Monthly Archives: May 2010

Westworld

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Westworld movie poster

 

The late Michael Crich­ton is pri­mar­ily known as a best­selling nov­el­ist, but some­what less so as a screen­writer, fea­ture film direc­tor, and tele­vi­sion pro­ducer (he was one of the co-creators of the block­buster series E.R.). Char­ac­ter­is­tic nov­els Juras­sic Park and The Androm­eda Strain are built upon fas­ci­nat­ing spec­u­la­tive sci­ence with thrilling story poten­tial, spoiled by wafer-thin char­ac­ters and sim­plis­tic plots. His 1973 thriller West­world suf­fers from the same syn­drome. Despite its high-minded ori­gins in spec­u­la­tive sci­ence, the movie is sim­ple in struc­ture and theme. It’s not unusual for sci­ence fic­tion films to be overtly based on West­ern tropes (the best exam­ple that comes to mind is Out­land), but West­world is a hybrid with equal parts of each. The sec­ond half is basi­cally an extended chase sequence, punc­tu­ated by a few clas­sic hor­ror movie tropes.

Yul Brynner in WestworldThere’s a face off in the corner

West­world posits a future in which robot­ics and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have advanced enough to enable a new mar­ket for enter­tain­ment and leisure. The futur­is­tic vaca­tion resort Delos is a fore­run­ner to Juras­sic Park: an expe­ri­ence adven­ture for the afflu­ent, pow­ered by untested advanced tech­nol­ogy. Imag­ine Dis­ney World-like ani­ma­tron­ics taken to the next level: semi­au­tonomous robots roam an immer­sive envi­ron­ment to serve as inter­ac­tive ser­vants, sex toys, and tar­get practice.

Crich­ton skips over the entire issue of how these machines achieve con­scious­ness, mak­ing the com­mon movie fal­lacy that robots = arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. If they are basi­cally ani­ma­tronic machines, how did they evolve an instinct for self-preservation? If these droids are not feel­ing actual rebel­lion and mur­der­ous vin­dic­tive­ness, is it a virus or mal­func­tion? On a more prac­ti­cal level, there appears to be a plot hole in how all robots but The Gun­slinger (Yul Bryn­ner) appear to com­pletely van­ish after mur­der­ing the Delos’ staff and visitors.

Richard Benjamin and James Brolin in WestworldJames Brolin & Richard Ben­jamin take the vaca­tion of the future, today

Brynner’s may wear the same cos­tume as in The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven (read The Dork Report review), but The Gunslinger’s true ana­log is closer to Jaws and Moby Dick. He pops up again and again, seem­ingly unkil­l­able, pos­sessed of an unex­pressed, inex­plic­a­ble moti­va­tion to hunt one sin­gle man. He fix­ates on tourist John Blane (James Brolin) and remorse­lessly pur­sues him to the death, not unlike the implaca­ble demons that haunt Cor­mac McCarthy’s No Coun­try for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, and Blood Merid­ian. Bryn­ner isn’t given much in the way of dia­log or char­ac­ter, but you can see he worked very hard on his phys­i­cal per­for­mance. His bear­ing, pos­ture, gait, and gaze are all unset­tling. Far from a car­toon­ish robot fig­ure, The Gun­slinger is really inhu­man, weird, and creepy.

West­world, like Juras­sic Park, seems to be a vague cau­tion­ary tale against toy­ing with advanced sci­ence. The famously science-minded Crich­ton (an M.D.) is not sim­ply demo­niz­ing sci­ence itself, but rather its arro­gant mis­use. If the first mis­take is to build machines more com­plex than the human mind can under­stand, the sec­ond is to bet our lives upon them.

Delos is a fan­tasy world where peo­ple can kill or fuck any­thing they want. In other words, a recipe for dis­as­ter. Later sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries like Tron, The Matrix, and Caprica (read The Dork Report review) would typ­i­cally stage sim­i­lar moral­ity plays in vir­tual real­ity. But I don’t get the sense that West­world is crit­i­ciz­ing the indul­gence of humanity’s worst ten­den­cies. Is it instead focus­ing on the mis­treat­ment of semi-sentient beings as slaves? When the park is in work­ing con­di­tion, the robots are pros­ti­tuted and mur­dered over and over for humans’ enter­tain­ment. After they become con­scious, we see one “female” robot reject a human’s sex­ual advances, while another is cru­elly chained up in a dun­geon. Nei­ther seems to be express­ing much in the way of grief or resent­ment. Instead, we are per­haps meant to see them as inno­cents that are sim­ply seek­ing a lit­tle dignity.

Stray obser­va­tions:

  • The sequel movie Future­world (1976) and TV series Beyond West­world (1980) are not avail­able on DVD or online at this time of writing.
  • Young James Brolin looks so much at times like Chris­t­ian Bale does today that it’s almost creepy.
  • Even Delos’ ani­mals are robotic, per­haps allud­ing to the moral tests regard­ing the treat­ment of ani­mals (robotic or real) in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep. Even more on the nose, Blane finds a robot snake in the desert, fore­shad­ow­ing the ones we see for sale in Blade Runner.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Design is how it works: Gary Hustwit’s Objectified

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Objectified movie poster

 

Objec­ti­fied finds its the­sis in a quo­ta­tion from one of history’s prime indus­tri­al­ists, Henry Ford: “Every object, whether inten­tional or not, speaks to who­ever put it there.” In other words, every­thing we select, pur­chase, and inter­act with, was first designed and man­u­fac­tured by a skilled arti­san. That person’s job is to obsess about you, your body, needs and habits, and how their prod­uct might become a part of your life. Direc­tor Gary Hustwit’s pre­vi­ous doc­u­men­tary fea­ture Hel­vetica (read The Dork Report review) was a cel­e­bra­tion of typog­ra­phers and graphic design­ers, and inspired laypeo­ple to rec­og­nize the long his­tory and great labor that went into the type­faces they use every day on their com­puter screens. Sim­i­larly, Objec­ti­fied pro­files the often unknown indus­trial design­ers behind the stuff we buy.

Jonathan Ives in ObjectifiedJonathan Ives’ inner sanc­tum. After con­duct­ing this inter­view, Apple had the film­mak­ers shot.

Apple’s res­i­dent guru Jonathan Ive is per­haps the most famous design auteur fea­tured. Ive is prob­a­bly the sec­ond most famous per­son at Apple, justly acclaimed for his sin­gu­lar design aes­thetic that first caught the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion with the bondi Blue iMac and then the stark, white, decep­tively “sim­ple” iPod. Ive’s boss Steve Jobs famously said that design is “not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” a prin­ci­ple born out in Ive’s work. Know­ing inside and out the par­tic­u­lars of dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als and man­u­fac­tur­ing is just part of design­ing a product’s exter­nals. Ive bran­dishes precision-tooled parts from a dis­as­sem­bled Mac­Book Pro to illus­trate that Apple spends an enor­mous amount of time and resources not just design­ing their prod­ucts, but also the cus­tom machines and processes nec­es­sary to mass pro­duce them.

Naoto Fukasawa in ObjectifiedNaoto Fuka­sawa rethinks the CD player.

Objec­ti­fied spends some con­sid­er­able time on the topic of sus­tain­abil­ity, a respon­si­bil­ity that regret­tably only recently entered the indus­trial designer’s job descrip­tion. Valerie Casey of IDEO relates the incred­i­ble anec­dote of the dif­fi­cult process of devel­op­ing a new tooth­brush. When the prod­uct is finally ready and in stores, she embarks on a much-needed vaca­tion to Fiji. If you didn’t already guess where this story was going, she finds a dis­carded IDEO tooth­brush washed up on a beach halfway around the world. In less than a week, her prod­uct had become pollution.

Objec­ti­fied nec­es­sar­ily makes a brief detour into inter­ac­tion design (this brief digres­sion would be wor­thy of a film unto itself, but in the mean­time, the curi­ous can refer to Steven John­son’s 1997 book Inter­face Cul­ture: How New Tech­nol­ogy Trans­forms the Way We Cre­ate and Com­mu­ni­cate). When we inter­act with most ana­log prod­ucts, their form fol­lows their func­tion. As a thought exper­i­ment, would an alien from outer space (or a Tarzan raised in the wild) be able to infer an object’s func­tion sim­ply by look­ing at it? That is likely the case with a spoon or chair, but not so much with an iPhone. For many prod­ucts of the dig­i­tal age, the out­ward form fac­tor gives no clues as to the func­tion. Thus, inter­ac­tion design was born with the Xerox PARC graph­i­cal user inter­face. Many of our daily tasks are now abstracted onto a two-dimensional screen. The Apple iPhone and iPad have pop­u­lar­ized the touch­screen, which likely sig­nals the begin­ning of another sea change when periph­er­als like key­boards and mice will be revealed to have been a tem­po­rary evo­lu­tion­ary bump, now marked for extinction.

still from ObjectifiedAwww yeah, design­ers know what time it is.

The last images we see are of the devices used to make the movie itself: a com­puter, hard drive, and cam­era. Tellingly, the Objec­ti­fied Blu-ray edi­tion has no menu struc­ture at all. You put it in, it plays, and the sup­ple­men­tary fea­tures fol­low imme­di­ately after the clos­ing cred­its. It’s a com­pletely guided, lin­ear expe­ri­ence that speaks to the film’s ele­va­tion of the cre­ator over the consumer.

Offi­cial movie site: www.objectifiedfilm.com

Must read: A Hur­ri­cane of Con­sumer Val­ues by Alissa Walker

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report: