Escape Velocity (39 page)

Bodies reconstituted as information floating in data banks can have a profound impact on physical bodies in the real world. This information-age truism is the point of departure for The Net, a 1995 cyber-thriller about a hacker who stumbles on a conspiracy to take over the U.S. government. The villains erase her identity by deleting her Social Security information, credit records, and so forth, and replace it with that of a wanted woman. On the run from the police and the conspirators, she laments that each of us has an "electronic shadow, just sitting there, waiting for somebody to screw with it."

Steve Kurtz, an assistant professor of art theory at Carnegie-Mellon University, believes that

social relationships are mediated ... by the perception of our electronic doubles resid[ing] in cyberspace. Our data bodies-

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educational records, credit history, bank statements, criminal files-will direct the type [of] social relationship that we have whenever authority (to oversimplify, those who own or control information) is confronted. . . . Regaining control of the data body is a key act of electronic civil disobedience, [since] it is the most efficient way to return autonomy to the individual.'°^

Kurtz is a member of Critical Art Ensemble, an artistic collaborative exploring the intersections of critical theory, technology, and art. In Critical Art Ensemble: The Electronic Disturbance, a theoretical work that is equal parts academic discourse, postmodern SF, and Abbie HofFmanesque fist-banging, the group plots strategies for "regaining control of the data body." In cyberculture, argues CAE,

[a]bstracted representations of the self and the body, separate from the individual, are simultaneously present in numerous locations, interacting and recombining with [other bodies of information], beyond the control of the individual and often to his or her detriment. . . . This situation offers the resistant performer two strategies: one is to contaminate and call attention to corrupted data, while the other is to pass counterfeit data. . . . Greater freedom in the theater of everyday life can be obtained once the virtual theater is infiltrated.'°^

Kurtz, who is friends vv^ith the transsexual Toni Denise, sees her surreal run-ins with local law enforcement as a funny, down-to-earth example of "electronic civil disobedience" and "regaining control of the data body":

When [Toni Denise] was pre-op, she used to ride around in her convertible with her breasts exposed. The cops would pull her over to arrest her [but] when her electronic data proved s/he was male, they would have to let her go. She drove the police nuts! I love Toni-even though her goal is to be the girl next door and to live the life of a "normal" middle-class housewife, she can be no other than a living model of political resistance.'°*

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Oddly, Kurtz's poster girl for political resistance is the same person who appears in the CAE videotape Gender Crash, imparting pearls of mallcrawler wisdom such as "I have taken what I was born with and modern technology and created the perfect aesthetic look for me. I have a 39-27-39 body; that's perfect." Of course, Naomi Wolf, Donna Haraway, and all who resist the notion of a "perfect" female body and the constricted worldview it implies would beg to differ.

Irreverent as she is, Toni Denise has little to say about the beauty myths that shaped her vision of femininity or the extent to which her performances in transvestite revues exchange the confines of one gender role for another. Her encomiums to the sublime nightmare of cyberculture ("That's what the world is becoming, techno-bodies, techno-everything, and I'm the techno-woman of the nineties") take no notice of the way in which the very technologies that liberated her have disfigured the lives and bodies of other, biological women. Kurtz acknowledges that she

has little to do with [a] feminist critique. Does she think about what body-beautiful tech has done to women? No, she doesn't think about women at all. She is searching for the self-contained male universe. Does she know where her ideas on beauty originate? Yes, and it is precisely within this matrix of desire that she is working ("That's why it is so easy for me to pick up men," she says). She is a man who has constructed herself as female with male tech for the pleasure of men. . . . [T]he elimination of [biological] women is the goal. Kill all competing objects of desire; this is her cyborg function. . . . For CAE, she is our poster girl within the virtual theater; however, in a general analysis, she has some frightening characteristics.'°^

Clearly, finding a way out of Haraway's "maze of dualisms" is not going to be easy. Michel Eoucault's axiom that transgressions-bodily or otherwise-reaffirm cultural bounds even as they test them is borne out in the ambiguities and contradictions of Toni Denise's real-life science fiction.

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Unnatural Histories Tioid Rage

In this age when metal and mechanics are all-powerful, man, in order to survive, must become stronger than the machine, just as he [had] to become stronger than the beasts.

-Alfred Jarr/^'^

Bodybuilding represents a last-ditch attempt to hold the body together at a time when genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project remind us, disconcertingly, that a human being is "little more than a cloud of information," to borrow Thomas Mine's memorable phrase."'

There is a giddy dysphoria to our historical moment-a vertigo induced, perhaps, by the fear that even we will one day be dematerialized in a swirl of data-bits, like passengers in a Star Trek transporter. It can hardly be happenstance that the signature sample of techno music, quoted in countless songs, is the phrase "Pure Energy," spoken by Star Trek's Mister Spock, or that the climax of The Lawnmower Man occurs when Cyberjobe declares, "I'm going to . . . complete the final stage of my evolution. I'm going to project myself into the mainframe computer; I'll become pure energy."

Considered in this context, the cult of the gymnasium makes cultural sense. With the aid of weight-training machines, nutritional supplements, and anabolic steroids (synthetic testosterone), bodybuilding obses-sives erect an impregnable bulwark of "ripped"-that is, sharply etched— muscles around the notion of an immutable body and an integrated self. Obviously, the notion of being huge and hard in cyberculture is a colossal irony; muscle is redundant in a world where even the easiest tasks-changing channels, switching lights on and off, adjusting the volume on a CD player-are allocated to small, smart, ever more biomorphic devices. "My upper-body musculature, developed largely on Nautilus machines, means that I probably can chop wood or unload trucks, not that I ever will,'' writes Barbara Ehrenreich."^ It is for psychological, not physical, reasons that many of us worship at the stations of the Nautilus.

In a broader cultural sense, however, bodybuilding speaks not only to anthropologist Alan M. Klein's assertion that "the golden era when 'men

were men' has passed, and the powerful roles traditionally the exclusive province of men have vanished, weakened, or are no longer gender-specific," but also to a gnawing anxiety about the future of the body in a cybernetic environment-an environment that still requires the mind, the eye, and the hand but has little use for the rest of the body."^

Bodybuilding reasserts the validity of human brawn in an age of intelligent machines. It's an anachronistic desire, of course-a ritual of resistance to industrial modernity that is as old as the steam-age myth of John Henry, the railroad worker who won a contest with a steam drill but died of exhaustion shortly thereafter. " 'Roid rage"-slang for the rampages associated with habitual steroid use-becomes a pun when applied to bodybuilding conceived of both as a rage against the machine and as a practice that paradoxically produces humans who look and behave like machines: android rage. Significantly, technological imagery colors first-person as well as journalistic descriptions of'roid rages. In his Village Voice article on bodybuilding, "Living Large," Paul Solotaroff depicts the former Mr. Universe Steve Michalik as a hormone-addled android whose eyes, like those of the hunter-killer "endoskeletons" in Terminator 2, "went as red as the laser scope on an Uzi" when he was angry.^'"* In the same article, Michalik recalls the time he ripped off a truck door and caved in the offending driver's face with one punch: "[I]t was like I was trapped inside a robot body, watching myself do horrible things, and yelling, 'Stop! Stop!' "''^

The "body proud"-to borrow a term from RoboCop 2-refute the obsolescence of the flesh by twisting their bodies into whip steel, making themselves over in the image of the machine. "Of all the sports conceived by man, none bears a closer resemblance to bodybuilding than auto racing," notes the Details writer Erik Hedegaard. "The only difference is that one engine is mechanical and the other corporeal."''^ Pop singers, professional wrestlers, movie stars and ordinary gym-goers chisel themselves into futurist sculptures, all sharp edges and flat planes, in unknowing fulfillment of the futurist poet F. T. Marinetti's rhapsodies about "the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor."'^^ Ads for Evian bottled water feature glistening Aryans whose streamlined physiques look as if they were lathed and polished on some Nordic assembly line.

The die-cut piece of work known as the "hard-body" is, at its heart, a machine-age artifact. The effect is achieved by means of a process that

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presumes the objectification of the physique, a fact hinted at by a phrase that appears on muscle T-shirts: body sculpting. Stuart Ewen has noted the convergence of the "principles of instrumental reason, engineering, and technological regimentation" in the weight room, where gym-goers move along an assembly line of "stations," or Nautilus machines, each of which exercises a different muscle group.''^ The body is conceived of as an interlocking assemblage of machinelike components, and the desired effect, in which glutes, lats, pecs, and abs stand out in sharp relief, resembles the product of a punch press.

It seems only appropriate that the cultural icon for the late eighties and early nineties should turn out to be Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, an ex-steroid-using former weight lifter best known for his portrayal of a predatory cyborg in The Terminator (1984). Schwarzenegger is at once a pumped-up hunk and an affectless automaton whose acting ability falls just short of Disneyland's Mr. Lincoln, an Audio-Animatronic dummy brought to life by bursts of pressurized air. His physique reconciles the male centerfold, all rippling pecs, and an exploded view of the internal combustion engine. In Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, Sam Fussell describes Schwarzenegger in tellingly mechanomorphic terms: The champion bodybuilder "used the weight room as his smithy" in the creation of an ironclad "human fortress ... to keep the enemy host at bay"-the "enemy host" being, in Fussell's mind, the school-yard toughs and sand-kicking bullies of the world.''^

The Schwarzenegger Menschmaschine is the link between two utterly unlike subcultures: hard-core bodybuilders and cyberpunks. Klein's reading of bodybuilding as an attempt to fortify the notion of an unassailable masculinity at a time when gender roles are under siege is echoed in Andrew Ross's argument that "the cyberpunk image of the techno-body played into the crisis of masculinity in the eighties.'"^^ Although he caricatures cyberpunk as a "baroque edifice of adolescent male fantasies," Ross generates valuable insights by setting "the inflated physiques of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone" alongside the prosthetically enhanced bodies of male cyberpunks as mythic responses to the waning of patriarchal power.'^'

Examined in the context of Ross's "crisis of masculinity," both bodybuilders and cyberpunks arrive, by opposite routes and with different

baggage, at the same place: the "metahzation of man" imagined by Marinetti.*^^ In that sense, they are two sides of the same coin, although the hard-bodies' worship of a sublime Renaissance humanism symbolized by Michelangelo's David-an incarnation of the Neoplatonic notion that the flawless human body is evidence of man's perfectability-blinds them to the glaring irony that their machine-tooled, often chemically enhanced bodies are already posthuman. And that coin, like any, can be flipped: The bulging, knotty-veined physiques of bodybuilders are fundamentally unnatural, a fact they acknowledge in their slang term for themselves ("freaks"), while cyberpunks can be seen, as Ross argues, not as mutants who have spun off of humanity's evolutionary trajectory but as exponents of a "maverick humanism" whose "radical mutations in bodily ecology" are "welcomed as an advance in human evolution."'^^

Terminator 2: Iron John Meets Steely Dan

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.''^'*

-Margaret Fuller

Buried deep in the public mind, cultural nightmares about the crisis of masculinity, the body's growing irrelevance, and the putative obsolescence of the species erupt in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

In The Terminator, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) vanquishes the titular villain (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a cyborg assassin sent back in time to liquidate her. The Terminator comes from a future in which SkyNet, a "Star Wars"-like computerized defense system that obviates the need for all human decision making, acquires sentience and with it the instinct for self-preservation. When panic-stricken humans attempt to pull SkyNet's plug, the system triggers a nuclear holocaust ("Judgment Day") and dispatches autonomous tanks, flying machines, and gun-wdelding "endoskeletons" (Terminators sans flesh) to flush out any remaining pockets of human resistance.

But fate has decreed that John Connor, the leader of the save-the-humans movement, will ultimately triumph over the machines, so SkyNet

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sends a Terminator into the past to rewrite history by terminating Sarah Connor before she can bear humanity's savior, a boy named John Connor. Happily, Connor and his resistance foil SkyNet by sending back a time-traveler of their own-a robot-killing guerrilla fighter named Kyle Reese. History, here, is a locked loop: In addition to helping Sarah destroy the Terminator, Reese spends a night of passion with her, fathering John Connor.

In Terminator 2, set a decade after the first film, Sarah Connor has been institutionalized for blowing up a computer factory and raving about the impending techno-apocalypse; John Connor, now a punky, disaffected preteen, is the unmanageable ward of dysfunctional foster parents. Yet another Terminator is hot on the boy's trail. This one is an "advanced prototype" T-1000 made of "mimetic polyalloy" that allows it to assume the appearance of "anything it samples by physical contact." Before our very eyes, the T-1000 liquefies into a featureless silver mannequin, then hardens into the look and shape of anyone-or anything-it has touched. Luckily, Connor has a guardian angel: a T-800 Schwarzenegger-type Terminator reprogrammed by Connor and sent back in time to protect himself

On the surface, T2 is a cautionary tale about the fate of a society that leaves its technology on automatic pilot, staged as a thrill-a-minute carnival of carnage. If we look beyond the obvious, however, we find another, no less desperate battle being waged, this one a contest for meanings.

In one sense, T2 is a duel of dualisms—a philosophical struggle over body images and gender boundaries. With its monotonal delivery, impassive expression, dark sunglasses, head-to-toe black leather getup, Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle, and whopping guns, the Schwarzenegger Terminator is the standard-bearer for a hypermasculine archetype: the crypto-fascist man of steel with the iron will. The T-800 is a technophallus, a (literal) Iron John whose robopathic autism and ever-ready rigidity will show the "soft" man vilified by Robert Bly who's boss.

Early in the picture, the T-800 ritually strips one of society's most durable icons of fearsome masculinity of the badges of his virility when he relieves a cigar-chomping, heavily tattooed biker of his gun, his leathers, and most important, his mammoth, gleaming motorcycle. In a cinematic moment that is pure cartoon Freud, the Schwarzenegger Terminator mounts

mounts the big machine to the tune of George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone," a bit of Bo Diddleyesque braggadocio about a lover man who really hits the G-spot. A biker's motorcycle is both sexual surrogate and penile prosthesis, according to Hunter Thompson, who quotes a Hell's Angel on the meaning of the word "love" ("the feelin' you get when you like somethin' as much as your motorcycle") and cites a psychologist who calls the machine "a phallic locomotor symbol ... an extension of one's body, a power between one's legs."'^^ Symbolically castrating and cuckolding the biker by stealing the Harley that is both his manhood and his woman, the T-800 proves to all concerned that he is an indomitable rock of masculinity, "bad to the bone." And a bone, as every American male who has survived high school gym class knows, is an erection.

The T-1000, by contrast, is boneless. It personifies the "female" characteristics feared and loathed by the hard-body-softness, vulnerability, and wetness (its transformations are accompanied by a faint slurping sound). A polymorphous perversity, the T-1000 is the nightmare Feminine given squishy, shifting shape. Penetrated, again and again, by bullets and impaled, at one point, on a spike, the T-1000 frustrates the T-800 wdth its "feminine" mutability, puckering its wounds closed with a soft, almost obscene sucking noise. In the movie's climactic struggle, the Schwarzenegger Terminator lands a roundhouse punch on the polyalloy android's head, only to have his fist become embedded in the liquid metal-an SF update of that hoary Freudian phobia, the devouring vagina from which no male organ escapes intact.

Mercurial, duplicitous, the shape-shifter archetype is, in traditional terms, "feminine"; the chameleonic ability to "blend in" while nonetheless preserving something of one's innermost thoughts and feelings is, after all, a survival strategy of the powerless, one for which men (at least, straight, white ones) in Western culture have historically had little need. The "difference" feminist Jean Baker Miller believes that "women's reality is rooted in the encouragement to 'form' themselves into the person who will be of benefit to others. . , . Out of [this experience], women develop a psychic structuring for which the term ego, as ordinarily used, may not apply."^^^ By Miller's logic, all women are made of mimetic polyalloy.

With its chrome finish and quicksilver qualities, the T-1000 resembles a blob of mercury in human form. In alchemical and Jungian symbolism, mercury is a lunar, mutable element associated with the feminine

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principle and, more specifically, androgyny and hermaphroditism. The liquid metal robot is indeed polygendered: in its generic state, it is unequivocally male, resembling an Oscar statuette or a personification of Steely Dan, the strap-on dildo in Naked Lunch, but it can assume any sex. It is androgynous, too. There is more than a hint of coded homosexuality in the T-lOOO's chosen incarnation: a smallish, vaguely effeminate policeman w^ith a tart, thin-lipped smirk whose favored method of dispatching his victims is by poking stiff, pointy objects into their holes (a blade-shaped arm through a man's mouth, a stilettolike finger through a male prison guard's eye).

In the movie's final moments, both Terminators are consumed in a vat of molten steel, where their mettle is revealed. The technetronic Teuton, Schwarzenegger, slips into the boiling goop with a chivalric thumbs-up worthy of a Wagnerian hero; the T-1000 squirms and shimmies, mouthing silent, Edvard Munchlike screams in a distinctly epicene fashion. As it dissolves away to nothing, the T-1000 cycles through the various characters it has impersonated (the cop, John's foster mother, a guard in Sarah's mental hospital)-a demise that conjures the liquefaction of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard ofOz. Why, it can't even die like a man!

The T-800 hard-body and the protoplasmic T-1000 put computer-age faces on the two symbolic bodies theorized by Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies, a two-volume study of the Freikorps-protofascist mercenaries who crushed worker uprisings and fought Germany's border disputes in the turbulent years between the world wars.

Looming large on the landscape of the male fascist unconscious are two mythic bodies, locked in binary opposition: the monstrous Feminine-a sump of foul effluvia, an engulfing "red flood," a sucking morass-and the armored robo-corpus of the Freikorps killing machine, safe and dry inside its full metal jacket from a host of "feminine" horrors. In their introduction to the second volume of Male Fantasies, Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinbach detail the "the corporal metaphysics at the heart of fascist perception":

On the one side, there is the soft, fluid, and ultimately liquid female body which is a quintessentially negative 'Other' lurking inside the male body ... On the other there is the hard, organized, phallic body devoid of all internal viscera which finds its apotheosis in the machine. '^^

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Theweleit suggests that the robopathology manifest in the armored body is the result of the projection onto the Feminine of the abominable, "soft" desire for maternal love buried, along with other "womanly" emotional yearnings, in the fascist male psyche.

The gender war that lies just beneath the surface of T2 rages around the fact that each term of a binary opposition inheres within the other; the thesis ("man") is parasitically dependent on the antithesis ("woman") that defines it. The vigilance with which the dominant term polices the no-man's-land between itself and the Other betrays the sneaking suspicion that the Other is in fact an externcilization of something repressed, buried deep wdthin the self-in this case, the feminine principle in every man that renders his masculinity less than absolute. "The warrior Utopia of a mechanized body is . . . erected against the female self wdthin," affirm Benjamin and Rabinbach.'^^

In Sarah Connor, whose physique and psyche strike a precarious balance between the "masculine" hardness of the T-800 and the "feminine" softness of the T-1000, that bulwark against "the female self within" is erected, oddly enough, by a female self. Her diatribe against men who give birth to bombs, her declaration of maternal love to John, her ministrations to the bullet-riddled T-800, and her ultimate function as the secular humanist Madonna whose only begotten son is humankind's savior are unconvincing; they seem designed to reassure conservative sensibilities that what looks butch on the outside is femme on the inside.

In one of T2's ugliest moments, Sarah Connor-outfitted in SWAT garb and accessorized with some very mean hardware-barks, "Down on the floor, bitch!" to the African-American wife of Miles Dyson, the computer scientist destined to create SkyNet. Frightened, maternal women of color are clearly at the bottom of T2's pyramid of power; at the top is the technophallic, hard-bodied T-800, the only "real man" in the movie. Nearly all of the human males, in comparison, are ineffectual wimps, "soft" in body or spirit: John's foster father, Todd, is a shiftless channel-surfer; the psychologist who interrogates Sarah Connor is an effete, third-rate Torquemada; the orderly who molests her in the mental ward is a potbellied pervert who is easily beaten to a pulp when Sarah jumps him; and the trembling, gibbering Dyson is a scared-stiff Poindexter.

"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear," muses Sarah Connor, in a voice-over. "The Terminator would never stop; it would

never leave him and it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it w^as too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there and it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this machine, this thing, was the only one who measured up." The implacable, manhunting Terminator from the first film ("It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead," warned Kyle Reese) is reconstituted, in a neat turnaround, as the perfect surrogate father, batteries included. In an era of dysfunctional families and "deadbeat dads," only a literal Iron John can get the job done.

In r2's pantheon of manhood, Sarah Connor is second only to the Schwarzenegger Terminator when it comes to testosterone level. She is a pumped-up, lock-and-load, postfeminist heroine whose empowerment, in a patriarchal world, is attained not through political action but through technology-heavy-duty weaponry and paramilitary training in the movie, and weight-training machines and sessions with an Israeli commando in real life. An Entertainment Weekly cover story on the film includes a fawning sidebar on Hamilton; headlined "a new body

OF work: LINDA HAMILTON GETS TOUGH IN 'TERMINATOR 2,' " it might have

been titled "the morphing of linda Hamilton." We are told, in fetishistic detail, of her "washboard stomach and marathoner's legs," her aerobic workouts, her frolics in costar Arnold Schwarzenegger's on-location gym. "She looks like a sweet young thing in her sundress," cautions the writer, "but don't be fooled. Linda Hamilton can bench-press 85 pounds as easily as she swings her Evian bottle. She can pump-load a 12-gauge shotgun with one arm and run eight miles before lighting up a Camel. . . . She has metamorphosed into a fierce, humorless commando. And she has transformed her softly feminine physique . . . into a hard^body even a five-time Mr. Universe can admire."^^^

All that flabby femininity has been flensed away like so much blubber, revealing a masculine, mechanical hard-body worthy of Sergeant Rock-a transformation given ironic spin by the fact that T2's masculinist protagonist is a woman. As Entertainment Weekly makes clear, the actress's on- and offscreen personae have very nearly fused, in the public mind, into a hybrid entity in the same way that Schwarzenegger's hypertrophied physique has become synonymous with the Ubermenschmaschine. Morphed into a Freikorps cyborg, Connor triumphs over the feminine aspect embod-

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ied in the T-1000 with the aid of the male principle manifest in the Schwarzenegger model.

Thus, Hollywood icons of hard-bodied technofeminism can be problematic in the same way that professional female bodybuilders are. While their body transgressions undeniably make hash of traditional notions of femininity as soft and organic, both break free of the feminine mystique by welding themselves, contrarily, into the machine-tooled hard-body of a masculine mystique that is no less restrictive.

An argument could be made for the recuperation of the hard-bodied, gun-happy Connor as a technofeminist heroine, Hollywood's answer to Haraway's call for a feminism that rejects "a demonology of technology," but the convenience of such an interpretation renders it suspect. After all, the movie industry's exploitation of the Freudian subtext in the image of a sweaty woman squirting hot lead from a throbbing rod could hardly be called empowering. The scene where Connor pumps a shotgun at the T-1000 is uncomfortably reminiscent of the video Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns, in which bikini-clad "Southern California beauties [fire] some of the sexiest machine guns ever produced," according to a mail-order catalogue.'^^ Real-life testimonials by female shootists-"With a gun I have more . . . control over potential events around me, and more personal power," declares a female gun owner in Patrick Carr's Gun People, couching self-help bromides in language the NRA likes to hear-must be weighed against the incessant use, in film and TV, of the gun as a phallic substitute. Technofeminism remains at odds with technophallicism.