identity
4 films tagged with “identity”
A Scanner Darkly
The scramble suit is the film's central organisational object. Agent Fred — undercover narcotics officer Bob Arctor — wears a device that projects a constantly shifting composite of thousands of different people onto his…
Perfect Blue
The mechanism that destroys Mima Kirigoe is not the stalker, and not the murders. It is the fan website. Early in the film, Mima discovers a site called 'Mima's Room' — a first-person diary written in her voice, by someo…
Gattaca
Gattaca is the clearest film ever made about what happens when a proxy metric becomes the thing itself. The genome was meant to predict outcomes; by the time the film opens it has stopped predicting anything, because it…
Blade Runner
The Voight-Kampff machine is a classifier, and everything that goes wrong in Blade Runner goes wrong in the way classifiers go wrong. It does not detect artificiality directly, because artificiality is not observable; it…