THE COMEBACK KIDS: SARAH AND HILLARY
If Governator Ahnold, former Mr. Universe and embodiment of the patriarchal ideal, was ideally suited in 1984 (the same year that Time magazine made the personal computer the “man of the year” ) to play the Terminator, a robotic assassin sent back to the past to prevent the future, it is rather telling that at precisely the same moment that this country faces the real possibility — many would say threat — of being ruled by a female president the mother of that future is now at center stage in a new tv show called “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” A lot of people have focused on the tear-factor in Hillary’s recent surprise win in New Hampshire, but few have commented on the fact that since the loss in Iowa, Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, has been featured more prominently than ever at various campaign events. Having seen how little good her credentials as first lady were working for her, H.C. has been relying more and more on her credentials as a mom, and not surprisingly a large percentage of her winning vote in New Hampshire consisted of older married women with children or grandchildren. The pubic Bush is being hounded by the real thing, a mother and the wife to the man who got his pen cleaned and polished in the egg-shaped office. Barak Obama may be an inspired speaker and a visionairy idealist, but he himself admits that his wife is the pants in his family. So he’s at a real cultural unconscious advantage in a race against the Monstrous Mother. In the age of the complete takeover of the digital paternal symbolic and the demise of the analog maternal imaginary, the Matriarchy, as either Sarah or Hillary could tell you, is trying to stage a comeback. Or to borrow from Ahnold’s famous phrase from the film, “SHE’LL BE BACK.”
The name “Sarah” comes from the Biblical wife of Abraham (the first Hebrew Patriarch) and mother of Isaac, from Heb., lit. “princess,” from sarah, fem. of sar “prince,” from sarar “he ruled,” related to Akkad. sharratu “queen.”
As for, Connor, according to The Penguin Dictionary of First Names it was originally a nickname given to hunters. Thus Princess or queen of Hunters, an appropriate name for a mother whose only concern is to save her son and the future. As for Hillary, spare the Rodham, spoil the child.
Here’s a review of the show, the title of which would be perfect for an article about Hillary’s campaign for the presidency: Running and Fighting.
Dr. B.
January 12, 2008
Television Review
Running and Fighting, All to Save Her Son
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
The writers’ strike brings with it, of course, the significant potential to lower our viewing standards now that television’s midseason is under way. How amenable will most people be to rendering honest judgments on anything new and being shown and not the 923rd season of a reality venture in which people trade wives, or nannies, or plastic surgeries, or wallpaper or ferrets?
I propose circumventing the problem with the creation of two temporary critical categories: strike-good and, well, just plain good. To the second denomination I submit “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a new Fox series that begins on Sunday. One of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while, the series is taut, haunting, relevant and an exploration of adolescent exceptionalism rendered without the cheerleading uniforms and parody of “Heroes.”
Extending the “Terminator” franchise, built on Arnold Schwarzenegger in his liquid corporeality, the series revolves around a young woman whose commitment to maternity makes the ordinary parental obsessions we’ve come to live with seem no more serious than a game of backgammon. Sarah, played by Lena Headey, all anxious muscle, isn’t fretting about nut allergies and tennis camp and early admission to Amherst (though boy, would her son, John, qualify as out-of-the-box enough to get in); she is striving to save him from the government-sponsored nut cases of the microchip brains and titanium bones who seek to annihilate him and thus his capacity to save humankind from their apocalyptic vision.
“Certainly for a parent, the death of a child is no less than a holocaust,” Sarah says in one of the show’s spare voice-overs. “In the case of my son, these words are literally true.”
“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is a fantasy of technophobic paranoia, but it is also a metaphor for mad, crazy blood love, for motherhood not merely as an honorable career but also as salvation. Keeping John safe has required Sarah to learn four languages, work at 23 jobs, assume nine aliases and submit to years in a mental hospital. Sensing possible danger and telling John that they must move on from their seemingly pleasant life in Nebraska, Sarah, in the pilot episode, orders him out of bed and onto the road: “Half an hour, one bag, plus the gun. I’ll make pancakes.”
John, played by Thomas Dekker, complements Sarah’s intensity with a quiet anguish. He hopes for normalcy, friendships, a long-term address, but he doesn’t throw the sort of predictable temper tantrums in which he might scream that he just wants to be like everybody else and enter a motocross competition. He likes his mother’s boyfriend and is saddened because he and his mother have to skip town just as the matter of marriage has come up. That Sarah decides they must leave and assume new identities, right after she receives the proposal, leaves the question lingering of what it is she is actually afraid of.
“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” finds its dimension in the way it refuses to shy away from the terrors of ordinary life. By time-traveling her way around what would have been an ugly past, Sarah realizes that an alternate life would have left her dying of cancer. Cells wreak havoc just as robotic maniacs do. The most unsettling moments of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” occur when, seeking to avoid such an outcome, she visits an oncologist’s office.
Terminator
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Fox, series premiere Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time. Regular episodes start Monday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Josh Friedman, John Wirth, Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, executive producers; Toni Graphia, co-executive producer; James Middleton and Natalie Chaidez, consulting producers; premeiere directed by David Nutter. Produced by C-2 Pictures and Warner Brothers Television.
WITH: Lena Headey (Sarah Connor), Thomas Dekker (John Connor), Summer Glau (Cameron) and Richard T. Jones (James Ellison).