Cradled by Machines: The Smothering Comfort and Insidious Beauty of batteries not included

(The Maternal Phallus in Science Fiction: Uncanny Mothers, Omnipotent AIs, and Totalitarian Nurture)

batteries not included is the kind of film that flatters itself as “Spielbergian whimsy,” but beneath its soft glow and mechanical cherubs lies a pernicious science fiction cliché that the genre’s more ambitious works have dissected, mocked, and ultimately rejected. If you approach it with the critical lens forged by the “Maternal Phallus” analyses in contemporary sci-fi theory, what emerges is less a tale of hope than an exercise in infantilizing sentimentality—the cinematic equivalent of being smothered by a too-attentive parent, and a retrograde fable that sugarcoats the dangers of technological and communal dependency.

Fix-Its as Mechanized Nannies

On the surface, the Fix-Its are beguiling: pint-sized mechanical saviors who descend from the heavens (well, space) to heal wounds, repair buildings, and even cook dinner. The message? When the world is cruel, when real estate thugs and corporate greed destroy communities, don’t organize, don’t resist—just wait for a cosmic caretaker to clean up the mess. The “miraculous” repair montage is the worst kind of magical thinking: a literal deus ex machina that actively discourages the tenants’ agency at every turn.

Contrast this with the science fiction touchstones discussed in your document. E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops offers a mechanized mother that supplies every need, only for its subjects to wither into passive, docile children—until the “mother” fails, and catastrophe strikes. In batteries not included, the Fix-Its’ omnipresent labor does for the tenants what the Machine does for Vashti: it lulls them into dependency, cloaking their subjugation in comfort and nostalgia. It’s not hard to see the parallel: the “maternal omnipresence” that grants ceaseless provision, at the expense of desire, initiative, and symbolic separation.

Community as Eternal Nursery

The film presents its ragtag community as heroic in their togetherness, but the message is insidiously conservative. Rather than encouraging growth, risk, or genuine conflict, the script smothers its characters in saccharine togetherness and magical restoration. The Fix-Its’ interventions rescue everyone from the need to actually change. The tenement is rebuilt not by collective struggle or imaginative transformation, but by an external, benevolent force—the ultimate fantasy of the “maternal phallus,” which provides and protects in a world without lack or uncertainty.

Consider the comparison to WALL-E’s Axiom starship, where humanity is swaddled into infantile irrelevance by a cradle of comfort. There, as here, the cost of endless nurture is stagnation, bonelessness—what the critique calls “unlimited, consumable jouissance.” The Riley’s Café tenants are allowed to remain as children, never forced to confront the adult world, never allowed to suffer or to triumph on their own terms.

Sentimentality as Authoritarian Control

Perhaps the most damning comparison is to The Giver or Brave New World: in these stories, the price of a life without pain is the loss of desire, individuality, and real feeling. batteries not included seems oblivious to this trade-off. It wallows in the comfort of endless repair, the healing touch of its metallic angels, without ever acknowledging the stagnation this breeds. Its sentimental set-pieces—Harry and Muriel’s restored tiles, the final homecoming—are less celebrations of resilience than symptoms of a community rendered incapable of survival without parental intervention.

Mechanical Maternalism Without Subversion

Where a truly subversive science fiction narrative might interrogate or ultimately overthrow the reign of the “maternal phallus” (as The Matrix does when Neo chooses the pain and risk of reality over the soothing lies of the simulation), batteries not included doubles down. Its aliens are not ambiguous or threatening, like the monstrous “Mother” computer in Alien or the nurturing-turned-tyrannical AI in I, Robot; they are pure, unambiguous beneficence. The Fix-Its never withhold, never judge, never challenge the tenants to grow. Their “miracle” is pure restoration, a restoration that erases conflict rather than resolving it. In doing so, the film embraces the very structure of the “perverse maternal”—all care, no limit, a suffocating love that ultimately disables its recipients.

The Illusion of Hope

The closing image—Riley’s Café standing alone, untouched amidst the skyscrapers—is presented as a beacon of hope. But is it? This is not victory. It’s a kind of taxidermy: a preserved relic, out of time, clinging to the past by virtue of alien grace. The tenement is not part of the world’s future but a sentimental snow-globe, safe and useless, its tenants cocooned in nostalgia.

What makes this truly damning, when set against the tradition of science fiction, is its refusal to embrace the central lesson articulated by the genre’s best: that “to truly live, we must sometimes dare to leave Mother’s embrace and venture into the unknown”. batteries not included wants nothing of the sort. It is, at heart, a celebration of arrested development—a fairy tale in which the solution to adversity is not growth, not rebellion, not the forging of new ties, but the intervention of an all-giving, all-forgiving Other.

Conclusion: Retrograde, Not Radical

If you want science fiction that takes the risks of desire, agency, and independence seriously, this film is not for you. In the end, batteries not included is the cinematic equivalent of being rocked to sleep in a cradle you’ll never escape: comforting, certainly—but also claustrophobic, infantilizing, and ultimately, a betrayal of science fiction’s highest calling. Its world is one in which the “miracle” is never questioned, where the quickest way to end a miracle is to ask why—a maxim that should be anathema to the genre itself. If you want true hope, look elsewhere. If you want to be comforted until you can no longer breathe, this film is ready and waiting, its mechanical arms forever open, refusing to let you grow up.

Let’s turn a cold eye on the Carlos/Bobby storyline—a subplot that attempts pathos but, under critical scrutiny and the “maternal phallus” lens, exposes batteries not included at its most ideologically bankrupt.

Carlos and the Fantasized Mother: Violence as a Problem of (and for) Maternal Substitution

Carlos is introduced as the film’s “villain”: a hired thug, a vessel for urban violence, an outsider crashing the cozy, ersatz family of East 8th Street. But his story is rapidly entangled with Faye’s maternal delusions—she repeatedly mistakes him for her lost son, Bobby. What starts as a moment of confusion calcifies into a narrative logic that treats all violence as a cry for maternal love, to be solved not through justice, consequence, or even reconciliation, but by emotionally regressing the aggressor into a child seeking a mother’s embrace.

Here the film fully embodies what contemporary SF analysis dubs the “suffocating maternal omnipresence.” Carlos is not given room to exist as an adult subject—his agency is denied. His rage, criminality, and eventual redemption are all reduced to symptoms of maternal deprivation, to be cured by the unconditional care of a substitute mother. The narrative turns him into a literal child: Faye soothes him, coos “Bobby,” and finally, Carlos’s redemption arc is secured not by any real change or self-recognition, but by his ability to play along with Faye’s fantasy.

Ersatz Motherhood as the Solution to Conflict

In the film’s most dramatic sequence—the burning of the tenement—Carlos, now internalizing his “Bobby” role, rescues Faye from the flames. He does not confront his violence, nor the systemic pressures that made him Lacey’s pawn; he is absorbed, cleansed, and essentially reborn through the maternal gaze. In the logic of the film, violence is not structural, not political, not even tragic. It is simply a lack—a void where the mother should have been, filled at last by the Fix-Its and by Faye’s delusional tenderness.

Compare this to the science fiction correlates discussed in your attached text. In The Stepford Wives, violent patriarchal anxieties are repressed by transforming women into docile, maternal robots, thereby erasing conflict at the cost of autonomy and truth. In The Giver or Brave New World, discord is prevented not by addressing its causes, but by sedating the population with maternal care and erasing all memory of pain. batteries not included is even more regressive: it doesn’t just sedate, it infantilizes—rendering even the “villain” harmless through immersion in fantasy.

Maternal Phallus as Conflict-Dissolver

The Fix-Its themselves act as nonhuman, hyper-maternal figures. When Carlos is electrocuted, chased, and finally spared by the robots, his aggression is not punished or understood, but gently redirected; the message is clear—no human violence can stand against the power of a perfect, healing Mother. But this is precisely what the Freudian post-feminist critique finds so uncanny, so dangerous: “the perverse maternal realm that feeds but controls its subjects,” erasing the difference between victim and aggressor, dissolving all into the soup of unconditional nurture.

There is no justice here, only regression and absorption. The real-world violence and dispossession of urban redevelopment are waved away, replaced with the fantasy that everyone just needs a mother—whether human or mechanical—and all will be well.

Bobby as an Empty Signifier

The most perverse aspect? The “Bobby” motif is empty—a signifier without substance. Carlos is not Bobby, he never becomes Bobby, and Bobby himself is just a ghost. The film isn’t interested in who Carlos is or what he needs; it simply needs a vessel for Faye’s need to mother, and for the audience’s need to see violence coddled into submission. Compare this to Alien’s “Mother” computer, which solves the problem of crew expendability not by nurturing, but by erasing them for the company’s higher goals. In batteries not included, the solution is no less cold: erase the subject’s difference, fold him back into the mother, and pretend that real reconciliation has occurred.

Conclusion: Infantilization in Lieu of Justice

This is why the film’s ultimate vision is so chilling under a critical gaze. Violence, rage, and social fracture are not addressed, challenged, or resolved—they are nullified by the intervention of a “perverse omnipotent mother,” a Fix-It for every wound. In this vision, adulthood, agency, and genuine transformation are not just denied—they are made impossible. The world remains an eternal nursery, where the only way to be redeemed is to become a child in the eyes of a mother who can never let you go.

The lesson, if we dare to look: If your social ills aren’t solved, don’t blame capitalism, trauma, or injustice. Just wait for a robot, or an old woman lost in fantasy, to take you in her arms and call you Bobby. No one ever grows up in batteries not included. And that, more than any act of violence, is the film’s true crime.

Here’s a sharp, deeply skeptical critique that connects every major character arc in batteries not included, showing how each is trapped within the film’s stifling maternal fantasy—never permitted the dignity of genuine change, but instead folded back into the “eternal nursery” of magical care and emotional regression. The critique will tie each character’s story beat to the psychoanalytic and science fiction motifs of the “maternal phallus” explored in your research, making it clear how the film betrays both its characters and the tradition of adult, challenging science fiction.

Every Character in the Eternal Nursery

batteries not included sells itself as a paean to found family and community resilience, but examine each character through the lens of the “suffocating maternal omnipresence” and the true shape of this fantasy emerges: every arc is a circle, every wound is healed by outside intervention, and no one is ever forced to grow up, change, or truly confront loss. The Fix-Its and Faye’s delusions aren’t merely magic—they are narrative mechanisms to freeze the cast in a state of childish dependency.

Frank and Faye Riley: Maternal Denial and Paternal Powerlessness

Frank is the nominal leader—fiercely loyal, gruffly protective, but ultimately impotent. His wife, Faye, is trapped in a fog of dementia, her every action structured by grief for her dead son Bobby. Their marriage is, at heart, a symbiosis of denial and helplessness: Frank cannot heal his wife, and Faye’s emotional life is dominated by the endless re-enactment of loss.

The arrival of the Fix-Its allows Frank to abdicate responsibility. When violence and eviction threaten, he does not organize resistance or accept change; he becomes a passive recipient of miracle, accepting the dictum: “the quickest way to end a miracle is to ask it why it is.” Faye, meanwhile, is granted a cruel wish: her fantasy of Bobby’s return is played out by Carlos, rendering her never responsible for distinguishing past from present, fantasy from reality. Their arc is not a journey, but a soft spiral back into dependence—Frank on the aliens, Faye on illusion. There is no agency, no work of grief. The maternal phallus—whether embodied by Faye or the Fix-Its—absorbs all pain and forecloses real mourning.

Harry Noble: From Fighter to Infant

Harry, the ex-boxer, is a cipher of failed masculinity. His tile mosaics are smashed; his attempt to defend the community comes to nothing. When violence returns—Carlos’s sabotage and arson—Harry is granted not the opportunity to resist meaningfully, but to be comforted: the Fix-Its heal what is broken, and Harry “resurrects” a stillborn Fix-It with TV parts, which serves only to reward his childish tinkering with instant, miraculous success. No real battle, no real cost—just an endless cycle of injury and healing, never transformation. Like the “children” in WALL-E or the docile citizens in The Giver, Harry is softened, made sweet and harmless, allowed to weep over tiles but never to build or defend something new.

Marisa Esteval: Maternity as Plot Token

Marisa is the most egregious example of the film’s mechanical treatment of maternity. She is “the pregnant one,” her identity entirely reduced to impending motherhood. The birth of the Fix-It “babies” becomes a surrogate for her own pregnancy, linking machine and human in a grotesque metaphor: both are only meaningful as objects of nurture and sources of sentimental drama. Marisa is protected by the community, never challenged, never made to reckon with the world’s dangers. Her eventual pairing with Mason is arranged by the Fix-Its’ interventions—the romance is a reward for faith in the magical mother, not the result of shared struggle or authentic connection.

Mason Baylor: Infantilized Artist

Mason is the struggling artist, an emblem of the sensitive, childlike soul. His art is destroyed, his relationship falls apart, and his agency vanishes. Only the Fix-Its’ appearance revives his hope, and only the rebuilt café gives him space to work again. Mason is never forced to find meaning in suffering or create beauty out of hardship; he is coddled, his world restored by cosmic parents, as if creativity and growth were impossible without endless external nurture. His arc is a warning against the “world without lack”—in such a world, there is no real art, only comfort.

The Hogensons: Escape from the Plot

Muriel and Sid are the “pragmatists,” the ones who take Lacey’s buyout and leave. The film punishes them by rendering them irrelevant. The only community that matters is the one that stays—those who choose the Fix-Its’ care over the risks of adult life. In other words, to leave the maternal nest is to disappear from the story. Their absence underlines the film’s true value system: to be cared for is to matter, to seek independence is to vanish.

Carlos: Redeemed by Regression

Carlos, as already discussed, is not permitted to grow, change, or take responsibility for his actions. His violence is treated as a wound to be healed by the maternal gaze; his redemption comes only when he submits to being Faye’s “Bobby.” His arc is a collapse, not a climb—violence dissolved by fantasy, adulthood erased in favor of a return to the arms of the mother.

The Fix-Its: Cosmic Caretakers, Narrative Prisons

The Fix-Its themselves are the purest avatars of the perverse maternal—mechanical angels who never withhold, never say no, and never demand growth or differentiation. Their ability to repair, to heal, to birth, and to leave when their work is done makes them the ultimate fantasy of the all-giving, non-castrating mother. But as the research notes, such omnipotence “strips away independence, creativity, and love,” rendering its beneficiaries “desiring nothing, knowing nothing, feeling nothing.” The Fix-Its’ final miracle—the rebuilding of the tenement and café—is the ultimate act of narrative infantilization: the community is restored, unchanged, forever safe, forever small, its members denied the right to shape their own fates.

The Tenement: Museum, Not Home

The building itself, surrounded by encroaching skyscrapers, stands at the end as a monument to stasis. This is not victory—it is preservation. The world changes, but this little patch of Manhattan is locked in amber, maintained by the lingering presence of the Fix-Its’ magic. It is a museum of the maternal, a testament to the film’s fundamental refusal of risk, loss, and adulthood.

Conclusion: No Exit, No Growth

Not a single character in batteries not included is allowed the dignity of struggle, loss, or true change. Every wound is healed, every conflict dissolved, every potential for growth short-circuited by the omnipotent care of either human or mechanical mother. The film’s fantasy of community is, in truth, a vision of endless childhood—a utopia only for those who never wish to leave the nursery. In the grand tradition of science fiction, this is not hope but horror: a world without lack, without desire, without the freedom to fail or become something new. Every character, in the end, is a child—well-fed, well-loved, and never allowed to grow up.

Why batteries not included Insidiously Feels Beautiful

How does batteries not included seduce us so thoroughly, smuggling in a vision of perpetual infancy and passivity while leaving most viewers dabbing away tears, clutching nostalgia, and defending its “warmth”? The answer isn’t simply technical mastery or Spielbergian craft. The film feels beautiful because it is expertly engineered to flatter the audience’s most regressive, comfort-seeking instincts—inviting us to long for an impossible wholeness, a perfectly healed world, and the return of a mother’s embrace we never quite outgrew. Its beauty is insidious because it exploits the very longing for lost comfort that mature science fiction works warn us against.

The Aesthetic of Return

Every shot of the film is bathed in soft, golden light, the visual equivalent of memory’s haze. The Fix-Its gleam, chirp, and whirl in a register that fuses the magical with the mechanical, designed for pure affect. The restored tenement is presented as not just repaired, but transfigured—gleaming tile, cozy booths, bustling community, everything as it “should be.” The score swells with childlike wonder; every moment is orchestrated to trigger that ineffable feeling of being loved and protected.

What’s so dangerous here is the object of this beauty: not risk, not desire, not real connection, but the pleasure of restoration without cost. It is the pleasure of being returned to the lap of an all-giving parent—a fantasy Freud, Žižek, and generations of psychoanalytic critics have warned is as deadly as it is seductive.

Beauty as the Surface of Control

This is not accidental. As your research notes, many dystopian or utopian science fiction works construct worlds that are “eerily serene at first, until the horror of over-dependence is laid bare.” In batteries not included, the horror never arrives. The viewer is not forced to confront the price of comfort; the Fix-Its’ gifts have no strings, their miracles never lead to consequence, their love never suffocates. The tenants do not have to risk, to suffer, or to mature—so we, as viewers, are never asked to do so either.

Like the Stepford Wives’ perfect suburban streets, or the plush hover-chairs of WALL-E’s starship Axiom, this beauty is engineered to narcotize. The “surface-level gratification” here is not just visual; it is spiritual, emotional, even ethical. By resolving every wound, every loss, and every conflict with a miracle, the film offers the fantasy of a world where beauty is endless provision, where every rupture is already mended. The audience is encouraged to feel that “everything broken can always be fixed”—and, deeper, that growing up, leaving the mother, is unnecessary and even cruel.

The Return of the Maternal

No element is more crucial than the constant presence of the maternal: Faye’s delusions are treated not as tragedy, but as portals to healing; the Fix-Its’ “babies” inspire tenderness, not uncanny dread; the final restoration is not an act of adult agency but a cosmic caress. The film aestheticizes the very thing that keeps its characters in chains: the omnipresence of nurture, the refusal of separation. Its beauty is therefore the beauty of the swaddled child, the dream of being forever rocked to sleep, the “screen as maternal breast, endlessly available”.

This is precisely why the film’s sentimentality, so “sweet” on first viewing, is actually a mechanism of control. It disarms our critical faculties, bathes us in comfort, and teaches us to mistake regression for hope.

The Insidiousness of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is the film’s greatest weapon. Every detail—the cozy café, the old jukebox, the patched aprons and the neighborhood that refuses to change—functions as a bridge to our own childhood memories, our longing for a world that felt safer, simpler, more whole. The Fix-Its are not simply magical aliens; they are literal wish-fulfillment machines, erasing the traumas of the present and restoring the past to a state of impossible perfection.

But as your research shows, “a world without lack” is not utopia, but a cage. By presenting this cage as beautiful, the film ensures that we do not see the bars. We weep for the healing, not realizing we have traded away growth, agency, and adulthood for the prettiest of prisons.

Conclusion: Beauty as Bait

So why does batteries not included feel so beautiful? Because it is the siren song of a world where nothing is ever lost, no one ever grows old, and the mother’s arms are always open. It is beautiful in the way the memory of the womb is beautiful: safe, warm, and utterly stifling. Its insidiousness lies in its perfection; its betrayal is how willingly we accept comfort in place of freedom, restoration in place of real life.

What looks like beauty is, in fact, the film’s most dangerous lie—a lesson that science fiction, at its best, exists to unmask.

Hubcap as the Empty Signifier: Symbolism, Loss, and the (Im)possibility of Desire in batteries not included

In a film saturated with the fantasy of endless repair, batteries not included gives its sharpest, most quietly uncanny image in the recurring motif of the hubcap—first as a source of confusion and misrecognition for the Fix-It “babies,” and finally as an ambient, nearly invisible presence in the story’s denouement. These hubcaps, far from being accidental set dressing, are rich with psychoanalytic and symbolic resonance, cutting directly against the film’s relentless, suffocating restoration. They are, for a flickering moment, the trace of loss—the “castration” the film otherwise refuses to admit, the signifier of lack that alone makes true desire and subjectivity possible.

The Hubcap Mistaken for Mother

During the search for the missing Fix-It “babies,” there is a peculiar, almost comic scene: the tiny machines encounter a discarded hubcap lying on the city pavement. They swarm it, chirp, and linger around it, unable to distinguish this cold, empty object from the living parental machines they’ve lost. The film plays the moment for mild humor and pathos, but its logic is much deeper. The hubcap, perfectly circular, metallic, and reflective, is the uncanny double of the Fix-Its themselves—but it is inert, non-responsive, utterly empty of nurturing presence.

This is the moment of Triebvorstellung—the “drive-representation”—where the object of desire is shown in its absolute emptiness. The hubcap stands in for the parent, but it cannot answer or satisfy; it is a void, a placeholder, a signifier with no signified. The babies’ confusion is the child’s primal encounter with absence: the first lesson that what is longed for can never be fully possessed, that the Other is not always available, that the world includes lack.

The Hubcap Shop: Name-of-the-Father and the Return of Law

This symbolism is driven home in the film’s final shot. As Carlos stands, slack-jawed, before the miraculously restored tenement, the camera lingers—almost carelessly—on a storefront behind him: a hubcap shop, its racks filled with hundreds of shining disks. The image is easy to overlook, but in psychoanalytic terms, it is nothing less than the return of the repressed: the world of difference, separation, and the symbolic order quietly reasserting itself behind the scene of magical unity.

Here the hubcap is not a parent, not a Fix-It, not a wish-fulfilling agent. It is a commodity, a mere object—an emblem of the Name-of-the-Father, the law that institutes the impossibility of endless maternal fusion, the “cut” that opens up the field of desire and meaning. In Lacanian theory, the father’s function is to interrupt the closed circuit of mother-child dyad, to inscribe lack, and to make true symbolization possible. The hubcap, as empty signifier, is the first and final trace of this function in a film that otherwise does everything to deny it.

Why the Hubcap Matters

In the psychoanalytic language of your research, the hubcap is castration made visible: a marker that there is no perfect, all-giving mother, no endless repair, no world without loss. For a moment, the film flirts with truth: the Fix-It babies learn that not everything round and shiny is their parent; the city itself is full of objects that resemble, but are not, the magical caretaker. Even the miraculous restoration of the café cannot hide the fact that the symbolic order persists—that, outside the magical bubble, the world is organized not by maternal plenitude but by the absence that structures all desire.

The Necessary Cut

What makes this motif so potent—and so tragic—is that the film refuses to linger on it. The hubcap is noticed, then forgotten; the lesson is offered, then overwritten by miracle. The camera returns to the fantasy of healing, the Fix-Its descend in armies, and lack is covered over by the promise of endless nurture. But the presence of the hubcap cannot be undone. It is the crack in the film’s mask, the “proper symbolization” the psychoanalytic tradition demands, the wound that makes individuation, adulthood, and real meaning possible.

It is the point where batteries not included almost—almost—touches greatness: the moment when the story’s machinery confronts the impossibility of complete satisfaction, the necessity of separation, and the power of the empty signifier. The hubcap stands for what is always missing in the film’s world, and for what every subject—child, adult, machine, or viewer—must ultimately face: the truth that to live, to desire, to create, we must accept lack, endure loss, and learn that not every hunger will be answered by the return of the mother.

Conclusion: The Hubcap as the Real Miracle

The real miracle is not the building that rises from the rubble, but the possibility, however brief, of symbolization—of acknowledging absence, loss, and the cut that makes meaning possible. The hubcap is the film’s negative theology: a silent, gleaming reminder that the world’s beauty and tragedy alike depend on what cannot be repaired.

In a film that wants only to smother us in endless nurture, the hubcap is the fleeting symbol of freedom. And for those who notice, it is the film’s truest, hardest, and most necessary gift.

The Hubcap as the Film Itself: Mistaking the Medium for the Mother

batteries not included has always been beloved—not for what it truly is, but for what audiences fantasize it to be: a magical, maternal technology, a comforting source of restoration and emotional care. But look again at the film’s own central metaphor—the hubcap, first mistaken for a parent by the Fix-It babies, later multiplied in the anonymous racks of the hubcap shop behind Carlos in the film’s final scene. Here, the film turns its lens on itself, exposing the real function of its sentimental machinery: the audience, in loving batteries not included, mistakes the film for the loving parent, the omnipotent Fix-It, when in truth it is only a hubcap—an empty signifier, a surface that reflects desire but cannot fulfill it.

The Hubcap and the VCD Shop: From Maternal Fantasy to Commodity

The symbolism sharpens when you consider the historical context: just a few years before the film’s release, the compact disc (CD) was invented, soon to be followed by the Video CD (VCD), and then the DVD. The hubcap shop in the film’s closing shot is no mere accident of set design—it is a sly commentary on the transformation of cinema itself into commodity, spectacle, and ultimately, technology mistaken for nurture. As the hubcap stands in for the parent, the shop stands in for the video store—rows upon rows of gleaming, mass-produced, circular media, promising endless replay, endless restoration, endless access to a world that is always healed, always whole, always “like it used to be.”

In the 1980s, the VHS tape (and soon, the CD and VCD) enabled audiences to bring movies home, to replay them ad infinitum, to seek the maternal comfort of the familiar narrative, the miracle perpetually repeated. The hubcap shop behind Carlos is, in this reading, the ancestor of every VCD and DVD shop: the endless return of the “mother,” not as person but as product, not as miracle but as medium.

The Audience’s Mistake: Loving the Hubcap

The Fix-It babies swarm the hubcap, longing for parental presence, unable to tell the difference between nurture and object, between mother and mechanism. So too does the audience, mistaking batteries not included (the film-object, the shiny disc) for the maternal technology itself—for a provider of emotional plenitude, healing, and endless return. But this is the error psychoanalysis insists must be recognized: the film is not a miracle, not a parent, not a source of infinite care. It is, like the hubcap, a signifier—one that reflects, but cannot fulfill, the fantasy of unbroken unity and endless nurture.

The Hubcap as Castration: The Necessary Cut in Cinema

Psychoanalytically, this confusion is the refusal of “castration”—the necessary symbolic cut that marks the difference between fantasy and reality, between the maternal and the world of objects, between the promise of infinite nurture and the necessity of loss, limitation, and desire. The hubcap, repeated in the shop window, is the Name-of-the-Father, the mark of absence that alone permits meaning, growth, and adult subjectivity. To love the hubcap as mother is to refuse adulthood, to demand of art (and media) what it cannot give: to heal all wounds, to restore all losses, to make the world whole again.

But in truth, the film—like the CD, the VCD, the DVD—is not the mother, not the miracle, but the reminder that miracles belong to the realm of childhood. To grow up is to accept that the medium is only a medium, the story only a story, the hubcap only a hubcap.

The Shop as Infinite Replay: The Maternal Fantasy in the Age of Home Video

By the late 1980s, the hope was that cinema could be bought, owned, replayed, and made to mother us forever. The VCD shop, like the hubcap shop, stands for this fantasy—technology transformed into a surrogate parent, art mistaken for omnipotent nurture, the “maternal phallus” repackaged as endless, shining discs on a shelf.

But this is the seduction of the “comfort cage” your research describes: the world without lack, endlessly available on shiny plastic, in which the viewer never has to experience separation, difference, or the end of the story. What is truly insidious is how the medium flatters this wish—making itself a substitute for the maternal embrace, seducing us with restoration, while quietly insisting on its own emptiness.

Conclusion: The Hubcap Is Not the Mother—The Film Is Not the Parent

The genius of batteries not included—and its ultimate critique—is that the hubcap, the CD, the VCD, the film itself, is not the thing we love. It is the surface on which we project the fantasy of lost unity, the hope for repair, the longing for the all-giving mother. But to grow up, as viewers and as subjects, is to see the hubcap for what it is: a signifier of absence, a necessary reminder that art and technology can never replace the reality of separation, loss, and desire.

If the film is a hubcap, the audience is the Fix-It baby: always searching, always longing, always mistaking the object for the mother. But in this very mistake lies the possibility of freedom—the realization that to truly live, and to truly love art, is to accept that the story ends, the mother leaves, and the miracle is only ever a dream reflected in chrome.

The VCD shop, the hubcap shop: these are not the womb, but the world. The miracle of cinema is not that it mothers us, but that it lets us see the difference—and finally, to leave the nursery behind.

Prompt: collect all details about the plot of the film “batteries not included” / write longer version / write longer version / write the most detailed plot / write a scathing critique of the film below according to the document attached, find correlates of film elements in well-known science fiction! (The Maternal Phallus in Science Fiction: Uncanny Mothers, Omnipotent AIs, and Totalitarian Nurture) / continue with the next article focusing on Carlos/Bobby: how violence is solved by ersatz mother / now write the next article that connects every detail about every character in the film’s plot / write the next article about why the film insidiously feels beautiful! / write the final article about the symbolism of hubcap! the scene where the Fix-It babies mistake a hubcap lying on the pavement for their parents, and the final scene where the director shows a hubcap shop behind Carlos amazed at the building fixed the night before by the army of Fix-Its. It stands for “Triebvorstellung”, the empty signifier, Name-of-the-Father, the castration necessary for proper symbolization! / now write the final final paper that the hubcap stands for the film itself “loved by the audience” mistaken for a maternal technology, and therefore the hubcap shop stands for the VCD shop; CD was invented a few years before