Audient Audit: Heartbeeps

This is the tenth in my 2019 monthly series Audient Audit, in which I review my books to see if I've cooked them to include movies I haven’t seen.

When I’ve gone through my various movie lists and through Flickchart, there have been two movies I think of interchangeably, neither of which I’m sure I’ve seen. One has been Steve Barron’s Electric Dreams from 1984, and one has been Allan Arkush’s Heartbeeps from 1981. They do both feature artificial intelligence, but maybe the most salient common element was that I wasn’t sure either belonged on my lists.

Well, I should no longer confuse them, at least, and can now be certain I've seen at least one of them.

I was a bit bemused to find Heartbeeps available for easy download on iTunes. It seemed like the type of the movie that should have passed into general obscurity, no longer available for an audience that no longer cares about finding it. But there it was, along with a couple other randos from the same time period that I also considered for October, such as D.C. Cab and Unfaithfully Yours. I would have preferred Solarbabies, but that indeed has passed on to the Great Obscure. (And since I have plans for the last two months of this series, D.C. Cab and Unfaithfully Yours will have to wait indefinitely for their time of reckoning.)

Heartbeeps carried a fair bit of promise for something kind of outrageous and campy, plus it has a bit of genuine interest for comedy fans, as it stars Andy Kaufman. (And Bernadette Peters, a talented comic actress, but not someone whose presence alone would draw me to a movie.) I soon discovered it also features Randy Quaid and Dick Miller.

The story involves two malfunctioning service robots who fall in love on the shelves of the factor where they are waiting to be repaired. He’s Val Com 17485, a valet, and she’s Aqua Com 89045, who assists at poolside parties. They are naturally dutiful robots without a sense of rebellion, but they do effectively rebel by deciding to steal a company van to go investigate some trees they see off in the distance. They are accompanied by the robot version of Rodney Dangerfield, who smokes a cigar and adjusts his tie while telling bad Borscht Belt one-liners. On their way they make a small helper robot out of spare parts, who is effectively their child. They’re running from the hapless employees who let them escape on their watch and a proto Robocop who hasn’t figured out how to distinguish between criminals and parents pushing strollers. But their biggest antagonist may be the limited life of their batteries.

Heartbeeps is both better than I thought it would be and not as satisfying as I thought it would be. I had it in my head that it would be really weird, but it’s not that weird. Within its world it presents us a fairly straightforward road trip movie. Kaufman and Peters both commit to their roles and they have a really sweet chemistry.

My favorite part might have been the Rodney Dangerfield robot, though I should say he’s not voiced by Rodney Dangerfield. In fact, I told at least two of his one-liners to my kids, who appreciated them.

The thing that made me certain I had in fact seen it, though, was that I had a clear memory of two scenes, at opposite ends of the movie: the two main robots standing on the shelves and engaging in their innocent robotic banter, and the scene of them running out of batteries at the end (spoiler alert). Although the movie does not have particularly deep thoughts on its mind, there’s something kind of moving about its contemplations on mortality. These robots have become so advanced over the course of this film that it seems tragic to ponder their basic mechanical limitations, which undercut their evident humanity. Of course, that’s not the actual ending, which is far cheerier (spoiler alert).

I also enjoyed the confused police robot, which gets trapped in logical loops that it cannot reconcile and goes haywire. It might not be up to the Robocop level of satire, but there’s some funny stuff going on here with a dangerous robot who has the intellect of a child proud of the shiny silver badge he’s wearing.

It does seem like a bit of a strange role for Kaufman, though he may have taken it as a challenge. That consummate outside-the-box performer boxes himself in big time by acting within the confines of a pre-programmed machine, albeit one that is consistently breaking free of its own limitations. He gives an entertaining performance, but it’s probably not the one you would recommend to someone in search of “the real Andy Kaufman.”

Okay! Two more months to go before I put away my auditor’s pencil and transparent visor for good.