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  • "9/11—What's That?":Trauma, Temporality, and Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  • Anna Froula (bio)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:SCC) ran on Fox for two seasons, from January 2008 to April 2009. The television series continues but significantly problematizes the storyline from The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991). Narratively, T:SCC occurs before the third installment, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003), which kills Sarah Connor with cancer and ends on "Judgment Day," when the machines unleash the world's nuclear arsenal.1 T:SCC follows the efforts of Sarah (Lena Headey) to prevent the creation of Skynet, a sentient computer-controlled military industrial complex that declares war on humans, and to protect her son, John Connor (Thomas Dekker), the future leader of the resistance. Within the Terminator mythology, "future John" sends both humans and specially programmed cyborgs through time into the narrative's ever-traumatic present to protect the Connors and to assist them with their mission.

T:SCC mediates the US national trauma of 9/11 on allegorical and structural levels. Allegorically, the protagonists fight the product of the military industrial complex's hubris. Skynet was built to protect the United States and its interests, but it turns on its human creators, a parallel to US-funded allies who have become enemies. This analogy becomes less straightforward because Sarah, who has trained for this impending war in the jungles of Central America like a freedom fighter, must operate underground like a terrorist, and is indeed labeled a terrorist by the show's media spokespeople and law enforcement officials. She is a thief, a carjacker, and a torturer of humans in league with the machines, and she blows up buildings in her mission to stop Skynet.

What is most compelling about the series is the way in which its formal properties operate as a traumatic framework by fragmenting time and memory. From the franchise's Reagan-era movie origins in 1984 to the 2008 series, Sarah has fought to prevent war. Time travel makes what would be flashbacks (memories of war) into flash-forwards (memories of future war), resulting in a temporal confusion that is characteristic of [End Page 174] trauma. In the Terminator franchise, trauma has always originated in the imminence of future catastrophes that the Connors continually experience in the present, but which are animated by Kyle Reese's (Michael Behn) "memories" of future events. Theorists have argued compellingly that the structure of trauma imposes a recursive process of reliving the past.2 The cognitive processing of trauma, as Cathy Caruth writes, designs "a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or set of events, which takes the form of repeated intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from the event." The pathology is structural, she notes: "[T]he event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it."3 What differentiates T:SCC from the rest of the Terminator franchise is the multidimensional structure of trauma, which parallels the preemptive revenge narrative that drove the Bush administration's international and domestic policy. After 9/11, the show's flash-forwards invoke both past terror and future horror for an American audience still working through a culture of fear induced by threats that the Bush administration promised and then promised to prevent.

In the shadows of 9/11, the television show's flash-forwards to Los Angeles as toxic rubble under siege by an inhuman enemy eerily take on the contours of the crumbled World Trade Center being circled by helicopters. Combat trauma from John and Sarah's past and present—and from resistance fighters' future memories—conflates the anxiety from the United States' failure to prevent 9/11 with the fear of greater horrors to come. Thus, John and Sarah's trauma exists in the recirculating "logic" of the preemptive strike as war strategy. In theory, a preemptive strike is a calculated first move. But, when writ large as a strategy of war—against terror in the contemporary United States or against machines within the fictional universe of T:SCC...

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