After Work

All of the Terminator films except for the third one have their climactic scene set inside of a factory. That is the place where the killer robots (pardon: cybernetic organisms) are crushed or melted down or obliterated in a thermonuclear explosion. But factories are also where the Terminators are forged. These golems of the post-industrial age are born in factories just as humans – and especially first-world humans – are locked out of them, laid off, made redundant, outsourced, terminated. And so, albeit on a crude, literal level, the Terminator films are also stories about the de-industrialisation of America, a decades-long economic and social transformation that lacks a recognisable set of cinematic referents simply because blue collar work was hardly ever featured in the nation’s films to begin with.

The factories of the Terminator films are already depopulated. Unlike the research facilities that are guarded  - in Judgment Day - by their own paramilitary security forces, these are buildings without so much as a night janitor. In The Terminator, Connor and Reese waltz into one such factory and initiate an automatic production sequence simply by flicking a random series of switches on a console, thus setting in motion a series of whizzing robotic arms and appendages whose overt purpose is to remind us of the dehumanisation of work and invite us to consider the small step that supposedly separates replacing the odd worker from killing all humans.

Unpacking Hollywood technophobic fantasies is never straightforward, and mostly pointless: of course James Cameron’s rage against the machine is a glaring paradox, just like the condemnation of simulations by the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix is a glaring paradox. The underlying messages are never subversive, the social analyses always absent. These are stories that are ground out of the raw material of literature and philosophy by a semi-industrial process – think of the heavy and contested debt of both The Terminator and The Matrix to their various respective sources – and that carry trace quantities of more coherent artistic visions and more serious reflections. But what Hollywood also does, more than any other single global cultural site, is to reify fantasy, that is to say define each year what counts as real imagination. This can be observed for example in the press releases of the companies that make the software used in post-production, which are all about setting and re-setting the always shifting benchmarks of verisimilitude.

So, even at its worst, American apocalyptic cinema engages in the culturally significant task of imagining what the end of the world or the decline of particular social classes might look like, and mobilises to this end a formidable technical and creative apparatus. Additionally, a franchise like Terminator allows to observe within a single storyline the evolution of the means of producing such a fantasy over time – to be precise, the twenty-five years that separate the original Terminator to Salvation. On this, some scattered observations.

Firstly, there is the most obvious transition from mechanical to digital effects, and from low to high budget, and its failure to improve on the aesthetic of the original. I’m parting ways with k-punk here, who has expressed admiration for Salvation’s ‘CyberGothic’ – there was nothing to my mind in the last instalment that improved on the low-tech, low-budget flash forwards of the first Terminator, or that expanded on the image of future Earth as a corpse-strewn waste land that populated Kyle Reese’s memory and Sarah Connor’s nightmares in instalments one and two. And this is not just not very imaginative of the film-makers. It’s also not very imaginative of the machines.

Consider the factory where the final confrontation in Salvation is set. There is a suitably sombre moment when John Connor realises that he’s standing on the factory floor on which the Terminators are built. These are early models, T-800s. He knows them well, and so do we. One of them is a computer-simulated and, in all fairness, entirely credible version of the Arnold Schwarzenegger of 1984. The others are endoskeletons that have yet to come on-line. But what’s more notable about this factory is that it looks like it was designed by humans: it has stairs and elevators and doors, hydraulic piping and large wheels for opening and closing valves manually. So whereas on one hand the machines appear fiendish in their, well, machinations, always looking for new ways to infiltrate and deceive the resistance, they are baffling failures at creating environments in their own image. The ‘Moto-Terminators’ (an innovation of Salvation) are a typical example: these androids ride armoured motorbikes that they actually have to control, meaning that if the rider is unseated or killed the bike itself is rendered useless, for it has no intelligence of its own. Furthermore, the occasional point-of-view shots from inside the Terminators’ brains indicate that they visualise data in Arabic numbers and select options from sets of commands in English; but of course it’s not just human symbolic language but the very idea of a ‘computer screen’ for somebody to look at that is entirely redundant if you happen to be the computer.

What is most striking about the world of the machines is all this vestigial humanity, all the inherited tics that our mind children appear unable to unlearn. What was the point of becoming self-aware if Skynet was just going to take over and be like us? For that matter, why wage all-out war on humanity? On this point, The Matrix rather more intelligently suggests that the best way for machines to enslave us would be to run a programme that looked and behaved exactly like late capitalism. The takeover by means of the greater and greater mechanisation of labour is an outdated scenario that later Terminator films need to keep playing out simply because it’s what the future looked like in 1984, when the android or replicant seemed the most likely successor to the human race. Nowadays the synthetic other looks rather more like a financial instrument than a robot.

But here’s another question: why is the T-800 anatomically correct? And by the way, we can infer that it is because none of the people who briefly see it naked when it travels to the past ever shout “look, a giant naked man with no penis!”, but the approving glance of a waitress in Judgment Day, above, is the only proof positive – it’s not as if Arnie’s schlong is ever in view. Nonetheless: the T-800 is an infiltration unit, but only insofar as it needs to appear human for long enough to come within shooting range of actual humans. We also know that all T-800s look alike, meaning the disguise would only go so far if you happened to survive the first meeting with one of them.

Still, even if we speculated that Skynet gave the T-800 a penis just to stick with the design, or on the off chance that it might some day have to exterminate a nudist colony, it would be another one of those incidental, vestigial attributes, but also one that calls attention to the fact that the machines do not seek pleasure. On this point it might be worth reminding ourselves that the eighties were not only the decade of the killer robot but also of the sexy robot, meaning not just Blade Runner’s Roy, Pris and Rachael, or Kelly LeBrock’s character in Weird Science, but ones that would get naked right down to the chassis in the works of illustrators such as Hajime Sorayama, without forgetting Donna Haraway’s infinitely more layered but still resolutely pleasure-seeking cyborgs.

None of these creatures remotely resemble Skynet and its machines, whose business time is strictly regular business time: meaning the fulfilment of whatever mission might be at hand, with the corporate and military senses of the word both in play. Clare Danes’ character in Rise of the Machines quizzes the reprogrammed T-800 about this, asking it if it cares about the well-being of its charges, to which the reply is:

If you were to die I would become useless. There would be no reason for me to exist.

The liberated machines have simply turned inwards the utilitarian principle on which they were once built. And so comes the answer to Philip Dick’s question: these androids don’t dream.

If the machines are strangely maladjusted to the world that they inherit, so too are Sarah and John Connor to the world that fails to end: having trained for the post-apocalypse, they cannot adjust to society this side of the catastrophe. And so they drift, gaining a fleeting sense of community from their association with a gang of Mexican outlaws – whether criminal or revolutionary, is left unclear – but always coming back to the country where they are routinely incarcerated or lumped with the clinically insane.

She used to be a waiter. He’s an occasional road gang worker who lives off the grid and is caught stealing drugs from a veterinary clinic. Their ritual insistence that ‘there is no fate but what we make’ is belied by the fact that there is plainly no future for them in human society and that they don’t believe in the possibility of social change. And so when Sarah dies of cancer, one year after the scheduled end of the world that she had managed to defer in Judgment Day, she asks that her ashes be scattered but her coffin be filled with assault rifles and grenades, for the fight against the machines that might yet come, and the revolution that never will.

One last image. By the time the second Terminator film was made, in 1991, the steel crisis was two decades old, yet a vat of molten steel is to this day one of the stock images of industrialisation and a symbol of our capacity to manufacture things. (A current Hyundai ad campaign emphasises this.) In Judgment Day, it becomes the means of undoing progress, of literally forgetting the advances that we can speculate about but have yet to pass: it is the place where the T-1000 comes to die, shrieking horribly and shape-shifting as it flails about in its final spasms, the embodiment of the nightmare of a future without work, a future that doesn’t need us.

The Terminator (James Cameron, USA, 1984)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, USA, 1991)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, USA, 2003)
Terminator Salvation (McG, USA, 2009)

This has just come to hand: Aaron Bady on first seeing The Terminator in 2008.

War Is Hell (for other people)

He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital… And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.

He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he’d never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.

(Frederic Brown, ‘Sentry’)

When a force of marauding aliens invades the earth and starts killing everybody, the only sensible response is a military one. You do not negotiate with terror itself. And so every enlisted soldier, every reservist, every citizen with a weapon becomes part of the resistance. The enemy is ruthless, its weaponry deadly, its advance seemingly unstoppable. Frontal confrontation soon proves disastrous, and so the resistance has to adopt guerrilla tactics: ambushes, improvised explosive devices, suicide attacks. Anything to disrupt the invaders.

Jonathan Liebesman’s World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles is set in an irony-free zone, demonstrating not an inkling of how the never-say-die, self-sacrificing ethos of its heroes might resemble the mystique of insurgent warriors elsewhere, and how much the super-armoured aliens dropping out of the sky might in turn reflect how the Western military is perceived in the other world that is Asia, or Africa, or the Middle East. ‘Here come the Americans / Garibaldian martians’ intoned a song by the Italian band Stormy Six on the liberators who fought the Last Just War, and they really must have seemed an alien race: nobler, stronger, futuristically equipped (those shiny chocolate bars!). But six decades later, still we grapple pathetically with that fundamental problem of perspective: how to represent the Western invader as an Other, how to comprehend that its motivations may appear completely hostile and opaque to the invaded – and not just to the extent that they actually are, but supercharged into the truly demonic: a Great Satan, indeed.

Hollywood’s crudest fantasies of aliens coming for our blood (War of the Worlds) or our water (Battle Los Angeles) highlight the extent of this failure, as do the films which purport to assume the point of view of the colonised only to construct a disconcertingly impoverished and self-serving clash-of-cultures narrative (Avatar). In between, the enlightened liberal view of products like Generation Kill, the HBO series by David Simon, Ed Burns and Evan Wright based on Wright’s experience as a reporter embedded with the first Marines reconnaissance battalion‎ during the Second Gulf War. This is a far more nuanced treatment of contemporary colonial warfare, aware of its absurdities and its atrocities, but also of the implications of embeddedness, that is to say, of siding literally with the battalion, as if war was a first person shooter and we – as players, spectators, reporters and citizens – had no choice of which side to take.

But the show’s critique, if you could even call it that, only goes so far, and in the final scene of its final episode, when the Marines assemble to watch the video of the invasion shot by one of the men and choose to leave the room one by one, responding to the manipulation of the spectacle by withdrawing from it, we remain bound to it, and manipulated in turn by the non-incidental use of Johnny Cash’s When the Man Comes Around. Ultimately – and more so than The Wire, which offered the point of view of the gangsters, the project-dwellers and the occasional citizen alongside, albeit secondary to, that of the police – Generation Kill is content with shooting the Iraqis as roadside extras or more frequently victims, while the army, that is to say the film crew, advances onto Baghdad, and us with them: also embedded, also complicit, also forced into a role.

Battle Los Angeles dispenses with any such semblance of self-reflection, even as it appears dimly aware of the possibility that its fantasy might offer a commentary on world events. Thus a talking head on a CNN show in the early hours of the invasion, when it emerges that what the aliens are attempting is an aggressive water privatisation scheme, puts forward the following analysis:

When you invade a place for its natural resources, rule of colonisation states that you wipe out the indigenous population. Right now, we are being colonised.

One could expand on the validating role of branded fake bulletins in these films, but whichever way you look at it, the pronouncement is highly egregious, for this is not in fact how colonisation has worked on this planet for some time. There is no rulebook that says you can wipe out an indigenous population in order to plunder its resources. To suggest that there is implies that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Libya are not colonial, nor aimed at securing the supply of oil or exerting strategic influence. Civilian casualties in these conflicts are considered in fact by the citizens of the countries that send their military as acceptable collateral damage, which is certainly scandalous enough – but not as the actual means to the ultimate end.

What makes Battle Los Angeles even more egregious, however, is its blithe existence as an entertainment and consumer product while all those other wars are being fought. On this point I must go to the always excellent Aaron Bady and his recent reflections on simultaneity and indifference. The essay opens with a reminder, or possibly a piece of information: did you know that 40 civilians died in Pakistan as a result of a botched drone attack last month? I confess that I did not. The attack, in that Orwellian non-place that is the region known as AfPak, got very little coverage in our media, and elicited a rather muted outcry. Bady expands on this, and on the difficulties in maintaining a perspective and a sense of the unfolding of simultaneous events, each with their own repercussions in actual communities and societies.

To grasp simultaneous events is a challenge: attention is finite and we can only care about so much. To do so in a media environment that is so often blind to correlations and equivalences, of in fact insists that connections not be made, makes the challenge harder still. But Bady goes a step further, and contends that the elision of perspectives necessary for what Rohit Chopra has called ‘imperial indifference’ is not an act of inadvertent omission, or of reflexive or parochial cultural laziness, but has in fact to be actively produced. Writes Chopra, and Bady quotes:

[I]mperial indifference is the result of an immense intellectual, political, cultural and social labour undertaken in diverse locations of social life and practice – from the content of school and college textbooks to the representation of ethnic minorities on television shows in India or the US, traversing the multiple tracks and channels of soft diplomacy and the realpolitik calculations of hawks, enshrined in the gendered and raced division of global labour and no less in the political economy of global information technology, communication channels and telecommunication networks. Imperial indifference is made possible by the relentless inscription of the lessness of some lives and bodies; when some lives, as Judith Butler suggests, are less grievable than others […]. In various forms of social existence, in the banal stuff of everyday life as in the obviously “imperial” acts of powerful states, imperial difference enables as much as it reflects the normalisation of empire in the present historical moment.

Chalk up Battle Los Angeles to the normalisation of empire, then. File its cliché-laden elegy for the Marine Corps under the rubric of a propaganda that isn’t innocuous, casual of vacuous, but on the contrary is a tool of indifference, a thing that numbs and blinds us. And regard how sophisticated its language is, how adept the filmmakers are at this game. The mise-en-scene, favouring faux-documentary handheld action over more classic mounted camera set ups, puts you right there, on the scene, one of the guys. The balance of ethnicities, genders and temperaments makes of the Marines unit a microcosm and at the same time a composite model society based on sacrifice, solidarity, resilience and deference to the chain of command. As the rest of society is victimised and helpless, the implication is that this microcosm could take its place. And so, as in 2012, the destruction of Los Angeles, of the great city with all its contradictions and its messy complexities, is a cleansing act that prepares us for a new beginning.

But observe also what is less obvious: beginning with how fortunate you should count yourself that these warriors are on your side. These people are an unstoppable force. They never quit – every challenge is answered by the chant ‘Retreat? Hell!’ – there is no wound that will slow them down and they never die except by being blown up to bits. They are meticulously sadistic, although strictly at the service of good: thus when they capture a moribund alien, the character played by Aaron Eckhart proceeds to peel off its flesh and stab its internal organs one by one in search for the most vital. Seen through the alien sentry’s eyes in Frederic Brown’s famous story, they might well look like monsters, or through the eyes of a thirsty colossus from outer space, like cockroaches. But they are our monsters, our cockroaches. They are us.

Which leads right back to the question of point of view. The film, as I noted, is practically a first person shooter. A videogame version has been announced, and it promises to be indistinguishable from it, while another first person shooter – Call of Duty - Black Ops – recently broke all records by reaching $1 billion in sales in 42 days. Now don’t worry, I am not about to claim that videogames are corrupting our youth by desensitising them or making them fond of violence. Merely observing how seamless the entertainment machine has become, how different media – television, cinema, online gaming – bleed into one another, and how together they organise our very selective understanding of real world events, naturalising such concept as pay per view, billable time, permanent war. You play, you learn about stuff, you point and shoot. There is no sinister, conspiratorial intent that binds this semiotic system to transnational capitalism and economic and military imperialism: it’s just that they are cut from the same cloth, or rather, that they operate on the same global informational networks and aspire to the same transparent realism.

And this is possibly the most perverse aspect of Battle Los Angeles: its paradoxical claim to authenticity. The three weeks military-style training undergone by the actors, the explicit reference to the vocabulary of Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan, the involvement of actual military personnel and facilities, are all put at the service of an infantile fantasy at the same time as actual wars are being fought but cannot be apprehended, sometimes not even in the form of headlines, because they are stories that no longer sell, or do not mesh. And so the grotesquely named but nonetheless actual place that is AfPak becomes less than Liebesman’s Los Angeles: less important to learn about, less salient, less real.

Spoiler alert: the turning point in the film is when the hero works out how to disable the enemy’s drones.

The World Will Be Tron

The passage from postmodernism to virtuality involves a shift from copying to simulating the world, from the reproductive practices of photography and film, to post-reproductive or simulation technologies such as telepresence, advanced digital imaging, virtual reality and other immersive environments.

(Darren Tofts, ‘The World Will Be Tlön’)

Entonces desaparecerán del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español. El mundo será Tlön.

(Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’)

The grand design of Clu, the villain in Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy, is to take over the world at the head of an army of software constructs magicked into being by a laser printer, and then rid it, genocidally, of its imperfections. The apocalypse will be heralded by the message ‘New updates are available’, and what gets updated is us.

How long has cinema and popular culture more generally been recycling this idea? Yet at least the first incarnation of Tron came up with a striking and original aesthetic for it, and one that has the not insignificant merit of having dated quite well. I’m not just talking about the perennially cool light cycles, but also the sepia complexion of the characters on the grid, resembling actors in a silent movie, set against the far more well-defined and colourful, ultimately real-, concrete-looking uniforms and scenery. The object of imperfect simulation, inside a computer, is the human flesh.

And then, yes, there were the light cycles, and those memory discs that doubled as weapons, because the (il)logic in the digital world was one of gladiatorial entertainment, a cruel arcade game in which everyone gets only one life, and in which the prize was control of information necessary for the functioning of the post-Fordist society. In Tron: Legacy, the corporation has moved from selling games and running an unspecified informational infrastructure to exerting a de facto monopoly on the world’s operating systems, and the prize has become the control of its boardroom, a birthright that young Sam – the son of Tron’s hero Kevin Flynn – seems uninterested in assuming. In the meantime his old man, having disappeared from this side of the computer screen in mysterious circumstances, is stuck on the grid and locked in an extenuating positional war with the Codified Likeness Utility, or Clu, the programme he had designed a quarter of a century earlier to run the place.

Thus the premise of the sequel, but so tired is the script, so derivative most of its visuals, that the story becomes that of another remake, another recycling.

A remake, because Legacy doesn’t really bother to become another film: it is more interested in playing around with the cult iconicity of the original than doing something interesting with it and – the employment of Jeff Bridges’ zen master buddy notwithstanding – it never seriously entertains pretences of spiritual or philosophical depth (unlike, say, Avatar or The Matrix). So one is left to contemplate its ways of rememory: its poster is a replica of the Tron poster; its opening sequence morphs the lines on a microchip into an urban landscape, just like in Tron; the memory disc duels and the extended team light cycle battle get replayed more or less blow by blow; the long, slow journey towards the portal mimics a similar scene on the old grid. It’s one long and frankly at times barely sufferable cinematic déjà vu.

And then there is Kevin Flynn himself, who appears as a young man in the form of Clu thanks to the magic of digital performance capture whilst the finely aged Bridges gets to play the older version straight. Here, like in the case of the untalented Mr. Gollum, we get schooled again in the blindness of the filmmaker to the limits of a new technology: the (barely) animated Clu gets a whole rousing speech and extended close-ups as if he could measure up to real actors, whereas he’s exactly what it says on the box: a codified likeness, what a person may look like after extensive facial reconstruction surgery or a series of strokes, and then only so long as you choose to suspend disbelief and trust in the code. Yet while China Mieville's critique of CGI remains valid and current, we must concede that it has become genuinely difficult to tell some digital effects from their more traditional in-camera counterparts, and digital backdrops from concrete scenery. It is therefore possible for performance capture to lay some claim of genuine future viability, in which case Legacy could just be heralding a new era of remakes in which you actually get to use the original, since-aged or deceased actors. In a film in which nothing is original – the few new locations, Flynn’s hideout on the grid and Castor’s bar, are baffling pieces of Kubrickiana – this is just about the overt theme of Legacy, pace PKD: we can remake you.

This particular mode of recycling requires an almost casual meshing between the simulated and the actual, the virtual and the real, that reminds us of the extent in which these slippages have become ingrained, integral to entertainment and storytelling. In this respect the old Tron seems, yes, different and far more naïve. You couldn’t imagine a contemporary film sporting this laugh-out-loud intertitle,

nor one featuring the sequence of Flynn’s digitisation, line by excruciating line.

In Legacy, Sam gets blasted by the same laser beam but the effects are instantaneous. This neatly circumvents the need to represent the transformation, which also happens to be at the heart of the extropian immortalist project: how is the you inside the machine still you, if the digital copy doesn’t just replicate but in fact replace the analogue, flesh-and-blood original? In lieu of coming up with the requisite pseudo-science, Legacy speeds up the process to the extent that it cannot be visually apprehended if not as a conventional transition, much like a fade out.

In fact the greater speed of the action sequences is another and wholly predictable difference between the old and new Tron. Greater speed as we know in computing terms means more power, more bandwidth, that is to say a better experience. This is something that Pat Cadigan liked to play with in her Dore Konstantin novels – to have faster access to artificial reality meant for her characters having greater, richer access to it. 

Another thing happens in the transition from the ‘real world’ onto the grid: namely, the film goes 3D. This is just about the only interesting idea in Legacy: to have made the simulated world more real than the real, in at least one aspect – its visual depth. And for once the third dimension adds value to the mise-en-scene, thanks to some quite nifty direction and a smattering of suitably grandiose vistas. If nothing else, the grid seems vast, capable of fitting a specular world. This may be what we want to take away from Tron: Legacy: a couple of frames, the odd half-sequence, in that they do a passing job of representing that other world that so preoccupies us, cyberspace, and thus may be deserving of a place in the catalogue of our imaginings.

In his short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, first published in 1940 in the magazine Sur and then in 1941 in the collection above, Borges tells of a world imagined in so much detail that it comes to replace the real one. The creators of this world, first organised as a secret society in the sixteenth century, proceed in their design – not unlike Clu – under the guidance of the philosophical doctrine of idealism (Berkeley himself was a member), and let their mindchild intrude upon reality a little bit at a time, initially via the mischievous inclusion of an entry on the Tlönian country of Uqbar in a few copies of volume XLVI of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia of 1917. These incursions culminate in 1937 with the delivery to one of the adepts of a complete set of The First Encylopaedia of Tlön, which coincides with the appearance in various world locations of objects that appear to come from Tlön as described in the encyclopaedia. Then come the objects with unlikely material properties, seemingly not of this world. And by the time the story draws to a close, the fiction is poised to take over.

Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön’s rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already Tlön’s […] “primitive language” has filtered into our schools; already the teaching of Tlön’s harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has obliterated the history that governed my own childhood; already a fictitious past has supplanted in men’s memories that other past, of which we now know nothing with certainty–not even that it is false.

It may seem a little extravagant to get Borges out of bed to account for a film as pedestrian as Tron: Legacy, unless we were to read into it the symptoms of a growing inurement – and blindness – to simulations. That humans may be digitised, or software constructs made flesh, as in the case of the female protagonist at the end of Legacy, is a trope that no longer requires justification. But then so is hyperspace, right? Yet nobody believes in it. True. Except here the realities are beginning to nest – which, as Darren Tofts has observed in his masterly essay on Tlön, was the point of Borges' story: a calling into question of the boundary between fiction and reality, which is not just the overt subject of the story but also deployed in the way that it is told, by the first person Borges, leaving a trail of clues that could be traced to actual persons, places and publications, as in the act of manufacturing a myth (we would say a hoax). Writes Tofts:

As a synthetic reality, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" draws us, the readers of Borges the writer, the people outside-text, into its perplexing ontological orbits. That is, our experience of the world is affected by our involvement in the story. Like the inhabitants of Tlön, we find ourselves engaging with metaphysics as if it were a "branch of fantastic literature" […] Borges defiantly teases the readers' desire to believe in the reality of the discovered world, secure, as they are, in their assured, known world outside-text. He tests, in other words, the extent to which readers are prepared to forestall their exit strategy, to explore the outer limits of credulity to do with this previously unknown world.

The use of virtuality in film has presented us with a number of Borgesian knots in the last two decades. Recall for instance how in The Matrix the cityscape of Sydney, Australia, was used as the palimpsest for a digital set that stood in the diegesis for a real place but was later revealed to be a simulation – which, in a perplexing convergence of fantasy and reality, is exactly what it was. And what about Toy Story 3, what of those Thinkway replica toys, modelled with neurotic precision from Woody and his friends, some fifteen years after the fact, doing exactly what the toys do in the film, and more. Are they not real?

On the face of it, Legacy offers no such intricate puzzles. The replica light cycle paraded around at the launches doesn’t fool us: it is a fake. We know that Jeff Bridges has aged. There are no meaningful intrusions, no persistent blurring of the ontological distinctions. Except we forget that it all started with gaming: Tron was an actual arcade title, its release by Bally Midway set to coincide with that of the original film. It had its own sequels, the latest of which, Tron: Evolution, paved the way for Legacy. It was proof of ownership of a game that enabled Flynn to gain control of the corporation, Encom. And what is a game if not a world imagined in enough detail as to become real? When you can socialise, study, achieve status and work in a game environment, how can you say that it’s not real? And if you were still inclined to, could you tell with ease which parts of a game are not real, and which part are your life? Is there a threshold that you can step back through, signalling that you've abandoned the fantasy?

Tron: Legacy doesn’t cogently explore any of these dimensions, it just happens to be immersed in them, like in a soup. The franchise itself is shorthand for the conflation of gaming and cinematic narrative: it paved the way for all the crossovers and the reciprocal adaptations – films into games (was ET the worst of them all?), and games into films (Final Fantasy, surely, the lousiest). Several generations of the Tron games are remediated in the course of the film. And then there is the question of Flynn senior: what should we make of his twenty-year absence? Was he really digitised, or did he rather choose retire to live in the game, yet at the same time refusing to play it according to the rules (‘removing himself from the equation’, in zen fashion) precisely in order to defer closure, and seal off the exit strategy of the virtual?

Answering some of these question is as difficult as it is, ultimately, boring, but the dullness of Legacy may just remind us that virtuality is at its most insidious not when it is spectacular and seductive and filled with surprise and pleasures, but rather when it is repetitive and tedious, always remaking and recycling itself, near-indistinguishable from life and work. Contact with Tron, the habit of Tron, is poised to disintegrate this world.

Jorge Luis Borges. 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'. Tr. Andrew Hurley. In Collected Fictions (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 68-81.Available online in a different (and uncredited) translation here, and in Spanish here.

Darren Tofts. 'The World Will Be Tlön: Mapping the Fantastic onto the Virtual'. In Postmodern Culture, Volume 13, Number 2, January 2003. Paywalled here.

For a study of Borges' story in relation to gaming, see chapter 7 of Gordon Calleja's doctoral thesis, Digital Games as Designed Experience: Reframing the Concept of Immersion (Victoria University of Wellington, 2007), available for download here.

Thanking Jake, as more or less customary.

It's Just a House

There’s a percentage on your mortgage and your house is gone

There’s a percentage on your mortgage and your life is gone

(Rock Off Crew, ‘Losing Our Home’)

Pixar’s Up is without a doubt the best film made to date about the subprime mortgage crisis, unless you were to contend that rather than about it was in and of the crisis. Writing began in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble; the film was released five years later, when most Western nations were busy bleeding themselves dry to rescue what was left of their credit institutions and simultaneously doing nothing to prevent the most vulnerable borrowers from losing their homes, or else actively kicking them onto the kerb. Production took place whilst all of this unfolded, forming a perfectly rendered background of dying hopes and crumbling certainties.

‘What I am saying to you is that I have found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.’ Alan Greenspan said this in October of 2008 in front of Henry Waxman and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. That was the punishment for his leading role in causing the immiseration of millions of people: having to publicly concede that there may be a flaw in the model of the self-regulating free market. But spare a thought for the man, for it was no small admission: the model underpinned everything, it was the guarantor of American prosperity itself. In 2000, when Fannie Mae formulated a plan to extend home ownership to 18 million more low and middle income earning families, it chose to call it nothing less than its ‘American Dream Commitment.’ This commitment involved ‘bringing global capital to local communities,’ and global capital obliged, so long as it could place a bet on the outcome of each of those mortgages, which Greenspan dutifully allowed. What could possibly go wrong?

A flying house. An old man literally tethered to his only asset. Quite another dream, that of escaping with one’s home away from civilization and the economy, and inside of a childhood drawing. There. An image, like in one of those proposals that architects and design firms put forward for no practical purpose other than enhancing their creative reputation. Say, a vertical city built under a disused viaduct. Or a lone house perched atop a cliff, next to a waterfall.

When Up shifts out of its extended prologue and into the present tense, Mr Fredricksen is about to lose his house and be moved into a retirement village. The house itself is to be demolished to make way for a massive residential building, a development that this side of the crisis seems somewhat incongruous – are the busy city centers encroaching on the quiet suburbs these days in America? My head is full of stereotyped images of abandoned peripheries and dilapidated inner cities and commercial areas reclaimed for aspiring loft dwellers rather than large scale new construction, but I make no claim to actual knowledge. At any rate this aspect of the set up fits within the usual and supremely ironic Pixar theme of the struggle against the inexorable and dehumanizing march of progress told in the full glory of digital 3D. The face of evil here is a suited property developer who’s always talking on his cell phone despite appearing to be mouthless.

Fredericksen escapes the predicament by tying thousands of helium-filled balloons to the house, and it is clearly an escape in imagination as much as one in reality – set against the backdrop of the most catastrophic housing market collapse in history, it’s an image that demands to be deconstructed.

Floating gently above the clouds, away from earthly troubles. It is intriguing to speculate how the unfolding storlyine, the creeping of the word subprime into the media conversations and common parlance, the progressive deepening of the crisis might have affected at this time the screenwriters and the artists, many of whom would have had their own mortgages to service. Real estate prices in Emeryville, California, where Pixar Animation Studios is headquartered, began to tumble in the spring of 2007, although not quite as severely as in some other parts of the state, which was one of the worst affected by the crisis.

It is a storyline that you can also follow on the shelves of your local public library. Go to the real estate section and watch the mood swing on the book covers. In 2006, it’s upbeat books with fantastic titles along the lines of Proportunities: How to Use Creative Finance to Make a Fortune in Real Estate; by 2008, it’s the post-mortems of the bubble and the bust, and how to make the most of a bad situation. Whilst the Net has a funny way of overwriting its own past, there too with a little Google savvy you can take samples and measure the time it took for the perceptions and narratives to begin to match reality. One of my favourite documents is the Cato Institute daily podcast of 31st of August 2007, in which supply-side economist Alan Reynolds downplayed the implications of the subprime crisis for the housing market – let alone the wider economy – and placed the blame for it squarely on the borrowers themselves, whom he painted as either liars who fudged their loan applications or serial property ‘flippers’ motivated solely by greed. We know now what to make of both of those judgments, but it’s not just how comically wrong Reynolds turned out to be that makes the piece interesting; it is also his neoliberal emotional blindness to the lives of those who faced foreclosure. ‘They can just walk away’ was his somber summation. It would be nothing more than ‘an inconvenience’.

Apply your natural capacity for empathy, or watch Lesley Cockburn’s American Casino for a sense of the actual devastating impact of those foreclosures, which hit and continue to hit disproportionately inner city and African American communities. Yet interestingly the song by Baltimore band Rock Off Crew featured in the documentary opens with a line that is at odds with the remainder of the lyrics in its yearning not for a solution or respite, but for an escape:

All I want to do is get away, just get away

Away from the struggle and the repayments, away from having to carry the house on your back, or at the end of a rope, perhaps. Away from the American dream and the injection of global capital into local communities. At its most visually lyrical, Up literally embodies this yearning.

But just like the market, so too the house will have to come down eventually, and Fredericksen’s character arc is carefully paced so that by the time he has to let go of it, he is ready to do so. First he jettisons with a grunt of satisfaction his beloved furniture, full of the encoded gestures and memories of his life with late wife Ellie,

later he watches as the house itself disappears into the clouds. And when his young traveling companion commiserates him on his loss, there comes the quip that completes the arc: ‘It’s just a house’.

Just a house. One of the effects of the credit crisis has been to foreclose on the aspirations of home ownership of the working class, further deferring the promise of security and prosperity for all that free market theory regards as its inevitable long-term outcome. I don’t recall in which interview or at which juncture of the crisis Jon Stewart complained rather pathetically that ‘our wealth is our work’, as if his own ideology actually allowed for such an equation. If the ongoing crisis has (re)taught us anything, it is that our work will create somebody else’s wealth. And when the crunch comes, it's the working poor and the unemployed who have to learn to let go, to rise above their attachment to material goods, as if your house was really just a house, and not also a refuge, a shelter from the uncaring outside, the anchor to your community, the thing that once paid off protects you from being evicted or foreclosed, or cushions the blow if you lose your job.

In an interview for Democracy Now! on her documentary on the crisis, Lesley Cockburn spoke of how she and the other researchers had found one of the film’s main subjects, Baltimore high school teacher Denzel Mitchell, ‘inside a Goldman Sachs investment product’. She meant that they had traced the mortgage for his Baltimore home in a derivative devised and put together in Manhattan, but the choice of words is telling: it makes sense to say that they found him in there, wrapped in a financial instrument, his own little speculative bubble. Floating. This is the destiny that Fredericksen ultimately chooses not to pursue – to float away in his house, somewhere offshore, amongst the clouds. That terse statement of fact – ‘it’s just a house’ – becomes then also a refusal to be defined by a property relation, and the means to re-enter society as a free(er) subject. It’s the other side of walking away, of letting your house be taken.

In the very last image before the credits of Up start rolling we discover that the house has landed gently just where Ellie had fantasised as a child. It is a comforting resolution, inevitably so, full of symmetry and sentimental denouement, and yet at the same time unsettling, for it leaves us with the picture of a dream without its dreamer, of an economy without people. It is also therefore, in one final ambiguity, a picture of the crisis.












The hat tip for the link to Matt Taibi's article in the first paragraph goes to the indispensible Zunguzungu.

The Unmaking of Pinocchio

Puppets never grow. They are born puppets, they live puppets and they die puppets.

(The blue-haired fairy)

When Walt Disney set about adapting Pinocchio for his second animated feature, he struck problems. Six months or so into the project, he discovered that what he had was an impossible sell: the story of a petulant, unlovable puppet that no audience could possibly warm to. Always the realist, he assembled his staff and informed them of the need for a sharp change of course. The puppet had to be transformed, in order to have a life on the screen at all; he had to be a sympathetic character before he could be a good boy. The result was – at least for lovers of Carlo Collodi’s original story – the utterly dismaying Pinocchio of 1940, a film that, much like Burton’s Alice of 2010, represents almost in every single detail a betrayal of its source. Beginning with the protagonist, who in Collodi’s serialised book was capricious, selfish, lazy and dishonest, traits that were more than a match for his occasional desire to do well by old, cantankerous Geppetto – himself hardly a paragon of lovability. Add to this that the original cricket gets squashed by Pinocchio with a wooden mallet in chapter four, two pages after making its first appearance, and that the blue-haired fairy, latterly Pinocchio’s sister and mother, debuts as a terrifying ghost wholly indifferent to the puppet’s fate, and you’ll get a sense of the breadth and depth of Walt’s troubles. How do you make an animated feature sure to be loved by millions out of such material?

There remains, granted, the small detail that Collodi’s Pinocchio had in fact succeeded in becoming a classic in its native Italy, and was a book that still spoke to children and adults half a century after its publication. That it had managed that, in spite of being resolutely impervious to crowd-pleasing, one could perhaps attribute to its wonderful invention, which is likely also the secret of the stubborn success of Carroll’s largely unsympathetic Alice. Neither book has ceased to this day to be relevant, nor to be read and loved. But, while we still wait for a film version of Alice that achieves worldwide iconic status, Disney likely rightly perceived that Pinocchio couldn’t be sold to a global audience like that.

Italian Gothic: Pinocchio swings from a tree in view of the house where the blue-haired fairy was murdered, from the Jonathan Cape edition of Pinocchio illustrated by Roberto Innocenti

And so now we have two Pinocchios: Disney’s saccharine-dripping, visually gorgeous film, which is all about the transformative power of deeply-felt desires and the will to succeed; and Collodi’s bleak and pessimistic fable, which is about the primacy of need: the need to be clothed and to eat – first and foremost – to which are subordinated the need to get an education and to work, that is to say, to comply with society’s demands. Not because it is the key to fulfilment and happiness, but simply because the individuals who don’t – as both the short-lived cricket and the sometime despotic fairy remark at different junctures in the book – generally end up ‘either in hospital or in jail’.

And naturally, inevitably, it is Disney’s utterly unfaithful Pinocchio that most people outside of Italy, and many inside of it, know and remember. In a piece for the London Review of Books, Bee Wilson has gone as far as to argue that Disney’s version ‘restored the story from an irony-laden parody to a true fairy tale,’ as if that made it somehow more authentic (and more valuable), although there is probably some truth in her claim that the film contributes to the continuing success of the book. Be that as it may, I want to talk about that warmth today, that lovability.



When John Lasseter and his colleagues at Pixar set about making their first animated feature, they struck the exact same trouble that had beleaguered old Walt: two years into production, whilst presenting an early draft to Disney’s producers, they came to the realisation that their central character, Woody the Sheriff, was a sarcastic and unlovable brat. ‘A thundering arsehole’ were co-screenwriter Joss Whedon’s actual words. And so again the work of animation was halted, the production team regrouped and a major rewrite ensued, to ensure that Woody would be warmed to and therefore that the film could succeed. And in this case too I have little doubt that it was the smart thing to do; besides, there was no fidelity to be compromised in the process, no book to betray, unless one were somehow inclined to regard Pinocchio as an implicit ur-text, the ghost of puppets past haunting Woody from beyond the grave.

Then again, why not? Perhaps the remarkably similar story of the two films suggests precisely that Woody had to smooth the same character flaws that made Collodi’s Pinocchio an impossible sell: an intractable pig-headedness, a fierce determination not to comply or listen to his master’s voice. We’ll never know, insofar as there is no script for the film that never was. But we do know that Woody’s eventual incarnation is quite the opposite of Collodi’s creature, chiefly in that he knows the purpose for which he was made and embraces it fully. He spends in fact the best part of the film teaching Buzz what it means to be a toy, and that it’s a higher calling than saving the universe, which is Buzz’s factory-set delusion.

In order to fulfil this calling, as we saw two weeks ago, a toy relinquishes its agency to the child and becomes completely passive and quite literally spineless – the transition when a person appears on the scene is marked in the anthropomorphic toys by their flopping over on the spot. But this is no automatic reflex, or absolute law of toy nature, as demonstrated at the end of the film when Woody commandeers a group of toys to rebel against Sid, Andy’s sadistic neighbour, and in the process breaks that cardinal rule simply by choosing to remain animated in full view of the child. By contrast, as Wilson writes, Collodi’s Pinocchio

is wilful before he has even been carved. As a log of wood, his voice shouts out that the hatchet hurts him and the plane tickles his tummy. When Geppetto makes him into a puppet, all his attempts to establish mastery over the wood are mocked: Pinocchio kicks Geppetto, steals his wig and laughs at him.

What a thundering arsehole. But then how much of the warm, loveable nature of Disney’s Pinocchio and of Woody is in fact a function of their meekness, of their absolute and freely-given compliance? And to what extent is this subjugation a function of the transition from the book to the screen?



When Jessica Rabbit quipped that she wasn’t a bad person, she was just drawn that way, she illuminated what makes cartoon characters so ontologically peculiar. A cartoon is not just written, it is also drawn. Every minute aspect of their being has to be crafted, and then manipulated so as to fit the design. A cartoon lead needs to be able to show a range of emotions that was never demanded of Gregory Peck, or Keanu Reeves. Nor is it as easy as describing those emotions in words; they need to be shown. And when cartoons go digital, the degree of command over those virtual bodies becomes a measurable variable with which to conceptualise the artist’s role even more tightly as a form of total and ultra-precise control. So for instance we are told that in the first Toy Story Woody ‘was operated by 723 motion controls, including 212 for his face and 58 for his mouth’.

Those are quite a number of strings on the old puppet, I think you’ll agree. And perhaps even by Pixar’s brilliant standards of putting the artistry at the service of storytelling, it is simply impossible in that environment, where every single gesture has to be carefully computed and modelled, to conceive of a rebellious lead pulling the story in dark, foreboding places, eschewing his directives or refusing to be loved.

And so we find ourselves again, as we did after Avatar and Alice, contemplating that familiar paradox at the heart of contemporary cinema, namely how to the staggering expansion of its capacity to represent form – in flawless CGI and the fulness of 3D – corresponds an even further narrowing of the available range of meanings. The puppets must be always obedient and lovable; the fictions must be always comforting and warm. Or else we'll have to stop everything and rewrite the entire bloody script.



Carlo Collodi. Pinocchio. Translated by E. Harden. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988.
Bee Wilson. 'No Strings'. London Review of Books Vol. 31 No. 1 · 1 January 2009.
'Toy Story: The Inside Buzz'. Entertainment Weekly No. 304, 8 December 1995.

With many thanks to Dougal for his help with the sources.

Useful Life

(The first in a series of posts about Toy Story 3. I’ve kept the spoilers to a review-standard minimum for this one.)



There is a dream sequence in the second Toy Story in which Sheriff Woody is tossed aside by Andy, the boy who owns him, and plunges through the floor and a vast expanse of darkness into a garbage bin. It is one of the rare moments in the first two instalments of the Pixar trilogy when a toy expresses the fear not of being lost, or sold into another family, or stolen to be displayed in a museum, but of actual annihilation. Except there is the issue of what death would even look like for these creatures. You could imagine Woody slowly rotting and moulding in a trash pile, but what of his all-plastic companions? For how much longer would they survive amongst the garbage, and at what point would consciousness finally seep out of their non-biodegradable shells?

This may all seem rather morbid, but Toy Story 3 steps up the existential questions posed in the first two chapters and gives them that much urgency, that much brooding poignancy. The theme of death by garbage disposal makes another appearance, too, and in an extended sequence of pure high cinema the filmmakers even show us the resignation and terror of a group of toys about to meet their unmaking. Things get that serious, and invite us to give equally serious consideration to those recurring dilemmas: what is the proper life of an object of play? If they did have desires, aspirations and fears, what would those be?

Of course the toys aren’t really toys, they are allegorical figurines that we are supposed to read human meanings into, but I want to try to be literal for a moment. There is one irrefutable truth that we learn through the films about the toys’ psychology, one trait that all of them except a pair of scarred deviants – Stinky Pete and Lotso – have in common: what they like best is to be played with by children. But it so happens that at those times they are limp and inanimate; as is the case whenever they are in the presence of people, their spark abandons them, their eyes become vacant – a point that is further underscored in Toy Story 3 by the otherwise extraordinary capacity for expression of those eyes. So what the toys derive the most pleasure from is also what flicks their off switch, reverting them to the base status of mass produced consumer objects: every Sheriff Woody, every Buzz Lightyear totally identical to any other, therefore totally interchangeable, Andy’s marker-pen branding notwithstanding.


There are shades here of Thomas’ oft-repeated wish to become a ‘very useful engine’, or the ghastly compliance of Collodi’s Pinocchio as reinvented by Walt Disney (on which more in a future instalment). But there also shades of the happy worker who – as you might recall – also cultivated elaborate illusions of individuality and irreplaceability, whilst appearing, or wishing to appear, to take pleasure in the performance of its stated function.

What the Toy Story trilogy is about, then, alongside more overt themes like the end of childhood, is instrumentality, or the human use of human beings: so not only labour and property relations and various notions regarding the role and duties of the individual within society, but also who is allowed to be happy, and how, and for how long. Mediated as it is by the most emotionally charged of commodity fetishes, our childhood toys – at least until somebody comes up with a visually and narratively satisfactory way to anthropomorphise Apple-branded gadgets – it's a treatment that could hardly fail to brood over the alienation and the inexorable churn of it all, whereby things and people are declared outdated before they are ready to move on, outmoded whilst they still have the energy, the capacity and the desire to contribute.

This core theme, which was presented very forcefully from the trilogy’s outset, has become progressively darker, and so whilst in earlier films being made redundant meant having to leave the community of Andy’s toys by the relatively benign route of a yard sale, in the third Toy Story when you cease to be useful, you die.



All the reviews that you’ve read weren’t wrong to describe Sunnyside Daycare as a prison, but some might not have mentioned that it is also a concentration camp, however much the screenplay chooses to understate the analogy. Yet even if you take your mind off that particular association, you’ll be struck by the cruel twist: it is precisely being played with, that most pleasurable of things, that becomes deadly if carried out outside the toys’ specifications, age-inappropriately. Thus work, a source of libidinal fulfilment in the quasi-utopian workplace that was Andy’s room – barring its lay offs in the form of chilling selections – becomes truly inhuman, a thing to be survived.

(And here, thinking of those eyes, and possibly taking things too far, I am reminded of my mother’s description of her best friend when, as a teenager, she would return from a full-day shift in the rice fields, her stare made vacant by sheer exhaustion.)

I must at this point clarify one thing: I loved Toy Story 3. It is immensely entertaining and clever, genuinely moving (as a friend put it, it got very dusty in that theatre towards the end) and made with unerring dedication to the story and its characters. Yet it is impossible not to balk at the extent in which virtually every aspect of its production undercuts its message. This of course has always been true: the runaway success of the Buzz Lightyear merchandising was as much an ironic fulfilment of Woody’s fears in the original Toy Story as the depletion of clownfish following its release made a tragic mockery of Finding Nemo. But just as Toy Story 3 is the most staggeringly ambitious film in the trilogy, so too is the merchandising effort at its most soul-crushing, culminating in the creation by Thinkway of a brand new line of replica toys. Here’s Pixar supremo John Lasseter, from a promotional video on Disney Living:

As we started approaching Toy Story 3, […] I kept thinking of the Toy Story toys that are out there, and said: ‘We can do better’. The idea that we had was: ‘We need to make the exact, authentic toys that Andy always played with.’ Nobody had ever done that before, until now. And so in front of me here are the exact toys and they’re beautifully made. Thinkway Toys has done an incredible job, and what is really cool is the packaging. Now you’re going to have to do what I do: not buy one, but buy two, one to keep in the package and one to open up and play with. Anyway if you look at the packaging, it’s exactly how Andy would have bought it at the store – it is just fantastic. But the other cool thing about these toys is that they have kind of two modes: there’s the toy mode and then the toys come alive. And when the toys come alive, it’s something to see… They really feel like they have a life of their own. And so I think you have to get the whole collection. That’s what I would do – that’s what I’m going to do.

It’s hard to know where to start recoiling here: if at the notion that we should buy two of each toy – is Lasseter here channelling the collector villain from Toy Story 2? – or the creepy fetishism concerning the packaging, or the idea of the second mode, in which the toys come alive, which swiftly and brutally undoes the magic and the mystery of the toys having a separate existence when you’re not in the room. But I’ll settle for the exactness of the replicas. In the case of Woody, for instance, Lasseter explains that the toy’s face was modelled based on the ‘exact data’ from the original 3D models. (Data which, ironically enough, had degraded to the point of not being available for reuse on the film itself.) And what is this obsessive precision, this faithfulness to the real thing – which was never real in the first place – at the service of, if not doing all the work of the imagination on behalf of the child?


It’s as if the filmmakers were serving us here with a legal notice: the only authorised fantasies concerning these characters are theirs and theirs alone. And indeed the troubled genesis of the film hinged on the ownership of the idea: when Disney and Pixar were negotiating the renewal of their relationship and Pixar seemed ready to break off, Disney made known their intention to produce Toy Story 3 themselves, and even created a studio for it called Circle 7. It was the most extraordinary of negotiating strategies, the threat of ruining a good yarn. But it worked: as writer Jim Herzfeld put it: ‘It was essentially [then Disney CEO] Michael Eisner putting a gun to the head of Pixar's children’. And it brought Pixar back to the negotiating table.

All this information is not any more extraneous to Toy Story 3 than the replica toys are, for it defines its conditions of possibility – including the $200 million budget – along thematic fissures that are explored by the film itself. And I’ll finish for today with a concrete example of what I mean. The real Woody toy, as Lasseter himself has clarified, is supposed to be a hand-me-down bought for Andy’s father in the 1950s, when it would almost certainly have been manufactured in the United States. But apparently they couldn’t bring themselves to take exactness that far, and the Thinkway Toys replica, as we learn at the very end of its otherwise lyrical description, is 'imported'. In that one word, that doesn’t even dignify this country of origin with its proper name, we are forced to read so much against the grain of this extraordinary film: about the global entertainment industry, about work, about the undoubtedly less useful lives of others.



(Go to part 2)

Educating Rosie

Lyn Childs, one of the interviewees in Connie Field’s documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, has explained more succinctly than anybody else I have come across the origins of Rosie.

When we first got into the war, the country wasn’t prepared. They needed all the heads they could get, and they drafted them all. And as the manpower in the country was getting pulled into the service, all of the industries were wide open. So they decided, ‘Well, we better let some of those blacks come in.’ Then after the source of men dried up, they began to let women come in. It wasn’t a struggle to do it, it was just plain necessity. The doors were opened.

That is how in 1943 Ms Childs, an African-American woman, found employment as a welder in the San Francisco shipyard. As she goes on to explain

[w]e’d never had the opportunity to do that kind of work. Do you think that if you did domestic work all of your life, where you’d cleaned somebody’s toilets and did all the cooking for some lazy character who were sitting on top, and you finally get a chance where you can get a dignified job, you wouldn’t fly through the door?

However this is not the picture of the vast new contingent of female factory workers that was being presented through the media at the time. First of all, the women on the posters and in the newsreels – and who became collectively known as Rosie the Riveter from one of the songs that celebrated them – were unfailingly white. Secondly, and no less importantly, they hailed from the middle class. If they already had jobs at all, they would be as floor managers in a fashion store, not as waitresses or chambermaids, but mostly they were housewives or brides to be, first-time workers whom the propaganda reels urged to join the ‘invisible army’ as a temporary sacrifice, just like going to war was a sacrifice for the soldiers; not to get a better, more dignified job, much less gain long-term financial independence. Yet long before the image on the J. Howard Miller poster above and on the Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post were reclaimed by the women’s movement, many of them had developed a sense of themselves as belonging to a new generation of women: skilled workers who – in the words of another of Field’s informants, Lola Weixel – could contribute after the conflict to the reconstruction of the cities, ‘do all the good and beautiful things for America, because Fascism was destroyed’.

But America had different ideas, and just as quickly and meticulously as the image of virtuous Rosie was constructed, it was deconstructed. Suddenly the women in overalls depicted in the reels started being asked by the man off screen if they had plans to continue working after the war. ‘I should say not. When my husband comes back, I shall be busy at home,’ replied one. ‘My job belongs to some soldier. When he comes back, he can have it,’ said another. Women belonged in the home, and jobs didn’t belong to women. Suddenly too the children for whom the work recruitment trailers had promised largely non-existent childcare provisions became victims of neglect due to the selfish career pursuits of their mothers, and the very fabric of modern marriage and society had come under threat. It’s all rather neatly condensed in the following 100-second reel segment, which culminates in the staggering musings of Marynia F. Farnham, MD.





A formidable text to unpack, I think you’ll agree. But it’s not my intention to point and laugh at the crude propaganda, rather to argue that things in fact haven’t progressed much further. There is much still that is crude about contemporary ideas regarding women in the workplace, and the contradictions are just as glaring. Writes Nina Power:

When people talk about the 'feminization of labor', then, their discourse is often double-edged. The phrase is at once descriptive (work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women's jobs tended to be in the past) and an expression of resentment ('women have stolen proper men's jobs! It's their fault - somehow - that we don't have any proper industry anymore!').

Nowhere is this tension, this simultaneous pull in two opposite directions more evident than in the figure of the working mother. While the message in the United States in the immediate post-War period was that such a creature could not by rights exist




Western societies have since become much more comfortable with extracting from women both the labour and the children, and without having to provide very much at all by way of provisions or compensation. We simply ask that they be both things at once – the feminine nuclear wife and the hard(nosed) worker, the tender mother and the ambitious career-seeker. Of course there is no inherent contradiction between any of those terms: what constitutes anti-progress is that this modern-day Rosie - just like her predecessor - is presented not as a possibility open to women but rather as a demand put on women.

‘juggling kids and career while standing on her head’

Enter SuperMom, the action figure. This brilliant creation from the team at Happy Worker ‘magically creates extra hours each day juggling kids, schedules, chores and career’. Her ‘eight accessories of mommy might’ include an interchangeable calm or frazzled head, a ‘super-long to do list’ and naturally a baby, whose mood can also be changed between ‘little angel’ or ‘mini monster’. Available in three different ethnicities (‘while each cultural version has unique mom and baby paint detailing, all share the same packaging with Caucasian pictures’), SuperMom

[navigates] jungles of toys and mountains of kiddie stuff, [...] prepares tasty-yet-healthy snacks, tames dust bunnies and banishes stubborn stains. With an invisible third arm and a never ending pursuit of work / life balance she can help with a school project and answer an all-important business call while wrist deep in dirty diapers.

Oh, and by the way: she cannot sit down, which, as the makers quite appropriately point out, is actually a feature.

What’s happening here? Is this a humorous send-up, or is it in fact integral to the indoctrination of the modern woman? If the material that accompanies SuperMom doesn’t read like a piece of propaganda, if you think it’s much too light-hearted, firstly I’d respond that so was Rosie’s song, and so were many of the reels in which she starred, but I’d also suggest that what might have occurred is simply a rhetorical shift in the kinds of texts that we invest with constructing our social realities. We no longer model our behaviour based on the instructional videos issued by government agencies, by and large; but maybe we take our cues (also) from comic strips, action figures, glossy magazines, always feeling that we are subjects capable of evaluating autonomously the truth value of their statements, which is likely how the original audiences of those World War II newsreels felt about themselves. But ironic distancing is not the same as safeguarding one’s autonomous judgment, as standing outside of a text – if there was even such a place. So the problem remains of how to get past the feeling of self-satisfaction that comes from getting the joke; how to substitute the inexorable logic, the perfect interplay of signs and meanings (‘SuperMom’s mood is usually determined by her children’s’) with a gesture of defiance, or the call for some sort of action, as opposed to just another piece of analysis, another blog post for like-minded people to nod at.

I don’t know how to do that. Well, obviously! I tend – perhaps because of my topic of interest – to search my memory and the past for political projects, instead of looking forward to them, and I tell myself that there is a place for that kind of work. But at the same time I feel a growing sense of impatience, when I read, say, about SuperMom or watch the new ad for the Sienna SE. Impatience at myself, for wanting to deconstruct these texts, for almost physically needing to do it, and impatience at them, for being so perfectly maddeningly clever and wrong. And I seek solace in gestures, writings or images capable of pushing back. Today, it’s in the extraordinary clarity and strength of the women interviewed by Connie Field, so glorious even in defeat; in the energy of Nina Power’s book; and in the frescoes of the chapel of San Precario, a place where to pause and contemplate what work has become, what we have allowed it to become. And there I find a rather different image of the working mother.



Here too we find that tension, that literal pull in two opposite directions, but this time without without the illusion that those obligations can in fact be successfully mediated, or that the choice – your baby and your job – is a meaningful one if it’s not accompanied by profound changes in the way we do things, in work itself. And that’s a good way to begin to look forward: by starting again to formulate demands.



Connie Field's The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (which is also where the YouTube segment comes from) is now available on DVD through the link on the title - whereas Amazon will tell you it's out of print.

Nina Power. One Dimensional Woman. Winchester: 0 Books, 2009. The book was reviewed by Dougal here.

This just came to hand: Visualising the 100-hour week of the 1947 housewife, by the redoubtable Mr Ptak.

(And before somebody points it out, I'm aware that technically the J. Howard Miller poster at the top of the post is not of Rosie.)