Cherry 2000 (1988)

and the Man Who Went Looking for the Same Model

His robot wife breaks down, so he crosses a wasteland to put her memory into an identical body, and hires a tracker who can drive, fight and fix a plane. The first turn in the series, where the made woman is finally set down. What it gets right, and what the turn still cost her.

Cherry 2000 (1988). Directed by Steve De Jarnatt, screenplay by Michael Almereyda from a story by Lloyd Fonvielle. David Andrews as Sam Treadwell, Melanie Griffith as Edith “E” Johnson, Pamela Gidley as Cherry, Tim Thomerson as Lester.

His wife breaks down, and he sets out across a desert to find another one exactly like her.

He comes home with a woman who was never for sale.

This page belongs to On Screen. The films before it built women to order: Weird Science with a computer, Mannequin in a store window, Blade Runner in a corporate lab. Cherry 2000 starts in the same place and then does something none of them did. It lets the man look at the made woman, and put her down.

That makes it a turn: not a refusal in the heroine’s own words, like Labyrinth, but a film that changes its mind halfway through. Like every entry on the On Screen page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Sam is not a villain. He is a lonely man in a world that has swapped intimacy for paperwork, and when it counts he turns the plane around.

The Story

It is 2017. The United States has broken apart into wastelands with a few civilized islands. Society has grown wary of intimacy and buried what’s left of it in bureaucracy: in one establishment, lawyers draw up a contract for every encounter. Robots have been built as substitutes for wives.

Sam Treadwell, a recycling executive, is married to one. She is a Cherry 2000. One evening she shorts out on a wet kitchen floor. The repairman tells him she can’t be fixed, but her memory disk, which holds her entire personality, could go into a new body, if he can find the same model. A dealer tells him the Cherry 2000 is no longer made. The only ones left are in an abandoned warehouse in Zone 7, the most lawless stretch of the desert.

So Sam carries Cherry’s disk in a little device that plays back her voice, and hires a tracker to take him there: Edith “E” Johnson, a tough professional with a heavily modified 1965 Ford Mustang.

Zone 7 belongs to Lester and his gang. E and Sam take shelter with Six-Fingered Jake, an old tracker who taught E everything she knows. Sam is captured, and among Lester’s people finds his own ex-girlfriend, now calling herself Ginger. When he sees the gang murder a tracker, he escapes and finds E and Jake alive. Jake, who had let Sam think the disk was lost, gives it to E and stays behind to draw the gang off.

Sam turns out to be a capable fighter, a veteran of earlier wars, and E begins to have feelings for him. His own feelings for her are derailed when the playback device goes off by accident and Cherry’s voice plays. At a gas station run by Jake’s friend Snappy Tom, E repairs an old light airplane using parts from her Mustang. Jake catches up, and is shot in the back by a woman who has betrayed them to Lester. E and Sam escape by air.

Sam is nearly ready to give up. E won’t: she means to finish the job, so that Jake’s death means something. They land, and Zone 7 turns out to be the ruins of Las Vegas. The warehouse is a casino. Inside, Sam finds a working Cherry 2000 and brings her to life with the disk.

She is exactly who she was. And because she was programmed only for home life and the bedroom, she cannot cope when Lester’s gang attacks. The three of them scramble into the plane, and it is too heavy to take off. E jumps out, so that Sam and the robot can get away. Sam realizes that Cherry cannot give him what he and E have had, and turns the plane around. Cherry, built to please him, offers to bring him a Pepsi. He sends her away. Sam and E fight off the gang, take off together, and kiss as they fly into the sunset.

The film was finished in December 1985. Its distributor, Orion Pictures, shelved it and moved its release date again and again. It came out in February 1988 and went quickly to video. The director explained the delays simply: “It’s also kind of a soft film. I don’t think anyone really knows how to market it.”

What It Gets Right

More than its reputation suggests.

E is one of the most competent women in this whole series. She knows the desert and the people in it, has her own car, repairs a plane with parts from her own Mustang, and carries on after her mentor dies because she has decided his death will not be for nothing. Her reasons are her own. She is not waiting to be noticed; she is doing a job.

The world of the film is a sharp joke about where the made-woman fantasy leads: a society so wary of real closeness that it needs a lawyer’s contract for every encounter and has swapped wives for appliances. The film sees the emptiness of that before its hero does.

And the ending is a genuine turn. Sam gets exactly what he crossed the desert for, the same model, with the same memories, and finds out it is not what he wants. For a film that begins with a man grieving a robot, that is a lot of distance travelled.

What It Teaches

1. A wife is a model number

The premise is the plainest version of this series’ oldest lesson. Cherry is a product with a model name. When she breaks, the question is not whether Sam will grieve but whether a replacement body is in stock. Her personality lives on a disk that can be moved from one body to the next, like a part.

The Decoder’s Card 54, Trophy on the Shelf, names the pattern in one line: “Your image, not you, is the point.” A girl watching learns that a woman can be swapped for an identical one, and that the man is being loyal when he insists on the same model. She does not learn to ask what it would mean to be loved for something that couldn’t be reordered.

2. She was built for home, and nothing else

Cherry can do exactly what she was made for, and nothing more. When real danger arrives, she has no way to meet it. In the middle of a gunfight she offers to bring him a soda. It is played as a joke, and it is one, but it is also a portrait of a woman whose only skill is his comfort.

The Glossary has a word for someone who gives you back only what you want to see: mirroring. Cherry is mirroring in a body. The film is honest that it isn’t enough, which is more than most of the made-woman films manage.

3. The voice in the box

Sam carries Cherry’s voice across the desert in a playback device. Just as he starts to feel something for the real woman beside him, the device goes off, and her recorded voice pulls him back to the idea of her.

That is what idealization sounds like. A perfect memory, always the same, playing over a real person who is sitting right there. Many of us have been the real person in the room, competing with a recording of someone who never argued and never changed.

4. The real woman had to jump out of the plane first

Here the turn needs a careful look. Sam chooses E only after she has taken herself out of the picture: she jumps from the overloaded plane so that he and the robot can escape. Her sacrifice is what makes him see her.

It is a quieter version of a lesson the series has met before: that a woman is recognized at the moment she gives herself up. E deserved to be chosen while she was still in her seat. The film gets to the right answer, but it makes her pay for the question.

5. And then he turns the plane around

Still, he does. Sam puts down the made woman he crossed a desert for, and goes back for the one who can track, fight, fix an airplane and refuse to quit. The last image is two people escaping together in a plane she repaired.

After Mannequin, Weird Science and Blade Runner, that matters. A girl watching this one learns, at least by the end, that the woman who fixes the plane gets the ending, and the woman who only brings the drinks does not. It is not a perfect lesson. It is a turn.

The Made Women, Side by Side

	Weird Science (1985)	Mannequin (1987)	Blade Runner (1982)	Cherry 2000 (1988)
Who made her	Two teenage boys	A lonely artist	A corporation	A factory, as a product
What she was for	Their confidence	His success	Easier control	Home life, and his comfort
What happens to her	She vanishes	She becomes real as his reward	He takes her away	He sends her away

Four films in which men build or buy the woman they want. Only one of them has the man look at what he ordered and send it back.

If You Grew Up on This

You may have found this film on a video shelf, and loved E, and the Mustang, and the plane. Nothing on this page asks you to stop. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Have you ever felt replaceable, as if a newer version of you would do just as well?
Have you ever competed with someone’s memory of a person who never argued back?
What would you have to give up before someone finally saw you? Is that a price you still agree to?
What is your plane: the thing you can build from the parts of your own life?
Who in your life chose you while you were still in your seat?

E repaired a plane with parts from her own car, and it carried them both out of the ruins. The man came too. The plane was hers.

You’re the audience now. You were never a model number.