The notion of “surrogate” has so many implications in the modern world, and the screenwriter does such a skillful job of weaving them all into the subtext, that it’s often disorienting to keep your bearings.
Perfect movie stars in perfect makeup do all the rest.
When Bruce Willis first ventures into the real world in the flesh, his ennui is palpable.
The backbone of the film is a few frames of machines making machines in an assembly hall the size of a large metropolis. A whole city of people, not one of them a real human being. The really scary part about it is it’s all so very real.
Millions of people play virtual games online, never leaving their dark cubbyholes at home. The military’s drones do what real soldiers cannot — more!
The film has the feel of William Gibson’s Neuromancer where people “jack in” to cyberspace, but it goes way beyond that. This is more than the feeling of a small town loner like me, being in a big, ugly, impersonal, hostile city for the first time in years.
It’s more than stepping out of a dark movie theater, after enjoying the vicarious journey of beautiful people in a perfect world, only to see my same old self reflected in a mirror in the bright daylight.
We live in a pro wrestling kind of world. Nobody is who they seem to be anymore. Women on dating sites hide behind photos, either of some glamor fashion model, or of a much younger, made up self.
We all hide behind clothes that obscure our bellies, our sagging boobs, our flaccid pricks — unless we have silicon tits, buttocks implants, penile implants, or any of a thousand plastic surgeries.
We hang fancy college degrees on our “ego walls,” each representing volumes of information that has long since been forgotten.
We’re all surrogates in every way. We live in big cities, often never seeing a forest or a beach or farmland for our whole lives.
We don’t grow our own food, milk our own cows, or even raise our own children — they’re in daycare from birth onward, practically. We don’t wash our own cars, feel our own pain, or even live with our own teeth, hair, eyes; our our own anything.
Advertisers have discovered how to make us feel that youthful invulnerability for all our lives. We’ve bought into that delusion hook, line, and sinker.
We drink, smoke, have sex, even work in excess. Every spare minute is filled with texting, Twitter, Facebook, email, Blackberry, and cell phone photos, surfing, emails, and web browsing.
The experts say all this multi-tasking without a break is destroying gray matter in our brains, literally. That’s the stuff we need to think. The brain is wired to love this constant stimulation. We have caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol to enhance the aura.
We don’t want brain cells, we want — what do we want, anyway?
