The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [361]
This leads to the climactic `nightmare stage', conveniently ending in a metal foundry, in which the `bad' Terminator closes in on John, his mother and his `good' rival. Thanks to Schwarzenegger, the `bad' Terminator is eventually plunged into a vat of molten metal and is hideously destroyed. But then comes a last twist to the whole story, which shows the power of the archetypal structure once again reasserting itself. In a typically sentimental Hollywood ending, the `good' Terminator explains to John and his mother that, in order to save mankind, they must help him to be melted down too. Otherwise he and the computer `super-chip' he is carrying would be enough to ensure that the totalitarian computer-system would still take over the world. As he bids his farewell to them, he says he has at last learned why it is that human beings cry. As a machine, he has at last done the impossible and begun to develop human feelings. That is why he knows he must selflessly sacrifice his own existence, to save humanity. With tears in their eyes, John and his mother see their friendly Terminator dissolving into a molten lake, throwing in the vital chip after him. Humanity has been saved. The values of the Self have won the day.
In rational terms, of course, none of this stands up for a moment. If the dark power of the Terminators has truly been destroyed, then so has the supercomputer of the future which created them. They could never have existed in the first place. The world of 2029 could never have materialised in the way it has been described. There would be no nuclear holocaust in 1997; no ruins amid which John could lead his resistance struggle; no John Connor in 2029 to send his father back to the world of 1984 to impregnate his mother. The boy John, whom we have been watching throughout the film, could never have been born. None of this remotely makes sense, but that is not the point.
The point is that, through all this endless parade of make-believe violent imagery, in one of the most relentlessly violent stories ever put on a cinema screen (apart from a Tom and Jerry cartoon), we have seen the two dark versions of the Terminator as personifications of the human ego and the `masculine' values of physical and mental power, in their most deadly, remorseless guise. We have seen them as agents of an immense, all-knowing totalitarian power, a 'dark Self', dedicated to the extermination of the human race. Yet in the end they have all been destroyed, simply because one of these mechanical embodiments of the human ego has been through a classic Rebirth. Its heart has been awakened, its eyes have been opened to `see whole'. It has switched from `dark' to `light'. And by dying in its ego-self, it has merged with the interests of the true totality; that universal, eternal `Self' which is the living force behind all the universe. Out of the black depths of such a vision of chaos and destruction, the archetype has again re-formed itself into that image of wholeness which lies at the heart of what our urge to imagine stories is about.
But, if the conclusion of The Terminator finally shows the archetype of the Self winning the day, in one sense it always wins the day in stories, because, even on a sentimental level, this is the only way in which any story can be brought to a proper resolution. The archetype cannot be cheated. If it is defied, the story is doomed just to peter out, or to be forced into some implausible `pseudo-ending' which leaves its audience curiously unsatisfied. None of the other stories we have looked at in this chapter have been able to reach anything like such an allresolving conclusion. The ending of Fanny Hill is just a little cardboard fake; that of Justine is like