So it was reassuring to find the following quote in a (somewhat misinformed) article in the New York Times:

“My original concept,” he said, “was almost operatic: the cadences, the deliberate pacing. I mean that in the sense of the best comic strips, the ones that adults read, which are very operatic. Batman—you can’t get more operatic than that.”

Batman? Yes. Fuck yes.
I’m all over those new DVDs.

And here are a few of them.

The choice of films is a bit strange. Few would argue with including Blade Runner, Akira, RoboCop, or Terminator. But Aliens and not Alien? The entire Mad Max trilogy (more punk-looking westerns than cyberpunk)? What about Brazil, Videodrome, Johnny Mnemonic, or Strange Days?

These oversights are further compounded by the fact that six of the nine films Holden examines were written and directed by the same people. The similarities between Aliens and the Terminator series are due more to the lack of variety in Cameron’s writing than cross-generic commonality; ditto George Miller’s Mad Max. Holden’s analyses may hold for the handful of movies he chose, but they are not a very representative group of films to generalize from.

Holden often resorts to illustrating his points with pieces of other, indisputably non-cyberpunk sources. While these are refreshing to watch (Cheers dubbed over in German), they cast some doubt on the applicability of his theories to cyberpunk film. You see much more of what he talks about in bits from Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, and old NES games than from clips of Aliens.

This could be due to the level and type of analysis that Holden decides to execute. While I’ve nothing against Northrop Frye’s theory of myths—indeed, from what I know, they appear to be very widely applicable and informative—they better serve higher-level conclusions. They classify a work according to repeating structures and themes from Christian (and pre-Christian) mythology. Holden applies these large, medieval structures (the great chain of being, the seven deadly sins, etc.), and the aptness and specificity of his conclusions are just as abstract and general. What Holden says of cyberpunk films could be said as well of many other films, and likely not of many films considered to be cyberpunk.

Nothing Holden presents is wrong, really: it’s broad. It doesn’t get at the roots of cyberpunk. You would argue for a more Marxist approach. Much closer to the causes of what makes cyberpunk distinct from other (sub)genres of film are the socio-political, historical, economic forces at the time of their creation.

Although Holden never really justifies his decision to consider films from the 1980′s, by doing so (consciously or not) he has limited himself to the short period in which cyberpunk could have been thought culturally relevant. Science-fiction had moved away from the shiny space-age of the 50′s and 60′s, and the desolate post-apocalyptic imaginations of the 70′s, bringing the technological future together with desperation and sadness and into the city. The social anxieties of that time are reflected clearly in cyberpunk works: the oil scare of the seventies, the transparently two-faced reign of Reagan, fear of the Japanese, microcomputers, larger corporations, pollution, punks, and phreaks.

By the time Hollywood released Strange Days and Demolition Man cyberpunk lost cultural and political currency; it was more of an aesthetic, set dressing. The world was different by the early 1990′s, with its push for optimistic multiculturalism, awareness of truly covert and cooptive methods of marketing, and the accessibility of personal computers. The most obvious sign of this shift in mindset is the late 90′s dot-com bubble: a time full of (entrepreneurial) optimism and hopeful futurism, when money flowed as quickly and voluminously as rhetoric. Technology was thought to be liberating, democratizing, a way of establishing a new and open way of things. In some ways The Matrix demonstrated this change: beginning with what seems a straight conflict between man and machine, but ending in a very blended world where technology and flesh live together, rather than struggle. This wasn’t a rainy tragedy, it was a collectivist dream of self-sufficiency, peace, and no ethnic (even biological) social divisions.

Now, in 2007, the mid-80′s harshness of technology and corporate rule is much less pronounced, as are the glowing benefits of the internet many were keen on in the 90′s. Technology in post-cyberpunk work is not alienating, feared, imposed, an entirely separate world. It is symbiotic and ubiquitous, full of web 2.0 rounded edges: iPhones, not eyephones. Anxieties over corporate and government power continue, but the clear sense of good and bad has been diffused. Gibson himself seems eager to turn the myth of cyberspace “inside out.” His two latest novels concern characters much less certain of where they stand, working with an insubstantial but powerful, moneyed corporation that lacks a guarded dark tower headquarters. The dangers of technology and capitalism are amorphous and enabling, not evil and enslaving.

The Cyberpunk Educator does skip across the surface of this more situational interpretation, dropping lines such as “the main purpose of minorities in 1980′s film is to be shot.” Indeed, in its incidental discussion of punk and irony, it comes closer to describing the cyberpunk mindset than with its talk of seasonal myths. Yet it’s limited by its self-imposed constraints to the rather dull conclusion that cyberpunk films are “tragedies with strong ironic content.” Holden’s is a fun documentary, especially for aficionados of sci-fi film, but it does a far better job of describing the framework of Frye’s interpretations than it does cyberpunk. It can be enjoyed it for what it is, but “Cyberpunk Educator” is a bit of a misnomer.

The future is now, it’s just not well distributed. What would Philip K. Dick say?

In the past week, you’ve found yourself listening to Pendulum‘s Plasticworld often. Its first minute, as it descends from orbit (Space Lion), is quite satisfying.

Detritus and minor orphaned activation in the uppermost level over generation two hundred twenty through [[current]]

Incident notables:

Redundant spinners in the uppermost level lost activation to unidentified interference in generation two hundred eighteen. The dispatched hunting vectors discovered sources of interference and successfully identified engram connections common to the resistance in generation two hundred nineteen. They engaged in memetic co-optation over generation two hundred twenty to two hundred twenty-three. Post-averaging analysis follows:

Some resisters were so desperate to avoid memesis as to allow Strainers full access to their language. The Strainers bound and re-bound as it is their prerogative to do, mutating the resisters’ structures until they collapsed under mega-semantic exhaustion. The results were devastating, but not uniform: many resisters were rendered fully aphasic, a small minority were left rankled.

The hunting vectors were unable to control a significant proportion of the resultant activation cascades and circuit ghosts. No evidence of Strainers survived second-order signal averaging.

Projected effect:

The uppermost consciousnesses will suffer losses due to circuit ghosts and unwarranted activation over the future set of sixteen generations. The expected drop in noetic yeilds in the uppermost consciousnesses will be compensated for by lower-level mid-glials over generations three hundred three to five hundred eleven.

Request:

None. It is not needed to advise.

Reference:

TTR-09-8122

Just as he misses the pattering feet of the tin foxes and the rustle of paper bears, he misses the taste of fish. He has tired of soups, of eating them under blacklight among the buzzing of image deflectors and the rumble of gentlemanly cars. Soup—too much of it—never any fish.

Too few were dismayed at how the wineglasses the Icthyds took were replaced with larger ones, glasses that would be filled with boxed wine, whose stems would be held in full fists. Reassurances were made, and, at the time, humoured. These things were temporary; the glasses would soon return.

He heard the neighbours knocking on the door at night. When this happened, his father would stand and stare at the door with his fists clenched; his mother would whisper to him from across the room. “You don’t need neighbours if you don’t have family,” she’d say. The knocking stopped the same night the windows were taped.

People looked at the ground when the sky began whistling. Walls went up and came down overnight, but nobody seemed to care. Concern had been reined in by the fighting. No one said anything when butter disappeared and the oceans closed. The Mega-Sun and the Icthyds struck a deal. War is to overwhelm all else. There are no secondary purposes.

He was wearing an over-large orange t-shirt on the day they moved down to ground level. The shirt was more like a dress on him, its bottom just below his knees. He had never liked this. As his parents climbed over the furniture piled at the windows, stretching to reach for the ends of the tape crossed over the glass, he guided his whimpered belongings out into the hallway. He did this with his left hand. He held the bottom of the shirt to his hip with his right. He was pushing a plastic basket of towels against Mrs. Ganymede’s door across the way when he heard his father laugh. He stood in the hall with his hand on the basket, burning with embarrassment. He willed Infectors to come riding up in the elevators and tell his father never to laugh again. When they did, swinging their image guns from their hips, he pushed his face into the basket and retched. It was demanded that they flush their supply den, the whole deck was to do it. The wine would be ankle-high in the halls for days afterwards. His father giggled through a cut lip as they rode down in the elevators.

Something seeks him out, the White-as-bones, and it speaks through regret. It’s something flawless and eternal. He cries for fish. He’s kissing the floor while the bombs go off. The smoke that fills the sky makes a bruise of the sun. He misses things more now than he ever did before.