Immersion Breaks

You know that thing that kids do sometimes when they're watching a movie or TV show and they see something that doesn't make sense to them so they question it as though they forget that it's a piece of fiction created by a person? For example, my son—who for a while was obsessed with lasers and knows how they work scientifically—asked me one time how the light sabers in Star Wars limit the length of the beam if they're basically lasers.

I actually love this because it shows that he is thinking critically. He knows how the physics of light work and knows that the photons will continue to travel and spread further and further out as it propagates and across an increasing distance. But he sees the light saber with it's three or four foot long beam and wants to know how it's possible to limit the beam to that distance.

The easy, non-fun answer is to say "it's just fiction, the person who created it didn't really think that much about it so you're not really supposed to question it." It's the truth but I hate it. It breaks the immersion. With Star Wars, it's easy to explain away. The beam isn't a traditional laser beam after all. It's created by a kyber crystal, a sentient, force-sensitive crystalline entity that emits the beam when triggered by a power source. It's alive and can therefore control the length of the beam it emits, or can consciously emit a beam length appropriate for the saber-wielder's height.

That was my answer to him. I think it's actually the canonical answer now in Star Wars lore. But I did also add, "But when they were originally created, the person who created them probably wasn't thinking that much about it so we're most likely not really supposed to question it either. He just wanted to create a cool-looking weapon." I had to offer the not-so-fun answer too because part of the critical thinking process recognizing all possibilities, including that one. He was satisfied with that answer.

I want him to understand that sometimes, in order to enjoy something, you have to suspend your disbelief a little but that it's still okay to think about it critically.

It's fun to ponder the logical gaps in fiction though, isn't it? Even though you know the real answer is just that it wasn't important to the creator of the work and so not much thought was put into it. Sometimes it's fun to just wonder how you would explain something that didn't make sense at face value.

I found myself doing this recently while watching The Terminator with my oldest daughter. She has an interest in 1980s culture and media recently and wants to experience some of the films, music, and video games that I grew up with. And so the first film we decided to watch was The Terminator.

It was kind of funny and awkward watching the opening scenes of the film with her and seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger's bare ass after he is teleported from the future to downtown Los Angeles in 1984. "Do they always travel back in time naked?" She asked me. "Yes, because the time travel technology the machines use in the future can only transport living tissue so anyone using it has to go naked."

"But the terminator is a robot right? Made of metal, so how is that possible?" She countered. "Well, that's why he's covered in living tissue. It protects his metallic innards from whatever happens in the time machine thing that incinerates non-living materials." This is explained later in the film, so I don't take credit for it. But it got me thinking.

The terminators are covered in living tissue for two purposes, one to travel back in time as previously mentioned, but also to blend in with human beings in order to infiltrate human encampments during the war in the future without being suspected as terminators. So they're made to look indistinguishable from a human.

And so when Schwarzenegger's terminator is sent back in time, he looks human and he is naked. We can see nearly his entire naked body. All except one thing. And not seeing that one thing really made me wonder. . .does he even have that thing? You know what I'm talking about. And the answer is yes. Yes he does. I know this for an absolute fact and I'm going to explain how I know but the more important questions for me are why does he have one? and to what extent is it functional?

Yes, I'm talking about the terminator's penis (and by extension his testicles, I suppose). Which he has.

There are several reasons I know this. First, when the terminator arrives naked, we see most of his body except that one area, which is intentionally obscured from the camera. So we know it is there because we are prevented from seeing it. In my opinion, this is enough to make an open-and-shut case alone. But there's more.

The terminator encounters several people before he acquires clothing. Those people express the usual surprise and confusion you'd expect them to when encountering a muscular, naked man in public. And in fact, this lady from Terminator 2 seems rather pleased with what she is seeing:

Nothing in these peoples' reactions screams "Oh my god, that guy doesn't have a dick!"

Editor's note: After putting the film on to get a screenshot for the featured image of this post, I have confirmed that the terminator's penis is in fact visible when he is walking up to the drunken punks at the beginning of the film. I never noticed this before even after having seen it five-hundred times! Maybe watching it in HD makes it more visible, I don't know. It kind of renders this whole argument pointless, but. . .Look, I spent far too much time thinking about this for me not to hit 'publish' now so we're going to pretend we never saw that.

And so we've established that the terminator has genitalia, the more important question is why. If the reason the murderous machines of the future made these human-like terminators to begin with is simply to get in to kill as many humans as possible, they shouldn't need them. When they arrive in human encampments they're already fully-clothed. And they don't spend any time integrating with human culture, their purpose is just to get in and then they immediately start killing.

So there's no chance of them having any sort of sexual intimacy with anyone. And no simulated urination in order to appear more human after they've gotten in. And if there were, it just raises further questions around how functional it is. Does it have all of the, uh, inner workings of a real human penis? Like erectile tissue? Is it connected to the terminator's neural net CPU in some way that it can send blood to that tissue to simulate an erection should it encounter a situation where sexual intercourse is likely? And how likely would that even be? They don't have much in the way of personality, do they.

These questions are harder to answer. It seems like reproductive organs would be deemed unnecessary to clone given their complexity and obscurity from view. So, why? Why, James Cameron? Why would the terminators have genitals? I have to know.

Actually, I really don't. But for a longer time than I am willing to admit, I did. That's because it's something that broke the immersion for me. When you read a book, or watch a film, or play a game, you want to get lost in it. You want believe it's real for a short time. You want to live in the world they're in. You want to empathize with the characters and the situations they're in. Not that I'm expecting every bit of minutae to be considered to make the world completely believable. That would be too much for any filmmaker and it would be absurd to expect that of them. There's always going to be something that breaks immersion. But when it happens it can be disconcerting.

Or it can make you laugh out loud and shake your head, which is what happened to me when I started thinking about the terminator's penis. After all, it probably wasn't that important to James Cameron and he likely didn't think that much about it and so I shouldn't question it. Or he did and thought it would be fun to just let people wonder about it. Either case wouldn't surprise me.

I've gotten pretty good at suspending my disbelief when it comes to fiction, but I couldn't let this one go. And one could make the argument that this detail is not quite as minute as other, less important ones.

Also, I'm sorry for this!