Hollywood Utopia

must be both father to the man and mother to the mom’, ensuring he learns not to
kill people, as she learns to become domesticated (cited in Copjec 1993: 245).
This is effectively visualised by the original film’s closure with mother and son
clutching onto each other, both having learned the unique potency of humanity
through their display of human empathy as expressed by tears, which is both
dramatised and reified by their cyborg friend. The cyborg agent finally helps bring
out the nascent nurturing humanity in his newfound ‘family’, rather than help
construct a more radical ‘post human’ form of group identity. Such rediscovered
innate power allows the mother, in particular, to affirm in a final voice-over, her
capacity to face the future for the first time with hope. If ‘a machine can learn the
value of life’ so can she and so she acquires the mental strength and nurturing
qualities required to help save the planet.
In the sequel T2, however, (human) agency affords a more contradictory trajectory.
Sean French affirms that T2 ‘humanises the idea of the cyborg; making him civic
minded, just as its star, has made himself admired as a public figure above and
beyond any of his individual films’ (French 1996: 69). The T800 model is replaced
by T1000 who is sent back to kill the 13-year-old boy. The humans of the future,
presumably still not as technologically advanced as the machines, have
reprogrammed a T800 (Schwarzenegger) to return to protect John from the T1000
(Robert Patrick’s simulation), which is so sophisticated he truly mimics humanity.
The antagonist T1000 takes on the persona of a white male LA cop, whereas the
(modernist) agent T800 embodies the form of the countercultural ‘low-life Easy
Rider’. While Schwarzenegger (T800) ‘learns human values’, the more technically
proficient prototype (T1000) is completely amoral, being totally in control, yet
unable to ‘learn’ from his environment. Instead it simulates or replicates with the
sole object of gaining control, like the Borg enemy in Star Trek, The Next
Generation discussed elsewhere. Or as Pfeil elegantly puts it, it ‘oozes swiftness’
via a ‘metamorphosis of its liquid shape’. Such transformational ability, like the
serpent in Christian mythology, is evil personified and his ‘endless semiosis, is the
highest form of technocratic death-rationality’ (ibid.: 247). Sean French is more
dismissive of these powers in his reading of Patrick, the cyborg, as both a nerd and
symptomatic of the (post-Fordist) company man as opposed to the rugged moral
individualism of the technically outdated T800 (French 1996: 30). Consequently,
audiences are positioned firmly on the side of human frailty as opposed to the posthuman
perfection which does not have to consider, much less endorse, the laws of
nature.
In contrast, the ‘heroic’ (Christian) notion of human sacrifice, 10 knowing when
and why to commit suicide, is evocatively symbolised by T800's newfound
‘socialised humanity’. This is visualised by the excessive mise-en-scène focusing on
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 205