Monday, September 26, 2011

After Work



All of the Terminator films except for the third one have their climactic scene set inside of a factory. That is the place where the killer robots (pardon: cybernetic organisms) are crushed or melted down or obliterated in a thermonuclear explosion. But factories are also where the Terminators are forged. These golems of the post-industrial age are born in factories just as humans – and especially first-world humans – are locked out of them, laid off, made redundant, outsourced, terminated. And so, albeit on a crude, literal level, the Terminator films are also stories about the de-industrialisation of America, a decades-long economic and social transformation that lacks a recognisable set of cinematic referents simply because blue collar work was hardly ever featured in the nation’s films to begin with.


The factories of the Terminator films are already depopulated. Unlike the research facilities that are guarded  - in Judgment Day - by their own paramilitary security forces, these are buildings without so much as a night janitor. In The Terminator, Connor and Reese waltz into one such factory and initiate an automatic production sequence simply by flicking a random series of switches on a console, thus setting in motion a series of whizzing robotic arms and appendages whose overt purpose is to remind us of the dehumanisation of work and invite us to consider the small step that supposedly separates replacing the odd worker from killing all humans.

Unpacking Hollywood technophobic fantasies is never straightforward, and mostly pointless: of course James Cameron’s rage against the machine is a glaring paradox, just like the condemnation of simulations by the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix is a glaring paradox. The underlying messages are never subversive, the social analyses always absent. These are stories that are ground out of the raw material of literature and philosophy by a semi-industrial process – think of the heavy and contested debt of both The Terminator and The Matrix to their various respective sources – and that carry trace quantities of more coherent artistic visions and more serious reflections. But what Hollywood also does, more than any other single global cultural site, is to reify fantasy, that is to say define each year what counts as real imagination. This can be observed for example in the press releases of the companies that make the software used in post-production, which are all about setting and re-setting the always shifting benchmarks of verisimilitude.

So, even at its worst, American apocalyptic cinema engages in the culturally significant task of imagining what the end of the world or the decline of particular social classes might look like, and mobilises to this end a formidable technical and creative apparatus. Additionally, a franchise like Terminator allows to observe within a single storyline the evolution of the means of producing such a fantasy over time – to be precise, the twenty-five years that separate the original Terminator to Salvation. On this, some scattered observations.

Firstly, there is the most obvious transition from mechanical to digital effects, and from low to high budget, and its failure to improve on the aesthetic of the original. I’m parting ways with k-punk here, who has expressed admiration for Salvation’s ‘CyberGothic’ – there was nothing to my mind in the last instalment that improved on the low-tech, low-budget flash forwards of the first Terminator, or that expanded on the image of future Earth as a corpse-strewn waste land that populated Kyle Reese’s memory and Sarah Connor’s nightmares in instalments one and two. And this is not just not very imaginative of the film-makers. It’s also not very imaginative of the machines.


Consider the factory where the final confrontation in Salvation is set. There is a suitably sombre moment when John Connor realises that he’s standing on the factory floor on which the Terminators are built. These are early models, T-800s. He knows them well, and so do we. One of them is a computer-simulated and, in all fairness, entirely credible version of the Arnold Schwarzenegger of 1984. The others are endoskeletons that have yet to come on-line. But what’s more notable about this factory is that it looks like it was designed by humans: it has stairs and elevators and doors, hydraulic piping and large wheels for opening and closing valves manually. So whereas on one hand the machines appear fiendish in their, well, machinations, always looking for new ways to infiltrate and deceive the resistance, they are baffling failures at creating environments in their own image. The ‘Moto-Terminators’ (an innovation of Salvation) are a typical example: these androids ride armoured motorbikes that they actually have to control, meaning that if the rider is unseated or killed the bike itself is rendered useless, for it has no intelligence of its own. Furthermore, the occasional point-of-view shots from inside the Terminators’ brains indicate that they visualise data in Arabic numbers and select options from sets of commands in English; but of course it’s not just human symbolic language but the very idea of a ‘computer screen’ for somebody to look at that is entirely redundant if you happen to be the computer.

What is most striking about the world of the machines is all this vestigial humanity, all the inherited tics that our mind children appear unable to unlearn. What was the point of becoming self-aware if Skynet was just going to take over and be like us? For that matter, why wage all-out war on humanity? On this point, The Matrix rather more intelligently suggests that the best way for machines to enslave us would be to run a programme that looked and behaved exactly like late capitalism. The takeover by means of the greater and greater mechanisation of labour is an outdated scenario that later Terminator films need to keep playing out simply because it’s what the future looked like in 1984, when the android or replicant seemed the most likely successor to the human race. Nowadays the synthetic other looks rather more like a financial instrument than a robot.


But here’s another question: why is the T-800 anatomically correct? And by the way, we can infer that it is because none of the people who briefly see it naked when it travels to the past ever shout “look, a giant naked man with no penis!”, but the approving glance of a waitress in Judgment Day, above, is the only proof positive – it’s not as if Arnie’s schlong is ever in view. Nonetheless: the T-800 is an infiltration unit, but only insofar as it needs to appear human for long enough to come within shooting range of actual humans. We also know that all T-800s look alike, meaning the disguise would only go so far if you happened to survive the first meeting with one of them.

Still, even if we speculated that Skynet gave the T-800 a penis just to stick with the design, or on the off chance that it might some day have to exterminate a nudist colony, it would be another one of those incidental, vestigial attributes, but also one that calls attention to the fact that the machines do not seek pleasure. On this point it might be worth reminding ourselves that the eighties were not only the decade of the killer robot but also of the sexy robot, meaning not just Blade Runner’s Roy, Pris and Rachael, or Kelly LeBrock’s character in Weird Science, but ones that would get naked right down to the chassis in the works of illustrators such as Hajime Sorayama, without forgetting Donna Haraway’s infinitely more layered but still resolutely pleasure-seeking cyborgs.

None of these creatures remotely resemble Skynet and its machines, whose business time is strictly regular business time: meaning the fulfilment of whatever mission might be at hand, with the corporate and military senses of the word both in play. Clare Danes’ character in Rise of the Machines quizzes the reprogrammed T-800 about this, asking it if it cares about the well-being of its charges, to which the reply is:
If you were to die I would become useless. There would be no reason for me to exist.
The liberated machines have simply turned inwards the utilitarian principle on which they were once built. And so comes the answer to Philip Dick’s question: these androids don’t dream.

If the machines are strangely maladjusted to the world that they inherit, so too are Sarah and John Connor to the world that fails to end: having trained for the post-apocalypse, they cannot adjust to society this side of the catastrophe. And so they drift, gaining a fleeting sense of community from their association with a gang of Mexican outlaws – whether criminal or revolutionary, is left unclear – but always coming back to the country where they are routinely incarcerated or lumped with the clinically insane.

She used to be a waiter. He’s an occasional road gang worker who lives off the grid and is caught stealing drugs from a veterinary clinic. Their ritual insistence that ‘there is no fate but what we make’ is belied by the fact that there is plainly no future for them in human society and that they don’t believe in the possibility of social change. And so when Sarah dies of cancer, one year after the scheduled end of the world that she had managed to defer in Judgment Day, she asks that her ashes be scattered but her coffin be filled with assault rifles and grenades, for the fight against the machines that might yet come, and the revolution that never will.



One last image. By the time the second Terminator film was made, in 1991, the steel crisis was two decades old, yet a vat of molten steel is to this day one of the stock images of industrialisation and a symbol of our capacity to manufacture things. (A current Hyundai ad campaign emphasises this.) In Judgment Day, it becomes the means of undoing progress, of literally forgetting the advances that we can speculate about but have yet to pass: it is the place where the T-1000 comes to die, shrieking horribly and shape-shifting as it flails about in its final spasms, the embodiment of the nightmare of a future without work, a future that doesn’t need us.




The Terminator (James Cameron, USA, 1984)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, USA, 1991)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, USA, 2003)
Terminator Salvation (McG, USA, 2009)

This has just come to hand: Aaron Bady on first seeing The Terminator in 2008.



15 comments:

Unknown said...

I think this is part of that line http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugireeCoYyU

David K Wayne said...

"Nowadays the synthetic other looks rather more like a financial instrument than a robot."

- Excellent. Brought to mind something else about the Terminator films (just the 1st two - couldn't be arsed with the others): How much they highlight the contradictions of Reaganism. Or rather, the deep denial the films are in over neoliberalism, de-industrialisation (despite the visual signs) and the wounds they inflicted on communities and family life.

For everything you point out, the films foreground the very personal conflicts Reagan's America exploited to sustain itself. The first film is basically about preventing an abortion by any means necessary (the clue is in the title, and arguably Arnie's manner/accent relates abortion to the dark history of eugenics). The other Sarah Connors killed are just surplus - in narrative terms they don't 'matter', because they're not destined to have THE baby. A baby for which history must be halted.

Also, every single good guy (even the inventor of Skynet) has a big turning point where they 'see the light', based on faith alone. Readily accepting the mad prophesies told to them, they're defined by 'born again' religious conversions in all but name. They don't earn the right to be seen as good guys until they do this. And of course, motherhood is so holy (the paradoxical 'virgin/not virgin' birth) that everyday life is literally a war zone as soon as Sarah is informed of her biological destiny. In T2, her violent nuttiness is entirely justified by the narrative - compare it with the short shrift John Connor's 'lazy' adoptive parents get. The fetish for guns is interesting - taking them to the grave! All those scenes about gaining/retaining access to them, even though they're shown to be ineffective for fighting Terminators.

Related to Connor's survivalist nuttiness is the films' standard hostility to anything 'big government'. Public medical professionals are treated as complacent or abusive. Police are all inept and disposable. Teachers and social workers are dozy and ineffective. Skynet is a huge infrastructure project destined to destroy humanity, despite being intended as a peacekeeping solution. As we're seeing now, it's an ideological contradiction that really took a hold of the right-wing imagination - via fiction and political campaigning. After all, any number of Republicans regard Democrats as Godless technocratic 'levellers' - Obama viewed as the 'foreigner' assaulting the autonomy of the family with 'Germanic' ideas like welfare, Marxism or even Nazism. The anti-Christ destroying civilization, subject to flexible 'upgrading' to outflank his opponents: President Terminator.

Giovanni Tiso said...

President Terminator.

It is a great tragedy that this plot was never allowed to develop, and that Arnie only made it to governor.

For everything you point out, the films foreground the very personal conflicts Reagan's America exploited to sustain itself. The first film is basically about preventing an abortion by any means necessary (the clue is in the title, and arguably Arnie's manner/accent relates abortion to the dark history of eugenics). The other Sarah Connors killed are just surplus - in narrative terms they don't 'matter', because they're not destined to have THE baby. A baby for which history must be halted.

The overt mysticism of this also feeds into certain strands of conservative thinking in America, although I feel less than qualified to comment on those.

Unknown said...

In the Matrix, Neo is The One. This also relates to Parsifal. Hollywood always transmutes the mythic meaning to suit it's agenda, perhaps all myths have been tused thus? Being The One is fundamental to others becoming ruled by the one.
The first step in any religion establishing itself is to establish patrilineal credentials, the patriarchs, right down to the founded Adam...who raised a Cain, who became The One, from two...Romulus and Remus and so on.
I have no credentials but I can go on, and on, heh.
Then there is Adam Kadmon, who shares many attributes with Jesus Christ, another One.
Hollywood's agenda is quite transparent, some directors are aware, some seemingly not.

wv,tedsions, a mysterious order of teddy bears.

Giovanni Tiso said...

In the Matrix, Neo is The One.

It's just that I suspect that in Terminator the one isn't John Connor, it's the T-800.

Unknown said...

This doubt as to who is The One is central...also whether or not they ask the question...For Whom Does The Grail Serve.
Talk about taking over the narrative.
Arney cannot be President because he is Austrian, BTW.

David K Wayne said...

Well American superheroes are interesting as 'the ones'. Due to market forces, they have to have many 'ones' - rooms filled with 'ones' (all those random accidents, alien visitations & unrepeatable experiments that put them there too). Because of commercial franchise considerations, we get crowds of messiahs arguing with with other for decades, over how they can get along as 'ones'.

Now you get a lot of comic-book plots where the main antagonists are simply the public asking "Where did all these bloody superheroes come from? Can we vote for anyone to get rid of them? Could we win a war against them if they started one?" The X-Men franchise has been really successful with that plot motif. That's where the persecuted messiah theme comes in... then the 'ones' become a class.

Unknown said...

The one god problem is very old.

JL said...

Here is my take on why T-800s are anatomically correct: It is to make them a more effective weapon of terror. What is more terrifying than being raped by a machine? There was evidence in T-one of James Cameron's latent fantasy, then it became more explicit in T2. Cameron was probably listening to Guns N'Roses in 1987, when Appetite for Destruction came out. The artwork for this album shows an image of a woman who's evidently just been raped by a seedy robot in a trench coat. Maybe this is what led to Gn'R being invited to produce the theme song for T2 in 1991. "You could be Mine" is a particularly awesome song too, I might add.

Giovanni Tiso said...

Thank you JL! The original version of the above comment was accompanied by a salient image,
this one.

David K Wayne said...

By the great Robert Williams - as responsible as his comix campadre Robert Crumb for some incredibly disgusting and offensive images. That cover raised a bit of a (justifiable) stink back in the day.

George D said...

I came across this yesterday:


Arthur McEvoy has argued that the key to understanding the relationship between industrial accidents and industrial technology is to view the workplace as an ecological system in which the worker's body forms the biological core.
(1)

The instability caused by the machine human relationship is a tremendous one. Machines are merely instruments for exercising matrices of power. But that power is real, and derives from the ability to use machines to exact surplus labour (generative power, reproduction) from the human.

This motif ; the appearance of 'humanity' and the mutability of robot workers is what unsettles the picture - humans can no longer extricate themselves from their production.

(1), Johnston R. & McIvor J., Oral History, Subjectivity, and Environmental Reality: Occupational Health Histories in Twentieth-Century Scotland. Osiris
n2, v19, pp. 234-249

Keri Hulme said...

Love new banner!

Brooke Mitchell said...

I always wonder in these movies, is humanity at war with technology(terminators, a software program) or sentient capital(skynet the institution). The line gets blurry but I feel in T2(my fave) its the latter.

Giovanni Tiso said...

"Love new banner!"

Thank you Keri, the credit - as for the previous two - goes to Shirley Carran.