80 Years Of Robots In Hollywood Options

[noorie]

The Eyes of the State
Metropolis (1927)

ROBOT:Maria

QUOTE: "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."
—Maria, the leader of the underground world of the workers, calling out to her followers.


Alfred Abel and Rudolf Klein-Rogge in Metropolis.

Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece set many of the ground rules for the sci-fi epics to come, not just in the way it depicted a dystopic future, but also the way it dealt with mad scientists and of course, their creations.

Depicting a world in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are literally divided by the Earth's surface — the elitists living above ground and the workers living in the dark, dank caverns beneath the surface — Maria is a robot used by those in power to pry their way into the workers' world. A silver machine created in a secret lab, Maria takes on the face and characteristics of the female leader of that underground world, the one who the workers trust and rally around. By controlling the robot, the surface-dwellers manage to control the underground populace, turning Maria's words of uprising into words of reassurance: Get back to work, and be happy.

One of the very first big-screen depictions of a robot in this, the first great sci-fi film, is that of a mole and an imposter; of an enemy that can't be defeated, much less identified. For so many of the movie robots to come, Maria was the defining transition from the robots of sci-fi literature to the artificial intelligence of the sci-fi movie.

[humble_rafi]

CODE

Perfect Neighbors
The Stepford Wives (1975)

ROBOTS: Almost every wife in Stepford, Connecticut
QUOTE: "I won't be here when you get back! ... There'll be somebody with my name! And she'll cook and clean like crazy, but she won't be me! ... She'll be like one of those robots in Disneyland!"
—Joanna Eberhardt, a new arrival to Stepford, trying to explain her conspiracy theory to a psychiatrist.


Katharine Ross in The Stepford Wives.

Robot movies often terrify, none perhaps in the manner of The Stepford Wives, which explored a man's ideal mate and a feminist's worst nightmare. This film introduced a completely new robot concept to the big screen: a human reproduction equal parts Doris Day and Playboy Bunny. For female moviegoers still reeling from Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, these household sexbots are the ultimate enemy, wholly consumed by vanity, cleanliness, cooking and pleasure. What's worse, these robo-Barbies look so realistic their own children don't even notice the difference.

Imagine the horror of liberated mother and wife Joanna Eberhardt, who reluctantly leaves Manhattan to settle down in suburban Stepford, Conn., with her husband and two kids. Joanna blames water contamination for the hyper-domestic behavior until she watches one of her neighbors malfunction — freakishly repeating the same household task over and over again (while eerily simulating the tedious repetition of domestic chores).

But the Stepford robots are not the real enemy, men are the true problem — the Stepford husbands to be exact. While the men belong to the Stepford Men's Association, the women belong nowhere. In this film, if you're a woman (human or otherwise), you're doomed.

This is a good topic to start with.Noorie have you seen the latest The Stepford Wives of Nicole Kidman?