The cyborg, to be sure, retains his uncouth instincts to destroy all in his path, and must be counseled by sarcastic but sensitive John in murder-etiquette. In contrast, Schwarzenegger’s cyborg killer in the sequel is the hero, programmed to save the now teen-aged John Connor. In the first film, Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, returning from a future in which machines bent on eradicating all the remnants of human life rule the earth, was an unstoppable agent sent to kill the woman, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn child, to be named John, would eventually lead the human resistance against the machines. But, as Schwarzenegger told talk-show hosts unironically when he campaigned for the 1991 sequel, he was now playing a “kinder, gentler Terminator.” This sequel, Schwarzenegger suggested, had been tailored to fit the ideological and rhetorical design of the Bush presidency. Always a bit of joke in such films as Stay Hungry (1976) and Conan the Barbarian (1982) and its sequel, Schwarzenegger benefited from James Cameron’s innovative use of him as the implacable Terminator in the 1984 film of that name, a sleeper box-office hit and one of the great films of the 80s. The image encapsulates the menace and might of Schwarzenegger’s newly rearticulated identity as a futuristic killing machine. Perhaps the most iconic cinematic image of manhood from the days of the presidency of George Bush 41 (1989-1993) is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular cyborg in the ad for the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, sitting atop a motorcycle, wearing a black leather jacket, black T-shirt, and black sunglasses from whose left lens a red point of light glows, an enormous phallus of a gun held in his right hand and pointed aggressively upwards, the entire image darkly swathed in an ominous blue-black neon glow. Terminator 2 illuminates the split between narcissistic and masochistic modes of male sexuality that informs the period’s representational practices. The film is exemplary of the “Bush to Bush” era-from 1989 to 2008, the period presided over by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Terminator 2 cloaks its sadomasochistic fascist fantasies in the guise of the violent, melodramatic family film. The film forces us to acknowledge that while queer desire may be troublingly complicit in the structures of normative power that pathologize it, those very same structures proceed from an oddly analogous fascination with the homoerotics of power, especially in its most virulent, which is to say, its fascist, form. In his famous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani argues that the “logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies.” This essay argues that films like Terminator 2 enact the queer theory debates indexed in Bersani’s essay, revealing the complicity with normative standards of gendered identity in queer desire, but also exposing the queer nature of these normative standards. When the highly charged allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is added to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star persona, now evolved into that of national political figure, this persona emerges as a welter of gendered, sexual, and racial anxieties that relate in multivalent ways. As the most important and sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film, the Terminator films, particularly the first two, continue to demand a considerable amount of critical scrutiny.
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