In “Towards Embodied Virtuality,” Hayles discusses how the body and mind are separate entities of a being. Though this concept can be somewhat hard to believe or even process, as technology evolves, we see more and more that this idea is true. Hayles talks more about this when she says, “Identified with the rational mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body,” (Hayles 4). In this quote, she talks about how virtuality takes no shape or form, like the human mind, which is only housed by one’s body. But who the person is or what makes them truly unique are their thoughts and ideas, which are stored in their mind. In both “Be Right Back” of Black Mirrors and Stepford Wives, we see this idea of our minds and our bodies are free and separate as technology begins to evolve in two very different ways.
In “Be Right Back”, we are introduced to the characters Ash and Martha, a married couple who is moving to a home in the country. The very next day, while running errands as Martha works, we discover that Ash is dead. What is unique about this episode is that there is a type of technology that exists that will take all of the things Ash ever posted online and whatever information that Martha gives it to “recreate” Ash’s mind, including the way he thinks and the way he speaks. “Marvin Minsky precisely expressed this dream when, in a recent lecture, he suggested it will soon be possible to extract human memories from the brain and import them, intact and unchanged, to computer disks,” (Hayles 15). This example shows us that the mind and body can be separated, because someone’s mind or at least their “virtual mind” is still intact long after they are gone. For example, those who have passed on, but may have had Facebook long enough to develop an online identity, can be remembered through their posts and pictures, much like Ash was. The things they have said and done are still there. What the creators of the episode were doing was showing us that we are never truly gone as we still exist in the virtual world. Also, in the episode, VR Ash didn’t exactly need a body to communicate with Martha, though she chose to have kind of a filler body for this disembodied technological representation of her husband. This being or recreation of a being was still able to function just on information alone, the information that it was fed by Martha and by all of Ash’s social accounts. We, as a society, are so invested in technology and social media that we have created virtual versions of ourselves.
The movie, Stepford Wives, takes the other side of separation between mind and body. In this movie, we are introduced to Joanna Eberhart and her family as they prepare for their move to a small, quiet community, where the Men’s Association Club is the elite group of the town. There is something off about the women of the town, which Joanna, and later another woman named Bobby, notice, how submissive and one-sided theses women are. The men of the town have somehow figured how to separate the minds of these women from their bodies, implanting only what is necessary for their behavior into robot versions of themselves. Unlike Ash in the Black Mirror episode we watched, these women aren’t kept whole. Only the parts that were seen as fit for their “new” bodies were kept. Like the female characters portrayed in RUR and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, these women are only seen as objects, to be controlled and to carry out wishes or demands, at their own freewill of course, but still guided to do these things, whereas Ash was functioning almost as well as any human male, only relying on his “administrator” for confirmation here and there.
