Lawnmower Men
Mad scientists are one of my favorite science fiction tropes. From Doctor Frankenstein to Doctor Octopus to Doctor Herbert West (Reanimate my Love is the greatest tie-in music video in history — see Reanimator 2) — They stand for a kind of social commentary that makes for great storytelling — individuals who loose all self-awareness because of an obsession with parsing fact from fiction. The stories we tell about the mad scientist speak to our relationship with knowledge, truth, and the tyranny of our mental geographies.
The modern Mad Science classic, perhaps pioneered by Gothe in Faust, is one of hubris. The hubris of knowledge; of pretension. The man made made by science is one who, taking their theory as truth, comes loose from their compact with their friends and neighbors. They violate the norms that held the community together, and terrify villagers with their bright lights and monstrous constructs. In the old days, the mad scientist simply meddled with things he couldn’t understand. The modern incarnation is more often than not, meddled with in return. One might also take this as a structural critiques of the systems and economies that make scientific advancement possible today — science has come to serve two masters: truth and institution.
Take The Lawnmower Man, the cult classic from 1992. In it, Pierce Brosnan plays a research scientist called Dr. Angelo working for the defense department. He has developed, apparently on his own, an entire VR training system that, through combination of drugs and video games, can make monkeys into soldiers. They also look a bit like Robocop — only more adorable. The theatrical release had the good sense to cut out the cyborg-monkey escape sequence, a decision that likely saved the film from total oblivion.
Suffice to say, the cyborg monkey dies, and Dr. Angelo falls into a deep depression, complete with bouts of hard drinking and the usual feelings of being misunderstood — “the fools.” Every good depression calls for a good inspiration, so after his girlfriend storms out, he starts to experiment on a local *Rainman-*type character called Job — the Lawnmower Man.
Job is afflicted by a generic mental slowness. We are never really told what — some combination of neglected upbringing and genetic misfortune has left him with the mind of an awkward child. As a study of mental heath, the film is insulting and grossly misinformed, but you can see what they’re trying to do. In this way, he’s presented as an empty, yet reflective subject.
The doctors “intelligence” experiments (mostly consisting of flashing math equations on the screen for hours on end) are an incredible success, and soon Job is a psychic genius who has earned the admiration of his creators, has made peace with his enemies, and even learned a thing or two about love. Kidding — a bumbling government operative changes his meds, and Job turns out totally mad, consumed with the need for “order”, and bent on dominating humanity to create a perfected, more harmonious future. A Cyber-Frankenstein’s monster, if you like. But one that manages to land a girlfriend on his own. Because science.
The structure of Job’s developing malady is a mirror of Dr. Angelo’s. Both are obsessed with a kind of perfectibility; one built largely on a question of attention. Dr. Angelo decided that the cure for idiocy could be found in knowledge; his creation escaped in the world convinced that the world could be cured on this foolish obsession by a return to totems — a god, benevolent and true, that could salvage the species from ignorance. Very early on, Job calls the knowledge he gains, principally through the lessons of history, “disturbing” and contrasts the lives of great men and women to the persistence of tragedy — it might be a juvenile observation, but it speaks to the ideology required to sustain the doctor’s hubris. After all, most greatness rises as a consequence of tragedy; the question then is less about what is done, as to why the sacrifice was required in the first place.
And this fixation on history as a means of judging the present is at the heart of the mad scientist myth. The mad scientist is, in reality, a being who must be unconcerned with the judgement of history and the preconceived notions that tradition has stuck us with. If they are to impact their society, they have to violate its rules. To break with what was and fly in the face of taboo is an act that can look like courage only in retrospect. Dr. Angleo didn’t create his virtual tyrant on purpose, he created it in order to prove a point — virtual reality could make people “better.” Turns out it actually just turns you into a narcissistic god. If we take that as a metric, I imagine the whole thing would be pretty easy to replicate.
But there’s a couple assumptions here, myths that inform our public discourse, and thus make the mad scientist a plausible moral fable. The first is that of the sovereign individual, a creature that shapes it’s own destiny. Dr. Angelo, in contrast to his creation, is a sympathetic character. Job is initially sweet, caring, and decent. His mental and emotional evolution begins by heightening many of these characteristics, and makes his eye ready against injustice. Dr. Angelo is (predictably) betrayed by his military paymasters — men in black suits who mostly appear as faces on giant monitors. Had the experiment been left to Angelo’s vision, maybe a pure philosopher-king might have emerged. Either way, we mortals are left with the freedom of a new master (we one dares call that freedom), and Dr. Angelo is left behind — suddenly so very average.
The myth is just that of course. No individual is really sovereign, and no freedom can survive an encounter with the civilization that birthed it; every great act depends on the cooperation and support that only shared vision can produce. The mad scientist’s downfall, in many ways, begins with their failure to share a vision, and to see theirs as in conflict with the rest of creation. The mad scientist foolishly assumes that the truth has no need for introduction. It is, after all, true. This is the nonsense that inspires the vision of the philosopher king. It is a hope that somewhere, out there, is a perfected being who will lead the world into righteousness — who can communicate that truth to allies and enemies alike. Of course, this is a fantasy. The truth is far more apocalyptic; human life is far too fractured — we might still call it idolatry. And idols haunt us. They drift up from the pages of books and the warrens of memory. They float to the surface once the storms have disturbed the seabed. Which means that any living idol is just a dead one that waited patiently to be picked up.
The second great assumption is that the past can or should serve as a guide to the future. It can’t; just because we know what was, should not suffice to demonstrate what is. I is certainly no guide to what might be. Storytellers, especially the kind that write scripts about archetypes, tend to see character as destiny. There is an element of truth to this: self-awareness creates a new sense of limitation too. We become aware of what we can do, in part on the basis of what we cannot — something we figure out through experimentation. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that an act of creation follows along the contours of existing experience — the trauma of vision begets itself, one might say: once you have seen the thing, you can’t stop. And in this way, it helps to give shape identity — the language of our collective disturbance.
