This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com George Holliday’s camcorder caught Arnold Schwarzenegger filming T2 outside the bar across from his apartment, and then, on the same tape, LAPD officers beating Rodney King. The film opened four months to the day after the beating, its liquid-metal killer disguised as an LAPD patrolman, and James Cameron told the Los Angeles Times it was about “the dehumanization we do on a daily basis.” Jamie Merchant, author of Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, joins Van for a movie they both grew up on (with Lyle calling in from Japan for the opening stretch). Van came up surprisingly short on criticism. The cops are the villains, and the raid on Cyberdyne plays like the Weather Underground with a clear conscience. Jamie digs a critique of capital out from under the spectacle. Skynet is a corporate product built with the military, or as Van puts it, venture surplus with nowhere else to go and one reliable customer, the national security state. Van once sat on an Obama-era Pentagon working group on autonomous weapons, where Skynet was everyone’s shorthand for what to avoid. The moral engine is a boy teaching a killing machine why it can’t kill. “You just can’t go around killing people.” “Why?” Arnold’s T-800 never takes a life, and Van’s point is that once you follow the instrumental logic, you are the machines. Jamie sees a post-bourgeois family, cyborg as father, son as teacher, and a mother who nearly becomes a Terminator in Miles Dyson’s living room, only to find her son teaching her. That’s where he locates Fredric Jameson’s utopian moment, in relationships rather than some imagined society. Mercifully, the shelved ending, with John grown into a U.S. senator, stayed shelved, and the film closes on Sarah’s last line. “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.” Further Reading Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline by Jamie Merchant Jamie Merchant at The Brooklyn Rail “In the 1990s, Terminator’s Ultimate Evil Took the Form of a Cop. In 2019, It’s the U.S. Border Patrol.” by Chris Klimek City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era by Susan Jeffords “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” by Fredric Jameson Teaser from the Episode Terminator 2 Trailer
