My Crush on Sarah Connor is Hard to Explain

I had an experience this last fall working at a residential treatment facility for boys with behavioral issues. My boys had been dying all week to watch Black Widow. These boys very seldom got to watch new movies while they were with us except for special field trips or when on home visits, and this movie had only just become available on Disney+. The staff all agreed to let them have a special viewing as a reward for their deep cleaning leading up to Parents' Weekend. 

I was really proud of my boys for their enthusiasm. I took it as a token of their evolving social awareness that they were as excited for a female-led superhero pic as they had been for Falcon and the Winter Soldier. My boys were becoming little feminists, or so I thought. 

    Imagine my disappointment when we finally watched the film and they spent the entire runtime catcalling Natasha and her sister. An entire film dedicated to a powerful heroine moving heaven and earth to liberate her sisters in arms, and all my boys could see was Scarlett Johanssen doing cartwheels in tights. Finally, I understood why they were actually excited to watch the film ...

This situation really highlights one of the great paradoxes of female empowerment in Hollywood these days. The fences that have hindered female representation for a century are so entrenched in our social patterns that even a feminist achievement like Black Widow is often lost on this audience. 

I was flustered watching my boys completely miss the point of Black Widow, but my faith was somewhat restored when at least one of my boys confided that he loved Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies.

The original target of the eponymous machine, Sarah Connor is often referenced as one of the earliest action heroines of cinema. By most definitions, she is the protagonist of the franchise, at least the first two films which are all anyone remembers anyways. Yet she is still somewhat overshadowed by things like Schwarzenneger’s cloud of celebrity. People remember "I'll be back," before they remember anything about Sarah Connor.

That's nothing agonizing, I guess. The Terminator is a pretty cool character. But what is agonizing is when I come across conversations about how Sarah Connor “hasn’t aged well” or “is actually bad for feminism.” 

  Maybe it’s because the legacy of the franchise privileges the title character over her, but Sarah Connor finds herself an undeserving victim of internet pseudo-intellect, and that needs to be corrected. Because it's not just that Sarah Connor isn't a damsel in distress or that she gets to use a gun. Sarah Connor is powerful for her agency within her films, powerful for how she is treated visually, and powerful for what she stands for. 

          

Crash Course in Terminator Lore

       The central conflict of the Terminator franchise is an apocalyptic war of mankind versus machines. But one of the unique things about these movies is the fact that while this war is a strong presence within the narrative, it’s seldom depicted on screen. In-universe, the war takes place in the future and wipes out most of humanity. Mankind ultimately wins this fight, but the machines make one last effort to win the war–before it even starts. 

         The original Terminator movie is set in 1984, a good forty years before the war. This is where we first meet Sarah Connor, a hapless waitress who spends her days mixing up the customers’ orders and her nights being stood up. Sarah does not see herself as the center of any grand conflict. Yet Sarah finds herself the target of a formidable assassin who pursues her with inhuman relentlessness.

   Sarah is rescued from a near-death encounter by a man named Kyle Reese who also came from the future to protect her from this entity, known as The Terminator. Kyle tells Sarah about the future war and that she has been selected for termination by the robot army. The fate of the war comes down to one man who manages to lead the humans in their rebellion against the machines. The name of this extraordinary leader? John Connor—Sarah’s unborn son. The machines hope they can win the war before it begins by removing her from the equation.

         Kyle and Sarah fight to stay one step ahead of The Terminator as Sarah acclimates to the role she will play in a future war. Their shared experiences draw them closer together, and Sarah and Kyle have a night of passion. The Terminator finally catches up to them and pursues them to a factory, killing Kyle in the process. Left to confront The Terminator alone, Sarah faces her destiny and destroys the machine once and for all. 

         Months later, Sarah reflects on the events that have transpired and the future that awaits her. She assures John Connor—now growing inside her, the fruit of the love she shared with Kyle—that they are going to withstand whatever the future brings them as she drives off into a thunderstorm.

         Terminator 2 brings two major additions to the mythology. First, John Connor himself is a character in the movie. Second, the Terminator is back, but this time as a good guy. In-universe, a machine of the same model as the original Terminator has been reprogramed by future-John Connor to fill a Kyle Reese-like role to John and protect him from an even more powerful machine out to destroy him.

    The sequel takes place years after the first film after the authorities have taken a pre-teen John from Sarah, who at the start of the film is locked up in a mental institution. The robots make one more attempt to eliminate John Connor, this time by targeting him directly with another Terminator that’s even deadlier than the first because this one can shape-shift. (This is actually a very dumb feature that set the precedent for even dumber gimmicks in sequels, but everyone else seems to like it, so what do I know?)

    This comes as the robot’s first strike against the humans—Judgment Day—is just on the horizon. There’s a dual tension within this movie: Sarah and the reformed Terminator have to protect John from the machines while also attempting to stop Judgment Day before it happens.

    I'm somewhat unique in my opinion in that I actually prefer the first Terminator movie to the second. I really like T2, and in a lot of ways, my respect for it has only grown over time. But I still consider that first movie to be the stronger offering. The first movie is a lot more straightforward with fewer moving parts, but it works as a greater whole much better than the sequel, which sort of becomes a different movie halfway through. A lot of this also has to do with the function Sarah performs in either film.

     Much of this essay is derived from the discourse that erupted around Sarah Connor some five years back. This was following the release of Wonder Woman in 2017 when female representation was on everyone’s mind. James Cameron was talking retrospectively about the second "Terminator" movie when the conversation inevitably fell to Sarah Connor and the legacy she left for women in action films.

    He shared, “All of the self-congratulatory back-patting Hollywood’s been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided. She’s an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing! I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards. Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit.”

         Cameron more or less gave his opinion about the movie and was civil about expressing a deviating response, but much of the public's reaction was not. Writer Tricia Ennis accused Cameron of using his position of power to silence women, while Jesse McLaren retorted that James Cameron is just confused by women who aren't motivated solely by motherhood. So the internet landed on this narrative that Sarah Connor was bad for feminism, actually.

         I hadn’t seen the Terminator movies by this time, so I didn’t really know what to think, but when I finally caught the first film, a good two years after the fact, my mind returned to this discussion. So here I am, five years late to the conversation (which I'll acknowledge is pretty on-brand for this blog) to tell the world that maybe the internet overreacted just a little (it’s happened before). I'm not here to put Sarah Connor and Diana Prince in competition with one another, but I would be remiss to not admit that I often find myself lingering on specific feminist talking points within the Sarah Connor conversation that have been left behind by mainstream discussion.

Mother of Year

        The base of the pushback against Sarah Connor that came during this time was that “Sarah Connor is bad for feminism because she’s only special for having a baby,” and I just know in my heart that this came from the same guy behind the “Ariel changes herself for a man” nonsense. As a basis for our discussion, we’ll look at this article, written for The Metro in December of 2017:

“First of all, Cameron seems to be ignoring the Sarah that we met in the first movie. She was the damsel in the distress who needed to be saved by Kyle Reese countless times from the Terminator who wanted to kill her.”

    People tend to write off Sarah in the first film in part, I theorize, because T2 Sarah is more overtly empowered, but Sarah was never “weak.” She was thrown into a volatile situation and reacted about as well as anyone could be expected. 

    Calling Sarah 1984 a “damsel in distress” kind of places the blame on her for not waking up each morning expecting to be attacked by a literal killing machine. I guess that's our baseline for empowerment now? But particularly in the context of a lot of 2010s feminist displays, I feel like what 1984 Sarah ends up displaying is that characters in heightened situations, like the kind you see in a major blockbuster, are allowed to feel overwhelmed by their situations, find their bearings, and then rise to the occasion--which is exactly what Sarah does in that film.

    This is especially striking in that first film when John Connor is more of a concept than a character, a name we give to the future of the human race, and all the responsibility falls on Sarah exclusively. It’s understood that even Sarah Connor the waitress had power latent inside her, she just had to unearth it.

At its heart, The Terminator is about a woman who doesn’t view herself as important or significant who learns that the future depends on her becoming a fighter. Sarah herself reads like the protagonist of a standard 80s or 90s rom-com. In another movie, the big inciting incident in Sarah's story could have been Bill Pullman taking a chance on a waitress like her. (And in a way, that is what happens ... it's just that Bill Pullman's pickup line here happens to be "come with me if you want to live.") We could easily draw parallels between Sarah and the likes of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in that she is an ordinary girl who is thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and through her experiences, she discovers within her that which is also extraordinary.

    I guess now is also as good a time as any to talk about Kyle Reese, Sarah's protector. One point of diversity within the discourse of “strong female characters” is the role men should or shouldn’t play in a woman’s self-actualization: can the leading lady truly be a “strong female character” if she has to be saved by a man?

    I've always felt it was somewhat skewed to expect a person to do this without receiving help from 50 percent of the world’s population. And so it feels less pertinent to ask “did Sarah need Kyle to save her?” and more to ask, “what exactly does the film say about manhood through their relationship?”

Kyle arguably rough-houses Sarah early on when he’s basically dragging her out of the gunfire, as one might in a life or death situation. But his “do exactly as I say right now!” behavior is confined exclusively to such scenarios, and it eases up as Sarah becomes more adept.

When they’re not literally running from death, Kyle spends most of the film expressing his admiration for Sarah, telling her how he volunteered to be sent back to protect her “to meet the legend.” Even more than fishing Sarah out of the path of the gunfire, it’s this emotional support that defines Sarah and Kyle’s relationship. Every time Sarah doubts herself, Kyle is quick to tell her about the warrior she has the potential to become and the influence she is going to have on the future.

    Many other "strong female characters" of film take a similar approach. Erin Brockovich is widely considered a touchstone of onscreen female empowerment, and the writer for her film, Susannah Grant, displayed how her hero's arc was also informed by the relationships with the men in her life. A part of that includes her relationship with her biker boyfriend, but even though that does not last, the film still gives attention to how Erin's choice of who she lets into her circle informs her final destination, like her lawyer who helps her take on this case against the state corporation. In Grant's words,

"I came to believe that the spine of the story would be stronger if it was an emotional spine rather than an informational spine. So I really structured it [around] Erin and Ed's relationship. Structurally, it's a love story. It's not a romantic love, obviously, but it is an interpersonal love story."

    Sarah and Kyle's relationship comes full circle in the climax of the film when we see Sarah’s growth start to blossom. An explosion leaves Kyle disoriented with the Terminator still on their trail. Sarah prompts him to keep moving, eventually exclaiming “On your feet, soldier! On your feet!” spurring him to action. It’s here that we really start to glimpse the leader that Sarah is destined to become.

In short, fixating on Sarah being a deer in the headlights in the first movie is missing the point. Moving on … 

“Cameron seems to be under the misconception that just because he doesn’t use the male gaze to objectify Sarah … he’s flying the flag for feminism, but when it comes down to it it’s never actually Sarah saving the day.”

         “Never” is really strong wording in that the writer seems to be ignoring that it is “damsel in distress” Sarah who ends up killing the Terminator in the first film. I’ve shared in my Notorious piece that the female lead doesn’t always have to “save the day” in order to be strong, but the film doesn’t even lean on that. Sarah doesn’t just survive the Terminator–she defeats him. Sarah also plays a huge part in the second film redirecting the attention to not just surviving the attacks of the Terminator but actively eliminating the threat by destroying Skynet, the corporation responsible for the rise of the machines.

         And we’ll hit the “male gaze” talking point in the next section.

“Sarah is merely the vessel that was needed to produce the true savior of the world causing her power as a strong woman to perpetually be reduced to her ability to give birth and take the role of the mother.”

This line of thinking really drives home the way that the Sarah backlash largely ends up harming the conversation on feminism. Critics who accuse the films of reducing Sarah to merely a babymaker end up doing just that themselves.

    Sarah’s role in stopping the apocalypse wasn’t just a matter of popping out a kid so he could make the date, not any more than the role of motherhood is a matter of pumping out a baby and calling it a day. John Connor was a leader. He knew how to inspire people. He had courage and a strong moral compass. But who taught him these things? The answer is very obviously his mother. And so, the future hinges upon Sarah acquiring these qualities herself. The future hangs on Sarah’s ability to self-actualize and attain the self-assurance to become the heroine of her own story.

        This inevitably collides into the real core of the Sarah Connor question: does Sarah’s empowerment ultimately serve the most heteronormative barrier of them all? Does empowering Sarah through motherhood reinforce the idea that the only way for a woman to be powerful is to enter into motherhood.

The female experience encapsulates a lot, and while motherhood is a significant tentpole, it’s only one part of it. There’s a lot of ground to cover, more than I think any one character can be expected to take on. It’s a little unfair to ask that Sarah be an ambassador for motherhood and childlessness, championing this signature item of womanhood while also distancing herself from it. This only highlights the danger of choosing a single representative for a chosen cause or community. There are multiple valid ways to be a woman, so there are multiple valid ways to empower women. Dragging Sarah down for not being able to do it all devalues the merit of this representation.

Like women as a whole, motherhood has historically been brushed aside as unimportant and not worthy of attention. One of the greatest things about Sarah Connor is the way she showcases this institution as something powerful. Here, motherhood isn’t something a woman does once she’s through with being a hero and is ready to retire into anonymity and unremarkability.

    In some ways, the role of preparing a child to take on their destiny is the biggest battlefield of them all. Women have been disappearing behind the mantle of motherhood for centuries, their achievements unacknowledged or dismissed. Sarah Connor rises from behind the curtain and tells society, yes, these achievements are worth admiring, and the women behind them are nothing less than heroic.

    Anyways, now we'll talk about the male gaze.

Sarah Connor and the Male Gaze

King Kong (2005)

    As a brief reminder, the term “the male gaze" is a name given to film’s function of displaying female bodies for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The term was introduced in Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and it encompasses many different facets of how the woman is presented: the way she is dressed, the way the camera treats her, her function within the narrative, etc. 

    Even if the presentation is not inherently sexual, there’s still an overtone of male dominance in how the woman in question is being presented. Even a woman’s competency or strength can just be a part of what makes her enticing, and therefore still a fetishistic presentation. Again, I refer to my experience with my boys watching Black Widow.

       It’s worth repeating that while no film scholar doubts that the male gaze exists, the concept itself doesn’t have a set list of parameters. There’s no one universally agreed way to sidestep its limiting effects on how women are presented to the viewer. Some go as far as saying that the male gaze can’t ever really be overcome in a medium designed for voyeurism. But there are patterns in how the male gaze operates, and Sarah Connor is especially relevant to this discussion because she subverts most of these.

         I’m hoping to not come off the wrong way when I say this, but I’ve always thought of Linda Hamilton as beautiful, but I’ve never thought of her as "pretty.” At least, she doesn't have the same pixie-ish look that is generally rewarded by casting directors. She has a different look than other starlets of the day like Michelle Pfeiffer or Jessica Lange--or even other actresses who went on to play Sarah Connor like Emilia Clarke or Lena Headey.

    If you look at what actresses get cast in leading roles in Hollywood, the minimum beauty threshold for leading ladies is very strict. Hollywood isn’t interested in seriously exploring the complex inner life or romantic pursuits of anyone who couldn't play Tinker Bell. You sometimes see average-looking girls cast in the role of like the leading lady’s gal pal, but that says a lot about what kind of women audiences are willing to give the time for. It’s not every day that an everyday woman is granted the spotlight. Men are beholden to this standard to an extent, but they also have an easier time escaping it. The easiest way to be employable in Hollywood is to be good-looking.

Howard the Duck (1986)

    But where even female nerds have to look like supermodels, Hollywood still leaves some room for men of moderate jawlines. Our collective consciousness absolutely accepts that all a male character has to do is be a protagonist, and then he is entitled to the full package of hero's spoils, including the attention and affection of a girl who is much better looking than he is. Women are seldom afforded that same privilege.

And so it’s to the credit of The Terminator that the heroine looks like a regular person not a Greek Statue. Really, Sarah Connor looks like a girl you could reasonably run into on the street, and I think that’s part of her character’s appeal: she’s an average girl with an extraordinary destiny. That, combined with Hamilton's innate charisma, makes it impossible for you to take your eyes off of her.

       For extra context, Ms. Hamilton’s biggest role between the Terminator movies was that of leading lady in the CBS series “Beauty and the Beast.” The show was wildly successful (at least for the first two seasons until Hamilton left the show) and people loved seeing Hamilton as the tender romantic lead. 

         You’d think then that Hollywood, knowing that Hamilton did have the capacity to play that airbrushed lady you saw on shampoo commercials, would ensure that their sequel had maximum appeal by tailoring Sarah Connor to fit the leading lady model to a tee.

         Turns out, they had other ideas.

         The first time we see Sarah in Terminator 2, she’s so unrecognizable, they might as well have cast a different actress or even invented a whole new character. She’s got an action-figure build, her hair is all tangled and hanging over her face, and the scowl she’s sporting would frighten off a silverback gorilla. The “everyday gal” has evolved into something powerful and formidable. An Entertainment Weekly article promoting Terminator 2 shared the following about Hamilton’s workout preparation for the film:

“Hamilton says, an Israeli commando, Uzi Gal, primed her for action scenes with ‘judo and heavy-duty military training. I learned to load clips, change mags, check out a room upon entry, verify kills. It was very vicious stuff. And it was sheer hell.’ She went through the training ‘because Sarah would have,’ but she did set limits. ‘He would have liked to have had me swimming in the ocean at dawn with a 50-pound pack, but I have a son who needed me too.’”

    You hear a lot about male celebrities going through similar physical transformations to get ready to play superheroes and whatnot. It's not as common for women to be celebrated for bulking up in the same fashion.

Even more interesting, it was at Hamilton’s suggestion that Sarah even went through this makeover to begin with. When Cameron reached out to Hamilton about the possibility of a sequel, she was the one who requested that Sarah get to play more like an action heroine in this film. Cameron shared, “I wrote it to the hilt based on her directive.” So it’s not just that Sarah looks tougher than your standard leading lady, the woman on display was the one defining how she would be presented visually.

There’s a long-running joke about women in action films always maintaining perfect hair and makeup even as they’re running through an exploding jungle, and this certainly plays into the male gaze’s mandate that the woman be kept visually beautiful at all times. It’s common practice to keep Evangeline Lily’s hair in place even when she’s crashing a fighter jet. Except with Sarah. She's allowed to get her hands dirty, and the way they showcase “Sarah Connor—action hero” is more in line with how action stars like Bruce Willis or Kurt Russell were presented visually.

V for Vendetta (2005)

        At the same time, it’s not entirely accurate to say that they empower Sarah by making her into Bruce Willis or Kurt Russell. Often films overcompensate and try to empower their female heroes by visually stripping them of their womanhood. What you often see are GI Jane style makeovers in which the heroine’s female features (long hair, breasts) are somehow disguised (cut off, buried under layers of clothing). Empowerment comes at the cost of their femininity.

    And this isn't to discount a wider representation of feminine expression. I'm just noting a pattern in which women who already display preference for traditional femininity in films are generally expected to shed that connection as a sort of payment for respect, and I'm wondering if there isn't another way.

         Again, Sarah Connor is a notable exception. Her outfit clearly outlines a womanly form, and she gets to keep her long hair throughout the adventure--long hair that gets tangled and ratty as Sarah goes into battle. Hamilton herself has shared specifically that she was the one who pushed for Sarah to get to keep her long hair in the second movie. Sarah Connor finds the golden mean wherein her womanhood is not exploited for male pleasure, but it’s also not shoved aside so that the big boys can take her seriously.

         And it’s here that I think that Cameron’s critique of Wonder Woman actually has merit and where Sarah Connor genuinely feels ahead of the curve. Even films like Wonder Woman or Black Widow can’t help but suggest that female strength is worth celebrating as long as the female in question still looks like a fantasy.

    And I’m not trying to place the blame on the actresses themselves—women in Hollywood already have way too much to deal with. I’m also not digging at Wonder Woman. I really appreciate Patty Jenkins’ movies both for their feminist advances and their entertainment value. (I’m actually one of six people who gave Wonder Woman 1984 a positive review.) But if our aim is to empower women, it stands that we should also aim to empower all women, not just those deemed worthy of attention by a casting agent. Again, as Mr. Cameron pointed out, “Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon.”

“So You Feel Nothing?”    

i, ROBOT (2004) 

   The "Terminator" movies popularized a lot of trends within pop media, trends that imitators didn't necessarily know how to translate gracefully. It might not seem readily apparent that a movie about a dude who rides around with a motorcycle and a machine gun might actually be an exploration of the need for human goodness. Michael Beihn went as far as saying that the first Terminator movie is best understood as a love story. James Cameron himself has also said about the franchise:

"The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed by future machines. They're about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other.”

    Note the way that Kyle describes The Terminator in the first film: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear …” These are traits associated with machinery, but humans can develop these attributes.

    Indeed, the fear of something like a Terminator hinges on the prospect that something that appears human can have a proclivity for destruction that is entirely inhuman. It’s this kind of indifference, which can only be described as robotic, that leads humans to create weapons with the capacity to destroy civilization, which grants the machines the tools to bring humanity to its knees.

         This is also one of the reasons why Terminator 2 works so well as a sequel. It finds a new angle to examine the same territory as its predecessor. The first film asked if a killing machine like The Terminator--this token of human brutality--could be defeated. The second asked if it could ever learn human values.

    There’s a scene in the first half of T2 when John is just starting to appreciate how cool it is to have his own pet robot who does whatever he says. Pre-teen John starts to have some fun with this by telling The Terminator to take care of a random guy on the street giving him a hard time. 

    It’s all fun and games until John realizes the Terminator has interpreted his instruction to mean killing the civilian. John stops the Terminator just in time and realizes that this machine has no value for human life and would have carried out his instructions fully. And so, John sets a ground rule for his robot buddy: human life is valuable, killing is off-limits. (One wonders where John learned such values.)

         This sets the tone for The Terminator’s arc in this movie. Through his experience with Sarah and John, protecting John stops being just a thing he was programmed to do and turns into a mission that teaches him the value of a life. The culminating moment for his character comes at the end of the film when The Terminator asks Sarah to lower him into the vat of molten metal to destroy the last bit of Skynet programming inside of him, ensuring that this technology is eliminated forever. It’s a truly selfless act from a machine, emblematic of something inhuman acquiring distinctly human attributes.

         So what does this mean for Sarah Connor?

    Leading up to the love scene between Sarah and Kyle, Sarah notes the intense sadness and pain that Kyle is carrying. He responds, “Pain can be controlled. You just disconnect it.” And Sarah echoes, “So you feel nothing?”

         This exchange lays out the real tragedy that awaits humanity. Machines have taken over humankind, not just by gunning them down, but by removing the thing that makes humans human. When you live in a warzone, you aren't able to feel anything. That isn't something Kyle gets to experience until he meets Sarah, and their brief union is a testament for the human capacity to feel for each other. That’s something that the machines, who eliminate humanity out of pure tactical advantage, do not possess, and it's something Sarah is abounding in.

    Sarah in that first movie has a very acute, very active, nurturing instinct. When she sees that Kyle has been shot, she immediately stops with her own self-concern and tends to his wounds. When she hears that her roommate was brutally killed by the Terminator, she's a mess. And the movie hinges on those qualities. Much of what is revelatory about Sarah Connor is this idea that great compassion and emotionality can and does portend other kinds of strength as well. A vibrant sense of humanity can also signal fortitude and courage.

        This is another reason why reducing Sarah’s victory to simply having a uterus is just a shallow reading of her character. Sarah carrying the child of the man who saved her life is more than just a token of a woman’s reproductive capabilities. It’s an emblem of the love she felt with another person, a love that gave Sarah the courage to face her destiny and Kyle the chance to experience something other than fear for the first time in his life. It’s that love that will enable humans to overcome the machines of the future.

  This poses some major questions for Sarah in the second film when she dons this warrior queen persona and it seems that maybe the spark of empathy has been extinguished. Because we're in full action mode in the second film, the signposts of domesticity feel so far removed from us--and away from Sarah. And as awesome as it is to see Sarah go full warzone, a part of you does kind of mourn the Sarah from the first film--the Sarah who gets dressed up with and jokes around with her roommate, the Sarah who takes care of their pet lizard. That softer Sarah is just nowhere to be seen in T2--and that could have potentially deadly consequences.

    There are certainly internal narrative motivations behind choosing to follow John Connor when he's still a kid. It would obviously make sense for the robots to try taking him out when he's at his most helpless. But more thematically, the film puts us in a place where that childlike impulse to go and pull your mom out of danger is framed as poor battle strategy.

    There's a moment after she and John escape with the Terminator from the institution where Sarah berates her son for recklessly coming to save her knowing it would put him in danger. John naturally insists that of course he's going to try to save his mother no matter what, but it does represent something of a moral dilemma for the future savior of the world. What place does sentiment have in the battlefield? Can these guys afford to let their emotions get in the way of their destinies?

    This conflict comes to a head in Sarah’s central moment in T2, arguably the centerpiece of her entire character arc, when she nearly goes to drastic measures to pre-emptively end the war. After Sarah has a nightmare about Judgment Day, she decides that the only way to stop the machines from rising is to kill the man who developed the Skynet system, a scientist named Miles Dyson. And so she goes rogue and hunts Dyson in his house with the intent of eliminating him.

    It's a really dark moment when Sarah has effectively become a Terminator herself. She gets very close to taking Dyson’s life, even in front of his wife and son, and in doing so she very nearly becomes the thing she’s fighting against. A machine would make the tactical choice to eliminate Dyson, whatever the emotional toll. That’s not a step that Sarah can take, so she drops the gun and spares his life. This moment is capped when, right after she's decided that she can't go through with the deed, John comes in and embraces her. 

    It's a mirror to the moment when John comes to rescue her from the hospital, only this time Sarah doesn't chastise her son for following his feelings. She's learned, or maybe just remembered, that this bizarrely human impulse to throw away one's programming and just do what feels right, maybe it's something to be grateful for. 

    And that's ultimately what ends up saving the day. Yes, there's a lot of shooting and exploding along the way, but the reason we feel hope for the future at the end of "Judgment Day" is that our Terminator--this guy whose only purpose in the last movie was to kill--has somehow acquired a sense of right and wrong, such that he is willing to sacrifice himself in order to help those he has grown to care about. And those aren't qualities he just stumbled upon incidentally. He learned them from watching John and Sarah.

    For a lot of people, Sarah’s greatest victory is that she makes the leap from helpless damsel in The Terminator to machine gun master in Terminator 2. I’d propose what makes her truly great is that even after Sarah evolves into action heroine, she never actually loses touch with that everyday waitress with a deep sense of goodness. Trauma and tribulation could not take away her humanity.

The Legacy of Sarah Connor

         Sarah Connor is a fascinating subject of study because conversations around her reveal a lot about how we define female strength. 

      Terminator: Dark Fate brought back Linda Hamilton as Sarah for the first time since T2, and I guess they just assumed that what everyone wanted to see from Sarah was the scowling gun master who doesn’t have time for your feelings.

    It’s probably the best film sequel post T2, but still a bit of a mixed bag, in large part owing to how it portrays Sarah. I give this emotionally suppressed depiction some leeway since part of her arc in this film hinges on her being lost in grief, but even that storyline feels unduly buried. The finished film never really lets Sarah grieve the death of John (yep, that happens) and see the arc completed to its fulness. It’s still not nearly as terrible as what they do to Sarah (or John, for that matter) in "Genysis," where Sarah is just brash and rude because that’s what female empowerment looks like …

Hollywood never quite understood what they had on their hands with Sarah Connor, and their mismanagement of the character is a large part of the reason why none of their attempts at a reboot have been successful. They got really close with the television adaptation, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which found the best balance between Sarah the action goddess and Sarah the human being. This series naturally ran only two seasons because anything more would have been fair …

        Other imitators have hardly been any better. I think Elizabeth Swann in the Pirates sequels was trying to channel Sarah Connor, but the makeover doesn’t translate as neatly. Elizabeth didn’t have to “man up” in the first film in order to hold her own, and nothing’s happened between the two movies that would make a complete wardrobe change feel like a natural progression of her character.

    Elizabeth the Pirate Boss just reads like a cynical move on part of the filmmakers to prove that Elizabeth is cool enough to hang with the big boys. This mentality reduces a woman’s strength to a narrow set of external factors, factors that are inevitably coded as unmistakably masculine.

In promoting Terminator: Dark Fate, Linda Hamilton herself reflected on Sarah Connor’s relationship to women in film: 

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

“Certainly, there are definitely many more women in action films now, but these things go through phases. That’s the way of the film landscape. But there have always been strong women. In the ’40s, there were fantastic roles for women. It’s just today, we’re using our bodies to show our strength.

    I guess another point worth reflecting upon is that following T2, Linda Hamilton actually retreated from the spotlight largely because she was not satisfied with the roles she was being offered. She's spoken out about wanting to dive into more comedic or romantic roles, but no one wanted to see Sarah Connor have a meet-cute. And so I do think there is a conversation to be had about both the barriers that inhibit female representation and also those that sprout up behind them after they've made the jump. Hamilton further explained,

 

   "I welcome the day where it’s just, nobody has to talk about it, that it’s just equally represented. I don’t only want to see strong women on film… I love the idea of playing incomplete women and women who aren’t prepared and women who are funny and women who are weak, because that’s the full range of the human experience.”

     Representation is all about depicting complexities, defying easy categorization, and Sarah Connor is full of contradictions: she breaks gender boundaries through championing one of the most elemental roles of women, she fills the role of either protectee or protector with equal grace, and even at her strongest, Sarah’s greatest trait is her ability to experience empathy. 

        --The Professor