For centuries, artists and writers have used dolls to explore our innermost drives. Photo / Esteban Lopez, Unsplash
OPINION:
In 1918, after being left by his lover Alma Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka requested a life-size doll of her from the artist Hermine Moos. “Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure,” Kokoschka wrote to Moos, sending her a drawing of Mahler, and specifying his desire for “a layer of pouches stuffed with down, [and] cotton wool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this… is an experience which I must be able to embrace!” Ignoring his instructions, Moos covered the doll’s body in swan feathers – much to Kokoschka’s dismay. Later, during a drunken party, he decapitated “Alma” in his garden.
The dream of the living doll has a long and discomfiting history. For centuries, artists and writers have used varieties of automata to explore our innermost drives. In Ovid’s long poem Metamorphoses (8 BC), the reclusive sculptor Pygmalion carves an ivory statue for company; after he prays to the goddess of love, it magically comes to life as a woman. And nearly two millennia later, in Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), the theme is the same: a carpenter creates a living wooden puppet, who miraculously becomes a real boy – like a surrogate son.
More often than not, these stories act as warnings – playing God comes at a price. In ETA Hoffmann’s story The Sandman (1817), a man falls unknowingly for an automaton, casting aside a real woman’s love; on discovering the truth, and seeing the doll’s glass eyes abandoned on the floor, he goes mad. Hoffmann and Collodi’s tales were preoccupied by the advancing technology of the 19th century, an age in which dolls gained limbs that moved and eyes that blinked – some even began to speak.
Inevitably, as these creations have evolved, so has the unease around the technologies that animate them. In 1870, the French composer Léo Delibes and choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon turned Hoffmann’s story into the ballet Coppélia, and Scottish Ballet’s 2022 production (which has its sold-out London premiere next week) transported the story to Silicon Valley, engaging with today’s anxieties about artificial intelligence.
The definition of “doll” is forever expanding. Last year, at the Venice Biennale, artistic director Cecilia Alemani posed a question: “How is the definition of the human changing?” Automata were everywhere in the exhibition: Paula Rego’s stuffed fabric puppets, Thomas Edison’s talking doll, Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s animated sex marionette. And in Gerard Johnstone’s recent film M3GAN, the horror of Don Mancini’s infamous Chucky is reworked in an artificially intelligent doll designed to provide “companionship and emotional support”. Inevitably, it isn’t long before M3GAN’s instructions get lost in translation.
In recent years, literary fiction, in particular, has been the art form to reveal the dark side of the doll – and of us. Many a story has borne out Gaby Wood’s suggestion, in her 2002 book Living Dolls, that “the animating force is love itself… Without desire, the android cannot exist.” In The Doll’s Alphabet (2017), a short-story collection by Camilla Grudova, one story sees sailors mutilate a wooden mermaid, giving her female anatomy they can abuse. Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me (2019) uses a male robot called Adam to explore a contemporary ménage à trois. In Rachel Ingalls’s novella In the Act (1987, to be republished this year), after discovering her husband has built himself a sex robot, a wife demands her own.
The newest example is Dorothy Tse’s novel Owlish (translated by Natascha Bruce, published last week), in which a middle-aged professor falls in love with a machine, and his touch inspires an awakening in her mechanical limbs. When the professor, embarrassed to be seen with her in public, relinquishes her hand, the doll – named Aliss – finds her newly liberated limbs freeze up: “After her hand was so ruthlessly discarded, the petrification had crept from her fingertips into the rest of her body.” Without the professor’s love and touch, the magic fades.
Set against the turbulence of political upheaval, the sin of the professor isn’t so much the fact that he indulges in his fetish – we now live in a world where sex-doll clubs are common knowledge – but that in doing so, he disengages with the society around him. The energy expended in nurturing life within Aliss’s body takes its toll on the equilibriums of his own: “Professor Q would press his lips to Aliss’s earlobes, slide his fingers into her hidden crevices and crawl like a clumsy reptile over the undulating topography of her body, leaving damp vestiges in his wake. In these moments of high passion, he would think, To hell with the Nevers mountain trails! Because this was true adventure. Here he had secret paths, wild abandon, the thrill of the unexpected. Here he was witness to an exciting new landscape.”
Like John Donne objectifying his lover in To His Mistress Going to Bed (“O my America! my new-found-land”), the reduction of Aliss to a “landscape” hints at the dangers of a mindset that ignores the experience of others – human or not.
It’s tempting to think that our resurgent interest in dolls is linked to 21st-century society’s exploration of sex and gender roles. The idea of putting ourselves in the place of the doll, or the doll-lover, focuses our attention on how we can objectify those we care about. Who can now listen to Cliff Richard’s six-decade-old song Living Doll without mild horror? “I’m gonna lock her up in a trunk so no big hunk / can steal her away from me” – clearly images of perfection, being “doll-like”, are linked to expectations about how women should conform to an ageless ideal, one built on male sexual satisfaction. The same tune persists today, but with a satirical twist: in the American pop singer Bella Poarch’s music video for Build a B---- (2021), men are shown queuing to “design the girl of their dreams”, as the camera pans down to a factory floor of plastic female bodies on a production line, and Poarch’s severed head sings on a conveyor belt. (Next, in the video for her 2022 single Dolls, the singer leads a machine revolution.)
In Owlish, it’s the professor who undergoes a process of “dollification”, stuck in the same routes from home to work, oblivious to the world around him. Aliss, meanwhile, becomes more curious: the world holds her full focus. Who, Tse seems to ask, is more human? Olga Ravn’s novel The Employees (2020, translated by Martin Aitken), told in epistolary form, pushes this question to the limit. Set on a spacecraft orbiting a newly discovered planet in deep space, it’s framed as a series of “statements” about daily life on board, given by anonymous interviewees; it provides a form of literary Turing test, in which the reader has to detect whether a narrative voice is human or humanoid. It begins as quotidian, but builds in menace as the tensions between human and non-human shipmates grow.
Our deepest fear, it seems, is being replaced – or, worse, eradicated. Just look at cinematic sci-fi classics such as Terminator, I, Robot and Blade Runner. “I know that I’m living,” says one of Ravn’s speakers. “You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.” As in Hoffmann’s The Sandman, the eyes of the doll are the most uncanny and unsettling part. When we use our creations to look at ourselves, we’re looking in the mirror: we can’t help but shudder at what we see.
NY Times: The onetime social media superstar re-emerged as rookie pop star of the year.