"You Are Not Enough of Him"

       

 The film Be Right Back, allows viewers to clearly draw a line between the concepts “appearing to be” and “being” through the interaction Martha has with the human-like replica of her husband. After the unfortunate event of losing Ash we see Sarah at the wake tell Martha the following, “I can sign you up to something that helps” which we later discover is a software system that mimics Ash and his responses by using his online profiles as a foundation and it becomes more like Ash based on the amount of information Martha provides him with. Clearly the human like robot is appearing to be Ash because although he looks like Ash and responds like Ash it lacks human experience. The robot Ash can act afraid but he cannot feel/experience the feeling of fear such as rapid heartbeat or that gut feeling one gets when scared.

"Lack of Human Experience"

            Something else that caught my attention throughout the film is how easily Martha develops this attachment towards the robot which makes me ask myself the following question, If the robot did not look like Ash would Martha have still developed an attachment towards it? I personally think she would have not developed an attachment towards the robot if it did not look like Ash because the robot’s appearance provided a sense of comfort to her because in a way it was like Ash was still with her. It could also be argued that to a certain extent Martha had developed an obsession with the software itself because Martha freaks out when she drops her phone and realizes she has lost contact with computerized Ash. I think her obsession ties back to her tragic experience of losing the real Ash because she never gave herself time to grieve and by dropping the phone she feels like Ash has died again although it’s just a computer software acting like Ash. This also brings up another interesting point which is how much information internet users put out there in social media. This film is eye opening because the software system just had to look back at what we as humans have put out there and it could instantly appear to be us. In the film, we see Martha coming to the realization that robot Ash is appearing to be Ash since he lacks the emotional responses Ash would have engaged in before, therefore he is not Ash.