Cultural Literacy and the Theory of Meaning

N ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER'S first good movie, The Terminator, there is a scene in which a perfectly crafted and fiendishly powerful mechanical man faces a moment of decision. The setting is a staple of the Hollywood action-adventure and the TV cop drama: the Terminator sits alone in a seedy hotel room while someone standing in the dirty corridor knocks on the door. The Terminator is a Cyberdyne Systems 101 man-hunting cyborg (cybernetic organism), dispatched by the machine-dominated society of the future to terminate the woman who will mother a rebel hero. At this point in the movie, the indomitable Terminator has suffered significant damage to the flesh covering his combat chassis-so much damage that the flesh has begun to decay. The hotel janitor has noticed the foul smell coming from the Terminator and bangs on the door: What ya got in there, a dead cat or what? Puzzled, or at least taken aback, our mechanical thinker pauses to decide what to do. We cut quickly to his mind's eye, a computer screen which is being read-by whom? the inner man? the ghost in the machine? The display lists, under the heading POSSIBLE RESPONSES, the output of the Terminator's language processor: YES/NO, OR WHAT? GO AWAY, PLEASE COME BACK LATER, and so on. The cursor moves down the list as the Terminator considers each in turn, until he lights on Fuck you, asshole. Whereupon, we cut back to the outside view, he says his response totally without affect, and the janitor laughs and

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