James Cameron's Long Vietnam Hangover

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)
near the culmination of their journey, in The Terminator

“Listen, understand,” Kyle Reese urges Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bargained with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” His eerie, clenched-teeth delivery is famous. The future’s most villainous forces have sent a monster to kill Sarah, and Kyle must be equally monstrous to protect her.

Nearly forty years after its debut, it’s easy to forget the ambiguity which greeted The Terminator’s first-generation audiences. Though Schwarzenegger’s stone-faced murderer is clearly a monster, and kills people from the beginning, Kyle Reese appears hardly better. He steals a lawman’s gun, flees the police, and carries a shotgun into the night. The only difference between Reese and the Terminator is that Reese shows emotions, mainly desperation.

As the movie develops, Reese’s context becomes clearer. He’s never known anything but war: born into a nuclear-scarred hellscape, he trained in military tactics from childhood. He lives in a bunker, sleeps in his uniform, and cradles his gun like a teddy bear. Unlocking the story, it becomes clear that, where the Terminator lacks emotion because it’s essentially bad, Reese shows damaged, battle-scarred emotions, because he’s basically good.

In my youth, this transition seemed perfectly reasonable. As I’ve written recently, science fiction often tends toward simple binary morality, pitting veritable heroes against straightforward villains. Since I was nine years old when The Terminator dropped, I didn’t understand the cultural context, that America was suffering lingering growing pains. It would be years before I understood PTSD, something many adults were first grappling with then, among Vietnam veterans.

Years later, I watched writer-director James Cameron delivering an interview about his follow-up movie, Aliens. Cameron acknowledged he’d essentially written a Vietnam movie. He asked himself: what would compel a survivor to willingly return to the jaws of combat? In the first Alien movie, Ripley didn’t much fight the xenomorph; every direct challenge got someone killed. Except for the final scene, Ripley’s triumph came from simply staying alive.

In the sequel, though, Ripley chooses combat. She directly challenges the monsters which bedevil her, and destroys them. Like Sarah Connor, she goes from workaday drone, somewhat adrift, to a warrior. But both do so because they have something worth living for: Kyle Reese, in Sarah’s case, and Newt, in Ripley’s. When a meaningful relationship becomes important enough for each woman, she becomes able to kill.

Ripley (Siguorney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn)
near the culmination of their journey, in Aliens

War, Kyle Reese implies, destroys relationships. Though surrounded by people, he’s essentially alone. Sarah Connor’s Polaroid becomes that staple of Vietnam-movie tropes, The Girl Back Home. Even amid constant death and destruction, Reese retains that shred of humanity, because he’s fighting for something outside the theatre of combat. But when he reaches her, he’s so war-scarred that he can’t express it. Sarah is initially terrified of him, and rightly, too.

Private Joker, the narrator of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam classic Full Metal Jacket, famously muses: “The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” This seems contradictory. An indestructible, fearless man would seem robotic. The Terminator is fearless and almost indestructible. Isn’t Arnold, then, the prototypical heroic Vietnam soldier, rather than fear-stricken, haggard Reese?

Reese, the Terminator, Ripley, and the Alien Queen are, for Cameron, four manifestations of Vietnam’s imprint on American society. Reese and Ripley have had war define themselves so thoroughly that, like their Baby Boomer culture, they can’t imagine life without it. Reese, the soldier, is scarred, carrying the war inside himself. Ripley, the civilian, simply accepts the mental image of the pursuing xenomorph as her constant shadow self.

The Terminator, by contrast, simply kills, because that’s his programming. No officers, no end-point, just a mission to kill. The Queen is arguably worse: she doesn’t just kill, she teaches the homeland a culture of killing and appetite (see Kathleen Belew’s history of White Power). Reese and Ripley adapt to their circumstances: Reese by actually expressing love, Ripley by defending her surrogate daughter Newt. The Terminator and the Queen never adapt.

Therefore, the moral binary in James Cameron’s early work isn’t between Good and Evil. It’s between those capable of change, and those incapable. In post-Vietnam America, haunted by the reality of our shared culpability, Good and Evil seemed increasingly outmoded. We’ve never successfully embraced these paradigms since. Cameron’s early movies remain timely because they offer an alternate morality, asking: are we able to change?

Why This Strange Appeal to the Civil War?

An insurgent, tentatively identified as Jake Angeli,
during Wednesday's attack on the Capitol (source)

I can say one good thing about Wednesday’s insurgent attack on the U.S. Capitol Building: it was incompetent. As horrific as it was watching ravening crowds surge into the Capitol, its first physical breach since 1814, carrying General Lee’s battle flag into the building for the first time ever, it could’ve been far worse. The insurgents clearly had no strategy to hold the building. They also, despite fine-sounding promises, didn’t have the President’s support.

Many hard-right extremists have long believed we require only one significant violent display, to push America into a second Civil War. Besides isolated events from individual bigots, this belief plays large into many violent groups’ principles, including the Boogaloo Movement and The Turner Diaries. Some of Wednesday’s attackers, if their rhetoric is correct, believed they’d start such an uprising. Many violent traitors believe Civil War is one good hard push away, like a bowel movement.

This Civil War rhetoric isn’t new. Us news junkies remember July 2018, when tinfoil hat wearer Alex Jones claimed “Democrats Plan To Launch Civil War On July 4th.” Please, the Democrats have proven we can’t organize a two-car funeral, much less a violent uprising. But by priming his audience that war is inevitable, Jones helped justify his audience preparing for violence. Conservatives apparently believe, if another Civil War happens, they’ll somehow win this time around.

It seems counterintuitive. When Confederates shelled Fort Sumter, they presumably believed they were striking a blow for regional autonomy. But the first Civil War resulted in consolidating federal authority. As historian James McPherson writes, every Constitutional amendment before the Civil War placed limits on federal authority; almost every amendment after the Civil War expanded federal authority. The war didn’t protect slaveholders, grant Southern autonomy, or accomplish anything its fomenters intended. (Bear with me, don’t nitpick.)

The first Civil War was arguably a rear-guard action. Growing mechanization of farming made slavery an increasing financial burden, besides its inherent injustice, and Northern industry had moved money into a handful of cities. Cotton feudalism simply lacked further funds. The Solid South needed to either modernize, or revolt against modernity. Like today’s coal miners, demanding protections for their increasingly obsolete trade, Southern plantation farmers chose rebellion, rather than be dragged into the 19th Century.

Alex Jones' ineffective 2018 scare

We see the same happen time and again in American history. Racists would rather bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church than admit their philosophy was odious and antidemocratic. The White Power movement would rather blow up the Oklahoma City federal building than admit America was moving on without them. Defenders of the status quo always think killing people and destroying property will stop America’s slippery slide into modernity. Civil War is an alternative to retreat.

Alex Jones’ 2018 Civil War scaremongering served the same purpose. Jones prepped his audience for violence so he wouldn’t have to admit the President he admired was corrupt, philandering, and inept. The Boogaloo Bois would rather shoot people than admit Americans, in the aggregate, reject their backward, racist philosophy. Wednesday’s insurgents had to attack the Capitol, or admit America voted against their guy. In every case, diehards think violence will prevent the ignominy of retreat.

I used to wonder whether arch-conservatives believed their Civil War rhetoric. Did they really believe the stories of threadbare Confederates around a campfire, cooking their meager rations of beans while Jebediah strums a plangent hymn on his guitar? Their ongoing embrace of Confederate regalia would suggest it. But now I see, they aren’t embracing the myth of delayed victory. Like the Chicago Cubs, the Confederacy exists specifically to lose; victory means relinquishing a lucrative story.

Therefore, American conservatives love Confederate mythology to the exact extent they know they’re losing. Like their grey-clad forebears, these reactionaries hope defeat will transform them from dirt farmers and White trash, into noble heroes of a Lost Cause. Maybe that’s why these antimodern relics love costumes so much, because they’re attempting to curate how they’ll be remembered in defeat. They don’t want Civil War because they’ll win; they just want to control the narrative later.

Wednesday’s fleeting triumph helped secure their noble defeat. Senators who’d planned to object to the election, reversed themselves quickly, and President-Elect Biden was certified just hours after the insurgency ended. The administration immediately pledged “an orderly transition.” The attackers got what they wanted: history will soon forget the elected officials. Going forward, the shared public narrative will be about the angry, pulsing mob of ordinary people, who temporarily brought the American government to its knees.

America, and the Klingon Way

Klingon warriors, as depicted since the 1980s

“You look for the battles in the wrong place,” Lt. Commander Worf admonishes a fellow Klingon, in the episode “Heart of Glory.” “The true test of a warrior is not without—it is within.” Worf has been quarreling with Korris about the nature of Klingon valor, a recurring theme in Star Trek: the Next Generation. His ongoing efforts to define himself as Klingon, while serving in Starfleet, are his greatest character arc.

In another recent Trek essay, I wrote: “America has become darker, more violent, more brutal—dare I say, more Klingon-ish.” I meant to describe how Trek responds to developments in wilder culture. An outside respondent replied: “I don’t know that America is any darker or more brutal now than it was, especially for persons of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.” Which is, in fairness, pretty accurate.

Science fiction, probably more than any other mainstream genre, is innately tied to the years in which it’s created. First, and most obviously, because science fiction always reflects its authors’ relationship with science and technology, which evolves rapidly. But in visual media, continuing improvements in visual effects make more complex depictions of non-human worlds increasingly possible. Sometimes that’s bad; after all, Jar-Jar Binks exists.

However, the development of visual effects also made Klingons possible. Though the conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire is a background story throughout original Trek, the Klingons appear in only six episodes. Their culture is vaguely “oriental,” reflected in their original makeup design, with bronze-colored skin, thick eyebrows, and slightly slanted eyes. They look less like aliens, than like White actors in Charlie Chan makeup.

Only with the big-screen movies did Klingons develop any real identity. In 1977, they had distinct physical features; by 1984, they had a language. And with TNG, they began developing a culture. We saw images of their religion, their government, even what Klingons did during their off hours—which apparently consists of getting drunk and brawling. We especially saw Worf’s efforts to maintain his warrior ethic and proclaim his honor.

So, to refine my previous statement, I’d say America is more Klingon-ish today, not because it’s necessarily more brutal, but because it’s more brutal in a specific, highly organized way. Klingons don’t fight because they’re genetically predisposed toward violence; that’s why puppies and grade-school boys fight, and it’s something they hopefully outgrow. These Klingons fight because they have organized philosophies of individual and collective might.

Klingon Warriors, as depicted in the original Star Trek

Even more important, Worf repeatedly protests the importance of honor. I have many friends who believe American culture today suffers because we’ve lost the importance of “honor”; these friends are all current or former military, or children of military. But “honor” means something specific in scholarly circles, a cultural standard based on performance of important rituals which establish one’s standing and protect one’s name.

Honor culture arises from peoples who have, or think they have, nothing to lose but their names. Military personnel, who are rootless and must often possess only what they can carry, are natural honor societies. So are poor people living on marginal land, as among Scottish clans or Appalachian farmers. When you have nothing to lose but your reputation, you must defend your reputation at any cost. So honor cultures are violent.

Recent years have seen rises of mostly White, right-wing honor organizations. The Proud Boys are the most famous. Their initiation ritual, a cringe-worthy satire of street gang culture, reflects that the Proud Boys’ mostly working-class membership, conscious that our economy no longer rewards hard work or loyalty, must seek advancement elsewhere. Their members think they’ve lost everything else, so they strive to establish a name.

Yes, America has historically been violent toward women, POC, and LGBTQIA+. I dare take nothing away from that. But the ritual aspect of this violence, formerly embodied in organizations like the Klan, and highly programmatic lynchings, was pushed underground for nearly two generations. In 1966, when Trek debuted, ritual violence maybe seemed like a dying relic of a prior civilization. Gene Roddenberry believed humanity was constantly progressing, and his universe reflected that.

Worf’s Klingon brethren engage in ritual violence and war to enhance their reputations and build social standing. So do many right-wing organizations like the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Movement, and Christian Identity. Once concealed, America’s highly ceremonial violence has become visible again during our lifetimes. Our Klingon-ish declension comes, not from violence, but from the rituals of honor attached to it. To some Americans, today is a good day to die.

Quantum Leap, the Enlightenment, and “Laplace’s Demon”

Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula, left) and Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell) in Quantum Leap

“Ziggy says…” These words became a recurring mantra in the early-1990s cult TV hit Quantum Leap. Al Calavicci, the comic relief and exposition bringer, carries a handheld computer unit which appears made of Legos, which beeps sporadically, and sometimes needs struck to work correctly. This is Al’s connection to Ziggy, a supercomputer programmed with all human knowledge through 1999, the year the series begins.

As the series progresses, it transpires that, before jumping back in time, the show’s protagonist, supergenius polymath Dr. Sam Beckett, programmed Ziggy with all known and speculated information available in the then-distant year 1999. Once Sam leaps into various characters, Al uses the iPad-like handheld unit to quickly uncover any information Sam needs to complete each week’s quest. Between Ziggy’s knowledge and Sam’s wisdom, they always ultimately restore justice.

Ziggy’s premise derives from the idea that lack of cogent data is the only impediment between judicious humanity and a fair universe. If humans only had better information and higher education, we’d all be reasonable and just. This idea didn’t begin with Quantum Leap or its creator, Donald P. Bellisario. It permeated much early American science fiction, most prominently Isaac Asimov, and derived from the philosophy of the French Enlightenment.

During the Enlightenment, self-appointed keepers of knowledge postulated that humanity was on a path toward perfection. Rejecting the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin, they asserted (with notable exceptions) that humanity began life savage and ignorant, and life was, in Hobbes’ famous phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.” But continual improvements in knowledge and social structure continued bringing humans closer to perfection, as measured by Enlightenment philosophers’ own personal yardsticks.

This philosophy contained important blind spots. Enlightenment thinkers tacitly accepted that all past societies were mere rough drafts for the present, which was a stepping-stone to a perfected future. They also accepted that non-European societies were deviations from European greatness. The Enlightenment was inherently, but not overtly, racist; thinkers like John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu were instrumental in European conquest of the Americas and Africa.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Okay, so. Enlightenment philosophers considered the past a rough draft, the present an edited but improved intermediary step. But they only saw time moving in one direction; “time travel” didn’t exist as a philosophical concept until H.G. Wells, in 1895. Therefore perfection existed only in the future. Our beautiful, Eurocentric Utopia remained yet to come.

After the Enlightenment, another Sam Beckett-like polymath, Pierre-Simon Laplace, postulated an idea that remains controversial in physics. If some supernatural being, Laplace suggested, could know the location and velocity of every particle in the universe, that being could compute where they’d all been, and where they were going. This being, termed “Laplace’s Demon,” had God-like knowledge of the universe’s existence, though no power to influence it.

One important consequence of Laplace’s Demon is that information, at least hypothetically, exists both forward and backward in time. Though Laplace’s speculation holds little water in contemporary physics, it remains important as philosophy, evidenced by the existence of the supercomputer Ziggy. Though Ziggy doesn’t hold all knowledge, it holds all knowledge available to humans, and therefore can map the movements of society, and transmit that information into the past.

This marks an advancement in Enlightenment philosophy. Philosophers like Voltaire and Descartes saw the past as a rough draft of the present, but they also saw it as fixed and immovable. Dr. Sam Beckett sees the past as subject to amendment and improvement, as a draft he can change. Using the perfect knowledge of the present, he can redress injustices in the past. He can spot imperfect knowledge, and use his information to make the past good again.

Series canon asserts that Sam always leaves the past improved, some injury or cruelty prevented. Sam leaps into situations and, aided by his “demon” Ziggy, patches moments of ignorance through gentle application of information. But the series occasionally acknowledges that not everybody is as beneficent as Sam. On occasion, he meets others who use future knowledge to exacerbate cruelty and inequity, to make the past measurably worse.

Therefore, although Sam attempts to do good—as, undoubtedly, Enlightenment philosophers thought of themselves as good—his actions nevertheless open doors for colonial despotism. The precept that we understand reality better than our ancestors, contains at least the possibility of seeing ignorance as a sin worthy of punishment. Sam and Al aren’t colonialists, as Voltaire and Newton weren’t. But as their philosophy held doors for the real colonialists, so too does Ziggy permit others to become cruel.

Star Trek, Injustice, and Our “Real” World

Lieutenant Saavik (Kirstie Alley) and Captain Kirk (William Shatner)
discuss the meaning of the Kobayashi Maru exercise

“A no-win situation is a possibility any commander may face.” Captain Kirk speaks these words to Lieutenant Saavik, his newest bridge officer, after she endures the Kobayashi Maru test. To science fiction fans, this moment from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan is iconic, establishing the moral complexity of the movie, and the later franchise. The words “Kobayashi Maru” have become, among fans, a shorthand for moral impossibility.

Science fiction often defaults to simple ethical binaries: the Jedi vs. the Sith, for instance, or the Federation vs. the Klingons. Even authors like Isaac Asimov, who pooh-poohed simple black-and-white, often had their novels end with heroes and villains clearly established, even if we needed to adjust our viewpoint partway along. So the Kobayashi Maru, while not diminishing the Federation’s supposed goodness, nevertheless admitted that “good” is seldom clearly defined.

When this movie dropped, in 1982, I didn’t understand this. Sure, I could understand that doing right sometimes came at personal expense; when we feed the hungry, we still need to pay for the food. But on macro-scale issues, like the themes of justice and war often addressed in Star Trek, I wasn’t prepared for this. I was eight years old; my family was Republican at the height of the Cold War. Right and wrong, I believed, simply existed.

I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, in part, because they’re free to address sweeping ethical themes in ways other genres aren’t. Mysteries, Westerns, and “literary” fiction have anchors in real life, and cannot contradict what we know about reality (even if our “knowledge” is sometimes misinformed). Science fiction and fantasy don’t have this; they create worlds afresh every time. There’s no need to reconcile their reality with ours.

That said, exactly how science fiction addresses certain themes changes with the times. Original Star Trek often upheld White colonial stereotypes of intrepid homelanders taming savage species; the first-ever episode, “The Man Trap,” featured a vampire species invading the Starship Enterprise. Despite its notably racially diverse cast, Star Trek was a powerfully White story, reflecting the unambiguously triumphant early-Vietnam culture of 1966.

By 1982, things had changed. America has survived Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” years, and Ronald Reagan’s reactionary militarism. Gene Roddenberry’s cheerful humanism of 1966 seemed remarkably dated, and the belief in unquestionable American goodness hardly seemed true. Maybe the Soviet Menace still needed quashing, but would that triumph mean anything if it cost America its soul?

If these conundrums seemed difficult in 1982, they’ve only gotten worse since. America arguably won the Cold War, but then immediately burned down the edifice we’d built to fight it, as I’ve written before. America stopped subsidizing arts and education, and perhaps not coincidentally, we’ve seen a rise in racism, even overt Naziism. America has become darker, more violent, more brutal—dare I say, more Klingon-ish.

Fixing these problems creates new problems. It seems straightforward to institute hate-speech laws to silence Nazis. But as journalist Mick Hume writes, governments, when invited to squelch some noxious speech, have a history of using that authority to silence all forms of dissent. Do Americans really want to invite another Cointelpro explosion, even if it muzzles Nazis? I have no easy answers. It’s a real Kobayashi Maru problem.

Am I, like Spock, willing to die to preserve my ship and shipmates from destruction? I can’t answer that easily. I maintain fantasies of charging heedless into enemy fire to save the kitten, but I haven’t always done so. On occasion, I’ve literally broken up fights with my own body; other times, I flinch from even small confrontations. I’d like to live in a more just world, but die for it? I’m not really so sure.

Maybe another science fiction franchise matters here. The original Battlestar Galactica, in 1978, featured the human race driven to near-extinction by nuclear assault from faceless robotic invaders. Definitely a Cold War metaphor. But by the 2004 reboot, the conflict had become more nuanced. The robots were attractive, even sexy, while humans descended into infighting. Humanity’s survival seemed much less of a foregone moral conclusion this time around.

Star Trek, in 1968, simply assumed that the Federation’s eternal outward expansion was good for everybody. In 1982, it assumed this expansion would exact a price upon humanity. By 2019, Captain Picard had abandoned Starfleet, and the bridge crew of Discovery were battling one another. Our team’s innate goodness had abandoned us; our loyalties needed tested to destruction. Congratulations, nerds: we’re now living aboard the Kobayashi Maru.

 

Follow-up:
America, and the Klingon Way