ABSTRACT
The bubble light foregrounded in the final image of A Brief History of Time identifies Stephen Hawking and his project with the same themes of the law and its relation to violence and chance that organize the earlier film. Certain popular fantasies about scientists and Utopian images of science cluster around the figure of Stephen Hawking. Hawking, as any visual image of him reveals, is sustained, cyborg-like, by an array of prosthetic devices including his speech synthesizer. The articulation of his mental processes with the prosthetic is what makes them sexy. In Errol Morris's film, the emerges visually in the remarkable division of labor evident in the gender specificity of topics as they are divided between the talking heads. The intersection of coincidence and law, gender and intellect, is revealed to be the place where thought occurs, the locus of the intellectual's activities.
