SPIDERHEAD COMES UP TAILS
Plenty of potential is squandered in favour of standard action movie fare
Escape from Spiderhead is a short story by George Saunders, originally published in the Christmas 2010 edition of The New Yorker, and later in the collection Tenth of December. A thoughtful meditation on love, sex and pharmaceuticals, it includes this chilling bit of dialogue from Abnesti, a prison warden who tests mood-altering drugs on the inmates:
“Say someone can't love? Now he or she can. We can make him. Say someone loves too much? Or loves someone deemed unsuitable by his or her caregiver? We can tone that s--t right down.
Say someone is blue, because of true love? We step in, or his or her caregiver does: blue no more. No longer, in terms of emotional controllability, are we ships adrift. No one is. We see a ship adrift, we climb aboard, install a rudder. Guide him/ her toward love. Or away from it.”
I recommend Escape from Spiderhead, easily accessible online.
Spiderhead is an adaptation by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (Zombieland, Deadpool), directed by Joseph Kosinski, whose Top Gun: Maverick is in theatres now and well worth a watch. It stars Chris Hemsworth as Abnesti, and Miles Teller as Jeff, a prisoner who has agreed to be a human guinea pig in exchange for serving his time in a relatively pleasant, open-concept prison, Brutalist in design but otherwise not unlike a university campus.
Jeff is given drugs through a spine-mounted drip called a Mobipak. The drugs' names sounds like minor villains in a Marvel movie. Verbaluce makes you talkative. Darkenfloxx makes you miserable. There's Laffodil, Phobica, OBDX. And if you want to know if Luvactin is right for you, ask your doctor.
Like a good Philip K. Dick story, there's a lot of untapped potential in the original text to explore notions of free will, brain chemistry, identity and perception. And like a bad adaptation — Total Recall, Paycheck, Next — that potential is squandered in favour of standard action movie beats, nutty plot twists and a budget that appears to have been mostly spent on the rights to songs by the likes of the Doobie Brothers, Supertramp, Thomas Dolby and Hall & Oates.
There was one exchange that stuck with me. Abnesti is explaining that Phobica can be given to people to make them afraid of things that are bad for them. Jeff asks: “Like gluten?” Abnesti replies: “Or thinking too much.” Looks like the filmmakers had a hit of that themselves.
Spiderhead is available June 17 on Netflix.