REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (24)

By: Deborah Wassertzug
June 18, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

ELECTRIC DREAMS | STEVE BARRON | 1984

In 1996, Jack Dangermond, co-founder of GIS company ESRI, gave a speech which mentioned the coming “instrumented universe,” where devices would record data constantly. I wrote down and underlined this phrase, not realizing the role these instruments would come to play in our lives in just a few short years, or that we would become the instruments.

The team behind Electric Dreams (1984) — including director Steve Barron (better known for music videos), and the production company, Virgin Pictures Ltd. (a Branson tentacle)‚ had an inkling about this universe. In 2024 — and in 4K, not Betamax — the film is hilarious and painful.

Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen, RIP) is a San Francisco architect who struggles to get to work on time. In his spare time, he pursues a passion project — an earthquake-proof brick shaped like a jigsaw puzzle piece. The opening scene finds him at LAX, pushing buttons on a machine that prints his ticket, but won’t yield it to him. The stage is set for another Human At Odds With Machine picture, but with chaos less benign than it was in, say, Desk Set.

This “Fairytale for Computers” soon devolves into a nightmare. Miles scoffs when a colleague suggests he get a digital organizer. Then he’s at ComputerWorld, getting upsold to a PC. Pulsating synth-pop accompanies much of the film, starting with Miles setting up his machine. He makes a typo when entering his name. He plugs adapters into absolutely everything in his home. And here’s where his troubles begin.

A love triangle develops when Madeline (Virginia Madsen) moves in upstairs. A “creation montage” cuts between Madeline in rehearsal and Miles, who instantly masters CAD, working on his brick. Computers in 1984 apparently did the exact things computers do today, just more clunkily. Miles spills sparkling wine all over the circuit board, and the machine becomes sentient, and listens to Madeline’s cello through the vents.

Disruptors “improve” our lives, but this computer literally disrupts Miles’s life. When Miles mumbles during troubled sleep, the computer (creepily voiced by Bud Cort) learns to speak. Miles asks it for a love song for Madeline. In a precursor to today’s AI, the lyrics aren’t great (“Darling, I love you to bits / And I want to see your tits”). The computer protests it doesn’t understand what love is, but eventually produces a song (by Culture Club) which exceeds expectations. The couple fall in love, enraging the machine, which exacts revenge by financial and other means.

My first time watching Electric Dreams, I fell for its nerdy heartthrob and for San Francisco, which wasn’t the industry casualty it is today. I continue to love this film, because in it, tech’s tyranny comes to an end, and the distractions of the Web are nowhere to be seen. The computer oversteps, but you sense Miles will eventually own a computer with healthier boundaries. Things aren’t going that way in the instrumented hellscape of 2024… but we can dream.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (24)

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