Payton Ewalt - Core Post #4

My favorite tidbit about Terminator 2 was this scene of Linda Hamilton at the very end of the film where she had bulked up so much for the part that she was able to pump the shotgun with one arm. Apparently, that part of the scene was unscripted but the sheer level of cool for her to be able to do that made Cameron include it in the film.

While I agree wholeheartedly with the argument in the latter half of Jeffords’ piece of the Terminator replacing the role of the mother and the father and Linda Hamilton’s character being “not a mother at all but only a soldier for the future,” I still can’t deny that I adore that moment. Yes, she is only allowed to be strong to operate arms and weaponry and to protect her son who will set in motion the actions needed to save the future, but despite it all, she's just so undeniably cool. In Jeffords’ piece, the beginning outlines the common plot features of some 90’s films where the man discovers that his body has failed him, that what he thought he was in control of or owned completely that would fulfill a “version of a masculine heroic ideal” becomes a body that betrays his true inner feelings. This stuck out to me, because isn’t this what happens to Linda Hamilton in the first Terminator (in terms of her life)? She slowly begins to realize that the child she will produce is the answer to the continuation of a human future and her life is no longer her own, that it never was hers to begin with. Her destiny was her child. Even her choice of partner was not hers. 

But in Terminator 2, we’re reintroduced to her and her body has completely changed. She’s insanely ripped and almost feral – “more animal than human, or, better yet, a human whose animal instincts have been brought out in the face of death.” It’s necessary to delve into how her representation in the film can be the reproduction of conservative ideology or detrimental to gendered representations, but it just makes me want to imagine so much more for her character. What if, when she had learned that her body, her life, was no longer her own, that everything had failed her, she went and bulked up and became an anarchist anyway? What if she didn’t pair up with her future husband? What did she owe humanity – what did she owe the future as a woman?