TERMINATING THE POSTMODERN: MASCULINITY $ AND POMOPHOBIA Thomas B. Byers How can | be without border? Julia Kristeva "[T]he body is synecdochal for the social system per se. Judith Butier Unsurprisingly, the anti-feminist backlash and virulent homophobia that have formed such pronounced strains in American culture of the last several years are closely related to (though not fully explained by) the economic troubles with which the United States has been struggling to cope. This relation operates on a number of different planes, some more immediately accessible than others. On the simplest level, resent- ment of women's efforts to attain equality in the job market has risen as that market has “down-sized” in the shift from an industrial to an infor- ational economy. In addition, homophobia has been exacerbated by the scapegoating tendency that in times of economic crisis so often dis- places material anxieties into hatred of and violence against the margin- ‘Modern Fiction Studs, Youre 41, number |, Spring 1995. Copyright © for dhe Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins Universi Press. Al rights to reproduction in any form reserved Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (e) Johns Hopkins University Press6 Mfs alized. Of the many recent avatars of this pathology, the skinhead phe- nomenon is perhaps the most spectacular, but the efforts of many states to prohibit ordinances protecting gay rights, as well as the (at times literally) violent reaction against attempts to ease prohibitions against homosexuals in the military, are equally symptomatic. However, increased intensities of reaction in matters of the poli- tics of gender and sexualities were not merely phenomena of the reces- sion of the Bush years, nor are they likely to abate much even in a cycle of “recovery.” Rather, they represent a set of deep and persistent fears on the part of a formerly dominant order that has begun to recognize that it is becoming residual. Needless to say, anti-feminism and homo- phobia are, in part, reactions against progressive attempts to destabilize patriarchal heterosexual hegemony (attempts to which | hope my writ- ing may contribute). But they are also condensations and displacements of popular anxiety, particularly masculine anxiety, over a whole complex of other destabilizations. These include both changes in the material and economic base (fears of which are neither unfounded nor necessarily retrograde) and the general collapse of master narratives. As Yvonne Tasker has pointed out: “Post modernity... signals significant shifts in the definition and, | would add, the availability] of work and the masculine identity that it proposes. Postmodernism also calls into question the production and status of knowledge and categories of truth. These de- velopments help to situate and historicize ... shifts in Hollywood's rep- resentation of the male hero,” whose current struggles embody “anxi- eties about masculine identity and authority” (242-243). In what follows | will attempt, through an analysis of an immensely popular text, Termi- nator 2: Judgment Day, to show how feminism and homosexuality be- come tropes for these postmodern developments and foci for the dis-ease caused by late capitalism —and thus how popular hostilities to- ward feminist and gay underminings of the traditional masculine subject are overdetermined and intensified by the anxieties of postmodernity. |. Kissing Our Selves Goodbye Untimately what all these destabilizations —of base and superstruc- ture, gender and sexual orientation—have in common is that they pose threats to the continued existence of the reified subject of bourgeois humanism and compulsory heterosexuality, as well as to the privileged Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers 7 site of that subject's being and security: the nuclear family. In short (as ‘Tasker suggests), the traditional subject, particularly the masculine sub- ject. is in the throes of an identity crisis. Moreover, this crisis is a partic- ularly radical one—too radical, in fact, to be contained within tradi- tional humanist boundaries. For it is not simply a matter of discovering or choosing for oneself a single, unified, coherent identity from a range of cultural possibilities. Norisit only a matter of the subject's dislocation or transition from an old place to a new one. Rather, the current crisis threatens to transform or even overthrow the whole concept of iden- tity. This is the point of convergence of fears of late capitalism, fears of theory, fears of feminism, fears of any swerving from the path of “straight” sexuality: the fears that, together, constitute what | want to call “pomophobia.” This crisis is also the latent content of Sarah Connor's dream of nuclear “judgment day” in Terminator 2—a dream that propels her ac- tively to assault the future in the name of the present.’ In the dream, Sarah, in her guerrila fatigues, stands outside a chain-link fence enclosing a playground full of children. There she sees a vision of herself as a tradi- tional bourgeois mother playing with a toddler. This is, presumably, an image of the life she expected to have before the events recounted in The Terminator. These events resulted in her marginalization as single mother, underground warrior, mental patient, and fugitive—all roles which are functions of her struggle against a future that Sarah knows to be genuine and terrifying, but that her world at large complacently sees as her paranoid delusion. As the dream continues, guerrilla-Sarah tries to scream warnings to her domestic double and the others inside the fence, but they do not understand or heed her. Then, in a blinding flash, the bomb hits. Alll the figures ignite and burn to ashes, though they stil maintain the shapes of bodies. Finally, the shock wave blasts across the scene, blowing them all to pieces, and dispersing them all (except guerrilla-Sarah, whose skele- ‘ton remains clinging to the fence) as in a great rush of wind. Thus the promise of the future is the utter annihilation and disper- sal of the subjects of contemporary culture, because of their neglect of the threats that the present is preparing. While the text profers” the dream’s manifest content—nuclear armageddon—as the real danger, this theme seems a little anachronistic in Hollywood terms, for the film was being made just as the end of the Cold War was easing popular Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press8 Mfs fears of this threat. On the other hand, to see the dream as the holo- caust of the bourgeois heterosexual subject (as well as the nuking of the family) not only answers to the dream's nostalgia for the vision of Sarah as that kind of subject, but also fits neatly with a reading of the threats posed by the movie's chief figure of terror and evi: the liquid metal Ter- minator T-1000. For these, too, are threats of the destruction and dis- persal of identity 2. Liquid Onsets ‘The contrast between the Terminator model T-10! and the newer T-1000 embodies the opposition between classical and late capitalism, between a production-based industrial and a consumption-based infor~ mational economy, between modern and postmodern culture, between paranoia and schizophrenia. The T-101 (or, as | like to call him, the “Schwarzenator") is a kind of technological version of Superman. Even in the first Terminator film, where he was the bad guy, he was not radi- cally other. True enough, he was more implacable, better armed and, of course, more pumped-up—stronger—than his human antagonists. Stil, except for his superhuman relentlessness, he was not much more than a physically hyped version of those contemporary mass murderers who enter public places and begin shooting everyone in sight. In other words, at least until the ending, he connoted a violence more different in de- gree than in kind, more pathological than monstrous. Moreover, to the degree that he was fearsome or monstrous by virtue of his technology, the form of that technology remained in a way rather reassuring. In both films the T-101 has a scene where he slits ‘open the flesh of his arm and reveals that underneath he is a hydraulic machine. Though he is computerized, the primary source of his power lies in a mechanism that has by now been more or less comfortably as- similated by the popular imagination. Thus in the first film he can be stopped by a more powerful version of that same mechanism: the hy- draulic press that crushes him. And in the sequel, reprogrammed, the T- 101 actually becomes a force for good—indeed the only force that can save us. In Terminator 2 the scene of the cutting of the arm also has some other reassuring elements. It serves within the diegesis to confirm the truth of Sarah Connor's story about the coming nuclear holocaust and Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers 9 ‘the machines’ subsequent war on humanity, and thus to help enlist Miles Dyson's aid in resisting this future. In addition, though we wince at the sight of it, it is surprisingly unmessy (unlike the gore of a real human body), and what it reveals is reassuringly graspable, solid, and consistent: the hard-body exterior covers an interior that is equally solid, equally clearly demarcated, and equally grounded in (human) nature—it is modeled on the structure of the human skeleton. In the T-101, we con- front an object, not the abject Ultimately, the 7101 not only embodies a technology typical of classic capitalism's industrial mode of production, but also figures the mechanics of solids and the firm territorializtions of individual identity that are characteristic of this stage. He also comes to connote Ameri- can economic power, dominant in the industrial age, but already far less so in the post-industrial global economy. It’s telling in this regard that Schwarzenegger has what in jock circles is often referred to as a "body by Fisher” (he's as solid as a 1950s Chevrolet) and that his adversary is defeated when their war moves to the most improbable setting in the film: a working steel mill in mid-1990s southern California, (At this point it becomes pretty clear that the space within which postmodernism can be forestalled is only the realm of wish-fulfllment.) In contrast to the now in every sense domesticated Schwarzena- tor, the T-1000 represents a whole range of elements of post modernity that are alien to the traditional bourgeois male heterosexual subject. It is made of liquid metal that gives ita particular flexibility, Nuidity, and re- slience. Though it lacks the mass and solidity of Arnold—it is played by an actor (Robert Patrick) of much slighter build and finer features — these “lacks” are really part of its force. It can be delayed by firepower, but not really damaged by it, for it can reconstitute itself almost in- stantly. It can flow through any hole or gap in a barrier: it oozes between the steel bars of a cell-type door, for instance. Moreover, it is a shape- shifter: it can take over the form of almost anything it touches, from a tiled floor to a foster mother. Hence it is extremely hard to locate, fix, contain, pin down, or damage. It blurs boundaries not only between ap- parently solid objects, but even between the exterior and the interior of ‘the body; indeed in a sense it has no interior, as we see in the various scenes where it is shot. ‘What are the connotations of the T:1000's mechanics of fluids and its slurping reconstitution of its surface that covers no depth? First, Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press10 Mfs they are in themselves a threat to masculine identity. As Antony East- hope has said: “The most important meanings that can attach to the idea of the masculine body are unity and permanence... Very clear in outline and firm in definition, the masculine image of the body appears to give a stronger sense of identity” (53). Hence the body that appears solidly masculine, unified, permanent, clear in outline, but then shows it- self not to be, clearly subverts the identity founded on the masculine body image. ‘The full resonance of the T-1000 emerges, however, only when we place him in the context of late capitalism. His “liquid metal,” unlike Arnold's hydraulic arm, does not represent literally any known technol- ‘ogy. However, its attributes are comparable to those of electronic, in- formation-age technologies such as the computer-imaging through which the special effects of his liquidity were created on film (see Bukat- man 14). The film itself metonymically links the liquid metal to the com- puter when, at the end, humanity's future hinges at once on dissolving the T-1000's (dis)simulation of the human body and on destroying the computer chips that are the “souls” of the new machines. Now, the most important economic function of the new electronic technologies is not the production of goods but the organization and movement of capital. And the T: 1000, with his fluidity, his powers of resiliency, perme- ation, and colonization, his ungraspability, his constant dispersal and re- organization, figures not so much a specific technology, or even a partic- ular mode of production, as the mysterious workings of capital itself. In sum, he embodies the schizophrenic flows that Deleuze and Guattari identify with capital as a force and capitalism as a social formation. His nightmarish, relentless aggression represents the threat posed by these flows (and by their new, and ever more ephemeral, reterritorializations) to the reified individual subject and to the Oedipal family as “the per- sonal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism's [tra- ditional] efforts at social reterritorialization” (266). . In one sense, such figuration is nothing new. As Slavoj Zizek points out, "the ultimate ‘social mediation’ of the monster figure is...to be sought in the social impact of capital, this terrifying force of ‘deterritori- alization’ which dissolves all traditional (‘substantial symbolic links [J] it is by no accident that ‘monsters’ appear at every break which announces a new epoch of capital” (139). Deleuze and Guattari present both this “terrifying force” and the resistance to it as constitutive of cap- Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers II italism in all periods: “schizophrenia pervades the entire capitalist field from one end to the other. But for capitalism it is a question of binding the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that al- ‘ways opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with... in- terior limits” (246). The Anti-Oedipus does not identify traditional terri- torializations or binding axiomatics more with classical than with late capitalism, nor does it present schizophrenia as more typical of the latter than of the former. There are, however, good reasons for suggesting such a peri- odization (as, indeed, Fredric Jameson does in his analysis of “The Cul tural Logic of Late Capitalism” [see 14-15, 25-31, and passim). At least it seems clear that anxieties about schizoid deterritorialization are inten- sified in the transition to late capitalism. Afterall, the “emergence of the ‘postindustrial’ society” is, for Zizek, one of only three “break{s] which announce ...a new epoch of capital” in the entire history of capitalism (139). These breaks bring major changes for the individual subject in re- lation to both base and superstructure, and any such major changes are likely to produce anxiety. Moreover, this particular shift emphasizes the ever-increasing rapidity of flows—par ticularly flows of information, cap- ital, and consumer activity. An overheated consumer economy contin- ues to thrive, in fact, to the degree that it can accelerate such flows. This rush of deterritorialization becomes itself the means of exploitation, of the extraction of surplus value, in such an economy. If we are fascinated by the T-1000 as a function of our fascination with postmodern tech- nologies of pleasure and fulfilment via simulation, we are disturbed by him at least in part because he figures the dangerous fluxes of postmod- ern capitalism. After all, the same word (“termination”) that is in the films a euphemism for being Killed by this monster is, in the language of daily life, a euphemism for being fred. Moreover, constant deterritorialization threatens not only the subject's economic well-being, but also the very possibility of "binding the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic” (Deleuze and Guattari 246). Such axiomatics are exemplified by the master narratives whose foreclosure is, according to Lyotard, definitive of the postmodern condition (xxiv). Thus, just as the T-1000 represents the postmodernity of the base, he also signifies the postmodernism of the superstructure—the various unsettlings, theoretical and otherwise, of the possibility of stable meaning. As Fred Pfeil points out, whatever Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press12 Mfs “our intense enjoyment in Terminator 2 of the spectacular semiotic muta- bility of our protean vilain,” that figure is finally coded as “the embodi- ment of amorally evil dispersion itself, endless semiosis" (45, 34). This combination of shifts in the base and underminings of the su- perstructure ultimately threatens to destroy the entire mapping of sub. jectivity typical of classical capitalism—it’s felicitous in this regard that Deleuze and Guattar'’s schizoid nomad literally “spells out” its antitheti- al relation to the monad of bourgeois individuality. Ths is why so much of today’s paranoia is about schizophrenia, and is engaged in a kind of modernist holding action against it. The forces arrayed against the self now are feared not for their monolithic power so much as for their un- graspability and permeation of all boundaries; they threaten not to crush the self but to dissolve it. In this context, we can understand para- noia as an extreme concern with the defense of the (illusory) unity, in- tegrity, and significance of the subject (and of his/her body). Thus para- 1noiais in one sense simply a logical extension of bourgeois individualism, while schizophrenia is the breakdown of that axiomatic." The association of paranoia with the imaginary unity of the subject is borne out by Freud's association of that pathology with “fixation at the stage of narcissism” (176, emphasis in original), particularly when we consider Julia Kristeva’s description of narcissism as “a regression to a position set back from the other, a return to a self-contemplative, con- servative, self-sufficient haven, Actually,” she goes on to say, “such nar- cissism never is the wrinkleless image of the Greek youth in a quiet foun- tain. The conflicts of drives muddle its bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything that, by not becoming integrated with a given system Of signs, is abjection for it” (14). Narcissistic regression as a return to conservative self-sufficiency is precisely what one might expect of the subject in a period (such as the postmodern) when its integrity is threat- ened, And the inevitable destabilization of this regressive state by drives that muddle or fragment the imaginary unity would only be intensified by the increasing deterritorialization of the drives under late capitalism. There are other good economic and psychological reasons why myths of the coherence, solidity, and power of the subject, especially the masculine subject, should prevail under classical capitalism and come apart under late capitalism. The producer-based economy of industrial capitalism requires subjects (at least among the classes that are not rich) who are oriented toward production more than consumption. Such an Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers 13 ‘economy thrives on thrift—on delayed gratification. It is, fundamentally speaking, anal: if, as Freud suggests, money is shit ("Character and Anal Erotism” 31 and passim), high capitalist wealth is a nicely formed turd— or, in terms of the common figurative confusion of excremental with reproductive functions, a nest-egg. Just as the productions of heavy in- dustry are solids, so (Deleuze and Guattari to the contrary) are the standard tropes of classic capital: “rock-solid”; “a piece of the rock.” “Get what you can, and what you get hold,” advises that paragon of emerging high capitalist anality, Ben Franklin’s Poor Richards "Tis the stone that will tum all your lead into gold" (175). And through such retentiveness the in- dividual becomes an avatar of high capitalism's ideal subjectivity: a “solid citizen.” In late capitalism, on the other hand, the rock-solid thrifts are liqui- dated, and the nest-eggs go down the drain. The individual, now most important not as producer or accumulator but as consumer, is neither mandated nor trained to delay or interrupt or “oppose . .. decoded flows with ... interior limits" (Deleuze and Guattari 246). Rather, if the new economy is to stay afloat, his or her control must be far more lax than be- fore. Credit cards, mass-media advertising, tax cuts and runaway deficits, the shopping channel, and facilitating technologies such as fiber-optics, are the laxatives for a subject whose value is measured in liquid assets. 3. Homophobia: Invasion of the Gender-Bender ‘The desire for unity, solidity, and control thus links paranoia and narcissism with anal retentiveness as tendencies within the constitution of the high capitalist subject. Freud suggests a means for theorizing this link more rigorously and, importantly, for adding homophobia to the chain, He emphasizes that paranoia is specifically a matter of “the step back from sublimated homosexuality to narcissism’ (‘Psychoanalytic Notes” 176, emphasis in original)—a regression that brings with it an object- choice identified with oneself. Yet this step exemplifies how, as Kristeva claims, the bed of narcissism is muddled by the conflicts of drives. In the attempt to withdraw from the other to preserve the coherence of the self, one is in danger of destroying that fragile construct. For the “‘prop- erly" unified, coherent, “normal” self of our civilization is by definition heterosexual—one whose object-choice is not its own mirror image, the homo-, but rather its binary other, the hetero-.° The regression to it (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. ‘ight (e) Johns Hopkins University Press14 Mfs narcissism thus necessitates a further defense, this time against the ho- mosexual desire that, hydra-like, now rears its head. The desire is re- pressed, and the effect of this repression, Freud claims, is paranoia “To what degree Freud's account of homosexuality itself is helpful | am not prepared to say, but | do think he was onto something about paranoia, which in his account is very close to homophobia. Certainly the two are intimately related in Dr. Schreber's case, when Schreber fears that he is to be transformed into a woman, handed over to Dr. Flechsig “ ‘with a view to sexual abuse, and... then simply . .. abandoned to corruption’ (Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes” 115).’ An analysis of certain aspects of homophobia suggests how it becomes a key site not only for the conflation of anxieties about gender and sexuality, but for acting out fears of dissolution and deterritorialization. ‘The standard answer to the question of what heterosexuals fear in homosexuals is that they fear their own taboo homosexual desires— the more intense these desires, the more vehement the reaction for- mation against them. And as I've already suggested, the problem is not only that these desires are prohibited, but that the structure and coher- ence of the heterosexual’ identity depend on their repression. Accord- ing to Judith Butler, the taboo against homosexuality precedes even the incest taboo among “the generative moments of gender identity [and this] disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization” (135). Moreover, “{iJnasmuch as identity’ is assured through the stabiliz- ing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of 'the per- son’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoher- ent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined” (17). Finally, not only are these norms con- structed, but their construction is both difficult and precarious. Thus Butler suggests that we “might account for the violence enacted against sexed subjects—women, lesbians, gay men, to name a few—as the vio- lent enforcement of a category violently constructed” (166). The fear of homosexuality as an assault on gender identity is exac- erbated both by the homophobic’s perception of homosexuals as having "succumbed" to such an assault, and by the fact that a male homosexual proposition puts the straight man in the traditionally “feminine” position of the object rather than the subject of desire, Thus for the homopho- bic a homosexual is a "girly-man” who wants me to be a “girly-man” Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers too. (Of course | draw "girly-man' from the derogatory slang used by Hans and Franz—those notorious parodies of Arnold Schwarzenegger himself—on Saturday Night Live). And of course a man who accepts this role forfeits the prerogatives of patriarchy. The extreme form of this fear of “feminization” is the homopho- bics paranoia about homosexual rape (think again of Dr. Schreber)—a fear of violation of the masculine body that, in a heterosexual economy, sees itself as inviolable, as hard and sealed off rather than soft or ‘opened, as the penetrator rather than the penetrable. In our time this paranoia is compounded by the threat of AIDS, which turns the fanta- sized rape into a potential murder by fluids. All of this clinches the con- nection between homophobia and anal retentiveness. Both are matters of maintaining the body's sealed-off coherence and solidity against all sorts of threats of invasion and dissolution: threats of Deleuzian schizo- phrenia and Kristevan abjection, of feminism and feminization, gender ‘rouble and homosexuality, of fluidity, dissemination, and termination, Given all of these theoretical connections, if Terminator 2 carries fears of postmodern dissolution of identity, we might expect it also to manifest anxieties about sexuality and gender. And it does. The action plot, centered on flight from and combat against the T1000, is classically paranoid and subliminally homophobic. In it, the boy hero, John Connor, is at once the world's savior and the object of relentless pursuit by an older male. Mark Dery indicates how the latter figure connotes gender confusion and sexual “deviance” soft, squishy evil pours itself into the... shape of the T-1000, a polymorphous perversity... [whose] quicksilver quality speaks loudly, in Jungian and alchemical terms, of mercury, a lunar, mutable element associated with androgyny and her- maphroditism. ....In its original state, it [the cyborg] is un- equivocally male ... but it can assume any sex. Then, too, there is more than a hint of caricatured S/M homosexuality in...[its] chosen incarnation: a smallish, vaguely effeminate policeman with a tart, thin-lipped smirk, whose favored method of dispatching his victims is by poking stiff, pointy objects into their holes (102-103). The two key instances of such pointed assaults are against the boy's two father figures. In the first case, the T-1000 kills John's foster fa- it (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. it (c) Johns Hopkins University Press 1516 Mfs ther by extending its arm into a blade and stabbing through the milk car- ton from which he is drinking into his oral cavity and all the way out through the back of hs head. When this occurs the T-1000 is as it were, in drag: he has assumed the form of the foster mother. Thus a figure coded masculine, having “put on” femininity, commits an act of obvi- ously phallic violence against a paternal fgure who is forced to take the other's extended member in his mouth. In the shot that reveals this to usa thin stream of the white milk dribbles to the floor. The second case is perhaps even more strikingly homophobic. In the final battle, the T-1000 appears to finish off the T-101 by standing astride his prone form, stabbing him near the base of the spine with a long pole, and prying the pole from side to side in an ever more damag- ing penetration. The visuals emphasize both the sadism of the assault and the pathos (from a patriarchal perspective) of the hypermasculine surrogate father, his weapon now beyond his reach, forced to submis- sion and passivity.® Given the graphic connotations of homophobia in these two scenes, other, less emphatic moments take on similar shadings. James Reeves has called to my attention (among other details) the early scene where the T-1000 gets a snapshot of John from the foster-mother: “He's a good-looking boy,” says the villain. "Mind if | keep this picture?” Minutes later John’s real mother, Sarah, pleads with her psychiatrist “You have to let me see my son. Please. Please. He's in great danger: he's naked without me.” Right after this the first long chase sequence begins; during it, John’s greatest peril comes when the T: 1000, driving @ semi-tractor, twice rams the boy's motorbike from behind, snapping his body into whiplash and eliciting from him a noise between a grunt and a scream, The last chase presents a similar scenario, as the T1000, again driving a semi, tries to ram the rear of the truck carrying John—this im- mediately after he has flown a helicopter up behind the truck, firing a machine gun into its half-open back door. In another scene John, his mother, and the T-10| are in an elevator, and the T1000 stabs into it over and over with his blade-lke arm, After they escape, the T-1000 ‘oozes down as a huge globule through an opening in the roof in an image that visually taps fears of AIDS. Taken together, and seen in the light of the T-1000' final attack on the Schwarzenator, these repeated, insistently phallic assaults from above and/or behind may be read as a motif subtly tinged with homophobia it (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. it (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers 17 | must reiterate, however, that the T1000's encoding as a homo- sexual threat to masculine identity is evinced not justin the images of his Violence, but in his general appearance, his gender-bending shapeshift- ing, his dangerous fluidity. All of these highlight his contrast with the true protector of the Law, the Schwarzenator, whose masculinity is thus fur- ther underscored. And it needs to be, for, as Jonathan Goldberg has shown, in the first Terminator fm the 7-101 is a “leatherman” who em- bodies “the relentless refusal of heterosexual imperatives” (189). Gold- berg reads this earlier T-101 in terms of Donna Haraway’ “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway’s cyborg stands for a repudiation of "the senti- mental humanism that marks many .... responses to postmodernity,” in favor of a “recognition of the ways in which a post-humanist ideology is necessary for the kinds of 'new people’ who demand a place in the po- litical women of color, people with AIDS, etc—people whose ‘nov- elty’ lies precisely in the ways in which their... identities fracture the human/biological/heterosexual imperatives” (Goldberg 187). Thus in the first film Arnold himself is identified with some of the same destabi- lizations that the T1000 signifies in the second one—and that both films, in contrast to Haraway’s more sanguine view of the postmodern, present as murderous. Terminator 2 goes to extremes to undo Schwarz- enegger’s implication in such disruptions, by aligning the T-101 with hy- permasculinty, patriarchy, and the recuperation and preservation of the family, over against all the threats posed by Haraway's “new people.” 4.Mom-Bashing, or Too Much is Not Enough This alignment is part of a highly self-conscious reshaping of ‘Schwarzenegger's image to the mold of “family values.” In Terminator 2, Kindergarten Cop, The Last Action Hero, and True Lies (as in the earlier Commando), his characters stand in a paternal and protective relation to children (now, in Junior, he has gone maternal). The new image is rein- forced by his constant discussion of his marriage and children on talk shows and in popular magazines. However, lest his domestication sug- gest a “caving in" to the demands of women, Arnold's retooling has en- tailed a frontal attack on working mothers and feminists, whom he blames for the physical unfitness of America’s TV-addicted children. “The villain,” he says, “is the economic situation and women's equal rights” (Littwin 23)” it (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. ‘ight (e) Johns Hopkins University Press18 Mis ‘The subplot of domestic melodrama in Terminator 2 is another front for this attack. In the film’s cultural work, Sarah Connor (surely one of the hardest working mothers in film history) represents femi- nism, first in her demeanor and actions as she tries to fill a traditionally masculine role, and later also in her words. While this representation may at first seem to profer a positive image of a strong woman, it ulti- mately portrays feminism as an excess that results from and seeks to compensate for a specific lack. The excess is of traits usually identified with the masculine/paternal: anger, aggression, and violence, toughness, the withholding of affection, the repression of tears. The lack is of mas- culine authority and phallic potency. in the end this (phal)logic sees any attempt on the part of a woman to “be a man’ as excessive, because it is always already doomed by women's “natural” lack of the things that make a man a man. But before we look at Sarah herself, we must briefly note some overdeterminations of contemporary anti-feminist backlash that provide a context for a reading of her cultural implications. If affirmative action and women in the workforce become targets of men’s animosity in a time of economic insecurity, this reaction is im- bricated with American men’s unremitting tendency to identify manli- ness with breadwinning. As Susan Jeffords has noted, “{t]hroughout the 1980s, the Yankelovich Monitor of US social attitudes recorded that men’s primary definitions of masculinity rested in their sense of a man being ‘a good provider for his family" (170).'° Of course in the present stage of capitalism this measure of the phallus “is becoming economically and socially obsolete” (170-171). Thus "downsizing becomes a partic- ularly apt condensation of what frightens men in today's economy. The undermining of such “manliness” is a concerted project of postmodern feminism, which not only repudiates the gendering of breadwinning but suggests that gender itself is not “natural” but con: structed/performed, and constructed/performed so as to maintain pa~ triarchal prerogatives and women's oppression. Popular resistance to deconstructions of gender comes down to something like “Those femi- nists think there's no difference between men and women,” a possibility that clearly threatens not only male hegemony, but all constructions of identity in terms of gender binaries, Thus feminist demands for equal ‘employment and equal pay constitute a double whammy for patriarchal masculinity: they at once increase the economic pressure that weakens Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers men's capacity to be “real men” (that is, providers), and also dangerously erode the very ground of traditional subjectivities. ‘Constance Penley sums up the problems raised for film by all of this the narrative logic of classical film is powered by the desire to establish, by the end of the film, the nature of masculinity, the nature of femininity, and the way in which the two can be complementary rather than antagonistic... . But in film and television, as elsewhere, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference. As men and women are less and less differ- entiated by a division of labor, what, in fact, makes them dif- ferent? And how can classical film still construct the differ- ence so crucial to its formula for narrative closure? (71) The domestic plot of Terminator 2 attempts, in effect, to reconstruct this crumbling difference. It does so in part by dramatizing Sarah's “masculine” excesses, which emerge in interactions with John. After he and the T-10! help her escape from the mental hospital, Sarah, who hasn't seen her son for months, seems to embrace him, but it becomes clear that she is only checking him for wounds. Once she determines that he is not hurt, she scolds him for saving her, emphasizing her own self-sufficiency (see Jef- fords 160), and she does not comfort him when he cries. Later, John tells the T-101 that Sarah still loves his father. "I see her crying some- times,” he says. “She denies it totally, of course.” She can neither really keep the stiff upper lip of the traditional father nor admit her vulnerabil- ity. Still later, her attack on the scientist Dyson is coded as an excess of violence (as though she's a homicidal maniac for wanting to kill one fa- ther in order to save the lives of three billion people).'' Finally, however, unable to execute him in front of his small son, she breaks down into whimpering grief. Again her attempt to assume the position of a tough masculine hero is at once excessive and impotent. Only when the protector role is filed by the 7-101, who embodies a “real” masculinity that is up to the job, can Sarah be “feminine” again. ‘And even then she is further humiliated: in her breakdown she becomes the red-nosed, blubbering child of her son, who is shown to be both wiser and more nurturing than she. Thus her regression offers a vivid contrast with that of the "Dad” who, according to Vivian Sobchack, in a it (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. it (c) Johns Hopkins University Press 9200 Mis spate of 1980s movies “giv{es] up patriarchal power and authority to his children.” This figure is seen not as degraded but as ‘positively’ inno- cent, transparent, and cute... a poignant and sweet figure” in his help- lessness and vulnerability (12). Sarah's excesses at once expose her shortfall in masculinity and signal her “betrayal” of maternity. Thus the film covertly attacks single mothers and “women whose work has interfered with their ability to mother their children” (Jeffords 166)—both those who try to do with- out the father and those who compete with him on the job. The latter are the same mothers Arnold attacked for turning American children into ““couch-potatoes,"" and just as he indicted “"‘wornen’s equal rights” aa “villain” in this regard (Littwin 23), so does the film indict feminism. As Jeffords points out, Sarah's “final delegitimization is accom- plished” when, after her breakdown, she bursts out at Dyson with a bit- ter essentialist “feminist critique of masculine birth compensation” (164): “Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb; men like you ‘thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it’s ike to really create something—to create a life—feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction." In context, this invites us to hear it as an act of projection: itis Sarah who is compensat- ing, trying to reserve some special prerogative to the feminine, to her- self in particular, over against her castration. The speech also serves to identify the ideological underpinnings of her “excessive” anger and to make feminism seem hysterical, as becomes clear in John's embarrassed physical reaction and his verbal response: “Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here, ok?" (Though cut from the film, John’s next line in the published script is “I don't see this as a gender-related issu [Cameron 177}) Thus the film lets us know that feminist rage has no positive part to play in shaping the future; in this moment of crisis it's not the males, but would-be phallic mother Sarah, now obsolete and nostalgic for her past role in reproduction, who is being destructive rather than creative ‘That this mother is not, or not adequately, phallic is exposed in her visual contrast to the T-I01; here we can plainly see the female's lack Linda Hamilton may be wonderfully muscled, but her muscles do not, cannot ever, measure up to Arnolds. If the hard, pumped-up body is a fetish, his is simply much bigger. As if that weren't enough—or rather because, given current levels of masculine anxiety, it isn’t enough—the Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressByers 21 point is reiterated in several of the gunplay scenes, where the T-101 is consistently more potent than the brave but ineffectual Sarah. For in- stance, during the escape from the hospital, Sarah, John, and the 7-101 are in an elevator, while the T-1000 is on top of it. As the T-10! fires a shotgun through the ceiling, Sarah grabs a handgun from his waist and ineffectually pops off several rounds. The contrast is striking. (Moreover, the only effect of Sarah's action is to allow the T-1000 to locate and wound her; the T-10! remains unharmed because he shoots only inter- mittently and he moves between shots) In a later scene the T-101 uses ‘the same handgun to shatter (temporarily) the frozen T-1000. Weapons that are impotent in her hands are not so in his. At the end, Sarah drives the 71000 to the brink of destruction by firing a powerful weapon at him, but she lacks the last shot needed to drive him over the edge into a pool of molten steel. He quickly reconstitutes his surface and shakes a finger at her as though she has been naughty. Then the Schwarzenator appears, with a still bigger and more explosive weapon, and blows his adversary into a grossly distorted shape that falls to its destruction. TTough as Sarah is, she just can't shoot hard enough to get the job done; she and John need Arnold to be the father (see Pfeil 31). And of course the masculine spectators need him, too, both as fetish to protect against the lack she signifies, and as recuperation of the differences she threatens to collapse. Arnold's role as the restitution of the paternal is made quite explicit in a now-famous voiceover of Sarah's: Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. 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 thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice. First among the would-be fathers who did not measure up, we are in- vited to conclude, was Sarah herself. Sarah Connor's failures are, finally, the film's projection onto a subaltern other (one who attempts to be like but can never be quite like ‘the master/father) of the fears and compensatory excesses of contem- porary men. The fears center on the sense that postmodern economics it (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. ‘ight (e) Johns Hopkins University Press2 Mts and culture (as figured by the 7:1000) are beyond the father’s control; that he may not be able to protect his family (or even his own identity) from their vicissitudes; and that therefore he is deficient in masculinity These are fears, in short, of castration (in a culturally and temporally specific form), and it is no accident that they are made manifest in the in- sistent reiteration of the woman's lack. Nor is it any surprise that the Schwarzenator’s hypermasculine body and weaponry function as fetishes. Sarah must be put in her place, and the T-10 must measure up, so that the men can come to see themselves (and their fathers) not in the woman who figures their lack, but in the embodiment of phallic sur- feit: Mr. Olympia himself, the “Austrian Oak,” Arnold Schwarzenegger. 5.The Uberdad Sarah Connor's speech about the T-|0! as father, and the accom- panying view of him playing with John, constitute a key moment in the film's restitution of paternal masculinity. As Jeffords (162) points out, the scene makes the cyborg a more nurturing parent than Sarah herself. Jef- fords sees this in the context of a series of late-eighties fms in which “fathering became the vehicle for portraying masculine emotions, ethics, and commitments, and for re-directing masculine characterizations, from spectacular achievernent to domestic triumph” (166). She con- nects this trend not only to revenge on the working mother (166) but also to men's colonization of “an alternative to the declining workplace and national structure as sources of masculine authority and power— the world of the family’ (170).'? Sarah's speech can also be read in a more ominous light. particu- larly when it is contrasted to the prototype for Hollywood "new men’s” colonization of domesticity, which is 1979's Best Picture Oscar winner, Kramer vs Kramer. While that film is at least as harsh as Terminator 2 to- ward the mother who oversteps her bounds, it demands a good deal more of the colonizing father. Both Kramer's emotional impact and any use it may have for feminism—and my undergraduate students con- tinue to find both of these things in it—lie in its protagonist's transfor- mation from a neglectful, narcissistic, greedy yuppie breadwinner to a nurturing, sacrificing, domestically capable and emotionally sensitive man on the mommy track. For all its problems, from its nastiness to- ward the mother to its irritating tendency to glorify domestic labor and Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press