The following will appear in the upcoming Quarterly Journal of Gremlins 2 Studies. Sign up for our email list to receive the journal for free.

In April 1996, the FBI raided the cabin of one Ted Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber”. After decades of mailing pipe bombs to nerds, his reign of terror came to an end. Kaczynski, once a promising Harvard graduate, had turned his back on a society that in his eyes was being degraded by its unhealthy relationship with technology. He had been identified only after he published his manifesto, a long screed against industrial society.

Among his possessions was a copy of the novelization of Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and several ticket stubs from its run at the local cinema in Lincoln, Montana. It is believed that the film’s depiction of reckless genetic experimentation is what led Kaczynski to target geneticists in the mid-90s. He even, for a time, used the alias “Ted Katheter”, a reference to Christopher Lee’s character in the film.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch is a cinematic pipe bomb. It’s an explosive commentary on our contemporary relationship with technology. In the decades since its release, many of its parodies have become prophecies.

To fully examine the relationship between the Gremlins and technology, we must first return to their origins in popular folklore. “Gremlins” first enter the vernacular during WWII, perhaps as a reaction to the increasing role of machinery in warfare. They were creatures that caused aircraft to malfunction. Whimsical saboteurs.

But what happens when technological thinking is no longer applied solely to machinery? What happens when it is applied to an entire society?

In the mediocre prequel Gremlins, the monsters are shown to act more in line with the original myth. They sabotage cars, appliances, and most memorably a stair lift. There are also parallels between the Gremlins and Mr. Peltzer’s many useless inventions. Ultimately, the film is a simple moral parable: in irresponsible hands, technology can turn monstrous.

But what of the sequel?

In Gremlins 2, we go straight to ground zero, to the shiny chrome heart of post-Cold War technocapital: New York City. But, with the exception of a few establishing shots and the brief inclusion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the film is really set in a kind of neoliberal no-where place. The sterile concrete of Clamp Center could just as easily be London or San Francisco.

What we find is an environment where the newest innovations double as mechanisms of surveillance and control. Rather than changing technology to better accommodate human behavior, we see precisely the opposite. Everything in Clamp Tower must be rationalized, measured, approved: including its employees. Even the plants in the lobby appear to be painted grey. In the words of James Scott:

“ The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

This is precisely the same dynamic at work in Clamp Industries.

The building is not only full of technology, but technological thought. And in the process, everything human is lost. The employees are reduced to barcodes they wear on their lapels — a frightening bit of Holocaust imagery. Yet what frightened people about the Holocaust was not merely its body count, but its bureaucratic approval and ruthless efficiency. This is what separated that particular horror from the horrors of the past. The promise of the Enlightenment — of science, of reason — did nothing to stop the trains to Auschwitz. Just the opposite: it made the machinery of death possible. The databases the Gestapo used were ran by IBM computers.

The imagery of atrocity is used here to excavate something hidden beneath the glossy exterior of techno-positivity. Clamp Center may be the world’s first “Smart Building”, but the social structures that have been engineered alongside it result in degredation and dehumanization.

Against this stand the Gremlins. They are irrational and destructive, but when the forces of creativity and rationality have been made completely subservient to power, those traits can be the very things needed to reclaim autonomy from the jaws of control.

The Vegetable Gremlin

Then, of course, there is the Splice-O-Life lab. Technology has brought capital to its final frontier: the body. But we are given a choice: horror or liberation. We see the horror in the form of the Vegetable Gremlin. Here we have the logic of capital taken to its cannibalistic endpoint. While bodies have always been worn out in the name of capital, it is only in recent years that we have seen the rise of black market organ trading, or the formation of a legal market for plasma (driven by vampiric Silicon Valley robber-barons).

When capital looks at a forest, it sees lumber. When it looks at a mountain it sees a potential source of metal or minerals. When it looks at a human, it sees an economic node, a source of labor. Or rather, it used to. With the advent of automation, capital’s relation to the humanity is changing. How does capital see “excess” humanity? In this new era, the body is no longer a car to drive, but one to break down to its component parts. Such a change has already happened in animals, who went from beings who labored and produced, to objects for consumption. This is the body horror of the Vegetable Gremlin, a visage of what awaits man in the chop shop of technocapital.

And yet, we also have the wonders of the Bat Gremlin, or the Spider Gremlin. While both meet gruesome deaths, their short lives are brimming with vitality. They are the Gremlin liberated, the anti-Vegetable Gremlin. They turn the weapons of capital against itself. There is the old socialist phrase, “ The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” Let us update this: “The last capitalist to be ensnared in our web will be the one who sold us the Spider DNA”.

That is where Joe Dante succeeds, and Ted Kaczynski fails. Technology in itself is ambiguous, its the mindset behind the technology that can be either authoritarian or liberatory. Dante has turned the Hollywood sequel into a radical Trojan Horse. Like the Gremlins in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, he has turned a tool of domination into a tool for liberation.

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