One day while flicking channels something caught my eye. On the screen there was a strange being with slick blond plastic hair, angled features and black suit talking in rapid bursts against a perpetually spinning digital neon background. I didn’t understand much of what he said, but just enough to be entranced with his appearance and attitudes. His laughter was hysterical and his voice would change in pitch as the transmission slowed down or picked up speed, at times he would get caught in a loop and repeat syllables or whole words over and over again; who would have though that something like stuttering could be cool. His opening line was: this is Ma-Ma-Max Headroom.

Max Headroom (source: Wikipedia)

Although his image was the product of hours of make-up and analog effects, Max Headroom was marketed as the “the world’s first computer-generated TV host.” He was witty, sarcastic, self-referential and carelessly irreverent, as was expected from a Reagan era rebel. As an artificial intelligence, he was ever interested in the inconsistencies and contradictions of human nature. His peculiar style made him one of the most popular commentators of his time:

Who was it said that observing the United States is like watching an epic movie. Oscar Wilde? Woody Allen? Ma-Ma-Ma-Max Headroom. Just think, they’ve got an actor for a President, economic advisers called ‘projectionists.’ Even their latest defense strategy is named after a film, ‘Star Wars,’ and why pick on that one? Why not something gentler like ‘Kramer vs. Kramer.’ And of course everywhere in the world to them is just a theater of operations, except when they’re fighting in it. And then it is a theater… of war.

Max Headroom is a paradigmatic figure of the eighties, the über-celebridad of the decade and prototype of the celebrity of our time. Instead of a human or even an artificial intelligence, he is a smooth, plastic surface that reflects his audience’s expectations. It is rather difficult to avoid the impression that Max Headroom is not longer an image (imago) in the Barfieldian sense of the term but a mere thing, “a brittle exterior surface, which is however not the surface of anything” (2.16, 4.4). Another inhuman for Agamben’s list. (2.13).