Overview of The Work Force

The central concern of a futuristic drama I have been envisioning, titled The Work Force, is a clash between the dynamics modern industry and interpersonal relationships. However, the "persons" who are involved in these relationships are not always fully human, and the industrial aspect of the story is not treated with the same sort of cynicism that usually attends such futuristic dramas. In fact, this story is not necessarily designed to serve as an indictment of competitive business practices; rather, the story is told for the sake of illustrating how social forces of attachment are able to follow a sacred path of evolution, day by day, even as virtual substitutes gradually replace key members of a human community. The viewer is left to decide whether or not such a social trend signifies an inherently positive or negative conception of the future. In the first scene of this story, I imagine a pair of coworkers engaged in separate discussions over the matter of their work relationship. One of the men, who is older than the other, is talking this matter over with his wife. It is clear to see that he is dealing with complex emotions connected with this work relationship. The other man, who is many years younger yet bears an unmistakable resemblance to the older man, appears to be comparatively more animated and relaxed as he is involved in a relaxed conversation with his peers. During the scene, the viewer catches a glimpse first of one conversation and then the next, switching back and forth freely between the two, as the scene accumulates a sense of dramatic intensity. The older man "knows" something essential about the "character" of younger man. In a fundamental way, the younger man appears to be curiously oblivious to the true nature of his own character. Popular with his peers, however, he is viewed as smart and trustworthy. Furthermore, he is an entertaining storyteller, drawing his audience into confidence through skillful use of purposeful descriptions, creative embellishments, and sharp reflections. By contrast, the older man's story is disjointed, wrought with elements of sadness and joy, and guided by what can only be construed to be aimless questioning. As opposed to the speech of the young man, which is punctuated with humor, the older man's speech is weighted with seriousness. He seems to be on the verge of tears as he mulls over the matter of his work relationship with the young man. So, what is at issue here? Bit by bit, the viewer is able to determine that the older man considers the younger man to be his son, not only in a figurative sense but also in a literal sense. The younger man writes off the older man's belief as the lonely fantasy of a man who is sliding into the early stages of insanity. Still, based on the speech each man delivers, the viewer is inclined to identify the older man as the story's protagonist. All the while, the younger man's speech raises questions regarding his own credibility, despite the positive reception that his speech receives before the audience of his peers. Then, just as the viewer is prepared to watch the story of the conflict between these coworkers unfold, the younger man and his group of peers disappear in an instant like flames rising from a camp fire, flickering like ghosts into thin air. The viewer is inclined to wonder what has happened. In visual terms, nothing is explained. At this point, discussion between the older man and his wife continues. As the man speaks, we learn through a revealing series of flashbacks that he and the younger man are actually father and son. For example, we see them playing catch with a baseball during the young man's boyhood, we see the father and other family members laughing as his son tries to blow out the candles on his birthday cake at 7 or 8 years-old, we see the father feeding a spoonful of medicine one night when his son is resting sick in bed, we even see the father cheering on his son as he graduates from high school . . . The older man's recollections serve as an axis for nostalgic yearning and lament. Sadly, part of the past --the greatest part--has failed to translate into the present. Bit by bit, we begin to see that the story of this film revolves around the working relationship of a father and son who have both been employed in the same factory/warehouse setting for a number of years (which is located either on a spaceship or on a faraway planet). This story is set many years in the future, when technological breakthroughs have permitted private corporations to augment their work forces with provisional "virtual" employees. These virtual employees perform according to standards that have been set by "live" human employees, and in certain fundamental ways the virtual employees operate as clones of the live employees. Live employees who opt to sign over their virtual rights (for a 30% per-hour wage increase) acknowledge that their employers may utilize advanced "capturing" technologies to monitor, record, and recreate aspects of their job-related performance. Such technologies are rarely abused and are typically only used for professional purposes, since any other use is cost- prohibitive. Of the two men, the son was considered an exceptional employee at the factory/warehouse. Furthermore, he had signed over his rights at his date of hire, and a virtual version of the son sometimes worked alongside of the father whenever the schedules of the two men differed. The virtual version of the son was quite unlike the son in a number of ways. Essentially, he looked a lot like the son. However, his personality was not quite the same as the son's. The father could easily tell the difference between the son and the virtual employee, and the father never treated the virtual employee as he would a family member. The father was proud of his son, especially because the son was recognized as an outstanding employee by the company. For years, he had encouraged his son to consistently outperform others, and since the job involved heavy hours of manual labor such performance standards were physically exhausting to meet. Also, working to such high standards was risky. The son constantly pushed his body to the limit, and one day he fell victim to a fatal work-related accident. He was killed in one brutal instant. His death was grieved by the father and evaluated as an unfortunate loss by the company. The son's virtual employee continued to work as it had in the past. In fact, it was now put into play in the very position once held by the son. So, it was given a virtual promotion. The father felt so upset by the loss of his son that he began to view the virtual version of the son in a new light. In his grief, he began to try to build a father-son relationship with the virtual employee. The virtual employee, whose personality was much different than that of his real son's, was taken aback by the father's attempt to nurture an emotional breakthrough with him, for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, he did not possess any of the real son's memories, much like a pair of identical twins who are separated at birth do not possess or even share access to the same memories. Secondly, he was a virtual being whose ability to experience emotions was tentative and impeded by technological limitations. So, despite the fact that this story is grounded in the genre of science fiction, it is essentially a story of human emotions. The relationship that the father is trying to build with the virtual employee is clearly an inferior version of the relationship that he had shared with his son. People begin to question his sanity for even trying to build this relationship. The father does not merely pass through a phase of grief in trying to build this relationship. He commits himself wholeheartedly to the project, causing his behavior to be viewed as irrational and even desperate by family members, peers, supervisors, and, most of all, by the virtual employee himself. The father requests overtime just so that he will be able to spend more time working alongside of the virtual employee. What is important is not that the father is able to change virtual employee's basic personality in any significant way. In fact, he is able to effect very little change. What is important is that the father is able to build a new kind of relationship with the virtual employee, which did not exist prior to his son's death. The father's intention is not merely to hold onto the past, but rather to honor the memory of his son was and to imagine who his son could have been, even if only in a disembodied virtual form. With regard to my narrative, if virtual versions of employees were to exist as they do here, I think that live human employees would feel understandably threatened. To the extent that they were able, these live employees would seek to secure their positions and assert their value through collective bargaining. Managers would be forced to abide by certain regulations in their efforts to implement a virtual work force, in order to retain a healthy pool of live talent. On the basis of such a presumption, I am able to formulate a response to the following question: "If the virtual clone has the muscle memory and work ethic memories of the young man, why doesn't he have any of his other memories?" Before signing off to have their work performance captured, monitored, and recorded, live employees would flatly assert that their privacy rights should not be egregiously compromised. Thus, although technology would be available that could convincingly recreate a human being--memories and all--people would refrain from doing so. For the same reasons, present-day stores refrain from planting cameras in bathroom stalls in order to catch shoplifters. The technology exists, but the general consensus is that using technology for such a purpose is invasive. Despite the fact that the bathroom stall occupies space in a public bathroom, the interior of the stall may be defended as a private space. According to this pragmatic interpretation of my narrative's work place, the management team of the factory/warehouse is bound by a set of rules in the way it runs its virtual operations. I've worked at a couple of places where employees routinely refer to union policy in order to counterbalance to the aims of the company. It would certainly not be in the live employees' interest for the virtual employees to receive countless enhancements, so that every virtual employee did the work of 5 live employees. Consequently, the virtual employees would not always be working at optimal speed. So, in response to the following question I have an answer. The question is "If the virtual clone is simply a program to be turned off, why does it have time to speak to a group about a work relationship?" My answer is that he and the other virtual employees experience moments of downtime during their shift, due to inefficiencies at a management level. They have near-human capabilities of emotion and thought, in order to engage in acts of initiative, but their emotions are regulated to a certain extent through engineering, just as certain people are regulated with medicine prescribed by doctors. They still find humor in their work environment, and behavioral consultants indicate that humor is included in a range of emotions that are vital components of the team-building process. So, the virtual employees are permitted to feel and think so long as their overall performance supports company prosperity. As far as how the clones appear, their appearance is chosen chiefly for the sake of identifying their capabilities. Since each virtual employee represents a clone of a live employee, it is vital that managers and floor supervisors are able to easily distinguish which virtual employee was cloned from which live employee. The easiest way to do so is to create virtual employees that look identical to their live counterparts. So, the clone's appearance is really just an interchangeable part, sort of like a monitor for a computer. As for the idea of action in the narrative, an issue that is a greater concern for me is “How can I supply viewers with all of the information stated above without senselessly boring them?” I certainly would not want for the story's audience feel like they were sitting down to read a manual of work regulations for an hour and a half in order to finally be granted the privilege of viewing 15 minutes of legitimate action. I would want to convey most of the information stated above by way of moments of activity, much as I mentioned before about the supervisor trying to create a fantasy lover. One thing that I feel might be effective is for the characters of the father and the virtual son to discuss their concerns during an initial scene of the film with some urgency, and for the narrative to hit several marks in a relatively short amount of time, sort of like the beginning of the movie Raising Arizona. If you've seen that movie, you might remember how Nicholas Cage's character narrates over about 4 or 5 minutes of material before the film's title is revealed and the story unfolds at a more natural pace. As he talked, all sorts of action was being presented in a collapsed time frame, almost in the way that a montage might be able to do. Shortly thereafter, the filmmakers abandoned that style, only to employ it later near the end of the film. (Roger Ebert gave that movie a thumbs-down review, because he argued that southerners simply do not talk as Cage's character does; I disagree with Ebert that the movie was deserving of a thumbs-down, because I think that Cage's character was never supposed to be like a real southerner, but was written to be sort of a cartoon-version of a southerner.) With regard to the initial scene, described above the father in the story might be talking to a work psychologist instead of his wife. Perhaps the virtual son would be voicing his concerns about the father to his virtual coworkers in a locker room, and these virtual characters would all be trying to mask their true emotions by speaking about specifics (such as the “Glengarry Glen Ross” characters speak of “leads,” or the characters of “Pulp Fiction” speak of Big Macs with Cheese or foot massages), as men might speak together about football. I've wondered what sort of work these employees might be doing. Just now, I realized that they could be located on a spaceship or another planet just as easily as they could on Earth. Maybe much of the film's action might revolve around just how risky their jobs were, much like a Haliburton employee might feel about working in a war zonfacte such as Iraq. What sorts of actions can you imagine occurring at a factory/warehouse that’s floating in space, which would be presented as these two characters engage in voiced-over monologues? In thinking about the personalities of the father and son, I have thought of a couple of parallels. One is to Greek mythology, of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, the father and son who flew with wings made of feathers and wax in an attempt to attain freedom. Instead, Icarus flew too high, burned his wings, and fell to his demise. Much like this story is the true story of the Von Erich family, headed by Fritz Von Erich, who was a professional wrestler when my mother was a girl. During my teen years, Fritz' sons were famous, and I especially enjoyed watching his son Kerry Von Erich wrestler. But 4 out of 5 of Fritz' sons died early deaths, with suicide being the cause of Kerry's death. I met Kerry at an autograph signing in 1988, which I wrote about here. Here's a video about Kerry's death. As a wrestler, Fritz employed violent tactics, typically leaving his opponents' faces covered in blood. He taught his sons that succeeding at professional wrestling was of paramount importance, and Kerry's death seems to have been attributable in part to his uncompromising sense of honor. It is a tragic story, and whenever I think of it, I usually also remember this song, since it was the type of music that the Von Erich brothers liked during the 80s. Put yourself in the position of the father of my story’s narrative; how would you feel every night when your shift ended, and you saw the virtual version of your son vanish into oblivion? Would you feel like he was dying all over again each time? What would you do after work ended? If some friends invited you to go out for drinks after work, would you join them? Would you hide your emotions behind bluster, humor, or sarcasm? So anyway, that is certainly a lot of downbeat information. But it helps the story in this sense: imagine what it must have been like to have been sitting beside Fritz Von Erich in his living room years after 4 of his sons had died, and imagine that a lifelike clone of Kerry had been built and Fritz was seeing the virtual Kerry perform in a televised wrestling match. I'm sure that during the moments of the match, Fritz' heart would have been filled with a new sense of life, if only momentarily. How easily, and how deeply, can a person wholeheartedly imagine the return of a lost loved one? Is this nostalgia or is it different? In trying to imagine this question, 3 songs popped into my head: "Photograph," which was sung at a tribute to George Harrison shortly after Harrison's death, "Here Today," which was written by Paul McCartney for John Lennon after Lennon's assassination, and which later made McCartney choke up with tears when he sang it live during his divorce from Heather Mills, and "Almost Blue," an Elvis Costello song written for the famous jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, who before his death in the late 80s had lived through a checkered past of failed romance and drug addiction (to be compared with the drug problems experienced by Kerry Von Erich). What touches me about the performance of "Photograph" is Eric Clapton's love for Harrison, and how he shares the song with Harrison's son (who looks so very much like George Harrison himself) as they play the music below the large photograph of Harrison. It's like art mirroring reality all over again. The performance of "Here Today" reinforces the idea that the elderly McCartney looks to Lennon's legacy for strength, as he has stated time and time again in interviews. When McCartney's life enters moments of confusion, it seems that he tries to speak with Lennon through his son--to bring him back to life for a few brief minutes so that he can turn to him with a tear in his eye for guidance and love. "Almost Blue" is about how a man knows from the beginning that a doppelganger of his lost lover will not satisfy his needs, but he still pines after her anyway with the hope that somehow his needs will be fulfilled. All of these songs provide insight as to what the father would be feeling each time he worked alongside of the virtual version of his son. What would the father be hoping to achieve by requesting overtime to work alongside of his virtual son other than to only momentarily regain a sense of relationship with his lost son? I guess the most significant lapses of trust between the father and the son's clone would occur when the virtual employee expressed cynicism about the relationship that the father was trying to build with him. I think it would be interesting, though, if the virtual employee would begin to view himself in a new light, based on the father's belief about who he was. (The movie Starman serves as a great template that illustrates the positive emotional potential of dealing with a lost loved one.) If Fritz Von Erich could speak with a virtual version of Kerry Von Erich, he probably would have tried to coach him, and perhaps give him the love that he never got around to giving him when he was alive. This reminds me of some sort of Rocky movie or something, like Rocky V, which I haven't seen. He might tell him to stop wasting himself and to get on track to be a better version of himself. I think I would enjoy seeing someone like Kerry Von Erich or Kurt Cobain being given a second chance to face their challenges, and to see them come out as victors who figured out the way draw upon and express more of their hidden potential. For example, what if Kurt Cobain had learned how to write music for movies, and had composed the soundtrack for The Avengers, making a transition similar to the one that Danny Elfman made from singing in Oingo Boingo to composing the music for Tim Burton films and the soundtracks for the Spiderman movies. We have such hidden potential in us to live fruitful lives. If somebody believes in us, for whatever reason, sometimes their support can make an enormous difference. How might the father’s belief influence the virtual son’s performance?