Brett's Creation of the Humanoids Notes

The Creation of the Humanoids (1962)

Background

Director Wesley Barry was born in Hollywood and got his start as a child actor in the silent era. He actually looks like the little kid Stranger from Dark City, which is interesting because Creation of the Humanoids has other Dark City connections (see below).

He was the assistant director on the population control predictive programming TV movie The Last Child (1971). Assistant director on 8 episodes of the Mod Squad. First movie as an assistant director is the 1946 Bowery Boys movie called Mr. Hex, the synopsis for which reads: “Sach is given a post-hypnotic suggestion that turns him into a championship prizefighter.”

His directorial debut, The Steel Fist (1952), starring Roddy McDowell, is an anti-Communist B movie (Monogram studios) that seems designed to vindicate and glorify Western intelligence operatives trying to subvert the Eastern bloc. Mostly did B Westerns after that.

Writer Jay Simms would go on to write episodes for the Gene Rodenberry-created Lieutenant, an advertisement for the Marines set in Camp Pendleton, California; Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

One of his last credits is for the 1971 movie The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, part of the synopsis for which reads: “A U.S. Senator is spirited away to a secret New Mexico medical lab after a serious car crash. His injuries are completely healed by a secret organization that has developed advanced medical technology. What does the organization want in exchange for saving his life?” On the cover of this movie, there are also ashen bald alien-type figures, like the humanoids from Creation of the Humanoids.

He wrote Panic in Year Zero, starring and directed by Ray Milland, in which a nuclear bomb destroys Los Angeles (1962).

The story is loosely inspired by Jack Williamson’s Humanoid series, originally published in 1947-1948 in Astounding Science Fiction. It is set in a world in which human-looking robots, “in the name of their Prime Directive” to serve man, have

essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids.

They also have the ability to manipulate memory, which is important to the plot of Creation of the Humanoids. Williamson’s story seems partly to be a cautionary tale about how utilitarian logic joined to technology can lead to a dehumanized, mind-controlled society. They are defeated, in a new ending added to the novelized version of the story, with the use of “psionics,” otherwise known as psychotronics, i.e., with scientifically enhanced psi-abilities, i.e., theta programming a la SRI and Stargate.

This ending was suggested by editor-in-chief of Astounding Stories John W. Campbell, a man who was instrumental in pushing psi literature in the 40s and 50s. I wonder if Campbell is the main force early on behind this literary-cinematic trope, at least in the context of the sci-fi genre, where the heroes can only defeat the super-tech/super-powered bad guys by becoming more like them. Campbell went to the same elite prep school, the Blair Academy that reared John Cassavetes, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, and a laundry list of politicos. Campbell collaborated with L. Ron Hubbard on what would become the latter’s Dianetics and promoted his career.

Producer Edward J. Kay only produced this and another inconsequential TV movie, but he was a musical director or otherwise in the music department of over 300 films, almost all of them apparently B movies, including a disproportionate number of anti-Communist and pro-G-Man films.

Predictive Programming

The film opens on a nuclear Great Reset: the old man and the old society had to be destroyed to make way for the new man and the new society.

AI proto-nanotech built a synthetic brain. Humanoids are the 21-70 models of robots.

Radioactivity has reduced human birth rate to the point that humans will go extinct in the next few hundred years without artificial means of reproduction. So predictive programming combined with misdirection: fertility rates indeed continued to plummet, but the real causes are not revealed.

People eat “synthetic foods.” This was a standard sci-fi trope of the era (cf. 2001) and also a piece of predictive programming.

Machines have made most people stupid by taking over most of the tasks.

Parallels with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(Replicants, Humans, and Mind Control)

Many parallels here to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), probably owing to the common influence of Jack Williamson’s Humanoid series. The main plot conceit involves the problem of robots becoming indistinguishable from humans. As in Androids, there are laws against manufacturing robots over a certain level of intelligence. A robot that is outwardly indistinguishable from a human has killed a human, setting off a crisis and prompting demands from the Order of Flesh and Blood to eliminate all the humanoids (robots from series 21-70).

And as in Androids, the lead turns out to be a robot himself.

Theme of malleability and fungibility of man. Dr. Moffat, the dissident scientist in the Order of Flesh and Blood (otherwise called “the Brotherhood”), gives the postmodern view of man that lays the groundwork for modification of the organism, “Mankind is a state of mind. He is no more than he thinks himself to be.”

Pax, Esme’s bot boyfriend, implies that the clickers are the “next step” in an “inexorable evolution,” in which each new evolutionary step uses the previous one for food (think, “To Serve Man,” Twilight Zone).

An apparently global society is run by a single technocratic regime. Pax says that “machines” have replaced “politics” and that therefore the “Ministry of Politics” is “expendable.” Cragis defends the function of the Ministry of Politics as the coordinator of all the other ministries, which reminds one of the role of the true Statesman (who is also the true philosopher) in Plato’s Statesman. Pax’s point is that the function of coordination eventually gets taken over by machines as well once the goals of coordination are determined and submitted to superior machine intelligence.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner, and especially Blade Runner 2049 all play with the relationship between mind control and being a robot/android. There’s also an obvious Invasion of the Body Snatchers mind control component to this story: Dr. Raven, himself a replicant, along with the other replicants and high-functioning humanoids, are replacing the human population with replicants—which is one way to solve the crisis inherent in the approximation of robots to humans (as opposed to the Order’s solution of just eliminating the humanoids and circumscribing the role of robots in society). Pax is mind-controlling Esme in her sleep (think of William Sargent’s “deep sleep treatment”), making her more and more receptive to a total “mind meld.”

The replicant humanoids will, according to Dr. Raven, soon be able to reproduce by procreation. This is also the ending of Blade Runner 2049. Note, however, that this is not the final step (see below under Religious Themes): this only “fulfills a certain psychological need,” but eventually birth will have to cease when death ceases and all the replicants are immortal.

The Revelation of the Methodmoment comes at the end, when Dr. Raven breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, telling them that “Of course the operation was a success, or you wouldn’t be here.” Sci-fi as grooming/predictively programming the population to accept the breakdown of man-machine distinction and welcome “the new man.” The credits say something like, “End of the beginning,” further grooming the audience to accept this inevitable future.

Dark City Comparison (False Memory)

The theme of false memory and memory extraction evokes Dark City. Both movies (but especially Dark City) have mind control overtones. Remember that Tom O’Neill discovered relatively recently that Jolyon West had in fact developed a technique to implant false memories through inducing deep trance states.

As in Dark City, a “renegade” scientist is involved in developing the memory implant technology, in this case Dr. Raven, who has developed the “thalamic transplant” technique, which places the memories and personality of a dead human into an upper series robot that is a replica of the person. Notably, he had to erase the memory of the death experience from the replicant so that the replicant would not immediately commit suicide—definitely a nihilistic view of life behind this detail, or at least a dark existentialist view that holds that it is better not to be born in a world of suffering and death (“wisdom of Silenus”).

Similar to Dark City, the humanoid replicants “shut down” in the middle of the night (from 4 AM to 5 AM in this movie) and become totally at the mercy of their programmers.

The mere possibility of implanting false memories (or, in a different register, the mere possibility that any human could really be an android) lays the groundwork for universal gnostic gaslighting and thus universal decoherence. Consider the Revelation of the Method ending: if everyone really thinks this way, then everyone is effectively wiped clean and ready for reprogramming. Hyperstition.

Religious Themes

Cragis and the Order object to the existence of humanoids (as opposed to lower model robots) because they amount to a “soulless, godless imitation of man.” Dr. Raven, however, eventually convinces Cragis (only after he has shown Cragis that Cragis is a replicant/humanoid too) that God must exist in humanoids just as He exists in the creators of the humanoids, and he convinces him that he, Cragis, will “probably be deified” once they take over. A few lines later, Cragis says, “When the entire human race is transplanted, death will cease to exist.” To which Maxine replies: “And so will birth.”

Red and blue lights flash over the opening credit sequence also. And later we’ll see that the symbol for the society is a pair of overlapping rings, one red and one blue, forming a vesica pisces.

The robots are creating a “pseudo-religion”: they call the charging stations “temples,” the master computer the “Father-Mother,” and they have “death and resurrection” as ersatz sacraments. All this can easily be related to Yuval Harari’s insight that religion is indispensable to the kind of organization required to control the world. Hence, the vanguard of the scientistic ideology have long known that “religion” will never wither away (hence the “Star Trek” religion promoted by Gene Roddenberry, which seems to be a model for the trajectory of post-Vatican II Catholicism).

Odds and Ends

The lead replicant looks like Pinhead from Hellraiser.

The eyes of the humanoids look like those from The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, released just a year later, in 1963, directed by Roger Corman and starring Ray Milland, star and director of Panic in Year Zero, written by Jay Simms, who also wrote this. Makeup artist Jack Pierce, once one of the top makeup artists in Hollywood, had used such lenses for a 1957 B movie, The Brain from Planet Arous.

Wikipedia:

The Creation of the Humanoids is often said to be "Andy Warhol's favorite film".[14]The original source for this claim appears to be a 1964 art review of new Warhol paintings that begins with a short description of the film and states that the protagonists' climactic discovery is "the happy ending of what Andy Warhol calls the best movie he has ever seen."