Having just watched the first two terminator movies for the first time, this post makes me think about the weird kinds of simultaneity those movies are invested in: in the first, the son sends his own father back into the past to prevent his being killed before he’s even born and also to conceive him, and in the second, the machine that was invented to kill John Connor is sent into the past, eventually, to destroy the machine that invented him, a machine which it turns out was actually built out of him.
There’s something so bizarrely tautological about these experiences of time, a really interesting combination of simultaneity and linear (since the paradox of simultaneity can only be expressed by recourse to linear terms?), but what I really love about it is Cameron’s disinclination to play “Back to the Future” games with the temporal sequence; whereas BttF tries very hard to make it seem like there’s only one sequence (and changes in the past have more or less instant consequences in the “present”) the whole point of the terminator movies seems to be the incoherance of the nuclear age’s machine messianism, a simultaneity of all times that isn’t merely always present but is also never going to happen, and our heroine gets the message that “there is no future” from the future, in the hands of a person sent to save her from a future that, if it doesn’t happen can’t provide the seeds for its own not happening.
This is why leavening “judgement day” messianism with a quasi Donna Haraway-ist message (in which the machine is what makes us human, even though our humanity is defined by not being machines) seems to be exactly the point. While your Back to the Future wants to domesticate time, regulate it, and make it make sense, here the point of it is that tthe very terms we use to understand it fall apart if we try to make them make sense. They are self-consuming artifact, terminators, if you will…
Another reading would be that the movie evokes messianic time in the first movie because it was made at a time when it was morning in the American cold war — hell, it was actually 1984 when the film was released — so black could be white in a very particular and patriotic sense. But the second movie is definitely on the cusp of nuclear messianism being shunted off stage in favor of something else, perhaps a kind of postmodern soft city-ism which can only be defended against by learning to love the machine again. But how on earth do you historicize a movie about the incoherence of temporality?
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October 18, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Joseph Kugelmass
What is soft city-ism? I can probably comment more intelligently once I grasp that.
October 18, 2008 at 7:36 pm
zunguzungu
don’t worry about commenting intelligently; I’m just musing irresponsibly. But I was thinking of David Harvey’s deployment of David Raban’s Soft City in the beginning of his postmodernity book (an obscure reference if you don’t live in my brain, I now realize), but more specifically I was thinking about the kind of Clinton-era caricature of squishy liberalism (as a degradation of family values, for example, and a “moral relativism”) that was used so effectively by family values republicans once the Soviet Union was no longer so effective a scare tactic. So I guess the work that reference is doing is this: I wonder to what extent the difference between T1 and T2 (in which Arnold changes sides) can correlate with the difference between “Evil Empire” cold war rhetoric of 1984 and the post-Berlin Wall falling, almost ready to elect Bill Clinton nation of 1991. In the first one, “the machine” is clearly linked to messianic nuclear time, but I wonder if the second one hasn’t turned Arnold into something else, a kind of cold old industrialism of the past against which the moral relativism of the 1991 present can be contrasted. The postmodern T1000, after all, gets burned up in a steel mill, and nothing says Fordist production like a steel mill.
October 18, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Scrimshander
It’s interesting, now that you mention it, that the first film rigorously avoids any suggestion that the time-line may be changed, any temporal contradiction, while the second film effectively indulges in the grandfather paradox, allowing Arnold to purge the present of the future technology that allows him to be built, give or take the remainder of his severed arm (“our own right hand / shall teach us highest deeds”). I wonder if we’re meant to surmise (or if we should anyway) that the second film’s optimism amounts to repression, merely an act of erasing the signs of future events from the present, of loving the machine insofar as he consents to vanish. “I’ll be back,” after all, is a catch-phrase uniquely suited to the repressed.
In any case, the hopeful ending facilitates the return from survivalist exile to a social sphere bounded and regulated by the same institutions (a Foucauldian check-list) that have provided the T-1000 with his avatars: policing, medicine, the family. In his chameleonic way, this villain moves almost invisibly through the channels of social discipline, embodying the kind of dispersed power that can’t be blown up because it never resides at a singular source. Under this paradigm, assaulting the social order with a view to smashing the control chip where it lives is about as effective as unloading bullets into into the T-1000. He is, as you have implied, a figment of an upgraded apocalypse.
It must matter also that the spectacle of the T-1000 indexes the progress of digital reproduction and (if one may stretch) the virtualization of commodities. Speaking of which, the sequel’s self-consciousness as a sequel, it’s incessant reworking of lines and scenes from part one, may well arise from T2’s status as Cameron’s first (and still only) experience extending a film of his own into a brand after providing second acts for Piranha, Alien, and (screenplay only) First Blood. In T2, the play of iteration and escalation becomes a simultaneous source of pleasure and anxiety, in that the second film sets itself apart with flourishes rooted in our memory of the original, signifying a broken mold by means of a hermeneutic that is specific to the franchise as a franchise. I wonder, along these lines, whether the proliferation of sequels during the eighties and nineties provides a useful symptom of poetic conditions as well as market forces, granting that the two aren’t exactly unrelated. Someone has to have written something in that direction that I haven’t yet managed to read. To return to the text proper of the film, the Fordist nostalgia of a showdown in a steel mill sharpens the film’s concern with obsolescence, of the old-fashioned steel-frame Terminator and possibly of the fantasy in which he moves.