SURROGATES

SURROGATES. Jonathan Mostow, dir. Michael Ferris, John D. Brancato, script, from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele — q.v., The Surrogates (graphic novel). USA, 2009. "A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Touchstone Pictures presentation of a Mandeville Films/Top Shelf production" (Variety rev.)[1]; see IMDb at link for details of prod. & dist.). Industrial Light & Magic, top billing for SpFx. Jeff Mann, prod. design.[2]

Satiric SF techno-thriller (Todd McCarthy in Variety: "speculative suspenser"). In a near-future world — although what we see is the USA (filming was in Massachusetts) — most (rich) people operate surrogates: humanoid robots, where the top-of-the-line avatars are indistinguishable from very beautiful (strong, agile, durable) human beings. The technology is explicitly presented as a straight-line extrapolation from current work on human/machine cybernetic interfaces for the crippled and for the military. The plot involves a resistance movement of (poor) "meat-bag" people who use their own bodies, a device that can "kill" surrogates and, without quotation marks, kill their users, and, as an inciting incident for the plot, a murder. The film may be more interesting generally — and certainly of more interest here — for its traditional cultural, political, and philosophical concerns ("traditional" as in recycling 20th-c. liberal-humanist motifs) and for its immediate political relevance for the USA in the first decade of the 21st c.

Life for the users of the avatars is safe and pleasant: the "surreys" do the bodily work and generally live better than their not-so-beautiful, agile, and/or durable users ever could. The cost is a certain flattening of experience and, usually unknown to the human users, the possibility of very effective government surveillance and direct intervention: for their own good, of course, but undermining privacy. For the denial of the body in favor of mind and life in a supposedly safe cell, with inputs coming in and information going out, see the seminal, yea downright ovular, "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. For the motif of "the lotus eaters" — life of slothful and pleasant passivity — cf. and contrast such classic Star Trek episodes as "The Apple"; for life lived in tech-mediated fantasy, note "Hollow Pursuits" on ST: Next Generation. For the choice of safety over freedom, cf. and contrast J. Williamson's Humanoids series.

For additional "Intertextuality," and for initial critical reception, see MetaCritic entry[3]. For potential real-world referents for the satire, see Kyle Smith's review in the New York Post.[4]

For summary, evaluation, and references to other relevant SF works, see review by Ritch Calvin, SFRA Review #291 (Winter 2010): pp. 25-26.[5] Calvin mentions D. G. Compton's Synthajoy and Tiptree's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and notes connections with cyberpunk motifs.

RDE, 25/IX/09, edited and updated 14Mar21