“A Thing About Machines:” On Cyber Horror, Techno-horror, and Technophobia in the Digital Age
Caution: The following contains spoilers for The Twilight Zone: “A Thing About Machines,” Christine, and Ex Machina.
Judging solely from my iPhones screen time reports (which are far too shameful to admit here), it might seem as if I have no qualms at all with technology. Not only am I active on social media, perhaps a little too active…, I spend almost all of my waking hours devouring film, and my laptop is infested with games, music, and about a million miscellaneous apps.
On the surface, you could joke that I’m digitally infatuated or “chronically online,” as my partner says. But behind the screen and cybernated veil, the truth is that technology scares the ever-living daylights out of me. Even so, it is simultaneously that same distressing phobia that led me to discover cyber and techno-horror, two converging subgenres that accentuate my fears in the lushest way possible.
Growing up in the nineties, I have to admit that many of my fondest memories revolve around technology. I vividly recall thumbing through the LaserDisc collection in my parents’ bedroom and dragging my little fingers down the spines of the sleeves. The edges were soft and cottony, not from age, but from immensely frequent play. On top of that, I remember spending hours at the Blockbuster Video near our house, lingering in the horror section, much to my dad’s dismay, and bringing home VHS tapes for my mom and me to wolf down before nap time.
Videocassettes, especially, with their toylike blockiness and seemingly magical intricacies, have always felt like little treasures to me. As both a lover and collector of physical media to this day, they continue to intoxicate me with an almost holy decadence. Even now in my reminiscing, I can still make out my mother’s and my hazy outlines napping with Elm Street on in the bedroom, the tape humming melodically in the VCR like a lullaby or ambient music, and the sound of the old whirring machine enveloping the entire room.
Ultimately though, however peculiar as it was, falling asleep to the sound of a screen-locked nightmare demon was not what did me in. Rather, I can pinpoint the initial blossoms of my technophobia quite specifically on an episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, one quite aptly named “A Thing About Machines.”
I first saw this episode with my father while we ate frozen mini-pizzas on the recliners in the fireplace room. As with my other tech memories, this particular one doesn’t shy away from the uncanny quality of machine and nostalgia fusing inexorably together. In any case, if you’ve been lucky (or unlucky?) enough to miss this one, the episode goes as follows:
Mr. Finchley, the ill-fated main character and a petulantly entitled and misogynistic bon vivant, has broken his television set and called in a mechanic to fix it. We immediately find out, however, that this is a far from isolated incident for Finchley, as he apparently destroys his household appliances on the regular.
The mechanic, who begrudgingly knows him quite well at this point, tells Finchley that his machines keep breaking down because he doesn’t “...treat them properly.” Finchley, however, won’t listen to reason. Rather, the snobbishly infantile man is adamant that his machines are the ones conspiring against him.
Essentially, Mr. Finchley is and has for a long time been in a tireless battle with technology. This is likely because he has no clue how to connect with it on any sort of meaningful level. Certainly, the idea of connectedness is nebulous at best to Finchley, whose unrelenting pompousness and fragile ego have managed to push away nearly all of his acquaintances. But as we spend more time with the man, we watch him get thrust into an even more desolate, albeit well-deserved, isolation.
Because of his flagrant unwillingness to change, good old Mr. Finchley eventually hits rock bottom and is left to his own devices with his own devices. The “... mechanical Frankensteinian monsters” as he calls them, thus, become the sole proprietors of his violently misdirected rage. Dissimilar to Frankenstein’s monster, however, whom I’ll defend ‘til I’m flower food myself, the irredeemable Mr. Finchley continuously mistreats others, because of his own ignorance, cruelty, and self-assuredness. It’s ultimately these vile qualities that seal his fate as he inches closer and closer to his mechanically charged death at the end of the episode.
Mr. Finchley preparing to throw a chair at his television
From the show’s midpoint on, we see Finchley’s not-so-innocent contrivances animate one by one, attacking him in an autonomous merciless vengeance. Finally, as the show nears its conclusion, Mr. Finchley permanently succumbs to his machines at long last. His car, the largest and most deadly of them all (think: Christine, without the romance), chases him into a lonesome swimming pool, and he subsequently drowns. The credits roll, and I’m changed forever.
As a child who was so rarely afraid of horror films or television, this experience awoke something in me. Not only was I surprised at my own reaction to this episode, I was confused by what had elicited it. I remember my young mind churning with dread and anxiously pondering a mélange of desperate questions, the kind that bled into my adulthood and still often plague me today.
Was Mr. Finchley correct the whole time? In his universe, was technology inherently evil? If not, did his machines come to life just to get revenge? Are machines this powerful in my own universe? Are they conscious? Are they watching me? Are they capable of bloodshed?
At the end of the day, these questions have no clear answer, and with how rapidly technology’s advancing, it’s futile to even guess. It’s one of those phenomena that’s somehow as inescapable as it is elusive, and as with Finchley in “A Thing About Machines,” Arnie in Christine, and both Nathan and Caleb in Ex Machina, how could you not be lured into something so magnetically mysterious?
Of course, unlike Arnie, Nathan, and Caleb, Mr. Finchley abhorred technology right from the get-go. The episode’s title, however, gives me pause, because the phrase “a thing about” usually indicates a fondness for something. In many cases, it even carries with it a note of flirtation, as would more accurately describe the seductive situations claiming the lives of the men in Christine and Ex Machina (assuming that Caleb died at the end, which he totally did).
Arnie Cunningham with his beloved Christine
All the same, Mr. Finchley, just like the unfortunate others, was more or less responsible for digging his own grave. Intimidated by technology as he was, he ultimately couldn’t leave well enough alone. As was the case for the men in Christine and Ex Machina, Finchley’s toxically masculine obsession with machines turned deathly sour, costing him his body, mind, and spirit in the process. When I reflect on these characters, however, and in turn my own day-to-day interactions with technology, I can’t help but wonder if we are all consumers, or if we are just simply consumed.
Nathan and Caleb blissfully ignorant in Nathan’s lab
Toxic masculinity notwithstanding, I confess that I myself am no stranger to obsession. Diagnosed in my mid-twenties with obsessive-compulsive disorder, admittedly most of what I do and watch is informed by this lens. As terrified as I am of machines, computers, and the shadowy implications they carry, I am tenfold afraid of my psyche’s response to them. Even so, my curiosity about technology is and will always be stronger than my fear of it, making cyber and techno-horror the perfect stomping grounds for my morbid questions and intrusive thoughts to haunt.
Much like Mr. Finchley, I am also unnerved every day by the machines in my house. There are so many of them that in this room alone, I can count four. I can never expect to even come close to their brilliance. But still, I differ from Finchley, because I do try to embrace my machines, whether for better or for worse. After all, as inescapable as they are, I’d much rather surrender and lean into them than wind up in a lonesome swimming pool.