What better contemporary robot to talk about than the beer guzzling robot, Bender. Bender is one of the main characters in the television show Futurama, and is always a fan favorite. Bender can be described for the most part as quite selfish, and some of his most prominent qualities is that he loves to steal, drink heavy amounts of alcohol, and is a womanizer or lady fembotanizer. Bender was made in a factory in Mexico, with one purpose, which as his name suggests is bending. He can bend anything and everything.
Benders qualities are why I decided to write about him, one can see his qualities all over in today's society. Take for instance his alcoholism, he practically embodies the stereotypical college student who runs on booze. It is near impossible to go through the day without hearing at least one person saying, "I could use a drink." Bender begins to break down if he goes a time without a drop of alcohol, just like some people today and not just college students. Alcoholism has become quite predominant, and most people know one person who may be suffering from it. Some people may go through withdrawals if they have not had a drink in one day. One of Bender's other qualities is how he treats women. He can be quite degrading at times with his comments or remarks toward some woman or lady robot. Which today is a huge problem, that fact that most of my female friends carry mace or a taser on them because they are terrified for their safety is sad. So many women today hear degrading comments on the daily, and for the most part the person who says it does not even realize what they are doing.
One fear or anxiety that Bender brings up is that of the technology taking over. Bender is always making comments about how he wants to kill all humans or ruin everything that they care about. Although they are pretty much empty threats, he is still poking fun of those people who fear that technology will someday overrun the humans. But those people can just bite his shiny metal ass.
Though bender always jokes about ending humanity and despising humans, there are multiple scenes where his soft side comes out and he confesses his love for his human friends, usually fry. Do you think the writers intentionally do this to represent a relationship between technology and humanity? That it may be intimidating but will never be able to decide to be our enemy?
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, Bender is the primitive man. He drinks, steals, and he's a womanizer (kind of the description that people use to generalize about guys.) Through this, you could probably say that he isn't a fully developed person. It's kind of the way one thinks about how people have changed over thousands of years. He has an excuse though - he's a robot.
ReplyDeleteTrying to answer Zach's question, I think Bender's slow admittance that he cares for his human friends is actually a lot like the typical male personality. In that regard, I'm no different. It feels weird expressing all of your emotions. It just seems like more of a feminine trait to me, and probably to a lot of other guys, as well.
To date, my favorite episode is the one where Bender is blasted into space and gets to play God. He ends up going through various forms of emotions associated with being forever alone in space, undying, until he comes across that small colony of beings. The choices he makes when those little creatures are perfectly logical and yet he leads them to nuclear war and ultimately annihilation. I find it interesting that its a robot who cant really understand emotions that is chosen as the pseudo God for this scene. I wonder if this does not have larger connotations with robots just doing the most logical choice, as what brought Benders beings to nuclear war. Maybe despite robots best programmed intentions, under their control, humanity is doomed?
ReplyDeleteThere are so many examples of Bender expressing a desire to conquer or destroy humanity -- usually played for laughs -- but when the opportunity actually appears, he tends to do the opposite, choosing to keep his friends around, or find a reason not to kill all humans. Bender is a surprisingly compassionate character, especially since he is (arguably) the most fickle and ridiculous of the group when it comes to day-to-day situations.
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