Unlike Daniel, I did not bother watching what was left of the Golden Globes award-announcing telecast thingy. I was instead on good ol’ Fox, watching the premiere of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” Gotta admit, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t exactly excellent television, but it had impressive effects, fairly lean (if lazily motivated) plot lines, and managed to be somewhat surprising.

It can be an annoyance to watch a new show establish itself: it’s sort of like watching someone fill a bookshelf or assemble a model railway. Protagonist goes here, primary and secondary motivations go here, antagonist goes here, mysterious strangers go over there: Okay, plug ‘er in!

This show absolutely depends on a working knowledge of all three Terminator movies to fully make sense. The events depicted take place between the second and third installments. And of course the most notable twist in the canon: the Terminator sent to protect John Connor from the bad SkyNet-dispatched robots is a sporty, teenage-looking girl version, rather than the Hummer-sized Schwarzenegger model.

I’m already feeling sort of sorry for John Connor: He’s got a mother that is a caricature of the overprotective parent– even worse, one familiar with guns and such. And instead of the surrogate father-figure from the movies, he’s got a robot looking out for him who looks hot enough to make out with. Hopefully, when he’s not on the run from Terminators and preparing to deliver mankind from Armageddon he’s getting as much therapy as he can.

Okay, why not a father-figure? Times have changed, and the subtle societal expectations that made the older configuration inevitable been displaced with newer, different ones. We’re now living in the era of the Strong Girl. Notice I didn’t say “Strong Woman.” I’ll actually go one step further and call this the “Heroic Cheerleader” era.

Why cheerleaders? I can’t call it a coincidence: it’s a solid trend. I can track it right back to it’s originator: Joss Whedon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer carries considerable cultural resonance now, but back in 1992 the very name on the script was a bit of a giggle. “Imagine, a ditzy cheerleader staking the undead!” Mr. Whedon, a third-generation television writer with a college background in feminist studies, caught a trend everyone else was ignoring—except in the world of comics, where teen heroes of either gender have been staples since the sixties.

And yeah, this trend could be tracked all the way back to the 1979 film Alien and subsequent installments which featured a tough, no-nonsense Ellen Ripley who took on beasties in four movies. The fact Joss Whedon wrote the fourth film Alien Resurrection is no coincidence. But strong women in films is not really new: it’s the fixation on the teen variety that strikes me as odd.

A strong, agile teenage girl who could kill monsters single-handed was such an intriguing idea it surpassed the rather flawed film version and made it to a TV series, where the rest is television history. But still, it should be noted the movie Buffy Summers was a cheerleader, and the television version played by Sarah Michelle Gellar was a Sunnydale High rah-rah for one episode (and her sister Dawn was too). True, the series got away from the original ironic joke built into the name and explored areas of dark humor and Gothic horror, but the mold was cast. And it should be noted that Cameron, the girl Terminator from the new series, is played by Summer Glau. She played River Tam in Joss Whedon’s “Firefly”– another fairly unsocialized killing machine, pretty much the same character in most respects.

The trend moved down the age bracket when “Buffy” was ending it’s run. “Kim Possible” is another series about an auburn-haired high-school cheerleader who saves the world on a regular basis. It is very similar to “Buffy” in rough details: in many ways hyper-capable Kim is just a Disneyfied take on Whedon’s superhuman Slayer. And, if conspiracy theories are to be believed, not without a dark streak of it’s own.

Among the flock of ABC’s “Heroes” is Claire Bennett, a cheerleader who discovers she in completely invulnerable to injury and cannot die. She uses this new-found ability to appropriately heroic effect. The parameters of Claire’s character are mostly indistinguishable from Buffy Summers or Kim Possible, if more self-reflexive in tone and much darker. Claire was the series’s first “breakout” character: “Save the Cheerleader. Save the World.” was an early tag line.

Again: why cheerleaders? Why that particular high school clique? Why not heroic color guards or drama geeks or 4H members? As Daniel once noted, we never really leave High School: the cliques and social structures of our formative years still permeate us, and our lives are largely patterned by the social values picked up there.

If Cheerleaders represented the elite of high school society, why do we feel a need to impose additional moral superiority upon their fictional representations? I have several theories:

1. The elevation of the Cheerleader is simply a modern embodiment of the Victorian elevation of young womanhood, the externalization of virtue a mirror of the internalized virtues of chaste femininity.
2. It’s an inevitable pendulum-swing from the male-heavy Die Hard-era of action-flicks and buddy pictures.
3. A reflection of a larger societal correction addressing the empowerment of young girls, much like the academic-athletic initiatives under Title IX.
4. It may be a prurient excuse: Making Cheerleaders heroic allows the general public to simultaneously admire and ogle them.

Whatever the reason, the trend is apparently now firmly in place. The very fact the new Terminator is in girl form is now practically to be expected. Her intro was eased in a bit by Kristanna Loken’s turn as the advanced-model cyborg from Terminator 3. But, at least to me, that particular nemesis, with her expensive-looking suit, severe bun and silver Lexus, reminded me of a homicidal Realtor. And homicidal Realtors are a genre for another day.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Acting, Ancilliaries, General, Long Tail, Motion Pictures, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.