The Truth Machine (36 page)

The movie's designer explained that he wanted the Voight-Kampff apparatus to look like “a giant tarantula on a desk lamp.” It was a weird idea, he recalled, but it made him “realize that what could give this sophisticated lie detector a definitely threatening air was to suggest that it was alive.” He also devised a small rectangular lens on a stalk that focused on the eye. People were more body-conscious about their eyes than any other organ of the body, he explained. This gave the Voight-Kampff machine an intimidating appearance. “I also designed a set of bellows on the side of the device;” he said, “it breathed. Actually, this breathing had a functional aspect, as the machinery was taking air samples of its subject for analysis. When you're nervous you sweat and exude a distinctive airborne chemistry.”
⁴³
Syd Mead placed his futuristic lie detector within an august tradition. The machine was alive; it could breathe and smell fear. It possessed agency and was extremely threatening. As if to emphasize the gaze of the “eye of power,” a small screen on the side of the instrument showed a close-up of the suspect's pupil. The eye reacted automatically to stimuli, in the manner of a “primary autonomic response” that “can't be controlled voluntarily.” “The VK is used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly human,” the original 1982
Blade Runner
press kit explained, “by measuring the degree of his empathic response through carefully worded questions and statements.”
⁴⁴

The lie detector represented the dreams of criminology in support of the law. But it also promised to replace the due processes of law altogether. Image from “The Simpsons.”

At the heart of the film lies the problematic status of Rachael, the highly evolved replicant femme fatale. She is the spider woman, the dark lady who is central to the film's key theme of what it is to be human. Like a long line of female suspects before her, she is unfathomable, enigmatic, and inscrutable. Possessing a heightened capacity to deceive, Rachael is the ultimate manifestation of the cultural positioning of women as duplicitous. From Eve to Pandora, it has been suggested, woman is framed as the perennial problem confronting the will to truth in spite of—or indeed because of—their inscrutability.
⁴⁵
Film noir habitually places the problem of “woman” herself, not merely the solving of a crime, at the heart of the investigative quest effected by the male detective.
⁴⁶
The enigmatic status of woman has haunted criminology since its inception in the nineteenth century. “Woman” was the puzzle that the lie detector promised to solve. The scene in which Rachael is interrogated with the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test is crucial to the film's narrative, because it reveals that she is unaware of her status as a replicant. The test breaks Rachael's spirit, shattering her confidence and poise. Later on Deckard reveals that the story she invoked as evidence of her humanity— the dream of a swarm of baby spiders that consume their own mother—was nothing but a false memory, a factory-set implantation. Rachael is crushed by the disclosure.

A central irony of
Blade Runner
is that one apparently sentient machine is used to test the vital integrity of another, further critiquing the apparent human-machine opposition. The term “humanoid android” suggests that the
distinction is problematic from the outset. In the film's final scene, the replicants' charismatic leader, Roy Batty, commits an act of such moral commitment that through his actions he has become indistinguishable from a human being he so wants to become. Deckard, the Blade Runner bounty hunter, it emerges in a dramatic twist, might not be human either, but also a replicant.
⁴⁷
Ultimately the film suggests that what defines the human is the possession neither of memories (for these can be implanted); nor emotions (for these can be acquired); nor even self-knowledge (for this is gained through agency): it is the capacity for ethical action. In this sense, the film concludes, the replicants have indeed become human through their acquisition of a capacity for empathy and self-sacrifice. The film's message is that being human is a matter of ethical action, not genetic inheritance.

The lie detector also raised questions concerning the demarcation between the human and the machine—a consequence of the network of binary oppositions that made its emergence possible. It was the very essence of sober science, but it was a prized resource for entertainers, advertisers, and utopian visionaries. It was a humane technology of truth, although it sought confessions through intimidation. It represented the dreams of a criminology in support of the law, but it promised to replace the due processes of law altogether. It offered to explore the deep recesses of the body yet operated through a veneer of signs. The human subject was construed as possessing mechanistic autonomic responses, but the machine was attributed with humane agency. While the lie detector enjoyed autonomy and charisma, the suspect was regarded as an anonymous automaton. Machines, like dreams, can “fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly.” But the problem was not so much deciding when the lie detector was beneficial to humanity and when it was hazardous. The problem was deciding where the machine ended and the human began.

I would like to thank the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, for permission to quote from the August Vollmer Papers; the Dibner Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., for permission to quote from the William Moulton Marston papers; and the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, for permission to quote from the Boder Museum Papers.

I can trace the origins of this book to a stimulating period I spent with Geoffrey Cantor, John Christie, Jon Hodge, and Bob Olby at the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. At York University, Toronto, and at the University of Toronto, I was privileged to be able to study with some outstanding scholars including Ray Fancher, Paul Fayter, Chris Green, Ian Hacking, Trevor Levere, Bernie Lightman, and Mariana Valverde. My Ph.D. dissertation supervisor, Kurt Danziger, was, and remains, a great inspiration. My fellow graduate students made my time in Toronto both intellectually invigorating and great fun. I am grateful to my cousin Stacey Crinson and her family for looking after me while I lived in Canada. Ben Harris was an early champion of my work and has continued to send me newspaper and magazine cuttings ever since.

I am grateful to David Borwick, Geoff Bunn Sr., Erica Burman, Hugh Hornby, Mark Jepson, and Graham Richards, all of whom provided insightful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Thanks are also due to Steve and Wil Bunn for helping with the production of the initial book proposal. At the Johns Hopkins University Press I have been fortunate to work with Robert J. Brugger, whose timely interventions have been critically important for the success of this book; and Helen Myers, whose patient copy editing greatly improved the text. My wife, Janet Bunn, has been a perceptive editor and critic. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the love and support of my parents. I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Florence Bunn.

1
. “Lie Test Shows O. J. Didn't Do It!”
The Globe,
February 7, 1995, 5.

2
. Mark Nykanen, director, “OJ's Voice Stress Test,”
Hard Copy,
January 30, 1995.

3
. “Lie Test Shows O.J. Didn't Do It!”

4
. See, for example, Paul V. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” pts. 1 and 2,
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
29 (1939): 848–81; 30 (1939): 104–19; Eugene B. Block,
Lie Detectors: Their History and Use
(New York: David McKay Co., 1977).

5
. David T. Lykken,
A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 2; F. Allen Hanson,
Testing, Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

6
. Ibid.

7
. Evidence suggests that this number has increased since 1988, even though in that year the U.S. government banned use of the lie detector for private preemployment screening, exempting itself, a public employer, from the ruling.

8
. Thorn Bacon, “The Man Who Reads Nature's Secrets,”
National Wildlife
7 (February-March 1969), 4–8.

9
. Ibid., 7.

10
. For the contemporary status of polygraphy, see Anthony Gale, ed.,
The Polygraph Test: Lies, Truth and Science
(London: Sage, 1988); Gershon Ben-Shakhar and John J. Furedy,
Theories and Applications in the Detection of Deception: A Psychophysiological and International Perspective
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).

11
. Ken Alder,
The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession
(New York: Free Press, 2007).

Epigraph.
J. B. Thomson, “The Hereditary Nature of Crime,”
Journal of Mental Science
15 (1870): 489.

1
. Malcolm Gaskill,
Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 203.

2
. Ibid., 217.

3
. Ibid., 229.

4
. Brian Marriner,
Forensic Clues to Murder: Forensic Science in the Art of Crime Detection
(London: Arrow, 1991), 162.

5
. “Cruentation (from
cruentare:
to make bloody, to spot with blood) was a test used to find a murderer. Bleeding was considered a “Judgment of God,” manifested by the “indignation” of the corpse when the murderer was in its presence. Dating from the period following the overthrow of the Roman Empire, it was used in Europe until at least the seventeenth century. See Robert P. Brittain, “Cruentation in Legal Medicine and in Literature,”
Medical History
9, no. 1 (1965): 82.

6
. David Garland, “Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain,” in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner,
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22.

7
. Ibid., 25.

8
. Nicole Hahn Rafter, “The Unrepentant Horse-Slasher: Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminology,”
Criminology
42 (2004): 979–1008.

9
. Sir George Onesiphorus Paul (1809) quoted in Martin J. Wiener,
Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 104.

10
. Richard F. Wetzell,
Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 18801945
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 32.

11
. Wiener,
Reconstructing the Criminal,
100.

12
. Ibid., 103.

13
. Michel Foucault, “The Dangerous Individual,” in
Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984,
ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 127–28.

14
. Marie-Christine Leps,
Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).

15
. Rick Rylance,
Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

16
. Wiener,
Reconstructing the Criminal,
162.

17
. Michael Hagner, “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture: On Cerebral Biographies of Scientists in the Nineteenth Century,”
Science in Context
16 (2003): 195–218.

18
. See for example, “R,” “Social and Moral Statistics of Criminal Offenders,”
Journal of the Statistical Society of London
2, no. 6 (January 1840): 442–45; Theodore M. Porter,
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

19
. Garland, “Of Crimes and Criminals,” 26.

20
. Quoted in Peter J. Hutchings,
The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics
(London: Routledge, 2001), 172.

21
. Quetelet (1835) quoted in Wiener,
Reconstructing the Criminal,
163.

22
. Piers Beirne, “Adolphe Quetelet and the Origins of Positivist Criminology,”
American Journal of Sociology
92, no. 5 (1987): 1160.

23
. Quoted in Beirne, “Adolphe Quetelet,” 1163.

24
. Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Numbers,”
Humanities and Society
5 (1983): 279–95.