General Golgol

James Bond 007 | EVERY GENERAL GOGOL SCENE

It's better.

INT. SPIKE'S BASEMENT APARTMENT - DAY 

Wesley is grinding something into a paste in a mortar and pestle, mumbling to himself while doing so. Illyria is sitting behind him on the edge of the bed. 

ILLYRIA 

I don't understand. 

WESLEY 

It'll help you heal faster. 

(shakes the paste off the pestle, sets it aside) 

If you really plan to join us in this fight— 

(grabs a strip of muslin and dredges it in the paste) 

ILLYRIA 

I will fight. I've been broken and humiliated. I will return in kind every blow, every sting. I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. 

WESLEY 

(pulls the strip out of the paste and walks with it toward Illyria) 

You're a very inspirational person. Have I mentioned that? 

(brushes her hair away from her neck) 

ILLYRIA 

You are what I don't understand. 

WESLEY 

And that would be different because? 

(presses the strip to Illyria's skin) 

ILLYRIA 

Angel told you to do whatever you wanted. Today... tonight, you may all be dead. 

WESLEY 

Yes. Good point. 

ILLYIRA 

I am not what you want. 

WESLEY 

(stands back, turns away, walks to his preparation area) 

(his voice nearly cracking) 

No. 

ILLYIRA 

(touches her bandage) 

Then why— 

WESLEY 

(prepares another bandage) 

Don't I go off and have one last perfect day? Smell the flowers, or sky-dive, or have a go with Mistress Spanks-A-Lot... or whatever the hell one is supposed to do in this situation. 

(places another bandage on Illyria's neck) 

ILLYRIA 

Mistress who? 

WESLEY 

There is no perfect day for me, Illyria. There is no sunset or painting or finely-aged scotch that's going to sum up my life and make tonight any... There is nothing that I want. 

ILLYRIA 

You want to be with Fred. 

WESLEY 

(finishes bandaging Illyria, wipes his hands on a hand towel) 

Yes. Yes, that's where I'd be if I could. 

ILLYRIA 

I could assume her shape, make her come alive again this once for you. 

(looks down) 

But you would never ask me to. 

WESLEY 

The first lesson a watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion. Because in the world of magics, it's the hardest thing to do. The truth is that Fred is gone. To pretend anything else would be a lie. And since I don't actually intend to die tonight, I won't accept a lie. Is it better? 

ILLYRIA 

(touches her neck) 

It's better.

That’s Sick

I don’t agree with that interpretation of The Facts.

Q. : We were talking about Work Ethic —

Because Everyone in comparison 

to YOUR output, Joss, and your Work Ethic, 

would appear to be slack and lazy —

Because, y’know, people work very hard, 

in Life, and they get their pay —

But YOU seem to be working, like, 

a hundred times harder than •anybody• else —

J.W. : Well, part of that is Smoke and Mirrors, 

I think, but part of it is that I DO Love The Work,

and also, I DO Have A Problem,

A Serious •Mental• Problem :

It’s Workaholism, and it’s •not• fun, 

I Don’t DO Anything Else —

Other People Have Lives,

and, They’re Nice to Their Friends,

and They do all sorts of things that 

I •forget• to do in The Morning

(and that also includes Basic Hygiene, 

but let’s not talk about that....) “

I mean, none of my schoolteachers could’ve told you, that this was going to happen 

(except perhaps my Film Professor) —

It wasn’t until I began studying 

and making Film, and Television, 

that I discovered that 

That was Why I am Here,

and that was really 

The ONLY Reason —

Zoë: 

We got time for gravediggin’?

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: 

Zoë, get something to rope them together, 

five or six of them. I want them laid out 

on the nose of Our Ship.

Dr. Simon Tam: 

Are you INSANE?

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: 

Put Book front and center - 

He was Our Friend, 

We should honour him. 

Kaylee! 

Find that kid who’s takin’ 

a dirt nap with baby Jesus — 

We need a hood ornament.

[yelling] 

Jayne! 

Try not to steal 

too much of their shit!

I Am Job

Vietnamese 

Mrs. Doubtfire : 

(over The Phone)

I-am-Job!

The Karen :

......do YOU Speak English..?

Vietnamese 

Mrs. Doubtfire : 

(over The Phone)

I - am - JOB!

The Karen : (runs off screaming into The Night)

(Lying through her Teeth) 

-- I'm sorry, The Position has been Filled  (hangs up)

RUDE!!

Mrs. Doubtfire I Am Job

Chinese Democracy

[Scene now shows the interior of Astrotrain as the Decepticons aboard escape inside him, adding heavy loads that prevent him — he says — from making it back to Cybertron.  Now it is Decepticons versus Decepticons...The Strong wish to stay onboard whilst The Weak get thrown off to die in outer space]

137 ASTROTRAIN: "Jettison some *weight* or I'll never make it to Cybertron!"

�138 STARSCREAM: (stepping forward, gleeful) Fellow Decepticons, Astrotrain has requested that we *lighten* our *burden!*

�139 BONECRUCHER: "In that case I say it is survival of the fittest."�140 STARSCREAM: "Do I hear a *second* on that?"�141 SOUNDWAVE, DIRGE, RAMJET, THRUST, BLITZWING, : "ayes."

�142 STARSCREAM: "And against?"

�143 THUNDERCRACKER, SKYWARP, INSECTICONS: "Nay."

�144 STARSCREAM: "The ‘Ayes!’ *have* it.�145 SOUNDWAVE, DIRGE, RAMJET, THRUST, BLITZWING: 

Get! Make room for others,

146 THUNDERCRACKER, SKYWARP, INSECTICONS: Brothers don't —

[Thundercracker, Skywarp, and Insections all were forced to be thrown off board by the healthy Decepticons.]

STARSCREAM: [Doing it personally] Oh, how it •pains• me to DO this —

�148 MEGATRON: (weakly) Wait, I •still• function.�149 STARSCREAM: Wanna BET…?

[Starscream throws Megatron out into Space]

�150 MEGATRON: STAAAAAAAARRSCREAAAAAM!!!!!"

�151 STARSCREAM: (one hand wiping clean the other)Well — as Megatron has — how shall we say..? — •departed•, I nominate MYSELF as the NEW leader.

[ You DO surprise us….]

"Wait, the Constructicons form Devastator, 

the most powerful robot, WE should rule."

SOUNDWAVE: 

Soundwave superior, 

Constructicons inferior.

BONECRUSHER: "Who are you calling ‘inferior’.

155 HOOK: "Nobody would follow an un-charismatic bore like you."

156 RUMBLE [BLUE]: "No one calls Soundwave  un-charismatic."

157 FRENZY [RED]: "Yeah, let's Kick tailgate."

158 SCRAPPER: "Constructicons unite! [ The Unions come out on Strike ]�159 RUMBLE & FRENZY: "No way!

The Lamp

Supreme Dalek Reveals its Plan

Resurrection of the Daleks

Doctor Who

Hmm. Oh, Agent Starling....

You think you can dissect me

with this blunt little tool?

You're so ambitious, aren't you?

You know what you look like 

to me with your good bag 

and those cheap shoes?

You look like a rube —

a well-scrubbed, hustling rube

with a little taste.

Good nutrition's given you

some length of bone,

but you're not more 

than one generation

from poor white trash,

are you, Agent Starling?

And that accent you've 

tried so desperately

to shed ? Pure West Virginia.

What does your father do?

Is he a coal miner?

Does he stink of The Lamp?

And, oh, how quickly 

The Boys found you ?

All those tedious, sticky 

fumblings in the back seats 

of cars while you could only 

dream of getting out, 

getting anywhere,

getting all the way 

to The efF-Bee-Eye.....

You see a lot, Doctor --

But are you strong enough to point

that high-powered perception at yourself?

What about it? Huh? Why don't you ?

Why don't you look at yourself

and write down what you see?

Or maybe you're afraid to.

(The sliding Food-

tray slams closed)

A census-taker once tried to Test me --

I ate his liver with some fava beans,

and a nice Chianti; uhf-uhf-uhf-uhf-fff --

You fly back to school now, little Starling.

Fly, fly, fly --

Fly, fly, fly --

Fly, fly, fly --

The Leather Bootlace

The Railway Series - James and the Bootlace

Scary Trousers

Neil Gaiman on being dubbed 

"Scary Trousers" by Alan Moore

“A descendant of Polish Jewish immigrants, Gaiman had gotten his start in the ’80s as a journalist for hire in London covering Duran Duran, Lou Reed, and other brooding lords of rock, and in the world of comic conventions, he was the closest thing there was to that archetype. 

Women would turn up to his signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth 

attire of his characters and beg him 

to sign their breasts or slip him key 

cards to their hotel rooms. 

One writer recounts running into Gaiman at a World Fantasy Convention in 2011. 

His assistant wasn’t around, and 

he was late to a reading. “I can’t get to it 

if I walk by myself,” he told her. 

As they made their way through the convention side by side, “the whole floor 

full of people tilted and slid toward 

him,” she says. “They wanted to be entwined with him in ways 

I was not prepared to 

defend him against.” 

A woman fell to her 

knees and wept.

People who flock to fantasy conventions 

and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” 

one of Gaiman’s former friends, 

a fantasy writer, tells me. 

They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share 

their souls with The Creators 

of these works. 

“And if you have morality 

around it, you say ‘no.’” 

It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. 

But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual. As one prominent editor in the field puts it, 

“The one thing I hear again and 

again, largely from women, 

is ‘He was always nice to me. 

He was always a gentleman.’” 

The writer Kelly Link, who met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. “He was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,” she says, “but also made him seem very harmless.” Someone who had a sexual relationship with Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”: “He read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He’d be very demure.”

But there were some who saw another side of the author. One woman, Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The Sandman where she was working. On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for connecting with each individual. 

He would ask questions, laugh, and assure them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman sat next to Brenda. “Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser focused on me,” she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist. 

The night after the awards ceremony, she 

and Gaiman ended up in bed together. 

As soon as they began to hook up, 

the feeling that had drawn her to him — 

the magical spell of his interest 

in her individuality — vanished. 

“He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. 

“He wanted me to call him 

‘Master’ immediately.” 

He demanded that she promise him her soul. 

“It was like he’d gone into this ritual 

that had nothing to do with me.”

The 20th Century

20th Century Fox (Alien 3)

Alan Moore talks to John Higgs about the 20th Century

John Higgs - author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century - talks to Alan Moore about how The 20th Century has been portrayed in his work - in particular From Hell, Providence and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century.

Alan Moore has described 

Stranger Than We Can Imagine as, 

"An illuminating work of massive insight... 

I cannot recommend this 

magnificent work too highly."

Huge thanks to Chris Atkins and all 

at the Lodge Studios, Northampton

www.facebook.com/OfficialAlanMoore/

www.facebook.com/JohnHiggsAuthor

www.twitter.com/johnhiggs

Higgs : .....There's a lot of your work, uh that says quite a lot of interesting things about The 20th Century.

I've certainly 

Higgs : The first thing that sprung to mind was was From Hell, was an idea in From Hell, which was a big inspiration of my KLF book; but the idea was, that The Act of Jack The Rippe was what gave birth to The 20th Century -- I was just curious where that idea came from?

Well that was my conceit um that resolved a lot of the material that had uh emerged during my research into prell okay um when I was just looking into the 1880s I noticed all of these things that had happened that I think in 1882 uh mitchelson and moley actually performed the experiments which were meant to iron a couple of last wrinkles in the theory of The Ether but ended up completely disproving that ether existed um which was a kind of result but not the one that they were looking for you'd got France going into Indochina um you had got uh the beginnings of the um the modern art movement uh with Walter siket You' got uh some of the first kind of modern realist writings with people like Emil Zola uh you'd got um a surprising amount of focusing upon prostitutes in literature in the Arts um and all of these things which had gone on to really color and shape the 20th century and then in 1888 these senseless violent murders um it just seemed to me that symbolically uh I could kind of um position the Jack the Ripper murders as the birth throws uh of the 20th century with Jack the Ripper as a kind of really ghastly Midwife yeah yeah and there's the the Reading Providence whole tabloid sort of thing growing up around it in that sort of violent sort of Stew so it sort of yeah does what what struck me about reading Providence even though it's it's not so overtly about the 20th century is the the lovecraftian worldview probably sums up uh that time better even than you know my book or anything deliberately about the about the the 20th century is it do you do you see it as a well yeah I mean I see uh researching Providence um was quite an eye opener uh and it changed my opinion of Lovecraft not of his stature as a writer in fact I think that only continues to increase the more I think about him um but more of an understanding of him in relation to his times um the thing is Lovecraft is generally positioned as an outsider probably because that was the name of one of his most famous stories so it's it's not much of a reach but you have look at Lovecraft he was um he was homophobic uh this at a time when um gay men principally gay men some gay women as well but that was different uh were starting to emerge um quite vocally and very visibly onto the streets of New York um there was a huge guy subculture um in the early 20th century New York it wasn't just something that started after the second world war um and these were becoming more visible you'd got women I mean Lovecraft was certainly not a misogynist but uh he was perhaps somewhat awkward or conflicted in his relationships with women this was at a time when women were just about to get the vote um there had been 20 years of the biggest influx of immigrants that America had ever seen up until 1910 1920 um and that had led to conservative fears that uh American identity was going to be lost beneath the tital wave of misation in breeding sort of uh that um all of these fears were exactly those of the war middle class Common Man I mean the Russian Revolution had just happened in 1917 um and in America there were all of these strikes which at the time looked like oh it's going to happen over here uh in fact most people when you talk about the Red Scare they think oh that's the 1950s that's McCarthyism the Red Scare was 1919 and in some ways Lovecraft became a perfect barometer because he was so sensitive so unbearably sensitive then all of the fears of the early 20th century including the fears [Music] of man's relegation in importance given what we were starting to understand about the cosmos Lovecraft was unlike other people of his day he actually understood that stuff he was very quick he didn't like Einstein but he was very quick to assimilate Einstein's ideas he didn't like quantum theory but he almost understood it um yeah this was it he in some ways his stories represented the kind of landscape of fear the the territory of fear um for the 20th century as a whole m he he didn't like the modernists at all in terms of writing and things like that but he was conflicted he was a closet modernist himself I mean yeah he he hated Gertrude St TS Elliott James Joyce um he wrote a brilliantly funny and actually very well written parody of the Weiss land called Weiss paper uh but you actually look at lovecraft's writing and much as he's decro all of the modernists and much as he's bigging up his favorite 18th century authors people like Pope um actually Lovecraft is a modernist he's using stream of Consciousness techniques he is using um glossolalia more impenetrable than anything INF finigan white um he is using techniques of deliberately alienating the reader or confusing the reader um his descriptions tend to be along the lines of here three things that cthul who doesn't look like uh or he'll describe the color out of space as only a color by analogy so what is it a sound is it a rough texture or a smell what um these are deliberate kind of techniques they're not flaws they are techniques that alien it the reader of putting the reader into an uncanny space where language is no longer capable of describing the experience yeah and it Lovecraft that sort of for horror it was it was all the the gothic horror had sort of gone it was just a sort of modern horror that's yeah well that that's important because all horror or most horror up to Lovecraft uh at all been predicated upon uh the gothic tradition which is a tradition where you have an enormous vertical white in time that is bearing down upon a fragile present uh a history of dark things in the past that are leading up to some terrifying Den Numa in the present day um with Lovecraft yes there is uh an awful lot of talking about remote Antiquity and the past but with Lovecraft I think that it's a much more more present horror of the future uh he's talking about that time when man will be able to organize all of his knowledge and um when that time comes the only question is whether we will Embrace this new Illuminating Light or whether we will flee from it into the reassuring Shadows of a new Dark Age yeah which is very preent um given say current to fundamentalism um which is a direct a response to um too much knowledge too much information let's take it all back to something that we're sure of that God created the world in six dies um yeah in that way Lovecraft was sort of uh yeah he was really exploring all of the he was a very is still a very contemporary writer I think that if you wanted to do as Mel morco did in the 60s Mel morco was mainly interested in modernism uh in he noticed that the science fiction genre was laying around with its wheels off and that nobody was doing much with it apart from kind of cowboys in space so he thought why don't we hijack this and make science fiction a vehicle for modernism M um and then yeah JG balard all the rest uh I think you could do the same thing with Lovecraft alone amongst horror riters yeah I think that lovecraft's preoccupations were so forward-looking that uh and his writing techniques were so unusual that yet you could use Lovecraft as the starting point for a new kind of modern horror if you will Century cuz that sense of linking the 20th century to this sort of impending horror um reminds me a bit of of uh Century your League of Extraordinary Gentlemen uh volume three the century one that which for my mind is is probably the bleakest uh of all the league sort of thing if you think that's fair it's got that sense that the the uh creative imagination Withers away during the 20th century is is is that what you're aiming for yes it was um I got quite a bit of criticism for that I know that people were saying after reading the the third book they said that it was my equivalent of saying it were all fields around here once um which it wasn't that wasn't what I was saying uh but what I was saying was um that I don't think it was unfair to choose the Beggars Opera as represent presenting a um a big important cultural event of 1910 mhm I don't think it was unfair choosing Donald camel's performance as representing a big important cultural event in 1969 and I don't think it was unfair choosing JK rowlings Harry Potter as representing a big cultural event from the early 21st century mhm um I would say that if you were to plot those things upon a graph the line isn't going up yes um I think that it's a fair comment yeah that our approach to culture has um in the mainstream has degenerated the the values that people used to put into a work of art those have been eroded uh and yeah I was trying [Music] to express that in the league of of Extraordinary Gentlemen because the whole of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen it's about this massive planet of fiction MH that has been a kind of a counterpart to our own world for as long as we've had fiction M um that we've made up this world that um it's the world we want the the exciting world where exciting things happen and meaningful things happen yeah um and if you look at those two worlds there's interesting points of comparison that they had similar events that shaped them but uh slightly different and they worked out slightly differently and so yeah in Century it was using the league to look at the 20th century from the point of view of 20th century culture and to draw what conclusions seemed uh accurate --

Um,  I wasn't saying that all Culture in the late 20th century was rubbish; I wasn't saying that Culture was doomed; 

I was saying that mainstream culture um was becoming repetitive um was not having original ideas would no longer be capable of coming up with a performance let alone a Thro the Opera yeah it's I mean what struck me Science Fiction when I was I was doing my 20th century book was uh especially all the guys who took us into space took us into the moon so guy cor of w v braa uh the importance of um Jules Vern to them to of you know and in that culture of book Rogers and and and Flash Gordon and things like that and I was thinking about that when I was watching do you know have you seen um Prometheus the it's really it's really Grim it's uh basically they realize Humanity's being um built by aliens so they go off to find these aliens and they finally find an alienist to say oh oh Godlike thing why did you create us and the alien um goes oh what are these things do being still around it just starts like punching them in the face to sort of kill them and it's about as o Bleak an idea as you can imagine and I just kind of wonder if W Von Brawn and and those guys were growing up with that level of Science Fiction whether they've been quite so Keen to sort of go to the moon and sort of push us forward well I mean I think that uh I mean Science Fiction it's interesting what the way that science fiction was handled in the 20th century um I mean science fiction all right there's a lot of precursors for it but um a a non-controversial starting point would probably be Mary shell Frankenstein yeah um and then you'd move on to people like Wells and ver um about a century later uh now all of those are um actually kind of grim warning visions of the potential future they are potentially alarmist about the nature of technology and what it will mean um with Mary shell she was reacting to the Industrial Revolution which was actually starting up around her while she was writing Frankenstein in 1814 or whatever it was um Wells he is um all of his science f books are for the most part dystopias um the time machine with its view of the class system of wells's day even more stratified literally so that you've got workingclass cannibals living underground and feeding upon these Dopey drippy middle class sort of um food animals basically it's the austerity Jules Verne story sort of exactly it's so and jores Vern now obviously jores Vern is getting much more of a kick out of his big machines but he always says and imagine if these machines were to fall into the hands of a mad man like Captain Nemo who I secretly admire but at least it is a warning uh 1910 1915 America discovers science fiction in the form of Tom Swift um and it is a different thing alog together it is not about giving doal warnings for the future it is about saying look how great America's going to be in the future it's almost I suspect like um the tendency in older Nations when we want to Big ourselves up is to reach back to the past to something imaginary in the past like King Arthur or something like that America hasn't got that amount of History to deal with so in some ways what America needs is science fiction when we're trying to say look at what we were then America more or less has to say look at what we will be um and so their science fiction from the 1920s with the boom of the pul magazines it was all of this bright optimistic New Frontier stuff where it was going to be cowboy and Indians all over again only it was going to be earthmen and neptunians but you could just go through the whole of the the the tropes of the western genre and Pioneer fiction but in space and it became this uh in my opinion that was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to science fiction it took until the late 1940s after Hiroshima for these new voices that had got a radical sense of Doubt uh to start to creep back into science fiction and that gave a brilliant era probably the best ERA of Science Fiction um from say like 40s to the mid '70s when George Lucas brought out Star Wars a piece of fundamentalist science fiction if ever there was one and turned the clocks back mhm to to the science fiction ideas of 50 years before cuz now Black Mirror with the Pig we're in in the position that whole idea between science fiction and the real world interacting with each other now we get things like black mirror with the pig and then on Monday that's no longer science fiction that's the uh whether this whether this is the sort of level of uh of of of uh leeway between fiction and non-fiction that we wanted at the end of this period Well I mean like I have said in the past that I believe that the membrane between fiction and fact is porous and semi-permeable and I have become used to my most ridiculous ideas um whether that be coming up with v Vendetta and then suddenly seeing a load of go Forks M anarchists invading the world stage um which is a good thing uh or the having come up with the idea related to my film Project Jimmy's end of having a Sinister clown manifesting in various locations around Northampton and returning from holiday and finding that a Sinister clown had manifested in Northampton at the end of my street about 100 yards from my front door you start to get the impression that um yes sometimes things can kind of percolate through from the realm of ideas into the realm of actuality I would say to Charlie Brooker um that it's his own fault that sort of he shouldn't have written about British prime ministers in an Unholy relationship with a pig if he didn't want this to happen you know so happy now this is assuming of course uh Conclusion that it's not true which I just I like to think it probably isn't true and that Lord Ashcroft is enough of a [ __ ] to have done that but part part of me it just sort of it fits a bit too well it just feels a bit too much like a real occult initiation sort of ceremony I I remember somebody saying this might have been someone like Mark mothers B from dvo saying about the the idea of Donnie and Marie Osmond um being married and he was saying yeah I know that that's not really true but in my heart it's true and I think that that is the way that I feel about the revelations about David Cameron that sort of uh we all know that in his secret Soul David Cameron is exactly the man who would do something like that if he has not done it literally he has certainly done it metaphorically uh so uh yeah I say that sort of without a shred of evidence that I am going to believe that for the rest of my life lovely thanks very much Alan we will go forward to the 21st century with that as the start of our Dr of imagination thank you

At Your Convenience

MEANWHILE, up in 

The World of Ideas --

Archangel MIKE :

Chrome reflects our image.

ELECTRICIAN :

Elec-tricity.

Archangel MIKE :

From PURE air... 

We have descended... 

from pure air — 

[quote from Josephus]

Going up and down;

Intercourse between... 

The Two Worlds.

BOB

Light of new discoveries. 

MRS. TREMOND

Why not be composed of materials 

and combinations of atoms? 

MRS. TREMOND'S GRANDSON

This is no accident. 

ELECTRICIAN

Ani-Mal Life. 

Archangel MIKE :

Garmonbozia!

THIS is The formica table; 

GREEN is its color —

FIRST WOODSMAN

Our world. 

Archangel MIKE :

With chrome. And everything 

will proceed cyclically. 

SECOND WOODSMAN

Boneless. 

Archangel MIKE :

Yes, find the MIDDLE place 

BOB

I have the FURY 

of my OWN 

MOmenTUM! 

MRS. TREMOND'S GRANDSON

(Pointing) Fell A Victim. 

Archangel MIKE :

With THIS ring, 

I THEE wed! (both laugh)

(Smile disappears) ….Fire, 

Walk With Me —

[Ezekiel 28:14 " You walked in 

the midst of the stones of fire.”]

BOB

FIRE, Walk With Me.

SECOND WOODSMAN

Thus time moves on —

Well, it’s not exactly Crocodile Dundee II, now, IS it?

THE (AS IT WERE) SEMINAL IMPORTANCE OF TERMINATOR 2

By David Foster Wallace

  1990s MOVIEGOERS WHO HAVE sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like Twister and Volcano and The Lost World can thank James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day for inaugurating what’s become this decade’s special new genre of big-budget film : Special Effects Porn. 

“Porn” because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they’re eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren’t really “movies” in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes — scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff — strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.

  T2, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, opened six years ago. Think of the scenes we all still remember. That incredible chase scene and explosion in the L.A. sluiceway and then the liquid metal¹ T-1000 Terminator walking out of the explosion’s flames and morphing seamlessly into his Martin-Milner-as-Possessed-by-Hannibal-Lecter corporeal form. The T-1000 rising hideously up out of that checkerboard floor, the T-1000 melting headfirst through the windshield of that helicopter, the T-1000 freezing in liquid nitrogen and then collapsing fractally apart. These were truly spectacular images, and they represented exponential advances in digital F/X technology. But there were at most maybe eight of these incredible sequences, and they were the movie’s heart and point; the rest of T2 is empty and derivative, pure mimetic polycelluloid.

  It’s not that T2 is totally plotless or embarrassing—and it does, admittedly, stand head and shoulders above most of the F/X Porn blockbusters that have followed it. It’s rather that T2 as a dramatic narrative is slick and cliché and calculating and in sum an appalling betrayal of 1984’s The Terminator. T1, which was James Cameron’s first feature film and had a modest budget and was one of the two best U.S. action movies of the entire 1980s,² was a dark, breathlessly kinetic, near-brilliant piece of metaphysical Ludditism. Recall that it’s A.D. 2027 and that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in 1997 and that chip-driven machines now rule, and “Skynet,” the archonic diabolus ex machina, develops a limited kind of time-travel technology and dispatches the now classically cyborgian A. Schwarzenegger back to 1984’s Los Angeles to find and Terminate one Sarah Connor, the mother-to-be of the future leader of the human “Resistance,” one John Connor³; and but that apparently The Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet’s time-travel technology and sends back to the same space-time coordinates a Resistance officer, the ever-sweaty but extremely tough and resourceful Kyle Reese, to try desperately to protect Ms. Sarah Connor from the Terminator’s prophylactic advances,⁴ and so on. It is, yes, true that Cameron’s Skynet is basically Kubrick’s HAL, and that most of T1’s time-travel paradoxes are reworkings of some fairly standard Bradbury-era science fiction themes, but The Terminator still has a whole lot to recommend it. There’s the inspired casting of the malevolently cyborgian Schwarzenegger as the malevolently cyborgian Terminator, the role that made Ahnode a superstar and for which he was utterly and totally perfect (e.g., even his goofy 16-r.p.m. Austrian accent added a perfect little robofascist tinge to the Terminator’s dialogue⁵). There’s the first of Cameron’s two great action heroines⁶ in Sarah Connor, as whom the limpid-eyed and lethal-lipped Linda Hamilton also turns in the only great performance of her career. There is the dense, greasy, marvelously machinelike look of The Terminator’s mechanized F/X⁷; there are the noirish lighting and Dexedrine pace that compensate ingeniously for the low budget and manage to establish a mood that is both exhilarating and claustrophobic.⁸ Plus T1’s story had at its center a marvelous “Appointment in Samarra”–like irony of fate: we discover in the course of the film that Kyle Reese is actually John Connor’s father,⁹ and thus that if Skynet hadn’t built its nebulous time machine and sent back the Terminator, Reese wouldn’t have been back here in ’84, either, to impregnate Sarah C. This also entails that meanwhile, up in A.D. 2027, John Connor has had to send the man he knows is his father on a mission that J.C. knows will result in both that man’s death and his (i.e., J.C.’s) own birth. The whole ironic mess is simultaneously Freudian and Testamental and is just extraordinarily cool for a low-budget action movie.

  Its big-budget sequel adds only one ironic paradox to The Terminator’s mix: in T2, we learn that the “radically advanced chip”¹⁰ on which Skynet’s CPU is (will be) based actually came (comes) from the denuded and hydraulically pressed skull of T1’s defunct Terminator… meaning that Skynet’s attempts to alter the flow of history bring about not only John Connor’s birth but Skynet’s own, as well. All T2’s other important ironies and paradoxes, however, are unfortunately unintentional and generic and kind of sad.

  Note, for example, the fact that Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie about the disastrous consequences of humans relying too heavily on computer technology, was itself unprecedentedly computer-dependent. George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, subcontracted by Cameron to do T2’s special effects, had to quadruple the size of its computer graphics department for the T-1000 sequences, sequences that also required digital-imaging specialists from around the world, thirty-six state-of-the-art Silicon Graphics computers, and terabytes of specially invented software programs for seamless morphing, realistic motion, digital “body socks,” background-plate compatibility, congruences of lighting and grain, etc. And there is no question that all the lab work paid off: in 1991, Terminator 2’s special effects were the most spectacular and real-looking anybody had ever seen. They were also the most expensive.

  T2 is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law : it states very simply that the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of T2 shows that much of the ICQL’s force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally—maximally—sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back.¹¹ I.e., a megabudget movie must not fail—and “failure” here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit—and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit. One of the most reliable of these formulae involves casting a superstar who is “bankable” (i.e., whose recent track record of films shows a high ROI). The studio backing for T2’s wildly sophisticated and expensive digital F/X therefore depends on Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreeing to reprise his Terminator role. Now the ironies start to stack, though, because it turns out that Schwarzenegger—or perhaps more accurately “Schwarzenegger, Inc.” or “Ahnodyne”—has decided that playing any more malevolent cyborgs would compromise the Leading Man image his elite and bankable record of ROI entails. He will do the film only if T2’s script is somehow engineered to make the Terminator the Good Guy. Not only is this vain and stupid and shockingly ungrateful¹²; it is also common popular knowledge, duly reported in both the trades and the popular entertainment media before T2 even goes into production. There’s consequently a weird postmodern tension to the way we watch the film : we’re aware of what the bankable star’s demands were, and we’re also aware of how much the movie cost and how important bankable stars are to a big-budget movie; and so one of the few things that keep us on the edge of our seats during the movie is our suspense about whether James Cameron can possibly weave a plausible, non-cheesy narrative that meets Schwarzenegger’s career needs without betraying T1’s precedent.

  Cameron does not succeed, at least not in avoiding heavy cheese. Recall the premise he settles on for T2 : that Skynet once again uses its (apparently not all that limited) time-travel device, this time to send a far more advanced liquid metal T-1000 Terminator back to 1990s L.A., this time to kill the ten-year-old John Connor (played by the extremely annoying Edward Furlong,¹³ whose voice keeps cracking pubescently and who’s just clearly older than ten), and but that the intrepid human Resistance has somehow captured, subdued, and “reprogrammed” an old Schwarzenegger-model Terminator—resetting its CPU’s switch from TERMINATE to PROTECT, apparently¹⁴ — and then has somehow once again gotten one-time access to Skynet’s time-travel technology¹⁵ and sent the Schwarzenegger Terminator back to protect young J.C. from the T-1000’s infanticidal advances.¹⁶

  Cameron’s premise is financially canny and artistically dismal: it permits Terminator 2’s narrative to clank along on the rails of all manner of mass-market formulae. There is, for example, no quicker or easier ingress to the audience’s heart than to present an innocent child in danger, and of course protecting an innocent child from danger is Heroism at its most generic. Cameron’s premise also permits the emotional center of T2 to consist of the child and the Terminator “bonding,” which in turn allows for all manner of familiar and reliable devices. Thus it is that T2 offers us cliché explorations of stuff like the conflicts between Emotion and Logic (territory already mined to exhaustion by Star Trek) and between Human and Machine (turf that’s been worked in everything from Lost in Space to Blade Runner to RoboCop), as well as exploiting the good old Alien-or-Robot-Learns-About-Human-Customs-and-Psychology-from-Sarcastic-and/or-Precocious-but-Basically-Goodhearted-Human-with-Whom-It-Bonds formula (q.q.v. here My Favorite Martian and E.T. and Starman and The Brother from Another Planet and Harry and the Hendersons and ALF and ad almost infinitum). 

Thus it is that the 85 percent of T2 that is not mind-blowing digital F/X sequences subjects us to dialogue like: “Vhy do you cry?” and “Cool! My own Terminator!” and “Can you not be such a dork all the time?” and “This is intense!” and “Haven’t you learned that you can’t just go around killing people?” and “It’s OK, Mom, he’s here to help” and “I know now vhy you cry, but it’s somesing I can never do”; plus to that hideous ending where Schwarzenegger gives John a cyborgian hug and then voluntarily immerses himself in molten steel to protect humanity from his neural net CPU, raising that Fonziesque thumb as he sinks below the surface,¹⁷ and the two Connors hug and grieve, and then poor old Linda Hamilton — whose role in T2 requires her not only to look like she’s been doing nothing but Nautilus for the last several years but also to keep snarling and baring her teeth and saying stuff like “Don’t fuck with me!” and “Men like you know nothing about really creating something!” and acting half-crazed with paramilitary stress, stretching Hamilton way beyond her thespian capacities and resulting in what seems more than anything like a parody of Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest — has to give us that gooey “I face the future with hope, because if a Terminator can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too” voiceover at the very end.

  The point is that head-clutchingly insipid stuff like this puts an even heavier burden of importance on T2’s digital effects, which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story’s center, which in turn means that even more money and directorial attention must be lavished on the film’s F/X. This sort of cycle is symptomatic of the insidious three-part loop that characterises Special Effects Porn —

  (1) Astounding digital dinosaur/tornado/volcano/Terminator effects that consume almost all the director’s creative attention and require massive financial commitment on the part of the studio;

  (2) A consequent need for guaranteed megabuck ROI, which entails the formulaic elements and easy sentiment that will assure mass appeal (plus will translate easily into other languages and cultures, for those important foreign sales…);

  (3) A director—often one who’s shown great talent in earlier, less expensive films—who is now so consumed with realizing his spectacular digital visions, and so dependent on the studio’s money to bring the F/X off, that he has neither the leverage nor the energy to fight for more interesting or original plots/themes/characters.

  —and thus yields the two most important corollary formulations of The Inverse Cost and Quality Law :

  (ICQL(a)) The more lavish and spectacular a movie’s special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-F/X respects. For obvious supporting examples of ICQL(a), see lines 1–2 of this article and/or also Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Forrest Gump, etc.

  (ICQL(b)) There is no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources. 

The number of supporting examples of ICQL(b) is sobering. Have a look, e.g., at the differences between Rodriguez’s El Mariachi and his From Dusk till Dawn, between de Bont’s Speed and Twister, between Gilliam’s Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, between Bigelow’s Near Dark and Strange Days. Or chart Cameron’s industry rise and artistic decline from T1 and Aliens through T2 and The Abyss to—dear Lord—True Lies. Popular entertainment media report that Cameron’s new Titanic, currently in post-production, is (once again) the most expensive and technically ambitious film of all time. A nation is even now pricing trenchcoats and lubricants in anticipation of its release.

  —1998

  1 (actually defined in the film as “mimetic polyalloy,” whatever that’s supposed to mean)

  2 The ’80s’ other B.U.S.A.M. was Cameron’s second feature, the 1986 Aliens, also modestly budgeted, also both hair-raising and deeply intelligent.

  3 (whose initials, for a prophesied saviour of humanity, are not particularly subtle)

  4 The fact that what Skynet is attempting is in effect a retroactive abortion, together with the fact that “terminate a pregnancy” is a pretty well-known euphemism, led the female I first saw the movie with in 1984 to claim, over coffee and pie afterward, that The Terminator was actually one long pro-choice allegory, which I said I thought was not w/o merit but maybe a bit too simplistic to do the movie real justice, which led to kind of an unpleasant row.

  5 Consider, for example, how the now-famous “I’ll be back” line took on a level of ominous historical resonance when uttered by an unstoppable killing machine with a German accent. This was chilling and brilliant, commercial postmodernism at its best; but it is also what made Terminator 2’s “in-joke” of having Ahnode repeat the line in a good-guy context so disappointing.

  6 It is a complete mystery why feminist film scholars haven’t paid more attention to Cameron and his early collaborator Gale Anne Hurd. The Terminator and Aliens were both violent action films with tough, competent female protagonists (incredibly rare) whose toughness and competence in no way diminished their “femininity” (even more rare, unheard of), a femininity that is rooted (along with both films’ thematics) in notions of maternity rather than just sexuality. For example, compare Cameron’s Ellen Ripley with the panty-and-tank-top Ripley of Scott’s Alien. In fact it was flat-out criminal that Sigourney Weaver didn’t win the ’86 Oscar for her lead in Cameron’s Aliens. Marlee Matlin indeed. No male lead in the history of U.S. action film even approaches Weaver’s second Ripley for emotional depth and sheer balls—she makes Stallone, Willis, et al. look muddled and ill.

  7 (This is a ponderous, marvelously built-looking quality [complete with ferrous clanks and/or pneumatic hisses] that—oddly enough—at roughly the same time also distinguished the special effects in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. This was cool not only because the effects were themselves cool, but also because here were three talented young tech-minded directors who rejected the airy, hygienic look of Spielberg’s and Lucas’s F/X. The grimy density and preponderance of metal in Cameron’s effects suggest that he’s looking all the way back to Méliès and Lang for visual inspiration.)

  8 (Cameron would raise the use of light and pace to near-perfection in Aliens, where just six alien-suited stuntmen and ingenious quick-cut editing result in some of the most terrifying Teeming Rapacious Horde scenes of all time. [By the way, sorry to be going on and on about Aliens and The Terminator. It’s just that they’re great, great commercial cinema, and nobody talks about them enough, and they’re a big reason why T2 was such a tragic and insidious development not only for ’90s film but for James Cameron, whose first two films had genius in them.])

  9 (So actually I guess it would be more like “Luke Skywalker’s Appointment in Samarra”—nobody said this was Art-Cinema or anything.)

  10 (viz., a “neural net processor” based on an “uncooled superconductor,” which I grieve to report is a conceit ripped off from Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm)

  11 The Industry term for getting your money back plus that little bit of extra that makes investing in a movie a decent investment is ROI, which is short for Return on Investment.

  12 Because Schwarzenegger—compared to whom Chuck Norris is an Olivier—is not an actor or even a performer. He is a body, a form—the closest thing to an actual machine in the history of the S.A.G. Ahnode’s elite bankable status in 1991 was due entirely to the fact that James Cameron had had the genius to understand Schwarzenegger’s essential bionism and to cast him in T1.

  13 It augurs ill for both Furlong and Cameron that within minutes of John Connor’s introduction in the film we’re rooting vigorously for him to be Terminated.

  14 A complex and interesting scene where John and Sarah actually open up the Terminator’s head and remove Ahnode’s CPU and do some further reprogramming—a scene where we learn a lot more about neural net processors and Terminative anatomy, and where Sarah is strung out and has kind of an understandable anti-Terminator prejudice and wants to smash the CPU while she can, and where John asserts his nascent command presence and basically orders her not to—was cut from the movie’s final version. Cameron’s professed rationale for cutting the scene was that the middle of the movie “dragged” and that the scene was too complex: “I could account for [the Terminator’s] behavior changes much more simply.” I submit that the Cameron of T1 and Aliens wouldn’t have talked this way. But another big-budget formula for ensuring ROI is that things must be made as simple for the audience as possible; plot- and character implausibilities are to be handled through distraction rather than resolved through explanation.

  15 (around which the security must be just shockingly lax)

  16 That’s the movie’s main plot, but let’s observe here that one of T2’s subplots actually echoes Cameron’s Schwarzenegger dilemma and creates a kind of weird metacinematic irony. Whereas T1 had argued for a certain kind of metaphysical passivity (i.e., fate is unavoidable, and Skynet’s attempts to alter history serve only to bring it about), Terminator 2’s metaphysics are more active. In T2, the Connors take a page from Skynet’s book and try to head off the foreordained nuclear holocaust, first by trying to kill Skynet’s inventor and then by destroying Cyberdyne’s labs and the first Terminator’s CPU (though why John Connor spends half the movie carrying the deadly CPU chip around in his pocket instead of just throwing it under the first available steamroller remains unclear and irksome). The point here is that the protagonists’ attempts to revise the “script” of history in T2 parallel the director’s having to muck around with T2’s own script in order to get Schwarzenegger to be in the movie. Multivalent ironies like this—which require that film audiences know all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff from watching Entertainment Tonight and reading (umm) certain magazines—are not commercial postmodernism at its finest.

  17 (His hair doesn’t catch on fire in the molten steel, though, which provokes intriguing speculation on what it’s supposed to be made of.)