I'm not sure I could answer the question posed in the title to this blog any better having seen this film. Indeed I suspect it is one of those questions about which only someone on their third joint and attending the kind of conference at which this film is set would even muse. However, anyone prepared to give up 90 minutes of their time should be well rewarded and gently amused by this brilliantly conceived and realised piece - a saline drip of droll humour on very slow release.
The development in the early 1980s of chess programmes capable of competing against real people is used as a starting point for all sorts amusing insights and hallucinations. Indeed the film is as much concerned with hallucinations as anything else. A number of the characters see these as having almost permanent effects and there is a bravura sequence involving a machine increasingly seeming to question the programmer rather than the other way round which finishes with a glimpse of an embryo 'in the machine'.
There is a strong element of narcissism and hubris running throughout as the participants obsess about programming and creation but fail to see the absurdity of their own situation and are deeply sensitive to failure and slight. One team magnificently resigns from a game before a single move has been made because they are convinced that they won't win.
For me one particularly telling exchange occurs when the only female member of a team (a point which comes up repeatedly and almost inevitably in a sexist manner) suggests that she has started to see some of the participants as chess pieces and makes some well gauged comments about how far they act as kings, knights, pawns etc. However, she also says that she feels as though she was 'teleported' into that situation. The programmer to whom she is talking is naturally much more interested in that process rather than any insights into character.
Equally naturally the chess programmes reflect the characteristics of their designers. We have anthropomorphised cats (of which more later). Now our intelligence is applied to designing programmes that act as extensions of ourselves. One of the hallucinations concerns the degree to which a programme starts to become more aggressive when playing against a real person.
One character opines that 'a man on 3 scotches could programme his way out of any problem in the world'. The need for artificial stimulation in order to achieve the nominal perfect pitch of programming is very funny. As indeed is the assertion that programming can solve any problem; the perennial search for the magic bullet. There is a nicely observed conversation throughout the film about the degree to which ultimately developing a successful chess playing machine is contributing to a potential military application. Despite ongoing denials it turns out that one of the teams has indeed been doing work for the Pentagon.
There is also the degree to which programmes are oversold. Mr Papageorge is both something of a flaneur and a free loader ('how would you like to pay?' to which he replies 'tomorrow') but he's also the future marketing man who will of course become increasingly important as the consumer applications of such activity move centre stage. He remarks that much of what he sees is 'mediocre but turbo charged'.
Then there is the hotel. It is shot as something of a labyrinth - which might stand for both mind and machine - which allows for a running gag of Mr Papageorge's peregrinations looking for a room in which to stay and as often as not failing and ending up curled up under a table or flat out on the stair carpet (he is indeed lost in a loop)
But this idea is extended by having the hotel simultaneously host the computer chess event and a self help therapy session with each competing for time and space. Mr Papageorge awakes from one sleeping situation to find himself in the room being used by the therapists and by the end the therapy students are comforting the chess guru who has just lost to a computer.
One very earnest programmer is criticised for seeing life as 64 squares on a board rather than trying to achieve his full potential. He protests that an almost infinite number of chess games could be played out on that grid and moreover he is the programmer not the player. 'In' but not necessarily 'of' this world. The therapists on the other hand want to break out and be reborn even if that is achieved by inserting hands into loaves of bread or rather odd incantations. We are all seekers after something.
There is also a fantastic gag about cats which start to appear sitting on computers or leaving lifts but then turn out to have gathered in numbers in the only notionally spare room in the hotel. Presumably this is a comment on the degree to which images of our cats on social media have now reached epidemic proportions.
The other, now staple, web phenomenon appearing mysteriously in the hotel is the fantasy woman. Our very reserved programmer having spurned, it has to be said understandably, a threesome with a couple attending the therapy conference ends up in his hotel room with a silent and rather strange and rapidly unclothed female. But then something very odd happens. Hallucinations again?
Comments
Post a Comment