The Economist reviews Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History starting with the anecdote on the curious habits of 19th century polymath Francis Galton, who would “estimated boredom levels by counting fidgets; in Africa he used a sextant and tape-measure to calculate the proportions of the buttocks of a “Hottentot” woman from afar. Galton also created a “beauty-map” marking every woman who passed as, “attractive, indifferent or repellent.” Davis’ book also discusses obsession as a creative tool, “And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity.”

NYT has a story about a “beautification engine,” a “new computer program that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining what programmers call an ‘unmistakable similarity’ to the original.” Of course true beauty is usually due to something unusual about one’s face. The Slide Show, using photos of distinctively attractive actors, confirms it. “The computer scientists who developed the software said the goal was not to argue that the altered faces are more beautiful than the originals.”

What compels someone to point out a woman’s unattractiveness besides his own sense of inadequacy? Generally the better looking the man, the less likely he relies on society’s perception of beauty to influence his own. Women far out of the leagues of anyone who finds this website funny, routinely throw themselves at Matthew Broderick and Robert Downey Jr, and sure as hell threw themselves at John F Kennedy Jr. Look fellas, Sarah Jessica Parker wouldn’t consider you in the first place … she attracts much hotter guys.

Incredible short film by Andy Huang called “Dollface”. Fans of Bjork’s “All is full of love” won’t want to miss. (via.)

The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”

looker2.jpg

Michael Crichton was a promising young director until his books started receiving Hollywood check-sized advances. His 1981 movie “Looker,” starring Albert Finney as a Los Angeles plastic surgeon and Breck-girl Susan Dey, (his love interest, disturbingly enough); sways like a sailor aboard a sinking ship, from misogynistic to feminist and then back again. Take some pre-Tron computer graphics, a time and space-defying raygun, and throw in, as the IMDB plot keywords states, a “Body Landing On Car” and you’ve got a middling techno-fetishing new wave thriller. (The trailer is here, if you are willing to sit through the IMDB ads.)

The L.O.O.K.E.R gun isn’t just a raygun but time-paralysis stunner than magically stops a person in time, giving the shooter invisibility. In retrospect I wonder if that might have influenced my favorite TV show in elementary school, Out of this World. Maybe it’s DARPA’s inspiration for “LED Incapacitator.” Some bad guys are using the Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses gun on the models at a Los Angeles agency, as they undress in their highrise apartments. The “Body Landing On Car” is actually a pretty amazing stunt with a lanky model in her undies falling out the window five flights on top of a tan Camero, post-stun. Is it suicide or…????

These same models once used Albert Finney’s services, although he told them, with no ulterior motives, that they were beautiful just they way they were. Still the numbers don’t lie. The modeling agency has the scientific tools to quantify a woman’s looks. For some reason models can’t plateau at near perfection– a 99.4 will eventually be a 99.2 again — and that is precisely why the models need to be die.

looker_shot4l.jpg The music is great with a theme by a Kim Carnes-soundalike and a Muzak-version of Goblin instrumentals when the pretty girls are under watch. Lots of close-ups on doors with card swipes and plenty of digital animation — that neon-on-black 80s 3D-modeling. It was the first film to create a realistic computer generated human. It was also the first movie to create 3-D shading with a computer (via.)

In my favorite scene, the modeling agency madam shows Finney a commercial with a dot representing his visual fixation (this is of course the least plausible science, as everyone knows now men look at crotches.)

“I have this feeling like I live in the future. I think things have happened when they haven’t yet. It’s just so self-evident they will happen that I begin to act like they’ve already happened,” Crichton says in the commentary. I have to agree with Dan Swensen’s take on Cyberpunk Review, “Looker seems both surprisingly relevant and woefully dated at the same time.”

You have to give Crichton credit for the paranoia and early critique of neural-advertising. The idea of a focus group deciding the shape of a woman’s nose, just likely they would the font or color of an advertisement, is a scary one.

Plus, his film was one of the first to discuss plastic surgery, which was widely understood but a very private, potentially embarrassing matter. Ironically, none of the models in the movie could make it in LA today, where the advent of airbrushing has created demand for the most airbrushed-looking women. There is no such think as a perfect looking woman, which is why “99.4s” often worry about their looks a heck of a lot more than us civilians.

Crichton says he directed movies between writing books, because writers were advised against writing “more than one book every three years” (those were the days!) When you consider Looker, Coma, and the really fantastic Westworld, it’s not out of bounds to think he could have been, if not Ridley Scott, than maybe the sci-fi Brian De Palma.

Related links:

  • Cyberpunk Review, which has a ton of lost classics (have you heard of “Magdalena’s Brain“? “Texhnolyze“?)
  • More on Out of this World from YouTube (very funny clip)
  • News on the Westworld remake (Breach writer/director Billy Ray is currently attached.)

Posted by Joanne on Apr 10, 2008 | Link

  •  
  •