NOTE: I've posted this to both the badsubjects list and Screen-L list, so if you want to reply, check your mail header or you'll show up on both lists. HERE COME THE SPOILERS...... | | | | | | | \ / A couple of things re: "True Lies" and directorial autobiography. 1) Early on in the film, I could've sworn that I was seeing a kind of mea culpa on the part of Cameron, whose marriages to producer Gale Ann Hurd and director Kathryn Bigelow both dissolved loudly in the gossip press (at last head count, he was buddying up with Linda Hamilton, o ye of inquiring minds!). In effect, I was noticing this subtext: By day, I'm a director of exciting action films that exploit violence and sexy women and snappy (yet pithless) dialogue); but by night, I'm a family man. Things in the film eventually took many other turns, of course, but I think there is something of an attempt to exculpate the workaholic husband and father afoot in the film. 2) Several posters (on both lists) have alluded to the cursory inclusion of the daughter in the story, but let's take another look at her. We are explicitly told that she's 14 and that Harry and Helen have been married for 15 years. (Harry has been a spy for 17 years, even if he's only been teamed up with Gib for 15.) When the daughter (I'm sorry, wasn't it Dana?) is almost busted for stealing from Gib's wallet, Gib then suggests to Harry that she's sexually active, a fact that almost drives the pathologically jealous Harry to strike his partner. Fast-forward to the Miami skyscraper, and here's Hafez Al Terrorist arriving astride a nuke (a la Slim Whitman in "Dr. Strangelove") and then chasing the sexually innocent daughter up an elongated pole. Big Daddy swoops in to quash the bad guy (to stop him from, er, exploding his device); he literally emasculates him at one point, in a Three Stooges-style knock-in-the-balls, and then he launches him on his own, er, pitard to his death. Chaste little Dana is returned to earth (after crawling back into Daddy's metal condom, right?). This may or may not be an autobiographical concern of Cameron's (I have no evidence at hand that he and Hurd have an adolescent daughter, though they would've been 26 and 24, respectively, in 1990, when Dana would've been born), but it blends nicely with treatments of the daughter-in-peril in more explicitly autobiographical works by Martin Scorsese ("Cape Fear," in which the auteur's own past returns in a viscious reification to claim the protagonist's daughter -- Juliette Lewis' best friend was in fact played by Domenica Scorsese) and Francis Coppola ("Godfather 3," in which Sophia Coppola was unfairly cited for bad acting (in a film featuring the inexpressive Andy Garcia and the hammy Eli Wallach!) when in fact all she did was play a rich, powerful man's duaghter, which is what she is -- don't forget that her last, pathetic act in the picture is to look just to the side of the camera (right where the director would be sitting on the set, no?) and say, 'Daddy' and then die). What I'm saying is that there's a distinct confessional strain to the film that goes deeper than the "obvious" "misogynies" or "feminisms" in it, and that these autobiographical elements -- coming to the surface in a genre not exactly noted for its capacity for delving into the creative soul -- may be in part to blame for some of the unusual mixtures of tone and message the film can't rise above. OBTW, never mind OJ Simpson as an intertext: How about Tom Arnold talking about failed marriages to a bloated celebrity?! Deliver me from John Tesh! Cheers, Shawn Levy | "If we only had a lousy little grand [log in to unmask] | We could be a millionaire!"