An essay from 2006 about people getting massively off by getting massively killed.
“Together Will We Rust The World”: The Cyborgization Process In Robocop, Crash and Tetsuo
The relationship between humanity and technology is a theme central to science fiction film and literature. The emergence of “cybernetic organisms”, or cyborgs, in popular science fiction gives physical manifestation to this theme – “the literal melding of what were previously seen as separate and divided: the human/machine, the human/nonhuman” (Cornea, Figurations, 275). On one level, cyborgs illustrate the possibilities and benefits that technology could have in terms of human life – an extension, reinforcement, an empowerment. However, narratives of cyborgization rarely show this amalgamation as simple, or pleasurable. The three films I will be concentrating on here – Robocop (dir. Paul Verhoeven), Crash (dir. David Cronenberg) and Tetsuo (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto) – all present different processes of cyborgization, with differing consequences for those involved, but in all three the processes are intrinsically linked to violence and the end of a humanity recognizable to contemporary audiences. The meeting between human flesh and machine is presented as a collision (literally, in the case of Crash), rather than a smooth transition. The cyborg is borne out of violence, and it is the destruction of the body that leads to its rebirth as a cybernetic organism.
This is a paradox at the heart of the discourse about cyborgs – as Claudia Springer writes: “Fusion with electronic technology thus represents a paradoxical desire to preserve human life by destroying it” (Springer, 322). This is certainly true, and while Robocop, Crash and Tetsuo all feature people meeting violent death, they are also concerned with ideas of achieving immortality through a melding with machines. The dilemma faced by the characters in these films, and countless other cyborg narratives, is how to balance their humanity against the benefits and miraculous possibilities offered by a violent union with technology. Often, this means a redefining of what “humanity” means.
Looking at the films in their contemporary settings, they can also be read as projections of fears of technology, as the end of the twentieth century grew near. Robocop, produced in a Reaganite era of rampant consumerism, reflects those contemporary concerns. Similarly, Tetsuo reflects a Japan adjusting to the effects of AIDS and unstoppable technologization, while the protagonists of Crash anticipate, and actively pursue, a future entangled with technology, a future that JG Ballard posited in his 1973 novel, which became David Cronenberg’s film. And so the cyborgian paradox returns – for while these fears are projected onscreen, the films revel in their imagery and technology. The cyborg position is one simultaneously desirable and terrible, in some respects a bold step forward into a bright future, but in the main a tumble towards the end of mankind.
So, what perspectives do Robocop, Crash and Tetsuo offer on these ideas, about the inherent paradoxes and struggles at the heart of the cyborgization debate? How do they see the role of violence in the formation of a cyborg? And what kind of a cyborgized future do these three very different films envisage?
The melding of human and machine implies violence, in that the two are not associative, at least in general perception. In cyborgization, the body is literally “violated” by technological forces alien to it. But, of course, the process is more than mere destruction. It is loaded with promise and possibility, a rebirthing, new power: “the interface of flesh and technology is both thrilling and awful” (Fuchs, 284). Again, we see the paradox at the heart of the idea. Physical destruction becomes physical (and technological) reproduction.
This concept of violence as a reproductive force is at the centre of Robocop, Crash and Tetsuo. It is Murphy’s slaughter by a gang of crooks that leads to his transformation into a cyborg, in both Crash and Tetsuo, the violence of a car crash is involved with the potential cyborgization of the characters: the events of Tetsuo are set in motion by a hit-and-run; in Crash the car accident is central to the cyborgization process. Rather than merely aligning sex with violence, these films position them as the same thing, both in terms of reproduction and pleasure (certain characters in all three films display an increasingly perverse enjoyment in perpetrating and suffering violent acts). Acts of violence give “birth” to the cyborg. This idea is taken furthest, and made most explicit, in Tetsuo, where the rapidly changing Salaryman grows a huge drill-like phallus, which he subsequently uses to slaughter his girlfriend. This happens immediately after he has been entered from behind by his girlfriend with a “snake-like prosthetic phallus” (Cazdyn, 244). The scene is comprised of acts of sexual, mechanized violence perpetrated by a couple against each other. The sex performs no reproductive function – the creation of new life, and new power, is left to the amalgamation of the Salaryman and the Metal Fetishist at the film’s climax. As Eric Cazdyn writes: “After the Fetishist and Salaryman merge (however sexually), they (it) triumphantly resolve(s) to ‘rust the world’” (Cazdyn, 244).
The idea of a violent rather than sexual penetration as the way in which new life is created echoes across the films. In Robocop, Murphy is shot to death, death which leads to rebirth as Robocop. Cynthia J Fuchs reads this scene as violent rape: “The agony is made explicit in the repeated sequence of his brutal death…a grueling scene visually organized as a gang rape…[a] cut reveals Murphy’s perspective as he sees the villains looking down at him, an image mediated through a frenzy of ejaculation” (Fuchs, 285). The events of Tetsuo are set in motion when the Metal Fetishist physically penetrates a bleeding gash in his leg with a piece of metal pipe. In Crash, Ballard literally has penetrative sex with a wound in a woman’s leg. As the director David Cronenberg said of the scene: “It…was integral to what’s happening with those characters at that time: being involved in a strange sexuality that is a mutation – not genetically but physically – through scars, car crashes, and self mutilation” (Rodley, 197). The “mutation” of the characters sexuality positions violent interaction with machinery as the object of their sexual desire. The traditional pattern and function of sexual intercourse is subverted through the body’s relationships to metal and machinery: drills, bullets, cars, computers and so on. Sex and violence become intrinsically linked in the three films, but it is violence that is perhaps most pervasive and transformative, fulfilling the reproductive function usually associated with sex. The cyborg is time and again created out of violence.
As Claudia Springer writes: “violence substitutes for sexual release” (Springer, 316). This denotes the alignment of sexual pleasure, as well as reproduction, with violence. Springer, quoting Klaus Theweleit, describes how “‘acts of killing take the place of the sexual act’ and the ecstasy of killing substitutes for sexual climax” (Springer, 317). Theweleit was referring to fascist soldier males; for the cyborg, acts of killing become the sexual act, rather than merely taking its place. Created out of violence, the cyborg’s conceptions of sex and violence become entwined. In Robocop, Murphy’s “technologized, desexed body is the sign of his death” (Fuchs, 286). His memories code him as once having been a sexualized being (he has a family), but as a cyborg he is no longer able to fulfill a sexual function. His response is a violent one: shooting a would-be rapist in the groin, stabbing (penetrating) his nemesis Boddicker in the neck with a spike that emerges from his fist (and thus avenging his own “rape”). These actions are a close as Murphy, as Robocop, gets to a release of pleasure. In Crash, the joyless sex lives of Ballard and the other characters are only truly stimulated when coupled with the violence of a car crash.
With violence attaining the function and becoming the source of sexual reproduction and pleasure, traditional male/female gender roles are to some extent removed. It is now the machinery that fulfills the part of the “mother”, although the very word “mother” itself becomes unnecessary, engendered as it is. As I have said, in Crash sexual encounters are only meaningful when entwined with the transformative power of car crashes. This is where the allure is derived from, and where alone, in the minds of the characters at least, reproduction, or resurrection, can take place. All the lead characters appear to exhibit bisexuality, but this suggests a measured choice, which I do no believe they make. Their desire for destructive sex amongst crunching metal supersedes any measured seeking-out and choosing of a partner. The person and their gender are irrelevant, only the act itself is important (as James Spader, who plays Ballard, has said: “After all, I do fuck everybody in the movie” (Rodley, 197)). As such, traditional gender roles in Crash are blurred, to an extent removed. Women are no longer needed to propagate the human race. Rather, this function is taken on by the amalgamation of human and machine. In fact, the concept of the existence of a “human race” at all slips towards obsolescence. The protagonists in Crash, while not as obviously physically cyborgized as Murphy or the Metal Fetishist, certainly “contradict sociobiological constructions of paternity and maternity” (Fuchs, 282), something Cynthia J. Fuchs denotes as a cyborg trait.
Similar subversions of traditional gender roles are present in Robocop. Murphy’s memories of his wife and child are just that – memories. They exist only, and crucially, in the past, and have no place in his present, or future, as Robocop. Murphy’s rebirth as a cyborg means the destruction of his old life, the end of a man’s relationship with a woman. His female partner, Lewis, is distinctly un-feminine, with short hair and wearing the same clothing and armour as all the other police. JP Telotte suggests that Lewis “becomes a kind of replacement or double for his [Murphy’s] wife, as she lovingly protects and cares for him”; helping him to aim his gun after his “targeting system is a little messed up” (Telotte, 173). Telotte writes that “the resulting scene is a sexually overdetermined one, as she embraces his body, holds his arm and hand, even strokes the arm, directs his raised gun/phallus” (Telotte, 174). While the scene maybe indeed sexualized, Lewis is only really functioning to re-enforce the violent impulses that have replaced Murphy’s sexual ones – fixing his “targeting system”, allowing him to express and satisfy himself through his phallic weapon and the agency it possesses. Lewis does not function sexually as a woman in terms of Murphy; physical, sexual interaction between two people is no longer of consequence to him, when reborn as Robocop. The climax of the film, in which Robocop “regains” his lost persona as Murphy and is, in a sense, reborn again, is expressed through violence and further removes women from the process: after he kills Dick Jones (the villainous mastermind), Robocop “remembers his last name (Murphy) and is at the same time deemed “son” by OCP’s president, the Old Man” (Fuchs, 287). Murphy loses both his physical and sexual identities when he becomes Robocop, and while he does regain some idea of who he is at the end of the film (“The name’s Murphy” (Robocop)), it is clear that this “new” Murphy has been fathered by OCP, that is to say technology, and that it is a world of violence that he now inhabits.
So, with violence replacing sex as the cyborg’s mode of reproduction and creation, what kind of a cyborg being is created in these films? With a subversion of traditionally perceived gender roles and how males and females interact, the representation of the cyborg as a masculine being becomes important (the main protagonists in all three films are male), and the question is asked as to whether gender is at all important in terms of a cyborg. In this respect, the paradox returns. As Claudia Springer writes: “the attempt to preserve the masculine subject as a cyborg requires destroying the coherence of the male body and replacing it with electronic [or mechanical] parts…The construction of masculinity as cyborg requires its simultaneous deconstruction” (Springer, 318). In Robocop, Murphy’s death and rebirth as Robocop not only turn him into a super-masculine warrior, it also, in fact, allows him to realize masculine fantasies held by the human Murphy before his death – he becomes as powerful and invincible, and can spin his gun in an imitation of the fictional TV character TJ Lazer he and his son previously watched together. While the creation of Robocop means, to an extent, the end of Murphy as he had been previously, it is by no means seen as an entirely negative event, in terms of masculinity at least. He has become harder, faster, stronger – more masculine. As Claudia Springer writes: “In a world without human bodies…technological things will be gendered and there will still be a patriarchal hierarchy. What this reconfiguration of masculinity indicates is that patriarchy is more willing to dispense with human life than with male superiority” (Springer, 318).
In Tetsuo, the destruction of the Salaryman paradoxically turns him into a far more powerful being, again, harder, faster and stronger. However, unlike the character of Robocop, while the transition maybe traumatic in the extreme, the masculine convention of power is not reinforced. The “patriarchal hierarchy” noted by Springer is not present, the cyborg has moved somewhere beyond being described as “masculine”. The Salaryman/Metal Fetishist amalgamation created at the end of Tetsuo does not present a super-masculine image like Robocop; indeed, it is barely recognizable as any kind of gendered being at all. And while this union between two male characters can be seen as the creation of a super-masculine being, in that the amalgamation is now powerful enough to take over the planet, powerful enough to “rust the world”, it also can be seen to have transcended gender entirely, and that its masculinity is no longer a concern. Indeed, in Tetsuo, writes Eric Cazdyn, “only a new cyborgian body (whether it is still gendered is not clear) that ‘rusts’ the old world and builds the new one offers any chance of survival” (Cazdyn, 244). While the issue of whether or not the new creation is male or female at all maybe interesting, the question is raised as to whether gender even matters any more in a world overtaken by metal and technology. While Robocop can be seen as reinforcing a patriarchal society through the super-masculine depiction of Robocop himself, Tetsuo appears to take a different route. Much as the female role in terms of reproduction is marginalized by cyborgs, it seems that in Tetsuo, masculinity, and indeed gender itself, is rendered meaningless. The cyborg in Tetsuo, in this respect, becomes not so much a cyborg at all, but more of simply a machine itself. Even the consciousness of the Salaryman/Metal Fetishist amalgamation seems removed. It is no longer recognizable as vaguely human, unlike Robocop or the protagonists in Crash.
The characters in Crash present the most recognizably “human” cyborgs across the three films. And at first glance they are not clearly denoted as cyborgs, in any recognizable definition (as opposed to Robocop, for example). As Christine Cornea writes: “the melding of the human with the machine in Crash is far ‘messier’ than the relatively ‘clean’ images presented in [Robocop and others]…the cyborgization process is revealed in startlingly literal terms as the bodies of the performers become literally entangled with the technological bodies of the cars” (Cornea, Performing Cyborgs, 12). Indeed, this process can be viewed as a low key precursor to more advanced cyborgization techniques emergent in science fiction narratives set more firmly in “the future” than in Crash – altogether cyborgization remains ostensibly the same process however it is represented; the collision of human and machine. Conceptions of human subjectivity are clearer in Crash than in Robocop and Tetsuo, but these also become subverted.
In terms of images of masculinity, Crash is closer to Tetsuo than to Robocop. The protagonists in Crash only really become truly cyborgized through death, and in death gender becomes somewhat irrelevant. While the characters of Ballard and Gabrielle are at times encased in metal braces and supports, these become to an extent symbols of a failed attempt at completing the cyborgization process. Death is the key (Ballard placates his wife, who is still alive at the films climax: “Maybe the next one, darling” (Crash)), and Vaughn’s death, when achieved is not the end but the “beginning” – he, as JG Ballard has said, is reincarnated as the ’63 Lincoln that Ballard retrieves (Sinclair, 104). Indeed, Iain Sinclair has commented on how the characters in Crash “have no interest in anything beyond their own performance…They are the dead talking to the dead” (Sinclair, 121). Vaughn’s tattooing of a steering wheel on his chest is a sign of things to come, a first step in the amalgamation process; indeed, he refers to the tattoo as “prophetic” (Crash). But, while a large American muscle car such as the Lincoln can easily be read as a symbol of super-masculinity (again, it becomes an agent of violent penetration), I think that the cyborgs present in Crash, like the amalgamation in Tetsuo, do not need to be viewed as gendered. The cycle of violent death and subsequent violent rebirth positions them beyond this, into a world where technology transcends gender concerns. When Vaughn talks of “reshaping the human body through modern technology” (Crash), this reshaping is total. The body becomes unrecognizable, neither man nor woman. The multitude of sexual acts in Crash are a step towards a world where sex and gender are obsolete.
This vision of a cyborgized future world is one that the three films share, but to different extents (Claudia Springer is correct in saying that Robocop reinforces a patriarchal society, but the role of violence has overtaken that of sex in the film). The films also project other concerns about the future, based, inevitably, around the progress of technology, and people’s developing relationship with it. These concerns are formed out of the contemporary environment of the films’ productions. Robocop, released in 1987, while doubtless functioning on one level as an action thriller, is also a well designed satire on the corporate and rampantly consumerist society of Reaganite America. As JP Telotte writes: “Omni Consumer Products [the creators of Robocop] suggests the modern corporate world and its bottom-line concern not just with creating products for the consuming public, all sorts of products, but with transforming the consumer into the product and ultimately with consuming the very public it purports to serve” (Telotte, 167). Murphy becoming Robocop can be read as human becoming product, and a product based around extreme violence. In the America of 1987, not quite out of the Cold War, this intrinsic linking of people with consumerism, and, of course, violence reads as a shrewd indictment of a world leaping forward technologically, embracing an aggressive consumerist agenda. The film’s tagline – “The future of law enforcement” – obviously functions as a snappy hook for the film, but, if taken as a satirical prediction of the future, also presents the horrifying reality of Robocop’s Detroit as the destination for an America being taken over by consumerism and technology.
Similar anxieties are evinced in Tetsuo, but the director Shinya Tsukamtoto is more concerned with problems that were/are specifically Japanese. Released in 1989, Tetsuo emerged into a Japanese culture beginning to experience the effects of AIDS. As Eric Cazdyn writes: “we have Tetsuo’s gesture to viral infection, to body-and-life-transforming contagions, at a moment in which AIDS is just beginning to register in Japan” (Cazdyn, 250). Certainly, the technology that rampantly invades the bodies of the Salaryman and the Metal Fetishist can be aligned with a disease as destructively transformative as AIDS. Of course, as cyborgization is, as we have seen, the process of destroying the human body to create something new, this analogy is easily made. However, creation of a cyborg body also protects against disease – Robocop, we assume, is impervious to illness, divested of biological weakness. This double meaning of cyborgization in terms of disease returns the debate to the paradox at the centre of the cyborg idea – strengthening the human body through damage to it, immortalization through destruction.
Ultimately, Robocop, Crash and Tetsuo are distinctly aware of the part that technology played and plays in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each film (and, in fact, all cyborgian narratives) display both fascination and fearful concern over the human race’s developing relationship with technology and machinery, and both the possibilities and dangers that this relationship represents. While filtering this interest through various differing specific concerns (consumerism, violence, sex, disease and so on), the processes of cyborgization that these films display certainly share similar traits. Violence is the key to the transformation; the flesh and blood human must be literally violated for a cyborg to emerge. Whether or not this violation is perpetrated against, or actively sought out by, the characters, traditional modes of reproduction are subverted. Technology itself (whether it is a motor car in Crash, a computer system in Robocop, or a junkyard full of scrap metal in Tetsuo) becomes the mother of the future. Traditional gender roles and identities are realigned, subverted or destroyed entirely as human beings both reform themselves, and are forced to reform through outside forces. Sexual penetration is replaced by violent physical penetration. Technology, and a future based around technology, destroys the flesh and bone human and gives birth to the cyborg. The ideas of reinforcement and empowerment of the human body offered by the cyborg are certainly present, but these films are more than aware of the dangers that cyborgization threatens. Murphy, Vaughn, the Salaryman, and others, all lose their definition as human beings through their experiences with cyborgization. While cyborgization offers power, strength and, often, immortality through death, it offers it at the price of a complete redefining of “humanity”. This is a fear that runs through Robocop, Crash and Tetsuo, an anxiety over what kind of future a technological world offers us, a future in which we may become increasingly defined by technology, to the extent that there remains no division between us and it, no division between the human and the machine.
“Sex times technology equals the future.”
– JG Ballard (Springer, 303)
Bibliography
– Cornea, Christine, “Figurations of the Cyborg in Contemporary Science Fiction Novels and Film”, A Companion to Science Fiction, David Seed, ed., (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 275-288
– Cornea, Christine, “David Cronenberg’s Crash and Performing Cyborgs”, Velvet Light Trap (September 2003), pp. 4-14
– Cazdyn, Eric. The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (London: Duke University Press, 2002)
– Fuchs, Cynthia J. “Death Is Irrelevant” in Hables Gray, Chris, ed. The Cyborg Handbook (London: Routledge, 1995)
– Rodley, Chris, ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London: Faber & Faber, 1997)
– Springer, Claudia, “The Pleasure of the Interface”, Screen, V.32, N.3, (Autumn 1991), pp. 303-323
– Sinclair, Iain. Crash. (London: BFI Publishing, 1999)
– Telotte, JP. Science Fiction Film (Cambridge: University Of Cambridge Press, 2001)
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