ynthetic Pleasures is an amalgam of all things technical and futuristic as they pertain to the concept of reality. Billed as a documentary, it is more of a video essay, presenting montages of all that is digitized, electronic and constructivist. To support its documentarian claim, it uses commentaries by such zeitgeist-masters as R.U. Sirius and Timothy Leary, and footage of manufactured environments ranging from indoor Japanese beaches to computerized virtual reality.
Adding substantial texture, and effectively transforming the material into an informal essay via its artistic values and sheer bulk, is the incidental imagery. Synthetic Pleasures is interspersed throughout with techno-graphics and archival film footage, such as the sick bay monitors from the original Star Trek series. If viewers want to actually process any of this footage, though, they shouldn't blink. Most of it streams by in mercurial nanoseconds.
Topics entertained in this manner will be mostly familiar to the postmodern and cyber-literate: VR, smart drugs, body piercing, cybersex and cryogenics. Some of the material has been less well-trod, like the work of Orlan, a French performance artist who uses plastic surgery to rebel against the tyranny of biology. Broadcasting a series of operations to an audience, Orlan transforms her features into those of the Mona Lisa.
The commentary, although frequent, is used economically. Director Iara Lee relies heavily on the language of image itself to convey the film's message. Talking heads may speak about the sterility of manufactured environments and ponder their value, but shots like Japanese patrons fishing at a waist-level high, indoor aquarium are of equal or greater value.
The emerging frontier of the mind
Synthetic Pleasures is structurally loose, and while that tactic gives the streaming, image-rich content a more powerful voice, by the end of the film, the entire affair seems just a little long. Visual imagery is certainly its own language, but even such a language has grammar. Most work that invokes a similar stream-of-conscious ethic wrestles with the issue of how to successfully deliver content in an informal manner. While Synthetic Pleasures never spins off into incoherence, it would benefit from a bit more architecture.
Although the film delivers a vivid pastiche of cultural and technological developments that echo the film's central question--"How does technology affect the nature of reality?"--it falls short of successfully articulating both the question and any possible answers. In relying so heavily on footage of multi-pierced club kids raving, Las Vegas, and computer graphics, Synthetic Pleasures ironically comes close to being mistaken for some of the eye candy it wishes to document. Briefly showing the beagle that was revived after being frozen is not necessarily interesting in and of itself.
Despite its flaws, Synthetic Pleasures is interesting for the bulk of its screen time. The images and commentary it chooses to present, while perhaps not providing a guaranteed flashpoint for provocative discussion, do stimulate thought, albeit in a vague sort of way. Also, Lee is careful to render no strong judgments on these new frontiers, but catalogs them evenly. It is an open-minded approach to the emerging frontier of the opening of the mind.
