I’ve seen “The Terminator” dozens of times since I was a kid in the 80’s and I noticed it was on TV the other night while browsing around my DVR’s channel / program guide. Now that I’m an adult that’s hyper-aware to symbolism in the visual arts I decided to watch this film again with the purpose of seeing if I could notice any symbolic imagery. I noticed plenty but the following article is only going to deal with Christian imagery for the sake of length.
The Christian imagery in “The Terminator” is somewhat subtle but obvious to people like me who are symbolism-aware and look for this stuff while watching movies. In film and other visual art, sometimes the symbolic imagery hits you over the head it’s so blatant, but other times it’s almost subliminal. The first step to noticing this stuff is being aware of it, and then you’ll start to notice things right away. I liken this process to being taught about symbolism in literature for the first time in high school English class and then theorizing what is being described in a book could actually represent. It’s the same thing with visual art, but instead of visualizing the written word with your mind, you are viewing visual objects and deciding what they stand for as you see them. One uses written words and the other uses visual cues and I am good at both but much better visually. This may be because I have been good in art since I was a little boy, but it also may just be because humans as a whole were seeing things with their eyes long before spoken language and then written language was developed. All creatures with the sense of sight are visual beings and can identify things using their eyes. A picture says a thousand words, as they say, and that is exactly the point I am trying to make: an image sends a message instantly, if not consciously we instinctually pick it up subliminally. But enough about the theory behind visual symbolism, that’s for another day. I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of a background on it to help support what I’ll be talking about in this article. Let’s begin:
The most obvious Christian reference in “The Terminator” is the future savior of mankind, John Connor, having the same initials as the Christian savior of mankind, Jesus Christ. Many people have noticed this and it’s nothing new, but I wanted to mention it because it makes the theories I will present soon seem more plausible; if one Christian reference is already there and widely accepted as such, the
... keep reading on reddit ➡
)