|Chelli Riddiough|
The Terminator plays Saturday, March 28th at Emagine Willow Creek. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit emagine-entertainment.com.
The Terminator isn’t a very horny film, unless you’re into feathered mullets and homicidal Austrians. But inside this 80s action thriller lives a love story, and not one, but two, very weird sex scenes. That’s enough to catapult it into a genre I call “cyberspunk.”
When The Terminator begins, our protagonist Sarah Connor is a carefree gal who spends her time mopeding around LA, waitressing in a hideous maid outfit, and getting stood up by some dude named Stan. By the end of the film, a mere 107 minutes later, she’s a jeep-driving, bandana-wearing, German Shepherd-owning badass. What powers this shocking transformation, more befitting of a T1000 than a soft-eyed, 20s-something waitress? I’ll argue that Girl on Top (yes, the sex position) plays a significant role in Sarah’s change.
The film follows Sarah as she’s pursued by the titular Terminator, a human-passing cyborg sent back from the future—a scary time known as 2029 A.D., where humans are at war with the machines. The Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) traveled forty-odd years back through time to kill Sarah before she can conceive and bear her child, John Connor, who will become the leader of the resistance movement. Fortunately for Sarah, her future son has also sent someone back to 1984: Reese, a handsome, scruffy soldier whose imperatives are to A) protect and B) impregnate Sarah. Yes, Reese is also John Connor’s dad. Sarah initially thinks Reese is trying to kill her before realizing he’s there to help, and they then spend the rest of the film being pursued by the Terminator (henceforth referred to as Ahnold). They run, they hide, they hole up in a motel room to make pipe bombs. And that is where they fuck.
Before we get to that glorious sex scene, there’s another that bears mentioning. It’s early in the film, and Ahnold is on the hunt for Sarah Connor. He’s already killed the first two women by that name who were listed in the phonebook, and is en route to Sarah’s apartment to finish the job. Sarah doesn’t live alone, however: she has a roommate named Ginger (plus a pet iguana, Pugsley).
Ginger is the curly-haired yin to Sarah’s high-waisted yang. They work together, live together, and primp in the bathroom for their dates together. That’s where we first meet Ginger: she’s touching up her lipstick and rocking out to her Walkman, all while wearing the world’s shortest purple satin bathrobe. Sarah is next to her, blow-drying her hair. When the phone rings, Sarah answers to hear Ginger’s boyfriend Matt launch into some verbal foreplay (“First I’m gonna rip the buttons off your blouse one by one…”), apparently unable to distinguish between voices on the phone. It’s going to be a steamy night in for Ginger and Matt. She’s traded the purple satin bathrobe for a hot pink dress, and her mullet has been teased to a formidable height. “Better than mortal man deserves,” she remarks as the two roomies check out their reflections. But then Stan cancels on Sarah, and she leaves the apartment so Ginger and Matt can get some alone time. Unfortunately for them, it’s a bonk to dismember.
Reese, waiting outside Sarah’s apartment, sees her leave and begins to follow her. Meanwhile, at the police station, cops are learning that two women, both named Sarah Connor, have been shot to death. They’re trying to get a hold of our Sarah, but in this era of landlines and phonebooks, the call goes to voicemail. An answering machine beeps, and we hear Sarah’s voice: “Haha, fooled you, you’re talking to a machine.” A clever line, especially given that later, she will unwittingly reveal her location to Ahnold as he disguises his voice as Sarah’s mom’s.
Why doesn’t Ginger hear the ring phone ring, you ask? Because she’s in the bedroom with Matt, and she’s still listening to her Walkman. Headphones on! Matt even turns up the volume for her. Her eyes are shut and she’s bobbing her head to the music. Is she even aware that her boyfriend is having sex with her? She doesn’t seem discontent, but the level of detachment is striking.
We cut to Sarah, overhearing the news about the two dead women with her name. She notices Reese following her, thinks she’s being stalked by the murderer, and slips into a club named TechNoir to call the police.
Cut back to Sarah’s apartment building. A useless cop car pulls away just as Ahnold approaches the front door. Inside the apartment, Ginger and Matt are apparently finished. She’s re-donned her purple bathrobe, while Matt is now passed out in bed. He never took off his red socks. And Ginger never took off her Walkman: she’s rocking out to “Intimacy” by Lin van Hek, a solid 80s track with the telling lyric, “Don’t want no kissin’, I’ll die.” In the kitchen, she pulls out the gallon of milk and some sandwich fixings. She insults Pugsley the iguana, who startled her.
Back in the bedroom, Ahnold stands over Matt, who wakes up and yells, “Whoa!” He darts out of the way just before Ahnold puts his fist through the pillowcase. Matt wields a lamp and a threat (“Don’t make me bust you up, man!”) before being thrown through the glass patio door. In his striped briefs, Matt gets mercilessly tossed around by the Terminator, and Ginger doesn’t hear a thing: she’s too busy rocking out, using celery as a microphone and drumsticks, and compiling the world’s thickest post-coital sandwich.
It takes Matt getting thrown through the wall in front of her to bring her back to reality, and by that point, it’s too late. Ahnold kills her, thinking she’s Sarah Connor. (If Single White Female wasn’t enough to convince you that two women shouldn’t live together, maybe The Terminator will.) To add insult to injury, Ahnold steps on Ginger’s headphones, crushing them, as he realizes his mistake and sets out to find Sarah at TechNoir.
When he gets there, he breezes in without paying the $4.50 cover fee (different times) and begins a shooting spree. Amid the confusion, bloodshed, and amazing dancefloor outfits, Reese approaches Sarah with the sexiest one-liner ever to be uttered by a man who’s never experienced a shower: “Come with me if you want to live.”
At first, Sarah’s in a borderline hostage situation with Reese. He looks stark raving mad, a detail not lost on the cops who arrest him after a car chase that ends in a crash. Sarah’s brought to the station, too, to convalesce on a grimy couch. She still isn’t sure she can trust Reese, and when the cops tell her that he’s crazy, she wants to believe them—to believe this ordeal has been a nightmare, a lie. This fragile hope is shattered when Ahnold breaks into and absolutely massacres the police station. Reese saves Sarah again, and they escape to some absolutely killer synth music.
By this point, the Terminator has lost the flesh around one of his eyes, revealing the red pupil underneath and necessitating the sunglasses that become part of his look. As the film goes on, man gives way to machine. Meanwhile, Reese is becoming more and more human in the eyes of Sarah. In a concrete underpass, she dresses his bullet wound and asks some standard getting-to-know-you questions, such as “What’s it like to go through time?” We learn Reese’s first name (Kyle!), that he volunteered to protect Sarah, and that life in the future is pretty bleak. Everyone lives underground, hiding from the machines. Children watch fires burn inside hollowed-out TVs and hunt rats for sustenance. Cleanliness seems to be in short supply. But in this filthy tunnel world, where everyone’s face is covered in dirt and ash, one thing gets Reese through: an old photograph, kept folded in his pocket, of Sarah. And you thought your edging practice was extreme?
The next morning, Reese and Sarah hitch a truck ride to the Tiki Motel to hide out and make pipe bombs. Sarah’s new reality is settling over her, and she doesn’t feel she’s up for the task. “Look at me, I’m shaking,” she says. “Some legend, huh? You must be pretty disappointed.” She asks him if, in the future, he has someone special. “No,” he says. “Never.” Never? He’s a virgin from the future? Unfazed, Sarah caresses his sexy, scarred back. He tells her about The Photograph. “I came across time for you, Sarah,” he admits. “I love you. I always have.”
I was around 12 years old when I first watched The Terminator, and, while I was not a naïve child, I was shocked by the sex scene. It was my first time seeing Girl on Top. Also, watching it at such a formative age instilled in me the belief that every one-night stand would be better if the man you were fucking died the next day—a belief that, so far, has not been proven wrong.
The Reese-Sarah sex scene is cheesy, unrealistic, and over-the-top. But over 20 years later, it remains one of my favorite movie sex scenes. Is it the theme song, rendered in slow piano? Is it Reese’s rock-hard bod, giving new meaning to the line “Who gets the burly beef?” (You do, Sarah. You do.) Is it that the spectre of death hangs over the whole thing? I think it’s all of the above. Naked, Sarah and Reese kiss, then roll over so she’s on top. What follows is weird thrusting, some pained facial expressions, and slow-mo shots of their sweaty fingers laced together. The sex scene is brief, a mere 41 seconds. According to my own system of movie math sex, that equates to 16.4 minutes of Real Fucking Time. That’s not bad for a future virgin!
After this sex scene, it’s a new Sarah Connor. She becomes much more assertive: pulling out the pipe bombs as they flee from Ahnold, who found them at the Tiki Motel. Driving the truck while Reese chucks the explosives out of the window. Running Ahnold and his motorcycle off the road. Dragging a wounded Reese from the crashed-out car before they get run over by the truck that Ahnold has jacked. Reese manages to shove a pipe bomb into the truck’s tailpipe, causing a massive explosion and fire that subsumes the Terminator. But Reese is grievously injured, and his and Sarah’s roles continue to invert. When the Terminator rises up from the fire, now fully stripped of its human shell, Sarah’s the one to grab the gun as they flee, then use it to smash the window of a door. In the hydraulics factory where the climactic final action scene of the film is shot, she even affects a military tone: “Move it, Reese! On your feet, soldier!” And crucially, Sarah is the one to kill the Terminator. By that point, Reese is dead. It’s just her. In the end, Sarah saves herself.
There are a lot of factors that go into Sarah Connor’s transformation from Mullet Maid to Jeep Vigilante: being stalked, falling in love, almost dying a bunch of times, watching her baby daddy die, and killing a killing machine in a machine. But I can’t help feeling that somehow, Girl on Top plays a vital role in her change. You get the sense that before all this, Sarah Connor was a missionary kind of girl. I mean, she was dating a dude named Stan, for Christ’s sake. Something incendiary happens in that motel room, and it’s got nothing to do with an improvised explosive device. The sex scene arrives at a pivotal moment in Sarah’s ordeal, when she finally starts to believe in the madness that Reese is telling her. You begin to see the fighter she’ll become, the person capable of raising a leader like John Connor. Her gaze changes, her movements grow more confident. Whereas at first she was a damsel, now she is a demagogue.
Can the way we have sex influence the type of people we become? I think it can, as made plain by the contrast between the Ginger-Matt and Sarah-Reese sex scenes. Ginger tunes out, and she ends up dead. Sarah gets a workout, and she survives. While these sex scenes seem very different—one defies the space-time continuum, one defies a sense of common courtesy—they have something in common. Together, they impart a powerful message: Sex can’t protect you, but it can transform you. Whether it transforms you into a corpse or the mother of the resistance is up to you.
Edited by Finn Odum