Capital secretly desires to replace humans—or perhaps just the ones consumers care about (i.e., celebrities and other pretty faces)—with computer programs, with their perfect simulations, so that they are now not only infinitely repeatable but also malleable. Whereas the first generation of virtual performances were simply the digital reproduction of existing footage (Diet Coke commercials, Sky Captain), the presence of virtual Arnold in the latest Terminator (2009) suggests the (endless) possibility of new performances through a combination of archived data and motion-capture performance—or some other yet unimagined innovation.
This may still remain somewhat alarmist in its assumptions (as though there’s anything wrong with waking up). So I would look back to the fascinating cult film, Michael Crichton’s Looker (1981). Two decades before S1m0ne (2002), Crichton envisioned a world where powerful media interests could exploit the digital archiving of virtual performances for an endless supply of free labor and complete authorial control. In Looker, a plastic surgeon named Larry Roberts (played by Albert Finney) discovers an elaborate conspiracy on the part of “Digital Matrix Services” to use computer programs and television signals in order to manipulate viewing consumers at home into buying any range of possible products—ranging from kitchen cleaning supplies to presidential candidates.
To a degree, Crichton’s film echoes similar anxieties about media technology in American science fiction of the period. While Tron (1981) suggested that distinctions between real and “virtual” selves would become increasingly arbitrary, Videodrome (1982) more sinisterly posited that television would not only further blur that difference but also drive us mad to the point of murder and suicide. Looker, meanwhile, offers a hybrid of these two approaches to a postmodern loss of reality—combining Tron’s ambitious vision of the digital’s reproductive capabilities, but stripping it of its inherent hacker utopia, with Videodrome’s more ominous anxiety about audience manipulation, endless consumption, and a loss of personal control.
In Looker, Roberts discovers that Digital Matrix Services seeks to convert “real” glamour models, such as Cindy (Susan Dey), into computer programs so that their virtual avatars can always be re-used and re-imagined later whenever a company needs another commercial. Meanwhile, the models themselves are subsequently killed off as an unnecessary corporate liability, once the conversion is complete. The term “computer model” takes on a brilliant new double meaning as sales pitches are now possible at the click of a button, with no analog (paper) trail behind.
Looker takes Fredric Jameson’s comment about a computer’s ability to store dead human capital to absurdly sublime levels of literalness. This brilliant satire of the early Reagan era so clearly anticipates the corporate desire to reduce human capital to mimetic digital programing, to reduce appealing faces to free-floating, endlessly re-workable commodities, with such utter precision and prescience, that of course no one took it seriously when it first appeared. Political and fiscal conservatism thrives on denying even alternate possibility to accepted norms and practices, which Looker further assists by way of a gleeful embrace of satire that encourages the spectator to enjoy but also dismiss its absurd narrative.
Even the film’s own production betrays its impossibility. The only actual digital image of a human in the film (a first) is a split-second rendering of Cindy on one of Digital Matrix’s computer screens as her nude body is methodologically scanned into the hard drive. Otherwise, all the other “computer” images of models and politicians in Looker are just traditionally shot 35mm footage coded within the narrative as a supposedly digital image. Of course, it was technologically impossible in 1981 to use a computer to convincingly replicate the look and texture of a flesh-and-blood human. No doubt, many envisioned it would remain that way. Yet a perverse historical irony in looking back at Looker now is that the medium of film was required by filmmakers to emulate the “look” of digital media—today, of course, the opposite is true.
Looker, though, still holds onto the necessity of the real world as a material anchor for the digital one—even though we know that’s not really true now. Later in the film, those same stored “digital” images are digitally placed into the images of pre-existing sets in real television soundstages as a demonstration to investors of their potential—setting up one of the film’s best sight gags. Roberts and the film’s villainous henchman (Tim Rossovich) chase each other around the soundstage during the live broadcast, causing to them to appear on the image next to (absent) computer-rendered salespeople for the unintended amusement of diegetic spectators in the movie.
If we were to be suddenly concerned with narrative logic, we would notice that while Digital Matrix depends upon the labor of virtual models, they still inexplicably require otherwise physical locations to pull off the computer-generated footage. Ultimately, Looker’s only failure then was in its continued naiveté, its unknowing nostalgia regarding the persistence of humans and the real world. By trying to scanning Cindy into binary code, or by forcing models to undergo plastic surgery in order to better fit a computer’s pre-existing ideal of aesthetic beauty, Looker erred by holding on to the belief that computers would still need the indexical presence of the human subject to begin with. We know “now” that the actual presence of physical objects in space and time is no more necessary to computer imaging systems than the existence of unicorns and leprechauns.
Digital cinema is a thoroughly historical concept, despite its best attempts at erasure. Comparing digital media to the explosion of nickelodeons at the dawn of the 20th Century, D.N. Rodowick stressed the impossibility of grasping—then as now—what the new medium truly was, let alone where it was headed. Looker may be the ultimate artifact of digital cinema’s pre-history—a past vision of the future so prescient that we are only now beginning to articulate what it said, beneath the satire, about the intersection of global capitalism’s ambition, the ubiquity of advertising culture, the aesthetization of politics, the seamless potential of computer graphics and the inevitability of post-human labor.
Its perceived absurdity in 1981 only reflected the limited awareness then of the digital’s ultimate, still largely unrealized, potential. Philip Rosen's notion of the “not yet” rhetoric of new media seems perpetually in tension with the “always already”—that is, the once unimaginable developments (i.e., the uncanny celluloid mimicry of digital cameras) that have already come to pass and which model for us the future changes still to come.
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