by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

Before I dig into this month’s films, I wanted to note that I had teased in my last article that I would be discussing Island of Lost Souls (1932). Unfortunately, Island of Lost Souls is proving difficult to track down, so I will be swapping it out for Weird Science (1985), which ultimately paired better with The Perfect Woman (1949) for reasons that will become clear. Never fear: I will be writing about Island of Lost Souls as soon as I can get my hands on a copy, hopefully during the next Criterion sale.

This month, I returned to films with gynoids–androids with femme appearances–to continue the ongoing conversation about gender and sexuality introduced in Metropolis (1927). In my article on that film, I observed that gynoids often stand in for submissive or passive sexual and/or domestic fantasies for the benefit of men. These androids tell us a lot about the heteronormative ideal for femininity and womanhood precisely because the men in these films often see them as superior or more accessible than human women. They are objects that can be manipulated or used and they don’t have the “flaws” of human women, thus giving us a realized version (or at least a cinematic representation) of the ideal woman.

Both films I discuss today engage in this conversation. The Perfect Woman is our first British film for this column. Adapted from a play of the same name, the film is a farce, more interested in comedic set pieces than in science fiction. Indolent heir Roger Cavendish (Nigel Patrick) and his bumbling butler (Stanley Holloway) need money fast, so they answer a job-wanted ad from Professor Ernest Belman (Miles Malleson). The professor wants them to take his latest invention–a fembot named Olga (Pamela Devis)–for a night on the town to test her capacities in real-world scenarios. However, Belman’s sheltered niece Penelope (Patricia Roc), desperate to escape the house and have some fun, switches places with Olga, pretending to be the android for the night. What ensues is a Shakespearean comedy of misidentification, misunderstanding, and, of course, marriage. It may seem odd that I include a film here in which the actual android only really appears in three scenes, but Penelope’s act of impersonation and the way she and Olga are both characterized and treated in the film has much to say about gender performance and idealized femininity. After all, it’s in the title.

There is no way to describe the creation of Olga as anything that doesn’t sound like a very specific type of pornography. Any uncle who creates an exact android replica of his niece, calls her “the perfect woman,” and orders two men to take her to a hotel to perform “rigorous tests” is clearly in the grip of an incestuous fixation. He even provides a detailed list of custom undergarments with Olga’s exact measurements to his housekeeper Mrs. Butters (Irene Handl) and Penelope to order. The oppositional ways in which he views Olga versus Penelope–while connecting them through their similar appearance–provide the central tension of the film. Penelope, rightfully, tells Butters that her uncle has isolated her due to overprotection: never letting her meet any men or go to many social engagements. She is jealous of Olga, who the professor spends all his time with and who gets to have fancy underwear and go on dates. However, if Freud watched this film (oh Freud, what would we do without you?), he would observe that in many ways, Belman is displacing his desire for his niece onto the more appropriate Olga. Freud defined taboo conceptually in these same oppositional terms: the object of desire is simultaneously sacred and impure, holy and forbidden. Penelope is Belman’s Madonna and Olga is his whore. To protect Penelope from his own unconscious desires, Belman must compartmentalize the conflict into two different women.

The displacement of those desires onto Olga allows him and the other men to treat her more sexually than they would otherwise. When Belman explains to Roger and Ramshead why he refers to Olga as “the perfect woman,” he has a specific set of qualities in mind: “She does exactly what she is 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.” This attitude reveals much about how men often view women as objects. The way Roger and Stanley treat Penelope when they believe her to be Olga is downright horrifying: they pinch and grope her, make crude comments about her body, and undress her, moving her body around in the way that they would like her to be positioned. They act this way because they believe that they can, revealing that in the absence of any social constraints, they would do so to all women. Olga is perfect precisely because they can use her in this fashion, not because she is as idealized as Penelope.

The comedy of these scenes emerges from the tension: the audience knows that it is fine to treat Olga this way but not to treat Penelope this way. Olga isn’t real, so she can’t have any feelings or bodily autonomy, making her the perfect object. Except that Roger and Ramshead are aware of the fact that Olga at least metaphorically is a woman. When Belman warns them that if they say the word love around the android, she will immediately go into a violent rage and defend herself, Roger exchanges a significant glance with Ramshead, remarking dryly, “We know the type.”

But because The Perfect Woman is a comedy, all is set right in the end. Because Penelope was physically compromised by Roger during her roleplay as the android/whore–threatening her status as pure and sacred–of course, they fall in love and get married. Someone accidentally says Olga’s trigger word, and she is destroyed, just as maschinenmensch was before her. Only the Madonna/Maria/Penelope can survive these films. There is no place for the impure and the forbidden in the domestic fantasy.

But what if we removed the domestic element? Because I was short a film to pair with The Perfect Woman, I decided to put on Weird Science, a film also centered around the creation of a gynoid. High school outcasts Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Michell-Smith) are inspired by Whale’s Frankenstein (colorized for TV) to create a dream woman, the perfect Lisa (Kelly Lebrock). What ensues is familiar territory for Hughes: high school coming-of-age hijinks culminating in Cat in the Hat style-chaos.

Women in the film–both human and android–are associated primarily with their bodies and physicality. The very first scene of the film focuses on a girl’s gymnastics class, the camera pulling back to reveal that their slow-motion, sensual movements are the product of Gary and Wyatt’s gaze as they ogle the objects of their desire. Because they cannot access these women due to social hierarchies (more on this in a minute), they decide to create a woman who will allow them access, just as Olga was created to allow Belman and the others the access they wanted. The boys create her Lisa using Wyatt’s computer–and a great deal of hacker magic–and a Barbie. The use of Barbie in Lisa’s creation is significant because Barbies hold a great deal of cultural capital when it comes to the idealized femme image. Despite my excitement for the new Greta Gerwig Barbie film, research shows that playing with Barbies negatively impacts body image and increases the chance of eating disorders in young girls because of her incredible hourglass form. Barbie is the impossible ideal, so it makes sense that Gary and Wyatt would turn to her in their question to make the perfect woman.

Because the film presents Lisa to us as the archetype of femininity, it provides us with a narrow definition of what femininity is (or should be). Deb (Suzanne Snyder) and Hilly (Judie Aronson), the two real love interests of the film, remark that Lisa is perfect according to a specific set of guidelines: “no zits, no fat, so relaxed.” This was not LeBrock’s first outing as “the dream girl,” either. She was already a fairly recognizable advertising model when she began acting and she plays an almost identical character in her first film Woman in Red (1984). Her role in Weird Science cemented her role as a Hollywood sex symbol. 

While it would be easy to dismiss the character of Lisa as pure objectification–every straight teenage boy’s wet dream–Lebrock manages to create a character who has her own desires, quirks, and personality. Despite her claim that she belongs to Wyatt and Gary, she often reclaims her own agency by interpreting her purpose a little differently than her creators originally intended. When Wyatt asks her why she doesn’t always respond to their commands the way they want her to, she replies, “I’m here to give you what you really want, not what you ask for,” in what appears to be a reverse monkey’s paw situation. She is fun, intelligent, and has an unlimited amount of reality-bending powers at her disposal, creating cars, clothing, and even in one hilariously absurd scene, a gun, out of thin air. She moves through the world with complete confidence and poise, going from one adventure to another with almost uncanny grace. Unlike Ogla or the maschinenmensch, Lisa is not a domestic fantasy. She may have been created as a sex object for the boys, but it becomes quite clear from the beginning that this is Lisa’s world. Gary and Wyatt just live in it.

In actuality, Weird Science is less about femininity, than it is about masculinity. Lisa might be Gary and Wyatt’s creation, but her primary purpose, unbeknownst to the boys, is to recreate them from nerdy cowards into more traditional masculine archetypes. She does this by manipulating them into situations designed to shame them for their weaknesses or to reward them for their masculine traits. She takes them to a dive bar–incidentally setting up Anthony Michael Hall for one of the most cringeworthy racist caricatures of John Hughes’ filmography–so they can learn to talk to other men. She takes them to the mall so they can show up their classmates by parading her around as a symbol of their virility. She throws a wild rager in Wyatt’s house and encourages Gary to stand up to his parents. When they cower in fear in a closet, hiding from their bullies (Robert Rusler and a charmingly baby-faced Robert Downey Jr.), she tries to shame them: “What about John Wayne?”

Here, Lisa is encouraging a specific performance of masculinity. We could say that this entire film is about gender performance. Judith Butler famously introduced this concept by claiming that “gender is performative, which means, quite simply, that it is only real to the extent that it is performed.” In this case, Lisa is citing the ultimate performance of American masculine identity–the rugged cowboy archetype–as the ideal to which Gary and Wyatt should strive. Their access to women–the reason they created Lisa in the first place–depends solely on their ability to perform their gender correctly. The film makes it clear that women exist on a continuum of value directly related to their physicality, a continuum that directly correlates to a system of social capital among men. The more masculine a man is, the more popular he is, the more “perfect” of a woman he can date/have sex with. Gary and Wyatt have to earn their ultimate relationships with Deb and Hilly through displays of courage, bravado, dominance, and wealth. Once they are in relationships with “real” women, Lisa declares her purpose fulfilled, although, unlike Olga, we do see her in her own career as a gym teacher at the end of the film, implying that now she might have her own goals.

I will discuss many more gynoids in the future, but these two films provide a good microcosm of how these “perfect women” often promote traditional gender performances and roles. Unlike Whale’s cyborgs, which break down boundaries, the gynoids in these two films represent a firming up of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, illustrating how heteronormative societies often define the two in opposition to each other. It’s a stifling and narrow perspective, to be sure.

Next time, I return to one of my favorite ‘50s science fiction films, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), to talk about the iconic Gort.