While fancying up the site, I still managed to find time for some cultural stimulation. Since I didn't write them up before, I'm doing it now. Join me in pretending that these things just happened.

This is how I described Freejack to one of my friends who had not seen it:

• Emilio Estevez: race car driver who dies in a crash
• Mick Jagger: bounty hunter from the future who takes Emilio's body before he dies
• Anthony Hopkins: powerful executive from the future who wants to put his mind in Emilio's body
• Rene Russo: Emilio's girlfriend in the past, Anthony's employee in the future

You can imagine the drama that unfolds. (That is, if you can wrap your head around those star-studded variables.)

I would have put a spoiler alert or something, but the plot is alternately so obvious and so poorly developed that it would be disrespectful to my reader(s).

The thing about the future in Freejack, is that it is like Victorian England---but with laser guns. The majority of the population lives in abject poverty, which we see entails wild-west-style fistfights and clothes stolen from the cast of Oliver Twist. The lucky upper class (led by Anthony Hopkins, and populated by Rene Russo and some other not-famous people) lives in an office park. They drive wacky round cars, and have filtered the air somehow to make it breathable (everyone in the poor districts has whooping cough and psoriasis or something from pollution).

See, it turns out that Anthony Hopkins is dying, and wants to use his company's "Spiritual Switchboard" to take his mind and put it in another body. Why not just clean up a poor person and take their body? Because clearly they are too damaged by the atmosphere that stops at the border of the rich district to live a healthy life ever again. So, Mick Jagger gets hired, sucks Emilio Estevez's body out of the past, the doctors are about to wipe his mind, and in a post-apocalyptic convoy attack, Emilio escapes into the environs, making him a "freejack."

In the ensuing plot, we meet a cussing nun, the sleazy agent from Emilio's past who remains sleazy, and a magical negro who eats rats on a dock by the river and speaks exclusively in metaphors related to eagles.

While I haven't entirely figured out what this blog is going to be about, it is not going to be about plot summaries of every piece of media I shove in my brain. (Although I couldn't help myself this time: the plot of Freejack is just too good.) Some analysis or cultural criticism is in order, I guess, and even though I am out of practice, I'm just going to kick it from my head:

Out of all the themes in Freejack (and there are a lot), the one that they repeat the most is the cognitive difficulty of involuntary time travel. First, Emilio Estevez has to figure out where he physically is, waking up in a moving doctors office with a mind-wiping laser pointed at his head. Second, once he gets that he's still in New York, but things are weird, he has to figure out the social system.

This social system involves unfamiliar technologies (phones that can see you), neologisms ("freejack," for one), and a completely re-worked political economy. When he tries to take shelter in a church, he is assaulted by a cussing nun with a gun, and when he tries to go to his girlfriend's old apartment, the new tenants scream "Freejack!" and point a gun at him. His first contact with someone he knows from the past is similarly fraught: his old agent tries to turn him in for a government reward, and, of course, assaults him with a gun.

When Emilio finally finds his old girlfriend, he confronts all three of these issues at once: she assumes he is some sort of technological trick being played on her, so she responds using the current language about legality and policing that he doesn't understand. When she resists him, he tells her how what has been 18 years for her has only been one day for him, and this is the crux of the movie's plot.

Emilio's experience (and the experience of the audience) is a sudden change in the entire social system, and the point of the movie seems to be "what if" this cultural shift happened overnight? While everyone else in the movie has slowly adapted to the new way of things, Emilio plays the role of alienated observer. Time travel enables a strange sort of verfremdungseffekt where sudden defamiliarization is not the result of artistic intent, but the reality of a suddenly displaced person. Emilio Estevez becomes a walking defamiliarizer, shocking people out of their complacency with the state, and bringing with him to morally bankrupt 2009 the values of idyllic 1991.

Okay, that one got a little of control. Here's to reining in the lit major talk in the future---sorry if I alienated you.