I few days ago I started to rewatch the Terminator movies. One of my favourite childhood movies had always been
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). The film was avant-garde in both the action and science-fiction genres and the CGI was the most advanced in the film industry at that time. Judgement Day received six academy award nominations of which it won four, and numerous other awards, including five Saturn Awards, and six MTV Movie Awards. Apart from the high tech special effects that surpassed the first Terminator film, the acting in the sequel was particularly good, and the character Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton, wonderfully blossomed from the flat girl-in-distress character in the first movie, to a very well developed, round character in the second. Had the teenage me known that the MTV Movie Award bestowed upon Linda Hamilton the “Most Desirable Female” award, I would definitely had agreed. I remember when I first got an internet connection in 1995/6, “Linda Hamilton” was one of the very first celebrities I searched for online.
But my obsession with the strong female character was not the reason I liked the movie that much. It was more likely because of the other leading role, the character John Connor, played by Edward Furlong. The character John Connor was about 13 years of age, about the same age as myself, so I could identify with him. I never realised how much I identified with the character, and for what reasons, until I rewatched the movie a few days ago. Over twenty years later I have enough distance to look at the film and my younger self with some objectivity and a sense of insight.
John Connor was an outsider. He was rather rebellious, much more than myself, but this was at an age when I also felt a sense of rebellion. He also had, what he thought was, a crazy mother. The film starts with Sarah Connor in an insane asylum. My mother had never been in an insane asylum, but she did suffer from mental illness brought on by physiological causes. I could associate with John Connor; I could understand how he felt.
The fact that John Connor had grown up with a constant sense of caution and an awareness of potential violence is something else I shared with him, and it is this particular similarity that I did not realise until I watched
Judgement Day again recently. The reason I had not realised this similarity before is because when I grew up I thought it was normal—it was such a part of my life.
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The riots in South Africa in the 80s and early 90s
were often violent.
(Image Source) |
I grew up right against
Sebokeng -- and in particular the notoriously violent Zone 13 -- a short jog from
Evaton and a short drive from
Sharpeville. These “locations”, as they are known in South Africa, were some of the most heated areas during the anti-apartheid struggle and the tumultuous riots of the eighties and nineties. During this time our lives were always in danger. I grew up with guns and learned to handle a gun from very early on. Before I had even gone to school I already knew the basics of gun safety and I had learned to shoot different guns before I had learned to drive a car. I've never taken a liking to guns, and to this day I still don't like guns, but I know how, at least, to use them. The need for guns was purely for self-protection, because in the locations there were many illegal guns (there still are) and at the time white people, as the oppressors, were the enemy. I remember so clearly the regular sound of gun fire, particularly AK-47s, at night time. (Where I currently live is right next to a military base where they often do shooting practise and the sound of gunfire can sometimes be clearly heard. My first emotion when I heard the sound was nostalgia!) From a very early age I had learned certain precautions. For instance, in the evening one was never to stand in front of a window, especially not with the lights on as this will cause your silhouette to be cast against the curtains, making you a very easy target from outside. We (my father, siblings and other men on the farm) often had to stand guard at night. As a child I had seen a man attacked with “pangas” (machetes), I heard the screams for help of someone being necklaced (a car tire put around them, gasoline poured on them, and then set alight), I had been in roadblocks—big stones rolled into the road and when you are forced to stop, your car is bombarded with rocks; by God's grace we were able to escape. My brother had been held at gunpoint twice and my father had been shot in the head. It is with this kind of violence that I had grown up and most of my childhood I had thought it all normal—thought that it is how all South Africans live. I was thinking recently, how many children have escape routes memorised and contemplate different hiding places, depending on where the enemy comes from.
Watching
Judgement Day again and seeing young John Connor growing up with such a sense of danger and constant anticipation of potential violence, I can understand why I resonated so much with this character and this movie. John Connor grew up in an environment that required constant vigilance. The villain, the Terminator T-1000, also made the abstract concrete to me. I grew up with a constant threat—a politically driven threat—that I did not understand. I did not understand why there were black people trying to hurt us, commit arson to our property, and so on. The black people I typically had contact with were people that had worked for my family for years. We cared for them and they for us. In fact, my nanny had named me and was part of our family set-up for nearly thirty years.
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| My nanny Emily who named me. |
As a child I was fluent in Sesotho, the native tongue of the area, and I played with the black children in the area. I did not understand the extend of the injustices of apartheid and while my family undoubtedly had a racist side, I also sympathised with the anti-apartheid activists. I still remember telling my parents that I think, had I been born black, I would also have rioted too, to which they agreed. So the whole political situation was a complex mess that I couldn't wrap my head around—but the Terminator T-1000, like most Hollywood villains, was simple. It was an “other” and was clearly evil. Even though the movie is science-fiction, it explained the world in the simple dichotomies of good and evil.
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The T-1000 Terminator sent
back through time to
kill John Connor.
(Image Source: Terminator Wiki) |
For years I had thought that the reason the film was such a favourite was because of its special effects and my love for speculative fiction, and I'm sure that definite contributed to it. However, in hindsight I recognize that this film spoke to me at a much deeper level. It played out the archetypes that were present in my own life, and in a strange way helped my subconscious, not so much to make sense of the word, but at least create a sense of alternate normality. I was not the only 13 year old boy who lived in a dangerous world.
(This post may make it seem as if I lived in a war zone under constant threat of death and that I had a most dreadful childhood. This is not the case. There were many periods in my childhood where the threat was insignificant. The political anger came in sweeps, in seasons of high and low intensity, so that I did not always feel threatened, although the area we live did require constant vigilance.)
