Documentary Review: 'My Husband, The Cyborg'

My Husband, The Cyborg

Directed by Susanna Cappellaro

Written by Susanna Cappellaro

Starring Susanna Cappellaro, Scott Cohen

Release Date February 3rd, 2025

Published February 4th, 2025

My Husband, The Cyborg is a terrific documentary in that it is so very inviting. By that I mean, the film invites you into a conversation with it. Your mind can’t help but argue or challenge the movie, unless you agree with what’s happening, but then you are probably thinking of the possibilities it demonstrates for your own life, in a different conversation with the film. For me, it was a running argument with the protagonist of My Husband, The Cyborg, Scott Cohen, a frustrating human being who, though he is probably a fine person in general, drove me up a wall.

My Husband, The Cyborg proceeds on the premise of filmmaker, Susanna Cappellaro documenting her husband Scott’s transformation into a ‘Cyborg.’ Scott is starting the process of enhancing his body for the future. The first step is getting a series of bolts in his chest, essentially piercings, which will be in place to hold a small microchip. This microchip has one function, it vibrates when Scott is facing magnetic north. It’s a vibrating compass. That’s it. According to Scott, he will now always know when he’s facing north, which I am sure is valuable information… somehow.

I could be facing north at my desk right now but I don’t care. It doesn’t affect my life in any way to currently know what direction I am facing on a compass. But what’s frustrating is that Scott believes that he’s the one who knows what direction he’s facing, rather than a machine telling him what direction he’s facing. To me, this is like saying I know what the weather is like because I have my phone in my hand and I can look it up. Having a compass attached to your body doesn’t inherently make you a compass, the compass is a compass.

This may seem like a semantic argument and I can already hear people like Scott loading up their philosophical semantic arguments. So why bother even bringing it up? Because Scott is selling this notion to people. Though his career is in the music industry, he’s apparently entering the tech space with this idea about facilitating humans becoming cyborgs. At one point, the documentary shows him giving a presentation, much like a TED Talk, in which he bemoans the money being put into making technology smarter but not making humans smarter.

As an abstract comment, that notion sounds deep. It sounds as if Scott has said something profound. But, what he’s saying is not that we need to be better educated. He’s not encouraging people to go to school or even read a book, he hates physical media. What he’s really talking about is installing technology in human beings that will allow them to have access to more information. Think of it like having an internet search engine in your brain. It’s that scene in The Matrix where someone plugs something into Neo’s head and he suddenly knows Kung-Fu.

Is the future really going to involve invasive procedures to put the internet directly into your brain? That’s what Scott seems to be talking about. The problem with this philosophy is actually well challenged by his wife, Susanna, via this documentary. While he is obsessed with knowing which way is north, he’s neglecting the fact that he can’t hug his wife because the thing on his chest hurts too much. He spends endless minutes turning himself one direction and then another until the silly thing on his chest buzzes to tell him that he’s facing north.

He thinks he’s enhancing himself but he’s missing the humanity right in front of him. When the couple attends her family Christmas celebration, Susanna asks Scott how he feels about Christmas as a Jewish man. He says it feels lonely. I get what he’s saying, feeling left out of what is happening around him. But, he’s surrounded by family, people who love him, and care about him, most especially his wife, and he says he feels lonely. Now, it’s possible to feel lonely anywhere. Colloquially, you can feel lonely in a crowd. It’s a state of being. But, when you add the context of this documentary, it's the closest Scott will come to being aware of the distance he's choosing to place between himself and others and that, perhaps, his feeling of loneliness is of his own creation.

One of the most frustrating things about Scott Cohen is how much he complains about his Cyborg part, his compass. He’s afraid of needles and before getting the implants in his chest, intended to hold his microchip device, he’s in agony because he’s afraid of the pain. I wanted to shake the guy and remind him that he chose this. He can choose not to do this. He agonizes over telling his mother about his body modification and, again, I want to scream, you chose this! This was a decision. It’s not something he had to do.

Scott brings this agony upon himself and has the gall to complain about it, as if he's been burdened by outside forces. All of Scott Cohen's problems are problems he's created. His infinitely patient and caring wife tries desperately to explain this to him, that he's changed, and that this change is driving them apart, and he keeps saying that nothing has changed, for him. For him, the cyborg part, he and Susanna come to call it Northy, has not changed him in any way, even as there is documentary footage of him being changed by his choices.

My Husband, The Cyborg is a documentary about obsession. It’s about a man obsessed with a mythic concept of human and technology combining for the betterment of mankind. The obsession blinds him to his own humanity. He’s so focused on his enhancements that he can’t see that he’s driving his wife away. He can’t see the hurt he causes her by being distant or off in his own little world, spinning around rooms to make his little toy buzz when he’s facing North. He can’t see how childish he looks when he is turning himself every which way just to feel a thing buzz against his chest.

That’s actually one of the reasons why My Husband, The Cyborg, is such a great documentary. It doesn’t let Scott off the hook entirely. Susanna clearly loves her husband and wants to be kind to him, and give him the benefit of her patience and love, but she doesn’t hide the hurt from his distance. The hurt he causes by choosing to find North on a compass on his chest over hugging his wife is documented. You can say it's biased by the perspective of the documentary camera and the control a director, Susanna herself, wields over the film in editing and presentation, but the same camera is capturing her trying incredibly hard to understand him and giving him the kind of patience that he doesn't have for her and the hurt that he's causing her.

Scott is missing those essential human pieces that connect us to other people. And, most frustratingly, he can’t see that he’s choosing to cause this harm and this disconnection. He feels disconnected, he feels lonely in the presence of his wife, and other people who love him and he cannot see that he's the one who has created this decision. It's genuinely heartbreaking watching him repeatedly choose his cyborg tech start-up and his silly buzzing, pseudo appendage, over the life he's supposed to living and building with his chosen partner in life.

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