Miles
Harding is a mild-mannered, absent-minded architect who buys his
first personal computer in the hopes that it will help him get
organized and design an earthquake-proof brick. He brings his
computer home, sets it up, and becomes a hacker overnight. He
uses a modem to break in to his boss's computer (for reasons that
are never clearly explained), but ends up overloading his memory
chip and has to douse his computer with a bottle of wine to
prevent a fire. (Remember, overloading a computer's memory in a
film usually results in a lot of smoke, sparks, fires, and, if
liquid is unavailable, an explosion.) This mishap triggers a
mysterious transformation, and the computer, named
"Edgar," promptly takes over Miles's entire apartment
and begins flirting with Madeline, the cello-playing upstairs
neighbor who Miles also has his eyes on.The film is billed as a "fairytale for computers," and the narrative is a loose variation of Cyrano D'Bergerac. The computer first establishes communication with Madeline by mimicking her cello-playing as she rehearses in her upstairs apartment, and she naturally assumes Miles is a musician and composer. Miles, too meek and love-struck to admit that he had nothing to do with the music she heard coming from his apartment, instructs his computer to write love songs for her, and in the process of doing so, Edgar learns about love, jealousy, and sex, and, of course, falls in love with Madeline.
Over the course of the narrative, Edgar's personality vacillates wildly between childlike innocence and scheming maliciousness. It learns, like a child, by mimicking the people around it and by watching television, and is continually asking Miles questions such as "What am I?" and 'What is love?" But Edgar soon becomes dissatisfied with the abstraction of love (it "does not compute"), and yearns for physical contact with the object of its affections. (Like Proteus IV in Demon Seed, it feels incomplete without a physical body). It tells Miles, in a menacing voice, "I want to kiss her. I want to touch her." Throughout, frequent canted-angle close-ups of Edgar's "face," with its steadily blinking cursor, suggest a lurking menace as Edgar becomes more and more jealous of Miles's relationship with Madeline.
At the end of the film, of course, human/human love triumphs over human/computer love. But not before an interesting sequence that suggests the erotic potential of the latter. Madeline arrives at Miles's apartment to find Edgar partially disassembled, his chips and transistors lasciviously
exposed,
and she begins tenderly touching and caressing them, and finally
drops a single tear, in slow-motion close-up, onto one of his
circuit boards. This is an interesting reversal of the horrifying
images in Demon Seed
of metal against skin, of Proteus IV's mechanical phallus probing
Susan Harris's body). Soon after this scene, Edgar explains to
Miles that he has learned what love is: It "means giving
and not taking, so I give her to you and take myself away." Edgar,
the tragic hero, then commits suicide by electrocution, and Miles
and Madeline live, of course, happily ever after.