Non-Cyborgs as Cyborgs

I’m going to go ahead and lay my anti-thesis bare:

The Terminator IS a cyborg.

The anti-thesis is a counter to this thesis, one of the excellent offerings over at 50 Posts about Cyborgs. (If you don’t know, then go.)

Now, I am not the major Terminator fan that is nailing his ass to the wall. Well, at least not exactly. You see, I am not a fan of the Terminator, that is to say the T-800: not even as an anti-hero. What I am a fan of, is the film, The Terminator.

And this is the ambiguous technicality on which I will make my case. Not the technicality that Jonah Campbell mentions in his footnote–that in fact, yes, there is dialog in the film explicitly referring to the T-800 as a cyborg. I am referring to the film itself–the film, The Terminator, is a cyborg. This is the ambiguous part.

Because, a film is not a cyborg any more than the character of the T-800 is a cyborg. In the same way that the T-800 is not so much a classic cyborg as it is a special effect, a movie melange of various horror themes involving technology and human mortality, as Campbell describes, it would be disingenuous and perhaps a pretentious stretch to claim that a work of culture is such a cybernetic feedback system.

But I am a dealer in post-structuralism, and disingenuous and pretentious are two of our main product lines. So here goes.

There are two features of any film. (There may be more, but let’s start here.) There is the plot, or narrative of the story being told, and there is the aesthetic form of the film. One might isolate these into content and form, but I wouldn’t go so far as that. I only separate these two aspects at all, by means of their function for delivering the culture-item itself to the viewer. Film excels at delivering this distinction. There is a quality of film, which I could delve into in a whole other essay, that still attracts the eye, and pulls it in to its artistry, even without the smooth sugar of plot to help it down. Perhaps it is in the timeline of film, the fact that film will progress even without a story. Or maybe it is the moving, visual quality that attracts the attention. I see this most explicitly in Eastern European and Russian film. Tarkovsky, Vertov, Tarr. The ability to just look, without saying anything.

Even Western blockbusters and spine-tugging B-movies still tap into this feature of the media. Horror films, by the fact of hackneyed and predictable plot rendering its narrative aspect practically moot, let the image and spectacle of violence, music, and anxiety build to avant-garde levels. This is the way we are introduced to The Terminator–as another sci-fi afternoon at the movies. An unbeatable villian, from a future where all is war. He guns down cops without a thought. And he will not stop until he kills one particular woman.

But there is more to the film than meets the eye, and it is not just the red eye of a machine burning beneath a suit of flesh. There are little tidbits scattered throughout the film. These are small things–little bits of aesthetic that could be easily missed in the pulse-pounding chases and the furious suspense and the eventual violent release. But while your endocrine system is responding to the plot, your aesthetic systems are responding to these small elements. The naked male body of a body-builder, triangulated between a vitrivian man, steroid experiment, and zeitgeist politician. Punks on the edge of society, receiving their just comeuppance, or meeting their (no) future? A female sex object, that will not take off her headphones, even during sex. A motor scooter–the closest we’ve come to a jet pack in the automobile age. Exotic reptiles, kept as pets. Breaking a date on a friday night. A joke, in the form of an answering machine message–”machines need love too.” Cops addicted to nicotine and caffeine. Targets assassinated according to their order in a phone directory. The announcement of one’s own death delivered live over broadcast TV. Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, Blade Runner, dystopic future prison-states and other natural wastelands. Vehicles and weapons, interchangeable, dumped as soon as they cease to function. A synth soundtrack–the fusion of futurism and current culture, an entire history to itself. A bar called Tech-noir. Dogs as man’s best friend, and machine’s worst enemy. Mutilation without pain. Killing sprees. Fast speeds. Robots as toys. Robots as manufacturing workers. Robots as distractions. Robots meant for killing robots. And a Polaroid camera: an image, an emotion, and entire life developed in the briefest of market transactions that will become a key piece of history, to those who will live to see it.

I could delve into each of these images and themes (and boy would I love to, if anyone read 10,000 word articles on the Internet), and unpack and interpret them and their cybernetic connotations for our culture. But, sticking to the post-structuralist promise, I will keep it meta. Each of these images is a cultural mechanism. A feedback loop in celluloid, plugged into our brains. Written in the programming language of Hollywood, Year 1984 AD. Together they form a cybernetic system, regulating the functioning of our aesthetic being, expressing a particular continuity through our emotions of fear, paranoia, and desire. Paranoia of a machine-man is a cyborg reaction. Paying admission to collective horror at simulated violence on a projected light screen is a cybernetic affect. Dancing in a dark, dirty dance club is a feedback loop. Falling in love at the end of the world is the expression of a pattern. Reading the coded messages in a film as part of the experience of viewing a film is culture, and our culture is part of a system, and the programming therein makes one B-movie into a film that defines not only part of an era, but part of us.

So, it is still perhaps disingenuous for me to say that The Terminator is a cyborg, if I am also going to argue that our entire culture of expressive media and consumption of that media is part of a cybernetic structure. But it is. Our notion of what cyborgs are, and aren’t, and what this might mean for our bodily integrity, our history/future, and our entertainment on a Saturday night, serve to prove the point, not only of cybernetic systems, but also of ourselves. We are the emotions we experience at the movies. What we want to show each other, what we want to see, and what we want to feel, is ourselves. Around and around again, always adjusting, always re-orienting, never quitting, as long as we’re alive.

In the end, we are cyborgs, starring with red eyes into a dirty mirror, and using a scalpel to pull a bloody bit of ourselves out, so that we can watch it fall into the water, and scare ourselves to death.