CORE RESPONSE #4 - Dean Moro - "Hard Bodies" with a Funny Bone

  In Susan Jeffords’ book Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, her chapter “Terminal Masculinity: Men in the Early 1990s” discusses the shifting perceptions of male heroism and masculinity from 1980s Hollywood cinema into the early 1990s. First, Jeffords frames her argument by citing Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop (1990) as being one of the first cinematic entries of the new decade that is “resolved through a man’s return to his family” (Jeffords 143). She emphasizes that Kindergarten Cop star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom she calls “one of the hardest bodies of the 1980s,” was a paragon in helping establish the 1990s Hollywood motif that she writes was “a discovery by the male lead that this body has failed him in some way” (Jeffords 146). Jeffords then exemplifies this sense of a powerful yet flawed male body by discussing the various installations of Beauty and the Beast, ultimately arguing that the Beast in Disney’s 1991 animated version recognizes his “body is not, as it was for Rambo, a gift but a curse” (Jeffords 153). Jeffords insists that both Kindergarten Cop and Beauty and the Beast in some form or another suggest that “men…are really loving and kind beneath those brutal exteriors,” and that the first and second installments in James Cameron’s Terminator series contribute to this idea. 

Moreover, Jeffords argues that Cameron’s “films elaborate the shift from hard body to family man,” a dangerous transition which Jeffords believes comes at the expense of Sarah Connor, the maternal figure in the series (Jeffords 156). Because Schwarzenegger’s character becomes a protective force over John in T2 as opposed to the ruthlessly destructive force he embodied in the first film, Jeffords believes that the movie puts “her in direct competition for the Terminator’s role, a job—and a body—that she just cannot fit” (Jeffords 162). In other words, since Sarah Connor is “more an animal than a human,” reducing her to even more basic survivalist nature, she cannot be as parental as the impenetrable machine that is the Terminator. 

My first introduction to Schwarzenegger in film was through the Christmas family comedy Jingle All the Way (1996) in which he plays an overworked Dad who would ultimately, just as Jeffords discusses, decides to “thumb [his nose] at an economic superiority that [he] did not have and return to the [family he] had neglected before” (Jeffords 141). In other words, I’ve never seen our Governator as a hard body, but rather as a goofy Dad with a funny accent. Parcels of this humor certainly come through in T2. The scene in which John Connor teaches the Terminator how to talk like a human using slang is almost like the cliche of a teenager teaching his or her out of touch parent what a certain “hip” new word means. For me, it’s really the humor in the Terminator’s newfound lightheartedness that grants him access into Jeffords’ 90s notion of fatherhood.  

Core Response #4 

Dean Moro