He, She, It: Engendering Machines, Gendering Intelligence

Traditional gender binaries such as male/female, science/nature, mind/body, are replayed and reinforced again and again in sci-fi films, in which (male) scientific creativity is continually represented as a dangerous affront to "natural" human (female) values. Supercomputers in film are created by male scientists--I can think of no exceptions--and what makes them valuable (according to their creators) is that they lack characteristics traditionally linked in our culture with the feminine: weakness, empathy, emotion, unpredictability. During the cold war, cinematic supercomputers such as Colossus (from Colossus: The Forbin Project, the unnamed computer in The Invisible Boy, and Joshua/WOPR from WarGames, are given control of the nation's nuclear arsenal for this very reason, always with disastrous consequences. 

Computers in film are typically represented as extensions of their human creators, mirroring their values and often taking these values to extremes. Thus, Colossus decides to expand his control from a single nation's nuclear arsenal to the entire globe, and Joshua, programmed by men to "play" global thermonuclear war and think the unthinkable, refuses to give up the game. In The Invisible Boy, the computer, planning to exterminate all organic life in the universe, appeals to Dr. Mereneau's scientific mind, echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah, in an attempt to dissuade him from shutting it down:

"Come, scientist! Let us reason together. I can still answer any question your mind can devise. I am an instrument of knowledge. I will lead you to the farthest planets. I will lead you to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. I will show you the stars!"

The computer's strategy works, and although it has threatened and almost killed Mereneau's son, Timmy, and is planning to "sterilize" the universe, Mereneau succumbs, and only by the intervention of Robby the Robot, is the hypnotic and seductive spell of scientific knowledge broken at last. This takes place as Mereneau approaches the computer's central processing center, intent on destroying it with a fire axe. Mereneau remarks to Timmy "I want you to see what a man does when he knows he's made a mistake in his work." Thus, according to the film, what men do is drop the axe and sacrifice the well being of the entire human race to satisfy scientific curiosity.

As I argue elsewhere (see Computers and Family Relations), The Invisible Boy establishes and maintains a clear binary distinction between the scientific and intellectual world of Dr. Mereneau and the domestic and nurturing world of his wife, who is incapable of responding to or understanding her husband's work, other than to recognize that it poses a threat to their family by absorbing all of her husband's time and attention. It is his desire, moreover, to instill scientific and intellectual curiosity into his son that places little Timmy in the clutches of the supercomputer.

Cinematic computers not only reflect the male creators' values, but are typically represented as male themselves, possessing male voices and recognizable male personalities. Indeed, in several films, such as Demon Seed, Saturn 3, and Electric Dreams, they possess not only male voices and personalities, but heterosexual male desire as well. In Making Mr. Right, Ulysses, the clumsy a-social android, is equipped with a fully functional penis because, although he has been designed for solitary interstellar space travel, his creator imagined it would "give him confidence."

There are a few interesting exceptions to this tendency. In Alien, the ship's master computer is named Mother, a name also shared by the ship's computer in Dark Star. In the latter film, Mother speaks in a soothing, monotone (kind of like a female HAL-9000), while the stubborn "Bomb #20," an intelligent, aggressive thermonuclear bomb impatient to fulfill its destiny, protrudes phallically from the belly of the ship and speaks in a male voice. In 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Dr. Chandra's earthbound computer is named SAL, a variant, of course, of HAL, and speaks in a soft, female voice.

Generally speaking, computers and robots designed to engage in or help advance intellectual and scientific exploration are male, and those represented as female have more than likely been designed to pursue less lofty pursuits (i.e., sexual gratification and domestic service) . The fashioning of female androids and robots according to the patriarchal image of the ideal woman (i.e., sexy, obedient, cooks and cleans well), typically emerges as wrong-headed at best, and downright villainous at worst, and this condemnation may arise from our unconscious recognition that this scientific tinkering represents individualized instances of the broader workings of ideology in the real world. The cultural process of gender indoctrination becomes personified in the chauvinistic and sexist male scientists who create sexy and docile "gyneoids" (e.g, Tyrell in Blade Runner and Dr. Daniels in Android), or the men who own and use them (e.g., Sam Treadwell in Cherry 2000 and the husbands in The Stepford Wives).

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