I disgraced myself watching the latest Star Wars film. The tension was at its height as Obi-Wan Kenobi told how he knew the terrible truth – that Anakin had slaughtered the “younglings” and was turning to the Dark Side - when the audience was so silent that you might have heard a popcorn drop, alone in the crowd, I laughed out loud. Obi explained that he knew Anakin had done these this awful deed because he had seen it himself - on the security hologram.
It seemed to me at that moment that the circle was complete. In the real world holography has been reduced to small silver objects serving as security markings, whilst in the mythology of science fiction holography the evolution of the hologram had reached the same destination.
Over the past twenty years holography has been evolving in fiction in parallel to the far less spectacular evolution of real holograms in everyday life, and the manner in which holograms are portrayed in films discloses the real expectations of the general public with regard to the medium, and actual holograms fall far short of what people want or expect from holography. Fictional holograms are depicted in an idealized form wherein they more clearly express human needs and desires.
The striking agreement and consistency within the different portrayals of fictional holograms in different films and programs on TV, and the large number that have been represented, has resulted in a notion a mythical hologram, which has, in recent years, become subtly infused into the popular concept of what constitutes a real hologram, so that the word "Hologram" has a cultural significance over and beyond the literal dictionary definition.
One of the earliest uses of a hologram in Science-fiction was in the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth", made in 1976 director Nicholas Roeg, starring David Bowie as an alien from outer space.
Throughout the film we get brief glimpses of the alien's family left behind on their desert world. In one shot we see his wife holding up a multiplex hologram. The action is cut in with a shot of Bowie on Earth, taking family snaps with a camera. The correlation is clear: the hologram is the family photo of the future. This is a rare use of holography in film, because although the context is purest science fiction, the hologram is genuine and the depiction of holography is authentic.
"Logan's Run" also released in 1976, was directed by Michael Anderson and starred Michael York as the hunter turned fugitive. In the climatic scene where Logan 5 is being interrogated by a computer that is attempting to probe his mind, the internal conflict is represented by a multiplex hologram of Michael York's face, mouthing the words "There is no Sanctuary".
Here representation of the hologram has progressed: although real multiplex holograms are used, they are given the power of speech.
Real hologram exhibits have in the past been put into installations with an accompanying tape-loop which give voice to the mute image, so it might be argued that this portrayal of the medium still remains in a sense true to life, despite the science-fiction context. One fundamental aspect of the mythical hologram that is established in this scene is the link between holograms and machines. The hologram is situated in a pillar, yet it is portrayed as being somehow projected there by the computer.
The film most responsible for the genesis of Hollywood's Mythical Hologram, however, appeared the following year: George Lucas' "Star Wars" (1977). Although not named as a "hologram" in the first Star Wars film, the scene in which the image of Princess Leia is projected from the robot droid R2-D2 pleading "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only chance!" has lodged into the popular consciousness and irrevocably linked with holograms: not as they are, but as they ideally should be.
Not only did the image of Princess Leia move and talk, but also she was in full-color. Here, as in "Logan's Run", the image is projected from a machine. From that time on, Hollywood's fictional holograms were all to be "computer-generated".
The fact that real holograms are images diffracted from a physical surface, which is composed of film, glass-plate or embossed plastic, is entirely eradicated. Fictional holograms service our psychological needs, and are not required to meet the dictates of authenticity. The tangible fact of the hologram plate somehow detracts from the ethereal nature of the effigy.
Unlike the three-dimensional image that we see in a mirror trapped behind glass, the idealized hologram image is able to move and float in space. No longer trapped in the plane of a physical surface, it is a free phantom - somehow emanating from a machine. To be entirely different from a photograph, an image on a TV screen, or another form of representation or sign, the mythical hologram is liberated from the substrate. This is the first step away from being a representation of a thing... to becoming the thing itself.
In the wake of the "Star Wars" films there were several instances of holograms as projections used to communicate, a kind of 3D video link, such as the one in the film "Critters" where the image is referred to as a "holographic transmission". In "Superman II" we see another example of the projected three-dimensional image, as Lex Luthor makes his escape from prison. The image is fully life-like, reacting to the prison guard as he looks into the cell, and apparently playing a game of chess.
Only when the guard walks forward into the cell does he realize that something is amiss, as Lex Luthor suddenly vanishes. The guard has blocked the beam of the projected image and we see it playing on the back of his shirt. Here again the image is projected by a machine. Looking vaguely like a gun, but also like Hollywood's notion of a laser, it provides a clue as to why the mythical hologram is always thought of as being launched from a device of some kind. Conceivably it stems from a simple confusion between laser light-shows, where graphic images are sometimes projected, and the fact that lasers are "used to make holograms": resulting in the misconception that hologram images are in fact laser-projections of some kind.
An early scene in the film "Total Recall" shows holograms in a domestic environment, used as a kind of futuristic keep-fit tape, a hologram of a tennis coach gives instructions as to how to improve one's game. The scene serves as an introduction to a later scene, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, trapped by military-type bad-guys who are trying to shoot him, uses a "hologram” as a decoy to draw the soldiers' fire. They see it, they fire at it, and Arnie goes down splattered with blood...only to get up again laughing. Amid the laughter, the image shimmers and vanishes, leaving the soldiers perplexed and hesitating until their leader yells out the warning: "Look out! - He's got a Hologram!".
This hologram shares all the aspects of the now well-defined Hollywood hologram: a full-color, animated, projection from a machine; in this instance a small device worn like a wristwatch; it goes further, however, in extending the attributes of the mythical hologram. This "hologram" is not simply an identical image of Arnie, it is able to interact with the physical action: The bullets do not simply go through the hologram ricocheting off the walls, they penetrate it as though it were flesh. When the hologram is shot, it bleeds even though the real Arnie remains unscathed. Here we are approaching the "absolutely iconic" perfect likeness that Umberto Eco imagined holography to be years earlier in his book “Travels in
Hyper-Reality”.
The mythical hologram is at its most sophisticated, most exact as a reproduction of reality, in the T.V. series "Star Trek, the Next Generation". Entering through the door of the Holo-deck is to enter into a fantasy world made real.
Here nursery-rhyme characters like Little Jack Horner can be encountered eating his plum pie. Figures from literature can be summoned, and made to enact games for the pleasure of the person who has beckoned them forth. Once again, the holograms are "computer-generated":
When the computer program is cancelled, the image fades, and only a grid looking like a computer graphic remains.
In the Holo-deck all things are possible, it is a world of pure wish-fulfillment. It is like a dream dimension where the dreamer gets whatever he or she desires. It is not simply a "virtual reality", because everything in this world is tangible, fully actual in every respect. In this context the term "real-image" takes on a new literalism. Friends and work colleagues can be commanded to appear in any guise and perform any function.
These holograms not only materialize in full color and move about, reacting to the environment, like the hologram in "Total Recall", these are much more: these are holograms one can take out on a date. One can eat with them, dance with them, hold rational conversations with them, and make love to them. They are the end of Umberto Eco's quest for the “Hyper-Real”: They are identical clones of human beings who are willing to indulge in your every desire, every whim.
This externalizing of one's internal fantasy world, making it an exact duplication of the authentic world, but under the domination of the individual's will enacts the extreme Cartesian crisis: the conflict between the internal world of thought, and the external, real-life world. Here daydreams are imbued with all the attributes of objective reality. The fantasy is now external: imagination and desire has full expression as objective actuality.
The more fulfilling and objectively real the fantasy, the greater the desire is to take the "false" in place of the "real" and never to abandon the dream made flesh.
The conflict between the "true" real and the "fictitious" real is brought to a climax in an episode called "Elementary, Dear Data" where the fictional character of Moriarty is summoned up and accidentally becomes self-aware.
Like any other sentient creature Moriarty wants to survive and he persuasively argues that he has as much right to existence as any other conscious being. This is one of the rare occasions that the moral rights of holograms are examined in the “Next Generation” series. The theme runs on in the later “Voyager” series, where the ship’s doctor is a hologram and his struggle to attain respect and equal rights as a sentient being is a central sub-plot to the series.
The English T.V. show "Red Dwarf" takes the issue further, going the full distance to absurdity. Here the machine-generated hologram is an unpleasant individual called Rimmer, who lives on a red spaceship with three other unlikely characters. In one episode, Rimmer goes aboard a hologram spaceship to meet up with an entire crew of holograms. Rimmer meets several female holograms, falls in love with one of them, and they end up in bed together.
Rimmer is really only a logical extension of the holograms on the Holo-deck, which can eat, drink and hold conversations... what else might holograms do when there are no human beings around indulging in wish-fulfillment, but to begin to inter-act with one another and start to have wishes and desires of their own?
The evolution of the notion of the mythical hologram over the past couple of decades, and more importantly, the continuity of ideas expressed in each of the many instances of fictional holograms, everything from the holographic Jazz Player in film “Vanilla Sky” to the holographic Librarian in film “The Time Machine”, has led to a popular understanding of the word "hologram" which is far wider than the dictionary definition which pertains to actual holograms. Even though I understand that real holography will never deliver on these expectations, as with everyone else who enjoys science fiction, I would like to think that one day perhaps in the distant future, the fantasy Holograms of Hollywood might be a reality.