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Amenábar's <i>Abre los ojos</i>: The Posthuman Subject

2009; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Volume: 154; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsf.2009.0006

2165-6185

Dennis Perri,

Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations

AMENÁBAR’S ABRE LOS OJOS: THE POSTHUMAN SUBJECT by Dennis Perri Grinnell Gollege “The reason you enter reality even though it is a pain in the butt is that it is someplace where you are not alone” (Jaron Zepel Lanier in Garreau 202). ON Stardate 41263.1 the U.S.S. Enterprise accelerates mysteriously and ends up over a billion light years from its previous location. To make matters worse, the crew finds itself in a galaxy where the boundaries between the mental and physical disappear. Individual thoughts spontaneously and often terrifyingly take material form, threatening to cast the entire ship into chaos. Human beings for whom thought and material reality fuse remain a fabrication of science fiction at this time. Nonetheless, the United States government, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), already funds investigations involving telekinetics, human enhancement, engineered human evolution, and brain-machine interfaces. The ultimate goal of one such project is “to seamlessly merge mind and machine, engineering human evolution so as to directly project and amplify the power of our thoughts throughout the universe” (Garreau 20). An ever growing body of literature imagines and evaluates this future, in which technological and medical advances result in mentally and physically enhanced humans. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts a tomorrow in which human beings will have integrated technology into their physiology and psychology. For Kurzweil, the term “virtuality” itself will no longer distinguish between an artificial and conventional existence: nanobots are in our capillaries and do nothing if we are in real reality ; once we want a virtual reality they intercept all the inputs and in89 stead give signals that fit the virtual environment and ultimately we can go to virtual places . . . we will meet other people there, both real people and simulated people. Of course, ultimately there won’t be a clear distinction between the two. (49) Hayles foresees a posthuman era when there is “a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and informational circuits in which it is enmeshed” (“Virtual Bodies. . .” 80). Donna Haraway has argued already that at the end of the twentieth century “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (150). The seemingly endless doubling of computing power convinces writers (see Joy and Kurzweil) that we are approaching a singularity, that is, “a point where our everyday world stops making sense” and that the nature of humanity will be radically changed (Garreau 72). Not surprisingly, debate has intensified in many disciplines over what being “human” means and what categories will describe and define subjectivity. Scott Bukatman considers science fiction a central discursive space in which representations of this new subjectivity have appeared: It has fallen to science fiction to repeatedly narrate a new subject that can somehow directly interface with – and master – the cybernetic technologies of the Information Age . . . a subject that can occupy or intersect the cyberscapes of contemporary existence. (2; 8-9) Alejandro Amenábar can be cited as a narrator of this new subject, even though he has made only one film that fits into the science fiction genre. In at least three of his films, however, the director addresses specifically the issues of identity and the nature of the human. Mar adentro (2004) dramatizes the biography of Ramón Sampedro, who judges that his life as a quadriplegic lacks the dignity required in his notion of being human. In two other films, Amenábar suggests the implications of an evolution toward a posthuman condition . Grace in The Others (2001), unable to cope with the loss of her soldierhusband , suffocates her children and kills herself; the film chronicles Grace’s emerging realization that she now exists as one of the dead and that categories of the living no longer apply to her identity in this new realm. The protagonist of Abre los ojos (1997) cannot bear living with a deformed and scarred face. Brought back to life by a cryogenic company, César represents Amenábar’s conception of an individual struggling to grasp the nature of subjectivity in the future and to comprehend his own...