Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part One)

Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn as Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in The Terminator

Watching James Cameron’s first two Terminator movies back-to-back, it’s difficult to avoid noticing the biggest change. In 1984’s The Terminator, Kyle Reese quotes a message which John Connor putatively gave him to carry back in time to his mother, Sarah: “I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to tell you that the future is not set.”

By 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that speech had evolved to its more famous form: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” This isn’t a huge difference in terms of words, but the change in meaning is glaring: nothing, the franchise now states, is inevitable. We’re not subject to anyone else’s standards.

This matters because the first movie presents time as a flat circle. Events set in motion must come to fruition, created by the causal loop: the thing created sets itself in motion. Like the great Biblical prophecies, the act of prophesying causes that which is foretold. The fact that Kyle Reese and the Terminator traveled back to destroy John Connor, caused John Connor to be conceived. Then Sarah rides into the sunset, bearing the child of destiny.

But where, in the first movie, Sarah’s knowledge of the future causes that future to happen, by the second movie, knowing the future makes the future malleable. The first movie sees Sarah swept along by history’s tide, helpless to do anything but survive. The second movie sees her take a bold stand against destiny, seize command of fate, and, aided by a band of determined outsiders, change the trajectory of history.

These movies dropped at different times, certainly. Those of us who grew up in Reagan’s America had two overlapping experiences. We were encouraged to believe we could be anything, through hard work and perseverance. But we understood that, no matter our efforts or aspirations, there was a high likelihood, in Reagan’s Manichaean Cold War outlook, that we wouldn’t live to see adulthood.

By 1991, that threat had lifted. The Soviet machine was in eclipse, and America was apparently triumphant. Terminator 2 asserts we aren’t beholden to historical forces, and that humans, not systems, decide history’s greater arc. Anyone willing to resist history’s seemingly ineluctable movement, actually has the power to change history; society and culture are tractable in the second movie, not systemic.

Edward Furlong and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Put another way, these two movies represent two very different interpretations of society and history. The Terminator sees all society, and history as its longitudinal arc, as determined by systems. Kyle and Sarah cannot change history, they can only prevent a more horrible outcome. Terminator 2 sees society and history as composed of humans, as an accumulation of individual narratives. In that view, individuals really can change the arc.

Note, however, how every subsequent sequel has returned to the first movie’s grim inevitability. That’s because the franchise needs a marketable trajectory, of course. But also, the decades since 1991 have shown us that the systems around us aren’t dead just because the Cold War ended. If anything, society today is more technocratic, more adversarial, and more economically unequal than it was in 1984.

As the late legal scholar Derrick Bell pointed out, the forces that surround us have a seemingly inexhaustible ability to adjust to the pressures we put on them. Bell, who was Black, specifically meant racism. But class conflict, nationalism, and other bigotries have adapted to history broadly. The systems controlling our lives have never been successfully broken, only forced to adapt to massed individuals’ transitory outrage.

We’re all trapped, beholden to the social machine we’ve built. But though I say “we,” us individuals didn’t do it, and can’t control the machine once it’s in motion. Kings and priests gave primacy over to capitalists and politicians, proving the system survives by adapting. The Terminator’s violence might exaggerate the forces surrounding us, but we all experience this helplessness, this sense that we’re all feeding the machine.

We could argue that The Terminator, which ends with Sarah riding off into the storm, overstates our inevitability. The machine adapts because we press it to. But Terminator 2 overstates our control. Time isn’t a flat circle; our organized efforts can force the system to change. But that change means the machine adapting, not dying. We must fight the machine, not because we’ll win, but because the fight is right and necessary.

The future is not set. But that doesn’t mean we should be arrogant enough to think we’ve beaten our fate.

Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Two)
Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Three)