Entering the main door of the Planet complex you will be greeted by a full-sized Terminator endo-skeleton, equipped with laser rifle and glowing eyes. Why is he there? Cause he's cool, you don't need any better reason than that. The Terminator is as a cool as icons get.
Twenty-five years ago The Terminator first appeared and despite all incarnations it is that Terminator that has remained the icon. It's the first Terminator film that remains iconic. It came at a time of the mid'80s when the romance and paranoia of developing gee-whiz technologies were at their ultimate clash. Termi turned up in the perfect incarnation as the glorious image of super-strong man and shiny killer robot.
Terminator is actually a holy trinity, three icons in one. First he is Arnie himself. But not any Arnold Schwarzenegger. We're talking the Arnie that was in the first Terminator film. That specific one, of that age, of that look, of that restricted level of performance - that accent saying Uzi 9mm. Cause that's when you perceived The Terminator as Arnold Schwarzenegger not later when it became Arnold as The Terminator. The distinction is important. The original Terminator remains distinct from the star and celebrity of Arnie, something that was impossible later on.
The second incarnation is the endo-skeleton. A joint creation by effects man Stan Winston and writer / director James Cameron. It's this image of chrome and claw and ball sockets and glowing red eyes and those nashie teeth, which is the real cool part. It's the symbology of pre-millennial techno-angst at its most, well, shiny. And it's a lovely piece of design.
The third incarnation, and not to be underestimated in its importance with the three, is the merging of the other two. The portrait of Arnold with half his face torn or burnt away, revealing the endo-skeleton. Here it's not the whole body image that sticks, but simply the close up shot of one Arnie eye and one glowing red orb. This is ultimate bio-tecnofetishism. David Cronenberg and Shinya Tsukamoto couldn't do better than this to express future shock fascination.
This third image is actually the only one that was properly established by the second film rather than the first. Terminator 2 aka T2 : Judgement Day is inferior in all respects to the first except in its huge budget, but that allowed Winston to create a good make-up job with Arnold and thus images from the second film replace the lesser-executed ones from the original.
However, the cult is for the first, the rest is fanboy crap, fun as it might be (and yes, I think it's fun). And as each film (and TV show) diminishes in importance and strays further away from a film that is of its time and also encapsulates that time, its iconography only grows in stature. The real Arnold gets older, the subsequent films as they come out become less and less relevant to the zeitgeist of tech culture but the original three pre-21st century icons remain signs of future fantasy portent. Signs through a darkly groove or, if you prefer, glowing red eyes.
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