The Effect of Technology on the Emotionally Weak

In both the graphic novel and the film of Surrogates, the character of Maggie (Greer’s wife) is heavily affected by the surrogate technology. In the film, her dependency runs much deeper, seeing as she lost a son and her surrogate is her way of pretending like nothing ever happened. The surrogates are an alternate reality for all the characters, because with a surrogate they are given the choice to be happy and be who they want to be, their idea of ‘perfection’-- they put up a front to the rest of the world, who are also surrogates. For Maggie’s character, she chooses to have her surrogate be completely social and carefree- very different from the older, more worn-out woman behind the technology, whom we see later on in the film. The technology allows Maggie to run away from reality, which is ideal to her, given her mental and social decline after the death of her son. She runs from not just the situation, but people as well-- her friends, her husband -- even herself.

In the film Surrogates, the world also lives through humanoid robots called surrogates, meant to act as a representation of the person controlling them. With a surrogate, you can be anything you want to be, and do anything you want to do. If you are a paraplegic and have always wanted to run a marathon, you can now do it. If you’re fat, you can be thin. With the new technology of surrogates, a person can run away from their own reality, by creating an extension of themselves that can be their substitute in the real world, which is only populated with other people’s surrogates. In this way, no one ever truly knows who they are talking to-- people can choose what their surrogate looks like and make themselves dramatically different than who they really are. People thus socialize and interact with one another in a relatively blithe way-- since it is not really you, and no one can prove that it is you speaking, you can voice any opinion you have, whether it is popular or not. You also don’t have to worry about being judged, since the exterior that people associate with you is not your permanent one, and if things ever went wrong, you could always buy a new surrogate. This acts as insurance for people’s desires, and allows them to live out all their fantasies without ever having to get out of a chair.

Naturally, this poses a problem for people, and society in general. If people are spending all their time living out their lives in a chair and behind a piece of machinery as protection, are they really living at all? Deep rooted problems that they have, that once had to be dealt with, are pushed aside when a person is ‘plugged in’ to their surrogate. Thus, people develop a dependency for their technology. A particularly strong example of a surrogate-dependent human is Maggie, Detective Greer’s wife. With the help of a beautiful, youthful and energetic surrogate, Maggie lives out her days not mourning the death of her son, but instead living a luxurious lifestyle-- she is seen always getting dressed up to go out with friends, working at a beauty salon helping people improve their surrogates’ beauty, and ‘jacking’ with her friends. She lives the kind of life that is very often associated with youth-- acting carefree and obsessing about appearances. She even sorrowfully admits at one point to her husband that “this is [her] life”(Brancato, pg. 76) When introduced to her surrogate in the film, the audience at once assumes her to be a shallow beauty queen, because that is what she focuses on. It is not until later on in the film that we see the real human Maggie, haggard and depressed, but full of emotion and turmoil from all the problems bubbling inside.

Maggie is haunted by the death of her son, but instead of relying on her human emotion to deal with the issue, she instead seeks shelter behind her surrogate, who is emotionless and carefree. At one point in the film, Maggie’s vanity is exposed when all she can offer to Greer’s partner is “a free [beauty] consultation” (Brancato, pg. 52) It is clear from Maggie’s choice of surrogate that what she truly wants most of all is to be happy again, because her surrogate always looks perfect and calm; when acting as her surrogate, she can act as untroubled as she pleases, and she doesn’t have to feel as if she would be judged for not being bothered by the death of her son, because her surrogate never had a child, let alone one who died. Through surrogacy, it is as if the death of her son never occurred. Instead of mourning, she can hang out with her supposed friends, who are all just surrogates as well. They have no real attachment to one another, which can be argued to suit Maggie’s emotional needs perfectly; she needs to be around people to escape her own thoughts, but isn’t too eager to emotionally invest herself in other people, who could be harmed and thus harm her emotionally and make her even further depressed. By living through her surrogate, which is a fake representation of herself, and by having surrogates who are friends of her surrogate, she can detach herself from others while still getting social interaction.

The situation with her husband is no better. Since the death of her son, Maggie is withdrawn and acts disinterested in doing anything real or meaningful with her husband. She sees life as something to run from, and so she runs by becoming addicted to the surrogate technology, and denying that there’s anything wrong, as displayed by the conversation she and Greer have about not spending time together anymore: “…I think we’re doing just fine.” When Greer rebuts, saying “that’s our surrogates. It’s not the same.” Maggie snaps back with her honest belief that “It’s better.” (Brancato, pg. 17) Her attitude comes with the confidence that owning a surrogate instills in her; she doesn’t have to confront anybody face to face, but rather surrogate to surrogate, which changes a personal matter from being actually personal, to being viewed as an outsider or stranger might view it, with a passing interest. Her relationship with her husband suffers, and finally boils to a point when she pleads to her husband in the beauty parlor where she works that “That body in our apartment—the one you call real—it isn’t me. I’m right here…what matters is what I choose to be.” (Brancato, pg 83)

But the most dramatic effect of surrogate technology on Maggie deals with how she faces herself. A key difference that should be noted between the graphic novel of The Surrogates and the film Surrogates is the degree of intensity of her addiction to surrogacy. In the film, when the surrogates are de-activated, Maggie eventually comes to her senses and realizes that she has to face her reality, and begin to live her life as a real human being, with real emotions. Her emotions come pouring out of her, perfectly demonstrated by the film direction: “Slowly, she puts her arms around him, weeping against his chest.” (Brancato, pg. 116). She finally allows her real emotions to show, something which she was able to hide with her surrogate and which to the real, depressed Maggie was a blessing. This is the climax for Maggie, in which she wears her heart on her sleeve and finally opens up to her husband by crying and letting him see her do so. Neither her surrogate, nor any amount of medication, could help her like Greer does at that moment, because it allows her to be, for once, human. By crying, Maggie finally faces herself and her past, and starts the process of becoming independent of the surrogates.

In the novel, however, Maggie takes a much darker turn after the downfall of surrogates. Greer knocks on the door to her room, yelling that “It’s over Margaret…I thought maybe we could go for a walk.” (Venditti, pg. 157) After no response, he bursts into the room, only to find Maggie dead, having killed herself with an overdose of her anxiety medication. When the surrogates stop working, Maggie chooses death over a life without a shield to hide behind. She leaves her husband instead of finding a better solution which would fix their marriage and begin to rebuild their lives post-surrogates.

Maggie’s character is heavily affected by surrogacy because she is the model for the average surrogate user. Completely opposite of her husband, Maggie loves surrogacy and is in many ways obsessed with hers- maintaining it, and living her ‘life’ as carefree as possible. She allows it to control her life, because she needs something to do so, and needs some way to shape herself back into the person she aspires to be.

An argument made by Sherry Turkel can be applied to surrogate technology when it comes to creating a persona for oneself-- “one’s body can be represented by one’s own textual description: the obese can be slender… the shy [can] be outgoing,” (Turkle, 2) When her son died, she felt as many people feel after the death of a loved one, she felt her normal life slipping away from her, as this abrupt change in daily life occurred. So, she tried to get her life back to an equilibrium as fast as possible-- by cheating. Instead of working on her problems and moving on with a happy real life, she chose to hide behind the surrogate and allow it to put on a brave face for her; she remained to the rest of the world as a calm, perfect person, but behind the technology she is a withering woman taking medications to help her deal with the stress of bottling up all her emotions. In the graphic novel, perhaps the missing detail of the dead son is what finally drove her to kill herself when she had nothing left. In the film, the dead son is what keeps her and her husband together emotionally.

Although she becomes dependent on technology and runs from her husband, she loves him still but cannot cope with the pain of the loss. In the novel, there is no such reason behind her addiction to surrogacy. It is plain lust for perfection, as Maggie tells her husband, “ It must be nice…to not care that you’ve put on weight and gotten older. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t share your self confidence.” (Venditti. 59). Maggie’s character shows how much the new technology affects the population in general, but also people who are not living their lives to the fullest, and so see their surrogates as a means for escape from their otherwise dull lives. But with this new technology, which let people live the most adventurous lives if they wanted through a mechanical and fake depiction of themselves, was anybody really living anymore?

Works Cited

Brancato, John and Michael Ferris. Surrogates (Screenplay). 16 Oct. 2007. Script Collector.

Script Collector. Web. 18 Nov. 2009. < http://scriptcollector.blogspot.com/

2009/10/surrogates-2009-screenplay.html>.

Surrogates. Dir. Jonathan Mostow. Perf. Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike,

James Cromwell, and Ving Rhames. Touchstone Pictures, 2009. Film.

Turkle, Sherry. "Cyberspace and Identity." Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum:

Brief Edition. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Pearson-

Longman, 2004. 123-132. Print.

Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele. The Surrogates. Atlanta: Top Shelf, 2006. Print.