Hollywood Utopia

202 Hollywood Utopia
actions and decisions as heavily responsible for our future, especially for our
dystopic visions of the future. Nevertheless, overtly at least, most blockbuster films
appear to remain preoccupied with ego-centric heroism and sentimentality which
negates the probability of promoting effective universal human agency. Yet the
Terminator series at least embodies this dichotomy.
Feminist criticism articulates most effectively T2's inability to finally become a
‘progressive’ text. Constance Penley, for example, affirms that while The
Terminator tries ‘to dissipate the fear of the same, to ensure that there is a
difference’ in gendered terms, it ultimately (re)presents ‘a conservative moral
lesson about maternity, futuristic or otherwise: mothers will be mothers, and they
will always be women’ (Penley 1991: 175). Feminist discourse often effectively
articulates both the benefits and danger that can result from an attempt to create
a new, all- encompassing meta-narrative or some form of micro-narratives which
embody human agency and behaviour. But the danger of endorsing some form of
totalitarian system which reduces individual expression to systematic homogeneity
remains ever present. Looking for hope through an artificial development of
holistic systems can be a recipe for disaster. For instance, must ecology privilege
the controlling ‘system’ at the expense of, or in opposition to, the heroic human
individual? Hollywood, as has been asserted since the start of this study, finds it
impossible not to privilege the latter. This dilemma is skewed and exposed
particularly by the way human/cyborg agency effects change through individual
protagonists and narrative closure.
Fred Pfeil asserts that such blockbuster texts address a lack of particular political
goals and attainable human values which can be traced to:
the terrible defeats dealt out here throughout the 1980s to every potentially progressive
constituency . . . (which serves) to deepen widely held libertarian-individualist
suspicions that no structural or institutional transformations for the better are possible,
that nothing political can be done . . . What is absent from the present moment
of confusion and dejection all along the left, and most necessary for its redemption,
is the confidence that individuals can come together in collective action to transform
societies structurally and institutionally for the better
(in Copjec 1993: 255).
While such a historically specific political explanation of film may be accurate for
many disaffected Left collectives, popular texts often address a much wider allencompassing,
if divergent, constituency so as to reaffirm the primacy of
individualism. T2 and other high concept blockbusters remain essentially
humanist, especially through their extension of conventional notions of heroes as
agents of utopian change. The resultant praxis encourages a revived sense of