Movie Review: Brainstorm, Starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, and Cliff Robertson, directed by Douglas Trumbull (1983)

Natalie Wood in Brainstorm, 1983.

Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood in Brainstorm, 1983.

Christopher Walken as scientist Michael Brace in Brainstorm. Someone really needs to make this picture a meme.

Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher, Joe Dorsey, Natalie Wood, and Cliff Robertson in a scene from Brainstorm. That's three Oscar winners and one legend in the same photo. And Joe Dorsey.

Advertisement for what would have been Natalie Wood's stage debut in Anastasia.

Natalie Wood’s final movie was the science fiction tale Brainstorm. The film holds up well today, and presents an interesting storyline. A scientific team led by Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) and Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) are developing a headset-like device that allows people to experience thoughts and emotions that have happened to other people. If person A wears the device and records their experiences, then person B can wear the device and play back the tape of what person A did, feeling and experiencing it just as person A did at the time. 

Wood plays Karen Brace, Michael’s wife, and it’s clear that the Braces’ marriage isn’t in very good shape. Karen is a designer, and she gets hired to help with the design of the device. By sharing their memories, the device actually helps bring Michael and Karen closer together again. Meanwhile, Lillian is concerned that the president of their company, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson) might be planning to sell the technology to the government or the military. 

The device that Michael and Lillian are working on is similar to a virtual reality headset, and the idea that you can experience another person’s thoughts and emotions is a rich one to explore. Because of this, Brainstorm still feels fresh and relevant today. 

The performances in Brainstorm are all very good. It’s a rare film that features three Oscar winners and one bona fide screen legend. Fletcher brings grit and determination to her role as a committed scientist. Robertson is good in a supporting role, exuding both charm and a slight menace. Walken is excellent as Michael. Walken is believable as a quirky genius, as he has the right off-kilter mannerisms to successfully play a scientist who is fully committed to his work and has thus neglected the fact that his marriage is under strain. Wood does the best she can with the material she has to work with. Director Douglas Trumbull said that the role was expanded once Wood was cast in it. She’s good, realistic and believable. She wasn’t going to win an Oscar for her role, but she does a fine job, giving the viewer a portrait of a woman who has obviously had to sacrifice for the sake of her husband’s career. 

Director Douglas Trumbull started out working on visual effects in films. Trumbull worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Blade Runner. No big deal, just four of the biggest science fiction movies of that era. Trumbull’s original idea was to shoot most of Brainstorm in normal 35MM, but to use a new process for the scenes where characters were experiencing someone else’s thoughts and emotions. Trumbull called the process Showscan, which was filmed in 70MM and was shot at 60 frames per second, rather than the traditional 24 frames. The idea was to present these scenes as more vivid than actual reality. Unfortunately, to have made the movie this way would have necessitated equipping theaters with different projectors to show the movie. Since that was cost prohibitive, Trumbull settled for using 35MM and mono sound for the real scenes, and 70MM with stereo sound for the enhanced reality scenes. It would be interesting to see Brainstorm on a movie screen to see how this would change the effect the movie has. 

Location shooting for Brainstorm began in North Carolina in September, 1981. Just before location shooting started, members of the cast and crew spent a weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, getting in touch with their emotions and doing other New Age-y stuff. Wood and Walken connected right away, and some people on the set thought they might be having an affair. 

After location shooting wrapped, studio filming took place in Hollywood, and the production took a break for the Thanksgiving weekend. Wood and her husband Robert Wagner invited Walken to spend the weekend aboard their yacht, the Splendour. Sometime during the night of November 28-29, 1981, Natalie Wood drowned off of Santa Catalina Island. The events of that evening have been the subject of much debate and speculation, to say the least. 

Soon after Wood’s death, MGM shut down production of Brainstorm. MGM was willing to scrap the movie in order to collect money from the insurance company, rather than trying to finish filming. Trumbull was incensed, as Wood’s part was nearly complete, and he tried to tell MGM that he could successfully complete the movie. The insurance company Lloyd’s of London ending up getting involved, and they agreed with Trumbull that the movie could be finished. Lloyd’s ended up putting up several million dollars for filming and post-production to be completed. 

By the time Brainstorm was finally released, it was late September of 1983; two years after filming had begun. None of the posters I’ve seen for the movie featured Wood’s photo, and while you could argue that the studio was being respectful by not wanting to seem to be profiting from her tragic death, you could also argue that not making the impressive cast more visible wasn’t going to help the box office. Also not helping the box office was the fact that Walken didn’t do anything to promote the movie, since he didn’t want to have to answer questions about what happened on board the yacht that weekend. 

Brainstorm was not a financial success, grossing $10 million dollars against a budget somewhere between $15-$18 million. To play the what if game, if Wood hadn’t died and the movie could have been released according to its original timetable during the summer of 1982, perhaps it would have benefited from a publicity push from Wood and Walken and become a hit. Brainstorm is the kind of odd, quirky movie that seems like it might have found a cult audience on VHS, but it doesn’t seem to have found any audience at all. 

Brainstorm is a movie well worth seeing, especially if you’re a fan of any of the four stars of it. It definitely fits into the paranoid thriller genre that was so popular in the 1970’s. (Spoiler alert: don’t trust any of the white guys in suits who work for the government!) There are some great Christopher Walken moments in the film, and my favorite might be a brief flashback as we see Walken from Wood’s perspective after he’s placed a large satellite dish in their back yard. Walken is wearing a chef’s hat and apron and says, “You could put flowers all around it. I don’t know what you’re so upset about.” 

Of course seeing Brainstorm makes me wonder about Natalie Wood’s career and what she would have done if she were still alive. She was only 43 years old in 1981, and although she had a lengthy career because she started in the movies so young, obviously there was much for her to still accomplish. According to Suzanne Finstad’s biography, Wood was pursuing the screen rights to Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, which would have been an excellent role for Wood. There was also something more immediate on the horizon. In February of 1982, Wood was going to star in a Los Angeles production of the play Anastasia. It would have been Wood’s stage debut, and it might have been the start of a new era in her career. Wood was excited about playing the role, in part because it was a way of connecting with her Russian heritage. 

We’ll never know what the course of Natalie Wood’s life and career would have been had she lived longer, and while we should appreciate all the art that she gave us over the years, it’s hard not to feel the pain of what might have been.

Thoughts on the 2019 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot

Hall of Famers Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, and Mariano Rivera.

2019 Hall of Famer Roy Halladay.

Last week the results of the BBWAA vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame were announced. Four new Hall of Famers were chosen: Mariano Rivera, who became the first player to ever be named on 100% of the ballots, Mike Mussina, Edgar Martinez, and the late Roy Halladay. These four players will join Lee Smith and Harold Baines, who were elected by the Today’s Game Era Committee in December. 

First, some thoughts on the election of Smith and Baines. In my post in November when the ballot was announced, I wrote that it was quite possible no one from that ballot would be elected. I also wrote that while I really like Harold Baines, I didn’t expect him to be elected. Well, I was wrong. The Committee threw everyone for a loop by choosing Baines, and the sabermetrics folks have had a field day complaining about Baines’ election, and how it lowers the bar for future candidates. I was pretty shocked that Baines got in, since he received very little support from the writers when he was on the ballot.  

Baines’ election doesn’t concern me that much as far as setting a bar for the future, since there are so few players that are truly comparable to Baines. Are Al Oliver, Dave Parker, and Vada Pinson suddenly going to get in because Baines did? That seems unlikely to me.

I wasn’t too shocked about Lee Smith’s election, but it did surprise me that he was a unanimous selection of the Committee. I think Smith was obviously one of the most dominant closers of his era, and if you’re going to put Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter in the Hall, you should put Smith in there too.  

Rivera’s selection being unanimous was somewhat surprising to me. Obviously, he’s a first ballot Hall of Famer and the greatest closer ever, but it’s hard to get 425 people to agree on anything. The reason for my surprise at Rivera’s unanimous selection is because he’s a specialist, and it wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere among those 425 BBWAA voters there was one guy who was like, “I’ve never voted for a relief pitcher, and I never will. I didn’t vote for Hoyt Wilhelm, or those guys with the weird mustaches, or Lee Smith, and I ain’t gonna vote for Mariano.” From everything I’ve read about Rivera off the field, it sounds like he’s a pretty remarkable person, so he’s certainly a good choice for the first unanimous selection. 

As expected, Edgar Martinez got a 15% bump and gained election in his 10^th and final year on the ballot. As I’ve written before, I just don’t feel very strongly about Edgar Martinez one way or the other. Martinez’s election highlights some of the ridiculous absurdities of Hall of Fame voting. In his first year on the ballot, Martinez got 36.2% of the vote, not even halfway to the 75% needed for election. In 2014, his fifth year on the ballot, Martinez’s support bottomed out at 25.2%. Amazingly, he gained 60% more votes in five years! But what about Edgar Martinez’s stats changed between 2014 and 2019? Nothing! He still had 309 home runs, 1,261 RBIs, a lifetime batting average of .312, and an OBP of .418. So why wasn’t he a Hall of Famer five years ago? Why do people’s minds suddenly change the closer someone gets to 75%? There’s probably at least one BBWAA member who voted for Martinez this year who had never voted for him in the previous nine years. What on earth was their rationale for changing their minds now? “Well, it looks like he’s gonna get in, so I guess I should vote for him so I can say I voted for him.” Despite how cranky I sound, I’m actually an advocate for slow thinking, and I think it’s important for people to be able to change their minds and re-examine new evidence. But it’s just sort of absurd for me to think that just five years ago 75% of the voting BBWAA members DIDN’T think Edgar Martinez was a Hall of Famer, and now 85% of them think he IS a Hall of Famer. 

Roy Halladay received the exact same numbers of votes as Martinez, earning election in his first appearance on the ballot. Sadly, Halladay died in November of 2017 when he crashed his personal aircraft. Halladay was a great pitcher, and he’s an interesting example of peak performance as opposed to steady compiling. Halladay won 203 games, which is 58^th most of the 80 pitchers in the Hall of Fame. As pitcher wins become a less important statistic, it will be interesting to see if a starter with fewer than 200 wins is ever elected. 

Mike Mussina just got in with 76.7% of the vote. I think Mussina was clearly deserving of the Hall of Fame, and I’m very glad he finally got in. Mussina’s winning percentage is the same as Jim Palmer’s. Mussina didn’t have some of the impressive accolades that Palmer did—Palmer was a 3-time Cy Young Award winner and was an 8-time 20-game winner. Mussina never won a Cy Young award and didn’t win 20 games in a season until 2008, his final season. Also, Mussina never had a best-selling underwear poster, which probably cost him several votes. Palmer also benefited from playing during the 1970’s, an era when offenses were not as potent as they were in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Palmer also benefited greatly from having Mark Belanger at shortstop and Brooks Robinson at third base for many years, as they were probably the best fielding shortstop/third base duo ever. 

 

Curt Schilling jumped to 60.9%, and with three years left on the ballot, he’ll most likely make it in, despite being a total jerk. 

And speaking of total jerks, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds inched forward ever so slightly. Clemens is at 59.5% and Bonds is at 59.1%. Clemens got 11 more votes than last year, moving up to 253, and Bonds added 13, moving up to 251. However, if the number of voting BBWAA members holds steady around 420-430, with only three more years on the ballot, they’ll need to add more than a dozen votes a year to get elected. That being said, if they keep inching forward the next two years, they could be within distance of getting a big enough bump in the last year on the ballot to put them over the top. 

Larry Walker had a huge vote jump, gaining 20% to end up at 54.6%. He’ll need another 20% gain next year, his last on the ballot, to gain election. As I wrote last year, Larry Walker is the Canadian Edgar Martinez for me. Can we just agree to ignore any stats that anyone puts up in Colorado? In the 26 seasons that the Colorado Rockies have been in existence, Rockies players have won 11 batting titles. That’s 42%. And it includes players like Michael Cuddyer and Justin Morneau. I’m a Twins fan, and I like Cuddy and Morneau, but they are very fluky batting title winners. 

Okay, moving on. Omar Vizquel got a nice 5% bump to get to 42.8% in his second year on the ballot. That bodes well for his future chances, especially since he gained on a very stacked ballot. 

Fred McGriff got a significant bump in his final year on the ballot, as he was named on 39.8% of the ballots. I’ve always really liked McGriff and I was surprised he never received more support, since he was a slugger who presumably stayed clean of steroids. I do think that bouncing around from team to team probably hurt McGriff’s case. Quick, close your eyes. Picture Fred McGriff. Which team is he playing for? The Blue Jays? The Braves? The Devil Rays? The Cubs? McGriff was great for all those teams, but he didn’t play for any one of them long enough to be strongly identified with that team. There’s definitely a Hall of Fame bonus for playing your whole career for one team, or for playing for one team long enough that you become identified very closely with that team. 

Nothing too exciting happened down ballot. Two first-year candidates get to come back again next year, as Todd Helton and Andy Pettitte both received more than 5% of the vote. Helton was an excellent player, but as I noted above, I’m skeptical of anyone who played their entire career in Colorado. The most remarkable fact about Pettitte to me is that he started 521 games and only threw 4 shutouts. That’s fewer shutouts than Ervin Santana. That’s fewer shutouts than Jim Deshaies. That’s 10% of the shutouts that Claude Osteen threw. Granted, Osteen spent the bulk of his career pitching for the Dodgers in the 1960’s, but Osteen threw 6 shutouts for teams other than the Dodgers, which is still 50% more shutouts than Pettitte threw. Orel Hershiser threw more shutouts IN ONE MONTH than Pettitte did in his entire career.   

Andruw Jones just barely hung on this year, holding steady at 7.5%, so he gets to come back for a third ballot. I’m not going to advocate for Jones’ election, but he’s a fascinating candidate, and he deserves to at least be considered, since he had such a great peak. Maybe he’s just taking the Harold Baines path to the Hall of Fame. 

There were some good, steady players who didn’t make it to 5% of the vote and dropped off after one year. I’m not going to say any of them should be Hall of Famers, but there were some darn good players in there, like Michael Young, Lance Berkman, Miguel Tejada, and Roy Oswalt. I always liked Michael Young; he was just an excellent hitter. He ended up with a .300 batting average over 8,600 plate appearances, which is impressive. 

And at the very bottom were two players I enjoyed, the perfectly named Placido Polanco and the speedy Juan Pierre. Polanco somehow managed to get two votes, so I assume that he probably saved two BBWAA members from drowning. Pierre didn’t get any votes, despite stealing 614 bases over his career, which ranks 18^th all-time. I was at a game where Juan Pierre walked, so I was pretty excited to see that rare occurrence. I remember around the time that Pierre got his 2,000^th hit people were wringing their hands about Pierre possibly getting 3,000 hits, because they didn’t think he was a Hall of Famer, even if he got to 3,000 hits. As it turned out, Pierre finished his career a mere 783 hits short of 3,000, so those prognosticators had good reason to be worried.

Book Review: Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys (1934)

Paperback cover of Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys, originally published in 1934. The evocative cover design is by Tim Gaydos. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Ella Williams, who wrote under the pen name of Jean Rhys, 1890-1979.

Voyage in the Dark, published in 1934, was the third novel by Jean Rhys, the pen name of Ella Williams. The novels Quartet, also known as Postures, and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, preceded Voyage in the Dark, and, read with her fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, form a quartet of works that cover similar themes. All four books follow female protagonists through their travails. The women in all of these books do not have the education or the inner drive to attempt to make much of a career for themselves, and as a consequence, they are largely financially dependent on the kindness of male companions. These male companions may be amused by these women for a while, but marriage is not on their minds. 

The main character in Voyage in the Dark is Anna Morgan. As the novel opens, 18-year-old Anna is treading the boards as a chorus girl. In the town of Southsea, Anna and her friend Maudie meet two men. Walter, the man Anna is paired off with, expresses an interest in seeing her again when they are back in London. Walter ends up supporting Anna in London, and tries to help her “get on,” i.e., advance her career. When the much-older Walter inevitably tires of Anna and casts her aside, she must figure out what to do with herself. 

Like Rhys, Anna was born and raised on an island in the Caribbean. (Anna’s island remains unnamed in the novel; Rhys was born in Dominica.) Throughout the novel, Anna flashes back to life on the island, and how different it was from London. These are fascinating passages, and they add a lot to Anna’s backstory. Anna always feels like an outsider in English culture, and I would venture to guess that Rhys felt similarly. 

I want to report to you that I enjoyed Voyage in the Dark, but “enjoy” isn’t really the proper word for experiencing Jean Rhys’ fiction. As always, I appreciated her sharp, incisive language and her keen observation of the human condition. It’s obvious to modern readers that rather than being simply moody or melancholy, Anna is suffering from some sort of severe clinical depression. There are numerous passages that attest to this, but the following ones really stuck out to me:

“Vincent started off again about books.

I said, ‘I haven’t read any of these books you’re talking about. I hardly ever read.’

‘Well, what do you do with yourself all day?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.” (P.86)

“For a week after Walter left I hadn’t gone out; I didn’t want to. What I liked was lying in bed till very late, because I felt tired all the time, and having something to eat in bed and then in the afternoon staying a long time in the bath.” (P.90)

“It’s funny when you feel as if you don’t want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That’s when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.” (P.113)

As much as I wanted to scream at Anna that she was depressed and should see a doctor, I don’t know if seeking professional help for mental health issues in the 1913-14 time period of the novel would have been beneficial for her. Anna’s struggles with depression were another thing that she had in common with her creator. As Rhys said in a 1979 interview:

“When I was excited about life, I didn’t want to write at all. I’ve never written when I was happy. I didn’t want to. But I’ve never had a long period of being happy. Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write. You see, there’s very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.” Jean Rhys, The Paris Review interview, 1979.

Like Rhys’ other female protagonists, Anna doesn’t seem to have a clear sense of what she wants out of life. Anna is somewhat passive; she’s much more acted upon by others than decisively acting for herself. When her life as Walter’s plaything is set up, she thinks:

“Of course, you get used to things, you get used to anything. It was as if I had always lived like that. Only sometimes, when I had got back home and was undressing to go to bed, I would think, ‘My God, this is a funny way to live. My God, how did this happen?’” (P.40)

Anna also has a somewhat unrealistic expectation of life:

“I don’t know how people live when they know exactly what’s going to happen to them each day. It seems to me it’s better to be dead than to live like that.” (P.75) 

Well, that’s harsh. And also not an attitude that is going to help you succeed in life. Life is repetition. That’s something that no one ever really tells you as you become an adult, but unless you have a really odd, fascinating job, much of life is the same every day. You will go to the same office/school/wherever you work and interact with many of the same people every single day. Then you’ll wake up and do it all again. Although to be fair to Anna, when I was 18 or 19 years old, I might have thought the same thing that she did. When you’re 18 or 19 years old you think that every day is pregnant with possibilities, and at some point you learn that’s not actually true. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If I didn’t have a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to me each day, I’d be worried sick. 

The first-person narration of Voyage in the Dark gives it a different feel from Rhys’ other early novels, and it also enables the reader to feel a more immediate connection to Anna. Voyage in the Dark feels more like a first novel than Quartet does, so I wonder if Voyage was written before and then set aside. The flashbacks to Anna’s life on the island also give the novel some extra texture, and throughout the book I was more conscious of place and culture as themes. I think Anna’s sense of being an outsider in English culture is part of the alienation and depression that she feels. 

Reading Voyage in the Dark immediately after Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, I was struck by the negative portrayal of London in both novels. In The Secret Agent, the metropolis becomes a symbol for the modern, mechanized age, and its capitalistic excesses. In Voyage in the Dark, London is a gloomy place: “Everything was always so exactly alike—that was what I could never get used to. And the cold; and the houses all exactly alike, and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike.” (P.179) I doubt that Rhys was specifically influenced by Conrad in the way she describes London, but I would guess that he was a writer she admired, since she quotes from his novel Almayer’s Folly in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. And she may have felt an affinity for another foreign-born author who was an outsider to English culture. 

Voyage in the Dark is an example of spare modernism at its best, and Rhys' writing style makes the novel feel very contemporary. It's an excellent introduction to this often overlooked author. 

Book Review: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad (1907)

The paperback cover of the 1983 Signet Classics edition of The Secret Agent that I read. (The Secret Agent was originally published in 1907.)

Polish/British author Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924. He's probably thinking, "And how many classic novels have you written in your third language?"

Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent is a classic work of political intrigue. As the novel begins, it focuses on the hapless Adolf Verloc, a British citizen living in London who is actually a secret agent for an unnamed foreign government—most likely Russia. Verloc owns a shop that sells dirty books, and has a wife, Winnie, who is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Verloc also supports Winnie’s mother and her younger brother, Stevie, who we would probably diagnose today as having some sort of learning disability. Verloc has contacts among London’s anarchists, and he informs on them to the government he works for. Verloc is called to the Embassy, where Mr. Vladimir, a new administrator, excoriates Verloc for his incompetence. Vladimir tells Verloc that he needs to prod his anarchist friends to carry out an attack, so that the British government will then crack down on civil liberties. Vladimir’s idea for a target is science, and what better scientific target than the Greenwich Observatory? Yes, the Prime Meridian! Greenwich Mean Time! The very house of the great god of science itself!

I’ll leave the plot summary there, so as not to spoil anything. The Secret Agent is a complicated book, with a narrative point of view that shifts as we enter numerous characters’ heads for a period of time. While the novel is told in the third person, there’s part of a paragraph at the beginning of Chapter Two that is in first person. It’s the only time the first person narrator intrudes, so it’s an odd little moment. 

Conrad’s writing is sharp and precise, as he delineates many characters, and their various ways of thinking. Conrad is able to get inside the heads of characters like the Professor, a radical anarchist who walks around with a bomb in his coat, ready to push the button if he’s ever cornered by the cops, and Chief Inspector Heat, who has nothing but contempt for the anarchists. 

Along the way, Conrad has many excellent quotes: “The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.” (p.76)

Another of my favorite quotes was this: “But Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise—at least not truly so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position.” (p.79) 

A piece of terse wisdom from Conrad emerges as he describes the Assistant Commissioner of police and his relentless drive to investigate: “We can never cease to be ourselves.” (p.102)

Joseph Conrad had a very interesting backstory, to put it mildly. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what is now the Ukraine. English was his third language, after Polish and French, and he didn’t start to learn English until he joined the British merchant marine in his twenties. Pretty impressive, as he is now considered one of the greatest novelists of the English language. After a 19-year marine career, Conrad published his first novel Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River in 1895, when he was thirty-seven years old. Conrad devoted himself to writing for the rest of his life, and he produced a substantial body of work that has proven to be highly influential, including the novella Heart of Darkness, and the novels Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes, among others. 

The Secret Agent is an excellent book, and quite a haunting one. Some of the events in the book were inspired by the 1894 death of Martial Bourdin, a French anarchist who accidentally blew himself up in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory. It’s unknown what Bourdin’s ultimate goal was, but it may have been an attack on the Observatory. In a 1920 “Author’s Note,” to The Secret Agent, Conrad wrote of Bourdin’s actions as “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes.” The Secret Agent is Joseph Conrad’s attempt to explain the logical processes of this kind of perverse unreason.