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Can а dog and a robot really be just friends? This article argues that Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams (2023) uses historical Queer allegories of Animal and technological anthropomorphisms to map contemporary anxieties of Gay and Queer men onto the historical setting of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City. This reading is contextualized by the reshaping of Gay place and space by electronic and televisual media at the advent of the postmodern. Through presenting an overlapping of the (historicized) AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the (contemporary) Gay loneliness epidemic of the 2010s, Robot Dreams presents a vision of Queer Derridean survivance, or living death in the form of material and narrative traces-both for its characters, and for Gay and Queer men more broadly.
Are you alone?
A lonely, anthropomorphic Dog plays Pong (1972) alone in his New York apartment, eating microwaved Mac-and-Cheese. He flips through the channels, and a bright advertisement catches his eye: ARE YOU ALONE? CALL 1-800-ROBOT (Figures 1 and 2). Dog calls the line and, in the next scene, Robot is delivered to his door by a large anthropomorphic Ox in a United States Postal Service uniform. Dog assembles Robot and, in homage to Frankenstein, Robot sits up-casting a shadow across Dog's apartment. However, rather than blank horror, Robot's face presents both Dog and the viewer with a clean, welcoming smile. Dog and Robot quickly depart into a montage of roller-skate choreography (Fig. 3) and Gay dates in their 1980's New York City, filled to the brim with anthropomorphic animals, all set to Earth, Wind, and Fires 1978 disco hit September
This is the opening of Robot Dreams, Pablo Berger's 2023 animated non-dialogic film, which I will argue operates as a meditation on Gay and Bisexual Mens subjectivity in postmodernism, particularly in the context of the AIDS Crisis and New Media technologies. The film metaphorizes the Gay condition of the late 20™ century and overlays it with that of the present, engaging in both the historical identity of American Gay men, as well as the subjectivity in which we currently reside. I will first describe the relationship of Gay and Queer men to Animal and Technological anthropomorphisms. Following that I describe the way in which Robot Dreams maps...