On Tue, 4 Oct 2022 09:41:01 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
<
jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote:
TCM is showing robot movies on Saturdays this month. The introductions to the movies didn't specifically focus on the meaning, philosophy, or technology of the robots, but there is an interstitial with such. To see how dead this newsgroup is, I'm
going to focus on the meaning, philosophy, and technology of the robots in a series of posts. I'll also take the opportunity to calibrate my ratings scale on the quality of cinematic robots which is based on the extent to which we believe the robot is
not just a man in a tin suit.
As opposed to the field of robotics, the fictional subject of robots also includes artificial life, essentially, as an extension of exploring artificial intelligence. Almost any writing on the subject will include Frankenstein and other ways of
artificially making people, biologically or even magically. The subject also branches into removing self-determination, or "robotizing" people, whether with a sci-fi twist of using a person's "mental pattern" or very brain as the basis of an artificial
being, or ancient superstitions such as zombies. This being October, there'll be a few classic movies of that type shown.
We begin with "Metropolis," and the robot Maria, or, as some pedants say, "false Maria." Some call her Hel, after the idea (cut in some shorter versions) that she is modeled after the dead woman of that name whom the scientist loved, but who had
married the industrialist instead. (Other names include the german "Maschinemensch," in the '70s some used the term "robotrix," probably now deprecated.) TCM points out that in modern terms this is a sexbot; I suppose the concept of that goes back at
least to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. In between then and now was the 19th Century "Tales of Hoffman", where a man mistook a dancing automaton of the time for a real woman.
IIRC, the Mad Scientist Rotwang explicitly states that the robot is
"Hel reborn" or something similar.
Which brings into doubt Maria's status as the first robot on film. They were making movies about dancing automatons--played by dancers-- since the days when they could only make a movie a reel at a time. There's also Charles Ogle as Frankenstein's
creation, which at least is visually designed not to look
like a regular person. Paul Wegener's costume as the Golem makes him look like a made thing, in this case a statue. Where Maria's design may be first is in being mechanical, although now I have to search if there were any early movies about self-
driving cars.
The second movie was "Forbidden Planet." Robby, the robot of the '50s reflected further thinking. Isaac Asimov, creator of robotics (well, the word) fought what he called "the Frankenstein complex," the idea that if you build a robot, it would run
amok and kill you. Robot-induced damage does not come from meddling in God's domain, but from bad design decisions. He came up with the Three Laws of Robotics, which this movie demonstrates by putting Robby through the drill: It will preserve itself,
but will obey orders to stick its arm in a disintegration beam, it can fire a ray gun, but not at a human being. Only the fact that it is not built like an action-movie hero prevents a more dramatic scene of it throwing itself in danger to prevent
humans from coming to harm.
Now for the ratings. Based on whether we believe it's a robot and not just a person in a tin suit. That seems like a simple binary choice: 0 we don't believe it, 1 we do, but the logic can get kinda fuzzy, so there are values between the two.
0 are those androids indistinguishable from humans, which I'm sure I'll get to rant about in later movies.
I'll let the rating climb to about 0.1 as they become less and less indistinguishable from humans. That is, the less the characters in the story are able to believe they are people, the more we are able to believe they are robots.
Then we come to robots that only approximate the shape of a human. This is where I put Maria, about 0.3, a bit below her "grandson," C-3P0. Those exterior pistons on his arms really do a lot, plus, in her movie, Maria is magically given the appearance
of "real Maria," allowing her to be played by Brigitte Helm out of the suit, and somehow in physical interactions with her no one notices she is hundreds of pounds of unyielding metal. (I almost wrote "cold, unyielding metal," but I realized she excited
a crowd of men to carry her off on their shoulder with a dance the gyrations of which would have taxed her motors, and may have heated her to be warm or even hot to the touch. It takes a lot of engineering to stay within the narrow range of human body
temperature.)
She is transformed in a scene which some have tagged as the granddaddy
of all Mad Scientist Laboratory Scenes. No magic involved, just really
advanced science. And, for its day, some impressive effects work.
Somehow I rate these suit of armor designs like Maria and 3P0 above the boiler and stovepipe suits of cruder robots (see the Republic robot, or Volkite, used on "Voyager" in the Captain Proton holodeck program as apparently in public domain.) despite
the fact that the boilers look less human. Should it go the other way?
Robby is the first I heard of a designer disguising the shape of the human operator. The operators' heads (there were two in alternating shifts, not counting Marvin Miller who supplied the voice, although effects technician Eddie Fisher (not that one)
wore the suit in building it, the Screen Actors Guild decided that since Robby had lines, it had to have a member play it, Frankie Carpenter and Frankie Darrow got the job) the operators' head was just above Robby's chest plate, and they looked out from
between the voice light tubes. (Argon and mercury vapor? Check. With high voltage electricity? Check. In fragile glass tubes? Check. Inches from your operator's face? CHECK!) I want to set this at the midpoint. Well, just below the midpoint, with his "
brother" the Robot from "Lost in Space" just above. Either Robby at 0.49 and the Robot at 0.51 or make the difference between them a round 10 milliislands, and take us to three digits 0.495 and 0.505.
Who says actors can't be brave? Or stupid, depending on your point of
view.
I've heard the robot Tobor from the movie "Tobor the Great" (Tobor is robot spelled backwards) thrown into this family. Does anyone know a source that Robert Kinoshita designed it as well as the other two?
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."
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