Terminator Cool
Finding Meaning in the Action Film

by Charlie Angus
HighGrader Magazine
This article may be downloaded for personal use but any reprints require permission from .

Enlightenment comes to those who wait. I admit that I squandered many years in movie-going darkness. Living in the city I devoured more than my share of art films, foreign films and profound dramas. Obscure movies from Poland, dour films made by German Marxist-Feminists or Italian films about people who are more like chickens than people. You know, meaningful movies.
Then during a very scaled down version of a honeymoon in Montreal I saw Road Warrior. Unable to afford a hotel, we were put up by a priest friend at a Seminary. Surrounded by too many priests who were just a little too stingy with their overloaded beer fridge, there wasn't much else to do (separate rooms, after all) except to sneak in a bottle of wine, rent a movie and hunker down with our Jesuit friend for a very long night.
The evening's choice was between Casablanca and Road Warrior, Mel Gibson's apocalyptic B-grade version of the future. In a moment of divine inspiration, I insisted on Road Warrior. I loved it. Watching Road Warrior was sheer, visceral delight. Especially when one frothing-at-the-mouth evil type got killed for the second time (guess they had a limited budget). Mel Gibson left tire treads all over Bogie and Ingrid Bergman.
Returning to Toronto, fearing perhaps social censure, I kept my desire to see bad guys blown up to myself. I didn't want people to think of me as just another Albertan barbarian. But then we moved to Northern Ontario.
By the end of the first long winter, we had watched every movie at the video stand from the  corner store at least twice. On a cold night in late February we found ourselves out of options. Schwarzenegger? I hesitated. Everyone knew his movies were mindless and violent. But it was February. And so I watched my first Arnold Scharwzenegger movie - Total Recall. By the end of the film I was converted. I had discovered my inner-Arnold.
Since then it's been a slippery slope - Terminator (1 and 2), Running Man, Robo Cop (1, 2 and 3), Bruce Willis (Die Hard trilogy), Predator (1 and 2), Stallone in everything from Judge Dredd to Demolition Man and Tank Girl - the best female role model since Emma Peal. Now I'm onto Jean-Claude Van Damme, even though a good friend suggested he was too pretty for my taste. I even tested the tepid waters of Dolph Lundgren. It's nice to know, however, that I still have standards.
You might think I'm simply addicted to comic book violence; good guys blowing up bad guys to the sound squealing tires. But there's much more to action films than testosterone and cordite. These films, and in particular the futuristic action genre, offer the last, authentic social critique of American culture. Forget guys like Neil Postman or Noam Chomsky. If you want a stinging critique of corporate-driven society, stick with Big Arnold.
"I'm a business man. A very, very serious business man. ...Wars, John? Wars, they come and go. We did Viet Nam, we lost. We did the Gulf, we won. What changed John? Nothing. Nothing ever does. The only difference is who gets rich and who gets dead. Personally, John, I prefer rich."
-James Caan in Eraser

The Future is Now
The year is 2084. Our hero, Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is a construction worker who becomes embroiled in a power struggle over mineral resources on Mars. Douglas Quaid lives in a corporate run world where memories can be erased and implanted at will. Obsessed with a reoccurring dream about life on the mining colony, Quaid goes to Rekall Corporation - a sleazy outfit selling vacation "memories." Quaid's "fake" trip to Mars unleashes a roller-coaster of plot twists and machine-gun bursts.
Total Recall, based on Philip Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", explores a common theme in sci-fi: conflict in a world of limited resources (this time its fresh air). In Total Recall, the rich Pyramid Mine is run by the corrupt magnate Mr. Cohagen. He keeps the miners under control by limiting the amount of fresh air in the miner's living quarters.
"Nobody on earth cares what goes on up here," complains one resident. Sound familiar? The resources are gouged, the population gets sick and the owners get richer. But thanks to Arnold, the evil corporate leaders are blown up and the resources are freed for the locals. Hasta La Vista Baby!

Besides conflicts over shrinking resources, these films also articulate our underlying mistrust of technology. This fear is exploited in the Terminator series. Scientists working at Cyberdyne Systems create a prototype for artificial life. But the system, called SkyNet (a cross between Reagan's Star Wars and the Internet), eventually gains control over its own technology and launches a nuclear war to annihilate human life. Remaining humans are rounded up to be exploited in labour camps.
An effective resistance movement is started by a John Connor and the plot revolves around SkyNet's attempt to use time-travel to terminate John Connor before he even exists. Get it? The mother, Sarah Connor, has her final showdown with the cyber-Arnold in an automated factory. The choice of location is telling; the cyborg that has come to terminate life has sprung from the same technology that has terminated the jobs of blue-collar America.
By the time we get to Terminator II: Judgment Day, John Connor's mother has transformed herself into a self-taught commando type that takes no guff. She teams up with a reformed terminator (Arnold) to battle a new and improved evil terminator. In the process she saves both John Connor and civilization.
The moral of this movie is twofold: don't trust the so-called "experts" and take control your own fate. Sarah Connor is dismissed as a lunatic by the professionals in the movie. The film tackles a growing legitimation crisis in American society: people believe that the institutions that are supposed to help them, hospitals, government, police, military, are either unwilling or unable to do so.
Arnold, with his black leather jacket and motorcycle becomes a classic heir to the Americn Outlaw/Hero tradition. The myth tells us that when legitimate institutions fail, heroes must act outside of these impotent or corrupt systems. Out of necessity they become outlaws. Hence, the evil terminator assumes the garb of a policeman while the good terminator emerges as a biker, a classic American outlaw image.
In the Robo Cop series, this legitimation crisis is made more explicit: public institutions have fallen victim to privatization and corporate control. At a board meeting of the evil Omni Consumer Products, one of the corporate minions provides an upbeat scenario for corporate expansion. To respond to shifts in tax structures, the capitalist fiends have moved into traditional non-profit sectors like hospitals, prisons and private security. As one Omni exec says, "Good business is where you find it." These guys could be young Turks in the Tory party.

In Robo Cop III, Omni Consumer Products now own Detroit and have launched a war on the homeless and poor, dislocating families of squatters in an inner city neighbourhood to make way for a mega-development scheme. Seen in light of the crack-down of the poor leading up to the Atlanta Olympics, the future once again does not seem so remote. Thank God for Murphy, the Cyber-Cop. The bad guys get blown right out of their corporate office towers.
In Eraser, the bad guys are a nefarious combination of a major arms corporation and corrupt government officials. Detective John Kruger (Schwarzenegger) is always saying he "vorks alone", but in order to beat the corporate conspiracy he needs union help. Tony "Two-Toes", President of Local 129 of the Dockworkers Union, stands up to the nasty corporate crooks with a 2 by 2: "Let me explain something to you sonny boy. Nothing moves off these docks that don't get loaded by the union. I don't see no union people around here, do you?" After busting up a few heads, he admonishes:"Nobody screws with the union." So what if these guys look like extras from Hoffa. When was the last time that union labour got to be good guys in a major American (or for that matter Canadian) movie?
"It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the USA."
- Leonard Cohen

"This country needs a president so rich he doesn't have to listen to anyone. ...When I get elected we're going back to the Ô80's again; the top 10%  will get richer and the other 90% had better emigrate to Mexico"
-Evil senator McComb in Van  Damme's "Time Cop"
Kick-Ass Politics
Schwarzenegger's Running Man is a brilliant satire of television, where even justice must eventually bend to the tenets of mass-entertainment. Ben Richards (our boy Arnie) is a policeman in the year 2017. Food and natural resources are in short supply and the television networks have shut down all the schools. Ordered to fire on a gathering of unarmed citizens demanding food, he rebels, but is framed for their killing and ends up as a guest on a game show "The Running Man".
The rules of the game are simple: condemned criminals are hunted down before a television audience by game-show stalkers with monikers like Buzz Saw and Sub-Zero. The program is hosted Damon Killian (played masterfully by game show celebrity Richard Dawson) and is produced in cooperation with the Entertainment Division of the Department of Justice. Ben Richards' allies are a small, rebel faction who want to shut down the networks, jam the TV signals, and tell the population the truth of how they have been manipulated by their corporate masters. Ralph Nader with an M-16.
The send-up of the media is devastating. The bloodthirsty crowd might have seemed a little overdone back in 1985 when the movie first came out, but since then we've had Ricki Lake and shows like "Cops". Would the producers of Sally Jessy Raphael turn down the chance to host a public execution? Not likely.
Naturally, Arnold manages to take on all the stalkers, destroy the credibility of the game and even aid the rebels in revealing the manipulation of television. The killer line in the movie comes as  Killian defends his program to the Justice Department: "Look, this is a contact sport. You can't have it both ways if you want people in front of their TV's instead of on picket lines."
The Rush Limbaughs would have you believe that blue-collar Americans fear illegal immigrants, Cuba and socialism more than anything else. The action film suggests otherwise. In Escape from L.A., the United States has been turned into a fascist state by a president that seems an equal mix of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan. The new moral-right has banished the outsiders, the Mexicans and the ungodly (including cigarette smokers) to Los Angeles. Our hero Snake Plissken lands in L.A. where he meets up with one inmate. Her crime? Being a Muslim in South Dakota.

In the end, Snake obtains a weapon that will wipe out all electronic power in the world. He is asked to choose between his loyalty to the United States and the threatening hordes of third world illegal aliens coming over from Cuba. Snake decides to plunge the whole lot into darkness and then walks off into the sunset smoking a cigarette from a pack of smokes called American Spirit. The movie is a bit lame, but the sight of the one-eyed Marlboro man pulling the plug on the nasty moral majority is worth a mention.
Demolition Man, starring Sly Stallone and Sandra Bullock, is an incredibly funny and well-crafted critique of the tyranny of the politically correct. The year is 2032 and the dominate philosophy of the day is that "anything that isn't good for you is bad for you and is therefore illegal". People live without violence or rancour, but also without smoking, drinking, meat-eating, non-educational toys and swearing. Virtual sex has replaced the old -fashioned "hunka chunka" and the "wild mambo". The big event for a night on the town is a trip to Taco Bell (the only outlet to survive the "franchise wars at the end of the century"). There you can hear a piano-bar singer sing a sappy string of golden oldies, the commercial jingles of the 20th century.
Thrown into this land of Tofu-Nazis are two old-fashioned kind of guys - Simon Phoenix, a psycho gang leader from 1990s L.A. (played with gleeful abandon by Wesley Snipes) and Sergeant John Spartan, the hard-nosed, shoot-first kind of cop (Stallone). No sooner can you say, "Why's everyone wearing bed sheets" then mayhem starts to reign.
The real hero of the movie is the leader of the resistance movement, the notorious Edgar Friendly. As people get blown up around him, Edgar Friendly makes his great pitch for freedom as symbolized by burgers, beer and a 1969 red Thunderbird: "I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder ÔGee, do I want the T-bone steak or the rack of ribs with gravy on the side?' I want high cholesterol, bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, and a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to rub green jello all over my body while reading Playboy. Why? Just because I might want to." Need we say more?

Finding Your Inner-Arnold!
The sentiments of Edgar Friendly, John Spartan, et al, are hardly in vogue in an age where men are supposed to expunge the macho beast and get in touch with their drum-beating inner self. It is no accident that many of the great showdowns occur in smelters, steel works, mines and factories. The action movie is the counter revolution of blue-collar values. It turns a culture that fawns on the rich and demonizes those who have fallen through the cracks - particularly the homeless and criminals - on its head.
In Van Damme's films the dispossessed man is continually called to stand up for justice in the face of decadent and evil rich people. In Hard Target, Jean-Claude faces down wealthy hunters who get their kicks hunting down homeless people. In the final scene, having laid waste to every bad guy and his idiot brother, Van Damme is asked by the evil hunter why he bothered to get involved. "Even poor people get bored," responds Van Damme dryly. 
This male power is never at the expense of the female characters. Indeed, the women all have their own inner strengths and work in tandem with the requisite he-man. Cruel misogyny is, however, always just below the surface of the smooth talking professional men in suits. And thus the morality tale in action films is not simply that violence wins the day, but that traditional male strengths such as self-reliance and protectiveness still have a value in a world corrupted by finance and power. The action film reaffirms the very men who are being made obsolete by technological change.

The action film explores the unarticulated fears and tensions of a world in flux. A recent issue of the Economist (September 28, 1996) points out that in the new economic order, traditional roles for men are gravely undermined and the anticipated social consequences will be devastating. According to the Economist, blue-collar men who are unable to financially provide for their family quickly lose their place in community and their ties to the family. This results in social breakdown. Researchers William Galston and Elaine Kamarck found that the connection between crime and the lack of a father at home "is so strong that it erases the relationship between race and crime, and between low income and crime."
It is no accident that a reoccurring scenario in the male action genre is displaced men finding redemption by helping a fatherless family. In Nowhere to Run, Jean-Claude Van Damme turns the traditional Hollywood horror scenario (escaped con, fatherless family, isolated farm) upside down. He risks himself to protect a family from evil developers because the young boy looks to him as a father figure. In the end, he is led away to prison but the family farm is saved.
The message may seem simple, but it holds up a model of duty that is sorely lacking in a culture that denigrates masculine values like protectiveness, courage and self-sacrifice. Take Ian Brown, author of "Man Overboard", for instance. He has an entire television series to indulge his queasiness about being a modern man (ie. someone who likes all the perks and none of the responsibilities of adulthood). In a promo for the series he whines about committing himself to his daughter and wife: "Don't get me wrong, it's not as if I don't love them, but the idea of being chained to them for 20 years drives me crazy."
Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, cuts through such blithering with an assessment of the need children have for a role model. So what if it's with a machine: "Watching John with the machine it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him and it would never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there and it would die to protect him. Of all the would be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, he was the sanest choice."

Okay, it's an insane world, sorta. And unlike Sarah Connor, I don't have to worry about relying on the Terminator to baby-sit my children. That being said, the action film has a lot more to offer than the cynicism and bland feel-good escapism that runs rampant through the entertainment industry. People need heroes, even if they are comic book ones. And the message is one of optimism about the human spirit  - that in the end, even an average guy or gal can set the world straight.
Now let's be honest. If my car broke down 20 miles outside of Wawa in the dead of winter, who would I want to see coming over the horizon? Some Richard Gere type who thinks all problems can be solved by a cell-phone? Some guy more in touch with how he feels than with how to jump-start a chevy engine? I think not. I want an Arnold on that Arctic Cat.   

Vaping has become a popular alternative for those seeking a Stylish and Convenient way to enjoy nicotine without the drawbacks of traditional smoking. the iget moon Offers an exceptional Vaping Experience, combining sleek design with ease of use. Its compact size makes it perfect for on-the-go enjoyment, while its variety of flavors satisfies diverse preferences. Choose the iget moon for a modern and satisfying Vaping solution that fits seamlessly into your lifestyle.