According to Hugo Munsterberg How Does Film Prove Itself a Sophisticated Art Form?
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Literature/Motion-picture show
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Hugo and the Automaton1
On initial viewing, Martin Scorsese's 2011 moving-picture show Hugo is likely to leave viewers puzzled. A big-upkeep, family-friendly, 3-D motion picture featuring heavy use of computer-generated imagery, inappreciably seems like the kind of fare expected from an auteur whose oeuvre, including Taxi Commuter, Raging Balderdash, Goodfellas, and Casino, skews more gritty, realistic, masculine, and violent. Upon farther reflection, such puzzles might be resolved by recognizing Scorsese's long-standing interest in flick preservation. Scorsese is founder and chair of The Moving picture Foundation, dedicated to protecting and preserving motility motion-picture show history, and Hugo itself can exist read as an argument for film preservation, with its loving recreation of the cinematic workshop and output of Georges Méliès and its interpolation of numerous scenes from classic cinema. Such a reading is underscored by Hugo'south source material, Brian Selznick's children'south picture book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007). Selznick himself comes from classic picture palace royalty, existence related to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, and The Invention of Hugo Cabret nostalgically evokes the celebrity days of cinema's by. Furthermore, Selznick's volume, a graphic novel that literally incorporates in its pages cinema's past in the form of nevertheless images, and Scorsese's film, evoking cinematic history while employing possibly its technological time to come, are both meditations on the nature and changing forms of literary and cinematic media.
This backward-looking reading of Hugo is certainly not wrong and both book and picture are deserving of assay in terms of questions of class. In this essay, though, I will advise another, more forward-looking view, focusing largely on the conceptual and narrative ground both volume and film explore. Rather than situating Hugo in film'due south past every bit an argument for our cinematic heritage in an age of digital streaming, Hugo can be read as an statement for a futurity, posthuman vision in which homo beings live technologically-mediated lives. On this reading, Hugo is an extended meditation on the technological forces that are transforming not but movie house simply human beings.
Those transformations have led some to hypothesize that we are witnessing something of a paradigm shift, from a human to a posthuman world. It is widely maintained today that the convergence of nano-, bio-, cogno-, and data technologies has disrupted the once firm boundaries between homo and applied science, technology is seen equally central to the human condition, and the human being is portrayed as a product of technological relations.
It is in this posthuman context that Scorsese'south motion-picture show deserves a close, critical reading. Cardinal to the story of Hugo Cabret is a sophisticated philosophical account of engineering science that contributes to our agreement of how technology mediates culture while simultaneously being mediated by culture. While accounts of the nascency of the posthuman in human-applied science co-evolution typically move us beyond simplistic accounts of technology as neutral or autonomous, they are often under-theorized, especially in regard to examining the nature of these relations and their shape relative to specific man beings, the so-called users of technology. Turning to film and literature in this context, especially a child'southward novel and a "family film," helps us to examine in a more than substantial grade the thesis of technological mediation. Hugo, with its intertwined narratives featuring Méliès' office in the nativity of the cinema, and Hugo'south human relationship to one of Méliès other inventions, an automaton, as well as Méliès' goddaughter Isabelle, offers a nuanced view of human-technology relations which suggests that human life has e'er been shaped and mediated by engineering science only that we human beings are never just tool-using animals. While foregrounding the role and significance of homo-engineering relations in our lives, Hugo suggests that we need to situate those relations in broader cultural frameworks in which we recognize that technology is itself mediated by narrative frameworks. In this regard, Hugo mirrors a view long endorsed by feminist philosophers of the social and cultural dimensions of human beings. As Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar observe in their introduction to the anthology Relational Autonomy, "an analysis of the characteristics and capacities of the self cannot exist fairly undertaken without attention to the rich and complex social and historical contexts in which agents are embedded" (21).2 It is precisely these complex social and historical, and we should add, technological contexts that both Hugo and its source material attend to.
Hugo and the Posthuman
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a children'south picture book that at kickoff glance seems like a elementary coming-of-age story, something of a bildungsroman with a steam-punk splash, only information technology evolves to be more it beginning appears. In form, information technology clearly challenges the limits of traditional narrative and the distinction between print and cinematic text. As Selznick (north.d.) describes it:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is not exactly a novel, and it'southward not quite a motion-picture show book, and information technology's not actually a graphic novel, or a flip book, or a movie, just a combination of all these things. Each picture (in that location are nearly 3 hundred pages of pictures!) takes up an entire double page spread, and the story moves forward because you turn the pages to see the next moment unfold in front of you.
Volume and flick introduce us to Hugo, a twelve-yr-onetime boy living in Paris in 1931. Hugo lives solitary in the walls of the Gare Montparnasse train station and manages to escape observe equally he maintains the station'due south elaborate timekeeping equipment. He spends much of his time trying to outwit the station inspector, a stern man with a steel leg brace who takes delight in aircraft children to the local orphanage. Hugo'southward only reason for existence, his purpose, is to finish repairing an elaborate automaton capable of writing that he had worked on with his begetter while he was still alive and which he believes holds the clue to his purpose in life. To fix this device, Hugo steals the necessary parts from a windup toy stand up in the train station, which is how he meets the mysterious George Méliès.
Méliès runs a pocket-sized stand at the train station where he sells windup toys and various clockwork creations to the many passersby. He catches Hugo stealing parts and as a issue takes 1 of Hugo'due south prized possessions, a notebook filled with drawings of the automaton'southward various mechanisms fabricated past his begetter. When Hugo doggedly begs the old man to return this notebook, Méliès states that he will render information technology only if Hugo works off his debt at the toy stand. Hugo agrees and begins to form a relationship with Méliès and his goddaughter Isabelle.
Given access to an abundance of machine parts, Hugo manages to reconstruct the automaton and realizes that its purpose is to draw a moving picture (See Figure 1). The picture show it draws is a scene from a picture show that Hugo'due south father in one case saw, and below the movie the automaton signs the name George Méliès. Hugo and Isabelle find this exceedingly foreign and ready well-nigh finding out the automaton's origins and how it is continued to the owner of the humble toy store.
Information technology is at this point that both book and motion-picture show recount the history of Méliès. Prior to being consigned to the toy shop, the children larn that he was a famous magician who upon seeing the first films thought they were magic in its purest form. He gave up his successful stage human activity and became a director. He was successful for a while and his movies were adored by his legions of fans. However, the Great War arrived, tastes changed, and his movies seemed like escapist frivolities in comparison to the existent horrors seen on news reels. No one had time for his lighthearted fantasies, and thus the slap-up George Méliès, his dreams destroyed, sold his studio and became the old and bitter possessor of the mechanical toy shop in the railroad train station.
Upon their discovery of his tragic history, Hugo and Isabelle set about arranging a meeting between Méliès and Rene Tabard, a professor at the University of Film in Paris who is an gentleman of Méliès' piece of work and a lifelong fan of the man himself. Mrs. Méliès at outset forbids this meeting because of her husband's intense sensitivity to the mere mention of what he considers to be his past failures, but once Méliès is reintroduced to his past he realizes that his perceived failures were actually an important office of the history of film and his life. Book and flick end happily with the adoption of Hugo by the Méliès family unit and with Méliès being honored by the Academy of Moving picture equally a pioneer in film.
On the surface, there's little to propose that Hugo has much to contribute to the debate over posthumanism and homo-applied science relations. And however, both book and movie speak to concerns central to posthumanism. While a full account of posthumanism would take us far afield from a discussion of Hugo, ane can recognize a few elements key to nigh discussions of the posthuman and posthumanism. Cary Wolfe offers a succinct and widely cited business relationship:
Posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economical networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us), a new mode of thought that comes afterwards the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon. (sixteen)
Recognizing that the human form might be changing radically in lite of our imbrication in diverse networks, the posthuman is the technologically mediated human existence. Posthumanism is the critical credo in which the human being existence becomes an open up question and seeks to come to terms with these changes, reconceptualizing the human being in low-cal of its decentering in a multifariousness of networks. Posthumanism is centrally about how technology is implicated in the disappearing boundaries betwixt human beings, animals, and engineering science. The human being existence, it avers, is a prosthetic being who has co-evolved in and with animals, machines, and the material earth.
Returning to Hugo, we might again wonder what this coming-of-historic period family unit flick has to do with posthumanism. Fundamental to both book and pic is the crossing of boundaries characteristic of posthumanism. In the remainder of this section, allow me to suggest that Hugo occupies some of the same space as the posthuman by focusing on four figures exemplary of the posthuman: the media, automatons, dogs, and children. Beginning with the question of media and the distinction between impress and moving picture, every bit Selznick makes clear in his clarification of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, his "book" is a picture book incorporating not merely his many drawings, but also dozens of stills from archetype movie house. The book near reads similar a moving picture show, something that the moving picture dramatically illustrates. In an early scene of Hugo, Méliès, having appropriated Hugo's notebook, flips through it quickly, bringing Hugo's line drawings of the automaton to life, as a kind of flipbook. Later, as Hugo and Isabelle are in the Flick Academy library, they page through Rene Tabard'southward history of the picture palace and the pages come up alive, transforming from printed page to cinematic text. As the book mediates cinema and the movie theater mediates books, both book and film are situated in the realm of border crossings and disappearing boundaries betwixt print and cinema.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret was inspired by Selznick's love of early cinema and by his reading of Gaby Wood'south Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (2002), which itself is concerned with the borderline betwixt the lifeless and the living and questions about what makes united states human being, especially in the context of replicating human life in the form of avant-garde automatons. Edison's Eve is a cultural history of automatons and includes a give-and-take of Méliès in which Wood links the automaton with the birth of cinema and what nosotros might term the birth of the posthuman. Woods straight connects the automatons to the invention of film. Every bit she notes, "Cinema was a directly descendent of the androids of the Enlightenment; its birth was a Promethean, or Pygmalionesque, event" (173). The cinema and automatons were, Wood hypothesizes, both methods of mechanically reproducing the mechanical in man. Wood connects the nascency of cinema and automatons past situating Méliès in the history of other mechanists testing the boundaries of what was human (176). Woods argues that it was Méliès' workshop for automata that gave nascence to the movies and suggests that both the automaton and the cinema were early on figures in the exploration of the boundary between life and lifeless, homo and car (183), concerns central to the posthuman.
Hugo picks upwards this narrative thread linking automatons and the history of cinema and adds to it something of a dog'due south tale. Scorsese'southward film includes a subplot not in the book in which ii long-haired dachshunds join Monsieur Frick and Madame Emile. The film as well introduces the character of Maximilian, a Doberman who is the partner of the Station Inspector and drives many of the picture show's hunt scenes. In its focus on brute life as central to the film's plot and every bit providing comic relief, Hugo also participates in the disappearing boundaries between man and animal characteristic of posthumanism, humanizing animals and erasing the boundaries betwixt the states and them, questioning and destabilizing the traditional humanist boundaries betwixt human and animal.
Finally, we might recognize that while cinematically the posthuman is nearly often associated with the genre of scientific discipline fiction film, children and the family films that focus on them occupy similar territory. Children themselves occupy something of a liminal between-and-betwixt infinite characteristic of the posthuman, in that they are clearly homo and even so they have not acceded to their full humanity, at least as its traditionally imagined past adults in terms of their achieving autonomy, rationality, and responsibility. Hugo himself calls out to be recognized in his humanity and however is field of study to the whims of the Station Inspector and fifty-fifty, at to the lowest degree initially, Méliès. In Children'southward Literature and the Posthuman, Zoe Jacques argues that the imaginative and purlieus-blurring nature of children'south fiction is an unexplored location for shaping posthuman and proto-posthuman philosophy. As she observes, "children'due south fantasy animates and gives a voice to a host of imaginary, impossible and real beings so that cartoon boundaries between truth and fiction becomes sufficiently challenging as to question a rigidly hegemonic, humanist ontology, in keeping with the aims of posthuman thinking" (6). From the automaton to Maximilian to Hugo and Isabelle, Scorsese's film screens an involvement in liminal figures fundamental to an exploration of the posthuman.
Hugo and Technological Mediation
It is clear that both The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Hugo have engineering at their heart, a metaphor I will return to, and both demonstrate the axis of technology to our lives. On both page and screen, nosotros have clear representations of the very materiality of technology and an environment deeply shaped by the pervasiveness of engineering science, starting time almost obviously with 2 technologies that played dominant roles in arguments about the "machine age": the clock and the steam engine. Much of the activity in both film and book takes identify in the Gare Montparnasse railway station, and the sounds and sights generated by its giant steam engines shape the pic'southward mise-en-scène. The steam engine is key to both the narrative of film and book every bit well as to the history of movie house. The Gare Montparnasse became famous for an incident in which a locomotive batty and crashed through the station, a scene reenacted in both Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The steam engine is also a central character in ane of the first documentary films ever produced, the Lumières' 1895 sort film 50'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, which is also featured in Hugo's narrative and provides the inspiration for Méliès' love of cinema.
While the steam engine is often credited with powering the industrial age, Lewis Mumford has argued that the clock is equally, if not more, of import. Every bit he notes, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age...The clock…is a piece of ability-mechanism whose 'product' is seconds and minutes…" (fourteen-15). Clocks, likewise, play a pivotal office in Hugo's life. He has, later on all, been consigned to the clock towers of the train station where he must labor in the upkeep of the clocks, lest he be discovered and sent to an orphanage. The clicking of clocks and the passage of time play a pregnant part in the film'due south mise-en-scène and the clicking audio of time passing is often analogized to the unspooling of film. All the characters are deeply aware of the passing of fourth dimension, none more than and so than Méliès, who resents having been all but lost to history.
The transformations wrought by these 2 corking industrial technologies are made especially credible in the long opening tracking shot of the film, which begins with a circuitous shot of a clockwork mechanism that slowly transforms into a night vision of Paris, suggesting the metropolis itself is a giant clockwork machinery (Run into Figure two). After, as Hugo grows closer to Isabelle, he takes her to the clock tower and shows her the cityscape, commenting: "Right after my male parent died, I would come up here a lot. I'd imagine the whole world was i big automobile." As the camera sweeps through the city, it travels through the train station and forth the train tracks, alighting on the station's clock tower, where a tiny Hugo tin be spied staring out from the clock at the life below, unfolding in mechanistic precision.
Human beings are, as it were, at dwelling in this monument to industrial technologies, suggestive of the intimate means in which human being beings live in and with engineering. Indeed, engineering itself functions as a 1000 metaphysical scheme in Hugo'south life and the theme of technological mediation is driven dwelling house in the manner in which both Hugo and Méliès appropriate technological metaphors every bit they grapple with their own existential situation and endeavour to understand their place in a fractured world. Indeed, Hugo blows this image up into a metaphysical scheme meant to account for his very identify in the world and his purpose for being. As he tells Isabelle: "Machines never have any actress parts, you know. They e'er come with the exact number they need. And so I figured if the entire globe was i big car I couldn't be an extra role, I had to be here for some reason." Hugo'due south very purpose is vouchsafed by this thousand technological metaphor and we see how a technology such every bit the clockwork mechanism can itself function as tantamount to a myth, a story we tell ourselves to clear our place and significance in the world.
The automaton too plays such a role in Hugo's life, condign a central metaphor for agreement what it ways to be human being, particularly what it ways to be a broken human being. Selznick'south novel regularly employs metaphorical linguistic communication serving to connect human beings to their technological others: Hugo's listen was spinning, travelers are cogs in an intricate motorcar, Hugo feels the cogs and wheels in his head spinning in different direction, the imaginary gears in his caput were ever turning. And both Hugo and Méliès describe themselves as broken; Méliès in particular feels like a broken windup toy. Scorsese's have on the automaton noticeably diverges from Selznick's, in that while Selznick adheres more closely to the traditional image of an automaton dressed in dress and with wooden arms, Scorsese's is all lovingly glossy and gleaming, a Victorian have on a digital avatar.
The figure of the automaton too helps to convey the pure passion and existential joy that frequently comes from engineering science. Hugo'southward relationship to his male parent is mediated by their love of picture palace and their working together on fixing the automaton. When Hugo's father brings habitation the abandoned and broken automaton, Hugo is worried that it tin can't be repaired but his father replies, "Of course nosotros tin can fix it! We're clock makers, aren't we!" Father and son spend many hours together, laboring over the automaton, which comes to represent for Hugo his bond with his begetter. Both Hugo and his father are drawn to the automaton and feel a deep reverence if not love for the automaton. Hugo and Méliès share a mechanical bent and a love for and connection to machinery and Méliès besides long ago loved the automaton, stating "he was a particular treasure. I put my eye and soul into him." Méliès' fascination with technology and his dearest of machines is what initially draws him to cinema, as he recounts in the moving picture: "The Lumiere brothers had invented the movies. I roughshod in love with their invention. How could I not be a office of information technology? It was like a new kind of magic..." Where humanism has often been defined by its distrust and dread of the machine, particularly in those uncanny situations when they claiming distinctions between life and nonlife, the organic and the mechanical, Hugo presents technology as a source of wonder and even love and existential joy.
Across these early technological forces in the industrial auto age, we also have the technology of the book, which occupies a key role in Isabelle's life and the rediscovery of Méliès. The movie goes to some lengths to emphasize volume civilisation, including a touching scene in the movie not included in the book in which the owner of a used book emporium, Monsieur Labisse, gives Hugo a gift of the volume Robin Hood. Isabelle had simply thanked Hugo for taking him to the movies (Isabelle declares, "Information technology was a gift.") and then Labisse gives him a book that was intended for his godson. Both movies and books are gifts. Hugo had earlier commented that Labisse really has purpose and both he and Isabelle find refuge in Labisse's bookshop. Ane sees in both book and film a dearest and regard for book culture, even in the midst of the high engineering science of a 3-D, special-effects driven movie. This is especially noteworthy in Selznick'due south very non-traditional graphic novel which incorporates narrative with drawings and film stills, literally enacting a kind of textual and technological mediation.
Hugo besides underscores the fashion in which the technologies of volume and film shape subjectivity. Isabelle describes the bookshop equally "the near wonderful place on earth! Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped up into i," and she often understands her own experiences through the mediation of literature. "I feel like Jean Valjean!" she comments as she and Hugo begin an take a chance. She observes that information technology's alright for Hugo to cry for they are always crying in books. Hugo and his begetter bonded over science fiction and take a chance tales, reading Jules Verne and Robin Hood together. More than significantly, we learn that Hugo and his father used to bask going to the cinema and Hugo'south flashbacks are themselves presented in cinematic form. Every bit Hugo remembers back to when his begetter plant the automaton, nosotros hear the running of a projector (Méliès later comments, "I would recognize the sound of a movie projector anywhere.") and we meet the distinctive pattern of light coming from a movie projector as we are taken back in fourth dimension. Our very capacities to remember are shaped by our experience with cinematic applied science.
Novel and film as well, in interesting and contrasting ways, point both backwards and forrard to indicate how deeply implicated applied science is in human life and underscoring how human life has always been mediated by technology. A central element of the novel that all but disappears in the movie is the myth of Prometheus, the Titan and trickster figure who steals the gifts of technical noesis and burn for humankind and is linked in the novel to the founding of cinema. Prometheus steals burn down from the gods to create movies. In this regard, Selznick's children's novel interestingly points in the direction of Bernard Stiegler'southward (1998) appropriation of the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus in volume i of Technics and Time, where he connects Epimetheus' deed of forgetting to bestow whatsoever talents on man beings to Prometheus' souvenir of engineering science, which and then becomes the ground of our existence. Our anthropogenesis is simultaneously a technogenesis. Hugo too is forgotten, and, in this void, technology as well serves as his anthropogenesis, or better his technogenesis.
The figure of Prometheus is all but displaced in the Scorsese picture show. We have instead the Station Inspector, who plays a much larger office in the film than he does in the book. And hither too nosotros are reminded of our technoanthropological nature, of our being natural born cyborgs, to borrow a phrase from Andy Clark (2003). The Station Inspector, Gustav, was injured in Earth War 1 and he is forced to wear a leg caryatid, which becomes his defining feature. Indeed, the brace's squeakiness and propensity to seize up and become caught on things is the source of much of the motion picture's comic set pieces. By the finish of the movie, though, Hugo, our modern Prometheus, has redesigned the caryatid, which now works flawlessly, and Gustav reports: "Information technology does not squeak at all.…I'g at present a fully functioning man." With his take on the automaton and the Station Inspector, Scorsese embraces a steampunk artful that reminds us that our current fascination with artificial life and cyborgs already has a long history that predates our digital era.
Hugo's meditation on technological mediation extends to film technology itself and it is especially knowing in this regard, as it uses and foregrounds gimmicky digital technologies to tell a story nigh the invention of moving picture applied science. Nosotros learn in both book and movie that Méliès was an early adapter of film every bit a source of illusion and mystery and many of his films dealt with fantastic tales and relied on what was at the time advanced techniques to create fantastical images and scenes. Hugo literally pulls back the drapery so to speak on the technological production of film, showing united states how Méliès created some of this magic. Hugo itself, as a 3D film heavily dependent on CGI, engages in some of these very same practices of spectacle, foregrounding the simulational nature of motion-picture show experience and further underscoring technology'south arbitration. It takes complicated engineering science to produce Hugo, further underscoring the mediating nature of movie applied science, particularly in the hands of a consummate director such as Scorsese.
Hugo's Complications
All of this suggests that Hugo has given us a thoughtful take on man-technology relations that accords with the current recognition of how posthuman life is fundamentally mediated past engineering. Our lives are indeed inextricably jump upward with and shaped by technology. But cartoon on a metaphor from horology, I'd now like to read both texts somewhat against this grain. In horology, a complication refers to any feature on a watch that goes beyond the simple brandish of hours and minutes. Automatons themselves were something of a complication, demonstrating the ultimate art of the watchmaker. Hugo'south automaton, then, perhaps invites us to complicate this picture of technology and the posthuman and in this department, I'll argue that Hugo suggests that while our lives are indeed mediated by engineering science, we ought not to make the mistake of placing technology in a fundamental or foundational position, a mistake oft made today when nosotros place also much emphasis on the power of technology and forget that it as well has cultural, historical, and social dimensions.
Let's begin with Hugo's cosmological metaphor: the clockwork universe. While at that place are a number of elements in both book and movie that cover this technologically mediated vision of the creation, there are an equal number which push back against it and which wait for competing narratives and competing mediations in our lives. Consider, for case, Hugo's treatment of time. While Hugo's uncle tells us that time is everything, nosotros also learn in the conclusion to the book that "Time tin can play all sorts of tricks on y'all" (Selznick 2007, p. 509). While time might hateful the fixed, orderly globe of clock fourth dimension, which inevitably and inexorably moves forrad, analogous perchance to the fixed and orderly unfolding of the visual scene on the screen equally the spool of film inevitably and inexorably unwinds, fourth dimension might likewise mean our sense of lived time, in which time speeds up and slows downwardly, or even cinematic time, in which time freely moves backwards and forwards. Hugo itself is an statement for the mutability of time equally its narrative repeatedly takes usa backwards in fourth dimension. And as Selznick notes in regard to time and the movie theatre, "In the darkness of a new cinema that opened in a nearby neighborhood, Hugo was able to travel backward through time and see dinosaurs and pirates and cowboys, and he saw the hereafter, with robots and cities then gigantic they blocked out the heaven" (Selznick, 2007, p. 492). Scorsese seemingly emphasizes this alternative sense of time past inserting Salvador Dali and James Joyce into the action of the Parisian train station, perhaps recalling Dali's experiments with dripping and melting clock pieces and Joyce'southward experiments in Ulysses with narrative fourth dimension in which hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of words are used up in the expanse of a single day. Time from this alternative perspective is not merely the mechanical passage of seconds and minutes marked by the mediation of technical artifacts, merely the dramatic and symbolic time mediated by narrative and movie theatre and aesthetic phenomena.
Indeed, we may read Hugo as suggesting that while our lives are indeed technologically mediated, our appropriations of applied science are themselves always mediated by complex symbolic constructions. While horology is often elevated to a cosmological vision, it is also deeply tied to magic and Hugo's and Méliès love of magic, illusion, myth, and fantasy. Hugo comes from a long line of horologists charged with fixing clocks and keeping time, just what he actually wants to exist is a wizard. Hugo disrupts the simplistic technological metaphor of the clockwork mechanism, a dominant theme in the Enlightenment and i that still rules today. We see that Hugo is struggling with this metaphor and using information technology, employing it to make sense of his life and the misfortunes he has been subject to. But we also meet him struggling against it and resisting it much in the same way that he struggles against his family unit heritage of beingness clockmakers. Hugo adopts what he knows—fixing machines—to thinking about the universe as a whole, including thinking about the issue of purpose. His give-and-take of being broken or fixed, of having extra parts, of fitting in (coordinating to how all the parts accept to fit the automaton precisely) all suggest a particular mechanical and therefore technological take on the world. But this picture of the world must compete in both book and film with an alternative picture of the world shrouded in mystery and illusion and dreams and predicated not on mechanical fixity only the power of fate.
This same theme is emphasized in Gaby Woods's Edison's Eve, which recounts the foreign mixture of magic, technology, and desire that went into the early development of the automatons. Following the rediscovery of Méliès in book and picture show, he triumphantly takes the stage and addresses the audience every bit they truly are: "wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers…and magicians." "Come dream with me," he says. Méliès is not simply ane of the early inventors of film but the inventor of film as fiction and our appropriations of applied science are never far from the powerfully mediating influences of narrative and myth and fifty-fifty Hollywood magic.
At that place are still further challenges to Hugo's clockwork universe where everything has a identify and happens for a reason. While the novel concludes on the optimistic note that "The machinery of the world lined upwardly…and Hugo'due south future seemed to fall perfectly into place" (Selznick, 2007, p. 507), nosotros also take to assume that if the world is a vast machine where every part has a purpose and there is a reason for everything, then Hugo's father had to die, his uncle had to imprison him in the clock belfry, and his loneliness is completely explicable. And Hugo's loneliness and his disconnection from people are nearly palpable. After being defenseless by Gustav, he implores: "Listen to me! Delight! Listen to me! You lot don't understand! You have to let me become! I don't sympathize why my father died! Why I'm alone!" Hugo is as much characterized by his being alone as by his mechanical aptitude.
It is this fear which drives a fundamental and emotionally compelling scene in the film in which Hugo wakes upwardly from a nightmare only to hear a ticking coming from inside himself. He rips aside his nightshirt and discovers that he is himself an automaton and his heart has been replaced with mechanism (Come across Figure iii). He dreams of being enclosed and entrapped within the walls of the clock belfry every bit his humanity slowly seeps out. He finally awakens in a fright. While Hugo is attracted to the automaton and finds it beautiful, he as well fears existence turned into one. At this bespeak in the film, the clockwork mechanism is presented in darker and more claustrophobic ways. What Hugo lacks, both figuratively and in the case of the automaton literally, is a centre and he ultimately depends upon someone else to provide that missing piece, taking the difficult step of learning to trust Isabelle and reach out to someone or something other than the automaton. Hugo begins to push back confronting a metaphysical picture of the man suggested past the automaton and mutual to western thought.
This same theme takes center phase with our cyborg Station Inspector Gustav. Nigh the end of the motion picture, Gustav finally captures Hugo and locks him up until he can be taken away to the orphanage. He tells Hugo, "You'll learn a thing or 2. I certainly did. How to follow orders, how to go on to yourself. How to survive without a family, because yous don't demand one. You don't need a family!" Gustav is the human being equivalent of the clockwork mechanism. He's a social automaton—isolated and lonely, without a family unit, simply post-obit orders and keeping to himself. His chore is to keep the railroad train station running orderly and efficiently where at that place is no room for orphans, whom he characterizes equally urchins and vermin, declining to recognize their humanity. But he also yearns for a human relationship with the flower girl Lisette, with whom he bonds equally they both recall the mechanistic terrors represented by the Battle of Verdun in World War I.
The flip side of the Enlightenment metaphors of the clock work mechanism and the automaton is the view of homo relations as socially atomistic. And even so Scorsese portrays a film rife with people yearning for human relationship and connexion: Hugo and Isabelle, Gustav and Lisette, Emilie and Frick. Even the dogs get in on the action equally Emilie and Frick are brought together through the amorous pairing of their dachshunds. Every bit Gustav moves to arrest Hugo, Lisette looks at him imploringly and Emilie appeals, "Gustav, have a heart." And it'southward the heart that Hugo previously dreamed disappearing, and it's the heart that Isabelle finally provides to animate the automaton, in the form of a centre-shaped cardinal that brings life to the automaton and promise to Hugo. A heart-shaped fundamental Isabelle received from Mamma Jeanne who received it equally a gift from Papa Georges. While fatherhood plays an important role in Hugo, or at least the absent male parent does, it is relationships to women, mediated by the presence of a middle, that finally redeem Hugo and Georges and Gustav. When Gustav finally accedes at the end of the film to existence a fully functioning man, it's possibly partly because Hugo has provided him with a new prosthesis. But information technology's every bit considering he has a new relationship. He speaks start to the musicians he had previously run into: "Don't worry. I'1000 now a fully functioning human being." And then he looks direct at Lisette and continues, "Aren't I, beloved?" displaying one of the iii smiles he has mastered.
By the end of picture show and novel, Hugo and Gustav, besides every bit Georges Méliès of course, find their place. They belong. They are non alone. And this sense of belonging, of place, could not be provided by the automaton or the clocks or whatever of the other myriad mechanisms Hugo and Georges and the Station Inspector have surrounded themselves with. All three are deemed broken and demand to exist stock-still, but Hugo discovers that the mechanical fixes that work for the automaton don't suffice for Papa Georges or the Station Inspector or even himself. Hugo says of the automaton, "I idea if I could fix it ... I wouldn't be so solitary." But fixing the automaton isn't sufficient to addressing his loneliness. Our fix involves other human beings. Film and novel suggest that relations are important and that human beings can only be understood from the standpoint of a relational ontology. Technology plays a function in that ontology and nosotros human beings are technologically mediated tool-using animals. But before any of those tools tin can do the piece of work they are supposed to do, we human beings must offset have a center and enter into a more fundamental relation with other homo beings.
Feminist ethicists have long recognized the significance of a relational ontology and its claiming to the same Enlightenment (and 1 might add masculinist) model critiqued past posthumanists. As feminist philosopher Susan Sherwin notes in "Whither Bioethics? How Feminism Can Help Reorient Bioethics,"
Feminist relational theorists take helped make vivid and comprehensible the fact that persons are, inevitably, continued with other persons and with social institutions. We are not isolated atoms, or islands, or self-contained entities, but rather products of historical, social, and cultural processes and interactions. The beingness of any person is dependent on the existence and social arrangements of many others. Our interests are discovered by and pursued within social environments that assistance to shape our identities, characters, and opportunities. (Sherwin 12)
Sherwin's observations are peculiarly relevant when dealing with children, such as Hugo and Isabelle, both of whom are orphans seeking connection. In the world of Hugo, children, and perhaps even more then orphans, exist in some of the same boundary infinite as the posthuman. They are perceived as neither fully rational subjects nor in command of their own destiny or bureau; their humanity is not yet fully formed. But the processes by which we movement from children, thought of by the Station Inspector as vermin and urchins, abused by uncles and deserted by parents, that process seldom takes fundamental stage in accounts of the posthuman. How is the achievement achieved? Hugo suggests that no amount of technology, machines, or fifty-fifty dogs is going to be plenty to do the trick. What it takes to achieve this is first and foremost other human persons, caregivers who help us realize our humanity, even as that humanity is shaped by applied science and nonhuman others.
Annette Baier reminds the states that all persons outset out as children. Persons crave, according to Baier, successive periods of infancy, childhood and youth, during which they develop equally persons. "In virtue of our long and helpless infancy, persons, who all begin as small persons, are necessarily social beings, who first learn from older persons, past play, past imitation, past correction" (Baier 10). It is our social nature, the fact of common recognition and answerability, our responsiveness to other persons, that shapes and makes possible our personhood. Equally Lorraine Code observes, Baier'southward account of 2d persons "shows that uniqueness, creativity, and moral accountability grow out of interdependence and continually turn back to it for affidavit and continuation" (82). Hugo Cabret's "invention" involves a repudiation of the Station Inspector's dictum that y'all don't need a family to survive. His humanity unacknowledged, Hugo yearns for connectedness and to empathize why he is alone. As a children's novel and family movie, Invention and Hugo stress that maturity and the achievement of humanity comes non from alienating yourself from others and achieving autonomy through disconnection and independence but through a recognition of dependence and vulnerability and the need for others, a lesson that both Papa Georges and Gustav ultimately larn also.
Hugo comes into his own and accedes to his total humanity equally he risks moving out of the clock tower and setting bated his automaton and entering into interpersonal relations with Isabelle, Georges, and even Gustav. Ultimately, both Hugo and The Invention of Hugo Cabret are less nigh technology than near what it means to be human being in a technological world. And what it means to exist human is defined as much by our relations to others and our dreams and our desires for a little scrap of magic equally information technology is our relations to engineering science.
Complications Bated
Posthumanism encourages the states to reimagine what information technology means to be human, especially in calorie-free of our increasing imbrication in technological networks. Doing so, however, should not entail declining to recognize distinctive aspects of being homo. Hugo reminds us that we human beings need literature and movie, that both are gifts, that we demand to preserve that heritage and perhaps recognize that information technology points to distinctive features of the human experience, including our seeking out imaginative adventures. Yes, books and movie theatre are technologies, but they are technologies that betoken to something in the man being that Kate Soper refers to as "the distinctively human being appetite for innovative forms of cultural transcendence and individualizing cocky-expression" (366). As well, Hugo reminds u.s. that social relations are central to becoming human, that we become human in the presence of other human being beings and that without such relations we neglect to achieve our full humanity. Hugo ends not in the train station but in the Méliès family home with a lively party scene where Georges is united with his many fans, Gustave and Lisette join Frick and Emilie, and Hugo entertains guests with his magic as Isabelle begins to write his story. The automaton is relegated to a side room, where it sits alone, momentarily forgotten. And yet, the flick ends with an extended shot of the automaton staring out at us, engaging united states, perhaps inviting a last word: a mechanical, if non magical, word.
Endnotes
i I would like to give thanks Ian Olney, Colbey Reid, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and feedback on an before typhoon of this essay.
ii For more than on feminist arguments for reconfiguring the self every bit social and relational, see the essays nerveless in Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Cocky, edited by Mackenzie and Stoljar; the essays collected in Diana Meyers, Feminists rethink the self; and Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ideals and Other Slave Moralities.
Works Cited
Baier, Annette. "A Naturalist View of Persons." Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Clan, vol. 65, no. three, 1991, pp. v-17.
Lawmaking, Lorraine. "Second Persons." In What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Noesis, Cornell, 1991, pp. 71 – 109.
Hugo. Directed past Martin Scorsese. Paramount, 2011.
Jacques, Zoe. Children's Literature and the Posthuman, Routledge, 2015.
Mackenzie, Catriona and Natalie Stoljar. "Introduction: Autonomy Refigured." Relational Autonomy: Feminst Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, Oxford, 2000, pp. 3 – 31.
Meyers, Diana, editor. Feminists Rethink the Self, Routledge, 1997.
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization, Routledge, 1934.
Selznick, Brian. The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures, Scholastic, 2007.
---. (n.d.). The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Retrieved from https://www.theinventionofhugocabret.com/about_hugo_intro.htm
Sherwin, Susan. "Whither Bioethics? How Feminism Tin can Help Reorient Bioethics,"International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7–27.
Stiegler, Bernard.Technics and Time, Stanford UP, 1998.
Soper, Kate. "The Humanism in Posthumanism." Comparative Disquisitional Studies, vol. 9, no. iii, 2012, pp. 365–378.
Willett, Cynthia. Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, Routledge, 1995.
Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism, U of Minnesotta Printing, 2009.
Wood, Gaby. Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Anchor, 2003.
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