The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Cameron · a film · 1984 · about 107 minutes · written with Gale Anne Hurd
Mode
Pursuit thriller and slasher joined to apocalyptic science fiction; an annunciation told as a chase
Mythos
The annunciation: a messenger from the future, a woman told she will bear a saviour, a son who sends his own father; death made walking, the golem and the made creature turned on their makers
Phase
A few days and nights in Los Angeles in 1984, framed by a field of skulls in 2029 and closed by a road into the Mexican desert
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35 mm, in English, about 107 minutes; a hunter, a protector and a quarry, a police station, a motel and a factory floor; a synthesized score
Register
From a waitress’s bad shift and the jokes of a police station to a massacre and a field of skulls; steel blue and sodium orange, rain, smoke and headlights
Scale
One woman’s survival of one pursuit, on which the history of a war depends
Governing Proposition
A machine is sent back from a future war to kill a waitress before she can bear the son who will lead the war against it, and a soldier is sent after it to protect her. The wager of the film is that a pursuit can carry a myth: that the slasher’s unkillable stalker, given a reason and a future, becomes death made walking, and that a closed loop in time, in which the son sends his own father to make him, can be felt as fate through nothing but the shape of a chase.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens in the future, over a battlefield at night. Skulls lie in a field and are crushed under the treads of machines; searchlights sweep over a ruined city. It is a few images only, and the film never returns to this future at length. But it is set down first, before any character, as the end toward which everything in the present runs, and the present will be measured against it.
Then Los Angeles in 1984, at night. Two arrivals. At the Griffith Observatory a sphere of blue electrical light opens and leaves a naked man crouched on the ground, who rises and looks down at the city: the Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In an alley elsewhere a second figure arrives the same way, naked, hurt and hunted at once: Kyle Reese, played by Michael Biehn. Only living tissue can pass, so both come without clothes or weapons, and the first thing each must do is take them from the city.
Between the two arrivals stands the woman they have come for. Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton, is a waitress, bad at her job, sharing an apartment with her roommate Ginger. Nothing about her is marked for history. The film’s design is visible from here: a hunter, a protector and a quarry who does not know she is one, and a city that will not believe any of it.
Movement II
The machine arms itself and opens the phone book. There are three Sarah Connors in it, and it works down the list. Two women of that name are killed in turn. The method is the horror: a name in a directory, an address, a killing, the next name. The police, slow and comic, see the pattern only because the phone book has ordered it for them.
Sarah works her shift at the diner. At the apartment Ginger, wearing her Walkman, cannot hear what happens in the next room, and she and her boyfriend are killed. The answering machine plays a message from Sarah, and the machine learns where she is. Every instrument of an ordinary life, the directory, the headphones, the recorded voice, has become the machine’s means.
At the Tech Noir nightclub the two pursuers meet over her. The Terminator finds Sarah among the dancers and raises its gun; Reese shoots first, and the machine, hit in the chest, gets up again. Reese takes her out into the night. It is the first escape, and the first lesson of the form: the thing that should be dead resumes.
Movement III
In a car, with the machine behind them, Reese tells Sarah what it is. “Listen, and understand,” he begins. It is a machine under living tissue, sent from a future in which a defence network has decided against its makers and the machines hunt the survivors. Her son will lead the war against them. The speech names the thing, and it is the point where the film says plainly what the structure has already shown.
The account brings the first flashback: Reese in 2029, among ruins and searchlights, and a dog that barks when an infiltrator comes. Somewhere in the night the machine repairs itself at a sink: it cuts out a damaged eye and drops it, and covers the wound with dark glasses. Stan Winston’s makeup makes the scene plain and unbearable.
The chase ends in a crash, and Reese and Sarah are taken by the police. At the station Lieutenant Traxler, played by Paul Winfield, and Vukovich, played by Lance Henriksen, joke; Dr. Silberman, played by Earl Boen, interviews Reese and diagnoses him in confident jargon. No one believes him, and the film lets the disbelief be funny. The comedy is the world that cannot imagine what is coming, and it is about to be answered.
Movement IV
The Terminator comes to the police station and says, “I’ll be back.” It returns by driving a car through the doors. The massacre that follows is one advance, room by room, over Brad Fiedel’s metallic pulse, the officers falling and the figure never hurrying. The line is literal; only the audience hears it as a joke, and the station that laughed at Reese is destroyed for its disbelief.
Reese and Sarah escape. They sleep in a culvert, then reach a motel, where Reese makes pipe bombs. In a second flashback the dog barks again. Reese has kept a photograph of her for years, and he shows it to her. They spend the night together, and the son who sent Reese is conceived. The loop is closed: the son has sent his own father back to make him.
From the motel Sarah calls her mother. The voice that answers is the machine’s, counterfeiting her mother’s, and the call tells it where she is. The ordinary voice, like the answering machine before it, has been taken over. The machine comes to the motel, and the dog barks at it as the dogs of 2029 bark.
Movement V
The last pursuit is a chase on a motorcycle and a tanker on the freeway. It ends in an explosion on the freeway, and the tanker burns. Out of the fire, stripped of its flesh, rises the endoskeleton, the human form burnt away and the machine standing in it. The pursuit continues on foot into a factory, among the robot arms of an automated floor. Reese is killed. The half-machine drags itself after Sarah across the floor, and she crushes it in a hydraulic press.
The film does not end on the kill. In the coda Sarah drives south into Mexico, pregnant, recording tapes for her son about what she knows and about his father. A boy takes her photograph with a Polaroid camera. It is the photograph Reese carried for years: it is made here, in the last scene, after the man who carried it is dead.
The boy says something in Spanish and it is translated for her: a storm is coming. She looks at the sky, and she drives on into the desert under gathering cloud. Terror has turned to a grave calm. The pursuit is over and the war has not begun; the form has closed on itself, and the end of the story is the beginning of the soldier’s.
Act III · The Twelve
The plot is a single pursuit, and the subtractive test finds very little to remove, because nearly every object is planted to be paid. The phone book orders the killings and lets the police see the pattern. Ginger’s Walkman keeps her deaf to the killing in the next room. The answering machine gives the machine its quarry’s location, and the mother’s voice it later counterfeits closes the trap. The photograph Reese has carried for years is made in the last scene; the dog that marks the machine in the future marks it again at the motel. The police comedy is the disbelieving world the machine destroys. What gives: the Tech Noir sequence and the second chase repeat the first escape’s shape, and the freeway chase adds one phase more than the design needs.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the made thing has no pity, and the machinery of an ordinary life is already its instrument. The film is built from the technology of 1984 turned on its users: the phone book, the answering machine, the Walkman, the pager, the police computer, the factory robots of the last scene. The killer is the culmination of that mechanism, and the war it comes from is the nuclear dread of the early 1980s made literal, a defence network that decides. A second disclosure stands beside it: a waitress learns that her life matters for what she will bear and teach, and takes the burden. What holds it below the top: much is put in Reese’s account rather than worked through the action, and the dread at times is a mood more than a meaning.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The register is terror, and it rises often. The opening future, skulls crushed under treads and searchlights over ruins; the arrival in blue electrical light at the observatory; the advance through the police station, one figure moving room by room over Fiedel’s metallic pulse; the self-surgery at the sink, the eye cut out and dropped; the endoskeleton rising from the tanker’s fire, stripped of its human form; the half-machine dragging itself after Sarah across the factory. The coda turns terror to a grave calm, a car driving into the desert under gathering cloud. Held where it is because the elevation is of one kind, dread and its release, and because at the summits the means show: in the factory the stop-motion endoskeleton reads as a model, and the height is reached and briefly undercut.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The myth is built, and it carries the plot. Its structure is an annunciation: a messenger arrives from the future to tell a woman that she will bear a saviour, and in the motel he becomes the child’s father. The son has sent his own father back to make him, a loop with no origin outside it, and the motel exists because the myth requires it. The adversary is death made walking, a figure that cannot be reasoned with or stopped, the golem and Frankenstein’s creature made efficient. The particular stays particular: a waitress, a roommate, a cheap motel. The initials John Connor shares with the Christian saviour are allusion and are not what is scored. What holds the axis just below the gate: the annunciation is legible rather than deepened, and the myth carries the frame without an inner life of its own.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the stalker film after Halloween (1978), the paranoid science fiction of television, Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits teleplays above all, the chase picture, and the urban night of 1970s crime cinema. The turn is real. The slasher’s unkillable pursuer is given a reason and a future war; the slasher’s victim becomes the protagonist of an apocalyptic history; a bodybuilder star is cast as a machine and his limits become its strength; time travel is used not for wonder but as a closed loop that fixes fate. The stake was real: a low-budget picture from a director whose one feature had been a troubled sequel, for a minor company, with no assured market. Held below the bar because the wager was placed within forms that already sold, and the premise is shared with Ellison’s work.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The form is the pursuit: a sequence of escapes each closed by the machine’s return, so that the viewer learns in the structure what Reese says in words, that it will not stop. Each apparent end, the shots to the chest, the crash, the fire, is broken by a resumption, and the last breaks the human form itself. The time loop is the second shape: the story ends where Reese’s began, with the photograph, and the form closes on itself as the paradox does. Made as an investigation or a war film, the material would lose the felt inevitability of the future. What holds it from higher: those two shapes apart, the grammar is the action film’s inherited grammar, used with great economy rather than remade, and the flashbacks are conventional inserts.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Forty-two years of return are evidence. The film has been taken up as a Cold War document; as a feminist text, Sarah’s passage from waitress to soldier read beside Ripley in Alien; as a paradox of causation that will not resolve; and lately as an early figure for the fear of autonomous machines, which public argument about artificial intelligence still names by the film’s fictional network. Formally it yields on return in its planted rhymes: the photograph, the dog, the storm, the machines of 1984 waiting in every room. What holds it a step lower: much of the return is to the franchise rather than the film, and its sequel of 1991 reshaped how this one is seen; the film itself is lean, and its paradox and its themes are visible on a first viewing.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what a low-budget genre picture could hold, joining slasher, chase and apocalyptic science fiction in one taut structure, and made the relentless machine pursuer a form of its own. It did not reorganise what film could do outside its genres. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the action and science-fiction cinema of the following decade in its pacing and its night-blue look; Cameron’s own career, from Aliens (1986) to Terminator 2 (1991) and beyond; the screen persona of Schwarzenegger; the unkillable pursuer of later films; a franchise; a line in common speech; and a name for machine catastrophe used in public argument. The limit is the kind of reach: much of it lies in popular culture and the franchise, and within film it is generic more than formal.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on forty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, and its restorations repair it. Presence: continuous and very wide, in revivals, on television, on every home format, and in quotation that has not stopped since 1984. Fabric and surface are where the charge falls. Parts of the surface are fixed to their moment: the synthesizer score, the fashions and the punks of 1984, the stop-motion endoskeleton in the factory. Against that, the night city, the pursuit and the machine’s advance have not aged, and the film is still watched for itself and not as a period piece. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown; the dated effects hold it from the widest figure the presence alone would earn.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making bears weight. Mark Goldblatt’s cutting keeps the pursuit continuous and lets no sequence slacken. Adam Greenberg’s night photography works in steel blue and sodium orange, rain, smoke and headlights. Brad Fiedel’s score, a synthesized heartbeat and an anvil-struck pulse, is cheap and exactly right. Stan Winston’s makeup carries the self-surgery above all. Schwarzenegger builds the machine from stillness, economy of movement and a flat voice; Linda Hamilton marks Sarah’s growth from comedy to resolve plausibly across the film. The charges: the stop-motion and puppet work in the factory and the half-machine show their budget; some supporting playing and dialogue are flat, Reese’s exposition and the police banter among them; the love scene is soft-focused convention. The craft is lean and sure, not at every frame the medium’s highest.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the police station, Silberman’s jargon and Vukovich’s jokes, and the field of skulls in 2029. One law governs both: the present does not believe the future until it arrives, and the machine is indifferent to what anyone believes. The jokes are the disbelief, and the massacre answers them. The machine’s one line of wit, “I’ll be back”, obeys the same law: it is literal, and the joke is the viewer’s. The loop is internally consistent; the film never breaks its own causation, down to the travellers arriving naked and unarmed because only living tissue can pass. The range runs from comic romance to apocalypse. The strain is the love scene, scored as conventional romance in a register the rest of the film does not use.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders are many and the pursuit holds them in one line. The state and its force, in the police and in the military network that starts the war; technology, everywhere; the family, in Sarah’s mother, a father who is a stranger and a son who sends him; labour, in a waitress’s shift, a diner and a factory floor; history, in the nuclear war and the war after it; consciousness, in Sarah’s change; and the sacred in the annunciation. They are integrated: the fate of history depends on one woman surviving one pursuit. What holds the axis lowest is speed. The orders are sketched at the pace of a chase; 2029 is a few images, the city of 1984 a set of locations for the hunt, the mother a voice on the telephone, the war a backdrop. A small form, honestly held.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 8.5, then The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4. Forty-two years of continuous and very wide presence; a fusion of slasher, chase and apocalyptic science fiction whose reach runs through the action cinema of the next decade and into common speech; a single pursuit in which nearly every object is paid; and an annunciation built as plot, the son sending his own father back to make him.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the state, technology, the family, labour, history, consciousness and the sacred are integrated by one pursuit and sketched at the pace of a chase, with 2029 a few images and the city a set of locations. Above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.7: much of the return is to the franchise, and the film is lean, its paradox visible on a first viewing. Then The Sublime and The Swerve at 7.8: an elevation of one kind, briefly undercut by visible means, and a turn placed within forms that already sold, on a premise shared with Ellison’s work.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Unconcealment at 7.9 six tenths short and The Swerve at 7.8 seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.6, an average of 8.05 that displays 8.1, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, nine tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Terminator as released in the United States on 26 October 1984, the theatrical cut of about 107 minutes, from the field of skulls to the road into the desert: directed by James Cameron from a screenplay by Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, produced by Hurd for Hemdale and Pacific Western and distributed by Orion Pictures, photographed by Adam Greenberg, edited by Mark Goldblatt, with music by Brad Fiedel and the Terminator’s makeup and full-size endoskeleton by Stan Winston. Scenes removed before release are not part of the work. Later prints and video carry an acknowledgement of Harlan Ellison’s work, after his claim that the premise drew on his Outer Limits teleplays “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand”. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain; other lines are described. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the credit for additional dialogue, the house that made the stop-motion and miniature effects, the budget, the number of the Terminator’s lines, the scene timings, the terms on which Ellison’s claim was resolved, any account by the makers of the hero’s initials, the soundtrack remixes and colour regradings of later editions, and the film’s listings and honours.