F/X PORN by David Foster Wallace : If you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres [F/X blockbusters and porn ] become so obvious they’re eerie. Wallace makes an interesting and wholly reasonable case against Terminator 2, which, he claims, is an appalling betrayal of 1984’s The Terminator. I’ve always considered T2 to be inferior in many ways to its predecessor, but Wallace tears into T2 with both intellectual and practical arguments that can’t really be denied. The main thing that always upset me about the sequel was its blatant departure from the ironic way in which T1 solved the time travel paradox… in effect, T2 succumbs to the paradoxical nature of time travel! Why would you do such a thing? Apparently it has something to to with Wallace’s Inverse Cost and Quality Law (ICQL), which states that “the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be.”
