My good friends Bert Stabler and Katie Fizdale were obsessed with the late, lamented Terminator TV series. In the wake of its cancellation, they had an email back and forth about whether or not Terminators have souls. I wanted to reprint it, so, with their permission, here it is.

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Bert: In the context of the Terminator franchise, the immortal second movie and the regrettable third, and the maudlin but epic television series, cyborgs buiilt and programmed to destroy humans (“Terminators”) can, with important side effects and caveats, be re-oriented toward assisting humans and protecting human life. In this pretty explicitly Biblical narrative (“Judgment Day” is one of many frequently invoked sound bites) these reprogrammed Terminators echo the redemptive New-Testament-style narrative of defklecting the impending apocalypse through time-travel– a memorable line from the sequel, Terminator 2: “No fate but what we make.”

Katie: Terminators don’t kill all humans, that is not what they are programmed to do, they are programmed to follow out (mostly killing) assignments. (Remember Quib – the submarine captain – on SCC?) They kill with discretion, they kill only their targets, and whatever gets in their way, which sometimes very sadly includes dogs. Their ability to carry out an assignment is what sometimes may be seen as a sign of a “soul” or a sense of morality. (” I love you, John”) Though that is destroyed whenever a Terminator kills quickly and without remorse.

B: A little background- SCC stands for the Terminator TV series, Sarah Connor Chronicles. “Quib” (I think “Queeg,” like Melville) was a submarine officer on SCC, in the future narrative, is a reprogrammed Terminator, who was given a secret mission, but I don’t believe killed anyone? Cameron, reprogrammed protector Terminator of show hero John Connor in 2009, said “I love you, John” when he was about to crush her, after she had gone haywire and killed people.

Anyway– being a robot assassin does not by itself mean the robot has no soul. The question is, what gives a human assassin a soul? The SCC show makes clear that Terminators have “urges” to kill even after reprogramming, just as humans have primal and problematic, some would say sinful, urges, and these cyborgs can, in some sense, choose to favor their socialization over their deep programming. In the context of the show, and I would say in general, the ability to make moral choices and value life are meaningful (though perhaps not the only) criteria for having a soul.

K: Queeg did kill someone. He killed the insubordinate soldier that released the liquid terminator, that is what caused the big upset with the aussie, her losing her baby, the reason why she has such a problem with metal etc, etc…..

A human assassin has chosen their profession, they can stop being an assassin if they chose and become a plumber. They are human and can use their free will to decide their life decisions. Metal can’t. Metal is whatever their duties dictate. They have urges because they are programed to. This makes them a better killing machine. The terminator is interested in killing – it’s an obsession. In the future, metal kills all humans because that is their constant task since they’re at war with the humans, but when metal gets sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, they only try to kill her and John. That doesn’t mean that they are the only ones that get killed. A lot of people get killed in the crossfire, but those people aren’t given a second thought by the Terminator, because the Terminator sees them as being superfluous, non existent because the only thing that exists for the Terminator is their mission. Human life is not important to them because their lives mean nothing to them because they are a machine.

B: Right, he did kill that guy. But I think death for mutiny is quite possibly a standard sentence, especially in a non-democratic situation. Does that makes him (Queeg) an extension of the “state” in a way that is different than a human officer would be? Maybe, but perhaps not. One reason the Terminator franchise is compelling is that the killing robots are almost always depicted side-by-side with desperate humans, who are often soldiers, in a formal or an informal capacity. The death sentence for insurrection underscores the reality that soldiers have very few choices, especially when the fate of the entire species is at stake. Can we really say that the Connors chose their fate, as potential saviors if humanity?

Free will is extremely meaningful as a component of the soul (it makes the argument for the souls of animals a little less tricky than the morality criterion), But Terminators do make choices and calculate tactics– recall the immortal “fuck you” chosen from the list of responses that reads out on Schwartzenegger’s retinas in the first Terminator film– and, while methodical, their complex grasp of the world is a pretty strong argument for intelligence. As far as their emotional inner life is concerned, I don’t think we know really what it is. Arnie saying “I know now why you cry” before being melted down in Terminator 2 is a cheese line, but it doesn’t seem inconsistent with what kind of beings these are. What they might lack in empathy I would say they make up for in loyalty and bravery. If those don’t apply to robots, is it only because humans have fear?

K: To me what is compelling about Terminator is that they illuminate the choices that we do have. Sarah and John Connor often show this in their strict no body count rule, and every time that a Terminator violates this rule it only adds to their hatred of them. It’s true that soldiers are working with very few choices, but what is different between a Terminator and a human soldier is that humans are accountable for their actions. All humans feel an emotion in reaction to taking a life, it is not always a feeling of regret, but there is always a response. You need to have emotions in order to react to them.

B: There is highly circumstantial evidence that the reprogrammed Terminators experience emotions, but that’s enough for me to not dismiss them as expendable. Cameron (the 2009 protector Terminatrix on the TV series), John Henry (the Terminator we saw being reprogrammed in the series), and Arnie Schwartzenegger’s character in T2 all reported having feelings. Cameron certainly had a motive to lie, but the other two didn’t, and Cameron did later give John a.device to end her life if she ever threatened him again (not that we know if it works, but Terminators don’t seem to go around lying all that much).

Sooner or later we have to deal with Darwin– the fact that most of what humans are inclined by nature to do, including nurturing one another, may very well contribute to our survival as individuals and as a species. The mechanical nature of our mental experience of reality, including a certain way of experiencing emotions, is not enough to justify our souls. Our souls are the essence of life viewed from another perspective, an outside and transcendent view, that values our subjectivity. There is plenty of evidence to not simply dismiss the possibility, given the shows and movies as “evidence,” that Terminators might experience themselves as subjects..

K: John Henry and Cameron cannot be compared. John Henry has been reprogrammed entirely and from all indications is not a killer, rather he is trained to be curious and that curiosity plus his capacity to obtain and disseminate information is what it seems is going to make him a powerful asset to whatever army he is apart of. I don’t think that curiosity and highly sophisticated coding can be mistaken for having emotions. We see examples of such curiosity in our everyday travels on the internet. For instance, Google’s “did you mean” tool and gmail’s sidebar advertisement based on algorithm’s that it picks up from your e-mails (ones that are currently being advertised are based on our e-mail exchanges are “Artery Clearing Secret” and “Human Resource Job Open”…huh. (not to be included in the blog)) except John Henry has these capabilities times a bagillion. He can override elaborate computer systems (like ones in prison – he was able to hack into their system and get all of the locks in the prison to unlock in a matter of seconds to help Sarah escape).

I don’t know if Cameron’s explosive device is real and guessing from the “season” finale of SCC we won’t find out because the show is obviously canceled. Cameron has lied several times to John regarding her “health” and has gone through many attempts to try to fix herself without John knowing. And thanks to the magic of television…surprise…John found out! Then Cameron presents John with her self-destruct button. It may be more for John’s peace of mind more than anything, but bottom line is I trust Cameron to protect John, she in some ways knows him better than he does because she knows what he is like in the future.

B: Curiosity implies an experience of pleasure in learning (and power), but I guess that doesn’t qualify as emotion. Even economists can experience that. Har. But John Henry had an extremely difficult time when he was shut down (experiencing death), and Cameron’s sexual-allure programming and her protect-John programming have overlapped in numerous weird situations that have made her behavior seem irrational– or, more precisely, justified based on her psychological state. I think the possibility of Cameron fighting her urges and loving John Connor, and John Henry fearing death and keeping secrets, cannot be dismissed as mere non-subjective output on the basis of the evidence in the show.

I discuss Rawle and Caivano and process in comics in my column up today on comixology.

Kyle Baker
Nat Turner
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
207 pages, $12.95
B&W, softcover
9780810972278

I have a great respect for Kyle Baker, and I’m very interested in the history of slavery. So I really wanted to like this biography of slave revolutionary Nat Turner.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that I did. A lot of this has to do with Baker’s decision to rely mostly on images rather than text. There are long stretches of wordlessness; what exposition there is consists almost entirely of long quotes from Nat Turner’s pre-execution confession. There’s no real dialogue as such. Baker’s black and white art is meant to be expressionistically grim and evocative, but while it’s certainly competent, it’s not really distinctive or powerful enough to carry as much of the narrative weight as he places on it. For a mainstream comics artist, he’s very good, but to do what he’s trying for he needs to be Bill Sienkiewicz, and he just isn’t quite there.

Dispensing with any explanatory text is intended, I think, to focus on the dramatic and mythic qualities of the story. But it also makes it difficult for Baker to elaborate the story’s specifics. Sometimes when he tries, the result is just confusing — I’m still not entirely sure, for example, whether the protagonist of the beginning chapter is or is not supposed to be Turner’s mother. In other places, the lack of historical context leads straight to cliché. The book ends, for example, with a slave sneaking off with a copy of Nat Turner’s confessions, by which we are supposed to understand that the inspiration lives on. Okay as far as it goes — but this obscures the fact that one of the main effects of Turner’s quixotic rebellion was to confirm Southern white fears and significantly harden resistance to change. If you want to make the case that Turner’s good outweighed the bad, I’m ready to listen, but to be effective you need to engage the other side, not merely ignore it. And just as Baker’s sentiment often seems unearned, so too does his gore have a second-hand, horror comic inevitability. Babies are tossed to sharks, a drummer gets his hands chopped off, there are multiple whippings. And, in the inevitable denoument, we get to see a hulking, axe-wielding, superhuman, almost slavering black murderer, stomping right out of America’s collective unconscious to take his place as Turner’s right-hand man.

If that last image sounds like borderline racist caricature — well, yeah. Baker avoids most of the real questions raised by Turner’s story — is hopeless rebellion heroic or immoral? Is murder of one’s oppressors justified? — and as a result he’s at the mercy of his own genre conventions. Those conventions dictate blood, revenge, inspiration, and exoticized others. Worthy pulp tropes, perhaps, but I don’t think they’re the best lens through which to view a complicated and controversial figure like Nat Turner.
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This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.

Two negative music reviews, one of veteran indie rockers Sonic Youth’s disc The Eternal and one of R&B newcomer Chisette MIchele’s Epiphany.

Hideo Azuma
Disappearance Diary
Fanfare
softcover/$22.99
B&W/194 pages
9788496427426

The Lady and the Tramp

I probably tend to idealize manga a bit — Japanese comics often seem to me to be less insular, less exclusively male-oriented, and overall better than their American counterparts. Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary is, in this context, a nice corrective, for it is as monotonous, as self-absorbed, and as relentlessly guy-fixated as the work of any interchangeable American autobio wunderkind who ever snapped his arm in half while trying to simultaneously lay out a grid and pat himself on the back.

Admittedly, Azuma’s style is more polished and expressive, and his boxy layouts more inventive, than you’d find in the work of most of his American peers. His cartooning chops are impeccable, and many of the small moments are great: he learns how to tie his boots like a laborer in a flurry of expressive motion lines, for example, and his dts summon up a host of adorably blobby hallucinatory critters. Alas, these bright spots are methodically buried under the steady drip-drip of the tiny panels and the mundanity of their content. I’m willing to look at one drawing of Azuma vomiting; three or four seems a bit excessive; twelve and I’m wondering why in hell I offered to review this book.

If the art is repetitive, it’s got nothing on the writing. Reading Disappearance Diary is like being locked in a room with that boring guy (you know the one) who can’t tell the difference between an interesting detail and his own belly-button lint, and who is constantly telling the punch line in the middle and then going back to it three or four times to explain why it’s funny. The pages drag on and on — Azuma gets up, Azuma does random uninteresting thing, Azuma does other random uninteresting thing, Azuma goes back to tell you about the uninteresting thing he did yesterday, Azuma goes to sleep, Azuma wakes up…..

What’s most frustrating is that it seems like there really is a worthwhile plot buried here somewhere under the soporific storytelling skills. The narrative focuses on a decade long period of crisis in Azuma’s life during which the successful manga-ka quit his job to become homeless, returned to work and quit again to become a gas pipe-layer, returned again and then descended into alcoholism. Obviously, something worth hearing about was going on in his head — and just as obviously, he doesn’t want to discuss it. Azuma avoids introspection with an intensity and vigor that is positively incriminating. Instead, of explaining himself, he focuses on the details of daily life, apparently under the assumption that there is something intrinsically funny or interesting about the life of a homeless man, or that of a pipe-layer, or that of a hospitalized alcoholic. In other words, the lumpen proletariat is supposed to have innate anthropological interest, a theory which is both offensive and, as it turns out, false. It’s no more revealing to see Azuma search for cigarette butts every day than it is to watch him dig a hole every day than it is to watch him trying to meet his deadline as a manga artist every day. Whether you’re a big-game hunter, an international spy, or a garbage man, without emotional context the routines of daily life are just routines.

So what is the emotional context or background? What would give this drab plod some meaning? There’s not a ton to go on, but it seems to me that the big, unanswered question in the manga is about Azuma’s relationship with his wife. We hear very little about her. In the opening sequence, when he talks about quitting it all and running away to live in the woods, he mentions his editors and friends, but never his wife. Over the course of the whole book, though, a few details come out. We learn that she puts out a missing persons report on him both times he disappears. We learn that she acts as his assistant on his comics, and that she makes some effort to get him to handle his assignments in a responsible fashion. In the last chapter, we see her committing him to an institution for alcoholism. While he’s there, he mentions briefly that he is afraid she will divorce him, though she apparently never does.

In a couple of bonus interviews, we find out a bit more. Azuma’s wife apparently thought he was dead at one point during his first disappearance, and during his second she remodeled the house, eliminating his studio. Also he has kids, and they didn’t recognize him when he came back the second time. Oh, and his wife was apparently kind of pissed at the way she was so thoroughly excised from the manga.

The most telling moment though, comes in the comic itself, towards the end of his second stint away from home, when he’s working as a pipe-layer. The police pick him up for having a stolen bicycle, and discover his identity. Azuma relates:

“After that they took my fingerprints, gave me a stern talking to, and my wife came to get me and took me home (abbreviated because none of this was funny.)”

Of course, if Azuma was going to cut everything unfunny, he’d be in big trouble. Virtually nothing in the book elicits a laugh; on the contrary, it’s all deadly dull. The suspicion, then, is that he cut the discussion about his wife not because it was serious, but because it might have been interesting. Indeed, once he and his wife are reunited, he continues working his blue-collar job, commuting from home. Surely there would have been some revealing conversations there. They might even, one would think, have had comic potential.

Azuma’s reticence here also casts light on the first words of the comic: “This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible.” In this context, “realism” would seem to indicate grit, misery, and so forth. But, in fact, Azuma is perfectly willing, and even eager to retail the sordid facts of his existence — scrounging through garbage cans, vomiting all day every day, etc. What he isn’t willing to talk about in the manga is his wife, or his kids, or, for that matter, any of the important relationships in his life. Instead, we see him interacting with a series of men for whom he expresses insistent disdain. As a pipe-layer, for example, he works with a guy named Yanai. Yanai is bossy and disgusting and most of his partners drop him after only a week. Azuma, though, sticks around much longer. He attributes this to the fact that “whatever nasty things [Yanai[] said to me, I had my own pride.” That’s one interpretation, I guess.

As it happens, Azuma is best known, not for autobiography, but as one of the creators of Lolicon, a manga genre which depicts young girls in sexualized situations. The fascination with unavailable girls, the apparent preference for relationships with emotionally stunted men, and the refusal to discuss his own marriage — all these form a rather suggestive triangle. No doubt it’s impolite to psychoanalyze… but then, it’s also bad manners to relate endless strings of wearisome anecdotes. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wades all the way through this deliberately tedious volume is owed a little payback.

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This piece first ran in The Comics Journal.