Sci-fi cinema is peppered with a large number of constructed beings. There are several types of cyborgs. The predecessors to cyborgs are humans with prosthetic limbs (the line between a human with a prosthesis and a cyborg is indeterminant). These creatures began in literature (ie. Captain Hook) and are quite common in cinema even today (the one-armed man of The Fugitive or Moses Baxter's prosthetic hand in Hardware. Cyborgs can be found as humans resurrected from flesh into machine (such a Robocop) or as machanical beings with a human body (such as Edward Scissorhands or the T-800 Terminator). Beings are often cunstructed to look like humans but are not made out of organic flesh (such as Star Trek's Data and the replicants of Blade Runner. Mechanical beings can become endowed with a personality (Jonny Five of Short Circut). Humans can have their minds altered to become mental robots (Quaid in Total Recall, the towns people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alex in A Clockwork Orange). Human consciousness can be implanted into cyberspace -- where it looses the confines of the body (as seen in The Lawnmower Man, Max Headroom, and Videodrome).

Clearly, there are many types of machanical beings populating the world of sci-fi. Webster's defines a robot as an automaton, especially a person who acts or works mechanically and without original thinking. This definition perfectly describes the Tramp in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). In the film, the Tramp is a factory worker, and Chaplin shows how the Tramp is a slave to the machines with which he works.

The Tramp's speed in the workplace is dictated by the speed of the machine. As the conveyor belt races by at an increasing rate, the Tramp must work faster. The machine does not exist to help him -- it is not useful technology -- rather he exists to serve the machine. The Tramp becomes a robot for the machine, loosing his identity as a human. Eventually, the Tramp gets sucked into the machine, meshed into it's grears (see image). With this image, Chaplin demonstrates how people working in factories are literal machines.

In the film, when the Tramp's co-worker gets stuck inside the machine, the Tramp simply accepts his new position. There is no outcry as we would expect -- the little effort that is made to get the worker free is suspended when lunch time arrives. Again, the Tramp behaves as a robot. He immediately ceases his activities -- namely, freeing his co-worker from a giant machine -- and begins to eat lunch when the whistle blows. After much complaining, the Tramp takes notice of his co-worker again. Assumming that the man must be hungry (and not that he is complaining because he has been literally immobilized by the forces of industrialization), the Tramp begins to feed the man (see image).

Chaplin's film is a continual barage of messages. He visually punches us with images of the Tramp as a robot. During one scene, the lunch whistle is blown. However, the Tramp cannot stop the repeated motions required by the machine. He begins to tighten everything (see image). The Tramp looses his ability to function -- he cannot eat or drink because his arms keep spasming. He begins to adjust everything in sight, including the nose of one of his co-workers. Factory work has transformed his very exisitence. Industrial society undermines human identity in favor of mass production. This idea is again illustraed in the scene where the boss introduces the feeding machine. The Tramp is chosen to be the test subject for the machine. He is submitted to an uncertain technology. When the machine begins to malfunction, the technicians care about the mechanical parts, but not the human test subject. The Tramp must sit there while the machine repeatedly backfires: soiling and injuring him. The audiences laughter masks the fear that this is the trajectory of the modern workplace.

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