You can't just say "Special effects are bad." As the fireballs billow around you you might want to, but it's just not necessarily so—if you're making a sci-fi movie and the story involves combat, if you think the movie's world might allow for zap-guns then there's no reason to avoid having a lot of attractive, physically improbable flashes and blasts all over it. And while clever visual elisions can be effective in the right place, if your story is about a woman who's killing people with the fanged phallus in her underarm it would be a ridiculous distraction not to show the hideous thing at least a little. Special effects are only another technique, and like any other can be well or badly employed.

But there's a family of special effects which is always bad, which can't ever be used right because they don't have a right way of use. It's unclear whether movie production committees know just what they're doing when they use them—they may think they're only making more regular special effects—but they use them often and insistently. These can be known as extra-special effects.

What's typical of these is that unlike the sound of a church-bell in the distance or blood packets showing where everyone's been shot, the extra-special effect is not a consequence of the story—it's whipped cream on top of the cherry. The immense size of the Death Star, the glow in E.T.'s finger when he heals an Ouch, and Willie the Whale leaping to freeness over his little boy all have one thing in common: they're too much. WAY too much—too much by too much and a half. They are alien intrusions.

Every zap-gun does need its blast or nobody can get hit, but having to deal with a ship the size of a moon is a serious military handicap; since we're already pretending there's a planet-destroying ray, is there something wrong with also pretending it's a usable size? But the Death Star isn't there to be a battleship; the Death Star isn't even there to destroy the planet. The Death Star has come just so it can be SO BIG, because the one advantage that monstrous Death Stars have over sensible ones is that they make the audience open wide and say "OOH!"; planet-destruction is an afterthought. E.T. could have done his faith-healing just as well without lite-up fingers, but if you do light them up—and get the OOH out—you have a sight-bite suitable for framing in posters and happymeals. In this respect the movie is only a matrix in which advertisements for the marketing of the movie can be embedded: recursive product-placement.

So we can account for part of the non-relationship between an extra-special effect and the story it's inserted in by this fact that it's motivated by concerns external to the film in the first place; since it works for a different department there's no way it can be fully integrated. But to be a really good ad for its marketing it needs a further non-relationship, which is why the OOH is there.

Every work of fiction needs you to offer it a suspension of disbelief; for the duration of your relationship with it you agree to go along with its propositions despite your knowing that these events have not really happened. Regular special effects are here to offer their support for this agreement; they enrich the fiction's world—or maybe provide shortcuts through uninteresting areas; in any case, they help make the proposed world live.

Extra-special effects have the opposite function. Rather than helping you think along with the movie their purpose is to stop you from thinking about it at all. Instead of boosting that world's reality they assert its Truth, and they do so by astonishing you away from your capacity for evaluation.

The extra-special effect's antipathy towards the movie which surrounds it is prominent in something like Thelma and Louise, whose basic premise—it's possible to get so entangled in a situation that the only freedom left might be suicide—is one you might do a lot with if you care about it. If you don't, then when the time comes for the final reckoning you can accomplish it with glamorous girls magnificently driving their fabulous car into a spectacular canyon; they'll drag any thoughts the audience might have had about urgency and constraint along with them, and up they all go together in a big puff of myth.

The destructive power of that particular extra-special effect (any such death-by-heartwarming actually belongs to the subcategory of very-special effects) was evident in the confusion displayed on Honda Civics everywhere, which subsequently sprouted bumper stickers saying "Thelma and Louise live!" E.T. had also had a popular sticker noting that he lived, but in his movie he did—twice—and while metaphoric immortalities are nice the only serious point that could have come from Thelma and Louise is bound to literal death. By making that death so very fabulous that there was nothing to be said about it but "OOH!" the movie stopped them from dying and stopped itself from meaning anything it might have.

An extra-special effect simultaneously rouses and caters to a nonspecific belief-lust, or extra-special affect. Real belief, correct or false, is always belief in something; an extra-special effect creates intransitive belief—a kind of mental singularity, with an attraction so strong even thought can't escape its pull. Typified by the "I Want To Believe" poster on Agent Mulder's office wall, it only is: a general credulence, answering "yes!" where no question has been put. It's a belief which neither asserts nor denies; doesn't advise one action or discourage another. The aim of the extra-special effect is to create the awe of the slack-jawed yokel seeing the City for the first time. He knows full well he can't buy the little bridge over his local creek, but maybe he can buy this huge bridge here, because where there's an Empire State Building, couldn't anything be possible? And as with Brooklyn Bridges, so with happymeals.

Extra-special affect is the resolution of the paradox Hannah Arendt pointed out in the members of a desocialized, mass society, who come to be simultaneously utterly cynical and totally gullible: you can't believe anything They tell you, so instead look for all the things They aren't saying—untold stories, unsolved mysteries, the shocking truths behind all the scenes. When people will only believe the incredible you have to expect that their belief will be intransitive, since pure preposterousness can't support and doesn't want any organized principles. That's why so much of Fox's programming is devoted to alien autopsies and other world records. If they can show you someone spinning more basketballs than any human has been known to spin before, what is there to say but "wow"? And having said "wow", can you then deny the significance of what you've seen?

Robin Williams is an extra-special effect all by himself, as is William Hurt. The low, low budget of The Blair Witch Project was used as a post-production extra-special effect, so flogged in every piece of publicity that admiration of its economy was part of its viewing experience; had there been Blair Witch happymeals—as there certainly should have been—the boxes would have been printed with the little stick-man on the sides and spreadsheets on the ends. And of course, all that Disney touches turns extra-special—they do the really advanced work, fabricating extra-specialties that carry their OOH for ninety minutes at a time. Fantasia 2000, which starts with flying whales and ends with a volcano which is Evil, is a gasp riot.

It's all about sex in the end. What's the last thing on your mind at climax? Everything. And that's the way you provide the production committees with the best value for their investainment dollars.

October 18, 2000

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