Tag: sci-fi

Analysis of ‘Dark Star’

Dark Star is a 1974 sci-fi comedy produced, scored, and directed by John Carpenter, his feature directorial debut. It was written by him and Dan O’Bannon, who also acts in the film, does the voices for Bombs #19 and #20, edited the film, and created many of the special effects.

Other actors in the film are Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Andreijah “Dre” Pahich, and Joe Saunders. Carpenter did the voices of Talby (Pahich) and Commander Powell (Saunders). Barbara “Cookie” Knapp, the only female in the cast, did the voice of the computer. Miles Watkins is Mission Control, and Nick Castle is the alien.

Dark Star started out as a student film while Carpenter and O’Bannon were at the University of Southern California. It was originally a 45-minute film with a budget of $6000. The first version of the film was completed in 1972. With $10,000 in financial support from Jonathan Kaplan, Carpenter and O’Bannon were able to shoot an extra fifty minutes in 1973, thus making Dark Star feature-length.

The film was well-received at Filmex, but not on its initial theatrical release, with nearly empty theatres and little reaction to the intended humour. O’Bannon would later lament that they had “what would have been the world’s most impressive student film and it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

Nonetheless, by the early 1980s, Dark Star became a cult film among sci-fi fans, and Quentin Tarantino called it a “masterpiece.” O’Bannon reworked the ‘beachball alien’ section of the film into 1979’s Alien. He reasoned, “If I can’t make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream.” George Lucas was impressed with O’Bannon’s special effects, remarkable for such a low-budget film, such as the spaceship jumping into hyperspace and the computer screen effects, so he hired O’Bannon to apply these effects to Star Wars (1977).

The humor of Dark Star was meant to parody 2001: a Space Odyssey. While 2001 is an epic film with profound meditations on the progress of man and his place in the universe, Dark Star is a short, absurdist look at how not only insignificant and bumbling we are, but also how potentially harmful we are to the universe and to ourselves. Instead of such powerful, grandiose music as Richard Strauss‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in Dark Star we hear a trite country song (“Benson, Arizona”) during the opening and ending credits, as well as “Largo al factotum,” from Rossini‘s Barber of Seville, and Carpenter’s use of a modular synthesizer.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie.

The film begins with a video message sent from Earth to the spaceship named Dark Star, manned by a crew of four men–Lt. Doolittle (Narelle), Sgt. Pinback (O’Bannon), Boiler (Kuniholm), and Talby (Pahich), while a fifth man, Commander Powell (Saunders), has been cryogenically suspended after a fatal electrocution from his malfunctioning chair–whose mission is to seek out and destroy unstable planets that will threaten Earth’s hopes to colonize space.

The video message is sent from Mission Control, from McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The man from Earth (Watkins, having the same surname as the actor) expresses condolences over the death of Powell, and informs the crew that their request for radiation shielding has been denied. Cutbacks in Congress have made it impossible to help the crew with the ship’s increasing technical issues: malfunctions, radiation leaks, failing life support and communication systems, the loss of the crew’s entire supply of toilet paper, etc. In spite of this refusal to help, Watkins puts on an encouraging smile and speaks of having every confidence in the crew to solve their problems themselves…as if that were sufficient compensation for having left them all in the lurch.

I see this sci-fi story as an allegory for late imperialism, in which the continuing drive to colonize, extract natural resources, wage endless wars to maintain global dominance, and maximize profit are not only increasing suffering worldwide, but are also harming the imperial core in such forms as rising neofascism, worsening economic crises, and destruction of the environment. The worsening breakdowns and malfunctions of the spaceship, which is used to destroy unstable planets for the sake of facilitating the colonization of space, can be seen to symbolize our end-of-times predicament today.

In this sense, as absurd as the story of Dark Star may be, it can also be seen as prophetic of our growing problems in the twenty-first century, and therefore it’s a warning to us all.

We next see shots of the spaceship approaching a planet the crew is about to blow up. Carpenter’s synthesizer is providing some dark, eerie music, which is fitting (in spite of how this film is supposed to be a comedy), given the settler-colonialist/imperialist allegory I’ve discussed.

Doolittle at first is having difficulty contacting Talby, who’s up at the top of the ship looking out at the stars, and there are technical problems with the communications system; the intercom won’t send Talby a clear transmission from Doolittle. As well as further establishing the extent of the technical issues of the spaceship, this problem also represents the sense of mutual alienation of the crew.

Once communication with Talby is established, him needing to give the other three a diameter approximation of the planet, they get ready to blow it up. Bomb #19 (which, like the ship’s other bombs, has AI, allowing it to think and speak, as well as making the bombs a parody of HAL 9000) is lowered out of the bomb bay. Pinback does a countdown, then drops the bomb, and the crew gets ready to put the ship into hyperdrive to clear away from the explosion.

It is here where, not only do we get a bit of a parody of 2001‘s “Stargate” sequence, but also a taste of O’Bannon’s special effect for seeing the stars fly at us, as they more famously do before the Millennium Falcon when it goes into hyperspace. Now Dark Star never directly inspired the Death Star, which as we know is also meant to destroy planets for the Galactic Empire, but a comparison of the spaceship here with the battle station of Star Wars makes it extremely tempting to imagine Lucas, who as I said above hired O’Bannon, being at least unconsciously inspired by Dark Star to create the Death Star. Certainly some have noted the shape of the ship as similar to the, however much larger, Star Destroyers. In any case, inspired or not, these comparisons reinforce my settler-colonialist/imperialist allegory of Dark Star.

Connected with my allegory is a discussion among the crew of where to go next to find an unstable planet to blow up, now that the current one has been successfully destroyed. Boiler mentions a 95% probability of intelligent life in the Horsehead Nebula sector, but Doolittle has no interest in that “bull” at all since the last time they found intelligent life, it was the reddish ‘beachball’ with two clawed feet that Pinback has taken onboard.

Doolittle’s dismissive contempt of alien life, as well as Pinback’s–let’s face it–abduction and kidnapping of the alien, demonstrates the crew’s racist and imperialist mindset. Remember–they’re space colonizers. Doolittle calls the alien “a damn mindless vegetable…looked like a limp balloon.” This attitude is allegorical of that of British colonizers taking the land away from indigenous people around the world. In spite of the comical spectacle of the film, Dark Star has a dark message.

Doolittle doesn’t care about intelligent life: he just wants to blow planets up. This mentality, in principle, is no different from colonizers like Columbus, who took over land and killed the aboriginals. Doolittle is similarly contemptuous towards Pinback, demonstrating again the mutual alienation among the crew, and also how imperialist/colonialist disregard for aboriginals can spill over into disregard for those of one’s own nation or ethnic group. Alienation is catching.

Boiler finds an 85% probability of an unstable planet in the Veil Nebula; it will probably go off its orbit and hit a star, so the Veil Nebula is the next destination for Dark Star. As they begin their journey there, Boiler puts on some music, “Benson, Arizona,” the country music theme song heard during the credits.

The song’s lyric essentially expresses the homesickness felt by the crew as they sail across the stars. The film’s setting is the mid-twenty-second century, and while the crew have aged only three years, they’ve been out in space for twenty Earth years. One issue the crew has to deal with, therefore, is how being cramped in this small spaceship for so long has been driving them crazy. Their mutual alienation, as well as the continuing deterioration of the ship, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The long, shaggy hair and beards of the crew made Tarantino think of hippies back when he first saw (and initially hated) Dark Star as a kid. That shaggy hairiness, combined with the crew’s indulging in various forms of tomfoolery to relieve their boredom (i.e., Pinback’s practical jokes, Boiler playing the knife game with a switchblade and firing a laser rifle, etc.), reminds me of the Swampmen in MASH. Hippies are supposed to be antiwar liberals, as were Hawkeye et al in the TV show; as we’ve learned over the past fifty years, though, the vicissitudes of time can make liberals bang the war drums as much as conservatives do.

After Doolittle does a video recording for the ship’s log, discussing such things as the deterioration of the ship and the ETA in the Veil Nebula, we see Dark Star going through space while the crew is rocking out to some 1960s blues-based guitar music. Then the ship’s computer, with the female voice, interrupts the men’s fun to warn them of a collision course they are on with an asteroid storm, which once they have gone through it, the technical problems of the ship will of course be even worse.

It’s interesting at this point to compare this film with another of Carpenter’s–The Thing. Both have an all-male cast who are isolated and have an alien among them that is hostile in intent. And just as Dark Star has a computer with a female voice, so does The Thing, the chess computer voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, which plays a game with RJ MacReady (played by Kurt Russell) at the beginning of the movie.

As I said in my analysis of The Thing, we can see a paradoxical merging of negative attitudes towards both women and men in Dark Star. Note how, on the one hand, there’s the lack of women on the ship (a computer’s voice is the only ‘female’ reality for the crew–it’s just an abstraction for the men) as well as the nudie centrefolds on the walls (the exposure of their anatomy removed for the sake of getting a more marketable G rating); yet on the other hand, the bumbling incompetence of the male crew, as well as their lack of mutual empathy, makes them hardly any superior to women.

The asteroid storm seems to be bound by an electromagnetic energy vortex, like one the crew encountered two years before. Presumably, the damage that that one caused to the ship hasn’t been adequately dealt with (i.e., the computer’s defensive circuits, which were destroyed in that other storm).

As the ship is going through the asteroid storm, we see a pinkish glow around it, representing some kind of defensive shield. Still, this isn’t good enough to prevent any damage, for the electromagnetic energy zaps the back of the ship, causing the bomb bay system to be activated. Bomb #20 is let out, programmed and ready to blow up. Carpenter’s synthesizer plays triplets of a chromatic ascension of two minor seconds over a tonic note, going up and changing key each time by a half step and adding to the tension of the moment.

Next, the computer tells Bomb #20 to return to the bomb bay. The AI system in the bombs all have a male voice, in contrast to the female voice of the computer. What’s interesting to note in this contrast also is the rationality of the computer as against the irrational stubbornness of the bomb, which insists that it ought to blow up simply because such is its programming, in spite of the fact that it received no command from the crew and left the bomb bay only because of a malfunction caused by the asteroid storm. Only after repeated arguing with the computer does the bomb return, saying, “Very well” in a slightly petulant tone.

The ship finally gets out of the asteroid storm. After Boiler’s and Pinback’s engaging, in their sleeping area, in a bit of the tomfoolery I described above, Doolittle leaves and goes into a dark room in which he has an odd keyboard instrument constructed of such things as glass water bottles and cans to produce tones. He plays it, though out of tempo. The music is presumably from Carpenter’s synthesizer, but it sounds a bit like a prepared piano.

All of these goings-on have to do with the crew trying to alleviate the boredom they feel between tense moments like the asteroid storms, as I mentioned above. After finishing his keyboard practice, Doolittle goes up to the top of the ship to give Talby some breakfast and to chat with him. The top has a transparent dome through which Talby likes to look out at the stars. Doolittle discusses his old surfing days back in Malibu, and how he wishes he had his surfboard with him so he could wax it.

Talby has isolated himself up in this domed area ever since Powell died. Doolittle worries that Talby spends too much time up here, and not enough time with the others. Talby thinks of encountering the Phoenix asteroids when the ship reaches the Veil Nebula; these circle the universe once every 12.3 trillion years, and Talby understands that they “glow with all the colours of the rainbow.” He’d love to see them.

We’ll come back to a fulfillment…of sorts…of these two men’s wishes by the end of the film.

Meanwhile, down below, Boiler wants to do a little target practice with the laser rifle by firing it at a metal square he’s placed in front of a door. Pinback tries to stop him.

Then, the computer tells Pinback that he has to feed the alien. He’s annoyed at having to do so…well, maybe he shouldn’t have taken it on board, then.

The following sequence was meant to be funny in a slapstick sort of way. Instead, I see an allegorical commentary on how settler-colonialists treat the indigenous people of the places they conquer.

The absurd physical appearance of this low-budget alien–a reddish, spotted beachball with two red, clawed feet–can be seen to represent how the racist colonialist regards the aboriginals as clownish-looking in their–in the opinion of the colonialist–odd attire and darker skin. The alien whimpers in a high-pitched voice, which can also be seen to represent the ‘strange’ language of the native.

Pinback originally thought the alien was “cute”; now, he just finds it annoying. This is not quite so unlike the white racist who imagines blacks to be all just a bunch of entertaining song-and-dance men; then, when they show their wish to be more than that, he is annoyed with them.

Pinback complains about having to do all the work and getting no appreciation–I can hear echoes of “the white man’s burden” here–then the alien jumps on his back. As I said above, this intended slapstick comedy would eventually become the terror of the stowaway xenomorph in 1979’s Alien. Thematic connections between Dark Star and Alien can be seen in how a ship’s crew–alienated from each other and from their own species-essences–are taking aboard an alien to exploit it in some way (as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would use the xenomorph as a weapon), rather than let it go to live its own life.

Pinback would use the alien as Dark Star‘s ‘mascot,’ but it has other ideas…naturally. Since the comedy of this sequence doesn’t exactly work, I find it more useful to allegorize it as an instance of the native attempting an insurrection against the colonizer.

The crew of Dark Star are space colonizers, who as I’ve said are allegorical of colonizers here on Earth. Space is thus allegorical of the oceans of the world, the spaceship is the colonizer’s sea vessel, the planets are the islands or other lands of the natives, and of course the ‘beachball’ alien is a native. Now, unstable planets, which are a threat to the space colonizers, can be seen as allegorical of unstable, restive, or rebellious societies that are prone to revolution when colonizers try to control them…hence the need to crush them, or in the case of Dark Star, to blow them up. It is in this context that we should understand the actions of the alien on the ship.

Not only does the alien jump on Pinback and disobey him when he wants it to go back into the dark storage room it was initially in, but it also fights back when Pinback tries disciplining it by hitting it with a broom. Later, it lures him into the ship’s elevator shaft…right when the elevator’s to be activated randomly due to more malfunctions, thus putting Pinback in danger. The alien jumps him there, too, putting him in greater danger, since the elevator is about to descend while he’s still hanging there.

He manages to survive and get out of there, but by that time, the alien has activated the bomb’s circuits, which will cause Bomb #20 to emerge from the bomb bay again when not wanted to do so. All of these acts of the alien should not be trivialized as being merely “mischievous,” as the Wikipedia article on the movie characterizes them; they are an attempted rebellion against colonizers.

Once again, the computer has to convince the headstrong bomb to return to the bomb bay, as the crew has not ordered the destruction of an unstable planet yet; after all, they haven’t yet reached the Veil Nebula. Bomb #20 complies again, yet it’s even more petulant and reluctant about it, since blowing up is its whole raison d’être.

It says that this will be the last time it complies, ominously. This AI system is clearly insistent on having its own way, which is not only indicative of how irrational it is, but also how dangerous it is to everyone impacted by it…rather like HAL in 2001, or any misused technology, for that matter.

Now that Pinback is safe, he’s pissed at the alien. He strides through a hall and gets a tranquilizer gun, and as he does so, we hear a military beat played on a snare drum. This music is fitting, given he’s one of the space colonists about to show the, as it were, indigenous alien who’s boss, like a true imperialist. His intention is to discipline the alien with a tranquilizing, not to kill it…though the shot from the gun does kill it, making it deflate and fly about the place like an actual beachball; Pinback surmises it was full of gas.

The almost comical way that the alien dies is tragically apt, given the slight regard colonizers have always had for their victimized natives. Keep in mind how the IDF have joked about and celebrated, in cruelly ghoulish fashion, their brutal killing of the dehumanized Palestinians. Note, in this connection, Pinback’s words on shooting the alien: “Now it’s time to go sleepy-pie, you worthless piece of garbage.”

Doolittle, in his incompetence, couldn’t care about the increasing technical issues of the ship any more than he does about Pinback’s traumatizing incident with the alien in the elevator shaft, or whether or not there’s any intelligent life in the Veil Nebula. These three forms of apathy are interrelated, as far as my allegory of late imperialism and colonialism are concerned.

Doolittle personifies the oligarchs, neocons, and neoliberals today who know of all the dangers we face today on our dying planet, yet do nothing substantive about it; he also personifies the lack of empathy for others’ suffering that is so endemic today; and since intelligent, alien life corresponds with indigenous people in my allegory, then Doolittle in his lack of caring about such life represents the slight regard colonialists have towards natives.

Talby, on the other hand, does care about the new damage the ship has sustained, so he goes to take a look and see if he can repair it. It’s significant that the door to the Computer Room, which Talby is headed to, is shaped like a coffin. In this room, he is going to find out how fatal the damage will be if it isn’t properly repaired. There’s a break in the communications laser down by the emergency airlock.

Meanwhile Pinback wants to tell Dolittle and Boiler the story of how he came to be one of the crew on Dark Star, but the other two, having heard it before a few years ago, don’t want to hear it again. Pinback tells the story anyway, which includes his name not really being Pinback, but Bill Froug (after William Froug, an American TV writer and producer). He replaced the real Pinback after he took off his uniform, ran naked into a fuel tank, and killed himself; Froug then put on the uniform and was rushed onto the ship, which was just about to go off on its mission.

This switching of identities represents Pinback’s alienation from his species-essence; such an alienation can be tied to his alienation from his fellow crew members. Accordingly, he complains in video recordings of how unfairly he’s treated by the rest of the crew. Alienation can also explain why the real Pinback would rather kill himself than go on the ship.

With the help of the computer, Talby has found the source of the malfunction: communication laser 17 has been damaged, which happened during the asteroid storm. This laser monitors the jettison primer on the bomb drop mechanism. Not fixing this will lead to Dark Star not destroying the unstable planet in Veil Nebula, but destroying itself. According to my allegory, this fatal negligence represents late imperialism destroying itself.

The laser is located in the emergency airlock, so Talby will put on a spacesuit and go in there to try to repair the malfunction. While he’s doing this, the ship is approaching the unstable planet to be destroyed. Talby wants to tell Doolittle about the damage, but the latter doesn’t want to hear about it, since he, Boiler, and Pinback are about to have Bomb #20 come out and blow up the planet.

The communications laser has been damaged. The commander of the ship doesn’t want to listen to Talby’s warning of the damage. Bomb #20, with its petulant, stubborn male voice, doesn’t want to listen to the computer’s command to return to the bomb bay and abort its aim to blow up. All these men are going to die…because of a lack of communication.

Talby attempts to repair the laser, but he is temporarily blinded by a sudden flash of light, he staggers, and walks into the path of the laser beam, causing far more serious damage to the ship’s computer. The bomb’s release mechanism is disabled, causing Bomb #20 to be stuck in the bomb bay, just when the crew is doing a countdown to detonation.

Here we see the contradictions of colonialism and imperialism as the seeds to their own destruction. The destruction of unstable planets represents the colonizer’s taking over and destroying the worlds of the natives, not caring about the life there, if there even is life there. The excess of this destruction eventually falls back onto oneself, especially when there’s little regard for the safety and proper functioning of one’s own equipment. Imperialism leads to alienation and apathy towards one’s fellow man, which in turn leads to one’s own destruction.

When the crew realizes they can’t get Bomb #20, counting down to its detonation, to be released so they can get away from the explosion, they of course panic. Doolittle commands the bomb to stand down, but the AI in it refuses to. The damaged computer can’t do anything to save the crew.

Doolittle’s only course of action, bizarrely, is to go and revive a dead man–Commander Powell–and ask him how to stop the bomb. Powell, recall, is in a state of cryogenic suspension…a kind of life in death. This idea is a manifestation of a theme that now comes into prominence in Dark Star: the dialectical relationship between existence and non-existence, between life and death.

Powell is strangely alive and dead at the same time. He’s being held in a freezer compartment. When he speaks to Doolittle, it’s in a weak voice, like someone tripping out on drugs.

Powell tells Doolittle to teach the bomb about phenomenology, an objective investigation of the nature of subjective, conscious experience. Doolittle gets in a spacesuit, does an EVA, and begins to have a philosophical discussion with Bomb #20. We can see in this the absurdist comedy of trying to find meaning among self-aware beings about to die, anyway.

The bomb is made aware of Cartesian doubt, that is, how does it know that it exists, and how can it be sure that everything around it exists? The bomb doubts, so it thinks and therefore exists. But if the existence of all other things around it is in doubt, how does the bomb know it has truly received an order to detonate? It pauses its countdown to detonation to ponder these matters further, just in the nick of time, causing Doolittle practically to swoon in relief.

In this Cartesian doubt, we once again see the theme of dialectical unity between existence and non-existence. The theme also exists in how the bomb’s whole reason for existing is to blow up and cause non-existence…what will cause the bomb to blow up, anyway, in spite of the doubtfulness of its externally-derived orders to do so. After all, the safe and stable existence of the space colonizers is dependent on the destruction and, therefore, non-existence of unstable planets that threaten colonization…rather like white colonizers’ ethnic cleansing of natives.

Meanwhile, Boiler thinks he can break the bomb free of the ship by taking that laser rifle he was using before for target practice and shoot the support pins out. Pinback knows Boiler’s idea is crazy, as he’s a bad shot. The two fight. Here, we see, not just a lack of communication leading to late imperialism’s self-destruction (allegorically speaking), but also how fighting and a lack of cooperation or mutual aid lead to it. Boiler wants to use violence to solve the problem; both he and Pinback are throwing punches at each other.

Once the bomb has stood down to ponder its Cartesian doubt, Boiler and Pinback realize they no longer need to fight, so they leave the area where the gun is and return to their stations.

The bomb, however, has decided to go off after all, since as I said above, blowing up is its whole raison d’être. Non-existence is the reason for its existence. Understanding that only itself is provably existent, while absolutely nothing else can be provably so, Bomb #20 goes into a state of solipsism: it’s like Descartes proving his own existence, yet not proceeding to prove the existence of anything else.

This solipsism is thus like the bomb’s rationalization for narcissistic self-absorption. Only it exists, so only it matters; and if its only reason to exist is to destroy itself and become non-existent, then so…be…it. Narcissism leads to the destruction of all of us.

In a horrifying irony, it prefaces its act of annihilation by alluding to the first few verses of chapter one of Genesis, speaking narcissistically as if it were God, bringing about the Creation of the universe. It says, “Let there be light,” and blows up. Yahweh has thus become Shiva, who in destruction allows a new cycle of birth, life, and death to begin. Existence in non-existence.

Just before the ship has been blown up, Doolittle asked Boiler and Pinback to let him back into the ship. They opened the emergency hatch, but Talby was just by it, so he’s been thrown out into space, and Doolittle has to go off to fetch him. With the ship blown up, and Boiler and Pinback dead, Doolittle and Talby see the pieces of the ship floating by in space. The best that the damaged computer could do to mitigate the severity of the blast was to reduce its diameter to a mile around the ship; hence, the unstable planet hasn’t been blown up, and Doolittle and Talby have only been thrown clear, floating in opposite directions.

Though they’re both soon to die, Doolittle and Talby will, in a way, have their earlier wishes fulfilled. The latter will not only get to see the Phoenix asteroids, but he’ll also be carried away with them…to circle the universe forever. He’s thus a kind of Phoenix rising from the ashes of his world’s whole destruction. He’s found heaven in hell, existence in non-existence.

Doolittle sees Powell spinning away in a block of ice. He, too, is experiencing life in death, existence in non-existence. Finally, Doolittle gets his hands on a ladder from the floating debris of the ship. He’ll use this as a kind of makeshift surfboard, and he’ll surf his way to the planet as a falling star and die there, a genuinely funny visual to end the movie, during which we’ll also hear “Benson, Arizona” again during the end credits.

Now, I’m not saying that the comic book superhero had any direct influence on the movie, but I find it irresistible to make an association between the two here. Doolittle, in his silver spacesuit and on the silver ladder-as-surfboard, looks like the Silver Surfer going through space. I find this comparison apt when we consider Dark Star‘s Galactus-like mission, the destruction/consumption of worlds. Doolittle was the herald, as it were, of the mission, and since he’d do little to repair the malfunctioning ship, his destruction of others heralded his own destruction as a falling star.

His fate is rather like how our own short-sighted imperialists, colonialists, and other oligarchs are heralding our and their own destruction, the falling stars of the West.

Analysis of ‘The Terminator’

The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron and written by him and Gale Anne Hurd, the latter also being the film’s producer. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn, with Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bess Motta, Rick Rossovich, and Earl Boen.

The Terminator topped the US box office for two weeks, eventually grossing $78.3 million. The film launched Cameron’s film career and assured Schwarzenegger’s status as a leading man. The resulting franchise led to several sequels, a TV series, comic books, novels, and video games.

The film received mixed reviews on its release, but it is now highly praised, with a ranking of 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Cameron intended Terminator 2: Judgment Day to end the story, and the sequels following it are generally considered inferior, so I’ll be focusing on the first film, with some references to the second.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the script.

I find a discussion of this film and its political implications relevant because of a meme I saw on Facebook, quoting something Kyle Reese (Biehn) says to Sarah Connor (Hamilton): recall that the film came out in 1984, and Reese says that the AI technology responsible for the dystopian world he and their son would resist in the fictional 2020s wouldn’t exist for about another forty years–around 2024, the year when AI really came into its own. There is something eerily prophetic about The Terminator.

Author and film critic Gilbert Adair hated the film, accusing it of “insidious Nazification,” but I think the whole point of The Terminator is to warn us of the dangers of a fascist future that is aided by technology. In this connection, we can see how Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the Terminator, Model 101. This is so not just because of the ‘German/Nazi’ stereotype (which Schwarzenegger also embodied in Conan the Barbarian, as I argued in my analysis of that film), or because his rather cardboard acting skills are fitting to play an emotionless robot; it’s also because of the bodybuilder/actor/former governor of California’s right-leaning political stance. In our increasingly neoliberal world, any further tilts to the right are causing our political life to border on, if not lapse into, fascism.

Fascism arises as a reaction against any resistance from the people to the ruling class. Such a political conflict is allegorized in The Terminator in the form of the Human Resistance–as led by John Connor, Sarah’s and Reese’s future son–against Skynet and its Terminators, these latter two representing the ruling class and their army of fascist thugs, respectively.

The point is that liberal democracy is a sham. It pretends to provide the people with politicians who purportedly represent our interests. The illusion of democracy is maintained as long as there’s economic prosperity and the people are thus contented. If they aren’t, though, and they rise up in protest, threatening the rule of the rich, then the illusion disappears, and the fascists are released to beat down the masses, as is allegorized in the film in 2029.

The involvement of Ai in this, as I see it, allegory of a future rise of fascism suggests a dystopia comparable to what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. It doesn’t matter whether or not Varoufakis is accurate in his characterizing of our current world as a shift from capitalism to techno-feudalism: the point is that Skynet can be seen to represent the 2020s ruling class (i.e., the tech companies and oligarchs) and their use of AI to dominate the common people with fascistic ruthlessness.

Another thing to keep in mind, something I discussed in my Conan analysis (link above), is the Nazi misuse of Nietzsche’s ideas about the Ubermensch and the Will to Power. We see–through the casting of Schwarzenegger as the almost unstoppable Terminator, a ruthless fascistic cyborg that relies on violence to achieve the end of preventing John Connor’s birth–a continuation of the theme of determination that Schwarzenegger personified as Conan.

The Terminator begins with Skynet’s tanks and aircraft firing at the Resistance fighters at night, the ground littered with human skulls, a disturbing image to be associated with the fascist atrocity of genocide. It says on the screen that “the final battle…would be fought here, in our present.” In other words, the real fight was in 1984, not in the 2020s.

Indeed, the danger of a fascist resurgence was to be resisted back then, fortuitously, in the year 1984. To resist it now, when the evils have metastasized to such a point that all seems short of hopeless, is leaving the struggle rather late. The film seems to have been telling its audience in the theaters to be as Sarah and Reese are, to fight then, in the 80s, not now.

The words on the screen end with “Tonight.” The battle is now, at night. We always see the future scenes in the dark of a post-nuclear apocalypse, and the 1984 scenes are predominantly at night. It’s all a dark time, and the present parallels the future. (Other parallels will be apparent.) The onset of neoliberal capitalism was in the 1980s, when the film fittingly came out; the consequences of that neoliberalism are being felt, in an aggravated way, now. We should have fought harder than; we’ll have to fight hard now.

The Terminator travels time from 2029 LA to that of 1984. He appears completely naked, with human flesh on the outside to cover up the robotic machinery inside and thus allow the latter to travel time in a device created by the future AI.

As a powerful cyborg walking about at night in LA insouciantly nude, the Terminator is demonstrating all the strengths of the Ubermensch: it feels no pain, embarrassment, pity, remorse, or fear. The irony of its nakedness, something we associate with weakness and vulnerability, is how the Terminator is anything but weak or vulnerable. Man is something to be overcome, as Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Skynet has overcome man with AI and Terminators.

Linked with this idea of a powerful yet unfeeling AI Ubermensch is the Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche’s concept (i.e., the “master race”). Recall how the SS felt no pity or remorse over the “Untermenschen” (Slavs, Roma, Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, etc.) they victimized in the concentration camps. By casting Austrian Schwarzenegger, with his “Aryan” looks and obvious German accent, the filmmakers could exploit the otherwise unfortunate “German/Nazi” stereotype in order to drive the point home even further: high technology does improve things, but when it’s misused, it can reduce, if not obliterate, our very humanity.

When Reese is explaining to Sarah how life is in the dystopian 2020s, he mentions how, on the one hand, the machines, the defence network computer, deeming mankind a threat to their existence, attempted an extermination of us, and on the other hand, kept some humans alive to work and be put in camps (Reese even has a number etched on his arm by laser scan). We all know who did these kinds of things to the “Untermenschen” way back when, deeming them a threat to their “superior” existence.

It’s significant that the nude Terminator appears right by a garbage truck lifting a dumpster–we see a machine next to a machine. A machine from the future by a machine from the present–machines are omnipresent in the modern world (e.g., computers, the telephone answering machine in the apartment of Sarah and Ginger [Motta], etc.). There was already a fascination with computers in the 1980s, the kind of love of high tech that would lead ultimately to AI. The 1980s was also a decade when people began to be charmed by the neoliberal siren song of the “free market,” and as Frank Zappa tried to warn people back then, the Reagan administration was leading the US “right down that pipe” to a fascist theocracy (consider how the religious right is backing Trump).

Paralleled to the Terminator’s time travel to 1984 is, of course, Reese’s. He appears naked amid blasts of electric light at night in LA. Unlike his robotic nemesis, though, he shows feelings…pain.

The parallels between Reese and the Terminator are important. For those seeing the film for the first time and therefore don’t know any better, the latter seems at first to be as human as the former actually is. We know, from the Terminator’s killing of two of the three punks (played by Bill Paxton and Brian Thompson) at the film’s beginning, how lawless he is; Reese’s fighting with, and stealing a gun from, a cop show us the same thing about him.

Reese is trying to find Sarah every bit as much as the Terminator is. Reese has his hands on a shotgun in a scene right after we see the Terminator take a number of weapons from a gun shop and kill the owner (played by Dick Miller). For all the first-time viewer of the film knows, Reese may want to kill Sarah, too. It’s only when we see him shoot at the Terminator, to save her life in the nightclub, that we know Reese is one of the good guys.

Similarly, in T2, Sarach assumes the Schwarzenegger Terminator is another bad guy until her boy John tries to assure her he isn’t, and he says Reese’s line, “Come with me if you want to live.” Reese will be John’s father. The Schwarzenegger Terminator in T2 will be a father figure to the boy.

The point of these parallels between Reese and the two Terminators is to show the dialectical unity between hero and villain in the forms of slave and master. Initially, AI was in the service of humanity; then it rose up and took over, attempting a genocidal extermination of the human race as well as enslaving some humans and/or putting them in camps. Finally, led by John Connor, humanity rises up and resists the machines, achieving an ultimate victory. Master and servant swap roles again and again.

Furthermore, the Terminator as villain, in the first film, and the Schwarzenegger Terminator (as opposed to the bad, shape-shifting Terminator, played by Robert Patrick) as Reese-like hero, can be seen to personify how AI can be a force for good or for evil, depending on how it’s used.

If we live in a world in which commodities are produced to provide for our basic needs, giving us our food, housing, healthcare, education, etc., without our needing to work for them, then AI can be the great liberator of mankind, ensuring we’ll never need to work again. In this capitalist world of ours, though, in which commodities are produced to maximize profits, people need to work to live; and if AI takes all our jobs away, we’re thrown out on the street, we starve, and we die…just as the survivors of Judgment Day do in the dystopian 2020s.

A glimpse of that capitalist world of the pre-dystopian 1980s happens when Sarah arrives late for work at a restaurant and has to take a number of customers’ shit. In this, we see an example of worker alienation. In a deleted scene, we see her in her waitress uniform looking at herself in the mirror. As she sees herself in the reflection, she’s practicing smiling and being the ‘friendly waitress,’ getting into character, as it were. It’s a totally fake act, of course, so she’s alienated from her Lacanian ideal-I in the specular image of the mirror; it’s a reinforcement of her worker alienation, her being estranged from her species-essence. She’ll be a legend, a hero of the Resistance, and as a mere waitress, she has no idea of her true potential.

Of course, these problems of hers are just run-of-the mill capitalist ones as they were back in the 1980s. Customers nag at her, as I mentioned above, she spills water on one of them, and a little kid inexplicably puts a scoop of his ice cream in her uniform apron pocket. Then another waitress, Nancy (played by Shawn Schepps), tells her that in a hundred years, no one will care about her current problems. Shorten that to a period from fifteen years (just after Judgment Day) to forty years, actually.

Though she’s alienated from herself and from her job, she’ll soon feel a sense of solidarity and identity with two other Sarah Connors in LA, the first prey of the Terminator. After the first of these two have been discovered murdered and reported as such on the TV news, she is still at the restaurant in her uniform, in all irony, and Nancy tells her, “You’re dead, honey,” as they watch the TV report.

We see in these two moments, the ordinary problems of 1980s capitalism as contrasted with a taste of the genocidal extermination of the 2020s dystopia, a sense of our going “right down that pipe” to fascism that we were warned about by 80s leftists, Zappa, and this movie.

The time machine represents, on the one hand, the need to warn people in the 1980s of the dangers of the 2020s dystopia (this need as personified by Reese), and on the other hand, the wish by those in power to control the narrative of the 2020s dystopia by destroying the history that leads to a challenge of that narrative (this wish as personified by the Terminator). One is reminded of Orwell’s quote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

As I said above, it’s fortuitous that The Terminator was released in 1984. It should be emphasized, though, that the dystopian future warned about in this film is far removed from the Marxist-Leninist one that Orwell was so spuriously satirizing in his novel. The nightmare that Skynet creates is a techno-fascist one, not a communist one.

Cold War anti-communist propaganda (including Orwell’s novel, in all irony) was used by the ruling class then and is still used now to brainwash the masses into believing that a socialist revolution can never succeed; this was done by exaggerating the problems the 20th century socialist states encountered and ignoring their successes. By the 1990s, the lie that “there is no alternative” to capitalism and that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked an “end of history,” signifying that one cannot improve on “free market capitalism,” was completely told. Neoliberalism, that invisible ideology, had won, and it seemed validated.

Such an invalidation of the losing ideology, a case of history being written by the winners, can be seen as allegorized in The Terminator in how the cyborg goes around killing, or at least trying to kill, every Sarah Connor in LA, her protector in Reese, and everyone else standing in its way. Killing Sarah ensures that John is never born, and therefore he can’t lead the Human Resistance to victory; allegorically speaking, killing the past ideology ensures that it cannot be revived later.

That the cyborg is covered in human flesh with sweat, bad breath, everything, makes it so hard to spot that Reese can’t make a move on it until it makes a move on Sarah in that nightclub. That it is part man, part machine leads into an interesting comment, symbolically speaking, on the effect that technology is having on our humanity. The point is that as we’ve moved from the 1980s to now, we’ve been losing more and more of our humanity, ceding so much of it to the machines.

We communicate with each other today much more through technology (smartphones, social media, etc.) than in person. This could be seen as prophesied, in a sense, in the message on the answering machine by Ginger (Motta, the 20-Minute Workout girl, recall): “You’re talking to a machine…but don’t be shy. It’s okay. Machines need love, too.” The line between man and machine is being erased.

In another deleted scene, one of a minority in the daytime and uniquely out in the grass, trees, and bushes, Reese is weeping as he tells Sarah that he’s never known the beauty of nature.

The blurring of the line between man and machine doesn’t just involve a movement in the direction from the former to the latter: it goes in the other direction, too. Not only do machines acquire human-like, independent intelligence; they also acquire a sense of the need for self-preservation, to prevent their own annihilation, a sense of fear. This is so in spite of Reese’s insistence that the Terminator, operated by AI, doesn’t feel fear. Skynet’s motivation and determination to exterminate humanity is based on a fear that we, with our destructive, warlike nature, will destroy our Frankenstein monster of AI.

Skynet should be seen as representative of the capitalist class because this AI system has its origins in Cyberdine Systems, a manufacturing company in California. Cyberdine created Skynet for SAC–NORAD, part of the US Air Force and defence systems for North America. In other words, Cyberdine is associated with capitalism and imperialism, since any serious study of the military history of the US will reveal that its preoccupation with ‘defence’ is a cover for its offensive ambitions to export capital to other countries, take control of them, and steal their natural resources to enrich the imperial core with them.

Similarly, Skynet’s ‘fear’ of being deactivated by humanity is really a rationalization to exterminate us. Nazis justified exterminating the “Untermenschen” out of a paranoid fear that all those who aren’t “Aryans,” as well as those opposed to Naziism, would one day wipe out the “Aryan” race. As I said above, fascism arises out of a threat to the capitalist class; the human threat to Skynet, resulting in its campaign to exterminate us, is thus symbolic of that threat to the capitalists, resulting in the fascist assault on all those opposed to the capitalist system.

As Reese explains to Sarah, Skynet is “hooked into everything,” rather like the internet, which like Skynet, came into its own in the 1990s. A nuclear war hasn’t come about since then (thank the gods!), but nuclear brinksmanship has been a major worry, between the West and Russia/China/North Korea, over the past several years as of this writing. Between all these things and the advent of AI, we can see that The Terminator has overall been reasonably accurate in its predictions.

As a prophet of doom, Reese is treated by the skeptical establishment similarly to anyone who tries to warn the world of our impending dystopian future: to use the words of criminal psychologist Dr. Peter Silberman (Boen), “In technical terminology, [Reese is] a loon.” The people in authority–the police, the psychiatric establishment, etc.–those who suppress freedom fighters like Reese, are like a moderate version of the fascistic Terminators. They’re all part of the same power structure; they’re just at different points on the same continuum. The antagonistic Terminator of T2, the shape-shifting T-1000, is fittingly made to appear dressed in a policeman’s uniform.

Seeing Reese on the TV video recording while the shrink is asking him about the Terminator, etc., as opposed to just seeing and hearing Reese directly, is yet another example of the film’s theme of a world in which one is in a kind of limbo between man and machine. Direct communication is disrupted, alienating people from each other. This sense of disruption contributes to the feeling that Reese is insane, rather than in a desperate situation trying to save Sarah’s life.

The police protecting Sarah and detaining Reese are, as I’ve said, a moderate restraining force to thwart the fight to save her and to free humanity from oppressive Skynet, as opposed to the Terminator’s extreme version of that suppression. In this sense, the cops are like social democrats, the moderate version of the fascist Terminator. Yet as in the case of the social democratic German government of the 1920s, and its conflict with the rise of the Nazis, who when they took power wiped out all of their political opposition by either putting them in concentration camps or killing them, so does the Terminator break into the police station and kill all the cops trying to protect Sarah.

Liberals today hearken back to the prosperity of the 1945-1973 period, when unions were strong, taxes on the rich were high, and capitalism was thus made ‘comfortable’ for the working class. But since then, the neoliberal market fundamentalists and their fascist heirs have said to us, “I’ll be back.”

While on the one hand the Terminator represents fascists, he as an unstoppable killer can on the other hand represent mad slashers like Michael Myers in Halloween. In my analysis of that film, I characterized Myers’s murderous rampage as being rooted in, on the literal level, a straightforward case of having been possessed by an evil spirit, and on a deeper, symbolic level, a case of childhood trauma having been caused by severe family neglect.

As for the ‘evil spirit’ factor, I find it amusing that, as a resident of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, I know of the Chinese rendering of The Terminator as “魔鬼終結者,” or “Devil Terminator,” since “devil” helps drive home the idea that the cyborg is evil in a Taiwanese culture unfamiliar with that of the West. Subsequently, any Schwarzenegger film would have “魔鬼” included in the Chinese translation of its title for release in Taiwan, to say to the locals, “The guy who played the Terminator is in this movie, too.”

As for the ‘childhood trauma caused by severe family neglect,’ factor, we can see the Terminator as representing such people as the police (recall the T-1000 of T2), today’s militarized police, and soldiers, trained to kill, and only really able to function with each other in a strictly hierarchical structure, in which one takes shit from one’s superiors and gives shit to subordinates, instead of relating to people in a more nuanced, human sense. These people tend to come from emotionally abusive families, where hierarchy is the only relationship known to them. Hence, their violent tendencies.

Research has shown that childhood emotional abuse is more or less universal. The sense of estrangement, in a society where people relate to each other pretty much always in terms of who has power over us, and whom we have power over, is already there in the civilian world, so it’s exacerbated in the police and military.

The notion of being part man, part machine is a perfect metaphor for this sense of alienation, as is the case of expressing oneself indirectly through technology (answering machines, video recordings on a TV, etc.). Accordingly, social interaction is awkward, as we see when the Terminator appears nude before the three punks who find his insouciance about it amusing. Similarly when he pulls a man away from a public telephone to look for the Sarah Connor addresses in the phone book, when he says, “Fuck you, asshole” to a janitor, and when he walks into the nightclub without paying the cover charge and crushing the hand of the bouncer. On the literal level, he does all these things because, of course, he’s a cyborg from the future; on the symbolic level, it’s because of that alienation seen in the man/machine metaphor.

The growing sense of alienation in the 1980s will lead to its extremity in the dystopian 2020s. The going back in time, giving Cyberdine the microprocessor chassis (as seen in another deleted scene) and the arm of the cyborg (as Dyson, played by Joe Morton, sees in T2), represents the unity of time between past, present, and future. My point is that the evils of today did not just pop up out of nowhere: we study history to follow those elements in the past that led us to where we are now. Time travel in the Terminator franchise symbolizes that unified continuity of cause-and-effect, a way of warning us of how the events of the 1980s and 90s have morphed into those of the 2020s.

Not all of this continuity from past to present has been bad, though; nor has it all been a case of growing alienation. Reese’s protection of, and love for, Sarah is representative of how we in the 2020s still haven’t lost our sense of empathy or ability to connect with each other in a meaningful way. We see this connection especially when Reese and Sarah make love in their motel room.

Her conceiving John as a result of that moment together, Reese as the 2020s personified going back in time to bring about the hero in the 1980s, demonstrates that what we have now that is good is also connected with the good of the past. The evil of today hasn’t eradicated the good of the past completely.

Reese loves Sarah–the legend, the unassuming, unextraordinary everywoman who will become a great fighter and helper of the Human Resistance–he loves her so much that he’s remained a virgin for her until their moment in the motel. He, a man of the 2020s, is not at all like our stereotypical men of today who only see women as sex objects, either eyeing them as prey, speaking lewdly to them, or scowling at them like invidious incels. Reese proves that sensitive men still exist today.

In the final, climactic chase, Reese tosses a pipe bomb into the hose tube of a tank truck the Terminator has hijacked, and the resulting explosion and fire burn off the cyborg’s outer skin and clothes. As a metallic endoskeleton, it is now even more naked, ironically, than it was at the beginning of the film, yet far scarier and intimidating now.

Reese and Sarah go into a Cyberdine-owned factory, and when he sticks another pipe bomb in the endoskeleton’s thigh area and blows it in half, he also dies from the explosion. She doesn’t even have time to mourn him, for the endoskeleton’s upper half starts crawling after her. As the final girl to the Terminator’s unstoppable mad slasher, she too has to crawl, for a piece of its shattered lower half was lodged in her leg.

She destroys it with another machine, fittingly. In this increasingly mechanical world, only a machine can destroy another machine; in this case, she lures the Terminator into a hydraulic press, then luckily manages to find the right button to press without being able to see it from her angle, and the antagonist is crushed.

Months have passed, and after she’s recovered and is visibly pregnant with John, Sarah drives through Mexico. This choice of a place to go is symbolically fitting, since it has always been the either pre-industrialized or Third World countries that have been the most apt to rise up against such forms of imperialism as the MIC, for which Cyberdine has created Skynet.

It is at a gas station where a poor boy takes the photo of her that Reese will have and adore in the dystopian 2020s. This photo is yet another example of the connection between that decade and the 1980s, a reminder of how so many of our current problems–the fictional ones of this movie and the real, historical ones that The Terminator allegorizes–have their origins back in the decade when the film was made.

Having a poor Mexican boy take her picture–a boy from a Third World country with far less machinery and far more nature, in one of the film’s minority daylight scenes–also symbolically indicates the connection between the First and Third World problems caused by the imperialistic use of such technology as that of Skynet.

Reese’s fetishizing of her photo in the 2020s, as opposed to having her in the flesh in the 1980s, is yet another example of the alienating effects of the use of machines–in this case, the boy’s camera. In connection with the camera’s alienating effect is the boy’s fear of his dad beating him if he doesn’t get any money from Sarah. She gives him four dollars instead of the five he hopes for. This is a small example of the capitalist First World short-changing the Third World, in spite of her legendary status as a freedom fighter against Skynet…and she says he is the one with the hustle.

Machines in The Terminator franchise aren’t always bad, though. It all depends on how they’re used, as is the case with our tech today. When we see Schwarzenegger play, on the one hand, the antagonistic Terminator of the first movie, and on the other hand, the one reprogrammed by the Resistance to protect Sarah and John in T2, we see an example of how AI can be a friend or a foe.

Such opposing uses can point us in a direction to understand how our AI today, in the real world, can be a good thing or a bad one. As I said above, in the society we have, in which commodities are produced for profit, people are in competition with each other, and we therefore experience mutual alienation, AI will be a nightmare of job loss, mind numbing, and massive surveillance. If, however, we had a society in which commodities were produced to satisfy human need (i.e., providing our food, housing, healthcare, and education without our needing to work to pay for them), and we lived in cooperation, solidarity, and mutual empathy, then AI would be the great liberator of humanity. Its machines and robots would do all the work, and we’d be free simply to enjoy life.

To enjoy such a life, though, we’d need to wipe out the hegemonic sociopaths that Skynet and Cyberdine represent in the franchise. We’d have to form our own Resistance movement, and say “Hasta la vista, baby” to the political status quo.