Sonhos elétricos: uma análise da construção do imaginário do computador pessoal no cinema americano do início dos anos 80

Abstract

How does one react before a new technology? How does the media mediate and influence people's reaction to what is new? And how did it happen in such a specific culture as the 1980s? This dissertation aims to analyze how Hollywood cinema represented the personal computer in the early 1980s. Therefore, the object of study here is the movie called Electric Dreams (1983), directed by Steve Baron. As a methodology, a comparative analytical method that establishes relationships between filmic productions which, in different ways, illustrate the role of the computer in the movie, was chosen. The concept of personal computer for homes and offices is a technology started taking shape in the 1970s, but only in August of 1981 was the IBM PC 5150, considered the first computer in the market with affordable price (US$ 1,565) for the American middle class, released. In the second instance, the intention is to analyze how Frankenstein's monster, created by English writer Mary Shelley in 1818, continues to exercise its influence in several movies, whenever a representation of the computer is portrayed in them. Then, the objective is to better understand how the imaginary construction mechanisms are created in relation to new technologies through the analysis of movies that had that same technology as a character in their plots. This work seeks to prove that the construction of the imagery is given using pre-existing elements in the world of movies, TV and the literature. Over time, the stories are not lost, but converging, constantly changing to adapt themselves to new aesthetic, economic, political and social realities, but always keeping their embryonic characteristics.