2001: A Space Odyssey

More could be said about this giant of a film than could probably ever be written into one entry (or several for that matter). Rather than regurgitate the claims made by the authors we read this week, with their many brilliant analyses of 2001, I'd like to point out an interesting comparison I noticed. When reading Hanson's piece on Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice, I couldn't help but be reminded of an oft-cited article by Andrea Huyssen titled The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Huyssen's article makes several claims about gender and the role of technology in Fritz Lang's acclaimed Metropolis that work well in conversation with Hanson's argument. 

The common thread in Hanson and Huyssen's analyses is that man's apprehension and anxieties about the machine or technology is conflated with a psychological male fear of femininity and otherness . Indeed, both narratives can be picked to bits by Freud's theories of castration anxiety, the fear a male undergoes once he realizes his mother does not have a phallus as he does. The mother (and females in general) become a threatening source of anxiety; one that needs to be subjugated. In the case of 2001, HAL serves to represent an Otherness that must be questioned by the two men traveling to Jupiter. This is due to HAL's mechanicity, but also, Hanson asserts, to his queerness. In Metropolis, the evil scientist Rotwang invents a robot which will destroy the entire city. Unlike HAL, the vamp is not merely a disembodied voice. Instead, the vamp is shown as having a characteristically female body, one that threatens and titillates men, and must also be controlled by them. The interesting disparity between these two representations emerges in the way that the vamp possesses a certain corporeality that HAL lacks.