“Samsung Galaxy: The Future” dir. by Sam Pilling (review)

“Samsung Galaxy: The Future,” is a one-minute science fiction-like, advertisement illustrating the unlimited potential of phone technology. The ad’s futuristic narrative is coupled with the breezy attitude of the classic song, “Que Sera, Sera.” A Samsung press release description of the ad states: “As the world now enters a new era of uncertainty, Samsung refuses to accept those laissez-faire lyrics with a promise to empower people to create their own future.”¹ Under the guise of personal empowerment, the ad showcases a mixed-race lesbian couple using their phone’s at-home ultrasound feature to hear the heartbeat of their unborn baby. It is in this scene that the ad’s fanciful envisioning of a futuristic world unravels and instead tropes of unruly women emerge. Lesbian motherhood is constructed as unnatural, out of control, and in need of discipline.

The commercial presents a variety of diverse identities and possibilities for new technology. As a young blonde girl riding a tricycle passes by a window in her home, an artificially intelligent cartoon monster emerges to smile at her. A black male fashion designer is shown crafting patterns with the swipe of his hand. A heavily tattooed artist designs an image on a tablet, which is then inked onto the shoulder of a young Asian woman with the use of a robotic arm. The aforementioned lesbian couple lies in bed watching the heartbeat of their expectant child on their phone’s screen. A group of demographically diverse gamers collectively work to destroy an alien-like creature through seamless multidevice capabilities. The people and technology then disappear, replaced by a black screen with white text stating, “What we create today,” pause, new black screen and new text “lets you create the future.” As the ad ends, the hashtag #DoWhatYouCant appears.

Upon multiple viewings, the positive image of lesbian motherhood diminishes and is replaced by overly intimate and dystopian rendering of lesbian identity. The physical intimacy of the lesbians’ scene as compared to the other characters is unnerving. The two women are in bed cuddling and only partially clothed. No other characters in the ad touch each other and except for the child on the tricycle, everyone is in a public space and all are fully dressed. Most important, whereas other characters in the ad use the technology for external uses such as art, work, and entertainment, the lesbians use their phone to watch the heartbeat of their unborn baby. The physicality of the women’s representation, the hint of sexual intimacy, and the internal glimpse of their future in conjunction with the overarching message about technology’s unlimited potential—#dowhatyoucant—becomes antagonistic. Lesbian motherhood is made strange and unnatural.

I suggest the commercial extends gendered anxieties of female independence and reiterates the pathology of lesbians as not women.² The ad, a preview of futuristic technology, enacts a science fiction-like strategy of embodying society’s anxiety about the future or current state of existence. The seemingly progressive inclusion of lesbian moms in the Samsung ad actually exacerbates cultural anxieties about the displacement of patriarchal control and power. These lesbians represent society’s fear of female empowerment, mistrust of women, and perceived inability to make mature decisions about their own bodies. Narratives of monstrous entities represent our culture’s “collective fears”³ and, in the Samsung ad, the lesbian mothers are indeed such entities, female robotic monsters known as gynoids.

The gynoid symbolizes anxieties and fantasies about technological industrialization and gender from a patriarchal perspective. Unlike industrial machines, robots no longer require the physical strength of a man to operate; rather, their information-based technology requires only intellectual strength, opening their operability to women.⁴ Most popular stories of the gynoid place their male creators in a God-like position, for they have manufactured “an ideal female using science in place of divine intervention.”⁵ As such, lesbian gynoids agitate the “Eve anxiety”—without supervision, women will act immorally. No longer in need of men, the gynoid turns on and eventually...