Constructing the Ideal Mate:
Pondering the Gynoid Connection
On the back cover of Lynn Peril´s book Pink
Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons the editorial blurb rhetorically
asks: “What does it take to be the ideal woman?”1 I believe this
problem is still valid today, but I am not sure that any of the proposed
answers to date offer a real solution. I will not look at these other proposals
but will ask again: What does it take to be the ideal woman? I will center my
paper on media attitudes during the 1950s and the 1960s Cold War era and
especially on the image of woman as a transgressed Other as played out by
science fiction narratives. For this I will focus my attention at the
particular take that some episodes of Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone [TZ] (1959-1964) have on this issue, taking special interest in the
episode “The Lonely” (aired 13.Nov.1959), and in the representation of the
female as object (gynoid) to see how they allow us to re-think the evolution of
mid-twentieth century ideas of male-female dichotomy. I won’t claim to answer
the questions posited by these works, and many others. At most I pretend to
point toward a societal attitude that seemed to express a need to continue as
if nothing was wrong, and, as such, conspired to repress social mores in both
men and women by engaging in the stabilization of sexual roles. I also look at
some other examples, both contemporary to and later works, to see if these ideas
are still present and valid.
The deconstruction of the female (and male) body
in the second half of the twentieth century has failed in producing any
positive results in the liberation of women (and men) from the oppressive and
repressive nature of (post)modern society. This is so because such deconstructive
acts strive toward a pure redux of gender, a move more aligned with
turning identity into a sterile and unknowable mush, an amorphous material
readily molded into any shape or concept temporarily fancied at the time, and
not toward establishing shared experiences of Being-in-itself. The somewhat
cynical view of woman as “savior of their gender” by becoming both male AND
female in their android/cyborg form somewhat seems to undermines the whole idea
of hybridity. What must be achieved, and cannot be achieved by the senseless
and incessant finger-pointing accusations of the Other, is, rather, the
embracing of the centering-decentered being. That is, it is necessary to
accept, temporarily, the absoluteness contained at the moment in space, and the
locale in time, where events of being are enacted. And, in the relation between
men and women, this means that it is necessary to accept the presumed absolute
nature of the body as represented in the maleness of the woman and in the
femaleness of the man. “As the imagined social body has become increasingly
more perfect and controlled—more and more closely fitting the modernist model
of (male) autonomous subjectivity—the likelihood of the eruption of the
repressed body, in all its abject, excessive, imperfect, uncontrolled,
boundary-challenged ‘female-ness,’ increases” (Orbaugh 443). But this does not
mean that we must return to the old oppressive apollonian/dionysian camps of
being male or being female. Nor does it mean that each camp must absolve the
differences that exist between each other. Rather, it means that one must
demand that each being identifies its dual nature, its male-female juncture,
through which the species turns toward one as identity, and desires the other
as completion in the true hybrid nature of Being. Then, and only then, can any
true progress be made in solving the problems between the male and the female.
And only then can the female be truly free from this oppression, not only of
men, but of the women who do not allow for an “other” to be free. Only then can
beings stop worrying about being men or women, of being male or female, and
turn their attention to being itself.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that many
works try to fall within the “utopian tradition of imagining a world without
gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world
without end” (Haraway 150). Yet as Anne Balsamo notes of Arthur Kroker´s
analysis of the female body in Body Invaders, “female bodies continue to
mark gender: thus they announce the deployment of a gendered opposition of
bodies in postmodern theory. This is a gendered opposition, whereby the One
(recently “invaded” body) is unmarked by gender and the Other (the always
postmodern body) is female. Such is that the fate of the female body in the
postmodern cultural imaginary: an always silent/silenced conceptual place
holder in hysterical male discourse” (Balsamo 32).
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” Donna Haraway
proposes seeing the cyborg as a “utopian” paradigm through which one may pursue
an understanding of the gendered body by providing a hybrid context through
which to represent unfamiliar “otherness.” This stems from Haraway’s idea that
“There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not
even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category
constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social
practices” (Haraway 155). It is in this context that she introduces the cyborg
as a female construct. “The cyborg,” states Haraway, “is a matter of fiction
and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century” (my emphasis, 149).
I am troubled by what seems to be Haraway´s
conclusion that the cyborg is exclusively a female construct, especially since
Haraway begins her argument with a more generic and genderless definition of
the cyborg. Yet Haraway eventually takes for granted that the dichotomy of the
cyborg is by nature female. Even though
“A cyborg,” as Haraway states earlier, “is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of
machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction” (149) she eventually claims that the cyborg is a female construct. As
one can roughly see there is no direct link between the “cyborg” as defined
above and its identification with “women’s experience,” or any gendered
experience per se, as stated later by Haraway. This overt identification of the
cyborg with “women” is reinforced when Haraway later states that the cyborg is
“an ultimate self-untied at last from all dependency, a man in space” (151).
Another problem with Haraway’s cyborg as female stems
from her statement that
Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the
cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the
garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its
completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of
community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal
project the cyborg could not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of
mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. (Haraway 151)
Haraway’s utopia seems to reject most previous
ideas of the utopian. Though I admit that many books and movies have idealized
the soulless cyborg as a rebel against societal conformity (and patriarchal
oppression), I find it somewhat strange that Haraway feels moved to not only
overgeneralize this idea of total individualization but to embrace it so
wholeheartedly. After all, if a cyborg, by her own admission, is part machine
part organism, then is it not expected that part of it will eventually
deteriorate into dust? This lack of dreaming and of hope also seems to imply
that the cyborg has no human quality: i.e. a human brain. As such, Haraway’s idea
of the cyborg is supported mostly by the implementation of an AI rather than
the old standard wetware. This only seems to compound one’s sense that one must
strip the cyborg of all —dare I say it— humanity for the cyborg to be defined
as Haraway seems to infer, as intrinsically female. One may even argue that the
cyborg is homosexual by nature since it has no interest in seeking heterosexual
mates (Or could it be asexual? Not really since Haraway makes it clear that it
is female, but it would be an interesting thought.). Why not just say that it
looks for no mate at all? That would
make more sense given that Haraway had just previously defined the cyborg as “a
creature in a post-gender world…,” and, as such, it might make more sense that
it would not seek a mate at all, whether homo- or hetero- (150).
Even so, I am particularly intrigued by how, in
some cases, the present discourse of the androids, cyborgs, and, especially,
gynoids propose an idealized utopian (/dystopian) form of female (or male)
being, and how this discourse evolves into a gendered hybrid identity. This
identity might not present a true discourse between the One and the Other for,
as a transgressed identity, its borders are not necessarily well defined. There
is the possibility of seepage from one to the other, from male into female into
male, from human to machine to human. As Balsamo notes, “Cyborg bodies, then,
cannot be conceived as belonging wholly to either culture or nature; they are
neither wholly technological nor completely organic. In a similar sense, cyborg
bodies cannot be completely discursive. Cyborgs are a matter of fiction and a
matter of lived experience” (33). As such, the cyborg’s “identity is predicated
on transgressed boundaries” (Balsamo 32).
In “The
Lonely” James A. Corry (played by Jack Warden) is serving time for a murder he didn’t
commit on a penal asteroid out there somewhere nine million miles away in an
unspecified future. Corry’s only contact with society is with the captain and
crew of a supply ship that visits his quadrant regularly every four months or
so. Other than that, Corry is all alone in what represents a desolate asteroid,
reminiscent of the Arizona desert, alone in a rundown metal shack, flanking a rundown
touring car of centuries gone by for company, and running makeshift parlor games
as entertainment. As the opening narration sums it up for us: “Now witness if
you will a man’s mind and body shriveling in the sun, a man dying of loneliness.”
Corry’s physical isolation accentuates the existential
loneliness felt by man during the mid-twentieth century, and its effect on the
human psyche. Loneliness is that state of mind from which no human being can
completely escape. This phenomenon and its effects upon the psyche has been explored
before by writers such as Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe 1719) and Adolfo
Bioy-Casares (La invención de Morel 1940. Translated as The Invention
of Morel). The Twilight Zone has
also explored this theme in some of its episodes, such as in its pilot episode “Where
Is Everybody?” (aired 2.Oct.1959) where Mike Ferris (played by Earl Holliman) finds himself
in a town strangely devoid of people. But despite the emptiness, he has the odd
feeling that he’s being watched. The story ends with the revelation that Ferris
is an astronaut who has been in an isolation chamber as part of laboratory
experiments to gauge man’s ability to travel for long periods alone in outer
space. As the closing narration warns us “Up there, up there in the vastness of
space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It
sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting...in
The Twilight Zone.” But isolation is
more than an experiment, and is not exclusive to outer space. Loneliness is
real and, as the opening narration reminds us, “The place is here, the time is
now, and the journey into the shadows that we're about to watch could be OUR
journey.” And our journey is being-in-itself, as “an undetermined and constant
movement situated between disclosure and concealment” of the truth of the fe-male
self (Del Río 387).
Of course the problem is: Who or what is the
proper companion?
Concepts such as journey, abandonment and
loneliness have been considered by writers before. For example in Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe we are confronted with a man marooned on an island for
years, who alone at first eventually
eventually befriends a (noble) savage whom Crusoe saves from cannibals.
Defoe’s novel seems to propose that a savage, Friday, given its simpleness of
being, is the ideal companion for a civilized and cultured man stranded on a deserted
island. But this is only possible if the character of the savage is somewhat
feminized by turning him into a slave/servant, the ideal of the Noble Savage, or
a child of nature, and thus subservient to the ideas and whims of the West and
the rationality of civilization. Even though Defoe’s tale is seen mostly as a
cautionary tale and a statement of civilized Europe’s somewhat screwed-up ideals
and treatment of the New World and its inhabitants, it points to the paternalizing
attitudes of the (civilized) male over its (savage) inferior (i.e., the female)
in any (un)natural relationship, being the male One and its inferior seen as
its Other.
This same idea is present in the campy sci-fi
version Robinson Crusoe Goes to Mars (Byron Haskin 1964) in the guise of
a small monkey which “manned” (or, better yet, monkeyed?) a previous Mars
probe, and later by an alien humanoid who ends up being the extraterrestrial
Friday, an ideal (estranged) Other. An equally yet somewhat more telling of the
imposition of correct social sexual mores is the Disneyesque version of this
story of abandonment, The Swiss Family Robinson2 (Ken Annakin
1960). The problem of abandonment and loneliness is compounded by the presence
of a cast ensemble in the place of the One. It is not the plight of a sole
survivor who is marooned, but of a family unit. Equally complicated is the fact
that the Other is already inserted in the unit in the figure of a surviving
young woman, Roberta, the Captain’s niece (played by Janet Munro). Roberta is
the “perfect” (girl) Friday since she will eventually fulfill her role as ideal
companion in the movie. Roberta will be referred to by the androgynous (almost
male) moniker “Bertie” until she eventually becomes the intended for the
family’s elder son, and, being the only other female, a focus of discord
between the all-male Robinson siblings. Even in isolation the gendered
construct of being female wreaks havoc on the peaceful quasi-utopian illusion
of the island paradise. Bertie’s blossoming into the more formal and gendered, and
more feminine, Roberta is foreshadowed by the dual nature in her proper name
Robert-a, a subtle semblance of her hybrid identity.
But the idea of an ideal mate can lead to more
questionable and interesting propositions, as dealt (un/intentionally?) in the
television series Lost in Space (1965-1968) where the perfect companion
may not be organic at all, but an inorganic surrogate, present in the figure of
Robbie the Robot (portrayed by Bob May). Even though the series was mostly
campy fantasy, especially in its last year of production, Lost in Space
is just another version of Robinson Crusoe story only set in Outer
Space. It is the story of a family (the Robinsons) and their crew, (the pilot
and the stowaway) marooned in space without an inkling of how to return to
their known universe. Father, mother, two daughters and a son, plus a pilot and
the stowaway bring the total to seven, four males and three females. An uneven
number and one that leaves someone (eventually) alone, in this case presumably
the son Will Robinson (portrayed by Bill Mummy). The presence of the robot is
not only as an essential part of the equipment necessary to their operations
but, as it will eventually play out, to their well-being as humans, by becoming
a friend and companion to the son, Will, and an eventual mate. One has to
consider that Will is somewhat Other-less in the matrix of the story. He is the
only character which has no Other to play off, except for his sister Penny (portrayed
by Angela Cartwright) and Dr. Zachary Smith (portrayed by Jonathan Harris). Barring
any ideas of incest or pedophilia, it actually does present a weird interest triangle
between the three Others and Will as its focus. This is remedied, somewhat, by
playing the tensions off Penny (as sibling) and Dr. Smith (as male antagonist)
against Will, who allies himself with Robbie the Robot. As Will Robinson’s “play-mate” Robbie becomes
an early example of machine supplanting “natural” relations between humans,
and, effectively, between male and female while avoiding any questionable
relationship between his female sibling and the male antagonist. Which, in
retrospect, is no weirder than the relation between Chuck Noland and Wilson —portrayed
by Tom Hanks and Wilson Soccer Ball respectively— in Robert Zemeckis’ Cast
Away (2000). It is, after all, about man confronting his loneliness through
the (in/visible) duality of his being—the Other—, even if that duality is
represented by a bloodied hand print on a semi-deflated football.
Returning to “The Lonely” it seems to imply that
what releases human beings from their existential angst is not just the
presence of another human, as evidenced by Corry’s (a la Defoe’s Crusoe)
troubled excitement at the arrival of the supply ship (cannibals/pirates) from
Earth (neighboring islands/Europe), but of a mate (his Friday). As always, the
proposal of The Twilight Zone is to
explore the quirks of human existence, and, in this particular episode, this
quest emphasizes the human quest for companionship as defined (as in almost
every other stereotypical case) by a woman. Even though the story is structured
lightly on what seems to be a (gendered) dichotomy of “authority, power, and
control,” (Cranny-Francis 156) I believe that it is more a problem of the human
sense of Being before the void, not only embodied but augmented in the
simulacra of the female android or gynoid.
In “The lonely” there are two concepts being queried:
first, the image of the female as companion; and second, the idea of technology
and machines as substitutes to nature (and as companion). Both concepts are
common in the defining ideals of the male (boys and their toys), and “The
Lonely” explores both concepts as they become one. Key to this idea is the
common practice underlying in man´s relations to the female to machines, where
both are seen as one and the same—women treated as objects (possession),
machines being feminized (car referred to as she). First the female figure and its male observer
would become a determining factor as to the roles played by women in science
fiction. Laura Mulvey’s analysis of spectatorship in “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema” proposes that all cinematic representations fall into
categories of male voyeurism or male sociophilia. Mulvey also states that it is
the traditional role of women in films, especially during the 1950s and 1960s,
to carry forth the pleasure images thus always in display to the masculine
gaze.
Traditionally,
the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the
characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator
within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side
of the screen. (Mulvey 19)
Even though Mulvey is correct in her assessment
of male fantasy, Paul Wells' argument in “The Invisible Man: Shrinking
Masculinity in the 1950s Science Fiction B-Movie,” brings to light an
interesting, and equally valid, counterpoint to her proposal. Wells’ claim that
the American male has lost his ‘masculinity’ during the cavalcade of science
fiction films of the 1950s is not too far from the truth. Accordingly the male
personae upheld by society until the 1940s had started to break down due, in
part, to the new roles played by women during the Second World War, roles that
openly questioned man’s tower of authority, and the justification of the ruling
patriarchy. Furthermore, Wells argues that during the 1950s the supremacy of
the male was put in question especially by the boom of the science fiction film
industry. For example, Wells indicates that “time and again, men in sci-fi
B-movie[s] demonstrate ineptitude in their attempt to secure power and take
control of their circumstances” (Wells 182). This ineptitude delivered a great
blow to man’s exclusive claim of dominion and authority over nature through
science. The stereotyped scientist is perceived as an “isolated figure,
single-mindedly pursuing his research, sometimes at great personal cost, but
with an unbridled energy and intensity that sometimes borders on the
obsessive,” his masculinity usually left unexplored (Wells 183). In fact, this
stoic, almost monkish personae tends to reflect a personal repulsion for the
other sex.
The other sex is in fact seen as a bothersome
inconvenience that may have to be suffered given social convention. Even so,
the scientist is usually portrayed as a person who often neglects his wife,
focusing all his attention on his work. Hence movies tend to depend on the
antisocial, “de-sexualized” rationalistic paradigm to create a sub-tension in
the plot showing the “inadequacies” of the scientific de-naturalized male, such
as in Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox 1956) and The Thing (From
Another World) (Christian Nyby 1951).
One classic pre-1950s case in point is James
Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), where the scientist, Henry Frankenstein
(played by Colin Clive), becomes “the Promethean figure of modern science” at
the expense of becoming, ironically, impotent, as Michael Sevastakis notes:
Whereas
the count in Browning’s Dracula has brought life-in-death to those with whom he
came in contact, Dr. Frankenstein is interested in bringing a death-in-life to
his creation. Once he has aided in the process of creation, however, he [Henry Frankenstein]
is physically and mentally incapacitated and cannot for a time go through the
marriage ceremony (60).
On the other hand, Virginia Wright Wexman’s work Creating
the Couple sheds light into the common misgivings that scholars have
reflected in their interpretations of male-female relationships during the
1950s (e.g. Mulvey). Wexman points out that “By 1950 52 percent of women worked
outside the home.... As a result, the relations between the sexes became newly
charged with issues of competition and dominance” (168). This new and open
“threat to the traditional gender hierarchy” brought about new concerns which
imperiled the ruling concept of the domesticated housewife. Current trends,
though, have shown that through a careful appreciation and study of science
fiction of the 50s and 60s we are able to access a “critique of the control
exerted over women’s lives by culture in which their reality is denied in favour
of a constructed image that serves the maintenance of a gender hierarchy” (Shaw
264). But, while it is true that June Cleaver (played by Barbara Billingsley),
from Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963), and Donna Stone (played by Donna
Reed), from The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966), tried to sell the myth of
the perfect female role as wife and homemaker, women in the real world were
advancing precariously into the world reserved for male roles of business and
sciences, though in those few examples television series portrayed her as a
hybrid of business and homemaker as seen in the character of Dr. Maureen
Robinson played by June Lockhart in Lost in Space. Even so, these
characters were few and mostly paired to a strong male figure, somewhat
offsetting any power the female character may wield. As Debbie Shaw notes in “In
Her Own Image: The Constructed Female in Women’s Science Fiction”
A
large component of women’s oppression originates in the myth that we [women]
are condemned to frailty, both physical and mental, through our reproductive
capacity and it is this, plus the demand that we conform to a physical image of
the ‘ideal’ woman, that imposes the burden. (274)
This role of the “female” should be approached from
a possibly less jilted point-of-view. For example L. Timmel Duchamp, in her
essay on the construct of the “housewife” in the later part of the twentieth
century, tries to remember what made the actual transition from “housewife” to
“career girl” seem so traumatic back in the 1950s and 1960s. As she remembers
her experience of her own mother’s life during that period she reflects that
all is not as it seemed.
Her care to earn less than my father had had as
much to do with her desperate attempts to “feel like a woman” (as she usually
put it) as with the desire to preserve my father’s masculine pride. It had
never occurred to me that her
pride—as a—“real woman”—required this difference. She might be a “career girl”
when she was on the job (where men as well as women had to jump when she said
“jump!”) functioning like a man, but at home, at least, she could act like a
woman—which meant if not cooking and sewing, at least bringing in less money
and wearing cosmetics and “feminine” clothes. (Duchamp 21)
Duchamp’s mother’s identity doesn’t exactly
conform to the traditional Western subject as described by Sheryll Vint in her
essay “Double Identity: Interpellation to Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian Trilogy.” In
it she defines the process of subject formation as “formed by both what is
(those identifications we make, those calls we answer) and what is not
(identifications we reject, calls we refuse). The process of subject formation
thus plays on doubled meaning of the word identity as both unique
characteristics and as sameness. To construct a definition of self (identity)
we need to describe what we see as the same as this self (what we identify
with) and set the boundary where this self ends and becomes other” (407). Duchamp’s
mother is a true hybrid identity (though not a cyborg, as Haraway would lead us
to prefer), in her role as both female and male, mother (in her inward role as
“housewife”) and (somewhat) father (in her outward role as a “career girl”). She
balances being both, unique yet the same.
But this is not an option that everyone can
envision for female roles during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in popular
media. Such an example is the episode “The Lateness of the Hour” (TZ aired 2.Dec.1960). Jana (played by
Inger Stevens) has lived all her life, with her parents, in the protection of
her house and in total isolation from the world. She not only resents her
exclusion from life she resents the fact that she has no life to speak of. Her prison is both outward as it is
inward, in the form of the house, and in her gynoid nature—a fact which
compounds the problem at hand. Both represent the artificial environment in
which she has been raised, and which has impeded her true role to be achieved. For
Jana is unable to come to terms with the traditional subject as she learns that
she has no boundaries, that she is unique yet not the same, and she is
bounded by her true (hidden) nature as a gynoid.
It is the female role, the role of mother-housewife
that the “daughter” in “The Lateness of the Hour” wishes to embody. To fully
feel alive. This, of course, brings horror to her parents, who have lived a
long and sterile secret. For Jana is not even human. She is an android—a
gynoid—the perfect and ever unchanging daughter. The parents never counted on
her developing this psychological need to be “feminine”—to be a woman—so they
never figured they needed to tell her the truth about her identity. This need
to be “feminine” is now compounded by the artificial make of the gynoid. She now
not only wants to be “female,” she wants to be human—to feel, to love and to have
a family. All which is to be denied Jana as gynoid, eventually loses her mind,
not only because she is not human, but because she is not even she, and cannot
bear the uselessness of her apparent form.
A contrasting example of this idea is “I Sing the
Body Electric” (TZ aired 18.May.1962)
where the gynoid takes the form of a sweet, yet stern, grandmother who aids a
bachelor father to raise his children as a surrogate mother figure. This gynoid
is not to be seen as a substitute of the lost companion and lover, she does not
present herself as a remedy for the male (in the role of the wife), but as an
aid which complements the natural role of nourishing and protection needed by
the family, one that once her job is done will leave and return to her storage.
The story seems to imply that man can only be true to one woman and that the
loss of her demands that the man be faithful to her memory. Yet given the lack
of a “housewife,” society demands that this void be filled by an entity. The
presentation of an artificial “mother,” not to be confused as a sexual but as a
(grand)motherly figure, prevents the man-father of crossing over to the female role
of woman-mother while allowing him to fulfill his primary male role as patriarch-provider.3
Returning to “The Lonely,” Corry, as a fallen
being, does not fall into these idealized male roles, and as such, is forsaken
from all societal connections. As a consequence, he has no “female” figure to
focus his being. He is the (ne’er-do-well) rogue of the old westerns and the
film-noir mysteries that lives exiled
in the limits of society. But, contrary to romantic rogues such as Clark Gable
in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming 1939) and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca
(Michael Curtiz 1942), Jack Warden’s character is a misfit rogue who is ousted
from society against his will and wants desperately to return to the security
of the community.
Captain Allenby, the penal supply ship’s
commander (played by John Dehner), feels sorry for Corry’s condition. Part of
the subplot deals with the inhumanity with which a society may punish a human
being for crimes committed against society. Corry has been sentenced to fifty
years of solitary confinement on an isolated asteroid by the authorities on
Earth. Since his sentencing, Corry’s lawyer has tried to appeal the decision.
But the courts are harsh, and, given that Corry’s crime is murder, even though
it was in self-defense, his plight falls on unsympathetic ears. As such Allenby
decides to lessen Corry’s inhumane burden by a token of his latent and weary humanity:
Allenby brings Corry a consort, of a sort, a robot named Alicia (played by Jean
Marsh).
Corry’s objection stems from the isolation
expressed by his barren hostile surroundings. It is the world of the Western.
The Western defines clearly the binary female role between the schoolmarm and
the saloon girl, the former defining the temperament of civilization, the
latter defining the passion of the Wild West. The male is represented as a wild
card, a somewhat lovable rogue who paired to the right woman can become an
example of society, but if seduced by the wrong woman he becomes the epitome of
lust and recklessness. This struggle is present in such movies as Angel and
the Badman (James Edward Grant 1947), Shane (George Stevens 1953) and
the television series Gunsmoke (1955-1975) where the hero is depicted as
constantly straddling both the good as the bad. The loner, viewed outside
civilization, and the law, roams between both world, seduced by the wild
passion of the saloon but attracted to the civility of the school. A good
example of this struggle is the episode “Two” (TZ aired 15.Sep.1961). A post-apocalyptic retelling of
Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, this story deals with the survival of
two opposing warriors of an all-out global war, one male (Charles Bronson) and
one female (Elizabeth Montgomery). We only listen to the male figure as the
female, for reasons not explained, doesn’t talk.4 As we see them progress
through the episode, and through the desolated city, their hatred and distrust
wanes as they grow comfortable with each other and end, eventually, walking
away hand in hand towards an unknown future, somewhat like Adam and Eve after
they have been driven out of the Garden to face the perils of a new world
together. Elizabeth Montgomery’s character is portrayed as both feral and feminine,
more a Lilith than an Eve. Yet her female role eventually takes over and allows
her “softer” side to rise to the occasion. This is evident when she says "Precrassny",
which is Russian for pretty, when looking at a dress and the proceeds to put on
the dress. Meanwhile Bronson’s character “shaves” thus revealing a civilized
man under the wild savagery of the warrior. What makes it more poignant is that
this is the only word she utters during the whole episode, while Bronson’s
character talks throughout the whole episode Montgomery´s only verbalization is
in reference to a frilly dress on display at a store window.
This episode seems to imply one of two things (or
maybe both): either that men are superior to women given their power of reason
over impulse, or that women are mere objects for men’s fulfillment and
pleasure. This is especially relevant given Montgomery’s portrayal of her
character as a feral child (Tarzan), a female Friday for Bronson’s Crusoe. She
is, in fact, the perfect (or at least better) Friday, for she is not only a
Noble-ized Savage, but a female (Eve) with which Bronson’s character (Adam) may
fulfill his role as patriarch and re-populate the world. Thus Montgomery’s
character not only transforms her sex role by adopting a hybrid identity, as construct
of the warrior and feminine, but through her femaleness allows Bronson’s
character to become a more fulfilled male.
This struggle between the sex roles can be seen in
The Postman (Kevin Costner 1997) Kevin Costner eventually resigns
himself to accept the female companion not as lover but as a partner, and thus,
equally, resign himself to not wander aimlessly anymore through the New Old
West the frontier out of the post-apocalyptic western American plains. As in
the Old Western motif woman and child (daughter), lover and loved, bring
civilization to the savage wilderness of man—represented in the form of the
post-apocalyptic ravaged lands of the American Northwest.. The unwilling hero,
a post-apocalyptic Shane, saunters up to once again defend and solidify his
future through the guise of the female.
But as Sigmund Freud would state, this future is
double-edged. And man must face his true fears—his nakedness, especially before
the Other. “Whenever primitive man has set up a taboo,” states Freud, “he fears
some danger and it cannot be disputed that a generalized dread of women is
expressed in all these rules of avoidance. The man is afraid of being weakened
by the woman, infected with her femininity” (“The Taboo of Virginity” 198). In
facing the female man is afraid of losing his virility—his maleness—, in a
sense, he is afraid of becoming a “girly-man.” Or, in event, of not be(com)ing
at all. The female marks the end of his liberty—more libertine—, she announces
the end of the male’s lack of responsibility and of the sense of pure freedom
from all constraints. She also defines the possibility of never reaching truth,
the ideals and dreams by which the male guides all his actions. In fact, the
Postman never arrives at his set destination, he never reaches the place he had
originally set for, nor, for that matter, the Pacific Coast, he allows himself
to be “shackled” to a “lesser” goal. It is this fear of not reaching one’s true
goal, of giving up one´s dream—or true destiny—that makes the female such a
terrifying entity.
In “The Lonely” Corry is equally afraid of losing
his true goal. In fact, Alicia serves as a remembrance of earth, of the civilization
Corry had to leave behind because of his “imprisonment,” and it is the fear of
giving up, the underlying realization and resignation of never been able to go
back, that makes Corry reject her. For Alicia is a (virtual) reminder, if not a
balm, of his exiled being, of his ostracization from society, and from humanity
itself. Alicia is an institutional attempt to civilize, or rather to give the
illusion of civilization to social misfits. As a construct the gynoid allows
man to focus his desires on an objective site of action, an outward unconscious
which deflects the natural impulse or desire allowing him to experiment with
various possibilities and outcomes without risking committing himself to any
one of them. Barring his ostracized condition, Alicia allows Corry to fix the
physical and the psychological boundaries of the self by allowing Corry to seek
and possess her in his loneliness.
And she does achieve civilizing Corry, for Corry,
in his barren delusion, finally accepts Alicia as his companion to the point
that he really believes that she is
‘real’. But, with the help of violent force, this illusion is lifted when
Allenby shoots Alicia in the face revealing the ugliness of the circuitry that
was hidden under the falsity of womanhood.
With this revelation we find out that the
scientific/technological community forms an integral part of the illusion
makers, if not the greatest of all illusions themselves.5 For the
woman, Alicia, is not flesh and blood but a creation of someone’s belief of the
ideal woman, the techno-scientific version of Pygmalion’s Galatea or Hephaestus’
Pandora. But, instead of being a creation of divine purity, Alicia is revealed
to be no more than another tool, another machine created by humans to fool man,
with her pretty face —conveniently shot off by Allenby—, into believing that he
is not alone in the world. With that, another lie that keeps humanity, and, in
this case, man under control is destroyed. Male’s reason for being, and the well-being
of society, the propagation of his seeds to preserve the species, is revealed
as a conspiratorial lie established, ironically, by a patriarchal society to
suppress him from acting out his own will.
During the 1950s and early 1960s science and
technology functioned to support societal illusions of correct roles for man
and woman.6 This societal illusion, which hides in itself the
loneliness veiled by technology, and which eventually eats at a human’s soul,
leaving it helpless in a nauseating sterile void, is revealed from under the
artificial female societal mask as Allenby tells Corry: “All you're leaving
behind is loneliness.” Corry, stunned by his willingness to accept the
pseudo-reality that was created by an authoritarian science and technology,
replies: “I must remember that. I must remember to keep that in mind” (“The
Lonely”). In other words, if Corry doesn't keep the remembrance of this
illusion alive, he might fall again victim to the dangers and vanities of
trusting the plastic pleasures of the created feminine, and of civilization as
a whole. He must remember to remember what must be, not what is, for what is is
only an illusion upon which his whole life is constructed.7 One
could say that God (Allenby) giveth and God (Allenby) taketh away.
It had taken Corry eleven months to accept this
othered Other by falling prey to the illusions of femininity, and of
civilization. And, it takes a fleeting action of violence to recuperate his
freedom by destroying the other.
It is not true that human beings delay loving or
hating until they have studied and become familiar with the nature of the object
to which these affects apply. On the contrary they love impulsively, from
emotional motives which have nothing to do with knowledge, and whose operation
is at most weakened by reflection and consideration. (Leonardo da Vinci
74)
Allenby’s
violent act against Alicia, as woman, depends heavily on seeing this woman as a
menacing other that keeps Corry from his true freedom, from his reality, by
providing, effectively, a false comforting illusion of happiness amidst the
desolation of his surroundings. Alicia had fulfilled her role as female; she
had been the oasis in the desert of Corry’s Being. Alicia’s mission/crime was
to seduce Corry into believing she was human. And a woman, to boot. She is
vilified by the same society that offered her as remedy to the pain of Being
(alone) in the world. She is reduced to an aberration against nature, and man. And
she is discarded as old rubbish, along with the beat-up jalopy and the run-down
metal shack that once defined Corry’s reality.
Alicia’s vilification, not only as android/cyborg
but as well as female, is standard practice in science fiction. It is the fear
of the unnatural Other, a fear grasped in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926).8 Rotwang’s Maria,
gynoid, represents the idea of the evil that that infernal creation called
woman can be if left to her own doings. But this male paranoia is again
revealed as misdirected when it is revealed that the gynoid Maria is the result
of a male centered fear of the Other, of the ambiguous power of the natural female
Maria, It is the forceful encounter of the opposites as defined by the medieval
concept of AVE-EVA, the conceptual dichotomy of woman as Saint (in form of the
human Maria) and Whore (in the form of the gynoid Maria). Unfortunately, this
male attempt to (re)create the (ideal?) female backfires not only when Rotwang loses
control over the robot, but because it was created to create havoc and seduce
the masses with her female wiles.9 The idea of the gynoid Maria in Fritz Lang’s movie warns us not to accept
something at face value (pun intended), but to look deep under the covers, or
the war-paint, to see the true horrors of an irrational artificial being
determined to eventually destroy humanity. She is the vagina dentata
personified, for she devours the goodness of men through her sex. Did her
creator know what he was unleashing on man? Did the creator know what he was
unleashing upon him-self?
Part of the problem is that Alicia is created in
the image of the female. She is not only a product of man’s ingenuity—of
technology, but she is molded in the form of the Other, and not just any Other
but the idealized Other—the female. As in the story of Adam and Eve God creates
woman, not from the same material as man (the clay of the Earth) nor does He breathe
life into her, but he takes a rib, an object defined by man’s previous being,
and shapes woman out of it (Genesis 2). She is an object made from an objectified
being, a simulacrum of the true being—man. As Eve is denied the same
essence in her coming to be so Alicia is denied her essence in her illusion of
being female. In a sense, she is a hand me down. As much, as in Genesis, and unlike
Rotwang’s Maria, Alicia is supposed to be created for a good—that is, she is not
to undermine man’s patriarchal society but to uphold its egalitarian status.
Alicia is created to be of a service to her male ‘owner.’ Equally present in
her figure is the negativity of the created Other, as portrayed by Hephaestus’
Pandora, the woman commissioned by the gods to punish and torment man. So, in
essence, Alicia is the embodiment of the eternal hybrid—between good and
evil.
In the real world, man spends his efforts and his
technology in remaking the female, not only in her physique, but through her
surroundings, recreating woman’s role as mother, wife, caretaker, and lover.
And in real life, science does not liberate women from their slavery, but, as
demonstrated by their fictional counterparts, science reconstructs her prison
in such ways as to hide from her the truth behind those marvelous technological
advances thus perpetuating her slavery (e.g. House of Tomorrow, Kitchen
of Tomorrow, Avery 1949). As Adorno puts it: “The individual who supported
society bore its disfiguring mark: seemingly free, he was actually the product
of its economic and social apparatus,” (42) and, in the end, as in the case of
Corry and Alicia, its slave. For in the end Corry became not a prisoner of
Alicia, but of a simulacrum of the ideal, a rational ideal which represented
the rational male ideal of the correct female role.
Again, I must return to the problem of man’s apparent
acceptance/rejection of technology as his savior from nature. When Corry opens
the box in which Captain Allenby has smuggled Alicia —for it would cost Allenby
his job if the authorities had found out about what the box contained— Corry is
outright shocked, insulted and, even, disgusted by its contents.10 As
stated above, Captain Allenby had not revealed to Corry what the box contained.
Playing the part of a merciful promethean god Allenby had decided, without prior
consultation with anyone, that Corry was in the need of something to make his
sentence more bearable. What is significant is not so much the choice of a
female companion, rather that said companion is not one of flesh and bones but
one, obviously, created by male technicians for those who not only are lonely
but incapable of achieving a real relationship on their own (with a real woman,
even).11 Obviously we are confronted here with a version of the
Adam-Eve motif, where the demiurge (in this case Captain Allenby, and by
extension society) has provided this futuristic Adam (Corry) with an adequate (female)
mate for companionship (Alicia).12
Corry is the post-apocalyptic pioneer, the
isolated pilgrim forced into an isolated world barren and forgotten by
civilization living as a hermit in a forsaken environment. Alicia brings the
softness and the hope of a civilized world. But, instead of being provided with
a woman/companion of flesh and blood, Corry is surprised by a mechanical
substitute: an artificial remembrance of an era gone by. Corry is instantly
repulsed by this ever servile unnatural substitute of nature for it not being
real, it—Alicia—is not of flesh and blood, it/she cannot feel. Or, can't
it/she? For when Corry rejects her and roughly manhandles her, she weeps.
Emotions are supposed to be inherently human, and
only human. That the machine—Alicia—weeps brings to question who or what is
more human: Alicia, as dejected object, or Corry as dejected subject. The self
is thrown into shock by the sudden appearance of the normal, the natural,
somewhat like getting water from a stone.
Male interaction is then centered on a relationship
with an artificial female creation, a gynoid, and not with a human female. It
underlies our willingness to forego human contact for this sterile substitute. “If
human identity—figured in terms of that which makes us uniquely ourselves—is
constructed out of both identifications and repudiations, then anyone or
anything that occupies the margin of self and other threatens the (constructed)
existence of the self.” (Vint 405) Alicia not only straddles the boundaries
between the savage and the civilized, but also the boundaries between the
natural and the unnatural—between flesh and machine. She not only disrupts Corry’s
routine —as outcast—, but his sense of being male—human.
This male created creature underlines an attempt
to subvert the freedom of human will and overcome the modern fear of
uselessness in males by imposing, forcefully, upon females the supremacy of
male rationality over female irrationality, and, in its wake, a superiority of
technology over nature.13 Corry’s need for companionship, and for a
reason for being, eventually results in his forgetting that Alicia is not
human. In the end Corry has to realize that she is not human and that she must
be content with her reality: a reality defined by the fact that she is not real
but a manufactured substitute to look real, inhuman yet humanlike.
We can see a similar example in Steve Dejarnatt’s
Cherry 2000 (1988) where the ideal female is portrayed as an always
willing, subservient and submissive programmed electronic mate. In this movie
Melanie Griffith, as a tomboyish mercenary, is hired by a businessman to find a
new host to replace his live-in female consort, an android, which depicts the
idealized female as a perfect wife and lover sans a soul, always willing and
submissive to male desires. In a skewed attempt at male dominance over nature,
women have been subjected to being reduced and reproduced as nothing more than
mere mechanical commodities in the service of the ruling patriarchy.
Alicia’s roboticity reflects what Ana G.
Jonasdottir talks about in Why Women are Oppressed. Jonasdottir believes
that in the same way that capitalism exploits the labor force men expropriate
women’s capacity to give life and love (in English 19). As such Alicia’s
roboticity can be seen as the epitome of how flesh and blood women give their
all to men and their families: they are expected to “give up their selves,
bodies and minds,” spending their energies “in working for and loving others
than themselves” selflessly (English 19). And we expect them to hide their
flaws. They are to be perfect beings, virtual representations of the proper
woman: hard working and servile to men. Or, as Shaw explains in reference to
Tanith Lee’s The Electric Forest, “Magda [a cloned being] is the
idealized female, the virgin-angel, manipulable to men’s desire ....” (Shaw
277). In her novel Tanith Lee describes Magda “a doll which could be bathed,
with washable tresses. She was a doll who could walk and talk, and eat and
drink, and have orgasms” (qtd. in Shaw 277). For all (male) intents: perfect.
Magda is emblematic of what could be deemed today
as The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes 1975) mentality which has dominated,
in a rather cynical way, our perception of the ideal female role. This movie
proposes a community where women are replaced by automatons that do their
husbands bidding. The perfect being, a subservient female machine, reflects
upon the true nature of the gendered android/cyborg which maintains the social
ideal of the perfect woman: Aristotle’s incomplete ir/rational being as
improved by the machine heuristics. Following on the lines of Sharalyn Orbaugh
remarks in “Sex and the Single Cyborg”, the gynoid — as represented in figures
such as the blonde ditzy escort Pris in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) and
the domesticated life size Barbie Cherry 2000 in Cherry 2000— “represent
an ideal version of the modernist conception of the body/self. But the
conceptual price that must be paid for our increasing attempts to control the
body is the recognition that the repressed always returns” (443). But from movies
such as Species (Roger Donaldson 1995)—where the fear of genetic
hybridity is compounded with the natural fear of women (a postmodern take of
the medieval AVE-EVA syndrome)—, to the television series Sex in the City
(1998-2004)—where women adopt a more male care-free attitude toward sex—, the
female personae has become a very confusing and dangerous entity to deal with—not
only for men, but for women themselves.14
Who is fooled: The male viewer/user or the female
object/use? Apparently the battle of the sexes has left us wondering who is the
oppressed and who the oppressor is. Sex differences, as ambiguous constructs of
the body, is no more than an agent for a simulacra, vis a vis, a virtual self poised upon defining “the human/machine
interrelation configured through a female body [that] is not mind/machine, but
body/machine” (Cranny-Francis 155).
The cyborg or android image … conveys a very
ambiguous message for women. The female androids and cyborgs that appear in
fiction reinforce the cultural production of femininity as accessible sexuality
rather than invulnerable authority, as a use/object rather than a user/subject.
In other words, the female cyborg (or android) may have deconstructive
potential for women who read the figure resistantly. But the figure has not
actually offered women a position within the debate at all. The human/machine
anxiety enacted within the technological imaginary was about men, authority,
power, and control—not about “the human.” In fact,… it configures “the human”
conventionally as “the masculine.”(Cranny-Francis 156)
The female construct in midcentury science
fiction is rather complex. It is a hybrid that points to the somewhat simple
confrontation of the male to the Other. To be male is just to be or not to be. As
Vint expressed, to be fe-male implies to be and not to be, to be self and subservient
to man and woman alike. In the works I have looked at the male psyche is
reduced to a simple equation: it is lonely. Its loneliness is marked by its
inability to fulfill his expectations by his own self. The rejection, at first,
of the female defines man’s fear of not realizing his “true” (male) destiny, or
of giving up on his dreams. But, as I have tried to argue, the female role
gives the male role a way or realizing his self, she becomes the true reason to
be by becoming the way to become.
The hybridity expressed by this utopian/dystopian
being, as represented in the acceptance-rejection dichotomy apparently inherent
to the female android (or gynoid) by the human male, could point towards an
understanding of the true hybridity of the human as a gendered self: i.e. the
identification of wo/man as expressed in and through the gynoid as a pursuit of
Being-in-itself. This gendered being, as an extension of the male-female “sex
role” or “sex differences” dichotomy, is, in itself, an observance of being in
the form of the idealized fe-male: the Being that is both and none in-its-self.
The problem, then, is not that a body is gendered or that the body is cyborged
nor, even, that the machine is gendered, especially, as female (and, as such, subservient),
but that the machine is (virtually) human.
Walter J. Mucher Serra
Guaynabo, PR
October 4th, 2006
Notes
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