Dark, man

A long time ago, there was a second-tier movie based on a special effect. These happen quite often: an example from the 1950s was a forced perspective gila monster in The Giant Gila Monster. In the late 1990s it was the CGI of an invisible man in Hollow Man. The movie I'm thinking of is called Darkman, and it was wholly based on the idea of a story revolving around air bladders under face makeup.

In it, the usually competent Liam Neeson finds himself as an absurd scientist in a laughable precept. He is a biologist working with a single Asian grad student to develop a synthetic skin substance to use as grafts for burn victims and plastic surgery. The two are on the verge of a breakthrough: they've got a perfect skin substitute, it's just completely unstable. It disintegrates in the presence of sunlight. Naturally, bad guys end up destroying Liam Neeson's entire life and leave him for dead, pretty much step for step like what happens to the titular character in Swamp Thing. Of course, like Swamp Thing, Liam Neeson doesn't die. He's just transformed, in this case terribly burned, and he uses what's left of his skin synthesis process to exact revenge on the bad guys.

None of this is particularly interesting.

What is interesting, and the reason why the film is called Darkman and not something more literal and Japanese translation-sounding like, y'know, Fake Skin Science Revenge Man, is that Neeson discovers that his faux skin, which always ends up melting into a pile of goo after 99 minutes in a petri dish, remains perfectly stable in the dark. Ordinarily, I'd believe that great scientific discoveries are often accidental. The benefits of Scotchgard weren't noticed until somebody found that a splotch of it spilled on their tennis shoe repeled dirt months afterward and such. But Dr. Darkman discovers that his synthetic skin dissolves in sunlight because — get this — he's timing a batch of it with a stopwatch and, just as it's about to start bubbling and smoking at the 99 minute mark, just as the clock reaches 98 minutes and 59 seconds...the power goes out.

Yup. A perfectly timed brown-out is what makes him notice that his dish of skin is still alive and well, wrapped in the shadows of the night. This I could not believe. I mean, how convenient is that?

Now, the whole reason I bring this up is that I don't believe the lights will go out at just a second before something major is supposed to happen. It's good for a plot device, but these things don't happen in real life. Do they? Well do they?

They do. Today, I'm checking the clock to see how fast the PBX switch is. It should be about four seconds. So the seconds tick by. :53,:54,:55. And just as I'm looking at the clock on the phone to see it switch.... You guessed it.

Dramatically, the lights go out. They're on a motion-activated timer. If there's no motion for a few minutes, they shut off. And my desk is too far away from the sensor for me to trigger it.

I don't think I'll be quite as harsh on Darkman as I have been. These coincidences do, in fact, seem to happen from time to time. I just hope no bad guys decide I need to die now.