“Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
“Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.”
— Kyle Reese, character from The Terminator
Fear: Confronted
Let me be blunt: As a seasoned practitioner of nonviolent communication, I’m a bit nervous writing about something as graphic and violence-condoning as The Terminator. Nervous around the reception of a post written by an advocate for nonviolence that praises in its critique a piece with so many elements of killing and suspenseful horror.
But what good comes of a fear unconfronted?
Looking at the cultural visages embodying our shared sociological realm of myth, I’d be lying if I said that I thought the stories of our times (or, yes, even the decade of the ’80s) have no real signification of anything beyond being tragic expressions of deranged desires for gore and thrills. (I wouldn’t be lying, however, if I told you I had once thought that.) The truth is, stories like The Terminator become cinematic classics for a reason, and I’m tempted to explore the intricacies of such long-standing popular artifacts if I ever find, underlying the images it’s perhaps better known for, signs of a message or a theme, intended or not, that echoes the principles of the new leadership model that I identify with.
But, really, The Terminator?? Why?…
Let me share with you an interpretation (one that is more than likely beyond what James Cameron had in mind himself) of the dynamics of a film that I avoided watching my whole life until just the other day — and perhaps persuade you to reconsider the possible signification of such a story more deeply than its hyper-sensationalized exterior.
Becoming the Warrior: Sarah Connor
If you haven’t seen it (and as a late-time viewer, I’d certainly understand why), let me give you the quick and dirty.
The terminator (Schwarzenegger) is a cyborg 40 years from the future, a time when machines have risen up and all but destroyed the human race, sent back to 1980-something to terminate (get it?) the life of Sarah Connor, a simple and average waitress who likes iguanas and can’t score a good guy. (She will, though, don’t worry.)
Sarah, with the help of an edgy soldier Kyle Reese who comes from the same future time as the terminator, comes to understand that it has come to destroy her in order to prevent the birth of her son, John Connor, who will lead the human resistance movement (including Kyle) against the computer-machine uprise. She learns that she is revered in the future for not only being the mother of John Connor but for training and preparing him for combat, instilling in him the very courage that sparks the rebellion. She dismisses this (wouldn’t you?) and spends the greater part of the film simply running away, under Kyle’s devoted protection, from the terminator with little hope of surviving.
Plot spoiler, folks: Kyle manages to severely incapacitate the terminator from the waist down before dying heroically by his own tactic. However, it is Sarah who finishes off the terminator, just as it finally gets its metal skeleton grip around her throat. At the end of the movie, she is escorted to the hospital but soon after escorts herself and her fetus son (oh yeah, get this, she’s pregnant…thanks to Kyle) across the border, already preparing records for her leader son’s future reference and facing the impending storm of war (represented by an actual storm in the distant mountains she’s heading for) she knows will come. She’s become a warrior.
What significance does Sarah’s story have for us?
Allow, for a moment, an aspiring warrior of empathy to give his amateur and unfounded interpretation of an inspiring metamorphosis: I believe that Sarah’s story is our story.
The girl in the beginning of this movie is frail and completely unambitious. She spends hours fixing her hair and giggling with her friends and trying to earn a minimum wage at job she naturally despises. She’s discouraged but not surprised to get stood up by her date for Friday night, and her only reactive strategy once the danger gets going is to call (and call on) others to save her. When she hears (even from someone who would know better than anyone else given the circumstances) that she is the stuff of legend to those who come after her, she doesn’t even give it a chance until long after all other defenses have been disintegrated by the impending destruction of the cyborg sent to kill her.
So what happens? Well, even if you discount the film’s deleted scenes (whereby she starts to take action in plotting an elusive counterattack by destroying the industry that will eventually invent cyborg technology like the terminator), Sarah is the one who saves Kyle from being demolished by the terminator (in a petroleum-loaded tanker truck) and who (in the unexpected tone of a military officer in command) pushes Kyle to keep moving beyond what seemed his possible threshold with the terminator still in chase. And most importantly, it’s Sarah, not her protector (now deceased), who pushes the button that crushes the terminator and ends the deadly chase.
Despite her rational disbelief, and by way of both her circumstances and the decisions she brings herself to make in the choice between life and death, Sarah becomes a warrior. She could have given up. She could have let her fear of death overtake her and paralyze her. She could have ultimately discounted all she was told by the messenger of her legacy (Kyle). Instead, she adapted and followed through to the end. And she did it motivated as much by what her life meant to those who would come after her as it meant to herself. She fulfills a legacy she never asked for, grows beyond herself and her own limits, and in moving forward carries the hope of future generations.
Death, Not the Other: The Terminator
What is it that Sarah is really overcoming in this film? What is it that she ends up fighting for? How does it relate to our own individual stories?
To answer these, I want to relate what I so appreciated about the unique dynamic of characters in this movie. The Terminator has an original basis, in my eyes, for what the antagonist (the cyborg) plays in relationship to the main character, as well as its significance in relationship to the protagonist’s supporter, soldier from the future Kyle Reese.
The uniqueness that I’m speaking to is in the form of antagonism that is portrayed by the terminator character. The harbinger of fear and death that encroaches on Sarah bit by bit as the movie progresses is not a creature of wrath and revenge but an emotionless automaton only and simply only carrying out it’s function (what it was programmed to do). Kyle himself alludes to this:
“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.”
The T-800 cyborg terminator doesn’t feel anything or hold grudges. It doesn’t reason (although it clearly calculates well enough), nor try to uphold to reason. It just is, like the distant storm on the end scene horizon.
This is what death is. Unlike most horror stories — or any stories at all for that matter — death is portrayed here for what it is as the simple (in function) and brutally honest phenomenon against the backdrop of life. More accurately, the terminator stands in for death, becoming the projected object of fear of death. Nothing (in this day and age, anyway) stops it — be it a shotgun, an exploding 16-wheeler, or even a nitroglycerine-based bomb embedded in its very abdomen. The only thing that brings it (for now…) to an end is the adapted steadied hand of the one it seeks (here Sarah, of course) who even to the end, its fingers at her throat, summons the courage to do the one and only thing that can end its threat to her life. In this case, hitting the button to a giant factory-grade hydraulic press that crushes it to oblivion. (Hey, whaddaya gonna do: It’s a Hollywood action film, after all.)
The other beautifully clever attribute of this sci-fi scythe-wielder is that it conveys that death is extremely personal. Exempting the broader sweeping mechanics of the foretold future — where the overtaking H.K. (“hunter-killer”) vehicles more resemble an exaggerated cleanup crew than an army of invaders (…much more like the expected horrors of global warming than global takeover) — the antagonist here, as the terminator, holds the image of death as something bearing greatest concern and consequence to Sarah. It does not come so much as a foreign “other” (a philosophical “l’autre”) — a Far East terrorist regime or a slew of extraterrestrial invaders…or even a secret conspiring government weapon — bent on wiping out the human race and all that we believe is good. Rather it comes as something imagined and created by the very people Sarah and Kyle are trying to save (vicariously, someday) and with an unopinionated agenda for no one but Sarah (again, without the premise of revenge or hateful passion or other emotionally motivated bent).
All in all, I quite like the death figure the terminator represents as, in the way it’s portrayed, a reminder that we all have in our lives our own personal grim reaper, who appears to constantly seek us out and who signifies our greatest fears (likely of death itself).
Hope for Life: Kyle Reese
Finally, a short tribute to the soldier who journeyed back in time, along with the terminator, precisely in order to save our hero Sarah from a premature demise.
The significance of Kyle Reese has everything to do, for me, with the spirit of life-serving purpose and coaching that a motivation-based leadership entails. Kyle understands better than anyone else (except Sarah, toward the end) what the cost would be for even a simple and unpromising waitress in L.A. to robbed of her fuller potential — and not only what it would cost her, but what it would cost the rest of humanity.
Kyle enters the past as a desperate and determined scout, seemingly crazy to everyone he speaks to, including Sarah, but whose hope for the future of life lies in dedication to this girl. The truth is his role is absolutely vital — truly characteristic of a greater vitality than Sarah’s pre-adventure life — which makes (spoiler alert #2!) the fact of being the father of John Connor all the more pertinent to the story. Kyle quite literally impregnates Sarah with the likes of warriorship, both as a future warrior son and as the warrior she herself comes to embody by the end of the film.
Our vision for the future and those in it, like Kyle, infuse and inspire in us the move toward realizing our potential. Sarah’s fate (if we can call it that) could have been anybody’s, but her destiny either way required the promise of hope, vitality and support, that spoke on behalf of the generations that would follow her and was ultimately enunciated by the fallible but capable likes of Kyle. With every justification at hand to question him and his story, to doubt his sanity and berate his imperfect actions, Sarah’s role as the mother of life was made possible in the first place by that one “wholly other” (“taut autre”) individual who knew death and the impending future destruction at hand better than she did and who could motivate her, for the sake of life, to respond and take responsibility.
The End?
That I’m not sure. Not only are there at least three more sequels following this film (and if I understand correctly, a fifth?), but more significantly, the questions I wish to pose by this are:
- How do we relate with the story of our own personal death and the impending consequences that have already been pointed out on the horizon in the coming years?
- Who do we imagine ourselves to be, and how might that limit us from becoming more than ourselves in the service of the greater scope of life?
- Who or what inspires us to be different, to do differently, not because we aren’t good enough as we are, but because what we do differently would precisely express what was inherent to who we are in the first place — would express our potential destiny?
…Not bad for an old Hollywood mid-’80s sci-fi flick, no?
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