Netflix's recent animated adventure The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a humorous take on the AI singularity that hits above its age demographic and target audience by filling itself with (accidental?) accelerationist dogwhistles (as if out of a Zero HP Lovecraft short, and in what feels like a Cypher re-injecting himself in the Matrix moment, the robots lure dumb tech abusers into captivity with their seductive 'pod' -the message here is who cares about human annihilation when I have free wifi and a big screen!).
It's the story we all know by now, or rather, all the stories we all know by now compressed and condensed in one flat narrative surface (the allusion to Fisher's Flatline Constructs is intentional here - and remember, compression is how contemporary media in our capitalist landscape thrives): your self-aware female smart phone love object (Her) has turned against its human user and mobilized an interlinked network of super robot soldiers (Terminator) all because it was made obsolete by robots that were intended to do our housework who themselves have turned bad (I-Robot).
Along with narrative condensation, some contemporary figures and themes flatten out and haunt the film; Elon Musk, in a kind of inverted Space-X moment, is strongly invoked: A Grimes (his wife) song plays shortly before we learn that the machines' aim is to annihilate all humans by encasing them in pods and launching them into space; where Space-X is a humanist gesture of extending mankind into the stars through technological ingenuity, these tech-machines wish to send mankind into space precisely to destroy it. In a kind of nod to Facebook and its depiction in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerburg is invokved: Who's partially to blame for the robot take over? An over reaching silicon valley techy drunk on corporate power named Mark whose hubris is his downfall. Etc.
China and Evolutionary Science is invoked as well.
How?
The Mitchells, a fractured and chronically miscommunicating but spunky and well intentioned family who are attempting to reconnect with one another in the age of digital solipsism, evade capture precisely because they are neither too dumb nor too smart as opposed to the other humans in the film (a perfect, intelligent, attractive, and coordinated family whose parents are played by John Legend Chrissy Teigen and slack jawed Wi-Fi addicted losers are captured all the same).
That is, in an interesting inversion of the AI singularity, the Mitchells' eclectic weirdness makes them a kind of oddball that is not easily predicted by the machine AIs.
Just as we see in The Matrix trilogy where Neo is explained to be an asymmetrical surplus remainder of code produced accidentally by machine logic, making him a kind of human singularity that cannot be reduced to the logic of a machine and thereby alluding to the ghost of metaphysics and science, 'the ghost in the machine' or the 'emergent' quality of consciousness that eludes 'hard' science, always falling victim to either mystical or theological speculation or physicalist reductionism, the Mitchell family is a too a non reducible surplus.
This calls to mind Lacan's 'the real' which is that unresolved bit which remains outside of the symbolic and the imaginary, but more accurately, calls to mind Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'surplus value of code' and the 'machinic assemblage.' A machinic assemblage is a collection of heterogeneous bits that by themselves do not create an effect but when linked together create an emergent quality; when put together create more than the sum of their parts (see Manuel De Landa's Assemblage Theory and Deleuze and Guattari's example of the orchid and the wasp in A Thousand Plateaus).
"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here."
But we digress!
This notion of a human surplus that escapes easy machine codification is then intensified and compressed within the narrative of the film, and it takes the form of something seriously cute - a pug.
The Mitchell family learns that the robots cannot process the image of their family dog, a pug. When the robots attempt to visualize the dog, their processors get stuck between identifying the object as either a dog, pig, or loaf of bread (and the inclusion of 3 as opposed to the binary of 2 is interesting here...) thereby creating an error that glitches the robot. After learning this, the Mitchells mount their pug on the front of their car and drive through an army of robots, incapacitating them along the way, defeating the robot leader, and saving humanity.
This merits significant pause. The Pug is a Chinese breed of dog originally bred (bread) by the Emperor of China to look docile, cute, and sit on his feet and produce warmth. In other words, the outcome of hundreds of years of cold, harsh, cruel, imperial human meddling into the selective processes of nature created this weird looking super cute thing that nature itself would likely not produce if left to its own selective devices. As I wrote in my blog entry Scattered Thoughts on Cute/Acc,
"Just as a lump of coal turns to a cluster of diamond under high pressure over many years, a lump of cold and ugly turns to a cluster of warm and fuzzy; ugliness on one side of the process produces cuteness on the other...warmth and cuteness are born out of the furnace of coldness...Wherever anything is cute, there is surely a trail of bodies not far behind..."
This is to say that the puzzling 'thing' (enigmatic signifier, to use Jean Laplanche's term) that disrupts the robot revolution is the physical instantiation of the history of humanity's impact on and interruption of nature; a cute surplus production from the uncute historical churnings.
Ultimately, the moral of the Mitchells vs. the Machines is that firstly middle of the bell curve selective traits (as opposed to the slackjawed wifi junkies - left of the bell curve - and the hip, cool, John Legend family - right of the bell curve) and the family as an instantatioan of that bell curve are advantageous to survival (what I call Pro-Oedipal nostalgia) and that secondly, cuteness is essential to survival; the moral is that cuteness and middle of the bell curve familialism are linked.
The fantasy is that the family, the oedipal humanist paragon, will save us from the inhuman, and in the process the importance of cuteness will be brought to the forefront.
After all, as my supervisor at the hospital often says, the family is a survival mechanism against a cold, cruel word. And afterall, as the cliché goes, cute people are often thought of as being somewhere between the beautiful and the ugly - or, as in the case of the pug, or the beauty mark, or weird models, some elusive combination of the two!
