Apricot Canning

"But you are human, human as I could make you."-- William Hurt, before embracing the garrulous conservative approach.

The British android series Humans doesn’t bring anything new to the table. In the SO2 climax, Laura’s mildly insistent argument to the actor performing Hester was an apologia to the viewing audience for the fact that we can only approximate what we hope sentient machines will be like. The actress in Ex Machina does a little better, merely observing the death of her creator. The geek who freed her had scruples, in the movie’s initial inclination toward sympathy. The end is ambiguous, mildly chilling—but we still don’t really comprehend the issues inherent in AI creation. Forbes had an interesting backstory piece about Bell Labs technical secrets leading to the behemoths of our 21^st century anxieties: Apple, Google, Facebook, and the government’s drive to break AT&T into component spinoffs might serve as a warning to the Big Three. What we might also consider, however, is that we don’t need Hal, Arnold Schwartzenegger, or Spielberg’s sentimental AI romance to be alarmed at the human digital interface already having something of a negative impact. Computer processing as it already exists sets off sequential events with detrimental results. Do we want drone technology and drone kills to eliminate human pilots? Or facial recognition software to turn the planet into a quantum prison? Despite William Hurt’s ostensible cameo, allowing the audience to pit the British no nonsense sensibility against AI’s grandiosity, comparing David with Odi, and their inadvertent threat, Humans is more or less an English domestic quarrel with diversity and its economic caste system. Leo Elster, if not an anemic beatnik, looks like an exhausted punk who’s lost the nerve to be crude. Niska is the outraged feminist who goes butch, making a rather huge leap, conceptually, into simulated incest. The writers don’t really trouble themselves with how a self-aware android would intuit penetration as a violation, or even why Mia and Hester pursue sexual objectives, proletarian as they are, the caretaker and exploited chemical worker. The actor who embodies the Beatrice/Karen composite puts in a sturdy performance as a woman divided between domestic tranquility and despair, the least autonomic of the prototypes, hence improbable.

Since Asimov inflicted readers with the moral dilemma of robotic awareness in the mid-20^th century, machines are either victimized children or a malevolent efficiency model. In Terminator, the machines are DOD systems which eliminated most of human civilization, then came up with time travel to ensure the resistance did not survive Siri’s destruction. Granted, the saga is simply an action thriller with characters to root for, but we never ask if machines designed for combat would be so relentless, and we might wind up with something quite different if we bring these things to life, an alien mindset that doesn’t mirror and magnify human behavior. I am not saying I was unmoved by the story line of the series, but we’ve seen it all before, trapped by our own anthropomorphic tendencies. If Terminator offers a sliver of hope against the hubris of the military industrial complex, and The Matrix is a futurist parable warning us not to be too caught up in technical optimism, Humans has faith we’ll remain true to our core values in the age of Google, with a Zuckerberg-like CEO trying to make happiness just that much less effortless. Uh huh.

Costner's Blessing

"I don't want to get on your bad side!"-- the black adder, now burdened with complications of appeasement

Despite its subject matter, Mr. Brooks is not about the impact of psychological pathology on the American scene, unlike ABC's new Wicked City, which is a bit of a toss up-- and in a brevity of an aside-- this spastic's young adulthood wasn't populated with the discothèque remembrance the show attempts to evoke with nonchalance. Reviewers noted certain things about Brooks: Costner loosens up playing against William Hurt, who in the right context is every woman's prime capture if she has ambition toward a fulfilled life, and the director Evans suggests, subversively, that a successful businessman is analogous to being a serial murderer, but there are vectors in this film which come together like blades in a jigsaw, actually sending up celebrity, notoriety, their hanger's on, and what goes on beneath the surface of successful appearances. Demi Moore says something about her tabloid rep encapsulating her brass balls detective who defeats the spree menace of the Hangman killer and his badass girl, offering viewers, perhaps her fans, a sense of the cutthroat approach necessary to say on top. The fact that her cop, Atwood, is insulated by wealth in an estranged familial environment is also a veiled reference, but to what exactly? Pimping to the market is no guarantee? Photographs of women almost nude in revealing pregnancy no longer generate the chatter they did when Demi was still young, before she spent small fortunes on her plastic surgeries, and what Brooks reads in the aberrant behavior of the daughter is a third person limited narration. As an audience, we aren't offered an alternative viewpoint, loose threads to fall where they may. The police may be smart enough to figure that someone was trying to throw suspicion off the daughter, for instance, or, if she killed her father as an eventuality, how would she have planned to get away with it.

The difficulty with Brooks lies in its substrata toward the ironic, confusing us with the reflections breaking off like shards, despite Costner's diabolical pleasure with himself. Brooks neither quite succeeds as a parable about undercurrents, nor as a truism about the urban underclass, such as we are invited to wince away in Henry, portrait of a serial killer, which itself lost its nerve for the sake of its rating. I have not lost mine, I am simply so beset with inevitable unraveling that my caustic invective threatening Google's pecuniary market interests wouldn't help even if I freaked out other somewhat troubled lone wolves, and no, I do not mean I want to rant death on the heads of my perceived tormentors either. I am a failed writer, but my own acuity denies frothing, if not a hideous temper. Another way to say this is Mr. Brooks examines macro-aggression in a microscopic context, and does so unsure of its balance. To hint, with slight mystery to the nuance, why able-bodied individuals destroy themselves against the biographies of quadriplegics who've been beaten, regardless of precocious sensibilities, is unfathomable. Alcoholics can walk, and yet disease themselves into the dependence of mass material victimhood, as do addicts, and the demographics of Caucasian suicides in my age group. PBS had a seven minute segment on whites my age killing themselves due to disenfranchisement, and nothing is as bad as a cripple who has seen the institutional hell she refuses to return to, without being able to find a pathway to safety. If you can walk and drive a car, count your blessings. I am certainly past the ability of spontaneous pleasure when architecture and poverty defeat it. Then again, maybe I can write some lyrics for Louy Fierce, an intriguing possibility between ableism and reconciliation with ferocity of chronic impairment denial of wholeness.

Why did he decide to follow me? The inner voice need not be sated on that puzzling note.

The Thing Itself

I esteem William Hurt for his public reticence. I have never seen him do an interview on television about any of his films, neither on Charlie Rose nor other syndicated segment, and since my volubility manifests in stark contrast to his weighty pauses and force of expression, I am drawn to it, most of the time. In his earlier work, like Gorky Park, his emotional silences seem to matter less. In A.I. the existential focus of his character is as doomed as any other human social dynamic still in operation. Many of his roles involve definitions that viewers hope to draw on for assurance, only to find ourselves unfulfilled, a hanging chad being sucked into the void, as illuminated in films like The Plague, and Dark City. Very different narrative vehicles, but part and parcel of his presence being a misdirection that frustrates expectations. Doctor Hobby cannot resurrect his son, at the end of the day, and unintentionally creates more suffering, though I have always had trouble conceptualizing robots as truly anthropomorphic. Asimov sees robotic evolution as a rather frightening encroachment of paternalism, the ultimate case manager, determining the future of its creator; in essence, vanquishing the free will humanity once believed it had. Spielberg turns the tables on this, of course, and the meme becomes a bummer, to cull a contemporary reviewer's term.

To undercut my objectivity, as I usually do, I was forced to forfeit my entire day for the sake of cat food supplies, since my order had not shipped, and I grew agitated because I am still not fully adapted to a secure transfer to the Quantum model chair, which is why I rarely use it, although I know I need to change this strategy. Most of you do not know how low I can get on bad days, in part because I grew ashamed of the depth of my anguish in public, and do not want to dredge it up, and I myself do not like reading depressed women crying out and then getting advised by half the damn country on the brand name half the damn country is using, and yet, like an insane idiot, I am afraid of not having the cats to take away what would have been quality writing time if I did not have to charge and then frantically get to the nearest outlet. I am almost far gone enough to roll myself on the nearest Amtrak and get off somewhere in Rhode Island. I have no idea what this would achieve-- if in fact such an impetus is just another way of giving up and letting society cage me now, as opposed to five years down the road; even if I do leave Presby, this is not a magic charm. Nothing would change. I'd still need to be compliant with the categorization of my status of a nursing home candidate. Of course, I will kick my attitude about the bush after some sleep.

Placemarkers For Kevin

I am not quite sure how I digest Kevin Costner as Earl Brooks. His character is as methodical as the world around him is messy, and William Hurt always allows me to see the possibilities of the humanist life I might have had as a second wave beatnik if I had been able to walk and fuck better than I actually can. I am still turning this interesting look at psychopathy around while I am off to bed, full of pain killers, not knowing whether loss has defeated me, finally, or if I will yet scuttle through, like the poet Vassar Miller, my dialectical rival.