From shadow citizens to teflon stars

cultural responses to the digital actor

L i s a B o d e

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2004

School of Theatre, Film and Dance University of New South Wales

Abstract

This thesis examines an intermittent uncanniness that emerges in cultural responses to new image technologies, most recently in some impressions of the digital actor. The history of image technologies is punctuated by moments of fleeting strangeness: from Maxim Gorky’s reading of the cinematographic image in terms of “cursed grey shadows,” to recent renderings of the computer-generated cast of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as silicon-skinned mannequins. It is not merely the image’s unfamiliar and new aesthetics that render it uncanny. Rather, the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be human at that historical moment. In various ways Walter Benjamin, Anson Rabinbach and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed that the notion and the experience of “being human” is continuously transformed through processes related to different stages of modernity including rational thought, industrialisation, urbanisation, media and technology. In elaborating this argument, each of the four chapters is organized around the elucidation of a particular motif: “dummy,” “siren,” “doppelgänger” and “resurrection.” These motifs circulate through discourses on different categories of digital actor, from those conceived without physical referents to those that are created as digital likenesses of living or dead celebrities. These cultural responses suggest that even while writers on the digital actor are speculating about the future, they are engaging with ideas about life, death and identity that are very old and very ambivalent.

Acknowledgements

Over the course of researching and writing this thesis I have been exceedingly lucky to be supervised by Dr. George Kouvaros. From the early stages of research he has encouraged me to read from a wide range of sources, to traverse disciplines and to include fiction in my literary diet. George’s generousity with time and research materials, his never-failing encouragement, and his patience and trust in allowing me the time I needed to mull over ideas, have kept the doctoral process stimulating and more enjoyable than I could have hoped. His keen insights, enthusiasm and good humour have buoyed me in moments of self-doubt. The student-supervisor relationship can be fraught, I know, but ours has been a pleasure. Thank you George.

I also wish to thank my co-supervisor, Dr. Ross Rudesch Harley, who provided invaluable practical assistance with publishing opportunities, work experience and mentoring. Thank you also to Dr. Jodi Brooks who made some excellent suggestions for further research after my first seminar paper, infected me with her enthusiasm, and allowed me to hope that my ideas held promise. I am indebted to Dr. Ailsa McPherson, my colleague and friend, without whose eagle eyes and brisk pencil there would a good deal more errors in this thesis than are present.

To my husband Scot, thank you for giving up your evenings to proofread my work, for sacrificing income in your financial support of me these past months, and for arguing through ideas with me. Not a day passes in which I am not grateful for your love, encouragement and your keen analytical mind. Lastly, thank you to my parents, Jim Bode and Kathleen Wakefield, for teaching me to read and giving me a love of books.

Contents

Introduction: An intermittent strangeness 6

Chapter 1. Shadow citizens and teflon stars: reception of the transfiguring effects of new image technologies 36

Chapter 2. Enchanting objects: tales of seduction and wary resistance 80

Chapter 3. Doppelgängers: tales of actors, technology and obsolescence 124

Chapter 4. Dancing dead and melancholy ghosts: tales of resurrection, technology and the immortal image 171

Conclusion 218

Works Consulted 220

4 List of Illustrations

Wireframe view of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . 35

Drawing of a cinematographic projector. 35

The face of the machine: the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis . 79

Head shot of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . 79

The aging actress: Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 123

A digital scan of Hugo Weaving’s head for The Matrix: Reloaded 123

Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein 170

The digitally resurrected Marlene Dietrich 170

5 Introduction: An intermittent strangeness

In an article for Wired magazine in 1995 called “Silicon Stars: the New Hollywood” Paula Parisi describes her impressions of Scott Billups’s computer-generated actor, a figure based on Marilyn Monroe:

She demonstrates an admirable if not entirely desirable range, with a propensity to slip at a moment’s notice from strikingly beautiful to alarmingly grotesque. Her attempts at motion are as endearing as an infant’s first feeble gestures; her awkward grace is as inspiring as it is frightening. Watching Marilyn recalls the chilly seduction of the first artificial flirt, captured so precisely in the classic climax to James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. 1

The computer-generated, virtual or digital actor has been the focus of research and development since the early 1980s when photo-realistic 3-D computer animation began to seem possible. This quest for photo-realism has been steered by corporate and state research and development bodies since the late 1970s. 2 For, as Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen argue, new technologies do not simply emerge – product development in the era of late capitalism is determined by market aspirations. 3 Recently virtual actors or synthespians have been developed to the point where they are widely used as extras or body and stunt doubles in the more expensive end of Hollywood narrative cinema. 4 Professionals working in this field, however, proclaim that their “Holy Grail” or ultimate goal is to create a computer-generated actor that

1 Paula Parisi, “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood,” Wired , vol. 3, no. 12, December 1995, p. 204. 2 Michele Pierson, “Welcome to Basementwood: Computer Generated Special Effects and Wired Magazine,” Postmodern Culture , vol. 8, no. 3, May 1998, p. 11. 3 Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen (eds), Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen (London: BFI, 1993), pp. 2-3. 4 Oliver Morton, “Attack of the Stuntbots,” Wired , vol. 12, no. 1, January 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/stuntbots.html (accessed 12/1/04).

6 could either seamlessly replace a human performer in a leading role or perfectly imitate the performance of a living or dead actor. 5

The commercial concerns that have shaped the developmental course of the synthetic actor have also tended to limit commentary on this figure. According to John Thornton Caldwell, this is a wider problem in discussions of digital technologies in general. He argues that the “master-paradigm of novelty” drives editorial policy on the digital. 6 This obsessive focus on the new encourages a kind of amnesia that eclipses the old or ignores it as irrelevant. This positioning of the new in opposition to the old is not an anomaly of the digital age but runs through progressivist histories of technology. It is especially intensified in the age of the technological commodity and the high-tech discourse that frames digital technologies. 7

Much commentary on the virtual actor is underpinned by a progressive myth of image technology working towards greater and greater verisimilitude. This myth feeds the pervasive expectation that the seamless digital human is just over the next horizon. Michele Pierson’s recent examination of how viewer response to computer- generated imagery and cinematic special effects is cultivated and organised presents Wired magazine as one of the main arenas for the playing out of these myths. 8 We see this elsewhere in the “Silicon Stars” article, for example, when Parisi writes: “[T]he ability to conjure a convincing human from a synthetic source has hovered tantalisingly out of reach. But that’s changing.” 9 Each new digital actor is unveiled

5 See for example Parisi, “Silicon Stars,” p. 144, and Paul Baylis, “In Quest of the ‘Holy Grail’ of the Truly Lifelike Digital Actor,” Asahi Shimbun News Service, 7 June 2003, http://www.asahi.com/english/weekend/K2003060700271.html (accessed 25/2/04). 6 John Thornton Caldwell, “Introduction: Theorizing the Digital Landrush,” in Electronic Media and Technoculture , ed. John Thornton Caldwell (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 2. 7 R.L. Rutsky, High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 1-5. 8 Pierson, “Welcome to Basementwood,” p. 1. 9 Parisi, “Silicon Stars,” p. 144. At the time of its launch in April 2000 www.ananova.com , the website for the computer- generated newsreader Ananova, featured a guest-book (no longer available). One enthusiastic entry claimed that the launch of Ananova was “more important than the moon landing.” The virtual actor is also received, then, within a broader framework of technological and scientific achievement.

7 within this framework of expectation, and each unveiling is seen to fall, progressively, a little less short of a seamless photo-real illusion. The dominant line on the digital actor flowing through newspaper reports, the technology, science and entertainment press, and even in some academic circles, is one that is anticipatory and speculative, perpetually reaching forward to a future perfect simulation.

Parisi’s response to the virtual Marilyn stands out in this discursive context. She does not complain about the digital actor’s imperfections or position the figure as a failed simulation. Rather, her account evokes something mythic, beautiful and terrifying, a being that hovers unsettlingly between states: neither dead nor alive, neither subject nor object, neither human nor machine. Moreover, this mode of characterisation is actually reminiscent of an older, earlier kind of response that the cinema historian Yuri Tsivian examines in his work on the cultural reception of early cinema in Russia. 10

Tsivian shows us that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Russian writers such as Zinaida Gippius, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok and Maxim Gorky were intrigued by the images they saw on the screen. Unlike many reporters and commentators in the United States or England, however, the Russians did not rave about the realistic or lifelike qualities of the images. They were instead interested in the way in which the images were not like life or, more precisely, the ways in which the images seemed to manifest a state between life and death. The figures onscreen moved. They smiled, laughed, danced and walked, yet there was no sound and no bloom of the colours of life in their cheeks. The signs of life (movement) mingled with the signs of death (grey pallor, silence). While English or American commentators either glossed over such deficits in their enthusiasm to see “reality,” or else complained about the deficient quality of the image, these Russian writers tended to receive the image reflectively. 11 That is, the way in which they wrote of the

10 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , trans. Alan Bodger, ed. Richard Taylor, with a foreword by Tom Gunning (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 11 Tom Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xix.

8 cinematographic image conjures up not an inadequate image of reality or a bad copy, but a picture of reality transformed. 12 Tsivian emphasises that such responses did not materialise out of the individual imagination of the viewer, but referred to texts, motifs and themes already in circulation. Thus, for Leo Tolstoy and Leonid Andreyev, seeing their own filmed images on the screen called up the motifs of the double, the magic mirror or the living portrait. As Tsivian explains, “early film reception worked by putting new life into old literary clichés.” 13

I do not wish to collapse either the spatial or the temporal gap between the context of early film and that of the digital actor. I would argue, however, that a similar, though not identical, process is at work in Paula Parisi’s invocation of the bride of Frankenstein’s monster to describe the virtual Marilyn. Her reading transforms those slightly jarring aspects of the figure’s gesture and expression. They become not deficiencies in the image technology but instead special qualities of the figure portrayed in the image. In this erstwhile emblem of cinema’s future, she finds an image from cinema’s past – yet evidently not the image intended by its creator. Rather than seeing Marilyn Monroe’s breathy ’50s sexuality, situated precariously between natural innocence and knowing artifice, Parisi finds Elsa Lanchester’s fright-wigged, wild-eyed portrayal of a thing , cobbled together in the charnel house and electrically animated.

Parisi’s response to the virtual Marilyn reveals something at work in the reception of the computer generated actor that is often left unexplored, perhaps due to the effect that dominant techno-futurist, speculative commentary has of glossing over or marginalising other kinds of discussion. 14 As we shall see, clichés and motifs from literature, film and folklore often emerge in the language used to discuss virtual actors in the entertainment press, film reviews and those spaces that write the links between technology and culture, such as Wired magazine and online forums. Loaded words

12 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 2. 13 Ibid., p. 4. 14 I borrow the term “techno-futurist” from Hayward and Wollen, Future Visions, p. 3.

9 such as “dummy,” “siren,” “doppelgänger” and “resurrection” circulate through even the most banal newspaper reports on developments in the field of digital actors, suggesting that even while these writers speculate about the future, they are engaging with these images through ideas that are very old. There is much that can and will be inferred from this use of language and the kinds of complex audience engagement with digital actors it reveals. The importance of such a focus for film and media studies, though, is that it enables us to rethink questions of why we make, how we engage with, and how we understand images, at a time when significant claims are being made for the radical novelty of digital representation. For in the rush to theorise the newness of new media technologies, sometimes the uncertainties created by the entry of the “new” into older media frameworks are left unexplored.

The digital “revolution”

The increasing digitalisation of all aspects of image and sound production has stimulated an intense theoretical focus on the implications of the shift from photomechanical images to digital images. Some writers, like Kevin Robins, express anxiety and regret that the photo-simulationist potential of digital imaging has forever laid a shadow of doubt over the status and function of the photographic image as representation. 15 For others like Timothy Murray and Angela Ndalianis, the digital image has renewed their fascination with the various legacies of cinema, such as the star system and the history of cinematic special effects. 16 We have also seen productive work from Mary Ann Doane, Laura Mulvey, Laura U. Marks and Philip

15 Kevin Robins “The Virtual Unconscious in Postphotography,” in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation , ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), p. 156. 16 Timothy Murray, “By Way of Introduction: Digitality and the Memory of Cinema, or, Bearing the Losses of the Digital Code,” Wide Angle , vol. 21, no. 1, January 1999, p. 4. Angela Ndalianis, “Special Effects, Morphing Magic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change , ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 251-72.

10 Rosen rethinking questions of the index. 17 Concurrently however, another group of writers has emerged for whom the proliferation of digital imaging technology is taken as signaling an urgent need to, in fact, break from what they perceive as the dominance of an old discourse of making and understanding images.

Within a progressivist commercial framework the novelty paradigm largely (although not exclusively) steers digital images along a trajectory toward ever-increasing photo- realism. Within some theoretical discussions, however, there is a marked tendency to frame the novelty of digital imaging in terms of a rupture or revolution. Warning against such theorising, Thomas Elsaesser points out that digital imaging technologies merely shift much of the filmmaking process from the arena of production to post- production, and thereby provide filmmakers with newer, easier ways of creating sets, special effects and stunts. 18 Even so, other writers like Lev Manovich, Timothy Binkley and William Mitchell insist that digital images have an intrinsic difference from those produced through older media, and that these differences are ushering in a completely new image culture. 19 At the core of their work is a concern with computer code and everything that this code makes possible for the digital image, such as interactivity, malleability, diverse delivery modes and a vapourisation of contact between sign and referent. 20 Sean Cubitt argues that a framework for future research into the digital image must not view it as a deviation from the

17 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Massahusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). Laura Mulvey, “The Index and the Uncanny,” in Time and the Image, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002). Laura U. Marks, “How Electrons Remember,” Millennium Film Journal , no. 34, Fall 1999, http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ34/LUMframeset_horiz.html (accessed 8/4/04). Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 18 Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time,” in Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age , ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), pp. 201-222. 19 Lev Manovich “What is Digital Cinema?,” 1995, http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital- cinema.html (accessed 20/4/04). Timothy Binkley, “The Vitality of Digital Creation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 55, no. 2, 1997, pp. 107-115. William John Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992). 20 Philip Rosen, “Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity in the Digital Utopia,” in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 306.

11 photomechanical, but instead examine digitality on its own terms. 21 Manovich, Mitchell, Binkley and others, however, tend to define digital images explicitly against the photomechanical, merely inverting the binary in their quest to privilege the digital. In the process, certain assumptions are made about the history of representation, the various functions of images and the ability of digital representation to determine or affect our reception of images.

Mitchell believes that the digital image heralds both a new regime of image-making and a radically new position for image reception, arguing that digital image production and distribution speak to a desire to “dismantle the rigidities of photographic seeing and to extend visual discourse beyond the depictive convention and presumed certitudes of the photographic record.” 22 He enthuses that in contrast to the “closed, finished perfection” of traditional photography, “we can construe the tools of digital imaging as more felicitously adapted to the diverse projects of our postmodern era.” 23 As Philip Rosen remarks in his review of certain utopian tendencies in digital theory, “conceptions of the image are inseparable from conceptions of historicity.” 24

Both Mitchell and Manovich argue that digital technologies and representation chime with a prevailing postmodern cultural logic. They implicitly relegate the photomechanical and the index to the past as quaint relics of a bygone era. Manovich dismisses cinema as “the art of the footprint” and looks to a future where we may well come to see that notions of indexicality are the remnants of a nineteenth century concern with preserving traces. 25 The increasing digitalisation of images, Manovich asserts, will eventually lead to audiences no longer associating images with “truth.” 26 Gregory Veen agrees, insisting that digital imaging technologies are leading to a transformation in visual literacy. Rather than viewers seeing images as meaning

21 Sean Cubitt, “The Distinctiveness of Digital Criticism,” Screen , vol. 41, no. 1, spring 2000, p. 88. 22 Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, p. 59. 23 Ibid., p. 8. 24 Rosen, “Old and New,” p. 303. 25 Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?,” online. 26 Ibid.

12 conductive or pointing to a “real elsewhere,” he argues that viewers are coming to see images as being consciously produced to convey a particular meaning. 27

These arguments tend to ignore both the long history of photographic manipulation and the problem that, as Rosen has pointed out, “the photographic medium of cinema is positioned as a key compositional model for the digital image.” 28 Additionally their reading of the index as being synonymous with “truth” is very different from more recent work that has come to read indexicality in connection with issues of temporality and mortality. 29 Manovich, Mitchell and Veen assume that the index is a quality that arrives and leaves with the photograph. But as André Bazin observed in his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” a concept of indexicality is central to the meaning of such relics as The Shroud of Turin and the mummification practices of the ancient Egyptians. 30 The index prefigures the photographic. But more than this, our image culture emerges from and is still infused by social practices revolving around the creation and transmission of images in which there is a contiguous relation between the image and the thing that it represents. Manovich and others fail to acknowledge that even as the digital image severs the link with physical reality, there are still ideas connected with indexicality infusing viewer response and perception. As Rosen argues, there are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, levels of hybridity in the register of the digital image, most markedly in those digital images that mimic the cinematic or photographic image. These hybridities stymie attempts to oppose the indexical and the digital and they make claims for a radical historical break difficult to sustain. 31

It must be noted that Manovich doesn’t ignore the continuation of this drive towards mimesis, in fact he tries hard to account for it. He concedes that the “photographic

27 Gregory Veen, “The Reception of Digitally Produced Images,” Seeing the Digital: Emerging Visual Literacies , 2000, http://greg.veen.com/seeing/main.php?sectionID=202 (accessed 17/12/03). 28 Rosen, “Old and New,” p. 313. 29 See for example Rosen, Doane, Mulvey et al., footnote 17. 30 Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 1946, What is Cinema? Volume 1 , ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9-10. 31 Rosen, “Old and New,” p. 303.

13 code” of representation remains the dominant form of the image’s “visible skin,” even though it does not mirror the “internal structure” of the image. Using a Marxist analogy he writes: “[W]e can say at present our visual culture is characterised by a new computer ‘base’ and old photographic ‘superstructure.’” 32 Manovich holds out hope that the dominant aesthetic and function of digital imaging will change, coming eventually to reflect the “internal structure” of the image. To this end he asks wistfully: “What kind of images would we see when the superstructure would finally catch up with the infrastructure?” 33

Manovich is not alone in this opinion. Rosen points out that Timothy Binkley and Anne Marie Willis also argue, in different ways, that the digital emulation of older media is just an initial phase. 34 Rosen observes that there is a tendency in these approaches to use the “rhetoric of the forecast,” where “[d]efinitions of the digital and its capabilities are repeatedly made into a matter of the future.” 35 This reliance on forecasting rhetoric means that theorists are freed from having to deal with the complex image hybrids of the present, except insofar as they are perpetually defined as transitory, temporary modes, evolving into an ideal digital state. Just as the commercial framework defines current digital images through a perpetual “not yet” of a perfect photo-real simulation, these digital utopian theorists are also busy constructing their own “not yet” of an ideal digital aesthetic that has little to do with photo-realism.

Similarly, Friedrich Kittler suggests that the actual form or function of the images produced by digital imaging technologies are of little consequence. He contends that the digitisation of all media forms is erasing all intrinsic difference between them, reducing them to codes largely unreadable by humans and stored in and transmitted between machines. The implication of this erasure of intrinsic difference for audience

32 Lev Manovich, “Image after The Matrix ,” October 2003, updated April 2004, http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/image_future.doc (accessed 3/6/04). 33 Ibid. 34 Rosen, “Old and New,” pp. 315-6. 35 Ibid.

14 engagement is that: “Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash.” 36 An obsessive focus on code works to dismiss the actual images produced by it as unimportant superstructure, surface effects, or for Manovich, the empty mimicry of dead or dying media forms. It also dismisses audience response as an area of unimportance. Our response is, after all, only to “surface effects,” except that is, when the images produced are deemed to be manifestations of a digital ideal. 37

By ignoring the diverse forms and function of images, their reception and their cultural place, arguments that obsessively focus on code in order to theorise the radical difference of the digital image have reached a dead end. In this context Vivian Sobchack has argued for the need to “move beyond general analyses and broad critique of our digital culture to a more focused theory and criticism that distinguishes among a variety of quite specific digital articulations.” 38 While she concedes that digitisation is translating various kinds of media representation into a “homogenous algorithmic mode of expression,” she also claims that we must still recognise that digital representations in themselves are diverse and heterogeneous in form and function. 39 Sobchack proposes expanding an inquiry into technological practices and their effects to examine how they carry across “different realms of our present existence and culture.” 40

It is in this spirit that I am focusing on the cultural reception of a specific digital articulation: the computer-generated actor. The digital image of the human figure is

36 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , trans. and introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop- Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 1. 37 For Kittler, this digital erasure of media difference forces us to reengage with the media of the past. His argument is that the media of the present determine not only “our situation” but also how we view old media in the light of the new (Ibid, p. xxxix-xli). And, as Michele Pierson points out, image aesthetics can be affected by such things as the deskilling of the animation workforce and the increasing reliance, by studios, on off-the-shelf animation software (Pierson, “Crafting a Future for CGI,” pp. 42-3). 38 Vivian Sobchack, Introduction, Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change , ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. xiv. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. xiii.

15 where arguments about images, indexicality, technology and historicity come most clearly into focus. For the human figure in cultural texts is the palimpsest upon which cultural and technological changes are most often inscribed. Indeed, in some arguments about the impact of digital imaging, the digital actor is where some of these claims reach their most hysterical peak, as the synthespian comes to bear the weight of our dreams of cyborgs, artificial intelligence and electronic disembodiment.

Cyborg dreams and the computer-generated actor

According to Elsaesser, “the digital has come to function less as a technology than as a ‘cultural metaphor’ of crisis and transition.” 41 He observes that there has been a tendency by some writers to overstate the impact of the digital. As such they have ascribed changes and upheavals in our media landscape to this technology, and even linked digitisation to “wild evolutionary speculations” about an eclipsing of homo sapiens by artificial intelligence. 42 For instance, in Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man – Technology Takes Over , Olliver Dyens enthuses:

When a human is digitized […] the resulting image is no longer the “mirror” of a living being. A digitized human being becomes other, a true cyborg, half-computer and half-human, an impure being (phantom, simulacrum) with no stable definitions of who or what he (she? it?) is, several things, several sexes, several organs, several machines all at once. Once digitized, the image of a human being is released from its origin and can transform itself into a multitude of landscapes; it becomes a system unimpeded by any conceptual limits. 43

Dyens makes bold assertions of an automatic technological split or rupture between sign and referent. He implies that, by contrast, the photomechanical image of a

41 Elsasser, “Digital Cinema,” p. 202. 42 Ibid, p. 201-2. 43 Olliver Dyens, Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man – Technology Takes Over , trans. Evan J. Bibbee and Olliver Dyens (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 85.

16 human being has a “natural,” stable, almost biological affinity with its referent. He attempts to link the digital image to a larger evolutionary amalgamation of human and technology, and claims for it a liquid, almost emancipatory newness. Such claims need to be put into some historical perspective. Dyens’s evocation of “impurity” and of a radical independence of image from referent is again, like Parisi’s impressions of the virtual Marilyn, reminiscent of earlier responses to older image technologies – responses that shall be examined at later points in this thesis.

Not everyone who writes on the digital actor participates in this hysteria. Barbara Creed, for example, speculates how a seamless, photo-realistic synthetic actor might transform viewer-screen actor relations in a hypothetical cinema of the future. Creed tests this relationship between viewer and screen actor through Jacques Lacan’s theories of spectatorial identification. She argues that the depthless, plastic aesthetic of the virtual actor carries across into viewer awareness (conscious or not) that the digital figure on screen has not been through the common human experiences of birth, desire and loss, and that it lacks our awareness of future death. Our identification with photomechanical images of human performers is, she claims, grounded in our knowledge of the experiences we share with them as humans. 44 Creed asks if the viewer of the synthespian will take an “excess of pleasure” in subjecting the image as an object to their erotic look, or will they feel emotionally indifferent to the image on screen, aware that it only resides in the imaginary, and is “totally removed from the symbolic order of loss, trauma and death?” 45 Ultimately, how do we relate to a figure without an unconscious?

In a comparison of the computer-generated actor and the glamorised female film star, Creed acknowledges that the film star is presented as the “perfect product” through flattering close ups, editing, lighting and camera angles. Our pleasure in looking at her is “tied to a desire to identify with idealized figures.” In this respect identification

44 Barbara Creed, “The Cyberstar: Digital Pleasures and the End of the Unconscious,” Screen , vol. 41, no. 1, spring 2000, p. 84. 45 Ibid., p. 85.

17 with the digital star is not that different from identification with the fleshly star: both, she argues, are idealised glamorous figures. The difference in response comes from the viewer’s conscious or unconscious knowledge of origins. According to Creed the identification with the human star is one where the spectator is caught up in a moment of “recognition and misrecognition between subject and ego-ideal.” The identification with the digital star is one between subject and non-subject “which, strangely, may also function as an ego-ideal.” Running through Creed’s argument is the realisation that the difference between audience identification with the glamorised star (as “perfect product”) and the computer-generated star is difficult to separate. 46

Creed takes a measured approach, examining the computer-generated actor within a framework of spectatorial identification. This is quite unusual, as the computer- generated actor within non-interactive media contexts is often ignored in favour of those that serve as video game characters and online avatars. 47 Writers and artists like Mary Flanagan, Ray Kurzweil, Bob Rehak, Miroslaw Filiciak and Mike Heim have varied interests in the computer-generated actor as an avatar within interactive environments such as computer games or online space. 48 Much of this work is tied up with theories of fluid identity, of inhabiting different identities, genders and ethnicities, and the attendant impact on the subject.

Flanagan is largely disinterested in the digital star of cinema, suggesting that electronic games are replacing cinema as the foremost leisure activity in our culture. A

46 Ibid., pp. 84, 86. All quotes in this paragraph are from these two pages. 47 This tendency to ignore the synthespian in cinema could be attributed to several reasons: the desire to focus on what Rosen calls the “digital ideal of interactivity” (Rosen, Change Mummified , pp. 333-5.); the box-office failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (the first entirely computer-generated movie to be based on live action principles), and the belief by some digital theorists that cinema is simply a dead medium. 48 Mary Flanagan, “Mobile Identities, Digital Stars and Post-cinematic Selves,” Wide Angle , vol. 21, no. 1, January 1999, pp. 77-93. Ray Kurzweil, Ramona! , www.KurzweilAI.net (accessed 20/4/04). Bob Rehak, “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” in The Video Game Theory Reader , ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 103-28. Miroslaw Filiciak, “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” in The Video Game Theory Reader , pp. 87-102. Mike Heim, “Avatecture” and “Avatar Manifesto” in Fine Art Form , September 2000, http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_14/faf_v14_n09/text/feature.html (accessed 20/4/04).

18 champion of the Tomb Raider game character Lara Croft, Flanagan observes that the game offers the player the pleasure of both watching Croft and being Croft. 49 This is a more intense form of engagement, she argues, than that offered by a cinematic non- interactive image. Flanagan posits that the complex subject positioning and blank identity spaces offered by Croft and the Tomb Raider series cater to a general cultural desire for interactivity and control. 50 Kurzweil takes this desire for interactivity and control further, envisaging a future where we will be living much of our time in virtual spaces, communicating through virtual human avatars. He writes:

By the end of this decade, we will have full-immersion visual-auditory environments, populated by realistic-looking virtual humans. These technologies are evolving today at an accelerating pace, as reflected in the book Virtual Humans . By the 2030s, virtual reality will be totally realistic and compelling and we will spend most of our time in virtual environments. By the 2040s, even people of biological origin are likely to have the vast majority of their thinking processes taking place in nonbiological substrates. We will all become virtual humans. 51

Within such celebratory positions on post-human existence the virtual-actor-as- avatar is embraced as a new form of (dis)embodiment that, as Margaret Morse has suggested, signals a “growing desire to disengage from the human condition.” 52 This post-humanist discourse and its distaste for the fleshly lived body sometimes referred to as “wet-ware” concerns Sobchack. She writes: “Such an insubstantial electronic presence can ignore AIDS, homelessness, hunger, torture, and all the other ills the

49 Tomb Raider , Eidos Interactive, UK, 1996. 50 Flanagan, “Mobile Identities, Digital Stars and Post-cinematic Selves,” pp. 77-93. 51 Ray Kurzweil, Foreword, Virtual Humans: A Build-It-Yourself Kit, Complete with Software and Step-By-Step Instructions , by Peter Plantec, AMACOM, 2003. Kurzweil himself has created a female alter-ego avatar called Ramona through which he “performed” at the N.Y. Music and Internet Expo in 2001. Ramona also functions as the “hostess” of Kurzweil’s website at www.kurzweilAI.net (accessed 4/6/04). 52 Margaret Morse, Virtualities , Television, Media Art and Cyber Culture (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 125.

19 flesh is heir to outside the image and the datascape.” 53 As she suggests, this desire to shift one’s existence away from the physical world to the world of the screen seems indicative of a need to remove oneself from the space of the suffering of others – others who may be locked out of this datascape.

At the extremes of this dominant and, to an extent, commercially and institutionally defined discourse, writers like Kurzweil hold aloft the figure of the avatar as a shimmering promise of that which we are becoming and indeed, what any self- respecting member of the techno-elite should aspire to be. In some sectors of the entertainment press the digital actor is promoted as a figure that will, in future, emancipate filmmakers and streamline the process of creating entertainment by removing one more human (and therefore fallible and inefficient) element. On the promotional level, the digital actor is the poster-girl (being most often coded as female) for the techno-elite and the discourse of techno-futurism. But as have seen, even in the pages of Wired magazine, this figure stirs up a certain ambivalence. This ambivalence is sometimes even more pronounced in the broadsheet or tabloid press, where cinematic digital actors and the latest CGI (computer generated imagery) blockbusters are reported upon and dissected for a wider readership. 54

This thesis argues that in the ambivalent discussions that coalesce around the digital actor we can find threads that reconnect the digital image to histories of response that are part of our image-making heritage. It looks for ways in which reactions to the computer-generated actor connect with older responses such as those generated by the automaton and the early film image. I will argue that although these image

53 Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence,’” in Electronic Media and Technoculture, ed. John Thornton Caldwell (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 153. 54 See for example: Austin Bunn, “The Dead Celebrity who Comes Back to Life,” New York Times Magazine , 11 June 2000, republished online at http://www.3dmaxmedia.com/PR_3dMaxMedia_HeavenSent01.htm (accessed 20/10/03). B. Howarth, “Play it Again Sam, or Whoever it is,” The Australian (Computers and High Technology), 13 April 1999, p. 33. Stephen Romei, “Virtually too Good to be True,” The Australian , 26 July 1999, p. 1. Jonathan Romney, “Hollywood Hightide for Digital Magic,” Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1996, p. 28.

20 technologies and their respective historical contexts are very different, at stake each time are questions of what it means to be human in an environment increasingly transformed by processes related to different stages of modernity, from rational thought to industrialisation and urbanisation, media and technology. In this thesis certain responses to the virtual actor are seen, ultimately, as pointing to this figure, not as a means of escape from our world but as a reminder of the conditions under which we live. Moreover certain categories of the digital actor, I will argue, bring to the fore questions of mortality, temporality and memory – those same issues connected to the index. By focusing on the image of the human figure and the discourse around it, we are reminded that images mediate our vision of the world, our relation to ourselves and others, and the relationship between the living and the dead.

In its study of a historically situated cultural reception of the human image, this thesis crosses many disciplines and draws together wide-ranging approaches and fields: work on the “uncanny,” concepts of modernity, etymology, a history of human- machine metaphors, an excavation of folklore, close readings of literary and filmic texts, and an awareness of the relations between different media forms and how they register the impact of new technologies. Connecting such apparently disparate fields is crucial because the cultural reception of the human image cannot be read simply as the operation of only one or two factors. Rather, it operates at the intersection of various discourses: literary, mythic, sociological, scientific, technological and psychoanalytical. What is more, cultural reception feeds back into many of these discourses, inflecting the cultural reception of future images.

The remainder of this introductory chapter will be dedicated to further situating and outlining this approach. To begin, I will briefly look at two projects with some similarities to mine. Next I will examine the particular model of cultural reception that this thesis draws on and its use in relation to the various texts that form the backbone of my study. This will be followed by a short discussion on the relation between “the uncanny,” animated human figures, a rational framework and literature. There will then be a brief summary of each chapter before we finally conclude with an acknowledgement of some of the boundaries and limitations of this thesis.

21 Allegories and histories

In her introduction to Meta-Morphing Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick- Change , Sobchack writes of our fascination with the “strangely familiar” computer graphic “morph.” While the morph intrigues us as an illusion of a physically impossible transformation, Sobchack argues that the morph can also be read allegorically as our physical and cultural double:

As our physical double, the morph interrogates the dominant philosophies and fantasies that fix our embodied human being and constitute our identities as discrete and thus reminds us of our true instability: our physical flux, our lack of self-coincidence, our subatomic as well as subcutaneous existence that is always in motion and ever changing. As our cultural double, the morph enacts our own greedy and effortless consumerism – at the same time as it terrifies us with reflected images of our own consumption. 55

She locates the strange familiarity of the morph within both a long-standing cultural history of narratives and images of transformation and metamorphosis, as well as the “quick-change” logic of our particular historical moment. The acceleration of “quick- change” has been a defining characteristic of our technological, entertainment and industrial landscape since the mid-nineteenth century. As Sobchack points out, the morph “enacts the more macrocosmic and fluid quick-changes not only of the computer and entertainment industries that generated it but also of the larger metamorphic technosphere in which we all live.” 56 The transformative action of the morph not only mirrors the macrocosmic but also speaks of our obsessions with home renovations, cosmetic surgery and makeovers. These obsessions are encouraged by the burgeoning transformation industries: consumer electronics, fashion, body-building, cosmetics, and home wares. Increasingly we are encouraged

55 Sobchack, Introduction, Meta-Morphing , p. xii. 56 Ibid., p. xiii.

22 to link our own sense of personal achievement to physical transformation through various patterns of consumption.

The significance of Sobchack’s framing of the morph, as both specifically historically situated and connected to a tropological history of metamorphosis, is that it makes a crucial break with essentialist technological arguments and reconnects the image to its cultural context. It also suggests ways to look at other digital articulations, such as the synthespian. In some similar ways this thesis looks at how various tropes (such as the automaton, dummy, artificial woman, doppelgänger, and zombie) are brought to bear on the computer generated actor in its promotion and reception, as well as how the synthespian becomes an allegory for the effects of various aspects of contemporary existence.

Another project with some parallels to my own is Michele Pierson’s work on the cultural reception of CGI special effects. Through excavating the past and extending her project outwards horizontally into the present, Pierson examines how the reception of cinematic special effects operates within discursive networks that have their origins in early cinema and the popular science and magic shows of the mid to late nineteenth century. 57 The value of Pierson’s work is that it suggests non- essentialist ways of bringing the past to bear on the present, and it implies the presence of a variety of different discursive frameworks for different categories of images. This process of illuminating the present by “excavating the past,” she admits, is a “well-worn trope in contemporary commentaries on new film and media technologies” but nevertheless:

[S]till offers the best antidote to all those narratives of convergence – industrial, technological, and cultural – that have taken the novelty of convergence to mean that all the old ways of organizing viewer’s emotional and intellectual responses to special effects have been swept away. 58

57 Michelle Pierson, Special Effects: Still In Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 58 Ibid., pp. 46-7.

23 Pierson acknowledges that Tom Gunning’s work has laid invaluable groundwork for a focus on current technologies through his elucidation of nineteenth century discourses and modes of reception of new technologies. Gunning’s work on what he calls an “aesthetic of astonishment” and the “cinema of attractions” has recently been used by several writers to shed light on current modes of spectatorship encouraged by the more FX heavy Hollywood cinema. 59 Work such as Pierson’s as well as writing by Angela Ndalianis, among others, have been useful in bringing the past to bear on the present in preference to amnesic attempts to demonstrate an unprecedented and dramatic shift. 60

Pierson and Ndalianis use Gunning’s work to examine more generally the kinds of exhibitionist, monstrative imagery characteristic of special effects cinema, and the modes of spectatorship encouraged by such an address. But through Gunning we can also see that the American science, entertainment and trade journalism of the late nineteenth century received the cinematograph in certain ways that seemed to prefigure the current promotional discourses surrounding the digital actor. There is, for instance, a similar focus on the lifelike qualities of the new medium, and a triumphalist sense that, through this new technology, humans can at last conquer mortality with an image that lasts through time. 61 To an extent, this thesis examines these similarities. However it is also heavily influenced by the work of another cinema historian, Yuri Tsivian, and his idea of cultural reception. His approach suggests that the history of responses to modern image technologies is punctuated by moments of intermittent strangeness.

59 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film , ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 125, and “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame Narrative , ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), p. 61. 60 Ndalianis, “Special Effects, Morphing Magic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions,” and “The Frenzy of the Visible: Spectacle and Motion in the Era of the Digital,” Senses of Cinema , March 2000, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/3/matrix.html (20/4/04). 61 Tom Gunning, “Re-newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/articles/gunning.html , p. 9 (accessed 13/7/01).

24 Cultural semiotics and the uncanny

To study the cultural reception of an object is to study the traces of reading or viewing encounters with that object. Traditional communications studies examine the way in which texts make meaning. Anything extraneous to the message of the text is considered “interference.” Tsivian, however, uses a theoretical framework called cultural semiotics, studying the way in which texts are processed through particular cultural milieus and examining the unexpected meanings that are produced through “intentional and accidental misreadings.” 62

In the past twenty years or so there has been a growing movement within the Anglo- American humanities toward studying the reception of literary or filmic texts within particular cultural moments. As Gunning explains in his foreword to Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , Tsivian’s approach is quite different from Anglo- American theorists of cultural reception of cinema. The difference is in the expansion of his sources as he turns not only to journalistic and press reports, but also to the work of Russian novelists and poets. 63 In short stories, poems, novels, letters, and articles by these writers, Tsivian finds responses to the cinema that reveal a quite different sensibility and, thus, a quite different cinematic object from that reflected in often-cited reports from American and British journalists. As Gunning writes in the foreword to Tsivian’s book:

The writer on film filters his or her perception of the films through more than a subjective grid. As they participate in the passions and tacit assumptions of their age and nation (not to mention class and gender) they stain the image they present of the film with them.64

The encounter with the object can create ripples through the cultural moment, inflecting new texts. But the object gains its meaning(s) too through the dissemination

62 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 104. 63 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xvii. 64 Ibid., p. xvii.

25 of texts recording the encounter. Through these accounts our image of early cinema is refreshed and we come to see it through quite different eyes. This act of refreshment (or estrangement, if you will) also encourages us to rethink our conception of the history of image technologies and our conception of the relationship between images and the things that they represent. Through a close reading of these reception texts, we discover that this history is not linear or progressive and that the relationship between image and referent is not transparent.

Similarly, writing on the digital actor is “stained” by the subjective response of the writer, as well as the various cultural and institutional factors that come to bear on the process of writing. In examining cultural responses to the digital actor, this thesis moves out from a set of primary sources with their own particular functions and constraints. These sources include a survey of film reviews of the CGI film Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within gathered from a variety of Australian, American, and British tabloid and broadsheet newspapers and popular magazine, as well as promotional material and reportage and speculative or futurological reportage and commentary. 65 These various types of primary sources sit in slightly different relations to the digital actor and its techno-futurist production framework.

Film reviews, for example, are usually designed to provide the reader with a sense of the film as an entertainment experience filtered through the sensibility of the supposedly knowledgeable reviewer. There is perhaps also a desire on the part of some reviewers to appear credible in the eyes of their readers. This may account for the tendency of many reviewers of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , to “unpick” its virtual actors and declare a resistance to enchantment. At the same time, these reviews evidence a sensitivity to certain uncanny qualities of these computer- generated figures, and a desire to convey this uncanniness to their readers through the use of evocative imagery. The film has also been discussed in theoretical circles. Animation theorist Mark Langer, for instance, observes that the film’s computer- generated characters elicit no audience empathy because they occupy a “liminal

65 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara, USA/Japan, 2001.

26 position between animation and live-action.” 66 The film reviewers do not speak of this liminality, but instead imaginatively rework the image’s uncanny effects so that they become something more explicitly macabre. Viewed through the lens of these film reviews the synthespians in Final Fantasy become blank and mindless dummies, mannequins, automata and cadavers. 67

We witness a shift in imagery, though, in the way the film’s lead digital actress Aki Ross is characterised in promotional texts. The imagery used to promote Aki in men’s magazines and on the DVD release explicitly sexualises the synthespian, while at the same time fetishising the technology that underpins her appearance. A shift occurs again in articles speculating on the development of digital likenesses of living or dead actors: here we find references to doppelgängers, clones, resurrections and the concept of “raising the dead.” 68 This variation in language marks the perceived difference of these referential images from those in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that have no physical referent, suggesting that we cannot theorise the digital actor as a uniform object. Rather, there are different categories of digital actors with attendant different relations between image and referent.

The separation of this thesis into four chapters reflects these differences of perspective and different categories of digital actors. Generally speaking, while the erstwhile “sexy robot” figure of Aki Ross in Final Fantasy reminds reviewers of a mindless and blank dummy, the digital likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger evokes the theme of deadly usurpation, and the digital likeness of Marilyn Monroe is reminiscent of the resurrected corpse. This work pays attention to such imagery, linking its use to broader discourses about technology, contemporary life and its effects. Clearly these writers are tapping into imagery already in cultural circulation, imagery that over time

66 Mark Langer, “The End of Animation History,” Society for Animation Studies website, 2002, http://asifa.net/SAS/articles/langer1.htm , p. 5 (accessed 30/7/03). 67 Paul LePetit, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sunday Telegraph , 29 July 2001, p. 98. Rob Lowing, “Dummy Run,” review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sun Herald , 29 July 2001, p. 8. 68 See for example Caryn James, “Raising the Dead for Guest Appearances,” New York Times , 14 May 1998, Living Arts Pages, pp. 6,10, and Catherine Donaldson-Evan, “Ad Campaigns Resurrect Historical Figures,” Fox News , 29 May 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88031,00.html (accessed 8/8/03).

27 and through varying use has grown accrued layers of meaning. This thesis follows different motifs as they twist and morph in varying cultural contexts and texts across Romantic, modern and postmodern literature, science fiction film and television. A major focus here is on how and why different categories of digital actor evoke particular uncanny themes and motifs.

These motifs (automata, androids, doppelgängers and zombies) speak to the intellectual uncertainty at the heart of Ernst Jentsch’s theory of the uncanny. Jentsch observes that uncanny sensations arise with “doubts whether an animate being is really alive or conversely whether a lifeless object may be in fact animate.” 69 In his later response to Jentsch in 1919, Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as “a class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” 70 In “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts,” Freud prefigures this discussion, noting that “what is known of old” are our repressed anxieties and doubts about the border between life and death and our long-held mental associations between animism, movement and life. 71 It is only when old beliefs, such as in animism or in the existence of ghosts, have been surmounted by rational and empirical modes of thought that an uncanny experience can be triggered by particular phenomena. Freud writes “we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.” 72

Many of the examples Jentsch points to (such as automata and wax figures) pervade the nineteenth century entertainments of illusion. 73 Jentsch pays close attention to such figures, noting that “the life-size automata that perform complicated tasks, blow

69 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” 1906, Angelaki , vol. 2, no. 1, 1995, p. 11. 70 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al, vol. xvii, 1917-19 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), p. 220. 71 Sigmund Freud, “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al, vol. xiii, 1913-14 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), pp. 76-7. 72 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 247. 73 Mulvey, “The Index and the Uncanny,” p. 144.

28 trumpets, dance, and so forth, very easily give one a feeling of unease.” 74 He also observes that the uncanny is most prevalent in those images that aim for “an absolute and complete imitation of nature,” and that “[t]he finer the mechanism, and the truer to nature the formal reproduction, the more strongly will the special effect also make its appearance.” 75

It seems that it is only since the virtual actor has begun to approach the appearance of real humans that it has begun to evoke the uncanny. It should be acknowledged, at this point, that not all digital human figures generate this response. The synthespians in animated fantasy features like Shrek , Toy Story , and Finding Nemo , for example, are not read as uncanny. 76 These three-dimensional figures reach for a rounded, comedic and cartoonish aesthetic. With their short chubby limbs, enormous round eyes, pug noses and generous mouths, the proportions of their features are exaggeratedly childish and toy-like. Their movements have an inbuilt bouncy fluidity that seeks to uplift rather than convey a grounded physical realism. Their fantasy context and form means that watching them elicits no troubling intellectual uncertainty. For this reason, then, this thesis largely omits reference to cartoon characters or computer generated fantasy characters such as those in the Toy Story films, Shrek , Jar Jar Binks from George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace or the widely lauded Gollum from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. 77 The focus is limited to discourse surrounding human figures that are reaching for a photo-realistic aesthetic and that call forth a disquieting uncertainty.

However, as Freud suggested, this sense of unease is not merely drawn from intrinsic qualities of the object. It is also dependent upon conditions and contexts of viewing and reception. Those nineteenth century entertainments of illusion such as waxworks and moving dolls were not simply uncanny because they had reached a certain peak

74 Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” p. 12. 75 Ibid. 76 Shrek , dir. Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jensen et al., USA, 2001. Toy Story , dir. John Lasseter, USA, 1995. Finding Nemo , dir. Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, USA, 2003. 77 Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace , dir. George Lucas, USA, 1999. Lord of the Rings (trilogy) dir. Peter Jackson, USA/NZ, 2001, 2002, 2003.

29 of verisimilitude. Rather, these figures emerged in a context of uncertainty about the causes of human agency, where, as Anson Rabinbach and Gaby Wood demonstrate, scientific and industrial discourses attempted to explain human movement and agency through mechanical metaphors. 78 E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote “The Sandman” in such a context as an expression of his repulsion and unease at Wolfgang von Kempelen’s notorious chess-playing automaton. 79 Hoffmann’s horror at the automaton is not just a response to a machine that simulates a human; is also a reaction to particular changing scientific and philosophical concepts of “what it means to be human.” Additionally this work speaks of a general anxiety that humans were being transformed through the changing conditions of their existence such as early industrialisation and the popularisation of rationalism and empiricism.

As Walter Benjamin and others have shown, certain literary works of later decades reveal traces of a daily experience and sense perception radically altered by conditions of living and working in Europe’s growing urban centers. Benjamin observes that Charles Baudelaire’s lyric poetry evokes the agitated, alienated outlook of an urban Parisian of the mid-nineteenth century. 80 This thesis uses Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire, but also turns to works by Hoffmann, Émile Zola, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Maxim Gorky, Luigi Pirandello, as well as Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis . The aim is to map how the motifs of doubling, resurrection or artificial beings circulate through these texts, carried through on the shifts and fluxes of anxiety, energy, fatigue, detachment and engagement of their respective contexts.

Closer to our own time, N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics and Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones are useful for their work on human experience, the changing definitions of what it means to be

78 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). 79 E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”1818, in Tales , ed. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 277-308. Wood, Living Dolls , p. 59. 80 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973).

30 human in the age of pervasive media and digital technology, and the exploration of how these changes leave their mark in cultural texts. 81 In a search for traces of contemporary anxieties about the continuing transformation of experience, this thesis turns to works by William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis, Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and J.G. Ballard, as well as the recent films S1m0ne and The 6 th Day .82

In examining some of the earlier configurations of such uncanny motifs of the double, the resurrection, the ghost or the automaton, it is of vital importance not to collapse the distinction between the very different cultural historical contexts of the writers. E.T.A. Hoffmann, after all, was writing in early nineteenth century Germany, while science fiction authors like William Gibson inhabit a very different contemporary post-industrial globalised landscape. It is not at all my intention to conflate very different historical contexts simply on the basis of a similarity of response to a new image technology. However, we will discover some continuity between the different literary genres of German Romanticism, Russian symbolism, and mid to late twentieth century science fiction even as they each wrestle with the particular anxieties of their day.

Although his sweeping narratives of media convergence seem to preclude a study of reception such as this, Friedrich Kittler’s work is useful here. Kittler’s main focus is on how the figure of “man” is transformed through interaction with and use of each new medium, and how this transformation reverberates through the texts produced in older media. He argues that older media, such as literature (and now presumably film and television), register the effects of newer media such as those based in digital technology. His discussion tends to move back and forth between works in different genres and media. For example, in his essay “Romanticism – Psychoanalysis – Film: A History of the Double,” Kittler looks at, among other things, the effect that the

81 N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). Sadie Plant, Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1998). 82 Simone , dir. Andrew Niccol, USA, 2002. The 6 th Day , dir. Roger Spottiswoode, USA/Canada, 2000.

31 advent of film had on the motif of the double. 83 While useful, his approach tends to position media as separate agents rather than both symptomatic and productive of their times.

This thesis, then, is careful to position new image technologies within the particular historical contexts that shape their production. My approach to particular works of film and literature is to see how they register the effects of their historical moment. It seems that what these texts have in common is their use of an image of a human figure (its uncanny effects and aesthetics) as an allegory of ongoing human transformation in modern industrial societies. With its focus on the recurring tropes used to describe these slightly different articulations of the virtual actor, this approach both serves to situate responses to the virtual actor within the present historical moment and to explain how it is currently perceived and framed differently from the so-called carbon-based star. 84 It also serves to connect the present with earlier moments of response to moving images of humans, including those produced by the cinematograph.

Chapter one investigates a series of responses to images of human beings produced through technologies of the past two centuries: the automaton, the early film image, and the computer generated actors in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . These responses evidently incorporate semiotic interference, and are read here in relation to aspects of their respective historical contexts such as prevailing scientific human-machine metaphors and the broader cultural mood concerning modern life. Such cultural frameworks and their attendant media technologies leave their traces on various literary texts from Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” to Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise , to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero and The Informers . These texts speak in their different

83 Friedrich Kittler, “Romanticism – Psychoanalysis – Film: A History of the Double,” in Literature Media Information Systems: Essay/Friedrich A. Kittler , ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 1997), pp. 85-100. 84 Whether a carbon-based actor’s image has been “captured” on celluloid or digital video is a moot point in this argument – for even though the digital video image is composed of the same pixels as a digital star, and is theoretically as malleable within the space of the computer, the way the two images are framed in discourse and reception is very different.

32 ways of an existence transformed and perhaps impoverished by the shifting mental frameworks and conditions of modern life.

Chapter two examines the idea, prevalent in some (often cynical) discourses, that the mechanical image is our ideal double or usurper. This concept contains conflicting anxieties about disillusionment, enchantment and deception, which are explored here in relation to the tropes of the artificial female and the siren. The use of the word “siren,” sometimes used to describe virtual female stars such as Aki Ross, reminds us of those dangerous and enchanting figures in the Greek myths whose singing was said to mesmerise sailors and lead them to their death. We find that “The Sandman,” Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Tomorrow Eve , Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and William Gibson’s Idoru all traverse anxieties about fatal enchantment and losing ones wits in the face of the artificial woman, which on a wider scale also speak of our uneasiness at the lure of high-tech.

Chapter three notes the common use of the word “doppelgänger” to refer to a digital likeness of an actor or celebrity. The doppelgänger is a curious figure that according to Otto Rank once ensured the immortality of the self. As belief in this figure was surmounted, it came over time to instead threaten death or madness. 85 Through the doppelgänger I investigate the theory that image technologies have transformed the self’s relationship to the self, particularly for those such as actors and celebrities who, in the words of Kittler, “stand in the firing line” of image technologies. 86 This chapter explores a series of texts that concern an actor’s encounter with their own image, from Luigi Pirandello’s Shoot! to Hollywood’s aging actress cycle of films from the 1950s and 60s to the recent science fiction film The Sixth Day . Through these texts we can chart changes in cultural history of image technologies and their perceived implications for the self. These changes are in turn read through a mythical history of

85 Otto Rank, The Double 1925, trans. and ed. Harry Tucker Jr. (North Carolina: University of Carolina Press, 1971). 86 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 147.

33 the image as a double promising the immortality of its subject. Similarly, the digital double is currently promoted as a solution for the actor’s career obsolescence.

Chapter four reviews what nature of career immortality is offered to the dead actor through their digital resurrection. The notion of digital resurrection is examined historically through an inquiry into changing attitudes to death, immortality and ghosts, and a discussion of how other media technologies have been previously promoted as solutions for mortality. I ask here: do we read the image of a digitally resurrected dead actor differently from the image on film of an actor who we know to be now dead? How do different image technologies change our notion of immortality and the way we think of presence, absence and death? We see through this chapter that the computer-generated actor does not dismiss questions of the index, but rather brings them uncannily to the surface again through questions about death, memory and time.

My account of these cultural responses will mean that sometimes the figure of the digital actor will seem to disappear from view. But this is because of the broad historical, cultural and intellectual framework used to make sense of this phenomenon. This thesis looks to the past much more than it looks to the future, and, in its focus on a particular kind of reception, it looks at viewer unease and anxiety much more than it looks at pleasure and desire. Hence, not really interested in speculation about potential success or failure, I use the figure of the digital actor to consider how “newness” comes into being, how it is read and understood through an engagement with a persistent uncanniness. The use of uncanny imagery in film reviews and some reportage and commentary to describe the computer-generated actors in Final Fantasy , suggests that computer-generated actors do not simply project us forward into a science fictional future of seamless human simulacra. Rather, at this moment in its development at least, the synthespian, in its framing and reception, can also lead us back through a gallery of uncertain and uncanny human images.

34

Figure 1. Wireframe view of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within .

Figure 2. Drawing of a cinematographic projector.

35 Chapter 1. Shadow citizens and teflon stars: reception of the transfiguring effects of new image technologies

The day after seeing the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph for the first time in 1896, Maxim Gorky tried to articulate the disquiet stirred in him by the moving images on the screen. A normal street scene of daily life in Paris had been captured by a camera and projected at Aumont’s Café at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair. In an allusion to the mythic underworld, he dubbed these images “the Kingdom of Shadows,” a place populated by flitting, ashen and noiseless Parisians:

Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless, although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours – the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life. 1

Reading this extraordinary account from over one hundred years ago, we are given the opportunity to glimpse the early moving image anew through Gorky’s eyes. Perhaps to us now these faded monochrome Lumière actualities are indeed a “Kingdom of Shadows,” recording as they do the shadowy traces and movements of people long dead and buildings long demolished or renovated. Gorky’s commentary at his time, however, was rather exceptional, for the more usual response was to

1 Maxim Gorky, “Fleeting Notes,” newspaper review of the Lumière Programme at the Nizhni- Novgorod fair , Nizhegorodski listok , 4 July 1896, reproduced in In the Kingdom of Shadows , by Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London & Madison NJ: Cygnus Arts & Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), p. 5.

36 proclaim devices such as the cinematograph, vitagraph and biograph as producing pleasingly realistic “living pictures.” 2

Gorky’s writing sits in contrast to other reports such as one from The Scotsman of June 1896, which enthused: “The management of the light was perfect; the movement of the figures were wonderfully natural; and the general effect was singularly pleasing.” 3 The enthusiasm evident in this review is more typical of the reaction from the American and British entertainment and scientific press of the time. As Tom Gunning has pointed out, many of the first published American reactions to motion pictures came from mainly anonymous journalists who were invited to press screenings at the Edison laboratories in West Orange or at the large Vaudeville theatres in New York City. He writes:

For many journalists the invention of motion pictures was a source of national pride, since the machines that they first saw were either American inventions or direct offspring, so they believed, of the kinetoscope invented by Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” the peepshow device that had sparked interest in moving pictures. 4

Besides this national pride, there is sense of wonder running through some of the articles in Colin Harding and Simon Popple’s collection, In The Kingdom Of Shadows, that the writer’s own life should coincide with such milestones in human progress. In these reports, the primary focus is on the movement of the image. This movement is equated satisfyingly with life and vitality, and it is seen to mark a progression from the familiar still photograph to a closer approximation of “living” reality. 5 Gorky also notes the movement on the screen, but he focuses on the contradictory qualities of

2 Staff writer, “The Month: Science and Arts,” Chamber’s Journal , 25 April 1896, reproduced in In the Kingdom of Shadows , by Harding and Popple, p. 9. 3 Staff writer, no article title provided, The Scotsman , 2 June 1896, reproduced in In the Kingdom of Shadows , by Harding and Popple, p. 12. 4 Tom Gunning, Foreword, Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , trans. Alan Bodger, ed. Richard Taylor (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xvi. 5 Staff writer, “The Cinématographe,” The Times , 22 February 1896, reproduced in In the Kingdom of Shadows , by Harding and Popple, p. 8.

37 the image, giving a glimpse of an uncanny world of agitated moribundity caught between “living energy” and “lifelessness,” between laughter and grey silence. He repeatedly and perhaps compulsively returns to these mismatching signals, writing of them as if snatching onto a nightmare already dissolving in daylight.

More recently, in 2001, the cinematic release Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was heralded by many within the entertainment industry as a “milestone” or “landmark” in digital cinema production. 6 It is the first feature length computer-generated film to be based on live-action and photo-realistic principles, in contrast to the principles of cartoon animation. Much of the pre-production and industry commentary focused on its all digital cast (most notably the virtual actress, Aki Ross) and the purported uncannily astonishing level of photo-realism attained by Square, the Japanese- American software developers involved in the film. 7

However a survey of film reviews in the broadsheet and tabloid press reveals a rather less celebratory view of these digital actors. These reviewers almost universally take pains to state their appreciation of the labour, technology and cost involved in creating such images, yet this appreciation is tempered by a sense of disturbance and unease. The virtual actors are variously likened to “three-day-old-cadavers (all grey and moving rather strangely),” 8 “shop dummies,” “blow-up dolls,” “Thunderbirds puppets,” 9 and “not just like real people; they’re like really boring people.” 10 Kenneth Turan of the LA Times adds that, “the sight of these characters getting romantic is

6 See Bruce Newman, “Now That’s a Bad Hair Day,” (e-commerce report) Sydney Morning Herald , 15 May 2001, p. 8, and Jay Carr, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Boston Globe, 11 July 2001, p. D1. 7 See Newman, “That’s Bad Hair Day,” p. 8, Sue Williams, “It’s No Act,” (profile on Aki Ross) Sun Herald , Sunday Metro, 22 July 2001, p. 3, staff writer, “Flesh for Fantasy,” Wired , vol. 9, no. 7, July 2001, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/eword.html?pg=4 (accessed 9/4/03). 8 Paul LePetit, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sunday Telegraph , 29 July 2001, p. 98. 9 Rob Lowing, “Dummy Run,” review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sun Herald , 29 July 2001, p. 8 10 Chris Vognar, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Dallas Morning News , 11 July 2001 www.dallasnews.com (accessed 10/8/01).

38 about as involving as watching two expensive mannequins kissing in Macy’s window.” 11

These readings of Final Fantasy ’s digital actors in terms of puppets, dolls, dummies and cadavers focus on their movement and the visible texture of their skin. Descriptions of their virtual complexions emphasise a “waxiness” and unnatural smoothness, evoking the synthetic qualities of manufactured materials like plastic and teflon. Texturally, these figures seem too “perfect,” being without the asymmetry, flaws and individual characteristics of the human countenance. They lack the natural wear and tear on the epidermis in the form of scars, pockmarks, pores and wrinkles that come through the processes of living. 12 The other “deficits” these readings hone in on concern movement and gesture. The digital actors in Final Fantasy could not be said to move stiffly or with the pronounced over-bounciness of prior digital figures, yet their movement is still perceived as strange. It is difficult for these writers to articulate in what way this is so as the degree of difference from natural human movement is almost imperceptible, yet it is still evident to them that something is “not quite right.” 13 Although these writers do not have Gorky’s exquisite turn of phrase, their comments seem to well up from a place which he might recognise.

Strange misfirings, like those noted by Gorky and the reviewers of Final Fantasy , are most disturbing in moving images of humans that have reached a certain level of veracity. A moving image that makes a claim of reproducing visual (or photographic) reality requires from its viewer a very different set of expectations from those of an animated cartoon. It might be said that, for some viewers, their perception of the

11 Kenneth Turan, “‘Final Fantasy’ Sticks to Game Plan,” LA Times , 11 July 2001, http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Movies-X!ArticleDetail-38046,00.html (accessed 10/8/01). 12 This response is strange when reading Square USA’s production notes, which make a point of detailing how much labour and time went into developing flawed skin, pores, wrinkles, and even liver spots for the characters. Production notes for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within available online at http://www.cinema.com/article/item.phtml?ID=507&Page=13 , p. 13 (accessed 5/7/04). 13 Peter Bradshaw, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , The Guardian , UK, 3 August 2001, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,531411,00.html (accessed 5/4/03).

39 image’s “deficits” draws their attention to the ontological status of the image, its particular relation to reality (indexical or otherwise) and the mechanical or digital basis of its animation. These are two very different types of misfirings, pointing to the perception of two different types of ontology. Gorky cannot dismiss from his mind that the people on screen consist only of their immaterial shadows. For the reviewers of Final Fantasy , the figures onscreen can never overcome their synthetic, manufactured origins.

On one level these responses may be characterised as instances of neo-Platonic ventilation about the inability of artifice to capture the essence of life, or a general fear of simulation replacing reality. Yet, on another level, this disturbance is more connected to a hovering between states, an uncertainty and of some kind of vague wordless threat that this uncertainty entails. Does this sense of uncertainty stem merely from the mind of a viewer confused by contradictory raw perceptual signals or are there other cultural factors at play? The fact that there is no uniformity of response to either Final Fantasy or the Lumière brothers’ work suggests the latter.

Yuri Tsivian provides a richly detailed exploration of the historical and cultural circumstances from which responses such as “the Kingdom of Shadows” emerged. Rather than showing that Gorky’s reaction was an idiosyncratic exception to the general trumpeting heralding the birth of cinema, Tsivian demonstrates how this response arose from within a larger body of Russian, primarily literary, cultural reception influenced by Symbolist thought. He examines a body of writing consisting of letters, articles, reviews, essays, poems and novels from the final decade of the nineteenth century through to the early 1920s and scours these works for traces of the impact of the cinematograph upon their writers. This approach is characterised as follows:

The task of those who take up the study of cultural reception is quite similar to the Rorschach psychologist: to summarise and interpret the recurrent

40 associations and fixed ideas that each culture reads into the “moving smudges” of early cinema. 14

Rather than building upon cognitive theories of reception, Tsivian’s approach emerges from a heritage of cultural semiotics as theorised by Roman Jakobson and further developed by Yuri Lotman. 15 As Tsivian explains, this branch of cultural semiotics differs from the study of the semiotics of communication, as its focus is on the way texts are processed through historically situated people, as opposed to how people communicate texts. 16 The main point of interest, then, is the distortion rather than the clarity of the message. Tsivian concludes: “Cultural semiotics, therefore, investigates the discrepancies between the “input” and “output” texts. What for communication is “background interference” or “noise” may be turned into “message” by culture.” 17 Tsivian is interested in those responses to the cinematograph that apparently transformed the intended message of the image through the incorporation of such interference as over or under-cranked projectors, lack of sound and colour, crackles and flecks on the film, and the social composition of their fellow audience. 18 The overwhelming sense we get when reading their responses is that of a world made strange through technology . This sense of strangeness did not stem from raw sensory perception but was instead an acculturated response, drawing on ideas, images, texts, or perceptions already in circulation. In some early Russian writings on the cinema, for example, we see the recurring literary motifs of the double, the magic mirror and the haunted portrait, as the shock of seeing familiar faces on screen resonated “by putting new life into old literary clichés.” 19 This acculturation is evident also in Gorky’s response. At one point he makes reference to the dark wizardly powers of a Merlin enchanting the inhabitants of a street, robbing them of the power

14 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 3. 15 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature , ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1987). Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” New Literary History , vol. 9, no. 2, 1978, pp. 211-32. 16 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 104. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 101-24. 19 Ibid., p. 4.

41 of speech and the vitality of colour. Additionally, for Gorky, the flickering colourless image of three men playing cards could not help but evoke the “game in hell” – an apparently archetypal literary situation originating in Russian folk tales. 20 Gorky wrote: “It seems as if these people have died and their shadows have been condemned to play cards in silence unto eternity.” 21

In contrast, the more celebratory American and British trade journal accounts cited above express a mode of seeing which ignores interference, focusing on the technology itself and the referent it presents. According to Gunning, this focus on the living movement of the referent seemingly preserved on film often extends to “the optimistic and progressive claim that through this new technology man has in a sense triumphed over death.” 22 But my concern here is not so much to account for the differences between such disparate readings. Popple, Harding, Gunning and others have performed ample analyses and critiques of the arguably more conventional “progressive” modes of perception mentioned above. Rather, I intend to explore responses to image technologies which evidence similar reading processes and affects to those colouring Gorky’s fleeting notes on the “Kingdom of Shadows.” These responses are traces of encounters with image technologies – traces that are embedded in their respective cultural and historical moments, but that reverberate beyond their contexts, colouring later encounters and further texts. Tsivian’s work serves to defamiliarise our view of early cinema, and it is hoped that using such an approach here will enable us to defamiliarise our view of the digital actor. As Tom Gunning suggests of this approach in his foreword to Tsivian’s book:

It invites us to develop theses about other pleasures of film going which may yet persist beneath the culturally dominant regimes of narrative and information. It encourages us to ask new questions about historical

20 Ibid., p. 5. 21 Gorky, “Fleeting Notes,” p. 5. 22 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xix.

42 spectators and even to wonder if contemporary spectators are as “medium- oblivious” as some academic theorists seem to assume. 23

Certainly, as Gunning himself has demonstrated in his work on the “cinema of attractions,” the manner in which new cinematic technologies are traditionally promoted and received tends to position the aesthetics of the technology or the medium itself as, if not above, then at least equal to narrative and information. 24 The various responses to Final Fantasy mentioned above express a preoccupation with the uncanniness of its digital actors, to the point where the narrative of the film becomes a secondary consideration. In and of themselves these digital actors hold little interest for me. Their framing, however, and the intriguingly uncanny nature of the commentary which coalesces around these figures, appears to echo prior traces of engagement with then-new image technologies. This chapter will look more deeply into other moments in the cultural reception of new moving image technologies, including our own present moment of the digital actor, searching for the recurrence of uncanny motifs, such as cadavers, dolls, mannequins and puppets. My first task here is to determine the conditions under which the human image becomes uncanny. Next, I will chart some shifts in this motif, and its production and reception, in relation to anxieties, obsessions or fascinations pertaining to the various historical moments in which it emerges. We will attempt to trace the remnants of these much older threads as they continue to accrue new meanings through changing cultural contexts, and as they currently wind through readings of the digital actor.

Mechanical humans and human machines

The category of experience known as the “uncanny” is, as Sigmund Freud explains, only possible within a rational context, where repressed beliefs seem to be startlingly

23 Ibid., p. xxi. 24 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame Narrative , ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990) pp. 56-62.

43 or disquietingly confirmed. 25 Some years before Freud elaborated on this subject, Ernst Jentsch had attempted to catalogue the various types of phenomena that may trigger such, often fleeting, feelings. According to Jentsch, uncanniness is bound up with a “lack of orientation.” It is a state of psychic uncertainty experienced by a subject during an encounter with something in their world. 26 Importantly he wrote that this sensation was more likely to be experienced in a state of “abnormal disposition” such as “light sleep, in states of deadening of all kinds, in various forms of depression and after-effects of diverse terrible experiences, fears, and in severe cases of exhaustion or general illness.” 27 These conditions will be revisited later in more detail but, at present, I want to focus on one kind of phenomena that Jentsch thought particularly capable of triggering this psychic uncertainty: “[N]amely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.” 28 Among the various phenomena Jentsch listed were waxwork figures, automata, panoramas and life-size mechanical dolls. 29 He also included epileptic fits and hysterical spasms, for, as Freud explained, “these excite in the spectator the impressions of automatic mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity.” 30

From this description we see that uncanny sensations can arise in response to something that appears to hover uncertainly between states of life and lifelessness, like conceptions of zombies and the “living dead,” or a mechanical simulation of a human being. For, in the human imagination, it is movement that is most analogous to life. Writing on what he calls the “animistic mode of thought” or “the doctrine of souls” Freud notes that these beliefs emerged through preliminary human observations of death and sleep – a state of being which can appear similar to death.

25 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al, vol. xvii, 1917-19 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), p. 220. 26 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 1906, Angelaki , vol. 2, no. 1, 1995, p. 8. 27 Ibid., p. 10. 28 Ibid., p. 11. 29 Ibid., pp. 11-14. 30 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 226.

44 Subsequent attempts to explain these states developed into the belief that vitality, life and movement were produced by an animating spirit. Reminding us that “Schopenhauer has said that the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy,” Freud observes that there have been three such explanatory systems of thought: animistic, religious and finally scientific. 31

Natural philosophers and entertainers alike have long sought to recreate the illusion of life using the movement of inanimate objects and static images, through puppetry, shadow-play, magic lanterns and automata. 32 As Lev Manovich acknowledges, this urge continues to drive the computer graphics industry today. He notes that companies are under constant pressure to utilise the latest software research, and to remain “state of the art” in order to compete for funding and contracts. The benchmark of progress in this field is often measured by accuracy in simulating cinematic and visual reality. 33 Within this arena of industrial and technological progress, every achievement is greeted with applause and a sense of the triumph of human creativity.

One long-standing aim is the creation of simulated human beings – of which the Final Fantasy cast are merely prototypes in a long production line. In Living Dolls: a Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life , Gaby Wood writes of a lineage of human simulacra ranging back to the moving statues built by Hero of Alexandria in 150 BC. 34 While those Greek automata were created as mechanical tricks to inspire awe in worshippers at the temples of particular gods, later ones, envisaged in the name of philosophy by René Descartes, were created to demonstrate theories of the inner workings of the human body. In The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity , Anson Rabinbach details how Western philosophers and scientists in the

31 Sigmund Freud, “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al, vol. xiii, 1913-14 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), pp. 75-7, 87-88. 32 Harding and Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows , p. 1. 33 Lev Manovich “Reality Effects in Computer Animation” in A Reader in Animation Studies , ed. Jayne Pilling (Sydney: John Libbey, 1997), p. 10. 34 Gaby Wood, Living Dolls : A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. xv.

45 Age of Reason endeavoured to explain the human body through the metaphor of the machine. 35 The movement of the human body was thought by some to be based upon similar principles to those of clocks or hydraulic fountains. One noted Edinburgh professor, Hermann Boerhaave, applied the theories of Newtonian physics to the problem, imagining the operations of the body in terms of hydrostatic pressures, pipes, weights and liquids. 36

Jacques de Vaucanson’s celebrated eighteenth century automata sought to physically demonstrate the workings of the vascular flow and the digestive system. Science and spectacle merged in Vaucanson’s life-sized flute-playing automaton. Fashioned from wood and painted white to mimic the marble of a Greek statue, it astonished and puzzled high society audiences in the 1730s. Using an extremely complex system of bellows, levers, valves, pulleys and wheels, the figure was constructed so that it could be opened to show the workings of its mechanisms to the audience as it played. The need to demonstrate internal operations was necessary so that there could be no accusations of human agency working behind the twelve different melodies in its repertoire. 37 Later automata, such as Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk, reached wider audiences in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, touring Europe and North America.

These life-size, glass-eyed mannequins with moving parts used ingeniously hidden levers, air pipes or (as was later revealed in the case of Kempelen’s Turk) human agency. 38 They could appear to play the piano, write letters or beat human opponents at games of chess. As a result they became the subject of spirited essays and diatribes by fascinated or horrified writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allen Poe. While Poe endeavoured to expose the often substantial human agency behind these intriguing illusions of mechanised life, Hoffmann found the effect of the automaton

35 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). 36 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 38. 37 Wood, Living Dolls , pp. 20-2. 38 Ibid., pp. 57-103.

46 and the philosophies underpinning it abhorrent. For him it raised questions of free will and was an attempt to “usurp the prerogatives of nature.” 39 Hoffmann’s horrified fascination with automata led him to attend every visiting exhibition of the philosophical toys. He also attempted to build one of his own with help from a late eighteenth century manual “Instruction in Natural Magic, or, All Kinds of Amusing Tricks” by Johann Christian Wiegleb. He did this primarily as research for his stories “The Automaton” and more famously “The Sandman.” 40 “The Sandman” is one of the first and most notably uneasy cultural responses to a technologised human image. This cultural response to the figure of the automaton is one that most commonly rises to the surface in any discussion of the literary “uncanny.”

“The Sandman” expresses Hoffmann’s unease with the automaton as a figure of troubling contradictions. It is capable of movement yet not alive, with eyes that blink or shift from side to side in their sockets, yet which cannot see. Hoffmann evokes the discomforting aspects of the automaton, while at the same time working a subtext through the story concerning then current debates about reason and passion, and the nature of the soul and of human will. There is a deliberate blurring and confusing of the line between human and machine. The principle character is a highly-strung young man called Nathaniel who fears he is at the mercy of malevolent machinations operating behind the scenes of his life. Nathaniel’s rational human lover Klara attempts to reason with him in a calm, logical fashion, but his response is to accuse her of being a “damned lifeless automaton,” while proceeding to become infatuated with just such an object called Olympia. Deluded, he mistakes Olympia for a real woman. Choosing to disregard her vacant sightless gaze and the icy touch that elicits involuntary shudders from him, he imagines her silence and her stare as indicative of a deeper understanding of him and his peculiar sensibility. 41

39 E.T.A. Hoffmann cited in John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 45. 40 Wood, Living Dolls , p. 31. 41 E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”1818, in Tales , ed. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 277-308.

47 At first the town’s population also believe that Olympia is a real woman. Significantly though, unlike Nathaniel, they have suspicions that there is something strange in her mannerisms and bearing. At a ball where Olympia is whirled about the floor by her human lover, the other guests titter at the stiff clockwork rhythm of her dancing and the dull vacant look in her eyes. 42 While the eventual discovery of the true nature of Olympia sends Nathaniel into madness, the townsfolk are also markedly disturbed by the revelation of her ontological status. They become suspicious then of all human figures and begin to question the humanity of their loved ones:

[M]any lovers insisted that their mistresses sing and dance arrythmically and embroider, knit, or play with a lapdog or something while being read to, so that they could assure themselves that they were not in love with a wooden doll; above all else, they required their mistresses not only to listen but to speak frequently in such a way that it would prove that they really were capable of thinking and feeling. 43

In this way, the people of the town attempt to come to terms with their shock by creating a rigid human/machine binary. On the side of the human they place irregularity, chattiness and imperfection, and on the side of the machine, regularity, silence and perfection. But, as Hoffmann suggests, in the absence or vacillation of a belief in an animating human soul or “essence,” and the insistence of new doctrines claiming material and mechanical forces behind all signs of life, such a binary becomes less and less tenable, even as its construction may become more desirable. In such a cultural context, where people cannot be certain of their beliefs, mimetic technologies and the creation of artificial things which can appear “alive” through movement and/or the emanation of sounds, cannot help but produce the welling up of uncanny sensations.

42 Ibid., p. 301. 43 Ibid., pp. 305-6.

48 By the early nineteenth century, automata had proven a scientific disappointment because of their inability to move by their own power, and were derided by philosophers as inadequate copies of humanity. 44 In the annals of scientific history the automaton was quickly relegated to a position of delightful curio. Culturally, however, it had a much more lasting impact. Despite the actual historical objects being mainly confined to dusty rooms in obscure European museums, the term “automaton” has remained in common use in our language. Perhaps in part due to the enduring cultural power of Hoffmann’s image of Olympia, “automaton” has come to have a double meaning. It is both “a figure which simulates the action of a living being” and “a human being acting mechanically in a monotonous routine.” 45 In this sense, the automaton can be seen as a powerful reference point continuing to emerge in later responses to the human image as it has and continues to be refashioned through various image technologies. For example, we find references to automata in a response to the early cinematograph by the Russian Symbolist writer Zinaida Gippius. She writes:

[T]he way moments of time are broken up to reveal the spaces between them – serves only to confuse the unpracticed eye. They frighten us in the same way we are frightened by a mechanism that passes itself off as an organism – by an automaton, for example. 46

Gippius’s fear of “a mechanism that passes itself off as an organism” is a similar uneasiness to that expressed in Hoffmann’s short story. Indeed, as Tsivian points out with regards to Gippius’s diagnosis of the cinematic image, “cinema in Russia was brought into the Hoffmannesque universe of Romantic and post-Romantic literature.” 47 Gippius disregards this cultural framework though, arguing that her response to the cinema is instinctive, natural and involuntary, stemming from the free-flowing associations produced by the macabre images on the screen. Her

44 Rabinbach, The Human Motor , pp. 51-2. 45 Wood, Living Dolls , p. xviii. 46 Zinaida Gippius cited in Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 9. 47 Ibid.

49 perception was informed, nevertheless, by an awareness of what she saw as an “unnatural process” at work behind the image, influenced in part by Henri Bergson’s concept of “the fallacy of movement.” Gippius reads the jerky and “agitated” effects caused by variable projection speeds as confirming her Bergsonian view of the cinematic process as one that sliced up the natural flow of movement over time, and then reassembled it frame by frame. 48 In broader Symbolist terms, Gippius’s schema is also based on the simple binary of organism versus machine. As Tsivian states, within this view “the machine was cast as the antithesis of life.” 49 For Gippius, mechanisms and all associated with them are equated with death. Her reading of the image is, therefore, in terms of a mechanical process transforming the movement of living people into something uncanny and frightening. The Symbolists saw the cinematographic image as the exemplary visualisation of modernity itself. The younger writers such as Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely embraced “the new medium precisely as an embodiment of a fascinating and frightening new world exemplified by urban life, speed and instability,” but older writers like Gippius “viewed it with suspicion as a mechanical product of a modern culture for which they had little sympathy.” 50 Perhaps underpinning this schema and her response is also a sense of how human experience and behaviour off-screen had been transformed by an increasingly industrialised landscape.

Industrial life and industrial humans

At about the same time that Gippius was writing in Russia, Georges Méliès was making his trick films in France. With titles like Gugusse and the Automaton and Coppélia or the Animated Doll , his films have rudimentary plots that reveal a fascination with the miraculous animation of statues, dolls and mannequins. 51 According to Wood, Méliès also enjoyed a hobby of repairing old automata and setting them in motion in the

48 Ibid., p. 8. 49 Ibid., p. 9. 50 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xix. 51 Wood, Living Dolls , p. 181.

50 foyer of his theatre. It was his obsession with clockwork, Wood argues, that was crucial to the success of his often elaborate trick films. Méliès used the ticking of a metronome on the set to encourage the most automatic clockwork gestures from his actors. The timing of the actors needed to be meticulous in order to match the cutting of film stock and the mechanical movement of sets and props. 52 So, while the camera itself did not transform living beings in quite the way Gippius imagined, perhaps the pro-filmic conditions of film-making under Méliès could be seen to affect a comparable change. The conditions Méliès imposed on his cast made their bodily movements ancillary to the requirements of the cinematographic apparatus in a manner in tune with industrial practices on a wider scale.

The growth of the factory system harnessed the energy and movement of the worker’s body to the projects of mechanised production and production-line work. In the context of industrialism, some writers adopted the cinematic projector as a literary trope. It was seen as the ideal motif for a growing, ominous and inescapable force holding mastery over human destiny. 53 This force was no longer God or the church but industrial society, its doctrine of linking the individual to inescapable social and scientific progress and its associated regulatory bodies; those of law, government and the clock. As the eighteenth century model of a clockwork universe had spilt over into conceptions of what it meant to be human, so too the cinema projector, with its ability to wind time back and forth, repeat and speed up or slow down, seemed expressive of a cultural logic of industrialism obsessed with temporal issues and individual destiny at the mercy of larger predetermined forces. With the winding of his handle, the projectionist could appear to bring people to life or snuff them out. 54 This concept of cinema as what Tom Gunning labels a “destiny machine,” can also be found in responses outside the Russian context. 55 An English writer known only as O. Winter seems in their review of a moving picture screening to be disturbed by

52 Ibid., pp. 182-4. 53 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , pp. 119-21. 54 Ibid., p. 51. 55 Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), p. xi.

51 their sense that the movement on the celluloid reel could be endlessly repeated for each screening by the turning of the projector handle, causing the human figures so captured to be seemingly transfigured into involuntary marionettes, their will and individuality overridden by the machine. 56

The Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello also explores this concept in his novel Shoot! . His main character, the cameraman Signor Gubbio, remarks, “it is a machine that mechanizes life” and “I might indulge myself with the illusion that I set these actors in motion when I turn the handle.” 57 Pirandello’s novel develops the idea of the systematic nature of modernity, and the cinema’s deep structural connection with it – something that had become increasingly apparent to some in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. 58 Gubbio’s narration of the story includes an observation that within the particularly rigid social and temporal conditions of modern urban life there is no time for contemplation or consciousness of one’s actions. 59 He compares this situation to that of movie actors who, within the fragmented process of silent Italian narrative filmmaking, have no sense of the entirety or of who they are meant to be. They merely move through the predetermined movements of their scene according to the chalk markings on the floor. 60 Gubbio argues that, like actors, modern citizens are shunted through the predetermined circuits of a “clamorous and dizzy machinery of life, which from day to day seems to become more complicated and to move with greater speed.” 61

Taking a less hectoring and didactic line, Walter Benjamin finds that the transformation of lived experience left a dramatic mark on literature of the nineteenth century. As Rachel O. Moore observes, “modernity’s literature tells us that the senses

56 O. Winter, untitled review of a moving picture screening, New Review , February 1896, reproduced in Harding and Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows , pp. 13-7. 57 Luigi Pirandello, Shoot! (Si Gira) The notebooks of Serafino Gubbio Cinematographer Operator , trans. C.F. Scott Moncrieff (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1926), p. 6. 58 Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang , pp. x-xi. 59 Pirandello, Shoot! , pp. 3-4. 60 Ibid., p. 5. 61 Ibid.

52 had been radically disturbed, if not reconfigured.”62 Benjamin recognised that the development of the modern metropolis and its attendant crowds were central catalysts for perceptual transformation. Writing on the ascendance of the crowd as literary motif Benjamin turns to Edgar Allen Poe’s short proto-detective story, “The Man of the Crowd,” a work which contains one of the first appearances of the crowd in literature. 63 The movement of the figures in Poe’s crowd reminds Benjamin of clowns. These figures reference economy, machines and the pace of industrial production, in the way that they move abruptly, jostling, bumping up against each other, automatically reacting to the impact of others with gesture, evasion and apology. Benjamin writes: “The people in [Poe’s] story behave as if they could no longer express themselves through anything but a reflex action.” 64 This development of reflex action, formed in an environment and process of shock and impact is, Benjamin claims, one of the characteristics of the city-dweller. The body of the pedestrian in the crowd adapted to move automatically, negotiating a path through traffic and streets, and around vehicles, buildings and other pedestrians. But their senses also had to adapt to the sights and sounds of the city – an adaptation that involved shielding or insulating the senses, growing invisible scales over the ears and eyes. As the social theorist Georg Simmel argued, city dwellers responded to the intensification of nervous stimulation via a dulling of their senses or the growth of a protective sensory shield. 65

For Benjamin, it was Charles Baudelaire who most astutely captured this new subjectivity of the city-dweller, with his repeated references to eyes that watch but do not see, and gazes swiftly met or evaded. 66 As Benjamin explains, Baudelaire consciously wrote lyric poetry for the specific reader of his age – a reader who, he

62 Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 12. 63 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Portable Poe , ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York & London: Penguin Books, 1945), pp. 107-18. 64 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , pp. 52-3. 65 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel , ed. Kurt H. Wolf (New York: Free Press, 1950), p. 410-20. 66 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), p. 106.

53 envisaged, no longer had the ability to concentrate for long periods of time and who was no longer deeply receptive or interested in his or her surroundings. Baudelaire believed that modern industrial experience was causing such qualities to shrivel. 67 This lack of concentration and receptiveness is only one of the symptoms that Benjamin and others have described as peculiar to modern urban industrial experience.

The development of a protective or sensory shield was accompanied by the growth of what Gunning and others call a “lust of the eyes.” Urban expansion, the new perceptual chaos of the city and its traffic, the growth of consumerism and window displays, and western colonisation of the globe, all “provoked the desire for images and attractions.” 68 The industrial revolution ushered in a popular obsession with mechanically contrived simulations of sounds, movements and appearances. Inventions designed initially to showcase the limits and possibilities of contemporary technologies were channeled into replicating the signs of (especially human) life. Urban pleasure seekers were interested in seeing the most modern techniques of illusion, in seeing the impossible made apparently manifest, all the while aware of the context of artifice. Gunning claims that this modern “lust of the eyes” and a hunger for thrills point to the development of a modern subject whose senses had dulled and who had begun to feel removed and alienated from direct experience. 69 He reasons that the development of the “sensory shield” resulted in a kind of blunted or numbed existence, necessitating the need for greater sensory assaults and a culture of “distractions.” These performed a compensatory effect, responding to a central lack in the life of the audience, especially the working masses. 70

At the same time, a related effect peculiar to industrialised societies was the concept of “fatigue,” the flight from which could give birth to a “radically interiorised subject

67 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 1939, in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Great Britain: Fontana Press, 1992), p. 152. 68 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film , ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 125. 69 Ibid., p. 126. 70 Ibid., p. 128.

54 whose personality is shielded from all stimuli.” 71 Early in the nineteenth century, according to Rabinbach, philosophers had shifted their interest from a mechanical model of humanity based on hydraulics to the concept of the motor. The motor was a model of self-motivating power that did not rely on an external source to set it in motion. Such a conception of the human body became central to the industrial conception of the human worker, for “the technology of the factory system required more than externally imposed discipline and direction, but rather an internally regulated body ancillary to the machine.” 72 The concept of the motor brought with it a model of energy, but energy was chased by its destructive shadow, fatigue.

Already in circulation as a theme of ennui, listlessness and nervous exhaustion in the literature of Flaubert and Baudelaire, fatigue had been discovered as a scientific principle in 1870. The model of energy at the centre of the “human motor” concept was altered by the notion of entropy: the winding down, cooling and eventual death of the universe. 73 Rabinbach argues that, like so many other scientific discoveries before and since, the discovery of entropy inevitably bled over into concepts of human energy. This led to the widespread and pessimistic idea among the European middle classes that “humanity was depleting its ‘accumulated energy’” 74 and that, for the individual, the conditions and experience of modernity itself were a cause of fatigue:

Fatigue encapsulated, as Nietzsche recognized, the paradoxes of modernity: Was not material progress undermined by the unreasonable demands that it made on the body and spirit? Did not scientific and technological advances

71 Rabinbach, The Human Motor , p. 41. 72 Ibid. , p. 35. 73 Ibid., p. 6. 74 Ibid., pp. 19-20.

55 produce a dark underside in the physical and psychological exhaustion of modern life? 75

The French novelist Émile Zola deals with such questions, as well as developing some of the other themes and symptoms of modern experience identified above, in his work from 1883, The Ladies’ Paradise . This novel is an ambivalent love-letter of sorts to the Parisian department store Bon Marché (renamed within Zola’s pages as “The Ladies’ Paradise”), encapsulating some of the oppositional readings of modernity swirling around in his time. There has never been a blanket response to modernity and urban experience. As Gippius and others condemned modernity and cinema as unsympathetic to human life, we saw that Andrei Bely trembled with excitement at the kinesis of speed and movement. 76 Zola’s novel prefigures both this view of the modern world, and a conception of the cinematograph as symptom and agent of modern experience. The novel also expresses these paradoxes of modernity: energy and fatigue, vitality and moribundity. In the next section I will endeavour to give a close reading of this work and the way in which Zola writes the department store as metonymic of the modern city, in its effects on the store clerks and customers who move through its aisles.

“The poem of modern activity” 77

The reader first encounters this gargantuan cathedral of commerce, The Ladies’ Paradise, through the awed gaze of Denise, a poor simple country girl. She stands transfixed, bewildered and attracted by the giddying tumbling displays of goods in the plate glass windows, and the buzz of energy, movement and activity inside. 78 The

75 Ibid., p.6. Rabinbach argues that fatigue did not play a large part in British thought, and he attributes this to the fact that the fruits of competitive capitalism were more widely distributed in England than in Germany or France. We might surmise that this same cause could be behind the British and American responses to the cinematograph. 76 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xix. 77 Émile Zola, cited in Brian Nelson, Introduction, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883) by Émile Zola, trans. and notes Brian Nelson (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. ix. 78 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise , pp. 4-16.

56 book charts Denise’s rise from lowly shop girl to grand management status, her fortunes rising with those of the department store as it sucks all capital and energy from the surrounding dingy dark old-fashioned shops, whose proprietors refuse to move with the spirit of the times. The narrative continually halts, however, for Zola to indulge his celebration of the modern economy, returning irresistibly, like Denise, to lengthy proto-cinematic and symbolic descriptions of the thrusting electrifying glory of the department store.

The eponymous building, variously described in the novel as a “monster,” “ogre,” “colossus,” “machine for devouring women” and “factory” among other terms, has an amazing transforming effect on all who enter it. Shoppers and sales staff alike are “burnt up” and “consumed,” moving with jittery nervous energy between the aisles, from door to display to cash register. The displays are continually rearranged so as to disorientate the customer. These mainly female customers are described as “pale with desire” and suffering from a dazed delirious fatigue brought on by negotiating the press of the crowd and the ever-changing riotous colour and range of fashions, fabrics and haberdashery. The main figure of shopping desire is one Madame Marty, whose husband slaves away in a low paying job, terrified of the catastrophe of bankruptcy, while she funnels his meagre funds into her addiction. On one expedition we find that “her eyes were dilating, intoxicated as she was by the parade of wondrous things dancing before her eyes.” 79

The store’s dynamic young proprietor, Octave Mouret, thinks of nothing else but how to increase the effects of his displays upon his customers’ senses, and to so keep them enthralled and spending. He seems to understand their capacity to become numbed by sensory overload, and so is forced to continually up the stakes, in order to penetrate the very psychic shields that his displays engender in them in the first place. As one window dresser explains Octave’s “brutal” and “explosive” displays to Denise, “he used to say that the customers should have sore eyes by the time they left

79 Ibid., p. 260.

57 the shop.” 80 At some point, all this feverish desire and movement begins to give way to fatigue in the midst of too much stimulation, but even this Madame Marty finds delightful: “[S]he was deriving great enjoyment from her tiredness, the slow exhaustion of her energies in the midst of the inexhaustible display of merchandise.” 81 So too, the reader of The Ladies’ Paradise tends to find his or herself, after a time, in a state of fatigued intoxication from the constant cascading descriptions of commodities, displays, movement and desire.

Fatigue and tiredness feature prominently in The Ladies’ Paradise . But these are two contrasting types of tiredness, signaling an ambivalence in Zola’s vision of modern urbanism. Denise, Octave and those associated with the department store suffer tired bodies but feverish minds. Mouret rarely sleeps, consumed as he is by the bright nervous energy of commerce. Denise suffers from insomnia. At night her senses still buzz from the stimulation of the store. 82 Made to model a coat for a customer at the end of an exhausting day, her mind churns feverishly, yet she is described as outwardly “compliant and motionless like a dummy.” 83

The other tired weariness, a negative kind, is one that emanates from those characters and places that are the losers of the new economy: the morose and stubborn small- shopkeepers and the pokey “dank gloom” of their silent shops with small windows, without customers or displays. These people and spaces have refused to succumb to the new “lust for the eyes.” They are defined by Zola in terms of entropy, sleep, decay and death. He writes: “They were dying a slow death: there were no shocks, just a continual slowing-down of business.” 84

Denise’s Uncle Baudu owns such a shop and his daughter, Genevieve, is forced to stand “mute and motionless” in this space day in day out, waiting for customers and

80 Ibid., p. 48. 81 Ibid., p.159. 82 Ibid., pp. 31, 122, 131, 134. 83 Ibid., p. 113. 84 Ibid., pp. 10-16. The quote is from p. 219.

58 activities that never come.85 She begins to deteriorate physically, described as having the “debilitated, colourless appearance of a plant left to grow in the dark,” and she eventually succumbs to death from consumption. 86 Even the shopkeepers who attend her funeral on a rainy grey day at a cemetery mired in mud are thus described: “[T]heir blood impoverished from living in the depths of their unhealthy shops, were acquiring a sickly ugliness beneath the mud-coloured sky.” 87 Finally, as his wife and daughter have both died and he is bankrupt, Uncle Baudu walks in circles around the grey shell of his forlorn shop:

He walked up and down continually in the silence and half-light, still with his heavy funereal gait, giving way to a morbid need, to real paroxysms of forced marching, as if he wanted to lull and deaden his pain […] walking with the obstinate restlessness of deep despair, which goes round and round in circles without ever being able to escape. 88

Zola’s novel attempts to show what awful fate awaits those who refuse to swim with the tide of the modern economy. Sapped of energy, wan and impoverished, they are doomed to move in circles rather than upwards and onwards like Octave and Denise in their city of light and feverish life. In tune with the popular view of energy at the time, Zola considers that human energy is finite and that the rigours and demands of industrial modern society threaten to deplete it. Zola’s impoverished shopkeepers are drained of an energy and capital that has flowed elsewhere, sucked into the vortex of the grand department store. Zola doesn’t see this as a tragedy but as inevitable. Blame, in his eyes, lies with the shopkeepers for refusing to sell their property and throw their lot in with Octave Mouret.

Written in 1883, Zola’s novel is pre-cinema yet curiously cinematic. The final scenes of Baudu’s fate resonate uncannily with Gorky’s writing on the cinematograph in his

85 Ibid., p. 209. 86 Ibid., p. 10. 87 Ibid., p. 373. 88 Ibid., pp. 386-8.

59 “Fleeting Notes” and his reference to the “grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.” This particular image of hopeless fatigue corresponds to what Gorky describes on the screen at Aumont’s café when he writes of figures who seem “condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.” 89

Gorky’s “bleak and dismal life”

Gunning argues that Gorky’s writings bear the marks of the blunted perception and jaded ennui that is a product of the conditions of modernity. He finds evidence of this in Gorky’s account of his visit to Coney Island, which is tinged with boredom and an overwhelming hollow sense of joylessness. 90 Gunning says: “For Gorky, the cinematograph presents a world whose vividness and vitality have been drained away.” 91 Perhaps Gorky’s descriptions of his surrounds at Aumont’s Café also provide us with a clue to his particular perspective. His first view of the cinematograph takes place in a kind of underworld of “wine, music and vice,” where painted prostitutes from the brothel upstairs ply their trade. It is in the midst of this sordidness that Gorky sees the immobile grey image on the screen appear to shudder to life with the turning of the projectionist’s handle. This location, with its condemned women and “loafers who here buy their kisses” is just one of the perceptual conditions which might be said to contribute to Gorky’s reading of the cinematographic image as a “Kingdom of Shadows.” 92 Indeed, as Gunning argues, “a journalist in pre-revolutionary Russia seated in a house of semi-ill repute sees a film very differently from an American journalist seated at the feet of Thomas Edison.” 93

The lack of sound and colour is disturbing to Gorky as it lies in tension with movement and its implications of life. The moving image with its hollow centre

89 Gorky, “Fleeting Notes,” p. 5. 90 Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” p. 126. 91 Ibid., p. 118. 92 Gorky, “Fleeting Notes,” pp. 5-6. 93 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xvii.

60 opens a window onto some kind of disturbing terrain between life and death, between flesh and shadow, and between the animate and the inanimate, where apparently living figures appear “condemned” and “bewitched,” prompting him to write:

This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and distress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim. 94

Upon first reading, it seems that the sinister meaning Gorky finds is a morbid premonition of a world beyond the grave, and of what awaits each of us. However, his suggestions of a “life drained of vitality,” taken in tandem with his description of his surroundings, tells us that the cinematographic image speaks metaphorically to Gorky, chiming with his perception of modern experience as impoverished and drained. This is borne out when reading the second half of the article where he denigrates his fellow loveless and amoral patrons of Aumont’s and then extends this denigration more broadly to “Russia’s markets thirsting for the piquant and the extravagant.” He finally speculates on the uses this invention will be put to: sordid, debased and sleazy spectacle in an appeal to the lowest common denominator. 95

Zola’s descriptions of the shopkeepers emerging from the depths of their dank shops with their “impoverished blood” and “sickly ugliness” and the image of Genevieve’s “debilitated colourless appearance of a plant left to grow in the dark” also resonate with Zinaida Gippius’s cadaverous reading of figures on the cinematograph screen:

Look at that grimacing, greyish face; those lips, black as earth with their soundless mouthings; that eye with its glassy sheen […] When the muscles

94 Gorky, “Fleeting Notes,” p. 6. 95 Ibid.

61 contract into a cadaverous smile, then, however much the trombones may ring out, a human being can not help but give a shiver. 96

This connection between moribundity and modernity had also been educed, decades before, by Baudelaire when he wrote in 1851:

[I]t is impossible not to be gripped by the spectacle of this sickly population which swallows the dust of the factories, breathes in particles of cotton, and lets its tissues be permeated by white lead, mercury and all the poisons needed for the production of masterpieces […] of this languishing and pining population to whom the earth owes its wonders; who feel a purple and impetuous blood coursing through their veins, and who cast a lone, sorrow-laden look at the sunlight and shadows of the great parks. 97

Baudelaire observes here the literal deathly effects of pollution and poverty upon the bodies of factory workers toiling long hours to produce glittering commodities for the new middle classes. In Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find that cadaverousness becomes allegorical as well. In such writing, Tsivian finds a sense of a society on the brink of immanent catastrophe, decaying structures, entropy, things winding down, an atmosphere of dread and decadence, which seems to foreshadow revolution. 98 He marks out how in many of these writings on the cinema the characteristics of the screen seem to bleed onto the audience. Some writers described the cinema auditorium itself as a “house of the dead,” its immobile occupants staring, painted in the gloomy flickering light reflected from the screen. 99 Gunning accounts for such impressions with the statement: “[I]f the cinema seemed to summon up a primal fear of a world of shades this was partly because pre- Revolutionary Russia was a dying society obsessed with imagining its own demise.” 100 We can see here also the kinds of conditions that Jentsch wrote of: “states of

96 Gippius cited in Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 9. 97 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism p. 74. 98 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xix. 99 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 18. 100 Gunning, Foreword, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. xx.

62 deadening of all kinds, in various forms of depression and after effects of diverse terrible experiences, fears, and in the severe cases of exhaustion or general illness.” 101 These are the states of mind in which Jentsch thought the uncanny was most likely to flourish.

Whether attributable to larger visions of crumbling pre-Revolutionary Russian society or the broader mundane horror of a slowly poisoned urban population, for such viewers as Gorky and Gippius, the perceived deficits in the image mirrored their imaginings of their contemporary situation, seeming to project an uncanny premonition on the screen. While other commentators read the cinematographic image through the schema of progress and technological bounty, it is arguable that writers like Gorky and Gippius saw imagery on the screen that served as a troubling visual allusion to some of the paradoxical implications of modernity for their social world.

Gippius saw agitated corpses bathed in grey light, living beings rendered cadaverous by the cinematic apparatus, gesticulating frantically in silence: mirroring her perception of her decadent dying society. Gorky saw figures who were filled with “living energy” yet “condemned” to live out a “bleak and dismal life.” The overstimulation of urbanism, which left the crowds (such as those at Aumont’s Café) thirsting for more piquant entertainments, pointed also to a deadening of the senses and a waning of affect. The conditions of modern experience fatigued and drained the life from the city-dweller, even as they kept him/her in a state of fevered delirium. Reading these responses now, they seem also to evoke the lead-poisoned ghosts of industrialisation. The famous images of workers spilling through the gates of the Lumière factory are remade in these responses as spectral suffering figures inhabiting the dark underside of the new dazzling electrified city.

But such responses were, as Tsivian points out, more prevalent before the discomforting aspects of the new technology were gradually papered over.

101 Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” p. 10.

63 Developments in the cinematic apparatus worked together to enhance “message” by reducing the possibilities of distortion or interference, in the process closing off the possibility of such readings as Gorky’s “Kingdom of Shadows.” The velvet curtain covered the troubling void of the blank screen. Projection speeds and, eventually, soundtracks were standardised from cinema to cinema. Narrative drew viewer attention in and away from distortion or interference in the message. As Tsivian argues:

Obviously this type of response ceased to work as cinema passed out of the sphere of “the new” and entered the sphere of “the familiar.” Now cinema was expected to behave according to domestic rules […] Primarily, this was a declaration of war on technology. The technical apparatus, proudly displayed in the previous decade, was pushed behind the scenes. 102

Nevertheless, this shift towards domestication was resisted by some who, like Gippius, railed against such strategies. Remember her comment: “[H]owever much the trombones may ring out, a human being can not help but give a shiver.” 103 She shows an awareness that the use of music is one attempt to normalise her reading of the image, but she resists the trombone’s call to jollity. Tsivian also quotes Konstantin Stanislavsky who, in 1914, still could not accept the cinematograph and, like Pirandello, compared it unfavourably to the stage:

Theatre is alive only because of the ceaseless exchange of spiritual energy between spectator and actor, because of the invisible sympathetic strings that exist between actor and spectator. The cinematograph will never have this, because the live actor is missing, because his spiritual impulse is confined by mechanical means. 104

102 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 23. 103 Ibid., p. 9. 104 Ibid., p. 158.

64 In the early decades of cinema the image of the actor on film was compared unfavourably to the vital presence of the actor of the stage. Currently we see the digital actor being compared unfavourably to the living film actor. Jonathan Foreman, for example, in the New York Post writes of Final Fantasy that the film’s “strange lifelessness reminds you of the all-important energy real-life actors bring to the screen.” 105 Such statements suggest an assumed (if not actual) domestication of the filmic image of the actor.

The door has opened again, and while it remains open before the digital actor becomes domesticated and normalised like the film actor before it, I wish to mine these uncanny responses for the productive estrangement of perspective they reveal. Even as I write this, though, the press commentary on the latest instalment of the Wachowski brothers The Matrix trilogy suggests, with a great deal of hyperbole, that the door is rapidly closing. I will attempt to keep it ajar.

“The deadening feeling”

At first it’s fun to watch the characters, including a hero (Alec Baldwin), a villain (James Woods) and a feisty doctor (Donald Sutherland), hopping around inside a dome that encloses what's left of Manhattan. But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements. Familiar voices emerging from the mouths of replicants erect a distance. The dark backgrounds leave you with the deadening feeling you get after too many hours of playing cybergames. 106

Peter Travers for Rolling Stone magazine locates and emphasises the disquiet in his own response to Final Fantasy , seemingly fascinated by the way it creeps up on him.

105 Jonathan Foreman, ‘’Fantasy’ Isn’t One,” New York Post , 11 July 2001, http://www.nypost.com/movies/071101a.html (accessed 4/4/03). 106 Peter Travers, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Rolling Stone , Issue 874, 2 August 2001, http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/review.asp?mid=2042272&afl=imdb (accessed 4/5/03).

65 Notably, like Gorky, he also resorts to the use of the second person present to encourage the reader’s intimacy and identification with his own personal unease. Perhaps the effect of the image on him is such that he must share it. While other reviewers like Roger Ebert for The Chicago Sun-Tribune and Jay Carr from The Boston Globe suggest that the narrative and character development of the film are too thin to support the spectacle of the animation, Travers suggests that the uncanny qualities of the animation creep into and slowly undermine his enjoyment and involvement in the narrative. 107 His review gives a sense of the unfamiliar seeping into and curling its tentacles around the comfortable familiarity of the action movie text. He notes contradictory cues, such as the dubbed (as opposed to electronically synthesised) voices from well-known actors, which are intended to lend the characters an air of fleshy materiality, but instead call forth the disconcerting sense of ventriloquism at work. The phrase “Familiar voices emerging from the mouths of replicants,” evokes controlling minds steering senseless bodies, as the voices of Ming Na, Donald Sutherland and Alec Baldwin emanate eerily from the empty shells of virtual actors.

Travers’s association of the virtual actors with “coldness” taps into the earlier responses we saw above, such as Hoffmann’s writing of the automaton Olympia and Gippius’s Russian Symbolist association of all things mechanical with death. It also sits within the same category of response as Paul LePetit’s description of the virtual actors as “like three-day-old cadavers (all grey and moving rather strangely).” 108 Nonetheless, even as they share this older Romantic and Symbolist heritage, these evocations of coldness and death are now articulated under new social conditions, and within new technological and philosophical frameworks.

107 Roger Ebert, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , 11 July 2001 http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/07/071101.html (accessed 4/4/03). Carr, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , p. D1. 108 LePetit, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , p. 98.

66 From energy to information

As we have seen, over the past few centuries Western scientific and philosophical thought has tended to imagine organic life through a series of technological metaphors. The “human machine” explained the movement of limbs and vascular flow via a variety of mechanical principles. This was followed by the “human motor” conception of self-perpetuating movement and energy. In the mid-twentieth century the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics indicated another major epistemological shift. Cybernetics according to N. Katherine Hayles’s definition is “a conceptual framework that constituted humans, animals, and machines as information processing devices receiving and transmitting signals to effect goal-directed behaviour.” 109 At the very first of these series of cybernetics conferences, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann announced that the important focus in man-machine equivalence was no longer “energy” but “information.” 110

This announcement marked not only a shift in the fields of technological and biological thought but also an economic transfer from manufacturing, and its requirements of energy, to media and its requirements of information storage and communication. Indeed, in his conclusion to The Human Motor, Rabinbach opines that now “communication is the slogan of the day, not the rationalization of the body. Physical work no longer occupies the position in social thought and practice that it once did in the perceptual universe of the nineteenth century.” 111 He concludes that work is no longer the centre of our world, and our occupations are no longer the core of our identity. Rather, leisure, consumption and communication have replaced labour as the centre of our culture. Glossing over the mass transfer of manufacturing bases to the third world, Rabinbach attributes this major shift in our culture to changing technologies. The automation of so many processes “made possible the gradual elimination of the physical production of material objects. Physical work was

109 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 37. 110 Ibid., p. 51. 111 Rabinbach, The Human Motor , p. 295.

67 being replaced by images, by communication, and by cybernetic systems of self- regulation.” 112 Corporeal work has been largely replaced by work dealing with abstract systems of knowledge.

Despite this shift, the genesis of cybernetics resides in the control requirements of nineteenth century industrialisation. As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz argue in their introduction to Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter :

In the wake of capitalist expansion of productivity and the distribution of goods, engineers had to invent ever more refined feedback loops and control mechanisms to ensure the smooth flow of products to their consumers, and more generally to regulate the flow of data between market needs and demands. 113

I would argue too that, despite the shift away from physical work to the processing of information in our culture, we still have a lingering obsession with maintaining or increasing energy and productivity levels. Shareholder demands for greater efficiency and productivity in the workplace have entailed a move in the past decade or so back towards longer working hours, placing heavier demands on the working mind-body. A walk along the contemporary supermarket aisle reveals an ever-increasing array of “energy booster” foods and drinks as testament to this claim. Perhaps the lingering needs of the material body demonstrate, as Hayles herself argues, that materiality and information cannot be so easily separated. 114

Nevertheless, cybernetics conceives of us less as subjects than as “informational processing devices.” 115 Scott Bukatman argues that our “now completely technologised existence has forced a crisis around untenable definitions of the

112 Ibid., p. 297. 113 Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz, Translators’ Introduction, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , by Friedrich Kittler (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. xxxvi. 114 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman , p. 48. 115 Stephen Pfohl, “The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener,” CTHEORY , article A044, 16 January 1997, http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=86 , p. 1 (accessed 4/4/03).

68 human.” 116 Bukatman goes on to claim that science fiction is the place in which to search for new subject positions capable of coping with such a situation. This is because contemporary science fiction does not focus on technology per se but on the interface of technology and the human subject or “the narration of the technological mode of being in the world.” 117 He calls this position “Terminal identity,” a reference to the perceived end of the liberal humanist conception of the subject, but also an evocation of a new subjectivity constructed through terminal screen interfaces such as televisions and computers: “The world has been refigured as a simulation within the mega-computer banks of the Information Society. Terminal identity exists as the metaphorical mode of engagement with this model of an imploded culture.” 118

Cybernetic theory conceives the boundaries between self and world as porous, shifting and unstable. So-called “cyberpunk” writers, such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, have endeavoured to write characters who traverse these boundaries with ease or who leave their bodies, “uploading” their minds onto computers and becoming “pure information.” While Bukatman argues that such fantasies of disappearing or dissolving into electronic space are seen as empowering, Marshall McLuhan was far more ambivalent about this situation. 119 Rather than envisaging the self as spreading its tendrils outwards through electronic circuits and filaments in an image of liberation from biology, he saw the self as putting out synthetic feelers while withdrawing its locus ever inwards.

From protective shields to auto-amputation

Considering the transformative effects of technological media on human beings, McLuhan believed that the central nervous system reacts to stress and trauma by “auto-amputation.” In some ways reminiscent of the concept of the protective shield

116 Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 5. 117 Ibid., p. 6. 118 Ibid., p. 22. 119 Bukatman, Terminal Identity , p. 21.

69 developed in response to overstimulating and traumatic urban environments, the medical concept of auto-amputation suggests a numbing withdrawal inwards. McLuhan thought that this defensive process provided the impetus for technological innovation. In his schema technologies are conceived of as compensatory prostheses, providing a buffer zone between the self and the world, and replacing that which has been forced to become numb and withdraw. 120 McLuhan saw the problem with this process as being that each new technological buffer or prosthetic also brings with it the intensification of the very stimuli from which the self is attempting to shrink. He argued that the electronic age had seen this process culminate in the steady numbing of the nervous system and its prosthetisation in the form of the computer network.

That “deadening feeling” Peter Travers ascribes to both playing cybergames and watching Final Fantasy is a symptom of this numbing withdrawal from electronic stimuli. The “deadening feeling” reminds him of the desensitised and numbed state reached after hours spent, joystick, keypad or game-controller in hand, manoeuvering through screen-worlds. Travers thus shows an awareness in his response of the effects of contemporary entertainment technologies on his sense of self.

In Zeros + Ones Sadie Plant also writes of the defence mechanisms that the human nervous system develops in order to cope with increasing levels of stimuli. She sees this defence more in the traditional terms of the “shield” or as the growth of a protective coating that transforms organisms into beings “whose outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter [and who] becomes to some degree inorganic.” 121 In such a metaphorical scenario, vulnerable porous skin becomes teflon or silicon – the very materials evoked by the unnatural waxiness of the “skin” of the virtual actor in Rob Lowing’s and Jay Carr’s responses to Final Fantasy . The characterisation of the Final Fantasy cast in terms of dummies, dolls, mannequins, puppets and replicants places the digital actor within a heritage of

120 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1987), Chapter 4, “The Gadget Lover.” 121 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1998) , pp. 183-4.

70 uncanny objects going back at least to E.T.A. Hoffmann. Their uncanniness is defined through the sense of ontological uncertainty that always accompanies such objects. These objects, nonetheless, more than ever remind us of their converse: the living being who appear inanimate or deadened to some degree. 122 Such a reading is especially apparent in two reviews that focus on the eyes of the virtual actors. In Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek writes: “They look at each other and their gazes don't quite meet – there's something a little blank, even slightly cross-eyed, about them.” 123 Kenneth Turan also notes: “These are 3-D beings who look completely human and yet completely Other. But their eyes, like much of the movie, seem empty and mostly expressionless. They're not just like real people; they're like really boring people.” 124

This motif of blank, emotionless gazes, Travers’s remarks about the “coldness of the eyes,” as well as Turan’s reference to “really boring people,” educe the types of characters who populate the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. While Zola chronicled and celebrated, albeit with some ambivalence, the effects of the late nineteenth century consumer economy, Easton Ellis marks the effects of the incremental intensification of mediated experience, consumerism and the worship of celebrity on relationships in the late twentieth century. It may be argued that alienated, isolated and non- empathetic figures have become almost a cliché of both modern and post-modern literature. But, as Tsivian wrote of early Russian responses to the cinematograph, they resonated “by putting new life into old literary clichés.” 125 A similar relationship may be seen between those responses to Final Fantasy that latch onto the blank, cold, emotionless quality of the virtual cast and the blank empty figures who drift through the pages of Easton Ellis’s writing.

122 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” p. 226. 123 Stephanie Zacharek, Review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Salon.com, 13 July 2001, http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/07/13/final_fantasy/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110 (accessed 4/5/03). 124 Vognar, Dallas Morning News , 11 July, 2001, online. 125 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 4.

71 “Really boring people”

“You were never there. You were never there.” I stop. “You were never… alive.”

“I was…alive,” he says feebly. “Alive?”

“No you weren’t,” I say. “You know what I mean.”

“What was I, then?” he asks.

“You were just” – I pause, look out over the expanse of white carpet into a massive white kitchen, white chairs on a gleaming tiled floor – “not dead.” 126

In Easton Ellis’s novel The Informers this disconnected exchange between wife and husband takes place in the sterile unmarked surrounds of the white blank décor of their apartment. According to the wife, the husband has been not “there,” not “present,” not “dead” but not “alive.” Neither of them has left a mark of their lives in the apartment. The gleaming tiles and clean spotless carpet have no hint of the wear and tear that comes with living in a home. The apartment is a clinical mausoleum space, a showroom or a display case for the un-dead.

The blankness of gazes, missed connection between characters, a sense of them being devoid of interior life, that their homes and apartments are lifestyle magazine simulations – these are all common motifs in Easton Ellis’s work. In Less Than Zero , the narrator Clay notes the sameness of his acquaintances, their apparent interchangeability, and how when people move to Los Angeles, they begin to lose their individuality and drift into a pattern of sameness and blankness. Entering the lounge room of a party in Malibu, he comments:

There are mostly young boys in the house and they seem to be in every room and they all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank

126 Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers (Great Britain: Picador, 1994), p. 101.

72 look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them. 127

In The Informers also an unnamed older woman notes of her younger lover: “I take a drag of his cigarette and look up at Martin, who is very tan and strong and young, with blue eyes that are so vague and blank they are impossible not to fall into.” 128 At least in part this vagueness and blankness is attributable to the fact that the television is always on, and characters are always only half-engaged in conversation, distracted by the screen that continually intrudes upon their attention.

As McLuhan argued, our media technology extends us and projects our cognition into the world, while simultaneously screening our immediate social environment out. In urban space the Walkman (or any other portable music device with headphones) sonically screens out our environment and also blocks out the voices of others, instead immersing us in media. It provides us with a sensory shield for the ears, as sunglasses, more than just blocking the sun, shield our eyes from gaze of others, or hide the perhaps unsanctioned direction of our own gaze in the city street, on public transport or increasingly even in nightclubs. Technologies such as these function as prosthetic shields for the senses, enabling us to withdraw inwards in public space and to disengage from others in our environment.

Characters in Easton Ellis’s novels are often presented as inscrutable and blank behind dark sunglasses, their eyes like black plastic discs, deflecting and screening others. The Walkman or Discman also give some characters, like Victor in Glamorama , a sense of living in a movie with their own private soundtrack adding prosthetic emotional cues to various situations. 129 The Informers , a novel written from a different character’s perspective in each chapter, revolves around a series of interconnected lives where each character’s voice reads the same as the last. In one chapter a father belatedly tries to connect with his teenage son while on holiday in Hawaii:

127 Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero (Great Britain: Picador, 1986), p. 140. 128 Easton Ellis, The Informers , p. 35. 129 Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (London: Picador, 1999).

73 Tim shrugs catatonically and pushes his sunglasses back up. I’m not sure he heard what I said, due to the Walkman, but he realized I spoke. It is impossible to know what he wants. Looking at Tim, one can’t help but feeling great waves of uncertainty, an absence of aim, of purpose, as if he is a person who simply doesn’t matter. 130

Narration in Easton Ellis’s novels takes the form of a continually unfolding first person present expressing the detached point of view of a main character. This style of writing records accounts of action but little inner reflection. Lines like “Blair nods, then coughs” read like pared down stage directions, minutes from an uneventful business meeting, commentary from a distant spectator watching through a camera viewfinder, or a dispassionate report of action unfolding on a television screen. The act of recording is an act of removal and detachment, deferring experience of the moment and reflection upon its meaning until a later date. But reflection is also usually impossible, as characters find concentration and engagement difficult. A couple seated in a multiplex cinema, for instance, cannot remember the narrative of a film they have just seen, as the credits roll down the screen. The experience of what they have just seen is already melting into the air.

Easton Ellis’s characters are interchangeable. Their names flash by with little information to distinguish them – just a blur of tanned skin and blonde hair. Indeed, a sense of differentiation becomes increasingly meaningless to the main characters in each novel. They find, as the new character names multiply with each turn of the page, that they can no longer keep track of who is who. Characters misidentify each other, and even the principal narrators are often the victim of mistaken identity or misnaming. The repeated line in Glamorama , “we’ll slide down the surface of things,” could be describing the reader’s relation with the text. It is impossible to find an entrance into these characters – they are slippery silicon-skinned figures with little hint of interior life and no porousness.

130 Easton Ellis, The Informers , p. 56.

74 Leisure time unfolds as an endless round of repetitious parties, cocaine and the pretence of “having fun” which is never achieved, to the point where the books themselves reproduce in the reader the characters’ experiences of repetition, boredom and non-engagement. Zola’s Ladies’ Paradise with its giddying electrifying displays and lusty, desiring and thrilled customers has been replaced by the Beverly Center, a vast multi-storied shopping mall incorporating a multiplex cinema, where bored teens hang passive and useless. They struggle half-heartedly to keep their eyes open, to feel anything, and they lose that struggle. They drive around and around purposely with no fixed destination, just killing time.

Easton Ellis’s work registers a deepening chill, a kind of updating of the creeping deathliness and joylessness that Gorky both experienced and saw on the screen at Aumont’s Café, a hundred years before. The nineteenth century’s “hunger for thrills” and “lust of the eyes” of which Gunning wrote, has in Easton Ellis’s novels given way to a joyless automatic need that remains perpetually unsatisfied. It is as if the sensory shield of the city dweller has grown so thick and hardened that no thrill can penetrate, leaving these characters unreceptive and deadened. The only things that spark a genuine response are those that entail the direct undeniable physical suffering of the human body: death, torture and mutilation. But, as Sheli Ayers points out, in Glamorama the characters find that even “tortured and dead bodies look inauthentic, like props or wax anatomical dummies.” 131

Moving through Easton Ellis’s oeuvre, from novel to novel we find that the presence of media is increasingly central, and that there is a developing obsession with images and surface. By the time we reach his recent work, Glamorama , the main characters are followed everywhere by camera crews. They have flattened out to the point of becoming mere breathing images who speak in advertising copy and the lyrics of AM radio songs, cry with glycerin tears and offer canned responses. They remind each

131 Sheli Ayers, “Glamorama Vanitas: Bret Easton Ellis’s Postmodern Allegory,” PMC , vol. 11, no. 1 September 2000, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.900/11.1.r_ayers.txt , p. 3 (accessed 5/7/04).

75 other of mannequins, advertising campaigns and of other celebrities. In this context the reviews of Final Fantasy which describe its virtual cast in terms of dummies, puppets, and “mannequins in Macy’s window,” which shiver at the “cold blankness” of their eyes, and which feel a “deadening feeling” seeping from the screen, could well be tapping into the same imagery, texts, and perceptions that influence Easton Ellis’s work.

These reviewers are uncomfortable with the computer-generated actors, indicating that they are reminded of people who, while physically flesh and blood, seem all slick surface, manufactured and insincere. With the prevalence of silicon implants changing the ideal human silhouette and botox injections disabling facial expressions, some people are beginning to appear vaguely inhuman. In this cultural context, where increasingly so much of our experience including our relationships is mediated through image technologies and where so much of our media is taken up with a focus on fleeting fame and celebrity, Mary Flanagan asserts provocatively that we no longer need human stars:

In this age of information technology, who really needs physical, human stars, these Meg Ryans, Jennifer Anistons and Brad Pitts with their less than perfect grins? Why bother reading about them so much – and paying them so much? They ultimately cannot help us, cannot be with us, cannot be ours. Why not fall for a digital star instead? 132

We inhabit a mediascape populated by those whose images are heavily constructed through plastic surgery, wardrobe stylists, spin-doctoring and public relations consultancies – not to mention digital retouching or enhancement. Flanagan argues that the digital actor is eminently suited to such a culture, much more so than the inadequate organic messiness of humans. Besides her criticisms of people as being aesthetically “less than perfect,” she contends that the human star must ultimately

132 Mary Flanagan, “Digital Stars are Here to Stay,” Convergence , summer 1999, vol. 5, no. 2, p. 16.

76 disappoint, for his/her body and mind must eventually disintegrate. 133 The virtual actor is for Flanagan a “denial of presence.” In her scenario, the virtual star is a metaphorical shrugging of the shoulders at the shriveling and final gasp of any misguided notion of the “real,” and a resigned turning to those things that do not threaten to remind us of what we might be losing. Unlike the celluloid image with its uneasy holding in tension of absence and presence, and its intrusive questions of death and mortality (both our own and others), the virtual actor allows us the immediate pleasure of an engagement in the here and now: “The non-corporeal digital star is a perfect match to a technology of representation and subjectivities that mediate our experience.” 134

Additionally, those who champion or celebrate the digital star tend to emphasise the potential for interaction with this figure. Timothy Binkley stresses that, because the digital image exists in numbers, it can be “continuously subjected to computation based on user input,” and can, therefore, be made to appear “aware” of the viewer/user. 135 Tellingly, he contrasts this interactive digital image with the “frozen apparition” of the analogue image, noting that, “their subjects are oblivious to our approach.” 136 Flanagan also suggests a concern with the obliviousness of the analogue image when she disparages the Hollywood star who “cannot be ours,” and declares:

The digital star offers so much more than the conventional physically-bound star of the cinema. We will see more of these stars, we will have one-on-one relationships with them, and they will develop further to fulfil our fantasies. 137

133 Ibid., p. 17. 134 Ibid. 135 Timothy Binkley, “The Vitality of Digital Creation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 55, no. 2, 1997, p. 113. 136 Ibid. 137 Flanagan, “Digital Stars are Here to Stay,” p. 20.

77 The next chapter explores a cultural history of the promotion, both ironic and genuine, of artificial ideal figures as exemplifiers of modernity. It will also look at the desire for an image that “looks back” at us.

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Figure 3. The face of the machine: the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis .

Figure 4. Head shot of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within .

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Chapter 2. Enchanting objects: tales of seduction and wary resistance

The “digital apparition” is the light that illuminates for us the night of the yawning emptiness around and in us. We ourselves, then, are the spotlights that project the alternative worlds against the nothingness and into the nothingness. 1

But I suspect I should find myself rather too alone in the company of your unaware Eve. 2

In Tomorrow’s Eve , by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the melancholic Lord Ewald is miserable in his infatuation with an aspiring actress, Miss Alicia Clary. On the brink of suicide, Ewald confides in his friend, Thomas Edison, telling the (fictionalised) inventor that, while he is captivated by the radiance of Alicia’s physical beauty, he is repulsed by her dull, complacent materialism and grasping desire for fame and money. He speaks of himself as being shackled to her in helpless desire, while also joylessly disconnected and emotionally distanced from her due to Alicia’s ostentation, hypocrisy and “unconscious coldness of heart.” 3 Edison endeavours to solve Ewald’s problem by building him an android called “Hadaly” (allegedly an Iranian word meaning “Ideal”), physically identical in every way to Alicia, but “without the consciousness with which she seems afflicted.” Instead Edison programmes her with

1 Vilém Flusser, “Digital Apparition” in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation , ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), p. 245. 2 Lord Ewald in Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Eve Future 1886, translated elsewhere as Eve of the Future ), by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, trans. Robert Martin Adams (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 68. 3 Ibid., p. 43.

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a “cylinder of gestures and speech” which will give her the appearance of being inspirited. 4

Negative and doubtful at first, Ewald follows Edison through his enchanted labyrinthine workshops at Menlo Park, observing and questioning all the aspects of the creation process and the philosophical implications of interacting with a machine. As in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, one of his deepest misgivings is about the machine’s unawareness and unconsciousness of him. He fears that he shall be able to sense its remoteness, no matter how cleverly this might be masked through technological tricks and an illusion of responsive warmth. Although Edison is building Hadaly as an ideal companion, Ewald believes that in the android’s company he shall feel even more alone and alienated than before. Edison, however, has an answer for each one of his friend’s misgivings. This mainly takes the form of a didactic spiel in which Edison repeatedly uses rhetoric and anecdote to demonstrate how the line between the machine and the modern person has come to blur, and how mechanical the human Alicia already appears. Ewald, after all has previously complained at length of how Alicia’s beauty is not sufficient to mask her internal qualities, for they are manifested in her “flat and complacent tone of voice” and seem to imbue her with an “empty and mechanical fidelity.” 5

As with most of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s writing, the novel did not mesh with the popular tastes of his time, having only minor success in its incomplete serialisation in first La Gaulois and then L’Etoile Francais .6 Nevertheless, as with many works considered out of step with the tempo of their times, the novel has been reclaimed by later generations. We can now see Tomorrow’s Eve as opening a window into its late nineteenth century context, revealing a peculiar perspective on the modern transformation of human experience and the ascent of technological representation.

4 Ibid., pp. 84-5. 5 Ibid., p. 43. 6 A.W. Raitt, The Life of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 188-209.

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Over the winter of 1878-79, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (henceforth referred to as Villiers) wrote the bulk of Tomorrow’s Eve in an unfurnished and freezing Parisian garret. Impoverished and embittered, he is said to have poured his bile at the inhabitants of the modern world onto sheets of paper resting on bare floorboards. 7 By this time Thomas Alva Edison had become a celebrated figure in both America and Europe. This was due in no small part to his own publicity campaigns which, according to Gaby Wood, strove to present him as a “modern-day Prometheus who had single- handedly transformed the world with his inventions.” 8 In Villiers’s work Edison is a mysterious god-like figure. Along with Lord Ewald, he also takes on the role of mouthpiece for Villiers’s own views on the hollow and mechanical temperament of the late nineteenth century city-dweller, transformed by various forces of modernity including many of Edison’s own inventions.

Villiers demonstrates a particular scorn for the female consumer, constructing an image of an empty and deceptive creature whose illusory beauty and youth rely on factory-manufactured creams, tinctures, stockings, corsetry, prosthetic bosoms, false teeth, hair-pieces and other purchased accoutrements. For him, these material fragments do not create a picture of womanly glamour, but instead a “banal assemblage of false elements.” 9 This criticism of materialism is in tune with Villiers’s known opinions, which he often expressed in vehement but hilarious satirical performances in cafes and soirees, as well as in his collection of short stories, Cruel Tales .10 According to Robert Martin Adams, the character Alicia was drawn from Villiers’s own experiences with a young English heiress, Anna Eyre, who spurned his eccentric amorous advances and feverishly passionate poetry readings. Villiers bitterly

7 Robert Martin Adams, Translator’s Introduction, Tomorrow’s Eve by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. xiii. 8 Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) , p. 108. 9 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 115. 10 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Cruel Tales (1883), trans. Robert Boldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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attributed this rejection to her bourgeois materialism and lack of an emotional life, both for him particularly modern characteristics. 11

The conversations that Villiers wrote between Edison and Ewald reveal in places something that moves beyond personal bitterness to philosophical inquiry. Besides aiming to demonstrate the interchangeability of modern woman and machine, Villiers also spends a great deal of time working through the nature of our responses to representation and the possible causes of disruption to the success of an illusion. We see this in Ewald’s fear of his own alienation and remoteness from the android. He fears the indifference of the object. He fears not just the innate qualities of the machine, but that his own unforgettable knowledge of its operation will undercut the success of the illusion. When the completed Hadaly is finally presented to him in the closing pages of the book, Ewald will have seen the machine lying on the laboratory table, open, blank and silent, revealing the mysteries of her operations within. Because of this, he worries that his own knowledge of these intimate mechanisms, and of what lies beneath her simulated skin, will taint his response and disrupt his pleasure in the image. This is the one misgiving with which Edison seems to concur. He ensures, then, that the android’s face always remains discreetly covered by a black veil, until the intended time of her revelation as the perfect simulacrum of Miss Alicia Clary. When Ewald asks about the veil, Edison replies:

I supposed [...] that you were not eager to create a memory in your mind which might rise up and disturb the vision I have promised you. The face that I could show you this evening could remain fixed in your thoughts, and would forever suffuse those future features in which your hopes are eternally embodied. 12

This ineradicable knowledge of origins is one of the cruxes of the novel, and leads us to anticipate that, no matter how perfect the simulation, Ewald’s enjoyment of the

11 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 115. 12 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , pp. 149-50.

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android will be marred by an involuntary mental superimposition of the machine’s face. Here, Tomorrow’s Eve explores the relationship between knowledge, sense perception and belief, prefiguring major questions in film theory about the workings of cinema spectatorship. The operation of a film spectatorship involving a willing suspension of belief in the image can be roughly characterized as “I know, and yet I see.” 13 For this reason, Annette Michelson argues that L’Eve Future (she refers to the text by its French title) “is a greatly privileged instance in the formation of our arsenal of mechanical reproduction, initiated, as it were, by photography, extended by telegraphy, phonography, cinematography, holography, television, and the computer.” 14 Some of the themes and motifs in the novel can be seen to resonate at later moments, including at the beginning of this twenty-first century as the ascent of representation continues on a trajectory through digital realms.

Barbara Creed has recently revisited this question of the operation of knowledge, sense perception and belief in her speculative work on the cyberstar. Creed wonders if it will matter to us that these figures have no unconscious. Will our knowledge that the figure onscreen has not experienced birth, desire or loss, and has no awareness of its own future death have an impact on our ability to identify with cyberstars? 15 The stakes are obviously much higher in Tomorrow’s Eve . The suicidal Ewald claims that his very life depends upon the success of the illusion in dispelling his crippling loneliness and alienation. Yet Creed’s musings on this point echo Villiers’s exploration of a knowledge that overwhelms belief in illusion. It is curious then that Aki Ross of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within has been promoted in a way that is designed to encourage a response in which belief in what we see is undercut by a deliberate revelation of technological operations. The next section will examine how and why this response is elicited, and what other discourses and texts this kind of promotion taps into.

13 Tom Gunning refers to this operation as “I know very well … but all the same.” “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film , ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 115. 14 Annette Michelson, “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” October , vol. 29, summer 1984, p. 4. 15 Creed, “The Cyberstar: Digital Pleasures and the End of the Unconscious,” Screen , vol. 41, no. 1, spring 2000, ” p. 84.

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The face of the machine

In 2001 the release of Final Fantasy and the promotion of its computer-generated “star” Aki Ross, generated an explosion of discussion about the synthespian or virtual actor, and its capacity or incapacity to “seduce” the viewer. While some writers enthusiastically championed the near photo-realism of the image, 16 others expressed disappointment that the image was “not quite there yet” evidencing a desire to be not just convinced but swept away, as yet unfulfilled. 17 Others still refused to be moved, stood distant and detached from the image, and looked at these characters with a hyper-critical and disenchanted eye. 18 In the reviews examined in chapter one, Aki was received as something blandly discomforting, vaguely reminiscent of a pervasive increasing artificiality, of the kind perhaps prefigured by Villiers in his characterisation of Alicia Clary. As we saw, the disposition of the viewer will go some way to determine whether the technological illusion succeeds or fails in its ostensible aims. I am interested here, however, in exploring the strategies employed by the image/object in its contribution to the push-pull of this relationship. While Villiers’s Edison makes certain to veil the face of the unfinished Hadaly before the moment of her revelation, Aki’s creators appear to deliberately solicit an ambivalent viewer response, by creating a theatrical arena where the layers of the image are removed.

This arena is an option titled “Aki photo shoot,” available on the special features menu of the DVD release of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . The beginning of the “photo shoot” consists of a series of still poses of Aki in a skimpy high-cut black bikini. As one image replaces another in the series, elements of the image begin to be removed or manipulated as if by invisible hands. The shaded wall against which she is shown leaning, is first erased. Next the entire image is rendered in silver, with Aki standing like a spray-painted statue with blank sightless eyes and immovable hair

16 Jay Carr, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Boston Globe , 11 July 2001, p. D1. 17 Peter Bradshaw, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , The Guardian , UK, 3 August 2001, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,531411,00.html (accessed 5/4/03). 18 Rob Lowing, “Dummy Run” Review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sun Herald , 29 July 2001, p. 8.

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against a silver wall. This image recollects both the first unveiling of the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Hajime Sorayama’s “hyper illustrations” of soft-porn androids or “Sexy Robots” as they are officially known from the late 1970s and 1980s. 19 Progressively more surface detail is stripped away as the silver Aki is replaced by a flesh-tone Aki, bald and featureless like an abandoned store-window mannequin with holes for eyes and her face spooky, like a hollow mask. Finally even this covering is divested and we briefly see the green wire-frame skeleton that underpins the fantasy of Aki’s pliant flesh and salon-fresh hair, before we return with some relief to the Aki of human appearance.

This “photo shoot” bemuses, for it attempts to position Aki outside the text, building for her an imaginary pro-filmic existence by posing her as a conventional starlet at her first magazine shoot. The starlet imagery and this rudimentary sense of an existence outside the textual boundaries of the film are reminiscent of what Richard deCordova calls “picture personality” discourse. This early phase in the development of the Hollywood star system acknowledged the actor’s individual existence beyond the film’s boundaries, and ushered in a “play of surface and depth” that encouraged an increasingly more intimate engagement with the image, with the promise of progressive revelation of layers of truth and secrets. 20

The first images in the series, like all conventional magazine images of starlets, pull in the gaze and invite the imaginary touch of the viewer. The insubstantial bikini, barely covering breasts and crotch, aims to stimulate curiosity for further unveiling of what lies beneath the digital fabric. What is revealed, however, is not the “truth” of a sexual body, but the operation of technology. The layers of computer rendering refer indirectly to the labour of technicians required to construct such a tactile “natural” image. In this sequence and in many press and trade articles printed about Aki, much of the focus is on the time, labour and capital which were required to build each

19 Metropolis , dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927. Examples of Hajime Sorayama’s “Sexy Robot” imagery are available online at his official web site http://www.sorayama.net (accessed 20/7/04). 20 Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2nd edn. 2001), pp. 131-40.

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software package responsible for skin texture, hair movement, facial expression, gesture and so on. 21 She is continually presented as a “benchmark” in the development of virtual actors, a virtual embodiment of how the discourses of high- tech and “state-of-the-art” are inextricably bound up with the ever-newness of capitalism. 22 The discourse of high-tech jostles uneasily with the discourse of the starlet, for these images of Aki have not only appeared in journals devoted to science and technology but also within the pages of men’s magazines. In particular, an image of Aki in the bikini featured both inside on the cover of MAXIM Magazine’ s “Hot 100” issue for 2002. 23

Aki’s photo shoot straddles two discursive fields, for at the same time the visual connotations of some of the images in this DVD segment position her within a science fiction lineage of texts about artificial women. As the photo-shoot sequence progresses by stripping the image back to reveal the technological operation beneath the artificiality of the starlet, the image calls up memories of other fictional technological women. Her visage seems to regress through the annals of science fiction’s machine women, plotting a path from William Gibson’s digital Idoru of 1996 to Fritz Lang’s silver robot (1927) and Villiers’s Hadaly (1886), to Hoffmann’s eyeless and wooden Olympia of 1818. 24 Read historically, these textual creatures are the products of their respective authors’ responses to both mimetic technologies and the conditions of their particular moment in modernity. The figure in its forms of the automaton, the android and the digital actor, exists as both historical object and textual motif. As we saw in chapter one, these two forms are difficult to disentangle. The textualised form often expresses some kind of cultural response to technology, while the objects of technology are often unveiled within a theatrical context that

21 See, for example, the online production notes for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , p. 13. Bruce Newman, “Now That’s a Bad Hair Day,” (e-commerce report) Sydney Morning Herald , 15 May 2001, p. 8, and Sue Williams, “It’s No Act,” (profile on Aki Ross), Sun Herald , Sunday Metro, 22 July 2001, p. 3. 22 R.L. Rutsky, High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Post-Human (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 23 MAXIM Magazine , “Hot 100” Issue, April 2002. 24 William Gibson, Idoru (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1997).

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owes much to previous textual imaginings. The “artificial woman” text and its surrounding discourse tend to become a haze through which the actual figures of the automaton, the animated waxwork, the hologram, the robot and the virtual actor are anticipated and received. It is for this reason that the remainder of this chapter will analyse certain tendencies of and differences between these texts, in order to see what kinds of cultural and historical forces are at work in the production and reception of objects like Aki Ross.

Sadie Plant argues that such texts as Tomorrow’s Eve , Metropolis , and The Stepford Wives are male fantasies of compliant robot doubles replacing the unruly female. 25 Certainly in some entertainment press articles the virtual actor and synthespian are often touted (with an evident amount of schadenfreude ) as ultimately replacing the celebrity who, in these contexts, tends to be painted as a demanding, unprofessional, overpaid, pampered primadonna. 26 This fantasy has even been the subject of a recent film, S1m0ne , in which a Hollywood director replaces his temperamental and greedy star with a blonde and blue-eyed digital construct. 27 The one recurring joke of the film is that no one even suspects that the synthespian is not human. S1m0ne is a satirical and rather didactic commentary on the artifice of Hollywood and the perceived “phoniness” of those who live and work there. More usually, though, this fantasy of usurpation is less straightforward, being held in tension with several anxieties. As we see in Tomorrow’s Eve , these stories often tend to express a degree of disquiet about the transformation of the female body and “femininity” through technology, media, work and consumerism. There is also an anxiety about the indifference and remoteness of the object, as well as an uneasiness concerning the potential for the viewer’s knowledge to disrupt his/her pleasure in the image. This unease is

25 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1998), p. 87. The Stepford Wives : a novel by Ira Levin (London: Bloomsbury, 1972). Originally directed for the screen as a latter-day gothic horror film by Bryan Forbes in 1975. A remake directed by Frank Oz, with an apparently more jolly and satirical tone, is in release for 2004. 26 See, for example, Williams, “It’s No Act,” p. 3. Flanagan’s valourisation of digital actors in “Digital Stars are Here to Stay” also takes a derisive tone towards human stars. 27 S1m0ne , dir. Andrew Niccol, USA, 2002.

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underpinned by a perception of these figures as inanimate objects that have gained animation through technological means.

These objects are shown to employ strategies to either “enchant” an unwitting viewer/companion or, at the very least, to overcome the anxieties mentioned above. This notion of “ensnarement” or “enchantment” often becomes a source of anxiety within the text, one that is either voiced indirectly through modes of narration, or distilled in a figure who actively resists the attractions of the object, and tries to warn others against deception. So we see here a tension at work between an anxiety about being enchanted by the object, of being “deceived” if you will, and an anxiety about being disenchanted, of the illusion not “working.” This occurs either through the intrusion of rational knowledge on the part of the viewer or the viewer’s sense of the object’s indifference to them. This chapter will analyse the operation of this ambivalence across a number of texts, and try to fathom its relation to anxieties about the transformation of experience through modernity, and the ascent of representation.

Lord Ewald’s alienation

Lord Ewald’s burden is his alienation and profound sense of aloneness; symptoms of existing in a world that seems blind, deaf and unaware of his presence. He dreads his first encounter with the robot, anticipating its unawareness and unconsciousness of him. Similar themes of alienation run through the works of some of Villiers’s contemporaries, most notably in the poems of Charles Baudelaire. The young Villiers was an acquaintance and fervent admirer of the older, taciturn, and apparently anti- social Baudelaire, whose writings and ideas the young man avidly devoured. 28 Perhaps Villiers’s use of the theme of unawareness and unconsciousness comes from a similar place to the motif, found in Baudelaire’s writing, of eyes that have “lost their ability to

28 Raitt, The Life of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam , p. 30.

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look.” 29 As we saw in chapter one, Benjamin observes that Baudelaire’s work registers aspects of nineteenth century modernity, such as the teeming crowd and the new metropolis. Benjamin sees modernity as having a dramatic effect on experience, in particular on the disintegration of what he calls the “aura.”

The auratic experience is, in the context of Baudelaire, intimately connected with eyes, which sensing they are being looked at, return the gaze of the looker. 30 This return of the gaze implies awareness, consciousness and a connection between subject and object that overcomes alienation. The metropolis of the nineteenth century brought the unprecedented suffocating presence of thousands of strangers into close proximity, pushing against one another in the crowded streets, and on trains and buses, feeling the warmth of each other’s bodies and polluted breath. The closeness of strange bodies was unfamiliar and confronting, but could be kept psychically at bay by a refusal to register the stranger with the conscious gaze. As Graeme Gilloch writes:

[T]he metropolis demands that one appear to look without seeing. In the crowded buses and trains of the city the passenger must still find empty spaces into which he or she may safely stare [...] In the crowd, one may see many people, but one notices no one, one looks at no one, one recognizes no one. 31

For Villiers, an inhabitant of Paris (a city then obsessed with the modern), the citizen had become one who routinely blocked the gaze of others. As we saw in The Ladies’ Paradise , their eyes lit up only for the city itself and its dazzling displays of commodities and technologies. This intensification of a general obsession with money, mass consumer culture, technological progress and the realm of appearances, frustrated Villiers, who evidently saw this obsession as most clearly embodied in the

29 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939, in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Great Britain: Fontana Press, 1992), p. 185. 30 Ibid., pp. 184-6. 31 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press), 1996, p. 145.

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young urban woman. What it is then that Ewald seeks from Hadaly (and what he fears he will not receive) is a retrieval of an auratic experience previously extinguished in his fruitless and disillusioning interactions with Alicia Clary.

Auratic prototypes

Intriguingly, Hadaly is written throughout the novel as a kind of fetishised commodity. An ambivalent yearning pervades the descriptions of her so that she becomes not only a would-be companion, but the ultimate in technological luxury objects. In these descriptions, that go on for many pages, the machine is broken down into its constitutive segments, and each of these is lavished with the fetishistic attention of the narrator, just as the appearance of Ewald’s lover Alicia has been similarly deconstructed before. But while Alicia is described in terms of natural imagery (trees, flowers, animals and pagan goddesses), we are told that the android is meticulously crafted as if by jewellers from the most precious metals. Her joints are lubricated with oil of roses and she is clad in pearls and silks. Her inner mechanisms are tuned with the precision of Swiss clocks and her body is enveloped in a fine velvety skin, fashioned from some new mysterious material just invented. 32

Hadaly is “cutting edge,” haloed in the late nineteenth century equivalent of our contemporary high-tech discourse. In this way we note that these descriptive passages do not merely contrast her to her human double Alicia but that Edison takes pains to define her in relation to the automata of past decades. These creatures he derides as hideous puppets and uncanny wooden dolls that “reek of gutta-percha.” Their mechanical origins are painfully apparent in “the sound of the key in the mechanism.” Hadaly, he insists, will conceal her origins. She will be a perfect simulacrum, seamless, whole and complete. 33

32 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , pp. 129-54. 33 Ibid., p. 61.

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Notably, Hadaly is also defined in relation to another figure: a Miss Evelyn Habal, whose sordid story Edison narrates. Habal was a dancer who some years before seduced a close friend of Edison and brought him to ruin and disease. It becomes clear that Hadaly is not merely Ewald’s revenge on Alicia. The android serves as Edison’s revenge on Evelyn Habal and indeed all those women who he deems deceptive and morally questionable. Having died some years before, all that remains of Habal is a drawer, which Edison keeps, full of the accoutrements of the feminine seductive arts. Stained bosom padding and corsets, greasy potted remnants of face paints, matted wigs – a grotesque assortment of objects once glittering in the windows of shops, now used, abandoned and obsolete.34 If these ashen remains of Habal are the discarded and shameful rubbish of yesterday Hadaly, by contrast, has the gleam and allure of the ultimate luxury commodity.

Moreover, the unwitting woman’s mechanical usurper is not mass-produced, but singular and exotic, crafted by the cleverest hands from the finest luxury materials. 35 Her exclusive luxury status is all the more emphasized by her singularity. The fact that there is only one Hadaly, and that she is yet to roll off the production line in her thousands, intensifies her auratic glow. This is indeed the case for all the artificial women in these texts. They are not mass-produced and are therefore not sullied by connotations of dull sameness. Similarly, the way in which Hadaly is unveiled emphasizes her status as an object for display. While Habal’s remains are hidden away, shoved roughly into a box, Hadaly makes a grand entrance. Edison summons the android up from her cavern via some kind of elevator, and black velvet curtains are swept aside revealing her enigmatic, mysterious figure.

The vision seemed to have features compounded of shadow; a string of pearls across her forehead supported a dark veil which obscured the entire lower part of her head. A coat of armour, shaped as for a woman out of

34 Ibid., pp. 119-21. 35 Ibid., p. 57.

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silver plates, glowed with a soft radiance. Closely molded to the figure, with a thousand perfect nuances, it suggested elegant and virginal forms. 36

This description of Hadaly and her unveiling are similar to the way that we are first shown the robot in Metropolis . It is likely that Fritz Lang had read Tomorrow’s Eve , for his film robot is at times reminiscent of Villiers’s creation. Our first view of the robot is at the scientist Rotwang’s house, where he unveils his creation for Fredersen, the controller of the city. Claiming to have at last created a machine which will replace the wretched human workers whose needs and failings are detrimental to the city’s industrial processes, Rotwang, with a theatrical flourish, whips aside a dark velvet curtain to reveal the robot sitting on a small dais, waiting impassively. At his command, it stands and slowly walks forward. Surprisingly for one whose stated purpose is to usurp the film’s predominantly male workers, the robot’s figure is streamlined and feminine with breasts and hips. Its metal features are sculpted after a modern or classical ideal: strong, beautiful, perfectly symmetrical, like the face of a Greek statue. An Art Deco goddess in armour and helmet it is, at this time, a mere potentiality without identity. As the robot moves towards Fredersen, he shrinks from it in some kind of awe or fear, as it is terrible in its blankness.

The machine is soon remade in the likeness of Maria, a saintly figure revered among the downtrodden workers in the caverns beneath the glittering city spires. This mask is taken up in order to sow discord and chaos among the workers, who will be eventually replaced by a completely mechanised workforce, one which, in the words of the robot’s creator, will “never tire or make a mistake!” The completion of this transformation from blank robot to Maria robot is marked by the machine raising her head and fluttering open her heavily painted eyes, like mesmerizing, black butterflies. The blank metal of before has gone, masked now by a sexualized, vampy facade, embodied in the exaggerated arched torso gestures and sloe-eyes of the actress who plays her, Brigitte Helm.

36 Ibid.

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In one memorable scene the robot Maria makes her public debut at a club frequented by the young male elite of the city. She wears the guise of an exotic dancer, inviting the desire of all the men present. This is the ultimate test of her passing for flesh and blood. She makes a theatrical entrance, rising through a giant iris, appearing mysterious and indistinct through clouds of smoke. Then, her head crowned in a jewelled orientalesque headdress, her body first demurely veiled and then backlit to reveal her curves, she begins to undulate, attracting all eyes her way. The scene cuts between an image of a revolving, disorientating sea of ogling eyes, and a vision of robot Maria’s body rotating and swirling like a sex machine, reminiscent of both a European conceived belly-dancer and some bizarre industrial mixer. As the men rush forward, incited to touch this vision, the platform raises her out of reach of their grasping hands. She is remote and seductive, poised on the back of a many-headed sea dragon.

Fritz Lang’s film endeavours to analyse the “seductive lures that propel our technology and impel our embrace of it,” even as the film’s own arsenal of stunning technological iconography works to seduce its audience and is the main reason why the film remains so popular among all silent films. 37 As Telotte attests:

This most important of early robot figures is, tellingly, feminized and presented as a seductive creature, an artificial body whose primary function is to deprive men of their self-awareness, to lure both men and women to a kind of forgetfulness of their human responsibilities, and to bring them all under the sway of those technological powers that have given her birth. 38

This seduction is, in part, produced by a focus on luxurious tactile materials, nacre, lustre and things intoxicating to the eyes, which construct an overwhelming image of technological and material plenitude. This luxuriant image embodies the ultimate bounteous fulfillment promised by economic and technological narratives of

37 J.P. Telotte, Replications: a Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 70. 38 Ibid., pp. 16-7.

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progress. In contrast to the anonymous male and female workers in their drab utilitarian clothing, the robot in Metropolis is a luxurious, singular and exotic entity. Designed to seduce, she/it is not the image of the mass-produced, production line machine which we might otherwise connect with the capitalist system, and which this system had, according to many texts of the earlier decades of the twentieth century (including Luigi Pirandello’s novel Shoot! or Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times ), made of humans. 39

Automatic pilot: mechanised work and psychic transformation

Kittler and Plant argue that certain machines, such as the typewriter and the switchboard, aided the mass employment of women in the traditionally masculine domain of the clerical office during the 1880s. Women were found to be eminently suited to the tasks of typing and switching as generally they had small, quick fingers, made dexterous from needlepoint in suffocating parlors. 40 Kittler adds that traditional pen-wielding male office clerks tended to be obsessively proud of their handwriting and held the new machine in disdain, further encouraging the exponential increase in numbers of the female typist. Increased industrialization had brought with it a greater need for speed in storage and communication of data. Young women were quickly recruited to fill the demand for typists and stenographers, and later switchboard operators and assembly line workers. 41

The effects of the “American system” (and later Fordism) of manufacture and production on the worker, are well-documented by writers such as Rabinbach, as we saw in chapter one. The switch to an assembly system, where each worker performed a single repetitive task on a production line, not only increased workers’ fatigue but also fragmented their perception. As John Ruskin in England wrote, this kind of work

39 Modern Times , dir. Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1936. 40 Plant, Zeros + Ones , pp. 116-9. 41 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , ed. and trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 183-93.

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“turned men into mere segments of men.” 42 Similarly, the social organisation of the telegraph and telephone network in the early twentieth century was “dislocated and fragmentary,” an experience exacerbated by the fact that workers’ names were replaced by numbers. Each one was trained to perform a specific task, with no view of their relation to the whole process, like a cog in a machine, or a bee in a hive. 43 Plant writes of the effects of such tasks on perception, arguing that the repetitive and automatic work of the typist, switchboard operator or assembly worker leads to an unconsciousness or tuning out of the worker’s surroundings. He/she is fragmented into hands or fingers that move in predetermined circuits and eyes and/or ears that scan an object for information relevant to the task at hand:

The typist’s fingers fly automatically over the QWERTY alphabet tapping sequences of numbers and letters, in a monotonous staccato rhythm. Her mind wanders. She hears, but isn’t listening. She sees, but she does not watch. Pattern recognition without consciousness. Tactile vibrations on taut membranes. 44

The mechanised workplace provides an intensification and concentration of the broader experience of the metropolis, where people also look without seeing, alert for collisions and the possibility of danger, but blind to possible human contact. The switchboard operator repeats the same phrases over and over, while her hands deftly flick switches and plug jacks, crossing back and forth over the board. According to Plant, such repetitive manual tasks in the late nineteenth century were seen as a continuation of traditional women’s work such as weaving, and continued a perception of women as mindless bodies. Such work shaped and continues to shape women’s minds and bodies, their relation to the world and their sense of self.

Plant endeavours to show how a particular idea of women as imitators, impersonators, workers of craft, and so never “authentic” has confluenced with

42 Cited in Wood, Living Dolls , pp. 112-3. 43 Plant, Zeros + Ones , p. 120. 44 Ibid., p. 125-6.

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images of technologised humanity such as the automaton and the android. The overarching historical image of women as weavers or embroiderers, but never artists or writers, their weaving imitating the pelts of animals but not creating “authentic” work, helped to perpetuate this image of womanhood.45 Kittler also points out a telling ambiguity concerning the initial meaning of the word “typewriter.” At first this word could refer to both the machine and the woman who tapped away on its keys. 46 This is similar to the way that “automaton” has come to have a doubled meaning. As we saw previously, an automaton can be either “a figure which simulates the action of a living being” or “a human being acting mechanically in a monotonous routine.” 47

So, bearing out Villiers’s argument in Tomorrow’s Eve, it is at the very time when people begin to resemble mechanisms both to themselves and to others, that the automaton and android become popular figures in fiction. In such fiction there tends to be a subtext of doubling and usurpation of the human by the artificial being. Yet, importantly, the machine is rarely presented as being utilitarian or of performing the mundane tasks expected of machines. Instead the artificial being (despite the claims of its inventors) tends to be presented as a seductive prototype, not designed for mass production.

Idols of consumption, idols of stamina

Both Hadaly and the robot in Metropolis make their entrance theatrically, rising from unknown places, veiled, mysterious and exotic. Both are constructed of luxurious materials. However, Hadaly’s “pure virginal forms,” restraint and melancholic stillness are very much locatable in their late nineteenth century context, while the erotic dynamism of Lang’s robot speaks of a new age of spectacle. Her motion is central to the brothel scene, and its mode – both mechanical and oriental – positions her firmly within the 1920s sense of the modern.

45 Ibid., p. 24. 46 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 183. 47 Wood, Living Dolls , p. xviii.

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In the early twentieth century, the modern woman was often imagined as a dynamic figure in perpetual motion. According to Elizabeth Coffmann, in her article on the dancer Loie Fuller, this image encapsulated conceptions of exoticism and technology. 48 The sense of the robot’s exoticism and singularity is also reminiscent of deCordova’s writings on the early star-image. DeCordova criticises the “truism” that the star system is analogous to a factory process. As he argues, “while the star system is rationalized, it is not geared toward producing a standardized product in the usual sense of the word. It produces a product that is in fact highly individuated – the individual star.” 49 Within ten to fifteen years of Gorky writing of the flitting grey shadows of ordinary Parisians on the screen at Aumont’s café, mass audiences were flocking to see the luminous forms of Florence Lawrence and Theda Bara projected in picture palaces. The individuated star had become a fully-formed entity by 1927, when Metropolis was produced. The Maria robot’s sumptuous material and sexual plenitude contains strands that we can see flowing through particular female star- images in the years immediately preceding.

The Maria robot dance sequence seems prefigured in the images of exotic and decadent queens in the historical epics directed by D.W. Griffith and J. Gordon Edwards. 50 These images spilled over from the screen into the fan magazine depictions of the glorious wealthy lifestyles of the stars, such as photographs of Gloria Swanson posing in her black marble bathroom and ostrich-feathered robes. As Richard Dyer argues, one of the themes around which the discourse of stardom was (and to a certain extent still is) organised was that of conspicuous consumption. The focus on the star’s clothing, cars, homes, make-up and hair haloed the star and their lifestyle with a luxuriant glow, albeit often with a dark undercurrent of tragedy. The

48 Elizabeth Coffmann, “Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the ‘Interpenetration’ of Art and Science,” Camera Obscura , 49, vol. 17, no. 1, 2002, pp. 73-5. 49 deCordova, Picture Personalities , pp. 8-9. 50 See, for example, Intolerance and The Fall of Babylon dir. D.W. Griffith, USA, 1916 and 1919, respectively, and Cleopatra and Salome dir. J. Gordon Edwards, USA, 1917 and 1918, respectively.

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star became an “idol of consumption,” in a manner comparable to the artificial women figures of Tomorrow’s Eve and Metropolis .51

Jennifer M. Bean’s focus on another type of early female star weaves a different thread through the connection between star discourse and these artificial women figures. Bean looks at early female action stars such as Pearl White, Irene Castle and Anita King, who were celebrated in the media of their time for their athleticism, agility and dare-devilry in their ability to swim, fly, fall, dangle from dangerous heights, or romp playfully with lions. Such stars were constructed in trade paper and fan press discourse as modern figures of “physical and psychical stamina” who, significantly, didn’t compromise their traditionally feminine attributes of prettiness and daintiness. 52 The press focus on “stamina” in the appraisal of Pearl White and company was particularly significant for this time. Bean points to an alarming proliferation of “nervous disorders” and the common public discussion of depleted nerves, nervousness and weakness from about the mid-1910s, coupled with the marketing of medical cures and advice. The effects of shell-shock and the new terror of technological warfare on soldiers fighting World War I seems one cause, as does the more general stimulating and disorientating conditions of modern urban life. 53 Bean sees these early women stars then as figures envied and admired by a nervous and exhausted public for their stamina, will, and mental and physical resiliency in the face of the perils of modern life. 54 We can also see connections in this discourse of stamina with the contemporaneous idea of modern woman discussed by Coffmann above. The dynamic feminine figure of perpetual motion, which was widely celebrated as representing the spirit of the age, contrasted sharply with the realities of workers’ lives.

51 Richard Dyer, Stars , 1979 (London: BFI Publishing, new edn. 1998), pp. 35-9. 52 Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” Camera Obscura , 48, vol. 16, no. 3, 2001, pp. 10-1. 53 Ibid., p. 36. 54 Ibid., p. 38.

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In Metropolis , the robot is celebrated in such a way by her creator, Rotwang. A machine that promises perpetual productivity reveals the dark underside of this discourse. Fredersen’s stated plan, after all, is to replace the fatigued, fragile and unreliable bodies of the workers (those wretches who snap under the pressure and demands of the monstrous machine Moloch) with an untiring, unstopping workforce of robots.

A “natural” woman

Within trade and broadsheet press, the synthespian is always constructed, like these textual artificial women, within a discourse of usurpation. Ironically, in light of the previous discussion of Pearl White, it is the action star’s stunt double whose career is most threatened here. Unlike these early action stars, very few action stars now are identified with images of pro-filmic stamina and courage. Instead, the stunt person began to take on these attributes as the monetary value of the star’s safety increased. But stunt doubles have remained anonymous as their contribution to the construction of the extraordinariness of the star-image remains, by necessity, invisible. Now even the bodies of the anonymous professional are increasingly seen as too fragile and expensive to risk in the pursuit of increasingly spectacular action movie stunts. The rhetoric surrounding the synthespian stunt double tends to emphasise its ability to repeat a movement endlessly, to never tire or complain and to never suffer bodily injury or death, which would necessitate mammoth compensation payouts by the studios. This same rhetoric has been used in articles celebrating Aki Ross. However as Aki is not a mere double used in the service of bolstering a star-image, but is presented as a starlet in her own right, the rhetoric harnesses these alleged financial and physical benefits to other discourses concerned with visual aesthetics.

Similar to the description of Hadaly and the presentation of the robot in Metropolis , Aki’s appearance is written of in the trade and broadsheet press in a manner that fragments it into individual features. The texture, colour and shine of Aki’s hair, her

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eyes, the freckles dotting her complexion, and her slim, boyish figure are all singled out for a sort of breathless commentary. 55 On occasion this commentary celebrates Aki as a significant visual nodal point in a progressive history of the development of computer-generated imagery. In such celebrations, her features and various bodily parts tend to be praised for their verisimilitude, and their ability to deceive the “untrained eye” (evidence of a particular discourse concerning “duping” which is further explored below). At the same time specific qualities of Aki’s features are used to compare her to, and differentiate her from, other starlets in the mediascape.

For example, the images of Aki in MAXIM Magazine became the focus of a CNN soft news story in July 2001, where reporter Jeanne Moos took to New York’s streets, magazine in hand, to canvass the opinion of a cross-section of the urban male population. Men, apparently chosen at random, were given the task of selecting which of the bikini-clad beauties on the page were computer generated. We saw a quick succession of slightly puzzled men, pointing thoughtfully to the wrong image, followed by a shot of Moos raising an eyebrow mock quizzically, and closing the story with a pithy comment to camera about the artificiality of the contemporary female ideal. In most cases (or at least the ones which the television audience were shown), the men chose a silicon-breasted, bleached blonde with collagen lips and cheek implants as the digital imposter.

This news story functions in two ways. Firstly it aims to demonstrate the verisimilitude of the image and its ability to “deceive,” and secondly, as with the rhetorical strategies of Villiers’s Edison, it aims to show how the artificiality of the modern starlet, transformed bodily through technology, blurs the line between human and machine. The notion or preconception of the virtual actress tends to evoke an image of a female body augmented by silicon, botox, collagen, peroxide, and other consumer products and invasive surgical procedures connected with an image of contemporary mediascape femininity. Within this mediascape, a particular type of

55 See, for example, Williams, “It’s No Act,” p. 3, and Newman, “Now That’s a Bad Hair Day,” p. 8.

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“ideal” female body is one where the visible signs of sexual difference such as lips and breasts are distorted and magnified.

Aki’s brown hair, comparatively subtle proportions and the smattering of freckles across the nose, are signifiers of untampered, uncosmeticised “nature,” designed to overcompensate for her technological origins. They operate to present her as more realistic than the real, and to differentiate her from a particular starlet-image with its connotations of homogeneity. The mediascape beauty bears the scars of her implants, the mark of her maker: she wears the signs of technological tampering, of the labour of beauty. Even though Aki is fragmented through language in press descriptions, her actual image is presented as whole, seamless and scar-less, a paradoxical vision of natural technological perfection. Her carefully constructed “naturalistic” appearance works to confound a particular preconception of the artificial woman.

Conversely, we can see that this preconception of the artificial woman’s bland homogeneity informs the appearance of a woman playing the role of the eponymous digital actress in S1m0ne . In this film, rather than using an actual synthespian in the role, Andrew Niccol cast a blonde and blue-eyed Canadian human model, Rachel Roberts. In the “making of” component on the DVD release, it is revealed that Roberts’s facial features were digitally smoothed in post-production, removing moles, pores, tiny wrinkles and other “imperfections,” in order to bestow on her a glow of shimmering digitality and to give her eyes “a look you can’t get from a human being.” 56 However, this presentation of the digital actress as blatantly artificial backfired, and ultimately led to the film’s failure at the box office. As Andrew O’Hehir complains, “Simone […] never seems remotely like a human being; she's got less soul than your average ‘Wild On’ guest host.” 57 Reviewers acknowledge that yes, Rachel Roberts seems sufficiently synthetic as Simone but at the same time, our

56 Michael Stroud, “For Simone , ‘Fake’ is Flattery,” interview with Andrew Niccol, Wired , 23 August 2002, http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,54691,00.html p. 1 (accessed 14/12/02). 57 Andrew O’Hehir, review of S1m0ne , Salon.com , 23 August 2002, http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2002/08/23/simone/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110 (accessed 2/3/04).

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perception of her artificiality undercuts any empathy with the hysterical behaviour of her onscreen audience. The film wants us to believe that Simone captivates all who see her and that she inspires adoration and fanaticism on a global scale. We cannot believe in this reaction, though, as from our perspective Simone/Roberts gives a performance with all the emotional resonance of a model in a Ralph Lauren perfume commercial – all sighs, shimmering tears and gazes into the middle distance.

This cultural preconception or anticipation of a formulaic artificial woman is also noted by William Gibson in his 1996 book Idoru , which is about a Japanese virtual actress (or “idoru”) called Rei Toei. When the “netrunner” Laney encounters the idoru for the first time, her appearance confounds his expectations of formula, production line, homogeneity and bland anonymity – those things which in his mind characterise each year’s new crop of starlets and “it” boys:

If he’d anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. That was usually the way in Hollywood, and the formula tended to be even more rigid, in the case of software agents – eigenheads , their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity. 58

The idoru is described as having rough-cut “black hair that brushed pale shoulders,” no eyebrows, but black, black pupils. Her appearance signifies something strange, exotic and difficult to categorise. Like Aki Ross, the idoru inhabits a mediascape – not the physical landscape of bodies, machines, labour and consumption of her predecessors in their late Victorian or early twentieth century urban landscapes. While all these textual figures, to some extent, take on the luxurious qualities and halo of the commodity fetish, the qualities required of a figure inhabiting this mediascape are different from those required by the industrial urban landscape or the tastes of the Victorian gentleman. As we have seen, an inspirited nature has been longed for at one time, and stamina and efficiency at another. Perhaps a crowded mediascape teeming

58 Gibson, Idoru , p. 175.

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with jostling figures competing for attention and longevity means that artificial figures require visual markers that will inscribe them with connotations of exotic difference. For Laney in Idoru , Rei Toei’s “difference” is connoted not merely through these immediate markers of style, but through a fleeting series of visual narratives. Laney is overly sensitive to information like some kind of “data psychic” so, looking at the idoru, he is suddenly aware of:

[S]tone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon. The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk. 59

Laney discovers later that this series of images are from the idoru’s latest music video, but, textually, they help the idoru to communicate something almost ancient and mythic, terrible and transfixing. These images are the result of the enormous amount of digital code pulsing through the idoru’s source computers. Laney muses that the idoru’s visual manifestation is just the tip of an “unthinkable volume of information.” 60 In this way, like her precursors in Tomorrow’s Eve and Metropolis , the idoru presents a vision of technological plenitude, except here this plenitude is one for the age of information rather the manufacturing age. Laney is for a moment lost in her, dazed and unaware of his physical surroundings. He is dazzled and hypnotised in a way that makes the idoru seem dangerous, with a powerful hold over him.

Fittingly, the word “siren” is sometimes used in reportage and press discussion to describe digital actresses. 61 The word “siren” calls forth images of alluring sea nymphs singing a spell of enchantment to lure unwitting sailors to their doom; of wailing air- raid warnings of danger and death; and of luminous femme fatales from classical

59 Ibid., pp. 175-6 60 Ibid., p. 178. 61 See, for example, Williams, “It’s no Act” (profile of Aki Ross) p. 3, Bruce Newman, “Now That’s a Bad Hair Day,” p. 8, and Nicole Gaouette, “Sirens of Cyberspace,” The Christian Science Monitor , 2 July 1998, http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/07/02/fp51s1-csm.htm (accessed 3/8/01).

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Hollywood cinema, like Rita Hayworth in Gilda .62 The otherness of the machine and the object, and the otherness of femininity, merge in the artificial woman figure – whether fictional or actual – and whether such figures are made from stone or wood and clockwork, metal alloys, or whirling clouds of code. 63 But the word “siren” especially brings to the fore this connotation of danger, and a sense that the seductive operation of the technological image is not harmless, but a cause for anxiety.

Enchantment: the intoxicated viewer

When Ewald finally meets Hadaly in the closing pages of Tomorrow’s Eve , the illusion of the simulacrum is so complete that, initially, he mistakes her for Alicia. He rejoices, for Alicia seems transformed into a sympathetic, unselfish creature with liquid soulful eyes. Upon realizing his mistake his joy turns swiftly to horror. Yet this emotion is not merely caused by the revelation of the machine’s operation beneath the velvety skin of his beloved. It is finding himself in the position of the dupe, as if lulled into a trance, which scandalises him. Villiers writes: “He had been made the victim of this inanimate mechanism, the dupe of this masterpiece of illusion. His heart was confounded, humiliated, thunderstruck.” 64 During Ewald’s previous lengthy discussions with Edison about his fear of sensing the presence of mechanical operation, or of feeling a kind of cold and alien remoteness emanating from Hadaly, he has been afraid of sensing the machine’s unawareness of or obliviousness towards him. It is Villiers’s bitter little joke that, in the end, Ewald discovers that the machine emanates more warmth, spirit and empathy, than does its human template. Ewald’s horror is then turned back onto himself, for he is askance at his own unawareness and obliviousness of the deception.

62 Gilda , dir. Charles Vidor, USA, 1946. 63 Plant points out that the automata of the eighteenth and nineteenth century embraced not only the figure of femininity, but also exotic others such as the Kempelen’s Turkish chess-player: “[T]he mysteries of race and sex were added to the mysteries of clockwork motion.” Zeros + Ones , p. 85. 64 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 193.

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The theme of enchantment by a terrible deception also runs through Metropolis . In the brothel scene we are shown that the young men of the city see a vampy odalisque, stripping away layers of filmy fabric as she spins, leading to the progressive revelation of her markers of gender, her breasts and rounded hips, but stopping short, as J.P. Telotte points out, of revealing her ontological truth. 65 We the audience, however, have seen beforehand what lies beneath this fleshly fabrication. This prior knowledge intensifies the power of the scene, more so than if we perceived this figure as a human. When we watch the men watching the robot writhe on her stage, we hold our awareness of her origins close. Our response is informed by a memory of the robot’s blank face in Rotwang’s laboratory. We see the men rush towards the stage with their arms outstretched, entranced and oblivious to the artificiality of her supple joints and skin. But we see calculations beneath allure, we see metal beneath skin, we see a blankness masked by painted eyes like black sea anemones.

This is the same effect that concerns Edison when he insists on veiling the machine from Ewald until it is the completed simulacrum of Alicia Clary. Edison knows that a memory of the machine’s face will continually intrude on Ewald’s pleasure in the illusion. Watching Metropolis , our response to the Maria robot is similarly complicated by this doubling effect of knowledge and appearance. Even in our own pleasure in the image, we are anxious for those on screen who, without the benefit of our knowledge of origins, are deceived. There is something terrible about an unwitting response such as this, for it suggests a lack of awareness, a loss of will or reason. Dupe figures themselves become almost like the puppet or the automaton, manipulated by external forces.

This is not an uncommon theme in literature. Over the past two centuries, there have been several texts featuring artificial woman and their dupes. As we saw in chapter one, Hoffmann’s famous short story “The Sandman” (1818) deals with Nathaniel’s infatuation with an automaton called Olympia whom he believes to be real, and his friends’ failed efforts to extricate him from the grip of delusion. Chapter one

65 Telotte, Replications , p. 65.

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examined “The Sandman” in order to show the rudimentary operation of a machine/human binary and to explore the enduring cultural relevance of the automaton figure. I revisit this text here in order to further explore the problem of Nathaniel’s enchantment by the automaton and to compare this enchantment and its resolution with William Gibson’s more recent tale of a man’s desire for an artificial woman.

Gibson’s novel, Idoru , deals with the impending marriage of a global rock icon Rez to a Japanese virtual media star, Rei Toei. The story, posed as a thriller, is mainly concerned with investigations by various anxious parties, including a psychic “netrunner” hired by the star’s management, and a young, female fan. Both of them are convinced that Rez has been somehow psychically ensnared, enchanted, spell- bound by a technological illusion, and has abandoned reason, to the detriment of his career and ultimately his life. Even though “The Sandman” and Idoru are historically and culturally distant from one another, they nonetheless each speak in different ways of the culturally constructed feminine and the mechanical illusion, and deal with our continuing fears of the lure of technological enchantment.

Hoffmann’s abhorrence of the automata of his day is channeled through “The Sandman.” Yet many of his contemporaries found these figures fascinating. Charles Babbage, for instance, was reportedly so amazed by two silver female dancer automata which he had seen as a child that, as an adult, he purchased one of them and had his female friends choose her wardrobe. 66 Edgar Allen Poe’s response to seeing Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk was to write a meticulous and remarkably clear-headed analysis of what he correctly believed was an extensive human agency behind it. He dismissed it on the basis that he believed it to be not a simulation of humanity, but a laborious illusion of “pure mechanism.” 67 For Hoffmann it seemed that the mere visual appearance of these wood and clockwork creatures was

66 Plant, Zeros + Ones , p. 85. 67 Edgar Allen Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” The Portable Poe , ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York, London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 508-37. By this time Kempelen was no longer living and the automaton had passed into the possession of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel.

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disturbing in itself, while the philosophies of humanity underpinning their creation also raised questions of free will and the consequences of “usurp[ing] the prerogatives of nature.” 68 Before “The Sandman,” Hoffman wrote another short story “Automata” in which a group of men who, after seeing the chess-playing Turk in action, discuss their feelings about automata and of being in the presence of this “unnatural and gruesome […] necromantic goblin.” The conversation later turns to the idea of a man dancing with an automaton:

I suppose it would be possible, by means of certain mechanical arrangements inside them, to construct automata which would dance, and then set them to dance with human beings, and twist and turn about in all sorts of figures; so that we should have a living man putting his arms about a lifeless partner of wood, and whirling round and round with her, or rather it. Could you look at such a sight, for an instant, without horror? 69

This image is a precursor to the heightened horror of the scene in “The Sandman” where Nathaniel unwittingly dances with the automaton Olympia. If we read “The Sandman” through a German Romantic perception of sinister, unseen forces working below the apparently rational appearance of everyday life, we can interpret that the figure of Olympia is a projection of Nathaniel’s own anxieties. He seems to act and feel as if, like her, he is a “puppet” at the mercy of dark and hostile forces. An irrational man in possession of too vivid an imagination, he is also, like her, “out of rhythm” with his times and a source of amusement to his contemporaries. As Nathaniel’s friends try to help him, he scorns them and, as noted previously, derides the careful reasoning of his lover Klara as that of a “damned lifeless automaton.”

For Hoffmann it is not merely the creature itself that is frightening – it is also the behaviour of her human lover who is unaware, no longer able to differentiate a

68 E.T.A. Hoffmann, cited in Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 45. 69 E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Automata” 1814, reproduced online in its entirety at the Black Mask literature server, http://www.blackmask.com/books72c/automata.htm (accessed 12/3/02)

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human woman from a machine. This is why the construction of the binary, in the townspeople’s insistence that their lovers speak and sing loudly and move without a regular rhythm in order to prove their humanity, is so important to the resolution of the story. Hoffmann’s adoption of the automaton as allegorical of the Enlightenment’s transformation of the image of humanity (à la the Human Motor), also resounds through Villiers’s Tomorrow’s Eve , where the figure of the android is less influenced by machines that resemble humans, than by humans starting to resemble mechanisms. 70

“The Sandman” ends with the deepening insanity and death of its protagonist. Idoru in contrast ends with an alchemical union between the rock star and the digital construct, and others’ tentative acceptance of their marriage. Like Metropolis , Idoru demonstrates the seductive potential of technology, but this demonstration is ultimately celebratory, for the image proves that she is not the feared demonic seductress whose existence is untenable and who must be destroyed. Instead, in the end, the idoru is shown to be an empathetic artificial intelligence and a sentient conglomeration of continually updated information. Gibson’s focus on the idoru as “information” encourages us to see her as not so very different from her human lover who, as a global superstar, is also apprehended (by all but his closest friends) as a collection of endlessly shifting and expanding data. Despite the difference of Gibson’s conclusions, up until this point in the story he is consciously exploring our long-held suspicions about technological simulacra through the motif of the artificial woman and her “dupe,” aware that many of us are still ambivalent about this concept.

The CNN news story about Aki Ross attests to this continuing ambivalence. The men in this report play a similar role for the viewer at home to that of the deluded men in the brothel in Metropolis , but in this instance it is less sinister. Here is a contemporary version of the type of story early cinema used to enjoy telling about itself in films about film viewing In these films, unsophisticated rubes and hayseeds were shown shouting at, or attempting to fight the disembodied and unaware figures

70 Adams, Translators Introduction, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. xx.

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on the screen. 71 As Tom Gunning (after Christian Metz) argues, such stories serve to build a mythology around the veracity of the image. At the same time, they displace our own belief or enchantment safely onto others who become figures for our (perhaps relieved) laughter. 72

This anxiety about being deceived, lulled half-asleep, intoxicated or enraptured, creeps through all of these texts, connecting them to a broader unsettling mistrust of not just visual illusions but the promises of technological progress in general. The themes of intoxication and entrancement are not confined to these texts about the artificial woman. Their wider implications can be seen in Benjamin’s writings on the modern city, the doctrine of progress and discourses of commodified technology, which he saw as framing the citizen’s responses to the metropolis and to modernity more generally. In Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City , Gilloch writes that for Benjamin “the intoxication of the city must not be allowed to befuddle the senses or hinder critical engagement.” 73 Gilloch contrasts Benjamin’s critical stance to that of the Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton for whom, “the metropolis was bewitching. With its kaleidoscope of lights and perspectives, its cacophony of sound and noise, its mass of diverse artifacts and distractions, the city was the site of the perpetual stimulation, the intoxication of the modern.” 74 Benjamin is more ambivalent. While also enchanted and fascinated, he is wary of these effects of the city and the celebratory discourse of technological progress, believing this allure must be resisted as it has the power to lull citizens into “misrecognition of the nothing-new and forgetfulness of ongoing suffering.” 75 Fittingly then, in the counterfeit woman text, there tends to be a third figure who acts as a counterpoint to the dupe, providing a warning voice who, like Benjamin, remains suspicious of or emotionally detached from the image/object. This voice, which is either produced indirectly through the

71 See, for example, The Rube at the Moving Picture Show and Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show dir. Edwin S. Porter, USA, 1902. 72 Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” pp. 114-133. 73 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis , p. 95. 74 Ibid., p. 103. 75 Ibid., p. 108.

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narration or in the form of another character or characters, pulls the reader/viewer back, while simultaneously emphasising and underlining the extent of the dupe’s deception/fascination.

Disenchantment: the detached viewer

Look at these women with a cold eye for what produces the illusion, and it will dissipate in thin air, leaving a sense of invincible disgust, deadly to the slightest stirring of desire. 76

To look with a “cold eye” implies looking without emotion, without passion, without desire. Such feelings colour the image, imbuing it with more than is actually present. Looking with a “cold eye” for what “produces the illusion,” as Edison tells Ewald, means looking analytically, pulling the image apart to find the root of its operations, in the same way that Poe dispassionately dissects the chess-player automaton. As Poe reduces apparently magical effects to material phenomena, thereby diminishing the illusion of occult occurrences or “pure machine” to a mere glorified puppet, Edison reduces the tempting object of his friend’s desire to a mere “banal assemblage” of material objects.

Edison, however, is not referring to the illusion of android women, but to women of flesh and blood who weave an illusion of youth and enchanting beauty around themselves through a bewildering array of manufactured accoutrements. This view is again reminiscent of the news story street survey of young men mistaking the digital Aki for a real woman, and misidentifying her silicon implanted, botox injected, bleached, primped, waxed and tinted sisters as digital constructs. With a theatrical flourish Edison opens a coffin-like drawer in his underground cavern and shows Ewald the remains of Evelyn Habal who had once lured men to their downfall. As mentioned previously, there are no bones or flesh here, just an abject and mundane collection of cosmetic refuse. Edison tells Ewald that all the various “attractions of

76 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve, p. 116.

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this curious creature had been patched onto the intrinsic paltriness of her individuality.” 77 Of such monstrous women, Edison continues:

[T]he serious and upright man they insidiously accustom, by a series of gradual and imperceptible blurrings of the vision, to a kind of sweetish half- light that gradually depraves his moral and physical retina […] Custom prevails, lowering curtains over the sight; haze and darkness settle in; the illusion deepens – and the capture of the personality cannot be prevented. 78

So we see that the voice of those who see with a “cold eye” provides a counterpoint within the text to those whose gaze is “heated” and blurred by desire or love. It implies that such emotions serve to create a golden haze or “aura” around the object of affection, filling in blanks, painting over negative attributes and, perhaps most importantly in this kind of love, imbuing vision with a warm power of vivification. And so it is in “The Sandman,” where we are told that Nathaniel notices Olympia’s sightless gaze, but dismisses it from his mind. Her icy touch elicits involuntary shudders from him, and revives brief remembrances of a half-forgotten tale of the dead bride, however, through his touch and his gaze her “skin” seems to warm and pulse with life, and her eyes become full of expression, soulful, deep and hypnotic.

The detached voice often belongs to a friend of the one who is transfixed, under the spell of the illusion. In “The Sandman,” Nathaniel’s friend Sigismund, although he is not yet aware that Olympia is not human, nevertheless finds there are many strange, disconcerting and unappealing things about her, to which he endeavours to alert Nathaniel:

She seems to us – don’t take this badly, my brother – strangely stiff and soulless. Her figure is symmetrical, so is her face, that’s true enough, and if her eyes were not so commonly devoid of life – the power of vision, I mean – she might be considered beautiful. Her step is peculiarly measured; all of

77 Ibid., p. 110. 78 Ibid., p. 111.

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her movements seem to stem from some kind of clockwork. Her playing and singing are unpleasantly perfect, being as lifeless as a music box; it is the same with her dancing. We found Olympia to be rather weird, and we wanted to have nothing to do with her. 79

Sigismund’s words do not break Nathaniel’s enchantment. They only draw hostility from him, as he is convinced that it is his friend’s perspective that is at fault. They do serve, however, to confirm Olympia’s status to the reader. If we are unfamiliar with the text, until this point we have been given only little hints about the beautiful young woman in the window across the street from Nathaniel’s room. We know, from Nathaniel’s descriptions to his friends, that Olympia sits perpetually still and rigidly upright, gazing into space with eyes that seem to be open but unseeing, so she is perhaps asleep or blind. It is only through moving from Nathaniel’s voice to Sigismund’s and the apparently objective voice of the narrator, that we gain this more detached view of what Olympia is.

The detached voice can be also found in some mainstream press’ reportage on Aki Ross, such as from The Guardian :

A preview last week in London showed that “she” may look more human than most characters of software born, but there’s still something wrong. Her skin and eyes look lifeless, and when she runs, her movements are somehow too smooth. 80

A critical, dispassionate view, looking for the ways in which the synthespian still differs from that which she mimics, serves as a counterpoint to the wistful aching desire of some of Aki’s (presumably young and male) fans. While fully aware of her non-physicality, they post declarations of love and desire for matrimony on the

79 E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” in Tales , ed. Victor Lange (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 301. 80 S.A. Mathieson, “Let Me be Your Fantasy,” The Guardian , 26 April 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4175596,00.html (accessed 3/4/03).

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message boards of many of the Aki Ross “Shrines,” set up on the Internet with the purpose of coming together in worship. 81

In Idoru the detached voice and the “cold eye” are still present in the text, but played with reflexively by Gibson. Long before we encounter the idoru directly, we see the other characters speculate about her in vague terms with second or third hand information. She is implicitly a personality construct, an image, a person who does not exist. We witness the anxiety experienced by Rez’s fans who worry about the mental health of their idol, and by his management who fear that someone has “gotten to him,” that he has been brainwashed, that they may lose control over his finances, and that his media image will be harmed if his public think their hero has become unstable. When we finally meet the idoru, she is in a restaurant with Rez and his band, projected into her seat holographically from an aluminium canister. It is a brief quip from Rez’s blind drummer Jude that points to the schism between what Rez experiences of his digital dining companion Rei Toie, and what is actually present, sitting in her seat. Jude may be blind, but as an inhabitant of a Gibsonian future he wears video cameras over his redundant eye sockets that transmit grainy electronic footage to his brain’s vision centres. His electronic eyes do not have sufficient resolution to pick up the idoru’s image. “Man,” he says, “Rozzer’s sittin’ there makin’ eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.” 82 Most other people who encounter the idoru find that their prejudices against artificiality and media constructs are somewhat dissolved, but for Jude, his “cold eyes” are artificial themselves, and no amount of desiring intent will help him to see what Rez sees.

Sigismund’s “cold eye” renders Olympia a “wooden,” stiff and blank “music box” or “clock”; Edison’s “cold eye” sees a tawdry collection of bizarre objects in the shape of a woman; Jude’s cold electronic eyes see a stubbornly inanimate thermos, but not the digital genie emanating from it. This is not the same kind of perception detailed in

81 See Aki Ross: CGI Goddess , http://www.angelfire.com/movies/akiross/ (accessed 5/6/04), Aki Ross Shrine , http://temoto.co.uk/aki (accessed 4/3/02) and Final Fantasy Message Board , http://members2.boardhost.com/ffclips/ (accessed 5/6/04). 82 Gibson, Idoru , p. 179.

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chapter one, for there we saw a process of reception that transformed the elements of the image into something else. Here we find a way of seeing that removes the magic, disenchanting the image by dissipating the spell that covers the gaze. The “cold eye” banishes enchantment from technological objects, and sees the world as blind and deaf and indifferent to its presence. The dupe, instead, animates the world with its feverish gaze. The object itself, though, must have certain qualities that make such a response possible.

The eyes of the object

He looked into her eyes. What kind of computing power did it take to create something like this, something that looked back at you? He remembered Kuwayama’s conversations with Rez; desiring machines, aggregates of subjective desire, an architecture of longing. 83

The digitally rendered eyes of the idoru in William Gibson’s novel are apparently successful in conveying the artificial intelligence that circulates through the countless computers lying behind them. They “look back at you,” and, through the wonders of Gibsonian technology, they actually “see.” Here at last are eyes that appear to return the gaze, seeming to retrieve some kind of auratic experience, and hence making the novel’s happy ending possible. On one level Gibson’s novel seems to be a fantasy of retrieving the aura of objects, a fantasy of reconciliation through high technology between objects and subjects. 84 As we have seen, eyes are a central motif in tales of human images, whether it is the warm animating eyes of the gazing desiring subject or the cold dispassionate eye of the critical and suspicious subject. But what of the mysterious changing eyes of the object? It is these eyes that the desiring subject looks into, and it is their quality that will initiate or not the circulation of desire and imaginary animation.

83 Ibid., p. 237. 84 There are times where Idoru seems a conscious plea for this reconciliation. One way that Gibson makes this clear is in his intermittent references to Japanese attitudes toward technology – an attitude that he characterises as non-oppositional.

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In “Fatal Strategies,” Jean Baudrillard writes of “the logic of the object.” He argues that the object has an existence of its own, without regard to the desiring, projecting subject, and he examines how the object works to both attract and repel the subject. The object, he argues, seduces the subject with its very blankness and indifference. These are the qualities that allow the subject’s projection (and perhaps delusions), but they can also make that projection untenable. 85 As Lisa Trahair explains:

According to Baudrillard’s account, there are two sides to the object: on the one hand, its reflective capacity and its initiation of the endless circulation of meaning; on the other, its brute senseless materiality and its ability to stop communication dead. 86

It is at the point where reflection ceases that the indifference of the object becomes too obvious for comfort. Eva Marie Simms argues a similar point in her analysis of the uncanniness of dolls. Noting the recurrence of the figure of the doll in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Simms attempts to unlock the particular power of the doll above other objects in the toy-box. She acknowledges that Rilke’s particular relationship with dolls had its roots in a disturbed childhood, when his mother dressed him as a girl and forced him to play with dolls. However, she suggests that our broader expectations of the doll are different from those we harbour for other inanimate objects, because of the doll’s anthropomorphic form. 87 The doll’s eyes, staring, bright and reflective, and seeming to look back at us, are a contributor to the qualities which seduce the child, and allow the doll to become the central figure of his/her complex fantasies and imagined narratives. But it is also the doll’s muteness and the blank indifference of its eyes that, to Rilke, threaten to dispel the illusion of

85 Jean Baudrillard, “Fatal Strategies,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (1988), ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 199. 86 Lisa Trahair, “Fool’s Gold,” in Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance , ed. Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999), p. 221. 87 Eva Marie Simms, “Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud,” New Literary History: A Journal of Interpretation , vol. 27, no. 4, autumn 1996, p. 670.

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life, and so make the child aware of the doll’s lifeless, unyielding body, and the nothingness and “denial of being itself” that this body entails. 88

This awareness is heightened in a moment of jarring shock in “The Sandman,” when Nathaniel accidentally catches sight of Olympia without her glass eyes, her body carried limply over the shoulder of her creator. Her gaping sockets are black holes speaking of nothingness and seem in turn to nullify his own being, for he had previously seen a deep acknowledgement of himself reflected in her. Her blind eyes had appeared to emit understanding and her silence indicated a deeper psychic connection between them, rendering the spoken word obsolete, for it seemed “as if she spoke from within him.” 89

As Phillip Brophy has written in his excellent article, “Ocular Excess: A semiotic Morphology of Cartoon Eyes,” the eyes are the central point of attraction in encounters with others. A baby’s emerging consciousness is denoted by the way its eyes begin to follow us when we speak. When someone speaks, “we seek out the eyes as if they were the throbbing tip of an optic fibre connected to the vocal vibrations.” Dead eyes convey nothing, and we live in fear of the deadly stare, one that is vacant, unaware of its surroundings and on the verge of “withdrawal back into the black holes of the skull.” This explains our conventions of gently closing the eyes of the dead, or of placing pennies on their eyes. The eye also then becomes the central feature in our encounter with human images, or artificial humans. As Brophy points out, the eyes of animated figures in cartoons tend towards “ocular excess,” their round googliness seeming to scream out “I’m alive!” as a kind of necessary overcompensation for their artificial basis. 90

Perhaps for this reason, the face of the French budding virtual media star, Eve Solal, has gone through some noticeable transformations. In her previous incarnation,

88 Ibid., p. 674. 89 Hoffman, “The Sandman,” p. 302. 90 Phillip Brophy, “Ocular Excess: A Semiotic Morphology of Cartoon Eyes,” http://media- arts.rmit.edu.au/Phil_Brophy/KBMartcls/OcularExcess.html (accessed 4/4/02).

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Solal’s creators at Paris’s Attitude Studio had ignored the usual tendency toward enlarging the eyes of virtual actors in favour of copying the proportions of the average human face. The result was that her eyes appeared small and “squinty,” dark slits in her face and not reflecting much light, which tended to give Eve a kind of creepy, almost demonic appearance. In her latest incarnation, Eve’s eyes are both rounder and larger, exhibiting large blue-grey iris reflecting pools. 91 There is also an acknowledgement of the importance of eyes in a report on Princess Fiona in Shrek .92 Newman writes: “Fiona’s eyes have the same depth as a human’s, which the animators managed by layering her cornea and iris. Throughout the film, her pupils dilate and contract according to the light in the scene.” 93 This status given to eyes also explains the disturbance in the readings of the digital actors in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , explored in chapter one, and why, above all, it is this sense of life communicated through the eyes that is needed for the simulacrum to work. The eyes of the image can suggest a potential to see and to respond to us, or they can remind us of the image’s dull senseless materiality, and of the void.

In the final pages of Tomorrow’s Eve , Hadaly sees Ewald’s horror and inward struggle and reaches out to him – object to subject. The machine exhorts, it promises fidelity, it dazzles him with an exhibition of soulfulness. After a few pages of text during which he listens to the machine in silence, Ewald finally surrenders, convinced that this demonstrative machine is preferable to a life of misery with a woman who seems mechanised. In the end, Ewald comes to see Alicia’s technological usurper as a superior model, and pledges to close himself off from the modern world with his android bride. However as he moves forward to take the machine in his arms, joyous and entranced in his choice, Villiers’s narration switches from painting an image of Hadaly as the perfect companion to reimagining her as a kind of technological vampire:

91 Eve Solal , official promotional web site http://www.evesolal.com (accessed 9/10/02). 92 The creators of Shrek (2001) and Shrek 2 (2004) for DreamWorksSKG, deliberately aimed for an aesthetic halfway between cartoon and photorealism. 93 Newman, “Now That’s a Bad Hair Day,” p. 8.

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Half-goddess, half-woman, a sensual illusion, her beauty irradiated the night. She seemed to drink in the soul of her lover, as if to make it her own; her half-open lips, trembling and alight, as they met those of her creator in a virginal kiss – at last, oh my beloved, she said in a hollow voice, at last I have found you! 94

Intriguingly, prior to Ewald’s surrender, Hadaly’s voice had been described as “melancholic” and “unforgettably melodious,” and she had promised to act as his mirror, not his succubus. 95 After their return to Edison’s laboratory, while Ewald raves of his new love to Edison, Hadaly stands to one side, apparently unnoticed by her lover: “As if suddenly returned to her senses, the Android remained motionless and apart.” 96 Villiers suggests that once the process of seduction is complete, Hadaly becomes an inanimate object once more.

Confusingly, we subsequently discover that Hadaly is not the inspirited machine that she seemed. Rather Villiers suggests that Hadaly is the cipher of a wronged woman’s revenge, vivified by the soul of Anny Sowana, who lost her husband to the manufactured charms of Evelyn Habal. Sowana, weakened by illness lies on a couch in Edison’s property, channeling her soul into the machine for Ewald’s delight or deception (we are never certain of her motives) via a mysterious process of telekinesis. We are not allowed to see if this animation sustains itself, because Sowana then passes away from the exertion. Hadaly is also disposed of for she is soon lost at sea, sinking to the bottom of the ocean during the voyage back to England. As in the majority of such texts, the problematic artificial woman figure is destroyed before her full implications can be explored.

Aki, like these earlier models, also seems to have metaphorically sunk like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. The production studio responsible for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within failed to recoup the US $145 million the film cost to make, and Square

94 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 204. 95 Ibid., p. 192. 96 Ibid., p. 205.

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USA, the United States subsidiary of Japan’s Square Co. closed operations on 31 March, 2002, citing huge financial losses. 97 Yet, as Aki is out of commission, her image is still in circulation, both in official texts such as the DVD of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , and on unofficial fan sites on the Internet. This image, with its now empty promise of technological plenitude and equally empty threat of usurpation, still seems to catch some viewers between the positions of transfixion and detached suspicion:

In the movie, I had gazed upon the perfect, lightly freckled skin between her breasts. In the dream, I undo the buttons of her uniform, and unclasp her futuristic bra, to see what lies beneath. I have no mouth and I must scream. She has no nipples and I must scream. My perfect lover has only black and white line drawings where I was expecting Hefner-esque details. 98

This intimate confession of a voyeuristic fantasy horribly disrupted, comes from the anonymous proprietor of a website devoted exclusively to images of women in bikinis and lingerie, of the kind published monthly in MAXIM , Ralph and Sports Illustrated . Like a latter-day Ewald, the writer seems to be trying to come to terms with his conflicting responses to the image of Aki Ross, the digital starlet. He seems caught between two viewing positions. On the one hand Aki’s realistic tactile appearance stimulates an involuntary libidinal urge. On the other hand his knowledge of her non- physical, digitally constructed basis pulls him back uneasily. Aki’s image draws him in with a glimpse of soft décolletage, initiating a fantasy of undressing her, but his rational knowledge of what lies beneath, and her emanation of indifferent blankness leave him bereft and disconcerted – his hands flailing in empty air. This response suggests that the digital actor does not (yet?) inhabit the framework of cinematic spectatorial immersion, “I know, and yet I see.” Rather, the operation of its inverse “I see, and yet I know” continues to undercut our desire for the digital apparition and its

97 David Briscoe, Associated Press writer, “Career of Digital Actress Aki Ross Ends as Studio Shuts Down,” http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID=9204 (accessed 3/6/03). 98 Anonymous, http://www.beerbreath.com/FinalFantasy.htm (accessed 4/3/02).

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ability to illuminate the void around and in us. This is in part due to a current promotional emphasis on the technology, labour and cost in creating the image (reminiscent in some ways of the “cinema of attractions”), and the image’s vacillation between the positions of “natural woman” and “sexy robot.”

This chapter has examined the work of the siren of technology and the complex relations between viewer and object. The next chapter shifts in its approach to examine the relationship between the self and its image. This focus is pertinent at a time when the “digital doppelganger” is entering our lexicon and is the centre of much discussion on the implications of the digital actor. 99 Tomorrow’s Eve , as we have seen, is about a relationship between a man and an object – the seamless mechanical double of his lover, Alicia Clary. Over the course of the book Alicia remains in blissful ignorance of her double. She never encounters Hadaly, but instead fades from the text, unknowingly usurped both in the story and in her lover’s eyes. At various points in Hadaly’s construction, however, Edison alludes to the implications of this doubling for Alicia:

I am going to steal her own existence away from her! I’m going to show you, how, making use of modern science, I can capture the grace of her gesture, the fullness of her body, the fragrance of her flesh, the resonance of her voice, the turn of her waist, the light of her eyes, the quality of her movements and gestures, the individuality of her glance, all her traits and characteristics, down to the shadow she casts on the ground – her complete identity, in a word. I shall be the murderer of her foolishness, the assassin of her triumphant animal nature. 100

Tellingly, Edison declares at one point: “I will duplicate her so exactly that if in a dozen years or so she should happened [sic] to see her unchanged ideal double, she

99 See, for example, Angela Ndalianis “Digital Stars in Our Eyes,” in Stars in our Eyes – the Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era , ed. Angela Ndalianis and Charlotte Henry (Connecticut: Praeger Publishing, 2002), and Gaouette, “Sirens of Cyberspace,” online. 100 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 63.

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will be unable to look at it without tears of envy – and of terror!” 101 Tales of the double always concern the fraught relationship between protagonist and likeness – a relationship that, we shall see, takes on a new resonance with the advent of new image technologies.

101 Ibid., p. 65.

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Figure 5. The aging actress: Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Figure 6. A digital scan of Hugo Weaving’s head for The Matrix: Reloaded

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Chapter 3. Doppelgängers: tales of actors, technology and obsolescence

During the years when the silent movie cast its spell over cinema auditoriums, playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote his novel Shoot! ; a colourfully didactic rant that defined the cinematic apparatus as emblematic of modern industrial life. One of the novel’s characters is a film actress called La Nestoroff who lives in shame and fear of her image on the screen. She is a beautiful predator who has driven a man to suicide and leaves other men as ruins in her wake. The actress’s sins are punished by the unblinking eye of the camera that transforms her image into something “violent” and “demoniacal” for all to see. 1 Our narrator, a camera operator, Serafino Gubbio, notes her responses to these images each time she leaves the screening room:

She herself remains speechless and almost terror-stricken at her own image on the screen, so altered and disordered. She sees there some one who is herself but whom she does not know. She would like not to recognise herself in this person, but at least to know her. 2

The actress is tormented when confronted with this moving image of her self rendered Other. This is a modern reworking of particular kinds of nineteenth century Romantic stories where magic mirrors reflect the hidden guilty self of those who gaze into their silvery depths, or a protagonist is dogged by their shadowy recriminating likeness. 3 It also has some resonance with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray , where Dorian’s painted portrait slowly alters to take on the hideous countenance of

1 Luigi Pirandello, Shoot! (Si Gira) The notebooks of Serafino Gubbio Cinematographer Operator 1916, trans. C.F. Scott Moncrieff (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1926), pp. 59-60. 2 Ibid., p. 61. 3 John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 13-4, and Paul Coates, The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction (Hampshire and London: Macmillian Press, 1988), p. 32.

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his inner self. 4 All these types of stories concern variations of the double or doppelgänger (literally, “double-goer”) motif, which in Indo-European folklore heralds the imminent demise of its tormented template.

Like the doppelgänger, La Nestoroff’s ghostly and silent image seems to drain her of life, replacing the gestures and expressions of her flesh with those of a monochromatic shadow on screen. It is not La Nestoroff herself in person who flits across the projection sheet, but her image, or, as Maxim Gorky wrote, “it is not life but its shadow.” 5 The agent of this split between actress and her “altered and disordered” image in Pirandello’s modernist text is less La Nestoroff’s guilty conscience than the operation of the cinematic apparatus.

Otto Rank, a noted student of Freud, was the first to produce a serious comprehensive study of the double as both a problem of psychoanalysis and a motif in literature. 6 But the striking quality of his book The Double (1925) is that it takes cinema as its point of departure. Rank writes for some pages on the film The Student of Prague ,7 seemingly caught between fascination at the film’s “shadowy, fleeting, but impressive scenes” and a need to defend the use of something so modern and banal as a film-drama as an illustrative example.

Any apprehensions about the real value of a photoplay which aims so largely at achieving external effects may be postponed until we have seen in what sense a subject based upon an ancient folk tradition, and the content of which is so eminently psychological, is altered by the demands of modern

4 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), introduction and notes Peter Ackroyd (London, Penguin Books, 1985). 5 Gorky, “Fleeting Notes,” newspaper review of the Lumière Programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair , Nizhegorodski listok , 4 July 1896, reproduced in In the Kingdom of Shadows , by Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London & Madison NJ: Cygnus Arts & Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), p. 5. 6 German authors like Rank and, in some translations, Kittler, use the broader term “double,” which embraces a variety of meanings, including the more specific and overtly sinister German Romantic term “doppelgänger.” This chapter will often use “double” in recognition of the broader heritage of this motif, but will also sometimes use “doppelgänger” as, significantly, this more sinister term is commonly used in discussions about animated digital likenesses. 7 The Student of Prague , dir. Hans-Heinz Ewers, Germany, 1914.

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techniques of expression. It may perhaps turn out that cinematography, which in numerous ways reminds us of the dream-work, can also express certain psychological facts and relationships – which the writer often is unable to describe with verbal clarity – in such clear and conspicuous imagery that it facilitates our understanding of them. 8

Rank is perhaps unnecessarily cautious, for Tsivian certainly sees an intimate connection in the cultural imagination between the doppelgänger motif and the early cinema image. Tsivian notes, for example, that Méliès made at least eight films between 1899 and 1908 capitalising on the cinematograph’s ability to evoke the motifs of duality and doubling. 9 The central point to Rank’s thesis, however, is that the double is essentially a problem of morbid narcissism – an excessive and disruptive self-love. Stories of the double are about a disturbance in the protagonist’s relation to his or her self. The use of basic cinematic effects such as superimposition in The Student of Prague provide a visual and technological exemplification of the problem, enabling the filmmaker to make two discreet images of the actor seem to interact within the one frame. In light of this cinematic achievement, Rank argues tentatively that the cinema is a superior new medium of representation for stories of the double. However, he does not seem to also see how the new medium itself could potentially create new forms of disruption in the relationship between self and self-image.

Perhaps such a theory requires the benefit of temporal distance, for writing some sixty to seventy years after Rank, Kittler draws links between the evolution of the double motif and developments in new image technologies. 10 At his point of departure Kittler examines the emergence of the doppelgänger in Romantic European literature around 1800, arguing that the problem with these doubles of

8 Otto Rank, The Double , trans. and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. (North Carolina: University of Carolina Press, 1971), p. 4. 9 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception and its Cultural Reception , trans. Alan Bodger, ed. Richard Taylor (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 4-5. 10 Friedrich Kittler, “Romanticism – Psychoanalysis – Film: A History of the Double,” in Literature Media Information Systems: Essay/Friedrich A. Kittler , ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 1997), pp. 85-100.

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literature is that they have no “guarantee of optical identity.” 11 They are only textual assertions – existing in a time before the age of photography, fingerprinting, or databases of physiognomy. Visual descriptions of characters at this time are vague, the writer not having recourse to the language of photographic minutiae. In 1800, we had not yet learnt to see and remember in the manner of the camera. This absence of widespread technologies of recording and inscribing the visual signs of the body, leads Kittler to insist that, “the individual of 1800 is merely a generic individual and that means no individual at all.” 12 He contends that the way in which we imagine identity today is a function of our media of recording and storing bodily data – media yet to be invented in 1800. The early nineteenth century saw the introduction of widespread enforced literacy programmes in which Germans were taught to read in their millions, leading to the popularisation of the novel. For the first time, readers were encouraged to immerse themselves in the text of novels. Kittler argues that the motif of the doppelgänger in Romantic literature at this time functions as part of a larger mechanism of readerly identification. To Kittler’s mind, the very unverifiability of the doubles that haunt the protagonists in these novels allowed any reader to slip between the pages of the text and become the double of the writer. 13 But this literary process did not last. Kittler argues that, later in the nineteenth century, the two- pronged attack of psychoanalysis and film meant that the doppelgänger of Romantic literature was no longer sustainable. For “[p]sychoanalysis clinically verified and cinema technically implemented all of the shadows and mirrorings of the subject,” rendering the vague silhouette of the textual double redundant. 14

Whether film’s unique tricks can visually represent certain psychological states that are otherwise reduced to “empty rhetoric” in literature is beside the point. For Kittler the important point is that film does not just depict doubles, it creates them: “Cinematic Doubles demonstrate what happens to people who get caught in the way of

11 Ibid., p. 88. 12 Ibid., p. 89. 13 Ibid., p. 89. 14 Ibid., p. 95.

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mechanical media’s firing line. Their mechanized likeness roams the data banks that store bodies.” 15 Those most clearly in the “firing line” of the camera are actors, celebrities and politicians. These are the figures who are most likely to experience the concentrated effects of this “technological rechristening of the soul.” 16

Kittler’s use here of the word “soul” reflects the metaphysical effects that some ascribed to the camera in the early photographic era. 17 However, he reframes this anxiety, pushing it into the realm of psychology. Kittler suggests that the film image threatens to usurp, or at the very least disrupt, our internal self-image: “[F]ilms anatomise the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans (in contrast to animals) with a borrowed I. The camera liquidates the fund of self-stored images.” 18 The uncanny effects of newer media reverberate through older established forms. Novels and cinema are where the impact of newer media on subjectivity, image culture, the ascent of representation and the diminishing of direct experience can be read. 19 This is not to say that the double has disappeared from literature altogether. Rather, Kittler argues, the doubles of film infiltrate the doubles of twentieth century literature. Such doubles, he claims, have little to do with the Romantic heritage of Hoffmann and Chamisso, and everything to do with film. 20

Media artist and scholar Isabelle Jenniches points out though that due to the plenitude and ubiquity of our images on video monitors, TVs and surveillance systems, “today’s doubles go mostly unnoticed.” 21 Our relationships with these image technologies have shifted from anxiety and astonishment to habit and automatism. Nevertheless, the uncanny’s potential to resurface is always present. This sensation can re-emerge and prickle our nervous systems when the human figure makes an

15 Ibid., p. 96. 16 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , trans. and introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 149. 17 Susan Sontag, On Photography , 1973 (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 158-9. 18 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 150. 19 Ibid., p. 149. 20 Kittler, “Romanticism – Psychoanalysis – Film,” p. 98. 21 Isabelle Jenniches, “The Light Cast: Telepresent Characters as New Dramatis Personae” (Thesis, January 1999), http://www.9nerds.com/isabelle/thesis/index.html (accessed 4/8/01).

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appearance in a relatively new recording or transmitting technology. Jenniches is fascinated, for example, by the shadowy, ghostly aesthetics of early videoconferencing images, claiming that these images cause “the ephemeral and distorted record of the human figure to strike us again.” This is somewhat similar to Gunning’s argument, after Martin Heidegger, that, “It is the breakdown of equipment which allows us to experience it afresh.” 22 While not necessarily requiring this “breakdown,” the slightly strange aesthetics or functions of the new image technology open up a gap between the image and “living reality.” In this gap the human image becomes defamiliarised, and there is a flowering of uncanny notions that allow us to review the practices of representation. Post-camera tales of the doppelgänger are connected to this uncanny estrangement. In our imagescape the doppelgänger is a figure that now, according to Kittler, mainly speaks of the impact of image technologies on the relation of the self to its own image. The task of this chapter is to explore the implications of this argument in both more breadth and more detail, through an examination of texts in which variations of this encounter between self and image are played out. My aim is to uncover different factors – technological, economic, and cultural – that may account for variations and shifts in this textual encounter, leading eventually to the question, how do we imagine that the creation of digital likenesses transforms this relation of the self to its image?

The digital doppelgänger

In the realm of glossy, high octane, high-risk action cinema, pro-filmic reality and digital effects converge. Most actors who work on these kinds of films have in recent years submitted their restrained bodies and necessarily neutral faces before the laser of the 3D scanner. According to Ron Magid writing for Wired :

22 Tom Gunning, “Re-newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/articles/gunning.html , p. 9 (accessed 13/7/01).

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Hollywood is buzzing that superstars are having their likenesses scanned so they can license their digital doppelgängers to play roles in absentia. By sitting still for a mere 17 seconds, with a cyberscanner orbiting 360 degrees, an actor's features can be translated into 3-D data. And voila! A synthespian is born. 23

Their likeness captured, the actor’s digital doppelgänger can be made to do many of the things and take many of the risks that the actor is reluctant or unable to do. These doubles have not yet usurped their originals though. As we saw in chapter two, currently they only threaten the career niche of those invisible workers, such as the stunt performer or the body double, whose bodies labour to inflate and brighten the aura of the star. Many entertainment industry personnel balk at, or pour scorn on the notion of replacing human cinema actors with digital figures, arguing that the box- office is dependent upon the persona of certain stars, and that one of the major pleasures of film-going is watching an actor act. Additionally, it is still much cheaper and faster to put an actor in front of the camera than it is to create one via computer. 24

However, a few computer animators dream of one day eliminating the human actor entirely from cinema in their quest for complete control over the film-making process. 25 At the same time, many admit that this figure must somehow acquire the megawattage of celebrity persona in order to be financially successful. Theorists such as Flanagan point to the success of Lara Croft and insist that it is possible to artificially construct an acceptable level of persona for a digital actor. 26 However, in non-interactive media such as cinema a greater density of star-image information is still be required to fill out the image in the viewer’s imagination. In part, it is this need

23 Ron Magid, “New Media: Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers” Wired News , 3 March 1998, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html (accessed 12/9/03). 24 See for example interview with Raman Hui (supervising animator at Palo Alto’s Pacific Data Images, who worked on the CGI film, Shrek ) in Newman’s “Now That’s a Bad Hair Day,” p. 8. 25 See for example, Scott Billups interviewed in Parisi, “Silicon Stars,” p. 204. 26 Mary Flanagan, “Mobile Identities, Digital Stars and Post-cinematic Selves,” Wide Angle , vol. 21, no. 1, January 1999, pp.79-84.

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to harvest the pre-packaged baggage of star-image that is behind the desire to re- animate the images of dead stars or to use the image of the currently living as templates for digital actors. More mundanely, in the latter case, this process is often simply concerned with exercising greater control and eliminating risk from the filmmaking process.

The phrases “digital doppelgänger,” and “digital cloning” are casually used across the industry, trade, and mainstream press to describe digital figures with actual celebrity referents, as well as the process of creating them.27 Although used casually, these words are loaded down with cultural meaning that has accrued over decades and centuries, and cannot be glossed over. They imply a perception that something far more sinister is taking place than the mere creation of an image. Rather, they suggest that the digital likeness (a model birthed in a computer, that can be made to gesture in the actor’s stead) signals a disruption between referent and image. In order to examine this problem, it is important to turn first to earlier similar moments of perceived disruption, and the way these disruptions are played out and worked through in cultural texts. In texts such as Shoot! as well as the cycle of “aging actress” Hollywood films from the 1950s and ’60s, we find that this problem is not simply caused by the arrival of a new technology of representation. It is related also to complex relationships between the function of the human image and image technologies in their cultural moment.

For example, the schizophrenic potential of surveillance technologies is explored by Philip K. Dick in his novel from 1977, A Scanner Darkly . In Dick’s book, the main character is at once a surveillance cop called Fred, and an undercover cop called Arctor, under surveillance through hidden cameras, which are operated by himself in his role as Fred. 28 Such recording technologies allow Fred/Arctor to be both

27 Ron Magid, “Dead-Talent Agency,” Wired , vol. 7, no. 1, January 1999, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/mustread.html?pg=23 (accessed 6/7/04). Susan Kuchinskas, “Image is Everything,” Wired News , 18 June 1998, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,13075,00.html (accessed 14/1/04). 28 Note the closeness of the name “Arctor” to the word “actor.”

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surveilling subject and object of his own surveillance. In this way Arctor/Fred’s identity is already fractured, but progressively unravels further over the course of the novel, compounded by the lethal drug Substance D, which he is forced to take in his role as narcotics dealer/undercover cop. 29 While Dick’s novel deals with anxieties about surveillance, the operating function of the digital clone or doppelgänger is very different. As we shall see, this figure engages with discourses of stardom, obsolescence and the career longevity of the star.

Pirandello’s wrote Shoot! in 1915-16 during the time of the genesis of the star system, when the figure of the actress was a pale outline yet to be properly “filled in” by star persona. We will turn then, to Shoot! for an analysis of how this text and the relationship between La Nestoroff and her cinematic doppelgänger might relate to their historic and cultural context. I will argue that the doppelgänger arises here as a figure of anxiety concerning the uncanny aesthetics of the new technology, the technological transformation of the modern citizen, and the difficulty of culturally positioning the work of the actor in a new medium prior to the framing discourses of stardom.

Pirandello’s Shoot! , modernity and the cinematic apparatus

Benjamin refers to Pirandello’s novel in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He recognises it as one of the first comprehensive discussions of the relationship between actor and their screen-image. For Benjamin the root of the actor’s anxiety is that she is acting for the camera (a “mechanical contrivance”) and is therefore exiled from the traditional space of the stage and her audience. She sends out her shadow to face the public, and this shadow, decorporealised and voiceless, heralds a diminishment of her presence and aura for the audience. 30

29 Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly , 1977 (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996). 30 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936, Illuminations , ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Great Britain: Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 222.

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A similar preoccupation with this split between the actor and their cinematic image can be found in early articles from the American trade press. In his work on the development of picture personality discourse, deCordova unearths commentary and reportage on the then burgeoning popularity of Florence Turner. One article from Moving Picture World in 1910 expresses surprise at the thousands of people who attended a public appearance by the actress:

That the popularity of the Shadow Girl would cause a small riot by reason of the eagerness of those who only knew the “shadow” to greet the reality was, to say the least, a surprise. In a way too, it was an enlightening illustration, or demonstration, of the hold the moving picture itself has on the public. 31

The writer separates the actress from her image – puzzling that her “shadow” excites public interest in her real body. We see here how clearly the actor was demarcated from their image at this time before the development of the particular cohering effects of star-image discourse. The notion of the detachment of the shadow from the actress’s body prefigures Benjamin’s writing on the cinematic apparatus, which painted it as separating the image from the actor, as if snatching the actor’s mirror reflection and transporting it before the public. 32 Similarly, in Shoot! through the narrator-figure of Gubbio, Pirandello expands on the estrangement of the screen actor from their image, arguing that they are not only in exile from the stage but also, in a sense, from themselves:

Because their action, the live action of their live bodies, there on the screen of the cinematograph, no longer exists: it is their image alone, caught in a moment, in a gesture, an expression, that flickers and disappears. They are confusedly aware, with a maddening, indefinable sense of emptiness, that their bodies are so to speak, subtracted, suppressed, deprived of their reality, of breath, of voice, of the sound they make in moving about, to become

31 Dated December 1910, p. 1521, cited in deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2nd edn. 2001), p. 66. 32 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 224.

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only a dumb image which quivers for a moment on the screen and disappears, in silence, in an instant, like an insubstantial phantom, the play of illusion upon a dingy sheet of cloth. 33

In part this writing is evidence of Pirandello’s hostility towards a technology that he saw as a threat to his own theatrical profession. 34 However, he demonstrates that there is more at stake than simply a battle between the screen and the stage. Pirandello’s reading of the film actor also presents a figure who, as Benjamin saw, must struggle to retain their humanity in the face of an alienating process that strips them of their self-image and parades it before a mass audience. 35 On screen the actor’s image is reduced, fragmented, silenced and phantasmic in a manner that evokes Gorky’s writing on cinema from some twenty years earlier. It is perhaps no wonder that in Shoot! La Nestoroff emerges each time from the projection room, “terrified and enthralled, with that sombre stupor in her eyes which we observe in the eyes of the dying, and can barely restrain the convulsive tremor of her entire person.” 36

Fittingly, Pirandello renders the camera as having a menacing sort of animism, describing it as a sinister black box crouching like a hungry insect on its tripod, lying in wait to consume the expressions and gestures of actors. Taking us on a tour of the studio, Pirandello/Gubbio leads us down into vast underground rooms, described as wombs of “monstrous mechanical birth,” a place washed in blood-red light where coiled reels of film like parasitic “tapeworms” develop in their baths. 37 Here, like in some Frankenstein’s laboratory: “[W]e have to fix this life, which has ceased to be life, so that another machine may restore to it the movement here suspended in a

33 Pirandello, Shoot!, pp. 105-6. 34 Elsewhere, for example, Pirandello’s Gubbio opines that this technology “fills the cinematograph halls and empties the theatres, so that all, or nearly all the dramatic companies are now doing wretched business; and the actors, if they are not to starve, see themselves compelled to knock at the doors of the cinematographic companies.” p. 105. 35 Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” Film Quarterly , no. 40, winter 1987, p. 205. 36 Pirandello, Shoot!, p. 61. 37 Ibid., p. 84.

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series of instantaneous sections.” 38 However, like other writers before him such as Gippius, Pirandello implies that restoring movement to the series of still images does not necessarily bring the actor’s image back to a state of “life.” As we saw in chapter one, this particular perception of the cinematic image was partly influenced by a Bergsonian framework, but was also due to a sensitivity to the visible mechanical operations on the image, such as the impact of inconsistent projection speed on the actors’ movements.

During the 1910s, both film camera and projector were cranked by hand. The speed of screened movement was therefore entirely dependent on the human operators of these machines. It was common for a projectionist to lend some haste to the action on the screen, in order to finish work at the auditorium early. Writers on film were well aware of the projectionist’s role in transforming “calm fluent gesture” into a “jerky convulsive twitch,” and making the “actors gesture like puppets.” 39 For the actor themselves, the stress of seeing their image detached from them and made to move according to the mischievous will of another would have been intolerable, to the extent that some wrote open letters of complaint to the theatre journals. In 1914 Ivan Mosjoukine for example wrote to The Theatre Paper , in defence of his own performance before the lens, and of those of other hapless screen actors:

The poor actors, through no fault of their own, jump and twitch like cardboard clowns and the audience, not initiated into the secrets of the projection box, dismisses them as untalented and inexperienced. I cannot tell you what it feels like when you see your own normal movements transformed into a wild dance at the whim of this mere boy. You feel like you were being slandered on all sides without having any way of proving your innocence. 40

38 Ibid., p. 85. 39 Reviewers for The Theatre Paper and Cine-Phono , cited in Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , pp. 53-4. 40 Ivan Mosjoukine cited in Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 55.

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Mosjoukine’s frustration at the mechanically controlled actions of his screen image is reminiscent of the helpless rage of Mr. Golyadkin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Double , where his reputation is smeared beyond repair by the actions of his cheeky double. Mr. Golyadkin’s double is greedy, bold and impudent – qualities that the anxious, gauche and hapless Golyadkin wishes he himself possessed. 41 Dostoyevsky suggests that Mr. Golyadkin’s double is perhaps a repressed aspect of his personality that emerges after a series of mortifying public humiliations. In Mosjoukine’s case however, it is not the vengeance of a repressed Id, but the aesthetics of a mechanical animation that disturbs the image of the self, rendering it a mechanically animated Other. In these cases of early cinema, the apparatus did more than detach an actor’s image and play it before the public. It left traces on the image of its mechanical operation. As we have seen in chapter one, at this point in European culture there was much discussion and concern about mechanic versus organic principals. There were deep-set convictions on some sides, like those expressed by Pirandello, that the mechanical was anathema to life (and therefore art).

If we read La Nestoroff’s response to her image through these other passages concerning the mechanical apparatus, we might surmise that she herself notices the deadly traces of mechanical processes leaving a mark on her screen Other. For her image on the screen might evoke several interconnected problems. She sees the steady diminishment of her aura as a performer. She sees perhaps a kind of premonition (for this is what a doppelgänger is) – a foretaste of her own death, and resurrection by an industrial process so abhorrent to Pirandello. But perhaps she also sees in her own image the most visible and immediate incarnation of a theme that runs through the length of the novel: the dehumanising qualities of the modern industrial city.

The novel is populated by other characters who are similarly dehumanised, reduced and humiliated by their automated work, such as a formerly celebrated violinist forced

41 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double , 1846, trans. and intro. Jessie Coulson (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1972).

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to keep time with a mechanised player piano. Our narrator the cameraman Gubbio repeatedly laments that the value of his own work is also diminished, to the point that he has become nothing more than the “mere hand that turns the handle of the camera.” Everywhere he looks he notes the same fate for others, as he remarks on the workers processing film negatives in the depths of the film studio. In the dim lighting,

I see nothing but hands, in these dark rooms; hands busily hovering over the dishes; hands to which the murky light of the red lamps gives a spectral appearance. I reflect that these hands belong to men who are men no longer; who are condemned here to be hands only: these hands, instruments. 42

Pirandello writes of the reduction of the body to its useful limbs – those parts required to operate the machine. Moreover, both through its content and writing style, Pirandello’s novel explores the effects on perception of mechanisation and the general pace of urban life. The book begins as a series of staccato, impassioned speeches about the “furious haste” of the city-dweller swept up and overwhelmed by the “dizzy bustle” and the “urgent throb” of “countless machines, near and far.” 43 Gubbio equates the tempo of modern urban life with the onrushing images of the cinematograph that “sweep away every thought” and that affect his own perception: “Already my eyes and my ears too, from force of habit, are beginning to see and hear everything in the guise of this rapid, quivering, ticking mechanical reproduction.” 44 Mimicking the rapid, ticking, dizzy machinery of the life he describes, Pirandello’s prose rushes onwards in long breathless passages punctuated by exclamation marks like stop signs and horns in traffic.

This experience of distracted urban workers and their relationship with the cinematic image, and the screen actor, is dealt with too by Benjamin in “The Work of Art in

42 Pirandello, Shoot! , p. 85. 43 Ibid., pp. 10-11. 44 Ibid., p. 10.

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The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 45 An earlier version of this essay titled “The Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” written in 1935, defines the figure of the screen actor as having a particularly important function for the audience. According to Miriam Hansen’s extensive and thorough reading of this earlier essay, Benjamin believed that, for the workers of the early twentieth century who, “everyday living in cities and working in offices and factories are expropriated of their humanity,” the screen actor becomes “a stand-in, a representative of their own daily battle with an alienating technology.” 46 Benjamin contends that the screen actor “took revenge not only by asserting his humanity in the face of the apparatus, but by making that very same apparatus serve his own triumph.” 47

In Shoot! , however, La Nestoroff is so estranged from her image, that the possibility of asserting her humanity in triumph over the apparatus doesn’t even occur to her. Nonetheless, even in her defeat, perhaps the actress does function in some way as a “stand-in” for the urban worker. In Shoot!, the actor serves as the most visible figure of the process of reduction and fragmentation afflicting urban workers of the early twentieth century. Hansen points out though that in Benjamin’s final version of the essay from 1936, he seems to reverse his earlier position on the relationship of the urban worker to the screen actor. This later essay more pessimistically realigns the audience with the distancing alienating gaze of the camera, leaving the actor isolated, cushioned less by their “humanity” than by an illusion of aura created through the star system. Benjamin writes:

The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. 48

45 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 224, 233. 46 Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience,” p. 205. 47 Benjamin, cited in Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience,” p. 205. 48 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 224.

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Pirandello, writing twenty years prior to Benjamin, is also writing prior to this fully- fledged star-image discourse. In Shoot! the screen actress is not yet enveloped in the electrified glow of inter-connected texts such as roles, studio publicity, glamour photography, interviews, and gossip. Face to face with her screen-image La Nestoroff is accosted only by the bald facts of its mechanised animation, its silence, its lack of colour. Benjamin suggests then that the star-image is developed by the studio system in a response to the troubling shrivelling of the actor’s aura.

At this point I want to examine how this shift, from the image marked by mechanical processes to the star-image suffused by the “phony spell of a commodity,” affects the hypothetical encounter between actor and screen image. Does the star-image serve to fill in the gap between person and image, or does it go on to complicate this relationship in new ways? We shall see that new image technologies or new modes of image consumption create new problems in this encounter, making the split apparent and again creating a divide that must be renegotiated afresh each time. The fictionalisation of this crisis gives us clues as to what difference the technology makes and its place in its cultural moment.

The star: fusing actor and image

As Dyer argues in his influential study of the star, the development of the star-image worked to collapse the split between image and actor. This argument is complicated though by the fact that for certain actors (he mentions Bette Davis and Lana Turner) the gaps between “self” and performance, appearance and constructed persona are part of their meaning as stars. 49 Nevertheless, the actor-as-person and actor-as-image became fused in the public imagination, particularly in the preliminary stages of the development of star-image discourse.

DeCordova tells us that, circa 1907, discourse on the mechanical and apparatic aspects of the cinema in American trade publications began to be replaced by a focus

49 Dyer, Stars , 1979 (London: BFI Publishing, new edn. 1998), pp. 20-22.

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on the human labour behind the image, in particular, the new and unfamiliar concept of cinematic acting. 50 In part this change in focus reflected the shift in cinema production from mainly actualities to fictional narrative – a shift made necessary by audience restlessness, and the need for greater control over the pro-filmic process in an era of production expansion. 51 The “picture personality” was constructed by linking an actor’s name to a rudimentary “identity” built across a series of films as well as through the publicity surrounding those films. This discourse encouraged audience belief that an actor’s appearance and series of roles contained clues to their “real personality.” A growing army of film fans were thus encouraged to see the actor’s films in their quest for knowledge of the person. 52 By the 1910s, concerted efforts were being made by studio publicity to create a sense of continuity between person and image, promoting the belief that the actor’s personality and appearance remained the same whether onscreen or off. This new framing discourse worked to dissolve any sense of a disconcerting split between actor and image.

In addition to the framing discourse of the star, technological developments in the apparatus itself and particular ways of framing these developments, aided in the steady closing of potential uncanny responses. As we saw in chapter one, the potential for uncanny or uncontrolled responses was gradually eliminated in the cinema through such developments as the standardisation of projection speeds, the use of the velvet curtain covering the blank screen, and the adoption of sound. 53 Film sound was especially important as it was sound’s synchronisation with a visual track that necessitated precise cranking speeds, eliminating the possibility of unintentionally mechanically agitated or ponderous gestures such as those imposed on Mosjouskine in the early days of the Russian cinema. Cinema sound also gelled with pre-existing

50 deCordova, Picture Personalities , p. 46. 51 Ibid., p. 28. For a discussion on how the film industry’s continual movement towards standardization and control has effected film forms, see Eric Faden, “Assimilating new Technologies: Early Cinema, Sound, and Computer Imagery”, Convergence , vol. 5, no. 2, summer 1999, p. 77. 52 deCordova, Picture Personalities , p. 51. 53 Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 23.

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philosophical frameworks that privileged sound over vision, arguing that sound had an intimate connection to material reality due to its origins in physical vibration. 54

However, just as we have seen with cultural responses to the cinematograph, cultural responses to sound varied. Tim Armstrong tells us, for instance, that Aldous Huxley disliked the sound cinema, complaining of “disembodied entertainers gesticulating flatly on the screen and making gramophone-like noises.” 55 Others complained that the mystery and “soul” of film was now dissipated, made mundane by the disconcerting and distracting rustlings, breathiness and bumping produced by the actors’ bodies. For some, the previously captivating, phantasmic idol of the screen was now rendered ungainly, ordinarily solid and material. 56

According to Dyer this sonic evocation of the material physical body had an impact on the concept of stardom, further bringing into play the star-image’s vacillation between ordinariness/extraordinariness. Alexander Walker, for example, thought that sound’s naturalism brought about a “de-divinisation” of the star. 57 Studio promotional material reveals how sound was framed as fleshing out the star-image, bringing about a new sense of embodiment. This material also illustrates how the progressive discourse of new technology tends to vilify older media as obsolescent and redolent of death. The advertising copy for John Barrymore’s first sound film in the late 1920s proclaims: “ Yesterday a speechless shadow – Today a vivid, living person – thanks to VITAPHONE.” 58 We are encouraged to believe that the addition of sound brings the experience of film closer to “life,” and conversely leaves the previous silent image (once championed for its connotations of “life”) now tinged with a strange dreamlike deathliness. More importantly the development of the

54 For a discussion of the various philosophical movements that have privileged sound over vision, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993). 55 Aldous Huxley, “Silence is Golden,” Do What you Will (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), p. 61, cited in Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 229. 56 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, pp. 230-1. 57 Dyer, Stars , p. 22. 58 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body , p. 223.

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technology is promoted as aiding John Barrymore in making the leap from shadow to a person. This is similar to how the perceived progression from photography to cinematography was pitched as a movement from the dead stiffness of the immobile image to a movement equated with life.

However this new evocation of the actor’s embodiment brings with it another troubling aspect. A reminder of the material, ordinary body brings with it a stronger reminder of that body’s mortality. In this light, Flanagan’s celebration of the digital actor as a “denial of presence” is connected to a desire to be done with the reminders of mortality that haunt the actor’s image. Now then, just as the promotional material for the John Barrymore sound film trumpets the actor’s sound-enabled shift from shadow to living person, those industry personnel who champion the digital actor/synthespian over the actor claim for it a perfection beyond filmed flesh. The digital actor doesn’t complain, become ill or injured, and cannot die – this is the economically tempting fruit held out for media producers. However, gaining legal authorisation for the creation of a digital copy of a dead or living celebrity is not easy. The bait that is held out to the estates of dead actors is the “resurrection” of the screen careers of lucrative iconic ancestors. The living are lured by a promise of the financially beneficial media career extended beyond their physical or aesthetic ability to work. According to one entrepreneurial suggestion: “For actors who scan themselves in their prime, a digital doppelgänger could be a walking, talking retirement savings plan.” 59 This more recent conception of the doppelgänger can be read then in relation to both the problem of the aging star/discarded commodity and an older, mythic conception of the motif which existed prior to the nineteenth century Romantic figure reworked by Kittler.

Kittler refers repeatedly to the shadowy celluloid ghosts of actors’ bodies, and at a couple of points asserts that, “the occult presupposes the mechanical.” 60 However, he

59 Nicole Gaouette, “Sirens of Cyberspace,” The Christian Science Monitor , 2 July 1998, http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/07/02/fp51s1-csm.htm (accessed 3/8/01). 60 Kittler, “Romanticism – Psychoanalysis – Film,” p. 95.

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tends to leave these thoughts hanging, instead exploring an argument that the origins of film are intimately bound up with criminology and psychoanalysis, “belonging to those modern technologies for the gathering of traces that optimize the control of bodies.” 61 He makes a connection between European psychiatry’s burst of interest in the psychopathology of the double during the 1880s, and the exponential growth in photography and other forms of image recording media, as well as Alphonse Bertillon’s photo identity system. 62 This is certainly a valid exposition, however Kittler tends to focus almost exclusively on this connection at the expense of the links between the mythical origins of the double, the development of recording technologies, and nineteenth century obsessions with mourning and mortality. The pre-literary, mythical form of the double is always about mortality, and, in some capacity this older meaning still informs recent texts. In the next section I will examine the origins of the double in mythology and draw some connections between this figure, representation and nineteenth century technologies of mourning.

In the realm of myth: doubles, representation and immortality

The double appears in older Indo-European myths and folklore as a shadowy and usually silent warning of imminent death. This incarnation is connected to animistic beliefs in the manifestation of the soul in shadows, reflections and images. 63 The traces of such beliefs can still be found in the continuation of such Eastern European customs of covering the mirrors in a building where death has occurred, as well as in etymological details such as the word “psyche” – a French term for a tall standing- mirror stemming from the Greek word for soul. 64 To Freud the double was an acutely uncanny figure. Referring to Rank’s study, Freud points out that the earliest connotations of the double were benign, characterising it as “a preservation against extinction.” However, in the post-Enlightenment era, belief in the preservative

61 Ibid., p. 93. 62 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 152. 63 Rank, The Double , pp. 49-77. 64 Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: a Literary Iconology (New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1977), p. 159.

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powers of the double was surmounted, and subsequently, the meaning of this figure came to be inverted. The double then became an “uncanny harbinger of death.” 65

As a “preservation against extinction” that has been surmounted to uncanny and disquieting effect, the motif of the double is intimately connected to the magical origins of representation. Perhaps the most enduring form of image magic has been that concerned with rendering the subject immortal. As Andre Bazin argues in his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” the basic psychological impulse beneath the origins of the plastic arts was a desire to snatch mortal things from the indifferent flow of time – to cheat death through the creation of a substitute, a double, for the living body. 66 Originally this impulse appeared in methods of preserving the form of the body itself, through such practices as mummification, or the sculpting of clay features onto skulls in a mimicry of preserved flesh. 67 Later this activity shifted from a concern with preserving the body itself, to a de facto preservation through the making of effigies, death-masks, statues, and later portraiture and waxworks. This creation of a material double of the dead can be understood within the logic of sympathetic magic. Within this logic, the continuing existence of an image-double likewise ensures the continuing preservation of the spirit-double. 68 In some belief systems the image of the dead is thought to aid the soul in knowing and remembering itself. According to these beliefs, just as the body needs the spirit to animate it, so too the spirit needs a home, a reference point or anchor in

65 Freud, “‘The Uncanny,’” pp. 324-5. 66 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 1946, What is Cinema? Volume 1 , ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1967), p. 9. 67 E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1962), p. 93. 68 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 2.

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the material world, otherwise it might evaporate, or wander lost and amnesic – a threat to the living. 69

The image as double also serves as a kind of communications link between the worlds of the living and the dead, thriving especially in those belief systems based around ancestor worship, where care of the image of the dead is seen as a means to ensure the spirit acts in the best interests of the living. 70 In this case, the image-double is a reference point as much for the memories of the mourning living as for the dead soul itself, and it is in this state that it has more or less survived. As Bazin says:

No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death. 71

Bazin’s point is prefigured by Freud, who argues that in a rational era, “the ‘spirit’ of persons or things” might now come down to “their capacity to be remembered or imagined after perception of them has ceased.” 72 In such a context, the effigy is no longer a material counterpart for the living spirit itself, but a memorial – a material object that gains meaning only through the living’s memories of the deceased. A memorial image is both a reminder of the once-living subject, and an evocation of their death. It was into a rational context concerned with memorialisation that technologies of recording and inscription were first received.

69 See Sir George James, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion , abridged (Macmillan: London, 1963). Moore writes of the persistence of such older beliefs in connection to photography: “Spirits of the dead […] could use existing photographs of themselves as models to remind them of how they had looked, such that in some instances these images could occupy a place in photographs of those loved ones who were still very much alive.” ( Savage Theory , p. 85). 70 Roger T. Ames, “Death as Transformation in Classical Daoism,” in Death and Philosophy , ed. Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 60-3. 71 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” p. 10. 72 Freud, “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al, vol. xiii, 1913-14 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955, p. 94.

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Technologies of immortality

Tom Gunning writes that a cluster of nineteenth century inventions, such as the phonograph, photograph and cinematograph, were greeted in some quarters as uncanny technological responses to the ultimate limit of human life: mortality. These technologies were often read as uncanny, but this uncanniness was not simply due to their apparent “overcoming [of] fatal oblivion.” It was instead indicative of a “deep ambivalence” stemming from the fact that technology also delivered “a foretaste of death.” According to Gunning, for those attuned to it, this moribund aspect stemmed from an awareness that:

The preservation of distinctive human traits divorced from a living individual, produced less an experience of immortality than a phantom, a bodiless transparent, or even invisible double, who haunts our imaginations rather than reassuring us. 73

Just as the figure of the double moved from an operation of preservation to a forewarning of mortality, the kind of discourse that championed the apparent preservative qualities of image technologies slid into disquiet at the ghostly end- product. Tsivian finds writings that illustrate this disquiet in reports of encounters with the cinematographic image of the self. From 1909 it was common for Russian filmmakers to make short films of the famous writers and intellectuals of the day, usually sitting at home, or in their garden. We have records of the responses of at least two of these personages, Alexei Tolstoy and Leonid Andreev, to their own images on the screen. Tolstoy is reported to have been unaccountably fearful and discomforted by his image, and simply walked out of the theatre, while Andreev was moved to analyse his own anxiety at his image in the following passage:

Cinema kills the very idea of identity. Today my mental image is still formed by what I am at this moment. Imagine what will happen when the

73 Gunning, ‘Re-newing Old Technologies,” p. 14.

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cinematograph splits my self-image into what I was eight years old, eighteen years old, twenty-five years old! … What on earth will remain of my integrity if I am given free access to what I was at different stages of my life? … It makes you feel scared. 74

While some encounters draw attention to the mechanical animation of the image, Andreev’s response draws our attention to the temporal dimension of the relationship between self and image. In a manner that bears out Kittler’s claim that “The camera liquidates the fund of self-stored images,” Andreev’s anxiety stems from a belief that the cinematographic self-image disrupts his own ability to maintain a coherent sense of his own subjectivity over time. 75 He conceives a splitting off or detaching of his self-images, which threatens a diminishment or mental unravelling – a kind of techno- psychopathology that echoes Honoré de Balzac’s famous superstitions that the photographic camera operated by stripping translucent psychic layers off its subjects, and that the subject who stood too often before the lens risked their own eventual disappearance. 76 It should be pointed out that it was not just the machine that was perceived as the threat, but the older magical connotations of representation. Balzac’s anxiety towards the camera was in some ways a modernisation of older superstitions that allowing one’s portrait to be painted would bring death. Rank claimed to find evidence of such superstitions in Germany, Russia, Greece, Albania, Scotland and England. 77

Despite these earlier responses and the perception of the image’s threat to the self, our image culture has intensified exponentially over the past century. Scott McQuire writes that the advent of photography democratised individual representation, giving those previously too unimportant or too poor to afford it, the right to an image of

74 Cited in Yuri Tsivian, “Portraits, Mirrors, Death: On Some Decadent Clichés in Early Russian Films,” Iris , autumn 1992, no. 14-15, p. 68. 75 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 150. 76 Roger Cardinal, “Nadar and the Photographic Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France,” The Portrait in Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), p. 13. 77 Rank, The Double , p. 66.

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themselves. 78 By and large, this right to self-image is sought after. In our contemporary situation our stacks of photo albums, our videos of our weddings, births, parties, christenings, our personal home pages on the World Wide Web, the increasing adoption of web cams, and the tens of thousands who audition for reality television shows, all stand as evidence of the pleasures we take in self-surveillance. As McQuire puts it, this self-surveillance takes place “in a world in which the consciousness of one’s constant visibility has never been more intense.” 79 Rather than being envisaged as a liquidator of our internal self-images, the photomechanical image is now seen as, in fact, bolstering our identity.

Pleasure in the self-image might be simply due to its plenitude and ubiquity, but it is also testament to the success of the progressivist promotion of technology. Armstrong writes that the promotion of technology as having a prosthetic function is central to a more “American” and progressivist style of modernity. Progressivist and industrial capitalist discourse posit the “human” and the “body” as a series of deficiencies that must be solved through the production and consumption of technological solutions. An obsession is encouraged with the limits of the body, and a belief is cultivated that the body is out of step with the needs and projects of modernity. In this framework, the development of technology is primarily geared towards increasing the body’s productivity, and expanding the limits of perception and memory. Recording technologies, information storage and retrieval systems, communications technologies and other forms of media are included in this project of technological prostheses. We can also see that the early reactions to the cinematograph and photograph, which positioned them as tentative answers to the limits of human mortality, were also connected to this larger prosthetic framework.

Apart from this promotion of technology as improving, expanding, and building upon, technologies are also conceived as replacing those things that are irretrievably

78 Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage Publications, 1998). p. 40. 79 Ibid., p. 41.

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lost. Armstrong turns to Freud in order to explain the compensatory function of prosthetic technology, arguing that Freud “writes of technology under the sign of mourning.” Within this framework, technology:

[S]upplies deficiencies and makes up for absences, correcting defects in sight, replacing a lost loved one; the house replaces the original loss, the womb. Lost body parts and objects – as in Freud’s thinking generally – are compensated for. 80

However, our awareness of the “deficiencies” in our memories and perception (which these technologies claim to compensate for) only arise as our environment changes through the processes of modernisation. The challenges of contemporary existence are presented as almost too much for us to cope with alone. Technologies are positioned as panaceas to fill in our deficiencies, and help us rise to the challenge of living. These discourses are central to the operation of the economy, keeping the wheels turning so that we consume more, and so that we have more energy to work at a more “productive” level. Information storage and retrieval media, for example, seem indispensable when we are encouraged to believe that our own memories are inadequate to cope with the increased amounts of information produced and disseminated. In this discursive framework such technologies come to be seen as superior usurping doubles for our limbs, memories, and sense organs.

Armstrong defines cinema above all other technologies as “doubly prosthetic.” The technologies of the cinema promise an expansion beyond the limits of vision and memory. But more than this, Armstrong claims also that the body of the cinema actor (presumably in the Hollywood sense) is presented to us as a complete and perfect compensatory illusion or promise “as recompense for the fragmented body of technology.” 81 He positions the body of the cinema star as the figure-head or idol of

80 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: a Cultural Study , pp. 77-8. 81 Ibid., p. 220.

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advertising rhetoric. While our own bodies are reflected back to us through advertising as:

[A] body in crisis, a zone of deficits in terms of attributes (strength, skill, nutrition) and behaviours (sleep, defecation, etc), the celebrity or star is presented larger than life, as that “prosthetic god which we are always just failing to be.” 82

Armstrong’s vision of the cinematic star rather narrowly focuses only on those particular discourses that present the star as an “idol of consumption” or an “idol of stamina” – a figure which, it should be pointed out, does not encompass the breadth of all screen actors and star-images, yet it is important here nonetheless. 83 We saw in chapter two that the “idol of consumption” figure emerged in the 1920s with the economic intertwinement of manufacturing, advertising and cinema. As the private realm of the star became another stream of knowledge circulating through star discourse, so too did their homes, their cars, their wardrobes, and their “beauty secrets.” DeCordova points out that these objects (the car, the home) were linked to the star within discourses of both normal domesticity and luxurious consumption and leisure activity. 84 Those stars who were seen to embody athleticism, agility, energy and action became figures of envy or admiration for those audience members exhausted and broken down by the conditions of modern urban life. 85

At this time, even more so than their films, the “look” of a star became suddenly something for consumption with the promotion of fashion and cosmetics enabling shop-girls and typists to attain “the Clara Bow look” or “the Jean Harlow look.” 86 In our time this is still the case as we are given the opportunity (if we choose to exercise this consumer choice) to waft into a room on the scent of Jennifer Lopez’s signature

82 Ibid., p. 98. 83 Dyer, Stars , pp. 35-9. Bean, ““Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” p. 38. 84 deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America , p. 197. 85 Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” Camera Obscura , 48, vol. 16, no. 3, 2001, p. 36. 86 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body , p. 241.

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fragrance Glow, while lounging luxuriously in her J-Lo velour leisurewear collection. The promotion of these products holds out the promise of attaining a certain level of Jenny-From-The-Block’s ghetto fabulousness. No doubt as the auratic glow of J-Lo fades, these products will be reduced to cheap perfume and nasty synthetic tracksuits. For the star identity is never fixed. It is always in a process of becoming and transformation. 87 Thus, the star, like the commodity, must face its inevitable fading from fashion (whether rapidly or slowly) and the fact that one day it will occupy the position of cultural refuse. As Theodor Adorno wrote:

[O]rganized fame and remembrance lead ineluctably to nothingness, the foretaste of which is perceptible in the hectic doings of all celebrities. The famous are not happy with their lot. They become brand-name commodities, alien and incomprehensible to themselves, and, as their own living images, they are as if dead. 88

Similar to Benjamin, Adorno saw the star as always already having an alienated relationship to their own image as “brand-name commodity.” His argument does seem borne out by the celebrity complaint commonly aired in interviews that in reality they are “nothing like” their image. Such claims may be an attempt to bolster their connotations of “ordinariness” and connection with their public, but they may also be a genuine expression of a celebrity’s bewildered sense of their own non- coincidence with their image. Mary Ann Doane points to twin developments of the early to mid twentieth century that have contributed to a more confusingly doubled sense of identity for all of us, but women in particular. As we have seen, the woman has been positioned as a perfect consumer of commodities that claim to enhance her own visual appeal, further encouraging an obsession with “to-be-looked-at-ness”. At the same time, the popularisation of Freudian psychoanalysis has fostered the desire to uncover hidden truths and interiority. Doane sees this split being played out for

87 deCordova, pp. 111-2 88 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 100-1.

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the female spectator in two woman’s films from 1946, The Dark Mirror and A Stolen Life .89 In both films the glamour of the lead actress (Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis, respectively) is doubled by having her play visually identical twins, but the narrative uncovering of essential and dark differences between the twins reveals the importance of interior truths. 90 Doane shows how the films’ use of doubling was tied into cosmetic promotions, with the line “all women lead a double life” used to stress a split between the defeminised woman at work and the glamourised woman of the cocktail hour. 91 For Doane, the films’ narratives, their use of the female star, and their promotional tie-ins spoke to the female spectator of her own sense of divide between a hidden interior and a steadily increasing commodified exteriority. This divide and attendant blurring of the subject/object is, then, not just a problem for the commodified star. The star is perhaps just the most visible manifestation of this problem in our culture.

How though does this alienation between star and their image play out, as the star ages or begins to slide from view to the periphery of the celebrity landscape? The problem is that, for the star themselves, so many of their temporally distant images will still circulate, and the gap between person and image yawns ever wider. This gap or separation creates a potential entry-point for the doppelgänger as the actor is forced to confront an image that reminds them, perhaps not explicitly of their future death, but of their lost star-value. The next section examines how this figure seems to implicitly haunt cultural texts about the aging actor and image technology – texts that sit within a broader category of the double or doppelgänger. These texts may also shed more light on arguments about how the star functions for us, whether the star is, as Armstrong argues, a “prosthetic god,” 92 or as Dyer suggests, “examples of the way people live their relation to production in capitalist society,” 93 or, as Benjamin

89 A Stolen Life , dir. Curtis Bernhardt, USA, 1946. The Dark Mirror , dir. Robert Siodmak, USA, 1946. 90 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 43. 91 Ibid, p. 23. 92 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body , p. 93. 93 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York :St Martins Press, 1986), p. 6.

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once thought, our “stand-in” in our daily battle with technology, who asserts their humanity in the face of the apparatus. 94

Tales of the aging star: “The 16mm Shrine”

An episode from the TV show The Twilight Zone , titled “The 16mm Shrine,” tells the story of a faded film star Barbera Jean Trenton, held under the spell of her younger celluloid image in the private screening room of her mansion. 95 Her body is deteriorating and diminishing with age, and she looks to her screen image of thirty years before as being like that “complete and perfect body” of the cinema. 96 Barbera Jean is played with a certain irony by Ida Lupino – an actress who, in her youth, never achieved the star status she wished for. Her star-image apparently never quite gelled, and she was often seen as the inferior copy of greater stars. First labelled “The English Jean Harlow,” and later, after a career of playing hard boiled down-on-their- luck dames, “The poor man’s Bette Davis,” she eventually found more success as a director, writer and producer. 97

In typical Twilight Zone fashion, an eerie tone is set from the beginning when we see Barbara Jean sitting in a darkened room, entranced, watching her younger self on the screen in a sappy romantic clinch. The mechanical whir of the projector in tandem with the alternating light and shadow serves to create an uncanny space reminiscent of an alchemist’s chamber – familiar to viewers from the books and films of mad scientific obsession, gadgetry, mysterious machines and chemicals. Despite pleading from her agent, Barbera Jean refuses to “live in the present.” Her agent is troubled by her behaviour, and he compares her funereal 1920s house, with its dark wood and foreboding windows to a graveyard. The aging house contrasts sharply with the other

94 Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience,” p. 205. 95 First broadcast on 23 October 1959, USA. 96 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body , p. 220. 97 Ally Acker, “Ida Lupino Biography,” http://www.reelwomen.com/lupino.html (accessed 30/9/03).

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interiors we are shown, such as the revamped movie studios and offices with their clean and bright interiors of late 1950s architectural style.

At these new studios, young well-meaning directors want to cast the aging actress as a minor matronly figure, rather than the romantic lead she once was. Barbera Jean struggles ferociously against these attempts to push her out of the spotlight and into the shadows. In the hope of shocking her into recognition of what she has become, her agent brings one of her old co-stars to visit. The once square-jawed and vigorous actor is now stooped and gnarled, but this attempt to force the actress into the temporal present is unsuccessful. She returns defiantly to the screening room once more, where we see her fervently wishing aloud that she was back on the screen. A temporally distant Narcissus in the age of the camera, she is totally absorbed in the vision of her younger more radiant self. Eerie music swells on the soundtrack and the image is engulfed by fog, indicating that something mysterious is at work, somewhere between the realms of technology and sympathetic magic. When a maid enters the room with a tray she screams at finding that her mistress has been granted her wish. For we see that Barbera Jean (in her older, present version) now swans about happily as an image, again on the screen. She acknowledges her askance viewer by waving her scarf, bidding them adieu. Time is at last arrested for her.

The voice-over at the conclusion tells us that Barbera Jean “changed the blank tomb of an empty projection screen into a private world.” The end credits roll down over a shot of her empty chair in the screening room. A cigarette wafts smoke atmospherically from an ashtray, while the light from the turning projector continues to flicker. This site where the aging actress sat before as a traumatised spectator of her own younger image, is now pregnant with her absence. Despite the attempt to conjure atmospheric eeriness, there is a kind of comfort and closure expressed, like that for a dying person fulfilling their final wish. In keeping with the overall generic tone of the Twilight Zone TV series, “The 16mm Shrine” is a text that borrows themes from fantasy and science fiction. The strength of Barbera Jean’s will is enough to

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propel her back into the “line of fire of technological media,” and her wish is granted, but at the expense of her physicality. 98 Her body evaporated, the actress comes to exist literally as a celluloid image – hence the episode title. However, Barbera Jean mistakes the importance of the celluloid for its projection before an audience. Whether on-screen or off, there is still no-one watching her. There is merely her empty chair in the projection room, with smoke curling from an ashtray.

This televisual text was produced at a time in the late 1950s when those who once occupied the sparkling firmament of the Hollywood classical cinema had now become jowly and lined. Every week aging stars were filling guest spots on the ubiquitous television variety shows, or hosting their own. At the same time, Hollywood’s incursion into the new medium, studio mergers, and sales of back catalogues of film classics of the preceding decades meant that the movies of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were being re-screened as part of regular television programming. Television viewers of the 1950s would have been the first generation to experience stars such as Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, in both their younger more luminescent versions, as well as in their somewhat diminished and mortal, grey-templed versions appearing on the Milton Berle Show and its equivalents.

Films such as Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? capture the public and tragic melancholy of the rumpled faded beauty and mortality of the immortal celluloid star. 99 Jodi Brooks points out that these “aging actress” films are playing out the “passing out of the old Hollywood,” starring as they do major female stars (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson) representing earlier moments of cinema. 100 Importantly, Brooks notes that the crisis these stars go through in these films is not so much a problem of their own aging as finding themselves “occupying the position

98 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 149. 99 Sunset Boulevard , dir. Billy Wilder, USA,1950. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? dir. Robert Aldrich, USA, 1962. 100 Jodi Brooks, “Performing Aging/Performance Crisis (for Norma Desmond, Baby Jane, Margo Channing, Sister George, and Myrtle),” Senses of Cinema , http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/16/cassavetes_aging.html , p. 1 (accessed 2/9/03).

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of cultural refuse,” and in turn refusing this position. 101 These actresses self-reflexively play “outmoded objects,” once the height of fashion, but now discarded, unloved, and tainted with connotations of something tragic and repulsive. Using old footage from these actresses’ earlier films, the “aging actress” film establishes a “temporal distance […] between their central character’s status as fetish and wish image and their status as fossil and ruin.” 102 As Brooks argues, “If these films stage, in different ways, a crisis, it is predominantly one of confronting one’s status as image – and as an image marked by its use-by date.” 103

In these films, these actresses “negotiate their status as image” in different ways. In Sunset Boulevard , Norma Desmond (Swanson) attempts (unsuccessfully) to “resurrect her status as commodity fetish.” 104 In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? , Jane (Davis) attempts something similar, dancing and singing in her cracked voice before her reflection in the mirror. But it is her sister Blanche who has the advantage. We see that Blanche’s (Crawford) career took off in the era of the sound film, and now her films are replayed nostalgically in the present of 1960s TV. As her old films are rediscovered by an appreciative younger generation, Blanche’s image moves back into circulation. If not a commodity fetish, her image is still valued and remembered and does not occupy a position of cultural refuse. Blanche sits, smiling contently, enchanted by her image, knowing that she is loved and resurrected again. By contrast, Jane is an ex-child star of the stage from an era before Hollywood, and she has no “jam” stored up for winter in the form of animated images of her younger self. 105 All she has are her “Baby Jane” memorabilia, most notably, a large inanimate doll version of her girlhood self, which stares back at her with obstinately impassive eyes. Jane embodies all that is humiliated, angry and forgotten as, through defiant performance,

101 Ibid., p. 2. 102 Ibid., p. 4. 103 Ibid., p. 2. 104 Ibid., pp. 3-5. 105 This is a quote from Angela Carter’s book Wise Children (London: Vintage, 1991), which Brooks uses at the beginning of her essay. The quote concerns two elderly actresses watching an old film (“their eyes glued on their own ghosts”), gladdened that their past selves are on celluloid, stored away “like jam for winter.”

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she is forced to literally recreate her star-image before the mirror. Unlike Blanche she cannot simply sit back and watch herself in a new medium, but must labour and fail at recreating her star-image the best she can.

Brooks writes of the final scenes of Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in a way that evokes “The 16mm Shrine.” She describes: “Norma and Jane are both swallowed in whiteness, as if disappearing into and becoming one with the light of the projector.” 106 As we have seen, this is what literally happens to Barbera Jean Trenton. The difference though is that in the endings of Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Jane and Norma both have captive audiences. They have committed crimes, and are about to be publicly arrested. Unlike Barbera Jean, they have briefly and triumphantly recaptured the public gaze, rather than just the impassive gaze of the camera. We do not see what happens after they are arrested and led away. They are allowed to end on a moment of deluded triumph. Both films tell us that the only chance for the aging Hollywood star to re-enter circulation in the present is either through a new media technology, like Blanche, or through the discourse of scandal.

Those texts are 1950s and ’60s responses to the problem of the aging star’s obsolescence. Now, however, the “digital doppelgänger” is proposed as a technological solution to this same problem. Currently the machine used to create these digital doubles is the Cyberware scanner – a laser scanner that produces a 3-D model of the actor’s body by running its beam over the body’s topology. Dick Cavdek is the President of Cyber F/X, a company that employs this scanning technology. He sees the use of the digital double as being invaluable for those film productions where an important actor has died during production. According to Ron Magid:

106 Ibid., p. 6.

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Cyberware president David Addleman is hopeful that all stars will eventually stockpile their data, like the suspended bodies in Coma, just waiting for the day when technology will resurrect them for as yet undreamed-of projects. 107

This strange reference to the 1970s horror film, Coma , with its connotations of lifeless bodies and sinister scientific procedures, reveals an uncertainty towards this project, even as attempts are made to assuage the anxieties of actors fearful of career obsolescence by promoting the idea of their digital doppelgänger as a career saver and a route to immortality. 108 As with La Nestoroff’s response to her filmic image in Shoot! , some actors’ concerns about digital imaging technology revolve around a fear of separation from or loss of control over their image. 109 Parisi raises the possibility of a future where actor’s bodies are reduced to the status of raw material or “digital assets” for computer animation. 110 These are fears of decorporealised detachment. In this fear of the image, in exile from its referent, being endowed with the semblance of life through digital processes, we can hear the echo of Pirandello’s beliefs about the camera’s “mechanization of life,” as well as earlier anxieties of the doppelgänger and the narrative of usurpation. 111

In earlier times, as we have seen, photomechanical images were perceived by some to disrupt the relation of the self to the self-image. This photo-mechanically mediated relationship has been through various processes of negotiation, reframing, and renegotiation. These processes have taken place both at the level of the cinematic apparatus and through different cultural texts. Now, there is a perception that the digital image is disrupting this relation, and so will have to traverse similar processes of reframing to negotiate the space between the self and its image. The next part of

107 Magid, “New Media: Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers,” online. 108 Coma , dir. Michael Crichton, USA, 1978. 109 See, for example Tom Cruise’s call to establish laws governing the use of actors’ images and his comments: “[I]n terms of redefining who we are…I don’t want anybody else playing the roles I play and I don’t want to play anybody else’s roles.” (International Artists Rights Symposium, 1994) cited in Parisi, “Silicon Stars” p. 210. 110 Ibid. 111 Pirandello, Shoot! , p. 6.

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this chapter examines the way in which the figure of the digital doppelgänger has left its mark both explicitly and implicitly in recent films.

Doppelgängers, clones and code

The doubling potential of digital imaging technology was first dramatised to its most literal and sensational effect in James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day .112 The villain of the film is a fluid, mirror-like technological being called the T- 1000, a high-tech shape-shifter capable of adopting the likeness of anything or anyone it touches. The T-1000, played by Robert Patrick, “samples” its victims in order to mimic their appearance and voice for the purposes of deception, prior to killing them in a gory and efficient fashion. In one memorable scene a pudgey and freckled middle-aged security guard trudges along a sterile black and white tiled corridor. Our view switches to the tiled floor, where his heavy foot leaves its print, in which we see the ghostly hint of a face. Stopping at a coffee machine the guard punches in his request with chubby fingers, slow-witted and unaware of the menacing figure silently rising up out of the floor behind him. The figure looms into view as a man-shaped effigy, its features indistinct and blank, its surface composed of the same black and white alternating tiles as the floor. Before our eyes, through the process of digital morphing, the figure transforms to become the very image of the guard. 113 Tapped on the shoulder by his doppelgänger, the guard turns. Wordless in disbelieving horror, he gapes at his double, which meets his gaze with a cold and bland curiosity before its finger – now extended in a deadly steel spike – skewers the vulnerable eye and brain of its fleshy template. Like a bag of rubbish, the guard’s body is dragged and concealed in a cleaner’s cupboard. His usurper stalks off impassively wearing its new temporary guise.

112 Terminator 2: Judgement Day , dir. James Cameron, USA, 1991. 113 The actors whose characters are usurped, stand in for their artificial doubles, narratively expressing the terrifying seamlessness of this technology.

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As The Student of Prague was to early narrative cinema, this moment in a film that is seen as one of the first “groundbreaking” examples of digital technology demonstrates in quite a chilling manner what that technology can do. The guard is replaced by his likeness through a visibly seamless process of digital copying. This scene implicitly frames digital imaging technology as a potential disruptor of identity, as something powerfully deceptive and not to be trusted. It was not crucial to the plot that the guard meet the gaze of his usurper, but the film gives us this chilling portrayal of encounter between template and copy in a direct referencing of the doppelgänger myth. The guard encounters his doppelgänger (the apparitional harbinger of death) and we witness his wordless terror at the vision before his organs of sight are punctured.

These archaic references are injected into a narrative that not only pits humans against machines, but pits older and newer technologies against one another. The metallic, changeling-like, and largely anonymous T-1000 spends much of the film in combat with the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a cyborg guardian with fixed, stable and bulky contours. 114 Following the progressive logic of Hollywood sequels, this film and the recent sequel, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines , are shot through with the line of the newer technology’s functional superiority over the old. 115 The new can mimic – it has powers of deception, enchantment and illusion. Conversely, the old and familiar technology is presented as trustworthy, dependable and noticeably mechanical with its moving parts and stiff movements. According to Scott Bukatman’s comprehensive survey of recurring themes in post- modern science fiction, others have mined this particular conflict for various contemporary anxieties. He notes that Claudia Springer argues that Terminator 2 configures electronic technology as a feminised threat through its opposition of the androgynous, fluid body of the T-1000, to the hard and armoured certainty of Arnold

114 In the original film The Terminator (dir. James Cameron, USA, 1984), Schwarzenegger’s cyborg character plays the villain - figured then as a relentless red-eyed machine-monster fighting a human opponent. 115 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines , dir. Jonathan Mostow, USA, 2003.

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Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. 116 Mark Dery however sees the morphing activities of the T-1000 as a “paradigm for the surfeit of body-reshaping technologies available today, from aerobics to cosmetic surgery.” 117 This reading has some similarities to Sobchack’s vision of the computer-generated morph as speaking allegorically of the “quick-change” logic of our contemporary world. 118 Dery is reading this paradigm into a motif that is presented in Terminator 2 as explicitly hostile. What is represented in the film as a deadly threat to humanity becomes, through Dery’s reading, a tool or function that is held out to us as the means to improve our lives. Dery sees morphing as speaking of new forms of mutability and reinvention afforded the technocratic elite through such things as plastic surgery, personal trainers, and genetic science. What are mutability and reinvention but strategies to deal with obsolescence? But then, this holding in tension of threat and salvation is indeed the paradox of the doppelgänger.

There is an imaginary slippage here between physical body and image, between biology and digital code. Through this framework we can see connections between such things as Demi Moore’s widely reported (US) $100,000 total body “overhaul” and the potential for an actor to create a younger digital “self.” Similarly we might imagine that a scientist tinkering with genetic code to lessen the human propensity to obesity, cancer, or grey hair, follows a similar logic to a technician tinkering with digital code to erase crow’s feet or cellulite. Both activities, after all, are part of a larger progressivist project. Can we then in this framework also imagine digital technology as emblematic of modern life in the way that Pirandello writes of the cinema?

How do we relate to the dominant technologies that are part of our everyday landscape? In contrast to those modern citizens who populate Shoot! our senses no longer vibrate and rattle from the thrummings of vast machines and engines. The

116 Claudia Springer, “Muscular Circuitry: The Invisible Armored Cyborg,” Genders , p. 12, cited in Bukatman, Terminal Identity, pp. 303-6. 117 Mark Dery, “Cyborging the Body Politic,” MONDO 2000 , issue 7, 1993, p. 101, cited in Bukatman, Terminal Identity , p. 304. 118 Vivian Sobchack, Introduction, MetaMorphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change , ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. xii.

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mechanical has been replaced in many ways with the electronic. Unlike Pirandello’s workers, we toil in air conditioning. Many of us are removed from the processes of manufacturing and production, and pushed into the selling and the advertising of such goods. We work with and through telephones and computers, and decreasingly less face to face with other people. Direct perception plays a dramatically lessened role in our relationships with others. Perception and many of our relationships are mediated through technologies. Technological processes are now barely perceptible, flowing through quietly humming circuits and wires. Devices have been shrunk, streamlined, muffled and made as discreet and invisible as possible, sitting dormant on office desks or in the home.

If the computer and the computer network are now our dominant information storage and retrieval devices, according to Kittler, it is also the computer and the computer network that influence or dictate how we imagine our being or subjectivity. Kittler argues that this is because, “the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions.” 119 The digitisation of this information renders it a series of baffling numbers, unreadable for us. For Kittler this unreadability also makes our situation seem obscure to us, and “difficult to grasp and describe.” 120

As most of the information about our world exists for us in the form of digital code, similarly, our current dominant scientific conception of organic life, human being and individuality is seen through the framework of genetics and DNA code. There is an imaginary transference between the concept of both the image and the body as being constructed from discrete units of information. However, in discussions about genetics and DNA the anxieties and ethical issues raised by the idea of human cloning demonstrate that the clone has, in some ways, become interchangeable with the doppelgänger, as the highly charged figure that is held out to us as both the promise of and threat against our own continuity. Just as DNA is the basis of human cloning,

119 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. xi. 120 Ibid., p. xxxix.

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binary numbers are the basis of the digital clone, and similar language is used to describe them. Indeed Jeffrey Lotman, the founder of Virtual Celebrity and CEO of Global Icons, has trademarked the term “digital cloning” for the process his company uses to digitally graft the head of a dead celebrity onto the body of a live actor. 121 This imaginary transference between biology and information runs through the Hollywood science fiction film The 6th Day – a film which, while ostensibly about cloning, also plays out an implicit anxiety and resistance toward the figure of the digital doppelgänger. 122

The phrase “digital doppelgänger” has currently reached a point of oversaturation to the point of near meaninglessness. Loaded with mythic and sinister connotations, this term is now used to refer to the digital copies of any form of information – from banking details to music to photographs. Anything that was once merely called a “copy” has now been labelled a “doppelgänger.” 123 But The 6 th Day reveals that a point of anxiety and resistance still exists no matter how banal and void of meaning the term doppelgänger is becoming. On one level The 6 th Day articulates the concerns of an industry anxious to retain control over the production and distribution of its product against the increasing economic threat of pirate DVDs and videos. However the main function of the film, like that of most science fiction, is that of an arena for the playing out of cultural anxieties about unfamiliar technologies and scientific research.

While the plot of the The 6 th Day is ostensibly about illegal human cloning in the near future, there is also an underlying commentary running through it about the digital cloning of celebrities. The film’s lead actor is Arnold Schwarzenegger who, as Dyer points out, has displayed remarkable continuity of body and voice and hence star- image across his films. Schwarzenegger’s performance in each film (and The 6 th Day is no exception) operates as “personification,” a style that foregrounds continuity over

121 Kuchinskas, “Image is Everything,” p. 2. 122 The 6 th Day , dir. Robert Spottiswoode, U.S.A., 2000 123 This pervasive and prosaic use of “doppelgänger” was discovered by typing “digital doppelganger” into the search engine at www.google.com.

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the differences of character in each role. 124 John Sears points out that Schwarzenegger’s oeuvre is built around the motif of doubling. This doubling, he argues, operates on every level of Schwarzenegger’s career, from the themes of most of his films’ narratives ( Terminator 2: Judgement Day , Twins , Total Recall , Last Action Hero , The 6 th Day ) to his heavy reliance on stunt doubles, and to the sense audiences have of this actor’s conflation with his characters. 125 It is due to this perceived conflation, and his clear-cut physical identity, easily replicated speech patterns, wooden acting style, and tendency to play the types of action oriented characters suited to computer animation and gaming culture, that Schwarzenegger has been cited by character animators and image software developers as the perfect subject for digital modelling. Arnold Schwarzenegger is truly in the “firing line” of technological media. 126

He plays here, somewhat improbably, an average suburbanite called Adam Gibson, living in half acre solid brick splendour complete with wife, young daughter and dog. Adam runs a helicopter charter business, but one day while flying a Bill Gates style CEO to a meeting, his chopper comes under attack from mysterious figures. The film cuts disorientatingly from this brief flashing sequence of violence to a shot of Adam sitting in a taxi on his way home, seemingly unaffected by the previous events. Upon arrival, though, he peers through the window in his front door to see, to his horror, that his exact double has taken his place at the dinner table, smoothly usurping his role as husband, lover, daddy, and hapless handyman. Adam’s search to find out how and why he has been cloned, and his bid to reclaim his rightful place, drives the roller coaster action narrative of the film. But, as is often the case with such films, the subtext is of more interest than the plot. The near-future world of the film is one where simulation and artificiality reign, and old-fashioned authenticity and uniqueness struggle for survival.

124 Dyer, Stars , p. 185. 125 John Sears, “‘In his own image’: Genre, Memory and Doubling in Schwarzenegger’s Films,” Post Script , vol. 22, issue 3, summer 2003, pp. 104-16. Twins dir. Ivan Reitman, USA, 1988. Total Recall dir. Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1990. Last Action Hero , dir. John McTiernan, USA, 1993. 126 Alan Deutschman, interview with Kevin Mack, Premiere Magazine Online , January 1995, http://www.premieremag.radicalmedia.com/ featpres/Jan_95/kevinmack/kmack3.html, p. 3 (accessed 4/9/01).

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The film positions cloning as a tool controlled by global mega corporations for maintaining the status quo through keeping literally the same people in positions of political and economic influence. We could surmise from this that the digital cloning of stars would be equally undesirable, thwarting the careers of younger actors. On a smaller, more intimate scale, cloning is also shown to encourage a widespread inability to face death and finality. This is primarily evident in a subplot where Dr. Griffin the genetic scientist (played by Robert Duvall) repeatedly clones his ailing wife, bringing her back for a few more years of suffering, before finally she begs him to allow her to remain dead. Sears points to the similarities between the film’s presentation of the clone and the figure of the double. The clone here, like the double, is the “literal warding off of death, the apotropaic re-enactment of the self as a defence against its destruction.” 127

The theme of artificiality as a kind of social sickness pervades the film, from the legal cloning of the dead family dog at the amusingly named “re-pet” company, to the prevalence of virtual girlfriends and companions. This near-future culture is characterised by a widespread inability to mourn and let go, and a desire for stasis. Schwarzenegger’s character Adam is shown as a lone old fashioned voice valuing uniqueness and “real people” just as he pointedly refuses to ditch his old Cadillac for an anonymous fuel-efficient hatch-back. When his wife urges him to replace their daughter’s dog before she gets home from school and learns some harsh truths, he argues somewhat ineffectually, “suppose clones have no souls or they’re dangerous?” This simple rhetorical question that implies that the copy must always be debased, cloaks the scientific/technological in the garb of the mythic, and echoes the logic of the doppelgänger. After all, there is no rational basis for a clone to be “soulless,” or to run out of control causing mayhem.

So too the procedure of cloning is painted as somewhat supernatural. It is achieved instantly, through the injection of DNA code into adult sized genetically “blank” embryos, resembling retail mannequins floating in tanks. Dead characters are replaced

127 Sears, “‘In his own image,’” p. 10.

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in the film’s narrative with the instantaneousness of warrior resurrections in a computer game. In this way clones seem to bear similarities to digital actors, revealing an imaginary sliding between the logic of DNA and binary codes. Upon injection of DNA code, blank features digitally morph into the face of the deceased, visually mirroring the process of digital mapping features onto a blank three-dimensional figure.

While the pace of The 6 th Day is mostly frenetic, there is a curious moment early in the film, where things seem to stand still. After the film ends in a shower of sparks and explosions, this moment remains with us. It retrospectively shrouds the rest of the film with a vague sense of what the bogey of the digital doppelgänger might mean for the big Hollywood film actor.

Schwarzenegger, the veteran of so many action and science fiction films, is here an average suburban male. Pensively, almost anxiously, he studies his face in his mirror while his wife lies in bed looking on affectionately. “Do I look any different to you?” he asks her. It seems that this question is also addressed to us, as he manipulates his face, somewhat shockingly emphasising deep lines on his forehead and around his eyes and mouth. We the audience can only be aware of how different he does look, and how much he has aged. This sense of his physical difference here is especially disturbing in light of how we see his star-image as the personification of continuity. Some reviewers of The 6 th Day have commented on how haggard and weary he appears, seemingly disturbed by this, as if he is a reminder to them of their own mortality: the once mighty muscled terminator machine man is human after all, and his aged oak quality in this film seems part of the proof that he is vulnerable. 128 Schwarzenegger’s perceived continuity across his various film roles has perhaps been a source of comfort for some of us – a stable anchoring point in a media landscape in a continual state of transformation.

128 Sandra Hall, review of The 6 th Day , Sydney Morning Herald , 18 January 2001, p. 8.

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This new mortal and vulnerable Arnie provoked squirming and uneasy laughter in the semi-full auditorium where I viewed the film. The Austrian accent, so teutonic and perfectly matched to the emotionless armoured characters he once played, jars here in his attempt to convey “everyman.” He seems to be whistling in the dark, uneasily aware that his career is on the wane and that he will be replaced soon enough. We are aware of the extra qualities that Arnie brings with him. There is deliberate emphasis in the script and his actions (at the beginning at least) of Arnie’s age, his humanity, and his vulnerability, such as when he is felled by a misplaced kick to the groin by his young daughter.

We see him later involved in energetic and high-octane action sequences, such as high diving off a steep cliff into a churning dam, with corporate super-villains in pursuit. This impossible act seems even more so in light of prior moments of vulnerability. The action scenes throughout are undercut by our sense of Schwarzenegger’s age and creaking limbs, and we become ever more sensitive to the pro-filmic reality that it is not the actor himself performing these stunts but a stunt-double (and probably at times, a digital double). This dissonant awareness brings with it the uncanny suspicion that Schwarzenegger/Adam has already been replaced, but doesn’t know it yet. This sense becomes even stronger when the plot twist is revealed at the film’s conclusion. We discover that the version of Schwarzenegger/Adam living through this exciting and dangerous life and fighting to prove his own status as the original, has been the clone all along. The original Schwarzenegger/Adam has all this time been off-screen, living out his ordinary, suburban life in blissful ignorance. Here at least, the action- packed life of the double is more visually explosive and therefore more spectacularly cinematic than the comfortable suburban life of the original. In this way the film enacts those speculative future-orientated claims for the digital doppelgänger, which suggest that an actor’s digital likeness could continue to perform in their stead, while the original goes on holiday, retires or is otherwise in absentia. 129

129 Magid, “New Media: Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers,” online.

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Schwarzenegger lurches uneasily through this film, seeking to demonstrate at several opportunities his vulnerability, his humanity, and his mortality. It is as if he is trying to elude the laser of the cyberscanner, insisting on his irreplaceability by his own digital image. His aged quality, his weariness and wrinkled face intrude into the action sequences, bringing a melancholy that we were never aware of when he seemed so invincible and immortal in his previous mechanical action-man screen incarnations, seeming to refute Roland Barthes argument that cinema does not contain the same melancholy of the photo. The temporal flow and movement of the cinematic image harnessed to the unfolding of a fictional narrative, subsumes the image’s “pastness” to a sense of present, or “here-and-now.” 130 Our perception of the pastness of the actor, Barthes thought, is subsumed in the unfolding present of the role and the narrative. 131 However, there are particular cases, including the work of actors like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, where the actor is never completely subsumed in their role but overwhelms it with the bittersweet potency of their own mortality. Indeed, with regards to certain dead actors Barthes admitted that:

I can never see or see again in a film certain actors whom I know to be dead without a kind of melancholy: the melancholy of Photography itself (I experience this same emotion listening to the recorded voices of dead singers). 132

The melancholic feeling elicited by actors whom we know to be dead, brings us to another related function of digital imaging technologies that is currently the subject of struggle: the digital “resurrection” of dead celebrities. Our image recording technologies have roots in nineteenth century practices of mourning and remembrance, among others. In our mediascape the dead and the living co-exist, but a few years ago there was an outpouring of outrage when Fred Astaire was digitally made to dance with a vacuum cleaner in an American television advertisement for

130 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 79. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid.

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Dirt Devil.133 The resulting controversy has raised questions of how we should deal with the images of our dead in the digital age, as phrases like “grave-robbing,” “resurrection” and “bringing the dead back to life” have emerged. The next chapter examines such phrases and similar anxieties from the past, in order to ask what is the nature of our relationship with the dead, and how do such things as contemporary experience and new image technologies disrupt or transform it?

133 See Catherine Donaldson-Evans, “Ad Campaigns Resurrect Historical Figures,” Fox News , 29 May 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88031,00.html (accessed 8/8/03) and Caryn James, “Raising the Dead for Guest Appearances,” New York Times , 14 May 1998, Living Arts Pages, pp. 6,10.

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Figure 7. Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein

Figure 8. The digitally resurrected Marlene Dietrich

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Chapter 4. Dancing dead and melancholy ghosts: tales of resurrection, technology and the immortal image

The dead in our presence

In chapter two we saw how Villiers’s Tomorrow’s Eve works through questions concerning our responses to mechanically produced images, and how this novel expresses its author’s aversion to the effects of such things as materialism, rationalism and consumerism on experience and behaviour. In this section I will focus on a short and curious chapter titled “Danse Macabre” which reveals Villiers’s uncertainty about recording technologies – particularly their apparent ability to deny the finality of death. The setting is Edison’s opulent secret cavern below Menlo Park, where the inventor demonstrates a new invention for his pale and sorrowful friend, Lord Ewald. Following a lengthy speech about deceptive women and their illusory arts, Edison tugs on a cord to activate a clockwork device that pulls tinted pieces of glass on a plastic strip between a large reflector and “the luminous glow of the astral lamp.” 1 This mechanism produces the image of a woman dancing on a wide white screen:

The transparent vision, miraculously caught in colour photography, wore a spangled costume as she danced a popular Mexican dance. Her movements were as lively as those of life itself, thanks to the procedures of successive photography, which can record on its microscopic glasses ten minutes of

1 Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve ( L’Eve Future 1886, translated elsewhere as Eve of the Future ), trans. Robert Martin Adams (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1982) p. 117.

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action to be projected on the screen by a powerful lamposcope, using no more than a few feet of film. 2

The dancer’s voice, though “flat and stiff,” can be heard singing and playing the tambourine in strange synchronicity with the image. Describing these images using triumphant phrases like “as lively as those of life itself,” Villiers’s narrative style prefigures the breathlessness of those journalists who attended Edison’s actual demonstrations of motion picture projection. 3 The novel is filled with intricate descriptions of gadgets and a sense that the boundaries between living and dead, and present and non-present have been irrevocably blurred. These descriptions are often laborious and awkward in their attempts to grasp the complexities of unfamiliar mechanical processes, as written by someone struggling in a language which is not yet everyday, or their own. Written some fifteen years before the first cinematographic exhibition, and two years before Edison’s experiments with animated photography, André Bazin cites this passage as one of the founding myths of “total cinema” that spurred on further invention and development of the apparatus. 4 It seems important then to note the way in which the operation of this machine and the images produced by it are conceived in the novel.

We are told that this contraption can bring the dead into the presence of the living. The woman on the screen is no less than the unfortunate Miss Evelyn Habal whose unappealing accoutrements, as we saw in chapter two, lie heaped and loveless in Edison’s drawer. She has been dead for some years, yet Edison insists to his astonished friend that this fact matters very little: “I can make her come into our presence as if nothing had ever happened to her.” 5 Edison’s blithe statement, delivered no doubt with a dismissive wave of the hand, implies that Miss Habal has been roused from her coffin unchanged by the process of death and technological

2 Ibid. 3 Tom Gunning, Foreword, Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , trans. Alan Bodger, ed. Richard Taylor (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xvi. 4 André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What is Cinema? Volume I , ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 20-21. 5 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 116.

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reanimation. Perhaps Edison’s insistence that Habal remains unchanged by technological resurrection implies that while alive, the woman was only a breathing illusion – her face and body constructed from an array of technologies, cosmetics and prosthetics. However, as we have seen, Villiers was constantly caught between bitter cynicism at the society of his time and astonishment at what feats the technologies of the late nineteenth century could achieve, especially with regard to the blurring of the line between life and death.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , Kittler writes briefly about the impact of film and the gramophone on our conceptions of the dead, ghosts and the notion of immortality. He argues that in the age of literature the figures of the dead and the terrain of human memory were the province of print, but:

Electricity put an end to all this. Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts, become technically reproducible, readers and writers no longer need the powers of hallucination. Our realm of the dead has withdrawn from the books in which it resided for so long. 6

As we have seen previously, Kittler contends that the encounter with the moving image of the self visually confirmed but also eclipsed the mythical and literary figure of the double. Similarly he suggests here that the cinema produced tangible ghosts in moving images of the dead, while at the same time eradicating older beliefs in an afterlife. However he seems to skim over this point, leaving it hanging tantalizingly while he expounds at some length on the impact of media technologies upon the figure of the double. 7

Terry Castle has also written on this subject arguing, though, that the reimagining of the dead was not merely due to the development of recording media, but was also

6 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 10. 7 Friedrich Kittler, “Romanticism – Psychoanalysis – Film: A History of the Double,” in Literature Media Information Systems: Essay/Friedrich A. Kittler , ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 1997), p. 150.

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due to a broader shift in mental frameworks. Castle writes that, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rational thinkers attempted to account for hauntings and reported sightings of spectres. Their theories relocated the cause of ghost-sightings from an external supernatural world to the internal operation of a fevered mind. It was thought that ghosts were merely hallucinations that tended to plague those poor souls suffering from an unbalanced sensorium. 8 The sensorium could become unbalanced through poor diet and digestion, lack of sleep and nervous complaints – those very conditions, incidentally, that could be exacerbated by living and working in a nineteenth century industrial centre, and that Jentsch recognized as important to the appearance of the uncanny. 9 Castle details though how the development of pre-cinematic technologies of illusion, such as the magic lantern, coincided with these new rationalist theories about the delirious ghost-seer. At the same time that ghosts became accepted as internal phenomena produced by a feverish or disordered mind, new technologies were developed that could produce the external illusion of ghosts. 10 The magic lantern came to be seen as the obvious mechanical analogue for the human mind in that it “made illusory forms and projected them outward.” 11

In this chapter I will examine the ability of our media technologies to keep the dead in our presence. Michael Taussig writes of the line we attempt to draw between the living and the dead, and the “rousing send off” we give their bodies and spirits. He argues that while we may suppose that death is about disappearance, the dead are not so easily tucked away and contained. 12 This is especially the case in our mediascape where the images and sounds of those who are now dead are an everyday phenomenon. Zygmunt Bauman argues that in the age of recording media things no longer live and then die. Instead they appear and disappear, with the possibility of

8 Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphysics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry , vol. 15, no. 1, autumn 1988, pp. 26-61. 9 Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 1906, Angelaki , vol. 2, no. 1, 1995, p. 8. 10 Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” pp. 54-5. 11 Ibid., p. 58. 12 Michael Taussig, “Dying is an Art, Like Everything Else” Critical Inquiry , vol. 28, autumn 2001, p. 307.

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appearing again. Disappearance, like death, is another mode of “ceasing to be,” but its difference from death lies in its potential reversal:

True, beings still undergo transformations superficially similar to death; indeed they vanish from sight and cease to communicate. Yet the resemblance to death is but superficial, since unlike death their departure is reversible and revocable; one can always “recover” the vanished beings from the limbo where they reside […] Unlike death, disappearance is not final, not “forever;” there is no certainty of its permanence.13

It should be pointed out that this summation of medial permanence is a little complacent. Through Bauman’s book, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , runs an assumption that the act of recording preserves and stabilises its object indefinitely, until a future moment of retrieval. Film archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai would no doubt disagree, having seen the ruin and heart-wrenching decay that can befall aging film stock. Images once clearly defined become faded, spotted and eroded, eventually disappearing forever. Videotapes are often recycled and their images, once taped over, are permanently erased. Bauman does not take into consideration the fragility of the material substance that contains the image. Nor does he conceive that his bold narrative of obsolescence applies as much to media and technology as it does to those things recorded by them. As the exemplification of hi- tech discourse digital media technologies are at the mercy of a continual process of updating and superseding. Computer equipment falls into disrepair, and with parts or replacements no longer available, formats become obsolete, their contents no longer readable as they are locked in dead media. 14

Whether we are complacent or anxious in our reliance on media to store the remnants of the past, nonetheless, as Kittler, Bauman and others have recognized,

13 Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality & Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 175. 14 Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2001).

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these technologies have had an impact on our notions of immortality and upon the imaginary relationship between the living and the dead. Bauman’s quote above about disappearance and reappearance suggests that media technologies remove the sting of death’s finality. Similarly, Kittler writes: “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture. In our mediascape, immortals have come to exist again.” 15 But how do we conceive of the continuing existence of the dead in this mediascape? How does the media presence of the dead affect us? Do we perceive a difference between the images of the dead on film and those animated via computer? What kind of cultural frameworks influence these perceptions?

In an article titled “The Dead Celebrity Who Comes Back to Life” Austin Bunn writes of experiments and developments in techniques for digitally recreating the images of dead actors. The article first appeared in a New York Times Magazine special issue, “Tech 2010: A catalogue of the Near Future,” in which technology writers were invited to speculate about interesting developments in order to whet the appetite of future-orientated readers/consumers for hi-tech products and events. 16 The processes currently used to recreate the appearance, gestures and expressions of a dead actor are varied. Some dead actors are recreated through digitally mapping an image of their face onto a live actor double. Others are modeled entirely in a computer and animated frame by frame, while others still rely heavily on live actor impersonators, who study motion, gesture and emotion libraries of the dead actors compiled from their body of work. These live actors don motion-capture suits on which sensors are placed that record tiny degrees of movement. These movements are used to animate the digital likeness of the dead. Beneath the image of the “resurrected” star lies a patchwork of harvested film footage, high-end technologies, technicians, programmers and vocal and gestural mimicry. 17

15 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , p. 13. 16 Bunn, “The Dead Celebrity Who Comes Back to Life,” New York Times Magazine , Sunday June 11, 2000, reproduced http://www.3dmaxmedia.com/PR_3dMaxMedia_HeavenSent01.htm (accessed 20/10/03). 17 Ibid. See also, staff writer, “Resurrecting Dead Actors,” Sci Tech Inserts , http://www.tvpc.co.za/Sci-tech/deadactors/deadactors.htm (accessed 21/8/01).

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It is now well known that after Oliver Reed died during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 18 the creators of the film decided not to recast and re-shoot his part, but to instead complete the film via the use of judicious editing and the rendering and animation of a few frames of a digital Reed. 19 Similar practices to ensure that an actor’s final performance reaches the screen pre-date digital technology by decades. When Jean Harlow died suddenly of uremic poisoning during the making of Saratoga , the film was completed by having a double, Mary Dees, interact with Clarke Gable. Dees was shot from behind and voiced by Paula Winslowe. 20 The use of digital imaging technology merely shifts this same process of completing a film into post- production. Such economically practical uses for CGI are of less fascination to Bunn and other technology journalists, however, than the possibility of casting digitally resurrected dead stars in major roles opposite the living. Bunn affects a casual tone when writing of the change this technology may bring: “Death may no longer mark the conclusion of a star's career, just a pause before rebooting.” 21 Death is refigured to be no more devastating than the conclusion of a career or a period of obsolescence or retirement, before a comeback. Both Bunn’s report on the digital resurrection and Villiers’s descriptions of Edison’s machine claim much on behalf of technology. Both writers also reveal, though, an ambivalence towards the process and the results attained. I will argue in this chapter that this uncertainty is revealed in Villiers’s use of the phrase “Danse Macabre” and the widespread use of the term “resurrection” to describe the reanimation of the images of dead stars via CGI. But first I will examine the late nineteenth century context from which these technologies and this mediascape emerged. This is in order to see how this technological mode of immortality was framed, as well as to contextualise Villiers’s particular uncertainty.

18 Gladiator , dir. Ridley Scott, UK/USA, 2000. 19 David Morgan, “Building a Better Rome: Gladiator FX Take Viewers Back in Time,” 20 March 2001, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/entertainment/Oscars/FX_Gladiator010223.html (accessed 3/6/03). 20 Internet movie database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029516/trivia (accessed 4/8/04). Saratoga , dir. Jack Conway, USA, 1937. 21 Bunn, “The Dead Celebrity Who Comes Back to Life,” online.

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Nineteenth century projects: salvaging lost presents

Tomorrow’s Eve abounds with imagery of technologically enabled afterlife. Ewald’s first hesitant and wide-eyed steps into Edison’s cavern bring him within earshot of a nightingale singing in a flow of pure notes recalling dark forests and a vast sky. He is astonished to find that this song does not emanate from the beak of a living bird. The recording of the dead bird’s final song is piped through the calyx of an artificial orchid crafted from silk. Ewald’s shock is countered by Edison’s melancholic cynicism: “Dead you say? Not altogether since I’ve recorded here his song and his spirit. I evoke it by means of electricity; that’s spiritualism put in really practical terms, right?” 22 Through Edison, Villiers mocks the then current vogue for Spiritualism with its attendant beliefs in ghost photography and spectral recording. 23 For Villiers there were no longer such things as ghosts as they had been banished from the world by positivism. As we saw previously, Freud argued that in a rational era, “the ‘spirit’ of persons or things” might now come down to “their capacity to be remembered or imagined after perception of them has ceased.” 24 In such a world, as Castle points out, the only remaining avenue of immortality was a material one in which the inscriptions of light and vibration were stabilised and preserved.

Villiers’s dreamlike Menlo Park of perpetual twilight always sits slightly out of focus with the historical Menlo Park of bustling workshops and workers. Similarly the outline of Villiers’s god-like and pompous Edison overlays that of the actual inventor but during the novel rarely matches the historical reports of the “plain-talking […] ex- railroad telegrapher.” 25 But at this point in the novel where a dead nightingale sings and a dead woman dances, the historical and the fictional seem to fall for a moment into line with each other. The words that Villiers puts into this fictionalised inventor’s

22 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , pp. 94-5. 23 John Potts, “Electroplasm,” 21.C, The End of the World Issue, issue 9, autumn 1993, pp. 42-7. 24 Sigmund Freud, “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al, vol. xiii, 1913-14 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), p. 94. 25 Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 126.

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mouth match the intentions behind the projects that the actual Thomas Alva Edison was working on at the time. Villiers was an admirer of Edison and possibly, in spite of his natural cynicism, bought into the inventor’s propaganda with regards to his achievements.

Edison believed that devices, such as his phonograph, would be used to record the words of the dying, and to salvage things in the process of slipping away forever. 26 The desire for retention and holding onto the ephemeral was a broader nineteenth century concern. Philippe Ariès’s famous study on shifts in Western attitudes towards death informs us that, for a few hundred years prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a person came to discover their own individuality “in the mirror of his own death.” 27 A gradual shift took place, however, in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century that brought a different focus onto the death of loved ones or significant others. Dan Meinwald attributes this shift to changes in social organization caused by the onset of industrialisation. Large sections of the population relocated from sizeable rural communities to smaller and more insular family groups in urban areas. Within this closed interdependent circle, the death of an irreplaceable family member created a greater sense of rupture and discontinuity. To ease this sense of rupture, strategies were developed to symbolically retain a sense of the dead one’s continuing physical presence. Such practices ranged from post- mortem photography to elaborate mausoleums and effigies to weaving ornaments and jewellery from the hair of a lost loved one – even to taxidermy. 28 Bauman points out that such strategies were not merely developed for the benefit of the living who mourn. They were also developed for the comfort of the living in their status as “the future dead.” Commemorative rites are reassuring for those who practice them, as “what they do now to their predecessors will be done to them by their own

26 Ibid., pp.123-4. 27 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present , trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 52. 28 Dan Meinwald, “Memento Mori: Death and Photography in Nineteenth Century America,” CMP Bulletin , California Museum of Photography, http://www.cmp1.ucr.edu/terminals/memento_mori/ (accessed 6/8/03).

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successors.” 29 In the nineteenth century, the diminishment of a comforting belief in immortality and an afterlife meant that memorialisation and the idea of remaining immortal in the memories of others ascended to almost hysterical proportions in what Ariès labels a “cult of memory” or “cult of the dead.” 30

It is in this context that we can locate some of the originating impulses leading to the development of recording technologies. In her chapter on Edison in the book Living Dolls , Gaby Wood surveys the American press at the time, finding references to the phonograph that describe it as a machine that can record and play back the “old familiar voice of one who is no longer with us on earth.” Such reports propose its possible use for a mother mourning her dead son or daughter, “who would give the world could she hear their living voices again.” 31 Edison’s declaration to the New York Post about his phonograph also gives us some insight into how he envisaged it would be used:

Your words are preserved in the tin foil, and will come back upon the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same voice you spoke them in […] This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb, voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm. 32

Bearing out Bauman’s argument, Edison seems here more concerned with selling his instrument as a tool of permanence to the future dead, rather than as merely a device for mourners. He also gives us an impression of an uncanny machine that

29 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies , pp. 52-5. 30 Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present , pp. 55, 70, 72. Also, see Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1995). 31 Wood, Living Dolls , pp. 122-3. 32 Edison, cited in Wood, Living Dolls , pp. 123-4.

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dispassionately mimics the voices of the dead. With regard to the comparable effects of the cinematograph, Simon Popple quotes an incident reported in an issue of The Photographic Chronicle during 1901. During one of Edison’s screenings of locally filmed actualities in Manchester, a grieving mother was in the audience whose daughter had recently been killed. Watching an actuality that had been filmed some weeks previously, the woman spotted her child on the screen:

[W]alking serenely behind the barrier of her Sunday School in the most natural way imaginable. After this incident hundreds of people from the neighbourhood in which the little girl had lived came to see the almost living image of their departed friend. 33

The title of this report is “A Pathetic Incident,” indicating a perception of the event as less miraculous than pitiful, for the sight of her daughter “almost living” on the screen was apparently a terrible shock for the mother. The fact that crowds flocked to see this “almost living” image of the dead child attests to the image’s status as something that was uncanny and strange. Similarly, Villiers saw that Edison’s devices had ushered in an era where the dead were no longer altogether dead. The dead no longer needed to disappear with the disposal of their biological body: their corporeal image and voice could be brought forth again into the realm of the living as an inscription of light and shadow or vibrations. Despite Villiers’s wide-eyed descriptions of such technologies in Tomorrow’s Eve , there is also a level of uncertainty about the results of this technological achievement. The next section will explore the nature of this ambivalence.

Danse Macabre

The Danse Macabre/Dance of Death is an iconography that proliferated in the church friezes and poetry of fourteenth century Europe. In this medieval image a

33 Simon Popple, “The Diffuse Beam: Cinema and Change,” in Cinema: the Beginnings and the Future , ed. Christopher Williams (London: University of Westminster Press 1996), pp. 100-101.

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skeleton or rotting corpse leads various members of society, from prince to peasant, through a dance. The message on many church walls told the parishioners that no amount of power or money could aid in the avoidance of death, and that every man or woman would eventually have to “join the dance” and make his or her peace with God. 34 While it was acknowledged that death was unavoidable, it was widely believed that one could have an element of control over one’s after life. The Catholic Church, for instance, regulated the means by which the dead could be both guaranteed passage through Purgatory and be retained in the memories and physical structures of their community. In a virtually contractual manner, the dead benefacted their church, paying for alter cloths, archways or windows in exchange for an epitaph engraved in the structure of the church walls, organised masses and prayers of intercession for their soul. 35

Villiers was a conservative Catholic, and he was disillusioned and disgusted by the modernisation of the Catholic Church and its growing social irrelevance in the nineteenth century climate of secularism and positivism. According to Robert Martin Adams, Villiers saw rational positivism as a “grotesque parody” of his church, “an ersatz religion devoid of all sanctity, all sacrifice, and all supernatural sanctions.” 36 In this light Villiers’s reference to “Danse Macabre,” an ancient term that had once proclaimed the Church’s dominion over all avenues of human immortality, holds several layers of meaning. Its use, as the title of a chapter concerning a machine that appears to bring back the dead, acknowledges the waning of the Church’s power, and suggests that recording media had taken over the avenue of human immortality and memorialisation forsaken by the Church. Villiers also points to the hollowness of claims made in the name of science and technology of an eventual victory over death itself. According to Bauman and others, the implicit project of modernity in the nineteenth century was the overcoming of human mortality. Yet in our time, despite

34 Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, “Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe , ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 15. 35 Ibid., pp. 4-5. 36 Adams, Translator’s Introduction, Tomorrow’s Eve , pp. xvii-xix.

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the best efforts of medical science and cryogenics, the “dance of death” still holds. Indeed, Bauman argues that the continuing inescapability of mortality is the great unspoken shame and failure of progressivism and the biological sciences in particular. 37 Life may be prolonged now, but death eventually claims us all.

On the one hand, Villiers seems to quiver in exhilarated terror at the grand projects of science and technology. But on the other, he uses the phrase “Danse Macabre” as a kind of taunt, evoking failed projects and the impenetrable barrier of human mortality. He implies that, like the Church, all that science and technology can offer is yet another mode of immortality through memorialisation. But unlike the Church, technology does not offer a spiritual dimension to this mode of immortality. Villiers’s use of the term “Danse Macabre” assesses the results of this new mode of memorialisation. In the context of the novel the term literally describes the macabre sight of the dead woman dancing on the screen. “The dance of the dead” is rendered here a dark but empty miracle. Technology, despite its promises, has not brought the dead woman back to life. Habal remains in the realm of the dead, yet here on this screen, she is seen to dance.

Over time we have become comparatively blasé towards the sounds and images of those whom we know to be dead. Yet Villiers’s ideas in this chapter are not merely a quirky footnote in the history of science fiction literature. Rather, they reveal concerns that circulate around our use of recording media, media that, as Gunning recognises, originated in nineteenth century obsessions with “overcoming fatal oblivion.” 38 As Michelson argues, Tomorrow’s Eve marks a “greatly privileged instance” in the formation of our image technologies and culture, which emerges from these nineteenth century roots. 39 Yet this focus on cinema’s temporal dimension must be tempered by a more prosaic awareness of cinema’s place in a media culture that is less

37 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , pp. 15, 131-8. 38 Tom Gunning, “Re-newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/articles/gunning.html , p. 14 (accessed 13/7/01). 39 Michelson, “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” October , vol. 29, summer 1984, p. 4.

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about preservation than dissemination. It is at the nexus of these two concerns – preservation and dissemination – that the digital resurrection of the dead star is produced. The next section is dedicated to elucidating Bauman’s argument about this broad historical shift in the function of representation, and its impact.

From preservation to dissemination

At the time he patented the phonograph in 1877, Edison believed that the machine’s central role would be within the realm of private mourning, as a device to stabilise and preserve the last words of the dying. 40 It is Bauman’s thesis, however, that at some point during the process of modernity a widespread cultural concern with notoriety, fame or celebrity began to eclipse a concern with immortality or existence beyond death. He argues that this transition occurred at the point where “viewing replaced reading and screens replaced books.” 41 Bauman’s contention has some similarities to Walter Benjamin’s argument about the effect of mechanical reproduction on the aura, that the displacement of “cult value” by “exhibition value” began in the age of photography. 42 For Bauman points out too that, soon after their advent, the use of the phonograph and film quickly expanded beyond singular preservation to a project of multiplication and mass dissemination of sound and image. This new mass dissemination ushered in a new age of industrialised popular culture. 43

What recording technologies meant for this project of immortality was that an image of the corporeal identity of the dead – a double – could be retained, long after the physical body had lost its resemblance to the living human individual and had dissolved into earth or ashes. Recording technologies challenged the dominion of total oblivion. Previously techniques of embalming, effigies, death masks or

40 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , p.176, fn. 11. 41 Ibid., p. 83. 42 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936, Illuminations , ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Great Britain: Fontana Press, 1992), p. 219. 43 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , p.176, foot note 11.

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portraiture had also been used for such a purpose – but these were the provinces of only a privileged few. As historian Vanessa Harding observes:

Post-mortem decay literally dissolves the integrity of the physical body […] consciousness of decay, of the physical changes that the corpse undergoes that take it further and further from the recognisable human individual, also undermines the sense of personalisation. Social or financial power can resist this, deferring the consciousness of decay, and therefore the loss of personal identification for the longest possible period.” 44

Harding writes of the privileges social or financial power could bring the dead. Embalming, lead coffins, and dedicated secure burial sites, memorial services – all these things were designed to defer or draw attention away from the body’s physical metamorphosis, and to therefore retain a notion of the deceased’s personalisation. Retention from oblivion has long been sought, whether physically or in the memory of the living.

To a certain extent, immortality was democratised once most people in a society could make a durable image of their face or a recording of their voice. The result of this new equal opportunity for immortality and the plenitude of recorded images and sounds, according to Bauman, was that immortality in its earlier form as a social relation began to lose its meaning. Value was transferred onto notoriety instead. Mass media, he contends, gives many a short-cut to notoriety or prominence, “that in a surrogate way may assuage, for a time at least […] the anguish of mortality.” 45 Bauman suggests that the desire for notoriety also originated with the growth of the metropolis and its accompanying shrinking sense of being anonymous, one of a faceless million. In the metropolis the “facelessness of the many gives meaning to the

44 Vanessa Harding, “Whose Body? A Study of Attitudes Towards the Dead Body in Early Modern Paris,” in The Place of The Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe , ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 172-3. 45 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , p. 84.

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faces of the few.” 46 In the metropolis and the age of media: “‘Being in view’ is the way of being an individual; perhaps the only way of being one.” 47

Tomorrow’s Eve marks both a point of transition and resistance to this new age. The two villainesses of the book, Evelyn Habal and Alicia Clary, are both creatures of the stage who seek celebrity. Habal is a dancer and Clary a “lyric artist” who “represents well” and professes, “I want to be famous, and that is the thing nowadays.” 48 But in the end Alicia’s pursuit of celebrity is her undoing. Edison lures her into a trap by playing the role of a theatre impresario and appealing to her vanity. He holds out the bait of Alicia’s own glorification via a grand representation. She models for what she believes will be a great statue of herself in the mode of Eve that will, so she is told, occupy a place of public prominence and be admired by her future legions of fans. Meanwhile, as she stands naked in Edison’s studio envisaging her future celebrity Alicia’s image is taken from her by ingenious machines that instead record her exact dimensions for the modeling of Hadaly. Using techniques derived from photography, they transfer the precise shading of her features and the texture of her skin to the silken artificial skin of her double. The recording of her voice for use in Hadaly’s twin golden gramophones of speech is explained by Edison as having her read and practice lines for an upcoming play in which she will triumph on the stages of Europe.

She labours under an illusion of future public notoriety, but the reality planned for her by Ewald and Edison is future private immortality. They believe that the real Alicia will drift away into another level of society, while her lovely mechanical shade will glide through the lonely parks of Ewald’s private estate, speaking to no-one but him. In writing Alicia’s fate thus, Villiers seems to resist the larger cultural transition from preservation to dissemination, as well as the notion of the entry of women into public life. Tomorrow’s Eve figures recording technology as a punishment or trap – the

46 Ibid., p. 83. 47 Ibid. 48 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 170.

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fame-hungry are replaced by their images, which are forced to act out an unvarying set of gestures. The very technologies Villiers envisages as serving poetic justice against the vain and shallow, in actuality, enabled the entrenchment of the cult of celebrity. However worship by this cult is only fleeting. The constant struggle of the faceless towards what Bauman calls “the centre of visibility” means that notoriety is coupled with instant obsolescence, as those in the spotlight are pushed out to make way for the new: “The stage is dazzlingly lit, so that the wings are barely visible and actors seem to emerge from nowhere only to melt back again into abstruse fuzziness.” 49 A very few reach iconic status and are not so easily ushered into the shadows. Within an economy that places value on the current, it is no longer enough to become immortalised through media recording technology.

As we saw in chapter three, a technological solution is again promoted – for those who are deemed in some way still relevant enough to remain on our screens. Just as the creation of a double in the form of an image was a bid for immortality, so too the “digital clone” or “digital doppelgänger” has been touted as a solution for the career obsolescence of stars. If, however, the actor in question is dead, then this digital likeness can no longer be labelled a “doppelgänger.” For with the dissolving of his or her corporeal model there is no “double,” as all that remains now of the actor is their image. In the trade and mainstream press, the computer-generated likeness of a dead actor is instead commonly labelled a “digital resurrection.”

Digital resurrection

Interviewed in 2000, Jeffrey Lotman, President of Global Icons and its offshoot, Virtual Celebrity Productions, claimed: “With the integration of all the technologies and creative acting skills at our disposal, we believe we’re very close to a recapturing the soul of dead personalities.” 50 Lotman planned to resurrect the screen careers of

49 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , p. 176. 50 Interview with Jeffrey Lotman, President of Virtual Celebrity Productions, for article: “Resurrecting Dead Actors,” by staff writer, Sci Tech Inserts ,

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Marlene Dietrich, James Cagney, and W.C. Fields among others. 51 Although the project is currently on hiatus due to a lack of funding, Peter Riva, the grandson of Marlene Dietrich, still champions the possible return of her image to the screen in new films through the animation of a digital likeness. According to Riva, Dietrich was fascinated by new image recording technologies, and she insisted on being involved with each new medium as it emerged. As evidence of Dietrich’s love of media, Riva tells us that in her later years in Paris as an old woman, the retired actress went through five VCRs, continually updating her home entertainment system as the standard of technology developed. On this basis, Riva surmises that Dietrich would be an ideal candidate for “digital resurrection.” If she were alive she would be delighted, he insists, for her image to reinhabit the realm of high-tech. 52 Riva’s comments suggest that Dietrich saw new image technologies as solutions for career obsolescence. Public identity, she saw, could be maintained through the entry into new media forms. Refusal or inability to enter each new medium as it superseded or cannibalized the old, threatened one with fading away into oblivion, just as many of those stars of the silent screen who could not make the transition to sound are now forgotten.

Similarly, both Karen Kaplan and Megan Turner position the digital resurrection within the more mundane discourse of the “come back,” and compare it to the resuscitation of a dead career, such as John Travolta’s celebrated reappearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction after years of career decline. 53 In this view, the biographical body and the person of the actor becomes irrelevant. It is merely a starting point, a template, as the star-image takes on a life of its own. The digital resurrection merely returns the star’s image to the current centre of screen visibility,

http://www.tvpc.co.za/Sci-tech/deadactors/deadactors.htm (accessed 21/8/01). 51 In an email correspondence from Jeoffrey Lotman, dated 8 November 2001, he informed me that although the project has been put on hold indefinitely due to lack of funding, most of his celebrity clients were enthusiastic about their own future resurrection. 52 Bunn, “The Dead Celebrity Who Comes Back to Life,” online. 53 Karen Kaplan, “Old Actors Never Die; They Just Get Digitized,” LA Times , 9 August 1999, reproduced online at House of Moves , http://www.moves.com/film/vcp/latimes.html (accessed 9/6/03). Megan Turner “Back From the Dead,” New York Post , 26 October 1999, reproduced online at House of Moves , http://www.moves.com/film/vcp/newyorkpost.html (accessed 9/6/03).

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or the media temporal zone called “Now.” These articles suggest that proposals to develop digital resurrections of dead stars mark a shift in focus from keeping the dead in our presence to keeping the dead in our media present . Like Villiers’s Edison, these contemporary writers suggest that through new digital imaging processes the dead can return to us unchanged by technological resurrection and with the rosy bloom of life digitally restored to their cheeks.

This triumphalism, however, is tempered by a certain amount of repugnance from other quarters. In 1998 the President of the Screen Actor’s Guild, Richard Masur, disparaged the practice as “casting from Forest Lawn” in reference to the main cemetery in Hollywood, and he joined others who have labelled it “exploitative and perverse.” 54 We should of course take into consideration the certain amount of economic self-interest that is at the heart of such comments. After all, actors have a difficult time competing for work against the living, without being forced to fight the dead for roles. But there are other considerations too. The common use of the word “resurrection,” along with phrases like “raising the dead for guest appearances,” “back from the dead” and the references to “the grave” reveal a level of uncertainty even within the realm of celebratory discourse. 55 By examining the use of such terminology we can understand how the star-image of the dead actor is perceived as being somehow transformed by its entry into a new media technology.

On resurrection, exhumation and zombies

What does it mean to resurrect? This word, like “doppelganger” in the previous chapter, is thrown around casually yet it retains connotations that reveal some hesitancy towards the practice of digitally reanimating dead celebrities. In Christian

54 “SAG Seeks to Block Synthetic Actors,” Internet Movie Database Daily News, 27 March 1998, http://us.imdb.com/SB?19980327#6 (accessed 28/3/98). 55 See for example, staff writer, “Resurrection Man: Bringing Bruce Lee Back from the dead,” Empire Online UK , 15 November 2001, http://www.empireonline.co.uk/news/news.asp?3541 (accessed 6/1/04). Caryn James, “Raising the Dead for Guest Appearances,” New York Times , 14 May 1998, Living Arts Pages, pp. 6,10.

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theology “The Resurrection” has divine and miraculous connotations. It refers to the rising again of Christ after His torturous crucifixion and subsequent entombment, and the connected belief in the eventual rising of all humans on a future day of judgment. 56 More generally “to resurrect,” means to “bring back to life,” to “raise from the dead” or, more mundanely, to “bring back into use.” 57 It also refers, however, to the historical and less savoury practice of exhuming corpses for use in medical dissection. Thus, entangled in this word are both the connotations of a miraculous survival beyond physical death and a mundane yet sinister meaning connected to anxieties about the desecration of the corpse. Harding’s study of attitudes towards the corpse and the retention of physical identity in early modern Paris explains some of the origins of these anxieties about desecration. Here she writes of the treatment dealt to the corpses of criminals and other undesirables:

As persons who were outside normal society, their bodies were liable to be treated in ways that emphasized their exclusion from the normal. In some cases the corpse had to bear the full brunt of society’s disapproval of its owner’s actions in life; ritual degradation of the body, dismemberment and distribution were a way of taking revenge. 58

We see here that connections between body and identity were perceived to survive beyond death. Indeed, such connections persist, manifested in our continuing horror at postmortem dismemberment and the reluctance of many to donate their bodies for medical research or organ transplants. A similar anxiety about desecration comes through in opposition to the digital resurrection of dead actors. As Bunn points out, “A danger is that once digital facsimiles are made, controlling their use might be close to impossible. James Dean could be traded like an MP3, and end up ‘starring’ in

56 Definition from The Australian Oxford Dictionary , 2nd edn. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004). 57 Ibid. 58 Harding, “Whose Body? A Study of Attitudes Towards the Dead Body in Early Modern Paris,” p. 174.

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pornography.” 59 The concern here is similar to that experienced by the inhabitants of early modern Paris – an anxiety about the loss of control over the use and state of one’s body. The copyrighting of one’s image and voice is an attempt to retain this control over one’s identity even after death. This control is put in the hands of the deceased’s estate, with the trust that their wishes in life will be accorded with in death, in a manner similar to the older practices of benefactions and promises extracted on the deathbed.

Unease about corporeal resurrection and loss of control over one’s body and identity are also central to the image of the zombie. As the Australian electronic and performance artist Stelarc has often reiterated: “A Zombie is a body that performs involuntarily, that does not have a mind of its own. There has always been a fear of the involuntary and the automated.” 60 Robert Hood tells us that although the word “zombie” originated in the West African term “zumbi” (meaning “fetish”), the zombie of modern cinema narrative has been less about Haitian voodoo, and more connected with the reanimation of corpses and Frankensteinian themes. 61 Marina Warner states that the zombie is the opposite of the ghost – it is a body without a soul, whereas the ghost is envisaged as a disembodied spirit. Her research into the zombie’s origins has found that this figure emerged from the storytelling of slaves in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century: “Zombie is actually a literal description of a slave… somebody living whose soul has been sucked out by a spirit master, a demonic figure, who does it in order to make that person work for them day and night.” 62

59 Bunn, “The Dead Celebrity Who Comes Back to Life,” online. 60 Stelarc, From Zombies to Cyborg Bodies: Extra Ear, Exoskeleton and Avatars Explorations in Art and Technology , 2002, http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/ccrs/gallery/stelarc/stelarc.htm (accessed 1/6/04). 61 Robert Hood, “Nights of the Celluloid Dead: A History of the Zombie Film,” first published in Bloodsongs , no. 4, 1995, ed. Steve Proposch, reproduced online at http://www.tabula- rasa.info/Horror/ZombieFilms1.html , pp. 2-3 (accessed 1 /6 /04). 62 Joyce Morgan, “Friends of the Living dead,” Interview with Marina Warner, Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, 4-5 January 2003, p. 12.

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Certainly, in many of the films that Hood lists the dead are reanimated and controlled, exploited for the malicious ends of others. In later years this figure has been appropriated to speak metaphorically of the dehumanizing aspects of the kinds of work that we examined in chapter two, such as assembly-line work and switchboard operations. The zombie can also become a figure that comments on “mindless consumerism.” In George A. Romero’s semi-humorous Dawn of the Dead , zombies claw their way out of their graves and return in their moaning hordes to a shopping mall, where they lurch and stumble blankly in circles to a pleasant muzak soundtrack. 63 A scientist insists that the zombies are “pure motorized instinct,” but another character speculates that they must have some memory of the mall that brings them back: “this was an important place in their lives.” 64 The means of the zombies’ animation are also significant. In earlier films from the 1930s the zombie is a creation of sorcery, but by the 1940s, the dead are routinely reanimated and controlled by various technological means: electrification, nuclear radiation, computer chips and so on. Such imagery can also be seen to inform the unease with which some of incidences of digital resurrection have been received.

A good example of this uneasy reception is an article by Jodi Kantor responding to the digital resurrection of Nancy Marchand, a cast member of the TV show The Sopranos , who died of cancer between filming seasons. 65 Rather than simply writing her character out of the show, the creators filmed an entire final scene in which a digitally reanimated Marchand, who played Tony Soprano’s mother Livia, speaks final words to her son before dying. Livia/Marchand was recreated through a process of digitally grafting an image of Marchand’s head onto a body double. Marchand’s digitally grafted head speaks lines edited from her previous performances to which her son played by James Gandolfini, responds. According to Kantor the result of this process is that: “Livia sounds like one of those dolls that repeats one of several

63 Dawn of the Dead , dir. George A. Romero, USA, 1979. 64 Quotes available online from the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/quotes (accessed 4/8/04). 65 The Sopranos , HBO, USA, 1999 - still in production.

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alternating phrases each time you pull the cord in her back […] Her head is cocked at an odd angle, and it’s too small for the body to which it was attached.” Kantor finds the “ventriloquism” of the effect “ghastly.” It is nothing but a “bizarre Frankensteinian experiment, using technological gimmickry to resurrect Nancy Marchand.” 66

For Kantor this process of technological resurrection is underpinned by a gross disrespect to the dead actress’s identity. Marchand’s image and voice are rendered repugnant and bring to mind not the memory of the actress as she lived and worked, but instead something that does violence to that memory. The imagery Kantor uses such as “Frankensteinian,” and the title of the article, “Livia Let Die: Let her Rest in One Piece,” conjure up a vision of Marchand’s dead body dissected, cobbled back together and made to speak mindlessly in the fashion of the zombie. The sense that violence is done to more than just the memory but also to the body and persona via the actress’s image reveals the continuing operation of a framework informed by sympathetic magic. This is especially apparent when the process of resurrection incorporates actual footage of the actress as she lived rather than the animation of a non-indexical digital model. This is not an isolated response, for we are reminded that Paula Parisi’s impressions of Scott Billups’s virtual Marilyn also reference “Frankenstein,” in recognition of the use of the body parts and facial elements of various models and actresses used to compose the image, conjuring up a similar image of cadaver parts sewn together and animated via an external electrical force. 67

As we saw in chapter one, some of the Russian Symbolists were similarly affected when they saw human figures projected via the cinematograph. Gippius thought that the apparatus mechanically dissected and then rejoined the natural movement of living things, thus transforming the organic into something semi-mechanical. She saw the cinematic process as one that mechanically “killed” and then reanimated its

66 Jodi Kantor, ‘Livia Let Die: Let her Rest in One Piece,’ Slate (Culturebox) , 2 March 2001, http://slate.msn.com/id/101783/ (accessed 6/1/04). 67 Parisi, “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood,” Wired , vol. 3, no. 12, December 1995, p. 204.

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object, and she compared its uncanny effects to those of automata. 68 This response emerged from the Symbolist conceptual framework that held the mechanical in opposition to the organic. As this framework has dissipated, the uncanny effects of the apparatus have been papered over, and in the passing of time as the earlier images made by these machines have aged, we have come to place a greater emphasis on cinema’s temporal aspects. In a sense, the Edisonian project still continues. Despite the mass dissemination of images and Bauman’s argument about the displacement of a concern with immortality with an obsession with notoriety, the cinematic apparatus is still seen as an instrument of temporal salvage, able to snatch a moment from the indifferent flow of time. We have come to see these images as more akin to disembodied spirits than soulless mechanically animated bodies.

The haunted screen

Images of dead stars on film do not evoke zombies or Frankensteinian animated corpses. These images have a ghostly beauty for us now, as Susan Felleman observes: “The flesh of Bette Davis and Greta Garbo has gone to earth, yet their beautiful traces haunt our movie screens and fly as signals out into the universe.” 69 Similarly, Leo Charney seeks to remind us that a major pleasure of the cinema is one that is both uncanny and melancholic:

The movies’ great appeal is not simple voyeurism, as so many people assume. It’s the voyeurism of loss. Staring slack-jawed at loss in motion, corpses on parade. Cinema offers the illusion of movement and depth and it looks like life and it’s cool to see it so big on-screen. Movies also and quietly offer the illusion of conquering absence, mastering loss, vanquishing death. 70

68 Gippius cited in Tsivian Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception , p. 9. 69 Susan Felleman, “The Moving Picture Gallery,” Iris , nos. 14-15, autumn 1992, p. 191. 70 Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 42.

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A “voyeurism of loss” recognizes and appreciates that this machine does not bring the dead back to us intact. These images instead prickle our nervous systems, evoking the irreversible absence from this earth of those past beings on the screen. Watching these old movies we are caught between “vanquishing loss” and holding tightly onto it. Such a perspective locates the camera and projector in a category that includes memorial photography in albums bound in black ribbons, funeral processions with horses in ebony bunting, and the romantic drabness of widows’ vestments.

We have seen that the connotations of resurrection, desecration and zombies flow through some of the disquiet aimed at the digital reanimation of dead actors. These connotations indicate a perception that violence is done to the image of the actor’s body without their consent, that they are helplessly slandered in death, becoming an unwitting body without mind or spirit, technologically animated, lumbering through the mediascape. But perhaps another thing that is troubling about the computer- generated dead star is that it is seen as an attempt to pin down, figure out, and enshrine the star in a rigid image – to proclaim their meaning as something that can be distilled and emulated, such as in Lotman’s comments about “capturing the soul of dead personalities.” 71 On the one hand the star’s identity is reanimated and put back to work in new entertainment contexts, but on the other they seem reduced to certain traits, catchphrases and gestures. Bauman declares that the very nature of immortality is rigidity. To become immortal is for one’s identity to become fixed and undynamic. Those traits and deeds that developed during the life process, he says, settle like sediment after that process is stilled. 72 According to deCordova, however, the star identity is never fixed. 73 Even after the bodily death of the star, the uncovering of hidden secrets potentially continues and adds to the star’s process of becoming and transformation, throwing an entirely new tint over the eyes of those who see the dead. For our perception of the actor’s work on screen is unavoidably shot through with our knowledge of their life experience and the labour of screen acting. A

71 Interview with Lotman for article, “Resurrecting Dead Actors,” by staff writer, Sci Tech Inserts , online. 72 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , p. 68. 73 deCordova, Picture Personalities , pp. 111-2.

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marriage break up, a bout of alcoholism, an affair or a feud with a costar – such experiences and public knowledge of these events inflect the audience’s reading of the performance on screen. Reading these “back stories” into performance is one of the pleasures of film-going.

George Kouvaros, in a thoughtful review of the Magnum Photographers book The Misfits: Story of a Shoot , observes that photos of dead actors are usually associated with a “constricted circuit of melancholy.” 74 We feel the loss of some actors more keenly than others – and often, it may not be because they are more beloved than others, but because of what they seem to represent or embody for us. Some of us enjoy trying to unravel the enigma of the star who is dead but yet who lives in this moment on film, captured forever sliding towards death. The melancholic pleasure many of us still gain from watching a film like The Misfits on video or DVD bears this out. 75 We marvel at the film’s dreadful serendipity with its themes of death, fading and madness and Guido’s musings in the desert about the glow from dead stars, while we watch the enduring light and gestures from stars (Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift) long since imploded. The film holds us in thrall like a curse being played out in which we cannot intervene. We know the ending(s) so well, for they have become part of Hollywood lore. Clark Gable, dead of a heart attack the day after filming; Marilyn Monroe, within months found dead of an overdose naked and alone on a rumpled bed; Montgomery Clift - his downward curve took a few more years to reach its nadir, until 1966 when his ruined body finally gave up the struggle to live. All three beloved actors are suspended here in this film in the 1960’s desert at the mouth of the abyss.

We shake our heads at the tragic ruination of Clift’s car-mashed face. Watching Clark Gable, we trace the fissures in his face and savour the lurching performance of drunkenness by the once suave idol who has a parallel after-life on thousands of

74 George Kouvaros, “The Misfits: What Happened Around the Camera,” Film Quarterly , vol. 55, no. 4, summer 2002, p. 33. 75 The Misfits , dir. John Huston, USA, 1961.

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video shelves as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind .76 But mostly we watch for the breathless and marshmallowy Marilyn. Her other disingenuous characterisations in The Seven Year Itch and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are the usually preferred incarnations of drag artistes and impersonators the world over, but here she is vulnerable, lax, a tumble of denim, un-bustressed flesh and unkempt hair. 77 When watching these images, it may only be that, as Benjamin argued, we are held in thrall by the “spell of the personality.” 78 However, watching Marilyn here in The Misfits, for the first time it’s as if we are really seeing her, just briefly, before she slides from view and is eclipsed by Marilyn Icon, subject of a thousand glossy coffee-table books and Andy Warhol reproductions. In imagining Marilyn as iconic we tend to see her white halter neck dress forever billowing around her thighs from a subway grate, her face as a mask (all half-closed eyes and glossy mouth half-open) – an industrially orgasmic gasp of ’50s Americana. It is this Marilyn, the Marilyn of the knowing sexual artifice, and not the dusty, trembling Marilyn screaming and raging like a banshee in the desert, who has been digitally resurrected by several different software developers and digital animator over the past decade or so.

“Abominable masquerades” and “outrageous caricature” 79

Before Scott Billups’s virtual Marilyn, the first serious attempt to create a digitally animated Marilyn Monroe was by Daniel Thalmann and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, launched for Miralab in 1995. 80 If we access their Marilyn via the Internet and watch her move through her rudimentary routine in a small QuickTime player box on our monitor she seems, by the CGI standards of the present, ludicrous and primitive. 81 In the five-second online demonstration, a tiny figure in a short pink dress walks

76 Gone With the Wind , dir. Victor Fleming, USA, 1939. 77 The Seven Year Itch , dir. Billy Wilder, USA, 1955. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , dir. Howard Hawks, USA, 1953. 78 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 224. 79 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 79. 80 Kelly Tyler, “Virtual Humans,” Nova Online , http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/specialfx2/humans.html (accessed 11/5/01). 81 “Marilyn at Lake Geneva” (demonstration), Miralab, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/specialfx2/marilyn (accessed 11/5/01).

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towards us along a path on the filmed shore of Lake Geneva. Blonde hair in a vaguely recognisable hairstyle sits atop blurred features. Her face seems veiled, secretive, as if seen through a fuzzy memory or very dusty glass. The digital Marilyn passes two “real” males, our surrogates, who turn and acknowledge her. Their eyes, which we know are really looking at empty space, have evidently been instructed by the director to appear as if involuntarily drawn to the sexual magnetism of flesh rippling under cloth, or doing a “double-take” at the apparent resurrection of a dead icon.

The strategy of using surrogate credulous spectators is, as we saw in chapter two, reminiscent of those early short films depicting naive yokel characters rushing the cinema screen, misidentifying the image for reality. But this quite aggressive instruction to us (“Look! Isn’t she amazing!”) does not serve to convince, but instead points out how unconvincing she is. Her limbs move so carefully as if under complex instructions (“lift and bend and straighten”) from a commanding voice in her head, steering her through her machinations. There is no energy left here for undulating, pouting or smiling – the figure is too busy working out how to put one foot in front of the other. This primitive “Marilyn” evokes nothing more than a remote control mannequin in a pink rag and an obscene wig.

Since 1995, the images produced through such technologies have become increasingly perceptually convincing. The apparent aim of their creators has been to erase as many uncanny effects as possible, and to create an illusion of unthought movement combined with a thoughtful presence. The immediate almost repulsed response to the earlier model mentioned above is like Edison’s disdain in Tomorrow’s Eve for early automata that he characterises as absurd “abominable masquerades” and “outrageous caricature.” 82 Just as the new in high-tech discourse is validated in comparison against the old, Villiers’s Edison positions his work as a refinement, a movement towards precision and perfection, in creating a machine that evokes life while the puppets of the past only bring to mind the abjectness of the animated corpse.

82 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve , p. 61.

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As we saw in chapter one, the qualities of the CGI cast in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , even though technically much more advanced than the Thalmann’s virtual Marilyn, still evoked “three day old cadavers.” 83 These qualities though are perhaps more disturbing in a likeness of someone who we know was once alive but who is now dead. We receive these images through a framework informed by an awareness of indexical relations between the film image and what it represents. Over time we have come to see images of dead stars on film in affectionately melancholic terms as ghostly or spectral. But the digital actor has no such indexical relation – as we have seen in chapters one and two, it is perceived as having a material counterpart in such things as puppets, dolls and animatronic dummies.

However, even these objects, which have such loaded cultural heritages, are not automatically uncanny. Waxwork models of current celebrities, of the type exhibited at Madame Tussauds, for example, occupy a framework that operates to mute their potential uncanny effects. 84 These solidly material celebrity simulacra serve as an adjunct to the star-image. The physical proportions of the famous are measured and reproduced in an attempt to conjure a sense of their presence in the world and to fill out the spatial dimensions of their image. Madame Tussaud’s official websites feature the motif of a paparazzo camera continually flashing, interspersed with images of visitors posing gleefully on a red carpet with the stiff likenesses of a perma-tanned Brad Pitt and a smiling Julia Roberts. Unlike the traditional historical displays, these celebrity exhibitions are concerned with reflecting and materially confirming the media present. As celebrities lose their lustre, their wax figures are removed from display to make room for the new. As stars change their appearance or style, their wax likeness is updated accordingly to reflect the template. Currently Madame Tussauds are promoting an “interactive” Jennifer Lopez that appears to blush coyly when words are whispered into its ears. The London exhibition also features a model of Britney Spears, leaning backwards, frozen in a precarious erotic dance pose, its

83 LePetit, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sunday Telegraph , 29 July 2001 p. 98. 84 Madame Tussauds official site is available at: http://www.madame-tussauds.com (accessed 2/7/04).

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animatronic bust heaving from implied exertion. 85 These are animatronic dummies of the living, stand-ins for those who may be elsewhere but who are still present in the same historical moment. This is not, then, a context of loss. In a context of loss the animatronic celebrity elicits a different response. J.G. Ballard’s snappy, satirical science fiction novel, Hello America , sets up a context of loss – one that marks more than just the absence of a dead celebrity, but the future disappearance of our entire mediascape. 86 Here we find the potential uncanniness of animatronic dummies realized with a certain black humour. Besides exploring the effects of such images, Ballard also provides us with the impetus behind their construction. The question of which stars are selected for technological resurrection is, it seems, as important as the manner in which they are resurrected.

Hello America : animatronic icons

There is a peculiar scene, hysterically black, uncanny and uncertain in Hello America , where long dead stars do seem, for a moment, to have come back to life. The book is set in the future, one century or more after the economic collapse of the United States of America. We are told that a mass exodus took place as America abandoned itself after the exhaustion of all fuel and power sources. The grandchildren of immigrants returned to the lands of their ancestors, leaving enormous ghost cities of the Eastern seaboard to be claimed by desert and cacti. This book narrates the expedition of a small band of scientists and adventurers, moving West across the dead continent towards the ruins of Hollywood and Las Vegas. One of the travelers, the main protagonist Wayne, is named after John Wayne. An amateur enthusiast for all the lost popular culture of America, he has spent his twenty years poring hungrily over the faded pages of Time Magazine, and listening to his mother’s scratched Bob Dylan records.

85 Images of the “breathing” Britney Spears wax figure are availble online at the celebrity pictures gallery, Volumized.net : http://www.volumized.net/britney-spears/britney-spears-picture-wax/britney- wax-picture.php (accessed 2/7/04). 86 J.G. Ballard, Hello America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989).

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Struggling exhausted in the heat, sun-burnt, thirsty and fatigued, the band make their way down the empty freeways, tracing dead dreams, projecting their fantasies of what has been lost onto the rusting bridges and crumbling monuments they pass. Suddenly they reach Las Vegas. They are puzzled. This place seems empty, yet it is lit up. Neon signs blaze and the casinos and hotels triumphantly proclaim their continuing existence to no one but the surrounding flora and fauna. Wayne and his friends are lured up the strip by the faint sound of music and a ripple of applause. They move hesitantly towards the sounds and we wonder what they will find. Is a small part of Americana still intact way out here?

The sounds of an orchestra and a man’s voice crooning in a half-familiar “relaxed but showy baritone” float eerily through the lobby of the Sahara Hotel, luring the now ragged and fatigued band of explorers closer. As they enter the auditorium some of the explorers find it difficult at first to make sense of what they are seeing, and the reader is encouraged to wonder fleetingly if the passage describes some kind of dangerous dream or hallucination from which the explorers must awake. 87 The hotel auditorium is filled with a middle-aged well-dressed audience seated at supper tables, applauding the singer onstage. Are these the ghosts of entertainers and well-to-do gamblers, fated to play out this scenario over and over for eternity? Only Wayne remains composed, half-guessing what is occurring and giving us our clues to what lies beneath the apparent reality of the passage.

Wayne had already identified the man with the microphone, the portly but powerful build, the balding head and iron-like thatch. This was the Sinatra of the later period, the Sinatra of the endless farewell appearances and testimonial concerts, when America had clung to its last great icons, its emblems of self-confidence, forcing them to return again and again to the stage. 88

87 Ibid., p. 118. 88 Ibid.

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This reference to the “Sinatra of the later period” acknowledges the possibilities for multiple Sinatras, and tells us that Wayne knows that this is not the actual Sinatra. The passage functions in another way too, giving us a sense of what this figure represents – of the other ways in which star-images may function for us, and why we may need to resurrect them. This Sinatra with his “relaxed yet showy” presence is one who was well established and comfortable in his icon status, always in the process of moving away but never allowed to retreat into the shadowy margins of retirement. Ballard tells us that America had had a need for Sinatra as a rallying point for national confidence, and kept calling him back into the spotlight. Even here in Vegas, long after that nation has faded away, this Sinatra still remains like an epitaph of a dead America’s economic swagger.

The spotlight swings across the stage and Sinatra introduces his special guests, a louche cigar smoking Dean Martin, and a Judy Garland in pigtails, gingham dress and crimson shoes – this Garland is evidently of The Wizard of Oz era. 89 However, Wayne’s pop culture historical knowledge tells him enough to know that this Garland is out of temporal synch with this particular Sinatra and Martin whom she joins on stage to sing the final rousing chorus of “My Way.” Wayne muses:

Her daughter should have been here with the mature Sinatra and Martin, the mother had been dead of drugs and alcohol for too many years to be singing as this straw-haired teenager from The Wizard of Oz . Apart from anything else, the wistful young Judy Garland would never have sung this brassy, self-congratulatory song. 90

This young Judy Garland is fresh-faced, innocent and wistful – the symbol of American hope – yet to slide into her later self-destruction. At this point though the text shifts from a focus on the perfect simulacra of these three icons; “Their sun- tanned, immaculately made-up faces were exactly as he remembered them from the

89 The Wizard of Oz , dir. Victor Fleming, USA, 1939. 90 Ballard, Hello America , pp. 119-20.

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movie magazines.” Things begin to go very wrong when, on impulse, Wayne decides to test the limits of the simulation and runs onto the stage to shake Sinatra’s hand. Running down the stairs to the stage past oblivious waiters and audience, it is as if Wayne is invisible. The three singers are singing the climax of the final chorus of “My Way” when Wayne reaches the spotlight:

Sinatra stepped forward, his hard eyes not noticing Wayne. As his hands beat out the last bars of the music his elbow caught Wayne on the shoulder. Before Wayne could stop him Sinatra spun round, and lost his balance on his stiffly jointed legs. He collided with Dean Martin, upsetting his drink, and kicked Judy Garland smartly in the ankle. He then fell backwards on to the floor, where he lay still singing and gesturing, eyes showing no emotion at this surprising change of posture. 91

Wayne’s intervention in the simulation creates pandemonium. It becomes apparent that the entire show – audience, waiters, stars – are part of a massive mechanism where everything is moving in preprogrammed synchronicity. Wayne’s attempt at interaction throws the vast machine out of alignment. The spotlights blur and falter, the string section in the orchestra pit begin stabbing themselves in the eye with their bows. Waiters throw drinks everywhere. Sinatra is stuck in a loop repeating the two words “my way” over and over in a steadily rising falsetto, his legs and arms kicking stiffly, eyes glassy and unmoved, while Martin continues unperturbed to splash the glass of whiskey over his own face.

Meanwhile Judy Garland was moving into an epileptic seizure. She glanced down at her magic shoes, then gave a tic-like smile, launching into an ever- more rapid set of skips that sent her vibrating across the stage. “Did it did it did it did it did it did it…” jabbered Sinatra, then came to stop like a dead doll. 92

91 Ibid., p. 120. 92 Ibid., p. 121.

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The icons are revealed to be animatronic dummies now in a state of malfunction and thus resembling frenzied, mindless zombies. The movements of the wistful Garland become epileptic and crazed in a macabre choreography of seizures and tics, reminding us of those categories of experience Jentsch and Freud labeled “uncanny.” Eventually the machine winds to a stop with some relief. But what is the rationale behind this resurrection of dead icons for an equally oblivious mechanical audience?

We find that a scientist, Dr. Fleming, insane and consumed by obsession (as many Ballardian characters tend to be) has been building these simulations of dead America for years. It becomes apparent that their animation here is part of a strange, almost magic, ritual. In Fleming’s fevered mind the mechanical stars and their audience function as part of a larger machine designed to awaken America (often envisaged by the characters as a “sleeping giant”) and make the nation a powerhouse of industry and popular culture once again. But it is clear to the other rational perspectives in the text that that America is long vanished and never will be again, if indeed it ever was. Ballard shows us that these animatronic stars, embodying starry-eyed national hope and brash confidence, are merely monuments marking the loss of these qualities. Moreover, in the catastrophic breakdown of their mechanical process, these icons are rendered ridiculous and disconcerting, and all the qualities they embody are instantly evaporated in this moment.

Similarly, we might ask what qualities are embodied by those stars who are popular candidates for digital resurrection? As we saw previously Marilyn Monroe has been one of the most common figures among the dead stars proposed for computer- generated resurrection. Certainly her image still has some currency, forty years after her death. But what does her star-image mean ? According to Richard Dyer, Monroe’s star-image holds in tension artificiality and nature. He argues that her enduring appeal is largely due to the irreconcilability of these contradictions, as he charts how she came to embody a contrived and stylised post-war femininity that, at the same time,

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seemed shot through with currents of a natural sexual guilelessness. 93 In The Misfits her “naturalness” is played to the fore, and if we imagine that her image here is the closest to the “real Marilyn,” it is because we perceive a close fit between the idea of Monroe as the tragic, unstable and vulnerable beauty, and the role of Roslyn. Perhaps it is these twin contradictory signs of natural/artificial in Monroe that appeal to computer animators. Perhaps they hope that a viewer will automatically view her digital likeness through the cloudy uncertainty of these conceptions, and their assessment of the result will be less critical.

In tandem with Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart is the actor most commonly mentioned when digital resurrections are proposed. Already his old footage has been digitally inserted into advertising campaigns, and according to Joseph J. Beard, Bogart was digitally resurrected to play a fictional character in an episode of Tales from the Crypt in 1995. 94 Several commentators on digital resurrections have speculated on the possibility of remaking Casablanca , or at the very least a prequel to the classic film, in which Bogart could appear again opposite any number of actresses dead or alive. 95 In contemplating the appeal of a resurrected Bogart, we might consider the eulogy written shortly after Bogart’s death by André Bazin, in which the actor, dead from “stomach cancer and half a million whiskeys,” is portrayed as embodying the “immanence, and the imminence of death.” 96

Bazin’s characterization dwells on Bogart’s physicality: the appeal of Bogart’s decayed appearance, sallow skin, tomb-stone teeth, and his careworn cantankerous melancholy. Bogart enters each film as one who has seen the worst life could offer,

93 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St Martins Press, 1986), pp. 23-50. 94 Tales From the Crypt : “You Murderer,” HBO broadcast, 15 February, 1995. Additionally Bogart and James Cagney have been digitally inserted into a Diet Coke commercial. See Joseph J. Beard, “Clones, Bones and Twilight Zones: Protecting the Digital Person of the Quick, the Dead and the Imaginary,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal , vol. 16, 2001, available online at: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol16/beard/beard.pdf , pp. 53-4 (accessed 1/8/04). 95 B. Howarth, “Play it Again Sam, or Whoever it is,” The Australian (Computers and High Technology), 13 April 1999, p. 33. Casablanca , dir. Michael Curtiz, USA, 1942. 96 André Bazin, “The Death of Humphrey Bogart,” Cahiers Du Cinéma the 1950s Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave ed. Jim Hillier (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 98.

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who had already suffered, fought, loved, lost and survived. He never enters the narrative as a blank-paged innocent ripe for transformation. Instead he comes to us each time with “his face marked by what he has seen and his bearing heavy with what he knows.” 97 In this being who seemed to “internalise death,” Bazin argues, we saw our own “decomposition.” His actual death then seemed a double blow, for, in embodying death for so long as a “spirited cadaver,” he had seemed to resist it. 98 Perhaps on some level this “spirited cadaver” quality of Bogart is recognised by his animators. The very appeal of Bogart to animators might circulate around a need to retain this image of simultaneous embodiment of death, and resistance to death. A digital Bogart could become a kind of talisman for us, designed so that we could continue to ward off our own anxieties concerning our own future decomposition and resulting loss of corporeal identity.

Mourning in the age of media technologies

We have reviewed some of the originating impulses behind the desire to retain our dead in media, and we have explored some of the troubled or uncertain responses to images of the dead in different contexts. I wish to shift focus here to examine the impact keeping the dead in our presence might have on us in a context of grief. While the nineteenth century cult of memory sought to keep the dead symbolically within the circle of the family to enable a sense of familial continuity, this kind of mourning is now considered pathological or “acute” grief. Acute grief and melancholy are considered counter-productive to the needs of modern post-industrialised societies. They entail loss of motivation, slowing down, lessening time spent in active work. We do not have the words to say to someone in such a state, and the once accepted rituals of grieving, such as a year spent clad in black, are lost to us. Grief is no longer seen as something to be properly and respectfully endured for a fixed length of time but a mentally unhealthy state that must be assuaged. The grief-stricken are placed in

97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., pp. 98-9.

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the care of professional counsellors. In the place of ritual, anti-depressants are routinely prescribed for the bereaved so that they can “move on” and “get on with their lives.” The encouragement of the formation of new relationships and a rapid return to work, suggests the focus has shifted from the eighteenth and nineteenth century preoccupation with “thy death” to an emphasis on “my life.”

Perhaps it is this shift in attitudes that has led some to review our, now normalized, practice of retaining the dead in technological media. Anthony Enns argues that, “media prevent us from bringing the work of mourning to a close.” 99 By encouraging us to retain the images and sounds of the dead, media are associated with the endless work of mourning that Freud called “melancholia,” as “technology becomes the crypt that contains the dead but prevents the bereaved from grieving.” 100 According to Freud’s definition, the work of mourning is the process of coping with the death of a loved one by gradually withdrawing one’s attachment. Melancholia though is an unhealthy reaction in which the “free libido” is not transferred onto another object but is instead “withdrawn into the ego.” Melancholia, unlike mourning is a potentially endless process. 101

As Enns claims, texts like Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris reveal the ways in which the “delirious effects of technological media influence human consciousness by prolonging the work of mourning through the preservation of the deceased.” 102 I would like here to examine not only Lem’s book but also the first film adaptation of Solaris directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.103 For, its visual incorporation of media technologies makes this theme of medial melancholy even more explicit. Although superficially concerning an encounter between humans and alien life, the film’s central obsessions are a mourning that is tied up with guilt, questions of what part

99 Anthony Enns, “Mediality and Mourning in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and His Master’s Voice ”, Science Fiction Studies , vol. 29, no. 1, March 2002, p. 45. 100 Ibid., p. 49. 101 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Freud Reader , ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), pp. 584-8. 102 Enns,“Mediality and Mourning in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and His Master’s Voice ,” p. 38. 103 Solaris , dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972.

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mnemonic technologies play in our organisation and creation of meaning of the past, and the points of vacillation and flow between organic and prosthetic technologised memory. These preoccupations are played out in the way characters use recording technologies within the film, the planet Solaris itself (which operates as a kind of machine for playing back or projecting subjective memories in material form) and the character of Hari (Rheya in the book). Essentially this text deals with an encounter between the mourner and the memorial image, and asks us to imagine what would happen if our images of the dead became self-aware and could speak to us. It encourages us to conceive of the impossible suffering of a melancholic image.

In Solaris , Kelvin, a rational psychologist, is sent to investigate the baffling behaviour of some isolated scientists on a space station orbiting a distant ocean planet, Solaris. He finds the station in disarray with one scientist dead by his own hand, and the other two hiding in their quarters, playing host to indeterminable visitors, of which we are allowed only tantalising glimpses. On the first night of his arrival on the space station, Kelvin retires to his quarters after a puzzling day attempting to uncover what has happened to the scientists – why are they so cagey and secretive, seeming ashamed of what or who inhabits their quarters? Suspicious, somewhat fearful, but not yet affected personally, Kelvin retires to his pristine, plastic enshrouded quarters. In the dim red light of one of the planet’s suns radiating through the window, he is awoken by a sense of a presence and movement in the room. It is his dead wife, Hari – a hole in the arm of her dress placed almost accusingly, revealing the angry prick of the hypodermic needle with which she took her own life twenty years before after he abandoned her.

The scene is not played for horror: she does not appear dead nor malicious. But warm, alive and glowing from the light like golden-syrup, she smiles gently as she lays down sleepily next to him on the bed. It is only the soundtrack’s low-pitched rumble and ominous metallic reverberation that underscores her erroneousness. However, she is not Hari, nor Hari’s ghost, but a material manifestation of his memory. We discover that she is an image constructed from neutrinos, and projected somehow by the apparently sentient ocean below like a film image impossible to shut off.

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But she is for the moment oblivious, unaware of her own apparent inauthenticity and her status as not-Hari but Hari’s image. The book by Lem makes explicit her status as memory-image, as Kelvin the narrator tells us that “she seemed somehow stylised, reduced to certain characteristic expressions, gestures and movements.” 104 Like the “last image” or “history” of a person of which Siegfried Kracauer wrote in his essay “Photography,” the unforgettable is preserved in this Hari, but is then “projected” by the planet. 105 The death-mark of the hypodermic needle is, for Kelvin, unforgettable: an involuntary memory, and unfortunately for him, non-eraseable.

As Kelvin struggles to suppress his bewilderment and choking horror, Hari searches in puzzlement for her slippers, finding instead a framed photo of Hari, which she holds up in confusion asking, “Who’s this?” Catching her reflection in the mirror, she matches her likeness to that of the woman in the photograph, and turns to him, saying hesitantly “Kris, it’s me….you know I have a feeling…I’ve forgotten something…I can’t understand.” The more she searches internally for thoughts and memories, the more her own disquieting blankness becomes apparent. Being an externalisation of Kelvin’s guilt concerning his abandonment of her and her subsequent death, it seems that he is all she knows. She instinctively senses a lack at her centre, an absence in herself, which at first she worries might be a sign of epilepsy.

Being merely an “image,” she turns to other images of the real Hari for visual validation and confirmation of her identity. But, as Kracauer argued, “in a photograph a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow.” 106 It is only our knowledge and our subjective investment in the image that can bring this history to imaginary life – without it, the image is merely an image. Solarian Hari does not know anything of the real Hari, and therefore, the photograph and the filmic image can only provide her with the enigmatic and opaque visual detail of Hari’s visage: a stubborn

104 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 58. 105 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” Critical Inquiry , vol. 12, no. 3, spring 1993, p. 426. 106 Ibid.

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gently smiling mask. The distressing hollow absence she expresses seems to be the absence of the real Hari herself. The impermeable image is just a fetish for the mourned, absent lover, and refuses to be of assistance.

The clothing worn by Hari in the photograph is also worn by the Solarian manifestation of Hari. This suggests that Kelvin has lived with this photograph of his dead wife for years and that over time the sartorial details of the photograph have adhered, becoming memory-image. Her distinctive shawl and dress strikingly patterned in geometric chocolate, russet, and cream, become another recurring motif in the film. Kelvin discovers when he comes to undress her that the dress has no functioning fastenings, as though she had been sewn into it. The appearance of fastenings without function, hints at the operation of the planet that, like a camera, captures an image mechanically and “blindly” without understanding the significance and use of details. Kelvin must then cut Hari out of the dress with scissors. He takes off her dress, helps her into a spacesuit, pushes her into a rocket in the station’s docking bay, and propels her and his conscience as far away as he can – burning himself in his haste and panic to remove her from his sight. Yet his memory persists.

That night he awakes in the hazy crimson light to find Hari in his room once again. Not a return of the one he sent away, however, but another, identical and unknowing. This one instinctively reaches for the scissors to slice off her dress as he did the night before, and lays it over the chair next to the one already nestling there. The camera moves in stealthily to the two crocheted shawls and dresses with their distinctive patterns hanging symmetrically over the back of the chair, metonymically invoking the potential for endless duplicate Haris. Kelvin gazes silently at the dual shawls and dresses, pondering the possibility of an infinite number of Haris, dresses and shawls, with no unique original. This endless return and repetition of Haris brings to mind Bauman’s declaration about our media culture’s effects on notions of immortality: “In

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the world in which disappearing has replaced the dying, immortality dissolves in the melancholy of presence, in the monotony of endless repetition.” 107

In the book, the three scientists puzzle over the mechanics of the planet, and the ability of their visitors (or “phi-creatures” as they are called) to resurrect themselves nightly, unaltered in appearance or mood. Kelvin wonders aloud: “perhaps they are plugged into a contrivance which goes round and round, endlessly repeating itself, like a gramophone record.”108 Thus Lem compares the operation of the planet to the stylus of a record player, blindly feeling its way through a groove carved in their consciences, and amplifying the discomforting music therein. Similarly, Tarkovsky’s film compares the planet to visual recording/playback devices. This becomes especially apparent with the interpolation of Kelvin’s “bonfire recording,” which he shows to Hari when her lack of memory and sense of self, coupled with Sartorius’s callous comments that she is only a “replica” and a “mechanical copy,” makes her restless and anxious.

Under the meandering strains of Bach’s Chorale prelude in F Minor on the soundtrack, we see a little boy, Kelvin, in red trousers and woolly hat cutting a rosy figure against the stark whiteness of the snow, in which a small fire burns. Then it is autumn, and the camera pans from dying leaves to a young woman, his mother, gazing into the middle-distance. Winter again and his father, younger, but recognisable, smiles, turns and runs over the snow. His mother, isolated, wrapped protectively in white fur, smokes a cigarette impassively, then picks her way cautiously across the snow towards camera, intermittently meeting its gaze with one which is fleeting and world-weary. Older, but still young Kelvin smiles briefly, and the camera pulls away from mother again in autumn, before panning across to Hari who is waving, identical in appearance and dress to the Hari who sits quietly in Kelvin’s quarters, absorbing these visions of a life and planet she has never known. Seemingly incorporated in this relay of looks in the film, she packages herself in false memory.

107 Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies , p. 175. 108 Lem, Solaris , p. 104.

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Again she returns to the bathroom mirror, her eyes restlessly scanning her face and appearance, looking for reassurance from her resemblance to the Hari in the film. “I don’t know myself at all, I don’t remember. I close my eyes and I can’t remember my face.”

Like the planet Solaris, Kelvin’s bonfire film provides an access of sorts to the long- dead. His mother, his wife, his childhood self, and his father who he will most likely never meet again – these images captured on celluloid are all that materially remains of his relationships with these people. The projected family members endlessly repeat their circuit of looks and gestures, embedded in the time of their recording, unaware of their status here as mere image. They are in this sense, like Hari when she first arrives, but unlike her they will never be conscious nor have to become painfully aware of their referential circumstance. The planet then, is like the projector of a too- intimate home movie, and the scientists are both guilty cinematographers and unwilling audiences of a film which, if shut off, is forcibly re-screened nightly from the beginning of the reel.

Hari is at first also like these images: oblivious and repeating, resurrecting. But unlike Kelvin’s family in the bon-fire recording, she is actually changed by his presence. The longer she exists in his presence, the more conscious she becomes of her own absence, causing her to progress through a sort of unravelling into sobbing anxiety, to a timorous resignation. But Kelvin is transformed as well. His encounter with her at first terrifies him, but he develops a strangely sympathetic and protective relationship with this increasingly vulnerable figure. The longer Hari remains in his presence, the more dissolved and irrational he becomes. Sweating, dishevelled, and rambling incoherently, he shuffles aimlessly along untidy corridors, clad only in his saggy underwear, until finally we see him in bed suffering delirium and hallucinations.

On one level Solaris is a ghost story for the age of media technologies, reminding us of Castle’s work on the rational relocation of the spectral into both the feverish mind of the ghost-seer and the technological realm of the magic lantern. Hallucinations plagued the delirious, unbalanced sensorium, but the likelihood of seeing ghosts

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could also be exacerbated by the presence of religious mania, poetic frenzy and an overburdening sense of guilt. 109 As Robert Burton had argued centuries earlier in his Anatomy of Melancholy : “Those suffering from a surplus of melancholy humours, were especially likely to see specters.” 110 It is apparent that Kelvin’s inability to detach himself from the memory of his dead wife and the home he has lost is exacerbated by his holding onto these things in photographic and filmic form. Kelvin’s melancholia is shown to be in part symptomatic and in part the result of how he uses media. Although his wife died many years before he has never remarried and he carries her photo with him everywhere. Hari’s inability to be away from him is an externalisation of his inability to be done with his dead wife and his connected guilt.

When Kelvin awakes from his delirium, to his dismay Hari is gone. She has actively sought her own demise, consenting to be vapourised by the neutrino destabilising device the scientists have perfected. In several prior scenes we have seen her attempt suicide via various means, but she is always involuntarily and painfully resurrected, her “body” wracked by the pain of its hapless and unwilling reconstruction. On one level Hari’s suicidal behaviour is due to the fact that Kelvin only remembers her as suicidal – this aspect has adhered to her memory image. But on another level, her desire for non-existence, overriding that instinct which, according to Freud “compels every living thing to cling to life,” stems from self-loathing at her secondary and referential status. 111 At one point she rages at Kelvin: “It’s not me. It’s not Hari! Does it disgust you that I’m like this?”

In this way, she displays the signs of the melancholic: self-reproach, diminution in her self-regard, declaring herself worthless and despicable, begging for death or exile. Freud argues that the melancholic state results from a loss in regard to the ego, stemming from identification of the ego with an object that becomes lost. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the

109 Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” p. 54. 110 Robert Burton paraphrased in Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” p. 54. 111 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 584.

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return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object – if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world.112 The lost object, with which Hari identifies, is the original Hari lost by Kelvin. The absences Hari senses in herself, and her lack of memory and identity, are those of the deceased Hari. Solarian-Hari expresses this absence loudly rather than offering only enigmatic silence like the Hari on the bonfire film. She is an image who reveals her own hollowness, or a tombstone pointing to a life once present. This is intolerable for her, and so it is with relief that she vanishes into a “burst of light, a puff of air” – as Snow tells the dismayed Kelvin after he wakes.

Disappearance or vaporisation without a desire to return has a sense of relieved finality about it, even if Kelvin does not choose to let her go. Texts like Solaris acknowledge the role that media plays in a melancholic form of mourning, but transfer that melancholia onto the image itself. We are encouraged to imagine the impossible subjectivity and suffering of the ghost or image whose existence can only speak of the absence of the dead. This is similar to the empathy that we have with the ghosts in the recent melancholic ghost films, The Sixth Sense and The Others .113 Ghost stories tend to feature the persistent intrusion of the past as a problem that must be worked through so that the relation between the living and the dead can be properly resolved and severed. These stories speak of an ancient desire to keep the dead separate from the living, expressive of that rousing send-off that we give the dead in our disposal of their bodies and spirits. 114 Like Hari in Solaris , the spectral protagonists in The Sixth Sense and The Others , fade from our screens, finally at peace, once they have made their resolutions. This empathy with the ghost or image speaks of our hesitation, as we are caught between a need to farewell the dead and a media culture that insists on their retention.

112 Ibid., p. 588. 113 The Sixth Sense , dir. M. Night Shyamalan, USA, 1999. The Others , dir. Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/France/Italy/USA, 2001. 114 Taussig, “Dying is an Art, Like Everything Else,” p. 307.

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The digital resurrection extends this retention in an attempt to recirculate the image of the dead star in the media present. More than this though, it is currently seen as a dubious technological process that splits the image from its referent, in a manner comparable to how Benjamin and others once saw the film image. The digital resurrection has John Wayne selling Coors beer and Fred Astaire selling Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners, it aims to put the stars back to work, re-deploying them in the task of generating consumer desire. 115 Without digital resurrection, dead celebrities slip slowly out of the media present, slipping also largely through the grasp of commodification. Even if retained as icons, like Monroe, their images encapsulate their very absence and their untimely death.

Moreover, in death, their mortality is testament to the failings of modernist projects, reminding us that no matter how much the locus of the self shrinks inwards, screened from the world through various media technologies, that ultimately death will claim us. As Benjamin once believed, the screen actor is a heroic figure, asserting his or her humanity in the face of the apparatus, and making that apparatus serve his or her own triumph. He later reversed this opinion as we know. 116 However I would argue that in death the actor once again asserts their humanity. Paul Hegarty, discussing Georges Bataille’s thoughts on death writes: “Death is the loss that defines our existence as individuals as sexual reproduction is absolutely caught up with the death of the individual, as, unlike amoebae, there is no continuity of Being from one organism to the next.” 117 Death, the unimaginable absence of self, eludes Benjamin’s “phony spell of the commodity.” 118

115 Catherine Donaldson-Evan, “Ad Campaigns Resurrect Historical Figures,” Fox News , 29 May 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88031,00.html (accessed 8/8/03) 116 Benjamin, cited in Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” Film Quarterly , no. 40, winter 1987, p. 205. 117 Paul Hegarty, “Bataille, Conceiving Death,” Paragraph: a Journal of Modern Critical Theory , vol. 23, pp. 173-4. 118 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 224.

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I conclude here by turning to a text that deals with ghosts and media in a very different manner from Solaris – William Gibson’s novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive .119 In Gibson’s science fictional near future, the dead exist, like the idoru, as information stored in holograph transmitter devices. Called “ghosts,” they are not memorial images invested with melancholy or regret. They are instead digital personality constructs that are retained to serve the living and the economic structure of the present through the dispensation of advice, working as oracles or the guardians of corporate memory. Gibson envisages a world simultaneously re-enchanted and disenchanted through technology. Here “ghosts” have returned to the world, but they are now commercial products, produced by Maas-Neotek and housed in sleek black containers. The more expensive and advanced the technology, the higher the bandwidth, with added fidelity in the timbre of the voice – like the black lacquer boxes in her father’s study which fascinate the young Kumiko. Her father tells her that these boxes hold the recorded personalities of dead executives, providing corporate continuity through memory. They quietly dispense advice when he kneels before them, head respectfully bowed on the tatami mat, as he would have done to an ancestral shrine in a previous life. At another point in the book, Kumiko comes upon a “ghost” housed in low-end or badly maintained technology, which grates and flashes through layers of static, and cheap pink light. This one sits in a slum cul de sac, surrounded by half-burnt candles and offerings of cigarettes and beer. Just as Kumiko’s father approaches the dead directors in his study for guidance, the slum residents of the city treat this cut-price ghost as an oracle of sorts. Seeing it, Kumiko remembers her father laughing at her nervous questions about the souls of the dead. He answered, “They are not conscious. They respond when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts.”

Like Villiers’s Edison, Kumiko’s father denies the existence of conscious ghosts and immortal souls, while recognising that technology now has the monopoly on such

119 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988).

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things. However, unlike the emotionally desolate landscape of Tomorrow’s Eve , Mona Lisa Overdrive does not seem so imbued with this sense of calamitous loss. For over one century later, Villiers’s loss is not Gibson's own: the wound has scabbed over, and perhaps aches or twinges only a little. Additionally in the worlds Gibson writes, technological invention does not stand apart wondrous and strange – it has slotted into traditional roles previously left vacant with the erosion of spiritual faith. In this novel at least, while ghosts and holograms may be conflated, the role they play has a long pre-history within Japanese ancestor worship. Gibson does not see the ghost as a melancholy figure. Absence is not evoked. As we saw previously in Idoru , in Gibson’s future, the living, the dead and the virtual all co-exist as information pulsing through networks, patterns of continual coagulation and dispersion. If we are conceived of as information within a cybernetic framework of life, then personality constructs are deemed to be the closest thing to the capturing or preservation of an “essence.” The crucial point here though is that the digital holographic ghost constructs in Mona Lisa Overdrive require a subjective investment on the part of those who seek solace or advice from the dead. It is this subjective investment of the beholder that serves to inspirit the digital image, as, indeed it is also required for the photo-mechanical image. Such a subjective investment, moreover, reveals threads winding back to much older image-making practices – those that involve sympathetic magic and a notion of the index.

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Conclusion

The current manifestation of the digital actor, according to progressivist techno- futurist discourses, is a transitional figure, evolving into some future image that will be indistinguishable from (while superior in some ways to) the screen actor of today. As we have seen, some of the commentary, reportage, and speculation generated by this figure express uncertainty and misgivings. Different categories of digital actors are perceived as strange disruptions within an older media framework informed by notions of a contiguous relationship between the image and the thing that it represents.

If the past tells us anything, it seems that these perceptions of the digital actor as an uncanny or disruptive figure will not be permanent. As Tsivian observes, the early reception patterns in Russian writing on cinema did not last. This is partly because reception became normalized or “domesticated” as the cinematographic apparatus was finessed and reframed. Elements of possible interference were removed or smoothed over as projection speeds were standardised, appropriate musical accompanyment and cinematic narrative were developed, velvet curtains covered the blank void of the screen, and the institutions of cinematic stardom emerged. Slowly, what had once seemed uncanny and strange slipped into invisibility.

My desire has been to mine these responses before they slide from view. This task has been made more urgent by the fact that so much of this discourse exists only online: a medium as mutable as the digital actor itself. The very form of the computer- generated actor is dependent on technologies in a continual state of progressive transformation. The French virtual actress Eve Solal, for instance, was triumphantly promoted until the funding evaporated, and then her presence in the mediascape simply vanished. No gentle fading into the shadows. One day Solal’s web site was proclaiming her to be on the brink of superstardom; the next day her gamine features had disappeared from view. “Evesolal.com” now plays host to a more prosaic but lucrative search engine. The only proof we have now that Solal ever existed are a few

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outdated excitable reviews and posts on message boards linking to her now redundant site. 1 The web sites set up to promote, report or speculate on virtual actors can change or vanish as rapidly as the actors themselves. Some reportage or commentary is archived, but all too many of these responses are ephemeral: the new often eclipses rather than supplements the old, or web sites are simply removed as their creators lose interest in their maintenance or the host goes into receivership. As I write, many of the web sites previously consulted during the years of research for this thesis have now vanished, leaving only a “page not found” or “unable to open http:// […] cannot locate the Internet server or proxy server” message when their now-dead addresses are called up.

Historians of cinema lament the fragility of their object. Such things as celluloid, video and paper decompose, and no doubt much of our media past is irretrievable — corroded, carelessly discarded or burnt by those who couldn’t envisage its future use. However, historians of early cinema have at least had tangible archived newspaper and journal reports and some remnants of early cinema at their disposal in their quests to reexamine the shifting cultural frameworks into which the moving image was first received. By contrast, the future historians of digital imagery may find that there is little remaining of present discourses circulating around the digital actor. The recording and analysis of these discourses in a less mutable form is crucial, if not for today then for tomorrow. For these moments of intermittent strangeness in the reception of new image technologies reveal far more than just an encounter with an image. They illuminate a historically situated framework of reception, a framework informed by beliefs and uncertainties concerning the living and the dead, and what it is to be human within dehumanizing systems.

1 See for example the BBC news story, “A Cyberstar is Born,” 8 January 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1106121.stm (accessed 8/8/04), and a French site reporting/promoting Eve Solal at: http://www.chez.com/vpixels/eve.html (accessed 8/8/04).

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———,The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1993.

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Literary Fiction

Ballard, J.G. Hello America , 1981, Carroll & Graf, New York, New York, 1989.

Ballard, J.G. “The Smile,” Myths of the Near Future , Triad Grafton Books, London, 1984.

Baudelaire, Charles, Baudelaire in English , edited by Carol Clark and Robert Sykes, Penguin Books, 1997.

Brin, David, Kil’n People , Orbit Books, London, 2002.

Dick, Philip K., A Scanner Darkly, 1977, Harper Collins , London, 1996.

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Easton Ellis, Bret, Less Than Zero , 1985, Picador, Great Britain, 1986.

Easton Ellis, Bret, The Informers , Picador, Great Britain, 1994.

Easton Ellis, Bret, Glamorama , Picador, 1998.

Gibson, William, Idoru, Penguin Books, 1996.

Gibson, William, Mona Lisa Overdrive , Victor Gollancz, London, 1988.

Hoffmann, E.T.A., “The Automata,” 1814, reproduced in its entirety online at the Black Mask literature server, http://www.blackmask.com/books72c/automata.htm (accessed 20/4/02).

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235

Lem, Stanislaw, Solaris , 1961, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, Faber and Faber, London, Boston, 1970.

Pirandello, Luigi, Shoot! (Si Gira) The notebooks of Serafino Gubbio Cinematographer Operator , 1916, authorised translation from the Italian by C.F. Scott Moncrieff, E.P. Dutton and Company New York, 1926.

Poe, Edgar Allen, “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Portable Poe , edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, Penguin Books, New York & London, 1945, pp. 107-18.

Schulz, Bruno, “The Street of Crocodiles”, 1934, The Fictions of Bruno Schulz , translated by Celina Wieniewska, Picador, London, 1988.

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, L’Eve Future , translated as Tomorrow’s Eve by Robert Martin Adams, University of Illinois press, Urbana, Chicago, London, 1982.

Villiers, Contes Cruels , translated as Cruel Tales by Robert Boldick, with an introduction and notes by A.W. Raitt, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Waugh, Evelyn, The Loved One: an Anglo-American Tragedy , Penguin Books, 1948.

Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray , with an introduction and notes by Peter Ackroyd, Penguin Books, London, 1985.

Zola, Emile, The Ladies Paradise , 1883, translated and with an introduction by Brian Nelson, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Film Reviews

Bradshaw, Peter, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , The Guardian , UK, Friday, 3 August 2001, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,53 1411,00.html (accessed 5/4/03).

Carr, Jay, “Final Fantasy,” Boston Globe , 11 July 2001, p. D1.

Ebert, Roger, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , 11 July 2001, http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/07/071101.html (accessed 4/4/03).

Foreman, Jonathan, “‘Fantasy’ Isn’t One”, New York Post , 11 July 2001, http://www.nypost.com/movies/071101a.html (accessed 4/4/03).

Hall, Sandra, “Pale impression of a funny Hollywood satire” (review), Sydney Morning Herald , 20 February 2003.

Hall, Sandra, review of The 6 th Day , Sydney Morning Herald , 18 January 2001, p. 8.

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LePetit, Paul, review of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, The Sunday Telegraph , 29 July 2001, p. 98.

Lowing, Rob, “Dummy Run”, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Sunday Metro , The Sun Herald , 29 July 2001, p. 8.

O’Hehir, Andrew, “Simone” (review), Salon.com , 23 August 2002 http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2002/08/23/simone/index.html?CP=I MD&DN=110 (accessed 2/3/04).

Travers, Peter, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Rolling Stone , issue 874 2 Aug 2001, http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/review.asp?mid=2042272&afl= imdb (accessed 2/3/03).

Turan, Kenneth, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , LA Times, 11 July 2001.

Vognar, Chris, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Dallas Morning News, 11 July 2001, www.dallasnews.com (accessed 10/8/01).

Zacharek, Stephanie, review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , Salon.com, 13 July 2001, http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/07/13/final_fantasy/ index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110 (accessed 4/5/03)

Filmography

A Stolen Life , directed by Curtis Bernhardt, USA, 1946.

Bride of Frankenstein , directed by James Whale, UK, 1935.

Coma , directed by Michael Crichton, USA, 1978.

The Dark Mirror , directed by Robert Siodmak, USA, 1946.

Dawn of the Dead , directed by George A. Romero, USA, 1979.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara, USA/Japan, 2001.

Finding Nemo , directed by Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, USA, 2003.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , directed by Howard Hawks, USA, 1953.

Gladiator , directed by Ridley Scott, UK/USA, 2000.

Gone With the Wind , directed by Victor Fleming, USA, 1939.

Last Action Hero , directed by John McTiernan, USA, 1993.

237

Lord of the Rings (trilogy) directed by Peter Jackson, USA/NZ, 2001, 2002, 2003.

The Misfits , directed by John Huston, USA, 1961.

The Others , directed by Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/France/Italy/USA, 2001.

The Terminator , directed by James Cameron, USA, 1984.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day , directed by James Cameron, USA, 1991.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines , directed by Jonathan Mostow, USA, 2003.

The Seven Year Itch , directed by Billy Wilder, USA, 1955.

Shrek , directed by Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jensen et al., USA, 2001.

Simone , directed by Andrew Niccol, USA, 2002.

“16 mm Shrine,” The Twilight Zone , first broadcast on 23 October 1959, USA.

The 6 th Day , directed by Robert Spottiswoode, USA., 2000.

The Sixth Sense , directed by M. Night Shyamalan, USA, 1999.

Solaris , directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972.

The Sopranos , HBO, USA, 1999 – still in production.

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace , directed by George Lucas, USA, 1999.

The Student of Prague , directed by Hans-Heinz Ewers, Germany, 1914.

Sunset Boulevard , directed by Billy Wilder, USA, 1950.

Twins directed by Ivan Reitman, USA, 1988.

Total Recall directed by Paul Verhoeven, USA, 1990.

Toy Story , directed by John Lasseter, USA, 1995.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? directed by Robert Aldrich, USA, 1962.

The Wizard of Oz , directed by Victor Fleming, USA, 1939.

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