Making babies: James Cameron’s Aliens

James Cameron’s first film, Terminator (1986), concerns a threat posed to the future of the human race by the unintended evolution of a species of machines which respond to a threat to their own survival from their creators (who try to unplug SkyNet, the selfaware strategic defence computer who ‘fathers’ this species) by trying to annihilate them – first by nuclear war, then by genocide. The machines send a cybernetic organism back through time to kill the woman who will give birth to the leader of the successful human resistance; and the film charts the ensuing struggle between this ‘terminator’ and a resistance soldier sent by his leader to protect that woman. By the end of the film, Sarah Connor has been transformed from an underachieving waitress and overly trusting dater of unsuitable men to a mother capable of terminating the terminator even after her protector’s death. She drives off into the desert, equipped to take on the task of preparing the child now growing in her womb for his future military role. It is not difficult to imagine the producers of the Alien series

regarding this film as a calling card or show-reel that might have been specifically designed to demonstrate Cameron’s suitability for taking charge of their planned sequel. Terminator shows Cameron to be imaginatively at home in the field of science fiction, whilst being comfortable with the idea of a strong female character at the centre of this traditionally male-oriented genre; he has invented a ‘villain’ who represents an evolutionarily superior race whose

very existence threatens the future of the human species; and he has embedded the duel between these two protagonists within a thematic structure that focuses explicitly on issues of survival and reproduction, of sexual difference and female generativity. Moreover, Terminator has one distinctive and much-prized cinematic quality of which Ridley Scott’s Alien had no particular need – a well-paced, driving narrative that links explosive and violent action scenes in a smoothly escalating sequence. Inviting Cameron to take the next step in the Alien story must have seemed like bowing to the inevitable – acknowledging that director and subject-matter were made for one another, each the other’s fate or destiny. The imaginative empathy between Cameron and Scott in fact

extends beyond the latter’s work in Alien to his further investigation of distinctively human existence in Blade Runner. For, of course, the peculiarly powerful dread induced by Terminator’s eponymous villain (both in the film’s characters and in its viewers) is best understood as responsive, not to the fact that its distinctive nature (flesh-and-blood encasing a titanium-alloy combat chassis) makes it uniquely capable of dealing death and of dealing with the threat of its own death, but rather to the fact that it is death. The terminator is death itself, embodied and made real: its mere presence spells death, it has no other interest, emotion or purpose other than causing death, and it cannot itself be killed (Death cannot die). As the resistance soldier Kyle Reese puts it: ‘It cannot be bargained with, it cannot be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop until you are dead.’ Heidegger’s characterization of death as one’s ownmost, non-

relational, not-to-be-outstripped possibility might easily have been the terminator’s blueprint. It is dedicated, programmed, to seek one specific individual’s death; and neither the death of those who share her name (the two other Sarah Connors that the terminator kills first) nor the death of those who try to stand between her and it (the police, Reese) can prove any kind of substitute. Hence, in the end, Sarah is deprived of any helpers and friends, and proves incapable of escaping her terminator by fleeing from it, whether intellectually or physically. The comforting but inauthentic idea

that one’s death is a future event, something that comes gradually and predictably towards us as our lives extend themselves in time, is annihilated by the terminator’s disorienting capacity to be projected into any present moment of our lives; and once it is so projected, once its gaze fixes on its target, it cannot be outstripped by driving, running or crawling away from it. Sarah has to confront her terminator on her own – face to face with the titanium death’s head, stripped of its human guise, through the bars of the robotic metal-press. (And Cameron’s sequel to his own first film will have much to say about whether her crushing of the terminator in that press should be understood as her overcoming her own death, or rather as its coming to inhabit her life, and the life of the human species as such.) In this respect, of course, Sarah Connor is no different from

any other human being: if the terminator only represented death, or human mortality as such, then we would each have our own terminator, capable of appearing at any moment of our lives to isolate us from our relatives and friends and confront us with the essential non-necessity of our individual existence. But Sarah Connor is targeted by her terminator for a more specific reason, one which picks her out as a woman, and as a particular woman: she is to be terminated because she is to give birth to the human male who will bring about the extermination of the machines, and hence ensure the survival of the human race. In other words, her death is a kind of advance (or is it retrospective?) abortion; and it is required because her generativity as a female stands for the (re)generativity of the human species as such. Her capacity to become a mother symbolizes the human capacity to reproduce itself, our possession of a future. There is a clear sense, then, in which Sarah Connor is meant to

exemplify an affirmative and empowering vision of femaleness. She is exemplary of humanity as such, and her generativity is what will keep human history open to the future; and although her reception of this knowledge is at first panic-stricken, the film charts a real growth in her character towards a kind of self-sufficiency – for in acquiring a repertoire of defensive and offensive techniques (both physical and psychological), she acquires the strength to take on the terminator by herself, and to take on her responsibilities

to her future son and the human race as such. In this respect, Terminator observes the creation of a female warrior. On the other hand, however, what picks Sarah out as the vital

figure in this narrative is also what sidelines her as an individual. For, of course, insofar as her worth to the human race turns entirely on the man to whom she will give birth, it turns on her offspring rather than herself – and on a male child, at that. This underlying sense that her femaleness is valuable only instrumentally, as a means to reproducing maleness, is reinforced by the displacements of causality that the film’s disruption of the temporal order makes possible. For it turns out that Sarah acquires Reese (and hence not only self-protection, but the education for survival and motherhood that he imparts) only because he was sent to her by the resistance leader to whom she will give birth, her son John; and since it further emerges that Reese is the destined father of her son, the film ends by conferring on John Connor the power to authorize his own birth. Not only does he provide what is required for his mother to survive long enough to give birth to him, he also chooses (and brings his mother together with) the man who will be his father. Indeed, since their conjunction brings about not only his conception but his mother’s acquisition of the beliefs and skills necessary to bring him up so as to become the hero of humanity, we can say that John Connor is the author not only of his own family (the [re-] birth of Sarah and Kyle as warrior-mother and warrior-father) and his own birth, but of every aspect of his life, and hence of himself. Within this bizarre displacement of the familiar human family

structure, Sarah Connor comes to seem more and more like a counter or token in a complex relationship between men. For whilst John Connor’s foreknowledge of the past is what allows him to give Kyle Reese the mission that will make him his father, from Kyle’s point of view that same mission allows him to write himself into his hero’s own history. He is enabled to become the father of the man he most adores in the human race’s postnuclear future; he thereby finds at once a displaced heterosexual mode of expression for his love for humanity’s ultimate warrior, and a means of ensuring that the son he fathers will be exactly

the son he could have wished – thus insulating paternity from its inherent openness to the contribution of female fertility and of unpredictable events, from its openness to contingency, and the loss of control that such openness entails. Of course, Sarah’s room for independent manoeuvre within

this exchange between men is not entirely eliminated. She is the one who refuses to accept Kyle’s (admittedly half-hearted) attempts to disown his declaration of love for her, and thus brings about the sexual intercourse through which John Connor is conceived; and, within that declaration, Kyle is insistent that he fell in love with Sarah primarily because of the expression on her face in a photograph of her. Kyle thereby seeks to present the narrative of Terminator as a love story, a quest across time motivated by love at first sight, and hence by the woman who elicited that love. On the other hand, he is given his first sight of Sarah in that photograph, and hence Sarah herself, by John; and the final scene of the film reveals that the photograph captures her expression just as she is thinking of Kyle himself, and of their one night of love. In other words, he sees the consummation of their love in her eyes, and hence sees himself as already beloved by her (and thereby sees the removal of any risk in his declaring his love – the removal of the possibility of refusal or non-reciprocation, and hence the removal of Sarah’s autonomy, her otherness); and he also sees his beloved son, already alive within her. In short, what he sees in this photograph is not primarily Sarah but himself and his offspring; he sees in her the consummation of a narcissistic fantasy of male sexual potency, of paternity and patriarchal family structure. This sense that Sarah’s photograph is not so much a love token

as an expression of her tokenistic role in a relationship between men is confirmed by its place in one of the most disorienting sequences of the film, in which Sarah – hiding beneath a bridge with Kyle, just after his diagnosis as paranoid has been disproved by the terminator’s destruction of the police station, and just before their lovemaking – appears to dream of a future in which Kyle is killed by an infiltrating terminator. In fact, since the dream is initiated and sustained by Kyle’s description of his previous life in the future, it would be more accurate to say that Sarah realizes

her future lover’s words, uncovering a certain range of meaning in them. And what she realizes is a vision of his death, which occurs just after he has been poring over her photograph, and which results in that photo being consumed by flames before his dying gaze. Kyle’s death at such a point in the future – that is, before his return to Sarah’s time – would amount to the death of John Connor’s father, and hence to John himself never being born. This is a salutary reminder of Kyle’s own significance in the film’s story beyond that of protector and educator; but the sequence also declares that his removal from the narrative would mean that Sarah would never be reborn as John’s mother, hence never be in a position to be photographed whilst thinking of her dead lover and his unborn child. The destruction of that photograph thus signals that her primary role is as Kyle’s lover and John’s mother; her significance goes up in flames when their existence is consumed by a terminator’s lethal attentions. It is worth noting that the spatially, temporally and emotionally

displaced family structure of which this photograph is the currency is not entirely unfamiliar. Its most obvious cultural precedent lies at the heart of Christianity, in the Holy Family. There, too, we have a single male offspring, whose impending birth is announced by a guardian angel, whose initials are J.C. and whose destiny is to be the saviour of the human race; and given that this child’s divinity participates in the Trinitarian structure of the Christian God, we can say that he, too, creates his own family and authors his own birth. True, Cameron’s (post-, or perhaps pre-) nuclear family displaces the sign of virginity from the mother to the father of this family (Kyle’s declaration of love embodies a declaration of his own previous celibacy); but even this may rather indicate that Kyle, as the merely surrogate father of this family, in this respect resembles the Holy Family’s surrogate father, Joseph. Otherwise, however, Cameron’s representation of Sarah as the family’s mother seems quite strikingly to reproduce the combination of apparent centrality but ultimate marginality typically thought to define the place of Mary (and hence femaleness) in Christianity – the woman as temporary host, vehicle or medium for a creative transaction between or within an essentially male principle of cosmic divinity. (Here is yet another point

of contact with the logic of Alien, as well as a pointer towards a deeply buried religious dimension in that film.) We should not, however, overlook the fact that the photograph

of Sarah – by its very nature – reminds us that the material basis of the medium of film is photographic, and hence that one range of its significance in Terminator might be to act as the vehicle of Cameron’s reflections upon the nature of the medium in which he is beginning to work. Several lines of thought find their origins here. First, if the photograph of Sarah is a synecdoche of the film in which it appears, and which is constituted by sequences of such photographs, then the person who is ultimately responsible for it – for its framing and composition, and for its appearance as a symbol of the medium of film – is the film’s director. This is confirmed by the fact that the photograph is taken for,

preserved and handed on to its most avid viewer by a character whose initials are J.C. – a character who is never seen in the film, but is presented by it as the ultimate author of the events it depicts. Indeed, just as this film records John Connor’s authorization of his own birth, so we might think of the film itself as James Cameron’s creation of himself as a film director, at this point someone for whom this film constitutes his entire body (of serious work). And if this interpretation (with its equation of the film’s director with a character whom the film further equates with God) implies a certain hubris in Cameron, it is as well to recall that this photograph of Sarah is envisaged as having more than one future. In one, it makes possible the reality that the photograph itself depicts, and amounts to a certain kind of redemption – a re-achievement of genuine humanity, say, in a medium that is otherwise reduced to the merely commercial; in another (that of dream or nightmare), it is consumed by flames, its very existence aborted by an unforeseeable evolution of time and more particularly of the very technology without which it would not even have been conceivable as a cinematic work of art. One might even think of this dream as showing Cameron’s prophetic awareness of the fundamental importance that technological advances in the medium of cinema will have in the evolution and evaluation of his future career as a director.