Even if your soul isn't ground to dust by the hectoring of the world, it's still hard not to get your feelings hurt along the way. Enter the Terminator, eyes cloaked by mirror sunglasses, a metaphor for death itself, with no feelings to get in the way of getting what he wants.
The James Cameron creation is the strong, silent type -- even when he gets shot repeatedly, dragged underneath a speeding 18-wheeler or set on fire in a tanker explosion. (Even the more evolved -- namely, more namby-pamby -- "protector" Terminator in the second film admits he would never be able to cry. Oh, boohoo!)
Of course, he is still a character animated by his own decisive actions, which he directs more than a few times at one of the most confounding and enraging sources of modern life -- the bureaucracy.
So we perversely love him because he's powerful and because he concentrates his rage at objects with which we can sympathize.
In the early scenes of the original film the Terminator goes into a gun store and we witness his distaste for the regulations. He's told there's a waiting period for the handguns, and when he begins loading a weapon, the store clerk abruptly tells him he can't do that. Blam! That's what the Terminator thinks about your stinking rules!
But the scene that made the Terminator an icon comes at a police station. He walks into its quiet lobby and asks if he can see Sarah Connor, the woman we all know he wants to murder. The police officer dismissively tells him that he can't see her and that he'll just have to wait. And then he utters what is still his most famous catchphrase: "I'll be back."
Then, in an act quietly cheered by those beaten down by the machinations of the state, he crashes his car through the station's front window and proceeds to shoot up the entire police station. Sure, he takes a few dozen bullets to the chest, which clearly stagger him, but that's a small price to pay for refusing to be dehumanized and brushed off by the system.
That's a sentiment even an eternally optimistic sponge could applaud.
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martin.miller@latimes.com
