Mike Hodges' The Terminal Man

Mike Hodges’ The Terminal Man (1974)

I wrote this some time ago, trying to get it published somewhere, but it wasn't accepted. I'm really happy with it, though. 

With the passing of Mike Hodges, one of my favourite English filmmakers, I thought I could make it my inaugural post here. I'll try to add some illustrations at some point.

This is not widely seen, I don’t think. It’s not widely available (Warner Archive standard-def studio cut DVD only - in the USA). It was apparently never even released to cinemas over here, though I saw the director’s cut at a Hodges retrospective a few years ago. 

Is it well-regarded? Perhaps it isn’t present enough in the world to have any kind of rep. It should be. 

Perhaps it isn’t because it’s bleak. It is bleak. 

It’s a sci-fi, but it isn’t very concerned with being a sci-fi. Any filmmaker who offers some skewed perspective on the world is almost science fiction in some sense - but The Terminal Man is SF on the basis of an idea: the effort to control ideas, specifically the bad ideas that the title character’s head has been having. He’s a brain full of bad wiring (one of the film’s most chilling conceits is to highlight the similarities between human workings and the workings of machines, robots - to show that both are simply a matter of programming, circuits being directed in one direction or another). There are no gadgets. No futurescapes. It’s about drilling into a man’s head and patching him like a computer, only to find that he becomes more unknowable and unreachable than before. And perhaps, in a bleak way, that is what makes him human. What it is, seen now, is the rare science fiction that almost exactly resembles our current world. 

Is it set in the future? Perhaps. It’s not said, and probably doesn’t matter. It revolves around a surgical procedure which does not exist even today (although visually it looks modern), so it could be, though it gives no visual signifiers of that, except perhaps in its exacting and specific visual design, beginning with characters clad in cobalt gradually being replaced by stark whites and some black - interiors, clothes and furniture all. 

I’d call it a journey film. That’s different to a road movie - though it traverses LA, that happens entirely via interiors. There are only two exteriors that I can think of: briefly in a road tunnel and the climax, in the Forest Lawn cemetery, a sudden sensory overload of colour at the point of dying. 

Kubrick was a fan, apparently, and tried to help mount a sensible ad campaign with their shared studio, Warners, in an effort to stave off its doom (Terrence Malick was a fan, too - http://cinearchive.org/post/53154959148/mike-hodges-acquired-a-letter-of-overwhelming).

Hodges out Kubricks-Kubrick in terms of the controlled austerity of his mise en scene. There is a pre-Shining moment of bathroom-door smashing. Even get title cards orienting us. 

Segal might be a man with HAL in his head, but TTM plays as an anti-Clockwork Orange, deliberately or not (it came out three years later): here an adult psychopath, angst not glee, minimal music, zero glamour. For all Kubrick is accused of being emotionless, he blatantly sympathises with Alex - here, given a protagonist in a situation out of his hands, a man who was looking for a cure for his behaviour, the Hodges really does seem impassive.

I want to highlight a series of sequences to hopefully switch you on - pun - to the film. They’re easy divided up: events take place across four days, Tuesday to Friday. 

Tuesday: 

Harry Benson (George Segal) is admitted to hospital. At some point he was left brain-damaged. He was left prone to seizures, which trigger violent paranoia - paranoia that machines are taking over the world. He has lashed out at loved ones. He is perhaps already a killer (in police custody from the off). He seeks a cure, and has volunteered for experimental surgery: the implantation of computer circuitry to calm his brain upon a seizure, hopefully ending the attacks. 

Wednesday: 

The operating table. There are monitors, observers. It is computer controlled. Astronaut-style surgical helmets. I clocked the surgery sequence as lasting fifteen minutes at least - comparable to one of 2001’s space journeys, or maybe the one in Solyaris - where all that happens is a bunch of lights bounce off the hero’s visor. Here, Segal is the system of destination. He, an ordinary man altered by a freak of fate, therefore any of us potentially, is become Solaris, the 2001 monolith. With one major difference: these scientists don’t want to understand him, they want to control him.

Thursday:

 Assembled doctors and scientists literally push Harry’s buttons - one which holds right up to my face a fact about human identity which I find completely nightmarish: the fact that all we are, all our selves are, is a bunch of electrical impulses. I fear that we don’t amount to any more than that; but the fluke again, like Harry’s accident, is what makes us what we are. But who he was upon being born was a fluke, too. As is what he has become after his operation. The doctors push buttons: they make Harry tastes ham on rye, regress him back to childhood, arouse him (it becomes an actor’s showcase to have Segal change up emotions on the turn of a dime). Everyone is delighted. Success. But it seems less like they are celebrating the radical alteration of a human being than they are acting like a new-bought gadget performs the way the manufacturer said it would. The Martin Amis looking doctor seems like a danger.

Friday: 

Harry escapes the hospital as the doctors party. He has dodged his medication. He is taken in by his girlfriend, a dancer played by Jill Clayburgh. A seizure hits him, timed like clockwork (the doctors know exactly the hour at which it will strike), and he murders the woman. It is one of the most matter-of-factly shocking sequences that I can think of and you don’t know me but I’ve seen my share of onscreen-shit-that’ll-turn-you-white. Speaking of white, the production design is none-more-white. The entire room, walls, bed and all: white. The dresser, white.  She and Segal both kitted out in white. The floor is white. There is an exception to that white: a red rose Segal tears apart in his bare hands. The petals fall over his body. He strikes her at exactly 3:00, stabbing her and then her waterbed, in slo-mo, over and over again. It’s a frenzy, absolutely terrifying, but, crucially, it somehow also seems automised. 

Later the same day, we see a malfunctioning robot, vandalised by Harry - its arm smashing against the ground over and over again - directly reflecting Harry’s earlier frenzy. He is explicitly one and the same with the machines he so hates - and, by extension, we are the same as machines: aren’t we, as said above, all merely products of particular electrical impulses? It’s just that most of us aren’t so ‘dysfunctional’. It is perhaps Harry’s recognition of his/our similarities to robots that fuels his hatred of them…

I’ve barely mentioned the music. Not many films are as conspicuous in their silence. We really feel it. One thing is key: it never tells us how to feel, no matter what occurs onscreen, no matter what emotions the characters are going through, there is no desire from Hodges to pass them on to we, the viewer. We are issued no instructions. 

To me, this means that the film is relying upon our inherent humanity: it does the opposite of what the scientists do to Segal: it does not manipulate. It does not treat us, the audience, the same way. It trusts us to take what we are being offered in the manner of our choosing. If you think this murder is horrifying, then it is. If you think that it is thrilling, a cinematic coup, then it’s that. If you think it’s both of those things and maybe more things besides, then, you’re entitled to that overload - if you can handle it. After the murder, blood and water, mixed together, trickles through the rivulets of the floor’s intricately designed tiles (white, of course), the camera lingers, watching the liquid fill the patterns. It goes on long enough that you might wonder why you’re being shown it. There’s poetry in an image like this, certainly. But it becomes apparent: this trickle mirrors - more slowly, yes - the progression of electricity along synapses. In his, ours.

Welcome to a film in a category of one, as scared, individual, murderous, unremarkable, unlucky, as Harry Benson, as me, as you.