From my interpretation of Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), the purpose of the film was to capture all the different aspects of human nature and the extremes that we face in life. The film explores this by tying in ideas of postmodernism and digital reality. In an interview with Indiewire, director Leos Carax shared his thoughts about some of the views he holds about the film and how he thought it would be received by the viewers. The concept of in a technology-mediated world is one of the more overt themes of this film, seen especially in the scene where Mr. Oscar is wearing a motion capture suit and performing many strange action sequences.
When the interview got to the topic of how the film alluded to virtual reality and living in the internet era, Carax had some interesting remarks about his view on it, stating that while he does have interest in what the digital world has to offer, he believes that there have been many consequences that have arisen from “the way they [presumably big tech companies] try to impose it on us”. To conclude his opinion on this topic, he makes the claim that “pioneers invented a world they believed in, but the followers must follow that world whether they believe in it or not”. At first, this quote was pretty confusing to me. What did he mean by a “world” that the “pioneers invented”, and who are the followers of this world? My guess is that the pioneers are the ones who created the technology in the first place, and that the followers are essentially everyone else– the people that consume their products. This led me to think that Carax holds a somewhat pessimistic stance on the direction that technology is headed, as from my understanding of his response, he believes that the people who control the technology want to have some responsibility over our personal lives, and how the reality is that this is increasingly becoming the case. I think that his sentiments connect well to the scene depicted by the image above, where Mr. Oscar, who is quite literally surrounded by the technology that he is wearing, is receiving directions by an unseen person who is not on set, reflecting how even though technology heavily influences the choices we make in our day to day lives, the specificities of how we’re influenced comes down to the algorithms and technological design produced by humans.