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From the department of Awesome
Today I discovered that one of my all-time favorite cultural studies theorists, Meaghan Morris, is apparently a fan of The Sarah Connor Chronicles -- she begins a recent paper (Grizzling about Facebook) with an epigraph quoting Riley:
‘You're all crazy. Every one of you. You just sit here, in your cosy little house, with your cold sodas and your Facebook pages, like it all matters. Like it's even real. But it's not! It's all going to burn and you're going to be nothing but bleached skulls. Don't you get it? You're dead! All of you are dead!'
(Riley in ‘Strange Things Happen')
Morris later elaborates:
Of course, Morris subsequently notes that:
Linking to this film [T2] in particular, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series makes John Connor's adolescence a study in psychic conflict between longing for an ordinary suburban life and knowing that (as Riley puts it) ‘it's all going to burn'. What sets John apart as a leader here is not his awareness of the fire to come; in a fuzzy way, there is common knowledge around him of the unsustainability of our world. Rather, this version of John Connor stands out from his helpers (with the partial exception of Cameron, his studious Terminator guard) because he knows why people care, none the less, about cold sodas and cosy houses, ‘like it all matters'. I doubt that John Connor could risk having a Facebook page, but I'm fairly sure that he'd want one.
...okay, I think it's awesome, and you would too if you imprinted on Morris' classic The pirate's fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism. Because it's very cool when your intellectual crushes share your taste in television!
Now, since she's Australian, I can only hope that she's also a fan of Sea Patrol. I wonder if she's watching the audition episodes of the new season of the Australian version of So You Think You Can Dance?
‘You're all crazy. Every one of you. You just sit here, in your cosy little house, with your cold sodas and your Facebook pages, like it all matters. Like it's even real. But it's not! It's all going to burn and you're going to be nothing but bleached skulls. Don't you get it? You're dead! All of you are dead!'
(Riley in ‘Strange Things Happen')
Morris later elaborates:
An example of this and one of my favourite Facebook put-downs is the outburst quoted above from Riley, the undercover girl from the future in the second season of the Fox network TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Cracking under the strain of impersonating an alienated, pre-Judgment Day American teenager, Riley wheels on her bemused foster family in the kitchen one day and, with four viciously delivered metonyms (‘just sit here', ‘cosy little house', ‘cold sodas', ‘Facebook pages'), pours scorn all over their lives. In this moment, Facebook is absorbed into the store of belittling stereotypes of mindless suburban complacency that print media, film and, superbly, television (the suburban medium par excellence), have been producing—and donating to critical culture—for more than fifty years.
Of course, Morris subsequently notes that:
Linking to this film [T2] in particular, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series makes John Connor's adolescence a study in psychic conflict between longing for an ordinary suburban life and knowing that (as Riley puts it) ‘it's all going to burn'. What sets John apart as a leader here is not his awareness of the fire to come; in a fuzzy way, there is common knowledge around him of the unsustainability of our world. Rather, this version of John Connor stands out from his helpers (with the partial exception of Cameron, his studious Terminator guard) because he knows why people care, none the less, about cold sodas and cosy houses, ‘like it all matters'. I doubt that John Connor could risk having a Facebook page, but I'm fairly sure that he'd want one.
...okay, I think it's awesome, and you would too if you imprinted on Morris' classic The pirate's fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism. Because it's very cool when your intellectual crushes share your taste in television!
Now, since she's Australian, I can only hope that she's also a fan of Sea Patrol. I wonder if she's watching the audition episodes of the new season of the Australian version of So You Think You Can Dance?