We’re back with the third installment of this series looking at the Terminator film franchise. In this week’s episode, we examine Terminator 3 which, although it was not a total flop, nevertheless was almost universally recognised as an inferior movie compared to the first two. The failure of the movie was not, however, in the quality of its acting, special effects, or editing. The real problem with Terminator 3 was in the story. What we will see in this week’s analysis is that T3 failed to create the core archetypal meanings that had made the first and second movies such great stories. Without this grounding, the film lacked emotional depth. By analysing this failure, we not only learn to see why T3 failed, we also gain a deeper appreciation of how good the storytelling was in the first two movies.
Author: Simon Sheridan
Terminator 2: An Archetypal Analysis
We are back for the second in our mini-series analysing the Terminator film franchise from the point of view of Archetypology. Up this week is what is undoubtedly the greatest of the Terminator films: Terminator 2. When we apply the archetypal lens to the story, we find a family dynamic which revolves around the mission of the hero, John Connor, to resolve childhood trauma and take the leap into the Orphan phase of life. In order for John to achieve his mission, Sarah Connor must overcome the Devouring Mother archetype and the T-800 must give up the role of Tyrannical Father. All of them must learn to bypass “fate” by destroying a worldview which is holding them back.
The Terminator: An Archetypal Analysis
For some time now I’ve been wanting to try my hand at the podcast format just to see what’s it like, and after realising that last week’s post left a number of themes unexplored in relation to the Terminator franchise, I thought it would be a good test case to do a more in-depth analysis of the films. So, that’s what I’ll be doing for the next few weeks. This week’s “episode” is a more detailed look at the first film in the series, The Terminator, and includes an introduction that goes over some of the more theoretical aspects of the archetypal analysis of stories and film.
Click the play button below if you’d like to hear my dulcet tones. (Note: for anybody subscribed to my Substack, I’ll be uploading the podcasts there too).
The Terminator Movies: An Archetypal Analysis Part 1
Long-term readers would know that I did my degree in linguistics and worked briefly as a linguist after graduating. I think this must explain my fascination with archetypal analysis since it involves an identical process to linguistics of looking beneath the surface forms for the deeper patterns at play. Even though I’ve been on this archetypal journey for about four years now, I still find it surprising and enjoyable to discover new examples.
So it was this week as I stumbled across a clip of one of the Terminator movies on my internet travels and realised that almost all of that franchise consists of what I call Orphan Stories. That is, they are stories about heroes who are dealing with the challenges of the Orphan phase of life. As is usually the case, pulling at the archetypal thread opened up a number of interesting issues which will take a couple of posts to explore. To begin with, though, we’ll need a quick refresher on the Orphan archetype which provides the grounding for the Terminator films.
The Orphan archetype sits between the Child and Adult phases of life. It is what is generally called adolescence. This is the time of life when we begin to establish our sexual, political, economic, and religious identities. The reason why the archetype is called the Orphan is because it requires us to separate from our parents psychologically and socially in order to find a place outside the family home in wider society.
The Orphan phase of life begins with puberty and ends when we graduate into adulthood, meaning our sexual, economic, political, and religious identities move into their mature phase. Although it can differ from individual to individual, the core components of the Adult phase of life include getting married and having children, beginning our career (economic identity) and fully participating in the political and religious customs of our culture. It is this mature set of identities that we begin to develop during the Orphan phase of life.
We can see from this brief overview that the archetypes imply a developmental progression. For any archetype that we are in, there is only one direction to proceed, i.e., onwards to the next archetype. We can never go back to a previous archetype, but we can cling to the previous archetype longer than we should. This clinging is pathological when it prevents us from moving into the next phase of life, and this dynamic forms the core of a great many stories, including the Terminator movies. They are about the hero moving from one archetype to the next (or failing to do so).
The Terminator movies are nominally science fiction films featuring high-tech robots sent back from a dystopian future. But, with archetypal analysis, we need to look beneath these surface forms and focus on the archetypal dynamic that grounds the challenge faced by the hero. The paradox of science fiction is that, from a storytelling point of view, it functions much more like ancient myth. We can think of the terminator character as the modern-day equivalent of the giants and monsters of the mythical world. He is a primal force which we mere humans must confront as an existential threat.
What Jung realised was that the giants and monsters of myths were symbols of the unconscious. And that’s the exact same role that the terminator plays. He is a symbol of the iron laws of fate. That’s why he comes from the future. The word “fate” comes from the Latin fata, meaning a prophecy or oracle that must come true. In archetypal terms, what must happen is that we must proceed through the sequence of archetypes. It is our fate to graduate from the Orphan to the Adult and from the Adult to the Elder. The question is not whether we make the transition but only how we do it.
The terminator is a messenger from the future who operates psychologically as the bearer of unwelcome news: “Hey, you. It’s time to grow up.” It is because the messenger is unwelcome that he comes from the unconscious mind. More specifically, the message has been pushed into the unconscious but now rises up as a final challenge to the conscious ego. That is what is going on archetypally in the Terminator movies.
Let’s now explore this dynamic more precisely and go through the movies one by one.
The Terminator
The hero of the first Terminator movie is Sarah Connor, a young woman who, while she may technically be an Adult, is really stuck in the Orphan phase of life. Yes, she has a job (economic identity), but we see at the start of the movie that it’s not a very good job, and she is not exactly highly motivated to perform it well. More generally, she is still living the carefree lifestyle of a teenager, free from the kinds of real responsibility that characterise the Adult phase of life.
Sarah needs to grow up, i.e., to make the transition from Orphan to Adult. Since she is already there biologically speaking, her growth must be in the socio-cultural and psychological realms.
It may seem like a long way from a modern high-tech sci-fi movie to a medieval fairy tale, and yet the first Terminator movie has its archetypal equivalent in numerous fairy tales with young female heroes. Fairy tales almost always represent the call from the unconscious in the form of a powerful and dangerous symbol not unlike the terminator.
Moreover, fairy tales make clear that the consequence of not making the archetypal transition is death, either literally or metaphorically. Thus, Snow White is presumed dead after eating the poisoned apple, while Sleeping Beauty is also apparently dead after pricking her finger on the spindle. The terminator’s mission to kill Sarah puts him on a par with the evil queens and wicked fairies of medieval myth. Perhaps the closest fairy tale to Sarah Connor’s story is Cinderella, since Sarah is the modern world’s equivalent of a washerwoman (waitress).
The first Terminator movie presents an innovation on the premise of the young woman’s graduation to adulthood. It is not Sarah herself that is the primary target but her unborn son. Since becoming a Mother is one of the most important components of the Adult phase of life for women, the terminator’s mission represents Sarah’s failure to transition to adulthood. He is a symbol of the shadow form of the psyche that is trying to deny fate. That shadow form forces itself into Sarah’s conscious mind and forces her to make a choice one way or the other.
Following the fairy tale analogy, Kyle Reese, the human who has been sent back to save Sarah from the terminator, is the equivalent of the knight in shining armour or the handsome prince who will break the spell and usher the princess into adulthood. The fact that he initially presents to Sarah like a madman or a homeless person is not a surprise. Just as the ugly frog will turn into a handsome prince if only the princess will get over herself, Sarah must learn to see Kyle for what he is or what he can be. What he can be, of course, is the father of her child.
In summary, the terminator is the all-powerful symbol of fate. He is a prophecy from the future forcing Sarah to confront the archetypal challenge that she has been avoiding. Kyle is the handsome prince who will become the father of Sarah’s child, thereby ushering her into the role of Mother. This change requires her to let go of the carefree life of the Orphan and accept the responsibilities of the Adult.
Of course, Terminator is not a fairy tale with a happy ending. It’s a dystopian sci-fi where Sarah makes the transition to Adult in a world with a bleak future.
Nevertheless, the first movie ends with Sarah’s successful transition into the Mother role and therefore her graduation to adulthood. That leads us into the second movie in the series.
Terminator 2
The hero of Terminator 2 is the young John Connor, and here we see an interesting variation on the archetypal dynamic from the first movie. In the first movie, Sarah was officially an Adult but had not made the transition to adulthood in a meaningful sense. The archetypal resonance of the story is about her need to become an Adult.
With the young John Connor, we have a boy who is on the cusp of the Orphan phase of life but is struggling to make the transition. It’s the same archetypal dynamic as the Netflix TV series Adolescence, which I analysed in recent posts. Just like Jamie, John Connor is off to a bad start as an Orphan, wagging school, disrespecting his foster parents, and getting into crime.
How fitting is it, then, that the evil terminator in the second movie is going to take the form of a policeman? Just like the T-800 in the first movie, the T-1000 is a prophecy from the future, a symbol of what awaits John if he continues down the pathway of crime.
The big twist in Terminator 2, of course, is that the T-800 becomes the good guy who is going to save John. He is now in the same role that Kyle Reese played in the first movie. But clearly the T-800 is not going to fulfil the archetype of the white knight. This raises the question: what archetype does the T-800 fulfil in the second movie? What is its relationship to John Connor?
One option would be the archetypal Elder. This works because John Connor is the right age to be guided by such an Elder. However, the T-800 is not there to teach or instruct John but to protect him. Therefore, he is not an Elder archetype but, rather, a Father archetype.
The T-800 is going to become the Father-figure that John never had. This reading is reinforced by the fact that the movie will involve John also reuniting with his Mother, thus giving us a classic nuclear family configuration.
Terminator 2 involves John Connor experiencing the childhood that he missed because his parents were absent. It’s about resolving his childhood trauma, thereby allowing him to progress to the Orphan archetype. That is why the T-800 needs to “die” at the end of the movie. In order for John to enter the Orphan phase of life, he must separate from his “parents”. The death of the T-800 symbolises the separation from the father. But the happy ending to the story also symbolises the separation from the narrative that Sarah Connor has been bound by and which she has foisted onto John (that he must “save the world”).
Since the action of Terminator 2 is supposed to prevent the dystopian future from happening, that means John and Sarah no longer need to save the world. They are both free at the end of the movie to become normal people again. Thus, we have a three-way archetypal progression in the story. The T-800 learns to stop being the Tyrannical Father, the all-powerful godlike figure that Fathers represent to their young sons, and develop some level of empathy. Sarah learns to stop being the Devouring Mother and forcing her narrative and worldview onto John. That means John is now free to become a normal teenage boy (an Orphan).
That should have put an end to it. But the box office success of Terminator 2 meant that the bean counters in Hollywood were never going to be able to resist the temptation to wring every last dollar out of the franchise. That brings us to Terminator 3.
Terminator 3
We have now seen the pattern that the first two Terminator movies established. The terminator comes from the future as a messenger calling the hero to resolve the archetypal problems they are facing. For Sarah Connor in the first movie, this was her need to move into the Adult phase of life, symbolised by becoming a Mother. In the second movie, it was about Sarah learning to let go and allow John the freedom and space to grow up (become an Orphan). For John Connor, the second movie was about the need to resolve the relationship with his “parents” and thereby move into the Orphan phase of life.
Terminator 3 combines a little bit of each dynamic from the first two movies. John Connor is once again the hero, only now he finds himself in the exact same situation as his mother in the first movie i.e. he is technically an Adult but is stuck in the Orphan mindset, drifting along in a life without meaning or responsibility.
The terminator’s message from the future is a call for John to become an Adult. This message is reinforced by the fact that the evil terminator is also trying to kill John’s future wife, Kate Brewster. John and Kate’s married (Adult) life is calling them from the future.
The interesting twist here, which is nevertheless very fitting from an archetypal point of view, is that the evil terminator in the third movie is a beautiful female. Ideally, the movie would have featured a scene where the T-X seduces John, but I guess that couldn’t be done since such a seduction would have required her to be close enough to him to kill him. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to see the T-X as a symbol of the hyper-feminine, leading the young man astray from his mission to find true love; all very fitting in the age of online porn and OnlyFans.
What John needs to do is connect with a real woman. Since Kate is technically the co-hero of the movie, the terminators also work in relation to her situation. Unlike John, she has already taken a big step into the Adult phase of life by establishing a career that she enjoys. However, she is stuck in a loveless relationship, and so the terminator’s arrival is her symbol from the unconscious to seek true love (with John).
Thus, the archetypal dynamic of Terminator 3 is for both John and Kate to take the leap into the Adult phase of life, a call from the future to get married.
Terminator: Dark Fate
The next two films in the franchise were Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys. Both were awful, and the less said about them, the better. It’s no coincidence, though, that neither film had a proper archetypal dynamic at the core of the plot.
That just leaves one more film to talk about, Terminator: Dark Fate. It was also a box office flop. It also features a confused story that has no obvious archetypal resonance. Nevertheless, Dark Fate’s failure is worth analysing in more detail because it at least tries to construct a convincing archetypal dynamic.
Nominally, Dark Fate gave us the same dynamic as the first movie. The hero of the story seems to be Dani, a working-class girl, just as Sarah Connor was.
Just like Sarah Connor was forced out of stasis at the start of the first movie by the terminator killing her flatmate, the terminator in Dark Fate kills Dani’s father and brother, giving us the classic Orphan Story set up (separation from family). Where Dark Fate diverges from the earlier film is that it makes Dani not the Mother of the future leader of the resistance, or even a co-leader like Kate was in T3, but as the future leader in her own right. Thus, she is a kind of combination of Sarah and John Connor.
Another alteration to the standard plot that Dark Fate give us is that it’s not a terminator sent from the future to save Dani but rather a cybernetically enhanced human, Grace. She’s kind of a combination of Kyle Reese and the T-800.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this. The problem is that it’s not clear what relationship is supposed to exist between Dani and Grace. Kyle was the white knight to Sarah Connor in the first film. The T-800 was a father figure to John in T2. Grace doesn’t present any obvious archetypal relationship to Dani. She’s not a mother figure. She’s not a love interest. At best, they are friends. Perhaps because of that, the film can’t seem to decide which of them is the real hero of the story.
This archetypal confusion extends into the relationship between the new evil terminator and the two heroes. The evil terminator, the Rev-9, also doesn’t represent any specific archetype. He’s basically an everyman who just happens to be a killing machine.
In the first movie, the evil terminator was just a blunt force of nature, which worked perfectly as a representation of fate. In the second movie, the evil terminator was a cop, representing the future that awaited John Connor if he continued his life of crime. In the third film, the evil terminator was the beautiful woman, representing the hyper-feminine threatening to get between John and Kate. All these were archetypally and symbolically fitted to the character of the hero.
Yet, in Dark Fate, we are presented with a completely generic evil terminator. He’s so generic that they didn’t even bother to put him on the posters for the movie. Was this just a random blunder? I don’t think so. The problem with Dark Fate is that it can’t figure out who its hero is. Because of that, there is no primary archetypal dynamic to the movie and because that is missing, the writers couldn’t figure out who the evil terminator should be. So, they chose a terminator that symbolises nothing in particular.
All this starts to sound a lot like the problems that plagued the two prior Terminator movies, including the truly awful Genisys, which has to be one of the worst movies ever made. But I think there’s something more interesting going on with Dark Fate. There’s a quite specific reason why the writers couldn’t figure out who the hero is.
Unlike Genisys, Dark Fate not a complete train wreck. In fact, the start of the movie matches the first three in beginning to develop an archetypal dynamic featuring an Orphan hero. Ironically, where Dark Fate really starts to fall apart is with the introduction of Sarah Connor and then the T-800. It’s as if some studio executive said, “recreate the magic of the first movies” and that message was taken as a literal instruction to hire the same actors.
What ends up happening is that Sarah Connor is brought in to quite literally save the day near the beginning of the movie. But this short-circuits the whole dynamic between Dani and Grace.
The protector from the future in this case is Grace. She is supposed to save the hero at the beginning of the movie. Ultimately, the hero of the story, Dani, is supposed to be able to save herself by the end of the movie. The introduction of Sarah Connor to save them both subverts the pattern. That’s not necessarily a problem. Rules are made to be broken. But the introduction of Sarah makes the already problematic question of who the hero is even more problematic. What’s more, it loads the plot with the huge extra burden of explaining why Sarah is there (something which the writers are unable to achieve successfully).
All this gets even worse when Schwarzenegger is wheeled out later in the movie. Perhaps the main reason that Dark Fate can’t figure out its hero is because it has to carry the weight of the heroes from earlier movies. The result is a completely confused archetypal dynamic that works for none of the characters.
I can’t imagine it was intentional, but the spectacle that Dark Fate provides us with is a couple of ageing boomer actors (Linda Hamilton and Schwarzenegger) parachuting into a movie where they don’t belong and leaving the younger actors with no room to move. Presumably they also took the lion’s share of the payroll too. Sounds like a perfect metaphor for wider society these days.
But what we see in Dark Fate is not just a question of boomers being boomers and refusing to step aside for the next generation. It raises a number of interesting issues around fame, individuality vs archetypes in storytelling, and the nature of modern media. We’ll explore those in next week’s post.
The Trouble of Interpretation
As part of the research for my upcoming book, The Initiation of Nietzsche, I’ve been revisiting the works of the philosopher and the broader cultural background of the 19th century in which they emerged. It’s something that we take for granted nowadays, but one of the big cultural shifts that occurred at that time was, in Nietzschean language, the freedom of interpretation, especially in relation to the Bible.
This trend had begun with the Reformation but we have to remember that the main instigators of that movement were all university scholars. Their rebellion against the Catholic Church was born out of their ability to read the Bible and especially their belief that the Church’s official translation, the Vulgate, was incorrect. It must be remembered that, at that time, the average person in Europe was illiterate and there were no vernacular translations of the Bible anyway. Thus, the average person was not free to make their own interpretation even if they wanted to. One of the main achievements of the Reformation was to make the Bible available to the general public in their own language.
But just having Bibles in vernacular translation was not enough. People needed to be literate in order to read them. In Protestant lands in the aftermath of the Reformation, there was a massive push for literacy among the general public so that people could read the Bible for themselves. Teaching literacy was mostly carried out by the various Protestant churches. As a result, literacy in the Protestant lands was much higher on average than in Catholic ones, although the Reformation also sparked a Catholic response which resulted in more emphasis on education.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see what would happen once everybody was able to form their own opinions on the holy book. Luther himself had spent hundreds and hundreds of pages discussing the finer points of scripture with Erasmus. If you’ve ever seen a long internet thread where two people are arguing past each other and never coming to an agreement, you have some idea of what the correspondence between Luther and Erasmus is like. It’s no surprise, then, that Protestantism gave rise to thousands of different sects all claiming a slightly different interpretation of the holy book.
At that time, most people saw the Bible as being infallible and any misunderstandings were the fault of the reader. However, the inconsistencies in the text perhaps inevitably gave rise to a new idea that took root among scholars and philosophers. The Protestants had noticed problems with the text, but they had blamed the Church for its sloppy scholarship. They never doubted that the text itself came from God. The scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, eventually got round to the notion that the text itself was not the direct word of God. That opened the way for a whole new set of interpretations.
Eventually, we get to philosophers and scholars such as Feuerbach or Renan, who no longer interpreted the Bible as the word of God or Jesus as the son of God but rather treated it all as the work of man. Feuerbach claimed that all theology was really just a projection of human psychology. Meanwhile, Renan claimed that Jesus was a teacher and reformer, rather than the son of God.
This was all fine and there was some interesting work done by these thinkers. Nevertheless, there was a big a problem with their analysis, one that was intolerable to Nietzsche. Now, because Nietzsche framed his critique in terms of logic and science, he has been placed in the same camp as modern atheists who come from the positivist or similar schools of thought. In fact, Nietzsche couldn’t abide the scholarly approach to the subject precisely because he could see the power behind the religious viewpoint. The lukewarm approach of the scholars watered down both the logical and religious viewpoints into a paltry compromise.
Nietzsche set out to highlight the tension that existed between the logical and religious viewopints by engaging in a new method of interpretation. He no longer reserves the right to reinterpret the gospels according to a different overarching framework of understanding; he proclaims the right also to call the authors of the text into question. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche, in his usual bombastic and belligerent fashion, proclaims the writers of the gospels as bigots and madmen. From there it follows that the actual text itself cannot be taken at face value and this gives Nietzsche the licence to reverse engineer the story. Jesus becomes an “idiot”. His unwillingness to fight back against crucifixion follows from this fact. The whole rest of the gospel is just a fiction born out of the desire of the disciples to turn a farce into a heroic quest with a happy ending.
This extreme degree of reinterpretation follows from genuine problems in how we understand the text. For example, nobody these days can believe the parts of the gospel where Jesus miraculously heals the sick, brings a woman back from the dead with the touch of his hand, or walks on water. But if we simply ignore or reinterpret those parts of the story, then how do we argue against others who might want to ignore another section of the text? If everybody is ignoring different parts of the text, then everybody will actually be telling a different story and we’re no longer even talking about the same thing. The grounds for a shared interpretation then break down.
Moreover, if we can’t believe in the miracle cure part of the story, then we can’t just ignore it. We need an explanation for why it was put in. That explanation has to come back to the writers and their audience. Did they really believe it? Were they just following the literary convention associated with stories about prophets? Either way, we’re no longer worried about the story itself but the writers and broader cultural context in which it was written. Nietzsche’s seemingly ad hominem analysis is correct in principle, even if we disagree with his deliberately inflammatory opinion.
One of the larger points that Nietzsche was making was that once you allow for freedom of interpretation, you also open the way for radically divergent takes on a story. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jesus goes from being a hero to being an idiot. Such inversions are something we have to live with in our time. For example, some people think Trump is going to save the USA, others think he’s going to destroy it. It’s the same man. Only the interpretations differ. But interpretations are how we make sense of the world. Therefore, in some sense, we’re not even living in the same world when we can’t agree on the basic facts of reality.
Nietzsche foresaw these problems, and that’s why later in his life he came to see the Reformation as a disaster. While the sacred text was in the safe hands of the church leaders, all the little inconsistencies could be quietly left out of the discussion. This is a variation of what Socrates called the noble lie. It might sound like a good idea to open the discussion of “truth” to everybody, but then you just get endless bickering.
It should be clear that this process of simply leaving out the inconsistencies in order to create a sensible narrative is exactly what governments do all the time. We all just lived through possibly one of the most extreme examples of that in history with the corona debacle, which was so absurd that the only way to deal with it is to never speak of it again and pretend it never happened. But that’s the point that Nietzsche was making with his re-interpretation of the gospel. An idiot and a group of madmen came up with a story that was a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, that story changed the world. From a cause and effect point of view, it makes no sense. We need another way to understand it.
The other way that Nietzsche laid the groundwork for and which Freud and Jung refined was psychological. Even if the gospels are complete fabrications, they still constitute one of the greatest stories ever told. The fact that the story has all kinds of logical contradictions is only a problem if you think the world runs on logic. And that ended up being one of the central points that came out of the whole episode. What if the world doesn’t run on logic? Or, what if “nature” runs on logic but there is a higher force that is beyond logic? The illogicality of the story then becomes a feature, not a bug.
Perhaps ironically, the situation we face now is very similar to that in the Levant during the time of Jesus, where there was a seemingly endless string of saviours and prophets all competing for attention while the Jewish religious authorities struggled to maintain control of the narrative. The fact that John the Baptist and Jesus were both put to death is evidence for how threatened those authorities were. Socrates met the same fate in large part due to the tumult in Athens in the 4th century. It seems hard to believe, but the current ferment is exactly the kind of milieu that could give rise to a new messiah in our time.