Cherry 2000's 2017: Some Thoughts

On its much-delayed release the film Cherry 2000 was not a commercial success, and rather predictably so--the backers, unsure of how to market a film they had spent a then very respectable $10 million to make, letting it sit on the shelf for over two years before dumping it in theaters with so little fanfare that the movie's own star Melanie Griffith herself apparently didn't know it had ever come out. Still, after that one didn't have to go out of one's way to find it on cable, where it seemed to have got a lot of play (helped perhaps by Griffith's career hitting its peak that very year with her Oscar-nominated turn as Tess McGill in Working Girl).

Ubiquitous as the film became attitudes toward the film don't seem to have warmed very much. Its Rotten Tomatoes score today stands at 42 percent with audiences--and an even worse 36 percent with critics. Still, I think a case can be made for the film having acquired a cult following, in part because even if most of it plays like just another post-Mad Max adventure tale about people driving around a desert in the wake of some vaguely sketched civilizational collapse it had the benefit of quirkiness. As it happens the reason why the protagonist of the film is out in the desert is that in the then far future year of 2017 he had a robot wife with whom he was very happy until an accident involving a washing machine caused her to short-circuit. Wanting her repaired he finds to his dismay that her particular model (the titular "Cherry 2000") is no longer manufactured, and that the only replacement parts he can get are in a warehouse stored beyond the Zone where something like modern middle-class life goes on in the wasteland where stands what used to be Las Vegas, and as a matter of practical necessity enlists a "Tracker" to help him reach it. That is the point where the film skews toward the Mad Max-ish stuff, but prior to that we see that robots and the desolation are not the only changes in the world, the relations between men and women having become very acrimonious indeed--as shown in one of the film's most commented-upon scenes, the hero's being dragged to a single's bar by his friends, which shows us what seeking non-robot "companionship" looks like. Here we see that in this era a pickup in such places is something one completes with the help of lawyers as they draw up a contract specifying exactly what may and may not be done on the date to follow (complete with all the melodramatic shouting and threatening that audiences expect of the movie-and-TV version of the legal profession's work).

Looking at such bits I can imagine that if the film was thought to be tough to market in 1987 it would have been tougher still to market in the actual 2017, the year that the #MeToo hashtag took the web and the culture by storm, and of a considerable hysteria against sex robots in spite of the fact that they didn't actually exist. Indeed, a few years on the Guardian, inconsistent and tepid on the left's traditional concerns regarding the domestic and international economic and political order, but utterly fire-breathing on gender, remarked the "hyperbole" of the period when observing that not only had such robots not materialized then but might never do so--while of course ignoring just how much that very newspaper participated in said hyperbole as it ran piece after piece denouncing sex robots, and the men who would want them (heterosexual male interest, of course, the primary thing agitating its writers about the matter). Still, if it would seem that there is much in the movie that adherents of "woke" gender politics would find completely unacceptable, the film still hewed to a pointedly feminist view in the protagonist ultimately giving up his robot to be with a flesh-and-blood woman instead, with this the more pointed still because as a Tracker Edith Johnson (make of her last name what you will) was the opposite of the fantasy of ultra-feminine domesticity that Cherry represented. The politics are clearer still when one contrasts the story's course of events with that in another human-robot love-themed comedy from the prior year, Making Mr. Right, where the female protagonist of the film does indeed find happiness with a male robot by film's end.

It is, of course, not fashionable or politic these days to point out any way in which the prevailing mores may be to the disadvantage of men (save in a "patriarchy is bad for men too!" way), but one can see a double standard there--namely that the prevailing opinion has as of late been prone to judge women much less harshly than men for flouting societal conventions in this area of life, with what one sees in matters such as involvement with a significantly younger "partner" extending to ignoring the Space Pope's injunction against seeking "robotic companionship." It appears reasonable to see this as connected with another double standard, namely the acceptability of devaluing members of one sex against the other--with this going so far as to make of the view that where women are concerned men are replaceable and altogether dispensable an uncriticized commonplace. Thus is the woman who chooses to be without a man not merely respected as having made a valid choice, but often praised for her independence and "empowering" decision, while even those quick to celebrate female singleness, and dismiss in tones of contempt any reference to male need see the single (heterosexual) man who elects to be so as suspect--as in some significant way flawed or failed, dismissing him as misogynistic reactionary, or at least someone who "never grew up." Thus is it also the case that the woman who would prefer to be with a man but finds the dating market frustrating is permitted to blame men for failing to live up to her standards ("All the good ones are taken!"), but men required to blame only themselves when similarly frustrated, and blamed by society at large even when they aren't frustrated, just single (all as pointing out the mathematical absurdity of blaming men for their singleness when so many women just aren't interested in a relationship with anyone is specifically forbidden). Of course, when so much of what is obvious--and undeniable--is so unsayable, how can those concerned about these problems hope to get anywhere with regard to men and women learning to get on in a world very different from that of their great-grandparents? The plain and simple answer is that the thunderously promoted marriage of postmodernism and status politics has never been about addressing such problems, but rather distraction from the consideration of life's problems, and for the well-positioned, a tool for cynically getting ahead in the scramble of the petty bourgeois after "success" that defines their lives. Where all that is concerned it has certainly accomplished its end.