Muscular Circuitry: The Invincible Armored Cyborg in Cinema

of the future constructed by films. Its features have given concrete shape to the idea of human fusion with technology, a concept that currently circulates in fictional, filmic, and scientific discourses. What has emerged most prominently from the cycle of cyborg films is an aggressively violent cyborg that embodies a fantasy of destructive force combined with invincibility. Although this hyperviolent figure is only one of many types of fictional cyborgs in circulation, it has become the dominant way for mainstream commercial films to represent the cyborg condition. While television, science fiction, and comic books have explored diverse and imaginative ways to depict the fusion of humans and technology, mainstream films have privileged the violently masculinist figure, and this cinematic phenomenon warrants closer examination.  An analysis of invincible armored cyborg films reveals that the films and the cyborg bodies they put on display provide a battleground for the conflict between different ways of thinking about sexual identity and gender. There are several types of cyborgs represented in popular culture. Two of the most common types are defined by David Tomas, an artist and anthropologist at the University of Ottawa: "The postorganic, the classical (hardware-interfaced) cyborg and the postclassical (software-interfaced) transorganic data-based cyborg or personality construct. "2 The first type combines an organic human body, which either pre-existed as a person or was genetically engineered, with industrial technology in the form of implants or prostheses. The second type has no physical form but consists of the human mind preserved on computer software. A third type of cyborg results when fictional characters plug software programs directly into their electronically wired heads. Cyborgs differ from both robots and androids. Robots are completely mechanical figures of any shape or size. Androids are human-shaped robots or genetically engineered synthetic humanoid organisms, but they do not combine organic with technological parts. Androids look like, and sometimes are indistinguishable humans. The replicants in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) are therefore androids, not cyborgs, because they are genetically engineered organic entities and contain no technological components. The terms robot, android, and cyborg generate a great deal of confusion and are sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably. For the purposes of this essay, I am interested exclusively in the invincible