Robots, Cars and AI – Oh My! Jumbo Progresses Our Onscreen History of Wanting to Have Sex with Machines
Amusement parks are intoxicating places. The flashing neon lights, the cacophony of laughter and excited shrieks, the smell of freshly fried funnel cake, the dizzying choices of which giant metal contraption to ride next. It’s sensory overload in the best possible way, a place where anything seems possible—including a budding romance between a young woman and one of the giant attractions. Maybe she’ll have sex with that machine.
Zoe Wittock explores such a relationship in her debut feature Jumbo, where a young woman slowly begins to accept herself as she falls in love with the “Move It” carnival ride, which she lovingly names Jumbo. Jeanne (Noémie Merlant) is quiet and shy, still living at home with a caring yet commandeering mother. She works the graveyard shift at her local amusement park, reveling in the silence and the solitude. This is where she meets Jumbo, a stoic machine that she believes is alive. She finds acceptance with Jumbo and is able to be herself around the machine. She doesn’t have to worry about being reprimanded, shamed or teased. She can simply be with the one she loves.
Jumbo is not the first film to address the love between human and machine. As early as 1927 with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, there has always been an onscreen fascination with the romantic infatuations between humans and their technological creations—and it persists today. Just think about the recent Disney+ sensation Wandavision. However, many of these films are centered on heterosexual ideas of romance with gynoids and robots. Men fall in love with perfectly crafted female-coded beings with large breasts, flat stomachs and enough programming to make them interesting but not too smart. These creations are idealized visions of humanity where every feature can be crafted to personal preference; they are objects of a male gaze.
Films such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina use these gendered androids to create stories about the powerful, and carefully constructed, sex appeal of the machine. Ava (Alicia Vikander) from Ex Machina is a creation of tech mogul Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). In the basest of terms, she is his property because she is an object of his design, despite her evolving AI and critical thinking skills. Her job is to manipulate, though Bateman does not comprehend just how evolved she truly is. She takes that directive to convince a young programmer that she is essentially human to achieve her own goal of bodily autonomy. With her human face and mechanical body, Ava creates a tension between the real and the constructed, and what it means to be subjected to the gaze of the person that made you.
The danger of robot love isn’t just used in highbrow sci-fi films. In the 1997 comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the fembots are sexy gynoids in pink, feathery lingerie and go-go boots who have “machine gun jubblies” AKA guns hidden in their breasts. In a film that parodies flashy spy thrillers and their suave protagonists, the fembots then are a parody of the femme fatale, the token female character who is meant to serve both as love interest and enemy. In taking that trope and transforming it into a shallow robot that is constructed to arouse the notoriously horny Austin Powers, these fembots illustrate how women in these types of films exist solely to fuck and to kill. In that same vein, as the femme fatale often meets her downfall at the hands of the spy, so do these fembots as they literally explode due to Powers’ sex appeal. Any semblance of strength, both human and mechanical, is immediately ripped away after a glance at the nude male body. The fembots only play a small role in the film, but their inclusion speaks volumes about the expectations of androids within a sexual context. Regardless of genre, the idea of love between human and android is based around the idea of manipulating the human’s libido and the machine’s identity.
Something interesting happens when the idealized body is erased but the female coding remains, as seen in Spike Jonze’s Her. There is no female object of the male gaze, but there is still awareness of gender through Scarlett Johansson’s recognizably smoky voice, which makes this love feel more palatable. Despite being an evolved form of consciousness, Samantha’s inherent “femaleness” makes her and her relationship easier to understand. Without a sexualized object, the film is able to function in a similar space as Jumbo in the creation of a genuine romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and his new operating system, Samantha (Johansson). Her’s romance is unconventional as they cannot hug, kiss or hold each other; this is not a romance based on sexual gratification, but on genuine emotional connection, something not typically explored in science fiction. Operating systems and robots are seen as purely mechanical beings, and therefore have very limited understanding of human emotions and how to express them. In removing her body but still tethering Samantha to the idea of gender, Jonze begins to explore the possibility of love between man and the more abstract idea of technology, something that cannot be contained in a physical form but instead exists as the amorphous Cloud.
As the humanoid body disappears and their voices quiet, mechanical love endures through a fascinating romantic obsession with some non-anthropomorphic machines: Cars. While not explicitly gendered themselves, cars are a symbol of masculinity, with their vibrating engines, piping hot undercarriage, luxurious leather seats and shiny top coat. Such a relationship can be seen in queer filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s short film “Kustom Kar Kommandos,” where men in tight shirts and jeans caress the parts of a car as if it is a lover. There is something about cars that make them acceptable to love so tenderly; such an expensive piece of equipment must be cherished—even worshipped.