You're domesticated, fucker!

As noted earlier, in Terminator and T2 the present that the cyborgs are are beamed back into is a contemporary urban area . This trope is repeated in all three movies and acts almost as model of the shifting nature of the City and the suburb over fifteen years or so of American life.

In the first in the series the Terminator is sent back to a blasted and crumbling, rubbish-strewn dystopia overrun with by punks and junkies from whom he steals his outfit. Here there is a clear urban/suburban split. Sarah Connor lives out in the bright suburbs, an area of sunlight, lawns, bustling communities and service jobs (Sarah works as a waitress), the City is a kind or perpetual night, a dark and atavistic realm of Industry and excitement. Much the same kind of division, though more muted is at play in T2, though here the city is the home both to the older forms of industry that will again destroy the new Terminator with a dependable American heavy-tech and the newly emergent, post industrial offices of Cyberdine. In T2 the suburbs also carry a stronger sense of malaise than is hinted at in the first film and the distinction between the two is more blurred. Indeed it might be argued that T1 represents a kind of fantasy projections of a bored/frustrated suburban women of just what Dionysian, dirty and death-filled delights the City holds, not unlike Janet's vision of Downtown in Shock Treatment, or that the Suburb/City distinction carries over something of the utopian vision of  Seventies’ Sci-Fi (about which more later)

In the first two Terminator movies then the city is still home to industry, and the link between American vitality and dynamism and the industry of the past as its still visible correlate is stressed. Industry is a “real”, heavy, primitive and rust flecked but still the expression of and the force through which the spirit can be used to crush the threat of superior technologies invading and overwhelming it from without, including, in Judgement Day, the more amorphous and supple “informational” T2. Here one form of technology threatens another, the films are filled with anxieties about technological obsolescence and the accelerating pace of change, in the first film Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are the humans who must defeat the advanced technology and do so through a combination of “spirit” and the already existing technology. (Gung Ho follows a similar pattern though in a very different genre.)

                                      (the militarization of  everyday life)

In T2 the previously threatening technology has already been “domesticated”, made to act as a father/husband figure and take on some human(e) and American values, and is itself now subject to a threat from outside, from more sophisticated shifts in technology that threaten to render it obsolete. In a sense the first two Terminator movies reprise the legend of John Henry, the mythical hyper-productive miner who competes with the steam hammer, wins, but alas, being only flesh and bone dies as a consequence of his exertions. Here there has been a shift, Fordist heavy-tech is identified with the human, with a known world about to be destroyed.

The problem for T3 of course (though here we are jumping ahead of our allotted time frame as T3 was made in 2003) is that it doesn’t have an equivalent shift and domestication of the previously alien. The T3 is a kind of hybrid of the T1 and 2, or a T2 with a few extra gimmicks. Here the series runs out of energy and is forced to play fundamentally with cultural tropes, since the T2 represents the horizon of imaginative representations of the fear of the weightless economy. Ideally in T3 Robert Patrick would have returned as the new defender/custodian of the American spirit fighting against an entirely new form of cyborg, but since this is impossible to imagine (and it would also mean losing the franchise’s star, Schwarzenegger) the film instead flatlines. The anxieties of the Seventies and Eighties, the rapid shifts in technology, reduced to campy, self-referential ”fun”.

If between Terminator and T2 the Terminator shifts his status from destructive, inhuman and alien to protective father figure who understands the need for self-sacrifice, then by T3 he has assumed something of the familiarity of the cowboy in the elegiac westerns of the late Sixties and Seventies, the redoubtable, persistent and dogged man-out-of-time, so that in T3 the T101 has in effect become the comforting though doomed relic of the past whose potency the culture still needs to affirm in the alarming face of its seeming redundancy, the role, essentially that heavy industry plays in the first two movies.

Significantly, by Terminator Three, Rise of the Machines the urban dead-zone of the first movie has been thoroughly transformed. Kristanna Loken’s female Terminator is beamed back into a fashionable boutique, gets herself kitted out in an expensive leather catsuit and immediately steals a high end motor. She may be a female destructborg from the future intent on bringing forth the Apocalypse, but as a women she still essentially a consumer.

Terminator Three shows a fully neoliberalized city, an ordered place,with clean streets and boutiques. This time Schwarzenegger is mysteriously sent back to the suburbs and in a parodic nod both to the masculine archetypes of the Eighties, now felt to be redundant and an open acknowledgement of their roots in gay culture, must retrieve his standard Leather Queen biker outfit from a camp stripper on a hen night. The suburbs are now a backward, campy, vulgar place, the smart futurist area is the reclaimed urban centre and its professional elite.

The Terminator movies are a part, of course, of a long line of films representing anxieties about technology that runs from Metropolis through the cold war anxieties of The Forbin Project up to War Games but The Terminator’s most obvious predecessor is Westworld (1973).