 The detective in "Men in Space" is a radio surveillance operative who starts out boasting he "can always get a strong signal", but ends up losing the signal and then becoming deaf, cut off from all communication.In one interview, McCarthy discussed this character's similarity to Francis Ford Coppola's Harry Caul in "The Conversation".McCarthy created an art project around Cocteau's "Orphée", at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by radio and internet.