Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Why is the Rotwang’s Robot gendered feminine?

This may be tricky question. First, there is the possibility that originally the Robot is not gendered at all, that is, how it is seen in its unskinned form. And then it is later gendered feminine simply because it takes the form of Maria, who is a woman. Better to forget the ‘male gaze’ and all that nonsense. I do actually think the Robot was originally intended to be feminine, even though besides having either large pecs or small breasts, the rest of the form is gender indeterminate. Rotwang it seems had an affair with Freder’s mother, and after her death he was lugubrious and lonely. So the Robot took a vague feminine form as determined by the absence of a woman he once cared for. Damn, someone should tell Huyssen that men cry too.

The android Hadaly of Tomorrow’s Eve and the android Maria of Metropolis, well kids, let’s just say it’s like the Good Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West. Except with more irony. The Wizard of Oz was a bit short on that, though maybe because it was primarily a children's movie and if there’s anything parents are more reluctant to expose their children to than any kind of sexual behavior it’s irony. Irony is disruptive; it leads to sarcasm and also some of the more sophistacated kinds of teenage rebellion. Anyhow, Villiers put mouthfulls of irony in Edison; his diatribes on Hadaly’s advantages were gems (in paragraph form) of trenchant blindness. Lang’s approach to the android Maria was a bit more direct, a bit more openly suspicious of the technology that can mimic and improve upon human existence. With Villiers, I don’t know, I get the sense that as he wrote Edison’s ironic dialog there was no insignificant part of him that really felt that the inventor was both sincere and wise. I mean that Villiers’ Edison was simultaneously sordidly, obliviously ironic and also a genuine humanist and visionary; and that Hadaly is both a ominous and subtle literary mirror and also an inspiring apparition of human Progess. In the end, I feel Lang’s android Maria was an unambiguous tool for plot development and cultural critique, while Hadaly was a mysterious form that evokes in me commensurately mysterious reactions.