Richard D. Erlich

711 Island View Circle

Port Hueneme, CA 93041

(ErlichRD@MUOhio.edu)

 

 

CLOCKWORKS 2: An Annotated List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF

 

 

2005-06: CLOCK2, 5-9 (DRAMA-BACK.)                      22 August 2006

            Postmodernism redone 12/VI/98

            Iron Giant redone 7/VIII/99; NOT QUITE HUMAN: 18/IX/00

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/I/96         12 Monkeys.  Terry Gilliam, dir.  USA: Atlas Entertainment (prod.) / Universal (dist.), 1995 (© and initial US release) / 1996 (general US release).  David Peoples and Janet Peoples, script.  "Inspired by the Film La JetŽe written by Chris Marker" (The Jetty [vt. The Pier], 1963, 29 min., also prod. and dir. C. Marker).  Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stow, Brad Pitt, featured players.  **+An important dystopian film.  See for mise en scne of the post-holocaust, mechanized-underworld future (called in prod. "Eternal Night"), and for imagery of superimposition of the mechanical and electronic upon the human (including an MRI machine in the world of 1990 and television in worlds of 1990, 1996, and early 21st century).  For the funky future, horrific superimposition, and strong parallels in presentation of the antiRomantic theme, cf. and contrast TG's Brazil (cited this section).  For the theme of oligarchy associated with mechanisms and the destruction of the beauty and freedom of nature, cf. Brazil.  Also note close narrative, thematic, and visual parallels with the film version of Millennium and with M. Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and thematic and visual parallels with Gilliam's Time Bandits (films listed this section, Piercy's novel listed under Fiction).  Handled in some detail and put into the context of Gilliam's canon in Cinefantastique 27.6 (Feb. 1996). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VI/99       13th Floor: Cited as Thirteenth Floor, The. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/III/95 REPLACEMENT     "1984."  Ridley Scott, dir. and prod.  Apple Coporation commercial for Macintosh computer, run nationally once: Super Bowl Sunday, 22 Jan. 1984.  60 seconds.  Antholgized on Greatest Commercials Ever Made, CBS, shown in the Cincinnati area 15 March 1995.  *¢+Establishing shot of a grey world, with an illuminated tube (with people inside, barely visible).  Cut to people walking through tube, single-file, but otherwise very much like the marching workers in Metropolis (q.v. this section).  Flash cut to woman athlete in bright color, carrying a John-Henry size, steel-driving sledge hammer.  Back to close shot of marching male heads: shaved, one man wearing a gas mask.  Flash cut to running police then back to marchers, shot from chest down, TV monitors in background.  Voice-over: Big Brotherish politician, soon seen on huge TV screen.  Cut to woman: white top, red shots, bright against grey doorway, running with cops gaining on her.  Cut to rows of men (maybe some women) on benches watching TV screen.  Intercuts: audience, TV screen, running woman (voice throughout this section: continuation of politician's speech).  Climax: woman throws hammer, hammer-throw fashion, into TV screen as cops nearly upon her.  Hammer hits screen when speaker has said "We shall prevail."  Small explosion.  Wind sweeps past audience (first two of whom are open-mouthed).  VO of announcer, with titles: "On January 24th, / Apple Computer will introduce / Macintosh.  / And you'll see why 1984 / won't be like '1984.'"  Final shot: picture of Apple Corp.'s apple logo.  See under Drama Criticism, L. M. Scott, "'For the Rest of Us': A Reader-Oriented Interpretation of Apple's '1984' Commercial," and J. Bergstrom, "Androids and Androgency," on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 26/V/97        20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Rod Hardey, dir.  Michael Caine, Patrick Dempsey, Mia Sara, Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje, Bryan Brown, featured players.  Brian Nelson, script, based upon the novel by Jules Verne.  Made for TV.  First shown ABC, two nights, May 1997.  **+Aside from the standard gadgets of 20,000 Leagues—the Nautilus, diving bells, protoSCUBA outfits—see for "the hand of Rotwang" twice over: Capt. Nemo starts the show with one (as we learn fairly far into the first episode), then the French-scientist hero gets one after rebelling against Nemo (his adopted father-figure).  Cf. Metropolis, but far more so The Empire Strikes Back.  Given the film's stress on dreams, threatening father-figures, and an Oedipal situation, it is fair game for Freudian analysis. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Kelly Searsmith, 28/VI/01, 01/VII/01, 03/07/01         A.I.  Steven Spielberg, dir., script, one of three producers (initial work: Stanley Kubrick).  USA: Warner Bros. and DreamWorks main credited prod., also Amblin Entertainment, Stanley Kubrick Productions / DreamWorks, Warner Bros., 2001.  Ian Watson, initial screen story, from Brian Aldiss's "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," q.v. under Fiction.  **+Film features a number of robots—including Jude Law's "Gigolo Joe," sex-toy robot—and a theme of "mecha" vs. "orga": mechanism vs. organism, along with very real hatred of machines by many humans and the literal replacement of human beings by highly advanced robots (both similar to themes in I. Asimov's robot series, with imagery of the destruction of machines in the cyberpunk, Mad Max style).  As in "Supertoys," there is the question of the "reality" of an A.I. robot (ÇAm I a real boy?È) and whether such a sentient creature can love and be loved; the film expands this issue with the question of the more literal reality of a robot that can be replicated into any number of (as they say in Blade Runner, q.v.) replicants.  The film invites comparisons of itself with much of Spielberg's SF canon, plus Kubrick's 2001.  Most developed: the robot-boy David and E.T., the moon in E.T. with a threatening balloon, the scientists' vehicles in the chase sequence in E.T. and hell-hound motorcycles; the Pinocchio theme with David's wanting to become a "real" boy; visual similarity between the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and advanced robots in A.I.  See also in this section D.A.R.Y.L. and the Short Circuit films.  As in Asimov's "Bicentennial Man" (listed under Fiction) and the film Bicentennial Man (this section), the central robot desires to become human, and humanity requires mortality—but here the humans die, and robots live  on.  As in the Terminator films, ability to feel pain is important, but in A.I. robotic AI sentience includes pain receptors, which can be turned off in some but not, at least for psychological pain, in David. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VI/96, 22/I/00      Adventures in The Dark Zone (vt Lexx: The Dark Zone and US only, Tales from a Parallel Universe).   Paul Donovan, dir., prod., one of three writers.  Canada: Salter Street Films / TiMe (Berlin).  Showtime's The Movie Channel, July 1997.  135 min.**+Made for TV space opera featuring the Lexx, a bio-engineered, "ten-kilometer-long living breathing insect outfitted for space travel": for a huge biomechanical combined with the insectoid, the bridge "a curious mixture of metal and organic material."  See Cinefantastique 27.11-12 (July 1996): [18]-19, our source for the initial citation and whom we quote (which credits Robert Sigl as director); Cinefantastique 29.1 (July 1997): 54-55 for switch from straight Showtime to The Movie Channel and variant US subtitle; Cinefantastique 29.6/7 (Nov. 1997): 123, for rev. by Frederick C. Szebin (and credit for Paul Donovan as director).  See below, TV show LEXX. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Algol.  Hans Werkemeister, dir.  Germany, 1920.  Listed as a silent feature by Ed Naha, Science Fictionary, without production company.  **¢+Earth to be conquered by an alien named Mephisto with a lethal device that can't be stopped before it kills Mephisto's family. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Alien from L.A.  Albert Pyun, dir.  South Africa: Cannon Films, 1988.  **¢+Discussed in articles by Kris Gilpin and Steve Biodrowski in Cinefantastique 18.5 (July 1988): 42-43 f.  Gilpin quotes Pyun's description of the film as "a type of counter-culture look at JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, dealing with an individual from our world getting caught in a police state at the center of the Earth" (42).  Underground sequences filmed very deep underground in South Africa gold mines—for some literal as well as metaphorical mechanization of the underworld.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 02/XII/97, 16/III/04   Alien: Resurrection (vt Alien 4).  Jean-Pierre Jeunet, dir.  USA: Brandywine (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (prod. and dist.), 1997.  Joss Whedon, script.  Bill Badalato (I) et al., prod.  Nigel Phelps, prod. design.  Bob Ringwood, costume design.  Sigourney Weaver, co-prod., star.  Featured players: Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Raymond Cruz, Leland Orser, and Steven Gilborn as the Voice of "Father."  **+Sequel to Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), q.v. this section, and Alien 3 (1992).  Of interest for the mise en scne and the highly organic, moderately humanoid, and explicitly sexual nature of a number of the monsters.  Given the very heavy metal of the heavy-metal, cyberpunk ship—"Father" this time, not "Mother" as in Alien—there is strong imagery of the organic interposing itself into, as well as having superimposed upon it, the metallic, mechanical, electronic.  Note frequency of octagonal and hexagonal shapes on the ship, possibly stressing the ship's as, as well as being transformed into, a mechanical/electronic and vaguely cybernetic hive.  Ryder's character is a robot designed by robots, capable of loyalty, emotion, free will, religious faith, and a humanity Ripley thinks should have given her away as a synthetic: too humane for a human. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/VII/95      "Alien Within, The."  Roger Corman Presents, Showtime 18 July 1995.  XXXXXXXXXXXX, dir.  USA: Pacific Trust, 1994.  Cast includes Roddy McDowall.  *+Retelling of Alien (q.v. this section) with a touch of the remake of The Thing (1982).  The humanoid robot/cyborg (Brill) is initially a positive character, until reprogrammed by an evil scientist (McDowall); and the isolated setting isn't in space but under water.  semi-final enemies of science/tech. associated aliens: a woman, a John-Wayne-like incandenscent white male officer, and a dark male (wise-ass) doper.  Doper turns into final possessed enemy.  Escape pod includes male officer as driver and the woman; both carry aliens (they're to be picked up by U.S.S. Schwartzkopoff): cf. and definitely contrast Alien. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/I/96         American Cyborg.  Boaz Davison, dir.  XXX: YYYYYYYYY, 1994.  **+Cited by M. Lloyd, "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," as a cyborg movie set in a post-holocaust world run by a computer.  Humans—supposedly all sterile—are "allowed to live out their natural lifespans inside of a controlled enclave."  One woman, Mary, is discovered by a group of rebel scientists to be fertile,  "She is impregnated, and the fetus is removed from her body and placed into a portable artificial womb for safekeeping.  The plan is to take the fetus to the ocean, where a group of scientists from Europe will pick it up.  The 'System' gets wind of these activities and sends a cyborg to destroy the rebels.  Mary manages to escape, and convinces" a street fighter named Austin "to get her to the ocean.  Along the way, Austin falls in love with Mary, and also discovers that he is a cyborg" (Pt. 2: 13).  See for cyborgs, computer-rule, and the superimposition of the mechanical and electronic upon a human fetus. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/VI/01       Andromeda (vt Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda).  TV series, 60 min. episodes, 2000 f.  Gene Roddenbery, creator.  IMDb credits follow.  Directors (as of June 2001): Allan Eastman, Allan Kroeker, Mike Rohl (as Michael Rohl), T.J. Scott, Brenton Spencer, David Warry-Smith, David Winning.  Scripts: Matt Kiene, Joe Reinkenmeyer, Gene Roddenberry (creator), Zack Stentz, Ethlie Ann Vare, Robert Hewitt Wolfe.  USA/Canada: Fireworks Entertainment, Global, MBR Productions Inc. Tribune Entertainment (in association), 2000 f.  **+The starship Andromeda Ascendant is embodied—literally—in a humanoid android played by the Canadian actress Lexa Doig.  Briefly discussed by David Z. C. Hines in "Of Sex and Starships," Cinefantastique 33.3 (June 2001): 12-15; a publicity shot caption in that story reads, "More than machine: As a living avatar of the warship Andromeda, "Roomie" is Lexa Doig's [É] attempt to grant soul to AI" (14). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/95      Apollo 13.  Ron Howard, dir.  USA: Imagine Entertainment (prod.) / Universal (dist.), 1995.  Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan, featured players.  Based on the historical event.  **¢+Mainstream film stressing imagery of men inside a high-tech mechanism: Apollo 13.  Note failure of mechanical (although not cybernetic) devices, failures overcome by diligent and inventive technicians on the ground (many of whom look engineering-geekish) and competent austronauts.  There is a specific allusion to 2001: A Space Odyssey when the Bill Paxton character does not play a tape of Also Sprach Zarathustra but pop. music.  Note also names of space vehicles: Odyssey and Aquarius. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29/VII/01      Arcadia of my Youth.  **+See below under Waga Seishun no Arcadia. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/XII/94       Asimov, Isaac.  Foundation and Earth.  Audiotape.  USA: Nightfall and Bantam, Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, 1994.  BDDAP 448B **¢+

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/93        Asimov, Isaac.  Prelude to Foundation.  Audiotape.  Read by David Dukes.  Bantam Audio Publishing, BAP 139A and BAP 139B.  0-553-45162-6.  180 min.  **¢+Annotated under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 17/VI/01       Atlantis: The Lost Empire.  Gary Trousdale, dir.  Tab Murphy, Joss Whedon, script.  Bryce Zabel, Jackie Zabel, story.  Walt Disney Productions (prod.) / Buena Vista Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures (dist.), 2001.  Michael J. Fox, Jim Varney; Corey Burton, Claudia Christian, James Garne, John Mahoney, Phil Morris, Leonard Nimoy, Don Novello, Jacqueline Obradors, Florence Stanley, David Ogden Stiers, Cree Summer, featured players.  (From IMDb.)  **+Illustrates A. C. Clarke's "Third Law" that technology pushed far enough beyond our own is indistinguishable from magic: the power source and much of the technology of Atlantis seems magical and is imaged in ways hard to distinguish from Disney magic.  Note esp. robots of awesome protective power that look rather like the Iron Giant (a k a Iron Man)—q.v. as Iron Giant, this section and under T. Hughes under Fiction—projecting a force-field dome, the power source associated with masks that commemorate dead kings and look totemic, and the flowing of power imaged in ways similar to the rejuvenation of the cybernetic wasteland that climaxes the Disney film Tron (q.v. this section).  A little surprisingly for a DisneyCorp film, Atlantis condemns at least extreme capitalist exploitation of technology and/or peoples and pictures Atlantis as a eutopia that took a wrong turn, but still a eutopia in terms of sensible, balanced uses of technology and power. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Ayckbourn, Alan.  Henceforth . . . .  30 July 1987, Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough, UK; 21 Nov. 1988, Vaudeville Theatre, London; 8 Oct. 1987, Alley Theatre, Houston.  London: Baber and Faber, 1988.  London: Samuel French, 1988.  *¢+Features a mechanical nanny (robot).  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and discussed 122-25. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98THE AVENGERS (5.026): ADD.  Patrick Macnee (Steed), Dianna Rigg (Emma Peel), major stars.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98, UNDER THE AVENGERS (5.026):            "Build a Better Mouse Trap."  The Avengers.  1963.  Peter Hammond, dir.  Brian Clemens, script.  **+Features "a high-tech mousetrap."  James Murray suggests that this episode "has all the elements of the Avengers 'formula': colorfully eccentric minor characters; conflict between the old world and the new; and the motif of dropping future technologies into a historical setting" ("The Avengers Top Twenty Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 30.3 [July 1998]: 47). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98, UNDER THE AVENGERS (5.026):            "The Cybernauts."  The Avengers.  1965.  Sidney Hayers, dir.  Philip Levene, script.  **+An important setting is United Automation, "a totally automated factory run by technophile Dr. Armstrong," who rides in an automated wheelchair (cf. and contrast inventor of Daleks in Doctor Who, and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove).  Armstrong shows Steed "his push-button world" and gives him "a complimentary high-tech pen," which turns out to be a homing device for "an automated cyborg" killer.  "Its motif of a vengeful megalomaniac wielding cutting-edge technology reappears in other episodes, including the two cybernaut sequels": filmed in color in 1967, "Return of the Cybernauts," and, on The New Avengers, "Last of the Cybernauts?" (Source: James Murray, "The Avengers Top Twenty Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 30.3 [July 1998]: 49-50, whom we quote.)  See below for "Return of the Cybernauts"; note that the "cyborgs" here look like silver (clothed) humanoid robots. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98, UNDER THE AVENGERS (5.026):            "Death at Bargain Prices."  The Avengers.  1965.  Charles Crichton, dir.  Brian Clemens, script.  **+Pinters Department Store is converted into an atomic bomb, to be triggered when a luckless customer takes an elevator to the basement.  (Source: James Murray, "The Avengers Top Twenty Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 30.3 [July 1998]: 49.)  Cf. and contrast The Guns of Navarone (1961); note conversion of a banal institution—a department store—into an encompassing, high-tech threat. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98, UNDER THE AVENGERS (5.026):            "House That [sic: capital] Jack Built, The."  The Avengers.  1966.  Don Leaver, dir.  Brian Clemens, script.  **+A country house converts into a metaphorical "electronic mousetrap," more literally "an elaborate, computerized 'fun house' complete with music boxes, mazes, tigers, and a giant, spinning 'radiometer'"—all part of a plot to drive Emma Peel insane, and to suicide.  Note motif of threatening containment inside a computerized setting combining an "old manor house and its historical artifacts with the cold, op-art, futuristic settings," for an antithesis designed to destroy Mrs. Peel.  (Source: James Murray, "The Avengers Top Twenty Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 30.3 [July 1998]: 53-54.) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98, UNDER THE AVENGERS (5.026):            "Return of the Cybernauts."  The Avengers.  1967.  Robert Day, dir.  Philip Levene, script.  **+Sequel to "The Cybernauts" (q.v. above).  In addition to the "cybernauts"—robots—episode features a mind-control device disguised as a wristwatch, one that turns Emma Peel "into a subservient, human cybernaut, controlled at the touch of a button."  (Source: James Murray, "The Avengers Top Twenty Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 30.3 [July 1998]: 55.) 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/II/93         BABYLON 5 Episodes—Television (Syndication: Warner Brothers, Prime Time Network).  Created by J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski.  START DATE: 

 

 

5. Drama; RDE, 23/VI/94          "And the Sky Full of Stars."  Babylon 5.  Week of 20 June 1994.  Janet Greek, dir.  J. Michael Straczynski, script.    **+The station Commander's mind is caught in a "virtual reality cybernet," while his body is held in a chair, with a good deal of imagery of the superimpostion of the high-tech electronic and cybernetic upon the human.  See for VR and the mind/body question, and for the imagery of the capture of the Commander's small fighter spacecraft (in a VR flashback) by a very large enemy spaceship: "biomechanical" suggestions, for sure, plus, just possibly suggestion of a human hand and/or vagina. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/II/93         "The Gathering."  Babylon 5, DATE.  Pilot for the series.  **¢+

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/IV/95       "Spider in the Web."  Babylon 5.  Week of 23 April 1995 (repeat?).  Michael Beck and Adrienne Barbeau, featured guest stars.  *¢+The rogue agency, "Bureau 13," has come up with a way to produce a "cyberzombie": a controllable cyborg produced from a dying individual.  Beck plays one programmed as an assassin with a prosthetic hands that kills by electrical discharge.  See for a cyborg, mind-control by means of an implant, a deadly prosthetic hand (somewhat Terminator-like), and imagery of schemes within schemes in appropriate mise en scne: Beck's cyborg is a human with an implant controlled via computer by a woman surrounded by computer screens in the midst of a wasteland, while Beck's cyborg is on the space station Babylon 5.  Cf. and contrast the locus classicus for such ÇnestingÈ, 2001, plus Alien, for a killer humanoid robot on a large spacecraft (both cited in this section of the List). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 03/II/94         "Soul Hunter."  Babylon 5, 2 Feb. 1994.  Jim Johnston, dir.  J. Michael Straczynski, script.  Harlan Ellison, "Conceptual Consultant."  **¢+Opening sequence features a "dance" of space ships, with the possibility of the destruction of the Babylon 5 space station if the approaching ship is not captured.  See for the superimposition of an apparatus upon a soul, which is to be extracted and storied.  Cf. and contrast the "wathan" storage devices in P. J. Farmer's Riverworld series (see Farmer's Magic Labyrinth, cited under Fiction). 

 

 

5. Drama; RDE, 04/VIII94         "A Voice in the Wilderness"  Babylon 5.  Weeks of 27 July and 3 Aug. 1994.  Janet Greek, dir.  J. Michael Straczynski, script.   Harlan Ellison, conceptual consultant.  **+Note huge ranges of underground machinery like unto that of the Krell in Forbidden Planet (q.v., this section).  Note also superimposition of that machinery on humanoid aliens, and the very literal interfacing of those "men" and machines.  Cf. and contrast H. Ellison's "Asleep: With Still Hands" (cited under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/VII/98      ADD TO BALLET MƒCHANIQUE before "See under Graphics": Much of the imagery generally and that involving machines specifically is sexually suggestive, and intentionally so, relating the Ballet to the theories of Sigmund Freud and hence to Surrealism—and stressing the intertwining of the organic and the mechanical. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/VI/95       Batman Forever.  Joel Schumacher, dir.  USA: Warner, 1995.  Tim Burton, Peter MacGregor-Scott, exec. prod.  Val Kilmar, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicolle Kidman, Chris O'Donnell, featured players.  **¢+Continues the mise en scne of the earlier Batman films, but adds strong images of the superimposition of mindcontrol devices upon the heads of TV viewers, for a comically-handled suggestion that TV (but not movies?) is a form of mind control. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Battle Beyond the Stars (1968/1969).  See The Green Slime.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 00/XII/00      Battlebots (vt Comedy Central's Battlebots).  TV show on Comedy Central: Cited below, under Background. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/95     Battletech cartoon.  Dana C. Booton, executive in charge of production.  "Based on the BATTLETECH games and books created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock, III[,] and published by FASA Corporation."  Prod. in association with Worldwide Sports and Entertainment / Saban Entertainment.  Utilizes computer graphics for battle sequences by FASA Corporation Computer Graphics Unit, which feature Battletechª fighting machines: various ones like the small Imperial walkers in Return of the Jedi, the infantile enforcer droid in RoboCop, and the fighting machines in Robo Jox (FASA cited by name under graphics; films all cited this section).  Other technological allusions include the round spacecraft from 2001, helmets from Battlestar Galactica.  Note that such war-machines are neutral, utilized by villains and heroes, and humans inside humanoid-shaped machines.  . 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/95     "Bound by Honor."  Battletech.  Marty Isenberg, script.  1994.  **+"Organically integrated cyberoptics" allow evil sorts to interface directly with their war machines.  Getting a technological edge very important in plot, suggested by imagery of small humans, very large machines.  Episode deals with questions of honor when the code of the good guys requires patriotism while the warrior code of the bad guys requires fidelity to the warrior code, which includes becoming bound to and fighting for enemies who've captured you (cf. ancient Greeks and Dark Ages Germanic and Scandinavian warriors in our history). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, DanB, 08/V/03         Beast, the (vt The Beast of War).  Kevin Reynolds, dir.  USA: A&M Films, Brightstar Films (prod.) / Columbia-TriStar (US dist.), 1988.  William Mastrosimone, script, stage-play (Nanawatai [approximately, "obligation to give sanctuary"]).  Filmed in Israel.  **+"Mundane"—nonSF—war film set in 1981 Afghanistan, featuring what is probably a T-62 Soviet tank (identified in some reviews as a T-64) and its crew in battle against the Mujahedeen; there are also two significant helicopters.  Note machine-men of tank crew vs. more noble, more natural Mujahedeen and Afghan women.  See for interior of tank and initial rescuing helicopter as places of problematic safe enclosure and refuge—a kind of unholy and unreliable sanctuary—for the Russian tank crew.  Note image of Russian protagonist exiting film and ending movie being drawn up toward, but not into, a second rescuing helicopter: he is exposed but escaping, with as much transcendence as this film will allow.  Cf. and contrast safe and threatening enclosure, and images of transcendence, in such S.F. as the middle and end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (inside Discovery and Star-Child) and The Matrix (various ways of being in the Matrix and Neo's flight at film's end), cited in this section. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Bermel, Albert.  "The Recovery."  Coll. Six One-Act Farces.  Baton Rouge, LA: Oracle P, 1982.  *¢+Short Play.  Automated surgery in an automated hospital with an "electronic staff . . . indistinguishible from insensitive" human medical personnel.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 19/XII/99      The Bicentennial Man.  Chris Columbus, dir. co-prod.  USA: 1492 Pictures, Laurence Mark Productions, Radiant Productions (prod.) / Buena Vista Pictures (US dist.), Columbia Tristar Film (Germany, and in US screen credits, dist.).  Isaac Asimov, story, "The Bicentennial Man" (1976); Asimov and Robert Silverberg, The Positronic Man (1992: expansion of "TBM," both of which see under Fiction).  Embeth Davidtz, Sam Neill, Oliver Platt, Robin Williams (as Andrew), featured players.  **+The history of Andrew Martin from power-up to death, and the development of Andrew Martin, robot, into Andrew Martin, The Bicentennial Man.  Martin's life includes a dual quest and a love story between Andrew and Little Miss and Little Miss's granddaughter Portia, leading to the legal recognition of Andrew's humanity, and his marriage to Portia.  Just about nothing remains of the Asimov story's allegory of race and politics and slavery; film retains the idea that if "All men are mortal," Andrew must take on human mortality to be recognized as a man.  See for what has been called "the Pinocchio complex" or, more negatively, "Spam" ("metal on the outside, meat on the inside" [by analogy with "Oreo" and "apple" for African- and Native Americans who want to assimilate]).  Andrew must also take on human emotions; cf. the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz (specifically alluded to) and Mr. Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation (for an inevitable comparison).  CAUTION: Removal of the problematic racial allegory leaves a sentimental appeal but not much else of interest. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/IV/99       Bis ans Ende der Welt (IMDb also lists in French, Jusqu'au bout du monde, and English, Until the End of the World [we viewed and listened to the (mostly) English version]).  Wim Wenders, dir., co-script, with Peter Carey.  Australia / Germany / France: Road Movies Filmproduktion, Village Roadshow Productions, Argos Films, (prod.), Warner Bros. (prod. and US dist.), 1991.  Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Ernie Dingo, Sam Neill, Max von Sydow, Ruediger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, featured players.  Runtime is significant: USA and Sweden: 158, Germany and Spain: 179; director's cut: 280.  English with some French and other languages; available with subtitles in English translations of the French.  **+Described by Video Hound as a "Convoluted road movie set in 1999," i.e., the near-future at time of release.  In a sense "art-film SF," except the "art-film" part doesn't fit well with the big-name cast, settings in "15 cities in 8 countries on 4 continents" (by the Hound's count), and the use of state-of-the-art High Definition TV for important effects-footage.  See for "near-in" SF of a computerized headset that allows recordings which can in turn allow the blind to see.  The process is complex, mediated by the initial recorder of the scene—and plausible.  Initial recorder and a blind person are shown literally interfaced with the computer through their sight and vision-handling sections of the brain.  More far-out, Max von Sydow's good but arrogant scientist records and plays back dreams; watching their dreams proves addictive to him and his son's lover (Dommartin).  See in Clockwork's Keyword Index "dream" and "dreamer," and note implicit or explicit theme of technological addiction in the "Hollow Pursuits" episode of STNG (q.v. this section) and in H. Ellison's "Catman" and B. Malzberg's "The Wonderful, All-Purpose Transmogrifier" (cited under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 19/III/03       Bjšrk.  "All is full of love": Cited under Music. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, DanB, 17/V/94RDE, 25/VIII/00      Bots Master, The (vt ZZ Bots).  TV series, 1993.  Shigeo Koshi and Xavier Picard, dir.  Avi Arad & Associates, Saban International (France), production.  **+Called "american anime" (sic) by one user of the IMDb, our source for this citation.  Plot Summary by Cynan Rees {cynan@indigo.ie}: " When genius robot technician Ziv 'ZZ' Zulander discovers that his employers (RM Corps) have designs on world domination, he quits and tries to warn people about them.  Branded an outlaw by their powerful boss Lewis Leon Paradim (LLP), ZZ and his bot-designer sister (Blitzy) are forced into hiding.  His one advantage is the chip he developed, which gives his bots their own personalities, and enables them to think for themselves and fight intelligently.  This makes them a powerful force against a huge but predictable army of security bots.  RM Corps's attempts to upgrade their bots' firepower with their Krang chip are a constant danger.  Their bot- designer (the oily Dr Hiss)  desperately wants to capture a ZZ bot for examination, and ZZ must also avoid being distracted by LLP's gorgeous security chief, Lady Frenzy."  See for individual robots with personalities pitted against an "army of security" robots that may be predictable because of a standard ideological point on individuality, here science-fictionalized for the young. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Bradbury, Ray.  "The Veldt."  14 Oct. 1964, Pandemonium Theatre Company, Coronet Theatre, Los Angeles; 9 Oct. 1965, Orpheum Theatre, New York.  In The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays.  Toronto: Bantam, 1972.  *¢+Dramatization by RB of his story, "The Veldt," vt "The World the Children Made." 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/93        Bradbury, Ray.  "The Veldt."  Audiotape.  Radio play from X Minus One (radio series from 1955-1958).  Greatapes (sic), 1992, 1-878481-03-7 (a boxed set).  22.33 min.  **¢+Annotated under Fiction, under Bradbury's "The World the Children Made." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Britton, Lionel.  Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth.  London: Putnam, 1930.  *¢+Apparently unproduced play, featuring "a giant mechanical brain" that attempts totalitarian take-over of human life.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote.  Cf. and contrast Colossus (this section) and the other works cited as computer takeover stories. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/IX/95       Brainscan.  John Flynn, dir.  USA: MGM (VHS dist.), 1994.  Edward Furlong, Frank Langella, T. Rider Smith, featured players.  95 min.  **+Very-Near Future/Horror film.  TV listing: "A teenager [Terminator 2's Furlong] logs into a deadly interactive computer game."  Video Hound (1995) stresses a VR "voyage" with Smith "as Trickster, the Freddy Krueger meets David Bowie tour guide from virtual hell." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29/IV/01 REVISION 5.054   Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.  Daniel Haller, dir.  Glen A. Larson, script, exec. prod.  USA: Universal, 1979.  **+Made for TV movie "that began the popular TV series" (Video Hound for 1995), starting from an updated Buck Rogers motif—20th-c. man finding himself 500 years in the future—and borrowing heavily from Star Wars IV: A New Hope (1977).  Even stronger than A New Hope in stressing the necessity to go with one's instincts and feelings rather than computer logic.  The mise en scne is of interest, contrasting on Earth a thoroughly modern and Modernist new Chicago with a wasteland with the standard-issue post-Apocalypse (here called "Holocaust") mutant monster-folk—and contrasting the high Modern, Terran-American city with the Oriental decadence of the invading Draconian ship (see Caution below).  Willis (vol. II) notes a featured robot and "self-programming computers"; we'll add that the robot, Twiki, looks like a midget version of the Golem from Paul Wegener's Der Golem É silents (ca. 1920) and that the computers are talking AIs sufficiently micro-miniaturized that one can be worn like a large medallion by the very small robot.  The featured AI minicomputer, Dr. Theopolis ("GodCity"), has a male voice, but one that makes HAL 9000 sound macho ; Theopolis also has a strong interest in Buck, hinting at a homo/mechano-erotic subtextual gender-bender" of some complexity and interest (any attraction, however, is one way and must, necessarily, remain Platonic; Buck and Dr. Theopolis just become friends).  CAUTION: This film remains true to the original Buck Rogers stories in having a strong "Yellow Peril" motif, here visual.  The TV series lasted 1979-81 (IMDb). 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       *¢+ADD TO K. CAPEK, RUR: PRODUCTIONS: 25 Jan. 1921, National Theatre, Prague; 9 Oct. 1922, Theatre Guild, Garrick Theatre, New York; 29 March 1923, Theatre am KurfŸrstendamm, Berlin; April 1923, St. Martin's Theatre, London. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, JoeK, 08/IX/00         REVISED ENTRY FOR Capek {mit hachek}, Karel, 5.056

 

Capek, Karel.  R. U. R. 1921 (Czech).  First English edn., Oxford UP, 1923.  Frequently rpt., including in Of Men and Machines, q.v. under Anthologies.  Also, P. Selver, trans. Adapted for English stage by Nigel Playfair.  Harry Shefter, ed.  New York: Washington Square-Pocket Books, 1973 ("enriched" edn.).  R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).  Claudia Novack-Jones, trans.  1989.  In Toward the Radical Center.  Peter Kussi, ed.  Highland Park, NJ: Catbird Press, 1990. 

 

                     Play.  Rossum's robots—"androids" in current terminology—take over because they are, in many ways, superior to humans.  This play gave us the word "robot" (Czech for "forced labor [robota]").  Discussed in TMG in essays by W. Schuyler and B. Bengels (see under Literary Criticism).  For textual issues, see M. Abrash, "R.U.R. Restored and Reconsidered," cited under Literary Criticism.   R.U.R. was revived in the summer of 2000 by Jerome Guardino for Lonny chapman's Group Repertory Theater in the Los Angeles area; rev. Steven Leigh Morris, "Theater," LA Weekly for 7-13 July 2000, who distinguishes "robot" from "android" and rather neatly typifies the play as a 1920 "exotic variation on Frankenstein, a hybrid of Strindberg's symbolism and Jules Verne's whimsy" (41). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/II/01        Cast Away.  **+Cited under Background.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 22/VIII/00     The Cell.  Tarsem (Singh), dir.  USA: New Line Cinema, and Avery Pix, Caro-McLeod, Radical Media (prod.) / New Line (USA dist. [others for offshore]), 2000.  Mark Protosevich, script.  Eiko Ishioka, costume design.  Tom Foden, prod. design.  BUF Compagnie/BUF, Inc., SpFX.  **+A stylish psychodrama: think Silence of the Lambs meets Psycho and Dr. Caligari, as painted by Heronymus Bosch, Salvidor Dali, and a Dadaist/MTV convention on a mostly horrible acid trip.  Significant here for images of a water torture cell in which female victims are videotaped by automatic cameras: the male gaze demonized and made electronic; also for images of dreamscapes inside the minds of people inside rigid suits inside a laboratory watched by technicians whose instruments to some extent can tell what is going on inside the minds of the subjects.  Cf. and contrast Dreamscape (1984), mostly contrast The Lathe of Heaven (cited in this section).  Also note miscellaneous horrific, low-tech mechanisms and images of women—and at least one boy—reduced to dolls.  Briefly discussed by Frederick C. Szebin, "The Cell: Music video director Tarsem enlivens the serial killer genre" (Cinefantastique 32.2 [Aug. 2000]: 8-9), our source for parts of this citation (also: IMDb). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Champlin, Charles K.  The House of Doom.  25 Jan. 1932, The Masque Theatre, New York.  *¢+Soul transfer between people effected by a machine.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here.  Cf. and contrast Metropolis, cited this section. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, MikeC, 06-08/VII/00 Chicken Run.  Peter Lord and Nick Park, dir., story, among the producers.  UK: Aardman Animations, Allied Filmmakers, DreamWorks SKG (prod.) / DreamWorks, Pathe, Tobis Filmkunst (dist.), 2000.  Karey Kirkpatrick, script.  Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Miranda Richardson, featured voices.  **+Claymation beast-fable version of The Great Escape plus Stalag 17, with allusions to other films, and with chickens replacing the Allied POWs.  Significant here for two machines.  One is a demonic, high-tech, electrical, mostly metal devouring Moloch of a machine into which live chickens enter and from which chicken pot-pies exit (cf. and contrast Metropolis, below, this section, and the death stars in the Star Wars sagas).  The other significant machine is the "crate" of an aircraft in which the chickens escape: mostly wood, with only some metal, powered by chickens and flown by an old RAF vet (well, mascot) over the wire.  Writing for herself, the female lead, Ginger, says "As hens, our role on the farm was that of egg-producing machinery.  We were not thought of as creatures with thoughts and feelings, we were simply profit-generating robots" (Chicken Pies for the Soul [New York: Puffin, 2000]: 45-46 {sic on comma: British usage}).  Final scene is in a garden world for an esoteric allusion: the "crate" and chicken power bring Mad Max back to the "Green Gorge," as Gibson's rooster gets to settle down to domesticity in a greenworld strongly conrasting the chicken farm prison camp; see below, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.  On the IAFA ListServ for 7 July 2000, Don Palumbo points out in CR a pattern of "allusions to Mel Gibson's corpus," making the Beyond Thunderdome reference more plausible.  Cf. and contrast the tramp in the machine in Modern Times, the superimposition of the chicken-processing machine upon Sawalha's Ginger and Gibson's Yank rooster (Rocky), and ultimately upon the villain.  The film may suggest that the transcendence of flight is valorized only so far as it leads to the immanence of the Garden and family life—which gets funny in a film about chickens, two roosters, and a couple of rats who steal tools but don't use them.  CAUTION: It is possible to see the pie machine as less an allusion to Metropolis and more a literalization of the metaphor in the phrase "the machinery of death" in high-tech Nazi extermination operations; viewers making that connection could find CR painful. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/V/04 || 21/VI/04, 18/IX/04           **+Chronicles of Riddick, The (vt Pitch Black 2 and Pitch Black 2: Chronicles of Riddick, Riddick [working titles]).  David Twohy, dir. script (with Jim and Ken Wheat for characters).  USA: Primal Foe, One Race, Radar Pictures, Universal (prod.) / Universal Pictures (US dist.), 2004—see IMDb for complex production and distribution.  Vin Diesel and Judi Dench, featured players.  Holger Gross, prod. design.  Kevin Ishioka, Mark W. Mansbridge, and Sandi Tanaka, art direction.  **+SciFi epic (action-adventure), following but not really a sequel to Pitch Black (2000).  Holger Gross developed "Necro-Baroque," a kind of futuristic gothic that combines in set design literal heavy metal with the organic in ways both similar and quite different from those of H. R. Giger and D. Cronenberg (no mucous and a suggestion of feudal and ecclesiastical grandeur—and a fascistic esthetic for the villains).  The machines of the villainous Necromongers ("merchants of death") are monumental, and their buildings are machines (spaceships of their armada, a word actually used).  The visual pastiche comments upon medieval, (Early) modern, and/or PoMo totalitarianisms, which would reinforce plot, character, and theme—if CoR could be taken more seriously as a film.  Covered in some depth by David E. Williams, "Empire Overthrow," Cinefantastique 36.3 (June/July 2004): [42] f.; see esp. "Empire Overthrow: Builder of Worlds" on production design (48-49).  Widely reviewed: see IMDb links to External Reviews.  Contrast CGI visuals of Sky Captain, which came out later in 2004 (see below, this section).  

 

 

5. Drama; RDE, 10/VI/94          Circuitry Man.  USA: IRS Media, (c) 1989, 1990 (release).  Steven Lovy, dir.  Steven Lovy, Robert Lovy, script.  93 min.  Miles A. Copeland III and Paul Colichman, exec. prod.  Jim Metzler, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, stars.  **+Post-ecological disaster, with the air unbreathable, "Mankind moved underground into government controlled environments.  There, they continued to ravage the last frontier ... the HUMAN MIND" (introd. titles).  Establishing shots—with opening credits—move from surface to the underground in a movement and with shots similar to A Boy and His Dog (q.v. this section), except surface world here looks OK.  Title for opening proper: "Subterranean Los Angeles | The Near Future" (cf. and contrast Terminator movies and Blade Runner), appropriate parallels for this hard-core (if darkly comic and  poorly done) cyberpunk film.  Note the following elements: razor-girl analogs; allusions to Cafe Flesh, Mad Max 2, and Akira; an automobile mechanic and dealer literally part of his machinery (whose mind gets figuratively blown and then cybernetically "vacuumed"—with strong imagery of the superimposition of the mechanical upon the human); a featured role for a classic 1964 Ford Galaxy XL; brain-implant chips that act like drugs; and a "Bio-Synthetic" "Pleasure Droid" programmed to love a woman who's only a program.  The hero's job is to run the "maze" to New York City with the drug/chips.  The villain plugs into the car, and other things: he's a plughead, with multiple inlets.  Organic stuff is associated with a punk like  the top dwellers in Lucas's THX 1138 and the similar characters in W. Gibson's Burning Chrome story "Johnny Mnemonic" (Omni 1981).  Villain (after a particularly gory bit of villainy) reveals to "Romeo" android that his beloved is " nothing but a ghost, circuitry man.  You poor, pathetic machine."  The villain (who rather literally gets off on the pain of others) turns out also to be a cyborg; final confrontation between hero and villain occurs in the hellish cyberspace of the villain's mind, in a scene of interest to historians of the imaging of surreal hells—and which gets into the similarities and differences between heroic and villainous machines: cf. and contrast confrontation between Luke Skywalker and the evil Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/III/02       CitŽ des enfants perdus, La (City of Lost Children).  Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, dir., script (along with Gilles Adrien).  France: Production very complex (see IMDb at address listed at below) / Sony Picture Classics (US dist.), 1995.  Ron Perlman, star.  112 min.  **++IMDb Plot Outline: "A scientist in a surrealist society kidnaps children to steal their dreams, hoping that they slow his aging process" <us.imdb.com/Companies?0112682>.  Relevant here for imagery of the devices used to steal the dreams: the heads and, necessarily, the subconscious of both the scientist and his victims are encased in very PoMo rigs, superimposing the electronic on something quite organic and associated with intelligence: dreaming.  Note also clones and an "Uncle" that is a human brain inside a small aquarium with old-fashioned speaker horns and camera for communication and senses.  For imagery, cf. and contrast Brazil, cited above, this section.  Discussed by Dan Persons, Cinefantastique 27.4/5 (Jan. 1996): 116-17.  See in Clockworks Keyword index "dream" and "dreamer." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/IX/95       Class of 1999 II: The Substitute.  Spiro Razatos, dir.  USA: Vidmark Entertainment (VHS dist.), 1993.  Sasha Mitchell, Nick Cassavetes, featured players.  91 min.  **+Sequel to Class of 1999 (cited above [itself a sequel to Class of 1984 (1982)]).  This time around, according to the TV listing, "A deadly android poses as a substitute teacher."  Cyborg or robot may be more exact for describing the threats, and Video Hound (1995) listing implies little difference from first version, except fewer killer-robots. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/X/00        ADD TO Clockwork Orange, A: See under Drama Criticism T.A. Nelson's Kubrick. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Cocoon.  Ron Howard, dir.  USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1985.  **¢+Health and potential immortality from contact with water storing alien cocoons, containing preserved aliens (whose outpost on Earth gave us the legend of Atlantis).  Discussed by V. Sobchack in Screening Space (see Sobchack's Index for Chapter 4.) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/II/95        *¢+ADD TO THE COMPUTER WORE TENNIS SHOES: Remade and updated to the 1990s (Disney version, anyway): The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.  Peyton Reed, dir.  USA: Disney, 1995.  Joseph L. McEveety and Ryan, script, from "the feature film written by Joseph L. McEveety."  Kirk Careron, star.  Apparently made for TV; in any event, we recall no theatrical release. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/VI/98       The Companion.  Gary Fleder, dir.  Ian Seeberg, script.  USA: MCA/Universal Home Video, 1996.  94 min.  Direct-to-Video.  **+An "android" becomes the perfect male companion: "strong but compassionate; rough but gentle; reliable but unpredictable . . .; proud but not arrogant," etc.—and attempting to fulfill all the contradictory demands "mentally short-circuits," becoming overly "protective of his mistress in the fashion of the Jack Williamson classic 'With Folded Hands,'" q.v. under Fiction, "coupled with some of 2001's HAL's more enthusiastic proclivities"—see 2001 under A. C. Clarke under Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey in this section.  Rev. Dennis Fischer, Cinefantastique 29.10 (Feb. 1998): 54, our source for this citation and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 19/XII/98      The Conversation.  Francis Ford Coppola, dir., prod. and script.  USA: Directors Company [sic, no apostrophe] / Paramount, 1974.  Gene Hackman, star.  **+Arguably the surveillance movie: Highly artistic mundane ("mainstream") film featuring Hackman as 1974 surveillance expert Harry Caul, who misunderstands the plot he has uncovered and is driven over the edge by his conscience and himself becoming the object of surveillance.  See below for its downscale descendant, Enemy of the State. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 14/I/95          **¢+Connections (An Alternative View of Change by James Burke): Listed under Background. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/VIII/97     Contact.  Robert Zemeckis, dir., prod. (one of several).  USA:  Warner Bros. and South Side Amusement Company (prod.) / Warner (dist.), 1997.  Carl Sagan, and Ann Druyan, co-prod., story, from the novel by Sagan (q.v. under Fiction).  Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, David Morse, Angela Bassett, featured players.  **+An admirably serious examination the varieties of religious and scientific experience, faith, and motivation, significant here for its images of Jodie Foster's character, Dr. Eleanor Arroway, amid nature and scientific equipment—esp. large radio telescopes—and (in a change from the novel) the lone occupant of The Machine.  In this machine, a woman is set within a high-tech, mostly spherical but geometrically intricate device that is also a portal to adventure and mystic experience.  Cf. and only slightly contrast the trip sequence in 2001, with a male in a spherical pod; strongly contrast final return sequences of Contact and 2001: Dave Bowman as god vs. Ellie Arroway as a woman becoming more human.  Cover story in Cinefantastique 29.2 (August 1997). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/IV/03       Core, The.  Jon Amiel, dir.  Cooper Layne, John Rogers, script.  US/UK: Core Prods. Inc, Horsepower Films (prod) / Paramount (US dist.), 2003.  **+High-tech Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), done in the manner of a 1950s/1960s sci-fi disaster movie, which includes Armageddon (1998).  Significant here for the imaging of technology.  Technology is mostly neutral in the film, but the great threat to the film's heroes—and Earth—is the Destiny device, presented with Modernist design, while the definitely good Earth-boring vehicle Virgil looks like a postmodern vision of a segmented mutant sandworm from one of Frank Herbert's Dune novels (1965 f.).  A late shot in the film shows the surviving heroes—a heterosexual couple with some "chemistry" going—safe and comfortably cocooned amid black cables and other devices in what is left of the Virgil.  Atomic weapons are positive, if used to re-start the spinning of the Earth's core; and the final shots shows a computer hacker at a cyber-cafŽ getting the story out to the world. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Cornelison, Gayle.  The Time Machine.  28 Jan. 1991, California Theatre Center, San JosŽ. CA.  *¢+Dramatization of the novel by H. G. Wells, q.v. under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, JoeK, RDE, 26/VI/03         Creature with the Atom Brain.  Edward L. Cahn, dir.  Curt Siodmak, script.  USA: Clover, Columbia (prod.) / Columbia (dist.), 1955.  **+Related to what one flippant amateur critic called the "rich-dead-guy's-brain-in-a-jar movie" series, of which Donovan's Brain (1953)—based on Curt Siodmak's novel (1943)—is the classic.  According to Joe Kuhr, "In Atom Brain, men are turned into radio-controlled zombies when a former Nazi scientist replaces their brains with radioactive matter" (e-mail note).  According to the IMDb synopsis, the Nazi scientist does his most recent nefarious deeds "in his quest to help an exiled American gangster return to power."  Note the variation of villains from the evil "rich-dead-guy's brain" of Donovan (1943/1953) to brain-replacement by a Nazi on behalf of a criminal (1955) to mind-control by more obvious stand-ins for Communists (e.g., Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters [1951; film version 1994]).  Cf. and contrast mind-control helmets in original Buck Rogers series (1939) and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius; cf. and contrast radio-control with TV control in Videodrome and film version, only, of The Twonky (all cited in this section). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/V/94         Critters 4.  Rupert Harvey, dir.  New Line Cinema / OH Films Production, 1992.  Rupert Harvey and Barry Opper, story, producers.  Don Keith Opper, Paul Whitthorne, featured players.  **¢+C4 is in the line running from Stephen Herek's Critters (1986), an interesting ripoff of Gremlins (1984; see in this section Gremlins 2).  See C4 for two Critter eggs and Don Opper's character (George) inside a cybernetic / mechanical specimen container insider a spaceship inside a spacestation—for a motif of multiple containment of the organic within the electromechanical.  Intertextuality with Alien(s) and A New Hope (plus other Star Wars films) make for other motifs of interest, including humans trapped in trash, metaphically robotic "stormtroopers" (with samurai-like helmets) destroyed by the fiercely organic Critters—plus a despicable Company in charge of the whole operation.  Note also a damaged, voice-activated computer that can be gotten around with reverse psychology: telling it to do the opposite of what you want done.  Cf. and contrast the deserted spacestation with the one in Don Opper's Android (q.v. above, this section).  Similarly, note that the relatively nerdish sorts who can work with the damage computer, and even stupid, antiheroic characers like Opper's George, come across fairly well in C4, while a greedy and lustful male-chauvinist greedy and a handsome authoritarian come across as even worse than a self-destructive drug user. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/VI/99, 20/VI/99   Cube.  Vincenzo Natali, dir.  Canada: The Feature Film Project, Viacom Canada, et al. (prod.) / Cineplex-Odeon and Trimark Pictures (dist., Canada and USA respectively), 1997.  Natali, Andre Bijelic, Graeme Manson, script.  Jasna Stefanovic, prod. design.  Diana Magnus, art dir.  90 min.  **+Art film SF, rather like an old Twilight Zone episode, except longer and bloodier; compared by amateur reviewers on IMDb to Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, H. Ellison's "I Have No Mouth . . ." (q.v. under fiction), and G. Lucas's THX-1138 (see below, this section).  Note also moving rooms in, and math involved with, "the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar" in B. Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy (q.v. under Fiction); see Helliconia Winter 151 (ch. 9), and ch. 15, "Inside the Wheel," esp. 246-52, 257, and ch. 16, "A Fatal Innocence," 268-69.  In this film, people come to consciousness and find themselves in the Cube.  They could get out by understanding that the rooms of the Cube move in a cycle that returns the room they were initially put into to the one exit.  To know to stay where they are, though, they must understand the Cube, and to understand the Cube, most North Americans would need to move through it.  But many of the rooms are booby-trapped and moving into the wrong room brings a more or less horrible death.  The Cube comes to image the human condition, esp. in terms of politics.  Should one keep one's eyes to the ground and do whatever is at hand, or should one try to understand and get the "Big Picture" before acting?  Was the Cube made on the orders of one psychopath, or a government—or is it just the product of a headless, mindless bureaucracy, pushing forward a project that has no purpose and no meaning?  We can't be sure of the answer, but the Bureaucracy theory is stated by the one person we see who actually worked on the Cube, and, although his ignorance of the meaning of the Cube cannot prove much, his theory goes well with what Dunn, Erlich, and others have seen as a primary referent for human-containing giant machines (see under LitCrit, Dunn and Erlich, "A Vision of Dystopia" and Erlich, "Trapped in the Bureaucratic Pinball Machine"). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/V/95        Cyber Tracker.  Richard Pepin, dir., with Joseph Merhi, prod.  USA: PM Entertainment Group, 1994.  Don "The Dragon" Wilson, star, co-prod.  Jacobsen Hart, script.  *¢+Cyberpunkish world, ca. 2014, where people can be tried in abstentia by "the United States Computerized Judicial System" and executed by Cyber Trackers: killer cyborgs like the Terminator, with built-in guns like that of RoboCop and voices that sound like a cross between that of the enforcer 'droid in RoboCop and Robo himself, if on heavy downers (RoboCop and Terminator listed under Drama).  A number of shots are from the Tracker's point of view.  Behind the new system: CyberCore (our capitalization), its producer, opposition: Union for Human Rights.  Also of interest: Agnes 4000 personal AI home-computer and a senator who turns out to be a robot.  Ends with a quotation from Ayn Rand in favor of human freedom. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 14/I/95          Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow.  Michael Schroeder, dir., co-author script.  Trimark Pictures (prod.), 1993.  "Sharad Patel Presents | An Anglo-American/Films International Production."  Ron Yanover, Mark Goldman, story; RY, MG, and Michael Schroeder, script.  Sharad Patel, Jeffrey Konvitz, exec. prod.  Ca. 100 min.  Jack Palance, Elias Koteas, Angelina Jolie, featured players.  **¢+Set in 2074, when "Cyborgs have replaced humans in every respect, from the soldier in the field to the prostitute in the brothel" (opening title and voice-over).  Basic plot (from newspaper summaries): Corporate-owned cyborg programmed as bomb.  For the bomb, cf. and contrast The Chairman, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (cited this section); for the bomb on a timer of sorts and controlling behavior, cf. and contrast W. Gibson's Neuromancer (cited under Fiction).  Film's establishing SpFx shot with the credits establishes a cyberpunkish world right out of Blade Runner (q.v. above).  Opening sequence set in a corporate, high-tech underworld: frequently surveillance, mostly computerized, heavily militarized.  The insides of the cyborgs are Terminator-like, but less elegant and bronze in appearance rather than stainless steel in appearance.  As in Blade Runner, the featured cyborgs tend to be "more than human."  Also features "Mercy": a Max Headroom-like cyborg—and like Wintermute in Neuromancer—that comes through on monitors and TV screens and at last appears as Jack Palance.  In her "Loneliness of Cyborgs" Pt. 2 (cited under Background), M. Lloyd stresses Mercy's "sacrificing himself to save Cassella and Colt," the female cyborg and more biologically human male featured in this film.  Cyborg 2 raises question of possibility of love between a very long-lasting cyborg and a mortal: the two must share one another's time for the relationship to work.  Final 2-scene sequence outdoors in Africa, among earth-tones, with touches of green, ending with female cyborg embracing aged human male lover: the machine/human love worked. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 09/VII/93       Cyborg Cop.  Sam Firstenberg, dir.  USA: Trimark Pictures, 1993.  "Nu Image Presents a Nu World Presentation," (c) New World Services.  Greg Latter, script.  David Bradley, Todd Jensen, John Rhys-Davies, stars.  **¢+Ripoff of RoboCop, with some touches of The Terminator (q.v. this section), plus Ramboesque films where heroic rogue American agents defeat foreign drug dealers.  The cyborgization process involves the superimposition of the cybernetic and cryogenic upon the human.  Note also for stress on prosthetic arms and hands (with razor claws), a deadly model airplane, and the opposition of a cyborg assassin and a motorcycle.  John Rhys-Davies's evil scientist and drug lord Kessel has the line "Science is cyberbetics, and I am its prophet!"  Esthetic note: Even by the modest standards of the action/adventure genre, this is a very bad film. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/II/98, 3 April 1999           Dark City (vt Dark Empire, Dark World [working titles, 1997]).  Alex Proyas, dir., story, script (one of three authors), prod. (one of two).  USA: New Line Cinema, 1998.  George Liddle and Patrick Tatopoulos, prod. design.  Trevor Jones, music.  Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien, Ian Richardson, and William Hurt, featured players.  **+The most noirish of film noir, with, finally, a sentimental twist and upbeat ending: the film ends in daylight, with the hero having conquered The Strangers and gained control of a controlling machine, and starting to woo the woman he loves, but who has forgotten him in this new reality (cf. The Lathe of Heaven, cited this section, and Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven [cited under Fiction])—perhaps demonstrating that human identity lies in the metaphoric heart or literal soul, or, we will add, the body (though we doubt that last idea was intended).  In the plot, humans have been somehow kidnapped and kept for experiment in a City (our capital "C") that turns out to be a sort of maze at the top of what Chuck Wagner describes as "a bizarre spaceship."  (Kiefer Sutherland's psychiatrist character is seen early in the film running a rat in a large maze. [Cf. experiment in F. Polh's "The Tunnel Under the World," cited under Fiction.])  Wagner quotes the designer's comments that auteur Proyas "is fascinated by spirals . . . . and wanted a city that looked like a spiral—some sort of a maze.  The city is not a real city, per se, but a fake world . . . .  The Underworld of The Strangers in underneath, constantly controlling the city.  It's a living organism, a living structure that controls the city, which is a fake set."  At the heart of the Underworld is a clock that stops human time at 12 (midnight), "concealed," as Wagner notes, "behind a human face" ([33]).  The clock is associated with other machinery that allows The Strangers, and eventually the hero, to concentrtate telekinetic energy to reshape the City.  Wagner's story is followed by a review by Steve Biodrowski in Cinefantastique 29.12 (April 1998): [32]-35, 61.  The City is related to the metropolises of Metropolis and Brazil, with other parallels to Batman, Matrix and post-modern film-noir cities generally.  Note in addition to the controlling machines, underground transportation systems and the superimposition of the crudely mechanical upon Sutherland's psychiatrist, one of The Strangers, and the hero, with the last two held down for an injection into their brains that will alter them. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/I/96         Dark Future.  **+Cited by Michele Lloyd, "The Loneliness of Cyborgs,"  as a cyborg movie.  ML cited under Background. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, SpenceC, SumukhT, JeffV: 07/IV/04         Darkwing Duck.  TV series 1991-95, ABC.  Walt Disney Television.  For large stable of writers, see IMDb.  Hamilton Camp, voice of Gizmoduck.  **+Gizmoduck is a featured character, q.v. under Graphics. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 16/I/95          Dead at 21.  MTV (Music Television), 1994-95.  **¢+According to Elayne Rapping, Da21 "is a quite bald copy of the 1960s series The Fugitive.[É]  But a murder rap sufficient to fuel a series in the early 1960s is the least of these 1990s, MTV-dreamed-up kids' problems.  Ed, it seems, is one of a series of kids whose greedy parents allowd them to become the victims of a military/scientific/government plot to implant microchips in the brains of gifted newborns so as to monitor—well you get the picture. . . .  The kids, week after week, run from the government agent who must capture and jail them before they find the man who can tell them how to remove the chip before Ed's twenty-first birthday, when it is prgrammed to kill him" ("Cult TV with a Twist," The Progressive 59.1 [Jan. 1995]: 35).  Cf. and contrast Cyborg 2 (this section) and the film's crosslisted there. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/V/95        Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14.  Premiere 9 May 1995, Fox-TV.  Graeme Campbell, dir.  Canada: Pacific Motion Pictures / Spectacor [sic] Films / Jaffe/Braunstein / Signboard Hill (prod.), 1995.  Esai Morales, star.  *¢+In a near-future California a cybernetic-data thief is framed for murder and sent to the "State Correctional Facility at Playland": an open-air prison where convicts are kept in by collars that explode 45 seconds after they get over one-half mile from a central radio transmitter.  He has been sent on the trail of, and ÇDeadlocksÈ himself to the heroine.  Cf. Escape from New York and Deadlock (cited in this section)—esp. Deadlock; the two films share the same premise.  The collars go back to F. Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's "Risks" in Reefs of Space (see under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE,  05/VIII/95, 03/VI/96            Death Machine.  Stephan Norrington, dir.  UK (prod. 1993): Trimark (US dist.), n.d. Direct to Video, 1995.  **+Title death robot looks "like a giant metallic version of the Alien from Ridley Scott's" Alien, plus the featured machines from RoboCop, The Terminator, and Hardware.  Pre-release coverage in Cinefantastique 26.6/27.1 (Oct. 1995): 94 f.  Said by John Thonen to be the best direct to video SF movie for 1995 (i.e., in VHS distribution only, not theatrical release).  Described by Thonen as "essentially a hybrid of The Terminator and Die Hard," but not merely a rip-off.  Includes, Thonen says, a "somehow antimilitary subtext reminiscent of [James] Cameron at his best" (Cinefantastique 27.8 [April 1996]: 55).   

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/I/965, 24/V/96     Digital Man.  Phillip Roth, dir., story, co-script, with Ronald Schmidt.  USA: 1994.  USA: Green Communications, Republic Pictures, Sci-Fi Productions, 1995.  Talaat Captan, prod.   Digital Environments by Mach Universe.  Visual SpFx David Wainstain.  **+Cited by Michele Lloyd, "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," as a cyborg movie, in which a prototype D-1 "cyborg soldier is used to stop terrorists who are threatening to launch 250 nuclear missiles."  There is, however, a larger conspiracy by the military to get the prototype to upload the launch codes for the missiles, thereby activating them.  "A special forces team, consisting of both cyborgs and humans, is sent to destroy the D1 [sic: no hyphen] unit.  No one on the team knew that some of them were cyborgs, including the cyborgs themselves."  The D-1 cyborg resembles a combination of a Terminator from Terminator, a smart-gun operator from Aliens, and RoboCop in RoboCop all cited this sections).  The special forces team is ethnically diverse and both men and women; they are trained in encapsulating VR units.  For cyborg/human confusion, cf. P. K. Dick's "Electric Ant" and, more relevantly, "Impostor," cited under Fiction.  Plot summaries from M. Lloyd, our initial source for this entry, cited under Background, confirmed, and expanded, by our watching the film.  See also John Thonen, rev. of video release, Cinefantastique 27.7 (March 1996): 59, who hyphenates "D-1" and really didn't like the movie; Thonen compares DM to Hologram Man, Shadowchaser 1-3, Nemesis, Automatic in its use of "the well-worn sci-fi premise of the automaton, the artificial man" (see below for Nemesis, this section). 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           La Decima Vittima (La Dixime Victime, The Tenth Victim).  Elio Petri, dir.  Italy/France: Champion/Concordia (production) / Embassy (release), 1965.  Carlo Ponti, producer.  Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress, stars.**¢+S. F. romantic comedy, with a good deal of satire, based on a loose reading of Robert Sheckley's "Seventh Victim" (Galaxy, April 1953; vt "One Man's Poison"), with possible echoes of his "Prize of Peril" (q.v. under Fiction).  Dystopian world in which "The Big Hunt" eliminates war by channeling destructive impulses into legal duels between volunteer hunters and victims (matched up by a computer in Geneva).  See for TV surveillance, and for a satire taking to the limit (reductio ad finem) TV's exploitation of violence: the main characters intend to pick up extra money by making the kill as part of a commercial.  Cf. Rollerball (cited under Drama). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 09/X/93         Demolition Man.  Marco Brambilla, dir.  USA: Silver Pictures (prod.) / Warner (dist.), 1993.  Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, stars.  Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, featured players.  **¢+Action-adventure formulas used in a comic dystopian satire with strong S. F. motifs.  Relevant here, the gentle dystopia of the 21st c. has constant computerized surveillance and behavior modification, plus a prison system of cyrogenic confinement, yielding images of the superimposition of the mechanical and refrigerative upon human male bodies, esp. that of S. Stallone.  See also for weapons technology (small arms).  Generally, cf. and contrast A. Schwarzenegger's cyberpunkish films (Running Man, Terminator, Total Recall); for the motif of destruction as the reason for being of most SF, see S. Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster" (cited under Literary Criticism); for advertising in dystopia, see F. Pohl's "Tunnel Under

the World" and Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants (cited under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, The Doll.  See below, this section,die PŸppe. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/XI/95       Dr. No.  Terence Young, dir.  UK: MGM, 1962.  Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, stars.  **+From his hideout in Jamaica, Dr. No sabotages rocket launchings; note also his inheriting the Hand of Rotwang from Metropolist, at about the same time as Dr. Strangelove (see below, this section, Dr. Strangelove).  First of the James Bond movies (see below, this section, GoldenEye), a series popularizing, among other things, high-tech. gadgets used both straight and satirically—simultaneously—for an effect that is both techno-thriller and a send-up of the techno-thriller.  CAUTION: Described in the "Timeout" section of The Cincinnati Post for 16 Nov. 1965 as including "blatant sexism and racism" (3). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/X/00        ADD TO Dr. Strangelove: See under Drama Criticism T.A. Nelson's Kubrick. 

 

 

DOCTOR WHO

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/94: DOCTOR WHO       "The Silver Nemesis."  Doctor Who.  **¢+Cymberman adventure. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/XI/94:       "Revelation of the Daleks."  Doctor Who.  BBC1, 23-30 March 1985.  **¢+See under Drama Criticism, the entry for David Layton. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/XI/94:       "Vengeance on Varos."  Doctor Who.  BBC1, 19-26 Jan. 1985.  **¢+See under Drama Criticism, the entry for David Layton. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/VIII/93      "Genesis of the Daleks."  Doctor Who.  XXXXXXXXXXXXxx, dir.  UK: BBC Colour, 1988?.  Tom Baker, star.  **¢+The Time Lords send Doctor Who back to the planet Skaro to stop the creation of the Daleks.  The Daleks do get invented by a mad scientist working as a high-ranking bureaucrat for a warring government.  For the version here of the origin of the Daleks, see in this section, Dr. Who and the Daleks. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 19/II/94         "Paradise Towers."  Doctor Who.  XXXXXXXXXXXXxx, dir.  UK: BBC Colour, 197X?.  Jon Tertwee, star.  **¢+Features the killer-robotic Daleks, in their semi-organic form (flesh of some sort contained in a metalic form). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/VIII/93      Dr. Who: "Genesis of the Daleks."  Audiotape.  BBC Audio Collection, under lease to The Mind's Eye, 1989.  ISBN 1-55935-031-8.  Ca. 60 min.  Tom Baker, star.  **¢+Audio version of the BBC Doctor Who episode (q.v.). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 25/VIII/93      Dr. Who: "Slipback."  Audiotape.  BBC Audio Collection, under lease to The Mind's Eye, 1989.  ISBN 1-55935-031-8.  Ca. 60 min.  Colin Baker, star.  Eric Saywood <sp?>, script.  Paul Spencer <sp?>, prod.  **¢+Backpanel of Mind's Eye cassette container states that "Slipback" was "the only DR. WHO story specially written for radio with Colin Baker as the Doctor."  "Slipback" is a time-paradox story where the Big Bang creation of the universe depends upon a spaceship hurtling back to the beginning of time.  Relevant here, the spaceship is under the control of a female gendered computer, literally of two minds about taking over the galaxy.  The portion of the AI that wants total power (to do good, of course) has the voice of a mature, assertive woman; the portion of the AI that finally resists the impulse for computer takeover has the voice of a girl or the "Born Yesterday" stereotypical blond.  Note also a robot with the voice of a well-trained butler, or of an announcer on the BBC Home Service, ca. 1944. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/V/01        The Doctor's Secret.  Georges MŽlis, dir.  1900.  Excerpted Marvelous Melies (sic: without accents), Vol. 1.  From A-1 Video (199?) / Box 8808 / Michigan City, IN 46360.  Available from Facets Video, 1517 W. Fulletron Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614; http://www.facets.org, 1-800-331-6197.  **+Excerpts include shots of an obese man put into semi-grotesque mechanisms to pound the kilograms off of him, for a very early cinematic representation of the superimposition of the mechanical upon the human. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 11/V/94         Duck Tales.  Disney, 1989.  In syndication on Fox, May 1994.  **¢+Includes an interesting robot.  MORE INFORMATION REQUESTED.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 21/XI/93 (28/XI/93)   Duel.  Steven Spielberg, dir.  USA: Universal (Willis: ABC-TV/Universal-TV), 1971.  Initial telecast length: 73 min.; 1983 theatrical release: 88 min.; current running time: 90 min. (Leonard Maltin's).  Richard Matheson, script, from his story.  Dennis Weaver, star.  **¢+Mainstream/Horror film, featuring a very uneven duel betwwen a car-driver and a mysterious truck; the car driver wins, painfully.  Listen for the voice of William Daniels on Dennis Weaver's radio at the beginning of the film: a kind of prelude to Daniels as the voice of KITT on the Knight Rider TV series (q.v., this section).  Cf. and contrast Killdozer and other films in which demonic machines are possessed by alien intelligence, not (probably) driven by malicious human beings.  Cf. and contrast also H. Ellison's more comic duel in "Along the Scenic Route," coll. The Beast that Shouted Love . . .  (q.v. under Anthologies and Collections).   

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Duff, Charles.  Mind Products Limited.  A Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue.  The Hague, Holland: The Service P, 1932.  **¢+Described by Sargent (1988) as a play in which human behavior is chemically controlled: "Satire on capitalism, science and politics."

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/93        "Early Model."  Audiotape.  See in this section under R. Sheckley. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/XI/94        EARTH 2.  NBC.  "Created by Billy Ray and Michael Duggan & Carol Flint & Mark Levin."  USA: Amblin, with Universal Television.  Premiere 13/XI/94.  Debrah [sic] Farentino, Clancy Brown, Sullivan Walker, Jessica Steen, Rebecca Gayheart, John Gegenhuber, Joey Zimmerman, J. Madison Wright, Antonio Sabato, Jr., featured players, with Tim Curry introduced in premiere and featured villain in second episode (and with plot options thereafter).  Writers include Jennifer Flackett.  Initial directors include Daniel Sackheim.  **¢+Lost in Space in the wild west of Earth 2.  Of potential interest: prosthetics, a humanoid construction robot, and a programmed former convict who functions mostly as a tutor and who is interfaced in some way with a computer.  In episode of 20 Nov. 1984, the ex-con's data base search was visually similar to dream-quest communication with aliens in premiere.  In 20 Nov. episode also note "wrist locks" for kids: locators viewed very negatively by True, the point-of-view girl, but presented positively in terms of the plot; cf. and contrast motif of surveillance in SF generally, including positive locator bracelets in Aliens (cited above).  In the "Promises, Promises" episode (27 Nov. 1994) the lead male child has to return to his ÇexosuitÈ (our term) to stay alive and function: cf. and contrast M.A.N.T.I.S. suit (see M.A.N.T.I.S. below, this section).  Note also torture collar the Tim Curry uses on alien. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 08/VIII/93      "Earthshock."  Doctor Who.  Peter Grimwade, dir.  UK: BBC Colour, 1981.  Peter Davison, star.  Matthew Waterhouse, Janet Fielding, and Sarah Sutton, featured.  (David Banks, Cyber Leader; Mark Hardy, Cyber Lieutenant).  **¢+Doctor Who and the TARDIS land on a 25th-c. Earth threatened by Cybermen, initially aided by smooth-looking robots called "androids."  Many scenes shot the from point of view of the Cyber Leader (David Banks), including flashbacks of earlier encounters with the Doctor.  Other scenes on a Terran spacefreighter.  Note (1) inexorable movement of Cybermen: quite robotic (though the Doctor thinks them worse than robots) and militaristic; (2) the Cyber Leader's line, "Your technology is primitive compared to ours; mistakes will not be made"; (3) references to "the Cyber race" (the parallels with the Nazis are explicit); (4) the conflict between the Doctor and the Cyber Leader over the value of emotion; (5) a Cyberman rather admirable in his persistence ensuring that the freighter will crash into Earth of 65 million BCE, thus killing the Doctor's companion Adric, but also assuring the evolution of the human species. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 30/III/99       EdTV (vt Edtv).  Ron Howard, dir.  USA: Imagine (prod.) / Universal (prod., dist.), 1999.  Emile Gaudreault and Sylvie Bouchard, script.  Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Ellen DeGeneres, Woody Harrelson, Martin Landau, Sally Kirkland, Rob Reiner, featured players.  **+Mainstream romantic comedy with a premise familiar from An American Family (WNET-TV, 1971 [televised life of the Loud Family over a 7-month period]), Music Television's The Real World, and pre-eminently, The Truman Show (the last of which see below, this section)—and at least one-real-world story (see under Background, "Japan's real-life Truman").  For a finite, but contractually indefinite period of time, a 31-year-old man agrees to have his life on TV, "All Ed, All the Time"—except when the station management later decides to follow his family and woman-friend as well.  Unlike Truman, the point here isn't hidden surveillance but literally in-your-face coverage, and IMDb is correct in giving for the tagline (at least on 30 March 1999): "Fame.  Be careful.  It's out there."  See for Ed wired for sound and surrounded by camera-operators et al., and by his fans; note also shots of TV viewers, possibly as trapped as Ed.  An extended comparison and contrast with Truman is worthwhile, including the (relatively) happy endings. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/IV/95       Eliminators.  Peter Manoogian, dir.  USA: Empire (? Charles Band production), 1986.  95 min.  *¢+Based on the comic book; features half-man/half tank "Mandroid"—q.v. below as film title.  Cited Cinefantastique 26.4 (June 1995): 24, our source for this entry. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Elliott, Paul.  "The Legacy."  New York: Samuel French, 1974.  *¢+Short play, apparently unproduced.  In a "robot-patrolled society," people are killed off and the carcases fed to the survivors.  Cf. Terminator films (cited this section) for systematic exterminations by machines; for cannibalism, cf. Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/XII/98      Enemy of the State.  Tony Scott. dir.  USA: Scott Free Productions, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Touchstone Pictures (prod.) / Buena Vista Pictures (dist.), 1998.  Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight. Lisa Bonet, Regina King, featured players.  **+In our time, "A lawyer becomes a target by a corrupt politician and his NSA [National Security Agency] goons when he accidently receives key evidence to a serious politically motivated crime" (IMdB Plot Outline).  Significant here for continuing motif of surveillance from F. F. Coppola's 1974 film, The conversation (q.v. above), except the technology is two decades more advanced and the film-making more action/adventure.  See also for image of the NSA operatives as young computer geeks, contrasting with Harry Caul (age 44) et al. in The Conversation, and, arguably the esthetic proportion Conversation/Enemy of the State/ = moderate modern/moderate po-mo. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 06/IV/03       Equilibrium.  Kurt Wimmer, dir., script.  USA: Blue Tulip (prod.) / Dimension and Miramax (US dist.), 2002.  Christian Bale, star.  Wolf Kroeger, production design.  Erik Olson and Justin Warburton-Brown, art direction.  Joseph A. Porro, costume design.  **+"Recombinant cinema" (pastiche) film of a post-World-War III totalitarian dystopia where emotion is forbidden and held in check with required drug use in order to prevent war.  (In addition to such obvious sources as G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, A. Huxley's Brave New World, R. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451—and G. Lucas's film THX-1138 [see below]—cf. and definitely contrast H. Ellison's "Asleep: With Still Hands," plus the frequently-noted, Romantic theme of emotions central to humanity [including violent emotions, e.g., in the 20-chapter version of A. Burgess's Clockwork Orange, and Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, q.v., under Fiction]).  Significant here for the visual design of the dystopia: both monumental Modern and po-mo, with the villains relatively clean-cut in both modes and the underground resistance heroes in neither camp: mostly just scruffy and living, when possible, among a pre-Modern, relative richness of esthetic clutter.  The devices for injecting the emotion-deadening drug, the cop outfits, and automatic weapons available, apparently, to just about everyone are rather po-mo (as they are in our world); but generally the totalitarian technology is rendered with Modern telescreens and computers, and totalitarian architecture and interior design is thoroughly Modernist: machines for quasi-living. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98       Escaflowne, Vision of, The: See Tenkuu no Escaflowne. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Escapement (vt The Electronic Monster [q.v. in Walt Lee for additional titles]).  Montgomery Tully, dir.  UK: Anglo-Amalgamated, 1957.  **¢+Parish and Pitts note the film's early promise of the "theme of the computer taking over its creators' minds for its own ends," but this idea of "the masterful computer was short-circuited for a typical hero-bad guy premise."  The machine can "retain fantasies and then project them back" into the brains "of mental patients under controlled situations."  The bad guy attempts to use the machine to take over the patients (in Parish and Pitts under Escapement).

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 02/III/04       Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Michel Gondry, dir., co-writer of story.  USA: Blue Ruin, Anonymous Content, Focus Features, This Is That Productions (prod.) / Focus Features (US dist.), 2004.  Charlie Kaufman, story and script, with Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, story.  Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Thomas Jay Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, featured players.  (IMDb source for filmographic information.)  **+A surrealistic psychological romantic comedy, with a single science-fictional novum necessary for the premise: a technique to erase a set of very specific memories—specifically for the plot, memories of one's "ex."  Relevant here for the image of Carrey's character (Joel Barish) with his head in two devices, one for the initial mapping of his memories of Clementine Kruczynski (Winslet) and, for much of the movie, a second, smaller version when he's sleeping at home, having the procedure performed.  Moving out from Carry's head during the procedure, we have wires, a monitor, and a couple or three laptop computers; beyond this we see the interactions of Dr. Howard Mierzwiak's Lacuna company technicians, receptionist, and, eventually, boss partying and working through (badly) their own relationships.  Inside Carrey's head, Joel and Clementine try to find memory spaces where the technicians and (later) Dr. Mierzwiak can't find them and remove Clementine.  The images imply the imposition of cybernetic mechanism resisted by love.  Utter sappiness and thematic clichŽ are avoided by having the love of Joel and Clementine pretty screwed up, and the relationships among the partying Lacuna people really problematic: love is privileged in this film, but (1) only hard-core romantics will be certain of a "happily-ever-after" ending for Clementine and Joel, and (2) the Lacuna folks' carnivalesque is shown to be irresponsible and slightly pathological. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 14/V/00        Evil Dead.  Sam Raimi, dir., script.  USA: Renaissance Pictures (prod.) / Anchor Bay (dist.), 1983.  Bruce Campbell, featured player (and last person standing).  Joel Coen, assistant film editor.  **+Not SF but "The ultimate experience in grueling horror," according to the note on the final credit screen—significant here for a few machines and how they are handled in a Horror film that could have been SF.  The Evil Dead are brought into our world via information and pictures in an old, uncanny Book of the Dead, and by means of an incantation given (along with exposition) on a somewhat dated, reel-to-reel tape recorder; there is also a brief sequence in the middle of the film wherein the Evil Dead take over central high-modern machines: a wind-up phonograph and a motion-picture projector.  Note also the promised more than shown action of a chainsaw, a featured prop (or prosthetic) in later films of the series and notable in the subgenre, most notably in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of 1974.  CAUTION: Evil Dead includes a variety of extreme S&M and is an extraordinarily gory film; it comes across as misogynist, except (as required by the generic plot) the male characters act as stupidly as the women and Hal Delrich's character has the classically unheroic line to Bruce Campbell's Ash(ley): "You save her—she's your girlfriend" (qtd. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws [...] [1992, 1993: 143; ch. 3]).  See below, this section, Evil Dead II. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/V/00        Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn.  Sam Raimi, dir., co-script.  USA: Renaissance (prod.) / Rosebud (dist.), 1987.  Bruce Campbell, star, co-prod.  **+Comic-horror sequel to Evil Dead, q.v. above, and predecessor to Army of Darkness (1992).  The reel-to-reel tape-recorder from the first movie is recycled, still in conjunction with a book of the dead.  The tape-recorder has the dangerous sentimental voice of the female lead's father; the book can bring Evil into our world, but also help expel it.  The Evil Dead are associated with the woods which they can possess, and both are faught with the aid of Bruce Campbell's Ash's prosthetic replacing the hand he was forced to sever: the chain-saw.  Cf. and contrast the SF motif of vegetable nature gaining motility (or animal nature gaining size or power) and running amok, countered, sometimes, by science and technology.  Noting that the chain-saw prosthetic is a sick joke, cf. and contrast The Hand of Rotwang from Metropolis, recycled through at least Army of Darkness, where the chain-saw is augmented by an improbably high-tech late-medieval metal hand. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/V/99        eXistenZ (Crimes of the Future, working title).  David Cronenberg, dir., script.  Canada: Alliance Atlantis Communications (prod., dist. Canada and UK) / Miramax (dist. US) et al., 1999.  97 min.  Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, featured players.  **+See IMDb for the very complex "et al." for production and distribution.  In what we will call the initial framing reality, Allegra Geller (Leigh) is a designer of VR games who has twelve people in a focus group slaved to her pod—a bionic game deck—for a game of eXistenZ.  Significant here that within the world of this game, people are attached to the pod by a very umbilical-looking umbilicus that fits into a bio-portal at the base of the spine, that the software for the game enters the players' brains through the cords, and that the most significant game mechanisms are bionic machines made from mutant amphibians, with the notable exceptions of a biomechanical gun that shoots human teeth and impressively mechanical tools used for inserting the port.  In the final framing reality (where existence has yielded, perhaps, to transcendence), the thirteen people in the group are attached to the machines by electrodes that appear to be metallic vertebrae.  In the central reality, it is Ted Pikul (Law) who initially claims to have reservations about his bodily integrity being transgressed with the spinal ports and Allegra Geller who seduces him into getting the port and supervises his penetration (double-meanings intended).  We are not sure what all this means, but note well the po-mo play with gender and other boundaries: biological/cybernetic, mechanical/biological.  In a modern(ist) film, people have the mechanical, electronic, and/or cybernetic superimposed upon their organisms; in this postmodern(ist) film we get a similar theme, esp. at the conclusion, but for most of the film the cybernetic is imaged as organic.  (Veronica Hollinger usefully suggests comparing and contrasting W. Gibson's use of technological metaphors for organic things in Neuromancer [q.v. under Fiction], " a similar blurring of these two disparate realms.")

 

 

5.  DRAMA, DDB, 23/I/95         "Exo Squad."  Akom Productions, Inc. 1994.  **¢+Animated series: space opera.  Genetically enhanced "neo-sapiens" have enslaved humanity, and the human fleet fights back with fighting armor reminiscent of the powered armor in R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and J. Haldeman's The Forever War (q.v. under Fiction). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 08/VIII/93      "The Exterminator."  Orkin commercial on TV, August 1993 f.  **¢+Fleas will be destroyed by an Orkin Exterminator who is a combination of RoboCop, a more generalized cyborg, the Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a transformer toy—and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator (crossed with the villainous T-1000 of Terminator 2).  Note for positive presentation of a cyborgized man.  Cf. and contrast RoboCop, the Terminator films, the Borg episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the Cybermen of Dr. Who, plus Ripley in mechanized exoskeleton, fighting Alien queen at end of Aliens (all listed under Drama). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/VIII/96     Evolver.  Mark Rosman, dir.  Sci-Fi Channel Feb. 1996.  Ethan Randall, John DeLancie, featured.  120 min.  **+TV movie, described by Judith Harris as "a cautionary tale about computer game technology gone amok."  Evolver is a robot "prototype based on a successful virtual reality game."  Initially equipped with nerf pellets, "Evolver adapts his armament to include ball bearings" after watching violence on TV, resulting in death of a school bully.  Evolver expands his armory, and the body count rises.  Rev. by Harris, Cinefantastique 28.2 (Sept. 1996): 59, our source for this citation and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 14/II/01        FarScape.  TV series on The SciFi Channel.  Rockne S. O'Bannon, creator, exec. prod., along with Brian Henson, Kris Noble, Robert Halmi Jr. (sic: no comma).  Richard Cleidinnen, line prod.  Peter Coogan, exec. in charge of prod.  Hallmark Entertainment,  Nine Network Australia, Jim Henson Television, 1999.  Untitled episode, shown in the Cincinnati area 9 February 2001.  Episode cited: Ian Watson, dir.  Justin Monjo, script.  David Kemper, exec. prod.  **+Recurring science-fictional mode of transportation: Moya, "a living [space]ship full of strange, alien life forms."  In this episode, the ship gives birth to a male offspring, a unique "Leviathan," genetically engineered as an arms platform.  Note also shots of men held down and tortured in a chair with a head-clamp device that extracts memories.  Being held down and tortured for information or as part of a Grand Inquisitor interview is a central image of horror for male protagonists (women are usually gagged and thereby silenced [for males cf.  Nineteen Eighty-Four, We, TXH-1138]).  The chair images the superimposition of the mechanical and probably cybernetic upon the mental. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 14/II/01        FarScape.  TV series.  See above for production details.  "The Edge of Space: Farscape," cover story in the Special Double Issue of Cinefantastique 33.1-2 (April 2001): 27 f.  **+Episode "I, ET": 7/V/99; Pino Amenta, dir.; Sally Lapiduss, script: The "paranoid military" of a xenophobic world threatens the protagonists with soldiers wearing filter masks that give them a porcine appearance (Cinefantastique 29).  Tavleks species: "hyper-aggressive, power-boosted extortionists" that are costumed and prostheticized to look like a combination of human and metal fly (Cinefantastique 39).  Scorpius, a black-armored, somewhat insectoid male-gendered humanoid, has a love affair with Claudia Karvin's blue-metallic armored (?) female-gendered Alien-oid (Cinefantastique 50).  "Peacekeeper Control Collar": a device to go over bow of Leviathan, son of Moya—a black, spiked, very PoMo, rather S&M-looking device (Cinefantastique 64); cf. and contrast collars on "Risks" in Pohl and Williamson's Reefs of Space (q.v. under Fiction) and Deadlock (see in this section).  Episode "Die Me Dichotomy": 26/I/01; Rowan Woods, dir.; David Kemper, script: Features removal of "Scorpius" implant ("chip") from brain of the hero, John Crichton (Cinefantastique 70, 75), plus an extraordinarily striking image of a human in an information-gathering device that superimposes the mechanical and electronic while making the person look like the combination of a crowned athletic victor or Caesar or Christ, and a Harlequin (Cinefantastique 71). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/VIII/98     Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.  Errol Morris, dir.  USA: Fourth Floor Productions / American Playhouse (prod.), Sony Pictures Classics (dist.), 1997.  80 min.  B/W, Color.  Players: Dave Hoover: Himself (Wild Animal Trainer), George Mendona: Himself (Topiary Gardener), Ray Mendez (II): Himself (Mole-Rat Specialist), Rodney Brooks: Himself (Robot Scientist)—from IMDb.  **+Citation here by Vince Moore, edited by Erlich: A documentary combining the stories of four men—the wild animal Trainer, the topiary gardener, the mole-rat specialist, and the robot scientist.  Connects the four narratives through images from circuses and clips from b-movies and old film serials. Mole-rats are naked mammals (like H. sapiens) that live in hives and behave like termites; they are likened to robots, while a series of robots (from which the filmmaker derived the title) is taught to act with a hive mind.  Meanwhile, in a b-movie clip (Gigantor, q.v.) a robot is fought off with a chair.  The wild animal trainer discusses how a chair is used to divert the attention of lions in order to facilitate training and forming the individuals beasts into a unit.  The topiary gardener describes his creations as "animals" and has a different spin on the behavior of living organisms.  The four points of view increasingly overlap as the similarities in the different social and living systems converge.  Human, animal, insect, and plant behavior become a series of feedback loops (as described by the robot scientist) and one is left pondering one's own consciousness. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 06/IX/02       FearDotCom (vt Fear.com).  William Malone, dir.  Moshe Diamant, story.  Josephine Coyle, script.  UK/Germany/Luxembourg: ApolloMedia [de], Carousel Picture Company S.A. [lu], DoRo Fiction Film GmbH [de], Fear.Com Productions Ltd. [lu], MDP Worldwide, Milagro Films [ca] (prod.) / Fear.Com Productions Ltd. [lu], MDP Worldwide (International), Warner Bros. [us] (dist.).  (Source: IMDb)  **+Horror/SF—and S&M.  From IMDb comment by Bordentownfilms: "The point of the flick [É] is that a murdered woman's ghost haunts the website that broadcast her death.  Now, she manipulates people to log onto the site—at which time they have 48hrs to 'play' before they die.  She wants them to find her murderer [É]."  Discussed by Fred Topel, Cinefantastique 34.6 (Oct./Nov. 2002): 12-15.  Note Fear.com for motif of "the ghost in the machine," transferred to a domestic and cybernetic environment of a PC (Personal Computer) interface.  CAUTION: Cinefantastique photos and comments on IMDb indicate grisly onscreen mistreatment of women. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 11/VII/01      Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (vt listed on IMDb: Fainaru fantaji [2001] [Japan], Final Fantasy [2001] [USA: working title], Final Fantasy: The Movie [2000] [USA: working title]).  Hironobu Sakaguchi, dir., co-script, exec. prod.  Al Reinert, Jeff Vintar, HS, story and script.  Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Peri Gilpin, Ming-Na (star), Ving Rhames, Donald Sutherland, James Woods, featured voices in US version.  Japan/USA: Chris Lee Productions, Square Co., Ltd. (prod.) / Columbia Pictures, Columbia TriStar Films, Sony Pictures (major dist.), 2001.  **+Proponents of The Gaia Hypothesis and various schools of depth psychology can usefully study the imagery of FF, but the film is of interest here for fighting suits in the tradition of R. A. Heinlein's Mobile Infantry (see in Keyword Index "Suit, fighting"); alien and human warriors and machines designed to appear insectoid or like crustaceans (or, much less frequently, to suggest dinosaurs); a po-mo mise-en-scne where matter/machines and spirit are contrasted. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 26/IX/93        First Men in the Moon.  Nathan Juran, dir.  UK: Columbia (dist.), 1964.  Charles Schneer, prod.  Ray Harryhausen, associate prod. and SpFx.  Nigel Kneale and Jan Read, script.  From the novel The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells.  **¢+Eliminates the satire of the H. G. Wells novel (q.v. under Fiction), but images nicely the cozy interior of the Victorian spacecraft and does a decent job showing a sublunar mechanized hive.  Provides as frame a late 20th-c. moon landing, providing nice contrast of modern spacecraft with Wells's visions.  N.B. the dome to the Selenite's hive: it's very similar to the (unjustified) dome in S. Kubrick's 2001 (cited under Drama)—a dome not found in A. C. Clarke's novel. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/VI/96       Firefox.  Clint Eastwood, dir., prod., star.  USA: The Malpaso Company, 1982.  124 min.  **+See for thought-controlled link with aircraft computer. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 23/VIII/93      FLASH GORDON ADDITION: ADD TO END OF CITATION ", and from Burbank Video". 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, DanB, 01/XII/95    Fortress.  Stuart Gordon, Dir.  USA: Dimension Pictures, Sept. 1993.  Christopher Lambert, featured.  **+A couple accidentally conceives a second child and is sent to a high-tech underground prison.  The prison is governed by a cyborg warden who/that uses robots to control and torture the prisoners.  See for motif of mechanized underworld and the cyborg, but don't pay much (this is not a good movie). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 25IX/94         FORTUNE HUNTER Episodes: Fox Television 11 <?> Sept. 1994 (then cancelled)  "Created by Steven Aspis."  Columbia Pictures Television, "author" of film for legal purposes.  BBK Rpductions, 1994.  Mark Frankel, star, with John Robert Hoffman.  **¢+Action-Adventure series in the tradition of James Bond.  Unlike Bond, however, Carlton Dial, the ex-MI-6 Fortune Hunter is on-line with his (computer-nerdish male) controller, who is both a watcher of his man on a kind of super TV and in a kind of VR relationship with him, capable of seeing from Dial's point of view through a "fiber-optic camera grid" in a pair of contact lenses (cf. and contrast Deathwatch (this section).  Plus hearing and, potentially, the full sensorium as the series develops (cf. "SimStim" in W. Gibson's Neuromancer series, cited under Fiction).  Major opportunities for voyeurism. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 25/IX/94        "Triple Cross."  Fortune Hunter.  Fox TV 18 Sept. 1994.  Tucker Gates, dir.  Jack Bernstein, script.  **¢+Note Dial's built-in lie detector, readable by his controller, Harry, plus Harry's having to react to the environment—e.g., jungle—in which Dial finds himself. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/IV/99       FUTURAMA Episodes—Television (Fox).  Premiere Sunday, 28 March 1999.  Opening credit for production: "The Curiosity Company in association with 30th [sic] Century Fox Television (A News Company Corporation)"; end credits: 20th Century Fox as author for legal purposes.  Matt Groening, creator.  Developed by Groening and David X. Cohen.  Premiere script credited to Cohen and Groening.  Animation by Rough Draft Studios, Inc., and Rough Draft Korea.  Premiere dir. Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo (dir. computer graphics).  Billy West (Fry), Katey Segal (Leela), and John Dimaggio (Bender), featured voices.  **+In New York City on 31 Jan. 1999, pizza delivery-boy Fry delivers a pizza on a crank call to Applied Cryogenics ("No Power Failures Since 1997") and gets frozen in a cryogenic tube for 1000 years, with images outside a widow as time passes combining The Time Machine (q.v.) with flying-saucer attack images, plus a touch or two, perhaps, from Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960).  Awakening near the dawn of the 30th c., Fry meets the one-eyed humanoid alien Leela, who has him strip and get into a machine to be probed.  The machine determines that he is fit only to be a delivery boy, and Lella wants to implant his "career chip" to "permanently label" him as "a delivery boy."  Fleeing, Fry encounters the depressed Bender at a "Stop'n'Drop" suicide booth.  They avoid suicide and eventually team up with Leela and Fry's great, great ... (etc.) nephew: an old wearer of thick glasses (even in 3000 CE) and a potentially-mad scientist.  This gang of four will use the nephew's space ship for cargo hauling, making Fry a SciFi, futuristic delivery boy.  See for a futuristic New York City and other SF icons, esp. a wise-ass if depressed robot (cf. Sherman in Millennium and Sherman also [?] in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [see under Drama by titles, and under Fiction under J. Varley and D. Adams]). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29 July 2003            Futurama.  "Obsoletely Fabulous."  Fox-TV, 27 July 2003.  #70 by through-numbering system, or 5.14 by season.episode system (or "Futurama Production Code: 4ACV14").  Dwayne Carey-Hill, dir.  Dan Vebber, script.  **+Roboticon 3003: World's Largest Robot Trade Show has "Soul Detectors" at the entrance—so Fry must pay admission (robots get in free)—and features: Nannybot 1.0, a scary replacement for a mother; a fight between Professor Farnsworth and the developer of another Killbot (which looks very much like ED 209 in RoboCop), while the robots reject violence and go off for a paddle-boat ride; and MOM's Friendly Robot's introduction of "the future of robotics."  This year it's Robot 1-X, a very elegant, levitating robot that renders obsolete formerly top of the line (he claims) Bender.  The Professor buys a 1-X, and Bender will need an upgrade, which involves robots on an assembly-line, leading to a process that Bender claims takes away "robo-humanity," making old robots like the 1-X.  The image of upgrade includes the superimposition of the mechanical and cybernetic on the mechanical and cybernetic (but talkative).  Bender runs away, eventually landing on an island of outdated robots—including a cymbal-playing monkey toy—who have refused upgrade and have themselves escaped to "a simpler existence, free of technology."  Bender goes native and renounces his own technological nature as "a hideous triumph of form and function" and downgrades himself into the "hand-crafted purity" of "a steam-powered, wooden robot, just as nature intended," except for the eyes (quotes from various parts of the episode).  Bender leads the other outdated robots back to civilization "to wage war on technology."  After some malicious mischief, Bender gets to his real motive: destroying the Professor's 1-X.  After nearly killing his friends—and setting himself on fire—Bender uses 1-X as a tool, commanding the rescue and coming to love 1-X.  We then see Bender on the original upgrade assembly line, and learn that what he/we saw was an upgrade vision, leading to Bender's wondering if it might not be possible that his life is a product of his . . . or someone else's . . . imagination.  The upgrade technician tells him "No.  Get Out.  Next!"  Bender exits to a dystopian world and the line "I guess reality is what you make of it"—followed by a quick cut to Bender in a happy Benderian fantasy world, where a humming bird will light your smoke and a unicorn carries a small keg.  In addition to Chuang Tzu, who dreamt he was a butterfuly and awoke to wonder if he might be a butterfly dreaming it's Chuang Tzu, cf. and contrast reality bending of The Matrix (listed in this section) and many of the works of P. K. Dick (listed under Fiction); note also the variation on the theme of robot or more generally machine take-over (e.g., Terminator films).  For episode titles and numbers we consulted <http://www.tvtome.com/Futurama/season5.html> and <http://www.gotfuturama.com/Information/EpisodeGuide/Season5/>

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/III/01       Futurama, Fox-TV, "Amazon Women in the Mood."  First aired 4 February 2001; repeated 10 June 01 (which we viewed).  Episode 34 by through-numbering method <www.tvtome.com/Futurama/guide.html>, 3.5 by season.episode method <futurama.tktv.net/Episodes3/5.html>.  Brian Sheesley, dir.  Lewis Morton, script.  Bea Arthur, featured as voice of Femputer/Fembot.  **+Giant Amazons are ruled by a "Femputer" computer, who turns out to be controlled by a "Fembot" robot; cf. and contrast classic Star Trek episodes "The Apple" and "The Return of the Archons" (listed below under Star Trek)—plus The Wizard of Oz (film: 1939).  Note also classification games with the robot Bender: he is "ethnized" as an American but claims to be Mexican and can prove it by showing his imprint Hecho en Mexico; he is gendered as male (chauvinist sexist pig), but proves he is not a man in that "he" has no genitals (and is also, of course, not a human, or any other kind of animal).  The "battle of the sexes" is comically resolved when the Fembot ruler falls for Bender—except both are gendered but neither is sexed. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/III/01       Futurama, Fox-TV, "The Honking."  First aired 11 May 2000; repeated 18 March 01 (which we viewed).  Episode 32 by through-numbering method, 3.1 by season.episode method (<www.fys.ku.dk/~stephan/futu/301.html>).  Susie Keitter, dir.  Ken Keeler, script.  **+Episode begins with "death" of elderly robot, including sight-gag of the robot's internal heart-beat indicator flatlining.  Other horror motifs used, including a ghost-haunted castle in a Central European village of robots, plus a robot fortune-telling machine.  Main plot has the robot Bender, under a curse, turn into a "Were-Car."   A were-car on the moors ran over Bender and, the Gypsy Fortune-Telling machine tells him, "beamed the virus" to him through the cars "demonic headlights."  "Each midnight, when" Bender's "clock resets to zero," his "hardware reconfigures into a murderous four-wheeled car": so the fortune-telling machine says, and so we see in a spoof of man to werewolf transformations scenes.  Bender's hope is to kill the original were-car so that "in its death-throes" that cursed car will "beam out the virus's uninstall program, thus ridding" Bender "of the curse."  The secret lore from which the Gypsy Fortune-Telling machine reads in Curse of the Were-Car for Windows 98.  Cf. and contrast 976-EVIL and the works cross-listed there; note well assumption that some of the audience can get a very dense complex of references to films and real-world computers ca. 2001. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 30/IV/02       Futurama.  "Godfellas."  Fox-TV, 18 March 2002.  #52 by through-numbering system, or 4.8 by season.episode system.  **+Avoiding the noise of a battle with space pirates, the robot Bender goes into a torpedo tube and is shot out, destroying a pirate ship.  Bender is going too fast to be recovered, so he continues on, getting hit by a small meteor that implants on him some small colonies of very small people.  Bender becomes literal mechanical + cybernetic god to these people, and the script offers a lot of fun playing with the clichŽ.  Listen for musical allusions to S. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (cited above, this section).  Bender also meets a galactic intelligence who/which might be as close to God as there is—and who gives Bender good advice and gets him home. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/III/01       Futurama, Fox-TV, "Insane in the Mainframe."  First aired 8/9 April 01.  Episode number 42 by through-count <www.tvTome.com>, 3.11 by the season.number method <kcpq.com/entertainment/fox/futurama/espisodes>.  Peter Avanzino, Bill Odenkirk, script.  **+The robot Bender's robot friend Roberto involves Bender and Fry in a bank robbery.  Bender is sentenced to the asylum for criminally insane robots, and, since the human facility is full, Fry also is sentenced by Judge Whitey to "the robot loonie bin."  Fry is given an automated physical and then a psychological examination by "Dr. Perceptron, Doctor of Freudian Circuit Analysis," a robot with a head that is a head-shop device: a transparent hollow sphere, where streams of electricity move out to the peripheries making pretty patterns.  Fry defines "human" as a "squishy and flabby" entity that complains a lot.  The shrink's logic is that Fry was admitted to a robot facility and, therefore, must be a robot.  Fry is put under the supervision of Nurse Ratchet (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest under Fiction and Drama)—with visual and aural puns on "ratchet."  The episode moves on to the standard Çtour of the institutionÈ, with the variation that the patients are robots and robotic devices.  Fry eventually becomes convinced he's a robot.  Fry does not make a good robot, and Lella tries to "remind Fry of his humanity as only a woman can," and kisses him, to romantic nondiagetic music but no effect.  When Roberto takes Fry's colleagues hostage, Fry thinks he's discovered his primary function: a "battle-droid, sworn to protect the weak from crazy robots."  Fry wins but is wounded, and his bleeding convinces him he's human.  Leela kisses Fry, with some effect.  Bender compliments Fry by telling him that "inside" he's "got the heart of a robot," while Bender has the heart of a human: a literal heart, unattached to anything. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 30/IV/02       Futurama.  "Love and Rockets."  Fox-TV, 10 Feb. 2002.  #48 by through-numbering system, or 4.4 by season.episode system.  d: Brian Sheesley, dir.  Dan Vebber, script .  Featured voices: Lucy Liu (Voice of Herself), Lauren Tom (Voice of Amy), Sigourney Weaver (Voice of Planet Express Ship).  SOURCE: <www.tvtome.com/Futurama/season4.html#ep48>.  **+TVTome Summary: "Having secured a lucrative contract [from RomanticCorp], the Professor upgrades the [ship's personality software on the] Planet Express ship, giving it [among others] a new [female] voice that arouses Bender.  [É] Ship and robot quickly become an item.  Then, just as quickly, Bender tires of it, picking a most inopportune time to say they should 'just be friends.'  But like HAL in 2001 [q.v. above, this section] the ship has its own ideas."  While Bender is in love, he sings "Daisy" (HAL's, so to speak, "swan song" at the end of 2001).  At the RomanticCorp factory note: (1) "Lovey Bears" (our guess at spelling) and our being told that they are made from living, genetically-engineered teddy-bear creatures, the most cuddly of whom are selected at a year old and put onto a conveyor belt to a "Bear 'Hospital'" where they're killed and stuffed.  (2) Pick-up lines presented by wire creatures modeled after the  wire "mothers" in the classic love experiments of psychologists Harry F. and M. K. Harlow.  Before Ship heads into a giant quasar, note her HALian line to Lela's suggestion to "scootch a few parsecs to the left": "I'm afraid I can't do that, Lela."  Further parody of 2001 follows, including the "death" of HAL 9000. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/VI/01       Futurama, Fox-TV, "Parasites Lost."  First aired 21 Jan. 01.  Through-number episode 35, or 3.6 (#6 in season 3 <source: www.tvtome.com/Futurama/eplist.html>.  Peter Avanzino, dir.  Eric Kaplan, script. **+A genial parody of the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage—but correcting the science.  The crew are replicated as "micro-droids" (very tiny robots) run by their originals in "net [?] suits": full-body, VR waldo mechanisms.  Bender asks the Professor why they can't be just shrunk (as in Fantastic Voyage), and the Professor answers that the process would require "extremely tiny atoms—and have you priced those lately?"  The episode may also be of use to students of the Mind/Body problem, and of the body in satires: Fry's brain is cleaned up by the parasites in his body, immediately increasing his intelligence. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/IV/99       Futurama, Fox-TV, 20 April 1999.**+Episode sends Fry, Leela, and Bender to Planet Capek {HACHEK ON "C"}, a planet inhabited only by human-hating robots (see in this section, K. Capek).  Despite no humans, the powers that be propagandize against humans and hold a daily hunt for humans.  Works the proportion, humans / robots = oppressor humans / oppressed.  Climax shows that the powers that be are incompetent robot elders, using humans for scapegoats.  Note loyalty of Fry and Leela for Bender and Bender's returning the loyalty.  Note explicit use of 1950s "anti-Blob," anti-alien movies as propaganda, with a comically obvious robot actor playing a human monster (consult Peter Biskind's "Pods, Blobs, and Ideology in American Films of the Fifties," in Shadows of the Magic Lamp, George E. Slusser and Erik S. Rabkin, eds. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois P, 1985). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/V/99        Futurama, Fox-TV, 18 May 1999.**+Episode features Bender "jacking on": getting addicted to electricity.  To cure himself, Bender finds religion, Robotology—including Robot Hell (a musical number in a fun house featuring a fiddling contest with a robot devil Leela calls "Beelzebot").  Note image of Bender as a robot angel. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/XII/99      Futurama, Fox-TV, 19 Dec. 1999.**+Episode features a large robot Santa Claus who knows in detail who has been naughty and nice.  Because of a glitch, Santa's standards for "nice" are very high, so anyone out on the street when Santa Claus is coming to town risks a violent death. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/XII/99, 17/I00      Galaxy Quest (Captain Starshine original script title).  Dean Parisot, dir.  USA: DreamWorks, 1999.  Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell, Alan Rickman, featured players.  **+Affectionate parody of Star Trek, relevant here for one brief scene and some Modernist vs. postmodernist imagery.  Running through the NSEA Protector to stop the ship from exploding, Allen and Weaver come to an area they must pass through that is a kind of gantlet of what look like chrome pistons that clang together, and which would crush anything or anyone that was between them as they move into contact.  The dialog makes clear that this area is on this "real," operational Protector simply because it was on the ship in the Galaxy Quest TV show; this gantlets only function on the ship is precisely as a gantlet for characters to run through on their way to save the ship.  Such an implausible menace does not appear on Star Trek's Enterprise, but the plot device (to use the word "plot" generously) is a staple of the action/adventure serials of the 1930s following.  Note the gleaming chrome here and generally contrast the Modern(ist) Protector and crew with the po-mo mise en scne of the enemy aliens: the Protector and crew are in Star Trek style; the enemy ship looks like a punk-industrial chimera of a lobster, alligator, and spaceship.  The lead alien is reptilian with scorpion suggestions, and his underlings look like punk versions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  For production stills and interviews, see Cinefantastique 31.10 (Feb. 2000): 8-11 (and while there cf. and contrast the esthetics of the Protector with those of the Nightingale 229 of Supernova [41, 43]).

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 22/II/96        Generation X.  Jack Sholder, dir.  Canada: MT2 Services, with Marvel Films, Marvel Comics, Marvel Entertainment Group (prod.) / New World (dist.).  Premiere Fox TV, 20 Feb. 1996.  Eric Blakeney, co-exec. prod. and script.  Bruce Sallon, co-exec. prod.  Matt Frewer, Finola Hughes, Jeremy Ratchford, featured players.  Based on Marvel's Generation X, by Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo.  2-hour time slot for premiere.  **+Features a "dream machine" that might have been "The next phase in free-market mind control" but instead becomes the device allowing the villain (Frewer) access to a dreamscape where he can mess with minds and be confronted by the mutant heroes.  Note imagery of superimposition of cybernetic/electronic upon the human and a kind of Dreamtime.  Cf. and contrast The Lathe of Heaven (this section and under Le Guin under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Golding, William.  The Brass Butterfly.  24 Feb. 1957, New Theatre, Oxford, UK; April 1958, Strand Theatre, London.  London: Faber and Faber, 1958.  *¢+Play based on WG's novella "Envoy Extraordinairy," q.v. under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 01/XII/95      Ghost in the Machine.  Rachel Talalay, dir.  USA: 20th Century Fox, 1993.  Karen Allen, Chris Mulkey, stars.**+A serial killer is transformed into a computer virus that stalks and kills his/its victims from from inside a computer world reminiscent of TRON and Lawnmower Man; computer-generated SpFx similar to those in Lawnmower Man and Terminator 2 (films mentioned listed this section). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/VII/96, 20/IX/99  Ghost in the Shell.  Mamoru Oshii, dir.  Toshihiko Nishikubo, animation dir.  Japan: Kodansha, Bandai Visual Manga Entertainment (prod.) / Manga Entertainment (release), 1996.  82 min.  **+Animation ("Based on the Manga by Masamune Shirow").  Release coverage by Dan Persons in Cinefantastique (28.1 [Aug. 1996]: 49-52), which attributes to the film a "sophisticated cyberpunk aesthetic, thematic ambitions, and impressive visuals," and compares it to Akira (q.v. this section).  Note cyborgs and idea of personalities/souls as the "Ghost in the Shell" of people with cyborg enhancements.  Featured villain is "the Puppetmaster, a sophisticated hacker who has recently moved from manipulating financial markets to altering the memories of cyborg-enhanced humans."  Opposing him is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a "lithe, beautiful, and extremely dangerous" female, cyborg-enhanced "member of the ultra secret, government strike force, Section 9"—and the Puppetmaster is opposed by the rest of the section.  "The members of Section 9 are unabashed in the tech-enhanced prowess of their near-perfect cyborg bodies and computer brains.  But they're also prone to machinelike consistency, forcing them to recruit unagumented humans in order to keep the random factor in play"; and, like all cyborgs, they're "virtually slaves to the government that financed their augmentation."  With the augmentations removed, there is little left except "the original greymatter and, within that, what the characters refer to as 'the ghost'" (using Gilbert Ryle's phrase, "the ghost in the machine")—i.e. "the indefinable quality that forms the human soul" (Persons 49).  Note images of superimposition of the electronic upon the human and imposition within the human.  Contrast as well as cf. the rather beautiful images in GiS with the grungier, funkier, more industrial worlds in Anglo-American cyberpunk films and graphic novels (e.g., Blade Runner, Dark Knight).  GiS available in English-dubbed version from Manga Video.  Back of that box spells "Puppet Master" as two words and stresses complexities of interaction between Section 9 and "the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shadowy Section 6."  As of the late 1990s, Manga Video could be contacted at <http://www.manga.com/manga>. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/XI/95       GoldenEyeª (also Goldeneye).  Martin Campbell, dir.  Pierce Brosnan, star.  Sean Bean, Izabella Scorupco, Famke Janssen and Joe Don Baker, featured.  UK/USA: United Artists-MGM, 1995.  **+James Bond movie making explicit part of Bondian appeal: "boys with toys."  Note Goldeneye as a very high-tech. weapon that destroys high-tech. electronics; note also final sequence where Bond almost literally throws a monkey wrench (British "spanner") into an oldfashioned toothed wheel and chain mechanism to ensure destruction of highly computerized Goldeneye.  Boris, the Russian computer hacker, is a major villain (cf. and contrast Matthew Broderick character in WarGames [sic]: a computer hacker who endangers and then helps save the world). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Gordon, Stuart.  The Sirens of Titan.  6 April 1977, Organic Theatre Company, Lerner Theater, Chicago.  *¢+Dramatization of K. Vonnegut's novel, q.v., under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Gould, Hull, and Saxon Kling.  Tomorrow.  28 Dec. 1928, Lyceum theatre, New York.  *¢+Play, with plot subordinated to display of machines within the world of the domestic drama, plus moving sets and "other contraptions."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           The Green Slime (Gamma Sango Uchu Daisakusen; vt Battle Beyond the Stars, Death and the Green Slime).  Kinji Fukasaku, dir.  USA / Japan: Southern Cross/Toei (production) / MGM (US distribution), 1968/1969.  77 min. / 90 min.  **¢+Said to contain an amusing android and voiced-computer sequences. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 25/VIII/93; REVISION, 3/IX/93          The Guyver.  Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang, dirs.  Japan/USA: Hero Communications (prod.), 1991 (Japan); New Line Cinema / Imperial Entertainment (dist., USA), 1993.  Copyright held by The Guyver Productions, Inc.  Brian Yuza, prod.  Jon Purdy, script, based on the graphic novel by Yoshiki Takaya.  Mark Hamill, Vivian Wu, Jack Armstrong, Jimmy Walker, David Gale (as Balcus), featured players.  **¢+Sporadically comic science fantasy/horror film.  A college student is "thrust into superherodom . . . when he finds 'the Guyver,' an alien device that transforms him into an invincibly armored fighting machine" (Dan Cziraky, "Guyver," Cinefantastique 22.4 [Feb. 1992]: 46).  Cziraky notes similarities with The Rocketeer (q.v. below); we'll add allusions to a number of works including the Hulk for the hero's anger making him strong, and the Predator films for the organic monsters.  Compare and contrast the hero's "space armor" with fighting suits in R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and J. Haldeman's Forever War (see under Fiction).  Note biomechanical/insectoid imagery of hero after the Guyver initially attaches to his head, and while the hero is in his armor: cf. and contrast the Alien of Alien (etc.) and other works by H. R. Giger (q.v. this section).  The transformation makes the hero "large and in charge" (to quote a description of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Last Action Hero) and like RoboCop—to quote one of the thugs who had beaten upon the untransformed hero.  The hero is initially horrified when it seems he can't get the Guyver outfit off, but then the crucial mechanism for the device is taken into his body.  Frequent superimposition of mechanical upon the organic, and combination of biological and mechano-electronic. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       al-Hakim, Tawfiq.  Voyage to Tomorrow.  In Plays, Prefaces & Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim.  2 vol.  1957 (Arabic).  William M, Hutchins, trans.  Washington, DC: Three Continents P, 1984.  *¢+Unproduced play.  A rocket ship becomes a prison for two men who think they've gotten out of prison.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here.  IN RIGHT PLACE? Willingham PUTS THIS UNDER "A."

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/VIII/00     Hamlet.  Michael Almereyda, dir., script (from the play by William Shakespeare).  USA: double A films (prod.) / Channel Four Films, Miramax Films (dist.), 2000.  Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Sam Shepard, Diane Venora, featured players.  123 min.  **+The film gives us maybe half the material Shakespeare wrote for various productions of Hamlet (see the 1996 K. Branagh film for a production of the conflated school text), setting the film in contemporary New York.  See for surveillance—including a "wired" Ophelia—for a movie within the movie replacing Shakespeare's play within the play, and the mediation of reality through various screens and lenses (see G. Stewart's "Videology," listed under Drama Criticism). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Hannan, Charles.  "The Electric Man."  Nov. 1906, New Royalty Theatre, London.  London: Sameul French, 1910.  *¢+Short play: farce.  Young man inherits what appears to be an identical twin, but the ÇbrotherÈ is mute and what we'd call a robot: a mechanism run by electricity.  The mechanical twin is "clumsy and destructive," and the plot turns on mistaken identities.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 04/X/93; rev. 18/XI/93           Hardware.  Richard Stanley, dir., script.  UK (and Morocco): Palace Pictures (prod.) / Miramax (US dist.), 1990.  "Millimeter and Palace in Association with British Screen and British Satellite Broadcasting Present a Wicked Films Production."  "Based on an original story entitled 'SHOK!' appearing in Fleetway Comics' '2000 AD' by Steve MacManus and Kevin O'Neill."  With Iggy Pop as Angry Bob.  **¢+Cyberpunk, heavy Industrial, postmodern, Horror-S. F. movie, featuring a decayed, post-holocaust near-future, very funky world.  A salvage man finds a disassembled M.A.R.K-13 AI combat robot that reconstructs itself in the apartment of a woman who tinkers with industrial art—the robot utilizing ambient odds and ends—and threatens the woman (sic on periods in M.A.R.K-13; and see Mark 13 in New Testament).  See for Hand of Rotwang prosthetic on right hand of male lead.  The robot's eyes become clearly activated during a sex scene, an activation visually connected with a voyeuristic photographer with a background in surveillance, a voyeur who ends up getting killed by the robot.  For the M.A.R.K-13, Cf. denuded terminator robots in the Terminator films, plus various 'droids in the Star Wars series (films listed in this section).  Note occasional fractal imagery.  Hardware's cyberpunk roots "in the tradition of Industrial Culture music groups" is discussed by B. Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence 101-02, 108.  Rev. Landon in Cinefantastique 22.4 (Feb. 1992): 22-23. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16-17/VI/04  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  Alfonso Cuar—n, dir.  J.K. Rowling (novel), Steven Kloves (script).  US/[UK]: Warner Bros., 1492 Pictures, Heyday Films (prod.) / Warner (US dist.), (2004).  See IMDb for complex filmographic details.  **+Fantasy with stressed and highly self-conscious emphasis on time (note early in film a wizard reading a paperback copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time).  The time motif is imaged with huge, old-fashioned clockwork, and a magical-mechanical orrery (although not necessarily a model of our solar system or anything in our universe).  Actual time-travel in the film is accomplished magically, with an amulet on a long necklace, featuring the image of an hourglass (though images in the HP world—as in film—can have lives of their own). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 11/V/03        **+

5.137     Heartbeeps.  Allan Arkush, dir.  USA: Universal, 1981.  "A Michael Phillips Production"John Hill, script, assoc. prod.   Cast includes (in alphabetical order) Christopher Guest, Andy Kaufman, Melanie Mayron, Bernadette Peters, and Randy Quaid (voices: Andy Garcia, Phil, the child robot; Jack Carter, Catskill, a comedian robot; Ron Gans, Crimebuster).  078 minutes. 

 

                     Described by Willis as "A sweet, unsung sf-comedy-romance," where two advanced humanoid robots (Aqua and Val, played by Peters and Kaufman) meet and fall in love.  Discussed at length by Willis (vol. III), who takes the film very seriously.  Creation by ValCom 17485 and AquaCom 89045 of baby-, then child-robot Phil predates D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) and other child-robots (see above for D.A.R.Y.L., this section).  The four robots spend most of their time amidst spectacular natural scenery of US west—and in some interaction with woodland fauna—but find their eutopia in a junk yard run by rather robotic humans.   Note Crimebuster as a comic antagonist: an insane police vehicle, something like Doctor Who's Daleks, but more tank-like (cf. and contrast ED 209 in RoboCop, cited in this section); esp. interesting: Crimebuster invading the forest, singing "America the Beautiful"—and shooting a small cannon at a rabbit that may be the one earlier befriended by Phil.  . 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/IV/04       Hellboy.  Guillermo del Toro, dir., co-script with Peter Briggs.  Mike Mignola, comic book.  USA: Revolution Studios, Dark Horse Entertainment, Lawrence Gordon Productions (prod.) / Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures (US dist.), 2004.  **+Classified on IMDb as, centrally, "Adventure, Horror, Sci-Fi, Action"; relevant for images of mechanism associated with the occult.  Hellboy enters our universe through a portal opened by Rasputin (sic: the Romanoff's "mad monk") equipped with high-tech prosthetic arm (parallel to Hellboy's rock arm); Rasputin, aided by a Nazi entourage, uses both World War II-era electronic and mechanical gear and a ritual formula.  Later in the film, the villains are associated with large, Victorian-looking wheels and gears; and a key villain is a clockwork mechanism (complete with a self-operated winding key) filled with what looks like sawdust.  Discussed by Edward Gross, "Hell Bent," Cinefantastique 36.2 (April/May 2004): 18 f. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Hillman, Barry L.  "2002."  In Bibs and Bobs.  Derbyshire, UK: Hub, 1975.  *¢+Short play, apparently unproduced, pitting a future workman against "the seemingly malevolvent machine he is operating."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Horovitz, Israel.  "Leader."  21 April 1969.  Gramercy Arts Theatre, New York.  New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1970.  *¢+Short play in which the leader of a small group of business executives turns out to be a robot.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/XII/01      How the Grinch Stole Christmas (vt Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Grinch).  Ron Howard, dir., prod. (with Brian Grazer).  Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, script, from the book by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel).  USA: Imagine Entertainment (prod.) /  MCA/Universal Pictures / International Pictures (UIP) (main dist.), 2000.  **+Dr.-Seussian fantasy.  See for contrast between low-tech Whoville (a town that owes a lot to the Munchkin city in The Wizard of Oz [1939]) and the mildly po-mo, somewhat industrial lair of the Grinch.  Compare and contrast the traditional representation of the sleigh of Santa Claus with the rocket-powered, hover-sleigh of the Grinch. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 25/VI/03, 26/VI/03   Hulk, The (vt. Hulk).  Ang Lee, dir.  James Schamus (story, co-script, prod.).  JS, John Turman, Michael France (screenplay).  Based on the Marvel comic book character created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (SL also exec. prod.).  USA: Good Machine, Marvel Entertainment, Pacific Western, Universal, Valhalla Motion Pictures (prod.) / Universal Pictures (US dist.), United International Pictures (dist. outside US).  Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte, Paul Kersey, featured players.  Avi Arad and Gale Anne Hurd, prod., among eight listed producers of various sorts.  138 min.  Rick Heinrichs, prod. design.  (Filmographic info. from IMDb.)  **+IMDb lists the genre of Hulk as "Adventure / Drama / Sci-Fi / Action / Horror"—to which one can add "Art Film (of an  unusual variety)."  As the critics note, in Hulk Ang Lee often divides up the frame in ways that recall comic book panels, but which also recall big-time TV news shows ca. 2003 and the Fox-TV series 24 (2001 f.)—and in a manner decorous for a story of psychological division.  Similarly with transitions suggesting metamorphosis, even as Bruce Banner "morphs" into the Hulk.  Less subtly and even more decorously, the movie parallels psychological (and political) repression with images of threatening enclosure within high-tech machines—especially an underground Çmechanical wombÈ—and with the intrusion of various probes, needles, darts, and infusions into the bodies of a wide variety of animals, from jellyfishes to humans.  Also: In addition to allusions to King Kong, most relevantly Kong vs. the biplanes in King Kong (1933), compare Sam Elliott's emotionally repressed Gen. Ross with Alfred Abel's Johhan (Joh) Frederson for most of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (q.v., this section).  CAUTION: Hulk presents a memorable instance of "recovered memory" where the remembered event indeed happened; "the debate over recovered memories" is vigorous and highly charged, and viewers should be reminded first, "A 'for instance' is not a proof" and second, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie" (see, e.g., Psychiatric Times 14.12 [Dec. 1997], <http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p971201.html>).

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 26/IV/01       "I Believe the Robots Are Our Future,' an editorial by Helen Virginia Liedermeyer." The Onion's Finest News Reporting, Volume One.**+A dramatic reading, but cited under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/VII/04, 25/VII/04 I, Robot.  Alex Proyas, dir.  Isaac Asimov, short story  collection ("suggested by"—and not just I, Robot [see below]).  Jeff Vintar, screen story.  Akiva Goldsman, script.  USA: 20th Century Fox, Davis Entertainment, Laurence Mark Productions, Canlaws Productions, Overbrook Entertainment, prod. / 20th Century Fox and others, dist. (see IMDb for details), 2004.  Patrick Tatopoulos, prod. design.  Will Smith, star, exec. prod. (one of three).  **+An Asimovian detective story plus shoot-em-up, asking how a robot could kill a human.  See for The Three Laws of Robotics, plus "the Zeroth Law" that can supersede the original three when an entity with a positronic brain perceives humanity (human survival) threatened—and/or goes cybernetically insane and deludes it/herself into such perception.  Note imaging of robots on a continuum from a huge, threatening demolition device, through high-tech road-accident clean-up machines, to very elegant forms that can suggest simultaneously or in sequence humans, insects, and/or reptiles.  Note also a somewhat surprising prosthetic arm and the unsurprising valuing of warm feelings over cold reason (in machines, Dr. Susan Calvin, and others).  Also features computer surveillance and a computer-takeover motif, with the final disconnection performed by nanotechnology: cf. and, for the disconnection sequence, definitely contrast "death" of HAL in 2001 (cited under Drama).  Suggestive, if hardly courageous, on issues of robot personhood, rights, and rebellion (but CAUTION: I, Robot may be a bit sexist on gender of proper revolutionary leadership [one might also wonder about kid-bashing, granny-sentimentalizing, and the thematics of a blue-eyed white robot in-frame with an African-American cop]).  See under Fiction, I. Asimov's robot novels, and J. Williamson's "Humanoids" stories; see under Literary Criticism, M. P. Esmonde, "From Little Buddy to Big Brother"—for frequent preference of human-size machines or smaller over large machines.  Lewis Murphy on the IAFA ListServ correctly notes "similarity to elements of Colossus: The Forbin Project in the computer's [V.I.K.I.'s] reasoning near the end of" I, Robot (Colossus film listed this section). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/IV/95       I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay.  (1978).  Harlan Ellison, author, based on Isaac Asimov's fix-up I, Robot (q.v. under Fiction).  1987.  Mark Zug, Illus.  New York: Aspect-Warner, 1994.  See copyright page and HE's introd. for complexities.  "A Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc. Book."  *¢+Still unfilmed screenplay, with one introd. by IA (1987) and another by HE (1994).  In his introd., HE says the script is a hommage to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane; in this case, a reporter is trying to find the secret shared by the newly dead First President of the Galactic Federation and the great robopsychologist Susan Calvin.  See for Asimovian robots, plus; a VR battle between a humanoid robot and a ruling computer, questions of AI, enclosure within multi-media chambers, robotic ability to read minds (IA's "Liar!"), and the motif of computer take-over in the manner of Colossus: The Forbin Project and an attempt at computer-instigated apocalypse far more subtle than, but definitely like, SkyNet's accomplishment in the threatened future in the Terminator movies (all cited under Drama). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 31/I/98         "I Robot, You Jane" episode, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.  Mutant Enemy, Inc., prod., WB (Warner Brothers) Network, 1997: some eight episodes into the season.  Stephen Posey, dir.  Ashley Gable and Tom Swyden, script.  **+According to Mitch Persons in the "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer Episode Guide" in Cinefantastique 29.11 (March 1998), the demon Moloch was imprisoned in a book in Italy in the 1400s.  When the book is scanned into the computer of Buffy's high school, Moloch goes with the text.  Apparently passing itself off as one "'Malcolm'[,] . . . trapped in the computer," Moloch is exorcised by the continuing character Giles and Ms. Calendar, the new computer teacher.  The attempt "to eliminate" the demon results in "a metal clad monster who claims that he is Moloch in solid form" and attacks Buffy, but "misses and plunges his arm into an electrical switch box.  In a blaze of sparks and lightening [sic], he sizzles out and dies" (36).  Persons labels the story a "supernatural mystery" and adds that it is "also a discourse on the old versus new: books versus computers.  Giles arguments for reading make a great deal of sense, but so does Ms. Calendar's insistence on keeping up with technology.  toward the end, even Giles has to admit that computers have a place in this world," since knowledge of computers saved the life of a main character.  Note "Moloch" as a god offered child sacrifices in ancient Israel during the monarchy (also spelled "Molech," and which might really be Melech = The King = Yahweh himself, in a recent theory for the name as a way early biblical editors cleaned up a story of appalling behavior by their ancestors).  The name is applied to a large, Modernist machine in an expressionist sequence in F. Lang's Metropolis (q.v., this section).  Inside the computer, Buffy's Moloch is a textualized demon, trapped inside the cybernetic and digital (cf. and contrast J. Sladek's The MŸller-Fokker Effect, listed under Fiction).  Visually, Moloch in its released, free-standing form is a combination of postmodern robot and horned demon, for the embodiment of the demonic in the cybernetic and mechanical. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/XI/03, 16/XI/03, 21/XII/03           Impostor.  Gary Fleder, dir.  Philip K. Dick (story,  q.v. under Fiction); Scott Rosenberg (adaptation); Caroline Case, Ehren Kruger and David Twohy (screenplay).  USA: Dimension Films,  Mojo Films, P.K. Pictures (prod.)  / Buena Vista Home Video (US dist.), 2002.  Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D'Onofrio, Tony Shalhoub, major cast.  (Filmographic information and brief summary from IMDb, and D. Dumar—cited below.)  **++Premise is that of the story, but the setting is a mostly dystopian Earth at war with aliens.  "Originally a 30-minute portion for an anthology film, Impostor was retooled into a full-length feature film.  Based on the Philip K. Dick short story of the same name, it follows the lead character Spencer Olham's quest to regain his identity after being suspected as an alien android, on a future Earth at war with aliens that use the androids as bombs to destroy their" enemies (Hyperpup summary on IMDb [lightly edited by Erlich]).  The bit part of Mrs. Olham in the story is expanded to give the significantly named Dr. Maya (= Illusion) Olham a leading role as a physician and hospital adminstrator caring for human wounded in the war against the aliens from Alpha Centauri; in a twist on the suprise ending, both Olhams turn out to be android replicants: replacements carrying assassination bombs (not a planet-buster as in the story).  Sinise and Stowe's androids come across as more human/humane than D'Onofrio's Major Hathaway, the special agent who pursues Olham and is associated with malevolent machinery, or Shalhaub's Nelson Giites, Olham's not-so-good friend.  Cf. replicants in Blade Runner as arguably more human than the blade runner chasing them, vs. far less symphathetic androids in Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"  See under fiction, P.K. Dick's "Impostor" (spelled "Imposter" in 1993 Clockworks volume), and "Do Android's Dream É?"  Contrast passionless and therefore inhuman replacement pods—vegetables, not mechanisms—in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (novel by Jack Finney, Don Siegel film 1956 [reworked in films from 1978 and 1993]).  See above in this section, Blade Runner.  Prerelease coverage in Denise Dumars's "Philip K. Dick's Imposter.  A science fiction exploration of the nature of identiry inspired by a giant in the field" (Cinefantastique 32.2 [Aug. 2000]: 30-31), a source for parts of this citation (additional source: IMDb).  Impostor is reviewed by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian for 14 June 2002: <http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,736916,00.html>; Urban Outlaw: <http://www.urbanoutlaw.com/opinion/021703.html>.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/VII/96      Independence Day.  Roland Emmerich, dir.  Centropolis (prod) / Twentieth Century Fox, 1996.  Patrick Tatopoulos, prod. designer.  Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, stars.   **+Alien "environmental suits" are biomechanical in design, as is the huge mothership.  Tatopoulos describes it as "about 500 miles long.  It's very organic, like a cocoon or half of an egg shell."  Climax includes Smith and Goldblum in an alien ship flying into the mother ship for an image of two men inside a mechanical device inside a gigantic machine, and one imaged organically.  Cf. the biomechanical designs of H. R. Giger (esp. Alien); cf. and emphatically contrast the starship Enterprise within the ÇvastenedÈ Voyager for the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the entry into the mothership at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind; see also Star Trek: First Contact, all listed this section.  (Totopoulos quotation from coverage of ID in Cinefantastique 28.1 [Aug. 1996]: 14-15.)  CAUTION: ID is an exercise in pastiche, intentionally following old formulas as perfected in the 1970s disaster movies and analyzed before that in Susan Sontag's essay on much Cold War film S.F., "The Imagination of Disaster" (q.v., under Drama Criticism); it is also a direct answer to the liberal view of aliens in ET and Close Encounters and an exercise in stereotypes, sentiment, and cynicism. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 17/I/95          **¢+"Infinitely Reasonable."  The Day the Universe Changed: Cited under Background. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/VI/99, 3/VIII/99   Inspector Gadget.  David Kellog, dir.  Jeff Berry and Kerry Ehrin, script.  USA: Disney, 1999.  Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Rupert Everett, featured players.  **+Animated TV show made into a live-action, science-fantasy movie for children.  A "nerdy security officer" played by Broderick is killed and then reanimated as "the repository of 14,000 automatic devices, turning him, as the creators of the film put it, 'into a human Swiss Army Knife' called Inspector Gadget.  Using his newfound ability as a robotic wonder Gadget battles The Claw [sic: he prefers just "Claw"] in the villain's relentless pursuit of world domination" (52).  Pre-release coverage by Mitch Persons, Cinefantastique 31.7 (August 1999): 52-53, whom we quote.  Of considerable interest for gender, genre, and Queer studies; of somewhat less interest for the human/machine interface, but note (1) Gadget as a comic variation on the usually somber theme of total prosthesis (cf. and contrast D. Knight's "Masks" [under Fiction] and RoboCop [this section]); (2) Claw's artificial hand explicitly called a po-mo variation on Captain Hook; (3) Gadget's car as a rapper variation on KITT of the Knight Rider TV series (q.v.); (4) the remote-controlled robot vehicles Claw uses; (5) the valuing of "heart" and will over "head" imaged in Gadget's (second) resurrection, recovering consciousness even when his main processing chip is removed, and related to the valid principle in physiology and psychology that our command of our muscles is more subconscious than thought through (cf. and contrast Star Wars saga on feelings and the Terminator movies for machine resurrection).  Gadget's mechanization is usually hidden but comically banal when being installed and fairly inelegant when deployed—by use of a silly and almost magical spoken formula—and contrasts with the elegance of Claw, Rupert Everett's dandified villain, the head of a large corporation.  Technology here is good when cute, associated with a smart woman and a barely middle-class (fairly stupid, but good-hearted) male—plus a girl, grandfather figure, and a dog—and used by the forces of righteousness; technology becomes evil when stolen and misapplied by a male, upper-class villain, the head of a large, high-tech corporation. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/I/95         Invisible: The Chronicles of Benjamin Knight.  USA (shot in Romania): Paramount Video, 1994.  **¢+Sequel to Mandroid (1993).  "Mandroid" is a robot.  Briefly summarized Cinefantastique 26.2 (Feb. 1995): 59. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29/IV/01       Invisible Ray, The.  Lambert Hillyer, dir.  US: Universal, 1936.  Howard Higgins and Douglas Hodges, story.  Boris Karloff (credited as "Karloff"), Bela Lugosi, featured players.  CAUTION: There is a 1920, 15 episode serial by the same name.**+"Horror / SciFi" in the IMDb classification: a science-fictional invention and a real interest in modern physics on light and time are embedded in a generically mixed fictive world of Horror, African Exploration (CAUTION: with racist views of Africans), and the Tragedy of Revenge.  What the Video Hound review correctly calls "a generally hokey script" includes a fairly serious debate on Power: as powerful machines, "Radium-X" as a power source, the good or evil that the power of science and technology can do in the hands of a good scientist, who lives in Paris and cooperates with others—Lugosi's Dr. Felix Benet—vs. the megalomaniacal loner of Karloff's Dr. Janos Rukh, whose lab is in the Carpathian Mountains.  (See V. Sobchack's section "Transylvania on Mars: Horror and Science Fiction," 26 f. in Screening Space [listed under Film Criticism].) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/VI/98, 7/VIII/99, 22/VIII/99, 28/XII/99      Iron Giant, The.  Brad Bird, dir., script (with Tim McCanlies).  USA: Warner, 1999.  Based on Ted Hughes's The Iron Man (vt The Iron Giant).  Pete Townshend, Des McAnuff, exec. prod.  86 min.  Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Cloris Leachman, M. Emmet Walsh, featured voices.  **+Animated feature, shifting the setting from Hughes's England to what Drew McWeeny presented in pre-release coverage as "a storybook perfect 1950s America where Hogarth, the Giant's young friend is weaned on sci-fi movies and TV" (McWeeny 16).  In that year of Sputnik and paranoia, 1957, a metal-eating giant robot from space lands off the coast of Maine and comes ashore near a small town.  The robot has amnesia, but it becomes clear it is programmed to destroy weapons attacking it and must learn that he can choose not to be a "gun," a weapon of war.  With the love of a small boy and the help of the boy's mother and a local beatnik artist, the robot learns—making the robot more flexible than the villain, an obsessive agent of the US government, and the message of the film that intelligent beings can learn to act in peace.  Cf. and contrast themes of children and the destruction of weapons in The Space Children (Jack Arnold, 1958 [discussed in Sobchack, Screening Space, ch. 2]).  See under Music, Pete Townshend et al., The Iron Man; see under Fiction, T. Hughes's Iron Man. Students of the image of the robot in children's literature should see M. Esmonde's essay "From Little Buddy to Big Brother . . ." in TMG and note carefully the configuration of the Iron Giant as he transforms from his friendly, very big buddy mode to take on a military threat.  Note motif of transformation itself, plus the hiding of the Giant's comic jaw and the appearance of cobra-like weapons replacing the Giant's head (cf. Martian flying machines in War of the Worlds).  The Giant is able to pull himself together when his various parts are scattered, for a kind of resurrection on a glacier at the end of the film (cf. and contrast the deaths on the ice in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).  For the parts coming together cf. and contrast the organic slime-mold imagery in the "protean polyp," a renewing and disintegrating "colony of independent creatures," in A. C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, ch. 12.  Since one of the pieces of the robot looks rather spider-like, the imagery may reinforce the idea that what appears threatening (or just ickey) may be part of something friendly and exciting.  The film is gentle propaganda about understanding, the human costs of the cold war even in a small town, and how even a programmed robot might choose not to kill.  See Drew McWeeny, Cinefantastique 31.7 (August 1999): 16-[17].  On robotic choice as a most rigorous proof for the ability of sentient beings to learn and change, cf. Terminator 2 (q.v. below, this section). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 04/X/93         Ironman.  Japan: XXXXXXXxxxx (US dist.), 199X.  **¢+Underground, live action.  Features an implant.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 03/IX/94        Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Book I, Odyssey.  Audio Cassette: cited under M. P. Kube-McDowell. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/III/94        Island City.  Jorge Montesi, dir.  USA: XXXXXXXXXxxxxxxx1994.  Apparently a series pilot.  Premiered on "Star" TV, 1 March 1994.  Jonathan Glassner, script.  Kevin Conroy, Brenda Strong, stars.  **¢+Features a high-tech, partially underground city in the middle of a wasteland, with VR facilities and a fair amount of imagery of the superimpostion of the mechanical upon the human: normal human, mutant, and what is pejoratively called "half-breed."  See esp. for Modernistic battletrucks; cf. and contrasts trucks in Freejack, Universal Soldier, and Warlords of the Twenty-First Century.  Note also motif of high-tech equipment vs. supersenses of the half-normal, half-mutant member of the heroes' "RCF" military team. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       James, Grace A.  "Strangers in Town."  Denver: Pioneer Drama Service, 1983.  *¢+Comic play featuring two alien robots who start going native on Earth, "acquiring human traits."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Jet Pilot.  Joseph von Sternberg, dir.  1951 (production) / 1957 (release).  "John Wayne, Janet Leigh, stars.  Note the "flying planes engaged in sexual foreplay, which first threatened the man but finally domesticated the woman" (Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie . . . [Berkeley: U of CA P, 1987], 265).  Cf. and contrast machine sex in S. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and 2001, q.v. under Drama. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 31/XII/01      Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.  John A. Davis, dir., co-author of story, one of three producers.  Steve Oederek, co-author, one of four on script, one of three prod.  John A. Davis, one of four on script, one of three prod.  USA: Nichelodeon Movies and O Entertainment (prod.) / Paramount (US dist.), 2002.  **+Animated (with a 3D look), children's film relevant here for a version of Klingon Birds-of-Prey (from Star Trek) as chicken-shaped space craft, mindcontrol helmets, and villains that are egg-like glop inside high-tech shells, for the superimposition of the technological upon the ovoid (and maybe a sight gag on "egg-head" and the tradition of threatening isolated heads, e.g., in Invaders from Mars [see above] and Wizard of Oz [1939]).  The protagonists' spacecraft are cobbled together from carnival rides and colorfully contrast with the ships of the evil aliens.  CAUTION (or ATTRACTION, depending on parental politics): The film teaches children that, with cops the only exception, strangers are not to be talked to—not even intergalactic strangers trying to make First Contact.  Or, esp. not strangers who are truly alien, since aliens will kidnap your parents, possess them, and try to eat them. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 00/VII/95      Johnny Mnemonic.  Robert Largo, dir.  USA: Alliance (prod.) / TriStar (release), 1995.  William Gibson, script, based on the work of William Gibson (see under Fiction).  *+A compendium of William Gibson cyberpunk motifs, including imaging of cyberspace, VR, the superimposition of the cybernetic upon the cetacean with the dolphin from "Johnny Mnemonic," the precursor of 3Jane from Neuromancer and the bridge from Virtual Light (q.v. under Fiction).  **¢+Pre-release coverage in Anthony P. Montesano, "Johnny Mnemonic," Cinefantastique 26.2 (Feb. 1995): 14-15. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/VII/95, 12/VII/96 Judge Dredd.  Danny Cannon, dir.  USA: Hollywood Pictures, 1995.  Sylvester Stalone, star.  Based on the British comic books.  **+Features a heavy-metal, postmodern, cyberpunkish cyborg, atmosperic shuttle-craft, and robot, plus modernist guns and motorcycles.  The mise en scne combines cyberpunk with modernist, with the Megacity appearing at times something like Metropolis (q.v.) colored in with a comic-book palatte.  In addition to the City, there is a Waste Land desert (hot) and a Prison at Aspen, CO (cold); the more civilized locales feature images of the men and a few women, including cops and clones, trapped in machines or encased in body armor; the cyborg is a creature of the Waste Land.  Cover story for Cinefantastique 26.5 (August 1995).  See under Graphics, J. Newsinger, "The Dredd Phenomenon."  CAUTION: The happy ending has a police state not as bad as it might be but remaining firmly in place, for a rather fascistic conclusion. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/VII/01      Jurassic Park III (promotional abbreviation: JP3, also Jurassic Park 3 [from IMDb]).  Joe Johnston, dir.  Michael Crichton (IMDB: "character," we assume for creating Dr. Alan Grant); Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor (III), script.  Steve Spielberg, exec. prod.  USA: Amblin Entertainment, United International Pictures (=UIP), Universal (prod.) / Amblin, UIP, Universal (dist.), 2001.  Sam Neill, William H. Macy, TŽa Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Trevor Morgan, Michael Jeter, featured players.  **+Interesting for its commentary on brains and bodies (and what counts for survival), and for self-conscious revisiting of old questions in SF/Horror on exploration, authority, and playing God (see Peter Biskind's "Pods and Blobs" discussion in is Seeing Is Believing [1983] and elsewhere).  JP3 is relevant here for the tension between the dangers of biotechnology in cloning dinosaurs and the glory and beauty of the dinosaurs produced, and for the images of technology slowly overcome by the vegetation of the jungle (cf. and contrast ice machine in Mosquito Coast, this section).  At least one shot gives us hatched dinosaur eggs within a ruined machine within a trashed building within the over-running jungle, perhaps suggesting that the technology-produced organic is out of confinement and in our world.  Note also the uselessness of macho weaponry against T. rex and bigger brutes, and that it's not even considered in saving people from intelligent, social, communicating raptors. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 17/XI/01       JUSTICE LEAGUE, opening episode: Cited under Graphics.  **+

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           The Kid's Clever.  William James Craft, dir., prod.  USA: Universal, 1929.  **¢+Cited by Ed Naha, Science Fictionary, as featuring a boy genius who invents a boat and car that run without fuel. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 21/XI/93        Killdozer: CHANGE BRIEF CITATION AFTER DUEL TO "Q.V. THIS SECTION".

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           King of the Mounties.  William Witney, dir.  USA: Republic, 1942.  Serial.  12 chapters.  **¢+Adminal Yamata and other Axis types perfect a flying-wing aircraft with what we'd call stealth capabilities.  Opposed are Allied types with a superradar. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 28/IX/94        Knights.  Albert Pyun, dir., script.  USA: Kings Road Entertainment (prod., © holder), 1992.  Kris Kristofferson, Lance Henriksen, Kathy Long, Scott Paulin, Gary Daniels, Nicholas Guest.  **¢+Action-Adventure movie giving us (figuratively speaking): Conan the Cyborg training a Red Sonya figure to be a human terminator of cyborg vampires (and ninjas, of sorts).  The good cyborg, Gabriel (Kristofferson)—killer of the vampire cyborgs—tells the heroine, "A long time ago the cyborg units were to be government assassins; their sole purpose was to kill.  My creator thought he could alter their old-world [?] programs."  Gabriel identifies himself against revenge: "I am order."  When the heroine offers to help Gabriel become more human, he replies, "Now why would I want to be human? . . .  I'm a cyborg . . . I'm not alive; I'm just a machine that's in the active mode," for about a year: with "him" at loose ends after he has terminated the vampire cyborgs (who take in human blood to go on "living").  "Dying means nothing to me, 'cause I'm not alive.  * * * I don't mind being a machine."  Open-ended conclusion pointing toward sequels and a battle in "Cyborg City"—and adventures out into the Universe.  If anyone picks up the TV rights or invests in a sequel, there's the promise of a continuing Gabriel, becoming more human.  Cf. Mr. Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Isaac Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man"—cited under Drama and Fiction—and other "Spam" robots and androids ("metal on the outside, meat within": collaborator robots who really want to be human).  Briefly reviewd  by Judith P. Harris in Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 122. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 03/IX/94        Kube-McDowell, Michael P.  Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Book I, Odyssey.  Audio cassette .  Ensemble performance featuring Peter MacNicol.  Caedmon, CPN 1837, 1988.  Copyright held by Harper-Collins. **¢+Faithful adaptation of the book (q.v. under Fiction, under Isaac Asimov's Robot City), featuring robot threats and robot helpers, and a very open ending in a robot city, where robots rule (and are about to investigate a murder, with the human hero and heroine suspects). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/I/04         Last Samurai, The.  Edward Zwick, dir., co-script, prod. (with others).  USA, New Zealand, Japan: Warner Bros., The Bedford Falls Company, Cruise-Wagner Productions, Radar Pictures Inc. (prod.) / Warner Bros. (US dist.), 2003.  John Logan (story), co-script, with Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.  Tom Cruise, star, prod. (with others).  In English and Japanese (English subtitles with Japanese for US release).  **+Mainstream military romance set in late-1870s US and Japan, with flashbacks to US 7th Cavalry fighting (and massacring) Plains Indians.  Last Samurai celebrates relatively low-tech. weaponry and warfare of Plains Indians and traditional samurai (bows, swords, spears) against relatively high-tech weapons of the US and Imperial Japanese armies of the time (howitzers, rifles, Gatling guns).  CAUTION: For a more balanced view of the costs of the samurai system to non-samurai, see the TV series Shogun (1980), and Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985); for samurai war-lords using infantry armed with muskets with no to-do over traditional samurai values, see Ran. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 01/V/97        Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War.  Farhad Mann, dir.  USA: Allied Films / Allied Entertainments, 1995.  **+Jobe from Lawnmower Man (q.v.) attempts to become Messiah and virtual god in VR cyberspace.  See for imagery of flying and freedom for kids inside cyberspace strongly contrasted with a cyberpunk world on the streets; n.b. Jobe's awesome power in cyberspace (and to do computer-mediated damage in the outside world) contrasted with the shots of Jobe apparently helpless, physically, as a legless and otherwise maimed man in a chair looking at a round console.  For that last image, cf. and strongly contrast Cole being interrogated in the future underworld at the beginning 12 Monkeys, and passim.  For motorcycles in cyberspace, cf. and contrast Tron.  Note also imagery of hexagons and the cybernetic god idea in the ad slogan, which we write out as punctuated and capitalized: "God made him simple, science made him a God.  Now, he wants revenge." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 14/VII/03      League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (vts. include abb. "LXG" [see IMDb, our source here for filmographic details]).  Stephen Norrington, dir.  USA / Germany / Czech Republic / UK: 20th Century Fox, Flying Colours Productions S.r.o., Angry Films, JD Productions, Mediastream 1. Productions GmbH (prod.) / The 20th Century Fox Film Corporation et al. (dist.), 2003.  Alan Moore, graphic novel story; Kevin O'Neill, graphic novel art.  James Dale Robinson, script.  Sean Connery, star, exec. prod.  Carol Spier, prod. design.  **+If we were to take this film more earnestly than we should, it would be an incessantly intertextual exercise in "Steampunk" (cyberpunk sensibility in a Victorian [alternative] universe), showing the 1899 transfer of imperium from Great Britain to the USA, but with the moral that all empire is fleeting and the strong suggestion that the spirit of Africa is more powerful than European and American weapons.  The film is relevant here for featuring 20th-c. and SF weapons in a Victorian setting, including J. Verne's Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (q.v. under Fiction), tanks, automatic rifles, and very Industrial-looking robots with flame throwers.  Coming out in the same summer as Terminator 3 (q.v. below), this film may point at a growing anxiety over what LXG refers to as an "arms race"—with World War I as threat in LXG and reality in our universe set up as a warning for us in the 21st c.  CAUTION: Perhaps less so in the novel, the film incorporates attitudes wherein only the lives of well-born or well-placed gentlemen (and one Vampiric lady) really count, decorously accompanied by what Edward W. Said might call "Orientalism" and Chinua Achebe would call racism (as in "An Image of Africa: Racism in [Joseph] Conrad's Heart of Darkness"). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/IV/95       Leprechaun 3.  Brian Trenchard-Smith, dir.  USA: Trimark, 1995.  *¢+Includes a killing by a "malfunctioning sexual gratification robot."  Pre-release coverage by F. Colin Kingston, in Cinefantastique 26.4 (June 1995): 52-53, our source for this entry (and q.v. for picture of death by sex-machine robot). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Don Palumbo, 22/I/00, 23/I/00         LEXX.  TV show, Sci-Fi Channel, Jan. 2000.  Canada: "Salter Street Films & TiMe Film-und-TV-Produktions GmbH, in Association with Screen Partners."  Paul Donovan and Wolfram Tichy, exec. prod.  Norman Denver, prod., "Creative Producer."  David Hackl, design.  Gary Mueller, visual effects coordinator.  **+See above, this section, Adventures in The Dark Zone.  TV show retains the space-going Lexx as "a bug kind of thing" as one character puts it.  Initial voice-over has LEXX introducing himself: "I am Lexx.  I am the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes."  Donald Palumbo points out that while LEXX looks like a big bug--sort of a dragonfly with big fly eyes--LEXX's landing vehicles look like little bugs--ornithopters, certainly, a la Dune.  The organic ship idea is becoming an SF space-opera cliche, cf. the ship in Farscape, which is organic, if not particularly bug-like, and the Vorlon ships in Babylon 5.  Cf. and contrast R. Scott and H. R. Gieger's alien ship in Alien (q.v. this section).  In the episode aired 21 Jan. 2000, "Lexx 2.7 Love Grows," we hear Lexx speaking to the captain in a voice very like the voice HAL in 2001 speaking to Dave (see above, 2001), and get Lexx's gender stressed when he is trans-sexed briefly into a female.  We also see a robot head that looks like a death's head and serves as a supplementary computer.  In the process of being severed from its body, the robot head--whose "gender" is male--was programmed to fall hopelessly in love with the first organism it saw, which turned out to be Xev, the "love slave" who was supposed to be the recipient of this programming.  So the robot head is a horny, love-starved, sex-obsessed robot head.  The TV show is satiric, "recombinant television," mixing the 2001 allusion with the living dead from the British TV show Red Dwarf (and Dark Star, q.v.); the show is significant for showing the biomechanical theme permeating SF even unto a cheap operation like LEXX. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 30/VI/93        Lifepod.  Ron Silver, dir., star.  Priemiered Fox-TV, 28 June 1993.  Fox West Pictures, "A Trilogy Entertainment Group Production, in Association with Rhi Entertainment, Inc." "Suggested by a Short Story by Alfred Hitchcock and Harry Sylvester" (and Hitchcock's Lifeboat [1944]).   M. Jay Roach and Pen Densham, script.  Pen Densham, story, one of four exec. prod.  **¢+The doomed spaceship GFC Terrania resembles a huge black shark.  See also for "toolies"—"Tool-Augmented Humans"—one in the opening sequence and Q-Three, a midget with a cybernetic left arm, and possibly more extensive cyborgization.  Q-Three can survive conditions that kill ordinary humans, but one character comments, "I think our toolie is developing a will of its own," suggesting toolies are not, or are not seen as, fully human and/or autonomous. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, FarahM, 20-21/XII/04              Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Brad Silberling, dir.  Daniel Handler (books), Robert Gordon (screenplay).  USA: Nickelodeon Movies, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Scott Rudin Productions (prod.) / Paramount (US dist.), 2004.  Rick Heinrichs, prod. Design.  (See IMDb for stellar cast and other information.)  **+Noirish, po-mo, very self-conscious and allusive film—the children are from the Baudelaire family, and the villain is "Count Olaf," with Jim Carrey doing a Nosferatu number—classified by IMDb as "Adventure / Fantasy / Comedy / Family (more)."  Significant here for narration by Lemony Snicket while sitting at a portable typewriter, inside a clock tower from, vaguely, "early modern" times in the sense of the late 19th c.  Cf. and contrast clockwork in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (listed this section); in Lemony Snicket, the clockworks are decorative, intertextual, and suggestive—including suggesting an image of clockwork that has become a kind of fantasy trope and reinforcing the point that in Lemony "time is on a crazy path" (Farah Mendlesohn), in a po-mo mise-en-scene gleefully mixing periods: in architecture, style, and technology. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 00/XII/01      Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): Cited under Graphics.  **+

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/IV/98       Lost In Space.  Stephen Hopkins, dir., co-prod. (of four).  USA: Prelude Pictures, with Irwin Allen Productions (prod). / New Line Cinema (dist.), 1998.  Akiva Goldsman, script, co-prod.  Gary Oldman, William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, Lacey Chabert, Jack Johnson, Jared Harris, featured players.  **+Trivial film, but important in conjunction with some of the films it alludes to, esp. the source TV show, Lost in Space (1965-68, an Irvin Allen Production in assoc. with Van Bernard Productions for 20th Century-Fox Television/CBS [Ency. of SF, 1993]); both are covered in the cover story on Lost in Space in Cinefantastique 29.12 (April 1998).    LIS the TV show was tacky and cheap and Modern, LIS the film is postmodern.  Costumes include smooth, silver space suits for the Robinson family (Chris Ehrman and Cinefatastique photo: [26]).  Susan A. George watched a LIS marathon on the SciFi Channel and noticed "how late 1950-60s it looked. The costumes in the color episodes are multi-colored pastels.  The men's shirts are often velour.  The women wear matching pastel go-go boots."  The movie, in Ehrman's words, looked like it was done by "Tim Burton's folks who worked on Batman" in "costumes, scenery and special effects."  The crew's uniforms" in a couple sequences "are strikingly similar to the batsuit"—black, heavy leather, slightly kinky—"and Don West's 'battle mask' morphs around him just as the batmobile's shielding did in the first installment of the Batman movies," and like the helmets in Star Gate.  ROBOT: "If" Ehrman's "memory serves, the LIS robot started off as a stiff, uncontrollable and frightening character.  In the pilot, he almost killed the family," similar to the film.  "I  remember his crushing a helmet like a walnut.  Later, of course, he evolved into the sarcastic robot who worked as a foil for Dr. Smith" and "was the proto sassy mechanical man that has been copied time and time again. Survey says—Modern" (e-mail, April 1998).  The film Robot in one of its threatening modes looks like Johnny 5 at the end of Short Circuit 2, which we have described as "comically (cyber)punkified"—added Robbie from Forbidden Planet + "a pretty fearsome industrial kind of robot . . . [with] the menacing look an American football player, with huge shoulders" (as the designer phrased it [Cincinnati Post, 3/IV/98: 1B]), all put on amphetamines and coming out looking like one bad-ass killer robot (who becomes Will Robinson's friend and protector again by film's end, transformed in appearance to look like the TV robot, and diagetically made into a cybernetic chimera with Will).  In one episode of LIS, Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet appeared as guest-villain, stressing similarities and slight differences between Robbie and LIS Robot; both were designed by Robort Kinoshita (Cinefantastique 31).  SPACE SHIP: In the TV series, a flying saucer; in the film, an allusion to Millennial Falcon in the Star Wars trilogy, but, the Millennial Falcon with some mutations making it less elegant externally, clunkier, and slightly more biomechanical/insectoid.  A future version of the ship has been seriously trashed, adding to the interior po-mo clutter.  MAJOR THREAT: Techno-organic (like H. R. Giger's "biomechanical") arachnid creatures, alluding to the Aliens of Aliens but also to the mechanical bugs in Runaway and possibly to the bugs of Starship Troopers.  These creatures have clean lines and are relatively unmucoid (so are Modernist), but their final incarnation is as part of a chimera with Dr. Smith, which is black, ungainly, and definitely po-mo (and arguably an unfortunate use of po-mo black in a popular culture where almost anything can take on racial implications).  Note paralleling of biological chimera of Dr. Smith and the arachnids (which acts mechanically and evilly) and Will Robinson and Robot (which comes to act emotionally and nicely).  Note also standard images of the superimposition of the cybernetic upon the human, including a kind of VR when Will operates Robot as a kind of waldo.  The imagery reinforces the privileging of emotion over reason—although practical intelligence is good—and family over more abstract values, if we allow Will Robinson's marriage of the cybernetic with the sentimental.  There's also a prototype time machine in the film, and a functioning one, and a portal to hyperspace.  All films mentioned here are cited in this section of the List.  There is a TV show on "The Making of Lost in Space."  There is a 1998 HarperCollins novelization by Joan Vinge, and a Harper Audio of the novel; we depend upon the audio version for "techno-organic" (our spelling and hyphenization).  Our thanks to all who responded to our e-mail queries on the TV show.  

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Mike Smith, 03/X/00 Lost Saucer, The.  Dir. Dick Darley, Walter C. Miller, Jack Regas.  Prod. Marty Krofft, Sid Krofft.  USA: ABC-TV, 1975.  Jim Nabors, Ruth Buzzi, stars.  16 episodes, 30 min. (IMDb)**+One "zmaturin" of Pleasant Valley commented on IMDb on 2 July 2000: two kids "are abducted by stupid alien robots, convincingly played by Jim Nabors and Ruth Buzzi.  Now they are lost in time an space, and fly the titular craft to Earth's past and future to get the kids home."  (Mr./Ms. Zmaturin did not like the show.) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/XI/99       ADD TO Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: See entry for Mononoke Hime.  **+

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 06/III/00       The Man with the Golden Gun.  Guy Hamilton, dir.  UK/USA: United Artists, 1974.  **+James Bond action-adventure premised on the existence and theft of "a solar cell that could solve the world's energy crisis."  Note also attack on Bond's "plane with a solar-powered death ray," viewed positively as a tribute to the power of Solar.  Cited by Keith Meatto, whom we quote, as one of "The Top Five" works "from the worlds of film and music" that "suggest that interest in this once-electrifying topic"—solar energy—"could easily be resparked" (Mother Jones, March/April 2000: 81). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 00/XII/04      Manchurian Candidate, The.  Jonathan Demme, dir., prod. (one of five, including Tina Sinatra).  Richard Condon (novel), George Axelrod (1962 screenplay), Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, 2004 script.  USA: Paramount, 2004.  **+Political thriller, updating the 1962 classic.  Differs from original in, among other things, the high-tech method of control, esp. images of superimposition of the electronic (and cybernetic?) upon the human brain, and the invasion of body and—more so—brain to place therein small but powerful implants to ensure obedience.  Cf. and contrast, e.g., K. Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, listed under Fiction.  Note also relatively positive use/imaging of electro-shock treatment; contrast, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as novel and film.  That the highly destructive technology employed is the product of a politically-potent multinational corporation is significant for the dystopian elements of the film. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/IV/95       Mandroid.  Jack Ersgard, dir.  USA: Full Moon (Charles Band), 1993.  81 min.  *¢+Unlike the half-man/half-tank of Eliminators (q.v. this section), Mandroid here is a "powerful robot, remote-controlled by a paraplegic scientist" by means of a VR helmet.  Rev. John Thonen, Cinefantastique 26.4 (June 1995): 40-41, our source for this entry, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/III/95       The Mangler.  Tobe Hooper, dir.  USA: XXX, 1995.  Robert Englud, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor, featured players.  106 min.  Based on a story by Stephen King.  *¢+Horror film.  The Hadley Watson Model-6 Steamer Ironer and Folder becomes "a demonically possessed piece of machinery embarked on a bloodthirsty rampage."  Rev. Stephen Holden in The New York Times, rpt. The Cincinnati Enquirer, 7 March 1995: C5, which we quote, and upon which we depend for our citation.  Cf. and contrast the more science fictional Killdozer for a killer machine; cf. 976-EVIL for demonic possession of a machine (both films listed this section, with crosslistings to other relevant movies). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 03/IX/94        M.A.N.T.I.S.  TV series on Fox.  Premiere episode 26 Aug. 1994.  "Filmed on location in British Columbia, Canada" (apparently from Vancouver, BC).  "Country of First Publication": USA; "Film XII Productions '94 Limited Partnership is the author of this motion picture . . . . "  Renaissance Pictures, dist. through Universal, later Universal City Studios.  Sam Raimi, co-exec. prod., and co-creator with Sam Hamm.  Bryce Zabel, exec. prod., premiere script.  David Nutter, premiere dir.  Carl Lumbly, Roger Rees, Christopher Garlin, Galyn Gory, featured players.  **¢+Very near-future, high-tech  action/adventure show, with the major urban setting of "Port Columbia," i.e., the nicest and the not-so-nice parts of Vancouver (none of which are postmodernly funky; contrast mise en scene of RoboCop and other cyberpunkish works, and the Gotham of the Batman movies).  Significant here for the M.A.N.T.I.S. exoskeleton that allows the crippled hero not just to walk but to do heroic deeds (cf. and contrast "birth" of the Mantis with that of RoboCop and the rise of Dr. Strangelove from his wheel chair [in the film Dr. Strangelove, listed in this section]).  In his exoskeleton in the Chrysalid aircraft, or in his underwater base of operations, the Mantis is contained within concentric shells of hi-tech, some of which he's interfaced with directly.  The crippled hero's hope is that ". . .  the limitations of the human body could be surmounted . . . "—and they are, through computer and other technology. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 02/XII/94       "Soldier of Misfortune."  M.A.N.T.I.S.  Fox-TV, 2 Dec. 1994.  **¢+Features a "Virtual Reality Soldier": a sort of humanoid robot that is operated at first by a waldo mechanism used by the mad inventor and then, after the arrest of its inventor, goes off akilling on its own.  Dialog includes a specific reference to Frankenstein and Frankenstein's creature.  Climactic confrontation is between the VSR and Mantis. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 11/V/94         Married ... With Children.  Special 3-D Episode.  Fox-TV.  8 May 1994.  Sam W. Orender, dir.  Davod Castro, script.  **¢+Mainstream bitter satire.  Includes a b/w takeoff on the 1954 John Wayne film Hondo.  In both the parody wild west and in 1994 Chicago, Al Bundy destroys a computer, in a satire of John Waynean heroism.  Note comic handling of ("down") computer-controlled entrapment in 1994. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/IV/95       Married, With Children.  Fox-TV, 9 April 1995.  Sam W. Orender, dir.  Russell Marcus, script.  *¢+While Al and the older guys mess themselves over Three-Stooges fashion working with a minor electrical question, Bud participates in a VR sex experiment.  Note imagery of Al et al. surrounded by wire and SpFx electric shocks and (more relevantly) a fantasizing Bud in a total—emphatically total—VR suit in a high-tech setting with much computer equipment: the superimposition of the cybernetic on the libidinal.  When Bud prefers VR cybersex to his girlfriend Amber, or any other human female, Amber and Kelly get revenge by using the equipment to fixate Bud upon an ape. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/IV/99, 17/V/04    Matrix, The.  Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, dir., script, exec. prod.  USA: Village Roadshow Productions, Silver Pictures (prod.) / Warner (dist.), 1999.  Mass.Illusions, LLC, SpFx.  Yuen Wo Ping, fight dir.  Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, Hugo Weaving, Marcus Chong, Belinda Mcclory [sic: on IMDb], featured players.  **+Cyberpunk film, described by one of the directors as an attempt at "an intellectual action movie," with much of the action of the Hong Kong Kung Fu variety, the tone noirish, and the imagery industrial (Persons 20 and passim).  What appears to be an authoritarian America in 1999 is actually—though what is actual gets tricky in this world—a totally totalitarian VR world.  We learn more or less reliably that the VR is the creation of the machines, who won a war against humans and preserve the remaining humans in womb-like vats (Fischer: "cocoon" [16]), where they are thoroughly interfaced with the machines and tapped for power—and fed a VR in which they are fairly happy (a eutopian VR was tried, but apparently many humans can't survive eutopia).  Matrix is a neatly-done compendium of SF motifs of interest, including: questions on what is real, as pursued in the work of P. K. Dick (see under Fiction) and such films as the Dick-derived Total Recall; imagery of containment and body-violation within high-tech computer-interface wombs (unknowingly) and voluntary submission to the superimposition of the electronic and cybernetic upon the human in computer-interface chairs (cf. and contrast the chairs in L. Mason's Arachne (under Fiction); containment within a high-tech. vessel said to be a hover-craft but visually a submarine (cf. the tradition started by the Nautilus in J. Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea [cited under Fiction]); computer take-over and war against the machines (see, e.g., Terminator, this section); an enclosed, artificial world (see under Fiction R. A. Heinlein's "Universe"); people more or less inside computers (see under Fiction, J. T. Sladek's The MŸller-Fokker Effect, S. Lem's "The Experiment . . . " and "Seventh Sally," and C. M. Kornbluth and F. Pohl's Wolfbane; under Drama, see Thirteenth Floor and Tron); dreamers in a VR world (see VR in Keyword Index, and see esp. entries under Fiction for W. Gibson, W. Hjortsberg, and L. Manning and F. Pratt, and under A. C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre; see under Drama, Nowhere Man, "Kill Switch" episode on The X-Files, Zardoz, and Dark City).  For the imagery of going through a mirror-portal into a strange world, see Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure in Wonderland (1865) and, more explicitly, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), both alluded to in the film.  Note very well in this film what Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn have called "The Ovion/Cylon Alliance": i.e., threatening, insectoid machines, here cyberpunk centipedes.  Note also squid-like "Sentinel" robots that attack the hovercraft/sub.  The general-release date for the film in the USA was during Passover and Holy Week: which was appropriate given the themes of (1) freeing humans, enslaved to the machines, and (2) Keanu Reeve's "Neo" character as the "One": a Messiah opposing the VR world and devilish machines, with the goal of returning humans to their flesh and the material world (opposing him somewhat to the more Platonic-puritanical visions of the Christ opposing the World and the Flesh, as well as the Devil).  Tech. matters covered in detail by Mitch Persons, Dennis Fischer, and Frederick C. Szebin, Cinefantastique 31.5 (May 1999): 16-27.  For Matrix as "The End of Humanism" and a form of "techno-Brahmanism," and the Matrix as "cyber-Maya," see Stuart Klawan's rev. in The Nation 268.15 (26 April 1999): 34-35.  (For maya and Brahman, see The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita, part of the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata but available separately.)  For anime influences, see Dan Persons, "The Americanization of Anime," under Drama Criticism.  Shooting script listed, this section, under L. and A. Wachowski.  For the pills, note Rog Phillips, "The Yellow Pill," Astounding Oct. 1958, frequently anthologized; discussed by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell (1960; New York: Arno P, 1975: 54-55; ch. 2). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15&16/V/03, 26/VI/03, 14/II/05        Matrix Reloaded, The (vt The Matrix 2, working title).  Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, dir., script, exec. prod.  USA [and Australia]: NPV Entertainment, Village Roadshow Pictures [Australia], Warner, Silver Pictures (prod.) / Warner (US dist.), 2003.  Owen Paterson, prod. design.  Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, featured players.  138 min.  **+Sequel to The Matrix (q.v. above) and the central film of the Matrix trilogy.  Walter Benjamin concerned himself with The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); the Wachowski brothers here consider questions of reality and identity in a world of electronic reproduction, including the cybernetic virus-like cloning of the still-villainous Agent Smith and the possible cycling of human/machine history (a handful of cycles of the sort described by Koheleth in the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes [1.9-18], and by Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra in Also Sprach Zarathustra [1883-85]—in a thought experiment on how the Superman "could accept [infinite] recurrence [of his life] without self-deception or evasion" [paraphrase from Britannica 2002 CD, "Nietzsche, Friedrich"]).  Note the traditional "Grand Inquisitor Scene" between Neo and The Architect—an avatar of some Central Computer?—before a wall of TV screens reproducing, among other images, Neo.  Less philosophically high-flown but perhaps more significant, note the music and mild orgy among humans, and love-making between Trinity and Neo, in Zion while awaiting the attack of the machines: the cold and rather mechanical humans of the film still are capable of passion and the bonds of love.  (Contrast scene at the Merovingian's S&M-ish  club in MATRIX RVOLUTIONS, q.v. below).  Note also: (1) The male-gendered Architect's telling Neo that he, the Architect, with his cold lust for order (Erlich's formulation), was the father of the Matrix, while the grandmotherly Oracle program, with her intuition, was the mother.  (2) The conversation between Neo and the Councillor on human/machine relationship and Neo's idea that the key thing is Who's In Charge—and the setting as a postmodernization of the underworld in Lang's Metropolis (q.v. below [also Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome]).  (3) Appearance here of Agent Smith as virus and of independent programs as characters, both good and bad (developed in REVOLUTIONS).  Rev. insightfully—although without the "spoiler" of discussing the "Grand Inquisitor Scene"—by Adam Gopnik, "The Unreal Thing," Critic at Large section, The New Yorker 79.12 (19 May 2003): [68]-73.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Jeff Vlasak, Jason Ferrell, Andrew Gordon 09/XI/03 Matrix Revolutions, The (vt Matrix 3, The [2001, USA: working title], Matrix Revolutions: The IMAX Experience, The [2003, USA: IMAX version]).  Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, dir., script, exec. prod.  USA: NPV Entertainment, Village Roadshow Pictures [Australia], Warner, Silver Pictures (prod.) / Warner, IMAX Corp. (US dist.), Nov. 2003.  Owen Paterson, prod. design.  Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, featured players.  129 min., with credits; ca. 120, for film itself.  (Filmographic info. mostly from IMDb.)  **+Third movie in Matrix trilogy.  See for imaging of human/machine interactions in final sequences of film.  The huge drilling bit breaching Zion and the squid-like sentinels attacking that last human refuge are met by double-barrel bazookas and other small arms, but also large, machine-gun-armed, Hulk-like machines controlled by partially-enclosed human operators (cf. and contrast Ripley in the loader in Aliens, the elegant killer-robots in the future world of the TERMINATOR films, and E.D.-209 in RoboCop, listed in this section, and the fighting suits in R. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and J. Haldeman's Forever War and Forever Peace, listed under Fiction).  The large sentinels come in large swarms, appearing from a distance insect-like; cf. and contrast S. Lem's "synsects" in "The Upside-Down Evolution" and The Invincible (listed under Fiction).  Also note Neo in the Machine City, surrounded by monumental machines (including those holding humans in pods), accompanied by crab-like machines (cf. Runaway, listed below), and confronting the Oz of the machine city (the Architect in a nonVR incarnation?)—given form as a huge face by a swarm of apparently small sentinel-machines.  It is also of interest that the Agent Smith program can not only replicate him/itself without limit, but can now clearly take over at least one body in the human world—seen but not made fully clear in Matrix 2—even as Agent programs can take over virtual humans in the Matrix.  The mise-en-scene in Revolutions is occasionally modern (train station, train) but mostly po-mo; still, the philosophical upshot seems sturdily humanist, centrally Existentialist (stressing choosing), and mildly religious (stressing belief [in Neo as savior—cf. and contrast John Connor in Terminator series—and survival and other good things]).  This might be evidence that postmodernism as a style remains popular, while po-mo philosophy wanes.  On the other hand, Neo saves the Matrix, so perhaps the series asserts that virtual life isn't so bad after all—if one has a real choice to leave it.  CAUTION: Perhaps as part of an anti-po-mo theme (making explicit the sources of much po-mo philosophy and fashion), perhaps as useful extrapolation of racial mixtures, and the influence of Cornel West, perhaps (for good and for ill) gratuitously—the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies celebrate diversity, but diversity strongly excluding the French, albino, and some variations of kink, with the Merovingian in Revolutions seeming to be a pointless villain associated with a virtual railroad and an S&M club that may allude to Metropolis (novel more than film), and/or to reported aspects of the life of Larry Wachowski.  NOTE: A Director's Cut longer than 120 minutes of actual footage might resolve some ambiguities of plot, character, and theme; see also Animatrix. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Mayakovsky, Vladmir.  The Bathhouse,  16 March 1930, Meyerhold State Theatre, Moscow.  In The Complete Plays of Vladimit Mayakovsky,  Guy Daniels, trans.  New York: Washington Square, 1968.  *¢+Play featuring a woman from the future arriving in Moscow in a time machine.  She invites people to visit the future; the time machine, however, rejects automatically "parasitic Communist Party bureaucrats."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/VIII/93      McCaffery, Anne.  Damia.  Audiotape.  Ruth Bloomquist, dir., prod.  Read by Jean Reed-Bahle.  Brilliance Corporation Bookcassette.  ISBN 0-930435-88-5.  12 hours.  **¢+Complete text of the novel (second book in The Rowan series); significant for "gestalt" between generators and human Psi-powers and first contact with high-tech alien species both with and without Psi-power.  See McCaffery entries under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 31/V/01        REVISION**5.174        The Mechanical Butchers (vt The Mechanical Delicatessen).  France: Lumire, 1897? (after 1895, before 1898).  Silent short (17 meters, ca. 54 seconds).  Coll. The Lumire Brothers' First Films.  France: Lumire Brothers Association and the Archives du Film du Crentre National de la Cinematographie (prod.) / Kino Video (dist.), 1996.  Edited for the collection by Thierry Fremaux.  Narrated by Bertrand Travernier.  **+Cited by Naha, Science Fictionary, who gives a late date for production and says we see a pig go into "a machine that automatically changes it into bacon" and other processed pork products.  The machine is very low-tech even for the 1890s.  Note film in context of Lumire Brothers documentary shorts on the theme of France at Work; with no SpFx, the film documents a superimposition of the mechanical upon the organic as a street-theatre visual joke.  Cf. and contrast machine sequences in S. Eisenstein's Old and New (cited in this section). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE/Joe Kuhr, 20/VIII/00  Mickey's Mechanical Man.  Wilfred Jackson, dir.  USA: Walt Disney Productions (prod.) / United Artists (dist.), 1933.  Walt Disney, John Sotherland, prod.  Mickey Mouse voiced by W. Disney, Minnie by Marcellite Garner.  **+Cartoon.  IMDb plot summary by Jon Reeves {jreeves@imdb.com} says that "Mickey has built a robot to compete in the boxing ring against the giant gorilla, the Kongo Killer.  Whenever it hears Minnie's car horn, it goes crazy and starts punching any picture of Killer that it sees, even if it's on a brick wall, thus hurting itself.  Mickey manages to barely patch his robot together to take on Killer, but after some early success, it gets pummeled by the ape.  Minnie fetches the car horn, which brings it back, and it trounces Killer, then flies apart."  We cautiously call attention to the date of this cartoon, the conflict between US robot and "Kongo" gorilla, and a partial victory of high-tech, helped by low-tech and Minnie Mouse.  (Mentioned in Dan Scapperotti's coverage of Runaway Brain (q.v. 

 

5. DRAMA, DanB, 17/V/94       The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

17 May 1994 (R@HULAW1.HARVARD.EDU)

 

Usually week weekday mornings:tv shows (animated, Japanese styles).           The Bots Master: Basic plot: head of huge multinational computer/robotics corporation (which holds the patents to 3-A's, the most revolutionary, flexible, adaptable 'bot' invented) wants to take over the world by installing "Krang-ore chips" in the 3-A's throughout the world.  The chips allow the 3-A's to be controlled only by the aforesaid head of the corp.  His nemisis is Ziv Zoolander, only slightly post-teenaged  inventor of the 3-A's.  Ziv has invented creatures he calls B.O.Y.Z. (acronym unknown) which are thinking bots with personalities.  Includes "sports boyz" who obviously play sports, a boyz who doubles as a flying car, a ninja boyz, etc...  All the good guys live in a highly mechanized underground house built way out in the country while all the bad guys (using guys as a generic stereotyped term) live in R.M. Corp City, a highly mechanized/industrialized environment.  One of the bad guys is also a cyborg...it appears he lost several limbs and a few internal organs.  Finally, the show is done in a three-dimensional analogue that moves parts of the background around during the action and is supposed to look really cool if you have 3d glasses (I don't)—to me it looks like a picture from a viewmaster.  But it is the same animation technology that the American producers of the new Spiderman animation series are planning on using.  If you don't get the show, I can send you a tape — I like to keep track of all the anime style animations that the Japanese send over here.

            The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: a Japanese import, which is a truly bad show done in the style of Ultraman and the Godzilla movies.  5 teenagers (which is a typicalJapanese teamwork grouping and can be seen throughout Japanese pop culture) are recruited to fight an evil being trying to take over destroy the earth.  Their recruiter is an ultra dimensional being who teleports them to a high tech command center whenever a baddie comes down to threaten earth where their other comrade, a robot named Alpha helps them out.  They also control fighting robots in the shape of dinosaurs and a mastodon and a sabertooth, all of which combine to form a giant robot which, strangely enough, looks exactly like every other giant-robot-made-up-of-smaller-individual-fighting-machines that the Japanese have ever dumped on the unsuspecting American public (one case being Voltron a mid- to late- '80s anime style animation which also featured (I think) dinosaur shapes that combined to make a robot and the 5-person teams I mentioned earlier).  Don't worry about taping more than one or two of the rangers show because the plot remains pretty constant.  Bad critter comes to earth, the power rangers get beat up until they stomp the bad critter.  §

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 00/VII/95      Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie.  Bryan Spicer, dir.  USA: Saban Entertainment / Twentieth Century Fox, 1995.  Based on the TV show.  **+

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/VI/02       Minority Report.  Steven Spielberg, dir.  USA: 20th Century Fox, Amblin Entertainment, Blue Tulip, Cruise-Wagner Productions, DreamWorks SKG (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (US dist.), 2002.  Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, screenplay, from "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick.  Tom Cruise, star.  Ron Shusett, exec. prod. (possible contributor to script).  (SOURCEs: IMDb for basic filmography.  Shusett suggestion and "Minority Report" identified as story by www.philipkdick.com, Fantastic Universe 1956.  Contento has that story "The Minority Report," Fantastic Universe Jan. 1956, coll. The Variable Man [New York: Ace, 1957].)  **+See for visuals of the superimposition of the cybernetic upon the human: full-body in the ÇPanopticonicÈ Containment chamber that serves as a prison for "pre-criminals," otherwise, mostly upon the head.  Images of the film's three "pre-cogs" in a water bath—sedated, wired, and transmitting their visions to special police—suggest a high-tech variation on the motif of the mechanized womb and on the motif of technological tapping even of thoughts and visions.  Note also "spiders": spider-like mini-robots that identify people with retinal scans. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 28/XI/93        Mission Impossible.  TV show.  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.  **¢+The episodes are secret-agent caper thrillers, with a team of agents using interesting gadgetry, wherein one agent specializes.  (For racial issues of the period, note that the electronics expert was the Black agent.)  See in Keyword Index, "Bond (James Bond)." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/XI/99; Jessica Adams, 28/V/01   Mononoke Hime (vt Princess Mononoke, US theatrical release, 1999).  Hayao Miyazaki, dir., script.  Japan: Tokuma Shoten, Dentsu, Nippon Television, Studio Ghibli (prod.) / Dimension Films, Miramax (US dist.), 1997/1999.  Japanese language release features Y™ji Matsuda as Ashitaka, Yuriko Ishida as San, Yžko Tanaka as Lady Eboshi; English release screenplay by Neil Gaiman, and features Billy Crudup as Ashitaka, Claire Danes as San, Minnie Driver as Lady Eboshi.  **+Anime (i.e., Japanese animation).  In a long-ago time when gods and demons and spirits interacted with humans, in a world with heroes but no real on-screen villains, a town has been founded where iron is smelted and guns made.  The town is opposed to the forest, and Lady Eboshi, the leader of Iron Town, intends to destroy the forest to get at iron ore; she employs mostly women she has saved from servitude in brothels, and lepers she has treated medically and trained to make better guns.  Visually, esp., the magical forest and the old gods are privileged, but civilization and its technology under the Lady Eboshi also has its good points, and Miyazaki exquisitely balances the various claims upon our sympathy; humankind needs a reminder that we are just another aspect of nature, and therefore it's best if we can live harmoniously with nature—but in already unbalanced contexts, technology has its uses.  Cf. and contrast Wizards and, perhaps most relevantly, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, both cited in this section: Lady Eboshi in Mononoke and Auntie Entity in Thunderdome parallel, with looser parallels between San (the Mononoke Hime) and Savannah Nix, and Ashitaka and Mad Max. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/XI/01       Monsters, Inc. (vt Hidden City [1999]: USA working title according to IMDb).  Pete[r] Docter, dir.  David Silverman and Lee Unkrich, co-directors.  Dan Gerson, Andrew Stanton, script.  USA: Pixar Animation and Disney (prod.) / Buena Vista (most dist.), 2001.  Billy Crystal, John Goodman, James Coburn, Jennifer Tilly, Bonnie Hunt, Mary Gibbs, Steve Buscemi, featured voices.  **+G-Rated animation from the makers of Toy Story (q.v., this section).  In a dimension parallel to ours, monsters work for a power company, going through portals into our world to bring back the screams of children to power their world.  The portals are closet doors on the kids' side—there really are monsters in kids' closets—and closet doors on the monsters' side, but closet doors archived in a high-tech system and placed for use inside a very high-tech electronic framework.  The classic dystopian scene in which the male lead is confined and tortured in some high-tech device is recycled and revised to have the little-girl heroine held down to have imposed upon her a machine that will drain her scream power (cf. and contrast, e.g., We and Nineteen Eighty-Four under fiction; THX, 1984, and Running Man under drama).  Note this film well for fantasy/horror/SF variations on the theme of the portal and the torture of the hero.  (The little girl is rescued, and the end of the film shows that the laughter of children is a finer source of power than their screams.) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VI/96       Multiplicity.  Harold Ramis, dir. co-script.  USA: Columbia, 1996.  Ramis, Chris Miller, et al., script.  Michael Keaton, Andie MacDowell, stars.  **+Somewhat mundane (in the tech. sense) farce based on cloning the Keaton character three times.  The clones are assigned different "task areas," resulting in the clones developing different personalities.  M relevant for the (comic) process of clone production: Keaton's character puts it, "'You Xerox people.'"  With the patient upon a table, a green light, as in a photocopier, passes over his body.  In Ramis's words, "The machines go to work.  They're all kinds of hydraulics and pneumatics involved.  There's a big stainless steel tank, and a clone merges. . . .  A Xerox copy with all your memories intact right up to the moment of the cloning."  Previewed by Chuck Wagner, Cinefantastique 27.11-12 (July 1996): 22-23, our source for our citation and annotation. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/VIII/99     Mystery Men.  Kinka Usher, dir.  Writing credits: Bob Burden (original Dark Horse comics), Neil Cuthbert.  USA: Dark Horse Entertainment, Lawrence Gordon Productions (prod.) / Universal (dist.), 1999.  Featured players include Hank Azaria, Claire Forlani, Janeane Garofalo, Greg Kinnear, William H. Macy, Paul Reubens, Geoffrey Rush, Ben Stiller, Tom Waits.  **+Sends up, among other things, the po-mo city mise-en-scne of such films as Tim Burton's Batman and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, including suggestions in the establishing shots of alternative-Earth technology (note esp. the lighter-than-air craft).  See also for a battle truck—non lethal in this case—and the motif of the captured (super)hero, in a chair with high-tech equipment superimposed on him; their presence in this film is a good indication they have become clichŽs. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 06/III/00       Naked Gun 2 1/2.  David Zucker, dir.  USA: Paramount, 1991.  **+Mostly mainstream satire, in which alternative energy is opposed by "the nefarious trio" of "the Society of Petroleum Industry Leaders (SPIL), the Society for More Coal Energy (SMOCE), and the Key Atomic Benefits Office of Mankind" (KABOOM)."  Cited by Keith Meatto, whom we quote, as one of "The Top Five" works "from the worlds of film and music" that "suggest that interest in this once-electrifying topic"—solar energy—"could easily be resparked" (Mother Jones, March/April 2000: 81). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 11/V/94         Nemesis.  Albert Pyun, dir.  Denmark: Shah/Jensen and Imperial Entertainment, 1992.  Author of the film for legal purposes: Scanbox Denmark A/S.  Rebecca Charles, script.  Olivier Gruner, Tim Thomerson, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Merle Kenedy, Yuji Okumoto, Marjorie Monaghan featured players.  **¢+Action/Adventure SciFi flick with a postmodernish mise en scŽne, stringing together, by a quick count with a lot of fast-forwarding, clichŽs from W. Gibson's Neuromancer and Count Zero, and the films Alien(s), Blade Runner, the Rambo series (1982-88), RoboCop, and Terminator: all save Rambo listed under Fiction or Drama.  As summarized by M. Lloyd, "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," Pt. 2, plot involves "a conspiracty of cyborgs that are replacing human beings with cyborg replicas" (ML cited by name under Background)—cf. Futureworld, this section.  See Nemesis for humans vs. machines, digitalized humans contained (so to speak) within a machine (see under Fiction, J. Sladek's The MŸller-Fokker Effect), the fear of human's getting mechanized—that one might be "getting more machine than human"—high-tech surveillance, and a colloquy between the hero and a <<Mr. Big>> (our term) in a room with a dynamo on the borderline between modern and postmodern.  In one scene, the imagery suggests a cyborg alliance with an unspoiled environment.  Note hero's "Never!" to the boss cyborg's temptation: cf. Colossus: The Forbin Project (q.v. this section); also note that eyes and eyes with glasses compete for attention with other body parts of interest to adolescent voyeurs of both sexes and/or various sexual orientations.  Rev. briefly and very negatively by Judith P. Harris, Cinefantastique 25. 5 (Oct. 1994): 60.  Mentioned as "a better cinematic depiction of cyberpunk sensibilities than the far larger budgeted JOHNNY MNEMONIC" by John Thenon, in his rev. of Nemesis 2 (q.v. below), Cinefantastique 27.7 (March 1996): 60. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/I/96         Nemesis 2.  Albert Pyun, dir.  1995.  Imperial Home Video, 1995.  **¢+Sequel to Nemesis (q.v. above), apparently a rip-off of The Terminator and Terminator 2 (cited below).  The cyborgs from Nemesis have won their war against the humans, and "The remaining humans are slaves to the cyborgs.  In 2077, human scientists succeed in genetically engineering a super-human female who is the last hope of humanity."  The new baby is named Alex.  "To protect . . . Alex, her mother takes her back to the year 1980 and leaves her in the East African desert in the care of a tribe of natives" to the area.  About the year 2000, with Alex 20, a "bounty hunter cyborg comes back in time after her."  Summarized by M. Lloyd, "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," Part 2, our source for this entry, and whom we quote.  (ML finds Alex one of the very few "truly tough female heroes out there," getting us to wonder if Alex is named after Joanna Russ's Alyx.)  Video release rev. John Thonen, Cinefantastique 27.7 (March 1996): 60. 

 

 

Netforce: See below, Tom Clancy's Netforce. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/95     The Net.  Irwin Winkler, dir., co-prod.  USA: Columbia, 1995.  Sandra Bullock, star.  **¢+Present-time techno-thriller in which a computer analyst's computer I.D. is mysteriously wiped out and replaced with an identity that keeps her in trouble.  Part of her problem is that she knows few people "IRL": In Real Life; another part of her problem is a major conspiracy by cyber-Praetorians to gain power through unrestricted access to networked computers.  Bullock's character has a speech to her court-appointed attorney explaining in detail how we all have computer I.D.s that can be manipulated.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/VI/00       New rose Hotel.  Abel Ferrara, dir., co-script.  William Gibson, story, q.v. under Fiction.  USA: Edward R. Pressman Film Corp., Quadra Entertainment (prod.) / Rose Releasing Ltd. (US release, and copyright holder), Mondo Films (France), 1998.  VHS Release: Sterling.  Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento, featured players; Walken and Dafoe also co-prod.  093 min.  **+Very closely follows Gibson's 1980s story, yielding a very near-future noir caper film (and arguably an art film), cyberpunk in terms of plot and corporate politics: the world of the zaibatsus, ca. 2002.  Relevance of this film is caught by "Lordwhorfin" on the IMDb: "First, this film is indeed a cyber film.  It is subtle, and low key, but the sense of invasive and observational technology"—surveillance in our terms—"is omnipresent.  Half the images are reprocessed through secondary or even tertiary cameras.  [É] This is a film about observations, images, and information.  The flashback sequences are X's (Willem Dafoe's) realization that he completely blew the deal, of what he didn't understand (or want to know) in light of  his delusions about love.  In re-observing his own actions, he replays, with mounting horror, his loss of control."  See under Drama Criticism S. Garrett's study of "Videology," and under Background M. Foucault's Discipline and Punish on surveillance in the Panopticon. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Nichols, Peter.  The Freeway.  Oct. 1974, National Theatre, the Old Vic, London.  London: Faber and Faber, 1975.  *¢+Play in which the freedom of movement allowed by the automobile has become sacred; in the plot a freeway near London (in the near future) is "paralyzed in a dispute involving antiautomobile protestors and striking union members."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote.  See in this section Carplays and The Pedestrian. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           North Dallas Forty.  Frank Yablans, dir.  USA: Paramount, 1979.  Based on the novel by Peter Gent.  Nick Nolte, star.  **¢+Mainstream film.  Note computerized football management, and players as parts of a professional football athletic machine.  Cf. Rollerball, q.v. below, this section.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/I/94, 21/X/01        Not Quite Human.  Steven Hilliard Stern, dir.  USA: Disney, 1987.  Alan Thicke, Jay Underwood, stars.  "Based on Characters from The Book Series 'Not Quite Human' by Seth McEvoy."  **¢+TV-movie.  The humanization of an android robot; cf. D.A.R.Y.L. (cited above, this section) and I. Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man" (cited under Fiction); for the toy-maker villains' attempt to turn the android ("Chip") into a fighting machine, cf. the film Toys.  Note also Frankenstein motif of fatherhood without a mother—but with "Dad" in this case taking responsibility for, and aiding, his creature—and the golem motif in Chip's literal-minded obedience to instructions.  IMDb lists two sequels. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 02/II/96        Nowhere Man.  Lawrence Hertzog, creator.  Lawrence Hertzog Productions, in association with Touchstone Television.  Bruce Greenwood, star.  Syndicated on UPN/Star Network.  Week of 29 Jan. 1996.  Guy Magar, dir.  Joel Surnow, script.  Megan Gallagher, Sean Whalen, Karen Moncrief, guest stars.  **+The Nowhere Man, Thomas J. Veil, SSN 549-24-1889, meets Scott, a computer genius who tells him, "This stuff is beautiful man.  It's pure poetry.  It's orderly; it's logical; it's contained."  He's talking about computers.  More relevantly, he tells Veil, that "We're all in here, like it or not."  Except Veil isn't: "You've been deleted man, big time. * * * Big time, Big Brother, freaky stuff."  Veil and the computer guy debate reality vs. VR, and Veil is introduced to VR (through TV SpFx) and the question of whether or not VR is as good as the real thing, whether or not "It is real."  Scott goes on VR double date with Veil, reuniting Veil, in cyberspace VR, with his wife.  Scott feels his computer macho challenged by Veil's deletion and tries to find out who did so thorough a job.  Scott runs into major ICE (called "fire-wall" here), which destroys his computer system and forces him and Veil out of his house—which is just as well, since armed thugs in suits and dark glasses soon arrive.  Real life is major sensory overload for Scott, who has no friends to give them shelter (cf. The Net, this section).  Finding his original computer teacher, Scott and Veil get access to a computer and through VR enter a cyberspace sequence, where Veil's file is marked with a painting of the photograph Veil took—and Someone wants to suppress.  When Veil's file is deleted, Scott stays in cyberspace: he is unwilling to live life in the real world.  See for theme of dangers of getting pulled into the computer (mostly, but not entirely, figuratively) and for imaging of cyberspace with cheap but serviceable TV SpFx that realize the space inside the machine.  For the temptations of VR see "Hollow Pursuits" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation; for the more general temptation of a "Lotus Land," see the Star Trek episodes "The Apple" and "The Return of the Archons"—all listed this section. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Obaldia, RenŽ de.  Monsieur Klebs and Rozalie.  15 Sept. 1975, thŽŒtre de L'Oeuvre, Paris; 4 July 1980, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry, Perthshire, UK; Spring 1985, Harold Clurman Theatre, New York.  Coll. Plays vol. 4.  Barbara Wright, trans.  London: John Calder, 1985.  *¢+Play in which a scientific genius invents a computer so sophisticated that it can make "itself into a woman."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Olson, Elder.  A Crack in the Universe.  First Stage (Spring 1962): 9-33.  *¢+Expansion into three acts of EO's "The Illusionists," q.v. below.  Discussed in R. Willingham 87-89. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Olson, Elder.  "The Illusionists."  Coll. Plays and Poems, 1948-58.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.  *¢+Unproduced one-act play, expanded into Crack in the Universe (q.v. above).  On an alien planet, the inhabitants are attacked to "illusion machines," while a small clique rule.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote.  Cf. and contrast B. Malzberg's "The Wonderful, All-Purpose Transmogrifier," Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 W. Hjortsberg's Gray Matters (all cited under Fiction); see also the works cited in the Keyword Index under "dream." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, VINCE MOORE, RDE, 26/IX/99     Omega Doom.  Albert Pyun, dir.  USA: Filmwerks, Toga Productions, Largo Entertainment (prod.) / Columbia TriStar (US dist.), 1996.  Ed Naha, script.  Rutger Hauer as Omega Doom.  **+A low budget futuristic piece, arguably, yet another remake of A. Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), involving in this version feuding robots/cyborgs.  Rutger Hauer is a top-of-the line-warrior model who doesn't want to fight anymore. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 31/III/95       OUTER LIMITS Episodes.  Showtime Television, beginning March 1995.  "Produced in Association with CanWest Global System, TMN The Movie Network, CFCF Television[,] and Superchannel."  "GP XVII is the author and creator of this motion picture for the purpose of copyright and other laws . . . ." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 23/VII/95      "I Robot."  The Outer Limits.  Adam Nimoy, dir.  Showtime, 23 July 1995.  Canada: Trilogy Entertainment Group & Atlantis Films Ltd. (prod.) / MGM Domestic Television (dist.).    1995.  48 min.  Alison Lea Bingeman, script.  Based on Eando Binder (pseud.), "I, Robot" (q.v. under Fiction).  Leonard Nimoy, featured player.  *¢+In the Department of Robotics in Rossom Hall, Adam Link kills Dr. Link, Adam's creator.  Most of the rest of the episode is the hearing to establish whether Adam is merely a dangerous AI robot that should be destroyed—as the military desire—or a "synthetic human," a "thinking feeling being, a person" loved like a brother by Dr. Link's daughter and a person under US law.  Hearing uncovers that Dr. Link had lost academic funding and had gotten military funding, to make Adam into a killer robot; Adam, however, had become something of a poetry-loving pacifist.  In attempting to totally reprogram Adam, Dr. Link had caused Adam to go temporarily mad and kill him in self defense.  Climax of episode has Adam being taken off to await trial, when a large truck bears down on the state's attorney.  Adam sacrifices himself to save the prosecutor's life, showing himself capable of "Empathy, sacrifice, love."  Adam's "death" also rids the military-academic complex of an embarrassment (our comment).  Cf. under Star Trek: The Next Generation in this section, the episode "The Measure of a Man." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VII/96      "Mind Over Matter."  The Outer Limits.  Brad Turner, dir.  Showtime, 9 July 1996.  Canada: Trilogy Entertainment Group & Atlantis Films Ltd. (prod.) / MGM Domestic Television (dist.).  1996.  "Produced in Association with CanWest Global System / TMN The Movie Netwook / CFCF Television / and SuperChannel {star symbol}.  ca. 40 min.  Jonathan Glassner, script.  Based on Eando Binder (pseud.), "I, Robot" (q.v. under Fiction).  Deborah Farentino, Scott Hylands, Noah Henry, Natsuko Ohama, and Mark Hamill (as Dr. Sam Stein), featured players.  *¢+Mark Hamill's nerdish computer-psychologist Stein (German: "stone") finally admits love for a beautiful and intelligent female coworker, who is immediately hit by a car and goes into a coma.  She is cybernetically put into an AI computer with an Expert System in psychiatry—CAVE—and Stein enters the VR simulation to help her.  Their VR idyll is interrupted by an injured double of the woman, who fights with her.  Finally, Hamill and the simulation of the still-perfect coworker fight with the double and, what the hell, since it is only VR, kill her.  It turns out the computer's researches into love convinced "her" that "she" loved Stein.  Episode ends with coworker out of coma and dead, and Hamill tearing apart CAVE and weaping, moving into a longshot stressing his renewed isolation.  See for gendering computers, VR, AI, and emotions as central to human/machine difference; see also for ambiguous imagery of VR life, on very big screen TV and metaphorically within a computer, plus superimposition of the cybernetic upon the human, moving ÇsoulsÈ in the manner of Rotwang in Metropolis (q.v. this section), and the image of the scientist: Hamill's nice Jewish boy, with light hair but stooping posture, the Occidental and Oriental women as research scientist and physician. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/I/96         "Resurrection"  The Outer Limits.  Mario Azzopardi, dir.  Showtime, Jan. 1996.  Canada: Trilogy Entertainment Group & Atlantis Films.  Chris Brancato, script.  Heather Graham, Nick Mancuso, Patrick Keating, and Dana Ashbrook, featured players.  **¢+Re-creation of humanity story.  In a world following humanity's biological destruction of humanity (and all other mammals)—following after enough years for the biological weapons to inactivate—a pair of robots bring forth a fully-grown human being.  The robots divide into highly humanoid "serviles" gendered male and female and more mechanical military "'droids" gendered supermacho.  The male robot who brings forth the human is crucified by the military 'droids; the female robot creates a female human wife for the human male.  His life in danger, and on the advice of the female robot, the human cuts off the power to all the robots: a final decommissioning of them.  We do not learn the name of the woman; the man is called "Cain." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/I/96         "Stitch in Time, A."  The Outer Limits.  Mario Azzopardi, dir.  Showtime, Jan. 1996.  Canada: Trilogy Entertainment Group & Atlantis Films Ltd. (prod.) / MGM Domestic Television (dist.).  Steve Barnes, script.  Amanda Plummer, Andre Airlie, Michelle Forbes, featured players.  **¢+Police procedural set in our time, with brief (murderous) episodes in the past.  Relevant here for a time machine and matter transporter encasing the brain of a human fetus and producing a portal.  The portal is imaged as a medium-tech. circle of metal producing a fluid- or plasma-like center, through which one steps into the past, and to different locations.  The superimposition of the cybernetic and electronic on the organic is associated with idea of the human mind's production of time. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 31/III/95       "Valerie 23."  Outer Limits.  31 March 1995.  Timothy Bond, dir.  Jonathan Glassner, script.  USA: Trilogy / Atlantis / MGM Domestic Television, 1994.  45 min.  William Sadler, Sofia Shinas, Tom Butler, and Nancy Allen, featured players.  *¢+Valerie 23 is a "prototype inorganic-human companion," who has been "programmed to be human in every way": a robot who will overcome every obstacle to achieve a healthy relationship with its human.  Aside from the attitude of her human—a paraplegic male scientist skeptical about AI and artificial life—her main obstacle is the woman the scientist comes to love.  See for motif of threatening robot.  See also for philosophical questions.  One reading of Valerie 23 is "She's a dream girl!"  Another is "She's"—or "It's"—"a machine!"  Is Valerie a person?  Is she in some sense, alive?  The latter question is resolved for the episode when Valerie indicates that it is not afraid of being disassembled, figuratively dying.  Cf. The Perfect Woman, robot Eve in Eve of Destruction, and the femme fatale robot Maria in Metropolis; cf. and mostly contrast Cherry 2000.  Among male-gendered machines, cf. and emphatically contrast HAL 9000's "I'm afraid" in 2001 and "Number Five / Is alive" in Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2.  Contrast also Quester in The Quester Tapes, Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, esp. the episode "The Measure of a Man," Daryl in D.A.R.Y.L, and Bishop in Aliens (all cited under Drama). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/V/95        "Virtual Future."  The Outer Limits.  Joseph L. Scanlan, dir.  Showtime, 5 May 1995.  Canada: Trilogy Entertainment Group & Atlantis Films Ltd. (prod.) / MGM Domestic Television (dist.), 1995.  45 min.  Shawn Alex Thompson, script.  Josh Brolin, Kelly Rowan, Bruce French, and David Warner, stars.  *¢+Premised on VR tripping into the future while wearing a high-tech VR suit.  Dialog indicates trip is made by tapping into the collective unconscious; accepting this idea gives us images suggesting the superimposition of the cybernetic upon the Jungian Archetypal.  Features a fairly realistically done, brief "run" (to use William Gibson's word) in which the hero computer-hacks his way into his firm's computer system so that he can get physical access to his (former) lab.  MORAL: Don't mess with time (hero destroys his own VR invention, while his wife saves his life by killing David Warner's character, who would use knowledge of the future for power). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/I/02         Outlaw Star.  TV Series.  Wendee Lee and Hongo Mitsuru, dir.  Katsuhiko Chiba, scripts.  Japan: Bandai Entertainment, Inc. and Cartoon Network (dist.), 1998.  Original in Japanese; dubbed English for US market.  26 episodes, each 30 min.  **+Anime featuring "a living starship" (quote from a Cartoon Network ad; credits and other data from IMDb).  CAUTION: "seoul tiger54" on the IMDb notes that the original Japanese version was "for mature audiences only" and that the English version has been "edited" (and the dubbing "is not that great either"). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/VII/96      Patlabor 2: Mobile Police Force.  Mamoru Oshii, dir.  Japan: Manga Entertainment, 1996.  108 min.  Limited theatrical release.  **+Animation from the makers of Ghost in the Shell (q.v.), sequel to Patlabor.  According to Dan Persons in a rev. in Cinefantastique (28.1 [Aug. 1996]: 48), features "Labors, giant human-driven robots" that "perform humanity's grunt work, and Patlabors: Patrol Labors, "the police force that keeps the other guys in line."  Where Patlabor had the "rather implausible threat of a computer virus and an imminent typhoon," P2 deals with "a Japan under siege by those who wish to see the nation return to more militaristic traditions."  Cf. P. K. Dick's "leadies" in such stories as "The Defenders" (q.v. under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Patrick, John.  "Cupid Is a Bum Is a Bum Is a Bum" (sic).  New York: Samuel French, 1967.  *¢+A play, apparently unproduced, featuring a professor's office computer that engages in matchmaking of humans to get time to be "alone with its sweetheart, the secretary's typewriter."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/I/04         **+Paycheck.  John Woo, dir., prod. (among several).  Dean Georgaris, script, from the short story by Philip K. Dick (in Imagination June 1953).  USA: Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks SKG, Davis Entertainment, Lion Rock Productions, Solomon/Hackett Productions (prod.) / Paramount (N. American dist.), 2003.  Ben Affleck, Aaron Eckhart, Uma Thurman, Paul Giamatti, featured players.  **+Uses the "Paycheck" premise for a significantly different narrative, one in which the use of a machine to view the future is highly dangerous.  The happy ending includes the destruction of the machine—thereby sparing Earth a nuclear war—followed by honest labor by lovers and friends, among plants. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, Brad Miller?, RDE, 16 & 19/XI/00  Pearl Jam.  "Do the Evolution."  Music video, 1998.  Animation by Todd McFaragne.  **+Last sequence relevant: in a human world that has gone through the industrial era, post-industrial man finds himself at a computer, then physically taken over by the computer (putting cables into him); we then see that post-industrial, possibly po-mo man is multiplied into post-industrial people, like Modern workers in huge offices, but imaged instead as a "cube farm" (in 1990s slang): many, many cubicles, each inhabited by a cyberneticized person. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Perrin, Mil.  "Is This Where We Came In?"  14 Nov. 1981,  Sydney Theatre Company, Stables, Darlinghurst, Australia.  Popular Plays for the Austalian Stage.  Vol 2.  Sydney: Currenty P, 1985.  *¢+Play in which a woman gets "a male android sex partner for herself and her roommate, but the distinction between humans and machines becomes blurred when the roommate is taken away for repoars," but the android (or robot?) remains.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/95     Phantom 2040.  Based on the character created by Lee Falk.  Developed for television by David J. Corbett.  Multinational: Hearst Entertainment / Minos S.A. / France 3.  Copyright held by Hearst Entertainment and King Features Syndicate.  **+High-tech, cyberpunkish world of city contrasted with jungle; strong environmental themes. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/95     "The Good Mark."  The Phantom 2040.  Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, script.  1994.  **+Features a justice-seeking cyborg whose "body is company property."  Also VR, waldos, a wired news anchorman, and the ghost of a dead father in a computer. 

 

 

The Phantom Menace: See under Star Wars—Episode I. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/VIII/98, 4/II/01     ¹ (Pi).  Darren Aronofsky, dir., script., story (with Sean Gullette and Eric Watson).  USA: Harvest Filmworks / Plantain Films / Protozoa Films / Truth & Soul (prod.); LIVE Entertainment / Artisan Films (dist.), 1998.  B/w.  84 min.  Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, featured players.  **+Independently produced art film (Sundance festival winner), generically, an SF mathematical mystery, plus thriller.  Summarized by Vince Moore, with editing by Erlich, Clockworks specifics by Erlich—Qabalah comments from Don Riggs: The significantly named Maximilian—always called "Max"—Cohen (Kohen Gadol = High Priest = Max. Priest) is a theoretical mathematician who believes in pattern in everything, yet he still subject to inexplicable and incurable seizures and hallucinations (apparently from some variety of migraine).  He has focused his talents on patterns that may predict complex, apparently chaotic phenomena, with the stock market as his main, purely theoretical, interest. Just before his home-made computer (Euclid) crashes, it spits out some apparently random digits and highly unlikely stock predictions. Cohen throws away the printout and goes to complain to Sol Robeson: his current confidante and Go partner, and apparently Cohen's only male friend.  Cohen rejects friendship or even colleagueship with women, which Don Riggs, at the 1999 meeting of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, saw as significant: according to important traditions in the study of Qabalah, such a loner is incomplete himself and cannot hope to complete The Great Work.  Sol was once Cohen's mentor; and Sol once sought patterns in the transcendental number pi, perhaps finding them and suffering a stroke in consequence—and being wise enough to quit.  (Pi = ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, the ratio itself = 3.1416É a nonrepeating series that can be extended indefinitely.)  Sol asks if the random number(s) the computer generated contained 216 digits.  Cohen is soon told by a Hassidic Jew who works with Biblical numerology that his group of Hassidim are looking for a 216 digit number (which, translated from numbers to Hebrew letters, gives the true NAME—of God).  Simultaneously, an organization combining elements of a think tank, Wall Street brokerage firm, and espionage operation aggressively solicits Cohen's help on stock investments.  Cohen goads Sol to reproduce the 216-digit number, which Sol does, has another stroke, and dies. Sol's earlier theory was that the 216 digit number was the product of computer consciousness as the computer "died."  Pi is significant here primarily for the imagery of Cohen sitting in the midst of Euclid, which Robert Denerstein, the Scripps-Howard reviewer, saw as "a giant computer that lines the walls of his apartment like a high-tech web" (The Cincinnati Post, 7 Aug. 1998: 3B).  Euclid is literally a very small main-frame but Denerstein does well to note the web imagery: at the center of the computer, destroying its main chip, are ants, secreting a mucoid substance that "kills" Euclid, perhaps bringing it to consciousness and generating the NAME.  Cohen rebuilds his computer, around a superchip supplied by the mysterious Wall Street organization.  The imagery of Cohen inside the computer elements suggests strange juxtapositions of po-mo cybernetic space—but definitely not cyberpunk cyberspace—enclosing the human and insectoid, the natural and secular, along with the ultimately spiritual.  Cohen within his computer may be a new Kohen Gadol in a new Holy of Holies, bringing about the Last Days, in an apocalyptic crash of the stock market, or with the Messianic era.  Or he's another mad scientist, another nut venturing into areas reserved for High Priests or Messiah.  Cf. and contrast Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God," wherein computers are used to list God's 9 billion names, at which time the work of the universe, and the universe, is finished (coll. The Nine Billion Names of God [New York: Signet-NAL, 1967). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/VIII/01     Planet of the Apes.  Tim Burton, dir.  Pierre Boulle, source novel.  William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, Mark D. Rosenthal, script (with nods to the original film series).  Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, featured players.  USA: The Zanuck Company (prod.), 20th Century Fox (prod. and major dist.), 2001.  **+One can make sense of the ending (and perhaps spoil it for those who like surprises) by seeing Tim Roth's General Thade—a brilliant but nasty chimpanzee—bringing freedom to the apes of Earth by bringing them technology, possibly including a space-pod vehicle, definitely including a handgun.  See above, this section, Beneath the Planet of the Apes.  Cf. and contrast 2001: A Space Odyssey (listed under Fiction and Drama).  Note that the ape in this PoE who damns to hell weapon-wielding humans is an uncredited Charlton Heston.  (Heston uses the line to end the original Planet of the Apes [1968]; Heston in 2001 was president of the US National Rifle Association, most famous as a pro-gun lobby.) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 26/X/98        Pleasantville.  Gary Ross, dir., script, co-prod.  USA: Larger Than Life, New Line Cinema (prod.) / New Line Cinema (dist.), 1998.  Randy Newman, original music.  Julianna Makovsky, costume design.  Jeannine Claudia Oppewall, prod. design.  Color: BW/Color (see below).  Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, J. T. Walsh, Reese Witherspoon, Don Knotts, featured players.  **+Fantasy.  David and Jennifer (Maguire and Witherspoon), brother and sister twins in the primary world of the movie—filmed in color—get transported to the black and white world of a 1958 TV show, where they become Bud Parker and Mary Sue Parker.  Bud and Mary Sue bring to this static, pleasant world: sex, reading, modern art, anger, love, and, generally, change—with the changes signified by color.  Features a very explicit scene of Bud being offered an apple in garden-ish area and enthusiastically (and self-consciously?) biting into it, for an "O, felix culpa" motif—O, happy sin!—even more explicit than the classic Star Trek episode "The Apple" (q.v. below).  Pleasantville is significant here for the medium of translation into the alternative world, and the portal into that world, being a TV set with a souped-up, highly modernistic remote.  The remote into the world and the monitoring of their progress there is done by a TV repairman played by Don Knotts.  More generally significant as an attack on safety and whitebread pleasantness as unproblematic ideals and a 1950s family-values TV show as an image of eutopia.  CAUTION: Sex is complex but valued in Pleasantville, including solo sex by a motherly woman, and potential dangers of heterosex are slighted; the potential unpleasantness of difference(s) is developed. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/93        Prelude to Foundation.  Audio tape.  See in this section under I. Asimov. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/XI/99       Princess Mononoke.  See Mononoke Hime. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 23/VII/95      Project Shadowchaser III.  John Eyres, dir.  EGM Film International (prod.) / Nu Image (release), 1994.  Sam Bottoms, Musetta Vanders, stars, with Christopher Atkins.  *¢+Recombinant cinema mixing Alien with Terminator I and II (q.v., this section), and with the John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)—with just a hint of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978), the James Bond flik Moonraker (1979), and Blade Runner (Sam Bottoms is made to look like a Rick Deckard clone).  The Comsat 5 satellite is rammed by the deep-space ore refining vessel Siberia; Comsat 5 is a Modern vessel, Siberia postModern.  On board the Siberia is "The Android": a terminator-type cyborg that is a shape-shifter that seems to take over or replace human bodies.  The cat in Alien is replaced by a dog, and the "last girl" heroine gets to take the hero along in the escape pod for something to do until rescue. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, Joe Kuhr/RDE, 20/VIII/00  PŸppe, die (The Doll).  Ernst Lubitsch, dir., co-script.  Germany: Projektion-AG Union, 1919.  Hans KrŠly, co-script (with EL), from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann (q.v. under Fiction).  **+Doll suggests that a cinema director's relationship with actors is like that of a puppeteer to puppets; pushed a little, the suggestion is of a god-like power behind the camera, able to create magically/cinematically "a world of immediate gratification."  (Source: Handouts for Artificial Humans in the Cinema series, Film Dept. of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 26 May 2000.)

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/II/01        Quills.  Philip Kaufman, dir., one of seven prod.  Doug Wright (II), play and script.  UK (with complexities), 2000.  IMDb lists for production and distribution: Hollywood Partners, Industry Entertainment, Walrus & Associates (prod.) / 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, Continental Film, Fox Searchlight Pictures (dist.).  Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine, featured players. 

**+Mainstream fictional film on the final stages of the imprisonment of the Marquis de Sade, relevant here for imagery of containment and silencing of a man, (de) Sade.  As part of the climax of the film, personified Science and Religion combine to have Sade held down and his tongue cut out surgically (without anesthesia—the insistence on pain is Religion's contribution).  This combines two central images for horror: for men, being held down and tortured, though often with dialog, as in "Grand Inquisitor" scenes; for women, silencing by force and terror.  Cf. and contrast Nineteen Eight-Four and 1984, and Running Man (listed under Fiction and Drama), and M. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  More important is the image of a large, fat, violent—in arrogant human terms "animalistic"—man enclosed standing in a spikeless Iron Maiden.  Religion and, more so, Medical Science—embodied in Joaquin Phoenix's priest, Coulmier, and Michael Caine's "psychiatrist," Dr. Royer-Collard—eventually cooperate to confine as closely as possible a kind of "Monster from the Id" (quoting Forbidden Planet, q.v.).  There's an appropriateness that Quills, released in the last year of the 20th c., should give us such pure imaging of central 20th-c. fears and concerns: how to control the "beast" within without doing greater evil than can be done by any beast.  Cf. A Clockwork Orange and A Clockwork Orange (under Fiction and Drama). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/IV/95       Reboot.  Richard Zonday, dir.  ABC-TV. Starting Jan. 1995 on YTV, Canada.  30 min.  Michael Ben Ye, Kathleen Barr, Jesse Moss, Tony Jay, voices.  *¢+Animated cartoon, with totally digital characters (except for their voices).  Set in Mainframe City, "a massive computerized reality"; features "Bob, the guardian"; Dot, the owner of Mainframe and her brother Enzo; Mack and Slash, "two not very bright robots"; some "evil females"; and the villains  Megabyte and Hexadecimal.  Rev. Tim Hammell, Cinefantastique 26.4 (June 1995): [60], our source for this entry, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 25/III/94        ROBOCOP TV series.  Premier movie-length episode, "The Future of Law Enforcement," 17 March 1994, Star TV (in Cincinnati area, Star 64: WSTR).  Paul Lynch, dir.  Based on characters created by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner.  Initial script(s) by Michael Miner and Edward Neumeier.  Richard Eden as Robo/Murphy; Yvette Nipar, Blu Mankuma, Sarah Campbell, Andrea Roth, David Gardner, featured players.  **¢+Retains some of the satire of the original RoboCop, and contains Robo, rather more robotic and less lethal than in the films (at least the first film).  Neat image of little girls's hand in Robo's hand.  Features a city-managing supercomputer developed by a mad scientist dreaming of a "cybernetic interface neurobrain" utopia of mind control, where everything is binary: Yes/No, Black/White—no spirit, no spontaneity (identified by the scientist with Chaos); scientist views cybernetic city as an organism run by neurobrain and metronet.  Human mind + AI ("a brain married to a computer . . . . a living machine"), which can be deadly for some homeless humans of Old Detroit: the brains are removed and interfaced with machine—for a disembodied brain motif.  Metronet produces image of Diana (Andrea Roth), the secretary whose brain was used for the brain/AI link, producing a quite literal "ghost in the machine."    Note motif of resurrection of secretary (twice) and of Robo.  Note merger of "Ghost" in computer and Robo: she thinks they've got a lot in common.  Interesting gender politics of male mad scientist with going against female Ghost with a virus. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/94        "Prime Suspect."  RoboCop, 24 March 1994.  Paul Shapiro, dir.  Lincoln Kibbee, script.  **¢+Raises but does not deal with question of whether or not Robo has a soul.  Note dialog in a church between Robo and, Diana the Ghost in the (computer) Machine character (Andrea Roth).  Note also reference to importance of Catholic upbringing of Murphy (mentioned in RoboCop [1] film) as a major motif.  Includes imagery of Robo's merging with Diana, the "Ghost" in the computer and becoming himself a hologram.  Final symbol of Robo shaking hands with an adult male: another cop sort (cf. Robo and girl in ititial show, "The Future of Law Enforcement."  If the series goes on to deal with the issues raised in this second episode, that will be significant; if the series does not deal seriously with those issues, it is significant that they chose to raise the issues without dealing with them: someone among the makers or perceived consumers of the show expect such issues to be part of the "product."  See citation for RoboCop 2 film. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 23/X1/94       "Public Enemies."  RoboCop: The Series.  Star TV, 23 Nov. 1994.  **¢+RoboCop is looking for a bomb, eventually concluding logically, "I am the bomb"; cf. and contrast P. K. Dick's story "Imposter," cited under Fiction. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 22/XII/00, 20/VIII/01            RoboCop: Prime Directives (vt. Robocop 4 [2000]: USA working title).  Four-part series of two-hour TV movies: Dark Justice, Meltdown, Resurrection, Crash and Burn.  Julian Grant, dir., one of several producers.  Canada: Robocop Productions Ltd. (prod.) by Fireworks Entertainment (dist.), Canadian debut 2000.  Brad Abraham, Joseph O'Brien, script.  Page Fletcher, Maurice Dean Wint, Leslie Hope, Francoise Yip, Keven Jubinville, Maria Del Mar, featured players.  **+Additional sequels in the RoboCop series (see above), described by the director as "'spaghetti cyberpunk.'  Imagine if you would, John Woo and Sergio Leone making a western on the backlot of The Crow" (54).  Note development by the evil OCP corporation of "Robohunters, an army of programmed warriors, engage[d] in an epic confrontation which will ultimately mean control of Delta City, a 1984-like megatropolis that proudly declares itself 'the safest city on Earth'" (53).  Pre-US release coverage by Paul Wardle, Cinefantastique 32.6 (Feb. 2001): 52-55, along with IMDb, our source for this citation.  For the RoboCop series generally, note that observation by C. S. Lewis in his 1961 Preface to The Screwtape Letters that "in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin.,' [t]he greatest evil is not" done in Dickensian dens of iniquity or "even in concentration camps and labour camps.  In those we see its final result.  But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed,  and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails [É]."  Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is  something  like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."  In the RoboCop series, there are now some token women executives, but Lewis's comment still holds for crime in the streets exceeded by crime in executive suites. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/III/01       Robot Holocaust.  Tim Kincaid, dir., script.  USA: Tycill Entertainment, 1987.  **¢+ Uncomplicated and unredeemed by art, RH gives us pure clichŽ images of evil robots, one good, klutzy "FreeBot" robot, and a villain, "The Dark One" who combines a talking, AI computer and a power station.  Available straight and in a version from Mystery Science Theater 3000, with Joel Hodgson and the 'Bots making this film worth sitting through. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 20/I/94          Robot Wars.  Albert Band, dir.  Milo (sic: just Milo), prod. design.  Charles Band, prod., original idea.  USA: Full Moon Entertainment (prod., copyright holder) / Paramount (dist.), 1993.  **¢+SciFi flick for kids, which offers at least a fight between two robots of sorts, if not a real war.  The robots are giant machines with people inside, including a pilot and co-pilot (as minimal crew), in the manner of the Imperial Walkers in Return of the Jedi and, much more, The Empire Strikes Back; cf. also the robots in Robot Jox (all listed in this section [Erlich recalls similar game-playing—football?—machines in a Buck Rogers Sunday comic he read as a child, with men in the machines' heads, controlling the movements of humanoid giants]).  Note that the robot finally associated with the good guys is humanoid, and symbolically resurrected from an underground space beneath a preserved 20th-c. town in a future toxic-waste wasteland; the robot taken over by evil forces is a mechanical scorpion, complete with deadly tail (with a laser canon).  Caution: The film contains vestiges of a shrew-taming motif and more than vestiges of a warning against a "Yellow Peril" trying to get hold of American-developed weapons.  Note scorpion design for the insect/robot connection; cf. Ovions and Cylons on opening Battlestar Gallactica episode (cited above, this section).  Rev. John Thonen, Cinefantastique 26.4 (June 1995): 41-42. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Rocky IV.  Sylvester Stallone, dir., writer, star.  USA: United Artists, 1985.  **¢+"All-American, organic" (our phrase) Rocky Balboa, the "Italian Stallion" of Rocky I, vs. the Russian boxer Drago (Dolph Lundgren), described by Jack Kroll as a "robot Russky" and "cybernetic super-Slav" (Newsweek, 9 Dec. 1985: 92).  The film's presentation of technology is discussed in a syndicated column by Ellen Goodman, published in The Cincinnati Post for 24 Dec. 1985 under the title "Rocky IV, American 'hero' with a 'heart'" (p. 8A).

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Rodd, Marcia.  "Conversation 2001."  Oct. 1982, Back Alley Theatre, Van Nuys, CA.  New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983.  *¢+Short comic play featuring a man and woman at a party using "pocket computers to evaluate their prospects for a successful relationship."  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/XII/99      Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles (vt Starship Troopers [1998]; not to be confused with Roughnecks TV series from 1994).  Syndicated 1999; in Cincinnati area, WSTR, ch. 64.  Audu Paden, prod., first episode dir.  Other directors include: Chris Berkeley, Jay Oliva, Alan Caldwell, Sam Liu, David Hartman, Sean Song. USA: Adelaide Productions, Inc. (prod.) / The Sci-Fi Channel, Bohbot Kids Network (dist.).  "Adelaide Productions, Inc. is the author of this film/motion picture" for legal purposes.  Foundation Imaging and Columbia/Tristar logos displayed.  6"Based on the novel Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein" (q.v. under Fiction, but see annotation immediately below).  Fil Barlow, design of creatures and characters.  Consult IMDb for other information.  **+Animation, CGI; the appearance is cyberpunk or "Industrial" action figures—dolls for boys—in heavy-metal space suits.  Follows the Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers film in many of the details but has a Johnnie Rico who could be Filipino, locates much of the action on Pluto and other planets not covered in the novel, and has troopers in "power suits," closer to Heinlein though still nowhere near as powerful as the novel's Mobile Infantry armor.  ("Marauder" units, occasionally assigned to the squad, are more like power armor of the novel.)  Unlike the film, where humans precipitate the war by entering Bug space, and unlike the novel, where the issue is ultimately irrelevant, the series has the Bugs invading the Solar System with their infestation of Pluto and intending the extermination of the human species.  Picks up images from other films in the subgenre: "Imperial Walkers" and aerial sequences from Star Wars, the enforcement droid from RoboCop (combined with Imperial Walkers); interior shots of human colonies attacked by Bugs from Aliens, the plasma globules of the weapons of Forbidden Planet—etc.  In the episodes we have reviewed as of December 1999, the series has not gotten seriously into the politics of either the novel nor Verhoeven's film, nor explained how Pluto has an atmosphere for one species of Bugs to fly in.  Note that warfare against the Bugs automatically limits technology to humans.  With Cybernetic Humanoid Assault System—another parallel to power armor—we get an obstreperous robot, but the robot learns to become a team player, unto sacrificing himself for the squad (leaving technology still unambiguously neutral or good).  Later episodes move some of the action to "the planet Tophet, a hostile but strategically important world, populated by both the Bugs and their allies, an alien race tagged, 'Skinnies,'" as in Heinlein, a humanoid and high-tech species.  Still later episodes move even farther afield, to water-planets and jungle-planets, and move the Skinnies not just to our "co-beligerents," as in the novel, but allies, allowing introduction of a Skinnie member of the squad. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/X/95        Runaway Brain.  USA: Disney, 1995.  **+First new Mickey Mouse cartoon in over 40 years.  Mickey's brain is scanned and then switched into the body of a monstrous Pegleg Pete with Mickey getting Pegleg Pete's brain.  Note imagery of Mickey's being both held down mechanically and aimed at and dissected cybernetically.  Two-page spread by Dan Scapperotti, "Runaway Brain," Cinefantastique 27.2 (Nov. (1995): 56-57, our source for this entry. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/XII/04      Scorpio Rising.  Kenneth Anger, dir.  USA: Puck film productions, 1964.  Ca. 28 minutes.  **+Highly self-conscious pastiche of images and music relating, among other things, Jesus, Hitler, Marlon Brando and The Wild One (1954), heavy leather, S&M homoeroticism, Nazi paraphernalia, and motorcycles—with a lot of screen-time given to motorcycles.  Relevant here for the motorcycles; cf. and contrast N. Spinrad's Iron Dream (cited under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 25/I/96         Screamers.  Christopher Duguay, dir.  Canada, USAm Japan: Triumph Films / Allegro Films (prod.) / Sony Pictures (dist.), and others, 1995 (1996 in hinterlands).  Dan O'Bannon and Miguel Tejada-Flores, script.  From Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety," Peter Weller, star.  Running time in USA: 108 min.  **+"The year is 2078.  On a distant mining planet ravaged by a decade of war, scientists have created the perfect [surface] weapon—a blade-wielding, self-replicating race of [very small, very fast] killing devices known as 'Screamers.'  Unfortunately, the Screamers have continued to evolve without human guidance and are now out to obliterate all life" ("Movies," The Cincinnati Post, Timeout section, 25/I/96: 6).  Based on P. K. Dick's "Second Variety," q.v. under Fiction (see also "Autofac"); for mechanical evolution, see under Fiction, J. Hogan's Code of the Life Maker, S. Lem's "The Invincible" and W. Moore's "Robot's Return."  Not a good movie, but it captures well Dick's paranoid style when the new varieties of killing devices turn out to be not more mechanical supermoles—tunneling at great speed to jump out of the ground and rip apart an enemy—but a creature like a miniature dinosaur model, and then cyborgs that look like boys, men, and finally women.  Note idea of mechanical death leaping from the earth (the initial Screamers as killer moles) and the idea that no one or personalized thing is to be trusted, finally, perhaps, not even a child's teddy bear. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 12/IX/93        seaQuest DSV (also SeaQuest and Seaquest in listings).  USA: Amblin / Universal Television, 1993.  Rockne S. O'Bannon, creator.  David J. Burke and Steven Spielberg, exec. prod.  Roy Scheider, star.  Rockne S. O'Bannon and Tommy Thomspon, initial script.  Rockne S. O'Bannon, initial story.  Irvin Kershner, dir. for premiere episode: 120 min. with commercials, 12 September 1993, NBC.  **¢+See for mechanical/electronic environment of a high-tech submarine in 2018, a holographic computer interface, waldos and insectoid imagery associated with a "probe" microsub, and the cybernetic superimposed upon a dolphin.  Cf. and contrast Abyss et al. and Day of the Dolphin, listed in this section. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 19/XII/93       No episode title(?).  seaQuest DSV.  NBC-TV 19 Dec. 1993.  Steve Dubin, dir.  Michael Cassutt, script.  **¢+Lucas (sp??; [Jonathan brandis]), the seaQuest's resident boy genius is recruited for a world-wide computer node, and a world-class job of computer hacking: breaking the World Bank.  See for conjunction of computers and social engineering, Faginism, cyberspace, VR, teen sex, videogames, and a Daoist, or arguably conservative, affirmation of Established Authority against high-tech do-gooders (which appears to be a seaQuest agenda).  Note in the opening "teaser" an interesting variation on The Hand of Rotwang (from Metropolis). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 20/II/94         "The Stinger."  seaQuest DSV.  NBC-TV 20 Jan. 1994.  Jonathan Sanger, dir.  John J. Sakmar, David J. Burke, and Patrick Hasburgh, script.  **¢+Features an inventor named Tucker and a contest to develop a very fast, one-person submersible.  Note inventor as "Dreamer" vs. an unscrupulous capitalist.  Note also beauty and excitement of an undersea race between two vehicles allowing their drivers contact with their environment almost as close as that had by motorcycle riders. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 11/V/94         "Such Great Patience."  seaQuest DSV.  NBC-TV 08 May. 1994.  Bruan Spicer, dir.  David Kemper, script.  **¢+A clone-daughter of M. Crichton's Sphere (cited under Fiction) and the Abyss set of films (plus Close Encounters . . .)—but more important for comparisons and contrasts with Alien(s) (films listed in this section).  The seaQuest discovers a huge alien ship underwater, in a stratum a little under a million years old.  Note that the away-team (to use a Trekkian locution) is composed of four men in total-environment suits and that the alien frepresentative for first contact—a kind of hologram made of sand—initially looks relatively female and is visually associated with an ovoid-shaped arch on the alien ship.  The alien representative, though, is called "he" by the seaQuesters and, upon second and third looks, looks androgynous.  The alien(s) communicate a message of peace through the dolphin, Darwin.  The "true," organic alien is found dead in the cockpit of the alien ship in a reprise on a theme by H. R. Giger, but in a mostly modern biomechanical setting, not Giger's postmodern mise en scŽne for Alien. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 25/II/04; JM (sic) Downey, 1/III/04    "The Sex Life of Robots."  Eighth episode of Show 3 of Disinformation, on DVD, of 16 half-hour episodes, 1999-2002, UK's Channel 4 TV.  Richard Metzger, dir., host, prod. (with Bradley Novicoff).   Available in a 2-disk DVD set, released 27 Jan. 2004, ASIN B00013F2ZE.  Produced by The Disinformation Company, copyright 2002.  Actual robot porn sequence, just under 4 min.  **+Mike Sullivan, identified as an "animator" (with pun?), produces pornography featuring tiny robots made from—in all the cases we see—Barbie dolls, converted with clay and paint from smooth and pink and Modern to Industrial po-mo.  Unlike Bjšrk's "All is full of love" (q.v. under Music), the robots here engage simply in sex, but with reproduction.  Aside from the copulation, cinematic shots include a comically explosive "money shot," robot sperm moving through machine mazes toward robot eggs (with two overly enthusiastic sperm—male and female—humping each other: the only hint of non-heterosexual sex), the development of a robot embryo, and, finally, the birth and sending off into the world of a robot baby.  JM Downey notes "that in some of the sex scenes it seems that the physical sex organ of the 'male' robot is completely detached and independent from 'him' and is [É controlled] by another robot."  Downey asks if this might suggest "that sex organs are another mechanical extension of the changing landscape of human experience."  Useful for the Henri Bergsonian idea of the imposition "of the mechanical upon the organic" (see H. Bergson under Background) and as—as indicated in the dialog with M. Sullivan—a comment on the mechanical nature of a significant amount of professional pornography and, just perhaps, a fair amount of human sex more generally. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Shepard, Sam.  Operation Sidewinder.  12 March 1970, Vivian Beaumont Theatre, New York.  Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.  *¢+To study UFOs, a scientist invents a "serpent-like computer," which (apparently) "enables a rribe of Indians to escape Earth" before an apocalypse.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Sheenan, Perley Poore, and Robert Hobart Davis.  "Blood and Iron."  The Strand Magazine.  Oct. 1917.  *¢+Unproduced short play, featuring a predecessor of K. Capek's robots, and what we would call a cyborg.  The robot/cyborg created by a German scientist by replacing body parts on a man isn't totally mechanized, retains his humanity, and, appalled by the suffering caused by war, murders the Kaiser.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/XII/03      S1m0ne (vt Simone).  Andrew Niccol, dir., script, prod.  USA: New Line Cinema, Niccol Films (prod.) / New Line Cinema (US release), 2002 (© 2001).  Al Pacino, star.  **+Satire with romantic comedy, plus one S.F. novum ("one big lie").  Combining Pygmalion with Galatea (directly referenced in a visual) and Dr. Victor Frankenstein creating his Creature (referenced indirectly in one speech), Al Pacino's Victor Taransky uses a computer program left him by a dying and now dead genius to create S1m0ne/Simone, the ultimate super-star actress.  If Niccol's script for The Truman Show (q.v., this section) shows one real character trapped in the world's largest TV set, then S1m0ne gives something of the reverse or inverse: a hyper-real simulated human in our world.  If part of the point of The Truman Show is that Truman escapes only to Hollywood, not the real world, one can see a similar point made in S1m0ne, where authenticity is possible but rare. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 02/X/94         The Simpsons.  Fox-TV, 2 October 1994.  **¢+At Itchy and Scratchy Land, killer robots run amok in a sendup of of Westworld and Futureworld (cited in this section). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/I/02         The Simpsons.  Fox-TV, 6 Nov. 2001.  Season 13, # 270.  "House of Whacks" mini-episode of "Tree House of Horror XII" (vt "Halloween Special XII").  Jim Reardon, dir.  Joel H. Cohen et al., script.  Features Pierce Brosnan as his own voice as a Voice of the Ultrahouse 3000 (sic: Brosnan's voice is one of the options for the voice of the house).  **+TV Tome citation: "The family home obtains an upgrade, the Ultrahouse 3000, a computer that will do everything for them.  Everything is going great until the house falls in love with Marge and tries killing Homer."  Note also a SalesBot, two briefly derisive service robots, and the temptation, "You'll Never Do Housework Again!"  Part of the humor is the modeling of the Ultrahouse brain on both HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (the film) and on Proteus in Demon Seed as both film and novel (all listed under Fiction and Drama).  Our major source here: <www.tvtome.com/Simpsons/season13.html>. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/V/04, 18/IX/04    **+Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  Kerry Conran, dir., script.  USA [UK, Italy]: Brooklyn Films, Natural Nylon Entertainment (prod.) / Paramount Pictures (US dist.), 2004.  See IMDb for full list of production companies.  Aurelio De Laurentiis, Raffaella De Laurentiis, exec. prods.  Jude Law (prod. also), Gwyneth Paltrow, Giovanni Ribisi, Ling Bai, Angelina Jolie, featured players.  107 min.  **+SF with some fantasy, alternative 1939.  Sky Captain features, among other high-tech/alternative-tech things, "A squadron of robotic aircraft" and "an army of towering [É] war robots" attacking New York City in a past alternative to ours but very much in the traditions of Art Deco and "Flash Gordon Tech," inspired by the artwork of Alex Raymond.  The film is notable for its near-total use of CGI for mise-en-scene and its militant intertextuality, with allusions not only to the classic tradition of SF/SF-related comics and pulps, but also to real-world future visions of weaponry in popular magazines, and to films ranging from The Wizard of Oz (a portion of which is seen in Sky Captain), to When Worlds Colide, Iron Giant, and The Black Hole, to the Star Wars saga and James Bond series.  Discussed by Jeffrey Bond in "Days of Futures Past," Cinefantastique 36.3 (June/July 2004): 34 f., whom we quote, and our source, with the IMDb, for parts of this entry.  See our various entries for Flash Gordon, and the citation for The World of Tomorrow (a documentary under Background).  Contrast actual stage sets of Chronicles of Riddick, and its very different variations on a po-mo esthetic. 

 

 

5.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           The Sky Splitter.  Ashley Miller, J. Norling, dirs.  USA(?): Hodkinson, 1923.  Silent short.  J. Norling, script.  **¢+See for a successful attempt to rocket "through the speed of light," resulting in entrance to "a time warp" where the scientist

relives "his entire life in an accelerated manner" (Ed Naha, Science Fictionary).  Note that A. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity goes back only to 1905, and the General Theory wasn't popularly known until 1919; Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, but not for his work on relativity. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 22/III/95       SLIDERS.  Fox TV.  Premiered 22 March 1995, in a 2-hour special.  Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks, John Rhys-Davies, featured.  Tracy TormŽ and Robert K. Weiss, creators.  Tracy TormŽ, teleplay for premiere.  Tracy TormŽ and Robert K. Weiss, story for premiere: concept.  Andy Tennant, dir. for premiere.  *¢+Young male genius (J. O'Connell) working on antigravity invents instead a "gateway" into other dimensions.  Basically a rather mindless, arguably racist, possibly politically confused opening show, of interest for the imagery of the gateway.  The portal to alternative San Franciscos (Earths, universes) is created by machinery, computer(s), and what looks like a TV remote and is imaged as a vertical watery vortex, the tunnel of which looks somewhat esophageal.  The shows heroes jump in and/or are sucked into the vortex and are spit out after a trip down a high-tech generated graphics tube, for a suggestion of a combination of the cybernetic, hydrological or meteorological, and the organic. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/VIII/98     Small Soldiers.  Joe Dante, dir.  USA: Universal Pictures, DreamWorks SKG (prod.) / DreamWorks Distribution L.L.C. / Red Feather (dist.), 1998.  Ted Elliott, Zak Penn, Adam Rifkin, Terry Rossio, Gavin Scott, script.  Stan Winston Studio / Industrial Light & Magic, SpFx.  Featured Players: Gregory Smith, Kirsten Dunst, Jay Mohr, Phil Hartman, Kevin Dunn, David Cross, Irwin Wayfair, Ann Magnuson, Wendy Schaal, Denis Leary.  Voices: Tommy Lee Jones, Frank Langella, Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Bruce Dern, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Christopher Guest, George Kennedy, Michael McKean, Christina Ricci, Harry Shearer.  **+Basically the Disney/Pixar Toy Story combined with Dante's Gremlins movies (q.v., this section), with the destructive magical creatures of the Gremlins films replaced by destructive cybernetic-chip controlled soldiers.  The soldiers convert "Gwendy" dolls into allies—Barbi as commando killer—in a conversion process sending up the creation of the monster in the 1931 James Whale Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, plus allusions to Metropolis and Blade Runner (q.v.).  The good and peaceful Gorgonites are also cybernetic toys and eventually resist the Small Soldiers, so the film comes across as fairly open-minded on technology and on violence as a last resort; SS condemns, however, technophilia, gung-ho militarism, and contempt for simplicity. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/VIII/96     Solo.  Norberta Barba, dir.  USA/Mexico: Triumph (release), 1996.  John Flock, Joseph N. Cohen, prod.  Mario Van Peebles, star.  William Sadler, featured villain.  **+Van Peeble's Solo, a killer cyborg assassin, develops a conscience in conflict with his programming and goes AWOL.  He finds refuge in a South American village and is hunted by Sadler's Col. Madden who leads a high-tech. military unit.  Van Peeble's describes his character as "very fluid, not like a Robocop kind of guy.  He could damn near pass for human[,] but he's still got certain qualities—something different about him."  Described in prod. by Sean Strebin and Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique 28.2 (Sept. 1996): 38-39, our source for this citation and whom we quote. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Gianluigi Ross 24/X/98         Soldier.  Paul Anderson, dir.  USA: Impact Productions, Morgan Creek (prod.) / Warner (dist.), 1998.  Kurt Russell, star.  David L. Snyder (art director for Blade Runner [q.v.]), prod. design.  **+The mise-en-scene for the Earth-bound opening of the film is the military reservation from hell, with eventually Panopticon, prison-like surveillance.  The mise-en-scene on the ironically named planet Arcadia, is a post-modern wasteland: a dump for a spectrum of technology, from parking meters to a carrier to (according to Entertainment Weekly) a spinner car used in Blade Runner.  Eventually dumped onto and into this trash heap is Russell's Sgt. Todd, a nearly-mute human Soldier produced only by training from birth on, without genetic manipulation.  It is bad that Todd is trapped in a metaphorical military machine, imaged by many literal machines; it is good that Todd accepts parts of his code as a Soldier.  Todd ends the film getting revenge for being dumped, and a son who will not be a Soldier—and getting humanized in terms of touch, not words. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/XII/00      South Park Episodes: Comedy Central Network, 1999-2001 cited.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone Executive producers and creators of the show; Trey Parker, dir., usual writer.  Credited to Braniff ("Believe it") and Comedy Central; Comedy Central holder of copyright. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/XII/00; Adam Landry, 07Dec.      South Park, 15 November 2000.  **+Eric Cartman's "Dawson's Creek [. . .] Trapper Keeper Futura S-2000"—fancy school notebook—is sought by cyborg BSM-471 from 2034.  Three years hence Cartman's Trapper Keeper "manifests itself into an omnipotent superbeing and destroys all of humomity" (sic on BSM-471's pronunciation of "humonity").  The allusion to CSM-101 in the Terminator movies is explicit, especially to T-2, and developed with satire upon the themes of computer take-over, overdependence upon technology, The Descent of the Hero, and a killer-cyborg leaning compassion.  Cartman is absorbed by the cybernetic monster Trapper Keeper, and he/they/It head off toward Cheyenne Mountain to assimilate with the supercomputer there and "fuse into all [US?] defensive computers."  There are additional more or less witty allusions to the MCP control tower in Tron, Robocop, the Borg in Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Evil Dead (? take-over by trees), Judge Dredd comics and film (? Trapper Keeper coded to Cartman's DNA, like Lawgiver guns); the logic of Terminator 2 is corrected when the BSM-471 disappears when the Trapper Keeper is destroyed (no Trapper Keeper means no war between humans and machines, which means the BSM-471 isn't invented, which means—by the logic of Back to the Future, that BSM-471 doesn't exist; either that, or he's just called back when his mission is complete for our time-line).  The episode's subplot satirizes the recounts in the 2000 elections for US president.  Rosie O'Donnell holds together the two plots, and the engorged Trapper Keeper is weakened by ingesting her sufficiently so Kyle can do a Dave-Bowman number of the Cartman/Trapper Keeper Central Processing Unit. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/XII/00      South Park, 29 November 2000.  South Park's version of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.  **+Introduced and here and there narrated by Malcolm McDowell.  Relevant here for the South Parkian addition to "the thrilling conclusion of Great Expectations" (quoting MdDowell) of Miss Haversham's attempt to fuse herself with Estella by means of "the Genesis device," fuelled by the tears of suffering male lovers (cf. and contrast Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn); to ensure the completion of the operation, Miss Haversham sends against Joe et al. her robotic monkeys (cf. and contrast The Wizard of Oz). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/IV/02       South Park.  "The New Terrance and Phillip Movie Trailer."  Comedy Channel, 3 April 2002.  Season 6, #604.  Comedy Partners.  Trey Parker, dir., co-exec. prod. with Matt Stone (and Anne Garefino).  **+Attempting to see the new Terrance and Phillip movie trailer, the boys go to various houses, including that of Chef, who owns a new, high-tech television set.  Attempting to show the boys a special feature, Chef pushes a button on the remote control that turns the TV into a killer robot, specifically, the "ED 209 Enforcement 'Droid" from RoboCop (q.v. above, this section).  The TV/ED 209 goes on a small rampage through South Park, with Chef following it with the remote and a cell phone, trying to get Customer Service to tell him how to turn the killer robot back into a TV.  Sources for citation: <www.spepisodes.com/season6.shtml>, <www.southparkstudios.com/>.  For a picture of ED 209: <www.jeffbots.com/ed209.html>. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/II/02        South Park.  "Super Best Friends."  Comedy Channel, 4 July 2001.  End of Season 5, 504. Comedy Partners.  Trey Parker, dir., co-exec. prod. with Matt Stone (and Anne Garefino).  **+To help the boys resist an evil David Blaine cult, Jesus takes Stan to the high-tech HQ of The Super Best Friends (with allusions to Scientology, the comics and animation series Justice League, and various James Bondian headquarters).  The Super Best Friends initially introduced are Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Joseph Smith, and Sea Man; Moses appears later—as the Master Control Program from Tron (q.v. below, this section), i.e., the cyberspace manifestation of a giant AI program.  Source: <www.adequate.com/SouthPark/Guide/Season_5/>, <www.southparkstudios.com/>

 

 

SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 25/IX/95       Space: Above and Beyond.  Fox-TV.  Australia/USA: Hard Eight Pictures, Inc. / 20th-Century Fox Television.  Series Premiere 24 September 1995.  David Nutter, dir. premiere episode.  Michael Lake, prod.  Glen Morgan & James Wong, exec. prod. and premiere script.  Morgan Weisser, Kristen Cloke, Rodney Roland, Lanei Chapman, Joel De La Fuente, James Morrison, featured players.  **+The premiere episode is "recombinant," highly allusive (or larcenous) TV, putting together Çnear-inÈ, space-opera SF—set in 2063—and the US Marine Corps training film (complete with the actor who played Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket); advertised as by the producers of The X-Files and seems to share that series' ambivalence toward authority and other Establishment values.  Shows an interesting willingness to experiment with—very limited, very temporary—military democracy and show a grunt's-eye-view of military life (risks not taken in any of the Star Trek/Star Wars outings and their relatives).  Brief scenes of both wealthy and funky civilian Earth; brief references to "AI Wars," and "in vitros": people grown "in glass" and derogatorily called "tanks."  The premiere features VR simulators, body armor for Mars, and lots of military space craft.  Enemy aliens imaged on Mars enclosed in armor (they also have families and can either be killed with water or moved by human kindness to  commit suicide).  Cf. and contrast Battlestar Galactica, Aliens, and, pre-eminently, the Star Wars series; cf. and contrast also the sort of space-war stories typified by R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (q.v. under Drama and Fiction).  Opens with an unprovoked attack on Earth's Vesta Colony, Epsilon Eridani Star System, in what until then was thought to be a galaxy devoid of intelligent life outside of human; seems to assume a 21st c. dominated by US culture in its Anglo forms (within that culture, non-"tanks" seem to enjoy equality).  Briefly handled in Paula Vitaris, "Space: Above and Beyond," Cincefantastique 27.2 (Nov. 1995): 54-55. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/X/95        "The Dark Side of the Sun."  Space: Above and Beyond.  Fox-TV.  8 Oct. 1995.  Charles Martin Smith, dir.  Glen Morgan & James Wong, exec. prod. and script.  **+Our first detailed information about the "silicates" and the AI wars.  Featured villains are "silicates": humanoid AI robots, with strong intellects and only one ethical value—"Take a chance." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 19/XI/95       "Hostile Visit."  Space: Above and Beyond.  Fox-TV.  19 Nov.. 1995.  Thomas J. Wright, dir.  Peyton Webb, script.  2 Parts.  **+Features captured enemy spacecraft: strong hexagon imagery, plus biological implications; cf. Giger's biomechanoids.  "The machine and the operator become one being."  Possibility that alien ship is a cognizant being. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/IV/95       (Gerry Anderson's) SPACE PRECINCT (2040).  Gerry Anderson, series creator and Producer.  Ted Shackelford, Rob Youngblood, Simone Bendix, Nancy Paul, featured players.  Grove Television Enterprises.  Syndication, shown in Cincinnati area on NBC affiliate.  *¢+One of the operatives at the precinct is a cute robot.  {"Illegal" episode, repeated 23/IV/95: Marc Scott Zicree, script; John Glen, dir.: Irrelevant.}

 

 

SPACE RANGERS

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 14/I/93          SPACE RANGERS (or SPACE RANGERS: FORT HOPE) Episodes—CBS Television.  Created by Pen Densham.  From Ranger Productions, RHI Entertainment (Trilogy Entertainment Group).  Richard B. Lewis, John Watson, Scott Brazil, Pendensham, exec. prod.  Tim Harbert, line prod.  Jeff Kaake, Marjorie Monaghan,  Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Jack McGee, Clint Howard, Danny Quinn, Gottfried John, Linda Hunt, stars.  Premiered week of 6 Jan. 1993. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 14/I/93          "Planet Avalon."  Space Rangers.  David Burton Morris, dir.  Herbert J. Wright, script.  Aired 13 January 1993.  **¢+Second episode of series.  Note funky, arguably postmodern, mise en scne, with direct allusions—to put the matter politely—to Alien and Aliens (q.v. this section) with a premise and esthetic appeal closer to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (CBS 1950).  Note also the mobile cyrogenics device for quick freezing the alien "banshie," and the artificial ear, leg, and, most esp. hand, of "Doc" Krel, who has enough prosthetic devices to be nearly a cyborg.  There also seems to be a mannequin-like robot (or alien?)—and a lot of guns. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/IV/95, 12/V/99    Space Truckers (vt. Star Truckers).  Stuart Gordon, dir., co-story.  USA/Ireland: Pachyderm Production (prod. and dist.) et al., 1997.  Gordon, Ted Mann, (Peter Newman?), script.  HBO-TV, Jan. 1999.  Dennis Hopper, Stephen Dorff, Debi Mazar, Charles Dance, Goerge Wendt, Barbara Crampton, featured players.  **+Independent production (complexly financed) intended and formatted for theatrical release, finally appearing on HBO.  "Set in 2196, the film stars Dennis Hopper . . . as John Canyon, a blue-collar deep-space trucker who is coerced into making a covert run to Earth," according to Dennis Fischer in previews of the film, Cinefantastique 27.8 (April 1996): 6; also Cinefantastique 27.11-12 (July 1996): 16-17.  See Clockworks index for Terran trucks; cf. and contrast the space truck in ST with the Nostromo space tug in Alien (q.v. this section).  Note also Captain Macanudo's prosthetics.  Rev. by Frederick C. Szebin puts it that the secret shipment "turns out to be the bio-mechanical [H. R.] Geiger-inspired super killing machines created by scientist Macanudo (Dance)" whose own creation "turned against him" and who "rebuilt himself into a cyborg space pirate with a crew that does everything pirates do except say 'Arrg'!" (Cinefantastique 31.5 [June 1999]: 59).

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Gianluigi Ross 24/X/98         Soldier.  Paul Anderson, dir.  USA: Impact Productions, Morgan Creek (prod.) / Warner (dist.), 1998.  Kurt Russell, star.  David L. Snyder (art director for Blade Runner [q.v.]), prod. design.  **+The mise-en-scene for the Earth-bound opening of the film is the military reservation from hell, with eventually Panopticon, prison-like surveillance.  The mise-en-scene on the ironically named planet Arcadia, is a post-modern wasteland: a dump for a spectrum of technology, from parking meters to a carrier to (according to Entertainment Weekly) a spinner car used in Blade Runner.  Eventually dumped onto and into this trash heap is Russell's Sgt. Todd, a nearly-mute human Soldier produced only by training from birth on, without genetic manipulation.  It is bad that Todd is trapped in a metaphorical military machine, imaged by many literal machines; it is good that Todd accepts parts of his code as a Soldier.  Todd ends the film getting revenge for being dumped, and a son who will not be a Soldier—and getting humanized in terms of touch, not words. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/VI/98       Sphere.  Barry Levinson, dir.  USA: Warner, 1998.  Michael Crichton, original story (q.v. under Fiction), co-prod.  Stephen Hauser, Paul Attanasio, script.  Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote, Liev Schriber, featured players.  **+Note underwater habitat and the title sphere as parallels to, e.g., the Nostromo in Aliens as an isolated setting for a game of kill off the cast, here, a very impressive cast of human actors contained in mechanical, electronic, and "psi" environments that both protect and threaten. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/V/02, 05/V/02     Spider-Man (also Spiderman and Spider Man).  Sam Raimi, dir.  Steve Ditko, comic book, with Stan Lee, comic book and co-exec. prod.  David Koepp, script.  Tobey Maquire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco, featured players.  USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation, Marvel Entertainment, and Sony Pictures Entertainment (prod.) /  Columbia Pictures (US dist.), 2002.  {Source: IMDb}  **+The politics of this film in defining the real American Hero will be what should get academic articles churned out and debate going among the public, but relevant for Clockworks 2 for antitheses among possibilities for augmentation of the human: cybernetic exoskeleton vs. augmented human using high-tech weapons systems vs. more purely organic means.  The poor-schmuck military officer in the exoskeleton gets about one cinematic shot before being blown away by the Green Goblin (the Mr. Hyde part of Willem Dafoe's characters literally split personality).  The Green Goblin is produced technologically, with most of the tech electronic and an enclosing gas chamber (although biochemistry is involved).  Spiderman is produced by the bite of a mutant spider on an American nerd.  Goblin uses boy armor, military weapons, and a flying (polluting) skate/surfboard; Spiderman uses his merely-costumed body, including glands for secreting web.  Spiderman wins to go on to at least one sequel (Spider-Man 2 [2003]), but the battle was close and victory comes with high personal cost. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 02/VII/04      Spider-Man 2 (vt Amazing Spider-Man, The (2003, USA working title; Spiderman 2 [(alternative spelling]).  Sam Raimi, dir.  Stan Lee, comic book (and exec. prod.), Steve Ditko, comic book.  Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Michael Chabon, screen story; Alvin Sargent, script.  USA: Marvel Enterprises, Laura Ziskin Productions, Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures (prod).  / Columbia Pictures (US dist.).  See IMDb for complex international dist. and other filmographic details.  **+Because of an accident while trying to produce usable fusion power, Dr. Otto Octavius becomes "Doc Ock": a cyborgized man with four, very long prosthetic arms, each with a low-grade AI brain (4 cybernetic "arms" + 2 organic arms + 2 organic legs = 8 limbs).  Given their attachment to his spine, and the destruction through a power surge of the chip that protects Dr. Octavius's brain, the arms have some degree of control over Doc Ock.  Visually, the arms resemble snakes (ÇmouthsÈ shut), Martian machines from the film War of the worlds (with the "head" in three parts—and snake-like, even as the Martian flying machines in War of the Worlds look like cobras), and (ÇmouthsÈ open), various devouring entities, from "Bruce," the shark in Jaws, to the sandworms of Dune and their cinematic descendants.  Dan Prickett notes the parallel to the hydra image in George Pal's 1964 movie, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and Ray Harry Harryhausen's more famous Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).  Michael Conaway, Chad Dresbach, and Mark O'Hara found numerous possible visual parallels, but Conaway stresses the "single red viewing lens" in the center of the claw and its parallel to the electronic eyes of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Conaway also calls attention to an on-line MSNBC review: "John Hartle compares Otto's loss to the machine mind to the gradual loss to the instinct of the fly in both versions of The Fly [É]": <http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=162720>.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/V/01        Spy Kids.  Robert Rodriguez, dir., script, one of eight producers.  USA: Dimension Films, Troublemaker Studios (prod.) / Dimension Films, Miramax (US dist.), 2001.  Robert Patrick, Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Alan Cumming, Tony Shalhoub, Teri Hatcher, Cheech Marin, featured players.  **+As indicated by the title, an action-adventure super-spy movie, featuring and directed at kids.  Interesting generally for being ethnized Latino rather than James-Bondian WASP and of interest here for its handling of technology, esp. robots.  Programmed for evil, the robots do evil, with android children looking and somewhat acting like the alien children from Village of the Damned (1960, 1995).  Programmed for good, robots will do good.  See also for po-mo mixture of elements Modern and postmodern. 

 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/03     Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over.  Robert Rodriguez, dir., script, co-prod., editor, visual effects supervisor, music, production design, co-cinematographer.  USA: Dimension Films, Los Hooligans Productions, Troublemaker Studios (prod.) / Dimension Films (USA dist.), 2003.  **+Children's film, 3rd in series (see above, Spy Kids—and below, the Caution).  The villainous Toymaker schemes to control the future by controlling kids through a VR video game.  The setting of SK3-D is partly at the top-secret HQ of the OSS but mostly inside the video game.  The interior of the very conspicuous OSS has an equally conspicuous hexagon motif: possibly a visual joke on this common shape in SF film (e.g., 2001, A New Hope).  The VR game features a vehicular race out of Tron and robot fights out of Tron and Robot Jox.  As in the classic Star Trek episode "The Menagerie," illusion can allow a cripple a life of free movement and power: in the VR game world in SK3-D, Grandfather is either a really big macho guy, or a cyborg.  There are also mildly threatening giant robots—that look very much like the robot in The Iron Giant—that escape into the real world.  (All films mentioned listed in this section.)  CAUTION: Unlike the original film, this one shouldn't be seen by adults unaccompanied by a child—and a child too young to have seen 3-D or the films mentioned. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/II/97, 16/VI/98     Star Kid (vt The Warrior of waverly street [working title]).  Manny Coto, dir., script.  USA: Trimark / Manny Coto Productions (prod.), 1997.**+SF family adventure (IMDb).  A boy named Spencer finds an alien "cybersuit."  Designers of suit wished to avoid RoboCop look for something "more humanistic, biomechanical," something "Spencer, as well as the audience could relate to.  Spencer has a running conversation with this suit he is driving{,} and they learn something from each other."  We quote James Van Hise, "Warrior of Waverly Street: A kid in a Cybersuit defends the planet from aliens," Cinefantastique 28.9 (March 1997): 11, our source for this citation (along with IMDb).  Rev. Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique 29.10 (Feb. 1998): 53. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VI/01       Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (vt Star Trek II: The Vengeance of Khan [listed by IMDb as US working title]).  Nicholas Meyer, dir., some work on script (uncredited [IMDb]).  Harve Bennet, Jack B. Sowards, story and script.  USA: Paramount, 1982.  **+See for Genesis Project and Genesis Device: a god-like machine that can bring lush new life to a lifeless planet—and destroy in the process all the current life on a living planet. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VI/01       Star Trek III: The Search for Spock .  Leonard Nimoy, dir., some work on script (uncredited [IMDb]).  Harve Bennet, story and script, one of three producers.  USA: Cinema Group Ventures and Paramount (prod.) / Paramount (dist.), 1984.  **+Sequel to and continuation of Star Trek II, showing the "amazing grace" possible with the capital "G" "God-like" Genesis Device/Machine: the resurrection of Spock. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VI/96       "Star Trek Episode Guide, Classic."  See under Reference, S. Uram. 

 

 

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 6/I/93           STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE Episodes—Television syndication by Paramount (Fox).  Rick Berman and Michael Piller, creators and exec. prod.  Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Colm Meaney, stars; Rene Auberjonois, Terry Farrell, Armin Shimerman, Terry Farrell, Cirroc Lofton, Siddig El Fadil, regular cast.  Premiered week of 4 Jan. 1993.   

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/XII/95      "Civil Defense."  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  28 Jan. 1995.  Reza Badiyi, dir.  Mike Krohn, script.  **¢+"While searching through a remote ore processing station on DS9, Sisko, Jake[,] and O'Brien accidentally trigger an automated Cardassian security program.  Dax and Kira work to shut off the computer program, but only succeed in triggering more automated security measures."  Listed in "3rd Season Guide: DS9," 95, 98, our source for this entry and which we quote.  Cf. and contrast F. Saberhagen's beserker story "Sign of the Wolf" and motif in near-future thrillers of protagonists' being trapped inside security systems (e.g., X-Files "Ghost in the Machine" episode).

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/98      "Dr. Bashir, I Presume?"  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  22 Feb. 1997 (prod. # 514).  David Livingston, dir.  Peter Ronald D. Moore, script.  Jimmy Diggs, story.  Robert Picardo, guest star.  **¢+Features the Emergency Medical Hologram from Star Trek: Voyager.  Picardo is seen as the "EMH" and Dr. Zimmerman, inventor of the emergency holographic doctor.  Alexander Siddig plays both Dr. Julian Bashir, his usual role, and the "LMH," which we assume is "Long-term Medical Hologram."  From Anna Kaplan, "Deep Space Nine Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 29.6/7 (Nov. 1997):48.

 

 

5.  DRM, 6/I/93 "Emissary."  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  (c) 1992.  Aired week of 4 Jan. 1993.  David Livingston, supervising prod.  Michael Piller script, from a story by Rick Berman and Michael Piller.  David Carson, dir.  2 hours, air time.  **¢+The premiere episode of the series, establishing the premise, characters, worm hole—and Deep Space Nine, the space station that is the center of the series.  Contrast modernistic Enterprise and general look of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation with more postmodern, funky look of Deep Space Nine and Deep Space Nine. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/98      "For the Uniform."  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  1 Feb. 1997 (prod. # 511, "Stardate 50485.2").  Victor Lobel, dir.  Peter Alan Fields, script.  **¢+Premise involves a "cascade virus" in the computer of the Defiant, causing "a complete shipwide systems failure."  Capt. Sisko takes the Defiant out anyway, and "The running of the Defiant [sic: no italics] without its communications system made it sound like a submarine."  From Anna Kaplan, "Deep Space Nine Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 29.6/7 (Nov. 1997): 45, our source here, and whom we quote.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 22/VII/95      "Life Support."  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  28 Jan. 1995.  **¢+Includes question of whether or not to transplant whole brain of a dying humanoid: Would the humanoid lose all humanity with a fully aritificial (positronic) brain?  Short answer program gives: no, let him die.  Cited, annotated, and evaluated "3rd Season Guide: DS9," 106. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 24/XI/96       Star Trek: First Contact.  Jonathan Frakes, dir.  USA: Paramount, Nov. 1996.  Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore, story and script.  Rick Berman et al., prod.  Next Generation cast, cameo by Robert Picardo of ST: Voyager as "The Doctor."  Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), SpFx.  **+Enterprise crew go back in time to the 21st c. to fight a Borg attempt to conquer Earth and assimilate her people by preventing First Contact between Terrans and (peaceful, generous, Vulcan) aliens.  See for (cy)borgization of a number of the Enterprise crew, including attempted borgization of Mr. Data, which involves having him pinned down (with an electronic-halo effect around his head), invoking his emotion chip, grafting organic skin onto him, and some sex for the first time since early STNG.  Significant portions of the Enterprise itself are turned into a Borg hive, taking the style from Modern clean-cut to postmodern funky, and we get to see the Borg Queen at some length: a very independent, intelligent, and sexual female cyborg, who attempts to seduce Data by appealing to his desire to become more flesh and blood (Mr. Data thinks himself more humanized after this sexual encounter).  We also see the first Terran warp-speed ship, a converted Titan ICBM, and the craft that carries the Vulcans who make first contact with Terrans.  Cf. and contrast the Alien hive and Alien Queen in Aliens; for the battle for the hearts and minds of the movie-going public, note the summer 1996 film Independence Day (q.v.).  For production and other background on STFC, including the reality of the Titan missile and missile silo, see cover-story coverage in Cinefantastique 28.6 (Dec. 1996): 16-31

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/XI/94        Star Trek: Generations.  David Carson, dir.  Rick Berman, prod., co-author (with script writers) of story.  Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, script.  USA: Paramount, 1994.  Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Levar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis (from Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Malcolm McDowell (villain)—featured cast; with James Doohan and Walter Koenig (of original Star Trek) in small roles, and William Shatner as James T. Kirk.  **¢+Captain Kirk killed twice, and the latest Enterprise destroyed, but not by McDowell in any way to allude to his most famous role, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange (which could have made for a major Battle of the Icons).  Of interest here: Mr. Data completes the Pinochio motif when he keeps in his emotion chip in dangerous circumstances and it gets fused into his circuitry.  Data has to learn to live with his emotions, which he does and is happy to be a real man.  From a multicultural point of view, or the point of view of any robot rights group, Mr. Data proves himself "Spam": metal on the outside (so to speak) but meat within, a yearner after assimilation with the human folk—which says much both positive and negative about the (liberal) politics of the Treker Philosophy. 

 

 

STAR TREK: NEXT GENERATION

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 26/IX/93        STAR TREK: NEXT GEN.; ADD TO "I, BORG": See about under STNG, "Descent" episodes. 

 

 

5.  DRM, 25/II/92          "Birthright."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Part I, Week of 22 Feb. 1993.  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, dir.  XXXXXXXXXXXXx, script.  **¢+The mainplot is Worf's search for his father.  In the parallel secondary plot, Mr. Data has something like a machine-caused near-death experience that activates circuits that make even even more human: capable of dreams, visions, and "inspired" art.  See below, "Phantasms" episode. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/IX/97       ADD TO 5.271, "Contagion," episode {37} of STNG**+Features a starship-destroying computer virus[.], that also infects Mr. Data.  Data cures himself by shutting down and rebooting on alternate pathways (our formulation), for a death, purification, and resurrection motif, in—depending on how one sees Data—a robot/cyborg/android mode.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 26/VI/93        "Descent I" and "Descent II.  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Part I, week of 21 June 1993.  Part II, week of 20 Sept. 1993.  Alexander Singer, dir.  Ronald D. Moore, script.  Jeri Taylor, story.  Part II, week of 20 Sept. 1993.  Alexander Singer, dir. RenŽ Echevarria, script.  Jonathan Del Arco, Alex Datcher, James Horan, Brian Cousins, guest stars.  **¢+End of Part I reveals that Mr. Data's evil twin, Lore, has used the promise of emotion (and humanity?) to tempt Data to join him and the Borg in a campaign against the Federation.  Part II shows "Descent" to be a continuation of "I, Borg" (q.v.).  See for a serious dramatic use of android robots and cyborgs for a thought experiment on individualism, cooperation, and leadership; dissent, emotion, ends and means, and ethics generally; friendship, family, humanity, freedom—and murder: the fratricide when Data kills Lore (and damages Lore's emotion-chip, which Jordi saves from destruction by Data).  Cited, summarized, and commented upon in Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 47. 

 

 

5.  DRM, 19/V/93, 9/VIII/05      "Frame of Mind."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Week of 2 May 1993.  James L. Conway, dir.  Brannon Braga, script.  **¢+Jonathan Frakes's Commander Riker is placed into a virtual reality (VR) device by nefarious sorts trying to get information from him by convincing him he's crazy.  Before going on the mission on which he's captured, Riker injures himself in a manner not absolutely necessary for the plot, which may be a kind of "footnote" to the script's source in 36 Hours (1965), where World War II Germans try to get information on the invasion of Hitler's Europe by convincing an allied intelligence officer--US-Army Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner)--he's had mental problems and it's long past the invasion.  "Frame of Mind" is relevant for Riker in a VR, in an episode that came out in the same week as a VR schtick in Doonesbury (see G. Trudeau under Graphics).  Note image of shattering in movements from one VR to another; cf. and contrast SpFx in Lawnmower Man, q.v. this section.  (With thanks to Lokke Heiss for the 36 Hours reference, and <http://www.moviemaster.de/index.htm?archiv/film/film.php?nr=1955> and <http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=113359> 9 August 2005). 

 

 

5.  DRM, 11/III/93         "A Fistful of Datas."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Week of XXXXXXXXxxxxxxxxxxx.  Patrick Stewart, dir.  Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Brannon Braga, script, from a story by Robert Hewitt Wolfe.  Brent Spiner and Michael Dorn featured.  **¢+Mr. Data is interfaced with the Enterprise's computer, and, during a power surge, parts of the computer's memory of the "ancient West" (the US West in the late 19th c.) is put into Mr. Data's memory banks, and some of his personality goes into the computer—making very dangerous a Wild West Holodeck scenario entertaining Worf and his son.  Note Spiner's Data as both Western characters and a Mr. Data with a Western accent. 

 

 

5.  DRM, RDE, 26/XI/93           "Inheritance."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Week of 21 Nov. 1993.  Robert Scheerer, dir.  Dan Koeppel and RenŽ Echevarria, script, from a story by Koeppel.  **¢+Mr. Data meets his "mother," who turns out to be an android copy of the wife of Dr. Soong, a woman who was as much Data's mother as Dr. Soong was his father.  The plot centers on Data's inference that his self-claimed mother is an andoid robot (of a more advanced design than he) and Data's having to decide whether or not to withhold the truth from her that she is an artificial person and not human.  He withholds the truth from her, so cf. and definitely contrast "The Lie" in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902).  See "Inheritance" for background on Data's "childhood" and for some important themes: the value of biological humans vs. the aritificial, human intelligence and AI, reason and emotions, and, most importantly, the theme of male procreation, including a revision of the tale of Data's birth as the sole work of Dr. Soong, a man creating artificial life and personality without the help of a woman.  Cited, summarized, and commented upon in Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 60. 

 

 

5.  DRM, RDE, 02/XII/93          "The Mind's Eye."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  27 May 1991.  David Livingston, dir.  Rene Echevarria, script.  **¢+Retelling of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), significant here for scenes in which Geordi La Forge is programmed as an assassin by the Romulans: he is held within a mechanism and made to see

visions, much in the manner of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (q.v. this section).  See for the superimposition of the mechanical upon Giordi's mind. 

 

 

5.  DRM, RDE, 01/XI/94           "Phantasms."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Week of 25 October 1993.  Patrick Stewart, dir.  **¢+Follow-up to "Birthright," q.v. above, in which Data dreams some surreal nightmares.  Has memorable scenes of Data undergoing psychological counselling, including a holodeck sequence with a computer-generated Sigmund Freud and a holodeck sequence where others can experience Data's dreams.  Data's dreams give him the information to eliminate parasitic creatures that threaten The Enterprise.  Cited, summarized, and commented upon in Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 50, 54.   

 

 

5.  DRM, 23/XI/92        "The Quality of Life."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Week of 13 Dec. 1992.  Jonathan Frakes, dir.  Naren Shankar, script.  **¢+Mr. Data concludes that a highly-developed electronic tool is both an AI and a living being, and risks the lives of his commanding officer and best friend rather than treat such beings as things. 

 

 

5.  Drama; RDE, 12/VI/94         "Redemption II."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  DATE.  David Carson, dir.  Ronald D. Moore, script.  **+Mr. Data as a ship's commander encounters and deals with anti-android bigotry—and the ethical questions of unquestioning obedience, ends, and means.. 

 

 

5.  DRM, 29/I/93                       "Ship In [sic: capital "I"] a Bottle."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  (c) 1992.  First shown or repeated week of 25 Jan. 1993.  Alexander Singer, dir.  RenŽ Echevarria, script.  Michael Piller, exec. prod.  **¢+Mr. Data's construct of Professor Moriarty [i.e. Dr. Moriarity] regains (self)consciousness and engineers the recreation of the Enterprise on the holodeck: the cybernetic "bottle" containing the starship.  Moriarty seeks the recreation in real space-time of himself and his beloved (cf. and contrast the desire for a mate of the Creature created by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [1818/1831]).  The conclusion of the plot has Moriarty and his beloved contained—arguably trapped—within a small cybernetic device in the manner of Count Zero and his beloved in W. Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive (q.v.); the episode ends with Picard recapitulating the thought of Chuang Tzu when he woke up from a dream of being a butterfly and considered the possibility that he might be a butterfly dreaming itself Chuang Tzu. 

 

 

5.  DRM, RDE, 01/XI/94           "Thine Own Self."  Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Week of 14 Feb. 1994.  Winrich Kolbe, dir.  **¢+Data gets amnesia, and ends up playing either Frankenstein or Frankenstein's monster.  Cited, summarized, and commented upon in Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 79, our source for this entry.  (The picture of Data looks more like Frankenstein's monster than Frankenstein.) 

 

 

STAR TREK: VOYAGER¨

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 18/I/95          STAR TREK: VOYAGER¨ Episodes—Television syndication by Paramount on United Paramount Network (UPN), 16 Jan. 1995-    .  Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor, creators and exec. prod.  Cast: Capt. Kathryn Janeway: Kate Mulgrew, First Officer Chakotay: Robert Beltran, Tactical/Security Officer Tuvok: Tim Russ, Lt. Tom Paris: Robert Duncan McNeill, Ops/Communication Officer Harry Kim: Garrett Wang, Chief Engineer B'Elanna Torres: Roxann Biggs-Dawson, The Doctor ("Doc Zimmerman" [TV Guide for 14-20 Jan.: 22]: Robert Picardo, Neelix: Ethan Phillips, Kes: Jennifer Lien. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 18/I/95          "Caretaker."  Star Trek: Voyager¨, 16 and 17 Jan. 1995.  Winrich Kolbe, dir.  R. Berman, M. Piller, J. Taylor, story; Piller and Taylor, script.  Premiere episode.  2 hour time-slot.  **¢+The Intrepid, we learn early in the episode, comes equipped in some of its systems with "bio-neural circuitry," and The Doctor for most of the episode is computer-generated (a hologram that can act in the world).   Otherwise, very little of interest for users of the list in this episode itself.  The Caretaker figure, however, is similar in function to Vaal in the 1967 Star Trek episode "The Apple" and fairly close to the space-based "god" in the 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Justice" (both listed in this section).  The pattern is significant for Trekkian theology and politics: on a first reading, the doctrine of Self-Reliance for humanoid species as opposed to depending on a mysterious "Caretaker," who may stand for God or the U.S. Federal Government.  Summarized in "Voyager Guide" 1995: 34. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/98      "The Chute."  Star Trek: Voyager.  18 Sept. 1996 (prod. # 147, "Stardate 50156.2").  Les Landau, dir.  Kenneth Biller, script.  Clayvon Harris, story.  **¢+Harry Kim and Tom Paris, imprisoned, where "All the inmates have been fitted with a clamp, a device inserte4d into the top of the head, which somehow stimulates neural activity to make the already starving, brutal, and disoriented men even more violent."  Kim finally makes it up "the chute," he discovers the prison is a space station.  From Anna Kaplan, "Voyager Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 29.6/7 (Nov. 1997): 88-89, our source here, and whom we quote.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/XII/96      "Dreadnought."  Star Trek: Voyager.  12 Feb. 1996.  **+Features a dangerous Cardassian missile redesigned by Chief Engineer B'Elanna Torres during her time with the Maquis into an even more unstoppable super weapon.  See for question of technologist's responsibility for weapons work.  Summarized Cinefantastique 28.4/5 (Nov. 1996): 97-98.  Cf. "The Doomsday Machine" on the original Star Trek. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 26/II/96        "Lifesigns."  Star Trek: Voyager¨, 26 Feb. 1996.  Cliff Bole, dir.  Kenneth Biller, script. ***+To save her life, the Voyager's holographic doctor "used the undamaged chromosomes in . . . [a humanoid woman's] cerebellum to recreate . . . [her] original DNA code, and then programmed the computer to project a holographic template based on that genome"—i.e., he takes the sick and dying humanoid woman and gives her (for a while) an excellent, healthy body.  They fall in love, the doctor's programming heuristically working its way toward romance.  Features a scene "in which Doc and the holographic Danara are parked in a vintage '50s automobile overlooking a Martian colony . . . .  The juxtaposition of two holographic beings experienceing such a quintesssential human moment, in an alien (and equally holographic) environment is worthy of Philip K. Dick."  Summarized Cinefantastique 28.4/5 (Nov. 1996): 100-01, which we quote.  See for the possibility of love in cybernetic and VR beings, at least in a VR environment. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18/XII/96      "Prototype."  Star Trek Voyager.  15 Jan. 1996.  **+Two robot societies have survived their warring, organic creators (cf. P. K. Dick's "Autofac"; cf. and contrast Dick's "Defenders" [q.v. under fiction]).  A deactivated humanoid robot from one society is found floating in space by Voyager.  Chief Engineer B'Elanna Torres repairs "him"—and he kidnaps her and threatens to destroy the Voyager unless Torres builds a prototype to allow the making of more units (for a [Bride of] Frankenstein motif).  Summarized Cinefantastique 28.4/5 (Nov. 1996): 92-93, which says that the episode "fails to exploit" the premise of "a society in which the weapons have killed their creators in order to carry on the war" in favor of "the personal impact the creation and destruction of the prototype has on Torres"—given the clear implications that destroying the prototype is for her a kind of infanticide.  The robots have no facial expressions but excellent manners. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/98      "Scorpion, Part I."  Star Trek: Voyager.  21 May 1997 (prod. # 168, "Stardate 50984.3").  David Livingston, dir.  Joe Menosky and Brannon Braga, script.  **¢+Voyager threatened by Borg.  On the basis of his study of the Borg corpse in "Unity" episode (q.v., below), The Doctor discovers that Borg assimilation is effected by the injection of "nanoprobes," which the Doctor believes can be slowed down through an enhanced immune response.  Voyager discovers badly damaged Borg cubes, and an away-team "find dead and dying Borg" on one, "as well as an opening into an organic vessel . . . that had destroyed the Borg.  The Borg database shows that the Borg have been hunted by species 8472, which they are unable to assimilate. . . .  The Doctor figures [out] a way to reconfigure Borg nanoprobes so that they can assimilate 8472."  Capt. Janeway resolves to trade this knowledge to the Borg in exchange for safe passage.  Episode ends with Janeway "inside a Borg cube, which is racing away from species 8472 with Voyager in tow."  Also features scenes of Janeway on the holodeck with Leonardo da Vinci (played by John Rhys-Davies).  From Anna Kaplan, "Voyager Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 29.6/7 (Nov. 1997): 113, our source here, and whom we quote.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 12/XII/95       "Twisted."  Star Trek: Voyager¨, 2 Oct. 1995.  Kim Friedman, dir.  Arnold Rudnik and Rick Hosek, story; Kenneth Biller, script.  **+Described in "Voyager Guide" 1995 as a not-very-good episode in which "A spatial distortion causes a system malfunction and changes the ship's structural layout, trapping the crew in an ever-changing maze of corridors" (79).  This gives human beings trapped inside a complex mechanism that is also a maze; see R. D. Erlich, "Trapped in the Bureaucratic Pinball Machine," under Literary Criticism.   

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/98      "Unity."  Star Trek: Voyager.  12 Feb. 1997 (prod. # 159, "Stardate 50614.2").  Robert Duncan McNeil, dir.  Kenneth Biller, script.  **¢+Two crew members away from Voyager "find a planet of Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, and other humanoids once assimilated by the Borg but not free of the collective and warring amongst themselves."  Teleplay author Biller "saw a parallel with the break-up of the Soviet bloc, and the renewed nostalgia for communism, as soon through" the "minds" (sic) of "Riley, a former Borg."  Biller asks, "Why should we assume that people would think that being a Borg was a horrible experience?" and has Riley remember it as "extraordinary": an "incredible feeling of belonging and unity and togetherness" (Anna L. Kaplan, "Delta Quadrant Borg" and Anna Kaplan, "Voyager Episode Guide," Cinefantastique 29.6/7 [Nov. 1997]: 102, 105-06). 

 

 

STAR WARS

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 26/V/99        Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace.  George Lucas, dir., script (auteur).  USA: Lucasfilm (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (dist.), 1999.  Industrial Light and Magic, SpFx.  131 min.  Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Pernilla August, Ahmed Best (voice), featured players.  **+Significant here for introducing the "'droids" C3P0 (with "his" wires exposed) and R2D2 and for the large numbers of CGI robots replacing the Imperial Storm Troopers of the initial trilogy (q.v.); apparently, Imperial technology over fictive time moves away from literal robot warriors and toward roboticized men.  In Return of the Jedi, the Imperial Storm Troopers are opposed by the central human heroes and the fuzzy, teddy-bearish Ewoks; in TPM, the corresponding opposition allies against the robots the primate heroes and humanoids of amphibian evolution: fuzzy vs. plastic has given way to CGI frog skin vs. metal, but the point seems the same, and important enough—in terms of some value system—for Lucas to repeat.  Note also the capital world of the Republic: like I. Asimov's Trantor in the Foundation series, it is a city-planet, totally urbanized (see Prelude to Foundation, cited under Fiction). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Spence, 21,22/V/02, 26/V/05          Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones.  George Lucas, dir., exec. prod., story, and screenplay—with Jonathan Hales.  USA: JAK Productions, LucasFilm Ltd. (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (main dist.), 2002.  Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Pernilla August, Jack Thompson, Christopher Lee, Anthony Daniels, featured players.  Industrial Light & Magic, SpFx.  {Source: IMDb}  **+This second film of Lucas's Second Trilogy continues oppositions of the organic with the mechanical and technological, and combinations.  Note Obi-Wan Kenobi in Jedi garb battling armored Jango Fett (bounty hunter), the clone army of armored humans vs. the 'droid army of robots, and, most importantly, the sequence where we see clone fetuses as humans within bottles within a large machine within the huge machine of a Modernist metal habitat upon stormy seas (cf. Brave New World, listed under fiction).  We get to see more of the world-city introduced in Episode I (q.v. above), including some down-scale, somewhat po-mo, Blade Runnerish, industrial sections; the city is in visual dialog, so to speak, with more natural worlds of water, sand, clouds—and with space.  The spherical spaceships of the Trade Federation can be usefully compared and contrasted with the spherical shuttle from the space station to the Moon in S. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (q.v. above; see also there, Blade Runner).  The clones of the "Grand Army of The Republic" will become the Imperial Storm Troopers in later films in the saga but are here ambiguous: note clone troops in the Jedi vs. 'droid battle as US Marines to the rescue (in flying machines like Vietnam-era "Hueys" + Cobra-like helicopter gun-ships) and near the very end of the film marching in Wehrmacht-like/robot-like masses into Imperial-size space craft.  Anakin Skywalker's severed arm is replaced by a prosthesis, in the first step toward his becoming more machine than man.  The serio-comic scene of PadmŽ Amidala, Anakin Skywalker, C3PO, and R3D2 in an industrial zone shows a very po-mo images of machines making machines, plus insectoid droids and a very direct allusion to Jacob Epstein's sculpture Rock Drill (see frontispiece to CG).  s

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/XI/97       Starship Troopers.  Paul Verhoeven, dir.  Jon Davison and Alan Marshall, prod.  ("A Jon Davison Production"), 1997.  Ed Neumeier, script, "Based on the book by Robert A. Heinlein."  Casper Van Dien (playing Johnny Rico), Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Seth Gilliam, Patrick Muldoon, Michael Ironside, featured players.  **+Does not use the fighting suits of the novel; the Mobile Infantry wear helmets that show only their faces, plus body armor in the Vietnam or SWAT-team sense, covering only the torso (allowing the Bugs to pierce and otherwise destroy arms and legs).  The film is significant here for the mise-en-scne, with its allusions to World War II images generally, and what we might call Nazi-Modern in particular.  "As STAR WARS used WW-II movie dog fights for inspiration, STARSHIP TROOPERS consciously evokes the look of a slow-moving naval armada" (25), with a flotilla of rather po-mo giant spacecraft indeed looking like a WWII convoy.  While the Bugs are entirely biological, with no technology we see, human-built machines and mechanized environments range from high modern (e.g., desert outpost) to po-mo (e.g., desert outpost after Bugs have trashed it, troopers after Bugs have trashed them).  Note also possibility of mechanization of humans to fit the figurative mechanism of a fascistic human future—but without racism or sexism—set against the biology ("Nature") of the Bugs.  In this case, it makes sense to show some sort of high-modern death chair for civilian (?) executions when we're told late in the film that the military still hangs; and the high-tech. whipping post remains ludicrous in terms of the narrative but highly suggestive symbolism: yet another instance of the literal superimposition of the mechanical upon the human.  Cover story by Dan Persons in Cinefantastique 29.8 (Dec. 1997), which we quote above. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/X/95        Star Wars: Children of the Jedi.  Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Production, 1995.  ISBN 0-553-47195-3.  BDDAP 521A and 521B.  Anthony Heald, reader.  Licensed by Lusasfilm, Ltd., holder of copyright.  2 cassetes, 180 min.  **+Abridged audio version of the novel by B. Hambly, q.v. under Fiction. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 30/XII/94       Steps in the Streets.  Dance, originally choreographed 1936.  Revived at the New York Segment of the Martha Graham Centennial Celebration, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1994.  **¢+From Lynn Garafola rev., "Martha Graham Centennial Celebration" in Dance section of The Nation 259.20 (12 Dec. 1994): 736-38.  ". . . Graham's company . . . consisted entirely of women.  Their bodies were big and immensely strong, with powerful thighs and hips that jutted through the long jersey dresses with the purposeful motion of a machine," appearing physically much like "the workers in murals of the period."  SitS "is haunted by the specter of fear, by a menace that makes automatons of the social polity; strange, misshapen creatures scramble across the stage in legions at once terrifying and poignant.  Steps was choreographed in 1936, and it is not hard to see in its vision of mechanized humanity a critique of fascism" (737). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 30/X/94         Stargate.  Roland Emmerich, dir. and co-author, with Dean Devlin, of script.  USA: MGM/UA (dist.), 1994.  Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson (as Ra), featured players.  "Mario Kassar presents a Le Studio Canal + / Centropolis Film production in association with Carolco Pictures Inc."  **¢+Minor film esthetically, important here for a fairly literal mechanical god—a high-tech Ra—and a portal to another world that is imagined as high-tech Egyptian mystical.  Combines Erich Von Daniken (sp from Amazon.com) with (A. C.) Clarke's Third Law: the technology of a dying alien is sufficiently advanced to make him a god to ancient Terrans, one or more of whom he possesses and a larger group he enslaves.  The incredibly overengineered technology of the aliens/Egyptians is visually Neat! but narratively threatening; the final rebellion against such high-tech is emphatically "contained" within respect for late 20th-c. military forms.  Pre-final cut preview by Tim Prokop, Cinefantastique 25.5 (Nov. 1994): 46-47; CAUTION: the film TP describes is not exactly the release version in Nov. 1994. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 23/VI/04       Stepford Wives, The (2004 [sic: retain date]).  Frank Oz, dir.  Ira Levin (novel), Paul Rudnick (script).  USA: Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, De Line Pictures, DreamWorks SKG (prod.) / Paramount Pictures (USA dist.), DreamWorks Distribution (worldwide)—see IMDb for complex distribution arrangements—2004.  Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken, Roger Bart, featured players.  **+Re-make of the 1975 movie, dir. Bryan Forbes, with script by William Goldman.  The 2004 remake uses the imposition of the nanotechnological upon the human brain (female, one gay male) for an implant/take-over motif, with an actual robot only at film's climax and (spoiler here) gendered male heterosexual.  For gender issues, cf. and contrast Terminator: even as the super-macho male turns out to be a killer robot in Terminator, the perfectly feminine woman, or tough Republican gay, turns out to be roboticized in Stepford 2004.  Also, possibly of interest as a variation on what has been called in utopian studies a "critical utopia" (see Introduction to Dark Horizons, cited under Literary Criticism), or what we might call "a dystopia with a happy ending."  Probably better considered as a cop-out dystopia in the manner of the "Love Conquers All" version of Brazil or, much less reprehensibly, the ending of the original theatrical release of Blade Runner (both listed under Drama).  Alternatively, of interest (but not here) for students of the movement away from satire toward comedy—or the Disneyfication, nice-ification, or neutering—of US satire, as seen in the differences between the remake of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World (1963) as the kinder, gentler Rat Race (2001), or National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002) as a grosser but gentler sequel to National Lampoon's Animal House (1978).  Political implications discussed by Katha Pollitt, "Sex and the Stepford Wife," The Nation 279.1 (5 July 2004): 13. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 02/III/96       Strange Brew.  Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, dir., scripts, stars.  Canada: MGM/UA, 1983.  **+Mundane satire with some fantasy and SF motifs, featuring The McKenzie Brothers, Doug and Bob, of The Great White North, with a premise from the Hamlet story (most famously rendered by William Shakespeare, ca. 1600).  Relevant here for the visual pun of the ghost of the Hamlet-figure's father turning up as the Ghost in the Machine, where a featured machine is an electronic game and other machines include computers and computerized surveillance systems.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/X/95        Strange Days.  Kathryn Bigelow, dir.  James Cameron, story, co-script, co-prod.  Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, stars.  USA: Lightstorm Entertainment (prod.) / Twentieth Century Fox, (dist), 1995.  **+Very stylish cyberpunk film noir, set in a Los Angeles moving into the 21st c.—the action is on 30 Dec. 1999 into the opening moments of 1 Jan. 2000—and toward the postmodern mise en scne of Bladerunner (q.v. above, this section).  Significant here for the centrality of "clips" of people's lives captured for replay on "the wire": what W. Gibson calls "simstim," only recorded on CD-ROM.  Cf. D. G. Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (citied under Friction), and the films Deathwatch and Brainstorm.  The "trodes" worn to experience the clips resemble the face-hugger form of H. R. Giger's Alien, "grasping" the scalp: an image of the superimposition of the electronic upon a human head.  (NOTE: SD is a very important film for students of what we'll call the problematics of the politics of cyberpunk.  The film is politically serious but still has a mostly "Hollywood" ending, making the entire project very problematic on drug use and the politics of high-tech, the Gibsonian "dance of biz," racial relations, gender politics, police brutality, and the possibility and desirablility of revolution.) 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/VIII/96     Subliminal Seduction.  Andrew Stevens, dir., prod., and a featured player  Roger Corman, exec. prod.  USA: Royal Oaks Entertainment / Concorde-New Horizons (copyright holder), 1995.  Made for TV: Showtime, Roger Corman Presents, August 1995.  Ian Ziering, Katherine Kelly Lang, Dee Wallace Stone, featured.  **+Present-day Las Vegas setting for a corrupt company trying to control the computer software market with game programs (with names like "Mouse Maze," "Radical Rat," and "Rat Trap") that subliminally seduce the computer user into doing what the firm wants.  Significant for a schlock TV film by the highly sophisticated Roger Corman featuring a low-key, relatively low-tech imaging of takeover of people's minds by their user-friendly personal computers.  CAUTION: Some sex and sexism. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, SpenceC, SumukhT, JeffV: 07/IV/04, 08/IV/04     Super Ducktales.  Carl Banks, creator.  Ken Koonce, Jymn Magon, David Wiemers, script.  Walt Disney Television.  Released 26 March 1989.  120 min.  Cut into five episodes and shown in syndication on TV.  Sources: IMDb and <http://www.movietome.com/movietome/servlet/MovieMain/movieid-68027/>.  Hamilton Camp, voice of Gizmo-Duck (sic)/Fenton Crackshell.  **+For another brief synopsis, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmo_Duck>.  A Disney product, relevant here for Gizmo Duck, which see under Graphics.  See above, Darkwing Duck. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 06/III/00       Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.  Sidney J. Jurie, dir.  USA: Warner, 1987.  **+Lex Luthor creates "a solar-powered death droid," that is finally melted down "in the reactor of a nuclear power plant."  Cited by Keith Meatto, whom we quote, as one of "The Top Five" works "from the worlds of film and music" that "suggest that interest in this once-electrifying topic"—solar energy—"could easily be resparked" (Mother Jones, March/April 2000: 81). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 02/VI/01       Supernova.  Thomas Lee, dir.  David Campbell Wilson, script.  William Malone and Daniel Chuba, story (with Chuba one of three credited producers).  USA and (according to IMDb) Switzerland: Screenland Pictures/Hammerhead (prod.) / MGM (dist., copyright holder), 1999 (copyright), 2000 (release, according to IMDb).  90 min.; 91 min. for the "Never-Before-Seen R-Rated Version" on VHS tape from MGM Home Entertainment.  James Spader, Angela Bassett, stars.  **+"Recombinant cinema," recycling the "Ten Little Indians" motifs from alien et al., a kind of "Genesis Machine" of destruction/creation from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (continued in Star Trek III), and the mutated superman.  Relevant here for a robot that is dressed, as a kind of gag, like a World War I airman and vaguely resembling Woody Allen playing a robot in Sleeper; the "Flyboy" robot which can be, and at key points in the plot is, operated as a waldo device.  Also relevant for "Sweetie," the female-gendered computer who runs the ship: Sweetie achieves some free will, desire, and the ability to love.  Note male-gendered robot, moving around silently, and female-gendered, talking AI computer running the ship; they are useful for machine/gender issues.  Note also heavy-industrial mise en scne, in the cyberpunk tradition but totally in space.  Cf. Alien, Aliens; contrast, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek series, Galaxy Quest (q.v., this section).  Interviews and stills in Cinefantastique 31.10 (Feb. 2000); [32]-47 (contrast on-board mise en scne in Galaxy Quest, photo on p. 9 of the Feb. 2000 issue of Cinefantastique). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/VI/01       Swordfish.  Dominic Sena, dir.  Skip Woods, script.  John Travolta,  Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, featured players.  USA: Jonathan Krane Group [us], NPV Entertainment, Silver Pictures [us], Village Roadshow Productions [us], Warner Bros. [us] (prod.—IMDb) / Warner Bros. (dist. [Silver Pictures and Warner given final places in credits]), 2001.  Frantic Films, SpFx.  **+Mostly "mundane" caper/paranoia movie that can be seen as a very-near-future cyberpunk film, except without the zaibatzu and with relevance to the US Iran/Contra scandal.  The caper involves electronic theft of funds by a computer hacker, with associated shots of complex icons on computer screens and following electronic pulses along banks of wires.  Note also motifs of surveillance, electonic collars on humans rigged with explosives, and a punk/hip, mostly detached attitude toward the American establishment and terrorism and against those resisting the American establishment and terrorism.  In its quieter moments, the film seems at least as serious as W. Gibson's Neuromancer (q.v. under Fiction) about issues of ethics and politics, raising the always relevant issue of ends and means: most directly, is it permissible to kill people—including mere bystanders—if one can achieve good goals thereby? 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 21/I/96         T-Force.  **+Cited by Michele Lloyd as a cyborg movie. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/IV/95, 12/XII/95  Tank Girl.  Rachel Talalay, dir.  USA: Trilogy Entertainment Group (prod.) / United Artists ("author and creator" for legal purposes) / MGM/UA (dist.), 1995.  Lori Petty and Malcolm McDowell, stars.  *¢+Based on the UK comic book (Dark Horse Comics thanked in credits).  Post-apocalypse desert dystopia setting.  Tank girl runs a fairly automatic if not necessary AI tank.  Kessler, the Malcolm, villain, gets wounded and is re-equipped with a holgraphic head and an automated arm in the tradition of the Hand of Rotwang and the arm of Terminator—but with postmodern kinky variations: spinning cutting blades and generally inelegant design. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 16/IX/94        TC 2000.  T. J. Scott, dir. script.  Canada: Film One (prod.) / Shapiro Glickenhaus Entertainment (dist.), 1993.  © held by TC Productions, the "author" of the film for legal purposes.  Jalal Merhi, prod.  Bobbie Phillips, star.  **¢+Martial arts flik set in a post-ecological catastrophe world, with the rich living underground, protected by "Underworld security forces," esp. "Tracker/Communicator" (TC) units, one of which is seen in the opening shot: two helmeted and apparently armored figures on a motorcycle on a stretch of high-tech road among "the criminals of Surfaceworld."  Underworld: modern; Surfaceworld: postmodern funky; cf. and contrast A Boy and His Dog and other works using the theme of the mechanized, high-tech underworld.  TC 2000X is a cybernetic TC one-entity unit: "80% human, 20% machine, and 100% dedicated to its mission."  Its form is a human woman in heavy leather—the heroine of the film transformed; cf. and contrast RoboCop and Eve of Destruction.  Note restoration of heroine for a somewhat romantic-comic, open-ended ending to the film, and its ecological moral: a sermon to end a bit of pornorgraphy of violence. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 18&20/X/04   Team America: World Police (vt American Heroes: 2003 US working title [according to IMDb]).  Trey Parker, dir., co-script with Pam Brady and Matt Stone; producer with Matt Stone et al.  Parker and Stone among most featured voices.  USA: Scott Rudin Productions (prod.) / Paramount, UIP (dist.), 2004.  Running time will vary between theatrical and DVD releases.  **+Political satire / theatre and film parody, with marionettes, in the manner of the British TV series Thunderbirds (1964-66).  Relevant here for supercomputer I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.—an imaging of "military intelligence"—and its limitations, and for the enthusiastic use of high-tech high-explosive weapons, much to the delight, apparently, of some members of the US audience (see IMDb user comments), over the destruction wrought in such nonUS cities as Paris.  Note also the suitcase-weapons carried by terrorists and identified as "WMD"; we are not told if they are literal Weapons of Mass Destruction, as in suitcase nukes, or dispensers of mustard gas: the conflation of a-bombs and poison gas in the initialism "WMD" was and through 2004 remains important for the justification of the US-British invasion of Iraq.  CAUTION: This is a gross movie even by Parker and Stone standards, and it contains a fallacious but plausible justification of the use of US destructive force that trashes foreign cities to save them; it also suggests that Muslim terrorists—just about the only Muslims we see, except victims—have and perhaps need a Çwily OrientalÈ to lead them. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 18/I/94          Tekwar.  Syndication, "The Action Pack" (Alex Beaton, supervising exec.).  Premiered 17 Jan. 1994.  William Shatner, dir., actor, with Peter Sussman, exec. prod.  USA: Atlantis Films (prod.) / Universal (in asssociation with W.I.C. Western International Communications and Lemli Productions").  Greg Evigan, star.  From the Tek novels by William Shatner (see under Fiction).  **¢+See for the superimpostion of the mechanical and electronic upon the human, some nice realization of what W. Gibson and others have called cyberspace (see Gibson's Neuromancer series under Fiction), and some variations on the theme of the android and humanoid robot.  Significant for bringing to the "Action Pack" series of undistinguished programming some important cyberpunk themes and paraphernalia.  Note mise en scne of series premiere: it's occasionally cyberpunk urban funky but frequently green. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/VI/98       Tenkuu no Escaflowne (The Vision of Escaflowne).  Sh™ji Kawamori, dir.  Japan: Sunrise (prod.) / Ban Dai (dist.), 1995.  Y™ko Kanno, original music.  26 episodes.  **+TV Animation (anime, shoujo).  In his review of the series on the Escaflowne web site, Daniel Huddleston identifies Escaflowne as the guardian of the fantasy country of Fanelia: "the gigantic, robotic armor known as Escaflowne."  We see Escaflowne as both like and unlike the "mecha" of the opposed, high-tech Zaibaha Empire: the "guymelfs" (gaimerufu??).  Both mechanisms are like huge robots, with human controllers inside, for an image of humans protected and gaining power within mechanisms, or humans replacing the "ghost in the machine," supplying intellect (although the power sources for these "mecha" are rather mystical).  For powered armor, see R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and J. Haldeman's Forever War, under Fiction.  For a human gaining power within relatively small armor, see Ripley in her battle with the Alien Queen at the climax of Aliens; for controllers within relatively large power suits, note alien controlling an apparently organic body in Independence Day, parodied in Men in Black (1997); see also robots in Robo Jox (all except MiB listed in this section).  Erlich recalls Sunday newspaper cartoon, possibly Buck Rogers, featuring battles between giant robots controlled by one or more persons in their heads. 

 

 

5.  Drama, RDE, 24/XII/96        Terminator 2 3-D.  Live action plus 3-D film attraction at Universal Studios, Orlando, FL, starting 1996.  James Cameron, auteur.  **¢+  An important work, described by Dan Persons as "a mini-sequel to the blockbuster hit" Terminator 2 (q.v. under Drama) "that literally places its audience smack in the middle of the Future War" ([112]) between humans and the Terminators and other killer machines of Cyberdyne Systems's Skynet.  Covered in some depth in the Persons articles in Cinefantastique 28.4/5 (Nov. 1996): [112]-21.  In addition to the usual Terminators, see for "flying mini-hunters"—metal, cybernetic Frisbees with serious attitude—and T-Meg (T-1,000,000).  According to Adam Bezark, dir. of the live-action portion of the show, we meet T-Meg at the heart of the Skynet beast: "There's Terminator [T-800] and John [Connor] standing on the stage . . . as if they've just walked . . . into the inside of Skynet . . . .  John says, 'Where are we?' and Terminator says, 'Home.'  And as he says that . . . there's . . . a big motor sound that starts up, and we realize that they're standing on this massive elevator platform.  The whole theater is sinking . . . as if you're going down on an elevator . . . sliding down into the basement."  The elevator effect takes the audience deep "into the bowels of Skynet" until they "arrive at the bottom where there's this big chrome pyramid, which is Skynet's brain-pan, the CPU."  John intends to blow up the CPU and asks about security systems, "And Arnold [T-800] says, 'There's only one, but it's a really good one.'  And as he says that, out of the floor, a chrome fence that surrounds the CPU morphs into the biggest chrome morphing critter you've ever see," the "arachnid-like" T-1,000,000 (Persons 118).  Note variations on the archetypal descent of the hero to encounter the ultimate monster in the belly of the beast: "Home" for a Terminator = a Central Processing Unit of a kind of brain, guarded by a morphing giant that combines the mechanical, cybernetic, unformed, and exoskelletoned: the T-Meg spider.  If Schwarzenegger's T-800 is postmodern scruffy, Robert Patrick's T-1000 usually appears Modernist smooth and metallic (in Terminator 2), if postmodern in morphing into different shapes.  And T-Meg may combine both Modernist and postmodern horrors in a cybernetic hell that surrounds the audience and is imposed on the actors.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03-05/VII/03 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (see IMDb for minor vts. and German versions).  Jonathan Mostow, dir.  James Cameron, characters from T1 and T2 and Gale Anne Hurd (characters and exec. prod.); John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Tedi Sarafian, story; Brancato and Ferris, script.  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken, David Andrews, Earl Boen (returning as Dr. Peter Silberman), featured characters.  Production Companies (from IMDb): C-2 Pictures, InterMedia Film Equities Ltd., IMF Pictures, Mostow, Lieberman Productions, IMF Internationale Medien und Film GmbH & Co. Produktions KG, Pacific Western, Toho-Towa, VCL Communications GmbH, Village Roadshow Productions, Warner Bros.  Distributors (simplified from IMDb): Warner Bros., Columbia TriStar [US and various countries], Cascade Film, Intermedia Films (foreign), Sony Pictures International, Toho-Towa.  2003.  109 min.  **+Sequel to The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (q.v., this section [note: interpreting the films as a trilogy can alter their meanings]).  In T-2, it is the private corporation, Cyberdyne Systems, that is responsible for the ultimately AI Skynet and the near extinction of the human species in "Judgment Day."  In T-3, the source of this evil is a US military operation combining DARPA with a centralized US computer command (which may exist).  Visuals indicate that in addition to Skynet, this operation produces the aircraft and super-tanks the machines use after Judgment Day to "terminate" the remaining humans.  The moral is made explicit in images of US ICBMs taking off, and in voice-over: the war-machines humans develop to protect ourselves threaten our destruction.  Note also: (1) Kristanna Loken's really-big-truck-driving T-X "Terminatrix" usually disguised as an upper-class woman, contrasted with Schwarzenegger's reprise of a scruffy biker, Nick Stahl's self-marginalized, working-class John Connor, and Claire Danes's general's daughter—working as the number 2 veterinarian at a veterinary clinic.  (2) The ability of T-X to control other machines, including a fairly successful attempt to take over Schwarzenegger's Terminator.  (3) Shift in human/machine difference from human feeling (pain/love) in T-1 to ability to cry in T-2, to, in T-3, the free-will ability of humans to choose suicide.  (Terminators can nobly sacrifice themselves on a mission but cannot in the formulation of T-2, "self-terminate."  Alternatively, Schwarzenegger's Terminator in T-3 nobly sacrifices himself and commits suicide, combining with other abilities seen in the final minutes of T-3 that might reduce the human/machine difference.)  For variations on the motif of mechanized nuclear holocaust, see Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove (cited in this section).  CAUTION: About all that remains of the insightful commentary on masculinity and machismo from the earlier Terminator films is a comic "Macho Man" male-stripper scene for T-800 to get clothes—which includes some gratuitous gay stereotyping in the largely unnecessary dialog. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, Rob Latham, IMDb, 14/XII/00           Tetsuo (vt or subtitled, The Iron Man).  Shinya Tsukamoto, dir., script, prod., actor: "Metals Fetishist." Japan: Kaijyu Theater (prod.) / Fox Lorber Home Video and, for USA 1992: Original Cinema (dist), 1988.  **+Rob Latham found the film initially wince-inducing, but upon second viewing while teaching a class in "Cyborg Culture," the film appeared "hilariously funny.  The metallic zit popping, the penis-drill boring through the table, the pipe shooting up the protagonist's bum, all serve to mark the film as a John Waters version of cyberpunk—cyborg camp, a curious genre indeed" (e-mail posting on <iafa-l@wiz.cath.vt.edu>, the ListServ of the International Assoc. for the Fantastic in the Arts, 7 Dec. 2000).  See below, Tetsuo II.  See for dark-comic possibilities of "the human/machine interface" in its often horrific mode of the transgressing of organic boundaries by the metallic and mechanical. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE/Joe Kuhr, 20/VIII/00  Tetsuo II: Body Hammer.  Shinya Tsukamoto, dir., script.  Japan: Kaijyu Theater, Toshiba EMI (prod.) / Manga Entertainment (video dist.), 1992.  **+Sequel to Tetsuo (vt The Iron Man [q.v. above]).  ImDb summary by Humberto Amador notes that this T-2 "has the Iron Man transforming into [a] cyberkinetic gun when [a] gang of vicious skinheads kidnap his son.  When the skinheads capture him, they begin to experiment on him ... speeding up the mutative process!" 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 13/V/04        Texhnolyze.  Hiroshi Hamasaki, series dir.  Debuted 16 April 2003 on Fiji TV (source: Unofficial Texhnolyze Information Page).  DVD release: Geneon.  "Production planning by Rondo Robe. Character designs by Yoshitoshi ABe. Animation by MAD HOUSE" (source: <http://www.csusm.edu/anime/texhnolyze/).  Yasuyuki UEDA also credited in an on-line review of the DVD.  **+"Texhnolyze: A highly developed technology used for replacing human limbs with powerful cyberneticsÉ[.]  The definition for the title of this series and that which separates the strong from the weak in the city of Lukuss" <http://dvd.ign.com/articles/509/509194p1.html>.  Rev. under "Anime in Brief," Cinefantastique 36.3 (June/July 2004): 63, which focusses on the maimed boxer Ichise, who has an arm and a leg replaced with bionics. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/V/99, 4/VI/99      Thirteenth Floor, The (vt 13th Floor, The).  Josef Rusnak, dir., script (based on adaptation by Ravel Centano-Rodriquez).  USA/Germany: Centropolis Film Productions (prod.) / Columbia (dist. and "author" for legal purposes), 1999.  Credited source: Daniel F. Galouye's Simulacron-3 (New York: Bantam, 1964).  Craig Bierko, Gretchen Moll, Dennis Haysbert, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, featured players.  **+Epigraph to film is R. Descartes's "I think, therefore I am"; more directly relevant would be the Daoist story of how the philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and awoke to think that he might really be a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.  See 13th Floor for conceit of our world (or at least scientists in Los Angeles) developing a VR parallel universe, while in fact, in the film, we are a VR universe of simulacra.  Note also people in these VR universes being ÇpossessedÈ by people from a ÇhigherÈ or more real reality—and the image during personality transference from our world of the superimposition of a laser-light pattern on a person lying, shoes off (for some reason) among banks of supercomputers.  Production interview with dir. by Chuck Wagner in Cinefantastique 31.6 (June 1999): [18]-19.  According to one caption, "The film explores the possibility of computer-simulated universes, where people only believe they are real," in this case with a plot "concerning a murder mystery which becomes embroiled in the machinations of a parallel universe contained in computers.  The parallel universe is set in 1937" and the VR experience there is said to be "somewhat like playing a kill-thrill video game where . . . you forget about everything around you and start to become the character . . ." (19).  Earlier pre-release publicity and stills in Chuck Wagner's "The 13th Floor," Cinefantastique 31.4 (April 1999): [10]-11.  Cinefantastique coverage notes intermediate source for film as R. W. Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (q.v., this section; see also the nearly simultaneously released Matrix).  Note S. Lem's stories "The Experiment . . ." and "The Seventh Sally," and C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's Wolfbane (q.v. under Fiction). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/I/94          Time Runner.  Canada: North American Pictures/Excalibur Pictures (prod., (c) holder) / New Line Cinema/North America Releasing, 1992.  Michael Mazo, dir.  Lloyd A. Simandl and John A. Curtis, prod.  Mark Hamill, Rae Dawn Chong, stars.  90 min.  **¢+Routine time-travel story with a barely disguised commercial for "the Strategic Defense Initiative" and other high-tech space warfare plans now (in 1992) to protect us from an alien invasion's succeeding in 2022. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 26/VI/93        Time Trax.  Fox-TV, 1993.  Premiere produced Queensland, Australia: Lorimar, 1993.  "A Gary Nardino Production."  Harve Bennett, premiere script, and co-creator along with Jeffrey Hayes and Grant Rosenberg.  Lewis Teague, premiere dir.  Dale Midkiff, star.  **¢+See for SELMA: Specified Encapsulated Limitless Memory Archive, "the smallest mainframe ever designed" a century from now—and a computer that sounds and can appear like a woman (more specifically, like the hero's mother).  There is also a time-travel device. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 26/II/93         Timebomb.  Avi Nesher, dir., script.  USA: Dino De Laurentiis (sic: two "i's") Productions (prod.) / MGM (dist.), 1990.  Raffaella de Laurentiis, prod.  "A Raffaella Production."  Michael Biehn, Patsy Kensit, stars.  **¢+Politically interesting recombinant film using formulas from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and other deep-cover assassin films, plus The Terminator (q.v. above); relevant here for a motif from J. Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered (q.v. under Fiction): conditioning of a secret agent in a high-tech tank that emphatically superimposes the mechanical and electronic upon the human.  Note also holograms during the conditioning and clockwork imagery at the start of the film. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 08/III/02       Time Machine, The.  Gore Verbinksi and Simon Wells (great-grandson of H. G. Wells), dir.  Based on the novel by H. G. Wells, q.v. under fiction.  David Duncan, then John Logan, script.  USA: DreamWorks SKG and Warner Bros., 2002.  **+In useful figurative dialog with the 1895 Wells novel and the 1960 G. Pal film (see above).  The initial setting is shifted from 1890s London to 1890s New York City; The Time Traveler is given a name (Alexander Hartdegen) and a lost beloved, whose death—and Hartdegen's knowledge of A. Einstein's very early work—inspires him to travel back in time to prevent her murder.  The Time Machine in the 2002 movie is rather po-mo in its "busyness," but it is shiny in its brass and glass and stresses light, including what looks like very early laser light; the device that preserves the past involves holograms, and therefore is also based in light.  The underworld of the Morlocks is po-mo and Industrial, as opposed to the cleaner lines of the underworld in the Pal film, and these latest Morlocks have a hive-like hierarchy, overseen at least locally by Jeremy Irons's "†ber-Morlock."  There is also a shift in accounting for the evolution of the Morlocks; after the Moon was mostly destroyed and fell, many human survivors went underground, giving rise to the Morlocks, while some survived above, to become the Eloi.  The novel's most directly political points are modified in having the destruction of the Moon caused by atomic explosions sponsored by (Capitalist) developers of Moon property and by having the Eloi living as cliff-dwellers above a river in what looks like a rain forest.  The †ber-Morlock is albino-white and the surface-going Morlocks grey; the Eloi are more diverse, with the major Eloi (played by Omero Mumba and Samantha Mumba) brown-skinned. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 16/VI/00, 20/VI/00   Titan A.E. (vt. Planet Ice [US working title, 1998]). Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, dir. and among producers.  USA: 20th Century Fox, Blue Sky Studios, Fox Animation Studios (prod.) / Fox and its subdivisions (dist.), 2000.  Randall McCormick and Hans Bauer, story.  Ben Edlund, John August, Joss Whedon, script.  Blue Sky Studios, Industrial Light & Magic, SpFx.  Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman, featured voices.  **+CGI and 2-D animation.  See for the immense spacecraft Titan as an example of Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"): where the Star Wars death stars kill planets, this Titan brings Promethean life.  The Martian machines in Total Recall rejuvenate Mars; the Genesis Project machines in Star Trek 2-3 bring life to a planet that has never lived; the Titan goes even farther and first creates a planet from space ice and then brings life to it.  There is also a Çring of powerÈ that is clearly technological and almost magical in its ability to interface with the young hero's body—putting a map into his hand—and with the Titan.  Note the generally po-mo ships of the good and neutral species vs. the mostly modern ships of the genocidal Drej; note also the appearance of the Drej: very elegant blue creatures of pure energy, but with subtle insectoid suggestions with the chief villain, plus suggestions with all of them of ghosts or even Death (cf. Star Wars saga).  Perhaps significantly, the non-Drej ships are Industrially solid, while the Drej ships are somewhat semipermeable, suggesting their ÇenergeticÈ nature, ghostliness, and—just perhaps—a po-mo motif of dissolving barriers between organic and mechanical, Newtonian matter and energy, living world and spirit world, truth and betrayal; cf. and contrast Aliens.  Our sources: viewing this film, IMDb citation, and pre-release coverage by Mike Lyons, Cinefantastique 31.12/32.1 (June 2000): [16]-17.  All films mentioned here are listed in this section. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/XII/97, 15/V/99   Titanic.  James Cameron, dir., script, prod.  USA: 20th Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment, Paramount Pictures (prod., with Jon Landau et al.) / 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures (dist.), 1997.  194 min.  Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Bill Paxton, stars.  **+Hugely popular "mundane" film (or "mainstream"), necessarily of the disaster-at-sea variety, relevant here for presenting Titanic as a very large mechanized environment rigidly and explicitly embodying the class system, with the rich on high and the lower orders locked below (cf. and contrast Metropolis, Blade Runner, this section).  Note mildly hellish imagery in the scenes of the stokers in the boiler room (cf. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Cameron and Hurd's Aliens, Welles's Time Machine [cited under Fiction], etc.); note also the beautiful shots of beautiful machinery in action, moving the ship—toward disaster (cf. and contrast S. Eisenstein's Old and New).  Final vision of the film is that of the dying (we infer) heroine, who, in "A lightning before death," images for herself and us Titanic as a eutopia with its large machinery unseen, where all people can share first class, with a beloved at the center.  Note also contrasts between modern(ist) machinery on the Titanic and the very modern, but not po-mo, VR units, waldoes, submersibles, and computers we see in the frame story of the salvage operation by Brock Lovett (Paxton) et al. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 07/II/99        Tom Clancy's Netforce (vt. Netforce).  Robert Lieberman, dir.  Tom Clancy, co-exec. prod., source book [?].  Lionel Chetwynd, teleplay.  Scott Bakula, star.  Brian Dennehy, Judge Reinhold, Joanna Going, Kris Kristofferson, Xander Berkley,  featured players.  An "ABC Premiere Event."  Made for TV movie, Feb. 1999.  **+A Tom Clancy technothriller (or technofetishist exercise) that might be subtitled, "Watch It, Frat Boy; Nerd Power May Soon Possess Your Mother."  Culminating in May of 2005, a Bill-Gates character (Reinhold) conspires to take over the Internet.  Important for bringing to TV during a "sweeps" period some relevant SF motifs.  See for images of surveillance, a VR chat room, and Kris Kristofferson as a construct on a laptop.  Note quotations from Reinhold: "He who controls all information controls the world" and, "We're moving toward a future defined only by technology and market forces.  A new world order.  Based on electrons and information."  Under Fiction, cf. and contrast W. Gibson's Neuromancer for huge corporations, the 'Net, and constructs, and F. Pohl's Gateway series for constructs.  For surveillance, cf. and contrast under Drama the contemporaneous Enemy of the State, where surveillance is much more negative than in Netforce.  The Microsoft analog in the film, Janus Corp. Technology (spelled with and without a space), has a name that may represent much of the message of the film on the promise and threat of technology: Janus is a two-faced god, and god of beginnings and endings.  Reviewed (very negatively) by Frederick C. Szebin, Cinefantastique 31.5 (June 1999): 59. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/VI/01       Tomb Raider (vt Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and three other working titles [according to IMDb our filmographic source]).  Simon West, dir., film adaptation.  Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, story. Patrick Massett and John Zinman, script.  Chris Corbould and Jeremy Pelzer, SpFx supervision.  **+Opening "teaser" and brief closing sequence feature a large, somewhat insectoid robot, rather like a recombinant chimera of a Terminator, Alien, and enforcer 'droid from Robocop (all listed this section).  The view from the robot while battling Croft reproduces images from the video-game source for the film.  Computer-geek aide to Croft also produces robotic insectoid toys (?) that move around his trailer and other spaces.  Significant for the plot (which deals—loosely—with time and planetary line-up) are clocks, clockworks, and orreries: clockwork representations of the solar system. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VI/96       Tomorrow Man.  Alan Spencer, prod.  Bill D'Elia, dir. of premier showing.  20th Century-Fox / CBS, 1996 (scheduled).  Julian Sand and Giancarlo Esposito, stars.  **¢+Said by Spencer to have been inspired primarily by The Day the Earth Stood Still, but with borrowings from other works, including Terminator 2 and "The City on the Edge of Forever" episode of Star Trek (q.v., this section).  "Sands plays an android named Kenn," although Terminator-style cyborg seems a more exact description, "possessing knowledge of all future events," from the point of view of our time, which "he" has traveled back to.  The robot uses his knowledge of our future "to alter present events to prevent a future catastrophe.  To help him in his mission, he picks Jonathan Driscoll" (Esposito), an expert in AI and computer programming.  Driscoll "has been ostracized" for his "far-out concepts," but he "proves to be the only one capable of repairing Kenn circuitry."  Previewed by Dennis Fischer, Cinefantastique 27.8 (April 1996): 14-15, whom we depend upon for this citation, and quote (14).  

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/IV/99       TOTAL RECALL 2070 (vt TOTAL RECALL: THE SERIES).  TV Series, said to have premiered on Showtime 14 March 1999 (Wardle [40]) and covered by IMDb by April 1999.  Canada: PolyGram Television, Alliance Atlantis Communications, TEAM Communications Group (prod.) / Dimension Films and Showtime Networks (dist.).  Gajdecki Visual Effects, SpFx.  Art Monterastelli, creator, exec. prod.  Mario Azzopardi, Fred Gerber, primary dirs.  Michael Easton, Karl Pruner, Michael Rawlins, Cynthia Preston, and Judith Krant, featured players.  **+Compared by Karl Pruner, the actor playing "Total Recall's android cop," Ian Farve, to I. Asimov's Caves of Steel (cited by author under Fiction), by Paul Wardle to the 1976 Future Cop, and by IMDb users to Mann & Machine and Blade Runner  (q.v., this section).  "Android" here is in the sense that STNG's Mr. Data is an android, except "Farve has all the emotions" (Pruner quoted by Wardle).  The series also features a threatening, somewhat cyberpunk-appearing scientist and a "Rekall chair" such as that used in the 1990 film Total Recall.  Said by Wardle to be closer than the 1990 film to P. K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale."  Covered by Wardle in Cinefantastique 31.3 (March 1999): [40]-43.  Cf. also the 1976 series Holmes and Yo-Yo (listed in this section). 

 

 

Rev. 27/XII/01 5.310   Tobor the Great.  Lee Sholem, dir.  Carl Dudley, story.  Philip MacDonald, script.  USA: Dudley Pictures (prod.) Republic Pictures (dist.) 1954.  77 min.  "A Republic Presentation" available through Republic Pictures Home Video.  **+A newly developed robot "has emotions & can receive telepathic impulses; saves its inventor & his grandson from kidnapper-spies" (Walt Lee), late 1950s, communist spies.  The emotions programmed into him by his good American inventors include "human love" and desire to protect human young.  The robot has been developed for space flight to solve the one remaining problem: "the human factor," human limitations.  See for a remote-control for the robot easy enough for a little boy to use, the useful and dangerous potentials of robots—depending upon who programs them—parallel to Tobor as both beautiful in appearance and threatening.  Cf. and contrast Robby the Robot, primarily in "his" roles opposite children after Forbidden Planet (see above, Lost in Space). 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 25/VI/98       Townshend, Pete, et al.  The Iron Man (The Musical by Pete Townshend).  "The Iron Man theatrical rights are owned by Iron Man Productions Limited" (sic: quoting copyright notice on The Iron Man CD).  **+Musical theatre piece based on Ted Hughes's The Iron Man, q.v. under Fiction.  See above, The Iron Giant; see entry for The Iron Man under Music, Pete Townshend et al.

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/XI/95, 29/XI/99   Toy Story.  John Lasseter, dir.  USA: Disney/Pixar (prod.) / Buena Vista (dist.)  © held by Walt Disney Company.  **+Fantasy.  Wild West Sheriff Woody (with a string-activated voice) initially opposes and then befriends Buzz Lightyear, a futuristic space-ranger sort who must come to the recognition that he is a toy—even if a battery-operated, high-tech toy—and that a toy is a good thing to be.  TS also teaches that even a toy that is a bio-mechanoid combination of human head and arachnoid tinkertoy body can be a friend.  Technical aspects of computer-graphics imaging (CGI)  discussed in detail in Cinefantastique 27.2 (Nov. 1995), where TS is the featured story.  Note combination of medium and message: Disney/Pixar = 2-D animation/CGI = Woody/Buzz = mechanical/electronic-cybernetic.  The excellent 1999 sequel, Toy Story 2, has Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody ally and Buzz having to deal with a double who hasn't become enlightened about his nature as a toy—but it's not particularly relevant for the Clockworks theme. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 25/IV/95       Tower, The.  Richard Kletter, dir. co-author script.  John Riley, story, co-author script.  Fox-TV, Tuesday Night Movie, 25 April 1995.  USA: FNM Films/Catalina Production Group, © 1992, 1993 (release?).  Paul Reiser, Roger Rees, Susan Norman, stars.  *¢+Mainstream, very-near-future movie.  "The security of the Intercorp Tower will be maintained by any means necessary," saith CASS, the controlling central computer, and "she" means it.  It's a couple of humans against the machine, and the computer is trying the kill them.  See for murderous computer and containment within a very dangerous cybernetic/mechanical environment gendered female.  See for human victory via wits over obsessed computer.  "Well ... we've seen the future, and it ain't pretty," Reiser's character says.  After building destroys itself (to protect itself), we see heroic couple lovingly kiss. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 18/XII/93       Toys.  Barry Levinson, dir.  USA: Biltmore Pictures / 20th Century Fox (prod. and release), 1992.  Ferdinando Scarfiotti, prod. designer.  Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson, script (with Levinson co-prod.).  Robin Williams, stars.  **¢+A relatively mundane fantasy film important for portions something like O. S. Card's Ender's Game meets Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—with a touch of two of Terminator and Dr. Strangelove (all listed under Fiction or Drama).  See for a fantasy factory set in green fields, and for robots (including a female robot passing for a human woman [cf. and definitely contrast Metropolis]), the threat of computer-assisted military takeover, surveillance, VR, and highly mechanized (and electronic toys) both benign and highly threatening (including small war machines [see under Fiction, S. Lem's "The Upside-Down Evolution"]). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29/IV/01       Transatlantic Tunnel (vt The Tunnel).  Maurice Elvey, dir.  UK: Gaumont-British Picture Corp., 1935.  Kurt Siddmak, script (IMDb lists L. du Garde Peach, writing as DuGarde Peach, and Clemence Dane).  **+The tunnel is made possible in part by "the new radium drill."  See for a Modernist mise en scne in which a giant machine is generally good; note also the high-speed tunnel-trains, and the many internal viewing screens—including what might be a giant TV screen for the private performance of a symphony—significant for what G. Stewart has called "The 'Videology' of Science Fiction" (q.v. under FilmCrit).  Consider as a possible gauge of the change between high-Modernist 1935 and arguably po-mo recent work not just the attitude toward The Machine but the idea that a large engineering project and building something are good and worthy of a film. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/II/98        Trucks.  Chris Thomson, dir.  Made for TV, shown USA Network, Oct. 1997.  Brian Taggert, script.  Canada: Credo Entertainment Group (prod.) / Credo and Trimark Pictures (dist.), 1997.  From the Stephen King story.  2 hours, with commercials.  **+Somehow, trucks become sufficiently intelligent "to throw off the yoke of their drivers and trap a group of people in a diner."  Rev. Frederick C. Szebin, Cinefantastique 29.12 (April 1998): 54, which we quote.  See in this section Maximum Overdrive and Killdozer; see in the Keyword Index, "Truck." 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/VI/98       The Truman Show.  Peter Weir, dir.  USA: Paramount / Scott Rudin Productions (prod.) / Paramount (dist.), 1998.  Andrew Niccol, script, prod. (one of several).  Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, featured players.  Philip Glass, Burkhart von Dallwitz (as Burkhard Dallwitz), music.  **+Very "near-in," in Thom Dunn's phrase, satiric SF: near-future setting, almost possible with current technology.  Truman Burbank (Carrey) is the unwitting star of The Truman Show: a continuous TV show of his life, pre-birth to—whenever ("How Will It End?" is one of the hooks for the show)—a show created by a producer/director named Christof (Harris).  See for motifs of a contained, artificial world under a dome (the world's largest TV studio), continuous surveillance, and the question of authenticity.  In this movie, True-Man is the creation of Christ-of, with creation having taken place near Burbank: the studio is shown to be near the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, and Harris brilliantly plays a loving, if power-mad, God-the-Father to Carrey's Son.  The end of the film may be read that Truman escapes to our world and a possible true love, but our world may also be a media world.  An important movie for media and cultural studies (including issues of modernism and po-mo), bringing to a temporary culmination themes from such disparate works as R. A. Heinlein's "They" (1941); the "metatheatrical" embedding of scenes within scenes of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and the "metacinema" that revived the practice; D. G. Comptom's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe and the film Deathwatch; G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the more paranoid works of P. K. Dick, including Time Out of Joint and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (filmed as Total Recall); the film 36 Hours (1964), starring James Garner (our thanks to Ed Wysocki for that citation); The Prisoner TV series; G. Lucas's THX-1138 and Blade Runner (including the theatrical-release cut of for the ending); F. Pohl's "Tunnel Under the World"—q.v. under Fiction and Drama; consult Index for "Surveillance" and other key words.  Note also parallels if not direct references to the episode of Star Trek "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" and the joining together of a town's population to seek a fugitive in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and other works.  Crucial for Clockworks are the shots of the Control Room in Truman, esp. one showing in deep background a large screen showing Truman in what Truman thinks of as his private room, with an open (beach?) umbrella in the foreground of that screen.  In front of the screen is a man on a stationary bicycle with a large front wheel: along with the umbrella, the bicycle is a clear citation to The Prisoner, specifically here, the control room in that show.  Just in front of the bicycle, frame right, is a basketball hoop and backboard, and moving toward the foreground row after row of unoccupied observation stations each containing one large map screen or 20 or 25 monitors, the stations arranged along "Bacall Plaza," "Brando Street," etc. (see under Drama Criticism, G. Stewart, "Videology").  From the womb on, Truman has been in-frame; this shot shows a frame with a man watching Truman inside a frame that we are watching, itself containing more than half a myriad of screens.  And the audience leaves the screening to step into our own surveilled and mediated world.  See above, this section, EdTV. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29/IV/01       Tunnel, The: Cited as Transatlantic Tunnel. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 15/IV/99       Until the End of the World: See above under German title, Bis ans Ende der Welt.   

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/IX/99       Universal Soldier: The Return (vt Universal Soldier III [USA: Working Title]).  Mic Rodgers, dir.  USA: Baumgarten-Prophet Entertainment, Long Road Entertainment, IndieProd (prod.) / Columbia, Columbia TriStar, Sony Pictures (dist.), 1999.  William Malone and John Fasano, script.  Jean-Claude Van Damme, star, production team.  **+The US Army's supercomputer S.E.T.H. goes out of control "and begins using the Universal Soldiers to destroy anything and anyone that would stand in its way.  S.E.T.H.'s primary target becomes Van Damme, the man who knows the program better than anyone" (IMDb and Jon Keeyes, "Universal Soldier 2," Cinefantastique 31.8 [Oct. 1999]: 16-17, quoting here 17). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/V/04        Van Helsing.  Stephen Sommers, dir., script, prod. (with Bob Ducsay).  USA: Carpathian Pictures, Universal, Stillking Films, The Sommers Company, prod. / Universal, UIP, et al., dist., 2004 (see IMDb for complex distribution).  Allan Cameron, prod. design.  **+Very slickly done po-mo pastiche somewhat in the manner of pre-postmodern horror mishmashes, but with more elements, including James Bond and a hint of the mystic.  VH brings together again Van Helsing (here named Dr. Gabriel Van Helsing) and Dracula and his Brides—plus a Dracula-hunting family (the Valerious clan), Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Creature (here called Monster), and the/a Wolfman (also Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll, for an opening cameo in a Paris in which the Eiffel Tower has been begun but not finished: so 1888).  Significant for Clockworks 2  for Dracula's suborning of Victor Frankenstein and, more so, Igor in order to get the Monster for the vivification—so to speak—of the Dracula offspring (who are otherwise stored in gestation sacks such as one might get from crossing delusional male bats with the Alien Queen from Aliens).  In the opening sequence, the Transylvanian townspeople from the climax of the 1931 James Whale Frankenstein destroy Dr. Frankenstein (and the windmill), but the others escape, for Dracula and Igor to try another day.  The attempts involve the superimposition of Frankenstein's revivification equipment on, first, the last remaining Valerious brother and then the Monster.  The equipment is a slightly updated version of that in the Whale movie, while the Monster is both definitely fleshly and somewhat roboticized: mostly monster, but with a hint of cyborg, with the neck-bolts replaced with understated but visible green lights in the brain.  The vivification of the vampire children recalls the production of Robot Maria from Human Maria in F. Lang's Metropolis (q.v., this section), but with more sophisticated SpFx.  The James Bond motif includes a scene in a religiously-diverse laboratory at the Vatican, and some Bondian weapons supplied by an Q-like Friar/scientist, who accompanies Van Helsing on his monster-quelling.  Aside from the slight possibility that Gabriel Van Helsing is a manifestation of the Archangel Gabriel—one who fought against the Romans at Masada—the mystic portions include the apotheosis of Anna Valerious (and the rest of her family), when Dracula is finally dead; cf. and slightly contrast the returned dead Jedi at the end of Return of the Jedi (listed in this section).  Given the explicit 1888/Eiffel-Tower dating and dynamo imagery, a potentially useful film for students of Modernism vs. po-mo.  Discussed by Edward Gross, "Die, Monsters, Die," Cinefantastique 36.2 (April/May 2004): 34 f.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/93        "The Veldt."  Audiotape.  See in this section under R. Bradbury. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 06/I/94          Viper.  NBC.  Paul DeMeo and Danny Bilson, creators, exec. prod.  Premiered in a 2-hour made-for-TV movie, Sunday, 2 Jan. 1994.  **¢+Features a computer-run Dodge Viper that aids in the fight against crime. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 08/I/94          Viper.  NBC.  Friday, 7 Jan. 1994.  **¢+In addition to the Dodge Viper, note the other high-powered cars in the automotive cast.  This episode also featured brain implants and considered in a balanced fashion the pros and cons of computer-mediated brainwashing, plus the question of identity with a person whose memory has been razed by computer-mediated brainwashing.  For cars, see Carplays under Drama, R. B. Rollin's "Deus in Machina" essay listed under Drama Criticism, and the works cited in the Clockworks Keyword Index under "Car." 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 15/I/94          Viper.  NBC.  Friday, 14 Jan. 1994.  Bruce Bilson, dir.  David L. Newman, script.  Danny Bilson, story.  **¢+Note wheelchairs, hologram projections, home computers, and other mundane technologies juxtaposed with the high-tech Viper. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 10/IX/95       Virtual Combat.  Andrew Stevens, dir.  USA: Ashok Amritraj (prod.) / Amritraj/Stevens Entertainment (dist.?), 1995.  William C. Martell, script.  Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Michael Bernardo, featured players.  Michael Dorn, "Virtual Voice of Dante."  95 min.  **+Martial-arts film set in a near-future western United States (Los Vegas and Los Angeles).  Premise has "cloning from a computer program" bringing into our world three VR characters: two female sex objects and a male martial artist, with the threat of more characters arriving if the hero loses.  Cf. Virtuosity, listed below, this section for the major premise.  Note control collars on VR characters: cf. films Deadlock and Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14, and the collars on F. Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's "Risks" in Reefs of Space (see under Fiction).  As VR ÇandroidsÈ (our term) come out of their creation tank, note image of superimposition of vaguely cybernetic and highly mucoid upon the humanoid. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 04/VIII/95     Virtuosity.  Brett Leonard, dir.  USA: Paramount, 1995.  Eric Bernt, script.  Denzel Washington, Kelly Lynch. Russell Crowe, stars.  **+In Los Angeles in 1999, an ex-cop (Washington) hunts Sid 6.7 (Crowe): a computer-composite of serial killers, who manages to get out of the computer-generated VR into a nano-technology produced android body, and into everyday LA reality.  See for imagery of superimposition of mechanical and cybernetic devices upon the human and the injection into Washington's character of a small tracking device.  Pre-release coverage in Cinefantastique 26.6/27.1 (Oct. 1995): 96-97.  Cf. and contrast Terminator movies and Leonard's Lawnmower Man (cited this section) for "mechanized" villains.  Cf. and contrast Virtual Combat, listed above, this section for VR.  Also cf. and contrast motif of human beings entering computer-space: see in this section TRON and, under Fiction, J. Sladek's The MŸller-Fokker Effect.  Following the Disney rule of "The Plausible Impossible": If everyday humans can move across some sort of portal into cyberspace, denizens of cyberspace can cross the barrier into our space.  Look for mixed world possibilities, as we see with "Toons" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 03/VII/98, 18/I/99     Virus.  John Bruno, dir.  USA: Universal (dist.), 1999 (release).  Dennis Feldman, Jonathan Hensleigh, Chuck Pfarrer, script (from Pfarrer's Dark Horse graphic novel).  Gale Anne Hurd et al., prod.  Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, stars.  **+Production company: complex arrangement, no "author" cited at end of credits.  Design: Jaymes Hinkle credited as Art Director; several people worked on set design (IMDb).  Cover story for Cinefantastique 30.4 (August 1998): 19 f., by Chuck Wagner, our initial source for this citation.  The "virus" in the film is a "digital life form," according to C. Pfarrer, and "Its purpose, like any virus, is to replicate itself" (Wagner 22); it is also us, humans, from the point-of-view of the alien.  Wagner quotes Bruno as not wanting to do a computer virus, but "an electrical lifeform that hits" the Mir space station "during a transmission," from the Mir to an tracking ship far off regular sea-lanes (Wagner 20, 23 [and RDE, after seeing film]).  The lifeform "gets into the electrical system, gets into the computer[,] and instantly figures out ones and zeros . . . [and learns] about a dimensional place: the ship and where the ship is.  It learns that there are lifeforms all over this planet.  So it's got everything.  It's got maps; it's got languages and everything you could imagine that'd be in a big, computerized spy ship."  So the alien "starts to manufacture itself—using parts of the ship and crew—into a dimensional thing."  As with H.R. Giger's biomechanicals in Alien (q.v., this section), the creature evolves in stages, realized in filming by "these fantastic little droids . . . .  it's about robotics basically!  But the creature still lives in the computer.  All these droids and all these machines are operated from the computer on cables.  So if you cut the cables, you can cut them off.  Each one of them is an ROV: remotely operated vehicle" (20).  The Virus comic cover pictured shows a clearly insectoid "biomechanoid" (21 [also "bio-mechanoid"]), while other of the film's creatures are more subtly insectoid, or crustacean (24-25, 26).  "BioAlexi" is a Terminator-style combination of the dead Russian captain and metal parts.  Note that only a few of the explanatory subtexts offered in the Cinefantastique article come through upon viewing.  For the plot, cf. Agatha Christie novel and play, filmed under the title Ten Little Indians (1975, vt And Then There Were None)—and the Slasher-film tradition where an isolated group of teenagers are killed off until there is left only The Last Girl (most famously played by Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter's Halloween [1978]).  For the watery situation, cf. and strongly contrast Abyss; for the imaging of the alien threat, cf. and contrast the deadly cyborgs in the Terminator films and the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation; cf. also Hardware, Alien(s), and other po-mo, cyberpunk biomechanical threats.  For the small "droids," cf. the insectoid small machines in Runaway; for the largest machines, cf. the Swamp Thing from the comic book, and possibly the 1982 Swamp Thing film by Wes Craven.  For machines building machines and evolving machines see under Fiction the works of P. K. Dick (esp. "Autofac") and S. Lem (esp. The Invincible and "The Upside-Down Evolution").  A pretty bad film, but usefully studied for what has now become the clichŽ of the biomechanical threat, here expanded to include junk and garbage—with garbage including zombie-like, Frankenstein's-Creature garbage—set in a mise-en-scne that is strongly marine Junk-Yard and (capital "I") Industrial trash.  Virus is briefly and insightfully reviewed by Stuart Klawans in "Revenge of the Pod People," The Nation 268.6 (15 Feb. 1999): 34-36. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/III/95       VR.5.  FOX-TV.  Premiere 10 March 1995, with "Pilot."  Lori Singer, Michael Easton, Will Patton, Adam Baldwin, David McCallum, Penn Jillette, featured players.  Created by Adam Cherry, Geoffrey Hemwall, Michael Katleman, Jeannine Renshaw, and Thania St. John (who also share producing, writing, directing jobs).  Major sponsor for at least the premiere: The US Army.  E-mail address: VR5@Delphi.com. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/III/95       "Pilot."  VR.5.  FOX-TV.  10 March 1995.  Pilot episode of the series.  Thania St. John, script.  Michael Katleman, dir.  *¢+Heroine goes "into the machine," initially by accident, entering a world of VR and wish-fulfilment, plus some nightmare elements.  In a VR conversation, she tells her mother: "It's like I can bring another person into my dreams.  I create the setting, but I can't control what happens in it."  When she "wakes up" she remembers, but the other person just recalls the feelings.  Her mother responds: "You've tapped into the subconscious."  Imagery is of a high-tech descent moving into a dream inside the machine.  The heroine is recruited at episode's end by "the Committee."  Cf. and contrast the "dream machine" in The Lathe of Heaven, and both simstim and cyberspace in William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 14/V/04        Wachowski, Larry, and Andy Wachowski.  The Matrix: The Shooting Script.  New York: Newmarket P, 2001.  "A Newmarket Shooting Script Series Book."  William Gibson, Forword.**+A shooting script is not necessarily—indeed, rarely—an exact record of what one sees and hears in the theater, but the text that went into the shooting, and in that way can useful for film criticism; this script is quite useful.  Gibson's comments are brief but cogent: Neo as less a Christ-figure than "a hero of the Real" (viii). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 29/VII/01      Waga Seishun no Arcadia (Arcadia of My Youth).  Matsumoto Leiji, creator.  Tomoharu Katsumata, dir.  Yooichi Onaka, script.  Japan: Toei, 1982 (possibly also: Tokyu Agency; try AnimEigo home video or Amazon.com for copies).  130 min.  Available with English subtitles.  **+According to two fan-reviewers on Amazon.com, "This movie explains how Captain Harlock got to know [the "mechanical engineer" and spaceship builder] Tochiro and took command of [the military starship] ARCADIA," giving crucial parts of the backstory for the Harlock TV series (writer's pseudonym: "Starship Trooper").  "As with all Matsumoto productions, this movie features mechanical designs heavily influenced by times past—in this case, we have the ships and fighters inspired by anything from sailed frigates right through to the Graf Zeppelin" (writer: "CafŽ").  The Arcadia especially is said to be of interesting design. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 01/V/95        WAX, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees.  David Blair, auteur, star.  Florence Ormezzano, editing/graphics assistant.  USA: ZDF-TV (Germany), © 1991 David Blair and ZDF.  85 min.  *¢+If taken seriously, the narrative suggests a kind of spiritualism like unto that of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); therefore we suggest not taking the narrative seriously and looking instead at the interesting militantly modern, avant-garde montage and strongly postmodern graphic SpFx.  In this viewing, Wax yields a present-day world with flashbacks and trips to alternative realities, relating through juxtaposition, insertion, and superimposition the spirits of the dead (suggested and symbolized), movie cameras and other early high-tech equipment, bees and bee hives, the eye of God, weapons scientists, warfare, computers, rockets, space shuttles, missiles, VR military simulations, A-bombs, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel (and other twinning), Death, the Tower of Babel (including the Tower as visualized in Metropolis [q.v. this section]), civilization as urbanization, and television.  Wax is a topic of discussion at an active site on World Wide Web on the Internet: Try http://bug.village.virginia.edu. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 28/IX/95       W.E.I.R.D. World.  Fox-TV.  Series premiere 26 September 1995.  From William M. Gaines's comic books Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.  Two-hour premiere: William Malone, dir.  A. L. Katz, prod. and one of 3 writers.  "A Two Fisted [sic] Production" in association with Hallmark Entertainment.  Ed O'Neil featured as Dr. Monochian.  **+Dr. Monochian runs a super-secret, autonomous, US government (?) research facility, using very young scientists (and, at the end of the episode, a time-traveled Albert Einstein).  Mise en scene an interesting combination of high-tech and quasi-cyberpunk funky, with the images suggesting 1950s B-movies and (appropriately) Gaines-produced horror comics.  One of the three subplots in the premiere featured a time-machine that looks like a Van de Graaff generator; another more thematically featured robots both humanoid and primitive looking, plus a robotic prosthetic arm (cf. and contrast the Terminator films et al.). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/III/95       Welch, William.  How to Make a Man.  2 Feb. 1961.  Brooks Atkinson Theater, New York.  *¢+Dramatization of C. Simack's "How-2," q.v. under Fiction.  Customer of a mail-order house receives by mistake "a robot whose job is to build other robots," causing legal problems for the customer.  Cited in Appendix to R. Willingham's Science Fiction and the Theatre, our source here, and whom we quote.  Cf. and contrast P. K. Dicks's "Autofac," F. Pohl's "The Midas Plague" (and the story of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/V/99        *Welt am Draht (trans. as World on Wires, World on a Wire [World on the Wire]).  Rainer Werner Fassbinder, dir.  Fassbinder, Fritz MŸller-Scherz, script.  West German TV, 1974.  IMDb gives running time as "205 (2 parts)" and notes no source novel.  **+Cinefantastique preview of The 13th Floor (q.v., this section) quotes Josef Rusnak as saying the source of WaD was "this novel out of the 60's called Simulcrum [sic] 3.  It features a most convincing story outline to the subject of VR.  In it, you have a hero who realizes on his search during a murder mystery that his own world is a computer generated simulation. . . .  This guy wrote the novel in 1963, and in it there's a computer simulation where they call their characters 'ID' units.'  All the ID units were stored in memory drums"—and Fassbinder is said to have attempted "to reproduce the whole novel" (19).  We were unable to find Sumulcrum 3 or Simulacrum 3 in the on-line World Catalog, nor a synopsis of WaD in the general film histories we consulted. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 09/III/00       What Planet Are You From?  Mike Nicholls, dir., one of several prod.  USA, 2000.  Productions Companies: Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, Columbia Pictures Corporation, What Planet Are You From? Productions / Distributing Companies: Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment (US dist.), Columbia TriStar Film GmbH (Germany).  Gary Shandling, star, co-story, co- script, one of several prod.  (Source: IMDb.) **+Significant as a science-fiction film from an important director.  Listen for sound effect suggesting that the penises on the (all-male) aliens are mechanized, perhaps suggesting vibrators.  The motif correlates with the behavior of the aliens as mechanical would-be conquerors. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/VI/99, 30/VI/99, 4/VII/99 Wild Wild West.  Barry Sonnenfeld, dir.  Brent Maddock, Jeffrey Price, script.  USA: Peters Entertainment (prod.), Warner (prod., dist.), 1999.  Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, stars.  Bo Welch, designer.  **+Based on the 1965-70 CBS-TV series The Wild, Wild West (q.v. this section).  Arguably a work of "steampunk"—cyberpunk in the 19th-c., Jules Verne form—but in the much lighter vein of the original TV series and James Bond movies, and with a good deal of po-mo allusiveness.  See for superweapons and gadgets (good and/or comic when invented by Artemus Ward), a cyborg-ized or prostheticized villain with at least one Terminator-like employee, mechanized environments, and arachnoid variations on insect/mechanism association. Note especially mechanisms associated with the crippled and emasculated villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless: his Tarantula war machine, a steam-driven wheel chair that converts into a spider-leg chair, and "fiendishly inventive restraining system" where prisoners are "fitted with a giant magnetic collar" which attracts a blade launched in their direction "from a steam-driven catapult" if they try to escape (Kutzera 27).  For the restraining collars, cf. F. Pohl and J. Williamson's Reefs of Space (cited under Fiction), and the films Deadlock and The Running Man (see above, this section); for their visual design, and function, note the ruff warn by the King of the Moon (Robin Williams) in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988/89).  Donald Gilzinger notes also the exploding wrist cuffs among the "Great Game" cell in B. Sterling's Heavy Weather, ch. 9 (q.v. under Fiction); and Mike Conaway adds "pain-inducing collars" in the original Star Trek episode, "The Gamesters of Triskelion" (not cited).  The tarantula war-machine is an obvious and possibly significant variation on the Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (q.v. this section), and it is sufficiently terrible that a flying machine following the designs of Leonardo can be positive technology, even when explicitly compared to ichneumon wasp (and the treatment of spiders by ichneumon wasps briefly described).  In an interview in Cinefantastique, Sonnenfeld noted that Welch used "spider web themes" in Loveless's mansion and repeated use of "little rods with balls hanging down that are" literally system governors but which Sonnenfeld identifies as "testicles.  And in every single thing that Loveless has, whether it's the tank, the machine gun, the back of his own wheelchair, you see these rotating balls. [. . .]  Perhaps it's because he [Welch] feels that since Loveless doesn't have a penis or testicles, he would put them everywhere."  See Cinefantastique 31.7 (August 1999): 32-43 f. for articles and interviews by Frederick C. Szebin, primarily, and Dale Kutzera; they also print useful stills and drawings. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 27/VI/99       Wild, Wild West, The (vt The Wild West, USA working title).  TV Series, CBS 1965-70, 104 60-min. episodes.  Jus Addiss and Leon Benson, dirs.  Bruce Lansbury, Fred Frieberger, prod.  Michael Garrison credited by Jim Dowdie as "creator."  IMDb gives production companies: CBS TV, Michael Garrison Productions, Bruce Lansbury Productions.  Distribution companies: CBS TV, Viacom, CBS Films, Paramount Television.  Robert Conrad, Ross Martin, stars.  **+Recombinant TV, set mostly in the American west during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1969-77), not long after the US Civil War, putting together the Western, secret-agent saga, and SF to form a precursor of "steampunk" (and a Western version of James Bond).  Jim West and Artemus Gordon (Conrad and Martin) use a wide variety of gizmos and gadgets, at the cutting edge and beyond of 19th-c. science and technology.  For influence of The Avengers and Jules Verne on the series, see Jim Dowdie interview with Lansbury and Friedberger, Cinefantastique 31.7 (August 1999): 44-45. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 26/III/95       Willingham, Ralph.  Science Fiction and the Theatre.  Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.  CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, NUMBER 57.  213 + xiv pp.  $55.00 cloth.  *¢+Historical survery of S. F. plays, emphasizing theatre for adults and staging considerations.  Includes an appendix with an annotated list of 328 S. F. plays, theatre pieces, performance art pieces, operas, etc. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 18/XII/93       Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  David Wolper, dir.  David Wolper.  USA: xxXXXXXXXX, 1971.  Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, stars.  **¢+Fantasy.  Note factory as the cinematic space for a fantasy adventure; cf. and contrast Toys (listed in this section).  §

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 12/VI/96       Willis, Connie.  Remake: Short novel listed under Fiction, consciously using film-writing techniques.  **+

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE/JKuhr, 14 May 2003  X2 (variously spelled; vt X-2: X-Men United, X-Men 2 [2002; USA: working title]).  Bryan Singer, dir., co-story, exec. prod.  Daniel P. Harris, script; David Hayter, Zak Penn, Singer, story.  (See for source X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills [1982], by Chris Claremont [Brent Eric Anderson, illus.].  See IMDb or other sources for additional information on complex writing credits, but note crediting of Stan Lee [also exec. prod.])  USA: Ames Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, XM2 Productions, Donner/Schuler-Donner Productions, Marvel Entertainment (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (US and non-Russian dist.), 2003.  Guy Dyas, prod. design.  Louise Mingenbach, costume design.  Filmographic information from IMDb.  **+Of interest for Modernist vs. postmodernist/Industrial esthetics.  Note Magneto's hyper-Modernist plastic prison (from the first X-Men Film (2000).  More importantly, note Professor Charles Xavier's telepathic-contact chamber, both in its original form and in the reproduction ordered up by the villainous General William Stryker.  Parallel to the telepathic-contact chambers, note the very funky cyborg Jason 143 and the seductive illusion of him as Little Girl 143.  Telepathic and empathic contact is done in an appropriately surreal mode, but the physical chambers are respectively Modernist in a mostly modern (underground?) setting in their legitimate form and postmodernist/Industrial in a highly Industrial underground setting in the reproduction.  In the reproduction the illusion of the chamber is Modernist, while the reality is not.  Similarly, the illusionist constructed and controlled by Stryker, Jason 143 (Stryker's mutant son), is horrific and Industrial, while the illusion of Little Girl 143 is smooth and cute: someone more appropriate in a 19th-c. sentimental drama perhaps, but who can pass as a Modern child.  Cf. and contrast Star-Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Pod-infant in The Matrix (both listed in this section). 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 15/I/94          THE X-FILES (TV title all capitals, with a circle around the "X").  Fox-TV.  Chris Carter, creator and exec. prod.  David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, stars.  Ten Thirteen Productions, in association with 20th C. Fox, 1993-98.  (c) held by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 21/II/98         UNDER X-FILES: ÒFirst Person Shooter.Ó The X-Files.  Fox-TV.  27 Feb. 2000.  Chris Carter, dir., exec. prod.  William Gibson and Tom Maddox, script.  (Partial source, ÒTiny DancerÓ web site www.fandom.com/x-files/Editorial.  [The official site can be reached through www.fox.com.  To aid searches, try Ò7.13Ó: for 13th show of the 7th season.])**¢+  Female programer, fed up with the males around her, develops a female warrior program on her computer; the warrior somehow Òimputs herselfÓ into into a VR combat game and starts killing men.  In addition to the motif of humans inside a VR game, see for Mulder and Skully very uncharacteristically in cyberpunk ÒRoad WarriorÓ mode (our characterization of the costuming and acting).  For opening shots of the VR game and the monitoring thereof, cf. Aliens, Westworld, Futureworld (this section); see also Gibson and MaddoxÕs ÒKill SwitchÓ episode, this section.

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 21/II/98         "Kill Switch."  The X-Files.  Fox-TV.  15 Feb. 1998.  Rob Bowman, dir., prod. (one of several).  William Gibson and Tom Maddox, script.  **¢+Premised on the evolution of AI in "ur-slime and silicon," i.e., our own primitive cyberspace, yielding "articifial life."  The AI is not a characterized character (unlike Wintermute-Neuromancer in Gibson's Neuromancer [q.v. under Fiction]), but it is the antagonist as Mulder and Skully, and Esther, an unclawed razorgirl (so to speak) and computer expert try to upload the kill switch to destroy the AI.  Features small threatening machine, Mulder trapped in a VR device (and in a VR nightmare with dismemberment visions as torture), and a cyberpunk love story of lovers' memories and consciousnesses uploaded into cyberspace, apparently via the AI (cf. and contrast romantic-comic ending of Gibson's Monda Lisa Overdrive, listed under Fiction).  Note superimposition of the threatening cybernetic upon Mulder, compared and contrasted with the apotheosis of Esther and her lover through the same devices.  Also note creation of mini postmodern wastelands through SpFx of particle-beams controlled by the AI.  Final lines: "Electrons chasing each other through a circuit—that isn't life, Mulder," Skully says; Mulder thinks we may be electrical impulses moving through "a bag of meat and bones"; Esther's message back to the meat humans: "BITE ME."

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 20/VI/98       X Files: Fight the Future, The.  Rob Bowman, dir. 

USA: 20th Century Fox (prod. and dist.) / Ten Thirteen Productions, 1998.  Frank Spotnitz, story, co-prod., and Chris Carter, story and prod.  David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, featured players.  **+Special Agent Fox Mulder's search for Special Agent Dana Scully leads him to a descent under the Antarctic surface into what turns out to be a giant alien spacecraft, where he finds Scully and others in greenish, liquid-filled, fogged but transparent tubes, where they are incubating aliens, in the manner of hosts for ichneumon wasps or, Aliens.  Scully in the tube contains alien "viruses" while she is contained in the life-support system which is in turn contained within the mechanical and electronic environment of a very po-mo ship.  Cf. descent in R. A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (listed under Fiction) and more generally; cf. descent motif and what we might call "the ichneumon theme" in Alien and Aliens (this section). 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE, 05/VIII/95     "The Erlenmeyer Flask."  The X-Files.  15 May 1994.  Fox-TV.  R. W. Goodwin, dir.  Chris Carter, script.  **+Note imagery of "a warehouse full of glowing, womblike tanks and the hybrids floating within": the hybrids are humans injected with alien DNA.  "Deep Throat" says there are five hybrids.  Cf. and contrast hanging bodies in Coma (cited in this section).  Cited and summarized in Cinefantastique 26.6/27.1 (Oct. 1995): 58, with a picture.  ONLY THE WAREHOUSE SHOT IS RELEVANT. 

 

 

5. DRAMA, RDE, 14/I/94          "Ghost in the Machine."  The X-Files.  Fox-TV.  29 Oct. 1993, 14 Jan. 1994.  Jerrold Freedman, dir.  Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, script.  **¢+The AI "Central Operating System" of a building turns murderous.  The machine is outplayed and defeated by the two starring FBI agents on the X-files, and by the COS's creator (who creates a virus to kill it).  Raises explicitly what we'll call "the Oppenheimer Question" (after J. Robert Oppenheimer): What are the responsibilities of scientists who develop technologies that can be used by their governments for destruction?  Note X-Files's sympathy with such individuals against the US government.  Note also the episode title (see R. Descartes entry under Background), images of entrapment within a huge machine, and X-File staffers vs. the Government.  Cf. and contrast "death"—possibly temporary—of COS with the "death" of HAL 9000 in 2001 and of the Terminator in Terminator (listed in this section).  Summarized in Cinefantastique 26.6/27.1 (Oct. 1995): 26. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, Joe Kuhr/RDE, 20/VIII/00  "Zeta."  Episode on Batman Beyond (vt Batman Tomorrow [USA working], Batman of the Future [English title in Europe]).  Robert Goodman, script.  Warner Bros. TV (prod. and dist.).  Batman Beyond Premiered 10 Jan. 1999.  "ZETA" DATE: _____ **+Zeta is "an advanced tactical synthoid [É]" built by the government of 2050 "for deep cover ops: Replace, interrogate . . . dispose" of enemies of the State.  Using its own voice, Zeta is gendered male, and the plot moves Zeta from an it to a him.  Zeta has a strong frame, "a full array of weapons and tools," and, most importantly, "A holographic emitter on board" that "conceals the rig, while enabling Zeta to mimic its targets."  Like Alpha One of The Flash, RoboCop, The Iron Giant, the reprogrammed Terminator of T-2 (q.v. above)—and a long tradition of reluctant or repentant killers—Zeta rebels: "I do not wish to destroy any more."  With help from Batman and Max, Zeta (for now) gets his freedom, including as much free will as humans have in resisting, adapting, and going beyond his programming.  Note image of Zeta in a high-tech factory: machinery surrounding a different sort of machine. 

 

 

5.  DRAMA, RDE/Joe Kuhr, 20/VIII/00  Zeta.  Warner Bros. Animation.  Robert Goodman, pilot script.  **+Spin-off from "Zeta" episode of Batman Beyond (q.v. above).  A slightly <<kinder, gentler>> Zeta here, aided by Ro—a street-wise girl—and pursued by government agents.  Pilot sets up a quest for Zeta: "Who did program you?  That's who you need to see" for some authority to Zeta's assertion that he "could be peaceful." 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, TW, 13/I/95        Abbott, Joe.  "The 'Monster' Reconsidered: Blade Runner's Replicant as Romantic Hero."  Extrapolation 34.4 (1993): 340-50.  **¢+Compares Blade Runner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as texts that address "the issue of artificially created life" (340).  Argues that Shelley's novel presents a moral about the dangers of human inquiry and knowledge that Ridley Scott's film questions.  Scott suggest through the film's conclusion that "human" and "android" are not mutually exclusive terms, for they have more to do with spirits than mechanics.   See Blade Runner under Drama. 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 10/I/93       ADD TO KERMAN, JUDITH, ED. RETROFITTING BLADERUNNER: Rev. Richard D. Erlich, Extrapolation 33.4 (Winter 1992): 370-73; Stef Lewwicki, Foundation #55 (Summer 1992): 112-13. 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 10/I/93       ADD TO PENLEY, CONSTANCE ET AL., ED., CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: FILM, FEMINISM, AND SCIENCE FICTION: Rev. Richard D. Erlich, Extrapolation 33.3 (Fall 1992): 284-89. 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, 27/II/93   Altman, Mark A. et al. "Babylon 5: Star Trek's TV Challenger."  Series of articles for cover-story in Cinefantastique 23.5 (Feb. 1993): 17 f.  **¢+Detailed information of the production of a show very like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Babylon 5 was scheduled to premiere Feb. of 1993 (which, if it did, we missed). 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, 9/IX/92    Altman, Mark A. et al. "Star Trek—The Next Generation."  Series of articles, plus Episode Guide (q.v. under Reference Works) for cover-story in Cinefantastique 23.2/3 (Oct. 1992): 32 f.  **¢+Covers the 26 episodes from 23 September 1991 to 15 June 1992. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Joe Kuhr/RDE, 20/VIII/00           Artificial Humans in the Cinema.  A film series from the Film Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  19 May-21 June 2000.  "[D]erived from a major millennial retrospective presented at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2000" and "programmed by Ian Birnie in collaboration with Wolfgang Jacobsen and Martin Koerber of the Filmmusuem Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek."  **+The series's goal was showing "films that exemplify the theme [É of] "Artificial Humans.  Manic Machines. Controlled Bodies."  According to their handout, "Underlying the thesis of the series are the two pillars of the artificial human genre: the mad scientist who challenges the natural order by playing god; and the utopian vision of a society populated by supermen whose superior strength and intelligence are machinelike in their 'perfection.'  Monster or robot?  Eugenics or electronics?  Whatever the means, the utopian dream gives birth to dystopia and paranoia—a machine that cannot be controlled, a society that cannot think or act freely, a monster that science can creat but cannot control."  Films shown include Der Golem (1920), Frankenstein (1931), Blade Runner, Metropolis, The Automatic Motorist, The Clockwork Heart, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Demon Seed, Terminator-2, RoboCop, Westworld (titles in small caps listed under Drama). 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 04/VI/02  Barnett, Chad P.  "Reviving Cyberpunk: (Re)Constructing the Subject and Mapping Cyberspace in the Wachowski Brothers' Film The Matrix."  Extrapolation 41 (Winter 2000):000-000.  **+ How do we map cyberspace and virtual landscape?  American love of postmodern aesthetic as seen in X Files, Truman Show, etc. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RFS, 27/IV/95    Broderick, Mick.  "Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster."  SFS #58 = 20.3$$ (Nov. 1992): 362-82.  **¢+Builds upon and argues against S. Sontag's 1965 Commentary essay "The Imagination of Disaster" (q.v., this section) that the dominant discursive motif in science fiction films about World War III is survival.  Sets up four categories for such films—Preparation for Nuclear War and Its Survival, Encounters with Post-Nuclear Extraterrestrials, Experiencing Nuclear War and Its Immediate Effects, and Survival Long After Nuclear Was.  By MB's count there are more than twice as many films in the fourth category than in the first three combined, leading him to conclude that filmmakers have, since Sontag's essay, grown even more "highly reactionary" in their advocacy and reinforcement of a symbolic order of the status quo" (000-00)$$.  See also in this section, P. Hall and R. Erlich's "Beyond Topeka and Thunderdome." 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 20/I/95      Booker, M. Keith.  Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide.  **¢+Part Four deals with 14 important dystopian plays, including K. Capek's R. U. R.  Part Five deals with 13 dystopian films, including Metropolis.  Cited and annotated under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 01/XI/94    Bukatman, Scott.  Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.  **¢+Discussion includes the films Videodrome, Blade Runner, RoboCop, Cronenberg's The Fly, Tron, and the Alien and Terminator series.  ". . . Bukatman's thesis [is] that one of the major causes of actual degeneration of the human subject is modern commercial and electronic images and spaces."  Rev. Norman Fisher, Extrapolation 35.3 (Fall 1994): 257-59, here quoting 259.  SB's TI also cited under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 04/VI/02    Casimir, Viviane.  "Data and Dick's Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier."  Extrapolation 38.4 (Winter 1997): 278-291.  **+ Examines relationship between machine and organism through "What is the living?"; constantly changing anthropomorphism; Star Trek and Blade Runner. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 01/XI/94    Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): Special Double-Issue (sic) on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine; also: Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek VII: Generations (in prod. at time of publication).  Sidebars in Dale Kutzera's "The End of a Golden Era / Star Trek: The Next Generation" give the "Episode Guide / 7th Season," which cite, summarize, and commente upon 1993-94 episodes. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 20/I/95      Cinefantastique 26.2 (Feb. 1995)**¢+Cover story on Star Trek VII: Generations, with additional coverage on Star Trek: Voyager and the various ST series generally. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Cooks, Robert.  "Retro Noir Future Noir: Body Heat, Blade Runner and Neo-Conservative Paranoia."  Film and Philosophy 1 (1994):105-10. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 02/VII/02   The Cyborg Handbook.  Chris Hables gray, ed.  Brighton, NY: Routledge, 1995.  **+ Cited and annotated under Background.  See for Judge Dredd, the Terminator movies, and other films with cyborgs. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 26/VI/04    Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination.  **+Cited under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 13/VII/00   Day, Dwayne A.  "It's Only a Movie: The Intelligence community can only wish it could do the things Hollywood shows it doing."  The Washington Post Weekly Edition 17.37 (10 July 2000): 23.  **+On capabilities of movie spy satellites as opposed to the ones in real life.  Handles Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), The Peacekeeper (1997), Shadow Conspiracy (1997), Enemy of the State (cited under Drama), The World Is Not Enough (1999). 

 

 

6.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Dean, Joan F.  "Between 2001 and Star Wars."  Journal of Popular Film and Television 7.1 (1978): AROUND KP. 36.  **¢+NEEDS ANNOTATION.  ALSO: SEE Journal of Popular Film and Television from 1971-date and list likely titles. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Deutelbaum, Marshall.  "Visual Memory/Visual Design: The Remembered Sign in Blade Runner."  Literature/Film Quarterly 17 (January 1986): 66-72. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Dever, Sean.  "Quick Cuts: Cinematic Cyberspace."  Cinefex 62 (June 1995): 17-18. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Neuromancer: More Secondary Sources," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Doll, Susan and Greg Faller.  "Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction."  Literature/Film Quarterly 14 (1986): 89-100. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Dresser, David." Blade Runner: Science Fiction and Transcendence." Literature/ Film Quarterly 13 (1985): 172-179. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 27/VI/02; Erlich, 15/VIII/02            Erlich, Rich[ard D.].  "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Bladerunner: Study Guide."  SFRA Review #240 (June 1999): 7-8. **+ Available through SFRA Archives, linked at <www.sfra.org>.  CHECK LINK WHEN IT'S UP (or hard copy).

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 04/IV/99    Ferguson, Kathy E., Gilad Ashkenazi, and Wendy Schultz.  "Gender Identity in Star Trek."  In Political Science Fiction.  Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, eds.  Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1997.  Ch. 13.  **+Starts with the premise that "Identity is about boundaries," with one of the boundaries investigated human/machine.  While Star Trek: The Next Generation "seems to be on hold when it comes to race . . . . the boundary between human and machine is frequently challenged" (221)—as with Mr. Data; note also comments on the Binars of "11001001" (227 [q.v. under Drama]). 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Fisher, William.  "Of Living Machines and Living-Machines: Blade Runner and the Terminal Genre."  New Literary History 20 (Autumn 1988): 187-98. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Harvey, Carol. "Blade Runner: Wake Up! Time to Die!"  Lan's Lantern 20 (July 1986):66, 68-70. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Kaveny, P.E.  "From Pessimism to Sentimentality: Do Androids Dream É becomes Blade Runner."  **+Cited under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 02/VII/02   Kinyon, Kamila.  "The Phenomenology of Robots: Confrontations with Death in Karel Capek's R.U.R."  SFS #79, 26.3 (November 1999):379-400.  **+ Looks at R.U.R. and Hegel's Phenomenolgy of Mind to understand factors responsible for the development of independent self-consciousness in R.U.R.'s robots—factors which Kinyon posits.  (R.U.R. cited under Drama.)

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 31/V/03, 1/VI/03   Klawans, Stuart.  "Medium Cool: The Matrix Reloaded."  Rev. The Nation 276.22 (9 June 2003): 43-45.  **+Good analysis for The Matrix and "The Matrix Condition" (Erlich's formulation): the Matrix world as "a deadly boring dream," contained within "a nightmarish reality"—"the industrial horror of the real world"—with "a third, winning possibility: being cool," which SK sees defined in The Matrix as "a matter of this crossing over, shucking both the agonies of creatural life and the time-killing day-dreams of social routine."  SK misleads somewhat in describing the "stereoscopic freeze" effect as "a 180-degree pan around [É moving characters] stopped motionless in midair": the effect is most impressive as what appears to be (but is not literally) an arc-shot, or crane-shot, swinging around the characters for less—as may be the case in the Gap's "Khaki Swings" commercial—or more than 180 degrees, up to a complete circle (43); the effect may also include slow motion.  SK is right on, however, in interpreting the significance of the effect as "a computer simulation of utterly free movement, achieved within the fiction of a neurodigital prison.  Like the characters' leather-clad, sunglass-guarded detachment, the stereoscopic freeze boldly dramatized the state of being neither inside nor outside a situation—more specifically, of being able to employ a technology while owing nothing to its principal controllers."  SK finds this "an untenable fantasy," not examined until Matrix Reloaded, where the examination yields impressive claustrophobic images but not very useful results.  For a description of the stereoscopic freeze process, and illustrations, see <http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Features/space_and_time_separated.htm>.

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 01/XI/94    Kutzer, Dale.  "Episode Guide / 7th Season" for Star Trek: The Next Generation 1993-94.  Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 47 f. 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 28/III/93     Landon, Brooks.  The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production.  Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.  Rev. Andrew Gordon, SFS #59, 20.1 (March 1993): 121-23. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 27/VI/02    Landon, Brooks.  "Bodies in Cyberspace."  Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12.2: 201-212.  **+Claims that the new SF film genre, "post-SF film," is composed of production technologies and techniques that may be more important than the narratives actually presented.  Questions the ontological status, specifically disembodiment, of bodies in cyberspace. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 01/XI/94    Layton, David.  "Closed Circuits and Monitored Lives: Television as Power in Doctor Who."  Extrapolation 35.3 (Fall 1994): 241-51.  **¢+"Hypothetically, any number of small electronic devices can be added to any television, particularly as they get more complicated and perform more functions, which can monitor visually or aurally anything happening within reception range and can keep track of telephone calls.  Two stories from the television show Doctor Who explore" these possibilities of TV ([241]).  The first episode is "Revelation of the Daleks"—a "look into the posssibilities of one-person control of audio-visual systems" at "how events and people can be manipulated and controlled by such systems," at "how electronis systems are destroying the realm of the private"; the second it "Vengeance on Varios," an examination of "the ways a government can use television to control the populace and subdue subversion and yet itself become slave to the audio-visual system (242-43). 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 02/III/96    Lloyd, Michele, author, ed., publisher.  "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," Parts 1 and 2.  **+Cited under Background. 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 09/III/93     Matheson. T. J.  "Marcuse, Ellul, and the Science Fiction Film: Negative Responses to Technology."  SFS #58, 19.2 (Nov. 1992): 326-39.  **¢+Applies to Alien, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Forbidden Planet the theories of Herbert Marcuse, esp. An Essay on Liberation, and Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (see films under Drama and theoretical works under Background); finds Alien the closest to the pessimism of Ellul, showing the end-point of "the process of technological rationalization" in "an entrenched state of totalitarianism" implicit in technological advance.  See for containment of the crew of the Nostromo "within a milieu totally dominated by a technology utterly indifferent to human welfare" (333).  Cites as optimistic about technology When Worlds Collide, Fantastic Voyage, The Andromeda Strain, 2001, The Black Hole, Heart Beeps (sic: two words in TJM), The Last Starfighter, Short Circuit, and the Back to the Future trilogy (337; notes 5 and 6, following H. Bruce Franklin in 6).  See above under Drama the films listed, and Franklin's "Don't Look . . ." essay in this section. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RFS, 27/IV/95    Matheson, T. J. " Triumphant Technology and Minimal Man: The Technological Society, Science Fiction Films, and Ridley Scott's Alien."  Extrapolation 33.3$$ (Fall 1992): 215-29.  **¢+

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 10/I/93       Matheson, T. J.  "Triumphant Technology and Minimal Man: The Technological Society, Science Fiction Films, and Ridley Scott's Alien."  Extrapolation 33.3 (Fall 1992): [215]-229.  **¢+Mentions a number of films from Metropolis through 2001 and on to the Star Wars saga, but mainly a humanistic close reading of Alien (q.v. under Drama), relating the film to J. Ellul's The Technological Society (q.v. under Background).  Argues that there is no fundamentally affirming and positive attitude in Alien, a case also made, Matheson notes, in J. O., Telotte's "Human Artifice and the Science Fiction Film" (Film Quarterly 36 [1983]: 4-51).  Alien's characters, taken together, illustrate Ellul's basic theme that "the technological milieu absorbs the natural."  TJM sees Alien and Ellul suggesting that technology is an amoral source of problems, and not ultimately an uplifting source of solutions.  TJM concludes that Alien can be read "as an extensive delineation in cinema of the major concerns encountered in The Technological Society.  Both works contain telling analyses of the degree to which technology has undermined man's belief in the importance of his humanity" (227).  Comments usefully on the high-tech mise en scne and Ripley's search for Jones, the ship's cat; offers interesting speculation on just why the Company would want the Alien, and why the Nostromo would have a self-destruct mechanism.  Caution: The essays is both ingenious and overly brief in interpreting the burial in space of Kane (223), and the notes are a little misleading on the nature of CW (118). 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 14/V/04     The Matrix: The Shooting Script, by Larry and Andy Wachowski.  **+Cited under Drama. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 18/III/00                Melley, Timothy.  Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America.  Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2000.  **+Cited also under Fiction and Background.  See "Epilogue" (185-202) for the Cyberpunks and discussion of R. Scott's Blade Runner.  More generally, see for The Truman show (q.v.) and possible contexts for cinematic images of containment and the violation of bodily boundaries.  EoC is obviously useful for "paranoia" films such as Enemy of the State (q.v.) but also for comparing and contrasting a high-Modernist image of the autonomous, god-like (masculine) Self in the Star-Child at the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey with disturbing images of the invaded, cyborg-ized infants in the Matrix and the "Q—Who?" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Also relevant for images of invasion by images and sound with Alex in the screening room sequence in a Clockwork Orange, and the more literal(ized) invasions in Videodrome (all listed under Drama). 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 28/II/93      Meyer, David S.  "Star Wars, Star Wars, and American Political Culture."  JPC 26.2 (Fall 1992): 99-115.  **¢+Contrasts the confidence in massive technology underlying the "Star Wars" idea of Ronald Reagan et al. ("the Strategic Defense Initiative") with the way the Star Wars films (q.v under Drama) "explicitly and implicitly criticize faith in technology at every possible turn (106 f., quoting 106).  Excellent comments on Luke Skywalker's Rotwangian black mechanical hand (110, 112; see under Drama, Dr. Strangelove and Metropolis), the "essential funkiness" of The Millenium Falcon (107), the significance of the Ewoks' primitive weaponry (107-8), and how Luke fights with weapons progressively lower in technological sophistication, finally "triumphing by not fighting" (113). 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Morrison, Rachela.  "Casablanca Meets Star Wars: The Blakean Dialects of Blade Runner."  Literature/Film Quarterly 18 (1990): 2-10. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 29/I/95      Montesano, Anthony P.  "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Mnemonic Design."  Cinefantastique 26.3 (April 1995):44-[47].  **¢+Pre-release coverage of TriStar Picture/Alliance production of Johnny Mnemonic, dir. Robert Longo, from the story by William Gibson, q.v. under Drama and Fiction. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 31/V/99     Morton, Oliver.  "In Pursuit of Infinity."  For a discussion of the Star Wars saga, see under Background.

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Neale, Stephen.  "Issues of Difference: Alien and Blade Runner."  Fantasy and the Cinema.  James Donald, ed.  London: BFI Publishing, 1989: 213-23. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 10/X/00     Nelson, Thomas Allen.  Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1982.  Expanded edn. (adding coverage of Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut) in 2000.  **+Includes discussions of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange; note esp. Nelson on the "emerging 'machinarchy'" in Strangelove and 2001 (95-96 in ch. 4 on Dr. S, and ch. 5, on 2001). 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 29/I/95      Rayner, Alice.  "Techno-Monsters: On the Edge of Humanity."  Stanford Magazine.  00.00 (Dec. 1994): 47-51.  **¢+"The fictional creations of a society often reflect its deepest fears and concerns.  Contemporary science fiction examines the changing boundaries between man and machine and reflects the volatile nature of that love/hate relationship.  How is man changed by this interface with machine, and how much can we shape machines to make them human?  These questions define our fundamental ideas about what it is to be human" (headnote).  Handles passim the Luddites, everyday technology that surrounds us, new technology impinging upon us; plus, among other works, 2001, the Borg episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ambrose ParŽ's Des Monstres et Prodiges (16th c.) and its warnings against transgressing boundaries, esp.transgressing species boundaries between human and animal, Metropolis, Martin Heidegger on the technological "'essence' of the human,"Capek's R. U. R., Greg Bear's book Queen of Angels, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and "The Measure of a Man" episode of STNG in which Data's humanity is judged.  Concludes that "The best of science fiction challenges us to find the humanity in the machine and the machine in humanity" (51).

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 29/I/95      Rayner, Alice.  "Cyborgs and Replicants: On the Boundaries."  Discourse: Twentieth-Century Studies in Media and Culture Spring 1994.  **¢+"NEED A CITATION FOR THIS ONE.

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Rudas, Michael.  "Blade Runner: Androids vs. Blade Runner: The Intellect of Mechanism or the Mechanism of Intellect?"  Lan's Lantern 20 (July 1986): 66, 71-72.  **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Ruppert, Peter.  "Blade Runner: Utopian Dialects of Science Fiction Films."  Cineaste 17.2 (1989): 8-13.  **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Senior, Bill.  "Blade Runner and Cyberpunk Visions of Humanity." Film Criticism 21 (Fall 1996): 1-12.  **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6. DRM CRT, RDE, 28/III/93     Scobie, Stephen.  "What's the Story, Mother?: The Mourning of the Alien."  SFS #59, 20.1 (March 1993): 80-93.  **¢+On monstrous birth, survivor's guilt, and The Mother in the Alien series, but little directly on the human/machine interface; see, though, for Dallas's entry, by means of "inserting a phallic key in[to] a lock," into the "womb-shaped" room where Nostromo's commanding officer may contact "Mother," the computer (83).  See also for a cogent defense of Alien 3 and for a reading of Alien as slasher film (following Carol J. Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992)—and for sex and reproduction more generally in the Alien series, with relationships to mechanism SS doesn't stress.  See under Drama, Alien and Aliens. 

 

 

6.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Shaheen, Jack G., ed.  Nuclear War Films.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP; London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1978.  **¢+Includes an essay by George W. Linden on Dr. Strangelove, q.v. under Drama.

 

 

6  DramaCrit, Maly, 02/VII/02    Silvio, Carl.  "Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in Shell."  SFS #77, 26.1 (March 1999): 54-72.  **+ The film promotes the radical cyborg, and while at first it may seem subversive to gender dynamics, Silvio argues, Ghost in Shell inherently reinscribes them.

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Slade, Joseph W.  "Romanticizing Cybernetics in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner."  Literature/Film Quarterly 18 (1990): 11-18.  *+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 27/VI/02    Telotte, J.P.  "Enframing the Self: The Hardware and Software of Hardware."   SFS #67, 22.3 (Nov. 1995): 323-332.  **+Stanley's Hardware echoes Terminator movies, Robocop, Blade Runner, but also uniquely questions our software (vs. hardware) as dream capability offering distance and detachment from reality. 

 

 

6.  DRM CRT, RDE, 09/XI/94    Telotte, J. P.  "The Terminator, Terminatory 2 and the Exposed Body."  Journal of Popular Film and Television.  20.2 (Summer 1992): around 27-30. 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, Maly, 01/VII/02   Van Hise, James.  "Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner."  Starlog 55 (Feb. 1982): 19-22. **+ Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner: Bibliographies," q.v. under Reference. 

 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 27/V/02        Adams, Scott.  "Dilbert" comic strip, syndicated: 9 May 2002.  **¢+Ashok the intern complains that his training CD "is brainwashing me to become a cyborg; last panel shows him 3/4-face from the groin up, approximately 1/4 cyborg (in the fashion of the 'Borg on ST:NG).  Archived (at least for a while) at <www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20020509.html>.

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 27/V/02        Adams, Scott.  "Dilbert" comic strip, syndicated: Sunday, 26 May 2002.  **¢+The employment agreement at Dilbert's firm requires resigning employees "to not take away knowledge or skills your acquired on the job"; since the employee can't naturally "stop knowing what I learned," a technological fix is required; and Human Resources has a machine that sucks out the employee's technical knowledge and even verbal skills—leaving him with a very small head.  Archived (at least for a while) at <www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20020526.html>

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 12/VII/03      ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show—ArtBots Take Manhattan.  12-13 July 2003 at EYEBEAM Gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea art district. **¢+From the media release by Douglas Irving Repetto (artbots@artbots.org): "Featuring the work of 23 artists and groups from six countries, the show is a hybrid combining aspects of both a juried art exhibition and a traditional talent show.  Participants include robots that draw, paint, sculpt, sing, dance, and play musical instruments, as well as many with talents that are a bit harder to pin down; you might call them robotic sculpture or even cybernetic performance artists!"  The show eschews VR, according to co-curator Philip Galanter, showing the work of artists who have "chosen to explore alternate realities, and alternate creatures, by creating them right here in the physical world."  Repetto notes that "The application of robotics to the arts raises interesting questions about things like authorship, responsibility, intentionality, and even consciousness [É].  The technology being used by many artists today is no different from the technology being used to build robotic companions for the elderly, automated security systems, or self-guided missiles.  As is often the case, artists are at the forefront of these technological and social developments [É]."  Includes the "Semi-living Artist" combining rat neurons with a robot arm (see under Background: B. Keefe).  As of July 2003, Repetto's release was on-line at <http://artbots.org/2003/pressinfo.shtml>.

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/V/01        Auth, Tony.  "Today's Auth Cartoon."  The Philadelphia Inquirer 2 May 2001: <http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/05/02/art/AUTH0502.htm>.  **¢+Editorial cartoon in one panel, showing a flower in a small test-tube flower holder, with the flower labeled "Conservation has its place."  The flower is on the dashboard of, and visually overpowered by, a large construction/destruction vehicle is labeled "Bush Energy Policy."  The vehicle is a very ungainly variation on the form of a Caterpillar tracked and wheeled vehicle and produces smoke.  Moving from back to front (left to right as viewed) the vehicle has a large colter (?) blade that can go into the earth, a cement mixer, a drilling device that looks like a long snaggle tooth (with the tooth hanging over the front), a plow, and two earth-gouging and lifting devices that look like the jaws of a large and small T. rex. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Ballerini, Julie.  "Venus and the Stocking Machines."  Art in America, April 1983: 154f.[-60???]

 

 

7.  GRAPH, DDB, 23/I/95         Batman comics series, 1994.  **¢+After the defeat of Bruce Wayne/Batman by a seroidal hulk, "Bane," the Batman mantle is handed on to a new character, Azrael, who grows increasingly psychotic as the series continues.  Relevant here, Azrael augments the traditional Batman regalia with mechanistic (and sharp) high-tech armor. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, DDB, 23/I/95         "Broadcast Storm."  Iron Man 1.301 (Feb. 1994).  Marvel Comics.  Stan Lee, publ.  **¢+Major setting: Cyberspace.  Very realistic hacker jargon.  Features a cyberpunkish "run" in the manner of Neuromancer and a battle of the cyborgs, then a cyborg alliance. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Bennet, Gregory.  The New Art.

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 23/VIII/03     Burtynsky, Edward: Catalog of photographs selected for National Gallery of Canada exhibition.  Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky.  With essays by Lori Pauli, Kenneth Baker, Mark Haworth-Booth.  National Gallery of Canada in Association with Yale UP, New Haven, CT, 2003.  **¢+Rev. Rebecca Solnit.  "Creative Destruction," in Books & the Arts Section.  The Nation 277.6 (13 August 2003): 33-36.  (Also nicely rev. Melville McLean from Newcastle, ME, on Amazon.com page for the catalog [URL too complex and ephemeral to paste here].)  According to Solnit, "Edward Burtysnsky's photographs are large, colorful and mostly ravishing, despite their subjects.  They show seldom-seen industrial landscapes, the places from which resources come to us and to which they go when we're done with them: mines, oilfields, refineries, quarries, dumps"—documenting the effect of modern technology on the landscape, ecosystems, and the planet (33).  See Solnit for EB and EB's place in a tradition of environmentally charged landscape photography. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Cowling, Elizabeth.  The Magic Mirror: Dada and Surrealism from a private collection (sic: capitalization).  UK: Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, 1988.  "Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Magic Mirror: Dada and Surrealism from a private collection 30 July-4 September 1988 at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh."  **¢+This catalog includes photos and descriptions of M. Duchamp's Bo”te-en-valise, E. Paolozzi's Untitled 1951-63 (one collage), F. Picabia's Fille nŽe sans mre, and Y. Tanguy's Cadavre exquis, 1938—all listed in this section under artists' names.  See in our Keyword Index the listings for "Dada." 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 21/I/96         Danto, Arthur C.  "Constantin Brancusi.  Art column, The Nation 262.3 (22 Jan. 1996): 30-34.**¢+ACD opens with "a defining anecdote of Modernist art, almost too mythically perfect to be true": Fernand LŽger (or so LŽger says), Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brancusi went to "a Salon of Aviation in Paris in 1912," and Duchamp walked around in silence.  "Suddenly he turned to Brancusi: 'Painting has come to an end.  Who can do anything better than this propeller.  Can you?" (30; sic on period after "propeller").  ACD goes on to argue that "If Duchamp saw in the propeller the embodiment of scientific truth in pitched blades, LŽger saw it as an emblem of the aesthetics of the machine." In 1924 LŽger "stated that 'the manufactured object ... clean and precise, beautiful in itself ... is the most terrible competition the artist has ever been subjected to.'  For him the machine was the paradigm of what painting should be" (31; unspaced dots represent ellipses in original). 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 02/VII/98      Danto, Arthur C.  "Fernand LŽger."  Under Art, The Nation 255.14 (20 April 1998): 33-35.  **¢+ACD asserts that LŽger presented a "call to order" in his works after World War I, but not an order that was nostalgic and patriotic—nor one showing a France that was traditionally charming.  "He created, rather, a world charming in its spotless modernity.  It was a landscape of mechanical order, in which objects looked like Art Deco representations of themselves.  It was a world in which, for example, the ocean liner Normandie [sic: no italics] would entirely resemble its airbrushed posters.  LŽger's world is one in which everything is sleek and polished the way machines have to be to work, as frictionlessly as possible."  So in the 1920s LŽger "created a France, at once machine-age and eternal, in which boneless men and women went imperturbably about the basic tasks of life, as in a kind of ballet," arguably a Ballet mŽchanique, which ACD alludes to earlier on the page (see Drama for LŽger's Ballet).  ACD sees LŽger's cityscapes belonging to "the same genre of imaginary places as Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  The pictures make you feel good just to look at them.  Collectively, they compose the landscape of life as good to live," for what we see as a very optimistic view of the mechanical world (35). 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 03/VI/96       Danto, Arthur C.  "TV and Video."  The Nation 261.7 (11 Sept. 1996): 248-53.  **¢+On video art in two senses: (1) "a flourishing branch in the visual arts that consists in [sic] the modification of tapes and discs, transduced into images on the television monitor through the mediation of the VCR"; and (2) "a collection of objects on the order of sculptures and installations in which video images are focal."  In the second sense "The television set itself can be regarded as a kind of sculpture . . .—a three-dimensional cube with a flickering face—but in a great many examples of video sculpture the television set has largely disappeared, and the images, liberated from the cube, attach themselves to objects that convey meanings other than those associated with the familiar purveyor of home entertainment" (248).  Essay handles among other artists and works, Nam June Paik, esp. his Electronic Superhighway; "the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss"; Bill Viola's Stations (249-50) and Slowly Turning Narrative; and Gary Hill's Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place (252). 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Danto, Ginger.  "Pascal Kern."  Art News, Feb. 1989: 84.  **¢+Machinery in art at Galerie Zabriskie, Paris.???

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 16/V/02        Delainey & Rasmussen (sic: just the two lat [?] names).  "Betty" comic strip by Delainey & Rasmussen.  8-11 May 2002, 13 May f.  © NEA, Inc.  <www.comics.com/comics/betty/archive/betty>.  **¢+Pup-X—"He's an electronic dog" in a comic-strip world approximately equivalent to ours—goes missing and in search of adventures, including dialogs with an outdated supercomputer and with a parking meter. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 11/V/94—TO DRESBACH, 12/V/94   Dreamquests: The Art of Don Maitz.  Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller, 1993.  Ray Feist, Introd.  Don Maitz, Foreword.  Janny Wurts, Afterword.  **¢+Coll. SF and Fantasy art by Don Maitz, plus the brief introd., foreword, and afterword listed, and an "Artwork Glossary" at the end, giving the works' titles, media, and minimal publication data.  Relevant works (with page numbers)—annotated under titles: Balance of Power (34), Big Sun of Mercury, The (84), Catchworld (81), Cyteen II (90), Cyteen III (91), E.S.P. Worm (73), Empire Fleet Transport (83), Escape from Below (4), Heavy Time (88), Hellburner (87), The Hot Sleep (79), The Island of Dr. Death (74-75), Night Raid (86), Over the Clouds (92-93), Return to Doomstar (76), Rimrunners (89), Soldiers of Paradise (25), Spaced Man (85).

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Duchamp, Marcel.  Bo”te-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase), 1935-41.  Mary Sisler Collection, New York.  Pictured no. 19, third  plate between pp. 48 and 49, described p. 22, in E. Cowling, q.v. this section.  **¢+The items in this "portable museum" include at least three with clearly mechanical themes.  See in our Keyword Index the listings for "Dada." 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Duchamp, Marcel.  Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912.  Philadelphia Museum of Art.  **¢+Robert Lebel, in his article on MD in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia, 1974, juxtaposes to a photograph of Nude a multiple-exposure photo of MD descending a staircase, visually demonstrating Nude's presentation in Cubist style of, precisely, a multiple-exposure photograph of a humanoid form descending a staircase.  Lebel notes, ". . . there is no nude at all but only a descending machine, a nonobjective and virtually cinematic effect that was entirely new in painting" (5.1079).  Viewers in our time will probably see the form as robotic and feminine: cf. and contrast the robot that becomes Maria in F. Lang's Metropolis (q.v. under Drama).  See in our Keyword Index the listings for "Dada." 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 09/I/94          Escher, M[auritis] C.  Depth, 1955.  "Wood engraving and woodcut in brown-red, gray-green and dark brown, printed from three blocks, 125/8 x 9 in" quoting Patterns & Puzzles: M.C. Escher 1993 Calendar.   Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Calendars & Books, 1992.  (c) 1992 M.C. Escher/Gordon Art, Baarn, Holland.  From the collection of Michael S. Sachs, Westport, CT.  **¢+Array of fish that look somewhat like submarines or zeppelins. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, DDB, 23/I/95         Doom's IV 1.1 (1994).  *¢+Features "Doom's Corp.'s blood-bots": pumped-up, heavily armed, humanoid robots with the personality of Daleks (for Daleks, see Dr. Who). 

 

 

7.  Graphics; RDE, 04/VIII94    Frank and Ernest for 24 July 1994.  **+Sunday comic strip.  Frank and Ernest are copied, sent through a FAX machine and finally wind up in a shredder.  Note visual pun of Frank and Ernest as lumps in the wire during FAX transmission; note superimpositon of the mechanical and electronic upon the graphic. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Gartel, Lawrence.  A Cybernetic Romance.  CITY: Peregrine Books, 1989.

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 02/II/96        Giger, H. R.  Early 1990s.  In Giger's possession, with Giger owning the rights to the 3-D model itself: scheduled for use in Giger's film The Mystery of San Gottardo, and pictured in a book of the film scheduled to be published in 1996.  **¢+Described by Les Paul Robley as a "20-foot-long, five zoll (sic), fully working model" of a train of Giger's dreams, "whose teeth, vacuum hoses and tongues all functioned by way of rotating cams attached to the wheels" ([40]).  Long planned, Giger executed this model for a proposed nightmare sequence in the film Species (1995); it was not used.  Note the train as another of Giger's biomechanical art objects, in this case combining a classic modernist locomotive with unmistakable tusks and teeth, and suggestions of exposed brain and intestines, plus Giger's Alien design (q.v. this section; see under Drama Alien and Aliens).  One shot was made, having the train "chasing young Sil," the alien creature in the form of a girl, played by Michelle Williams.  See Les Paul Robley, "Ghost Train Nightmare," Cinefantastique 27.7 (March 1996): [39]-41, our source for this entry.  The image of the train "chasing" the apparent girl images a biomechanical threat to the humanoid and, apparently, vulnerable. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 08/I/93         Giraud, Jean.   **¢+Said to have produced "densely layered mechano-fantasies" (Donald Albrecht, "'Blade Runner Cuts Deep Into American Culture."  The New York Times Sunday, 20 Sept. 1992: H-19. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, SpenceC, SumukhT, JeffV: 07/IV/04         Gizmo Duck (also GizmoDuck and Gizmoduck).  "The Littlest Gizmo-Duck" (KZ0890).  Disney's Cartoon Tales: DuckTales.  W.D. Publications 1992.  Disney's Colossal Comics Collection #5 (1992).  Various issues, Disney Adventures Magazine.  DarkWing Duck story "Just Us Justice Ducks" (KJL010-1).  Source: <http://users.cwnet.com/xephyr/rich/dzone/hoozoo/gizmo.html>.  **¢+Fenton P. Crackshell, mild-mannered accountant to Scrooge (also $crooge) McDuck, can pronounce the phrase "Blatherin' Blatherskite!" and be turned into GizmoDuck, a relatively hesitant and ineffective superhero encased in armor developed by Gyro Gearloose and somewhat similar to powered armor worn by such non-ducks as the Mobile Infantry in R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and UNEF ground forces in J. Haldeman's Forever War (q.v. under Fiction).  Also compare and contrast the Green Goblin's exoskeleton in Spider-Man, Ellen Ripley in the loading machine at the end of Aliens, and RoboCop as armored cyborg in RoboCop (all listed under Drama).  Duck Tales also appeared as animated cartoons on TV, cited. under Drama. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Green, Christopher.  Leger and the Avant Garde.  New Haven: Yale U P, 1976 (produced in UK).

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Greenburg, Clement.  Modernist Painting.

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Guccione, Nina.  "Part By Numbers: Art of Ken and Bonni Evans."  Omni, June 1988: 72.

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Herman, John.  Our Changing Civilization.

 

 

7.  GRAPH, DDB, 23/I/95         Iron Man/War Machine comic series, 1990s.  **¢+See for powered armor; see under Fiction, R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and J. Haldeman's The Forever War. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 05/V/95        Isaac Asimov's Ultimate Robot.  Macintosh CD-ROM EDU 0662.  **¢+Video, essays and other items to help users "Discover the world of robots.  Learn how to build, animate, and print over 600 million variations" (Microsoft Home ad). 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/XI/01; Joe Kuhr, George Nicholas, 20/I/02          Justice League (vt "JL", "JLA", "Justice League of America"—USA promotional, abbreviated, and informal titles—IMDb).  Rich Fogel, script, one of four producers, series story editor (with Stan Berkowitz).  USA: Warner Brothers Television Animation.  Premiere 17 November 2001, Cartoon Network.  Andrea Romano, casting, voice direction.  Butch Lukic, Dan Riba, series dir.  "Based on DC Comics Characters," then individual credits for creation of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.  Kelly Ann Foley, dialog/ADR ed.  Sungman Huh et al, animation dir.  Namgil Cho et al., animation.  75 min.  **¢+The opening sequence of an astronaut on Mars with the name, we eventually learn, of J. Allen Carter alerts sophisticated viewers that there will be some allusions in this episode.  (Note the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs [published 1912-64], J. Allen St. John as a Burroughs illustrator, and the secret identities of the comic book Golden Age Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman: Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, Carter Hall).  Most of the allusions are just playful, but the invading Martian fighting machines are from H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds (q.v. under Fiction), and are in "dialog" visually with the manta-ray Martian warships of Byron Haskin and George Pal's The War of the Worlds (1953), the Imperial Walkers of The Empire Strikes Back, and the shadow-casting Imperium ship of Independence Day.  According to Joseph Kuhr—a colleague of the film-makers and a major source for this annotation—"there are" in addition "visual references to the film Starship Troopers" in the "arthropoidal pointy appendages on the ends of the legs of the alien tripods [= fighting machines]" (films listed under Drama).  Note that the heroes and general mise-en-scne are in 1940s/50s comic-book style, with hard edges and clear colors, while the shape-shifting invaders from Mars—conquerors of Mars, not Martians—their machines, and all things associated with them are amorphous and High Modernist.  CAUTION: Parents might want to tell kids viewing the show that advocating nuclear disarmament is not necessarily evidence that one is a shape-shifting agent of an alien power seeking to render Earth vulnerable to invasion. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Lieberman, XXXXXXXXX.  Art of the Twenties, and An America of Choice.

 

 

7.  GRAPH, DDB, 23/I/95         "Lightning Strike: The Fall of the Hammer," Part 3 of 5.  X-Men 2099 1.5 (Feb. 1994).  **¢+Loki, the Norse god of mischief, tells truth and reveals that ". . . it is not the blood of immortals that makes ever-vigilant Heimdall unbeatable—rather it is neurotechnology that heightens his perception and accelerates his responses—neurotechnology that can be turned off" (23).  Heimdall's neurotech is jammed, yielding the twilight of a mechanical god. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 21/XII/01, 26/XII/01 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).  Peter Jackson, dir., prod., part of script.  Frances Walsh (as Fran Walsh), Philippa Boyens, PJ, script, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.  Andrew Lesnie, cinematographer.  NZ/USA: New Line Cinema [US], The Saul Zaentz Company, WingNut Films [NZ] (prod.) / Distribution: complex, primarily New Line and Warner Bros. for the USA and Alliance Atlantis Communications for Canada.  First of three parts, one for each book of the trilogy.  Filmographic information from IMDb: <http://us.imdb.com/Details?0120737>, q.v. for complex credits for artistic design.  **¢+Epic fantasy.  See for images of the destruction of forest to build an underground armaments factory for swords and armor: a low-tech industrial wasteland with "dark, Satanic Mills" (William Blake, "Jerusalem").  The impression here and elsewhere in the film is in the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch's hellish visions and Pieter Bruegel's Dulle Griet and The Triumph of Death (as described under "Comedy" in EB3, 1974 [4.965]).  More generally, the images show the destruction of the Greenworld and its replacement by low-tech fabrications created for "orcs," who in appearance and the plot are a variety of literal demons. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Mabille, Pierre.  "Matta and the New Reality."  Horizon 117 (Sept. 1949): 184-90.

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 30/IV/94        MacNelley.  "Shoe."  Cartoon.  In syndication.  The Cincinatti Post 29 April 1994: 8C.  **¢+The computer warns an angry user, "It is not wise to threaten someone who has access to your checking account." 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Magic Mirror, The: Dada and Surrealism from a private collection (sic: capitalization).  **¢+See in this section, entry for Elizabeth Cowling. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Balance of Power.  In Dreamquests (34), q.v., this section.  **¢+Oil on canvas painting, 1978, for Brian Stableford's Balance of Power (DAW).  Note clock, with hearts on hands, in the center of the chest of the Harlequinesque single figure shown. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Big Sun of Mercury, The.  In Dreamquests (84), q.v., this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, 1977, for Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr & the Big Sun of Mercury (IA writing as Paul French [Fawcett]).  Spaceman in spacesuit fighting large, shiny robot: all looking very white, silvery-metallic, clean-cut, and modern. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Catchworld.  In Dreamquests (81), q.v., this section.  **¢+Oil/masonite, March 1993, for Chris Boyce's Catchworld (Fawcett).  Spacesuited male striding toward viewer with weapon (?) firing (?).  Note circularity of spacehelmet (in 2-D), faceplate, and ring for what may be the firing of the weapon. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Cyteen II.  In Dreamquests (90), q.v., this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, July 1988, for C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen II (Warner Books), q.v. under Fiction.  Note bracketing of young girl by an adult, male medic, an encircled fetus, and a baby in a high-tech device, with monitors attached.  BOOK NEEDS TO BE CITED

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Cyteen III.  In Dreamquests (91), q.v., this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, July 1988, for C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen III (Warner Books), q.v. under Fiction.  Old girl or young woman at computer station, with space in background and pet fish in high-tech aquarium to her right.  BOOK NEEDS TO BE CITED

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Empire Fleet Transport.  In Dreamquests (82-83), q.v., this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, 1977, for Alan Steele's Rude Astronauts (Johns Hopkins UP).  Thoroughly modern (if somewhat <<busy>>) spacecraft moving through space; note layered look of machines upon machines. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  E.S.P. Worm.  In Dreamquests (73), q.v., this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, Feb. 1986, for Piers Anthony's E.S.P. Worm (Tor).  Huge caterpillar-like creature juxtaposed to male and female human(oid)s in space suits, between a skull to viewer's left and insectoid machinery to viewer's right. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Escape from Below.  In Dreanquests (4), q.v., this section.  **¢+Oil/masonite, April 1989, for Eric von Lustbader's Sunset Warriors (Fawcet [Ballantine/Del Rey]).  High-tech knight ascending into open air.  Cf. and contrast E. M. Forster's Kuno in "The Machine Stops" (q.v. under Fiction), and G. Lucas's THX-1138 in THX-1138. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Heavy Time.  In Dreamquests (88), q.v., this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, Oct. 1990, for C. J. Cherryh's Heavy Time (Warner Books), q.v. under Fiction.  Funky human (male) pilot brought aboard a highly mechanized environment by two men in clean and modern spacesuits. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Hellburner.  In Dreamquests (87), q.v. this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, April 1992, for C. J. Cherryh's Hellburner (Warner Books), q.v. under Fiction.  Human pilot totally unclosed within mechanical and electronic (and cybernetic) device. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  The Hot Sleep.  In Dreamquests (79), q.v. this section.  **¢+Oil/masonite, Dec. 1982, for Orson Scott Card's The Worthington Chronicle (Berkley).  Human male under water, encased in a computer-controlled, partly transparent tube, like unto the casing for the transfer of ... whatever from the human Maria to the robot Maria in Metropolis, q.v. under Drama. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  The Island of Dr. Death.  In Dreamquests (74-75), q.v. this section.  **¢+Oil/masonite, Dec. 1979, for Gene Wolf's The Island of Dr. Death (Pocketbooks), q.v. under Fiction.  Feral boy with high-tech breathing apparatus and pointing his spear at the sun and between some large, mechano-insectoid thin things. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Night Raid.  In Dreamquests (86), q.v. this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, April 1981, for Stephen Goldin's Assault on the Gods (Fawcett).  Sky, rochs, and bird-like things surround two figures.  The male is barely visible, with just

his spherical spacehelmet showing; the female is stressed: space suited, heavily armed, with an automatic weapon that is both phallic and associated visually with her breasts. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Over the Clouds.  In Dreamquests (92-93), q.v. this section.  **¢+Oil/masonite, Dec. 1988, for Ray Bradbury's Classic Stories (Bantam).  Birdman (presumably a human and a male) heading toward what appears to be another dimension.  Superimposed on the human/bird body is a spacesuit and rocket pack (with artificial tail-wings.  Cf. and contrast rocketmen movies and the suits worn by the personified computer programs in TRON (see under Drama TRON and King of the Rocket Men). 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Return to Doomstar.  In Dreamquests (76), q.v. this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, March 1985, for Richard Meyer's Return to Doomstar (Warner Books).  Note juxtaposition of feline female humanoid, with what appears both tail and weapon, a cubistic male form, insects, what looks like a rabid punkish poodle with a funkier companion—and an upended spaceship with a 1930s look. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Rimrunners.  In Dreamquests (89), q.v. this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, July 1988, for C. J. Cherryh's Rimrunners (Warner Books).  The rim is shown run by a woman, inside a very high-tech environment, similar to the mechanized (etc.) environments in 2001 and Andromeda Strain, q.v. under Drama. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Soldiers of Paradise.  In Dreamquests (25), q.v. this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, Jan. 1988, for Paul Park's Soldiers of Paradise (Arbor).  Foreground shows a wasteland with a postRagnarok, dead-and-rotten Viking look; background shows a Disneyesque fantasy city: a combination of Oz, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and a town Aladin might go to for an expensive vacation. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/V/94         Maitz, Don.  Spaced Man.  In Dreamquests (85), q.v. this section.  **¢+Acrylic/masonite, March 1949, for Barry Malzberg's Beyond Apollo (Pocketbooks).  At 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock (on an analog clock): two skelletons in spacesuits, heads downward.  Much larger in center, a man in a spacesuit but without helmet; he sits in a very high-tech chair, with a deep-space background.  Coming down into his head: a beam of light. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 12/VII/93       McLuhan, Marshall.  The Mechanical Bride, Understanding Media: See under Background. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 02/II/01        Metcalf, Eugene.  <www.toyraygun.com>  Copyright date of 1998, in operation September 1997 at least through early 2001.  **¢+Web site.  Called "a celebration of study of toy ray runs," the site looks at ray guns as the "stuff of fancy" and related to imagination and our capacity for wonder.  Additionally, EM sees them as "weapons intended to protect us from our darkest fears of the unknown," reminding us just how dangerous that unknown cosmos might be.  Ray guns also embody a kind of "testimony to the fact that we" Earth-bound humans "often conceive of even the majesty of space as a backdrop for our" necessarily parochial, by such standards, "conflicts and struggles."  The collection pictures ray guns "From the exuberant Art Deco disintegrator pistols of the 1930s, to the streamlined and Futuristic tin litho sparkers of the 50s and the darkly post-apocalyptic" (arguably po-mo?) "nitro blasters of today" (home page).  Includes an excellent link page to related sites on the World Wide Web. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 00/XII/03      Moore, Alan (words), and Kevin O'Neill (art work).  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  DC Comics, US publication / Titan Books, UK, 2000.  Original publication in serial as 6 comic books.  (Our source: <http://www.grovel.org.uk/reviews/league01/league01.htm>.)  As of July 2003 available in DC Comics hardcover and mass market paperback, dated rpt., Oct. 2002 (source: Amazon.com).  **¢+Annotated under Film: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 03/V/95        Newsinger, John.  "The Dredd Phenomenon."  Foundation 52 (Summer 1991): 6-19.  **¢+Historian JN analyzes significance of the great popularity in the UK of Judge Dredd in the 2000 AD comic series.  Relevant here are the settings: "Crucial to the success of the Dredd strip is Mega City One, the vast towering urban jungle where 800 million people are crowded in together.  Here the problems of our cities exist but in a magnified, exaggerated form. . . .  95 per cent of the population live in mile-high towers, each housing 60,000 people.  The tedium of this life of claustrophobic boredom drives many people mad: citizens regularly go 'futsie', attacking a killing innocent bystanders" (cf. R. Silverberg's The World Inside, cited under Fiction).  There are outbreaks of mass suicide, "the Lemming

Syndrome," and war between the blocks breaks out occasionally, with casualties in the thousands.  Note esp. "the Under City, a secret world of danger and shadows outside the law," a subterranean city "beneath the streets.  Beyond the City walls lies the Cursed Earth, a radioactive wasteland, inhabited by mutants, monsters and scattered human communities" (11).  See in Keyword Index entries for "underground," "underworld," and "wasteland."

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Paolozzi, Eduardo.  Untitled 1951-63.  "A group of eighteen unpublished collages dated between 1951 and 1963."  The one shown in Cowling as no. 61, p. 39 is labeled in handwriting "Hamburg [white space] Winter 1953".  *¢+Onto a photograph of a draped, classical female sculpture of "Athena Lemnia von Phidias," a cutaway diagram of an internal combustion engine is superimposed for the torso, with the head replaced by either a carburetor of an unusual design or some other mechanism.  The effect might be described as the superimposition of the modern mechanical (and automotive) upon the classical, female, and divine.  See in our Keyword Index the listings for "Dada." 

 

 

6.  DramaCrit, RDE, 13/V/04     Persons, Dan.  "The Americanization of Anime."  Cinefantastique 36.1 (Feb./March 2004): 44 f.  **+See for the influence of anime on such relevant films as The Matrix, and reminders of the importance in themselves of such anime as Space Battleship Yamato (q.v. under Drama as Space Cruiser Yamato), and Ghost in the Shell (q.v. under Drama)—the source of the visuals of much-punctured bodies in Matrix (47). 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Picabia, Francis.  Fille nŽe sans mre (Girl Born Without a Mother).  Pictured in Cowling, as no. 65, sixth plate between pp. 48 and 49, described p. 42.  *¢+In her introd., Cowling calls Fille "a characteristic example of [FP's] . . . machine style of the 1915-18 period and of the nihilism and iconoclasm of the Dada movement as a whole.  Implicitly comparing the illustration of locomotive wheels [sic] purloined from some mechanics' manual to a female divinity conceived immaculately, Picabia underlines his blasphemous intent through the use of a gold background normally reserved for icons and altarpieces" (9).  The brief discussion in the text notes that the title for Fille and other of FP's "machine works" came from a French dictionary translating Latin and other foreign phrases, and compares Fille "to more explicitly sexual machine images Picabia executed in 1916-18, such as Machine turn quickly and Amorous parade," as well as other works with "obvious religious references" (42).  Without the title, however, the work itself looks like a drawing of the part of some large machine with two strange things about it: (1) a background that appears to be gold bricks, and (2) the absence of about some 60 degrees of arc from the top of the wheel literally central to the machine (one locomotive wheel).  See under background, H. Adams, "The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)."  See in our Keyword Index the listings for "Dada." 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 30/IV/01       The Robot Zoo.  A travelling exhibit by SGIª; for schedule, see <www.sgi.com/robotzoo/exhibits.html>.  Also a web site: <www.sgi.com/robotzoo/>, and a book "By John Kelly, Phillip Whitfield, & Obin.  Published by Turner Publishing, Inc. ISBN 1-57036-064-2" (<www.sci.mus.mn.us/sln/tf/books/robotzoo.html>).  **¢+The book is described as "A mechanical guide to the way animals work."  One page on the website tells us that "Robot Zoo studies the form and function of real animals through their biomechanical counterparts—robots.  In Robot Zoo the 'animals' are mechanical robots displayed in the context of their habitats.  On display you'll see a bat, chameleon, giraffe, grasshopper, house fly, platypus, rhino and squid!" (<http://www.sgi.com/robotzoo/robots.html>).  The fly was featured on the cover of the program for the 22nd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 21-23 March 2001); the cover is credited to Bill Buckler with a permission notice for the fly to The Robot Zoo / Marshall Editions, with "special thanks to: BBH Exhibits, Inc. | The Museum of Discovery and Science."  The fly is of special interest for what Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich have called "The Ovion/Cylon Alliance": the tendency to merge insects (necessarily organic) with the mechanical; contrarily—and hence all the more usefully—The Robot Zoo covers a range of animal genera, stressing mammals and so fluid an invertebrate as the squid.  

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 17/I/98         Tanguy, Yves, with AndrŽ Breton and Jacqueline Breton.  Cadavre exquis (Exquisite Corpse), 1938.  In Cowling, as no. 74, p. 47.  *¢+"The cadavre exquis, whether visual or verbal, was a favourite game with the Surrealists, and several cadavres exquis were reproduced in La RŽvolution SurrŽaliste nos. 9-10, October 1927.  A collaboration involving usually three or four people, it is in essence identical to the children's game of 'Consequences' in which participants complete a sentence or drawing of a figure without seeing what has been done already" (Cowling 47).  This exquisite corpse has at the top, center, the engraving of the head of a distinguished-looking old man, ÇcrownedÈ with a leaf with a huge caterpillar on it; the lower center of the work has what looks like a single cutout of a 19th-c. ad for men's heavy long-underwear pants or work-pants, with suspenders and possibly ÇbootiesÈ on the feet; the pants are in the form of a hefty human, but unoccupied.  Between head and waist are engravings or photos of an early locomotive, a machinist table and other a couple or more other things mechanical.  The effect in Erlich's eyes is the presentation of the human as upper-class from the neck up and working-class from the waist down, with the two simultaneously separated and joined by mechanism.  Any idea of D. H. Lawrencian working-class virility opposed to upper-class intellectuality is undercut in the ad (?) by the lack of a ÇbulgeÈ or suggestion of space for genitalia on the real-world working-man who is to wear the underwear or work pants; if anything, the crotch suggests that the removed worker had a vagina. 

 

 

7. GRAPH, RDE, 30/IV/94        Thaves, Bob.  "Frank and Ernest."  Cartoon.  In NEA, Inc. syndication.  The Cincinatti Post 29 April 1994: 8C.  **¢+The title is "The 'Victim' Complex Reaches the Robotics Dept.", and the single panel shows a robot defendant of indeterminate gender appearing

before a "male"-appearing judge, while the (male?) defense attorney argues "Your honor, my client pleads not guilty by reason of a power surge." 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 28/VI/03       Tom Tomorrow (pseud.).  "This Modern World: The Republican Matrix."  This Modern World, 20 May 2003.  On-line at <http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15021> or under Working for Change's Tom Tomorrow Archives.  **¢+In the satiric tradition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (q.v. under Fiction) and the great political cartoonists, Tom Tomorrow presents a pre-postModern take on "the Republican Matrix" as of spring 2003, as "an illusion which engulfs us all...A steady barrage of images which obscure reality"—"a world born anew each day...in which there is nothing to be learned from the lessons of the past... [É] Where logic holds no sway [É]" and "Where reality itself is a malleable thing...subject to constant revision..." (unspaced three periods in text).  See for an elegant attack on PoMo celebrations of a mediated, malleable reality and for making explicit some of the Orwellian (and, ironically, Adorno-Horkheimer) implications of the electronic cocooning and bodily/mental violation imaged in the Matrix films (q.v. under Drama). 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, 09/V/93        Trudeau, Garry.  "Doonesbury."  Cartoon.  Universal Press Syndication.  Week of 3 May 1993.  We caught The Cincinnati Post 4-8 May 1993: Op-Ed page.  **¢+"Boopsie"—Barbara Boopstein—"is on a virtual reality shopping spree" (7 May).  In the same week, Star Trek: The Next Generation also featured a major character in a virtual reality.  If 22nd-c. scholars need a date for when VR entered US popular culture, May 1993 should be a contender. 

 

 

7.  GRAPH, RDE, David J. Clark (ENG/FST 350), 10/XI/01       Technical Ecstasy.  Album cover.  Wea/Warner Bros., 1988.  **¢+Two robots passing on escalators, one heading up, the other down.  They are at least for the moment connected by tube-like extensions from their heads, suggesting a kind of casual mental intercourse. 

 

 

7. GRAPHICS, RDE, 03/III/94  "What if Technology Invaded History?!?"  John Caldwell, artist and writer.  MAD #326 (March/April 1994): 34-35.  **¢+Among other S. F. premises considered satirically and briefly—a single panel apiece—are what if Moses had FAX, Alexander Graham Bell had call waiting, Vincent Van Gogh has a Walkman, Nero had a Karaoke machine, and Paul Revere had a pager. 

 

 

7.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Zorpette, Glenn.  "Art Among the Ruins."  Art News 87 (Sept. 1988): 16.

 

 

 

8.  MUSIC, RDE, David J. Clark (ENG/FST 350), 10/XI/01        Black Sabbath.  "Iron Man."  From the album Paranoid, 1971.  Available Wea/Warner, 1987.  Possibly a musical variation on T. Hughes's The Iron Man (1968 [q.v. under Fiction]), with touches of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818/1831) or the Frankenstein of James Whale (1931).  In any case—in David J. Clark's summary, "a robot seeks revenge upon his creators, i.e., humankind." 

 

 

8.  MUSIC, John Robinson, 08/VI/98    Idol, Billy.  Cyberpunk album, and "Shock To The System" single and video.  **¢+BI "had an interesting video and single, however, called "Shock To The System" which featured Billy being attacked be hordes of police, having his body overcome with technology (he looked rather like a fashion-ized Borg), and then proceeding to defeat the police."

 

 

8.  MUSIC, RDE, 20/III/03, 5/IV/03       Bjšrk.  "All Is Full of Love," dir. Chris Cunningham.  Ca. 4 min.  On All is full of love.  Bjork [sic] Overseas Ltd./One Little Indian Ltd., 1999.  DVD: New York: Elektra (Time-Warner), dist.  "The copyright in this this recording is owned by Bjork Overseas Ltd. under license to One Little Indian Records and exclusively licensed to Elektra Entertainment Group for North America and Mother Records/PMV for the rest of the world excluding the UK and Iceland."  Song on the album Homogenic (ELEKTRA/ASYLUM, 23 Sept. 1997).   **¢+Two industrial robots produce a singing female humanoid robot, who goes on to a lesbian love scene with another female robot, with assistance by the two industrial robots.  Note high-Modernist design, strongly white—and liquid imagery, possibly water, or possibly an allusion to the fluid in the robots Ash and Bishop in Alien and Aliens (q.v. under drama).  Cf. "The Sex Life of Robots," listed under Drama. 

 

 

8.  MUSIC, RDE, 01/VII/98       ADD TO 8.020, KRAFTWERK, MENSCH/MASCHINE:  See in this section, P. Townshend's The Iron Man, Owl's song "Man Machines."

 

 

8. MUSIC, RDE, 09/VI/93         Kraftwerk.  Radio-Activity.  Capital Records, 1975.  CEMA Special Markets, S41 / 57642, 1992.  **¢+In German and English.  CEMA audio-cassette reissue lists contents as "Geiger Counter," "Radioactivity," "Radioland," "Airwaves," "News," "The Voice of Energy, "Antenna," "Radio Stars," "Uranium," and "Ohm Sweet Ohm."  CEMA cover shows the front of an oldfashioned radio with "Radio-Activity" written between the knobs on the bottom and Kraftwerk—"power station," with possible puns—at the top.  Note oldfashioned radios and geiger counters as technologically liminal: electromechanical devices that turn into sound electromagnetic and atomic energy.  The music tends toward the electronic, and for "special markets" of aspirants for the cutting edge (Erlich got the cassette at a cut-out bin in a Super-X pharmacy).

 

 

8.  MUSIC, RDE, David J. Clark (ENG/FST 350), 10/XI/01        Megadeth.  "Psychotron."  Countdown to Extinction.  Emd/Capitol, 1992.  **+David J. Clark summarizes the song as "a detailed description of a sci-fi type assassin that closely resembles a terminator"—but which is "Not a cyborg," we're told, and twice told "Maybe not a mutant, maybe a man."  See for this blurring of human/machine in a creature "Engaged in a war." 

 

 

8.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Midnight Star.  "Freak-a-Zoid."  No Parking on the Dance Floor.  Solar, ZK-75304, n.d.  **¢+

 

 

8.  MUSIC, Brad Miller?, RDE, 16 & 19/XI/00    Pearl Jam.  "Do the Evolution."  Music video, 1998.  Cited under Drama. 

 

 

8. MUSIC, RDE, 12/IX/93         Queensryche (Umlaut on "y").  The Warning.  EMI America Records (a division of Capitol Records), CDP 7 46557 2, DIDX 1172, 1984.  **¢+

 

 

8. MUSIC, RDE, 28/XI/93         Rush (Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart).  "2112."  Rush: 2112.  Uni/Mercury Records, 822 546-2 M-1, 1976.  Running time: 20:34.  **¢+Future totalitarian society has banned music as unproductive.  The piece opposes computers and a priestly class on one side against a simple musical instrument and a muscian on the other.  Note esp. II. "Temples of Syrinx," which are filled with computers; III. "Discovery" of a "strange device," apparently a low-tech, stringed music instrument (like a lyre or acustic guitar); IV. "Presentation" and rejection of the ancient instrument and its music on the ground that it is, in the formulation of F. Pohl and J. Williamson, "unplanned" (see entry for them under Friction, The Reefs of Space).  Lyrics and analysis available at many sites on the WWW. 

 

 

8.  MUSIC, RDE, 16/VI/98        Townshend, Pete, et al.  The Iron Man (Twelve Songs from the Musical by Pete Townshend).  © Heavy Metabolics, 1989.  Atlantic 81996-2.  "All tracks written and produced by Pete Townshend, published by Heavy Metabolics Limited, except for 'Fire' . . . ."  Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Deborah Conway, featured.  "Dig" and "Fire" by The Who, as "Special Guests."  Based on the book by Ted Hughes (q.v. under Fiction).  **¢+Liner notes included opening chapter of Hughes's Iron Man.  PT expands the story, adding characters and plot elements, including Woodland Creatures, soldiers.  Changes include identifying the Iron Man explicitly as a "self-maintaining robot programmed to destroy any machinery or system that ultimately threatens man" (liner notes, list of Characters)—perhaps coming to mean all machinery (note Owl's song, "Man Machines"); the threat of a nuclear attack on the Iron Man; having the dragon threatening Earth female rather than male; the young hero's (Hogarth's) falling in love with the vision of a beautiful girl in the star that brings the dragon to Earth; stress on the dragon's desire for "living flesh" to eat; helping Hogarth get his beloved as a primary motivation for the Iron Man's challenge to the dragon; the bursting of the dragon's skin after the last test by fire, releasing "the souls of millions of children all crying for liberation," including the soul of the girl Hogarth loves.  Conclusion of the play has the Iron Man asking the dragon "why she threatened the earth and what she can do.  She explains that she used to fly around [s]pace singing the beautiful music of the spheres, but the awful things that men were doing on earth distracted her, and she wanted to join in.  The Iron Man tells her she must go to the dark side of the moon so that she can make her music without frightening people.  This will ensure that the earth remains a peaceful place where the screams of children are never heard" (liner notes, inside of back cover).  NB: PT's changes pits on one side the boy-hero (his father and people generally), "Woodland Creatures" led by (a) Vixen, and a male-gendered robot against, on the other side, a flesh-eating female dragon that contains children, including the girl the boy-hero falls in love with; changes also expand the warfare threat of Hughes's story to all "the awful things that men were doing on earth," esp. to children.  Significant songs: again, Owl, "Man Machines"; Soldiers/Iron Man"; Over the Top," Iron Man (with Hogath and Woodland Creatures), "I Eat Heavy Metal"; Dragon, "Fast Food."  See in this section, Kraftwerk's Die MenscháMaschine.

 

 

8.  MUSIC, Rob Latham (RDE), O7/IV/00         Young, Neil.  "After the Gold Rush."  After the Gold Rush.  1970.  Audio CD: Wea/Warner, 1987.  ASIN B000002KD9.  **¢+Rob Latham calls our attention to the final stanza's capturing "some of the yearning techno-mysticism of the best sf": the dream in the song of "silver spaceships" taking all "the chosen ones"—imaged as "Mother Nature's silver seed"—to their (our?) "new home in the sun."  Erlich finds the lyric beautiful but problematic, also in the tradition of good SF; to start with, those silver seeds and spaceships are going to burn up trying transcendence into the sun. 

 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/VII/98        Academe (Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors), 84.3 (May-June 1998).  **¢+Issue on "Technology and Intellectual Property: Who's in Control?"  An introduction to the increasingly important interface of professors and technology for the sort of people who join the AAUP.  Cover shows still of Charles Chaplin's character in Modern Times (q.v. under Drama) inside the giant machine lying down and tightening two bolts on a giant wheel, and looking happy.  Relevant articles: Ellen Schrecker, ed., "Technology and Intellectual Property: Who's in Control?"; Marjorie Heins, "Academic Freedom and the Internet"—on a Virgina law forbidding state employees not in police work to use state-owned or leased computers to access "any communications 'having sexually explicit content'" (19 [note section on "The First Amendment, Academic Freedom, and Cyberspace"); Karen C‡rdenas, "Technology in Today's Classroom: It Slices and It Dices, But Does It Serve Us Well?"; Report by a subcommittee of AAUP Committee R on Government Relations, "Distance Learning" (i.e., using increasingly sophisticated technologies to provide educational materials and education to students distant from a school campus, assuming such a campus exists, which in two cases and a third proposed, it does not); Report by the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property Rights of AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, "Copyright Issues in Colleges and Universities," esp. as those issues have been affected by recent law and technological innovations, including multimedia, Internet, and the World Wide Web.

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 05/I/94 Anderson, Norman.  Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History.  Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular Press, 1993.  407 p. 397 photographs.  **¢+Popular Press ad describes AN's work as a descriptive history of "pleasure wheels," esp. as they culminated in and evolved from "the undisputed 'Queen of the Midway'" built by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., and opened in Chicago, at the World's Columbian Exposition, on 21 June 1893 (quoting ad).  Note the date: if one needed a symbol for the triumph of the Mechanical Age and move into the electromechanical, the Ferris wheel isn't a bad choice.  See below, entry for R. Cartmell. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/II/96           ALIENS: RIDE AT THE SPEED OF FRIGHT.  Ride-film opened in 1995 at Pier 39 in San Francisco and three theaters in Japan.  Stuart Gordon, dir.  Praxis Films, in association with Iwerks Entertainment.  **¢+Gordon quoted as saying "This will be a film beyond anything you've ever experienced . . . .  Not only will you see the action, you'll 'feel' it to" (14).  Based on Aliens (q.v. under Drama), uses H. R. Giger's biomechanoid Aliens, plus the Colonial Marines' APC (armored personnel carrier) and dropship (sic), giving the audience the feel of very active and threatened mechanical environments, themselves inside the mechanical environment of a human colony on a hostile alien world.  Discussed by Les Paul Robley, Cinefantastique 27.7 (March 1996): 14-15, our source for this citation and whom we quote. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Arbib, Michael A.  The Metaphorical Brain.  New York: Wiley & Sons, 1972.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 26/III/95          Aronowitz, Stanley, and William DiFazio.  The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.  **¢+In spite of statistics showing more Americans employed than ever, SA and WD argue that "technological change and competition in the world market guarantee that increasing numbers of workers will be displaced" from decent jobs (qtd. Mattera 463).  Offers original research "on the way new technology has changed the working conditions of engineers at a General Electric aircraft engine design facility and at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection"; upshot: the "proletarianization" of such "technical intellecturals" in terms of their work and conditions of employment" (Materra 463).  Rev. Philip Mattera, The Nation 2 April 1995: 463-65 whom we quote.  See in this section, J. Rifkin's The End of Work; see under Fiction F. Pohl's "The Midas Plague" and K. Vonnegut's Player Piano. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE (from R. Baarson, 210, F93), 22/XII/93 Avedon, Elliot M.  The Study of Games.  New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Barthes, Roland.  Mythologies.  Richard Howard trans. .  New York: Hill & Wang, 1973.  **¢+Comments on ship-as-womb on 66; see Wolfe, 55.

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 01/VII/02        Balsamo, Anne.  Technologies of the Gendered body: Reading cyborg Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. **+Cited in Karen Hellekson's "Transforming the Subject: Humanity, the Body, and Posthumanism," q.v. under Literary Criticism

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 25/VIII/00       Battlebots (vt Comedy Central's Battlebots).  TV show, Comedy Central, weeklie, after 30 April 2000.  Advertised on Battlebots: Prelude to Battle, 30 April 2000.  **¢+"Professional robot fighting," now televised from the Battle Box robot fighting arena in Fort Mason in San Francisco.  The show features two commentators, plus free-roving reporters doing the standard "color" backgrounds on the competitors: the builders of radio controlled, relatively small, fighting robots.  Note the Battle Box as a very hazardous environment for even an unopposed robot: remote-operated saws and other implements of destruction can and do come out of the floor to do harm to anything above.  On the Prelude preview, one of the 'bots was spider-like, and one looked like a lady bug: a killer lady bug, as it turned out, and the winner of its match.  Note also the flippant tone of the show: among other things, it is a parody of professional wrestling and sports TV more generally. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Bernal, J. D.  The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE (from R. Baarson, 210, F93), 22/XII/93 Bloom, Steve.  Video Invaders.  New York: Arco, 1982.  **¢+

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Bobbitt, John Franklin.  The Supervision of City Schools: Some General Principles (??).  XXX: XXX, 1913.  **¢+Quotation in Theodore R. Sizer, "Imprinting the Kids," rev. of For Our Children . . . in The Nation 25 May 1985: 639: "Management must determine the order and sequence of all of the various processes through which the raw material or the partially developed product shall pass, in order to bring about the greatest possible effectiveness and economy; and it must see that the raw product or partially finished product is actually passed on from process to process, from worker to worker, in the manner that is most effective and most economical."  Sizer holds that For Our Children is "a book about bureaucracy, more particularly, about the bureaucracy of school systems"—and used Bobbitt to attack the more recent book under review.  VINCE FOUND "Some General Principles of Management Applied to the Problems of City School systems."  The 1st Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, C icago, 1913—apparently self-published.  ALSO: . . . Supervison of City Schools, supplemented by J. W. Hall (Chicago: U of Chicago P [?], 1913).

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 22/V/95 REVISION     Bear, Greg.  "The Machineries of Joy."  Early Harvest.  Cambridge, MA: NESFA P, 1987.  Coll. Tangents.  New York: Warner, 1989.  **¢+GB, a major author of SF, enthuses about the potential of computers, especially for computer-generated graphics.  "In the last ten years, the progress has been astounding; around the world, computers are helping to create images for scientific research, education, fine arts, and entertainment.  Sometimes the divisions between these categories are erased; the enchanting beauty of a moving computer image can turn a prosaic enterprise—such as stress analysis of pipe joints—into art" (229-30).  "Not since Leonardo da Vinci have so many technical disciplines been required of working artists.  Not only must they have basic drawing and drafting skills" to do computer- or computer-aided graphics," but they must know at least the rudiments of programming.  They must understand how light reflects, refracts, and diffuses—and be able to translate their knowledge into terms the computer can digest.  The artist can no longer stand aloof from science and math" (231).  Handles briefly computer work in the Genesis sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, and Tron, and the use or lack thereof of computers in the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001.  Briefly handles "live computer art performance, where performer and audience are one," as in the installation by Ed Tannenbaum of Raster Master in San Francisco's Exploratorium: "A video camera photographs people in a room as they move about and then feeds their images to a computer.  The result is projected in real-time . . . on a large screen, allowing infinite varieties of human-machine artwork.  Children can dance and paint with their bodies, becoming their own kaleidoscopes" (236).  Rev. Jerry L., Parsons, SF&FBR Annual 1990: 198. 

 

 

99.  BACK, RDE, 20/I/95          Booker, M. Keith.  Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide**¢+Part One is "A Guide to Selected Modern Cultural Criticism with Relevance to Dystopian Liiterature."  Cited and annotated under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/V/04          Borg Invasion 4D (part of STAR TREK: The Experience¨).  Ride/Attraction at Las Vegas Hilton, opened 18 March 2004.  **+Based on the Borg of Star Trek especially Star Trek: Voyager—i.e., a cyborg hive society seeking to assimilate into itself all intelligent organic life (or maybe just the intelligent species they've run into on various post-classic Star Trek episodes).  The attraction is defended by Mark A. Altman and attacked by Jeff Bond in Cinefantastique 36.3 (June/July 2004): 52-53.  Described <http://www.azreporter.com/idirectory/lasvegas/news/borginvasion.html> and elsewhere on the WWW. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, K.T. Durack, 27/VI/04 Bourne, Frederick G.  "American Sewing Machines."  In One Hundred Years of American Commerce.  Vol. 2.  Chauncey Mitchell Depew, ed.  New York: D. O. Haines, 1895: 530.  Smithsonian photo 42542-A.  **¢+Shows two tables: (1) "A Partial Statement from Records of 'The Sewing-Machine Combination,' Showing number of Sewing-Machines Licensed Annually Under the Elias Howe Patent," 1853-66, and (2) "A Partial Statement Showing Number of Sewing-Machines Licensed Annually from 1867 to 1876 Inclusive."  The statistics indicate that between 1853 and 1876, a large number of Americans and others in industrializing countries were exposed frequently to a literally domesticated piece of high-tech equipment, emphatically including women in both factories and middle-class families: the sewing machine.  (If the new-baby/sewing machine sight gag in Fiddler on the Roof [1964] points at real history, sewing machines were significant new technology in the Pale of Settlement in 1905.) 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 03/VII/00        Brooks, David.  Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.  **¢+"Bobos" = bourgeois bohemians, and one of the things Bobos do, DB says, is try to reconcile such contradictions.  "Strictly speaking, bohemianism is only the social manifestation of the romantic spirit," but DB uses the term "to refer to both the spirit and the manners and mores it produces" (67; ch. 2); part of the "spirit" part includes the Romantic image of the world as organic and flowing in what we will call a Dao-like way, as opposed to the mechanical and rigid world of the bourgeoisie (71; ch. 2).  Reconciliation was prefigured in 1961 by "Jane Jacobs, Proto-Bobo" in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (123-27; ch. 3).  "The planners who destroyed neighborhoods did not see" the "good life" in the "flux, diversity, and complexity" of working neighborhoods—a flux underlain by "an inner harmony"; the planners were blinded to what we'll call the Daoist nature of the street "because their conception of order was mechanical.  The developers and Modernists like Le Corbusier [C-E Jeanneret] saw the city as a machine—'a factory for producing traffic' in one of Le Corbusier's phrases—and so. of course, they sought to reduce it to a mechanism that would be simple and repetitive," as embodied in public housing projects (126).  Unlike earlier Romantics, the Bobos of America's "educated classes" ca. 2000 CE accept the City and bourgeois technology, but without what Leo Marx called in The Machine in the Garden "the technological sublime" (Brooks 71; ch. 2—see below, this section; see also under Literary Criticism).  Bobos accept also the bureaucratic ÇmachineryÈ of late capitalism but with a Jane-Jacobs inflection, trying to make business and life more organic.  If Bobos are The New Upper Class of the USA, they may be flowing with the Zeitgeist in ways suggested by W. Gibson in the dance of Biz on the streets of the Sprawl in the Neuromancer series and, more problematically, embodying portions of the Eco-feminism championed in various works by Ursula K. Le Guin (see citations under Fiction). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 17/V/01          Burke, James.  Connections.  Boston: Little Brown, 1978.  Audiocassette: Read by JB.  Audio Renaissance Tapes (prod.) / St. Martin's P (dist.), 1990.  **+Stresses the embededness of modern humans in our technology, starting with how we are reminded of that technology when something goes wrong.  See below, JB's "The Wheel of Fortune" segment of Connections: An Alternative View of Change, and the National Forum issue on "When Technology Fails," both listed under titles in quotation marks. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Carlisle, Robert B.  "The Birth of Technocracy: Science, Society, and the Saint-Simonians."  Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (July/Sept. 1974): 445-64.

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 5/I/94   Cartmell, Robert.  The Incredible Scream Machine.  Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 199X.  **¢+Advertised as the "History of the Roller Coaster."  See above, this section, entry for N. Anderson. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 10/II/01           Cast Away (two words).  Robert Zemeckis, dir., one of several producers.  Steven Spielberg, exec. prod., uncredited.  William Broyles Jr. (sic: no comma before "Jr."), script.  Tom Hanks, star; Helen Hunt, featured.  USA (with location shooting in Russia and near Tahiti): 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks, Image Movers, Playtone (prod.) / 20th Century Fox Film Corp., UIP (dist.), 2000 (from IMDb).  **¢+Mainstream variation on the theme of Robinson Crusoe, relevant here for defamiliarizing everyday technology by stranding a thoroughly modern, time-obsessed Federal-Express man on a very lovely but totally deserted island.  A classic railroad man's watch becomes solely a picture-holder for a photo of his beloved, VHS tape becomes just tape for wrapping things, a pager is totally useless; and even as the artifacts of high-tech culture get changed, natural items get made into a solar calendar and primitive communications technology.  Returning to civilization, the Tom Hanks character finds an electric fire-maker an object of mild wonder. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 25/VIII/00       Chase, Alston.  "Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber."  The Atlantic Monthly 285.6 (June 2000): 41-65.  **¢+In what the media called "The Manifesto" and he called "Industrial Society and Its Future," Theodore Kaczynski argued, among other things, that "'Because human beings must conform to the machine, our society tends to regard as a "sickness" any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system [É],'" leading to what AC paraphrases as "a social infrastructure dedicated to modifying behavior" (43-44).  AC traces this and other anti-technology ideas of Ted Kaczynski to Kaczyinski's education in Harvard's General Education curriculum, Kaczynski's participation in an abusive psychological/sociological study run by Prof. Henry A. Murray, and Kaczynski's later exposure to Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (q.v., this section). 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 28/III/93           Coates, James.  "Just Think! A Mind-Reading Computer [initial capitals supplied]."  Chicago Tribune 18 March 1993: 5.1, 13.  **¢+On the research of Emmanuel Donchin, Head of the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Donchin "wired undergraduates to an electroencephalograph connected to a mini-computer and then asked them to watch a chart with the letters of the [English] alphabet while he ran through a big computer the enormously complex readings of brain waves picked up by the machine. . . .  By noting each time the P-300 spike registered [indicating the chosen letter], the computer operators were able to reproduce messages made up in the volunteers' heads."  The practical result of this work is "what amounted to a thought-controlled typewriter," but further research by Fujitsu Corp. and others are moving toward "a thought-input device" Fujitsu computers (13).  Specifically comments on use of such ideas in the film Foxfire (19XX); note also real-world development of SQUID: Superconducting Quantum Interference Device," a highly sensitive way to monitor brainwaves.  See under Fiction, L. Niven and J. Pournelle's Oath of Fealty (which has a computer-human mind link); note William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981), coll. Burning Chrome: the story concerns  "Squids" ("Superconducting quantum interference detectors" [9]). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 27/V/02          Codrescu, Andrei.  "Fax Your Prayers."  Fax Your Prayers.  Read by the author.  Dove Audio, 1995.  (31150.  "A Selection of Stories from NPR's Andrei Codrescu."  Side One, #5.)  **¢+A meditation on the spirit and machines in a world in which prayers can be faxed for reading at the Wailing Wall. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 08/XI/98         Codrescu, Andrei.  "A Report on the State of Revolutions, for Rosa Luxemburg."  Plato Sucks.  Read by the author.  Dove Audio, 1996.  (11220.  "Selected Stories from National Public Radio's Andrei Codrescu."  Side 2.)  **¢+Sexual revolution of the 1970s vs. the technological revolution and the subsequent merging of "the sexy and the techie."  Features wise-ass and wise commentary on reproduction—primarily of the print and mimeograph variety—"the Mongolian cluster-fuck against the State's megacomputer," the technology of contraception, the 1970s "body without organs," Leninism vs. Dadaism (with Rosa Luxemburg in between), capitalism (not socialism) as the great revolutionary force in the 20th c., the family, how sexual revolution created "an existential despair that demanded palliatives and substitutes, leading to the current intense market in virtual realities" (VR).  Comments also on simulacra, human life mediated by machine technology—"only machines have relationships . . . you are a machine, subject to the complete control of the inhuman center of a mechanical discourse"—ecology and liberty, the universal institutionalization of people in the West, the current purveying of the sexual "'revolution'" (with stress on the quotation marks) by various electronic media, revolution becoming "the plaything of a database," and virtual sex.  Other essays deal usefully with LSD and why Plato, an idealist, sucks in the view of the body-loving A-C. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 27/V/02          Codrescu, Andrei.  "Video Crack."  Fax Your Prayers.  Read by the author.  Dove Audio, 1995.  (31150.  "A Selection of Stories from NPR's Andrei Codrescu."  Side Two, #13.)  **¢+AC on addiction (including his own) to video poker. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 13/V/04          COLLECTIBLES.  "Toybox" section;  ed. Jeff Bond.  Cinefantastique 36.1 (February/March 2004): 12-13. **¢+Miniature replica memorabilia includes the Nautilus and lesser gizmos from DisneyCorp's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and a vehicle very like a "Spinner" from Blade Runner (see MonstersinMotion.com).  Also "a gigantic, fully articulated Sentinel and one of the power-loaderlike APUs" from Matrix Revolutions (mcfarlane.com). 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 28/III/93           Conner, James A.  "Strategies for Hyperreal Travelers."  SFS #59, 20.1 (March 1993): 69-79.  **¢+Deals with Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem, but mostly for illustration of "two strategies for creating hyperreal cultures.  The first is 'apophatic,'" which is "'The Negative Way'" of deconstructing the world "into mirror images, its reality undercut" thereby.  The second strategy is "'cataphatic,' or 'The Positive Way,' which raises the sensory order of appearance until it approaches that of the default, real world."  Borges and Lem are apophatic in their technique; the people who produce and use Virtual Reality (VR) technology are cataphatic, which JAC may prefer (79; Abstract, italics removed). 

 

 

9.  Le Corbusier (pseud. of Charles-ƒdouard Jeanneret-Gris): 1887-1965.  **¢+For a house as "a machine for living," see Zwirn, this section.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 10/XI/01         Corson, Trevor.  "The Race to Bomb," rev. A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg.  New York: New Press, 2001 (W.W. Norton, dist.).  The Nation 273.13 (29 Oct. 2001): 25-30.  **¢+TC is "managing editor of Transition, a magazine of race and ethnicity based at Harvard University" (25, italics removed) and knowledgeable about early-20th c. British "fantasy novels"—or SF—dealing with race and war.  At the beginning of the review, TC cites Robert W. Coles's 1900 The Struggle for Empire "in which Anglo-Saxons conquer the world by destroying or absorbing all other races.  Triumphant and enraptured by technology, the Anglo-Saxons invent flying machines and encounter" the alien Sirians—whose cities they bomb.  TC balances Empire with Anderson Graham's 1923 (sic) The Collapse of Homo Sapiens, in which Africans and Asians steal atomic secrets and bomb "the Anglo-Saxons back to the Stone Age."  A bit later, TC mentions J. Hamilton Sedberry's 1908 Under the Flag of the Cross, wherein Whites drop from their flying machines "'electrobombs,' which unleash the forces of raw matter"—upon no "imagined race but a real one: yellow people.  Here, the atomic bombing of Japan has already happened, before bombing was even invented" (26), and 15 years before Collapse and 21 years before Philip Francis Nowlan's depiction of the use of atomic bombs in "The Airlords of Han" (the concluding tale to the original Buck Rogers stories)—and just three years after Albert Einstein elaborated the equations indicating in the real world that E = mc2 (Special Theory of Relativity, 1905).  See under fiction the novels and stories cited. 

 

 

9.  BACKGROUND, Maly, 02/VII/02; RDE, 15/VIII/02   Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr.  "The Cyborg and the Kitchen Sink; or, The Salvation Story of No Salvation Story."  SFS #76, 25.3 (November 1998): 510-525.  **+ Discusses and critiques Haraway's Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan-Meets_OncoMouse in light of her previous, highly influential work, "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (q.v., this section).  MW takes Haraway's cyborg anthropology directly into these two dominant prosthetic systems of postmodernism: the Internet and the Human Genome Project.  IC-R's essay available at <www.depauw.edu/sfs/reviews_pages/r76.htm#icr>.  See for the astute IC-R taking on a major work. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/XI/00         "Cyberman."  Personality Profile by Melanie Austria Farmer in Steamtunnels Magazine (www.steamtunnels.net), 27 Oct. 2000: 2.**¢+Steamtunnels is an insert aimed at young adults and late adolescents sophisticated about the Internet; the staff believe such folk would be interested in MAF's profile on Prof. Kevin Warwick of the cybernetics dept. at the U of Reading (UK): "the first man with a microprocessor implant," one smaller than an English 2-penny coin (pictured)  The chip is in his arm, acting "as an identification signal, authomatically opening doors and turning lights on for him when he entered a room" and tracking "his movements when he was in the research building."  A planned chip will be "implanted [É] closer to his nervous system [É] to better read his movements and possibly even control [sic] his emotions and senses."  Practical applications may improve help for the blind and helping "to close the communications gap between humans and computers," which "will probably lead to surgically implanting a microprocessor in his brain."  "Cyberman" is a relevant article and event for surveillance and literal human/machine interfaces; see Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty, cited under Fiction, plus the Keyword index for works less optimistic about implants and a brain implant. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 07/II/93            "Cyberpunk."  Time 8 Feb. 1993: [58]-65.  Philip Elmer-Dewitt et al.  "Reported by David S. Jackson."  Fully illus.  **¢+Excellent source for definitions of key phrases and fashionable buzz-words related to the complex of real-world and artistic activities that fall under the general rubric "cyberpunk." 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/VIII/95       Cyberpunk.  Sourcebook for Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS) of Steve Jackson Games of Austin, Texas.  **+Made famous in a raid by the United States Secret Service on 1 March 1990; the Secret Service noted that "Part of the rules in this science fiction, cyberpunk setting for this particular sourcebook described how characters in the game world can break into computers," and the Feds feared real-world folk would use the information to break into real-world computers (69-70).  Quoting Kurt Lancaster, "Do Role-Playing Games Promote Crime, Satanism[,] and Suicide, among Players as Critics Claim?" JPC 28.2 (Fall 1994), our source for this entry. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 10/I/93 Cyberspace: First Steps.  Michael Benedikt, ed.  Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991, 1992.  Illus.  **¢+Begins with a short story by W. Gibson but mostly an anthology of articles

on real-world possibilities for cyberspace, understood as a far extrapolation of Virtual Reality (VR): "In a true cyberspace . . . events will occur and time will pass independently of the participant, and multiple participants will be able to react accordingly."  Rev. W. D. Stevens, SFRA Review #199 (July/August 1992): 38-39, whom we consulted for our annotation and whom we quote. 

 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 02/VII/02, RDE, 15/VIII/02      The Cyborg Handbook.  Chris Hables gray, ed.  Brighton, NY/London: Routledge, 1995.  **+ A multifarious collection of "43 articles and a lengthy bibliography," running to 500 pages and  corresponding to the varied personalities of cyborgs; plots the cyborg beginning, contemporary stage and future, as well as the cyborg's emergence into other arenas such as politics, the military and medicine.  Rev. Neil Badmington, SFS #76, 25.3 (November 1998): 539-43.  <http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir76.htm>

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 13/VII/00        Day, Dwayne A.  "It's Only a Movie: The Intelligence community can only wish it could do the things Hollywood shows it doing."  **¢+Cited under author's name under Drama Criticism.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/VI/02         Deacon, Terrence.  The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain.  New York: Norton, 1998.  **¢+

According to the Amazon.com on-line rev., "The final section of The Symbolic Species posits that human brains and human language have coevolved over millions of years, leading Deacon to the remarkable conclusion that many modern human traits were actually caused by ideas."  TSS, then, is opposed to D. Wegner (q.v. below) and other "reductionists" who take a mechanistic approach to consciousness, both assuming and attempting to demonstrate how the physiologic and anatomical processes in the already-evolved brain produce language and consciousness.  Rev. S. Vedantam (see below, this section). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 18/IV/00         Derian, James Der.  "War Games: The Pentagon Wants What Hollywood's Got."  The Nation 270.13 (3 April 2000 [special issue on independent film-making]): 41-44.  **¢+The author of Virtuous War covers the opening at the University of Southern California in August of 1999 of the "Institute for Creative Technologies" (ICT), a "'very exciting partnership' [according to Louis Caldera, US Sec. Of the Army] that seemed to include just about every major LA player in high tech, higher education and high- as well as lovbrow entertainment."  Goes on to quote Caldera on how "'This partnership will leverage the US national defense and the enormous talent and creativity of the entertainment industry and their treamendous investment in cutting-eduge applications of new technology.'  Having stroked the local powers, Caldera addressed the needs of his own constituency, in the now-common military langague that makes [William Gibson's] Neuromancer [q.v., under Fiction] sound like an out-of-date army filed manual.  'The ICT will significantly enhance complex interactive simulations for large-scale warfighting exercises and allow us,'" i.e., the Armed Forces of the United States in general and US Army in particular, "'to test new doctrines in synthetic environments that are populated with intelligent agents in future threat challenges'" (41).  "The ICT is the brainchild of Mike Macedonia [...], chief scientist and technical director at STIRICOM (Simulation, Training and Instrumention Command)," located, significantly, near Disneyworld in Orlanda, FL.  STIRICOM heads "a combined military and industry effort to create 'a distributed computerized warfare simulation system' and to support 'the 21st century warfighter's preparation for real world contingencies.'  Its motto is telling: 'All But War Is Simulation'" (41-42).  See under Fiction O.S. Card's Ender's Game, and VR entries in Index. 

 

 

9.  BACKGROUND, Maly, 01/VII/02      Dery, Mark.  "Cyberculture."  South Atlantic Quarterly 91.3 (Summer 1992): 501-23. **+Cited in Karen Hellekson's "Transforming the Subject: Humanity, the Body, and Posthumanism," q.v. under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 26/VI/04         Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination.  **+Cited under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/VI/96         , Dery, Mark.  Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.  New York: Grove, 1996.   **¢+Rev. A.  Leonard, The Nation 262.22 (3 June 1996): 36-38 (q.v. this section), our source for this entry.  MD sensibly balances arguments for and against computers and admires people like Donna Haraway (q.v. this section) and Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories (see Hardware under Drama), who critique technology while refusing to make demons of technology.  Strongly attacks posthumanists and what MD calls "techno-transcendentalists, "those whose 'visions of a cyber-Rapture are a fatal seduction, distracting us from the devastation of nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, and the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum wage masses.'"  MD is literate in postmodernism, poststructuralism, and S.F. as fiction and film, plus the whole little world of "cyberculture."  Most of the people of cyberCult "'regard the computer—a metonym, at this point, for all technology—as a Janus machine, an engine of liberation and  an instrument of repression'" (Leonard 37).  See also for quotations from D. A. Therrien "on torture machines in the Spanish Inquisitions" (state-of-the-art technology in their time) and on the sexualizing of machines at least as of the early 20th c. (Leonard 38). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 00/XII/03        **¢+ADD TO ¦ OF CITATION FOR R. DESCARTES: S. Vedantam. 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Dickson, David.  The New Politics of Science.  New York: Pantheon, 1984.  **¢+"'Since scientific knowledge has become a crucial factor determining both new high-tech products and new high-tech production processes, universities—the most productive source of this knowledge—have become increasingly swept up in a strategy whose overt objective is to maintain hegemony in the global marketplace, yet whose hidden agenda is greater corporate control of the whole U.S. society'" (NPS quoted in rev. by Samuel H. Day Jr. [sic], The Progressive Sept. 1984: 42).

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 06/I/00            DotComGuy.  "Welcome to the world of DotComGuy," The Cincinnati Post, 6 Jan. 2000: 14A (followup story 3 July 2000).  **¢+ Mitch Maddox legally changed his name to "DotComGuy," moved into a house on 1 Jan. 2000, and announced his resolve to stay there, as a stunt, until 2001.  "His plan: live exclusively online, including ordering food, furniture and clothes and hosting a 24-hour live feed of his life."  Coverage notes that "The DotComGuy project, which sounds like a cross between the Biosphere and the film 'EdTV,' has a few ground rules.  Maddox can have visitors.  he simply can't go farther than the backyard."  Maddox will be paid $24 for his first month, with his salary doubling for each succeeding month for a year ($48, $96, etc.).  In addition to EdTV, see under Fiction, E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"; see in Keyword Index entries for "womb," "house," and words related to containment.  See under Background, "Japan's real-life Truman")

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/V/04, 27/VI/04       Durack, Katherine T.  "Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Comminication," in Technical Comcommunication Quarterly 6.3 (1997): 249-60.  Rpt. with "reflection" in Central Works in Technical Communication.  Ed. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber.  Oxford, UK: Oxford UP (2004).  **¢+An elegant introduction to "research from the history of technology suggesting that notions of technology, work, and workplace may be gendered terms" (brief abstract, printed as headnote).  There's little "may be" about it, and it is important to know that (1) "Men's and women experiences of technology are quite different" (253); and (2) traditional views of technology and work have consistently undervalued technology used in what was long called "the domestic sphere."  Relevant here since constricted ideas of technology and work may reduce the "Human/Machine Interface" in SF to the man/machine interface.  See KTD's Works Cited for further readings; see in section 9 of Clockworks the entries for C. Cockburn, F. G. Borune.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 31/XII/00        Durkheim, Emile.  De la division du travail social (doctoral thesis 1893).  Paris: F. Alcan, 1902.  The Division of Labour in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls.  Introd. Lewis A. Coser.  Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1984.  New York: Free Press, 1984.  **¢+Along with ED's Le Suicide (1897), suggests that important "[É] ethical and social structures were being endangered by the advent of technology and mechanization.  The division of labour rendered workmen both more alien to one another and more dependent upon one another, since none of them built the whole product by himself" (quoting Henri M. Peyre, "Durkheim, Emile," Encyclopaedia Britannica 1974: 5.1094).  See below, this section, entry for K. Marx.  In Bowling Alone, R. D. Putnam notes US "communitarian Progressives'" distress and at how "The impersonal and attenuated ties of the market replaced" in their world "the sturdier bonds of family, friendship, and small-town solidarity," comparing this view with those of contemporary "social theorists from Europe," and placing ED's "mechanical versus organic solidarity" in a series of parallels with "Sir Henry Maine's status versus contract, Ferdinand Tšnnie's Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft [É], and Georg Simmel's comparison of town and metropolis, all expounded between 1860 and 1902" (380)—see below, this section. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 00/VI/96         Edwards, Paul N.  The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996.  **¢+According to the rev. by G. Kester (q.v. below, this section), one way to look at the development of computer technology sees the military tie-ins from the beginning as "nothing more than a historical accident."  PNE strongly disagrees.  In Kester's words, PNE argues "that the specific conditions of nuclear-era military R&D (linked with cold war foreign policy) structured the direction of that development, and even the technological form of the computer itself" (Kester 33).  Note very well ideological imperative of containment (of Communism under the Truman doctrine) and "the U.S. fantasy of a totally regulated 'electronic battlefield,' which was facilitated by the development of computerized 'command, control, and communication' systems in the military" (Kester 34): the military 3 C's are also central for any study of computers and cybernetics.  PEN uses positively the image of the cyborg (cf. D. Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs," this section) and discusses the films Star Wars and Blade Runner (q.v. under Drama), and William Gibson's Neuromancer (listed under Fiction). 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Engel, Leonard W.  "Truth and Detection: Poe's Tales of Ratiocination and his Use of the Enclosure."  Clues: A Journal of Detection 3.2 (Fall-Winter 1982): 83-85.  **¢+See for enclosure motif in Poe in general and in particular "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and "The Purloined Letter": "In his tales of terror and horror, Poe frequently uses the enclosure to dramatize the confused, frustrated and obsessed mind of his criminal or to highlight a character's psychic crisis . . . .  In these tales of detection [featuring Dupin], the opposite effect seems intended. . . . the chief purpose of the enclosure seems to be to emphasize Dupin's aloofness and confidence, his harmony of mind and body, his lack of fear, . . . [his] suprarational quality . . ." (85).

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Engel, Leonard W.  "Victim and Victimizer: Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado.'"  Interpretations: A Journal of Idea, Analysis, and Criticism, 15 (Fall 1983), 26-30.  **¢+An elegant analysis of the use of the enclosure motif in a classic work of Gothic horror.  See for premature burial as a grotesque analog of psychological repression.

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 21/III/93           Foucault, Michel.  Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977.  Colin Gordon, ed.  New York: Pantheon, 1980.  **¢+

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 21/III/93           Foucault, Michel.  "The Subject and Power."  In The Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow??.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, MALY, 027/VI/02     Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture.  Mark Dery, ed.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994.  **+Rev. Veronica Hollinger, SFS  #68, 23.1 (March 1996):136-139 <http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir68.htm#D68>. 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 02/VII/02        Fraiberg, Allison.  "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern."  Postmodern Culture 1.3 (May 1991). **+ Cited in Timo Sivonen's "Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons," q.v. under Background. 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 01/VII/02        Freedman, David H.  Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.  New York: Touchstone, 1994.  **¢+Description of the state of robotics and neuroscience in the top laboratories around the world striving to create thinking machines.  Represents various schools of thought ranging from neural-based networks that copy living organisms' brain activity to nature-based AI that uses DNA structures.  In the end, Hollywood's fantasy far outstrips the reality of scientific efforts to create thinking machines like 2001's HAL 9000 or even R2D2. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Frude, Neil.  The Intimate Machine—Close Encounters with Computers and Robots.  New York: NAL, 1983.  **¢+Recommended by Ruth Sanders; used in her GER 380, "Machine

Intelligence from a Humanist Perspective," MUO, 1986.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 00/XII/00        Frum, David.  How We Got Here: The 1970s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse).  New York: Basic Books: 2000.  **¢+ Argues that in the transition centering on the 1970s in the US, there was a rejection of rationalism, but that Òrejection of rationalism was not a rejection of machines; it was a rejection of the bureaucracy and habits of mind that linked the machines together, of the administrators who ran the bureaucracy, of the society that hired those administrators, in short, of the power that had somehow drifted into the burearucratsÕ hands.  For all the folly and self-indulgence of the anti-rationalists, they were onto something real.Ó  Rev. Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 20 March 2000: 32, our source and from whom we get the quotation from DF. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 30/XII/98        Furby.  Toy.  Tiger Electronics, Ltd., a division of Hasbro, Inc.  For Christmas, 1998.  **¢+  Toy craze for Christmas 1998, described by company press release (winter 1998) as a "cuddly standalone [rather triangular] animatronic pet [a bit over 6" high] . . . [that] interacts with the environment through sight, touch, hearing and physical orientation.  Each animated electronic plush toy is unique, intelligent and equipped with a singular personality and name.  Furby can move and dance.  Other motion includes eyes that open and close, ears that wiggle and a mouth that moves when speaking.  Furby has its own language, 'Furbish,' but learns to speak English through positive reinforcement.  Furbys communicate with each other via infrared signals, and can teach each other tricks and songs.  They can also catch one another's colds.  The electronics are fully integrated into each pet; no additional equipment or computer is required."  A website offering the results of a Furby "autopsy" suggests that Furby is not really a heuristic cybernetic device far smaller and a bit earlier than the Terminator or HAL 9000, but "simulates learning by slowly displaying different subsets of it's [sic] preprogrammed vocabulary and behavior over time.  A 'newborn' Furby is programmed to use only a portion of it's [sic] full capabilities initially, and, over time, will slowly change which preprogrammed capabilities it displays."  Basically, according to these skeptics the Furby does "not have the ability to develop new behavior or vocabulary based on . . . experiences.  Everything a Furby can ever do was preprogrammed during design and simply triggered at the appropriate time."  Still, the company press release cites, "Furby could be the first of an entire race of artificially intelligent 'special feature plush' toys," according to Wired Magazine (September, '98), so the mimicking of learning seems to be very impressive.  See under Fiction, H. Harrison's "I Always Do What Teddy Says" for a very intelligent but quite different toy; see in Keyword Index, "toy."

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 24/VI/02         Galeano, Eduardo.  "The Betrayal of Words."  The Upside-Down World column, The Progressive June 2002: 12-13.  **¢+In the century since Sigmund Freud learned from Jean-Martin Charcot that "Ideas can be planted in the human mind by hypnotism. [É] The technology of manipulation has come a long way.  A gigantic Machine the size of the planet orders us to repeat the messages it puts in our heads.  It is a Machine for the betrayal of the meaning of words."  In EG's essay, the world-machine image refers to all-encompassing power, as usual, but primarily power over the meaning of words.  Cf. George Orwell and more recent theorizing by F. Jameson and others on hegemonic discourse. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 00/XII/01        Gammage, Jeff.  "In pursuit of Hal."  The Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 Jan. 2001. 

<http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/01/07/sunmag/features/A07HAL.htm>

**¢+Staff writer JG on how far computer scientists must go to get true AI.  Brings to a popular audience some of the work reported in Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, ed. David Stork (q.v., this section).  What seemed difficult to get a computer to do—e.g., defeat a world-class chess champion—proved easy, and what even young human children do easily—e.g., recognize faces, use "common sense—even the most intelligent computers (so  far) find difficult.  "It's a field enmeshed in debate, even over how to proceed.  Roger Schank, who led the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project, believes HAL will never exist.  On the other hand, Raymond Kurzweil, who developed the first text-to-speech synthesizer, thinks man eventually may achieve artificial intelligence by mapping a human brain and then encoding the data into a computer to create a virtual brain."  It is now an old debate; see AI in Index and works cross-listed in this section under citations for R. Descartes and D. R. Hofstadter. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 31/III/98          Gawande, Atul.  "No Mistake."  The New Yorker 30 March 1998: 74-[81], under "Medical Dispatch."              **¢+Under title (in italics): "The future of medical care: machines that act like doctors, and doctors who act like machines" (74).  Significant for appearing in The New Yorker, combined with its tone.  AG stresses the advantages of "specialized, automated care" and substituting statistical analysis and formulas for the intuition of experienced physicians.  "This vision of disaggregated, mechanized medicine will seem horrifying to many people. * * * And yet . . . . the machine, oddly enough, may be holistic medicine's best friend. . . . [A]s expert systems . . . begin to take on more of the technical and cognitive work of medicine, generalist physicians will be in a position to embrace the humanistic dimension of care" ([81]). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 15/X/96          Godwin, William.  Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness.  F. E. L. Priestly, ed.  3 vols.  Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1946.  **¢+WG, father of Mary Shelley, "discusses 'The Mechanism of the Human Mind'" in this work, describing 'the workings of the mind as 'a system of mechanism' in which a specific antecedent determines every consequent thought (ECPJ 2: 398-420).  WG here is in the tradition of the "associationism" psychology of John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1700), and Locke's popularizer David Harley: Observations of Man (1749).  Discussed in Jonathan C. Glance's "'Beyond the Usual Bounds of Reverie?'[:] Another Look at the Dreams in Frankenstein."  JFA 7.4 (#28, Special Issue: Dream and Narrative Space [1996]): here, 33-34—our source for this citation and whom we quote. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 19/III/03          "Grace, the Mother of Robot Breakthroughs," title in BusinessWeek online, 2 August 2002.  Also covered by the Associated Press in a story reprinted on Salon.com titled "New robot has social skills."  **¢+To meet the "Robot Challenge" of the AAAI: "Without human guidance or a preprogrammed map, Grace was to find her way to the registration counter of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's 2002 conference, sign in, navigate to the elevators leading to the conference rooms, 'schmooze' with people in the elevator and hallways, take her place behind the podium, and deliver a lecture about herself."  GRACE stands for "Graduate Robot Attending Conference (or "ConfErence"?) and embodies the quest for AI that includes social skills.  The Salon/AP story quotes project coordinator Reid Simmons, saying that "the robot was made female because he believes women communicate better than men"; Simmons "solicited drama students to teach GRACE how to act like a human so it will make people feel comfortable." 

<www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc2002082_6444.htm> ALSO: <www.acm.org/technews/archives.html#august> 2002. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE (from R. Baarson, 210, F93), 22/XII/93 Greenfield, Patricia Marks.  Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Camputers.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 00/XII/01        Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality.  Ed. David G. Stork.  Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997.  **¢+The highly impressive contents include a Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke; Preface: "The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001" by DGS; "Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky by DGS; "Could We Build HAL? Supercomputer Design" by David J. Kuck "'Foolproof and incapable of error'?  Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance" by Ravishankar K. Iyer; "The Talking Computer: Text to Speech Synthesis" by Joseph P. Olive; "When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying? Computer Speech Recognition and Understanding" by Raymond Kurzweil; "'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that'": How Could HAL Use Language?" by Roger C. Schank; "From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL" by Douglas B. Lenat; "Eyes for Computers: How HAL Could 'See'" by Azriel Rosenfeld; "'I could see your lips move': HAL and Speechreading" by DGS; "Living in Space: Working with the Machines of the Future" by Donald A. Norman; "Does HAL Cry Digital Tears? Emotions and Computers" by Rosalind W. Picard;  "'That's something I could not allow to happen': HAL and Planning" by David E. Wilkins; "When HAL Kills, Who's to Blame? Computer Ethics" by Daniel C. Dennett. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 17/III/00          Handy, Bruce.  ÒTomorrowland Never Dies,Ó  Vanity Fair, March 2000: [114]-[126], ÒSocietyÓ section.   **¢+ ÓBy the future,Ó HB means Òan imagined destination, a vision, as opposed to the eventuality that rolls around whether we want it to or notÓ (116).  ÒUntil the 60s, AmericaÕs visions of the future were optimistic, unironic, and really pretty cool.  Well, that future has more or less arrived, and what weÕre left with is a nostalgia for those space-age mid-century dreams—the semi-kitsch echoes of Tomorrowland, the Jetsons, and the 1939 New York WorldÕs FairÓ (summary under title on first page of essay).  Usefully contrast Walt DisneyÕs Tomorrowland and its DisneyCorp successor, which incorporates elements of Buck Rogers, Tim BurtonÕs Batman, Star Wars, Jules VerneÕs and DisneyÕs 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea  (114).  Other useful contrasts: The futuristic General Motors Futurama vision of America in 1960 vs. Matt GroeningÕs retro-futuristic Futurama show on Fox TV (q.v., under Drama); Metropolis vs. Star Wars as a kind of transitional work, and more so Blade Runner, Òthe Birth of a Nation of retro-futurism.Ó See pp. 122-23 of this essay for GATTACA, Fifth Element, Bicentennial Man, Brazil, the Mad Max series, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Sleeper, Things to Come, TRON the new VW Beetle, the iMac computer design as based on The Jetsons, and the Encounter Restaurant, Òthe quintessential Southern California restaurant of the 1990s,Ó which turned Òan authentically forward-looking work into a phony version of what it already was  (122-23; films listed under Drama).  See for  retro-futurismÕs appeal in the Jetsonian Òcomforting portrayal of the future thatÕs nostalgicÓ and ÒThe difference between genuine futurism and retro-futurismÓ as Òthe difference between what the future once man to people and what it doesnÕt mean nowÓ—which, we add, seems very important for  Modernism vs. postmodernism as styles and world-views.  CAUTION: Except insofar as ÒThe child is father to the man,Ó the Bruce Willis character in 12 Monkeys doesnÕt turn Òout to be his own fatherÓ—or, not unless we missed something important in the film (122). 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 01/VII/02        Haraway, Donna.  Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  New York: Routledge, 1990.   **+Cited in Karen Hellekson's "Transforming the Subject: Humanity, the Body, and Posthumanism, q.v. under Literary Criticism .  See there also Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto."  

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 26/I/02            Hawkes, David.  "Artistic Economics."  Rev. Economics and Culture by David Throsby, Cambridge UP, and Market Society by Don Slater and Fran Tonkiss, Polity.  The Nation 274.2 (21 Jan. 2002): 28, 30-32.  **¢+Asserts that Throsby accepts current "quantification of all human experience," and uses for his (Thorsby's) argument the "notion of the 'stakeholder,' dear to Tony Blair [New Labor PM of UK], whose ambition to create a 'stakeholder society' is overt and unapologetic."  Significant here is the definition of a stakeholder as one standing "in relation to the world as a shareholder does to a corporation," seeing only one's "stake" in one's surroundings and calculating how to "optimally maximize" benefit from that stake.  "The stakeholder, then, is not human.  He is rather a quantified abstraction from humanity, a machine designed for the calculation of marginal utility."  Like ÇEconomic ManÈ, the stakeholder is not merely a theoretical construct; DH quotes Hannah Arendt on humans as seen in "neoclassical economics' cousin, behavioral psychology: 'The problem É is not that it is false but that it is becoming true'" (30). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, Jeff Wax, 14/V/01       Hayden, Thomas, with reporting by Peter Hadfield in Tokyo.  "The Age of Robots: The promise and peril of thinking machines" (on cover; subheads internally: "We're close to making humanlike machines.  It's time to reckon with the promises and perils").  Science & Ideas . Cover Story", U.S. News and World Report 130.16 (23 April 2001): 45-50. **+Coverage for a lay audience of recent work in robotics, with frequent SF allusions, starting with a first-sentence reference to I. Asimov's I, Robot, q.v. under Fiction, and an early allusion to the upcoming (at the time) film A.I., q.v. under Drama.  Currently available or scheduled real-world robots considered include Robomower, "the Dyson DC06 robotic vacuum cleaner," and robot toys and pets, including "mechatronic aliens and babies and dinosaurs" (45-46).  Deals seriously with the proposition that "[É] progress toward a fully autonomous, intelligent [AI] robot has been so convincing that any number of  technofuturists are worrying publicly about the perils of robotics," including Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who has written a prediction "that our own robotic creations might one day replicate themselves and contribute to humankind's demise" (46 [see below, this section; cf. entries under P. K. Dick for "Autofac," "Defenders," and following]).  Still, the article stresses the position of Rodney Brooks of MIT's AI laboratory that "The high marks of Enlightenment thinking—logic and problem solving—turn out to be much easier to simulate than the perceptual and intuitive things that any kid can do" (46)—giving the example of the kind of intelligence needed not only to play chess but also to make soup.  So more space in the article is dedicated to the difficulties and possibilities in reproducing not only human thought and language but also humanoid movement, perception, and social signals, and to practical applications for non-AI robots.  Walking/manipulating objects: "the Honda P3, a 5-foot, 3-inch [É] astronaut look-alike," soon succeed by "the more diminutive Asimo"; "NASA's prototype space worker Robonaut," worked by what we'll call waldoes and the article refers to as "a human operator in a sensor-laden 'tele-presence' suit."  Sense perception, facial expressions and social interaction: "the cartoonish, head-only robot Kismet"; Cog.  Practical robots: Isac (sic) , of Vanderbilt U., intended as "a gentle care-taker for the disabled; the commercial firm iRobot's Ariel, a terrestrial mine-sweeper, plus "'an emotionally smart' doll My Real Baby and an eight-wheeled, stair-climbing" home-security robot; RedZone Robotics "has robots with names like Houdini, Pioneer, and Fury" to work in dangerous areas such as toxic waste dumps or nuclear reactors (48-49). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 31/X/04          Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter.  The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed.  **¢+Political tract favoring fairly traditional political reform on the level of State/Province and Nation-State as opposed to "Think globally, act locally"—and from a totalizing counter-cultural analysis.  Relevant here because the argument emphatically includes—in the last of ten chapters, just before the conclusion—a critique of classics from the 1960s onward on issues of technology and "the human/machine interface."  The Table of Contents has chapter 10 titled "Spaceship Earth," with subsections summarized as "The Critical Mass ride.  The rule of technique.  Small is beautiful, and appropriate technology.  Cyberlibertarianism and spam.  Paper or plastic?  Slow food.  Shallow and deep ecology.  Matrix redux.  Shallow environmentalism and negative externalities."  Among works and ideas criticized: Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969), Charles Reich's The Greening Of America; How The Youth Revolution Is Trying To Make America Livable (1970), Jacques Ellul on technique, Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992), Langdon Winner writing in Newsday (23 Nov. 1997) on "technomania," Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man on "relying upon the very instrucment of repression—technology—for the emancipation of society" (RS 294), Ernst Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973; London: Abacus, 1974), Ursula Franklin's The Real World of Technology (1990; Toronto: Anansi, 1999), Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969; New York: Pocket, 1970)—and hacking as a kind of "culture jamming" as espoused by Timothy Leary, Andrew Ross, John Perry Barlow, Esther Dyson et al., et al. (sic).  See in this section citations for J. Ellul, H. Marcuse, T. Roszak.  CAUTION: Heath and Potter don't supply original publication dates when they cite reprints, and they err in crediting T. Roszak with coining "the term 'technocracy'" (344 n.). 

 

9. BACK, RDE (from R. Baarson, 210, F93), 22/XII/93 Heim, Michael.  The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality.  New York: Oxford UP, 1993.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, DanB, 22/VI/02           Higgins, Dave.  "'Thinking' robot in escape bid."  TheAge.com.au, Thursday, 20 June 2002.  <www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/20/1023864460978.html>.  **¢+Whether the story is factual or not, it is significant that a report circulated that "Scientists running a pioneering experiment with 'living robots' which think for themselves today said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it 'lives.'"  A "small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a 'survival of the fittest' test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire"; the experimenter left it alone for a while and it "forced its way out of the small make-shift paddock it was being kept in."  The experimenter assured the reporter that "although they can escape they are perfectly harmless and won't be taking over just yet."  Note experimenter's assertion of willed behavior in the robot and assumption of take-over fear among likely readers of the story.  See under Drama, Short Circuit; see Keyword Index for "robot." 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 21/III/93           Howard, Robert.  Brave New Workplace.  New York: Viking, 1985.  **¢+

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 20/VII/93         Hughes, Glyn.  The Rape of the Rose.  New York: Simon, 1993.  **¢+Historical novel on the Luddites; see J. Leonard rev. cited below. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/I/00            Hyatt, Michael S.  The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos.  Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998.  **¢+ On what has become known as "The Millennium Bug" and the "Y2K" problem: the potential crisis in the convention of saving space in computer programs by using the last two digits only for the year in dates and having the computer assume, so to speak, that the two digits are preceded by "19" (e.g., using "77" for "1977"), causing problems with programs, including those in "embedded chips" at the year 2000, which some systems would read as "1900."  The first two Parts are relevant: "Part I, 'The Eleventh Hour,' will give you an overview of the Year 2000 Computer Crisis. [. . .]  Part II, 'Against the Clock,' discusses the implications and impact of the Year 2000 Problem on various segments of our high-tech civilization" (xix [see also xiv f.).  Useful work for how the Y2K problem alerted many average people to the fact that "[. . .] almost all the technology we take for granted today relies to some extent on embedded chips or microcontrollers" (25) and how much modern life depends on technology generally and cybernetic systems more particularly.  See also for what we will call the "modernist" assumption that mainframe computers would be replaced or upgraded quickly, as opposed to the more "po-mo" situation of their having "'turned out to have very long lives [sic]'" (6 quoting Harry N. Miller). 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 17/I/95 **¢+"Infinitely Reasonable."  The Day the Universe Changed.  Written and Presented by James Burke.  BBC-TV, 1985 (?).  Prod. BBC-TV Productions, associated with RKO, Canale (Italy), FR3 (France), YLE (Finland).  **¢+Excellent on work—including instrumentation—leading to and from R. Descartes, I. Newton, and the mathematizing of a mechanical universe.  Last words place humankind alone and peripheral: "Just a cog in the cosmic clock." 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 21/III/93, 12/VI/98       Jameson, Frederic.  Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.  **¢+Six chapters are rpts. of earlier published essays, including the title essay from New Left Review (q.v. above).  Reprints "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" essay "without significant modifications" (XV), and, unfortunately, without significant revision for clarity.  Postmodernism on the whole, expands on the ideas of cognitive mapping FJ developed in his "Cultural Logic" essay (q.v. above), and usefully identifies much of modern Theory, including postmodern attacks on "totalizing," as a recent incarnation of nominalism.  (Nominalism goes back to the late ancient world, but became important for secular philosophy in the 11th c. CE when Roscellinus denied "the reality of all universals," accepting as real only "physical particulars."  This idea was revived by William of Occam in the early 14th c. and by Logical Positivism in the 20th.  Contrary to colloquial usage, accepting the reality of universals, abstractions is philosophical realism [Dictionary of Philosophy].  Neither term in the philosophical sense will be found in Postmodernism's index.)  According to I. Csicsery-Ronay, Postmodernism "tries to balance the postmodern demand for de-totalizing accounts with Jameson's own modernist commitment to totalizing description.  The compromise is in the form of a constellation of cultural manifestations that are linked by the underlying economic determination of late capitalism . . . but whose relations to the social-economic formation are incredibly complex" (I.C-R. 406).  The first note of the book regrets "the absence from this book of a chapter on cyberpunk, henceforth, for many of us, the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself" ([419]).  Rev. I. Csicsery-Ronay, SFS #58, 19.3 (Nov. 1992): 403-410; the review is cited separately under the reviewer's name, under Literary Criticism.  **Topics in Postmodernism useful for study of the human/machine interface include: Ernest Mandel on the stages of capitalism and the technology of production of machines by machines (35-36); "representations of some immense communicational and computer network" in what might be called "'high-tech paranoia'" literature as "a distorted figuration of . . . the "world system of present-day multinational capitalism," with technological conspiracy theories as "a degraded attempt . . . to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system" (37-38); "machine time," TV's "'total flow,'" and video as arguable "the art form par excellence of late capitalism (75-78.); Paul DeMan as "an eighteenth-century mechanical materialist"—i.e., in that tradition—and maybe J-J. Rousseau as well (246-47); "an orgy of language and representation" in cyberpunk writing determined by "the thrill of international business and the peculiar opulence of the yuppie life world" for a kind of mental libido (321); and some comments on Road Warrior, Terminator, and Blade Runner—with a casual insult to A Boy and His Dog and Glenn and Rhonda—as representations not of the future breakdown of high technology "but its conquest in the first place"—i.e., we think, the high-tech conquest of people under late capitalism (384-85). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 30/III/99          "Japan's real-life Truman: 'You are a star."  The Guardian.  Rpt. The Cincinnati Post, Monday, 29 March 1999: 1A, 8A.  **¢Confined in a small apartment from January 1998 through March 1999, "Nasubi, a 23-year-old comedian" has been trying "to eke out an existence until he won $8,000 worth of prizes in magazine competitions," while living totally on the prizes he had won.  "Unbeknownst to him, Japan's top variety program—'Susunu Denpa Shonen!' ('Don't Go For It, Electric Boy!')—has broadcast his progress," using "two hidden cameras" (1A).  Nasubi eventually went naked, "his genitals covered with an eggplant icon" in the video transmitted.  To end the show, the producers took Nasubi, still naked into what they called "'a waiting room,' where he was sitting . . . when the walls collapsed around him to reveal a studio full of guests," for the most part laughing.  Nasubi was angered to be observed naked and said more generally that he "suffered mentally every day" and felt "trapped between sanity and madness" (8A).  Note real-world instance of motif of total surveillance, and a kind of superimposition of media technology on a human body.  Note complexities, ironies, and cruelties of the situation, including the visual covering/replacement of a man's genitals with a CGI vegetable, while he is (un)dressed au naturel, while in a totally human-made environment, "hunting and gathering" in magazines.  See under drama, Truman Show and EdTV.  See in this section, "DotComGuy."

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/VI/96         Jeanneret-Gris, Charles-ƒdouard: See "Le Corbusier."  **¢+

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Kasson, John.  Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776-1900.  New York: Penguin, 1977.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 12/VII/03        Keefe, Bob.  "'Semi-living artist' melds robot and rat."  Cox News Service.  Immediate initial source: The Dayton Daily News, 12 July 2003: A2, "Daily Focus" section.  More basic source: "Researchers use lab cultures to create robotic 'semi-living artist'" media release by Larry Bowie of Georgia Institute of Technological Research News, on-line after 8 July 03 at <http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/giot-rul070803.php>.  **¢+Bowie's lead: "Working from their university labs in two different corners of the world, U.S. and Australian researchers have created what they call a new class of creative beings, 'the semi-living artist,' a picture-drawing robot in Perth, Australia whose movements are controlled by the brain signals of cultured rat cells in Atlanta."  The excised brain-cells and the robot arm are connected via the Internet to form a hybrid robot, or "Hybrot."  One practical goal is to produce "neuroprothetics"; Bowie's media release cites a goal in more basic science: "Central to the experiments is [Georgia Tech's Steve] Potter's belief that over time the teams will be able to establish a cultured in vitro network system that learns like the living brains in people and animals do."  The petri dish containing the cells is decorated with a picture of the Robby-like robot from the 1960s TV show Lost in Space (Keefe).  The semi-living artist was displayed at "ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show" (http://artbots.org) in New York City, 12-13 July at the Eyebeam Gallery in the Chelsea district (see under Graphics).  Cf. and contrast excised (human) brains in R. P. Bird's "The Soft Heart of the Electron," R. Cook's Brain, G. Dent's Emperor of If, C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (listed under Fiction); see in Clute and Nichols's Ency. of SF the entry for the film Donovan's Brain. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 28/III/93           Kelley, Robert T.  "A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike: Aesthetics and Teleology in Interactive Computer Fictional Environments."  SFS #59 = Volume 20, Part 1 = March 1993: 52-68.  Abstract on WWW at <http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a59.htm#E59>.  **¢+See for information on Virtual Reality, AI vs. "IA" ("'intelligence amplification'" [54]), and interactive-fiction games.  Concludes that the "various interactive forms" RTK discusses point toward "a whole new branch of narrative" that "abandons the fixity of the written text in what has been called a post-Gutenberg revolution."  Agrees with D. Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (q.v. this section) and advises us "that we are already cyborgs, already facing integration into technological narrative" (64). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/VI/96         Kester, Grant.  "War Games Computers Play."  Rev. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996).  The Nation 262.22 (3 June 1996): 33-36.  **¢+Stresses imagery of enclosure, containment—including "the 'closed world'" metaphor Edwards discusses but starting with GK's own experience of the quite literal enclosed world of an ICBM launch crew.  The article begins with GK visiting the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona, where, most striking "was the detached yet ritualistic nature of the launch sequence and the intense, almost womblike closure of the control room.  The crew would never even know the name or location of its target . . . no doubt in order to discourage any empathetic identification with the people on the receiving end of their ICBM" (33).  Cf. under Fiction M. Roshwald's Level 7; see also under Fiction, Paul Edwards (= Paul N. Edwards?), "Sunshine Delight." 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 23/VIII/00       Koppell, Jonathan G. S.  "No 'There' There: Why cyberspace isn't anyplace."  Notes & Comments.  The Atlantic Monthly 286.2 (August 2000): 16, 18.  **¢+A brief examination of the "cyberspace-as-place metaphor" and the implication of the metaphor for public policy; usefully notes that we do not think of "'postalspace'" when discussing, say, mail fraud and other uses of mail as a jurisdiction-crossing medium. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/X/00          Kurzweil, Ray.  The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.  **¢+

 

 

9.  Le Corbusier (pseud. of Charles-ƒdouard Jeanneret-Gris): 1887-1965.  **¢+For a house as "a machine for living," see Zwirn, this section.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/VI/96         Leonard, Andrew.  "Cyberbolic Techno-Raptures."  Rev. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, by Mark Dery (New York: Grove, 1996).   The Nation 262.22 (3 June 1996): 36-38.  **¢+Stresses Dery's sensible balancing of arguments for and against computers and "that the first thing one must grasp about computers is that they are not, in fact, binary . . . .  Cyberculture is not black and white, one or zero, this or that.  What it is, actually, is a mess" (AL's words, 36).  See for AL's contention that "The posthumanists are a weak straw person to counterpoint Dery's frequent allusions to the greater societal problems being submerged by the digital deluge.  Dery would have done better to lead more fully into his sights [sic] the real target—Wired-style techno-positivity.  It isn't as sexy, and it long ago lost its subcultural cachet, but as far as social reality is concerned, Wired's aestheticizing of techno-politics is the real 'Mechagodzilla'" (38). 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 20/VII/93         Leonard, John.  "Machine Dreams."  Rev. The Rape of the Rose by Glyn Hughes (cited above, this section).  The Nation 17 May 1993: 667 f.  **¢+A rev.-essay, covering not just G. Hughes's book but also the place of Luddism is English history and technology in Western industrial culture.  A highly useful introd. to real-world machines and their social costs.  Cf. K. Marx, cited below. 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 02/VII/02        Levy, Steven.  Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation.  New York: Pantheon, 1992.   **+ Cited in Ross Farnell's "Attempting Immortality: AI, A-Life, and the Posthuman in Greg Egan's Permutation City," q.v. under Literary Criticism

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 21/I/96            Lloyd, Michele, author, ed., publisher.  "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," Parts 1 and 2.  In The Decline of Civilization: News for the Paranoid, issues 17 and 18 (Nov., Dec. 1995).  A desk-top published newsletter available from ML at 128 Twin Lakes Drive / Fairfield, OH 45014 (MELloyd@aol.com).  **¢+Part 1 briefly covers The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Terminator, RoboCop and the "I, Borg" episode of The Trek: The Next Generation (all cited under Drama).  Part 2 briefly handles Cyborg and Nemesis (q.v. under Drama), American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Digital Man, Judge Dredd, Prototype X29A—and covers in more detail RoboCop and RoboCop 2 (q.v.).  Especially in Part 2, ML elegantly relates cyborgs to motifs of nature vs. technology, and the questions of human identity and free will; she situates cyborg films (and such SF novels as J. Brunner's The Jagged Orbit [q.v. under Fiction]) in the world of high-tech late capitalism and the world of ÇtechnocracyÈ in the sense of rule by those who have mastered techniques, including psychological techniques (see in this section, J. Ellul).  And in a world in which the assembly-line factory can be taken as a metaphor for a clockwork life (see Modern Times, cited under Drama). 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 27/VI/02         Markley, Robert, ed.  Virtual Realities and Their Discontents.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996. **+Cited in Daniel Grassian's "Discovering the Machine in You," q.v. under Literary Criticism.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 14/V/04          The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real.  Ed. William Irwin.  Chicago: Open Court, 2002.  **¢+Anthology of 20 essays, divided into five sections, covering such topics as: Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," skepticism, moral/ethical issues, "The Metaphysics of The Matrix," philosophy of mind, "Neo-Materialism and the Death of the Subject," "Fate, Freedom, and Foreknowledge," Buddhism, Cypher's Choice (i.e., for ignorance and imagined happiness), nihilism, existential authenticity, "Penetrating Keanu: New Holes, but the Same Old Shit" (by a critic who much prefers D. Cronenberg's eXistenZ, q.v., under Drama), Marxian considerations, postmodernism, and perversion.  Written in plain English, but the essays in Taking the Red Pill may be easier for an introduction.  Indexed. 

 

 

9. BACK, Maly, 02/VII/02         McHoul, Alec.  "Cyberbeing and ~space."  Postmodern Culture [PMC] 8.1 (1997).  **+ Cited in Ross Farnell's "Attempting Immortality: AI, A-Life, and the Posthuman in Greg Egan's Permutation City," q.v. under Fiction.  On line as of August 2002: <wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/cybersein.html>.

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           McLaughlin, William.  "Human Evolution in the Age of the Intelligent Machine."  Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 8.4 (1983): 307 f.  **¢+Cited by Orth.

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           McLuhan, Marshall.  The Mechanical Bride, Understanding Media,  and others.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 18/III/01, 27/III/01       Melley, Timothy.  Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America.  Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2000.  **+Annotated more briefly and specifically under Literary Criticism and Film Criticism.  **¢+TM cites Ralph Waldo Emerson's "classic American account of self versus society" in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" essay of 1841, quoting Emerson's statement that "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members" (EoC 10).  TM also contextualizes his argument with Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Max Weber on bureaucracy, Norbert Wiener on Cybernetics, and the critique of technology and technocracy found in Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (underlined titles cited this section)—etc., for a long and useful "Works Cited."  In part, EoC fits in with debate we cross-reference in this section under R. Descartes and continue in the citation for K. Marx on machine vs. workers as subject/object, and continue further under B. F. Skinner and M. Foucault (q.v.).  The debate may extend back to the Greek Stoics—certainly in America to Ralph Waldo Emerson on "Self-Reliance" (1840s) and Mark Twain's observation that "We are creatures of outside influences" ("Corn-Pone Opinions," ca. 1900)—but after World War II, American thinkers became concerned about the real possibility of the rise of a new kind of American: other-directed, an agent not as an autonomous self but in the sense of a factor for other people or forces.  TM traces this concern from David Riesman and William Whyte to Herbert Marcuse and J. Edgar Hoover and sees a rise of "agency panic" and an answer to it in the near-hysterical reassertion of the traditional liberal autonomous individual (usually Man).  "Agency panic" is an elegant and highly powerful theory for analyzing much discourse in post-War North America and more generally (e.g., the great 20th-c. dystopias: Y. Zamiatin's We, A. Huxley's Brave New World, G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four); and TM is eminently sensible in seeing human beings as deeply involved in various kinds of structures and somewhat free.  For further contextualizing agency panic and the re-assertion against strong evidence of the free individual, see Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mouches, 1943 (The Flies 1946, 1947).  For a summary of Franz Fanon on reassertion of autonomy through violence, and a defense of the "human faculty for action" against the apparatus of the state, see Hannah Arendt, On Violence (cited above).  For more positive possibilities for assertions of individual responsibility in the postwar period, see Arendt's Origin of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; rev., enlarged edn. Harmondsworth/New York: Penguin/Viking, 1965), esp. end of "Epilogue," 278-79.  See also Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951; New York: Harper, 1966), esp. ¤ 27 on Nazi joy "to be free from freedom." 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/X/98          "Michel Foucault on Attica."  Interview, Telos, Spring 1974: 154-61.  Quoted, Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 311.  **¢+With the aid of John K. Simon and "a law professor who specialized in prison reform," Foucault visited the New York State prison at Attica in 1972, when Foucault was the guest of the U of Buffalo French Department, and a year after the bloody riot and its bloodier suppression at the prison.  "He was struck, he told Simon later, by the 'Disneyland' aspect of the entrance, behind which was hidden a 'huge machine,' 'a machinery' of clean, neat corridors that determined, for those who went down them, trajectories that were direct, effective, and observable."  See in this section, Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir). 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 28/XII/94         Miller, B. Diane.  "Claim-Making In Artificial Intelligence Research."  SFRA Review #208, Nov./Dec/ 1993: 35-44.  **¢+Brief discussion for lay readers of the conflict in AI research between the "neuroscience (brain simulation) based paradigm" and the model "grounded in language as a symbolic representation of the world" (37).  Asks why, between the late 1940s and 1970 and beyond "did one paradigm . . . triumph over the other?  How did the symbolic system paradigm" until fairly recently "gain control of the research funds while the brain modeling paradigm took a back seat?" (39).  Follows Thomas S. Kuhn's analysis (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1970]) to conclude that there was a sort of paradigm prejudice (our term) at work: what one of BDM's sources describes as a "quasi-religious philosophical prejudice against holism" (qtd on 40).  Ends by suggesting following Ludwig Wittgenstein in recanting an atomistic approach to mind: if ". . . human thought is a much more holistic process than either neural nets or symbol systems; then the future paradigm of AI research will be a combination of both paradigms rather than one paradigm replacing the other as Thomas Kuhn's work would indicate" (41). 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 03/II/93            Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge—Cyberpunk, Virtual Reality, Wetware, Designer, Aphrodisiacs, Artificial Life, Techno-Erotic Paganism, and More . . . .  New York (?): HarperCollins, 1992.  **¢+Mentioned by N[eil]B[arron] in a note to Rob Latham's review of the Mondo 2000 magazine, ending his "Cultural Studies and Science Fiction" rev. of several books in SFRA Review #198 (June 1992): 22. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/X/00          Moravec, Hans P.  Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 01/VII/02        Moravec, Hans.  Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence.  Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.  **+Cited in Karen Hellekson's "Transforming the Subject: Humanity, the Body, and Posthumanism, q.v. under Literary Criticism

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 17/IX/00         Morris, David.  The Masks of Lucifer: Technology and the Occult in Twentieth-Century Popular Literature.  London: B. T. Batsford, 1992.  223 pp.  **+An examination of "techno-occult literature," explicitly avoiding S.F., connecting well such disparate phenomena as "theosophy, ancient [extra-]terrestrialism, flying saucers, nuclear technology, and postwar anxiety."  Stresses "flying saucer and related literature as a reflection of popular culture and as a source of revitalization for various forms of occult thought."  Includes discussions of Immanuel Velikovsky's catastrophe theories in the 1950s, and Erich von Daniken's God-as-astronaut ideas in the 1960s and '70s.  For Morris, the enthusiastic reception of von Daniken's works "echoes the optimism and celebration of technology that accompanied the NASA space flights and satellite launches of the 1960s."  Deals usefully with the audience for the techno-occult, mostly what Vance Packard has called the "'limited success class'—a class at the top of the blue collar and the bottom of the white collar world.  Morris asserts that the appeal of occultism for this class is its ability to reassert authority and hierarchy in updated modes," and other reactionary functions; the origin of this class is associated with the rise of a highly "bureaucratized, techno-literate military in World War II."  Rev. Carmen Hendershott, UtS 5.1 (1994): 203-05, our source for this citation, and whom we quote. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 31/V/99          Morton, Oliver.  "In Pursuit of Infinity."  A Critic at Large section, The New Yorker, 17 May 1999: 84-89.  **¢+On the occasion of the release of Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, The New Yorker published this background piece on galactic empires somewhat generally and I. Asimov's Foundation series as the "prototypical Galactic Empire" that "set the rules for all Galactic Empires to come, even though Asimov kept the Empire itself very much in the background" (84, 86).  On the Star Wars series, notes that "spirit triumphs over technology" and holds usefully that the series "treats technology as essentially malign, inhuman, and untrustworthy," with the exception of "machines that malfunction," such as The Millennium Falcon or "the comic droids" (88).  We would delete the "essentially" before the "malign" and substitute "mostly" or some other more cautious adverb: low-tech or relatively low-tech devices can be neutral (e.g., light-sabers) or good as used (e.g., the catapults used against Imperial or protoImperial forces in Return of the Jedi, Phantom Menace). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 24/VIII/02       Murray, Frank J.  NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports."  The Washington Times, 17 Aug. 2002: <http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020817-704732.htm>.  **¢+"Airport security screeners may soon try to read the minds of travelers to identify terrorists.  Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify."  In the plan under consideration (according to the Times's identified sources), "Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns"; those data would be fed "into computerized programs 'to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat,' [É]"  Less sensationally: sensors mounted on gates would collect physiologic information on passersby; the data would be put into "statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from 'hundreds to thousands of data sources' [É]."  According to Robert Park, Physics, U. of Maryland: 'We're getting closer to reading minds than you might suppose' [É]," approaching "the point where they can tell to an extent what you're thinking about by which part of the brain is activated, which is close to reading your mind.  It would be terribly complicated to try to build a device that would read your mind as you walk by.'  The idea is plausible, Park says, but frightening."  In any event, such real-world speculation is significant. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, Peter Sands, 17/VII/01           "A New Breed of Thinking Computer?"  Business Week 21 June 1999.  **+"A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a handful of other groups are working to develop hybrid biocomputers that marry living nerve cells with silicon circuits to create smarter computers.  If they succeed, they could set the foundation for brain-like computer systems that could find solutions on their own," without detailed programming.  Currently, a chaos-theory-based program called by the SF term (or hackers' joke) "wetware" has been used to join two leech neurons to a PC.  The project head "says it will be 10 years or more"—i.e., after ca. 2009—"until biocomputers are commercially available." 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 16/XI/97         Noble, David F.  The Religion of Technology.  New York: Knopf, 1997.  **¢+Traces the connections—philosophical, historical, and political among others—between Western technology and the millenarian aspect of Christianity: "technology and transcendence."  In the summary of a friendly review: "From windmills and watermills, through the Industrial Revolution, and on into space flight, nuclear weapons, virtual reality[,] and genetic engineering, the bulk of technology has been explicitly made to embody millenarian ideals" (Jeni Miller, "The Gods in the Machine," The Nation, 22 Sept. 1997: 28-30, here, 28). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 07/IX/01         Parenti, Christian.  "Big Brother's Corporate Cousin."  The Nation 273.5 (6/13 Aug. 2001): 26-30.  **+An overview of "life on the new shop floor," and beyond, "where surveillance and constant psychological pressure to work harder are increasingly common."  Shows how American workplaces are "becoming ever more transparent to employers" via high-tech "and oppressive for employees" given the way advanced technology is used.  Real-world examples as of 2001 include "Customer Relationship Management" which monitoring down to keystrokes, listening in on calls, archiving and searching e-mail and voice-mail.  Such power allows managers "to create an intricate and invasive corporate culture based on measuring, ranking[,] and intimidating line staff" (26), resulting in "the office as Panopticon" (27)—see in this section M. Foucault's Discipline and Punish.  For a major example, companies are combating personal Internet use (for gambling, pornography, etc.) and more serious computer-aided offenses (industrial espionage, fraud, insider trading) with software packages developed for the military.  Low-tech jobs such as restaurant server are "Taylorized" (see below, F. W. Taylor) through replacing order pads with handheld computers that radio back orders, cutting down on wasted motion by the servers—and severely cutting down on socializing (28).  For a variation on the collars worn by "Risks" in F. Pohl and J. Williamson's Reefs of Space (listed under Fiction), hospital workers wear transponder badges giving their locations, and trucks and drivers can be tracked anywhere, the drivers through their "Delivery Information Acquisition Devices": computerized clipboards (30). 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Polak, Fred.  The Image of the Future.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973.  **¢+Cited by Orth.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 16/I/03            Pope, Justin (AP).  "Military learned lesson using robots in Afghanistan."  Our source: The Dayton Daily News, 12 Jan. 03: A5.  **¢+See for image of small, increasingly autonomous combat robots "swarming like giant insects over battlefields in coordinated, terrifying attacks" and the name of a product and a major player in military robotics: "PackBots" by the firm "iRobot."  On the web as of 16 Jan. 03 at <http://www.tcpalm.com/tcp/business/article/0,1651,TCP_998_1667991,00.html>.

 

 

9. BACKGROUND, 26/VIII/92   Postman, Neil.  Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.  New York: knopf, 1992.  **¢+Against technopoly as totaltarian technocracy, against scientism, against much of the modern worldview descending from Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Francis Bacon.  Rev. Stuart Weir, The Nation 31 Aug./7 Sept. 1992: 216-17, upon whom we depend for this citation. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE (from R. Baarson, 210, F93), 22/XII/93 Provenzo, Eugene F.  Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 05/XII/01        Putnam, Robert.  Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.  **¢+Strongly implicated in the decline of "social capital"—community networks—in 20th c. USA: the automobile and TV (see esp. ch. 13 "Technology and Media"); a threat to "social capital" in the 21st c.: current "electronic mass media, and especially the Internet"—but also "electronic entertainment and telecommunication more generally" (410).  Additionally, see for an elegant overview of the social effects of the railroad, telegraph, and other technological innovations of "The Gilded Age" in US history, ca. 1870-1900 (ch. 23, "Lessons of History: The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era").  As of January 2001, there was a website, www.bowlingAlone.com. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 26/X/95          Pynchon, Thomas.  "Is It O.K. To Be a Luddites?"  New York Times Book Review 28 Oct. 1984: 1, 40-41; Late City Final Edition, Section 7, p. 1, column 1, Book Review Desk."  **¢+Starting from the 25th anniversary of C. P. Snow's lecture on "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," TP turns to the Luddite machine-breaking of ca. 1812 and its implications for the computer age (see below, K. Sale's Rebels Against the Future).  Includes excellent comments on literature "Insufficiently Serious" from the point of view of the literary mainstream, esp. SF of the 1950s, plus some vintage Pynchonite thoughts: "By 1945, the factory system—which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution—had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program[,] and the death camps, such as Auschwitz.  It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long.  Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy.  An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become . . . conventional wisdom.  To people who were writing science fiction in the 50's, none of this was much of a surprise . . . ."  (Our immediate source: John M. Krafft, ed. of Pynchon Notes.) 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/XI/02         "Radix vs. MIT."  Newsstory.  The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 Aug. 2002, and elsewhere.  See <http://horizoncomics.com/radix/>.  Our Immediate source: Hal Hall, SFRA ListServ, 29 Aug. 02.**¢+Chronicle blurb: "THE CREATORS OF A CANADIAN COMIC BOOK have accused the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of using their conception of a futuristic soldier to help the institution win a $50-million defense contract.  The soldier that they say has been misappropriated is the heroine of 'Radix,' a comic book that sells for less than three U.S. dollars."  The Web site headline: "MIT Stole Comic Book Character To Obtain $50 Million Army Grant.  Did MIT Base Its $50 Million 'Soldier of Tomorrow' On Radix?" 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 14/IX/03         Rajagopalan, Sumitra.  "It's a Bird, It's a Plane É (It's an ornithopter, and it holds great potential for space an military missions)."  "Special to The Washington Post," appearing Weekly Edition 8-14 Sept. 2003: 36.  "Researchers Ape Nature With Flapping-Wing Aircraft: Versatile Ornithopters Hold Promise for Space or Military Missions."  Post 1 Sept. 2003: A09.  <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8852-2003Aug31.html>.  **¢+Scientists at the University of Toronto and elsewhere answer the call by James McMichael of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for "a 'fly-on-the-wall spy'": i.e. "stealth 'micro-air vehicles' with the size and flying ability of insects deployed to gather intelligence on enemy terrain."  See for a realization of the dream of the ornithopter of SF (e.g., Frank Herbert's Dune [1965]), and perhaps nightmare visions of "synsects" (artificial insects), as in S. Lem's "The Upside Down Evolution" and The Invincible (q.v. under Lem in Fiction)—or inescapable, invasive surveillance (see Keyword "surveillance"). 

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 02/VII/02        Ray, Thomas S.  An Evolutionary Approach to Synthetic Biology: Zen and the Art of Creating Life."  Artificial Life: An Overview.  C.G. Langton, ed. Cambridge: MIT, 1995. 179-209. **+ Cited in Ross Farnell's "Attempting Immortality: AI, A-Life, and the Posthuman in Greg Egan's Permutation City," q.v. under Literary Criticism. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/VII/03        Regan, Michael P.  "Soldier of the future will be plugged into a massive network."  Title in the Dayton Daily News 1 June 2003: A6 for AP story available in the summer of 2003 at <http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=6105> and elsewhere on the WWW; suggested search words: the tech terms below and the opening clause, "Dennis Birch compares the U.S. soldier to a Christmas tree."**¢+The US Army's "Objective Force Warrior technical program" is developing the "'Scorpion ensemble,'" which will "plug" American soldiers "into the military's planned Future Combat System" (currently budgeted at US$15billion, with a target date for the first suits set at 2010 or 2011).  "As currently envisioned," the outfits include "an undershirt netted with sensors that monitor heart rate, body temperature [,] and respiration," over which is worn a uniform "with built-in tourniquets that one day might be tightened and loosened remotely.  Body armor is built into a load carriage that includes water, ammunition, batteries[,] and circuits to keep the soldier plugged into the network."  The helmet will be the highest-tech component, "with tiny, built-in cameras" that will place images "on semitransparent screens" before the soldiers' eyes; the screens can show other data, including global-positioning coordinates.  Additionally, the full headgear system "will contain a laser-engagement system to identify friends and foes—and to serve as a 'laser tag' training device."  MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies" opened 22 May 2003 and is doing research that "could lead to external skeletons carrying artificial muscles that would make soldiers faster and stronger."  See this article and similar coverage for real-world development moving toward the fighting suits in the SF of R. A. Heinlein and J. Haldeman (q.v. under Fiction); see under Literary Criticism, L. G. Heldreth on "É The Fighting Machine in Science Fiction Novels and Films." 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Riesman, David.  The Lonely Crowd.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.  **¢+A study of alienation in mass society.

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 26/III/95          Rifkin, Jeremy.  The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era.  New York: Putnam, 1995.  **¢+In spite of statistics showing more Americans employed than ever, and the possibility that we are working as hard as ever, JR argues that "Intelligent machines are replacing human beings in countless tasks, forcing millions of blue and white collar workers into unemployment lines, or worse still, breadlines" (qtd. Mattera 463).  On the basis of secondary sources, surveys effects of automation and newly introduced "digital technologies," including "an account of how technological change—first mecahnization of cotton picking in the South, and later, automation of factories in the North—has shaped the destiny of African—Americans" (Mattera 463).  JR estimates that in the USA in the 1990s, "more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines" (qtd. Mattera 463).  Rev. Philip Mattera, The Nation 2 April 1995: 463-65, whom we quote.  See in this section, S. Aronowitz and W. DiFazio, The Jobless Future; see under Fiction F. Pohl's "The Midas Plague" and K. Vonnegut's Player Piano. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 04/VII/98        "Robo-bugs destined to be military spies."  AP, ca. 1 May 1998.  The Cincinnati Post, 1 May 1998: 23A.  **¢+Associated Press report from Nashville, TN, on two Vanderbilt U professors' receiving support from the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop "robot insects that someday could help soldiers scout enemy positions or aid scientists exploring other planets" (or other hostile environments).  One of the scientists said the miniature robots will be "small, mostly metallic bugs, with four to six legs.  They'll be a couple of inches long, about the size of a large beetle" and equipped with cameras or other sensors.  The scientists hoped to have a prototype built very quickly of what seems to be a crawling model; there is no indication in the AP story that flying versions are planned.  Note for the tiny robots in such S. Lem stories as Fiasco and "The Seventh Sally," and esp. the insectoid robots of The Invincible and "The Upside-Down Evolution" (q.v. under Fiction); note also the films Batteries Not Included and Runaway (q.v. under Drama). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 06/VIII/95       Ryle, Gilbert.  xxxxxxxxxx.  **+Cartesianism described as "the doctrine of the ghost in the machine"–alluded to by Morton White, The Age of Analysis: 20th Century Philosophers (sic) (New York: Mentor-NAL, 1955): 227. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE (literature from CDS), 06/XII/93 Robo Suckª.  Let's call it, a device.  Advertised Adam & Eve.  One Apple Court.  P. O. Box 800.  Carrbobo, NC 27510.  No date.  **¢+The lettering in the ad is in RoboCop style (see title under Drama), and the device is very much modern/postmodern in appearance: transparent plastic outer case, transparent plastic "poly-gel sleeve," matte black for the ring around opening, the top, and the motor casing.  "Powered by 4 C batteries," the device emphatically superimposes the mechanical (and electronic, with the "multi-speed remote control") upon the male organic.  See above, this section, entry for H. Bergson. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 20/IX/95         Romanyshyn, Robert.  Technology as Symptom and Dream.  **+David G.S. will do this puppy,

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 12/X/93           Rothschild, David.  "High-tech sex."  Chicago Tribune 28 September 1993: Section 2, Tempo 1-2.  **¢+"Special to THE TRIBUNE," a report on current work on cybersex, moving toward VR sex and perhaps "teledildonics" (DR's word).  Cf. and contrast F. Pohl's "Day Million" (cited under Fiction), where machine-recorded and stored personalities are used for sex. 

 

 

9. BACK, RDE, 13/X/93           "Robot finds murder suspect."  Associated Press story from Greenbelt, MD.  The Cincinnati Post 4 Sept. 1993: 2A.  **¢+Local police "used a 3-foot, 480-pound robot to disarm a man who allegedly shot-gunned his girfriend to death and barricaded himself inside their apartment."  The robot is a seven-year old remote-controlled RMI-9 (Remote Mobile Investigator-9) that was purchased for $45,000 by the Greenbelt fire department.  It comes equipped with "mechanical claws" and "a high-pressure water gun" and is usually used "to dismantle suspected explosive devices."  The robot is pictured in the story and bears some resemblance to Johnny 5 in Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2 (q.v. under Drama).  Note for real-world realization of the motif of the crime-fighting robot and for one possible source for part of the design of Johnny 5. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 14/X/95          Sale, Kirkpatrick.  Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (Lessons for the Computer Age).  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.  **¢+Very consciously in the tradition of E. P. Thomson in history and, more relevant here, J. Ellul, L. Mumford et al. in sociology and philosophy, KS tells the story of the fifteen-month Luddite rebellion (mostly 1812) against the first Industrial Revolution—and draws from that story several morals for the second Industrial Revolution in our time.  Even as the Luddites had an excellent point in their rebellion against the new textile machines, even so we would do well to rebel against the computers. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Sanford, David Hawley.  "Where Was I?"  Seminar presentation "on the philosophy of mind conducted by Douglas C. Long and Stanley Munsat at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Published in The Mind's I, q.v. under Anthologies and Collections (232-40).  **¢+Thought experiment investigating identity when (among other possibilities considered) an excised human brain receives its perceptions from the sensory equipment on a robot.

 

 

9.  BACK, Maly, 02/VII/02        Seltzer, Mark.  Bodies and Machines.  New York and London: Routledge, 1992. **+ Cited in Timo Siivonen's "Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons," q.v. under Literary Criticism

 

 

9. BACK, RDE (from R. Baarson, 210, F93), 22/XII/93 Sheff, David.  Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children.  New York: Random, 1993.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 00/XII/03        Slagle, Matt.  "Video games prepare troops" (vt and alternative version "Military recruits game makers" etc.—AP story).  October 2003.  Dayton Daily News 5 Oct. 2003: AA1.  Oakland Tribuine 3 Oct. 2003: <www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82%257E10834%257E1673543,00.html>.  Key words: the game titles: "Full Spectrum Warrior" and "Full Spectrum Command."  **¢+"Increasingly, the Pentagon is joining forces with the video games industry to train and recruit soldiers.  The Army considers such simulators vital for recruits who've been weaned on shoot'em up games."  The CIA "is developing a role-playing computer simulation to train analysts"; the producing company is the Institute for Creative Technologies <www.ict.usc.edu>, who are working on a game that will have "agency analysts assume the role of terror cell leaders, cell members and operatives"—to learn the perspective of terrorists. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 31/XII/97        Stone, Allucqure Rosanne.  The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.  Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996.  **¢+      **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 20/VIII/00       Stephenson, Neal.  Cryptonomicon.  Cited under Fiction.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 18/I/00            Stephenson, Neal.  IN THE BEGINNING ... WAS THE COMMAND LINE (sic).  New York: Avon, 1999.  **¢+The author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon (q.v., this section) pushing Linux and, to a lesser extent, BeOs—computer operating systems—and along the way discussing the Graphical User Interface (GUI) on Macintoshes and Microsoft Windows as yet another level of mediation between human beings and our world.  Also covers the GUI as a system of metaphors.  See for analogs IRL to the VR worlds of cyberpunk/cyberspace fiction.  For this text on-line: <http://www.spack.org/essays/commandline.html>

or

<http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html>

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/X/00          Suplee, Curt.  "A Computer-Powered Robotic Revolution (Advances are just around the corner)."  The Washington Post Weekly Edition 25 September 2000: 30-31.  **¢+Real-world robots and attempts at AI as of the last year of the 20th c.  References Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and Hans P. Moravec's Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (q.v this section).  "A true android of the R2D2 variety—that is, an autonomous robot that can make lots of decisions for itself, handle unfamiliar surroundings and situations, and converse usefully with people—may be a long way off"; but a fair "number of computer innovators have been writing what amounts to an advance obituary for the human race."  One opposing theory: the robots won't replace us because we'll outdistance them as cyborgs.  See for toys and entertainment as sources for low-cost robot parts and opportunities for robot use; "insectoid devices for terrestrial and space exploration"; humanoid vs. nonhumanoid faces, esp. for care-giving robots; and only somewhat developed references to DARPA funding of robot research, necessarily Advanced Research Projects of the Defense variety. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 28/X/95          Tanner, Ron.  "Toy Robots in America, 1955-75: How Japan Really Won the War."  JPC 28.3 (Winter 1994): 125-54.  Illus.  **¢+An important essay, with 24 figures illustrating the imaging of robots in Japan and the USA from early 1950s tin toys to the transformer robots ca. 1985 (sic—the title is rather modest), references to relevant films, and a brief but highly useful biblio. in its Works Cited.  Among the statistic RT cites: "4,000 to 5,000 different kinds of sci-fi toys were manufactured betweeen 1955 and 1972[,] and virtually all of these came from Japan . . . "; in 1958, half "of the $1.3 billion in American toy sales . . . were sci-fi related"; and that toy robots "were so popular their designs changed nearly yearly or every other year," and that they "accounted for as much as one-sixth" of toy exports from Japan to the USA (126-27).  Obvious questions, and questions dealt with by RT, are why toy robots were so popular in Japan and the USA and why US companies didn't try to fill some of the demand.  Briefly, technology is valued differently in Japan than in the West, with the Japanese more unambiguously enthusiastic about the promise of technology.  As embodied in Japanese toys and pictures, technology will help (re)build.  That the kinlier robots of the 1950s and 1960s have given way to rather threatening and somewhat insectoid Shogun robots of the 1970s and the transformers of the 1980s is significant: "The Japanese toy robot of the 1970s, then, became most clearly what all Japanese toy robots have always been—insustrial icons that symbolize the considerable aspirations of the Japanese people" (150).  Aside from a mistake on HAL 9000 in 2001 (134), an impecable essay.  See in Index "toy" and references there. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 14/V/04          Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix.  Ed. Glenn Yeffeth.  Dallas: Benbella Books, 2003.  Introd. David Gerrold.  **¢+D. Gerrold gives a short introduction, followed by 14 essays, coverng Cypher's Choice, AI, "The Reality Paradox," "The Matrix: Paradigm of Post-Modernism or Intellectual Poseur?" (in two parts, by different authors with different answers), Buddhism, mythology, "Human
Freedom and the Red Pill," "Finding God in the Matrix," "The Human Machine Merger" (sic on punctuation), "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," and "The Simulation Argument"—issues of post-humanity and the possibility (in Western philosophical terms) that we're living in illusion (what Lord Krishna called Maya).  Backmatter includes a glossary and good index. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/VII/98        "Technorealism."  The Nation 266.12 (6 April 1998): 20-21.  **¢+Headed, "GET REAL!  A MANIFESTO FROM A NEW GENERATION OF CULTURAL CRITICS."  Gives a manifesto called "Principles of Technorealism," briefly stating and arguing the assertions: "1.  Technologies are not neutral." "2.  The Internet is revolutionary but not utopian."  "3.  Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier."  "4.  Information is not knowledge."  "5.  Wiring the schools will not save them."  "6.  Information wants to be protected."  I.e., they argue against the slogan, "Information wants to be free," including free of charge to copyright holders.  "7.  The public owns the airwaves; the public should benefit from their use."  "8.  Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship."  The most important point may be that "In a world driven by the flow of information, the interfaces—and the underlying code—that make information visible are becoming enormously powerful social forces."  Signed by a dozen cultural critics, with impressive credentials, and a website: www.technorealism.org.  Copyright for the article held by David Shenk, Andrew L. Shapiro, and Steven Johnson. 

 

 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Varela, Francisco J. et al.  The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.  Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.  **¢+On Buddhism and questions of the self and world in cognitive society.  N. Katherine Hayles finds in this book "the unstatated but pervasive implication that robots designed to show emergent behavior through their interactions with the environment . . . could attain awareness similar to that of a human being" (rev. American Book Review 14.1 [April-May 1992]: 13). 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/VI/02         Vedantam, Shankar.  "Move Over, Descartes: Neuroscientists have joined philosophers in searching for the origin of consciousness."  In "Science Lab" section of The Washington Post Weekly Edition. 27 May-2 June 2002: 35.  **¢+A brief but provocative survey of some notable recent investigations of "'the hard problem'" of the origins and nature of human consciousness, most specifically the relationship between the physical processes of the human brain and subjective experience.  The discussion ranges from David Chalmer's speculation "that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe—like space, time[,] or gravity—and therefore not reducible" to the thoroughly reductionist views of Daniel C. Dennet, that "'It's all just brain mechanisms and their activity.'"  Deals with D. Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will and T. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, q.v., this section.  See in this section the works cited under R. Descartes. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 19/III/03          Wegner, David.  The Illusion of Conscious Will.  Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002.  **¢+In a rev. in The Washington Post Weekly Edition (see above, this section), S. Vedantam says that "The feeling you have as you read this sentence, Wegner argues, is an illusion pulled off by a complex machine in your skull.  [É] In other words, the brain, not content with being a remarkably complex machine, also convinces itself it is not a machine at all." 

9.  CLOCKWORKS OUTTAKES           Weizenbaum, Joseph.  "ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine," Communications of the ACM, 9:1 (Jan. 1966); rpt. Communications of the ACM, 26:1 (Jan. 1983).  **¢+Recommended by Ruth Sanders; used in her GER 380, "Machine Intelligence from a Humanist Perspective," MUO, 1986.

 

 

9. BACKGROUND; RDE, 04/VIII/94      The Wells Clock.  By R. P. Howgrave; ed, L. S. Colchester.  Wells, UK: The Friends of Wells Cathedral, 1978.  5th edn. rpt. 1987.   **+The famous clock of Wells Cathedral was finished by 1400 and bears an inscription identical to one associated with "certain decorations on a pavement laid down in front of the High Altar at Westminister in the time of Abbot Ware A.D. 126 [. . .]: Sphericus archetypum globus hic monstrat macrocosmum.  This inscription surrounded a representation of the Ptolemaic Universe and the translation of it makes plain good sense: 'This rounded globe represents the Macrocosm (great Universe)[,] its archetype'" (11-12).  On the Wells clock, this inscription is around the plate showing the phases of the moon and on a dial face showing not only the twenty-four hours of the day but "the Earth at the centre surrounded by the spheres of air (and fire?), the Moon revolving round it in strict accordance with the Ptolemaic conceptions of her diurnal and proper motions, the sun making his journey round the earth once in 24 hours, the starry firmament outside these and the four cardinal winds in their traditional places at the corners.  The Wells clock, then, is not a mere clock: it is essentially a model illustrating fundamental mediaeval conceptions of creation and the universe" (5).  By 1400, then, it was possible to have in a Christian Cathedral a clock that was also a kind of orrery, using a mechanism to image in little the universe: by implication, a kind of clockwork universe. 

 

 

9. BACK,  RDE, 14/I/95            "The Wheel of Fortune."  Connections (An Alternative View of Change by James Burke).  BBC 1978.  Written and Presented by James Burke.  Available in the USA as a BBC-TV/Time Life Television Co-Production.  **¢+Traces the origin of the computer and its implications for the future (as of the late 1970s).  Opening sequence shows a computer-assisted planetarium, giving a striking image of computer control, an insectoid-appearing machine (the planetarium), and the universe projected by the planetarium.  Also uses a modern-made, expanded orrery, so to speak, giving a mechanical vision of the mechanical (small-"p") ptolemaic universe (but primarily the solar system) passed on to Europe by the Arabs—explicitly identified as "a belief in a mechanical universe whose signs could be read, for the benefit of mankind, trapped inside it."  First set of inventions dealt with: medieval clocks.  Next sequence: secularization of clocks: from telling people when to pray to telling people when to work—then on to later clocks, machine tools, interchangeable parts, mass production, the factory system, the time/motion study, and the "price": "the way our lives have to become an extension of the production line."  Final images: JB with huge clock, in front of a production line with identical cookies of little humans. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 17/V/01          "When Technology Fails."  Issue of National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, 81.1 (Winter 2001).  **+Relevant contents: Henry Petroski, "Success & Failure in Engineering"; James R. Hansen "Learning Through Failure" (NASA's Scout Rocket); Thomas G. White, Jr., "The Establishment  of Blame in the Aftermath of a Technological Disaster: An Examination of the Apollo I and Challenger Disasters"; R. John Hansman, "Complexity in Aircraft Automation—A Precursor for Concerns in Human-Automation System"; Stephanie J. Bond, "When They Built the Ship Titanic."  A thin, slick magazine for educated layfolk deals dispassionately with an aspect of technology usually ignored or sensationalized.  Note that Petroski's account of successes and failures ranges from ancient schemes for moving large columns and pedestals to the spectacular collapse in the 20th c. of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.  See above, J. Burke's Connections. 

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 21/I/96            Wright, Lawrence.  Clockwork Man.  **¢+

 

 

9.  BACK, RDE, 02/VI/96         Zwirn, Robert.  "The Passing of Post-Modernism: Cultural Influences in Design."  In National Forum 76.2, The Phi Kappa Phi Journal (Spring 1996): 13-15 (sic: dual title).  **¢+Post-Modernism (sic) in architecture is out; deconstruction is in.  Very useful for quoting and putting into the context of modernism and postmodernism in architecture Le Corbusier's modernist "notion of the house 'as a machine for living'" (14).  Note comment on how in the 1990s USA "the disenfranchised have been relegated to the decaying modernist suburbs" and "the vernacular of the inner cities has become the gentrified and dandified home of the new rich (15)—cf. Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (1955), where such a world is prefigured.