Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

directed by James Cameron

Jessi Heffington

I haven’t written anything in a long time. Like, a long, long time. I’ve been beating myself up over this lately, because I know I can be better than who I am now. I push myself down before I even get up, thinking: who cares what I have to say? Hasn’t it all been said before? When my dad died in 2017, I was nineteen. I aped all the creative energy I had left in me and vomited it up on the page for the world to read. My anguish made me mistake grief for insight and pain for novelty. When someone dies, and especially when you’re young, it feels like you’re the only person in the world who’s ever felt the crushing blows of grief. I speedran tragedy and ended up a jaded burnout by twenty-two. Before that, though, I left for Berlin on scholarship in 2018 thinking I could escape my life stateside. I couldn’t. I became an alcoholic and roasted cigs in my student accommodation at four in the morning. I skipped class, got the stomach flu, pissed in the street, bought weed off dudes in the park, and ignored a guy who clearly had a crush on me. He liked to juggle. The only thing that consistently brought me joy was watching movies—when I was skipping class or couldn’t sleep, none of my friends awake to take my call.

I’ve always “loved” movies in the anodyne sense of the word. I loved about five movies ardently, a seed planted as a child that never matured past that for a decade. If you asked five-year-old me what my favorite movies were, they’d be Braveheart, The Thing, Aristocats, Mulan, and, most of all, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. My parents wearied of having to pop that VHS in like parents in 2013 despaired of booting up Frozen for the one millionth time. To be clear, T2 is one of the most successful and beloved films of all time. It’s not groundbreaking for me to cherish it like I do. As I get older, new meanings become apparent, and I finally feel like I have something to say again. I have friends who don’t like to rewatch movies. That’s fair, and I respect their opinion, but that’s absolutely and totally wrong. Every time you watch a film, listen to a song, or look at a painting in a museum, I’d argue you’re encountering it for the very first time again. You, the viewer/listener/discerner, are evolving every single second; you are essentially a different person now than you were two seconds ago. Imagine coming back to a work of art that you’ve been engaging with for as long as you can remember for decades. The art becomes a dear friend that you’ve grown with.

My viewership of T2 changed after I began exploring my gender and experiencing the death of my father, as you can imagine. One of the weird pleasures of growing up is looking back on your child self and immediately bringing something into focus. Why was I so obsessed with this movie? Why was puberty traumatic for me? Why was I especially drawn to my friends, all of whom were girls? Why was I so stubbornly insistent against being feminized? All these years on, all I can do is laugh to myself and say “oh.” I did not have a good relationship with my dad. How novel. However, in the year or so before his death, it felt like he finally thawed out and allowed me to foster a serviceable, often loving repartee with him. I think this is the bitter cherry on top of the shit sundae that made grieving him all that much harder.

People are generally very annoyed by Edward Furlong’s performance as John Connor in T2, but I find it to be sincerely down to earth and real. It’s fantastic that we hear his voice crack, teaching a cyborg to say corny ‘90s one-liners like hasta la vista, baby, and insisting upon a somewhat naïve philosophy of “no killing.” One thing that Terminator has over T2 is the fact that the T-800 is not afraid of killing cops, and a lot of them. However, I’m not going to fault a 12 year old for this approach. Always, at the screen, I’m yelling: “Nooooo, John, don’t you realize that the first procurers of genocidal self-aware technology will be the police and militaries of the world?” One of these rewatches, I think he’ll hear me. It’s his vulnerability and naiveite that position him for a powerful uptake of a new father figure. During a desert scene where the Terminator and John are fixing a car together, Sarah Connor says: “The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him... it would always be there. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it couldn’t spend time with him because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him.” As a young, abused person, I latched onto these words, made it my mantra. I wished so badly that that could be true for myself, that I could have something like that. I needed a true protector who would be there no matter what, no excuses. Now, I approach this scene with my child self’s perspective in mind, bolstered by the knowledge that I am becoming my own protector.

What is a dad? Is it just some guy who’s one half of your genetic makeup? How does one “become” their dad? Is it intentional, or subconscious? A curious thing happened to me when my dad died. I started adopting his habits, taste in music, and outwardly masculine aspirations and attitudes. It was like I was trying to keep his spirit alive through these intentional, if not compulsive, actions. Exploring all the contradictions of adopting the persona of someone I hated for most of my life was challenging. A part of me wanted to be a person he would hang out with and approve of. But a bigger, more secret part of me felt free to be ungendered for the first time in my life. I didn’t have to have two of me anymore.

These days, I am film obsessed. I’m very spoiled by the repertory scene in LA, where I can see multiple all-timers on 16, 35, and 70 mm (not to mention a glut of 4K re-releases). Sometimes I feel guilty about how I spend my time, but mostly I don’t. I quit drinking at the beginning of this year, and, in retrospect, I had the silly hope that this one trick would dig me out of the depressive, lackluster, unmotivated hole I’ve been digging for six years. Now begins the difficult work of reinventing myself. I’m looking forward to seeing T2 on the big screen tomorrow night for the [REDACTED] time. This time, when I see Arnie blown up in all his glory, I’m going to see myself: an ultra-masculine, cool, capable dude. A protector.

Jessi Heffington (they/them) is a writer and non-profit worker living in Los Angeles. They share a beautiful, small 2-bedroom apartment with their partner Audrey, roommate Justin, and a small tyrant (cat), Shadow. They love watching movies, talking about them, and writing about them. You can find them on Twitter @gonefishin420 and Letterboxd @naturradler.