More Than Human: the role of the android in cinema
Created | Updated Dec 13, 2004
To the best of this reviewer's knowledge, the term "replicant" was coined by the author Philip K Dick in his novella, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, later to be filmed as the classic sci-fi movie Blade Runner. The book and film both revolve around the role and morality of non-humans in a human society : specifically, non-humans designed to imitate and resemble their creators. The bone of contention, from the blade runners' point of view, was that the Replicants outdid their creators in almost every department, from physical prowess to mental agility. Note Rutger Hauer's quick-fire technical exchange with Dr Elden Tyrell, just prior to Tyrell's gruesome death at the hands of his Replicant son. Roy (Hauer's character) is not just a warrior, he is a thinker, a lover and a tormented soul forced to supress his poetic nature because of his situation.
The Beginning?
This is hardly a new theme in cinema. As early as 1927, Fritz Lang's Metropolis explored the idea of a mechanical human facsimile, superior to the real thing. In the movie, the mechanical Maria is a malevolently-portrayed seductress, the carbon copy of the "real" Maria but with her virtues inverted. The scene where the robot dances for the crowd is the visual apotheosis - Salome-esque, with Lang showing us glimpses of the lascivious men watching her every move. Beauty and the Beast in one smooth metallic package.
Dangerous Minds
Fast forward to more modern times and we have Ian Holm, in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi chiller Alien. Better known these days as the diminutive Bilbo Baggins, Holm plays the synthetic person Ash with chilling calm, which is thrown into sharp relief when he's revealed as the "baddie" of the crew. Ash, as it turns out, has been instructed by the Company to bring home the Alien at any cost, even that of the human crew. It's an interesting motif by the writer and director: in a theme running through the Alien movies, the Company (Weyland-Yutani) is a sinister and intangible mega-corp, whose interests are interchangeable with those of human space exploration (a less-evolved Spacing Guild, to borrow an example from Frank Herbert's Dune). Using the cold, emotionless android as its face and protector of its interests is a masterstroke, particularly given the icy menace Holm brings to the role. The sequel, Aliens, chooses to give the Company a human face in Paul Reiser (of My Two Dads fame - he was the non-hairy one) and the chill factor suffers considerably. Lance Henriksen is the synthetic this time, and a boringly well-behaved one too. Where's the fun in having an ice-cold electronic brain without having the superiority complex (and contempt for Homo Sapiens) to go with it?
As an aside, the last film of the quartet (Alien Resurrection) has Winona Ryder playing the personality-free and irritatingly earnest android. Which, some might say, she had been doing for years anyway.
Human obsolesence
Iain M. Banks, the sci-fi-writing alter ego of the hugely successful novelist Iain Banks (how on earth did he come up with THAT nom de plume?) makes a good point in his novel "Against a Dark Background", which he does not really pursue. A key character in the latter stages of the book is Feril, an android enlisted by the heroine to help her in her quest. In this setting, androids are usually constructed with a simple bipedal humanoid form and basic stylised features, but are clearly designed so as not to be mistaken for the humans that they are so vastly superior to. This is the real fear on the part of mankind: what, after all, could a more frightening thought than the idea that one is obsolete? This paranoia is a frequent motif in Blade Runner, underlined by the sleazy and unpleasant world of the blade runners themselves. Bryant is a bigoted, overweight alcoholic; Gaff, his underling, an ineffectual bully. Deckard is the pick of the bunch: another drinker with serious emotional issues which may or may not be exacerbated by the fact that he is himself a Replicant. The jury is still out on this one and Scott presumably isn't talking. Despite his psychotic tendencies, Roy Batty's love of life marks him apart from the men trying to catch him. As Dr Tyrell says, "The light that burns twice as brightly burns half as long... revel in your time!".
Learning from us, and vice versa
To balance this patchy and simplistic look at artificial beings in cinema, a glimpse at two characters that began as weapons of mass destruction (to use a vogueish term) but ended up "learning" from mankind's compassion and generosity. Brad Bird was inspired by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes' story to create The Iron Giant. This animated feature tells the story of the eponymous 100-foot hero, a sentient weapon created by beings unknown for ends not dealt with in the film. Through its friendship with a young boy it comes to learn the meaning of kindness and empathy, and its murderous instincts are only reawoken by a dastardly government agent trying to exploit it. This is echoed by the epic Terminator 2, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-101 learns the meaning of all-American "humanity", and somehow manages to avoid throttling Edward Furlong's pubescent John Connor. A saccharine morality tale, but a fine action movie. In both cases, these electronic assassins exceed their programming and take on recognisably "human" traits: traits such as friendship, duty, loyalty and self-sacrifice. It is a fruitless debate, but imagine for a moment that these figures survived the end of their respective movies and continued in their relationships with the people around them. Would they have been so successful in assimilating other recognisably human traits, such as hate, vindictiveness, bigotry and jealousy?
Good or bad, synthetic life in film suffers from the same obsession as anything else: our obsession with ourselves. Why else would an alien weapon, such as the Iron Giant, bear such a close physical resemblance to the human form? Why does Star Trek's Data yearn to be more human? To recall a good line from a poor movie (not to be named), "Give a man $100,000,000 and you create a frustrated billionaire". It would seem that giving a "robot" human form creates a being with biological brain-envy but is, in the end, only a reflection of our dissatisfaction with ourselves.
The Beginning?
This is hardly a new theme in cinema. As early as 1927, Fritz Lang's Metropolis explored the idea of a mechanical human facsimile, superior to the real thing. In the movie, the mechanical Maria is a malevolently-portrayed seductress, the carbon copy of the "real" Maria but with her virtues inverted. The scene where the robot dances for the crowd is the visual apotheosis - Salome-esque, with Lang showing us glimpses of the lascivious men watching her every move. Beauty and the Beast in one smooth metallic package.
Dangerous Minds
Fast forward to more modern times and we have Ian Holm, in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi chiller Alien. Better known these days as the diminutive Bilbo Baggins, Holm plays the synthetic person Ash with chilling calm, which is thrown into sharp relief when he's revealed as the "baddie" of the crew. Ash, as it turns out, has been instructed by the Company to bring home the Alien at any cost, even that of the human crew. It's an interesting motif by the writer and director: in a theme running through the Alien movies, the Company (Weyland-Yutani) is a sinister and intangible mega-corp, whose interests are interchangeable with those of human space exploration (a less-evolved Spacing Guild, to borrow an example from Frank Herbert's Dune). Using the cold, emotionless android as its face and protector of its interests is a masterstroke, particularly given the icy menace Holm brings to the role. The sequel, Aliens, chooses to give the Company a human face in Paul Reiser (of My Two Dads fame - he was the non-hairy one) and the chill factor suffers considerably. Lance Henriksen is the synthetic this time, and a boringly well-behaved one too. Where's the fun in having an ice-cold electronic brain without having the superiority complex (and contempt for Homo Sapiens) to go with it?
As an aside, the last film of the quartet (Alien Resurrection) has Winona Ryder playing the personality-free and irritatingly earnest android. Which, some might say, she had been doing for years anyway.
Human obsolesence
Iain M. Banks, the sci-fi-writing alter ego of the hugely successful novelist Iain Banks (how on earth did he come up with THAT nom de plume?) makes a good point in his novel "Against a Dark Background", which he does not really pursue. A key character in the latter stages of the book is Feril, an android enlisted by the heroine to help her in her quest. In this setting, androids are usually constructed with a simple bipedal humanoid form and basic stylised features, but are clearly designed so as not to be mistaken for the humans that they are so vastly superior to. This is the real fear on the part of mankind: what, after all, could a more frightening thought than the idea that one is obsolete? This paranoia is a frequent motif in Blade Runner, underlined by the sleazy and unpleasant world of the blade runners themselves. Bryant is a bigoted, overweight alcoholic; Gaff, his underling, an ineffectual bully. Deckard is the pick of the bunch: another drinker with serious emotional issues which may or may not be exacerbated by the fact that he is himself a Replicant. The jury is still out on this one and Scott presumably isn't talking. Despite his psychotic tendencies, Roy Batty's love of life marks him apart from the men trying to catch him. As Dr Tyrell says, "The light that burns twice as brightly burns half as long... revel in your time!".
Learning from us, and vice versa
To balance this patchy and simplistic look at artificial beings in cinema, a glimpse at two characters that began as weapons of mass destruction (to use a vogueish term) but ended up "learning" from mankind's compassion and generosity. Brad Bird was inspired by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes' story to create The Iron Giant. This animated feature tells the story of the eponymous 100-foot hero, a sentient weapon created by beings unknown for ends not dealt with in the film. Through its friendship with a young boy it comes to learn the meaning of kindness and empathy, and its murderous instincts are only reawoken by a dastardly government agent trying to exploit it. This is echoed by the epic Terminator 2, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-101 learns the meaning of all-American "humanity", and somehow manages to avoid throttling Edward Furlong's pubescent John Connor. A saccharine morality tale, but a fine action movie. In both cases, these electronic assassins exceed their programming and take on recognisably "human" traits: traits such as friendship, duty, loyalty and self-sacrifice. It is a fruitless debate, but imagine for a moment that these figures survived the end of their respective movies and continued in their relationships with the people around them. Would they have been so successful in assimilating other recognisably human traits, such as hate, vindictiveness, bigotry and jealousy?
Good or bad, synthetic life in film suffers from the same obsession as anything else: our obsession with ourselves. Why else would an alien weapon, such as the Iron Giant, bear such a close physical resemblance to the human form? Why does Star Trek's Data yearn to be more human? To recall a good line from a poor movie (not to be named), "Give a man $100,000,000 and you create a frustrated billionaire". It would seem that giving a "robot" human form creates a being with biological brain-envy but is, in the end, only a reflection of our dissatisfaction with ourselves.
