Rock. . .Robot Rock.

Last week marked the eighty-fifth anniversary of Carl Capek’s coining of the term “robot.” He invented the word for the inventions in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots, and the use and etymology of this obscure Russian playwright’s invented word has grown to almost insane proportions. “Robot” (along with its colloquialisms and offshoots like cyborg and android) conjures up any number of iterations, cultural references, and definitions, from the metallic adversaries of Captain Video to the lethal fembots of the Austin Powers films to that insipid dance which carries the robot’s name. In other words, more than any other science-fiction trope, the robot has worked its way into our shared cultural lexicon, giving shape to this realm of fiction in the general public and further defining the shorthand we all use to define our dreams.

The use of the robot, though, seems to vary drastically according to the socio-political background and mores of the culture which is employing the device, even down to the basic definition of the robot itself. For instance, the descendants of the Soviet culture which birthed the very concept of the robot now has turned its back on the concept, relying more on mythical creatures and the supernatural for its inhuman scares (to which the recent success of the Nightwatch series attests). When the robot is applied in Britain, it usually appears in an archaic and inorganic form, whether it be the frightening Cybermen of Doctor Who or the bumbling Kryten of Red Dwarf. Germany, having once created one of the definitive robot stories in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, has now seemingly abandoned the concept altogether, focusing, as many of the cinemas of Western Europe are wont to do, on self-important and overly violent character pieces rather than the realm of the fantastic. While the robot once had an evolutionary life in the national fiction of these countries, it is now all but dead.

While the old world has abandoned the conceit, the idea of the robot continues to evolve in two disparate, but equally thriving, cultures: the United States and Japan. What makes the artificial being so attractive to these countries while the idea is nearly abandoned elsewhere? The myriad answers point not only to the success of this stalwart trope of sci-fi, but also to the engrained identities of these two societies. After all, both the U.S. and Japan lean heavily on their sense of cavalier imperialism for their national identities. The Japanese have proven themselves to be vindictive in battle and less than gracious in defeat, trampling over their neighbors in land-grab attempts to expand their empire and fighting their enemies long after the battle has ceased. We here in America do not fare much better historically, as we made a habit of wiping out the indigenous population of our country and going back on our promises to remain isolationist and anti-imperialistic. Woodrow Wilson ran on the campaign slogan “he kept us out of war,” and then immediately set about getting us mired in World War I and attempting to rewrite the ways of the world by creating the League of Nations. When you look at the histories of these two countries, it only seems fitting that their fiction would continue to use a trope which requires the characters to play God. The robot, by its very design, must have an earthbound designer, or at least a mortal one. These cultures have been at the forefront in the modern age in attempting to hold their will over others, so the only logical next step is to create a new race to impose upon. Capek saw this reasoning coming, and therefore ended R.U.R. with the robots rising up and triumphing over their masters. Once a being can comprehend the idea of self-preservation, Capek reasoned, it will not take to enslavement without a fight. Americans, the younger and less-stable country, took this warning to heart, and most of the early robot stories feature a great deal of phobia about our creations; even after the invention of Asimov’s Positronic Laws, robots tended to go on murderous rampages in attempts to conquer their creators. The Japanese forcibly silenced their army at the end of World War II, and seemingly regressed into their rigid class system, so their representation of the robot differs slightly. You are more likely to see the representation of robot as surrogate daughter, subservient maid, or confused amnesiac-figure represented in manga than the one-man army of American fiction. When the robot is a killer, it is usually wracked with self-doubt or a gigantic suicidal streak, and is only delaying the inevitable freak-out over the fact that it isn’t a real human. (For further viewing on this subject, I do not point you to the execrable Ghost in the Shell or the last few episodes of Bubblegum Crash, unlike many of my colleagues who for some reason delight in those gigantic piles of elephant dung.) And so we see the two great imperialist powers of the 20^th Century, each reflecting their own identity crises through the guise of the robot.

The robot shares an impressive number of similarities in its American and Japanese editions, several of which speak not only to cultural mores, but also to our similarities as human beings. Robots tend to be used as reflections of ourselves, as creations which allow us to view creation itself from a distance and begin to surmise exactly what makes us so different. The most well-known of these commentary characters is Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. While Brent Spiner, the actor who portrayed the android, is an accomplished and nuanced performer, his part was often overwritten and hackneyed. There is an episode entitled Role Model where a young boy who has survived a cataclysmic accident adopts the logical thought patterns and robotic mannerisms of Data. The boy can only move on when Data explains his longing to be human, and how envious he is that the boy can feel the pain of loss. The episode is terribly written, but it speaks to the main themes American and Japanese writers tend to touch upon when writing about the sympathetic robot. As typically written in these stories, the robot is our analogue, another sentient being who wishes to understand its maker just as we continue the search for our place in the universe. As Data states in “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode of The Next Generation, he has seen the universe in a way that is unique to all other sentient beings in the universe, but he’d “give it all up for the chance to be human.” In Data’s search for his place in the grand scheme, we see a reflection of our own psychological longings, and also get a chance to reevaluate exactly why we’re searching.

Of course, our creations are not always seen in the same benign manner as Data. Ronald D. Moore, one of the writers on The Next Generation who actually seemed to have a sense of how Data should be written, went on to write the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, a series which treats the creations of man as an openly hostile warrior race bent on destroying us all. Galactica danced around the idea of the robot (here called “cylon”) and its sense of self. However, when Moore and his writing staff finally got around to explaining the psychological quest of their cylon race, they threw the entire audience for a loop. As the character of Brother Cavill, a cylon masquerading as a human priest, states during an interrogation, “we should be true to ourselves. We’re machines, and we should try to be the best machines the universe has ever seen. But somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that we were the children of man [. . .] our first major error.” For once, the robot of modern American sci-fi is not simply attempting to replicate the behavior of his creator, but trying to turn itself into something wholly other. The show benefits on this front from its obvious parallels to the War on Terrorism, even if the representation is more sympathetic than would be for a real-life representation of our current war. The result is an evolution of Capek’s original theory: not only are the robots of Galactica attempting to conquer their masters, but they are also attempting to advance their own standings and become something other than the creation of mortals. It’s a noticeable shift from the sycophantic longings of the Enterprise’s ersatz lieutenant commander, and demonstrative of the almost nihilistic mindset of the current American media. Not only is the human race in the middle of a war in the new Galactica, but they aren’t even rulers of their own domain. Instead of a human race united in the achievement of their creation, we are instead presented with humanity brought to its knees by an idea gone wrong. The idea of the robot as metal marauder has returned with an evolutionary twist; humanity won’t just be wiped out, but replaced.

Galactica offers another interpretation of the robot threat, one that ties into a more fetishistic representation. Each Galactica begins with an opening crawl which states, in part, that “there are many [Cylons]. And they have a plan.” The plan, it turns out, is an attempt by several Cylon agents to meld the two species and create a baby who would be a Human-Cylon hybrid. Of course, this subplot leads to the representation of certain Cylon models as extremely sexual; Tricia Helfer, who plays a Cylon dubbed “Number Six,” is a former model and, in the opinion of this writer, one of the most beautiful creatures to ever walk God’s green earth. Ms. Helfer (along with Grace Park, who plays Cylon sleeper agent Sharon “Boomer” Valerii) is the current iteration in a long line of actresses who have played the sexualized robot. Debates will rage from here until doomsday in the critical realm about whether these characters represent the objectification of the female or the feminization of the object, but the narrative device will remain extremely popular nevertheless. Almost never seen outside our two major arenas of America and Japan, these two countries have produced a plethora of stories dealing with the sex life of the gynoid, or female robot, the results of which explain nearly everything about the attitudes of sexuality in these countries. American stories in this milieu tend to pull their punches; after a perfunctory glimpse of the sex act or the form of the synthetic woman, the manuscript will veer uncontrollably back towards conventional tropes.

Take, for example, Michael Crichton’s Westworld, where the first thirty minutes offer several indications that the complex filled with robots was designed specifically for guilt-free murder and promiscuity. Americans don’t deal in guilt-free, however, and the human perpetrators quickly become prey at the hands of one haywire robot hunter. Westworld sets the tone for every American story featuring the sex-aware gynoid: no one gets away clean, and the robot must always remain the object, and never the protagonist. The Japanese take a view which is nearly the polar opposite of the American prudishness, creating a world which indulges in sexual acts and images which many tastemakers and pundits on this side of the world would label deviant. Yes, the Japanese have a more lax view concerning rape, mutilation, and especially interspecies relations than we do, these stories can also be seen as empowering for the female robot where the Americans favor disempowerment. The gynoids of these stories are often the protagonists, and always figure into these stories as major roles. One could hardly imagine Armitage III or Ghost in the Shell to be produced by an American studio, let alone gain the popular reputation they enjoy in their native country. Therein lies the essential contradiction of the Japanese representation, as the violence towards these artificial women is exponentially more intense and explicit, but the feminine objects themselves have a greater say in the stories.

Lord only knows what Capek would have thought of the evolution of his creation. The robot is not only one of the most well-known icons of the sci-fi pantheon, but also a sounding board for many of the most essential issues we discuss through fiction. Many of the writers employing the robot have stalled its evolution as of late, taking a potent device and reducing it to clichéd tropes. Those who continue to evolve it, such as Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore, use robotic-human relations and the qualities of Capek’s creation itself to continue sci-fi’s grand tradition of social commentary and critique. Here’s to Capek and his tin men, who at eighty-five show no signs of rusting.