The Lawnmower Man
Schlock & the unrealised future of VR
“My battle cry will be the sound of every telephone in the universe ringing in unison.”
I never developed much of a sweet-tooth for sincerely schlocky, so-bad-it’s-good cinema. But just as I enjoyed the infamous awfulness of The Room, so too did I recently marvel at the delicious badness of The Lawnmower Man (1992) – all 140 minutes of the Director’s Cut, no less. To have even made a film this bad seems extraordinary to me, much less its status as a global blockbuster that year. Equally astonishing to me is that Pierce Brosnan’s career not only survived his association with this film, but thrived – he would soon become the next James Bond. Shaken, but not deterred.
In this shameless crib of both Frankenstein and Flowers for Algernon, Brosnan plays Dr. Lawrence Angelo, a kind of cognitive scientist who plies his talents within Virtual Space Industries (VSI), a shadowy research organisation that appears to be funded by an equally shadowy government agency referred to only as “The Shop”. (Incidentally, its malevolent director is played by a truly awful Dean Norris, Breaking Bad’s Hank, who affects a strange English accent that makes him sound a bit like Martin Amis.)
In The Lawnmower Man, every character is a caricature: Angelo is the brilliant, destructively arrogant scientist whose devotion to a Great Discovery allows him to rationalise some increasingly creepy shit. He recasts his vanity as nobility, and realises too late the wretched fruits of his genius.
Angelo’s talent is for enhancing others’ intelligence through a combination of nootropics, VR headsets and, inexplicably, a human gyroscope. His first subject is a chimp, who through Angelo’s interventions develops a grand intelligence, hyper-aggression and an unlikely competence with firearms – all of which are used to murderous effect when he escapes the lab.
Having taken out several heavily-armed men, before absconding from a secured compound, our super chimp is eventually cornered in a church garden and gunned down by a crack squad much larger than the one that stormed bin Laden’s lair. (I might add that the chimp’s heroic abilities here are rendered not through CGI, but merely implied through hilariously crude editing.)
Dr. Angelo is distraught: the death of his chimp seems to spell the end of his research project, until he informally revives it with a human guinea-pig – a sweet lawnmower man with an intellectual disability.
*
Virtual Reality suddenly began featuring a lot in movies of the 1980s and ‘90s. To render its VR universe, Tron (1983) was one of the first films to ever incorporate CGI. The same year, Brainstorm – starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood (she drowned during the film’s making) – told the story of a scientist who develops the capacity to record both memories and emotions, and have them replayed (and experienced) by others. The discovery is at first innocently celebrated before it’s gravely feared: when a recording of a death is replayed by another, they too experience a (very real, non-virtual) heart-attack. And, like The Lawnmower Man, the early, joyously experimental applications of a revolutionary technology are explored for their improvements of one’s orgasm.
In the 1990s, there was Total Recall, Existenz, The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic – far from an exhaustive list, and each one different – but typically films that took VR as their theme were usually humourless affairs that borrowed from earlier literature (Philip K. Dick inspired both Total Recall and The Matrix, as he did Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, etc etc).
The year The Lawnmower Man came out, Neal Stephenson released his cult novel Snow Crash about a hacker/pizza delivery guy living in a dystopic Los Angeles who enters a “metaverse” – a kind of VR-based Internet, and the first appearance of the word – to protect against the spread of a computer virus than can also infect humans.
Twenty-two years later, Rony Abovitz, the CEO of “augmented reality” start-up Magic Leap, employed Stephenson as his company’s “chief futurist”. Magic Leap had secured some US$2 billion in funding – investors included Google and Saudi Arabia’s infinite slush fund – to develop an AR headset. Through a combination of eccentric TED Talks, tactically cultivated secrecy and some mind-bending (but utterly misleading) proof-of-concept videos, he enthusiastically sowed hype for the imminent head-set. “When we launch it is going to be huge.”
But it was not huge. The Magic Leap One launched in 2018, and sold poorly. A second-generation head-set was also a commercial failure. In 2020, the company halved its workforce. There were more cuts this year, and its raison d’etre is now unclear. It was better at making hype than technology people wanted to use.
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta, and pledged the serious investment of his company’s vast brains and coin into the development of the brave new world of the “Metaverse”.
What, precisely, is the Metaverse? Well, that depends upon who you speak to. For now, it’s merely a theory. An abstraction. A hope, a dream, an inevitability – or the chimera of false prophets. For Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist, former Amazon executive and the author of 2021’s The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, it will be:
“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
For Ball, at least, that’s the “what”. But there are plenty of other questions: of desirability, say, and of plausibility (we don’t have the computational power yet to sustain such a thing, and the Metaverse as described by Ball would likely require a degree of centralised control/regulation of the internet which doesn’t exist. That said, Neal Stephenson has made a company that’s investing in an entirely open, decentralised metaverse – Whenere).
Regardless, within 18 months Zuckerberg was sheepishly retreating from it. AI is the hot game now (and, I think, a topic more likely to yield interesting films). Which is not to say that investment and research has wholly ceased, nor that the future of the internet won’t be immersive.
Apple invested many billions of dollars into its “mixed reality” headset, the Vision Pro, which was released earlier this year. Tech writers were impressed – “magic” was a word often used to describe it – but the $6,000 price and limited application (for now, at least) has ensured its modest adoption. But technologies are sometimes made before the scope of their applications are realised or even discovered. Today, at least, its usefulness for architecture, say, or sim-training are obvious (and Christ knows what else that I’m ignorant of).
But more than thirty years after The Lawnmower Man, Virtual Reality remains relatively fringe – which hasn’t stopped the film’s director, Brett Leonard, long branding himself a “futurist” and offering public lectures on the consequences of the technology he deliriously fantasised about in his awful film.
I’m sceptical of film makers who offer themselves as tech prophets as well as artists. Leonard still speaks today with sickly pride about the (dubious) far-sightedness of The Lawnmower Man.
There’s a popular and stubborn habit of judging sci-fi by its technological prescience, as if all expressions of the genre are merely predictions with plots. But the works that have endured – and this should be obvious – are the ones which impose invention to better explore human psychology. Philip K. Dick was not a futurist, but a very strange and often perverse man who possessed an outrageous imagination. He was a writer that used his marriages and divorce; his alcoholism and homelessness; his paranoia, megalomania and obsessive spiritual questing in novels about state surveillance, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Never mind the androids and time-travel – his recurring theme was totalitarianism, both within and without.
But if we must contemplate prescience, I think the films from this time that focused upon the internet (or its antecedents) – WarGames (1983), Sneakers (1992), Hackers (1995) – proved more prescient, though I suppose they could be because the technologies they made their subject were already better advanced.
As absurdly as they romanticised their subjects – and those last two films are pure schlock – they did assume basic things that became true: that the world’s digital connections would sponsor a new world for war, crime and vulnerability. It would redefine communication as well as security. Ronald Reagan watched WarGames at Camp David the year it was released, and it prompted the President to anxiously inquire with his Joint Chiefs of Staff about the vulnerability of his military’s computer networks.
*
Dr. Angelo’s experiments on Jobe immediately yield results: within a day he can absorb a whole encyclopaedia and master Latin. Curiously, though, even as Jobe’s intelligence surpasses Angelo’s, the revelation that he’s been grossly exploited by him remains ungrasped.
Still, things are good for a time: Jobe develops a fondness for music, can better defend himself against insult, and he’s getting laid now. Mysteriously, he’s become ripped and has replaced his overalls for a crisp cowboy shirt and Levis. What’s more, these startling developments have not soured his sweetness.
Not yet, anyway. Because Jobe’s development is not done. He soon acquires telepathy and telekinetic powers – and his soul is becoming bizarrely degraded. As we know it must, Jobe’s gradual corruption transforms him into an avenging angel and he stalks his town visiting macabre punishments upon his previous tormentors: a sadistic priest, a hulking bully, and the abusive father of his kid friend Peter.
Jobe’s sexual development, complemented by his telepathic access to his girlfriend’s fantasies, makes for one of the film’s most jaw-droppingly strange scenes. Deciding to fulfill his lover’s secret desires, he introduces her to the VSI lab where he straps her into the gyroscope and headset. Within this virtual world – rendered as garishly as a ‘90s screensaver – the two virtually fuck, meld like quicksilver, then transform into a singular dragonfly.
But then – as can happen – Jobe’s avatar separates from its blissful unity and transforms into a hissing lamprey that spits black devil-goo at his darling. This terror seems to provoke a psychic break in his girlfriend who’s now condemned to wander the real world as a permanently giggling zombie.
Psychic fracture is a recurring consequence of VR in these sci-fi/horror films – and typically, the dangers seem vaguely Freudian. That is, the technology merely arouses dormant nightmares – or allows for literal meetings between split selves – and these visions of the subconscious are so graphic, so unspeakably traumatising and disorienting, that one’s brain is cooked.
Which, I suppose, is not unlike social media.
*
Jobe’s developmental stages go something like this: impressive intellect, spooky genius, supernatural killer, half-digital deity and then, finally, a purely electronic substance both evil and sentient and committed to haunting the world’s “mainframes” and phone lines.
The film’s great distinction might be the litigation it inspired. The film promoted itself initially as Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man, having been “inspired” by a short story of his of the same name. But the only thing they shared was its title and the fact that its hero telekinetically controls a lawnmower in order to dismember a man.
The chutzpah of taking his name for something entirely different astonished King, and he was successful in having courts order its removal from the film. But then, when the film was released on VHS, his name had returned to its title. The film’s production company, New Line, was found in contempt of court.
Crucially, King’s objection was not that the film was profoundly awful, but – justifiably – that it had no meaningful relationship to his short story. A judge said:
Appellants also suggest that the presumption of irreparable harm was rebutted because King himself enjoyed the movie, continues to be a popular literary figure, and was unable to specify particular financial injury. However, we have observed that the irreparable harm in cases such as this often flows not so much from some specific reduction ‘in fact’ to an individual’s name or reputation, but rather from the wrongful attribution to the individual, in the eye of the general public, of responsibility for actions over which he or she has no control.
I suspect the full story of the making of The Lawnmower Man would be sensational: you have a film as ambitious as it is dumb, a relatively modest budget, and the litigation of a famous man whose name you’re stealing. You have the crude use of a nascent graphics technology, several actors who are out of their depth, and film-makers who seem deficient in both humour and self-awareness.
Is it too late to wish for this book? I hope not. And I nominate Geoff Dyer to write it.