PFEIL, 'REVOLTING YET CONSERVED: FAMILY %NOIR% IN _BLUE VELVET_ AND _TERMINATOR 2_', Postmodern Culture v2n3
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REVOLTING YET CONSERVED:
FAMILY %NOIR% IN _BLUE VELVET_ AND _TERMINATOR 2_
by
FRED PFEIL
Center for the Humanities
Oregon State University
<centerfh@ccmail.orst.edu>
_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
Copyright (c) 1992 by Fred Pfeil, all rights
reserved. This text may be freely shared among
individuals, but it may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the
authors and advance notification of the editors.
[1] When we think about %film noir% in the present, it is
well to remember the categorical instability that has dogged
its tracks from the moment French critics coined the term in
the mid-1950s as a retrospective tag for a bunch of
previously withheld American films which now, upon their
foreign release, all looked and felt sort of alike. Ever
since, critics and theorists have been arguing over what
%noir% is and which films are examples of it, over what
social processes and psychic processes it speaks of and to,
and what might constitute its own social effects. Does
%film noir% constitute its own genre; a style which can be
deployed across generic boundaries; a movement within
Hollywood cinema, limited to its place in space and time?
These, the intrinsic questions and debates, have their own
momentum and energy, but derive extra charge from an
associated set of extrinsic questions regarding %noir%'s
relationships to other, non-cinematic social trans-
formations, especially shifts in gender identities and
relationships in the post-WWII U.S. Did the spider-women of
so many %films noir%, despite their emphatically evil coding
and self-destructive defeats, nonetheless constitute a
challenge to the restoration and extension of a patriarchal-
capitalist gender economy under whose terms men controlled
and ran the public sphere while women, desexualized and
maternalized, were relegated to hearth and home? Does the
aggressive sexuality, power and plot controlling/generating/
deranging force, of, say, a Barbara Stanwyck in _Double
Indemnity_, Jane Greer in _Out of the Past_, Gloria Grahame
in _The Big Heat_, together with %noir%'s characteristically
deviant visuality--its cramped asymmetrical framings, its
expressionistically harsh lighting contrasts and lurid
shadows, the whole twisted and uncertain spatiality of it
matching the male protagonist's lack of control over the
breakneck deviousness of its plot--constitute a real and
potentially effective subversion of the dominant order, as
Christine Gledhill suggests?^1^ Or is it simply, as
neoformalist film historian David Bordwell asserts, that
"These films blend causal unity with a new realistic and
generic motivation, and the result no more subverts the
classical film"--or, we may presume, anything else--"than
crime fiction undercuts the orthodox novel" (77)?
[2] %Noir%, then, as coded alternative or as alternate
flavor of the month, something to put alongside vanilla,
chocolate, strawberry and _The Best Years of Our Lives_?
The debate smolders on unresolved, and perhaps irresolvably,
depending as it does on some broader knowledge or agreement
as to what indeed constitutes subversive or progressive work
within a pre- or non-revolutionary cultural moment and
social formation. More directly, the question is how any
capital-intensive work, such as film or mainstream
television production, which is produced for a mass
audience, can be progressive, and how we can tell insofar as
it is. How (and how well) would such work *work*? What
(and how much) would it *do*? More crudely still, how far
can a work go and still get made and distributed within a
system whose various structures are all overdetermined by
capitalism and patriarchy (not to mention racism and
homophobia)? What's the most, and the best, we can demand
and/or expect?
[3] It is, as Marxists used to say perhaps too often, no
accident that such messy questions press themselves on us
today so insistently and distinctly that a whole new
interdisciplinary protodiscipline, "cultural studies," now
constitutes itself just to deal with them. Their emergence
and urgency for us is, after all, inevitably consequent upon
the dimming of the revolutionary horizon, and the loss or
confusion of revolutionary faith, not only within the
socialist Left but throughout all the other feminist and
"minority" movements in the '70s and '80s, condemned as each
has been to its own version of the excruciating declension
from essentialist-nationalist unity to division Fanon
outlined in _The Wretched of the Earth_ for a post-colonial
subject on the other side of a war of national liberation
for which there was finally, in the U.S. anyway, never a
credible or even distinct equivalent anyway. Here the
revolution, if there was anything like one, came from the
Right--New Right maven Paul Weyrich proudly proclaiming in
the wake of the first Reagan election in the early '80s, "We
are radicals seeking to overthrow the power structure"--
against the liberal-corporatist State and the sociopolitical
good sense that flowed from and supported it, both of which
had to be, and have been, dismantled and rearticulated in
quite different ways. Given this combination, then, of dis-
integration below and regressive hegemonic re-integration
from on high, the whole notion of what Gramsci called "war
of movement," of deep structural and institutional change,
has come to seem to many once-insurrectionary spirits to be
inconceivably crackpot or even worse, a grisly ruse of the
very Power (a la Foucault) it pretends to oppose; so that a
permanent "war of position," the ever partial and
provisional %detournement% of otherwise intractable
institutional arrangements and practices, becomes literally
the only game in town.
[4] I describe this situation here not to deplore or
criticize it, no more than I would claim to know how to
resolve the questions of cultural politics that flow from it
in some new transcendent synthesis of What Is To Be Done; it
is, for better and for worse, the set of circumstances we in
the developed West, and the U.S. in particular, are *in*.
So it will be both the context from which we must think
about the meaning and direction of the so-called "return" of
%noir% during the '70s and '80s just past, and some of the
newest mutations in the %noir% sensibility today.
[5] For starters, moreover, we would do well to resist the
very notion of straightforward repetition or "return" to
explain such films as _Body Heat_ (1981) and the remakes of
_Farewell My Lovely_ (1975) and _The Postman Always Rings
Twice_ (1981).^2^ For whatever %noir% was in the '40s
and '50s, it will not be again three decades or more later
by dint of sheer straightforward imitation, if only because
the meanings and effects of the original %films noir% even
today must still be experienced and understood in their
relation to a whole system of film production, distribution,
and consumption--the Hollywood studio system, in effect--
which was in its last hour even then and is now gone. As
Thomas Schatz has recently reminded us, it was that system
which most fully standardized and customized the look and
feel and plotlines of film genres, from MGM classics and
costume dramas to Warner's gangster pics and Universal's
specialty in horror: some of them genres from which %noir%
had something to steal (e.g., the deep shadows and
expressionistic framings of the horror film), but each and
all of them together a system of techniques, conventions
*and*, not least, audience expectations (e.g., the romantic
happy ending and/or the satisfying restoration of law and
order) that %noir%s first defined themselves by violating.
[6] Accordingly, when the studio system breaks up into the
present "package-unit" system in which individual producers
assemble production groups and materials on a film-by-film
basis, employing what is left of the studios primarily as a
distribution arm, and generic production atomizes too as the
specialized constellations of talents and resources once
fixed in position to produce it are dispersed, we may expect
that the working parts of the %noir% machine of effects and
responses will also break apart into so many free agents,
capable of being drafted onto any number of new, provisional
combinatory teams, all according to the same recombinant
aesthetic economy which, for example, a decade ago brought
us the TV series _Hill Street Blues_ out of a directive to
its original writers to knock out a combination of sit-com
_Barney Miller_ and the action-adventure series _Starsky and
Hutch_.^3^ In this newer Hollywood, quintessential site
of the intersection between the flexible specialization of
post-Fordist production and the free-floating ideologemes-
turned-syntax of postmodernism, the transgressive energies
and subversive formal practices that first animated and
defined %noir% may be most alive and well where they have
migrated from the now-conventionalized site of their first
appearance towards some new and even perverse combination
with other formal and thematic elements in similar drift
from other ex-genres of film.
[7] Such, at any rate, is the general hypothesis of the
present essay, whose specific claim will be that %film noir%
in particular, homeless now as a genre (or aesthetic
reaction-formation to genre), nonetheless currently finds
itself most alive where its former elements and energies
form part of a new chronotope whose chief difference from
that non- or even anti-domestic one of "classic" %noir% lies
in the extent to which the newer one includes, and indeed is
centered on, home and family, even as it decenters and
problematizes both. Through a look at two successful recent
films, _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_, I mean to show how
home and family are being destabilized, "%noir%-ized," in
both: in which case, the large differences between our two
films in terms of aesthetic strategies and audiences should
only make the similarities in the end results of each film's
processing of the elements of %noir% it takes up that much
more striking and significant. Striking in what way,
though, how significant and for whom? Connected to what
other transformations and praxes, underway or to come?
Those questions will raise their heads again on the other
side of the following readings, forcing us again to hedge
and answer them as best we can in the absence of any clear
or shared utopian goal.
I. _BLUE VELVET_ AND THE STRANGELY FAMILIAR
[8] It is too easy to tick off the %noir% elements in David
Lynch's art-film hit _Blue Velvet_ (1986). The
investigative male protagonist (Kyle McLachan) caught
between dangerous dark-haired Dorothy Valens (Isabella
Rossellini) and bland blond Sandy (Laura Dern); the far-
reaching nature of the evil McLachan's Jeffrey uncovers and
the entanglements of the police themselves in its web; the
homoerotic dimension of the relationship between Jeffrey and
the film's arch-villain Frank (Dennis Hopper): any college
sophomore with Intro Film Studies under his or her belt can
make the idents, just as anyone who's ever taken Intro to
Psych can pick up on the Oedipal stuff hiding in plain
sight, beginning of course with the collapse of Jeffrey's
father and ending with his restoration. Michael Moon, in
one of the best commentaries on the film, summarizes quite
nicely the familiar story of how it goes in between:
a young man must negotiate what is represented as being
the treacherous path between an older, ostensibly
exotic, sexually 'perverse' woman and a younger,
racially 'whiter,' sexually 'normal' one, and he must
at the same time and as part of the same process
negotiate an even more perilous series of interactions
with the older woman's violent and murderous criminal
lover and the younger woman's protective police-
detective father. This heterosexual plot resolves
itself in classic oedipal fashion: the young man,
Jeffrey, destroys the demonic criminal 'father' and
rival, Frank; rescues the older woman, Dorothy, from
Frank's sadistic clutches; and then relinquishes her to
her fate and marries the perky young daughter of the
good cop.^4^
[9] Such a blatant evocation, or perhaps more accurately,
acting out, of the standard image repertoires of generic
%noir% and psychoanalytic truism will, it is worth noting,
not be obvious to everyone--only to those who, thanks to
college or some other equivalent educational circuitry, have
the cultural capital to recognize the codes at work.
Assuming such an audience, though, the point is to consider
such paint-by-number material not as finished product, but
as starting point and second-order raw material for the
film's subsequent elaborations. If it would be a mistake to
accept such generic material at face value, in other words,
it would be just as wrong to write it off and look for what
else is "really" going on instead.
[10] Our first job, then, is rather to consider
*obviousness* in _Blue Velvet_ as a subject and production
in its own right, and with its own multiple, complex
effects. But to take this subject up in turn is to notice
immediately just how many ways Lynch "shoves it in our
faces" as well as how many things "it" in that last phrase
comes to be, so often and so many that a certain kind of
"ominous-obvious" may fairly be said to constitute both the
film's thematic subject and its formal method alike. An
exhaustive reading of _Blue Velvet_ along these lines could
in fact begin with the film's very first image, the rippling
blue velvet against which its opening titles appear, shot in
such extreme, quasi-magnified close-up that, as Barbara
Creed points out, its smooth soft surface appears mottled
and rough as bark (100). But I would rather concentrate
instead on the image-flow that follows those credits, a sort
of music video to the Bobby Vinton oldie of the film's
title, falling in between (in both a chronological and a
stylistic sense) the credits and the story-line that picks
up at its end. Here is a list of the shots that compose the
film's dreamy opening montage:
1. Tilt down from perfectly blue sky to red roses in
medium close-up against white fence. DISSOLVE to
2. Long shot: fire truck passing by slowly on tree-
shaded small-town street, with fireman on it
waving in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
3. Yellow tulips against white fence, close-up as at
the end of shot 1. DISSOLVE to
4. Long shot, small-town residential street: traffic
guard beckoning for schoolchildren to cross, again
in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
5. Long shot: white Cape Cod house and yard. CUT to
6. Medium shot: Middle-aged man with hose, watering
yard. CUT to
7. Long shot, interior: Middle-aged woman inside,
sitting with cup of coffee on couch, watching tv,
which displays black-and-white shot of man
crossing screen, gun in hand, and from which
issues sinister %noir%ish music. CUT to
8. Close-up of hand holding gun on TV screen. CUT to
9. Man with hose, as in shot 6, but now off-center at
screen left.
Actually, the sequence at this point has already begun to
speed up somewhat, moving from shots of approximately five
seconds apiece (shots 1-4) to an average of three (5-8).
From shot 9 on, moreover, the sequence will quicken and warp
still further, as an increasingly rapid montage of
increasingly close-up shots of kinked hose/sputtering
tap/vexed man, joined with a sound-track in which the
diegetic sound of water fizzing under pressure is combined
with a gradually rising and apparently non-diegetic buzz or
roar, towards the man's collapse, the hose's anarchic
rearing upward, a slow-mo shot of a dog drinking from the
hose beside the fallen man, the sound of the dog barking, a
baby crying, a rushing wind combined with a mechanical
rustling noise, as we go down through the lawn in a process-
shot pretending to be an unbroken zoom-in to a horde of
swarming, warring black insects whose organic-mechanical
noise-plus-wind now swells up to an overwhelming roar....
[11] What is one to make of such an opening? Or rather,
what *do* we make of it? Given our previous training in how
to watch feature films, or, more specifically, in how to
read their spatio-temporally orienting shots and narrative
cues, it seems to me that with part of our minds we struggle
to do the usual with this image-flow: to read it
narratively, place ourselves in it, "follow" it out. And,
of course our efforts and presumptions in this regard are
not entirely in vain. Okay, we say, it's a small-town, and
here's a particular family inside it, a Dad and Mom, and
look, something's happening to the Dad so things are off-
balance now, not right, gee what happens next? But all that
is only with part of the mind, and against a kind of semic
counter-logic or inertial drag instigated by the very same
shots, at least or especially shots 1-4 and the slow-motion
and extreme close-ups that close off the sequence (as other
such shot combinations will serve as the disjunctive
ligatures between one section of the film's narrative and
the next): in the degree to which all these shots overshoot
their narrative or, in Barthesian terms, proairetic
function, and force attention on themselves in some purely
imagistic way instead, Bobbie Vinton, blue sky and red roses
at one end, roaring wind, mechanical rustling and ravening
black insects on the other.
[12] If, moreover, such a difference from the opening moves
of conventional film falls somewhere short of effecting a
total break with the prevailing model of filmic narrative,
its relative distance from that model is nonetheless made
all the more apparent by the lurch that follows back toward
typicality. Like a second beginning, the shot-sequence that
follows the one we have just rehearsed opens with a set of
establishing long-shots of the town of Lumberton,
simultaneously named as such by the local radio station on
the soundtrack, after which we are shown Jeffrey the film's
protagonist for the first time, pausing on his way to visit
his hospitalized father in order to throw a stone in the
field where he will soon find the severed ear of Dorothy
Valens' husband and thereby set the film's %noir%ish plot
into full motion. So now, in effect, we are invited to take
a deep breath and relax and enjoy, i.e., do a conventional
reading of, the film: only once again, not quite. For this
sequence will no less settle into assured conventionality
than the last completely broke from it. So the d.j.'s radio
patter is slightly, well, *skewed*--"It's a sunny day," he
chirps, "so get those chainsaws out!"--as, on a visual
level, is the sequence of images itself, in which the
aforementioned shot of Jeffrey in the field is followed by
two brief red-herring long-shots of downtown, one in which
an unknown car pulls onto the town's main street, the other
of an unknown man standing spinning what might be a ring of
keys in his hand as he stands out in front of a darkened
store, before the sequence slips back into gear with a
close-up of Jeffrey's father in his hospital bed as
Jeffrey's visiting presence is announced.
[13] From its outset, then, _Blue Velvet_ is characterized
by the *partial and irresolute* opposition of two distinct
kinds and pleasures of narrative: one characterized by the
relative dominance of what, following Barthesian narrative
theory, I have called the *semic*, and the other by the
equally relative dominance of the establishing, fixing and
plotting functions of the *proairetic*. Less pretentiously,
of course, we could speak of the predominance of *image*
versus that of *story-line*, and avoid French post-
structuralist theory altogether, were it not for the real
yet perverse relevance of Barthes' terms, and the
psychopolitical valences attached to them, for this
particular film. To discern this relevance, we need only
recall, first of all, that within that theory the placing,
naming, and motivating functions of the proairetic, and its
predominance in conventional narrative, are held to be
defining symptoms of the constitutive *oedipality* of such
narrative energies and desires, or perhaps more precisely of
the binding, sublimation and containment of such desire;
just as the atemporal and never-fully-repressible bursts and
upwellings of the semic are identified with the
carnivalesque freedom of the unregulated, post-, pre-, or
even anti-Oedipal social and individual body. Then all we
have to do is notice how insofar as such definitions and
categories do hold water for us, _Blue Velvet_ gets them--
though once again, only sort of--wrong from the get-go,
observing this oppositional distinction and flouting it at
the same time by reversing what one might have thought was
their "natural" order: for what kind of narrative text is
it, after all, in which the fall of the father is *preceded*
by an image-flow predominantly semic in nature, but
*followed* by one that more or less falls obediently into
story-plotting line?
[14] A postmodern text, of course; the kind of postmodern
work which, as in Cindy Sherman's first acclaimed photos, is
concerned both to hybridize and hollow out the cliche. For
simultaneously hyper-realizing and de-centering narrative
and cinematic convention, is from the start what _Blue
Velvet_ is about, both its way of doing business and the
business itself. Visually, as Laurie Simmons' description
of Lynch's style suggests, its techniques and effects are
most clearly related to those of Pop Art, though more that
of Rosenquist, say, than Andy Warhol.^5^ Such perfect
two-dimensionality--so different, it may be worth noting,
from the expressionistically crowded and askew deep-spaces
of classic %noir% style--simultaneously flattens and
perfects all its glazed gaze captures, from roses to
ravening insects, soda fountain booth to severed ear, while
on the film's soundtrack, the same sense is created and
reinforced by Badalamenti's score which, here and in _Twin
Peaks_ alike, flaunts its bare-faced imitation of
%misterioso% a la Hitchcock composer Bernard Hermann one
minute, gushing romantic strings a la Dmitri Tiomkin the
next, with some dollops of the kind of insipid finger-
popping jazz-blues once written for Quinn-Martin tv-
detective series, soundtrack scores of the first living-room
%noirs%, thrown in on the side. Such predigested product
thus functions as the musical equivalent of the cliched
dialogue of the script and the two-dimensional visuality of
the cinematography, each overdetermining the other into an
aggregate signal of intentional derivativeness and knowing
banality whose obverse or underside is clearly that moment
when, aurally and/or visually, that which we take as the
%ur%-natural (the clicking and mandibular crunching of the
insects, the robin with the worm in its mouth) becomes
indistinguishable from sounds of industry, the sight of the
obviously animatronic--in short, the synthetic
constructions, material and imaginative, of human beings
themselves, recognized and felt as such.
[15] In early-industrial Britain, Keats invited his readers
to the edge of one sublime mode of hyper-attention, a
falling into the object's depths so intense the viewer's own
consciousness browns out ("A drowsy numbness pains/My
sense"). In the postmodern late-industrial mode of Lynch's
film, however, the gleaming but off-kilter perfection of
such %recherche% surfaces as those we have examined
constitutes its very own warp, and the terrified rapture of
the romantic swoon away from consciousness is replaced by a
queasy awareness of anxious affiliation to and
guilty/paranoid complicity with all that we are so familiar
with in what we see and hear, as in this scene in which our
hero Jeffrey has a talk in the den with Lieutenant Williams,
bland-blonde Sandy's father and police detective, consequent
to Jeffrey's discovery of the ear:
Williams: You've found something that is very
interesting to us. Very interesting. I know you
must be curious to know more. But I'm afraid I'm
going to have to ask you not only not to tell
anybody about the case, but not to tell anybody
about your find. One day when it's all sewed up,
I'll let you know all the details. Right now,
though, (glancing sidelong, sneaking a puff on his
cigarette) I can't.
Jeffrey: I understand. I'm just real curious, like you
said.
Williams: (slightly smiling) I was the same way myself
when I was your age. That's why I went into this
business.
Jeffrey: (laughs) Must be great.
Williams: (freezes, sours smile) It's horrible too.
I'm sorry Jeffrey; it just has to be that way.
Anyway Jeffrey, I know you do understand.
Each sentence, every phrase, 100% B-movie cliche, and
delivered as such, with all the wooden earnestness the
actors can muster. Yet I hope my transcription also conveys
something of the extent to which, even as that dialogue
rattles out, Williams' suspiciously askew reactions and
expressions move our reactions not so much against the
direction of the cliches as athwart them. On the level of
the story-line, and given our past experience of both
oedipal narrativity in general and %noir% in particular,
they may prompt us to wonder if Father/Detective Williams
won't turn to be one of the bad guys after all; on the level
of what we might call the film's enunciation, though, and in
light of all else we have seen about this film so far, such
a moment is apt to engender a far more fundamental distrust,
less the suspicion that we haven't gotten to the bottom of
this yet than the fullblown paranoia that *there may be no
bottom here at all*.
[16] So, in the closing moments of the film, when Jeffrey
and Sandy and their families are both completed and combined
around the exemplary center of their good love, the famous
moment when that robin shows up with the worm in its mouth
and Jeffrey's Aunt Barbara, looking over his shoulder and
munching on a hot dog, says "I could never do that!"
provokes a complicated laugh from the audience. On the one
hand, of course it's about both the ironic relation of that
amorally predatory robin to the goopy speech Sandy gave
earlier in the film, in which robins figured in a dream
she'd had as emblems of pure good, and the reinforcing irony
of Aunt Barbara's self-righteous disavowal of the very
appetitiveness she is displaying by stuffing her mouth. On
the other, though, given the bird's obvious artificiality,
the music's cliched goopiness, and the hypercomposed
flatness and stiffness of the %mise-en-scene%, it's also
about the anxious and delightful possibility that Aunt
Barbara--and Jeffrey and Sandy, for that matter--are robots
too. And of course they are, in the sense that they are
constructions of sound and words and light, spaces where
Lynch & Company's projections meet our own; and in this
sense so are all the characters in every feature film. Yet
if every film in the Hollywood tradition invites its
audience to recite some version of the Mannoni formula %Je
sais bien mais quand meme% on its way into and through the
story-world it offers, _Blue Velvet_ is nonetheless
distinctive for the steady insistence with which it ups the
volume on its own multiple, hybridized, and hyper-realized
elements of %retrouvee%, pushing its audience to acknowledge
its own "I know very well" at least as much as its "but even
so . . .," and so to taint and complicate a heretofore
blissfully irresponsible and safely distanced voyeurism with
its own admissions of familiarity as complicity, anxious
lack of distance, guilt at home.^6^ "You put your
disease inside me!" Dorothy says to Jeffrey, and of him, to
everyone around her at one point; and so he/we did; but in
another sense, of course, it was there/here/everywhere all
along, and we have "it" inside us too.
[17] It is this "it," this recognition and admission of the
obvious artifice, that we then carry with us alongside and
through those obvious elements of %noir% and of oedipal
psychopathology which have in and of themselves elicited so
much critical commentary. Some writers have concentrated on
Lynch's blending and blurring of genres (MacLachan's Jeffrey
as both Philip Marlowe and Dobie Gillis) and generic
chronotopes (the smokey nightclub in the small-town, the
naked "dark woman" in the family's living room), while
others hone in on the sheer mobility of male-hysterical
fantasy in the film--the dangerous, vertiginous, yet
perpetual oscillations between sadism/masochism, "Daddy" and
"Baby," hetero- and homosexual desire, as all these are
acted out (in both senses of the term) in the film's excess
of primary scenes (Jeffrey with Dorothy, Frank with Dorothy,
Jeffrey and Frank with Ben, Jeffrey with Frank). Yet even
those who have attempted to consider and synthesize both
these manifest topical areas have tended to miss, or at
least underestimate, the full measure, meaning and effect of
the de-realizing, de-naturalizing formal operations of the
film, and the extent to which they power the movement toward
what Michael Moon, examining that psychosexual terrain,
describes as "the fearful knowledge that what most of us
consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own,
that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audio- and
videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances of
them lip-synching of these circulating, endlessly reproduced
and reproducible desires" even before the generic mix is
evident and the sexual-psychoanalytic heyday/mayhem
begins.^7^ What fascinates and appalls in _Blue Velvet_,
what simultaneously underwrites and undermines the mixed
messages of its generic play and desublimated oedipality, is
the sense of the fragility of the Symbolic, its
susceptibility to the metonymic "disease" of constant
slippage that is always already inside it, a %gynesis% of
both film and family that irresolves without overthrowing,
that keeps home un-natural while forcing us to own up to the
familiarity of all that is officially Other and strange,
home-making and *and as* dislocating, from blue-sky
beginning (plenitude or emptiness? true blue or fake void?)
to blue-sky end.
II. _TERMINATOR 2_: ANY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE
[18] Things are somewhat different in this past summer's
blockbuster sci-fi hit _Terminator 2: Judgement Day_, if
only because it is not likely investors will put up $90
million for a project whose meanings, pleasures, and rules
of motion derive from the principle of semiotic erosion of
narrative conventions, irresolution as an aesthetic way of
life. The overall regime of pleasure in the blockbuster
film is, rather, a paradigm of late capitalist consumer
production: it must keep us constantly (though *not*
continuously) engaged without demanding much attention;
knock us out with all the trouble it's gone to just to give
us an instant's satisfaction; and not only offer us options
but affirm and even flatter us for whichever ones we pick.
[19] To define blockbusters in terms of such hard-wired
business requirements is, however, not to mark the point
where analysis of their significance ends, but rather to
suggest where it has to begin. For if the blockbuster
typically invites us to "have it either and/or both ways,"
then both the character of the particular contradictory
options offered and the name and the definition of the "it"
can be read as complex signposts showing the way to the
mainstream national culture's ideological "points de
capiton," the places where collective social desire--for
transformation and salvage, revolution and restoration,
anarchy and obedience--is simultaneously fastened and
split.^8^
[20] Thus, to take up one early example, the interest of
those opening scenes of _T2_ in which the two synthetic
creatures from the future first appear in present-day L.A.
bent on their opposed missions, to protect or kill the boy
John Connor, and to this end outfit themselves in the garbs
and roles of ordinary mortal men. The T-800, a.k.a. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, cyborg-simulacrum of Sarah Connor's would-be
killer in the first _Terminator_ film, arrives in the blue
burnished glory of his hypermuscled nakedness in front of an
equally gleaming semi-truck parked across from a biker bar
he will soon scope out, bust up, and leave in full regalia,
in shades and leathers, and astride a Harley hog, to the
heavy-metal strains of George Thorogood and the Destroyers
stuttering "B-b-b-born to be bad." In the following
sequence, however, in which we meet the protean, programmed-
to-kill *all*-robot T-1000, we are taken to a desolate patch
of no-man's land underneath a curving span of L.A. overpass
to which a city cop has been called to investigate the
strange electrical goings-on accompanying this unit's
passage through time and space: whereupon the T-1000,
assuming for the moment a proto-hominoid silver shape sneaks
up on the cop from behind, kills him, and takes on his
steely-eyed Aryan form, complete with uniform, as his
central "identity" for the rest of the film.
[21] In the span of these two brief scenes, entertainment
professionals James Cameron et al. have already provided us
with a wide range and satisfying oscillation of
identifications and exclusions, pleasures and disavowals.
For starters, there's the linkage and differentiation of
Arnold in his %ab ovum% muscle-builder's pose and the parked
semi behind him, suggesting as this composite image does
both Arnold himself as gleaming machine, icon of burly
masculinist culture at its most spectacularly developed
pitch, and Arnold as a display item quite out of this dingy
quotidian work-world altogether. Such ambivalence, together
with its options for enjoyment, is then carried right into
and through the mayhem at the biker bar that ensues, in
which those menacing scumbags are first literally summed up
by the T-800's hi-tech apparatus then disarmed and disrobed,
resulting in a new version of the composite Arnold-image,
both "badder" and "higher" than the bikers, at one and the
same time pure realization of their outlaw nature and
antithesis of their downwardly-mobile sleaze. And the
ambivalence of this newly sublated figure will then be
further marked and played out against that constructed in
the next sequence around the evil T-1000, which begins in
turn by cueing off our conventional identification with the
figure of law and order poking around in the dark shadows at
the margins of the normatively social, but ends by
conflating these two figures into one, a white male L.A. cop
*as* formless evil (a particularly pungent if fortuitous
maneuver, we may note, given national exposure of the racist
brutality of Police Chief Gates' L.A.P.D. a scant few months
before this film's release).
[22] We'll soon return to consider further the exact nature
and significance of the %agon% between this bad-guy-as-good-
guy and the good-guy-as-bad. For now, though, let this
opening example serve as a demonstration of the play of
opposition and symbiosis essential to _T2_: i.e., of a play
which combines a fair amount of mobility granted to our
various social and libidinal desires and fears with a lack
of ambiguity at any given moment as to what we ought to
think and feel. One minute the bikers are low-life scum,
then Arnold's a biker; one minute the L.A. cop is bravely
doing his duty, the next minute he's a remorseless assassin;
yet throughout all these inclusions and exclusions we are
never in doubt about which side to be on. The punctual
clarity of such a "preferred investment" strategy, as we
might call it, thus stands in marked contrast to the real
ambiguities of judgement and feeling that are the warp and
woof of classic %noir%, in the figures of, for example, the
morally shady detective and the smart, alluring %femme
fatale%, not to mention as far or even farther away from the
constant sliding and seepage inside Lynch's film. In fact,
the first thing to observe about most of those features of
%noir% taken up by _Terminator 2_ is the degree to which
they are, as in _Blue Velvet_, both untrustworthy as
straightforward quotation or appropriation, yet
paradoxically, all the more significant for that.
[23] Take _T2_'s narrational strategy, to choose one of the
film's several %noir%ish qualities. In "classic" %noir%, as
we know, the question of who is in control of the film's
narration is often central to %noir%'s meanings and
effects.^9^ In %noirs% like _Gilda_ or _Out of the
Past_, that question is posed by the disjunction between the
male protagonist-narrator's tightlipped voice-over and the
sinister twists of the enacted plot in whose devious
turnings the figure of the %femme fatale% seems to exert a
powerful hand. And at first it seems that something of the
same, but with a post-modern, post-feminist difference, is
true of _Terminator 2_ as well. Here too the laconic
decisiveness of the voice-over contrasts with the
comparative lack of power of the narrator to take control
over the film's action; only here the destination towards
which the plot careens is enlarged from individual
catastrophe all the way to planetary nuclear holocaust as a
result of the entropic drift of masculinist techno-
rationality, and the tough-guy narrator is a woman.
[24] On this level, then, _Terminator 2_ like its
predecessor appears to be a sci-fi "feminist %noir%" pitting
its female heroine Sarah Connor against various individual
and collective "males %fatales%" in a simple yet effective
inversion of the old device. Yet while such a conclusion
is, I think, not entirely false, even less could it be
declared simply true. For one thing, it is obviously *not*
Linda Hamilton who is the big star of _Terminator 2_, but
Arnold Schwarzenegger; nor is it Sarah Connor who, for all
her stirring efforts, is finally able to save the world, if
indeed it has been saved, but the proto/semi-male T-800 who
supplies the vital edge. For another, and for all the
%noir%ish haze and green/blue/black suffused throughout the
film, on the level of narrative structure and plot the
amount of confusion we are plunged into as to what is going
on, and how to feel about it, how the action is hooked to
whatever else has been happening and how it is all going to
come out, is virtually nil. Just as clearly as we know from
moment to moment who's good and who's bad, we know Arnold
the T-800 protector will rescue boy John from the clutches
of the wicked T-1000; and when boy John insists they break
into the state hospital for the criminally insane and rescue
his mother Sarah, we know they will be able to pull that off
as well. When the three of them, plus Dyson the computer
scientist, are on their way to the headquarters of Cyberdyne
Corporation to destroy those fragments of the first
Terminator from the first _Terminator_ film, which, when
analyzed and understood, will result in the construction of
the SkyNet system of "defense" that will in turn trigger off
the holocaust, Sarah's voiceover, atop a night-for-night
shot of a dark highway rushing into the headlights and past,
intones the %noir%ish message that "The future, always so
clear to me, had been like a dark highway at night. We were
in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went
along." By this time, though, such a message comes across
as mere atmosphere, the verbal equivalent of the
aforementioned laid-on haze, rather than as any real
entrance into "uncharted" territory on the part of a plot in
which we know where we are, and where we are headed, each
step of the way.
[25] Yet if the relation between narration and enactment in
_T2_ is thus less an innovative extension of %noir% than
first appeared, it is not hard to locate more genuine
expressions of a %noir% sensibility in its sense of space
and time, or chronotope. In terms of space, _Terminator 2_
early on takes its leave of the sunstruck residential
neighborhood where John Connor lives with his ineffectual
foster parents, and spends the rest of its running time
either keeping its distance from or destroying any and all
traditional domestic space. And its %noir%-classical
preference for the bleak sprawl of Southern Californian
freeways, state institutions, research centers, malls, and
plants over any closed familial enclaves is matched by its
implicit flattening of time even across the gap of nuclear
apocalypse. The premise motivating _T2_--that in the wake
of nuclear apocalypse a resistance led by the adult John
Connor continues to struggle against the inhuman power of
the machine, so that both sides, Resistance and Power
Network, send their mechanical minions back in time, one to
protect John-the-boy and the other to "terminate" him--
insists on a difference between present and future that the
film's depictions erode. Here in the present official
power, whether in the form of the sadistically panoptical
mental hospital, the gleaming surfaces and security systems
of the soulless corporation, or the massively armed and
equipped, anonymous police, already runs rampant; here
already, before the Bomb falls, the hardy band of guerrilla-
terrorists resists, the fireballs blossom and the bodies
pile up in the perpetual dark night of Hobbesian
confrontation between bad anarchy and good.
[26] _Terminator 2_ thus not only reconstructs the fallen
public world and queasy temporality of classic %noir% but
constructs them together in the form of an apocalypse that
has, in effect, already occurred. Like Benjamin's once-
scandalous Angel of History, its chronotope offers us a
perspective from which modernity appears less "a chain of
events" than "one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls it in front of [our]
feet," a "storm" that is "what we call progress" (Benjamin
257, 258). Yet the very incongruity of such a rhyme between
the ruminations of a Marxist-modernist intellectual in
Europe at the end of the 1930s and a contemporary Hollywood
blockbuster film raises its own set of questions concerning
what "conditions of possibility" must have been met before
such a view could become mainstream. What preconditions
must be met before a mass audience can find such an anti-
progressive perspective pleasurable, can "want to believe
this," as Leo Braudy says of the rise and fall of generic
perspectives in general^10^; and what consequences
follow from _Terminator 2_'s particular channelings of that
desire?
[27] Fredric Jameson suggests that the predominance of
dystopic visions in contemporary science-fiction signals the
general loss of our ability even to conceive of, much less
struggle to enact, a utopian social vision, trapped as we
are within both an imperialist nation in decline and the
overheated "perpetual present" of postmodernist culture
(Jameson, "Progress"). And much of _Terminator 2_, with its
timed bursts of violence merged with state-of-the-art
special effects, offers itself up to such an interpretive
hypothesis as Exhibit A. (Call to reception theorists: how
many in the American audience recognized in the evil
cybernetic techno-war depicted in _T2_'s opening post-
apocalyptic sequence an image of a hysterically celebrated
Gulf War just past, in which "our" machines mowed down their
human bodies, as the saying goes, "like fish in a barrel"?
And what were the effects of this surely unintentional
echo?) Yet here again, like a good blockbuster, _T2_ also
invites us to critique the violence it presents, and quite
explicitly, in Sarah's diatribe to scientist Dyson. "Men
like you built the hydrogen bomb," she roars. "Men like you
thought it up . . . You don't know what it's like to
*create* something." It is a speech that might have been
drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of such
essentialist critics of male instrumental rationality as
Susan Griffin, or such proponents of a maternalist-based
women's peace movement as Sarah Ruddick or Helen Caldecott;
and it is there for the taking, not instead of but right
along with, the violence it decries.
[28] The ease with which this moment's feminist critique of
Enlightenment takes its place alongside brutal displays of
techno-violence, though, should not blind us to its value as
a clue to what is deeply and genuinely moving--in both the
affective and narrative senses of the word--in _Terminator
2_. After all, the film we have described so far is one in
which a fundamentally uneventful frame (the apocalypse which
has already occurred) is constructed as backdrop for a plot
whose terms and ends (T-800 saves boy; saves Sarah; saves
world; destroys evil twin, a.k.a. T-1000) are all pretty
much known in advance. If the cybernetic machine that is
_Terminator 2_ nonetheless appears at all alive and in
motion, its assignment rather involves an extensive
renegotiation and reconstruction of the hetero-sex/gender
system itself, and that little engine of identity and desire
called the nuclear family in particular. And indeed, we
have already hinted at one important aspect of that
renegotiation in our discussion of the %noir%ish space of
action in _T2_, which gives us the ranch-style home and
residential neighborhood of traditional American domesticity
as the place of the *phoney* family (the foster parents of
which are promptly dispatched), and the new "mean streets"
of mall and culvert, corporate research center, freeway, and
desert, as site of the new true one.
[29] This relocation of the family unit of Mommy/Daddy/Baby
to the place where the %noir% hero used to be, out in public
and on the run, is likewise braided in with a complex
transfiguration of all three roles in the family romance,
part transforming, and part regressive in each case. Most
prominently is of course ultra-buff Linda Hamilton's Sarah
Connor as fully operational warrior-woman, like Sigourney
Weaver's Ripley in Cameron's _Aliens_ only more so, phallic
mother with a complete set of soldier-of-fortune contacts,
cache of weapons and survivalist skills.^11^
Conversely, there is "the Arnold," fresh from _Kindergarten
Cop_ and therefore all the more available for refunctioning
from killing machine to nurturant proto-father who, as
Sarah's own voice-over puts it, "would always be there and
would always protect him [i.e., John the son]. Of all the
would-be fathers, this machine was the only one that
measured up." And finally, rounding out this new holy
family is golden-boy John, who as grown-up rebel leader
sends Arnold back to the past to protect his childhood self,
but who as a kid must teach both Mom and Dad how and when to
cool their jets.
[30] If, as Constance Penley has shown us, the first
_Terminator_ film posits John Connor as "the child who
orchestrates his own primal scene" to run the energy of
"infantile sexual investigation" into the project of re-
marking the difference between the sexes through
remaking/displacing it as "the more remarkable difference
between human and other" ("Time-Travel" 121, 123), then in
_Terminator 2_ he must be both father-to-the-Man and to-the-
Mom. Arnold must learn from him that "you can't kill
people"; while Sarah must be domesticated away from the
Mother-Wolf fury in which she is enmeshed. That in this
latter task, as unerringly right-on as young John is, it
helps to have a Dad around is perfectly evident in the
follow-up to the film's one overtly erotic moment, when
having interrupted Mom's commando raid on the Dyson home,
John confronts her, now collapsed in a heap, and moaning "I
love you, John--I always have." "I know," he answers
hoarsely, and falls into her embrace. A second later,
though, we are all delivered from this hot-and-heavy scene
before it goes any farther and shorts out the film, thanks
to the presence of Arnold, whose stern let's-get-going
glance to John literally pulls the boy out of Sarah's
dangerous clutches and allows the action to roll ahead.
[31] But for that matter, it is also abundantly clear by the
end of the film that for all John's moral sense and Sarah's
muscles, they both still need Dad--and a Dad who's not
*that* different after all. For in the course of
_Terminator 2_'s movement from shopping mall to shop floor,
both John and Sarah are demonstrated to be ultimately
ineffectual in their struggle against T-1000 and the
forthcoming holocaust alike. For all her desire to change
the dystopian course of history, and all the paramilitary
training, Sarah is unable (i.e., too "womanish"?) to pull
the trigger on Dyson: just as, despite the fortitude that
enables her even to gun down her own T-1000 simulation when
it appears,^12^ she is incapable of defeating this
tireless, emotionless, yet endlessly mutable villain by
herself. Could this be because, as the film also shows us
through Sarah's own recurrent and prophetic holocaust dream,
she herself is after all a split subject only one of whose
forms is warrior-like--and that one, compared to the apron-
frocked housewife-mother on the other side of the fence,
merely a secondary product of, and compensatory defense
against, her terrible foreknowledge of the apocalyptic
future as the history-that-already-hurts?
[32] At any rate, for whatever reason, deliverance can only
come from a real man, i.e., another machine-guy like the T-
1000, albeit one minus the mutable part, and plus a modicum
of moral-sentimental sense. "I know now why you cry,"
Arnold the T-800 tells the John-boy in that touching final
moment in between defeating the T-1000 and lowering himself
down into the vat of molten steel that will terminate him
too: "but it's something I can never do." The moral
equivalent of such affective male positioning in the film,
is, of course, that grisly motif we are free to enjoy as
sadistic joke and/or, god help us even more, take seriously
as moral improvement: i.e., Arnold's oft-demonstrated
commitment to maiming (usually by kneecapping) rather than
killing his human opponents, as per the John-boy's moral
command.
[33] By such means _T2_ gets it all in its renegotiation of
paternal masculinity, offering us Arnold's stunted moral-
affective capacities to us simultaneously as hard-wired
limitation (push come to shove, he's still only a machine)
and as virtuous necessity (what a man's gotta do). And
indeed we might as well have come at the same point from the
opposite direction; for the converse of all I have just been
saying is also true, and equally well demonstrated in the
final victory over the T-1000, despite its technological
superiority to our Arnold. How is it, after all, that
Arnold the protector is able to rise from the dead, as it
were, even after the T-1000 has driven an iron crowbar
straight through his back? Or, perhaps more accurately, how
is it that we find ourselves able to *believe* that he does?
[34] Here, I think, is how. Because, you will recall, at
this very moment of greatest extremity, a small red light
begins to shine far, far back in his eye--the sign, we are
told, of his back-up power supply kicking in. And what then
encourages us to swallow such a manifestly inadequate
explanation--after all, there is no sensibly consistent
reason why a T-1000 would not know of, or would fail to
notice, the existence of an earlier model's alternative
energy source--is the primary distinction between 800 and
1000 that has been there all the time, but is now most
explicitly given us in the comparative representations of
Arnold's near-death to the T-1000's dissolution. For the T-
1000, the liquid-metal prototype, there is no deep red light
to resort to, no power backup to call on when all else
fails; there is only an orgiastic extravaganza of special
effects, recapitulating with oozy swiftness all the
metamorphoses its liquid-metal shape-changing abilities have
enabled it to undertake throughout the film. By contrast,
then, with this horrific (but spellbinding!) swoon through
difference, is it not clear that compared with the T-1000
Arnold, *our* new man, has a core-self--or, if you will,
individual soul--and *just enough* of one, whereas T-1000 is
the merely the embodiment of amorally evil dispersion
itself, endless semiosis as the highest form of technocratic
death-rationality?
[35] If so, in its implication that the capacity to feel and
make moral choices, *and just enough of it*, marks our new
adult Daddy-man out from both the inhuman rationality (or is
it semiosis?) on one side and the all-too-human (or is it
fanaticism?) on the other, _T2_ might plausibly be said to
have thrown its family out on the street only to turn it
every which way but loose, i.e., only to redirect us and it
back to the fixed ambiguities of a masculinist humanism
whose very vertiginousness is uncannily, and literally,
*familiar*. But then this reconstruction just at its most
triumphantly synthetic moment too half-dwindles, half-
mutates into one final set of ambiguous-available options
for our attention, anxiety, and desire. At the close of the
film, does our pathos go to working-stiff Arnold lowering
himself down into the soup, just another self-sacrificing
husband and father off to shiftwork at the plant, "just
another body doing a job"? Or do we move our sympathies
over to the figure of Sarah Connor fiercely holding on to
John-boy, and see her instead as that arguably more up-to-
date figure of the '80s and '90s: the victimized and
abandoned single-mother head of a homeless family?
III. CONCLUSIONS IN FLUX
That it 'keeps going on like this' *is* the
catastrophe.
--Walter Benjamin^13^
I'm in the middle of a mystery
--Jeffrey in _Blue Velvet_
[36] So far, we have looked at the overdetermining yet
mutually subverting interplay of formal means Lynch's _Blue
Velvet_ foregrounds as part and parcel of the project of
bringing the urban spaces and %ur%-narrative of %noir% into
the formerly secure domestic spaces of the small town and
the family. And we have also examined the narrative-
dramatic operations through which _Terminator 2_
simultaneously reconstructs the family even as it moves it
out to the mean streets. One film constructed for and
consumed primarily by the culturally upscale, and therefore
with a corresponding emphasis on meaning-through-style; the
other for a mass audience and, accordingly, with its
meanings and judgements carried largely on the back of its
plot. Yet the main burden of this conclusion of sorts must
be to consider some of the social meanings, possibilities,
and effects at play and implicit in the overall project we
have seen both films take up in this particular post-
generic, postmodernist moment, for all their different ways
of working on it: a project we have been suggesting is *the
domestication of noir*.
[37] As a kind of side-door entrance into such
considerations, though, it may first be worth taking note of
a few aspects of our two films we have left unmentioned
until now: specifically, those which draw on the *economic*
and *racial* codes of mainstream white capitalist culture.
The former is most obviously referenced in the very
selection of a steel mill as the site of _T2_'s climactic
ending, given the function of steel production in
contemporary socio-economic discourse as the paradigmatic
icon of the Fordist industrial world we have now, depending
on whom you read, shipped off, frittered away, or even
transcended, but in any case lost, in our national economy's
shift toward a "post-Fordism" regime with service rather
than manufacturing industries at its core. Yet similar
allusions to a vanished or vanishing industrial world can be
found throughout _Blue Velvet_ as well, from its frequent
reminders to us of its small town's extractive-industrial
base (e.g., in the deejay's patter, or the image of the
millyard in which Jeffrey comes to the morning after being
assaulted by Frank) to the ominous brick warehouses in which
Frank seems both to live and conduct his dirty work, and
arguably even down to the anachronistic "spider-mike"
Dorothy employs in the implausibly located night-club where
she works.
[38] Though the uses to which such imagery is put in each of
our two films are multiple and complex, in _Blue Velvet_ the
evocation of industrial culture is part and parcel of its
overall construction of an environment where nature and
culture lose their borders, and danger and pleasure
coincide; whereas _Terminator 2_'s uncanny yet nostalgically
recalled foundry adds an extra measure of weight and
yearning to the triumphant restoration and victory of the
old male dominant nuclear family and "breadwinner ethic"
that went along with the socioeconomic era just past. More
generally still, though, and in keeping with many another
contemporary polygeneric film from _Lethal Weapon_ to
_Batman_, the iconic spaces and imagery of Fordist
production and industrial culture in both our films function
as a late-twentieth century equivalent to the feudal mansion
in the chronotope of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel:
i.e., as a *ruin* (albeit a capitalist one) in which to
place the monstrous dangers of the present and/or stage a
regressive deliverance from out of the sex/gender system of
the past.
[39] But I will have more to say elsewhere on the subject of
these new capitalist ruins and their deployment as
privileged sites of "ruinous" pleasure and recuperation for
white straight masculinity.^14^ So for now let us move
along instead, and turn our attention to the inflections and
incitements of racial marking in these films, a practice
whose operations paradoxically take on all the more
significance insofar as racial discourse and positioning may
at first sight appear to play such a small part in our two
films' overall schemes, practices and effects. From a
normatively "white" point of view, after all, racial marking
would seem to be an issue only at those rare moments when
someone "non-white" shows up on-screen, and then only as a
question of how that "non-whiteness" is defined. What such
a normative perspective thus typically, indeed
systematically, fails to notice or acknowledge is the
essentially relational operation of all racial discourse and
representation, or in other words the way every construction
of a/the racial Other generates by contrast an implicit
definition of what it means to be "the same"--i.e., in the
present instance, "white" and by no means just the
"whiteness" up on the screen.
[40] Let us take a quick look back at our two films from
this relational perspective, then, to see what implications
we find in their nominally innocuous-to-honorific depictions
of "non-white." In _Blue Velvet_, there are the two store-
uniformed and aproned "black" clerks who work at Jeffrey's
father's hardware store, peripheral even as secondary
characters, and seemingly memorable only because of the
whimsically transparent little %shtick% they play out in the
scant few seconds in which they appear, in which the sighted
one uses touch signals to cue the blind one as to price or
number of objects, and the blind one pretends he has with
magical prescience come up with the number himself.
_Terminator 2_, on the other hand, while "randomizing" race
among those cops and hospital attendants destined to be
casually crippled or killed, places non-whites in secondary
roles of clearly greater significance: Dyson the corporate
scientist and his family as African-Americans; Enrique,
Sarah's former soldier-of-fortune comrade-in-arms, and his
family as Hispanics.
[41] In _T2_, in fact, the self-approvingly "non-racist"
liberalism we seem to be meant to read off from these last
two sets of non-white characters and groups is more or less
spelled out within the film. There, Sarah's musings, quoted
above, on how well Arnold the T-800 fills the paternal bill
are immediately followed by a softly sunstruck montage of
her old Hispanic running buddy's Mommy-Daddy-Baby unit
caught unaware in the midst of their unselfconscious
domestic bliss, the sight of which is then immediately
linked to a recurrence of that dream of nuclear holocaust
that separates Sarah from her own apron-frocked domestic
self. Likewise, a short while later, Dyson's more upscale
family life is depicted in similarly idyllic and
conventional terms, Mom taking care of Baby, Dad smiling
over from where he is hard at work, in the final moment
before Sarah's assault. The liberal progressivism of such
representations thus announces itself in the contrast
between the settled, happy domesticity of the non-white
families up above (Dyson's) or down below (Enrique's) the
social level of the aberrant and provisional white one we
are traveling with. But we could put the same point less
generously but no less accurately by saying that such
progressivism is itself little more than a stalking horse
for the conservative project that rides in on it, i.e., the
(re)constitution of the regulative ideal of the old male-
dominant oedipal-nuclear family for *whites*, coming at
them, as it were, from both sides.
[42] Moreover, though _Terminator 2_ neither represents nor
endorses any non-familial social ideal, it still seems
significant that both our non-white %paterfamilia% are
associated from the start with contemporary visions of
social disorder and mass violence. For many if not most
white viewers at least, Sarah's rapid allusion to Enrique's
past as a %contra%, combined with his guntoting first
appearance and his family's desert location, will call up a
melange of unsorted and uneasy impressions from _Treasure of
the Sierra Madre_ to the mainstream media's spotty yet
hysterical coverage of a decade of messy and unpleasant
struggle "down there" somewhere, plus attendant anxieties
over "their" illegal entry and peripheral existences "up
here" now; whereas the Afro-American Dyson is
straightforwardly depicted as the author of the
technological breakthrough that will eventually give us
SkyNet, the fully autonomous, computerized war technology
that will soon trigger nuclear holocaust as the first move
in its war against humanity itself. One wonders, in fact,
how many white viewers recoiled from Sarah's verbal assault
on a *black man* as the incarnation of value-free and death-
bound masculinist-corporate technorationality, and on what
level of consciousness they did so, and to what effect: how,
detached from its unlikely target, is her didactic
essentialist feminism taken in? I have no idea, and would
not presume to guess. At any rate, though, following this
bizarre moment, the film's treatment of Dyson runs once
again in familiar ways, towards familiar ends: it rolls out
the Moebius-strip time-travel causality of that '80s
blockbuster _Back to the Future_ in its suggestion that
Dyson the black man doesn't really invent anything^15^
(the breakthrough he comes up with turns out to be merely an
extrapolation from those remnants of the first Terminator,
from the first _Terminator_ film, that his corporate
employer managed to scoop up); and, as in many another film
featuring a once-wayward non-white sidekick, it
rehabilitates him _Gunga-Din_ style, by including him into
the assault on the power with which he has formerly been
associated, an assault whose victory is, not accidentally,
coincident with his self-sacrifice and death.
[43] These regulative procedures by which whiteness learns
from and is defined by its Other(s) even as those Others are
re-subordinated, stigmatized, and/or punished, are not to be
found in _Blue Velvet_, however--or not quite. There
another, culturally hipper version of the game of reference
and relegation is going on, in which, to put it briefly,
racial difference is placed within quotation-marks, and,
thus textualized, is both evoked and winked away. So the
blackness of the store clerks sits next to the blindness of
the one clerk and to the pseudo-magical trick they both like
to play, as just so much more semic doodling along the
margins of this endlessly decentered text in which each
element of the normal and conventional is estranged, while
each strangeness or Otherness is subjected to a metonymic
slippage that renders it both equivalent to every *other*
otherness and empty in itself: blackness=blindness=stupid
trick. In the universe constructed by Lynch's postmodern
aesthetics, there is no need either to make liberal gestures
towards the inclusion of the racial Other, or to discipline
and punish that Otherness when it appears. Rather, as the
whiff of Amos 'n Andy we can smell around the figures of our
two clerks in _Blue Velvet_ suggests, and the overtly racist
stereotypes (blacks and creoles as figures for a demonically
sexualized and violent underworld) in Lynch's more recent
film _Wild at Heart_ make abundantly clear, even the most
offensive tropes may be called back for a culturally upscale
and predominantly white audience to enjoy under the new PoMo
dispensation that such hoary ideologemes are really only to
be delected like everything else in the film, including the
tropes of Back Home themselves, as simply so many
hyperrealized/evacuated bits of virtually free-floating
text.^16^
[44] Our examination of both our films' means of
(re)producing the locations and distinctive pleasures of
whiteness and their regressive deployments of the new ruins
of Fordist industrial space thus bring us back to the
central vortex or stuck place by which we may know
contemporary "family %noir%" when we find it: in the
apparent dissolution of the rigid identity/Otherness
categories of the Symbolic in general, and those of the
sex/gender system in particular, into a semic flow or play
of boundaries from which, paradoxically, those same
categories re-emerge with renewed half-life; and in the
astonishingly mobile and contradictory circuitry of desire
and anxiety, pleasure and fear, that this process both
releases and recontains. _Terminator 2_, as we have seen,
plays around with border crossings between male and female,
human and machine, the Fordist past and the post-Fordist
present, and, for that matter, bio-social predestination
("It's in your nature to destroy yourselves") versus
existential possibility ("No fate but what we make"), only
to redraw the lines of the old nuclear family system as
precisely the last best line of defense against the fluid
yet inexorably programmed assaults of the terribly New. Yet
this restoration is itself a tenuous and contradictory one,
given its figuration through the asexual (or should it be
"safe-sexual"?) coalition of a cyborg Dad and a warrior-
woman Mom, half-assisted and half-constructed through the
educative and team-building efforts of a child who is thus
both effectively as well as literally Father to himself
(Pfeil 227 and ff.). And _Blue Velvet_ pulls off what is
finally the same denaturalizing/restoring act on a more
formal level, by presenting us with a pre-eminently oedipal
narrative whose recuperations of patriarchal order are
riddled with artifice and suspicion, and eroded by a mode of
skewed hyper-observation that simultaneously fills and
estranges, exceeds and evacuates the conventional terms in
which such narratives used to be couched.
[45] Within contemporary political culture, we know what to
call this meltdown and restoration of the categories by
which women and non-whites are put back in their place (even
_Blue Velvet_'s Dorothy, like _T2_'s Sarah, is firmly,
albeit hyperbolically, placed back in the mother role in
that film's closing shots) and white men in theirs, at the
same time as the devices of the political rhetoric that does
so are brazenly bared, and the very notion of location is
smirked away. Its name is Reaganism (or Bushitis now, if
you like). And certainly, brushed with the grain as it
were, the process by which _Blue Velvet_'s Jeffrey gets to
answer girlfriend Sandy's doubt as to whether he's "a
detective or a pervert" by being both, and a good kid
besides, is the same as that by which the old actor got to
be simultaneously the world's leading authority figure and
its largest, most spectacularized airhead. Likewise, our
intense enjoyment in _Terminator 2_ of the spectacular
semiotic mutability of our protean villain--practically Mr.
Gynesis in himself--together with the stabilizing
satisfactions provided by the return of the classically
distinct, embodied (if no less synthetically produced)
masculinity of our Arnold as Good Old Dependable
Dad,^17^ rhymes with the joys of the swings themselves
over the past four years, from Willie Horton to "Pineapple
Head" Noriega to, in Bush's delivery, "Sodom" Hussein,
together with the pleasures available in the manifestly
constructed image of Bush as, like the T-800, another
kinder, gentler, ass-kicking guy.
[46] Within cultural theory, too, as well as practice,
feminist critics such as Suzanne Moore and Tania Modleski
have been swift to notice and condemn this same process by
which %gynesis%, the dissolution of the forms and categories
of the patriarchal-oedipal-bourgeois Symbolic, can be taken
over by white male theorists and cultural producers, the
aptly-named "pimps of postmodernism," to co-opt the
pleasures of release and reconstruct new and more mobile
means of domination. Yet without disagreeing in any way
with these critiques, it remains for us to step beyond or
outside them, in accordance with the old Benjaminian dictum
that it is preeminently the task of the historical
materialist to "brush History"--even, and perhaps
especially, that History which is our own present moment--
"*against* the grain" as well (257). In other words, we
must attempt to read the particular complex of social-
psychological needs and desires that gets ventilated and
redirected in these films not only as raw material for a new
social contract with the same old Powers That Be, but as a
set of contradictory energies which, under the sign of
utopia, might be shaped and channeled in progressive
directions as well.
[47] It may be, then, that the way to respond to the
irresolute resolutions and rebellious conservatism of our
films without reproducing their equivalents in theory is to
recognize the truth and legitimacy of the needs and desires
that underlie the dynamics of the films' operations while
refusing their opposed yet commingled terms. Such a utopian
reading would then pass through the recognition that even
these admittedly corrupt and pernicious cultural productions
have to both rest on and run off a widely-held consensus
that the old nuclear, oedipal, male-dominant, breadwinner-
ethic-based family is neither a natural nor a desirable set-
up, and an equally widely-held and equally justifiable
anxiety as to the brutal chaos that ensues when the rules of
that old system are tattered or in abeyance without any
other emerging to take its place: to pass through that
recognition and then to take the combination of desire and
anxiety it has found *as a resource* for a progressive
politics, a need for a better sex/gender system that for its
fulfillment must be turned into a set of socially
transformative demands.
[48] In 1983, as the conclusion of her survey of white male
revolts against what she dubbed the "breadwinner ethic" and
the oedipal-nuclear families it produced, Barbara Ehrenreich
proposed that "male [white male, that is] culture seems to
have abandoned the breadwinner role without overcoming the
sexist attitudes that role has perpetuated" (182). But she
went on to suggest that the only way to begin to move beyond
this impasse is to struggle for an expanded, democratized,
feminist expansion of the welfare state in which women and
men alike earn a "family wage," and in which women are also
provided with the "variety of social supports" they must
have "before they are able to enter the labor market on an
equal footing with men or when they are unable to do so"--
including, and especially, "reliable, high-quality child
care" (176-77). Her argument is not that such goals, when
achieved, would automatically bring an end to the deflection
of male revolts against patriarchy into new forms of sexist
oppression, or issue in a feminist utopia; it is simply that
without such gains, little new ground for the construction
of less oppressive gender roles and relations was--and is--
at all likely to open up.
[49] In 1991, of course, after eight more years of
repression, rollback and decay, such a program may seem,
like Alec Nove's model of a "feasible socialism," all the
more a combination of the hopelessly insufficient and the
wildly utopian. Yet such a hybrid failing, if failing it
be, nonetheless seems to me practically unique, and uniquely
exemplary, within recent American cultural theory, in its
insistence on a given set of programmatic political goals to
organize and struggle for; just as that insistence in turn
seems infinitely more adequate to the need in the present
moment to recover the terrain of political agency and
possibility than any rehash of the essentialist vs. post-
structuralist debate. The same proposals, and others
instead or as well, might be generated out of another, more
fully utopian reading of the films we have looked at, and of
family %noir% in general: generated, that is, as so many
specific instances of a sense of "canceled yet preserved" we
must renew and nourish now within and across our various
movements and without any false sense of guarantees. But
the main point here is nonetheless that for all the
bleakness of the present moment, and indeed precisely
because of it, we must nonetheless learn or relearn to
propose *something* more real and more properly political as
the outcome of our analyses than the indulgent rages and
self-strokings of Identity and/or the %jouissance% of
post-structuralist free-fall. The only alternative to such
a "canceled-yet-preserved" renewal of politics itself is the
dubious enjoyment of being permanently stuck, like _Blue
Velvet_'s Jeffrey, "in the middle of a mystery" whose
pleasures most of the people we speak for and with can only
afford to take in every now and then, when thanks to the
magic of motion pictures and political campaigns aimed
variously both high and low, at the hip and the masses, the
catastrophe "That it goes on like this" is at no small
expense made into a little fun.
------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
A somewhat expanded version of this essay will be published
in _The Dark Side of the Street_, edited by Joan Copjec and
Mike Davis (New York and London: Verso, forthcoming).
Thanks to Ann Augustine, Gray Cassiday, Michael Sprinker,
and Ted Swedenburg for their suggestions, assistance and
support, and to the editors of _Postmodern Culture_ for
their smart editing; and special thanks to the Center for
the Humanities at Oregon State University for the
fellowship that enabled me finally to get this piece done.
^1^ Gledhill's argument for the subversiveness of the
%films noir% of the forties and fifties may be found in
"_Klute_ I: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist
Criticism," in Kaplan's _Women in Film Noir_, 6-21.
^2^ Here I feel bound to note that my argument
regarding these "neo-%noirs%" converges on that of Fredric
Jameson's concerning what he calls "nostalgia" films of the
'70s and '80s, but with a difference: I am less concerned to
relate their hollowed-out aesthetic of "pastiche" to any
larger and more global "cultural logic of Late Capital" than
to place that aesthetic within the particular commercial and
institutional context in which it makes its initial sense.
Cf. Jameson, _Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism_, 19-20 and 279-96.
^3^ See Gitlin's account of the rise and fall of _Hill
Street Blues_, and his argument that the "recombinant
aesthetics" of television production are the quintessence of
late capitalist cultural production, in _Inside Prime Time_,
273-324 and 76-80 respectively.
^4^ "A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in
Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and David Lynch," in Spillers,
ed., _Comparative American Identities_, 142. This is the
place, moreover, to declare the general debt my reading of
_Blue Velvet_ owes to Moon's insistent exploration of the
film's sexual-discursive "underside."
^5^ "Take something comforting, familiar, essentially
American," she writes, "and turn up the controls, the visual
volume. It's overheated technicolor . . . [e]very detail is
picture-perfect and it reeks of danger and failure." Quoted
from the anthology of responses compiled in _Parkett_ 28
(1991), "(Why) Is David Lynch Important?", 154.
^6^ Mannoni's widely-cited formula first appears in his
_Clefs pour l'Imaginaire, ou L'Autre Scene_ (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1969). For another recent consideration of
relationship of the circuitry of disavowal and enjoyment it
describes to postmodernist culture, see Jim Collins,
_Uncommon Cultures: popular culture and postmodernism_ (New
York: Routledge, 1989), 110 ff..
^7^ The full sentence from which this quoted material
comes is worth quoting in full for the linkage Moon makes,
and claims the film makes, between the film's
sadomasochistic homoerotics and the mobile discursivity of
the desires it displays:
When Lynch has Frank mouth the words of the song a
second time [Ben having done so, to Frank's anguished
pleasure, back at the whorehouse a short time before],
this time directly to a Jeffrey whom he has ritually
prepared for a beating by 'kissing' lipstick onto his
mouth and wiping it off with a piece of blue velvet, it
is as though Lynch is both daring the viewer to
recognize the two men's desire for each other that the
newly discovered sadomasochistic bond induces them to
feel *and* at the same time to recognize the perhaps
more fearful knowledge that what most of us consider
our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that
our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audio- and
videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances
of them lip-synchings of these circulating, endlessly
reproduced and reproducible desires. (146)
^8^ Buttoning or quilting points: borrowed here from
Lacan through Zizek, who lifts the concept far enough out of
the bottomless and hopelessly occluded waters of Lacan's
narcissistic language-game to allow me to transliterate and
socialize it that much more towards a strictly ideological
sense. See especially Zizek's alternately insightful and
hilariously obscurantist essay "'Che vuoi?'," in _The
Sublime Object of Ideology_, 87-129.
^9^ Not to mention %noir%ish melodramas of the same
moment: see Mary Ann Doane's illuminating discussion of
these issues in _The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of
the 1940s_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
^10^ See the opening pages of his fine discussion of
"classical" film genres in _The World in a Frame_, 104-24.
^11^ The hysterical panic provoked in (some) male
quarters by the appearance of Linda Hamilton's ninja warrior
in _T2_ and Sarandon and Davis's incarnation as vengeful
%bandidas% in _Thelma and Louise_ in the same summer of 1991
is a topic worthy of investigation in itself. For a sample,
see Joe Urschel's _USA Today_ editorial, "Real men forced
into the woods," July 26-28, 1991, which argues, as far as I
can tell, half-seriously, that the powerful women and male-
bashing plots of movies the two aforementioned movies leave
men no choice but to join Robert Bly's mythopoetic "men's
movement" and return to nature! I am grateful to my friend
Gray Cassiday for bringing this phenomenon to my attention.
^12^ Here the comparative term might be Jennifer
O'Neal's fatal paralysis at the sight of her cloned self at
the climax of _The Stepford Wives_ (1975).
^13^ Quoted, from the notes for the uncompleted
_Passagen-Werk_, in Susan Buck-Morss, _The Dialectics of
Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project_ (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 1989), 375.
^14^ See the concluding section of "From Pillar to
Postmodern: Race, Class and Gender in the Male Rampage
Film," in _Socialist Review_ and in _White Guys: Studies in
Postmodern Power, Choice, and Change_ (forthcoming from
Verso, 1993).
^15^ See "Plot and Patriarchy in the Age of Reagan:
Reading _Back to the Future_ and _Brazil_," in my _Another
Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture_
(Verso, 1990), especially 235-36.
^16^ For a prescient early warning of this phenomenon,
first spotted in the high-cult realm of the visual arts, see
Lucy Lippard, "Rejecting Retrochic," in _Get the Message? A
Decade of Art for Social Change_ (New York: E. Dutton,
1984), 173-78; and for a recent assessment of its presence
and effects in contemporary American popular culture, see
Suzanna Danuta Walters, "Premature Postmortems:
'Postfeminism' and Popular Culture," in _New Politics_, 3.2
(Winter 1991).
^17^ The distinction between the "classical" and the
"grotesque" body is drawn from Bakhtin and elaborated
brilliantly by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in _The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression_. What seems worth
noting here now, however, about the figure of "our Arnold"
and perhaps about other contemporary ideal-images of
contemporary white straight masculinity, is the degree to
which the "classical" and "grotesque" seem to be mutually
contained and containing within such figures, in a way that
seems connected to the broader thematic and political
argument I am making here.
------------------------------------------------------------
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