We Can Rebuild Him and Her: Bionic Irony, Hysteria, and Post-Fordism's

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We Can Rebuild Him and Her: Bionic Irony, Hysteria, and Post-Fordism’s Technological Fix in The Six Million Dollar Man Simon Orpana University of Alberta

The working man’s crash landing Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have observed that, when it comes to utopian visions regarding the societal benefits of space travel, it is not so much the alleged reasons for making a journey to Mars that matter but “what they can do to you on Mars when they get you there” (58). Pro- grams such as the Apollo missions or even current speculation about manned missions to Mars, whatever scientific benefits might be expected, simultaneously generate a host of less obvious outcomes that are nonethe- less useful from the point of view of social control, nation building, and ideological reinforcement. Collecting moon rocks might have added to the storehouse of human knowledge, but the Apollo missions were also immensely useful to the U.S. government for providing a unifying goal by which to capture the national imagination in the midst of such legitimation crises as those related to Vietnam, the Cold War, and environmental destruction. We might go further, with Caffentzis and Federici, and discern in the asceticism and other-worldliness required by space exploration a way of disciplining the terrestrial labour force: “The launch of today’s high-tech industry needs a technological leap in the human machine—a big evolutionary leap in creating a new type of worker to match capital’s

ESC 42.1–2 (March/June 2016): 89–114 investment needs” (61). Just as a space program that trains only a handful of actual astronauts might have a much larger effect on the national imaginary, creating the utopian fascination needed to implement new disciplin- Simon Orpana is a ary structures, so too can popular culture about science and technology sshrc Postdoctoral provide the fantasy scenarios that help generalize new modes of control Fellow in the Department even while entertaining and stimulating our imaginations.1 of English and Film The popular 1970s television showThe Six Million Dollar Man (hereaf- Studies at the University ter Six) is a case in point. Celebrating technological aspiration in the face of Alberta. He is of sensational failure, the show’s opening montage uses historic footage of illustrator and co-author the 1967 crash of nasa’s experimental M2-F2 lifting body aircraft, in which of Showdown: Making test pilot Bruce Peterson was almost killed when his plane hit the ground Modern Unions, a at over 400 km/hr. The m2-f2 was part of a series of experimental aircraft graphic history of the that led to the development of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in the 1980s. 1946 Stelco strike in In Six, Peterson’s crash is used as the background for an opening sequence Hamilton, Ontario detailing the reconstruction of the fictional astronaut Steve Austin, a man (with Rob Kristofferson, literally reduced to “human scrap,” in the words of the government agent Between the Lines, who oversees Austin’s transformation into a cyborg super-soldier. Using 2016). His writing digital sound effects with computerized graphics superimposed on images on subcultures, film, of Austin receiving his robotic implants, the opening sequence famously and popular culture proclaims in voiceover: “gentlemen, we can rebuild him … we have the appears in journals capacity to create the world’s first bionic man.” such as Topia and The The show’s dramatic juxtaposition of high and low, of “human scrap” Review of Education, with $6 million of high-tech machinery, offers insights into the tensions Pedagogy, and Cultural faced by a largely white male American workforce confronting the con- Studies and the tradictions of capital in the 1970s, a decade that saw the fraying of post– book Skateboarding: World War II Keynesianism and the initial stirrings of the more turbulent Subculture, Sites, and and unruly neoliberal market that would replace it. With the escalation Shifts (Routledge 2015). of Cold War tensions, labour unrest, energy prices, economic and environmental crises, and an increasingly unpopular military entanglement in Vietnam, the value of American lives seemed under question in a more nebulously unsettling manner than the century’s two horrific but spatially and temporally circumscribed world wars (and the economic depression in between) had managed to do. The white male factory worker privileged by postwar Fordism was further confronted with threats of deskilling and obsolescence through technological innovations and shutdowns fero-

1 Jon McKenzie elaborates a similar argument in Perform or Else (2001) where he examines the imperative to perform as a central dictum of postindustrial societies. His treatment includes fascinating analysis of the how forms of “techno-performance” inform discourses surrounding the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986.

90 | Orpana ciously pursued by industrialists as a means of both “streamlining” the workplace and disciplining the workforce. In the midst of these tensions, like the fallen astronaut from the opening of Six, hegemonic American masculinity might have keenly felt the proximity of the “human scrap heap” confronted by Austin.2 At the same time as workers attempted to push back against these tendencies through collective action, the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s saw disenfranchised subjects such as women and racialized minorities challenging established hierarchies and gaining footing in realms of work and society previously denied them. Caffentzis char- acterizes this great refusal on the part of exploited sources of surplus value—insurgent industrial workers and the unpaid or underpaid work of women and minorities—as helping precipitate the unraveling of the Fordist compromise, whose “Oedipal wage” was grounded in feminized and unremunerated sources of value-production (40–41). This mounting pressure, Caffentzis explains, forced a shift in the strategies capitalists used to extract surplus, from one in which workers’ wages were indexed to productivity (with surplus flowing from the unpaid socially reproduc- tive labour of women and racialized service workers), to one in which an expanded service sector generates surplus through longer working days and increases to the price of basic commodities, like petrol. These changing strategies of exploitation at the beginning of the post-Fordist era were experienced by workers in the form of such bugbears as de- industrialization and “stagflation,” where rising unemployment rates were coupled with a rise in commodity prices. Simultaneously, the composition of the American working class was fractured by mounting internal divisions between “inflationary ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ ” (Davis 178). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this destabilization of the white male wage earner generated alarming displays of bigotry and resentment, such as the mass “hardhat” demonstrations of construction workers against anti-segregationists and anti-Vietnam War protesters.3 Mounting con- cern over “blue-collar alienation” spurred a bevy of sociological studies about the newly discovered white working class and its attendant struggles,

2 Drawing from interviews conducted with American and Canadian workers, Steven High’s book Industrial Sunset (2003) provides a detailed portrait of the loss of work and community suffered by both men and women in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of de-industrialization. See especially chapter 2. 3 For an account of the “hardhat” protests and the construction of white masculinity, see Freeman. For an account that complicates the view of American workers as reactionary conservatives, see Lewis.

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 91 prejudices, and culture.4 The prime-time sitcom All in the Family, airing from 1971 to 1979, provided a caricature of this formation in the racist, misogynist, and homophobic patriarch Archie Bunker.5 This reactionary constellation—resurrected with fervour in the recent career of Donald Trump—posed a problem for politicians and capitalists of the 1970s, who struggled to instil a faith in social progress and The American Dream even in the face of aggressive new strategies to generalize precarity and undermine many of the gains made by labour over the course of the century. Amidst well-meaning calls for a new pluralism in American society to ameliorate these social tensions, the New Right saw an opportunity to solidify its political base by strategically catering to them, a process that, gathering steam over the course of the decade, allowed for the Hol- lywood screen star Ronald Reagan to become president in 1981.6 Similar to the handsome, square-jawed Reagan, Steve Austin is presented as an all-American celebrity in his role as a former lunar astronaut from Cali- fornia. As we shall see, he and his counterpart Jaime Sommers provide fitting figures for consolidating and managing tensions regarding race, class, and gender that structured the disenfranchised white working class’ “silent majority” in this era and paved the way for the emergence of the New Right in the 1980s.

Does the middle class exist? Before embarking upon this analysis, we must briefly disentangle a few issues of genre and audience. Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich com- pellingly read Hollywood’s “discovery” of the white working class in such 1970s films as The Godfather, Saturday Night Fever, and Rocky, not as genuine engagements with working-class culture but as the displacement of patently middle-class concerns over changing constructions of masculinity. For Biskind and Ehrenreich, these films’ representations of lean and ambitious “working-class” protagonists combine forms of parochial

4 See, for instance, Friedman; Sexton; LeMasters. 5 A fascinating study of viewers’ perceptions of the record-breaking All in the Family television show demonstrates that, while some viewers perceived the bigoted views of the show’s protagonist as satire, many actually identified with Archie Bunker’s prejudices, appreciating the show for what they perceived as its “tell it like it is” honesty (Vidmar and Rokeach). 6 For the rise of the New Right, see Davis, chapter 4. For detailed examination of the racial politics underpinning the New Right’s consolidation of power, see MacLean (2006), chapter 7. For analysis of the struggles of women, Afri- can Americans, and other racialized minorities in workplaces of the 1970s, see Moody (1988), chapters 11 and 12.

92 | Orpana white ethnicity with performances of virile masculinity that compensate for “conflicting masculine possibilities” of postwar, middle-class America (110). My analysis shares with Biskind and Ehrenreich the observation that “The ‘working class’ genre of films gives us the seventies’ most powerful cultural image of defiance—the young working-class male, jacket slung Figures like over his shoulder, cigarette drooping from one corner of his mouth, arro- gantly beautiful” (129). But I am hesitant to dismiss these postures of defi- Steve Austen ance as merely the vehicle by which a conflicted middle class projects its anxieties and desires upon fantasies of a residual, ethicized white working emerged as class. Biskind and Ehrenreich’s reading seems plausible until we remember that the middle class itself is a fantasy construct, one summoned to cover fantasies aimed over the contradictions and exploitation inherent in the post–World War II social pact (and revived, most recently, to address the mounting crises at preventing associated with a much different contemporary context of globalization).7 With this formation placed under increasing duress in the 1970s and 1980s, the white male figures like Steve Austen emerged as fantasies aimed at preventing the white male working class from recognizing itself as such, while simulta- working class neously immunizing these subjects against the kinds of solidarity with women, racialized minorities, and an increasingly globalized workforce from that could lead to progressive systemic change. As we shall see, Six franchise opens with precisely the politicized figure recognizing of defiance quoted above but divorced from its association with any “old- world” ethnic communities. We must consider the possibility that Biskind itself as such. and Ehrenreich’s middle-class crisis of masculinity is, itself, symptomatic of a more encompassing context regarding the dissolution of the Fordist compromise, a context to which the bionic transformation of Steve Austen specifically responds. This reading is supported by the fact that, although Austin displays markers of working-class affiliation—his posture of defiance and his “small town” habitus coupled with spectacular displays of physical prowess augmented by bionics—his life-world is patently not the workers’ ghetto or shop floor but a more elite, managerial realm of political and military intrigue: a fantasy of upward mobility that compensates for dwindling industrial wages. Thus, while Biskind and Ehrenreich read the representation of working-class culture in 1970s cinema as a surrogate for masculinity and gender, this essay will read the re-inscription of normative gender roles into an emergent sci-fi television genre as overdetermined by

7 Imre Szeman and Nicholas Brown suggest that the issue of whether there are three classes or two is “not a factual question, but a political one,” that is, it concerns one’s basic political orientation toward the reality of social antagonism and the conditions necessary for effective collective responses to such (324).

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 93 issues of class formation. Rather than a focus on residual, ethnic, working- class community consoling middle-class anxieties over masculinity, the high-tech intrigue of a cyborg government agent provides the compensatory fantasy of an upwardly mobile “working man,” one tailored to appeal to an increasingly precarious white working class at the dawn of the era of American de-industrialization. There is still a strong element of nostalgia in the bionic television shows, but it is for the hypermasculine heroism of Westerns and World War II dramas, which are crucially coupled with an utopian and futurist element, providing a technological fix to the tensions that beset American workers, soldiers, and families in the 1970s. By drawing from wartime visions of strength and heroism, recast in the techno-futurist register of cyborg superhumanism, these two programs provided an alternative narrative to the kinds of racist and patriarchal ressentiment that accompanied the upheavals of the 1970s. And yet, we shall see how Austin’s recuperation as a high-functioning bionic operative estranges him from solidarity with his fellows and necessitates the cultivation of “bionic irony” to cover over the loss—a figuration that resounds with the then-emergent neoliberal program to circumvent labour unions and other forms of collective resistance. Complementing Austin’s ironic distance, television’s first bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, provides a figure of what we will call “bionic hysteria” as a performance of the void and truth at the heart of Austin’s hyperbolic masculinity. Despite the promise of escaping white male ressentiment and orienting viewers toward a brave new world, the shows thus help articulate the imaginary space that will allow for neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism to develop in subsequent decades, re-inscribing white male privilege into the contours of the emerging postindustrial American society. Amidst this evidence of how essentialist and hierarchical gender division remained central to the reproduction of social relations during the crises of the 1970s, a symptomatic reading of these two programs might also recuperate some of the political potential of American television’s first two cyborgs, whose messy origin stories open on to a complex of social contradictions that the franchise’s invocation of masculinist, technocratic individualism and wartime nostalgia only imperfectly covers over.

Generic mutation and utopian critique Six was adapted from the book Cyborg written by Martin Caiden in 1972. The television franchise began as a series of three made-for-television movies produced by Universal Studios for the abc network in 1973. In the first film, “The Moon and the Desert,” Lee Majors plays Steve Austin, an

94 | Orpana ex-astronaut who has made three moon landings and whose aloof, anti- establishment posturing is exacerbated after his near fatal accident and bionic reconstruction. While the drama in the first film largely centres upon Austin’s psychological adjustment and interpersonal tensions with the government operative Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin), the next two telefilms, written by Glen A. Larson, cast Austin as an American version of James Bond. When this treatment proved unpopular with viewers, rather than retire the concept abc hired Harve Bennett, already known for his work on the popular show The Mod Squad, to oversee production of a weekly television show featuring Austin (Bennett). In January of 1974, the series began airing as a weekly, hour-long television spot that ran until 1978. From 1976 to 1978 it also spawned a spinoff in the form the hour-long Bionic Woman television show featuring Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers, the world’s first bionic woman. Both shows proved popular, remaining in the Neilson Ratings’ top ten list from 1975 to 1977. Indeed, these programs were two of the first sci-fi themed shows to make the Neilson top ten in its history and remain part of a very short list of top-rating shows to incorporate sci-fi themes.8 Tellingly, in the transition from the telefilms to the serialized television show, Austin goes from being a rebel without a cause to a comfortably enfranchised bionic arm of the military. As articulated further below, this shift allows the franchise to tap into some of the countercultural and activist sentiments prevalent in the 1970s and then channel these dissenting energies into narrative structures that reinforce a patriarchal military-industrial complex, thus undermining the kinds of collectivism that were posing serious challenges to capitalism and government at the time. In the opening scenes of the first telefilm, Austin arrives fashionably late for a test flight of the small aircraft whose crash will subsequently maim him. With only minutes until the scheduled flight, while scientists and top military brass fume over Austin’s absenteeism, he materializes from out the shimmering desert hills and ambles down the runway, a matchstick clamped between his teeth. Austin engages in friendly repar- tee with the working men attending to the aircraft, then, with slouched shoulders and thumbs hooked into the waistband of his signature red jumpsuit, he casually breezes past the attending General with a minimal grunt of recognition. Austin’s gestures of solidarity with the airstrip workers and his hostility to authority align him with anti-establishment heroes from films of

8 Others include Project U.F.O. (1977 to 1978) and ALF (1987 to 1989).

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 95 the late 1960s, such as Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke (1967) or Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider (1969). Attitudes of insurgence were also present in more contemporary films, such as Sydney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), and Robert Altman’s mash (1970). Such films are evidence of New Hollywood’s attempts to engage with niche markets in the wake of the dissolution of the studio system, a corporate move that opened spaces for edgy and experimental filmmakers to tap into the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s for their subject matter. But as Lynn Spigel points out, such currents were present in the popular television sitcoms of the era as well, where elements of science-fiction, horror, and fantasy mutated the suburban nuclear family drama to create new hybrid forms that could speak to the mounting contradictions in the postwar American Dream. What Spigel calls the “fantastic family sitcoms” of the 1960s, such as I Dream of Jeannie or The Munsters, were mostly comedies (119–20). But the 1970s saw the advent of several successful hour-long, prime-time television dramas that incorporated elements of sci-fi, comic books, and the fantastic. Alongside our bionic cyborgs, shows like The Hulk (1978 to 1982), Wonder Woman (1975 to 1979), Planet of the Apes (1974), and Battlestar Galactica (1978) used sci-fi and fantasy to explore such issues as alienation, discrimination, women’s empowerment, and migration. Percolating from a cultural underground of comic books, wartime pulps, and spaghetti Westerns, these shows gave prime-time audiences freakish figures of difference and mutation that could address some of the seismic tensions besetting American society as the postwar Fordist compromise began to reveal its structural fissures. Six registers many of these tensions. As an ex-astronaut celebrity known for several lunar landings, Austin’s near-fatal crash offers a meta- phor for the legitimation crisis surrounding the Nixon administration. Nostalgically evoking the Apollo missions, where the moon landings provided globally registered moments of nation-building pride for America, Austin’s established celebrity, and his disrespect for military authority on the airstrip, situate him as bearing the promise of American integrity and ability in the midst of contemporary scandals, such as Watergate and Vietnam. Tension between the ex-astronaut celebrity and the military- industrial state is reinforced during the introduction of the government operative Oliver Spencer at the beginning the film, which cuts between sequences of Austin’s doomed test-flight mission and scenes of Spencer, a diminutive man with a cane and briefcase, making his way to a top- secret meeting at a Washington “Federal Building.” As Austin struggles

96 | Orpana to maintain control of his oscillating aircraft, the viewer wonders about the identity of the mysterious bureaucrat with a limp and his relationship to the scene of disaster unfolding over the Nevada desert. When Spen- cer reaches the boardroom, he explains to the assembled authorities the need for a “single unit” who can be used to intervene in “uncontrollable international confrontations” where larger military interventions would be too risky. The exorbitant budget of $6 million dollars for the project is revealed, and when asked how the program will solicit volunteers to will- ingly undergo bionic reconstruction Spencer says, “Accidents happen all the time—we’ll just start with scrap.” That Austin will be this human debris is reinforced by a cut to Steve losing control of his aircraft (“The Moon”). Austin’s origins thus provide a moment of utopian critique, pointing out social injustices in the form of the divorce of the broken “everyman” from the excessive resources controlled by callous state officials. In the opening scenes, footage of Austin’s doomed flight is juxtaposed by the establishing shots of Spencer and the military-bureaucratic apparatus he represents, graphically gesturing to the way in which Austin’s rugged individualism is enmeshed in a larger, and largely inhumane, social structure. In the scene following Austin’s plane crash, this distance is reinforced when, after showing the bandaged, unconscious body of Steve being treated by Dr Rudy Wells (Martin Balsam) in an operating theatre, the camera pans upwards to a glassed-in observation room from which Spencer remotely monitors the scene. “Just keep him alive” he barks to a skeptical Wells, who questions if the unconscious Austin would even want to live in his current state. Although Austin is cast as a civilian astronaut in the pilot telefilm (he will be transformed into a Major in the television series), the parallel between the maimed Austin and the thousands of servicemen who returned from Vietnam in a similar state would have been immediate to American audiences of the 1970s. During Austin’s recovery, the issue of employment is also raised, evoking real-world anxieties over both the employability of ex-servicemen and larger issues concerning the industrial workforce. Spencer’s description of Austin as “scrap” not only registers the devaluation of human life affected by America’s military involvements but also resounds with questions over secure, industrial employment being undermined at what was the beginning of the end of the Fordist era. As Marx points out, when the ability of employers to extract absolute surplus value in the form of increasing working hours is limited (as it was in the 1970s by strong unions limiting the working day and ensuring overtime pay), capitalists will attempt to reduce the cost of labour through “revolu-

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 97 tionizing” the production process (431). Throughout the Fordist era, this “revolutionizing” included the constant pressure of production “speedups” and the threat of one’s job being made obsolete through technological Postwar Keynes- innovations. Although it would be intensified by the capital flight of the 1980s, the threat of deskilling was already prevalent in America in the ianism was also 1970s, where international competition was used as an excuse for introducing so-called labour-saving techniques and management strategies directed at that were rightly perceived by workers as threats to secure wages and employment. But, as Caffentzis highlights, postwar Keynesianism was reproduc- also directed at reproducing the kind of disciplined worker who could ensure the smooth running of industrial production lines, leading to a ing the kind gendered division of labour (between paid work and home life) that was under threat by the demands of women and racialized minorities for a of disciplined greater share of the profits they were instrumental in producing (24–26). The Fordist worker might thus have perceived himself as under assault worker who on two fronts, threatened by both technological innovations on the line and disruptions of patriarchal social hierarchies in the private and mar- could ensure the ket spheres. Lacking the kinds of cognitive mapping supplied by critical sociology, and paralleling the reactionary positions proliferating in our smooth own era of austerity, some workers would succumb to the temptation to personalize what were in actuality systemic and structural injustices, running of blaming their troubles on affirmative-action strategies, radical political movements, and racialized others.9 industrial The technological fix production Austin’s journey from alienated ex-astronaut to suave bionic operative speaks directly to the above-mentioned anxieties, offering a “magical” lines. solution to the economic and labour tensions of the era.10 Rather than participating in forms of collective action and solidarity-building, such as the struggles by labour and activist movements for a more equitable share of social wealth, the solution offered to Austin is expressly individualized and technological, neatly circumventing his participation in any larger, collective, and emancipatory political projects while simultaneously imbu- ing his recuperation with a nimbus of state-sanctioned progressiveness. 9 See, for instance, Freeman, and Richard Rogin’s New York Times Magazine article, “Joe Kelly Has Reached His Boiling Point,” reprinted in Friedman: 66–85. 10 The idea, introduced by Levi-Strauss inStructural Anthropology (206–31), that culture provides symbolic solutions to underlying societal contradictions has been taken up in diverse critical scholarship, including the Birmingham School research into subcultures and Fredric Jameson’s seminal The Political Unconscious.

98 | Orpana When Wells registers skepticism about whether Austin will be able to psychologically heal from his trauma, Spencer asserts “we have work for him,” flagging issues of employment and social value as central to Austin’s recuperation. Spencer then explain that Austin will be useful for certain jobs where the use of ships, planes, multiplicity of personnel would be inappropriate and where the use of a so-called normal agent would be ineffective. We feel that an agent … part machine and part human would be the best compromise at this particular time … He would work alone, of course, and to the extent that he is machinery, be much more durable due to the fact that you could replace the parts that might become damaged. (“The Moon” emphasis added)

Via bionics, Austin’s fragile humanity will be immunized against the kinds of shocks he has suffered in service of the military-industrial complex, and his enhanced body will actually be able to replace the types of machinery (planes, ships) that originally compromised him. Although actual American workers were being devalued and replaced by machines, and killed and maimed by the war machine abroad, Austin is spectacularly re-valued through the bodily incorporation of this same machinery, the exorbitant cost of which effectively makes Austin a life-long debtor to the state. And yet, despite the show’s prescient declaration of what will develop, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, into one of the primary modes of disciplining the post-Fordist working class—through mounting consumer debt—Austin is cast as a newly minted master of his circumstances. Initially a victim of technology, Austin becomes master over it, and master too, as we shall see, over the military-industrial hierarchy, for which he becomes a valuable asset. This transformation simultaneously threatens Austin’s sense of humanity, potentially situating him as a kind of monster. Upon waking from his bionic surgery, Austin’s first words to surgeon Rudy Wells are “Dr Frankenstein, I presume.” Later, when Austin becomes despondent after a public display of bionic strength causes some of the circuitry in his arm to be revealed to a petrified onlooker, Spencer has a hard talk with him. To Austin’s complaint that he has already more than paid his debt to the government, Spencer replies “obligations are never over.” He then goes on to explain how the U.S. government needs a different kind of weapon—a weapon that is potentially far more destructive than a cannon. It must be mobile and self-

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 99 propelled in the field under any circumstances and in any ter- rain. It must be able to reprogram itself in the field on the basis of new information and altered circumstances. It must have strength, stability, and utter dependability … these were our specifications. (“The Moon”) Both this and Spencer’s previous quotation about “machinery” situate Austin as a new kind of super-soldier, but read in the context of the every- day life experiences of workers on American factory floors the descriptions take on added nuance.11 Austin’s ability to “reprogram” himself in the field implies a kind of autonomy and self-direction yoked to the overarching demands of a larger mission, but it also resonates with the rhetoric of individualization, flexibility, and self-management that employers were introducing into 1970s workplaces where collectivization and clearly delin- eated job descriptions were perceived as a threat to corporate profits and authority.12 Austin’s transformation into a cyborg supersoldier consti- tutes a symptomatic response to this context: in a decade where workers feared being replaced by machinery, Austin becomes machinery, actually incorporating the alien—and often alienating—element into his very body, where he symbolically becomes master over it through his talent for being flexible and ingenious. In an era of deskilling and mounting precariousness for workers in North America’s industrial heartland, Austin’s $6 million makeover thus supplies a compensatory fantasy in which the white Ameri- can male, whose sense of identity and social value was being threatened on a number of fronts, is invested with outlandish levels of financial and technological capital. The price Austin pays for this revaluation is alienation from the collective community of workers. As Spencer’s above-quoted speeches reveal, Austin becomes a lone operator whose flexibility, autonomy, and use- fulness are predicated upon his remaining a unique and largely isolated individual. Much in keeping with dominant industrial narratives centred upon profitability and competitiveness in the 1970s, and anticipating what would become a linchpin of neoliberal ideology in the 1980s and 1990s,

11 For illustrations of these experiences, see, for instance, Aronowitz, especially chapter 1; High; Garson. 12 Robert Storey describes the regime of “flexible specialization” imposed in the 1980s to undermine the autonomy that workers had fought for in the Fordist era (75–77). These tendencies have only accelerated in the new millennium with the focus on producing a flexible, self-managing, non-unionized, and risk-bearing workforce of creative “elites,” for whom Steve Austin provides a fitting icon (and even a progenitor to Steve Jobs’s posthumous celebrity).

100 | Orpana Austin’s revaluation as a worker is predicated upon his abandoning collective efforts to provide organized resistance to the demands of capital.13 We can call this individualized accommodation to capitalism a technological fix that both registers unease with societal contexts (such as deskilling, shifting hierarches, and Cold War geopolitics) and provides a specious solution that, rather than truly addressing the source of discom- fort, makes it acceptable, exciting, and/or pleasurable, while simultaneously expressing the non-recuperated excess or anxiety—cast as a form of jouissance—that such compromises necessarily entail. Following Fredric Jameson’s insights into the political workings of popular culture in market- oriented societies, the narrative reification of dominant ideologies only succeeds by first offering a utopian “fantasy bribe” in the form of a critical stance that speaks to viewers’ experiences of contradiction and alienation (“Utopia” 144). This suggests that, if actor Lee Major’s rugged, bionics- enhanced masculinity provided a fantasy figure with whom workers and war veterans could identify, it is in part because his rebelliousness in the pilot film and early episodes speaks to a the mistrust of authority that was prevalent the 1970s America. In Six, this critique often centres on depictions of governmental devaluation of human life. In the first telefilm, for instance, Austin is sent on a useless and life-threatening mission by Spencer merely as a test of his ability to extricate himself from a seemingly impossible situation. In the second telefilm, “Wine, Women, and War,” when Austin’s love interest is killed by the bad guys her death is callously dismissed as an acceptable outcome of the mission by Austin’s superiors. In the first one-hour television episode, “Population: Zero,” the government refuses to pay the ransom demanded by a mad scientist who threatens to kill an entire city with his device, and so Austin must save the day. In these and other escapades, Austin is depicted as a quick-thinking, deep-feeling, and morally upright individual enmeshed in circuits of governmental and military intrigue that threaten the humanity of himself and others. Unlike other narratives of the time that draw upon a similar theme, however, Austin’s own body is infused with technology that issues from the same, questionable authorities, making the struggle to maintain his humanity all the more immediate and urgent. Bionic technology here acts as a homeopathic remedy: met- onymic of the larger technocratic, military-industrial society, the bionic

13 For an outline of the considerable leverage exercised by labour in the 1970s, see Christian Parenti’s article “Atlas Finally Shrugged.” For accounts of the challenges faced of the labour movement in the 1970s, see High chapter 5; Nelson chapter 6; Davis chapter 3.

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 101 implants implicate Austin in questionable power structures, but they also immunize him against the devaluation of human life inherent in these same biopolitical and industrial formations.14

The bionic wink of irony Austin’s critical stance, his hostility toward Spencer and the government, provides the utopian bait that encourages viewers to swallow the show’s ideological message regarding technology’s ability to mend social ills and ease political tensions. As a substitute for the kinds of collective activism that might actually challenge the dominant system, Six couples its critique of government with a simultaneous fetishizing of rank and privilege, thus exhibiting a similar tension between critical distance and complicity as other popular 1970s television shows, like m*a*s*h. This genre of military adventure offers a nuanced fantasy, critiquing the dehumanization, exploitation, and idiocy of “the system” while simultaneously celebrating the sense of (largely male) camaraderie it makes possible. Ultimately, these dramas fall under the broad category of fantasies that personalize what are in actuality systemic problems—a family of thought that imagines, for instance, that the excesses demanded by the capitalist system might be remedied by replacing “greedy corporate executives” with individuals who can demonstrate greater compunction and restraint. In Six, this fantasy is registered by the theme music, written by Glen A. Larsen and sung by Dusty Springfield, that sounds at the end of the second and third telefilms (it was replaced in the actual television show by a more uptempo signature). In r & b style, Springfield sings “Catch him if you can, beat him if you can, love him if you can—he’s the Man!” while “The Six Million Dollar Man” is repeated as an overlapping, background vocal. This theme reinforces the show’s image of Austin as the authentic and deserving Man who replaces the more nefarious figure of “the Man” as the industrial bosses who lord it over the “average Joe.” The show thus promulgates a fantasy that insti- tutions such as government and the military might be reformed, if only “ordinary” and upright people like Austin were to occupy positions of power—a fantasy structure that prepares the space for populist figures like Ronald Regan to claim power in the 1980s.

14 The shift of political and corporate power during the 1970s, from the established manufacturing and fiscal centres of the northeast to the southern and western “sun belt” and its flagship (ideologically, if not fiscally) aerospace and technical industries is likewise inscribed into Austin’s identity as a living amalgamation of Hollywood glamour and high-tech competency.

102 | Orpana Under the stewardship of Harve Bennett, this is exactly the direction the series charts. In an interview with Bennett included in the 2011 dvd release of season one of Six by Universal Studios, the producer explains: I come from a generation—the sons of World War II—[who] believed in heroes. That belief has been eroded by all kinds of things since. Maybe it’s returning now. I hope so. But that was our mission: we wanted to do a story about the kind of heroes that we had known during those frightening five years of World War II. Lee Majors had that quality of being Sergeant York, of being an American hero.

In the midst of the social tensions, governmental scandals, labour struggles, and energy and economic energy crises of the 1970s, producers like Ben- nett rightly estimated that audiences would respond well to a nostalgic return of the upright, square-jawed “all American” heroes of wartime drama. Austin’s association with the historic lunar missions, which suc- cessfully managed to consolidate national sentiments in an era when handy political enemies like fascists and communists were on the wane, amplifies this patriotic nostalgia. Richard Anderson, who plays Austin’s supervisor Oscar Goldman in the television series, baldly celebrates this recuperation: “The bionic shows were the first to bring back the heroes of television after the tumultuous 1960s, which was burdened by wars, race rioting and various other hostilities. They retain a sci-fi element bound to a medical message of hope that, as the 20th Century comes to a close, is delivered on many levels.” In the midst of the messy, insurgent 1960s and 1970s, entertainers like Bennett and Anderson sought refuge in what seemed, by comparison, a simpler time both morally and politically. The upright, witty, and charismatic Austin hearkens back to screen icons of masculine prowess like Gary Cooper but also forward to a promise that science and technology can repair fractured lives and societies. The biopolitical dimensions of this strategy are revealed by Anderson’s focus on a “medicalized message of hope” as a response to the kinds of “race rioting” depicted here as an internal threat to American society—a response that asserts as normative the management of societal tensions by the symbolic mediation of the technologized white male working body. Although Bennett claims that he returned to the alienated, defiant figure of Austin from the first telefilm as his inspiration for the series (after the second and third telefilm tried to recast Austin as a suave, American version of James Bond), in the first episodes of the weekly series, Austin’s relationship to his superiors dramatically shifts, warming considerably. In

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 103 “Population: Zero” for instance, Goldman has a handsome photograph of Austin sitting on his office desk at osi (“Office of Scientific Intelligence”). For his part, Austin confides to a colleague and love interest that even though Oscar is his boss, “He’s bright, he’s straight, and underneath that shell of red tape, he’s even got a heart.” When Austin deliberately disobeys Goldman’s orders, saving Goldman and the assembled military personnel from death via the evil Dr Bacon’s “alpha wave generator,” Goldman for- gives Austen and acknowledges his debt to him. The bromance continues in the next episode, “Survival of the Fittest,” a travel adventure in which Austin and Goldman are stranded on a desert island after their military plane crashes in a storm. Prior to this event, the couple miss their scheduled flight when their car gets a flat tire. Using his bionic arm to jack the car off the ground, Austin playfully admonishes the gobsmacked Goldman, saying, “would you stop admiring me and change the tire?” Later during the same travel adventure, Austin uses his bionic finger to penetrate and cauterize a bullet wound in Goldman’s side, cementing the bond between the two men. Such details reinforce the manner in which Austin, for all his initial resistance, becomes reconciled to working for the very establishment at which he balks in the first telefilms. Despite producer Harve Bennett’s attempts to move the franchise away from its imitation of James Bond, Austin retains a penchant for witty one-liners as a means of deftly side- stepping inquiries into the source of his unusual abilities. When uniniti- ated spectators witness his bionic abilities and inquire as to their source, Austin dismissively chalks them up to “vitamins” or eating a lot of car- rots. These exchanges point toward a general attitude of bionic irony that Austin exhibits throughout the series and that largely replaces the more pronounced anti-establishment stance of the initial telefilms. As if winking at the audience with his enhanced eye, Austin’s bionic irony allows him to signal a minimal distance from the monstrous technologies integrated into his body, while also demonstrating his composed mastery of, rather than subservience to, these same apparatuses. And this is the ideology of the show in a nutshell: the formerly wounded and alienated “everyman” is able to incorporate and master the system that maimed him, to the extent that he is able to give his supervisor the finger, as he literally does under the pretext of saving Goldman’s life in the episode described above. As an elite lone operative, Austen yet has the admiration and solidarity of the common man. All he misses is a romantic partner equal to his enhanced abilities and social position.

104 | Orpana An operating table of one’s own? This partner appears in the figure of Jaime Sommers, a high school sweet- heart whom Austin marries in season two. A world-class tennis pro, Som- Paralleling mers provides a figure of female empowerment and is equal to Austin in terms of her mix of small-town charm and international celebrity. While Austin’s bionic not afraid of flying, she is seriously wounded in a sky-diving accident during her courtship to Steve, providing what might be read as the one of irony, the show’s coded jabs at the perceived hubris of the burgeoning feminist movement in the 1970s. Distraught to the point of discomposure for per- Sommers’s haps the first time in the series, Austin implores Goldman to use bionics to save Sommers, to which request Goldman reluctantly cedes, creating bionic hysteria the first bionic woman. The recovered cyborg Sommers then becomes one of Goldman’s operatives, despite his misgivings that Steve’s love for situates her as Jaime will get in the way of his professional duties to country (“The Bionic Woman: Parts 1 and 2”). an uncanny While Austin supplies a figure of commanding masculine presence, always more than equal to the challenging situations in which he is supplement to deployed, the transformed Sommers, by contrast, is almost immediately cast as a self-divided and intrinsically lacking female subject. After a scant the fantasy of few scenes of bionic parity that show the newly married couple racing each other in matching red and blue track suits, Sommers’s body begins masculine to reject her bionic implants. The uncontrollable tremors she experiences cause her to flub her first mission, necessitating the intervention of her presence offered bionic hubby to save the day. To make matters worse, a blood clot in Som- mers’s brain causes her to act out in violent, uncontrolled ways, leading to by Austin. a bionic rampage on a dark, stormy night that melodramatically deploys pathetic fallacy to accentuate the monstrousness of her condition (“Bionic Woman: Part 2”). Paralleling Austin’s bionic irony, Sommers’s bionic hysteria situates her as an uncanny supplement to the fantasy of masculine presence offered by Austin. Where Austin is made whole and powerful through the incorporation of technology into his body, Sommers is further destabilized and self- divided, making her dependent on masculine guardians for her existence. Although Austin does suffer moments of bionic malfunction, especially in the telefilms, these are mostly depicted as humorous minor glitches requiring a mere tune-up from Dr Rudy Wells. Sommers’s malfunctions, in contrast, are cast as ominous from the beginning of her career, com- prising a central crisis of the plotline in “The Bionic Woman: Part 2.” Her characterization thus reinforces prevalent, patriarchal gender binaries that cast women as frail, in need of protection, and vulnerable in comparison to

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 105 men. Her rejection of the bionics also reinforces stereotypical ideas about the female body as being more in tune with nature—indeed, as the very guarantor of “naturalness”—an underlying assumption that explains why Sommers’s body rejects the artificial intrusion of a “masculine” and alien technology. A further telling difference between Austin’s and Sommers’s bionic implants reinforces gender-weighted binaries: while Austin has one of his eyes replaced by a bionic magnifying device, it is Sommers’s ear that is so augmented. This difference plays upon the potency of the male gaze as an active organ symbolizing command of the far-reaching spaces it surveys. Sommers’s bionic ear, in contrast, is a passive organ that receives sounds, thus accentuating the stereotypically female traits of sensitivity and communication. A telling instance of bionic irony underscores these signifiers of gender essentialism: although the actual cost of Sommers’s bionics is not revealed, Goldman jokes at one point that it was less than $6 million because Sommers’s “parts are smaller.” The glass ceiling, it seems, extends even to world of cybernetic operatives.

Melodrama and the void Further marking her as self-divided and unstable, Jaime actually dies at the end of “The Bionic Woman: Part 2,” only to be later resurrected through cybernetic science but at the price of wiping out some of her memories. She thus forgets that Steve is her husband, falling in love, instead, with her doctor. The four men who now take responsibility for her well-being, Austin, Rudy Wells, Oscar Goldman, and the neurologist Dr Marchetti, then decide that it would be best for Jaime not to know about her history and marriage to Steve, as remembering these events causes physical pain and risks re-traumatizing her. This development invites a symptomatic reading that detects, beneath the idyllic depiction of Austen and Som- mers’s pre-accident relationship, a latent, traumatic content that could not be addressed within the generic constraints of the show but which gestures toward a host of gender-related indignities that must be suppressed and managed to enforce the hegemonic ideal of the nuclear couple and family.15 When Austen good-naturedly agrees to serve as Sommers’s coach and friend, her infantilization thus reinforces the stoic heroism of Austin, who must suppress his own romantic feelings in order to help her. The distance between Austin’s bionic irony, in which superior knowledge buttresses masculine self-presence, and Sommers’s self-division and

15 For such a reading deployed in the context of the family sitcom and other post–World War II sites of American culture, see Spigel.

106 | Orpana incompleteness illustrates the Lacanian/Žižekian reading that “man is per- haps simply a woman who [erroneously] thinks that she does exist”(82).16 In other words, it is not Sommers’s self-division that is ultimately phan- tasmal since, from a Lacanian perspective, lack and interdependence are the real and foundational states of the subject. It is the covering over of this void with a fiction of masculine agency and independence that is problematic and false, constituting a dangerously reactive move and a fantasy to be transversed. We could add to this analysis Donna Haraway’s characterization of the cyborg as a figure of feminist-materialist resistance, one whose admixture of humanity and technology, nature and culture, confounds naturalistic origin myths and stereotypical binaries, as well as essentialist notions of labour and gender, that buttress patriarchal capitalism (455). Although seemingly derivative and secondary, Sommers as the cyborg subject marked by self-division and interdependence is the hidden reality that the masculinist fantasy of Austin as “the world’s first bionic man” covers over, a relation of priority that the television show effectively masks and reverses. Read thus, the Austin–Sommers complex allows us to link the series back to the socio-political tensions that the narrative evokes and then magically tries to resolve. Six provides a fantasy of masculine agency that compensates for the fraught social, governmental, and economic context of the 1970s. Combining nostalgic elements of wartime heroism with the utopian promise of a technological fix, Austin’s bionic irony allows white male viewers to put themselves in the position of the exceptional individual who can transcend and master the crises of the day. He does this not by forging bonds of solidarity in a shared political project but through the skilled deployment of exceptional, individualized abilities ingeniously adapted to the changing needs of the moment. This allows him to become “the Man” and the apparent saviour of the establishment he initially rejected, even while Sommers remains a feminized site for the disavowed content (desire for solidarity, acknowledgment of the relational nature of identity, historico-political amnesia) generated by this strategy.17 Austen’s fraught relationship with Sommers is the narrative’s attempt to symbolize and contain the excesses generated by the masculinist-tech-

16 Žižek further articulates the idea of “woman” as the symptom of male mis- recognition of the inherent incompleteness of all identity in The Metastases of Enjoyment (137–66). 17 Interestingly, Sommers’s crisis is the state of emergency that allows for a provi- sional new masculine solidarity to emerge in the form of the secret (regarding Sommers’s true origins) shared amongst the four men who “care” for her.

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 107 nologist fantasy, a strategy that, as we shall see below, spirals beyond the ability of the show’s patriarchal-capitalist frame to fully manage, spawning a whole new television series.

Patriarchal hauntings Although Sommers’s debut is marked by the techno-gothic tropes of bionic hysteria, she quickly and conveniently forgets these troubled origins and is resuscitated into her own, successful series.18 Sommers’s rebirth in the season three of Six contains its own interesting cooptation of feminist aspirations, sanitizing these for prime-time viewing. When Sommers is revived, her personality and skills are intact but her memory is erased, “clean slate,” as Rudy Wells describes (“The Return of the Bionic Woman: Part 2”). Sommers’s lack of knowledge about her own past, and her being surrounded by no less than four professional men who do know her back- story, creates a power differential in favour of what is depicted as benevo- lent patriarchy. This gendered power imbalance haunts the plot of the show, just as Sommers admits to feeling haunted in her first one-on-one conversation with Austin since the loss of her memory: sommers: I still feel a little strange around new people. It’s all just incredible … all of a sudden just, here I am! austin: It must be hard for you. sommers: Yeah, but it’s also fresh too, you know. Every time I see something new or touch something or meet a new person, it just makes me want more. And I want to look back too. I want to know who I was and where I come from. But it’s a little frightening too … It’s like something’s haunting me. (“The Return of the Bionic Woman: Part 2”)

In this speech, Sommers’s lack of knowledge of her past with Austin makes the television audience complicit in an amplification of the show’s bionic irony, which now exceeds humorous one-liners to become a painful pre- dicament for the lovesick Austin. Sommers’s wonder over the “freshness” of her experience captures something of the optimism and excitement generated by women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: like 18 Writer/producer Kenneth Johnson, the creator of the bionic woman, did not want to have Jaime Sommers killed off at the end of the two-part story that introduced the character in season two of Six. The executives at Universal, however, wanted an ending that echoed that of the popular romance filmLove Story (1970) in which the female lead dies at the end. After receiving many letters of protest over the death of Sommers, the studio decided to resurrect the character (Kenneth).

108 | Orpana the many American women who were venturing into formerly forbidden realms of social, professional, and public life, Sommers feels an expansion of possibility, experience, and desire. At the same time, she is “haunted” by her forgotten past life—a history that any one of her protectors could easily reveal to her, were it not for the strange suggestion that she might be retraumatized by this knowledge. By denying her access to this past, and instead letting Sommers become embroiled in a romantic relationship with the cryogenic specialist Marchetti who resuscitated her, the men in Som- mers’s life infantilize her just when she is poised to become truly liberated. We could thus identify the mysterious distress that haunts Sommers as patriarchy itself, as manifest in her relationship with Austin where she is first forced into the role of supplement to his fantasy of male mastery then kept in a state of ignorance about this history by her supposed protectors. Supporting this reading, Sommers also haunts Austen, and she is repeatedly shown as a translucent memory image superimposed on Aus- tin’s troubled visage. In “The Return of the Bionic Woman: Part 1,” knowledge of Sommers’s resuscitation is initially withheld by Goldman and Wells, for fear of traumatizing Austin. Austin sees Sommers for the first time through his bionic eye, in a military hospital while sedated after being severely injured on a mission. When he espies her again from afar through a hospital window, it is again through his bionic powers of magnification. If we accept Sommers as the supplemental figure to the fantasy of male, technological mastery embodied by Austin, this detail makes psychoana- lytic sense: although seemingly a “real” independent entity, Austen’s vision of Sommers is really a projection of Austin’s own bionic equipment—a phantasm of the masculinist, technological fix. Later in this episode, Austin’s bionic irony is temporarily suspended, putting him in the position of questioning his own judgment, experience, and memory. However, unlike Sommers’s protracted struggle to learn what the audience and men in her life already know, Austin quickly and decisively rectifies the situation: after pushing over an elderly guard during a bionic rampage (delivered while in a wheelchair!), Austin uses the threat of physical violence to force Goldman and Wells to tell him the truth about Sommers’s resurrection. We see, for a moment, a return of the brash, unruly Austin from the pilot telefilm, with Austin challenging the paternalistic authority structures in which he is enmeshed. In the very next scenes, however, rebellion is translated into romantic tension as Aus- tin witnesses Dr Marchetti making moves on his former wife. So begins a bizarre plotline that sees the four men who care most about Sommers

We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 109 attempting to put their personal feeling aside to plot a scenario in which their charge might have her memory “naturally” mended. All of this makes for entertaining television viewing, amplified by the Six resurrects, additional frame of four decades of historical distance that lends these episodes a kitsch value beyond any irony intentionally written into the plots. for a new The analysis offered here might suggest that television writers, producers, and directors are either sophisticated ideologues lacing their plotlines generation of with reactive messages that reinforce the status quo or that they are naive pawns in a larger project to reproduce conservative norms and insulate workers, the society from more progressive forms of change. Of course, neither of these descriptions is entirely true. The forms of ideological manipulation, white patriarchal incorporation of dissenting discourses, and reproduction of restrictive binaries and stereotypes described above are present due to the politi- signifier as an cal unconscious, which we might follow Nicholas Brown in describing as “everything entailed or presupposed by an action that is not present to image of iden- consciousness in that action” (np).19 In this iteration, the action of writing a script or producing a television show depends upon a host of structural tification now factors, not just within the realms of production and political economy but also in the semiotic coordinates that map the limits of meaningful com- rescued from munication within the context of the antagonistic divisions that constitute the social field. These are the basic elements of meaning in a given social the charges of formation—what Jameson calls ideologemes—that television producers rely upon without having the time or capacity, in a six-day-per-episode racism and production schedule, to reflect very deeply upon (Political 72–73). discrimination. The man dreams alone This essay has demonstrated how popular science fiction shows like Six worked to reproduce the American working class in a manner that responds to the critiques of racism and sexism being leveled at it from progressive quarters, while also undermining the kinds of solidarity that would truly address these issues. By recasting the anti-establishment, working-class hero of 1970s cinema into the frame of an all-American, ex- astronaut turned cyborg secret agent, Six resurrects, for a new generation of workers, the white patriarchal signifier as an image of identification now

19 The unconscious, however, is not simply that which is excluded from consciousness but includes as its determinative content that which we want to exclude from consciousness. It is this not wanting to know that we don’t know that complicates the relation of the unconscious to conscious actions, giving the former an uncanny agency that might be missed in a “purely negative” vision of the unconscious.

110 | Orpana rescued from the charges of racism and discrimination, as well as from the spectres of deskilling and unemployment, that haunted the American workers of the day. The technological fix here fully emerges as a symptom of the mounting dissolution of the fiction of a middle class that had been deployed for two generations as an attempt to contain the tensions and contradictions of the post–World War II compromise. As this mirage began to show its structural fissures at the dawn of what would become the neoliberal era, our bionic heroes and a host of other strange mutations emerged as fantasy vehicles for directing collective hopes and anxieties down avenues that attempt to reproduce the dominant patriarchal and capitalist system that provoked these responses in the first place. We might further wonder if the recent bevy of popular space Rob- insinades, films like Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), and The Martian (2015), share secret complicity with Six’s bionic irony. Soon after receiving his bionic implants, the alienated ex-astronaut Austin confides to Wells that during his lunar mission he was “a quarter of a million miles from the real world, but I felt a lot closer to it then than I do now” (“The Moon”). For a figure like Austin to work as cultural fantasy, it seems crucial to maintain this sense of distance and alienation, to the point of taking great narrative pains to prevent his being “grounded” by a capable and equal romantic partner. The gothic convolutions of Sommers’s biography thus emerge as a symptomatic response to the political blockage constituted by the recuperation of Austin’s initial alienation and anti-establishment position: once Austin has become “the Man,” the utopian dimensions of his socio-political alienation must be translated into the another register: the romantic and personal. The recent films listed above reveal a similar sense of isolation and distance from the terrestrial and offer a parallel faith in technological fixes as a means of easing this alienation. We find in these films, as well, the depressingly predictable reiteration of figures like the female hysteric (in Gravity) and the insurgent, patriarchal saviour (in all three). As ideas of space exploration percolate in the collective imagination once again, to the extent that private companies claim to be actually screening candidates for a potential one-way manned mission to Mars, critical reflection upon these two television shows from the 1970s might help cut through the fog of fantasy distracting us from the pressing social, economic, and environmental issues that beset all of us here on earth.

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We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 113 Six Million Dollar Man Episodes Cited

“The Moon and the Desert.” Dir. Richard Irving. Perf. Lee Majors, Darren McGavin. First aired: 7 March 1973. The Six Million Dollar Man: Pilot tv Movies and Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2011. “Wine, Women and War.” Dir. Russ Mayberry. Perf. Lee Majors, Richard Anderson. First aired: 20 March 1973. The Six Million Dollar Man: Pilot tv Movies and Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2011. “The Solid Gold Kidnapping.” Dir. Russ Mayberry. Perf. Lee Majors, Richard Anderson. First aired: 17 November 1973. The Six Million Dollar Man: Pilot tv Movies and Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2011. “Population: Zero.” Dir. Jeannot Szwarc. Perf. Lee Majors, Richard Ander- son. First aired: 18 January 1974. The Six Million Dollar Man: Pilot tv Movies and Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2011. “Survival of the Fittest.” Dir. Leslie H. Martinson. Perf. Lee Majors, Richard Anderson. First aired: 25 January 1974. The Six Million Dollar Man: Pilot tv Movies and Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2011. “The Bionic Woman: Part 1.” Writ. Kenneth Johnson. Perf. Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner. First aired: 16 March 1975. The Bionic Woman: Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2010. “The Bionic Woman: Part 2.” Writ. Kenneth Johnson. Perf. Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner. First aired: 23 March 1975. The Bionic Woman: Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2010. “The Return of the Bionic Woman: Part 1.” Writ. Kenneth Johnson. Perf. Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner. First aired: 14 September 1975. The Bionic Woman: Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2010. “The Return of the Bionic Woman: Part 2.” Writ. Kenneth Johnson. Perf. Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner. First aired: 21 September 1975. The Bionic Woman: Season 1. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2010.

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