Exploration on how technology and its relationship to gender is portrayed on screen! There's a focus on Ex Machina, Her and Videodrome mainly due to the fact I wrote my dissertation on these films. Was meant to focus more on Tetsuo the Iron Man as it works a lot better for the arguments I'm making but there wasn't enough time to do it justice.
Main theme for the show is the 'double male fear of technology and women' as Andreas Huyssen wrote in their essay The Vamp and the Machine about Fritz Lang's Metropolis (the first cinematic cyborg is featured in this!). The crux of this show is that in cinema, fear of women gets ascribed to the technological body. There's no key text for this show as a lot of my views and analysis are informed by a lot of late 90's cyber feminism and general gender theory. Would recommend checking out this Guardian long read on accelerationism if you're not familiar with it. It's a viewpoint I engage with a bit on this show but in general I think it's really fascinating and relevant for right now. I also highly recommend reading Donna Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto as is very relevant to this show as well as being all round pretty inspiring stuff!! A lot of academics dismiss Haraway as being way too theoretical and fantastical but I think it works very well to inspire; after all it is meant to be a manifesto and a myth...
Some more essays on the cinematic cyborg that I've enjoyed;
Diseased Umby Cord from eXistenZFilms referenced...
Videodrome (1983) dir. David Cronenberg
Her (2013) dir. Spike Jonze
Ex Machina (2015) dir. Alex Garland
Other sexy tech films...
Metropolis (1927) dir. Fritz Lang
Shivers (1975), Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999) all directed by David Cronenberg
the entire Alien series
After Hours (1985) dir. Martin Scorsese*
Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989) dir. Shinya Tskumato
Ghost in the Shell (1995) dir. Mamoru Oshii
Lost Highway (1997) dir. David Lynch*
Cam (2018) dir. Daniel Goldhaber
*not sci fi films but certainly about emasculation in the face of modernity/urbanisation like in Tetsuo so fit the themes! After Hours has undercurrent themes of yuppies/the modern man being emasculated so his clerical/data entry work is particularly fitting (typing has historically been a 'women's' job for various reasons since the 1870's and culturally the work is still heavily 'feminised' - a perfect example of Husseyn's double bind in action). Check out Zizek's analysis of Lost Highway to see why I've included it... mainly for the observation that the protagonist 'is terrified of the enigma that is his wife' and it fit's into the discussion around male inertia and impotency
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