Hollywood Utopia

200 Hollywood Utopia
The final closure of the film isolates Sarah Connor, the chosen one, pregnant with
the future hero of the final post-apocalyptic struggle, escaping out into the western
desert in her red automobile. Alone, she speaks into a tape machine constructing a
new sense of self, which will provide a family history for her unborn son and herself
and articulate her newly-found heroic mission. In the far distance, as she drives on
‘the road to nowhere’, are growing atmospheric signs of a great ‘storm’ coming,
framed within a romanticised desert and mountain landscape. This is the only
representation in the film of unmediated pastoral nature. But such storms are also
most certainly not a natural phenomenon, signalling the impending apocalypse. Yet
she must face her heroic human destiny, predetermined within the narrative
framework which endorses a universal mythic agency, unlike the more ‘local’
gender specific conflicts in Thelma and Louise, for example.
Because so much of the narrative trajectory of the film is predetermined using a
conventional machine enemy, the narrative seldom rises above a two-dimensional
polarised global eco-conflict. Nevertheless the seeds of both (post)human
ecological agency together with the transgressive potentialities of cyborgs has at
least been sown for the more expansive sequel which cannot function without this
mythical framework being developed.
James Cameron, also the director of T2, asserted in a publicity interview that there
‘was a little bit of the “Terminator” in everybody’. The film, he continues, is a
‘dark, cathartic fantasy’ and audiences ‘want to be him for one moment’ (cited in
French 1996: 39). This conjunction of filmic cyborg and acceptable human agency
serves in some ways to reassert the primacy of individual agency as a site of moral
values. Peter Brooks’ Melodramatic Imagination (1976), pontificates that the only
remaining source of moral value resides within the human personality itself. ‘From
amid the collapse of other principles and criteria the individual ego declares its
central and overriding value . . . Personality alone remains the effective vehicle of
transindividual messages’ (Brooks 1976: 16). The cyborg also serves a dualistic
nature which is concurrent with the postmodernist ethos - effectively transmitting
both ‘transindividualism’ together with the potentiality of human disintegration.
Cameron has in fact gone on to show a fascination with the potency of the female
as an ultimate dark fantasy from Sigourney Weaver in the Alien series to Kate
Winslet in Titanic, figured as (maternal) heroines who must finally suffer the
trauma of losing their men in their struggle for survival. Such representational
expression and ‘hyperbolic emotions’, reminiscent of classic melodramatic
performance, also serve to focus attention on the interior moral agency of these
protagonists. 8
Sean French, for example, contends that Fritz Lang (whose seminal Metropolis
provides so many references for the science fiction genre and Terminator in