Power Word: Kill Recently I've seen a rash of movies based on the really creepy idea that if you see a certain thing, you're dead. In The Ring it's an image on a video tape that causes the viewer to die one week later. In Fear Dot Com it's a web site that kills the viewer forty eight hours later. So these movies got me thinking about what elements I'd take from the see = death mythos if I were to write my own movie. Well, it'd have to make a little more sense. I realize I'm just slapping the face of horror movies when I say that. And I'm not just mocking horror movies in general. I mean, sure, there's a boat-load of really bad horror movies that just don't make sense. But then there's some really really good horror movies that just don't bother to make sense and are better because of it. Take The Birds or Dawn of the Dead for starters; we're never told why the birds attack or the dead come back to life -- and it makes the movies that much more horrifying. But for me to create a plot I'd have to enjoy writing it, and I'd think the lack of explanation would just bug me to no end if I tried to do so. I'll leave explanationless horror to the experts, and I'll just suspend my disbelief for the two hours I enjoy their movie. So anyways... what's the deal with the see = death mythos? Fortunately we live in a world where everyone can grasp the concept of the crashing computer. We've all had badly designed computers completely lock up and need a forced reboot because it tried to run some bad code somewhere. And let me tell you, if you think Microsoft puts out a piece of shit operating system, they've got nothing on evolution. Check it out - evolution is design, by mistake, by the lowest bidder. Design which is muddled along until the inspection agency (death before mating) happens to not notice any violations. You've got no idea how your brain works. I mean, sure, parts are understood; chemical balances, electrical impulses... but these are just as likely to tell you how the brain conceives of thought as a Victorian era phrenology map. You have no operation manual and no manufacturer's guarantee on your noggin. Best you can say is, well, the brain seems to work so far. So what's to say there isn't some image, or sound, or thought, that doesn't just cause the old grey sponge to lock up hard. Squeeeee-poof -- and someone let's the magic smoke out of the capacitor. Now, if I were filming some actor being hit by the effect, I'm sure there's all sorts of hideous things you could have him do to portray it. Any even half way plausible side-effect or symptom could accompany the seizure -- Kuru like laughing, a single tear, a body-rending shudder or the nice magnetic-snap of rictus. The brain's just locked up the autonomic functions -- what's to say what the other random neurons might do. Of course, the hardest part would be to introduce the killing effect to the poor victims in the script. You can't really have the see = death object made by humans... anyone who crafted it would be a victim. Half the humor in the Monty Python World's Deadliest Joke skit is that teams of scientists worked on separate sections of the joke in isolation. You just can't have a human last long enough, once they think up the killing effect, to record it in any way. I guess you could have it be the words spoken by some alien in a first contact situation, or some glyph scrawled on the far side of Pluto. But I think I'd shy away from having an intelligence of any sort create it... the point of the piece is that the see = death object kills sentience, dead. Like intellectual Raid. So that means you have to introduce it naturally. Something found in nature... but with a pattern that is malignant. A image in a peculiar recursive design on some conch shell, or our own alpha-waves mapped onto an audible spectrum, or some new branch of mathematics. Of course, all of these start stepping on the dominion of god. And just as Carl Sagan played with the wonderful idea of god leaving a message in the endless bits of pi... who's to say the little message isn't just a little bit of cheese in the tines of a mousetrap. That instead of god, it's a cautious creator that sewed that particular land-mine, or thought virus into the universe. A line of in the sands of understanding, and intellectual cattle-grate. Maybe the movie I'd make would start up with a theorist, cozy in thought, squirreled away in his den, pondering upon some new way to solve some classic problem. It's a pity Fermat's last equation has been solved, it'd be perfect. On the table there's the latest issue of American Mathematician, open to some new article... the author of the article didn't realize it, but the article's advances are perfect for the theorist's own work. He's on to something, he's tapping the desk with his fingers, he's concentrating, we close up on his face and suddenly, his eyes are wide with insight... and then the camera pulls back slowly... back... back... to reveal the thin trickle of blood dripping out of the ears. Ok, so I'm no Michael Crichton... who cares, it creeps me out. i,jasona

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