I, Robot
Directed by Alex Proyas
Starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan and Alan Tudyk
The Stepford Wives
Directed by Frank Oz
Starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Glenn Close and Christopher Walken
REVIEW BY RJURIK DAVIDSON
The term robot was invented by the writer Karel Capek in 1917 and comes from the Czech word for "serf", meaning forced labour. Capek's play R.U.R., written in 1920, tells the story of robots created by a company and sold as cheap labour. The company creates a new generation of robots who achieve a level of sentience and who revolt, taking over the factory and then the world, declaring war on humanity. Revolutionary committees of robots set up soviets and issue manifestos:
"Robots of the world, We, the first national organisation of... Robots, proclaim man as an enemy and an outlaw in the Universe. Robots of the world, we enjoin you to murder mankind. Spare no men. Spare no women. Save factories, railways, machines, mines and raw materials. Destroy the rest. Then return to work. Work must not be stopped."
Capek's play, written against the background of the great revolutionary upsurge that followed World War I when soviets or workers councils had sprung up across Europe, expresses the fear of workers' revolution that ran through the elites during this period.
The robot manifesto recalls the closing lines of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, "Workers of the world unite!" Since then the robot has provided a rich metaphor to be used by radicals and conservatives alike.
I, Robot returns to Capek's concerns, once again placing the robot as a metaphor for the worker, and again being driven by a fear of worker revolt. The fear of the worker is expressed by the robots' inhumanity, by their inability to develop emotions.
While for Isaac Asimov, author of the book I, Robot, this was perfectly normal and not at all frightening (for the robot was, like all machinery, under control of the scientist), the film expresses a deep fear of these calculating machines, emblems of rationalism.
Here the film parallels Blade Runner, based on the work of Philip K. Dick, for whom the robot is a metaphor for reification, for the way modern society turns people into things.
Like Blade Runner, I, Robot introduces a unique robot who has "emotions", (called Sonny) and so suggests that perhaps to be human is not a question of what you are but of how you act. Yet all these questions are subjected to the needs of the action-thriller. True to the plot puzzle form of the Asimov stories, Will Smith's robot-hating detective is asked to solve the question of why a robot would kill a human, thus breaking the first law of robotics (that a robot cannot harm a human).
For the most part, the story relies upon its special effects rather than the implicit philosophical questions. And only towards the end does it come to approximate Carpek's R.U.R. in its fear of the mass-worker, which threatens to erase that individualism that is so prized in America. Alex Proyas, the director, is distinguished by films that are ambitious and flawed (Dark City for example), and I, Robot is much slicker than his earlier work, and pays a price for this. It is entertaining yet falls far short of its potential.
In 1938, Lester del Rey published the short story "Helen O'Loy", in which two friends order a robot for whom they design emotions. As the title suggests with its reference to Greek myth, the robot is the perfect woman. Among her talents is the fact that she is a genius in the kitchen and a perfect cleaner. Naturally both friends fall in love with her, and one eventually marries her. The story is explicit in its equation of perfect housewife and robot.
In 1972, this theme was reworked by Ira Levin in The Stepford Wives, filmed in 1974 in a brilliant feminist rendition. Joanna and Walter leave New York for the town of Stepford. Joanna, the hero of the film, is a feminist who tries to hold a consciousness-raising group. But something seems to be wrong, for the Stepford wives like being there for their husbands' every whim. There is something odd, disturbing, robotic about them.
The 1974 film is dark feminist science fiction, slowly accumulating small details about the horror of suburban America. Behind these explorations lie the radical upsurge of the second wave of feminism that burst onto the political scene in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The remake, starring Nicole Kidman, blunts this feminist message, and pays a heavy price for it. Its Joanna is a cold, hard yuppie (in the earlier version she was an artistic photographer), who in some way needs a bit of breaking down. It also plays the story for postmodern laughs and tries too hard for irony. In typically post-feminist fashion, the film cannot, in the end, decide what it thinks. Turning a dystopian classic into comedy was always going to have risks.
The film's confusion is related to the dominant culture's deeply contradictory and ambivalent attitude towards women. The desire to retell the story is a mark of the feminist movement's victories since the 1960s. But in the image of yuppie Joanna, there is an implication that perhaps this has all gone a bit far. Most illustrative of these contradictions is the fact that the whole setup turns out to be not a conspiracy of the men of Stepford, but of one of the women, who yearned for a time when everything was romantic, and life was simple. She just wanted to be, in the end, a housewife.
From Green Left Weekly, September 8, 2004.
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