Episode 44: Transcript
Episode: 44 — Terminator
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:09] And I'm Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:13] Today we're going to be talking about the Terminator movies. We just saw Terminator: Dark Fate. Dark Fate! And we actually really enjoyed it and we want to just talk about what the Terminator franchise means in 2019 and where it could go from here.
[00:00:30] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:00:57] So, Charlie Jane, why do you think it makes a difference that in this Terminator movie, the new one, Dark Fate, we actually have Linda Hamilton playing her famous role as Sarah Connor instead of substitute Linda Hamilton from Terminator: Genisys. Obviously, the Sarah Connor Chronicles is its own thing, but that's also a different person playing her. Lena Headey, actually, who was taking a break from destroying all of Westeros to help save the future. So, what difference does it make that Linda Hamilton is back and she's playing a woman who's old and who's still in this role?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:37] The thing that's really obvious after watching Terminator: Dark Fate is that Sarah Connor is the heart of the franchise. And just like how they brought Jamie Lee Curtis back for the most recent Halloween movie and they brought back Carrie Fisher for the Star Wars movies, bringing back these sort of aging icons actually really ironically rejuvenates and reinvigorates these franchises.
[00:01:57] Linda Hamilton basically steals that movie. She is the heart of that movie.
Annalee: [00:01:59] Absolutely.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:59] Like, it's a fun movie in general, but watching Linda Hamilton be an unapologetically old, not giving a shit, badass robot fighting tough person is just a delight. It's delightful and joyful and she is clearly having so much fun playing a version of Sarah Connor who no longer has any fucks to give. And it feels like a really interesting evolution of the character.
Annalee: [00:02:25] To me it was just fantastic seeing an older woman on screen being physically tough and imposing and having the same kind of gravitas that a grizzled, older male action hero would have.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:39] For sure.
Annalee: [00:02:39] She's got that magnetism. She's got the wisdom. She's got like a little bit of gravel in her voice.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:47] Yes.
Annalee: [00:02:47] And you know, we just don't see that. We do have examples of films where we see older women being kind of domestic together. We have like Golden Girls type stuff. We know they can be sharp-tongued. We know that they're human, but we really haven't—
Charlie Jane: [00:03:02] We have Mama Mia, or whatever.
Annalee: [00:03:03] We have Mama Mia, we have Grace and Frankie, but we don't have that model of that physically imposing, tough as nails, hyper-competent older woman. And God, what an awesome thing to see her just munching on the scenery.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:20] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:21] But you were saying, also, beyond us sort of gushing over Linda Hamilton being badass, that there's something about Sarah Connor being the heart of the series, even though they always come back to, but what about John Connor?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:34] Right. And by the way, we're going to have like some spoilers for the film. Probably not major spoilers. We won't give away like how it ends or whatever, but we're going to have some spoilers for Terminator: Dark Fate. And you know, one of the spoilers that has been all over the internet already is that they kill off John Connor in like the first 30 seconds in like a really ridiculous unceremonious fashion. It’s just like—
Annalee: [00:03:55] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:56] He just gets kind of run over by a bus. He's just like, you know, he's eating a hot dog, and the bus—actually he doesn’t literally get run over by a bus.
Annalee: [00:04:03] That is actually totally not at all what happens and that's kind of important. What happens to him is actually key to the film.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:07] I know, but it's done in a very throwaway fashion is what I'm saying.
Annalee: [00:04:10] It is, yeah, it's a classic—
Charlie Jane: [00:04:11] His death is just like, boom, like we're getting rid of that guy. Forget that guy.
Annalee: [00:04:16] We're getting rid of this CGI recreation of that actor.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:19] Right, yeah.
Annalee: [00:04:19] That was another thing that was pretty hilarious cause we, we briefly see sort of Edward Furlong reanimated in this CGI figure and then he's immediately gunned down.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:29] Yeah. I mean, I've seen a lot of talk online about the fact that the Sarah Connor Chronicles is the other kind of version of the Terminator franchise that really puts Sarah front and center and that's part of why it worked so well as a TV show.
[00:04:39] And I think that here, Sarah Connor is someone who's kind of lived through a bunch of versions of this story and has kind of seen how it ends over and over again. It kind of lends thematic weight to the film in terms of the kind of futility of fighting robots over and over again because they always come back and there’s always a new AI or whatever. I think that that actually works. And actually we've got a clip of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor from the film and talking about her history.
Terminator: DF Clip: [00:05:09] My name is Sarah Conn0r. When I was about her age, a Terminator was sent to kill me to stop the birth of my son, John, leader of the resistance. We changed the future, saved 3 billion lives. You're welcome.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:31] And I just, I love the cynicism and the kind of, yeah, the kind of burned out, grouchy meanness of her in this film. I feel like she definitely is the most compelling, probably the compelling character in that film.
Annalee: [00:05:46] So do you think that the Terminator franchise really has anything left to say at this point? I think that at this point it's clear that Terminator: Dark Fate, as delightful as it is, is not going to be a giant blockbuster hit unless something really dramatic changes.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:03] Sad.
Annalee: [00:06:05] You know, and it's funny because the movie, as many critics have pointed out, it kind of is a retelling of Terminator 2, which was an enormous hit. And it takes a page from the playbook of the recent Star Wars films where, you know, the new trilogy about the Skywalkers kind of retells the story of the original trilogy, which is actually the second trilogy.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:27] For sure.
Annalee: [00:06:27] It's very confusing, but we all know what I'm talking about. It worked for Star Wars, but it doesn't feel like it's working here. What's going on there?
Charlie Jane: [00:06:35] I mean, I think that part of what's not working here is that when—if you look at Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is pretty much a beat by beat remake of Star Wars: A New Hope, you know, the original Star Wars, but you know with Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford and a brief glimpse of Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, sorry. A brief glimpse of Mark Hamill.
Annalee: [00:06:58] We knew what you meant.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:59] At the end. Yeah. But the thing that The Force Awakens does do that I think is really underappreciated is it introduces really, really strong new characters. Like, Finn, the storm trooper who goes rogue is like, that's something that we had not seen in Star Wars before. We had never seen a Star Wars, a storm trooper decide to kind of rebel against his masters and go join the rebels. That's a brand-new thing.
[00:07:26] I feel like Rey, this kind of urchin living on this like scrap yard planet who turns out to just not really be that important, but she gets chosen. She's feels fresh and interesting. Poe, the kind of cocky pilot is somebody that we've seen before, but he's a very charming version of that character. He's sort of a Han Solo-esque character, but he's a really charming, delightful version of it.
[00:07:48] And I feel like The Force Awakens puts a lot of energy and a lot of time into building up those characters. And supposedly it's because Harrison Ford injured his leg shooting that movie, and so they had time to go back and really rethink how they were introducing the new characters. And they put a lot more energy into that because Harrison Ford wasn't available, which I think was a happy accident in a sense. I mean, obviously not for Harrison Ford, but for the rest of us.
[00:08:13] Part of the problem with Terminator: Dark Fate is that it doesn't invest as much time in its new characters. It doesn't give us anybody who has as compelling a backstory as Finn being a storm trooper who changes sides. I feel like there's nothing on that level in this movie.
Annalee: [00:08:29] Yeah. I mean we have Dani who is a great character, but is very much something that we've seen before. She's a woman who has no idea that there's this future, has to suddenly get a crash course in Terminators and dark futures and all this stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:45] Robotology.
Annalee: [00:08:46] Robotology. And then we have Grace who is a cyborg from the future. Again, we've never seen a cyborg from the future before, so that's exciting, but it doesn't feel like her story is very different from things that we've seen before. She has the same tale of there was one day when everything got fucked and then afterward it was really bad until I met this great leader who helped me and sent me back in time. So it's really beat by beat the same and it isn't kind of opening us up into a new possible future. It's another apocalypse caused by AI. This AI has a different name, Legion.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:23] Yeah, and that seemed just kind of silly to like have to invent a new version of Skynet and give it a different name. I always say—
Annalee: [00:09:29] Give it a more kind of dorky religious name, like, I mean Skynet at least sounds like the kind of name that a bad branding company would come up with for their AI crap. Whereas Legion, I mean come on, nobody, but Peter Thiel would name their technology Legion.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:45] He totally would, yeah. I think that it's interesting that part of the problem with this movie is that you have this idea that it needs to get bigger each time. So the Terminator has to be harder to kill and has to have a new gimmick. And so a lot of energy goes into making this particular Terminator different from the other Terminators and harder to kill than the other Terminators. And you’re going through the basic same storyline, but there’s more powers or whatever. The Terminator has more—
Annalee: [00:10:11] Rubber Terminator wrapped around a hard Terminator wrapped around a rubber Terminator, I don’t know…
Charlie Jane: [00:10:18] And it feels like that's not what we need. We don't just need, it's the same thing, but with a cherry on top. We need something that's like bringing a new element to it. And in terms of the question of whether the Terminator franchise still has something to say, I feel like this movie made some stabs at trying to say stuff.
[00:10:37] For example, there's a very clunky scene early on where we have a conversation about automation and robots taking our jobs and then that's pretty much immediately forgotten and does not matter in the film at all. But there is a thread that goes through the movie which verges on being interesting at times about surveillance and about how we live in a world of ubiquitous surveillance and how law enforcement is plugged into this whole apparatus that can be hijacked for evil ends.
[00:11:03] And there's one extremely moving—I think it's actually the best moment in the entire film, for me. There's one really moving scene where Sarah Connor says that she never took any pictures of her son John because she thought if there were no photos of him, Skynet wouldn't know what he looked like. And now that he's been dead for a while, she is starting to forget his face and there's no photos to remind her. And that's actually, that's a really beautiful scene that kind of shows the tragedy of ubiquitous surveillance in a way that's not just, you know, the usual.
Annalee: [00:11:33] Yeah, no, I think that that was, it was good that they tried to work in some references to surveillance because that was something that didn't really exist in the earlier Terminator films. Partly because we just didn't live in that world at the time. And I thought that was a moving scene. And I also thought that they didn’t really succeed in kind of dealing with surveillance stuff, but they certainly incorporated it enough into the movie that I wasn't kind of left wondering where it was.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:02] Right.
Annalee: [00:12:02] So. All right, well, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to think about the lasting legacy of the Terminator series and whether it even makes sense to keep telling stories like this in 2019 and beyond.
[00:12:15] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:30] So Annalee, we've talked a lot before about the great man theory of history and particularly as it relates to time travel. We kind of talked about that in our episode about multiverses. How do the Terminator films reinforce the great man theory of history?
Annalee: [00:12:43] Yeah. It's really interesting that you bring that up because as we were watching Terminator: Dork Fate, I mean, Dark Fate, I was thinking about how much these films are invested in the idea that there's only one person who can save us. And that person definitely changes from film to film. And there's a few different people because at one point in Terminator 2, of course, one of the important people is the engineer who is working on the Cyberdyne chip that eventually—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:11] Miles Dyson.
Annalee: [00:13:12] Miles Dyson, played by Joe Morton, who later became Eureka's resident mad scientist. So he just didn't get enough of being beaten up by robots. He just had to keep going.
[00:13:25] So I think that this is a series that deeply believes that in order to change the timeline you have to rescue certain people. And there's two things I think are interesting about that. One is that it's a series that does believe in changing the timeline. It does believe that we can have an effect on history, that we can save millions of lives, as Sarah Connor said in that clip that we had. And that the future isn't set in stone, which I love.
[00:13:50] At the same time, it kind of reinforces the idea that the future is set in stone and that there's one fate because there's only just this one person or maybe two people who are ultimately in charge of saving humanity or not.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:02] Right.
Annalee: [00:14:04] So it's funny because I always wonder if when we go into the future scenes and we see the human resistance, because we're only seeing it in North America, I'm like, is there another resistance that's taking place in Shanghai? And then there's another one in Johannesburg?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:22] That’s a really good question.
Annalee: [00:14:22] What’s the resistance like in Timbuktu? You know, I want to know. And I think that possibility is definitely left open in a certain way, but the Terminator franchise doesn't ever think about it. It's just like, nope, there's just the one white dude who is leading the resistance. Or maybe a Latina is leading the resistance, but it's all set in the Americas, and in North America. So it's a little bit progressive in the sense that we get this hint that, one strong woman can save the world. But it also kind of drags us back into this idea that only certain people are the chosen ones. It's kind of a chosen one narrative without ever having fantasy elements.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:07] But it is also like, it's sort of the equivalent of going back in time to kill Hitler except that instead of Hitler, it's the chosen savior. But it's this one idea that if you can kill this one guy, everything will be different. And now that I'm saying that, I think it's really… there is a storyline that the Terminator franchise to my knowledge has never done, that would have been interesting to explore if it was going to continue, which I don't think it will at this point. Of like, what happens when everybody in the world finds out about Terminators and Skynet?
[00:15:38] One of the tropes of the Terminator franchises that only Sarah Connor and a few other people ever know that there are robots coming back in time to kill us. And what happens if that becomes common knowledge? What happens if everybody in the world is like, Oh yeah, sometimes robots from the future come back in time and man, they're really bad news.
Annalee: [00:15:54] I know, and you'd think that that would have happened because there's all this footage and it's happened over and over.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:59] For sure.
Annalee: [00:16:01] And you’d think eventually the Terminator franchise would have turned into something like the Marvel franchise where everyone knows about the superheroes. Or, a franchise like what's happened with the Godzilla movies where everybody knows about kaiju. And so when a new kaiju shows up, it's kind of like a fandom develops around it. And so, I mean, depending on which version of the Godzilla movies you're watching, but there are some versions where that happens. And that's certainly the case in Pacific Rim.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:28] So you said before that in the Terminator franchise you can at least change history and you can make changes. But actually the original version of the Terminator is a causal loop. It's like, Kyle Reese goes back in time to save John Connor and ends up becoming John Connor's father. And we realized that he always went back in time and he always became John Connor’s father. And in fact it's a causal loop and maybe it's kinda hinted at the end of the Terminator that there's no way to change history, that it's actually fixed. And then, Terminator 2, several years later, comes along and is like, fuck that, actually you can change the past. And they introduced this whole dogma of there is no fate but what we make for ourselves. And that's become a thing that all the characters in the series say constantly. And at the end of Terminator 2, they do actually avert Skynet's apocalypse. And every version of the Terminator franchise since then has at least had the apocalypse take place on a different date than 1997 with different parameters.
[00:17:23] And so the idea is maybe the apocalypse was just postponed, but we definitely at least changed history. How does that, you know, change the parameters of the series and how does it counteract this sort of great man narrative? If you can change the past, can you change who the chosen savior is? Can you change who… can we actually have someone other than John Connor or Dani or whoever be the chosen savior?
Annalee: [00:17:46] Well, I think that's the entire plot of Terminator: Dark Fate, is that basically, yes, we can change who the savior is. We still have to have a savior. We still, we're not out of that. There's no chosen one that's been eliminated, right? So it's not like we replaced the chosen one with a beautifully organized uprising—
Charlie Jane: [00:18:07] Like, grass roots.
Annalee: [00:18:08] There's no—
Charlie Jane: [00:18:09] Grass roots, you know, crowdsourced, yeah.
Annalee: [00:18:11] Right, there’s no Occupy Skynet kind of movement that's possible. That's like a de-centered anarchist style uprising.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:20] What the fuck, resistance?
Annalee: [00:18:21] I know. Especially if you’re fighting AI, it seems like labor organizing would be a really good way to do that, since it's gonna all start with automation according to Dark Fate.
[00:18:33] So I think the thing that I find most interesting about the Terminator films and the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series has always been the fact that it was open to the idea that multiple timelines are in play and that the future is always changing. And almost every single movie, as you said, the future has changed a little bit and we're encouraged to identify with people who want to change the past radically in order to change the future radically. And of course it's always in self-defense, right? It's never because we want to make things, you know, we want to have like a better healthcare infrastructure in the United States. We're not doing that. We're just trying to prevent mass death, okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:12] Nobody ever goes back in time and tries to eliminate slavery in the Terminator universe.
Annalee: [00:19:18] Not at all.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:18] Nobody ever goes back to the 1820s or whatever, yeah.
Annalee: [00:19:21] No, we don't try to fix human problems, it's all in service of this war.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:25] Even though Skynet is also something that we created, like…
Annalee: [00:19:28] In Terminator 2, one of the things that Sarah Connor is trying to do is kill the guy who creates Skynet. So she is sorta trying to kill the bad guy there. But it is true that one of the things that is always going on in the Terminator series is that if we're changing the past, it's always, as I said earlier, it's kind of self-defense. It's done. It's a war narrative and this is something that we're doing in the name of warfare. And so it's a temporal war and we are allowed to use our time travel, we're allowed to use the tool of changing the past only to defeat our enemy and our enemy is the robots. And so it's never about how can we improve humanity, how can we defeat a human enemy? The only human enemies are ones who are directly connected to the creation of the AI and the AI is the bad guy.
[00:20:17] It's not even that the humans are the bad guy because one of the things we learn in Terminator 2 when we meet Miles Dyson is that he's like a really nice guy.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:23] He’s a family guy.
Annalee: [00:20:23] He's a sweetie, and he really doesn't have any idea where this could lead. He's like, he doesn't know that this going to become a giant eye in the sky that murderers everyone’s goals, all that kind of stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:38] So as a sidebar, I know that I always want to derail things into talking about Doctor Who, because I'm obsessed with Doctor Who.
Annalee: [00:20:43] It seems very relevant here.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:44] It seems very relevant here. So there's a Doctor Who story called Day of the Daleks which came out years before the first Terminator movie. But I feel like it is in some senses a response to the Terminator movies. In Day of the Daleks, a group of freedom fighters from the future, from the 22nd century, come back to the 20th century, to the 1970s, to kill a politician who they believe is going to sabotage a peace conference and cause World War III, which leads to a future in which the Daleks have become the rulers of a post-apocalyptic earth.
[00:21:16] And so it's sort of, it's got the same kind of outlines of like post-apocalyptic future, traveling back in time, trying to kill a guy or try to kill someone in the past in order to change the future. And in Day of the Daleks, it turns out that they are in a causal loop and these freedom fighters going back in time and killing this politician is what actually causes World War III and creates the post-apocalyptic future that they come from.
[00:21:38] And here's a little clip of Doctor Who talking about it.
Doctor Who Clip: [00:21:40] Changing history is a very fanatical idea, you know.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:44] But what's interesting about Day of the Daleks is not the causal loop, and the thing of the freedom fighters are actually creating the future that they were trying to destroy. The thing about Day of the Daleks that's interesting to me is that in the end, the takeaway message of that story is that it's not about this one great man, this politician who they're trying to kill or save or whatever. It's actually, like any individual, anybody, no matter who they are can save the future. And in the end it's this one freedom fighter who changes sides and kind of changes his mind and who says, you know, this time it's going to be different. And basically that's… he actually says that line and I always get chills when he says that. This time it's going to be different. We're going to actually make different choices and break out of this loop.
[00:22:26] And meanwhile, one of the guys who was working for the Daleks in the future, this sort of sinister dude ends up changing sites and becoming one of the good guys. And he says to the Daleks, I may have helped to exterminate you, like the Daleks are about to exterminate him. And it's this thing of like the individual and it doesn't have to be the chosen one. It doesn't have to be this one special guy. Anybody can make a choice that changes things drastically. And that's kind of the final point of that story is that this guy who everybody thought was the most important person actually turns out to be kind of irrelevant. He never matters.
Annalee: [00:22:57] Yeah. It's so interesting. I wanted to go back to a question that you asked a little bit earlier about the fact that in the Terminator franchise there's only a few people who know about time travel even though it seems wildly improbable that's the case. And I think that kind of gets to the heart of this question about who is allowed to change history. Like is it going to be great men or is it going to be just a regular individual or is it going to be a whole group of people? And I think that the reason why so many time travel stories, not just Terminator, not just Doctor Who have this idea that time travel is secret, is because that's buying into… Is because these stories buy into that rugged individual myth that we talked about in a recent episode where not only is it that only certain special chosen ones change the course of history, but also certain special ones travel through time. And you can only have a couple of people who are meddling with the timeline and—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:01] It’s because you have to be naked and only certain people are really—
Annalee: [00:24:04] Only certain people look really good when they arrive.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:06] Yes, there’s like…
Annalee: [00:24:07] It’s got to either be a muscly guy or a lean, tall lady that, that’s just sort of—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:14] It’s the glutes.
Annalee: [00:24:14] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:14] It's all about the glutes.
Annalee: [00:24:16] Yeah, that's right. So I think that kind of gives away or that gives up the game here in terms of what is really at stake in a series like Terminator. And so if we think about this rugged individual myth being behind a lot of time travel stories, it allows us to think about how much the time travel trope, especially in Terminator, is really tied into cold war politics. Where I said earlier that the time machines are kind of a weapon that's used in this war and it's very clear who the sides are in the war, which is something that a lot of nostalgia about the cold war suggests is like, back then we knew right and wrong and who was the bad guy and who was the good guy, and now it's all confused. And I think that the idea that certain men in a room or even just certain people in a room are deciding the world's fate fits in really nicely with that kind of cold war nostalgia idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:16] Oh, for sure, yeah.
Annalee: [00:25:17] That there were certain people who were in charge and they were doing certain things and they knew what was up and what they were doing was secretive, but at least you knew who was in charge. Whereas now we live in a world where politics have become really complicated because of social media. We actually have insight into a bunch of insurgencies, a bunch of grassroots movements that are also influencing politics and making it really confusing to know who's really in charge, who's really pulling the strings, what's at stake in political debates.
[00:25:48] And so I think that part of what makes the Terminator franchise feel a little creaky and outdated is the fact that it hasn't really caught up with that kind of political reality.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:00] Right.
Annalee: [00:26:02] And the funny thing is, is that Sarah Connor Chronicles kinda did.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:06] Oh yeah, it was so much more connected, yeah.
Annalee: [00:26:07] It was so much more about the idea that it wasn't just Terminators versus people. You know, there were different kinds of Terminators. There were Terminators with different agendas. There were people with different agendas.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:18] There were tech companies, and there were, you know, it was a much more complex world.
Annalee: [00:26:22] Yeah. And I think that that timeline would have maybe brought the Terminator franchise a little bit more up into kind of present day political allegory. Whereas continuing with that kind of cold war, one man or one woman can save us all idea. It just doesn't resonate right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:41] Yeah. And of course, I mean the Terminator franchise is definitely a product of, of the cold war era. It’s a series about nuclear apocalypse and it shares—
Annalee: [00:26:49] That’s right.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:49] —that with the Watchmen series where basically Watchmen is all about the threat of nuclear war. And the whole plot of the original Watchmen graphic novel is about trying to deal with the threat of nuclear war and making a Watchmen series or any… definitely the Watchmen film by Zack Snyder struggled to kind of conjure that same sense of overarching existential dread that you get from a cold war, kind of five minutes to midnight, kind of scenario.
[00:27:19] And obviously the threat of nuclear apocalypse has not gone away in real life, but people don't fear it the way that they used to at all for a variety of reasons.
[00:27:28] Final question about like robot uprisings and what kind of stories about robot uprisings would we like to see instead of the usual AI come to sentience and then builds robots to kill us all.
Annalee: [00:27:39] I mean, obviously I've written about this and in my novel, Autonomous, there's this kind of robot rights movement, which is something I would love to see. And we see it a little bit weirdly at the very end of that terrible I, Robot movie with Will Smith, where pretty much everything in the movie is awful. And I really wanted the movie to start at the very end where the robots actually are leading kind of a rights movement. They're getting together and they're talking about how they deserve to be viewed as humans. And so I'd love to see something like that.
[00:28:10] I'd love to see more narratives that are kind of like the movie Her or the very, very end of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, which has never made it to film. And in both of those stories, AI just have their own agenda, and they're just, they want to do their own AI things. And in both cases at the end, the AI just leave earth and they're like, okay, thanks, bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:36] Yeah, it’s like Wetware by Rudy Rucker, too. Y/
Annalee: [00:28:37] Yes, exactly. And in Rudy Rucker’s series, Hardware, Wetware, blah blah ware, there’s like 60 wares, the robots form an independent nation on the moon called Disky, and so that's the same notion that the robots… You know, I think one of the things that always annoys me in robot uprising stories is this idea that, and we see this in Battlestar Galactica too, the more recent one, that the robots are just obsessed with us. And I think if you look historically at sort of post-colonial movement, sure, there's a phase where you have to get the colonizer out. And so you have to kill some colonizers and you got to kick some colonizer ass. But then you've got to build up your own nation. You have your own business you want to take care of. And so I'd really like to see robot uprisings that deal with that. Like how are the robots developing their own culture that's not in relationship to these colonial humans? That actually is their own fricking robot culture. What do you want to see?
Charlie Jane: [00:29:36] I mean, I was just going to make the joke, we're so vain, we probably think this robot uprising is about us.
Annalee: [00:29:41] Yes. Good one. Very good.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:44] I mean…
Annalee: [00:29:44] Carly Simon is a super underrated scifi writer.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:47] For sure. Yeah. I mean I feel like, yes, I want to see a robot uprisings or robot secession movements or just robot rights movements that are more nuanced and more interesting and that kind of get back to the root of where robots come from.
[00:30:04] And you know, that play R.U.R by Karel Čapek where robots are basically a metaphor for workers. And I feel like we're, especially in this era of gig economies and freelancers who are treated like crap and other kinds of abuses of workers and unions being crushed, we could tell robot stories that are a lot more interesting than just like robots trying to kill us.
Annalee: [00:30:24] So one thing now that you've said that I really want to see is like a robot uprising that's really a worker uprising where there's solidarity between all these oppressed algorithms and all of the gig workers who are being manipulated by the algorithms. And instead of the algorithms working against the gig workers, they form solidarity and like rise up together against the tech companies. So please, someone out there, write that.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:49] I think you should write that. That sounds amazing. Seriously. You should seriously write that.
Annalee: [00:30:52] Okay, well I have two other books to write so I’ll put it in the queue.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:56] Yeah. So, my final thought about the Terminator series is that, just kind of stewing about this idea that people should know about Terminators and that it should become common knowledge. And I would love to see if they ever make another one, a Terminator movie that starts out with that usual classic thing of like the glowing sphere appearing and then there's a naked person who gets out of it and immediately they're mobbed by people with cell phones, being like, look, we found one! Oh my God, look! And the Terminator is just looking around like what the fuck is going on? Everybody's like videoing them and taking pictures of them and being like, yeah, will you be on my blog? I will just go on Snapchat. I want to do a TikTok with you. And the Terminator’s like what the fuck?
Annalee: [00:31:34] And then later you see the Terminator, like its arms flowing inside the servers that control TikTok. I'm going to mess up the TikTok algorithm. Everybody will watch me.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:47] That would be a great Terminator movie.
Annalee: [00:31:47] Yeah, I would… I encourage you to write that story, Charlie Jane. Or our listeners.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:54] Somebody needs to write that.
[00:31:55] Okay, so we're going to take a quick break and then we're going come back and we're going to talk about what we're obsessed with.
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Charlie Jane: [00:32:15] So Annalee, what are you obsessed with right now?
Annalee: [00:32:18] Well, I'm obsessed with something that I found through probably some terrible research hole on the internet, which is that a lot of the classic illustrations on the cover of Weird Tales magazine, which if you aren't familiar with them, just Google Weird Tales covers from the 1930s. Mostly they are naked women being tortured by devils, naked women being tortured by other animalistic creatures. And they often have just like fantastical kind of kinky or fetishistic scenes evoked. And to me they were just sort of classic cheesecake. And what I recently found out was that those covers were by and large painted and drawn by Margaret Brundage, who was an illustrator in Chicago who had just, that was her main source of work for about seven years in the mid-‘30s. And it's hilarious because she was credited as M. Brundage so people didn't realize she was a woman. And these are just classic, like I would call them like proto-Frank Frazetta type stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:29] They're very fetishy, very porny.
Annalee: [00:33:30] Yeah. There'll be like, you know, how can you create the tiniest possible nipple covering kind of thing. And I have actually a collection of postcards of her work, which I always just thought of as like, this is just like cheesy dude art. But no, she was the person who inspired so many artists afterward to do fantasy art in this vein.
[00:33:52] A humorous tidbit about Margaret Brundage's life is that she went to high school and college with Walt Disney and when they were in high school, she was in charge of the school paper and so she got to reject some of Walt Disney's terrible drawings. So I thought that was good. But the other thing about her is that, not surprisingly, when Weird Tales finally did reveal that she was a woman, immediately a bunch of dudes started jumping all over how terrible those pictures were and how they'd always been so terrible, even though apparently no one had noticed that before.
[00:34:22] And L. Sprague de Camp, who was a very popular science fiction writer in the mid-century, started a rumor that her model for all of her sexy scantily clad women was her daughter. Which, she didn't have a daughter. She had a son. And this rumor persisted until the mid-‘70s, and it just became like, Oh, well of course, like that's what ladies do. They draw their daughters in like weird fetishistic poses with demons.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:52] In bondage.
Annalee: [00:34:52] Yeah. You know, I don't think anyone would've said that somehow if it had been a male artist, that he was using his daughter for these images. And so finally, the record was changed to reflect the truth when she was interviewed in the ‘70s before she died. And she said, nope, indeed. I never had a daughter. And her models were just fashion magazines. She just used images from fashion magazines.
[00:35:18] Although I must say, if you check out a picture of Margaret Brundage, she was a hottie like, she could've been using herself as the model because she's like a tall, skinny lady with jet black hair. She definitely looks the part of like gothy lady who made Weird Tales even sexier than it was. So, go Margaret Brundage and what are you obsessed with right now?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:41] So I'm obsessed with a novel that I just read called Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed, who is a Canadian science fiction author. And Beneath the Rising is so much fun. It's got sort of a magic meets science vibe. It's about a young teenage, super genius inventor named Joanna AKA Johnny Chambers who has invented like cures for cancer and amazing energy systems and just she's transformed the world with her inventions and she's like 17 years old. She invents a clean reactor that has no environmental consequences and that can generate limitless power. And somehow this attracts Lovecraftian beings from outside our universe who want to conquer earth and also take the reactor for themselves because they think that it's a source of power that they can use.
[00:36:32] And I won't spoil it, but it turns out that there's a lot more to the story than that. And a lot of it revolves around her relationship with her childhood best friend, Nick Prasad, and the story gets into some really deep stuff around race and class and privilege. And this whole sort of myth of the super genius inventor is kind of deconstructed over the course of the story and it goes to some very dark places, but it's always fun and zippy and action packed and they travel all over the world trying to stop these demons from taking over the planet. And it just gets weirder and weirder and keeps having all these amazing twists and I would just, I was completely riveted. I highly recommend it. It comes out next spring so I read it kind of early but definitely, definitely, definitely preorder Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed.
Annalee: [00:37:18] Sounds awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:19] So thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. If you like our podcast, please leave a review in Apple podcasts or any of the other places that you can leave reviews. You can subscribe to us on Apple, Google, Stitcher, or any of the other podcasts subscription sites. And we are also on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and on Twitter at @OOACpod. Thank you so much to the incredible Veronica Simonetti at Women's Audio Mission for being our producer. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and thanks again to you for listening.
Annalee: [00:37:50] Bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:50] Bye!
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