Magnolia Pictures
Here's what the future looks like: collecting data on people while wearing AR glasses.
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Magnolia Pictures
Here's what the future looks like: collecting data on people while wearing AR glasses.
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Magnolia Pictures
David (Benjamin Dickinson) and his coworkers at a meeting for Augmenta.
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Magnolia Pictures
David (Benjamin Dickinson) listening to/watching a message from Reggie Watts.
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Magnolia Pictures
David (Benjamin Dickinson) testing out his new AR glasses.
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Magnolia Pictures.
David (Benjamin Dickinson) and Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen).
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Magnolia Pictures
Juliette (Nora Zehetner) and David (Benjamin Dickinson).
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Magnolia Pictures
Reggie Watts being Reggie Watts.
In the film
Creative Control, set in
near-future New York, people can slip on a pair of normal-looking
glasses and experience a world that is part reality and part fantasy.
This is what companies like Google and Microsoft have been trying to
achieve with AR: technology you can wear on your face
that doesn’t look completely ridiculous
and allows the wearer to access a constant virtual overlay on the real
world. There are obvious privacy concerns associated with this kind of
device, namely, that you can record people without their knowledge. But
there’s also the risk that your real and virtual worlds become so
intertwined that you won’t know the difference. That's exactly what
happens in
Creative Control, with fascinating and genuinely funny results.
David (Benjamin
Dickinson, who also directed and co-wrote) is an ad executive who hires
musician Reggie Watts (playing himself) to create something using
augmented reality glasses for a new client, the appropriately named
Augmenta. David is also tasked with trying out a pair of the AR glasses.
He talks to friends in the street, goes to parties, and works while the
glasses collect data on anything he sees. He then uses this data to
create virtual fantasies—which are centered around an avatar of his best
friend’s girlfriend. Whenever he is having a bad day at work or gets in
a fight with his own girlfriend, he puts on the glasses and escapes
into his fantasy world. It’s probably not giving too much away to reveal
that David’s virtual world does not make him any happier—the technology
makes him anxious, paranoid, and unable to focus on his real life.
Augmented reality eyeglasses aren’t on the market yet, but Creative Control
feels like it could happen in the next five minutes. The film captures
the addictiveness of consumer technology—and sometimes, the loneliness
and anxiety that can follow—with alarming accuracy. We see characters
use their smartphones (which, in this vision of the future, look like
see-through iPhones) to argue and flirt with each other over text
messages. And David often chooses his Augmenta glasses over human
interaction. David’s girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), serves as the
film’s voice of opposition to technology. She’s a yoga teacher who
dreams of living away from the city and its plugged-in culture.
Together, they represent two familiar desires of people who use tech
from the moment they wake up until they go to sleep: one is to always
stay connected, and the other is to throw your phone in the trash and
return to nature.
This might sound like yet another melancholic take on how technology is ruining our lives, but it's not. Creative Control is
fast-paced and funny. Most of the scenes, even when they show an
intense or stressful moment between characters, are embedded with
humor. Dickinson admits that he borrowed heavily from the 1979 Woody
Allen film Manhattan. Creative Control, like Manhattan,
centers around a small group of friends who work in creative fields in
New York, is filmed in black and white, and uses a strictly classical
music soundtrack. (One greatly appreciated change from the Allen film:
the lead character is not dating an underage girl.) These touches don’t
feel derivative or out-of-place. Instead, they make the film’s subject
matter lighter and more palpable.
One downside to the film is that we mainly only see how
David experiences AR. We don't get to look into the heads of the other
characters or see their virtual fantasies. The one exception is a video
that Reggie Watts creates with Augmenta glasses, but we don't see much
of his creative process. This keeps the film focused on one character's
perspective, but it leaves us wondering how the AR experience would vary
from person to person. Still, Creative Control is effective at
imitating the hold that technology has on our lives—something that is a
very personal experience to writer/director Dickinson.
Dickinson says he has fallen victim to opening his phone and obsessively switching between various apps. Dickinson told Ars
that he had to make a few changes in his life to limit his use of
technology. He doesn’t allow any tech in the bedroom—which means that he
wakes up to an actual alarm clock instead of reaching for his phone and
then scrolling through Twitter and Instagram for an hour. He also uses a
regular watch to check the time throughout the day so he doesn’t get
distracted by something on his phone. “I think everybody has different
thresholds,” Dickinson said. “I’ve instituted some boundaries in my
life, for peace of mind. I’ve decided that I want to be the one to
decide how I use technology and not have it tell me how to use it. Those
are small things that have made life better for me.” Yet, he added,
people in your life notice if you disengage too much from tech. “Through
[my cell phone], I’m connected to my family and closest friends,” he
said. “And if you don’t respond to a text right away, people worry or
they get hurt.”
Dickinson sees the upsides to technology as well. We can
easily connect to people in our lives who live anywhere in the world,
and we can create and share work with colleagues. Dickinson said that
augmented reality might even allow people to be less sedentary at the
office:
Working might also become more physical, and
there might be less working at a desk and staring at a screen. We might
just start being a little more active in our workstations, and we might
be able to collaborate more if we have a shared, virtual computing
space. So I think that’s the potential for good. My movie explores the
dark side of that: what could happen if you start to edit out anything
in the world that you don’t like. And then you create you own feedback
loop with a projection of your fantasies, which is kind of what David
does in the movie.
At the heart of Creative Control is a story about connecting with other people, IRL. Parts of the film draw obvious comparisons to the TV show Black Mirror or movies like Strange Days and Her—although it’s far more upbeat. Unlike episodes of Black Mirror, which can leave the viewer feeling a bit uneasy, Creative Control
goes down smooth. It shows us that a world filled with VR and AR might
not be so bleak after all—as long as we remember to talk to humans in
person occasionally.
Creative Control is currently in theaters.
Listing image by Magnolia Pictures.
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