Loving the Machine

Last Spring while teaching E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, we were talking about the protagonist falling in love with a robot, and I mentioned that this was one of the oldest motifs in sci-fi, then trying to update this Romantic tale, I mentioned, “like in Blade Runner.” Blank Stares, “You guys know Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford.” Blank Stares. I thought wow I really am getting old, I wasn’t expecting that anyone would know Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but not knowing a movie from the 80s with a big star still alive.

Time slips by. Grumbling around the mailroom in mock horror about the class and my own agedness, my colleague Eric Hayot, over at http://www.printculture.org/ tells me to throw Battlestar Galactica at them but I knew only the old 70s version. Now a year and many dvds later, I am worn down by the repeated shocking revelation that a character you thought was human is really not.

As everyone else knows, the show starts with the basic pattern: a supposedly intelligent man falls in love with beautiful woman who turns out to be a machine (or something like one). Yet, what works as a single shocking revelation in The Sandman, Metropolis and Blade Runner, is a reoccurring nightmare in Battlestar, pointing do the still fundamental differences between literature, film and television, which is obliged to deliver its surprises in installments even if we watch it on dvd. The show makes a game of it by letting us know well before all the revelations are in that there is a list of Cylons we thought were humans. Thus the horrific shock that drove Nathaniel mad in The Sandman is doled out over the course of several seasons.

Episodic literature tends to repeat. Even Homer’s Odysseus seems to land over and over again on the same strange island with new supernatural beings much like Kirk encountering new aliens on yet another version of that familiar studio-set planet.

The Uncanny that Freud first diagnosed while reading The Sandman has become more than just the return of a repressed desire, a familiar truth housed in an alien body. We are now faced with the uncanniness of the uncanny, we know that there will be revelations in which humans are shocked to discover their dearly beloved are inhuman, we know that this information will drive the tender, arrogant humans to madness, despair, drink and suicide.

So what becomes of the shock? Does it devolve into melodrama? Or is it a new trick to be mastered and then maneuvered around like an obstacle in Gameboy? How does knowing that a shock is coming become shocking?