(Re)/(Dis)Embodying Love: The Cyborg in <i>Metropolis</i> and <i>Blade Runner</i>

Abstract

Fritz Lang’s ground-breaking science-fiction film <i>Metropolis</i> (1927) has long held a particular fascination with film critics because of its exploration of the exploited proletariat and the dangers of human-machine interaction. While much academic interest in the film has focused on it as capitalist allegory – seen in the separation of the bourgeoisie above-ground from the proletariat underground – less attention has been paid to the film’s representation of the cyborg, and, more specifically, the cyborg femme. Drawing on posthuman theory, and in particular cyborg theory as proposed by Donna Haraway, this article investigates to what degree the film denies the true symbolic potency of the cyborg by casting its creation as reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster. It asserts that Lang denies the film an imaginary, visual space within which the cyborg femme, though seeming human, is not afforded any agency—as Derrida asserts about the machine-animal—or her own will towards self-determination. Though interrogating what it means to possess human capacity, the article further asserts that Ridley Scott’s characterization of the replicants Rachael, Zohra and Pris in <i>Blade Runner</i> (1982) casts these cyborg femmes as expendable or dependent on the human to protect them, thereby denying them love.