Both Flesh and Not: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  Cavalier sentiments, etc. But I can’t help thinking some of today’s knights still underestimate both AIDS’s dangers and its advantages. They fail to see that HIV could well be the salvation of sexuality in the 1990s. They don’t see it, I think, because they tend to misread the eternal story of what erotic passion’s all about.

  The erotic will exists “despite impediments”? Let’s go back to that knight and fair maiden exchanging lascivious looks. And here comes the knight, galloping castleward, mammoth lance at ready. Except imagine this time that there is no danger, no dragon to fear, face, fight, slay. Imagine the knight’s pursuit of the maiden is wholly unimpeded—there’s no dragon; the castle’s unlocked; the drawbridge even lowers automatically, like a suburban garage door. And here’s the fair maiden inside, wearing a Victoria’s Secret teddy and crooking her finger. Does anyone else here detect a shadow of disappointment in Sir Knight’s face, a slight anticlimactic droop to his lance? Does this version of the story have anything like the other’s passionate, erotic edge?

  “The human will to fuck”? Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life—not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character—meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose.

  History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business—and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose.

  And then, what must have seemed suddenly, the dragons all keeled over and died. This was just around when I was born, the ’60s’ “Revolution” in sexuality. Sci-fi-type advances in prophylaxis and antivenereals, feminism as a political force, TV as institution, the rise of a culture of youth and its gland-intensive art and music, Civil Rights, rebellion as fashion, inhibition-killing drugs, the moral castration of churches and censors. Bikinis, miniskirts. “Free Love.” The castle’s doors weren’t so much unlocked as blown off their hinges. Sex could finally be unconstrained, “Hang-Up”-free, just another appetite: casual. I was toothless and incontinent through most of the Revolution, but it must have seemed like instant paradise. For a while.

  I was pre-conscious for the Revolution’s big party, but I got to experience fully the hangover that followed—the erotic malaise of the ’70s, as sex, divorced from most price and consequence, reached a kind of saturation-point in the culture—swinging couples and meat-market bars, hot tubs and EST, Hustler’s gynecological spreads, Charlie’s Angels, herpes, kiddie-porn, mood rings, teenage pregnancy, Plato’s Retreat, disco. I remember Looking for Mr. Goodbar all too well, its grim account of the emptiness and self-loathing that a decade of rampant casual fucking had brought on. Looking back, I realize that I came of sexual age in a culture that was starting to miss the very dragons whose deaths had supposedly freed it.

  If I’ve got some of this right, then the casual knights of my own bland generation might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing, a gift perhaps bestowed by nature to restore some critical balance, or maybe summoned unconsciously out of the collective erotic despair of the post-’60s glut. Because the dragon is back, and clothed in a fire that can’t be ignored.

  I mean no offense. Nobody’d claim that a lethal epidemic is a good thing. Nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are; the only good and bad things are people’s various choices in the face of what is. But our own history shows that—for whatever reasons—an erotically charged human existence requires impediments to passion, prices for choices. That hundreds of thousands of people are dying horribly of AIDS seems like a cruel and unfair price to pay for a new erotic impediment. But it’s not obviously more unfair than the millions who’ve died of syphilis, incompetent abortions, and “crimes of passion,” nor obviously more cruel than that people used routinely to have their lives wrecked by “falling,” “fornicating,” “sinning,” having “illegitimate” children, or getting trapped by inane religious codes in loveless and abusive marriages. At least it’s not obvious to me.

  There’s a new dragon to face. But facing a dragon doesn’t mean swaggering up to it unarmed and insulting its mom. And the erotic charge of hazard surrounding sex and HIV doesn’t mean we can continue to engage in sport-fucking in the name of “courage” or romantic “will.” In fact, AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all. This is a gift because human sexuality’s power and meaning increase with our recognition of its seriousness. This has been what’s “bad” about casual sex from the beginning: sex is never bad, but it’s also never casual.

  Our sexual recognition of what is can start with the conscientious use of protection as a gesture of love toward ourselves and our partners. But a deeper, far braver recognition of just what kind of dragon we’re facing now is starting to take hold, and—far from Armageddon—is doing much to increase the erotic voltage of contemporary life. Thanks to AIDS, we’re expanding our imaginations with respect to what is “sexual.” Deep down, we all know that the real allure of sexuality has about as much to do with copulation as the appeal of food does with metabolic combustion. Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the chasms that separate selves. Sexuality is, finally, about imagination. Thanks to brave people’s recognition of AIDS as a fact of life, we are beginning to realize that highly charged sex can take place in all sorts of ways we’d forgotten or neglected—through non-genital touching, or over the phone, or via the mail; in a conversational nuance; in an expression; in a body’s posture, a certain pressure in a held hand. Sex can be everywhere we are, all the time. All we need to do is really face this dragon, yielding neither to hysterical terror nor to childish denial. In return, the dragon can help us relearn what it means to be truly sexual. This is not a small thing, or optional. Fire is lethal, but we need it. The key is how we come to fire. It’s not just other people you have to respect.

  —1996

  esculent—edible espalier—tree or shrub trained to grow in a flat plane against a wall; (adj.) espaliered esplanade—open flat place in park… like concrete spaces around central fountain et ux—Latin abbrev. for “et uxor” = “and wife”; “Mr. Hoad et ux” etude—musical piece composed for the development of a specific point of technique étui—small ornamental case for things like needles euchre—card game; slang for to cheat = “he euchred us out of our life savings” euphuism—ornate, allusive, overpoetic prose style exanthema—skin eruption accompanying some diseases, like dire skin trouble excise (n.)—internal tax on production, manufacture, sale, consumption of something excrescence—abnormal outgrowth or enlargement like a wart or boil excursus—long intellectual digression in a speech or piece of writing exe
crate (v.)—to loathe, hate, declare loath-some or hateful exeleutherostomize—to speak out freely (nonceword from Greek roots) exhilarant (adj.)—serving to exhilarate: “warm and exhilarant sunshine”; “exhilarant coitus” exocrine (n.)—an externally secreting gland, such as salivary or sweat gland exordium—introductory part of speech in practical rhetoric eyeteeth—canine teeth of upper jaw falcate—sickle-shaped falx—sickle-shaped anatomical structure fanfaronade—bragging or blustering behavior; a fanfare fastigiate—having parallel upcurving branches like lombardy poplar fastigium—worst part of fever, illness fatuous—unconsciously smug and foolish felly/felloe—the rim or section of rim of wheel that’s supported by the spokes feoff- ment—grant of lands as a fee fer de lance—venomous U.S. snake (pit viper) fermentative—causing fermentation (“the air in the trailer was fermentative”) ferrule—a ring or cap placed around a pipe to keep it from splitting ferule—cane, stick, or flat board used for punishing children festoon (n.)—decoration: a string or garland, as of leaves or flowers, suspended in a curve between two points fetch (n.)—distance unimpeded winds or waves travel fey—displaying an otherworldly or fairyish (coyly transcendent) look; faggy? filibuster—private, not military, raid of foreign territory flake (n.)—a frame or platform for drying produce flambeau—littorch; a decorative candlestick flange—protruding rim or edge or col lar on wheel or pipe shaft, used to strengthen, hold, or attach flitch—longitudinal cut in tree; a bunch of long planks bound together to make a beam floret—a small or reduced-size flower, like a daisy foliate—of or relating to leaves fourchette—small fold of mucous membrane forming the posterior region of the vulva and connecting the posterior ends of the labia majora; narrow, forked strip of material connecting the front and baxctions of fingers of gloves fox (v.)—to repair a shoe by attaching a new upper; to make beer sour by fermenting fugleman—leader, especially political leader fustian—corduroyish fabric fustic—kind of yellow gotten from fustic tree (tropical U.S.) fustigate—criticize harshly gabardine—sturdy, tightly woven cotton or wool fabric galenical (n.)—medicine made up of 100% herbal or vegetable matter

  THE (AS IT WERE) SEMINAL IMPORTANCE OF TERMINATOR 2

  1990s MOVIEGOERS WHO HAVE sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like Twister and Volcano and The Lost World can thank James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day for inaugurating what’s become this decade’s special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn. “Porn” because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they’re eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren’t really “movies” in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes—scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff—strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.

  T2, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, opened six years ago. Think of the scenes we all still remember. That incredible chase scene and explosion in the L.A. sluiceway and then the liquid metal1 T-1000 Terminator walking out of the explosion’s flames and morphing seamlessly into his Martin-Milner-as-Possessed-by-Hannibal-Lecter corporeal form. The T-1000 rising hideously up out of that checkerboard floor, the T-1000 melting headfirst through the windshield of that helicopter, the T-1000 freezing in liquid nitrogen and then collapsing fractally apart. These were truly spectacular images, and they represented exponential advances in digital F/X technology. But there were at most maybe eight of these incredible sequences, and they were the movie’s heart and point; the rest of T2 is empty and derivative, pure mimetic polycelluloid.

  It’s not that T2 is totally plotless or embarrassing—and it does, admittedly, stand head and shoulders above most of the F/X Porn blockbusters that have followed it. It’s rather that T2 as a dramatic narrative is slick and cliché and calculating and in sum an appalling betrayal of 1984’s The Terminator. T1, which was James Cameron’s first feature film and had a modest budget and was one of the two best U.S. action movies of the entire 1980s,2 was a dark, breathlessly kinetic, near-brilliant piece of metaphysical Ludditism. Recall that it’s A.D. 2027 and that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in 1997 and that chip-driven machines now rule, and “Skynet,” the archonic diabolus ex machina, develops a limited kind of time-travel technology and dispatches the now classically cyborgian A. Schwarzenegger back to 1984’s Los Angeles to find and Terminate one Sarah Connor, the mother-to-be of the future leader of the human “Resistance,” one John Connor3; and that apparently the Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet’s time-travel technology and sends back to the same space-time coordinates a Resistance officer, the ever-sweaty but extremely tough and resourceful Kyle Reese, to try desperately to protect Ms. Sarah Connor from the Terminator’s prophylactic advances,4 and so on. It is, yes, true that Cameron’s Skynet is basically Kubrick’s HAL, and that most of T1’s time-travel paradoxes are reworkings of some fairly standard Bradbury-era science fiction themes, but The Terminator still has a whole lot to recommend it. There’s the inspired casting of the malevolently cyborgian Schwarzenegger as the malevolently cyborgian Terminator, the role that made Ahnode a superstar and for which he was utterly and totally perfect (e.g., even his goofy 16-r.p.m. Austrian accent added a perfect little robofascist tinge to the Terminator’s dialogue5). There’s the first of Cameron’s two great action heroines6 in Sarah Connor, as whom the limpid-eyed and lethal-lipped Linda Hamilton also turns in the only great performance of her career. There is the dense, greasy, marvelously machinelike look of The Terminator’s mechanized F/X7; there are the noirish lighting and Dexedrine pace that compensate ingeniously for the low budget and manage to establish a mood that is both exhilarating and claustrophobic.8 Plus T1’s story had at its center a marvelous “Appointment in Samarra”–like irony of fate: we discover in the course of the film that Kyle Reese is actually John Connor’s father,9 and thus that if Skynet hadn’t built its nebulous time machine and sent back the Terminator, Reese wouldn’t have been back here in ’84, either, to impregnate Sarah C. This also entails that meanwhile, up in A.D. 2027, John Connor has had to send the man he knows is his father on a mission that J.C. knows will result in both that man’s death and his (i.e., J.C.’s) own birth. The whole ironic mess is simultaneously Freudian and Testamental and is just extraordinarily cool for a low-budget action movie.

  Its big-budget sequel adds only one ironic paradox to The Terminator’s mix: in T2, we learn that the “radically advanced chip”10 on which Skynet’s CPU is (will be) based actually came (comes) from the denuded and hydraulically pressed skull of T1’s defunct Terminator… meaning that Skynet’s attempts to alter the flow of history bring about not only John Connor’s birth but Skynet’s own, as well. All T2’s other important ironies and paradoxes, however, are unfortunately unintentional and generic and kind of sad.

  Note, for example, the fact that Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie about the disastrous consequences of humans relying too heavily on computer technology, was itself unprecedentedly computer-dependent. George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, subcontracted by Cameron to do T2’s special effects, had to quadruple the size of its computer graphics department for the T-1000 sequences, sequences that also required digital-imaging specialists from around the world, thirty-six state-of-the-art Silicon Graphics computers, and terabytes of specially invented software programs for seamless morphing, realistic motion, digital “body socks,” background-plate compatibility, congruences of lighting and grain, etc. And there is no question that all the lab work paid off: in 1991, Terminator 2’s special effects were the most spectacular and real-looking anybody had ever seen. They were also the most expensive.

  T2 is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budg
et is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of T2 shows that much of the ICQL’s force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally—maximally—sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back.11 I.e., a megabudget movie must not fail—and “failure” here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit—and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit. One of the most reliable of these formulae involves casting a superstar who is “bankable” (i.e., whose recent track record of films shows a high ROI). The studio backing for T2’s wildly sophisticated and expensive digital F/X therefore depends on Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreeing to reprise his Terminator role. Now the ironies start to stack, though, because it turns out that Schwarzenegger—or perhaps more accurately “Schwarzenegger, Inc.” or “Ahnodyne”—has decided that playing any more malevolent cyborgs would compromise the Leading Man image his elite and bankable record of ROI entails. He will do the film only if T2’s script is somehow engineered to make the Terminator the Good Guy. Not only is this vain and stupid and shockingly ungrateful12; it is also common popular knowledge, duly reported in both the trades and the popular entertainment media before T2 even goes into production. There’s consequently a weird postmodern tension to the way we watch the film: we’re aware of what the bankable star’s demands were, and we’re also aware of how much the movie cost and how important bankable stars are to a big-budget movie; and so one of the few things that keep us on the edge of our seats during the movie is our suspense about whether James Cameron can possibly weave a plausible, non-cheesy narrative that meets Schwarzenegger’s career needs without betraying T1’s precedent.