The Talkies /Rotters

...It is an absolutely astonishing moment, because it is done so completely without irony...

...The music is a hypnotic new age minimalist concoction, recognizable from the video arcades, but with digitally enhanced, earsplitting bass...

...We feel we know already—in the same way that we know real things—that the future will be marred by political, moral, or environmental catastrophe (or some combination of all three...

...In one particularly brilliant passage, Chad (James LeGros), the air-headed star of the movie-within-a-movie—an actor whose next two projects are "a rapist that Michelle Pfeiffer falls in love with" and "a sexy serial killer who shacks up with Winona Ryder"—assures Nick, the director (Steve Buscemi), that he thinks him a genius and that "these [i.e...

...on their own terms...

...A t one point in this film, the most silly and childish of the gang of hackers tries to patch things up between the bickering but ultimately happy couple by quoting (from the King James Version at that...

...That's just what scientists do...

...We are even prepared to believe that people will mutate back into animals...

...There's nothing we can do (that has a hope of making money anyway) that will surprise you, so what's the point of pretending, of going through with the charade of suspense and character development and careful adumbration of the illusion that what you are seeing on the screen is real...

...A nd it is true that, once the fantasist stops trying for the illusion of reality, the possibilities for entertainment begin to open up...

...I Corinthians 13.11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things...

...You all know that this stuff is fake anyway...

...In Hollywood this tendency dates from the mid- to late-1970s, when Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films revealed to us the mind of the unashamed movie fantasist who takes us by the arm and says: "Hey...

...But when his lame-brain suggestions make a mockery of the scene between himself and Nicole (Catherine Keener) and she offends him by telling him what she really thinks of him, he storms off the set shouting to Nick that "the only reason I took this part was that someone told me you were tight with Quentin Tarantino...

...Is it just the chronic pollution of that father of American cultural waters which killed them, or is there some new and virulent toxin whose presence has been too little noticed...

...In Virtuosity, the Tomorrowland looks more like Blade Runner and its imitators...

...And that's it, artistically speaking...

...Postmodernism was sort of fun for a while, but now it is beginning to get scary...

...It is a touchingly ironic reference to the now all-but-irrecoverable link between the fantasy of movie-making and real life...

...reality which, in real-world terms, is often merely fantastical...

...And he's in prison because he killed a vicious terrorist who didn't believe in democracy and killed lots and lots of people...

...Moreover, Denzel, the most "presentable" black Hollywood star since Sidney Poitier, is forced to fight with a ragged, bearded, tattooed, dirty-fighting white supremacist...

...This month, having sat through Kevin Costner's dreadful Watenvorld, the tale of a tough but sensitive homme-poisson living in a scarily watery future Earth, I decided to chart on your behalf some of the lower depths of bad moviemaking...

...Didn't it already happen in Planet of the Apes...

...and that is "your own fear...

...The girl seems to have no female friends but to live in a man's world, where she can compete with the gang of boy hackers (Dammit, she's the best man I've got...

...Is not the "graphics" and the music, the cool morphing (over and over again...

...The answer is: How can anyone tell when the movies themselves have become so childish...

...Since none of us knows what willhappen in the future, the movies have had to make it recognizable for us by drawing on the long tradition of futuristic movies...

...Sid also represents film-reality by being born in a pod (as in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and by being a performing, media-conscious villain, as in Batman or Natural Born Killers...

...The futurism of Watenvorld is a good example of film-reality in its purest form...

...Occasionally one of these new movies, a Miller's Crossing or a Pulp Fiction, will get close to it, but for the most part even the best of them are like Richard Rodriguez's Desperado—which is a grotesque confection of dreamlike images of sex and lovingly choreographed violent death, borne on waves of thrilling Latin music...

...When all the cast in the closing sequence are having daydreams which express their fantasies, hers is of taking a job as a short order cook: "I used to be an actress once," she says humbly to the bewildered owner of the diner in her fantasy...

...And among the lots and lots of people the terrorist killed were Denzel's wife and daughter...

...Of drama or genuine human experience there is none...

...They seem to share with Nix, the evil magician in Lord of Illusions, the consciousness that they are "born to murder the world...

...Say what you like about sex 'n' violence, they are part of the real world...

...Why bother to make such stuff minimally plausible when you can have so much fun piling up the movie clichés...

...The ground for it has to be carefully fertilized and watered (as it were) by the putrefying remains of a thousand artistically dead movies carried downstream by the mighty river of Hollywood crassness and vulgarity...

...Making fun of the mystique of the movies does about all that can be done anymore to bring them back down to earth...

...It's better just frankly to acknowledge the truth: it's a movie, not real life, and therefore you've got to expect it to be fake...

...Corporations are full of fascists like the crooked computer expert in Hackers who tells the hero about a "New World Order" in which technocrats like himself are "the Samurai, the Keyboard Cowboys, and all those people out there who don't know what's going on are cattle...

...From the greedy and corrupt multinational oil companies of Waterworld and Hackers to the sinister law enforcement agencies of Virtuosity, from the drug cartel of Desperado to the interplanetary empire of Mortal Kombat, all filmic experience teaches that evil is corporate and good is individual...

...The American Spectator October 1995 69...

...C:1 (James Bowman welcomes e-mail comments and queries about his reviews and can be reached at 72056.3226@compuserv.com...

...Is not this whole movie and the whole sub-genre of movies of which it is a part "childish things...

...This month I have examined a bunch more from among the end-of-summer kidflicks—including Virtuosity, Hackers, Mortal Kombat, Lord of Illusions, and Desperado—and have been confirmed in my belief that what is killing these movies is not the presence of filth but the absence of any expectation on the part of filmmakers and audience alike of truth-to-life—that is, what we critics call verisimilitude...

...As the wizard in Mortal Kombat tells his three ninja champions, "there is only one thing that can defeat" the determined individualist (like you...

...But, increasingly, neither the sex 'n' violence nor anything else in the movies bears much resemblance to what we recognize from the real world...

...All the plots, all the characters are familiar...

...T he Movie of the Month, Living in Oblivion by Tom DiCillo, is a brilliantly funny movie about movie-making which makes fun of film-reality by raising the curtain and showing us some of the wires and pulleys that sustain it...

...For badness like Waterworld's does not come out of nowhere...

...The moral dimensions of film-reality are even more easily taken...

...In Virtuosity, for instance, Denzel Washington benefits from the film-reality (recognizable from The Shawshank Redemption or Murder in the First) of prison as a place where decent fellows are unjustly imprisoned by a corrupt system of justice...

...Russell Crowe is the real bad guy—"Sid 6.7," a computer projection brought to life by the black arts of the scientist as "a nanotech synthetic android...

...Why the scientist would have wanted to do this, or why create in the first place a computer-generated person who has "200 different personality structures"—all of them mass murderers—is never for a moment considered...

...As regular readers will be aware, I have over the years performed autopsies on a great many of those dead movies...

...of the image of the Manhattan grid pattern with skyscrapers into an electronic circuit board, are not all these "childish things...

...But of course the movie New World Order is a paper tiger...

...She is chiefly known for a brief shower scene in a Richard Gere movie, which everyone continually makes reference to as essentially the only thing she has done in her career...

...Look at Mortal Kombat, the number one movie in America as I write, which is "based on the video game" of the same name—and a further illustration of the extent to which movies and video games are becoming indistinguishable...

...T rue, the movies have always championed the individual against the system, but the balance between them used to be a little more equal, a little closer to realism if not to reality...

...The film-reality here is a mix of kid-flick clichés and a Tracy-Hepburn type rivalry between the maleand female leads, played by Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie...

...In it the imagery is partly computer-generated magic lightning, partly fantastical creatures, partly impossibly crushing blows (most of them shrugged off as in cartoons) in fighting, and partly cool gross stuff like skulls with thousands of bugs and worms crawling out of them...

...In Hackers, however, it seems that the computers are there not so much to lend new possibility to fantasy as to accessorize the lifestyles of mega-cool 18-year-olds...

...You can save the world and vanquish legions of corporate foes—as the heroes 68 The American Spectator October 1995 of all these movies do—if only you believe that you can...

...We can let our "imaginations" run—with fantastical creatures from other worlds on Star Wars or with one ingenious hair's-breadth escape from certain death after another in Indiana Jones, with comically campy villains in the Batman films or lurid, high-tech variations on old horror movie themes in remakes of Dracula or Frankenstein—all without the tiresome necessity of having to make things look real...

...Film-reality, the body double for real reality, has now taken over its starring role and dressed itself in a garish outfit either of supernaturalism, as in Lord of Illusions or Mortal Kombat, or of high-tech mumbo-jumbo, as in Virtuosity or Hackers...

...The inevitable romance arises out of the competitive hackers' together foiling the plot of an oil company security officer to steal $25 million with the help of the brain-dead United States Secret Service, and pin the blame on them...

...Meanwhile, the crew is speculating about whether there will be any nudity today involving Nicole...

...The high-tech version (which owes something to Wells and Huxley) uses virtual reality, an "Olympics" of killing games with blood-lusty spectators, and a perfunctory contrast between its gleaming skyscrapers and unshaven tramps shuffling around fires in barrels on the street to make an equally recognizable future...

...What are all these gleaming machines and video games and hacking contests and "handles" and outlandish clothes and adolescent attitudes if they are not "childish things...

...small budget independents] are the kinds of films I want to make...

...The morality of these films is as fantastical as everything else in them...

...You've seen all the old movies...

...The high tech in this film is like the magic in Lord of Illusions or Mortal Kombat: it is the fig leaf of plausibility which allows the fantasist to do pretty much whatever he likes, unconstrained by reality...

...The movies have become a world of their own, and it is now all-butuniversally considered to be enough that movies should represent to us a movieJames Bowman is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement and media columnist for the New Criterion...