We Can Rebuild Him

Don’t they do foot binding on the NHS?

If someone is expecting to pay for a trip to Turkey and to hand over $16,500 to have their legs smashed up, and to subsequently, in addition, pay for months of “intensive physical therapy,” and months of disability, probably unable to work, then buying custom shoes and a more flattering wardrobe sounds like a bargain in comparison. Or indeed therapy of some kind. 

Again, trying to fix a software problem by smashing up the hardware. 

The trailer looked okay but Universal Horror don’t have a great track record. 

There are some mildly amusing details early on. The discovery of the Count’s ‘packed lunch’ – a strangely anaemic woman boxed in soil – but any hope of suspense and good writing soon evaporates. As the protagonist is black, there’s the inevitable dialogue about prejudice, which is tiresome and dramatically irrelevant, and we get a couple of brief scenes of girl-bossing, because, obviously, the anaemic woman has to be more competent with guns than the sailors. 

There’s also the reliance on characters doing inexplicably dumb things. Having fathomed that whatever is picking them off one by one is doing so at night, and is dormant during the day, the remaining crew belatedly consider investigating the mysterious, man-size wooden crates that they’re transporting. Which they don’t do immediately, during daylight, when they can see what they’re doing, but instead do at night. Needless to say, it does not go well. 

But I think much of the problem is in reducing the antagonist – the main attraction – to a silent, generic vampire, whose motives are only guessed at, in fairly uninspired dialogue, by fairly uninspired characters. A main attraction who only utters maybe half a dozen words – two very short lines, one of which is a wince-inducing cliché.

So, no, not a triumph. 

I’m just going to leave this here, for no reason whatsoever.

all those science fiction stories with transhumanist themes in which characters get their bodies dramatically and drastically altered in various ways. 

When thinking of a title for the post, I remembered how the Six Million Dollar Man TV series and its spin-offs differ from the Martin Caidin novel, Cyborg, on which they’re based. If memory serves, the novel is rather more grim, with the bionic prosthetics much less impressive, and with plenty of amputee angst. 

Still, our hero does have a dart gun built into his metal bludgeon arm. 

The advice to this person to seek therapy is the absolute correct one.

And yet in some quarters, among certain activists, were you or I to suggest this, we might very quickly be called names. Something I’ve said many times is that it seems we’re not supposed to tease apart the various phenomena currently bundled together as “trans”:  

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

And if we’re not supposed to make any attempt at unbundling those things, insofar as one can, and if we’re not supposed to do anything but affirm and defer, then it’s difficult to remain approved of while saying, however politely, “Actually this thing here is clearly unhinged and a recipe for disaster.” It’s hard to define an upper limit.

And so we end up with emboldened cross-dressing piss fetishists.

Which is a thing I didn’t anticipate.

How old do we have to be to LOL at David’s title for this story?

Now considering whether to dig out some old episodes of The Bionic Woman.

Maybe the fever will pass.