Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema

Holland, Samantha. "Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema." In Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Development. Roger Burrows and Mike Featherstone, eds. London: SAGE, 1995.

Opening of the essay is on line and available without cost as of 27 May 2019 here.[1]

Many contemporary films take up and enter into the traditional philosophical debates surrounding the so-called 'mind-body problem' and the nature of the human 'self', but few do so more explicitly than those centering of the representation of [...] a cyborg. With their human/machine hybrids, these films foreground questions of dualism and personal identity [...] and highlight contemporary concerns about the effects of technology on the human 'self' [...]. The cyborg film is particularly interesting when considering the relationship between the Cartesian (or Cartesian-influenced) dualisms of traditional philosophy and those dualisms of gender that, arguably, underlie and inform such a conceptual division.

The cyborg film is a generic hybrid that draws primarily on the genres of science fiction, action[,] and horror, and uses images of the technologized body to investigate questions of 'self'-hood [sic], gender, the 'mind-body problem'[,] and the threats posed to such concepts by postmodern technology and AI [...]. I will be concentrating on films [...] because they epitomize so well the contemporary concerns about strong AI, or technology more generally, 'taking over' and rendering humans and human-ness [sic] in some some redundant.

Deals primary with THE TERMINATOR and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, ROBOCOP (1987), ROBOCOP 2, and EVE OF DESTRUCTION. Also covered: ROBOCOP 3, CYBORG, R.O.T.O.R., RoboC.H.I.C., HARDWARE, CHERRY 2000, and EVE OF DESTRUCTION.

RDE, Completing, 27May19