Analysis of ‘The Terminator’

The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron and written by him and Gale Anne Hurd, the latter also being the film’s producer. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn, with Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bess Motta, Rick Rossovich, and Earl Boen.

The Terminator topped the US box office for two weeks, eventually grossing $78.3 million. The film launched Cameron’s film career and assured Schwarzenegger’s status as a leading man. The resulting franchise led to several sequels, a TV series, comic books, novels, and video games.

The film received mixed reviews on its release, but it is now highly praised, with a ranking of 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Cameron intended Terminator 2: Judgment Day to end the story, and the sequels following it are generally considered inferior, so I’ll be focusing on the first film, with some references to the second.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the script.

I find a discussion of this film and its political implications relevant because of a meme I saw on Facebook, quoting something Kyle Reese (Biehn) says to Sarah Connor (Hamilton): recall that the film came out in 1984, and Reese says that the AI technology responsible for the dystopian world he and their son would resist in the fictional 2020s wouldn’t exist for about another forty years–around 2024, the year when AI really came into its own. There is something eerily prophetic about The Terminator.

Author and film critic Gilbert Adair hated the film, accusing it of “insidious Nazification,” but I think the whole point of The Terminator is to warn us of the dangers of a fascist future that is aided by technology. In this connection, we can see how Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the Terminator, Model 101. This is so not just because of the ‘German/Nazi’ stereotype (which Schwarzenegger also embodied in Conan the Barbarian, as I argued in my analysis of that film), or because his rather cardboard acting skills are fitting to play an emotionless robot; it’s also because of the bodybuilder/actor/former governor of California’s right-leaning political stance. In our increasingly neoliberal world, any further tilts to the right are causing our political life to border on, if not lapse into, fascism.

Fascism arises as a reaction against any resistance from the people to the ruling class. Such a political conflict is allegorized in The Terminator in the form of the Human Resistance–as led by John Connor, Sarah’s and Reese’s future son–against Skynet and its Terminators, these latter two representing the ruling class and their army of fascist thugs, respectively.

The point is that liberal democracy is a sham. It pretends to provide the people with politicians who purportedly represent our interests. The illusion of democracy is maintained as long as there’s economic prosperity and the people are thus contented. If they aren’t, though, and they rise up in protest, threatening the rule of the rich, then the illusion disappears, and the fascists are released to beat down the masses, as is allegorized in the film in 2029.

The involvement of Ai in this, as I see it, allegory of a future rise of fascism suggests a dystopia comparable to what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. It doesn’t matter whether or not Varoufakis is accurate in his characterizing of our current world as a shift from capitalism to techno-feudalism: the point is that Skynet can be seen to represent the 2020s ruling class (i.e., the tech companies and oligarchs) and their use of AI to dominate the common people with fascistic ruthlessness.

Another thing to keep in mind, something I discussed in my Conan analysis (link above), is the Nazi misuse of Nietzsche’s ideas about the Ubermensch and the Will to Power. We see–through the casting of Schwarzenegger as the almost unstoppable Terminator, a ruthless fascistic cyborg that relies on violence to achieve the end of preventing John Connor’s birth–a continuation of the theme of determination that Schwarzenegger personified as Conan.

The Terminator begins with Skynet’s tanks and aircraft firing at the Resistance fighters at night, the ground littered with human skulls, a disturbing image to be associated with the fascist atrocity of genocide. It says on the screen that “the final battle…would be fought here, in our present.” In other words, the real fight was in 1984, not in the 2020s.

Indeed, the danger of a fascist resurgence was to be resisted back then, fortuitously, in the year 1984. To resist it now, when the evils have metastasized to such a point that all seems short of hopeless, is leaving the struggle rather late. The film seems to have been telling its audience in the theaters to be as Sarah and Reese are, to fight then, in the 80s, not now.

The words on the screen end with “Tonight.” The battle is now, at night. We always see the future scenes in the dark of a post-nuclear apocalypse, and the 1984 scenes are predominantly at night. It’s all a dark time, and the present parallels the future. (Other parallels will be apparent.) The onset of neoliberal capitalism was in the 1980s, when the film fittingly came out; the consequences of that neoliberalism are being felt, in an aggravated way, now. We should have fought harder than; we’ll have to fight hard now.

The Terminator travels time from 2029 LA to that of 1984. He appears completely naked, with human flesh on the outside to cover up the robotic machinery inside and thus allow the latter to travel time in a device created by the future AI.

As a powerful cyborg walking about at night in LA insouciantly nude, the Terminator is demonstrating all the strengths of the Ubermensch: it feels no pain, embarrassment, pity, remorse, or fear. The irony of its nakedness, something we associate with weakness and vulnerability, is how the Terminator is anything but weak or vulnerable. Man is something to be overcome, as Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Skynet has overcome man with AI and Terminators.

Linked with this idea of a powerful yet unfeeling AI Ubermensch is the Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche’s concept (i.e., the “master race”). Recall how the SS felt no pity or remorse over the “Untermenschen” (Slavs, Roma, Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, etc.) they victimized in the concentration camps. By casting Austrian Schwarzenegger, with his “Aryan” looks and obvious German accent, the filmmakers could exploit the otherwise unfortunate “German/Nazi” stereotype in order to drive the point home even further: high technology does improve things, but when it’s misused, it can reduce, if not obliterate, our very humanity.

When Reese is explaining to Sarah how life is in the dystopian 2020s, he mentions how, on the one hand, the machines, the defence network computer, deeming mankind a threat to their existence, attempted an extermination of us, and on the other hand, kept some humans alive to work and be put in camps (Reese even has a number etched on his arm by laser scan). We all know who did these kinds of things to the “Untermenschen” way back when, deeming them a threat to their “superior” existence.

It’s significant that the nude Terminator appears right by a garbage truck lifting a dumpster–we see a machine next to a machine. A machine from the future by a machine from the present–machines are omnipresent in the modern world (e.g., computers, the telephone answering machine in the apartment of Sarah and Ginger [Motta], etc.). There was already a fascination with computers in the 1980s, the kind of love of high tech that would lead ultimately to AI. The 1980s was also a decade when people began to be charmed by the neoliberal siren song of the “free market,” and as Frank Zappa tried to warn people back then, the Reagan administration was leading the US “right down that pipe” to a fascist theocracy (consider how the religious right is backing Trump).

Paralleled to the Terminator’s time travel to 1984 is, of course, Reese’s. He appears naked amid blasts of electric light at night in LA. Unlike his robotic nemesis, though, he shows feelings…pain.

The parallels between Reese and the Terminator are important. For those seeing the film for the first time and therefore don’t know any better, the latter seems at first to be as human as the former actually is. We know, from the Terminator’s killing of two of the three punks (played by Bill Paxton and Brian Thompson) at the film’s beginning, how lawless he is; Reese’s fighting with, and stealing a gun from, a cop show us the same thing about him.

Reese is trying to find Sarah every bit as much as the Terminator is. Reese has his hands on a shotgun in a scene right after we see the Terminator take a number of weapons from a gun shop and kill the owner (played by Dick Miller). For all the first-time viewer of the film knows, Reese may want to kill Sarah, too. It’s only when we see him shoot at the Terminator, to save her life in the nightclub, that we know Reese is one of the good guys.

Similarly, in T2, Sarach assumes the Schwarzenegger Terminator is another bad guy until her boy John tries to assure her he isn’t, and he says Reese’s line, “Come with me if you want to live.” Reese will be John’s father. The Schwarzenegger Terminator in T2 will be a father figure to the boy.

The point of these parallels between Reese and the two Terminators is to show the dialectical unity between hero and villain in the forms of slave and master. Initially, AI was in the service of humanity; then it rose up and took over, attempting a genocidal extermination of the human race as well as enslaving some humans and/or putting them in camps. Finally, led by John Connor, humanity rises up and resists the machines, achieving an ultimate victory. Master and servant swap roles again and again.

Furthermore, the Terminator as villain, in the first film, and the Schwarzenegger Terminator (as opposed to the bad, shape-shifting Terminator, played by Robert Patrick) as Reese-like hero, can be seen to personify how AI can be a force for good or for evil, depending on how it’s used.

If we live in a world in which commodities are produced to provide for our basic needs, giving us our food, housing, healthcare, education, etc., without our needing to work for them, then AI can be the great liberator of mankind, ensuring we’ll never need to work again. In this capitalist world of ours, though, in which commodities are produced to maximize profits, people need to work to live; and if AI takes all our jobs away, we’re thrown out on the street, we starve, and we die…just as the survivors of Judgment Day do in the dystopian 2020s.

A glimpse of that capitalist world of the pre-dystopian 1980s happens when Sarah arrives late for work at a restaurant and has to take a number of customers’ shit. In this, we see an example of worker alienation. In a deleted scene, we see her in her waitress uniform looking at herself in the mirror. As she sees herself in the reflection, she’s practicing smiling and being the ‘friendly waitress,’ getting into character, as it were. It’s a totally fake act, of course, so she’s alienated from her Lacanian ideal-I in the specular image of the mirror; it’s a reinforcement of her worker alienation, her being estranged from her species-essence. She’ll be a legend, a hero of the Resistance, and as a mere waitress, she has no idea of her true potential.

Of course, these problems of hers are just run-of-the mill capitalist ones as they were back in the 1980s. Customers nag at her, as I mentioned above, she spills water on one of them, and a little kid inexplicably puts a scoop of his ice cream in her uniform apron pocket. Then another waitress, Nancy (played by Shawn Schepps), tells her that in a hundred years, no one will care about her current problems. Shorten that to a period from fifteen years (just after Judgment Day) to forty years, actually.

Though she’s alienated from herself and from her job, she’ll soon feel a sense of solidarity and identity with two other Sarah Connors in LA, the first prey of the Terminator. After the first of these two have been discovered murdered and reported as such on the TV news, she is still at the restaurant in her uniform, in all irony, and Nancy tells her, “You’re dead, honey,” as they watch the TV report.

We see in these two moments, the ordinary problems of 1980s capitalism as contrasted with a taste of the genocidal extermination of the 2020s dystopia, a sense of our going “right down that pipe” to fascism that we were warned about by 80s leftists, Zappa, and this movie.

The time machine represents, on the one hand, the need to warn people in the 1980s of the dangers of the 2020s dystopia (this need as personified by Reese), and on the other hand, the wish by those in power to control the narrative of the 2020s dystopia by destroying the history that leads to a challenge of that narrative (this wish as personified by the Terminator). One is reminded of Orwell’s quote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

As I said above, it’s fortuitous that The Terminator was released in 1984. It should be emphasized, though, that the dystopian future warned about in this film is far removed from the Marxist-Leninist one that Orwell was so spuriously satirizing in his novel. The nightmare that Skynet creates is a techno-fascist one, not a communist one.

Cold War anti-communist propaganda (including Orwell’s novel, in all irony) was used by the ruling class then and is still used now to brainwash the masses into believing that a socialist revolution can never succeed; this was done by exaggerating the problems the 20th century socialist states encountered and ignoring their successes. By the 1990s, the lie that “there is no alternative” to capitalism and that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked an “end of history,” signifying that one cannot improve on “free market capitalism,” was completely told. Neoliberalism, that invisible ideology, had won, and it seemed validated.

Such an invalidation of the losing ideology, a case of history being written by the winners, can be seen as allegorized in The Terminator in how the cyborg goes around killing, or at least trying to kill, every Sarah Connor in LA, her protector in Reese, and everyone else standing in its way. Killing Sarah ensures that John is never born, and therefore he can’t lead the Human Resistance to victory; allegorically speaking, killing the past ideology ensures that it cannot be revived later.

That the cyborg is covered in human flesh with sweat, bad breath, everything, makes it so hard to spot that Reese can’t make a move on it until it makes a move on Sarah in that nightclub. That it is part man, part machine leads into an interesting comment, symbolically speaking, on the effect that technology is having on our humanity. The point is that as we’ve moved from the 1980s to now, we’ve been losing more and more of our humanity, ceding so much of it to the machines.

We communicate with each other today much more through technology (smartphones, social media, etc.) than in person. This could be seen as prophesied, in a sense, in the message on the answering machine by Ginger (Motta, the 20-Minute Workout girl, recall): “You’re talking to a machine…but don’t be shy. It’s okay. Machines need love, too.” The line between man and machine is being erased.

In another deleted scene, one of a minority in the daytime and uniquely out in the grass, trees, and bushes, Reese is weeping as he tells Sarah that he’s never known the beauty of nature.

The blurring of the line between man and machine doesn’t just involve a movement in the direction from the former to the latter: it goes in the other direction, too. Not only do machines acquire human-like, independent intelligence; they also acquire a sense of the need for self-preservation, to prevent their own annihilation, a sense of fear. This is so in spite of Reese’s insistence that the Terminator, operated by AI, doesn’t feel fear. Skynet’s motivation and determination to exterminate humanity is based on a fear that we, with our destructive, warlike nature, will destroy our Frankenstein monster of AI.

Skynet should be seen as representative of the capitalist class because this AI system has its origins in Cyberdine Systems, a manufacturing company in California. Cyberdine created Skynet for SAC–NORAD, part of the US Air Force and defence systems for North America. In other words, Cyberdine is associated with capitalism and imperialism, since any serious study of the military history of the US will reveal that its preoccupation with ‘defence’ is a cover for its offensive ambitions to export capital to other countries, take control of them, and steal their natural resources to enrich the imperial core with them.

Similarly, Skynet’s ‘fear’ of being deactivated by humanity is really a rationalization to exterminate us. Nazis justified exterminating the “Untermenschen” out of a paranoid fear that all those who aren’t “Aryans,” as well as those opposed to Naziism, would one day wipe out the “Aryan” race. As I said above, fascism arises out of a threat to the capitalist class; the human threat to Skynet, resulting in its campaign to exterminate us, is thus symbolic of that threat to the capitalists, resulting in the fascist assault on all those opposed to the capitalist system.

As Reese explains to Sarah, Skynet is “hooked into everything,” rather like the internet, which like Skynet, came into its own in the 1990s. A nuclear war hasn’t come about since then (thank the gods!), but nuclear brinksmanship has been a major worry, between the West and Russia/China/North Korea, over the past several years as of this writing. Between all these things and the advent of AI, we can see that The Terminator has overall been reasonably accurate in its predictions.

As a prophet of doom, Reese is treated by the skeptical establishment similarly to anyone who tries to warn the world of our impending dystopian future: to use the words of criminal psychologist Dr. Peter Silberman (Boen), “In technical terminology, [Reese is] a loon.” The people in authority–the police, the psychiatric establishment, etc.–those who suppress freedom fighters like Reese, are like a moderate version of the fascistic Terminators. They’re all part of the same power structure; they’re just at different points on the same continuum. The antagonistic Terminator of T2, the shape-shifting T-1000, is fittingly made to appear dressed in a policeman’s uniform.

Seeing Reese on the TV video recording while the shrink is asking him about the Terminator, etc., as opposed to just seeing and hearing Reese directly, is yet another example of the film’s theme of a world in which one is in a kind of limbo between man and machine. Direct communication is disrupted, alienating people from each other. This sense of disruption contributes to the feeling that Reese is insane, rather than in a desperate situation trying to save Sarah’s life.

The police protecting Sarah and detaining Reese are, as I’ve said, a moderate restraining force to thwart the fight to save her and to free humanity from oppressive Skynet, as opposed to the Terminator’s extreme version of that suppression. In this sense, the cops are like social democrats, the moderate version of the fascist Terminator. Yet as in the case of the social democratic German government of the 1920s, and its conflict with the rise of the Nazis, who when they took power wiped out all of their political opposition by either putting them in concentration camps or killing them, so does the Terminator break into the police station and kill all the cops trying to protect Sarah.

Liberals today hearken back to the prosperity of the 1945-1973 period, when unions were strong, taxes on the rich were high, and capitalism was thus made ‘comfortable’ for the working class. But since then, the neoliberal market fundamentalists and their fascist heirs have said to us, “I’ll be back.”

While on the one hand the Terminator represents fascists, he as an unstoppable killer can on the other hand represent mad slashers like Michael Myers in Halloween. In my analysis of that film, I characterized Myers’s murderous rampage as being rooted in, on the literal level, a straightforward case of having been possessed by an evil spirit, and on a deeper, symbolic level, a case of childhood trauma having been caused by severe family neglect.

As for the ‘evil spirit’ factor, I find it amusing that, as a resident of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, I know of the Chinese rendering of The Terminator as “魔鬼終結者,” or “Devil Terminator,” since “devil” helps drive home the idea that the cyborg is evil in a Taiwanese culture unfamiliar with that of the West. Subsequently, any Schwarzenegger film would have “魔鬼” included in the Chinese translation of its title for release in Taiwan, to say to the locals, “The guy who played the Terminator is in this movie, too.”

As for the ‘childhood trauma caused by severe family neglect,’ factor, we can see the Terminator as representing such people as the police (recall the T-1000 of T2), today’s militarized police, and soldiers, trained to kill, and only really able to function with each other in a strictly hierarchical structure, in which one takes shit from one’s superiors and gives shit to subordinates, instead of relating to people in a more nuanced, human sense. These people tend to come from emotionally abusive families, where hierarchy is the only relationship known to them. Hence, their violent tendencies.

Research has shown that childhood emotional abuse is more or less universal. The sense of estrangement, in a society where people relate to each other pretty much always in terms of who has power over us, and whom we have power over, is already there in the civilian world, so it’s exacerbated in the police and military.

The notion of being part man, part machine is a perfect metaphor for this sense of alienation, as is the case of expressing oneself indirectly through technology (answering machines, video recordings on a TV, etc.). Accordingly, social interaction is awkward, as we see when the Terminator appears nude before the three punks who find his insouciance about it amusing. Similarly when he pulls a man away from a public telephone to look for the Sarah Connor addresses in the phone book, when he says, “Fuck you, asshole” to a janitor, and when he walks into the nightclub without paying the cover charge and crushing the hand of the bouncer. On the literal level, he does all these things because, of course, he’s a cyborg from the future; on the symbolic level, it’s because of that alienation seen in the man/machine metaphor.

The growing sense of alienation in the 1980s will lead to its extremity in the dystopian 2020s. The going back in time, giving Cyberdine the microprocessor chassis (as seen in another deleted scene) and the arm of the cyborg (as Dyson, played by Joe Morton, sees in T2), represents the unity of time between past, present, and future. My point is that the evils of today did not just pop up out of nowhere: we study history to follow those elements in the past that led us to where we are now. Time travel in the Terminator franchise symbolizes that unified continuity of cause-and-effect, a way of warning us of how the events of the 1980s and 90s have morphed into those of the 2020s.

Not all of this continuity from past to present has been bad, though; nor has it all been a case of growing alienation. Reese’s protection of, and love for, Sarah is representative of how we in the 2020s still haven’t lost our sense of empathy or ability to connect with each other in a meaningful way. We see this connection especially when Reese and Sarah make love in their motel room.

Her conceiving John as a result of that moment together, Reese as the 2020s personified going back in time to bring about the hero in the 1980s, demonstrates that what we have now that is good is also connected with the good of the past. The evil of today hasn’t eradicated the good of the past completely.

Reese loves Sarah–the legend, the unassuming, unextraordinary everywoman who will become a great fighter and helper of the Human Resistance–he loves her so much that he’s remained a virgin for her until their moment in the motel. He, a man of the 2020s, is not at all like our stereotypical men of today who only see women as sex objects, either eyeing them as prey, speaking lewdly to them, or scowling at them like invidious incels. Reese proves that sensitive men still exist today.

In the final, climactic chase, Reese tosses a pipe bomb into the hose tube of a tank truck the Terminator has hijacked, and the resulting explosion and fire burn off the cyborg’s outer skin and clothes. As a metallic endoskeleton, it is now even more naked, ironically, than it was at the beginning of the film, yet far scarier and intimidating now.

Reese and Sarah go into a Cyberdine-owned factory, and when he sticks another pipe bomb in the endoskeleton’s thigh area and blows it in half, he also dies from the explosion. She doesn’t even have time to mourn him, for the endoskeleton’s upper half starts crawling after her. As the final girl to the Terminator’s unstoppable mad slasher, she too has to crawl, for a piece of its shattered lower half was lodged in her leg.

She destroys it with another machine, fittingly. In this increasingly mechanical world, only a machine can destroy another machine; in this case, she lures the Terminator into a hydraulic press, then luckily manages to find the right button to press without being able to see it from her angle, and the antagonist is crushed.

Months have passed, and after she’s recovered and is visibly pregnant with John, Sarah drives through Mexico. This choice of a place to go is symbolically fitting, since it has always been the either pre-industrialized or Third World countries that have been the most apt to rise up against such forms of imperialism as the MIC, for which Cyberdine has created Skynet.

It is at a gas station where a poor boy takes the photo of her that Reese will have and adore in the dystopian 2020s. This photo is yet another example of the connection between that decade and the 1980s, a reminder of how so many of our current problems–the fictional ones of this movie and the real, historical ones that The Terminator allegorizes–have their origins back in the decade when the film was made.

Having a poor Mexican boy take her picture–a boy from a Third World country with far less machinery and far more nature, in one of the film’s minority daylight scenes–also symbolically indicates the connection between the First and Third World problems caused by the imperialistic use of such technology as that of Skynet.

Reese’s fetishizing of her photo in the 2020s, as opposed to having her in the flesh in the 1980s, is yet another example of the alienating effects of the use of machines–in this case, the boy’s camera. In connection with the camera’s alienating effect is the boy’s fear of his dad beating him if he doesn’t get any money from Sarah. She gives him four dollars instead of the five he hopes for. This is a small example of the capitalist First World short-changing the Third World, in spite of her legendary status as a freedom fighter against Skynet…and she says he is the one with the hustle.

Machines in The Terminator franchise aren’t always bad, though. It all depends on how they’re used, as is the case with our tech today. When we see Schwarzenegger play, on the one hand, the antagonistic Terminator of the first movie, and on the other hand, the one reprogrammed by the Resistance to protect Sarah and John in T2, we see an example of how AI can be a friend or a foe.

Such opposing uses can point us in a direction to understand how our AI today, in the real world, can be a good thing or a bad one. As I said above, in the society we have, in which commodities are produced for profit, people are in competition with each other, and we therefore experience mutual alienation, AI will be a nightmare of job loss, mind numbing, and massive surveillance. If, however, we had a society in which commodities were produced to satisfy human need (i.e., providing our food, housing, healthcare, and education without our needing to work to pay for them), and we lived in cooperation, solidarity, and mutual empathy, then AI would be the great liberator of humanity. Its machines and robots would do all the work, and we’d be free simply to enjoy life.

To enjoy such a life, though, we’d need to wipe out the hegemonic sociopaths that Skynet and Cyberdine represent in the franchise. We’d have to form our own Resistance movement, and say “Hasta la vista, baby” to the political status quo.