The Lawnmower Man (1992): What In The Omnipotent Cyber God Just Happened?

About this episode

Ben and Rob explore the chaotic production and themes of 'The Lawnmower Man' while discussing its implications on virtual reality and cinema.

Ben and Rob strap themselves into the feedback loop and jack all the way in to The Lawnmower Man, directed by Brett Leonard and starring Pierce Brosnan, Jeff Fahey, Jenny Wright, and Mark Bringelson. What begins as a deceptively simple fable about a gentle simpleton turbocharged into a god by virtual reality and experimental drugs slowly mutates into something far weirder; a conversation about the most chaotic production history in early nineties Hollywood, the strange economy of Stephen King's name and exactly what it takes for him to legally disown your film, the accidental genius of low-rent CGI as a vessel for genuine existential dread, and whether a movie about a lawnmower man becoming an omnipotent digital deity has turned out to be less science fiction and more uncomfortable Tuesday. What even is virtual reality as cinema understood it in 1992, and how does that fever dream vision compare to the surveillance-soaked, algorithm-shaped reality we actually ended up inside? How did this film pass through so many hands, studios, and creative crises that its very authorship became a legal battlefield? Is there something genuinely prophetic buried beneath the laughable polygon…

People in this episode

Hosts: Ben Groves, Rob Macfarlane

Topics covered

• virtual reality
• film production history
• Stephen King
• CGI
• existential dread
• Hollywood chaos

Keywords

• Lawnmower Man
• virtual reality
• Stephen King
• CGI
• film analysis
• Hollywood history

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Lawnmower Man, Stephen King's name

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