Supplemental Post #3 - Cailin O'Brien

            Before now I had never seen any of James Cameron’s Terminator movies. In fact, I had pretty much written these movies off as being similar to the hard body action packed films of the 1980s. It made it easier to write them off after seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger as the male lead in each. I am almost embarrassed to say how wrong I was about this generalization. After realizing my mistake, once I began reading I was again immediately corrected by Susan Jeffords in her chapter on “Terminal Masculinity – Men in the Early 1990s”. Rather than be about individual accomplishment & glory of the hard bodies, films along the lines of Terminator 2 addresses how these independent feats can break the collective well being. Wonderful message, no? Well, It would be a great message if it focused only on the debilitating power of individualism, greed and aggression. As Jeffords mentions though it is about way more than this. For instance, it is also about the system of justice present within the film and white males dominance of it despite authority. We watch as the police & mental institution fail to protect public citizens while the Terminator goes beyond their authority to save the day. Another aspect being the guilt we feel for the white male (Terminator) in his struggle to transition from cold blooded killer to caring father figure. We are expected to “feel” for him, which I did, just as we feel for the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. I found Jeffords analysis of Disney’s Beauty to be extremely spot on and insightful in this way. Not only do we feel bad for the beast because he has fallen vulnerable to a selfish frame of mind he was not taught to avoid… but we get the idea that "quality and continuity of everyone’s life finally depend on these white men”. The rest of the kingdom and Belle would never attain freedom if the beast was not relinquished from his hard bodied curse.

I think that this movie in particular made me realize the value of analysis over value of entertainment within a genre that I did not particularly think lent to an in depth cultural and societal analysis. For me, it is intriguing to take a movie such as Terminator 2 and look at it in terms of the transition from hard body masculinity to the family man ideal. While most of the films we have looked at are in terms of analysis rather than genuine entertainment, I think that because this movie has been a part of my brothers lives and around during my lifetime as a source of entertainment I never saw it as something to culturally analysis. I only saw it as another scientific fiction film narrating human versus machine dilemma. Both of these films were advertised as machines against humanity situations, but we discover thru the Terminator’s keen observation that machines were never the issue, but rather humans are. He mentions to John that, “it is in your nature to destroy yourselves”, and his existence alone as a human made “Terminator” proves just this.