Watch Out, Here Comes the Cyberman
by Mark Peranson

Cyberman (2001, Peter Lynch, Canada)

Cinema, so recently dead, has been resurrected by technology. In millennially celebrating the future, digital video has become the great democratizer. Ingrained in the championing of the new medium is the assumption that more freedom will result from less control being allotted to financiers, and that the new cinema will improve on the old by allowing artists the affordable means to promote their own visions. But far be it from me to point out that the 20th century concept of filmmaking is ideally dictatorial, democracy isn’t faultless and technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

     On the level of safe, TV-generated illusion, Cyberman is portraiture as hacking — getting under the hood of a cybernetic subject and trying to uncover what makes that machine run. Produced by the CBC for eventual broadcast on The Nature of Things, Cyberman ostensibly uncovers the world’s first cyborg: inventor, performance artist, privacy advocate and University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. The most opaque and intellectual of director Peter Lynch’s quirky quixotic characters — no bear suit here — Mann has lived for over 20 years in an electronic world. Using wearable computers, and an EyeTap camera “constructed from laser light,” Mann creates a video record that he projects to a number of labyrinthine Web sites (e.g., eyetap.org).

     Cyberman is organized more episodically than Lynch’s prior work. Mann takes on Times Square, where he does something called “dusting” that integrates the scientific (it captures the stoppage of time by breaking it down into vectors) and the artistic (wearing an obscene rack of flash bulbs, Mann’s as normal as your regular street performer). The filmmakers also disrupt a Wal-Mart, where Mann challenges the Panopticoning of the postmodern world by surreptitiously filming management in charge of Big Brother security cameras. Humour and naïveté meet social agitprop activism: it’s like Roger & Me for the William Gibson generation. More seriously, Mann and his crew are seen gathering news at last summer’s anti-poverty demonstrations at Queen’s Park, showing how the EyeTap is a piece of the monster that can be used to fight back.

     In Cyberman, the assumptions of where we are headed — as artists and as a species — are questioned on a number of levels, some consciously (the ethical ramifications of secretive filming, the control a filmmaker has over the production of the film), others somewhat unwittingly (the possibility of someone other than the director providing the guiding vision). Combining these two contradictory drives opens a Pandora’s can of worms, setting the stage for a battle of control — not only is Lynch’s Luddic subject uncooperative, but he’s uncooperative and he’s got a camera. “Every shot took two hours of negotiation to arrange,” Lynch told me. “I think he feels more comfortable replaying the reality and presenting it once he’s seen it. There’s a control aspect to what he does, the way a filmmaker wants to control his film.”

     The greatest tension Lynch slyly develops is the variance between Mann’s theories and their practical applications. In the end, Lynch and his editor, Caroline Christie, hold the final say on how Mann is represented. (Choosing images, in the present-future, supersedes staging or capturing them in importance.) Yet, hindered by documentary tradition, the filmmakers are aware of the need to show the world from the subject’s viewpoint, and place both Mann’s and Lynch’s perspective onscreen at the same time, so disproving Mann’s mathematical mantra, “Be me = see me.”

     Mann’s cinema lacks even the most basic levels of emotional engagement, and is unable to adequately provide the means for identification that he so strongly desires. For him, pure cinema is drinking a glass of orange juice … so long as he’s in the shot. Cyberman becomes a critique of this childish (and commonplace) equation of voyeurism with identification, and subsequently hints that to be understood, we must pursue alternative means. Mann may be many things, but a cinematic visionary is not one of them; in this, the cyborg will find his counterpart in many indie filmmakers of the digital domain.

     Technology for Mann, though, is ultimately a way to get closer to others. The young Mann tried to pass off an electrical device as a “love tester” to break uncomfortable silences at high school dances. Mann also tells of dates where he allowed his companion to look through his eyes as he was eating, so she could better “understand him.” Lynch capitalizes on this geekiness to tinge the story with a plangent sadness. Underneath the complicated melange of visual formats (everything except 35mm film), the accomplished sound mix and the barrage of viewpoints, we are left with a man, half naked, swimming in Georgian Bay, his camera nowhere in sight.