THE TERMINATOR (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good* 
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

On re-screening 1984’s TERMINATOR, I noticed how dependent writer-director James Cameron was on an FX-staple of American action-films in the eighties: vehicular mayhem. This was a necessity, since the film’s budget was only 6.4 million, a far cry from the budgets of most if not all sequels in the franchise. And though all of the mayhem is well executed, it’s a little on the pedestrian side. Still, certain action-scenes, like the oft-referenced “precinct invasion,” exemplify Cameron’s genius for portraying relentless, driving motion—be if of barreling vehicles or blasting projectiles—and place him with America’s best “masters of motion,” from Hawks and Witney to Lucas and Spielberg.

At base TERMINATOR is an extended chase-film, and thus the plot is stripped down to its essentials, like a regular automobile being customized into a dune buggy. Thus the audience learns almost nothing about its modern-day heroine Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), only that she becomes the quarry of two travelers from the future: human Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who wants to save Sarah, and the inhuman Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who’s programmed to kill her. The future from which both travelers hail is likewise sketchy: an apocalypse in which the computer-system Skynet has created a hierarchy of machines to supplant, rather than enhance, the rule of man. Skynet is overthrown by a rebel-group led by John Connor, but the computer seeks to reverse the tide of events by sending the Terminator back to eliminate the womb from which John sprung. Providentially, future-JC is expecting this, thanks to the intelligence given to him by his future-mom, and he sends Kyle Reese through time as well, not only to fight the cyborg killer, but also to make sure that John comes into being in the first place. Cameron’s script labors to provide a rationale to keep the time-door closed to any other tampering, which rationale he himself had to demolish in the ensuing sequel.

Sarah Connor embodies a trope that Cameron would use again in both ALIENS and TITANIC: that of an inexperienced young woman who must emulate the heroic example of a courageous man, even though his labors on her behalf end with the male’s demise. To be sure, TERMINATOR is the only film in which there’s another man stage-managing the courageous male’s inevitable sacrifice. It wouldn’t be hard to read the narrative as a thoroughly secular rewriting of the Christian trope of a heavenly father sending his only begotten son to Earth, though Cameron has shifted roles so that it’s the son sending the father to the mundane world—and not only to die for a higher destiny, but also to copulate with the son’s own mother. Of all the many stories in which children are placed the position of choosing their own parents, TERMINATOR may be the most audacious.

  Though Sarah’s transformation from “zero to hero” proves integral to the film, the Terminator is the main star of this show. This cyborg-assassin might not have been the first major “hardbody” in cinema, but he’s almost surely the first who was harder on the inside than the outside. Even in 1984 it was routine for filmgoers to observe that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s limited thespian skills made him the perfect fit for an affect-less android, while his Germanic accent contributed to the stilted feel of his delivery. Yet Schwarzenegger’s tight rein on emotional expressivity is not the same as “not acting,” and his reserve allows the audience to speculate on what a malevolent machine might be thinking or feeling. Had Schwarzenegger never played this iconic role, it’s hard to imagine the actor remaining a Hollywood superstar throughout the nineties, to say nothing of his having a gubernatorial career. Though a sequel could’ve kept the stoic cyborg in his role as evildoer, it’s a mark of the Terminator’s deeper resonance that Cameron chose to place him on the side of the angels.