A butterfly lands on the finger of Will, a man wearing sci-fi goggles in a too-perfect midcentury modern room. “Oh wow,” says Will of the butterfly, but there’s something in his tone that suggests he’s faking it. Perhaps it’s the discordant horror music that just kicked in. Perhaps it’s Allessandra, the woman on the couch at his side who has just insisted that Will call up a dinosaur.
“Is that a raptor?” says Will, as the giant beast stomps through a portal in time, into the room, towering above him.
Allessandra corrects him. “It’s a rajasauraus,” she says. “If you shift from side to side, the rajasauraus will follow you.”
The unspoken implication: Will is trapped. A product demo that he never asked for, a demo he claimed unconvincingly to be excited about and just indicated he wanted to get out of, has taken a Black Mirror-esque turn.
The Cupertino Kool-Aid
That scene, spoiler alert, comes near the end of the unusual 10-minute video Apple just dropped on the day of pre-orders for its new augmented reality headset, the Vision Pro. For those of us on the fence about this $3,500-plus pair of goggles, the walkthrough video may convince us that we want to sit on our couches and scroll through panoramic photos in mid-air.
Or, just maybe, for those of us who didn’t drink the Cupertino Kool-Aid yet, it might give us dystopian movie vibes (mixed with cult documentary vibes) that say more about the Vision Pro lifestyle than Apple’s marketing team intended.
The problem here is Will — or rather the fact that we the audience are invited to sympathize with Will, literally seeing the world through his eyes, but know nothing about his backstory. Alessandra McGinnis is a real Apple product manager. Will is … someone who’s never used a Vision Pro before. And seems a little cautious about doing so, more so than he’s prepared to tell McGinnis.
Conclusion: either Will is a middling actor who isn’t great at faking excitement. Or Will is a really good actor, who is capable of conveying a backstory through this layer of hesitancy. A keen viewer gets the sense that Will has stumbled into this over his head, like a man in a hotel looking for a free breakfast who blundered into a timeshare presentation.
For example: At one point, McGinnis instructs Will to lie back and look at photos on the ceiling. He sees a woman at a beach, looking somewhat sternly at the camera. “Oh wow,” says Will, but nothing else. He’s being guarded about something. We notice Will is wearing a wedding ring.
Is that his wife in the photo? His daughter? Wouldn’t a normal human being in that situation say something more than “wow”? His secret lover, perhaps? Perhaps the product manager is testing his reactions, sending him a message: We know.
As soon as McGinnis offers him a way out, Will exits the photo mode. “It’s wrapping around me,” he says of a panorama. The past is literally closing in on Will. Later, he’s shown a soothing immersive environment into which McGinnis appears like an ethereal angel. “Now look at me,” she commands.
“What? You’re coming through the scene,” says Will. McGinnis corrects him: You’re experiencing what we in the cult of Vision Pro call a Breakthrough.
Later, as any cult leader would, McGinnis instructs Will to experience a mindfulness session while she watches. “Inhale appreciation,” says a glowing orb. “Exhale care.” After a five-minute session, Will is starting to display a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. “Can I do a 20-minute version of this?”
But something inside him is fighting back against the programming, determined to get out of the demo. “Just kidding,” he adds. Not for nothing is the character called Will.
McGinnis laughs off this challenge to her authority. “Let’s keep going,” she insists. “I want to show you some other fun experiences.” And that’s where Will meets the dinosaur designed to keep him in line.
It’s possible Apple is smart enough to have intended such Black Mirror overtones. Perhaps the creepy cult-like video is intended to create a cult following of its own, much as the famous Ridley Scott Macintosh ad of 1984 did.
Or maybe, just maybe, Apple doesn’t realize that it has become the Big Brother of that ad, keeping today’s hammer-throwers from smashing screens by locking them in midcentury modern rooms with goggles that hide their real eyes under fake ones.
Only the next episode — presuming McGinnis can find her next victim — will tell us for sure.
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Apple launched a ten-minute Vision Pro video with a product manager and a guy who really doesn’t seem like he wants to be there.
