Although I've hear mixed opinions about last year's scifi release, Moon, I found it to be a startlingly well-done reflection on the limits and consequences of personal identity. Its relevance is, as with most scifi films, entirely abstract, but it is the semi-abstract narrative realm in which many of the most compelling ideas reside. The movie owes much of its success to the obvious, although by no means isomorphic, analogy to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - and when a film manages to derive meaning from its relationship to other gems of cinematic history, the conceptual snowball really gets rolling.
Both films occur primarily in a man-made space vessel - the Discovery spaceship in 2001 and the Sarang moonbase in Moon - each of whose austere and highly economical spaces renders the human characters nakedly embodied on an unfamiliar and inhuman stage. The foregrounding effects are, of course, tremendous, but the alien scene in which the action occurs engenders a sort of film making that relies on a profound situatedness: a constrained environment invites that extra importance be placed on the details of angle, shape, and distance. The audience stares in awe at the slow panning shots of spaceships and the well-designed environs of the Discovery. The novelty of strange topologies (running in a circle is nothing new, but the transformation of that activity into a different plane with respect to the body is spatially dramatic in the highest) dominates 2001, and the inexorably slow rotations of the unsupported pod crafts in vacuum disables the audience's physical intuitions. These new forms of embodied action, strange and precise, are paralleled in the immaculate form of the monolith.
The end sequence of 2001, opening with a close view of Bowman's eye, our primary form of sensory interface with the world, then panning to the juxtaposition of his space-fortified pod and a normal bed, turns out to be a long and brooding scene, dubbed by Bowman's breathing, on our embodiment and physical understanding of the world. Ultimately, 2001 gestures at a transcendent embodiment which is realized over the course of the end sequence, whose temporally recursive views of an aging Bowman allows the audience one last reflection on their own physical form, framed by rooms and human artifacts which are, in fact, more familiar to the audience than any of the spaces and objects shown previously in the film, despite their alien quality. The transformation of the human form is perfectly mirrored in the unusual transformation of the spaces and objects with which we are most familiar: bathroom and bedroom, fork and knife. Bowman pauses reflectively upon breaking his glass - it is the first time that the usually common presence of gravity has made itself known since the beginning of the film, but it turns out to be a farewell too, as the Star Child adopts the physics of space, which has been meticulously documented by Kubrick throughout.
Moon pursues another avenue of exploration, asking whether imperfect and inauthentic forms of embodiment, namely that of the clone, holds the same existential currency. Questions of personal identity, normally occurring internally, are externalized in Sarang in a dramatic manner. Although Moon does not share the same cinematography as 2001, many of the same questions are raised within similar astronautical confines. If 2001 primarily explores our physical embodiment, then Moon explores our social embodiment. But the genetic themes of Moon aside, the aspect of embodiment present in both films is our relationship to our machines, and more specifically, the forms of embodiment our machines take. Indeed, the largest source of similarity between the films is the presence of an artificial intelligence sequestered with the human characters. But this similarity is only superficial because the capacities and embodiment of HAL and GERTY are profoundly different. The audience's familiarity with HAL causes them to import many of their intuitions picked up from 2001 into Moon, only to find that they had guessed quite wrong. 2001 primes the audience for Moon, and Moon deconstructs those expectations.
HAL is almost entirely disembodied. The only semblance of a physical realization is his monolithic red eye which appears in a variety of locations in the ship. Indeed, it becomes clear quite early that HAL is nearly omniscient within the boundaries of the ship, and quite well informed about the external space environment as well - hence the necessity of using the pod craft as a makeshift cone of silence by Bowman and Poole. It becomes intuitive that the body of HAL - that physical extension housing the sensory and action capabilities of HAL - is simply the Discovery itself. Bowman is enveloped by HAL in this sense, as is Pinocchio in the bowels of the whale.
But that analogy is imperfect because embodiment is more about epistemic and action capabilities than about mere physical continuity. HAL's body is the ship in virtue of the fact that HAL has intimate perceptual access to the ship and his capabilities of acting are mediated by the ship (locking/opening doors, detecting hardware malfunctions - a quite different domain of action and sensation from that of ourselves, to be sure). The whale, in contrast, has only indirect (at best) access to Pinocchio in this stomach. The dramatic element of embodiment that is relevant here should be understood as the agent's domain of knowledge and control. This is also the functional notion of embodiment of primary importance to cognitive science according to the philosopher Andy Clark (2008), and of course Dennett's parable of local body and distal brain is echoed none to faintly.
GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), unlike HAL, has a more concrete (familiar) physical manifestation. GERTY moves about Sarang suspended from the ceiling on a track. He is composed, in some sense abstractly, of both a primary lobe, which displays an ever present emoticon, and a robotic arm which moves independently from the main body. GERTY's lobe engages in many of the same sorts of perceptual actions that we ourselves do. That is, the lobe serves as GERTY's primary sensor cluster and social interface, much like a human head. This explains, for example, the smooth tracking motions that GERTY makes while looking at Sam as he moves about Sarang - it is necessary that GERTY physically move his lobe just as we do our heads, and thus GERTY's concept of 'watching' is much the same as our own. But GERTY is, nonetheless, physically continuous with Sarang, just as HAL is with the Discovery. This creates a confound from which the main dramatic role of embodiment in Moon derives: the audience in some sense expects that GERTY and Sarang are more intimately connected in virtue of their physical continuity. With this initial conception, it is somewhat surprising to see GERTY talking to his cohorts on earth via a video chat. That Sam is able to walk in on this conversation indicates that GERTY's form of embodiment plays a dramatic role in the narrative very similar to that of a human character, although quite different from that of HAL.
GERTY also has somewhat ambiguous access to information within Sarang. It is clear that GERTY does have privileged access to information about the state of the base and the harvesters, as GERTY is Sam's primary source for all such knowledge. GERTY also knows, for instance, exactly how many hours Sam has working on his toy models over the course of 3 years. Such informational cues, along with GERTY's physical continuity with Sarang, creates a picture of GERTY for the audience that is much like that of HAL. But this conception is largely incorrect because, as the drama unfold, it becomes clear that GERTY's knowledge is often incomplete, and its completeness depends on the physical positioning of his lobe. GERTY is not omniscient within Sarang, as it turns out, and it would be more suitable to think of his ceiling track as merely an inverted version of more familiar forms of robot locomotion - such as wheels - than as a profound informational bridge that constitutes the unity of GERTY and Sarang. Thus, GERTY drives a conceptual wedge between the functional notion of embodiment defined above - involving his domain of sense and action - and our familiar criterion of physical continuity. This divorce is the source of an ambiguity that is never fully resolved in the film and that springs precisely from the limitations of our intuitive and familiar conception of embodiment.
The form of the machine in both movies is commensurate with the machines' epistemic situatedness, and credit goes to Moon for completing this theme that 2001 opened. While 2001 motions toward new forms of human embodiment, Moon demolishes our notion of embodiment as relying primarily on physical continuity. The two films taken together, suggest a more fluid form of multiple embodiment that, as far as I can see, lies in the future of both our machines and ourselves. We are, after all, "indefinitely elastic."
---
Moon: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/
2001: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/
Clark, Andy. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press. [google books]
Dennett, Daniel. (1978). "Where am I?" [html]
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)