Shirts or Skins, a 2014 poetry chapbook by Jim Redmond

Director’s Commentary
—from The Terminator, at Tech-Noir

To see beyond the Terminator (his singularity conceived in hyperalloy, his slow lurch as someone off screen sweats out a few bars of “you’ve got me burning,” which slips back into a sort of mechanized thump and grind as he nears the camera). To see beyond the point of his trigger finger. To see beyond the bright aurora clouding your exit. To see beyond an end. Is there a point on the strobed horizon or is the gaze beyond gazed into … What is that look on Sarah Connor’s face and is she even the right Sarah? I can’t pin it down. But I keep coming back to it: the knowledge to end all knowledge, a loneliness here (to be the last Sarah Connor and not even sure), a staring into the abyss, which coddles the scrimmed reflection of self. Everything slowed down even more so, stretched out through the fisheye lens; the dilation of that pause with the gun just barely pulled back. I ease into her face here, and her eyes (deep with knowing, but also shallow with death, a give in the eyes here, not a take) and even her lips, half-pursed, half-opened; a stoic indecision, whetting that horizon. There is a hum; there is a frequency in this closeness (what the laser connects and what it hints toward): the bright point of death that shines her forehead into recognition. Here, unlike in the other scenes, the shot is never fired.

 

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