Terminator

On the 34th day I had a facebook account (a week after facebook went public) I watched the Terminator.  
On the 35th day I had a facebook account I watched the Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

When I was a child I was not allowed to watch the Terminator movies, what with the gratuitous sex and violence and lack of redeeming intellectual or emotional qualities.  My parents to this date have never and, I assume, will never see them.  I will ask my brother right now if he has.  (he has not)

When I was a teenager I learned about Monsanto's terminator seeds, those that produce crops that cannot reproduce seeds.  Third-world farmers have to rebuy seeds every year from Monsanto. 

And Wayne's World. At some point I understood that the motorcycle cop from Wayne's World was T1000 from T2. I also knew that at some point in the movie Arnold S. said "I'll be back." I figured they knew there'd be a sequel and so the first movie would end with that line to assure us of a second.

When I turned 18 I voted in my first election to not recall Governor Gray Davis and, in case the assholes did prematurately terminate his term (so to speak), to put in the Green Party candidate.  Davis was recalled and the people of California put Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place.  (I just googled my spelling of his name assuming I had spelled it wrong.  I had not.  That is how you spell it. Schwarzenegger)  I found this hilarious and the people of California confirmed my snobbish adolescent I'm-smarter-than-everyone worldview. 

In other words, I did not rush to the video story to rent the Terminator movies out of state pride.  I watched French new wave movies and ignored politics.

I had suddenly become an intellectual and I inhabited a world distinct from AS, that had its own movies and its own actors. It was epitomized in a moment of Bob Dylan throwing illustrated cue cards in black and white in front of Alan Ginsburg "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."  Another moment: "Don't follow leaders / watch your parking meters."

I didn't forsee a day when I would watch an AS movie ever again.  The terminator was a seed that assholes maliciously sold to impoverished farmers so they would have to rebuy them; Schwarzenegger was a symbol of the idiocy that surrounded, inhabited and was my culture. I lived in Oregon for the remainder of his term.  It was as though I had somehow forseen the future and I knew the human race was going to destroy itself, but I was powerless to do anything about it, while vaguely knowing I had an important, related destiny to fulfill.

In 2009, now 23 years young, I was in San Francisco with my friend Brendan.  We went to a bar on the upper Haight and drank beer.  There was a TV playing Terminator 2 with the sound off.  It was the end of the movie, beginning with, what I know now to be, the 3rd chase scene.  There was a lot of industrial props and action, and the motorcycle cop from Wayne's World.  Brendan, a University of Wisconsin film graduate, told me they would watch movies muted in class as a way of understanding the editing better, seeing the cuts without being emotionally guided by the music, or something like that.

He stuck up for the films, as I recall, and explained the gyst of the 2 movies.  Terminator 2 is one of his favorites, I have established, and was covered in his first film class.  Brendan, via email desired to "throw in something in—I saw the 2nd terminator film when i was really young, like six years old. And watching it terrified me so much that I had to call my grandpa who assured me that the events of the film weren't real and would never happen (my dad was out of town on business)." 

I have great respect for the way the first Terminator film tells the epic narrative of what is happening across time in this crazy world that seems to resemble our own.  It blends the pulp detective genius of Raymond Chandler with the far-out '60s sci fi of Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison.  I therefore feel obliged to place a spoiler alert in this essay, for those who don't yet understand why it is such a dangerous thing to be in Los Angeles in 1984 and be named Sarah Connor. 

Here is a quick paraphrase, from my roomates double Terminator Collection, of the plot for those who have seen it and those who have not and don't care about the potentially moving cinematic experience he or she may have with The Terminator:

In 1984, writer/director James Cameron brought two warriors from a nuclear war-ravaged future to battle over the life of a young woman whose yet-unborn son will become the savior of mankind.  Sarah Connor is the target of a killer cyborg from the year 2029 that has been sent to win a war against humanity by destroying her.

The genre of this movie is a particular brand of science fiction that is deeply soaked both in the hard-boiled pulp detective tradition and the psychedelic '60s Los Angeles counterculture that it starts to resemble its own genre, like that of Blade Runner, Total Recall (both based on Philip K. Dick novels), or the heady episode of Star Trek "The City on the Edge of Forever," written by Harlan Ellison (to whom James Cameron pays vague tribute in Terminator), heavily edited by Gene Roddenbury, where we see Spock and Kirk in 1930s Chicago, for the most part immune to Sci Fi clichés in that they are desperately attempting to fit in as native dwellers to a reality we already know (that of 1930's Chicago, or rather the clichés that compoe it to the people who did not live it, such as myself). 

To this genre it is irony and paradox that wins out over imagination and gimmick.  Technology is suspect, it saps our humanity; yet the films rely on the very technology it finds suspect to express the suspicion, flirting with the thing that will destroy us to make the warning convincing.  They are films dedicated to humanity, its necessary prevelance over machine,; yet they are emotionally flat, poorly acted, and completely lacking a sense of humor, unlike all of the writing of Dick and Ellison.

Just as I was wondering what is this genre?! as I was loving the insanely heavy, 10-ton weight handed Christ stuff, the deapan detective stuff, the Nike commercial moments, the 1984 slice-of-life build-up of Sarah Connor's waitress life, the time travel android science fiction, the heady art film real-truck-runs-over-toy-truck references to simulation, Sarah Connor goes into a club to use a phone and call the cops, my question was answered: the club was called, in futuristic white lights, TECH NOIR.   The name is as pretentious and simultaneously braindead as the movie itself, and the only logical way to describe the brilliance of what is going on. 

More than ever at the time of T1 a movie was a commodity; in the post Star Wars cinema sci fi and schmaltz emptied the public's wallets, packed the theaters and the wallets of producers.  To keep people interested the premises had to get headier and simpler at the same time; and the execution had to lack originality, replacing it with '50s sit com clichés.

Boy finds alien.  Alien needs to go home.  Done: biggest fucking thing to ever hit theaters.

Interestingly, once the premise is removed from the Terminator films, the plots are exactly the same (and not unidentical from the Matrix, which, when I saw it in the late '90s, I did not realize was entirely a rip off of T2.)

Context/credits

2 people from the future crouch nude and then steal clothes from someone

The 2 people search for the person that one was sent to kill the other to protect

Chase scene

The protector finds the subject before the terminator and says "come with me if you want to live."

Chase scene

Regroup period, moment of storytelling, reentrance into conflict.

Chase scene

Showdown with terminator

"death" of terminator

resurrection of terminator

chase scene

death of terminator

monologue from Sarah Connor

credits

considering the context of this essay, "Reflections on x days of having a facebook acoount," certain parallels between the films and my own life seem inevitable:

facebook goes public (May 18, 2012) / I watch Terminators 1 & 2 ( May 25-26, 2012)

facebook is the advancement that leads to the decline of humanity and the rise of the machines; Mark Zuckerburg is the guy from T2 who creates the great historical advancement.

Arnold S is the catalyst that leads me to get a facebook (April 22) and to destroy it (undetermined)

Sarah Conner is Alexandra (I watched the movies with her, she chose them instead of other fine VHS selections I had at my house; I had recently found Scent of a Woman at a thrift store and was curious to watch it; I did eventually and was unimpressed, though I loved the moment at the end of his speech where, that's another spoiler, and this is besides the point, anyway) who got me on facebook inadvertently.

John Conner is my facebook account.

I am Reese from T1 who impregnates SC.  I am also JC, and AS (Andrew Shaw-zen-Kitch)

This is some pretty far-out logic, granted.  The way things match up already has the virgin birth thing happening, which creates an interesting, farly blasphemous interpretation of holy trinity: Sarah Connor is the Virgin Mary, a real woman impregnated by Reese, a real man, though subject to God, and present in 1984, is from the future, the holy ghost being time travel and other kinds of man-made technological magic.  John Connor (JC) is, obviously, Jesus (JC).

OR

facebook is NOT the advancement that leads to the decline of humanity and the rise of the machines;

the stock immediately faltered, big shots were given refunds.

the movies are not good, visionary; it is a zeitgeist imaginative re-filtering of extinct cinema cliche.

Goy cinema better have a fantastic reason for appropriating the iconography of the holocaust. Does Terminator 1 merit that—who am I to say?

notes on technology v. humanity:

Amanda's call-in response to a discussion of the human element in sports calls and bringing technology into refereeing on 6/13's Talk of the Nation—

I know that there's technology everywhere, in fact I'm sitting here on my laptop while I'm listening...I don't think that just because technology's available in any particular venue, that we have to use it simply because it's available.  Aren't there some things that are pleasant just because they're human, and their us.  Going to the ballpark, I remember the first time I went time I went into a stadium, it was Busch Stadium in St. Louis and I'd never seen anything like it, it was magical, and I can't, you know I think I was 10, so there wasn't an inundation of technology like there is today.  But I think there's an interruption in our lives, and maybe even a little distancing from our humanity, when we include these things we've created, these tools in everything we do, I don't we have to have—I mean who cares if the ball was 2 seconds...who cares?  The human eye is part—I mean, we are human beings.   If a judge makes a call in a boxing match, who cares? It's sports.... I don't want to see Futurama acted out in real life where there are robot umpires, and robot baseball players, and robot boxers, and robot everywhere.  We are human beings and we still have a contribution to make to human things outside of computers and technology.

From D.T. Suzuki's introduction to Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, found 6/12 at the St. Vincent de Paul, "a story which splendidly illustrates Chuang-tze's philosophy of work, of a farmer who refused to use the shadoof to raise water from his well"—

A farmer dug a well and was using the water for irrigating his farm.  He used an ordinary bucket to draw water from the well, as most primitive people do.  A passerby, seeing this, asked him why he did not use a shadoof for the purpose; it is a labor-saving device and can do more work than the primitive method.  The farmer said, "I know it is labor-saving and it is for this very reason that I do not use the device.  What I am afraid of is this. That the use of such a contrivance makes one machine-minded.  Machine-mindedness leads one to the habit of indolence and laziness."

Appropriately, I just painstakingly re-listened to that phone call on the computer and typed out Amanda's thoughts before realizing NPR had already typed out the transcript.