Looking Into the Future
By Eric Grigs | July 1, 2020
While Michael Crichton’s Westworld and Jurassic Park might get all the attention as cautionary tales about future technology, 1981’s Looker starring Albert Finney and Susan Dey is the neglected sci-fi film to which Nostradamus would actually tip his hat.
“Digital” wasn’t even a commonplace word at the turn of the decade. Computers were only just beginning to enter our homes in 1981. Computer graphics at the time were mostly harmless, colored square bits in video arcade games, kid’s stuff—so viewers at the time of the movie’s release regarded weaponizing digital tools as pure science fiction. But the amount that it got right is staggering. It depicts full body scans of actors used to digitally animate them later, foreshadowing just how commonplace visual media created by CGI and fakery would become. (This even beat Tron to the punch by several months for the first-ever human CGI character on the big screen—Susan Dey’s Cindy.) We’re shown the insidious nature of advertising and willful manipulation of public perception by politicians and corporations using TV screens. And on top of that, why not overlay it all with commentary on plastic surgery in service of the pursuit of real-world perfection?
But the one thing Looker really got right that few people talk about when reviewing the movie: the hypnotizing loss of time that technology is all too capable of stealing from us. Except now it isn’t achieved by “Light Ocular Oriented Kinetic Emotive Response” guns. Rather, it’s our phones who are the thieves, as we stare into glowing blue screens from morning until bedtime—and each device even blatantly tells us how many hours it’s extracted from our lives. So we’ve willingly given control over to corporations and governments pushing disruptive technology and telling us what to think, whereas the dark side of tech is represented in the film by James Coburn’s character trying to pull off thought manipulation on the sly.
This movie is also not as serious and heavy as I’m making it sound. It’s a solid B-movie all dressed up and waiting to be a plus-one red carpet date for some other Oscar-nominated movie. Which means it’s a fun ride if you just go with it wherever it takes you. Albert Finney is a natural in every performance of his I’ve ever watched. I love how writer and director Crichton lets the audience sit with some of the same uncertainty Finney’s plastic surgeon character must navigate, not giving us all the answers too early for why many of his beautiful patients are turning up dead. He channels the everyman of Cary Grant in North by Northwest, an unwitting fall guy who must forge a path through the unknown to piece together the bizarre clues for clearing his name and foiling the bad guys’ plans. As one of his surviving patients, Susan Dey brings a quirky quality to her role, along with a light touch and gentle humor. All the villains here serve up solid performances, but for me, the one to watch is veteran mustachioed character actor Tim Rossovich who frequently played the heavy’s henchman in the 70s and 80s. I hesitate to say too much about the plot so as to not spoil its reveals if you haven’t seen it. Audiences today will catch on quickly to just what the hell is happening, but in 1981 I’m sure one reason this wasn’t a bigger hit was that people were confused and dismissed the sci-fi aspects as too fantastical. Joke’s on us, nearly 40 years later we’re all pretty much living in Looker’s world now—minus the 80s over-mirrored and pink-carpeted interiors.
Of particular note is the minimal synth score from Barry DeVorzon (Xanadu, Simon & Simon), which perfectly heightens the anxiety in suspense scenes. Similar to Hans Zimmer’s music for Inception or the Dark Knight trilogy but crafted decades before, DeVorzon uses repetitive electronic sounds to great effect, and its refrains are woven into Looker’s catchy theme song, sung with melodramatic gusto by Sue Saad (later to be covered by 80s staple Kim Carnes).
It’s also a type of movie we don’t see much any more—sci-fi that’s more concerned with big ideas rather than big special effects. But that’s probably a result of films from the 70s and 80s being less rigid about staying in their genre’s lane. Crichton allowed it to be a thoughtful drama, suspense thriller, good guy vs. bad guy actioner, and an unraveling mystery. If it were made today, his commentary acknowledged many sequences would be cut quite differently. I, however, love the slow build of the action scenes. Modern reviewers critique the climax as sluggishly long, but I’m all in for its action, suspense, and humor mixed together. It’s classic pacing gives time to breathe, think, and enjoy.
If you grew up as a kid in the 80s with HBO, you have some memory of Looker from its heavy rotation on the channel, but it’s worth a second look as an adult. (Interestingly, back then it was rated R, now reclassified as PG! Because, boobs.) Watching it now creates not quite nostalgia, but more like a time wormhole for the mind—few things have forced me to remember what life was actually like in 1981 when you wouldn’t have had a smartphone in your hand serving you ads throughout the day; you wouldn’t have had a home computer for shopping (with two day shipping!)—or probably not one at the office for work either. And you would rarely ever ask if a photo you were looking at wasn’t a faithful, unmanipulated representation of the real thing.
Crichton’s books and movies consistently questioned the morality behind technology. Few individuals who develop new and innovative ways of doing things spend as much time as he did delving into the “what ifs” before they forge ahead into making a brave new world. It takes films like Looker to stop us in our tracks and show us that the wonders of technology marched on with few of us asking if the trade-offs were worth it. The time to ask those questions, figure it out, and pause or halt the dangerous parts of progress, like our hero Finney does, has probably passed. It all happened in a flash—and suddenly a morally ambiguous future arrived—while we weren’t even looking.
Eric Grigs is a pop culture writer, artist, and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.