Intrigued with his father’s retirement plans, Devin Hubbard moved home to begin an apprenticeship in 2008. Neuromarketing was catching on, and Dr. Hubbard proposed an entrepreneurial adventure: with access to the scanner and an in-house expert in the still-fledgling science of analyzing brain response, the boys could hang out a shingle and start fresh. After a persuasive L.A. lunch with Devin some months later, Carlsen began planning his relocation to San Diego as well. In my imagining both of them bombed down the 405 with only a Rolodex strapped to the roof. After four years of (again, I imagine) bong-enhanced blue-sky sessions about the places they’d go, the movies they’d make, and the universes they’d master, and a few more years after that of being ignored by greasy M.B.A.’s in soul-corroding pitch meetings, here, at last, was a chance to unleash their dorm-room bravado on the real world. A chance to master this new game and serve it back to their old bosses. Once installed in San Diego, the new partners lingered over the right name for their concern, staked a website, and decided on the cornerstone of the business—an offshoot of fMRI market research they would call neurocinema.
* * *
The Scripps Ranch Civic Association had just celebrated its fortieth anniversary the day I passed the desiccated corner of the wildlife preserve along Interstate 15. The flora on either side of the preserve’s border is equally unimpressive, though only the freeway side is clotted with garbage. Some of it—a tenderized pack of American Spirits, a quarter bag of Funyuns—cleaves, spread-eagled, to the fence itself. Nearby a metal sign that forbids passersby from entering, trespassing, loitering, hunting, and cutting or removing trees or shrubs is heavily Pollocked with rust.
Size-wise, anyway, it’s a pretty healthy chunk of land. Speeding by it, I thought it might make a nice sanctuary for film journalism’s fried first responders—those critics who, like me, have started to wonder if the next Adam Sandler picture might be the one to send them over the proverbial edge and into a palliative grazing-type situation.
Yeah, yeah: bad movies, boohoo—there have always been bad movies, I hear you say. And bad moods and silly critics and jobs that start to bore you senseless. It has always been a depraved business too—should anyone doubt it, there’s an entire subgenre of meta-Hollywood movies and Raymond Chandler’s deathlessly acid studio dispatches for handy consultation. I do understand these things, and I too have been watching bad movies and movies about bad movies and movies about how bad it is making bad movies my whole life. I can only say that things feel different and hope you’ll trust me. Maybe you’ve felt it too. Maybe you are also unsure if bad movies—I mean really, like fog-up-the-joint bad—have ever done so well or stunk with this sort of alien enigma. Their inscrutability makes them difficult to align with a long and occasionally illustrious tradition of B-movie badness and straight-faced bombs.
In fact what’s scariest about the neo-terrible movie is the way it eludes traditional evaluation, pointing ultimately and only to the riddle of its own existence. The viewing experience is akin to watching a carpet being rolled out at one end and up at the other—this kind of movie seems to consume itself as it goes, leaving only the fleeting impressions of an unpleasant dream or hypnotic event. The question posed by the worst of them is actually quite profound: Have we changed what it means to call something a movie, good or bad? Subset: If we ever got around to a general-use definition of good and bad, has that shifted as well? Sub-subset: How did this astonishingly stupid thing I’m watching even happen? Is this really happening? Wait—what just happened?
There’s not a lot of sympathy to go around for those people waved into free movies for what is more or less a living. I’m not interested in sympathy; it’s never looked right on me. Having spent a few years absorbing Hollywood’s front line of fire at a rate of four to six new releases a week, I would only like to tell you that I have confronted and come to know quite particularly what we talk about, in the early twenty-first century of professional moviegoing, when we talk about burnout.
* * *
Ten minutes before we were scheduled to meet, Philip Carlsen painted the front of his button-down with freshly brewed coffee. Carlsen, now a Scripps Ranch resident, lives close enough to his headquarters that he was able to walk home, change his shirt, and walk back in time to greet me as I was milling about MindSign’s doors. The office is part of an industrial park found at the juncture of Old Grove Road and Businesspark Avenue, an asphalt gully among a wealth of elephant-footed eucalyptus trees. Scripps legend has it that the mogul’s gardener, one Chauncey I. Jerabek, believed eucalyptus wood to be a premium material in the production of railroad ties; he set out to line the ranch with free-market mojo. Though he was sadly mistaken about the wood, the spirit of Chauncey “Always Thinking” Jerabek’s enterprise lived on: Scripps Ranch’s first residential contractor was caught passing off bum lumber as prime cut.
Freshly shirted, Carlsen entered the office ahead of me, pleading an eccentric alarm system, then returned to buzz me in. It’s a modest office—just the two partners and the odd tech on-site on a given day—dominated by the presence of its engine. Built like massive mezzi rigatoni, the fMRI machine fills the center of its operating theater from floor to ceiling, a sculpted chunk of Tesla magnet, copper, and steel, coated in a smooth, white surface and stamped with the Siemens logo. It’s glassed into its own chamber, like a neonatal unit for an unknown species. You can hear it breathing throughout the office, the endless, electric inhale of a thousand refrigerators. The 3T had to be lowered in through the ceiling of the complex, and the office was rebuilt around it. Scans are watched from an observational bay, reinforcing the feeling that something Plutonian is being incubated inside. As we passed the chamber, Carlsen opened the door for a better look, warning me against letting my bag dangle over a line of red tape on the floor. They’ve lost a few good iPhones that way.
Carlsen pushed back in his chair as I placed a lipstick-size Olympus recorder on the corner slice of table separating us in the small meeting room next door. A look of pity crossed with polite aversion passed over his face, and I wondered whether he had wearied of going on the record with presumed enemies or was just taking in the absurdity of the contrast between his gadget and mine.
In their brief existence, MindSign has aroused some predictable controversy. Where the advertising racket is supposed to be poised on the cutting edge of evil, in general we assume the film industry is guided by better angels. We still want to believe that a bunch of people who are smarter and better looking than we are are spending that awesome capital trying to figure out how to entertain us, even send us away with our hearts full and our heads rearranged.
Any movie not being watched with one’s eyes pincered open is availed of this good faith. It won’t surprise anyone who has sampled even a rancid sliver of an episode of Bridalplasty or the last Saw sequel to learn that the working definition of entertainment has made a sharp turn toward the atavistic. It may feel troubling that we now accept on-screen vivisections and survival-of-the-hottest tournaments as entertainment, but those are human appetites with long and inglorious human precedents. Whether we should be encouraging those appetites and clarifying them into high definition is the question. The kind of stuff Carlsen is talking about involves relocating the movie industry’s creative command center into a lab like this one, where decisions about casting, character, plot, and style are determined according to a schema of diagnostic testing, a process ruled by what is referred to in neuroscience as activation.
Entertainment is the noun Graham Greene used to describe his lesser novels in the 1930s; David Foster Wallace imagined it as a velvet assassin in 1996’s Infinite Jest. But the Ponzi scheme of Western culture has a wicked turnover: like escapism before it, entertainment has shed its pejorative stench, and in just a few decades. The nihilistic scenario of a nation of pinwheel-eyed automatons has been reconceived as an ideal—quality-of-life as unlimited data, the mastery of amusement over time and space. Infinite Jest was the name of a movie so exquisitely
entertaining that viewers basically shit themselves and died. What came to pass over the years in which Wallace’s novel is set is a sort of inversion of that scenario, where the quality of whatever you’re watching or clicking or gawping at doesn’t much matter, as long as it’s something and it’s always on. Like buying the right sneaker or living in the right neighborhood, it becomes a matter of keeping up.
Different media conglomerates and cellular-service providers have tried on different versions of Bell’s proto-utopian 2010 slogan: “Be entertained anywhere.” Every week this ambition is pushed a little further. After a meal at a Union Square restaurant on a recent Friday night, I passed a lone man guiding fork to mouth with his earbuds plugged in and his eyes trained on an iPad, where the mise-en-scènic architecture of a movie pulsed in holographic blues. Watching the latest Transformers sequel and hoovering meat loaf at a crowded diner may be closer to an act of distraction, the pyramid’s late-twentieth-century ringer. Distraction and entertainment may in fact be the cochairs of the current culture, and the distinction between them gets thinner all the time.
I’d get so bummed out, back a few years ago when I was babysitting a six-year-old boy, watching him take all of his meals alone, in front of the television. Kid, I’d think, you’ve got your whole life to do that. It’s the only way he’ll eat, his parents said—he needs a distraction. But that wasn’t quite true: the instant the TV came on, he fixed and dilated, reanimating only when you moved to turn it off. His previous babysitter had demonstrated her method of pushing chicken nuggets in when his mouth hung open, but I just couldn’t do it. I’d try to watch the assaultive, crudely animated cartoons along with him and wind up asking, Do you like this show? Is it good? But this otherwise bright and extremely quick-witted little kid was in a place beyond value judgment and would grunt in reply. Activation is maybe the most basic marker of human response—anyone who has jangled house keys for a baby has observed it in its purest form.
Marshall McLuhan insisted, as the pshaw-ing Western world TV’d up and embraced the miracle of the microwave in the 1960s, that technology would retribalize man. The reconception of subjective cognitive and emotional experience in objective, neuroscientific terms will add another check in the man’s running column of catastrophes foretold. The more sophisticated the technology, it seems, the more profoundly it reduces the human to the animal, a paradox that has served the sciences relatively well but seems poised to destroy what we think of as social and creative culture. To valuate even the broadest forms of entertainment in terms of fight-or-flight brain-activation patterns is to bring us into line with the cinephilic tastes of the common prairie vole. It is to begin a process that has the potential to turn our primary storytelling medium into the equivalent of a giant crib mobile, a rotating dangler of spring-loaded stimuli.
It would appear that we are still very much invested in the idea of what makes a movie “good.” The entire industry is organized around a late-winter referendum on the subject; first just a show—the Oscars—now film awards comprise an entire season, if one crowded by industry politics and celebrity gawping. Yet the question of what makes a movie bad is treated as superfluous, snobby, or understood, i.e., not good. “Well, it’s all subjective” is how we agree to disagree on movie quality. And that’s true, to a considerable extent. But neuroscience is not just furthering a realignment of the culture with the principle that activation = good. It bears reminding that the first step of any scientific method is to eliminate subjectivity altogether. And what is a subject minus her subjectivity?
Carlsen has admitted it’s the screenwriters who send him hate mail. The honest ones, anyway. For the rest, the no-brainer shortcuts of neuroscience, like the microwave, just make life that much easier.
* * *
The face, for our purposes, of this particular future is so improbable it feels, to the cynical para-brain, totally obvious. Philip Carlsen is fair with closely cropped blond hair, thirtyish, and handsome in a slightly ruddy, wait-and-see way. He’s friendly but watchful, with the invigorated look and equable manner of a young man who has finally cleared a field for himself. He’s not worried, in other words, and in general. Carlsen describes MindSign as a family business—the Hubbards have all but adopted him—and he is free to hang around after hours and conduct pop-up experiments for fun. Instead of banging through a few GTA IV missions at home on a Friday night, he might stuff his head in the scanner to browse through high-end motorbikes, or use an Amazon couch purchase as an opportunity to see what his brain looks like when he clicks “buy.” Dr. Hubbard, a longtime practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, had planned to spend his dotage making similar sorties to the facility. A neuromantic of sorts, he envisioned the meditating brain as a Bastille Day of brain waves, blood firing like Roman candles in every lobe. In fact the images looked more like a tranquil pond at midnight. Couch buying, however, is activating as all hell.
The machine exerts a magnetic force thirty thousand times that of the earth’s gravity; belt buckles and ballpoints become deadly weapons in its presence. Its lavish energy needs have an allegorical pang: once turned on the machine cannot be turned off, for fear of surging the grid. In the simplest terms, fMRI scans track the iron in the blood as it is called to various parts of the brain. Interpreting blood flow in response to external stimuli is a matter of decoding complicated and as yet largely mysterious patterns. Facial recognition and motor cognition, for instance, have been mapped more confidently than the difference between fear and agitation, or agitation and laughter, for that matter. When I ask Carlsen what fifteen years of fMRI science has clarified about the nature of human response, he quotes Dr. Hubbard: “We know more about outer space than we do about inner space.”
But then the movie business has always been more interested in going concerns than in rocket science—and in terms of focus grouping, fMRI is the slick new thing. More comprehensive than the electric-signal capture of electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG), and more accurate than galvanic skin response (“It can tell you a little bit,” Carlsen says, “but I wouldn’t change a campaign based on Subject 42 sweating”) and standard MRI pictures, fMRI works in real time, revealing the parts of the brain where, as Carlsen says, “all the cool stuff happens.” The machine takes a picture of the brain every two seconds, which happens to be the average length of a movie shot. Though Hollywood studios are hypercautious about confidentiality (political campaigns also demand DEFCON secrecy), MindSign hopes to insinuate itself into every step of the filmmaking process. At the moment they deal mainly in movie trailers; in this they are not far removed from their Hollywood clients.
Still gunning in start-up mode, MindSign has picked up a rogue assortment of clients. Much smaller fish than McDonald’s and Warner Bros. are willing to shell out for what Carlsen calls “an expensive way to prove the obvious.” They have dealt with lawyers looking to out medical claimants as malingerers, and women determined to crack the case of the husband and the Asian masseuse. Though a techno-gumshoe outfit called No Lie MRI provided a steady feed of clients, MindSign found the adultery racket a little tawdry. Even so, there’s something comforting in the idea that the same old human messes were first in line at the future’s door. If there is an unwavering constant between the days of savior-doubting, witch-floating, and last week’s episode of Cheaters, it is the human obsession with gleaning, eliciting, and proving the “truth.” In that sense, the relationship between technology and tribalism is a two-way parade.
The lie-detecting business will thrive with or without MindSign—the people who know about such things agree that fMRI lie-detection scans will soon be widely admissible in courts. Still waiting for the movie-studio lawyers to triple-caulk their nondisclosure agreements, in 2010 MindSign hooked up with Martin Lindstrom—a branding consultant and the author of a book called Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy—to conduct more traditional neuromarketing research. Together they designed a study to deter
mine how close iPhone users are to the truth when they talk about being addicted to their gadgets. Subjects were scanned while they looked at images of an iPhone with no service and an iPhone that read “Mom calling”; they listened to the chirp of a text coming in; they watched video of an iPhone vibrating with a new message. The study predicted that iPhone stimuli would match the activation patterns associated with addiction, but in fact it engaged the insular cortex, the part of the brain believed to be associated with feelings of love and empathy. Carlsen cited this study as an example of how brain scans often prove surprising. Several months later Lindstrom discussed the results in a New York Times op-ed titled “You Love Your iPhone. Literally.”
* * *
I got stuck on the larger picture.
* * *
Response is the crudest and yet the most profound external measurement of consciousness. I know that you are not just alive but conscious because you respond when I look at, speak to, or touch you; you know the same about me. Together we form the network of mutually reinforcing subjectivities we call human existence. We respond, therefore we are. Underlying Carlsen’s belief in what he described as fMRI’s ability “to make the subjective objective” is a coolly tautological redefinition of consciousness: you respond, therefore you respond.
The most obvious illustration of that statement’s ontological bulk involves the seemingly vegetative patients revealed, through fMRI testing, to be suffering from “locked in” syndrome. Dr. Adrian Owen, the British neuroscientist whom Carlsen calls “the Michael Jordan of fMRI,” is at the forefront of this research, having already proven brain response in at least one vegetative patient. The first step was finding a substitute for what “yes” looks like in the brain, so they could try to communicate with simple questions. The trick was developing a kind of neurological key, a pattern of response robust enough that it could serve as a marker. The motor receptors that control our movements seemed like plausible candidates—they are known to activate, for instance, whether we imagine throwing a ball or actually throw it. As hoped, certain patients showed the appropriate activation when they were asked to imagine swinging a racket, or booting a soccer ball. One of Dr. Owen’s patients, a twenty-nine-year-old car-accident victim who had lain unresponsive for five years, was instructed to pretend he was hitting a forearm winner if he wanted to answer a question in the affirmative. Knowing the answer, Dr. Owen then asked the young man if he had any brothers. Yes, the subject’s brain said, glowing at the top of his skull like a porch light. As a matter of fact I do.
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