PRESTIGE SPOILING
I’m no Star Trek fan. Yet I recall an episode in which a malfunction occurs when Captain Kirk is teleported back to ship, creating two Jims: one is the normal Jim (the “real” Jim), one is his “evil other.” Philosophically speaking, this is not an interesting situation: the evil Jim is spawned from a malfunction, his elimination thus justified. But what if – and this was a question I was asked in an undergrad philosophy tutorial – what if the teleporter had created two “normal” Jims? Which one then would be the “real” Jim? The problem here, of course, is that the distinction between the real and the copy has been taken away. In this (imagined) scenario, the “original” Jim has simply been doubled: there is no “real” versus “copy” (or “evil other”) anymore. They are either BOTH originals or BOTH copies, or, rather, they are neither: they are simply TWO JIMS.
What put me in mind of this was some recent reading on new media (old hat for some of you, I’m sure, but exciting and new for a silent film historian). This is Timothy Binkley, in Hayward and Wollen’s “Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen”: “The vulnerability of analogue media is apparent in their very dissemination where ‘generation loss’ corrupts the quality of an image as it is repeatedly copied. It is difficult to maintain all the details of an image or sound when it is transcribed over and over again from one material object to another. … But there is a sense in which digital media deal only with ‘originals’ and hence neither propagate generation loss nor corrupt the source through repeated copying.” OK, so analogue transcription functions within an ontology of the original and the copy, where the copy is INFERIOR in detail to the original. Digital inscription, by contrast, suspends the ontological distinction between original and copy, such that my version of, say, a file-shared photo is perfectly EQUAL to the image stored in the digital camera that took the photo (it is, numerically, the SAME IMAGE).
All of which is a VERY long way round to a simple comparison of the Star Trek episode with Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, as follows:
• Star Trek is set in the future yet made in the past. The situation of the “evil twin” Captain Kirk presumes a fundamentally analogue imaginary (e.g., the transported Jim is subject to degradation in the process of being “copied” from one place to another: hence the creation of his “evil other”).
• The Prestige is set in the past yet made in the present. The situation of the “perfectly reduplicated” magician (Hugh Jackman) presumes a fundamentally digital imaginary (suspending the distinction between real and copy to a point where one no longer knows whether Hugh Jackman is the “original” himself or not: all of the Hugh Jackmans are THE SAME).
Or, in other words, Star Trek projects analogue ontologies into a future of “final frontiers,” while The Prestige projects digital properties into a nineteenth-century era of magic and mystery.
(As for Multiplicity, isn't this also an analogue universe in which the act of copying Michael Keatons introduces "lossy" variations, to the point at which one of the Keaton "clones" appears to be literally retarded?)
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3 comments:
That's an interesing take. In part it's an example of how we project our contemporary selves, both forward and back, on to imagined futures and re-imagined pasts. We're so self-obsessed!
At the same time, the digital imaginary is absolutely essential to the tragedy of Robert Angier (Jackman), as he obsessively sacrifices himself, over and over again, to his craft, but also to the functioning of the narrative.
If his copy was inferior in some way, the trick wouldn't be sustainable after a certain number of performances, as the copies, for instance, became increasingly less competent.
There's a lot to explore in the film, overall. I thought it was really smart, sharp work.
I am a Star Trek fan and I have seen the mentioned episode many times. I do take issue with RK's assessment that there is a "normal" Jim and an "evil copy" Jim. Actually, there are no "copies" involved. There are merely two (of a possibly endless number) of "mirror" universes involved. The transporter malfunction causes two of the universes to collide and one version (the version we know) of Jim gets switched and sent to the wrong universe (different dimension?) while the other universe's Jim gets sent to ours. What we get here is not necessarily a "copy" situation, but a "version."
In our version, Jim is "normal." But what does that mean? It means in basic terms that he is mostly good and balanced. Whereas, in the mirror universe Jim's evil side is dominant. However, this is not just a situation of "normal" universe vs. "evil" universe as shown by the Spock character in the "evil" universe. Spock in both worlds tends toward the middle and ends up helping "normal" Jim get back to his universe. At the end Jim tells evil-world Spock that his "Federation-like" system is better than the mirror world's totalitarian system, and Spock agrees to "consider it." (Obvious references to communism here.)
I could make a case for this being very philosophically interesting, but I want try and stick to the topic. I did not see the Prestige and cannot comment on the film, but as for a digital copies being the same as its orginal, cannot we say the same of identical twins? DNA-wise--the same. In reality--very different. Clones of animals--DNA--the same. In reality--different.
If, as you suggested, two "normal" Jims had been produced (a concept dealt with in later shows of Star Trek, Next Generation, BTW)then they would both be Jim--same, but different.
As I am currently finding out by designing my own Web site, I have found that there is no exact copy or duplicate, no matter what the "numbers" say. There is always some slight variation, even though the "code" is exactly the same, from the place and time where the digital image was replicated, the movement of the hand, the change in machinery, etc. (Is this chaos theory?) You may be able to replicate the image, but not the circumstances. Therefore, no two things are the same, even if we cannot detect the difference.
Lori, your comments strike at some central assumptions of new media theory -- particularly the assumption that "loss" is the primary measurement of difference. Although I would not presume to call my self a new media theorist or expert, the new media theory I have read comes close to the fetishism of the virtual, that because a copy or replication hasn't "lost" any information, then it is essentially the same. As you point out, something can be "identical" to its core, yet still not identical in the sense of having the same identity. We don't consider identical twins to be the same person, and wouldn't presume to say that their shared DNA is what makes them equally good. Yet media theorists would argue that the shared digital code does make different copies equal and for all intents and purposes identical.
In other words, perhaps we should question the importance of similarity or identity itself. Having an "identical" copy certainly has practical benefits, but should practicality be a basis for determining ontology?
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