Chapter 5 Part 4 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
SCHIZO—AFFECTIVE DISORDER and TERMINATOR
2 (1991)
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“Good movie?” I asked, nodding toward a poster
that advertised Terminator 2. –Dennis O'Neil, Batman |
Sequels are epilogues, self-reflective commentaries on the original film, or in the terminology of “chaos” theory, feedback cycles. Needing to go beyond the original, sequels escape tedium only at the expense of excess, but occasionally may utilize that excess to transcend the original (and thereby teach how to break free from old states), as with Terminator 2, which doubles the Gravesean stage three of the Terminator [1] to stage six.
Making the success of Terminator 2 even more an illustration
of utilization, it builds powerful art from ludicrous ideas. At the moment of John
Connor’s conception, he is chronologically older than his father, since the latter
came from the future. Randall Frakes' novelization of Terminator 2 has the
mother's psychiatric keepers consider her summary of the first movie a stock delusion:
“After all, her son's name was John Connor. J.C. Jesus Christ. And he was fathered
by a phantom from the future. Her son's birth was close as you get to an ‘immaculate
conception’ [sic]. And his sacrifice would save the world” (Frakes 65).
Recycling Terminator [I]
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... [In cinema, entropy as an aesthetic] most commonly finds its realization in those SF films that concretize and privilege the material aggregations of the city dump–the most literal among them The Terminator. Trash and waste, pollution and decay, are visualized as curious and beautiful, postmodern sensibility finding aesthetic pleasure and sublimity in the accumulations and transformative decay of the cityscape where, as Jameson points out, “even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendour.” –Vivian Sobchak, Screening Space |
It begins murdering everyone with the name “Sarah Connor” (updating
the biblical Slaughter of the Innocents by Herod's soldiers into a serial killing
of helpless women by a seemingly crazed muscleman–or, in terms of Cameron’s psychological
allegory, the terminator is a part of the mind functioning autonomously, as in MPD).
John Connor tries to aid his mother by sending Reese, a time-traveling messenger
to rescue her (comparable to the divine messenger whose warning saved Jesus from
that Slaughter, though, in Cameron’s psychology it is presumably a light side of
the psyche, balancing the terminator). Escaping from imprisonment and psychotherapy
imposed by unbelieving officials, Reese rejoins Sarah, begets John, and crushes the
metal infrastructure of the terminator. (Behind their union, there is presumably
a psychological “squash” as well.)
The “Backstory” of Terminator II
Although the original Terminator crumbles, it is only one of a series of androids (the T-800s); thus, John in the sequel reprograms an identical one to time travel to John's childhood and save him from a more advanced terminator (a T-1000) sent by the “God” Skynet. A Schwarzenegger/android becomes the hero of the sequel because he was the favorite character of the original. This popularity confirms Sobchak’s assumption that the audience is at least partly on the side of entropy and destruction, i.e., they have within them some part(s) analogous to the terminator.
In the first movie, no one calls attention to the writers’ recycled
gospel. Similarly, the psychological allegory remains tacit and undeveloped. In composing
the sequel, however, Wisher and Cameron initially thought of making the “backstory”
(the underlying “big picture” explicit. The 5/10/90 draft of Terminator 2
began with an extended sequence set in the future and narrated by John Connor. For
reasons of pacing and cost, the long introductory section was never made. T2
actually begins with a short montage of the future accompanied by a voice—over not
by John but by his mother, who narrates other parts of the film as if it flows from
her consciousness.
Who was Crazier, Sarah or her Doctors?
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[The healer] quite literally ‘takes over’ the sufferings of his patient and shares them with him. For this reason he runs a risk–and must run it in the nature of things. –C. G. Jung, CW 16, par 358) |
With expectations based on Terminator, a fan will begin trusting her. Dr. Silberman must be mad to assume that she is “schizo-affective” just because she believes in terminators from the future! That, however, is not her only symptom. Silberman defines the characteristics of “schizo-affective” as “depression, anxiety [the affective aspects], violent acting out, delusions of persecution [the schizoid aspects].” The emotional component brings explosive anger or suicidal despair, the schizoid one a paranoid belief system, which she allegedly follows violently, without regard for consequences. Does any evidence support the diagnosis? On video tape, raving out of control, she talks of living people as being “already” dead. In a monotone, as disturbing as her screams, she comments about the tape, “I'm much better now.” A few moments later she becomes homicidal, in one of many scenes where Dr. Silberman risks much from her condition. She also has passive moods–possibly mere acting to conceal her plotting escape–but they do resemble acute depression or even catatonia.
At first her symptoms seem due to her confinement, ironically caused
by the physicians treating her. After her escape, however, erratic behavior continues.
As she sits one afternoon vandalizing a bench by carving the graffiti “No Fate,”
her eyes close and she has a violent nightmare or hallucination of nuclear destruction.
Even after the vision's cessation, she remains under its spell. She rushes to murder
Dyson, a kindly young African-American scientist, whose work might result in the
building of Skynet. When her son interrupts the assassination, she falls into a bitter
reverie, blaming the ills of the world on male scientists. In it, she argues the
only reason they invent machines is that they cannot give birth. Disquieted by her
remarks, her son tries to bring her back to facing the problems at hand. (Her tirade
was even more extreme in the original script.) In The Making of Terminator 2,
Cameron says of her vision of the future, “It's driven her kind of to the point of
madness.”
T2 as her Schizo-Affective Dialectic
The movie, itself, resembles the diagnosis that Silberman gave to Sarah. The film's
principal science—fiction elements–the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) and T-1000 (Robert
Patrick)–look like hallucinations shaped by affective and schizoid symptoms respectively.
The original cause of Sarah's depression and anxiety was a T-800. Another of that
model is now programmed to protect John, a career of suffering and eventual self—destruction.
Suicidal behavior is one of the most extreme and characteristic symptoms of depression.
Contrasting with the battered T-800, in state-of-the-art special effects, the T-1000
changes form, becoming everything from a policeman to a tile floor. Dying, it recapitulates
many of these transformations in a blur of metamorphoses. An amorphous sense of self
characterizes schizophrenia. Watching the movie is almost like entering the mind
of a schizo-affective patient, for, as Sarah says, her world is insane.
To contrast the two terminators, the actors trained very differently. As usual, Schwarzenegger “pumped iron religiously” (Shapiro et27). Patrick underwent “Zen instructions,” including meditalation and breathing exercises (Holm 30). The primary purpose of Zen meditation is to move one beyond an individual sense of self. Like the opening section of the old Kung Fu series where martial arts techniques of a Zen monastery are compared to animal behaviors, Patrick learned to imitate animals.
The very gestures of the T-800 arise from Western tradition, traceable to the nineteenth-century “muscular Christianity” movement, which popularized weight lifting. The T-1000 flows with Zen fluidity. On a deeper level, the terminators' personalities represent popular understandings (or misunderstandings) of the difference between East and West. The T-800 learns about human emotions, smiles and tears–important in the Occident to distinguish man from machine or animal. In major East Asian faiths, however, such a distinction is less emphasized, since all are one in an indescribable state for which a number of names serve including Mind, Mindlessness, Void, or Tao. The T-800 is told to stop being a “terminator” and learns to care; the T-1000 follows orders unquestioningly–a Transformer Samurai.
Linda Hamilton (Sarah) trained in “Israeli Commando” style combining Eastern and Western martial arts, appropriate to her nature: burning emotion and ruthless cold. During the attack on Dyson, “She had become a terminator” (Frakes 182), the kind of being she most hated and feared, perhaps because it embodied a dangerous potential within herself. Silberman is not entirely wrong when, in a speech (cut from the movie) he pontificates: “You see, it's all about machines for her. We're seeing more and more of this new syndrome, a sort of acute phobic reaction to technology. It's a defensive response to the dehumanization of relationships in a high-tech world” (Cameron 279).
The movie's ethical message stems from the difference between the terminators. John causes the T-800 to learn. The original script emphasized this activity. In a whole scene reduced to a single line in the final cut, John switches its computer from read-only mode so that it can modify its original directives. It begins to care about Sarah while it was only programmed to guard John. In another scene cut to a single gesture, Schwarzenegger learns to smile. The T-1000 remains incapable of emotion or ethical action. Before coming to terms with her personal demons (if she ever does), “Sarah was burning, screaming silently, writhing in the repeating loop of her own Hell” (Frakes 181). Dehumanization equals damnation, and it is a “loop,” like Kazantzakis’s notion of selfhood.
Chaotic feedback loops, images of self-reflectivity pervade the movie. In one characteristic scene, the psychiatric staff videotapes Sarah, who watches a previous tape of herself. Surveillance cameras pry from the walls of one location after another. John gazes at a computerized video game of world destruction, a miniature version of T2’s threatened apocalypse. The audience sees through the camera eyes of the T-800. Repeatedly, the T-1000 becomes someone’s Doppelgänger, a mirror into which the victim stares before death.
Sarah’s madly watching her previous madness and people killed by mysterious doubles present feedback loops as traps. In contrast, learning from the feedback offers a way of breaking the cycle. Faced with the problem of how to transcend routine sequel writing–the loop of facile repetition–Cameron and Wisher made learning and growing the focus of the sequel, indeed, its definition of being human. What cannot learn–the merely mechanical–is condemned. John feels not the slightest twinge of guilt at crimes against property. He steals smilingly, engages in computer fraud wittily, breaks and enters, smashes. But as delighted as he is to have his own terminator as a pet, the thought of its taking human lives horrifies him. He makes it swear not to kill under any circumstance, even though his own survival and his mother's require all the firepower he can muster. He has quickly risen to Graves’s stage six, where empathy, not rules, governs ethics.
In accordance with that stage, people are judged according to their ability to break free from the prime directive of their lives. John saves his mother's life despite all her training that he is too important for such risks. She (with his help) stops her coldly logical (or schizoid) attack on Dyson. Philip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? (which spawned the movie Blade Runner, 1982) added to the store of ideas circulating in science fiction that schizophrenics and amoral androids are alike in their inability to empathize or break free from their own narcissistic cycles of behavior. They contrast with those androids and humans who can learn to care. As Sarah thinks when she sees the T-800 acting as if it were John's father, “In an insane world, he was the sanest choice [for paternity].”
Unlike Christianity, the movie’s ethical system barely takes intentions into consideration. (It has no God to reward the well-meaning for them.) Thus, the likable Dyson, whose life work was to save lives, must face guilt for something he never intended–has not even caused yet, the deaths of 3 billion people killed by the Skynet he might invent. As he complains: “You're judging me on things I haven't even done yet. Jesus.” There is, though, no Jesus to save him–only John. The script notes, “Dyson looks like that guy on the Sistine Chapel wall, the damned soul. . . eyes fixed and staring with terrifying knowledge” (Cameron and Wisher 174). What has he done wrong? In a scene cut from the film, he wants to work on Sunday afternoon despite his family's desire for an outing; he finally gives in to their wishes. A note by the Creative Technical Supervisor shows the scene intended to “flesh[] out his [Dyson's] character as an obsessed scientist caught blindly in the obsessive thrill of discovery without acknowledging the dangerous ramifications of his work.” In other words, he has let himself become a kind of terminator, unwilling to examine the direction of his career. Thereafter, with the help of John and company, he learns to destroy that labor, thereby saving himself and the world.
How, according to this ethical system, would one classify its creators Cameron and Wisher? Cameron describes the writing: “[T]o take responsibility for the financial success of a multi-million dollar project . . . [during composition] is the death of art. This makes the writing process also slightly schizophrenic. . . . As the deadline loomed, the nights got longer. Family and friends knew from experience not to call. I became like a wounded, pregnant wolverine holed up in a cage” (Cameron and Wisher 7). They finished during a 36 hour stint of sleepless labor that makes Dyson's “obsessed . . . obsessive” thoughts of perhaps working a little on Sunday sound slothful by comparison. Cameron's imagery in this passage might be ignored as mere whimsy except that a comparable theme plays such an important part in the movie itself: refusal to take responsibility for one's actions (because self-examination might lower efficiency), “schizophrenic” activity, isolation from family, becoming less than human like a violent animal (“wolverine”). The obsessive nature of writing itself apparently helped the scripters to identify with what was meant by the “schizo-” side of the action and their loneliness (also noted by Cameron) to empathize with the “affective.”
In addition to Terminator III and an indefinite number of likely sequels, the Terminator series continues in Dark Horse, Now, Malibu, and Marvel comic books, over-a-dozen video games, and an entire line of Kenner toys. Universal Studios theme park in Orlando has a Terminator 3D spectacle combining film (performed by the original actors) and live action, which partly merge because of the audience’s 3D glasses and a multitude of special-effects tricks meant to bring the audience into the action. Before traveling into the future, John Connor, Sarah, and a T-1000 invade the theatre, protesting against the performance. Thus, in its own way, the park attraction echoes the self-division of Terminator II itself. (For more on The Terminator on this site, see "The Underlying Graves-Level 7 and 8 Themes in the Terminator Series" by Nathan Webb)
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