Dangermouse
Battles the Body Cybernetic
by E.W. Wilder
By 1985 the self as recreated by increasingly technology-driven mass
media began to be reflected back upon the average person as an increasingly
mechanized being. Certainly, the mechanical model of medicine that had
developed over the century before helped to further this trend, but
increasing computer work in businesses and homes was a far more prevalent
and insidious reminder of the technologization of what was contemporary
life. We can trace the (con)-textualization of the cybernetic to 1948
and Norbert Weiner "to describe a new science which united communications
theory and control theory . . . . [C]ybernetics encompassed the human
mind, the human body and the world of automatic machines and attempted
to reduce all three to the common denominator of control and communication"
(Featherstone and Burrows 2). Thus was born the image of the self as
part of the machine age and, by extension, as part of the burgeoning
information age, as bodies had been reinvented through the past ages:
Weiner noted . . . that these stages generated four models
of the human body: the body as a malleable, magical clay figure; the
body as a clockwork mechanism; the body as a "glorified heat
engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of the
human muscles"; and, most recently, the body as an electronic
system. Weiner's two-fold periodization is significant because it
reveals an awareness, by one of the principle founders of cybernetics,
of important disciplinary phases in the machine-based history of the
western body. It is also significant because it draws attention to
parallel phases in the body's functional reimaging as a fundamental
element in a machine culture. (Tomas 23, emphasis his)
Contemporary with the creation of the cyberpunk novel in the mid 1980s
was, then, a pre-existing re-visioning of the body in cybernetic terms,
as extensions of the electronic system instead of the interpretations
of the time that suggested that technology was an extension of the self.
The cyberpunk novel is thus part of an already existing cybernetic system
that had been revisioning the body for quite some time:
The cybernetic automaton's mirroring of the human body was
not established on the basis of conventional mimicry, as in the case
of androids and their internal parts, so much as on a common understanding
of the similarities that existed between the control mechanisms and
communicational organizations of machine systems and living organisms.
(Tomas 27)
It's not so much that the machines became us as that we became they.
William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk work, Neuromancer, was being
created in 1985, would debut in 1986 and, "[u]nbeknown to its author,
at the time [the book] was written, research was advancing in the field
of fully immersive three-dimensional computer graphics - later to be
termed 'virtual reality,'" in other words, the recursive interface
of man and machine that man had already become (Clark 121). Furthermore,
"Gibson's fictive notion of 'cyberspace' comprised a kind of felicitous
fusion of the discrete and bounded virtual spaces that were already
in existence" (Clark 121). The cyberpunk of the mid-eighties, then,
was a description of an already envisioned self.
The m(0)thering of the body through the lens cybernetic is put famously
into theory by Donna Haraway, where she postulates the cyborg as feminist
signifier, anti-hegemonic and free of traditionalist constraints of
gender by virtue of the cyborg's being free from a traditional body.
This ignores the fact that the cyborg itself in nearly every film and
novel dealing with the subject is a product, either directly or indirectly,
of patriarcho-traditionalist industry, and, indeed, tends to reinforce
gender roles by being characterized as hyper-gendered. Samantha Holland
writes:
It is difficult to argue against reading the cyborg film
as upholding often stereotypical and exaggerated gender differences
at both a narrative and visual level. The representation of cyborg
(and other) males in the cyborg film clearly fits with Steve Neal's
theory that violence displaces male sexuality (in our homophobic culture)
by undermining any notion of the male body as passive spectacle through
narrative intervention that justifies the camera's objectifying gaze
by making him the object or operator of violent action. In light of
this, with characters such as the Terminator and RoboCop epitomizing
filmic images of near-invincible soldiers, Springer claims that the
cyborg film reveals "an intense crisis in the construction of
masculinity." That is, integrating men (sic) with technology
in the image of the hyper-masculine cyborg operates to "shore
up the masculine subject against the onslaught of a femininity feared
by patriarchy[.]" (165)
So the cyborg is, in fact, a product of the very rules of production
of the early postmodern age, the 1980s. This is reflected in the great
corporate success of both Apple and Microsoft and in the tremendous
appeal of such virtual presidencies as that of Ronald Reagan, whose
role as "The Great (White) Communicator" was facilitated by
the television, itself an early cybernetic medium incorporating the
viewer as a mass-produced downlink, the viewer, in turn, being able
to "interact" with the medium by channel selection. Reagan
appealed to viewers because of his photogeneity and relative lack of
content. He became an empty being, an avatar, into which the average
viewer could enter, existing within the primal, yet virtual space in
an i(Ron)ically masculine-idealized body onscreen. Reagan brought the
tremendous cybernetic power of television that advertisers had been
exploiting for decades previously into the political arena on a day-to-day
basis, creating, in effect, a politically-brand-identified-virtual-megacorp
out of the White House. From that era on, control of the media through
greater and greater advertising spending and greater and greater fund
raising would be the single most important factor in how elections were
won and lost. In effect, each campaign committee would have to create
its own ad hoc virtual reality megacorp. The body politic becomes the
body cybernetic.
We see the body as cybernetic system reflected in an almost perfect
mirror-image rendering in a single episode of the popular British animated
series Dangermouse titled "The Invasion of Colonel 'K.'"
In this particular episode, Dangermouse and his trusty sidekick Penfold
are shrunk to microscopic size to chase their previously shrunken arch
nemesis Baron Greenback into the body of Colonel K in order to prevent
Greenback from stealing all the secrets hidden away inside the Colonel's
brain. What is startling about this episode is not the plot; similar
themes were explored decades earlier in the film Fantastic Voyage.
What is surprising about this episode of Dangermouse is its depiction
of the interior of Colonel K's body. While Fantastic Voyage used
alien but still naturalistic imagery (imagery of an alien world versus
imagery of alien technology), Penfold and Dangermouse race through a
nearly entirely technologized interior-scape. The walls of Colonel K's
arterial structures depict gleaming metal; his brain itself is rendered
as a computer control room sunk deep inside mechanically rendered "memory
banks," rooms designed to look like modern bank vaults. The "body
defenses" that hinder Dangermouse and Penfold as they chase Baron
Greenback through Colonel K's body appear as both organic, spherical
green army men, and as purely mechanical, a tracked frontloader with
mean, metallic teeth that somewhat resembles ED-209 from the RoboCop
series. These defenses further reinforce the blending of the biological
and technological that characterizes a cybernetic system.
In the deigetic relationships to the rest of the characters, Colonel
K is considerably older, a gentleman moving rapidly out of middle-age,
purported to be by the narrator "a former desert rat." That
would place him, assuming a roughly contemporaneous narrative, since
this episode of Dangermouse came out in 1985, at about the age
of an aging WWII colonel. Weiner's realization of cybernetics is pegged
at 1948 - immediately after the war that brought all of the high-tech
developments of the last half of the twentieth century, from the computer
to the atom bomb, into fruition. This was, therefore, the period at
which the body of Colonel K was revisioned as a cybernetic system. The
body of Colonel K, then, is shown to be what it always already was:
a machine. Furthermore, The Colonel's body, as the setting for a Fantastic
Voyage-type plot, is the stand-in for all bodies, as the self-space
in which contemporary forms of communication and control are played
out. Dangermouse here describes exactly the world those living in 1985
had come to, one in which, as Neuromancer a year later would
also note, we were already living as cyber-beings, one in which we actually
had been living that way since at least WWII.
It is no coincidence that Dangermouse's archenemy is Baron Greenback,
the nickname, also for the American dollar. The increasing control of
high-tech industry, an industry created in the great blossoming in trade
control and technological advancement of WWII, is predicated entirely
on the dollar's promulgation and increase. It is the driving force behind
all commerce, all media, the creation and reification of cybernetic
communications and control, commercial television. The cyber-body is
the product, almost by afterthought, of the Greenback, and Dangermouse
the quintessentially British animated hero, and Dangermouse
the British television show, use the Greenback's own tool to threaten
his hegemony, delving into the cyber-body created by the Greenback's
invasion into otherwise organic space. Baron Greenback enters Colonel
K's body to "steal his secrets" in an attempt to control,
once and for all, the organic as the cybernetic, to confound the already
co-opted body into the vassal (vessel) of the almighty dollar. Dangermouse
and Penfold race over a contrasting landscape on their way to save the
day, a land of bucolic shops and green fields. Penfold himself is a
representative of the nation of shopkeepers, unassuming and plain, quintessentially
domesticated. He is the opposite of the Baron whose ostentation is represented
by his diamond tiepin and cane, his insatiable desire, like Ronald Reagan
and Microsoft - products of the same era - , to take over the world.
He is the amphibian face, for he is a toad after all, of the multinational
megacorp, invasive and controlling, able to live in either of the two
primary environments, the private-self and the public-corporate, with
equal ease - the unnatural product of an all-too-productive evolution.
He is a cyborg, neither here nor there, threatening the very nature
of nature herself, the warm world of mice and gerbils and kindly old
colonels, with a cold ambiguity.
1985 turned out to be the defining year, when cybernetic systems revealed
themselves to our consciousness, so inundating it that it is expressed
even through the apparently mundane medium of a children's cartoon.
But cartoons are directed toward the future even more than science fiction
is exactly since they are directed at children. The adults who read
science fiction are already lost to a future in which the always already
cybernetic body fights for its own control using the same devices as
those that enslave it, the hegemonic cyber-systems of mega-corporate
communication and command.
Works Cited
Clark, Nigel. "Rear-View Mirrorshades: The Recursive Generation
of the Cyberbody." Featherstone and Burrows, 113-33.
"The Invasion of Colonel 'K'" Dangermouse. Written
by Brian Trueman, Dir. Brian Cosgrove. Perf. Dangermouse and Penfold.
1985.
Featherstone, Mike and Roger Burrows eds. Cultures Cyberspace, Cyberbodies,
Cyberpunk: of Technological Embodiment. London: SAGE, 1995.
Holland, Samantha. "Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and
Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema." Featherstone and Burrows,
156-74.
Tomas, David. "Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in
the Age of the Cyborg." Featherstone and Burrows, 20-43.
