The list of films related to this essay curated by the author contains nearly 200 films, and can be found here.
In 1886, Auguste Villiers de I’Isle-Adam published “L’Eve Futur” aka “The Future Eve.” The novel popularized the term android in reference to a humanoid automaton with the story of a misogynistic scientist determined to create a perfect woman who would please men rather than make them miserable. This fictional version of Thomas Edison promises his friend this replacement, for his fiance won’t have any inconvenience of female personality problems. He tells him this artificial woman will be “[M]ore than a reality, an ideal.” A few decades later, the Czech playwright Karel Capek would publish the play R.U.R and introduce the use of the word robot for assembled mechanical beings in 1920. His brother Josef had suggested the Slavic root word ‘robota’ — which became roboti in the play — as in Czech, the term was understood to refer to serfs performing forced labor for the landowner they were a tenant of. Capek’s play was a story about the eventual revolution and revenge of these man-made workers, so it stuck.
The thing about synthetic lifeforms is that they can easily be a million times more interesting within our stories than we have ever let them be. There is a significant history to the analog human conception of synthetic beings that is rarely considered and, if referenced at all, is done so in a primarily aesthetic fashion. There’s some merit to the mirroring of visuals in the cinematic medium, as the subtle communication of symbols and themes through imagery has always had a role in the format itself, but it is often approached without any substance. Viewers of all backgrounds can feel what we watch growing increasingly superficial even when the story claims to be concerned with the authentic. Everything feels obsessed with emulating the appearances of something else, while ignoring the point or context of the very aesthetics they are attempting to replicate. But before our stories became a hall of mirrors, we first had to construct the very concept of synthetic beings into the roles they would be allowed to play.
No one source or influence is responsible for centuries of systemic design, but in focusing on my own love for film and synthetic beings, I began to grow curious about a more complete timeline of their narratives. What were storytellers focusing on, and what does the repetition of these narratives imply overall? How were they relevant to the climate they were being consumed in? What I found was a history of stories full of deracialized and degendered robots — often caught up in capitalist societies or dystopias where they are workers forced into labor — portrayed with racially coded concepts and forced gendering programming. The messaging that leaked into the concepts of writers continues to reflect in the media we see today, but it remains unaware of its own origins.
The movies surrounding synthetic beings sought to pose questions within persecution fantasies, but never really inquired into their own gendering and degendering of their artificial creations, nor any racialization factors. The exposition constantly shows viewers an inauthentic imitation of oppression it claims is authentic, yet is entirely unaware of the factors it has textually coded into others. Sometimes they’d attempt to investigate the ethics of sentient automated workforces, yet conclude some suffering is necessary, or some myth of compromise is possible. The movies ask the wrong questions, tell the wrong stories, and end up regurgitating what people are trying to escape. It’s a feedback loop in science fiction that goes back to the beginning of film.
. . .
1910s
A few of the early onscreen automatons, mechanoids, and machine dolls sometimes slightly referenced minstrel designs or played a genre equivalent to a minstrel character. It’s difficult to track down documentation for films such as The Automatic Motorist (1911) by Walter R. Booth, or The Master Mystery (1918) by Burton L. King and Harry Grossman, but as many science fiction films are, they are built off of racist and orientalist tropes as the very premise itself. Both films are roughly six to nine minutes long and cover newlyweds going to the moon or a tortured international spy up against extreme odds; respectively. The Automatic Motorist employs anti-Native bigotry by portraying violent aliens with spears attempting to kill a police officer, but both also feature bumbling or threatening metallic men who appear dark or made of black metal. In The Master Mystery, Harry Houdini saves a white woman from the black robot implied to be coming onto her — a rather loaded choice, especially only three years after the release of Birth Of A Nation (1915) by D. W. Griffith.
Sentient machines have consistently been coded as a subservient labor class, but the distinct anti-Blackness present in these early robotic tropes is never really dealt with in modern material. Film history tends to mention these works with little to no recognition of their racist content. The archetypes androids are often limited to sometimes mirror the common roles in minstrel acts; obedient housewife or mother versus disposable promiscuous sex bot, and the exploitable worker versus a diligent soldier. These automatons are always stupid, clumsy, property, aggressively rebellious, or a threat, and thus must be controlled or destroyed for everyone’s good. Whether or not these messages were consciously or subconsciously racist is irrelevant. They undoubtedly contributed to anti-Black cultural beliefs that would follow the depiction of robots well into the 1960s. The correlation is easy for us to miss now because science fiction tends to specifically portray androids as white, but when the timeline is considered in full, it makes the persecution fantasy from white writers writing white robots as ‘slaves’ uncomfortably apparent.
1920s-1950s
From the 1920s-1950s, films featuring robots fluctuated between deracialized worker bots, racially coded killing machines, and as always the immortal ‘ideal woman-machine.’ Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, is the best known of the earlier years; portraying Weimar fears of technology alongside a failed workers revolution placated with an android as a scapegoat. American releases at the time cut and edited it however they liked, and several intentionally chose to frame the human workers as selfish and evil antagonists. In a way, the False Maria is more than just a tool against the organization of the over-exploited workers who keep the utopia for the rich running. It is the fact that she is both a machine and a woman that palpably threatens the social order of any capitalist patriarchy. Robots can lead to revolution, and free women will always be a nightmare for men maintaining dominance.
The Perfect Woman (1949) by Bernard Knowles is explicit about what the ideal woman should be when it attempts to be misogynistically comedic: “She does exactly what she’s told, she can’t talk, she can’t eat, and you can leave her switched off under a dust sheet for weeks at a time!” In a way the story itself mimics that of “L’Eve Futur“, though this scientist bases his android off of his niece instead of his friend’s fiance. Neither ever stops to reckon with what it means to program people to be women, to program people to be workers, or to program people to be both.
Movies during this time period in general were crafting the visual definitions of white womanhood and white femininity. Sometimes this was done to sell it as a product, and sometimes as a form of maintaining control through consistent messaging. What persists across every era however, is the relationship of the sanctity of white feminine purity and the need for white men and the nuclear family to protect it. Robot films of the 50s reinforced this just as monster and alien films before or alongside them did as well.
The thrills came in the concepts of giant evil robots, and not what the real world was using to control people. The counter to the blonde damsels in distress on the posters either perished or found themselves to be the villain — such as the dominatrix seeking ‘male breeding stock’ for the matriarchy with a robot companion in Devil Girl from Mars (1954) by David MacDonald. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) by Robert Wise critiqued the brewing Cold War and warned people of nuclear warfare and the fate of violent humans versus impenetrable war machines. Robot Monster (1953) by Phil Tucker — now considered one of the worst sci-fi films of all time — uncritically presented a ‘gorilla-like’ robot programmed for genocide tamed only by his love for a white woman he encounters. Tobor the Great (1954) by Lee Sholem ran about with a telepathic link saving children as spies attempted to steal him for their government. It wasn’t until Forbidden Planet (1956) by Fred M. Wilcox that the screen saw a robot as its own character. The film itself was well-regarded and became highly influential for science fiction movies going forward, and Robby the robot became a part of the framework in developing robots that audiences were meant to humanize and sympathize with. Interestingly, the message that followed more human synthetic beings was the strict whiteness correlating to their access to humanity.
1960s
Before the android and cyborg boom to come, the 1960s were ready to say their parts in the timeline while also introducing the supercomputer to the canon as emotionless iron fists set on controlling everything they can. America in 1962 was at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which the robots-as-metaphor for Black people in The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) by Wesley Barry made hamfistedly clear. The humanoids are derogatorily referred to as ‘clickers’ for the entire movie, while running from persecution by ‘The Order of Flesh and Blood’ — an extremist group obsessed with the sanctity of human purity which is described verbatim as “[V]irtually dictating to the police.”
Alternatively, the USSR was more concerned with the coming space race and contributing to communal faith in Soviet futures, like the one in Planet of Storms (1962) by Pavel Klushantsev. A cosmonaut woman is inexplicably drawn to a Venus occupied by dinosaurs, while the cosmonaut men, their tragic hero automaton, and a quaint little hover buggy barely manage to survive the harsh planet they were desperate to see. The Czech film Ikarie XB-1 (1963) by Jindřich Polák captured an epic space exploration, critical of a derelict ship the crew find filled with dead 20th century capitalists who packed more nukes than food rations — so stylistically powerful it helped influence what became 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick.
Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) added to the fears of the looming supercomputer with the introduction of the sentient Alpha 60. This black and white tale of a machine-run dictatorship in a society without emotion points to another continuing theme underlying human-made threats; a hatred of women.
Sure, you can see it in the ridiculous fembots of Kiss Me Quick (1964) by Peter Perry Jr., Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) by Norman Taurog, and How to Make a Doll (1968) by Herschell Gordon Lewis, but it’s in all the early technoirs and proto-cyberpunks too. Godard’s women characters are less likely to love, to think, to feel in Alphaville, at a rate where fifty men are executed for acting emotionally to a single woman. They are susceptible to brainwashing, unable to understand love, and more they anything they are detestable for the fact that they are seductresses programmed to constantly have sex. It’s hard to say what antagonist of his is more of a threat to the future. Machine or woman? The worst would be anyone who had the misfortune of being a combination of the two.
Billion Dollar Brain (1967) by Ken Russell brought on a massive distributor of orders for communist and anti-communist spies alike. In 1961, the IBM 7094 became the first vocaloid; singing the song “Daisy Bell” with a fully simulated voice. Hal 9000 would sing his own version of the same song in 1968, while slowly attempting to murder the crew of ‘Discovery One’.
1970s
Then, to bring in the synthetics of the 70s, the underrated Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) by Joseph Sargent told the story of supercomputers uniting the US and the USSR by taking over both countries’ nuclear warheads, and monitoring the scientists who had created them. Colossus decides that for humanity to survive destruction, it must take control of every aspect of people’s lives. Dr. Forbin observes the overseer he made with disgust. “In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love,” it tells him as it continues to absorb more machines around the globe. Just before the credits roll, the doctor cries out — “Never!”.
By now a beautiful focus on tactile technology and convincing machinery was beginning to cement itself into the visuals of the future. Microfilm, expansive databases, and chunky lit buttons became a staple as science fiction film began to progress away from tinfoil buckets, and the regard of being a genre without the potential for artistry. Practical and special effects created stunning shots of iconic spaceship models both in theaters and on TV with the birth of the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Alien franchises. Yet, the same tropes for robots and androids persisted.
Now, filmmakers’ paranoia became more explicit in their anti-communist messaging, worries about the family, and machines fighting back or having no regard for human life. It also began to solidify two types of gendering for robots; the subservient feminine, and the masculine weapon. Indeed, watching works from this era often feels precogniscent of the reality of robotics now. Movies tell us to fear the robot worker, when what we have really built is a parade of A.I. surveillance bosses and algorithmic supervisors.
George Lucas debuted as a director with THX 1138 (1971), to a minor response, though it would become a fan favorite after his later success. The film depicts a city where everything is computed, sex and love are illegal sacriligious acts commited by ‘erotics’, and people are medicated into complacency. The exploited worker THX (Robert Duvall) asks the digital Jesus OMM in the confession phone booth what he should do. On different loops OMM repeats: “Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard. Increase production. Prevent accidents. Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy more and be happy.”
THX struggles to escape this “horrifying authoritarian state” — which conflates the failures of capitalism with what communism must be like — and his dangerous role of building chrome android cops, who look like prototype C3P0’s. The officers he has helped construct chase him down a service tunnel promising, “We won’t hurt you. We only want to help,” foreshadowing the coming prevalence of masculine androids as cops, military weapons, or intimate threats.
The early shot of the patriotic American Airlines biodome space freighter in Silent Running (1972) by Douglas Trumbull might look amusing to us now, but realistically it is private corporations who dominate spacecraft presently. Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is a sadly relatable character you can’t help but agree with as he gets frustrated with his apathetic crewmates who don’t care about the environment at all. Eventually he finds his only company are the three astromech drones he’s fond of.
They were not the first, nor would they be the last, non-human machines people found more likable than the human ones. Dark Star (1974) by John Carpenter may have been a parody, but the philosophical conclusion the sentient weapon Bomb 20 reaches is actually tastefully thoughtful. It realizes its sole purpose in life is to explode, and so it chooses to do so. The Polish-Soviet collaboration Pilot Pirx’s Inquest (1979) by Marek Piestrak is a rarer picture from this time (I had to have a Google Doc of the script’s translation in hand to watch it) that I also really liked. Here the androids are called non-linears and are being studied as potential replacements for human pilots on space missions. Of course Pirx eventually runs into trouble with these androids. Revolution is consistently inevitable when it comes to synthetic life.
In a phrase that smacks of gender, a returning visitor to the title amusement park in Westworld (1973) by Michael Crichton tells his friend how ‘real’ the park’s androids are: “Supposedly you really can’t tell, except for looking at the hands.” The scientists running the recreations of time periods, populated by hyper-realistic mechanical residents, are so certain of their work that they don’t realize it’s too late until they’re sealed in their control room.
An interesting point throughout the movie is how it captures the women androids, who can immediately be reprogrammed to consent as soon as a guest attempts to seduce them. Arlette stares past the camera like she’s not really there. It’s what makes her the perfect woman: being eagerly submissive and existing entirely for the sexual whims of men. The foil of the fembots, of course, is the Cowboy sharpshooter who hunts the main character once the robots are able to kill. It’s not just the androids limited to specific positions, but gendering in general takes on a heteropessimist view. A real woman is destined to be hated and a real man is destined to be feared.
Logan’s Run (1976) by Michael Anderson, Star Wars (1977) by George Lucas, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) by Robert Wise were the relevant major hits of this decade. Particularly, Star Wars saw so many immediate cash-ins and responses to the space opera narrative, that in part it changed the way science fiction films were seen. Of course, it wouldn’t have been as well made if it wasn’t for the work of Marcia Lucas. Her editing made the artistry of so many films a reality. These titles are well known, so I won’t dwell on them much, but in different ways all contribute compelling differences to the conception of synthetic beings. To say that the Runner’s feminine vague supercomputer, and the abandoned food preservation robot Box, C3P0 and R2D2, and V’GER and it’s android probe speak memorably different voices in the conversation of franchise sci-fi would be an understatement.
Demon Seed (1977) by Donald Cammell was oddly made and intentionally upsetting, as the plot centers around the entitlement the supercomputer Proteus IV feels towards every aspect of its creator’s wife Susan. In particular, the film makes it very explicit that it requires her womb by having Proteus assault and forcibly impregnate her after it has taken over the program which controlled all aspects of the smart house. At every turn, the movie could have made a critique on the treatment of women, but it never does. It simply portrays the trauma — without analysis — for shock and entertainment.
Luckily, Alien (1979) by Ridley Scott handles itself much better when it comes to the theme of bodily violation. Both in the choice for the fighting survivor to be a woman, and for the violation to happen regardless of class or gender. The status of classic is well-deserved and it features a little bit of everything I look for. The supercomputer MOTHER, the android Ash, a corporations’ greed and disregard for their employees, and the unshakeable Ellen Ripley surviving it all. It’s a pity that Ash had to be a malevolent entry into Ridley Scott’s Milky Androids Cinematic Universe; but A.I.s are out to kill us, I guess. Funny how they’re always made that way.
Finally, we get to one of my favorites with the original The Stepford Wives (1975) by Bryan Forbes. The contents of this movie alone could really be its own piece because it captures perfectly an extreme of gendered programming as the central theme. The perfect housewife is never sad, always sexually available, has no career but her nuclear family, and is always gorgeously grocery shopping. Despite the unhappy ending, it really drives home how much working women who cry for help slip between the cracks no matter how hard they fight. Entitlement to others in any form is really the issue at hand. It doesn’t matter if you feel entitled to someone in a way that stems from bigotry or if you feel entitled to their labor for your own comfort or profit; once you have justified creating or maintaining a sentient tool for your own gain, you’ve lost.
That’s what gets to me about the repetition in these films: they all use robots as metaphors for human oppression, without looking at the root mentality that informs all aspects of the many ‘Why’s. Even if they’re a synthetic human rather than an analog one, why do we still imagine futures where they must automate our consumption for us to exist?
. . .
We have continuously been constructing our own enemies — literally or figuratively. Maybe it’s easier to pretend there really is an us versus them. That real and fake have solid distinctions we can always make. The progression of science fiction films could never have seen how it would respond to significant success, nor the acceleration of consumerism in the world at large. Sometimes it was hunting for the fantasy of exponential growth, and at other times attempting to be profound in the exploration of life itself. So many of these movies boil down to such similar concepts that parts of their dialogue often overlap. “They’re not people, they’re property,” is found just as frequently as challenges to whether or not an android is a “real woman” or a “real man.” Underlying the whole of it is their designation as subjugated workers and fantasies.
It’s always this obsession with real versus ideal. The ideal is the fantasy we cannot naturally achieve and yet people still search for the promise of perfection at any cost. Real is what ‘makes us human’, people say while treating the mechanical workers they depend upon like disposable objects. Ridiculous as it may seem that people act more understanding towards cinematic equivalents to Roombas than sentient beings who resemble them, it’s not much different from how a customer treats a barista. There’s so much lying under the surface of these movies, both in their history and in their focal points. The ‘80s saw a permanent massive boom in science fiction films across the globe after Star Wars proved so massively popular. The canon expands twice as large — with more robots than can be mentioned — all pointing to how we still refuse to leave the wrong kinds of questions about ourselves and who the real enemies are behind.
