Escape Velocity (28 page)

Mechanical Reproduction

As Marcel Jean, writing in 1959, makes clear, the current interest in sex machines and machine sex is not a postmodern phenomenon. Freudian readings of the psychosexual symbolism of overheated machinery are hardly a recent development; the sight of camshafts thrusting ceaselessly, of hydraulic fluids squealing through small orifices under high pressure, quickened pulses early in this century.

Henry Adams's landmark essay "The Dynamo and the Virgin," in which he equates the forty-foot dynamos at the Great Exposition of 1900 with the Mother of God, is nuanced with a subtle eroticism. Standing in the Gallery of Machines, gazing awestruck at the enormous, spinning "symbol of infinity," Adams finds himself in the presence of an "occult mechanism" animated by an unmistakably female sexual energy-"female" because the force harnessed by the dynamo, electricity, is mysterious, almost supernatural. "In any previous age," he writes, "sex was strength. . . . Diana of the

Ephesians . . . was Goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction-the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund."'^ The sexual power of the pagan goddess was sublimated in the symbol of the Virgin, and now, says Adams, the procreative power and spiritual sensuality of the Virgin has been transfigured in the form of the dynamo.

Twenty-nine years later, the modernist poet MacKnight Black writes, in Machinery,

Dynamos are bosoms.

Round with the sweetJirstJiHing of a

new Mother's milk?"^

In modernist art, the idolatrous tendencies expressed by Adams shaded, by degrees, from religious devotion into mechano-eroticism; paeans to the machine by Italian futurists, English vorticists, and Russian suprema-tists often verged on soft-core porn.

Emerging from the rubble of World War I, the dadaists lampooned bourgeois ideals, excoriating the industrial culture that had brought the world to the eve of Armageddon. Putting an absurdist spin on the clockwork world of Cartesian mechanism, they reconstructed humankind as a race of automata run amok. Robert Short sums it up neatly when he writes that the dadaists "exploited the man/machine analogy to empty life of its spiritual content.'"^ But they did so with devilish wit. In images of mechanized coitus and seduction machines, they spoofed the objectification of sex in advertising and the refunctioning of the female body to accommodate mass-produced, mass-marketed fashions. The French dadaist Francis Picabia painted a tongue-in-cheek, draftsmanlike Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity (1915): a spark plug accompanied by the legend "for ever."

Mechanomorphic images were useful, too, in expressing bohemian contempt for a clock-punching, conspicuously consuming middle class that fornicated and Fletcherized with unblinking imbecility. ("Fletcherizing," a digestion-promoting regimen developed by a Dr. Fletcher in the early part of this century, consisted of chewing each bite forty times before swallowing.) The German dadaist Mcix Ernst produced a deceptively innocent-looking.

almost childish drawing of a fanciful gadget. An inscription reads: "[a] small MACHINE . . . CONSTRUCTED FOR FEARLESS POLLINATION"-a marital aid, perhaps, for petite bourgeoisie who find the thought of gooey fluids distasteful.

It is profoundly significant that the French dadaist Marcel Du-champ's seminal painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923) is, to put it bluntly, a Rube Goldbergian fucking machine. Robert Lebel called it an exercise in "onanism for two": The Bride Motor, an internal combustion engine that runs on "love gasoline" hangs stripped yet maddeningly unravishable in the picture's upper half, forever out of reach of the Bachelor Machine below, which grinds ceaselessly in frustration.'^ The Bride-at once the apotheosis of virgin and whore, the object of male adoration and the source of an inscrutable, vaguely malicious female desire-hangs poised between desire and possession for all time.'^

Duchamp's close friend Picabia employed mechanomorphic imagery in the service of auto eroticism, in the literal sense. A passionate collector and skilled driver of powerful cars, Picabia celebrated the intoxicating effects of the open throttle and the smell of gasoline even as he satirized human sexuality in the age of mechanical reproduction. Stephen Bayley sees a riot of sexual imagery in Flamenca, Picabia's 1917 rendering of an internal combustion valve and its guide. "|T]he reciprocating valve resembles in its action the rhythms of sex," writes Bayley, "the valve itself the penis, the guide the female sheath."'^ To Bayley, the Italian sportscar designer Enzo Ferrari's conjecture that "between man and machine there exists a perfect equation: fifty per cent machine and fifty per cent man" suggests that "the idea of mechanical intercourse, that parody of the act of love, lies only a little beneath the surface of people who are fascinated with fast cars."'^

The very notion of "auto eroticism," in the punning sense, has been so exhausted by pop psychologists that all who treat it run the risk of producing unintentional kitsch. The linkage of the pneumatic contours of the pinup goddess with the morphological oddities that characterized automobile design in its golden age, the 1950s-a veritable fantasia of protrusions and orifices, of bumpers shaped like bulging crotches or jutting breasts-is well documented.

Even so, auto eroticism is sufficiently rich that it resists flip dismissal. The car, second only to the gun, is the quintessential piece of American hardware, fraught with notions of rugged individualism, endless

frontiers, eternal youth, phallic power through extension, intrauterine comfort via enclosure, and the Utopian promise of American know-how and can-do. For the American teenager, getting a license and, ultimately, a car constitutes a rite of passage intimately associated with adolescent sexuality; backseats are the upholstered altars on which virginity is ritually sacrificed to adulthood. Often, the vehicle itself is a sexual surrogate, as in Simon and Garfunkel's "Baby Driver" ("I wonder how your engines feel") or the Rolling Stones' "Brand New Car" ("Jack her up, baby, go on, open the hood /1 want to check if her oil smells good"). Stephen King's Christine is a retelling of the medieval myth of the succubus in hot rod vernacular: a pimply teenager falls in love with a bloodred 1957 Plymouth Fury possessed by a jealous, murderous female spirit who runs down three boys who once mistreated her. Driving, throughout Christine, is equated with sexual conquest, as it is in the 1926 poem "she being Brand" by e. e. cummings, in which a temperamental car becomes a female virgin:

she being Brand

-new; and you

know consequently a

little stiff i was

careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal

joint tested mygasjelt of

her radiator made sure her springs were 0.

K.)i went right to itjlooded-the-carhuretor cranked her up . . .20

Futurist auto eroticism carries mechano-eroticism to its inevitable, cyborgian conclusion: the marriage of meat and mechanism. "[W]e will conquer the seemingly unconquerable hostility that separates our human flesh from the metal of motors," declares the poet F T. Marinetti in a futurist manifesto.-^' The tension generated by this seemingly unresolvable situation seeks release in the pornographic crash, a fiery ecstasy in which car and driver are conjoined, once and for all. In his 1914 poem "Fornication of Automobiles," Mario de Leon choreographs a car crash as the (vaguely homoerotic) copulation of gladiatorial machines:

I

Escape Velocity 191

Involuntary collision, furiousJornication of two automobiles-energy, embrace of two warriors bold of movement syncopation of two ''heart motors,'' spilling of "blood-gas. '^^

The notion of auto erotic collisions reaches its zenith in J. G. Ballard's proto-cyberpunk novel Crash. In the detached, exact language of the forensic pathologist or the engineer, Ballard adumbrates "a new sexuality born from a perverse technology":

In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts-by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on . . . by the compact fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer's medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.^^

Violent and passionless, beyond ego psychology or social mores, it is a posthuman sexuality "without referentiality and without limits," as the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard puts it.^'* Alienated from a body that seems, more and more, like a preindustrial artifact, this new sexuality fetishizes urban desolation, televised disasters, celebrities, and commodities-above all, the automobile.

In Crash, sex happens almost entirely in cars; removed from that context, it loses its appeal. The body is erotic only when it intersects with technology or the built environment, either literally (punctured by door handles, impaled on steering columns) or figuratively ("[t]he untouched, rectilinear volumes of this building fused in my mind with the contours of her calves and thighs pressed against the vinyl seating").^^ A young woman's body bears testimony to a severe automobile accident; to the narrator, who

was himself injured in an accident that imprinted his car's instrumentation on his knees and shins, she has been reborn:

The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities.^^

Here, as in SF films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, humans are dispassionate mannequins-crash dummies-while the technology around them is disconcertingly anthropomorphic: The "grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced on to a driver's crotch" in an accident conjures a "calibrated act of machine fellatio," while the "elegant aluminized air-vents" in a hospital "beckon as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice."^^ In the depraved geometry of Crash, semen and engine coolant, crotches and chromium instrument heads are congruent.

"I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible," said Ballard, in a 1970 interview, "simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape."^^

Published in 1973, Crash refracts McLuhan's monstrous menage a trois-sex, technology, and death-through the splintered lens of consumer culture, with its flattened affect, celebrity worship, obsessive documentation of every lived moment, and psychotic confusion of subjective experience and filmic fictions. Improvising on these themes with a gleeful viciousness that is equal parts surrealism, pop art, and punk, Ballard portends their convergence in cyberculture.

Built for Pleasure

Recent years have seen a proliferation of imagery that gives vent to the desire to "possess machines in a sexually gratifying way," as McLuhan so discreetly put it, supplanting Ballard's eroticized air-vents and instrument panels with the considerably more compliant electric love doll. Human-machine misce-

genation-RoboCopulation, by any other name-is the subtext of the future schlock illustrations of Hajime Sorayama and Larry Chambers, collected in glossy paperbacks and sold in science fiction bookshops. Sorayama churns out airbrush cartoons of robot odalisques, their chromium pudenda free of hair and other, all too human unpleasantries; Chambers is known for illustrations like "Steel Madam," a lovingly rendered drawing of a robotic trollop's stiletto heel flirtatiously tickling a gartered leg.

Chambers and Sorayama weren't the first to modernize Pygmalion's Galatea-the male fantasy of the anatomically accurate automaton. In West-world, a 1973 SF film about an adult theme park in which guests live out their fantasies in ancient Roman, medieval, or frontier settings, humanoid robots of both sexes are programmed for pleasure (typically, we see only female androids in action, since the movie's main characters are men). The male models, whose "external equipment" is "entirely unrealistic, but effective and stimulating," are equipped with "internal vibratory mechanisms"; the female models ("a technological triumph") are outfitted with "suction and torsion mechanisms." A scene set in the locker room of the technicians who maintain the robots is particularly memorable:

FIRST technician: You ever made it with one of those machines?

SECOND technician: No . . . I'll take the real thing. If I can ever get home to her.

FIRST technician: I tried it with one of those Rome hookers. One night out on the repair table. Powered her up and really went to town. . . .

third technician: You could get fired for that.^^

This exchange, reminiscent of off-color banter between morticians, hints at the necrophilia implicit in the act of making love to synthetic flesh. In Human Robots in Myth and Science, John Cohen makes this connection explicit. The erotic appeal exerted on some men by nude statues and "undraped" mannequins, he maintains,

is allied to necrophilia. The potential necrophilist needs an unresisting accomplice; the corpse is totally helpless and defenseless, and cannot resist an assault.^°

This is the source of the creepy pathos of the inflatable sex doll, whose goggle eyes and gaping, obscenely red mouth suggest a strangled prostitute. In K. W. Jeter's cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder, the protagonist recoils in gut-lurching horror from a roomful of mechanoid whores with "polyethylene cunt[s]":

Limmit felt his internal organs shift sickeningly at the sight of the high-ceilinged room's contents. Its entire length, stretching as far as he could see, was filled with duplicates of. . . whores, in various stages of completion. . . . Holy shit, thought Limmit, nauseated. The old science fiction pulp wet-dream: the mechanical cunt.^'

Limmit is backstage at a Westworld-style amusement park located in Nixon Country-California's Orange County. Sending up adolescent fantasies that cross Disney's Tomorrowland with Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, Jeter manages a few savage jabs at the same well-fed living dead satirized by the dadaists. Limmit despairs, a few pages later, at the horrifying thought that he might never leave Orange County, that he will become one more lawn-mowing, barbecuing suburban zombie: