Woman-machine

Writing on Lang's Metropolis, Theorist Andreas Huyssen writes: 

Historically . . .we can conclude that as soon as the machine came to be perceived as a demonic, inexplicable threat and as harbinger of chaos and destruction . . . writers began to imagine the Maschinenmensch as woman. There are grounds to suspect that we are facing here a complex process of projection and displacement. The fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the male's castration anxiety. This projection was relatively easy to make; although woman had traditionally been seen as standing in a closer relationship to nature than man, nature itself, since the 18th century, had come to be interpreted as a gigantic machine. Woman, nature, machine had become a mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control. (70)

The 20th century texts that are the subject of this project engage these anxieties about machines, women and the transformation of the work world. Higgins (of Pygmalion) and Lydecker (of Laura) both attempt to create an ideal woman out of ordinary, poor women, (Higgins works through mechanical means and Lydecker through cultural-semiotic--these films activate anxieties more germane to informational technologies than to mechanical-industrial ones that concern Huyssen). At the same time, these films reveal anxieties of the male characters about the disappearance of the aristocracy in the face of the power of the middle class (Laura, in a reverse move, transforms the failed aristocrat Shelby Carpenter into a regular working guy.) In Twin Peaks, the investigation touched off by the dead body of Laura Palmer exposes of a variety of conflicts between postindustrial and industrial work--represented on the one hand by the FBI agent on the other by the mill, with analogues in the immaterial soul of Laura and the material crime.