THE JOURNAL
Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator” (1984). Photograph by Shutterstock
“Your clothes. Give them to me. Now.” The Terminator was always about economy, from the ruthless efficiency of the titular cyborg and the original film itself – which turns 40 this year – to its budget, soundtrack and even script. In the title role, Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger was given just 58 words of dialogue. But he made his every utterance count. (Notably, by the beefed-up 1991 sequel, he was on 700 words and demanding boots and a motorcycle, too.)
Likewise, The Terminator’s wardrobe gets straight to the point. “There’s a carbon-dated 1980s-ness to the ideals of masculinity in the film and this goes through to the clothes,” says Ms Lauren Cochrane, senior fashion writer for The Guardian. “On paper, if anyone other than a human-like cyborg wore a black leather jacket and sunglasses now, there would be a whiff of midlife crisis. That being said, they are also classics that would work depending on how they are worn.”
Sunglasses at night aren’t for everyone. (“I keep seeing people do this,” Cochrane says. “From Charli XCX to Pharrell. Maybe it’s back?”) But even those without an exposed infrared optical unit to hide can see the appeal of a leather biker jacket. As listed in Cochrane’s book, The Ten: The Stories Behind The Fashion Classics, it’s a real investment piece, one that’s fittingly impervious to, and even improved by, time and will do a lot of heavy lifting in any man’s wardrobe. And there’s no shortage of choice on the AW24 racks – everyone from Acne Studios and SAINT LAURENT to Enfants Riches Déprimés has their own take on this iconic item. However, in The Terminator, it also serves as a character-setting shorthand.
“It’s a real investment piece, one that’s fittingly impervious to, and even improved by, time and will do a lot of heavy lifting in any man’s wardrobe”
“It goes back to its origins as a biker uniform,” Cochrane says. “This trope is irresistible in terms of the bad-boy image it allows its wearer to channel. You can pretty much draw a straight line from Marlon Brando in The Wild One to Arnie in The Terminator. The leather jacket works today because of all these film references – and others: The Ramones, Sid Vicious – are wrapped up in there.”
While no time traveller would look out of place in Schwarzenegger’s biker garms, the actor himself stood out. “In 1984, the big muscular body was still charged with heavy doses of symbolism and – more importantly – novelty,” says Mr Michael Andor Brodeur, a critic for The Washington Post and author of Swole: The Making Of Men And The Meaning Of Muscle.
From today’s perspective, when the stars of a Marvel franchise can spend more time in the gym than learning lines, it can be hard to get our heads around how pivotal Schwarzenegger’s arrival was. “That role, to me, captures a key moment in the development of the beefy male body on the big screen,” Brodeur says. “A character that was both human and not; real and virtual; possible and impossible. It was a special effect in the flesh.”
That’s not all that has moved on. The T-800 itself once felt like the product of a comfortably distant future but has since become the poster boy for a looming existential threat. “There was a time when the lead image of just about every article on artificial intelligence was a red-eyed android,” Mr Neil D Lawrence writes in his new book, The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves In The Age Of AI.
To view present-day computer science through a Termovision display, however, is to “misunderstand the nature of AI ‘intelligence,’” Lawrence tells MR PORTER. He argues that, despite Schwarzenegger’s unattainable physique, the Terminator often serves as a representation of AI precisely because “as humans, we struggle to think of intelligences that aren’t in a ‘bodily form’”. Collectively, we lack the “bandwidth”, he says, to grasp the mechanics of a black-box network.
(A more accurate analogy, according to experts such as the computer scientist Mr Eliezer Yudkowsky and Sapiens author Mr Yuval Noah Harari, would be the 1940 Disney musical Fantasia. In particular, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment – Mickey Mouse willing brooms to do his bidding, only for things to go awry – is, they say, a closer fit for the worst-case scenario when it comes to AI.)
“The leather jacket works today because of all these film references – and others: The Ramones, Sid Vicious – are wrapped up in there”
Despite which, The Terminator is yet another example of actual-world technology mirroring that of popular culture. Skynet, the faceless AI network from the film series, really does exist, in a manner of speaking, portentously lending its name to a British military communication satellite system. See also the US Strategic Defense Initiative (the “Star Wars” programme), the discontinued OpenAI chatbot with a voice that sounds uncannily like that of Ms Scarlett Johansson in Her or imitation theories fuelled by The Matrix.
“The tech world is full of sci-fi fans who want their real-life products to imitate art,” Lawrence says. “It’s also full of more reasonable people who are trying to use technology to solve the real problems our society faces.” He thinks it’s the latter, largely in academia, who are the real driving force behind the current AI technology. “But the former group is easier to build headlines, and even companies, around.”
Cultural artefacts such as The Terminator can still play a part in understanding new technology, Lawrence reasons. “I think the issue is how we use stories more than the stories themselves.”
So then, if you were to arrive – naked – in 2024 and you wanted to blend in, which outfit would you grab? A biker jacket wouldn’t be the wrong answer, but Cochrane has other ideas. “Maybe something normcore adjacent,” she says. “A hoodie, jeans and Birkenstock Bostons.” Very tech bro – and a singular look for the singularity.