Hollywood Utopia

individualism, as opposed to new forms of (post-humanist) community expression,
to begin again to fight back within a postmodern machine based environment.
In relation to T2 and the aesthetic potential of other blockbusters, Fred Pfeil
dismissively asserts that ‘investors are unlikely to invest in a project [T2 cost $90m]
whose meanings, pleasures and rules of editing derive from the principle of the
semiotic erosion of narrative conventions and irresolution as an aesthetic way of
life’. The overall regime of pleasure in the blockbuster film is, he continues, rather
a ‘paradigm of late capitalism consumer production’. As proposed by Walser, filmmakers
‘must keep us constantly (though not continuously) engaged without
demanding much attention; knock us out with all the trouble it has gone to, just to
give us an instant satisfaction; not only offer us options but also affirm and even
flatter us for whatever ones we pick’ (in Copjec 1993: 238B9).
These criticisms voice the standard dismissal of the possibilities for
oppositional/negotiated readings especially within apparently superficial
postmodern popular texts. They are based, however, on a misunderstanding of
means and ends within the blockbuster aesthetic. Such texts must de facto afford
comfortable mass pleasures if they are to succeed commercially and ideologically.
But the creation of easy pleasures need not necessarily preclude otherwise
unresolved elements being embedded in moments within the mise-en-scène, which
often includes a surfeit of ecological utopianism.
This study continually addresses how such high concept commercial cinema,
which often privileges the visual evocation of sublime moments, together with
evocative (post)human agency, can be textually analysed as ecologically potent, even
transgressive, by dramatically articulating ecological and ontological tensions
within the mise-en-scène, embedded particularly within the film’s closure. But
before this can be fully illustrated, an exploration of specific cyborg manifestations
needs to be appreciated.
Modernist/ Postmodernist Agency: Terminators - T800/ T1000
The evolution from hunter to cyborg in American myth is essentially the same as
the progress from modernism to postmodernism in western philosophy (Rushing
et al. 1995: 11).
While The Terminator certainly presents a dystopian future, it apparently does so
from a modernist critical perspective which is concerned to ‘locate the origins of
future catastrophe in decisions about technology, warfare and social behaviour that
are being made today’ (Penley cited in Jancovich 1992: 3). But Robert Romanyshyn
goes much deeper in Technology as Symptom and Dream and links the
development of technology with a linear perspective embedded in western culture.
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 203