“The Terminator” is one of my favorite actions movies of all time. It’s just non-stop suspense, set pieces that were revolutionary at the time and still stand up twenty five years later, and characters that you actually cared about. It put James Cameron on the map, and set the stage for countless man-against-machine rip offs that never captured the magic of the original.
But there’s one thing about “The Terminator” that I can’t stand, that irks me every time I watch it, that takes it from a 10.0 to a 9.9. I think you know what scene I’m talking about, and if you don’t, you might not want to read this post. Ready?
It’s the sex scene.
Not that it’s a bad scene (it isn’t), not that it isn’t kind of hot (it is), but let’s look at it rationally. You’re Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. You have an indestructible robot hell bent on killing you, who “will not stop until YOU ARE DEAD.” You’re on the run, constantly, often mere footsteps away from a giant cyborg that looks suspiciously like the future governor of California. So what do you do?
Well, if you’re a rational human being, you most certainly do not spend a romantic night in a motel room jumping the bones of the guy sent back to protect you. That scene gets me every time. I want to scream out, “Stop holding hands and feeling each other up! Run! Make more of those pipe bombs!” But no. They always get down and dirty, and I always shake my head as Arnold drives up to their motel on his motorcycle holding a gun the size of Italy.
So what’s my point? Well, a lot of readers ask me why there’s no sex scene in my first novel, THE MARK. After all, the hero and heroine are young, energetic, have plenty of chemistry, and are undeniably attracted to each other. So what gives, Jason? Are you just a big prude? Would it have been so bad to offer one romp?
But the truth is, I did have a problem with it. While writing THE MARK, I considered whether the two characters should have sex. I knew that in future books, if they stayed together they certainly would, but in the end I decided that this was not the time
I wrote THE MARK to take place over three days, in such a way that every second was accounted for, and every decision mattered. My characters, like Sarah and Kyle, were often mere seconds away from death, and even when they weren’t they didn’t know they were safe. If, all of a sudden, Henry and Amanda paused from the action to do a little hanky panky, it would have felt forced, disingenuous. I have nothing against sex scenes, in fact some of them can be quite enjoyable (and I’d be lying if every now and then I didn’t flip through a romance novel to see all the creative ways one could write a sex scene). But in THE MARK, it just didn’t work. It wasn’t an organic part of the story, and I think readers would have picked up on it.
Like in “The Terminator,” the tension would have fizzled out. After all, if the characters were so relaxed as to do the horizontal mambo while other people wanted to kill them, how dangerous could those people be? If you were an assassin, and you found your targets in a room rounding third base, wouldn’t you have a serious emotional breakdown? I mean, wouldn’t you question your vocation if you were so non-threatening that your targets didn’t even think they needed to wear clothes to protect themselves from you?
KYLE: Oh Sarah, I love you.
SARAH: Kyle, our son will save the world from the machines.
KYLE: God, you’re beautiful, and I bet eight years from now you’ll be buff as hell.
TERMINATOR: What the hell are you two doing?
SARAH (embarrassed): We were just, um, talking.
KYLE: Yeah, talking.
TERMINATOR: But you’re naked!
KYLE: Ok, you got us.
SARAH: Yeah, we were totally doing it.
TERMINATOR: What the hell? I mean, here I am, impervious to bullets and pain, with a gun that shoots a thousand rounds a minute. I’ve been chasing you non-stop for days, I killed an entire freaking police station, and you two are having sex? Don’t you respect me at all?
SARAH: We do, it’s just…
TERMINATOR: It’s just what?
KYLE: Ok, to be honest, you’re just not that scary. We figured even if you did a little coitus interruptus, we’d have plenty of time to make pipe bombs and get away.
TERMINATOR: I’m so ashamed.
SARAH: Don’t be. It happens to a lot of guys.
KYLE: Hey!
SARAH: Not you, stud muffin, our baby’s going to save the world, remember?
TERMINATOR: I need a drink. I’ll be back.
So, in the end, there is no sex scene in THE MARK. Not to say there’s no romance–there is–but Henry and Amanda have a relationship that just could not be consummated in the short time they have to get to the bottom of the conspiracy afoot. So when writing, especially characters involved in relationships, I always have to keep in mind the possibility of sex. It’s a normal, healthy part of a relationship, and when you’re writing a series there comes a time when your characters have to express their love for each other. Or, for other characters, they just meet someone for a quick bonk.
But it has to be organic to the story, and by that it depends on the universe you create. In my books, it’s important that sex only happens when it needs to happen. When it furthers along my characters, or acts as an emotional release (I was going to say another kind of release, but this is a family blog).
Hopefully I was able to create enough romantic tension between my two leads so that even though they don’t get much past first base, you’ll want to see how their relationship changes and matures over time. But it won’t happen at the expense of the story or realism or suspense.
So if anyone has any good editing software, let me know so I can edit out those few minutes of “The Terminator.” I’ll thank you greatly, and, deep down, I think the Terminator himself will be appreciative. If you look quickly, a small tear runs down his cheek as Sarah and Kyle make love, because he knows that when he gets home SkyNet will be mighty disappointed in him.
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I’ve always thought that scene was an O,S! moment James Cameron had when he realized he hadn’t addressed the real reason John sent Kyle back to Sarah’s time. The cheap motel and hastily-contrived intimacy (Kyle’s confession was really over the top; who falls in love with a Polaroid?) came across like classic plot hole filler.
I think sex is tough to write whatever the genre or story, and it’s got to be a decision you make on a story-by-story basis. I’ve never bought into the “there must be sex in the story or it won’t sell” attitude some editors and other writers have. You write what serves the story and what is genre-appropriate (I think an erotica book with no sex would be a tough sell — you’d need lots of very interesting foreplay, at the very least.)
I’ve read plenty of novels by authors who don’t include or skip depicting sex scenes and yet still manage to keep me fully engaged as a reader. Lynn Kurland and Anne Perry are two off the top of my head.
Under certain circumstances, avoiding sex scenes in a story can be just as challenging. I did a WFH novel once where I hired to write the life story of a prostitute, which I thought would be very interesting — until they told me there could be no sex whatsoever depicted in the book. I did so many fade to black scenes in that one I think all the characterss’ pupils remained permanently dilated.
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It’s nice to discover I’m not the only person that sex scene bugs. No one will watch the movie with me anymore because I yell at the TV when it starts. And being a practical person I wonder when Sarah had time to shave her legs.
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@Darlene Ryan – well, she was getting ready to go out on a date the night before. I’m sure leg-shaving would have happened then.
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The sex scene in Terminator did not bother me. It was one of those cases where once you knew Kyle Reese was the father of John Conner, you knew it had to happen. Where would you have put the scene? Or would you have changed that story point?
And about the falling in love through the picture…I don’t think “I saw your face and just knew I had to bed you” would have the same impact with the female audience. Frankly through the actions he took he becomes a tragic hero. And we women like men we think we can save. Why otherwise do we buy so many romance based books?
Yes, I have Terminator in my DVD collection. I also like Highlander, the timing of the modern day sex scene was interesting as well. Whoever thought of stabbing as foreplay must have an interesting psyche.
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I totally understand why the sex scene is necessary in terms of completing the film’s story arc (and, in turn, the future mythology of the Terminator series) but it doesn’t change the fact that the Sarah/Reece sex scene is “The Terminator” movie’s equivalent of the nubile, young co-ed in the horror film who wanders into the basement of the house where several of her friends have been cut into bite size pieces. She might need to go down there to further the plot, but no rational human being would ever do that in a million years. Of course “The Terminator” is a movie about a cyborg who travels back through time to kill a mother whose unborn son will lead a resistance against their machine enemies, so I suppose rational is all relative.
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Oh, this is HYSTERICAL because I know many many romance authors, one in particular who is NYT, who says this is one of the best scenes ever filmed! Hehehe!
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KYLE: Oh Sarah, I love you.
SARAH: Kyle, our son will save the world from the machines.
KYLE: God, you’re beautiful, and I bet eight years from now you’ll be buff as hell.
TERMINATOR: What the hell are you two doing?
REST OF DIALOGUE
TERMINATOR: I need a drink. I’ll be back.”
I believe that whole bit was in the deleted scenes feature.
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I definitely agree with the whole “Gee, we’re running for our lives, but here, let’s take a moment to boink and the people watching/reading will love us so much more for us” gratuitous scene makes me crazy! Their scene in the movie is about the time I get a refill on my lemonade.
I don’t have to read sex scenes in a novel, just like I don’t have to see them on the screen. If they’re integral and done seamlessly, wonderful. Tossing them in because someone thinks it’s just ‘needed’…pah!
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Oh, I love this post! LOL
The funny thing is, when I saw Terminator, the scene never bothered me. But since then, I have started writing, and now, thats something that would really bother me too. In fact, in Primal Male, I have the hero and heroine on the run, and there’s a point where she’s thinking he’s hot and sexy and all protective, and he notices that gleam in her eye and he tells her to stop it, they didn’t have time for that. *grin*
Sometimes how we see things and what we notice changes.
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Oh, pointless sex, how I despise you! I see it in books, movies, television, it drives me insane!
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I’m of two minds on this. This kind of sex scene bothers me in the same way that stories wherein two people meet each other for the first time and fall deeply, passionately in love for ever and ever over the course of, like, three days drive me crazy. I always have a hard time believing that two people will live HEA when they’ve never even spent a national holiday together, yet I often read stories that span a short time period and I’m supposed to buy this premise.
However, like the poorly-timed sex scene, I always end up fanwanking the situation by chalking it up to heightened emotions and pumping adrenaline. Two people on the run for their lives are living at a level that might inspire them to do some crazy things. If you truly believe that your life might end at any second, maybe you just need to go for the gusto, so to speak.
Not that I, personally, would be able to get in the mood if I thought Arnold was standing outside my door. But I have to chalk it all up to suspension of disbelief or I’d end up disgusted with 98% of the entertainment out there.
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At the risk of getting myself in trouble here, I mentioned that scenes like the Terminator one bother me, but…there were two thoughts that went through me head the first time I ever saw my DH, in this order.
‘Good Lord, I can wear heels and still not see the top of this man’s head!’
‘I’m going to marry this man.’
Thirty-one years later, my HEA is still going so, over the course of three days? Absolutely! That’s a lot longer than we had.
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That sex scene will forever make me laugh because I first saw TI and TII at a university theatre filled with students. The two memorable moments were:
When the Terminator was in the cop station killing people. The audience was counting the kills to see if it matched up with the Terminator’s display (didn’t).
The other memorable moment was the sex scene. The theatre was quiet except for a bit of embarrassed tittering from the first year students. Then, at the most (in)appropriate moment, someone yelled out: “The sperminator!”
I will never be able to watch the first movie without remembering those moments from the first time I saw the movies.
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The other memorable moment was the sex scene. The theatre was quiet except for a bit of embarrassed tittering from the first year students. Then, at the most (in)appropriate moment, someone yelled out: “The sperminator!”
OMG! This is funny. I think it will stick in my mind and I wasn’t even there. LOL
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LOL
Like you, that scene has always bothered me.
Loved your rewrite!