ABSTRACT
This chapter examines digital/human hybrid figures in three films. Transcendence (Pfister, 2014) centres on a dead man whose consciousness is uploaded into a computer. As a computer-human hybrid, he raises a powerful force to change the world. Spike Jonze's romance Her (2013) focuses on a man who dates his operating system and Luc Besson's Lucy (2014) is about a drug that enables a woman to access the full potential of her brain power. In all three films, the human brain is aligned with a computer consciousness that can extend and multiply itself rather than with a mechanical, robotic body. A gendered split arises between films in which the computer simulates a male mind and those featuring female-coded posthuman entities. In Transcendence, an aggressive male cyborg utilises the digital to manipulate the physical for personal power, whereas for female-coded figures in Lucy and Her digital enhancements allow them to transcend restrictive male control in a manner that ultimately frees them from gendered spatial constraints. While the male cyborg utilises composite digital/material spaces to try to impose a singular will on diverse environments, the female equivalents embrace a digitally enabled subjective multiplicity that allows them to thrive.
