Cinema and the Dream of the Living Machine

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, theoretical rigor, and critical clarity. Designed for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in film studies, media studies, cultural theory, and science and technology studies, the book combines historical depth with a distinctive theoretical framework. An original “Cinematic AI Fantasy Matrix” provides readers with a practical analytical tool for comparative study in the appendix.