Experienced thriller writers (or canny, or crass, or cruel — take your pick) don’t simply pull story ideas from thin air. We look around and try to get a handle on what’s bugging people, or worrying them, or — best of all — scaring them. Then we ruthlessly exploit those worries and fears by incorporating them into the plots of our novels. Such fun.
Some of my novels include plotlines where technology goes wrong or is used for twisted purposes. No spoilers here, but when you read Crosscut and The Memory Collector, terms such as military testing, nanotechnology, explosion, and horribly awry might come to mind.
When I’m researching a book, I always keep my eyes open for news about spooky tech developments. And one of my favorite sources for stories about the Looming Technological Apocalypse is the Times of London. For a while, the Times regularly ran stories about humanity’s imminent enslavement by self-aware robots. (AI! AI! Run in circles, waving and screaming!) Then there was the “head transplant” article, complete with cartoon drawings, which suggested that aged and dying people would soon solve their health problems by having their heads sewn onto healthy donor bodies. (Subtext: rich Americans are going to scoop up all Britain’s young, athletic donors to restore their health and physical perfection!) Only after about twenty column inches did the article mention that, oh yeah, by the way, transplanted heads would not be connected to the donor’s spinal cord, so the greedy recipients would not experience a second youth but would be quadriplegic. (And personally, I expect Futurama’s Head in a Jar Museum to become reality before body transplants.)
But none of those articles come close to this week’s Techno! Panic! — in which the Times basically says 3-D movies will make you kill yourself.
“Some fans of the 3-D movie Avatar have suffered depression and even contemplated suicide after rejoining the real world.”
[T]hanks to a 3-D film-making process that was 14 years in development, the experience of watching the film is so absorbing, and the subsequent fantasy world so hyper-real, that nothing in life outside of the local multiplex can possibly compare.
“With Avatar, the technology has become so highly sophisticated that it makes the screen world seem more vivid than reality can ever be,” says the author Michael Foley.
And, “according to Dr Gordon Claridge, a professor of abnormal psychology in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford,” Avatar’s “use of 3-D, and its approximation of reality, is the key. ‘The closer a movie gets to reality, the more it has the ability to move you,’ he says. ‘If something is written fiction you need to use your imagination to visualise it. But if it’s 3-D, and very realistic, it can become difficult to distinguish from reality in that moment.’”
But now that the transformation is almost complete (Avatar opened on 3,671 3-D screens worldwide), is the dark reality of the 3-D dream to be found in a bunch of film fans teetering on the brink of suicide? Or further still, is the real Pandora in the 3-D story not Cameron’s blissed-out planet but a Pandora’s Box of disaffection opened to impressionable audiences by this fully immersive experience?
“Claridge, for one, thinks that we underestimate the effects of 3-D at our peril. He explains that, in psychiatry, virtual reality is commonly used to treat paranoid disorders.”
“A screen is used, and we look at how people who are paranoid respond to virtual reality scenes that play out,” he says. If the presentation of a virtual reality under laboratory conditions can affect behaviour, it is not hard to believe that it also has power to do so in the cinema. Claridge hopes to instigate a study to compare the mood reactions of audiences watching 2-D and 3-D movies.
That’s a research grant that’ll keep him in movie popcorn for decades.
My sister is a psychiatrist. Now I know why she runs around her office all day wearing that VR helmet.
And if 3-D is so terrifying, there’s only one solution: eye-patches for all.
Hey, I think I’ve just talked myself out of the idea that 3-D is a scaaaary idea for a thriller plot. And now I’m in the mood for a movie.
