The Space between Human and Machine in Film

Indianapolis, IN

By looking to film, we can see striking and revealing representations of the human condition. Indeed it is through film that we can conceptualize what we fear, engage with it, and then wonder at the implications. The films Blade Runner and Metropolis reveal a key part of our social psychology: humans create other-labels to distinguish all that does not have human essence. Indeed the more than 50 years between these two films show that central concern has not changed. There is an implicit trust under which human relations occur, the collective sociocultural knowledge of humanity and its experience. Rooted in empathy, this network marks the separation between human and nonhuman, for they cannot pierce the veil of the human realm. Metropolis reveals its workers turning increasingly lifeless, automated, as the machines become more human by the lifeblood of the laborers. Blade Runner unveils the beauty of the ideal of mankind as seen in the machine. The audience is troubled; their sense of humanity exists in some liminal state between the two. Yet these films reveal that the cyborg or robot will remain the other, for humankind sticks to the belief that what is not at nature human, can never be human.