getmygoat

A few weeks ago I watched Gamer in the theatre.  More than once.  While I’m not a huge fan of action movies, I thought the premise of one person literally controlling another was intriguing.  I was expecting mindless violence, but I ended up watching an hour and a half of the most thoughtful violence I’ve seen in a long time.

In the film, Gerard Butler plays a death row convict who volunteered to be “played” in a video game called Slayers.  His brain is full of cells which give him a distinct IP address and allow the young man willing to pay for the privilege to control him in a battle situation.  Any convict who survives 30 rounds in the game is released.  Butler’s character, Kable, is the only convict to last longer than 10 rounds.

But you knew all that from the previews.  What the previews didn’t show you was another game featuring similar technology, Society.  At first glance it looks like the popular real-life video game The Sims.  On closer inspection, we see that Society is less about simulating a kooky yet functional life (as in The Sims) and more about hooking up with other “characters.”

Society fascinates and horrifies me on several levels.  First of all, the game enables the commodification of the human body.  One person literally pays to control another human being.  The actors in Society, as one character points out, are people who need the money and have no other way to get it.  Like the death row inmates trying to escape their sentence as Slayers, the people in Society are in their situation out of desperation.  I can’t decide if the people who play Society are voyeurs or solicitors.

At the end of the movie, the good guys win (quit groaning, by now you’ve had the chance to see it), and the cells get deactivated.  But I still find myself wondering what kind of person would want to borrow another person’s body for the purpose of sex or killing (let us remember now that Venus and Mars are clandestine lovers).  I know it’s fiction, but at the same time I think that the story is based in truth, and I think that the idea of inhabiting a different body appeals to most Americans (I also saw Surrogates when it came out, and it contains similar ideas, except the people we inhabit are fake this time around).

This started out as a rant about using other people as a means to get off in a fantasy world, but I think there’s more at stake here.  Is our self-esteem really so low that we would rather rent another body, not to copulate with, but to inhabit while we copulate?  I find the entire situation problematic and disturbing, and I hope that the movie instigated that same reaction from other viewers.