FILM COMMENT : Ultimately This Movie Is, on a Realistic Level, Just a Movie

“What the film is about, on the symbolic level, is the dehumanization we do on a daily basis.”

Time for a gullibility check. The movie referred to in the above comment, made in apparent seriousness by a major American filmmaker during a recent interview, was: (a) “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”; (b) “The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear”; (c) “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze” or (d) “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

It’s a tough one, I know. All four movies are so complex they require two titles. But there can only be one winner and though “The Smell of Fear” and “The Secret of the Ooze” have the strongest scents of hyperbole, the actual answer is . . . (d) “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” The speaker: “Terminator 2” writer-director James Cameron.

During that same interview, Cameron cited as an “amazing irony” the fact that George Holliday, the amateur cameraman who videotaped L.A. cops beating suspected freeway speeder Rodney G. King earlier this year, had just shot footage on one of the “Terminator” sets in the same neighborhood. That strikes me more as coincidence than irony, but Cameron managed to connect the two events by saying that both depict a dehumanized L.A. police force.

“Ultimately the film is about the value of human life,” Cameron says in the film’s promotional material. “The film empowers the individual. It says that no matter how inconsequential you may seem to others . . . your individual existence may have great value in the future.”

Do you believe this guy? He makes one of the greatest action movies of all time and he feels he has to justify it as some sort of sociological metaphor, to pass it off as a cautionary tale about the pack instinct among police, to cough up some existential phlegm about the individual in the 21st Century?

Jim, Jim, get a grip on yourself. “Terminator 2” is about saving the world, it won’t really do it. “Terminator” is a light summer movie, the story of two super cyborgs--one good, one bad--who blast to the past to fight over the future and, in the process, end up destroying a few dozen cars, trucks, buildings and people. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, we just haven’t seen it done this well.

When I first heard that Cameron was calling “Terminator 2” an anti-violence action film, the cynic always on duty in me assumed it was merely a marketing ploy. With adults now controlling the box office, perhaps more of them would take their children to the R-rated thriller if they thought they could write it off to responsible parenting. I can only imagine what moral they’d come away with it: “So kids, never talk to a stranger because he may be a cyborg from the future who will turn his finger into an ice pick and poke your eye out.”

But it’s worse than that. Cameron actually wrote what he considers anti-violence themes into the script. The first sign of it occurs between scenes where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “good” Terminator sticks a knife in a biker’s shoulder and one where the “bad” Terminator runs a sword through a man’s mouth and out the back of his head. The message is delivered by way of a lecture from the boy the Terminator has come to protect: “It’s bad to kill people,” the child says, insisting that the cyborg knock it off. Mr. T. obliges, but for the rest of the movie we have to watch him maim people by shooting them in the lower limbs.

The second anti-violence message--sandwiched between scenes in which the film’s female protagonist threatens to kill her psychiatrist by pumping liquid drain cleaner into his veins and one where she attempts to assassinate an unsuspecting engineer--comes when we see two small children fighting with toy guns. When their mother separates them, saying “Break it up or I’ll wring your necks,” the Terminator observes about mankind, “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.”

As the boy in the movie says upon learning that his father won’t be born for another 20 years, “This is heavy.”

Sorry, but you don’t make a film anti-violent by claiming that’s what it is. Beyond the usual cartoon mayhem found in summer action movies, there are several scenes of blunt brutality in “Terminator 2,” none of which are committed by cops (unless you count the evil deeds done by the bad Terminator while disguised as a cop, and that would be serious cheating).

A lot of this movie is vigilante violence, with audiences encouraged to relish the pain inflicted on those depicted as deserving. When a flabby orderly in a mental hospital leans over and licks the cheek of the heroine while she lies helpless in bed, you know he’ll get his. Sure enough, the first thing she does after escaping is break his face with a nightstick.

Cameron seems to equate violence with death and thinks anything short of that is anti -violence. When the Terminator disables a night security guard by firing bullets point blank into his legs, it’s played as comic relief: “He’ll live,” the Terminator assures his young master, and the audience roars with laughter. Well, I guess he’s a got a chance to live anyway, if he can apply a couple of tourniquets and crawl to a phone.

There’s no doubt that these scenes are violent; the question is whether they’re harmful, whether the sheer entertainment value of them contributes to the general dehumanization of society. I don’t think so. Despite Cameron’s attempt to hype its relevance, “Terminator 2” is pure escapism, an honorable service that movies have been providing through most of this century, one that music, literature and folklore have provided since man got his first set of bones and learned to talk.

What “Terminator 2” will do in the real world is spur the economy in the depressed exhibition business. It will sell trainloads of popcorn, candy and carbonated sugar water, and stimulate the moviegoer’s appetite for whatever else may be playing at the local multiplex. And it will almost certainly launch another cycle of big-budget special-effects movies.

What it won’t do in the real world is change attitudes about violence or nuclear energy or computer technology. Even if Cameron’s message was clear, it wouldn’t be worth the gum stuck under your seat. “Terminator 2” is a hit because it’s extraordinarily clever and fun, not because it promotes--in any conceivable way--a better world.

For a film to be anti-violent, its violence must repulse us, as George Holliday’s home video did. If Cameron wants to do something about attitudes toward violence in America, he should buy himself a video camera and hit the streets. Or start making a different kind of movie.