An Ode to Sarah Conner

There was a post up at Romancing the Blog recently called, "I Wanna Be Joan Wilder!" Yes, I liked Romancing the Stone, too. I liked Kathleen Turner. I liked Joan Wilder a lot.

But when it comes to heroines, my favourite has always been Sarah Conner.




Oh, what short memories we have, when we forget that Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't original. Do we really owe Joss Whedon our ovaries for making a strong female character? James Cameron did it first, and he did it in a mega-budget studio film, and he didn't have a hundred episodes to play with. Two hours to take Sarah from beaten-down waitress with bad hair to badass muttering "Die, mother fucker" as she presses the button to kill the robot. Two more hours to break her out of the insane asylum and avert World War Three. That's a story.

Sarah was kick-ass, but not just kick-ass. She was crazy, but not just crazy. In the second film, she's so flawed that she's the good guy and the bad guy in one. She falls in love, but when her lover dies she just soldiers on. She has a baby, but makes some mistakes in raising him that she never rectifies with a sappy, lovey reunion. She's haunted by visions of a nuclear holocaust (who can forget that playground dream sequence?) and that kind of thing can make a woman make a few mistakes. Name one cliche, one stereotype that fits Sarah Conner. Nope, neither can I.

This is original storytelling, the a completely original character, an original woman, real and good and bad and all of it. In the asylum sequence in Terminator 2 she's wearing just a tank top and cloth pants - not even a bra - and she's both menace and sexiness. She's in charge until the minute she sees the Terminator, at which point she stops nearly dead - frozen with fear, it's such a good shot that Cameron plays it in slow motion - and falls on her ass. (The scene where she one-handedly pumps the shotgun over and over is my second favourite in the movie.)





Heroines like that are hard to find. Elektra didn't really cut it, did she? The women in the X-Men films were angsty and self-sacrificing. Lois Lane was flat-out awful. Worst Heroine in Human Memory goes to Natalie Portman's character in the last Star Wars films, a woman so unreal I wondered if George Lucas has ever actually conversed with a human female. Meanwhile, James Cameron keeps on not making fiction films. Darn his eyes.

Meantime, I'll rent T2 again. It's been a Sarah kind of day.