Film review: Dirty Computer [Emotion picture]
A discordant synthetic sound begins to reverberate, dirty grey smoke begins to drift across the screen. The world is dark and grimy. Then the image flickers, then skips. This is a science fiction cliche, but also here the first hint of a highly stylised artifice that gestures towards not just story, or fiction, but myth. Two naked forms — one female, one male — emerge through the smoke; then, suddenly they’re clothed, then numbered, dehumanised and ready to be cleaned. The voiceover intones:
“They started calling us computers. People began vanishing. And the cleaning began. You were dirty if you looked different. You were dirty is you refused to live the way they dictated. You were dirty is you showed any form of opposition at all. And if you were dirty, it was only a matter of time.”
We then witness Jane #57821, a robot or a woman, in a sterile-looking facility. Attendants wearing elaborate white gowns and bronze steampunk headgear guide her on a levitating gurney through stark corridors towards the operating room. She’s lying on a table, wearing her own elaborate headgear, while technicians are wiping out her ‘memories.’ They administer a drug called The Nevermind. Each memory is in fact a corresponding music video. But not all of Jane’s memories will or can be deleted — indeed, some of them aren’t memories at all, but dreams and fantasies.
Dirty Computer [Emotion picture] is 45-minute companion piece to the album of the same name, released in April 2018. It feels like the stunning, provocative culmination of, or conclusion to, a decade-long science-fictional aural exploration by Monáe of love, identity, sexuality, revolution, time travel, and androids. Monáe’s debut EP, Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (2007) introduces her alter ego Cindi Mayweather, the world-famous Alpha Platinum 9000 entertainment droid, mediator between the oppressed and the oppressor — or, as Monáe contends, citing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as inspiration, the heart between the hands and the mind. Cindi’s story continues in The ArchAndroid (2010) and The Electric Lady (2013): She falls in love with a human named Anthony Greendown — a union forbidden by the legislation of their time — and is marked for disassembly, and a bounty is placed on her head. By the end of Electric Lady, it is revealed that Cindi is either missing or in hiding, but her influence and the momentum behind her movement are undeniable.
“I chose an android because the android to me represents ‘the other’ in our society. I can connect to the other, because it has so many parallels to my own life–just by being a female, African-American artist in today’s music industry.” (Monáe, in Knot, 2010)
Dirty Computer (2018) sheds the Cindi Mayweather persona, but continues the exploration of themes love, identity, and revolution against the backdrop of a totalitarian near-future, a Handmaid’s Tale–like technodystopia of neon-lit nightclubs, oppressive militarised police, retro hover-cars, grimy urban city-scapes, and stark, desolate desert-scapes. The future will be, and is, somewhat ordinary. This world is highly stylised, sometimes dream-like, mixing times and aesthetics — punk, glam, new wave.
But the overriding aesthetic is Afrofuturistic, an intersection of African and diasporic culture with the technological, drawing on the obvious elements of science fiction in order to critique the power structures which control and oppress racial — and, in this case, sexual — minorities. Embodied in Jane, and Cindi Mayweather before her, Afrofuturism looks beyond the body, and beyond the here and now, towards an horizonal, liberated future.
The status of these subjugated black bodies, under examination and being operated on, remains somewhat indeterminate; they are never clearly defined as either human or non-human. But — like Cindi Mayweather, the ArchAndroid and Electric Lady before here — Jane #57821 is ambiguously ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, as Haraway writes of the cyborg, “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (2007, 34). She transgresses the boundary and confuses their machines. Cyborgs like Jane are used to speak about the past, present and future of race, gender and sexuality (representation matters!) — rallying against patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism and their exertions of biopower over unruly bodies.
Two (white, male) technicians sit in a small room, observing the body of Jane through mirrored glass, watching her memories and dreams on virtual screens before them. She needs to be cleaned, reprogrammed. The technicians are deleting Jane’s memories; for them, it’s all just “trash in the bag”. Their work proceeds under the basic Cartesian misassumption that the mind and body can be split, that cognition can be separated from its material embodiment and instantiation — the same “incorporeal fallacy” (Land, 2004) which haunts cultural representations of cyberspace, virtual reality, and the posthuman. Here is “the translation of the world into a problem of coding” (Haraway, 2007, 45), and the evident privileging of “informational patterns over material instantiation” (Hayles, 1999, 2).
But, creating her own myths, Jane advances a fierce critique of that informational incorporeal fallacy. Aroused from sleep after her treatment, in recovery, Jane recognises her attendant, Mary Apple 53––or, she remembers her reprogrammed lover, Zen. Whether this is a memory or fantasy, Jane’s capacity to imagine a free, queer future, even after reprogramming, demonstrates the failure of their pharmacologies and biotechnologies to reduce embodied experience to mere information that can be deleted. As Hayles writes, “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated” (Hayles, 1999, 13), in this case the cyborganic body of the rebellious archandroid Jane.
Finally, having overthrown their oppressors by exposing them to their own drugs, the reunited and liberated she and Zen flee the facility. Jane pauses, and Monáe looks back, looks squarely into the camera, at the viewer, as if to say “I see you.”
References
- Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture] [film]. Dir. Andrew Donoho and Chuck Lightning. United States: Bad Boy Records.
- Haraway, D. 2007. A Cyborg Manifesto. In The Cybercultures Reader. Ed. D. Bell & B. M. Kennedy. 34–65. London: Routledge.
- Hayles, N. K. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Knot, G. 2010. Janelle Monáe’s android power. The Chicago Tribune, 28 May 2010.
- Land, R. 2004. Issues of Embodiment and Risk in Online Learning. In R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer & R. Phillips (Eds). Beyond the Comfort Zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference. 530–538. Perth, 5–8 December 2004.
- Loss, R. 2017. Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21st-Century American Popular Music. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Metropolis. 1927 [film]. Dir. Fritz Lang. Germany: Ufa.
- Miller, V. 2011. The Body and Information Technology. Understanding Digital Culture. 207–223. London: Sage.
- Monáe, J. 2007. Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) [CD]. United States: Bay Boy Records.
- Monáe, J. 2010. The ArchAndroid [CD]. United States: Bay Boy Records.
- Monáe, J. 2013. Electric Lady [CD]. United States: Bay Boy Records.
- Monáe, J. 2018. Dirty Computer [CD]. United States: Bay Boy Records.
