Surrogates: Robots Gone Wild

To get the most value out of Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, I very much recommend first watching Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer. A sleep dealer is an actual person; a surrogate is a robot. A sleep dealer is a Mexican who ensouls a robot and becomes a worker in the U.S.; a surrogate is a consumer ensouled by a U.S. citizen. Put both films together, and we get a future world of robot workers and consumer robots.

Also, both films are about revolutions: Sleep Dealer climaxes with a worker revolution; Surrogates climaxes with a consumer revolution. The first revolution moves from bottom to top: A worker (Luis Fernando Peña) rebels against the privatization of the common—water, memories, love, familial feelings, cultural heritage, and so on. In short, the sleep dealer wants human rights. The second revolution moves from top to bottom: A prominent consumer (Bruce Willis) rebels against a world that has no immediacy, that is totally artificial—he longs for a return to real bodies, real sex, real caresses. In short, the consumer wants to be a human.

The revolution in Sleep Dealer, a low-budget art-house film with unknown actors, is about going forward, going to a place in the future (a world that has globalized human rights). Surrogates, a big-budget Hollywood film with famous actors, is about going back in time, going to a prelapsarian condition. Indeed, a consumer revolution turns out to be its complete opposite: a devolution. The rebellion in Sleep Dealer is Marxist in the deepest sense—the exploited worker appropriates the means of exploitation (the means of production) and uses them against the exploiter (corporate America). The rebellion in Surrogates is, in essence, reactionary—a man who is deeply disgusted with the hedonism of robotized consumer culture challenges the system.

Sadly, the most interesting elements of Surrogates are not explored, precisely because they are dangerous and have actual revolutionary power. For example, the robots in the real world (shopping, dancing, doing drugs) do not always match (racially or sexually) the masters that operate them from futuristic easy chairs—the masters are always at home, always in pajamas. A white man can have a black surrogate or a female surrogate. This space between what is real and what is artificial (or what is possible) creates room for play, disorder, and invention. The film hints at this troubling area only twice, and each time only for a few seconds, and then quickly returns to the predicable plot. If Surrogates had fully entered those dark in-between spaces, then it would have been what it is not: an extraordinary work of science fiction.