Posthuman Blues

Way back in junior high I watched "Circuitry Man," a mostly forgettable cyberpunk movie that took its principle cues from "Mad Max" and "Blade Runner." One of the characters, an android, is haunted by a lost love and spends much of the movie ruminating on ways to win her back. In "Blade Runner" fashion, it's revealed that there is no lost love: the woman of his dreams is just that -- an implanted fiction designed (if I remember correctly) to instill a sense of hope in an otherwise intolerable world. (In "Blade Runner," Sean Young's character harbors tenuous memories of a childhood she never actually experienced; her realization that she's a genetically engineered "replicant" fated to a four-year lifespan is one of the film's most striking moments.)





Uninspired plot aside, the stalwart romanticism of the android in "Circuitry Man" must have struck a chord, because it's essentially the only part of the movie I remember. What do you do when you discover that the love you remember so fondly is so much computational static? Or, in human terms, how do you react to the prospect that "love" itself is a cunning delusion forged by millions of years of hominid evolution?

Most of us are at least partially willing to entertain the idea that something better is just around the corner, even knowing the psychological risks. We're wired for optimism because, ultimately, defeatism tends to pass along fewer genes. DNA is a uniquely tyrannical molecule. It lulls us with the lusty murmur of sirens until we find ourselves stranded on uncharted shores.

And then we slip back into the ocean, as amnesiac as any machine, and rejoice in the same cruel and artificial certainties.