In The Final Programme, released in the United States in August 1974, adventurer Jerry Cornelius teams up with the techno-mage Miss Bruner to acquire a micro-film from his deceased father, one boasting a scientific secret that could revolutionize the world and mankind.
The micro-film is ensconced in Cornelius’s booby-trapped country estate, where his brother Frank (O’Connor) is holding Cornelius’s junkie sister, Catherine (Douglas) hostage. As Cornelius works with Brunner to get the film and rescue his sister, he learns that his ally boasts the unusual ability to absorb the knowledge (and apparently bodies…) of her lovers, and that she plans to use the most advanced computer in the world, Duel, along with the micro-film data to create a completely self-replicating, “self-fertilizing, self-regenerating” hermaphroditic human. And worse, in a secret Nazi underground station in Lapland, Brunner plans to use Jerry as her guinea pig in the experiment…
Did that plot summary make sense to you?
Michael Moorcock’s 1969 novel The Final Programme is the first adventure of an anarchist/superhero/Nobel Laureate/secret agent and “Eternal Champion” character called Jerry Cornelius. The character is sexually ambivalent, while also a symbol of heroism in multiple quantum realities. Cornelius might also be viewed as a kind of satirical response to the popularity of James Bond in the popular imagination of the 1960s. Unlike Bond, however, Cornelius tends to work against authority and entrenched power. The science fiction character originally appeared in three additional Moorcock novels, including A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassins and The Condition of Muzak.
Moorcock is known and revered as being one instigator of the British New Wave in science fiction literature, a span which occurred when he took over editorship of New Worlds in 1964. The notion of this “new wave” was that high and mass art could be combined in the dismantling of technical and traditional structure. Characters thus became not individuals only, but avatars upon which one could assign symbols. The world imagined in Cornelius’s world was retro, one in which the past -- and thus past works of fiction and art -- played a crucial part in the “future.”
Robert Fuest (1929 – 2012), a visual director of the highest order who helmed The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1972) and began his career as a painter and set designer, adapted the first Jerry Cornelius novel to film in 1973, but the final result failed to please the award-winning Moorcock, and by-and-large confused mainstream audiences. Studying The Final Programme today, its primary strengths are its colorful pop visual design, which might aptly be described as “psychedelic chic,” and the lead performance by Finch, who proves dashing, erotic and entirely in-the-know regarding the satirical aspects of his character.
Outside those admirable elements, however, the film makes for a frequently a baffling viewing experience, especially to those unfamiliar with the source material and the character of Cornelius. To put it bluntly, Fuest seems to have directed all of his considerable attention into the admittedly-impressive avant-garde visualizations and given scant thought to the script and how it moves from scene to scene, set-piece to set-piece. Absolutely nothing is made clear regarding who the characters are, their relationships to each other, or what motives drive them. The film itself feels as though it is happening in some alternate universe where the viewer knows none of the rules, history, people, or other details of life.
For example, Sterling Hayden appears in just one scene in the film, in the first few minutes, and gives such an odd over-the-top performance, right down to a fourth-wall-breaking glare at the camera, that the movie grinds to a self-indulgent halt. Is Hayden attempting to revive some mirror universe version of his beloved Dr. Strangelove (1964) character? Or is he making a comment on the absurdity of the modern military mentality and its penchant for naming aircrafts and aircraft parts with letters and numerals? Even the structural use the character is put to proves utterly baffling, and a narrative dead end. He is introduced with flourishes of grandeur as though he is a main character, but he never reappears. He furnishes Cornelius a new, kitted-up jet….which the film then never actually shows, either.
If the message of The Final Programme is but style over substance, this approach makes sense. The form of the New Wave (with the past resurrected as the future…) means that Hayden’s presence symbolizes a pop-culture reference to and comment upon an actor’s similar role in the aforementioned Dr. Strangelove. The viewer must thus acknowledge both the actor and a previous character to fully comprehend his appearance here. In this way, perhaps, the film’s milieu accurately reflects Moorcock’s New Wave aesthetic to a high degree. But once more, the film baffles on more concrete levels. After this interlude with Hayden’s general, Cornelius meets with Brunner and a gaggle of scientists who want to break into his family house, which is outfitted with booby traps, such as a sound device that provokes “pseudo epilepsy” and toxic green and orange-colored gas. The interchangeable scientist characters unnecessarily clutter the sequence and are virtually indistinguishable from one another in terms of appearance and personal characteristics. One scientist would have done just fine for story purposes.
Then, bafflingly, the scientists end up in a weird tent room booby trap that resembles a modern bouncy house. Why is Cornelius’s house outfitted this way? What is the purpose of the tent room? Once more, no answers of any kind are forthcoming. It’s visually appealing, but nonsensical, like so much of the film. Again, it seems to be style for style’s sake.
In short order, it becomes clear that The Final Programme is indeed pure phantasmagoria, a visual “dream,” essentially, with no interest in providing audiences a lucid narrative experience. The visuals are such that they engage the imagination, but they simply can’t carry a film in which there is no real character to care about, and every aspect of the plot is treated with a self-indulgent smirk. Like 1975’s Doc Savage, the film qualifies as high camp.
Again, the British New Wave interpretation might simply be that Fuest subverts the mock-profundity of many Kubrick films here, particularly with the re-appearance of Hayden, seemingly still in character from Dr. Strangelove, as well as the film’s ending, which functions as a weird inversion of and comment on the Star Child ending in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Brunner and Cornelius join to become the ultimate self-replicating human, but instead of a beautiful messiah, a Neanderthal unexpectedly emerges from this union.
And the Neanderthal (in Jerry’s voice) does a Humphrey Bogart imitation as the movie ends…
This ending could be the direct answer to a question posed explicitly early in the film (in flashback) when Jerry’s mentor, a Hindu professor, wonders if people would recognize the messiah when he appears. The answer is, of course, that we wouldn’t. We all have our own individual vision of what the messiah should be, and a genuine one would have a difficult time living up to the multitudinous images.
Would we accept a Bogart-quoting Neanderthal as the next Jesus Christ?
Well, many people have accepted an orange-skinned reality star as one, so who knows?
The Final Programme also suggests man’s devolution and return to the beginning of his life-span on Earth, in pre-history, rather than a 2001-like transcendence into a glorious future. This is a comment on modern man and the failure he has become in the “Dark Ages” of the 20th century. Better then, to become a Neanderthal, and take a do-over.
This ending is not strictly what Moorcock imagined in the novel (where the messiah was beautiful, not a caveman) and was widely ridiculed by movie critics who felt it was an unworthy destination after such a trying, self-indulgent journey. Yet the problem was not the idea -- that man’s future was in going back to the beginning – but rather the non-serious way in which it was addressed, with the Neanderthal Cornelius adopting the much-mocked mannerisms of Bogart. Why Bogart? What does he symbolize? A pre-Bond film noir presence, perhaps, one that acknowledges (like Cornelius) that authority is inherently corrupt and positions the hero as outsider.
Is the final image of a Neanderthal Hero spouting Bogart-isms (and opining that the world looks tasty) in The Final Programme the equivalent of announcing a return to a pre-1960s aesthetic? The 1960s and the popularity of Ian Fleming’s character suggested violence is beautiful, performed by beautiful men, and always acceptable because they serve the State. Before Bond, gumshoes like the ones Bogart played on the silver screen were much more conflicted about violence and their responsibilities to society as a whole.
It is tempting to defend The Final Programme on the basis of its often-sensual visuals and clever witticisms. It is also tempting to defend it as a British New Wave commentary on popular art and its role in fostering the establishment. There are legitimate grounds for approbation. But as a lucid narrative the film just never coheres.
For instance: what has Miss Brunner to gain by becoming the self-replicating entity that appears at film’s conclusion? She already possesses the amazing ability to -- through sexual intercourse -- absorb the memories, knowledge, and identities of her lovers (whom she consumes, we must assume, in a physical sense). This ability is an amazing evolutionary adaptation in and of itself, and yet the film doesn’t acknowledge how miraculous a creature she is. Given her own special abilities, Brunner’s quest for evolutionary perfection hardly makes sense. Why not let two other folks (Cornelius and Jenny, perhaps) undergo the dangerous experiment and then simply “consume” and absorb the product of their union, while safely and securely maintaining her own identity and superiority?
Instead, when the Neanderthal super-being emerges, there is no sign of Brunner whatsoever. The being is decidedly male, decidedly Neanderthal, and decidedly Cornelius. The Brunner part of him has been completely buried. This may serve as rich justice for a person who consumed others. She is consumed herself, finally.
It’s also disappointing that Cornelius’s relationship with his sister in the film is given short-shrift, and that there is almost no notice taken of the beloved hero’s free-wheeling and ambiguous sexuality. In the film, Jerry seems decidedly heterosexual, which is fine, but not accurate or faithful to the literary source. Perhaps a bisexual Jerry Cornelius in the early 1970s is too much to ask of any film, but The Final Programme is an artwork of such wondrous excess one wonders why this particular and daring idea was dropped.
It is very apt to suggest that stylist Fuest was here attempting to transform the ethos of the British New Wave to the science fiction cinema, but The Final Programme is so confusing and closed-off in the final analysis that one can’t even begin to enunciate all the concerns with it. Instead, like Jerry, one has to ask first “what are the questions?”
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