John Connor: Holy shit, you’re real. I mean, you’re like a machine underneath, right, but sort of live outside.
Terminator: I’m a cybernetic organism – living tissue over metal endo-skeleton.
John Connor: This is intense…This is deep.
(Terminator 2: Judgement Day 1991)

In this scene from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, young John Connor (Edward Furlong) has come to the realisation that the human form standing in front of him is not quite what he, or it, seems. Humanness is only ’skin-deep’. Underneath that skin is metal and circuitry. The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is merely a replication – a mirror image of the human form. The Terminator is, as it admits, not human. It is a cybernetic organism, or, as Bishop (Lance Henriksen), the android in Aliens, would prefer to be called, an “artificial person”. This representation of the human as artifice has been a characteristic trait of science fiction films since the capitalist, Johhan Fredersen (Alfred Abel), asked the inventor, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), to create a “machine in the image of man that never tires or makes a mistake” in Fritz Lang’s remarkable representation of the workers’ lot in Metropolis (1927). From then till now, and likely into the future, science fiction films have been sites for reflection, for questioning who we are; how we see ourselves; what we are doing; and, where we are going. Science fiction films, according to Kuhn (1990, p. 15), “appeal to our imaginings” of other worlds in other times, but in doing so address the concerns and anxieties of our own time - our worries, our fears, and our woes. These concerns are exacerbated by the breakdown and questioning of identity as a consequence of the postmodern reaction to modernity (Telotte 1995, p. 20). “We are often told”, as Dyer (1997, p. 3) points out, “that we are living now in a world of multiple identities, of hybridity, of decentredness and fragmentation”. We are, quite literally, ‘lost in space’.

A recent advertisement for ‘personalised’ vehicle registration places suggests that the robots of science fiction may have a better grasp on identity than the humans who created them. This advertisement, aired on Brisbane’s Channel 7, October 2005, shows a number of robots that all resemble the ‘translator droid’, C3PO from Star Wars (1977). One robot stands out because that robot has gotten itself a personalised number plate. The robot says, “My plate let’s me express my inner self”, the implication being that if a person wants to express themselves, their personality, and thereby stand out from the crowd, then they should purchase one of these plates. The irony, however, is that these plates are placed on motor vehicles – the human, living tissue inside a metal ‘exo-skeleton’. The paradox is that to sell these plates that will help us to “express” our inner selves, the advertisers have chosen to use simulacra – simulations of ourselves. And interestingly, these simulacra have been appropriated from science fiction – the very genre that very often is questioning how we see ourselves. Telotte (1995, p. 4) argues that the images in science fiction films of androids, as simulations of human beings, reflect “not only the hopes and fears that cluster around the expanding role of robotics and artificial intelligence…but also a growing awareness of and attention to our own level of artifice, of constructedness”. Perhaps, rather than living in an age of technology, we are, as Baudrillard (Telotte 1995, p. 3) suggests, living in an “age of simulation”. Baudrillard (Telotte 1995, p. 150) argues that we have become “preoccupied with saving our identity…proving our existence”. But just like the little robot in the television advertisement, we are, as Telotte (1995, p. 150) points out, endeavouring to do this by the use of simulacra. Slade (1990 p. 13) warns that by doing this, we are actually becoming artificial ourselves “to the point that civilization itself is cyberneticized” – a simulacrum in and of itself.

Metropolis, though ostensibly a study of the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the capitalist and the worker, is also a study of identity in the modern mechanised world. With the patriarch and boss, Fredersen, as the ‘head’ and the workers as the ‘hands’, this text is a metaphor of the human body. But this body has two ‘hearts’ – and herein lies the conflict. For Fredersen, the heart is the cold, hard machinery that powers the glory of his city, pumping as it does only by the constant toil of the workers. Fredersen has no compassion, no concern for the needs of his hands which are overworked and tired. Maria (Brigitte Helm) tries to act as a mediator, a caring heart, through Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich). Fredersen has other plans. He gets Rotwang to kidnap Maria and make a robot in her image to deceive the workers. But the workers turn on the robot Maria and revolt. However, in so doing, the machines break down and the underground begins to flood, threatening workers, their families and the city itself. They put the robot Maria on a pyre to burn her as a witch for being a traitor to their cause. As the fire burns, the ‘living tissue’ melts away to reveal the ‘metal endo-skeleton’. The ruse is revealed. The son rescues the real Maria. The patriarch realises the error of his ways and reason prevails. The final statement in this text is: “There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator”. An underlying message here is that “you can’t fool all the people all the time”. An underlying concern is how corporate capitalism can so easily take away identity and bring about the collapse of society. Though more contemporary science fiction films have appropriated and re-presented both the explicit and implicit messages of Lang’s Metropolis, their conclusions have not always been so positive.

In Blade Runner (1982), a text with many similarities to Metropolis despite its being made over half a century later, no one really knows who they are, or, more precisely, what they are – human or artificial person, referred to in this film as replicant. The ‘head’ in this case is the head of a global enterprise, his namesake, the Tyrell Corporation. Tyrell (Joe Turkel) has taken Fredersen’s plan to its penultimate and has created a slave class of replicants that are virtually indistinguishable from humans. The corporation’s motto is “More human than human”. But unlike humans, these replicants have no memories, no past other than that implanted by their creator – false, imagined pasts. They also have no future, for along with the implanted past, they have also been given a limited lifespan, programmed into their circuitry in order to cut-off potential for them to develop emotions – to realise their own identity. It is in the quest for identity, for answers to the questions: “Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?” that they risk death, or termination, at the hands of the ‘replicant police’ officer, the blade runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford), who finds he has his own identity crisis.

When Deckard is searching a hotel room, supposedly where a runaway replicant had been hiding, he finds a collection of family photographs. But replicants do not have families. They have no mother. They do, however, have a father. That father is technology and that technology comes from the corporation. But why would a replicant have family photographs. Perhaps, Deckard suggests, they needed them – they needed memories. The photograph, a replicant itself in that it is a representation of something, is a recurring element or motif in this film. It represents proof of humanness. Rachael (Sean Young), Tyrell’s personal assistant, is a replicant, but she believed herself to be human. She had to be; she had a photograph of a woman and child, a photograph she believed to be of her with her mother. Deckard, too, has photographs. Rachael challenges Deckard’s humanness asking him if he has ever taken the same test he uses in determining if someone is a replicant or not. The seed of doubt planted, Deckard’s own uncertainty about what it means to be human grows. The photograph, according to Stewart (1999, p. 228) “marks a nostalgia for the human body”, but photographs can be engineered, just as can be humans, in Tyrell’s world at least. Interestingly, Deckard falls in love with the replicant, and they eventually flee away together. Though they leave behind them the dystopic world created by the corporation, they take with them their doubts and uncertainties about their own existence.

This doubt and uncertainty is displayed by a tourist interviewed on his return from a “vacation of the future” in Crichton’s Westworld (1973). The tourist, who got to play the role of sheriff in a futuristic recreation of a town in the American West of the 1890s, says:

I shot six people. Well, they weren’t real people. Well, they may have been robots. I mean, I think they were robots. I mean, I know they were robots.
(Westworld 1973)

‘West World’, along with ‘Medieval World’ and ‘Roman World’ are themed reconstructions of times past created by another corporation, Delos. In these worlds, the occupants are robots, replicants that look and act like humans. They have been programmed not to harm their human visitors. Indeed, they aim to please. At West World, tourists, Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin), enjoy the pleasure of two ‘female’ robots, while a staged bank robbery and gunfight goes on out in the street, adding to the experience of their trip ‘back to the future’. After their animal lusts have been serviced by the mechanical ‘ladies of the night’, Blane says to Martin, “Machines are the servant of man”. Later, in the middle of the night while the tourists sleep, an eerily anachronistic scene takes place as human technicians drive their trucks into the street to clear away the debris of the earlier gunfight. All is not as it seems. And all is not well with the robots. A ‘virus’ attacks the robots and they turn on the humans – viciously. A robot gunslinger (Yul Brynner), appropriately dressed in black, takes his role more diligently than expected, shooting Blane and then chasing Martin in a comical pursuit during which the gunslinger’s hands never leave his gun-belt unless they hold a gun. Though certainly far less serious than either Metropolis or Blade Runner, indeed, it is quite satirical, here, once again, the corporation has failed in its attempt to provide utopia.

Another more recent and not so humorous depiction of the failure of the corporation to create a utopia with the aid of mechanical ‘people’ is I, Robot (2004). The title, borrowed from renowned science fiction author, Isaac Asimov, is the epitome of humanity’s quest for identity and belonging through the simulation of humanness by technology. The corporation in this case is US Robotics, headed by Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood). The year is 2035 and there are as many robots as humans on the streets. US Robotics is planning a major release of new robots that will see one robot for every five humans. This generation of robots is controlled by a central robot/computer ‘brain’, V.I.K.I. (Fiona Hogan), an acronym for Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence, which appears as a holographic-like face of a woman, giving it both a seductive and a heavenly, ethereal appearance and power. The scientist, Doctor Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), who created the robots, falls to his death from his laboratory in the US Robotics building. It is presumed suicide, but police detective, Del Spooner (Will Smith), who has a distrust of robots, believes all is not what it seems. He discovers a robot, Sonny (Alan Tudyk), hiding in the laboratory. Sonny is arrested. But Sonny is having an identity crisis of his own. While being interrogated by Spooner, Sonny asks, “What am I?” In a rather bizarre twist, the scientist has programmed Sonny to kill him in order to highlight a plot by VIKI to overtake and control the human population. Although the robots, including VIKI, are programmed not to hurt humans, it is also a ‘robot law’ that they cannot “through inaction allow a human being to come to harm”. VIKI, sensing that humanity is actually in the process of harming itself, through global warming and other symptoms of the modern age, decides that the only way to protect humans, to stop them from destroying themselves, is to contain them, to place them under robot rule. Spooner, who is actually part-robot himself, having had an arm replaced after an accident, is aided by robot psychologist, Doctor Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) and Sonny in bringing down the well-intentioned, though deluded, VIKI and returning this world back to human control.

Another robot that must also destroy a fellow robot in order to save humanity is the one that promised “I’ll be back” – the Arnold Schwarzenegger character, “living tissue over metal endo-skeleton”, the Terminator – T101. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, as in the first of this series, machines have taken over the world, but are still facing pockets of human resistance. Once again they send a terminator robot back in time to kill the boy, John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of that resistance. But this time, it is a newer model, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), which is able to change shape into either metal objects – or humans. The resistance re-program a T101 and send it back to save the boy. An interesting aspect of this film is the notion of fathers, fatherhood. Vieth (2000, p. 1) argues that “men as fathers are represented as fundamentally flawed and irredeemable”. The young boy’s father was actually a resistance fighter sent back, by himself in the future, to protect his mother, Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton), in the first instalment. In this second episode, the boy becomes friends with the Terminator. In a rather poignant scene, while mother, son and robot are preparing their weapons and vehicle for the final showdown with the T-1000, the boy and robot take a break to play. The mother watches on and considers their relationship. She realises the Terminator has become for the boy more than any human father could be:

Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him and it would never hurt him; never shout at him or get drunk and hit him; or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there and it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers that came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

In the final scene, after destroying the T-1000 in an incinerator, Sarah must operate the controls of a hoist to lower the Terminator into the same molten death, in order to destroy any possible recovery of the technology that would eventually lead to the robot wars of the future. The Terminator says to John, “I know now why you cry, but it is something I can never do”. Of all the would-be fathers, this one was still a machine.

These films, Metropolis, Blade Runner, Westworld, I, Robot and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, from a genre spanning almost eighty years, are representative of how that genre has consistently reflected the concerns and anxieties of the society from which they arose. They each depict the folly of reliance on a centralised governance, the global corporation. They each question humanity’s continual obsession with technology, that only seems to complicate the ever-present desire, the quest, to be more human than human in a cold, emotionless technological world. As we continue to invite technology into every aspect of our daily lives, we loose, perhaps, yet another piece of our humanity. As we allow technology to take away from us those tasks that, in less advanced times, were the livelihood of our hands and our minds, it may be worthwhile to recall the wise words of Maria: “There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator”. We may be able to make, in films at least, robots that look like humans, and those robots may even learn to understand more about us than we do ourselves, but they will never be able to cry.

References

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