When I say “the TechNoir scene in The Terminator,” every GenX reader knows exactly what I mean. Sarah Connor escapes Kyle Reese, whom she mistakes for a violent stalker, by hiding inside a neon-fronted dance club. She sits uncomfortably at a table, awaiting police intervention, while dancers kick up around her, their brightly colored party clothes to the dimly lit club. Unfortunately, her patiently waiting makes her a sitting duck for her real attacker, Arnold.
This weekend, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s semi-elected dictator-for-life, put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on “special alert.” Putin pulled this move, not in response to his army’s inability to take smaller, less populous Ukraine quickly, but in response, he said, to Western rhetoric surrounding his invasion. That is, Putin probably won’t nuke Ukraine, with its valuable farmland and mineral resources, but any NATO countries which come to Ukraine’s defense. He’s put the world on a Cold War footing.
It’s impossible to separate The Terminator from the Cold War. Though the United States had dropped the feel-good maneuver of duck-and-cover drills, with their illusion that one could survive a nuclear blast, by the time I hit elementary school in 1980, we were still daily conscious that the bombs could fall at any minute. Reagan-era rah-rah confidence was double-edged: hard work and determination could take us anywhere, but we were also constantly about to die.
American youth handled this fatalism in divided ways. Much recent 1980s nostalgia, like Netflix’s Stranger Things and ABC’s The Goldbergs, focus on the brightly colored flamboyance that got captured in a lot of photographs. But smarter critics than me point out that bright colors and garish prints were the exception, not the rule; much of the 1980s was brown, from cars and restaurant decor, to the clothing adults wore daily. It was a drab-colored era.
We see this spotlighted in the TechNoir scene. The characters are dressed ostentatiously, the colors bright and the prints vibrant. But the room itself is poorly lit, a problem accentuated by the low-hanging pall of cigarette smoke. Several dancers prance around, doing a strange pony trot in place, bent at the waist so they’re studying their partners’ shoes. Almost like, in the midst of the party atmosphere, the dancers are fleeing something dark and terrible.
This weekend’s nuclear alert pushes the world closer to full nuclear conflict than at any time since Able Archer 83. In 1983, NATO forces held a joint preparedness wargame effort in the North Sea, between Scotland and Norway. The only problem was, nobody bothered to warn the Warsaw Pact. Viewed from Moscow, the wargame looked like forces organizing for an amphibious assault. Moscow prepared to defend itself from the anticipated attack, with nukes if necessary.
It’s possible to find 1980s movies about nuclear war caused by Malice, and in most cases, it’s presented as Soviet malice. Red Dawn or The Day After showcase military forces ranging from incompetent to downright evil. But following Able Archer 83, other movies depicted a military machine unprepared for rapidly changing technology. The Terminator, like WarGames, depicts an American military arsenal hijacked by intelligent computers, and humans unprepared to stop the terror they had created.
Faced with this reality, American youth split. Consider The Breakfast Club, and particularly the collision between Claire Standish and John Bender. Twho over-the-top personalities, they represent respective responses to the times. Claire dresses garishly, lives for sensual pleasure, and skips school to go shopping. Bender wears muted colors, dresses like he’s preparing for a street fight, and antagonizes others. Both manners are nihilistic responses to the expectation that, in nuclear-armed times, there is no future.
The fact that Claire and Bender kiss at the movie’s culmination serves the same purpose that dancing in the TechNoir provides. Of course these two share an attraction; notwithstanding Bender’s abusive behavior, they share fundamental values. Bright colors dancing in the dark, or the brawler and the princess exchanging saliva; it comes to the same end either way. To the extent that the 1980s were garish-colored, it was because those living then expected to die.
The Terminator, with its 1980s collision of party culture and violence, gave way to Terminator 2, in which John Connor starts the movie zooming around, looking for a purpose. The threat of nuclear annihilation was terrible, certainly. But at least it gave us something to live for right now, which the subsequent peace didn’t. The grouchy snarling of 1990s pop culture represented a culture cut loose. Unless something happens, it’s the future we now have.
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