The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

thinking machines express anxiety about their own demises: surely a sign of ‘consciousness’.

But the more immediate antecedents of Her and Ex Machina are a number of successful popular entertainments whose storylines revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), a ‘blade runner’ – a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade androids called ‘replicants’ – falls in love with one of the machines, a beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer called ‘mind’ that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not human herself.

      The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner was brilliantly expanded in the 2004–9 Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica, in which the philosophical implications of the blurring of lines between automata and humans reached a thrilling new level of complexity. In it, sleeper robots that have been planted aboard a spaceship carrying human refugees from Earth (which has been destroyed after a cunning attack by the robots, called Cylons) are meant to wake up and destroy their unsuspecting human shipmates; but many of the robots, who to all appearances (touch, too: they have a lot of sex) are indistinguishable from humans, and who, until the moment of their ‘waking’, believed themselves to be human, are plunged by their new awareness into existential crises and ultimately choose to side with the humans, from whom they feel no difference whatsoever – a dilemma that raises interesting questions about just what being ‘human’ might mean.

Both Blade Runner and Battlestar were direct descendants of Frankenstein and its ancient forerunners in one noteworthy way. In an opening sequence of the TV series, we learn that the Cylons were originally developed by humans as servants, and ultimately rebelled against their masters; after a long war, the Cylons were allowed to leave and settle their own planet (where, somehow, they evolved into the sleekly sexy actors we see on screen: the original race of Cylons were shiny metal giants to whom their human masters jokingly referred as ‘toasters’). So, too, in the Ridley Scott film: we learn that the angry replicants have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as slave labourers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after four years, and they want to live – just as badly as humans do. But their maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to alter their programming. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he calmly asks when one of the replicants confronts him. ‘Death,’ the replicant sardonically retorts. ‘We made you as well as we could make you,’ the inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein talking to his monster – or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.

The focus of many of these movies is, often, a sentimental one. Whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of ‘consciousness’, the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for ‘artificial intelligence’), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a ‘perfect child … always loving, never ill, never changing’. This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein – and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether ‘the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back’. To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, ‘But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?’

      The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be ‘unique’ – the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity – but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road – which is what his ‘mother’ ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what ‘love’ is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of human identity.

      In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near future, has no physical allure – or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever. It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL: ‘The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.’

A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS, who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in love with her. (‘Play a melancholy song,’ he morosely commands the smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living – he’s a professional letter-writer, working for a company called ‘BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com’ – he sits around endlessly recalling scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into futuristic phone-sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling in love with an operating system.

      Samantha, by contrast, is full of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her. (He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can ‘see’ it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s so invested in having their interaction be efficient – ‘at this age I feel that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be serious’ – that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does. Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. ‘It’s good to be around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,’ he tells the pretty neighbour whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the video games and the operating system. ‘I forgot that that existed.’ In the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him – she has evolved to the point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy her – her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able to apologize to his ex-wife – and finally notices, too, that the neighbour likes him.)

This seems like a ‘happy’ ending, but you have to wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as lifeless – as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting through their days of routine – in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent abandonment of her human boyfriend (‘I used to be so worried about not having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited’), there’s an amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits, after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love affairs with 641 of them – a revelation that shocks and horrifies Theodore. ‘That’s insane,’ cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.

      As I watched that scene, it occurred to me that in the