Termi-nation: A 25th Anniversary Look Back at The Terminator

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I divide my time between two towns that I call home, Boston, MA and Charleston, SC. Both towns are near military bases and both, back in the big-haired, leg-warmer-wearing 1980s, sweated in the nuclear crosshairs of the Cold War -- so much so, that Charleston got nuked in a really good and really controversial 1983 made-for-TV flick called Special Bulletin.

In Boston, I sometimes go to this thing called "Heroes" -- a retro 1980s dance night. And in Charleston, I hang out at this karaoke-like scene called "Metal Monday", where you get to belt out '80s crunch rock classics with a live band.

Thing is, to me, a guy who was 20-years old in that most Orwellian of years, 1984, the dance floor of "Heroes" is only akin to the real '80s in the way that the Renaissance Faire is akin to rural France in 1358, during the Jacquerie uprising. Kinda fun -- but without the Armageddon-y goodness of famine, class warfare and plague. You could say there's a lil' somethin' missing. And much as I love "Metal Monday", I can't help but brainwork how "karaoke" is Japanese for "empty orchestra", and how without a particular bouquet-whiff of immanent doom, "Metal Monday" is discount-chocolate-Easter-Bunny hollow.

We're living in a cultural landscape thicketed with old-growth 1980s, as stubbornly rooted in our minds as the Proustian olfactory memories of the scents of belched up wine coolers, Duran Duran-esque hair mousse, and He-Man and She-Ra Shrinky Dinks contracting in the oven. Beyond things like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", and the fact that a Flock of Fucking Seagulls now get played on "Classic Rock" stations, there's a litany of other examples I can list: washed-up '80s icon Mickey Rourke's defibrillation back to the living as a washed-up '80s icon in The Wrestler; millions of fanboys dampening their shorts with pre-ejaculate for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; new iterations of '80s slasherdom in the form of "re-imaginings" of VHS-era standbys My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th (yeah, Friday the 13th was made in '79, but as a franchise, it's pure '80s); G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra rating a Super Bowl spot for its August release; the looming advent of the alternate reality, atomic panic, superhero '80s epic Watchmen...and, God help the crushed scrotum of our creativity, Beverly Hills Cop IV is in the works.

And the return of one of the most iconic '80s artifacts is about the rain down like fallout. This summer brings Terminator: Salvation, a humongous movie that, due to the twisty knots of time travel, will be a prequel, a sequel, and a reboot of the franchise, and the first flick in a new trilogy starring everyone's fave f-bomb-dropping Welsh wigout master, Christian Bale.

The return of the Terminator gives me comfort in this omigod-fucking-drive-a-stake-through-its-heart-already 1980s resurrection. The Terminator, was a true icon, before it was ripped off by everything from V: The Series to Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah to Wallace and Gromit In A Close Shave to the porn flick The Sperminator. And of course there were those disturbingly fascist animated man/machine hybrids that used to show up during the bumper segments of televised NFL games.

The metal endo-skeletoned man/machine was the embodiment of a specific vintage of berserk, apocalyptic terror that defined the years of the Reagan/Bush Junta. The 1980s, which saw the final frenzy of the Cold War, was a time of doom in which even a benign kiddie movie like The Monster Squad (which gifted us with the knowledge that, indeed, "Wolfman's got nards!") featured the special effects-y end of the world. Doomsday loomed, and the coke-driven, junk-bond-funded bacchanal of doomsday was the cultural engine behind what is now reduced to the '80s kitsch of "Heroes" and "Metal Monday".

James Cameron's 1984 film, The Terminator, is now 25 years old. In turn, it was constructed atop the legacy of films from a quarter century before: 1959's Hiroshima Mon Amour, On the Beach, and the Geiger-clicking radioactive brontosaurus of The Giant Behemoth.

The Terminator is now recognized as a historical artifact. The Library of Congress recently placed it in the National Film Registry, for its being not just "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant, but also a work of "enduring significance to American culture."

Amen to that.

The Terminator is a work of cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance. But more than that, it's an important artifact of a once ubiquitous psychological reality, especially for geezers like me who thought that our beloved, doddering, Teflon-coated Unca Ronnie was gonna get us vaporized.

The inevitability of Apocalypse was a psychological ache that knotted our thoughts into rosaries of angst. In 1983, a girl I knew in my home town of Buffalo, NY lived near a neighborhood that was leveled by a propane explosion. She screamed and panicked when the blast knocked her out of bed because she was sure bombs were dropping. I talked to a bartender who was painting houses one summer near a naval base in Connecticut. The base blared an air raid test without notifying the surrounding community, whereupon this guy, thinking the nukes were flying, looked at the guy on the ladder next to his. They both shrugged and kept on painting, not knowing what else to do, sure that the shadows of their own vaporized forms would soon be on the wall they painted. My high school girlfriend asked me to kill her if the bombs dropped and we were left alive -- melodramatic, I know, but it was...y'know...high school.

No matter what melodramatic form my girlfriend's panic took, this terror was a sane response to a world gone bugshit. Unca Ronnie, early in his Presidency, John Hancock'ed a little goodie called the National Security Decision Document, which shifted the paradigm of nuclear war to something that the US could and should win, rather than it's more pedestrian and sane conception as a "non-survivable event." (*1) Reagan and his boys were talking such crazy cowflop that, if anybody else had said it in public, they'd be shot full of Thorazine and strapped to a gurney with rubber blankets. And these were the guys with their fingers on the button!

How can any sane person deal with a president making the famous joke that Unca Ronnie let fly on August 11, 1984, in front of an open mic, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes," a Dorothy Parker-ish bon mot that put the Soviets on alert?

In 1982, while culturally America was creaming itself over the adorableness of the Christ-like ET, Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberg was talking to Harvard students about the Apocalypse that might bring Christ back to earth. According to the New York Times (*2):

[A] student asked Mr. Weinberger: 'Do you believe the world is going to end, and, if you do, do you think it will be by an act of God or an act of man?'

'I have read the Book of Revelation,' the Secretary replied, 'and, yes, I believe the world is going to end -- by an act of God, I hope -- but every day I think that time is running out.'

In the fall of 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig said it'd be just a spiffy idea, if things got hot in Europe, to fire a nuclear warning shot at the Soviets if they used conventional forces, as if Ivan would just pack up his toys and shuffle back to Trotskygrad in the face of America's throbbing, uncircumcised atomic dick. But you know, even nuclear warning shots aren't that dire a commitment, as, according to Unca Ronnie, once you launched those nukes, you can recall them, just the way a falconer recalls his noble bird back to his gauntlet. In May of 1982, old "Dutch" said:

Those [nukes] that are carried in bombers, those that are carried in ships of one kind or another, or submersibles, you are dealing there with a conventional type of weapon or instrument, and those instruments can be intercepted. They can be recalled if there has been a miscalculation.

These terrors that bubbled in our collective Id attained a kind of Ground Zero in the few days before the release of The Terminator on October 26, 1984, when Reagan was running against Walter Mondale. Reagan was talking craziness about the 'end of the world' that so freaked out a bunch of Catholic, Jewish and Evangelical leaders, that on October 24, they were compelled to sign a document condemning Reagan's use of "nuclear Armageddon" rhetoric as being a "perversion of Holy Scripture and a danger to the security of our Republic." (*3) For their pains, they were heckled at their press conference by a phalanx of smegma brains from the Moral Majority, lead by the Heritage Foundation's Paul Weyrich.

A few days before that, in San Francisco, Mondale called out Unca Ronnie on the insanity of his "you can the recall the nukes" comment, saying (*4):

Think about that for a minute....You fire missiles, they come out of the submarine hole, go through the water, go into the air for several thousand miles and then you decided not to fire them. So they're stopped. Like a movie rolling backward, the missile backs up, goes down through the water and back into the submarine hole.

And just two days before The Terminator hit screens with its premise of uncontrollable mechanized warfare destroying humanity, a bunch of liberal malcontents chanted, "You can't call them back! You can't call them back!" (*5) at a Reagan campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio.

Beyond the psychological and political context in which it was released, The Terminator is an important document in that it makes visible what the Reaganite ideology wanted to keep invisible (and there is a fucked up terror to being forced into invisibility). Maybe just the way European exiles, as outsiders to American culture, could come to the U.S. and create a uniquely American genre about uniquely American outsiders in the form of film noir, it took a Canadian guy like James Cameron to fill The Terminator with the urban diaspora who lived in exile in their own country under Reagan.

The movie gives a glimpse into the urban shitscape that was city living in the 1980s, when, as a punk kid walking home to my shitty apartment, I'd have to pick the glass from broken crack vials the from treads of my Army Surplus combat boots.

Early in the flick, our hero Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), naked after dropping through time from a future dystopia to Unca Ronnie's trash-choked dystopia, steals clothes from one of the homeless that Reagan had cattle prodded into the streets, and for whom Reagan would abdicate any moral responsibility by saying they were homeless by choice.

The movie's cheapness is a virtue, as the location filming, on streets too dirty to be sets, preserves and documents the grime of the era nicely, as does the gloom of the discount store where Reese steals shoes and a coat before going back out into the night where guys who were themselves thrown out like trash push shopping carts to scavenge trash.

Reagan hated cities, populating them in his rhetoric with "welfare queens" as far back as 1976 while speaking in small towns. But even while he slammed cities, as far back as 1974, he presented a neo-platonic ideal of the city as a fucked up kind of political reality, the "Shining City on a Hill." This Puritan jerk-off fantasy seemed to exist as a thing Reagan created specifically so that his suburbanite voting bloc could hate real cities for not living up to that fantasy.

The Terminator, even as a science fiction movie, is a portrait, albeit a stylized one, of the neglected human detritus who could never be part of that City on a Hill. The first person seen in the movie is an African American garbage man working the night shift. Our heroine, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), is a waitress...the very kind of working young person whose nickel-and-dime tips Reagan would tax two years later while Santa Claus-ing tax cuts for the rich in an effort to facilitate trickle down oppression. The secondary characters, from Dick Miller as the gun store owner who gets blown away to the janitor who gets the first computer-generated "Fuck you, asshole!" in the history of cinema, to Paul Winfield as a cop, are too real as city people...they don't belong in Reagan's fairy tale city. They belong in the metropolises Reagan strangled.

The Terminator himself (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the administrator of the eighth largest economy in the world), before he went all candy-ass-"Now-I-know-why-you-cry" in the second flick, brought a small-scale version of Reagan's atomic Book of Revelations/fever vision into the kind of real city that would get blown to shit in the event of a real nuclear war. The iconography of atomic war is the destruction of cities -- from Godzilla to The Day After to the Oscar-winning The War Game to the later Terminator sequels. Fighting the Terminator was akin to fighting for our cities; it was invisible people fighting for the invisible people Reagan forsook.

So, with the prospect of not just a new Terminator sequel coming down the pike, but a new mini-franchise, the question arises, will the 2009 model Terminator bring us a new kind of terror suitable for today, in a world still defined by eight years of Neocon non-reality-based worldview, and thus be a document of our time? Or will it just be a karaoke of the social, political, and psychological forces that a young Canuck named Cameron scab-picked apart a quarter of a century ago? A simulacrum of something dynamic and alive, the way the Terminator himself was a simulacrum of something that lived?

Then again, maybe like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", it could just be fun.


Notes



© Michael Marano 2009.

Horror writer, pop culture commentator and Public Radio film critic Michael Marano previously wrote "Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President", and has a new fiction collection in the works about the crazy shit he lived through in the 1980s entitled Stories from the Plague Years.

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