"Land" by sweetestdrain, commentary by sweetestdrain
Title: Land
Vidder: sweetestdrain
Fandom: Terminator universe
Link to vid: LJ post here (also embedded after cut)
Notes/warnings: Very, very image heavy; spoils the hell out of the first three Terminator movies, plus a lot of stuff in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (including the finale); a couple of images may include sorta-naked people and/or robot gore?
Commentary by: sweetestdrain! Hope you enjoy. Questions welcome.
i. THE VID
I am far too long-winded (and technologically unsavvy) to produce one of those nice video commentaries, but I would advise watching (or rewatching) the vid if you're going to skim through any of the blather that follows-it'll probably help you make sense of me!
ii. THE IDEA
In 2008, I'd already discovered for my VividCon premiere that Sarah Connor = Patti Smith-with bonus lesbian robots, no less-but I don't recall exactly when I made the realization that my other favorite song off of Horses was also about Sarah (and the wider Terminator universe, to boot). The first (and only) notes in my storyboard file date from March and August of 2008, and as you can see, I didn't change my vision of the structure very much after that; however, I did need to somehow fill in all the rest.
I'm guessing from my “Hopefully there's a clip of a tombstone?” that at this point, I hadn't yet watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, only read the plot synopsis. I watched it specifically to use it in this vid, and have been ranting about the film ever since. (I won't judge you if you like it-parts of it are pretty fun!-but it's kind of incredible in how it manages to erase all the elements that I liked in the first two films. More on this later.)
Like I said, I'm not sure how I originally got the idea for this vid, but if I had to guess, I'd say it happened when listening to the overlapping vocal tracks that come in on the “sea of possibilities” later in the vid. If Patti Smith spoke for Sarah Connor in my other vid... this was a song in which she coule speak for multiple Sarah Connors.
I kept two organizing principles in mind as I worked:
There is a sea of possibilities.
and
There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
iii. THE STRUCTURE
I'm not even going to try to remember how I brainstormed the structure of this vid; instead, I'll talk a little about how I intended the vid to work. Although the original song is divided into three sections (Horses, Land of a Thousand Dances, and La Mer), I took advantage of the numerous musical shifts to divide it even further and play with the non-linearity of the story I wanted to tell. The unifying “logic” of the vid, beyond the idea that we're seeing a cross-section of possibilities (timelines, universes, multiple actors/actresses) in source material that already deals heavily with time travel, is that our point-of-view character is Sarah Connor-and of all the characters in the films and the TV show, Sarah is the one who is most often faced by strange dreams and patterns, apocalyptic visions, apparitions, and visitations that help keep her moving in the right direction. She is both guide and guided. Embracing this aspect of her character meant that the vid's narrative perspective could open up and show the audience various events as a more omniscient Sarah might perceive them.
There are a couple of sections that provide simple, no-frills retellings of the second two Terminator films (aided by some fun lyrical matching), which help to ground the vid enough that when it inevitably spins out again into overlapping what-ifs, weres, and yet-to-bes, the viewer isn't lost in all of it-or at least I hope that's how it works! But really, I feel like I didn't plan the structure so much as I managed to discover that Patti Smith's song had the perfect structure already; for instance, the moment about halfway through (~4:40) when the vocals overlap and the Sarahs come together is, for me at least, the linchpin of the whole vid.
iv. THE OPENING TITLECARD
I tried to establish Sarah Connor as the POV from the very first frame. The fade transition here from her face to the twisted and dark future wasteland (land! get it?) is in the original source (Terminator), and occurs when Kyle Reese begins to tell Sarah about the place from which he's come. She closes her eyes to imagine it.
But while the voice we hear is Sarah's, the lyrics themselves begin with a boy.
1. THE BOY LOOKED AT JOHNNY
The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea / from the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating
Another boy was sliding up the hallway / he merged perfectly with the hallway / he merged perfectly, the mirror in the hallway
This was actually one of the last sections of the vid I tackled. I had to establish “Johnny” as John Connor, as this was the name's first appearance in the song, but it didn't quite click together until I figured out that the other boy was also John Connor.
The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run / but the movie kept moving as planned
At this point, I'd already been working with the issue of how to vid multiple actors in a way to make it clear they represented the same character. However, linking Linda Hamilton and Lena Headey is a very different task than managing-how many John Connors? Michael Edwards (ex-boyfriend of Priscilla Presley! Can you tell I had to look up his name on Wikipedia?) appeared as the grown John Connor in flashforwards in T2 (and as the normal, happy John Connor in the alternate ending), Edward Furlong was kid John Connor in T2, Thomas Dekker was teen John Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Nick Stahl was, what, 20-something John Connor in T3? Four different actors representing the same character at different ages. Six, if I tried to work in the little dudes who played young John Connor in flashbacks on the TV show and dream sequences in T2. Seven, if I didn't pretend that Christian Bale's John Connor didn't exist. (That movie came out when my timeline was already planned out and half-vidded, and after half a second of considering how to work in a whole 'nother movie's canon when I'd already figured out how all the other canon, even freaking RISE OF THE MACHINES worked together in the vid, I decided the movie just didn't exist. In fact, I still haven't watched it.)
I decided to save Edward Furlong for the very emphatic “Johnny” that led into the horses sequence (and most of my linear narrative T2 footage), which left me with T3!John and TSCC!John to represent Johnny, and older John Connor to serve as “the boy” who appears from nowhere to wreak havoc.
In this section, I tried a couple different editing techniques to suggest that these dudes were the same dude. Probably the most successful were the quintessential face-fading-into-face technique, and lyric-clip matching so that the younger Johns were always “Johnny.”
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker / he drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
Can I just say? Patti Smith is amazing-I can't think of any other song I've vidded in which I had to work SO HARD to downplay the constant homoerotic (or just erotic) undertones of the lyrics. I didn't want to ignore them all together, as I think any source in which a dude sends his father back in time to impregnate his mom kind of deserves what it gets, but I wanted to focus more on the metaphorical interpretations of the more ambiguous lyrics than the physical implications. So here, when John Connor “drove it in, ...drove it home, …drove it deep” in his younger self, well, thanks to Patti Smith's delivery, we could easily hear that as either violence or sex; however, this violent encounter simply needed to show us John Connor as he forces his younger self to become John Connor, by influence, by reputation, and of course, by necessity.
One of the greatest things about the Terminator franchise is how we see the characters struggling with the knowledge of what they will-and what they must-become, and this struggle is central to how we see the character of John Connor in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (And I guess in T3, too, but I try not to think about that movie more than I must. His is a much more “boohoo, poor me” approach, anyway, for which I have much less sympathy.) I wanted to establish that idea here.
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees / started crashing his head against the locker
started crashing his head against the locker / started laughing hysterically
When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by-
2. COMING IN, IN ALL DIRECTIONS, HE SAW-
Or, Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Horses, horses, horses, horses / coming in in all directions / white shining silver studs
with their nose in flames / he saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses-
What do you do with horses coming from all directions? Terminators! Coming from all directions! (What, that's totally obvious.) I set up the terminator face-off from T2 to hammer that home, and then did a quick run-through of the Skynet-controlled terminators that come after John in the films. (One of the visual parallels that pops up again and again? Feet. I like the idea of comparing terminators to crazy, wild horses-they've both got feet! They can stampede!)
Shots with text in them are awesome for quickly establishing who's who and who's being targeted. Poor wee John Connor.
I can't say with certainty where Patti Smith breaks this song into its three component parts, but her cover of Land of 1,000 Dances begins right here. This section was a lot of fun; for a long time, the poor dude being shot on “boney-maroney” was my favorite part and made me die laughing whenever I watched the vid back.
Let's just run through some of these dance moves. Hopefully, the visual connections are obvious, even if they're not reminiscent of the literal dance moves.
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney?
Do you know how to twist? Well it goes like this, it goes like this
Baby, mash potato
Do the alligator, do the alligator / and you twist the twister
Like your baby sister / I want your baby sister, give me your baby sister, dig your baby sister
I have to get vaguely meta for a moment here. In a sense, the reprogrammed Terminators are John Connor's kin. In the TV show especially, we're forced to question how close he is to his machines. (And this strange dynamic comes up again and again in the vid, as well, because it's something on Sarah's mind; another price her son has to pay.) In this bit, the Terminator becomes his baby sister-an object of fascination-but in T2, Sarah Connor gives us a different impression of their familial relation.
It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
I would disagree with Sarah's idea of “sane,” but that statement further emphasizes the connection between John Connor and the machines. He fights alongside them as much as he fights with them, in some realities he might be closer to them than he is to other people, and it begins here.
Rise up on her knees, do the sweet pea, do the sweet pee pee / roll down on her back, got to lose control, got to lose control
I coulda sworn I uploaded screencaps for this part of the vid, but I can't find them now, and this commentary is image-heavy enough as it is! Starting at 1:59, I chose clips that made it hard for the viewer to really see Sarah here except as John sees her: a distant figure, a mother that is always driving away. But even as much as she might anger and intimidate him, a significant shift in their relationship is coming in the next few lines.
Got to lose control and then you take control / then you're rolled down on your back and you like it like that
Like it like that, like it like that, like it like that / then you do the watusi, yeah do the watusi
As Sarah loses control, John must take over. He steps in and deals with Miles Dyson when Sarah breaks down, and Dyson is convinced to help them. John helps him destroy what needs to be destroyed at Cyberdyne-and then Dyson winds up dying for the cause.
I had to have a very clear idea of what it meant for John to do the watusi, or be asked to, as it's repeated frequently throughout the song. Every time that line pops up from now on, it's at a point at which John Connor is asked to be John Connor. Step up. Be a leader.
3. CAN'T YOU SHOW US NOTHING BUT SURRENDER?
Or, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
This song and its abrupt shifts in tone, I love it! Following those musical and lyrical shifts made it very easy to transition from section to section. Here, I couldn't resist having John jerk awake, as if from bad dreams or memories of the attack at Cyberdyne.
Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin / angel looks down at him and says,
“Oh, pretty boy, can't you show me nothing but surrender?”
I have so many issues with this movie and I shouldn't even get into it. The ending of the movie, in which it turns out that everything is inevitable after all, just completely pisses on the idea of “no fate but what we make for ourselves” and invalidates Sarah Connor's entire struggle. Not to mention that in this movie, oh yeah, she's dead. Oops?
And my other main issue with this movie is that god, John Connor is such a whiner. I mean, maybe he's entitled. He has a hard life. But I couldn't resist making the “angel” into the good Terminator that comes to earth to shake John from his funk and provide inappropriate humor.
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket / taped to his chest there's the answer
You got pen knives and jack knives and / switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred
Without Sarah's influence, John's pretty adrift. The most power he feels he has is over his own life, and one of his weapons is the threat to end that life. What will everyone do without him, anyway? But he also has the Terminator, and he has Claire Danes, and they can give him the backup he desperately needs.
Then he cries, then he screams, saying / life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain
and I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud / go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud
These lyrics gave me a bit of difficulty; the second “I” is a bit ambiguous (is it Johnny or the speaker?) and so I wanted something that could apply to either John or Sarah. And in the fucked up world of T3, Sarah's bones are a weapons cache; John is there for his fix.
And, Rimbaud. What do you do with a reference to a dead French Symbolist poet?
I finally decided to run with the homoeroticism implied by Patti Smith's invocation of Rimbaud, because while the Terminator in T2 becomes John's family, the Terminator here is... something else. I'm not sure what. But their interactions in this particular movie are kind of intense and charged-if not quite like a drug-crazed French Symbolist poet, then as close as one could get. So “Rimbaud” becomes the intimate connection that John shares with the machines, and later in the vid, the echoes of Rimbaud are Cameron.
And go Johnny go, and do the watusi, oh do the watusi
I hate everything about the ending of this movie except this one moment-when he touches the microphone, when he steps up, when it's time to finally, yes, be John Connor.
5. ENTER SARAH, STAGE LEFT
Or, Things Get Apocalyptic and We Finally Meet Our Point-of-View Character
There's a little place, a place called space / it's a pretty little place, it's across the tracks
Sarah Connor appears. This is her dream. Her vision. But it's all really happening, or will happen, or did-her imaginative sequences blend with the events as we're shown in flashbacks/forwards. (And we see her feet first, in a shot which echoes those of the Terminators; they're alike, I suppose, in that they each have their mission.)
Across the tracks and the name of the place is you like it like that
I incorporated three different reactions to the Skynet apocalypse in this sequence; the Reese brothers look up at the sky, Sarah shields her eyes from the death in her vision, (and I was pleased at how well those two went together,) and we see John Connor in the bunker at the moment that it begins. Just think about that for a second-with the exception of Sarah, who sees things, this is where John Connor and his dad are right now, at this moment. (At least, in this timeline.)
You like it like that, you like it like that, you like it like that / and the name of the band is the
Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes / Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes
Y'all, it's so much fun to demolish human civilization to crazy piano music.
6. IN THE EYE OF THE FOREST
Or, Terminator.
Baby, calm down, better calm down / in the night, in the eye of the forest
Again: abrupt tonal shifts are my honeybunch sweetumpies. I love them. So we go from crazy apocalypse with everything on fire, to a sheet of paper gently twisting on the night breeze. And naked Kyle Reese.
There's a mare, black and shining with yellow hair / I put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair
I think some people got this part and some didn't, but I was very careful to try to identify Kyle Reese as the “mare” here. Sarah is the “I” of the song, but hasn't yet been established fully in the narrative as such, and so it's difficult to evade the visual associations; if anyone in this section is female and in possession of silken yellow hair, it's not Reese. But I think the term “mare” carries an implication of breeding-otherwise, why not just “horse”?-and I liked twisting gender and genre expectations here and making Kyle the one who's defined by his role in impregnation, instead of Sarah.
I didn't waste time, I just walked right up and saw that-
7. THE SEA OF POSSIBILITIES
Or, Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...
And now we wave a sad goodbye to any semblance of linear narrative and just jump right in.
up there -- there is a sea / up there -- there is a sea / up there -- there is a sea
the sea's the possibility / there is no land but the land / (up there is just a sea of possibilities)
This may be a blink-and-miss-it thing, but I'm pretty fond of the telephone book page with the multiple Sarah Connors listed, just to clue the viewer in even more.
the sea's the possibility / there is no land but the land / (up there is just a sea of possibilities)
there is no sea but the sea / (up there is a wall of possibilities) / there is no keeper but the key
(up there there are several walls of possibilities) / except for one who seizes possibilities, one who seizes possibilities (up there)
In case you hadn't realized before now, Sarah is one who seizes possibilities.
I seize the first possibility, is the sea around me / I was standing there with my legs spread like a sailor
And I suppose the “first possibility” is the one we see begin in Terminator. Kyle Reese dies, Sarah Connor goes on the road and bulks up-everything else branches from there.
(in a sea of possibilities) I felt his hand on my knee / (on the screen)
And I looked at Johnny and handed him a branch of cold flame / (in the heart of man)
The waves were coming in like Arabian stallions / gradually lapping into sea horses
Waves of time travelers from the resistance! Everything in this song comes back to horses and the sea. So many metaphors to play with.
He picked up the blade and he pressed it against his smooth throat / (the spoon)
Again, I failed to get a good screencap, but-he picked up the blade! I had to seize my Keanu moments where I could. This also has a figurative reading, though, as he's picking up the blade that Sarah has used to carve “NO FATE” in the table. And so, he also picks up her message; he sets out to make his own fate.
And let it deep in / (the veins) / dip in to the sea, to the sea of possibilities
I tried something a little weird here to try to represent the possibilities branching off from various points in time; I took the shots of mercury that we see begin to coalesce back into the T-1000 at the end of T2 and I ran them backwards. Then, I overlaid those shots on the clips of Derek seeing John Connor's Handy Time Machine for the first time, and on the clips of human soldiers and friendly Terminators arriving in the past via big flaming bubble. (The mercury also appears near the end of the vid as we see young John Connor and a flash of future John Connor.)
You'll also notice that I stuck in the face of the John Connor that Derek would have actually seen. With the powers of “screen overlay,” I can do ANYTHING.
8. THEIR LIVES ENTWINED
Or, I Can't Believe It's Not Incest?
At some point, I should probably mention how long it took me to make this vid. I fiddled with it, off and on, for over a year; I had about two-thirds of the timeline filled when the VividCon challenge show deadline suddenly loomed. At first, this didn't seem like such a big deal. My vid was two-thirds done! It would be fine! But then I realized that one-third of a ten-minute vid is... the length of a normal vid. Oops.
And so, roughly the last third of the vid (and some of the beginning) was vidded in a crazy, caffeinated haze in the last four days before the deadline. I might've gotten an extension somewhere in there, too, probably with the words, “OMG PLEASE I AM MAKING A TEN-MINUTE VID PLEASE WAIT FOR MEEEE.” I really can't recall. We'll just say I was going method with my vidding.
It started hardening / dip in to the sea, to the sea of possibilities
It started hardening in my hand / and I felt the arrows of desire
Things could have gone so wrong here; Sarah and John were already a bit too close for comfort. But she's not talking about John. Her desire is for answers and solutions-she follows the three dots.
I put my hand inside his cranium, oh we had such a brainiac-amour / but no more, no more
The alternate ending of T2 worked perfectly for what I had in mind. Sarah must shape John into the person he needs to be-she arms him, she trains him. She erases any chance he had of having a normal life (such a brainiac-amour) and sets him down the path that the John Connor of the future has ordained. The possible future of an idyllic playground, complete with a tiny adorable granddaughter, dissolves away.
I gotta move from my mind to the area / (go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud)
And faint images of Cameron and John appear on “Rimbaud” as Sarah walks down the hallway outside John's bedroom.
And go Johnny go and do the watusi / yeah do the watusi, do the watusi
Again, he must deal with the reality of his responsibilities; he visits Riley's body in the morgue, he holds Cameron's kill switch.
Shined open coiled snakes white and shiny twirling and encircling / our lives are now entwined
We will fall yes we're together twining / your nerves, your mane of the black shining horse
The music builds, and more parallels between Sarahs are brought in to remind the viewer of the struggle she faces to keep John alive. They're entwined.
And my fingers all entwined through the air / I could feel it, it was the hair going through my fingers
(I feel it I feel it I feel it I feel it) / the hairs were like wires going through my body
The two vocal tracks here are so heavily layered that I decided to vid them separately and then squish the visuals together to match. This resulted in a bit of a chaotic mess. I'm okay with that. You see enough to get the gist: both Sarahs are struggling, fighting, but neither are making headway. There's no clear grounding point until:
I, I, that's how I / that's how I / I died
The TV show allowed the characters to easily skip over a few years, and avoid the timeline in which Sarah died from cancer, leaving John alone-but the audience knows the possibility is still present, as does she.
(at that Tower of Babel they knew what they were after) / (they knew what they were after)
One of my favorite clip-lyric matches: Skynet as the Tower of Babel.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. (Genesis 11:3-9)
Obviously, in the Terminator story, the repercussions of the human race getting too big for its britches are a bit worse than a few language difficulties, but I still enjoyed the parallels here, and the implication that human developments had grown too high to be allowed to stand.
(Everything on the current) moved up / I tried to stop it, but it was too warm, too unbelievably smooth
Sarah has tried to change the future in a number of ways, but if she can be said to fail, it's because of her compassion-and because of the overwhelming nature of the enemy she faces.
Like playing in the sea, in the sea of possibility, the possibility / was a blade, a shiny blade
The Reese brothers play in a green, grassy park that intercuts with the green, grassy pauper's graveyard where they are both eventually buried. And the blade is now not a literal blade, but John.
I hold the key to the sea of possibilities / there's no land but the land
But now we get a literal blade! And as it cuts across the table-”NO FATE”-we see Sarah discover the bloody fingerprints which lead her to information that a dying resistance fighter has left for her in her basement.
Looked at my hands, and there's a red stream / that went streaming through the sands like fingers
Like arteries, like fingers / (how much fits between the eyes of a horse?)
Red streams = the blood shed in the struggle against SkyNet. I'm particularly fond of the transitions/fades in this bit. I also intentionally cut from Sarah leaving flowers on Miles Dyson's grave to her rising from a similar crouched position to shoot that one dude. Violence and compassion.
9. JOHN CONNOR BECOMES JOHN CONNOR
He lay, pressing it against his throat (your eyes) / he opened his throat (your eyes)
His vocal chords started shooting like (of a horse) mad pituitary glands
And here, yeah, I frame John Connor as martyr-at least in his mother's eyes-as he “opens his throat” and takes on the roles that Sarah is trying to spare him: he reprograms Terminators, he kills a man as Sarah watches on helplessly.
The scream he made (and my heart) was so high (my heart) pitched that nobody heard
No one heard that cry / no one heard (Johnny) the butterfly flapping in his throat
I'd like to point out just a couple of things here. First, the clip on “Johnny” where the robotic cactus arms wrap around him? That's taken from one of Sarah's dream sequences, but it also reminded me kind of hilariously of the aesthetics of some homoerotic artwork (Pierre et Gilles, etc.), and combined with the cultural references that I gleefully ignored all throughout the rest of the song, I decided it was a good moment for a shoutout. He's even wearing a tight white T-shirt. We won't even get into the phallic imagery. (Yes, so, basically I'm the only person that would even get this, but hey.) And second, the “butterfly flapping in his throat” … I totally associate that “butterfly” with the butterfly effect.
(His fingers) / nobody heard, he was on that bed, it was like a sea of jelly
And so he seized the first / (his vocal chords shot up)
(possibility) / (like mad pituitary glands)
Again, someone seizes the first possibility. One of my favorite John Connor moments is toward the end of the second season, when he appears in Jesse's room and reveals-and this sounds more uncharitable than I intend it to sound, but-that he's not actually as stupid as we may've assumed. Or in the vid's terms, I suppose, he demonstrates once again that he can do the watusi.
Two guns side by side, mother and son side by side. I was really happy that a couple of people picked up on the visual connection here.
It was a black tube, he felt himself disintegrate (there is nothing happening at all)
And go inside the black tube, so when he looked out into the steep
Sarah steps back both from the time bubble...thingy...and also from sight altogether. We do see her again in a moment, in the footage from Terminator, but effectively, this moment is her exit from the vid. She's letting go of John and allowing him to assume his role.
This whole section is full of visual association that's probably too obscure to catch on the first viewing, but what I was trying for was to suggest that, just as in the clip of wee John playing chess, all the pieces are being put into play. And so, John looks out into the steep and sees his father for the first time; he sees the man he will send back in time to become his father. He's now facing a much bigger game of chess.
Saw this sweet young thing (Fender one)
Humping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter
And here, Cameron, the sweet young thing also found “leaning on the parking meter” in Gloria, takes on a role more linked to the position she holds in John's plans (even if this John might not know what those plans are).
This is the part that I think makes it clear that in my personal canon, Gloria and Land exist in the same vid-verse-not that this particular Sarah is the Sarah that's off having lesbian robot sex, but perhaps, all Sarahs speak with this voice. I keep thinking about vidding more songs from Horses, but after finishing such an immensely long vid-even, what, two or three years later?-it's hard for me to figure out what else needs to be said about Sarah Connor. Someday! I did just discover that there's a 17-minute live version of “Land” that's apparently amazing...
10. THE BEGINNING
And in the tale of John Connor, as told by Sarah Connor, this is where it starts. As John Connor journeys to the future, potentially to take his place as Future John Connor, he will soon have to face the same decision he already made: to send his dad to the past. To set in motion events that for him, have already happened. To begin it all again.
And in the sheets / there was a man
Dancing around / to the simple
Rock & roll / song
*
If you've read this far, I hope you enjoyed this monstrous commentary, and thank you! I do fear that I've probably left out a lot, and I haven't rewatched the show since I made the vid so some things are kind of hazy, but I'd be very glad to answer any questions y'all have.
Vidder: sweetestdrain
Fandom: Terminator universe
Link to vid: LJ post here (also embedded after cut)
Notes/warnings: Very, very image heavy; spoils the hell out of the first three Terminator movies, plus a lot of stuff in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (including the finale); a couple of images may include sorta-naked people and/or robot gore?
Commentary by: sweetestdrain! Hope you enjoy. Questions welcome.
i. THE VID
I am far too long-winded (and technologically unsavvy) to produce one of those nice video commentaries, but I would advise watching (or rewatching) the vid if you're going to skim through any of the blather that follows-it'll probably help you make sense of me!
Click to viewii. THE IDEA
In 2008, I'd already discovered for my VividCon premiere that Sarah Connor = Patti Smith-with bonus lesbian robots, no less-but I don't recall exactly when I made the realization that my other favorite song off of Horses was also about Sarah (and the wider Terminator universe, to boot). The first (and only) notes in my storyboard file date from March and August of 2008, and as you can see, I didn't change my vision of the structure very much after that; however, I did need to somehow fill in all the rest.
I'm guessing from my “Hopefully there's a clip of a tombstone?” that at this point, I hadn't yet watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, only read the plot synopsis. I watched it specifically to use it in this vid, and have been ranting about the film ever since. (I won't judge you if you like it-parts of it are pretty fun!-but it's kind of incredible in how it manages to erase all the elements that I liked in the first two films. More on this later.)
Like I said, I'm not sure how I originally got the idea for this vid, but if I had to guess, I'd say it happened when listening to the overlapping vocal tracks that come in on the “sea of possibilities” later in the vid. If Patti Smith spoke for Sarah Connor in my other vid... this was a song in which she coule speak for multiple Sarah Connors.
I kept two organizing principles in mind as I worked:
There is a sea of possibilities.
and
There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
iii. THE STRUCTURE
I'm not even going to try to remember how I brainstormed the structure of this vid; instead, I'll talk a little about how I intended the vid to work. Although the original song is divided into three sections (Horses, Land of a Thousand Dances, and La Mer), I took advantage of the numerous musical shifts to divide it even further and play with the non-linearity of the story I wanted to tell. The unifying “logic” of the vid, beyond the idea that we're seeing a cross-section of possibilities (timelines, universes, multiple actors/actresses) in source material that already deals heavily with time travel, is that our point-of-view character is Sarah Connor-and of all the characters in the films and the TV show, Sarah is the one who is most often faced by strange dreams and patterns, apocalyptic visions, apparitions, and visitations that help keep her moving in the right direction. She is both guide and guided. Embracing this aspect of her character meant that the vid's narrative perspective could open up and show the audience various events as a more omniscient Sarah might perceive them.
There are a couple of sections that provide simple, no-frills retellings of the second two Terminator films (aided by some fun lyrical matching), which help to ground the vid enough that when it inevitably spins out again into overlapping what-ifs, weres, and yet-to-bes, the viewer isn't lost in all of it-or at least I hope that's how it works! But really, I feel like I didn't plan the structure so much as I managed to discover that Patti Smith's song had the perfect structure already; for instance, the moment about halfway through (~4:40) when the vocals overlap and the Sarahs come together is, for me at least, the linchpin of the whole vid.
iv. THE OPENING TITLECARD
I tried to establish Sarah Connor as the POV from the very first frame. The fade transition here from her face to the twisted and dark future wasteland (land! get it?) is in the original source (Terminator), and occurs when Kyle Reese begins to tell Sarah about the place from which he's come. She closes her eyes to imagine it.
But while the voice we hear is Sarah's, the lyrics themselves begin with a boy.
1. THE BOY LOOKED AT JOHNNY
The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea / from the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating
Another boy was sliding up the hallway / he merged perfectly with the hallway / he merged perfectly, the mirror in the hallway
This was actually one of the last sections of the vid I tackled. I had to establish “Johnny” as John Connor, as this was the name's first appearance in the song, but it didn't quite click together until I figured out that the other boy was also John Connor.
The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run / but the movie kept moving as planned
At this point, I'd already been working with the issue of how to vid multiple actors in a way to make it clear they represented the same character. However, linking Linda Hamilton and Lena Headey is a very different task than managing-how many John Connors? Michael Edwards (ex-boyfriend of Priscilla Presley! Can you tell I had to look up his name on Wikipedia?) appeared as the grown John Connor in flashforwards in T2 (and as the normal, happy John Connor in the alternate ending), Edward Furlong was kid John Connor in T2, Thomas Dekker was teen John Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Nick Stahl was, what, 20-something John Connor in T3? Four different actors representing the same character at different ages. Six, if I tried to work in the little dudes who played young John Connor in flashbacks on the TV show and dream sequences in T2. Seven, if I didn't pretend that Christian Bale's John Connor didn't exist. (That movie came out when my timeline was already planned out and half-vidded, and after half a second of considering how to work in a whole 'nother movie's canon when I'd already figured out how all the other canon, even freaking RISE OF THE MACHINES worked together in the vid, I decided the movie just didn't exist. In fact, I still haven't watched it.)
I decided to save Edward Furlong for the very emphatic “Johnny” that led into the horses sequence (and most of my linear narrative T2 footage), which left me with T3!John and TSCC!John to represent Johnny, and older John Connor to serve as “the boy” who appears from nowhere to wreak havoc.
In this section, I tried a couple different editing techniques to suggest that these dudes were the same dude. Probably the most successful were the quintessential face-fading-into-face technique, and lyric-clip matching so that the younger Johns were always “Johnny.”
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker / he drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
Can I just say? Patti Smith is amazing-I can't think of any other song I've vidded in which I had to work SO HARD to downplay the constant homoerotic (or just erotic) undertones of the lyrics. I didn't want to ignore them all together, as I think any source in which a dude sends his father back in time to impregnate his mom kind of deserves what it gets, but I wanted to focus more on the metaphorical interpretations of the more ambiguous lyrics than the physical implications. So here, when John Connor “drove it in, ...drove it home, …drove it deep” in his younger self, well, thanks to Patti Smith's delivery, we could easily hear that as either violence or sex; however, this violent encounter simply needed to show us John Connor as he forces his younger self to become John Connor, by influence, by reputation, and of course, by necessity.
One of the greatest things about the Terminator franchise is how we see the characters struggling with the knowledge of what they will-and what they must-become, and this struggle is central to how we see the character of John Connor in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (And I guess in T3, too, but I try not to think about that movie more than I must. His is a much more “boohoo, poor me” approach, anyway, for which I have much less sympathy.) I wanted to establish that idea here.
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees / started crashing his head against the locker
started crashing his head against the locker / started laughing hysterically
When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by-
2. COMING IN, IN ALL DIRECTIONS, HE SAW-
Or, Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Horses, horses, horses, horses / coming in in all directions / white shining silver studs
with their nose in flames / he saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses-
What do you do with horses coming from all directions? Terminators! Coming from all directions! (What, that's totally obvious.) I set up the terminator face-off from T2 to hammer that home, and then did a quick run-through of the Skynet-controlled terminators that come after John in the films. (One of the visual parallels that pops up again and again? Feet. I like the idea of comparing terminators to crazy, wild horses-they've both got feet! They can stampede!)
Shots with text in them are awesome for quickly establishing who's who and who's being targeted. Poor wee John Connor.
I can't say with certainty where Patti Smith breaks this song into its three component parts, but her cover of Land of 1,000 Dances begins right here. This section was a lot of fun; for a long time, the poor dude being shot on “boney-maroney” was my favorite part and made me die laughing whenever I watched the vid back.
Let's just run through some of these dance moves. Hopefully, the visual connections are obvious, even if they're not reminiscent of the literal dance moves.
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney?
Do you know how to twist? Well it goes like this, it goes like this
Baby, mash potato
Do the alligator, do the alligator / and you twist the twister
Like your baby sister / I want your baby sister, give me your baby sister, dig your baby sister
I have to get vaguely meta for a moment here. In a sense, the reprogrammed Terminators are John Connor's kin. In the TV show especially, we're forced to question how close he is to his machines. (And this strange dynamic comes up again and again in the vid, as well, because it's something on Sarah's mind; another price her son has to pay.) In this bit, the Terminator becomes his baby sister-an object of fascination-but in T2, Sarah Connor gives us a different impression of their familial relation.
It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
I would disagree with Sarah's idea of “sane,” but that statement further emphasizes the connection between John Connor and the machines. He fights alongside them as much as he fights with them, in some realities he might be closer to them than he is to other people, and it begins here.
Rise up on her knees, do the sweet pea, do the sweet pee pee / roll down on her back, got to lose control, got to lose control
I coulda sworn I uploaded screencaps for this part of the vid, but I can't find them now, and this commentary is image-heavy enough as it is! Starting at 1:59, I chose clips that made it hard for the viewer to really see Sarah here except as John sees her: a distant figure, a mother that is always driving away. But even as much as she might anger and intimidate him, a significant shift in their relationship is coming in the next few lines.
Got to lose control and then you take control / then you're rolled down on your back and you like it like that
Like it like that, like it like that, like it like that / then you do the watusi, yeah do the watusi
As Sarah loses control, John must take over. He steps in and deals with Miles Dyson when Sarah breaks down, and Dyson is convinced to help them. John helps him destroy what needs to be destroyed at Cyberdyne-and then Dyson winds up dying for the cause.
I had to have a very clear idea of what it meant for John to do the watusi, or be asked to, as it's repeated frequently throughout the song. Every time that line pops up from now on, it's at a point at which John Connor is asked to be John Connor. Step up. Be a leader.
3. CAN'T YOU SHOW US NOTHING BUT SURRENDER?
Or, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
This song and its abrupt shifts in tone, I love it! Following those musical and lyrical shifts made it very easy to transition from section to section. Here, I couldn't resist having John jerk awake, as if from bad dreams or memories of the attack at Cyberdyne.
Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin / angel looks down at him and says,
“Oh, pretty boy, can't you show me nothing but surrender?”
I have so many issues with this movie and I shouldn't even get into it. The ending of the movie, in which it turns out that everything is inevitable after all, just completely pisses on the idea of “no fate but what we make for ourselves” and invalidates Sarah Connor's entire struggle. Not to mention that in this movie, oh yeah, she's dead. Oops?
And my other main issue with this movie is that god, John Connor is such a whiner. I mean, maybe he's entitled. He has a hard life. But I couldn't resist making the “angel” into the good Terminator that comes to earth to shake John from his funk and provide inappropriate humor.
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket / taped to his chest there's the answer
You got pen knives and jack knives and / switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred
Without Sarah's influence, John's pretty adrift. The most power he feels he has is over his own life, and one of his weapons is the threat to end that life. What will everyone do without him, anyway? But he also has the Terminator, and he has Claire Danes, and they can give him the backup he desperately needs.
Then he cries, then he screams, saying / life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain
and I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud / go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud
These lyrics gave me a bit of difficulty; the second “I” is a bit ambiguous (is it Johnny or the speaker?) and so I wanted something that could apply to either John or Sarah. And in the fucked up world of T3, Sarah's bones are a weapons cache; John is there for his fix.
And, Rimbaud. What do you do with a reference to a dead French Symbolist poet?
I finally decided to run with the homoeroticism implied by Patti Smith's invocation of Rimbaud, because while the Terminator in T2 becomes John's family, the Terminator here is... something else. I'm not sure what. But their interactions in this particular movie are kind of intense and charged-if not quite like a drug-crazed French Symbolist poet, then as close as one could get. So “Rimbaud” becomes the intimate connection that John shares with the machines, and later in the vid, the echoes of Rimbaud are Cameron.
And go Johnny go, and do the watusi, oh do the watusi
I hate everything about the ending of this movie except this one moment-when he touches the microphone, when he steps up, when it's time to finally, yes, be John Connor.
5. ENTER SARAH, STAGE LEFT
Or, Things Get Apocalyptic and We Finally Meet Our Point-of-View Character
There's a little place, a place called space / it's a pretty little place, it's across the tracks
Sarah Connor appears. This is her dream. Her vision. But it's all really happening, or will happen, or did-her imaginative sequences blend with the events as we're shown in flashbacks/forwards. (And we see her feet first, in a shot which echoes those of the Terminators; they're alike, I suppose, in that they each have their mission.)
Across the tracks and the name of the place is you like it like that
I incorporated three different reactions to the Skynet apocalypse in this sequence; the Reese brothers look up at the sky, Sarah shields her eyes from the death in her vision, (and I was pleased at how well those two went together,) and we see John Connor in the bunker at the moment that it begins. Just think about that for a second-with the exception of Sarah, who sees things, this is where John Connor and his dad are right now, at this moment. (At least, in this timeline.)
You like it like that, you like it like that, you like it like that / and the name of the band is the
Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes / Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes, Twistelettes
Y'all, it's so much fun to demolish human civilization to crazy piano music.
6. IN THE EYE OF THE FOREST
Or, Terminator.
Baby, calm down, better calm down / in the night, in the eye of the forest
Again: abrupt tonal shifts are my honeybunch sweetumpies. I love them. So we go from crazy apocalypse with everything on fire, to a sheet of paper gently twisting on the night breeze. And naked Kyle Reese.
There's a mare, black and shining with yellow hair / I put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair
I think some people got this part and some didn't, but I was very careful to try to identify Kyle Reese as the “mare” here. Sarah is the “I” of the song, but hasn't yet been established fully in the narrative as such, and so it's difficult to evade the visual associations; if anyone in this section is female and in possession of silken yellow hair, it's not Reese. But I think the term “mare” carries an implication of breeding-otherwise, why not just “horse”?-and I liked twisting gender and genre expectations here and making Kyle the one who's defined by his role in impregnation, instead of Sarah.
I didn't waste time, I just walked right up and saw that-
7. THE SEA OF POSSIBILITIES
Or, Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...
And now we wave a sad goodbye to any semblance of linear narrative and just jump right in.
up there -- there is a sea / up there -- there is a sea / up there -- there is a sea
the sea's the possibility / there is no land but the land / (up there is just a sea of possibilities)
This may be a blink-and-miss-it thing, but I'm pretty fond of the telephone book page with the multiple Sarah Connors listed, just to clue the viewer in even more.
the sea's the possibility / there is no land but the land / (up there is just a sea of possibilities)
there is no sea but the sea / (up there is a wall of possibilities) / there is no keeper but the key
(up there there are several walls of possibilities) / except for one who seizes possibilities, one who seizes possibilities (up there)
In case you hadn't realized before now, Sarah is one who seizes possibilities.
I seize the first possibility, is the sea around me / I was standing there with my legs spread like a sailor
And I suppose the “first possibility” is the one we see begin in Terminator. Kyle Reese dies, Sarah Connor goes on the road and bulks up-everything else branches from there.
(in a sea of possibilities) I felt his hand on my knee / (on the screen)
And I looked at Johnny and handed him a branch of cold flame / (in the heart of man)
The waves were coming in like Arabian stallions / gradually lapping into sea horses
Waves of time travelers from the resistance! Everything in this song comes back to horses and the sea. So many metaphors to play with.
He picked up the blade and he pressed it against his smooth throat / (the spoon)
Again, I failed to get a good screencap, but-he picked up the blade! I had to seize my Keanu moments where I could. This also has a figurative reading, though, as he's picking up the blade that Sarah has used to carve “NO FATE” in the table. And so, he also picks up her message; he sets out to make his own fate.
And let it deep in / (the veins) / dip in to the sea, to the sea of possibilities
I tried something a little weird here to try to represent the possibilities branching off from various points in time; I took the shots of mercury that we see begin to coalesce back into the T-1000 at the end of T2 and I ran them backwards. Then, I overlaid those shots on the clips of Derek seeing John Connor's Handy Time Machine for the first time, and on the clips of human soldiers and friendly Terminators arriving in the past via big flaming bubble. (The mercury also appears near the end of the vid as we see young John Connor and a flash of future John Connor.)
You'll also notice that I stuck in the face of the John Connor that Derek would have actually seen. With the powers of “screen overlay,” I can do ANYTHING.
8. THEIR LIVES ENTWINED
Or, I Can't Believe It's Not Incest?
At some point, I should probably mention how long it took me to make this vid. I fiddled with it, off and on, for over a year; I had about two-thirds of the timeline filled when the VividCon challenge show deadline suddenly loomed. At first, this didn't seem like such a big deal. My vid was two-thirds done! It would be fine! But then I realized that one-third of a ten-minute vid is... the length of a normal vid. Oops.
And so, roughly the last third of the vid (and some of the beginning) was vidded in a crazy, caffeinated haze in the last four days before the deadline. I might've gotten an extension somewhere in there, too, probably with the words, “OMG PLEASE I AM MAKING A TEN-MINUTE VID PLEASE WAIT FOR MEEEE.” I really can't recall. We'll just say I was going method with my vidding.
It started hardening / dip in to the sea, to the sea of possibilities
It started hardening in my hand / and I felt the arrows of desire
Things could have gone so wrong here; Sarah and John were already a bit too close for comfort. But she's not talking about John. Her desire is for answers and solutions-she follows the three dots.
I put my hand inside his cranium, oh we had such a brainiac-amour / but no more, no more
The alternate ending of T2 worked perfectly for what I had in mind. Sarah must shape John into the person he needs to be-she arms him, she trains him. She erases any chance he had of having a normal life (such a brainiac-amour) and sets him down the path that the John Connor of the future has ordained. The possible future of an idyllic playground, complete with a tiny adorable granddaughter, dissolves away.
I gotta move from my mind to the area / (go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud)
And faint images of Cameron and John appear on “Rimbaud” as Sarah walks down the hallway outside John's bedroom.
And go Johnny go and do the watusi / yeah do the watusi, do the watusi
Again, he must deal with the reality of his responsibilities; he visits Riley's body in the morgue, he holds Cameron's kill switch.
Shined open coiled snakes white and shiny twirling and encircling / our lives are now entwined
We will fall yes we're together twining / your nerves, your mane of the black shining horse
The music builds, and more parallels between Sarahs are brought in to remind the viewer of the struggle she faces to keep John alive. They're entwined.
And my fingers all entwined through the air / I could feel it, it was the hair going through my fingers
(I feel it I feel it I feel it I feel it) / the hairs were like wires going through my body
The two vocal tracks here are so heavily layered that I decided to vid them separately and then squish the visuals together to match. This resulted in a bit of a chaotic mess. I'm okay with that. You see enough to get the gist: both Sarahs are struggling, fighting, but neither are making headway. There's no clear grounding point until:
I, I, that's how I / that's how I / I died
The TV show allowed the characters to easily skip over a few years, and avoid the timeline in which Sarah died from cancer, leaving John alone-but the audience knows the possibility is still present, as does she.
(at that Tower of Babel they knew what they were after) / (they knew what they were after)
One of my favorite clip-lyric matches: Skynet as the Tower of Babel.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. (Genesis 11:3-9)
Obviously, in the Terminator story, the repercussions of the human race getting too big for its britches are a bit worse than a few language difficulties, but I still enjoyed the parallels here, and the implication that human developments had grown too high to be allowed to stand.
(Everything on the current) moved up / I tried to stop it, but it was too warm, too unbelievably smooth
Sarah has tried to change the future in a number of ways, but if she can be said to fail, it's because of her compassion-and because of the overwhelming nature of the enemy she faces.
Like playing in the sea, in the sea of possibility, the possibility / was a blade, a shiny blade
The Reese brothers play in a green, grassy park that intercuts with the green, grassy pauper's graveyard where they are both eventually buried. And the blade is now not a literal blade, but John.
I hold the key to the sea of possibilities / there's no land but the land
But now we get a literal blade! And as it cuts across the table-”NO FATE”-we see Sarah discover the bloody fingerprints which lead her to information that a dying resistance fighter has left for her in her basement.
Looked at my hands, and there's a red stream / that went streaming through the sands like fingers
Like arteries, like fingers / (how much fits between the eyes of a horse?)
Red streams = the blood shed in the struggle against SkyNet. I'm particularly fond of the transitions/fades in this bit. I also intentionally cut from Sarah leaving flowers on Miles Dyson's grave to her rising from a similar crouched position to shoot that one dude. Violence and compassion.
9. JOHN CONNOR BECOMES JOHN CONNOR
He lay, pressing it against his throat (your eyes) / he opened his throat (your eyes)
His vocal chords started shooting like (of a horse) mad pituitary glands
And here, yeah, I frame John Connor as martyr-at least in his mother's eyes-as he “opens his throat” and takes on the roles that Sarah is trying to spare him: he reprograms Terminators, he kills a man as Sarah watches on helplessly.
The scream he made (and my heart) was so high (my heart) pitched that nobody heard
No one heard that cry / no one heard (Johnny) the butterfly flapping in his throat
I'd like to point out just a couple of things here. First, the clip on “Johnny” where the robotic cactus arms wrap around him? That's taken from one of Sarah's dream sequences, but it also reminded me kind of hilariously of the aesthetics of some homoerotic artwork (Pierre et Gilles, etc.), and combined with the cultural references that I gleefully ignored all throughout the rest of the song, I decided it was a good moment for a shoutout. He's even wearing a tight white T-shirt. We won't even get into the phallic imagery. (Yes, so, basically I'm the only person that would even get this, but hey.) And second, the “butterfly flapping in his throat” … I totally associate that “butterfly” with the butterfly effect.
(His fingers) / nobody heard, he was on that bed, it was like a sea of jelly
And so he seized the first / (his vocal chords shot up)
(possibility) / (like mad pituitary glands)
Again, someone seizes the first possibility. One of my favorite John Connor moments is toward the end of the second season, when he appears in Jesse's room and reveals-and this sounds more uncharitable than I intend it to sound, but-that he's not actually as stupid as we may've assumed. Or in the vid's terms, I suppose, he demonstrates once again that he can do the watusi.
Two guns side by side, mother and son side by side. I was really happy that a couple of people picked up on the visual connection here.
It was a black tube, he felt himself disintegrate (there is nothing happening at all)
And go inside the black tube, so when he looked out into the steep
Sarah steps back both from the time bubble...thingy...and also from sight altogether. We do see her again in a moment, in the footage from Terminator, but effectively, this moment is her exit from the vid. She's letting go of John and allowing him to assume his role.
This whole section is full of visual association that's probably too obscure to catch on the first viewing, but what I was trying for was to suggest that, just as in the clip of wee John playing chess, all the pieces are being put into play. And so, John looks out into the steep and sees his father for the first time; he sees the man he will send back in time to become his father. He's now facing a much bigger game of chess.
Saw this sweet young thing (Fender one)
Humping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter
And here, Cameron, the sweet young thing also found “leaning on the parking meter” in Gloria, takes on a role more linked to the position she holds in John's plans (even if this John might not know what those plans are).
This is the part that I think makes it clear that in my personal canon, Gloria and Land exist in the same vid-verse-not that this particular Sarah is the Sarah that's off having lesbian robot sex, but perhaps, all Sarahs speak with this voice. I keep thinking about vidding more songs from Horses, but after finishing such an immensely long vid-even, what, two or three years later?-it's hard for me to figure out what else needs to be said about Sarah Connor. Someday! I did just discover that there's a 17-minute live version of “Land” that's apparently amazing...
10. THE BEGINNING
And in the tale of John Connor, as told by Sarah Connor, this is where it starts. As John Connor journeys to the future, potentially to take his place as Future John Connor, he will soon have to face the same decision he already made: to send his dad to the past. To set in motion events that for him, have already happened. To begin it all again.
And in the sheets / there was a man
Dancing around / to the simple
Rock & roll / song
*
If you've read this far, I hope you enjoyed this monstrous commentary, and thank you! I do fear that I've probably left out a lot, and I haven't rewatched the show since I made the vid so some things are kind of hazy, but I'd be very glad to answer any questions y'all have.