by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

Near the end of my last article, I discussed the symbolism of the heart in The Bride of Frankenstein. My next two films will allow me to drill down (pardon the machine metaphor) on this symbol to illustrate how it exists within android narratives. The first is the 1939 Technicolor classic The Wizard of Oz. Although more fantasy than science fiction, the film does have a compelling android who accompanies Dorothy (Judy Garland) on her quest to return home to Kansas: the Tin Man (Jack Haley). The Tin Man isn’t the first cinematic android that comes to mind for most people, but he has become a sort of proto-example of an android trying to find a way to become more human, inspiring other android characters like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

Dorothy first encounters the Tin Man when she and the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) rescue him from his rusted immobility by the side of the yellow brick road. Haley plays the Tin Man as a soft-spoken and whimsical automaton, despite the silvery aluminum paste makeup, creaky movements, and axe. He tells Dorothy that he is a woodsman who was created to work tirelessly but that the tinsmith forgot to give him a heart. Like the Scarecrow, the Tin Man believes that his life would be better with the addition of this one missing component. Thus, he joins their quest to find the Wizard, hoping that he might be able to give him a heart..

The heart has a long history in both metaphorical and physical understandings of human emotion. Ideas about the connection between the physical organ and the soul date back to ancient Egypt, but it was Plato and Aristotle who made the connection between desire and love and the heart, a metaphorical connection that only became stronger over the centuries. Now, despite modern medicine’s insistence that the organ contains no such emotions, the heart is still closely associated with the ability to feel, empathize, and love. All one has to do is look at Ferdinard’s declaration of his heart flying to Miranda or Mr. Rochester’s insistence that his and Jane Eyre’s hearts are connected with a bit of string or Bon Jovi’s accusation of being “shot through the heart” by his inconstant lover. The heart has become a synecdochical stand-in, a one-word shortcut for invoking a range of human feelings and sensations.

For the Tin Man, his missing heart represents a lack of humanity, a flattening of his emotional affect. He sings:

When a man's an empty kettle he should be on his mettle,
And yet I'm torn apart.
Just because I'm presumin' that I could be kind-a-human,
If I only had a heart
I'd be tender - I'd be gentle and awful sentimental
Regarding love and art.
I'd be friends with the sparrows ... and the boy who shoots the arrows
If I only had a heart.

On the surface, this desire seems innocuous: the Tin Man wants to experience empathy with other beings, the joy and wonder of art, and romantic love. However, by associating these emotions with humanity, the Tin Man is establishing a hierarchy of what kinds of attributes are human and which are not. Since androids are often defamiliarized humans, this hierarchy can often lead to the dehumanization and rejection of any perception of abnormal behavior or way of viewing the world.

Because medical researchers and practitioners often weaponize the metaphor of the android against neuroatypical people, it is essential to recognize how films like The Wizard of Oz present us with androids who struggle to simulate humanity. Lack of empathy has been associated with autism, for example, since Bruno Bettleheim first wrote his infamous book The Empty Fortress. He even compared autistic children to machines, influencing writers like Philip K. Dick in their depictions of androids. (I will discuss this more when I eventually get to Blade Runner.) Researchers later argued that the ability to envision a mind other than one’s own–often referred to as Theory of the Mind or TOM–is a module, a program, that is present in the minds of neurotypical people and absent from autistic people.

Despite being created long before Betteleheim published his research in the ‘60s, the Tin-Man subscribes to a similar metaphor: his inability to feel emotions must mean that he is missing a physical component. He envisions this component as a heart, something that will allow him to become a cyborg or more human, which is his desired position in the hierarchy. Clay Morton, a scholar who writes about depictions of autism in science fiction, writes, “what the reader is invited to accept is an explicit binary–human/AI–that establishes further implicit binaries–emotional/unemotional, normal/abnormal–aligning normative emotional affect with humanity. Neurotypical/neurodivergent. Human/inhuman.”

However, what I find truly interesting about the film is that the Tin Man DOES experience great amounts of emotion and empathy. He cries huge wet tears when Dorothy succumbs to sleep in the poppy fields. He is completely devoted to Dorothy in every action; he hangs on her every word. His very romanticism of the idea of having a heart demonstrates that he has the capacity to at least imagine what those feelings must be like. Despite the Wizard assuring him that he would be better off without a heart, the placebo gift of a “philanthropic testimonial” means a great deal to him, reassuring him that his emotions are valid. “I know I have a heart,” he tells Dorothy, weeping as she bids him farewell, “because it’s breaking.” The irony here provides a friction between what the Tin-Man believes about his ability to feel and what he actually feels, a subtle but powerful critique of the neurotypical/neuroatypical hierarchy. He may not experience emotions the same way as Dorothy, but he does experience them deeply. He isn’t missing a module or a TOM. He only thinks he is.

As I was rewatching The Wizard of Oz for this article, my partner reminded me that I had never seen Disney’s unofficial sequel Return to Oz (1985). This film exists in a small but recognizable genre that I will dub “horror films made for children,” a special type of film that seems reserved specifically for Gen X children in the ‘80s. Return to Oz takes place a few months after the end of the first film. Frightened by Dorothy’s obsession with what they believe was a coma dream during the tornado, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry send her to a sanitarium for electroshock therapy, which makes this the first Disney film I have ever seen featuring institutionally sanctioned torture. During a dramatic escape, Dorothy finds herself back in Oz, but the land looks drastically different than it did before due to a new enemy, the Nome King. Dorothy sets out to find her friends, only to discover that the Scarecrow is missing and that the Tin Man and Cowardly Lion are petrified.

As a side note, I find it fascinating that, in this film, Dorothy describes the origins of the Tin Man as Baum did in the original novel rather than the absent-minded tinsmith version of the 1939 film. She tells her talking chicken Billina–who is a far inferior companion to Toto–that the Tin Man was a human at one point who gradually replaced all his body parts with tin until he was completely a machine, invoking the type of “boundary breakdown” horror I mentioned in my article last month.

Despite the Tin Man only appearing in two brief scenes in this film, another android joins Dorothy on this second quest: Tik-Tok (Sean Barrett). Tik-Tok is a frankly adorable spherical android made of copper with a kettle helmet and a stylized mustache. Like the Tin Man, Dorothy finds him completely immobile, although he claims he was left by the Scarecrow to wait for Dorothy’s return. Tik-Tok is a clockwork device: he has three keys that control his thought, action, and speech. He is not able to access any of the keys on his own and must have assistance in winding them up to function. Stamped into his nameplate is the description “Royal Army of Oz,” indicating his purpose as a military device. Indeed, he has superhuman strength, easily overcoming a large gang of Wheelers (terrifying cyborgs with wheels instead of hands and feet) with comical ease. He also has enormous longevity, telling Dorothy that he is “guaranteed to work perfectly for a thousand years.”

Like the Tin Man, Tik-Tok does not believe himself to be capable of emotion. He doesn’t even believe himself to be alive, a state of affairs that he is most grateful for as it made him invulnerable to the petrification spell that froze the Emerald City. This observation implies that the Tin Man, on the other hand, is alive as he was affected by the spell. Unlike the Tin Man, however, Tik-Tok does seek a heart or any human attribute. Even the threat of death or failure does not phase him: “I am a machine, so I cannot be sorry or happy no matter what happens.”

Like The Wizard of Oz, this film also wants us to see the irony in the space between what Tik-Tok believes–or was told–and what he does. Despite his insistence that he “values his lifelessness,” he is extremely proud of his superior intellect, firing off snarky remarks about living beings who can talk but not think. He sacrifices himself in one of the most heartrending scenes of the film in an attempt to assist Dorothy in solving the Nome King’s puzzle. He, like the Tin Man, cries green goop when Dorothy leaves Oz for the second time. Unlike the Tin Man, however, Tik-Tok doesn’t think he needs a heart or a TOM. He is perfectly content with who he is and his purpose in Oz, once again challenging the hierarchy that privileges the human over the non-human. In fact, Tik-Tok’s only wish is that his creators had made him so he could wind himself up, a desire for autonomy rather than a desire for humanity.

Next month, we return to the fembots and femborgs in The Island of Lost Souls (1932) and The Perfect Woman (1949).