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.
David Foster Wallace on Terminator 2: Judgment Day: F/X Porn, from Waterstone’s Magazine, Winter/Spring 1998.
