M3GAN is not a born mover. The robot doll at the center of the film “M3GAN”
starts out stiff-limbed and jerky, prone to sharp, birdlike tilts of the head —
C3PO, if he were styled by toymaker Madame Alexander.
But
once M3GAN, short for Model 3 Generative Android, discovers more about what it
means to be a person, her movements begin to smooth out. In a montage, we see
the robot learn a simple TikTok-style dance alongside the young girl she is
programmed to befriend and protect. As M3GAN’s understanding of that
programming evolves into something more malevolent, she advances to sinuous,
sinister bodily virtuosity. When the film reaches its bloody denouement, she
executes a routine to rival anything seen on a television dance competition:
rolling through her spine, swiveling her hips, flinging herself into a
hands-free cartwheel.
The
internet found the uncanny absurdity of that dance scene — much of which ended
up in the first trailer for “M3GAN,” which opened last week — irresistible.
Thousands of fans recreated or otherwise meme-ified M3GAN’s choreography on
social media.
“That
dance is so specifically eerie,” said Gerard Johnstone, the director of
“M3GAN.” “It’s been crazy to see it end up in the internet history books.”
People
have been afraid of robots for as long as robots have existed. But robots that
can dance — really dance — are distinctly unnerving. A
gleefully campy horror-comedy, “M3GAN” plays on the mixture of amusement and
deep unease that real-life dancing robots often provoke.
Over
the past several years, robotics company Boston Dynamics has released a series
of dance videos showcasing its sophisticated machines, their metal-clad bodies
step-touching, twerking, and bourrée-ing to the beats of popular songs. “Do You
Love Me,” an intricately choreographed video featuring the humanoid Atlas
robot, the doglike Spot and the wheeled model then called Handle, generated a
viral flurry when it came out at the end of 2020. Commenters both marveled and
shuddered at the machines’ slick proficiency. Actor-comedian Seth Rogen mused
about how “it would actually be funny” if the robots danced “as they kill us
all” on Twitter.
“When
you see the Boston Dynamics robots dancing in perfect unison,” Johnstone said,
“it’s almost like them looking at us and saying, ‘We can do what you do, and we
can do it better,’ in the most obnoxious way”. He chuckled. “Like they are
going to sashay their way toward the extermination of all humanity.”
M3GAN’s
ice-cold, ruthlessly calculated “performance” stands in contrast to the human
dancing in some recent horror films, where flesh-and-bone bodies reach states
of overheated delirium. Choreographer, director, and writer Jack Ferver, who
worked on the coming horror movie “The Parenting”, said dance horror is
effective when the person dancing “transcends their personhood”.
But
what does that mean for a nonperson? Robots are not dead behind the eyes
because they are in some kind of ecstatic trance; they are dead behind the eyes
because they are not alive.
In the
realm of the imaginary, a rich legacy leads to “M3GAN”. Mechanical dolls dot
dance history — particularly in ballet, whose canon dates mostly to the 19th
century, a period when the rise of mechanized industry spurred anxieties about
the consequences of automation. (The comic ballet “Coppélia” features an inventor
who dreams of bringing the mechanical doll of the title to life; a recent film
version of the ballet recasts Coppélia as a robot). Dangerous androids have
played influential roles throughout film and pop culture history, especially
recently, as the rapid advancements of the computer age have made
robot-apocalypse scenarios feel more and more plausible. In literature,
fantasies about the consequences of animating inanimate objects go back through
“Frankenstein” all the way to Pygmalion and Prometheus.
“You
can see that there’s a genealogy here that results in a TikTok-dancing murder
robot named M3GAN,” said Sydney Skybetter, a professor of choreography and
emerging technologies at Brown University. “This is fundamentally some old, old
stuff.”
“M3GAN”
riffs on some of the classic conundrums that arise when a machine develops
humanlike qualities. But to have M3GAN dance — a very human impulse — was not
part of the original script. Johnstone described it as “one of those crazy 3am
ideas” that he had later in the process, when considering the evolution of
M3GAN and how she might “keep her victims’ eyes locked on her.”
Though
“M3GAN” used an animatronic doll for simpler scenes, a robot that could walk,
let alone dance, was beyond the production’s budget. So it was a human dancer,
the talented 12-year-old Amie Donald, who brought M3GAN to dynamic life,
wearing a silicone mask and hands that were digitally augmented to look more
doll-like. Amie and her teacher, choreographer Kylie Norris, created the final
dance sequence together, trying to capture the mesmerize-and-kill vibe of
Johnstone’s fever dream.
“Gerard
wanted it to be very creepy and like, ‘Whoa, what is she doing?’” Amie said.
“She’s not supposed to do that! She’s a robot!”
Dance horror is effective when the person dancing “transcends their personhood”. But what does that mean for a nonperson? Robots are not dead behind the eyes because they are in some kind of ecstatic trance; they are dead behind the eyes because they are not alive.
Amie’s
gifts as a dancer ended up expanding the vision for M3GAN’s movement throughout
the film. “There was a moment where we wanted her to rise up from the ground
like a cobra, without using her hands,” Johnstone said. “The stunt guys were
all ready to rig that up. Then we get this video from Amie’s mom, of Amie doing
it on her own, after four minutes’ practice.” Johnstone took to calling Amie
“the machine” — a human machine, playing a machine trying to be a human.
People
are finely attuned to the movements of dancing robots, real or fictional,
because we are kinetic empathizers: The way we move in relation to one another
is part of how we form bonds. “One of the first things humans notice about
robots is how they move,” choreographer and roboticist Catie Cuan wrote in
Scientific American. But real robots have not been very good at humanlike
movement until relatively recently, because the complexities of humanlike
movement, especially dance, pose a colossal programming challenge.
“A
couple seconds of a robot dancing requires hundreds of hours of engineering,”
Skybetter said, and when we see it, “I think we register, on some level, that
complexity.” That’s where fear may begin to seep in: A dancing robot can be
entertaining, but it is also a demonstration of how advanced these machines
have become.
We also
tend to think of dancing as a uniquely human phenomenon. When something inhuman
dances — especially something as opaque, to most of us, as a robot — our
empathy wires can get crossed. “Robots that dance, these are haunted and haunting
contrivances,” Skybetter said. “They are spooky because they move in ways we
understand they shouldn’t. Also, apparently, they can murder people.”
The
killer-robot fears that animate so much science fiction are not unfounded. In
recent years, the accelerated development of drones and bombs that can decide,
without human input, whether to attack targets has prompted significant anxiety
and backlash. Though Boston Dynamics has pledged not to weaponize its robots,
it has long-standing ties to the military; the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) was an early funder.
Skybetter,
who works with Spot robots at Brown, noted that the Boston Dynamics robots are
networked: When you teach one of them to dance, you are actually teaching all of
them to dance. Those advanced mobility techniques could then be deployed by
other robot owners in unknowable and potentially violent ways. “What robots do
here,” he said, “is introduce an entirely different ethical continuum and time
scale to what it means to be a choreographer.”
“M3GAN”
makes fully explicit the security threat implicit in the Boston Dynamics
robots. Johnstone said the film was very much inspired by the company’s videos
— but not the dancing ones. Rather, he cited a series of clips showing engineers
testing the robots’ “robustness” by kicking them and hitting them with hockey
sticks. “I watched all that abuse, and I couldn’t help but think, Oh, my God,
don’t poke the bear,” he said. “Those things are going to come and take their
revenge.”
Taking
revenge is — mild spoiler alert — exactly what M3GAN ends up doing. Johnstone
describes “M3GAN” not as a Pygmalion or Prometheus story, but as a Pinocchio
story: This is a robot that wants to be a real girl. Her killing-spree dance
party shows just how many strings she has snipped away. As robot capabilities
go, the ability to kill is not all that advanced. But the desire to
kill, like the desire to dance, is more complex — or, rather, human.
Despite
the impressive facility of today’s robots, vengeance-minded machines are
probably not coming to murder us anytime soon. Or to replace human dancers.
Skybetter said that initially, Boston Dynamics had planned for its robots to
perform their dances live for an audience. But functionally, stage environments
require a remarkable degree of stability and flexibility. “Think of all the
things dancers do that make their jobs seem straightforward and simple that
are, for a robot, incredibly hard: dealing with lights, dealing with uneven
floors, dealing with people not being where they’re supposed to be,” Skybetter
said.
Ultimately,
our fears about robots are mostly projection. “We don’t trust robots because we
don’t trust people,” said choreographer Monica Thomas, who worked with Boston
Dynamics engineers on the company’s dance videos. As robots begin to move and
behave more like we do, our wariness grows.
Ferver
pointed out that “M3GAN,” like so many fictional portrayals of feminized
androids, reflects our misogyny as much as the dangers of killer robots. “A
great horror thesis is: What happens when we veer off of repeating what we’ve
been socially programmed to do? And in this case, what happens when it’s a
robot — a girl robot — and it ends up being violent?” Ferver
said. “Well, that tells us more about society than it tells about the robot.”
From an
artistic perspective, the singular creepiness of robotic movement offers much
to explore. “I feel like we’ve established that robots can dance in a way that
we recognize,” Thomas said. “How can they dance in ways that are new and
different? I think the desire is to really indulge the weird.”
The
“M3GAN” dance hit a nerve online because it thoroughly indulges that weird. And
while the strangeness of non-“robotic” robot movement may trigger our limbic
alarm bells, there can be beauty in it, too.
“I
think it’s cool for robots to spend time dancing, as opposed to spending time
doing things that could be genuinely harmful,” Thomas said. “Imagining a space
where technology brings us joy, brings us kinesthetic empathy — those are good
things. And if we leave technology only to the realm of fear, then we don’t get
to have that future.”
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