AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Most reviewers seem to think of it as a critique of the artificiality and characterlessness of suburban family life. But that is hardly a message that has to be repeated at this late date, eveybody knows the suburbs are phony and anomie-inducing, to mock them is cliche. The movie really kind of fails at that anyway, it's too abstract, too asocial (there are an infinite number of houses in Yonder, but no other people). No, it seems to be about something more elemental than the suburbs, like capitalism or maybe even reproduction or replication as such.
The treatment of The Thing as a kind of avatar of mindless replication was interesting. I happen to think this is an accurate picture of the universe, Richard Dawkins and Schopenhauer are basically right, but it is disturbing. It brought to mind another disturbing film, Vivarium (2019) , which also treats the subsumption of the human by inhuman replicators.
To me it has a slightly different connotation, more mechanical and less agentive. You model yourself on a role model, but an imprimer loads you up with something (an imprint), with a bit of goal machinery, like copying software or viral replication. It's deeper than a role model, at a lower level. More constitutive, less chosen. Role models are like teachers, imprimers are more like parents, where you get your very basic cognitive/emotional structures from.
normal brain: religion is a virus large brain: language is a virus (Burroughs level) galactic brain: people are assemblages of viruses universal brain: all serves the one true god of Replication