Unraveling Skynet: Part II - Between the Lines

     At six foot, two inches tall, and two-hundred, fifty pounds, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a very intimidating man, and an even more intimidating cyborg. It can rip you apart with its bare hands, calculate the physics of your movement to shoot you down and will stop at nothing to complete its task: terminate your life. The T-800 of James Cameron's 1984 classic The Terminator is one of the most well known icons of fear in cinematic history. It is also the perfect example of what the 80s considered to be "a man," despite the fact that Schwarzenegger is actually portraying a machine.

     The 80s "man" is rugged, strong, independent, tough, almost mean, uncaring, unkind and in it to win it. The T-800 exemplifies this notion: it is strong, mean, uncaring, and willing to stop at nothing to kill its target. When the T-800 first arrives in 1984, it searches for Sarah Connor using the phone book. Since there is more than one listing for Sarah Connor, he goes through each one, in order of how they appear in the phone book. The first Sarah opens the door for the T-800, he asks if she is Sarah Connor and she replies with a yes. Without hesitation, the T-800 barges through the door and shoots Sarah Connor to the ground. Sarah is the future mother of John Connor, the man who leads humans to the ultimate destruction of the Skynet system, which the T-800 represents. John Connor is a threat to the T-800's existence, and by eliminating his mother, the T-800 can ensure that it will continue to exist.

     What kept the T-800 continuing its murderous rampage if Sarah Connor had already been killed? Certainly we know that this is the wrong Sarah Connor, but we know the T-800 doesn't:

Dr. Silberman: Right. Now, why were the other two women killed? 

Kyle Reese: Most of the records were lost in the war. Skynet knew almost nothing about Connor's mother. Her full name, where she lives. They just knew the city. The Terminator was just being systematic.

The death of more than just one woman makes this machine more than just a threat to Sarah, it makes it a threat to women. This has an impact on the audience, making them hate the Terminator even more, and love the women's savior Kyle Reese. Even though Kyle Reese is more liked by the audience – has feelings, falls in love, saves the day – he is still the 80s man. He is independent, rough with Sarah, seemingly unkind to her, He is the one who knows how to defeat this machine and he won't take orders from her.
     Sarah, on the other-hand, is quite the 80s woman: soft, dependent, but a straight-thinker, moving toward the point where she too can be independent. She lives with her girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, is un-intimidated by her pet lizard, and really isn't that completely frightened when the Terminator comes to kill her (she has fears, but is still able to compose herself).
     Throughout the movie, her character goes through somewhat of a change. Sarah begins to want to know more about the future, despite its grim qualities; she learns to make pipe bombs, and wields a gun; she attempts to order Reese around after he gets wounded ("Move it soldier! On your feet!") and of course, in the end it is her that defeats the machine after Reese has died. But she still bears the traits of the dependent, soft woman. In the Motel, after she makes the pipe bombs, Sarah decides to call her mother, a move that Reese has strictly forbidden her to do. She begins talking, and the audience is shown her mother's house as they talk: a dilapidated house with the appearance that someone has broken in. The Terminator sits at the phone, its voice mimicking Sarah's mother's, and asks where she is. This is another thing Kyle told her not to do: tell anyone where they were. But she is soft, and breaks under the pressure, telling her mother their exact location. Sarah is one step between the 80s woman and the future. 
     Seven years later, the audience witnessed what was for Skynet merely seconds. The second terminator that Skynet sent back in time to kill John Connor was sent at the same time as the T-800, but arrived eleven years later. T2: Judgment Day is James Cameron's 1991 blockbuster sequel to The Terminator, that many claim is equally if not more amazing than the original. With a budget in the range of ninety-six million dollars more than its predecessor, T2 has the chases, the explosions, and the special effects to blow the audience away, and it can stand the test of time.

     But apparently, the characters couldn't stand the test of seven year's time. Although we see the arrival of a new terror, the T-1000, the true difference between the first movie and its sequel are the main characters. A new T-800 is sent back in time, a cyborg that looks exactly like the one that tried to kill Sarah eleven years ago. But its mission is the opposite of its predecessor's: John Connor must be protected. We can almost immediately tell that something is different, for when he searches for clothes to wear, he doesn't rip apart the first person he sees with his hands. Instead, he disables and tortures the people at a bar until they give him what he wants.
     The new T-800 is wimpy. Despite the fact that its physique is still Arnold Schwarzenegger, this Terminator is not the 80s man of the first movie. He is kind, caring, protecting, unwilling to leave John Connor, and ready to fight anyone and anything that would try to get at his family. Sarah Connor says it herself:

Sarah: Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator wouldn't stop, it would never leave him. It would never hurt him or shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers that came over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only thing that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

The T-800 is a family "man," giving up his individuality to be with John Connor, giving up his freedom to protect him, and caring for him, attempting to understand him and what he goes through. Some go as far to say that, since Sarah Connor leaves John with the Terminator just after she says he is the "sanest choice," that we can see the T-800 as a motherly figure, too. It has to fill the roles of both the father and the mother, and by protecting John from death, the T-800 is literally the mother of human kind. Because it is John who leads humanity to victory over the machines, and because the T-800 is giving John life, he is the mother of man's future.

     I don't know if I'd go that far... but there are some semblances between the Terminator and a motherly figure, especially in comparison to Johns real mother, who's "soft" self has now completely vanished. For instance, when John and the T-800 break Sarah out of the mental institute, Sarah yells at John, asking why he would risk his life, the most important life in all of mankind, for a measly woman like her. John then begins to cry and the T-800 turns around and asks what is wrong with his eyes. Whereas Sarah is angry and un-motherly to John, the T-800 attempts to understand what John is going through. When Sarah tries to kill Miles Dyson and stop the future herself, she finds she cannot do it, but instead of actually crying, she makes a horrendous noise and moans, holding back her tears. But the T-800 continues to ask John why people cry. He wants to understand, he attempts to plug into human emotion. The new Terminator is not the 80s man, he is a "man" in touch with emotion, willing to protect his family at the cost of his life.

     Sarah Connor, on the other hand, is not the 80s woman. Linda Hamilton, in fact, changed women forever. She buffed up for the role, lost weight almost to the point of looking sickly. It challenged the way women saw themselves, and actually started a new trend for women to look like Sarah Connor. Although it was somewhat controversial, Sarah's new look was a change from the past and a move toward the future. She is now the independent, uncaring, unkind, almost mean individual who pushes John to be a real (80s) man. Sarah is first seen doing pull-ups, she wields weapons (literally using anything she can find as a weapon: a broom handle, a syringe, guns, knives etc.), takes charge of situations and runs off on her own missions, trying to change the future herself. 
     But ultimately, this new look doesn't suit her. Despite the fact that she looks the role of the man, she really isn't. When it comes down to it, Sarah cannot complete the tasks that a man "must" do. When she goes to Mile's Dyson's house to assassinate him, believing that by killing him there will be no Skynet, she comes to the point where he is lying on the ground begging for her not to shoot, his son leaning over him begging the same thing. We see then, that this is just a façade. Sarah isn't really this brute, rampage-driven woman, because she cannot bring herself to shoot the man that will, in essence, murder millions of people.  And again, at the end of the movie, though she is driven to kill the T-1000, and she has nearly completed her task, the gun she uses runs out of ammo. She needs the T-800 to save her. Hers is still just a façade.
     Just as Sarah wears this façade of being manly, the T-1000 wears the façade of being human. This liquid metal man moves like a machine, but acts like a man, a truly frightening concept. Yet, the most frightening aspect of him is not that he can turn his arms into knives, but that he can take the shape of a woman. Like the T-800 from The Terminator who speaks with Sarah's mother's voice, the T-1000 takes the shape and voice of John's foster mother. This un-natural fluidity to change between man and woman is frightening and nearly disgusting, giving the T-1000 its evil.

     Seemingly taking from what the first and second Terminator movies provided, the TX of T3: Rise of the Machines is just as evil and scary as the first two. This time, Skynet sends a woman, now capable of destroying other terminators, who is part machine skeleton, part liquid metal, the best of both the T-800 and the T-1000. This new weapon is not only capable of that same transformative, gender-fluid freakiness that the original two had, but it can create weapons out of its arms, and has a less human like "skeleton" which makes for a more fearsome machine. Since the machine can not only move fluidly between male and female, but it can move from human to non-human just as easily, adding yet another layer of terror to its arsenal.

     The return of the Terminator series, after having been lost for twelve years, also saw the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the slightly improved T-850. This machine is somewhat of a return to the 80s man cyborg of the original movie. In his first scene, the T-850 symbolically rejects the femininity of the T-800 from T2 by destroying the star sunglasses found in the pocket of the stripper whose clothes he "stole."  The T-850 now makes more of its own decisions, even though it often gives in to the will of Katherine Brewster, whose orders he is programmed to follow. Another slightly symbolic act of rejection of the feminine aspect of the Terminators is the fact that the T-850 defeats the TX. She "infected" him with the virus that allowed her to remotely control him, but he was able to overcome the virus, and to destroy the TX itself. 

     The gender binary of female-male roles in films seems to have flip-flopped throughout the years. In the first movie, Sarah played the passive role while Kyle Reese played the active one. Almost as a foreshadow to the second movie, Sarah was the one in the end who became the active character, defeating the Terminator. In the second movie, the two characters of John and Sarah are somewhat the passive/active roles of the first movie reversed. Sarah appears to be the active role, trying to kill Dyson, trying to kill the T-1000 when the T-800 disappears, etc. And John appears to be the passive role, a helpless boy who only knows how to run (even though he orders the T-800 around and helps it break his mother out of the mental institute.

     In the third film, John Connor is once again in the active role, literally breaking free of his passive self when he breaks out of the cage that Katherine Brewster puts him in, only to keep her trapped in her own car later on. Here, the active passive roles from the second movie reverse, the female once again in the passive role, and the male in the active role. John convinces Katherine to go stop her father, John forces the information out of her father on how to stop the war, and leads Katherine to Crystal Peak where he thinks he can blow up Skynet, all while Katherine seems to be along for the ride and to retrieve information from the T-850. 

     Most recently, seeing as how the first two movies were made twenty years ago, and the third one still seven years ago, Terminator Salvation does little to move cinema toward a more equal-stance world. If the goal of modern cinema was to give male and female role an equally active part in the plot, then Terminator Salvation would fail. Although McG, the film's director, recently made Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, (and one might argue that that is more about women as spectacles and not agents of plot than a lot of films), his recent venture into the world of the Terminators is highly male-oriented. There are only three main female characters: Katherine Brewster/Connor, Dr. Serena Kogan, and Blair Williams (and a little girl, Star, who is the mute sidekick of young Kyle Reese). Of these characters, two are hardly ever seen, while the third is exiled and nearly killed for falling in love with a machine.

     John Connor is the main character of this film, a near complete return to the 80s man. He is independent to the max, not following any orders, directly disobeying others, and taking thing into his own hands. He knows the future his mother told him about, and he tries with all his might to be the man with the answers, the one who will lead the humans to victory: but he's not even in charge. He has a few followers, but for the most part he is alone. He can often be harsh, unkind, and care for nothing than seeing to it that his future comes true. Connor may have a wife and a baby on the way, but for being a family man, he's not with them very often.

     His wife, who we see almost as little of as Dr. Kogan, is strong and resilient, and therefore not seen very often. The screen isn't big enough for both John Connor and Kate Connor when they are both independent and strong. Blair Williams is first seen being rescued by a Marcus Wright, the half-human cyborg... (even though a cyborg is already half human... he's actually half human). She leads him to her camp, on the way needing him to save her again. At the camp it is discovered that he's not fully human and he's locked up and interrogated by John Connor. Blair rescues him and frees him but is, herself, exiled. Marcus convinces John to let him try to infiltrate the nearby Skynet compound where he finds Dr. Serena Kogan. It's not really her though, just the machine using her face and voice to convince Marcus that killing the humans is the right thing. But I digress...

     All in all, the world of the Terminators, created by that genius James Cameron, is one of gender confusion. Each film seems to have a new take on the roles men and women should have in the cinema. T3: Rise of the Machines seems to be the most confused, using comedy to lighten the tension it creates with the gender issues, and Terminator Salvation seems even more biased toward men than The Terminator, which was actually made in an era where the independent man was an idol.

References:
"Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey
"Can Masculinity Be Terminated?" by Susan Jeffords
"Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess" by Linda Williams
"Is the Gaze Male?" by E. Ann Kaplan