Lawnmower Man: On the Aspiration to Become Information
The Lawnmower Man (1992) has been much maligned by both critics and sci fi fanboys. The usual gripe has to do with its much discussed divergence from the Stephen King short story for which it was named. The wikipedia article, in fact, suggests that the original screenplay was much more interested in literal “cyberpunk” as it was to be titled Cyber God. The wikipedia narrative continues along an almost capitalist-conspiratorial view of way the studio renamed the film: just for the added glitz of producing a Stephen King narrative.
Sidestepping the whole King narrative, it seems to me that the film should have remained titled Cyber God. For that it is what it’s narrative is really about; how a cyber god would be made, from whom, and using what means.
Becoming Cyber God
The first element is Jobe, a caricature of mental illness and low intelligence. Though he is physical fit (and thus somewhat potent) his mental ineptitudes chain him to two realities: hard physical labor, and a slave’s relationship to religion (almost along Nichetze’s lines). Through the technology offered to him by Dr. Angelo (the very human scientist with a soul and a dream), Jobe is transformed, first into a human of a certain ‘normality’ than further into a dangerous potentially that becomes frighteningly omnipotent. This transformation is matched by Jobe’s own sexual awakening, which leads him to sexual liasons with his neighbor, Ms. Burke. At first, she is clearly the dominant partner, but Jobe soon eclipses her power in the bedroom, and eventually creates new spaces for her to copulate with him, wherein he has a nearly divine ability to manipulate the enivornment towards her pleasure. Unfortunately, Jobe is both too powerful and too out of touch with ‘conventional humanity’ at this point to protect Ms. Burke from the power of Angelo’s Virtual Reality, which at this point as become a sort of divine plane for Jobe, as he controls it effortlessly.
Eventually, Jobe’s psychology begins to be overwhelmed by the power of his change and his rise. He claims that he is only recovering a humanity that magicians, prophets, and alchemists were in touch with, but Dr. Angelo is fearful that the rise has been to sudden. He tells Jobe that he lacks the requisite wisdom to inheirit such lost knowledge so quickly.
Hayles and The Aspiration to Information
Jobe’s final movement as a human-becoming-God, is to escape his body and become some other type of being, something that loses the fragility of corporeality. This aspiration, as Jobe puts it, is to become pure information. But Why? Here, we should reach for N. Katherine Hayles and her work How We Came Posthuman, because it gives many rationales for the aspiration to ‘lose our bodies.’ The first is replicability, which is to say that information posseses the entirely anti-bodily attribute of being able to exist in two places (or more) at once. “If I give you information,” Hayles writes “you have it, and I have it too” (39). Other info-advantages to bodies include shifting questions of health and fragility into questions of access, information, as Hayles presents it, is only differentiated by “haves and have-nots” (39).
Which sets up an interesting comment on Lawnmower Man and it’s visual narrative. At the end of the film, as Jobe tries to escape the mainframe that Angelo has confined him in, we set Jobe as a paradoxical bodiless-body-of-information. This paradox, in many ways, is a mirror of the paradox of virtual reality itself; just why is it that we aspire for purely informational landscapes, abstracted from tactile, physical reality, to re-become bodies of information? The way we see Jobe at the end of the film is thus related to two thoughts Hayles has on the mutation of the narrative within the age of “information narratives” accompanying the computer revolution.
The characteristics of information narratives include, then, an emphasis of mutation and transformation as a central thematic for bodies within the text as well as for the bodies of the texts. Subjectivity, already joined with information technologies through cybernetic circuits, is further integrated into the circuit by the novelistic techniques that combine it with data. — Page 43
Mutation and transformation are exactly what Lawnmower Man is all about. Like a pokemon evolving in the presence of certain items, Jobe is entirely changed by his immersion/experience of advanced computer technology. His subjectivity is quite literally joined by cybernetic circuits into a narrative that is all about his aspiration to become information.
Stills
A few final thoughts on Lawnmower Man can be expressed as short questions/captions accompanying some film stills.
This is a still from the film's opening title card. I am very interested in the way it encourages a sort of technophobia, by implying the dangers of technology. Of course this is operative for the film's plot, but it may also be a sign of the times. Also, the "you" and "they" differentiation is a fascinating division of experience of technology. Why make it?
When Jobe is undergoing Angelo's immersive intelligence technology, the visual illustration of his learning is represented by the bombardment of alchemical symbols. Later, Jobe says he is simply recovering lost knowledge of alchemists. What is the alchemy fascination?
When Angelo finds Jobe after he has "become information" he (along with the viewer) find Jobe's body as emaciated and aged. It was an interesting choice on the part of the filmmaker, to make Jobe's mutation this visually obvious, but it also suggests that our youth and robustness are really just information.
The cybersex scene, is very interesting because it begins with two differentiated bodies (I'm tempted to call them avatars) but as the engagement becomes more erotic, the bodies blend together. This was a rare clever use of the idea that information was what virtual reality represents, so the sexual engagement of two people should look somewhat intimate. Thus, this sequence eventually depicts sexual encounters as overwhelming and enveloping.
Part of the film's continued appeal to technophobia requires the presentation that technology will not simply be limited as a threat to other technology or solely within technology. Here, we have one of the violent moments where Jobe demonstrates his god like powers, transcending his own body, and the media paradigm (technology, virtual reality) where he is most powerful, to become powerful in the physical plane. His god-ness sems to be represent by the fact that he has become merely icon, an almost cyber-christ whose face alone is proof of his power.