A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977)


Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977)

Cast: Julie Christie, Fritz Weaver, Gerrit Graham, Barry Kroeger, Lisa Lu, Larry J. Blake, John O'Leary, Alfred Dennis, Davis Roberts, Patricia Wilson, Dana Laurita. Screenplay: Robert Jaffe, Roger O. Hirson, based on a novel by Dean R. Koontz. Cinematography: Bill Butler. Production design: Edward C. Carfagno. Film editing: Frank Mazzola. Music: Jerry Fielding.

I'm still more afraid of insufficient human intelligence than of artificial computer intelligence, but I appreciate the prophetic quality of Demon Seed, a film that finds itself resurfacing today amid our uneasiness about social media and the invasion of privacy. Whenever I address my Echo Dot as "Alexa," I will be reminded of Julie Christie's Susan trying out voice commands on her wired house, which has turned from a servant into a jailer and rapist. The movie, unfortunately, looks a little cheesy today -- the cinematography is occasionally murky and the set-ups cluttered -- and it lacks a leavening sense of humor, which often makes horror sci-fi more fun and frightening. I question the waste of an actor of Julie Christie's caliber in a role that's mostly a passive woman-in-jeopardy cliché. And for that matter, why is the only woman scientist in the film Chinese? Are we stuck in the "sinister Oriental" mode here? There's a lot of muddle and loose ends in the plotting: What's the point, for example, of Susan's work as a therapist for a young girl, other than to use the kid as a bit of leverage that Proteus can wield in his torture of Susan? And why do we learn so late in the film that Susan and Alex lost a child, who died of leukemia, some time after we are told that one of Proteus's first achievements was a cure for leukemia? Still, Demon Seed holds its place as an unsettling view of the future that has become our present.
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