James Cameron's Long Vietnam Hangover

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)
near the culmination of their journey, in The Terminator

“Listen, understand,” Kyle Reese urges Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bargained with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” His eerie, clenched-teeth delivery is famous. The future’s most villainous forces have sent a monster to kill Sarah, and Kyle must be equally monstrous to protect her.

Nearly forty years after its debut, it’s easy to forget the ambiguity which greeted The Terminator’s first-generation audiences. Though Schwarzenegger’s stone-faced murderer is clearly a monster, and kills people from the beginning, Kyle Reese appears hardly better. He steals a lawman’s gun, flees the police, and carries a shotgun into the night. The only difference between Reese and the Terminator is that Reese shows emotions, mainly desperation.

As the movie develops, Reese’s context becomes clearer. He’s never known anything but war: born into a nuclear-scarred hellscape, he trained in military tactics from childhood. He lives in a bunker, sleeps in his uniform, and cradles his gun like a teddy bear. Unlocking the story, it becomes clear that, where the Terminator lacks emotion because it’s essentially bad, Reese shows damaged, battle-scarred emotions, because he’s basically good.

In my youth, this transition seemed perfectly reasonable. As I’ve written recently, science fiction often tends toward simple binary morality, pitting veritable heroes against straightforward villains. Since I was nine years old when The Terminator dropped, I didn’t understand the cultural context, that America was suffering lingering growing pains. It would be years before I understood PTSD, something many adults were first grappling with then, among Vietnam veterans.

Years later, I watched writer-director James Cameron delivering an interview about his follow-up movie, Aliens. Cameron acknowledged he’d essentially written a Vietnam movie. He asked himself: what would compel a survivor to willingly return to the jaws of combat? In the first Alien movie, Ripley didn’t much fight the xenomorph; every direct challenge got someone killed. Except for the final scene, Ripley’s triumph came from simply staying alive.

In the sequel, though, Ripley chooses combat. She directly challenges the monsters which bedevil her, and destroys them. Like Sarah Connor, she goes from workaday drone, somewhat adrift, to a warrior. But both do so because they have something worth living for: Kyle Reese, in Sarah’s case, and Newt, in Ripley’s. When a meaningful relationship becomes important enough for each woman, she becomes able to kill.

Ripley (Siguorney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn)
near the culmination of their journey, in Aliens

War, Kyle Reese implies, destroys relationships. Though surrounded by people, he’s essentially alone. Sarah Connor’s Polaroid becomes that staple of Vietnam-movie tropes, The Girl Back Home. Even amid constant death and destruction, Reese retains that shred of humanity, because he’s fighting for something outside the theatre of combat. But when he reaches her, he’s so war-scarred that he can’t express it. Sarah is initially terrified of him, and rightly, too.

Private Joker, the narrator of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam classic Full Metal Jacket, famously muses: “The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” This seems contradictory. An indestructible, fearless man would seem robotic. The Terminator is fearless and almost indestructible. Isn’t Arnold, then, the prototypical heroic Vietnam soldier, rather than fear-stricken, haggard Reese?

Reese, the Terminator, Ripley, and the Alien Queen are, for Cameron, four manifestations of Vietnam’s imprint on American society. Reese and Ripley have had war define themselves so thoroughly that, like their Baby Boomer culture, they can’t imagine life without it. Reese, the soldier, is scarred, carrying the war inside himself. Ripley, the civilian, simply accepts the mental image of the pursuing xenomorph as her constant shadow self.

The Terminator, by contrast, simply kills, because that’s his programming. No officers, no end-point, just a mission to kill. The Queen is arguably worse: she doesn’t just kill, she teaches the homeland a culture of killing and appetite (see Kathleen Belew’s history of White Power). Reese and Ripley adapt to their circumstances: Reese by actually expressing love, Ripley by defending her surrogate daughter Newt. The Terminator and the Queen never adapt.

Therefore, the moral binary in James Cameron’s early work isn’t between Good and Evil. It’s between those capable of change, and those incapable. In post-Vietnam America, haunted by the reality of our shared culpability, Good and Evil seemed increasingly outmoded. We’ve never successfully embraced these paradigms since. Cameron’s early movies remain timely because they offer an alternate morality, asking: are we able to change?