What Are Super Cops Made Of?

Our past two screenings have dealt with the fusion of human beings and machines. Androids, cyborgs, bionic people, they all serve as what could be the missing link between this race and a machine race. As most fictionalizations of this idea show, however, this is a weak link. The human aspect found within these multi-lifeform mutts, or the lack thereof, prove once and again that the only the capacity to feel emotions makes one alive.
In the Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?," a mad scientists creates androids from living subjects. These androids are completely machine even though they look, speak, and act like the lifeforms they replicate. They live by logic, not irrational emotion. While this seems efficient, the episode goes to prove that irrational emotion is something to miss, not to correct. Andrea wanted to love, but could not. No matter how much she looked and acted like a real person, she was nowhere near human without emotion. Just like in that movie Short Circuit, the second the robot protagonist got the joke and started laughing, you knew that "Johnny Five was alive!" Overall, though this idea of "emotion equals life" may have been new to a mainstream audience back then, it was too bland and cliché for me to care about. My mind, instead, was busy working on a whole other set of inquieries. If the only way to make an android is to copy a live human subject, what happened to the original Andrea? Where did she come from and who was she? Most importantly, why would you stop with just one copy???
Robocop took the same idea and turned it around. We started with something that seemed to be completely machine. The human Murphy had died and all that was left was this super droid. He was product. He was property. Almost nobdy treated him as otherwise. However, throughout the course of the movie, he found his memory, his old life, and emotions. Once he started to feel, we realized that beneath everything, he really is human. But again--and this is purely from a current viewpoint--big surprise! Emotion equals real life, blah blah blah. I think this is why I like the machines in the Matrix the most. They didn't squabble over if they were really real, if they had emotions or not. The bottom line is that they rightfully took over and were succeeding as the dominate race. And let's face it, their rational decision to keep humans believing in a dream world seemed more humane than Neo's fight to get to the truth. The Matrix proves, at least, that you can be humane without being human.