Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Nick Halloway is a stock analyst in San Francisco who cannot commit to a relationship, a condition the universe resolves by rendering him invisible during a lab accident. What follows is a chase picture, a romance, and a study in how little a man can accomplish while wearing nothing. John Carpenter directs, Chevy Chase stars, and the whole enterprise carries the exhausted air of a project that outlived too many cooks.

We are obliged to conduct the customary inventory. It comes back empty. The cast is uniformly white. The politics are absent. The villain works for the CIA, not for a corporation, which in 1992 was simply how thrillers were assembled. Alice, played by Daryl Hannah, produces television documentaries. She faints upon learning the truth, then rallies. That is a working woman in the way any woman with a paycheck in a studio film is a working woman. No argument attaches to her competence. She is resourceful because the plot requires a second set of hands.

There is no message here about the environment, the body, the mind, or the distribution of wealth. Nick trades stocks. The film treats this as a career, not a crime. The most subversive element is an alternate ending, since excised, in which Alice gives birth to an invisible child. Warner Bros. feared audiences would find the infant monstrous. Carpenter has described the production as a horror show, full of difficult personalities and a studio that sanded every edge smooth. The finished object is mild, agreeable, and empty. It does not lecture. It says nothing at all. We log it, we file it, and we move on.