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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.