Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  The Schwarzenegger Menschmaschine is the link between two utterly unlike subcultures: hard-core bodybuilders and cyberpunks. Klein’s reading of bodybuilding as an attempt to fortify the notion of an unassailable masculinity at a time when gender roles are under siege is echoed in Andrew Ross’s argument that “the cyberpunk image of the techno-body played into the crisis of masculinity in the eighties.”120 Although he caricatures cyberpunk as a “baroque edifice of adolescent male fantasies,” Ross generates valuable insights by setting “the inflated physiques of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone” alongside the prosthetically enhanced bodies of male cyberpunks as mythic responses to the waning of patriarchal power.121

  Examined in the context of Ross’s “crisis of masculinity,” both bodybuilders and cyberpunks arrive, by opposite routes and with different baggage, at the same place: the “metalization of man” imagined by Marinetti.122 In that sense, they are two sides of the same coin, although the hard-bodies’ worship of a sublime Renaissance humanism symbolized by Michelangelo’s David-an incarnation of the Neoplatonic notion that the flawless human body is evidence of man’s perfectability-blinds them to the glaring irony that their machine-tooled, often chemically enhanced bodies are already posthuman. And that coin, like any, can be flipped: The bulging, knotty-veined physiques of bodybuilders are fundamentally unnatural, a fact they acknowledge in their slang term for themselves (“freaks”), while cyberpunks can be seen, as Ross argues, not as mutants who have spun off of humanity’s evolutionary trajectory but as exponents of a “maverick humanism” whose “radical mutations in bodily ecology” are “welcomed as an advance in human evolution.”123

  Terminator 2: Iron John Meets Steely Dan

  Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.124

  —Margaret Fuller

  Buried deep in the public mind, cultural nightmares about the crisis of masculinity, the body’s growing irrelevance, and the putative obsolescence of the species erupt in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

  In The Terminator, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) vanquishes the titular villain (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a cyborg assassin sent back in time to liquidate her. The Terminator comes from a future in which SkyNet, a “Star Wars”—like computerized defense system that obviates the need for all human decision making, acquires sentience and with it the instinct for self-preservation. When panic-stricken humans attempt to pull SkyNet’s plug, the system triggers a nuclear holocaust (“Judgment Day”) and dispatches autonomous tanks, flying machines, and gun-wielding “endoskeletons” (Terminators sans flesh) to flush out any remaining pockets of human resistance.

  But fate has decreed that John Connor, the leader of the save-the-humans movement, will ultimately triumph over the machines, so SkyNet sends a Terminator into the past to rewrite history by terminating Sarah Connor before she can bear humanity’s savior, a boy named John Connor. Happily, Connor and his resistance foil SkyNet by sending back a time-traveler of their own-a robot-killing guerrilla fighter named Kyle Reese. History, here, is a locked loop: In addition to helping Sarah destroy the Terminator, Reese spends a night of passion with her, fathering John Connor.

  In Terminator 2, set a decade after the first film, Sarah Connor has been institutionalized for blowing up a computer factory and raving about the impending techno-apocalypse; John Connor, now a punky, disaffected preteen, is the unmanageable ward of dysfunctional foster parents. Yet another Terminator is hot on the boy’s trail. This one is an “advanced prototype” T-1000 made of “mimetic polyalloy” that allows it to assume the appearance of “anything it samples by physical contact.” Before our very eyes, the T-1000 liquefies into a featureless silver mannequin, then hardens into the look and shape of anyone-or anything-it has touched. Luckily, Connor has a guardian angel: a T-800 Schwarzenegger-type Terminator reprogrammed by Connor and sent back in time to protect himself.

  On the surface, T2 is a cautionary tale about the fate of a society that leaves its technology on automatic pilot, staged as a thrill-a-minute carnival of carnage. If we look beyond the obvious, however, we find another, no less desperate battle being waged, this one a contest for meanings.

  In one sense, T2 is a duel of dualisms-a philosophical struggle over body images and gender boundaries. With its monotonal delivery, impassive expression, dark sunglasses, head-to-toe black leather getup, Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle, and whopping guns, the Schwarzenegger Terminator is the standard-bearer for a hyper masculine archetype: the crypto-fascist man of steel with the iron will. The T-800 is a technophallus, a (literal) Iron John whose robopathic autism and ever-ready rigidity will show the “soft” man vilified by Robert Bly who’s boss.

  Early in the picture, the T-800 ritually strips one of society’s most durable icons of fearsome masculinity of the badges of his virility when he relieves a cigar-chomping, heavily tattooed biker of his gun, his leathers, and most important, his mammoth, gleaming motorcycle. In a cinematic moment that is pure cartoon Freud, the Schwarzenegger Terminator mounts mounts the big machine to the tune of George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” a bit of Bo Diddleyesque braggadocio about a lover man who really hits the G-spot. A biker’s motorcycle is both sexual surrogate and penile prosthesis, according to Hunter Thompson, who quotes a Hell’s Angel on the meaning of the word “love” (“the feelin’ you get when you like somethin’ as much as your motorcycle”) and cites a psychologist who calls the machine “a phallic locomotor symbol. . . an extension of one’s body, a power between one’s legs.”125 Symbolically castrating and cuckolding the biker by stealing the Harley that is both his manhood and his woman, the T-800 proves to all concerned that he is an indomitable rock of masculinity, “bad to the bone.” And a bone, as every American male who has survived high school gym class knows, is an erection.

  The T-1000, by contrast, is boneless. It personifies the “female” characteristics feared and loathed by the hard-body-softness, vulnerability, and wetness (its transformations are accompanied by a faint slurping sound). A polymorphous perversity, the T-1000 is the nightmare Feminine given squishy, shifting shape. Penetrated, again and again, by bullets and impaled, at one point, on a spike, the T-1000 frustrates the T-800 with its “feminine” mutability, puckering its wounds closed with a soft, almost obscene sucking noise. In the movie’s climactic struggle, the Schwarzenegger Terminator lands a roundhouse punch on the polyalloy android’s head, only to have his fist become embedded in the liquid metal—an SF update of that hoary Freudian phobia, the devouring vagina from which no male organ escapes intact.

  Mercurial, duplicitous, the shape-shifter archetype is, in traditional terms, “feminine”; the chameleonic ability to “blend in” while nonetheless preserving something of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings is, after all, a survival strategy of the powerless, one for which men (at least, straight, white ones) in Western culture have historically had little need. The “difference” feminist Jean Baker Miller believes that “women’s reality is rooted in the encouragement to ‘form’ themselves into the person who will be of benefit to others. . . . Out of [this experience], women develop a psychic structuring for which the term ego, as ordinarily used, may not apply.”126 By Miller’s logic, all women are made of mimetic polyalloy.

  With its chrome finish and quicksilver qualities, the T-1000 resembles a blob of mercury in human form. In alchemical and Jungian symbolism, mercury is a lunar, mutable element associated with the feminine principle and, more specifically, androgyny and hermaphroditism. The liquid metal robot is indeed polygendered: in its generic state, it is unequivocally male, resembling an Oscar statuette or a personification of Steely Dan, the strap-on dildo in Naked Lunch, but it can assume any sex. It is androgynous, too. There is more than a hint of coded homosexuality in the T-1000’s chosen incarnation: a smallish, vaguely effeminate polic
eman with a tart, thin-lipped smirk whose favored method of dispatching his victims is by poking stiff, pointy objects into their holes (a blade-shaped arm through a man’s mouth, a stilettolike finger through a male prison guard’s eye).

  In the movie’s final moments, both Terminators are consumed in a vat of molten steel, where their mettle is revealed. The technetronic Teuton, Schwarzenegger, slips into the boiling goop with a chivalric thumbs-up worthy of a Wagnerian hero; the T-1000 squirms and shimmies, mouthing silent, Edvard Munchlike screams in a distinctly epicene fashion. As it dissolves away to nothing, the T-1000 cycles through the various characters it has impersonated (the cop, John’s foster mother, a guard in Sarah’s mental hospital)-a demise that conjures the liquefaction of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Why, it can’t even die like a man!

  The T-800 hard-body and the protoplasmic T-1000 put computer-age faces on the two symbolic bodies theorized by Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies, a two-volume study of the Freikorps-protofascist mercenaries who crushed worker uprisings and fought Germany’s border disputes in the turbulent years between the world wars.

  Looming large on the landscape of the male fascist unconscious are two mythic bodies, locked in binary opposition: the monstrous Feminine-a sump of foul effluvia, an engulfing “red flood,” a sucking morass-and the armored robo-corpus of the Freikorps killing machine, safe and dry inside its full metal jacket from a host of “feminine” horrors. In their introduction to the second volume of Male Fantasies, Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinbach detail the “the corporal metaphysics at the heart of fascist perception”:

  On the one side, there is the soft, fluid, and ultimately liquid female body which is a quintessentially negative ‘Other’ lurking inside the male body. . . . On the other there is the hard, organized, phallic body devoid of all internal viscera which finds its apotheosis in the machine.127

  Theweleit suggests that the robopathology manifest in the armored body is the result of the projection onto the Feminine of the abominable, “soft” desire for maternal love buried, along with other “womanly” emotional yearnings, in the fascist male psyche.

  The gender war that lies just beneath the surface of T2 rages around the fact that each term of a binary opposition inheres within the other; the thesis (“man”) is parasitically dependent on the antithesis (“woman”) that defines it. The vigilance with which the dominant term polices the no-man’s-land between itself and the Other betrays the sneaking suspicion that the Other is in fact an externalization of something repressed, buried deep within the self-in this case, the feminine principle in every man that renders his masculinity less than absolute. “The warrior utopia of a mechanized body is . . . erected against the female self within,” affirm Benjamin and Rabinbach.128

  In Sarah Connor, whose physique and psyche strike a precarious balance between the “masculine” hardness of the T-800 and the “feminine” softness of the T-1000, that bulwark against “the female self within” is erected, oddly enough, by a female self. Her diatribe against men who give birth to bombs, her declaration of maternal love to John, her ministrations to the bullet-riddled T-800, and her ultimate function as the secular humanist Madonna whose only begotten son is humankind’s savior are unconvincing; they seem designed to reassure conservative sensibilities that what looks butch on the outside is femme on the inside.

  In one of T2’s ugliest moments, Sarah Connor-outfitted in SWAT garb and accessorized with some very mean hardware-barks, “Down on the floor, bitch!” to the African-American wife of Miles Dyson, the computer scientist destined to create SkyNet. Frightened, maternal women of color are clearly at the bottom of T2’s pyramid of power; at the top is the technophallic, hard-bodied T-800, the only “real man” in the movie. Nearly all of the human males, in comparison, are ineffectual wimps, “soft” in body or spirit: John’s foster father, Todd, is a shiftless channel-surfer; the psychologist who interrogates Sarah Connor is an effete, third-rate Torquemada; the orderly who molests her in the mental ward is a potbellied pervert who is easily beaten to a pulp when Sarah jumps him; and the trembling, gibbering Dyson is a scared-stiff Poindexter.

  “Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear,” muses Sarah Connor, in a voice-over. “The Terminator would never stop; it would never leave him and it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there and it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this machine, this thing, was the only one who measured up.” The implacable, manhunting Terminator from the first film (“It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead,” warned Kyle Reese) is reconstituted, in a neat turnaround, as the perfect surrogate father, batteries included. In an era of dysfunctional families and “deadbeat dads,” only a literal Iron John can get the job done.

  In T2’s pantheon of manhood, Sarah Connor is second only to the Schwarzenegger Terminator when it comes to testosterone level. She is a pumped-up, lock-and-load, postfeminist heroine whose empowerment, in a patriarchal world, is attained not through political action but through technology-heavy-duty weaponry and paramilitary training in the movie, and weight-training machines and sessions with an Israeli commando in real life. An Entertainment Weekly cover story on the film includes a fawning sidebar on Hamilton; headlined “A NEW BODY OF WORK: LINDA HAMILTON GETS TOUGH IN ‘TERMINATOR 2,’” it might have been titled “THE MORPHING OF LINDA HAMILTON.” We are told, in fetishistic detail, of her “washboard stomach and marathoner’s legs,” her aerobic workouts, her frolics in costar Arnold Schwarzenegger’s on-location gym. “She looks like a sweet young thing in her sundress,” cautions the writer, “but don’t be fooled. Linda Hamilton can bench-press 85 pounds as easily as she swings her Evian bottle. She can pump-load a 12-gauge shotgun with one arm and run eight miles before lighting up a Camel. . . . She has metamorphosed into a fierce, humorless commando. And she has transformed her softly feminine physique . . . into a hard-body even a five-time Mr. Universe can admire.”129

  All that flabby femininity has been flensed away like so much blubber, revealing a masculine, mechanical hard-body worthy of Sergeant Rock-a transformation given ironic spin by the fact that T2’s masculinist protagonist is a woman. As Entertainment Weekly makes clear, the actress’s on- and offscreen personae have very nearly fused, in the public mind, into a hybrid entity in the same way that Schwarzenegger’s hypertrophied physique has become synonymous with the Übermenschmaschine. Morphed into a Freikorps cyborg, Connor triumphs over the feminine aspect embodied in the T-1000 with the aid of the male principle manifest in the Schwarzenegger model.

  Thus, Hollywood icons of hard-bodied technofeminism can be problematic in the same way that professional female bodybuilders are. While their body transgressions undeniably make hash of traditional notions of femininity as soft and organic, both break free of the feminine mystique by welding themselves, contrarily, into the machine-tooled hard-body of a masculine mystique that is no less restrictive.

  An argument could be made for the recuperation of the hard-bodied, gun-happy Connor as a technofeminist heroine, Hollywood’s answer to Haraway’s call for a feminism that rejects “a demonology of technology,” but the convenience of such an interpretation renders it suspect. After all, the movie industry’s exploitation of the Freudian subtext in the image of a sweaty woman squirting hot lead from a throbbing rod could hardly be called empowering. The scene where Connor pumps a shotgun at the T-1000 is uncomfortably reminiscent of the video Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns, in which bikini-clad “Southern California beauties [fire] some of the sexiest machine guns ever produced,” according to a mail-order catalogue.130 Real-life testimonials by female shootists—“With a gun I have more . . . control over potential events around me, and more personal power,” declares a female gun owner in Patrick Carr’s Gun People, couching self-help bromides in language the NRA likes to hear-must be weighed against the incessant use, in film and TV,
of the gun as a phallic substitute. Technofeminism remains at odds with technophallicism.

  At the same time, as Claudia Springer points out, cinematic icons in the Sarah Connor mold convey multiple, often conflicting messages. Noting that Connor’s transformation “into a taut, muscular killing machine” is in part a response to the psychological and sexual abuse she suffers at the hands of male doctors and jailers in the psycho ward, Springer argues that while “Sarah Connor fits into a long tradition of phallic women in films . . . she also provides an attractive figure in the realm of fantasy for angry women”:

  As viewers of martial arts films know, it is enormously satisfying to experience vicariously the triumph of an underdog seeking revenge against the perpetrators of injustice. Women under patriarchy can experience the exhilarating fantasy of immense physical strength and freedom from all constraints when watching figures like Sarah Connor. Revenge fantasies are powerful, even when they are packaged for consumption by the Hollywood film industry.131

  On a similar note, the cultural critic Tricia Rose observes,

  The question is: Who is doing the constructing? The problem with the Terminator series . . . is that male imagination is driving the narrative, which is what makes a pistol-packin’ mama like Sarah Connor so problematic. But the larger question is, once again, not, “How was Sarah Connor constructed by the filmmaker?” but “How do the feminist graduate students I know (many of whom idolize these characters) use these women in ways that rewrite the narrative and maybe rewrite their life roles?” . . . These images are opening up possibilities, revising what men and women think women ought to be, even if they wind up endorsing patriarchal norms in other ways. Hollywood has to reaffirm the status quo, of course, but trust me when I tell you that just by opening those gates, they’re creating a rupture they may not be able to suture.132