III. CONCLUSIONS IN FLUX
That it 'keeps going on like this' *is* the
catastrophe.
Walter Benjamin13
I'm in the middle of a mystery
Jeffrey in "Blue Velvet"
[36] So far, we have looked at the overdetermining yet
mutually subverting interplay of formal means Lynch's "Blue
Velvet" foregrounds as part and parcel of the project of
bringing the urban spaces and %ur%-narrative of noir into
the formerly secure domestic spaces of the small town and
the family. And we have also examined the narrative-
dramatic operations through which "Terminator 2"
simultaneously reconstructs the family even as it moves it
out to the mean streets. One film constructed for and
consumed primarily by the culturally upscale, and therefore
with a corresponding emphasis on meaning-through-style; the
other for a mass audience and, accordingly, with its
meanings and judgements carried largely on the back of its
plot. Yet the main burden of this conclusion of sorts must
be to consider some of the social meanings, possibilities,
and effects at play and implicit in the overall project we
have seen both films take up in this particular post-
generic, postmodernist moment, for all their different ways
of working on it: a project we have been suggesting is *the
domestication of noir*.
[37] As a kind of side-door entrance into such
considerations, though, it may first be worth taking note of
a few aspects of our two films we have left unmentioned
until now: specifically, those which draw on the *economic*
and *racial* codes of mainstream white capitalist culture.
The former is most obviously referenced in the very
selection of a steel mill as the site of "T2"'s climactic
ending, given the function of steel production in
contemporary socio-economic discourse as the paradigmatic
icon of the Fordist industrial world we have now, depending
on whom you read, shipped off, frittered away, or even
transcended, but in any case lost, in our national economy's
shift toward a "post-Fordism" regime with service rather
than manufacturing industries at its core. Yet similar
allusions to a vanished or vanishing industrial world can be
found throughout "Blue Velvet" as well, from its frequent
reminders to us of its small town's extractive-industrial
base (e.g., in the deejay's patter, or the image of the
millyard in which Jeffrey comes to the morning after being
assaulted by Frank) to the ominous brick warehouses in which
Frank seems both to live and conduct his dirty work, and
arguably even down to the anachronistic "spider-mike"
Dorothy employs in the implausibly located night-club where
she works.
[38] Though the uses to which such imagery is put in each of
our two films are multiple and complex, in "Blue Velvet" the
evocation of industrial culture is part and parcel of its
overall construction of an environment where nature and
culture lose their borders, and danger and pleasure
coincide; whereas "Terminator 2"'s uncanny yet nostalgically
recalled foundry adds an extra measure of weight and
yearning to the triumphant restoration and victory of the
old male dominant nuclear family and "breadwinner ethic"
that went along with the socioeconomic era just past. More
generally still, though, and in keeping with many another
contemporary polygeneric film from "Lethal Weapon" to
"Batman", the iconic spaces and imagery of Fordist
production and industrial culture in both our films function
as a late-twentieth century equivalent to the feudal mansion
in the chronotope of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel:
i.e., as a *ruin* (albeit a capitalist one) in which to
place the monstrous dangers of the present and/or stage a
regressive deliverance from out of the sex/gender system of
the past.
[39] But I will have more to say elsewhere on the subject of
these new capitalist ruins and their deployment as
privileged sites of "ruinous" pleasure and recuperation for
white straight masculinity.14 So for now let us move
along instead, and turn our attention to the inflections and
incitements of racial marking in these films, a practice
whose operations paradoxically take on all the more
significance insofar as racial discourse and positioning may
at first sight appear to play such a small part in our two
films' overall schemes, practices and effects. From a
normatively "white" point of view, after all, racial marking
would seem to be an issue only at those rare moments when
someone "non-white" shows up on-screen, and then only as a
question of how that "non-whiteness" is defined. What such
a normative perspective thus typically, indeed
systematically, fails to notice or acknowledge is the
essentially relational operation of all racial discourse and
representation, or in other words the way every construction
of a/the racial Other generates by contrast an implicit
definition of what it means to be "the same"i.e., in the
present instance, "white" and by no means just the
"whiteness" up on the screen.
[40] Let us take a quick look back at our two films from
this relational perspective, then, to see what implications
we find in their nominally innocuous-to-honorific depictions
of "non-white." In "Blue Velvet", there are the two store-
uniformed and aproned "black" clerks who work at Jeffrey's
father's hardware store, peripheral even as secondary
characters, and seemingly memorable only because of the
whimsically transparent little %shtick% they play out in the
scant few seconds in which they appear, in which the sighted
one uses touch signals to cue the blind one as to price or
number of objects, and the blind one pretends he has with
magical prescience come up with the number himself.
"Terminator 2", on the other hand, while "randomizing" race
among those cops and hospital attendants destined to be
casually crippled or killed, places non-whites in secondary
roles of clearly greater significance: Dyson the corporate
scientist and his family as African-Americans; Enrique,
Sarah's former soldier-of-fortune comrade-in-arms, and his
family as Hispanics.
[41] In "T2", in fact, the self-approvingly "non-racist"
liberalism we seem to be meant to read off from these last
two sets of non-white characters and groups is more or less
spelled out within the film. There, Sarah's musings, quoted
above, on how well Arnold the T-800 fills the paternal bill
are immediately followed by a softly sunstruck montage of
her old Hispanic running buddy's Mommy-Daddy-Baby unit
caught unaware in the midst of their unselfconscious
domestic bliss, the sight of which is then immediately
linked to a recurrence of that dream of nuclear holocaust
that separates Sarah from her own apron-frocked domestic
self. Likewise, a short while later, Dyson's more upscale
family life is depicted in similarly idyllic and
conventional terms, Mom taking care of Baby, Dad smiling
over from where he is hard at work, in the final moment
before Sarah's assault. The liberal progressivism of such
representations thus announces itself in the contrast
between the settled, happy domesticity of the non-white
families up above (Dyson's) or down below (Enrique's) the
social level of the aberrant and provisional white one we
are traveling with. But we could put the same point less
generously but no less accurately by saying that such
progressivism is itself little more than a stalking horse
for the conservative project that rides in on it, i.e., the
(re)constitution of the regulative ideal of the old male-
dominant oedipal-nuclear family for *whites*, coming at
them, as it were, from both sides.
[42] Moreover, though "Terminator 2" neither represents nor
endorses any non-familial social ideal, it still seems
significant that both our non-white %paterfamilia% are
associated from the start with contemporary visions of
social disorder and mass violence. For many if not most
white viewers at least, Sarah's rapid allusion to Enrique's
past as a %contra%, combined with his guntoting first
appearance and his family's desert location, will call up a
melange of unsorted and uneasy impressions from "Treasure of
the Sierra Madre" to the mainstream media's spotty yet
hysterical coverage of a decade of messy and unpleasant
struggle "down there" somewhere, plus attendant anxieties
over "their" illegal entry and peripheral existences "up
here" now; whereas the Afro-American Dyson is
straightforwardly depicted as the author of the
technological breakthrough that will eventually give us
SkyNet, the fully autonomous, computerized war technology
that will soon trigger nuclear holocaust as the first move
in its war against humanity itself. One wonders, in fact,
how many white viewers recoiled from Sarah's verbal assault
on a *black man* as the incarnation of value-free and death-
bound masculinist-corporate technorationality, and on what
level of consciousness they did so, and to what effect: how,
detached from its unlikely target, is her didactic
essentialist feminism taken in? I have no idea, and would
not presume to guess. At any rate, though, following this
bizarre moment, the film's treatment of Dyson runs once
again in familiar ways, towards familiar ends: it rolls out
the Moebius-strip time-travel causality of that '80s
blockbuster "Back to the Future" in its suggestion that
Dyson the black man doesn't really invent anything15
(the breakthrough he comes up with turns out to be merely an
extrapolation from those remnants of the first Terminator,
from the first "Terminator" film, that his corporate
employer managed to scoop up); and, as in many another film
featuring a once-wayward non-white sidekick, it
rehabilitates him "Gunga-Din" style, by including him into
the assault on the power with which he has formerly been
associated, an assault whose victory is, not accidentally,
coincident with his self-sacrifice and death.
[43] These regulative procedures by which whiteness learns
from and is defined by its Other(s) even as those Others are
re-subordinated, stigmatized, and/or punished, are not to be
found in "Blue Velvet", howeveror not quite. There
another, culturally hipper version of the game of reference
and relegation is going on, in which, to put it briefly,
racial difference is placed within quotation-marks, and,
thus textualized, is both evoked and winked away. So the
blackness of the store clerks sits next to the blindness of
the one clerk and to the pseudo-magical trick they both like
to play, as just so much more semic doodling along the
margins of this endlessly decentered text in which each
element of the normal and conventional is estranged, while
each strangeness or Otherness is subjected to a metonymic
slippage that renders it both equivalent to every *other*
otherness and empty in itself: blackness=blindness=stupid
trick. In the universe constructed by Lynch's postmodern
aesthetics, there is no need either to make liberal gestures
towards the inclusion of the racial Other, or to discipline
and punish that Otherness when it appears. Rather, as the
whiff of Amos 'n Andy we can smell around the figures of our
two clerks in "Blue Velvet" suggests, and the overtly racist
stereotypes (blacks and creoles as figures for a demonically
sexualized and violent underworld) in Lynch's more recent
film "Wild at Heart" make abundantly clear, even the most
offensive tropes may be called back for a culturally upscale
and predominantly white audience to enjoy under the new PoMo
dispensation that such hoary ideologemes are really only to
be delected like everything else in the film, including the
tropes of Back Home themselves, as simply so many
hyperrealized/evacuated bits of virtually free-floating
text.16
[44] Our examination of both our films' means of
(re)producing the locations and distinctive pleasures of
whiteness and their regressive deployments of the new ruins
of Fordist industrial space thus bring us back to the
central vortex or stuck place by which we may know
contemporary "family noir" when we find it: in the
apparent dissolution of the rigid identity/Otherness
categories of the Symbolic in general, and those of the
sex/gender system in particular, into a semic flow or play
of boundaries from which, paradoxically, those same
categories re-emerge with renewed half-life; and in the
astonishingly mobile and contradictory circuitry of desire
and anxiety, pleasure and fear, that this process both
releases and recontains. "Terminator 2", as we have seen,
plays around with border crossings between male and female,
human and machine, the Fordist past and the post-Fordist
present, and, for that matter, bio-social predestination
("It's in your nature to destroy yourselves") versus
existential possibility ("No fate but what we make"), only
to redraw the lines of the old nuclear family system as
precisely the last best line of defense against the fluid
yet inexorably programmed assaults of the terribly New. Yet
this restoration is itself a tenuous and contradictory one,
given its figuration through the asexual (or should it be
"safe-sexual"?) coalition of a cyborg Dad and a warrior-
woman Mom, half-assisted and half-constructed through the
educative and team-building efforts of a child who is thus
both effectively as well as literally Father to himself
(Pfeil 227 and ff.). And "Blue Velvet" pulls off what is
finally the same denaturalizing/restoring act on a more
formal level, by presenting us with a pre-eminently oedipal
narrative whose recuperations of patriarchal order are
riddled with artifice and suspicion, and eroded by a mode of
skewed hyper-observation that simultaneously fills and
estranges, exceeds and evacuates the conventional terms in
which such narratives used to be couched.
[45] Within contemporary political culture, we know what to
call this meltdown and restoration of the categories by
which women and non-whites are put back in their place (even
"Blue Velvet"'s Dorothy, like "T2"'s Sarah, is firmly,
albeit hyperbolically, placed back in the mother role in
that film's closing shots) and white men in theirs, at the
same time as the devices of the political rhetoric that does
so are brazenly bared, and the very notion of location is
smirked away. Its name is Reaganism (or Bushitis now, if
you like). And certainly, brushed with the grain as it
were, the process by which "Blue Velvet"'s Jeffrey gets to
answer girlfriend Sandy's doubt as to whether he's "a
detective or a pervert" by being both, and a good kid
besides, is the same as that by which the old actor got to
be simultaneously the world's leading authority figure and
its largest, most spectacularized airhead. Likewise, our
intense enjoyment in "Terminator 2" of the spectacular
semiotic mutability of our protean villainpractically Mr.
Gynesis in himselftogether with the stabilizing
satisfactions provided by the return of the classically
distinct, embodied (if no less synthetically produced)
masculinity of our Arnold as Good Old Dependable
Dad,17 rhymes with the joys of the swings themselves
over the past four years, from Willie Horton to "Pineapple
Head" Noriega to, in Bush's delivery, "Sodom" Hussein,
together with the pleasures available in the manifestly
constructed image of Bush as, like the T-800, another
kinder, gentler, ass-kicking guy.
[46] Within cultural theory, too, as well as practice,
feminist critics such as Suzanne Moore and Tania Modleski
have been swift to notice and condemn this same process by
which %gynesis%, the dissolution of the forms and categories
of the patriarchal-oedipal-bourgeois Symbolic, can be taken
over by white male theorists and cultural producers, the
aptly-named "pimps of postmodernism," to co-opt the
pleasures of release and reconstruct new and more mobile
means of domination. Yet without disagreeing in any way
with these critiques, it remains for us to step beyond or
outside them, in accordance with the old Benjaminian dictum
that it is preeminently the task of the historical
materialist to "brush History"even, and perhaps
especially, that History which is our own present moment
"*against* the grain" as well (257). In other words, we
must attempt to read the particular complex of social-
psychological needs and desires that gets ventilated and
redirected in these films not only as raw material for a new
social contract with the same old Powers That Be, but as a
set of contradictory energies which, under the sign of
utopia, might be shaped and channeled in progressive
directions as well.
[47] It may be, then, that the way to respond to the
irresolute resolutions and rebellious conservatism of our
films without reproducing their equivalents in theory is to
recognize the truth and legitimacy of the needs and desires
that underlie the dynamics of the films' operations while
refusing their opposed yet commingled terms. Such a utopian
reading would then pass through the recognition that even
these admittedly corrupt and pernicious cultural productions
have to both rest on and run off a widely-held consensus
that the old nuclear, oedipal, male-dominant, breadwinner-
ethic-based family is neither a natural nor a desirable set-
up, and an equally widely-held and equally justifiable
anxiety as to the brutal chaos that ensues when the rules of
that old system are tattered or in abeyance without any
other emerging to take its place: to pass through that
recognition and then to take the combination of desire and
anxiety it has found *as a resource* for a progressive
politics, a need for a better sex/gender system that for its
fulfillment must be turned into a set of socially
transformative demands.
[48] In 1983, as the conclusion of her survey of white male
revolts against what she dubbed the "breadwinner ethic" and
the oedipal-nuclear families it produced, Barbara Ehrenreich
proposed that "male [white male, that is] culture seems to
have abandoned the breadwinner role without overcoming the
sexist attitudes that role has perpetuated" (182). But she
went on to suggest that the only way to begin to move beyond
this impasse is to struggle for an expanded, democratized,
feminist expansion of the welfare state in which women and
men alike earn a "family wage," and in which women are also
provided with the "variety of social supports" they must
have "before they are able to enter the labor market on an
equal footing with men or when they are unable to do so"
including, and especially, "reliable, high-quality child
care" (176-77). Her argument is not that such goals, when
achieved, would automatically bring an end to the deflection
of male revolts against patriarchy into new forms of sexist
oppression, or issue in a feminist utopia; it is simply that
without such gains, little new ground for the construction
of less oppressive gender roles and relations wasand is
at all likely to open up.
[49] In 1991, of course, after eight more years of
repression, rollback and decay, such a program may seem,
like Alec Nove's model of a "feasible socialism," all the
more a combination of the hopelessly insufficient and the
wildly utopian. Yet such a hybrid failing, if failing it
be, nonetheless seems to me practically unique, and uniquely
exemplary, within recent American cultural theory, in its
insistence on a given set of programmatic political goals to
organize and struggle for; just as that insistence in turn
seems infinitely more adequate to the need in the present
moment to recover the terrain of political agency and
possibility than any rehash of the essentialist vs. post-
structuralist debate. The same proposals, and others
instead or as well, might be generated out of another, more
fully utopian reading of the films we have looked at, and of
family noir in general: generated, that is, as so many
specific instances of a sense of "canceled yet preserved" we
must renew and nourish now within and across our various
movements and without any false sense of guarantees. But
the main point here is nonetheless that for all the
bleakness of the present moment, and indeed precisely
because of it, we must nonetheless learn or relearn to
propose *something* more real and more properly political as
the outcome of our analyses than the indulgent rages and
self-strokings of Identity and/or the jouissance of
post-structuralist free-fall. The only alternative to such
a "canceled-yet-preserved" renewal of politics itself is the
dubious enjoyment of being permanently stuck, like "Blue
Velvet"'s Jeffrey, "in the middle of a mystery" whose
pleasures most of the people we speak for and with can only
afford to take in every now and then, when thanks to the
magic of motion pictures and political campaigns aimed
variously both high and low, at the hip and the masses, the
catastrophe "That it goes on like this" is at no small
expense made into a little fun.
|