Hollywood Utopia

206 Hollywood Utopia
his still beeping red ‘heart’ at the end of the film and affords us, according to
Rushing et al., (trans)modernist hope, even redemption. Such a (white, male
American) agent articulates and accepts the need to take on the evolutionary
demands of the human race, to maintain its homogeneous ethical purity and
ecological purpose. Within this postmodernist text the cyborg other, by becoming
the same, can both articulate this essentialist assumption of the biological
imperative and also provide the necessary sacrifice to achieve this result.
It is therefore incorrect to postulate that Schwarzenegger is ‘a “perfect” icon of the
simulated world of postmodernism, whose persona, both body and character, is
perpetually constructed and reconstructed by technology’ (Rushing et al. 1995:
194). In T2, the cyborg hero has apparently become finally (post)human with the
assistance of the ‘innocent’ boy - a prevalent conventional theme in American
culture - who instinctively knows the value of life and continues fighting our
‘modernist’ meta-narrative fight for truth, honour, justice and individualism as well
as the ‘American way’.
Both ‘Terminator’ films, therefore, finally serve to endorse to varying degrees
almost (pre)modernist humanist notions of agency; recuperating Judaeo-Christian
beliefs of heroic martyrdom to negate the corrupting traces of the cyborg organism
which embodies the triumph of future militaristic capitalism. In many ways the
narrative thrust, especially of T2, echoes the patriarchal Christian myth, in which
Christ died for the sins of all humanity. The Terminator also dies so that humans
cannot destroy the planet. His spirit lives on in his ‘followers’ who, unlike Christ,
however, taught him the virtues and values of life.
Whereas T1 unleashes Schwarzenegger as a most compelling monster, T2 offers
his redemption. This can be seen in the heroic denouement of the Terminator in
T2, focusing on his ‘red’ eye and his severely dismembered body. Diegetic time is
slowed down and excessively dramatised since he has to use all his cyborg powers
to fight his terminal state of disintegration and save his human wards, thereby
redeeming his newly-acquired surrogate human nature. This is unlike the original,
in which the cyborg is simply motivated by a death rationality and a killing instinct.
Such heroic agency effectively cements various otherwise contradictory discourses
together, allowing old Promethean myths to become reformulated with renewed
potency. The cyborg representational carcass serves to focus varying, often
contradictory, discourses, especially this revivified notion of redemption which
continues to suffuse populist Hollywood cinema and coincidentally also helps to
promote ecological textual signification. Essentially, the cyborg provides new ways
of dramatising post-human agency aided by the (self)destructive exegesis of the
cyborg consciousness.
These potent moments manifest a universal and benevolent destiny even order of