“What a tangled mess we make out of our lives,'' I said to myself as I poked around behind my television in the dark, disconnecting and reconnecting miscellaneous HDMI cords that seemingly lead nowhere. Like many of my generation, I have a tenuous relationship with technology. It’s made my life undeniably convenient yet profoundly complicated. There are times I wish I could hurl my phone out the window and live a life disconnected from screens and notifications. Other times, I’m exceedingly grateful for the warm glow my iPhone provides in a dark room as I listen to my monthly rented music subscription and scroll through TikToks until I lose all sense of time and place. That kind of disassociation used to require heavy doses of psilocybin. Now I have it within arm’s reach. It’s a complicated relationship.
The films screening as part of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s “Control.Alt.Delete” programming all reflect the ebb and flow of our relationship with technology through various points in time. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Saul William & Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost span nearly a century of cinematic history and individually speak to specific concerns, both literal and existential, of their time. It’s an impressive array of science fiction and identity politics, and provides the ideal conversational fodder to muse on our place in an increasingly digitized and automated simulation.
