Opengender

For all that their plots are more or less sequential, Alien and Aliens are profoundly different narratives, generated by different contexts. It is not only that Aliens has the much faster editing which makes it formally an action-adventure-thriller; but the scopic regime is fundamentally different (partly as a result of the editing). Aliens picks up some of the visual effects of Alien (as does Terminator II) — in particular, the obscure vision and reliance on instrument-readings and scanners where eye-vision is obscure or not available — but its significance is altered. It is at the level of narrative structure and 'realism' that Alien's self-consiously pro-feminist gender-discourse is articulated. It is rather at the level of the irreal — the fantastic — that the film reads female-negative. The narrative conventions of horror/sci-fi are repeated but also undermined, and at this level a more general commentary about 'alien-ness' can be read.

The Lesbian and the Other Woman — Alien

Alien destabilises genre and narrative conventions, generating an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoid suspense. Visual control is perpetually denied to the spectator. In the opening sequences, there is no central focus of identification (Ripley emerges gradually as protagonist). Ripley's female body undercuts the mastery of phallic subjectivity as protagonist. The cargo ship's 'old-dark-house' (represented literally as body) interiors are claustrophobic and restrict visual orientation. The alien ship is mainly viewed through (frequently defective) instrument scanners. 'Eye-views' are obscured by darkness, mist and the sheer hugeness of the object. The scopic relay from male spectator, through camera, through protagonist, is estranged disrupted — 'interfered with'. Much of the action in the first part of the film is viewed on monitor screens-within-cinema screen. The diagetic camera is attached to the headgear of protagonists and viewed on monitor by other protagonists. The monitor images constantly break up due to 'interference'. Mastery of the image is denied both to protagonists and to the cinematic spectator. The viewer has the constant sensation of straining to see properly — of struggling to master the image.

The cargo-ship setting has taken on the familiarity of the everyday for the sci-fi fan; and is filmed in a style reminiscent of cinema verite. In this setting, struggles familiar to the feminist and lesbian spectator unfold. Issues of class, gender and race are addressed. Parker and Brett agitate for better bonuses, have a generally recalcitrant attitude; turn on steam valves, jocularly pretending they cannot hear the middle-class-woman Ripley's orders. Towards the end of the film, Parker and Ripley draw slightly closer together as each recognises 'common-sense' in the other. Stereotypical masculinity and femininity are critically addressed. Lambert panics, Dallas disregards safety with impatient machismo, Parker's black-macho posturing jumps the gun (and he is unable to act when Parker 'freezes' blocking his aim). As Ripley tries to enforce safety at work, she is contested by the emotional appeals of the feminised Lambert and actually overridden by Ash, who ignores her position of hierarchical authority and acts insubordinately. When Ripley takes him to task, he is clearly resentful of her female authority. The form of his murder attempt, as she uses her authority to override computer security and uncover his duplicity, resembles rape in cold rage — as assertion of challenged male authority.

Homo-social bonding is also critically addressed in the framing as Ash, Dallas and Ripley discuss returning the dead alien to earth, just after Ash has pushed the alien-spider onto Ripley (any girl will remember this from the playground) who cowers behind Dallas' masculine protectiveness. Dallas and Ash's heads are foregrounded, Ripley's head is smaller in the background. As Ash ridicules Ripley's concerns (as feminine 'irrational' fears), he faces out from the screen looking towards Dallas (and the male spectator), in a familiar male-exclusionary manoeuvre (any girl will remember this from the office). Interestingly, there is an almost identical frame with the same significance in The Silence of the Lambs. There is critical irony here because identification with Ripley has already been forged and subsequent narrative developments will show Ripley to be right and Ash to be duplicitous and inhuman. Dallas then ridicules Ripley's feminine-conscientious concern that they are 'blind' on some decks — again events will show Ripley to be right and their 'blindness' becomes literally loss of control as their scanning instrumentation repeatedly fails.

The distinction between 'human' and 'alien' is problematised. Brett is killed whilst looking for Jonesey, the cat. He finds the cat and bends to pick it up. It hisses because the alien is behind Brett. Brett thinks the animal is hissing at him — he is also 'other' to a cat, and both cats and humans are animals to the 'alien'. As Brett is dismembered and carried off by the alien, the cat — in choker close-up — looks upwards-right offscreen after the disappearing alien. The cats eyes, with their vertical-slit pupils, are a common metaphor for alienness, evil, feminine sexuality and feral implacability. But the cat is just an animal. The alien is made substantial — brought into the human real by this reversible 'otherness' — which threatens to annihilate the human/animal distinction.

This choker close-up of the cat's alien gaze looking upwards-right cuts directly to choker close-up of Parker (the black male) looking upwards-left in a match-shot. In this scene, Parker is demanding unmediated violent (male but also animal) action to ensure human survival; Ripley is reflective (feminine but also human). Ash, remarking that 'most animals retreat from fire' advises turning up the heat. Of course, the alien is not animal but clearly cold-blooded and likes heat, unlike the humans. Turning up the heat will merely make their own environment alien and make the alien more at home. Ash, of course, is not animal, human or male. Ash's subsequent attack on Ripley repeats the form of the alien attack on Kane as well as signifying sexual subjection of the female (by an 'inauthentic' male). Otherness is not only reversible here, but an uneasily shifting positionality.

The final scene, in which Ripley is displayed as sexual spectacle in her underwear before overcoming the alien, has been criticised by feminists because it objectifies the female body as site of sexual violence. Clearly, this sexualisation of Ripley's body functions as a disavowal of the lesbian implications of her 'phallic subjectivity' and her 'chastity'. Lesbians may, however, respond quite differently to this scene — in which Ripley is simultaneously female object of desire and active protagonist. Without her masculine clothing, Ripley appears feminised as a vulnerable sexual object. The lesbian spectator generally resists identification with objectified femininity and may slide into the phallic position in the classical scopic relay. As there is already strong lesbian identification with Ripley, when the lesbian (female) spectator looks pleasurably (as phallic voyeur) at Ripley's bi-sexualised body, subjectivity takes on the self-and-also-other structure of lesbianism. The passivity of objectification is also quickly undercut narratively and the polarity of sexual subject/object is further destabilised.

This echoes familiar lesbian strategy for resisting objectification and then coping with the 'impossibility' of reciprocal female subjectivity: 'phallicised' female sexual subject desires self-as-other female reciprocally. This final scene in Alien thus evokes the resistance/desire dynamic of inter-subjective lesbian sexuality. The lesbian resists passive objectification by adopting 'phallic' agency, yet desires a woman as sexual object. This paradox structures personal and political conflicts around lesbian sexual identity.

The alien is initially constructed as rapist/slasher here. 'He' is concealed in the shuttle (hiding in her home) where she thinks she is safe, has removed her clothes, and relaxed her control. The spectator is, then, initially in a position of voyeuristic control. The alien hand grabs at Ripley and she backs into the stored spacesuits, her heavy breathing signifying fear/arousal. However, the camera is angled low and the effect here of the low angle is to empower Ripley as an eroticised presence, and convey active female sexuality to the lesbian spectator. Ripley's barely covered breasts and genitals dominate the image invoking lesbian desire. The alien hand slides sensuously over the metal and tubing of the ship; the inner set of teeth (which slashes out and kills in previous scenes) protrudes slowly, drooling KY jelly. Ripley echoes its actions, repeatedly smoothing the spacesuit she has crept into with her palms and dripping sweat as she pants for breath. There is recognition of self-but-also-other and an implication of mutual wariness. A shot-reverse-shot sequence conveys an exchange of looks between Ripley and the alien conveying a sense of recognition and competition for survival rather than voyeuristic sadism on the part of protagonist or monster. Its 'otherness' feminises the alien and allows mutuality between the woman and the monstrous-other, undercutting the scopic structure of the 'slasher' scene by androgenising both positions and implying reciprocal wariness (and arousal).

Ripley forces the alien out of its cranny with jets of gas. Better adapted to the environment (in a space suit on home territory), she thrusts the alien through the airlock. When it tries to re-enter like a persistent spider up a drainpipe, she uses the engine thrust to blast it away. In spite of the ejaculatory thrust of the grappling iron and jet propulsion she uses to thrust off the alien, the whole scene is 'feminised'. The suggestion of spider/insect as metaphor for alienness is strong here as Ripley confronts her feminine-phobic fear (giving a faint reminiscence of eyeballing a huge spider in the bath!). Ripley's struggle to resist and transform panic into controlled action is signified by singing and chanting like a child. Fear, aggression and arousal combine in an intense adrenalin-high. The noises she makes become increasingly 'ejaculatory' as her fear mounts. The look on her face after expelling the alien is one of post-orgasmic bliss, before climbing into her virginal bed.

On the whole, identification with Ripley in Alien is pleasurable for the lesbian spectator. On the level of realism, Ripley is 'positive' — strong, capable, intelligent and feminist. However, Ripley's sexual difference is dealt with in the real only in terms of sexism at work by male colleagues. The more feminised Lambert is represented extremely negatively as 'hysterical' and ineffectual. At the symbolic level, the narrative is implacable in its explusion of 'the alien' and the mise en scene conveys misogynistic disgust for 'female plumbing'.

As Greenberg [1991] points out, the alien is 'mysteriously ungraspable, viciously implacable, improbably beautiful, and lewd. [italics his]'. The alien/other has phallic characteristics, but is generally coded female, both in its reproductive functions, its fatal, implacable beauty and its amoral survival instincts. In the traditions of sci-fi, it is associated with mad scientist, Ash, and the evil corporation, signified by 'mother' (the implacable, amoral central computer). The signification of the form of a 'feminine' regime as inhuman calculation and amoral acquisitiveness is a traditional patriarchal construction. The overthrow of the alien and its 'mother' corporation by the maiden-warrior recalls a traditional literary narrative in which the Amazon takes up the girdle of a male warrior (that of her patron/father) to suppress an outbreak of 'castrating' feminine excess.

'Have you Ever Been Mistaken for a Man? — Aliens

Aliens has a very different narrative form from that of Alien. It is a standard genre piece (although of mixed genre) in which the pleasures of its young male audience depend on reliable repetition of a known formula. It picks up many of the visual techniques used in Alien, but to quite different effect. The techniques of visual frustration signal occasions for assertive-phallic action. Phallic mastery is challenged only to be re-asserted after a suitable period of predictable suspense. Again, at the level of realism, there is some superficial critical engagement with feminism, 'machismo', militarism and the duplicity and exploitativeness of the corporation. However, this is expressed through the standard form and (male) attitudes of a 'kick-ass' action movie. Aliens plays out a sort of 'Oedipal drama' of dismemberment and reconstitution of self through Ripley as a 'final girl'. Ripley has to face and overcome the nightmares of mutilation with which the film opens and can only do so by ensuring that the alien threat is completely destroyed. In the final scene after overcoming the monstrous alien (who 'feminises' by 'impregnation' and mutilation), Ripley assures Newt that there will be no more nightmares.

Clover [1992] argues that the 'final girl' as protagonist allows the playing out of such Oedipal fears because the male spectator can effectively deny or distance himself from identification with the (female) body being threatened with terrifying mutilation. However, it is common in kick-ass films for the male body to be horrifyingly mutilated, or at least thoroughly beaten, on the road to achieving 'manhood'. This structure is evident in 'kick-ass' films as diverse as Karate Kid and Robocop. These films inherit the Oedipal obsessions of Westerns. Alien shows the impregnation-feminisation, mutilation, dismemberment and phallic piercing of the male body (whilst the female body is threatened with rape, implied by the tail curling around Lambert's thigh and in the final scene between Ripley and the Alien). If the male spectator is squeamish about the mutilation of the male body, he would be obliged to steer clear of the average 'kick-ass' epic.

It would seem, on the contrary, that it is the overt eroticisation of the violence which requires a female victim/survivor. Greenberg's comments on the final confrontation between Ripley and the alien in Alien are illuminating here:

'Simultaneously suffering with her, and voyeur to her victimisation, the viewer (especially the male viewer) experiences a powerful commingling of raw sexual excitement and mortal terror; an effect often sought but rarely achieved so well in suspense cinema.' [Greenberg, 1991]

Neale argues that the male gaze in the Western and action genres is not purely constituted in the relay suggested by Mulvey, but also contains an element of voyeuristic looking at the male body. The male body, stripped for action, becomes object of desire as well as site of suture for the male spectator. The homosexual eroticism occasioned by this feminisation of the male body is assuaged through violent action on the part of the protagonist restoring a sense of sadistic control for the male spectator. Neale comments on suppressed homo-eroticism in such genres:-

'The repression of any explicit avowal of eroticism in the act of looking at the male seems structurally linked to a narrative content marked by sado-masochistic phantasies and scenes. Hence both forms of voyeuristic looking, intra- and extra-diagetic, are especially evident in those moments of contest and combat [...] at which a narrative outcome is determined through a fight or gun-battle, at which male struggle becomes pure spectacle [...] taken to the point of fetishistic parody [...] the look begins to oscillate between voyeurism and fetishism as the narrative starts to freeze and spectacle takes over.' [Neale, 1983]

When the female body is substituted for the diagetic male body in such narratives, the element of homo-eroticism in the male look at the male protagonist is displaced onto the female body and thus rendered acceptable for the male spectator. Solterer [1991] suggests that somthing like this explains narrativisation of female militancy in 15th-century French texts in which the homo-eroticism of male combat as spectacle is displaced onto the female body in dream-narratives in order to suppress the homosexual implications of the gladiatorial spectacle. However, what becomes evident in the resultant masculinisation of the female body is an element of lesbian-eroticism for the female spectator. This, no doubt, goes some way to explaining the appeal of such films to lesbian audiences. Alien, Aliens and Red Sonja all have the narrative outcome determined by a gladiatorial spectacle between two women — against a female excess personified by the monstrous mother (Alien and Aliens) or witch (Red Sonja).

Substitution of the female body in the spectacle of male combat disavows its homo-erotic content for the male spectator. However, if the heterosexual male spectator of the male body is troubled by an element of homoeroticism, female spectatorship of the female protagonist must evoke a lesbian eroticism — both in a phallic-narcissistic identification with and an unmediated looking at the masculinised female body as object of desire. The lesbian implications of this manoeuvre now have to be disavowed or displaced for the heterosexual male spectator (at whom the film is principally aimed) because lesbianism would exclude him, as well as for the heterosexual female spectator. It is interesting to note that Thelma and Louise, which foregrounds female bonding, did not sell well to the young male audience to which this kind of film is directed — but which did consume the images of Ripley and Connor quite happily.

Marginal identities are stereotyped and tokenised in a multi-cultural bunch of 'squaddies'. Differences — particularly those of race and sexuality — are also defused through joking. Vasquez is stereotypically 'butch' and holds her own amongst the men:

— 'Hey, Vasquez — have you every been mistaken for a man?

Her racial identity is the subject of another joke:

— 'She thought they said "illegal alien" and signed up!'

Vasquez tops a career of male bonding and bravado by dying in heroic hara-kiri protecting the rear as Ripley and Newt escape (which solves the 'problem' of lesbianism). The squaddies constantly bandy fag-jokes. As the bottled inseminating-alien jumps towards Burke waving a penis-like organ, a soldier jokes on the homosexual implications. Identity politics and 'political correctness' are knowingly sent up. The android objects to the term 'robot', preferring to be called a 'synthetic human', and the alien is referred to as a 'xenomorph' ('you mean a bug-hunt' jeer the marines).

Homo-social bonding, excluding and ridiculing of Ripley by the male-military hierarchy, are broadly sketched. She is offended by the 'off' jokes of the marines; but the boys are alright — underneath they're all lovable. Differences are cancelled by death or submerged in male bonding engendered through mutual reliance in military action. Even the android-other, to which Ripley is initially hostile, proves his masculine reliability, and his final joke is a mutual recognition — that Ripley is 'not bad — for a human [girl]'.

In contrast to the relatively complex exploration of 'otherness' in Alien, Aliens marginalises, narratively resolves, or fetishistically conceals difference. Ripley's 'missing' phallus is more than generously supplied. Ripley wins out through the deployment of sheer firepower and phallic hardware rather than cautious, 'feminine' reflection and self-control as in Alien. There is sheer phallic pleasure in wielding all that wham-bam megavolt hardware and blasting those ugly aliens to smithereens. At one point, a marine shoves the barrel of his gun into an alien's mouth quoting 'eat this' before blowing off its head (a symbolic reference to homo-eroticism familiar in 'Nam action movies). Ripley 'proves' her 'masculinity' and gains some respect from the military by successfully manipulating the hydraulic fork-lift-robot which is 'worn' like an armoured extension of the body.

The masculinised female protagonist avoids the problem of homo-eroticism for the male spectator, and also disavows castration anxiety in the erotic spectacle of the female. However, for the male spectator, the spectre of female sexual aggression is raised and must be controlled or disavowed. The lesbian implication is intensified rather than releived by Ripley's 'female-transgressive' violence. For many lesbian spectators, Ripley's transgressive violence is intensely pleasurable. For the heterosexual female spectator, transgressive aggression may be pleasurable, but its lesbian element must be disavowed.

Male anxiety at Ripley's aggression is controlled by emphasising her heterosexual availability. Lesbian eroticism is thus also disavowed. Female bonding is devolved onto Ripley's relationship with Newt — a substitute child. Ripley's active female-eroticism is thus heterosexually contained without shading into incest (as it would had Newt been her natural child). Ripley is returned to the heterosexual family structure (absent in Alien). When Ripley discovers that colonists have settled on the infested planets she mutters 'families' in agonised tones. Her concern for the families influences her decision to go on the combat mission.

This re-integration of female-eroticism into the family is further signified through Ripley's relationship with Hicks. Each scene of emotional intimacy with Hicks, who is masculine-protective towards her, is followed by a scene of protective, motherly, intimacy between Ripley and Newt. Ripley gives the locator Hicks has given her to Newt. Interestingly, Hicks is blinded by his injuries — but this is the only reference to the implications of Ripley's phallicisation (they sleep in separate life-support units). The final shot is of Ripley and Newt sleeping side by side.

Motherhood is a central theme of both Aliens and Terminator II and functions as 'excuse' for Ripley's transgressive behaviour, as disavowal of lesbianism, and as locus standi of all female aggression. The Amazonian Ripley reluctantly dons the girdle of male aggression to protect the family (the heterosexual order) and to correct injustice, corruption and excessive violence in the patriarchal order — the traditional 'civilising' influence of heterosexual femininity. As though this maiden-warrior-mission were not justification enough, her orgy of violence at the climax of the film is more immediately inspired by the 'instinct' to protect 'her young'.

In Aliens, the feminine coding of the alien is amplified and the sub-textual misogyny of Alien is more explicit as the 'Amazon' meets the 'monstrous-feminine' in gladiatorial spectacle. Ripley's 'immaculate' motherhood is repeatedly juxtaposed to the slimy, drooling, biological, female-plumbing of alien motherhood (the female-reproductive body). Burke tries horrifically to 'impregnate' Ripley and Newt in order to smuggle aliens back to earth. The eggs are being laid by a sort of queen-bee alien deep in the bowels of the space-station. In rescuing Newt, Ripley encounters the queen-bee who has attacked Ripley's 'young'. After Ripley has destroyed her 'nest', the slimy biological alien-mother pursues Newt. Ripley puts on the ultimate armour — the hydraulic robot-body-shell. As the hangar door opens upward, Ripley is gradually revealed transformed. Back-lit, she appears almost like the alien body with angular, metallic planes and hydraulic muscle, suggesting an armoured reptile. At the same time, the image is extremely phallic, converting Ripley's feminine vulnerability to immensely satisfying armoured power.

This female-to-female gladiatorial spectacle also allows the male spectator to work off his anxieties about 'castrating' feminists and the monstrous regiment of women, through evoking, and overcoming the nightmare of female sexual aggression through the figure of the maiden-warrior. The phallicised female gladiator — the Amazon — masters the titilating threat of feminine sexual aggression (erotic excess) in a fetishised display for the male spectator, combining phallic narcissism, fetishistic looking (at Ripley) and voyeuristic-sadistic looking (with Ripley at the alien body).

Ripley challenges the alien to hand-to-hand combat saying: 'Come on, you bitch!' Lesbian 'recognition' in the female-monstrous may well set up a resistance at this point. However pleasurable Ripley's transgressive, orgiastic violence may be, the misogynistic construction of female reproductive processes — the female body — as monstrosity becomes disturbing. If a male protagonist used the term 'bitch' before exerting sadistic mastery over the parthogenetic-female-constructed-as-monstrous, we might be somewhat concerned as feminists. Could it be that the male spectator is disavowing his misogynistic aggression towards ('uppity' self-sufficient) women and/or the threat of dissolution in the (regime of) 'the feminine', by the substitution of the (fetishised) Amazon for the sadistic-controlling male protagonist? As Springer [1991], with reference to Theweleit's [1987] comments on fascist misogynistic identifications, remarks: '[t]he machine body becomes the ideal tool for ego maintenance.' But what happens when the 'machine body' is female and the spectator lesbian?

Does the lesbian spectator risk internalising and then disavowing this misogyny in the pleasurable rush of transgressive violence? Is this (male) violence really transgressive of the dominant order because it is carried out by women?

Whilst both Alien and Aliens tend towards the suppression of homosexual and lesbian elements of visual pleasure, and both exhibit misogyny, there is a discernible difference between them in their degree of self-awareness and the treatment of 'difference', especially sexual difference. Aliens, with its high degree of narrative closure, re-asserts phallic dominance through sadistic violence and heterosexualises the female protagonist; whilst Alien permits a much greater degree of ambiguity to subsist. Nevertheless, there is forbidden pleasure in the masculinised body and violence of the female protagonist in the kick-ass genre. To what extent is such pleasure 'subversive'?

Feminist as Mad Mother-Machine — Terminator II

Terminator II: Judgement Day (again directed by Cameron) also features a 'strong' female protagonist; a surface pro-feminism, and a misogynistic sub-text. In The Terminator, Sarah Jane Connors, played by Linda Hamilton, is a fairly typical 'final girl'. Screaming ineffectually through the initial stages of the plot, she pulls herself together and overcomes the implacable robot. In Terminator II, the first image of Sarah is of her strenuously performing pull-ups in high-security detention. Her body has been 'masculinised', having developed a strongly defined musculature through exercise and combat training, and she wears masculine sport clothes. The implications of Ripley's protagonism have been give a visual point of reference in Hamilton's bi-sexed body.

Sarah has been detained in a mental institution for attempting to sabotage the corporation which she knows to be manufacturing the technological doom of humanity. She describes to the doctor the visit of an implacable robot from a post-nuclear-holocaust future in which the survivors struggle to resist their extermination by robots controlled by an artificial intellegence, originally designed as a defence computer called Skynet. Sarah's unlikely story (feminine voice) and her aggressive determination to protect her child and the human race at large are interpreted as insanity. As she is questioned by the psychiatrist, her face is monitored on a screen-within-a-screen. The doctor pauses on the monitored image of Sarah's face distorted with 'insane' aggressive, feminist rage.

This representation of female anger as lunacy is ironically undercut by the spectator's knowledge (assuming that s/he has seen or is aware of The Terminator) that Sarah is actually telling the truth. This is further emphasised at one point by a cut to a model dinosaur decorating the offices of the cybernetics corporation in question, as Sarah tries to 'con' the doctor that she no longer believes these things in order to gain her release. Sarah is subsequently sexually assaulted by an orderly whilst under physical restraint. This is clear pro-feminist commentary on the patriarchal tendency to ignore women's insights and to interpret women's valid anger as unjustifiable and therefore mentally disturbed, for women to be committed to mental institutions when they are 'troublesome', and the incidence of sexual assault on female patients — because they will not be believed should they complain.

Clearly, all is not well in the patriarchal state. The corporation is soul-less, regimented and corrupted by greed (feminine-ordered). Technology proliferates for its own sake and dominates rather than serving 'man'kind. Women are 'left' to head families, John is out of the control of his foster-parents because his foster-father can't be bothered to 'discipline' him properly. The police are ineffectual or even evil robots themselves. Men are failing in their duties as protective husbands and fathers, and failing to take on board women's demands for a safer world for their children. These are typical concerns of such genres in which the individual must take the law into his own hands because the law is (no longer) reliable. In Terminator II, this is a job for the liberal 'new father'.

Technology is not represented as 'evil' in itself; but as morally neutral. It can be deployed for or against human interests. Sometimes it is indispensable, sometimes it is unreliable, its effects can be unexpected, and it can be overridden or reprogrammed. 'Man' is now powerless without technology, and must exert adequate control over it in order to regain control over human 'destiny'. Sarah is obliged to take on a male role to protect the family, and to become a suitable role-model for her son in the absence of an 'adequate' male. John Connor's 'messianic' quality is his ability to re-assert mastery of the machines. In Terminator II, he has reprogrammed the Terminator as controllable, user-friendly, technology and he is the one who skillfully overrides recalcitrant machines throughout. Sarah's role is biological, as are her motivations — she is to bear and protect the 'messiah'.

The message that Sarah is reluctantly obliged to become aggressive and combatative because the family is under threat is repeated. The image of the playground vaporised in a nuclear holocaust not only appears behind the opening and closing credits, but is rerun as Sarah reflects on the irony that only a machine-father (programmed by the son) 'measures up' as 'father'. Looking wistfully first at her son with Schwarzenegger in the role of 'reprogrammed new father', then at her friends with their infant son — backlit with nostalgic sungold, Sarah drifts into her repeating nightmare in which she stares at a feminised and unselfconscious version of herself with an infant in a playground. As the masculinised Sarah stares at her feminised 'self' through a chainlink fence, screaming to 'wake' her feminised self to the danger, the playground is engulfed in a nuclear firestorm, vapourising the children and the two Sarahs. Sarah's masculinisation is a response to emergency conditions — a crisis in masculinity — her 'natural' self is a happy, unselfconsious mother.

Perhaps sensitive to criticism of Cameron's own films, there is a commentary on violence as 'solution' to violence here. Cameron [1992] claims that this is the first pacifist action movie. John Connor tells the reprogrammed cyborg-soldier that he must not kill, but only disable. John insists on preventing Sarah from killing Dyson, the inventor of Skynet. When the good-Terminator remarks that Sarah will save a lot of lives by killing the inventor of the defence computer, John replies: 'Haven't you figured out why you can't kill people? In case the spectator has not yet figured it out either, Sarah is next shown breaking down, unable to proceed as the terrified inventor's wife and son huddle around him trying to protect him from her murderous onslaught. Realising that she is destroying the family which she seeks to protect, she switches to a 'feminist diatribe' against the inventor.

Dyson, the inventor, is played by a black actor. Sarah rants at him that men 'like him' invented the hydrogen bomb. Whilst the attribution of creative achievement to black people is a positive step for Hollywood, it seems unfortunate that the only 'achievement' thus attributed here is that of the worst instrument of mass destruction ever invented. The hydrogen bomb was, of course, invented by white men who tested in areas occupied by people of colour and then wreaked mass destruction on more people of colour. It's attribution to a black inventor might be interpreted as adding insult to injury. Whilst placing black actors in 'neutral' roles represents a 'progressive' attitude, it can produce negative effects because race is not neutral in Western society.

The image of the black man here bears much of the narrative's critique of 'inadequate' Western masculinity — which, given the history of 'feminisation' (disempowerment) of black men in which this narrative colludes, seems particularly unreasonable. An extremely low-angled, fetishistic shot of Schwarzenegger clad in black leather in Sarah's point of view as she cowers away from him on the floor during her hospital escape is repeated exactly; this time in Dyson's point of view as Dyson cowers, wounded, on the floor at Schwarzenegger's feet. He subsequently requires constant 'chivvying' to keep him up to the mark after he has been reluctantly recruited to the destruction of Skynet. He is also consigned to the 'space of the feminine' by his creation of the machine 'genus' which is protecting its kind by killing off humans (who tried to 'pull the plug' on it to protect their own generic survival).

As Sarah delivers her 'fanatical feminist' tirade against the wounded Dyson, he complains that she is 'judging' him (a common — though somewhat obvious — male complaint in the face of feminist criticism). John advises her to 'get more constructive' and to enlist Dyson's help in destroying the threatening technology — his own monstrous offspring. At this point, it becomes clear that, in terms of this narrative, Sarah not only appears mad — but has become 'fanatically' feminist and has got things just as much 'out of proportion' as Dyson, who cannot see anything wrong in developing technology that may be used in mass destruction. A metaphorical link is thus forged between Sara's feminism and the monstrous regime of the machine 'mothers'. It is left to John, the male messiah, to advance the voice of (white, male) 'reason', to keep his flakey mother under control, to keep the black man on the right course, and to ensure the destruction of the implacable machines.

Motherhood in Terminator II is not only explanation and excuse for Sarah's adoption of a male role, but repeats the 'nativity story' of The Terminator. Facing obliteration by Skynet, its technological offspring (coded feminine in its unknowable, implacable drive to survive), mankind requires a messiah. Sarah is the vessel through which power is transmitted in a closed circle in which time-travelling fuses father and son as aspects of a single individual. Now John Connor (J.C.) sends back a reprogrammed cyborg to represent the ideal-father-aspect which he, the son, will become. Again, Sarah's implacable motherhood is pitted against another implacable mother for the survival of 'man' (thereby ensuring her continuing subordination to the father and the son who will become the father).

On the face of it, it would seem that the high spot of Terminator II for lesbians would be the dunking of Arnold Swarzenegger (as symbolical 'new father') in a vat of molten metal. Nevertheless, a lot of lesbians found Linda Hamilton's masculinised body-image and transgressive violence very pleasurable, and/or sympathised with her character's rage. In particular, the confrontation in the final scenes between Sarah and the bad Terminator in which she advances rhythmically firing an enormous, phallic weapon which is reset by a powerful arm action between firing, gives equally enormous narcissistic pleasure, which also seems 'transgressive' for women and lesbians.