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New documentary The Mechanical Bride is a moving, weirdly human exploration of artificial companionship. It’s also an academic dissection of the male gaze and pop culture’s sexbots, from Metropolis and Battlestar Galactica to actual robotic love objects.
The title of the documentary is borrowed from Marshall McLuhan’s 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man , which studied “the cultural interfusion of sex and technology in the advertising strategies of his day,” director Allison de Fren told Wired in an e-mail interview. “What would he say about our nostalgic fixation with Mad Men? McLuhan would have a field day with the mechanical brides of our time.”
The Mechanical Bride , which screens Sunday at Canada’s international documentary festival Hot Docs, takes a long look at artificial creations like the RealDoll, a posable sex doll with silicone skin, as well as the technosexuals who love them. (Check out Wired’s array of artificial companions in the gallery above and see exclusive clips from The Mechanical Bride below.)
“Advertising’s ideal woman is a fragmented body of replaceable parts, whose origin is the assembly-line logic of consumer capitalism,” said de Fren, a professor of media culture at Occidental College who honed her robotics chops in Paul Allen‘s future-tech think-tanks Interval Research and Starwave. “The RealDoll is the culmination of that kind of logic. It’s ordered in the exact same way as a car, with detailed customization including head and body type, hair and eye color, breast size and lips.”
More sexualized creations are explored through their owners’ personal histories, which are de Fren’s sharpest focus. Her nonjudgmental lens lets The Mechanical Bride ‘s engrossing subjects provide their own electricity during their self-aware analysis of their silicone-and-circuit humanoids.
For instance, American goth Davecat, who can be seen in The Mechanical Bride clip above, talks about his artificial companion Sidore. She bows to Japan’s gynoid culture, sleekly represented by the iconic cyborg fembots of artist Hajime Sorayama, who also appears in the documentary.
There’s Slade, a RealDoll repair guru who began mending artificial companions after a skydive nearly shattered his body, and German mad scientist Michael, who’s upgraded Europe’s storied obsession with sex dolls — from pirate pleasure models like dames de voyage to mechanical love object Olympia from The Tales of Hoffmann — by creating grinding, moaning fembots like those from SuperBabe’s Mark Maki visible in the clip below.
And then there are the anonymous geeks of alt.sex.fetish.robot, who are evidently looking for much more than love in wired places.
“They’re a fascinating group, and definitely need to be differentiated from doll owners,” said de Fren. “ASFRians are robot fetishists, less interested in the perfectly realistic robot per se than in the tension and transformation between the human and the robotic, those moments when what looks like a human is revealed to be a robot shutting down or malfunctioning, its faceplate opening to reveal wiring and circuitry. Many love the original The Stepford Wives for scenes where the wives break down, which throws their artificiality into relief. These are often very smart but socially awkward men who find navigating the inconsistent rules of human interaction confusing. It’s an attempt, however circuitous, at connecting.”
The Mechanical Bride, which would make for a deeply technopathic double-feature if paired with Adam Curtis’ recent documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, manages to connect to these myriad geeks and gynoids with a scientific detachment that still manages to be warm. That uncanny human dimension attracted The Mechanical Bride narrator Julie Newmar, who herself played a fembot in obscure ’60s sci-fi program My Living Doll, which is currently rebooting for a new century.
“It’s a fascinating story, done by de Fren with loving care and delicacy,” said Newmar, who played Catwoman in ’60s TV series Batman . “I will work with anyone who looks at life with love, and a desire to understand its complexities.”
That desire is ironically driven by logic, given de Fren’s aspirational analogue.
“I have an endless, Spock-like curiosity about the subjects in my documentary,” de Fren said. “That’s not to say that there weren’t some people I interviewed who put me off, but I am one of those people who like to shine lights in dark corners and see what’s squirming around.”
“ Love and Sex With Robots predicts that within only a half-century, sexual intimacy between humans and their robot companions will be so commonplace that society will need to address the issues around robot prostitution.”
Even Spock would agree it’s logical that the sexbot market will spread into the mainstream as our capacity for technological innovation and sexual stimulation increases. Hell, by the time your grandkids are old enough to read this, fascination with fembots might be passé.
“David Levy’s book Love and Sex With Robots predicts that within only a half-century, sexual intimacy between humans and their robot companions will be so commonplace that society will need to address the issues around robot prostitution and human/robot marriage,” de Fren said. “Anime and fantasy sex dolls, which have been popular in Japan for a while, are starting to become more popular in the United States, where women and dolls are starting to resemble one another.”
But will, to beat a marketing term senseless, these fembots ever be real enough? RealDoll tinkerer Slade laughs at the idea that a sex doll, no matter how technologically advanced, comes close to a living, breathing woman. And even de Fren, who says she’s fascinated by robots, admits that most women are about as interested in sex dolls as they are in vibrators with issues.
“Whether robots will ever achieve consciousness that speaks to female sexual response is anyone’s guess, but I think that most women find it very hard to imagine,” she said.
The soul, that most complicated speculative invention, remains the sticking point, according to Newmar, who said sci-fi fantasies like My Living Doll have communicated “not a damn thing” about female sexuality and male desire.
“It’s totally make-believe, although I would like to hear what people say in 50 years about it,” she told Wired by e-mail. “Being a larger-than-life person, I was an excellent choice to play the Living Doll, which was the most difficult role of my life. As an actor, I usually work from the inside out to get an understanding of the character. This was the reverse, like building a paper doll into a child.”
