No Soap, Radio
By:
January 14, 2010
![barbarella2](https://www.hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/barbarella2.jpg)
Should we throw out the babes with the bathwater? After unplugging them of course. But perhaps the uncanny devil is in the details. Maybe all Barbarella needed was a little grounding; she needed to lure Lloyd from his silent running. He could save her from excessive technophilia, and she could save him from organic despair. I know: Barbarella was not, strictly speaking, a bot. But she was a bod, and isn’t that the essential component?
[Jane Fonda channeling Brigitte Bardot in the “anti-gravity scene” in Barbarella, dir. Roger Vadim, 1968]
In any event, Lloyd and his garden certainly needed her. Here, a little Vitamin B might have fortified him against outrageous fortune:
[Bruce Dern and friends in Silent Running, dir. Douglas Trumbull, 1972]
In Lawrence’s day the gardener did the rescuing. But erotic energy has always displayed a certain polymorphous plasticity. Perhaps in the future, the machine might play Mellors to those so beset?
![mellors](https://www.hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/mellors.jpg)
[Jean-Louis Coullo’ch in Lady Chatterley, dir. Pascale Ferran, 2006]
Or if not the machine itself, perhaps the more subtle energies of its programming. What if we could reach straight into the subconscious and extract a perfect dream of the Other?
[The “anti-gravity scene” in Solyaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972]
Without all those hooks and wires of course. Modification and maintenance via mind-meld.
![mindmeld](https://www.hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/mindmeld.jpg)
[Still from Spectre of the Gun, Star Trek, 1968]
And yet perchance, what dreams may come . . . there is a horror to a robot in its limitations and logic. But there’s also a surprise and a delight to the intricacies of our extensibility. As we manifest more of our metaphors, the play will only become more perverse.
And therein lies the rub.
[Scenes from I, Mudd, Star Trek, 1967]