Conceptions and Contraceptions of the Future: Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.

—Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing—but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.

—Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Cosmic Beginning, Heterosexual Begetting, and Star Trek's Primal Scene

The first Star Trek movie (dir. Robert Wise, US, 1979) concerns the uncanny reappearance of humankind's long lost technological offspring, the Voyager satellite. Unbeknownst to earth, several hundred years after its launch, Voyager has evolved into "a life form of its own, a conscious, living entity," Spock (Leonard Nimoy) says, and for that reason it is at first unrecognizable when it returns to the solar system "looking for its creator." Having been rebuilt and sent "on its journey back" home by "a machine-planet" it has encountered, the satellite calls itself VGER, its abbreviated name marking the loss of its memory concerning those who constructed it. Although it has acquired a new identity, it retains its original programming: to "collect all data possible" and to "transmit its information" to its maker, which it mistakenly "believes . . . is a machine." Once Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) convinces VGER otherwise—that "we [humans] are the creator"—it insists that "the creator must join with VGER." So intones Ilia (Persis Khambatta), the Enterprise officer VGER has reduced to a data structure and then reconstituted to serve as its interface with the "carbon-based units" it has not known are "true life forms." Star Trek ends when Kirk's first officer and captain, Will Dekker (Stephen Collins), and Ilia, metonymical figures of humankind and the alien consciousness, "join" in a PG-rated act of symbolic intercourse. As they stand face to face, Dekker and Ilia become sparkling particles of swirling light that stream outward in a fantastic explosion and diffusion. The scene condenses into a brilliant moment—a cosmic conception, parturition, and birth. "Spock, did we just see the beginning of a new life-form?" Kirk asks. "Yes, Captain. We witnessed a birth—possibly the next step in our evolution." To which the good doctor (DeForest Kelley) remarks, "Well, it's been a long time since I've delivered a baby."

The ending of Star Trek thus depicts the fulfillment of a wish—that the future is conceivable in human terms as an extension of heterosexual conception. That wish, however, betrays the anxiety that motivates it—the dread of a nonhuman, indeed an inhuman, future, a future that will spell the end of the human. As do countless science fiction films, Star Trek evokes this fear, at first imagining the future as the time of a nonhuman consciousness unable to hear humankind's welcome and therefore about to obliterate the earth. Star Trek then converts this fear into exultant joy by discovering the alien consciousness to be seeking in human consciousness precisely its future in the form of the "simple feeling" that would give it the "meaning" and "hope" that it lacks. VGER, Spock says after melding with it, is "asking questions. . . . Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" In representing humankind as being able to answer this consciousness, Star Trek turns...