Notes on The Terminator

 

The climactic encounter between Sarah Connor and the cyborg in James Cameron's 'The Terminator'

I’ve watched a pretty disparate bunch of films over the past few days – all of which I’ve been seeing for the first time – and I’m going to try here to put together some thoughts I’ve had about them, thoughts about each film individually and about them all in combination and comparison. First of all, there’s James Cameron’s The Terminator, which was on Foxtel a few days ago. Quite an interesting film, perhaps particularly odd to see for the first time now, already knowing so many things about it as one inevitably does with a film that has so totally entered the popular consciousness. Maybe because of that odd familiarity with the major elements of the film, the time travel narrative and Arnie’s one-liners, what I clung to as I watched and what I return to now, as I think about it, are a couple of minor things, brief moments that held me, and which helped me to return to the larger concerns of the film, viewed through the particularities of these individual moments or points. I’ll talk here about just one of these, what I consider the film’s most interesting moment, which we might call the point of the narrative’s absolute climax: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) has just crushed the Terminator in a machine at the factory where this climactic scene takes place. One outstretched, metallic hand (this is after the Terminator’s human surface, played of course by Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been destroyed) reaches out to Sarah, who is hugged to the wall, sitting, immediately behind the hydraulic press that has crushed the cyborg – crushed every part of it except this one hand and arm, which is stretched towards the neck of the woman it has been sent to kill.

There is a definite sexual threat present within this moment, with the phallic shape of the outstretched arm and hand thrusting towards the terrified (but, by this point in the narrative, brave) woman – a moment of climax in more ways than one. The spasms of the cyborg’s hand in its dying moments appear analogous to post-orgasmic spasms. All this is worth talking about, but I think it’s important to consider the meaning of this analogy between sex and death (or, we might say, a particular version of sex and a particular version of death) that seems to be occurring here more specifically, even if this risks the embarrassment of taking Cameron’s ‘silly’ plot seriously. For, of course, the central driving force of the film’s narrative is the title character’s determination to prevent a sexual act (the copulation between Sarah and Reece, which leads to the birth of a son, John, the future leader of the humans in their war with the machines) through the performance of another act in its place – the act of killing Sarah, before she can conceive and give birth to her child.

The Terminator’s one, unceasing need is to prevent the sex act through a death act: and yet, as we have seen, the act of killing that it attempts to perform at this climactic scene is itself analogised as sexual – the death that intends to prevent sex is itself sexualised, a sexual act. I suppose I could try to go Lacanian at this point, but I’ll try not to, and will just indicate briefly some ideas that come out of this: it seems that what we have at this point of the Terminator’s death are two sex acts – the sex between Sarah and Reece, which is permitted because Sarah has survived [another complication here is the fact that this sex act has in fact already occurred - to be more accurate, what is permitted by Sarah’s survival of this encounter is the making of this already occurred sex act into a product – the baby, John]; and the Terminator’s sex act, its violation of Sarah, which has failed. Does this mean that the phallic thrust of the Terminator’s arm that fails to reach its target should simply be read as metonymic of the failed act of killing, and that the Terminator’s death removes the threat of this phallus from Sarah’s story, enabling her and Reece’s (positive) sexuality to prosper in its place? Or is it that this phallus itself is what signifies the success of Sarah and Reece’s sex act; that the sexual threat of the phallus is not simply one that terrorizes them, but one that they appropriate, that they use to affirm the validity of their sex act, their version of this narrative’s sexual history? Is the Terminator’s arm representative of one side in this battle between good and evil, or would it be better read as a kind of pure phallus, a master-signifier that one side or the other may define itself in terms of? (Guess I’m getting slightly Lacanian here)

Anyway, I’ve been writing for three paragraphs and I haven’t yet got to the thing that’s happening here that I most wanted to talk about: so, Sarah has crushed the cyborg in the press, every part of it is crushed except for this one arm that is stretched towards her. She’s huddled against the wall on the floor, inches from this arm, and, like us, she stares at it. Having seen the Terminator rise from countless apparent deaths throughout the film, both she and the viewer remain anxious, wary of believing that this, finally, is the end, that her terrorizer is truly dead. We remain, locked in this act of looking at the unmoving hand, for what feels like an unnaturally long time in the context of this film, where nothing ever remains still for very long. Then, as this stillness continues, we hear the sound of a police siren approaching, and it is the entry of this sound into the scene that suddenly changes everything – the camera and Sarah’s head both remain in the same position, nothing within the frame changes, but as soon as the police siren is heard, the threat is over: we now know that the arm won’t spasm, won’t move again, that the cyborg is thoroughly dead.

It’s a remarkably clever and economical move, and is indicative of the importance of off-screen sound (much discussed in criticism of the films of Robert Bresson) for mainstream cinema, perhaps particularly genre cinema. [I’ll have more to say about off-screen sound and ambient sound in part two of this post, on Ferrara] More significantly for our discussion here, the introduction of off-screen sound into this complex moment may also help us to unpack some of the issues already raised: with the sound of the police siren signalling the end of the danger, it is made clear that what the death of the Terminator specifically means is a return to institutional and social order, as represented (of course) by the police. The dispute from earlier in the film between the clueless cops and the heroes is forgotten, as the traditional dichotomy of order and chaos is reinforced, with Sarah firmly on the ordered, policed and policing side, the Terminator neatly representative of the chaotic force that has been quelled. Perhaps, then, we may understand the sex battle discussed earlier in these terms: Sarah’s sex act is victorious here because it is brought into the social and institutional space represented by the police siren; the Terminator’s failed sex act, the killing of Sarah, is not so much asocial as it is part of an alien social and institutional order, belonging as it does to the world of the cyborgs, a world that only exists in the future. There are acceptable social and institutional spaces, and sex acts that are acceptable or unacceptable within them: the police siren signifies Sarah’s acceptability and the Terminator’s unacceptability. The outstretched arm, this phallus, represents the sexual (and social and institutional) power that each side attempts to harness, but the phallus itself does not belong to either social order: it itself is asocial or pre-social, and each side in the battle for the control of (social and sexual) history attempts to refer itself to this pure, pre-social power, to define the phallus in terms of itself, and itself in terms of the phallus. That, at least, is the conclusion I am tempted to draw just now.

That’s enough on The Terminator. I’d wanted to say something about the Marnie-esque final shot, and indeed that whole dénouement in Mexico and the sub-Blade Runner mess with the photograph (interesting how Cameron apes Ridley Scott here, just a couple of years before he made the sequel to Scott’s Alien), but I’ll leave it aside. Given how much I’ve written about just this, I’ll refrain from putting my thoughts on the other films I’ve watched recently – Abel Ferrara’s King of New York and Bad Lieutenant - all in this one post, but will add them in a new post later on.