Literary terms and Bicentennial Man - Allusion

I'm always trying to get my students to understand why it is so important that they read lots of classical literature. They need to expland their knowledge base so that when references come up in their own experiences, they will recognize them!!

Case in point:
I was watching Bicentennial Man the other night. When Andrew (the android, lol) follows the female robot home from the marketplace, you discover her name is Galatea.
(spoiler alert)

AHA!

In the story of Pygmalion and Galatea from Greek mythology, Pygmalion is a sculptor who creates a beautiful statue of a woman and names it Galatea. He soon falls in love with the statue, which is fairly tragic. He puts flowers, and pretty cloth drapes on it... all the while desperately wishing his statue was a living breathing woman, and being heartbroken because she was simply a chunk of carved ivory. He prays to Venus to help him and she brings Galatea to life. Pygmalion and Galatea get married, have a son, and live happily ever after.

How cute that the female android is named Galatea, right? Is there a Pygmalion? Yes... Rupert, her owner. It seems for a very long time that she's just a working machine for him, but as the movie progresses and he tells Andrew that he's figured out a way to make him a "real man," this dialogue passes between them about love:

Rupert Burns: What do they say?
Andrew Martin: That you can lose yourself. Everything. All boundaries. All time. That two bodies can become so mixed up, that you don't know who's who or what's what. And just when the sweet confusion is so intense you think you're gonna die... you kind of do. Leaving you alone in your separate body, but the one you love is still there. That's a miracle. You can go to heaven and come back alive. You can go back anytime you want with the one you love.
Rupert Burns: And you want to experience that?
Andrew Martin: Oh, yes, please.
Rupert Burns: So do I.

The quote doesn't quite show the sadness on Rupert's face as viewing the scene does. And there Galatea is, doddering around in her usual robot outfit. Kind of makes you wonder why he doesn't do what he can to make her more like Andrew, for himself. It's like the poor guy has nothing in his life but his work, which is actually world-changing, valuable work, as it turns out, and not merely a respectful continuation of his grandfather's work.

At the end of the movie, there's a little surprise. Andrew and Portia are lying on their bed, dying. The nurse comes in and tells Portia that Andrew is gone (want to know how the android "dies"? Watch the movie and you'll see). She asks the nurse to unplug her so that she can die, and when the very pretty, very human nurse complies, Portia says,

"Thank you, Galatea"

Aww.... Galatea was finally human. Or almost. There's no way to really tell from that last scene, but doesn't it make you wonder about Rupert? He was really old himself when he enabled Andrew to start on his aging process. Galatea was still a robot at the last "operation" for him.

I do hope that before he died, something nice happened between Rupert and Galatea. :) There was an earlier scene when she'd had some chip removed, and she was throwing all of Rupert's delicate equipment all over his workroom, and giving him a completely bitchy blessing-out about how he only sees her as a machine to help him. LOL I was wondering if she had robo-PMS or something.

Maybe she liked him too. :)

It adds a whole new level of understanding to just that small part of the movie - if kids don't know the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, how are they going to know how important it is that the nurse in the last scene doesn't just have the same weird name as that old female robot, but that she used to BE the old female robot, and she's evolved, too? Hasn't she technically broken Asimov's second law of robotics? (I can't remember if that was about not killing or not harming a human being - I read I, Robot in 7th grade) So if she helped / allowed a human to die, she couldn't still be living a life as a robot anymore, could she?

But if they don't know the story, and don't think about the implications of who Galatea really is, even though she's a minor character, I'm afraid that they're going to fail to grow mentally and emotionally when they see this scene.

Yikes, they'll miss a TON of really good stuff!

I'd like to get that movie, edit the pertinent scenes of the movie together, and show my students why reading is so important.

Of course, I realize that by doing this, they're going to think I'm a nutcase. LOL But I don't care. They need to get it.

Now, the funny part will be filling out that form to request being able to show edited chunks of the movie in my class. I sincerely doubt that the person I have to get to approve it would understand my point unless I wrote her a dissertation on the importance of Greek myths in modern literature and film allusions.

I bet I'd be asked "What's an allusion?"