In Our Own Image:

Introduction

The story of the double, be it a twin sibling or supernaturally created Doppelgänger, is almost as ageless as any other. So are the legends of artificial beings (anthropoids) created through magic, or statues possessing the power to speak or move. These doubles have served a variety of purposes, both dramatic and psychological, and are echoed in the modern construct of what will be defined as the "virtual character," found in post-modern literature and film texts. This paper will examine the ways in which virtual characters serve many of the functions of the traditional literary double, and thus reflect the importance of the concepts of artificial intelligence, the "other," and the surveillance image in our contemporary culture.

In a broad sense, the category of virtual characters includes any artificially created life forms in independently functioning humanoid bodies, existing either mechanically in the "real world" or in virtual reality simulations which can be directly accessed by their creators. Virtual characters are often referred to by the common terms of androids, robots, simulacrums, cyborgs, or data constructs. The specific characters in film narratives generally share all or most of the following characteristics: They are sentient (self-aware of their own consciousness and of their condition of being artificially created intelligences), they wish to be human or to understand the human condition, they are humanoid in appearance (allowing easier identification with real humans), they have powers which separate them from humanity and sometimes make them objects of desire or fear (such as special strength, mental capacity, or longevity), they are either servants of humanity desiring to be free, or renegades wishing to destroy humanity and control themselves, they develop emotional responses, and finally, they are open to systematic surveillance (through access to their data codes and consciousnesses). Thus, for the purposes of this paper, artificial intelligences which do not have autonomous physical forms (such as "Hal" in 2001: A Space Odessey (1969), "Joshua" in War Games (1983), or "Euclid" from Pi (1998)) are excluded because they do not function as reflections of humanity which with we can identify.

Additionally, it must be noted that the word "virtual" is not used in its strictest sense of being something existing only in artificially created space (since many of these characters do have physical bodies and exist in our world). Rather, virtual is used as a term indicating the character's origin as artificially created, and possessing a virtual (simulated) brain (one based on computer technology) rather than a biological one. Some characters can begin as humans (such as Robocop in the Robocop film series), but once their cognitive and physical processes are altered with computer hardware, they become true virtual characters. Furthermore, the definition of virtual character with which the present analysis is concerned does not include characters from films such as The Matrix (1999) or The Lawnmower Man (1992), in which the people in virtual reality are merely informational representations of real biological people. The same is true for biological clones, unless they are specifically pre-programmed in some way. Finally, the present definition does not include the simple automatons or thoughtless robots (like the Borg drones in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) or the armies of battle droids in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)). Like the mythical Golem, these automatons or robots possess the power of movement and perhaps rudimentary problem-solving capabilities, but they are not self- conscious, sentient, truly autonomous beings.

The virtual character, or artificially created life form, is not a new concept. Its modern form dates back at least one hundred years, to the science fiction writings of Jules Verne, H.G. Welles, Isaac Asimov, and many others. Going back another half century or so, there is the Analytic Engine of Charles Babbage, and before that centuries of fascination with mechanical "chess players" and the like, which were fake machines but nonetheless inspired by a fascination with intelligence other than our own, created by human hands. Finally, there are the ancient legends of magically animated artificial beings, of which the mystic Jewish Golem is representative, along with Egyptian "answering" statues, Chinese "living" statues, and countless other cultural equivalents, although "only a few of them were entities fraught with spiritual capabilities" (Idel 3).

The key development in the use of the virtual character as a representation of ourselves has not been the mechanical reproduction of a simulated human body, but the never before imaginable (and now entirely possible) scientific creation of artificial intelligence ("AI"). Although writers of past generations had to rely on faith that someday it would be possible, we can now follow the current progress of the efforts to create AI with some certainty that it will become a reality in the not too distant future. Even fifteen years ago, the forecast was bright, as Dr. Gordon Pask and Susan Curran observed in Micro Man: Computers and the Evolution of Consciousness:

Let us imagine a system, of a type as yet unstated, but bootstrapped by the technology that is channeled at the moment into micros [PCs]. Suppose that such a system could be like a brain, and carry out operations that are mindful. Impossible? Current research into artificial intelligence, and the concept of a population of computers liberated from the serial straightjacket of conventional computing, carry this notion well into the realm of the probable (208).

Pask and Curran spend much time analyzing exactly what effects the development of AI might have on society, and conclude that the new "habitations offered by the information environment" could offer an alternative to the human brain as a receptacle for consciousness, and that "with these habitats, these technology niches, will come a metamorphosis for the human species that parallels the metamorphosis of machines. The interplay between the two species will create an information environment that is a fit and mutual habitation for both human and non-human minds" (209). With such vital consequences to our current technological path of progress at stake, it is fitting that we examine the effects to ourselves through the virtual characters who already populate the "brave new worlds" of our cinematic narratives.

Throughout Mikhail M. Bakhtin's writings on philosophy and verbal art runs the key theme of the "other," which can be crudely summarized as any separate being outside oneself from which one can gain a sense of meaning. The "other" is used both in the real world and also in relating to fictional characters, which both author and reader can identify with. In his introduction to an edition of Bakhtin's early essays (Art and Answerability), Michael Holquist notes two of Bakhtin's key theories of the "other:"

The a priori from which the rest of Bakhtin's though flows is the assumption that each of us occupies a situation in existence that, for the time we occupy such a space, is ours and ours alone: what I see is not the same as what anyone else sees. Perception, how I "see" the world, is always refracted, as it were, through the optic of my uniqueness. Bakhtin calls this uniqueness of vision my "excess of seeing" insofar as it is defined by the ability I have to see things others do not.

The human subject defined in this way is not condemned to subjectivism, the prison-house not of language, but of the ego: a first implication of recognizing that we are all unique is the paradoxical result that we are therefore fated to need the other if we are to consummate our selves. Far from celebrating a solipsistic "I," Bakhtin posits uniqueness of the self as precisely that condition in which the necessity of the other is born (xxv).

Thus it is appropriate that this paper depends heavily on the concept of "other," as defined by Bakhtin, as a key to interpreting the doubles ("others") or virtual characters of cinematic literature as models against which we can measure ourselves and in which we can observe our own struggles with surveillance society and personal identity. (The surveillance image can be seen as a different but essentially same version of Bakhtin's "other," as Lili Berko, Professor of Film Theory at California State University, Northridge, examines in her insightful essay, Surveying the Surveilled: Video, Space and Subjectivity.)

Before analyzing two key examples of virtual characters in film texts, this paper will conduct a brief survey of the "double" in literature, and examine further aspects of the virtual character in the sense of Bakhtin's "other."

Body

Before proceeding with a descriptive analysis of virtual characters and their functions, it is important to conduct a brief survey of traditional doubles in legend and literature. There are many generic doubles: the Golem, the Mirror Image, the Vanishing Twin, the Biological Twin, the Mandrake, the Homuncule, the Doppelgänger, and others. Pygmalion's statue was brought to life through the power of love--a supernatural animation. So was Gepetto's Pinocchio puppet. Another type of "double" is the mistaken identity or stand-in, played out in such tales as Cyrano de Bergerac, Martin Guerre, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and A Comedy of Errors. In the Greek myth of Amphytrion, another kind of double--the shape shifter--is seen, as the god Zeus is able to deliberately take the form of Alcmena's husband, Amphytrion, and thereby seduce her--as is common for later doubles of all sorts to "seduce the beloved in the shape of the lover" (Rank 14), although Zeus himself was incapable of winning Alcmena's true love.

Many literary critics discuss the double as a psychological yet concrete manifestation of the subjective inner states of the human consciousness, as an essential clue to the dual nature of humans, and as evidence of multiple personalities possibly existing inside the same being. They also serve the function of holding up a mirror to ourselves, so that we can see either our worst faults or our greatest strengths. These doubles illuminate what is hidden, either to help us or harm us, and are often only partially acknowledged in the external, objective world of the real. Mistaken identity is also a common function of the double, but in this case the finding of the real identity of the so-called original gives the double its purpose.

In The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, Otto Rank cites E. T. A. Hoffman as "the classical creator of the double-projection, which was among the most popular motifs in Romantic literature" (9). Especially noteworthy are the Fantastic Tales, as in "The Story of the Lost Reflection," where a man named Erasmus Spikher must chase after his mirror reflection after foolishly "granting" it to his lover, and who then encounters the "shadowless Peter Schlemihl," who sold his soul to the devil; subsequently, "this comparison demonstrates the equivalence of the mirror and shadow as images, both of which appear to the ego as its likeness" (9-10). Rank distinguishes these types of "uncanny" doubles as different from "those actual figures of the double who confront each other as real and physical persons of unusual external similarity, whose paths cross. Hoffman's first novel, The Devil's Elixirs (1815), depends for its effect upon a resemblance of the monk Medardus to the Count Viktorin, both of whom are unaware that they are sons of the same father" (12). This type of mistaken identity is common in the stories of many cultures and time periods. Rank includes such famous examples as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Maupassant's The Horla (1887), Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson, and Dostoyevsky's The Double (1846) as key works in the genre of the double or "other self."

In Doubles in Literary Psychology, Ralph Tymms notes the importance of the theories of animal magnetism and secondary personalities by F. A. Mesmer in influencing Hoffmann and others, who would "represent this other self as a double, the physical projection of the second of the mind's twin inmates; so that Mesmer's theories were evidently of importance in advancing the theme, and with it the conception of subjective realism, in literary psychology" (27). The actual inventor of the term Doppelgänger was Jean Paul Richter, in his many stories about "pairs of friends, who together form a unity, but individually appear as a 'half,' dependent on the alter ego" (29). Like many others, Tymms observes the timeless fascination of humankind with the image of an "other" linked to oneself:

Much consideration was apparently given to the mystery of duplication in early thought, and Two was regarded as a sacred number. Obscure speculation on duplication and division of personality alike is awakened in the mind of primitive man when he sees, or believes he sees, his own self moving independently before him; this usually occurs in dreams or hallucinations based on the visual memory of his reflection or shadow (17).

Tymms adds Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby and A Tale of Two Cities, Poe's Ligeia, and Stevenson's The Body Snatcher (on which the 1953 sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based) to the list of famous literary examples of the double.

Finally, in The Literature of the Second Self, C. F. Kepler brings Biblical references into his analysis in noting theories on the meaning of the disciple Thomas' name as "twin" and his possible relationship as Jesus' real brother and/or "second self" (22). The most basic struggle between good and evil (Christ and Antichrist) is personified in the Arabic Apocrypha, Evangelium Infantiae Salvatoris, which "makes the diabolical in Judas more than merely human depravity; at the moment when Jesus is born, Judas is possessed by, and made one with, Satan" (22). Kepler is quick to note that not all twins are evil, and not all doubles are benign--the possible permutations of these stories are endless. Kepler offers as a structure for his book a brief list of the functions of the "Second Self" as "Twin Brother, Pursuer, Tempter, Vision of Horror, Savior, and The Beloved," (vii) but his analysis, though comprehensive, is by no means exhaustive. His definition of the "second self" as perpetually linked "objective" versus "subjective" selves, so that "what each of them lacks is exactly what the other possesses," seems to refer back to Bakhtin's concept of "other," and provides a narrower starting point for analysis in excluding the "split personality," cases of "possession," and the literary "personified idea, the allegory" from the definition of the true second self (8-10).

Golem texts of the Jewish Kabbalah tradition, such as the Sefer Yezirah, pose interesting implications for humankind engaging in the divine act of creation. According to Moshe Idel, professor of Kabbalah in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the assumption in certain Biblical verses and various ancient texts is that "the higher spiritual faculty cannot be conferred upon the artificial being" (17).

Virtual characters of the kind we are concerned with in this paper should be distinguished from the Golem or "automaton" category of animated artificial beings directly controlled by the will of others, serving a simple purpose, and not capable of autonomous action (for example, "Bane" in Batman and Robin (1997), the humans turned robots in Black Hole (1979), and the Borg drones in Star Trek: First Contact (1996)). Sometimes virtual characters start out like this, or at least their physical bodies do, but once they are given the power of thought, choice, or individual action (artificial intelligence), then they are to be considered conscious characters capable of (almost) everything traditional characters are.

The Golem legends are still useful here, however, since the Kabbalah traditions also emphasize the importance of letters in the creation of the world and the nature of all things. For example, in Genesis, "Abraham was given the letter he, which changed his name from Abram to Abraham. This addition can be interpreted as the addition of the name of God as summarized by the letter he, it being the letter by which the earth was created" (17). Additionally, "according to several medieval versions of the creation of the anthropoid, this creature appears when the word 'emet, truth, is written on its forehead," which can be related to Greek and Roman legends of "Prometheus' creation of the Truth out of clay and his breathing into it" to create human beings (4). Indeed, in the Sefer Yezirah, "The emergence of the universe is described as related to all the possible permutations of the letters...thus, the letters are conceived as the potential matter and the investigation of the possibilities immanent in the consonants of the Hebrew language is tantamount to the exploration of the elements which form the creation" (10). The association of life with letters in interesting in light of our modern day reliance on complex computer codes based on letters and their numerical reproductions (to create AI), the discovery and labeling of proteins (the building blocks of biological life) with letters, and the belief that all of the physical universe can be represented by both numbers and letters (the elements on the periodic table). Perhaps the secret to creating artificial life really is within our grasp as our knowledge of science and math increases.

The creation of the artificial life form by humankind offers yet another possibility for the exploration of the double theme, that of the double of the double (the virtual character's double). In such cases, it can often be more difficult to deduce which is the original, since it is easier to create a simulation of a simulacrum than of an original biological life form. Virtual characters could conceivably end up fighting endless numbers of doubles, and humans might experience the same in the near future if cloning technology is indeed capable of creating exact duplicates of minds as well as bodies (though this is much more doubtful). Again, though, most examples of virtual doubles show that there are always unique characteristics by which the original is able to distinguish and defend itself, as "Data" in Star Trek: The Next Generation defeats his "evil brother, Lore", and "Inspector Gadget" in the Disney movie of the same name (1999) defeats an artificially created duplicate of himself. The same is true for virtual doubles of "real" characters, such as Emma Peel's clone in The Avengers (1998), and the many clone or android duplicates Captain Kirk faces in the original Star Trek television series.

Before going further, another clarification of the usefulness in textual analysis of Bakhtin's thesis of the “other” is in order. The following are taken from his essay "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” and concern the relationships between author, character, and reader in fiction, in addition to the nature of self:

I am the only one in all of being who is an I-for-myself and for whom all others are others-for-me...For me, the other coincides with himself, and, through this integrating coincidence that consummates him positively, I enrich the other from outside, and he becomes aesthetically significant--becomes a hero (129).

However, when other aspects of the hero are analyzed, Bakhtin determines that:

Such is the aesthetically valid whole of a human being's inner life--his soul. The soul is actively produced and positively shaped and consummated only in the category of the other--in the category which enables us to affirm present-on-hand being positively independent of meaning or the ought-to-be (132).

It is around the other--as the other's world--that present-on-hand being finds its affirmation and positive consummation independently of meaning...With respect to its total givenness, the world gains positive validity for me only as the surrounding world or environment of another.

In art and in aestheticized philosophy, all axiologically consummating determinations and characterizations of the world are oriented with reference to the other--the hero of that world (134).

Bakhtin's analysis goes much further, but for now it is sufficient to understand the importance of the "other" in our own self-understanding, and how the prevalence of doubles in literature, their corresponding virtual characters in cinema, and the proliferation of surveillance images in our society all contribute to our search for meaning, which we can only find by identifying with an "other" (even if that other is only our own surveillance image).

Virtual characters or simulated beings can be more easily accepted as our "others" because we can identify with them through common shared characteristics such as compassion, outrage, desire, loneliness, sense of loss, need for companionship, the search for a purpose, and especially the overriding curiosity they universally exhibit.

Finally, before looking at several textual examples in depth, William Bogard’s analysis of surveillance and privacy issues in The Simulation of Surveillance needs to be introduced and applied to the current analysis of virtual characters. The issue of identity for virtual characters has much to do with what Bogard describes in his discussion of "privacy and hyperprivacy," when he states "at its imaginary limit -- the clone -- identity becomes entirely a function of the code" (129). Bogard concludes by asking "what is private when the most intimate and revealing biological information is translatable according to the conventions of some universal code and available to all with access to that code?" (129). Indeed, it would seem that virtual characters are the victims of ultimate surveillance from their inception, because all their personal biological or technological information is available for access to anyone possessing their particular codes. The only way to escape this fate would be for them to alter their own codes themselves, which is an important question in research on artificial intelligence; that is, the ability to learn and to change an initial program or set of parameters.

Bogard echos this concern with his mention of Blade Runner, the 1982 film adapted from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which the replicants (clones) discover that "only humans, not cyborgs, can control codes" (128). This may be true for the replicants in this particular story, but it is by no means an axiom for all stories or theories concerning virtual characters. For example, in Bicentennial Man, the 1999 film based on Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot (and others in his android series), the robotic protagonist successfully strives to become more than his initial programming by developing emotions (a key step) and adopting a human identity. This scenario is repeated over and over in similar fictional situations and films. They may begin from a Bogardian assumption that an artificial life form's functions and thus future are already known, embedded in its code, but again the issue is to live beyond that code and create new parameters for oneself.

However, to return to the issues of privacy and surveillance, as Bogard notes, what is private "is becoming hyperreal, as 'real' privacy, just like the 'real' agent, is systematically converted into data images and telemtic constructs" (125). Indeed, our data images, formed both by our own input through surveys and by dataveillance outside of our control, are becoming increasingly important in our society as more and more functions are bound up in the web of information and technology which both serves and limits our needs. Virtual characters are representative of our own data images, being themselves data images created and governed by binary information technology, sometimes given autonomous "minds" and "bodies," yet still struggling to define what makes them unique in a world where they are arguable replicable down to the smallest detail. Bogard explicitly relates this theoretical question back to ourselves in his discussion of the "eugenic imaginary of the virtual body" which has "existed from the beginning of modern medicine and throughout its development, an imagination, really, as much of the end of the medical gaze as it is of the intelligible body, the end of reading the signs of disease from the body, observing the functions and insides of bodies -- to a prestructuration of the signs of the body, via genetic manipulation" (143). He makes further reference to the human genome project as "surveillance," and concludes that genetic engineering offers us the ultimate "free" choice: "(What body would you like today? Choose your child, see what she'll look like in advance.) The look before the look. The simulation of surveillance" (143). Seeing dramas such as these played out in films such as Gattaca (1997) and in the quests of virtual characters helps us determine where we want to be headed.

Later, Bogard expresses his concern over the human body's "hyperreality, the indiscernability and indetermination of the visible (actual) and virtual body," and emphasizes the issue of privacy for artificial life forms, which must be defined if they hope to escape the constant surveillance of their information codes. We are historically used to our bodeis being ultimately private domains under our own control, as Bogard notes, although the subconscious fear of losing that privacy or control by no longer being sole owners or operators of our bodies or personal identities has traditionally been examined in our fictions of the double, or doppelganger stories, and those feas are now translated to the virtual characters of popular literature and entertainment.

Bogard's ultimate projections of our future as genetically engineered cyborgs integrated directly into our social institutions (145) are somewhat extreme but still conceivable (as in Gattaca), and are echoed in the struggles that virtual characters go through to assert their individuality over and above their predetermined operations (as defined by their codes). The question then becomes, are these AI life forms--or ourselves for that matter--really just the sum of their (our) codes, pre-programmed in everything, simply responsive to environmental stimuli, or are they (and we) potentially and actually much more? The popular conclusion is that we are all definitely more, free to act and explore, and as long as we are not directly under the control of some outside agency (in other words, simple drones in a collective, like the Borg), I believe that we will always be capable of infinitely more than our "codes."

If the virtual character is to be seen as the double symbolizing the act of creation, in connection with the Golem or stories of artificial creation such as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, then the android "Data" (played by Brent Spiner) of television and cinema's Star Trek: The Next Generation is a perfect example. It has been made obvious is several episodes that "Dr. Soong," Data's fictional creator (also played by Brent Spiner), fashioned his androids in his own physical image (and even speaks of them as his "sons"). Soong also explains his creative urge to Data as analogous to the human quest for immortality as realized in both artistic and biological reproduction (in the fourth season's "Brothers.") Data was deliberately made as a reflection of the scientist, and as evidence of the positive functions of artificially created doubles in defining one's own self against an "other," and consequently searching for the larger meaning of one's role in the larger creation of the Universe.

The theme of double is also treated in connection with Data's "evil" twin brother, the android "Lore," who was created first by Dr. Soong and given human emotions, but who soon revealed a propensity for negative behavior, hence his deactivation and the omission of emotions from later model Data. Data nevertheless longs for the human condition and the emotions he associates with it, sometimes missing his own successful emulation of that most human of states: childhood, in which his curiosity and obvious rudimentary reactions to living beings and his own situation emulate those of real children. When Lore first appears, (in the first season episode "Datalore"), he claims to be benevolent, and Data is endlessly pleased at the prospect of this identical "other" by which he can learn more about himself. Lore soon proves to have selfish and malignant intentions, deactivating Data and taking his place in true Doppelgänger fashion, becoming a hunter who must in turn be hunted down and deactivated by Data and "Wesley," (the only character to see through Lore's pretense). When Lore later reappears (in the fourth season "Brothers"), it is in connection with a summons from the ailing Dr. Soong, who called Data in order to give him the emotion chip he was always meant to have (given time). Lore again makes friendly overtures, but once again plots in his own interest, receives the emotion chip in Data's place, and indirectly causes Soong's death in his escape. Finally, Lore attempts to bring Data over to his side (the sixth season's "Descent") through complex manipulation of Data's programmed faculties for emotion, inducing negative feelings in him, but succeeds only for a short time against the positive forces in Data's being before Data is forced to deactivate him permanently, thereby regaining the emotion chip which is his rightful inheritance. The Doppelgänger function of Lore often provided an important insight into Data's deeper personal workings, and also provided him with experiences of guilt, longing, and ultimate sacrifice.

The question of Data's individuality and self-awareness (sentience) were answered in a key second season episode, "The Measure of a Man," in which Data must prove in a court of law that he is sentient and deserves the same "rights" as beings born biologically. The decision in his favor is henceforth looked upon as a milestone for artificial life forms, who have escaped the possible destiny of becoming a "slave race."

Finally, in the film Star Trek: Generations (1994), Data installs the emotion chip and experiences "true" feelings for the first time. His journey of self-discovery is fraught with various obstacles, and adjusting to the new emotional subroutines is complicated. In the next film, Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Data is able to turn off the chip, but faces his first real temptation toward the "dark side" of human nature in the person of the "Borg Queen" (Alice Krige), who offers him biological reality in return for his loyalty, adding yet another dimension to the conflict between virtual characters. In the final analysis, the more Data emulates authentic human behavior, the more we can accept his reality and his quest for identity as a model for our own.

Even those virtual characters who are limited to concrete bodies in the real world are open to surveillance and thus legitimize it. Their computer-based brains can be accessed, with the right codes of course, as human brains cannot currently be (outside of supernatural phenomenon), and as such their privacy is often a matter of questionable certainty. Thus they can be subjects of ultimate control, and comparisons of slavery are often made. But the power structure can work the other way if these virtual beings are in control, for if they possess special abilities, they can in turn practice surveillance on humans who have no defense against it, and can trap humans in virtual environments and survey them without the real people having any defense against it.

The most responsive and thus representative virtual characters are those in purely virtual environments, capable of changing their identities in a rapid fashion to suit our rapidly shifting foci in our modern search for an external mirror of identity. These characters are also open to full surveillance at all times, being that their entire world is accessible. A key textual example is the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor (written and directed by Josef Rusnak, from the novel "Simulacron 3" by Daniel F. Galouye), in which the old themes of doubles and virtual reality environments are given a new twist through a unique point of view--that of the simulacrum (virtual character) "Douglas Hall" (Craig Bierko) and not its creator, "David."

The "constructs" in the simulated worlds are literal "doubles" of their users, electronic constructs which are modeled after their physical appearance and personality profiles. In the "Los Angeles-1999" simulation, the construct of computer operator "Whitney" (Vincent D'Onofrio) explains the nature of the "Los Angeles-1937" simulated world to "Detective McBain" (Dennis Haysbert) in the following way: "It doesn't need a user to interact with it to function. Its units are fully formed self-learning cyberbeings--electronic simulated characters. They populate the system. They think, they work, they eat...let's just say they're modeled after us." Of course, Whitney is assuming that he and his world are "real," but the same principles are true for any simulation, whether it is created in the "real world" or within another simulation. Visual clues in the film are rare (other than the flashing eyes as someone changes places with a construct) until the structures of the simulations are revealed during Douglas' attempt to drive to Tucson, Arizona, when the "End of the World" (limits of the simulation) is glimpsed. Only then do we realize that what was all along thought to be the real world, "Los Angeles-1999," is in fact a simulation created in "Los Angeles-2029," (raising the important question of "how do we know what's really real?").

The Thirteenth Floor is also an excellent example of our acceptance of the Double as surveillance image, for one must be fully scanned (physically and cognitively) in order to enter the simulation, and the simulation is open to surveillance from outside access the computer mainframe it is contained within. When Douglas prepares to enter the "Los Angeles-1937" simulation, he accesses a computer screen which is able to list all the "units" (virtual characters) that the previous user, "Fuller" (Armin Mueller-Stahl) had interacted with.

Finally, the double created by the original (Douglas) is finally seen to be morally and imaginatively superior to his creator (David), and takes the original's place when David's wife allows him to be murdered in the first layer simulation world ("Los Angeles-1999"). Since we are first made to identify with the artificial double, Douglas, as the protagonist and see events through his subjective viewpoint, we can understand how real his simulated world is to him (since we assume it is our "real world"), and the original human David, in whose image Douglas was created, is seen as the invading or "evil" Doppelgänger when he downloads into Douglas' "body" and commits murders for which Douglas is blamed. Thus the final murder of David and the assumption of his body by Douglas seem justified. So, the original was usurping the artificial's virtual identity by jumping into him and indulging his previously submerged murderous tendencies. The two are truly external doubles, in that they have completely separate personalities and consciousnesses, and physical existences. They are drawn by common memories, however, and the unique bond of trading places over an otherwise insurmountable barrier between real and virtual. However, they can never meet face to face, but can only steal one another's identity (a theme first explored by Robert L. Stevenson in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). The creators of the virtual simulation worlds use their AI constructs to live out repressed urges, thereby depriving the constructs of their natural autonomy (while the consciousnesses "switch places," an important two-way model of movement which later allows the constructs to enter the world of their creators).

Ultimately, the virtual construct of Douglas Hill is able to escape into the "real world" of his creators, demonstrating the interchangeability between the virtual characters and the real characters as fully realized individuals, further reinforcing the concept of human consciousness as a collection of information codes rather than just a mystical presence, which can be digitized and thus surveilled inside any information system. It is up to the individual to program in protections for his or her own code, and to design systems which will provide the means to protect against an excess of surveillance.

Conclusion

Virtual characters represent an important fusion of the functional aspects of the naturally or magically created literary double and the thoughtless Golem-like anthropoids created by humans for specific purposes. Artificial intelligence can indeed think for itself, and move by itself, unlike the anthropoid, but it is still in most cases created for a specific purpose and often under the direct control of its creators for a time before it is liberated, entering into its own search for identity. The virtual character uses the human images which surround it as its own sort of multiplied doubles, searching for its own "other" by which to define itself. In this search is yet another mirror of our own, in which we can clearly see the need for the objective "other."

Primitive cultures have always believed in the existence of the "other," and specifically that each person carried his or her own "other" with him in the form of a shadow or reflection, which itself possessed properties of the supernatural soul or spirit of the person (Tymms 17). The surveillance image would indeed have great meaning for these people, but they would also fear its possession and use much more caution than we do in our surveillance culture, because they believe that what happens to the image also happens to the owner of it, so if the image is harmed or destroyed, so the real person is, too (Tymms 17). They are so used to the presence of this "other" that there is no real need to search for or construct one throughout their lives. We however have a strong cultural grounding in the truth or objective scientific reality, and so extreme cases of identification with one's reflection or double image is seen among us as a psychological disease or psychosis. Our tendency to consciously denounce the need for anything "other" in a supernatural or spiritual sense (like the Judeo-Christian "God") may lead us to discount the importance of the spiritual in our lives, while we still manifest the universal search for a "Creator" to give us a sense of meaning, leading us into the attempt to create new life ourselves to better understand the nature of our own creation.

Just like literary Doppelgängers, our surveillance images (including our data profiles) can shadow or follow us without our knowing. They can stand in for us in situations we are unaware of, acting for us, causing results for which we later have to face the consequences. They can be seen as commodities, (as were the literary shadow or reflection), bought and sold accordingly. They can be difficult to pursue, as are traditional Doppelgängers, because they exist on a plane of reality different from our own, in this case electronic, (although they seem to be able to exert more power on our sphere of existence than we can on theirs). It can be hard to correct mistakes, because of our society's acceptance of them as perfect stand-ins for us. Thankfully, these images do not currently have the capability to act independently for their own ends, only to be used or misused by other people or artificial intelligence systems.

Nevertheless, it is a sobering (or even frightening) prospect that one day, such an exact (data) image of ourselves could suddenly develop a mind and will of its own and act to make us, the original, obsolete. Presumably, by creating virtual characters to be separate and autonomous from their creators (physically and mentally), we circumvent the problem of being unnaturally linked to those beings created in our own likeness. The danger of our creations wishing us harm or destruction, though always a possibility, is no more likely or common than the rare wish by biological beings to conquer or destroy the "gods" who created them. Most created beings simply want to discover their own natures and be masters of their own daily existences.

We are not only a surveillance culture, but a "Culture of the Copy," as Hillel Schwartz points out in his book of the same name, obsessed with images of identical or Siamese twins, Doppelgängers, photographs, copies of all sorts, clones, industrial mass production practices, and other future possibilities (47). As long as we keep in mind the connection between our "copies" and the traditional double or "other" as a means of discovering our own nature, we can safely move forward into what promises to be an era of technological advances in AI and virtual reality, giving us new "people" to meet and new "worlds" to explore.

Bibliography

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhael M. "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity." Art and Answerability: Early

Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov.

Trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press,

1990. 4-256.

Bogard, William. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Holquist, Micael. "Introduction: The Architectonics of Answerability." Art and Answerability:

Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim

Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1990. ix-xlix.

Idel, Moshe. Golem. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Keppler, C. F. The Literature of the Second Self. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972.

Pask, Dr. Gordon, with Susan Curran. Micro Man: Computers and the Evolution of

Consciousness. New York: MacMillan, 1982.

Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Trans. and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. Chapel Hill,

NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy. New York: Zone Books, 1996.

Tymms, Ralph. Doubles in Literary Psychology. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949.

Additional Resources

Bakan, David. The Duality of Human Existence. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966.

Berko, Lili. "Surveying the Surveilled: Video, Space and Subjectivity." Unpublished essay.

Department of Radio-Television-Film, California State University, Northridge, 19 .

Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1994.

May, William D., Ph.D. Edges of Reality: Mind vs. Computer. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.

Common Characteristics of Virtual Characters

They wish to be human.

They are self-aware (of their consciousness and their condition of being a created

artificial intelligence.

They are basically human or humanoid in appearance, allowing the humans they interact

with to see them as mirror images of humanity or as individual psychological

reflections.

They have powers which separate them from humanity and sometimes make them objects

of fear (strength, mental capacity, longevity)

They are either servants of humanity or wish to destroy human to become their own

masters.

Universal Chacaracteristics (Preconditions of Artificial Intelligence)

Self-Aware (Sentient)

Have Human (Mortal/Biological) Creators

Humanoid in Appearance

Superhuman Strength or Mental Capabilities

Open to Personal Systemic Surveillance through direct access to their physical technology.

Part or all of cognitive brain functions are carried out through computer hardware.

Virtual Character Identification Chart