Among the film's many inspirations include The Three Stooges and other slapstick comedy films; Ash's fights with his disembodied hand come from a film made by Spiegel as a teenager, entitled Attack of the Helping Hand, which was itself inspired by television commercials advertising Hamburger Helper.
Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site.
A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative, virtual existence, and that we would have the old economy of atoms.