Flubber: A 1997 movie with 2013 relationships between humans and technology
How our relationship with technology has moved from utility to emotional.
What happens to the soul of a machine, Sarah?
This is the question Robin Williams asks his character’s love interest, while tenderly holding his robot / personal computer friend who was smashed with a baseball bat, whose lights are slowly flickering and wires jut out of her battered frame. Flubber, a 1997 family Disney movie about an absent-minded professor and his brilliant invention, was easily my favorite movie of my childhood, and despite extremely negative reviews, it always had a place in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office.
I watched the movie for the first time since there were two digits in my age this weekend, and the memories swirled back to me instantly. I remember being, at that young age, enamored with the bouncy green goo that gets the main character into a ton of trouble and adventure, as the movie plot intends. What we do see her is a very poignant look at humans relationships with technology, as if forewarning us of what’s to come in 2020. Yet the most fascinating part is not only was the movie made before personal computers were mainstream, and ten years before the iPhone was released, but it’s a remake of The Absent-Minded Professor, a Disney movie from 1961.
Robin Williams’ character Phillip Brainard represents the modern human: an absent-minded person that’s so filled with ideas to create that he can’t remember to connect in real life. Or, a modern millennial, in a sense. A recent study indicates that a lot of millennials are more forgetful than seniors, which can be attributed to the demands of modern technology, compounded by a lack of sleep. Williams is also driven by the modern innovations of his own time because he is constantly trying to create something, and we are too — obsessing over our digital platforms from tweets and photos to blog posts that we become disjointed and absent minded. And in both of our cases, we aim to create meaningful content that will help us connect with others in real life, with inconsistent results. Brainard reflects on this to Weebo, citing that he can’t seem to connect with anyone well except technology, and that no one else seems to understand him.
Yet it’s something that Weebo understands, for she loves him, even creating a holographic figure of herself in a desperate attempt to connect on his level, then succumbing to her virtual limitations, and helping him find real love before her untimely death. She’s basically the evolution of Siri and the iPhone — a personal device with the capabilities to access content from a wealth of information, maintain a calendar, send notifications, and is activated by both touch and voice. In this case, her artificial intelligence is so advanced that she’s able to use her screen and voice to respond back, appropriately to human emotion, and using several references to pop culture that add comedic relief in the movie, yet also show her technical capabilities.
After Weebo’s death, Brainard discovers a message Weebo had just so happened to record for him in case she died (weird) that not only professed her love, but revealed another folder that contains a prototype for a new and improved AI device, that she created because he could never finish, taking the best of both him and her. This surreal love child is seen zooming around at the end of the movie, and looks pretty normal in robot standards, but what it represents is much more monstrous: a device partially created by another device, not just a human; a lovechild of a human’s desire to connect and a robot’s ability to not just communicate, but sympathize and understand. It’s smarter and faster, with a more robust hardware, better screen, and improved motion capabilities, but also acts smarter and more confident, despite even being a child.
Unlike humans, who aim to communicate with others through technology, the possibilities of technology aren’t limited to our intelligence, and increasingly capable of mimicking and manipulating human wants and desires, but for what? We use it in today’s time for helping us remember important dates, and warn us if it’s raining, but how far away are we from allowing them to solve for the things we truly want? Connection, acceptance, belonging – we can find them not as an end result to the use of the device, but through using it, in itself.
Just as I finished writing this post, the trailer for Spike Jonze’s new film Her was released, showing Joaquin Phoenix playing a character afflicted with not forgetfulness, but loneliness, and strike up a relationship with his female, husky-voiced operating system, which seems to have found human emotions through him as well. In the trailer, his ex-wife looks at him, referring to it as “kind of a form of socially acceptable craziness”. And when it’s not a crazy professor saying his last goodbye to a smashed CD player-like robot with a tear in his eye, as shown in Flubber, but through Instagram-filter-like shots of a troubled, simple man laughing at his phone, it doesn’t seem that crazy that we’re helping technology help us connect, even if that relationship is artificial — in the simple sense of the term.
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I’d love to know what you thought about this piece. Reach out on Twitter @nicolecardoza and feel free to read my previous posts:
Digital Homebodies — the end of browser-based search
Fuck Monetization — why society can’t succeed if we concentrate on making profit
The End of Instagram in 15 Seconds — a prediction I posted on Day One that I really, really wish wasn’t coming true, but it is
