Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981)

Michael Crichton’s Looker is one of those technology-savvy films that, when viewed with 35 years of hindsight, seems impressively prescient on a lot of points, except that you have to keep overlooking all the ways in which it remains stuck in its own moment. When James Coburn’s manipulative corporate titan observes how much time people spend voluntarily staring at their televisions, and muses on the power that would flow from better control over the insinuating power of commercials, it would take only minimal updating to apply the thought and the dehumanizing implications to smartphones and pop-up ads and so forth. Similarly, the film’s obsession with scientifically-determined physical perfection, and the recourse to what we’d now call CGI when this falls short, leads directly to our age of digitally-reincarnated or –enhanced or –age-relieved actors. It’s bizarre though that Crichton’s concept stops short of assuming that the sets and environments in which virtual actors move around wouldn’t be virtually imagined as well, as opposed to being slavishly created in a studio. Anyway, it’s hard to engage consistently with such points of interest and semi-foresight when the film keeps losing you with its staggeringly unsophisticated A-leading-to-B narrative, relying on improbably reckless behaviour by heroes and villains alike; and with its overwhelming lack of interesting character and interaction, leaving Coburn and Albert Finney stuck in the extreme shallow end of their potential registers. Crichton’s stylistic superficiality isn’t entirely unsuited to the image-obsessed California milieu, but entails that the movie always seems to be dabbling in its various devices rather than interrogating them (by comparison, think about what Cronenberg achieved during the same decade with broadly similar material). One passingly haunting moment has Susan Dey’s besieged character visiting her parents for a respite from the mayhem, finding them stuck in their armchairs staring at some dumb comedy, barely capable of acknowledging her presence, hinting at a creeping malaise much greater than the movie acknowledges elsewhere.