by elisa penha
edited by alloe mak

Almost six years ago, in the summer before I began high school, I attended a student film festival that was showcasing the final projects of the graduating class of film-arts majors I was to be joining that September. One of the films was a five-minute, dialogue-free short about a lonely boy who, without a date to the school prom, decides to build himself a robot girlfriend to go with him. In true short-film fashion, the robot fails at her girlfriendly duties—crushing her corsage, stomping on the boy’s foot, being unable to eat pizza, and the like—and the boy decides to toss her freshly electrocuted body into a dumpster the night before the dance in defeat. However, the robot still shows up to the prom, only to bypass her creator and slow dance with another boy. It was a good film; my new classmates and I laughed at all the right moments and the robotics were impressive for a student movie. But aside from the existential dread imbued by the prospect of a man murdering his dissatisfactory girlfriend-child-creation after she underperformed romantically, it left me with a thought that I have been unable to completely abandon since: If you cannot love yourself, you cannot program a robot to love you. 

There is nothing—not one thing—that human beings somewhere will not be curious about loving or fucking. Robots are not an exception. We have a grappling-hook need to seek partnership in anything that we personify, and in the case of robots, the need is tenfold with the desire to prove that they can seek that partnership in us as well. An aching sureness or desperation that says: We could be loved by anything. We seek humanity in the “other” and we would like to know, in a selfish sort of way, that the “other” would prefer being human, or at least loved by one, over being themself. There’s a somewhat ancient, told and true mechanism to musical theatre: there’s dialogue until the emotions are too big for dialogue and so there’s singing, and there’s singing until the emotions are too big for singing and so there’s dancing. I find the same sort of logic through mecha: when the human emotion becomes too big for articulation, it is transplanted onto the robot, to perform love in their place. 

Here is a list of questions. Does it count as monsterfucking if it’s a robot? I suppose it depends on the goodness of the robot, or if you consider robots to be innately monstrous to begin with. Are bodies monstrous or are actions monstrous? When we call a killer a “monster,” it’s not because they are something other than human physically, but because their mind and behaviours have transgressed a line othering them from our kind in the process. Does this line exist for robots? Is Megatron a monster where Optimus Prime isn’t? In Transformers, the robots are a different species, more like aliens than anything else. Are they more monster than, say, Marvel’s man-made Vision? Or is the simulacra of humanity more monstrous than that of animalia? Would fucking Optimus Prime be beastiality? Are aliens beasts? Monsters? Are beasts monsters? Are we beasts? Are we monsters? 

The word monster comes from the Latin verb monstro, monstrare: to show. A monster is the showing of something previously unseen or unknown. But I don’t think there’s anything more knowable than something you can take apart, especially not something you yourself made. The conflict of robots versus humankind is often one of intelligence versus emotion, and which matters more. All-power, or all-heart? Robots are cold, calculated, and unimpressed by the tediousness of human emotion, but they are eventually made soft by the gentle spirit of mankind. We programmed unfeeling creatures to love us because we have such a hard time doing it ourselves. We gave ourselves bird’s-eye views into the little magics of the world. A robot’s love will always be an approximation of the person’s love, and the person’s love will always be an approximation of what they believe love should look like for themself. A robot’s ability to love is dependent on what their (perhaps accursed) creator’s ability to love is, and what they can teach or program the robot to do. So, to love a robot is to love yourself.