Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991)
"You forgot to say please."
It’s been six weeks since I last saw Dr Nicola Jones, but needs must.
‘What are you here for again?’ she asks. I answer with ‘I’m writing a piece for the blog, but I'm thinking of taking things in a different direction, and I just need…’ when she interrupts. ‘Something to smooth out the cracks?’ ‘Exactly.’
Nicola puts pen to paper and fills out a prescription form. I like Nicola, she’s calm, knows her stuff, and her office is a restful haven from the world. It even has a ticking clock in the corner, and you don’t see many of those any more. She finishes writing with a flourish, hands the prescription form over, I look at it, read it out loud. ‘Lyrica? What’s that?’ She answers with her head still facing down, her voice distracted as she fills in some kind of supplementary form. ‘Since when have you been interested in what it is. As long as it works, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘What’s the piece anyway?’ ‘The what?’ ‘You said you were writing a piece for the blog.’ I make the kind of face that someone might make if they had a spasm of indigestion, or shoulder pain. How do you put an unformed idea into words? Sure, it helps that Dr Jones is as interested in cinema as I am, but I still get the gnawing anxiety in my gut that comes at the very thought of discussing something formative and unpolished with someone else, swallow it down despite the discomfort and say… ‘That’s the thing. I thought I’d write about Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991) but I’m not sure how to couch it.’ ‘Terminator 2? That’s a little… old.’ ‘Well it’s just been re-released in 3D.’ ‘So there’s your angle. 3D.’ ‘I guess, but…’ Dr Jones puts her pen down, looks up at me, leans forward. If she’s not genuinely interested in all this then she does an excellent impression of someone who is. ‘But what?’
I think about this for a moment, and then inhale, and the next words come out fast, in one long river of sound. ‘I just don’t know where to start with it. The film is much messier than I remembered it being, and James Cameron himself seems to have no discernible style, no particular ‘thing’ that makes him recognisable. I mean, he has a kind of weirdly old-fashioned classicism to his compositions at times, but then it’s muddied by a cornucopia of choices that don’t seem to form anything concrete that anyone can talk about.’ Dr Jones makes a face which seems to suggest touché and says… ‘Well he likes technology, that’s a thing.’ ‘It’s a theme, but it’s hardly a cinematic signature. If you see a still from… I don’t know, a Wes Anderson film, or a Stanley Kubrick film or, hell, even a Michael Mann film you can recognise it because they have particular visual obsessions that come back time and time again.’ ‘And Cameron?’ Dr Jones lights a cigarette, in her office. I glance sideways at the door, and then back at her. She waves away my look and speaks while exhaling a lungful ‘You’re the last person coming in today. It’s fine. Anyway, tell me about Cameron.’
Knowing that I’m the last patient of the day is worrisome. Dr Jones will want to leave soon, but will probably want me to come with her, so this could go on for longer than I wanted, and will probably end up involving alcohol, and I have stuff to write, but I ignore this internal monologue and continue. ‘There’s nothing to tell. There’s nothing for me to find a foothold on. It’s like trying to do an impression of Jeremy Renner – there’s nothing there that is easy to recognise as being unique or personal.’ Dr Jones inhales sharply, a wince. ‘Harsh. But none of this helps you, or the article.’ ‘I know, which is why I’ve been thinking about turning it into something else, something about what’s not in Terminator 2 rather than what is.’ ‘Such as?’
Now I’m getting quite enthused, it’s always good to talk to Dr Jones, and these spontaneous chats we have help clarify my thoughts into something useful. As I expected, Nicola now wants to leave, to get a drink. We walk out of the clinic and the glass corridors we pass remind me of Linda Hamilton, fleeing from the LA police, guns blazing, the air thick with bullets, glass raining down. I think it was Dr Jones herself who taught me to pay attention to the material of the sets in action sequences and how they come to be involved in action set pieces, but I could be wrong.
‘Okay, so stop me if this is too weird, but I was thinking about turning it into something titled The Four Tenets of Filmmaking.’ ‘That sounds unnecessarily ostentatious.’ ‘You think? I just wanted to do something specific, and useful. Terminator 2 is so much noise, and lenses, and movement, and everything is being thrown at you. It might be nice to strip it all down to the basics. To the choices that are made before others.’ ‘Understood, so what’s number one.’ I take a deep breath. Suddenly the words that have been going around my head all morning sound silly to me now, but I say them anyway: ‘Either you move the camera or you don’t.’ ‘You weren’t kidding when you said you were stripping it back.’ ‘I should also add that this includes either the subjects move in the frame, or staying still.’ ‘So you’re saying that before there’s any conversation about lighting, lenses, rhythm, colour, all of that… furniture… that this is where it all begins?’ ‘Precisely. Every subsequent decision or topic that you can talk about in a film starts with this one question that the filmmaker asks themselves.’ ‘I like your use of a gender free pronoun. How does this relate to Terminator 2?’
We’re in a craft brewery now. Dr Jones is drinking something which sounds like it’s called fitte and all I can think about is that this is an obscene word in Norwegian. I don’t mention it. ‘When watching Terminator 2 I just became aware of so much visual noise, how so much was being thrown at us without any real consistency and then I got to thinking about what we call good films.’ ‘Such as?’ ‘Well that’s subjective, but I saw Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973) for the first time the other day, and there’s this one scene in particular where Liv Ullmann, playing a lawyer, is talking to a lady who wants to get a divorce.’ A light goes on in Dr Jones’s eyes, and her hands take on a life of their own to create a visual re-tread of the scene she remembers. ‘Wait a minute, I remember that bit. The lady who talks about being able to touch the table, but the sensation is duller than it used to be?’ ‘Yes! That’s the scene!’ ‘See, I know stuff too.’ ‘I never doubted you for a second.’ ‘I don’t remember the camera movements though.’ ‘Well there are hardly any. It’s told from a series of set-ups, 3 or 4 of them, and it moves from one to another as the scene progresses, always growing and going somewhere new, and never revisiting where it’s been.’ ‘But it’s just talking heads.’ ‘Sure, but there’s a real philosophy of thought going on in that scene, I mean… in the whole film really, but that one scene is a great case study for how you can add to a scene simply by asking yourself that question: do I move the camera, or do I not? And then adding to that by asking yourself two further questions: how and why.’ ‘And Cameron’s not doing this?’ ‘I’m sure he is, but his choices seem to relate to the second tenet.’ ‘Which is?’ ‘Either you recreate a film or you don’t.’ ‘I don’t get that.’ ‘So when you make a film, what you’re doing is either recreating moments or movements that you’ve seen in other films, or you’re not, and if not you’re drawing from something else.’ ‘Drawing from what? Life?’ ‘Yeeeeah, I guess.’
Dr Jones drains her glass and waves a hand at one of the bar staff signifying that we need two more drinks. Then she turns back to me, her eyes holding a touch more drift to them thanks to the fitte. ‘You sound tentative.’ ‘Because it’s messy, because it gets interfered with by people saying that one thing looks like another thing, you see it all the time on the internet; people find screengrabs from different films, but all somehow tied together, like images of people dead in a bathtub or something, where the framing or composition or lighting is similar.’ ‘Like… doing the Marat Sade pose?’ ‘Exactly, but maybe a dead guy in a bathtub just looks like a dead guy in a bathtub, you dig? Maybe it’s something the filmmaker has seen, or dreamt of, maybe it’s not always a reference to something else.’ ‘Sometimes a reference is only in the eye of the beholder?’ ‘Exactly.’ I glance up at the TV screen in the corner of the room and am reminded of how while Terminator 2 had a 3D makeover, all the CCTV screens in the film itself were flat, without any 3D elements. So weird… like they were saying this big screen you’re looking at where the movie takes place is solid, three dimensional, part of the world, but screens within screens are different. They're just objects. So weird.
A shift takes place here as our next two drinks are dropped in front of us, and suddenly Dr Jones is schooling me on Terminator 2. She’s holding an electronic cigarette now, and even though you’re not allowed to vape in here, she does. No one reprimands her. ‘But Cameron’s not doing that, he’s definitely drawing on film grammar, not a lived in experience. I mean, damn, a lot of Terminator 2 even feels like he was unhappy with how the first film went…’ ‘Which is heresy.’ ‘…agreed… But I kept getting the feeling that he wanted to do it right.’ ‘And by right you mean cleaner, more polished, with a bigger budget.’ ‘Exactly. That scene of driving through the wall of the police station in the first film was good, but imagine how much better it would be if the vehicle went through an entire wall of glass, and skidded across a large, brushed steel foyer.’ ‘Oh God, so much brushed steel.’ Without needing a signpost, we suddenly both deviate and start talking about texture. ‘It’s almost like one of the messages he believes in is that the future is smooth, free of detail.’ ‘Yes! I noticed this, everything new and futuristic is shiny, polished, free of tactility, and everything old is rusted, dusty, creaking.’ ‘There’s something going on there for sure. Okay, so what’s number 3?’ I press my hands together as I say the next sentence. ‘I have 3 and 4 together, symbiotic, I’m not really sure which one is more important than the other. So it’s: Either you hear the world or you don’t, and either you cut now, or you wait.’
Dr Jones finishes her second drink, and is now much looser, openly following the loping strut of one of the bar staff members as he walks back and forth. She keeps her gaze on him and says... ‘Did you ever see Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)?’ ‘Yes, but a long time ago, what are you thinking?’ ‘There’s a moment in the opening 20 minutes of the film where the police fire a tear gas canister into the building where the students are protesting, and the camera follows the canister as it slowly rolls across the floor. You keep thinking that the shot is about to cut, and of course it does eventually, but it goes on a lot longer than other people would have let it.’ ‘And what does that mean to you?’ The bar man walks out of view and Dr Jones blinks slowly, mechanically, and turns her head to look at me again, like a lustful machine. ‘Well, I guess normally the whole point of editing is about identifying a visual, reading an image for information, and as soon as you’ve processed that information you move on…’ ‘Agreed.’ ‘…but the longer you’re left to look at something the more you start asking yourself why am I looking at this, or why am I being shown this for so long, and that can take you to interesting places. By contrast, Terminator 2 shows you those gas canisters rolling along the ground, but only long enough for you to identify, and to understand, and then it moves on straight away. The focus is not the experience of a moment, but visuals as information that needs to be decoded, nothing more.’ ‘I had no idea you were so familiar with Terminator 2.’ ‘Oh, I’m just full of surprises. What about the sound tenet?’ ‘Okay, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not sure how that ties in to Terminator 2.’ ‘You’re talking about sound in general though, right? Whether we hear something or not, and possibly even whether the characters talk in a scene or not, these basic choices?’ ‘Correct.’ ‘So how about this…’ Dr Jones takes another drag on her electronic cigarette, the tip glows blue, and the vapour spills out of her mouth as she speaks in a way that I can only describe as extremely seductive. ‘There are a couple of scenes in the film where Linda Hamilton has voiceover…’ ‘Yeah, when she’s watching her son hanging out with the Terminator.’ ‘That’s one of them. Anyway, my point being, whose film is this? The way the narrative plays out you’re inclined to think it’s Edward Furlong’s film, but we never hear what’s going on in his head. He never gets any voiceover.’ The realisation of this hits me hard, how could I have overlooked this? ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Right? It’s almost like this one choice, which has to do with sound, makes the whole question of authorship complicated. Who does this film belong to?’
It’s late now, and the craft beer place is closing. I lost track of how many drinks we had, dumb move. I’m putting my coat on and Dr Jones is taking a blister pack of pills from her pocket. She offers them to me clumsily. ‘You want one?’ ‘What are they?’ She waves the packet at me, frustrated. ‘Just take one.’ So I do, and then there’s some kind of jump cut in my life, and suddenly we’re walking on the street, in what I can only presume is somewhere in South London. It’s cold out here, and everything’s kicking in now, and I feel like I’m being lowered into molten metal, losing the sensation in my body, from the feet up. Dr Jones speaks, slurring. I just listen to her. I can’t form words any more. ‘These four tenets seem strong to me. Four pillars that everything can be based on. But it’s not finished. You should develop this. It’s important. Finish the prescription, and then let’s meet up again.’ She hands me a scrap of paper and tells me to put it in my pocket, then explains… ‘This is for future you. He’ll know what it means.’ I clumsily tuck the paper into my pocket and idly wonder what future me will read in the morning.
It’s been six weeks since I last saw Dr Nicola Jones, but needs must.
‘What are you here for again?’ she asks. I answer with ‘I’m writing a piece for the blog, but I'm thinking of taking things in a different direction, and I just need…’ when she interrupts. ‘Something to smooth out the cracks?’ ‘Exactly.’
Nicola puts pen to paper and fills out a prescription form. I like Nicola, she’s calm, knows her stuff, and her office is a restful haven from the world. It even has a ticking clock in the corner, and you don’t see many of those any more. She finishes writing with a flourish, hands the prescription form over, I look at it, read it out loud. ‘Lyrica? What’s that?’ She answers with her head still facing down, her voice distracted as she fills in some kind of supplementary form. ‘Since when have you been interested in what it is. As long as it works, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘What’s the piece anyway?’ ‘The what?’ ‘You said you were writing a piece for the blog.’ I make the kind of face that someone might make if they had a spasm of indigestion, or shoulder pain. How do you put an unformed idea into words? Sure, it helps that Dr Jones is as interested in cinema as I am, but I still get the gnawing anxiety in my gut that comes at the very thought of discussing something formative and unpolished with someone else, swallow it down despite the discomfort and say… ‘That’s the thing. I thought I’d write about Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991) but I’m not sure how to couch it.’ ‘Terminator 2? That’s a little… old.’ ‘Well it’s just been re-released in 3D.’ ‘So there’s your angle. 3D.’ ‘I guess, but…’ Dr Jones puts her pen down, looks up at me, leans forward. If she’s not genuinely interested in all this then she does an excellent impression of someone who is. ‘But what?’
I think about this for a moment, and then inhale, and the next words come out fast, in one long river of sound. ‘I just don’t know where to start with it. The film is much messier than I remembered it being, and James Cameron himself seems to have no discernible style, no particular ‘thing’ that makes him recognisable. I mean, he has a kind of weirdly old-fashioned classicism to his compositions at times, but then it’s muddied by a cornucopia of choices that don’t seem to form anything concrete that anyone can talk about.’ Dr Jones makes a face which seems to suggest touché and says… ‘Well he likes technology, that’s a thing.’ ‘It’s a theme, but it’s hardly a cinematic signature. If you see a still from… I don’t know, a Wes Anderson film, or a Stanley Kubrick film or, hell, even a Michael Mann film you can recognise it because they have particular visual obsessions that come back time and time again.’ ‘And Cameron?’ Dr Jones lights a cigarette, in her office. I glance sideways at the door, and then back at her. She waves away my look and speaks while exhaling a lungful ‘You’re the last person coming in today. It’s fine. Anyway, tell me about Cameron.’
Knowing that I’m the last patient of the day is worrisome. Dr Jones will want to leave soon, but will probably want me to come with her, so this could go on for longer than I wanted, and will probably end up involving alcohol, and I have stuff to write, but I ignore this internal monologue and continue. ‘There’s nothing to tell. There’s nothing for me to find a foothold on. It’s like trying to do an impression of Jeremy Renner – there’s nothing there that is easy to recognise as being unique or personal.’ Dr Jones inhales sharply, a wince. ‘Harsh. But none of this helps you, or the article.’ ‘I know, which is why I’ve been thinking about turning it into something else, something about what’s not in Terminator 2 rather than what is.’ ‘Such as?’
Now I’m getting quite enthused, it’s always good to talk to Dr Jones, and these spontaneous chats we have help clarify my thoughts into something useful. As I expected, Nicola now wants to leave, to get a drink. We walk out of the clinic and the glass corridors we pass remind me of Linda Hamilton, fleeing from the LA police, guns blazing, the air thick with bullets, glass raining down. I think it was Dr Jones herself who taught me to pay attention to the material of the sets in action sequences and how they come to be involved in action set pieces, but I could be wrong.
‘Okay, so stop me if this is too weird, but I was thinking about turning it into something titled The Four Tenets of Filmmaking.’ ‘That sounds unnecessarily ostentatious.’ ‘You think? I just wanted to do something specific, and useful. Terminator 2 is so much noise, and lenses, and movement, and everything is being thrown at you. It might be nice to strip it all down to the basics. To the choices that are made before others.’ ‘Understood, so what’s number one.’ I take a deep breath. Suddenly the words that have been going around my head all morning sound silly to me now, but I say them anyway: ‘Either you move the camera or you don’t.’ ‘You weren’t kidding when you said you were stripping it back.’ ‘I should also add that this includes either the subjects move in the frame, or staying still.’ ‘So you’re saying that before there’s any conversation about lighting, lenses, rhythm, colour, all of that… furniture… that this is where it all begins?’ ‘Precisely. Every subsequent decision or topic that you can talk about in a film starts with this one question that the filmmaker asks themselves.’ ‘I like your use of a gender free pronoun. How does this relate to Terminator 2?’
We’re in a craft brewery now. Dr Jones is drinking something which sounds like it’s called fitte and all I can think about is that this is an obscene word in Norwegian. I don’t mention it. ‘When watching Terminator 2 I just became aware of so much visual noise, how so much was being thrown at us without any real consistency and then I got to thinking about what we call good films.’ ‘Such as?’ ‘Well that’s subjective, but I saw Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973) for the first time the other day, and there’s this one scene in particular where Liv Ullmann, playing a lawyer, is talking to a lady who wants to get a divorce.’ A light goes on in Dr Jones’s eyes, and her hands take on a life of their own to create a visual re-tread of the scene she remembers. ‘Wait a minute, I remember that bit. The lady who talks about being able to touch the table, but the sensation is duller than it used to be?’ ‘Yes! That’s the scene!’ ‘See, I know stuff too.’ ‘I never doubted you for a second.’ ‘I don’t remember the camera movements though.’ ‘Well there are hardly any. It’s told from a series of set-ups, 3 or 4 of them, and it moves from one to another as the scene progresses, always growing and going somewhere new, and never revisiting where it’s been.’ ‘But it’s just talking heads.’ ‘Sure, but there’s a real philosophy of thought going on in that scene, I mean… in the whole film really, but that one scene is a great case study for how you can add to a scene simply by asking yourself that question: do I move the camera, or do I not? And then adding to that by asking yourself two further questions: how and why.’ ‘And Cameron’s not doing this?’ ‘I’m sure he is, but his choices seem to relate to the second tenet.’ ‘Which is?’ ‘Either you recreate a film or you don’t.’ ‘I don’t get that.’ ‘So when you make a film, what you’re doing is either recreating moments or movements that you’ve seen in other films, or you’re not, and if not you’re drawing from something else.’ ‘Drawing from what? Life?’ ‘Yeeeeah, I guess.’
Dr Jones drains her glass and waves a hand at one of the bar staff signifying that we need two more drinks. Then she turns back to me, her eyes holding a touch more drift to them thanks to the fitte. ‘You sound tentative.’ ‘Because it’s messy, because it gets interfered with by people saying that one thing looks like another thing, you see it all the time on the internet; people find screengrabs from different films, but all somehow tied together, like images of people dead in a bathtub or something, where the framing or composition or lighting is similar.’ ‘Like… doing the Marat Sade pose?’ ‘Exactly, but maybe a dead guy in a bathtub just looks like a dead guy in a bathtub, you dig? Maybe it’s something the filmmaker has seen, or dreamt of, maybe it’s not always a reference to something else.’ ‘Sometimes a reference is only in the eye of the beholder?’ ‘Exactly.’ I glance up at the TV screen in the corner of the room and am reminded of how while Terminator 2 had a 3D makeover, all the CCTV screens in the film itself were flat, without any 3D elements. So weird… like they were saying this big screen you’re looking at where the movie takes place is solid, three dimensional, part of the world, but screens within screens are different. They're just objects. So weird.
A shift takes place here as our next two drinks are dropped in front of us, and suddenly Dr Jones is schooling me on Terminator 2. She’s holding an electronic cigarette now, and even though you’re not allowed to vape in here, she does. No one reprimands her. ‘But Cameron’s not doing that, he’s definitely drawing on film grammar, not a lived in experience. I mean, damn, a lot of Terminator 2 even feels like he was unhappy with how the first film went…’ ‘Which is heresy.’ ‘…agreed… But I kept getting the feeling that he wanted to do it right.’ ‘And by right you mean cleaner, more polished, with a bigger budget.’ ‘Exactly. That scene of driving through the wall of the police station in the first film was good, but imagine how much better it would be if the vehicle went through an entire wall of glass, and skidded across a large, brushed steel foyer.’ ‘Oh God, so much brushed steel.’ Without needing a signpost, we suddenly both deviate and start talking about texture. ‘It’s almost like one of the messages he believes in is that the future is smooth, free of detail.’ ‘Yes! I noticed this, everything new and futuristic is shiny, polished, free of tactility, and everything old is rusted, dusty, creaking.’ ‘There’s something going on there for sure. Okay, so what’s number 3?’ I press my hands together as I say the next sentence. ‘I have 3 and 4 together, symbiotic, I’m not really sure which one is more important than the other. So it’s: Either you hear the world or you don’t, and either you cut now, or you wait.’
Dr Jones finishes her second drink, and is now much looser, openly following the loping strut of one of the bar staff members as he walks back and forth. She keeps her gaze on him and says... ‘Did you ever see Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)?’ ‘Yes, but a long time ago, what are you thinking?’ ‘There’s a moment in the opening 20 minutes of the film where the police fire a tear gas canister into the building where the students are protesting, and the camera follows the canister as it slowly rolls across the floor. You keep thinking that the shot is about to cut, and of course it does eventually, but it goes on a lot longer than other people would have let it.’ ‘And what does that mean to you?’ The bar man walks out of view and Dr Jones blinks slowly, mechanically, and turns her head to look at me again, like a lustful machine. ‘Well, I guess normally the whole point of editing is about identifying a visual, reading an image for information, and as soon as you’ve processed that information you move on…’ ‘Agreed.’ ‘…but the longer you’re left to look at something the more you start asking yourself why am I looking at this, or why am I being shown this for so long, and that can take you to interesting places. By contrast, Terminator 2 shows you those gas canisters rolling along the ground, but only long enough for you to identify, and to understand, and then it moves on straight away. The focus is not the experience of a moment, but visuals as information that needs to be decoded, nothing more.’ ‘I had no idea you were so familiar with Terminator 2.’ ‘Oh, I’m just full of surprises. What about the sound tenet?’ ‘Okay, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not sure how that ties in to Terminator 2.’ ‘You’re talking about sound in general though, right? Whether we hear something or not, and possibly even whether the characters talk in a scene or not, these basic choices?’ ‘Correct.’ ‘So how about this…’ Dr Jones takes another drag on her electronic cigarette, the tip glows blue, and the vapour spills out of her mouth as she speaks in a way that I can only describe as extremely seductive. ‘There are a couple of scenes in the film where Linda Hamilton has voiceover…’ ‘Yeah, when she’s watching her son hanging out with the Terminator.’ ‘That’s one of them. Anyway, my point being, whose film is this? The way the narrative plays out you’re inclined to think it’s Edward Furlong’s film, but we never hear what’s going on in his head. He never gets any voiceover.’ The realisation of this hits me hard, how could I have overlooked this? ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Right? It’s almost like this one choice, which has to do with sound, makes the whole question of authorship complicated. Who does this film belong to?’
It’s late now, and the craft beer place is closing. I lost track of how many drinks we had, dumb move. I’m putting my coat on and Dr Jones is taking a blister pack of pills from her pocket. She offers them to me clumsily. ‘You want one?’ ‘What are they?’ She waves the packet at me, frustrated. ‘Just take one.’ So I do, and then there’s some kind of jump cut in my life, and suddenly we’re walking on the street, in what I can only presume is somewhere in South London. It’s cold out here, and everything’s kicking in now, and I feel like I’m being lowered into molten metal, losing the sensation in my body, from the feet up. Dr Jones speaks, slurring. I just listen to her. I can’t form words any more. ‘These four tenets seem strong to me. Four pillars that everything can be based on. But it’s not finished. You should develop this. It’s important. Finish the prescription, and then let’s meet up again.’ She hands me a scrap of paper and tells me to put it in my pocket, then explains… ‘This is for future you. He’ll know what it means.’ I clumsily tuck the paper into my pocket and idly wonder what future me will read in the morning.