Cameron’s The Terminator and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Responses to Neo-conservatism

From abortion to pornography, the “war on drugs” to the end of the Cold War, the 1980s played host to considerable controversy; amidst such political uneasiness, then, it seems that Reagan Era rejuvenated middle-America’s latent conservatism. This return to the traditional Puritan values of the “nuclear family” also sponsored heightened State intervention and policing of the private sphere, thereby buttressing cultural myths of the dangerous, unknown “Other”. As such a fear of the Other was socially perpetuated, it seemed the responsibility of liberal-minded skeptics to note such propaganda as an alarming preparation for totalitarianism.

Many cultural texts from the period, such as James Cameron’s 1984 science-fiction film, “The Terminator”, and Margaret Atwood’s 1986 feminist predictive-text, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, used this opportunity to illustrate the drastic outcomes of a society founded on such mass ignorance. Following in the tradition of “dystopian”, or anti-utopian, fiction, both texts use a depiction of a “perfect” future world in order to isolate, exaggerate and expose certain problematic social trends. While not intended as realistic or plausible predictions, these dystopian texts seek to expose extremist attitudes (such as radical conservatism, religiosity, or technological reliance) as fundamentally threatening to human nature and individualism. Dystopia, then, can be understood as a locale for the constant impediment of human freedom, maintained by a regime’s oppressive control of technology, gender and ideology.

What makes this fictional society so fascinating, however, is its cunning transformation from utopia to dystopia, or from Heaven to Hell; each of these corrupt worlds is originally presented as a safer, more stable and efficient alternative to contemporary society. Atwood’s tale, for example, presents a portrait of a society, Gilead, which is superficially ideal: it is free of (visible) violence, hatred or suffering. Yet this apparent perfection comes with sacrifice, for all aspects of the population are controlled: social class and intellectual ability are all carefully regulated, with stability maintained at all costs. Similarly, Cameron’s “Terminator” presents members of modern-day (circa 1984) Los Angeles in a beneficial symbiotic relationship with machinery: as technology improves daily life for humans, so too do humans improve technology. Yet this techno-friendly society based on social alliance is jaded once the machines begin to overpower and out-wit humans; here the oppressive regime that threatens humanity is technology itself.

In both texts it seems clear that both technological advancement and control are imperative to the succession of an autocratic state. And as the audience is always kept keenly aware of the dangers that homogeneity poses to the quality of life, these dystopian texts question whether technology necessitates a sacrifice of human individuality.