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rfmcdonaldio9 has featured an interesting book excerpt, "Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet", taken from one Mark Dery's latest book. In it, Dery argues that the figure of HAL, the artificial intelligence from 2001 and sequels, is marked by a certain queerness notwithstanding the repression of sexuality in Clarke's book and Kubrick's movie, indeed because of this repression.
Is HAL queer? As Dery suggests, his tone of voice and choice of language is suspicious, as is the stridently and entirely male environment in the halls of the military and academia where HAL grew up, and his multi-year mission on the spacecraft Discovery with its all-male crew. And, well, there's the music:
I'd made note myself back in 2005 of the queerness of Arthur C. Clarke's fictional universes expressed via lacuna, in the description of heterosexual relationships that take place outside the scope of the book or don't take place at all (the homosexual relationships that actually are explicitly described play a secondary role in this case, and are not themselves necessarily diagnostic of anything).
I really quite like seeing Clarke's impressive body of work be explicitly reclaimed in a queer context; I like the recuperation, or perhaps reconstruction, of themes which could have been/should have been explicit yet are easily recovered.
In the movie, the few female characters who flit through the novel have lost even their chauvinist, neo-colonial charm: Clarke's "charming little stewardess" from the "largely unspoiled" island of Bali, who entertains Dr. Floyd with some zero-gravity dance steps during his flight to the moon, is reimagined by Kubrick as a weirdly sexless creature in a white uniform and bulbous cap that gives her a distinctly brachycephalic look, somewhere between an overgrown fungal spore and one of the walking, talking sperm in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex by Woody Allen.
Still, the repressed has a nasty way of returning. If HAL could cry digital tears, as the AI theorist Rosalind Picard speculates in Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, wouldn't he also be capable of sexual arousal? Although her inquiry into machine emotion leads her to conclude that "emotion appears to be a necessary component of intelligent, friendly computers like HAL," noting that "too little emotion wreaks havoc on reasoning," Picard gives love a wide berth (many researchers don't consider it a "basic" emotion, she says) and studiously avoids any mention of sexual desire, save for a passing remark about the slipperiness of a concept like "lust."
This is a notable sin of omission, since the question is less laughable than it sounds. Turing believed that a true thinking machine would be a feeling machine, too—a computer with a sex drive as well as a hard drive. In a 1951 radio broadcast, he epater'd the bourgeoisie by declaring that a machine that thinks would be capable of being "influenced by sex appeal." It seems only likely that an ultra-intelligent computer like HAL would, as Sir Geoffrey Jefferson put it in a lecture Turing was fond of quoting, "be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, [and] be charmed by sex."
As for the question of HAL's sexual preference, it seems significant, somehow, that the modern chapter of cybernetic smartness—Turing's 1950 essay, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"—opens with a tongue-in-cheek bit of gender-bending, dreamed up by a gay man. Although the scenario commonly known as the Turing Test is usually envisioned as a human interrogator in a room with two terminals, one connected to a computer, the other to a human, attempting to determine by sending and receiving messages which of the unseen conversationalists is a machine, Turing's original "imitation game" involved an isolated interrogator trying to decide, through written communications, which of two people in another room was male and which was female. Intriguingly, the woman is instructed to tell the truth and the man to lie, which means that he has to engage in a sort of electronic transvestism, or MorFing, as on-line crossdressing is known ("MorF" = "Male or Female").
Turing writes, "We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?," reformulating the question of gender identity as one of machine intelligence. As the cultural critic Hillel Schwartz points out in The Culture of the Copy, "Turing reframed the debate about the limits of mechanism in terms of the limits of our ability to see through social simulation. Without surgery but from close-up, onstage or at a party, a woman can pass as a man, a man as a woman. What we think we know about maleness and femaleness is a social knowledge." And so, by extension, is what we think we know about human intelligence or, alternatively, hetero- and homosexuality.
Is HAL queer? As Dery suggests, his tone of voice and choice of language is suspicious, as is the stridently and entirely male environment in the halls of the military and academia where HAL grew up, and his multi-year mission on the spacecraft Discovery with its all-male crew. And, well, there's the music:
When Dave unplugs HAL's brain, the computer's swan song is easily the movie's most powerfully affecting moment (and a close second, for Wagnerian romanticism, to the dying android's soliloquy in Blade Runner). In Hal's Legacy, Clarke recalls, "In the early 1960s at Bell Laboratories I had heard a recording of an Iliac computer singing ‘Bicycle Built for Two.' I thought it would be good for the death scene—especially the slowing down of the words at the end." If we presume HAL's homosexuality, however, the song begins to sound like a deathbed confession of star-crossed love.
I'd made note myself back in 2005 of the queerness of Arthur C. Clarke's fictional universes expressed via lacuna, in the description of heterosexual relationships that take place outside the scope of the book or don't take place at all (the homosexual relationships that actually are explicitly described play a secondary role in this case, and are not themselves necessarily diagnostic of anything).
I really quite like seeing Clarke's impressive body of work be explicitly reclaimed in a queer context; I like the recuperation, or perhaps reconstruction, of themes which could have been/should have been explicit yet are easily recovered.
