I’ve been doing some intense thesis editing lately as I ramp up towards having a first complete draft of intro, every chapter, conclusion, the lot. I’ve been pretty tempted to sit up late each night to just keep reading and editing more out of impatience to have that draft done now than anything. That’s not the healthiest lifestyle option, though, so tonight I instead forced myself to wind down with one of the many silly films on my long list of films I should’ve seen by now: Robocop. As my thesis is largely concerned with cyborgs, rather than winding down I am now writing a blog post after midnight. Good. Great.
So Robocop was a really rad film about how the privatisation of public services is really fucked up, essentially. A giant corporation that pretty much owns Detroit and which has recently purchased the city police department, decides to turn dead cops into way more efficient robocops. You get the whole great explanation of how letting for-profit corporations run parts of society that should in no way ever be run for a profit while watching a whole lot of explosions. So that’s neat. Murphy, the protagonist, gets killed by the dad from That 70s Show and becomes the prototype robocop and then he does some things and, ultimately, remembers who is. The movie ends as, when someone asks him what his name is, he replies “Murphy” and smiles (he’s gotten rid of his helmet by this stage). The ultimate happy ending is that Murphy didn’t let the machine keep him down. He is still human.
So cyborgs. Cybernetic organisms. In movies through the 20th Century they often speak to the anxiety of pervasive technologies and humans being augmented by technology and all of that kind of stuff. They are scary because they are non-humans who pass as human without the failings of humans. The Terminator is scary because he’s a badass killing machine. The false Maria of Metropolis tricks a whole lot of labourers and nearly gets all their kids killed. Kinda different by Robbie Williams’s character in Bicentennial Man doesn’t get accepted as a ‘human’ until he accepts mortality.
But obviously cyborgs aren’t always evil, but they are always scary. When Arnie comes back in Terminator 2 as a good guy, he is still scary until he learns to think and behave like a ‘real’ human (“Now I know why you cry”). He gets so good at it that he erases himself. Murphy is scary when he comes back as Robocop. Darth Vader is an evil being incapable of empathy and real emotions until Luke helps him remember his ‘real’ self and saves his soul right before he dies. He’s a product, as he keeps being reminded. He stops being scary when he figures out how to suppress his own cyborg-ness and to instead act like the human he once was. Smiling and having his old name and all that.
So cyborgs are scary and express a whole bunch of 20th Century anxieties about technology, and they only become not scary when the Human is ultimately proven the victor in their will and strength to still be ‘themself’ in the face of so much machine. The cyborg becomes something to defeat. This is maybe kinda less true in the 21st Century where digital technology has become so pervasive and everyday (at least in the West) that cyborgism has become entirely mundane. This is probably seen best of all where cyborgs go from figures of monstrosity in cinema to figures of us in videogames.
But anyway. So in the late 80s Donna Haraway writes her “Cyborg Manifesto” and finds in the myth of the cyborg a really compelling analogy for how society sees women as monstrous. Haraway is an amazing figurative writer and well worth a read because any attempt by me to summarise her essay at 1am won’t do her justice. But essentially, whereas Man is able to conceptualise himself as distinct from his world in a way that perpetuates a bunch of dualisms that always keeps the most privileged dudes on top (Culture/Nature, Man/Woman, West/East, White/Black, Straight/Gay, Human/Machine, Human/Animal), Woman is seen as secondary, as imperfect, etc. Haraway does a bunch of work to show how impartiality and objectivity is a “god trick” that imbues a ranking of objectivity on one partial, dominant actor. The cyborg is a compelling counter to this because it embraces its partiality, its mashed-up-ness with nonhumans. So for Haraway the cyborg is compelling as a origin myth for thinking about how people are always already mashed-up with their world and to think otherwise only really serves the most powerful.
And it’s totally true! The way cyborgs get treated in films is way similar to how marginal people get treated throughout history: as both less than human but also some kind of giant threat to the way of things. As cyborgs act ‘more like humans’ they become less threatening. Just like women who ‘lean in’ to patriarchal work environments, or indigenous subjects that take on the cultures and behaviours of the ‘civilisation’ that takes over their land, or queer people who don’t act too queer. Cyborgs are scary because they threaten the status quo of what it means to be human. Just like queer people getting married threaten the status quo of what it means to be married.
So while I really liked Robocop, it still plays into this same kind of anxiety where the ultimate happy ending is that Murphy can still be Murphy in spite of his cyborgness. Ultimately, the marginalised person, much like the cyborg, conforms so well that they disappear entirely. Like Arnie lowering himself into the lava, or Australia trying to breed out the indigenous population (look up ‘The Stolen Generation’). Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Murphy, Arnie, and Robbie Williams would all rather be Men (gods) than cyborgs.
But then: videogames! Videogames are where the cyborg stops being an object of fear and starts being a mundane mode of existence. Cyborgs are no longer the scary thing in videogames, they are how the very way we engage with videogames is explained to us. Adam Jensen, Master Chief, the dude in Bioshock. Augmenting the human body with technology is both how our super strength within videogames is explained, and also literally how we engage with a videogame. We mesh out hands with these plastic technological things in order to restrict and extend our bodies in different ways. To play a videogame is to be a cyborg in a pretty explicit, literal, banal kind of way.
Few videogames actually manage to actually say anything interesting about cyborgism, however, Rather than a threat to Western masculine dominance, the cyborg just becomes an extension and celebration of this dominance a lot of the time. But there are some good exceptions! Most notably Binary Domain which does this amazing thing where, throughout the whole game, it constantly shifts the conceptual goalposts of just what is ‘human’ and what is ‘machine’ until, towards the end of the game, a person who is entirely organic in composition is considered ‘not human’. What this does is amazing and so intelligent and not al all adequately appreciated. It proves, by moving these conceptual goal posts, that strictly biological definitions of being a homo sapien has nothing to do with what is societally constructed as ‘human’.
This done on a super everyday level. The way the nightly news treats one domestic death with the gravitas of a thousand overseas deaths. We conceptualise others as less than human so we don’t have to deal with them. Or because dealing with them would destabilise our own conception of what a human is and that would freak us out.
So I don’t know where I’m going with this but, ultimately, Robocop was a real great film, but I found it interesting most of all for how the cyborg is not allowed to embrace his own cyborgness but instead, for the satisfaction of the audience, is bought back into the conceptual fold of humanity, not threatening us or forcing us to reconsider just what we are when we say we are human.
