The production and maintenance of a movie star as
hyper-masculine as Arnold Schwarzenegger must be an arduous ongoing process. If
Terminator Genisys is any indication, the industry that created Schwarzenegger may not be
limited to the mere extinction of the 67-year old action movie mainstay. The
titular, robotic role originated in James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator is probably the most
iconic of Schwarzenegger's career, which now dates back over 45 years to the
schlock of Hercules in New York
(Arthur A. Seidelman, 1969). As a star, Schwarzenegger's career trajectory and
cultural impact are unlike any other. As an actor, if I may, his skills are
severely limited.
I say this with full awareness that it’s a
stereotypical cheap jab at an easy target, but, more importantly, as a somewhat
flabbergasted acknowledgement that this extreme imbalance of masculinity over
ability has been such a longstanding, surmountable factor for movie consumers.
The triumph of the Star, in this case, comes at the expense of Acting.
Schwarzenegger's rise to stardom (ironically crossing paths with the great
actor's director Robert Altman in The
Long Goodbye, 1973), traverses a period of Hollywood filmmaking that
gradually shifted values from one that was actor-oriented to one that was
spectacle-oriented.
For Hercules
in New York the Austrian body-builder-turned-thespian had to have his part
dubbed by a more intelligible actor; an interesting reversal on the appearance
in Terminator Genisys of Australian
bodybuilder Bret Azar, a "body dub" for Schwarzenegger in the film's
attempt to re-contextualize scenes from the original Terminator. Hercules is a similarly suited role for Schwarzenegger,
foreshadowing the type of mythic, repeatable roles through which his Star power
would produce a new brand of right-wing cinema.
In Terminator
Genisys Schwarzenegger continues this long, conservative trek that has
criss-crossed a political career and three Expendables
films, kicking ass to the vicarious delight of aging, small-minded racists and
militants who lived through the simultaneous eras of the Counter-Culture, the
Hollywood Renaissance, and Viet Nam, and still have a bony right arm with which
to pull a voting lever. This entry of the long-exhausted Terminator franchise amplifies this historical aspect of the
conversation by placing the action in San Francisco, the epicenter of the
counter-culture movement, which we eventually see Schwarzenegger's aging
Terminator (Pops) transform into an underground arsenal. The speakers of San
Francisco, once carrying across the sound of revolution, are transformed into
weapons for destroying an even deadlier Terminator, the T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee).
But, the larger enemy is the new Skynet-as-flower-child, Genisys, whose
youthful hologram promises in the idealistic vernacular of a bygone era:
"We will change the world together."
Of course, it's Schwarzenegger's job, once again, to
bash any uprising of change, intellectualism, or youthful idealism. And,
perhaps, the once die-hard angst over the hippies has faded a bit, usurped by
the fear of a technological age that will trojan-horse in via video games, and
the wish of a generation to "Be Sedated," as per the film's Ramones-penned
refrain. In a scene late in the film, in the underground San Francisco arsenal,
the relentless time signature of the Ramones is too much for Pops the Terminator,
as he fails to load his final clips in rhythm with the music or his human rival
of masculinity, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney, in for Michael Biehn). It's here that
Reese reminds Pops of another of the film's refrains, that the Terminator is
"old, but not obsolete." For a movie I had taken as a sometimes
clever genre exercise for at least the first hour, at this point I could only
hope for the obsolescence of the Terminator
franchise.
Beyond the blow that the Schwarzenegger era dealt to
the craft of acting, and the conservative ideology it passed off as heroism
along the way, Terminator Genisys is
perhaps the most degraded example of "post-classical" cinema, as
discussed by Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland in their book Studying Contemporary American Cinema.
Not only defined by the aforementioned value of craft over spectacle, Terminator Genisys is what they would
call a "pastiche of the classical" where "the classical cinema
is merely refigured within the post-classical, neither abandoned or opposed,"
not unlike the refigured metal globs that find their way back to the T-1000.
Yet, pastiche doesn’t quite cover the case of Terminator Genisys, nor any of the multiple post-classical movies
occupying theatres this summer. Like Avengers:
Age of Ultron and Jurassic World before
it, Terminator Genisys continues the
trend of meta-narratives that are not only products of pastiche, but resigned
to a preoccupation with their own terminal nature as product, hopelessly unable
to exist on their own--not only as successful films, but as mere comprehensible narratives—with Schwarzenegger’s flaking
countenance as the latest signifier of this dire trend.
Ultimately, Terminator
Genisys is about Arnold Schwarzenegger as an aging Star, and our
naturalized anxiety about watching our icons of masculinity age. In Richard
Dyer’s book Heavenly Bodies, he
reminds us: “Stars articulate what it is to be a human being in contemporary
society,” and that the “individual” represented by the Star is complex in its
construction, as well as its impact on how we construct notions of ourselves
and each other. Terminator Genisys
adds a new binary to the way in which Dyer sees the complex physical body of a
Star like Schwarzenegger, here in his most literally artificial role, made even
more complex by the nature of the indestructible underneath of the Terminator
character, and the potential for endless incarnations of Schwarzenegger as a
marketable commodity well after his death. Where Dyer sees the classical heroes
divided by their “public” and “private” aspects, or their “naturalness” and
“artifice,” Terminator Genisys adds
the post-classical constructs of the Star as “human” or “post-human.” One has
to wonder to what extent we will become naturalized to the distinction between
a “thespian” and a “synthespian” in the movie production, consumption, and
criticism of the future. Perhaps
Schwarzenegger can re-do his past failures like Hercules in New York from beyond the grave? Or, given the recent
share of the cineplex market occupied by the Christian right, maybe he could
experience a second coming in a biblical epic, simply titled: Genesis.
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