Making Cyborgs, Making Humans – Of terminators and blade runners by Forest Pyle is a chapter from the book The Cybercultures Reader (2000, Routledge editions), and we have included its translation in full, except for one section of the introduction that refers to the theoretical background of deconstruction that the author attempts in the content of the films.
The author is clearly influenced by Donna Haraway and A Cyborg Manifesto (read about the manifesto in cyborg issue 2), indeed he himself states this in his footnotes. The influence of the manifesto is pervasive throughout the text, especially in parts concerning the collapse of the boundary between human and cyborg, the inability to precisely define the concept of “human,” particularly in contrast to the cyborg, and the inability to clearly support the human-cyborg opposition at critical moments. However, there is a fundamental difference between Haraway’s and Pyle’s approaches. For the former, the ambiguity in defining oppositions results in a cyborg elegy; for the latter, this ambiguity and indeterminacy of the “human” and its hybrid copy constitute elements of a dark world where technological hymns would sound at least somewhat grotesque…
Cinema has the ability to permanently etch images of specific faces and bodies into our memories. Just as someone who has seen them can hardly forget the faces of Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, it is equally impossible to forget Schwarzenegger’s imposing body as it moves relentlessly across the screen in Terminator. Perhaps no other aspect of cinema is as powerful—or potentially disturbing—as its ability to bring viewers face to face with such moving faces and bodies, compelling images that unfold in motion and over time. Of course, cinema’s attention to the impact of bodies in motion runs through all genres of film, from adventures to classic westerns and even to hard-core pornography. But something unique happens when the moving bodies are revealed to be “cyborgs.” This is the case in a subgenre of science fiction films that have gained notable acceptance from critics and audiences alike—films with a clear dystopian tone and content that have made the cyborg, this hybrid of human and machine, their thematic and formal focus. What we find in films like Blade Runner (1982) and in series like Terminator (1984, 1991) are ambiguous and unsettling speculations about the boundaries separating the human from the non-human.
The conflicts—and conspiracies—between humans and non-humans do not, of course, originate from these films: the opposition between human and cyborg is merely the modern and more mechanical mutation of a pattern that extends at least as far back as Frankenstein. Nevertheless, these films critically rework the opposition bequeathed to us by Romanticism, focusing attention on a profound disturbance—sometimes captivating, sometimes disorienting—that is present in our attempts to distinguish and define the human from the Other. Blade Runner and Terminator films not only reflect upon the threat that uncontrolled technological development poses to humanity, but they also raise even sharper questions about the consequences that arise from our definitions of the human. These films show that when we construct cyborgs—indeed, when we construct them in cinema—we also construct, and in some cases dissolve, our very conceptions of ourselves.
[…]
“If you want to live…”
Nothing less than the fate of the human race is at stake in James Cameron’s Terminator. The film’s famous and nightmarish opening scene depicts a post-apocalyptic world where humans who have survived a nuclear holocaust are engaged in a relentless war for survival with machines that “became intelligent” and recognize all humans as a threat to their existence. The machines send a combat cyborg back in time with the goal of “terminating” John Connor’s mother, the future leader of the human resistance. Humans follow by sending a “lone warrior,” Kyle Reese, to protect Sarah Connor from the terminator and thus ensure the uprising begins.
The contrast between protagonist and antagonist is established from the beginning of the film through the depiction of their arrival in the present. Schwarzenegger’s body and movement are a complex of symbols – a relief-like aristocracy of resilience – that directly echoes the concept of “man-machine.” These symbols are nonetheless equally complemented by shots of the cyborg’s point of view: the terminator’s obviously inhuman nature must be confirmed not only by seeing it (because such an appearance can be deceptive), but by seeing for ourselves in the way it sees. In this way, the distinction is sealed, because the point-of-view shots reveal that the terminator doesn’t “see” images, but simply gathers information.
If omnipotence is cinematically established as non-human, then the simplest negative signs—a relative physical incapacity—are what identify Kyle Reese as human (for whom no special shots of how he sees are needed to confirm his humanity). This gap in Reese’s representation gradually fills out over the course of the film as the cyborg’s mechanical superiority is contrasted with the positive human capacity for improvisation. Reese is progressively revealed through his ability to subordinate or circumvent technology through improvisations and makeshift solutions, flexible ways of thinking and acting, which the film tells us belong to the human arsenal. What the Terminator film defines as essentially human is the channeling of dominance over technology into a rebellious subjectivity, a heroism that can culminate in resistance, even in self-sacrifice.
The Terminator is filled with images and elements of modern (albeit not high-end) technology, which, even when entering the plot symptomatically, is what gives the film its visual density and contributes to the sense of corrosive—and aggressive—penetration of technology. The elements of contemporary technology that the film displays—answering machines, hair dryers, telephones, abandoned automobiles—do not conceal anything ominous, nor are they particularly advanced. But what all of these together reveal is the intrusive force of these technologies upon human communication and human agency. These are interventions that are literally and metaphorically open to manipulation by the exterminator and, consequently, must be eliminated under human vigilance.
Sarah Connor’s initial helplessness when confronted by this mechanized world functions both as a plot device that escalates the film’s suspense and as an allegory for our potential subjugation by—and possible liberation from—technology. Constance Penley has challenged this interpretation of Terminator, arguing that the kind of technology that defines the spirit of the film does not support this framework of opposition: «the film does not promote an argument of the ‘us versus them’ type, man versus machine, a romantic opposition between the organic and the mechanical,» says Penley, because here we are dealing with a cyborg, «part machine and part human». But although the film presents the absolute interpenetration of human and machine or represents their hybridization, the logic of its narrative tends toward fulfilling the essential humanist fantasy, that of human dominion over the machine.
Critics who have interpreted the film as politically progressive have emphasized that the work attributes human capacity for sovereignty [over the machine] to the woman, Sarah Connor, who is not only the bearer of human potential and mother of the savior of humanity, but also the character who appears in the film to achieve self-empowerment. When Sarah flattens the terminator in the hydraulic press, she does not become, as Penley claims, something akin to a machine. Rather, she manages to do something positive with what the film constructs as our collective desire to crush the threatening technological Other. Thus the fantasy is completed, not only because it includes two victories over the machines—ensuring victorious resistance in the future by achieving a human triumph in the present—but also because it presents the possibility of human dominion over time itself, a theme that dominates the second film in the series. Terminator is in this sense the confirmation of pure and absolute human agency, «the triumph of the will».
In the course of this cinematic triumph, we witness the gradual unveiling of any human element on the terminator. The film proceeds to uncover the cyborg, visually revealing that the similarity was indeed an illusion, that beneath the flesh and tissues there is nothing human. But in another sense, the machine that is revealed is human: it is the embodiment of a carrier of human fears. The film plays with this element, through suspense in the extended finale. The bomb that Reese had made explodes the terminator’s vehicle and as it wraps itself in flames, Reese and Sarah embrace as it seems the end has come. The relief is premature of course, as the terminator emerges from the flames, with its metallic skeleton intact and the machine we see is the same as the murderous machines that demolished the film’s first scenes and demolish the flashbacks of the future that Reese experiences. The final scenes are the most tormenting, partly because we suddenly recognize that this technological Other is nothing less than a condensation of our entirely human fears. The battlefield of the future is literally a nightmare, both Reese’s and ours, filled with pop depictions of stereotypical dinosaurs, mechanical tyrannosaurs and flying pterodactyls, while the humanoid terminators stripped of their flesh terrorize us by awakening the macabre childhood fear of the living skeleton. At this point, the contrast between human and non-human that the film has built seems to shift. Although we see the terminator more non-human than ever – with all its fleshy human disguise having disappeared – the non-human, mechanical Other seems simultaneously to be a human projection. When human opposition to the machine finally triumphs in Terminator, the contrast between human and cyborg begins to appear as the human projection it always was.
“Do androids dream…?”
Something less revelatory than the fate of humanity is at stake in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The execution or “retirement” of the cyborgs (called “replicants”) is portrayed as part of the job of the 2019 Los Angeles police force. Deckard is recalled to service as a “blade runner” when four replicants escape to Earth from a “distant world,” after a conflict in which many people were killed. Although the replicants appear ruthless and murderous, the threat is not even remotely at the level of Terminator: here we have nothing more than a minor slave uprising, and nothing suggests that the world is threatened. But from the beginning, from the moment of Deckard’s initial hesitation, the film conveys the sense that while “retirement” may be somewhat routine, it is in fact a very tangled job. The historical analogy arises when Deckard’s boss describes the replicants as “turkeys,” police slang that Deckard compares to the language in which, as “the history books tell us,” blacks were referred to as “negroes.” Eventually, Deckard is forced to take on the mission and begins his job of locating and terminating the replicants.
The process of detection and termination appears at first glance as a reflection of the logic we followed in Terminator: the “blade runners” are ultimately a kind of “exterminators,” searching for and destroying cyborgs, just like the terminator. But the representation of the cyborg in Blade Runner takes us in a very different direction. Although the plot suggests that cyborgs do not truly threaten us with annihilation, the film introduces a very real and disturbing threat—not so much for the film’s characters, but for the stability of the concept of the human that underlies our actions, beliefs, and meanings. Everything in Deckard’s journey, as he searches for the cyborgs, leads him—along with his audience—to a different and difficult kind of self-inquiry: specifically, to recognizing the elusive nature of the distinction between the human and its technological replica. The film thus begins to ask about humans what Walter Benjamin wondered about the work of art in a highly significant essay of 1936. How, Benjamin asked, is the status of the artwork affected by the advent of its technological reproducibility? He argues that while the work of art was always, in principle, “reproducible,” the development of new technologies—and especially film—shattered the “aura” and “authenticity” that surrounded the “original.” One could indeed interpret the necessity of exterminating the replicants through this logic: they are too close, their duplicity is disturbing, and because they constitute a threat to the “aura” of the “original”—the authentic human—that is why cyborgs must be terminated. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher describe the threat of copying in terms that, echoing Benjamin, reveal the “metamodern” condition of this relationship:
Thus, it becomes imperative to maintain formal distinctions between humans and machines, even if real differences tend to fade away. Here we find the explanation for the four-year lifespan assigned to the replicas. As machines, they could be functional for more than four years. Therefore, this time limit does not represent a technological constraint, but rather an imposed tolerance level, beyond which the human/machine interface becomes uncontrollable.
…Beyond this threshold, anything that would allow someone to distinguish between model and copy, between subject and object, disappears.
The film itself, then, appears to confirm Benjamin’s approach to the fate of the “original” and in its development confirms De Man’s claim regarding the collapse of the substantial concept of “man”: such a thing, De Man argues acrobatically, as what we call “man,” according to an extreme logic, does not exist. The film Blade Runner leads us to the point of such an awareness, an awareness that has been rejected in the name of “humanism”: that “man” is the result of an opposition, which, at critical and decisive moments, cannot be sustained.
The film has, of course, provoked opposing interpretations: most characteristically, that it depicts the threat posed to humanity by autonomous technology. Thomas Byers, for example, sees in the film a cautionary myth that “alerts us to the prospect of a capitalist future gone wrong, where human feelings and bonds are so severed that a near-literal dehumanization has perhaps become the worst danger.” While hardly anyone has probably seen Blade Runner as an ode to late capitalism, it is unclear whether the film leaves an exclusively human space outside the logic of mechanization; rather, technological reproducibility is considered to be the condition of things. Moreover, the “dehumanization” does not seem to be the worst danger presented by the film, since in Blade Runner it is harsh and perilous to have the identity of a human. Far from sustaining an essential and organic human dimension that opposes the dehumanized replicants, the film tends to dissolve this opposition. This dissolution is not achieved by attributing human qualities to the replicants—their “superhuman” and “mechanical” quality remains evident until the end—but by revealing that the human-machine distinction is unsustainable.
From this perspective, the means used by the Blade Runner to detect a replicant are highly significant: the “Voight-Kampff” test examines the dilation of the subject’s hairline blood vessels during questioning. The detective’s eye identifies the difference between human and replicant by looking into the suspect’s eyes, although the final decision is made only by the device that measures what the detective cannot see on his own. The motif of the eye and gaze runs throughout the film: the eye over the city in the opening credits, the enlarged eye during the “Voight-Kampff” test, the eye of the owl above the Tyrell Corporation building, the genetically engineered eye growing in the lab, the lenses of various microscopes, the viewfinders of cameras, the gaze of surveillance devices and advertising projections, even the eye of Tyrell himself, protected behind thick lenses and blinded during Roy’s inverted Oedipal patricide. All this literal and symbolic focus on the eye, this omnipresent presence of the gaze, serves only to emphasize the failure of seeing, since it turns out that no one can ever discern the difference just by looking. Rachael’s question about the “Voight-Kampff” test is relevant: “Have you ever tried this test on yourself?” she asks Deckard, “Have you ever mistakenly retired a human?”
But because someone cannot see or detect differences, it does not necessarily mean that such differences are absent: the differences may very well be internal, inaccessible to empirical observation. The film presents exactly the search for the most essential internal differences and distinctions—self-consciousness, feeling, memory—that confirm human integrity. From this perspective, the most crucial examination is that of time and memory, an examination that permeates every aspect of the film’s visual and narrative logic. More directly, perhaps, the film deals with the audience’s memory, working with a style, film noir, that can hardly help but evoke nostalgia. But the noir effect of this hybrid of the 1940s and the early twenty-first century results in a strange outcome, insofar as the cinematic nostalgia that plays with shadows and blurred colors is projected into the future. The noir aesthetic here works against the Hollywood nostalgia that is most often a comforting nostalgia for a morally clear and convenient past. But this does not mean, however, that nostalgia is altogether eradicated: with Blade Runner we are confronted with nostalgia for memory itself, for recollection of something more than merely a cinematic genre, for a way of remembering that is something other than a cinematic projection.
The allure that old photographs exert on replicants—”your favorite photographs,” as Roy says to Leon—is initially regarded by Deckard as a bizarre eccentricity: “I don’t know why replicants collect photographs. Maybe it’s like Rachael, they need memories.” But when he comes face to face with Rachael’s fabricated past, his view changes: because she too has “photographs,” documents that prove her past and provide testimony. Although Deckard concludes that the photographs are “fake,” given by Tyrell in order to reinforce Rachael’s implanted memories with the illusion of objectivity, they remind him of his own painful thoughts about his old photographs—photographs of absent women—images that are certainly from another era, images that, within the temporal framework of the film, Deckard could never possibly “know.” Deckard here remains silent regarding the discovery we observe: his own photographs are also “fake.” So why would someone collect photographs? Because photographs are memories, and the film tells us that, just like replicants, we need memories to support the stories we tell about ourselves. It seems there is a gap where we expect to find the core of humanity; we need photographs to fill this void, and “humans,” no more, no less than “cyborgs,” use the photographic image—which is always a substitute, a “photofake”—to complete what is missing.
As spectators, our relationship with the film and its noir atmosphere also works in the direction of undermining memory. As we recognize the film’s codes, we gain a sense of knowledge and understanding: “A hesitant and world-weary detective, shadowy cinematography and shadowy characters, Venetian blinds and ceiling fans, a dark woman with a dark past: of course, it’s a noir film.” On one level, these intertextual references or this game of mixing different cinematic genres places the viewer in a position of awareness, capable of understanding cinematic codes and the characteristics of different genres. But the certainty inspired by such awareness fades, as, along with Deckard, we are drawn into the allure of a past that we can never learn, a memory that can only be borrowed. The sense of “darkness” in Rachael’s past, evoked by the noir approach, is revealed not to be the result of some heinous or shameful act that shrouds her past in mystery, but literal darkness. The film, in other words, does not simply deviate from noir film traditions; the film refers to this genre only to颠覆 the hierarchy of themes: the sense of “mystery” is revealed to be nothing but the result of our own faith in distinguishing between replica and human. Blade Runner disturbs this faith by insisting on memory’s inability to restore the presence of what is past, an inability shared by all who live and remember in this film.
The rhetorical question that Gaff makes towards the end of the film – “What a pity that he won’t live! But, on the other hand, who is going to?” – refers directly to the essence of a film which, it seems, has effectively presented the deconstruction of the dominant distinction between human and machine. But it also appears that the film cannot tolerate an epilogue marked by such an inability to distinguish, at least not in the version imposed by the production studio, since the final conclusion – that with the canceled oppositions – was mitigated and supplemented with the escape of Deckard and Rachael in the final scene. They did not only escape from the oppressive atmosphere and the dangerous Blade runners of the city, they equally escaped from the film’s disorientations, towards the redemptive blue sky and the romantic verdant world of the “North”. It is one of the clearest scenes, but nevertheless fails to respect the film’s ending as the director intended (the epilogue, as well as Deckard’s narration, were required by the producers, despite the director’s objections). The ending shows, however, that the film created such a tightly-woven, thematic and visual complexity that only by resorting to such a pastoral epilogue could it somehow be balanced. Ultimately, the film reached a critical level; a limit that reveals that in Blade Runner, when humans construct cyborgs, this means the deconstruction of the human through an anxious recognition that both were assembled from the outset.
“Trust me”
When James Cameron returned to the distinction between human and cyborg with Terminator 2 (T2), the opposition took a new turn and acquired a new exterminator, both designed to give the film a clear adventure-action character and to make the opposition more solid and accessible. In the sequel, a second terminator is sent by “Sky Net” to exterminate young John Connor. Schwarzenegger returns in T2 as the terminator, but this time he has been sent by John Connor of 2029 to protect himself from extermination in 1991. The two rival terminators are not identical, nor equal, since, as Schwarzenegger explains to young John Connor, the second terminator, the T-1000 model, is technologically superior: it is no longer a cybernetic organism, “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton,” but is made exclusively of liquid metal. Thus T2 introduces us to a new terminator, as well as a new opposition: the moving mechanical parts of the older terminator take a stance against the advanced technology of the amorphous and completely inorganic opponent. The film, adopting Hollywood’s compulsory motive, raises the stakes of the technological gamble and in this way makes an allegory about the confrontation between a metamodern technology and a modernist one. This approach then takes an interesting turn, as T2 depicts a “modernist” triumph precisely on this technology – stunning, amorphous, supernatural, metamodern – that marks this film as different from its predecessor.
While the T-1000 technically is not a cyborg, it has the ability to copy any moving or stationary object, even a human, and to mimic the human voice. This ability provides the film with all those violent and incredible scenes of impersonation, where the copy confronts and then kills the original. But T2 takes a step back from the most dramatic and disorienting possibility implied by such technology: specifically, that we might never know in advance who the terminator is. Instead, these moments of impersonation emphasize the otherwise stable, supposed “identity” of the terminator. This identity, of course, is not entirely predictable, to the extent that the terminator “is” a Los Angeles cop. The T-1000’s ability “to change shape” visually demonstrates an opposition that runs throughout the film: the opposition between mechanical mimicry and authentic learning. While the T-1000 belongs entirely and exclusively to the logic of machines, the older “Cyberdyne Systems Model 101” is equipped with a “learning computer.” At the beginning of the film, John Connor asks the terminator whether “you could learn things you’re not programmed for, so, you know, you could become more human and not be a pain in the ass all the time?”. The terminator answers that the more contacts he has with humans, the more he learns. There seems to be nothing more human than “learning” – especially learning about moral principles and values – and T2 cultivates this humanistic position much more than the first film.
The film even revisits the identification of resistance with humanity implied in the first Terminator: a harsh and absolute resistance leads to the excesses of Sarah Connor, who has become perfect from a physical standpoint and has acquired from various mercenaries, special forces members, former guerrillas, and other dubious sources, the survival combat skills that Reese possessed in the first film. Her zeal drives her to attempt the execution of Myles Dyson, the computer engineer responsible for developing the processor recovered from the first terminator, which ultimately evolved into the advanced computer system Sky Net, which, in “a possible future,” gains “self-awareness” and commits genocide. Although determined to execute Dyson, she is ultimately restrained, but must learn from her son the same lesson that Reese had taught the terminator: “you can’t go around killing people.” Nothing seems more commendably “humanistic” than the film’s emphasis on learning such a lesson, its insistence on a human factor motivated by moral principles, its rejection of a closed future: “there is no fate but what we make” is the motto passed from Connor to Reese, from him to Sarah, and from the latter to young Connor, and perhaps to the audience as well.
But, although the film seems to deepen the distinction between human and machine, setting the moral principles of a human education against the threatening autonomy of a mutable technology, it achieves this distinction by employing a hybrid intermediary that disrupts the stability of such an opposition. The cyborg can learn and appears to acquire – gain – from its interactions with humans nothing less than authentic human subjectivity. But thus, the film’s overtly humanistic theme becomes shaky, when it is revealed that the cyborg terminator is absolutely necessary to the opposition: both in the story of human resistance to machines and in the conceptual opposition between human and machine. In a sense, the cyborg is well-intentioned due to its absolute obedience; at the same time, however, the opposition between human and machine is placed at the mercy of the cyborg. This disruption is what is described in Sarah Connor’s tribute to the cyborg as she sees it playing with her son. «The terminator will never neglect them,» she says, «he will always be there and die to protect him.» What in the first film determined the terror caused by the terminator – his absolute, relentless, merciless determination to exterminate – is reintroduced here as trust and reliability: the terminator thus becomes, according to Sarah’s assessment, the «best father.»
The cyborg is thus “humanized,” becoming capable of learning and, more critically, of “dying.” In the first film, as Sarah crushes the Terminator in the hydraulic press, she declares, “You’re terminated, you son of a bitch!” Now she voices a belief that the Terminator has the ability not merely to “cease” or be destroyed, but to experience “death.” This is confirmed by the film’s finale: after the T-1000’s spectacular melting, during which his copied victims reappear in scenes reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, Schwarzenegger’s Terminator sacrifices himself in order to prevent the possibility that any original component or processor of his deadly technology remains intact and eventually causes the destruction that had just been averted. Paradoxically, this act of his is the most “human” in the entire film, since in order to throw himself into the vat, he refuses for the first time to obey his master’s command, who pleads with him to come back. As Sarah lowers him into the vat—he cannot self-destruct—his mechanical hand makes the rhetorical gesture of human triumph: the victorious raised thumb. It is an easy visual cliché, of course, but it is emblematic of the deep interconnection of human and machine. Nevertheless, no matter how much the film wants to rid itself of the machine’s logic, the knot of human and cyborg remains inseparable: in Terminator 2, the triumph of humans and humanism ends up dependent on the humanization of cyborgs.
human gestures, mechanical hands
I want to return, now in the epilogue, to the topic with which we started, regarding the critical possibilities that open up from a reading that deconstructs contents. I hope it has become clear that far from seeking “to blind readers to everything that is human,” this deconstruction raises crucial questions about the ways sounds and images in cinema function and the ways these sounds and images intertwine with our notions of the human. If the concept of the human proves less stable than before, it is not due to a nihilistic disregard for human beings, but because such questions are posed by the films themselves, which, if looked at more deeply, can only shake the oppositions between human and machine that are so deeply and problematically embedded in our culture.
An image from each film can serve as an epilogue to our theme. In each film, the “death” or “extermination” or “withdrawal” of the cyborgs is accompanied by a hand gesture: the first terminator’s hand reaching out to grab Sarah’s neck as he crushes her in the hydraulic press; Roy Batty’s hand in Blade Runner closing, like Christ’s, around the nail driven through his palm as his own “time to die” has come; the triumphant raised thumb of the second terminator. Each is a “human” gesture made by a mechanical hand, and each gesture points toward a humanity that the films hope to affirm, but only through a persistence of mechanical hands that unite humans, even in extermination.
translation: Harry Tuttle
cyborg #10 – 10/2017