Rise Of The Machines
Ever wonder how James Cameron dreamed up Skynet and the terminators? Dana Goodyear profiles him in this week’s New Yorker:
One night, he [Cameron] said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.”
…Cameron… recruited [his friends William] Wisher and [Randall] Frakes to help him with a storyline centered on the chrome skeleton he had begun to think of as the terminator. He analyzed the common traits of the ten most successful movies of all time: an average person in extraordinary jeopardy was a major trope.
Yes, James Cameron’s dreams are cooler than ours, and so is what he does with them. And, says Gale Anne Hurd, his second wife, who produced his first three films, Cameron has always felt that:
“just about everything you could explore in a male action hero could be explored better with a woman.”
Still, I suspect that while we identify with and root for Sarah Connor, it’s the terminator that compels our attention—but not because of the metal skeleton. The revelation of that horror is reserved for the climactic scenes; for most of the movie(s), we have Arnold, human-looking but registering no pain, no anger, no remorse, his blankness tripping our emotions into what Masahiro Mori calls the “uncanny valley.”
Arnold’s T-800 is too human and not human enough. Watching him, our involuntary emotional triggers betray us; although we know he’s a machine, it’s impossible to think of him (as they would say in Battlestar Galactica) as a machine in the way a toaster is a machine. He’s a…. thing. He’s (non)alive, a monster to make Frankenstein proud, and as with Darth Vader and any number of inhuman entities (even 2001’s disembodied HAL, thanks to his voice), our skin crawls and it’s difficult to look away or get the thought of him out of our heads. (Io9.com does a good survey of creepy humanoid robots and their resemblance to corpses; Star Trek’s Borg are mysteriously omitted, but mentioned elsewhere).
Among Cameron’s many talents is an instinct for making something “cool” into something archetypal. He certainly knew what to do with his chrome skeleton. Goodyear’s entire article is here.
