Terminate with Extreme Prejudice

Three days of rail travel from California to Chicago. Five movies and some progress on a classic novel.

I spent a week staying with friends in Oakland and visiting others in San Francisco before taking a train from California to Illinois, three days of continuous travel over southwestern desert, through the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains and on across the plains of the American Midwest, before staying with a different set of friends in Chicago. I’ve watched five movies, three with the Oakland set and two with the Chicago contingent.

First was Sideways, directed by Alexander Payne in 2004. An alcoholic wine snob mourning the failures of his marriage and publishing career and his best pal, a charismatic, narcissistic, washed-up television actor who is soon to be married, take a trip to the Santa Barbara area to play golf, taste wine, chase women and bicker with one another. They are portrayed respectively by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in two excellent performances that help make these unlikable characters empathetic and funny. I recall liking Sideways well enough when it was first released in theaters, but now I find it aimless and tiresome and I don’t like the way the colors are mixed.

Next was Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder in 2019. I hadn’t heard of this movie before one of my hosts in Oakland suggested we try it. It’s about a recovering addict and drummer for a two-piece metal band played by Riz Ahmed who finds he’s losing his hearing and has to make hard choices about the changes he’s experiencing in his life. The picture looks okay and the story is under-cooked. At the very end the filmmakers try to pass narrative ambiguity off as spiritual profundity, a cheap trick a lot of today’s neorealist directors seem overly confident they can get away with. The story goes so far afield that I stopped caring about what happened; the last act looked and felt like it was from another movie altogether. Throughout the picture they did some nifty stuff with sound in order to simulate for the viewer the protagonist’s experience of hearing-loss.

After that we watched The Terminator, directed by James Cameron in 1984. I needn’t explain that this is a highly influential science-fiction/action picture and a career breakthrough for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays the titular cyborg sent back in time from the apocalyptic robot war of 2029 to preemptively assassinate Linda Hamilton’s character Sarah Connor before she can give birth to the man who will one day lead the human resistance movement against the machines. Michael Biehn, an actor I will never stop being annoyed didn’t become a marquee star, plays the soldier who travels back in time to get in between Connor and the Terminator. It’s a cool idea well-executed in this dark, violent, ahead-of-its-time picture. While the look is cheap and dated (one scene in particular made my friends cackle at how bad the practical effects look by today’s standards), the filmmakers rarely give the protagonist or the viewer a chance to get comfortable, so one can get swept up in and enjoy the well-staged action, efficient story-telling and serviceable acting. The point of the movie is that Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character never relents and kills anyone in his way; the breathless, snarling momentum with which the story crashes along from one car-chase or mass murder to another is stressfully enthralling.

But it isn’t nearly as good as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, directed by Cameron in 1992. Cameron inverted expectations for what a Terminator sequel might entail while submitting something more inventive, exciting and dazzling than its predecessor and any of its subsequent imitators. The first time I saw this movie on VHS as a kid we had all known for years that Schwarzenegger’s Terminator in the sequel has been reprogrammed to be on the side of the future resistance movement, to be a guardian for our heroes instead of an antagonist, so I’ve never felt disarmed by that narrative reveal. But one of my Chicago hosts pointed out that back in 1992 this turn was a surprise subversion of the first film’s template, and watching Terminator 2 in that spirit gave me a deeper appreciation of the grand, old-school showmanship and spectacle that Cameron summons in his best work. Business as usual is further upended by the second film’s drastic reinterpetation of Hamilton’s character, which she handles brilliantly in the movie’s most dynamic performance. Terminator 2 also deploys CGI effects with more competence and confidence than most big-time directors, including Cameron himself, have done in the subsequent decades; Robert Patrick’s villain is a liquid-metal shape-shifting cyborg that still looks reasonably convincing nearly thirty years later. This is Patrick’s iconic, career-defining role and he is perfectly cast as a diabolically good-looking Terminator that can walk through walls and impersonate anyone. The plot sequence doesn’t make strict sense in a four-dimensional analysis because I don’t see why the machine regime didn’t simultaneously send their most up-to-date model of killer robot back to 1984 and 1992 from the same point in the future, but the action is so well-staged, easy to follow, engaging and unceasing that there just isn’t time for nitpicking because the movie is simply too much fun to watch. This one has aged magnificently.

The Hospital was directed by Arthur Hiller in 1971, but it was written by Paddy Chayefsky and apparently Chayefsky exercised a great amount of control over the content of the picture. My host while I was staying in Chicago, the one who helped reorient my perspective on Terminator 2, is a great Chayefsky admirer who has read a Chayefsky biography and has had The Hospital on his watch list for some time, while I myself had never heard of it until he suggested it. I’ve been watching and rewatching the ingenious and frighteningly prescient Chayefsky-written 1976 film Network since I was a kid and The Hospital appears to have been something of a dry run for Network, with a protagonist played by George C. Scott who is a clear prototype for both Peter Finch’s and William Holden’s Network characters. Diana Rigg’s sexy, bizarre character in The Hospital also bears superficial and spiritual resemblances to Faye Dunawaye’s character in the later film. I intuited that Scott’s physician character was also based partly on Chayefsky himself from the way he’s made him up to resemble Chayefsky physically. I mentioned this to my buddy after the movie ended and he pulled his Chayefsky book down off the shelf and read aloud a passage confirming that Chayefsky is said to have uttered verbatim many of the depressed, suicidal and messianic lines that Scott’s character speaks in the film. The character is fed up with the alienation of the modern urban world, has Chayefsky’s withering scorn for the cynicism of loudmouth wannabe radicals and is too smart for his own good (but precisely smart enough for the good of the society which desperately needs his leadership). Personal and political exhortations are draped across the structure of a barely-plausible hospital-confined murder mystery which gets tied up with a surprisingly economical narrative bow. Chayefsky’s writing ricochets between discordant tones that are arranged to jar the viewer from one scene to another while Hiller’s elegant long-takes and chiarascuro lighting smooth things over and add cohesion. An ambitious oddity that seems to have been overshadowed by the many better movies from the same decade, including Chayefsky’s own later work.

On the California-to-Chicago leg of my rail journey I made some progress chipping away at the 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I’m having a good time, though doing a fair amount of flipping back to earlier passages to make sure I’m keeping track of the many Bennet, Lucas and Bingley sisters. I’m doing well keeping straight their various male suitors and annoyers – charming Bingley, imperious Darcy, cringey blunderer Collins and Darcy’s handsome rival Wickham. As I wrote previously, I know from Tanner’s introduction that one of the main subjects of the book is the protagonist Elizabeth Bennet’s process of learning that her keen and perceptive intellect don’t give her license to prematurely judge people or situations based on first impressions, and from what I’ve heard over the years I’m pretty sure (but not actually, certainly sure) that she ends up with Darcy, or at least eventually thinks better of him than the ghastly impression she has at this early stage in the text. Wickham is up to something, but I don’t know what. The Darcy/Wickham imbroglio and Elizabeth’s intrigues in imbroiling herself therein have me interested to learn what the heck is going on and what happens next. I’m filing this piece from an overnight train from Chicago to Boston with miles yet to ride, so today is a good day to find out.

Next: Posting up outside Boston for a week with a friend who is a writer, professor and film nerd. Should be an opportunity for me to make further progress on Pride and Prejudice and for us to watch some movies, likely trading favorites and exploring unexpected artifacts.