The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Nolan Gertz

November’s Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Nolan Gertz (University of Twente), who will talk about “’I have lived 300 years, and I long to die, but death is no longer possible’: How Movies like Zardoz have Shaped our Views on Death”. This will be a hybrid session and will be held on 25 November 2026, at 16:00 WET, in auditorium A102 at Colégio Almada Negreiros (Campolide Campus) and online, via Microsoft Teams. Click here for registration.

Abstract

In my forthcoming book “Cyber Cinema”, I explore how the depiction of technology in movies has shaped how we think about technology. In this talk, I will focus on how movies have specifically depicted the relationship between technology and death, and how this has shaped how we think about death as a “problem” to be solved by technology and so have sought to use technology to “conquer” death. For example, decades before anyone had ever discussed the ideas of “Transhumanism” or “Longtermism,” in “The Colossus of New York” (1958), we see a brain surgeon try to save his son’s life by transferring his son’s brain to the body of a robot. Though the movie suggests that the outcome of such a procedure would be the creation of something inhuman, it nevertheless also suggested that the frail and mortal human body could be seen as potentially replaceable by a superior and immortal robot body. This idea would of course be similarly explored later in “RoboCop” (1987), which while famous for satirizing techno-capitalism, nevertheless ends (spoiler alert) by leaving open the possibility that being brought back to life as a cyborg wouldn’t be as bad as we might at first imagine. Yet, whereas robot movies tend to focus on using robot bodies to keep human minds alive, in AI movies we see alternatively how lifeless humanity can become when life is controlled by artificial means. In “Alphaville” (1965), for example, all of life is controlled by the supercomputer Alpha 60, the result of which is that humans are shown to not only lose the ability to think for themselves, but to even care about life and death, and so executions become a source of entertainment rather than something to fear. In “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), life has become so computerized that computers seem more lifelike than humans do, as a result of which it is only the “death” of HAL 9000 that seems to have not just any emotion to it, but any meaning at all. In “Zardoz” (1974) we find a HAL-like AI called Tabernacle that has enabled humanity to life forever, but because this deathlessness is found to be lifeless, the immortal humans are shown to be desperate to find a way to die. Finally, in movies about virtual reality, we see death as something to be explored through VR technology, and also death as potentially a way to keep people alive while in VR. Whereas “Brainstorm” (1983) and “Strange Days” (1995) showed VR as offering the potential to experience death without having to die, in “Mindwarp” (1991) and “The Matrix” (1999) we see that people’s minds can exist in VR, but only if their bodies are kept alive by being fed the liquified remains of the dead.

Bio

Nolen Gertz is Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente, the Coordinator of the Human Condition Research Line of ESDIT, and a Senior Researcher of the 4TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of political philosophy, existential phenomenology, and philosophy of technology. He is the author of “The Philosophy of War and Exile” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), “Nihilism and Technology” (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and “Nihilism” (MIT Press, 2019). His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and on the ABC Australia website, as well as in interviews for BBC World, Al Jazeera, Austrian Public Radio, Ireland’s National Independent Radio, and France’s Philosophie Magazine.