MOVIE REVIEW: The Lawnmower Man (1992)
The future comes closer every day; the science fiction of the past becomes more real every minute.
The future I was presented with as a child was the gee-whiz kind from the 1950s, where flying cars and self-driving cars were as common as moving sidewalks and personal jetpacks and nearly everything ended with a number (ex.: Nimbus 2000). The Hanna-Barbera cartoon “The Jetsons” was bog standard for Zeitgeist futurism— homes had video-phones, robotic housekeepers, and the appliances communicated with each other. When Star Trek, Star Wars, and other darker sci-fi properties in the 80s came along, our idea of futuristic began to change—we wanted teleportation, communicators, pocket computers, androids, universal translators, cybernetic prosthetic limbs, and so-on. We might even be able to control it all digitally with our minds, becoming closer to a trans-human society. Once we reach that point it’s only another step before we move into the digital world as patterns of thought translated into ones and zeroes, unfettered by physical form in an extended version of reality.
While we’re still waiting on self-driving vehicles and flying cars to become safer, we have moving sidewalks in airports. The Roomba is no Rosie, but they do what they can — sometimes with disastrous results — and they communicate with other appliances via Bluetooth through the IoT (Internet of Things). Our smart-phones alone are a combination of:
- multimedia computer (handles text, images, and sound),
- alarm clock,
- tracking device,
- calendar,
- appointment book,
- television or movie screen,
- video game console,
- calculator (we were told we wouldn’t be able to carry a calculator with us everywhere we went as children, so this is big),
- telephone (both video and audio),
- universal translator (albeit not in real-time),
- newspaper, and
- repository of all human knowledge.
While neuro-technology has existed for use with prosthetic limbs dependent on feedback, only recently has the company Neuralink advanced such study and applied it to BCI (brain-computer interfaces) in the human trial phase. Who knew how close we would come to achieving all this technology in such a short time? Hollywood did, and they made several movies about it — and only one was made before 1999 — in a world before The Wachowskis’ The Matrix made it popular to speak on technologically-simulated extension of reality. Based very loosely on a Stephen King short story from 1975, The Lawnmower Man is a combination of that story and an original script called “CyberGod”. Both titular elements come into play when dealing with this character.
Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey, Machete, Planet Terror, Alita: Battle Angel) is a lawnmower man born with a bad brain. He lives in a shack on the property of Father McKeen (Jeremy Slate, Wives and Lovers, The Dead Pit), who treats him bad because Jobe don’t got no family to help him out and because he’s “stupid”. Father McKeen’s cousin Terry (Geoffrey Lewis, The Devil’s Rejects, Tango and Cash) cares a lot for Jobe; they’re buddies. Even though people think Jobe is kinda slow, everyone likes Jobe: he is honest and hard-working. One day, a scientist named Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan, Tomorrow Never Dies, Black Adam, “Remington Steele” [TV-NBC]) wanted to know if Jobe wanted to play games in his lab, just like the neighbor boy Peter Parkette (Austin Taylor O’Brien, Last Action Hero, My Girl 2). Jobe likes games, so he went to play games. Dr. Angelo even promised to make Jobe smarter at the same time. Even though he wasn’t sure, Jobe said yes to all that, too.
That was the day all the trouble started.
Dr. Angelo didn’t tell the simple-minded Jobe what he does for a living: Lawrence Angelo works for VSI (Virtual Space Industries), producing better military killers through chemical augmentation of the mind and running the test subjects through VR (virtual reality) simulations. The doctor would rather uplift chimpanzee test subjects to human intelligence using the serum he developed, combined with a non-violent VR learning program. When that pathology is not followed in favor of more aggressive programming, the augmented chimp goes on a rampage, stealing a gun and killing a guard in a bid to escape to the outside world. Even after the guards had to kill a mentally-augmented ape with a gun, the Director (Dean Norris, Starship Troopers, “Under the Dome” [TV-CBS], “Breaking Bad” [TV-AMC]) still wanted more testing with human-level tests seen as desirable. Angelo rejected the mandate and took a sabbatical, but he had plans to keep working. With a backdoor link to the VSI lab to his home lab, he could continue to work on the project with a less problematic serum. However, Dr. Angelo needed a human test subject to make this work…and he wasn’t going to do it to the neighbor boy because someone would notice the inevitable changes.
What happens next is a modernized but subverted version of Daniel Keyes’ 1955 short story Flowers for Algernon, with no pets or invasive brain surgery. Just like Charlie from the previously mentioned story, Jobe grows in mental capacity and begins to understand social cues — especially those from the extroverted young widow Marnie Burke (Jenny Wright, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” [music video], Near Dark) and the hostile gas-station attendant Jake (John Laughlin, The Rock [1996], Streets of Justice [1985], An Officer and a Gentleman), learning about sex and violence respectively. It goes beyond that as Jobe begins to develop telepathy and telekinesis, because the modified drug unlocked the potential of the human mind. Jobe keeps becoming mentally stronger and more powerful, believing by translating his mind into the VR world he would reach the ultimate form and become a “CyberChrist” to lead humanity from the other side of the screen. With the ability to mind control anyone and psychically disintegrate anything, nothing can stop Jobe— not even bullets — in the real world. He promises to herald his birth in the digital world by ringing every telephone in the world at the same time. Can Dr. Angelo stop the Lawnmower Man from ringing our bells?
When the first VR programs and appliances made by the company VPL (Virtual Programming Languages) showed what the could do in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a mere novelty of manipulating 3D renderings of geometric shapes bouncing around plotting grids stretched to infinity; it had nothing close to consumer-level application until the tech for its $10,000 DataGlove was pared down to the $90 Nintendo Power Glove. Roughly 30 years forward, we see nearly everything in some computerized form — our finances, relationships, spiritual worship, education, employment, law enforcement, military action, politics, sports, even our news and entertainment — and sometimes it’s blended into AR (augmented reality).
The world of technology keeps moving forward into perceptions of physical reality to the point where most people are starting to lose or have already lost the ability to tell actual reality from extended reality (which includes virtual and augmented reality). Even newer generations aren’t able to tell the difference because of things like generative AI (artificial intelligence) and audio-visual deep-fakes. The movie even gave us a quote about this stuff from Jobe: “Virtual reality will grow, just as the telegraph grew to the telephone — as the radio to the TV — it will be everywhere.” I just hope that when the Neuralink (or some other BCI) allows us to transcend into the digital realm, our bodies and minds will be safe from tampering by outside individuals or generative AI. I certainly don’t want situations where we’re not fed the correct and/or desired information and something bad happens; God forbid something happens to the body like in 2009’s Surrogates or 2015’s Don’t Worry Baby. Remember this over all else: if we consider each other’s safety and commit to the consideration, we can be sure the tech will work safely and go un-abused.
CHOICE CUTS:
- CAMEO: Blink and you’ll miss an appearance by character actor Troy Evans (Demolition Man, The Black Dahlia [2006], Twin Peaks [1989]) playing a cop, the one role he does reliably over his 40 years in showbiz.
- PRICELESS QUOTE: “‘Falling, floating, and flying’? So, what’s next, fucking?” — Caroline, reading off the names of the VR program he was using and demonstrating why Dr. Angelo let her leave the relationship.
- PRICELESS QUOTE: Jobe says something telling about our new hyper-real society: “By the year 2001, there won’t be a person on this planet who isn’t hooked into it, and hooked into me.” BRUH OUT HERE TALKING ABOUT THE INTERNET YO~
- PRICELESS QUOTE: The text crawl is just as paranoid about VR in the 1990s as we are about AI in the 2020s: “By the turn of the millenium [sic] a technology known as VIRTUAL REALITY will be in widespread use. It will allow you to enter computer generated artificial worlds as unlimited as the imagination itself. Its creators foresee millions of positive uses — while others fear it as a new form of mind control…”
- FUN FACT: The CG in this movie was created by Angel Studios, which would eventually become the offices of Rockstar Games San Diego.
- Jobe’s final digital form is an artifact of an earlier age in CG animation; it was cutting edge at the time. Accept it or watch something else.
- Pierce Brosnan’s physical acting as Dr. Angelo when Jobe forcefully probes his mind is laughable. And he does it more than once.
- Shoutout to Mark Bringleson (Madhouse [1990], Amazon Women on the Moon [1987], Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery), for playing back-stabbing corporate shill Timms. You did the job so well, I hate your character.
- Every time Jobe uses his psychic powers, the lines on his VR data-suit glowed…reminding me of the 1983 ABC superhero show “Automan”, which itself deals with a glowing suit-wearing AI lifeform that becomes a superhero cop with telekinetic powers.
- Dr. Angelo’s wife Caroline (Colleen Coffey, Indecent Behavior 3 [1995], Ride Me [1994]) leaves him near the beginning of the movie, because he was neglectful. Her behavior might be construed as shrewish, but he was an ass about it. “You don't understand…bla bla blah…” I’d have left his ass too, girl.
- Dr. Angelo is the worst kind of 90’s movie scientist: he smokes in bed, he’s always sweaty-looking, weirdly multi-disciplinary (for the sake of the plot), and is generally irresponsible on so many levels.
- The good doctor doesn’t have to wait long to replace Caroline (with good reason) since Jobe kills Peter’s abusive dad, played by stuntman Ray Lykins (Trancers, Critters 2: the Main Course, Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow). This leaves Mrs. Parkette (Rosalee Mayeux, “FreakyLinks” [TV-FOX]) open to new suitors that do not beat her OR her child…and Dr. Angelo seems like the best option. Oh boy…
- When Jobe becomes an AI/digital being, his body deflates like a drained juice box — as if all his meat and bone and organs flew into the VR world. It’s goofy as heck when you think about it.
- AI-Jobe finds a backdoor and escapes the explosion at VSI, bringing up my usual complaint: STOP ALLOWING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE UNFETTERED ACCESS TO THE INTERNET
- Maybe Jobe will cross paths with Edgar the AI from 1984's Electric Dreams; who knows.
