Abstract
This chapter critiques the persistence of Ovid’s Pygmalion myth in screen narratives of the creation of the ideal woman. Sculptor and statue have found everlasting life in stories about the challenge of shaping unpromising raw material into a culturally determined notion of female beauty. In the new millennium television and cinema continue to resonate with Ovidian themes and tropes. James discusses the ethics and aesthetics of designing artificial life in science and technology, especially the advent of the robotic sex slave. She argues that a classical text can be enriched by and contribute to our experience of the fiction and facts about cyborgs, CGI-generated personae, and biologically engineered creatures, including our desire to extend and adapt ourselves with mechanical parts and alien substances.
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- 1.
Pygmalion has entered the discourse of science and the AI phenomenon as Ovid is regularly acknowledged as the truly bardic or prophetic poet who created a constructed being that crossed the boundaries between human and synthetic. The subtleties of his story are rarely recognised by the scientific community even when the line of reception is clearer.
- 2.
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Liveley (2006) has written on classical cyber myths and organised the 2017 Classics and Cyborgs symposium at Bristol University, which featured a rich variety of papers on dehumanised and enhanced beings in ancient traditions. There is now a Leverhulme-funded project on Hero of Alexandria and his theatrical automata, led by Ian Ruffell of Glasgow University. The team’s ongoing work was presented in a panel at the 2017 Classical Association meeting held at the University of Kent.
- 4.
Gabriel (2004: 17).
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In her influential 2009 book on ecphrasis Webb cites Quintilian’s remarks on the ability of a speaker or an author to transport the audience to a scene (22). Webb also talks in terms of the ‘listener being stocked with internal images of absent things’ (113). The ancient reader could also certainly ‘get the picture’ if all the senses and the imagination were being triggered by powerful imagery. Norton (2013: 17–21) also suggests an approximate translation of phantasia as the kind of imagination that produces mental pictures. Winkler (2017: 21–40) discusses the relationship between visualising strategies in ancient texts and the cinematic techniques for vivid storytelling, using the Greek and Roman critical theorists as a commentary upon the imaginative involvement of readers and viewers.
- 6.
Bloom (2000: 292–93).
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Winkler (2009).
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Berger identified gendered readings of the female form in art in 1973. Mulvey (1975–2009) has been just as widely quoted for her analysis of cinematic viewing and the ‘to be looked-at-ness’ of the woman on screen. She has used the figure of Pandora rather than Pygmalion’s ivory girl as her mythical template.
- 9.
On the importance of the transformation/fragmentation motif in Horace and its cinematic portrayal in Aronofsky see Apostol’s chapter in the next part of this book.
- 10.
For a discussion of meme theory and how it can aid us in our wider classical reception project, see Bakogianni in this collection (151 and 165).
- 11.
Salzman Mitchell (2008: 291–311).
- 12.
On the close connections between the artist/poet/creator and his art (and in ancient times it almost always was a ‘he’), see Apostol in this collection (134).
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The identity of the Propoetides and the provenance of their name remain conundrums. See the discussion in James (2013: 189, n. 5).
- 14.
James (2013: 12–14).
- 15.
For Alcestis as an ideal lost wife and the problematic nature of this construction in modern contexts see Evans and Potter in this collection.
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On the cultural appropriation of classical ideals of beauty by Hollywood see Williams in this collection.
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Ivory appears as an early prosthesis, replacing the piece of shoulder Pelops loses at the banquet of the gods. It also features in the Odyssey (18.187–96) when Athena adorns Penelope making her whiter than new-sawn ivory.
- 19.
Stoichita (2008: 2).
- 20.
See note 1. Webb (2009: 27–34) makes pertinent comments about how the mind of the audience (or readership) became the locus of interaction between the word and the image. The ancient poets were constantly manipulating the reader but it has been argued by Mitchell (1994) that ‘words can “cite” but never “sight” their objects’, this in a fascinating excursus on the literary strategy of ecphrasis, and the body of scholarship it has spawned. Mitchell’s categories of ecphrasis are rather neglected and yet he encapsulates the dilemma of the simulacrum in his comments on ecphrastic fear, hope, and indifference on p. 4 of the internet version: https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/mitchell.html (accessed 26/2/2018): ‘All the utopian aspirations of ekphrasis—that the mute image be endowed with voice, or made dynamic and active, or actually come into view, or (conversely) that poetic language might be “stilled”, made iconic, or frozen into a static, spatial array—all these aspirations begin to look idolatrous and fetishistic. And the utopian figures of the image and its textual rendering as transparent windows onto reality are supplanted by the notion of the image as a deceitful illusion, a magical technique that threatens to fixate the poet and the listener.’
- 21.
As Elsner and Sharrock have pointed out (1991: 165–66).
- 22.
Hitchcock was inspired in his cinematic composition by nineteenth-century art and the emphasis upon Madeleine as an iconic painting for the man on her trail is a feature of the novella D’Entre Les Morts (by Boileau and Narcejac) upon which Vertigo is based. For the importance of nineteenth-century artwork in cinematic conceptions of classical urban landscapes see García Morcillo and Hanesworth (2015: 2–11).
- 23.
Elsner and Sharrock (1991).
- 24.
On the key role played by Venus in the construction of Hollywood ideals of female beauty in the early part of the twentieth century see Williams’ chapter (99–103).
- 25.
It is true that in the world according to Ovid, Book One of the Metamorphoses, Pyrrha and Deucalion were allowed by the gods to repopulate the earth with boulders that became flesh and blood, prefiguring Pygmalion’s privilege to play divine artificer. On the theme of Venus brooking no rivals, see her concern that the supernaturally lovely mortal princess, Psyche, would age and die, and yet she was being mistaken for the goddess, who would then be associated with death and decay, compromising her immortality (Apuleius, Metamorphoses / Golden Ass, 4.30).
- 26.
Leach (1974: 123).
- 27.
The interchange of characteristics, and to a certain extent behaviours, can confound the polarities set up for Prometheus and Pandora on the surface, that one tries to benefit mankind and the other is a negative force (James 2013: 27).
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James (2013: 137–49).
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Elsner and Sharrock find resonances of Hesiod’s Works and Days in this scene (1991: 173–76).
- 30.
A pre-circulated paper at the Bristol Cyborg Classics interdisciplinary symposium (July 2017) argued that Pandora is our synthetic mother as well as a biological progenitor. Giulia Chesi and Giacomo Sclavi adopt a fascinating approach to the myth (‘The Cyborg Pandora and the Question of Technology in Hesiod’), which forces us to rethink the construct in ancient and modern times. There are several movies that reprise the original concept of the robot as a programmed human (not a mechanical automaton) including Splice (2010) and Morgan (written and directed by Seth Owen 2016), where the flesh and blood make-up of the artificial and laboratory-grown girl makes her no less of a monster as the narrative unfolds.
- 31.
Holmes (2012: 26), see also 17–26.
- 32.
I owe the observation about April dying in sunlight she can no longer see to the focus group set up for the Open University module A330, Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds. This was the subject of an audio resource, organised by Amanda Potter in 2010. For further discussion of classical echoes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, see Evans and Potter in this collection.
- 33.
Bronwen Calvert has written extensively on the cyborg as simulacrum in the television works of Whedon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dollhouse. For her work on Buffy see in particular: http://offline.buffy.de/www.slayage.tv/Numbers/slayage15.htm (accessed 26/2/2018). She delivered a keynote address on cyborgs at the Slayage Conference in North Alabama in June 2018.
- 34.
For more on the Pandora theme in Xena and Charmed, and viewer responses to its echoes in these popular TV series, see Potter (2010) and her PhD thesis (2013).
- 35.
Renger and Solomon (2013: 295), see also 271–98.
- 36.
Jean Alvares and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell presented on classical narratives in Ex Machina at the cyborg symposium in Bristol (2017), raising the issue of Ava’s drive towards self-preservation, how she harnesses what she had learnt about her construction, and supplies her body with spare parts of previous models. At the same symposium Emma Hammond approached the film as a story of a modern Epimetheus engaging with the sci-fi legacy of the myth after Mary Shelley. Brett M. Rogers presented on the film at Patras University in June 2016 (Classical Reception and the Human Conference). His talk, ‘The (Post) Modern Prometheus and (Post) Human Limits in Science Fiction’ teased out the Pandora myth motifs of Ava’s alluring presence.
- 37.
She works in concert with another AI, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), to kill Nathan, but only Ava escapes the encounter alive: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/ (accessed 30/3/2018).
- 38.
A third series was broadcast in 2018, but was not available for consultation at the time of writing.
- 39.
- 40.
I hesitate to use the term ‘sex worker’ because there are legitimate concerns that this is part of the discourse of wholesale legalisation of prostitution (including clients and pimps, the latter bank rolling the legalisation lobby) which enshrines this exploitative industry and is a move towards corporate commodification. See the article by Julie Bindel (Guardian Journal, 11 October 2017) and a series of features in The Morning Star. Jo Bartosch’s article (Wednesday [6 September 2017], 6th issue, 8–9) ‘it isn’t the stigma that is killing “sex workers”’ states that: ‘sex work as a positive choice is a myth that’s as actively sold as it is hungrily consumed’.
- 41.
For a further critique of this movie see Alvares (2018: 337–56).
- 42.
For a further discussion of Hollywood’s construction of the male body-beautiful and Gosling’s star status see Williams (114).
- 43.
‘K’ clearly has feelings for his hologram girl. There is tenderness in the relationship on both sides and the simulacrum professes to love him until her portable program is crushed by an evil cyborg. For a comparable piece of scientific wizardry see the AI built from digital traces of a murdered wife in the futuristic novel From Darkest Skies (Sam Peters, 2017). In this case Alysha (the Eurydice character) has been resurrected as Liss, a copy who also has replaced her as the hero’s fellow agent, investigating the mystery of ‘her’ own death.
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Paphos is usually assumed to be a girl because of the feminine gender of the Latin ‘qua’ in line 297, Illa Paphon genuit, de qua tenet insula nomen ‘but the baby could have been a son’ if the word ‘insula’ has attracted the relative ‘from whom’ into its own gender, which is a grammatical possibility posed by Keen (1983). In some traditions Pygmalion and the ivory girl have a son Paphos and a daughter, Metharme.
- 46.
James (2013: 207–8).
- 47.
Stables (2008: 66).
- 48.
At the time of writing, there is a great deal of discussion on the Internet about living dolls. BBC Radio 4 started a series with Adam Rutherford called Rise of the Robots (February 2017) and The Guardian printed a long read article on ‘The race to build the world’s first sex robot’ written by journalist Jenny Kleeman (27 April 2017): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/race-to-build-world-first-sex-robot (accessed online 10/5/2017). Kleeman included Ovid’s Pygmalion and ivory statue in the story of the desire to create an ideal being. She also quoted the argument by David Levy (Love and Sex with Robots, 2007) that the artificial companions have therapeutic benefits for those ‘who otherwise would have become social misfits, social outcasts, or even worse, but who will instead be better-balanced human beings’.
- 49.
James (2013: 134–36).
- 50.
See James (2013: 166–67), for the Guys n Dolls exhibition (and accompanying catalogue, April 2005) in Brighton and the role of dolls in psychiatry and related fields. A 2017 exhibition at the London Royal Academy in April (which then transferred to Brighton) exhibited the installations of Cathie Pilkington. Sculptures and paintings were characterised by a mis-assembly of disparate parts and some formed impossible anatomies that highlighted the binary nature of the animate and inanimate.
- 51.
See Holmes (2012: 2) who ‘examines how strategic engagements with classical antiquity have contributed to the conceptualisation of gender as a modern and postmodern category of analysis’. The ancient world is still shaping our idea of male and female identities; then as now sex and sexuality are bound up with power, status, and a range of social norms.
- 52.
James (2013: 21–22).
- 53.
Kate Devlin is intimately involved with developments in AI and writes an informative blog. She has visited the Sheffield university laboratory where Tony Prescott, professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of Sheffield robotics, leads a team working on the iCub. This is a toddler automaton with a developing sense of self but a tendency at times to be potty-mouthed when given free rein in conversations (social artlessness is also a feature of Harmony Real Doll!). A fascinating article by Prescott (New Scientist, 21 March 2015, 36–39) traced the potential and challenges of the human replication process. Also available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530130.400-me-myself-and-icub-meet-the-robot-with-a-self/ (accessed 28/3/2018). Amongst the targets are the ‘aspects of self’ described by psychologist Ulric Neisser; ecological, interpersonal, temporally extended, conceptual, and private. Perhaps we should revisit Baudrillard’s features and functions of the simulacrum. It is significant that the Sheffield robotics team have decided it is too risky to allow the iCub to design its own motivations and goals.
- 54.
It is a fact of twenty-first century life that most of the manufacturers, the technologists, and the buyers of the sex dolls are male. Andrea Austin wrote about the gendering of technology (2001: 2, on internet version): http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/005958ar (accessed 26/02/2018): ‘the cyborg arouses anxieties about the difference between male and female, human and not human, against a cultural backdrop of the division between technology as feminine and mastery of technology as masculine’.
- 55.
See Gailey in Heller (2007).
- 56.
This was part of a BBC4 programme in collaboration with the Open University aired on 26 July 2017, with Ben Garrod and Danielle George as the experts in the field of science and social psychology.
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This chapter is dedicated to my brother Steve Deahl (October 1944–August 2017) who enriched my knowledge and understanding of key screen texts.
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James, P. (2018). Statues, Synths, and Simulacra: The Ovidian Contours of Screen Pygmalions. In: Apostol, R., Bakogianni, A. (eds) Locating Classical Receptions on Screen. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96457-7_4
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