Victoria Fox
11/19/09
English 120
The Bad Side of Technology
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 like an alternate reality for all
the characters, because with a surrogate they are given the choice to be happy and live up
to “perfection”- appearances, hidden emotions, hidden actions- 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 Maggies 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 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 one is talking to- a person can choose what their surrogate looks like and make them
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’. Thus, people
developed a dependency for their technology. A particularly strong example of a
surrogate-dependant 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”(Scrpt, 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.” (Scrpt, 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.” (Scrpt, 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, and instead 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.” (Scrpt, 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.” (Scrpt, pg. 116) She finally allows her real emotions to show,
something that she was able to hide with her surrogate, 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.” (pg. 157) After no response, he bursts into the
room, only to find Maggie dead, killing 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- upkeeping 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,” (pg. 2) When her son died, 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
that equilibrium as fast as possible- by cheating. Instead of working on her problems and
moving on with a happy real life, she choses 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.” (pg. 59) Maggie’s
character shows how much the new technology affects the population in general, but also
people who were not living their lives to the fullest, and so saw 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: PearsonLongman, 2004. 123-132. Print.
Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele. The Surrogates. Atlanta: Top Shelf, 2006. Print.