We Already Love Machines: Representing Abject Romance in Jumbo (2020)

Jumbo (2020) is, by all accounts, a classic love story, with its meet cute, its honeymoon period, its 'meeting the parents scene', its breakup, reconciliation and typical marriage ending. The film follows the shy and awkward Jeanne as she starts her job at a fairground and eventually falls in love with one of the rides, who she affectionately calls Jumbo. Where her life was previously grey and drab, she suddenly finds happiness in the bright neon glow of her lover. The story’s focus is on how this young woman should be navigating her love life versus how she actually is, and how she is perceiving her own desire and ultimate abjection. It seeks to imagine a world in which a love story like this would exist and how it would play out on a human scale.

One of my favourite films growing up was The Iron Giant (1999), and it was very hard for me to not look at these films side by side. Whilst they both have very different intended audiences, they both  argue that the inanimate objects at the centre of these stories have more humanity than the humans, who are often positioned as the oppressors. In The Iron Giant, Hogarth essentially befriends a giant gun and slowly teaches him what it's like to live in the world, that you have a choice as to whether you hurt people or not. 'You are who you choose to be', Hogarth exclaims. Though Jumbo doesn't speak, the roles here can be reversed in that Jeanne is not the one who has to convince her giant mechanical counterpart of his humanity but rather the other way around. Jeanne is someone who struggles with her human peers, particularly her mother, and is told implicitly that she must change to fit the world around her. This is not the case with Jumbo, who in her eyes only exists to bring her joy, and all he 'asks' in return is that she remain faithful to him. It is only due to her own shame about her desires that she breaks this promise, sleeping with a male co-worker as a kind of self-induced conversion therapy. Like in The Iron Giant, it is not technology itself that is positioned as inherently destructive but the desire for society to squash choice and freedom, and the unwillingness to see people (and objects) complexly.

Because the fairground ride is just that and not a man, the gaze of the lover in this film is more abstract than most. Due to facial pareidolia, the phenomenon that humans will naturally find faces in objects, Jumbo does have a kind of 'eye' in the middle of his 'face', and he can 'look' at Jeanne. But this isn't an imposing or domineering look. Whatever personality Jumbo has is entirely filtered through Jeanne, and because she has imposed the role of lover onto him, she controls the level of intimacy and sensuality, and mediates the way she is looked at by Jumbo in a way that she cannot seem to do with other men in her life.

It would be nearly impossible to watch this film and not come away with a queer reading, though what is 'queer' specifically is female sexuality itself. The film follows the beats of a romantic story lead by queer characters, including a coming out, but because the object of affection is a literal object, we have no choice but to focus on what is figuratively being made abject - that being Jeanne's desire and sexual freedom.  Her relationship, like many queer relationships, gives her sense of stability in a heteronormative world that sees her very existence as abject.

This film could have been very cruel if it wanted to be. There have been many videos and articles about people with 'weird' paraphilias who have decided to get married to inanimate objects. This very film seems to have been based on a real case of this. What you get with you scroll through these articles is a tone of ridicule and the intent to mock what is essentially harmless behaviour, but the framing of such acts is very telling on what we consider to be unacceptable in normative society. It wasn't long ago in the fight for marriage equality (which has still not ended for many people) that conservatives would laugh at the absurdity of queer people marrying one another, comparing it to someone trying to marry an animal or a car. The queer reading of this story can't be obscured, and its embrace of technophilia only speaks to the world where we have smart phones in our pockets, computers on our desks and every bit of information at our fingertips. In a technological world, we are already 'in love' with machines, and the refusal to present this as absurd seems to mock the idea that anyone would find this odd in the first place.