The other day I found something pertinent to what
we have been learning about mechanical reproduction. I was watching The
Twilight Zone on Netflix and came upon a particular episode called “I Sing
the Body Electric” (Season 3, Episode 35), and thought that it communicated
what we know about aura and how it relates to reproduction, as well as the gray
zone between human and robot.
In this episode, a family loses their mother and they contemplate how to
replace her. The son, Tom, comes across an ad by Facsimile Ltd. in a Modern
Science magazine, for a robotic grandmother. This company sells "an
electric data processing system" in a model called "I Sing the Body
Electric" that can give loving supervision to a family. The family picks
out a new “Grandma”/robot to replace the deceased mother.
Two of the three children, Tom and Karen, are
elated with “Grandma” and find her incredible and magical. The oldest child,
Anne, however, does not accept the new mother easily. This is where I think
that aura comes into play—although “Grandma” can do everything their mother
could do ten times better, Anne feels the difference between “Grandma”
and her mother. "She's not real, she's a machine", she says. Furthermore, Anne felt abandoned after her mother died and to
have a new mother who is oblivious to the negativity that she’s feeling toward
motherly figures seems impossible to her. In the end, although the robot is efficient,
Anne does not feel as though she is a better mother nor even her mother.
At the beginning of the episode, there is a quote that pertains to aura and
robots:
“They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn't
seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother
in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone”
This quote foreshadows the entire episode and
addresses the topic of robots being better in general at tasks, but lacking the
aura associated with an authentic person. This is seen when Anne is
almost run over by a car, but “Grandma” pushes her out of the way and gets hit
instead ("ten times better"). After this, Anne accepts “Grandma” seeing as she will not abandon her
so abruptly as her mother did, and this may be the difference in aura that she felt—that "Grandma" was not as human and fragile. In the end, since “Grandma” was not meant to be
an exact replica of their mother and because she is so competent, aura was able
to be overlooked.
Also, since this is the Twilight Zone, Robot Grandma proves to be remarkably capable of
emotions all throughout the episode, making it difficult to decipher whether
she is human or robotic, except that she is much more capable. Would robots be
able to feel emotions and act as humans? Surely, they are better at everything
than humans are, but do they really care? The Twilight Zone captures the
gray zone between robot and human.
Thus, aura is no longer important to Anne, because although the robot doesn’t feel
like her mother, she chooses to accept a better, more resistant mother. Over
time, the family gets along even better with “Grandma” and although she is not
the same as their mother, she is superior in many ways. When the children are
grown up and ready to leave for college, “Grandma” announces that she must
leave because she is no longer of use. The children and “Grandma” express
sadness at her departure, but she says that if she can continue being a good
grandmother, she’ll be gifted with “life and humanity”. Was she not already
human (she felt emotions)? Did interacting with people make her human, or, ultimately, is that how she will become human? What about aura? Where does robot
end and where does human start? Does she have an aura? If she has a different
aura than the mother she is replacing, is her own aura human? Is it possible to
combine aura and robots? Are people able to accept superiority over aura?
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