A New Electric Dimension: The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Pierce bounds out (they make you bound) and hits his mark to the sound of saxophone and rapturous applause. “Yes!” he shouts, twirling his hands in a theatrical whoosh before touching his nose a little coke-ishly. “It’s great to be here hosting Saturday Night Live!”

I’m not sure if it is. Pierce seems nervous, struggling to read the cue cards, squinting a little too obviously just past the camera. “Now, most of you,’ he stumbles a little on his way into the first joke, ‘most of you probably know me from my most famous role.” And he’s away. This is a slam dunk, a format SNL loves foisting on its less confident hosts that always ends in a laugh. 

He’s technically here to promote John Boorman’s middling adaptation of The Tailor of Panama, but it’s 2001, and this audience knows Pierce Brosnan for one thing only. You can hear them tittering, they know how this misdirect works and they’re waiting with excitement for Brosnan to say anything other than James Bond. 

“That of course, is, uh, Dr. Lawrence Angelo in Lawnmower Man.”

Something’s gone wrong. Nobody laughs, and I doubt it’s just because Brosnan lopped an article off the top of his film’s title. It’s a cringy moment in a generally cringy monologue, but I can’t shake the feeling that had he said something like “Stu from Mrs. Doubtfire” the joke would have worked as planned. Not even a full decade from its 1992 release, is it possible that The Lawnmower Man was already forgotten, not just obscure but so unknown it couldn’t even work as a punchline? If that was true for an SNL crowd in 2001, then it’s a shame. If it remains true for us all in 2024, then we owe the film an apology, because The Lawnmower Man might just be a minor miracle. 

The film shares a title with a Stephen King short story and not much else. After producers struggled to make a movie out of King’s source material, they made the very ‘90s call to jam a square peg in a round hole. The production house brought on board director Brett Leonard, with an original screenplay by Leonard and Gimel Everett that bears no resemblance to King’s story. But like the film itself, the title is just a vessel into which Leonard could pour his story, and keep pouring, and keep pouring until it overflows, and we are all hopelessly wet with it.   

With The Lawnmower Man, talking about the plot feels like a hindrance to discussing why it’s actually interesting. But it’s worth at least laying out that it is basically a softly cyberpunk upscaling of Flowers for Algernon occasioned by a fabulously premature belief in the magic of computer-generated imagery. Dr Larry Angelo (Brosnan)—a much-too-handsome computer scientist researching virtual reality under the auspices of a shadowy government agency—is one of three forces powering the film. The second, Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey), is the titular lawnmower man, an intellectually disabled gardener who Angelo adopts as a test subject after the plot conspires to keep him away from his lab equipment. Jobe, seduced by Angelo’s promises of increased intelligence, grows in mind and ability, eventually developing psychic powers and threatening to become something more than human. The third force, and that which binds Jobe and Angelo, is virtual reality. More precisely, it’s a dream of virtual reality endemic to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, bursting with ambitions that far exceed anything VR has ever actually become, while tightly bound by the limits of contemporary computer technology. 

In The Lawnmower Man, virtual reality is more imaginative and worse rendered than we have ever conceived of it. And in these contrasts, these contradictions, the film allows virtuality to grow into a space for both the far future and distant past. Two-thirds of the way through the film, Jobe starts believing that virtual reality is the site of his apotheosis into something post-human, becoming—as Leonard’s script was originally titled—Cyber God. 

Angelo pleads to him from the seat of reason: ”‘Listen to what you're saying. The first sign of psychosis is a Christ complex.”

Fahey delivers Jobe’s response flatly, and with a seriousness it benefits from but really doesn’t deserve. “Cyber Christ.”

In The Lawnmower Man, virtual reality is more real than our own. It is the space beyond the wall of Plato’s cave, and Jobe is going to take us there. Fifty minutes in, The Lawnmower Man makes history with what must be the first fully computer-generated sex scene in a cinematic release. And if not the first, then at least the most distressing in its conception. Jobe has been receiving steady treatments from Dr Angelo that have rapidly increased his intelligence and curiosity. These consist of nootropic drugs injected into the arm or neck depending on where in the film you are, and a digital assault through VR goggles of what seems to be kabbalah symbols projected over a swirling virtual netherspace. With the intellectual changes come physical ones—he’s jacked, he brushes his hair, he dresses like the Marlboro man—that blossom in a sexual relationship with Marnie Burke (Jenny Wright), one of Jobe’s mowing clients whose characterization begins and ends at “horny widow.”

Jobe takes Marnie to Dr. Angelo’s deep-state funded lab to show her the miracles of VR, where they strap into Vitruvian gyroscopes that—in concert with headsets and cyber-aesthetic bodysuits—bridge access to the full potential of virtual reality. Once inside, Jobe and Marnie’s glowing avatars meet in digital embrace: hers a lithe and shining purple, his a buff jade mannequin etched with swirling botanical fractals. Breaking from the kiss, their mouths remain attached by a membranous ichor that pulls them back together. Leonard cuts to the lab where Fahey and Wright are doing an excellent job at miming making out while flung upside down by their elastic contraptions. Back in virtuality, the avatars have begun swirling around and into each other as their embrace gets tighter and weirder. No longer Jobe and Marnie, this is Chronos and Gaia, inseparable and entwined at the beginning of time and space. 

The avatars fully merge, only to emerge as a twin-headed dragonfly that soars over a crystalline ocean of pulsing silver-blue swell. The Jobe-Marnie splinters into its original two forms, but now Marnie is trapped in the digital ichor, which has multiplied and fixes her virtual body to the surface of the virtual sea. 

“I’m stuck. I’m stuck in this stuff, Jobe.”

Leonard returns to the material world in a spiraling close-up of Fahey spinning, grinning within the gyroscope. “It’s from our primal mind.”

This is the last moment in which we see Jobe wholly in his innocence, before the power and temptations of virtual life turn him into something potentially monstrous. Leonard, deathly afraid of subtlety, gives us this transformation in the digital world. As Marnie sinks deeper into virtual soup, Jobe transforms his avatar into a gleaming, pulsating balloon-animal hybrid of Ooblina and Krumm from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, a cartoon that won’t exist for another two years. The creature shoots its blood-red proboscis directly at the camera, and Marnie loses her mind. 

All this wonder and madness takes place within a virtual environment that comes second in complexity and fidelity to most Windows screensavers (I’m thinking “3D Pipes”). When I saw The Lawnmower Man, I first dismissed the crude oddity of its effects by chalking it up to the limits of the era, until I remembered that Terminator 2 came out in 1991, a year before. These graphics are not the furthest technical edge of the nascent CGI movement, as James Cameron had just shown how far that really was. But they might be the limit of what could be creatively imagined within the constraints of a smaller budget. The Lawnmower Man’s effects were produced by Angel Studios, an outfit that would be eventually purchased and repackaged as Rockstar San Diego, the force behind the Red Dead franchise. Aside from The Lawnmower Man, Angel Studios made the music video for Peter Gabriel’s “Kiss That Frog” in 1992, also directed by Leonard and sharing the same mix of rudimentary yet fabulously original graphics—there are some serious similarities between the video’s frog (voiced by Gabriel) and Jobe’s sex monster.  

It’s in that mix of ambition and constraint that we might actually find the point of a movie like The Lawnmower Man. From its earliest moments, the film seems driven to communicate its ambition to be more than a test case for emergent technology while never forgetting that these ridiculous visuals are its reason for being. The Lawnmower Man has symbolism, it has themes. Long before Jobe announces his transformation into Cyber Christ, the film has been dripping with Christian iconography. We have Jobe as Job, and Jobe as Christ, and, through the dedication of the church that took in young Jobe as a ward and an intentionally placed Bosch print in Angelo’s basement office, we have Jobe as St Anthony. Separate Christian figures joined across the Testaments and beyond by the shared experience of temptation. Unlike his forebears, Job fails in his test of temptation. He succumbs. First to the promises of the flesh and, eventually, to the possibilities of the fleshless. 

The question of Jobe’s ultimate redemption remains open at the end of the film, as does the truth of his convictions towards his own fate. And this, again, comes down to the film’s capacity to imagine beyond the limits of its technology. Or maybe, striking those limits earlier than a film like Terminator 2, The Lawnmower Man is forced to trade mimesis for imagination that transcends its own bounds. From the beginning, Brosnan’s Dr Angelo is dogmatic in his belief that VR is a future technology which will advance the potential of mankind. Jobe, taken in by Angelo’s promises of intelligence, initially agrees until his experiences offer an alternative theory: 

It's not new. I realize that nothing we've been doing is new. We haven't been tapping into new areas of the brain. We've just been awakening the most ancient. This technology is simply a route to powers that conjurers and alchemists used centuries ago. The human race lost that knowledge and now I'm reclaiming it through virtual reality.  

Virtual reality, with all its power and seduction, is a technology that looks forward while unintentionally reaching far, far back. This vision of VR as a Pandora’s box for opening a path to some deep primordial beyond puts The Lawnmower Man in league with films of its era that express a shared anxiety towards the limitless reach of technologism at the end of the twentieth century. Like From Beyond (1986) or Hellraiser (1987) or Event Horizon (1997), The Lawnmower Man posits a realm just beyond our own suffuse with pleasure and power but commensurate dangers—that may or may not turn out to be hell itself. The sex scene with Marnie distills this all into a sequence of a couple minutes. Virtual reality isn’t video games, and it certainly isn’t team meetings in the Metaverse. It’s a place of potential we should be thrilled and terrified by in equal measure.

I’ve been trying to suggest that The Lawnmower Man is a film that offers more than its appearance. But it’s worth concluding by saying that it’s exactly what it looks like too. The film lives and dies by its orgiastic use of early CGI, to a lesser extent by Jeff Fahey’s admirable (and entirely failed) attempts to play an intellectually disabled man with dignity and grace, and lesser still by Brosnan doing little more than being so goddamn handsome and unbelievable as a computer scientist with a saucy little gold earring. It’s at times profound, but mostly not, and that’s a balance that works timelessly in The Lawnmower Man’s favor. But I might let Pierce Brosnan of 2001 conclude in earnest, about the movie, and the enigma that is its central character: “We’ve got a great show. Destiny’s Child is here.”

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