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Apr. 22nd, 2003 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rusty_haloSo, I came home from class today to discover that my website is broken (no clue why; going to call tech support in a bit) and my email is not working (I read hotmail through outlook express, and it's suddenly decided to stop downloading my mail).
I hate technology.
I'm becoming interested in Highlander again, and I'd like to re-watch the Methos episodes. I used to have most of them on tape, but my tape-collection has become scattered. (I think a lot of them are in boxes in my parents' basement, which basically means I'll never see them again). I tried downloading from Kazaa, but there's not much selection. Anyone know where I might be able to find copies? I thought about buying the Highlander DVDs, but 1) I don't have a DVD player and 2) I really don't care about the non-Methos episodes. Is there another download site somewhere or something?
Also, I had some thoughts in class tonight and rushed home to write them all down before I forgot. Hopefully I can use this as an essay someday; right now it's entirely raw, unedited, mostly unorganized rambling. But I would love feedback if you feel like wading through it.
Watched Terminator 2 in my film class today and it got me thinking more about the monster/machine essay I want to write. (I also thought about it this weekend because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jaydk and I watched a Data-centric Star Trek: the Next Generation episode). I already wrote a bit about my essay idea here; it was inspired by Blade Runner. *If* I write the essay, I'll probably use it for the final in my Alienation and Otherness class.
Anyway, T2 got me thinking about a few things. The first is the way that society uses the other to represent what it fears or desires about itself. In my Anthropology classes and in my "Borders of Western Imagination" class, we read a lot about the ways that Western society has treated non-Western, particularly indigenous, cultures. Most often Western society tries to fit indigeous people into one of two roles: the "savage barbarian" or the "noble savage." The "savage barbarian" is an uncivilized, evil, cannibalistic monster, lacking morals and humanity. On it, Western society projects its own worst images of itself (for example, the image of Native Americans as scalpers, when it was actually Europeans who started that tradition). The "noble savage", OTOH, represents what's best about Western society, our goodness. The noble savage is in touch with nature, with him/herself, with other people, and with spirituality; the noble savage is not "corrupted" by modern civilization.
Ironically in both these myths, the indigenous people meet the same fates. The savage barbarian must be converted and "civilized," so that his evil ways are destroyed. If he cannot be tamed, he must be destroyed to make way for Western "civilization." Yet the noble savage meets the same fate; he must move forward, integrate into modern society and become civilized. If he doesn't, he will die, because society has moved on and he is too pure for our world. The savage barbarian is destroyed with an air of righteous anger; the noble savage is destroyed with a tinge of sadness. But they're both destroyed.
My essay isn't specificially about indigenous people, though, it's about how society creates, perceives, and uses the myth of the "other." Much of our mythology uses monsters or machines to represent the "other" in the same way that we projected these ideas on to indigenous people.
These monsters or machines come from us; either we create them, they are made from us, or both. Frankenstein was created by a human, from human body parts. Pinnochio was created by a human. Data was created by a human. Spike was created from a human by a former human. The replicants in blade runner were created by humans. The terminators were created by humans. They were all created to emulate humans to some extent. (Which raises this whole issue of "playing god" and creating life, too....)
As such, we use them to reflect our own desires and fears about ourselves. In T2, the machines represent both the best and worst about humanity. One one hand, they are the worst: they have no feelings, no morality, no empathy, no love. All they do is follow orders, and their orders are to destroy. But this darkness is not confined to the terminators in this film; in fact, it's explicity compared to the darkness in humanity. The film has an undercurrent of "we did this to ourselves." The destruction of the world is our own fault. We get this human darkness clearly in the scenes of the hospital workers abusing Sarah (more of which are in the uncut version, which is really cool btw; it even has a dream sequence with Sarah and Kyle), and more explicitly in the scene where the two little boys are pretending to kill each other with toy guns, and their mother runs over and tells them, in typical mom-voice, to shut up or she'll wring their necks. John watches this and observes, "We're never going to make it, are we?" Later we even see this darkness in Sarah, when she comes *this close* to killing Miles Dyson (the man who ends up creating the machine that sets off the nuclear apocalypse). We created the machines; they represent the worst in us.
Yet the film also uses machines to represent humanity's potential. Throughout the film, we see the terminator strugging to become more human. This is represented by the fact that he learns human slang; he learns to smirk; he learns not to kill. He asks questions that make us think about our own humanity; what it means to smile or to cry. But most importantly, by the end, he learns to understand the value of human life. He understands that he must be destroyed in order to protect humanity, and voluntarily offers to go to his own doom. He even understands why his "death" upsets John. The use of machines to represent the best humanity is capable is underscored a few times, particularly when Sarah discusses the fact that the terminator is the best father John has ever had, and at the end when she suggests that "if a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too."
We get simlar situations in Blade Runner, in which the replicants commit some of the worst human atrocities (various, occassionally graphic, murders). Yet their evil is not isolated; it comes from the human society that created them. The film is full of examples of humans behaving with violence, cruelty, and lack of empathy (particularly, horribly, when we see Deckard shooting the replicants in cold blood as they scream and struggle just as humans would). The darkness in the replicants is a reflection of the darkness of the humans who created them. The humans try to destroy or hide from that darkness by destroying the replicants, but that only increases their own barbarism.
Yet the replicants in Blade Runner don't just represent human darkness. They also represent the best in humanity. They are loyal to each other (moreso than the humans seem to be; we get a definite sense of alienation and disconnection from all the human characters). They mourn for each other. They seem to love each other; they put each other first (as Roy does with Pris). And Roy's final line underscores the potential that they represent in his final scene when he talks about all that he's seen, etc. (And how interesting that the replicants are the ones who behave with more passion and "life" than the actual humans in the film. That's a lot like Spike's role on Buffy, too; he loves -- in this admittedly-biased Spike fan's opinion -- more passionately and purely than any of the human characters on the show, particularly in the past three years. And he often shows more passion for life -- in his eating habits, his TV habits, his sexual habits, his fighting habits, etc. He has more fun than any of the humans. "More human than human" indeed.)
And speaking of Spike, he embodies this same phenomena on BtVS. Vampires represent the worst of humanity on BtVS; they are our risen corpses, with all of human greed, hatred, selfishness, and violent tendences, and none of our human love and empathy (Spike being the exception).
Still, Spike does get used to represent the best in humanity as well. Like I was saying before, he loves more passionately and purely than any human. He endures torture from Glory, he fights bravely (grabs a sword, gets thrown off a tower), babysits Dawn all summer. In season five, Spike is the only one who understands and relates to Dawn; he, more than anyone, helps her through her identity crisis. In early season six (before Noxon sunk her bad boyfriend claws into the story), Spike is the only one who is there for Buffy; the only one who can understand what she went through and who listens to her instead of demanding something from her. In season six, when all of the humans fuck up gigantically and never do much about it, Spike is the only one who faces up to his failures and goes off to improve himself (by seeking a soul). It's hard to remember it now, what with all the "he's okay because he has a soul" crap that keeps getting shoved in our faces, but he really was portrayed heroically in late season five/early season six.
Most of these stories define humanity as the ability to feel, particularly the capacity for empathy. In Blade Runner, they give an empathy test to determine who is a replicant and who is human. In Terminator 2 (maybe just the expanded version), John Connor has a line explaining to the terminator why it's not okay to hurt people; just because the terminator feels no pain, it doesn't mean people don't; humans feel pain and fear. In the Star Trek episode that Jane and I watched (I'm going to have to look it up; it's the one where Data gets put on trial to determine whether some StarFleet guy has the right to experiment on him and take him apart or not), they first try to prove that Data should legally be given the rights of a human because he has the ability to think (consciousness, self-awareness), but the judge corrects them and says that the determining factor is whether he has a soul (and since she doesn't know, she gives him the benefit of the doubt). And what's a soul? Traditionally it seems to be tied to the ability to feel empathy; to make selfless choices. In Buffy we also get the empathy definition ("You don't have a soul. There's nothing good or clean in you. That's why you can't understand.")
And of course, in all these cases, the machines/monsters raise great big scary questions about the definition of humanity. The replicants develop empathy (especially Roy Batty when he cries for Pris and saves Decker). The terminator seems to develop empathy (at least, he understands why John is upset, and he understands the value of human life). Spike shows empathy when he puts the shotgun down in Fool for Love, when he protects Dawn in Intervention, when he comforts Dawn in Tough Love (probably the most purely selfless empathetic moment; just look at his face: he can't stand to see her in pain), when he reassures Willow and Tara in Spiral ... I could go on.
In this metaphor, the "other" always has to be destroyed; it cannot continue to exist as an other. Either it "dies" or it becomes human. The androids of Blade Runner, Frankenstein's monster, and the terminator are all destroyed. Spike, Anya, the Beast (Beauty and the Beast), and Pinnochio all become human (or, symbolically human in Spike's case with the soul; I have more to say about him but I don't want to spoil). That's why we don't have soulless Spike, Anyanka, and Clem walking off into the sunset and forming the "demons who don't hurt humans" society. Either they conform or, if they can't/won't, they die. (It would be interesting to look at postmodern interpretations of this story, such as Shrek, in which the "other" is celebrated for itself, and actually does get to remain "other" instead of conforming).
And kind of off-topic, but I also had some interesting thoughts about the Terminator films themselves. In a lot of my classes we've discussed the transition that our society is currently undergoing from analog to digital media (in relation to film, communication, etc). It's just cool how the first film seems to represent analog and the second to represent digital; the analog (first terminator) was fucking amazing, and then the digital (T-1000) just blows it out of the water. And, of course, the film itself represents a breakthrough in digital technology.
Also, I think that the first film represents the idea that we must fight technology; we must retreat to the natural, the home-made, to pure human connection. The machines must be destroyed. We see this over and over in the original film; Kyle is so run down and human; he takes his clothes from a homeless man; he makes his own weapons (and also teaches Sarah to do so). They don't have fancy terminator-alert machines; they rely on dogs to alert them. Kyle and Sarah defeat the machines not through technology, but through their love, the ultimate human connection. Love wins because it means the conception of John Connor, who will eventually defeat the machines, and because it is what inspires Kyle to sacrifice himself for Sarah. The film ends with Sarah, looking all natural with her hair blowing in the wind, riding off into the Mexican sunset; a beautiful scene of nature to give hope for the future.
T2 takes a different POV: in it, we must learn to *use* the machines, to fight the system by working within the system. The heroes don't make their own weapons; they buy or steal as many big, cool-looking, technologically advanced weapons as they can manage. They don't destroy the terminator; they use him to help them win. (There's an interesting scene in the uncut version that directly contrasts Sarah's (1st movie) perspective with John's (2nd movie) perspective; Sarah insists that they must destroy the terminator, but John insists that they use him). Ultimately it's technology, used for good (the tamed terminator), that results in the triumph of good.
I think T2 is influenced by the cyberpunk ethos of the 80's in which the heroes *used* technology instead of fearing it. (I don't know much about cyberpunk, this is just stuff I've read; I apologize if I'm misrepresenting it). This is also very Matrix-like. In the Matrix, they don't retreat off into nature and hide from technology; they succeed by using technology, by becoming the best they possibly can at it, by becoming *better* than those who use technology to oppress them. This is also kind of like what Donna Haraway talks about in her Cyborg Manifesto, which was supposedly written in response to "nature, earth goddess" feminists who wanted to get in touch with their roots and who hated and feared technology. Haraway's response was to encourage the use of technology, to say that we can use it to our advantage to eliminate the systems of oppression, based on human bodies, that have been frustrating us for years; if we become cyborgs and master that role, we create a new world in which our bodies won't hold us back.
(I'm not sure what it says about me that I greatly prefer the first movie. Perhaps just that I'm still too idealistic for my own good.)
I hate technology.
I'm becoming interested in Highlander again, and I'd like to re-watch the Methos episodes. I used to have most of them on tape, but my tape-collection has become scattered. (I think a lot of them are in boxes in my parents' basement, which basically means I'll never see them again). I tried downloading from Kazaa, but there's not much selection. Anyone know where I might be able to find copies? I thought about buying the Highlander DVDs, but 1) I don't have a DVD player and 2) I really don't care about the non-Methos episodes. Is there another download site somewhere or something?
Also, I had some thoughts in class tonight and rushed home to write them all down before I forgot. Hopefully I can use this as an essay someday; right now it's entirely raw, unedited, mostly unorganized rambling. But I would love feedback if you feel like wading through it.
Watched Terminator 2 in my film class today and it got me thinking more about the monster/machine essay I want to write. (I also thought about it this weekend because
jaydk and I watched a Data-centric Star Trek: the Next Generation episode). I already wrote a bit about my essay idea here; it was inspired by Blade Runner. *If* I write the essay, I'll probably use it for the final in my Alienation and Otherness class.Anyway, T2 got me thinking about a few things. The first is the way that society uses the other to represent what it fears or desires about itself. In my Anthropology classes and in my "Borders of Western Imagination" class, we read a lot about the ways that Western society has treated non-Western, particularly indigenous, cultures. Most often Western society tries to fit indigeous people into one of two roles: the "savage barbarian" or the "noble savage." The "savage barbarian" is an uncivilized, evil, cannibalistic monster, lacking morals and humanity. On it, Western society projects its own worst images of itself (for example, the image of Native Americans as scalpers, when it was actually Europeans who started that tradition). The "noble savage", OTOH, represents what's best about Western society, our goodness. The noble savage is in touch with nature, with him/herself, with other people, and with spirituality; the noble savage is not "corrupted" by modern civilization.
Ironically in both these myths, the indigenous people meet the same fates. The savage barbarian must be converted and "civilized," so that his evil ways are destroyed. If he cannot be tamed, he must be destroyed to make way for Western "civilization." Yet the noble savage meets the same fate; he must move forward, integrate into modern society and become civilized. If he doesn't, he will die, because society has moved on and he is too pure for our world. The savage barbarian is destroyed with an air of righteous anger; the noble savage is destroyed with a tinge of sadness. But they're both destroyed.
My essay isn't specificially about indigenous people, though, it's about how society creates, perceives, and uses the myth of the "other." Much of our mythology uses monsters or machines to represent the "other" in the same way that we projected these ideas on to indigenous people.
These monsters or machines come from us; either we create them, they are made from us, or both. Frankenstein was created by a human, from human body parts. Pinnochio was created by a human. Data was created by a human. Spike was created from a human by a former human. The replicants in blade runner were created by humans. The terminators were created by humans. They were all created to emulate humans to some extent. (Which raises this whole issue of "playing god" and creating life, too....)
As such, we use them to reflect our own desires and fears about ourselves. In T2, the machines represent both the best and worst about humanity. One one hand, they are the worst: they have no feelings, no morality, no empathy, no love. All they do is follow orders, and their orders are to destroy. But this darkness is not confined to the terminators in this film; in fact, it's explicity compared to the darkness in humanity. The film has an undercurrent of "we did this to ourselves." The destruction of the world is our own fault. We get this human darkness clearly in the scenes of the hospital workers abusing Sarah (more of which are in the uncut version, which is really cool btw; it even has a dream sequence with Sarah and Kyle), and more explicitly in the scene where the two little boys are pretending to kill each other with toy guns, and their mother runs over and tells them, in typical mom-voice, to shut up or she'll wring their necks. John watches this and observes, "We're never going to make it, are we?" Later we even see this darkness in Sarah, when she comes *this close* to killing Miles Dyson (the man who ends up creating the machine that sets off the nuclear apocalypse). We created the machines; they represent the worst in us.
Yet the film also uses machines to represent humanity's potential. Throughout the film, we see the terminator strugging to become more human. This is represented by the fact that he learns human slang; he learns to smirk; he learns not to kill. He asks questions that make us think about our own humanity; what it means to smile or to cry. But most importantly, by the end, he learns to understand the value of human life. He understands that he must be destroyed in order to protect humanity, and voluntarily offers to go to his own doom. He even understands why his "death" upsets John. The use of machines to represent the best humanity is capable is underscored a few times, particularly when Sarah discusses the fact that the terminator is the best father John has ever had, and at the end when she suggests that "if a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too."
We get simlar situations in Blade Runner, in which the replicants commit some of the worst human atrocities (various, occassionally graphic, murders). Yet their evil is not isolated; it comes from the human society that created them. The film is full of examples of humans behaving with violence, cruelty, and lack of empathy (particularly, horribly, when we see Deckard shooting the replicants in cold blood as they scream and struggle just as humans would). The darkness in the replicants is a reflection of the darkness of the humans who created them. The humans try to destroy or hide from that darkness by destroying the replicants, but that only increases their own barbarism.
Yet the replicants in Blade Runner don't just represent human darkness. They also represent the best in humanity. They are loyal to each other (moreso than the humans seem to be; we get a definite sense of alienation and disconnection from all the human characters). They mourn for each other. They seem to love each other; they put each other first (as Roy does with Pris). And Roy's final line underscores the potential that they represent in his final scene when he talks about all that he's seen, etc. (And how interesting that the replicants are the ones who behave with more passion and "life" than the actual humans in the film. That's a lot like Spike's role on Buffy, too; he loves -- in this admittedly-biased Spike fan's opinion -- more passionately and purely than any of the human characters on the show, particularly in the past three years. And he often shows more passion for life -- in his eating habits, his TV habits, his sexual habits, his fighting habits, etc. He has more fun than any of the humans. "More human than human" indeed.)
And speaking of Spike, he embodies this same phenomena on BtVS. Vampires represent the worst of humanity on BtVS; they are our risen corpses, with all of human greed, hatred, selfishness, and violent tendences, and none of our human love and empathy (Spike being the exception).
Still, Spike does get used to represent the best in humanity as well. Like I was saying before, he loves more passionately and purely than any human. He endures torture from Glory, he fights bravely (grabs a sword, gets thrown off a tower), babysits Dawn all summer. In season five, Spike is the only one who understands and relates to Dawn; he, more than anyone, helps her through her identity crisis. In early season six (before Noxon sunk her bad boyfriend claws into the story), Spike is the only one who is there for Buffy; the only one who can understand what she went through and who listens to her instead of demanding something from her. In season six, when all of the humans fuck up gigantically and never do much about it, Spike is the only one who faces up to his failures and goes off to improve himself (by seeking a soul). It's hard to remember it now, what with all the "he's okay because he has a soul" crap that keeps getting shoved in our faces, but he really was portrayed heroically in late season five/early season six.
Most of these stories define humanity as the ability to feel, particularly the capacity for empathy. In Blade Runner, they give an empathy test to determine who is a replicant and who is human. In Terminator 2 (maybe just the expanded version), John Connor has a line explaining to the terminator why it's not okay to hurt people; just because the terminator feels no pain, it doesn't mean people don't; humans feel pain and fear. In the Star Trek episode that Jane and I watched (I'm going to have to look it up; it's the one where Data gets put on trial to determine whether some StarFleet guy has the right to experiment on him and take him apart or not), they first try to prove that Data should legally be given the rights of a human because he has the ability to think (consciousness, self-awareness), but the judge corrects them and says that the determining factor is whether he has a soul (and since she doesn't know, she gives him the benefit of the doubt). And what's a soul? Traditionally it seems to be tied to the ability to feel empathy; to make selfless choices. In Buffy we also get the empathy definition ("You don't have a soul. There's nothing good or clean in you. That's why you can't understand.")
And of course, in all these cases, the machines/monsters raise great big scary questions about the definition of humanity. The replicants develop empathy (especially Roy Batty when he cries for Pris and saves Decker). The terminator seems to develop empathy (at least, he understands why John is upset, and he understands the value of human life). Spike shows empathy when he puts the shotgun down in Fool for Love, when he protects Dawn in Intervention, when he comforts Dawn in Tough Love (probably the most purely selfless empathetic moment; just look at his face: he can't stand to see her in pain), when he reassures Willow and Tara in Spiral ... I could go on.
In this metaphor, the "other" always has to be destroyed; it cannot continue to exist as an other. Either it "dies" or it becomes human. The androids of Blade Runner, Frankenstein's monster, and the terminator are all destroyed. Spike, Anya, the Beast (Beauty and the Beast), and Pinnochio all become human (or, symbolically human in Spike's case with the soul; I have more to say about him but I don't want to spoil). That's why we don't have soulless Spike, Anyanka, and Clem walking off into the sunset and forming the "demons who don't hurt humans" society. Either they conform or, if they can't/won't, they die. (It would be interesting to look at postmodern interpretations of this story, such as Shrek, in which the "other" is celebrated for itself, and actually does get to remain "other" instead of conforming).
And kind of off-topic, but I also had some interesting thoughts about the Terminator films themselves. In a lot of my classes we've discussed the transition that our society is currently undergoing from analog to digital media (in relation to film, communication, etc). It's just cool how the first film seems to represent analog and the second to represent digital; the analog (first terminator) was fucking amazing, and then the digital (T-1000) just blows it out of the water. And, of course, the film itself represents a breakthrough in digital technology.
Also, I think that the first film represents the idea that we must fight technology; we must retreat to the natural, the home-made, to pure human connection. The machines must be destroyed. We see this over and over in the original film; Kyle is so run down and human; he takes his clothes from a homeless man; he makes his own weapons (and also teaches Sarah to do so). They don't have fancy terminator-alert machines; they rely on dogs to alert them. Kyle and Sarah defeat the machines not through technology, but through their love, the ultimate human connection. Love wins because it means the conception of John Connor, who will eventually defeat the machines, and because it is what inspires Kyle to sacrifice himself for Sarah. The film ends with Sarah, looking all natural with her hair blowing in the wind, riding off into the Mexican sunset; a beautiful scene of nature to give hope for the future.
T2 takes a different POV: in it, we must learn to *use* the machines, to fight the system by working within the system. The heroes don't make their own weapons; they buy or steal as many big, cool-looking, technologically advanced weapons as they can manage. They don't destroy the terminator; they use him to help them win. (There's an interesting scene in the uncut version that directly contrasts Sarah's (1st movie) perspective with John's (2nd movie) perspective; Sarah insists that they must destroy the terminator, but John insists that they use him). Ultimately it's technology, used for good (the tamed terminator), that results in the triumph of good.
I think T2 is influenced by the cyberpunk ethos of the 80's in which the heroes *used* technology instead of fearing it. (I don't know much about cyberpunk, this is just stuff I've read; I apologize if I'm misrepresenting it). This is also very Matrix-like. In the Matrix, they don't retreat off into nature and hide from technology; they succeed by using technology, by becoming the best they possibly can at it, by becoming *better* than those who use technology to oppress them. This is also kind of like what Donna Haraway talks about in her Cyborg Manifesto, which was supposedly written in response to "nature, earth goddess" feminists who wanted to get in touch with their roots and who hated and feared technology. Haraway's response was to encourage the use of technology, to say that we can use it to our advantage to eliminate the systems of oppression, based on human bodies, that have been frustrating us for years; if we become cyborgs and master that role, we create a new world in which our bodies won't hold us back.
(I'm not sure what it says about me that I greatly prefer the first movie. Perhaps just that I'm still too idealistic for my own good.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-04-21 10:11 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I am not too tired to say let me know if you find a source of Highlander avis or mpegs that's not kazaa.
Is there really no chance you'll make Chicago? We'll make room!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-04-21 11:18 pm (UTC)*sigh* I would so love to go to Chicago. (Don't tempt me!) But there's no way I can work it out with my real life obligations. I think four conventions this year will probably be enough, anyway. ;)