Terminatanic
When the world ends with no time to PhotoShop
Here’s a movie quiz for you as we face the big kaboom. The plot: a plucky young man goes back to an earlier historical period to rescue a lovable but confused young woman who has no idea she’s been marked out for a special destiny. What he must save her from is a hulking technological marvel whose dangers weren’t recognized or taken seriously by its original designers. They were too ensorcelled by their own hubris to bother with trivia.
The young woman is disconcerted at first by the oddity of her self-appointed savior, as young women with self-appointed saviors generally are. For good reason, too: try naming one movie S-AS who’s a regular Joe, not some crazed dickhead who just thinks he’s selfless. But she comes to recognize he not only knows more than the heedless folk she’s surrounded by but cares about her more passionately than they ever will.
The plucky young man accomplishes his task, but only gets to make love to the young woman once before sacrificing his own life to save hers. He thereby alters the future’s outlook from a menacing prospect to a hopeful one.
Question: what movie is this?
a) The Terminator.
b) Titanic.
c) The Terminator AND Titanic, because they’re exactly the same fucking movie in different guises.
Right. Ding, ding. What did Alex Trebek say after proposing marriage? “Please phrase your answer in the form of a question.” Under the blazer, that mustachioed hunk of pistachio was a true existentialist. To a Canadian American, being and nothingness just come with the territory.
As for duplication, it often comes with deftly customized touches that can throw off people’s perceptions. Fewer cars and more water was James Cameron’s billion-dollar misdirectional brainstorm. That definitely swamped my own perceptions, mea gulpa. Glug, glug.
I tried to entertain some of you and piss off others last week –my only pedagogical mantra is that pissing some people off is beneficiary, to my mood if nothing else – by noting the overlaps between what I called Mar-A-Khargalot and John F. Kennedy and friends’ truncated but zesty Camelot. Some parallels were reductive, granted: I’m not sure Jared Kushner = Sargent Shriver slights Kushner’s malignance or downplays Shriver’s ineffectuality more.
Others had long made themselves homebodies in the Land of Nod-Nod-Nod, including both Jackie = Melania and Melania ≠ Jackie. Some were generalized, such as Camelot’s covert and Khargalot’s lustily unconfined appetite for nihilism. But did I ever blow it with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The customized touch I failed to take into account was that the swank but bumpy 2026 rerun of 1962’s World On The Brink of Destruction mini would feature the U.S. as the mad instigator pushing the world to the brink of destruction. That’s despite us not having any special provocation to rush to Judgment Day or even seriously pretending we do.
That last MIA value may not sound like it’s worth getting remotely worked up about; six of one, half a Putin of the other, next. So let me either intrigue you in a boring way or bore you in an intriguing way by saying that once upon a time, Serious Pretending would have been a good title for some of the howling successes of what we used to call American diplomacy.
Take October, 1962. At the time and later, good-faith and bad-faith arguments alike could be and were made that no real alterations to the geopolitical calculus resulted from Khruschev’s introduction of Soviet missiles into Cuba, something Castro very much wanted for the sake of showing the world the land of Lenin wuvved him. Then he found out he’d be the eunuch at the superpower orgy when it came to deciding --- and deciding who got to decide -- to actually use the damn things.
Next came misdirection time. Their K pretended our missiles in Turkey were among the intolerable provocations that had forced him a mere 15 years or so later to provide Cuba with tit-for-tat nukes. Our K, to save face and skip nuances that bored his ass off – incidentally honoring the Kennedy-family motto “When your ass gets bored, save face,” which doesn’t sound any better in Latin – riposted by pretending our missiles in Turkey were all that spared his West Wing bedsheets from becoming acquainted with the free world’s leader’s urine. This would have puzzled John-John if not induced him to do likewise; sons learn by emulating their fathers.
The Turkey basting, sorry bases, was in fact so antiquated that JFK had been planning to pull the plug before Khruschev took a dump in the bathtub. But Serious Pretending was in the saddle now, even if most observers would have rated these preliminary hufferies a draw. The reason it wouldn’t stay one long was that JFK and his Dobby team, recruited direct from Hogwarts — you remember his kid brother Dobby Kennedy, don’t you? — had a flying broom up their sleeves.
The gimmick involved one Pavlov-ripened word: change. It’s resolute enough that regime change still sounds like a really dynamic thing for U.S. Presidents to do even when White House rodomontade has to work hard so we won’t notice how often it amounts to calling for diaper change. Sounds good for the bairn and good for our pro-and-con tastes in olfactory stimuli, wot? Sure, so long as somebody’s checked first on whether if there’s a fresh set of Pampers anywhere between here and New Zealand.
On second thought, never mind that sort of trivia. After decades of conditioning, we don’t need propaganda’s help to believe that regime change is a good goal to aim at: drastic, maybe, but self=evidently beneficial. Why and to whom? To Presidents who dote on going off script while claiming Shakespeare had their number, that’s whom. And that’s why,
To John F. Kennedy, no decision was complete – sometimes no decision was contemplated – without considerable thought being given to its effect on his Administration’s image. Since he incarnated that Administration and was intensely conscious of it, his own identity was on the line in a way running deeper than a demeaningly petty, merely selfish concern with his personal legacy or place in history. After all, the Kennedys believed in institutions.
They believed in them so much more than ordinary folk can conceive even on Sundays – the most likely reason JFK became President and not Pope is that Joseph P. Kennedy would have been horrified by one of his sons even faking celibacy -- that they knew of no job more meaningful than performing as those institutions’ personification: their vicars on television, so to speak. In fact, given their equally high regard for their own talents and general invaluability to the nation, they couldn’t fathom settling for any lesser gig. Would you?
So: fall 1962. The JFK administration has been timid domestically, mousing around on civil rights and more stymied than most White Houses by the bewildering (to them) conundrum that a President’s personal charisma and charm have very little impact on Americans’ pocketbooks. Abroad, we – which means he – look weak: bulldozed by Khruschev at Vienna, self-Katzenjammered up the gumstump at the Bay of Pigs.
He a/k/a we have underwhelmed Charles de Gaulle, despite the great man’s gallant recognition that Jacqueline Kennedy’s one dame the word infatuation was invented for. Personification is as personification does, people.
Hit the road, Jack; it’s time to get kinetic. It’s time for Serious Pretending. The problem: it’s probably true that Russian nuclear hardware in Cuba doesn’t, in itself, make the planet’ incineration any more imminent. The eureka moment: other than that, Mrs. Vulcan, the shift from “No Soviet missiles in Cuba” to “Hey, look! Soviet missiles in Cuba” is indisputably a change. Now that the magic word’s in play, the world will little note nor long remember that the transformation is actually inconsequential – pocket change, if you will.
Our most effective theatrical coup is the unleashing of wild Adlai Stevenson, the Bald (only slightly pink) Panther. Adlai’s keepers have spent a year and a half forcibly restraining him from chomping down city buses raw on his daily stroll to work at the U.N., but he hasn’t stopped keeping two jars of loaded Grey Poupon in his holster. Displaying U-2 photographs of the missiles’ presence on the bases being constructed for them, he waxes wroth at the perfidy of it all with a rectitude so righteous Grant Wood would kill to paint it. Wood would, wouldn’t he? Of course he would, he’s not made of wood. Stevenson is magnificently indignant.
Who wouldn’t be? But Stevenson has motivation to burn. He’s so indignant Kenndy and not he is the President he could retch if he wasn’t panicked he might fuck up and mentally spell it ‘wretch’ in the crunch, destroying his cred as the soon-to-be-incinerated world’s most literate Democrat. As an actor might put it admiringly, Adlai sure knows how to inhabit the moment.
Only Philistines believe Stevenson’s showboat turn is the missile crisis’s most award-worthy performance, though. Guy wants an Oscar so bad we can taste it, you know? Nominated twice, never won, Johnny, we hardly knew him. . . That’s why discerning aesthetes prefer JFK’s underplaying as a President so filled with decisive anguish at humanity’s prospective extinction that he couldn’t give less of a damn he’s named John F. Kennedy, and that’s his magic. He always plays himself, but never quite the same self.
Sixty-plus years later, is the performance of Mar-A-Khargo’s throne-sitter in chief in the same league? In every way but one, no way. It must gall Trump to his bone spurs that the Kennedys outdo him even as narcissists, and he can’t stand Serious Pretending anyhow. Besides being profoundly unserious, he’s actually lousy at pretending: just watch him whenever he’s got to act solemnly concerned about anyone’s welfare but his own, something Kennedy could pull off even right after someone shot him in the head. As anyone who’s ever been in a bar fight can tell you, what Trump’s good at isn’t pretending but bullshitting, not the same thing at all. Too bad a ton of bullshit can kill people every bit as dead as a bazooka.
In performance terms, the most unsettling new wrinkle Trump’s added to keep Trump 2.0 fresh is that he’s insane. That is, it’s no longer a question of his terrible values and grotesque personality, which – cosplaying aside -- no shrink would claim vouch for his looniness sufficiently. In recent months and now mere weeks, we’ve watched him deteriorate from a deeply unpleasant man to a desperately sick one. You know it, I know it. Melania’s sexy robot waiter knows it.
One remarkable fact about the Trump of today is that he’s forcing us to accept that the Trump of yore was, relatively speaking, constrained. “Open the fuckin’ Strait” has an unhinged Celtics-stan bluntness that leaves his earlier Great Moments in Geography, from “shithole countries’ to giving a hurricane a goiter stitched together out of emperor’s new clothes with an emergency Sharpie – he wields those like a surgeon with the, how you say, D.T.s – seem like leftover details from an Edith Wharton novel.
He’s never been what you’d call a sharp dresser or a deeply sophisticated hair-salon customer. But I think his vanity would once have suppressed a penchant for lumbering around like an untethered harbor buoy with 50-kg Acme anvils weighting his eyelids. Meanwhile, his confused lips, which seem to no longer be on speaking terms with each other, grope in befuddled vain to recall where they left his saliva. Trump once wanted to celebrate surviving his Walter Reed covid scare by ripping open his shirt on the White House lawn to reveal a Superman logo; doesn’t everyone miss those sparkling Noel Coward, Armani, Emily Post days?
When people spoke of Trump’s slurs, they used to mean his crass insults. Now they’re describing his rubbery mouth’s vacuous grip on its Rube Goldberg plumbing. At least Woodrow Wilson was polite enough to stay bedridden upstairs; at least Lyndon Johnson didn’t actually feed his gall-bladder scar to his beagles. At least William McKinley had the grace to – nah, let’s not go there.
With downright medieval primitivism and/or Dorian Gray squalidness, Trump’s physical decline has become the visual metaphor for his moral malignancy. He’s broken out of the decorous straitjacket of mere callous indifference to United States war crimes. Now he revels in the prospect, not to mention his Prospero ability to make the ultimate everything-must-go fire sale a reality.
When he goes on about “obliterating” Iran’s infrastructure or shepherding an entire people back to the Stone Age, you rue a simpler time when moms thought their job was done once they took away the kid’s gunky copy of Playboy, if only to clean it some. And when he announces – on social media! – that “a whole civilization will die tonight” without specifying which one he means, you know his head lives in none.
Tonight, tonight. The most reliable, um, algorhythm to determine how widespread our fears are of the world ending could be how many people are deciding which pic of their cat and/or favorite recipe most deserves to adorn their farewell Facebook post. “Bessie looks so cute in that one. What a fraidy-cat she is! I wish my horrible ex wasn’t in it. No time to PhotoShop, I guess. But I did make him that great spaghetti carbonara for his birthday. I can’t remember whether we watched Titanic or The Terminator, it’s almost like my brain’s done a mashup reel and they’re the same movie. Hey, didn’t he send me a dick pic right after? I hope I haven’t deleted it. I don’t really like dick pics, but that one was hot. Bessie! Bessie, no! I love that darn cat, but she sure is a handful. Gee, maybe I’ll go with the old one of me and the ‘rents doing Disneyland. ‘Specially now that they’re dead and I’ll join them soon.”
Not soon. Tonight!