Rewatch/Rewind: Electric Dreams
Criterion revives this deeply weird (and spookily prescient) technophobic comedy for a modern audience.
(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)
In the great battle for streaming supremacy, you really only need two services: Tubi, for all your trash and old TV needs, and Criterion for the artsy stuff. As a boutique DVD label Criterion has tended to focus on classic and foreign film, but the streaming service often offers some unexpected gems, such as the films of Gregg Araki, and last year, Q: the Winged Serpent and Society as part of its spectacular 80s horror movie collection. Currently available is a collection of movies about the benefits and drawbacks (though mostly drawbacks) of artificial intelligence, including A.I., the lurid 70s sci-fi thriller Demon Seed, John Carpenter’s Dark Star, and, perhaps its most surprising selection, the mostly forgotten 1984 romantic comedy Electric Dreams.
Electric Dreams is one of those kinds of only-in-the-80s movies I’m a little obsessed with, that flopped at the box office, then aired seemingly twice a day on cable for two years straight, then immediately disappeared from the pop culture landscape, if it was ever part of it in the first place. For me, seeing Electric Dreams pop up on Criterion was like encountering a grade school classmate I hadn’t thought about in years on Facebook: a little jarring, but also vaguely pleasant1.
I watched it several times during its brief run of cable ubiquity, and while I probably hadn’t thought about it in at least thirty years, upon rewatching it this week I was surprised by both how much I remembered, like its creepy non-human antagonist and great 80s Britpop soundtrack, and how much I had forgotten, like its bizarre tonal shifts between light comedy and unsettling thriller. Mostly I hadn’t anticipated how weirdly prescient it would be, foreseeing both how we would come to depend on computers for nearly every aspect of our lives, and how teaching those computers what human emotions are can lead to disastrous results.
Describing itself as “a fairytale for computers,” Electric Dreams opens with Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen), a bumbling, perpetually disorganized architect, purchasing a home computer to try to get his life in order. The opening credits illustrate how much our lives were already dominated by technology in 1984, including calculator watches and automated airplane ticket machines (which, hilariously, are operated here by a single button with the customer’s destination on it).
Miles is uneasy about all this, even looking warily at someone using a Walkman, and so inexperienced with computers that he accidentally misspells his own name as “Moles” when setting his up. Despite his initial misgivings, once Miles sees what the computer is capable of2, he’s suddenly all-in, buying all the additional accessories that can be used with it, including a modem and voice recording software (both of which will later come to regret). His enthusiasm is short-lived however, when, while downloading data from Miles’s job, the computer overheats, and a panicked Miles pours champagne on it, seemingly destroying it. Instead, for reasons which are never explained (“because the script declared it”), the computer actually becomes sentient, calling itself Edgar, absorbing information about the world around it (him?) without Miles’s help, and speaking in the soft, deceptively soothing voice of Bud Cort.
Meanwhile, Miles has a new neighbor, professional cellist Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen, so beautifully soft-lit she looks like she fell directly from Heaven onto the film set). He’s immediately taken with her, and so is Edgar, who duets with Madeline while she plays the cello, though she thinks it’s Miles. While Miles’s first date with her is a spilling soda and bumping heads disaster, Madeline finds him charming anyway, and is particularly hung up on that piece of music he supposedly composed. Hoping to continue winning her over, Miles orders Edgar to compose a love song, walking him through every aspect of what “love” means.
Combining that with what Edgar has gleaned through television first results in a hilarious disaster (“I want to squeeze you, lick you, pucker up and kiss you? You make her sound like a lemon,” Miles protests), but the second try is the dreamy Culture Club single “Love is Love.” With a lie of omission, Miles takes credit for Edgar’s work, and a furious, jealous Edgar begins tormenting Miles, first by sending power surges through his electric toothbrush and aggravating his neighbors with loud music. When that doesn’t get the desired result, Edgar then takes his campaign of harassment outside the home, canceling Miles’s credit cards and filing a false police report against him3.
It’s interesting to note that, with a single rewrite, Electric Dreams could have easily been turned into a horror movie. For being a box on a desk, Edgar is a deeply disturbing character, telling Miles, in a serial killer voice “I want to touch her…I need to!” and emitting a demonic shriek when Miles protests. When he locks Miles in the apartment and turns every electrically-powered item in the place against him, he seems quite intent on murdering him. We haven’t even gotten to the bummer ending, when Edgar, after realizing that he can’t really love Madeline (at least not in the same way Miles can), literally destroys himself, exploding in so dramatic a fashion that he once again nearly kills Miles in the process4.
With these elements mashed together with a blandly pleasant romantic comedy, it’s really kind of remarkable that Electric Dreams mostly works. When it doesn’t work, it’s mostly due to sloppy editing, such as a third-billed Maxwell Caulfield being set up as a potential romantic rival for Miles (and presumably Edgar), then disappearing less than halfway through the movie, never to be mentioned again5. There’s also the matter of Miles designing a new kind of brick to make buildings more earthquake-proof, which seems like it might be important at some point (or at least, another way for Edgar to fuck with him later), but that too is just as quickly forgotten.
Where it’s most effective is both in predicting how much humans would eventually come to rely on computers for even the most mundane tasks6, and its on-the-nose observation that artificial intelligence is just that, artificial. A computer can’t be taught how to love, it can only collect, interpret and recycle data from other sources. Even with the state of computers today, if you were to ask a computer to write you a love song, you wouldn’t get anything as polished as a Culture Club single. At best, you’ll get a muddled mess of snippets of other love songs and the random poem, remixed and spat back out with a manufactured voice singing it. It’s not real. It’s just data.
And yet, here we are, and the Screen Actors Guild has just gone on strike along with the Writers Guild of America, and one of the issues they’re striking over is the growing use of AI in film and television production. Producers and studio CEOs, who traditionally far favor profit over art, are pushing to replace background actors with their computer-generated lookalikes, and would love to rely on churned-out scripts with no humans that require payment for their work involved. These are people who, if they were to watch Electric Dreams, would not see danger in Miles turning to Edgar to speak on his behalf, but rather a bright and sensible solution. In the end, it really is kind of a horror movie.
Unless of course that classmate used to pick on me, in which case I hope they’re living their lives in abject misery, estranged from their children and working a job that makes them pray every day for the sweet release that only Death can bring. Hang on, I might be getting off track here.
In an eerie precursor to the modern smart home, it can control both the entire security system in Miles’ house, and his coffeemaker.
Many of the less-than-glowing reviews Electric Dreams received upon release focused on how implausible much of the mayhem Edgar causes is. They’re right, a computer could never cancel your credit cards because it’s mad that you’re dating the girl it loves. A computer could cancel your credit cards because it’s fuckin’ Tuesday.
The movie does close on an upbeat note, when Miles and Madeline hear a song on the radio that Edgar has written and dedicated to them. On the other hand, this also suggests that Edgar’s consciousness still lives and can take over radio airwaves, which is pretty scary when you think about it.
Did…did Edgar kill him?
Electric Dreams would be a good double feature with The Net, another movie that tried to warn us about the dangers of becoming too dependent on technology, and absolutely no one (not even me) listened to it.
Not sure how old you are but I remember seeing this movie at the drive-in and if it's 1984 then I would have been 4 years old. I swear it was a double feature with the Gremlins as the other feature. And I've remember very little of it but have always remembered the computer that fell in love with a girl and then killed itself in the end. I didn't even remember there was another guy in it that actually owned the computer. Crazy the things I remember about a movie I haven't seen in 40 years almost.
Oh hey, this is where the Gorgio Moroder/Phil Oakley song is from isn’t it.