Looker: Crichton's Digital-Model Conspiracy

Four women who have had cosmetic surgery from the same Beverly Hills doctor are dead. All four were television models. All four had requested adjustments so minute — a fractional change to an eyelid, a millimetre off a nose — that the surgeon who performed them cannot understand why they bothered. Dr Larry Roberts, who did the work, starts asking questions and finds that his patients had all been to the same place: a company called Digital Matrix, which had scanned each of them, whole, into a computer.

Looker was released in 1981, written and directed by Michael Crichton, and it is a film that arrived roughly three decades early and was punished for it. Warner Bros. put Albert Finney in it opposite James Coburn and Susan Dey, marketed it as a thriller, and watched it fail. It has been a curiosity ever since, mostly cited by people who know one fact about it.

The one fact is real and worth stating at the top. Looker contains what is generally credited as the first computer-generated human character in a feature film — a full digital body, rendered by the firm Information International Inc., of a woman standing and moving in a void. In 1981. Everything else in the film is an argument about what that image is going to do to us.

The scan is the horror

The premise is deceptively small. Digital Matrix, an advertising research company run by Coburn’s John Reston, has worked out that a model’s usefulness is limited by the model. She ages. She costs money. She has opinions and an agent. So the company scans her — every surface, at high resolution — and thereafter the commercial can be generated without her.

The surgery is the setup for that. A model is measured against a computed ideal, and the tiny adjustments Roberts has been performing are corrections toward a mathematical specification of the perfect face. The women are being optimised for capture. Then, once the capture is complete, they are surplus.

That is a superb thriller engine, and it works because Crichton grounded it in the mundane end of the industry. This is not a film about a supercomputer. It is a film about an advertising agency doing cost control. Reston’s motive throughout is margin, and his pitch — that the digital model is more reliable, more compliant and cheaper than the human one — is delivered as a perfectly ordinary business case. Forty years of digital-likeness disputes have all been arguments with a version of that speech.

Crichton’s constant subject shows up here in an unfamiliar suit. In Westworld and Runaway the machinery fails. In Looker it works perfectly, and the consequences of it working are the problem. That makes Looker the most pessimistic of his films as a director, and the most contemporary.

Cinema’s first digital human

The Triple-I sequence is the reason film historians keep the film in the room, and the context around it is worth having.

Information International Inc. was one of the small handful of firms doing serious computer graphics for film at the turn of the 1980s. The company had form: the previous decade, the robot’s pixelated point of view in Westworld had marked the first use of digital image processing in a feature, and its sequel Futureworld had gone further with the first three-dimensional computer-generated imagery in a feature film. Triple-I was also deep in the work for Disney’s Tron, released the year after Looker.

So there is a genuine lineage, and it is Crichton’s. A writer-director with no particular technical vanity kept commissioning the newest available graphics work for three consecutive projects, and the field’s first three landmarks in feature film all sit inside films he wrote or created. That is not an accident of curation; he kept asking the computer people what they could do next.

What makes the Looker sequence more than a footnote is what it is for. The digital model in the film is a rendering of a real woman who has been measured and reproduced. The film’s technical achievement and its subject are the same object. In Tron, a year later, the computer graphics are a spectacle you are invited to admire. In Looker the computer graphic is the villain’s product, and you are invited to find it unnerving. Crichton got a genuine formal alignment out of an effects budget, which is rarer than it sounds.

The craft, and the film’s other obsession

Crichton shoots advertising with a genuine, curdled fascination. Long stretches of Looker are simply commercials being made — the studio floor, the lighting rig, the endless repetition, the woman on the mark being adjusted. He films the process as clinical and slightly obscene, and the film’s best material is in that reportage. There is a coldness to the Digital Matrix studio, all white surfaces and hard light, that gives the film its one distinctive visual register.

The film’s second gadget is where opinion divides, and I will leave its mechanics under the spoiler heading. What can be said above it is the thesis it serves: Looker is about a screen that does something to the person watching it. The film argues that television is a device for interrupting attention and that the industry’s real research programme is the measurement of exactly how. That is a large claim for a 1981 thriller to make in passing.

Cronenberg made the definitive version of this two years later. Videodrome takes the same proposition — the broadcast signal as a physical intervention in the viewer — and pursues it into the flesh with an artist’s commitment. Looker is the polite, well-lit, corporate cousin of that film, and watching them together is instructive: Cronenberg went inside the body, Crichton stayed in the boardroom, and between them they described the next forty years.

The case against

The film does not work. That has to be said plainly, because Looker’s reputation as an underrated gem tends to skip it.

Albert Finney is miscast and visibly knows it. He is one of the great British screen actors of the century, playing a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon in a thriller, and the register never settles — he plays Roberts as an intelligent man mildly irritated by a plot. The tone lurches: there is a chase sequence played as farce that belongs in a different picture entirely, and a running comic thread that punctures every piece of dread the film has assembled.

The plotting is loose in the way Crichton’s screenplays always are once the premise has been laid out — the middle act is Roberts being told things by people who then leave. Susan Dey’s Cindy is the film’s emotional centre and is written as a plot function. The score dates badly, and the title song is an artefact.

But the ideas are extraordinary, and they were nobody else’s in 1981. A company scans people to replace them. Perfection is a specification, and the specification is computed. The screen is a device with intentions toward the viewer. And the film contains, as its central prop, the first digital human ever put in a feature — a woman rendered by a machine, standing in a void, in a film about a machine rendering women in order to be rid of them. Crichton could not stage it. He saw it coming with a clarity that nobody else in 1981 managed, and he built the picture out of the exact technology he was warning about.

Spoilers below

The gadget is the LOOKER gun, and it gives the film its title: Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses. It is a torch-like device that emits a pulse which, on eye contact, induces hypnosis and a subjective gap in time — the victim simply loses a stretch of minutes and cannot account for it. Digital Matrix uses it as a murder weapon: hold the light on someone, remove their capacity to perceive the interval, and walk them off a balcony while they are absent from their own life.

That is a nasty, clever piece of invention, and its cleverness is that the weapon and the product are the same technology. Reston’s company researches how to arrest a viewer’s attention for advertising purposes, and the gun is that research pointed at one person at close range. The commercials Digital Matrix produces are doing a diluted version of the same thing to everyone watching them at home. The film’s most quietly horrible implication is that the murders are simply the research working at full intensity.

The film’s best staged idea follows from it. Because the LOOKER pulse causes the victim to lose time, a person holding the device becomes functionally invisible — the target’s perception skips over the interval in which they were shot at. Crichton builds a late sequence around this, with Roberts fighting an opponent he cannot consistently perceive, and the staging is genuinely disorienting in a way the rest of the film never achieves. It is Looker’s one moment of real cinema.

The resolution is where the film gives up. The Digital Matrix conspiracy extends into politics — the same techniques applied to campaign advertising, the same measured interruption of attention deployed at national scale — and having raised that, the film settles it with a chase through a soundstage and a conventional confrontation. The idea deserved a bleaker ending than a thriller of 1981 was permitted to have. Watch the digital scan sequence, watch the fight with the invisible man, and accept that the rest of it is a superb essay wearing a bad film.