Life During Wartime #10: THE TERMINATOR (Patreon exclusive)

by Walter Chaw

The Terminator (1984)
U.S.: Showtime, Fubo
Canada: CTV

After making an inauspicious directorial debut with Piranha II: The Spawning, James Cameron hit it out of the proverbial park with The Terminator (1984). I was 11 when the film came out, and figuring out a way to get our parents to let us watch it was an all-consuming project for me and my pals. I was so desperate to be cool that I lied to a buddy about having seen it, declaring that the laser-sight glimpsed in the television teasers was a laser gun cutting clubgoers in half as it made its circuit around the room. The film had a reputation for extreme violence, not unlike Blade Runner–which most of us knew at that time as that VHS box at the store that promised an unrated movie with bonus gore–and seeing it became a rite of passage. I didn’t actually get to do that it until I procured it during one of my unsupervised trips to the neighbourhood video store. It was worth the wait.

The Terminator was a cultural phenomenon, coming out of virtually nowhere to spawn a series of copycats and its own long-running franchise.

• Why do you think The Terminator caught on as it did?
• What premises/ideas in the film connect it to popular premises/ideas in other media? In other films?

Harlan Ellison famously and successfully sued for a cut of this pie as well as for a creator’s credit on the picture that began to appear in the first VHS copies of The Terminator. His claim was that the premise of a time-travelling soldier sent to protect the course of the past was lifted from an episode of “The Outer Limits” he had written called “The Soldier.” After The Terminator, we watched “The Soldier” and found it to be windy in the manner of Ellison’s screen work and…fine, though not nearly the best example of that venerable series. Quality aside, the kids acknowledged the similarities but offered that the whole idea seemed not so very novel in hindsight.

How many points of similarity should there be before a work is considered plagiarized?

My primary fear about showing the kids The Terminator before now was twofold: that the sex scene I remembered as steamy and extended would be too uncomfortable to endure with the children; and that Stan Winston’s exceptional stop-motion work would appear dated, even comical, to their eyes.

The sex scene does go on for too long in the manner of Eighties movies, but it’s not terribly steamy, truth be known. Blame my recollection on the days before free and copious amounts of porn could be enjoyed with no trouble at all from the comfort of the kids’ phones. You say yours aren’t sneaking a peek? Think what you would be doing as a thirteen-year-old with that kind of access. I still remember one of my pals happening on an old, water-logged PLAYBOY at an abandoned campsite and how we passed it between us for weekend visits like a treasured child from a broken home. Anyway, the sex scene was palatable, and the stop-motion effects went uncommented-upon.

• What role should special effects play in a film?
• What happens to a film when the special effects are the point?

I offered a summary of what stop-motion animation is and used examples from their experience–specifically, A Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline and the Wallace & Gromit shorts, along with all the other brilliant Aardman productions (Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Early Man). I took the opportunity to mention William Blake’s theories around something he called the “infernal method.” He made prints of his poetry and illuminations by hand using an acid engraving process. He believed that a reproduction acquired a bit of the artist’s soul with the artist’s touch. The word “animation” is derived from the Latin “anima,” meaning “soul.”

What do you notice about the difference between stop-motion animation (or hand-drawn animation cels) vs. other forms of animation?

The Terminator went over spectacularly well with the kids. They were engrossed from the get-go and afterwards had questions about Skynet’s strategy. Why not send someone back to when Sarah was a child instead? Why did they send only one Terminator? What if they had succeeded, wouldn’t there be another John Connor-type capable of leading a revolution in the future? John knew his father was Kyle; how did that work out in a military operation’s hierarchy?

Some of these questions are answered by the sequels, of course, in that Skynet does, indeed, send another Terminator into the past in the event the first Terminator fails its mission. The question of why there weren’t more sent back is answered in the text of this one. What I was excited about was how discussions of time-travel conundrums are essentially an introduction to logic and problem-solving. I like to think my kids are already geared to be resourceful and critical-thinking humans, but exercises that are fun and non-threatening, like this one, are always welcome. They’ve seen Back to the Future, of course, but it’s been a few years for each of them. It might be time to revisit that soon.

• What makes the final fight sequence in the factory so effective?
• What elements are introduced in that environment, and how are they paid off?

The Terminator makes for a nice introduction to the idea of “Chekhov’s Gun,” in which an object introduced early on resurfaces to serve the resolution. I asked for other examples in The Terminator where something is set up and paid off later. The obvious one is the photograph taken of Sarah in Mexico.

I also brought up the image of the two children in the future, huddled before a television set that a reverse shot reveals to be a makeshift fireplace. Both kids responded vocally to this reveal, and I asked them why. They said it was just such a surprise because they expected it to be a TV show or something–but of course it wouldn’t be. I then introduced the concept of “fireside chats” created by FDR as a radio “chat” through which the President addressed the people. He used the format thirty times between 1933 and 1944, tackling topics of national interest like banking, Nazis, recession, and unemployment. Sound familiar? It did to them as well. I told them the difference is that FDR wasn’t a fucking idiot. It’s important to note how radio was often the centre of a family’s home life. I referred to A Christmas Story and Ralphie’s obsession with the Little Orphan Annie program.

When Cameron makes a television a literal hearth in a dystopian hellscape, it’s a powerful image in terms of not only exposition and the story of place, but also the broader symbolic significance of a family’s home life revolving around television…and how that may lead to our eventual destruction. If you want to talk about Fox News’ role in our current troubles, you certainly can.

I was pleased, too, by how the kids weren’t thrown by the “datedness” of The Terminator, save a stray comment about Sarah’s hairstyle. It’s big. The hairstyle. I want to believe this has something to do with my drilling into them the useless reductivism of declaring things to be “of their time.” I mean, what other time would they be of if not their own? But The Terminator deserves a monster’s load of credit for being a lean, clever, vicious storytelling engine from a master of the action film. I give Cameron a lot of grief for the dialogue in his later films, but few have ever given action sequences this level of visceral weight and clarity, and his gifts were already at full-flower at this point in his career.

What is The Terminator about?

The kids had various responses to this question. It’s about love, sure, and it’s about fate, too. “Are they connected?” I wondered, which allowed for their mom and me to offer the opinion that we don’t believe in “soul mates” in the sense that there’s only one person who’s right for you out of the billions and billions of people on this planet. I mean, conservatively, there are probably 100 million people who could be suitable matches for any one of us. We believe that attaching a mystical element to finding a great match is dangerous in that it can inevitably lead to disappointment. None of this is meant to excuse poor choices or to devalue relationships, but to say that waiting for a supernatural sign may not be the best way to conduct major life decisions.

The question of whether we can control our destinies and shape the future bleeds into theology, of course, and the belief in an all-knowing God who has mapped out our lives for us. I brought up the Greek Fates: the one who measures out the thread and the one who cuts it. I asked if they took comfort in the idea that there was design in their lives…or if they saw that as limiting and instinctively wanted to push against it.

Next time, we watch Pierre Etaix’s Le Grand Amour (1969), a lovely, brilliant, imaginative comedy about a man pining for his lost loves and contemplating adultery.