FreeWrite on Dr. Adder

There are three themes in Dr. Adder that stand out to me. They are 1) landscape as organic entity, 2) Desire towards and of the altered body and 3) the removal of the conscious in the integration of the machine with the body. All of these share the concept of the cyborg in that there is a breakdown of the concept of the natural or whole body into a more complex that is more malleable. They all seem to circle around the idea of some sort of sickness as well.

L.A. as an entity seems to be colored as potentially sick, its various organs or systems polluted or in some cases, literally referred to as insane (the Visitor). It many ways it is a body in conflict with its self, the interface the main battle ground. Dr. Adder is representative of one side and Mox the other side. Since Mox has uploaded his conscious and become solely electronic based he seems to be aligned with the mechanical. If that is the case, the mechanical is also aligned with a sterilizing sort of morality (Thinking both of Mox’s goons but also his own castration). Argument can then be made for Dr. Adder as the biological side with his focus on the body and sexual desire. Of course this sort of binary opposition is problematized with Dr. Adders own fixation with gaining a mechanical prosthesis as well as Mox’s fixation on wholism or purity when he himself has gone through what might be seen as the ultimate amputation/modification of his body. The interface can also be representative of a human machine interface.

Dr. Adder’s surgical modification of men and woman are an interesting twist to the ideas of cybernetic prosthetics. Here we have the drastic modification of the body via the technology of medical science but without a mechanical replacement. Any sort of addition is purely biological in appearance. These modified bodies are objects of extreme desire and sexuality within this text. This makes me think of some of the other sexualized characters in other cyberpunk fiction. William Gibson’s character of Molly Millions is probably the most prominent example of a sexualized (but powerful) character whose status as an object of desire is partially derived from her modified body. (I should look for more examples of this). It’s interesting that all of the clients who are modified go on to be come prostitutes. It seems that the alteration of the body either always results in the person becoming a sort of commodity OR is always a result of some sort of market force. No one gets modified (except perhaps DR. Adder) for their own personal gratification. All of the male patients are automatically aligned with sadism and all the female patients are masochists. This could perhaps be a critique of the Hollywood created ideas or precepts of gender that people buy into.

The last interesting bit has to do with the cybernetic arm that Adder attaches to himself and how it results in an initial removal of his conscious. He becomes a mindless killing machine (perhaps the alignment with the machine with the military complex) that eventually collapses in exhaustion. There is a fear expressed here of the capability of the machine to take over and override what is human when we interface with it. This seems like a similar move in a lot of the more recent zombie stories, where some sort of biomedical agent results in a mindless flesh eating killer. In Adders case the machine allows a sort of clarification of his true identitiy. The posthuman nature of Dr. Adder (that he is not one singular ego with an intense drive but a complex system of sometimes conflicting entities) comes to the forefront and the control of Dr. Adder as a system switches to another part of his system, one seemingly more stable