During the hazy mid-summer months of 1994 Hollywood execs were writing
checks for planned sci-fi and cyberpunk flicks like an army of
psychiatrists prescribing Prozac. If you'll recall, that was the movie
season MGM's Stargate surprised the pundits and the accountants by raking
in an unexpected $80 million in domestic receipts, this when the film had
been seen as a definite bomb likely to break a once-proud studio's
financial back. Hollywood being a town that suffers from cyclical stutters
and flash-fire brain fevers, all manner of vaguely genre-related fare (from
Congo to Tank Girl to Species) was soon being expedited or green-lighted,
with the soft, money-making center of the next movie season (i.e. the
summer of 1995) left open for a slew of cyberpunk flavored entries: Johnny
Mnemonic, The Net, Virtuosity and Hackers.
It isn't all that ironic that this last quartet was spawned by the market
success of a film whose twenty year old script detailed the
extra-terrestrial origins of the pyramids. In Hollywood, cyber- is still a
sub-genre of science-fiction, the giddy "future is now" hype that surrounds
the use of consumer electronics in most films notwithstanding. No, the real
irony is in the slightly schizophrenic way the industry has approached
tech in general, showing undeniable resourcefulness when it comes to using
digital technologies during production, but going all fumbly when relatives
of that same technology (however distant) show up as elements of plot and
narrative.
The intoxication with the current production uses of digital technology is
at an all time high, reminiscent of equally heady days when sound, color,
cranes, flat-bed editing and the like were just as spanking new. Computer
driven filmmaking and editing techniques are such the industry norm that
the strategic failure to keep up with the techy Jones is something of an
asset, as in Tim Burton's savvy revival of retro gimmicks like stop motion.
Moreover, having found its way so completely into so many aspects of
production, the electronic mediation of screen images means that there's
often really very little difference between flicks like Forest Gump and
Jurassic Park as constructed film objects. Their marketing and plotlines
may make them look like apples and oranges, but lift the hood and you'll
have a hard time telling the tale of an American every-idiot from the
toothy Spielbergian extravaganza. The tech that makes their fantasy spaces
possible is essentially the same.
On the other hand, the law that cyber-stories are box office poison was
recently drafted after the failures of three out of four of the
aforementioned summer techno-flicks, thereby providing a neat anti-trend
for the Movietown glossies to tout at regular intervals. Or, as a recent
Entertainment Weekly headline put it in their "Can this trend be saved?"
column: "Booted Up Thrillers Bottom Out!" At the beginning of the summer a
75% failure rate would have seemed impossible, as the steep increase of
digital tech use on the set was precisely what was supposed to make
Hollywood and cyber-space such a natural narrative match. The media arm of
the electronic culture industry had shifted into high gear, and after
Stargate every studio exec worth their salt was suddenly remembering that
in the Stone Age summer of 1983 WarGames took in $74 million on the basis
of Matthew Broderick and monochrome graphics. Seen through such parochial
Hollywood lenses, the 1995 slate were sure winners, Mnemonic, The Net and
Virtuosity coming in with bigger budgets and marquee stars, while Hackers
was perfumed with the always promising smell of youth culture octane.
When these films performed poorly at the box office though, Hollywood
discovered its accountability problem for the year (think along the lines
of '93's famed "Do Arnold and Sly still have it" question.) Most of the '95
deficit was explained away by the ritual flogging of Hollywood's usual
suspects, namely actors, audiences and directors depending on which film
you had your heart banked on. Maybe Denzel Washington wasn't the stand
alone draw we'd mistaken him for all these years, it was suggested. Or,
maybe the 20 million or so Americans on the net really are wired to their
terminals, the poor geeks unwilling and unable to venture out to theaters.
A third camp argued sagely that perhaps letting painters direct major
motion pictures (Mnemonic's Robert Longo) was a little ill-advised, as if
this hadn't been clear from the outset.
Whatever the reason, the ticket numbers produced by films where the
computer technology was front and narrative-center were easy enough to
read: $14 million for Johnny, $23 for Virtuosity and a mere $6 for
Hackers. Luckily for Sandra Bullock, The Net cleared $50 million - not
bad when you consider the company it kept, but not that impressive when you
remember her status as this year's All American Girl. Hollywood learned its
dollar and sense lesson and the official word regarding the place of
computer technology in the dream factory drifted down from the top-floor
offices: Tech in movies is good, as long as tech is precisely the last
thing a movie is about. Several cyber projects were shelved or sent back
to development and Hollywood announced 1996 through 1997 would be years
remembered for alien attacks and dinosaur sequels.
Among those with a vested interest in things electronic there's a tendency
to take such Hollywood failures a bit hard. The common charge is that
"Hollywood just doesn't understand technology," as if great films from
Blade Runner to the Star Wars Trilogy made anything approaching
technological sense. On most levels the only technologies that Hollywood
really needs to understand are those involved in filmmaking, but the more
self obsessed nabes on the cyber-map still tend to lament the arrival of a
bad VR flick to an extent that exceeds said flick's actual worth as a work
of art or item of commerce. I don't mean to venture into the rough and
murky waters of the debate over high/low art by saying this, or to suggest
that viewers can't legitimately ask for more for their money. My point is
simply that, for many people, dismay at a film like Virtuosity's
fundamental lack of dramatic qualities (an engaging plot or convincing
characters, for example) rivals their annoyance with its failings as a
piece of cyber-culture, making it hard to decide exactly what bugs them
most about the film. As a result, there are two sets of conventional
wisdom on how to such a film could have been made "better": those inured to
the pleasures of tech would have been happy if its maniac-on-the-loose
angle had just been a bit less cliche'd, while those attracted to the film
precisely because of the VR-sprite-gone-haywire premise would have wanted a
more original and internally consistent genre take on the tech, with
something like WarGames again providing the model.
Both of these arguments have their merits, but when applied to your typical
Hollywood movie (as opposed to an independent or auteurist film) the latter
tends to run into what I like to call the TRON fallacy. You don't hear much
about TRON these days except in historically minded odes to Industrial
Light and Magic's fave graphics engine of the moment, but simply stated the
TRON fallacy concerns the assumption that the expert exposition or
visualization of technology constitutes narrative and character development
in and of itself. For example, you can see Johnny Mnemonic running into a
TRON problem during its exquisitely wrought but pointless cyberspace phone
call, alarm clock and ice-breaker sequences. While certainly nice to look
at, their lavishness is nonetheless out of proportion to the mere stone's
throws they advance the film's plot or characters. Pyrotechnic outbursts,
these cyber-set-pieces are indifferent to any context except their own
status as kewl F/X; the net result is a steady diminishment of returns for
the audience, as Johnny Mnemonic actually manages to tell us less about
its fictive technological milieu the harder it tries to show it to us.
The need to visualize and explore the invisible cyber-space is
understandably paramount in these recent films. We want to SEE this
cyberspace we've all been hearing about, but unfortunately in Hollywood
this is still a medium without a message worth the listening or mainframe
time. To date the movies have found no better narrative use for their
technically polished visions of cyberspace than to rip-off the form and
function of a scene from another sub-genre altogether, namely the Monolith
Trip sequence at the end of 2001. The recent films don't have the scope of
Kubrick's or its visual genius, reducing their cyber-stuff to compositional
window dressing thought up in prop rooms and during second unit shooting.
This is a workable enough division of labor when banging out traditional
sci-fi fare like Stargate, but it no sense at all when the tech has to do
triple duty as muse, protagonist, and, of course, tool.
Here's the latest soundbite from our readers' responses, courtesy of apj7@columbia.edu:
"Gary forgot to mention the one good cyber-flick, Strange Days. James Cameron is the only filmmaker out there who uses science fiction as a vehicle for cogent social commentary (True Lies notwithstanding, natch). As a result, his teaming up with Jay Cocks and Katherine Bigelow to make an adult science fiction movie that uses VR and cyber-babble as a gimmick to sell the most intelligent movie about race relations in America since I don't know when was the year's most fascinating--and overlooked-- artistic statement."Let us know what *you* think about these issues. Just click on the Feedbag icon below and start posting!
