| Terminator |
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In March, 1981, I lay in bed in a cheap hotel room in Robe with a high fever, no money and no ticket back to the States. I had been fired from my first directing job, a ruinous production about flying piranha backed by an Italian horror-film producer, and I was pissed off at the world, isolated and alienated in a city where I could speak to no one.
I dreamt (or nightmared) about machines with glowing red eyes who walked among us like men, bent on turning the course of history to their own cold purposes. From this fever dream came the idea for a movie which was called "Terminator" in my mind before a single word of the story was written down. I somehow got back home (don't ask) and, finding my car had been repossessed, borrowed a clunker from my father to drivew across the country. I dictated the story of the Terminator into a cassette recorder as I drove through the night.
I started writing the script in L.A. I drove the streets on rainy nights, seeing only cops and garbage trucks, eating in all-night restaurants like Ships and Du Par's, asking the waitresses what they thought of this idea or that as I wrote at my booth on yellow legal pads. My friend Takao, from Tokyo, calls L.A. "Terminator City" because he got the tail-light of his rental car shot out on the freeway during his first visit here. He's right. It is Terminator City. On one of the most infamous pieces of videotape in history are two things: the second, and better known subject on the tape is the senseless beating by LAPD officers of a man named Rodney King. The first is a distant view of the T2 crew shooting a scene on the streets of Lakeview Terrace, a few blocks away and a few days before the beating took place. In that scene, Terminator says, "we have to avoid the authorities."
Eleven years after my fever dream in Rome, I should kiss the feet of the scumbags who were responsible for me being in that dark and depressing state of mind, because in those years, the neo-myth of the Terminator has become a part of the global popular culture in a way I never could have imagined. The two films clearly must speak to many people on many levels. Most importantly, I believe, the films empower the individual. In a vast, seemingly out-of-control world filled with billions of people and forces far beyond our individual ability to influence, everyone wants to count, to make a difference, though it seems so hopeless. Yet when the lowliest waitress becomes a pivot of future history (herstory) we all are empowered with a sense of responsibility for our role in the grand scheme of things. In both films Sarah must solve the problem of her survival, and by extension ours, through her own will, ingenuity and determination.
The films also deal with our relationship to technology.... technology which we rely on to live, more and more every day as we rush toward the turn of the millennium, and yet which threatens our extinction. The gun pointed at Sarah by Terminator is the gun pointed at humanity by the nations who build hydrogen bombs. Technology also threatens to dehumanize us. In a technical, urban society we become machine-like in our responses.... from the unfeeling cop to the impersonal bureaucrat to the unsympathetic doctor. As we suppress our emotions we merge with the machine, denying life. We become isolated, alienated from each other, fearful and lost on the inside but proscribed from expressing it, or worse yet, uncaring to the point that the lives of others and indeed even our own become meaningless.
The Terminator is also, quite simply, death. The great implacable. The steel Reaper which cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, which does not feel pity, or remorse, or fear. His mechanism moves with the cold precision of the clock which ticks inevitably for each of us. And we fight death not with will, not with violence, but with love, which creates and nurtures life. Women, who create life from their bodies, must be the guardians of life in the male-driven world where all technological advance seems to lead only to more effective ways of killing.
These themes twist and turn through the two Terminator films. The can be seen in the love between Sarah and Reese which is a candle burning in the darkness of a doomed world, and then in her love for the product of that union, John, the reluctant savior of humanity who teaches the value of life to an unfeeling machine. The redemption of the Terminator himself, at the end of the second film, closes the cycle as the machine becomes human, learning the pain and joy, and thus the meaning, of life.... even as he must lose his.
Together, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, comprise a single, complete narrative. The first was made in 1984 when I was a fledgling director and when Arnold had yet to become a movie star, for a cost of 6.5 million dollars. Given the ambitious effects, action and make-up, this was a virtual shoestring. The second film could not have been a greater contrast.... with me well-established and Arnold arguably the biggest movie star on the planet, and with its much-publicized budget of 85 million dollars. And yet I like to think there is more the same about these two pictures than there is different. And though they were made seven years apart, one can hopefully see the themes and ideas which unify them.
—James Cameron
Note[]
- This is James Cameron's article about the Terminator saga (which ended with T2) that was included in the Special Edition laserdisc package and, later, the Ultimate Edition DVD of the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
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