This is part 2. Read part 1!
In the end, Sarah Conner strikes the final blow and
defeats the Terminator. Of course, without Kyle Reese this would have been
impossible. But the fact still remains that Kyle, by himself, would have
failed. What does this mean?
Well, on one level, not much. Considering the events
of the story as events, Sarah had to destroy the Terminator because Kyle wasn’t
around to do it. That’s just how it went down. But, the fact of this event at the climax of the story can tell us something
about what is being presented as a whole and the central role that Sarah Conner
plays in it.
In a direct and obvious sense, Kyle couldn’t succeed
without Sarah in the first place. Saving Sarah was his mission, and if she
refused to be saved he would have had very little hope. “Come with me if you
want to live” Reese says. If she had said no and run the other way, that would
have very likely been the end.
So, from the very beginning, at least marginal cooperation is required of
Sarah. But it is clear that more is being required of her over all.
Self-preservation drives her to flee from the Terminator, but self-preservation
is what drives Skynet to send the Terminator after her. Skynet may not be more afraid of Sarah than Sarah is of
Skynet, but it is at least as afraid
of her. It is afraid of her because she is going to be (and by the end of the
film she is) a mother.
The defining line for Sarah’s character is the
bitter, rhetorical question: “Do I look like the mother of the future?” She
thinks the answer is obvious (“no”), but could Kyle possibly think of her
otherwise? She is the mother of the future. In some sense this movie is tragic
because of that.
When we see Sarah at the beginning of the movie she
is a waitress at a diner, she lives with a roommate who is like the personification of ditzy
irresponsibility, and it is pretty clear that she thinks of herself as just a waitress, just the retiring friend who gets stood-up. Like lightening that illusion
comes crashing down. The ditzy friend, ears plugged so she couldn’t hear
destruction coming, is dead. Her dude-bro boyfriend is as easily destroyed,
pathetically brushed aside by the killing machine that is after Sarah. Not Sarah the waitress or Sarah
second pick for dancing at the club, but Sarah the woman, Sarah the future mother. Her opinion of herself at the
beginning of the movie is an illusion, just as it is an illusion for all young women for the same reason.
The tragedy of it, however, is that she has no time
to come to grips with the reality behind the illusion, no time to prepare. The
future is now. She hasn’t had time to mature by the end of the movie, but she needs
to be mature. The very last scene, skimming along the desert road into the
unknown, is ominous partly because we really aren’t sure if she is ready to be what she is, or to
face what she has to face.
Writing articles about this movie, one of my
favorites by far, I’ve noticed how heavy the subject matter is. In part 1, I
said that this movie helped to define the action movie genre and the meaning of
“’80’s”, and that is true. But those archetypes (clichés?) are – and I am not
running them down – more lightheartedly violent and shallower in plot (see
Commando, Predator, or Conan the Barbarian. Hmm... maybe it’s just Arnold in
lead roles…).
But The Terminator, while it can just wash over you
(smashing and exploding) if you don’t reflect, expresses surprisingly deep
themes. This movie is a classic which, while helping to define some important
pop-cultural categories, is not limited by them.
© 2013 John
Hiner III
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