Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Figure 9 A “tea-serving” karakuri automaton, circa 1800 (British Museum).

  The reason that Batou goes into enemy territory isn’t because he really wants to rescue someone, nor is it really because he wants to solve the case. He just wants to meet his angel, Motoko. It doesn’t really matter whether their relationship is a conventional romance or not. You see their love might seem cold to humans, but what is between them is no longer human, and now very innocent. (193-94)

  Batou is, perhaps, a figure not so different from the socially-alienated ASFRian, who chases the path of the exploding fembot in order to release the human imprisoned beneath her ideal facade. As in A.S.F.R., it is neither the body of the doll nor of the human that is important in Batou’s quest, but the interface between the two, where the ghost of his desire enters the picture. Illusions of humanity are shattered, and the film invites us, as spectators, to find something of ourselves within an increasingly posthuman, technofetishistic landscape.

  Notes

  1. Gynoids are humanoid robots that are gendered female. Sorayama borrows the term from sf writers Gwyneth Jones and Richard Calder to describe his cyborg (part female/part machine) pin-ups. His “Sexy Robots,” while also presented in cheesecake poses, are entirely metallic figures.

  2. In 2001, I made a documentary short about the group, which can be viewed at: http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2408202.

  3. While the mantra suggests a male heterosexual bias, a notable portion of the community is homosexual. All of the members with whom I communicated, however, are heterosexual males, so my descriptions should be considered most representative of their proclivities.

  4. Consult Wood for a further discussion of this phenomenon (138-39).

  5. For a general comparison between Freud’s views on fetishism and those of Krafft-Ebing and Bloch, see McCallum (48-54).

  6. For an overview of the companies manufacturing life-sized silicone lovedolls in the US, as well as their attempts at animating them robotically, see my article “Future Sex.”

  7. For a reading of the artificial female in Villiers’s novel as memento mori rather than as object of necrophilic desire, see my “Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve.”

  8. This accounting of Parigi’s intentions in the film is based on two interviews that I conducted with him in 2004.

  9. Plastination is a process through which the fluids of the body are replaced by a plastic resin that preserves specimens in perpetuity. The technique was invented and patented by the controversial anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens, who is best known for the traveling exhibition of dissected cadavers called Body Worlds (originally Köerperwelten). The climax of Love Object echoes that of the 1954 classic House of Wax, wherein the mad Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) seeks to transform a captive young woman into a waxen replica of his beloved mannequin Marie Antoinette, which was destroyed in a fire.

  10. For those ASFRians who do own Realdolls, the appeal is often a partner with whom they can enact a robotic fantasy, which may involve adding circuits and wires to the doll’s silicone exterior.

  11. For many ASFRians, the appeal of the artificial woman has, in fact, less to do with a love of the dead than what one ASFRian described to me as “the dream that goes on forever”—i.e., the fantasy of eternal life and beauty.

  12. The exchange is archived on the Fembot Central website at: http://www.fembotcentral.com/viewtopic.php?t=7764.

  13. Freud describes a game invented by his infant grandson for managing anxiety around the absence of his mother, which involves throwing away and retrieving a spool attached to a string while repeating “Fort!” and “Da!” (Gone! and There!).

  14. It occurred to me more than once that A.S.F.R. might be related to a mild form of Asperger Syndrome. I was not surprised when I read a passage in Katherine Gates’s book in which she explains the appeal of the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) for a female ASFRian whom she interviewed. Gates refers to the autistic slaughterhouse designer, Temple Grandin, who also “feels close to him [Data] in his clumsy efforts to perform like a human and in his urge to sort out the mystifyingly inconsistent rules of human social behavior” (Gates 228). Laslocky makes a similar supposition about the doll owners whom she interviewed. Data, claims Gates, has gotten more erotic mail than any other Star Trek character, Spock coming in second.

  15. For further critiques of Freud along these lines, see Cixous and Kofman.

  16. Derived from the word “saltpeter,” Hospice de la Salpêtrière was established by Louis XIV on the site of what had been a gunpowder factory. Less a hospital than a holding pen, it originally housed mostly indigent and insane women whom the Sun King wanted cleared off the streets of Paris; it incorporated a women’s prison for prostitutes at the end of the seventeenth century; and it became the largest asylum in Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The humanitarian and medical reform of the hospital is associated with Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), who became its chief physician in 1795; a statue in his honor still stands outside the hospital today.

  17. On Freud and Charcot, see also Didi-Huberman (26-27).

  18. Freud would later revise his “seduction theory,” concluding that hysterical symptoms were less dependent on a reality-based sexual trauma than on projected fantasies and repressed desire.

  19. “Private theater” was a term used by Anna O. for describing her “daydreams,” which she explored with her analyst Josef Breuer, who collaborated with Freud on Studies on Hysteria (1895). Anna O.’s case formed the basis for much of Freud’s discussion in the first of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1909).

  20. As Hal Foster notes, “whereas surrealism began with hypnotic sessions, psychoanalysis commenced with the abandonment of hypnosis” (2).

  21. Following a paper published in the Annales Medico-Psychologiques in which psychiatrist Paul Abély condemned the attack on psychiatry (and the call for the murder of psychiatrists) in Breton’s Nadja (1928), Janet took part in a discussion at the Société Médico-Psychologique in which he decried the work of Surrealists as “above all confessions of men obsessed, and men who doubt.” Both the paper and discussion are reprinted at the beginning of Breton’s “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” as a kind of initiatory prompt for the declarations that follow (119-23; the Janet quotation is from 121). Janet’s L’Automatisme Psychologique was published in 1893; on its links with Surrealism, see Foster (1-5, n8, n221). Breton’s Nadja, with its diatribes against psychiatry, was reportedly inspired by the author’s personal encounter with a former female patient of Janet’s.

  22. Bellmer is generally discussed in relation to the Sadeian materialism of Georges Bataille, who invited him to illustrate his Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’oeil) in 1945.

  23. Lotte Pritzel (1887-1952) was a German artist best known for her wax dolls, which served as inspiration for Rainer Maria Rilke’s essay, “Puppen” (Dolls, 1914). Pritzel’s suggestion that Bellmer read Rilke’s essay led him to explore his own obsession with dolls (see O’Reilly, par. 1).

  24. See, in particular, Brink and Taylor.

  25. For a theoretical analysis of fascist abjection that tallies with this discussion, consult Theweleit.

  26. Locus Solus is a reference to the country estate of “a Jules Verne inventor-hero” named Martial Canterel (Ashberry 192) in the 1914 book of the same name by French poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Roussel, who received psychiatric treatment from Pierre Janet, used, in the construction of his novel, a writing method that was based on homonymic puns, which was intended to help him tap into his unconscious. Such techniques made him greatly admired by the Surrealists. The novel, which follows a group tour of Locus Solus, describes, through an increasingly involved series of vignettes, the mechanical wonders and “inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness” showcased by the eccentric inventor for his guests (Ashberry 199).

  27. For a more extensive discussion of both citationality and e-brai
n hacking in the film, see Brown.

  28. See, for example, Bode, as well as Butler and Joschko.

  29. Jun’ichirõ Tanizaki explains traditional Japanese aesthetics in the following way: “There is an old song that says ‘the brushwood we gather—stack it together, it makes a hut, pull it apart, a field once more.’ Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates” (29-30).

  30. In 2003, when I attended Robodex in Yokohama, at the time the world’s only humanoid robot exposition, there was an exhibit devoted to the tea-serving karakuri.

  31. Gabriel was fashioned after Oshii’s dog of the same name, who was brought into a recording studio so that she could also become the “voice” of her animated counterpart (Oshii and Yamada 191).

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