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DeLoreans and Phone Booths: THE TERMINATOR

by Sam Morris, Staff Writer

“The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight.” 

James Cameron begins The Terminator (1984) with the above text accompanied by images of  Los Angeles in 2029. Large machines shoot lasers and crush human skulls in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Cameron will revisit 2029 throughout the film, but we spend most of the film in 1984, the “Tonight” of the opening text. Physicist and engineer Paul Nahin’s summary of  The Terminator does a great job of laying out both the ramifications of and the possible confusion inherent in framing the film in the future but having all of the action take place in the present day: “a time-traveling robot-killer from the future of 2029 appears in the Los Angeles of the present to murder the woman who will (already has?) give(n) birth to a son who has (will have?) enemies in the future” (48-9). Or, as time traveler Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) puts it, “One possible future. From your point of view. I don't know tech stuff.”

The uncertainty in the use of tense in Nahin’s statement sets up two divergent viewpoints on non-quantum time travel (i.e., time travel that exists in a single universe), which most time travel narratives in the 1980s employed. You know, “tech stuff.” For Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the film’s accidental protagonist, 2029 is the future; it hasn’t happened yet. For Kyle Reese, however, who has come back from 2029 to protect Sarah Connor from the T-800, 1984 is the future because he has not lived during this time period yet. The temporal perspective of the audience is also vital here: an audience in 1984 will always fundamentally sympathize with the ramifications of the film that center on 1984. Thus, any ethical consideration the 1984 audience makes will be from their point of view. Of course, that means that, in 2023, our ethical considerations might come from a differing third point of view. Which makes sense because, after all, when we watch a film from 1984, aren’t we time travelers ourselves?

In most time travel films such as Back to the Future, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and even Avengers: Endgame, we are invited by the filmmakers to identify with the traveler. Cameron, however, asks us to do the opposite, shifting perspective from Kyle Reese, the traveler, to Sarah Connor, the audience’s 1984-surrogate. Cameron shifts between these perspectives to accomplish a sense of confusion. If the audience stays with Reese, it would be encouraged to sympathize with Reese and his actions, which works against the temporal ethical standard of 1984. Because the audience primarily sympathizes with Sarah Connor, however, Cameron forces the audience to remain uncertain about Reese’s intentions, thus creating uncertainty about the ethical question inherent in a traveler from the future who meddles with the present of the audience.

And, really, why shouldn’t the audience be uncertain about Kyle Reese? Consider his appearance: gaunt, scarred, exhausted. Is this humanity’s savior? He looks like he can barely stand on his own two feet, let alone be the savior of the human race. Sarah Connor, too, takes quite a while to believe Reese. First, she assumes that, based on his appearance, he is the killer who is targeting all the Sarah Connors in the area; even after he provides an explanation of what is going on, she refuses to believe him because of the explanation’s implausibility. Only after the T-800 has destroyed a police station and left a trail of dead bodies in his wake does Connor begin to believe Reese. This willingness sets up the ultimate implausibility of the film: Reese proclaiming his love for Connor. Film studies professor Karen B. Mann describes the proclamation as “the one temporal impossibility in the story to be a product of sexual desire. His ‘love’ has required the leaping of a gap which the order of things defines to be unbridgeable” (22). In other words, the power of love (Great Scott!) is stronger than science. Laugh now, but that’s also the plot of Interstellar. In any case, once Connor is convinced of Reese’s story’s plausibility and his love for her, the audience is similarly convinced that Reese is credible and thus ethical in his actions.

Hold on! Is the power of love more important than ethics? Humanity’s sympathy for love or other emotion-based narratives do tend to ameliorate many ethical quandaries–this is as true today as it was in 1984. Plus, assuming the audience is composed of humans, it is likely to fundamentally agree that humanity should be saved. Perhaps that’s why referring to the T-800 as coming back to the past to perform a “retroactive abortion” isn’t something that gets talked about much in the context of The Terminator. To that point, Cameron presents the T-800 as an antagonist upon his arrival to 1984 by depicting him as an amoral murderer, before the audience even knows that he is a cyborg sent to destroy humanity’s only hope. The T-800’s perfect physique, as depicted by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is compared to Reese’s appearance, emphasizing the humans’ underdog status in the narrative. 

Here is the fulcrum of the ethical dilemma of The Terminator: in 2029, humans have already won the war. Reese tells Connor (and the audience) that the machines used time travel as a cheat, a way to change a narrative that has already all but played itself out. If the machines can win with this “last-ditch” strategy, then they will be the writers of history and the entities who define what is ethical and what is not. However, since humanity and its sense of ethics has not yet been annihilated, the paradigm in which the machines must still operate is that they are ethically bankrupt and will do anything to win. That ethical bankruptcy is the justification for the humans’ use of time travel to adjudicate the machines’ cheating. In these sorts of time travel narratives, two wrongs do make a right. Again, laugh now, but that’s also the plot of Back to the Future 2.

One takeaway from this ethical analysis of The Terminator is that members of the audience, either in 1984 or now, have no real way of viewing the actions of the machines except from their own worldviews. While it may seem nonsensical to suggest that the audience should lend some measure of sympathy to the machines, what the audience does in refusing to do so is historicize the future by claiming that humans (as opposed to the machines) represent the ultimate good, which justifies their actions. What if Kyle Reese was a terrible person? Once more, laugh now, but that’s the plot of the behind-the-scenes footage of Terminator Salvation when someone walks through Christian Bales’ shot.

We can justify as many of John Connor’s and Kyle Reese’s actions as we like, but The Terminator still relies on the time travel no-no of “reverse causation.” Physicists David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood explain reverse causation in this way:

Time travel appears to allow knowledge to flow from the future to the past and back, in a self-consistent loop, without anyone or anything ever having to grapple with the corresponding problems. What is philosophically objectionable here is not that knowledge-bearing artifacts are carried into the past—it is the “free lunch” element. The knowledge required to invent the artifacts must not be supplied by the artifacts themselves. (71)

Reese can travel back to 1984 to save Sarah Connor–no problem. John Connor can even be responsible for sending his own father back to the past. But if John Connor knows that Kyle Reese is his father, then that is definitely cheating. But even if we’re okay with reverse causation, that cause and effect can flow backward through time, then we are still left with the “free lunch” problem. Imagine that I went to the past to help my past self solve an equation that, in the future, I know that I had solved. I can help past-me solve the equation by leaving hints and other means of trickery. The one thing I cannot do is give past-me the equation outright: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Past-me still has to do the work to make the discovery. Or how will future-me know that I made the discovery?

Consider, though, that perhaps the machines anticipated that the incomplete destruction of the T-800 combined with humanity’s tendency toward innovation would result in the sentience of the machines. In this possibility, there is certainly reverse causation, but is the T-800 arm a “free lunch” or not. The audience in 1984 doesn’t seem to care much about time travel inconsistencies; what Reese does is ethically permissible, and that’s all that matters. In future films, we’ll see more tension between the rules of time travel and ethics. For Cameron, though, drama is king–only he would write the message that John sent to his mother via Reese: “Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.”

But as Ted “Theodore” Logan would say, “But he did exist! EXCELLENT!!!” After trips to outer space and the underwater depths, Cameron would check back in with Sarah Connor with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah Connor’s bogus journey will give us another perspective on these questions of time travel and ethics.

Works Cited

  • Deutsch, David, and Michael Lockwood. “The Quantum Physics of Time Travel.” Scientific American, Mar. 1994, pp. 68-74.

  • Grey, William. “Troubles with Time Travel.” Philosophy, vol. 74, no. 287, 1999, pp. 55-70.

  • Mann, Karen B. “Narrative Entanglements.” Film Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 2, 1989, pp. 17-27. 

  • Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. 2nd ed., AIP, 1999.

  • Richmond, Alasdair. “Time-Travel Fictions and Philosophy.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2001, pp. 305-318.