What we all need right now are some surrogates

My self-proclaimed outside-the-box quarantine-themed viewings continued last night, as I saw my second Bruce Willis quarantine movie. And by that I mean not only was it my second Bruce Willis movie during quarantine, but it was my second Bruce Willis quarantine-themed movie during quarantine.

The first, Twelve Monkeys, dealt with an actual virus. The second, Surrogates, deals with how we cope with threats from the outside world, a virus being only one possible example.

So all you peons out there, watching your "obvious" quarantine movies, need to check out the movie where people put artificial simulacra of themselves into the world to avoid getting killed. It's got loads of current relevance.

I was actually a fan of this comparatively under-the-radar 2009 sci fi flick back from the start, but given how far under the radar it flew, I hadn't really considered watching it again in the intervening 11 years. Then the other night it jumped into my mind for reasons I can't remember, and then stuck there to the point that I paid good money to rent it after not finding it on any of my streaming services. (It's just the kind of movie that should have been hiding away somewhere among Netflix's offerings, much as its characters are hiding away, but no.)

If you aren't familiar with the basic premise, it looks at a world in the not-too-distant future where people (known pejoratively as "meat bags") stay at home all the time, and instead of going out themselves, they pilot around androids that do all their real-world interfacing for them. Some look like their hosts, some look 100% different -- which makes sense, as they are, in a way, walking and talking chat room avatars. That 47-year-old man pretending he's a 22-year-old coed is entirely possible, maybe even encouraged, in this world.

The technology allows the actual humans, the people susceptible to violence and accident and disease, to stay at home in the protection of their apartments, where they sit in comfortable dentist chairs and connect up to a rig that allows them to see the world through the eyes of their robot surrogates. They can get into fist fights or jump off buildings or have sex with whoever they want, all while their increasingly fragile bodies stay at home, safe against everything except the ruination caused by lack of exposure to fresh air and lack of the use of one's muscles.

As I watched these "meat bags" walking around their apartments, unshaven, in bathrobes and slippers, squinting painfully against the stray beams of sunlight that reach them, I saw ourselves in the time of quarantine.

For the more enterprising of us, it's not that bad. We venture out for exercise and grocery shopping, using masks as the technologically viable alternative to having our own personal robots. We do get out and we do move around.

But some of us have probably gained an additional ten percent of our previous body weight, have lost any real inclination toward personal hygiene, and are the willing prisoners of devices and other virtual experiences that help us escape from the drudgery our lives have become.

And how good would it be, right now, to actually have a surrogate? The surrogate can go to the store, go to the movies, ride in a packed subway, even do your job -- and if your job is a dangerous one, your surrogate can do it without even wearing a helmet. In short, surrogates can keep the economy going in times of pandemic.

Alas, no one thought it fit to invent surrogates, even though Jonathan Mostow's film came out 11 years ago, even though the film series that helped inspire it -- The Terminator and The Matrix -- predated Surrogates by even longer than that. Why did they spend so much time on other things, like Tik Tok and chicken sandwiches with Krispy Kreme buns?

Of course, having your surrogate live your life for you is no way to live life, the movie is sure to let us know. Nor would we want to, I hope, in the long run, though this movie has interesting ideas to explore about how virtual reality could increasingly be a replacement for real life experience. During a pandemic, though -- when a vaccine is still probably more than a year away -- it could be handy.

Until then, we'll probably all be slightly hairier and more bathrobed versions of ourselves, squinting at the sunlight.