Arnold
Wyatt Williams
(This essay is reprinted from You May Now Fail to Destroy Me, edited by Ken Baumann and Blake Butler, which you may preorder here.)
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Blockbuster Video. Friday evening. Omaha, Nebraska. Corner of College and Airline Drive. 1991. On the shelves, an elaborate arrangement of VHS tapes meant to announce the arrival of the latest hit, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Tapes displayed facing out, five tapes per shelf, six shelves per rack, three racks devoted entirely to Terminator 2. A total of ninety identical VHS covers bearing the cold blue stare of Arnold in black leather jacket, black sunglasses, black t-shirt, black gun, black motorcycle. An impossible muscular refinement of his body that makes the distinction of his detailed flesh from the machines accompanying him if not indistinguishable, then at least irrelevant. This is the tape my father and I are here for.
Earlier that day, the bus dropped me off from school and my father picked me up for the weekend at his farm. It was not long after I turned seven years and not terribly long after my mother moved out of the farmhouse and into an apartment, but sometime before the day my parents finalized their divorce. It is unclear where my mother and older sister were this weekend, maybe a Girl Scouts trip? It may have been the first weekend I’d ever spent with my father alone.
He ordered delivery pizza along with two three-liter bottles of Coke. We ate in front of the television, the volume turned up to a level that she never would have approved of. I remember him saying, before he pressed play on the remote, “Just don’t tell your mother.”
When he dropped me off at her apartment a couple of days later, she asked what we’d done and I burst out that we’d seen Terminator 2. I had loved the movie—the robots and Edward Furlong’s hair had moved me—and was excited to tell anyone who would listen, but as the words came out of my mouth I saw the expression on her face, which turned away to anger at my father. I don’t remember the exact problem, something along the lines of me being too young for “violent movies.” When I looked to my father, in the moments before this turned into another one of their typical fights, I could see my transgression clearly in his face. He made no attempt to hide his disappointment in me. He had offered, however briefly, to induct me into the group of men, a fraternity of silence and unspoken agreements, and I had declined his offer. For the first time, I had betrayed him.
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On the day that I was born in November of 1984, sixty years ago, The Terminator was the number one movie in America.
In that film, two hitmen—one a human, one a machine—travel back in time to 1984. The machine played by Arnold is there to kill Sarah Connor and her unborn son; the human, Kyle, has been sent to kill the machine, but also to fall in love with Sarah and father the child that the machine wants to kill. This is complicated by the fact that Kyle has been sent from the future by John, the child he is meant to father, through a time machine that is destroyed after its single use. Kyle fathers John with Sarah but is killed before John is born. If this chain of death and birth sounds vaguely biblical, I would argue that is not accidental. The Terminator is a creation story, one that attempts to explain our universe with the same totality as any sacred text. What makes this variation distinct from the old stories is that a machine enables a son to both orchestrate the circumstances of his fathering and the murder of his father in the same action.
The second Terminator film is complicated by the return of the Terminator, who we believed to be dead at the end of the first but is now miraculously reborn. He is not John’s father, but he has been sent as a representation of a father made from flesh and machine, to protect Teenage John and show him the way. Teenage John is resistant at first, but eventually accepts the idea that a messenger sent by his future self, the invention of a machine-father, is better than no father at all. They become bonded. Key to this arrangement, though, is that the machine-father self-immolates at the end of the film, killing himself so that John can live.
I am aware that there are other Terminator films but the work I’m doing here does not concern them, primarily because I did not see them during the formative years of my brain development. This is neither a work of criticism nor memoir, though I would allow that maybe it is the work of theology. What I’m trying to do, the only thing I’ve ever known to do, is disassemble the parts of a powerful machine—stories are powerful machines I’ve learned—and understand what it does. I am using my own body and mind to show what it is capable of doing, what it has done.
Though I am bringing myself to this text, it is not to recount the events in my memory. What I am interested in is how the machine of this story is part of my brain; if those two are not fully indistinguishable, then the distinction is at least irrelevant. As with all writing, I am doing this because I believe I am not alone.
I am writing this to you now in my barn. It is a useless building that once served some purpose to the fields around it, but the machines were improved and made more efficient and now the tractors no longer even need a driver. The plowing is all done by satellite now and so this barn, filled with old broken pieces of now-useless machines, is useless to the world, as well. I find this an appropriate place to do my writing.
I have my papers spread out on the old workbench. There is a vice and a set of files and metric and imperial socket sets, two tanks of oxygen and acetylene for brazing and a 200 amp welder for TIG, spools of brass and silver. There is a diesel powered drill press, a lathe, and, fixed to the far corner, a bench grinder. Any machine could be made in this barn, fabricated from scrap, unless it needs a computer. There isn’t anything that could survive in here, either, if you opened those oxy-acetylene tanks and knew how to make them explode.
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Arnold exists in both the machine of the story as well as the fleshy dimension outside of it. It is impossible to watch the Terminator move through a scene and forget that you are watching Arnold simultaneously. His flesh story is, too, about transformation of man into the facsimile of a machine.
Arnold explains his relationship to his body in the documentary Pumping Iron in 1977:
I don't have any weak points. I had weak points three years ago. My goal always was to even out everything to the point that everything is perfect. Which means if I want to increase one muscle a half inch, the rest of the body has to increase. I would never make one muscle increase or decrease, because everything fits together now, and all I have to do is get my posing routine down more perfect, which is almost impossible to do, you know? It's perfect already.
Arnold is the last man on this planet to have believed that he had a perfect body. Future historians will understand this as a major moment in the trajectory of what went wrong: That machines were made to enable the perfection of a body and that once that perfection was finally achieved, it became inaccessible again. The cycle of machine improvement leading closer and closer to perfection and then creating a new and more complicated problem: That is the problem of our time.
In the same documentary, Arnold describes his relationship to his father:
You cannot have any kind of outside negative force coming in and affect you. If I get emotionally involved, that can have a negative effect on my mind and therefore destroy my workout. So therefore I have to cut my emotions off and be cold. If someone steals my car right now, I don’t care. I can’t be bothered by that. The only thing I would do is have my secretary call the insurance agency. I have trained myself for that, to be totally cold and not let things go in my mind.
My mother called me on the phone and said, “Your dad died.” She says, “You coming home for the funeral?” I said, “No. It’s too late. He’s dead. There’s nothing to be done.” I didn’t bother with it. I never did talk about it again.
That the relationship between our bodies and our fathers and our ability to construct the machines of our desires may have something to do with one another is a significant detail in my papers here. Arnold is saying that the ability to turn the warm flesh of his being down to the cold operating level of a machine is possible through the removal of his father from his mind. He has replaced his father with the machine-father of his body.
There was a time when I felt proud to share my name with Arnold. That when someone said my name, they thought of me but also of him, a man with a perfect machine-body. I was a child. Eventually, I came to realize that the association was unflattering, that it was embarrassing to have my body and be mentioned in the same name as him. My own name produces this shame.
I have spent the majority of my life in search of a machine that will make me less human. The specifics of which machines I have personally tried—which vehicles, which drugs, which philosophies of self-improvement—seems irrelevant and minute in a society that has so obviously embraced the belief that a new machine, the next one we make is the one that will save us, that we only ever need to make the next machine, the next machine will fix me, the next machine will save my time, the next machine will grow more soy, the next machine will optimize my health, the next algorithm will fix the way I think, the next machine will make things faster or sooner and finally end this interminable waiting and rid me of the thoughts that race while having to be patient.
Those fools and their false promises! I’m certain of their delusions because they are my same delusions, from my workbench surrounded by my tools to make more machines I know I can never escape them. My head knows where we have gone wrong while my heart still only wants for another machine, still believes in their beauty. I can’t shake that false faith in my heart. I still believe that I could create a machine-father to replace my own, a work of mechanical perfection that would erase the flaws of this flesh. I know this is how it is for so many of us. I will not give you the specific history of my machines, which ones I built, which ones I bought, what speed I was going when the first machine I built almost killed me, how exactly it was I went from inhaling steroids to injecting them before the side effects began, the farm implements I built thinking it would give me an edge over my competition, the amount of money I put into my operation before the farm went under, when I started finding that I could take apart a story the way I do an engine block, how it was that things began to be so disorganized for me. I’m not getting into any of that.
I need to explain how the belief in a machine can make a heart feel. The specifics of my own memories get in the way. What I can tell you instead is how to join one round metal tube to another round metal tube. Square tubes are easier because you can cut them flat and straight; there is nothing flat and straight in the human heart, which is why square tubes are irrelevant here. Joining one round metal tube to another is key to any engine, any frame that moves, any motorcycle, any plane, any tractor, any oil rig, any machine that untethers us from the limitations of our bodies and movement, that improves us beyond what a body can do alone. The angle of the joint must be determined by the purpose, which dictates shape and therefore angle. And the cutting must be done with a round blade—we call this a miter—that matches the diameter of the tube that it is being joined to. The miter is mounted to a mill and the tube secured with a jig set to an angle that is determined through a simple subtractive equation from the desired angle. Is it possible that an angle, which hides within the structure and purpose of a thing, may have some similarity to an angel that hides within the structure and purpose of all things? The mill turns the blade, spinning and shaving away through the hard steel and leaving thin flakes below until the cut has been made. The two tubes may be held together by hand to confirm the correctness of the blade. And if the correctness has been confirmed, the area of the joint to be created may be cleaned with acetone to ensure a sterile and unpolluted fusion. The cleanest torch is an electric one, pulsating amps, miniature lightning strikes only a few millimeters tall that melt the base and joining tubes along the thin gap made by the cut of the miter. Argon gas pumping in behind each lightning strike. Molten red turning to iridescent metallic rainbow blooming across the surface of the weld. The cooling metal pooled in teardrops of steel, stacked one after another until the round cut has been made whole, complete, and formed in a new creation: A machine.
I have gone everywhere in search of this feeling. Creation! The intoxication of using one machine to make a new and better machine than the last. It is burdened by hope that this machine will be the one to work, to improve over the life of the last. How blinding—how blinded I am by the torch and the glow, my eyes full of spots that float and glow as if my eyes were always set by the sun—the feeling is. Please do not mistake this for machine apologia. Any of us can see what they have done to our world, but what I am trying to understand is what they have done to our hearts, how in my heart I want a machine-father to solve the problem of machines.
What did my father want? What didn’t he want? I’ve never been able to write about him. I write about The Terminator instead.
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The films begin with male nudity. The Terminator is unclothed, Kyle is unclothed, and, suddenly as a crack of blue lightning, they find themselves in a world that requires they cover themselves. As it was in the Garden.
The world around them is fallen. Trash litters the ground as if it were leaves from a forest of trees. The frames direct our attention to the relationship between industry and military; the tread on a construction vehicle moving earth becomes the tread of a tank crushing skulls. These are, more than anything, films about machines, the intoxicating beauty of them and the possibility that the most beautiful and dangerous machine is one that cannot be distinguished from a human male. This is accomplished through a simple difference in the mechanisms: Making them more round than square. When a machine approaches nature’s roundness, we begin to see the serpent.
The terrible future appears only in dreams, visions, the fleeting seconds when someone who knows what is coming closes their eyes and for a little while we are allowed to see what they can see. It is redundant now to say that is also how it is in the Bible, that overwhelming visions of truth are one of the few ways for God to communicate with prophets. Sarah becomes one—a prophet of the truth who is deemed crazy for it—and the men around abuse her for it. John knows her truth but cannot believe it, can only dismiss it, until the reborn Terminator returns, the machine-father, to make him believe. The father is necessary but also impossible: If the father stays, even an imitation father, then John will die. The father must die for John to live.
How many men do I know who believe a machine will allow them to outrun the sound of their father’s voice? When one machine fails to achieve that impossible speed, they believe the problem is with that specific machine, not with their false beliefs? That hidden in the secret fraternity of men is the silence on this exact subject of escaping our fathers? How is it these men have made the whole world around us in the image of their machine pursuit, so that not even the field or sky is free from their obvious failures, the failures that will kill us all eventually, and yet I am alone in my knowledge and visions, isolated in this barn with my useless tools and useless pages, and in the fields around me I can see the wreckage of the rusting and rotten whole history, one useless machine given up for the machine useless machine, and all that is left for me to do is my watching and rewatching, making my notes and doing my theology, and the only resolution I have found, the only message I can glean from our creation story is the clear and apparent knowledge that another machine will not save us but killing our fathers could.
I have had to isolate myself here among my junkyard of the useless to see clearly this vision of the truth, but I cannot be alone in it, I know I am not alone, I believe I am not alone, and it is through action that we will discover that we are not alone, those of us that can see the vision clearly.
I am standing out in the field now. I am recording this with my phone, which types the words as I speak them. It is night and I can see my barn in the distance with its single bulb hanging from the rafters, rays of light glowing in the cracks between the boards. I can see the red and green oxy-acetylene gas tanks and how I have arranged them for this moment. In other direction, I can see my father’s barn, which is only a single light on the flat, far horizon. When was the last time we talked? If I called at this hour, I know that he would answer. It is only a short drive and I am well aware of exactly where he would park his truck. He would not notice the tanks or the way that I have arranged them. I am standing in the rows of soy and all above me I can see the rows of satellites moving in a line and I know what I need to do.
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Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating. His essays appear in Harper's, The Believer, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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