Unclear and Present Danger - Johnny Mnemonic

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 cyberpunk action film directed by Robert Longo and adapted from a William Gibson short story of the same name, by Gibson himself. “Johnny Mnemonic” stars Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano, Ice-T and Dina Meyer.In “Johnny Mnemonic,” Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a “mnemonic courier” who transports sensitive data for corporations via storage implant in his brain. He takes a job that requires him to store too much memory, threatening his life if he can’t make the delivery as quickly as possible. While getting the data, his clients are attacked and killed by the yakuza. Johnny goes on the run, where he is betrayed by his handler, befriended by Jane, a cybernetically-enhanced bodyguard, and brought to the attention of the Lo-Teks, an anti-establishment group.They discover that the data Johnny holds is a stolen cure to a technological disease that afflicts much of the planet. The creator, a mega-corporation called Pharmakom, refuses to release the cure because they are profiting off of the treatments. As Johnny is hunted by hired assassins for Pharmakom, he and his allies fight to disseminate the cure and save Johnny’s life.The tagline for “Johnny Mnemonic” was “The hottest data on Earth, in the coolest head in town.” You can find “Johnny Mnemonic” to rent or buy on demand at iTunes and Amazon.For our next episode, we are watching “A Time to Kill,” directed by Joel Schumacher. Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War. Our next episode, on “Virtuosity,” will be a companion to this one.

The year is 2021. It is no longer safe to transmit information. Phones, computers, and satellites are all vulnerable. But there is a solution. Your storage capacity? I can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in my head. Input the data into the brain of a human courier, like Johnny Nemonic.

Hit me. How do you fiddle that in your head anyway? I had to dump a chunk of long-term memory. You had to dump a chunk of what? My childhood. What are you doing? Making a long-distance phone call. I've got the goods, Ralphie.

Now I just want to get them out of my head. Now, in a future... We locked on him. Where those who control the information... Control the world. I've been charged with recovering the head of the mnemonic courier. Everyone wants what is stored in Johnny's head. Double cheese anchovies?

Charlie! You're waiting for me, Ralphie. Time is running out. I'm a dead man if I don't get this out of my head. I can get it out. How? A cranial drill and a pair of forceps. For the future's most wanted fugitive.

Keanu Reeves. You can't shoot me. Not in the head. Johnny Namonic. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamal Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write the subsect newsletter on Popular Front, and I am the author of the forthcoming book, When the Clock Broke, Con Men, Conspiracists, and how America cracked up in the early 1990. 1990s, and that's coming out in just about

two months. Two months. Get pre-order now, so you can have it on the day it comes out. A nice hardcover copy. Yep. With a great cover, the cover is terrific. Thank you. For this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, re-watched Johnny Nemotic, an 1995 cyberpunk

action film directed by artist Robert Longgo, not really, I don't think he directed anything else after this. I couldn't tell it. This was his only movie. He's known as much worst artist and a graphic designer. And I'll talk about this a little later, but I watched this movie and it's black and white conversion that came out a couple years ago that was supervised by Logo. The movie is still

the movie, but it looks great and it's much more reminiscent of Longo's other work. Yeah, it's paintings and stuff. His paintings in black and white. So, yeah, but this is Robert Longgo's only film. It was adaptive from a William Gibson short story of the same name. And it was the Adoptation was written by Gibson himself. Johnny Nemonic stars Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano, otherwise when it was Beat Takeshi, Ice Tea, and Dina Meyer, who you'll recognize from Starship Troopers. In Johnny Nemonic, Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a nomadic courier who transports sensitive data for corporations via storage implant in his brain.

He takes a job that requires him to store entirely too much memory, threatening his life, if he can make delivery as quickly as possible, and use the funds from the delivery to remove the thing from his brain. While obtaining the data, his clients are attacked and killed by the yakuza. Johnny goes on the run where he is betrayed by his handler, befriended by Jane, a cybernetically enhanced bodyguard, and brought to the attention of the Lotex, an anti-establishment group led by Ice-T, or Ice-T's character. I only see Ice-T as Ice-T and things.

I know, dude. They discover that the data Johnny holds is a stolen cure to a technological disease that afflicts much of the planet. The creator, a mega corporation called Pharmacom, refuses to release the cure because they are profiting off the treatments. As Johnny is hunted by hired assassins for Pharmacant, he and his allies must disseminate the cure and save Johnny's life. The tagline for Johnny Demonic was the hottest data on Earth and the coolest head in town. You can find it to rent, the movie that is, on a trender bio and demand at iTunes and Amazon. Johnny Nemonic had its American release on May 26, 1995, so let's check out the New York Times for that day. Okay, well, here we go.

NATO Jets bomb arms depot at Bosnian Serb headquarters, Serbs attack UN safe areas, killing dozens, confronting the Bosnian Serb leadership more directly than ever. NATO warplains bombed in ammunition depot near the Serbs political headquarters in the town of Pauley. The NATO attack at 4 p.m. in response to the Serbs renewed use of heavy weapons around Sarajevo was carried out mainly by American aircraft and was forcefully supported by President Clinton who warned the Serbs to stop shelling the Bosnian capital. The Bosnian Serbs responded this evening by shelling five of the six Bosnian towns designated as safe areas by the nine nations.

The assault was the most intense in the northern town of Tuzya. Agap Gannich, a member of the Bosnian presidency, put the death toll at 50, one of the highest in the three-year war. Tuvich Tolomovich, a doctor at the scene said as many as 70 might have been killed, the Associated Press reported. NATO's bombing of the Serbs' Arms Depot amounted to the strongest and most politically significant strike by the Western Alliance since Bosnian War began in April 1992. The target was jointly selected by NATO and the United Nations commanders.

Soon your NATO officials said, this is not my original idea, but I think like some of the thing, and I'm sorry listeners, if you get upset by this, I think some of the things have happened in Gaza at this point, perhaps like NATO would have should have intervened. I mean, we've definitely gone across lines of humanitarian destruction and death that, you know, that have approached as the worst parts of the things that we saw in the Yugoslav Civil Wars. I suppose in terms of intent, there's still some question. But, I mean, reading about this now, I mean, this was before or before. Shrebanita was was revealed, I suppose. I mean, the violence that we're seeing in the world now seems as intense or more. Shrebernaitsa happened in on July 11th, 1995, began on July 11th,

1995. So this was before Shrebernaitsa. So yeah, anyway, just to comment that not to say it's an exact parallel, but I do think it is interesting. that some of our allies engage in behavior that's hazardous or malicious even towards civilian casualties and do not get the NATO treatment. Anyway, what else we got here? So Powell on politics, still occasionally noncommittal. From the viewpoint of some who want to make him present, Colin Powell is playing his cars too close to his vest.

Either gives a hint of interest soon. one of the main backers said last week are people that the grassroots will dismiss him as too coy from his own perspective his friends say Colin Powell general Powell has no option to allow the political drama to unfold one of them put it this way suppose just suppose he wants a job he has nothing to game by running after it months ahead of time that makes him look like everyone else I want to keep my options open the general himself said casually I'm going to do something to try to help make this an even greater country than it is now just keep watching I'll be out there somewhere.

Whatever happened with Colin Powell's political career? He didn't pursue it. No, he didn't pursue it. He, I mean, I feel like for our younger listeners, especially, it's going to be hardly kind of like wrap your head around this, maybe. I don't know. Because Powell, by the time, you know, if you turned 18 and like 20 in the 2010s, Powell was sort of like a long diminished figure,

like not really a person of significance in American politics anymore and had lost a lot of respect because of his role in selling the war in Iraq. But after the Gulf War, after the first Gulf War, Powell was unquestionably one of the most popular figures, political figures, or just government figures in the United States, sort of not Eisenhower levels of popular, but like along those lines. Yeah. Broadly respected and well-liked guy who people thought of as being, you know, nonpartisan, a Republican, but in that sort of like, I'm in the military and that's, you know, I'm not signed on for all the social stuff, but like, yeah, we should have a strong military and like fiscal responsibility, that kind of thing. And so after the Gulf

War, you know, Republicans really wanted this dude to run for president against Clinton. They wanted him so badly to run for president. Even when he didn't, they wanted the run for president 2000. I happen to think that if Colin Powell had chosen to go into partisan politics and run for precedent as a Republican, I think he would have, I think he would have won the 2000 election handily. I don't know if he would have won the primary, though. You think he would have? At that point, I think with enough. He could win the Democratic primary and the Republican, he would win a Democratic primary and could win as a Republican on the general. election. I think he would have won a Republican primary in 2000. I think he could not win a

Republican primary like after Bush. But in 2000, I think he totally could have. The party establishment was still strong enough. They were still sort of like the Reaganite consensus are still like intact. Like all those seats are still the case. And the kind of the politics represented by the figures in your book was still kind of a little more marginal at the time. Yeah, that's absolutely. true. But I will say this, though, my only reason for saying this is that George W. Bush at the time looked like a loony or was presented to us as a loony and who beat McCain, who was someone a little bit more in the ilk, perhaps, of Powell in terms of his bipartisan appeal. George W. Everyone was sort of like, George W. Bush, how could he beat John McCain? John McCain, the great statesman and warrior,

etc, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I think the thing that would have given Powell leg up is just these black. Okay. I think the,

I think the, the prospect of being able to peel off like a non-trivial percentage of the black vote and maybe like maybe, maybe permanently, right? Yeah.

Oh, Republicans become, are the party that elect the first black president and like an extra 10 or 15% of the black vote and kind of like does make it, make it extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to win elections.

Because it's funny because, right, the W, basically, the W political vision was basically attempting to do a version of this. Yeah. And it's like, pull as many conservative leading blacks into the Republican Party identification and the Latinos. Yeah. It's funny that that seems to be happening, even though that they went away from that strategy, just happening delayed. Yeah, yeah, I think it's happening. I think it's happening along. like line like you know if they attempted it on the basis of sort of like you know the broad

middle class can be Republicans in this time it there are it's it's more of a um do you not like women that much yeah it's the it's a yeah it's a yeah it's a wounded masculinity vote which goes across all demographics right right um I do believe okay I mean my dad loved Colin Powell I mean before the war in Iraq and everything. My dad loved Colin. My dad's a liberal Democrat, essentially, and he loved Colin Powell and probably would have definitely voted him for president, even if he was running as a Republican. So I remember that.

My dad listens to this. So if I'm misrepresenting to you, I'm very sorry, dad. But, yeah. My parents, not only dude, I'll listen to this for that. No idea it exists. They don't even exist. He never told them about it. Yeah.

But no, I, my, my parents 100% would have voted for Colin Powell for president. Yeah. It's just like not even a question. And I remember my grandfather had Colin Powell's like biography, like prominently place in his living room. Sort of like, I think among older black people, especially Powell, was like very. Yeah, very respected. Very respected. I mean, I find it.

I know this makes me a little bit of. of a squish among left wingers, but I find his fall from, I mean, Grace to be kind of sad still. He sold himself out to something really stupid. And I thought he was a person who was who was better than that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, what else we got here? There's a balanced budget proposal. Senate approves proposal to balance budget by 2002. Talks with House are next. fight now turns intra-party and in Battlegrounders taxes. They did balance the budget in the end, right? I believe so.

Yeah. That was the whole thing about the first round of Bush tax cuts. So they're spending the bet. It was sort of like we have this balanced budget when we spend it on. Yeah. Right, right, right. Let's see what else we got here. This is from the next page, but I thought it was really interesting.

Perez inches towards seating golden for peace with Syria. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres came as close today as any top of Israeli officials has to say boldly that Israel will give up the entire Golan Heights as the price for a peace treaty with Syria, which he said would end war in the Middle East. What has to make a decision? He told fellow Labor Party members in Tel Aviv, a day after Syria and Israel agreed to principles of security arrangements for the Goralon that broke a monsog logjam and peace talks. Those negotiations are expected to resume in a week or two in Washington, Clinton, Michigan, Michigan, said, this is the price of peace that we also paid to Egypt. It does not have to be identical, but there are no illusions here. There's no Syrian I know who is prepared to be less than an Egyptian. This goes to show you that what has happened in the last 20 years, 25 years,

no, I guess it's, yeah, 20, 25 years almost in Israel and Palestine and the Middle East in general is a real deterioration of things. Things seemed a lot more hopeful in the 90s, not only because of Oslo, but of things like this. And, you know, we've really seen things go from bad to worse to awful in the Middle East. And I think really a lot of the blame can be put on Bush's foreign policy. And some of the blame for that definitely has to be put on Israel, some of the blame on Syria, and some of the blame on Iran. But, you know, the 90s were a time when these situations,

look like they might be resolved. We've talked about that before. Anything else? The one other thing. Simpson juror let go. Yeah, so there's two things. First, O.J. Simpson died last week, you know, rest and piss. Well, never know what actually happened.

Could have been anyone. Yeah, O.J. Simpson, obviously. That's very brave of you, Sangerva. Listen, I feel. I feel like, you know, for black people who were, you know, adults at the time, you know, he's sort of hesitating to really, you know, say it out there because he just said, you know, you don't want to, you know, symptom was guilty, but the LAPD was super racist and it's sort of like you don't want to, you don't want to hand it to him. But looking back, I mean, come on, he was guilty. my friend Joel Anderson wrote a great piece on Simpson just sort of noting that kind of the association

of like black people at Simpson is a little odd because Simpson's spent so much of his career trying to be like you know I am not a black guy and even afterwards like his patrons remain for the most part you know as white supporters but yeah so there's that the other thing Atlanta's welcome for Olympics draws a rebuff in the rural Georgia

as Atlanta prepares to open its arms to the world for the 1936 summer Olympics that welcome embrace has become a cold shoulder in the rolling hills of northeastern Georgia and this is about just like rural voters being angry of spending state dollars on the Olympics.

This is just your 96 Olympics consequential because of the bombing. Yeah. The Olympic Park bombing. Did you ever see that movie that the Clint Eastwood movie about the guy? I would like to see. I would like to see Richard Jewell. It looks good, but it also looks kind of

like they're picking on the white guy again. I mean, it is. It is very much an entry in Clint's, like, media is railroad in this guy. Yeah. It's like this. Evil liberals went after this poor, innocent white guy, and they made him look like he was good. Yeah. This and Sully are like the two that are just sort of like.

Right. The media and the liberals and the government, they're railroading these guys. But I would like to see Richard Jewel. I hear it's good. but it is like Clint's preoccupations. Well, it was terrible what they did to that poor guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, anyway.

So those are the only two. Yeah. We've talked about balance, budgets, and stuff, a bunch. But a stupid idea, but they were obsessed with in the 90s. Okay. So, we watched Johnny DeMonic. John, have you seen this movie before? I had never seen this movie before, actually.

And I had gotten it confused. And it was on the Criterion channel because they were doing like a cyberpunk thing. And the black and white version actually. And I almost watched it, but I didn't. And I actually got this confused with virtuosity, which I have seen, which we're also going to watch. But no, I hadn't seen it before. And I was pretty surprised that it was directed by Robert Longo, who I know as a painter. And I was also surprised.

And not surprised once I started watching the movie. I knew immediately that it was a William Gibson adaptation. But yeah, I had not seen it. I have this soft spot for, and I am always rooting for cyberpunk movies to do better in a way. And they always kind of disappoint me. And this one was no exception. I think like, so I was reading into this movie because I got really interested in the fact that it was like Robert Longo. And Takeshi Katano is a famous Japanese actor who, you know, directed and director who was sort of became a little bit of a cult figure.

in the 90s. And it was interesting to see him in the movie. And I think among the kinds of people who were into cyberpunk, anime, Japanese culture, the nod to Ketashi Katano made a lot of sense. So I looked into it and this was maybe going to be like more of an art movie and then it kind of got, you know, big production invested in it. And according to Longo and Gibson, they kind of ruined it and made it more action focused and took some of the irony out of the movie. Do I believe this? I think that's a little bit of an alibi. I think that this was there's another film by Abel Ferrara that tried to adopt a William Gibson story, New Rose Hotel, and that is an art movie with a small budget, and it also is sort of a failure. So I think that

there's just a difficulty in adapting William Gibson stories. The visual things in this movie, I wonder about it. Like, I was excited by this movie because I was like, oh, this looks cool. This looks like it's going to be cool. It has an aesthetic that I really dig. And then it kind of like the plot was a little eh. The script was a little eh. The writing was a little eh.

And then at some point, the cyberpunk milieu, the neo-noir, retrofuturistic stuff, can't, when I was young, maybe I would have disagreed with myself, but can't keep a movie together. And it has some references to Blade Runner and tries to kind of outdo Blade Runner, as some critics said, and it's cyberpunkness. But yeah, it's kind of like a little bit, a lot of these cyberpunk movies feel, which is funny because they're about a technological moment that's kind of gum and gone. They all feel kind of like mischances to me. And what, but I will say one thing is the movie and this obviously, we've talked about another movie that that is like this too. This obviously influenced the Wachowski's. And I think they used it to talk to investors.

It says on the Wikipedia. And it's, you know, it's got Keanu Reeves. It's a proto matrix in a lot of ways. It's interesting to think of the number of proto-matrix. Yeah. That were, you know, leading up. There's this. this virtual, I think virtuosity counts. There's dark city, which is all very matrix-like. It's like a lot of this stuff. Which I think was around the same time, but yeah.

Yeah, a lot of this stuff is percolating in kind of the culture. Yeah. And something like the Matrix was like inevitable, I think. So watching it in black and white, and it looks great. The black and white conversion looks amazing. Like the movie still doesn't quite hold together. Keanu is fine in it. It's sort of peak Keanu wouldn't.

It was going to be Falal Kilmer, who I think would have been way better. Yes. Yeah. And I feel like it takes, oh, it takes a, you know, obviously he's in speed and he's in point break. But those are very physical roles. And I feel like this isn't as physical. And Keanu kind of is best even now when he's in these very, very physical roles. Takeshi Katano is great.

And I love that guy. But like, a lot of the performances aren't too great. The sets and colors, clearly. that the sets are kind of cheap. Yeah. But the black and white conversion, I think actually it makes all that stuff, like it makes the movie look better overall.

Like you don't notice the sets or anything. You don't notice the fact that they're spending so much time to like dimly lead alleys and like smoke-filled rooms and stuff. If this was meant to be an artie film, it brings it closer to that vision. I'm not quite sure it does it, but it is much more kind of striking visually in black and white. I agree with you that for whatever reason,

cyberpunk makes for an incredibly compelling setting for video games, for forms of narrative fiction, for RPGs, right, like Shadow Run. It was cool as hell, whack in the day. But it doesn't quite work for movies. Like,

I'm one of these people who doesn't even think Blade Runner is all that great. I know, we've discussed this. Yeah. Yeah. It's visually incredible, but I'm not sure it holds together all that well as a story. And for, maybe it's because in so much cyberpunk stuff, movies at the very least, it's so much it leans on that, on that setting and that enough work is done to do, do, do, do stories. It's all vibes.

Yeah. I know what you're saying, which is fine. But I think this movie suffers from that a great deal. It's, you know, to, I kind of gave a, give a summary, but the movie, the movie does move along pretty quickly. It's not like particularly long. It moves along and at a good clip. But it's both, it's both, it's simultaneously too much into its world, like does too much, like, lore explaining. and not enough.

Yeah. I feel like by midpoint of the movie, it kind of loses the thread a little bit. You're like, what exactly is happening? Like, who is the villain? What is this weird cyber priest guy? Like, what? I think also the action wasn't exciting.

The action's not terrible, but it was also just like, I feel like a really talented action movie director could have made it more suspenseful. And then the setting would just, have been a cool um plus to the movie but it could have stood it alone as a as a thriller you know what I mean yeah yeah I just don't think it was like it's not it's not slow or drags it's just like

it's not I was just watching heat and um I was like okay this movie fucking rocks which is a very long movie actually but like its action sequences are like Jesus Christ like this is wild and like just and it's from you know around the same time and and it's just a much more hard hitting movie I think that this movie can kind of seem not I think someone said it was cheap yeah and a little B movie it doesn't hit that hard if there's something kind of hollow feeling about it at times it doesn't and it gets worse as the movie goes on like it kind of starts promising and you're like this movie's gonna rock and then you're like eh this is just it's it feels like kind of a cheap toy you know like where you're like it looks cool in the packaging and then you take

it out and then you're like this is kind of junky um which could work with the cyberpunk world because it's like full of junky technology and half used things and sort of uh just a lot of discarded objects and stuff like that but it just does not and dolf lunger's street preacher character just seems so stupid to me it's just like yeah it yeah it's like it's it's all it's it's it's too crammed in too much trying to rely on vibes yeah you can kind of tell i mean like you know people will defend this movie saying that William Gibson wrote it but that to me it's like you can tell William Gibson wrote it like couldn't couldn't dispense with the stuff that he liked also dude honestly man like credit where's credit is due i don't want to upset our listeners

But this is the same problem I have with Dune. It's just like, all right, man. So you took some stuff from medieval Europe. You took some stuff from the history of Islam. And you kind of mash it together and it's a pastiche. And if you're not that familiar with the source material, you're like, oh, whoa, what a weird universe. But I'm like, you know, like, okay. So you get some, you get some imagery and ideas from Asia.

And then you put a little film noir into it. And at first, you're like, whoa. that's cool but then like you're just like dude this is just chop and this was like a big part of like justifications of postmodern art and postmodern fiction was like remixing was cool and chopping and and taking pieces and doing uh brickillage from every different piece of thing was cool and it's just like but at some point you're like all of this stuff is kind of derivative and as cool as it is like it's just you know I don't think it's just like cyberpunk was meant to be kind of like an updated version of the noir universe in a way. But I don't think, like,

film noir is not just vibes. Like, there's a film noir, I don't want to say ethos, but there's a film noir. There are questions about the human condition that are raised by film noir movies that are, I think, a lot thornier and tricker to untangle than the ones that are raised by cyberpunk thrillers. Like, like the idea, the idea that like, oh, well, where does the line of human begin and end and so on and so forth? And what is humanity like once we start to make, make augmentations and stuff like that. All right. I just don't think that that's as like, that doesn't compel. Maybe that's, those are interesting questions for some people, but I mean, I have a little bit of, I'm not the biggest sci-fi guy in the world. But I just don't

find the, like, the plots of Phil Noir movies are really strange. The character's motivations are hard to understand sometimes. It's a world of moral, of like real moral problems. And I don't think that the depth of film noir movies and the, and the, even their trashiness, like, these movies are just not as, like, they're not as, they're neither as deep nor as trashy and sorted as film noir movies. So then I'm just like, this is dull. And, And like the amount of the amount of, and like the characters in the Phil Noir universe, it's like they have these perverse characters you're supposed to identify with or revile. The characters of these movies are nothing. They're kind of cutouts and they're just not interesting.

So I just think that that's what bugs me about it. I like, I think like when Abel Ferrarra tried to do it, he wanted to foreground the characters and make the side. And I mean, this was just budget made him had to do this. and make the budget, you know, I make the setting a little more low key and a little bit less obtrusive about how futuristic it was or so forth. And he couldn't pull it off, even though he's got a real, a real, you know, great eye for the sordid side of life. So I just don't know about the genre.

I hate to say it because I want it very badly to work because I have, not only do I think it's cool aesthetically on some level. And I also have nostalgia about it because this is definitely something I thought was cool when I was young because this aesthetic was emerging or becoming and I identify as being, you know, still think is kind of neat. Like, you know, Blade Runner. I hear what you're saying about Blade Runner. I do think Blade Runner is an interesting movie in more ways. But I mean, visually, it's, it's, I just think it's so overwhelmingly cool. It's cooler than this movie visually by a long shot. But like, I just think it's a visual universe of Blade Runner makes up for its deficits. It's a movie in a way. But I don't know. I suppose now that

we're in the future, it doesn't sound these, I don't know, sometimes these depictions of the future past are charming and interesting and show kind of lost possibilities and things like that. And other times I'm like, well, they didn't really capture what was interesting about the internet or what wasn't interesting about the internet. I think. think that that's the other thing is just like these like cyberspace has something so cool and edgy and requiring like special elite skills it's just so funny because now you're like everybody's on the internet everybody spends all their time on the internet you know like it's so and the AI is so soulless and has no like this movie made the this like a dy

vision of the world, but in a way, it's, and maybe this is something interesting you can pull out of it. It's dystopia, and this is why maybe people are longing for it and have some nostalgia. It's dystopia is more interesting than the actually existing dystopia of AI, which is just garbage world, right? Right, right, right. So it is edgier, it's sexier. It shows a more human environment in a way than what seems to be being created by the world of AI, which is with something that has no edges or grit whatsoever. Right. The dystopia of this world, I mean, we don't get much background, but it's sort of like,

oh, it gives the impression that there is a battle that was fought and was lost, right? Something happened, and humanity got on the wrong side of it. But what happened was, like, dramatic and exciting. and you're kind of living in the aftermath of that. But in reality, and with our AI in particular, it's like there was none of that. It's just sort of like, yeah, just like some people who wanted to sell some more bobbles, you know, developed a thing that might help them do it. And mainly what it does is it populates, you know, our internet space with nonsense and garbage. Yeah, and the technology is like starting to be less and less impressive in a certain way.

And it's just like, yeah, I don't know. The other thing about these movies, I think, that makes them problematic aesthetically or just not work very well for me is the plots. Like the, this is a post-history problem, which is, it's just like these corporations and like greed is the ultimate. Right. And you're just like, dude, who care? Like it's a pharmaceutical company. And you're like, oh, like at some, on one level, you're like, yeah, dude, that's fucking far out. in the future, pharmaceutical companies will be in charge.

Like, man, like, they're bigger than governments. Like, that's more than I. And then at some point, you're just like, well, that's just like, boring, you know? Like, I don't know. It's interesting to think about, I mean, because I think that was kind of a pervasive sense, rather than sort of, like, relieving the world of states behind. Yeah. They don't need this world of transnational corporations of, like, transnational groups

of various sorts, global capital. and, like, states will just be less important. And that's not the world that emerged, right? States are arguably as important as ever, are still highly significant. But this sort of skepticism, I feel like this is a very end of history thing, right? That's sort of like, okay, the next stage is the disappearance of the state as, like, a meaningful political unit. And we all, you know, corporations are the government. And this is, of course, like, dystopian because, you know, corporations, there's no democratic

input into them. I don't know. I don't know if I have more to say to say on that. But that very much is like the anxiety. I have a follow up to that. I have a follow up to that. And I think there's a reason. So why was the Matrix so successful when these movies kind of failed, right?

Or not failed, but they're not, obviously the Matrix is a fucking cultural shifting franchise and a huge deal. I don't particularly care for it that much either, to be perfectly honest with you, and I actually kind of prefer some of these older, I find these older cyberpunk movies to be a little more charming. There's something about the world of the Matrix and I find really bleak. But the Matrix did not dispensed of this corporate intrigue plot line, which Gibson really thought was interesting and was the sort of, you know, motivations of his characters. to, you know, the matrix turns into this kind of like spiritual allegory for the soul and reality and all this metaphysical stuff. And that's when it starts to resonate with people, which is really interesting, when it kind of reenters a religious dimension, when it's like, what are the religious stakes of computers? And now you have all these idiotic people who are like, we live in a simulation, which is just kind of a theological interpretation of the world without God. I personally think that the Matrix has done a lot of harm in the way that it's

sort of cheap and a lot of spiritual ideas about reality and illusion and turn them into pop culture. I know that a lot of people are going to get mad at me for saying this, but I don't find the world of the Matrix and to be extremely compelling or humanistically uplifting in any way. I find it pretty bleak. I find the vision that it has of apocalypse or redemption to be a bad one. And I find that it's political effects of the world. I'm just fucking going for it. I don't care.

It's political. We're going to do the Matrix later. So it's pretty of a little, but I will save it. And I'll try to be also given another shot and be fair. But I think that this is broader about my whole cyberpunk critique, too, is that its political effects have been bad because it's basically saying, like, well, where does the idea, all these like right wing lunatics, what do they say? They say they've been red pill. It's just, it's, anyway, that's a little, a tiny rant about the matrix. This is my other problem with cyberpunk.

It's just, it reflects a kind of dead end. I think transhumanism and cyropunk reflect a kind of dead end of interesting artistic possibilities for me at least. And I would be hard pressed to, I'm hard. I mean, I don't make movies, but I'm hard pressed to imagine a movie that can kind of transcend those problems. Yeah. I mean, I think that part of what makes them a dead in is, we're sort of observing.

where they lead in our present, right? Sort of like technoputurism. All these things that come out of the cyberpunk genre. And I think we're imagined as this is, you know, this will help human deliberate their capabilities or their capacities. In reality, the people who seem to be most obsessed with them have, like, little regard for human beings, for humanity, or like our shared environment. And, like, see them as like less of a, less of an unleashing human capacity,

has been more of like an escape from humanity and an escape from, like, whatever obligations we might have for each other. I'm certainly thinking of a movie I did not like, but I should revisit, was Spielberg's adaptation of Ready Player 1. And the thing that movie might have going for it is the extent of which Spielberg seems like self-aware about his role in kind of like creating the contemporary pop cultural, you know, milieu and like his role in what's bad about that in like the constant, you know, reference back to nostalgia, the obsession with IP. I think Spielberg seems like aware of that. But also there's something there in that movie about, you know, how the techno-futuristic dream can it be as much of, like, you know, a nightmare of something that is ultimately, like, much more harmful than good and then useful. And I think there's some of that there.

Yeah, I mean. I also think that it doesn't get, like, these movies also don't get at the, at the key anxiety of technological society, which is sort of self-loss, you know, like being so online all the time that you become completely indistinguishable from the network and its effects because it in if you are a node in it and you're getting, you know, constantly bombarded with things and then you begin to repeat them and you're just sort of you know like who this is like this right wing meme too where they call people mpc's non-player characters and they're often the most unoriginal and memed into thing people but it's just like there's a certain anxiety on

the internet of homogeneity right and i think that that's what these movies are missing in their worlds of radical weirdness and heterogeneity and strange corporations and weird figures and color and light and you know these cityscapes which are so chaotic and stuff like that the actual thing is like it's not a chaotic kaleidoscope like that is a less alienating environment i mean just speaking as a city dweller um that than the, I don't know, the way that the internet homogenizes people and creates, you know, kind of subjects out of us is, I just don't think it's very hard for art to get around that because it is so hostile to the idea of art itself or the possibility of art itself. So I think, like, art about the internet or art about tech, like, will always not be able to sort of get it at the nightmarish part about it. We don't even like to think about it. But if you spend a lot of time on the internet, you are the internet. Yeah. I mean, it is just you and everybody else. Right. I mean, you know, one thing, one thing you got me thinking up is sort of like the, you know, if the nightmare of this stuff of this genre is.

is like losing one's self. And then Johnny Nemotic, of course, like whatever technological disease people have basically makes them in junkies. Right. They've lost themselves. But kind of the actual nightmare of like online life is that you cannot escape your past. Yeah. Right.

Like you're, your, your identity across time is flattened into a single entity. Right. And so. Right. There's no growth or future. You're not like, oh, like this person used to be this, now they're this. just like that look it's the same person like yeah it's a weird flattening of time and there's no idea of formation or change or skill growth or deepening or any of these things like those things

are incommunicable on the internet for whatever reason right i don't know why but like the things that we associate with humanistic development which is a broadening of one's capacities and knowledge and integration of, you know, the different facets of one's personality and interests and sort of discovering the commonalities between yourself and others and so on and so forth. These things just don't really, I mean, the internet can be a tool for your education, but I don't think it can ultimately serve as a way, I don't know. I'm very, I mean, I make a living off of it. It's sort of how I built a career, but I'm very skeptical about its capacity for

contributing to positive human growth. I mean, yeah, it's saved. You know, I've made my living, made my career on the internet, and I likewise, you know, I mean, there's a reason why, right, like, I'm frequently telling people, or just, it's like, it's like a, it's like a phrase, it's in common circulation, um, to go touch grass, right? But like, attempting to live your life on the internet leads to insane distortions. disfunctions in people's personalities that you can like you can clearly see and probably see um and so it's like it creates a paranoia i suppose yeah i think the thing the i think the thing that

the cyberpunk and techno future you know dreams of the 90s get right yeah is that this the cyberspace is this kind of like bottomless well of information and at its best the internet is a place where you can just like learn a tremendous amount you have access to like I would it's too much to you have access to like the sum total of human knowledge but you have access to like a lot of human knowledge.

Yeah. The thing that I don't think people then quite anticipated that is very much part of our reality is like no one actually cares that much about accessing human knowledge. People don't

That doesn't interest me very much. They don't. They only, they want it. They just, yeah, they don't care about accessing knowledge. I mean, some people do, but not very much. Or they get a superficial smattering of knowledge that they turn into a kind of identity formation. You know, it's so strange. You have all these like dead political movements kind of getting, returning in zombie form

because people read about them on the internet or see their imagery on the internet. There's all these weird afterlives of things on the internet, which is kind of cool. But it's also just like, these are things that these are political possibilities that just don't exist anymore. They're like, you know, states that haven't existed in hundreds of years that people gravitate towards and have nostalgic feelings about. And it's just a strange world where, like, people think that they can become anything. and can be involved with something, and then it revolves, it involves like very little commitment, right? It's not embodied.

It's not real. You can log off. It's anonymous. It doesn't require a lot of existential risk. And of course, in its lack of existential risk, it's actually way worse because you can, like, I remember looking at that, what's that lady? The lips of TikTok lady who's like a psycho. horrible says horrible things and is even like directs violence towards people and then when

she talked I heard an interview with her with Taylor Lawrence or somebody and she sounded so stupid and thoughtless and I was like oh this is just how it can go on the internet like you can just get completely sucked down a hole and become something and not reflect on it ever and and never have a moment where you're like this is who I am now you know this is who I am now and the things I'm doing and saying actually have consequences you know it's not just posting into the void um I think that that's difficult to remember sometimes so yeah it creates I think that the idea of human possibly melding in and out of human possibilities and never hitting the grass hitting hitting the rubber never hitting the road into some real

stakes is disturbing and it's what creates it kind of makes people go, part of what makes people go crazy. I think the other thing is, is it's almost like a psychotic episode in a certain way. Because think about it like this. I mean, what do crazy people think? They think they can hear, they think they can hear other people's thoughts, right? Right. Then you log in on the internet, and what are you looking at? You're looking at other people's thoughts. Imagine 50 years ago. someone says i have a special machine that i carry in my pocket and when i look at it i can find out what everybody's thinking everyone said would say you're you sound like a crazy person right but this is what we have and you just hear you just get the opinions of so many people and the thought

the errant thoughts of so many people you're not with your own thoughts you're not with your own way of being you're constantly acting in relation to others which is sort of true of everything, but it's just you have less and less time with self and more time with social media. And I actually think, and we've talked about this before, and it gets a little creepy, but I do think that like some, we don't quite get how this is affecting us. I don't think anyone's really gotten their arms around it. There's no marks of or Frankfurt School or like The good theories of these things yet, but it is really altering the way human beings exist in ways that I think that we haven't, for some reason, have not quite been able to, um, to theorize properly. And I will try my best, but I don't know if I can do it either. Yeah, I go back and forth on this. I'm not sure. I'm always never sure if it is something new and unique or is it sort of supercharged the existence. pathologies that people already have.

It's taking things that are already common about the human experience and sort of kind of turning them up to 11 in a way that can be incredibly destructive not just socially, but just like for people for particular individuals.

I just keep thinking about in the film this disease. Again, they don't really talk much about it, but it seems to have that people who are afflicted by seem to be like jockeys. And, you know, that addiction metaphor for kind of the pervasiveness of technology is like a common one. But, you know, to me, the thing that you're keying in on is how connected this. People, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how he cared about connectedness and this is sort

to make his dream. We're all connected. But like, there are times when we don't, we shouldn't be, right? When, like, we actually should be in our heads and in our thoughts. and being reflective. Like, that's important. It's like, I, you know, the listeners to know that I have two kids

and they're young. And on one hand, you know, how do you entertain them all the time when they're home? It's like, well, I mean, you play with them. But then also, there are times when you don't entertain them.

Just let them figure it out. Like, figure out how to be bored. Figure out how to entertain themselves. And the fact that I remember being a kid, and being a teenager even, and we, you know, we had the internet at home, but it was like a discreet experience. I had to go into my parents' room to use the dial-up on my parents' computer. Yeah, you could be on it for a little while. But then if I, if I was finished reading a book or I'd done my homework and, like, my friend's been around, it's just sort of like, I guess I just found something you'd do.

Right. It was in my head. It was in my thoughts. I walked around. That's the other thing is, it's like the, um, there was a funny scene in the movie who goes, I need a computer. I need to log on. And this just feels so quaint because it's now like, everybody has a computer.

Everybody's logged on all the time, you know, you know, it's not like, it's a discrete experience. Even, I think even this movie in these cyberpunk movies, people thought it would be a specialized group of people who did it. And it would be a discreet experience. It was the continuous kind of secondary existence. I don't know if I'm sorry, this is exhausting. But like, I find it, I find it.

Yeah, I don't know. I need to break. This just being talking about my own addiction to these things. I mean, we're both addicted to the posting, so don't worry about it. And it really bums me out. I mean, we're posting right now. But like, I do believe like I try my best, but I would like to live a life that's just less online. And the problem is that we've also become, I think the addiction thing is correct and that it does plug into your dopamine system.

And the spontaneous satisfaction that you get from computer stuff is, you know, difficult to get elsewhere. I mean, you know, the satisfactions are deeper when you have to work at stuff. But, you know, you know, it can be frustrating. There could be reversals. It could be boring for a very long time. And you can log into the computer and get a rise out of somebody or get a, you know, a kick immediately.

I think eventually it becomes diminishing returns because it starts to get boring too. Yeah. Like I find Twitter now to be both addictive and boring, which is extremely sad. But I'm just like, I look at it, I look at it. I'm like, I'm getting. nothing out of this. I'm getting nothing out of this. I'm quitting, too. I'm quitting forever soon. Just putting that out there. Right, right, right. Once the book comes out. Once the book comes out. Um, I think, I think we can be sure to wrap up now. Um, I know, final thoughts on joining

demonic. I think it's okay. It's not great. It's okay. I think it's worth watching the black and white conversion just because it looks really interesting. Yeah. Um, if you've, if you've seen the black and white conversion, it's worth putting on. And, if you've seen the movie already, put the black and white conversion on as just something they have in the background, you don't have to listen to it. It's just, it's like an interesting visual experiment. I bought it on Blu-ray. I'll keep it around because I do think it looks really cool. Um, but otherwise, ginomonic, fine movie. I think really, I think, as we've been saying, really gets to the limits of this setting for storytelling. Um, uh, and does plug in to some

of the things I think people were kind of freaking out about in the mid-90s and thinking about especially kind of the role of technology in our lives. But because it gets so many things, I mean, getting it wrong is an harsh way of putting it. But just like it doesn't really see how these things like ended up playing out in reality. It makes for an interesting look back. Yeah. For sure. I mean, it's a good document like a lot of the movies we do. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That is our show. If you know a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available. on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found.

If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review so people can find the show and you can reach out to us on social media if you'd like to. Best way to reach out to us forever is via our email, unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. You can also just sign up for the patron

and contact us there freely. For this weekend feedback, we have an email from CT, titled Notes on Hackers, Hi, Zabel, John, I've enjoyed this episode, particularly to revelations about John's dabbling in hacker communities in his youth. At one point, during the discussion, there was a mention of how the hacker ethos of that era was partially about opposition to the profit motive. And now this was a common trope in the 90s. There's a particularly fun bit of context here at the start of the movie, Dade Murphy has been banned from using a computer for seven years for a hacky committed in 1988 that crashed 1,500 computer systems. This is an homage to the, quote, internet worm created by Robert T. Morris in November of

1988, which was a big deal at the time. Morris was not as young as date, he was 23, and he paid a fight in several years of probation, although he never went to jail. Morris' father, also named Robert, was working as a computer scientist for the NSA at the time, which is that relevant, was sort of interesting. In the late 90s, Morris co-founded an e-commerce site that he sold to Yahoo, making him a multimillionaire. He and his co-founder, Paul Graham, didn't use that. money to co-found the tech incubator

Y Combinator. The notorious hacker turned into a venture capitalist in less than 20 years. This gets back to our sneakers conversation a long time ago, just about how sort of like the radicalism of that scene is like kind of overstated. Yeah, yeah.

To quick other things, there is a mention of how the hackers in this case end up helping the government arguably this predicted the 1928 Senate testimony of the Boston Area Hacking Group Loft, L-O-P-HT, regarding the state of the nation's computer security, most of that crew have had successful careers as security consultants since, including some to have worked extensively with the U.S. government.

The name of Matthew Lillard's character is Emmanuel Goldstein, obviously referenced in 1984, but I believe an indirect one. He's the editor of 2,600 magazine, yeah. There we go. Yeah. That was about to, about to, yeah, that's what C-T is about to say. Love the podcast and the Patreon episodes. Keep it up. Thank you, C.T. That's a really great email. In forbited. I knew some of that stuff and had kind of forgot about it. But, but yeah, that's interesting.

Remember, listeners, if you want to check out our episodes on the film to the Cold War, you can send up for our Patreon, $5 a month. Patreon.com slash unclear pod. Our most recent episode was on the Atomic Cafe, and I think this documentary about Cold War propaganda. And we're going to actually, our next episode after this, our patron episode, is following up on this by what we're going to watch, Virtuosity, also with 95, and talk about that. I like that movie. It's dumb as hell. Looking forward to discussion. Episodes of this podcast come out every other week. So we will see you in two weeks with an episode.

I think there's a movie we missed, and I'll loop back to it later. I just can't remember what it's called. But for now, we're going to move forward through timeline. line and we're going to do a time to kill the Joel Schumacher film, our second Joel Schumacher film, uh, on, uh, a, you know, racism and law, uh, in a southern town. One of the sweatiest films ever made. Are all Joel Schumacher's a little bit racist? It's a good question.

I like Joel Schumacher. All right. We'll talk about it when we're, yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But this movie notoriously sweaty, star Sam Jackson, Matthew McConaughey. It's a fun movie. So Time to Kill, I think we'll have a guest for that one. A southerner as well. So that'll be good. And yeah, thank you everyone for listening. As always, for John Gans and to Melbury. This is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time. You know,