Fred Pfeil
Center for the Humanities
Oregon State University
<centerfh@ccmail.orst.edu>
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)?
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?
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.
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.
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 noirs first defined themselves by violating.
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.
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
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
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.
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:
- Tilt down from perfectly blue sky to red roses in medium close-up against white fence. DISSOLVE to
- Long shot: fire truck passing by slowly on tree- shaded small-town street, with fireman on it waving in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
- Yellow tulips against white fence, close-up as at the end of shot 1. DISSOLVE to
- Long shot, small-town residential street: traffic guard beckoning for schoolchildren to cross, again in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
- Long shot: white Cape Cod house and yard. CUT to
- Medium shot: Middle-aged man with hose, watering yard. CUT to
- 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 noirish music. CUT to
- Close-up of hand holding gun on TV screen. CUT to
- 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….
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.
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 noirish 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
Take T2‘s narrational strategy, to choose one of the film’s several noirish 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.
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 noirish 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 noirish 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.
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.
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 general10; and what consequences follow from Terminator 2‘s particular channelings of that desire?
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.
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 noirish 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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 Benjamin13
I’m in the middle of a mystery
–Jeffrey in Blue Velvet
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 anything15 (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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 noirish 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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