Make me perfect," the comely young model implores the plastic surgeon in an early episode of Nip/Tuck, the popular cable drama. The doctor is swift to oblige, snatching the woman's lipstick to mark up her cheekbones, belly and breasts -- strategic areas where an artful tug or implant promise to transform her from merely gorgeous to sublime.
The surgeon might have taken his cues from Ellery Pierce, the misanthropic narrator of Adventures of the Artificial Woman, Thomas Berger's new sci-fi parable about a maker of animatronic theme-park beasts who turns his talents to the manufacture of a simulated wife. Her name is Phyllis and she is a paragon, all lissome contours, silky hair and poreless "skin," oil-heated so as to be warm to the touch. "Not only were her limbs satin smooth and would never need depilation or know scars, but they would stay in that condition," her creator exults.
`the stepford wives' scene
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Phyllis is but the latest in an eerie procession of humanoids to insinuate themselves into the popular consciousness. Automatons, some fearsome, some friendly, populate a flurry of summer films, among them, of course, the pneumatic digital homemakers of The Stepford Wives and the elegantly attenuated silicone-and-metal men of I, Robot. Doc Ock, a robotized villain, animates Spider-Man 2, his slinky metallic tentacles turning on their master at a critical juncture in the film and bending his will to their own. Programmed humans function like digital zombies in The Bourne Supremacy, and The Manchurian Candidate.
Robots have also marched onto the shelves of toy stores and fashion boutiques. Some, like Miuccia Prada's whimsical, retro-futuristic digital men and women, suspended from key chains, have a nostalgic, endearingly cartoonish appeal. Others, inspired by Japanese animation, have entered the mainstream via Gundam, the palm-size plastic cyborgs popular with the preschool set, as cute and harmless as hamsters.
But the most provocative robots, those with the potential to chill, are the androids, digital beings with advanced motor skills, humanlike thought processes and even facial ticks that persuasively mimic people. Replicants, to a contemporary eye, seem a harbinger of a not-so-distant future -- one in which mannequins hard-wired with human attributes will so effectively mirror their makers as to seem interchangeable. That seems an apt conceit in a society that often prefers the artful copy to the flawed original.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Indeed, as some scholars argue, the current crop of robots, those designed to outperform their masters, stand as a metaphor for the relentless, and uniquely (perhaps) American drive to self-improvement. To a high degree robots are us, Dr. Sidney Perkowitz, the author of Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids and a physicist at Emory
University, suggested. "If there was ever a people that thought we could make ourselves perfect, we are it," Perkowitz said.
The fascination with robots goes back many decades. Metal monsters and intelligent machines like those of Fritz Lang's Metropolis or the Karel Capek 1921 play RUR first sparked the popular imagination in the decades of Sinclair Lewis and Babbitt. It was a time "when America was in great danger of vanishing into a nameless, faceless mass," as Akiva Goldsman, a writer of I, Robot, pointed out.
man or machine
That concern is resurrected in contemporary robo-lore, in which it is not the man but the machine that asserts its own particularity. "I'm unique," Goldsman said, quoting Sonny, the winsome tin-man of I, Robot. "It's a knee-jerk response on all our parts to the homogenization of society."
In the current Vanity Fair, James Wolcott offers a dyspeptic commentary on a surgically enhanced, copycat celebrity culture. "Look around," he chides. "They're everywhere. Pulled-back faces that resemble latex masks. Trapped eyes that seem to be crying for help. Chimp lips. Acrylic hair."
"Who needs a mad scientist to assemble a bevy of fembots?" Wolcott asks. "The fembots have already assembled themselves."
And they seem ever more eager to merge with machines. "What with face-lifts, skin grafts, breast implants and the like, the human body is becoming a cyborg in a lot of ways," said Jeffrey Brown, an assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Perkowitz advanced the case, citing pacemakers, cochlear implants and insulin pumps as evidence of a steadily eroding distinction between robots and their makers.
That notion resonates in the fashion world, evidence, perhaps, of its enduring love-hate relationship with artifice. In this month's Italian Vogue, the photographer Steven Meisel slyly sends up a contemporary beauty ideal, training his lens on the androidlike features of a clutch of nearly identical models. Their eyebrowless features, lunar-pale skin and platinum wigs render them flawless to a degree that is seldom, if ever, seen in nature.
The fascination with artifice is echoed, as well, in the window display at the Prada store on lower Broadway in Manhattan. There, a platoon of look-alike mannequins stand at rigid attention, their waxy, alabaster profiles all resolutely pointing south.
Such images can be both seductive and unnerving, as attested by a young woman who took in the shop's decor recently. On large and small plasma screens all around the store, a succession of naked, computer-generated humanoids goose-stepped with eerie precision toward some far-off unseen goal. For this young customer, it was all a bit much. "This store gives me the creeps," she muttered, then turned on her heel and, with ponytail swinging, darted out the door.
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