#terminator meta

For the filmmakers, Grace’s body is a problem

Grace, as a future supersoldier in Terminator canon, was imagined to be the short-term peer of a Terminator. With cyborg components buried in her body as ‘private parts’, she is an exile from the future. Being both female and, depending on your gaze, masculine or degendered, she is queer. She is classically Other – outside the norm and society.

What does Other look like? Grace was meant to be tough, stripped down, a vector to make an action movie’s action happen. Early concept art for Grace shows a character strikingly similar to Mad Max’s Furiosa.

Left: T:DF concept art of Grace. Right: Furiosa from Mad Max.

The filmmakers needed to make their future supersoldier not-Furiosa. The result was a character who tied even more strongly into queerness, which is saying something. The filmmakers parsed their future supersoldier onto a beautiful blonde actor. The result combines two LGBT visual archetypes. Grace blends a 1950s physique magazine bodybuilder (perhaps Jim Stryker) and a butch-of-center power lesbian (Ellen DeGeneres, Suze Orman).

Grace was imagined to be strong, but with a built-in weakness, a need for medication to keep functioning. Again, this combines two LGBT physical archetypes – though they are shadowed ones. Grace’s need for her meds evokes an AIDS patient who needs a drug cocktail to stay healthy. And a scene with Grace being examined by baffled medics evokes the non-standard woman who’s examined, pathologized, medicalized for being ‘wrong’.

To further other Grace, she was also envisioned as being mired in conflict. The T:DF script had lots of banter and negativity between her and the once-groundbreaking action heroine Sarah Connor. This was so extreme that Linda Hamilton, portraying Sarah Connor, put her foot down, insisting on changes and character work.(1)  

Finally, Grace was not intended to be physically attractive. The creative team, especially the director, meant that Grace’s character would not be sexualized and would not have a romance, despite being sent back in time to protect a lovely young woman. This did not hold up outside a straight male gaze, as famously deconstructed in an article on Slate.(2)

The filmmakers themselves were aware that having Grace as a protector was maybe, possibly, kind of lesbian. Terminator’s canon itself encouraged this. In the first Terminator film, a time-traveling future-protector, Kyle Reese, became Sarah Connor’s lover. Kyle’s backstory touches on a trope from other time-travel sci fi, most notably the 1962 film La Jetée: a strong emotional connection helps a human travel back in time.(3)  

So, late in T:DF’s narrative, we get the revelation that there is an emotional connection, but not a sexual one. Grace finally reveals that Dani had rescued and raised a young Grace.  After two hours of Grace and Dani’s physical and emotional intensity, this comes across as tacked on, apologetic. A final proof that the filmmakers see Grace, their creation, as a problem.

For Dani and Sarah, Grace’s body needs rescuing

It takes the film a while to let Dani and Sarah to start relating to Grace’s body. First, Grace must suffer.

Grace is the subject of conflict from the moment she appears, falling naked through a time-gate. First, a very heterosexual couple argue about her. This is followed immediately by a confrontation with multiple police, who Grace defeats – showing that she is a vector for action and violence. This done, Grace turns around and disrupts the heterosexual couple. She responds to “Thanks, lady” by saying “Don’t thank me yet,” and stealing the man’s clothes and their car. The scene is set: Grace is female, powerful, and acting in defiance of multiple laws, including gender.

Grace segues quickly into locking in on her mission’s target, Dani, and an extended, savage scene fighting a Terminator. By the time she and Dani get to exchange more than a sentence, and start doing more than surviving, Grace is at the end of her resources. And their queer drama begins.

The middle third of the film is packed with queer-coded physical moments between Grace and Dani, Grace and Sarah. The Slate article (1) shares a lesbian viewer’s gleeful take on the movie, especially this middle third. The action and physical exchanges, with their high drama, really do come across as a sci-fi take on a 1960s lesbian pulp novel.

Dani begins the film passively, a caretaking young woman with ‘a nice, normal life.’ She is baffled by both her peril and Grace’s presence. Her first chosen act around Grace’s body is to step away from being a bystander to defend Grace. This is driven by Grace’s need for medications leading her to hold up a pharmacy. Grace collapses mid-heist. When she does, Dani picks up Grace’s pistol, becoming involved in Grace’s crime, joining Grace in being Other.

Immediately after this, they are reunited with a third Other: Sarah Connor.  

Sarah has the authority of both someone capable of fighting back, like Grace, and of Terminator’s longest-running, oldest character. Once, Sarah herself was the disruptive, strange, and violent woman, albeit tempered by motherhood. She is now mainstream enough to start as the proxy for the filmmakers and their heteronormative bafflement. “I’ve never seen one like you before. Almost human.” She is ambivalent and antagonistic to Grace. Yet she, like Dani, supports Grace’s body.

In her first conversation with Dani and Grace, Sarah, too places herself outside society, with them, in the zone of Terminator survivors unlikely to be believed. But even before that, while Grace is unconscious, Sarah demonstrates what outsiders do: she puts Grace in bed.

With Grace in bed, her Augmentations overheating, Sarah engages in easily-sexualized acts of healing. She drenches Grace in a bucket of ice, penetrates her with a syringe of medication. Questioned, Sarah defends these choices, admitting both her own ignorance and showing Grace a basic respect. “Have you SEEN the bathtub?” Regaining consciousness, Grace turns queer-coded touch back onto Sarah with the trope of pinning her against the wall.

The camera takes Sarah’s point of view for a pivotal scene: watching Grace, who is watching Dani, who is sleeping on Grace’s lap. Grace and Dani have already fallen into physical ease with each other. This gaze-within-a-gaze moment betrays the importance and tenderness of Grace’s regard for Dani. More, this is subtly recognized by Sarah.

Shortly after this, Sarah’s relationship with Dani’s body brings conflict with her and Grace. Sarah, in both bitter identification and claiming, assumes that Dani is the mother of another future savior. At this, Grace erupts into fierce aggression. “If you’re Mother Mary, why do I want to beat the shit out of you?” She storms off to brood, pulp-novel style

They do not reconcile until far later in the film, when Sarah has changed her relationship with Dani. Sarah and Dani are bloodied side by side, with Sarah injured on Dani’s behalf. Seeing this, Grace hurts and heals Sarah in one go, resetting Sarah’s dislocated shoulder.  Grace re-empowers Sarah as a peer of hers, another defender of Dani, both ready to fight again.

Through the lens of robot action, Grace blurs gender, sex, and death

Grace makes it clear she’s out to confuse gender when, from the start of the movie, she repeatedly places herself in men’s clothes. It’s logical enough – they’re the clothes that fit her strength and height. We don’t see Grace wearing clothes that might be a woman’s until she’s at Carl’s cabin. This is both a slight abdication towards Carl and a first step towards Grace’s death. She is not the most powerful cyborg around anymore: the filmmakers give that back to Schwarzenegger’s iconic form.

Carl is a whole other essay. It’s interesting when the script places Carl on the outside-society continuum as asexual. This raises all kinds of questions. About the hollowness of the nuclear family, and how much social performance without substance rewards men. Why the filmmakers stepped away from the Tom of Finland gay-leatherman take of past T-800s.  Carl admits that, despite his flawless heteromasculine performance, he is missing something because of his lack of emotional connection – which Grace has in abundance.

Left: first T-800 Terminator. Center: Drawing by iconic gay artist Tom of Finland. Right: Carl in T:DF – again, almost a composite of the other two.

Harrowingly, both Carl and Grace expect to die – the ‘bury your gays’ trope raises its head as they strategize. Carl submits without protest to Sarah’s expressed desire to eventually kill him. At the film’s climax, Grace presents her own death as a solution, offering her power source as a weapon. There is no doubt for any character that removing her power source, buried in her abdomen, will kill her.

Grace’s sacrifice gains weight if we rewind to the future scene where Grace is attacked by a sophisticated Terminator, a Rev-7. Here, defending an injured Dani, Grace endures a curiously protracted attack from a horrific Rev-7, adorned with tentacular extrusions. In the course of the attack, after piercing Grace’s abdomen, the Rev-7 settles on top of her, opening its headpiece to drink in her cries of agony before judging her no longer a threat. In an action-movie context, it’s an intimate attack, nearly a mechanical rape. Grace ends this scene by howling “Make me an Augment!” to the medic attending her.

In T:DF’s crisis scene, Grace volunteers again, this time to be gutted anew, to pull out her Augment’s power source. It echoes her Rev-9 attack, reframing it as a sacrifice through her love for Dani. Dani is the one who accepts Grace’s offer, penetrating Grace, destroying her queer strength and taking it on in the same act. Through this Dani gains Terminator-land’s ultimate reward: the power to kill a Terminator.

At the end, the problem of Grace remains unsolved – until we see the filmmaker’s take: Dani encountering Grace’s younger, de-sexualised self. The innocence of childhood has returned to Grace. She is, for the straight male gaze, safe and acceptable for Dani to love. But with the movie’s recursive structure this is not the real ending.

In Terminator canon, Grace’s body is the future

Throughout T:DF, for all the filmmakers’ fumbles, Grace remains an ambassador of Terminator’s de-gendered future.

Postapocalyptic futures are often a canvas for sexual and gender fantasy. But Terminator’s canon future is oddly low-gender and neutral. George Miller said about his Max Max universe there was no time or resources for recreational sex.(4) There’s something of this in the Terminator future, too.

In the first Terminator, Sarah asks Kyle about the women of the future. Kyle says, curtly, that they are ‘strong fighters’. It is implied that a feminine woman is rare, especially if Kyle is idealizing a glimpse of resilient Sarah from a photograph. In both T:DF and tie-in Terminator media, like its comics, whatever someone’s biological gender, soldiers and scavengers dress and groom alike. In the future, everybody is masculine of center, even Dani.

Sarah Connor herself gives a gender-erasing twist to Grace’s paired revelations that Dani raised her and Dani is the future’s savior. “She’s John!” Sarah declares, linking Dani to her lost son, enforcing that gender roles don’t matter when there’s a world to save. By this point, all the women are dressed alike in dark military gear, grime, and visible wounds, the advance guard of Terminator’s future.

T:DF’s idea of a happy ending has two parts: the vague idea that The Future Will Survive and a tight focus on Grace and Dani. Young Grace and adult Dani are going to survive the next Judgement Day. They will be reunited in a future where Grace has become a ragged tomboy, addressed as a kid, not a girl. Dani will have gained a new toughness that, in any other context, would label her queer. As an adult in this future, Grace will choose, fervently, to become an Augment – to reclaim her life by increasing her strength and strangeness.

Terminator’s past buries its gays, Terminators and Augments alike: its future is going to empower them. 

1 - https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/linda-hamilton-reconnects-with-sarah-connor-after-all-these-years

2 - https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/terminator-dark-fate-lesbian-subtext-mackenzie-davis.html

3 - https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker-2/la-jetee-j-g-ballard/ J.G. Ballard’s essay on La Jetee describes its emotional impact. If La Jetee’s trope sounds familiar, it’s because it was also adapted into another sci-fi film, Twelve Monkeys.

contrast john’s response here versus two scenes (and particularly the second) in 1.08 ‘vick’s chip’. the episode starts out with a scene at home:

john: mom, food's done. smells done. [sarah voiceover interlude] mom, come on. it's gonna get burned. [sarah voiceover interlude] mom! [sarah rushes out and grabs the roast]

it’s such a teenage boy thing to do and yet I’m like - john - you can get the roast out yourself! and shortly after that, we get this scene while john’s starting work on the titular chip:

john: look, since you obviously have no clue how to read this garbage, would you mind making a 7-11 run or something? pick up some burritos, chocolate milk. [joking tone] it'd mean a lot to me. cameron: [ignores him and sits down] how much power are you giving the chip?

it’s a little thing, but the scene in 2.17 ‘ourselves alone’ genuinely makes me go “character growth! good job, john!” it’s a small thing, but I still dig it. it’s also about john setting boundaries between himself and cameron, but john taking responsibility for himself is also good!

first, in 2.01 ‘samson and delilah’, john and sarah are dealing with the facts of cameron-as-terminator:

sarah: then we need to talk about her. whatever happened with the explosion, it's flipped a switch. she's reverted or something. john: she knows everything. sarah: I know. john: bank accounts. contingency plans. weapons stash. sarah: I know. john: how we run, where we'll go. who we've been, who we'll be. she's stronger and faster. sarah: we have to kill her, john. john: [stabs the table with his knife] I know! [calmer - working to control himself] I know.

that episode later features cameron telling john she loves him, which sarah immediately tries to address and john flatly acknowledges:

sarah: what she said back there, everything she said, it was a trick. you know that, right? they don't feel anything. they don't have feelings. they don't know love. john: [dully] I know that, mom.

then the subject of cameron’s declaration goes into hiding for 17 episodes. it’s not until sarah is facing the belief that cameron killed riley, in 2.18 ‘today is the day - part 1′ that she brings it up again:

sarah: how can you say that? how can you be so sure? john: because I'm sure. and I know her. and she told me. sarah: she told you? just like she told you she destroyed every part we ever captured? just like she tells us what she does every night when we go to sleep? when she comes back in the morning, she's covered in cuts and bruises. hey, just like she told you she loved you? john: [suddenly vibrating with anger] you don't know anything.

this is the second (and last) time sarah brings up that cameron told john she loved him, and these are the only times sarah and john every talk about it. this time john reacts with anger. he practically snarls his response. he’s john, so he doesn’t get violent, but his anger is no longer carefully contained and managed. it’s out there, a living thing, and it’s because of this live wire of cameron. when someone tries to take cameron away from him, john’s core emotion is defensive anger.

john tried to put a lot of distance between himself and cameron this season, because for all that he dated riley in part to create that distance and play at normalcy, john is struggling with the facts of cameron - how much she feels and how much is programming - and what he’s willing to do to keep her. john is no fool; he knows he crossed a line by handing cameron a gun and (essentially) asking for her oath that she’s not here to kill him. he pointed a gun at sarah, derek, and charley to get her back. but if john thinks too much about cameron actually having emotions, or even being able feel things, his attempts at compartmentalization are going to fall right apart.

he’s faced with the blunt reality of cameron’s emotional ability twice in S2. first, in 2.09 ‘complications’, john is confused by cameron sticking her foot out the window:

john: what are you doing? cameron: feeling what it's like to get away. john: I don't think you are. cameron: what do you mean? john: if by feelings you mean emotions, I'm pretty sure you still don't have any of those. and if by feeling you mean what it feels like to have the wind blow through your toes or your hair I'm pretty sure you can't feel that either. cameron: I don't think you understand how we work. I have sensation. I feel. I wouldn't be worth much if I couldn't feel.

note john’s use of “you still don’t have any of those”. if emotions comes from thoughts, there is no reason why cameron - who is made up of thoughts - couldn’t feel things. neither john nor viewers are under the misconception that cameron doesn’t have thoughts, but if john accepts the through line of cameron also having feelings, then he has to accept that she could feel just as much as - and with as much meaning as - humans do.

it seems safe to believe that when cameron makes her big declaration (“I love you john and you love me”), it’s the terminator speaking - lying - because when john gets her chip out, he works on the physical damage. after the repair, cameron chooses to force override the termination order, which contributes to later glitching, but all of that happens after john works on the chip.

and yet, despite this being a lie, it’s also likely that the terminator program chose this lie because of something in cameron, and something they recognized about cameron and john. the terminator program could have chosen any lie; they chose this lie. and that’s why sarah is so concerned, over half a season later, about john believing it - because she believes it. 2.18 ‘today is the day - part 1′ is also the episode where cameron once again ~says she loves him - in riley’s voice, during the cover-up with riley’s foster dad. in neither case is cameron telling john she loves him as herself - but in neither case does john buy that it means absolutely nothing. neither does sarah.

the second time john runs up against the question of cameron’s emotions is in 2.22 ‘born to run’. he’d called her a machine earlier, in reference to concerns about her generator leaking radiation, but cameron then uses that against him after their conversation with ellison, to deflect attention away from her obvious bad reaction to ellison’s question. in other words, she’s trying to deflect attention from the fact that ellison upset her:

cameron: he upset you. john: me? I think he upset you. cameron: you know that's impossible. john: is it? cameron: you said it yourself, john. I'm just a machine.

I often think of this exchange between charlie and cameron in 1.06 ‘dungeons and dragons’ when charlie finds cameron in the garage destroying the vick terminator.

CHARLIE: you know, little girl? you freak me the hell out. on the outside, you're just as pretty as a picture. but on the inside, - you're a - CAMERON: hyper-alloy combat chassey. CHARLIE: is that a complicated way of saying "robot"? CAMERON: cybernetic organism. living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. CHARLIE: okay. scary robot. and here you are, carving up this guy - into chum. CAMERON: he's not a guy. he's a scary robot. CHARLIE: okay, he's a scary robot? you, you're a very scary robot.

cameron seems to have no problem with using she/her pronouns, and seems interested in exploring what it means to play at being a girl, including using makeup, physically mimicking she whom I call estrellita, and roleplaying as john’s “sister”. but josh friedman’s commentary in 2.22 ‘born to run’ puts it bluntly:

“it’s both sort of a way of completing the circle so that they’re together so he will follow her if she goes somewhere, and sort of locks them together, but it’s also a way to remind him “I’m not a girl.” it sort of does both. at least that’s how I always thought of it, both as saying “I’m not a girl but you do love me. but know that what you love is a machine.”

having a robot be an agender character is not new, and veers toward some negative stereotypes about agender people, some of which also end up being used with asexual people, namely that being agender or asexual is something not human. I think that on balance, tscc explores it carefully, but it is a tightrope.

and then we come to the eileen/alan park character, who is, as far as I can tell from the text, a canonical trans woman. I’ve used both names here because she claims both names, but although she initially tells sarah she went into hiding as a woman because she was scared for her life, she later says that this is the life she wanted to lead. but - let’s start at the beginning, with the reveal that eileen was behind the abraham blogs.

SARAH: abraham. where is he? if you know, tell me now. EILEEN: I'm abraham. I'm the one you're looking for. my real name is alan park. SARAH: what else is real? EILEEN: all of it. SARAH: all of it? EILEEN: the research, the blogs. It's all true. SARAH: except the woman part. EILEEN: my life was in danger. I needed to hide.

eileen deliberately puts distance between her identity now and the abraham behind the blogs at the start, which is a distance that sarah struggles to accept after the reveal. so much of the world is black-and-white for sarah - something is or it isn’t - because that’s how she’s needed to survive. someone is a terminator or they aren’t, someone is with john or they’re against him, etc etc etc. this is, I think, part of why she struggles so much both with the terminator in T2 and cameron, whereas john is much more comfortable living in the gray.

at the same time, it’s not entirely clear at this point in the script how eileen sees herself - as a woman, as alan park hiding as a woman, or something else:

EILEEN: oh, really? I'm a man who lives as a woman, and you're a woman who lives as a - SARAH: [pushing eileen against the wall with her gun] stop. EILEEN: what made you so hard?

but then we get the heart-to-heart outside the trailer, where eileen and sarah swap war stories.

SARAH: they tried to kill you. twice. EILEEN: they did kill me. they killed alan park. and I thank them for it. they gave me a gift. the life I was scared to lead. before this happened, I was a cog in the machine. ordinary, repressed. how many people dare to live the life they dream of? face their real fears about who they really are? not their houses, or their jobs, or their habits, but their deepest, truest selves. do you have any idea what I'm talking about? SARAH: I used to be a waitress. killed her too.