Themes and Messages - Dystopia Terminator/Metropolis/Wall E

Technology: The Rise and Fall of Cultural Fear

 

As Isaac Asimov tells us, 'modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solution.' Most definitions of sci fi reflect this notion: a hypothesized prediction of our future, based on what we have already done or learned in science.

Societal Fear

The Terminator films rely on two major themes: advanced technology and societal fear. These themes compliment and rely on one other. Perhaps the most obvious fear that can be seen in Terminator II is the connection with the historical context within the plot of the film. When the vicious computers became powerful enough to take over the world, the historical content within the plot of the film. When the vicious computers become powerful enough to take over the world, they do not simply emerge and start attacking; rather, Skynet launches a strategic military attach on the former Soviet Union, starting a chain reason in which they predictably fire nuclear weapons back at the United States, starting a third world war that is chemical, fatal, and the end of humankind as it has been known. (The most obvious connection here is to the cold war).
Another major fear of 1990s society is the fast paced movement of technology that we have all felt and arguably still feel now to varying degrees. We all feel it in some way or another. Science Fiction, like distopian literature, is littered with such fears and moral dilemmas. Is it our dependence upon the machine, the computer, the advanced mechanical world essentially, that makes us vulnerable to such a valid fear? We depend upon so much computer technology for our every day existence, that perhaps we are afraid of the consequences when we may someday go too far. Thus, the very idea of films such as Terminator 1 & 2, The Stepford Wives, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Demon Seed and the like. They play upon our fears and our dependency of/with technology.

Technology / Creation VS Creator

There is an existing debate over whether so much technology, computer and otherwise is good or bad. Few could argue that the creation of the atomic bomb is bad, just as the creation of carious computer aided medical equipment is good. However, there is an entire area of grey (of which we have already started to discuss elsewhere in forums) and which is much larger and much harder to define as simply good or bad. Yet no matter how sceptical, we are still fascinated, intrigued , and interested in technology. However, the moral responsibilities of science or the scientist to both their creation and to society is still a remaining (and frequently asked) question. As we will see later in the Course, Mary Shelley and others have illustrated this in works such as Frankenstein; the idea of the scientist, obsessed with the notion of new direction, advancing technology, etc., creating new things without regard for the moral consequences of their actions. This is precisely what happens in the Terminator movies. As Sobchack points out: Terminator II refuses to accept the unsettling consequences of the cyborg in the name of instrumental domination in the realm of technology.
Thus we arrive again at the popular motif/ real fear of the creation surpassing its creator. Consequently, the voice over at the beginning of Terminator II states: 'three billion human lives ended on August 27, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the was Judgement Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare - the war against the machines' (Terminator II, opening scene).
Technology is moving toward creating machines that will surpass us in strength, agility, and even intelligence. When this happens will we still be able to control it? Karla Jennings discusses the creation turning on its creator in The Devouring Fungus:

From the moment the German Metropolis unveiled the first gleaming cyborg, it has had a place in fiction as a creation both beautiful and evil. Made more perfect than the most flawless human, it's an avenging angel bent on murder and almost impervious to be destruction. It reached its gory glory in The Terminator, where Arnold Schwarzenneger is as skilled at massacring humans as doing home eye surgery.(200)

Jennings points out that the word 'robot' was invented by Karel Capek, who took it from the Czechoslovakian word for servitude or forced labour. She argues that we view the computer and its evolving technology as a 'growing' but 'unnerving' machine, adding that 'The computer isn't to blame for reflecting our fears, we are' (20).
Sherry Turkle also addresses the notions of creator and creation: She explains how a learning programme played checkers according to built in rules, and a built in programme which taught it to modify these rules based on experience. Eventually it played against the best in the world and won. However, as Turkle points out, 'the dramatic moment in this programme's life was not the day it bear a champion, but the day it bear its creator. The programme became good enough to bear Arthur Samuel (its creator) at his own game.' (278). Consequently, Norbert Wiener suggests that the implications borders on the theological: 'Can God play a significant game with this own creature? Can any creator,. Even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?' (279). Turkle then argues that for Wiener, 'the working of the Samuel programme started to feel like overstepping an ancient taboo: the taboo of speaking of 'living beings and machines in the same breath' (280). Why is it taboo to use such terms together? Turkle argues that it is not surprising:

The vehemence of response and expresses our stake in maintaining the line between the natural and the artificial, between human and the mechanical. Discussion about computers becomes charged with feeling about what is special about people: their creativity, their sensuality, their pain and pleasure.

And how do we feel when the cyborg is faster than us, stronger than us, more advanced than us? We fear that it will usurp our power-perhaps the most valuable thing we pride ourselves in having.
Indeed, we have seen much movement towards human vs the human like machine-the cyborg. Yet there still remains a belief that there is something special about humans that could never be replicated into a machine. Turkle says that,

The connection between artificial intelligence and the 'meta-physical computer' is apparent. As soon as you take seriously the idea of creating an artificial intelligence, you face questions such as whether we have any more than sentimental reasons to believe that there is something about people that makes it impossible to capture our intelligence in machines. Can an intelligence without a living body, without sexuality, even really understand human beings? (19-20)

The relationship between human and cyborg is a complicated one. The paradox which exists is one that where human rejects machine, they also yearn for its advantages, and vice versa. In science fiction, the inventions of cyborgs, artificial intelligence, computers and the like, may be rooted in the science, but they work in the fiction because of our ideas about the future of such technologies. We need not know the particulars of A.I. advances, or the complicated reasons why certain technologies do not as of yet work. Rather, all we need know are our 'ideas' about such things.
Turkle explores what happens to people when they come to think of their mind as a programme and in turn as themselves as machines. This sort of investigation is a common one amongst many science fiction stories: the human and the machine: separate, yet inseparable. In our vast moving world of technology, the distinguished line between human and machine has become blurred and thus frightening. As we have already seen in Haraway, there is

a leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. [earlier] machines were not self-moving, self-designing - they could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculine reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Not we are not so sure. Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed - our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (Haraway 579)

The cyborg in Terminator I, is innately arguably evil and inhuman. He is a machine who is called upon to perform a task; he is programmed to kill Sarah Connor and stops at nothing to achieve this. However, in the second film, this same machine learns human qualities. Although programmed to protect rather than stalk, the cyborg deviates from his specified task and learns the value of laughter, speech and finally, of human life. Like Star Trek: The Next Generation Data, he wants to be more human. He wants to fit in with the humans he has come to seemingly 'care' about and understand their feelings, etc. Envious of man's unique qualities, the T101 adopts human characteristics. But, 'the T101's, humanity' is at once superficial and artificial - a layering of organic material over a 'heart' of metal and circuitry' (Sobchack 7). Consequently despite the terminator's will for human qualities, it is this machinery at the core of the cyborg that determines the fate of its existence. As Sobchack notes: 'The Terminator is unable to shake free the machine at the heart of him' although he develops the semblance of a personality. At the end of the film he is still radically differentiated from the human: crying 'is something he can never do' (8). A similar argument can be made for the humans in the film. Although frightened by the possibility of 'being controlled', humankind in Terminator II, not unlike our own world, is obsessed with creating bigger and better machines. Further, some characters themselves not only become obsessed with the power uniquely attributed to the machine, but adopt machine-like qualities.

Sarah Connor is obsessed with the machines of the future.  She is committed to Pesatgero, an asylum for the mentally insane, because of her obsession and irrational fears of the machine (she tries to blow up cyberdom).  She not only becomes addicted to her thoughts of the machine, but in fact, becomes addicted to her own fear.  She is frightened of the future, dreaming of burning bodies, etc., yet she is obsessed with and cannot reject the idea of the machine.  Sarah Connor learns to ignore her human nature, showing compulsive behaviour as she teaches herself and her young son military tactics.  She eagerly builds a fortress of weapons and killing equipment to protect herself against the evil machines of the future.  Indeed, she seems *programmed* with a task in the same way that the cyborgs do.  She stops at nothing to prepare herself and her son, even continuing to fight for her freedom while incarcerated.

Connor begins to disregard all other aspects of her life, and instead turns to thoughts of the future. In the film, John explains that her last boyfriend was a green beret who ran guns, and that she 'would shack up with anyone she could learn from so that she could teach him how to be this great military leader' (Terminator II). Skynet is her only thought as she arms and prepares herself. She cannot stop herself from her addiction. She becomes cold and emotionally distanced from her former human compassion. Lost in her obsession, she eventually believes she can kill as coldly and mechanically as the Terminator itself. Connor's obsession can be most powerfully attributed to her fear (and thus society's own fear), of being mastered. Historically it is man or humankind who has mastered and controller lesser creatures. However, the computer is in most instances seen as an equal or superior 'creature'. Turkle argues that it is this concept of mastery that fascinates or addicts the hacker to the computer: Hackers use their mastery over the machine to build a culture of prowess that defines itself in terms of winning over even more complex systems. And it talking to personal computer owners I heard echoes of the search identity. I found that for them the computer is important not just for what it does but for how it makes you feel. It is described as a machine that lets you see yourself differently, as in control, as 'smart enough to do science', as more fully participant in the future. (20) In fact this is a significance in plot for both Terminator films and hackers, searching to break down the system of the undefeatable Terminators. In Terminator I, Sarah and Reese strive to outsmart the programmed cyborg and defeat him rather than be defeated. In Terminator II, they strive to outsmart and master the machine culture of Skynet as a whole. Their goal is to reprogramme the future so that the culture of machines will never exist in the first place, thus regaining control and becoming master over their own destiny. They fear the exact opposite; that the computer culture of Skynet will master the human race to the point of extinction (through execution). It is their fear of the more powerful machine, as well as the notion of losing control, that urges them on to conquer. Similarly, as Sobchack points out, John Connor discovers that he is superior to the T101 cyborg in Terminator II, when he discovers that he has control over him. 'Cool', says John 'my own terminator'. This control is crucial for John and all humans in the struggle to master the machine: 'this modernist logic in Terminator II has as its correlative the demand for 'instrumental' control of technology, and that it further accepts the impassibility of clearly distinguishing between humans and machines' (qtd. In Sobchack 11). Sobchack argues that the film operators through as dichotomy of the controlled/uncontrolled, as it moves from the present in which the machines are controlled by humans, to a 'dystopic future' which threatens not only its audience but its characters. She says that 'opening sequences portray a future in which machines dominate a landscape littered by human remains: It is under this logic that the T-1000 becomes so threatening' its continually taking on of new shapes allows it to elude human control (the T-1000 repeatedly escapes confinement, for example, by 'pouring' itself through small gaps) (Sobchack 9).

Consider the following questions:

• What is it that makes Blade Runner and the Terminator films scary? Do you find the lack of emotion in the replicants and the T100 and T800 cyborgs to be frightening? If so, why? If not, why? In our current cultural climate, what is it (if anything) about technology itself that is frightening in these films?
• Blade Runner addresses significant issues of morality, emotionality, and the concept of truth. Which of these do you find to be more difficult to 'settle' in your mind? Indeed, can they even be seperated? What parallels do you see with The Terminator or Terminator II: Judgement Day?

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You may take these as rhetorical questions to ponder yourself as you make your way through the material, or, if you wish, you may make an entry in your General Journal or The Gendered Cyborg Forum. Keep in mind that all contributions to questions such as these are preparatory for your final essay. In other words, the more hard thinking you do throughout the Course, the more prepared and the more material you will have when it comes time to do your final assessment.

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References

Beeler, Stan W. The Invisible College: A Study of the Three Original Rosicrucian Texts, (New York: AMS, 1991).
Gokce, Neyir. 'Definitions of Science Fiction' from http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf_defn.html (last accessed March 12 2005).
D. Haraway, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s' in Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, et al. (eds), The gendered Cyborg. (London: Routledge 1984).
Jennings, Karla. The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990).
Sobchack, Vivian. The Carnage of Identity: Cyborgs and Women in Science Fiction and Horror Film, from http://vioelt.berkeley.edu%7Erollins/cyborg.html (Feb 10 2005).
Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).