Another image from Metropolis that struck me as bearing an uncanny
resemblance to a piece of modern science fiction art film is the
image of the cyborg/Maria hybrid taken from a promotional poster
for the film and how it compares the ‘cyber-Bjork’ from
the video of Bjorks ‘All is full of love’ directed by
Chris Cunningham. The
video for 'All is full of love' depicts a lone mechanical lifeform
that solves its isolated state by producing a replica of itself.
The robot has the likeness of a female but reproduces itself in
a mechanical asexual manner.
This brings up the question, what gender is somebody whos body is
more machine than flesh?
Donna Haraway’s "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” * explains
that:
“The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no
truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour,
or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation
of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense,
the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final'
irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the
'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate
self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.”
