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