by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

The origin of my obsession with androids and cyborgs comes from watching Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns with my parents when I was three or four, an experience that I imagine I share with many people born at the beginning of the ‘90s. I was too young to know what utopia, colonization, or even space travel was, but I was not too young to love Data or to be terrified of the Borg. My Ph.D. advisor laughed when I related this story many years later. “Well,” she said, “don’t we usually write about what scared us as children?”

The idea of writing a column dedicated to androids and cyborgs in film appealed to me because there are so many films featuring them that I haven’t seen. My dissertation focus was mainly on posthumans in science fiction literature, not film, although I did write half a chapter about Blade Runner and its sequel. My Letterboxd list for this project currently has 72 films on it, but I’ve seen only about a third of them (feel free to suggest more in the comments), a number which seems low for someone who considers themselves an expert.

To put some sort of limiting factor on this project, I have decided to focus on films that explore issues relating to posthuman embodiment. This rules out films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Super Intelligence (2020) because the A.I. in those films mainly exists in a computer mainframe. Yes, even hardware like that can be considered “embodiment,” but for the sake of the project–and my sanity–I will focus specifically on films about androids and cyborgs. An android essentially is a humanoid robot: a machine designed to look like humans. A cyborg–the name a portmanteau of the words cybernetic and organism–is a being composed of both organic and biotechnological materials. As I will explore in this column, these definitions are not always as straightforward as they first appear, but, for my purposes, they provide a good starting point.

As I did my research, I was unsurprised to find that many of the first silent films featuring androids and cyborgs are lost, either in part or in entirety. However, there is evidence that even in the early years of cinema, filmmakers were as fascinated by the idea of machine people as their literary counterparts were. The earliest film I could find still intact is the short American film A Clever Dummy (1917). Only twenty-three minutes long, A Clever Dummy perhaps doesn’t have the most to say about androids: most of the film involves an extended vaudeville sketch of an incompetent janitor (Ben Turpin) pretending to be an android to escape being imprisoned. The pun of the film’s title relies both on the knowledge that a dummy is a replica of a human being as well as an ableist epithet for a fool.

I have to admit, I prefer Keaton and Chaplin to Turpin, so the premise of the film did not work for me. However, the film does rely on the idea that the primary purpose of creating an android is as a commodity. When the inventor (James Donnelly) reveals his clockwork person, he also reveals his motivation for making such a machine to sell it for a great deal of money. The android can move, dance, and sing, provided it is plugged into its “brain,” which seems like a fictional foreshadowing of a computer’s CPU, making it the perfect curiosity for the vaudeville troupe who wants to purchase it. Thus, the film establishes the android as a creature of capitalism, an idea that will become inextricably linked to the android as an archetype throughout science fiction in the twentieth century.

Why is this important? To answer that, let me put on my sci-fi nerd hat for a moment. (I often imagine it has antennae.) One of the purposes of science fiction as a genre is to allow the reader to imagine otherwise. Darko Suvin calls this cognitive estrangement—the ability to construct fictional alternative realities or possibilities that radically shift the way one thinks about their actual reality. Cognitive estrangement is unique to science fiction because the very mechanism of the genre is to explore other presentations of reality, usually in the future or near future. Seeing The Matrix (1999) and wondering whether the “real world” is actually a simulation is cognitive estrangement. Science fiction often accomplishes this estrangement through defamiliarization, or approaching social and political issues sideways. “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive,” as Ursula K. Le Guin would say. Defamiliarization allows readers to explore social structures and problems by presenting them within a new or fantastic situation.

How does this apply to androids? Because androids are often defamiliarized humans. Science fiction filmmakers often use android characters to talk about how humans treat other humans, especially humans that are different, other, or part of a minority. That android in A Clever Dummy is a commodity, valued only for its ability to bring a profit to its creator, just as humans in the 1910s were beginning to realize their role as commodities under capitalism. When we talk about androids, we are usually talking about ourselves.

The second film I watched–the German silent horror film The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920)–also defamiliarizes common human anxiety about technology. Directed by Paul Wegner and Carl Boese, the film is the third of a trilogy about the titular golem, but the first two films–The Golem (1915) and The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917) are both lost films. While the first film is about an antiques dealer in the 1910s who finds a depowered golem in the ruins of a Jewish temple, this film is the golem’s origin story. It is loosely based on a Czech legend about a sixteenth-century rabbi who creates a golem to defend the Prague ghetto against attack. The film itself adheres to one version of the legend in which the rabbi lost control of the golem which proceeded to destroy much of Prague, Godzilla-like.

Golems, of course, belong to Jewish mythology, but in essence they are an early form of android. In the film, Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) molds the golem (played by Wegner himself) out of clay and animates it using a medallion inscribed with a holy word obtained from a demon in a mystical ritual. Like many early depictions of androids, Wegner’s golem is bulky and his motions are rigid and choppy. The costume, however, does show Wegner’s very human face, which provides much of the horror of the film as his expressions transform from stoicism to twisted glee while he drags his creator’s daughter Miriam through the streets by her hair.

This plotline of a human creation run amok follows in the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (more on that in a future article). The golem represents human hubris in attempting to create life, an act reserved only for deity, but more broadly speaking, the golem is a defamiliarized apprehension about the unknown consequences of technology. When this film came out in 1920, Germany was still recovering from the after-effects of one of the most deadly wars in human history. The sheer devastation of the war–a war in which Wegner personally fought–was only possible because of new, significant advancements in military technology: machine guns, grenades, artillery, tanks, airplanes, and weaponized gas. The industrial revolution had not brought the bright future that its innovators had promised; it had brought destruction, death, and shellshock. The golem, then, is an expression of dread, dread that technological advancement would only bring more suffering.

While I find the blue and yellow tinted cinematography beautiful–due in no small part to a young Karl Freund–and the idea of a golem compelling, I was unsure of the film’s intentions. Wegner and Boese do seem like they want to respect the thematic elements of the golem mythology, and they avoid many of the racist caricatures of Jewish people common in German cinema at the time. Many of the actors are Jewish, and the film ends with a star of David emblazoned across the screen. However, knowing the growing anti-Semitism in post-war Germany as well as Wegner’s future career making propaganda films for the Nazis, I am wary of any film showing Jewish technology destroying a city. While I would love to read the golem as a symbol of Jewish faith in their deity to protect them–or as revenge for the countless crimes against them–I don’t know if the original German audience would have read it the same way. Cognitive estrangement and defamiliarization, like technology, are neither good nor evil; they are simply useful tools.

Next month, I will continue my journey with the German Expressionist film that launched a thousand science fictions, Metropolis.