Cinema and the Dream of the Living Machine (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)

Cinema and the Dream of the Living Machine offers a comprehensive critical history of artificial intelligence (AI) in Western cinema, tracing how films from Metropolis to contemporary science fiction transform technological anxiety into cultural fantasy. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and close film analysis, the book examines how AI repeatedly appears as servant, authority, lover, weapon, and mirror of human desire.Across nine chapters, Zornado and Reilly map recurring tropes, from disembodied systems of control to intimate companion machines that show how cinematic AI reflects capitalism, power, alienation, and the crisis of subjectivity.By treating AI not as speculative technology but as a symbolic formation, the book enables readers to understand how popular cinema diagnoses social contradictions and ethical failures, equipping students and researchers with conceptual resources to analyze contemporary AI culture with greater historical awareness, theoreti