film Reviews Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Hybridization is not just a modern phenomenon, and yet, it is undeniable that it represents one of the burning issues of our epoch. On the verge of what is representable and what is beyond representation, between ordinary and extraordinary, cinematography has always been fascinated by hybridization, the bio-cultural acquisition of alterity. It is a mysterious field of experimentation, since it plays with the boundaries of what is human. Along the years, Japanese cinema, in part due to the unforgettable tragedy of the nuclear bombing, has been the landmark for any aesthetics of transformation: in Tetsuo by Shinya Tsukamoto, humankind finds access to a different, higher trans-human dimension. The body of the employee Tomoo Taniguchi blends with the machine; he is disfigured by metal objects, and his penis is transformed into a dangerous drill, with which he will penetrate his fiancée to death. This moment of revelation, of epiphany, is an anagnorisis of what Günther Anders defines as the soft totalitarianism of technology. Moreover, the osmotic, visionary mutations put on the screen by Tsukamoto instantly recall the surreal hybridization of Videodrome, a film directed by the great David Cronenberg in 1983. The owner of a cable TV channel, Max Renn, being obsessed with snuff movies, decides to watch Videodrome: a pornographic show that mysteriously unsettles the psyche of any person that watches it. This begins a deep and symbiotic interaction between the protagonist and the television, an exchange that will lead Max to blend with the TV screen in an increasingly tight bond of violence, psychosis and tumorous hallucinations. Besides these devilish hybridizations, which emphasize the man-machine relationship to the point of envisioning a total fusion between them, the seventh art has also tried to define the category of human through contact with the robotic and cyberpunk universe, completely abandoning the horror front in order to evoke an emotional connection with technological otherness. In this genre we find Solo by Norberto Barba, Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus, A.I. Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, and, among many others, the recent Ex Machina by Alex Garland and Chappie by Neil Blomkamp. All these works share a common feature: the ability of the robots to experience or mimic human feelings. Besides frightening the human protagonists, this ability gets to the point of challenging the very idea of human identity: if we are not the only ones that can experience emotions, and express them through language, how are we different from anthropomorphic machines? Clearly, here there is at stake not simply how identity is built (in this case a property-based model, that describes humanity by listing its features), but the very notion of identity. Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is a delightful movie that explores this issue. It tells about the love life of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a lone and introvert man who lives in a future Los Angeles, governed by the technological panopticon. He is painfully going through a divorce with his wife; and one day he decides to purchase a new special model of operating system, OS 1, developed as an artificial intelligence that can evolve, learn and develop its personality. While configuring the OS, Theodore chooses a feminine voice for the interface, which proves to be particularly sensual and charming. When asked about its name, the OS chooses, on its own, to be called Samantha. As a result of many such examples of the apparent expression of a well-formed personality, the fascination of the boundless potentiality of that technology, and especially, Samantha's constant and sympathetic presence in his life, the protagonist is increasingly charmed by