Fantasy Phallus Fallacy: SATURN 3

While directed by Stanley Donen, this troubled production originally belonged to award winning Kubrick/Star Wars production designer John Barry; it was his story back in 1978, British bad boy novelist Martin Amiss turned it into a script, all this beautiful production design was in place but then--as the story goes-- Kirk's titanic male ego and a difficult-to-control robot threw Barry for a loop and after a few days of floundering, Kirk basically launched a one-man mutiny until Donen stepped in. Unfortunately as a result of too many cooks, Saturn 3 doesn't really pull far enough in any direction to make much of an impression, but it's really not that bad, especially on the slick Shout Blu-ray. I won't go so far as to say it's great, but if anyone had the right to mish-mash the style, look and sound of 2001, Star Wars and Alien with the pre-Lucas sci fi of Kubrick, Charles Heston dystopia films and emergency botanical ark ships (all the rage in the 70s, i.e. Silent Running), it's Barry, who was production designer and Star Wars and Clockwork Orange, among others.


And the idea of getting Martin Amiss to write the script was a good one, time has declared. In 1980 the 'slow fall from the top of the mountain' by the Great White Male, boozy and self-righteous and self-loathing in equal measure, greeting his immanent "flush" with a fuck you to the world - holla - was a little old-fashioned in 1980 (unless it was "literally" an adaptation of a classic novel and given Merchant-Ivory gloss, ala Huston's Under the Volcano). Now that most English Departments in the USA at least are focused in on correcting the balance of old straight white guys to everyone else in "the canon," it's easy to forget just how many damn writers there are chronicling their Great White Male's slow softening, so many midlife crisis affairs, even today living life ensconced in the Ivory tower, their mid-life crisis invariably consists of bedding one of their students rather than getting a motorcycle.

This passing of the male middle aged nudist license plate, and Amiss' space drugs and kinky sex seem to be simmering just out of reach on cutting room floors of the nervous censor and second-guessing producer's minds of SATURN 3, luckily there's a whole site devoted to the strange saga of this film, Gregory Moss's indispensable Something is Wrong on Saturn 3. Better even than the film itself That's the heavy trip underwriting the Great White Male in Decline novel, and it's certainly very Martin Amiss-esque, the subtext roiling underneath the couple vs. deranged robot motif, all the rage in the pre-Star Wars environmental issue sci-fi verse. This subtext makes it one of the last 'adult' themed sci fi films. Like Cheever, or Fitzgerald, Amiss' novels are full of drugged debauchery and fearless examinations of the disintegrating straight white male alcoholic psyche as his past catches up with him and dying alone... except maybe...except in Amiss, maybe, this girl who had a crush on him as a child now grown to legal age... a last life ditch life preserver in a Jon Krakauer-level storm. And in reality, an illusion, a mirage, even if she's real.
And if Roman Polanski had directed it, Saturn 3 might be considered a classic, he would contextualize the triangle much better: the 'young psycho' who joins an isolated couple (younger woman, older man) for head games in some enclosed isolated space where the younger interloper stirs the older man into displays of virility and dominance which the girl can find alternately childish, frightening, pathetic, or sexy, or all of the above depending on the type and her mood-moment to moment: Knife in the Water, Cul de Sac, and others in that vein, like: Purple Noon, Dead Calm and the vast empty "this empty planet ain't big enough for the 'three of us' triangles of Last Woman on Earth; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and more, I'm sure.

"This is literature, baby"

I think Kirk wanted this role because it let him harpoon his own priapic Adonis image, as his frequent co-star (they had great chemistry) Burt Lancaster did in 1968's The Swimmer. It seemed only fair, and competitive, perhaps. Burt being shirtless all the way through (and shoeless),  Kirk would have to one up him, and this role let him throttle a young upstart while totally naked. Since Lancaster overplays his hand by getting too traditional and possessive with his young blonde tag-a-long Julie (Janet Landgard), Kirk starts the film already hooked up (for three years) with Farrah, saving us all a lot of unpleasant angst over his antiquated smoov style. It's creepy enough watching him and Farrah shower together; in this early scene we see them, facing opposite directions --she, talking in an indoor voice, one lover to another, he, mugging ridiculously and shouting in her face, perhaps imagining the foley of the water would be louder. Between their mismatched style--her acting for the 70s small screen, he acting like he's doing a Disney voiceover, and the disconnect of interloper Harvey Keitel dubbed with the voice of a different actor, and Hector, who speaks in all three of their recorded voices, there's a sense that only Kirk's character, Adam, is actually 'alive' in the sense of being whom he is, and that this fucked up future is partly his fault for living this privileged bachelor w/sexy young thing isolation while all his same-age friends exclude them from bridge parties and their own children gradually turn into robots.

The SWIMMER, living the American dream, Kafka-style.

No one wants to end up like Lancaster's Mr. Merrill, hammering at his locked screen door or Max von Sydow, whimpering that Barbara Hershey is his only link to the outside world in Hannah and her Sisters, that's chump stuff. You have to act like you're fine even if the walls close in. Kirk's Adam sure doesn't give a shit about the outside world even without her, but he also knows it's inevitable she'll leave, and if she stays around it will be even worse. In space, no one can hear you scream, but neither can they see you cry and snivel, so snivel away. Pain can be endured better without the humiliation of some girl trying to snap you out of it because she thinks you're faking, or "being ridiculous" as one girl sneered at me when I was in a K-hole, lying on the ground in the at a Califone show. Do you want her to remember you as a man, or a whining little bitch who won't believe your in a pit, dug by malicious elves made of white noise static? When you're alone on a moon, you can simper and clutch the old photographs in peace, and enjoy every last self-indulgent choking gust of sob in peace. You can be naked, just for one day...

In the Gloaming (NIAGARA)

But on Saturn 3, the term "day" is meaningless.

And then, once no one's around to care one way or the other, you stop performing your little dance and the crushing anxiety dies instantly. Man, were you ever tired of having to hold back your gasses and suck in your gut all the the time, trying to act frisky and carefree when all you wanted to do is sit in a rocking chair and listen to "In the Gloaming" like Joseph Cotten in Niagara.

Maybe that exhibitionist brio can help explain the years 1992-3 when among other things Keitel himself was full-frontal naked in not one but TWO different art house hits, THE PIANO and BAD LIEUTENANT. Can it be that working with Kirk on this film planted some kind of priapic seed that bore nudist fruit when he he was finally old enough to have his own mid-life crisis?

The decision to create this beautifully modeled robot chassis - the ribs made of metal plates and muscle and tendon as pressurinzed tubing - with such a dumb little BoBo the owl meets a hermit crab eye stalks speaks to a genuine castration complex, for all his height and strength, this monster got no game, and no Cialis. His inherited obsession. Of course he remedies that later, Texas-style!

What's vexing is that beyond the character, Kirk Douglas the actor seems to be suffering from the vainglory of being both short/Napoleonic complex-ridden (which made him such a good villain in noirs like Out of the Past and The Killers) and old/"inadequate," in character and reality, a frustrated alpha male aging into the soft zone, making up for these "areas" perhaps by running around with his robe open at the waist, and being found in bed with Alex as often as possible. Amiss' vast knowledge of mid-life crises male vanity must have expanded tenfold when observing a titanic ego like Douglas': “When actors get old they get obsessed about wanting to be nude," Amiss noted in an interview, "and Kirk wanted to be naked.”

Even without all his posturing, Alex prefers "the Major" and there's no doubt that Benson is a grade-A nutcase (but you know how hot crazy people are in bed). He hasn't seen them actually fooling around, or heard Alex's frustrations with the Major's inadequacies in all his areas, so that quote about being inadequate... in every area, is just him just reacting to his own deranged mental images, seeing Adam as an impotent Cronus, devouring the young girl he desires rather than returning her to he sea (of boys her own age).

It's interesting to note that in the arc of the story, we follow not Kirk's Major Adam but the untrustworthy Benson (Harvey Keitel) an unstable pilot just denied his space license kills the original pilot for some unknown reason (deranged competitive foreshadowing?) and takes his place and then heads off to visit "the Major," Adam (Kirk Douglas), and Alex (Farrah Fawcett), a kind of May-December hippie couple (w/ cute dog) who are seldom out of their bathrobes. In charge of finding some means of growing enough food off world to feed the dying Earth, the couple are frolicking like a certain two cowboys on Brokeback Mountain. Benson is there like a hatchet man, the Randy Quaid, if you will, to tell Adam to stop pretending he's still carefree and casual to his young chippee and instead get some goddamn sharable results with his hydroponic setup.

To this end Benson is there to allegedly be setting up this swanky new robot named Hector. On his firs night he offers Alex a 'blue' and pre-emptively blows his chances with her by saying "you have a lovely body. May I use it?" as if she's just a kind of overside Kleenex. Yuck. Naturally the answer is no - but we remember how poorly he took the 'no' to his pilot license. "That's penally unsocial on Earth," to "use each other's bodies for pleasure." Noting the old Major is "obsolete, and frightened of the new ways." he refers to sexual permissiveness as 'hospitality' and mentions he eats dogs on Earth.

Despite his crass and psychotic manner, Keitel is impossibly gorgeous here, especially in his reptilian green space suit, and his new voice, compliments British actor Ray Dotrice! You'd think it would be off putting but that's why it works for Benson to make us uneasy around him in ways we wouldn't be it it was that endearing Mean Streets goombah-speak.

As the days/nights progress (there's no difference), Benson builds his only friend, a robot who soon turns on him when it absorbs his psychotic obsession with Alex. Benson keeps barging in on the happy couple in bed, showing off all the machine's new developments like a kid who never gives his parents a chance to have some uninterrupted mating time. He shows off Hector's brain thermos (stacked like Pringles in an electrified saline solution) and between their deductive power and Harold's steel-ribbed physique (modeled after the awesome if not entirely human sketches of Da Vinci), Benson has made a gorgeous intimidating monster, as good a use for all that sexual frustration as any. Was it Kirk who demanded the top be off, so to speak, the imposing thread member lobbed off at the head?

If you think this picture above is hot, just stare at her eyes and teeth for a few minutes and imagine  being a ten year-old and this is your very first ever poster (indeed it was one of 'THE' first ever posters,  certainly the first ever sold rolled up and available at the 7-11 counter where we got  comic books and tried to see the Playboy cover behind the brown partition. Staring staring at it for hours while half asleep in the early AM, still half-dreaming, super impressionable and easily terrified the way kids are.  Note the way the smile becomes desperate, pained, demonic, mocking, evil,  the eyes wide with terror and pain as if she's experiencing that terrible agony at the dentist when your jaw muscles start to ache from having to bare your full row of teeth,  open for so long at the dentist, now alternate that with that she's a devouring demon  (in the semi-dark her eyes and teeth seemed to glow, as if under a black light)

I'm running out of breath (30 years of smoking), but the film has a lot of good shit going: the Elmer Bernstein score hovers over the weird, 'half-assed attempt to be Kubrickian instead of what it is'-style opener - like a kid eager to be as cool as Richard Strauss without ripping off Also Spracht Zarathustra outright, so tempering his timpani bombast with ominous little Jerry Goldsmith Alien pipes and (his own) thunderous string rumblings while the equivalent of an Imperial cruiser travels (silently ala 2001- no engine roar) over the top of the screen towards the infinity point,  Bernstein, the man behind the music for both CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON is always way better than the material calls for, but never overdoes it. The set design and costumes are all awesome, a fusion of insect arthropod designs with astronaut suits like some cross between 2001, Star Wars, Microcosmos and Tales of Hoffman (below).

Another one of the cooler ideas at work is that Harvey has a jack in the back of his neck to connect to the brains to download his muscle and nervous system memory into Harold - connecting them and lifting and lowering his arms, etc. What he can't know, of course, is that his obsession with Alex is leaking over into Harold too, and thus a mighty Caliban is forming from the earth and ether. We realize why sanity was so important for this mission.

The problems too are many. Though he's in a dashing vaguely reptilian flight outfit and insect mask, his impassive features and dubbed voice wailing in voice over monotone about the older vs newer model man, there's no real conceivable threat from either the robot or Benson against naive Alex here, so nothing is at stake. The robot has no means of reproducing ala Demon Seed. So the real threat is just to the masculine vanity of Adam. His need to prove male omnipotency (in every area) was already considered the height of harpoonable offenses back in the 1980s; sensitive astronauts were too busy staring down their younger selves in the bathroom mirror of time to worry about, watching 2001 over and over.

Diabolik's pad; External view (deep in the caverns)

I'm partial to SATURN 3 because whenever I get the chance to sleep really really late I dream about a cavernous refuge just like Alex and Adam's groovy pad/greenhouse set-up. A deep basement bunker that's part Dr. NO's secret lair and part the bomb shelter in TERMINATOR 3 (and probably SILENT RUNNING which I haven't seen - as I don't want to imagine being stuck on a ship alone with Bruce Dern). It might seem weird that the villain's secret lair in a Bond movie, or a bomb shelter hewn from rock deep underground is my happy place, but I'm a Pisces, and need lots of alone time to not feel too self-absorbed when socializing, which is a very hard balance to make. But I think it's tied into relapsing, as there's barrels of whiskey down there, and always W.C. Fields tapes (and harkens back to basements of my youth); even the moldy smell is reassuring. For me, it's the ultimate escape (long as there's air conditioning and an elevator) as there's no long such a dichotomy as night and day, no time when one should be asleep or awake, no curfew or bed time or wake up time, just drunk time and oblivion. Drinking any other way is really just a tease.

So the whole SATURN 3 fantasia really resonates, especially being certain you, your girl and your dog are the only biological organisms things around. With its miles of multicolored neon tubing and build-in rock, oxygen producing plant life, the Saturn 3 hideout rocks an aesthetic that's like how I used to remember Space Port and Spencer's Gifts as a child in the 70s when the Montgomeryville (PA) mall first opened, and everything was new and strange and wondrous, lots of neon and gadgetry - the Sharper Image, projector TVs, Pong. It was like an adult amusement park, like how we imagined our own adulthood would be, all the things we could one day buy. SATURN 3's hydroponic pleasure palace reminds me of that, with samples of HR Giger biomorphic architecture (the hallways 'ribbed' with a spinal cord ceiling), the Death Star shiny black walls, colorful tubes galore, the Dr. No-style hewn rock walls incorporated into the arboreal dell. The set is beautifully elaborately lit, with a winding tunnel and mixture of greenery, rock, and primary color tubing; the feel is strangely both austere and gaudy. Defiantly depicted as a whirlwind of reactionary assertions of masculine identity, a final bird-flip from the crumbling Trans-Am and cowboy hat macho, the Burt Reynolds mustache and rug being slow being peeled off to show a bald screaming baby 80s.

In general though, what makes so many men like myself imagine as a kind of veritable 'happy place' a place deep deep underground (or underwater), with vats of whiskey, weed, movies and one or less (younger and therefor more impressionable and less judgmental) women, some bros dropping in and out to drink and watch old movies with, etc. is a chance to escape not just from nagging wives and mothers-in-law, work, and the IRS, but to avoid aging and/or dying, failures in family and all the things which maturity and linear development along the familial curve all but ensures wear a man down like an icicle sharpened on a grindstone. For one buddy's dad, it was always Das Boot, watched alone in the corner of his study with a big snifter of cognac; we turned him onto the John Huston Moby Dick, which we had duped from a rental by filming the screen with his video camera. For Howard Hughes, of course, as we all know, it was Ice Station Zebra. I understood the appeal of the frozen north and the submarine, but I'd never want to be stuck down there with Earnest Borgnine hamming it up as a Russian double agent? But you get the similarity - submarines are pretty "deep deep down" (i.e. the underground lair in Danger: Diabolik. It's the repository of all the aging male's dreams, the happy safe zone of sleep outside space and time and consequence.

But then, the sub is torpedoed by the shrill alarm clock or the wife waking up to trudge downstairs and give you an angry sleepy stare- resentful you'd do anything fun without her, though she turns all fun to stone with her touch. The ship is sinking even lower, so quick! Desert Island discs! The ship going down fast; your library is too damned vast. Grab what you can.What do you grab?

I doubt anyone would grab SATURN 3 in that situation but they should, because it's a movie about grabbing those same discs, so it's meta. Besides, none of us have or likely will experience that opportunity to actually be marooned on the desert island, so we don't know what we'll be in the mood to watch when we're there. When I was leaving my wife for a younger woman, shhhh, 13 years ago, I grabbed together a decent notebook full of essential movies and we drove the hell out of there, my Alex and I. Luckily my wife cooled down and didn't set fire to the rest as she promised. That's as close as I came. The girl I was with found it impossible to pay attention to any of the cool films I tried to show her, only POISON IVY. She loved that, as I love it. And I loved Tom Skerritt in in, as the dad who falls off the wagon (love that convert morning vodka pull) after being seduced by a young prime-of-her-hotness Drew Barrymore while wife Cheryl Ladd slowly dies of some respiratory illness up in her silken boudoir and 'plain' daughter Sara Gilbert begins to realize her hottie friend is blowing up her spot. That'll teach you to try and make friends, Sara Gilbert!


That's why the idea of Benson/Hector blowing up Kirk's spot works in SATURN 3, because it gets that the 70s mustache is coming off with or without our aid; it works because, frankly, it's learned not to trust people just because we're lonely and they're hot, it works because it too knows that beneath its confused whirlwind of defiant macho sensitivity structures, the unfulfilled desires for what it can't have (chosen especially for their rarity) lurks absolutely nothing. The aesthetic of every straight white male's man cave even if he is self-aware enough to laugh sardonically at his own absurdity, reflects this grim gallows' void lurking in the heart of sexual gratification, of 'sleeping around'. In that sense, SATURN 3 is not just a pre-ALIEN pre-STAR WARS science fiction in the SILENT RUNNING x WESTWORLD vein but a male version of BARBARELLA, It's a tale of a time when before he had to be a man with a career and a wife, a man was free to roam the galaxy in his private mobile sanctum, wall-to-wall carpeted van and kickass hydrophonc speakers, 8-track player blasting rockin' tunes, getting high as a kite, and tooling around exploring the vast emptiness around their home planet township. Barbarella's own ship resembles this - with crazy colors, some bizarre shape halfway between a lipstick and a triple dildo, and inside pink wall to wall carpet and  a big mirror screen. Sooo sexy, without guilt or slut shaming either, those two things invented by shrewish wives and their priests around your kitchen table while you're gone three days or weeks at a time and come in reeking of perfume, sex, and alcohol/cigarettes/pot... fuck those sober idiots! I'm not peein' in no damned cup, mom!

Well, of course she won, as far as I know. Yet even today the uninhibited great white male in decline has a fighting chance for a WILD BUNCH blaze of glory, as long as he grabs that chance with both barrels, by the horns, and with a finger saying fuck all y'all to the world.

So that's the deal, as long as it's with the fishes, a man can then sleep around all he wants sans guilt sans eyes. Sand and crustaceans consumed the rest. If you dare let go of even blaming the robot, blaming the girl, and instead blaming EVERYBODY, then every week can be shark week, and stiffness will never be a problem again (thanks to Rigor Mortis, the new craze all the older folks used back in the day and still do today where there is only night).

From R-L: Daughter (Anima), Magus (non du pere), Robot, young interloper

From L-to-R: (Daughter-age) Lover, reprobate (ex-magus / 'primal father'), young interloper, Robot

Simmer awhile with the comparison maybe of 1953's Forbidden Planet with Saturn 3 and the archetypal resonance is clear. The anima was a nubile daughter in the 50s, coming of age in the arms of a young man who didn't have time to sit around on porches and take walks in the Sicilian Hills; he had to go to war, so courtship was over a weekend, because his combat pension should go to someone and if it will help her stay out of the brothel, or whatever--but the 50s was losing its patina fast - in the crafty eyes of Wilder and his leering Fred MacMurray executives, 'banging' cocktail waitresses and secretaries and every unmarried woman expected to be a slut for any man who left a $100 tip or promised a raise. Their angry wives at home were busy too though, starting women's lib and raring to shove their sexuality right down their husbands' throats, which I applaud, naturally,.

Inside every red riding hood is a grandmother-wearing old wolf and vice versa... the anima and magus/sage on their island, alone together, Pai Mai and Beatrix Kiddo on the hilltops. The magus need never be jealous of her leaving him, never crave the insurance he doesn't die alone by the radiator (not sure why, but there's always a radiator), unless he can, in a sense, merge with the young man who takes his symbolic place (who comes at first against the patriarch's wishes, i.e. he 'intrudes'). In other words, the magus is not just himself, not just her father or the figure who worries of dying alone by the radiator, but the ultimate signifier - pointing to naught else but the mirror, not to see him for he is not even reflected, so merged is he with the infinite, but so you can see you. Or whatever -As in Mozart's The Magic Flute (where he's called Sarastro - bellow left) and Shakespeare's The Tempest (Prospero).

The young man earns his right to take his place only after a trial by fire (namely to test courage and resolve) and showing all good qualities for the patriarch; but if he passes he allows the magus to abdicate his role as ultimate signifier. This enables him to chill out with his parenting. That's the trick -his daughter's wedding is a symbolic death of his own split self and let go of his duty to represent the ultimate siginifier, he can merge full with his anima and be the indulgent grandfather instead of the stern authority who sets the bed time (i.e. John Wayne after the climactic fight in Red River - watch him closely and you see the change, the way his whole body and mood lightens from passing the load). This is how he is able to not have to actually die to be free of his anxiety about his "little girl's" welfare without him. Unless he's devoured by his own primordial freaks of the Id before he has time to have a heart attack chasing his grandchild through the tomato plants, he dissolves again; from the Fisher King and now....reborn as the cleansing fire in Harry's eyes. There wasn't enough time, Michael. But then there never is.

We can consider in Forbidden Planet how Morbius' daughter Alta is just at the 'ripe' age right when Nielsen arrives, as if summoned by his Krell-boosted will ala Prospero's storm heralding spell in the Tempest, his dire warnings and protestations being merely part of the rite of passage. In SATURN 3's Adam encouraging Alex to go down to visit Earth without him even before the obsessive young nutjob arrives with his robot. Adam is facing his own realization that one shouldn't let one's younger paramour see you get too old, lest they lose their glowing image of their father/benefactor/mentor as a cool character instead of an old pantaloon-and-slippers grandfather-type, soft and "inadequate in every area" sulking in the motel room, making models of old model T cars and smoking furiously to "In the Gloaming" while Marilyn dances with the young bucks outside in a provocative pink dress listening to "Kiss" while the Falls roar below.


Comparing the Saturn 3 and Forbidden Planet too is very revealing  too in contrast about the effect two decades of shifting cultural mores on sci fi fantasy, which--more than any other genre--is very intellectual and very immature at the same time. As in Shakespeare's Tempest, Saturn 3 offers an array of ages, maturity levels, social classes, of high and low comedy, poetry, tragedy, and terror. All three tales- Shakespeare's and the two sci fi pictures, offer an older man reverie of an island paradise of self --just the ego, a devoted anima (Ariel / Altair / Alex), and a dark primordial vast unconscious of which the magus has developed at least partial mastery (fairies / a planetary space complex / the Krell) not knowing they've opened the door to dark elements deeper than their conscious mind could even see (Caliban / Hector / Monster from the Id). Just as with Adam and Alex's little love bunker under the moon's surface, the Krell wonders are all Morbius' alone to explore- he doesn't even bring Altair down there - it's a giant massive man cave / den all to himself, alive and ever-humming and ready to erect whatever's needed from the ether. 

The age difference between Saturn 3 lovers Kirk and Farrah is 32 years; the age difference between Forbidden Planet's daughter Anne Francis and father Walter Pigeon - 33 years.  In CONCLUSION:  Sorry if this is all over the place. I'm getting senile. I've always had a soft spot for this film as I was still in the throes of my Charlie's Angels fever when it came out (though not quite as vivid as it had been a few years earlier) my scrapbook laden with photos torn from magazines, the Farrah poster still on my wall (her teeth terrifying me in the dead of night --they reflected the moon very well and gave her a voracious succubus look). This movie's not great by any stretch, but it doesn't deserve the sneers heaped on it, most of them by people just looking to kick an old man when he's down. See, I'm a fan of Kirk especially in his 40s film noir easy going bad guy routine with Mitchum in Out of the Past, with Stanwyck in The Strange Loves of Mrs. Ivers, and with Lancaster and Gardener in The Killers. But his work here in Saturn 3 is the worst performance ever, by anyone, yet it's brilliant. An aging hopelessly insecure short guy complex-stricken superstar coasting past the 60 yard line, vainly trying to seem jubilant and airy like his spritely maiden Alex, he comes off instead as delusional and disturbing. You can see the wild panic in his eyes, the way his mouth contorts in grins as phony as a three dollar bill. I can see why less perceptive critics just thought the acting was bad for the whole film, considering the small cast, and didn't dare dig deeper than the surface in an attempt to find something good (i.e. comparing it to Star Wars and Alien rather than to Silent Running and Soylent Green). All that said, it ends rather on point-- the trick to it is, as Jake Gideon does in All that Jazz, to kick over the board right before you're set to lose the game . The tragedy of the May-December thing is that there is really no honorable way out. You can have kids I guess, but that's kind of expensive, time-consuming, and grandiose (we see the end game of that in Notes on a Scandal), just continuing the lie. You can encourage her to leave, to go see the world and do new things (alone - you're too tired to mess with that dull tourist nonsense) but she won't, not without you. She doesn't want to go, she says, so much as "have already been." (one of Saturn 3's throwaway great lines).  I can assure you Kirk does a fine job, his viciousness towards Alex, and his final ah screw it, I blame everyone and fuck all y'all final declaration of fuck it is every great white paunchy two-legged Ahab's dream adieu. Sure it's a weird ending, a bit of a downer, but it's real - at the end Alex is on a ship heading back to earth, it looks like a first class cabin - replete with cocktails and full views of the approaching Earth. Mission accomplished. Kind of. Man, I'm not judging Kirk here, or myself, or any other schmuck who took the red pill, so to speak, as long as they're artists, actors, writers or characters. Just fascinated as these kind of things were still kind of shocking even in the 70s. I'm not attempting to justify it, but rather to consider the decade that bore it to the 50s, the more repressed, conservative time. Say what you will about Morbius alone on Altair 4 with his nubile virgin daughter Altaira (or Alta, to her friends), sequestered as the pair me be, as nubile yet confident as she is, there's no indication Alta's visited at night by some Krell energy incubus Caliban conjured from the most repressed and primordial depths of Morbius's subconscious Krell-brain-boosted mind. That shows us three things: 1) a willingness to please the censors (it was MGM, after all, that appeaser of Catholics, that naif, that irresponsible mind control programmer); 2) an almost idyllic faith in fatherly nobility which is admirable especially in today's film market where incestuous creep fathers (ala Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) are the only substitute to deadbeat weekend schmucks (even if its only on some weird abstracted dream level), or bland Greg Kinnear replacements. and 3) that with his boring paternal sense of measured scientific curiosity (4), Morbius has mastered the 'no of the father' Lacan writes of, in that he has relinquished the adolescent insistence on enjoyment, on pursuit of desire rather than knowledge. I've let myself ramble this far to indicate that, masculine identity crisis or no, Kirk is a MAN and his vanity issues are clearly related to being a man when erections weren't guaranteed at $17 a pill, and were therefore priceless. For I know as only lucky few others that unless the man is allowed his midlife crisis--the younger woman, the sports car, the offworld bachelor pad greenhouse, the weed/weightlifting weirdness of Lester Birnim--he can't realize that these things don't work anymore than throwing a picture of a pitcher of water onto a raging fire. Try telling this to the guy looking at the picture of water on the wall while he's burned at the stake, though, and he won't listen. Scotty on the ledge, he might fool someone somewhere into thinking he's still got his vim and vigor, some young thing who'll call him Mr. Smearcase and bat her eyelashes, but he can't fool himself and so it's all worthless. But at least he can finally realize it doesn't much matter how old he is or how boring he rambles, nobody cares, in space nobody can here you wheeze your last. There's joy in that once the despair wears off. Manly self assurance only comes when it's no longer relevant. Stripped of its hot rod and babes training wheels and ready for its OK Corral showdown, it's allowed first one last kiss-off, pushing the Farrah away and flipping off the world. Whether it was all a show to confuse the 'bot or no, it worked, didn't it? They all got free. Who's watering the plants while you're gone though, no one can say, or wants to. It's not your problem anymore, you free-ass mother.

NOTES
1. Something is Wrong on Saturn 3.
2. The 'boring' part is key, as part of the surrender to the symbolic castration of the social order (symbolized here perhaps by the jack in the back of Harvey's head) is the ability to let go of any need for approval, of being an entertainer, the father as embodier of the order is the "ultimate signifier" - and in making the law so Disney education film boring he asserts its truth.
3.... uh..
4. Wherein Kirk takes over on a ailing swashbuckler pic at Cinecatta when director Eddie G. Robinson takes ill. Robinson reads the pic is doing well so climbs out of bed to go take credit for it, spurred by his Lady Macbeth of a wife - the back-stabbing and egoic insecurity of Hollywood, in other words, trails BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL characters (kind of) across the pond.