Core Post: Ronald Reagan was Politic's "Bad" Terminator

I felt some type of way when Susan Jeffords, in “Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era,” came around to comparing Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwartzenneger’s first Terminator; George Bush I to his second. Tracking American masculinity from the beefcake protagonist of a James Cameron blockbuster to the 80's illogically worshipped Republican idol—now THAT is the content I came to film theory for. The best part is, her point rings true. The hard-bodied, rough and tumble action hero of the 80s was a product of a reactionary decade in American culture, when our economy (no thanks to Reaganomics, it would turn out) seemed impervious as our military machinery; our world hegemony at the Cold War’s finale as polished as the pecks on Schwartzenneger’s gleamed chest. Sure enough, that safe “White Male knows best” philosophy didn’t pan out, as America launched into the 90s with a recession, massive debt, and worst of all, not enough wars where we could play with all our expensive new guns!

As Jeffords posits, this left American culture at a crossroads around 1991. They could demonize the colossal blowhards that just took a battering ram to much of US domestic and international policy - hey, remember that time that Reagan defunded mental hospitals, condemning thousands of mentally ill people over the next three decades to the streets? Or what about when he used the War on Drugs as a smokescreen to distract from his unprecedented military spending, and an ultra-convenient way to re-institutionalize Jim Crow social sanctions on African Americans? Well, maybe that stuff sounds “bad,” but all we have to do is figure—it wasn’t his fault! The guys on top didn’t know any better, who did? Products of a misguided masculinity! Boys will be boys.

Suffice it to say, the collective demonization of American white males was still far off, Tumblr long from invented. Instead, we got a whole trend of ‘rehabilitated’ white men in film, learning to be better. The hyper-masculine hard-body of a star like Schwartzenneger had gotten just a tad too big for America to wrap its arms around—in one of Jefford’s best throw-away comments, she notes that the actor’s colossal chest shrank between the first and second Terminator films. In Terminator 2, we get the reversal of the Terminator, from a weapon designed to kill and destroy, to a heroic father figure whose self-sacrifice literally engenders the rebirth of humanity. So if anyone out in that 1991 audience had developed an impression that powerful white men were the most conspicuous destroyers of the world, their anxieties were assuaged—in fact, white men may be our only hope for a better future.

Reading Bukatman’s article “Terminal Identity” all I could think about was Ex Machina, and Ava the hyper-feminized (as opposed to hyper-masculinized) AI. The “dispossession of privilege” common to Western women’s experience—Ava lives in a stylish prison cell. Women’s understanding of the body as “bound into a system of power relations”; Ava didn’t have to be a real woman or even programmed as one to figure out how to use her robot-hot-bod to her advantage. And that fear of female sexuality... I won’t spoil the film, but let’s just say, check. I guess in the end, women are still at a crossroads: patiently help the Beast and Rambo and Bush resist the great burden of their white male masculinity, and forgive the past? Or...figure why bother? After all, we hear it all the time—the future is female.