and by turning in their storyboards" (Moss, 2009, p115).
This podcast started by noting that many secondary students are watching SF
movies at home. Often these viewings are much less critical, are much less
thoughtful than those undertaken with teachers at school. Quite often, the
DVDs or downloaded movies watched would not be able to be screened at
school, due to their content and/or censorship classification, often for
extreme violence.
Through a brief discussion of recent
DVDs Gamer (Nevildine &
Taylor, 2009) and Surrogates (Mostow, 2010) a case can be made that there is
worth in some of the themes of the texts, even though their structure is
predictable and appeal sensational. Moss' (2009) research does show that
students' home viewing can be influenced by school studies within a genre,
at the very least through functional film literacy. When a teacher directs
students' attention to scientific inconsistencies in a film, as found amply
in both texts, there is evidence that this type of scrutiny may be
transferred to home viewing.
Through examination of the SF genre itself: its icon, archetypes and
devices, there is also some evidence that students may come to employ
critical media literacies. According to Moss (2009), if students go on from
genre studies, classroom analysis and careful discussion into creating their
own films within the genre, students' critical media literacies can be
further developed, although much more research is needed in this area to
claim more than just slight influence on home viewing modes: from Spectator
to critical participant in the text. Without these influences students'
repeated viewings may place them in a position where the media is
constructing their reality. In the case of many recent SF offerings found on
the DVD shelves, this would be unfortunate for our hopes of a civil society.
Thanks for listening to Podcast 34. Thanks also to SlowAlan for the musical
segues as well as the podcast opening and closing music.
Podcast 35 looks at a text for teachers in their classrooms, Exploring Genre: Science Fiction, by Barbara Stanners. This Australian text was first published in 2009 and comes from Phoenix Education. It is designed to provide in-depth analyses and exercises to assist students articulate their understanding. It is aimed at Australian school year levels from nine to twelve.
If you want to find out
more about the mySF Project and its blog site, aim for
www.pataphysics.net.au/mysf_project.
You can also send an email to michaels@pataphysics.net.au.
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ends
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