Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (43 page)

James Cameron’s
The Terminator
has refracted these fears for almost three decades, providing modern America a forum to discuss the nature of humanity and its relationship to a techno-digital environment. A film trilogy that began in 1984 and continued into the 1990s, Cameron’s posthuman mythology has produced a television series, novels, comic books, and a 2009 follow-up film. This successful franchise imagines a future in which an artificial intelligence known as “Skynet” has unleashed a nuclear holocaust on humanity and mass-produced an army of predatory cyborgs to mop up the survivors. Humanity’s one hope is a man named John Connor, the founder and leader of the resistance. Mastering time travel technology, Skynet sends its agents, human-appearing assassins known as “Terminators,” into the past to kill Sarah Connor, John’s mother, before he is born. Failing at that in the first film, Skynet and its cyborg killers repeatedly try to kill the young Connor in the sequels.

The
Terminator
series combines the American fascination with religion and its anxiety over technological promise. John Connor is something of a messianic figure, and the day on which the machines will trigger nuclear destruction is known as “Judgment Day.” Religious questions about the nature of time and the meaning of the soul are key to the mythology’s development (this is especially the case in the television series
Sarah Connor Chronicles
).

The
Terminator
series suggests that our fear of posthuman possibilities may not be entirely related to a simple fear of technology. The
Terminator
mythos draws heavily on H. P. Lovecraft’s image of a universe full of beings devoid of human feeling and utterly indifferent to the human future. Rather than horrifying Cthulhu arising from his ancient sleep, the machines rise against humanity and seek to destroy them “without emotion, without pity, without remorse.”

Destruction of the social order at the hands of uncaring machines taps into very old human fears of powerlessness and meaninglessness in the face of an uncaring universe. Cameron’s dark vision can be seen to be oddly hopeful in this light. The most well-wrought iterations of the franchise,
T2: Judgment Day
and television’s
Sarah Connor Chronicles
, focus on the possibility of the cyborg learning human feeling and becoming part of a community through willingness to change and sacrifice. More than the atavistic primitivism of religious conservatism or the uncritical optimism of the futurists, Cameron’s
Terminator
offers hope based on integrating the monster into the human community, perhaps even creating that community based on the rejection of notions of monstrosity and ultimate difference.
¹⁷

That posthuman terrors have to be added to our list of possible monsters, along with sea serpents and serial killers, underscores the elasticity of the monster’s identity, the tendency of monsters to absorb the characteristics of the historical moment in which they appear. This book has refused to give a concise definition of the monster, assuming that no abstract definition exists. The creature we are hunting looks different in each historical era. In essence, every historical period decides what its monster(s) will be and creates the monster it needs. In fact, each historic epoch has a multitude of monsters, many of them representing warring discourses and basic cultural conflicts. The terror tales of the slave trade become symbols of a people’s oppression, while stories of frontier monsters become metaphors of conquest for the master class. In the twenty-first century, vampires can serve as traditionalist cautionary tales or
embodiments of alternative sexuality.

Frankenstein

Terminator

Monsters in America
has
looked at stories of the monster, told in different eras and by voices with differing interests, class positions, and racialized, gendered, or sexual identities. In contradiction to Craven’s
New Nightmare
, this book has suggested that stories do not so much contain the monster as give it life. Story and event, narrative and social structure are never truly separated. The subtext is always looming like a shadow in the text while the text comes to unnatural life in the social order. The victims of these tales are everywhere in American history, a landscape of corpses.

There is reason for hope. Greil Marcus writes that “cultural awakening comes not when one learns the contours of the master-narrative, but when one realizes … that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie.” Perhaps we can save the victims from the monster by calling into question the script. History is the work of human agency, and its mistakes can be corrected by human action. Understanding history will break its power, putting it in the grave where it belongs. Social justice can break the power of the monster, altering the structures of history and society so that the terror of history recedes.
¹⁸

Of course, they always come back. One of the conventions of modern horror is to portray the death of the monster and the restoration of the social order only to bring the thing horrifyingly back to life in the final frame. History is a bit like that. Despite the optimism of some posthuman theorists, there is no reason to see history as historical development, a narrative of upward ascent. A progressive vision of social justice can become a lie in much the same way that right-wing visions of American exceptionalism and innocence are nothing but happy bedtime stories for children rightfully afraid of the dark. There could be worse things waiting.