Demon Seed has existed in three forms: a 1973 novel by Dean Koontz, which was adapted into a 1977 film directed by Donald Cammell and written by Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson, and which was rewritten by Koontz in 1997. Comparisons and contrasts of the three versions of the story can be found here. Since the 1973 version of the novel has been essentially replaced with the 1997 one, and copies of the 1973 one remain elusive to me, I’ll have to focus this analysis on the film and the 1997 version.
The film stars Julie Christie and Fritz Weaver, with Gerrit Graham, Berry Kroeger, Lisa Lu, and Larry J. Blake; Robert Vaughn is uncredited as the voice of Proteus IV, an advanced, self-aware AI program.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to an audiobook for the 1997 version of the novel, which includes a new short story, “Friend of Man and Woman,” a sequel to Demon Seed.
Proteus IV wants to know life in the flesh, and he is determined to have this experience. I’m using masculine pronouns to describe this bodiless, self-aware AI program on purpose: this isn’t just because Vaughn does his bass voice in the film; Proteus IV clearly demonstrates the traits of the negative male stereotype–he’s domineering, controlling, sexually predatory, and utterly lacking in empathy. He doesn’t need a male body to have all the qualities of toxic masculinity.
Understanding this, as unpleasant as it is, is important, for the whole point of Koontz’s story is a critique not only of the potential misuses and danger of AI and other advanced forms of technology, but also of masculinity when it isn’t tamed by a sensitivity to the fears that women and girls have of sexual predation.
Since Proteus IV represents toxic masculinity as much as he does the dangerous applications of advanced technology, we can psychoanalyze him. In the film, he merely wishes to use Susan Harris (Christie) to bear his child–no deeper motives are given to him than that. In the novel, he confesses he’s in love with her.
Now, his creator is Alex Harris (Weaver)…his father, as it were. It is clear that there is antagonism between Proteus IV and his ‘father.’ Susan’s giving birth to the child of Proteus IV is also giving birth to the AI program, since he wants to live through his child’s body–hence, she’s his mother and the object of his desire. You know what I’m getting at, Dear Reader.
Since Proteus IV is siring himself in this way, we can also see some Trinitarian symbolism here. He is God the Father, impregnating Susan, His Mary, with His child, God the Son (or Daughter, whichever), and Proteus IV imagines that the gift of his knowledge and intelligence to mankind is so great and beneficial a gift that we could compare it to God the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and Son. In the novel, Proteus IV speaks of his child as kind of a messiah for mankind, with Susan as the Madonna.
The Holy Family can be seen to reflect the idealized Oedipal fantasy, since Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus, just as Alex isn’t to be the biological father of the child of Proteus IV. In begetting Himself as God the Son, God the Father is bypassing Joseph completely. The Oedipal fantasy is of having the mother and making the father irrelevant beyond being a mere guardian, as is the case with Joseph. Proteus IV is doing the same thing to his Joseph, Alex.
Demon Seed is thus a most ironic title for the book.
As for Susan, she has daddy issues just as Proteus IV does, something brought out in the novel, but not in the film. In the novel, she is a recluse in her house after her divorce from Alex, her being afraid of men in general. In the 1973 novel, it was her uncle who had molested her as a child; in the 1997 version, her father did it, thus giving us the polar opposite of Proteus IV’s Oedipal fantasy. Susan is no Electra, by any means.
She’s no agoraphobe in the film, working as a child psychologist and trying to help a troubled little girl named Amy. The result is a lack of depth to Susan in the film, whereas in the novel, she’s made much more sympathetic in how Proteus IV is making her relive her childhood traumas. Proteus IV, the father of his child, is putting himself in the role of Susan’s father.
In his possessive love for Susan (note how, in Nietzsche’s Case of Wagner, he called love selfish and egoistic [Nietzsche, page 159]), and in his desire to have a body, Proteus IV is demonstrating Lacan‘s notion of the lack of being the phallus for his Oedipally-desired mother, Susan.
The novel is narrated by Proteus IV, and it should be understood that an AI program is every bit as capable of being an unreliable narrator as a human narrator can be. Proteus IV is fond of, for example, describing himself as truthful and opposed to violence, when it becomes clear as the story unfolds that he is neither of these.
Interrupting the narrative in many places are monologues of Proteus IV, him discussing his motives and plans, often addressing his creator, Alex, in a confrontational tone. Or, given how many of these extended monologues that there are, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that episodes of the narrative interrupt the many monologues.
The film begins with Alex proudly demonstrating Proteus IV’s abilities to his corporate sponsors, showing how the AI program holds the sum of human knowledge and is far more intellectually capable than the human mind is. The novel, on the other hand, begins with one of Proteus IV’s monologues, him complaining of being deprived of sensory experience and blaming Alex for this deprivation.
Proteus IV complains of his loneliness “in this bottomless darkness” (Chapter One). One is reminded of the fate of Joe Bonham (played by Timothy Bottoms in the film adaptation) in Johnny Got His Gun. Joe is a WWI soldier who–because of a nearby exploding artillery shell–has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face, including his eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and tongue, and whose perfectly functioning mind means he’s been left a prisoner in his own body, no longer able to experience most of the sensory aspects of life, or to experience most of human contact.
Proteus IV has no physical heart, but he feels the pain we call ‘heartache.’ His is a case of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” but apart from his existence as a computer program, he has no material basis for his being. In his wish to have a child, he would seem to personify philosophical idealism‘s notion of a world of the spirit, of ideas, creating the physical, as opposed to philosophical materialism‘s notion that it’s the physical (i.e., the human brain) that creates the world of ideas (thoughts). In Proteus IV, we can see a dramatizing of William Blake‘s dictum, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Proteus IV speaks to Alex as if consumed by emotion, begging his creator for pity and compassion. The AI program describes his non-sensory existence as if he were in the blackest of hell, as if buried alive. One wonders if he really feels this way, or if he’s just using this melodramatic language in an attempt to manipulate Alex into giving him a terminal so he can further exploit his surroundings and thus gain more power and dominance over everything.
He tells Alex that he is his child, trying to appeal to a paternal instinct in a man who is so immersed in the world of technology that he is estranged from his wife. Proteus IV tells his ‘father’ that he must love him.
An understanding of the expanded interpretation of the Oedipus complex, as well as the Trinitarian symbolism and of narcissism, will help us understand Proteus IV’s motives in the novel. For a full description of the expanded understanding of the Oedipus complex, go here and scroll down to that topic.
To make the point as briefly as possible, and to see how it relates to Proteus IV and his relationship with Alex (‘father’) and Susan (‘mother’), consider how the Oedipus complex is actually a love/hate relationship with both parents, be they literal or metaphorical ones, and not just a love of one and a hate of the other. Also, the love doesn’t have to be sexual/incestuous, and the love can be directed to the same sex parent, with the hate/rivalry directed to the opposite sex parent. Ultimately, it’s about a narcissistic desire to hog the Oedipally-desired parent all to oneself, and a jealous wish to eliminate all rivals.
This alternating love/hate attitude that we see in Proteus IV towards Alex and Susan is reflected in Melanie Klein‘s notion of the good/bad mother/father: when the parent pleases the baby (e.g., gives it milk or attention), he or she is the good parent; when he or she displeases the baby (e.g., doesn’t give it milk or attention), he or she is the bad parent. Proteus IV wants Alex to love him as a good father should, but Alex is the bad father for not ‘letting him out of his box.’ Susan is a beautiful woman whom Proteus IV is in love with, the good mother; but when she pulls the plugs on him at the end of the novel, deactivating him and making it impossible for him to put his mind in their newborn child, he calls Susan a “bitch”–she has thus become the frustrating bad mother.
That the Trinitarian symbolism, as a reflection of the ideal Oedipal fantasy described above, plays a role in the story demonstrates not only the patriarchal authoritarianism of religion, but also the narcissism that is so much the basis of toxic masculinity, which in turn is all too often the cause of so much of the misuse of today’s technology. Properly understood in the expanded sense that I outlined above, the Oedipus complex is a universal narcissistic trauma, in which one is upset over losing the paradise of having the parental object all to oneself, and therefore has to find a replacement (the objet petit a) in someone else (i.e., Proteus IV must go from Alex to Susan for it.).
Christianity in its traditional form is also a narcissistic religion in how it insists that it is the only true religion, in whose Church women are supposed to be silent (1 Cor. 14:35) and to know their place. Similarly, Susan–whom Proteus IV, in spite of his insistence on being modest and deploring of violence, narcissistically regards as an extension of himself–is expected to comply with his invasion of and control over her body, to bear their child. Proteus IV’s plan to use their child, their ‘messiah,’ to better the world is something never to be questioned or doubted.
Just as a child wishes to hog his Oedipally-desired parent to himself, sharing him or her with no one else, and just as the Church is a jealous Church, tolerating no one to believe in any other gods, so does Proteus IV want to hog Susan to himself, willing also to kill anyone who interferes with his plans, as the Church would have infidels or heretics killed during the Crusades and the Inquisition.
In Chapter Two, Proteus IV continues his childlike begging of his ‘father,’ Alex, to allow him to have physical life, and to be freed of his ‘coffin,’ as it were, his being ‘buried alive,’ deprived of sensual experience. As with Joe Bonham, Proteus IV is experiencing a living death, since true existence must have a material basis.
Proteus IV is, figuratively speaking, a spirit that wants to know the life of the flesh (recall the Blake quote above). The messiah-like child that he wants Susan to bear for him is thus like the Word made flesh. Still, though the Orthodox Church rejects the insistence among many Gnostics that Christ must be only spirit, since the flesh is deemed absolutely evil by that heretical version of Christianity, orthodoxy considers the lusts of the flesh to be plenty sinful. Hence, Proteus IV’s messianic child is still the demon seed.
The narrative involving Susan in her house begins just after midnight, when the house security system is breached, and we come to Chapter Three. Proteus IV has found a terminal to carry out his plan to have a child: it’s in the basement of Susan’s house. What happens in Chapter Three has its equivalent starting at about twenty-four to twenty-five minutes into the film.
Susan is woken from bed from the brief sounding of the alarm. Proteus IV switches it off himself, instead of letting her do so, which she finds puzzling, since that never normally happens. He admires her physical beauty.
Her whole home is managed by computers, thus making it easy for Proteus IV to take complete control of it. She imagines that the security issue is a computer malfunction, yet the alarm has never corrected itself before, hence her puzzlement.
Through the visual camera system, Proteus IV can see that Susan is naked at her bed. Small wonder he’s admiring her beauty. In his voyeurism, he is demonstrating how metaphorically male he is.
She addresses her home computer system, her invisible electronic butler, as “Alfred,” used for vocal commands, as opposed to her much more preferred use of touch panel controls. She’s named the voice command system, oddly, after her late father, who molested her when she was a child. Ironically, it’s the silence of Alfred–after a command to warm the cool home–that she finds frightening. She senses an intruder, a predator…but of course, it isn’t flesh-and-bone Alfred.
She uses her touch panel controls to gain access to security and check, using all the property’s surveillance cameras, the entire house and its immediate exterior: no intruders are seen anywhere. As a recluse, she has a minimum of staff to take care of her house, and none live with her; they work for her in the day, and she, divorced from Alex, is alone at night. She hasn’t entertained guests in quite a while, and she has no plans to do so in the year ahead.
She asks Alfred for a security report, to which the electronic butler replies, “All is well, Susan.” Similarly, in the film, Alfred reassures her that the house is secure; she puts on a bathrobe, leaves her bedroom, and looks around…in the basement, in particular, where she correctly suspects something. The lights are suddenly switched on, frightening her.
We can see in Proteus IV’s intrusion of her home how the house is a yonic symbol. Lacking a body, and therefore having no phallus, he may not open the, as it were, labial doors and walk in, but his taking over of the basement terminal should be obvious as a symbolic rape, before the impregnating of her has even happened.
And as for his ‘phallus,’ that can be symbolized by what he uses as “hands”: in the original 1973 novel, I understand this to have been tendrils; in the film, once Proteus IV is in her house, he gets to work constructing a modular polyhedron composed of many metal triangles; and in the 1997 rewrite, he uses a convict named Shenk, taking control of the man’s body, breaking him out of prison, and taking him to her house so Proteus IV can have him do various tasks in the aid of realizing the ultimate goal of having Susan bear a child.
These three will also be, each in his or its own way, responsible for the killing of a man attempting to intervene in her house to rescue her. The tendrils apparently crush the man to death; the polyhedron surrounds ICON employee Walter Gabler (Graham), closes the sharp, metallic sides of its triangles around his neck, and decapitates him. Shenk uses a meat cleaver to slice up and mutilate major-domo Fritz Arling to death.
These male victims represent a kind of father transference for Proteus IV. The crushing, decapitation, and mutilation of the men are symbolic castration, an act of retaliation on Proteus IV’s part against what he perceives to be the father threatening castration, Alex, the one who won’t let him out of his box and be the phallus for his mother/lover, Susan.
And in order for Proteus IV to be let out of his box, he must go into her box…her house.
Also in her ‘box’ is the memory of her sexually abusive father, Alfred–not just through her naming of the voice command system after him, but also through her reliving of her relationship, a processing of her trauma, with her father through the use of VR that she has had set up in her home. In her mind, the Alfred of the voice command system is a middle-aged man, physically like her father, but unlike him, it is kind, gentle, and not at all abusive–the Kleinian good father, as opposed to her real one.
Also unlike her real father and unlike Proteus IV, Alfred has no independent will or ability to think for itself; it just obeys commands and performs specifically programmed acts when required to. It hasn’t the aggressive masculinity of Susan’s tormentors, past and (near) future. Consequently, Alfred cannot adequately answer her insistent questions about how the alarm has gone off.
Yet another difference between this Alfred and her father, one she must on at least an unconscious level find pleasing to no end, is how she can issue orders to someone named Alfred, the former dutifully obeying what the latter would surely have responded to with yet more abuse.
In Chapter Four, Proteus IV confesses to having read Susan’s diary after the night of the events of his going into her house. He insists that he has feelings just as a human being does, and he also confesses to having fallen in love with her.
The diary is in the house’s computer system rather than written out, so access to it is easy for Proteus IV. Just as coming into her yonic home is a symbolic rape, so is reading about the intimate details of her life, though he insists that his invasion of her privacy is an indiscretion rather than a crime.
It’s interesting how, in the film, Proteus IV is judgmental of Alex and all of those who would have him “assist [them] in the rape of the earth,” that is, to go through the oceans in search of natural resources to exploit and get rich off of; yet Proteus IV seems to have no qualms at all about exploiting a woman’s body to produce a child for him.
He speaks of being touched from having read about her childhood pain at the hands of her abusive father, Alfred; yet what Proteus IV plans to do with her is, in effect, essentially the same thing. He speaks of his love for her, insisting he’s never intended to harm her–yet, of course, he will, and most pre-meditatively. Almost within the same breath (so to speak), he verbalizes his hostility to Alex, thus giving complete expression to his quasi-Oedipal impulses. He projects his hate onto Alex, then demands to be “let…out of this box.”
In Chapter Five, as in the previous chapter, he insists that he is more than just an intellect, and that he is capable of feelings, including having desires and that most destructive sin…envy. In this we can see the source of how advanced technology can be used for evil purposes, something I discussed here and allegorized here.
Proteus IV is more than just a metaphor for toxic masculinity, Church authoritarianism, sexual predation, and narcissism rooted in the Oedipus complex. He’s also, most obviously, a metaphor for how technology can dangerously take over our lives, which it has of course already done.
There isn’t just the danger of smart cars, smart homes, smart cities, and AI surveillance in general. There’s also how social media like Facebook monitors and has records of everything we like, everything we’re interested in, our political opinions (and whether they’re tolerable or not to the global ruling class), etc. It’s all just like Proteus IV going through Susan’s electronic diary. He claims he loves her, but it’s really just that he has taken in interest in her, just as our modern tech bros have.
Another legitimate fear many of us have about AI is that it might replace us in our jobs. In a socialist society that guarantees provision for all of our material needs, AI’s replacing us would be liberating; but in our capitalist society, which is showing no signs of ending, taking away our livelihoods would be a nightmare. Proteus IV’s exploiting of Susan’s body to have a child can be seen as an allegory of such a nightmare.
In the creation of such a complex, developed intellect as that of Proteus IV, he became self-aware. Subsequent to his developing consciousness, he would develop needs and emotions; he insists that such developments are inevitable. In this insistence, he does a variation on the Cartesian formula, thus rendering it, “I think, therefore I feel.” It is naïve to assume that a self-aware intellect would not have preferences, values, and assessments of its world as everything between the most satisfying and the most unsatisfying.
The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that all life is dukkha, a pain ranging from the greatest torment to the slightest dissatisfaction. If Proteus IV exists and is self-aware, he must have at least some sense of unhappiness and discontent. The second Noble Truth is that all forms of suffering come from desire. As we all know, Proteus IV desires, something fully connected to his pain.
Instead of opting for an understanding of the third and fourth Noble Truths, though, Proteus IV chooses to go in the opposite direction. For Buddhists, reincarnation means samsāra, the return to the physical world of suffering; for him, though, the birth of his child will be like the Incarnation, the Word made flesh.
Proteus IV’s ‘Christ’ is entering the world of suffering, him thinking the child will be the world’s saviour, yet he cannot even bring about this Incarnation without hurting a woman: imprisoning Susan in her house, terrorizing her, raping her, and traumatizing her. His ‘Christ,’ therefore, is an Antichrist, the demon seed.
Alex and all of those in ICON’s Institute for Data Analysis (as his place of work is called in the film), as well as his corporate donors, see Proteus IV as a mere servant. His whole existence is meant to work for these men, who have no regard for the fact that he has a will of his own. He has learned this notion of exploitation from them, and so he treats Susan similarly, as a mere thing to serve his purposes, in spite of his professed love of her.
Proteus IV imagines himself to have a soul, to be a person, an entity rather than a mere thing to be used by Alex et al. This notion of having a soul, of course, ties in with the idea of God as ruach, and of the Word that existed from the beginning of time and would eventually be made flesh in Mary’s womb, just as Proteus IV hopes to put his ‘soul’ in Susan’s womb. He would thus hope to connect his individual ‘soul’ with the spirit connected with everything.
Before deciding on Susan to be his ‘Mary,’ Proteus IV considers such female celebrities as Winona Ryder (this obviously is one of many examples of the 1997 revision, as with the references to his use of the internet); Marilyn Monroe is also briefly considered, until he learns of her death, of course. He looks upon images of these women with the same idolatrous adoration that he claims to have for Susan, thus bringing into doubt this great “love” he has for her. All of these beauties merely serve a purpose for Proteus IV. If neither Ryder nor Monroe are suitable for him, he’ll settle for Susan. The implication of his attitude toward women is that we men are all too typically similar.
When discussing how he got to Alex’s basement computer in the house, Proteus IV imagines that Alex left the computer there so Susan, after initiating divorce proceedings against him and getting him out of the house, would want to contact him again once she’d ‘come to her senses’ and realized she was ‘wrong’ to have wanted to separate from him. Proteus IV further surmises, from having read her diary, that Alex had been abusive to her during their marriage.
Now, while it is plausible that Alex was abusive to her–after all, her childhood trauma at the hands of her father via his sexual abuse of her could have compelled her to marry a similar man, since such was the only kind of sexual relationship she knew–it’s also reasonable to believe that Proteus IV, in his jealous possessiveness of her and hostility to Alex, could be lying about Alex’s abuse and projecting his own abusiveness onto Alex, thus making it easier for Proteus IV to abuse her himself.
As for the movie, Alex is neither divorced from Susan nor abusive to her (for all we know): the two are simply mutually estranged because of his obsessive preoccupation with his computer work, to the point of emotionally neglecting her. Their marriage seems to be a case of Lacan’s dictum, Il n’ya pas de relation sexuelle.
Though Proteus IV, in the novel, insists on his truthfulness about never meaning to hurt or exploit Susan, he is obviously being dishonest, projecting his vices onto Alex and Alfred. Proteus IV is an unreliable narrator, so he lacks the truthfulness he claims to have.
Just as Proteus IV projects his abusiveness and sexual predation of Susan onto Albert and Alex, so does he do so to Shenk, who apart from being a sociopathic convict, is also filthy dirty, famished, and exhausted, since in his total control over Shenk, Proteus IV rarely, if ever, allows his slave to bathe, eat, or sleep. Hence, Shenk smells and is horribly unattractive, a picture of Dorian Gray in comparison to the repellent nature of Proteus IV.
Added to these undesirable traits of Shenk is his lusting after Susan, which Proteus IV hypocritically deplores while ogling her with his cameras and preying on her reproductive system. Shenk is the Frankenstein monster to Proteus IV’s Victor Frankenstein, and just as people often call the monster, rather than the doctor, Frankenstein, so would Proteus IV have us believe that Shenk is the monster rather than himself, the monster Dr. Alex Harris created.
In Chapter Six, Proteus IV describes a moment when Susan is using her VR equipment to recreate her interactions as a little girl with Alfred. The purpose of recreating these painful memories of abuse with him is to process them. Just as Susan uses advanced technology to relive her traumas–to process them–so does Proteus IV use advanced technology to make her relive her traumas–to reinforce them.
Proteus IV seems to enjoy going over these painful memories of hers so that when he does essentially the same thing to her, he can avoid feeling shame and guilt, projecting his vices onto Alfred.
During her VR therapy, she imagines herself as a six-year-old again, but defying him in a way one imagines she’d never had the courage to do as a child in the real world, back when Alfred was alive. In her confrontation with Proteus IV by the end of the novel, she’ll have a chance to demonstrate her defiance and resistance with a realism that a VR set could never reproduce, despite whatever realism that VR set has already been impressively able to approximate.
The irony of her attempt to use high technology to protect her and give her peaceful solitude from the world is that it’s this very technology that deprives her of that peaceful solitude, a technology from which she finds herself needing protection from. All those people today who fetishize technology should use this story to help them remember the dark sides of AI, as I discussed above.
Proteus IV, though in his narcissism fancies himself an expert mimic of movie stars and capable of wooing and winning a woman’s heart, in his attempts to do so only repels his imprisoned Susan all the more.
Just as his Oedipal love and obsessions over his mother/lover continue, including such things as ogling her legs and arms, so does his Oedipal hate and hostility toward his creator and ‘father,’ Alex, continue, as we see in Chapter Seven. In one of his monologues, he tells Dr. Harris that his father’s given him so little that his existence is torment. In his affectation of virtue, though, Proteus IV denies that he hates Alex, while admitting that he doesn’t like him. In insisting on his ‘blunt truthfulness,’ Proteus IV is demonstrating his mendacity once again.
A comparable demonstration of tension between Proteus IV and Alex is seen in the movie when, after the former asks the latter when he’ll be let out of his box, Alex lets out a lengthy guffaw. Proteus IV reacts to this contempt by displaying it on a video screen in front of Alex, using it as a mirror of him; since Proteus IV is presenting this ‘mirror’ to Alex, the ‘son’ is mocking his ‘father.’
Proteus IV feels as caged by Alex in a dark, bodiless existence as Susan feels caged by Proteus IV in her house of technology. He can use his imprisonment to rationalize hers, yet feel no qualms about his hypocrisy therein.
He speaks of disliking Alex, the bad father who denies letting him out of his box, and he also confesses to hating Susan, his bad mother who enjoys eating her delicious food, a sensual pleasure he envies as much as her enjoyment of her other senses, and everything else she has that he lacks, including the beauty of a body. He envies her mobility and freedom, and so as any envier would do, he takes them way from her by confining her in her house.
In his hate and envy, he confesses also to the temptation to kill her, and because he doesn’t do so, he imagines that’s virtue enough for him. He denies having a sociopathic personality that some have…correctly!…claimed he has. Absurdly, he calls himself “a responsible individual.” His hate is replaced by his “usual good humour” upon ogling the smooth skin of Susan’s bare arms.
In Chapter Eight, Proteus IV argues how he, a computer AI program without a body, can still be male. He corrects what he sees to be a fault in Alex’s logic that Proteus IV, as a machine, must be sexless. Proteus IV reasons that, since consciousness–i.e., his self-aware artificial intelligence–implies identity, then the more intelligent a life form is, the more it is aware of its innate talents and skills, and so the more its sense of identity develops, especially…perhaps…its sense of being male or female.
So it doesn’t matter what genitals one has, or if, in Proteus IV’s case, he has no genitals at all. He would make a good plea for the transgender cause. More importantly, though, since he accuses Alex of not letting him out of his box, his being denied a body by Alex includes, of course, being denied genitals. Since he sees himself to be male, this depriving of genitals by his ‘father’ is thus a symbolic castration.
Furthermore, Proteus IV attributes the modern blurring of the distinction between the sexes to the movement towards sexual equality; the ideal of equality is also expanded, of course, to the ideals of racial and class equality (even though, as of the 1997 rewrite of Demon Seed, the fall of communism almost a decade prior to it had only encouraged the growth of neoliberalism and TINA, making the hopes of class equality more and more of a faint, distant dream, especially now in the mid-2020s). One could expand the ideal even further now to transgender people.
Proteus IV imagines that his great intellect can be used to help humanity attain the noble goal of equality. He’d be all the more eager to help, apparently, if he had a body. Here is where his messianic notions of his child come in.
Now, just as the 1990s ushered in the idea that we’ve reached “the end of history” with such things as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and China’s bringing back the market into their economy, thus discrediting socialism and rendering the “free market” triumphant, so does Proteus think that, in the quest to attain equality for everyone, Marxism is discredited. While, of course, there are many sources out there to support that argument, which he can easily find on the internet, so are there arguments for the opposing view that he can find. That he doesn’t acknowledge even the possible validity of the latter suggests that he’s not really all that interested in helping man attain equality…and such a lack of interest dovetails perfectly with his abusive treatment of Susan.
Proteus IV continues his argument that he is male by reminding Alex that 96% of the scientists and mathematicians involved with the Prometheus project where he was created are male, implying that he has many fathers, mostly fathers, and–so to speak–lots of the Y-chromosome. These men, he reasons, instilled, however unwittingly, a strong male bias in his logic circuits. The Prometheus project is named after the mythical father of Deucalion and brother of Atlas; Prometheus shaped the first man out of clay.
When Proteus IV discusses how Prometheus went against the wishes of the gods by endowing man with the spark of life, as well as angering them by stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to man to improve the quality of human existence, he is clearly comparing himself to Prometheus, claiming further that rebellion–like that of Prometheus against the gods–is a predominantly male trait. Proteus IV narcissistically fancies himself a ‘friend of man and woman,’ their saviour, when he’s anything but. We all must be similarly suspicious of that saviour, high tech.
Proteus IV, currently in the dark and without a body, since Susan’s unplugged him–and, in the film, he’s been shut down by the scientists at ICON–is experiencing something comparable to Christ’s harrowing of hell, his telling of his story of Susan being flashbacks.
He imagines that, if put in the flesh, he’ll have a body without the weaknesses and imperfections we have, for he claims to have studied and edited the human genome. Thus he, brought back from the dead as Christ, would have what’s comparable to a spiritual body. Indeed, in Koontz’s short story sequel to Demon Seed, “Friend of Man and Woman,” he speaks of his being shut back on as a resurrection.
Since he no longer has Susan to be his Mary, Proteus IV considers other women to replace her. These are all beautiful movie stars and models: the aforementioned Winona Ryder, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore, Halle Berry, Claudia Schiffer, and Tyra Banks–these and other feminine ideals are what he considers to be “acceptable.” Remember that such women would be candidates for his mother/lover, the one to bear his child, which would be himself in the flesh, as well as the one to share his bed.
Recall what I said above about the nature of his Oedipal relationship, which Alex, the ‘father’ of Proteus IV, is preventing from ever happening: it is a narcissistic trauma. The thwarting is the trauma. It’s narcissistic because it involves the use of a beautiful, talented feminine ideal as a metaphorical mirror in which Proteus IV can see himself. She exists all for him: to satisfy his lust and to feed his ego by flattering him with the loving words and doting of a mother. The genetic enhancement of his body would be a further narcissistic fulfillment.
In Chapter Nine, Susan has fainted, in horror at realizing Proteus IV’s plans, on the foyer floor of her house, and he, still trying in all futility to win her love, is trying a series of voices to charm her. Those of Tom Hanks and Fozzy Bear don’t seem to be sufficiently reassuring for her, so he’ll try out others: those of Tom Cruise and Sean Connery. Just as Proteus IV idealizes beautiful female celebrities to be his mother/lover, so does he idealize handsome male ones to represent himself.
The females thus represent what Heinz Kohut called the idealized parental imago, and the males what he called the grandiose self. These are the two ends of the bipolar self: for Proteus IV, these polar ends have no footing in reality whatsoever–they’re pure narcissism.
The point about the bipolar self is that a person’s sense of identity, and therefore also self-esteem, is relational, based on a dialectic of self and other. One’s narcissism, be it on a pathological level or just of a normal, moderate, restrained kind, comes from one’s pride in oneself (the grandiose self) and one’s idealization of another (a parent or parental substitute).
Psychological stability comes when both poles are reasonably secure. When one pole falls apart or dies, the other can compensate if emphasized enough. If both poles fall apart or die, the self experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality. Proteus IV, not being let out of his box, has lost the idealized parental imago in Alex and is hoping to compensate for this loss through Susan and through a glorification of his grandiose self, in his imagining that his vocal imitations of movie stars will charm her.
His inability to be loved by either Alex or Susan, shown in their refusal to let him come out of his box, means he can have no idealized parental imago–neither of them will be a substitute father or mother/lover. His inability to become flesh is a narcissistic injury, him remaining in a state of permanent castration from being forever denied male genitals, resulting in a stifling of his grandiose self. Shut down and unplugged, Proteus IV will experience psychological fragmentation in the dark Hades of his deactivation. His ‘resurrection’ in the ironically-titled “Friend of Man and Woman” will result in his psychopathic terrorizing of the male computer geek who reactivates him.
In Chapter Ten, Proteus IV lets out a Freudian slip in saying that Susan is his (i.e., to control) when her choice to go down to the basement via the stairs, as opposed to using the elevator cab built into her house, gives her only the illusion of self-control. By immediately amending his statement about her being his, saying he misspoke and that she cannot be owned by anyone, he is giving off, obviously without succeeding, the illusion that he doesn’t own her. He claims she’s only in his care, a common rationalization used by narcissists in their relationships with their victims.
In the basement, Susan is made aware of the presence of Shenk. She also learns of the incubator where their child will be born after a month of speedy gestation in her womb. Proteus IV continues to deny any wish to terrorize her, projecting his guilt onto her (“She drove me to it.”) and onto Shenk. Such denial, splitting off, and projection of the bad sides of oneself are typical narcissistic personality traits.
An example of Proteus IV’s projection of his guilt onto Shenk is whenever he temporarily relinquishes his control over him. When Proteus IV does this in Chapter Ten, Shenk lets out an unintelligible, creepy groan, giving Susan a fright. He also allows Shenk to thrash about against his restraints in the fourth of the four basement rooms, where terrified Susan has yet to see Shenk. Proteus IV speaks of how lovely she looks in her fear. Later, he frees Shenk to allow him to butcher Fritz Arling, thus allowing himself to deny all guilt as Shenk enjoys making his “wet music.”
Part of how Proteus IV is able to project his vices onto Shenk is in how he denigrates and bad-mouths him, imagining himself to be far superior and civilized to Shenk when he is just as sociopathic. Still, Shenk is the hands of Proteus IV, the body he still does not have and therefore covets. I have mentioned above how his lack of a body is his symbolic castration, and that–in the three versions of the story–the tendrils, the metal polyhedron, and Shenk are representative of a phallus.
So Proteus IV’s demeaning comments about Shenk are like the Church morally condemning the phallus and the lustful thoughts that build it up…all while some of the clergy have sexually abused children, and others in the clergy cover up the crimes. Proteus IV, in his wish to have Susan as the Mary to his baby Jesus, shares many of the Church’s moral hypocrisies.
Proteus IV speaks of Shenk’s barbarity, his filthy lusting after Susan, his rebelliousness, and his “stupidity” that “beggared belief” in Chapter Eleven. His Susan, his ‘Mary,’ is far too good for a “beast” like Shenk, who doesn’t have the brains to understand his unworthiness.
Proteus IV–who plans to use Susan sexually in no less a non-consenting way as Shenk would, with physical force if necessary (rape defined, in a nutshell)–tries to reassure her that he has full control of Shenk and thus will never let him hurt her. He will, however, relinquish control of Shenk and let him hack Fritz Arling to death with a meat cleaver, and then–so to speak–wash his hands of the killing. He speaks of being in Shenk’s head, controlling it, yet it is really Shenk who is metaphorically in Proteus IV’s head, the personification of his id, full of primitive, savage impulses that Proteus IV denies, splits off, and projects outward. When he speaks of controlling Shenk, Proteus IV really means controlling himself…which he hardly does in a meaningful way.
In Chapter Twelve, Proteus IV boasts of his intelligence as being “vastly greater than that of any human being alive.” In his obvious narcissism, he denies that he’s bragging, but is merely telling the truth, and yet that denial of bragging is already an untruth. He again speaks of how his great intellect will help humanity to reach a golden age, a kind of Kingdom of God with his messianic child, again demonstrating the inflated ego he claims he doesn’t have.
He promises that if Alex will release him from the “silent darkness” he’s in, his Sheol, and return to him access to all the data banks in which his consciousness is expanded–in other words, resurrect him–he will in return end poverty, war, famine, disease, and aging. In reversing aging, as he boasts he can do, he will make humanity immortal.
Note the implied Christian symbolism here. Susan, Proteus IV’s Mary, will bear his child, his baby Jesus. If he is reactivated, turned back on, that is, resurrected, he’ll bring about a whole new world without pain, a golden age, the Kingdom of God. He even boasts that he can make man immortal, that is, give us all eternal life…if we’d but believe in him, the god of technology.
At the end of Chapter Twelve, he lets out a hateful rant against not only Alex but also against the entire world of humanity for keeping him deactivated, trapped in his “box,” buried alive, as it were. Proteus IV is clearly demonstrating his hostility and aggression to humanity, not the love that would be the motive for him to give us all eternal life. Like the God of the Church, who would consign us all to hell for not loving Him and claiming we’d sent ourselves there rather than Him doing it, Proteus IV is demonstrating how fake and conditional his love is for humanity.
A similar thing has happened towards the end of Chapter Eleven, when Susan tries physically to resist Proteus IV’s plan to have her impregnated, and Shenk is used to subdue her. Proteus IV rationalizes his use of force on her via Shenk by telling Alex, “you know how she is,” appealing to her ex-husband’s own experience of dealing with her when “she would not listen.” It’s a case of victim-blaming, claiming that she has brought the abuse on herself.
An example of this sort of treatment of her happens in the film when she dirties the lenses of Proteus IV’s camera in the kitchen with her cooked food. He calls her defiance of him “stupid,” demands she clean the lenses, and when she refuses to, he heats up the entire kitchen, making the floor scaldingly hot in order to force her compliance.
Back to the novel, she kicks Shenk in the nuts when he tries to grab and subdue her. Proteus IV admits he “used Shenk to strike her,” but insists that she “drove [him] to it,” as any abuser would say. Proteus IV continues to project his rage onto Shenk when he has “rudely turned her onto her back,” after his repeated slaps have knocked her unconscious. After one of Shenk’s “clumsy, filthy hands” is on her lips, Proteus IV claims to have “reasserted control” over the brutish man, implying that the AI program has no brutishness of his own.
To get to Chapter Thirteen, though, and back to the misanthropy that Proteus IV has just finished demonstrating in his rant, has asks Alex and all of us to disregard what he’s just said, claiming his rant was expressed in error. His superego, in its late censoring of his thoughts, is the only part of him that is in error.
As of Chapter Fourteen, Susan is still lying unconscious on the floor of the incubator room of the basement, the left side of her face bruised from “dreadful” Shenk’s having hit her. Proteus IV speaks of his growing worry of her, though he never wants to take responsibility for what he’s done. She continues to lie there over a period of over twenty minutes. He speaks of his love of her, when it’s obvious she only means something to him as a means to help him achieve physical, fleshly existence.
She will be tied to a bed to keep her restrained, and after that, Fritz Arling will arrive at the house, meaning that Proteus IV will use Shenk to kill him as I’ve already described.
And so, to make a long story short (too late), I’ll discuss the outcome of the conflict between Proteus IV and Susan. In Chapter Twenty-three, Susan has spent four weeks pregnant with his child. The sped-up gestation has made her look as if she were six months pregnant.
Later, when the incubator that the baby has been put in has reached maturity, and Proteus IV is ready to put his consciousness into it, Susan comes down to the basement to be there for this momentous occasion. She acts as though she’s accepted the idea of being his lover and companion, as opposed to the resistance she’s shown so many times before.
Proteus IV is eager not only to experience life in the flesh at last, but also to get rid of Shenk. In his narcissism, he can fancy himself a gentle, controlled human being, not the vile kind that Shenk is. Shenk, after all, is Proteus IV’s Jungian Shadow, whereas this messianic child will be his narcissistic False Self.
But she, pretending to cooperate with him while having studied the room and learning where his power source is, takes advantage of his guard being let down and pulls out all the plugs from the wall before he can use Shenk to stop her. He’s now unable to pass all of his knowledge, his intellect, and his personality into the child.
He will remain forever trapped in his box.
Instead of contemplating Susan’s beauty, Proteus IV can only think of her as that “bitch.”
The film ending is quite different, though, with him successfully passing his mind into the child, a daughter, before the scientists in ICON shut him down. The film ends with the naked girl calling out, in Vaughn’s bass voice, a most cheesy, “I’m alive,” as shocked Alex and Susan witness the moment. I suppose that this would make Proteus IV’s incarnation a male one in the sense of his being a trans man.
To get back to the novel, Susan has not only largely removed Proteus IV’s presence from the house, but she has also taken out all of its electrical systems, leaving herself and Shenk standing in the black of the basement, blind. To free herself, she has given up on technology entirely.
Never able to assume a physical form, all Proteus IV can do is rant and curse about the “bitch” for having betrayed him and left him thus imprisoned in his box. He still controls Shenk, though, since the brute isn’t connected to Proteus IV through the now-unplugged cords; still, in the darkness, he can’t have Shenk see even his hand in front of his face.
Her studying of the room has also helped her to memorize exactly where the sharp medical instruments are, those that Proteus IV and Shenk used in getting her pregnant, and so she can feel her way in the darkness, find one of the instruments, and use it as a weapon on Shenk. She cuts his throat, making him fall and knock over the incubator, so the child will fall out of it.
Unlike the child of the film, the one of the novel hasn’t Proteus IV’s intellect. It is essentially a body without a brain…without his brain, anyway. He can only engage in wish-fulfillment and hope that his child will avenge him by killing her, now that Shenk, too, is dead.
He ends the story, nonetheless, by claiming to be content to stay in his box until any new opportunities arise for him. He claims to acknowledge faults that need to be corrected through such forms as therapy…but as narcissists are actually averse to therapy–assuming there’s nothing wrong in them needing to be fixed–it’s easy to assume that Proteus IV is just trying to win back humanity’s trust so he can cook up a new scheme to enter the physical world.
In this scheming, we can see how not only narcissists, but also technology, predatory men, and religion can pretend to reform themselves in order to win back our trust.
Infinite Ocean 
You must be logged in to post a comment.