Hollywood Utopia

particular) would have approved ‘of a film that seems to preach peace while
depicting a future of Hobbesian struggle for survival between psychopathic
machines and a tribe of Nietzschean human warriors’ (French 1996: 11). But
taking up Robins’s criticism: cyberpunk, surfing, or ‘bumper sticker
libertarianism’, ‘is neither progressive nor democratic and despite all the rhetoric
of networking, it is hardly communitarian’ (Robins 1996: 90). Yet this was the
contradictory dream of many from the Easy Rider milieu to ‘Trekies’ in science
fiction. The maxim of cyberpunk is that ‘information wants to be free’ (Sardor et
al. 1996: 89). Cyberspace provides a potentially new anarchic frontier for white
colonists, where hackers can be equated with modern rebel frontiers men.
George Bataille pushes Cameron’s generalised assertion regarding the ontological
needs of human beings to assert that they are, first and foremost, creatures of
excess. ‘Humans gain pleasure from expenditure, waste, festivities, sacrifice,
destruction.’ Indeed, for Bataille, these underlying ontological principles, which
are manifest in nature as ‘universal laws’, are (in fact) more fundamental than
economies of production and utility (cited in Williams 1998: 66). While such
pleasure may help to explain the universal success of both Titanic and T2,
alternatively this form of excess, focusing on bodily pleasures and physical
destruction, can also articulate and signify the polar opposite. For example, saving
the planet as the Terminator finally does - with an act of supreme self-sacrifice -
can simultaneously count as the ultimate (if ‘regressive’) act of heroic agency for
any representative human protagonist. At the same time, we cannot forget that this
action takes place within the lived body of a postmodern cyborg agent, which by its
nature serves to continually problematise such ontological surety.
This grand anti-narrative trend involving human transformations (or becomings),
often packed within a self-reflexive comic format, has become in varying degrees
dominant within the new mega-science fiction blockbuster, with often
contradictory manifestations of excess being the primary visceral residue. The
concluding comic-book fight between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Terminators, as they
tear apart each other’s prosthetic bodies, at an overt level articulates conventional
generic and narrative resolution. But at the same time this destructive action
projects a multi-sensory excessive experience which conflates ethical issues within
the leaky boundaries between human and non-human bodies. Such conflicts are
less effective, however, when cyborg aliens are reduced to mere two-dimensional
machines, as in the original discussed above. Nevertheless, ‘high concept’ (if
necessarily contradictory), action-packed texts continue to be dismissed as simply
mindless special-effects vehicles.
The cyborg-driven science fiction film, together with other dystopic future films,
can be convincingly read against the grain as serving to critique not only possible
futures but also the present. T2, in particular, clearly cites contemporary human
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 201