Boy Do We Love Movies About Evil Machines

by Mik Awake

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, one wonders if she had any idea the impact her Gothic tale would have on literature in the following centuries. Considered by many the first work of science fiction, Frankenstein also spawned a whole subgenre of artistic production that crossed borders of time and medium.

Shelley wrote in the first days of the Industrial Age yet nailed a concern that eerily echoes today: the fear that machines might turn on us.

Kubrick’s stark rendition of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey reignited popular interest in technology gone dangerously wrong. These days, Phillip K. Dick, modern master of the evil machine tale, is posthumously responsible for a cottage industry of recent movies: Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and—not so recently but equally important—the classic Blade Runner. A post-Schindler’s List Steven Spielberg has been unhealthily-obsessed with the idea of the evil machine. With movies like The Matrix, I, Robot, and countless others doing damage at the box office, it is fairly safe to say that our collective fascination may be all-too-well founded.

Why do we still harbor this fascination and fear of our own machines? We are not, as Mary Shelley was in 1818, new to them nor they to us. More than ever, we have come to accept the place of machines and computers as integral parts of our lives. Living with them is not as scary living without them. To imagine life without the computers we toil upon, the ATMs that give us money, and the appliances in our kitchen we use every day is to conjure up a brutish world of typewriters, withdrawal slips, and iceboxes.

From voting to sex, banking to shopping, in almost every facet of life, machines mediate our daily transactions. And though the idea of machines dictating our most important experiences is a troubling—if not scary—notion there is a deeper, more corrosive fear operating in movies like Kubrick’s 2001, namely: that the evil lurking in machines is more like the evil lurking in us than we care to admit.

What the best evil-machine movies get across—and the more special-effects-centric ones could care less about—is that no machine, and perhaps no person, is innately evil. Like the evil human, the evil machine is hardwired with its tragic flaw. Its flaw is not—like that of Achilles, for example—kleos, but logos: not an excess of human pride, but an over-reliance on a singular mind.

At least for now, we can count ourselves lucky that, unlike computers, we can see the world in more than just binaries. We can also be thankful that behind every evil machine is a person, and that that person has a finger—a sensitive finger of flesh and blood—which is (for now) hovering over the power button.

(Image from flickr.)

Comments

[Derek Ferguson]

Interesting view from the article "boy do we love movies about evil machines". I especially like the duality of loving and fearing the machine: scared of them, but more afraid of not rendering their services and using typewriters and withdrawl slips.

I also enjoyed the reasoning behind the evilness, man or machine, and the possibility for a spark of light deep within the darkness.

thanks for the new view.