Literature Review

In the thesis’ part about The Promise of Technology, the concepts of technology, surveillance and the machines in Her and Ex Machina will be focal points. Here, the fear and desire for technology plays in among with the importance of the voice, body and space in cinema, which also is a valid discussion as the qualities of the machines with human-like features will be analysed in close readings.

J.P Telotte points out in Science Fiction Film (2001, pp. 50) that the Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Mary Ann Doane, explained science fiction as a genre that is specific to the era of rapid technological development, which frequently envisages a new, revised body as a direct outcome of the advances of science. Doane’s focus lies on sexual difference, and the representation of the sexes. Doane (pp. 50) describes the cyborg as the “revised body”, a prosthetically altered human in which are put limits upon. When looking at the science fiction film, the theme of boundaries most likely will come up. Telotte (2001)

states that the robot stands as a border figure between human and machine, and the rocket or spaceship, or even UFO, is a tool for traversing the boundaries of space. These boundaries are set as a point of separation between one thing and another that are now together, like the paradox of science and fiction set together. And the theme of paradoxes will continue when looking into the genre, like the paradox of the AI being.

In the part about Female Cyborgs, the concepts of gendered machines, feminism,

cyberfeminism and the representations and relationships of the males and females in Her and Ex Machina will be further discussed.

An influential figure for this analysis is Donna Haraway, an American Professor in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Haraway had made what she terms a “science fictional move” in her cultural commentary, something critics of the genre have quickly followed. Haraway is a key icon when it comes to the contemporary science fiction film about the cyborg, or the artificial being, used as a trope for investigating feminine identity in the postmodern cultural

environment. She wrote a recognized paper titled “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,

Technology, and Social-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1991), a central text in the discussion of feminism and cyborgs in the science fiction genre. Here, she describes how the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, like the ones separating human from animal and human from machine. The concepts Haraway introduces will help the analyses of the cyborg women and their relationships to the men.

Anthony Samuel Magistrale, who goes by Tony Magistrale, is a Professor in English at the University of Vermont, and he has written the chapter “Cyborg Woman: Ex Machina and Racial Otherness” in The Myths of Colorblindness: Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema.

(2019). Here, Magistrale (2019) argues that the film presents the viewer with a female android that becomes a locus for current cultural debates about race and gender. There is a racial hierarchy at work amongst the various races represented by the cyborg. Here, he draws on the works of Donna Haraway and Robin Wood, and argues that the cyborg becomes both the monster and the racialized Other, something Hollywood is known to do – fetishize in order to preserve hegemonic and patriarchal power. By portraying the female cyborgs as others, the men are not having a contemporary feminist view on them. This is something that the protagonists of Her and Ex Machina are guilty of. They are fetishizing the women and

treating them as others, thus the feminist view remains outdated and showing that the men are trying to be the ones in control. This goes back to the second wave of feminism, which is ironic in such developed and forward-looking films. It is a complicated matter, which comes back to the paradox of cyborgs – are they supposed to be treated as objects and humans, when it shows that they inhabit parts of the human condition? The control they arguably are able to gain over the cyborgs, is that a delusion and does it tie in with the fear of technology all together? Magistrale’s and Haraway’s work will help to shed light on the feminist issue and views in the films.

When discussing the concepts of feminist film theory, one almost has to mention the renown British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey. She is currently a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck at the University of London. Mulvey is maybe best known for her article

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that was first published in Screen in 1975, then included in, among others, Beaudry and Cohen’s book Film Theory and Criticism:

Introductory Readings (1999). The text discusses the way film reflect and reveals on socially established interpretations of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle. Mulvey (1999) discusses voyeurism and the male gaze, which are highly relevant when looking at film in from feministic point of view. The term “the male gaze” is coined by Mulvey, and it is described as the perspective of a hypothetical heterosexual man that is considered as embodied in the audience, or at least in the indented audience for films.

The male perspective that the audience would embody is characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women. Women are thus represented as objects to be looked at in film, and it can be done through the mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism.

Robert Stam points out, when discussing feminist film theory, in his book Film Theory: An Introduction (2000, pp. 174-175) that Laura Mulvey has been criticised by several theorists, and even she has criticised herself for forcing the female spectator into a masculinist mould.

Her essay became regarded as overly deterministic and blind to the diverse way in which women could subvert, redirect and undermine the male gaze, so many feminists would point out the ideological limitations of Freudianism and to the privilege of the phallus, male voyeurism and the oedipal scenario, which leaves very little place for female subjectivity.

However, Mulvey’s original essay is held in high regard and is heavily used when discussing feminism in film theory to this day. And the theory about the male gaze and voyeurism is very relevant, thus will be a big part of the analyses of Her and Ex Machina in the Female

Cyborg--part of the thesis. Especially when analysing how the men view the cyborg females and how the filmmakers have chosen to shoot the film.

In the thesis’ part about Agency of Machines, the concept of postmodernist films, posthumanism, personhood, agency and the meaning of the filmmakers’ choices of

perspective will be the main theories discussed in regard to the analyses of whether machines can have agency or not. Here, Daniel Dennett’s criteria for “personhood” in Conditions of Personhood (1976) will be discussed along with Diane Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialism: Ontology, Agency and Politics (2010).

Catrin Misselhorn is a German philosopher and has been a Professor at the Georg-August University in Göttingen since April 2019. Misselhorn has written an interesting paper on android and human-like appearance named “Empathy and Dyspathy with Androids:

Philosophical, Fictional and (Neuro)- Psychological Perspectives”. (2010) Here, Misselhorn (2010) argues that the fact that humans have developed feelings toward androids, or objects with humanlike appearances, has fascinated people since ancient times. However, research shows that our emotional reaction towards them are ambivalent. Misselhorn debates that human can develop feelings of empathy towards them, but feel repulsion or dyspathy when the androids show a very high degree of human likeness. Here, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s term “uncanny valley” is of high relevance. Misselhorn (2010) states that the positive emphatic response that turns into repulsion is the uncanny valley effect, because humanlike objects that become too humanlike start to produce a sensation of eeriness, unless the android are not a perfect copy of a human. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the term “uncanny valley” as: “used to refer to the unpleasant feeling that some people have when they see robots (machines that carry out actions automatically), or pictures of a human being created by a computer, that appear very similar to a living human.” ¹ So, it is used to describe a situation where the android looks so eerily human, but not quite human, and that is what creeps people out.

Henceforth, the ambivalent feelings people may have towards androids is, at first glance, like a paradox. One might argue that empathy with androids is reliant on an illusion which makes

1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/uncanny-valley Accessed: 24.03.21

people accept the android as a real human being, however it requires a kind of imaginative perception which is involved in emphatic responses to androids.