The two cows take a road trip to discuss how a decade of bored contentment in America gave rise to both the Gen-X slacker and prank culture, laying the seeds for a generational conflict that takes center stage in this highly re-watchable 2001 John Dahl thriller.

Oh to be young and in college, destined for a life of contented mediocrity, financially and socially secure enough not to take anything too seriously. A period of American complacency (coming after the end of the Cold War and before 9/11), it’s not surprising that the nineties birthed both prank culture (think: Jackass, Tom Green, Punk’d) and alt-comedy, with its meta-ironic detachment from everything. To the boomer generation who either fought in, or against, the Vietnam War, these Gen-X slackers must have looked like nihilistic spoiled brats. 

It’s thus fitting that in a movie where two impish Gen-Xers humiliate a middle-aged truck driver, it’s with the weight of an entire generation that he enacts his revenge, in the form of a tractor-trailer possessed by the disembodied voice of Ted fucking Levine (Buffalo Bill himself, uncredited). My sense is that these themes of generational conflict are the result of the inner struggle of the film’s author, JJ Abrams, probably the Gen-Xer most in love with that ultimate boomer director, Steven Spielberg, as he grapples with finding new storytelling paths in the shadow of his idol. Homages to Spielberg are littered throughout (the very premise of the movie a nod to Duel, a man loses his Jaw, a corn field chase right out of ET), perhaps the subconscious reflections of Abrams’ creative struggles. // Blobcat

I need to find Candy Cane.

Rusty nail

                 

The two cows discuss time travel, religious themes, and the nature of sequels in this action-packed episode. 

It’s fitting that the best sequel ever made is a meta-reflection on dualities and copies. Here, the basic conflict of the first movie is transposed from human vs. machine to reproduction vs. original, as the humans fight against bureaucratic structures and their own drive to create in order to avoid destruction at their own hands, all while hunted by the ultimate reproductive machine and protected by a reproduction of something originally designed to hunt them. 

This is also a movie about cyclical dualities: man/machine, parent/child, creation/destruction, past/future. The immaculate conception closed causal loop of John Connor’s birth from the original is revealed to be just one side of the equation: Skynet’s own existence is due to a closed causal loop as well—their shared origins presaging their  intertwined fates. // Blobcat

I swear I will not kill anyone. 

Terminator

                 

The two cows go to confession with Martin Scorsese’s Boston crime drama. 

Two men from the same working class Boston neighborhood fall under the spell of false prophets and the promise of power, autonomy, and comfort that a life of crime or civil service offers. But spiritual salvation is not forthcoming when your boss is the devil, or a crass bureaucrat. It’s tough out there for guys with shoulder chips and low-T, but somehow I think they’ll manage. // Blobcat

Patriot Act, Patriot Act! I love it, I love it, I love it.

Cpt. George Ellerby