Surrogates: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

Jonathan Mostow, the director of Terminator 3 (actually a pretty good film) has given us his new film Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, a sort of reworking of The Stepford Wives crossed with Minority Report.

The premise is a by now familiar one, for it reworks the theme of the avatar or alternate self that we have seen explored in films like Total Recall, Strange Days and Existenz: we are to imagine a future society in which the creation of synthetic robots has reached such a state of perfection that nearly everyone has replaced himself with his own double. The only difference is that the synthetics are shinier and usually younger and more attractive versions of one’s self. People hide in their houses, where they sit on chairs with pods on their heads that enable them to inhabit their synths via long distance. You can be anyone you want: if you’re a man, you can be a beautiful young woman, say, or if you’re an older man you can replace yourself with a younger, more attractive double. Whatever you want.

The social effects of the replacement of everybody with synths is that crime is virtually nonexistent. So when a couple of murders take place, the Bruce Willis character and his sidekick are brought in as detectives to track down the person who is somehow managing to use a weapon that not only destroys one’s synth, but then fries the user’s brain in the chair where he sits. Eventually, we discover that the man who invented the synths has had a complete turn around and now wishes to destroy them. He wants to get rid of all this artifice and he has a plan that will destroy all the synths.

At the end of the film, there comes a moment when the Bruce Willis character can, at the touch of a button, destroy all the synths or else just turn the bad guys in. He opts to hit the button, and everybody in the streets suddenly falls down in their tracks. They’re all synths. After a few minutes, their operators, in various modes of dishevelment, come shuffling out of their apartments, blinking in the sunlight which they have apparently not seen for a long time.

Philosophically, then, there is a wonderful rejection of technology here on the part of the filmmakers, who recognize that all this electronic technology that enables the creation and proliferation of artificial selves really has only a numbing effect on us all; it covers and displaces our real humanity. Technology, as McLuhan never tired of pointing out, numbs the self: people in cars are often more hostile than people on the street, since the car numbs one’s sensitivities to others. Bombers have no psychological trouble dropping bombs on civilians, but ask one of them to pour gasoline on a child and light him on fire and you are most likely going to get some resistance. The airplane, you see, numbs the human sensitivity.

Surrogates has its thematic heart in the right place, certainly, for its central metaphor is all about how electronic technology, and indeed, the culture of hyperreality in general, enables us to replace and displace the world. As Baudrillard put it, we are building a gigantic double of the world. The real Lascaux must be shut down and closed to the public while an exact replica is built nearby. This is the Disneyfication of the world. The idea of the surrogate is basically a development of Disney’s animatronic robots which so excited him.

It can also be read as a metaphor for the Internet: online you can be anyone you want to be. Identities shift and change and become as slippery as demonic beings in Bardo. Is that woman you’re thinking of dating really a woman at all, or some 12 year old boy just having a few laughs at your expense? Who knows? We all like to hide, these days, behind false selves, electronic personae that cover and disguise who we really are. And it is all completely confusing and socially upsetting. We think, with all these clever gadgets that we’re “progressing” somehow, but we’re really just muddling up the world and creating ever more intricate webs of social chaos and confusion.

Surrogates makes another point, too, about the technological imitation of the astral body: the person sitting in the chair with the mask on is like someone asleep and dreaming, while the synth replicates his dream self, what Rudolf Steiner would call his “astral body.” We are using technology, then, to try to imitate the architecture of the subtle body, as William Irwin Thompson has talked about in his books.

So, the film has the right themes and has chosen good material to work with, but the problem is that the screenplay is not well written nor is the film well directed. It moves along at a jerky, spasmodic clip, and sometimes leaves plot mechanisms unexplained. There is also a certain dullness and lack of imagination about it: compare the look of the synths when their human flesh is off with the robots in Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I. and you’ll see what I mean. Not much money was spent on the special effects, evidently. The film’s futuristic look, furthermore, basically duplicates that of Minority Report. There is little in the way of original production design and art direction here.

In short, I would skip Surrogates: it actually watches like a made-for-TV movie from the 1970s, one of those run of the mill cop dramas that, once upon a time, you could turn on at two o’clock in the morning.