This film captivated me. The 'real-world' setting of a southern suburb in the 1980s provides a backdrop of simpler times, and the narrative examines today's digital narcissism.
We get sucked into 'the matrix' by allowing our brains' synapses to rearrange themselves according to the constraints and functions of microchips. We become the chimera and thus inhabit the inside of a circuit board more than we inhabit an 'external reality'.
The conceit of having the victims get sucked into a screen, while on some scales the reverse of what actually happens, works very nicely (the machine also enters the ghost and possesses it that way, but plenty of films out there have already shown it in this direction). In practical effect, the very fantasy of it seemed more accurate precisely because of how the visuals and narrative abstract the concrete process.
Related viewing:
Related reading:
- Stephen L. Talbott's _The Future Does Not Compute_ (1995) and _Devices of the Soul_ (2007); (Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly Media).
- Clifford Stoll's _Silicon Snake Oil_ (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
