Conceptions and contraceptions of the future: Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 69-107

  Kimball, A Samuel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847734782     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-2_50-69     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 176.
2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.
3. George Lakoff and Markjohnson, Metaphors We Live. By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.
4. Page duBois, "The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction," in Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 169-83.
5. Phaedrus 276e-77a, qtd. in duBois, Sowing the Body, 178; her trans.
6. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1951), 86/206C.
7. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 208e-9a.
8. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Hamilton and Cairns, The Collected. Dialogues of Plato, 210c.
9. Robert Con Davis, "Aristotle and the Gendered Subject," in The Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 73-96.
10. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. John H. McMahon (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991), 4.5.1010a.
11. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans, and ed. A. L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 4.1.765b.
12. Davis, The Paternal Romance, 86.
13. Since the female produces only an impure kind of semen which she is "unable to cause to take shape or discharge" (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 4.3.767b), she cannot do what the male can - namely, bring form into being. Having no proper being of her own, she is but a debased form of the male.
14. Jacques Denida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 20.
15. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. and ed. Calvert Watkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), s.v. "bheue-."
16. Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored. Races in the Struggle for Life" and "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex" (New York: Random House, 1988), 99. Continuing, Darwin writes, "I believe this simile largely speaks the truth." The truth, however, concerns the violence this simile inadequately represents: "The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life."
17. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 91.
18. David M. Raup, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (New York: Norton, 1991), 3.
19. William K. Purves, et al. Life: The Science of Biology, 5th ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 1998), 433.
20. Raup, Extinction, 85.
21. Niles Eldredge, The Miner's Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1991), 58.
22. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 67, 85.
23. Eldredge, Miner's Canary, 125.
24. Leakey and Lewin, Sixth Extinction, 221.
25. Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony, 1996), 18.
26. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle, Elizabeth A. Dobbs, and Morris A. Parslow (Grinnell, IA: Peripatetic, 1990), 57b.
27. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, in Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11., 178-81.
28. In "'Troubles at Our Feet': The Five Riddles of Oedipus" (Soundings 83.1 [2000]: 40-77), I pursue the implications of the infanticide imagery that pervades Sophocles' tragedy, arguing that the drama ought to be understood not in terms of Oedipus's ironic guilt but rather of his deliberate efforts to educate Thebes concerning the infanticidal cause of the plague that besets their community.
29. In "Undoing the Eucharist: The Abject Mouth from Jonathan Edwards to Contemporary American Science Fiction Films" (paper presented at the Popular Culture Association in the South and American Culture Association in the South conference, Atlantic Beach, FL, 5 October 2001), I explore the anti-Eucharistic implications of such sacrifice, which invariably occurs in the context of a terrified mouth attempting to hail the other out of existence.
30. "Trivia for Matrix, The (1999)," us.imdb.com/Trivia?0133093.
31. For the early draft of the script, see geocities.com/scifiscripts/ alienresurrection_early.txt;
32. for the version in which Ripley asks if Call dreams, see www.screentalk.org/moviescripts/Alien%20 Resurrection.pdf.