Let the Right One In: Inner Dialogue in Upgrade (2018)

I was cautiously optimistic when I heard about Upgrade on the Brattle Theatre podcast.

I love the idea of pulpy, sci-fi philosophizing, but in practice I often struggle to get through it (with some very notable, obsessive exceptions). Part of me never wants to deflate my love for the idea of that type of sci-fi by actually consuming it.

But the comments on the BT podcast made Upgrade sound like a promising blend of some of my pet tastes (cyberpunk, body horror), which made it seem worth risking disappointment.

The idea behind Upgrade is that a luddite auto mechanic in a cyberpunk future is implanted with a chip that gives him superhuman physical abilities (increased strength, martial arts, etc.) after a mugging leaves him paralyzed. The chip “speaks” to him as a type of voice in his head, so he engages with it as he would another person. With the help of the chip, he seeks revenge on the people who’d mugged him and killed his wife.

The critique of technology is obviously the main dish here — and the film is not subtle about that. But what stood out to me was the theme of inner dialogue.

“Inner dialogue” refers to the inner monologue happening in a person’s mind. It’s the voice(s) you hear in your head when you’re thinking.

I’ve been interested in inner dialogue for years. I used to have the (incredibly socially awkward) habit of asking people what the voice in their head sounded like (for what it’s worth, the answers were interesting and varied quite widely). When I was going through a phase of setting my academic career on fire, I even briefly entertained the idea of writing a dissertation on it, which I’m sure made me seem deranged to my committee (and probably everyone else — that is, if me asking them earnestly about “the voice in their head” didn’t already do that).

The lived experience of inner dialogue is weird for a few reasons. One strange part of inner dialogue is how oddly passive it can be. Think, for example, of when a parent’s or former teacher’s voice surges up into your mind. Of course you are the person thinking those things, but those thoughts can certainly feel like they have a life of their own.

Seen from that perspective, inner dialogue indicates a sort of split in the construction of consciousness. Consciousness has this way of bifurcating into two and making it feel as though at least one dimension of itself is somehow separate or “other.”

Another weird feature of inner dialogue, which is related to the one above, is that it represents a case of us taking things in from the outside that we then weave into the most private parts of our subjectivity. After we’ve met a person with a strong personality, there’s a very definite way that we can then internalize our experience of that person before engaging with that projection.

This often happens when writing, for example — we might “hear” the voice of a former, demanding professor when putting our thoughts together. This can be empowering, or it can be stifling — I seem to remember reading a dissertation years back exploring the experience of writer’s block amongst undergrads that treated it at least in part as a result of oppressive inner dialogue (which, in turn, often reflects larger socio-structural patterns).

Inner dialogue is complex and can take a lot of forms. In one case, for example, I think of Heidegger writing about the “call of conscience” in Being and Time (1927), which may or may not take a verbal form, but can certainly be understood on the register of inner dialogue. Leaving the details of Heidegger aside, inner dialogue can be a way that we experience our conscience and in that regard reflect at least some facet of what we “genuinely” think or believe to be best (whatever that might mean).

On another register, I seem to recall George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society (1934) treating inner dialogue as one of the hinge points between society and the individual. Inner dialogue then becomes the way (or one of the ways) that we internalize society’s values and one of the primary ways we engage with our society. One wonders if you couldn’t put it on an evolutionary register and think of it as a way that societies of the past speak through and to us by virtue of their teachings having provided an evolutionary advantage that then surfaces as instinct expressed verbally in our heads (maybe?).

Ultimately, I’m inclined to think inner dialogue probably does all of those things and more as we spin off different parts of ourselves within our convoluted inner worlds. All of this is of course neither inherently good nor bad — it’s just what it is to be human.

To return to the film, the voice in Upgrade assists the protagonist in tracking down the murderers, but there is of course something creepy and invasive about it. The voice walks the line between intruder and assistant, and one is never quite sure how autonomous it is. The film hints at this in a nice fight scene towards the beginning in which the voice demonstrates a callous disregard for murder (while raising the kind-of-too-obvious-but-also-kind-of-interesting question of if and how the protagonist is morally responsible for the murder the voice commits using his body).

The obvious point here about the upgraded “voice” in the head of the protagonist of Upgrade is how modern technology can colonize our subjective worlds, act according to its own agenda, challenge the boundaries of what it is to be human, potentially destroy something precious about our humanity precisely by challenging those boundaries, and so on.

Those points certainly seem more timely than ever in our increasingly AI-infused world. But I also wonder if the reflections on inner dialogue in Upgrade might not gesture towards another, potentially ineluctable, dilemma about what it is to be human.

Aside from the more topical critique of contemporary technology in Upgrade, one can take from it an expression of a deeper, more existential challenge of what it is to be human. To put it bluntly: we don’t have a say in which voices end up getting braided into our consciousness, and it’s not always clear how to get rid of them once they’re there. If you think about it, that can be a disturbing feature of what it is to be human.

As much as we want to let the right ones in, much of the situation is out of our hands. The door is largely open because we are fundamentally open to and vulnerable to our environment. As the saying goes, “be careful who you let in your head,” which is certainly true insofar as it goes, but not only can we of course miscalculate (as is suggested by the plot of Upgrade) but it’s not wrong to say that much of what we metabolize into being what we know as ourselves (or “our selves”) just isn’t up to us.

It makes sense that this would reflect an inevitable and enduring anxiety, but there is profound beauty here as well. I seem to recall Derrida writing movingly about the internalization of a dead friend’s voice in The Work of Mourning.

Hearing a dead friend in one’s head can be seen as a complex form of commemoration. This facet of the phenomenology of inner dialogue speaks to me now after having recently lost a number of people close to me. Hearing one or another’s voice surge through my thought with a force of its own and communicating a perspective that is recognizable as that of a friend who is no longer here can be seen as a comforting memorial in the mind (or “memorial of the mind” or “memorial that is the mind”?).

On that note, an inner voice (maybe internalized from somewhere — an old friend? Something I read? An old teacher?) chides me now not to succumb to my tendency to overexplain.

So, in tribute to that peculiar memorial of the mind, I’ll leave this line of thought here for now….

In the end, Upgrade was the type of pulpy sci-fi that has its imperfections and often ludicrous plot holes make it all the more charming. I wouldn’t be heartbroken if it were to surface in my inner dialogue.