ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: A CONTROVERSIAL BOOK ADAPTATION
John: Yo what’s up out there corporate stooges, netrunners, street samurai, all you keyboard cowboys and script kiddies, we’re broadcasting our pirate signal to free your mind in this corporate dystopia. It’s called the Zone Film Challenge.
Alex: Although this is a written article.
John: *laughs*
Alex: Broadcasting is… well use your imagination.
John: Posting is a form of broadcasting.
Alex: Speaking of using your imagination, today we’re covering possibly the most imaginative take on what the internet would become. This current challenge was A Controversial Book Adaptation; pick a maligned adaptation of a novel or a short story. We chose the Robert Longo adaptation of William Gibson’s short story Johnny Mnemonic. Mnemonic would lead into Neuromancer; the keystone cyberpunk text of the 1980s, the one responsible for most of your favorite lingo that would later bleed into works like… well Cyberpunk, the tabletop game.
John: Stuff like The Matrix. It’s not as easy to draw a direct line to it but you see its influence in Ghost In The Shell and Cowboy Bebop and Serial Experiments Lain. It’s rare in this day and age that you can kind of point at one guy as the real originator and godfather of a genre but Gibson is more or less that for Cyberpunk. It’s a title he’d really only be under threat of losing to Neal Stephenson.
Alex: Some establishing facts about the movie. Came out in 1995, starring Keanu Reeves, Dinah Meyer, and a stunner supporting cast. You got Beat Takeshi, Dolph Lundgren, Henry Rollins, Ice-T.
John: Some high quality dudes on that list.
Alex: Interesting casting across the board. It doesn’t all work, Takeshi and Lundgren are both awkward fits but Rollins is a hit. When it came out, it was a big-time punchline but with almost thirty years of hindsight, it’s aged well. It has a good sense of what it wants to be and is confident in the ways that you want a sci-fi adaptation to be confident, especially when its adapting something as abstracted as Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy.
John: It’s a cocktail of an adaptation because by the time this came out the concrete had kind of dried on what the Gibson first gen cyberpunk aesthetic looked like and the Johnny Mnemonic short story doesn’t have a lot of those things. They needed to stir in some Neuromancer stuff. They needed to get online. They needed to punch in on your deck and dive the net, watch out for black ice and virus attacks etcetera
Alex: It blends in a bit of Count Zero & Mona Lisa Overdrive as well. It blends in a lot of the Sprawl stuff into a pretty digestible action sci-fi film. It makes up a lot of stuff whole cloth. There’s only a few things taken from Johnny Mnemonic — like Jones the Hacker Dolphin.
John: Like Jones!
JW’s Tangent:
It’s become more and more apparent over the past decade or so that the bold new brand of cyber billionaires with their hoodies and graphic tees are just as sociopathic as the suits they replaced. If not more so. The internet was pitched to us as a unifying discovery and yet we’ve never been more divided. Boiling down the wild west of the old forum days into half a dozen websites crawling with grifters, political radicals, and other people’s moms has poisoned the well of civil discourse. Nothing is safe. Not sports, not children’s cartoons, and certainly not politics. Every issue is a binary. Pick your side, arm yourself with half-remembered podcast bits, and hate the opposition until they ban you for it. Nuance is weakness. Silence is complicity with the enemy.
Maybe once upon a time some of these people had an ambition to fulfill the promise of that futurism they saw in early cyberpunk. An interconnected, transhuman, digital world without all that nasty dystopia. But somewhere along the line they realized dividing their users into Skinner boxes of recurrent rage was more profitable, and at that point all the ideals that hadn’t been smothered by billions of dollars went out the window. It didn’t matter. They’d already been given the keys to the kingdom by a bunch of decaying politicians who grilled them on whether the cyber was inside the computer. Now we live in a world built and run by a bunch of guys who decided they wanted to live in Neuromancer and it sucks.
I will not be accessing the so-called “Meta” so-called “verse” until it has been consecrated by the Pope and declared safe for Christendom. No, I am not kidding. No, this is not my residual Jesuit sympathies making themselves known, we mutually got that out of our systems in the Blatty piece, keep up. I will await Da Big Man Frankie Uno’s stamp of approval because a site for e-pilgrimages would at least be more interesting, sociologically and anthropologically speaking, than whatever the hell it was that the Incredible Zuck and his minions showed me in that already infamous extended reveal video.
I never thought we’d get Gibson’s internet. Especially not as it appears in Johnny Mnemonic. It’s a UI designer’s nightmare on par with the precrime touchscreen interface from Minority Report. Imagine having to program a system that can react to all those gestures. How do you even specify what can and can’t be interacted with? Need a lot more than those 80 gigs in your head to run that without it catching fire Johnny Boy, and here I was thinking you were the most technical boy in town!
No, what I mourn with the onset of our bland corporatized VR workspace future is the death of the internet i used to love. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Cartel beheadings on LiveLeak, elderly nudes on LemonParty, three dozen 4Chan users assuming the Health and Safety Swastika to make sure no one catches AIDS from the Habbo Hotel pool. All these moments will be lost like tears in the rain. Time… to bid on an NFT that can be used to customize my avatar.
Alex:
Although it’s a punchline today, it cannot be understated how impactful Internet Explorer was in developing the modern image of the internet. Launched in 1995, it was Internet Explorer that brought most of the United States online and served as the entry point for most folks to the world wide web. Coming pre-installed on Windows 95 and with a simple, user-friendly design, it vaulted over its major competitors to become the dominant web browser within three years of release. It launched in 1995, it was the king by 1998. Its simple gray background, drop-down menu bars, and flat clip art created a template for web design that still persists in UI design today. Internet Explorer standardized web design and in effect, standardized our imagination for what the internet could look like. This is all to say that 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic has aged wonderfully because it exists outside our modern understanding of web technology, it is not responding to one idea of internet — it is projecting its own dreams of the future.
Even if many of William Gibson’s ideas about the future turned out to be fanciful and quaint, his work still has much to say about our modern relationship to technology. Even when filtered through Hollywood, that core tenet remains. On this watch I was struck by how analog the technology was. It’s unclean, bulky and cluttered. Cathode-ray tube monitors dotting rusted interiors, 35mm jacks hardwired into the neck, wires and cords criss-crossing back and forth, netted behind desks and stapled into walls — there’s nary a trace of wireless technology aside from the VR headset that Johnny uses to access the internet. It’s aesthetically cool, of course but it’s an environment where technology is making encroachments into the literal skin of men. The opening crawl tells the viewer that the world is plagued by a disease known as Nerve Attenuation Syndrome which is caused by humanity’s growing dependence on the internet. The effects of NAS are similar to opiate withdrawal; the shot of a 35mm cord going into Johnny’s neck is shot with medical detachment like a scene of a nurse inserting an IV into a person’s arm. It’s a bracing shot, undoubtedly what LA Times critic Peter Rainer was thinking of when he called Mnemonic’s tone “too grim and lacking excitement.”
The movie’s aesthetic grimness is contrasted by its imaginative depiction of the internet. For the viewer, Johnny Mnemonic’s internet has more in common with Kingda Ka than it does Internet Explorer. Shown through a first-person HUD, the internet is a formless three dimensional space where the user can click on large visual objects, most often garish neon signs, to gain access to a server. From there it’s a barrage of symbols, numbers, and text — one of Johnny’s talents is that he can break through all this, outwitting the internet security protocols and reshaping the digital world for his own mission. Compared to its grungy sewer-wire aesthetic, the film’s idea of what the internet could be is hopeful and bright. For as straightforward an action film as Mnemonic is, there are moments of creative inspiration in it. Compared to its sci-fi contemporaries, like 1993’s Demolition Man or 1995’s Judge Dredd, it’s positively counter-culture.
It’s difficult not to be nostalgic for the days before our culture was internet literate, before we understood the possibilities and limitations of what a web browser could do. This is, in part, why William Gibson’s cyberpunk works are endearing today. They offer up a unique, stimulating future where you are physically plugged into the net, where you can transcend physical limitations. For all the emphasis placed on the “punk” in “cyberpunk”, space can be made to understand the appeal of the “cyber” as well. That ritual of offering yourself, body and mind, to the internet was a promise (or threat) made in the early days of post-ARPANET science fiction but it has not yet come to pass and the appeal of it fades the closer we come to making it reality. For a period, Internet Explorer flattened our expectations, bringing them back into the real world. Thankfully, we have Gibson’s works on the record to help the users of tomorrow understand the dreams of yesterday.
Alex: Johnny Mnemonic’s future is dirty, even where it’s supposed to be clean which is what gives it an added pizazz which helped it age. This was routinely mocked when it came out though it’s aged quite well because it stuck to its guns so fiercely. You might think this is lame, you might think this is nerdy. You might think that it’s stupid that there’s a dolphin who’s a master codebreaker -
John: Jones the dolphin is real and strong and my friend. He’s also a smack addict in the short story.
Alex: I know! Which I’m bummed they took out! . They coulda kept that, the movie’s rated R! Again — you might think that this is too goofy to be taken seriously and while it is mildly tongue in cheek, it plays itself straightforward enough that I’m entranced by it.
John: If you’re looking to get into Gibson, obviously you should go read Neuromancer. But if you’re an extra technical boy who doesn’t read books, watch this movie. It’s a Gibson sampler-platter and there are some great Gibson-isms in this script.
Alex: At one point Johnny says he needs a “Thompson Eye-Phone.” When I heard that my head swiveled like an owl’s.
Wanna take the challenge? Next week’s prompt is: Spectacular Crashes — Pick a Movie with incredible stunt crashes. The Zone’s Pick? Richard Rush’s Freebie & the Bean!
