David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

36 Tickets are sold separately for the day and evening sessions, and there are very complicated mechanisms in place to keep people with day-session tickets from lurking past 2000h. and mooching free evening spectation.

37 New Yorkers also have an amazing ability to mind their own business and attend to themselves and not notice anything untoward going on, an ability that impresses me every time I come here and that always seems to lie somewhere on the continuum between Stoicism and catatonia.

38 You’ll doubtless by the way be happy to know that I did, over half an hour later, find a quiet place to hunch and gnaw supper. One of the gratuitously cool things the ’95 Open does is open up a few of the minor National Tennis Center courts to regular public play once the sun’s gone down. This is why some of the people in the Stadium crowd had rackets, I bet. Anyway, it seems decent of them, and you can imagine what a thrill it must be for a couple of little kids to play on a court with vestigial rubber from an afternoon of pro sneakers still on it — the civilians playing clearly feel important, and they get a lot of attention from passersby on the paths who are now conditioned to watch intently whenever they hear ball sounds, and it’s interesting to watch the passersby’s faces change after two or three seconds when they realize who and what they’re watching. The little sets of bleachers for these minor public-play courts are, understandably, empty; and it was on one such little set of stands that I ate. A thirtyish guy and his wife were playing, the wife wearing a sun visor that looked a little gratuitous, the husband overhitting the way an afternoon of watching pros whale the hell out of the ball will make a man overhit. The only other person in the stands was one of the attractive young P.R. people who’d given me so much free coffee all day out by the M.G., sitting in her Valdez-outline T-shirt and eating something steamy out of a partitioned Styrofoam tray whose attached lid was folded back. Her professional smile and eye-twinkles were gone, so that she looked now more like the hard young New Yorker she was. As she ate she stared impassively at the husband whaling balls at his wife. She was clearly there for the same reason I was, to have some space and quiet while she ate, plus some downtime in which to rest her face from its cheery marketing expression. I felt a kind of bond between us, and from the opposite end of the bleachers where I was eating I cleared my throat and said, “Boy, it’s good to find a place to be alone for a minute, isn’t it?” The lady never looked around from the court as she cleared her mouth and said, “It was until a second ago.”

39 (Both these solicitations had their appeal — the straight-out-bribe one especially — and only a fear of getting caught and of having to inform Tennis magazine that my Media Pass had been revoked because I’d been nabbed renting it out on the black market kept me from making my own stab at ’95 Open free enterprise.)

40 You wouldn’t believe me if I specified what it was, and it’d require a lot of space and context to make sense of, and this in an article that’s already pretty clearly running over budget and straying from its original focused L.D.W. assignment.

41 (More power to him, on my view.)

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 savior 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 a decene 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.