Tag Archives: Science fiction

Cyberpunk is Dead

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By John Semley

Source: The Baffler

“It was an embarrasser; what did I want? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Me, caught without a program!”
—Bruce Bethke, “Cyberpunk” (1983)

Held annually in a downtown L.A. convention center so massive and glassy that it served as a futurist backdrop for the 1993 sci-fi action film Demolition Man and as an intergalactic “Federal Transport Hub” in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 space-fascism satire Starship Troopers, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a.k.a. “E3,” is the trade show of the future. Sort of.

With “electronic entertainment” now surpassing both music and movies (and, indeed the total earnings of music and movies combined), the future of entertainment, or at least entertainment revenue, is the future of video games. Yet it’s a future that’s backward-looking, its gaze locked in the rearview as the medium propels forward.

Highlights of E3’s 2019 installment included more details around a long-gestating remake of the popular PlayStation 1-era role-playing game Final Fantasy VII, a fifth entry in the demon-shooting franchise Doom, a mobile remake of jokey kids side-scroller Commander Keen, and playable adaptations of monster-budget movie franchises like Star Wars and The Avengers. But no title at E3 2019 garnered as much attention as Cyberpunk 2077, the unveiling of which was met with a level of slavish mania one might reserve for a stadium rock concert, or the ceremonial reveal of an efficacious new antibiotic.

An extended trailer premiere worked to whet appetites. Skyscrapers stretched upward, slashed horizontally with long windows of light and decked out with corporate branding for companies called “DATA INC.” and “softsys.” There were rotating wreaths of bright neon billboards advertising near-futuristic gizmos and gee-gaws, and, at the street level, sketchy no-tell motels and cars of the flying, non-flying, and self-piloting variety. In a grimy, high-security bunker, a man with a buzzcut, his face embedded with microchips, traded blows with another, slightly larger man with a buzzcut, whose fists were robotically augmented like the cyborg Special Forces brawler Jax from Mortal Kombat. The trailer smashed to its title, and to wild applause from congregated gamers and industry types.

Then, to a chug-a-lug riff provided by Swedish straight-edge punkers Refused (recording under the nom de guerre SAMURAI) that sounded like the sonic equivalent of a can of Monster energy drink, an enormous freight-style door lifted, revealing, through a haze of pumped-out fog, a vaguely familiar silhouette: a tall, lean-muscular stalk, scraggly hair cut just above the shoulders. Over the PA system, in smoothly undulating, bass-heavy movie trailer tones, a canned voice announced: “Please welcome . . . Keanu Reeves.” Applause. Pitchy screams. Hysterics in the front row prostrating themselves in Wayne’s World “we’re not worthy!” fashion. “I gotta talk to ya about something!” Reeves roared through the din. Dutifully reading from a teleprompter, he plugged Cyberpunk 2077’s customizable characters and its “vast open world with a branching storyline,” set in “a metropolis of the future where body modification has become an obsession.”

More than just stumping for Cyberpunk 2077, Reeves lent his voice and likeness to the game as a non-playable character (NPC) named “Johnny Silverhand,” who is described in the accompanying press materials as a “legendary rockerboy.” A relative newbie to the world of blockbuster Xbox One games, Reeves told the audience at E3 that Cyberpunk piqued his interest because he’s “always drawn to fascinating stories.” The comment is a bit rich—OK, yes, this is a trade show pitch, but still—considering that such near-futuristic, bodily augmented, neon-bathed dystopias are hardly new ground for Reeves. His appearance in Cyberpunk 2077 serves more to lend the game some genre cred, given Reeves’s starring roles in canonical sci-fi films such as Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and the considerably more fantastic Matrix trilogy (1999-2003)—now quadrilogy; with an anticipated fourth installment announced just recently. Like many of E3 2019’s other top-shelf titles, Cyberpunk 2077 looked forward by reflecting back, conjuring its tech-noir scenario from the nostalgic ephemera of cyberpunk futures past.

This was hardly lost among all the uproar and excitement. Author William Gibson, a doyenne of sci-fi’s so-called “cyberpunk” subgenre, offered his own withering appraisal of Cyberpunk 2077, tweeting that the game was little more than a cloned Grand Theft Auto, “skinned-over with generic 80s retro-future” upholstery. “[B]ut hey,” Gibson added, a bit glibly, “that’s just me.” One would imagine that, at least in the burrows of cyberpunk fandom, Gibson’s criticism carries considerable weight.

After all, the author’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is a core text in cyberpunk literature. Gibson also wrote the screenplay for Johnny Mnemonic, adapted from one of his own short stories, which likewise developed the aesthetic and thematic template for the cyberpunk genre: future dystopias in which corporations rule, computer implants (often called “wetware”) permit access to expansive virtual spaces that unfold before the user like a walk-in World Wide Web, scrappy gangs of social misfits unite to hack the bad guys’ mainframes, and samurai swords proliferate, along with Yakuza heavies, neon signs advertising noodle bars in Kanji, and other fetish objects imported from Japanese pop culture. Gibson dissing Cyberpunk 2077 is a bit like Elvis Presley clawing out of his grave to disparage the likeness of an aspiring Elvis impersonator.

Gibson’s snark speaks to a deeper malaise that has beset cyberpunk. A formerly lively genre that once offered a clear, if goofy, vision of the future, its structures of control, and the oppositional forces undermining those authoritarian edifices, it has now been clouded by a kind of self-mythologizing nostalgia. This problem was diagnosed as early as 1991 by novelist Lewis Shiner, himself an early cyberpunk-lit affiliate.

“What cyberpunk had going for it,” Shiner wrote in a New York Times op-ed titled “Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk, “was the idea that technology did not have to be intimidating. Readers in their teens and 20’s responded powerfully to it. They were tired of hearing how their home computers were tempting them into crime, how a few hackers would undermine Western civilization. They wanted fiction that could speak to the sense of joy and power that computers gave them.”

That sense of joy had been replaced, in Shiner’s estimation, by “power fantasies” (think only of The Matrix, in which Reeves’s moonlighting hacker becomes a reality-bending god), which offer “the same dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster movies” (enter, in due time, the video games and blockbuster movies). Where early cyberpunk offerings rooted through the scrap heap of genre, history, and futurist prognostication to cobble together a genre that felt vital and original, its modern iterations have recourse only to the canon of cyberpunk itself, smashing together tropes, clichés, and old-hat ideas that, echoing Gibson’s complaint, feel pathetically unoriginal.

As Refused (in their pre-computer game rock band iteration) put it on the intro to their 1998 record The Shape of Punk to Come: “They told me that the classics never go out of style, but . . . they do, they do.”

Blade Ran

The word was minted by author Bruce Bethke, who titled a 1980 short story about teenage hackers “Cyberpunk.” But cyberpunk’s origins can be fruitfully traced back to 1968, when Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a novel that updated the speculative fiction of Isaac Asimov’s Robot series for the psychedelic era. It’s ostensibly a tale about a bounty hunter named Rick Deckard chasing rogue androids in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco circa 1992. But like Dick’s better stories, it used its ready-made pulp sci-fi premise to flick at bigger questions about the nature of sentience and empathy, playing to a readership whose conceptions of consciousness were expanding.

Ridley Scott brought Dick’s story to the big screen with a loose 1982 film adaptation, Blade Runner, which cast Harrison Ford as Deckard and pushed its drizzly setting ahead to 2019. With its higher order questions about what it means to think, to feel, and to be free—and about who, or what, is entitled to such conditions—Blade Runner effectively set a cyberpunk template: the billboards, the neon, the high-collared jackets, the implants, the distinctly Japanese-influenced mise-en-scène extrapolated from Japan’s 1980s-era economic dominance. It is said that William Gibson saw Blade Runner in theaters while writing Neuromancer and suffered something of a crisis of conscience. “I was afraid to watch Blade Runner,” Gibson told The Paris Review in 2011. “I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.” Yet Gibson deepened the framework established by Blade Runner with a crucial invention that would come to define cyberpunk as much as drizzle and dumpsters and sky-high billboards. He added another dimension—literally.

Henry Case, Gibson establishes early on, “lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace.” As delineated in Neuromancer, cyberspace is an immersive, virtual dimension. It’s a fully realized realm of data—“bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void”—which hackers can “jack into” using strapped-on electrodes. That the matrix is “bodiless” is a key concept, both of Neuromancer and of cyberpunk generally. It casts the Gibsonian idea of cyberspace against another of the genre’s hallmarks: the high-tech body mods flogged by Keanu Reeves during the Cyberpunk 2077 E3 demo.

Early in Neuromancer, Gibson describes these sorts of robotic, cyborg-like implants and augmentations. A bartender called Ratz has a “prosthetic arm jerking monotonously” that is “cased in grubby pink plastic.” The same bartender has implanted teeth: “a webwork of East European steel and brown decay.” Gibson’s intense, earthy descriptions of these body modifications cue the reader into the fundamental appeal of Neuromancer’s matrix, in which the body itself becomes utterly immaterial. Authors from Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) to Ernest Cline (Ready Player One, which is like a dorkier Snow Crash, if such a thing is conceivable), further developed this idea of what theorist Fredric Jameson called “a whole parallel universe of the nonmaterial.”

As envisioned in Stephenson’s Snow Crash, circa 1992, this parallel universe takes shape less as some complex architecture of unfathomable data, and more as an immersive, massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Stephenson’s “Metaverse”—a “moving illustration drawn by [a] computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable”—is not a supplement to our real, three-dimensional world of physical bodies, but a substitute for it. Visitors navigate the Metaverse using virtual avatars, which are infinitely customizable. As Snow Crash’s hero-protagonist, Hiro Protagonist (the book, it should be noted, is something of a satire), describes it: “Your avatar can look any way you want it to . . . If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse.”

Beyond Meatspatial Reasoning

The Metaverse seems to predict the wide-open, utopian optimism of the internet: that “sense of joy and power” Lewis Shiner was talking about. It echoes early 1990s blather about the promise of a World Wide Web free from corporate or government interests, where users could communicate with others across the globe, forge new identities in chat rooms, and sample from a smorgasbord of lo-res pornographic images. Key to this promise was, to some extent, forming new identities and relationships by leaving one’s physical form behind (or jacked into a computer terminal in a storage locker somewhere).

Liberated from such bulky earthly trappings, we’d be free to pursue grander, more consequential adventures inside what Gibson, in Neuromancer, calls “the nonspace of the mind.” Elsewhere in cyberpunk-lit, bodies are seen as impediments to the purer experience of virtuality. After a character in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom unplugs from a bracingly real simulation immersing him in the life of Abraham Lincoln, he curses the limitations of “the stupid, blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears.” Or, as Case puts it in Neuromancer, the body is little more than “meat.”

In Stephenson’s Metaverse, virtual bodies don’t even obey the tedious laws of physics that govern our non-virtual world. In order to manage the high amount of pedestrian traffic within the Metaverse and prevent users from bumping around endlessly, the complicated computer programming permits avatars simply to pass through one another. “When things get this jammed together,” Hiro explains, “the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you’re going.” Bodies—or their virtual representations—waft through one another, as if existing in the realm of pure spirit. There is an almost Romantic bent here (Neuromancer = “new romancer”). If the imagination, to the Romantics, opened up a gateway to deep spiritual truth, here technology serves much the same purpose. Philip K. Dick may have copped something of the 1960s psychedelic era’s ethos of expanding the mind to explore the radiant depths of the individual soul, spirit, or whatever, but cyberpunk pushed that ethos outside, creating a shared mental non-space accessible by anyone with the means—a kind of Virtual Commons, or what Gibson calls a “consensual hallucination.”

Yet outside this hallucination, bodies still persist. And in cyberpunk, the physical configurations of these bodies tend to express their own utopian dimension. Bruce Bethke claimed that “cyberpunk” resulted from a deliberate effort to “invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology.” Subsequent cyberpunk did something a bit different, not juxtaposing but dovetailing those “punk attitudes” with high-tech. (“Low-life, high-tech” is a kind of a cyberpunk mantra.) Neuromancer’s central heist narrative gathers a cast of characters—hacker Henry Case, a cybernetically augmented “Razorgirl” named Molly Millions, a drug-addled thief, a Rastafari pilot—that can be described as “ragtag.” The major cyberpunk blockbusters configure their anti-authoritarian blocs along similar lines.

In Paul Verhoeven’s cyberpunk-y action satire Total Recall, a mighty construction worker-cum-intergalactic-spy (Arnold Schwarzenegger) joins a Martian resistance led by sex workers, physically deformed “mutants,” little people, and others whose physical identities mirror their economic alienation and opposition to a menacing corporate-colonial overlord named Cohaagen.

In Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves’s businesslike “mnemonic courier” (someone who ferries information using computer implants embedded in the brain) is joined by a vixenish bodyguard (Dina Meyer’s Jane, herself a version of Neuromancer’s Molly Millions), a burly doctor (Henry Rollins), and a group of street urchin-like “Lo-Teks” engaged in an ongoing counterinsurgency against the mega-corporation Pharmakom. Both Mnemonic and Recall rely on cheap twists, in which a figure integral to the central intrigue turns out to be something ostensibly less- or other-than-human. Total Recall has Kuato, a half-formed clairvoyant mutant who appears as a tumorous growth wriggling in the abdomen of his brother. Even more ludicrously, Mnemonic’s climax reveals that the Lo-Teks’ leader is not the resourceful J-Bone (Ice-T), but rather Jones, a computer-augmented dolphin. In cyberpunk, the body’s status as “dead meat” to be transcended through computer hardware and neurological implantation offers a corollary sense of freedom.

The idea of the cybernetic body as a metaphor for the politicized human body was theorized in 1985, cyberpunk’s early days, by philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway. Dense and wildly eclectic, by turns exciting and exasperating, Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is situated as an ironic myth, designed to smash existing oppositions between science and nature, mind and body. Haraway was particularly interested in developing an imagistic alternative to the idea of the “Goddess,” so common to the feminism of the time. Where the Goddess was backward-looking in orientation, attempting to connect women to some prelapsarian, pre-patriarchal state of nature, the cyborg was a myth of the future, or at least of the present. “Cyborg imagery,” she writes, “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” Part machine and part flesh, Haraway visualizes the cyborg as a being that threatens existing borders and assumes responsibility for building new ones.

Though they are not quite identical concepts, Haraway’s figure of the cyborg and the thematics of cyberpunk share much in common. A character like Gibson’s Molly Millions, for example, could be described as a cyborg, even if she is still essentially gendered as female (the gender binary was one of the many “dualisms” Haraway believed the cyborg could collapse). Cyborgs and cyberpunk are connected in their resistance to an old order, be it political and economic (as in Neuromancer, Johnny Mnemonic, etc.) or metaphysical (as in Haraway). The cyborg and the cyberpunk both dream of new futures, new social relationships, new bodies, and whole new categories of conceptions and ways of being.

The historical problem is that, for the most part, these new categories and these new relationships failed to materialize, as cyberpunk’s futures were usurped and commodified by the powers they had hoped to oppose.

Not Turning Japanese

In an introduction to the Penguin Galaxy hardcover reissue of Neuromancer, sci-fi-fantasy writer Neil Gaiman ponders precisely how the 1980s cyberpunk visions came to shape the future. “I wonder,” he writes, “to what extent William Gibson described a future, and how much he enabled it—how much the people who read and loved Neuromancer made the future crystallize around his vision.”

It’s a paradox that dogs most great sci-fi writers, whose powers for Kuato-style clairvoyance have always struck me as exaggerated. After all, it’s not as if, say, Gene Roddenberry literally saw into the future, observed voice-automated assistants of the Siri and Alexa variety, and then invented his starship’s speaking computers. It’s more that other people saw the Star Trek technology and went along inventing it. The same is true of Gibson’s matrix or Stephenson’s Metaverse, or the androids of Asimov and Dick. And the realization of many technologies envisioned by cyberpunk—including the whole concept of the internet, which now operates not as an escapist complement to reality, but an essential part of its fabric, like water or heat—has occurred not because of scrappy misfits and high-tech lowlifes tinkering in dingy basements, but because of gargantuan corporate entities. Or rather, the cyberpunks have become the corporate overlords, making the transition from the Lo-Teks to Pharmakom, from Kuato to Cohaagen. In the process, the genre and all its aspirations have been reduced to so much dead meat. This is what Shiner was reacting to when, in 1991, he renounced his cyberpunk affiliations, or when Bruce Bethke, who coined the term, began referring to “cyberpunk” as “the c-word.”

The commodification of the cool is a classic trick of capitalism, which has the frustrating ability to mutate faster than the forces that oppose it. Yet even this move toward commodification and corporatization is anticipated in much cyberpunk. “Power,” for Neuromancer’s Henry Case, “meant corporate power.” Gibson goes on: “Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.” For Case (and, it follows, Gibson, at least at the time of his writing), this power had “attained a kind of immortality” by evolving into an organism. Taking out one-or-another malicious CEO hardly matters when lines of substitutes are waiting in the wings to assume the role.

It’s here that cyberpunk critiques another kind of body. Not the ruddy human form that can be augmented and perfected by prosthetics and implants, but the economic body. Regarding the economy as a holistic organism—or a constituent part of one—is an idea that dates back at least as far as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” The rhetoric of contemporary economics is similarly biological. An edifying 2011 argument in Al Jazeera by Paul Rosenberg looked at the power of such symbolic conceptions of the economy. “The organic metaphor,” Rosenberg writes, “tells people to accept the economy as it is, to be passive, not to disturb it, to take a laissez faire attitude—leave it alone.”

This idea calls back to another of cyberpunk’s key aesthetic influences: the “body economic” of Japan in the 1980s. From the 2019 setting of 1982’s Blade Runner, to the conspicuous appearance of yakuza goons in Gibson’s stories, to Stephenson’s oddly anachronistic use of “Nipponese” in Snow Crash, cyberpunk’s speculative futures proceed from the economic ascendency of 1980s Japan, and the attendant anxiety that Japan would eventually eclipse America as an economic powerhouse. This idea, that Japan somehow is (or was) the future, has persisted all the way up to Cyberpunk 2077’s aesthetic template, and its foregrounding of villains like the shadowy Arasaka Corporation. It suggests that, even as it unfolds nearly sixty years from our future, the blockbuster video game is still obsessed with a vision of the future past.

Indeed, it’s telling that as the robust Japanese economy receded in the 1990s, its burly body giving up the proverbial ghost, that Japanese cinema became obsessed with avenging spirits channeled into the present by various technologies (a haunted video cassette in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, the internet itself in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo, etc.). But in the 1980s, Japan’s economic and technologic dominance seemed like a foregone conclusion. In a 2001 Time article, Gibson called Japan cyberpunk’s “de facto spiritual home.” He goes on:

I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns—all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information—said, “You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.” And it was. It so evidently was.

Gibson’s analysis features one glaring mistake. His insistence that “modern Japan simply was cyberpunk” is tethered to its actual history as an economic and technological powerhouse circa the 1980s, and not from its own science-fictional preoccupations. “It was not that there was a cyberpunk movement in Japan or a native literature akin to cyberpunk,” he writes. Except there so evidently was.

The Rusting World

Even beyond the limp, Orwellian connotations, 1984 was an auspicious year for science-fiction. There was Neuromancer, yes. But 1984 also saw the first collected volume of Akira, a manga written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo. Originally set, like Blade Runner, in 2019, Akira imagines a cyberpunk-y Neo-Tokyo, in which motorcycle-riding gangs do battle with oppressive government forces. Its 1988 anime adaptation was even more popular, in both Japan and the West. (The film’s trademark cherry red motorcycle has been repeatedly referenced in the grander cyberpunk canon, appearing in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Ready Player One and, if pre-release hype is to believed, in Cyberpunk 2077 itself.) In 2018, the British Film Institute hailed Akira, accurately, as “a vital cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre.”

Japan has plenty of other, non-Akira cyberpunk touchstones. As a cinematic subgenre, Japanese cyberpunk feels less connected to the “cyber” and more to the spirit of “punk,” whether in the showcasing of actual Japanese punk rock bands (as in 1982’s Burst City) or the films’ own commitment to a rough-hewn, low-budget, underground aesthetic. Chief among the latter category of films is Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, which was shot on 16mm over a grueling year-and-a-half, mostly in and around Tetsuo actress and cinematographer Kei Fujiwara’s apartment, which also housed most of the film’s cast and crew.

Unlike the Western cyberpunk classics, Tsukamoto’s vision of human-machine hybridization is demonstrably more nightmarish. The film follows two characters, credited as the Salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) and the Guy (a.k.a. “The Metal Fetishist,” played by writer/director/producer/editor Tsukamoto himself), bound by horrifying mutations, which see their flesh and internal organs sprouting mechanical hardware.

In its own way, Tetsuo works as a cyberpunk-horror allegory for the Japanese economy. As the Salaryman and the Fetishist learn to accept the condition of their mechanization, they merge together, absorbing all the inorganic matter around them, growing enormously like a real-world computer virus or some terrifying industrial Katamari. Their mission resonates like a perverse inversion of Japan’s post-industrial promise. As Tsukamoto’s Fetishist puts it: “We can rust the whole world and scatter it into the dust of the universe.”

Like Haraway’s development of the cyborg as a metaphoric alternative to the New Age “goddess,” Tetsuo’s titular Iron Man can offer a similar corrective. If cyberpunk has become hopelessly obsessed with its own nostalgia, recycling all its 1980s bric-a-brac endlessly, then we need a new model. Far from the visions of Gibson, in which technology provides an outlet for a scrappy utopian impulse that jeopardizes larger corporate-political dystopias, Tetsuo is more pessimistic. It sees the body—both the individual physical body and the grander corpus of political economy—as being machine-like. Yet, as Rosenberg notes in his Al Jazeera analysis of economic rhetoric, it may be more useful to conceive of the economy not as a “body” or an organism but as a machine. The body metaphor is conservative, “with implications that tend toward passivity and acceptance of whatever ills there may be.” Machines, by contrast, can be fixed, greased, re-oriented. They are, unlike bodies, a thing separate from us, and so subject to our designs.

Cybernetic implants and cyborg technology are not some antidote to corporate hegemony. The human does not meld with technology to transcend the limitations of humanity. Rather, technology and machinery pose direct threats to precisely that condition. We cannot, in Tsukamoto’s film, hack our way to a better future, or technologically augment our way out of collective despair. Technology—and the mindless rush to reproduce it—are, to Tsukamoto, the very conditions of that despair. Even at thirty years old, Tetsuo offers a chilling vision not of the future, or of 1980s Japan, but of right now: a present where the liberating possibilities of technology have been turned inside-out; where hackers become CEOs whose platforms bespoil democracy; where automation offers not the promise of increased wealth and leisure time, but joblessness, desperation, and the wholesale redundancy of the human species; where the shared hallucination of the virtual feels less than consensual.

There’s nothing utopian about the model of cyberpunk developed in Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It is purely dystopian. But this defeatism offers clarity. And in denying the collaborative, collectivist, positive vision of a technological future in favor of a vision of identity-destroying, soul-obliterating horror, Tsukamoto’s stone-cold classic of Japanese cyberpunk invites us to imagine our own anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate arrangements. The enduring canon of American-style cyberpunk may have grown rusty. It has been caught, as Bethke put it in his genre-naming story, “without a program.” But the genre’s gnarlier, Japanese iterations have plenty to offer, embodying sci-fi’s dream of imagining a far-off future as a deep, salient critique of the present. It is only when we accept this cruel machinery of the present that we can freely contemplate how best to tinker with its future.

Left to peddle such a despairing vision in a packed-out L.A. convention center, even cyberpunk’s postmortem poster boy Keanu Reeves would be left with little to say but a resigned, bewildered, “Woah . . .”

Saturday Matinee: John Dies at the End

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“John Dies at the End” (2012) is a sci-fi/horror/comedy written and directed by Don Coscarelli and based on David Wong’s novel of the same name. Like Phantasm, it’s a cross-genre cult film involving an inter-dimensional invasion by body-snatching aliens, but this time with the added complication of hallucinogenic drugs and time travel. It also features relatively unknown actors Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes as the two main protagonists with strong supporting performances by Paul Giamatti (who was also executive producer), Clancy Brown and Doug Jones.

Watch the full film on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11488923

Saturday Matinee: Corporate Monster

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By Rob Munday

Source: Short of the Week

From New Coke to the New World Order, conspiracy theories are rich throughout history and that stranger you meet in the bar, or family member you get stuck with at a wedding, will rejoice in informing you how the moon landing was filmed in a basement or how The Beatles replaced Paul McCartney after he died. In the age of fake news, where world leaders are the ones fueling these theories, S/W favourite Ruairi Robinson (Blinky™) returns to the site with his own conspiracy story—Corporate Monster.

Inspired by the current state of the world, which Robinson rather aptly describes as “f*cked”, Corporate Monster is the tale of a man who obsessively starts to believe that parasitic creatures are controlling the world. Hidden in the shadows and disguised from the majority of the population, these Zoidbergian beings are pulling all the political strings behind the scenes. The idea of giant decapods hiding behind human faces is obviously far-fetched (though nothing seems impossible nowadays), but the theory that a wealthy elite holds sway over the globe feels much less fictional.

An obvious ode to Carpenter’s cult classic They Live, Corporate Monster was filmed in both Dublin and Detroit, and builds on its eighties inspiration with a retro-tinged production. Frequent Robinson collaborator Macgregor is back behind the lens, and the duo compliment each other perfectly once again, deftly handling the quieter paranoid moments and the tense action sequences with equal aplomb. Produced with the support of Screen Ireland, this week’s online release comes on a sad note however, as it represents the anniversary of the passing of Robinson’s writing partner Eoin Rogers, and the film is dedicated to his memory.

The Varieties of Psychonautic Experience: Erik Davis’s ‘High Weirdness’

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Art by Arik Roper

By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
By Erik Davis
Strange Attractor Press/MIT Press, 2019

Two months ago, I devoured Erik Davis’s magisterial 2019 book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies the same weekend I got it, despite its 400-plus pages of sometimes dense, specialist prose. And for the past two months I have tried, in fits and starts, to gather together my thoughts on it—failing every single time. Sometimes it’s been for having far too much to say about the astonishing level of detail and philosophical depth contained within. Sometimes it’s been because the book’s presentation of the visionary mysticism of three Americans in the 1970s—ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna, parapolitical trickster Robert Anton Wilson, and paranoid storyteller-mystic Philip K. Dick—has hit far too close to home for me personally, living in the late 2010s in a similarly agitated political (and mystical) state. In short, High Weirdness has seemed to me, sitting on my bookshelf, desk, or in my backpack, like some cursed magical grimoire out of Weird fiction—a Necronomicon or The King in Yellow, perhaps—and I became obsessed with its spiraling exploration of the unfathomable universe above and the depthless soul below. It has proven itself incapable of summary in any linear, rationalist way.

So let’s dispense with rationalism for the time being. In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of McKenna, Wilson, and Dick: explorations that were an attempt to construct meaning out of a world that to these three men, in the aftermath of the cultural revelations and revolutions of the 1960s that challenged the supposed wisdom and goodness of American hegemony, suddenly offered nothing but nihilism, paranoia, and despair. These three men were all, in their own unique ways, magicians, shamans, and spiritualists who used the tools at their disposal—esoteric traditions from both East and West; the common detritus of 20th century Weird pop culture; technocratic research into the human mind, body, and soul; and, of course, psychedelic drugs—to forge some kind of new and desperately-needed mystical tradition in the midst of the dark triumph of the Western world’s rationalism.

A longtime aficionado of Weird America, Davis writes in the introduction to High Weirdness about his own early encounters with Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, the Church of the SubGenius, and other underground strains of the American esoteric in the aftermath of the ’60s and ’70s. As someone who came late in life to a postgraduate degree program (High Weirdness was Davis’s doctoral dissertation for Rice University’s Religion program, as part of a curriculum focus on Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism), I find it incredibly easy to identify with Davis’s desire to tug at the edges of his longtime association with and love for the Weird in a scholarly context. This book’s scholarly origins do not make High Weirdness unapproachable to the layperson, however. While Davis does delve deeply into philosophical and spiritual theorists and the context of American mysticism throughout the book, he provides succinct and germane summaries of this long history, translating the work of thinkers as diverse as early 20th century psychologist and student of religious and mystical experience William James to contemporary theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk and Mark Fisher. Davis’s introduction draws forth in great detail the long tradition of admitting the ineffable, the scientifically-inexplicable, into the creation of subjective, individual mystical experiences.

Primary among Davis’s foundational investigations, binding together all three men profiled in the book, is a full and thorough accounting of the question, “Why did these myriad mystical experiences all occur in the first half of the 1970s?” It’s a fairly common historical interpretation to look at the Nixon years in America as a hangover from the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, a retrenchment of Nixon’s “silent majority” of middle- and working-class whites vs. the perceived chaos of a militant student movement and identity-based politics among racial and sexual minorities. Davis admits that the general mystical seeking that went on in the early ’70s is a reaction to this revanchism. And while he quotes Robert Anton Wilson’s seeming affirmation of this idea—“The early 70s were the days when the survivors of the Sixties went a bit nuts”—his interest in the three individuals at the center of his study allows him to delve deeper, offering a more profound explanation of the politics and metaphysics of the era. In the immediate aftermath of the assassinations, the political and social chaos, and the election of Nixon in 1968, there was an increased tendency among the younger generation to seek alternatives to mass consumption culture, to engage in what leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse would term “the Great Refusal.” All three of the figures Davis focuses on in this book, at some level or another, decided to opt out of what their upbringings and conformist America had planned for them, to various levels of harm to their livelihoods and physical and mental health. This refusal was part of an awareness of what a suburban middle-class life had excised from human experience: a sense of meaning-making, of a more profound spirituality detached from the streams of traditional mainline American religious life.

To find something new, the three men at the center of High Weirdness were forced to become bricoleurs—cobbling together a “bootstrap witchery,” in Davis’s words—from real-world occult traditions (both Eastern and Western); from the world of Cold War technocratic experimentation with cybernetics, neuroscience, psychedelics, and out-and-out parapsychology; and from midcentury American pop culture, including science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and pulp fiction. Davis intriguingly cites Dick’s invention of the term “kipple” in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a key concept in understanding how this detritus can be patched together and brought new life. Given Dick’s overall prescience in predicting our 21st century world of social atomization and disrepair, this seems a conceptual echo worth internalizing a half-century later. If the late 1960s represented a mini-cataclysm that showed a glimpse of what a world without the “Black Iron Prison” might look like, those who graduated to the 1970s—the ones who “went a bit nuts”—needed to figure out how to survive by utilizing the bits and scraps left behind after the sweeping turbulence blew through. In many ways, McKenna, Wilson, and Dick are all post-apocalyptic scavengers.

All three men used drugs extensively, although not necessarily as anthropotechnics specifically designed to achieve enlightenment (Davis notes that Dick in particular had preexisting psychological conditions that, in conjunction with his prodigious use of amphetamines in the 1960s, were likely one explanation for his profound and sudden breaks with consensus reality in the ’70s). But we should also recognize (as Davis does) that McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were also, in many ways, enormously privileged. As well-educated scions of white America, born between the Great Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II, they had the luxury to experiment with spirituality, psychedelic drugs, and technology to various degrees while holding themselves consciously separate from the mainstream institutions that would eventually co-opt and recuperate many of these strains of spirituality and individual seeking into the larger Spectacle. As Davis cannily notes, “Perhaps no one can let themselves unravel into temporary madness like straight white men.” But these origins also help explain the expressly technocratic bent of many of their hopes (McKenna) and fears (Wilson and Dick). Like their close confederate in Weirdness, Thomas Pynchon (who spent his early adulthood working for defense contractor Boeing, an experience which allowed him a keener avenue to his literary critiques of 20th century America), all three men were adjacent to larger power structures that alternately thrilled and repelled them, and which also helped form their specific esoteric worldviews.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to summarize the seven central chapters of the book, which present in great detail Terence (and brother Dennis) McKenna’s mushroom-fueled experiences contacting a higher intelligence in La Chorrera, Colombia in 1971, Robert Anton Wilson’s LSD-and-sex-magick-induced contact with aliens from the star Sirius in 1973 and ’74 as detailed in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, and Philip K. Dick’s famous series of mystical transmissions and revelations in February and March of 1974, which influenced not only his fiction output for the final eight years of his life but also his colossal “Exegesis,” which sought to interpret these mystical revelations in a Christian and Gnostic context. Davis’s book is out there and I can only encourage you to buy a copy, read these chapters, and revel in their thrilling detail, exhilarating madness, and occasional absurdity. Time and time again, Davis, like a great composer of music, returns to his greater themes: the environment that created these men gave them the tools and technics to blaze a new trail out of the psychological morass of Cold War American culture. At the very least, I can present some individual anecdotes from each of the three men’s mystical experiences, as described by Davis, that should throw some illumination on how they explored their own psyches and the universe using drugs, preexisting religious/esoteric ritual, and the pop cultural clutter that had helped shape them.

Davis presents a chapter focusing on each man’s life leading up to his respective spiritual experiences, followed by a chapter (in the case of Philip K. Dick, two) on his mystical experience and his reactions to it. For Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis, their research into organic psychedelics such as the DMT-containing yagé (first popularized in the West in the Cold War period by William S. Burroughs), alternately known as oo-koo-hé or ayahuasca, led them to South America to find the source of these natural, indigenous entheogens. But at La Chorrera in Colombia they instead met the plentiful and formidable fungus Psilocybe cubensis. In their experiments with the mushroom, Terence and Dennis tuned into perceived resonances with long-dormant synchronicities within their family histories, their childhood love of science fiction, and with the larger universe. Eventually, Dennis, on a more than week-long trip on both mushrooms and ayahuasca, needed to be evacuated from the jungle, but not before he had acted as a “receiver” for cryptic hyper-verbal transmissions, the hallucinogens inside him a “vegetable television” tuned into an unseen frequency—a profound shamanic state that Terence encouraged. The language of technology, of cybernetics, of science is never far from the McKenna brothers’ paradigm of spirituality; the two boys who had spent their childhoods reading publications like Analog and Fate, who had spent their young adulthoods studying botany and science while deep in the works of Marshall McLuhan (arguably a fellow psychedelic mystic who, like the McKennas and Wilson, was steeped in a Catholic cultural tradition), used the language they knew to explain their outré experiences.

Wilson spent his 20s as an editor for Playboy magazine’s letters page and had thus been exposed to the screaming gamut of American political paranoia (while contributing to it in his own inimitable prankster style). He had used this parapolitical wilderness of mirrors, along with his interest in philosophical and magickal orientations such as libertarianism, Discordianism, and Crowleyian Thelema as fuel for both the Illuminatus! trilogy of books written with Robert Shea (published in 1975), and his more than year-long psychedelic-mystical experience in 1973 and 1974, during which he claimed to act as a receiver on an “interstellar ESP channel,” obtaining transmissions from the star Sirius. His experiences as detailed in Cosmic Trigger involve remaining in a prolonged shamanic state (what Wilson called the “Chapel Perilous,” a term redolent with the same sort of medievalism as the McKenna brothers’ belief that they would manifest the Philosopher’s Stone at La Chorrera), providing Wilson with a constant understanding of the universe’s playfully unnerving tendency towards coincidence and synchronicity. Needless to say, the experiences of one Dr. John C. Lilly, who was also around this precise time tuned into ostensible gnostic communications from a spiritual supercomputer, mesh effortlessly with Wilson’s (and Dick’s) experiences thematically; Wilson even used audiotapes of Lilly’s lectures on cognitive meta-programming to kick off his mystical trances. Ironically, it was UFO researcher and keen observer of California’s 1970s paranormal scene Jacques Vallée who helped to extract Wilson out of the Chapel Perilous—by retriggering his more mundane political paranoia, saying that UFOs and other similar phenomena were instruments of global control. In Davis’s memorable words, “Wilson did not escape the Chapel through psychiatric disenchantment but through an even weirder possibility.”

Philip K. Dick, who was a famous science fiction author at the dawn of the ’70s, had already been through his own drug-induced paranoias, political scrapes, and active Christian mystical seeking. Unlike McKenna and Wilson, Dick was a Protestant who had stayed in close contact with his spiritual side throughout adulthood. In his interpretation of his mystical 2-3-74 experience, Dick uses the language and epistemology of Gnostic mystical traditions two millennia old. Davis also notes that Dick used the plots of his own most overtly political and spiritual ’60s output to help him understand and interpret his transcendent experiences. Before he ever heard voices or received flashes of information from a pink laser beam or envisioned flashes of the Roman Empire overlapping with 1970s Orange County California, Dick’s 1960s novels, specifically The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Ubik (1969), had explored the very nature of reality and admitted the possibility of a Gnostic universe run by unknowable, cruel demiurges. Even in these hostile universes, however, there exists a messenger of hope and mercy who seeks to destroy the illusion of existence and bring relief. These existing pieces of cultural and religious “kipple,” along with the parasocial aspects of Christian belief that were abroad in California at the time, such as the Jesus People movement (the source of the Ichthys fish sign that triggered the 2-3-74 experience), gave Dick the equipment he needed to make sense of the communications he received and the consoling realization that he was not alone, that he was instead part of an underground spiritual movement that acted as a modern-day emanation of the early Christian church.

After learning about these three figures’ shockingly similar experiences with drug-induced contact with beyond, the inevitable question emerges: what were all these messages, these transmissions from beyond, trying to convey? One common aspect of all three experiences is how cryptic they are (and how difficult and time-consuming it was for each of these men to interpret just what the messages were saying). It’s also a little sobering to discover through Davis’s accounts how personal all three experiences were, whether it’s Terence and Dennis’s private fraternal language during the La Chorrera experiment, or mysterious phone calls placed back in time to their mother in childhood, or a lost silver key that Dennis was able to, stage-magician-like, conjure just as they were discussing it, or the message Philip K. Dick received to take his son Christopher to the doctor for an inguinal hernia that could have proven fatal. But alongside these personal epiphanies, there is also always an undeniable larger social and political context, especially as both Wilson and Dick saw their journeys in 1973 and 1974 as a way to confront and deal with the intense paranoia around Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon (in his chapter setting the scene of the ’70s, Davis calls Watergate “a mytho-poetic perversion of governance”). In every case, the message from beyond requires interpretation, meaning-making, and, in Davis’s terminology, “constructivism.” The reams of words spoken and written by all three men analyzing their respective mystical experiences are an essential part of the experience. And these personal revelations all are attempts by the three men to make sense of the chaos of both their personal lives and their existence in an oppressive 20th century technocratic society: to inject some sense of mystery into daily existence, even if it took the quasi-familiar and, yes, somewhat comforting form of transmissions from a mushroom television network or interstellar artificial intelligence.

Over the past nine months I’ve spent much of my own life completing (and recovering from the process of completing) a Master’s degree. My own academic work, focusing on nostalgia’s uses in binding together individuals and communities with their museums, tapped into my earliest memories of museum visits in the late 1970s, when free education was seemingly everywhere (and actually free), when it was democratic and diverse, when it was an essential component of a rapidly-disappearing belief in social cohesion. In a lot of ways, my work at We Are the Mutants over the past three years is the incantation of a spell meant to conjure something new and hopeful from the “kipple” of a childhood suffused in disposable pop culture, the paranormal and “bootstrap witchery,” and science-as-progress propaganda. At the same time, over the past three years the world has been at the constant, media-enabled beck and call of a figure ten times more Weird and apocalyptic and socially malignant than any of Philip K. Dick’s various Gnostic emanations of Richard Nixon.

Philip K. Dick believed he was living through a recapitulation of the Roman Empire, that time was meaningless when viewed from the perspective of an omniscient entity like VALIS. In the correspondences and synchronicities I have witnessed over the past few months—in the collapse of political order and the revelation of profound, endemic corruption behind the scenes of the ruling class—this sense of recurring history has sent me down a similar set of ecstatic and paranoid corridors as McKenna, Wilson, and Dick. The effort to find meaning in a world that once held some inherent structure in childhood but has become, in adulthood, a hollow facade—a metaphysical Potemkin village—is profoundly unmooring. But meaning is there, even if we need technics such as psychedelic drugs, cybernetics (Davis’s final chapter summarizing how the three men’s mystical explorations fed into the internet as we know it today is absolutely fascinating), and parapolitical activity to interpret it. On this, the 50th anniversary of the summer of 1969, commonly accepted as the moment the Sixties ended, with echoes of moon landings and Manson killings reverberating throughout the cultural theater, is it any wonder that the appeal of broken psychonauts trying to pick up the pieces of a shattered world would appeal to lost souls in 2019? High Weirdness as a mystical tome remains physically and psychically close to me now, and probably will for the remainder of my life; and if the topics detailed in this review intrigue you the way they do me, it will remain close to you as well.

Saturday Matinee: Quest

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By Jonathan Crow

Source: Open Culture

Saul Bass was one of the greatest graphic designers who ever lived. He created the logos for such ubiquitous organizations as AT&T, United Airlines and the Girl Scouts of America. He revolutionized the art of movie titles in such films as The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and West Side Story. He may or may not have designed the famous shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. His design work was always marked by a clean, highly graphic style that you can pick out a mile away.

Yet when Bass got a chance to actually direct, he didn’t make slick movies with simple plots and great visuals, as you might expect. Instead, he made profoundly trippy movies with great visuals. His one and only feature film, Phase IV (1974), is a deeply weird movie about evolution. Think of it as a low-budget 2001: A Space Odyssey. With ants. The movie was butchered by scared distributors and consequently, it bombed at the box office.

Almost a decade later, Bass, along with his second wife Elaine, made a short film called Quest, based on Ray Bradbury’s story “Frost and Fire.” You can watch it above.

The film centers on a tribe of robe-sporting people who live for only a mere eight days. If you’re an infant on a Monday, you will be elderly by the time the next Monday rolls around. At the opening, a nameless child is born as his elders ask in hushed tones, “Is this the one?” Of course he is. The reason he and his tribe have a shorter shelf life than grocery store sushi has something to do with a gate that blocks life sustaining light. “Beyond the great gate,” intones one elder, “people live 20,000 days or more.” The problem is that gate is five or so days away by foot.

So after a very brief training montage, the youth sets off across strange and fanciful landscapes that recall Yes album covers. Along the way, he faces down a beast that looks like a bear crossed with a lamprey, plays a video game with a Yeti on top of a ziggurat, and stumbles across a wizened old man who only the previous week was the tribe’s golden boy.

The movie is incredibly, hilariously dated, so much so that it goes right past kitsch into something close to sublime. If you remember watching, and loving, The Dark Crystal, Beast Master, Krull and Tron in your youth, you must check this out.

Saturday Matinee: Southland Tales

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In defence of Southland Tales – Richard Kelly’s futuristic folly

The director’s much-maligned second feature is a vigorous piece of pulp for the 21st century.

By Dominic Jaeckle

Source: Little White Lies

It’s November 2016, and Richard Kelly is sat in a Los Angeles restaurant dining with a newspaper journalist. They talk a little about the cult consensus surrounding the reissue of his 2001 debut, Donnie Darko, but the main topic on the table is Kelly’s reemergence following a long period of inactivity. Both writer and subject are eager to discuss the director’s ill-fated second feature, Southland Tales, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.

Endeavouring to reappraise the film, the journalist would later dub it “a pre-game show for the next decade of global misery” when he finally put pen to paper. Revisiting Southland Tales in 2017, however, it’s not only the speculative powers of the film that sing. What also resonates is the quiet conflict between commercial and contextual providence when we’re trying to read popular cinema, to hold it up against the world.

Kelly’s playbook, defined as it is by hypothetical disorder, frames an associative reservoir of contemporary symbolisms in which critics will swim. Searching for a sense of the inherent value of Southland Tales, some look for its hidden depths; others, the flat veneer of its surface. But the absence of consensus around the film feels entirely appropriate.

Taking the newsfeed as a stylistic turn, Southland Tales weaves together various subplots, dead-ends, and vignettes in the form of a rolling newscast. Set against the backdrop of nuclear war in America – the bomb having landed in Abilene, Texas – we find a country in meltdown. State borders are closed, and extensions of the Patriot Act have allowed intelligence services to function unmonitored. On the west coast, a neo-Marxist revolution is falling into chaotic failure around Venice Beach, and an actor named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) – having married the debutante of some Republican house of cards – has lost his memory. Now hiding out in Los Angeles, he runs with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an ambitious and entrepreneurial ex-porn star.

Together, Gellar and Johnson are penning a screenplay, a cop movie entitled ‘The Power’. But amid its attention to the trappings of genre, the script holds some answers to a spiritual foreboding prompted by an impending energy crisis stayed, only, by the numinous capabilities of a scientist (Wallace Shawn). A figure shrouded in a fog of incense, mystic vagaries and influence owing to the financial backing of a mysterious German multinational.

Seann William Scott stars as two police officers who are not allowed to meet, should they rupture a temporal continuum, and the film is ambiently scored by hotel lobby-era Moby. Justin Timberlake, playing a misanthropic Iraq War veteran, establishes the dynamics of the film’s dénouement. Rather than place or time, Timberlake instead reads us a bastardisation of the Book of Revelation fused, throughout, with misquotes from high-modernist poetry. Repeatedly, he tells us that “this is the way the world ends.”

Southland Tales is a time capsule flirting with end-of-history ideologues. It is a joke on the very idea of the running order of recent history. Self-identifying as a parable playing on a cultural implosion of operatic proportions, it runs as a look-book of early 21st century anxieties. It’s a speculative three-act riff on the catastrophic failings of the last 10 years, a fever dream in two hours and twenty-five minutes. Kelly’s film is a carrion call for a new culture of private consumption. Its characters can do little but watch one another, and the film milks its ignoble examination of mass consumerism through depiction of a dystopian reality defined by tragic inevitability and heavy self-consciousness. “I feel like sometimes things just need time to marinate,” Kelly has said; he always wanted us to read the film forwards.

This is a murky film, no question, but Kelly has suggested that key to understanding its meaning is the intellectual scope of its centrepiece scene: a three-minute dance routine. Around the halfway mark, a doped-out Timberlake slips into an opiate induced coma. In a fantasy sequence – blood down his shirt, Budweiser in hand – he dances through a thoroughly 20th century panorama, a pinball arcade, flanked by a chorus of dancers all legs and vinyl. He looks straight down the camera, lip-syncing his way through The Killer’s ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’, whose anthemic drive is matched only by the empty opacity of its lyrics. “All these things that I’ve done” – the song is about meaning read backwards, the ownership of experience, an inversion of the speculation showcased throughout Southland Tales. The engagement of its terms here feels like a play on use-value; it’s a psalm for our private habits as viewers.

If watching rather than knowing is our active-verb in Southland Tales, then the song proves vital. Meaningless in its aim for universalism, a pop song only resonates in the right room, when played in the right context, and recalling it – personalising its terms – becomes a statement of value. That’s a perfect picture of the vitality of Southland Tales – a vigorous piece of pulp for the 21st century, it courts that very idea. It wants to be used; the film wants to mount a consideration of the cumulative character of meaning, how popular cinema is always contingent on popular feeling.

At first, what we have seems like a mess of ideas. But give it time, let those ideas marinate, and we’re left with something more. Kelly’s joke, still intact 10 years later, is that there will always be a solitary ‘I’ as far as consumption is concerned. In 2007, Southland Tales was simply out of step, waiting for new platforms for personal entertainment, for the semiotic carry-on instigated by streaming cultures. It’s a film honed for the minute when cinema would feel more like a private habit than a public spectacle.

 

Watch the full film here.

Saturday Matinee: Endangered Species

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A Strange Harvest: Alan Rudolph’s ‘Endangered Species’

By Michael Grasso, K.E. Roberts, Richard McKenna

Source: We Are the Mutants

GRASSO: When our esteemed editor-in-chief recommended we look this week at the little-heralded-nor-remembered Endangered Species from 1982, I was cautiously optimistic. A B-movie starring Robert Urich, JoBeth Williams, Paul Dooley, and Hoyt Axton about cattle mutilations, shot on location in Colorado and Wyoming? I consider myself well-versed in movies about UFOs from the late ’70s and early ’80s, and the fact I’d never heard of this one was a real shock. To my further shock, the film was amazing: fascinating as both a time capsule of the early Reagan years and as a piece of weird outsider art/conspiratorial agitprop. In fact, in Mutant Chat this week I called Endangered Species “the last great 1970s political conspiracy thriller”; with a few days to mull over this assessment, I stand by it even more assertively. Endangered Species seamlessly and expertly weaves together all the threads of cattle mutilation lore as they currently stood in 1982, all while engaging the kind of B-plots that are characteristic of similar movies from this time period: a shoehorned (and slightly icky) romance between the two leads, a plucky teenage character for the teens in the audience to identify with, and a good chunk of edgy blood and gore (not just from the aforementioned mutilated cattle).

So I just have to ask before getting into the details and why I loved this trashy piece of late-night ’80s cable fare—Kelly, how in the hell did you find out about this thing?

ROBERTS: I remember this flick from the video store, but I never watched it (not that I remember, anyway) until about a year ago. Conspiracy films became a genre unto themselves after Watergate, as did UFO films after 1977’s Close Encounters. Endangered Species merges both—one of the few examples of such before The X-Files (1980’s Hangar 18, produced by exploitation experts Sunn Classic Pictures, is another). The campy elements are there, for sure, but overall I agree with you, Mike: this is a very interesting portrait of ramped-up paranoia during the high Cold War period that hits a surprising number of now well-known genre staples: “silent” black helicopters, chemical and germ warfare, keeping up with the Russians, moving vans that disguise shadowy government conspirators, references to satanism. Although the script can’t quite live up to the premise, the opening sequence that moves from a herd of cows in rural Colorado to a herd of humans rushing through the streets of NYC makes the point perfectly clear: our government makes no distinction between cows and people; we are all dumb beasts whose purpose is to be sacrificed for the preservation of the bastards in power.

MCKENNA: Jesus but it’s been a while since I last saw a mainstream film that felt as out-of-control as Endangered Species. I had a vague recollection of watching it, but apparently it was one of those false memories engendered by spending too long staring at the VHS covers down the rental shop, hence it was totally new to me. It comes on like an aggressive cross between a self-aware B-movie and an oddball independent cinema artifact, so it’s no surprise that director Alan Rudolph was a protégé of Robert Altman. Prior to Endangered Species, Rudolph had made a string of low-budget, intelligent, critically acclaimed films in a variety of genres. And Endangered Species is fucking great, despite the many odd and sometimes unpleasant things about it, which include what can’t help feeling like a bit of a cavalier attitude to animal welfare and Robert Urich’s awful yet incongruously multifaceted “hero” Ruben Castle. Castle is one of the most irritating and borderline repellent protagonists I can remember seeing posited as a good guy and romantic lead, despite which he’s given to flashes of grace and insight. Given Rudolph’s smarts, it’s intriguing to wonder if the character wasn’t a deliberate piss-take of bullheaded thuggish machismo—in fact, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether Endangered Species is actually stupid or just playing at it.

You mention Close Encounters, Kelly, and in some ways the whole film almost feels like a compelling satire-mashup of Spielbergian motifs, from the casting right down to the Sugarland Express-like motorcade of cars that provides the film with one of its most memorable images, as well as the disguised trucks containing government technology, like the ones used to ferry Francois Truffaut’s benevolent scientific staff across the US, though here ferrying something much less benign.

Rudolph’s direction is lucid and kinetic, the editing surprising, the acting pretty great, and the script off the wall enough to have its moments, but what is perhaps most surprising about it— especially given how early on it’s made clear that the UFOs are a cover for military–industrial complex shenanigans—is that Endangered Species somehow manages to remain oddly frightening (thanks in part to a deeply unsettling score by Gary Wright) and convincingly transfers the eerie atmosphere initially engendered by the non-sequitur aerial shots of rampaging livestock and rumors of heifer-lasering ETs to government conspiracies equally inhuman and incomprehensible.

GRASSO: Kelly, you’re right: this really is a sui generis artifact of ufology at the outset of the ’80s, one that really bridges two distinct eras in the field. As the 1980s progressed, tales of close encounters were rapidly leaving behind encounters of J. Allen Hynek’s third kind (where entities can be sensed or glimpsed) and becoming more and more likely to be abductions where perceptions of the experiencer’s sense of reality were changed: i.e., encounters of Jacques Vallée’s fourth kind. The suspicion that the U.S. government might be in some ways covering up or working in cahoots with the UFOs also dates from the 1980s, as the Majestic-12 hoax documents began circulating a year or two after Endangered Species was released. (One of Majestic-12’s biggest proponents, investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe, was also one of the earliest journalists to cover the cattle mutilation phenomenon.)

But ultimately I can’t think of another film from this period that is so decidedly Valléean in its almost fractal unfolding of putative UFO phenomena. In his 1979 Messengers of Deception, Vallée spends quite a bit of time looking at cattle mutilations in the American West. At the time, the classic mutilation event was over a decade old: the case of Snippy the Horse in 1967. Vallée examines how the costly mystery of the cattle mutilation phenomenon in the latter half of the ’70s gradually turned these ranchers from initially believing that UFOs were responsible to eventually believing some kind of government conspiracy were behind the mutilations. These streams of anti-government conspiratorial thought obviously flowed together with existing suspicion of government interference in ranching and land management in the West that would feed into the militia movements of the 1990s and beyond. (It’s interesting to note that JoBeth Williams’ Sheriff Harry character deputizes the entire town at the end of the film to confront the shadowy base on the edge of town; the idea of the posse comitatus was hugely inspirational to the anti-government militias forming in the West at this time.)

But let’s concede this much to the ranchers: their cattle were dying, and they had some reason to suspect government experiments. In Endangered Species, the paramilitary forces are abducting and experimenting on cattle to test biological weapons to be used against the Soviets. (This is probably the best place to note that both Peter Coyote’s and Dan Hedaya’s black ops operatives emit real sleazy menace in every scene they’re in; they don’t get much screen time, but for me they were by far the best part of the film.) These mysterious operatives are utterly dedicated to these experiments for “patriotic” reasons. In Coyote’s confrontation with Hoyt Axton’s big-time rancher, it’s obvious that Axton’s character’s patriotism was a big reason for his collaboration with the cattle mutilators (“I’m a patriot, Steele; I’d do anything for my country”), but after the murder of town newspaper editor Paul Dooley to keep the coverup intact, the black ops boys have gone too far for his tastes. “And you’re not in Guatemala takin’ pot-shots at barefoot natives,” Axton says to Coyote, putting the black ops conspirators firmly in the sphere of the CIA. It’s no surprise that Axton eventually dies a gruesome death; after a black-bag team taints his toothbrush with a mysterious agent, his guts literally fall out of him as an out-of-control hemorrhagic illness ravages his system. Obviously, we’re meant to be reminded of the kinds of domestic ops performed by CIA programs like MKUltra here, but it’s also interesting to see a bioweapon on screen in 1982 that is very similar to the Ebola virus (discovered by scientists in 1976). Government conspiracies involving Ebola/Marburg viruses were also au courant in the 1990s, as were beliefs that the U.S. government either had deliberately engineered or released the AIDS virus into the U.S. population at the end of the 1970s.

ROBERTS: I need to mention E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial here. Released exactly two months before Endangered Species, Spielberg’s film also featured government agents (in this case, the FBI) spying on American citizens and actively seeking to keep the truth from them, prepared to use violence if necessary. Ultimately, the agents are portrayed as benevolent, even paternalistic, their boss (played by Peter Coyote!) revealed to be much like idealistic kid-hero Elliott—as well as a potential father figure to him. Endangered Species does not cop out in such a way (as Spielberg did in 2002 when digitally replacing the FBI’s guns in the chase scene with walkie-talkies, a tragic mistake he later rectified), and is much more disturbing because of it, as you guys mention. While a number of popular ’80s films take on the military-industrial complex and conspiracy, to some degree—The Manhattan Project (1986), The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), WarGames (1983), No Way Out (1987)—only John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) and Endangered Species offer an outright rejection of Reagan’s manipulative idealism.

The film missed an opportunity with JoBeth Willams (who had just starred in 1981’s Poltergeist), whose character we expect to be a man when she’s introduced as newly elected sheriff “Harry.” The camera follows her as she walks to the podium to get sworn in, her long hair tucked up under her hat. For a while, Harry gets to show off her investigatory chops, and even challenges Urich’s claim to hero status, until the predictable “Does she ever wear a dress?” comment gets trotted out, and she takes a backseat to a stock character (the burned-out, drunk NYC cop who’s dictating his first hard-boiled novel into a mini tape recorder).

MCKENNA: It’s true, the very talented JoBeth Willams isn’t used anywhere near as well as she could have been, and the situations the script puts her in range from patronizing to offensive, but despite that she still manages to give a performance that radiates humanity and realness. Playing Urich’s daughter, Marin Kanter (who also appeared in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains the same year) is great too, as are all the various minor characters who evoke a convincing milieu of dickhead provincial bureaucracy.

In fact, Endangered Species is such a monster that even the poster’s a rocker, bringing together the lights in the sky from the alternate posters for E.T. with a light-grid (which appears in the film as part of the black ops tech used by the baddies) reminiscent of 1981’s Looker, giving it something of the feel of a summa of the zeitgeist. The whole thing quite clearly bears the greasy fingerprints of its executive producer, Zalman King. Better known for his screenplay for 1986 wank-fest 9½ Weeks and the erotic thrillers he subsequently directed, King had given a great performance four years previous to Endangered Species as the protagonist of Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine—another sort-of-countercultural horror-conspiracy movie—and was one of those people who seemed in some strange way to have the pulse of the unwholesome side of the popular culture, for better or worse. Endangered Species is yet more proof of that odd talent.

Another thing that struck me was the language used by the villains of the piece—a realistic-sounding form of the clinically euphemistic combat talk (which, like the conversations between scientists in 1980’s Altered States, makes you aware you are listening to professionals) that has now become commonplace but that feels surprisingly ahead-of-its-time in the context of the film. It not only gives Endangered Species a sheen of accuracy but also makes you wonder just how much this compellingly detached way of speaking about death and killing—because it is compelling, unfortunately—has contributed to normalizing, to whatever small extent, the kind of thinking that lies behind it.

GRASSO: As I said at the outset, Endangered Species feels a lot more like ’70s thrillers such as The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor than your typical 1980s VHS fare. Even the ambiguous ending pretty much assures us that greater and more momentous injustices committed by U.S. government-aligned forces will likely continue, long after the credits roll. But it does diverge from those classic 1970s conspiracy thrillers in an important way: instead of the protagonists being crusading journalists (Paul Dooley’s newspaper editor dies about halfway through), the protagonists here are a pair of cops. JoBeth William’s Sheriff Harriet character, as mentioned before, is a woman who can get things done and has the nominal trust of her fellow Coloradans (even if there is the whiff of sexism around the way she is treated at a climactic town meeting). But Robert Urich’s vacationing New York City cop is straight out of street-level 1970s films. While he’s not the same kind of maverick hero as Al Pacino’s Serpico, he’s a salt-of-the-earth schlub, reminiscent of ’70s protagonists such as Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three. But ultimately both protagonists are cops, and I think that’s worth noting as we move from the Nixonian Seventies to the Reaganite Eighties.

To echo what Richard said above, the film certainly is visually interesting for its budget and limitations. The high plains landscapes and slowly decaying small-town streets evoke the period exceptionally well, when America’s small towns were beginning to feel the hollowing out by global capital. The implicit confluence of shadowy government forces with local and international capitalists (in form of Axton’s rancher, the sinister big rigs, and the cattle mutilators’ headquarters, a U.S. missile silo eventually sold into private hands after the first round of U.S.-Soviet arms treaties in the late ’60s) is probably one of the most interesting sub rosa themes in the film. The film’s editing, especially around the repeated ubiquitous cattle abductions by helicopter, is solid as well. And the occasional use of computer graphics eschew the frequent cheesiness inherent in most ’80s films and give us a believable look at what the advanced surveillance and medical systems that the black ops personnel use might look like. Even Gary Wright’s offbeat synth score helps convey a feeling of technological alienation (although I chuckled at the inclusion of a character singing along to “Dream Weaver” on the radio). I maybe wouldn’t go so far to say that Endangered Species is a lost classic, but it’s a fascinating document that tells us more about the state of American conspiracy theorizing in the early 1980s than a lot of bigger, better-known films from the period.

Saturday Matinee: Hard To Be A God

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Source: Kanopy

When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei German died in 2013, he left behind this extraordinary final film, a phantasmagoric adaptation of the revered sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers (authors of the source novel for Tarkovsky’s Stalker). Hard to be a God began percolating in German’s consciousness in the mid-1960s, and would actively consume him for the last 15 years of his life.

He brought the film close enough to completion for his wife and son to apply the finishing touches immediately after his passing. Taking place on the planet Arkanar, which is in the midst of its own Middle Ages, the film focuses on Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), one of a group of Earth scientists who have been sent to Arkanar with the proviso that they must not interfere in the planet’s political or historical development. Treated by the planet’s natives as a kind of divinity, Don Rumata is both godlike and impotent in the face of its chaos and brutality.

Running Time
179 mins
Year
2013
Kanopy ID
1173813
Filmmakers
Aleksei Yuryevich German
Features
Dmitriy Vladimirov, Laura Lauri, Leonid Yarmolnik
Languages
Russian

Watch the full film here.