(Amidst all this extraordinary narrative closure, isn’t there perhaps something missing?)
Do we believe, at the trilogy’s end, the astonishing ease with which Luke not only accepts the “incest taboo” but seems to be, if anything, its walking embodiment? (Is there something missing…?) For upon learning that Leia is his sister, once his rage at his father is spent and has been replaced by love, he does not just accept the fact that his desire for her cannot be fulfilled: rather, the desire itself seems to vanish — indeed seems never to have existed!
Isn’t there something left out…?
The quintessentially Evil Cyborg to rage across the country and its giant screens in the year before Haraway’s manifesto appeared was Arnold Schwarzenegger, in The Terminator — certainly his best film. The allegory is a lot more violent, a lot less subtle, than in the Star Wars triptych: The Terminator has crossed time (another of those mythical abysses) in a spectacular leap, leaving him vividly naked, to attack, at the root, the seed of all possible future civilization. Here, the mechanical component begins as hidden, secret, implied within Schwarzenegger’s abundant flesh. But during the film that flesh is punctured, scarred, ripped or cut away — sometimes brutally and dispassionately by Schwarzenegger himself. (The scene in which he fixes the machinery inside his own forearm is a kind of onanistic replay of the scene already cited in the Lucas film.) At the two-thirds point, what remains of the corporeal is incinerated once and for all by a gasoline explosion, and the mechanical, burned free even of tarnish, rises gleaming and clanking to dominate the film’s final third, pursuing the heroine (pregnant with the superman) until she finally crushes him by making him crawl after her between the ominous and claustrophobic plates of a giant metal crusher, managing to throw the switch when she reaches the other side, creating a kind of vagina dynama, dangerous for her but — we all know it, and only wait for visual confirmation — fatal for him… making her, at least for a moment, something of a cyborg herself. He is flattened, with his bright claw out, already grasping her ankle in what, moments later, we know would have become a mortal grip.
But let’s extract the mangled metal from the crusher plates, straighten the crumpled limbs, examine the remains of this gleaming monster. On exhumation, we can see it is basically a metal skeleton. It is clean and efficient (flesh and blood, if anything, only seemed to hamper it, encumber it, make it heavy and slow); and, as we saw, it was desperately strong. Its torso was a polished barrel, most certainly hiding complexities of circuitry, as doubtless did its skull’s tin egg with red lenses. (As with Lucas’s C-3PO, its mother was the Maria robot from Lang’s Metropolis.) But note: its hips are a single bar no thicker than femur or ulna.
Certainly, there, something is missing…
Such pursuits of beleaguered women in commercial films all have their sexual component, all have their punitive — I hesitate to say “sadistic,” but there, in the hesitation, it has been said, as though it refuses to remain absent from this rhetorical galaxy — reading. Yet, as we have lavished an extra bit of attention to the physical structure of the cyborg in this film, we must pay a bit of extra attention to the narrative in which he has been so violently thrust. Unmarried, his woman adversary has had sex, and is pregnant as proof. (Everywoman, she bears the name of five others in the film — all previously “terminated” by the cyborg.) Are we mired, then, in that rape fantasy comprising the narrative genre running from Clarissa through Tess of the D’Urbervilles to Dressed to Kill that ordains women who do not have sex must be punished for withholding it; and women who choose to have sex with one man must be punished for not having it with another?
Probably.
There is confusion in the myth here, though, for Sara manages to escape, to triumph, to kill, to bear a son. Well, at Haraway’s exhortation, let us take pleasure in it and go on with our work.
Haraway posits the cyborg as a feminist image — or at least an image useful in the pursuit of feminist goals. These two cyborgs, one a secret (and good) cyborg, the other an overt (and evil) cyborg, are both male: neither is mentioned in Haraway’s manifesto. But her own attentions compel me to the following observation.
One of them — Luke — is such a friend to women (or, rather, to the single woman — Princess Leia — in the foreground story) that most of the audience just doesn’t believe it. Indeed, his friendship to women has much the quality of Lucas’s own throughout the trilogy: a kind of on-again-off-again lackluster concern with keeping Leia from becoming too much of a wimp, strongest in the first film, a left-over habit in the second, and simply missing from the third — a “feminist sympathy” that never gets as far as what, after all, must be the most important step: i.e., allowing Leia to know (or talk to, or be friends with, or consider the situation of) any other woman in the universe.
The other cyborg — the Terminator — is an implacable enemy of woman (and of life and of everything else), but can, thank some Higher Power (all too easy to name in the Wagner/Bergson/Shaw vitalistic tradition that controls the plot of both The Terminator and Star Wars: the Life Force), be vanquished by one.
Is the key to the cyborg image provided in the observation by historian Louise White in the symposium Women in Science Fiction published in Jeff Smith’s fanzine Khatru in 1975? Writing of Helva, that most famous cyborg in the precincts of written science fiction, White notes that she is “… another woman with her cunt cut out.”
Written between 1961 and 1969, and collected together as The Ship Who Sang (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), the McCaffrey series, which we have already tried to read, tells of a little girl who is born hopelessly deformed. But to save her life, most of her deformed body (including her genitals) is surgically removed and the rest is made the central brain in a complex mechanical body, or “shell,” with many superhuman qualities — magnifying vision is the first one we see at work in the tales — that finally becomes the basis for a spaceship. Helva’s foreground story is her love for her captain, his death, her mourning, her eventual revenge (“The Ship Who Mourned” and “The Ship Who Killed” are, recall, two of the story titles from within the series), and finally her happy repartnering with a new captain.
But, as White has noted, even in this most heterosexually sobrietous tale — as, hopefully, we have seen by now in all our others, however troubling — there is something missing.
III
… But what in fact was this appeal from the subject beyond the void of his speech? It was an appeal to the very principle of truth… But first and foremost it was the appeal of the void, in the ambiguous gap of an attempted seduction of the other by the means on which the subject has come compliantly to rely, and to which he will commit the monumental construct of his narcissism.
Let us skip over a great deal at this point. Let us leave a gap. Let us allow whatever is missing to remain… missing.
(Let us hope, with the rest of civilization, that the disruptive force of the occlusion does not return to destroy us and/or our argument…)