The Leda (film anthology segment)

The Leda. Peter Atkins and Tony Randel, directors, script. Sherrie Rosa and Trevor Goddard, actors. In INSIDE OUT. USA: Playboy Productions, 1991. Total running time for compilation, 89 minutes. Discussed in Anca Vlasopolos's "Technology as Eros's Dart: Cyborgs as Perfect (Male?) Lovers," our source for this citation.

SF-erotic very short film.

Vlasopolos summarizes "The Leda" as a segment in the Playboy "soft-porn anthology" as set in "a dystopian time when a woman [Bethany] who tries to save library disks of sixteenth-century poetry from a 'culture sweep' is sent off into space in solitary confinement, the same punishment as that of the man she literally hooks up with," in a space-travel sort of way — before the more mundane kind — "who is a murderer." The murderer becomes a "man-machine," which is an improvement.

The machine part is Bethany's ship's computer who earlier "struggles to write poems" to "win praise" from Bethany, denies being her jailer, and promises to aid her. "That the computer, who has no voice and thus no discernible gender or affect, is interested in Bethany in more than a Platonic sense becomes clear when it sends a long, sinuous print-out that coils around Bethany's sleeping body and ultimately reaches her face." The printout is a love poem asking her, to "dream me a body, dream me a face," a poem Bethany's movements indicates she has taken to heart.

The murderer plans to cannibalize the computer on Bethany's ship and then scuttle the ship, taking Bethany with him. The computer has other plans and asks Bethany to do as he instructs. We see only Bethany "chloroforming the man into unconsciousness. The next shot is of Bethany's face" which clearly indicates she has experienced "the long-awaited orgasm" the other prisoner hadn't given her. "As the man's face appears over her breasts, an overview shot reveals his plugged-in nape and the cable to the computer, and then we see his face in close-up over Bethany, reciting the poem, 'Dream me a body, dream me a face" (Vlasopolos p. 65).

See for varieties of human/machine interface, ranging from initially spiritual "Platonic" love to physical connection to and control by a computer, allowing non-Platonic, physical love-making (and not just sex).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 28Mar19