ABSTRACT
The opening of The Terminator pairs an ominous, driving synthesized percussion motive with images of a terrifying dystopian future in which sentient machines have destroyed most of mankind. Hollywood film scoring has long associated romantic music with female characters. Perhaps because women and romance are not important generic features of the hardbody action film, there is no typical approach to scoring romance. Despite the conservative ideological underpinnings, the male hero of the 1980s action film is inevitably depicted as an erotic spectacle, a concept seemingly anathema to normative heterosexual masculinity, as erotic spectacle is traditionally the purview of the feminine. In Speed, The Last of the Mohicans, and Terminator, romantic music associated with active, masculine heroism works to engender different kinds of masculinity than in Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance. In Speed the musical theme resonates with both racial and gendered anxieties, albeit more subtly.
