I do not doubt Contant’s review of Terminator Salvation. The film is most certainly an artistic mess. But I also believe its horribleness can primarily be attributed to the fact that the form of paranoia the movie exploits is dead to us, the people of today.
Soon after the 21st century started (the eventful year of 1989), fear of robots and machines went into decline and a new paranoia that had its roots in the mid 70s, when the public first panicked about recombinant DNA, ascended. Not machina but bios made us more and more anxious. In a sense, Terminator 2, directed by the greatest American Marxist filmmaker of the 80s, James Cameron (my leftist political views owe a bigger debt to Aliens than the Communist Manifesto), expressed this cultural shift. The machine (Arnold) turned out not to be the enemy but the protector of humans. And the real threat, the clear and persistent danger, turned out to be T-1000, the product of a biotech firm rather than a Fordist factory.
We are no longer scared of machines. Indeed, Bjork ensouled them at the end of the first decade of the 21 century.
We not only desire our machines, we are learning to love them. An example of this deepening love can be taken right out of the real world:
Thousands of robots now fight with humans on modern battlefields that resemble scenes from science fiction movies such as “Terminator Salvation.” But the real world poses a more complex situation than humans versus robots, and has added new twists to the psychology of war.
“One of the psychologically interesting things is that these systems aren’t designed to promote intimacy, and yet we’re seeing these bonds being built with them,” said Peter Singer, a leading defense analyst at the Brookings Institution and author of “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century” (Penguin Press HC, 2009).
Singer highlights many accounts of human soldiers feeling strong affection for their robots – especially on the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) teams where Packbots and Talon robots undertake the risk of disabling improvised explosives planted by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One EOD soldier brought in a robot for repairs with tears in his eyes and asked the repair shop if it could put “Scooby-Doo” back together.
Unlike the movie Terminator Salvation, that crying solider is a product of this machine-loving century.
(Thanks, Brian, for the tip.)
That’s exactly how the robots WANT us to feel! When we’re all in love with them, that’s when they’ll strike!
I mostly enjoy the use of the term “21th”. I prefer it to 21st…
We should fear them because they may want to eat us soon.
Oh, and there’s this.
Hmmm. Robot paranoia has fallen out of the cultural imaginary? I guess that explains why no one watched B.S.G. Oh wait…
Every time I’m reading a Slog post and it starts to make no sense, I have to ask myself, “Did Charles write this?” Inevitably, the answer is yes.
Charles, you make no sense to me. None. Ever.
Spot on Charles – Bio is much more likely to kill us all, and we’ll be chatting up our android buddies, sharing human-cyborg compatable synthetic fuels, soon enough.
But the real threat turned out to be biological. And talk about desiring/loving our machines.
Aliens was my favorite film as a child. I’m realizing right now that Aliens is the root of all of my assumptions about corporate oligarchy.
Of course The Company betrays its workers by letting the Aliens loose in the colony. That’s what corporations do. They pursue the bottom line regardless of human cost. I didn’t even notice when I watched it.
All this time I thought James Cameron was just about explosions and submersibles. Thanks Charles
Everyone loves Roombas.
“Different from human may not mean less. But it certainly does not mean more.”–Guillermo del Toro, Almost Colossus
I think that hammers in the point that robots are only products of their environment, just like humans. No robot will kill humans without being specifically programmed too, no robots will feel or think unless we tell them to, this fear of robots is completely irrational.
Case in point, take a laptop and smash it to little bits in font of 50 laptops, see if they give a shit.
I agree that this is an interesting shift, and someone already mentioned BSG, but I think the differences between the original series and the reimagining kind of confirms Charles’s point here. The old metal limbs-and-gyroscopes robots have been replaced by a new kind of monster which is much less easy to distinguish from the human being.
That said, I would argue that these are all just versions of the same fear of the automaton that has been around since early days of industrialization. After all, this fear (going back to Hoffmann and Mary Shelley’s stories) has always been about a man-made approximation/imitation of the human being. It stands to reason that this looks different as technology changes, but the same basic fear is consistent: we create something with many but not all of the properties of a human being, and it uses our most powerful qualities (reason, tools, what have you) to persecute us.
In a sense, you can even fit the fears of aliens and soviet communists into the same pattern: something that matches our capacity for destruction and violence, but has no sympathy for us nor regard for our way of life.
It’s a powerful narrative, and one that is based upon both a very realistic fear as well as very real sense of guilt: the capacity of the robotic enemy to do us harm is the mirror of our own capacity to harm others.