The Terminal Man
It was an unconventional diagnosis of a singular man, Harry Benson a computer scientist and expert on artificial intelligence, until recently a married man but now divorced and delivered in handcuffs to the Babel facility where his atypical paraepilepsy is to be treated by an experimental procedure where a computer chip will be inserted into his brain, monitoring electrical activity and issuing a tranquilising microvoltage shock to abort the seizure and the accompanying violent behaviour and subsequent loss of memory.
With fifty-seven tests carried out on animals, though no success rate nor how it was ascertained is declared, Harry will be the first human subject, and Doctor Ross is duly concerned but Doctors Ellis, McPherson and Morris who developed the technique and will carry out the procedure and supervise have his consent, resigned to the grim fact that he has no alternative; the surgery apparently successful, Harry is eager to leave, discharging himself before tests are complete or the side effects manifest, his brain maladjusting to the calming shock and prompting it by inducing seizures more frequent and powerful.
The twelfth novel by the trainee doctor turned novelist and film director though only the second published under his own name, The Terminal Man drew on Michael Crichton’s disillusionment with the medical profession, another tale of the repercussions of cause and unpredictable effect adapted by Get Carter’s Mike Hodges in 1974, two years after publication, but with Hodges also drawing inspiration from the work of modernist artist Edward Hopper, finding his expressions of “the shared loneliness of urban America” expressed his own experience of existence in Los Angeles and Crichton’s themes of alienation and isolation in the modern world.
An actor whose reputation was tied with sophisticated comedies though that was not the entirety of his career, George Segal was cast as Harry Benson, initially tired and resigned as he is wheeled into the hospital then revealing a showcase of emotions as he is later artificially stimulated by his implant, sensations and memories involuntarily provoked with no context, his otherwise blank face the canvas upon with the emotions are suddenly painted, Joan Hackett’s Doctor Janet Ross the only sympathetic presence as those running the experiment literally look down on him as no more than a particularly communicative and articulate guinea pig.
Hodges’ wish to shoot the film in monochrome denied by the studio, instead while it is ostensibly in colour the sets and costumes are almost entirely in shades of black, white and greyscale, the characters lost in vast impersonal chambers, no connection between them as they avoid looking at each other, faces often seen in reflection or through windows, at a remove from each other and the audience who are kept at a clinical distance, The Terminal Man glacial and cerebral which makes the red of blood splattered on the bedroom floor all the more shocking, even in slow motion.
An often overlooked film which sits (un)comfortably alongside the other paranoid science fiction thrillers of the era including Robert Wise’s Crichton adaptation of 1971, The Andromeda Strain, presented on Blu-ray by Arrow the new edition of The Terminal Man contains both the director’s preferred cut and the longer theatrical release containing a prologue added at the behest of the studio which expands on Benson’s background and makes explicit that his condition was caused by an accident, a new commentary, an archive interview with Hodges, and three fascinating video essays on the influences and context of the film, Hodges’ career, and on cinematographer Richard H Kline, preferred collaborator of both Hodges and Wise, the latter two essays both created with insight and affection by Howard S Berger, a personal friend to both Hodges and Kline.
The Terminal Man will be released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films on Monday 10th March
