Cultural Responses 2.-Cyber fiction-in Film.
Whilst the seminal novel in the development of Cyberpunk fiction is Neuromancer by William Gibson, in which the central character plugs his brain directly into the Web, has never been filmed, since film like the Web itself is primarily a visual medium, I make no apology for concentrating on film for this lecture. Incidentally although Neuromancer to some extent predicts both the net and VR technology Gibson wrote it in 1984-5 on a portable manual typewriter!
Science fiction as a genre in novel and film has concentrated a great deal on imagined futures from it's beginnings in the popular novels of the late nineteen century. Part of the genres enduring appeal to both film maker and audience is undoubtedly the opportunity afforded to stretch the limits of what can be convincingly portrayed. From the early dystopia of Fritz Lang"s "Metropolis" to 1999's visually outstanding "The Matrix" the Science Fiction has been at the centre of the technological development of SFX.
But not all science fiction counts as cyber fiction. The naive optimism of "Star Wars" for example is a odds with the dystopic ethic of cyberculture in general. The key issue, in any event, will be the point at, and the way that human interact with machines. In "Blade Runner" for example which was loosely based on Philip K Dick's novel "Do Androids dream of electric sheep?" the plot revolves around the degree to which a replicant, that is a genetically engineered human, is human.
The first politically motivated Sci-Fi novel and one which remains very influential was written as long ago as 1948. George Orwell conceived and wrote 1984 after having been employed at the BBC at a time when television was being resurrected from the War-time hiatus. 1984 may be a direct attack on the repressive regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union but the real fear is of technological surveillance by such totalitarian regimes.
The best film version of 1984 is the UK production filmed in London as close to the locations used by Orwell and released in 1984.
The Cyberpunk television series Max Headroom and David Cronenburg's visually disturbing Videodrome also centre on themes concerned with the powerful potential for domination the media of Television has.
That having been said even Disney occasionally get beyond their usual wide-eyed naivete and break new ground. Tron -a fantasy set inside the CPU- certainly set new standards in computer generated animation, although, of course, it now looks primitive. Tron even carried something of the dystopia characteristic of the genre.
The first real "hacker" film is as most of you will already be aware was "War Games" loosely based on a real event surrounding a teenager who successfully hacked the Pentagon mainframe in the early 1980's. As this is family film the plot s resolved with the boy in question going on to save the world by confusing the self same super computer into not launching a full scale nuclear war.
Even badly acted film can and sometimes does raise questions in relation to the central issue of Cyberculture and it's responses. Johnny Mnemonic features a central character with a brain implant used to carry sensitive data. The film is unspeakably awful in every respect- far better to read the short story on which it was based. Lawnmower man and its dire sequel push the boundaries of film technology and conceptual possibility with plots that imagine an entirely created digital universe dominated by an increasingly insane, megalomaniac VR user, whose intelligence has been artificially enhanced.
Hackers (still being periodically shown on Filmfour) imagines a global corporate conspiracy broken by a group of Gen-X crackers. The Net has a plot centred on the elimination of one persons entire existence by the erasure of all personal records, to be followed by her murder. Total Recall, and its probably superior TV spin off centre on the use technology to manipulate memory, a plot device also used in Men In Black.
The most recent dystopic cyberpunk film and one with both a thought provoking central plot theme and a stunning visual style was 1999's "The Matrix". Visually the film self consciously borrows from Japanese anime- another genre in which cyberpunk ideas are commonplace. Indeed much anime lifts plot devices and storylines from Hollywood Sci-Fi and blends with a particular Japanese notion of psychic energy (Chi). The central plot of the Matrix is at the boundaries even of cyber fiction and as such I would highly recommend viewing this film before the end of this module.
However he point of all of this, is that the common feature of fictional responses to cyberculture is the ability to examine potentials in technological change and raise questions at the centre of the theoretical basis of this module. The Paranoiac Dystopia that pervades cyber fiction is as we beginning to discover justified by the current uses made of the technology by States and TNC's of enormous power. The potential for the abuse of such power by the abduction of cyberspace of their own dominion makes such paranoia a symptom not of instability but of simply being aware.
It is who controls the technology that determines how it develops and in the long run also determines our relationship to the technology.
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