Hollywood terminates Edward Furlong (John Connor)

…by Jonas E. Alexis

The T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) was able to protect John Connor (Edward Furlong) from being exterminated by the T-100 (Robert Patrick) in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but it seems he was not able to protect Edward Furlong himself from Hollywood moguls.

Terminator 2 was a breakthrough for Furlong. He got the MTV Movie Award for playing John Connor. He was getting great accolades, and it certainly was an exciting time for him. One can say that Furlong was destined to be an A-list actor.

Furlong plays a rebellious child by the name of John Connor who has a habit of hacking credit cards and breaking the law. According to the police record, the 10-year-old Connor is a shoplifter, a trespasser and vandalist. He also has no sympathy for his foster parents who nurture him while his mom is in prison.

When he is asked to clean his room, he shrugs off with a rebellious look on his face and takes off with his friend on a motorcycle. “Your foster parents are kind of dicks, huh,” says his friend right before he left. When asked about his real mom, Connor responds, “She is a complete psycho. A total loser.”

It seems that life imitates art. Linda Hamilton, who plays Sarah Connor in the movie, admitted that she has “bipolar disorder” or “mood swing” or “depression.” He also was a drug addict, which got morphed into alcohol addiction and which destroyed her first marriage. “’I had years of suffering and I made everyone around me suffer, too,” Hamilton said, right after Terminator Salvation was released.

“When I was up, I could stay up all night, but when I was down, it was like falling into a manhole and being unable to climb out.”[1] Hamilton also admitted that she “medicated with lots of cocaine in my early life. Anything that I could do to get my confidence up.”

Edward Furlong also has a history of taking cocaine, which dragged him to rehab in 2000. By 2001, he was already hospitalized for an overdose after partying with people like Paris Hilton and Natasha Lyonne. Furlong admitted in 2006: “I was a heroin and cocaine addict. It was really scary.”[2] Furlong has also been arrested numerous times, and his life has been one sad story. In fact, Furlong’s portrayal in Terminator 2 resembles his own life:

“Furlong’s home life wasn’t exactly the most conducive to a normal life. He didn’t know his father. His mother eventually lost control of him, resulting in an aunt and uncle suing for custody and raising him until his early teens…

“Furlong was in a relationship with a 29-year old woman who was his on-set tutor during filming of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. He was 15. Furlong would eventually get engaged to – and split from – his manager, both personally and professionally.

“In 1999, she sued him for money owed to her for acting as his manager. She also claimed he was physically abusive. Throughout this time, Furlong is said to have taken hard drugs – heroin, cocaine – and was in the depths of serious alcoholism.”

Did Hollywood look after their bright star? Of course not. Furlong could no longer generate money, so he was basically terminated. He’s got problems, and Hollywood producers only care about making money.

“Throughout the 2000s, he was arrested several times for domestic abuse, drug addiction and various driving offences. He’s admitted publicly in court that he’s completely broke. According to iMDB, Furlong’s only starred in one film in 2015 and hasn’t had a theatrically-released film in ten years.”

Perhaps it is time for people like Furlong to wake up and cling to the moral order. He has indirectly made reference to some kind of morality, otherwise he wouldn’t have said things like taking cocaine and heroin “was really scary.” He wouldn’t also say things like “running and clubbing and doing coke” are quite “lonely.”

These activities are indeed lonely and scary precisely because Furlong, like other human beings, is a moral creature. He was destined to follow the moral order, and whenever he doesn’t, he suffers tremendously. He was hired by Hollywood producers to break taboos and to go against the moral order, but they never told him that there is a huge price to pay. Some actors have committed suicide precisely because they could no longer endure breaking the moral order.[3]

Others took drugs to alleviate their moral pain, but the same drugs sometimes drive those people mad, which more often leads to suicide. This was almost certainly what happened to people like Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robin Williams. They seemed to have realized that, in the end, you don’t break the moral law; the moral law breaks you.

The lives of those actors and actresses seem to vindicate what Christ told some of his listeners: “Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.”

Art, by its very nature, must not only portrays that which is noble, loving and true, but it also must reflect the moral order, which is the fountainhead of social harmony and docility. When Hollywood releases films that flatters the moral order—as in the case of The Lord of the Rings—the culture and much of the world is blessed.

But when they produce subversive movies like Hostel or Cosmopolis, cultural dysfunction looms. In fact, people like Eli Roth hasten to see this type of chaos. Keep in mind that it was Roth who said that his movies intend to “fu$k an entire generation.” Rabbi Dresner would have said quite rightly that Roth praises “rebellion, self-fulfillment, and promiscuity’ and a ‘debased view of the human body and spirit.”[4]

Roth wouldn’t be able to say things like that if the police force which used to hold people like Roth in check in Hollywood was still functioning in the social and cultural landscape. As E. Michael Jones pointed out way back in 2003:

“Beginning in the ‘20s, the outcry against Hollywood’s subversion of morals was so great that various forms of legislation – federal, state and local – were proposed as an antidote. As a way of heading off this legislation, Hollywood’s Jews in 1934 entered into a voluntary agreement with the Legion of Decency, a Catholic operation. That agreement was known as the Production Code. The Catholics forced the issue by organizing boycotts at a time when the film industry was reeling from the effects of the stock market crash and their heavy indebtedness to the nation’s banks.

“The most memorable and most effective boycott was organized by Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia, who forbade that city’s Catholics from watching movies in the city’s movie houses, which at the time were largely owned by Warner Brothers. His efforts created a situation in which Warner Brothers was losing $175,000 a week at the height of the depression.

“At a meeting of Hollywood moguls called to discuss it, the Philadelphia boycott had reduced the normally pugnacious Harry Warner, to ‘standing up at the top of the table, shedding tears the size of horse turds, and pleading for someone to get him off the hook. And well he should, for you could fire a cannon down the center aisle of any theater in Philadelphia, without danger of hitting anyone! And there was Barney Balaban (of Paramount Theaters), watching him in terror wondering if he was going to be next in Chicago.’

“The man who described Harry Warner’s plight at that meeting and the man who ran the Production Code office for the next 20 years was a Catholic by the name of Joseph I. Breen, a man who had no illusions about the attitudes of the Hollywood elite during the early ‘30s:

“‘They are simply a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money. . . . Here [in Hollywood] we have Paganism rampant and in its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant ,. . . any number of our directors and stars are perverts. . . .

“‘These Jews seem to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. They and they alone make the decision. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth (Black, Hollywood Censored, p. 70).”[5]

That police power needs to be reinstalled. This would be good for the entire world.

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[1] Quoted in Lina Das, “Terminators? Well, I’ve seen off drugs, booze – and two husbands, says Linda Hamilton,” Daily Mail, June 19, 2009.

[2] Quoted in Michelle Tauber, “Clean Start,” People, December 11, 2006.

[3] See for example James Parish, The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002).

[4] See E. Michael Jones, “Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos,” Culture Wars, May 2003.

[5] Ibid.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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