Hear My Eyes is a periodic Melbourne series where a local musician creates an all new score to accompany a classic film, and it gets showed a small number of times with live musical accompaniment. I've attended the series exactly once before, when it appeared during MIFF of 2017 and allowed me a new experience of a new favorite, 1972's Fantastic Planet, which I saw for the first time in 2008 but have now seen five times in total. That was a trippy experience, and so was this one.
The musicians in this case were all electronic, led by lead composer and performer Peter van Hoesen, with a cohort called MESS Snythesiser Ensemble on stage with him, and a laser light show orchestrated by Robin Fox. More on the laser light show in a minute.
You pay $89 for the experience, but trust me, it was well worth it.
Here are a couple ideas of what Hamer Hall in Melbourne looked like prior to Thursday's show, the middle of three. I had to take these photos a bit surreptitiously as there were already several people walking around holding up an iPad which showed a camera with a red Ghostsbusters-style cross through it. I know that was meant for once the performance started only, but I didn't want to unnecessarily anger anyone with what seemed like a blatant violation of the thing they were requesting of me.
Under the screen you can see a DJ station that was eventually occupied by about eight people. I should say that I don't totally understand live DJing in most contexts. I get that many DJ sets are not totally pre-planned, or if they are pre-planned, then they do the transitions live anyway. I mean, I don't think they're just up there pantomiming.
But for something like a score, where the music is timed out exactly to what is happening in the movie, there would be no reason I could see why they couldn't just press play on a pre-recorded sequence of music when the movie starts. I guess because then it wouldn't that cool. I do wonder if there is the freedom to interpret in the moment -- I mean, I can't imagine all the eight people up there were just pressing a button when it came time to press a button. But obviously there were certain moments within the movie that had to be respected, without any chance that a freestyle musical interpretation would step on them, such as when the music goes down in time for Arnie to say "Trust me" before he's about to not kill anyone with his gatling gun.
I wondered, as I was watching, how they managed to squelch the original score, which I have subsequently learned is by a composer named Brad Fiedel. (I had always assumed the score was by one of the household name industry giants, like a Hans Zimmer.) And this gets us to the elephant in that very big room, which is that Terminator 2 is a particularly difficult film score to replace because of how iconic it is. The "dum dum dum da-dum" that we all think of when we think of T2 is so inseparable from the movie itself, would we miss it? But I'm getting sidetracked and I will come back to that in a moment.
What I mean about this question of squelching the score is that I would have thought there'd be times that the score would be playing over key sound effects or dialogue in the movie. How would they erase the score without erasing the sound of smashing metal or human beings crying out in pain?
I did wonder if it was similar to how you can reduce a song to individual tracks. There's a podcast I listen to once in a great while called One Song where they do just that, playing only individual parts of a song to analyze those parts unto themselves, in the course of considering that single song over a 45-minute period. Maybe Van Hoesen et al are doing that here. In any case, it was seamless.
The score itself? Pretty great. The word "cyberpunk" came to mind as I was listening to it, but "industrial" would have worked -- a lot of metallic scratching sounds, deep bellows, that sort of thing. The word "atmospheric" also came to mind, because there are moments in the film where I believe there probably was no score originally -- though I am eager now for a comparison viewing -- and they were accentuated here by a background humming, a howling of wind, or a sinister sonic wallpaper that added to the overall sense of dystopia. If I were a music critic rather than a film critic, I might be describing this better.
I did wonder, if just to throw us a bone, whether it might have been nice to acknowledge the "dum dum dum da-dum" of Fiedel's original, especially in the opening credits. I don't think anyone would have accused them of being too influenced by Fiedel if they'd just done the equivalent of a shout-out to that. But no, the music over the opening and closing credits was a bit more like what I would call "technical malfunction music," the sonic equivalent of a robot going on the fritz, with scraping and springing sounds reminding us of a future gone haywire.
Okay now it's time to talk about the lasers.
I don't think they ever got any better than the opening. As you recall, we start on a future battle between the human resistance and the machines, and there are literal blue lasers being shot in the movie. These same blue lasers strobed through the theater, prompting oohs and ahhs from all of us. The use of lasers continued to be interesting throughout, though none as effective as our first experience of them. There were lasers to accompany the lightning as the terminators arrived from the future, for example. There were lasers, thinner in their thickness and more diffuse in their spray patterns, during the film's big explosions. There were single lasers that held, for things like a sudden knife thrust through somebody's skull, though I didn't think these were the best use of the gimmick. When Sarah has her gun sight set on the back of Miles Dyson's head, a single laser pointer from the back of the theater mimicked this, which we all loved. There were also lasers creating patterns on the screen any time we saw something through the eyes of the terminator, which as you remember are through that computer readout.
The whole thing was just generally enthralling, as an alternative to our normal T2 viewings though certainly not a replacement for it. I reckon Peter van Hoesen conceived of this project not because he thought "I can do better than Brad Fiedel's score" but rather, because he loved it so much that he wanted to add his own interpretation to a movie he loved dearly. All the rest of the times I watch that movie, I will get Fiedel's score, so I'm glad I got van Hoesen's once.
And the cumulative impact of this experience was having a strange emotional impact on me. I don't usually get emotional during T2, and if I ever did, it would probably be what we think of as "spectacle tears," where the sheer size and scope of something moves us. In this case, I found myself getting a bit choked up at the film's actual emotion moments, something I don't think I'd ever experienced with this movie.
Before I let you go for the day, I did want to include a smattering of first-time observations about the movie itself. Or if not first time, then things I was reminded of that I wanted to mention to you now.
1) There's something inconsistent about Sarah's behavior when she's in the mental institution. Clearly she's been working on a campaign to be released, or at least get a visitation from her son, which has involved six months of good behavior. Good behavior that her doctor acknowledges. Why, then, has she also recently stabbed the doctor in the knee with his pen? Surely she would realize this sort of thing would be disqualifying for her release?
2) I think we're supposed to believe that the T-1000 finally getting into a close quarters fight with Sarah at the end is significant, because he's finally sampled her physically and can finally mimic her. When in reality, he already touched her way back at the institution, when his metal sword arm slashed down through the elevator roof and cut a groove into her shoulder. I know they never subsequently shared any spatial dynamics where mimicking her would have been a benefit, but he could have mimicked her at any point from the mental institution onward.
3) There's one single moment I find kind of cringe that I started thinking of as "the most Michael Bay moment in Terminator 2." It's the moment where Sarah, John and the T-101 pause to watch two kids at a service station pointing toy guns at each other and screaming at each other, that leads them to conclude that human beings are doomed. It's not that James Cameron is above hitting you on the head with a message, but the subsequent slow-mo image of the two kids wrestling with their guns, silhouetted just a little by the sun, made me think of that as right out of the Michael Bay playbook. I mean, when you come down to it, Bay is basically just a very shitty version of Cameron, right?
4) This is something I always say about T2, so it's not new, but I continued to be annoyed by the fact that John and the T-101 just watch for five minutes as small puddles of the T-1000 reassemble themselves after being heated up following the liquid nitrogen freeze. They could have been miles away by the time he fully reformed, yet instead they're barely 50 paces ahead of him.
5) And speaking of John, I really appreciated how good Edward Furlong is in this movie. I think there might be some people out there who find his at-times squeaky performance to be cringe in the same way Jake Lloyd's performance as Anakin Skywalker is cringe, but I feel just the opposite about Furlong. I feel like this is one of the great child acting performances out there, to be honest. I was noticing little details of his performance, like the moment when he's looking at his mother as she tries to bury him under bulletproof jackets in the fleeing police truck. In this one prolonged expression you see three things: 1) sorrow that he never took his mother seriously all these years, 2) a sense of pride that his mother is so strong and capable, and 3) a desire to take in every part of her face, because it may be the last time he ever lays eyes on her. All in one expression.
I feel like there is a cohort out there -- maybe even the majority of people -- who think of The Terminator as the masterpiece in this series, and T2 as just a capable follow-up. Maybe even a great movie, but nowhere near in the league of the original Terminator in terms of creativity, world building, that sort of thing.
I just don't see it. I've seen the original Terminator only one time all the way through. Maybe twice, but no more than that. There's just nothing in that movie that makes me want to come back to it the way this one does. This is the masterpiece.
I said earlier that I might want to do a comparison viewing, especially while my Hear My Eyes experience is fresh. Well, I might get that chance. When the movie came up over dinner this week, in the context of discussing where Daddy would be on Thursday night, we thought it might be okay now to show these movies to our kids, even the 12-year-old, despite the violence. I think they could have more trouble with the nuclear annihilation scene -- that's the one that gave me trouble when I was 17 -- but I think the 12-year-old could probably handle all of it, and the 15-year-old certainly could. So that may be in the offing sometime soon.
If you happen to be in Melbourne and you happen to be reading this shortly after it's posted, there's one more performance tonight.
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