We May as Well Be Robots. . . Right?

This article examines the body/tool interface in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates (2009), focusing on how the two movies use the highly plausible novum of the thought-controlled external prosthesis to represent anxiety about loss of bodily autonomy and self-identity. While both movies reify digital information-transfer as enabling humans to enjoy the full-bodied sensory experience of their remote-controlled alternative bodies, each movie struggles differently with the problem of the leftover, passive human body that engages with the device. Both films vacillate around the special case bodies of their heroic, white, male protagonists: Surrogates, which propels along a typical Bruce Willis action flick trajectory, is premised on the idea that humans can fully experience whatever their surrogates are experiencing, yet its body/tool interface undermines this premise. The contradiction in Avatar is that while humans actually do feel more (and better) in their avatar bodies than they do in their own bodies, the movie is also premised on the concept of the body itself as expendable—except when it is not. Representations of the body/tool interface in both films reveal how each movie tries (and fails) to simultaneously reify information transfer and preserve human identity and autonomy.