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 rec...