Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/13/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 13, 2023

Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973)

James Brolin and Richard Benjamin in Westworld

Cast: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Norman Bartold, Alan Oppenheimer, Victoria Shaw, Dick Van Patten, Linda Gaye Scott, Steve Franken, Michael T. Mikler, Terry Wilson, Majel Barrett, Anne Randall. Screenplay: Michael Crichton. Cinematography: Gene Polito. Art direction: Herman A. Blumenthal. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Fred Karlin.

Today, Michael Crichton's film Westworld is probably best known for inspiring the HBO series of the same name. Viewing both of them is a study in the anxieties of two eras almost 50 years apart. The 1973 film takes place in a futuristic amusement park in which the guests indulge their fantasies by encountering androids playing figures from the past and mostly either killing them or having sex with them. So does the series, which ran from 2016 to 2022. In both the movie and the series, things go seriously awry, with the androids killing or maiming their human guests. Especially in comparison with the series' handsomely realized vision of the future, its exploration of the creation of the androids, and its portrayal of the corporate intrigue behind the scenes of the park, Crichton's movie looks antique: the special effects are clunky, the characterization and acting are routine, and some of the action scenes are unconvincing. But the chief difference between the movie and the series lies in their understanding of the causes of the park's disaster. In the movie, the cause is said to be malfunctioning technology, an undetected glitch in the machinery. But in the series the cause lies deeper: The androids develop consciousness, a self-awareness that causes them to rebel against their human makers. To put it in other words, in the 1970s we were concerned about the problem of increasing dependence on fallible technology. In the 21st century, we're worried about technology becoming too good, about artificial intelligence outstripping human intelligence. The fallibility is not in the machines but in ourselves. But to be fair, Crichton showed a sign of our concern about AI, specifically the potential for cybernetic beings to self-replicate and evolve on their own. An engineer in the movie notes that the androids are "almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work."