Following the mediocre box office showing for Conan the Destroyer (1983), Arnold Schwarzenegger was ready for something new but was less than enthusiastic about a leap into the futuristic sci-fi market. When asked on the Conan set about his next film project, which was The Terminator (1984), Schwarzenegger answered dismissively, “It's some shit movie I'm making. Take a couple of weeks” (cited in Andrews, 118). Although The Terminator was not a box office hit, several months after its release the new video rental industry showed what it could do for films that were not big hits in their theatrical runs. Through video rentals the film built momentum and became a cult smash hit, making a national superstar out of Schwarzenegger. When offered a choice of roles between the heroic Kyle Reese and the villainous Terminator, Schwarzenegger chose to play the Terminator. As it turned out, this was a career enhancing choice—but one that, as will be seen, Schwarzenegger nevertheless came to have doubts about.

    Critic Jake Horsley concludes that one of the more remarkable things about the film is “the sheer audacity of its plot.” But “audacity” may be too kind a word for the convoluted and tortured logic patched together and served up in this James Cameron directed disaster spectacle.

    The year of the film's “present,” 2029, finds the world dominated by a computer network, called Skynet, which was initially constructed for monitoring defense operations. Programmed to have creative intelligence and learning capabilities, Skynet succeeds beyond expectations. Apparently having been programmed too effectively, the network evolves into a form of “superintelligence” exceeding the capacity and control of human intellects. Drunk with its own power, and evidently jealous as well, Skynet decides that humans must be exterminated. Through a nuclear conflagration, Skynet is largely successful in this task but, nevertheless, a small group of surviving human resistance fighters threatens to overcome the network. In response, Skynet programs a robotic agent, the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and sends it back in time to kill the mother, Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton), of the leader of the resistance group, John Conner—thereby changing the “present” that threatens the network. Having learned of this dastardly intention, the resistance fighters send a human from their group, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), back to the same time period to destroy the Terminator before it can destroy Sarah Conner. So instead of duking it out in “present” time, Skynet and the resistance elect to duke it out in a chosen slice of the past.

    Examined from any perspective, this plot presents itself as a colossal absurdity. Audiences are asked to believe that a computer intelligence superior to human intelligence has decided, among its range of available rational options, that the best plan for defeating the resistance is to send an agent back in time to destroy the mother of the leader of the resistance. This seems more like an option that might present itself to a college freshman around two o'clock on a Saturday morning through the haze of an alcohol-clouded brainstorming session.

    Why would not Skynet, using its supreme intelligence, figure out how to defeat the small and technologically inferior resistance in the more familiar frame of present time than take the chance that by eliminating the mother of the resistance leader it might also inadvertently eliminate itself through an unforeseen glitch in the alternate future created? The lack of control regarding the unfolding of alternate futures—implicit in the assumption that the future can be changed at all by an alteration of the past—makes the option chosen by the network seem highly desperate if not wholly irrational.

    The audience is asked to believe that a state of the art computer has not posed itself the question: What if the Terminator gets the wrong woman? Several women named “Sarah Conner”—but not the “right” Sarah Conner—are in fact indiscriminately terminated by the Terminator. The audience is forced to embrace the convenient but unlikely presumption that the death of these women—not to mention the reckless slaughter of other innocents and the wide swath of wanton destruction the Terminator leaves in his wake—will have no unwanted effects on the new future desired by Skynet.

    Much more could be said about the absurdities of the plot, but these shortcomings only serve to illustrate that details of plot must be counted as irrelevant in the search for any real substance in the film. In the quest for this generic substance Horsley correctly observes, The Terminator is, like Alien, a horror movie with a sci-fi setting. More specifically, as Rushing and Frentz have noted, following Margaret Goscilo's analysis, it belongs in the horror subgenre of the slasher film: “Although Sarah successfully defeats the Terminator in the film's final minutes, in present time she never really stalks her enemy on her own terms or becomes like several of the men before her, a hunter. For most of the film, she is a frightened and tormented victim… [T]he film owes much to the slasher subgenre of horror, in which women are generally shown as incompetent, helpless, scantily clad, vulnerable victims whose bodies are the object of the male gaze and erotic violence” (175).

    The psychic liabilities of the slasher genre as an essentially male fantasy are examined in Chapter Nineteen. However, beyond the limited themes of the standard slasher plot, Rushing and Frentz point out that the melodramatic design of The Terminator is further amplified and embellished by its “rather transparent Christian underpinnings.” They note, in agreement with Richard Corliss's findings that “John Conner, a modern day J.C., born of an 'ordinary' mother, is the warrior-king [Christ figure] who is prophesied to reconstitute the world, to avert the apocalypse through a fight with a cyborgian devil” (179).

    The mythic progenitor and inspiration for the grandiose apocalyptic twist to the storyline resides in a particular version of the Christ story. This version derives from what Rushing and Frentz call the “exoteric” account of Christ's sacrifice and the Christian saga of redemption: “It is much more typical... to interpret the Christ story exoterically—that is, in a way that reinforces the ego by keeping the unacceptable parts of the psyche (the shadow) separated and disowned. In this version, Satan carries the sins of the world, and Christ substitutes for us in dealing with Satan... Christ dies for our sins,.... all that is required for redemption is belief, because the savior of humankind banishes that shadow for us” (180).

    In this exoteric or apocalyptic version—which coincides with the major institutional renderings handed down through tradition inspired through John's Revelations—the fate of all of humanity lies in the hands of one individual, a savior, who alone has the ability to overcome Satan (or Satanic agents) and through his sacrifice ransom humanity from Evil and complete destruction. Whatever may be the subtle social and psychological economy of such a plot, it certainly sets the stakes high and draws the lines of conflict razor sharp in a final all or nothing confrontation in which complete annihilation is the loser's share. The adjective “apocalyptic” is here used to indicate this type of conflict—one involving the spectacle of an ultimate clash between sharply drawn forces of good and evil and in which one individual stands out as a sacrificial savior.

    In making The Terminator, the director, Cameron, feeling an apocalyptic itch and sensing its commercial potential, may have said something of the following sort to his scriptwriting team: “I want a sci-fi action film—which means I need violence and lots of it. Give me a plot where the fate of the entire human race is in the balance (can't top that!) where the threat comes from an unstoppable cyborg monster chasing a girl defended by a hugely overmatched hero who must face enormous odds. And don't sweat the details on whatever rationale you have to invent to create this scenario.”

    For Cameron the goal was to create a situation that provides a conduit for action scenes wherein the violence can be amplified to maximum intensity. Since the conduit for action is the main objective, the extent to which it is framed in a situation that is contrived, artlessly stitched together, and unrealistic is of comparatively little importance. The carnage along the path of the conflict is the real show and it will distract the audience sufficiently from any failings in the credibility of the details of the plot. Offering a thinly developed and contrived plot with excessive emphasis on the accumulation of scenes of graphic violence, The Terminator becomes the violent analogue to a pornographic film—serving up violence much like the porn film serves up sex.

    But however skeletal, confused, and irrelevant the details and logic of the plot may be, the overall structure of the plot remains enormously significant. Just as the plot in a pornographic film may be insignificant in its details, it figures significantly in its structure through the way in which it may orient the attitudes of male and female viewers toward sex and each other. Similarly, the plot in violent action films acts suasively on viewers with its explicit, clearly aligned structuring of the featured conflict.

    The essence of the apocalyptic plot—the lone savior battling Evil for the fate of the world (or the “local” community of civilization)—is familiar and acceptable enough to audiences, through the tutelage of the Christ story, to outweigh any requirements for clarity or consistency among trifling details.

    The historical roots of this apocalyptically nuanced and Christian influenced myth in American culture have been extensively examined and exposed through the work of Richard Slotkin in his three volume study of what he calls the “myth of the frontier” (see also Chapter Seventeen for further discussion of Slotkin's work). In the second volume of this trilogy Slotkin devotes primary attention to George Armstrong Custer and the way in which his demise assumed mythic status and was appropriated and subsumed into the dominant mythological currents of American culture.

    The defining characteristics of this myth began to take shape in newspaper reports of the time through various eulogies and rehashings of the events. Summing up the tone and tenor of Walt Whitman's “Death-Sonnet for Custer” published in the New York Tribune, Slotkin observes that “Custer's defeat became a kind of atoning sacrifice, almost Christ-like: the representative of American youth, courage, and soldierly virtue violently perishes, but leaves behind a redeeming example that summons his fellow citizens to the purgation of evil, the regeneration of virtue and vigor, and a renewed pursuit of our 'ancient struggle' against the forces of darkness” (1985, 10).

    The complex reality of Custer's infamous “Last Stand” is delivered over to the ready-made template for conflict residing in the cultural tradition of the Christ story and similar themes. Once appropriated in this manner, the Custer myth is polished, amended, and magnified in popular retellings and serves to inspire works of fiction—such as novels and, in the 20th century, films—that perpetuate the myth. The Terminator is an example of the extension of the apocalyptic myth into the province of the postmodern “frontier” of a science fiction future—where the apocalyptic battle on the frontier of Custer's American West continues with hardly a loss of tempo. But instead of struggling against a savage land inhabited by savage “redskins,” Kyle Reese struggles against the evil of technological agency run amok and the wasteland of the remanufactured landscape it dominates and controls. The complex challenges of the new frontier created by the emergence of computer technology are readily reconfigured to fit the mold of the old mythological conflict structures. This would not be a noteworthy problem were it not for the fact, as argued herein, that the old structures serve human community in ways that prominently feature, admire, and celebrate violently exclusionary modes of resolution.

    Even Schwarzenegger, as already mentioned, began to have doubts about the cultural benefits of his portrayal of a cyborg monster. Fearful that the Terminator had emerged, despite its villainous role in the film, as an all-too-popular cultural icon, Schwarzenegger began to see a different role for himself in the sequel. As Rushing and Frentz report: “After the unexpected success of T1 [The Terminator], Schwarzenegger reportedly became concerned about the public's unabashed affection for the indestructible, cop-killing machine he portrayed in the original and insisted on a radical makeover for T2 [Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)]. The goal was for him to become 'a kinder, gentler terminator,' a better role model for children” (194).

    Schwarzenegger apparently believed he could deflect and redirect the negative role-model effects of the first film by returning in the second film as the same Terminator reprogrammed to protect and defend the struggling humans resisting the Skynet eradication campaign. With this thought Schwarzenegger showed that he had learned nothing from the first film. This is especially evident in his general attitude toward the effects of violent films—which has remained consistent throughout his film career. Speaking of the Conan films, Schwarzenegger remarked to French film critics, “Fantasy is definitely the thing now, because they [the audience] can get off on the killing on screen. They can get off on seeing someone get killed without feeling guilty” (cited in Andrews, 109). In a comment about the villainy in The Terminator Schwarzenegger explained, “I think the majority of people out there appreciate... [being] able to disconnect emotions and go after what they want to go after, destroy what they want to destroy. That's why they go to see those films. It's a fantasy” (cited in Andrews, 121).

    In a 1985 interview, while working on the film Commando, Schwarzenegger claimed, “If killing is done with good taste, it can be very entertaining indeed.” Arnold's idea of “good taste” became all too apparent when he went all the way to 20th Century Fox's Lawrence Gordon to insist upon the inclusion in the Commando film of the following scene: “... I chop a guy's arm off. So, when we're filming it, the stunt man does something not in the script—he starts to scream. Well, I got the idea to tell him to shut up and slap his face with the arm I just took off. They thought it was too much. I thought it would be fun” (cited in Andrews, 141). Showing unusual “good taste” in overriding Schwarzenegger, Gordon made sure this scene never made it into the film.

    The popularity of the Terminator character in the first film is a direct function of the film's success in achieving audience arousal effects with the exceptional emphasis on unremitting sequences of well choreographed, visually exciting, wildly destructive acts of violence. The Terminator, of course, occupies center stage in the scenes of violence and consequently emerges—since the film mostly consists of violent scenes— as the real star of the film. In this sense the film functions, in the manner of A Clockwork Orange, as a vehicle for the transgressions of an “anti-hero.” And, as happened with Clockwork's Alex, the featured anti-hero becomes a favorite character—particularly among young viewers.

    The second film repeats these arousal effects through the same formula while retaining Schwarzenegger as the reprogrammed “good guy” Terminator and adding a new and improved cyborg opponent. Far from salvaging Schwarzenegger as a role model, the second film irrescindably ties his image to the most egregious excesses of gratuitous cinematic violence. Like the first film, scenes of violence strung together along the slenderest thread of credulity challenging plot points create a cinematic context that, due to the threadbare plot, can be justly described as little more than a vehicle for the cheap thrills of “pornographic” violence—all in the service of reinforcing destructive attitudes toward the structuring of conflict.

    Schwarzenegger cannot duck responsibility for his complicity in a series of action films clearly designed to profit from the marketing of violence as a commercial confection—a marketing made suitably acceptable to conventional pieties by cooptation of culturally sedimented mythological themes. Terminator 3 (2003) continues these depredations ad nauseam.

    In their examination of Terminator 2, Rushing and Frentz confirm and reinforce a point made previously in the discussion of video games in Chapter Thirteen—that creativity and imaginative quality of narrative detail are often sacrificed in the current entertainment market for visually stimulating violent effects: “As more a remake than a sequel, T2 hedges on narrative innovation in favor of reforming Schwarzenegger and displaying its technical effects. In substituting artificial technique for human creativity, the film itself exemplifies how technological progress threatens human ingenuity” (195). In other words, with its smorgasbord of technological effects in lieu of any narrative substance, the film itself emerges as a portentous cultural artifact and exemplar of the technological apocalyptic nightmare it depicts.

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