Love Machine The Series Ep 7

[Pricilla Igoe]

Thestory now developed two temporal dimensions: one proper to the mobile digital device, so prone to the fickle algorithms of its human user; the other embodied in the package delivered by post, whose passage had unfolded across space and time, oblivious to the closure of the place it was intended to hold. This series of events struck me as a poignant expression of two different technical systems of communication and their ability to execute our decisions. The older of these is a calculative regime: analog, probabilistic, and determining. The second is a computational regime, where temporal and spatial relations are expedited by digital processing, and these express contingency. I photographed the hand-carved deer and the handwritten note with my smartphone, using the same device to preserve the very tenderness it had cut short two days earlier.

At the end of the movie, Ava boards a helicopter meant for the male programmer that she has locked in the research facility. She will be transported to the metropolis, where her identity as a construct of corporate patriarchy can be further augmented by adopting human female characteristics. We can share this fantasy as spectators, but rather as a desire to leave the cinema and take the helicopter that awaits the CEO of NBC Universal, who we have locked in the auditorium, free at last from our determination by the corporate patriarchy that is Hollywood cinema. Ex Machina is, on the one hand, a predictable cautionary tale about a female cyborg who seduces and outwits her corporate human creators, reflecting the social anxiety that attends liberation from patriarchal determination. On the other, it is a love story between the cinematic machine of discourse owned by massive corporations, and its human audience. The corporate assemblage of cinema has long structured, modulated, and evolved our understandings of what constitutes the human, and particularly what it is to love and desire.

It would, however, be too far-fetched to assume that computational devices are without more sinister co-determinations. We have already considered how we might use them to obfuscate our allegiance with new forms of colonial capital and misogyny that are essentially dehumanizing. If thought, cognition, and love are no longer the preserve of individual humans, how do we frame our responsibility to these others? How, if we have conflated the human with the nonhuman, can we recognize the inhuman, or the inhumane?

We can see computational systems and their devices as features of human control. Much digital communication functions at the level of machine-to-machine data transmissions, governed by protocol that exists between device and the application layer of encoding. In other words, a great deal of information is neither readable nor calculable by humans, but only between machines. The application layers that encode messages on the internet, including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), are architectures of control that determine what can be seen and delivered across digital space.21 In this case, the unseen layer of protocol is integral to contemporary existence, interaction, and our material condition. Such a system of control is not restricted to digital objects, but affects every level of the social system, coding and articulating bodies in their passage through social spaces.

In How We Think (University of Chicago Press, 2012), N. Katherine Hayles distinguishes between narrative that constructs causal modes, complex temporalities, and models of working minds, and databases that organize data (16). Due to their abstraction and fragmentary nature, she believes it is unlikely that the database will usurp narrative primacy in human systems, narrative being a unique human capacity (199).

Robin Stone is, of course, the hero of Miss Susann's new novel, "The Love Machine," and if he has brought happiness to almost none of Miss Susann's fictional heroines--who are, incidentally, the most willing group of masochists assembled outside the pages of de Sade--he is nevertheless on the verge of transporting the booksellers of America to unparalleled heights of ecstasy. Hot on the heels of Alexander Portnoy and his Complaint (Philip Roth's novel now has a staggering 450,000 copies in print) come Robin Stone and "The Love Machine" (with a first printing of 250,000 copies). And along with the book, as an added dividend, come Miss Susann and her husband, producer Irving Mansfield, who have already begun the first of a series of nationwide tours dedicated to knocking Roth off the top of the best-seller list.

The publication of "The Love Machine" should not be confused with a literary event. Not at all. There is nothing literary about Miss Susann--a former actress who became somewhat successful in the fifties doing Schiffli embroidery commercials with her poodle Josephine--or her writing. She is a natural storyteller, but her characters' motivations leave much to be desired and their mental processes are often just plain silly. I give you, herewith, a couple of typical sentences from "The Love Machine," on what Miss Susann' heroines think while crying, an emotional act in which they indulge 35 times in the course of the novel (a figure that does not include the number of times they refrain from bursting into tears in order to prevent their mascara form running):

"She was sobbing for all the rejections, all the men she had loved for just one night, all the love she had never had." And "She walked down to the river and knew the tears were running down her face. Oh God, it wasn't fair to put the heart and emotions of a beautiful woman into the body of a peasant."

As for her dialogue ("My forte," says Miss Susann), I have never met anyone who talks quite the way the characters so in Miss Susann's books. On the other hand, I have never met any of Jacqueline Susann's friends, who apparently do talk that way. For example, James Aubrey, former president of C.B.S., who was convinced that he was the prototype for Robin Stone, called Miss Susann one day, and according to her, said, "Jackie, make me mean. Make me a son-of-a-bitch." Like that.

But if Jacqueline Susann is no literary figure, she is nevertheless an extraordinary publishing phenomenon. Seven years ago, she gave up acting to write a rather charming little book about her poodle. It was called "Every Night, Josephine!" It was published by Bernard Geis Associates, and it sold quite nicely. Then, in 1966 Geis published her first novel, "Valley of the Dolls." The story of three young women who come to New York to find fame and fortune and end up hooked on pills, the book sold 350,000 copies in hardcover and, far more astonishing, eight million copies in paperback. It is now among the top all-time best sellers and has just gone into its 53rd Bantam softcover printing.

"When you think of all guys out there with pipes and tweed suits who've been waiting years to write the great American novel," said Miss Susann's husband Irving Mansfield, "and you think how the one who's done it is little Jackie who never went to college and lives on Central Park South, well, it's really fabulous, isn't it?"

As it happens, though, Mansfield's analysis of his wife's triumph is not quite accurate. Jacqueline Susann has not beaten out all those guys with pipes and tweeds, whoever they are. She has beaten out all those people who work in big cities, see the wages of sin thriving around them, read best-selling dirty novels, and say, "I can write that." In fact, they cannot write that. And neither can all the sloppy imitators of Miss Susann's style--like Henry Sutton ("The Exhibitionist"), Morton Cooper ("The King") and William Woolfolk ("The Beautiful Couple") to name a few. Good kitschy writers are born, not made. And when Jacqueline Susann sits down at her typewriter on Central Park South, what spills out is first-rate kitsch.

What's more, it is sincere: unlike Sutton, who is slumming at the type-writer, Miss Susann believes every word she writes. And unlike Cooper and Woolfolk, whose novels are barely fictionalized, badly written accounts of celebrity lives, Miss Susann is--well, let her say it: "I am a thematic writer. In other words, I pick a theme and then the characters fall into place. With 'Valley,' I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write about a prototype of Judy Garland or Ethel Merman.' I sat down and wondered, 'Why are we with the pills and why are we with the funny farms today?'" The theme of "The Love Machine," according to Miss Susann, is that power turns into machines; the title refers not only to Robin Stone but to television itself.

When "Valley of the Dolls" was published, it was not favorably received by the critics. When it succeeded, most observers gave the credit to Mansfield and Miss Susann for their frenetic promotional efforts. But a book that sells 10 million copies in all editions has more than just promotion going for it--and "Valley" had a good deal more. For one thing, it was the kind of book most of its readers (most of whom were women and a large number of whom were teen-agers) could not put down. I, for one, could not: I am an inveterate reader of gossip columns and an occasional reader of movie magazines, and for me reading "Valley of the Dolls" was like reading a very very long, absolutely delicious gossip column full of nothing but blind items; the fact that the names were changed and the characters disguised just made it more fun.

In addition, "Valley" had a message that had a magnetic appeal for women readers: it described the standard female fantasy--of going to the big city, striking it rich, meeting fabulous men--and went on to show every reader that she was far better off than the heroines in the book--who took pills, killed themselves and made general messes of their lives. It was, essentially, a morality tale. And despite its reputation, it was not really a dirty book. Most women, I think, do not want to read hard-core pornography. They do not even want to read anything terribly technical about the sex act. What they want to read about is lust. And Jacqueline Susann gave it to them--just as Grace Metalious did. Hot lust. Quivering lust. High-school lust. Sweaters are always being ripped open in Miss Susann's books. Pants are always being frantically unzipped. And everyone is always wanting everyone else. Take the women in "The Love Machine."

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