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“We Can Rebuild Him!”: The essentialisation of the human/cyborg interface in the twenty-first century, or whatever happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?

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Abstract

This paper aims to show how recent cinematic representations reveal a far more pessimistic and essentialised vision of Human/Cyborg hybridity in comparison with the more enunciative and optimistic ones seen at the end of the twentieth century. Donna Haraway’s still influential 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” saw the combination of the organic and the technological as offering new and exciting ways beyond the normalised culturally constructed categories of gender and identity formation. However, more recently critics see her later writings as embodying a Faustian deal between the individual and hegemony, where technology does not enhance but merely returns the subject to a level of normalisation. As such cybernetics is only configured as a form of prosthetic rehabilitation, to ‘re’-able the ‘dis’-abled, that ultimately re-establishes earlier essentialised subject positions through that same evolutionary process. The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran from 1974 to 1978, exampled a symbiosis between the organic and the technological where the broken human body is not just re-made via mechanical prosthesis but through a process of Cyborg hybridity which actually makes it better, faster, stronger than before. In contrast, contemporary films such as Avatar (Cameron 2009), Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay 2009) and Iron Man II (Faveraeu 2010) portray an inherent anxiety toward the cyborg body disavowing of any human/cyborg interaction beyond re-establishing their own discrete and separate subject positions. Although human/cyborg symbiosis constructs the possibility for potentialised bodies beyond those previously imagined, contemporary, popular, film represents them as separated and essentialised. This article looks at what cultural anxieties might produce such an about turn in such representations how this positions human identity in a time of increasing technology and, as a result, asks “whatever happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?”

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Notes

  1. Opening lines of The Six Million Dollar Man from Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/title/H0071054/ [accessed December 11th 2010].

  2. This is seen in one of Haraways more recent works "Modest_Witness @Second_Millennium" where she describes the creation of a patented mouse which develops human breast cancer and showing “nature enterprised-up” and consequently how the cyborg-isation of nature is used to restore ‘normality’ to human life. It can be seen, as noted by Eleanor M. Miller and Frank B. Varney in their review of the work in (1999), to "Both force a revaluation of what may count as nature and artefact, of what histories are to be inhabited by whom, and for whom" p. 119, but also example how the promise of the Cyborg Manifesto, has been compromised through commercial interest.

  3. Avatar grossed $2,740,405,721 worldwide, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, $836,303,693 and Iron Man 2, $621, 751, 988. All figures form Box Office Mojo.

  4. The original Bionic Woman series ran from January 1976–May 1978, whilst the more recent version was on from September 2007–November 2007.

  5. Interestingly, the actor playing Steve Austin, Lee Majors, followed this series with a highly successful one where he played a stunt-man called Colt Seevers, who moon-lighted as a bounty-hunter. It was called The Fall Guy and ran from November 1981–May 1986.

  6. The Terminator by James Cameron was released in 1984 and the flesh-covered machine sent back from the future, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is very much a weapon on legs that has no control over itself and can only fulfil the commands it has been given.

  7. Penley, not unlike Haraway, sees the cyborg as a hybrid category, but one that is predicated upon actions as much as actual mechanisation and so a human can be seen to act like a machine and vice versa.

  8. For anyone who has not seen the film, and according to the viewing figures, that should be a scant few of us, Sam requires a special pod to encase his body in so that his consciousness can be utilised to operate the body of a cloned Na’vi, the indigenous people of Pandora.

  9. There is an odd conflation of H.G. Wells here and Marxism where machines inevitably distance humanity from authentic experience and connection to the world, in the same way that labour is turned into a commodification of the worker but also the symbiosis between a world and the organisms that inhabit it. This is seen at the end of Wells’ War of the Worlds when the invaders are killed by bacteria that do not affect humans, or as Wells describes it: ‘By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers’ (Wells 2005).

  10. Iron Man was released in 2008 with a third instalment planned for 2013.

  11. Downey Jnr. is possibly the ideal actor for this role as it reflects his own off-screen physiological and personal conflicts.

  12. There is a slightly different reading of this in terms of the merchandising deals that are inherently part of the film—the Iron Man franchise has deals with Hasbro and Sega. Here there is an underwritten plot of accepting only original products, the red and yellow Iron Man, and rejecting ‘dangerous’ and generic imitations.

  13. This is continued in the later Terminator films where they level of mimicry of the robot distinguishes as being bad. The old version of the Terminator can only take on one form and so is relatively stable and so safe. However, the new version can change, almost at will and so is viewed as a far more dangerous threat.

  14. The series consists of Transformers (Bay 2007), Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay 2009) and Transformers III: Dark Side of the Moon (Bay 2011).

  15. Other representations of humans by either faction of robots in the series are designed to specifically deceive human observers and do not interact on a physical basis with them. This is largely as holographic drivers of whatever form of mechanical transport they are imitating.

  16. The first Terminator, or the T-800, famously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was a robot covered by living flesh which looked human but could not transform itself. The T-1000 that featured in the two later Terminator films, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Dir. James Cameron (1991), and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Dir. Jonathan Mostow (2003), was made from sentient liquid metal that could take on the external form of any object.

  17. see “Japanes Robots Enter Daily Life” in USA Today, 03/01/2008 [online]. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2008-03-01-robots_N.htm and “What's Behind Japan's Love Affair with Robots?” in Time Magazine,03/08/2009 [online]. Available at: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1913913,00.html.

  18. Interestingly Asma’s book qualifies this assertion by linking it with another monstrous body, which he somewhat all purposely identifies as “the military” making the worst consequence of such experiments being that one is turned into a weapon, This same anxiety is also seen in Iron Man II and Avatar where the robotic exoskeletons are controlled by outside forces that then make the human body within them do as it wishes. This circumstance is specifically denied by Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man where his cybernetic enhancements, though explicitly configured as military interventions, are entirely under his control and he has full agency over whether he undertakes the missions required of him.

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Bacon, S. “We Can Rebuild Him!”: The essentialisation of the human/cyborg interface in the twenty-first century, or whatever happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?. AI & Soc 28, 267–276 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-012-0387-1

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