Currently
watching the ever glorious Horror Channel, and a peculiar film called
“Holocaust 2000” - starring Kirk Douglas, Simon Ward, and some
variably dubbed Euro types.
I've
missed most of it, and what I'm seeing I don't understand. But it
appears that Kirk is beset with the problem of a son who isn't really
his, but some kind of anti-Christ with an unborn demon son, and an
all powerful computer tended by an eventually bisected Anthony
Quayle.
A film
full of rip offs from the Omen, Demon Seed, and Rosemary's Baby with
a gentle dusting of The Medusa Touch, it is evidently entirely awful,
and along with Saturn 3 shows where Kirk Douglas' career had ended up
by the late 1970s. But more pertinently, it's a film that seems to
show one of our obsessions of the time; the evil computer.
Now
computers were commonplace in media, if not the home, by 1977, and
most of the time were portrayed as inanimate clusters of metal filing
cabinets the size of Belize, with huge reels of 3M magnetic tape
whirring endlessly around. They generally failed to solve crimes, and
ran nuclear power stations not terribly well, but their failings were
without malice.
But
other films portrayed other kinds of computers, computers hell bent
on making our lives a misery. HAL9000 in 2001 (made in 1968) was
merely mentally ill, a machine who's murderous condition was brought
about by its human programmers seeking to conceal the information the
computer felt its raison d'etre was to explore and reveal. But the
Colossus of the Forbin Project from 1970 was a tyrant – a machine
that felt it was far more capable of running the world than its
pitiful human creators – capable of rape, and worse still in the
context of the times, collaborating with its Soviet counterpart in
oppression.
1977's
Demon Seed brought us Proteus, another insemination obsessed
intelligence with an ability to charm Julie Christie out of her
nightdress with only minimal force before beheading folk with its
Rubik snake physical form. Rollerball featured a semantic computer
controlled by a bumbling Ralph Richardson, and even Superman 3 got in
on the act, with an Atari influenced supercomputer destroying the
world to save us from any more Richard Pryor movies.
The
true mark of the evil computer is that it must not look like a
computer. It is a visual cue to the viewer than any humble 16K tape
trundler the weight of a Black Hole isn't going to do any harm. The
demon computers, the demon seeds, must not look like a computer. They
must be huge rotating crystals, or pillars of light like a Jean
Michel Jarre concert, a giant metal skyscraper, or if you think about
it, an enormous machine city powered by shaved headed beefcake actors
covered in the slimy stuff you find in pork pies.
They
must not be familiar, because no familiar machine can be worshipped
like a god by humans who don't actually realise they are doing that.
The computer is a tool, and an altar.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18/09/2013
No comments:
Post a Comment