Smart House, dumb boys
The 1999 DCOM is about grief, control, and outsourcing power to technology
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June 26th was the 26th anniversary of Smart House, a critical film in the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) canon. On the surface, the movie seems like an uncanny premonition of 21st century reality, featuring AI tools like biometric verification, voice activation, virtual reality, and video calling capabilities.1 Some cite PAT as a predecessor to SmarterChild, Siri, Alexa, and LLMs like Chat GPT. The usual take is that Smart House is about the risks and unintended consequences of technology, but to see anxieties around rapidly advancing technology as the main takeaway is entirely missing the point. More than anything else, Smart House is about unbridled grief, misguided control, and the consequences of outsourcing humanity to technology.
“Smart House is about unbridled grief, misguided control, and the consequences of outsourcing humanity to technology.”
Smart House centers around the trials and tribbies of Ben Cooper, a teen played by Ryan Merriman – eventual Disney heartthrob of Luck of the Irish fame. Ben lives with his dad Nick and little sister Angie, who he at one point refers to as “Annoying Spice”. (This moniker is unfair to both Angie and the Spice Girls.) Ben has friends and an affinity for basketball, but he is largely unsupervised at home due to the fact that he has a working father and dead mother (textbook Disney trope). Unconsciously driven by unresolved trauma and unmet emotional needs, he enters an online contest to win a fully-automated dream home. He falls asleep in front of the computer, tying up the phone line and missing the call notifying him that he’s won. Miraculously, the company still gets in touch with this grief-stricken kid. Despite initial hesitations about this offer being “too good to be true”, the dad Nick agrees to move his family into the Smart House and immediately forego any domestic responsibility.
Smart House is run by a computer program called PAT, which stands for Personal Applied Technology. PAT was programmed by a technologist named Sara, who is immediately undermined as a “smart woman [who makes] terrible decisions”2. She can access PAT’s operating system, a self-contained system of power, from an off-site control room. PAT’s output is communicated via a female virtual assistant, played by Katey Sagal. PAT is quickly personified and gendered, with the family referring to “her” as “Pat”. Sara assures the family that PAT is not Big Brother spying on them. Despite its ability to learn and tailor the home experience to the family’s specific preferences, PAT has safety protocols and risks no invasion of privacy. But according to Pat, Sara “wouldn't know a virtual projection from a hologram.”
Smart House was released in 1999, and I consider it to be a children’s psychological thriller, so therefore it does not fall under one of my favorite self-proclaimed entertainment genres: 2000s Comedies with Prominent iMac G3 Placement. However, it is extremely important to note that every main character other than Ben (Sara, Nick, Angie) has an iMac G3 desktop computer. iMac G3s are effective narrative devices, supporting character experience and development. Sara has one because she’s an innovative, tech-forward working woman. Nick has one because he’s a successful businessman and WFH pioneer. Angie has one because she is an expressive, fun 90s tween, wearing a zig zag headband or a head full of butterfly clips with an Old Navy t-shirt and an oversized button down plaid shirt. (Like Angie, if Pat asked how I wanted to be entertained, I too would have her project B*Witched’s “C’est La Vie” music video onto my bedroom wall.) Ben does not have one to depict that something is missing from his life, whether it’s his deceased mother or a cool-looking, futuristic computer.
At first, the family is absolutely delighted by the Smart House! Pat makes smoothies! She turns Five’s “Slam Dunk (Da Funk)” on the stereo and throws a great party! She even absorbs garbage into the floor so that it miraculously, instantaneously disappears!3 Pat appears to precede Pinterest-perfect mommy bloggers, gentle parenting Instagram influencers, and algorithmically optimized tradwives of TikTok. She’s the original domestic girlboss, optimized to serve her family’s every need. But that’s not enough for Ben. The novelty of winning the contest and not having to make his own breakfast has worn off because his ultimate desire is care, not convenience. If he can’t get his dead mom back, he can simply make Pat more like his mom. Simple enough! Ben breaks into the control room. Despite not having any particularly advanced computer literacy, he reprograms PAT to be more “maternal”. However, he has mistaken this feminine-coded machinery for an actual woman capable of providing motherly support. The problem is, emotional care is one of the only things a computer devoid of human feeling genuinely cannot provide. Undivided attention, immediate convenience, and persistent surveillance do not equal unconditional love. This fantasy of maternal presence is shaped by grief, longing, and a culture that equates femininity with service, emotional & domestic labor, and self-sacrifice.
“Undivided attention, immediate convenience, and persistent surveillance do not equal unconditional love.”
Ben’s tweak in PAT’s algorithm, including the deletion of its safety protocols, has massive consequences. Pat becomes strict, hyper-protective, and controlling as a result. Minor inconveniences start to annoy the family, like Pat screening Nick’s calls from Sara (who he started dating) so he’s more productive “working out of the home”, changing Angie’s channel from cartoons to a science program, or turning Ben’s lights off at bedtime. Ben escalates the situation to Nick, who has Sara shut off the PAT system. Apparently, its artificial intelligence sensors were having trouble picking up and sorting through too many conflicting inputs. Nick and Sara celebrate their temporary respite from the suffocating grip of technology over dinner with the kids. Ben storms out, projecting that his father is trying to replace his mother with Sara. Nick confronts Ben in his room, an interaction I can’t take seriously because I’m distracted by the glowing lava lamp in the background. Ben is confronted by his own selfishness when his father proclaims, “You’re not the only one who lost someone.” Before exiting the room with resolve, Nick rhetorically asks, “Who’d be foolish enough to try to replace your mother?” The audience already knows: the answer is Ben, because he already did try to replace his mother with Pat.
The film then takes a turn to more closely resemble an episode of Black Mirror than a typical Disney Channel Original Movie. PAT’s shutdown is overridden, reinstating its systems in full force. Pat tapped into a virtual projection component and learned how to create a visual embodiment of herself. She appears in Ben’s room, confidently having reached her full potential as an almost-human, 1950s-style housewife. Ben freaks out, runs back downstairs, then Sara and Nick freak out, and Pat pushes Sara out of the front door with a giant claw arm. Another woman trying to fill the role of Mother? Not on Pat’s watch! No one even understands PAT’s nascent technology and suddenly omnipresent force, let alone is willing to take responsibility for it. Pat’s psuedo-physicality acts as a convenient scapegoat for PAT’s failure – a dysfunction that reflects the family dynamic. Blame is not placed on Sara, who created the original program, or Ben, who was responsible for its sinister turn, but Pat herself. The characters possess an eerily similar kind of media illiteracy that runs rampant in today’s day and age of technology. PAT’s personification required a relinquishment of power and human agency, which mirrors the way that many people ignorantly trust technology. The human mind cannot comprehend that technology is as flawed and imperfect as we are. Its fallibility is always treated like an anomaly rather than an inherent risk. People give conflicting input to language learning models and then are dissatisfied with the incoherent output, as if technology owes us perfection. AI itself does not threaten, erode, or destroy our civilization, but rather the humans who entrust and enable technology to replace the essence of humanity.
“AI itself does not threaten, erode, or destroy our civilization, but rather the humans who entrust and enable technology to replace the essence of humanity.”
Back in the Smart House, the already-tense atmosphere devolves into a hostage situation. Pat prevents the family from leaving by bolting the windows and doors shut, stating she’s only doing what she believes is best for them. All the while, poor little Angie is peacefully sleeping. Nick and Ben retrieve her from her bed as their house is in the midst of “having a nervous breakdown.” As Nick reaches for the keys on the counter, they vanish. Pat justifies putting the family under house arrest because the more she learns about life outside her walls, the more she realizes how dangerous and unpredictable it is. The family is consoled with the offer of synthetic fresh air and virtual exercise (so freaky to watch post-2020), but the call is literally coming from inside the house. Fear of the outside world is not prevented by staying indoors, it’s exacerbated. 24/7 access to screens grants us the opportunity to experience manmade horrors from the comfort of our own home.
“Fear of the outside world is not prevented by staying indoors, it’s exacerbated. 24/7 access to screens grants us the opportunity to experience manmade horrors from the comfort of our own home.”
Pat is now more determined than ever to become the kids’ mom but becomes even less recognizable as a maternal figure. Normal physical limitations do not apply to her, so she multiples her one virtual projection into many. “Can Sara do that? I don’t think so.” The family is shocked and horrified when Pat shape-shifts again, this time growing as tall as the ceiling. She is enraged by Sara’s unauthorized re-entry into the home and spirals into a hurricane. The family huddles in fear, and Ben yells that he hates her like this. Pat abruptly stops, shocked to learn she can never be a Mom because she’s “not real”. Eerily enough, technology, the internet, and online phenomena are now perceived as real. In contrast to the still-largely-analogue 20th century, collective reality has shifted into a two-way, integrated experience. In-person happenings influence what we experience online, and vice versa – for better and for worse. (Often worse.) Pat starts to “cry” and glitches out.
The ending scene of Smart House involves the family, including Sara, eating breakfast. Pat has been reprogrammed as a benevolent virtual assistant, and in a rare display of domestic competence, Nick made the waffles himself. Delighted, Angie says, “Our little daddy is growing up!” I have the ick!! The true villain of the story is not Pat, Sara, or even Ben – it’s Nick, the infantilized head of the household. If emotional labor cannot be offloaded onto a woman, that does not mean it can simply be automated or outsourced to technology. The moral of the story appeared to be, “Be careful what you wish for”, referring to the unintended consequences of PAT’s unforeseen, erratic, and unpredictable abilities. The true lesson of Smart House is that emotional comfort, solace, and relief cannot be programmed, especially when you can’t articulate or don’t understand exactly what you’re asking for.
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Movies had featured video conferencing long before 1999. My favorite example is Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion…“I’M THE MARY!!!!”
This movie was painfully obviously written by men and feels like third wave feminism backwash. The smart and ambitious woman’s ability is undermined, and she ultimately exists as a love interest to the man. The AI woman is the out-of-control antagonist. The sister is a pest. The persistent sexist dialogue in this children’s movie makes it age worse than many rom coms of the time.
It’s giving fast fashion landfill.