Robots: Subverted/Contained

It shouldn’t be a surprise that robots are everywhere.  At least in the movies.  Obviously, robots serve different roles in different movies; sometimes they’re good (like Data in Star Trek or David in AI) but more often they’re evil (like Colossus in Colossus: The Forbin Project, or HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey).  In any case, what seems like a recent surge in robot movies got me wondering even more than ever why we keep coming back to this idea.  (When I say surge I mean movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation, and the recent book that I’m looking forward to reading How to Survive a Robot Uprising.)

 

One of the most obvious reasons that robots appear in movies is to serve as a cautionary tale: humans shouldn’t play god and manufacture beings.  If they do, disaster will ensue.  That’s the basic message behind the robots in Colossus and 2001, as well as countless other sci-fi movies going back to Metropolis.  Indeed, if you watch enough sci-fi you might start to get the impression that the relationship between humanity and God is the genre’s single biggest theme. 

 

While I think that reading of robot movies is interesting, it doesn’t quite explain why we keep coming back to that theme.  Indeed even though there have been great advances in robot technology, we’re still not very close to having Rosie the Robot cleaning our homes, or having intelligent machines interacting with us as sentient individuals.  Given these circumstances, it seems like intelligent machines wouldn’t come up as often as they do.

 

To understand why robots appear in so many movies I think it’s useful to look at Stephen Greenblatt’s ideas about subversion and containment.  This theory has been applied in a number of ways but for this blog it might be awkwardly boiled down thusly: some people will want to fight the powers that be (subversion), so society will create ways for them to vent that energy and feel like they’re fighting without actually causing any damage or change (containment).  

 

In this light we can look at robots in a few different ways.  First, they represent manufactured intelligence and its accompanying danger.  Second, however, they also represent the mechanized individual.  Even if they’re robots, they often look like people and the treatment of artificial intelligence in many movies seems to reveal an underlying fear that people are becoming a little too much like machines.  This too, is a really old theme and is expressed in films like The Matrix as well as straightforward robot movies.  Third, robots represent the apex of technological development and humanity’s dependence on it.    

 

If we look at robot movies in this context, we might see them as helping us feel comfortable about technology and exorcising our animosity toward it.  Yes we are all dependent on it.  Yes we all kind of act like machines.  Yes robots could someday replace people.  However, instead of  going out and smashing up machines or simply trying to do without them, our collective anxiety is contained by the movies.  In other words, robots often represent human inadequacy and the movies they inhabit help us feel a little less bad about ourselves.  The movies give us strategies to deal with robots that never really change anything but our emotions.

 

There are a number of interesting implications to this idea.  For example, the pattern of subverting and containing technophobia (or at least “robophobia”) actually leaves the door wide open for future advancement (a good thing in my opinion).  It also allows us to reconcile with all the technology we use on a daily basis.  (So I can use my microwave or laptop without worrying about the fact that I couldn’t do much without them.)  However, this pattern also presents possibilities toward which we might feel greater ambivalence.  For example, because there are no real robots lording over us, we have to ask what social or ideological element the robots represent.  Might it be government?  Business?  Or maybe something larger and more abstract, like capitalism or religion or simply "culture"?  I don’t know (of course), but it does seem likely to me that the anxiety our culture apparently feels about robots isn’t simply fear about some distant future in which robots will rule the earth.  Instead, it seems likely that robots are symbols of something else, and that the cycle of subversion and containment (as experienced through robot movies) has broader, socio-political ramifications.