This Week In Retro: The Lawnmower Man (1992) (Patreon)

March 6, 1992: Jobe 3:16 says "I AM GOD HERE"

by Diamond Feit

Virtual reality is a paradox. A simulation of reality cannot itself be "real," of course, but what I'm talking about is the dual nature of virtual reality. On the one hand, its advanced technology is perpetually seen as futuristic with untapped potential for entertainment, education, and many other disciplines. On the other hand, virtual reality has been around for a long, long time, and no matter how many advancements have taken place over the decades, it still requires human beings to strap hardware to their faces and stare at a screen right in front of their eyeballs. Nintendo's 27-year-old Virtual Boy and the Oculus Rift are more alike than unalike.

Whenever a new form of technology spreads, there are always people who regard its unfamiliar nature with curiosity and suspicion. Inevitably, this awkward period is reflected in contemporary pop culture as authors, producers, directors, and other entertainment industry professionals struggle to understand how this technology can impact the stories they seek to tell. The 1980s saw plenty of films that treated personal computers as nothing less than magical, just as films of the 1990s treated the internet like an alternate dimension. I had my first email address in 1994 but clearly nobody on the set of Mission: Impossible had one because "Max@Job 3:14" is all kinds of wrong.

In the case of virtual reality, since it has endured as "new" and "unfamiliar" for multiple decades (and counting), that means we have many years' worth of pop culture interpretations to reflect upon. A few have aged quite well: Keanu Reeves' adventures in The Matrix continue to thrill audiences to this day. However, the same cannot be said about Keanu Reeves' earlier cyberpunk outing, 1995's Johnny Mnemonic.

This week, we must journey back even further to 1992 to revisit The Lawnmower Man, a high-tech horror fable that borrows concepts from the science-fiction classic Flowers for Algernon. The horticultural title comes straight from a Stephen King short story, though the finished film adapts so few elements from King's version that he successfully sued to have his name removed from the project. One imagines that if any single person or company owned the name "virtual reality" they might do the same, for the VR seen in The Lawnmower Man bears little resemblance to any existing technology—then or now.

The Lawnmower Man introduces the audience to the improbably-named Dr. Larry Angelo, a scientist who uses virtual reality (and drugs, lots of drugs) to experiment on chimpanzees in a secret laboratory. Angelo believes his particular formula of injections and rigorous brain training can elevate the intellect of lower mammals. Unfortunately, the lab's top chimp takes his make-believe combat exercises too literally, picking a lock and shooting a security guard with his own weapon before being put down.

Angelo is distraught by these events, not just because he cared about his test subject but also because that was his last test subject. Depressed and desperate, he decides he needs to take his research to the next level by finding a human volunteer, a disadvantaged person who might benefit from a cerebral boost. He finds him in Jobe Smith, the local "lawnmower man" who lives and works in Angelo's suburban neighborhood. Jobe is in his thirties but is mentally closer to an adolescent; his best friend is a boy no older than 12.

Angelo lures the two pals into his basement with the promise of video games, then offers to help Jobe become "smarter." Is Jobe in a position to knowingly consent to such an experiment? Not in the slightest, but Angelo injects him with compounds and begins testing anyway. Further complicating matters and proving he has no moral or medical ethics, Angelo asks Jobe to keep their work a secret—as if no one in a small town would notice if the child-like man who mows all their lawns suddenly traded his comic book collection for college textbooks.

Angelo's personal virtual reality regiment quickly improves Jobe's mental capacity, leading him to discover the joys of combing his hair, dressing like a cowboy, and banging the neighborhood widow. However, unlocking his brain's full potential turns out to have dangerous side-effects when he develops psychic and telekinetic superpowers. To Jobe's credit, he doesn't start murdering innocent people right away, but it doesn't take long for him to go full God-complex and decide that he knows better than every other human being on the planet. Even though Jobe has far surpassed Angelo's intelligence, the bad doctor is the only person capable of stopping his former landscaper from taking over the laboratory and then conquering the world.

As a tale of science gone awry, The Lawnmower Man is by-the-numbers. Considering how things turn out for Dr. Angelo's favorite chimp in the first act, there is no suspense in Jobe's turn from friendly handyman to megalomaniac. It's more than a little disconcerting how the film treats Dr. Angelo as an idealist and a force for good when he illegally experiments on a human being—one who is incapable of understanding the nature of said experiment, for the record. Instead, Angelo remains the protagonist as Jobe turns into a villain from a slasher film, doling out "ironic" punishments to people who had wronged him before openly murdering anyone who gets in his way (but never harming Dr. Angelo despite his objections to Jobe's plans).

Where The Lawnmower Man flies off the rails is its use of virtual reality. The basic props all look the part: The actors wear headsets and gloves that seem authentic enough, and Dr. Angelo's home setup includes a reclined chair suspended on wires that allows him to just relax and float, fly, or fall through infinite space. Less plausible is his set of mounted motorized platforms capable of rocking in multiple directions to simulate the feeling of zipping through an obstacle course. Yet that's nothing compared to the twin gyroscopes Angelo keeps in his lab which support full-body interfaces and can spin, rotate, or flip the user 360 degrees. I'm certain those devices exist, but I'm equally certain that 95% of people strapping into one would vomit immediately.

The problem with The Lawnmower Man's vision of VR is that the film presents it as a complete sensory experience like plugging into the Matrix, as if the equipment connects directly to the cerebral cortex. An on-screen prologue warns that virtual reality could represent "a new form of mind control," and multiple scenes show Jobe wearing a headset while Dr. Angelo drags and drops waveforms onto Jobe's brain. Later, Jobe sneaks his girlfriend into the lab for a round of cybersex, but the two lovers board separate gyroscopes with no way to touch each other (or themselves). Unless those Tron-like lab suits include built-in vibrators, there's no erotic potential there.

To borrow a line from another Stephen King property, virtual reality is "just like pictures in a book." It isn't real, despite the nomenclature. There are a myriad of effects that seeing images up close can have on a person (in my case, it urges me to throw up) but VR doesn't unlock root access to the human brain. Virtual reality is also a one-way street, so no matter how smart Jobe becomes by the film's end, putting on a headset should not allow him to transfer his consciousness into the computer. A living soul cannot pass through a USB cable.

Sitting down to watch The Lawnmower Man in 1992 as I did (in theaters!), the computer graphics of the faux-VR convinced me that I was looking at my future. By that point in my life I had already seen games leapfrog from the primitive Atari 2600 to the full-color glory of the NEO GEO; I had no doubt that adult-me would someday have a basement full of equipment that put Dr. Angelo's setup to shame. Little did I know that by the end of the 1990s, home consoles would come to support 3D graphics light-years ahead of the images seen in this film.

To a 2022 viewer, The Lawnmower Man is pure camp. Actor Jeff Fahey commits to playing Jobe as broadly as possible, portraying him as pure and innocent in the first act before going full Carrie in the third act. I'm not sure what direction Pierce Brosnan received as Dr. Angelo but someone convinced him to deliver all his diary monologues while shirtless and sweaty. As a "scientist," he'd make one hell of a beach volleyball player.

The script doesn't do the movie any favors. It's never made clear what the clandestine "Shop" that funds Angelo's experiments expects to reap from his results; I know the 1990s was a rough time for the United States armed forces, but did we really need chimps on the front lines? Would they invest in fancy VR helmets for all our troops because that seems beyond even their astronomical budgetary reach.

The computer graphics of the era have not aged well, although this isn't that large an issue inside VR since everything on-screen is already abstract. Things get silly in some of the later scenes when Jobe uses his telekinetic powers to turn people into…balls. It seems painful (his victims are not happy about it) but even as a child I didn't understand Jobe's choices.

All of the above musings plus my own first-hand knowledge of what virtual reality actually looks like only underlines how bizarre The Lawnmower Man reads in modern times. I suppose that somewhere deep inside the recesses of my mind, I'll always remain fascinated by the promise of VR, and the film can still speak to me on that level no matter its other absurdities. I know I hated mowing my lawn as a teenager so Jobe's solution to cut the grass with mind control deeply appeals to me. His version of godhood, however, leaves much to be desired.

Seriously, why balls?

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.