Tech-Noir Film: A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres 1841504246, 9781841504247

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Tech-Noir Film

This book is dedicated to Valleyhome Farm

Tech-Noir Film A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres

Emily E. Auger

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Holly Rose Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-424-7 / EISBN 978-1-84150-540-4 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

So closely are the components of the power complex related that they perform virtually interchangeable functions: not only in the sense that every operation is reducible to pecuniary terms, but that money itself in turn can be translated equally into power or property or publicity or public (television) personalities. This interchangeability of the power components was already plain to Heraclitus at the critical moment that the new money economy was in formation. “All things may be reduced to fire,” he observed, “and fire to all things, just as goods may be turned into gold and gold into goods.” – Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine

Contents Foreword by Gary Hoppenstand

9

Preface

11

Introduction

21

Chapter 1: Method and Models

27

Chapter 2:

The Promethean Message

59

Chapter 3:

Tech-Noir

109

Appendix 1: Charts

165

Appendix 2: Tech-Noir Films by Date

179

Appendix 3: Tech-Noir Films by Type

187

Bibliography

199

Filmography

215

Index 1:

Film Titles

475

Index 2:

Film Motifs

487

Foreword

M

odern science fiction has become increasingly more pessimistic than optimistic. Perhaps this is because the novel that created the genre was born with a monster for a father and a technophobe for a mother. I am speaking, of course, of Frankenstein (1818) and the novel’s author, Mary Shelley. Many critics and historians of science fiction, myself included, consider Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece to be the first modern science-fiction story, and here Emily Auger takes this same novel as an early example of the genre of “tech-noir.” Shelley’s sinister cautionary tale of Victor Frankenstein’s hubris, his overweening Promethean theft of the fire of life, and his all-too-human failing in refusing to assume responsibility for his pretension to godhood, directed the fledgling genre down a dark path, a literary trail that eventually led to an overarching dystopian worldview of science and technology. The reason Frankenstein’s monster was such a frightening, yet fascinating, creature for the young Mary Shelley (and for the many succeeding generations of Shelley’s readers) was due in large part to the era in which the novel was first published: the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was not a single revolution at all, but a series of revolutions that rapidly changed the social fabric of nineteenth-century Europe and America. With the rise in factories, there was also an increase in the size of the cities whose populations supported the factories; there was a dramatic shift in social class, with the working and middle classes expanding into an ever-increasing group; there was an erosion of the power of the church, and a subsequently growing faith in science and technology as a replacement for religious belief. In other words, massive social and cultural changes were transforming the old ways into new ways, and the by-product of this transformation was a combination of awe and fear, the type of awe and fear Mary Shelley envisioned in her monster, the type of awe and fear that has dominated science fiction for nearly two centuries. This is not to say that the lights of optimism have been intermittent in science fiction during its first one hundred years of existence. The “fantastic voyages” of Jules Verne, for example, often glorified exploration and viewed the pursuit of knowledge as heroic. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) fearlessly predicted an American utopia at the dawn of the twenty-first century which, alas, never came to pass. Even the American dime novels of the late nineteenth century saw the frontier populated by young inventors and by mechanical steam-men bravely tramping across the seemingly endless western prairies of the Great Plains. Nearly fifty years later, the American pulp magazines of the late 1920s and 1930s – with their fascination for spaceships, ray guns, and beautiful maidens being abducted by gelatinous, amoeba-like aliens – engendered a childlike fascination with science fiction as space opera adventure.

Tech-Noir Film

Today, however, darker visions of science seem more relevant: H.G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) offers a more compelling metaphor than Bellamy’s Looking Backward, because people are more frightened of the unknown than fascinated by it. And when the unknown, created by science and employed by technology, becomes a weapon of war that can literally destroy the world, as seen with the atomic bomb at the close of World War II, then Mary Shelley’s monster dons a grim aspect larger than that of moral or social argument; indeed, the fundamental narrative of science and technology in fiction – in print, film, and television – in the latter part of the twentieth century became one of human survival itself. As anyone who has seen the James Cameron film knows, the Tech-Noir is a hip nightclub where Sarah Connor is hiding from the deadly Terminator, a machine passing as a human, following its programming from Skynet, and closing in to kill the mother of Skynet’s destruction. It is an appropriately named bar of garish neon light and shadows, a place where humans are attacked by black technology that seeks not only to snuff the life out of the individual Sarah Connor, but of humanity itself. When Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future and father to Sarah’s warrior-child (and soon-to-be-savior of humanity), intervenes to attempt the impossible and terminate the Terminator before it terminates Sarah Connor, then conflict ensues that defines the dystopian relationship between man or woman and machine. It is a fight to the death. The Industrial Revolution gave us the Tech-Noir, constructing it brick by grimy brick. It gave us godlike potential through our knowledge of science and application of technology, but it also gave us that reoccurring nightmare of imminent destruction, a nightmare fueled by the understanding of our own limitations as mere mortals to control the Pandora’s box of evils that escapes our grasp when the science and technology that we invent becomes greater than us, more intelligent than us (or absolutely indifferent to us), and willing to destroy us if we get in the way. If you look closely, you will discover that the wild party-goers at the Tech-Noir are actually the offspring of Frankenstein’s monster, the great-great-great-grandchildren that include among their vast numbers those brutal cyborgs, or sinister synthetic androids, or metal monsters, or deadly artificial viruses, or artificial brains possessing deadly thoughts, and they are in no way fond of the mortal descendants of Adam. As you pause to consider the ugly truth and consequences of Victor Frankenstein’s pride, you realize that the defining metaphors of the Industrial Revolution, the post-Industrial Revolution, and the post- post-Industrial Revolution are the true inhabitants of the Tech-Noir. Emily Auger’s book, which you now hold in your hands, offers one of the finest studies of our dystopian imagination in popular entertainment. Her brilliant discussion of the genre and the theory behind the genre is perceptive, well-grounded in theory, and simply fascinating to read. And that is only the first half of her book. For the second half she also offers a first-rate annotated filmography of the best, or most relevant, or most interesting “tech-noir” motion pictures. Emily Auger’s expert hand is holding the door open to the Tech-Noir for us to enter, so that we may examine and understand what makes Frankenstein’s children tick and why they hate us so. Enjoy the party. – Gary Hoppenstand Professor, Department of English; Editor of The Journal of Popular Culture; Michigan State University 10



Preface

“T

ech-noir” is the name of the nightclub in The Terminator (1984) where Sarah Connor tries unsuccessfully to hide from the machine: this term is also a useful descriptor, not only for the film in which it appears, but for many others that show how technology, once considered the utopian dream of science, has become an aggressively destructive force that threatens to transform the environment into a wasteland and forever alter the forms of human individuality, relationships, and ways of living.1 The initial objective of my study of such films, which began in 1997, was to compile a representative title list and establish the genre’s recognizable constituent units, such as character types, settings, actions, props, motifs, and plot resolutions. My further objective was to find the place of tech-noir film relative to other and earlier popular genres; thus, in the first two chapters, I examine the importance of two specific myths, Oedipus and Prometheus, to the form and content of popular genres and also demonstrate what others have frequently noted – that genre “hybridization” is the historical process by which new genres form and change to address contemporary social issues. The selection of the genre classics for analysis was at once arbitrary and obvious: a study of this type could hardly go without attention to Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) may certainly stand for science fiction and who but William Gibson (b. 1948) can represent “scifi” cyberpunk? The transition from gothic to detective to science fiction is detailed with examples by these authors in Chapter 1 and its supportive charts (Appendix 1); the chapter concludes with a very general history of the film medium and the appearance of various popular film genres. Chapter 2 shows the step to tech-noir, which I treat primarily as a film genre, through the analysis of selected literary progenitors by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), and Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) and their adaptations to film. In taking this approach, I left aside potentially lengthy and useful considerations of many issues and topics contributing to the development of tech-noir and prioritized a demonstration of the genre’s appearance and characteristics: throughout, I consider tech-noir as a cultural manifestation with deep historical roots and a particular relevance at the turn of the millennia. The study proved to be expansive, simply because technology keeps changing, the production of tech-noir films is ongoing, and the availability of past productions is constantly in flux; thus, this volume remains an opening statement, rather than the final word, on tech-noir and its relationship to previously established genres. The third and final chapter is a summary description of tech-noir films based on the titles gathered in Appendixes 2 and 3 and further annotated and discussed in the “Filmography.”

Tech-Noir Film

The chronological parameters of the “Filmography” are from 1970 to 2005 because, although there are many earlier films that could be included, it is in the 1970s that the core motivation for tech-noir, that is, the realization that technology is a real-world problem, began to consolidate in film in relation to certain plots, constituent units, and didactic messages. It was also, admittedly, much easier, though often still difficult, to gain access to films postdating 1970. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many stores were selling off their videos to make room for DVDs and some older “classics” with on-going marketability were being re-released on DVD. I searched for titles by browsing store shelves and bins, by cross-searching relevant subject headings in various video and DVD catalogs and encyclopedias, particularly Halliwell’s Film, DVD & Video Guide and the VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever, and later by using the film-related search indexes and ever-expanding on-line resources for purchasing. I have no doubt that my list is not complete, but I believe it is sufficiently comprehensive for the present discussion. These films serve as the primary resource material in my identification and discussion of the genre of tech-noir, including its constituent units and function as part of contemporary discourse about technology. The films from the 1970s and 1980s differ stylistically from those produced later: they tend to have more dramatic dialogue, less aerobic action, fewer special effects, and make less deliberate or less self-conscious use of the motifs now recognizable as tech-noir genre markers.2 Many of the 1990s films are extremely violent and include crude, even obscene, language, while a number of those dating between 2000 and 2005 manage a kind of nostalgic and even melancholic ambiance. All genres evolve from common sources such that their common and distinguishing elements – characters, sets, props, dialogue, and so forth – and the manner in which these elements are composed in the individual work may become recognizable as “early,” “classic,” and “late” or stylized, and may tend to the dramatic, the ironic, the satiric, and even the comic, without compromising the appropriateness of the genre label. At the core of every genre is a didactic message: the specific means and manner by which that message is conveyed is less important than the message itself. In the interest of creating a manageable list of films, I set other parameters regarding length, medium, and content. Although I included the one hour Max Headroom (1985) because it has been so influential, I otherwise excluded “shorts.” I included a number of teen films – detective fiction has its Sherlock Holmes and C. Auguste Dupin, it also has Nancy Drew – but excluded pure animation. I omitted historical war films, but included some films based on the selected literary classics – Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – because they help to demonstrate the shift between literature and film as forms of discourse; and some remakes of other films because the fact those particular films were remade punctuates their relevance to the genre. I excluded straight disaster films and most biological monster films, but included some in which the “monster” is a direct product of scientific manipulation, such as behavioral programming, DNA alteration, cloning, bionics, and robotics. I left out many fallen civilization films, most regretfully the Mel Gibson Mad Max films Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985): although obviously a significant influence on numerous tech-noir films, the Mad Max world is primarily one in which civilization has simply fallen, thus setting the stage for the appearance of Mad Max. I included several films set on alien worlds, but left out those with aliens: although I was tempted to include Dark City (1998) and Virus (1998), the presence of aliens seems to divert attention from technology as a product of our societies and from the consequences of human choices 12

Preface

and motivations. I included Andromeda Strain (1971), in which a virus threatening the human race is described as “alien,” because alien here refers to an unknown and nasty, but otherwise conventional, “bug.” I included Project Shadowchaser IV (1996) in the “Filmography,” even though it features an android of alien origin because this film is the last in the Project Shadowchaser series. The earlier films in the series do not include aliens and it therefore provides information about how the tech-noir plot evolves in sequels: I left it out of the charts and other discussions of specifically tech-noir films. I excluded a significant number of films with an almost exclusive emphasis on technologically mediated sexual experiences, but I included Nemesis 4 (1996) in spite of its rather violent representations of sexual contact because, like Project Shadowchaser IV, it demonstrates plot trends in sequels and also because it shows the extreme limits of tech-noir reductivism and stylization. Although most of the films were initially released to the theaters, I included a number that were made for television because there did not seem to be any special or absolute correlation between venue and content or even relative quality and generic significance. The “Filmography” is arranged alphabetically, but the films are also listed by release date in Appendix 2. Each “Filmography” entry identifies the film’s title, director, writers, other sources, series, release date, and the relevant tech-noir subcategories discussed in Chapter 3 and summarized in Appendix 3 based on articulations of character as human or artificial and related activities. Plot summaries reference main characters, events, and plot resolution. Each film is also briefly discussed in relation to its primary genre elements by cross-referencing to one or more other technoir, and a few non-tech-noir, films. These discussions show how the films are related to each other through repetitions, inversions, or adaptations of character types, character alliances, sets, actions, props, and other elements. A structuralist approach is used in the first two chapters to show that tech-noir is a genre with unique emphases and concerns that postdates the familiar gothic, detective, and science fiction. Like other popular genres, tech-noir ultimately derives from myths that have been adapted to address current issues in different fields of discourse; indeed, audience reception of a number of these films as myth is encouraged with framing devices, such as text or voice-over explanations about how an apocalypse or other disaster came about, or nearly came about, and the new world order that followed, for good or ill. Genre itself is a historically evolving and cumulative form of discourse that has been dedicated primarily to the person in relation to human society and invention. Each individual genre, including tech-noir, develops conventions in relation to the specific field of discourse it emphasizes: gothic is associated with psychology, particularly that of the individual, detective with sociology, science fiction with science, and tech-noir with aesthetics. Since gothic is the “base” genre relative to which the others have formed, it is not surprising to find psychoanalytic theory called upon in the interpretation of many literary and filmic genre exemplars, many of which have numerous gothic elements. The application of structuralist and other theories, particularly those derived from psychology, in the analysis of myth and popular genres is not new; indeed, the dominance of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s Oedipus complex and “mirror” stage in such studies has become quite familiar. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) uses the Oedipus myth as his principal example in demonstrating the application and usefulness of structuralism.3 Stephen Bauer, Leon Balter, and Winslow Hunt (1978) apply the Oedipus myth as a model in their analysis of The Maltese Falcon, both Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade novel (1930) and the film directed by John Huston starring Humphrey Bogart (1941). 13

Tech-Noir Film

They distinguish such European detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who are generally asexual types who “sublimate” any Oedipal tendencies, from the American “hard-boiled” Sam Spade type, who are extremely sexual and, due to their failure to sublimate, quite violent. They conclude that: “Just like the European detective, the American represents the Oedipal child. Since he does not sublimate as does the European, he is in much greater danger of committing the Oedipal crime himself, or, at any rate, becoming an accomplice. He often gets so intimately involved with the criminal that part of the drama consists in his ultimately maintaining his innocence.”4 Similarly, Hanna Charney (1987) finds Oedipal patterns are common in detective stories, but thinks they may be passing out of popularity as greater emphasis is placed on death, rather than murder.5 Debra Moddelmog (1993) also gives special attention to detective fiction, analyzing works by H.G. Wells, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Dick, Roger Zelazny, Flannery O’Connor, and others; and finds that, if she excludes incest and patricide from the list, the most common of the Oedipean “mythemes” in twentieth-century fiction are “the encounter with the Sphinx; the investigation into a mystery; the self-incrimination or selfrecognition; and the self-blinding.”6 With regard to film, Laura Mulvey argues in her now classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) that the image of woman “speaks castration and nothing else.”7 She draws this conclusion by understanding film and film viewing in terms of the Freudian/Lacanian theory of the formation of the unconscious in which woman functions as a symbol of the threat of castration: once her child enters the realm of the symbolic, she serves purely as memory of both “maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”8 Man possesses the gaze; woman is the object to which he directs his scopophilic instincts; woman does not look because looking is an expression of desire that is, at least theoretically, psychologically and culturally denied to her. Linda Williams (1984) has shown that, consistent with Mulvey’s theory, when a woman exercises the gaze, or simply looks, particularly in horror films such as Nosferatu (1922) and Phantom of the Opera (1925), she is usually punished both by the sight of the monstrous male and by death or other loss as well.9 Psychological interpretations are as commonly applied to horror films, often a kind of hyperbolic gothic, as they are to detective fiction. D.L White (1977) discusses horror in terms of a “fear of the id,” with monsters understood to be manifestations of the animal within and the fear of powerlessness in the face of this beast.10 Robin Wood (1978) believes such films demonstrate the Freudian thesis “that in a society built on monogamy and family there will be an enormous surplus of sexual energy that will have to be repressed; and that what is repressed must always strive to return.”11 In his analysis, Roger Dadoun (1980) invokes notions of the phallic mother, fear of castration, and the proliferation of fetishistic substitutes for the lost perfect mother as inspiration to horror films, but he also believes that horror films reached a kind of generic climax in the decade following the stock market crash. He notes that the same terms are used to describe the effect of the Depression on Americans and the experience of horror films: “ ‘panic’, ‘turmoil’, ‘fear’, ‘amazement’, etc.,” probably because both raised “anxieties of abandonment, disintegration, castration, [and] dissolution.”12 Filmic creatures, he believes, were designed to keep these stresses in place and this function was served by fetishization.13 14

Preface

Psychological interpretations of other genres, like those of detective fiction and horror films, also frequently return to Freudian concepts and Oedipus. Kenneth Munden (1958) interprets the western in terms of the Oedipus complex.14 Marie Jean Lederman (1979) finds the appeal of the film Superman (1978) in its adherence to specific aspects of the Oedipus myth.15 Andrew Gordon (1978) relies on Joseph Campbell’s (1904–1987) The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) for his ideas about the hero, but ultimately finds an Oedipal pattern at work in the film Star Wars (1977).16 William Indick (2004) likewise finds Campbell’s archetypal hero in many films, but returns to Freudian theory for his analysis of the horror genre.17 Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing (2002) consider The Matrix (1999) as myth, but rely on the Oedipus complex for their terms of reference, concluding that the film “suggests a way out of the technological Narcissus-narcosis as well as the Freudian/Lacanian/Mulveyan theoretical template, both of which keep us locked unsatisfactorily between two desires – the temporal world of the Fathers and the spatial comforts of Mother. The hero within the technological myth will probably have to cut his or her ties to both in order to get a footing as an adult, as Neo does when he hangs up the phone, his link to the manmade mother.”18 Oedipus may take some credit as a template for plot developments in an astonishing number of modern narratives, but this apparent fact says little about the deliberated motives and messages that lead to narrative construction and consumption, most of which may well be more consciously developed and more important than those of the purported Oedipal impulse. Further, as compelling as the evidence seems to be that Western society, or at least its imagination, is, was, or has become Oedipal, there is considerable evidence that, historically, different myths have been called upon to define, revise, and revitalize cultural norms. Many scholars, particularly those inspired by the work of Carl Jung (1875–1961) on myths and archetypes as indicative of the paths to individuation or complete psychic maturity and Joseph Campbell’s study of hero patterns in world mythology,19 believe that individual myths relate to a larger monomyth recounting the hero’s journey, a journey that is not necessarily defined by or limited to Oedipal issues. Stuart Voytilla (1999), for example, finds the key elements in a wide range of film genres, like those in individual myths, relate to different stages on the hero’s journey.20 The “katabasis” or descent into hell theme common to myth and discussed by Jung as the “dark night of the soul,”21 for example, is also one commonly found in films of different types: James J. Clauss (1999) discusses its appearance in The Searchers (1956)22 and Erling B. Holtsmark (2001) discusses it in films of a variety of genres and specifically in Cherry 2000 (1987),23 one of the films included here as tech-noir. William K. Ferrell (2000) likewise relates both literature and films to myth.24 Avent Beck (1992) undertakes a lengthy analysis of Platoon (1986) as a Christian allegory, without once invoking a particular generic classification for the film, or Oedipus.25 Will Wright (1975) does not bother with Oedipus in his structural analysis of the “classic” western and its variants: the vengeance, cultural transition, and professional western. He finds sixteen constituent units characterize the genre, including the arrival of the unknown hero with an exceptional ability, his status, lack of acceptance, and then his winning of acceptance by helping a social group deal with a villain who not only threatens them, but someone the hero cares about.26 Martin M. Winkler (1985) shows how the western hero follows the general pattern set by the experiences of those of classical mythology by drawing parallels between the two in relation to arms, violence and catharsis, journeys and quests, and finally immortality and apotheosis.27 David 15

Tech-Noir Film

Daly and Joel Persky (1990) follow Wright in taking the view that the western has generated its own mythic pattern with characteristic events and motifs.28 Patricia Warrick (1978) arrives at the same conclusion in her summary of the elements of the mythic pattern in science fiction as including, among other things, an adventure into some new dimension of space or time and a roster of characters that includes at least one scientist, machine, robot, android, and/or alien.29 Gary S. Bedford (1981) believes “reimagining the historical psyche within the mythological context,”30 not outside it as many methods of analysis propose, offers much to the potential reimagining and regrounding of “modern man and woman’s experience in the humus of storytelling and imagination.”31 In the present study, the realization of the historicized aspects of both myth and genre depends on moving beyond an obsession with infantile behaviors and Oedipus and giving greater attention to the world of adults as the product of adults who exercise free will, make choices, build societies, and, at least potentially, live out a tremendously complex variety of relationships and work toward goals invested in numerous fields of interest. The possibility for change in the cultural imagination away from its apparent Oedipal fixation is supported by George Steiner’s (1984) argument that the emphatic obsession with Freud’s points of reference in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and other tragedies dates from about 1905; prior to which and from the 1790s, the myth of Antigone was THE central myth inspiring the collective imagination, including many aspects of gothic literature.32 Steiner shows that Antigone’s story has much more to do with sibling relationships, cousins, twins, and doubles, and less to do with Oedipus’s destiny living out the fixations of sexuality purportedly established in infancy. Alternatives to the Oedipal pattern are also readily available in twentieth-century narrative: Sisyphus, for example, is not only regarded as the “hero” of existentialism,33 he is widely regarded as a prototype for the hard-boiled detectives of 1930s pulp fiction and for the detectives and other characters populating film noir after World War II.34 As Harry Slochower (1948) explains, existentialism is about negating collectives that have passed away and the acceptance of “the resulting homelessness, estrangement, fear, and anguish as a final ‘resting’ point. It does not subject its negation to critical self-analysis. It does not explore the question of the sources and bases out of which it has arisen. The individual is not born – he is ‘thrown’ into existence.”35 Sisyphus, who sided with the Titans against Zeus, was condemned to repetitively roll a rock up a hill in Hades because he witnessed one of Zeus’s abductions: this experience of being chained to futility summarizes that of many individuals in both Europe and North America immediately following the end of the war. Sisyphus, however, also got the better of Zeus;36 and thus, as Bedford notes, Sisyphus, like Prometheus, is a figure of both death and rebirth; and further, both Sisyphus and Prometheus challenged the hierarchy and did not actually join the new order of the Olympians that arose to replace that of the Titans.37 Prometheus specifically challenged Zeus’s rather selfish distribution of resources and Zeus, to punish him, took fire away from man; when Prometheus gave it back to him, Zeus took his wrath out directly on Prometheus by having him bound and left for an eagle to eat out his liver every day – being immortal, even this torture brought only the unending and recurring experience of pain and never the release of death. The importance of the Promethean gesture to the development of human civilization is indisputable. As Lewis Mumford (1967) observes:

16

Preface

This playing with fire was both a human and a technological turning point: all the more because fire has a threefold aspect – light, power, heat. The first artificially overcame the dark, in an environment filled with nocturnal predators; the second enabled man to change the face of nature, for the first time in a decisive way, by burning over the forest; while the third maintained his internal body temperature and transformed animal flesh and starchy plants into easily digestible food.   Let there be light! With those words, the story of man properly began.38 Just as Prometheus suffered for his sense of fair play and in relation to the distribution of resources, particularly fire, so do the leading characters in tech-noir films suffer – usually because a villain, like Zeus, uses technology to increase his own power: the hero or heroes must often defeat this villain, like Prometheus, by wit and guile, rather than by force of arms. Many of these heroes also show affinities to other mythological characters: Oedipus shadows every “son,” who may be man, clone, or artificial intelligence, that overthrows the “father”; and every policeman, detective, and hacker who must deal with computer programs, security, and encryptions is answering the Sphinx’s riddles, just as Oedipus did. Theseus’s journey into the labyrinth echoes through dozens of filmic excursions into high-rise corporate headquarters and virtual reality, not to mention maintenance tunnels, subways, and sewers. These settings seem to be modeled after the designs of Daedalus, of whom Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) wrote in Metamorphosis: Daedalus, an architect famous for his skill, constructed the maze, confusing the usual marks of direction, and leading the eye of the beholder astray by devious paths winding in different directions. Just as the playful waters of the maeander in Phyrgia flow this way and that, without any consistency, as the river, turning to meet itself, sees its own advancing waves, flowing now towards its source and now towards the open sea, always changing its direction, so Daedalus constructed countless wandering paths and was himself scarcely able to find his way back to the entrance, so confusing was the maze.39 Heroes survive all kinds of labyrinths – and their creatures: like Oedipus, they can answer the riddle; like Theseus, they understand the value of a ball of string; and like the half-human Perseus, they have the wit to know how to put a representation (or reflection) to good use – as he did when he defeated the Medusa with a mirror. Even the Sumerian Gilgamesh’s search for immortality40 is relived through numerous fictional and not-so-fictional experiments in body and mind transplants, bioengineering, and cloning. Tech-noir plot resolutions also take their cues from myth, with the standard endings including those already popularized in gothic, detective, and science fiction: marriage, apprehension of the criminal, and new kinds of relationships involving artificial beings. Tech-noir plots, however, make frequent use of the wasteland motif and attribute the wasteland to the misuse or over-extension of technology in the environment or the technological mimicry, rather than the cultivation, of the natural environment or person: tech-noir thus expands the intense interest in the person in relation to human society and invention characteristic of earlier genres to include a more active awareness of the world in its totality. Plot development and plot resolutions incorporate this awareness, such that they commonly involve the escape of one, a few, or many individuals from the wasteland, the 17

Tech-Noir Film

rejuvenation of the wasteland, or the recycling of the wasteland or artificial elements as a means of restoring the “natural,” if not nature itself. All of these resolutions are structural in that they mediate the natural, understood as both the nature of grass, trees, and water and the conventional social model of the film audience; and the cultural, understood primarily in terms of the variations of technology. Tech-noir is a historically grounded genre, however, and the core problem or mystery and the crisis posed in each film tend to invoke, deliberately or otherwise, some real-world aspect of the uses and negative effects of technology. Many of the heroes of tech-noir are forced into their role because of technological developments that seem beyond their full comprehension or control and because they thereby become victims of those who would use the Promethean gift as a means to power – a circumstance that film audiences are likely to sympathize with, even as they enjoy their microwave ovens, digital television, laptops, and cell phones. Acknowledgments My thanks to the organizers of the annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference, which I have participated regularly in since 1993, both as a presenter and as an area chair; and to the organizers of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics conference, held annually as part of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, at which I presented several papers on tech-noir film, including “The Aesthetics of Tech-Noir Film” (2000), “Baudrillardian Aesthetics in The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ” (2005), and “To Inform, L’informe and the Abject: The Aesthetics of Dream Representation in Blade Runner, Brazil, and Until the End of the World” (2006). The theory of genre development informing this study may be found in my thesis titled “A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres: Discourse in Gothic, Detective, Science, and Cyberpunk Fiction” (2001) written under the direction of Professor G.K. Blank at the University of Victoria. I owe a great deal to Professor Blank for his expertise, as well as his patience and continued support during the years between the completion of my thesis and the completion of this manuscript. My research on tech-noir film was financially supported, in part, by a research grant from Sir Wilfred Grenfell College of Memorial University in Newfoundland. Notes   1. Several websites, notably The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), have since added “tech-noir” to their search terms, but the titles it calls up remain limited in number and lack a defining reference point. I found the term used by Constance Penley as a subtitle and reference in a discussion of The Terminator (1984): “Time Travel, Prime Scene and the Critical Dystopia,” Fantasy and Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 197–211. Penley notes that the “tech turns noir because of human decision-making and not something inherent in technology itself ” (199).   2. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner discuss the representation of technology in a few 1970s and early 1980s films, notably THX 1138 (1970) and Blade Runner (1982), in terms of the threat the artificial posses to the “natural,” in “Technophobia,” Alien Zone, ed. A Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 58–65.   3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology (1958; New York: Basic, 1963) 206–31. 18

Preface

  4. Stephen Bauer, Leon Balter and Winslow Hunt, “The Detective Film as Myth: The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade,” American Imago 35.3 (Fall 1978): 278.   5. Hanna Charney, “Oedipal Patterns in the Detective Novel,” Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, eds. Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1987) 246–47.  6. Debra A. Moddelmog, Readers and Mythic Signs: The Oedipus Myth in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993) 110.   7. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 746.   8. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 747.   9. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks” (1984), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 561–77. 10. D.L. White, “The Poetics of Horror: More than Meets the Eye,” Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, ed. Barry K. Grant (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977) 124–44. 11. Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment 14.4 (July–August 1978): 27. 12. Roger Dadoun, “Fetishism in the Horror Film,” Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 46. 13. Dadoun, “Fetishism in the Horror Film” 46. 14. Kenneth Munden, “A Contribution to the Psychological Understanding of the Cowboy and His Myth,” American Imago 15.2 (1958): 103–48. 15. Marie Jean Lederman, “Superman, Oedipus and the Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 7.3 (1979): 235–45. 16. Andrew Gordon, “ ‘Star Wars’: A Myth for Our Time,” Literature/Film Quarterly 6.4 (Fall 1978): 320–25. Gordon’s observations about the mixing of genres in this particular film, including science fiction, western, Japanese samurai film, and war film, to name just a few, as well earlier films, novels, and comic books, also point to myth as a creative influence that is stronger than current perceptions of genre categories in film. 17. William Indick, Movies and the Mind: Theories of the Great Psychoanalysts Applied to Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004). 18. Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, “ ‘Mother isn’t quite herself today’: Myth and Spectacle in The Matrix,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 (March 2002): 83–84. 19. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 20. Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999). 21. Carl Jung regarded this experience as part of the process of individuation, or movement toward true maturity, and also believed it could be traced in the world of individual artists. See Carl Jung, “Picasso” (1932), The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, vol. 15, The Collected Works of C.G Jung, trans. R.F.C Hull, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 135–41. 22. James J. Clauss, “Descent into Hell: Mythic Paradigms in The Searchers,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 27 (Fall 1999): 2–17. 23. Erling B. Holtsmark, “The Katabasis Theme in Modern Cinema,” Bucknell Review: Classics and Cinema, ed. Martin M Winkler (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1991) 60–80. 24. William K. Ferrell, Literature and Film as Modern Mythology (Westport: Praeger, 2000). 25. Avent Beck, “The Christian Allegorical Structure of Platoon,” Literature/Film Quarterly 20.3 (1992): 213–22. 26. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) 48–49. 27. Martin M. Winkler, “Classical Mythology and the Western Film,” Comparative Literature Studies 22 (Winter 1985): 516–40. 19

Tech-Noir Film

28. David Daly and Joel Persky, “The West and the Western,” Journal of the West 29.2 (April 1990): 6–64. 29. Patricia Warrick, “Introduction: Mythic Patterns,” Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology The SFWASFRA Anthology, eds. Patricia Warrick, et al. (New York: Harper, 1978) xv–xviii. 30. Gary S. Bedford, “Notes on Mythological Psychology: Reimagining the Historical Psyche,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49.2 (June 1981): 231. 31. Bedford, “Notes on Mythological Psychology” 231. 32. George Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 18. For a review of studies of Antigone, most of which seem to find the Oedipal connection irresistible, see David Werman, “Methodological Problems in the Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Literature: A Review of Studies of Sophocles’ Antigone,” Psychoanalytic Association Journal 27 (1979): 451–78. 33. Harry Slochower, “The Function of Myth in Existentialism,” Yale French Studies 1 (1948): 44. 34. Robert Porfirio, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir” (1976), Film Noir Reader, eds. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996) 77–93. 35. Slochower, “The Function of Myth in Existentialism” 43. 36. Bedford, “Notes on Mythological Psychology” 237. 37. Bedford, “Notes on Mythological Psychology” 235, 237. 38. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harvest, 1967) 29–30. 39. Ovid, The Metamorphosis of Ovid, trans. Mary M Innes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955) book viii, lines 159–67. 40. Gilgamesh is a favored reference in the essays in George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin’s, eds., Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

20

Introduction

T

ech-noir films are about technology perceived as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality. They often expose the temporal nature of concepts of identity and society: rather than being fixed aspects of a permanent and indestructible “nature,” these concepts, like nature itself, are shown as mere parts of a larger simulacrum that is subject to change, exploitation, and even annihilation. Yet, even as tech-noir films present the mirror that reveals us to be as expendable and replaceable as any consumer product, they simultaneously affirm conventional beliefs and values – as do all popular genres. The conventions of science fiction have made the discourse of science and its related technological manifestations seem both familiar and friendly: the view of science and technology as problematic, often combined with a negative view of the professionals from other fields who have invested in scientific methods and technological gadgetry, is less generally characteristic of that genre. It is in tech-noir that the center of discourse shifts from the celebrated “science” of science fiction to its consequences, particularly technology and the ways it can be, and indeed is being used for purposes that challenge just about everything: the environment, economic and social stability, and more. Just as detective fiction tends to pick up after the classic gothic plot resolution of marriage, lending both amateur and professional attention to contractually determined matters of property and social class and, of course, criminality; so tech-noir picks up after science fiction, attending to the real world problems that form the wake of technological development.1 Unlike detective fiction, however, tech-noir often addresses or at least illustrates all-encompassing rather than isolated problems such that the entire worldview and physical environment – all aspects of the current simulacrum – are compromised by or suffer the aftermath of a violent revision of what we currently take to be reality. The main characters of tech-noir, as true children of Prometheus, are heir to the Titan’s philanthropic “gift” of fire … and his propensity to suffer for it. Discourse is the interchange of ideas giving rise to a formal, ordered, and extended expression of thought on a subject or specialization of interest, such as psychology, sociology, science, or aesthetics.2 It may be synthesized, embodied, and conveyed in the forms of speech and written language, such as mythology, the traditional romance, and the modern novel; and in the forms of visual art, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as the mixed mediums of theater and film. Popular genres, such as gothic, detective, science, and tech-noir fiction and film, are descendants of “mythology” via the “medieval romance” that appear and proliferate as specific

Tech-Noir Film

types of “novels” in Euroamerican culture from the eighteenth century3 on as part of the general trend of Romanticism in literature. The conventions and dynamics of discourse in popular genres are here demonstrated with a structural approach that links areas of discourse: psychology, sociology, science, and aesthetics, to realms of experience. These realms are similar to those developed by Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and frequently applied in twentieth-century psychoanalytic models: Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary.4 Psychology is associated with the realm of the symbolic, sociology with the real, and science with the imaginary. The simulacrum, associated with Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), provides the experiential counterpart to aesthetics: it is used here in the sense of the model preceding and defining what we take to be real or “natural.” Discourse is not only articulated in relation to realms of experience: that experience is represented in genres through common constituent elements, such as characters, crimes, clues, plot resolutions, and so forth, as well as the details pointing to the differences between them: for example, gothic tends to end in marriage, as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764); detective fiction with the identification of a criminal, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band” (1892); science fiction with alliances between different species and aliens, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948); and/or with the displacement of human behavior onto artificial beings, as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). This volume offers a broad view of the consecutive historical development of popular genres and their cumulative engagement of various areas of discourse and incorporation of conventionalized constituent elements. This cumulativeness is readily observed: marriage, for example, is part of the resolution in Otranto, “The Speckled Band,” and even Neuromancer. Criminals are recognized, if not necessarily punished in these same works, and what might be considered stand-ins for criminality – racism and xenophobia – are overcome in Against the Fall of Night. Changes in science and technology have affected so many aspects of our world that it can easily be argued that they are accountable for all popular genres since gothic, but they are treated more deliberately in science fiction. Similarly, aesthetics direct the representation of all constituent elements in fiction and further the recognition of genres in relation to each other, even as one element is substituted for another: the gothic castle becomes a space ship, the gothic labyrinth and ghost become cyberspace and its constructs, and the detective becomes “hard-boiled.” However, when perceptions of the impact of technology on the immediate environment and perceptions of what the world is and what the ideal world should be – physically as well as culturally – incorporate the realization that such perceptions exist in relation to a model rather than an absolute, then the discourse of aesthetics is not merely present, it is the prioritized discourse and the realm in which it is experienced is recognized as itself a simulacrum. This recognition fosters an ironic approach in many genres, but it is at the center of tech-noir. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1990) note, films of the 1970s and 1980s, such as THX 1138 (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), and Blade Runner (1982), “negatively affirm such social values as freedom, individualism, and the family” by dramatizing oppositions between mechanical and spontaneous, regulated and free, and further, they show technology as the means by which “nature” and everything associated with it is realized as a construct: The significance of technology thus exceeds simple questions of mechanics. It is usually a crucial ideological figure. Indeed, as the possibility of reconstructing institutions conservatives 22

Introduction

declare to be part of nature, technology represents everything that threatens the grounding of conservative social authority and everything that ideology is designed to neutralize.5 Not surprisingly, many of the conventions of popular literature and film may be traced to myths and medieval romances about villages and cities endangered by monsters, demons, and other villains, as well as heroes who quest for the restoration of the “natural” order and are rewarded with power, wealth, long life, and a desirable spouse if they succeed and experience disappointment and death if they fail – and bring the same to others. The details of setting, character, and action keep changing, but this story has survived the transformation from preclassical myth to classical theater to medieval romance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western literature and film. The ongoing popularity of stories derived from classical Greco-Roman and other ancient myths in popular genres is proof of their success as ideology: these narratives establish what have become constants of life and psyche and both represent and celebrate conventional beliefs and values.6 Popular genres arise as adaptations of myths relative to and as part of the content and form of discourse emphasized in a particular time and place: such emphases are a principal means by which a particular ideology or worldview is both arrived at and perpetuated.7 All of the traditional forms given to discourse, including those related to “entertainment” considered here, have developed historically in relation to earlier and alternative forms: the novel descends from such sources as letters, contracts, and wills;8 the easel painting from manuscript illumination, wall painting, and oral and literary narratives; and film from novels, painting, and theater,9 to name just a few. While all of these forms seem to have the capacity to reformulate and represent myths, their popularity has varied over time. It is also apparent that some myths lend themselves more readily to articulation within some fields of discourse than others. Historically, as interest in different fields of discourse changes, so does the identification with particular myths – as the shifts of attention from Antigone to Oedipus to the more recent engagement with Prometheus indicate.10 While some tech-noir films are based on a narrative first written as a short story, play, or book, most are developed as film scripts;11 and, like all popular genres regardless of form, technoir films perpetually reground myth in real world events and issues. These events, as always, include war, but the years between 1970 and 2005, the years of the release dates for most of the films considered here, were also years of extraordinary scientific and technological developments. Many of these developments, like the home computer, are related to digital technology, while others, like environmental pollution, are less seemingly innocuous: these realities echo through the Promethean genre of tech-noir. New genres arise then, not “merely” as matters of form, but as means to convey meaning in relation to content. Contemporary popular genres, both literary and filmic, share certain aspects of ideology grounded in myth and related to the individual’s coming of age by finding a place in society, but they are usually distinguished from their antecedent, the medieval “romance,” with its interlaced structure, complex and overlapping plots, and extensive character lists, by the modern preference for more Aristotelian literary qualities: that is to say, more linear narrative structure, plots of more limited scope, and fewer characters.12 This transformation of form indicates, among other things, a change in emphasis away from a sense of the complex interrelatedness of cosmic metaphysics and the materiality of the physical world toward a melodramatic fixation on simplified dualistic models for generating meaning in relation to characters, particularly victims, who are 23

Tech-Noir Film

intentionally chosen as mirror reflections of the anticipated audience, or rather as reflections that match the members of the anticipated audience as they imagine themselves. These general changes in popular genres find more particular manifestations in many examples of tech-noir and its literary antecedents, including the three classics considered here: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), all of which have been variously described in relation to both gothic and science fiction. Tech-noir films tend to be more melodramatic than these texts, and provide more thorough and extensive depictions of technology, sexuality, and violence. They also fill out the roster of “characters” and sets so as to appeal to a larger film audience and lend special dramatic attention to the experiences of the victim or victims of technology. Many of these films have very little dialogue and rely on visual ways of conveying the tech-noir message, notably the frequent treatment of the human form within the mise-en-scène such that it and its representations become part of a conceptual mise-en-abyme that revises the hierarchy or chain of beings. This mise-en-abyme contributes to the overall complexity of technoir films, even as they maintain the conventions of melodrama and genre: in tech-noir films the interrelations of the metaphysical and physical are reasserted by proxy in layered representations of technologized realities. Notes   1. For a list of some of those problems, see Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000) 291–324.   2. Roland Barthes argues that discourse is like spoken and written language in that it is “any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual,” but the term contributes more to the precision of critical analysis as a category within which different subject concentrations, forms of expression, and conventions may be identified. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, trans. Annette Lavers (1972; Toronto: Paladin Grafton, 1989) 119.  3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 180–85.   4. Where a very specifically Lacanian meaning of these terms is meant, these terms are capitalized.   5. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, “Technophobia,” Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 58–59.   6. Walter R. Agard, “Greek Prototypes of American Myths,” The Classical Journal 54.8 (May 1959): 338–43; Laurie Honko, “The Problem of Defining Myth” (1972), Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 49–51.   7. For a taxonomy of folklore genres ranging from the jargon and slang of the conversational to the riddling and joking of play, and the anecdotes and jokes of the fictive, see Roger D. Abrahams, “The Complex Relations of Forms,” Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970) 193– 214.  8. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).   9. Margaret Morse, “Paradoxes of Realism: The Rise of Film in the Train of the Novel,” Cine-Tracts 13 (Spring 1981): 27–37. The influence of painting and theater on film is also well documented with reference to early film classics. See, for example, Mike Budd’s essay “Modernism and the Representation of Fantasy: 24

Introduction

Cubism and Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Forms of the Fantastic, eds. Jan Hokenson and Pearce Howard (Westport: Greenwood, 1986) 15–21; and Angela Dalle Vacche, “Murnau’s Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 14.3 (Summer 1995): 25–36. 10. Discussion and citations on this point are available in the Preface. 11. Martin Rubin finds that science-fiction film tends more to a dystopian view of technology than does science-fiction literature, and he references a number of films considered here as tech-noir, including THX 1138 (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), and others, in “Genre and Technology: Variant Attitudes in Science Fiction Literature and Film,” Persistence of Vision 3–4 (Summer 1986): 100, 103. See also, H. Bruce Franklin’s “Visions of the Future in Science Fiction Films from 1970 to 1982,” Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 19–31. 12. This historical transition has been noted by numerous scholars of literature. See Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy’s The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) 4, for one such observation regarding the characteristics, though not the lineage, with regard to film.

25

Chapter 1 Method and Models

M

ythology is the prototypical form of discourse from which popular genres developed and Oedipus is currently the most frequently cited exemplar of a specific myth influencing popular genres in literature and film. The structural relationships between the genres of gothic, detective, science, and tech-noir fiction, like those between myth and other narratives, can be shown by the identification and ordering of constituent units or elements in a manner that brings forward content that may not otherwise be apparent. Vladimir Propp (1928) addressed fairy tales1 and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958)2 revisited Oedipus in this manner. Similarly, Jack Burnham (1971) has shown how the structurally defined “myth” of the avant-garde in the visual arts involves the treatment of cultural elements, such as tube paints and spray guns, as “natural” elements and then “culturalizing” them by processing with choices and decisions about application and arrangement.3 The structuralist approach taken here demonstrates the association of primary fields of discourse – psychology, sociology, science, and aesthetics; with realms of experience – the symbolic, the real, the imaginary, and the simulacrum; and with specific genres and their constituent elements (Chart 1). Discourse, realms of experience, and genres are all somewhat artificially compartmentalized to facilitate the identification and understanding of their presence, relationships, and dynamics. Any discourse may develop in any realm of experience, but specific areas of discourse take on conventionalized roles in relation to specific realms of experience, the constituent elements of popular genres, and individual popular genres. In other words, areas of discourse are articulated in the experiential realms and constituent elements of popular genres: characters; relationships between characters; the crime, mystery, or social issue at stake; its detection; and its resolution. This structural arrangement of areas of discourse, realms of experience, and constituent elements facilitates charting of the characteristics that historically distinguish individual genres and mark their cumulative development. It is demonstrated here in relation to the Oedipus myth and, more specifically, to exemplars of popular genres: Horace Walpole’s gothic The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764), Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction “The Speckled Band” (1892), Arthur C. Clarke’s sciencefiction Against the Fall of Night (1948), and William Gibson’s scifi-cyberpunk Neuromancer (1984). Realms of experience and genre Prometheus is undisputedly the Titan of technology and, by association, of tech-noir; but the Oedipus myth, not that of Prometheus, is the most commonly cited template for Western literature in general, and the inspiration for numerous structural and psychoanalytic analyses of narrative. The story of Oedipus, as compiled, summarized, and popularized by Robert Graves (1955) from 29

Tech-Noir Film

sources including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is as follows: Oedipus is abandoned as an infant by his mother Iocaste because of an oracular prediction about the future damage he will do and is thus raised by adoptive parents whom he later abandons because of a similar oracular prediction. His travels bring him to Thebes, a city tormented by the Sphinx sent by Hera as punishment to Laios, Oedipus’s biological father, for abducting a boy. Not knowing him to be his father, Oedipus kills Laios in a fit of temper. He then answers the Sphinx’s riddle and is rewarded for this accomplishment with the crown and the hand of his own mother, whom he also does not recognize, in marriage. Years later, when a plague blights the land, Oedipus seeks explanation in some human crime against the gods. He eventually identifies his own incest as this crime and blinds and banishes himself to wander as a beggar aided only by his devoted daughter Antigone. His sons (and brothers), Eteocles and Polyneices, war for his kingdom and Antigone has to see to it that the body of the defeated Polyneices is properly buried.4 Otto Rank (1909), Lord Raglan (1936), and Lévi-Strauss (1963) all studied this myth and their research identified what they believed to be a list of the constituent elements for the hero, including, among others, a royal bloodline, unusual conception, attacks on his life in infancy or early childhood, foster parents, a successful battle in early adulthood with some enemy or beast, a royal marriage, a crown, and the eventual loss of favor, dethroning, and mysterious death.5 Lévi-Strauss carries the structuralist analysis further and identifies the myth’s constituent elements as representing opposites that form patterns of mediation made more recognizable by their arrangement in four columns.6 He includes additional elements from the story of Cadmos, ancestor of Oedipus, and Cadmos’s search for his sister Europa after she is abducted and raped by Zeus and mothers three children by him, including Minos. Cadmos follows the directions of the Delphic oracle, kills a serpent and sows its teeth, which sprout the “sown” men who immediately begin killing each other until only five remain. These five swear their allegiance to Cadmos and become his servants. The first of Lévi-Strauss’s four columns includes those elements showing various kinds of excess or the exaggeration of blood relations: Cadmos seeking his sister, Oedipus marrying his mother, and Antigone burying her brother. The second includes those indicating the devaluation or underrating of blood relations: the “sown” men kill each other, Oedipus kills his father, and Eteocles kills his brother. The third column shows the denial of the indigenous origins of humankind insofar as it involves monsters unwilling to allow humankind to be born or to take up residence in a particular location: Cadmos kills the serpent and Oedipus kills the Sphinx. The fourth column includes the names of the male characters and their meanings: the name of Laios’s father, Labdacos, means lame; that of Laios means left-sided; and Oedipus means swollen foot. These names affirm the autochthonous origins of man by referring to what Lévi-Strauss claims is a universal characteristic of myth: the difficulties men have walking when they first emerge from the earth.7 Lévi-Strauss interprets the entire Oedipus myth as an attempt to resolve the conflict between the belief in autochthonous origins and the actuality of birth resulting from a union of man and woman,8 or, put another way, the myth is about how babies come to be and, more broadly, the question of how unity derives from individuals, diversity, and multiplicity. The first pair of columns identifies the extremes of relations between men and women and the second pair moves the dilemmas of this relationship to the mythic dimension of ultimate, rather than individual, origins. The Oedipus myth also provided inspiration for Sigmund Freud’s famous Oedipus complex,9 summarized in the cliché about little boys wanting to kill their fathers so they can sleep with 30

Method and Models

their mothers, and Jacques Lacan’s “mirror” stage of child development.10 Lacan describes both the Oedipal and mirror stages in relation to the experiential realms of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; that which is beyond these realms is the Real. Capitalizing his terms to emphasize the specific meanings he assigns them, Lacan explains that the Imaginary is experienced during the “mirror stage,” which lasts between 6 and 18 months, during which time infants derive a sense of wholeness and completeness through the “gaze” of the Other, typically the mother. This stage ends when a child realizes that his mirror reflection is not himself, that the “gaze” from a mirror is merely a reflection and, coincidentally, becomes aware of his own mortality.11 This moment is also that of the realization of difference, the basis of awareness of the self in relation to society and the purported Oedipus complex,12 and the moment when the unconscious is supposed to be created as repression begins when the child leaves the realm of the Imaginary to enter the realm of the Symbolic, forcing the mind to split into conscious and unconscious parts. Lacan believes that the child experiences a new sense of alienation when the mirror stage ends which he attempts to overcome by reconstituting himself as subject through language:13 he invests energy in various types of substitutes for the lost Other, the mother, substitutes that are frequently “linguistic” insofar as they are metonymically associated with the mother, and which recover something of the feeling of wholeness associated with her and the constitutive power of her vision. Lacan believes that the mind often attempts to restore a sense of the wholeness and totality experienced during the mirror stage in dream images of a fortress,14 whereas in life individuals often attempt to re-create a sense of wholeness through the endless “contemplation of women.”15 The flaws in the theory of the mirror stage, not to mention that of the Oedipus complex, are many; among the most obvious are the abandonment of girls and the anthropomorphization involved in the “projection” of experiences and feelings into a being unable to speak for himself.16 Nevertheless, the mirror stage theory has been used extensively as an interpretive model in literary analyses. For example, Philip Armstrong’s (1996) discussion of the stage as mirror and the mirror stage in Hamlet lends particular emphasis to the constituent power of the performance and to this constituent power as analogous to that of the mirror in the mirror stage. Hamlet holds up an image reflecting the audience back at itself, but also constitutes that audience in a manner that evokes considerable identification with and response to it: “Drama works not only like a mirror, but like a mould, keeping the impression or imprint left upon it by contemporary society.”17 Armstrong adds an interpretation of the content of the play relative to the psychoanalytic model of the mirror stage, observing that it contains various “doubles” or mirror images: Laertes is the mirror image of Hamlet and Hamlet’s struggle with Laertes is a dramatization of his struggle with his ego ideal.18 It is equally apparent that the mirror itself serves as a useful motif in discussions about self-awareness and conscious-awareness of the world in relation to specific characters. This “mirror stage” scene comes in Act III scene IV, when Hamlet confronts his mother about her sudden marriage to the brother of her recently deceased husband:

Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge. You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you. (3.4.19–21)

31

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The Queen’s marriage amounted to incest in Shakespearean England and would have offended the original audiences of the play as much as it does Hamlet, who not only accuses her of this crime, but suggests she is also guilty of poor taste when he pairs his father’s portrait with that of his uncle. Gertrude finally responds to her son’s tirade: O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grainèd spots As will not leave their tinct. […] O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet! (3.4.89–98) Clearly, Gertrude finds Hamlet’s confrontation and accusations startling and she seems to do so in the context of a kind of “mirror stage” revelation: she does not like what her son sees or what she then sees and can no longer bear to hear the words that he speaks.19 The association of looking into a mirror with self-scrutiny may be traced back to the third century,20 and became popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.21 At the time Hamlet was written, mirrors were usually only a few inches across, often convex, and they provided an extremely distorted reflection,22 yet this does not seem to have diminished their use in metaphors about the individual’s discovery of aspects of self of which he was previously unaware. In both play and theoretical essay, the “mirror stage” is associated with an individual’s increased self-awareness of his place in the social order. Indeed, with this understanding of the historical associations of mirrors, Lacan’s “theoretical” essay appears as merely the most recent literary form to employ an already centuries-old idea. Jean-Joseph Goux (1993) explains the relationship between the theory of the Oedipus complex and the Oedipus myth in similar terms: “it is because the West is Oedipean that Freud discovered the ‘Oedipus Complex.’ ”23 Using the myths of Perseus, Bellerophon, and Jason as examples, he argues that the Oedipus myth is the exception, not the standard, Greek “mono-myth.” The standard myth involves a man coming of age, three different kings, an attempted murder, the setting of a trial, a battle with a feminine monster, and a reward. The hero’s defeat of a monster leads to his marriage and eventually to the crown. Contrary to this model, Oedipus is never given a trial by a king; instead, he unwittingly kills his own father, encounters and defeats the Sphinx in a trial by language,24 and ends up married to his mother, a crime which later costs him the crown. In effect, says Goux, the Oedipus myth is a parody of the mono-myth in which the sequence of patricide to incest replaces that of matricide to marital engagement; thus it is the myth of “failed royal investiture, or of avoided masculine initiation.”25 The trial by physical combat and the death of the “female monster” are replaced by shrewdness and wit alone.26 Goux finds the Oedipus myth to be the “mono-myth” of modern Western society. The avoidance of “liberating matricide” and the resulting split between the conscious and unconscious has become a social norm: “the madness of Oedipus has become Western reason”27 and man’s destiny a “prolonged liminality […] an endless process rather than a passage.”28 The Oedipus myth, he 32

Method and Models

believes, marks the departure from the transcendent social norm associated with the gods and the ancestors and asserts the emergence and autonomy of the individual29 that is of such ideological importance in the modern world. At least some aspects of Goux’s opinion may be confirmed by the prevalence of Oedipal elements in twentieth-century fiction;30 however, while the popular genres analyzed here share many constituent elements with mythology in general and some of these also appear in the Oedipus myth, as melodramatic variations of myth they tend to end with a happier sense of closure for both the beleaguered “city” or “fortress” and the individual who must meet the challenge of its salvation. The metonymic chains of association and metaphors which, in Lacan’s psychoanalytic model of human development, are understood to begin during infancy and early childhood are recognizable in the conventions of discourse found in popular genres, such that the realm of the Symbolic is associated with the father, language, and the law and the Imaginary with the mother, the visual, and images. The Real is, as always, what is, or rather what seems to be, beyond representation. The simulacrum is the model or map established by a given set of beliefs and values, which, as Jean Baudrillard (1981)31 has so aptly observed, actually precedes reality. In popular genres, the simulacrum is what is compromised or threatened: it usually represents an idealized order of things that the hero is inevitably called upon to restore or reaffirm – this order is always one grounded in history and conventionality. Popular genres are melodramas and the characters of melodramas are predisposed to certain kinds of experience; thus the articulation of the realms of experience in popular genres tends to be uncomplicated, even transparent. Northrop Frye (1912–1991) took the Aristotelian approach when he categorized different types of literature (1957), including popular genres, according to different “modes” identified according to the hero’s varying power of action, even though he was well aware that these modes are not mutually exclusive. In myth, the hero’s power of action is superior to that of men and the environment; in romance, that power is superior in degree; in epic and tragedy, the hero is superior to other characters but is subject to the forces of nature; in comedy and realism, the hero is superior to no one and nothing; and in irony, the hero is inferior such that the audience looks in on his or her “bondage, frustration, or absurdity.”32 The popular genre hero is very often in a position that is equivalent or inferior to that of the audience; but the audience is likely to enjoy that relationship because, as Robert Heilman (1968) notes, they do not have to suffer with the character’s internal dilemmas or contradictions and can simply enjoy his or her limited and uncomplicated emotions.33 The melodramatic hero is monopathic, lacks any tendency to self-reflection, and is capable of complete single-minded dedication to the task or crisis of the moment, either because of the stressfulness of that situation or because he or she has been trained, as military types are, to function that way.34 Where tragic characters, such as Oedipus and Macbeth, are concerned, even public actions are given meaning in terms of revelations of the self within a private reality. Tragedy does not actually require a villain since the main character’s inner conflict may serve that part; the tragic hero may even be responsible for his own situation. The melodrama, on the other hand, needs a villain, individual or collective, who is opposed by some general or specific insistence that “right” prevail.35 Attention goes to the melodramatic hero’s virtue or innocence in the face of some threat to those qualities, a situation or a person,36 that has turned him or her into a victim. This difference in emphasis on plot in melodrama and character in tragedy has often led to a confusing 33

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misuse of terms. As Heilman observes, tragedy is widely overused as synonymous with the disaster narrative, even though disaster stories are really all about fatalities resulting from factors outside the victim, such as accident, illness, and other violence or bad luck: disaster is about “quantity of life.” Tragedy, on the other hand, is about “quality of life” affected by experiences generated from within and by the hero’s actions.37 Relationships between genre characters, particularly monopathic ones, tend to fall into the realm of the symbolic or the real, but they may also shift between them. Consanguine relationships, such as father, mother, son, and daughter, are real in that they are factual biological connections that do not necessarily entail the specific agreements typical of other kinds of relationships and tend to have preconceived and unquestioned associations, such that violation of the trust implied by these relationships does not require explanation to be understood as such, at least not in their melodramatic presentations. Contractual relationships between individuals, such as husband, wife, employer, employee, and servant, tend to operate in the realm of the symbolic because they are agreements made between individuals in relation to specific functions and goals without necessarily relating to matters beyond individual interests. Contractual relationships between the individual and a larger community tend to be imaginary in that they pertain not only to individual interests but also to the individual’s place relative to the world beyond himself. Contractual relationships tend to be definitive of the circumstances and central plot issue in most popular genres, as well as the plot’s resolution, which is always made in relation, usually in conformity, to the simulacrum. Motifs and other elements interpreted as clues to the plot mystery, crime, or other issue are always identified as clues in the realm of the imaginary because they only and always serve as clues in relation to the simulacrum. In general, the realms of experience are articulated in popular genres such that they emphasize movement between the symbolic, the real, the imaginary, and the simulacrum such that: •  The symbolic is identified primarily by the characters and is often articulated by their names and by their specific relationships. The main character or hero, however, is usually someone aspiring to a state of wholeness and unity with the community or universe in conformity with the simulacrum. •  The real is identified with the principal mystery, crime, or social issue that, at least at the beginning of the story, may be “beyond” the hero’s symbolic and imaginary understanding relative to the simulacrum. •  The imaginary is identified with the hero’s detection of the mystery, crime, or social issue and sometimes the actions that further the movement toward an understanding of the situation and its resolution. It is at this level that certain elements or actions are interpreted as “clues” pointing from the situation to its disjunctive or oppositional position relative to the simulacrum and thus to the appropriate resolution. •  The simulacrum is the realm of “natural” balance, wholeness, or unity. It is the model relative to which mysteries and crimes are both identified as such and resolved, usually by realigning or removing elements that have disrupted it.

34

Method and Models

Discourse and genre Popular genres are melodramas that are marked not only by the articulation of different realms of experience but also by the articulation of discourse. The popularity of melodrama and its related genres grew in the eighteenth century, the same century that, as Northrop Frye notes, the “low” mimetic forms of comedy and realism were introduced. Frye gives special attention to the growth in popularity of detective fiction in the later nineteenth century as a variation of the man-hunter story in which even the smallest details become evidence of great importance to the plot resolution, while the growing emphasis on the corpse and the process of selecting a criminal from the suspects adds the element of ritual drama to the form.38 He finds that by the twentieth century comedy and realism turn more toward irony, such that melodrama, advertising, and propaganda become prevalent literary forms: all of these types are marked by a specific kind of irony in that the audience does not take the “melodramatic” villain seriously, just as it does not take the claims about commercial products or the claims of politicians seriously.39 Nevertheless, even as the element of violence in the detective story increases and the type merges with that of the “thriller,” the melodramatic emphasis on upholding moral virtue remains: as Frye observes, “In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.”40 Frye does not think people take melodrama seriously; thus he supposes that while it and the detective novel in particular could be treated as “advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence,”41 they cannot be taken to serve this purpose simply because they are forms that audiences perceive as absurd.42 The didactic function of popular forms of entertainment should not, however, be underestimated: popular forms of entertainment that purportedly appeal only to the “masses” include, among others, the works of Shakespeare, who was derided in his own day for pandering to the general public with his stock characters, spectacles, and improbable turning points.43 Indeed, popular genres demonstrate a certain creativity in the invention of new characters that are often variations of mythological or romantic “archetypes” and also serve as agents of discourse. Any “body” with a name, which, as in mythology, includes a wide variety of supernatural, artificial, or otherwise enigmatic beings, is treated as a “character”: characters are “sites” at which discourse is “embodied.” A character is thus, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) notes, “not the image of a man in his own right, but a man who is precisely the image of a language.”44 The “feminine” role of the Other may thus be played by a great variety of “beings,” ranging from ghosts to androids to artificial intelligences, all of which are the agents of discourse: the ghost, for example, is the agent of psychology and the android the agent of science. The popular genre hero and other characters take different forms in accordance with traditions of individual maturation, participation in society, and methods of resolving disjunctions between situation and simulacrum. The hero typically undergoes a series of crises involving such events as a pursuit or quest, moments of identity and recognition, scapegoating, and poetic justice that initiate him into adulthood or into the mysteries of a superior awareness, possibly of the simulacrum as such. The “meeting”45 between the supernatural and human characteristic of mythology frequently appears in popular genres as a meeting between agents of discourse that also leads to maturation, change, or a new awareness of reality. This meeting marks the temporal intersection of different areas of discourse already marked spatially by the “embodiments” involved. 35

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Varying emphases on different fields of discourse and associated variations on the constituent unit or semantic level, including characters and prominent motifs, characterize different genres. However, as Stuart Kaminsky (1985) notes, a good genre study shows “the validity” of a given symbol or motif in relation to “a history of connotations.”46 Using Kaminsky’s key terms, a genre may be described as a group of works sharing a set of motifs used to articulate a common theme,47 and it is possible to trace the history of popular genres by the semantic changes within and additions to a general structure.48 No narrative element belongs exclusively to any one genre; indeed, it is questionable that any “pure” representatives of any single genre even exist: discussions about genres tend to develop, as this one does, around selected type specimens. Genre elements are borrowed and used and developed in accordance with emphases on different fields of discourse: the so-called “hybrid” genres are just interesting proofs of the historical cumulativeness of genre.49 New and hybrid genres appear in conjunction with changing emphases in fields of discourse. As the individual subject becomes more important, the gothic genre, with its attention to internal subjective states, becomes popular; as the feudal social and economic order shifts to empower the middle classes and capitalism, fictional detectives become the heroes who invigilate the new boundaries of behavior and the acquisition of wealth, thus dramatizing the field of sociology;50 when scientific advance reaches a certain point of influence, science fiction becomes accepted; when that science turns to computers and the digital, those elements enter the genre; when people start to seriously question the effects of science and technology, tech-noir appears. True to the propensity of genres to accumulate, science-fiction enthusiasts and scholars have embraced “cyberpunk” as their own, just as they have expanded the genre’s originally pro-science didacticism51 to include dystopian visions of the future.52 Yet “pure” science fiction is no more about the problems of science than gothic is about the problems of marriage: both gothic and science fiction are all about getting there, and not so much about the consequences that follow.53 As previously noted, detective fiction stands somewhat for “consequences” in relation to gothic insofar as it addresses property concerns and the invigilation of boundaries supposed to protect the interests of those in established relationships. Tech-noir is to science fiction what detective fiction is to gothic; hence, there is a certain affinity between tech-noir and film noir. Genres, as Fredric Jameson (1981) so conveniently summarized, “are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.”54 Science fiction, no longer deemed to speak to the proper use of science and technology, has given rise to tech-noir. Given the obvious and ubiquitous cumulative nature of genres, it is clear that all areas of discourse are evident in all genres; but it is also clear that specific areas of discourse are emphasized in specific genres through conventions of generating sector, focus, and agency, such that psychology is prominent in gothic fiction, sociology in detective fiction, science in science fiction, and aesthetics in tech-noir. The constituent elements found in all popular genres are also linked with particular areas of discourse through their articulation in particular realms of experience as follows: •  Gothic fiction emphasizes the discourse of psychology as one generated primarily in relation to the individual and with a predominant focus on gender. Gothic plots usually develop around a central mystery that relates to sex and marriage. Its primary agents include the person coming of age by finding a marriage partner or by moving to a new and superior level of consciousness 36

Method and Models

in relation to the simulacrum and beings associated with magic and telepathy, such as ghosts and telepaths. A villain often seeks to control or take advantage of the person coming of age by victimizing her.55 This situation is often resolved by a marriage. •  Detective fiction emphasizes the discourse of sociology as one generated primarily by society and with a predominant focus on class. The plots of this genre develop around a mystery, usually one which society deems to be a crime, such as a murder or theft. Its primary agents are those relating to class and law: the policeman, detective, and criminal, and, of course, the victim of the crime.56 The victim is usually vindicated when the criminal or villain is brought to justice. •  Science fiction emphasizes the discourse of science as one generated primarily by the scientific or corporate community and with a predominant focus on race. The plots of this genre usually develop around changes or differences in social forms arising from technological development or biological evolution. Its primary agents are therefore associated with science and evolution, as are the scientist, the robot, and the alien. One or more of these agents may be the object of attempts to thwart or direct the progress of science.57 Cyberpunk, a subgenre popularly associated with William Gibson, adds computer “scientists,” cyberspace and digital constructs, and AIs to the repertoire of science-fiction characters, motifs, and sets.58 Plot resolutions typically involve the restoration of “progress” or reaffirmation of the proper direction of scientific and technological development relative to the simulacrum. •  Tech-noir emphasizes the discourse of aesthetics as one that has been radically altered by technology, such that the simulacrum has become not only a field of discourse but also the object of discourse. Its agents may include the full range of artificial beings that appear in science fiction, as well as those empowered to direct the technology and technological programs that seem to control all aspects of individual and social forms, behaviors, and, indeed, the world. Corporate leaders, members of government, and military officers, as well as various professionals who work in other fields of discourse but have adopted the “master programmer” persona and technique, and the ubiquitous technicians who facilitate the programmer’s plans all make frequent appearances in tech-noir. The plot usually centers on someone who is the victim of these plans, who may or may not be an agent of technology themselves. Plot resolutions typically involve the restoration of accord between the real and the simulacrum; this accord often takes the form of some rejuvenation of the technological wasteland or the individual threatened by technology. The genre exemplars considered next show how the fields of discourse and realms of experience operate in relation to gothic, detective, and science fiction, with a prominent example of cyberpunk added to show its relation to earlier types. Applications The discussion in this section of the Oedipus myth, Horace Walpole’s gothic The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764), Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective story “The Speckled Band” (1892), Arthur C. Clark’s science-fiction novel Against the Fall of Night (1948), and William Gibson’s celebrated exemplar of scifi-cyberpunk Neuromancer (1984) demonstrates the changing associations between discourse, realms of experience, and specific genres and their constituent units. This discussion 37

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is preparatory to that in the next chapter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and their film adaptations as demonstrative of the development of tech-noir. Oedipus (Chart 2) An analysis of the Oedipus myth, already detailed above, according to its engagement with discourse and realms of experience reads as follows: the names of the characters and their symbolic meanings establish that they refer to adults fully invested in the symbolic realm who seek the advantages and rewards of a perfect alignment with the simulacrum. The main character is Oedipus who undergoes two initiations: the first into adulthood by solving the riddle of the Sphinx and the second, which occurs when he is an adult with children of his own, into a more complete understanding of himself in relation to the simulacrum. His second initiation results in the apparent loss, rather than the attainment, of rewards because, in Goux’s terms, the first initiation was a “cheat” initiation by words rather than a proper battle. After Oedipus defeats the Sphinx in a “symbolic” battle of words, he commits incest with his mother: this confusion of the symbolic and real is the “crime” that is detected and resolved. Many years later, a plague is interpreted as evidence that the simulacrum has been compromised and Oedipus eventually identifies himself as the one who has caused the problem. The resolution, that is, the restoration of accord between the real and the simulacrum, involves effacing the “feminine” principle: the Sphinx, which was itself sent by a female goddess to punish Oedipus’s father, commits suicide; Oedipus’s mother commits suicide; and Oedipus blinds himself with his mother’s brooch, thus eliminating the capacity for vision which is also linked metonymically with Lacan’s Imaginary and the mother. The assignment of the constituent elements of this myth to the realms of experience as they are developed in popular genres – the symbolic, the real, the imaginary, and the simulacrum – clarifies the role of gender in it, a role which is of particular interest because it seems, as Goux suggests, to be the prototypical mono-myth of the modern age and therefore influential in much contemporary discourse. In popular genres, gender is the conventionalized focus of the discourse of psychology; psychology is the dominant discourse in gothic, the prototypical popular genre, which addresses gender largely in terms of the selection of a mate: Oedipus certainly highlights the importance of choosing an appropriate mate. Other aspects of the Oedipus myth are indicative of attention to other areas of discourse that are more pronounced in post-gothic genres. For example, Oedipus’s attention to social boundaries and preparedness to punish transgressors brings in the kind of sociological discourse associated with detective fiction and, not surprisingly, this myth is often identified as a prototype for that genre: Oedipus is not only the young man coming of age, the middle-aged man getting an advanced level education, and the king, he is also both detective and criminal. “Science,” per se, is little in evidence. Events are treated as both clues and “proof ” of one thing or another: the interpretive process is derived from the pathetic fallacy, according to which circumstances and appearances are telepathically generated indicators of some internal state or “truth” – telepathy is a metaphor for the power and pervasiveness of the simulacrum. The discourse 38

Method and Models

of aesthetics is evident, as always, in the manner in which discourse in general acquires form in specific genres through specific constituent elements: since this narrative is being considered here as a myth and not in terms of any particular representation, the aesthetic details are left aside, except for the observation that everything is resolved in relation to the simulacrum – the simulacrum itself does not become the object of discourse or argument as it does in the Prometheus myth. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764) (Chart 3) Widely regarded as the first gothic tale, this story describes the coming of age of two young people, Isabella and Theodore, but involves the inter-relationships of three families across three generations as follows: Alfonso µ daughter Victoria marries Jerome µ Theodore

Ricardo µ son Manfred marries Hippolita µ Matilda and Conrad Frederic µ Isabella

These relationships, both consanguine and contractual, constitute the symbolic aspect of the novel and also set up the “real” context for the crime. Alfonso, the titular heir of the Castle of Otranto, was secretly married and had a daughter who married Jerome and with whom she had a son, Theodore. Jerome subsequently became a friar. When Theodore arrives at Otranto, he meets Jerome as his father for the first time. Alfonso was poisoned by his servant Ricardo and never saw his daughter; Ricardo manufactured a phony will by which he took his master’s property and title and passed them to his son Manfred. Manfred and his wife Hippolita have two children: the beautiful Matilda and the sickly Conrad. Manfred has contrived to secure his claim to Otranto by engaging Conrad to Isabella: Isabella is the daughter of Frederic, and Frederic, in the absence of Alfonso’s lineage, is the proper heir of Otranto, but he has not had sufficient resources to assert that claim by force of arms. Frederic has been away and Isabella meets him for the first time when, having received word that false guardians have betrayed his trust and given her to Manfred to dispose of, he comes to remove her from Otranto. Conrad falls dead beneath the weight of a giant steel helmet that, except for its disproportionate size, looks exactly like the one missing from a marble statue of Alfonso. Manfred then fancies he can divorce Hippolita and marry Isabella himself; Isabella flees from Manfred’s advances and meets Theodore, whom no one knows but who happens to look exactly like the castle portrait of Alfonso. Theodore and Matilda take a fancy to each other; but Hippolita, still unaware of her husband’s designs on Isabella and of Matilda and Theodore’s mutual attraction, suggests that Frederic marry Matilda. Initially, Frederic agrees as he thinks it is more likely he will beget an heir with Matilda than Manfred will with Isabella and thus his family will claim its property without bloodshed, but he becomes reluctant when Manfred accuses him of bribing his servant, and absolutely opposed when advised away from the agreement by a ghost. Hippolita learns of her husband’s plans and is not displeased by the idea of retiring to a convent, but Jerome insists she refuse the divorce. Manfred, believing Theodore is engaging in a tryst with Isabella, stabs a woman he believes to be 39

Tech-Noir Film

her, but murders Matilda instead. Upon further revelations from the ghost, Frederic offers Isabella to Theodore in marriage, cutting Manfred out of the property deliberations entirely. The two essential meetings of the story dramatize the importance of the consanguine and contractual relationships to the plot and its resolution. The first is Manfred’s meeting of a ghost, the frequent agent of the discourse of psychology in popular genres. This ghost animates the portrait of Manfred’s grandfather, an ancestor who had no part in the murder of Alphonso committed by Manfred’s father. The second meeting is that between the two young people coming of age, Isabella and Theodore, whose eventual marriage is the resolution of the various mysteries stemming from the murder of Alfonso. In the first meeting, Manfred is hot in pursuit of Isabella when the portrait appears to heave heavy sighs, and “with a grave and melancholy air,” leaves its panel. Manfred thinks he is dreaming but demands the ghost speak, at which point, the ghost sighs and gestures for Manfred, now “full of anxiety and horror,” to follow him into a chamber, except that the chamber’s door suddenly slams shut.59 While Manfred is occupied with the portrait, Isabella escapes and resolves to take sanctuary in the convent next to the church of St. Nicholas. She flees to the basement, a space that perfectly externalizes her psychological state of mind and personal situation: The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloysters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges, were reechoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. Every murmur struck her with new terror; – yet more she dreaded to hear the wrathful voice of Manfred urging his domestics to pursue her.60 Her blood curdling and her body shuddering at every sound and sigh, Isabella hears a step behind her, her lamp is blown out, she gropes for the door inside a ray of moonlight, and suddenly she sees Theodore for the first time. Overcoming her panic, she asks his help in locating the trapdoor she seeks and then, when the moonlight reveals it, escapes, leaving him to face Manfred alone.61 The “ghost” acts in the realm of the real to bring about the various mysteries and apparent crimes that serve to further the will and desires of both Alfonso and Isabella, each of whom is representative of their generation’s social pinnacle relative to legitimate claims on the castle and thus indicative of the simulacrum. The ghost also provides clues that ultimately point to the particular reorganization of characters needed to make legitimate claimants the possessors of the castle. The extraordinary size of the helmet that disposes of poor Conrad, as well as the giant body parts that frighten Manfred’s servants at various points and which appear in other scenes furthering the plot, are literal indications that Alfonso is a “bigger” man than Manfred. They also fulfill the assertion made by St. Nicholas to Ricardo in a dream that his heirs should have Otranto only until the rightful owner grew too big to live in the castle. When the discomfited Manfred accidentally kills Matilda, Isabella’s rival for Theodore’s affections is disposed of, Theodore’s rival for possession of Otranto is greatly weakened by shock and remorse, and reality is that much closer to being realigned with the simulacrum. The imaginary is the realm in which the events of the real are detected and understood in relation to the simulacrum. Conrad’s murder is a real but inexplicable event until Manfred and Jerome testify to Ricardo’s murder of Alfonso: their account is accepted by all as an explanation for 40

Method and Models

the murder and all the other weird things that have happened, as well as the likeness of Theodore to Alfonso’s portrait, because it explains the clues – the helmet, the portrait, and so forth – in a manner that links the real with the simulacrum. The second murder, that of Matilda by Manfred, seems to be taken as a kind of punishment of Manfred for his attempt to secure the castle for himself through marriage to Isabella. The “aesthetically” correct resolution of the novel is to align the real with the model, or simulacrum, by uniting Isabella and Theodore through marriage. Even Theodore’s preference for Matilda is not allowed to challenge this development as Isabella’s claim to Otranto is superior to that of Matilda: had Ricardo not murdered Alfonso, Theodore’s attraction to Matilda would probably have taken the form of a master’s advantage over a maidservant. The contract between Isabella and Theodore is really all that is left when the mysteries have been explained away. At this point, most of the castle disintegrates, the property that seemed to account for the plot being of little consequence,62 and the physical signs of the simulacrum being of far less importance than the simulacrum itself. This structural arrangement of the constituent elements of the story facilitates recognition of the conventions of discourse it employs. The conventions of the discourse of psychology are apparent in the emphasis on gender and the individual’s subjective experiences. The story clearly exploits sensational aspects of both symbolic and real gender relations and sexual desire: potential incest, the father’s murder of his own daughter, and a reluctant bride’s personal reactions to the first two men with whom she must consider alliance. Isabella’s flight through a labyrinth to a monastery is an obvious dramatization of her feelings toward both Conrad and Manfred. Theodore’s individuality and sexual preferences are secondary, since his love interest, Matilda, is killed off; however, he proves his manhood during a battle with Isabella’s father, who comes to claim her at the cave where they hide from Manfred. Theodore’s suitability as husband to Isabella is indicated by their shared and legitimate claims to the castle and by his likeness to Alfonso. The discourse of sociology is also of some importance to this story insofar as people are murdered, class boundaries are transgressed, and property passed along improper lines; there is, however, no interrogation of social practice or of class in the novel. Once the “facts” of the class transgression are known, the resolution is obvious to all. No policeman, amateur detective, external social authority, or jailer appears to interrogate and condemn Manfred, and no one really investigates the deaths of either Conrad or Matilda. The only external authority to appear on the scene is the monk Jerome, who conveniently authenticates Theodore’s bloodline, harbors the fleeing Isabella, and otherwise adds to the perception of the deaths of Manfred’s children as righteous vengeance authenticated by God as well as the ghost. Thus the mystery plays a crucial role in the story – without it there would be no story – but while there is much emphasis on manifestations of mystery, such as the animated portrait, ghost, and so forth, there is little on “sociology” per se or the processes of detection: when it is appropriate, testimony about the “truth” is provided, and the resolution then becomes obvious. Science, in the modern sense, does not figure significantly in the story, except in terms of the logic directing the pathetic fallacy. The events recounted purportedly took place around 1100 or 1200 in Italy. Such dislocations of time and space are among the conventions of the gothic novel, Italy being suitable for playing on Protestant readers’ vicarious fancies about pre-modern science, particularly Catholic “superstition” and mythology. Race appears as a convenient stereotype, familiar to readers and facilitating their acceptance of the fantasy: like society and class, it is not interrogated or found in any way problematic. Thus a mystery develops, clues to the meaning of that 41

Tech-Noir Film

mystery are provided, and those clues are detected and interpreted in relation to the simulacrum, but “science” per se is not an active field of discourse in this exemplar of gothic. Aesthetics figure in the narrative insofar as certain techniques of representation are used, first to engage the reader’s acceptance of the fictional world and secondly to draw attention to less commonly acknowledged aspects of personal experience. These techniques include, for the first purpose, those of familiarization, such as the conventional representation of social class and race relative to the setting and plot, and, for the second purpose, those of de-familiarization, such as the representation of unfamiliar beings and events which become sensible only with reference to the supernatural and are therefore effective in dramatizing the less than concrete workings of the individual’s imagination and emotions. The framing of the narrative within a narrative and the use of particular constituent elements, such as the ancient castle, the ancestral curse, the nearby monastery, and so forth, are “aesthetic” choices that articulate the gothic genre. As in the case of sociology and science, however, aesthetics is not active as a discourse beyond the most basic requirements of representation: the social simulacrum is temporarily overthrown, but in the manner of an individual crime that proposes no widespread change or challenge to the simulacrum. Thus the plot resolution involves a contractual alliance that brings everything into conformity with the model dictated by blood relationships – these are of central concern in the story and they determine both the original and the restored social order and its associated property and inheritance laws. The plot resolution might even be regarded as governed by the principle of mimicry, insofar as the realignment of characters is made to imitate a pre-existing model of how things should be. These constituent elements and their associations appear and reappear with various emphases, substitutions, and adaptations to accommodate changing emphases in fields of discourse in other popular genres. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band” (1892) (Chart 4) Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band,” like The Castle of Otranto, is considered exemplary of a single genre, in this case that of detective fiction, but it also has motifs and indicators of other genres. Like the standard gothic plot, this story involves a young woman, Helen Stoner, who is soon to be married. She is threatened by some unspeakable horror which she is certain claimed her last surviving blood relation, her twin sister or “double,” Julia. Helen’s father died many years ago and her mother, who subsequently married Grimesby Roylott, also died, leaving Helen and Julia alone and dependent on a contractual relationship that will be altered to Grimesby’s disadvantage if either of the girls marries. Grimesby is the owner of the large gothic building where the three live and which he renovates in a manner that, while seemingly aimless, furthers his plan to murder his stepdaughters. Helen’s reason for believing her life is in danger is the clue provided by Julia days before she died when she commented on a peculiar whistle she heard in the night. Soon after and just before she was to be married, as Helen explains to Holmes, Julia met her end just after emerging from a locked room:

42

Method and Models

The wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and splashing against the windows. Suddenly, amidst all the hubbub of the gale, there burst forth the wild scream of a terrified woman […] my sister’s door was unlocked, and revolved upon its hinges. I stared at it horrorstricken, not knowing what was about to issue from it. By the light of the corridor lamp I saw my sister appear at the opening, her face blanched with terror, her hands groping for help, her whole figure swaying to and fro like that of a drunkard […] her knees seemed to give way and she fell to the ground. She writhed as one who is in terrible pain, and her limbs were dreadfully convulsed […] she suddenly shrieked out in a voice which I shall never Forget, “Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!” 63 Needless to say, Holmes and Watson come to Helen’s rescue and investigate the fatal room. Holmes recognizes the clues of the smell of cigar smoke, the bell rope without a bell, the ventilator that does not ventilate, and the sound of the whistle as evidence that a poisonous snake has been set to the task of solving Grimesby’s problem, not once, but twice. The detective heroes sit up for most of the night on a stake out, Holmes attacks the snake, and the snake returns to Grimesby’s room and kills him. While the situation, setting, and first murder are all readily associated with gothic and the discourse of psychology, the narrative emphasis is not on the marriage itself, but on the property arrangements that the marriage will change. The entire situation has arisen because Helen’s mother’s will leaves Helen prey to Grimesby’s mercenary interests and she is clearly without other relations interested in helping her. Grimesby is the last of a once wealthy but now dissipated and morally corrupt family and, as the criminal of this story, he demonstrates a certain tendency for nineteenth-century detective fiction to reverse the assumption of upper class moral superiority over the middle and lower classes. He is thus brought to justice, not by the social judgments of his own class or by a unanimously agreed upon assumption of appropriate class hierarchy, but by an outsider, detective Holmes, who invigilates property rights when others are not able or willing to do so. Thus, the character, actions, and words of the criminal, his victim, and the detective all shift away from the initial gothic circumstance toward that of detective fiction and, simultaneously, show a more active engagement with the discourse of sociology. Holmes’s dedication to deductive reasoning also brings something of the discourse of science, though not the genre of science fiction, to the investigation as well. He is attentive to the implications of the will for the real world, contractually determined situation and its probable effect on Grimesby, and he looks for and interprets clues “scientifically.” However, no particular scientific expertise is really needed for the decipherment of the clues, and the scientific community is not referred to. The discourse of aesthetics comes into play, as in The Castle of Otranto, in the deployment of now well-developed and familiar techniques of representation adapted to emphasize the discourse of sociology. The gothic constituent elements of a “gothic” house, an ancestral curse in the form of an ill-formulated will, and a locked-room mystery, not to mention the exotic snake, are realigned by the voice of Watson, Sherlock’s companion and assistant, to emphasize the sociological concerns of the detective. However, the plot resolution, as in Otranto, involves the restoration of the simulacrum, such that a woman with a claim to property may take that property with her to a worthy male by way of marriage. Grimesby, having proved himself a particularly unworthy member of a dissolute class, is apprehended and Helen is free to marry – not free to go her own 43

Tech-Noir Film

way, but free to affirm another contract with a more suitable partner: marriage contracts that affirm the appropriate dispensation of property still outweigh all others in the age of the post-pure-gothic and the rising middle class. Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948) (Chart 5) Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (written 1936–46) is about a young man coming of age, but that coming of age has nothing to do with marriage or with maintaining class-based social boundaries, and everything to do with mastering technology of both human and alien origin and re-establishing contact between distinct races of the human species occupying the long-separated cities of Diaspar and Lys. In this future earth, humankind’s attempts to colonize space have already been made and abandoned for fear of the return of alien invaders who once nearly destroyed them. Humans settled into two isolated regions and paths of evolution: the citizens of the city of Diaspar are more or less immortal, make extensive use of technology, and have more or less forgotten about Lys. The people of Lys have an extremely long life span, but are not immortal; they are telepathic, live a more balanced lifestyle engaging both nature and technology, and do remember Diaspar because some of their brightest minds are individuals who fled from there to Lys. The mystery that leads Alvin far off the paths of activity usual for citizens of Diaspar is not that of family lineage, class relationships, or property, as these matters are of little interest to him: the mystery he sets out to investigate is no less than the true history and fate of humankind. Unlike his fellows, he is restless and not only wonders what exists in the world beyond the city besides the desert, he is also prepared to put himself at risk to find out. Alvin pursues enigmatic, almost gothic, clues indicating there is indeed something beyond Diaspar: first he finds an inscription in a place he thinks might provide some clue to escaping the city that reads “THERE IS A BETTER WAY. GIVE MY GREETINGS TO THE KEEPER OF THE RECORDS. ALAINE OF LYNDAR.”64 With a little help from Rorden, the current Keeper of the Records, Alvin learns that Alaine was a Keeper millions of years earlier who left clues for future seekers to find. Rorden realizes that the odd gaze of a commemorative statue of Yarlan Zey, builder of a city park, marks the access point to a long-forgotten transportation system below and between the once numerous cities of earth. After descending deep underground, they find themselves in a world that is as mysterious as, if somewhat more spacious than, the labyrinth beneath Otranto: They were standing, overawed by its immensity, in a great circular cavern whose walls came together in a graceful sweeping curve three hundred feet above their heads. The column against which they were standing seemed too slender to support the hundreds of feet of rock above it. Then Alvin noticed […] the great tunnels that pierced the circumference of the chamber.65 Alvin proceeds by automated train to Lys and meets its community of scientists and Theon, his Lysian age counterpart and son of one of the city council members. The boys and Theon’s large pet insect Krif go on a camping trip, follow an explosion they see in the night sky, and come upon the last of the disciples of a long-dead alien “Master” and his robots. Alvin’s meeting with one of these robots, an agent of the discourse of science, is essential to the success of his quest and it occurs, 44

Method and Models

appropriately, while he is searching some caves for the source of a light: “Hanging in the air before him was a great dark eye surrounded by a satellite system of smaller eyes. That, at least, was Alvin’s first impression: then he realized that he was looking at a complex machine – and it was looking at him.”66 The hermit transfers the ability to control one of his three robots to Alvin. While this robot still refuses to provide the answers he seeks, Diaspar’s master computers make a duplicate without the programming that prohibits the original from assisting him: “I was watching when it happened,” said Rorden excitedly. “It suddenly seemed to extend, as if millions of replicas had come into existence on either side of it. Then all the images except these two disappeared. The one on the right is the original.”67 With this duplicate robot’s help, Alvin escapes from the Lysians who would have sent him home with his memories erased rather than let word of their existence be known in Diaspar. The robot also recovers an alien spaceship with which Alvin and Theon travel into space and attract the attention of a behaviorally infantile, extremely ancient entity called Vanamonde, which was bioengineered by humans in their space-faring days. Vanamonde is recognized as a boon because he provides the historians and scientists of Diaspar and Lys with answers to the mystery of human history. It is the Lysians he communicates with most easily as he too is telepathic, but the vast quantities of information he is able to provide about human history becomes the basis for a new project of interest to both Diaspar and Lys and thus brings the two races into communion. The resolution of the mystery Alvin is investigating thus involves the restoration of a pre-existing, if long lost, model of social interaction through the pursuit of contractual relationships based on common interests and goals. The conventions of the discourse of psychology are somewhat apparent in the emphasis on Alvin’s coming of age, and some attention is given to the personal feelings of the various characters, but none to those relating to sex and marriage. The discourse of sociology is indicated by Alvin’s concern with the various mysteries of his world, but all of these mysteries involve the discovery and understanding of technology and race, not the invigilation of gender- or class-based boundaries and property rights. Alvin is a kind of detective, but he is much more interested in breaking down social boundaries and those of their associated geographical residential territories than maintaining them. The discourse of science, however, is constantly invoked in the descriptions of Diaspar and Lys, the technologies that Alvin uses, space travel, and the bioengineered Vanamonde. The scientific community of Diaspar is only minimally active, but the city is fully automated and literally full of technology: the scientists of the city’s past were, and those of the current Lys obviously still are, very energetic. Thus the discourse of science is the most prominent in this narrative, making it an exemplar of science fiction. Aesthetics, as always, affect the choice of setting and other genre conventions in conjunction with the other fields of discourse: here, the “gothic” house, curse, and marriage are replaced by the elements specifically linked to science – the technologized city and spaceship, the mystery of Lys and the science-related activities of the ancestors of the citizens both of Diaspar and of Lys, and the renewed association between long-divided races. The gothic ghost, agent of the discourse of psychology, becomes the robot, agent of the discourse of science. The marriage or imprisonment that typically resolves gothic and detection fiction narratives becomes the new alliance and 45

Tech-Noir Film

interaction between races: connections between individuals are dramatized as, or exchanged for, connections between groups. As in gothic and detective fiction, however, the revelations of the mystery in this story lead to a restoration of an older conventional model of behavior, activity, and contractual alliance on the assumption that it is better. To Alvin, this course of action is obvious: he never doubts the ideals of science, the value of technology, or the importance of continued study and exploration; thus he simply acts to restore the old order because he believes doing so will restore vitality to the world and even the universe. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) (Chart 6) William Gibson’s Neuromancer is unquestionably the most cited and written about exemplar of cyberpunk fiction. The principal human characters of this novel are the cyborgs hired to complete a series of tasks by a man known to them as Armitage: Case, a drug-addicted cyberspace jockey who can no longer work because he has been maimed for stealing from an employer; Molly, who earned the money for her implants by working as a “puppet” or prostitute – she has jacked up reflexes, extensible knives under her fingernails, and implanted glasses; and others, including Riviera, who can visually project his fantasies so others can see them. The symbolic realm also includes cyberspace beings, beings that are, literally, products of the symbolic insofar as they are computer programs: Wintermute, Neuromancer, a third artificial intelligence, and the construct Dixie Flatline. Dixie is all that remains of a famous cyberspace jockey nicknamed Flatline because he “flatlined” in cyberspace and was brought back to life before he was irreversibly dead. The three AIs were created by the TessierAshpool family corporation, also a “symbolic” entity, as a means to the preservation and longevity of individual family members and the family’s financial security. The members of the Tessier-Ashpool family are so thoroughly integrated with cloning and cryonic biotechnology that the consanguine relationships between them are conflated: Marie-France was the visionary who set up the family–AI relationship,68 but her “daughters” are clones of her, not her children. The family is maintained at the Villa Straylight, which, in a classic example of the pathetic fallacy, is envisioned, somewhat like the clones, as “a parasitic structure” that draws its resources from the satellite Freeside. Among the novel’s numerous mysteries, crimes, and social issues are the actions taken by the Tessier-Ashpool family against each other: the father murders his wife and at least one of his “daughters,” and one of his “daughters” murders him.69 No one much cares about these events, however, or bothers to investigate or resolve them: they are discovered more or less incidentally as Case and Molly carry out a job for Armitage, a man whose identity becomes a mystery for them that is of even greater interest than the tasks he assigns – the theft of Dixie Flatline and cracking the code for some cyberspace security “ice.” For the theft of Dixie, Molly enlists the aid of a local gang of punk terrorists, the Moderns; she also receives assistance from Case who can “jack” into her body to follow her movements and manipulate external events to assist her from his computer. Once retrieved, Dixie is put to work on the problem of cracking the security ice: Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing […]   Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles 46

Method and Models

centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.   “That’s the sting,” the construct said. “When Kuang’s good and bellytight with the TessierAshpool core, we’re ridin’ that through.”70 Case and Molly eventually learn that Wintermute is a subprogram of the Tessier-Ashpool corporation’s larger artificial intelligence and Armitage is more or less a zombie, animated from a near corpse, who is being used, as are Case and Molly, to make arrangements for Wintermute to merge with the “personality” AI Neuromancer. The resolution of the novel involves Wintermute’s defeat of an opposing third AI and his successful joining with Neuromancer, an event that inaugurates, as later novels in the series indicate, the beginning of true “shape” and “form” in cyberspace. The construct Dixie Flatline is erased by his own request because he does not want to exist as pure representation. Molly and Case merge whenever they have sex and whenever Case jacks into Molly’s perceptual faculties, but they do not marry: the novel closes with their separation without warning or farewell. It is the cyberspace beings who pick up the gothic plot line of searching for an appropriate “marriage” partner, while humans merely copulate for momentary pleasure or concern themselves with internecine wars. The resolution to this story is thus rather emphatically gothic in spite of the attention to technology: that technology is treated as an aspect of the discourse of psychology, such that it emphasizes contracts of a personal and familial nature, even and especially between artificial beings. The relationship between Case and Molly has little of the import and motivational drive that male–female relationships do in gothic narratives: it is the artificial cyberspace beings who possess the kind of individuality discovered and explored in gothic and who come of age by finding a significant Other. The discourse of sociology is articulated as Case and Molly investigate and explore the boundaries of possible activities for artificial intelligences: these two “detectives” are like the science-fictional Alvin in that they are fully invested in dissolving, not maintaining, boundaries, particularly those between biological and technological forms of life; but they are motivated, as Alvin is not, by such sociological concerns as their need for employment and the interests of their employer. Where Alvin is an agent for the restoration of science as a continuing practice, Case and Molly are agents of technology who dissolve the technology-based “racism” that obstructs their AI employer. This fact and the amount of action set in cyberspace emphasize the extent to which the significance of biological space has been relocated to technologically generated representations. The discourse of aesthetics acquires new emphases in the extension of the theme of doubles from the pairs and twins of gothic and detective fiction, and the robots and clones of science fiction, to the representation of an entire digital realm as an environment in which technological “species” may develop and evolve. This distinctive approach to science and emphasis on technological gadgetry as a means to mimicry does not, however, mark a significant change in attitude from science fiction. The main characters seem to think technology is wonderful and the more of it the better. The digital beings are even referred to as ghosts and they are anthropomorphized much as science-fictional 47

Tech-Noir Film

robots often are. The conventional simulacrum seems to be displaced into the digital environment; but, with the possible exception of Dixie, who chooses death rather than digital life, no one actually challenges the simulacrum or its relocation. Human society is presented almost entirely in terms of criminal subcultures of drug addicts and thieves like Case, prostitutes and thugs like Molly, and the anonymous corporate doctors at implant clinics without names. However, the hierarchy – the whole simulacrum – is still defined by the interests of race and class and, of course, economy: property and invigilating the protection of its associated rights are still crucial to the definition and maintenance of the entire order of things, as they are in gothic and detective fiction. As in much science fiction, the AIs are anthropomorphized to such an extent that they become or seem to become independently motivated by and invested in the kinds of alliances and conflicts formerly conducted only by humans. The primary differences between this narrative and established science fiction are the emphasis on criminal human subcultures without interrogation of that criminality and the shifting between the physical world and cyberspace. Popular genres in film The gothic, detective, and science-fiction genres have all been adapted to film and, in the process, gathered new ways and means of articulating their messages while retaining their basic structural relationships with areas of discourse and realms of experience. The change in medium added many possibilities to the propensity for genres to accumulate and appear in individual works in combination. Film, however, especially Hollywood film, like popular literary genres, borrows many features from nineteenth-century melodrama and these features tend to be straightforward means of upholding social convention: linear narratives; simple language; conflict structured around good and evil and represented by a hero and a villain; and, not least in importance, violence as an expression of that conflict and of emotion generally.71 Tech-noir is no exception to the rules of new genre formation as it shares many of its film antecedents, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Metropolis (1927), with other film genres, particularly horror, or hyperbolic gothic. Other stylistic and dramatic aspects of technoir films have been influenced by the many changes that audience support and preference have fostered within the entertainment and film industries, particularly those allowing for new and specific types of delivery method and content, as well as style. One of the most important of the changes affecting the development of tech-noir was the sudden availability and popularity of television in the 1950s: a negative view of this new form of entertainment was already available in the misnamed film Murder by Television (1935), but the title’s warning, like that of tech-noir, was destined to go unheeded as people, like some of the characters in Forbidden Planet (1956), remained unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the propensity technology has for bringing the products of the unguarded or malevolently motivated imagination into a more than fictional reality. Indeed, violence arising from the depths of the human unconscious was quickly established as the effective ingredient in many popular films. As Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy (1981) observe with regard to the 1950s social problem film, “violence allow[s] for straightforward visualization of feelings, crystallizing the issues in terms of physical combat.”72 The social problem film is, however, also something of an exception to the general simplifying trend toward melodramatically 48

Method and Models

stylized heroes and villains facing relatively uncomplicated and clearly defined crises. It seems to have first appeared in connection with racial issues in the late 1940s, as in Cross Fire (1947), and then extended into other areas, including the social problem posed by communists, or purported communists, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).73 Both of these films depend on violence for some of their dramatic effect, but as Herbert J. Gans (1964) explains, the typical social problem film is one that shows: how an individual or group is beset by the problem, weaves a plot around the causes and consequences of the problem, describes the moral or ethical issues – and dilemmas – raised both by the problem and by possible solutions, and finally ends with the hero taking appropriate action, usually including a morally difficult choice, which solves the problem, at least for him and his loved ones.74 The morally difficult choices characterizing the social problem film made it the exception, rather than the norm, relative to the numerous and popular melodramatic film genres that gained popularity after World War II. These genres included the disaster, science fiction, monster, horror, and gangster film, as well as film noir, all of which demonstrated the special usefulness of violence in association with the medium. Unlike the social problem film, “disaster” films usually emphasize mechanical or technical solutions to a given problem: how to get the most people to safety, how to stop the lava flow, or how to get out of the collapsed mine shaft. There is rarely time to contemplate subtleties of conscience or morality in such films as the choices are all about life or death, not quality of life. Disaster films tend to turn all characters into victims and they deliberately include characters representative of a cross-section of society so as to enhance the all inclusiveness of the event for viewers: no one escapes the consequences of whatever threat has appeared.75 In its emphasis on the psychological responses to the very present possibility of a violent death, or the proverbial “fate worse than death,” the disaster film derives from gothic; but like other film genres, it is rarely “pure” simply because genres engage fields of discourse and realms of experience cumulatively. The disaster film often engages both the discourse of science and the genre of science fiction: the disaster may arise because of an attack from an animal or the elements – or some monstrous “science-fictional” atomic mutation; the ill-fated journey leading to disaster may be taken by plane, car, train, boat, or bus – or spaceship; the failure of the city or civilization may come about because of poor planning – or alien intervention; the monster may be from outer space; the dangerous environment in which the protagonists must fight for survival may be a desert or ice field on earth, or a mine on Mars; war may be between nations or species; and “historical” disasters may be true history or science fiction.76 Similarly, science-fiction film often shows traits from other genres, and may even occasionally include characters who shift attention from external conflicts to the divided inner self associated with tragedy: Star Trek’s Spock is just one such example.77 Largely due to the influence of Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967), credited with coining the term “science fiction” and promoting it through the first American magazine dedicated to it, the genre developed as one with a didactic purpose, that of educating the public about scientific developments.78 Spock’s character may be accounted for in relation to this didactic intent and as evidence of the way principal characters in popular genres serve as agents of particular fields of discourse: Spock’s logic stands for pure science as 49

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progress complicated by the “primitive” tendencies fostered by the proximity of humans who are not ready for or not so committed to that ideal. Even film monsters change in relation to the field of discourse of current relevance. Brian Murphy (1972) finds the 1950s monster movie – exemplified by The Thing (1950), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Them (1953), and which is clearly a subgenre of horror or gothic – is specifically related to a fear of the future as the atomic bomb may make it. Monsters of other periods, such as King Kong and Dracula, are about the fear of the past, of what is ancient and beyond time; 1950s monster movies are thus also akin to science fiction in that they show a fear of the future, from which only the military and scientists may be able to save us, and then only if all America unites to support them. The future feared in 1950s monster films is a specific one: that invented during the war and perpetuated during the Cold War. These films emphasize fear, rather than the mysterious and the eerie and, perhaps consequently, their dialogue is quite unmemorable: overall, Murphy observes, “monster movies are, generally, not very good movies.”79 The renewed popularity of monster films in the 1970s and 1980s is attested to by the success of The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975) at a time when horror and science fiction were the leading popular film genres, but in these films the unstoppable monsters seem to resonate with the same problems said to inspire earlier films, now regarded as equally long-lived as the most ancient of monsters: economic recession, inflation, and ongoing Cold War anxieties.80 The gangster film is another excellent example of a genre identified by constituent elements that are all found in other genres. Closely related to the detective narrative, it typically includes “racketeers with brains who rise to the top, gangsters without [brains] who remain as hoods, gangsters’ women, stool pigeons, cops and bent cops, crusading district attorneys and legal mouthpieces for the mobs, private eyes and heroes forced by circumstances to be such, nightclub owners and their sadistic strong-arm men; and the countless secondary figures on the fringes of this dark world, newspapermen, pool-room and gymnasium owners, newsvendors and so on.”81 The setting is typically the nighttime urban environment of “dark streets, dingy rooming-houses and office blocks, bars, nightclubs, penthouse apartments, precinct stations, and especially in the thriller, luxurious mansions.”82 All of which serve, in Colin McArthur’s (1977) opinion “as a kind of expressionist extension of the violence and brutality of their world.”83 Also characteristic of this genre are men wearing hats and coats in a manner emphasizing their presence and propensity to violence and in association with weapons as instruments of deadly force, cars as status symbols and both sign and instrument of aggression, and, frequently, telephones as the medium for threats and intimidation.84 Clearly such elements are not absolutely definitive of this genre alone, as most would appear on a list of those identifying, for example, film noir. Film noir is a label commonly applied to certain post-World War II American films, many of which were developed from pre-war pulp detective fiction written by such authors as Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and James Cain (1892–1977).85 The film noir setting is typically wet, urban,86 and dark; the principal characters include someone, usually a woman and often a femme fatale, who seeks the assistance of a currently unemployed “hard-boiled” detective in solving her dilemma, which is often related to a missing person, a blackmailer, or a stifling domestic situation. Other players, principals or extras, include small-time hoods and gamblers, prostitutes, unlucky boxers or wrestlers, and others living on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, as well as a few living on the up side of town with lots of money and big houses and cars, but with no fewer problems. The 50

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story is often told with flashbacks and gaps created by lies, omissions, and bouts of unconsciousness brought on by drink or violence. The lights are usually low, the shadows dramatic, and the reflections startling; the framing is usually tight so as to enhance a general sense of claustrophobia; but the mise-en-scène is often relatively complex, including multiple layered interiors and other spaces that create unusual separations and associations between characters, such that it matches the plot complexities created by stories within stories and motives within motives.87 The language, as Jameson (1970) observes with regard to the slang in Chandler’s novels, is eminently serial in its nature: it exists as objectively as a joke, passed from hand to hand, always elsewhere, never fully the property of its user. In this, the literary problem of slang forms a parallel in the microcosm of style to the problem of the presentation of the serial society itself, never present fully in any of its manifestations, without a privileged center, offering the impossible alternative between an objective and abstract lexical knowledge of it as a whole and a lived concrete experience of its worthless components.88 In the 1960s and 1970s, films became increasingly expensive to make at the same time that more and more people chose television over public theaters for their evening entertainment.89 Television also changed viewer expectations of film in that people who grow up watching it not only have a far more sophisticated understanding of narrative strategies in relation to the medium, but also seem less easily offended by bad language, sexual content, and violence. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is one of the most influential films marking the discovery of viewer taste for choreographed violence and willingness to identify with characters engaging in criminal behavior. Based on the real-life Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who fell in love and set out on a road trip punctuated by robbery and murder, the film shows the couple robbing banks not individuals and killing police not bystanders. The couple relationship in the context of criminality, blurring into social rebellion and fashionable counterculture, has since become a mainstay of film narrative, including tech-noir, allowing for the affirmation and extension of the classic gothic plot about the one-on-one male–female relationship, while challenging the legitimacy of contracts imposed by collective and seemingly anonymous governments and corporate entities. An increased tolerance for sex and violence, or rather an increasing demand for it, led, in November 1968, to the replacement of the censorship approach to regulating film content with the ratings system, including the “PG” for parental guidance and “R” for restricted to seventeen and older.90 Film, or at least some films, thus became a fulfillment of Aldous Huxley’s imagined “violent passion surrogate,” vividly described in Brave New World (1932): “Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”91 Another release in this period that proved catalytic to notions of what sort of story would or would not make a good film is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This epic view of history begins with a sixteen-minute sequence focused on ape-men and then jumps to the turn of the millennium when a spaceship computer, the HAL 9000, kills off most of the human crew, apparently because he was confused by a bureaucrat’s directions to lie. This film is unusual for its reinvention of the “silent,” insofar as it has very little dialogue, and as the debut of HAL who, although far from 51

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the first computer in film, has a “personality” that marks a dramatic departure from the Robbie the Robot type that first appeared in Forbidden Planet (1956). HAL magnifies the scientist into a god and technology into a parthenogenetic being.92 Many films of later decades are dedicated to revealing the horror of this possibility while also exploiting its entertainment value and blurring the distinctions between the technological monster and biological woman: this approach marks The Stepford Wives (1975) and particularly Blade Runner (1982), a film that has won the attention of historians for its noir ambiance.93 Both films undermine or alter the role or “job” of women as mothers and lovers by replacing them with artificial beings.94 Since the late 1960s, increasing allowances have been made for the release of films, for which there is evidently a ready audience, with more obscene language, more explicit sexual relations, and more violence, not to mention characters with a unique potential for special effects and dramatic tension, such as stalkers and serial killers, who may or may not be human. In the 1970s, teens accounted for an increasing percentage of theater audiences95 and, coincidentally, new milestones in the popularity of mayhem and murder in relation to unsanctioned sexual contact as film plot were reached with Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) and John Carpenter’s independently made, prototypical “slasher” film Halloween (1978) – the latter is still recognized as one of the most lucrative films of all time. While its roots lie in nineteenth-century fiction, gothic, and other sources, Philip L. Simpson (2000) finds the slasher film is also a variant of the serial killer genre that developed simultaneously with the coining and widespread adoption of the term “serial murder” in the 1970s and 1980s.96 Simpson implies a connection between the contemporary fascination with such films and the obsession with serial sexual homicides in Weimar Germany, which he believes appeared as a kind of backlash against increasing freedoms allowed women. In Weimar Germany, the “ultimate evil” concept was readily exploited by political parties that soon proved to be extremely right wing in their social views. The whole notion of an “ultimate evil,” Simpson observes, made it possible to avoid debates about motives, responsibility, and real solutions to a real social problem.97 Heralded as the ancestor of the entire slasher genre, subsequent remakes, remodels, and recontextualized variants of Halloween, including many that also belong to technoir, have exploited just about every aspect of the serial killer character, high body counts, and ever higher quality gore related special effects. Special effects, along with panoramic violence, became another means of drawing audiences away from their living rooms and televisions, a place the home video industry was making very easy and comfortable to stay in, to the theater where such effects could be fully appreciated on the big screen. While models, miniatures, gadgetry, and artificial substances became and continue to be important to mise-en-scène filming, computer-generated graphics have also become part of the special effects repertoire. Early extended uses of this film production technique appear in Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984); after the success of James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989),98 not to mention his Terminator 2 (1991),99 it became a sign of the turn of the millennium in film. All of these changes to the film industry in general are part of the historical development of technoir as a genre. Tech-noir films often include elements that would never have been sanctioned for public viewing at an earlier time, including extended sequences of violence in the form of physical combat, weapons fire, detonating explosives, and vehicular collisions, as well as crude surgeries involving amputations and other invasions of the body, and special effects, not to mention obvious or thinly veiled sexual assaults, minimalist clothing, and equally minimal and crude language. The 52

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primary representation of all such violence as either the tool or the by-product of technologically inspired or enforced exploitation, racism, and class segregation is, however, equally apparent in tech-noir. Tech-noir film may be regarded in relation to numerous pre-existing genres: it is not only an accumulation of elements common to literary gothic, detective, and science fiction, it also shows an accumulation of motives and elements from film genres and subgenres. For example, it is, in some respects, a kind of social problem film, simply because it treats technology as a social problem; but, since tech-noir commonly treats the social problem as being so well fuelled by technology that it will soon, or indeed, has already, resulted in complete or near complete disaster, it also has a marked affinity with the disaster film. Furthermore, tech-noir is rarely far from horror in its representation of confrontation with the ultimate evil, and many tech-noir exemplars have stylistic affinities with film noir, insofar as they deliberately incorporate fashionable markers from that genre, such as the hard-boiled detective, certain types of gangsters, femme fatales, shots of dark alleys on rainy nights, and so forth. Prototypes for the tech-noir narrative itself, however, long predate the invention of film and include the Prometheus myth, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Notes   1. Vladimir Propp wrote one of the earliest structural analyses. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) 2nd edition revised and edited with a preface by Louis A. Wagner and a new introduction by Alan Dundes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).  2. G. Charbonnier, ed., Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961; London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology (1958; New York: Basic, 1963) 206–31.   3. Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art (New York: George Braziller, 1971). Rosalind Krauss uses a structural approach to expand the categories of “sculpture” to include forms not previously belonging to the conventional western definition in her “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT, 1986) 276–90.   4. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 1955, combined edition (London, England: Penguin, 1992) 371–77.  5. Robert A. Segal, “Introduction: In Quest of the Hero,” In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) xxiv, and Lord Raglan, “The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, Part II,” In Quest of the Hero 138.   6. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” 214.   7. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” 215.   8. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” 216.  9. Jean-Pierre Vernant notes that the myth of Oedipus as Freud understood it was a relatively late construction and that the older material does not include any of the self-punishment Freud makes so much out of: “Oedipus without the Complex,” Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, eds. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (New York: Zone, 1988) 90. 10. Jacques Lacan introduced his theory of the mirror stage in 1936 and reworked the idea many times before it reached its now canonical form in Ecrits as “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,” 1949, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 53

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11. Sheridan, “The Mirror Stage” ix; Lacan, Ecrits 1–5; Madan Sarup, Jacques Lacan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) 98, 102–03. 12. Lacan, Ecrits 6. 13. Lacan, Ecrits 2. 14. Lacan, Ecrits 5. 15. Lacan, Ecrits 210. 16. See Raymond Tallis for a critique of the mirror stage: “The Mirror Stage: A Critical Reflection,” Trivium 21 (Summer 1986): 5–44. 17. Philip Armstrong, “Watching Hamlet Watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the Mirror/Stage,” Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2, ed. Terence Hawker (New York: Routledge, 1996) 219. 18. Armstrong, “Watching Hamlet Watching” 225. 19. Armstrong’s analysis of this scene emphasizes the likenesses of Gertrude’s first and second husbands (235). 20. Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) 285. 21. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet 287. 22. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet 282. 23. Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 2. 24. Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher 9–16. 25. Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher 3. 26. Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher 38. 27. Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher 202. 28. Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher 203. 29. Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher 203–04. 30. See examples given in the preface. 31. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 32. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 33–34. 33. Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968) 97–99. 34. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama 97–99. 35. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama 97, 262. 36. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 28–29. 37. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama 262. 38. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 46–47. 39. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 34–35, 47–48. 40. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 47. 41. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 47. 42. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 47. 43. William R. Morse, “Desire and the Limits of Melodrama,” Melodrama, ed. James Redmond (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1992) 19. 44. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982) 336. 45. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin 98, and Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 203, on the meeting. 46. Stuart M. Kaminsky, American Film Genres (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1985) 8. 54

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47. Kaminsky, American Film Genres 9. 48. Emily E. Auger, “A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres: Discourse in Gothic, Detective, Science, and Cyberpunk fiction” (thesis, University of Victoria, 2001). Rick Altman describes film genre in terms of semantics and syntax and proposes the potential for combined semantic and syntactical analysis for diachronic, rather than the more common synchronic, analysis of film genres. Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” (1984), Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) 27–41. 49. For example, the workings of the unconscious mind that are central to gothic and purportedly completely rationalized by the detective are, in fact, of continuing importance as part of the fictional detective’s working method and the popularity of the genre. See Albert D. Hutter, “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction,” Victorian Studies XIX.2 (December 1975) 181–209. The familiar gothic locked trunk motif is adapted to become the equally familiar detective fiction locked room motif. See W.M. Verhoeven, “Opening the Text: The Locked-Trunk Motif in Late EighteenthCentury British and American Gothic Fiction,” Exhibited by Candlelight Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, eds. Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995) 205–19; and S.E. Sweeney, “Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity,” The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1990) 1–14. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ever-popular Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) is one of many examples of gothic-detective fiction. Examples of detectivescience fiction include Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, his Caves of Steel (1951) and Foundation series; and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1951). Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Coyote Jones novels, including Star-Anchored, Star-Angered (1979), combine the conventions of gothic, detective, and science fiction. The bibliographical essay in Hazel Beasley Pierce, A Literary Symbiosis: Science Fiction/Fantasy/Mystery (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1983) 235–40 provides numerous references to studies of science fiction that incorporate elements of other genres. 50. For an excellent history of the appearance of the detective as fiction hero in relation to the history of both police and detectives, see chapter eight, “The Detective Hero,” in Dennis Porter’s The Pursuit of Crime: Art, and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) 146–88. The ongoing difficulties both early police and detectives had when attempting to investigate crimes that actually took place inside the home are discussed in Anthea Trodd’s Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (London: Macmillan, 1989). See, in particular, the public badgering of Inspector Jonathan Whicher for investigating the daughter of the house where the four-year-old son was found murdered. Whicher resigned, but the young woman later confessed (19–23). Ernst Kaemmel gives special attention to the detective novel as a product of capitalist countries in “Literature under the Table: The Detective Novel and its Social Mission,” The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York: Harcourt, 1983) 55–61. The same point is made by Ernest Mandel, “A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story” (1984), Popular Fiction : An Anthology, ed. Gary Hoppenstand (New York: Longman, 1998) 761–68. 51. Gary Westfahl, “ ‘Scientific Fact and Prophetic Vision’: Marxism, Science Fiction, and ‘The Fantastic Other,’ ” Critical Studies 5.11 (1998): 187–208. 52. Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). For a broader view of the history of the use of rhetoric in writing about science, see Eric S. Rabkin, “The Rhetoric of Science in Fiction,” Critical Encounters II Writers and Themes in Science Fiction, ed. Tom Staicar (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982) 23–43. 53. This point is perhaps what Jonathan Benison was getting to when he cited Gibson’s concern about a science fiction that does not seem to know what pollution is, and proposed calling science fiction a mode rather than a genre as one way of indicating the need to address the realities of the industrialized world. “Science Fiction and Postmodernity,” Postmodernism and the Re-Reading of Modernity, eds. Francis Banker et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) 139. 55

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54. Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 106. 55. For descriptions of the identifying features of gothic, see Andriano, Bayer-Berenbaum, Botting, Delamotte, Graham’s anthology, Thompson, Varma, and Verhoeven. The earliest gothic tale may be Eliza Haywood’s “The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Mad-House” (1726). More popular is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764), usually considered the first fully gothic novel and the one from which the genre got its name; Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) is the genre’s favored parody. Later works include Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. 56. For descriptions of the identifying features of detective fiction, see Aisenberg, Most and Stowe’s anthology, Porter, Rosenheim, Sweeney, and Verhoeven. The detective makes an appearance in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–83), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes appears from 1887. In the early twentieth century, the hard-boiled detective type appears in the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and others. 57. For descriptions of the identifying features of science fiction, see Jameson, Miller, Stone-Blackburn, Suvin, Warrick, Westfahl, and Wymer. Marshall B. Tymn’s essay “Masterpieces of Science-Fiction Criticism,” Mosaic XIII.3–4 (1980): 219–22, provides an overview of studies of science fiction. Examples of science fiction include the works of Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1898); Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948) and Childhood’s End (1953); and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953). 58. For the identifying features of cyberpunk, see Bruce Sterling’s introduction to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Arbor House, 1986). This entire purportedly new genre tends to be identified with a single author, William Gibson, who first used the term “cyberspace” himself in the short story “Burning Chrome” (1981) and scholars seem to have accepted the associated label cyberpunk in connection with his work without much question. In his article, “The Aesthetics of Cyberpunk,” Foundation 53 (Autumn 1991): 36–46, Inge Eriksen finds in Gibson’s works a quality of cynicism and affinity for Raymond Chandler’s style that is absent from earlier science-fiction writers such as Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Douglas Kellner, writing in the mid-1990s discusses cyberpunk in relation to the theories of Jean Baudrillard, but he too associates the genre with William Gibson: “Mapping the Present from the Future: From Baudrillard to Cyberpunk,” Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1995) 297–330. Peter Fitting makes connections between cyberpunk and punk rock, noir, and Blade Runner, but acknowledges the purported genre was really a briefly fashionable style: “The Lessons of Cyberpunk,” eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Cultural Politics, Volume 3 Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 295–315. Likewise, Veronica Hollinger refers to cyberpunk as a “ ‘movement’ in science fiction in the 1980s”; see her “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism” (1990), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, ed. and intro. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) 175.   Here, I am following the lead of Darko Suvin, who notes the peculiarity of a single author’s work being treated as a genre. Suvin prefers to call the genre represented by Gibson, if it exists, “cyberpunk sf,” and finds the same optimism, utopianism, and inclination to happy endings in it that characterizes the common variety science fiction. Darko Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF,” Foundation 46 (Autumn 1989): 40–51. Ronald Schmitt, in “Mythology and Technology: The Novels of William Gibson,” Extrapolation 34.1 (Spring 1993): 64–78, notes Gibson’s extensive use of the “primitive mythological entities like ghosts, demons, and gods” (67) such that myth and mysticism are connected to science. Jack G. Voller, in his “Neuromanticism: Cyberspace and the Sublime,” Extrapolation 34.1 (1993): 18–29, establishes the connection between gothic and cyberpunk in the concept of the sublime.

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  Early works identified with cyberpunk include Philip Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), as well as the stories of William Gibson, including “Johnny Mnemonic” and “New Rose Hotel” in the Burning Chrome Collection (1986), and particularly his novel Neuromancer (1984) and its numerous sequels, and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975), J.W. Jeter’s The Glass Hammer (1985), Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers (1988), and Wilhemina Bard’s Crashcourse and Clipjoint (1994). For discussions of cyberpunk’s borrowing from feminist science fiction, see Nicola Nixon, “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, ed. and intro. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) 191–207. 59. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole; The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (Abridged); Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (Toronto: Holt, 1965) 24; ch. 1. 60. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 25–26; ch. 1. 61. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 27–28; ch. 1. 62. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 113; ch. 5. 63. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Speckled Band,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 178. 64. Arthur C. Clarke, Against the Fall of Night, 1948, Arthur C. Clarke Against the Fall of Night [and] Beyond the Fall of Night [by] Gregory Bentford (London: Orbit, 1992) 11; ch. 1. 65. Clarke, Against the Fall of Night 27–28; ch. 3. 66. Clarke, Against the Fall of Night 61; ch. 7. 67. Clarke, Against the Fall of Night 86; ch. 10. 68. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984) 229; ch. 19. 69. Gibson, Neuromancer 228–29; ch. 19. 70. Gibson, Neuromancer 180–81; ch. 15. 71. Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) 4–5. 72. Roffman and Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film 5. 73. Herbert J. Gans, “The Rise of the Problem-Film: An Analysis of Changes in Hollywood Films and the American Audience,” Social Problems 11.4 (Spring 1964): 327–28. 74. Gans, “The Rise of the Problem-Film” 327. 75. Maurice Yacowar, “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre,” Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, ed. Barry K. Grant (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977) 96–97. 76. For a summary of characteristics of the disaster film, without the references to science fiction, see Yacowar, “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre.” 77. Gary Westfahl, “ ‘Man against Man, Brain against Brain’: the Transformation of Melodrama in Science Fiction,” Melodrama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992) 198. 78. Westfahl, “Man against Man” 195. 79. Brian Murphy, “Monster Movies: They Came From Beneath the Fifties,” Journal of Popular Film 1.1 (Winter 1972): 37. 80. Noel Carroll, “Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,” Film Quarterly 34.3 (Spring 1981): 16–25. 81. Colin McArthur, “The Iconography of the Gangster Film,” Film Genre: Theory and Criticism, ed. Barry K. Grant (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977) 119. 82. McArthur, “The Iconography of the Gangster Film” 121. 83. McArthur, “The Iconography of the Gangster Film” 121. 84. McArthur, “The Iconography of the Gangster Film” 118–23. 85. The literature on pulp fiction and noir is vast. See Charles J. Rzepka’s Detective Fiction (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity, 2005) for a recent study of the historical development of the detective genre, including the hard-boiled variety. See Gene D. Phillips, Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, 57

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Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000) for an excellent source developing the connections between the literary and filmic genre. David Wilt’s Hardboiled in Hollywood (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991) traces the movement of writers who published hard-boiled fiction in Black Mask magazine to Hollywood. 86. On the influence of particular cities on film noir, see Paul Arthur’s discussion of Los Angeles in “Los Angeles as Scene of the Crime,” Film Comment (July/August 1996): 21–27. 87. Noteworthy anthologies on film noir include the four-volume Film Noir Reader edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions); volume one was published in 1996 and the others in 2004. Others include Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993); The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); and European Film Noir, ed. Andrew Spicer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Numerous filmographies of film noir are available including, John S. Whitney, “A Filmography of Film Noir,” Journal of Popular Film 3–4 (1976): 321–71.   All of the features identified with film noir are revisited in the 1980s and 1990s in such “neo-noir” films as The Grifters (1990) and L.A. Confidential (1997), as well as the “science fiction” film Blade Runner (1982). On the neo-noir genre, see Ronald Schwartz, Neo-Noir: The New Film Noir Style from Psycho to Collateral (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005). 88. Fredric Jameson discusses the colorful, if abbreviated, and slang-filled language of Chandler’s hard-boiled detective fiction in “On Raymond Chandler,” The Southern Review 1 (Fall 1970): 636. 89. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 3rd edition (New York: Norton, 1996) 919. The chapter “Hollywood, 1965–Present” (919–57) reiterates the received history of film through the 1980s. 90. Cook, A History of Narrative Film 922. For histories of censorship in the early twentieth century, see John Belton’s “The Production Code,” Movies and Mass Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 135–49; and Stephen Vaughn’s “Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code,” The Journal of American History 77.1 (June 1990): 39–65. For a discussion of the history of Hollywood censorship, see the articles in the Special Issue of American Quarterly: Hollywood, Censorship and American Culture (December 1992). See Carla Freccero, “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho,” Diacritics 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44–58, for an analysis of a more recent text that has been both censored and supported in relation to its violent content. 91. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955) 187. 92. Zoë Sofia compares political views of abortion and nuclear war in relation to this film: “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism,” Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 47–59. 93. The coincidence of film noir and science fiction in Blade Runner (1982) has been frequently noted: see David Desser, “Blade Runner: Science Fiction and Transcendure/Film Quarterly 13.3 (1985): 172–79; Susan Doll and Greg Faller, “Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction,” Literature/Film Quarterly 14.2 (1986) 89–100; and Kaja Silverman, “Back to the Future,” Camera Obscura 27 (September 1991): 108– 33; and Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: Harper, 1996). 94. Stephen Neale notes this point in his discussion of Oedipal issues in Blade Runner (1982) in his: “Issues of Difference: Alien and Blade Runner,” Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989): 213–23. 95. Cook, A History of Narrative Film 47. 96. Philip L. Simpson, Psychopaths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) x–xii, 14. 97. Simpson, Psychopaths x–xii. 98. Cook, A History of Narrative Film 955. 99. Peter Sorensen, “Terminator 2: A Film Effects Revolution,” Computer Graphics World 14 (October 1991): 56–62. 58

Chapter 2 The Promethean Message

P

rometheus’s story is known through numerous classical sources and its associations have, like those of all myths, changed in accordance with cultural beliefs and values. Homer (c. 800 BCE) never mentions Prometheus, probably because he was of no interest to aristocratic audiences; thus Hesiod’s (c. 700 BCE) Theogony and Works and Days, which illustrate the foolishness of defying the established tyrant, are the earliest known accounts of his activities. Aeschylus (525/4–456 BCE), playwright of the incomplete Prometheus trilogy (458–56 BCE),1 presents the Titan as something of an information broker with the gift of foresight who is severely punished for challenging a tyrant whom he believes is ruling badly. The Roman author Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) includes Prometheus in his Metamorphoses, a collection of interrelated poems rendered in English as short stories, with attention to his role in Zeus’s attacks on humans and the fate of Deucalion, Prometheus’s son, as a survivor of a great flood sent by Zeus to destroy humankind and as a regenerator of the human race. Prometheus has since made numerous appearances in literary and critical works, and the changes in his representation continue to speak to the changing forms and interests of Western civilization, particularly those related to power and the ability to create, control, prolong, and endure life. He has also undergone numerous adaptations and revisions to suit the changing interests expressed in popular literature, including those found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Frankenstein was written at a time when England was undergoing a gradual but violent and apparently irreversible transition into the industrial age: large numbers of people were forced to relocate from rural to urban areas by expropriation of the land; an increasing number of people made their living by working in factories; the forms of housing changed; wood was replaced by coal as a principal source of power and the steam-powered engine developed; and finally, after 1830, railways became a familiar sight. These changes were often described and even promoted in terms of man’s development of the means and methods of imitating nature: this metaphor applied to factories and to the transformation of labor from an act generated by the individual’s will to a commodity that it was necessary to exchange as part of a “natural” cycle of survival. The social and economic world was seen as imitating nature with ever-increasing perfection, thanks to industrialization. Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–1790) famed lightning rod (1752) and the later development of applications for electricity, such as making a frog’s muscles spasm (1786), and the more useful motors and light bulbs, completed the analogy: this manufactured energy was even equated with mental capacity and activity.2 Since those who controlled and profited by these changes tended to be members of the educated aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, resistance to them, passive or active, tended to come from members of the working class who did not appreciate the enforced change in lifestyle or decline in their standard of living, and those of the bourgeoisie who likewise found themselves losing 61

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their former affluence, social place, and self-direction. The suppression, exploitation, and even victimization of these classes entailed a kind of feminization insofar as individuals in them lost autonomy and the ability to control their own destinies relative to the new models of social and economic order; coincidentally, melodrama and the associated genres of gothic and subsequently detective fiction became popular, along with an emphasis on the victim’s point of view and ongoing tendency to resolve plot complications by realigning disruptive elements to conform with the prevailing simulacrum. Frankenstein has numerous gothic elements, but it also proposes and never fully resolves a radical alteration, rather than a mere disruption in the existing simulacrum. It is thus widely and correctly cited as one of the more significant ancestors of much later horror and science-fiction literature, including Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), as well as the many more recent tech-noir narratives in which the effects of technology are realized and represented.3 The following discussion of these literary works and their film adaptations demonstrates the transition from literary to film genre and the development of the repertoire of characters, settings, and other motifs characterizing tech-noir. Of obviously increased importance in the films are the conventions of melodrama: the hero and the villain, the wasteland setting as a prominent clue that something is wrong, and reliance on violence for action and dramatic effect. The supporting cast usually expands from text to film to include more peripheral characters, local color, and the details of contemporary history and events. The uses of mimicry and mise-en-abyme are also developed in some of these films: these devices become familiar means by which certain aspects of the technoir message are visually articulated. Mimicry refers to imitation – to the impulse to duplicate the behavior, appearance, smell, sound, and other aspects of someone, something, or even a social order or environment. That impulse may be satisfied by the duplication of a thing, a person, or a system, or by the creation of an entire collection of a new type of thing or an entire new “race”: one artificial person mimicking the human being may be dismissed as an anomaly; many artificial people may mean an entirely new simulacrum.4 Mise-en-abyme refers to the narrative use of multiple story frames to arrange juxtapositions of events and levels of meaning,5 as well as the arrangement of the elements of the filmic miseen-scène such that single shots present multiple layers of space, as when the viewer is allowed to see through multiple interior spaces in a single frame: this latter device is common in film noir. Here, mise-en-abyme is applied in this way and also used to refer to the layering, aligning, and juxtaposing of “original” forms with various kinds of doubles and representations to enhance the filmic thought about the human–technology relationship; thus the person beside the artificial person beside the skeleton or the sculpture “adds up” in tech-noir, as does the appearance of a television screen within the film screen, and the dream image within the film narrative. Filmmakers were not the first to realize the effectiveness of visual mise-en-abyme as a means of conceptualizing: Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656), which includes a painting of a painting seen from the back, a mirror or a painting viewed from the front, as well as paintings by other painters, and an extraordinarily complex network of gazes, is widely recognized as indicative of an escalation, even a kind of “sea change,” in consciousness experienced in specifically visual terms. Leo Steinberg (1982), for example, notes that everything shown in the room in this painting is about perception: the mirror, the open door and light, lamps, window, and the watchfulness of the characters who “are grouped and ranked according to what they see”6 in three equilateral triangles on the floor 62

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plan, the three watchers, the Infanta, curtseying lady-in-waiting, and the female dwarf all look straight out. The attendants – the boy with his foot on the mastiff, the kneeling Menina, and the talking chaperone – all see less because they are busy with their play, their service, or conversation and look only at things viewers of the painting see as part of the painting. The final three figures – the guard, the painter, and the person on the back stair – seem to see the most as they see their own world, its painted equivalent, presumably a two-dimensional imitation, and look beyond both into the world of the viewer. It is, however, the King and Queen, shown as reflections in the mirror, who actually see the most, that is all three “modalities of the visible”:7 the real or reality guaranteed by the appearance of the King and Queen in the mirror; the reflection or illusion indicated by the reflection in the mirror and the paintings on the wall; and finally the depicted (or replicated) elements, all of which are in endless circulation in this painting, which thus becomes a “metaphor, a mirror of consciousness.”8 The level of consciousness articulated in this work by these various representational methods: the gaze, the reflection, the paintings, as well as the indications of varying levels of awareness predicated by the individual’s ability to “see” is extraordinary and unprecedented and certainly justifies consideration of this painting as evidence of a change in visual consciousness. Svetlana Alpers (1983)9 also arrives at the conclusion that this painting marks a new or changing consciousness after noting it combines two distinct modes of representation: (1) the perspectival system identifying the viewer’s position as being outside the picture which results in images invoking the metaphor of the canvas being “like a window” and (2) the mapping system produced by the use of the camera obscura which does not give an account of the viewer’s location, except perhaps within the painting itself, but enables the world to produce its own image without a frame.10 In tech-noir, mimicry and mise-en-abyme are closely interrelated: visual effects created by different kinds of representations, both “natural” and technological, being particularly useful in demonstrating the conceptual problem posed by technology in relation to the human body, mind, soul, society, environment, and the entire simulacrum.11 Indeed, it is possible to conclude that the uses of these devices so far exceed those of Velazquez in complexity that they too imply a sea change in consciousness grounded in visual awareness or awareness made possible by new experiences related to the visual. This change has come about in relation to technology because technology has so far increased the ways and means of creating and manipulating representations: the technological medium of film is the de facto medium for positioning these representations relative to the discourse of technology and thus it is also the medium of tech-noir. Prometheus (Chart 7) Hesiod’s Theogony is dedicated to explaining the generations of the gods, while Works and Days is largely about agricultural labors and the days on which it is best to perform them. In Theogony, the Earth (Gaia) gives birth to many children through her coupling with Heaven or Uranos. When Heaven, who loathes these children, hides them away without light in a deep cavern, Earth helps her son Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, defeat his father.12 Kronos then has numerous children with his sister Rhea, most of whom he swallows at birth because he fears a prophecy that he, like his father, will be defeated by one of them. Rhea, like her mother, wants to protect her children, and 63

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manages to preserve Zeus by giving Kronos a stone to swallow instead of the baby; Kronos is later forced to spit it out along with all of his other children. Zeus, on the advice of Gaia, also releases others produced by the Earth–Heaven coupling: his father’s brothers, the Hundred-armers, and the Cyclopes; the latter are so grateful they give Zeus thunder and lightning to use in ruling both men and gods.13 Zeus then leads his allies in a terrible battle against the Titans, during which the Hundred-armers prove their worth: “A hundred arms sprang from the shoulders of each of them, and fifty heads grew from their shoulders above their stalwart limbs. These then engaged the Titans in grim slaughter, with sheer cliffs in their stalwart hands, while the Titans on the other side strengthened their battle lines with a will. […]”14 The Titans are defeated, and the survivors locked away behind heavy doors in “the extremities of dark earth and misty Tartarus.”15 Under the rule of Kronos, humans have fire, but Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetos, decides Zeus is a tyrant in need of a lesson in good government and tricks him into taking a portion of ox meat consisting primarily of bones. Zeus retaliates by denying fire to men, so Prometheus steals fire and gives it back to them. Zeus punishes Prometheus by binding him to a stake where a large eagle comes to repeatedly eat out his liver: since the captive is immortal, the liver keeps growing back so that the torture never ends. Heracles, son of Zeus, eventually rescues Prometheus, thus ending Zeus’s attack upon him because Zeus will not involve Heracles, whom he cares about very much, in the dispute. Such a release is not granted the recipients of fire, whom Zeus punishes merely for receiving the gift of fire with women. He sends the first of these women to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, possessor of the ironic gift of hindsight, rather than the foresight with which Prometheus is blessed. Hephaestus is credited with actually making woman, by Zeus’s command, as an “artificial” creature necessary to man that he might achieve his own kind of immortality through procreation, but torturous to him as otherwise worthless, lazy, and the source of pain and disease and countless other problems. Epimetheus, forgetful of his brother’s warning never to accept a gift from Zeus, finds his acceptance of this “bane” means its affliction on all mortals. 16 Hesiod also tells us of the “original” races of “men” as having been created five times over, with only the last surviving to the author’s day: first as the men of gold fashioned by Kronos, and then by Zeus in silver, in bronze, as a race of heroes, and then the fifth and final race associated with the age of iron. The first race, he says, lived in absolute leisure and luxury and died in their sleep, but “the earth covered up that race.”17 Members of the second race of silver lived for a hundred years as children, then quickly matured and died on account of their general witlessness in a state of suffering: Zeus destroyed them because they would not serve or honor the immortals. The members of the third race of bronze, also destined to be “covered up” by the earth, had great physical strength, misshapen bodies, and a propensity to violence. Most of the fourth race of heroes died in battle: Zeus arranged for some to live on pleasant isles far from men at the ends of the earth. The last, the race of iron, is destined to live by means of endless toil and in misery, suffering whatever troubles and torments the gods deem fit to inflict upon them.18 In Aeschylus’s trilogy of Prometheus Vinctus (Prometheus Bound) and the lost Prometheos Luomenos (Prometheus Unbound) and Prometheos Purphoros (Prometheus the Fire-Bearer), a number of points in Hesiod’s accounts are altered such that the message itself is changed. Prometheus Bound consists of four essential parts addressing the present, the past, and the future.19 First, Prometheus is punished for the transgression he committed before the opening: he is bound on Zeus’s orders by Hephaestus in the presence of Violence and Might and waits for the giant eagle 64

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to eat out his liver on a daily basis. In the second part, during a visit by Oceanus, past events leading to Prometheus’s situation are explained, and Oceanus suggests he free himself by making amends with Zeus. In the third part, the emphasis is on the future: Prometheus is visited by Io, whom Hera has turned into a heifer as punishment for attracting the attentions of Zeus. Io the heifer is in hysterical flight from a gadfly that will not leave her alone. She narrates her confused wanderings, and Prometheus offers her what is perhaps meant as a reassuring prediction about how she will, after many adventures, eventually be the agent of his release because Zeus will mate with one of her descendents and give birth to Heracles and it is Heracles who will free him. The fourth part is taken up with the visit of Hermes, during which the penalty Prometheus must pay for his defiance is increased by a lengthy stay in Tartarus. The surviving fragments of Prometheus Unbound suggest that in it Prometheus has been released from Tartarus and is again bound so that an eagle can repeatedly eat out his liver. The Titans, his brothers, were released from Tartarus at the same time and they come to visit him saying that Zeus now rules well, rather than badly as he did in ages now long past. Then Heracles comes along, kills the eagle, and frees him in return for information about his own fate. It seems likely that Prometheus also passes on some secret knowledge about Zeus’s eventual downfall at the hands of one of his own children to avoid further retribution.20 So few lines remain of the third part of the trilogy, Prometheus the Fire-bearer, that little can be said of it. C.J. Herington (1963) argues that since the second part ends with the reconciliation of Prometheus and Zeus, the only significant action remaining for part three is the legitimizing of the bestowal of fire on man by Zeus.21 Aeschylus changes Hesiod’s presentation of Prometheus in several ways. For example, Hesiod’s voice is that of the omniscient author while Aeschylus’s Prometheus engages in conversations in the present and the audience comes to understand his situation largely through his own accounts of the past and predictions for the future. In Hesiod, Prometheus is the son of a Titan; in Aeschylus, he is a Titan. In Hesiod, Zeus is the deity who wins his place by force of arms and whom Prometheus rather foolishly challenges; in Aeschylus, Zeus is simply a tyrant who rules by force and perhaps deserves to be brought down. In Hesiod, it is Gaia who plots against Kronos and ensures Zeus wins the battle by giving him knowledge of the secret weapon, the Hundred-armers; in Prometheus Bound, it is Prometheus who operates through “intelligence” or guile22 in the battle that leaves Zeus in power and later judiciously distributes the information he acquires through his gift of foresight. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus further claims that without his intervention Zeus would have destroyed all men; that it is he, not Zeus, who has brought men all the gifts derived from fire and associated with civilization; and that he gave men hope to aspire beyond their present capacity and condition and thus grow and develop.23 George Thomson (1941) believes Aeschylus actually chose Prometheus as the subject for his trilogy because he wanted to develop the story as one about class-based conflict: Aeschylus shows Zeus to be a tyrant who misuses his might, a view that must have found at least some interest in a Greece which was just then developing a negative view of tyrants who, like Zeus, seemed to work with Might and Violence ever at their side. Indeed, during Aeschylus’s lifetime many aristocratic privileges were lost in a struggle with the merchant class that, unfortunately, left slaves still slaves. Not surprisingly, the reconciliation between the purportedly reformed bad tyrant and the rebel who challenged the tyrant includes no hope for them.24 Herington is attentive to Aeschylus’s reversal of the usual prioritization of character over plot in tragedy, such that more attention is paid to plot and action than character. More specifically, 65

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he observes the presentation of the environment as an extension of that plot in his analysis of the role of the elements of earth, water, aither (air), and fire in Prometheus Bound: he believes that for Aeschylus, as for writers throughout the late archaic and early classical periods, “the world was still one: the Elements were Gods.”25 Near the beginning of the play, Prometheus is abandoned to the wind, water, and earth in what is certainly a wasteland for him, and he actively calls on the sun to witness his fate: at this point all the elements are present and orderly, but by the time the play ends, they are all in confusion because Aeschylus closely identifies the dramatic action vested in the characters, specifically the conflict between Zeus and Prometheus, with the behavior of elements. The elements do more than frame the action, however. Water is present, as the members of the chorus are the daughters of Ocean and Ocean himself pays a visit to Prometheus and makes a rather dismal attempt to convince him to reconcile with Zeus. Among the few generally agreed upon events of the second part of the trilogy are two additional visits, one from Earth and one from her sons, the Titans – visits thought to have been more dignified, though not more successful, than those of Oceanus and his daughters. Herington notes that while both Ocean and Earth were of great importance in Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods, neither had ever before appeared on stage and neither appeared on stage subsequently.26 Herington also observes that in earlier references, such as those in Aeschylus and Euripides, all three deities: Gaia, Uranos, and Oceanus, are granted some personality, with the union of Gaia and Uranos implying the archetypal springtime marriage.27 Herington believes that “Ouranos” may be identified with aither, as Ouranos means heaven and aither is simply a more specific reference to the stuff of which heaven is made, and that Aeschylus uses the two terms interchangeably.28 The fourth element, fire, clearly at the center of the play’s conflict, is regarded as the source of all technology and closely identified with intelligence of all kinds. Herington thinks it likely that fire is prominent in the third part of the trilogy because of its title, because of the rhythmic attention to the elements in the play’s known parts, and also because aither is “the celestial aspect” of ancient fire, existing as the “stuff of heaven and of the flaming thunderbolt, source of power and wisdom.”29 This association further emphasizes the probability of a conclusion involving Zeus’s legitimizing of the Promethean gift of fire to man, perhaps by sending his one-time challenger to man with fire as an officially sanctioned torchbearer.30 A final argument that such a resolution takes place lies in the prominence given to fire at the closing of Aristophanes’ Birds (c. 414 BCE), believed to be a parody of Aeschylus’s work: In this – perhaps the most fire-ridden scene of Greek drama – Peithetairos, after successfully negotiating with the Gods, returns in a dazzling aureole of fire, bringing with him indescribable blessings to the feathered race, and also what are described as “the undying, fire-bearing […] shaft of Zeus” and “deep-crashing thunders, both those below the earth and those which bring the rain.”31 In his Metamorphosis, Ovid lends Prometheus additional importance relative to the creation and various ages of men, rather than the races recounted in Hesiod, a change that is in accordance with the Roman attention to history as well as myth. Ovid also proposes that it was Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus, who was the maker of men, Prometheus who literally,

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took the new-made earth which, only recently separated from the lofty aether, still retained some elements related to those of heaven and, mixing it with rainwater, fashioned it into the image of the all-governing gods. Whereas other animals hang their heads and look at the ground, he made man stand erect, bidding him look up to heaven, and lift his head to the stars. So the earth, which had been rough and formless, was moulded into the shape of man, a creature till then unknown.32 This attribution of the creation of men to the fire giver is unsurprising given the Roman interest in technology. At first, Ovid explains, men lived in an idyllic Golden Age, without the need of laws, mercy, or armies, or even labor for food. With the passing of the age of Saturn to that of Jove, this age turns to that of silver with its changing seasons and variable weather, and thus the need for houses and agricultural labor. In the third age of bronze, men become cruel and inclined to warfare, though still without “taint of wickedness.”33 The final age, again identified as that of iron, is an age in which “modesty, truth, and loyalty” are replaced by “deceit and violence and criminal greed”34 and men seek to expand their territories by exploration and war, divide the land, and mine it so that some men become rich while others are poor, and familial ties are undermined. Jupiter finds this last race so despicable that he destroys it, invoking the example of the treacherous Lycaon whose vengeful behavior he had discovered while impersonating a man to find justification for his already established course of action: when discovered, Lycaon fled and turned into a wolf.35 There are objections from those deities worrying about the loss of followers and their gifts, so Jupiter appeases them by saying that he will create another race: these men, however, he destroys, not with thunderbolts, as he fears this weapon will set fire to all of heaven, but with a flood. The flood is survived only by the best of men who happen to be the son of Prometheus, Deucalion, and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus,36 whose boat runs aground on Mount Parnassus. The desperate couple immediately gives thanks for their survival to the Oracle, Themis, who foretold the future from a shrine there. Jupiter is moved by the survival of this one good man (the woman is apparently not worth considering), so he calls on Neptune to withdraw the flood. Deucalion and Pyrrha are terrified at the emptiness left behind the receding water and seek help from the goddess, who advises them to leave her temple, cover their heads, loosen their clothes, and throw the bones of their great mother behind them. Deucalion deduces that the bones referred to are in fact the stones of the earth, so they do as they were told with extraordinary results: the stones become soft, then acquire shape, grow, begin to take on human form, and finally they become re-created men and women.37 These three versions of Prometheus’s life and deeds by no means exhaust the available sources, which include both the literary38 and the visual;39 they are, however, sufficient to demonstrate that, from his earliest appearance, representations of Prometheus were subject to revision in accordance with contemporary models of power, but all retain something of his role as challenger of the social hierarchy with specific attention to race, the survival of the human race, and the quality of human life in relation to access to technology. All accounts place either Prometheus or his descendant in a wasteland and associate them with the rejuvenation of that wasteland: Prometheus by restoring fire to man and by staying the course in the face of Zeus’s punishment, and Deucalion by following the directions of the Oracle.

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These accounts variously maintain similarities between the Prometheus narrative and that of Oedipus,40 including the usurpation of “kingship” and the inclination of the usurpers to indulge in socially improper sexual relationships: both Zeus and Oedipus are usurpers, and, while Oedipus violates the codes of conduct for relationships between biologically related individuals, the immortal Zeus violates those of race insofar as he seeks intimate interactions with mortals. Oedipus, however, accidentally and unwittingly murders his father without his mother’s knowledge; Zeus deliberately usurps his father covertly with the aid of secretly acquired “intelligence” and he usurps the Titans by force of arms. Oedipus punishes himself when he realizes what he has done; Zeus punishes the challenger to his action, Prometheus, rather severely. Humans pay a price in both stories: Oedipus’s subjects suffer a plague that is eventually attributed to his misdeeds; Zeus arranges for men to share in the challenger’s punishment because the challenger has shown his concern for them. Violence directed at specific body parts is also part of each story: Oedipus puts out his own eyes; but it is Prometheus’s liver, not Zeus’s, that is eaten out on a regular basis. Charts 2 and 7 highlight the differences between the two narratives. In Oedipus, the crime and its punishment derive from the symbolic and are all about proper relationships, biological and contractual, such that a son marrying and procreating with his mother has terrible consequences for an entire domain. In Prometheus, brothers breed with their sisters, but no one seems to think this is much of a problem, except possibly the brothers when they discover their sisters are prepared to side with their favored sons against them. The significance of the Promethean account becomes more apparent if Prometheus, rather than Zeus, is compared with Oedipus. In the Prometheus story, Zeus is given fire in the form of lightning by the Hundred-armers, yet denies it to humans because he knows that denial will further punish Prometheus for tricking him out of a tyrant’s share of food. Although he answers the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus is not really a trickster, as Prometheus is. Neither does he have any interest in malefactors of any kind until the plague starts killing off his subjects – what is a king without subjects? Prometheus, unlike Oedipus, is willing to act in the interests of justice even when he is not personally involved: to Prometheus, Zeus’s superior force of arms is of little consequence if he is unfit to rule because the only proper criterion for a ruler is the ability and willingness to look after the social welfare. Oedipus has to have this moral point driven home by a plague, but once that happens, he goes so far as to take responsibility for his own punishment – something Prometheus, who deems himself guiltless, never does. Overall, however, the discourse of psychology is far less important in the Prometheus myth than it is in Oedipus. Sociology is relevant in the Oedipus myth for the disruption caused by a plague in one kingdom; thus a lot of lives are at stake and one social group within a presumably much larger realm is compromised. In Prometheus, one simulacrum is replaced by another very like it – except for the denial of fire to men; thus the entire development and form of human civilization is at stake. In Oedipus, the plague does not have a personified agent: it is simply interpreted as evidence of a problem in need of resolution – “science” per se does not enter into this equation. Science is present in the Prometheus myth insofar as the means to technology, fire, is or is not possessed; and insofar as the Olympians, on Zeus’s orders, punish “man” with the artificial being “woman.” This latter action might again be taken as an instance of Zeus’s reinvention of the previously existing simulacrum, while also making a few adjustments to satisfy his need for revenge. In Oedipus, everything is resolved in relation to the existing simulacrum. In Prometheus, the simulacrum is the object in dispute. 68

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The discourse of aesthetics is also significant in the Prometheus myth in relation to the motifs that articulate the Titan’s experience. Elements of special importance because they are of ongoing relevance to popular genres, particularly those discussed in this and the next chapter, include the motif of the wasteland: this motif is essential to plot associations between the villain with superior technological force and the creation and maintenance of the wasteland, and the association of the hero with its rejuvenation. Motifs related to foresight and future-telling and the image of the problematic “artificial” being also figure prominently: Metamorphosis includes descriptions of a wide range of creatures whose descendents populate popular literature and film, such as werewolves and others, not detailed here, such as vampires and even the phoenix. The formation of adult humans from inert matter by Deucalion on the advise of an oracle is also suggestive of the “mad” scientist’s oft-indulged project of creating life from corpses, but without an oracle and only science to guide him, that project is usually ill-fated. Also of importance to the aesthetics of the Promethean narrative is the melodramatic attention given to the devices and experience of torture. As Herington notes, Aeschylus emphasizes plot and action over subtle representations of character: the special attention given to the elements as characters supports this approach because it aligns the play’s action with natural forces in the environment as much as personal motives. Northrop Frye (1957) who, like other twentieth-century literary critics and historians, favors Aeschylus’s plays as the principal text on the Titan also notes the emphasis on action rather than character. Of further significance to both the aesthetics and the recent popularity of the Prometheus narrative is the identification of Prometheus Bound, as well as Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, as examples of a particular kind of tragedy that is deeply ironic, such that, as Frye notes, events unfold in a hellish “world of shock and horror in which the central images are images of sparagmos, that is, cannibalism, mutilation, and torture […] [Here we] reach a point of demonic epiphany, where we see or glimpse the undisplaced demonic vision.”41 The principal symbols of this type of tragedy, Frye writes, include instruments of torture, the prison, madhouse, public punishments, and mob amusements: the latter becoming for Prometheus especially, the horror of becoming the spectacle, of being watched.42 Prometheus, like some of the other presumed heroes of Greek tragedy, may thus be readily identified as a melodramatic character: Prometheus, after all, sees himself as the victim of injustice;43 and audiences watching the mutilated and suffering figure on stage as he explained his plight as the consequence of his act of philanthropic goodwill toward mankind could hardly help but see him as he saw himself. Perhaps the reason Mary Shelley’s adaptation of Prometheus in Frankenstein, in which the hideous Creature likewise suffers because of the actions of a father figure and likewise speaks eloquently of his experience and fate, has resonated through the centuries is that it remains true to this rather compelling aspect of the story.44 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) (Chart 8) Mary Shelley’s story about Victor Frankenstein’s ill-fated obsession with science is framed by that of Captain Robert Walton whose ship becomes locked in the ice during an attempted voyage to the North Pole. The Captain writes letters to his sister back in England, and Victor’s is the story within this story, told by Victor himself and recorded by the Captain; later, the narrative mise-en69

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abyme is further complicated by the Creature’s account of his life and his account of the family that inadvertently taught him to speak and read. Much is made of Victor’s peaceful early life, his cousin Elizabeth who lives with the family from a young age, and his younger brothers Ernest and especially the baby William. Victor develops an interest in alchemy and electricity, and acquires the friendship of Henry Clerval. Elizabeth contracts scarlet fever and, while tending her, Victor’s mother contracts the disease and dies; Elizabeth recovers. The family becomes quite despondent, but Victor eventually goes off for his long-planned studies at a medical college in Ingolstadt. There he becomes obsessed with parthenogenesis, and cobbles together an eight-foot creature from parts stolen from the dead: Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with remembrance […] I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.45 He finally achieves his goal: It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being in the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.46 His immediate response is not jubilation, but shock. After hours of distress, he finally sleeps, only to have a terrible dream in which he sees Elizabeth: he rushes to kiss her, then suddenly finds himself holding his mother’s corpse and the grave-worms that have infested her shroud. He wakes up with a start and finds the Creature at his bedside; he flees and spends the rest of the night in agitated pacing. To his great relief, he suddenly encounters his old friend Henry who has just arrived from home and, when they return to his apartment, he finds the Creature is gone. The two friends apparently dabble in some further studies before planning a farewell tour for Victor; unfortunately, word arrives that William is dead and Victor rushes home on his own: just before he arrives, he catches a glimpse of the Creature when he is illuminated by lightning. Justine, a family associate who was once a familiar companion to Victor and Elizabeth, is found in possession of a locket William had carried with a miniature portrait of his mother inside and she is quickly arrested, incarcerated, tried, and put to death for the crime. The Creature arranges a meeting with Victor and tells him of his time spent wandering and of living in secret beside a cottage occupied by the De Lacey family who are in exile from their homeland. While the blind grandfather might have helped him, the rest of the family is terrified by his appearance and move away as soon as they become aware of his presence. The Creature wanders off; he rescues a girl from drowning, and is shot for his trouble. Having realized the impossibility of ever finding a place in human society, he wants Victor to create a mate for him. Victor initially contrives to satisfy this demand during a separation from Henry while they are on an excursion to 70

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England: he sets up a laboratory in a lonely Orkney island cottage, but is ultimately so horrified by his own actions that he destroys the work in progress. In retaliation, the Creature swears to be with him on his wedding night and, meanwhile, kills Henry. Victor is jailed for the crime, but released after his father arrives. He returns home, marries Elizabeth, and, believing he is now the sole target of the Creature’s attention, leaves her alone just long enough for him to murder her also. Victor’s father dies soon after from grief and Victor embarks on his own quest for revenge, following the Creature to the Arctic where he is taken on board Walton’s ship. He briefly rallies the mutinous crew to the Captain’s will to continue their journey, and then dies soon after finishing his story. The Creature gets into the cabin to mourn briefly over the body, bemoans his fate to Walton, and then vanishes out the window. This narrative is unusual for the attention it gives to all of the principal areas of discourse, and their associated realms of experience, popular genres and the constituent elements of those genres, and also for its failure to actively resolve the “error” of science. The discourse of psychology47 is apparent in the emphasis on the individual, with Victor Frankenstein’s “mad” scientist point of view dominating the experiential realms: his name ironically marks the symbolic fact of his social place and failure to secure that position contractually by marriage, the appropriate course to procreation according to the prevailing simulacrum. The wrongful conviction of Justine is a dramatic detective-sociological highlighting of the social model’s allowance for resolutions to problems such that those resolutions contradict the idealism and justice assumed to inform it.48 This allowance is echoed in the manner in which the mere fact of the Creature’s existence points beyond the specifically social aspects of the model to the simulacrum as a whole: the Creature proves there are means to “human” reproduction apart from familiar and “natural” processes. Science is present, albeit in somewhat gothic terms, insofar as Victor defers his coming of age in order to pursue a goal not sanctioned by society or science, and invents a monster rather than a process or technique of some immediately recognizable benefit. He eventually realizes that he has not only sidestepped his “natural” society, he has usurped nature by reinventing the “real” as a new kind of life: he has created a new simulacrum. The discourse of aesthetics contributes to the development of familiar representational forms and motifs to draw the reader’s attention, but is not limited to that function. As in The Castle of Otranto, the narrative includes the now-conventionalized constituent elements: in this case, a private laboratory rather than a castle, scientific formulas rather than an ancestral curse, and a Creature rather than a ghost49 are the aesthetic choices marking the gothic turn toward science fiction. The framing device of a ship’s Captain presenting a narrative that includes his written letters and transcription of Frankenstein’s account of his own adventures and those of the Creature serve, not to authenticate the story by telling it from multiple points of view, but to promote its reception as an account already divorced from its source and thus already possessing the resonance of myth.50 This effect is greatly enhanced by Shelley’s choice of the Captain of an expedition to the Arctic: accounts of such voyages were tremendously popular in the eighteenth century, and the sense of mystery, excitement, and adventure they evoked was not wasted as a frame and context for the telling of a seemingly unrelated story of a scientific experiment gone wrong.51 The Arctic location is of additional import because it was known at the time to be inhabited by the Inuit, people who are replaced in the story by the Creature in an apparent reinvention of the “primitive” as the product of science rather than the presumed technological status of societies on the fringes of civilization 71

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or of non-Caucasian races.52 The frozen ice floes are also metaphorically opposite to the “spark” that brings the Creature to life53 and thus serve to structurally mediate or balance the imbalance its existence creates. The icy environments in which Frankenstein meets with the Creature and meets his death are both readily understood as wasteland environments, and so too are the laboratory in which the Creature was born and, indeed, the Frankenstein home as it is overtaken by death and almost complete ruin. Like Prometheus, Frankenstein calls, not just the social model into question, but the presumed biological order: he shows that the world people assume to be both real and absolute is merely one of at least two possible simulacra. Unlike Prometheus, Frankenstein aims to overthrow or at least challenge the existing simulacrum without addressing a specific representative of it. In his turn, and like Prometheus, the Creature challenges the current “ruler,” his creator, and like Zeus, the Creature takes up the task of punishing the one who would usurp the current simulacrum. From the point that the Creature turns to search for his “father,” the story plays out in somewhat Oedipal fashion, with the Creature acting in the realm of the real, and stalking and killing people his father knows and cares about. Not unlike the ghost in The Castle of Otranto, which acts in the realm of the real – murdering as necessary – to make relationships and contracts align with the existing model of society; the Creature acts as a self-appointed judge and executioner, denying Victor his return to “normal” society, terminating his marriage, and killing those individuals whose place and identity confirms, or “makes real,” the pre-existing simulacrum as Victor once knew it. Like the Otranto ghost, the Creature is bigger, his will stronger, and his actions somehow more appropriate than the human he opposes, and he, like the ghost, is the embodiment of the discourse this human character is actively engaged with.54 But where the Otranto ghost already possesses full knowledge of the terms of his existence, the Creature has to acquire that knowledge, and does so in the context of a kind of “mirror stage” revelation. Granting her monster this entrance into the world of speech, rather than limiting his effects to those of appearance was, as Chris Baldick (1987) notes, “Mary Shelley’s most important subversion of the category of monstrosity.”55 As the Creature explains to Victor, he began to understand spoken language and became aware of written language at the same time that he pondered how to overcome the alienation engendered by his hideous appearance. He delayed introducing himself to the De Lacey family because he felt he “ought not to make the attempt until I had first become master of their language; which knowledge might enable me to make them overlook the deformity of my figure […]”56 He then describes how he came to be aware of his deformity around the same time he became aware of language: “I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers – their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity.”57 As in the “mirror stage,” a relatively newborn being confronts his misshapen reflection and determines that the only way he may ever overcome this handicap and its consequent alienation is through the Symbolic, as Lacan defined it; that is, in essence, by learning to speak. His interaction 72

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with the blind grandfather is proof of this conclusion, as is Victor’s earlier reaction to him. The point, already driven home, is made to the Creature again when he studies the beautiful Caroline in miniature inside the locket carried by her youngest son. The locket motif is introduced immediately following Victor’s return to the family home, six years after her death, where he once again contemplates the image of his mother in a portrait showing her grieving for her deceased father: as he observes, a miniature of William hangs directly below this larger painting.58 The reader might add a few lines here in which Victor laments his lack of adeptness as an artist as more talent in this area might have allowed him to lend his Creature a better likeness to encounter in reflection. These “mirror” meetings are important to the story, but the essential meeting may be that of the Creature with his own reflection, as this moment reveals him capable of self-awareness, of learning, and positive intentions relative to current society in spite of his physical violation of the rules of the simulacrum as a whole: it is this capacity which earns the reader’s sympathy – the Creature understands and yearns for the very society that Victor tossed aside in favor of his great misadventure. The passing into the Symbolic realm is conflated with the Creature’s coming of age as an adult, punctuating the typically “gothic” potential for unusual beings to manifest at particularly dense intersections of discourse. Society’s rejection of him means he cannot ever be fully human and yet his consciousness will not allow his retreat to being a mere object. As the narrative closes, he describes himself: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”59 The Creature is left, in the end, in a state of unredeemed abjecthood, without home or society, in the world but not part of it. The abject, to paraphrase Julia Kristeva (1980), is that which is caught in a passage between subject to object, it is neither subject nor object, but something intermediate. Neither body nor not body; it is expelled but not necessarily rejected; it repels but also fascinates; it is vomit, mucus, menstrual blood, feces, and the shed skin. As Kristeva writes: There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects […] Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.60 Those “for whom the abject exists,” says Kristeva, are thus dejects who place, separate, and situate themselves, essentially straying “instead of getting [their] bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.”61 The abject, she writes, is a symptom of “a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear”; as symptom, the abject permeates the self and makes the self abject. 62 Shelley’s Creature is a science experiment, and she shows up the effects of that experiment on the Creature, its creator, and the creator’s immediate society; indeed, she makes it quite clear that the Creature becomes a killer because the element of nurture – which might have fostered his transition from abject to subject – is denied him, not only by his creator but also by the De Lacy family which benefited greatly by his friendship.63 She kills off all the main characters, except the Creature, 73

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whose fate remains ambiguous at the end, leaving only the minor character Ernest to carry on the Frankenstein line. Ernest decides to become a farmer – this point is so understated that it might easily be missed entirely, but it is an entirely appropriate resolution to his older brother’s meddling with the “natural” order. No one else arrives at this “solution”: for everyone else, the Promethean gift leads to emotional suffering, physical pain, and death. The film versions of Frankenstein tend to address the understatement and ambiguity in Shelley’s plot resolution; indeed, the popularity of reworking the narrative in film may well lie, in part, in the irresistible challenge of writing its closure. Frankenstein (1931) (Chart 9) In James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein, Shelley’s framing devices are altered to accommodate the new medium: a stage introduction includes a warning about the horror about to unfold, and the opening credits appear over a swirl of disembodied eyes. In addition, the locations at which the action takes place are made more ambiguous and also brought closer together, such that letters sent from Henry Frankenstein’s watchtower laboratory, which is referred to as a windmill by his father, seem to be from someone at a considerable distance; but people seem to move between the lab and the Frankenstein home in a very brief space of time. The Creature is brought to life in the watchtower laboratory, but burns to death in a windmill. The narrative begins with Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) robbing graves and gibbets, not to mention pickled brains, to support Henry’s great project of creating life outside the womb. Henry’s strange letters worry his fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) and friend Victor Moritz (John Boles), so they go to see his former professor Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan). The three then proceed to Henry’s laboratory where they witness the parthenogenesis (0:20–0:25): the Creature is strapped with metal bands to a gurney that is raised through an opening in the roof so that he is exposed to the lightning of a stormy sky (the function of the electric gadgetry tested prior to this event remains unclear); after which, he is brought down and he makes slight movements with his hand. At first things go well, but shortly after Henry and Waldman, who settles in as Henry’s ally and coworker, realize that the Creature (Boris Karloff) has a criminal brain, not the normal brain that Fritz was supposed to have stolen from Waldman’s desk, things go wrong. Henry takes care with his creation, respecting its sensitivity to light and giving it lessons in behavior (0:31–0:34), but the deformed and malicious Fritz somewhat inexplicably torments it with a torch. Fearing it might become aggressive, they chain it and lock it up. Unfortunately, this means that Fritz can now freely torture the Creature whenever he pleases, and eventually it murders him (0:34–0:36). Henry and Waldman decide it must be killed, so they give it an injection. Meanwhile, Henry’s father, Baron Frankenstein, goes to the laboratory (0:39) and insists that his son come home to marry Elizabeth. Henry, having collapsed during the struggle with the Creature, has little choice in the matter. Once home, he convalesces by spending time in the garden with Elizabeth (0:44) and wonders how he could ever have thought anything was more important than her. Waldman, however, continues the study, taking notes and observing that stronger and stronger injections are needed to keep the Creature comatose. He prepares to dissect it, apparently without 74

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even killing it; it suddenly rises, kills him (0:42–0:43), and then wanders off into the countryside. It is as confused by the bushes it stumbles through as it was by the furniture and torches in the interior of the lab, until a little girl, Maria, befriends him. He throws her into the water, obviously expecting her to float like the flowers they have been tossing, but instead she sinks and drowns (0:50). He flees, again in a state of confusion, through long branches of weeping willow trees until he eventually stumbles to the room where Henry has locked Elizabeth, already dressed for the wedding, for safe keeping because he has realized the Creature is in or near the house. Her screams (0:55) bring aid and the Creature flees again. Maria’s father brings his daughter’s body into town, carrying it slowly through the dancers already celebrating the wedding, and confronts the burgomaster (Lionel Belmore), who quickly organizes a search party. Henry becomes isolated from the group and the Creature knocks him out and drags him to the upper floor of a windmill. Henry manages to jump out the window where the windmill’s arms break his fall (1:05–1:06) and the townspeople burn the structure to the ground, presumably destroying the Creature who is so terrified by the flames that it becomes trapped under a fallen beam. As in the book, the Frankenstein heir is obsessed with the imaginary world of science, rather than the symbolic and real world of identity and contractual relationships; here, however, his friends and family actively support and help to correct the problems arising from that obsession. Henry’s father is revised into a somewhat comic figure who, having an uncomplicated understanding of the prevailing simulacrum and a selfish interest in seeing it maintained, comes to Henry’s aid much sooner than in the novel and returns him to the properly socialized world of nature, both the well-cultivated garden and his fiancée, which he obviously expects to lead to socially sanctioned and “natural” forms of procreation. The film’s mood is also lightened by the fact that it is not the Frankenstein family that pays the price for Henry’s folly, but those with whom he has contractual relations, including his employee Fritz and his associate Waldman, or whom he does not actually know, as is the case with Maria. Indeed, almost all of the characters and all of the primary actions of the film are presented in a manner that affirms the upper class and its associated privileges for those destined to perpetuate it: the true heirs of class-based wealth and privilege do very little suffering and they certainly do not die (at least not in the film). The film’s closure is thus far more thorough than Shelley’s, and is entirely in keeping with gothic and melodramatic precedents. In keeping with the other changes furthering the simplified melodramatic approach to the narrative, the film also simplifies the story at the symbolic level by renaming the Frankenstein heir Henry, thus displacing the ironic associations of “Victor’s” name so they apply to his competitor for Elizabeth’s affections; and by eliminating the Creature’s mirror stage coming of age: instead of a moment of self-reflection, he accidentally drowns a little girl in a pond; an incident apparently adapted from the moment in the novel when the Creature saves a girl from drowning. Whale’s Frankenstein, like many monster films, skips the creature’s participation in the symbolic realm; indeed, the film Creature, like that in the first theatrical presentation of the narrative (1823), does not speak at all. Whale’s monster has no will, only instinct: its crimes are the almost accidental threatening and killing of a few people – at least one of whom seems to have deserved it. Only initially and for a few moments after he awakens does his existence seem to pose a threat to the simulacrum. Apart from this brief synchronization with one of the most significant aspects of Shelley’s novel, the film’s aesthetics are more conventional than Shelley’s in that they affirm the 75

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status quo rather than serve an attempt to overthrow it; as, for example, in the film’s association of both the ugliness and deformity of outer form, such as Fritz’s hunchback and the Creature’s oversized misshapen body, and distortions of such internal organs as the brain, with depravity: Shelley indulges no such easy equations. Overall, the dramatic effect of the film’s visualized gothic motifs exceeds those described in the novel.64 Whale’s film is perhaps most memorable for its unique graveyard opening, the watchtower laboratory, windmill, the exaggeration of the role of lightning, and, of course, for Boris Karloff ’s portrayal of the monster: his back-first stage entry, his ponderous gait, and naïve efforts at human interaction are echoed in an endless array of subsequent animated corpses, clones, and other filmic “undead” species. The graveyard opening is a classic of gothic adaptation borrowed from German artist Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774–1840) style and subject matter. The dramatic use of fire, the symbolic and literal source of the Creature’s existence, such that it dies by the force that created it, is of special interest relative to the literal and symbolic importance of fire in Aeschylus’s representation of the Promethean myth. Further, the mythical idea of successive races or ages of men, obviously referenced by the Creature itself, echoes in the strategic arrangement of images that imitate the human form: in the opening, the camera pans to the right across the faces of the mourners and church representatives to arrive at a statue of death and a dead shrub (0:02–0:03). As Henry and Fritz undo the gravedigger’s work and pull the coffin back out of the ground, the statue appears behind them beside another caricature of a human created by a cloak thrown over a shovel (0:04–0:05). Later, Waldman is shown surrounded by more scientific signs and representations of the human body as he finishes some demonstration involving a corpse for the benefit of the students in the amphitheater: these include a comically buoyant skeleton, diagrams of the human body without skin, and the pickled brains (0:06–0:08). Later still, during his initial meeting with Elizabeth and Victor, his profile is echoed by that of a skull. The amphitheater and laboratory accessories align with the graveyard wasteland, and contrast with the garden where Elizabeth and Henry reaffirm their commitment to marry. Such mise-enscène has specific symbolic import approximating that of the traditional “vanitas” painting: the vanitas genre addresses the vanity or pointlessness of worldly ambition in view of the certainty that death one day finds everyone. Such paintings typically include a skull, dying flowers, or other symbols of mortality and the brevity of life and the associated need to address the requirements of the immortal soul. The sequence in which Maria’s father slowly carries his daughter’s corpse through the group of lively dancers celebrating the impending wedding likewise provides a moment of scenic juxtaposition intended to dramatize the seriousness of Henry’s dabbling with the “natural” order as a matter of life and death. This message is made as plain as the gothic message about the power and importance of “natural” means of perpetuating lineages and class-based privileges. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) (Chart 10) Director Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,65 included in the “Filmography,” is in many ways closer to Shelley’s novel than Whale’s adaptation, although it, like Whale’s film, changes many of the details: for example, the proper names are maintained but there is no middle brother Ernest, and the original Arctic frame is maintained and also supplemented 76

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by a voice-over imitating the author. Several of the changes made to Shelley’s narrative support Victor’s blurring of the boundary between life and death in conjunction with his relationships with women: Elizabeth enters the family after her parents die of scarlet fever (0:08), and Victor’s father is a doctor who can do nothing to stop Victor’s mother from dying while giving birth to William (0:10–0:12) – he is the one who must “cut” her so the child will live. Upon his departure for university, Victor’s father also presents Victor with a posthumous gift from his mother: an empty journal in which she intended he keep an account of his noble life (0:16). Victor’s mother thereby becomes a kind of rationalization for Victor’s subsequent acts: he grieves the loss of her life and vivacity and decides that death is a mystery that, like any crime, can be solved. (Later, he tries to restore the murdered Elizabeth to life, only to have her commit suicide.) The motif of the inherited gift, or secret knowledge, is repeated in Victor’s relationship with Professor Waldman, who is here murdered by a peg-legged man who does not want a life-saving vaccination (0:32–0:33). Victor then follows Waldman’s own directions for the creation of artificial life: he plants Waldman’s own brain in that of his murderer, who was immediately hung for his act, and adds a good leg from a cholera victim. Thus, where William lives at the cost of his mother’s life, Victor’s Creature lives because Waldman dies. William’s mother chooses to die so that her son might live; Waldman dies of bad luck with his wish that his research on the creation of living beings from corpses never be reinstated unrevoked. The actual birth of the Creature is a visual tour de force (0:43–0:48): he comes to life inside a vat placed over a fire and filled with amniotic fluid and electric eels; after a bizarre delivery and prolonged efforts by Victor to help him to stand up while both slip and slide about in the primal muck, he is accidentally strung up in chains. The Creature inherits his “father’s” affinity for the dead, as he escapes the panicked, plague-ridden city by hiding amongst the cholera victims (0:53); and he inherits the curse his father pilfered from Waldman, since he soon learns to read and thus deciphers Victor’s journal (1:00–1:03). Meanwhile, Victor gives Elizabeth a locket with his likeness inside as a token of their agreement to marry (1:05) and presumably to procreate in a more conventional fashion than Victor has just done. This likeness, however, serves as a connection that brings harm and grief to many as it later inspires the Creature to murder William and then to use it to frame Justine (1:14–1:15, 1:19). The subsequent mob lynching of Justine adds one more image of death to the film’s repertoire and also establishes, as do the parallel events in Shelley’s novel, the imperfection and injustice tolerated, and even promoted, by the social model. Although apparently inclined to sympathy for his “grandfather,” who dies peacefully looking at the locket carrying the likeness of his dead wife (1:36), the Creature refuses to indulge Victor’s sensitivity of feeling in such matters and brings him Justine’s body for resuscitation as his mate (1:31). When Victor refuses, it is Elizabeth, whom the Creature knows Victor will not be parted from, whose heart he pulls out (1:40) so that she will be re-created as death reinvested with life, just as he is. Elizabeth herself, however, is not satisfied with the deficiencies of her new appearance and chooses suicide rather than life as a mere and very ugly shadow of her former self – perhaps her choice would have differed, as Shelley’s entire narrative might have differed, had Victor been a better artist – appropriately enough, she sets herself, along with the house and very nearly her would-be lovers as well, on fire (1:49–1:50). Apart from those related to the blurring of the boundary between life and death in conjunction with Victor’s relationships with women, the most significant of the changes to the story in this film 77

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involve the clearer dramatization of the points of view of those who are witness to and victims of Victor’s actions: as in Aeschylus, this alteration adds to the audience’s sympathy for those who suffer. When Victor’s mother dies, the film takes the viewer into her husband’s shock and grief, and also his acceptance of his wife’s choice of death so that her child might live – the emotional intensity of this moment is sharpened by the fact that he is the surgeon who performs the fatal cut. It is thus not surprising that he plays no part in Victor’s plan to challenge the simulacrum and dies peacefully after witnessing his son’s marriage, still mourning his wife, meditating on her likeness, and believing the world is as it should be. Henry, who is here Victor’s fellow student at the university and privy to his interests, likewise takes no part in Victor’s science project. His close encounter earlier in the film with the artificial hand in Waldman’s laboratory is evidently enough to teach him all he wants to know about such endeavors. Other instances in which the victim’s point of view is given preference involve a frog, unmentioned by Shelley, that is the beneficiary of Victor’s first successful experiment in reanimating a dead body with electricity – it lies twitching and pinned down in a petri dish (0:38) while Victor rushes off to his next triumph. Justine’s mother is shown grieving at the loss of her daughter (1:18), even though she is otherwise not a particularly sympathetic character. Elizabeth supports Victor without really knowing what he is up to. When, contrary to the novel, she becomes one of Victor’s subjects, the film carries us into her moment of realization and refusal of any place in the new simulacrum. The Creature, as in the novel, is slow to realize what has happened and accepts his place until he is rejected first by his creator, and then by his adopted family. When Victor refuses him a mate, his sole reason for living is to take revenge and he chooses to die with Victor rather than go on living in a world in which he has no place. The film also provides numerous pans over the piles of bodies of those struck down by cholera and about whom no one seems to care: the filmic point here, as with Waldman’s efforts to carry out a vaccination program, is to further the contrast between the numb indifference individuals may feel in the face of mass death from disease and the intensity of their grief when one person they care about dies, as seen in the reactions to the death of Victor’s mother.66 Unlike Shelley’s Victor, this film’s Victor has several witnesses who come to realize, at least in part, what he has been up to and decide they do not like it. The film’s emphasis on the victim’s point of view draws the viewer into agreeing with them, and yet Victor’s basic position that it should be possible to extend life, if not defeat death, seems to be informed by the purest of motivations: his love for his mother and a commitment to the perfection of science. As the dialogue between Victor and Waldman and Victor and his Creature also establishes, Victor’s research offers the possibilities of growing or salvaging body parts and even proposes that memory is something residing in the body having future significance for the human race. These points, not specifically articulated in the novel, are, nevertheless, implied by it. Ultimately, when all the shock and horror is set aside, Victor’s experiment may be said to have failed only because he did not fully realize the importance of nurture in the fostering of “artificial” as well as natural life, a problem that also seems to have extended to his personal and familial relationships after going off to school. In other words, as in the original narrative, Victor fails for much the same reason that motivated Prometheus’s challenge to Zeus: lack of attention to the social welfare. This film also provides a more complete closure to the narrative than did Shelley, and it does so by dramatizing the elements in specific ways, just as Aeschylus did in his representation of 78

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Prometheus. Much is made out of fire and lightning and water and ice, and air is lent a moment of beauty by the grandfather’s flute playing in the countryside. These images serve as “clues” to the tremendous import of Victor’s Creation in relation to the larger simulacrum, particularly at the moments of his birth and death: what better way for the artificial being created by electricity and amniotic fluid to meet his end than by going up in flames with his creator’s corpse set adrift on a large block of Arctic ice? Frankenstein (2004) (Chart 11) Marcus Nispel’s 2004 adaptation Frankenstein, also detailed in the “Filmography,” departs extensively from the original story and was clearly intended as the pilot for a television series. This point is crucial to understanding the film’s open-ended ending: the closure that brings no permanent resolution to the essential problem as a prelude to a series is distinct in its implications. The setting is relocated to modern-day New Orleans and lots of gothic and detective film noir adjustments and additions are made to the characters, action, settings, and motifs; more important, however, is the greater attention lent to the challenge Helios’s ambition poses to the existing simulacrum. Victor Helios is a monopathic villain guilty of all the apparent madness and monstrosity divided between Frankenstein and the Creature in the novel. Most of the characters around him are both his creations and his victims and they victimize each other and humans. He has used his procedures to prolong his own life and to begin populating the world with beings he creates and controls, although some of these beings seem to live independently from him. Victor’s peculiar obsession with the perfect wife imbricates gothic and science fiction in some horrific action; for example, the murder and subsequent reanimation of his own wife revises the original Frankenstein’s creation of the Creature for the more generalized purpose of cheating death and his subsequent refusal to create a mate for that Creature. Helios’s goals are thus far more calculated and self-serving than Frankenstein’s and involve the use of his science to gain power for himself. Erika, Helios’s wife, is used to develop the idea, also apparent in Branagh’s film, of memory as something that can be cloned or replicated and altered, such that when she momentarily chooses death over life as Helios’s failed perfect wife, Helios immediately re-creates her with appropriate adjustments, including a more developed sense of instinct. Helios openly disparages his first Erika by criticizing her flower arrangements and her admittedly excessive makeup (0:17). He treats all of his creations in an aggressive manner, denying them the ability to procreate and killing them when they interfere with his plans. In this respect, these beings become objects of sympathy, particularly when Erika fights her “assisted suicide” and Helios drowns her anyway (0:50–0:52). Even Detective Harker, the film’s serial killer, is shown to have become a killer in response to the irreconcilable elements in his form and psychological profile and thus a character worthy of more than the viewer’s condemnation as some sort of ultimate evil. This sympathy is limited by the effects of the detectives’ two visits to the stash of human body parts he keeps in his apartment building’s attic (1:03–1:04, 1:11–1:12) and his other acts of violence. The Creature, here given the name of Prometheus’s son Deucalion, is no longer the unwitting agent of socially sanctioned authority or the vengeful out-of-control monster denied a place in society; he is a consciously motivated, intellectually sophisticated, and socially interactive being 79

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who appoints himself the guardian of the simulacrum Helios seeks to replace. Deucalion engages all of the four primary areas of discourse with active awareness: even his ironic understanding of his own appearance as that of a carnival “monster” addresses the discourse of aesthetics in relation to the simulacrum that he wishes to preserve in spite of his disadvantaged place in it. The film emphasizes Deucalion’s desire to stop Helios and offers little with regard to his more general feelings about Helios’s creations which might be expected to include compassion, given his sympathy for Anthony, the autistic younger brother of the detective assigned to the murders, Carson O’Connor. Carson and Anthony’s sister–brother tie is the only natural familial relationship in the film and Anthony’s autism could be taken as symbolic of the devolution of that social form in the days of Helios’s ascendance. The alignment of Deucalion with O’Connor asserts the sociological element and the detective genre; it also makes the Creature superior to Helios because he is able to win allies without recourse to covert methods of control. Deucalion is also the one who knows the truth behind the newspaper reports of Helios’s dedication to science that alleviates pain (0:14–0:15) and is willing to do something about it. The science is here updated through dinner party allusions to stem cell research, cloning, and, of course, the associated matters of power. The fact that Helios, working alone, has clearly managed to bring about tremendous changes to his own body suggests his work is focused on drugs and chemistry – evidently an advance over the surgeries of past centuries referenced by his possession of Rembrandt’s painting “The Anatomy of Dr. Tulp” (1632). The emphasis on drugs aligns Helios with Dr. Jekyll, rather than Frankenstein; but his accomplishments, so far as the coroner attending the third victim is concerned, are advancements, not regressions such as those characterizing Hyde, that improve the body’s efficiency and longevity.67 On an aesthetic level, the third murder victim’s apartment, with its black cats, black walls, and razor blade curtain, as O’Connor’s partner Sloane suggests, is “shabby goth” (0:11–0:14), as is the Joy Theatre, with its leaking roof, rats, and peculiar room with hanging glass jars. Both places have television sets perpetually set to receive static: Deucalion suggests that the woman keeping the theater, who wears slippers with cute fuzzy mice stitched to them, should get cable. Certainly “shabby goth” is an accurate descriptor of the décor in any number of “gothic” horror films; and Helios’s lab suggests a certain higher class “goth” with its wooden furniture and metal and glass equipment. Here, however, the gothic aesthetic supports the melancholic mood and violence following from the Creatures’ apparent yearning for death and inability to achieve that end on their own. The visual conventions of film noir are also called upon to further the general ambiance: most of the action takes place at night and in abandoned low-rent district urban streets and disintegrating buildings, and these contrast sharply with Helios’s high-rent district house and lab. The film’s aesthetic complexity is increased by the intertextual references to previous film adaptations of novels, to various genres, and to the original novel. Dracula (1897) is suggested when Deucalion arrives in New Orleans by ship in the opening sequence and the horror film The Phantom of the Opera (1925) comes immediately to mind when he occupies the abandoned Joy Theater. Both references contribute to the mise-en-abyme by placing fiction and the fictional performance in a conceptual continuum with a reality that elides Shelley’s fantasy creature with the purportedly real-life Creature occupying the theater. Shelley’s Frankenstein is specifically referred to as the fiction based on the facts coming to light in the present (0:46). The film’s only flashback dramatizes a moment of which Shelley makes relatively little: the birth. The flashback occurs just as Deucalion is reviewing some old 80

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newspaper clippings about Helios, and it provides images of his awakening in Helios’s lab that include lightning, the vat of fluid, the release from bandages, and so forth: this particular nightmare is referred to as such by Erika and the priest, but is not visualized in association with them. “The Anatomy of Dr. Tulp” is also a motif worth considering here, given that it places Helios’s accomplishment in the context of the history of scientific exploration and discovery as well as that of death and nightmare. It also asserts the importance of the discourse of aesthetics, somewhat negatively treated in most representations of the Creature. This painting appears hanging on the wall during Helios’s discussion with his beautiful second wife, who is already an accomplished ballerina and much more committed to instinct than her prototype (1:05). Rembrandt too was a revolutionary who worked in an instinctive and painterly style that contradicted the prevailing emphasis on classical and more intellectual ideals and was applauded by some for its relative liveliness: yet in this painting he applied his technique to the subject of death. The aesthetic complexity of the film furthers the articulation of Helios’s challenge to the existing simulacrum: he seeks immortality and unlimited power by changing his own nature and that of the population occupying the planet. The discourse of aesthetics is used to suggest the wasteland is growing – the filmic look, style, and genre motifs – all promote the viewer’s sense that the world is really not as it should be. They even create a sense of mourning or nostalgia for what has been lost – physical comforts, “normal” human abilities, “natural” procreation, and so forth are given over to slums, autism and psychological deviance, and artificial replication. It seems the actions of the heliocentric Helios, like Oedipus, might be to blame for the state of the world around him. That neither this possibility, nor any of Helios’s true accomplishments, are things the human world is ready to consider outside the realm of fiction is indicated by O’Connor’s response to her partner’s question about how she is going to handle her report on their first encounter with Harker: “Lie.” To this, her partner responds “Good call” (1:00). Humans exist, like one of Zeus’s soon to be annihilated experiments, in a kind of shadow world and generally lack awareness of what is “really” happening: the primary witnesses to the drama played out by Helios and his creatures are the numerous cherubs and religious statues that decorate the various sets. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),68 originally published as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, has several story frames. Here the initial frame makes the reader companion to Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer, as he discovers and deciphers the clues indicating that Jekyll is Hyde. One of these clues is the will Jekyll leaves in Utterson’s safekeeping, which he has adjusted so that Hyde is his sole beneficiary. This will acquires resonance as a clue to a mystery after Utterson hears a story from Mr. Enfield, his walking companion, about a strange and horribly ugly man who is made to pay damages for knocking down a little girl in the street by some of the witnesses, including Enfield himself. Enfield describes this man – Mr. Hyde – only with difficulty: There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary 81

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looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir: I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.69 Also of interest in this account is the general response to Hyde’s appearance: Enfield notes that a doctor present on the occasion appeared ready to kill him and, as he says, “I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black, sneering coolness – frightened too, I could see that – but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan.”70 Utterson realizes Hyde has a back route access to Jekyll’s home and begins to fear Jekyll is the object of some malicious blackmail scheme: this view is reasserted several times with the notation that it is quite unfair that a gentleman should be forced to pay for the follies of his youth. Hyde is also responsible for the murder of the elderly and entirely harmless Carew: a maidservant, the only significant female character in the entire story, witnesses Hyde carrying out the assault with “apelike fury”71 from her window. Utterson’s account ends shortly after he is called to aid Jekyll’s servant Poole with a household emergency. They discover Hyde’s still twitching body and certain proof of his suicide by poison. The ensuing search for Jekyll is, of course, fruitless, although they do find an envelope addressed to Utterson containing Jekyll’s final will leaving all to Utterson rather than Hyde, Lanyon’s letter, and Jekyll’s own account of his experiments. Lanyon’s and Jekyll’s documents are those placed after Utterson’s in the printed story. Dr. Lanyon’s account explains how he was the first to realize Jekyll had invented a potion that transformed him into Hyde. When Hyde needed assistance getting more of the chemicals for the remedy capable of turning him back into Jekyll, he called on Lanyon for aid. Lanyon brought the drugs to Hyde and chose to observe the effects of the draught: A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change – he seemed to swell – his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter – and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.   “Oh God!” I screamed, and “Oh God!” again and again; for there before my eyes – pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll!72 The final account is Dr. Jekyll’s own, written as he waited for the last of his remedial potion to wear off, leaving him to turn for the last time and irreversibly into Hyde. Jekyll explains he recognized “the thorough and primitive duality of man”73 and developed a drug allowing him to separate these twins, who have very different natures, believing it would be of benefit to rid man of his inner war between good and evil. His description of the effects of his first experiment is primarily sensational, rather than visual. First, there was pain and nausea, and then, simultaneously with the knowledge that his evil had increased by much more than his physical stature had decreased, he found: I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul […] 74 82

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As Jekyll further explains, repeated use of the potion gradually increased Hyde’s strength and decreased the effectiveness of the antidote, and led ultimately to his decision to commit suicide. The discourse of psychology is present in the attention to Jekyll’s obsession with finding a scientific means of exploring and controlling his inner personality, and in the monstrous product of that quest. Hyde himself is more interesting from a psychological, as well as genre-related point of view, for his monopathic nature, than his evil. As Irving Massey (1973) observes, Jekyll turns into Hyde, but Hyde can make no more transformation: There are no further transformations of Jekyll after he has metamorphosed into Hyde, and having faced his singleness, he cannot forever continue dodging back into the falsehood of duality. It is not because the evil in Jekyll has overwhelmed the good that Hyde can no longer return to the form of Jekyll; it is because all progress or descent toward unity is a one-way process, and the realization of singleness is something that once learned cannot be forgotten. Hell is the loss of duality, not the victory of evil over good.75 The associated Lacanian Symbolic is presented in the form of an adult version of the mirror stage as Jekyll discovers himself as Hyde: this stage is initially understood by him in terms of internal experience and then awareness of changed outward appearance. The association of height with moral superiority that is so prominent in The Castle of Otranto is here adapted so the emphasis is on reduced stature as indicative of moral depravity and even, as Jerrold E. Hogle (1988) proposes, a state of abjection.76 Ugliness and distortion is thus rather simplistically related to “character,” as well as evolutionary regression.77 Utterson plays the role of the detective78 and, as a lawyer, he brings something of the sociological to the narrative that goes beyond the general public outcry following Hyde’s acts of violence. Jekyll is the scientist whose curiosity and experiments, like those of Frankenstein, lead to injury and death. It is also the success of his effort to create an “unnatural” double79 that, like Frankenstein’s success, alters the narrative’s aesthetics such that the simulacrum becomes the object of dispute, rather than merely the terrain of some battle or argument internal to it. The existing simulacrum is described as a wasteland that, by the power of pathetic fallacy, articulates the inner state of the main characters. As Masao Miyoshi (1966) notes, the world occupied by Utterson and his associates is a wasteland: the men are all “unmarried, barren of ideas, emotionally stifled, joyless”; and the city itself is slightly surreal, because of the perpetual fog and because the buildings everywhere invoke a sense of disguised intent: the store fronts are compared to “ ‘smiling saleswomen’ (Chap. 1),” and Jekyll’s neighborhood is given over to “ ‘the agents of obscure enterprises’ (Chap. 2).” The wasteland, however, “is hidden by the secure and relatively comfortable respectability of its inhabitants;”80 just as Hyde is hidden by Jekyll. Hyde thus embodies an alternative simulacrum rather than a rejuvenation of the old one, just as Frankenstein’s creature does, although Hyde is perhaps the more dangerous of the two, given the covert nature of the Jekyll and Hyde relationship and the freedom this relationship gives Hyde to do as he pleases without immediate consequences. Here, however, the simulacrum associated with Hyde is brought to an abrupt and relatively unambiguous end by suicide and the loss of a recipe.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) Director John S. Robertson’s silent film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens with the text lines: In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be, we are. This statement establishes the melodramatic conventions of character and moralizing didacticism that dominate the film, elements that are absent from the book. The film also omits the story frames and places the events with the action, rather than the accounts of the actions, such that the chronology of the film, like the events, is linear. Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst), later the murder victim, is reinvented as the father of Millicent (Martha Mansfield), a passive young woman whom Jekyll is expected to marry. Jekyll (John Barrymore) is a practicing physician who spends all his time treating poor people for free at his clinic, leaving Millicent to pine for him. Carew is also responsible for tempting the high-minded and philanthropic Jekyll into exploring the world of sensation by taking him to see the Italian dancer Gina (Nita Naldi); it is after this encounter with temptation that Jekyll gets the idea of chemically separating the good from the evil in man. When he succeeds for the first time (0:27), the transformation is accompanied by dramatic convulsions; one of the first things he does when they subside is go into his living area to find a mirror so he can study his new appearance, which includes a change in the shape of his head, different hair texture, hairiness, a hunchback, and elongated fingers. Soon after, he sets Gina up in a shabby apartment; he also takes a ring she has that was, according to the story she tells, used to hold poison that eliminated a rival for a certain lady’s affections (0:35–0:37): Millicent, Gina, and the ring are completely new elements in the story. After Gina gets tired of him and leaves, Jekyll renounces Hyde and devotes himself to Millicent for a time; but Hyde is soon back, taking up with new women and shunning the now-dejected, dirty, and impoverished Gina. When he runs down a street urchin playing horsey with a stick, a crowd gathers and he is forced to pay damages – Jekyll’s signature on the check, as in the novel, creates a further association between the two men beyond that of Jekyll’s revised will leaving everything to Hyde (0:49–0:51). Carew also comes to check up on Jekyll, suggesting that he will withdraw his approval for the marriage if Jekyll’s peculiar behavior does not stop. Jekyll is so angered that he spontaneously turns into Hyde, pursues the startled Carew into the street, and beats him to death with his walking stick (0:54–0:56). Even worse for Jekyll, the corrective potion begins to lose its potency such that Jekyll goes to bed, wakes in a half-dream half-hallucinatory state, is accosted by a gigantic ghostly spider, and later wakes up as Hyde (1:06–1:06). Jekyll is now confined to his lab because his drugs have run out and there are no more to be had in all of London. Distressed by his master’s behavior, Poole sends the servant women to get Millicent and he goes for Dr. Lanyon. When Millicent knocks on his lab door, Jekyll begs her to leave, but Hyde lets her in and attacks her. She flees to the door, screams, and collapses. The men arrive, but only Lanyon witnesses Hyde’s transformation back into Jekyll as he dies from the poison he evidently had stored in Gina’s ring. Lanyon tells Millicent that Hyde killed Jekyll. 84

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Both book and film emphasize dramatic moments at which others witness the transformation. Although these moments differ somewhat, their purpose is the same in both mediums: these are not primarily moments when a woman looks, but rather moments when a man looks upon a “monster” turning into a man or vice versa. The maid who witnesses Carew’s death in Stevenson’s book is absent in the film, being replaced by Millicent who screams, flees, and collapses when she sees Hyde and he attacks her – she, like the servant, does not actually witness the transformation itself, only its horrible aftermath. The conclusion that Hyde must have killed Jekyll is the same in both book and film, although in the film it seems to be drawn more for the benefit of the distraught Millicent who has just lost her father and her supposed lover to Hyde’s violence than, as in the novel, for Jekyll’s servant Poole. In many respects the screen adaptation of the text brings the story into closer alignment with the original Frankenstein: notably, by the addition of a sidelined love interest, which contributes to the melodrama, fills out the cross-section of society film audiences expect to see, and emphasizes that Jekyll’s experiment, like Frankenstein’s, involves postponing marriage and “natural” procreation in favor of creation without female participation. Jekyll does not create a new body, but he does create an essentially new life form who might be described as his “son.” Both text and film, like Frankenstein, engage the principal fields of discourse marking popular genres: gothic-psychology in the exploration of desire and split personality81 and the strategic use of a fetishized piece of jewelry, detective-sociology in the murder and search for its perpetrator,82 and science-fiction-science in the experiment itself, although both texts and this film tend to interpret these experiments as much in terms of the supernatural as science. References to such psychological experiences as dreaming and the inclination to violence and pathological behavior, as well as the interpretation of a physically brutish appearance as the mark of psychological and evolutionary regression, draw on the same late Victorian notions that informed Stevenson’s original text – according to which such behavior and appearance were part of an earlier, more “primitive” stage of man’s development.83 Also noteworthy in the film is the increased attention to a cross-section of society, such that the individuals at the free clinic represent a range of ages, injuries, and illnesses, as well as poverty. This group contrasts with the affluent individuals around Carew, whose activities are strictly governed by conventional male and female occupations: the men at Carew’s house converse separately from the women, and Carew believes that some engagement with women whom he clearly thinks of as prostitutes is an important part of a young man’s education. Just as clearly, he keeps his daughter well away from this segment of society: Millicent’s apparent virtue is rewarded by more than one proposal of marriage and the attentions of numerous respectful gentlemen on the occasion of her father’s death. The film also studies the fate of the “fallen” woman. Gina is seen being “sold” twice: initially when she is directed to attend Jekyll who rejects her and later when Hyde demands her from her employer, and Hyde’s landlady rents him a room for a price without bothering about his relative respectability simply because she is beyond caring about her own.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)84 Director Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exaggerates the importance of the love interest added to the 1920 film. Both Muriel (Rose Hobart) and Jekyll (Fredric March) are eager for marriage; unfortunately, Carew, now a Brigadier General (Halliwell Hobbes), insists on an eightmonth delay and then takes Muriel off to Bath, hoping Jekyll will become less eccentric if he is impressed by the possibility that he might lose her. Jekyll’s eccentricity is indicated by a lecture he gives at the university in which he associates the good with what is noble and evil with the earth: Carew and Jekyll’s other friends feel he should “come down to earth” and spend less time working on the free hospital ward. The metaphor does not bear close study, but the idea seems to be that they think Jekyll should take a greater practical interest in matters pertaining to his own class; that is, the upper and professional class and matters of marriage, and fritter away less time on the lower classes. Jekyll, however, finds his responsibilities to his own class, like the earth, to be lower and less interesting than a noble and self-sacrificing dedication to the service of the very people his associates regard as not merely low, but base. While Muriel is away, Jekyll succeeds in dividing his good and evil natures with a potion, takes up with a music hall girl called Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), establishes an abusive relationship with her, and, after a particularly bad beating, she goes to Jekyll for help. Muriel returns and this event, along with his remorse for mistreating Ivy, make Jekyll resolve to give up his addiction to Hyde; Muriel’s father helps out by agreeing to let the couple marry in a month. Unfortunately, when Jekyll is on his way to the announcement dinner, he pauses in the park to listen to a bird that a cat comes along and kills – causing him to spontaneously transform into Hyde (1:04–1:06). Hyde then kills Ivy (1:08–1:11) and flees to his home, where his servant Poole (Edgar Norton) refuses to let him in. He enlists the aid of Dr. Lanyon (Holmes Herbert) in procuring his antidote, and Lanyon then witnesses his transformation back into Jekyll (1:16–1:18). At Lanyon’s insistence, Jekyll agrees to give Muriel up, but when leaving her home after delivering the bad news, he turns into Hyde again, kills her father (1:29), flees back to his lab, and takes another potion that turns him back into Jekyll. Lanyon, however, arrives to accuse him of the crime and the resulting shock causes him to return to his Hyde form in front of numerous witnesses, including the police. After a futile attempt at escape, he turns back into Jekyll as he dies. This film alters the text and 1920 film in several ways beyond the development of the idea that long engagements cause problems. The scenes of aggression, violence, and particularly the abusive relationship between Hyde and Ivy are much longer and more detailed than anything in the earlier adaptation. While Jekyll–Hyde is the center of attention throughout the film, the sympathy of viewers is turned to the victims of his science, primarily Ivy who, in spite of and because of her lower class status, inspires first humor, then perhaps a certain indulgence for her obvious attraction to a man who is socially so far above her, and finally an unambiguous sympathy for the consequences arising from what little success that attraction has. This film also develops the plot visually in an archetypal fashion. For example, a fire causes a steaming pot of some liquid to boil over at the same moment Jekyll’s passions take control of him (0:33–0:04); the potion he creates steams profusely; and Jekyll first stares out a rainy window (0:32) and later stares into a lit fireplace (1:04) while brooding on his situation. Camera work is likewise applied to render the story more visually articulate, beginning with shots from Jekyll’s point of view, 86

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such that we watch his hands as he plays the organ, we see his view of his servant Poole, and then we finally see him when he looks at his own reflection in the mirror.85 The camera does not take up the conventional external point of view until it is directed at Jekyll as he gives a speech at the university. Carefully chosen close-ups and point-of-view shots recur at different points in the film, including the declaration of love between Jekyll and Muriel (0:12–0:15), and at moments of Jekyll’s transformations (0:26–0:28, 0:34–0:36, 1:16–1:18, 1:32–1:33). The first transformation is preceded by a glance to the laboratory skeleton, a quick note to Muriel, a longer look at what appears to be a metallic statue of a samurai, and the mirror. The transformation itself occurs with a cut to Jekyll’s point of view with the room spinning, followed by cuts to the faces of women, Ivy’s seductively swinging leg, and other shots associated with emotional interests. When the transformation is complete, Hyde goes to check out his new appearance in the mirror. The visual emphasis on doubling goes beyond the original story to establish the experience of the uncanny evoked by an encounter with one’s double, particularly an unnatural double. The mirror reflections indicated in the book are present, but more effective here are the skeleton that hangs in Jekyll’s lab, and various statues, busts, and paintings that appear in the scenes with the characters as the abuse and violence escalates. Canova’s late-eighteenth-century statue of Cupid and Psyche in an embrace is particularly appropriate as the backdrop for Jekyll’s final assault on Ivy (1.08–1:11). The image refers to a story about Cupid, who, instead of punishing Psyche for arousing the jealousy of Venus, takes her as his lover instead, even as he forbids her to ever look upon him in the light. Psyche ruins the affair when she takes that forbidden look and is then abandoned and subject to a variety of torments. Like most of this film’s metaphors, the association is not exact, but Ivy does enjoy the brief kindness of the handsome Dr. Jekyll, only to find herself suffering for having won his notice at the hands of Mr. Hyde and for having “seen” Hyde for who he truly is. This spectrum of likenesses: reflection–skeleton­–sculpture–painting, as well as their varied associations, including Hyde as Jekyll’s twin and all the dualistic notions the double implies regarding good and evil, God and man, the creative process, and so forth are all motifs used to great effect, such that the frame compositions go beyond mise-en-scène and the conventional vanitas arrangements in the contemporary Frankenstein (1931) to support the narrative’s conceptual mise-en-abyme. This film not only emphasizes Jekyll’s research as compromising the status quo simulacrum, it does so with a relatively sophisticated visual vocabulary that both heightens and adds to the viewer’s understanding of the melodramatic violence. Jekyll and Hyde (1990) David Wickes’s Jekyll and Hyde, detailed in the “Filmography,” departs from previous film versions of Stevenson’s book by adding considerable detail to the sets and social environment and by making the whole story more or less part of Sarah Crawford’s account about Jekyll and Hyde to Utterson. Utterson is, as always, Jekyll’s lawyer: he finds Sarah working as a stable girl tending horses, shows her a photo of her and Jekyll, and tells her that she is Jekyll’s sole beneficiary. Along with the subsequent emphasis given to Sarah’s point of view, however loosely followed, this film frame asserts the importance of one of the primary victims as the most important character. No real equivalent to Sarah exists in Stevenson’s narrative or the earlier films: she is presented as 87

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Dr. Lanyon’s younger daughter and becomes Jekyll’s lover after his wife, her sister, dies of pneumonia. She is the woman who falls; or rather, she is the woman who is “pushed,” even before she has done anything to deserve the judgment that action implies. Jekyll is, as in the 1931 film, a philanthropist who spends time helping those who cannot afford his services, including the flower seller whom Hyde knocks down (0:04–0:10). Details contributing to the period ambiance include a visit to this little girl after her surgery in the hospital; the police efforts to catch Hyde; and the promise of aid the police offer to women lacking family protection, such as Lucy, the prostitute Hyde beats (0:12), and Sarah, whom he beats and rapes (0:49). Lucy goes to the police voluntarily and gets nothing for it, and then cannot find work anywhere; Sarah is forced to address the police because Jekyll’s insensitive housekeeper calls them in, but she tells them nothing. The detective’s “science” is present, notably in the surveillance assigned by Scotland Yard to Hyde’s room and the addition of the technician and Lanyon’s efforts to identify the components in Jekyll’s potion (0:28, 0:52, 0:55, 1:18). Jekyll explains to Sarah that he initially thought this potion would make the ugly beautiful and the stupid more intelligent, but that is not quite what happened. He recants on his dedication to science in a speech delivered to his students after he decides to give up the drug: Science will control our shape, our intelligence, even create new breeds of men: violent men to fight our wars, docile men to do our work […] Hell on earth. And I, I want no part of it. (0:59) In spite of his eloquence, Jekyll–Hyde’s impassioned pleas for assistance from Sarah and Lanyon when he is about to be captured resonate less as repentance for causing pain and harm to others, and more as the revelations of a drug addict doing what is necessary to get to the next fix. His suicide, with the photo of him and Sarah at his hand, likewise appears as a desperate solution to his withdrawal pains once he is sure his drugs are gone for good. The aesthetic details of the film also include a nosey newspaperman who follows up on gossip, as well as the purported facts, and orchestrates human interest accessories for the story, such as a sketch of Jekyll posing with the deaf parents of the flower seller. This sketch contrasts with that of Hyde, which proves to be of some use to the police in tracking him down primarily because of the extreme nature of Hyde’s facial deformities. The artistic renderings contrast with the photographs, which are much more precise: the photo with which Utterson reintroduces himself to Sarah captures the memory of the couple’s few weeks of happiness, while that Jekyll shows to Sarah following his transformation (1:02) shows the reality of his scientific success. Hyde’s interest in replicating his own image seems to echo in the appearance of the deformed child with the evil “Hyde” look to his eyes; the child also contributes to the film’s treatment of Hyde as the monstrous man and the women he becomes involved with as his victims in terms other than the verbal and physical abuse emphasized in previous films. Thoughtful viewers may also wonder what becomes of all the samples of Jekyll’s drug sent by Lanyon to scientists throughout London: Are there more Mr. Hydes already out there? And has this untested drug produced more deformed children? But all in all, the death of Jekyll, as usual, seems to close the book on Hyde.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002) Mark Redfield’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002), also detailed in the “Filmography,” like Wickes’s film, is of interest for the details it adds regarding the social class hierarchy and modern methods of reproducing likenesses, and for its addition of several points of reference to other well-known stories, both books and films: this latter feature is comparable to Nispel’s treatment of Frankenstein (2004). Redfield’s film, like some adaptations of both Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, develops its visual motifs in a complex mise-en-scène and mise-en-abyme that contributes to the conceptual understanding of the story. The upper class Carew home, for example, is full of white larger-than-life classical statues and Hyde has a painting of the Taj Mahal in the well-appointed apartment he sets up for the film’s principal fallen woman, Claire. Other visual references are made to the narrative itself, as in the opening sequence, which includes a shot of the first page of Stevenson’s novel. This moment, as recounted in the original story, finds two men standing in a street talking: Ashton’s account of Hyde’s aggression is visualized in a sort of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) fashion, as are various other moments and sets throughout the film. The most complex montage including shots of handwritten pages follows Hyde’s vicious murder of Miriam Carew’s brother Mordecai (1:01–1:02). This sequence shows the lonely Miriam pondering and reading her written declarations of love for Jekyll, before finally jumping off her balcony; cut with shots of Jekyll’s written journals, Jekyll burning his papers, and the sound of his recorded voice declaring his scientific goals and interests, as well as black-and-white flashbacks to his microscope, lab, and study, before he simply asks “What have I done?” (1:07–1:11). References to texts other than the one immediately at hand include those to Arthur Conan Doyle by one of the police and Jack the Ripper is mentioned several times, hinting that Hyde may well have been him, or perhaps that Jack Little was. Jack claims to have gathered the female livers and kidneys needed by Jekyll from graves (1:24), so the implication seems to be that any street murders related to the project were committed by Jekyll or some early version of Hyde. The lightning that flashes just before Hyde returns to Claire after a long absence (1:17) and the fickleness of the newly installed electric lights in the hospital’s free ward and Jekyll’s home also suggest a deliberately cultivated affinity for the earlier Frankenstein, although the attention to lightning and the spark of light in that novel is generally more understated than the visual references in this film. A more subtle reference to the locket used to frame Justine for murder in the Frankenstein text might be inferred from Claire’s necklace, which she deliberately leaves with Jekyll on her visit to him for the treatment of cuts left by Little (0:17–0:22). In Frankenstein, a locket in the possession of the youngest son William attracts the Creature’s attention and the beauty of the likeness inside inspires him to murder the child. Here, Jekyll quickly sweeps the little piece of jewelry up and out of sight: this necklace, like the locket, becomes an inspiration for the artificially created being’s violence. Hyde also misquotes the line Mary Shelley gave to her Creature after Frankenstein refused to create a mate for him: “I shall be with you on your wedding night.”86 Hyde revises this line when he refers to Jekyll in his conversation outside the laboratory door with Mr. Utterson: “I shall be with him on his wedding night” (0:46). Shelley’s line is a horrific threat; but given that Hyde is Jekyll, the reference here is as ironic as it is horrific. Hyde’s suicide by hanging imitates the accidental, though not fatal, hanging of Frankenstein’s Creature near the beginning of Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s 89

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Frankenstein (1994). Given Hyde’s recent discovery of the drug’s regenerative powers, his suicide may, of course, be a ruse. This event is topped by the on-screen appearance within the film frame of Jekyll transforming into Hyde. The very last word, however, goes to a bible quote that suggests, as does the distribution of Jekyll’s drug to a variety of London doctors for analysis toward the end of Wickes’s film, that this struggle for the power of god is not over:

See now that I, even I, am He and there is no God beside Me: I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.

(Deuteronomy 32:39)

The film’s closing thus involves numerous closings or exits from the melodrama: the use of an intertextual birth motif as one for death, the premiere of the Jekyll–Hyde on screen performance following the death of the performer, and an incantation suggesting that this is not the first time Hyde has been discovered and thus, possibly, not the last. The film’s closure is thorough, but it also assigns the narrative a mythical context, which, in itself, implies that what has happened before is likely to happen again. Herbert George Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)87 is a story that, like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, places many gothic and detective genre elements in conjunction with those of science fiction and the discourse of science. Moreau’s actions, however, are somewhat different from Frankenstein’s and Jekyll’s and his objectives are far more deliberated. Moreau reacts to his initial success, not with horror as Frankenstein does, and not only by repeating it, as Jekyll does, but by engaging in new experiments of both a surgical and sociological nature; thus his science project presents an alternative to the existing simulacrum that is much more fully developed than those that appear in the earlier stories. More uniquely, The Island of Doctor Moreau immediately adopts the point of view of a principal victim, Edward Prendick, a position that is carried over directly into its more recent film adaptations. Like Shelley and Stevenson, Wells provides a frame that at once distances his readers and brings them closer to the story: in this case, the frame is created by Edward’s nephew Charles who confirms certain facts in relation to his uncle’s otherwise unverifiable story, and then allows Prendick’s “notes” to tell that story. Prendick survives the collision of the Lady Vain on Feb. 1, 1887, by taking refuge with two other men in a dingy; the other two go overboard fighting, apparently over who is to be cannibalized first. Prendick is later rescued by the Ipecacuanha, an ill-kept ship with a drunkard for a Captain and carrying Montgomery and his cargo, including a large female puma and numerous other animals, as well as several strange men, to an unnamed island. Montgomery, a bit of a drunkard himself, takes an interest in Prendick, thus ensuring his recovery. Prendick is 90

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in bad shape, and remembers little of being brought on board. His first direct and fully conscious encounter with one of the strange men on the ship is colored by what he assumes is his memory of seeing them earlier, when he was barely alive: He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders […] still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature. I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yet – if the contradiction is credible – I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me.88 When Montgomery and the cargo are put off on a launch near their island destination, the Captain insists that Prendick go with them, saying: “This ship ain’t for beasts and cannibals, and worse than beasts, any more. Overboard you go […]”89 Prendick thus has further opportunities to visually inspect these strange beings, to observe their odd proportions, to listen to their uncanny voices, and to experience “the queer spasm of disgust”90 they arouse in him. Prendick soon discovers that Montgomery is working with Dr. Moreau on some very peculiar experiments; he also recalls the name of Moreau as having something to do with a journalist who got into his lab by pretending to be an assistant, and then gathered information for a shocking pamphlet that included an account of a flayed and mutilated dog escaping from Moreau’s house.91 The scandal ended Moreau’s career in England, but he renewed his studies on the island. Prendick’s nerves are upset further by the screams of the puma, which is suffering, as he later realizes, from Moreau’s efforts to turn it into something like a human: Yet had I known such a pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb I believe – I have thought since – I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.92 Not understanding and wishing only to escape the sound, Prendick goes for a walk, during which he is disturbed by glimpses of more of the beast-men until he decides to return to the compound. He is stalked by something until he panics and, as he says: I completely lost my head with fear, and began running along the sand. Forthwith there came the swift patter of soft feet in pursuit. I gave a wild cry and redoubled my pace […] So long as I live I shall remember the terror of that chase. I ran near the water’s edge, and heard every now and then the splash of the feet that gained upon me. Far away, hopelessly far, was the yellow light. All the night about us was black and still. Splash, splash came the pursuing feet nearer and nearer.93 His safe arrival at the buildings, however, brings to his ears what no longer sounds like the puma’s screams, but cries that surely come from a human being. When he goes to investigate, he smells carbolic acid, sees blood in the sink, and then “something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged.”94 At this point, Prendick decides that Moreau is engaged in experiments 91

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on humans and, fearing he is the next subject, he flees. He soon meets up with more of the beastmen, who are able to speak, but most have some deformity of the hands.95 They live by the Law set out for them by Moreau: they do not kill, eat meat, slurp their drink, or walk on all fours; and the overwrought Prendick finds himself participating in what, to him, is a mad, hysterical, ritualized affirmation of Moreau’s claim to power: “His is the House of Pain. His is the Hand that Makes. His is the Hand that wounds. His is the Hand that heals […] His is the lightning-flash […]” 96 And the repeated refrain: “Are we not men?”97 Eventually, Montgomery and Moreau catch up with him and, in spite of his readiness to commit suicide by drowning rather than face the torture he believes they want to inflict on him,98 they convince him that the experiments involve the conversion of animals into human-like beings by means of vivisection, blood transfusions, and various inoculations, and that they have no intention of operating on him. First, Moreau worked on sheep, and then he altered a gorilla, which he considers exemplary of the “negroid” type, and subsequently he even taught it to speak and count.99 Most of the offspring produced by his creations die and those that do not, he transforms into some odd rabbit-like things. When Prendick questions the pain his subjects suffer, Moreau is annoyed, finding pain to be nothing but “the mark of the beast.”100 Meanwhile, however, the animals have begun killing the rabbits Montgomery brought on his latest supply run, obviously a violation of Moreau’s prohibitions and thus a threat to his authority. Moreau, Montgomery, and Prendick go out to meet the beast-men to deal with the situation. Moreau, intending to force the guilty party back to the House of Pain for correction, ends up turning his creatures into a mob that pursues the Leopard-Man. Prendick shoots this creature out of pity just before the rest catch up with it. About two months later, the puma, or what used to be the puma, escapes, breaking Prendick’s arm in the process, causing Prendick to swear and Moreau to follow the puma only to be killed by his beast-men. Montgomery goes off to teach the beast-men how to get drunk and is killed shortly after. The beast-men soon begin to revert to their former animal state. Prendick survives for a while with the aid of a Dog-Man; when it is killed, he fears his own life will soon be at an end, until a small boat carrying two dead men, possibly from the Ipecacuanha, drifts in and he grabs the opportunity as one with less risk than what he faces on the island alone. After three days adrift, he is rescued. Finding that people believe his experiences to be proof of his madness, he claims amnesia and removes himself as much as possible from the company of men in favor of that of books. The discourse of psychology is present in Prendick’s horrific discovery of Moreau’s activities and his response to the beast-men: as he first misinterprets and then understands the clues to the island reality, his disgust quickly shifts from the beast-men to his fellow scientists101 and, after his rescue, to his fellows in general. In this, there is a decidedly Swiftian quality to the perception Prendick comes to have of what he once regarded as natural and normal.102 Psychology is specifically presented as transitional to the sociological in Prendick’s experiences and insofar as Moreau uses strategies designed to control his creations, particularly their induction into the symbolic by way of speech and the Law. The hierarchy of Moreau’s world is asserted by this control and further demonstrated by the character of the Sayer, the Leopard-Man, and others, such as M’Ling, who represents the contribution of voluntary dog-like devotion and servitude to the social structure. The island setting expands on the Robinson Crusoe experience and the private laboratory familiar to the science of the eighteenth century, and invokes Darwin’s descriptions of nature at 92

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large as a kind of laboratory where the battles of evolution take place.103 While decidedly “primitive” in vegetation, it is also clearly a place where forms are in constant flux, if only because of Moreau’s efforts to transform animals into humans, with little, if any, thought to the pain that he is inflicting on his subjects.104 As the controlling scientist, Moreau himself is both the pinnacle of the local hierarchy and the principal representative of the agency of evolution. As R.D. Haynes (1981) observes in a discussion of the text, evolution posed numerous challenges to Christian theology in the nineteenth century: These were, firstly, the stress on chance variations as the raw material for an arbitrary, nondirectional evolutionary process; secondly the inevitable waste thereby involved, since those variations which proved less fitted for survival in the struggle for existence became extinct; and thirdly the consequent pain which must necessarily be suffered by the ill-adapted.105 The world Moreau creates fulfills this evolutionary nightmare, being ultimately a wasteland filled with his failed experiments, which are not only a waste in terms of his scientific expertise, the pain the animals are forced to endure, and the sheer futility of the project as the essential nature of the animals cannot be permanently altered;106 but also a waste insofar as they remain abject107 to such an extent that even induction into the Lacanian realm of the Symbolic by the Law cannot provide them with a stable and unambiguous categorization as human.108 Unlike Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, Moreau does not birth a single new life form or turn his experimental interests on himself, but rather succeeds, as Helios does still more covertly in the 2004 film version of Frankenstein, in creating an entire society of artificial beings that is largely under his control and direction. Prendick’s experiences and discoveries in Moreau’s wasteland lead directly to a new awareness of an alternative to what he once thought of as natural, and he finds he can no more go back “home” than Jekyll could go back to being Jekyll once he had invented Hyde. His frantic, momentary bonding with the fringe world of the beast-men may be seen as a last desperate effort to continue as a social being after having rejected the human society offered by Moreau.109 Even the “mental specialist” he consults upon his return to civilization cannot fully dispel his feeling that the people around him are beast-people: Prendick lives, where the scientists Frankenstein, Jekyll, and Moreau all die, but Prendick the possessor of privileged information, Prendick the possessor of an enhanced understanding of the simulacrum – Prendick the victim – cannot go back to being who he was before he met Moreau. The Island of Lost Souls (1932) In director Erle C. Kenton’s film adaptation of Wells’s story, The Island of Lost Souls,110 Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) is rescued from the dingy in which he escaped a shipwreck and then he is restored to health by a former medical student named Montgomery (Arthur Hohl), who also kindly telegraphs Parker’s fiancée Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams) with the news that Parker has survived and the date his rescue ship is expected at port. Unfortunately, Parker expresses his opinion of the ship captain’s ill treatment of a beast-man and, subsequently, as Montgomery is departing with the cargo, he is literally thrown overboard and onto the other boat. Parker goes to the nearby island 93

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with Montgomery and Moreau (Charles Laughton). During the hike to the house, which includes passage through cave tunnels and a mile or so of jungle, Parker has the opportunity to observe Moreau’s handy and ready use of his whip on the array of creatures that watch them from the dark recesses and the trees. Parker soon discovers that Montgomery is Moreau’s assistant and that the two men have inhabited this unnamed island for many years along with the numerous products of Moreau’s experimental vivisections and surgeries. As in Wells’s text, Parker is sensitive to the screams of Moreau’s current patient and, upon seeing him strapped to an operating table, thinks that Moreau is practicing on humans, and flees. The feline-woman Lota (Kathleen Burke) helps him out of the compound and introduces him to the beast-men, of whom the Sayer-of-the-Law (Bela Lugosi) is a sort of leader. Parker listens in horror as they recite Moreau’s laws and chant “Are we not men?” after each refrain. Moreau arrives, subdues the beast-men, and shows Parker his various experiments on plants and explains that he has moved on to animals. As they watch some of the beast-men treading on a mill wheel, he asks: “You know what it means to feel like God?” When Moreau gets the idea of using Parker as a breeding partner for Lota, Parker loses any chance he had of an easy escape. Lota, who is the only female on the island, finds him reading a book about electricity and radios that he says might help him leave the island, so she throws it in the water. Parker is responsive to her flirtations, but after a kiss he notices her strange fingers and realizes that she too is one of Moreau’s experiments. Moreau, who has been observing the pair, is delighted with Lota’s responses, particularly the discovery that she can cry, so he proposes to take her back to the House of Pain to purge the final beast elements from her. Fortunately for Parker, his fiancée notices his failure to arrive as scheduled on the rescue ship, and she goes to the American Consulate for assistance. The Captain who abandoned Parker is forced to provide coordinates for the island, and Ruth, with a little help from a much friendlier ship’s captain named Donahue, is reunited with Parker. They enjoy a dinner served by M’Ling, but after Ruth is threatened by a beast-man who comes in through her barred bedroom window, they decide it is really time to depart. Donahue goes ahead to collect his crew with the intention of bringing them back to escort Ruth and Parker to the ship; unfortunately, he is killed on the way by the beast-men. Ruth, Montgomery, and Parker mange to escape just as the creatures turn on their maker, fasten him to his own operating table, and begin to wield the instruments he once applied to them. Lota, who has earned the pity of both Parker and Montgomery, dies defending the escaping humans from an attack by a beast-man. Ruth, Montgomery, and Parker row back to the ship as the entire compound goes up in flames. The film extends and slightly alters the narrative’s social and biological hierarchy so that the existing simulacrum is more assertively and repeatedly affirmed, and Moreau’s challenge to it dealt with even more thoroughly. The captain’s brutish behavior is not only laid out, as in the novel, in comparison to that of the beast-men and animals his ship carries as cargo, as well as the men it carries as passengers, he is brought to account for his conduct by the authorities. Moreau’s beastmen are clearly his slaves and, as in the novel, they are punished when they fail to follow his rules. Moreau himself was ostracized by the scientific community for failing to conform to its moral and ethical expectations: although he could not escape their judgment, he seems to have escaped its effects until, in this film at least, the laws governing conduct at sea bring his island under the jurisdictional control of the American consulate. The moment the beast-men turn on him is thus 94

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posed more clearly as the moment of consequence for his violations of the prevailing model: the beast-men are agents of nature, but here, like Frankenstein’s Creature, they also become agents of the existing simulacrum from the human perspective, rather than agents of their creator’s new one. The film loses more than it retains of the book’s portrayal of the Prendick–Parker point of view in that the camera simply follows the events and does relatively little to further the audience’s identification with any single character. It does alter the story by dramatizing a gender as well as a class-based hierarchy: it exaggerates Moreau’s voyeuristic observation of Lota with Parker and makes both Lota and Ruth into objects of leering male gazes and pursuits. Lota, however, gets much closer to finding a place in human society with Parker than her male counterparts do with Ruth, suggesting, perhaps, that less is expected of women and thus their roles easier to imitate. In spite of his shady past, even Montgomery is added to the film’s roster of good men from Euroamerican society, all of whom apply their energies to aid Ruth and rescue Parker. Given these changes, even the filmic addition of a long rock tunnel and a stretch of jungle between the beach and Moreau’s inner sanctum cannot lend the island the status of isolated kingdom unto itself that it has in the book. Those who stumble across it respond with disgust, more than personal fear: after his initial rescue, Parker is only afraid for his life for the few brief moments that he thinks Moreau might be planning to use him for surgical experiments; even Ruth only screams a few times when she catches unexpected glimpses of the beast-men. Overall, the film does not create a strong impression of Parker as a victim or even a potential victim in the melodramatic sense. Parker and the other outsiders are merely inconvenienced by a shipwreck and Parker’s incidental discovery of Moreau’s distorted little world. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) In director Don Taylor’s version of the novel, detailed in the “Filmography,” the frame is abbreviated such that the story begins with three men afloat in the dingy from the Lady Vain, goes directly to the landing of the survivors on the island, and ends with the main character, Andrew Braddock, in the same dingy with a woman, possibly a beast-woman, joyfully signaling a rescue ship. The overall adaptation is more interesting than that in the earlier film because it makes more use of melodramatic devices. For example, both films add a romantic interest for Braddock, but the 1977 film does not bother with the orchestrated mating experiment, favoring instead a presentation of Braddock’s relationship with Maria that makes her a symbol of his escape from the status of victim to a complete triumph over Moreau’s efforts to control him. Where Lota falls in defense of Parker’s escape in the 1932 film, here it is M’Ling who is attacked and killed by a big cat as he attempts to leave with Braddock and Maria (1:32). As in the text narrative, Braddock has much to do with the uprising of the beast-men; here, Moreau further complicates the situation by shooting Montgomery (1:11). He also does what Prendick only fears: he makes Braddock himself another victim of his science with the aim of regressing him to his animal origins by chemical injections, rather than surgery. Braddock’s subjective experiences are made immediately accessible to the audience by the actual events and the specific camera work and sets. The jungle is used to visually establish his initial state of confusion 95

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and disorientation (0:06), which is repeated when he returns to the compound from the dingy (0:28);111 while the semi-nude shots of him with Maria (0:36–0:39), particularly in the jungle near the dingy (0:56), readily suggest the Garden of Eden and a “natural” state of innocence. Braddock’s horror and frustration at his changed appearance, captivity, and his loss of language and manual dexterity are made clear in his interactions with both Moreau and Maria. The moment when he awakens strapped to a gurney and first sees himself in the mirror Moreau has apparently set up for the purpose (1:09) is particularly effective: it reverses Frankenstein’s Creature’s mirror stage moment and provides a sharp contrast to the more objective interest Hyde takes in his reflection. Several archetypal tableaux also contribute to the narrative. For example, when Braddock goes exploring, he finds that Moreau has a very conventional library stocked with books, a globe, wall maps, and the usual objects one might expect to find in the library of a dedicated scientist. Moreau, however, also shows him what is behind the closed cupboard doors (0:19): bottled embryos from a variety of animals, as well as a human; later, Braddock discovers the cages of animals awaiting Moreau’s attention (0:30–0:34). Even more vivid, however, are the images of Moreau’s body hanging (1:27) and then hanging in front of his burning compound (1:35): this latter shot is certainly intended to show nature’s retribution for his meddling in the order of things. The cave (0:44, 0:52) where the beast-men reside is also an image with metaphoric resonances: the place specifically invokes Plato’s well-worn analogy about man and his limited knowledge of the universe. While it does not include any dream sequences or sequences intended to exteriorize specific “interior” fantasies or experiences of the mind, and it does not reach for the archetypal elements approach of the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this film is far more visually sophisticated in its representation of the experiences and events of the story than the 1932 version of it, particularly those of the villain’s would-be victim. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) John Frankenheimer’s film victim, like Don Taylor’s, is much “handier” than the text’s Prendick: Douglas, for example, can pick a lock (0:18) and handle a motorized raft. This film, which is detailed in the “Filmography,” gives still more prominence to the signs of science in the form of large bottled embryos and failed experiments, elaborate zoo, and birthing scene (0:20–0:22). Both films favor an emphasis on gene manipulation over strictly surgical alteration as the means by which the beast-people are created, and develop the specific character of several of them. Here, the Sayer recites Moreau’s laws and also preaches and carries a staff with a mask as a prop; Aissa, the cat-woman, is the good daughter; and Azezello is the good dog, until his taste for the kill and running with the pack gets the better of him: Azezello’s vicious pursuit and hanging of Aissa (1:21) does resonate with a little more than the usual “cats and dogs” cliché given the upper hand gained by the larger felines released by the beast-humans at the end of the 1977 film. Frankenheimer’s version is also unique in its exaggeration of Moreau’s god complex and the element of parody between the individuals and strata of his world. An enthusiastic interpretation might even include a brief discussion of other films, such as Apocalypse Now (1979), as one of the film’s layers of imitation and mockery.

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Unlike the earlier film, this one represents the hierarchal levels of the island’s society as an overt parody of the chain of being stretching from god to humans to beasts. Moreau parodies god, acting the part of the benevolent father, who also happens to have an extremely effective weapon ever at the ready: the pain-inflicting implant is an unsurprising 1990s substitution for the House of Pain. Moreau’s ever-present midget creation (0:34), with the aid of matching clothes and a miniature piano, specifically imitates him and is also very quick to anticipate and satisfy his need for the control device (1:00) when Hyena-Swine and the others break into the house. Before Moreau’s death, Montgomery shadows Moreau’s anti-regression injections with concoctions of his own that keep the creatures happy and coming to him for more (0:48). After Moreau’s death, Montgomery expands and exaggerates the parody (1:07), mocking Moreau’s clothes, his allergy to the sun, and his pomposity and all round god-complex. The development of the fringe society created by Moreau shows the beast-people as recyclers: they use the junk of civilization to build their homes (0:25) – in earlier films they live in huts or caves. In this way of living, they parody the less wealthy members of the satellite-age mainstream and also parody the working class in that they do Moreau’s housework for him and even assist in his laboratory with little reward beyond his benevolence. Those allowed inside the house all seem to be male, with the exception of Aissa whose primary function seems to be to dote on her “father” (0:54–0:56) and be ornamentally beautiful (0:13). While Aissa’s feline origins presumably make her role a natural one such that she is never in need of discipline, most of the others live as Moreau directs because he punishes them if they do not. The laws and pain devices thus parody the social order and penal system supporting that order in the “civilized” world. Hyena-Swine’s question to his father, posed after he has torn out his pain implant: “If there’s no more pain, then is there no more law?” is entirely apt. This father–son relationship turns somewhat Oedipal when the rebellious Hyena-Swine then kills Moreau (1:04). Douglas is brought and forced to bow and grovel before the newly empowered beast-man. To ensure his own survival, he manipulates the situation by insinuating that Hyena-Swine has competition for the top position in the new hierarchy. Needless to say, the beast-men soon turn on each other and particularly on Hyena-Swine, who then kills himself by walking into a burning building (1:26). The beast-men’s final rampage may be seen as a regression setting up the final scenes showing the destructive aspects of human society as a perpetuation of their animal nature, or as a deeper parody of the “human.” This film, unlike the earlier two, includes something of Wells’s conclusion in which the protagonist returns to human society only to find that he can no longer live within it as he once did, his experiences having changed him so that he can no longer accept it simply because he recognizes it as the flawed simulacrum that it is and not an absolute. The concluding voice-over from Douglas, safely returned to civilization, and only slightly revised from the original text, is certainly a warning to those who would follow in Moreau’s footsteps … or rather, those who find themselves the victims of those who do follow in his footsteps: Most times, I keep the memory far in the back of my mind, a distant cloud, but there are times when the little cloud spreads until it obscures the sky. At those times, I look about me at my fellow man, and I’m reminded of some likeness to the beast people and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them and they’re neither wholly animal nor wholly man but an unstable combination of both […] as unstable as anything Moreau created. And I go in fear. 97

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Promethean prototypes for tech-noir The core elements of the Promethean story reappear in tech-noir film. These elements include the characters of the bad ruler in control of “fire,” the philanthropist-victim with the gift of foresight, and humans and not-quite-human beings as part of a chain of being that may have been reinvented several times over the ages. The Promethean plot action of wrongful or excessive condemnation, incarceration, torture, hostage taking, and other forms of violence are frequently revisited in technoir, as is the fixation on body parts. The tech-noir film is often set in a “wasteland” that may even evoke Tartarus and use references to the natural elements to emphasize the magnitude of what is at stake. The action underway is not merely about who gets to be in charge: from the human perspective at least, it is about the simulacrum as a whole. Shelley, Stevenson, and Wells develop and update these constituent units. Oedipal interpretations remain applicable to their characters, as they are to Prometheus: their scientists, like many a deity, find their lives or their claim to power threatened by their “son.” The authors of these narratives, however, are clearly far more interested in plot dynamics related to the problematic aspects of the Promethean gift and the development of motifs, characters, and settings that will satisfactorily articulate those dynamics. Film adaptations of Frankenstein, Jekyll, and Moreau develop the literary plots and associated constituent units in ways that sometimes accent Aeschylus’s dramatic visualizations of Prometheus and frequently align the narratives more closely with the coalescing film genre of tech-noir: the more successful of these adaptations typically show an exaggeration of the melodramatic elements and an emphasis on the victim’s point of view. The original Frankenstein contributions to the Promethean narrative include the story frame and adjustments to the wasteland, such that it is represented by the Arctic and by the grief-stricken Frankenstein family home. The bad ruler becomes the “mad” scientist in control of technology, particularly lightning and electricity, and the attention to Prometheus’s liver shifts to the patchwork approach to creating new life by borrowing parts from the dead.112 Prometheus’s gift of foresight and knowledge of his future release becomes Frankenstein’s dream about what is to come for him. The stalking of the creator and his family by his Creature and of the Creature by the creator may be seen as a melodramatic revision of the dynamics of the Prometheus–Zeus relationship. Shelley’s use of the human form, artificial human form, and various kinds of likeness, such as portraits, to visually articulate the challenge posed by the Creature to the “natural” chain of being and simulacrum as a whole may also be seen as adaptations of the mythologized reinventions of the forms and types of man and of woman as an “artificial” being. The Creature himself suggests one of the defective types created before the age of heroes. Not only is he ugly, he is denied both the satisfactions of “nurture” and access to the technology possessed by his creator. He is intelligent, violent, and at once hypermasculine in his verticality and propensity to violence, feminine in his state of social beggary, and abject in that he is neither person nor object. The Promethean association of fire with civilization is thus reversed such that it becomes a means to the “primitive.” The sidelined love interest is also adjusted, such that Elizabeth, unlike Io, not only suffers for her involvement with an ambitious male but dies because of it. In the Frankenstein films, Shelley’s adaptations are adjusted to conform to the expectations of twentieth-century audiences. While the original Frankenstein was a student dabbling in discarded theories and disoriented by his first separation from his family; Whale’s scientist is an ambitious 98

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upper class scientist; Branagh’s is a man-child who never recovers from his mother’s death; and Nispel’s scientist is a perfect monopathic villain who recognizes both the value of aesthetics and the importance of control. Shelley anthropomorphized her Creature by means of recognizable mirror and other coming-of-age experiences and his attempts to adopt a role relative to society, albeit that of stalker and killer. Whale’s Frankenstein, like many monster films, skips the creature’s entrance to the symbolic realm; Branagh’s restores Shelley’s conception of the Creature’s maturation; while Nispel’s Deucalion appears fully matured with a level of understanding far exceeding that of the humans whose world is compromised by Helios’s science. In all versions, the story of the sidelined love interest runs parallel to the unfolding consequences of the scientist’s failure to understand the role of nurture in the development of any living creature’s psyche, as well as its body; and also the relative emphasis placed on torture, a subject treated far more vividly in the films than the text. Shelley’s Creature harms no one until it is rejected not once, but twice, and realizes the impossibility of ever finding a place in existing society. Whale’s hunchbacked Fritz tortures the Creature to no purpose, and Waldman tortures it in the name of science, and then the Creature kills those who hurt it. In Branagh’s film, the torture is more psychological and the Creature’s violence at least, as in Shelley and in Whale’s film, seems to be a byproduct of a failure to nurture it properly. In Nispel’s film, psychological torment reaches a peak in the conflict between Helios’s Creatures’ desire for death and the programming that prevents them from committing suicide. Deucalion, however, seems to have a much more powerful life force and is motivated by the Promethean desire to protect those whom his creator has harmed or would harm to further his ambition and he actually establishes a partnership of sorts with a female detective. The flight and pursuit theme is never neglected in the films; indeed, such scenes are integral to the fear of torture, pain, and death. While this element is lent a somewhat traditional and gothic treatment in the earlier two films, Nispel places it in the context of the police detective story and “naturalizes” the artificially created serial killer with references to human pathology. Shelley develops the elements of fire and ice in relation to her plot, with fire representing the spark of life and ice the death that overtakes the “mad” scientist and carries his creation away. Whale adds to the repertoire of visual motifs and the complexity of the mise-en-scène with various representations of the human form and juxtapositions of animated and deceased bodies and skeletons. Branagh develops the birthing and death scenes by making realistic and symbolic use of water and fire. Nispel seems more interested in genre markers than symbolism and archetypal elements; nevertheless he brings Deucalion to the rescue by way of the ocean and lends him a special affinity for electricity. He also considerably broadens the points of narrative reference to include newspaper accounts that clearly do not cover the whole story, films, television static, specific paintings, dancing, and so forth. Films that make a special effort to engage the project of historical reconstruction, as does Branagh’s film, as well as Wickes’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990), add to the framing devices and also draw attention to or insert previously unobserved possibilities or links between the nineteenth-century and the late twentieth-century technological contexts. For example, Branagh’s attention to vaccinations, plague, and amputation, not to mention the twitching frog, contributes to the realization of the chronological depth of the problem addressed in contemporary tech-noir. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its film adaptations up to the early twenty-first century do not provide an absolutely thorough account of the development of the Promethean narrative to 99

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its manifestation in the genre of tech-noir, but they may be taken as a summary of it needing relatively few significant additions for completion. Many of these additions appear in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and their film adaptations. The contributions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the Promethean story, as it had already been adapted by Shelley, include the frame placing the events in a quasi-legal context; the city as a wasteland generated by the inner state of the main characters; and the prioritization of the point of view of the observers and victims of the “mad” scientist by placing the scientist’s account at the end, such that it follows the reader’s realization that he is already dead. The suicide of the scientist is also new, although perhaps not so far removed from Frankenstein’s end at the end of his doomed pursuit of his Creature. The Creature is now the scientist himself, thus the conventional Oedipal son and ever-popular twin theme acquires new resonances that partially erase the Oedipal associations in favor of those between siblings. Hyde develops the Frankensteinian Creature’s associations with the “primitive,” such that science becomes a means of exploring the past, as well as the “base,” the abject, and that which is generally both revolting and violent. The narrative also develops the experiential aspects of Jekyll’s transformation in terms of the witnesses’ perceptions of his physical body and his criminal acts, as well as Jekyll’s personal experience of the emergence of Hyde on an inner level and his subsequent addiction to the drug and to Hyde. Robertson’s 1920 film based on this story has a text prologue that asserts a more melodramatic plot – the battle between good and evil, includes what becomes the standard love interest to this particular story, adds more detail with regard to both class and gender behavioral conventions, and also incorporates a story within the otherwise strictly linear story, as Gina tells about the previous history of her ring. Mamoulian’s 1931 film also adds the sidelined love interest, pointing again to the importance of nurture in the cultivation of human relationships and of behavior that conforms with social ideals, but is more noteworthy for its emphasis on both psychological torture and physical violence and for its complex symbol and art-filled mise-en-scène pointing, less to the chain of being, and more to a complex conceptual mise-en-abyme derived from historical and mythological contexts and representations of male–female relationships. Wickes’s 1990 film expands the repertoire of characters, adding, among others, the reporter more interested in scandal than news and members of the upper, working, and lower classes, including a wider cross-section of women: servant, fallen woman, and physically injured woman and girl. This film also uses the drawing and photograph as modes of representation and shows them in the process of being made. This version, like Redfield’s 2002 film, is marked by a slight, but significant, plot shift away from the involuntary reassertion of the drug’s power as something beyond the remorseful doctor’s control to the doctor, rather than Hyde, as addict and possibly serial killer. In these, as in all of the films, the doctor’s villainy seems the more apparent for the representations of Hyde’s aggressions – Jekyll’s philanthropy hardly seems to outweigh the harm that follows from his experiments. Both of these more recent films, like Branagh’s Frankenstein, also suggest that the scientist’s project has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to humankind, alleviating a wide range of illnesses and handicaps, such as senility, old age, and so forth: one wonders what Jekyll might have done for the senile old Carew had his drug abuse and violence not brought the police, Ashton, and Utterson, as well as Claire, to his door. The biblical quotation at the end, like the text prologue to the 1920 film, furthers a mythologizing or archetypal understanding of the story.

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Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau develops and also adds some particular elements to the repertoire established by the earlier texts about Frankenstein and Jekyll: the flight and pursuit scenes are much more intense, and vivid descriptions of Prendick’s confusion, emotional state, and physical exertions contribute to the reader’s awareness of the direness of his situation as a victim of both circumstance and science. Similarly, the attention to torture in the name of science is far more thorough for being lent the voice of the puma’s screams, which soon transform into equally wrenching human-like cries: Prendick, not surprisingly, determines to commit suicide rather than be subjected to Moreau’s ministrations. That Prendick’s entire nightmare begins with the Captain’s confusion of him with “cannibals” is clearly a misinterpretation of his place in the social hierarchy, but also adds that stratum of humanity to the revised chain of being. The treatment of the society of the beast-men as a parody of “civilized” human society is also new. Frankenstein’s Creature and Mr. Hyde were the only ones of their kind, so they might be understood as parodies of the person, or the “son,” but only imply a parody of society as a whole. Other noteworthy details are the specific identification of Moreau’s gun with lightning, which asserts the importance of the element of fire as a means of control; the attention to the deformity of the hands of the artificial beings; and the invention of the Laws as a means of protecting humans from the not quite human – certainly a satiric comment on the laws of human society in general insofar as they tend to protect class or racially invested interests rather than those of the individual. The Island of Lost Souls (1932), like the contemporary Frankenstein film (1931), alters Wells’s representation of the social hierarchy in such a manner that it hardly seems anyone of affluence is ever in any real danger. It does, however, add the element of voyeurism, the gaze applied to females, and the “scientific” mating experiment. Male–female relationships are treated somewhat reductively as a matter of breeding possibilities and personal attraction without reference to family legacy and property, such as backed both Frankenstein’s and Jekyll’s enterprises. Taylor’s 1977 film adjusts the love interest such that Maria’s status as one of Moreau’s experiments remains ambiguous and her relationship to Braddock is entirely naturalized, being consensual and beyond the influence of family hereditary interests or even marriage contracts. Likewise, Montgomery’s character is simplified such that he draws a clear line between experimenting on animals and experimenting on humans and Moreau reveals the purity of his villainy by shooting him upon the instant of this revelation. While the characters are thus all more completely monopathic, this film’s visual treatment of Braddock’s emotional responses draws the audience even more intimately into his experiences than does Wells’s story. The most important addition to this repertoire of constituent units to be found in Frankenheimer’s 1996 film is the development of the beast-humans as characters and of multiple levels of imitation and parody, such that Moreau’s ambition is merely an extension of a monkey-like desire to copy. The weird “fringe” society created by the beast-humans around the Sayer-of-the-Law, but subject to intrusions and assertions by Moreau when he sallies forth from his own carefully constructed and decorated compound, echoes, like other plots, themes, and motifs in Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, through the tech-noir films created between 1970 and 2005.

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Notes    1. Although Aeschylus is widely credited as the author of this trilogy, both his authorship and the order in which the plays were supposed to be performed are the subject of debate. It does seem likely that if he did begin the play, it was probably finished by someone else. See Lois Spatz, Aeschylus (Boston: Twayne, 1982) 141–46 for a summary of the arguments on this subjects as well as D.J. Conacher, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: A Literary Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980) appendix 1.    2. Klaus W. Vowe, “Monster and Machine: Romantic Misreadings of the Dawning of the Industrial Era,” British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations, Festschrift for Horst Meller, eds. Michael Gassenmeier, Petra Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Erik Pointner (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag G. Winter, 1998) 262.   3. For a brief history of the artificial being in the century before Frankenstein, see Jürgen Barkhoff, “Perfecting Nature – Surpassing God: The Dream of Creating Artificial Humans around 1800,” eds. Christian Emden and David Midgley, Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination, Papers from the Conference “The Fragile Tradition,” Cambridge, 2002, vol. 3 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) 39–55.    4. There are numerous discussions of the role of the “double” in science fiction to be found, including: J.P. Telotte’s “Human Artifice and the Science Fiction Film,” Film Quarterly 36.3 (1983): 44–51; and “The Doubles of Fantasy and the Space of Desire,” Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 152–59. On the human-machine relationship articulated in films with cyborgs, androids, and other artificial intelligences in the context of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, see Conrad Shumaker, “More Human than Humans: Society, Salvation, and the Outsider in Some Popular Films of the 1980s,” Journal of American Culture 13 (Winter 1990): 77–84.    5. Tzvetan Todorov discusses this feature as one of three aspects of the time of narrative. Narratives, he explains, may be temporally distorted and combined by linking, alternating, or embedding. Embedding, “the inclusion of one story inside another,” is here discussed in terms of a mise-en-abyme effect. Todorov’s discussion of embedding may be found in “The Categories of Literary Narrative,” Papers on Language and Literature 16.1 (Winter 1980): 21–22. See also Lucien Dällenbach’s The Mirror in the Text (Cambridge: University of Chicago Press, 1989) on mise-en-abyme. Dällenbach gives very little attention to visual examples of mise-en-abyme and does not include references to Leo Steinberg’s and Svetlana Alpers’s analyses of Las Meninas.    6. Leo Steinberg, “Velazquez Las Meninas,” October 19 (Winter 1982): 53.   7. Steinberg, “Velazquez Las Meninas” 53.   8. Steinberg, “Velazquez Las Meninas” 53.    9. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas” (1983) Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology, selections and commentary by Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon, 1995) 281–90.   10. Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation» 53.   11. See also the discussion of the cave and the replication of a couch or chair in books VII and XI of Plato’s Republic.   12. Hesiod, “Theogony,” Theogony and Works and Days, trans., intro., and notes by M.L. West (Oxford University Press, 1999) 7–8.   13. Hesiod, “Theogony” 17–18.   14. Hesiod, “Theogony” 23.   15. Hesiod, “Theogony” 24–25.   16. Hesiod, “Theogony” 18–19, Hesiod, “Works and Days,” Theogony and Works and Days 38–39.   17. Hesiod, “Works and Days” 40.   18. Hesiod, “Works and Days” 40–42. 102

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  19. George Thomson, “Prometheia,” Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941) 297–324. On other reconstructions of the second and third parts of the trilogy, see Conacher, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound 114–19.   20. Thomson, “Prometheia” 309–13.   21. C.J. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I: The Elements in the Trilogy,” Phoenix 17.3 (1963) 188–89. Herington supports this argument with a reference to Birds, an apparent parody of Aeschylus’s play by Aristophanes. This point is more thoroughly developed in “Part II: Birds and Prometheia,” Phoenix 17.4 (1963): 236–43. Herington acknowledges that the interpretation of Birds as a parody of Prometheus Pyrphoros dates to at least the later part of the nineteenth century, but that at that time this part of the trilogy was thought to come first and thus the interpretation was not compelling. “Part II: Birds and Prometheia” 236.   22. G.M.A. Grube provides a thorough consideration of the argument that this conception of Zeus as a poor deity and of the changes he ostensibly goes through in the trilogy, including the suggestions that the first play either lacks originality or, due to its originality, it must have been written in another time and by a different author: “Zeus in Aeschylus,” The American Journal of Philology 91.1 (January 1970): 43–51.   23. For a more complete analysis by a specialist in the field, see Conacher, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.   24. Thomson, “Prometheia” 323.   25. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 196.   26. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 182, 185.   27. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 186.   28. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 187–88.   29. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 196.   30. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 197.   31. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia: Part I” 189.  32. Ovid, The Metamorphosis of Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955) book I, lines 80–88.  33. Ovid, Metamorphosis book I, line 127.  34. Ovid, Metamorphosis book I, lines 130–31.  35. Ovid, Metamorphosis book I, lines 231–39.  36. Ovid, Metamorphosis book I, lines 389–91.  37. Ovid, Metamorphosis book I, lines 402–15.   38. See, for example, the discussion in Susanna Barsella “The Myth of Prometheus in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron,” MLN 119 Supplement (2004): S120–41; Susan Delaney’s “Renaissance Versions of the Prometheus Myth: Délie 77, Olive 51, and Amours 13,” Michigan Academician XXVI (1994): 419–29; Anthony John Harding, “Myth and the War of Ideas: Coleridge and Shelley on The Prometheus of Aeschylus,” The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995) 230–59.   39. Patricia Junker, “Thomas Cole’s ‘Prometheus Bound:’ An Allegory for the 1840s,” American Art Journal 31.1–2 (2000): 32–55; Olga Raggio, “The Myth of Prometheus: Its Survival and Metamorphoses up to the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21.1–2 (January–June 1958): 44–62; Meredith Shedd, “Prometheus the Primeval Sculptor: Archaeology and Anatomy in EmericDavid’s ‘Recherches sur l’art statuaire,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 54 Bd., H. 1 (1991): 88–106.   40. Richard S. Caldwell interprets all of Aeschylus’s plays in Oedipal terms in “The Pattern of Aeschylean Tragedy,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 101 (1970) 77–94 but notes that in Prometheus, Aeschylus makes drastic alterations to that pattern.   41. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 222–23. There are also numerous studies showing the influence of painting on the early cinema, particularly The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). 103

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 42. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 223. Several scholars have applied Frye’s categories to film; for example Arnold W. Preussner shows how Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) does and does not adhere to the new comedy model. Arnold W. Preussner, “Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and the Genres of Comedy,” Literature/Film Quarterly 16.1 (1988): 39–43. Mark A. Hamilton’s application of Frye’s ideas is more far-reaching in that he attempts to show how Frye’s genres and phases may be used to categorize virtually all of popular film. His goal, he writes, is to “show how each film could serve as one of Frye’s phases of myth by drawing on past mythic plot lines.” Mark A. Hamilton, Categorizing Twentieth-Century Film Using Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism Relating Literature and Film (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2006) 1.  43. Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968) 262.   44. Vanda Zajko does not discuss melodrama, but does argue that much of the appeal of both stories lies in their invocation of the audience’s feeling of empathy for the suffering victim: “Narratives of Tragic Empathy: Prometheus Bound and Frankenstein,” Tragedy in Transition, eds. Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone (Malden: Blackwell, 2007) 172.   45. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), The Essential Frankenstein, ed. Leonard Wolf (Toronto: Penguin, 1993) 81; vol. 1, ch. 3.  46. Shelley, Frankenstein 85; vol. 1, ch. 4.   47. For an alternate psychoanalytic and structural approach to Frankenstein as horror, see Arthur Asa Gardner, “Frankenstein: The New Prometheus” (1992), Popular Fiction: An Anthology, ed. Gary Hoppenstand (New York: Longman, 1998) 736–43. Sarah Canfield Fuller emphasizes the ambiguity in the Creature’s identity and the difficulty of satisfactorily describing it in binary terms: “Reading the Cyborg in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 14.2 (2003): 217–27.   48. For more on Frankenstein as detective fiction, see Gordon Hirsch, “Frankenstein, Detective Fiction and Jekyll and Hyde,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years, eds. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 223–46.   49. Bryon L. Sherwin traces the evolution of golems from Jewish mysticism to contemporary film, but sees Mary Shelley’s creature as part of a separate tradition and that subsequently influenced ideas about the golem. “Golems in the Biotech Century,” Zygon 42.1 (March 2007): 136.   50. Beth Newman, “Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein,” ELH 53.1 (Spring 1986): 147.   51. Jessica Richmond, “ ‘A Paradise of My Own Creation’: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25.4 (December 2003): 295–314.   52. On the presence or rather lack of presence of the Inuit in Frankenstein, see Karen Piper, “Inuit Diasporas: Frankenstein and the Inuit in England,” Romanticism 13.1 (2007): 63–75.   53. For a recent note on the “spark of life” in Shelley’s day, see David Thame, “Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Organization of Matter, and the Spark of Life,” Notes and Queries 49.1 (March 2002): 41–42.   54. Punter interprets the construction of the monster as a construction of “part-objects” signifying “an attempt to bring together the parts of the inner world to form a whole which can somehow achieve cogency and validation in the outer realm.” David Punter, “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction,” Gothic Fictions Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York: AMS, 1989) 17.   55. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth Century Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 45.  56. Shelley, Frankenstein 157; vol. 2, ch. 4.  57. Shelley, Frankenstein 157; vol. 2, ch. 4.  58. Christopher Rovee discusses the aesthetics and cultural implications of miniatures, as well as the detailed realism of the large Elgin marbles in relation to Frankenstein in his “Monsters, Marbles, and Miniatures: Mary Shelley’s Reform Aesthetic,” Studies in the Novel 36.2 (Summer 2004): 147–69. 104

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 59. Shelley, Frankenstein 289; vol. 3, ch. 7.   60. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1982) 1; and Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (Fall 1996): 106–24.  61. Kristeva, Powers of Horror 8.  62. Kristeva, Powers of Horror 11.   63. For more discussion of the “failure of sympathy” in the eighteenth century with reference to Frankenstein, as well as Prometheus, see Harriet Hustis, “Responsible Creativity and the ‘Modernity’ of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus,” SEL 43.4 (Autumn 2003): 845–58.   64. Scott J. Juengel discusses Whale’s adaptation of Frankenstein with attention to the changes in visual aesthetics in his “Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Moving Image,” NOVEL: A Form on Fiction 33.3 (Summer 2000): 353–76. See also James A.W. Heffernan, “Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film,” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (Autumn 1997): 133–58, on both Whale’s adaptation and Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.   65. Branagh’s adaptation of Frankenstein is discussed in William S. Haney II, “Biotechnology and What Makes Us Human: Beyond the Final Frontier,” Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 7.1 (April 2006) [open access journal] and Peter Hajdu, “The Modern Prometheus and the Interpretive Communities,” Neohelicon 34.1 (2007): 59–66; and in Heffernan’s “Looking at the Monster.”   66. Barry Grant notes that poorer horror films tend to be those that reduce death to a spectacle such that a lot of people die, whereas the good ones involve everyone, but in more complex ways: “Experience and Meaning in Genre Films,” Persistence of Vision 3–4 (Summer 1986): 9. Here, Branaugh shows us the impersonal horror of mass death by disease and also uses it as the camouflage by which the Creature escapes the city in a wagon loaded with bodies.   67. For the place of Frankenstein in the search for longevity, see Kenneth V. Iserson, “From Creatures to Corpsicles: Man’s Search for Immortality,” HEC Forum 16.3 (2004): 160–72.   68. For details on the development of the manuscript and short essays on the reception to the book and performance adaptations, as well as excerpts from longer essays on the story, see Katherine Linehan, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: An Authoritative Text: Backgrounds and Contexts, Performance, Adaptations, Criticism (New York: Norton, 2003) and Harry M. Geduld, ed., The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion (New York: Garland, 1983).   69. Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886; Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981) 9; ch. 1.  70. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 5; ch. 1.  71. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 27; ch. 4.  72. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 76; “Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative.”  73. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 79; “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.”  74. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 82; “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.”   75. Irving Massey, “The Third Self: Dracula, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Merimee’s Lokis,” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 6.2 (Autumn 1973): 59.   76. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years, eds. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 161–207.   77. Ed Block, “James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction,” Victorian Studies 25.4 (Summer 1982): 443–67. Block also discusses The Island of Dr. Moreau and Dracula as being influenced by the same ideas, as does Samir Elbarbary in “Heart of Darkness and late-Victorian fascination with the Primitive and the Double,” Twentieth Century Literature 39.1 (Spring 1993): 113–28. In the late nineteenth century, science was associated with the discovery of the primitive and the fiction of the period makes the same connection.   78. For more on Stevenson’s book as detective fiction, see Hirsch, “Frankenstein, Detective Fiction and Jekyll and Hyde.”

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  79. Rosemary Jackson discusses both Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in her essay: “Narcissism and Beyond: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Frankenstein and Fantasies of the Double,” Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, No. 19 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981) 43–53.   80. Masao Miyoshi, “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde,” College English 27.6 (March 1966): 472.   81. So thoroughly “psychological” is this story that Jekyll and Hyde are used as terms in psychological and sociological studies. See J.L. Bernard and M.L. Bernard “The Abusive Male Seeking Treatment: Jekyll and Hyde,” Family Relations 33.4 (October 1984): 543–47. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges go so far as to analyze the characters in the novel in relation to the psychological and behavioral characteristics of the author and his wife in “Demonic Disturbances of Sexual Identity: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr/s Hyde,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 23.1 (Autumn 1989): 63–74.   82. Irving S. Saposnik discusses Hyde and the other novel characters as typical of Victorian England, noting that the uniform revulsion towards Hyde is indicative of the fear of what he represented; “The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 11.4 (Autumn 1971): 715–31.   83. Block, “James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction” 113–28.   84. Director Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) and Charles Jarrot’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (CBC 1968) are filmed somewhat in the manner of theatrical productions, and Jarrott’s was a made-for-television release. Flemming’s version is more or less identical to that of 1931 in terms of plot, events, and settings, but the use of props and camera work to develop archetypal and symbolic imagery is eliminated. Even the mirror is reduced to the status of secondary prop and, when Jekyll changes into Hyde the first time, the camera shows viewers little of the event. The camera does fix on Jekyll–Hyde’s face during subsequent transformations, but in doing so the emphasis on the facial expressions of those who witness this horror is eliminated. Jarrot’s version, starring Jack Palance, is narratively close to those of 1931 and 1941, although it eliminates the love interest, and successfully adds a sword-walking-stick as a prop and a black-mailer to the drama.   85. The use of this camera point of view is discussed with reference to The Lady in the Lake (1946) by Robert T. Eberwein in his “The Filmic Dream and Point of View,” Literature/Film Quarterly 8.3 (1980): 197– 203. The device is used more effectively in the film adaptation of Dark Passage (1947). For a discussion of the technical aspects of this type of shot, see Edward Branigan, “Formal Permutations of the Pointof-View Shot,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 54–64.  86. Shelley, Frankenstein 230; vol. 3, ch. 3.   87. Joseph D. Andriano includes a lengthy discussion of The Island of Doctor Moreau in fiction and film in his Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999). Andriano regards the monster in Freudian terms, as a projection of repressed aspects of the self. Sherryl Vint discusses the presentation of animals in Dr. Moreau, noting various similarities between the vivisectionist’s equipment and the devices used on women in nineteenth-century pornography: “Animals and Animality from The Island of Moreau to the Uplift Universe,” The Yearbook of English Studies 37.2 (2007): 85–102.   88. H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), H.G. Wells The Science Fiction, Volume I (London: Phoenix, 1995) 85; ch. 3.  89. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 93; ch. 5.  90. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 95; ch. 6.  91. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 101; ch. 7.  92. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 107; ch. 8.  93. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 111–12; ch 9.  94. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 115; ch. 10.  95. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 118; ch 11; and 140; ch. 15.  96. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 121–22; ch. 12. 106

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  97. Kenneth Sherman contemplates the significance of this refrain in “Are We Not Men?” Queen’s Quarterly 102.4 (Winter 1995): 869–75.  98. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 126–27; ch. 13.  99. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 134; ch. 14. Timothy Christensen provides an analysis of The Island of Moreau in the context of nineteenth-century racism: “The ‘Bestial Mark’ of Race in The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Criticism 46.4 (Fall 2004): 575–95. Naomi Zack extends the discussion of racism in the text to the three films considered below: “The Island of Dr. Moreau: Interpretation of Images of Race and Species,” SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction, ed. Margret Grebowicz (Chicago: Open Court, 2007) 25–37. 100. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 133; ch. 14. 101. R.D. Haynes discusses the characters of the three scientists in “The Unholy Alliance of Science in The Island of Doctor Moreau,” The Wellsian 11 (Summer 1988): 13–24. 102. For more on Wells and Swift, see J.R. Hammond, “The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Swiftian Parable,” The Wellsian 16 (Summer 1993): 30–41. 103. John Glendening points out that Wells’s book shows a number of direct connections to Charles Darwin, including the location of Moreau’s laboratory in the Galapagos islands, islands which were well known at the time due to Darwin’s research and publications: “ ‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2002): 572. 104. On the subject of pain in Moreau, as well as the similarities between Moreau and Mengele, see Elana Gomel, “From Dr. Moreau to Dr. Mengele: The Biological Sublime,” Poetics Today 21.2 (Summer 2000): 391–421. 105. R.D. Haynes, “Wells’s Debt to Huxley and the Myth of Dr. Moreau,” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens: Revue du Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes et Edouardiennes de l’Université Paul Valéry 13 (April 1981): 33. 106. Haynes also discusses evolution and pain as waste in his “Wells’s Debt to Huxley and the Myth of Dr. Moreau” 31–41; as does John Glendening in his “Green Confusion” 571–97, along with the role of chance and disorder in evolution. 107. Nick Redfern, “Abjection and Evolution in The Island of Doctor Moreau,” The Wellsian 27 (2004): 37–47. 108. Carrie Rohman, discusses this failure in “Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment Purification in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, eds. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 121–34. 109. For further discussion of the island beast community as a “theological grotesque,” see Gorman Beauchamp’s, “The Island of Dr. Moreau as Theological Grotesque,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 15 (1979): 408–17. 110. Judith Buchanan provides a fascinating analysis of The Island of Lost Souls in conjunction with Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Forbidden Planet (1956) in “Forbidden Planet and the Retrospective Attribution of Intentions,” Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction, eds. Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan (Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2001) 148–62. This similarity is also noted in Sybille Lammes analysis of the film: “So Far, So Close: Island of Lost Souls as a Laboratory of Life,” Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World, eds. Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt (New York: Rodopi, 2006) 70. 111. This aspect of the film is true to the spirit of the book’s description of the jungle and Prendick’s experiences on the island, in which there is no garden such as appears in this film: see John Glendening in his “Green Confusion” 584–85. Rohman discusses the understanding of the human as less involved with smells and more involved with sight in “Burning Out the Animal” 123. 112. The relationship between Shelley’s approach to creating artificial life and the modern day body part industry has been frequently noted: see Cecil Helman, “Dr. Frankenstein and the Industrial Body: Reflections on ‘Spare Part’ Surgery,” Anthropology Today 4.3 (June 1988) 14–16. 107

Chapter 3 Tech-Noir

T

he transition from the Prometheus myth to tech-noir film is part of the historical development of popular genres in general. Popular film genres rely heavily on the conventions established in earlier and equivalent literary genres and follow the literary genre precedent of substituting motifs as a means of articulating their particular messages. More specifically, the Promethean story is revisited in films, including some that may be regarded as fully developed tech-noir adaptations of Frankenstein,1 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Such narratives lead their readers and audiences to an understanding of science and technology as the means by which their world or some significant part of it may be radically altered, supplanted, or destroyed; and reduced to, or revealed as, a mere simulacrum. They dramatize the imminence of this possibility by presenting science and technology according to genre-based conventions and by incorporating references to real-world character types, events, debates, and, of course, technology. The film medium contributes to the treatment and presentation of technology, as well as the characters and sets: technology itself is used to simultaneously visualize and modernize the content of the narrative. Tech-noir films, including those based on Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau already discussed, usually deliver their message in melodramatic terms by presenting obviously monopathic characters: the villains are entirely villainous “ultimate evil” types who are often either rich or in control of exceptional resources and the victims, one of whom usually becomes the hero, generally lack resources or access to them. The characters, as in Prometheus and mythology in general, include a range of other types and not entirely human beings serving as agents for various areas of discourse: “humans,” both natural and “artificial,” are often the products or objects of experimentation by those in control of some specialized technology. In Prometheus, women are singled out as artificial creatures specifically designed to be both indispensable and exceedingly troublesome to men. In tech-noir, artificial beings may be male or female. Their roles are often, though not always, conventionally gender-specific, and they are variously helpful to and problematic for humans. Like Moreau’s beast-men, the more philosophically inclined of tech-noir film characters, both human and artificial, may ask, “Are we not human?” And this question invariably arises, not as part of some esoteric or metaphysical contemplation of the soul, but in conjunction with technological invasions of the body, society, and environment.2 Like Prendick, the victims of such invasions suffer shock, horror, and fear when faced with technology divorced from the ideals assumed to inform the science that created it. Many flee before it. Many find themselves, like Prendick and Moreau’s beast-men, placed relative to a revised chain of being defined by access to technology; mastery of technology (rather than mere speech); obedience to revised laws of conduct that seem to contradict “nature” and serve the interests of those already in control of technology; and physical appearance, 111

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with both mimicry and design influencing perceptions of value – the artificial eye as well as the perfected hand have special significance both aesthetically and functionally in this context. The tech-noir film laboratories where the key technology is developed or applied are, like Frankenstein’s and Jekyll’s, often private and secret, or they are, like Moreau’s island, isolated from the world at large and seem immune to judgment by the laws that apply to everyone else. These laboratories are variously reworked as the corporate precincts where covert experiments are performed, artificially created environmental bubbles, prisons, schools, and other structures and locations isolated by security systems rather than water or inherited privilege. This location is where the tech-noir Frankenstein cobbles corpses together or reanimates them, and the new Jekylls and Moreaus perform experiments with drugs and surgical processes that demonstrate the possibilities of organ transplants, cryogenics, amputations, artificial limb grafts, and genetic manipulation, not to mention behavioral programming and control. Tech-noir settings tend to reflect both the characters’ relative artificiality and their propensity to violence, such that they may be so filled with technology that technology supplants nature and the technologically empowered supplant god; or both nature and technology seem to abandon or condemn the world to pollution, disease, poverty, and other entropic forces. Concrete visualization of all kinds lends tech-noir films a certain didactic potency, particularly when they show industrial wastelands and the extremes of wealth and poverty fostered by reliance on technology, and simultaneously mobilize elements common to both tragedy and melodrama – torture, suffering, and violence – that literally show the Promethean experience in a world where even the brave live in fear. Various motifs and props are used to support the characters and settings in the presentation of technology in tech-noir film – these devices often achieve a different shock effect by their visual presentation than they do in writing. Fire is often prominent in the form of weapons and bombs, or it is displaced onto other instruments of aggression and violence, such as drugs, computer viruses, unwanted surgical amputations, and so forth. The related props are almost always updated to include modern instruments of incarceration and torture, and yet these devices frequently retain the essential forms and functions of their often ancient prototypes: restraints, cutting tools, needles for injections, and bottled embryos and failed experiments being just a few of the possibilities that are not at all dependent on a twentieth- or twenty-first-century period context. Some of these props contribute to the complexity of the visual mise-en-scène in a manner that also supports the narrative’s conceptual mise-en-abyme. Particularly effective in this regard are those images that align various kinds of representation of the human form, such as the artificially created being, skeleton, skull, diagram, painting, photograph, and screen image; as well as those that place images within images, as in television or movie screens within the film, or incorporate point-of-view shots from a surveillance camera or artificial being, dreams, memory images, and mind’s eye visualizations. This imagery, along with various frames and contexts, some referencing mythology or ages of humankind3 so vast as to exceed the grasp of written history, intensifies the realization that the story is about the simulacrum, not just what happens inside one particular model or historical perception of society and the world: history is written by the victors, tech-noir is all about the victims. While this realization is usually softened by a closure that validates or reaffirms the victim’s life and ongoing vitality and shows the villain punished as he deserves, the attention to the world as simulacrum subject to compromise is so widely present in films of the past few decades that the filmography on which this study is based could easily be doubled in both numbers of entries and the length of the discussion of each. 112

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The principal elements Tech-noir characters are almost invariably monopathic melodramatic types, while the settings both represent the technological problem the hero must face and serve the interests of pathetic fallacy, thus they are most often variations of the mythological wasteland. The plot is often reducible to matters of power and is almost always expressed in terms of violent action, but may also be complicated by reversals, misdirections, and revelations that are more likely to be related to the injudicious use of technology than to character development. Characters Tech-noir films always include professionals who use technology, particularly computers, including the technician and programmer, and those who investigate and provide information, such as the detective, policeman, news anchorman, reporter, and cameraman or photographer. Most of these characters, however, are also posed as types that are readily identifiable in other genres: the hero, love-interest, villain, and artificial being. They may even be deliberately stylized in conformity to some previously established genre: for example, the occasional fedora and trench coat, such as those worn by the detectives in Replikator (1994), Morella (1997), and Gattaca (1997), lends some films a slightly noir look.4 The villains may be criminal and gangster types similar to those found in some detective fiction. The artificial beings may resemble those frequenting earlier literary genres and may be allied with the hero or the villain, or actually be the hero or the villain. The tech-noir hero is usually from the working class and a victim of some individual or collective for whom technology is a means of gaining and maintaining power. He or she may be a young person winning a place in society through a coming of age experience, but is more often someone who is closer to middle-aged, already has a checkered past, and who, through the crisis of his or her encounter with the technological threat, acquires a more thorough understanding of the world or the nature of reality. He or she is occasionally an average person with no special technological skill, as in Twilight Man (1996); but is more often someone with certain computer skills, such as a hacker, as in Hackers (1995) and Swordfish (2001); a policeman, as in Dream Breaker (1996); or a detective, as in Rising Sun (1993), Cybercity (1999), and Netforce (1999), who must work with or face the dangerous aspects of technology mobilized by the villain and often embodied as one or more clones, cyborgs, androids, virtual reality constructs, or other artificial intelligences. The hero, like the villain, may be shown in the context of consanguine relationships, but of equal or greater importance are his or her contractual involvements, such as the employer–employee relationship, or membership in some ad hoc committee or team working toward a specific goal – usually that of world reconstruction and domination or the defeat of such. A quasi-gothic primary or accessory male–female sexual or love relationship is common, as are characters engaged in various relationships expressing experiences, interests, and objectives the audience can identify with, including random acts of aggression, kindness, generosity, and so forth, that are also necessary to the story’s development. The hero and his or her5 associates are usually people who are less than pleased by their involvement with the villain, having often come into the situation by some 113

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accident rather than choice, but they rarely spend a lot of time deliberating their fate because they must deal with the situation to prevent it from getting much worse. The tech-noir film is typically dominated by the hero-as-victim’s point of view.6 Victimizing may take any of numerous forms, all of which are enabled by technology: manipulation or appropriation of assets and property, identity theft, false criminalization, threats of or actual loss of employment, and threats of or actual loss of life. All or almost all of these possibilities may appear in one film, as they do in The Net (1995), Twilight Man (1996), and Enemy of the State (1998). Often, the mere identification of the victim through a technologically mediated form of vision, such as a gun’s aiming mechanism, a surveillance camera, or some other visual prosthetic, is a prelude to and a part of the stalking and murder or assault of the victim: to be seen equates with being victimized and, given the ubiquity of the surveillance camera, almost everyone is “seen.” In some films, it is the true villain who is seen, recorded, and brought to justice, as in Strange Days (1995), but surveillance devices are more often shown, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), to serve the purveyors of power, not the victim-heroes. The villain often has considerable status in an established collective organization, such as the military or a corporation, and uses technology to further an ambition to change the world. Attention often shifts away from the scientist as villain7 to someone with a more single-minded interest in controlling or reconfiguring the simulacrum to gain power. This person seeks to control the scientist or, more often, technology to further this goal: the scientist may just be another victim, rather than part of the essential problem. The villain may be fully recognized as such only when one of his victims belatedly figures out what is going on, as in Fatal Error (1999) and Crusader (2004). Further victimization may be used as a means of threatening or eliminating the person or people who have become an obstruction to the villain simply because they know what he is up to, as also happens in Fatal Error and Crusader. If the villain is a lone criminal, he is usually someone with a special talent for manipulating technology and/or a particular motive for victimizing his selected target or targets, as in The Conversation (1974), Terminal Choice (1985), and Twilight Man (1996). He may also be a killer, even a serial killer, as this character type is one that has a special association with technology and technologized society. The very term serial killer, which became popular in the 1970s, was coined by “FBI special agent Robert Ressler, who developed the psychological profiling technique that has become standard in FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.”8 The public knows the serial killer through the statistics associated with him in the reports of his activities, particularly his body count, and the consistency of certain aspects of his attacks. Both killer and news audiences also seem to be fascinated by the quality of seriality itself, which is inherently opposed to narrative.9 Human serial killers appear in such films as Terminal Man (1974), The Cell (2000), and White Noise (2005), while the artificial person acts as a serial killer in such films as Ghost in the Machine (1993), Shadow Fury (2001), and Frankenstein (2004). The artificial characters in tech-noir films include cyborgs, androids, clones, virtual beings, and other forms of artificial intelligence, all of which are embodiments or agents of technology. Many are created by some fusion of human and machine or human and animal, while others are created by the associated fission or isolation of some aspect of the human, such as the eye, the womb, one or more limbs, and memory.10 Special emphasis is often placed on one or two of the artificial beings’ body parts: the hand and arm are frequently emphasized in demonstrations of strength, dexterity, and precision, as in Westworld (1973), The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), and Mary 114

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Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). The head also receives a lot of attention, particularly the eye and the associated field of vision: the human eye is the proverbial window to the human soul, but the eye of the artificial being is usually directed outward so that film viewers see as they see, through grids and data streams, and, of course, targeting mechanisms. Automated surveillance systems serve more than a few villains, automated houses serve more than a few heroes, and the occasional non-humanoid master AI tries to take over the world, but most artificial beings are human or humanoid in appearance and thus perform many of the same functions and movements as their human counterparts with special adaptations related to their technological bodies. Some artificial beings even play main characters, as in Solo (1996), Replicant (2001), and Encrypt (2003), which feature an android, clone of a person, and virtualized human respectively. More often they, at least ostensibly, support either the hero, as in Encrypt and Millennium (1989), or the villain, as in Cyber-Tracker (1994), or are malfunctioning or renegade tools invented by the hero and his associates that, as in A.P.E.X. (1994) and R.O.T.O.R. (1988), take the place of a human villain. The humanoid appearance of the android was treated as an important factor in the development of human-like machines by science-fiction and detective science-fiction author Isaac Asimov (1920–1992). Asimov used the conventions of the detective genre to articulate his views on futuristic technology in relation to representation, showing that the discernment of “truth” is as fundamental to detective fiction as the operation of law in society and its effects on the individual. Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” are also central to his theorizing about how robots might function and be received in human society and by individuals in that society; indeed, Asimov’s elaboration of these laws in relation to technology is the intersection point between detective and science fiction in his work. He first summarized the robotic laws in the short story “Runaround,” published in 1942 and included in the I, Robot (1950) collection: […] a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm […] a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law […] And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.11 Asimov’s robotic laws may be taken as a simple updating of the laws invented by Moreau for his beast-men, but Asimov devotes many more pages to explaining the art of robot management and solving mysteries of robot behavior relative to the “psychology” defined by the three laws of robotics than Wells does to the management of the beast-men. The robotic laws also reappear in a wide variety of guises in relation to the artificial person in tech-noir films, where many artificial beings simply follow their programming, as do the numerous military and policing androids and cyborgs, and androids programmed for sexual pleasure..12 Such simplicity of motive and behavior aligns the artificial being with the monopathic human characters: the life of the little android boy in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is a case in point. As 115

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in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Slipstream (1989), I, Robot (2004), and other films, the entire plot and narrative development may depend on revelations about the actions of an android in relation to his programming. In Slipstream and I, Robot, the android is allied with the hero against the villain. In Solo (1996), the android simply overthrows his controllers because their directions contradict his laws of behavior, as his kindly maker and programmer has inadvertently taught him to understand them. For androids like Solo, as well as the android Sonny in I, Robot, the clones in such films as Boys from Brazil (1978) and Replicant (2001), and possibly the virtual beings in The Thirteenth Floor (1999), the nurture deemed essential to human development is just as essential to the artificial being’s comprehension and actions: this plot motif is also found in Frankenstein (1818) and its film adaptations. Some artificial beings do undergo an inner conflict of the sort usually banished from melodrama. This conflict may be related to the mystery of the artificial being’s origins, a motif borrowed from the hero’s history: this type of conflict is evident in such films as Blade Runner (1982), Digital Man (1995), and Phoenix (1995), in which the android who thinks he or she is a human discovers that he or she is an android. The artificial person may also reach a new level of awareness during a confrontation with his mortality – his built-in limited life span – as in Blade Runner; or when he realizes he has a scheduled date for demise because his body is meant to exist only until it is needed by a “real” person, as in Parts (1979) and The Island (2005). While artificial beings may be created to serve the interests of the villain, they may, like Solo in Solo (1996), make a “choice” to oppose those interests because of subtle priorities embedded in their programming that are incidentally emphasized by experience. This process may be supported by a learning program enabling him or her to “advance” to the point of making choices on the basis of love, as in Nemesis (1992) and Cyborg 2 (1993), or simple pragmatism, as in WarGames (1983). Cyborgs created from deceased or injured humans, as in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993), Cyborg Cop (1993), and Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), may also rediscover some residual human element in their psyche and, coincidentally, their autonomous decision-making ability. Some artificial beings not only make a choice to refuse to carry out the villain’s plans, but also, like Frankenstein’s Creature, turn about and attack their creator. Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz (1995) give special attention to this plot development and go so far as to interpret the filmic afterlife of Frankenstein (1818) as the American adaptation of the hunter myth to accommodate technology; Frankenstein, they write, is “the prototype of the technological man [ … who … ] does not worry about what his artificial creations are for, the thrill is in the invention.”13 This type is, unlike the original hunter, weak in the body, but like the original hunter he exploits “shadow figures,” and has problematic relationships with women.14 This new “hunter” makes robots, cyborgs, and other artificial life forms who, finding themselves incomplete, emulate Western Others in searching for some form of identity or purpose equivalent to those it perceives in its creator, but which the creator is unwilling to share: In terms of the hunter myth, as the weapon detaches itself further from the hand of the technological hunter, it reverses its direction: no longer does it travel from the tribe and hunter to the prey: it now turns around to hunt the hunter. Although much diminished by having given over their zest for life to their replications, the humans fight back. At the apex of this phase, then, is a double hunt in which the weapon and the hunter stalk each other as prey […] 116

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Psychologically, the ego’s perfected, autonomous extensions turn into the overdeveloped shadow and come back to haunt/hunt their makers.15 This action is the “technological fall,” or a recapitulation of “the original fall from grace of the machine’s human maker.”16 While humans stalk the artificial person in quite a few films, such as Blade Runner (1982), Slipstream (1989), and Virtuosity (1995); there are indeed many in which androids stalk humans, including most of those that have evolved into series: Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Project Shadowchaser (1992, 1994, 1995, 1996), Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995), and Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996). Similarly, Moreau’s beast-men turn about and destroy him using the same instruments he used to torture them in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996). All such artificial beings mark the possibility that all aspects of the current world – biological life, society, personal relationships – are merely parts of a simulacrum that may be supplanted by technology. While the clones in Morella (1997) and Replicant (2001) may be understood as unique casts from the same old human template, they forecast those in Code 46 (2003), It’s All About Love (2003), and Able Edwards (2004), which are not merely signs of a potential new order, but are proof that the new order is already here. In some instances, the new order is not imposed by a human villain, but by a master machine – an artificial intelligence who decides to act in his own interests or to serve humanity in a way that contradicts and often parodies human ideals and values, as do the master AIs in Colossus (1970), Demon Seed (1977), and Screamers (1995). Like corporations in real life, these beings often lack a face, but the demands of melodrama may lead the artificial intelligence to create one, as he does in Virtuosity (1995) and Universal Soldier: The Return (1999), and as the corporation does in Able Edwards. Small children, infants, and fetuses do not commonly play active characters in tech-noir, but they are often used to dramatize the villain as villain, particularly in otherwise ethically or morally ambiguous situations: nothing quite matches the effect of the violently extricated fetus abandoned on the floor in Embryo (1976) on the viewer’s perception of the otherwise sympathetic Victoria, even though it was dead long before its forced extraction. Children, particularly unborn children, also provide a motivation for individuals who might otherwise remain passive to take on the villain: in melodrama, a baby is an “object” of value beyond price and the necessity of protecting its life is assumed to be an absolute that does not require explanation in dialogue. In Fortress (1992), an unborn child is both the reason the hero-parents are incarcerated and their child destined for cyborg experimentation and the motivation leading those same parents to escape and at least temporarily defeat the technologically empowered enemy. In Duplicates (1992), the abduction of a little boy motivates the heroic action of his parents, who are also subject to manipulation by the technologically empowered villain, and leads to a revelation about the covert applications of science and technology. In City of Lost Children (1995), the abduction of a particular male child likewise leads to a search and rescue and ultimately reveals a mad scientist’s use of technology to terrorize many other children. Children also seem to make excellent hostages, but their inherent value to the person being blackmailed often inspires a result opposite to that sought by the hostage taker. For example, an artificial being takes a man’s adopted son hostage in Cyborg Cop 2 (1995), and in Universal Soldier: The Return (1999), when an artificial intelligence finds its plans obstructed by a former UniSol soldier, it immediately goes after that man’s daughter – in both cases the abduction only inspires 117

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the human hero to successfully destroy the villain. In Swordfish (2001), a terrorist uses a hacker’s daughter to force that hacker to do his bidding, while in John Q (2002) a man becomes a terrorist to save his son from a system that denies him medical treatment. In both of these latter films the victimization of the child establishes the relative identity of the villain and the hero in a plot context that is otherwise sufficiently ambiguous that audiences might opt to identify with the villain’s point of view. In Brainstorm (1983), the son of a nearly divorced husband and wife who created a virtual reality machine is hospitalized after using it to view a program it was never designed for: a child thus falls victim to a technology that, while invented with particular objectives by his own parents, was developed in a way never sanctioned by them and without his safety in mind. In other instances, the child’s status as victim is made more poignant by his or her fighting spirit: for example, the little girl who flees from those who would steal her bit of bread at the beginning of Encrypt (2003) becomes symbolic of the suffering that fuels the hero’s efforts to save his apparently doomed world. A small boy who cannot speak plays a similar role for Todd, the hero of Soldier (1998). A male child who is ultimately saved from certain death by the hero’s efforts is significant in terms of the framing narrative of Absolon (2003) and also summarizes the rewards of heroic action. Mimic (1997) strikes a somewhat different note insofar as the threat a disease poses to children justifies the doctor’s desperate efforts to stop it, but the doctor’s “solution” comes back to create more problems in the sequels: the artificial beings mimic the human interest in children such that humans become the threat from which their own offspring must be protected – and also the food that nourishes them. In Demon Seed (1977), The Fly (1986, 1989), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), and Jekyll and Hyde (1990), a fetus, fly–human newborn, beast–human newborn, and young child are variously used to symbolize the horrifying consequences of technology hybridizing with humans or hybrids created by science and technology.17 Now and then, a fetus or baby serves as the answer to a technology-related problem: for example, the unborn child in Warning Sign (1985) is the reason a woman is immune to a bioengineered germ and becomes the means by which many of the infected are saved. The fetus in a life-support tube is presented as the hope for the future in American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994), and in Cyborg 3 (1995) a female cyborg discovers she is pregnant, marking an entirely new stage in the evolution of human and machine and parodically reversing the usual dire warnings about such an evolution. Settings Tech-noir settings in general emphasize wastelands. Most are chosen or designed to dramatize the class disparity between the villains who wield wealth and power and the victims who, lacking wealth and power, live in low-rent districts or slums. The preponderance of impersonal, non-domestic environments may be interpreted as an extension and variation on Western Cold War paranoia about the potential loss of basic aspects of individuality and social structure to communism. Where earlier horror often showed the home or family under siege, as in Night of the Living Dead (1968), in tech-noir the traditional family home and often the family unit itself is entirely absent, having presumably fallen, not to the advancing front of communism, but to corporate and capitalist priorities. 118

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Tech-noir films always include some type of “zone” which may serve as the place where the have-nots live and where the victims face the villain or his agents. The zone may be an urban area, domestic or industrial, that has been abandoned by civilization, as in Circuitry Man (1990) and New Crime City (1994), and it may also be presented as the historical remains of some apocalyptic change or devastation to an older, sometimes nostalgically perceived, world order, as in Cyborg (1989). In these cases, the zone is a place in which nature or the old-order culture is marked, scarred, or obliterated by technology, or simply abandoned or neglected, even by its occupants. The people who actually live in such places, especially those peripheral to the principal action, may appear to be like the places themselves, in that they have been used up and discarded by the primary social and economic hierarchy that technology serves: such are the “weirdoes” encountered by Judge Dredd on his way back to the city from his near incarceration in Judge Dredd (1995) and by Dave and Wendy as they try to understand the geographical structure and social hierarchy of their world in Virtual Nightmare (2000). Occasionally, the zone is the location of an over-built and/or active “fringe” culture, such as the “Sky Ranch” in Cherry 2000 (1987), “heaven” in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Bombay City in Nirvana (1997), and possibly the world outside the city in Code 46 (2003). Those who represent the pinnacle of the hierarchy of power, wealth, and technological access do not live in the zone: they tend to live high and well, as indicated by the architecture of the spaces they occupy in films such as Blade Runner (1982),18 The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and Encrypt (2003). Fire is usually the most active element affecting the zone and other tech-noir settings. It is often presented literally as explosions and weapons fire, and serves not only to express melodramatic human violence, but as a demonstration of the impact of technology on nature as a whole. This violence is also indicated by the displacement of nature as a viable habitat by spaces constructed of metals, plastics, and glass, which most commonly have specialized employment and productionrelated functions, as do the offices in Gattaca (1997) and Matrix (1999); the laboratories of THX 1138 (1971) and Looker (1981); the prisons of Running Man (1987) and Fortress (1992); the schools of Mimic 2 (2001) and Mangler 2 (2001); and hospitals of Terminal Man (1974), Coma (1978), Terminal Choice (1985), and John Q (2002); as well as the space stations, shuttles, and ships of Android (1982), Fortress 2 (1999), and Project Shadowchaser III (1995); and the occasional oceanfaring ship, such as that in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997); the theme parks of Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976); and the entertainment stadiums where the hero’s experience may be created or worsened by the presence of an audience, as it is in Rollerball (1975) and Running Man. Warehouses and factories, particularly abandoned ones, are also near ubiquitous zone locations appearing in at least a few scenes in many tech-noir films. All of these locations tend to be or to incorporate labyrinthine tunnels, circulation ducts, pipes, wires, fuse boxes, stairwells, and panopticon-style atriums that are all filled with devices, often automated and always made of metal or plastic, that mediate both machines and the lives and behavior of humans, such as lab equipment, appliances, security systems, cameras, and various kinds of sensors and surveillance devices: the pulsing sound and shadow of the endlessly turning ventilation fan is a classic tech-noir motif symbolizing the breath of life for humans trapped in such spaces. In tech-noir films, the air may be so polluted that people have to wear masks to go outside and have to either buy or bargain for oxygen, as in Circuitry Man (1990), or it may be deliberately left or kept in a state so toxic to humans that it serves as an effective means of population control, as 119

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in Total Recall (1990),19 in which the local power mongers deny oxygen as a kind of hostage-taking strategy. In eXistenz (1999), a polluted nature becomes the place where the new order rises, as well as the place where the tools and devices of that new order are manufactured from mutant creatures. Water is targeted for willful corporate or terrorist polluting in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997) and Apocalypse Watch (1997). Earth is commonly represented as part of a desecrated, polluted, and often abandoned hinterland zone or as a brightly lit desert: these settings often substitute for metallic environments and metonymically satisfy the genre’s symbolic emphasis on fire through images of sand, heat, sun, minimal vegetation, and the wreckage of industrial civilization. The desert and/or desert-like environmental conditions are sometimes used to represent the post-apocalypse, as well as the post-industrial, environment, as in Cherry 2000 (1987), Cyborg (1989), Slipstream (1989), and the Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996). Vegetation is sometimes presented in domesticated form for the purpose of contrast, rather than as a primary setting for action, as in the happy interlude in the park in The Android Affair (1995). In Crusader (2004), a large garden hedge maze symbolizes the lead character’s moral confusion as he is subject to manipulation. Wild and untamed nature has other effects in tech-noir. In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), The Companion (1994), and Hostile Intent (1997), a bush is used to isolate one or more individuals and thus enhance their vulnerability to technological weapons or the interests of “science.” In Universal Soldier (1992), the urban labyrinth replaces the equally labyrinthine jungle setting appearing in the film’s opening scenes: both environments establish the main character’s confusion. In Solo (1996), the jungle is a labyrinth that may provide a useful camouflage to those who know their way through it. Lush vegetation is also sometimes presented as part of a plot resolution involving the destruction of an artificial environment and the return to nature, as in Logan’s Run (1976), Fortress 2 (1999), Virtual Nightmare (2000), and Aeon Flux (2005). Sometimes, the forces and resilience of nature seem to be part of the immediate problem or obstacle facing the hero, rather than its solution. For example, when the film world is set underground, it is often marked by incursions of earth, the natural processes of decay, and even reviving and mutating plant, animal, and humanoid life, as in the mines of Total Recall (1990) and Phoenix (1995), underground parking lots of Circuitry Man (1990), and subways and sewers of Mimic (1997, 2001). As it turns out, however, in all of these films except Mimic, the apparent obstructions of nature disappear when the hero becomes aware of and committed to the rejuvenation of the wasteland, as in Total Recall, or aware of and committed to the alignment of android evolution with human ideals rather than human aggression and ambition, as in Phoenix and Circuitry Man. Where the theme of recycling is incorporated into the plot, settings may include socially sanctioned factories where that process takes place, as in Soylent Green (1973) and the opening shots of Cherry 2000 (1987), but may also include locations where people or creatures who have been discarded like junk build their world from junk, as in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), and Soldier (1998). In these cases, nature is not so much invoked as a plot resolution as cultural detritus is naturalized as a means of survival by those deprioritized by the hierarchy.20 In Brazil (1985), an apartment’s facilities take on the appearance of an encroaching jungle so that technology is naturalized, but more to establish the extent of the problem than to propose a solution. Another type of labyrinth common to tech-noir films is the digital world of computer circuitry and virtual reality. The digital labyrinth is the digital world itself, often developed as a metaphor or 120

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double for physical reality, the city, and the mind. Much of the action of such films may take place in this digital or virtual reality, as it does in Tron (1982), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), Matrix (1999), eXistenZ (1999), and others. In these films, the digital or virtual reality usually becomes a “zone” identified with the desolate, degenerating, and sterile, as well as extreme violence, but occasionally it becomes a place where those sacrificed to technology may continue to enjoy a limited existence, as in Dream Breaker (1995) and Encrypt (2003). A metaphoric association between the city and the digital world may be developed by montages of aerial camera shots of urban areas and special effects visualizations of digital energy and information transfers on circuit boards or inside computer hardware. The digital labyrinth as a metaphor for the labyrinth of the mind itself may also draw attention to the differences between the artificial and the natural, as in Circuitry Man (1990) and Megaville (1990), and the hero or villain’s ability to function relative to both worlds, as in these films and others, such as Lawnmower Man (1992) and the Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003). Violence Tech-noir films often have plots, themes, and motifs that reference contemporary or historical events, issues, and probabilities, such as the imitation and displacement of the forms and functions of the human body and mind onto prostheses, clones, and computers. Many films take up the impact of surveillance and aggressive methods of control, including incarceration and implants, on the organization of humans in society, particularly at work. War, terrorism, and nuclear power are also frequent elements, with World War II, Nazism, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War and its associated arms race all serving as common filmic citations.21 Totalitarianism, often disguised as some form of collective government striving to serve humanity, appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and Equilibrium (2002), while a revival of Nazism is sought in The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Apocalypse Watch (1997). Master AIs sometimes adopt this method of organizing human affairs in films predating the period of this study: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is an early simplistic and rather blunt conceptualization of the moment when a machine becomes the ultimate arbitrator in matters relating to the human propensity to violence; The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) explores the idea that androids may arrange for humans to be replaced by androids; and Alphaville (1965) shows a world in which a central computer has an extraordinary amount of social control over humans. These relatively benign AIs give way to far more ambitious types who imitate corporate heads, human terrorists, and numerous criminal types in seeking greater wealth, power, and influence: see Colossus (1970), Demon Seed (1977), Tron (1982), Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), and others. The atomic bomb, as the ultimate detonation, was, like Hitler, destined to an afterlife of extraordinary duration in films. Some of this longevity may have something to do with a childish delight in fireworks and technologically enhanced special effects, but from a more adult perspective, the ubiquitous explosions in contemporary films derive from the fact that violence can be an effective way to make a melodramatic point. That point in tech-noir is the well-deliberated conviction that, while perhaps some things ought to be blown up for the greater good, bombs pose a very dangerous threat to human existence, particularly if their control is given over to automated processes and systems, as in Failsafe (1964), or to military types who just want bigger bombs, as 121

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in The Manhattan Project (1986). By the later 1970s and 1980s, particularly after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, people started worrying about nuclear power plant explosions, such as that which does not quite happen in The China Syndrome (1979), a film released before Three Mile Island. Near the beginning of Chain Reaction (1996), the fear of explosions – part of the strategy of terrorism – is itself exploited to keep everyone committed to an inefficient and dangerous system. Bombs are also used as weapons by terrorists in Hackers (1995) and Swordfish (2001), while more common criminals tend to be limited to single-target rapid-firing guns. Gun battles are all too familiar in many film genres, usually as forms of technological violence that, unlike some bombs, allow enough members of the cast to survive to go on with other plot interests. Tech-noir gun battles are also comparable to and often supplemented or replaced by choreographed physical combat that owes as much or more to the martial arts as film noir owes to wrestling and boxing. The sound of fists impacting on flesh and of breaking bones, like the blasts of bombs exploding and guns firing, enhances the effect of the violence, perhaps beyond tolerance. But while the martial arts require skill and training and direct contact between opponents, pointing and shooting involves a fetishized disassociation of villain and victim. The element of disassociation that may make intense violence tolerable is also added to tech-noir films featuring the martial arts when the combat or training sequences are relocated into virtual reality, as in Expect No Mercy (1995) and Matrix (1999). The effect of the violence also changes when one or both of the protagonists is an artificially enhanced or artificial being: the violence in the first instance is partially transposed from the assault context into that of a violent accident involving automated machinery, as in R.O.T.O.R. (1988) and Hardware (1990); in the second, it becomes a matter of one monster bashing or stalking another monster while the other characters bet on the outcome, as in Omega Doom (1996) and the later Terminator films (1991, 2003). Where the human or more-human-than-artificial being is pitted against the artificial being or the program itself, the plot resolution often involves the defeat of the artificial by the natural. Tech-noir films are, not surprisingly, heirs to the Cold War film monsters of the fifties: technoir monsters may be human villains or cyborgs, androids, clones, and artificial intelligences. Yet the technologically produced monster, with its frequent absence of personality, often appears to have more to do with Western Cold War fantasies about communists and a fear that humanity has already been lost to technological development and corporate interests, than a fear of actual machines.22 They often serve as instruments of death for a few or for many and the death they serve may be up close and personal, as in films in which the machine’s prowess is tested against that of the human in hand-to-hand combat, such as Westworld (1973) and Hardware (1990); or, like that from human-held guns, may be distanced, as when the artificial beings function as extensions of the gun itself to extend its range and mobility and, at least theoretically, make it more easily manipulated, as in WarGames (1983), A.P.E.X. (1994), and Digital Man (1995). The Cold War justified the build up of arms, surveillance, and political manipulation that led to the Korean War (1950–53), the Vietnam War (1954–75), and the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961). This so-called Cold War officially ended with the dismantling of the Wall in 1989 and the extension of capitalism into many communist countries. As a standard for economic systems, capitalism fosters the growth of corporations that frequently ignore and compromise the health of the environment, humans, and animals.23 Indeed, some corporations have become so powerful that they seem to have usurped governments, making the communist-democratic political polarity 122

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a matter for debate solely in forums associated with public entertainment rather than a matter of ultimate concern. Both Goldeneye (1995) and Redline (1997) pose tech-crime in formerly communist societies: in the first by the traitorous use of a Cold War satellite to destroy an isolated research facility and to threaten London, and in the second by the use of black market designer tech-drugs as a means to wealth and power. Film representations of recent wars, especially those invoking Vietnam and including Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), were less than popular until Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) marked a change in American attitudes toward this subject as one appropriate for film entertainment.24 The individual soldier’s experience, particularly that in the Korean War and Vietnam, was not only made credible and worthy of attention on the epic scale but also given melodramatic tech-noir counterparts in the Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999) films, as well as Solo (1996), to name just some of the most obvious. Likewise, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a film about an American-supported communist plot to manipulate American elections and candidates by means of mind-control, gained popularity to the point of being remade in 2004. This film is a recognizable footnote, if not outright prototype, for numerous films about the behavioral manipulation of soldiers or other individuals found convenient and suitable to the service of illegitimate political machinery, as in the Universal Soldier films, Apocalypse Watch (1997), and Fugitive Mind (1999). Simultaneously and in spite of various treaties and bans intended to control their development and implementation, the chemical and biological warfare arsenal aimed at human life has also increased. This subject is prominent in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997), while agents, methods of contaminant dispersal, detection, and protection are suggested in Apocalypse Watch, and the threat posed by new viruses and diseases arising from the natural environment and readily appropriated for terrorist purposes is dramatized in Global Effect (2002). One of the most important definitive aspects of tech-noir is its presentation of technology mobilized by war and terrorism as a challenge to the current simulacrum, but the technological threat also takes other forms. Automation, for example, has brought radical changes to the workplace, employee training, and valued human habits and practices: media and public representations of automation often reveal and perpetuate the same kind of racial stereotypes that fed Cold War and nationalist animosities. For example, in his analysis of the auto industry, Robert R. Arnold (1998) observes that the anti-unionism fostered by Ronald Reagan inevitably meant that automotive plants faced with the need to increase productivity did so by adopting Japanese strategies, such as automation, and chose to close or cut back plants where labor unrest was perceived as a problem. They tried to improve employee perceptions of automation by humanizing the robot: And just as in the 1930s the industry successfully displaced the management/labor struggle onto conflicts among different ethnic groups competing for jobs at different wage levels, in the 1980s it fueled a Japan-bashing/buy-American campaign to disguise its anti-labor campaign as nationalism, simultaneously merging its operations with its Japanese counterparts and outsourcing much of its component production to foreign plants that exploited much cheaper labor.25 The Terminator (1984) summarizes the fear that machines will do away with human labor – and also proposes the perfect poetic solution – the crushing of the machine on the assembly line 123

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itself.26 The numerous deadly stalker humanoid-machines in films of the later 1980s and 1990s, in which merely being “sighted” by the technological eye is a prelude to violent assault, indicate the perceived relentlessness of such technology. The violence of this “gaze” is escalated to that of the “body scan” in Looker (1981) and Nemesis 3 (1996). Similarly, traditional jobs, such as those of secretary, soldier, and prostitute, are performed by artificial beings in Cyber-Tracker (1994), Soldier (1998), and Cherry 2000 (1987), while motherhood is overtaken by artificial beings and processes in Stepford Wives (1975) and Morella (1997).27 Surveillance gadgetry is frequently represented in tech-noir films:28 military surveillance of potential enemies, military surveillance of citizens, corporate surveillance of competitors, corporate surveillance of its customers in malls to prevent shoplifting,29 police surveillance of streets to prevent traffic infractions, and surveillance conducted on the interpersonal level for domestic reasons are all related to victim targeting and preludes for violent acts. The investigation of the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel by members of President Nixon’s staff led to public revelations about the extraordinary scope of illegal, and apparently government-sanctioned, surveillance, particularly wiretapping, and, incidentally, was also the subject of the film All the President’s Men (1976). In Andromeda Strain (1971), the government surveillance of and intervention in personal communications are merely an unquestioned fact, not a topic for debate; but in post-1970s films, surveillance is increasingly a tool for intelligence gathering that is frequently represented both as a criminal activity and as part of the effort to monitor and control criminal activity: see, for example, Netforce (1999), Enemy of the State (1998), and Track Down (2000). Corporations are depicted as conducting surveillance on competitors in Cypher (2002), employees in Rising Sun (1993) and Gattaca (1997), and consumers in Looker (1981) and The Truman Show (1998). This surveillance may involve a wide array of one-on-one techniques, such as stalking, spying, and covert reporting; it may also include the use of rating systems, as in Rollerball (1975), Network (1976), and Running Man (1987). Special devices, such as night vision aids, cameras, microphones, and recorders, are also shown to be popular with criminals and/or police in The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Conversation (1974), and Blow Out (1981); as are electronic tags and global positioning system (GPS) tracking units in Hostile Intent (1997) and Enemy of the State (1998); and satellites, computer monitoring viruses, and other computer programs in Goldeneye (1995), Hackers (1995), and The Net (1995). Even the television signals themselves become a means of integrating the consumer with the corporatized media-imbricated will in Videodrome (1983)30 and Fatal Error (1999). Numerous tech-noir films also address the economy of availability, access, and “volunteerism” as having a special potential for violence, in association, for example, with biological transplant surgery: the victims or would-be victims of organ appropriation in Coma (1978), Synapse (1995), Killer Deal (1999), and Future Kick (1991) are clearly no more enthusiastic about that system than is the underprivileged father of the child denied a life-saving transplant in John Q (2002). (In typical melodramatic fashion, this latter film assigns the role of donor to save the life of a child to a reckless driver who is apparently also a childless female.) The beneficiaries of the transplants in the earlier films are, essentially, murderers, although they may or may not know that the “volunteers” who are providing the means to save or prolong their lives are being coerced. Similarly, the killers produced by means of drugs and behavioral modification in such films as Apocalypse Watch (1997) and Fugitive Mind (1999) are violently appropriated to the villain’s cause and are lucky to avoid paying for their bad luck with their lives. 124

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Addiction is a frequent theme, closely related to violence in tech-noir films, that arises from the voluntary or forced use of chemical substances and often appears in combination with some kind of virtual reality. Frequently, the addiction of large numbers of people to some drug or technological distraction is a necessary backdrop to other plot developments, as in Dream Breaker (1995), Strange Days (1995), Nirvana (1997), Redline (1997), and others. Where Jekyll becomes addicted to his potion as a side effect of what started as a scientific experiment, these films often show the exploitation of addictive substances for capitalistic purposes. In Wild Palms (1993), the addicts are clearly the victims of this economy as well as the drugs, a fact which emphasizes that addicts are victims rather than merely weak, and therefore unsympathetic, humans. Adult addicts are thus aligned with the victims of child abuse or exploitation insofar as they are rendered helpless and unable to defend themselves. Child abuse sometimes finds a place in tech-noir films, as it does in The Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996), City of Lost Children (1995), Hackers (1995), and Final Cut (2004), but it is not usually developed extensively since it diverts attention from the problem of technology. On rare occasions, the villain deploys a youthful form as a bomb, as in Screamers (1995) and TekWar (1994). In other instances, spousal abuse is a thinly disguised, if it is disguised at all, pattern of behavior for the human villain, as in Next of Kin (1984) and Final Cut (1998). In Hardware (1990) and The Companion (1994), virtually all of the film action involves the stalking of a female victim by an apparently indestructible agent of technology that is easily read in terms of gothicized abuse. Victims are often the involuntary subjects of technological instruments and processes and the villain thus makes use of restraining devices, such as the traditional prison or cage, both of which are treated in unique ways in the underground facility in 12 Monkeys (1995). The traditional straightjacket makes an occasional appearance, as in Terminator 2 (1991), and the psychiatrist’s couch or chair becomes a place for unwanted or unexpected torment in The Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002) and Future Shock (1993); but it is far more common for individuals to be victimized in conditions that parallel, parody, or exaggerate those of the medical doctor’s or dentist’s office, or the hospital operating room. Drugs may be used to promote compliance, as when Coty, a mere child, violently murders Gavin, an adult male, in a pseudo-surgery performed on a hotel room bed in Wild Palms (1993). Individuals are also strapped down on gurneys, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), Roboman (1973), and RoboCop (1987), in case they should happen to wake up and object to what is being done to them, as does the unfortunate clone in The Island (2005), who regains consciousness while his organs are being harvested. By far the most favored method of restraint, however, is the chair, to which the victim is bound for injection, implantation, interrogation, or programming, as in Brazil (1985), Running Man (1987), Fortress (1992, 1999), and many, many more tech-noir films. The violence of the language that frequently accompanies such contexts actually loses some of its shock value to the visual representation of the circumstances. Mimicry and mise-en-abyme Mimicry and mise-en-abyme are two of the primary means by which tech-noir delivers its message about the threat technology poses to the current simulacrum. Both of these devices add complexity to the narrative and distance it from the Aristotelian type involving just a few 125

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characters and relatively simple actions and align it with the medieval type in which all constituent units may be deeply imbricated with a metaphysical reality by a complex arrangement of interrelationships. Readers of medieval literature may find themselves encouraged by various literary devices, particularly the interlacing of character, action, plot, and environment,31 to develop an understanding of the physical world not only as part of a chain of being, but as the imprint or trace of a metaphysical reality of which they are a part. Tech-noir viewers are encouraged to understand themselves existentially – as little more than a body – biological or mechanical, original or replicated – imprinted with digitized or digitizable information and both themselves and the world as part of a vast simulation reflecting the interests of the latest megalomaniac or artificial intelligence in control of all the program options. Unlike the medieval interlace, which inspires awe and humility before a world imbued with the numinous, tech-noir films point out that awe, or rather technophilia, may just be the effect of technological illumination – something comparable to the effect of car lights on a deer. Indulge too much faith in technology and you may die because of a mechanical jam in the teletype machine, as almost happens in Andromeda Strain (1971); drop your guard for an instant and you may die from a random gun shot, as in November (2004); or, if you lose your faith, you may die from the desire for escape, as in Harrison Bergeron (1995). Technology itself has provided the means for ever-more sophisticated representations and imitations of the human form and mind: digital simulations have brought a whole new quality of realism – and fantasy – to film. Passing through such celebrated moments as Babbage’s early nineteenth-century calculating machine, revisited in Conceiving Ada (1997), to the digital “Colossus” and other machines used for code-breaking during World War II, revisited in Colossus (1970), computers became standard operating equipment for most businesses and entered domestic spaces soon after. In the 1980s, such companies as Microsoft, Apple, and others began to profit by marketing computers to the general public. Simultaneously, government fears of nuclear war supported the development of a universal network of computers that was initially exploited primarily as a message delivery tool and became available to the general public in the 1990s. By the mid-1980s, the danger of such networks was frequently conceived in terms of viruses and the birth of artificial consciousness, such as that of “Skynet” in Terminator (1984),32 rather than malfunctions, as in Failsafe (1964) and Andromeda Strain (1971). Artificial intelligences, such as those found in Colossus (1970), Demon Seed (1977), and others, more or less imitate the behavior of conventional melodramatic human villains insofar as they will use any means available to increase their power over others. Viruses, particularly the kind related to self-awareness or the desire for self-perpetuation, have become familiar science-fiction motifs: in the science-fiction Virus (1998), an alien intelligence, or “virus,” downloads into a ship’s computer system and begins constructing monstrous deadly cyborgs. In the more tech-noir Mangler 2 (2001), a virus behaves much like a serial killer and uses a school security system to stalk and kill the students trapped inside its precinct. Videodrome (1983) goes so far as to transform the transmitted image itself into a virus33 and in Fatal Error (1999) the transmission signal is the virus. Science fiction also features AIs with forms modeled after those in nature, as are the numerous humanoid androids and the less frequent cybernetic animals, birds, and insects. While some androids are presented as aesthetically interesting automatons, programmed with limited functions and no interpersonal skills, others seem indistinguishable from humans, as does Rachael in the 126

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tech-noir Blade Runner (1982).34 In many respects, the creation of an artificial being that appears “human” is an extension of “trompe l’oeil”: reproduction by replication rather than procreation. Waxwork illusions evoke a sense of the uncanny in their viewers, as well as amazement at the proficiency of the artist. Artificial beings may inspire similar reactions; but insofar as they become a part of society rather than experimental toys or objects in a museum, they also meet with the same range of gender, class, and racially inflected responses as humans do: affection, prejudice, and fear. The relative success of the android’s mimicry of human appearance and behavior is often an important ingredient in tech-noir plot developments, as human characters either try to figure out who is human and who is not or try to make up their minds about how to relate to their technological counterparts, and as the android characters discover the limits of their programs – as they do in Blade Runner. Other forms from nature are imitated to metaphorically develop the implications of less anthropomophic aspects of technology. For example, the spider-like “replicators” in the sciencefiction television series Stargate SG-1, first shown visually in the season-three episode “Nemesis” (February 11, 2000), lend technological form to a creature that seems to have special significance in tech-noir. Its multiple limbs articulate the computer’s capacity for multi-tasking and its webs mimic the maze of programs that have displaced more direct forms of experience and life. A spider appears as the nightmare vision in one of the early Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films (1920), another is vividly described by Rachael as one of her artificial memories in Blade Runner (1982), and Solo plays with and draws a spider in Solo (1996). Mimic (1997, 2001) favors cockroaches over spiders, specifically the genetically engineered “Judas Breed,” which develops its talent for mimicry in relation to visual appearance, sound, and also smell and applies it to the imitation of human beings to threaten and “cannibalize” them. The Judas Breed’s abilities seem to include all the various kinds of mimicry proposed by Roger Callois and John Shepley (1984) in their analysis of the phenomenon in nature: offensive and defensive mimicry, such that the bugs can escape notice of the humans who would kill them and also surprise their human prey; and both direct and indirect mimicry, such that they imitate humans because that disguise is the one that serves their current and immediate interests and because they seem to be on a path of convergence with humans in terms of behavior, specifically the behavior of human killers.35 Mimicry is also an essential functional and aesthetic component of human prostheses: digital technology, particularly the potential it created for miniaturization, has greatly enhanced the quality of this type of substitutive duplication. Artificial limbs, once made out of wood, but now made from metal, plastics, and other new materials, operate by means of electric impulses: some are no longer even detachable, but are completely integrated with the human body. Among the most sophisticated artificial body parts are those relating to the senses: cochlear implants, in particular, have progressed far beyond the crude hearing aids that were available in the early twentieth century. The first successful pacemaker implant took place in 1960; the first successful ear transplant in 1967; the first bionic arm “graft” in 2005. According to Daniel Dinello (2005): The word cyborg – cybernetic organism – was invented in 1960 by physiologist Manfred Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan Kline to describe a man–machine hybrid needed for a great technoutopian challenge: space travel beyond the stars. Later, the concept expanded to describe human/ 127

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machine weapons systems. Employed by NASA, Clynes and Kline proposed that a combination of surgery and drugs would enable humans to survive the inhuman atmosphere of outer space as well as the harsh environment of other planets.36 On a more mundane level, and as N. Katherine Hayles (1999) reiterates, cyborgs are not just part of a space-faring future, they really do exist now: About 10 percent of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin. Occupations make a much higher percentage into metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber-optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen player in the local video-game arcade.37 Cyborgs are, of course, commonplace in science fiction38 and in tech-noir melodramas about the horror of amputation and the capacities of the new limb or augmentations. Technology may have brought mimicry to a new level of perfection, but films such as Terminal Man (1974), Tin Man (1983), RoboCop (1987), and others, especially of the cyborg type, often show the devices themselves to bring problems that may be worse than those they correct, and the potential use of such mimicry as a means to power to be a serious threat to those not interested in donating their limbs or their lives to “science.” Like those addressing biological transplant surgery, these films should be considered not only in relation to the violence of the economy of availability, access, and volunteerism, but also in relation to simulations of experience, insofar as the fictional prostheses imitate the sensational as well as the unsensational aspects of functions served by their originals. The ability to technologically simulate sensations is proposed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1933) “feelies,” a kind of film designed to be perceived not just visually but by touch and emotional sensation as well. The term virtual reality was first used in 1987, but experimental gadgets from as early as the 1950s allowed for the perception of images and sound through some more complete imitation of the world and interface with that imitation than was afforded by screens and speakers.39 A device for creating such recordings for others to view and perceive is invented in Brain Storm (1983) and used to produce black market virtual reality tapes in Strange Days (1995) and other films; similar recordings or artificially created simulations also play a role in the virtual reality games featured in numerous tech-noir films. Most of the films that develop the possibilities of virtual reality show it to be a potentially dangerous distraction from the physical world;40 thus it is often treated didactically, and sometimes humorously, such that the simulated and commodified pleasures are not as good as the “real” thing. Men and women alike are indirectly or directly advised to not settle for anything less than the real thing: see Demolition Man (1993) for one such assertion and Terminal Justice (1995) for a greater elaboration of the commodification of virtual sex. Family Viewing (1987) establishes that even the homemade sex video intended for personal use, with nothing to offer but visuals, diminishes human relationships.41 Technology has also had numerous applications in the exploration, exploitation, and imitation of organic life in the physical world. “Eugenics,” a term coined by Sir Francis Galton in the nineteenth century, describes the centuries-old practice of breeding selectively to promote 128

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desired characteristics. Awareness of the effectiveness of this technique also led to the practice, commonplace in much of the United States in the early twentieth century, of sterilizing those the state decided should not reproduce.42 The idea of state-controlled reproduction was dramatized in Huxley’s Brave New World (1933) and subsequent real-world discoveries made the subject popular in tech-noir film, including the film versions of Huxley’s novel (1980, 1998). In 1953, microbiologists James D. Watson and Francis Crick realized that DNA is a code for life forms;43 the first successful experiments with test-tube babies took place in Britain in the later 1970s and 1980s; the first successful clone from an adult sheep was born in 1997; while the human genome project designed to map all human genetics, begun in the later 1980s and declared complete in 2000, has led to attempts to patent human DNA for commercial purposes. Further, as Dinello notes, an analogy quickly developed of “the cell as a tiny computer and DNA as the software. This establishment of cybernetics as a common language for computers and biology made it possible to use computers to manipulate the genetic code of living beings.”44 Films that articulate such discoveries include The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990, 2002), Mimic (1997, 2001), Godsend (2004), Natural City (2003), and others. The ability to interpret and reorganize DNA is applied to the production of superior “animals” in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996) and to promote the birth of genetically superior humans in Gattaca (1997).45 In The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971), this knowledge is applied to the task of cloning for transplant organs, while Nightworld (1998) suggests that DNA or body chemistry might be manipulated to produce longer- or shorter-lived beings.46 The attention given in films to the actual “test-tube” birth and birth of the artificial being in direct association with forms of violence that go far beyond that of the event itself – even as they imitate the natural prototype – points to the reason the being exists and the context and likelihood of its nurturing and its future purpose. These circumstances forecast the individual artificial being’s sense of self and future actions in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Replicant (2001), and Frankenstein (2004). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990, 2002) is relevant to this discussion, but in that story the “birth” separates Hyde from his “father” while temporarily denying the father his existence and completely denying Hyde any chance of being nurtured by anybody. Mimicry often appears in conjunction with mise-en-abyme in tech-noir films. Mise-en-abyme is traditionally associated with such conventional story frames as those exploited by Shelley, Stevenson, and Wells: a ship’s captain in Frankenstein, a lawyer in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a shipwreck survivor’s nephew in The Island of Doctor Moreau serve as the opening narrators who are both outside the main events and in-the-know about those events. Novel writers are often used as a means of supporting the story-within-the-story idea in tech-noir, but they also appear as the victims of stalkers in The Companion (1994), Twilight Man (1996), and White Noise (2005). The general idea in these films seems to be that technology is a threat with very special implications for writers insofar as they correctly fear that they and their art will be supplanted by visually oriented technological mediums. In Until the End of the World (1991), novel writing on an old-fashioned typewriter is presented as part of a general argument regarding the dangers of technologically enhanced memory and dream imagery and the moral goodness and healing power of words, especially, it seems, the type-written word. “Writing” that is more akin to a “program” often takes the place of the traditional book or story in tech-noir films. A virtual reality novel and its writer are featured in Future Kick (1991), while 129

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virtual reality “game” designers appear in Tron (1982), Arcade (1993), Dream Breaker (1995), Evolver (1994), Virtual Seduction (1996), Nirvana (1997), eXistenZ (1999), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and the game appears without its designers in Brainscan (1994). In most of these examples, the entrance of one or more main characters into the game sets up the “real” film world as a mere frame that is as distant to the main action as Prendick’s nephew is to Moreau’s island. Frames are also developed in tech-noir films by means of prologue voice-overs or text that establish some catastrophic event in the past or the position of one of the main characters, not necessarily the hero: Cyborg (1989), for example, opens with a voice-over by the principal opposition to the rejuvenation of the wasteland, a violent character who likes the violence, the death, and the misery just the way it is. Chain Reaction (1996), on the other hand, opens with an impassioned plea for “good” technology from a man who believes the entire planet is on the brink of its final destruction: he is almost immediately murdered by those who like the “bad” technology. The prologue of Cybercity (1999) establishes that a hellish, rotting, underground world is a punishment imposed by mother earth for the destruction humans brought to her surface with their wars and violence – thus setting up the context for the closing shots in which the heroes, a symbolic nuclear family, escape to the rejuvenated surface. A number of tech-noir films use a writer, reporter, or some other creator of representations to offer points of view that mediate between the main film events and the audience, thus imitating such experiences as watching the news on television, but also allowing for more complex developments of the experience of being recorded, watched, and otherwise studied or placed under surveillance. Films about ratings systems, such as Rollerball (1975) and Network (1976), pick up this theme, but with little attention to the writer. In Deathwatch (1980), a dying author is exploited by the media as part of the ratings game: the viewer’s sympathy for this woman is enhanced by the obnoxious self-interest and duplicity of the reporter who pursues her and is complicated by the necessity of complicity with his voyeurism. The opening and closing voice-overs by the reporter’s wife are obviously intended to develop sympathy for this otherwise not very sympathetic character and divert the possibility of making the film audience feel guilty by letting them discover, as the reporter does, just what the implications of media voyeurism are for the individual. In Speaking Parts (1989), a scriptwriter finds her work drastically revised by a director-producer who prefers to develop the story-within-the-story device by including a talk show within the film he is making. This film also addresses the interests and identity confusion of the actor who never stops playing a role and the young woman who finds it difficult to stop being an audience and almost impossible to identify with people outside their film or social roles. These characters, like some of those in Family Viewing (1987), as William Beard (2007) observes: adopt these technologies as a means to distance themselves, or conceal themselves, or live out their emotional lives in a voodooist or substitutive fashion. Dominating this landscape is the massive presence of video, with its ability to record, fix, replay, and rephrase people and situations. An astonishing number of the characters in these films are found obsessively making tapes or watching them or both, fixated on using video as a magical tool that will somehow enable them to process and manipulate their own lives and the world around them.47

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The visual effects used in this film include mise-en-abyme, or the arrangement of compositional elements within the frame such that the viewer sees multiple interior spaces or, as in this film, such that the viewer sees not only the set, but one or more screens, reflections, or other representations within that set. In tech-noir films, the television screen and surveillance image are frequently used as insets within the mise-en-scène to create a mise-en-abyme effect. In Death Watch (1980), for example, a television show is constructed from surveillance images gathered by a reporter’s camera eye-implant; the reporter is shown juxtaposed with the broadcast images on several occasions and responds sympathetically to the object of his surveillance for the first time when he actually sees the show. As reviewer Garrett Stewart (1983) notes, however, “here too he is filming, if blurrily, what he sees, in a potentially infinite regress of the already seen, the secondary. These ironies of electronic visual mediation are inseparable from the critique of technological escalation at large in the film’s prophesied future – and the correspondent atrophy of all narrative impulse.”48 Various kinds of camera-produced images, films and stills, appear repeatedly throughout many tech-noir films. The packaging of surveillance imagery as melodrama and the coinciding public response to that construction are central to The Truman Show (1998). Images gathered throughout the individual’s lifetime by an embedded surveillance device are used for “re-memory” services in Final Cut (2004). Covertly gathered surveillance footage shown to a murder victim’s friends and subjects serves as a kind of revenge in Final Cut (1998), and much of November (2005) is composed of memories of technologically mediated images belonging to a murder victim. Photographs and films may provide records of an otherwise unbelievable truth, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990, 2002), but in many tech-noir films such images metonymically represent the larger problem of finding some reality behind a façade or maze of images deliberately manufactured to hide it. Photographs support Rachael’s false memories in Blade Runner (1982)49 and a film seems to authenticate the hero’s “voluntary” body donation in Killer Deal (1999). The film and film stills in Rising Sun (1993) and a photograph in Judge Dredd (1995) are eventually deciphered so that a “true” image is found behind the artificially created representation; a separate recording serves a similar purpose in Killer Deal. While distillations of the “real” and the artificial make for easy plot resolutions, they are not always possible. Often, the mise-en-abyme shifts such that characters and settings are conflated, compacted, and even imbricated, while simultaneously and telescopically extended, as when one or more main characters has artificial limbs or implants that allow for direct interfacing with computers, or the artificial or artificially enhanced person seems to be an extension of his equally artificial environment. The liquid metal machine in Terminator 2 (1991), for example, can meld into and imitate anything of its own approximate size, and SID in Virtuosity (1995) can regrow his body parts from glass. This physical merging with the environment is itself a kind of extension of telepathy or telekinesis, such as that the androids in Phoenix (1995) develop as they evolve beyond their original programmed purpose. Character is further imbricated with setting and the mise-en-abyme developed conceptually, if not always visually, when the action moves into virtual reality, particularly when the virtual programming interfaces with the user’s unconscious, as in Virtual Seduction (1995). Time-loop or flashback sequences, such as those in The Terminator (1984),50 Freejack (1992), A.P.E.X. (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), and November (2004), may also have the effect of adding a layer to the conceptual mise-en-abyme. In the more visually sophisticated films, the particular nature of the person and the artificial person is coincidentally articulated, as in Blade Runner (1982)51 131

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and The Terminator,52 two of the most frequently cited tech-noir films, by the use of various kinds of representations as props within the settings or of the technologically generated counterparts of natural things. The mise-en-abyme is thus developed by the treatment of mise-en-scène. Such arrangements are particularly effective when they include representations and imitations of the human body and other subjects that may be selected from a wide range of mediums and forms: drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, dolls, life-sized mannequins, and dioramas, as well as the more sophisticated androids, clones, and virtual reality constructs. More rarely, mimes appear, as they do in The Conversation (1974) and Open Your Eyes (1997). While the “doubles” in paintings and sculptures are usually a sign of wealth, as are the paintings of Diana in Encrypt (2003), tattoos and graffiti are usually the art forms of the poor or signs of territoriality, as in the wild palms tattoo marking exclusive club membership in Wild Palms (1993). In Cyber Bandits (1994), a specific tattoo is lent unusual prominence as it contains digital information needed to make a virtual reality weapon operational, and in Final Cut (2004) tattoos are used to circumvent the effects of the “Zoe” implants: the first tattoo is a map and the second is a protective wall. Such temporal forms as music and dancing appear occasionally, as in the “Vulcanoid” exotic dancer in Cyberzone (1995) and the ballet dancing Erika in Frankenstein (2004). Both of these characters are part of a particular chain of being within each film. The exotic dancer stands between the female androids programmed to turn men “on” and the upper class female android specialist who knows how to find the androids’ “off ” switches. Erika is really Erika the second and, while physically indistinguishable from her predecessor, she possesses greater autonomy and self-confidence. Photographs of all kinds may be juxtaposed with drawings and paintings to emphasize their similarity as forms of representation and the differences in what the mediums purport to capture. Photographs and the film within the film are most commonly the products of surveillance, but photography is also an art practiced as such by the wives in The Stepford Wives (1975) and Godsend (2004). The Stepford Wives, detailed in the “Filmography,” makes extensive use of a range of representational images, including photographs, drawings, mannequins, and robots to lend a sense of the human form as part of a continuum that expands considerably on the traditional animal– human–god hierarchy. It also demonstrates the fetishizing of the eye and vision characteristic of tech-noir film in the context of mise-en-scène and mise-en-abyme development. The opening sequence finds Joanna and Walter Eberhart and their two small daughters just before they move from Manhattan to the Connecticut town of Stepford. While waiting in the car for Walter, the girls see and Joanna takes photographs of a man carrying an unclothed mannequin across a busy street. When Walter returns, one daughter says, “Daddy, I just saw a man carrying a naked woman across the street”; Walter responds, “Well, that’s why we’re movin’ to Stepford!” This statement also proves to be ironic because, once in Stepford, Walter joins an association of men from the aerospace and computer industries committed to turning their wives into androids programmed to be wives and mothers. The replication process involves adjustment of the physical specifications of the original to satisfy the husband’s fantasies, and the replication of the marital bedroom, apparently for practice sessions. An artist also has to prepare drawings of the subject with special attention to the eyes (0:31–0:36): the artist even gives Joanna one of his sketches, but her fascination with this rendering is also ironic given that she is seeking professional recognition for her photographs capturing the essence of her children’s play and that her ultimate fate is to be mechanically replicated. 132

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Joanna and her friend Bobby investigate the peculiar “feminine” docility of the local women conveyed by their appearance in costumes and domestic interior and exterior settings owing something to Monet: the lawn party at which Karen malfunctions and walks around repeating “I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe” (0:40) is indicative of the physical and intellectual world of the Stepford wives. The artist’s sketches provide clues to the behavior of these women: when Joanna and Bobby visit someone they formerly found to be as “normal” as themselves, she has not only become docile, domesticated, and utterly dedicated to her husband and the finer points of housekeeping, she has a drawing of herself (1:22) that is much like the one the artist gave to Joanna; later, when Bobby too has changed, she is in possession of a similar drawing (1:22). Joanna also realizes that the speech session she underwent with one of her husband’s new friends, which involved pronouncing the words on a list for him (0:50), is another clue when the android Bobby does not know the word “archaic” (1:38), a word the real Bobby knew perfectly well. In spite of her growing awareness that something terrible is happening to the Stepford women, Joanna finds she is unable to abandon her children, her “natural” doubles, and thus meets her end at the hands of the artificial double created to replace her. While male dolls, mannequins, and androids tend to appear hard, inflexible, and erect,53 the clones, at least at the moment of birth, sometimes imbricate the human and artificial experience through the presentation of the abject. For example, The 6th Day (2000) (see “Filmography”) shows an exceptional development of the conceptual mise-en-abyme: the primary aesthetic is one of artificial beauty with lots of shiny metal and glass objects paired with Adam’s Schwarzenegger body and the carefully selected people/actors with whom he works and lives, but a kind of aesthetic subplot of the abject is prominent in the scenes involving incompletely formed clones and the cloning process. These clones are pale and slimy, rather than colorful and glossy, slugs that wait for imprinting in a kind of large swimming pool. When they are needed, they become the objects of a largely automated process by which they are moved into shiny pods and subjected to the computer-generated and controlled programming that results in their perfect imitation of some original human. The scenes in which the not-quite-dead Drucker faces his not-quite-completelyprocessed clone are the climax of the abject aesthetic in this film. These clones, like the Creature birthed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), that birthed in Replicant (2001), and those in other tech-noir films, align initially not only with the helpless “blank” of the human infant, but with the adults conceived as mere receptacles for programming or imprinting. In such films, an unpalatable concept of the person is assigned to the helpless double, whose victimization is not necessarily easily understood given its lack of human personality or identity, but which nevertheless redefines the challenges of identity for the contemporary person. Tech-noir films address this problem in different ways and for different ends. The replicated wives of Stepford are humans reduced to “blanks” which viewers respond to with horror because they have been introduced to the “originals” and know what has been lost. The metallic man in Roboman (1975), however, is a “person” inside a “blank” body whom viewers know through surveillance information and his own testimony about his former life: the extremity of his plight awakens a certain amount of pathos, but it arouses almost as much paranoia. Many films, however, ask audiences to recognize a person inside a non-humanoid frame in even more overtly violent contexts that are ultimately less disturbing, perhaps because of the addition of comic and “fantasy” virtual elements or special effects, as in Tron (1982), Max Headroom (1985), Ghost in the Machine 133

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(1993), and Menno’s Mind (1997). In other films, humans simply extend their consciousness into the digital world, as in The Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996), Arcade (1993), Virtual Seduction (1996), eXistenZ (1999), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999). This latter possibility is best and most horrifically articulated by the panoramic view in The Matrix (1999) of a vast field of humans permanently jacked into an artificial reality from their fluid-filled, womb-like pods. Conceptual mise-en-abyme is, not surprisingly, frequently developed with specific reference to some imprinting or programming process. Androids discover their “true” selves when they realize their memories are complete fabrications or that they originally belonged to someone else, as in Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990),54 Phoenix (1995), and Total Recall 2070 (1999); much the same experience is waiting for the principal clone in The 6th Day (2000). Humans may likewise become heroes when they successfully find their way through the labyrinth and layers of implanted programs and memories, as in Total Recall and Cypher (2002); memory manipulation, as in Paycheck (2003); specific behavioral programs, as in Fugitive Mind (1999), Apocalypse Watch (1997), and Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004); and complete mind transplants, as in Megaville (1990), Menno’s Mind (1997), and Xchange (2003). In these films, humans seek to escape imbrication with some artificial reality and return to their “real” place relative to the simulacrum and the conventions of existence with which they are most familiar. Dreaming in tech-noir Dreams and nightmares have provided sources and inspiration for numerous stories including, among many others, The Castle of Otranto (1764), Frankenstein (1818), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).55 Dreams are also often used as framing devices and as sub-narratives in films, such that they enhance the complexity of the mise-en-abyme. Dreams frequently serve a similar function in tech-noir films, and are commonly juxtaposed or aligned with some type of technologically generated image, beyond that of the film itself, to assert the differences between the mind’s eye and the technological eye. The surveillance image, one of the most common tech-noir motifs, is typically produced by a recording device located in a building, machine, cyborg, or android and is often supplemented by data streams of information related to the objects and people within its frame. Such images are readily associated with the loss of individual freedom and privacy to the watchful eye of a corporate or governmental big brother and the loss of the subjective perception associated with the private individual. Most tech-noir films use mind’s eye images in a manner consistent with conventional Freudian wisdom about dreams as a way for the dreamer’s unconscious to convey information to his or her waking consciousness. Freud regarded dreams as conduits for telepathic communication that may have actually preceded spoken language in human development.56 He observed that dreams (a) may draw on memories, often from childhood, and knowledge that is not necessarily accessible to the person while awake, (b) are often stimulated by external or internal sensations or psychic experiences, (c) are essentially image based or perceptual, and (d) they often function as wish fulfillments or expressions of anxiety.57 Freud also found that dream images are altered and distorted from their real life correlates insofar as the manifest content may differ from the “latent” content and may be affected by condensation, displacement, and other processes of representation 134

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or what he called the “dream work.” Dream images in tech-noir films generally conform to Freud’s observations insofar as they usually serve to “telepathically” inform the victim about his or her true identity, true memories, or about how things in the current situation are not as they seem or should be. While most of these film dream images are quite literal and display little evidence of the “dream work,” they do sometimes show and contribute to other processes, including those of l’informe and of abjection. Informing Many dreams in tech-noir films serve to convey information from the dreaming hero’s unconscious to his waking consciousness for the purpose of foreshadowing or informing him about events that are only possible because of advanced technology, as in Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984), and Terminator 2 (1991); or for the purpose of providing clues to the hero’s identity, an identity that has been lost or compromised by corporate or military powers wielding technology capable of programming the human mind, as in Megaville (1990) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995). In these examples and others, the visual distinction between dream and real-life images is carefully maintained as the power of the dream message depends on viewers recognizing it for what it is and accepting it, as do the film protagonists, as one that cannot be dismissed or ignored. In Blade Runner, Rick Deckard is a retired cop and blade runner, meaning he used to hunt down and “retire” renegade replicants. The Tyrell Corporation specializes in making replicants: the Nexus 6 series is so advanced they might soon pass the eye-exam and question test used to distinguish them from humans. Deckard is called back into service to take care of some “skin jobs,” Nexus 6 replicants who have returned to planet earth in search of a way to bypass their built-in four-year life span because, as their creators feared, they have begun to develop human emotions and attachments and want to live longer to enjoy them. Deckard meets Rachael, purportedly Tyrell’s “niece,” when Tyrell asks him to demonstrate the test on a human: Rachael proves to be a Nexus 6 who probably does not have an expiration date. Deckard subsequently locates and kills one replicant, Rachael kills another shortly after as it is about to kill him, then he kills the third, while the fourth actually rescues him from certain death, then sits quietly in the rain philosophizing about the imminent loss of his experiences until he expires. The Blade Runner vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is filled with the contrasts of wealth and poverty that mark the tech-noir genre: the streets, always dark, are full of neon, projection screens, corporate logos, vendors, people, and grime. Photography and mannequins, as in other tech-noir films, dramatize the processes of detection and the contemplation of the nature of humanity inspired by androids. The original version includes voice-overs from Deckard, a feature that does much to enhance the film’s artistic ties to film noir, and a concluding exit into the country. The director’s cut of 1992 removes the voice-overs and final countryside scenes, but includes a sequence in which Deckard dreams of a unicorn (0:42). The unicorn dream appears to be an obvious clue produced by Deckard’s unconscious mind that Rachael, with whom he has fallen in love, is “one of a kind” and probably does not have a termination date. In this case the dream is one about the uniqueness, and possibly the humanity, of an android. Deckard is motivated, in part, by this dream to run off with Rachael rather than kill 135

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her. The point of the dream sequence is to present an image that bridges the gap between human and android and helps viewers to identify with Deckard’s realization and accept his decision. This effect is best achieved if viewers recognize the dream for what it is; thus the unicorn dream is clearly identifiable as such with fuzzy shapes, soft colors, and altered motion, … not to mention there is a unicorn. The dream “informs” Deckard about Rachael’s true nature: as a message from his unconscious, it persuades film viewers, as it does Deckard, of Rachael’s special qualities and they are thus inclined to agree with Deckard’s decision to preserve her. In The Terminator (1984), a killer android has been sent back in time from Los Angeles 2028 to kill Sarah Connor before she can give birth to her son John, the future human leader of the war on machines. Kyle Reese, one of John’s soldiers, has also come back to rescue Sarah from this untimely end. The opening sequence of the devastation that will replace Los Angeles reappears in Rees’s dream (0:19) when he pauses briefly to rest and again as he tells Sarah about the future. This story becomes Sarah’s dream (1:10) as she falls asleep, and when she wakens, she is fully convinced of the truth of what Rees has told her: all of her subsequent actions are indicative of the strength of her new found conviction that something must be done to stop the machines. Like The Terminator, Terminator 2 opens with a dystopian futuristic sequence: this time the war between man and machines in 2029 is vividly depicted with a voice-over by Sarah Connor explaining developments since the end of the first film. The Cyberdyne systems model 101 Terminator returns from the future (and the first film) to the present, reprogrammed to protect the troublemaking adolescent John from the T-1000, an advanced prototype liquid-metal killing machine sent to destroy him. John and the 101 model Terminator rescue Sarah from the mental institution where she has been confined for trying to blow up Cyberdyne Systems; something she did because she knows that company will eventually develop Skynet, the machine that will become sentient and turn against its human creators. The three then flee to the desert borderlands between the United States and Mexico where Sarah has a stash of weapons. Here, at the approximate midpoint of the film (1:15–1:18), Sarah falls asleep on a picnic table and dreams of a playground where a more innocent version of herself plays happily with her son. This idyllic scene quickly turns into a nightmare of the apocalypse. Waking, Sarah finds she has carved the words “No Fate” into the picnic table. She abruptly heads back to the city to find Dyson, the individual responsible for the technology that makes Skynet possible. Her son and the T-101 catch up with her and help convince Dyson to destroy his work. The film ends with both the T-1000 and T-101 incinerated in the furnace of a metal working factory. In both Terminator films, the dream sequences are made readily identifiable by setting, overlapping images, and altered speed and atmospheric coloring; indeed, as in Blade Runner, their effectiveness as a message from the human unconscious depends on the viewer’s ability to recognize them as such. In both films, that message is a dramatization of the urgency of the problem presented by technology that serves as an evocation of destiny or purpose in the main characters and simultaneously promotes the viewer’s identification with that same destiny. In these, as in most tech-noir films in which they appear, the dream images are clearly identifiable and contrast sharply with the data-stream images associated with technology. They serve as an indicator of the deep embedding of human identity, spirit, and survival instincts in the unconscious and they suggest that the human unconscious and intuition are what make the human superior to the machine. Similarly, Megaville (1990) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995) include short dream and related memory sequences as clues to the main character’s personal history that has been lost to corporate136

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controlled technology. These glimpses through the mind’s eye also appear as signs of the resilience of the human spirit and suggest that identity is deeply embedded in the unconscious where even the most sophisticated programming technology cannot penetrate.58 In Megaville, Raymond Jensen is a criminal who thinks he is Palinov because he has been given a memory implant from Palinov so that he will help a policing agency, CKS, infiltrate a black market media ring. The commissioner of CKS is able to see everything Jensen sees through another implant that taps into his optic nerve, providing a constant surveillance feed. Jensen has a dream of an occasion in his youth when he attacked a boy with a rock (0:08); his father, a hitman and criminal, later explains that the boy he attacked had bitten him: “It’s your mind trying to tell you who you really are” (1:17), he says. Jensen also has a series of memory flashbacks to his violent past that also help him to realize the truth of his identity (0:13, 0:17, 0:28, 0:39). These scenes are made recognizable to viewers as dream and memory images by their fragmentary nature, tendency to blur slightly, and their editorial cutting with the “normal” film reality. These mind’s eye images contrast sharply with the bluish and static-filled surveillance data continually fed back to the director who is attempting to use Jensen for his own illegal and profit-motivated purposes. Jensen eventually takes his revenge by using a headset to play a virtual reality game that confuses his monitors into thinking he has evidence of their complicity with criminals (1:26). Unable to identify the game as such through the surveillance, the commissioner responds by having the suitcase of offending information brought to his office where the bomb Jensen planted in it blows up. In this film, dreams and memories contribute to the main character’s confusion, but they are also clues to his identity that resurface in spite of the implants and other technological manipulations. Virtual reality images, on the other hand, are readily confused with those of the film’s “real” life, especially when they are transmitted through a surveillance feed incapable of making fine distinctions between natural and artificial realities: the technologically generated images thus become false clues that help the criminal escape from the equally criminal government agency. Unlike Jensen, whose loss of memory was involuntary, Johnny in Johnny Mnemonic forfeited his long-term memory, his childhood, in order to enhance his capacity as a data courier. His lost childhood is now all he thinks about. To pay for the expensive process required to restore it, he takes on what proves to be an extremely dangerous job, carrying the cure for the plague of technologyrelated health problems created and kept secret by Pharmakom to a group that intends to make it available to the general public. The cure proves to be more information than he can safely carry, even with his latest “doubler” upgrade, and Johnny sets out on his delivery-run highly motivated, not only by the various thugs who try to stop him, but by the need to download the information before it starts to seep and cause permanent damage to his brain. Johnny’s dreams of his childhood play an important role in both structuring the film and dramatizing the difference between technologically and memory-generated images. He dreams in fragmentary images on three principal occasions, on each of which he is sitting up, but in an apparent state of complete exhaustion or collapse. The first dream (0:34) occurs after he has escaped a murderous assault and is dozing in a sewer: it appears as flashes of warm colors and fuzzy images that include a screen door sliding shut and a child skipping. The second dream (1:08) occurs after he has made it to low-tech “heaven” and has collapsed in a chair: more images styled like those in the first dream appear, including a chandelier, a hall, a birthday cake, balloons 137

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in the sky, and people. The third dream (1:30) occurs after he has completed the download of the Pharmakom data and again collapsed in a chair: he sees a tricycle break through a wall, a hall with a window at the end, a woman in a bright red party dress going down some house stairs, a child skipping from the window end of the hall (toward the viewer), four children playing outside in a yard with flowers and balloons, a white cake with blue trim and red flowers and seven candles with the words “Happy Birthday Johnny 7” written on it, a point-of-view shot as if a child looks up from the cake to the woman in the red dress, and then balloons flying into the sky. All of these dream-memory images are stylistically marked by their soft colors and shapes and are thus readily distinguished from the morphing kaleidoscopic neon grids and cartoonlike characters populating the computer-generated digital reality, also frequently shown during the film as Johnny uses all his technological know-how to evade his pursuers and complete his delivery before one or the other kills him. This film includes one other repeated technologically generated image: that of Anna, a digital version of the former and deceased CEO of Pharmakom (0:34, 0:42, 0:49, 1:01, 1:16, 1:23). She was supposed to continue to serve as an advisor to the company, but turned against it when she discovered they were keeping the cure for the plague to themselves. Anna appears, apparently at will and on screen, as a glowing white and blue face until the corporation burns her out of the system, at which point she disappears in pink and mauve flames. Her appearance is consistent with the contrasting aesthetics of the mind’s eye and technologically generated images in the rest of the film: as a human who has retained her humanity, even in her post-human existence, she looks more like a dream image than a data stream. L’informe Dream images in tech-noir films may provide clues regarding profound changes facing human identity in the face of intrusive as well as pervasive technology, as do those in Brazil (1985) and RoboCop (1987). In these films, the visual distinction between dream and surveillance or technologically generated imagery collapses in a manner that supports the film message about the radical effects of technology on humanity. The breaking down of categorical distinctiveness is the operation of “l’informe” or the formless. As Rosalind Kraus and Yves Alain-Bois (1997) explain it, the formless is not a theme or quality, but rather a performative closely associated with entropy;59 but where entropy is the expenditure of energy that allows the encroachment of disorder and rot, l’informe refers more to the actual lowering and declassifying of things, the returning of things to a state of taxonomic disorder.60 In Brazil and RoboCop, the surveillance and dream images become declassified, but they do not become disordered. The world of Brazil, located “somewhere in the 20th century,” is one of cramped, windowless offices and apartments full of technology and overtaken by entropic forces: administrators have no idea how to manage simple problems because the paperwork is so complex and even the simplest machines do not work properly. On a more personal level, entropy is destroying all of the systems and structures in Sam Lowry’s life, from his government job to his apartment’s environmental controls, such that he feels increasingly disassociated from just about everything. Sam’s dreams mark this progressive disassociation. 138

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The first dream (0:12), following that in the opening credits, finds Sam as Icarus flying in the clouds when he sees a beautiful woman, but storm clouds gather, so he kisses her and flies away. In the second dream (0:24), he flies toward the same woman floating behind sheets of gauze, but monolithic blocks erupt from the ground into the sky and separate him from her. It is after this second dream that Sam first encounters Harry Tuttle, a renegade engineer who shows up to rescue him from his overactive apartment heating system. The next day, Sam sets off to do a good deed for his boss by delivering a check to a woman who does not have a bank account. The check is a refund for costs related to her husband’s arrest and death, an arrest that no one will acknowledge or even really knows was an error resulting from a squashed fly causing a printer to change the name Tuttle to Buttle. While on this errand, Sam meets the real-life counterpart of his dream woman, the entirely self-sufficient Jill. This occasion marks the first specific imbrication of Sam’s dream life with real life and, initially, Sam responds as to a dream come true. Sam’s next dream (0:49) is actually a fantasy he has while returning home from work: this shift from dreaming to fantasizing marks the further imbrication of Sam’s unconscious with his real life. In this fantasy he is flying once again, and as he flies he sees ghouls pulling Jill in a floating cage. He rescues her by sending the creatures away. Dream-fantasy four (0:52) occurs almost immediately: he sees a golden, metal-encased man as well as the ghouls. He slashes the rope so that the cage floats off. A voice asks: “what have you done with the body?” He battles the metal man. Sam is shaken from this fantasy by a singing telegram reminding him of one of his mother’s parties, which he then attends, and has another brief fantasy – number five in the film (0:57) – this time of the ghouls that first appeared in fantasy four. At the party, Sam meets the wheelchair-bound man from whom his mother has wrangled a promotion for him and tells him that he accepts the promotion: he accepts because he believes the new position will enable him to find and help Jill. His sixth fantasy (1:02), which follows this event, is one in which he battles the golden man. Fantasy seven (1:10) occurs in his post-promotion office as he waits for his neighbor to dig up some information about Jill on his computer: in it, he runs along the ground as Jill floats off in the cage. He grabs the rope and is carried along with the floating cage as a brick monster appears in the ground beneath him begging him not to leave. Following these dreams and fantasies, Sam tracks down the real-life Jill by going to his friend Jack, accidentally comes upon evidence of the torture that has replaced the due process of the court system, gets a file on Jill, realizes that Jack killed Buttle, gets caught in a malfunctioning elevator, and commits several misdemeanors while trying to get to Jill, who has come into the office to complain some more about the bureacracy’s misplacement of Buttle. Sam finally gets to her and the two make a wild escape from the police who are now after Sam. They land in a department store where Jill has a package to deliver and where a terrorist bomb goes off nearly killing them both: both try to help the injured. Sam almost immediately lapses into fantasy eight (1:36), in which he battles the golden man with a sword and finally stabs and unmasks him only to discover his own face. Both Sam and Jill are then arrested. Sam is released and he returns to his office where he loses control, stuffing messages back up the message pipe, until finally he just stoppers both ingoing and outgoing pipes with the result that papers fly everywhere. He subsequently finds his home overtaken by ice and insulting repair men. Tuttle arrives to help him get even, then Jill arrives and Sam decides to take her to his mother’s apartment where she apparently decides she likes him. He leaves to engage in 139

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a daring operation involving unauthorized access to some governmental offices where he arranges to have Jill officially deleted and thus made free of further pursuit. He returns to Jill and, as they embrace, Sam’s mind cuts out to fantasy nine (1:51): flying with Jill, but this momentary delight is interrupted as men break in and take him away in a hooded straightjacket. The final fantasy sequence begins soon after Sam is taken captive and faces torture and certain death. He imagines Tuttle comes to rescue him: it is not until Tuttle dissolves in a flurry of papers on the street that this fantasy is clearly identified as such. Sam’s fantasies then take him to his mother’s simultaneous funeral and celebration of recovered youth where he topples her decayed corpse on the floor. He flees and hides out in a housing unit, which is driven away to safety in the countryside by Jill. The principal motifs in Sam’s dreams and fantasies all have “real-life” counterparts and most are associated with some form of sublation: Icarus corresponds to the winged humanoid bronze with the inscription “The Truth Will Set You Free” in the foyer of the corporate office where he works and the golden robot is the alter ego of his own real-life persona as humanistic bureaucrat. The floating cage is the elevator that promises to take him “up” to a better job, which is actually worse than the one he had, and “up” to the comforts of his high-rise apartment, which is constantly overtaken by heating and cooling problems and the associated disarray of pipes and tubes. The ghoulish creatures are both the victims of terrorist bombings and the disintegrating women who seek eternal youth through experimental cosmetic surgery. The real-life Jill is trying to help her neighbor whose husband, Buttle, has been erroneously arrested and terminated, not Sam, though Sam’s fate, in the end, perhaps differs little from Buttle’s. L’informe is evident in the gradual imbrication of Sam’s unconscious and conscious life, an imbrication that is indicated in three ways. First, characters and circumstances that initially appear in his dreams or fantasies then appear in his real life: Sam first dreams of Jill as a beautiful damsel and then he meets her in real life; he dreams of battling a metal monster, actually himself, and then he really does try to take on the system by having Jill “deleted.” Second, there is a shift from dreaming to waking fantasies: Sam meets Jill after two dream sequences; subsequently his imagined images take the form of waking fantasies. Third, the visual appearance of the imagined events changes over the course of the film. The initial dream sequences are a bit fuzzy in appearance with unusual artistic coloration and the forms themselves are improbable: viewers may easily interpret such features as signs of dream imagery. Later in the film, as the protagonist gradually loses control of his physical world, the visual distinction between reality and dream becomes less clear, marking both the appearance of his dream and fantasy characters in his “real” life and his subsequent retreat into an inner human world that he can comprehend, the outer world having become too inhuman to tolerate. Indeed, viewers may easily believe that following Sam’s incarceration and subjection to torture, a team of rebel forces really does arrive to rescue him and may be disappointed to realize that this event is “merely” a fantasy. Sam’s loss of distinction between fantasy and real life, the declassification of fantasy as distinct from a real life already radically affected by the entropy of an overly bureaucratized civilization, thus leads to Sam’s removal from that bureaucracy and thereby restores its uniformity – uniformity itself being an effect of the declassification of individuals as such. A similar collapse of the visual difference between mind’s eye images and those of the “real” world takes place in RoboCop, but with a somewhat different plot resolution. In RoboCop, Murphy 140

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is murdered by a gang and then “rehabilitated” by the corporation that controls Detroit: Omni Consumer Products. In spite of his metal body and computer programming, Murphy retains the ability to dream, and he follows the clues provided by dreams of his wife and son and of his own murder back to his pre-cyborg life. His first dream (0:23) occurs while he is undergoing the surgery that will transform him into RoboCop: he sees his son watching T.J. Laser blast a bad guy on television and then hears him say, “Can you do that dad?” Then he sees and hears his wife saying, “I really have to tell you something.” Then he sees his wife and son standing outside their house waving to him in a point-of-view shot from his position speeding rapidly away from them. Then he sees images of his own violent death. His second dream (0:44) occurs while he, now transformed into RoboCop, is napping in his chair in the police precinct basement. He is wired to an array of monitoring devices so, on this occasion, viewers see the face of Murphy’s killer as he dreams it flash on a screen evidently rigged to show projections from his “unconscious.” When RoboCop follows up on the clues provided in his dream and goes to investigate his former residence on Primrose Lane, he encounters a monitor running a film of a sales agent advertising the house. His vision turns to static and the house then reappears, apparently through his eyes, as it formerly was. Murphy’s memories of his family, first re-experienced in his dreams, are now surfacing as RoboCop’s conscious visual memories. He later explains that he cannot actually remember his family; he can only feel them. As he moves through the house (0:54), he sees his son, as in his earlier dream, watching television and asking: “Can you do that dad?” Then he passes another sales monitor: looking at the empty house as it really is, he finds a mug that says “husband” on it, and an old family photo in a book. At this point film viewers see static, as in RoboCop’s own visual point of view, then a view of Murphy’s wife with a jack-o’-lantern, his son in a devil’s costume, and Murphy himself joining the family photo moment and turning to look at the camera set with a timer to take a picture. Murphy then goes down the hall to the bedroom where his wife again says, “I really have to tell you something,” but this time she gets to complete her statement: “I love you.” RoboCop walks back through the deserted house, smashing one of the sales monitors on his way: having rediscovered his identity in terms of his connection to his wife, he has no more dreams in this film, but he has recovered his sense of self emotionally, as well as in time and space.61 The first and second dreams are visually and contextually tagged so that they are clearly identifiable as dreams, but on the third occasion these same images enter RoboCop’s waking consciousness as memory images playing out in his mind following a static cut from his now usual perception of the world accompanied by data streams. This phenomenon is attributable to technology that is equally capable of transmitting images from the mind’s eye and the body’s eye. The message is clear: as those aspects of his former human identity that are untouched by the artificial programming process surface and are integrated into his new technologically mediated audio-visual memory, Murphy and RoboCop morph into a new cyborg entity in which the human controls the machine. Brazil and RoboCop present the dream image as a sign of human identity, as well as humanity, and the surveillance or data image as a sign of corporate-controlled technology. Brazil collapses different kinds of mind’s eye imagery to suggest that insanity is the only means of escaping the intrusions of technology, whereas RoboCop collapses forms of mental and machine vision to satirically suggest that the two may be interchangeable: indeed, if man controls the machine, this is the stuff of which the hero of a technological dystopia is made.

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Abject The dreams in tech-noir films discussed thus far are rather literal, but otherwise conform to Freud’s popularized dream theory in that they often refer to childhood, provide clues necessary to the main character based on external or internal experiences, are essentially, if not entirely, image based, and also serve as wish fulfillments or expressions of anxiety. They tend to affirm the idea that dreams are a more ancient, and somehow more truthful, indicator of human nature and identity and may be the last reservoir of an individual’s resistance to incursions on his or her individuality and freedom by technology. The films discussed thus far, however, also focus primarily on dreams as the product of the mind and body. In some tech-noir films, dreams are made the object of surveillance, and the transformation of these images such that they may be observed by others, reviewed, and transmitted alters their nature: these dreams are no longer subject and not entirely object, they are abject. The characters involved in lending the dream this new status also rob it of the functions of prophecy and hope which it otherwise serves in life and tech-noir. Technology may serve to pathologize or even criminalize the dreamer without actually dedicating any time to dreams per se. This effect is apparent in Strange Days (1995), which develops the notion of recorded experiences as marketable commodities that will fulfill consumers’ “dreams,” and in Dream Breaker (1995) and Virtual Seduction (1996), in both of which virtual reality games are programmed to respond to the user’s fantasies. In all of these films and others, the users of the technology seem reduced by it, such that they become pathetic, disfunctional, and, more importantly, repetitive and uncreative in their speech, interactions, and activities. In Virtual Nightmare (2000), Dale’s obsession with a dream about a red slide that he turns into the basis of an advertisement for a product he knows nothing about coincides with his daily car purchase and his parents’ incessant use of clichés and aphorisms instead of interactive dialogue. At the same time, Dale’s dreams are further commodified and deciphered as clues to some terrible problem with the “system.” The bureaucrats engaged in this particular project are as routine-bound and deluded as everyone else, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their reliance on technology and the belief it fosters that they are the ones with all the creative energy and perspective on the “real” situation. Similar effects are achieved in Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Demolition Man (1993), in which the characters without a fantasy life are shown to be somehow less than they could be by their repetitive behaviors and uncreative speech patterns. Dream surveillance technology is also used to implicate its controllers in an assault on the individual person: this technology is applied to RoboCop while he is sitting in his cage and to Dale who, at one point, is drugged and more or less incarcerated to facilitate the study of his dreams by the city bureaucrats. In Virtual Nightmare (2000) and also Fortress (1992), in which a prison director eavesdrops on one of his prisoner’s dreams, the surveillance of dreams is posed as a means of protecting society from criminals or other dangerous activities, but it really seems that voyeurism is being illegitimately legitimized as a means to power. In these films, the aesthetic distinction between human-generated dreams and technologically-generated surveillance imagery characteristic of most tech-noir films is maintained in order to emphasize the superiority of the biological and individual human over the corporate-controlled machine, even as the relationship between the dreaming subject and the dream is changed.

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In Until the End of the World (1991), however, the recording of dreams ends with somewhat different consequences, insofar as the addiction to self-generated images reduces its users to a complete and voluntary state of abjection. In this film, Sam Farber travels about the world recording images and messages from family and friends using a revolutionary device invented by his father that will enable the transmission of these messages to his blind mother. While engaged with this project, he attracts the affections of Claire, who pursues him all the way to the Australian outback where Sam’s father has set up his laboratory with the help of local aborigines. Sam is unable to transmit the images to his mother (1:59), but Claire can. Sam’s mother dies soon after experiencing them. The final section of the film (2:15 ff.) is about how her bereaved husband, son, and Claire discover that the same technology can be used to record dreams, which they do, and all three soon retreat into their private worlds – fixated on the indistinct, techni-colored, static-filled shadows recorded from their dreaming minds. No government or corporate agency is present during the scenes in which Sam, his father, and Claire lapse into near catatonic obsession with the recordings made from their dreaming unconscious, yet the threat posed by technology which can extract and transform the subject’s dreams into abject forms is shown to be even more threatening and potentially fatal than that in films in which an external agent deliberately uses such technology as a means of control. The dream made abject by technology may be the greater threat because it poses the end of the unconscious as the absolute and informing voice identifying what is most deeply and profoundly human in an increasingly technologized environment: the dream made abject is the greater threat because it poses the end of the unconscious, not as the violent by-product of intrusive corporate and governmental demands for power and control over individuals, from which there may always be hope of salvation, but as something quite absolute and transformative that individuals may bring upon themselves through mere curiosity about the images their minds produce and their obsession with technological gadgets. The aesthetics of good and evil Tech-noir films use mise-en-abyme in numerous ways: sometimes it is a matter of literal visualization, as is the surveillance or dream image within the larger frame of the film, and other times it is more about conceptual realities made explicit by the motifs and actions, as in the mind inside the machine or the artificial memory or artificial personality implant that does not completely eradicate the original person. In films incorporating extensive virtual reality and visual conceptualizations of cyberspace, the mise-en-abyme is created, less by the motif of the image within the image or the person laid over the person, and more by that of the world within the world – of the simulacrum within the real or the simulacrum within the simulacrum. While the cyberspace simulacrum has been the object of much discussion as a kind of utopia,62 a new version of the old idea of the “heavenly city,”63 Jean Baudrillard (1990) has much to say about how the simulacrum becomes increasingly “evil” as it becomes further removed from any sort of original or “gold standard.”64 Indeed, Baudrillard suggests that all art will soon be replaced by advertising and, just as the market which advertising serves is “beyond good and evil,” so “presentday art is beyond beautiful and ugly.”65 One might expect tech-noir films to follow Baudrillard’s 143

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reasoning and thus discard or ignore the association of aesthetics and values, but they, particularly those analyzed here – Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Matrix, Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor, and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, all three of which were released in 1999 – take a rather conventional approach to aesthetics and their associated values. In all of these films, the beautiful appears as a trope for the good and the ugly for evil. This approach is entirely consistent with popular genres, which tend to repeatedly affirm the conventions of society in their appearance, structure, and plot resolutions. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard identifies four stages or categories by which the simulacrum comes to precede social reality: the first reflects reality and is therefore “good,” but the second, third, and fourth categories enter the realm of simulation where the distinction between truth and falsehood falters or fails and they are all therefore “evil.” The second is evil because it masks the true nature of reality; the third because it masks the absence of reality, merely playing with appearances and thus operating as an order of sorcery; and the fourth because it loses all connection to reality and becomes “its own pure simulacrum.”66 When the real ceases to be what it was at the first stage, Baudrillard finds that nostalgia for what has been lost inspires a multiplicity of myths, truths, and a general “panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production […] [that becomes] a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.”67 In all three films the world corresponding most closely to the film viewer’s reality appears initially as a “good” image insofar as it corresponds to that real world; but in each film this world, which is the real world of the film characters, is revealed as a “false” reality corresponding to Baudrillard’s second, third, or fourth image categories in The Matrix, The Thirteen Floor, and eXistenZ respectively. Each of these false realities is a film “noir” reality, complete with dramatic lighting and shadows, dark streets, and stark contrasts between wealth and poverty; in addition, each incorporates two sets of aesthetic categories operating relative to good and evil. The first set, based on capitalist and consumer culture, includes the capitalist or consumer beautiful and ugly. The “capitalist beautiful” is referenced by virtual reality and high tech: monolithic architecture; glossy metal, particularly stainless steel; large panes of glass; leather; and, of course, men in suits, women in heavy make-up and tight fitting clothes, as well as other forms of Hollywood-style glitz. The “capitalist ugly” is represented by disintegrating architecture, slums, and pollution. The second set is based on nature and includes “nature beautiful” and “nature ugly”: nature beautiful is referenced by well-kept architectural spaces filled with wood, soft browns and creams, and other such “natural” colors, as well as oceans, sun rises and sun sets, and youthful women without visible signs of make-up. Nature ugly is identified with dirt – dirty cotton clothes, dirty pretty faces (in effect the ugly as vegetal and animal nature migrating to places humans often prefer to keep clean), and low tech, defined by its purposeful and primarily mechanical extension of human limbs and senses and serving similar functions, rather than their replication as is the case with the high tech of virtual reality. In The Matrix, machines have taken over the earth. The matrix is a virtual copy of the corporate urban world of 1999 generated inside the minds of human beings whose bodies lie permanently encased in pods designed to harness their energy so that the machines can survive. This world is revealed to some film characters as Baudrillard’s second-order image insofar as it masks the true nature of reality. The matrix is also revealed as a definitively evil part of the capitalist and 144

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consumer aesthetic order – its beauties being those of corporate wealth and its ugliness being that of slums and deteriorating abandoned buildings.68 A few humans have managed to escape this prison to true reality, which is both capitalist ugly and nature ugly. The sky has been scorched so they never see the sun. They exist in their biological bodies, get dirty, wear dirty cotton clothes, eat disgusting food, and occupy the cramped metal spaces of the low-tech ships they use to fight the machines. From the point of view of these heroes, there are no first-order truthful or “good” images, or indeed any images – no pictures, no art, no dreams, no visual fantasies – except the false reality of the matrix.69 They are apparently beyond a concern with aesthetics, not because they are beyond beautiful and ugly, but because of their devotion to mastering the matrix and finding others worthy of initiation into their cause of the liberation of humankind from enslavement to the high-tech world of the machines. The evil nature of the matrix is further conveyed by Cypher, a character who plays a kind of Judas by betraying his comrades to the machines for the chance to be reinstated into the matrix with his memories of reality completely erased. He wishes to return to a state of innocence so that he can enjoy a beautiful life defined in terms of capitalist aesthetics; that is, good food, beautiful women, and nice clothes; and he wants to be, as he says, “someone important, like an actor.” While viewers of this film will certainly appreciate Cypher’s desire for a return to the bliss of innocent consumerism, they are also made to understand the capitalist beauty of the matrix as tempting only to characters who know nothing of the real world or who are too weak to withstand the challenges of “real” life. The aesthetic hierarchy associated with the good and evil forces in The Matrix thus becomes: with nature beautiful destroyed, enlightened and superior humans prefer nature ugly and, where necessary, capitalist ugly; that is, dirt and bad food are part of the lifestyle of good freedom fighters using low-tech weaponry to survive as they battle the machines who use the capitalist beautiful in the matrix as a means of enslaving and dominating humans. Good humans become “consumers” of the matrix only as infiltrators intent on its destruction. The matrix, it should be noted, also serves, at least in the first film in the series, as the primary site for the battle between machines and humankind. These scenes of violence, which increase in frequency as the film progresses, certainly possess the ability to fascinate, with their bone crunching, but stylized choreography and gravitydefying acrobatics, not to mention the heroes’ partiality to dark sunglasses, black leather, and sleek weaponry while on their excursions into battle. These scenes momentarily invoke Baudrillard’s proposal that aesthetic judgment has been replaced by fascination, but in this film at least, it is quite apparent that fascination is a supplement, not a replacement, for the underlying grid of aesthetic value correlations with moral judgments. In The Thirteenth Floor, a matrix or virtual reality coincides once again with a contemporary urban corporate world. Unlike The Matrix, however, the true reality of the film, which happens to be the year 2024 and is not shown until the film’s end, is clearly nature beautiful in that it contains well-designed beachside apartments with natural interiors. The technology is sophisticated, but at least it is discrete. The affluent and apparently deserving occupants of this world created virtual reality, perhaps initially as a form of entertainment and perhaps in the image of their own historical past, and populated it with characters having their own physical likenesses. In a unique plot twist, these characters reinvent virtual reality, specifically one modeled after 1937, also with characters modeled after their own likenesses. 145

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Both virtual realms are marked by both capitalist and nature-based aesthetics, but the first is predominantly a world of glossy, metallic, glass-filled, expensive hotels and high-rise and high-rent corporate buildings, one of which contains the virtual reality equipment, as well as a bar, parking lot, and grocery store; these sites are associated with both the purveyors of capitalist-consumer culture and consumption. The second virtual world, that of 1937, is shown with an emphasis on the spaces assigned to desire and consumption during the time period. An antique and bookstore hints at nature beautiful, but the character who downloads from the world above into its occupant prefers the capitalist-consumer beauty of the public space where he can drink, dance, and enjoy prostitutes. A brief glimpse of the rural slums occupied by the underprivileged affirms the existence of the capitalist ugly, as do the locations, such as back alleys, underground parking lots, and locker rooms that are the primary locations for violence and murder in this world. As in the Matrix, both virtual worlds are places of pleasure defined in capitalist-consumer terms – good food, dancing, singing, sex – and they are also the places of violence where some characters struggle with their counterparts from other virtual levels or from reality. Whereas in The Matrix, understanding may bring freedom, or at least physical escape from the virtual, in The Thirteen Floor, characters that become aware of their true nature remain products of computer programs: they have no “original” physical bodies to be released to or which may be freed from enslavement to the program. Even those characters with physical bodies consciously “downloaded” into a virtual reality do not have any special power to exceed the physical rules of the world they have chosen to enter – as in gravity, life, and death – as characters in The Matrix do. Thus, where the virtual world of The Matrix is a second-order image masking the true nature of reality, the virtual worlds of The Thirteenth Floor are both third-order images insofar as they mask the absence of physical reality: pull the plug and the characters do not die in their pods, they dissolve into nothingness, they have no physical reality. Only the lead character escapes this fate, as he is rewarded for his goodness by being uploaded to reality. The third order is also suggested by the quality of play active in the virtual realm: both virtual worlds were apparently invented for entertainment purposes and both are manipulated by the “sorcerers,” to use one of Baudrillard’s descriptors, who enter them. As in The Matrix, in which Cypher plays a character subject to the desires inspired by the beauties of capitalist culture, in The Thirteenth Floor there are two characters who voice their appreciation for commodified luxury: the first is Jerry Ashton, a bar tender turned murderer who, when uploaded from the 1937 virtual world to that of 1999, finds a corporate interior filled with multiple television sets that he thinks is exquisitely beautiful; and the second is David, a character who, when downloaded from reality into the 1999 virtual world, discovers a perverted taste for violence and murder. Like Cypher, both characters meet with violent, and apparently just, ends. The aesthetic hierarchy, in association with the good and evil forces in the film, is revised so that the apparently good utopia of “reality,” not seen until the very end of the film, is heavily inflected by nature beautiful. The corporate aesthetic axis exists only in the virtual worlds, which are judged to be evil by the 1999 inventor Mr. Fuller because of the master–slave relationship they impose on the program characters. From the point of view of the virtual characters in-the-know about the nature of their existence, the “evil” of that existence is also derived from its lack of authenticity. These characters value nature beautiful as the highest-order beauty, but if nature beautiful is not authentic that value is in question. The Thirteenth Floor then, like The Matrix, deploys the connection between good and beautiful and evil and ugly. The happy reality at the end of The Thirteenth Floor shows 146

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only good and beauty: evil exists only where there is ugliness and artificiality, that is, in the virtual realm. The introductory scenes of eXistenZ appear to show a plausible, not too distant future. Unlike The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, however, eXistenZ utterly confuses image and reality so that, as the plot dissolves into a horrific epiphany of violence, it becomes impossible to distinguish one from the other. The film begins with master game designer Allegra Geller introducing a group of enthusiastic volunteers to her new creation, “eXistenZ,” played with biopods plugged into special ports installed at the base of the user’s spine. Something apparently goes wrong and she becomes the object of an assassination plot. She goes on the run with her security guard Ted Pikel through the countryside, a place identified with virtual reality game players and their support system. This reality, nature as the home of virtual reality supporters, is principally identified with capitalist and nature ugly: the shape of the biopods themselves is certainly nature distorted, if not ugly, because they have been so designed to serve their consumers. Ted gets a bioport installed at a grimy place called the “Country Gas Station.” They also seek help from bioport technical experts working out of an abandoned ski chateau (no one actually physically skis anymore) who slice open the biopod for surgery, thereby providing viewers with the opportunity to examine its visceral as well as its external oddities. The game reality, as it is initially introduced, is also capitalist and nature ugly, including the grimy spaces of a former trout farm now used for gutting the mutated creatures used to make biopods and as culinary delicacies served at an equally grimy local Chinese restaurant. Neither nature beautiful – as in beautiful beaches, sun rises, and such – nor the capitalist beautiful of high rises, black suits, and glass walls has much presence in this film. Capitalist ugly and nature ugly are tightly imbricated, however, in that the polluted rural environment produces the mutant creatures used as food and to make gaming biopods and guns. Similarly, the game programming quickly imbricates with the consciousness of the “real” characters; thus Ted finds himself involuntarily speaking certain lines because they are needed to advance the game plot and then performing acts of violence and murder with ever decreasing indications of difference between his original “self ” and his character. Ted, unlike Cypher of The Matrix and Jerry and David of The Thirteenth Floor, does not like virtual reality and expressly states his desire to leave, not surprisingly, as he and Allegra are returning from a violent adventure at the Chinese restaurant to their menial jobs at the “trout” farm. He is unable to do so; instead, his free will is eroded such that the constantly shifting program character supplants the original Ted and viewers lose any sense of clarity about who the “real” Ted is or ever was. As in The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix, however, some characters, in this case “pro-realism” anti-gaming terrorists, judge the virtual world to be evil. Here, they seek to erode it by infiltration, violence, and by the destruction of the one and only biopod containing the game “eXistenZ.” This struggle is played out in conjunction with that between different corporations seeking dominance over the virtual reality market and coincidentally with the absolute blurring of any distinction between reality and virtual reality. The final minutes of the film are marked by an escalation in violence and by several returns to different realities ending in a reality that is significantly altered from that shown in the initial opening; specifically, there is a change in the name of the distributors of the game and in the name of the game itself from “eXistenZ” to “transCendenZ.” The film ends without any clear termination to the simulation; indeed the film ending implies that it began in the middle of a simulation and 147

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that it is ending in exactly the same way. The viewer, granted no sign of what the original reality might have been, if any such thing ever existed, is abandoned in a nightmare of endless deterrence where the model can never be located because there is nothing outside of it. eXistenZ thus shows us Baudrillard’s fourth-order image where the distinction between reality and representation, and indeed between good and evil forces, is no longer possible; thus there is only the evil of the fourth order. Similarly, nature ugly and capitalist ugly are joined together, and without reference to either nature beautiful or capitalist beautiful, there is only the ugly. The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ depict virtual realities that correlate quite specifically with Baudrillard’s second-, third-, and fourth-order images, orders that Baudrillard himself associates with evil given their falseness and loss of connection to traditional distinctions between original and copy. These virtual realities are also evil in the popular sense of the term insofar as they are used to deceive, enslave, and destroy people. In addition, however, and in contradiction to Baudrillard’s notion that aesthetics are as far beyond beautiful and ugly as the marketplace is beyond good and evil, all three films also maintain the traditional association of beauty with good and ugly with evil. Clearly, Baudrillard understood the categorical complexities of the late twentieth-century image, but he underestimated the conventional didacticism of popular culture, which leads to the deployment of aesthetics to convey judgments of good and evil regarding capitalism and consumerism in specific relation to technology in these films. Similar judgments are conveyed in tech-noir films of all kinds repeatedly and most obviously in relation to the maintenance of the nuclear family and conventional male–female procreative relationships, but, in their absence and in the presence of an overwhelmingly capitalist- and consumer-oriented culture, the maintenance of their “natural” aesthetic correlates is prioritized. Types of tech-noir (Appendix 3) The types of tech-noir films identified here are based on the general correlation between characters and the kinds and functions of the technology featured, particularly insofar as that technology is used to create “artificial” beings. Human characters in a technological world 1. Technology 2. Surveillance a. Media, marketing, and entertainment b. Information and control c. Security systems d. Domestic contexts 3. Behavior modification (with or without permanent prosthesis) 4. Bioengineering a. Diseases and cures b. Transplant (including brain transplants; see also Clones) c. Transformation (including reanimation and cryonics) 5. Cyborg 148

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Human and “artificial” characters in a technological world 6. Virtual reality a. Media, marketing, and entertainment b. Hacking the mind c. Security, information, and control d. Mind transplant 7. Clones (all relate to bioengineering) a. Body parts b. Society and service 8. Android a. Entertainment b. Love and lovers c. Security and security gone wrong d. Stalkers and assassins 9. Non-humanoid artificial intelligence a. Master AI b. Automated house Technology is often “embodied” by active human agents, such as human hackers, security systems specialists, technicians, computer programmers, and other professionals who simply make extensive use of technology because that is how things are done in the contemporary world; thus the first group includes films about “Human characters in a technological world.” A number of films that also feature “artificial” characters are listed here. With some debatable exceptions, such as Frankenstein (2004) and The Fly (1986, 1989), the heroes in these films are (more or less) “natural” humans or human cyborgs. The second group includes films about “Human and ‘artificial’ characters in a technological world”; that is, films that are more about individuals who are more “artificial,” such as clones, androids, virtual beings, and other artificial intelligences, with “artificial” understood as a category subject to reinterpretation and acceptance or rejection relative to the being’s interest in maintaining or restoring a “good” simulacrum. The heroes in these films may be human or artificial. More information on the individual films is provided in the “Filmography.” The conclusions or plot resolutions of these different types of tech-noir films have many common characteristics; these are summarized at the end of this chapter. Human characters in a technological world 1. Technology Every entry in the “Filmography” might be placed in this category, but it is here reserved for films that emphasize the most basic kind of technology; that is, films in which technology is shown to be extremely dangerous primarily because of its tendency to explode. This eventuality is shown to arise from defects in machine components, problems inherent to automation, or the motivations of those who control machines and their systems. Two films in this group, Brazil (1985) and Millennium (1989), propose an apocalypse that is less a matter of a big bang – although Millennium 149

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does conclude with this note – and more a matter of a long, slow, entropic devolution brought on by a failure to recognize or do anything about the effects of technology on people and the environment. Several films, notably Andromeda Strain (1971) and The China Syndrome (1979), include a strong element of technophilia expressed as long, slow pans across the machines and long moments with the camera fixed on automated processes: such images establish the fascinated response technology often invokes as a prelude to a demonstration of its dangers. 2. Surveillance Like the explosive potential of technology, surveillance is ubiquitous in tech-noir films: this list simply highlights those in which it is more prominent. Surveillance may be both auditory and visual and is justified in various ways by the governments, corporations, criminals, and other individuals who make use of it to maintain or add to their power. Although sometimes used to corner or capture the villain, surveillance is often a means of victimizing the hero or some group of people lacking the power and resources needed to avoid it. It is objected to by almost everyone subjected to it or who is aware of the negative implications it has for individual freedom, personality formation, and democratic political processes. a.  Media, marketing, and entertainment In tech-noir films, the media is often used to promote entertainment and product marketing techniques that are also means of controlling people, although in several films, including Videodrome (1983) and Fatal Error (1999), the media’s delivery system itself, rather than the manifest content it delivers, is the deadly threat. In all of the films for which this is the primary category, the media is a profiteering corporation or it is the corporatized tool of a larger agency or government and it is controlled by greedy, selfish, ambitious individuals motivated by the desire for money and power and little or no sense of public duty. These media controllers often engage in a continuous and intensive surveillance of the public’s interest in various forms of entertainment and advertising so that products and/or audiences can be adjusted as needed. Their obsession with ratings and market shares is such that those who are the objects of public attention one day may be completely expendable the next, as in Roller Ball (1975) and Network (1976). The viewers of these films are sometimes made self-conscious about their affinity to the film’s portrayed audiences, which “buy into” the media, as in Death Watch (1980) and Running Man (1987): in “art” as in life, it seems the public needs entertainment and entertainment keeps people from noticing what might “really” be going on in the world around them. Many tech-noir films that include non-human or artificial beings also include reporters and references to the media. Some of these are listed under the current heading; others may be found in the “Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment” and “Android: Entertainment” categories. In those listed here, the reporter and/or the media play a prominent role, either because the reporter is busy investigating a covert operation involving experiments on involuntary subjects, as in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999) and Cyborg Cop 3 (1995), or because the media itself makes intrusions into the narrative for the purposes of exposing the nature of the world the main characters are coping with, as in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993) and Heatseeker (1995). The media and media-associated characters also make frequent appearances in many tech-noir films in which they do not play a leading role and are therefore not listed here: in such films, the 150

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“surveillance” aspect of the media or even the reporter’s research surveillance may be downplayed or nonexistent. However, they may provide satiric interludes, as in Cybercity (1999); serve as a kind of environmental backdrop necessary for the “realistic” portrayal of the contemporary urban world, as in The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973) and Until the End of the World (1991); or be a useful and convenient way of conveying information between characters who do not meet or have not yet met, as in Frankenstein (2004). Reporters in these and other films are usually motivated by both ambition and a sense of public duty, and the media is either a corrupt propaganda machine or it is just the means of publicly disseminating the reporter’s story, a process that, in itself, is often shown as a kind of solution to the technology-related problem: this conclusion appears in The China Syndrome (1979), The Manhattan Project (1986), and others, such as Johnny Mnemonic (1995), in which the media does not otherwise play a significant role. The media may also be shown as the instrument of various hoaxes as it is used to promote dangerous products or broadcast phony news stories, as in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971), RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993), and Running Man (1987). b.  Information and control In tech-noir films, surveillance is often conducted as a means of gathering information for use in controlling and victimizing individuals and maintaining a specific technology-empowered hierarchy. Like surveillance related to the reporter’s research methods and the media, it appears as part of the background context in many more films than are listed here. In some films, individuals are placed under surveillance at birth, as in Parts (1970), Logan’s Run (1976), and Nineteen EightyFour (1984), to ensure their movement along the path in life deemed most appropriate for them. In Gattaca (1997), a single individual is deprioritized by surveillance practices, but accomplishes something not supposed to be statistically possible for him. Surveillance may also take the form of corporate or explicitly criminal espionage; thus individuals who come into possession of special information by acts of surveillance carried out by themselves or by others often become the object of efforts to either retrieve the information or to stop the information from being passed to those who might thwart the activities it refers to: Blow Out (1981) and Enemy of the State (1998) are classic examples of this type. Surveillance materials are also subject to misinterpretation, manipulation, or outright falsification, as in The Conversation (1974), Rising Sun (1993), and White Noise (2005). c.  Security systems Security systems, augmented by high-tech visual surveillance equipment, are an integral part of many tech-noir films and specifically overlap with the theme of surveillance for the acquisition of information and control. Other related listings may be found under “Virtual reality: Security, information, and control” and “Android: Security and security gone wrong,” although in these latter films the security is usually an anthropomorphized android, rather than a system per se. The “master” security device or program that provides the user complete control of or access to the internet is usually shown as something desired by governments, corporations, and criminals alike. In these films, this device is most often envisioned both in terms of protection against unauthorized access to the internet and computer-operated systems, such as air traffic control, hospitals, and so forth, and in terms of providing unlimited access to those same systems. In a 151

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few films, these security systems are less about the internet information highway and more about maintaining control over populations in urban areas and in prisons, as in Minority Report (2002) and Fortress (1992, 1999). d.  Domestic contexts Surveillance of domestic settings, relationships, and life in general is usually portrayed in tech-noir films in terms of corporate or government violations of civil liberties and privacy and thus overlaps with the general category of “Surveillance: Information and control”; but individuals also conduct surveillance on other individuals with no greater motivation than curiosity, malice, or personal gain. Stalking is a common action where domestic surveillance is the principal theme. While this action occasionally seems relatively innocuous, as in Speaking Parts (1989), it is usually intended to cause the subject of the stalking distress and perhaps even lead to their death. Something of this element appears in films where the domestic surveillance is purportedly conducted for the victim’s own good by government or corporate agencies with values that contradict those of the victim, as in THX 1138 (1971) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984); or where law-abiding individuals become involved in, or a threat to, some criminal activity, as in Enemy of the State (1998). November (2004) is the most unusual film in this group as its main character is a photographer who relives the last few months of her life as she lies dying of a gunshot wound: these memories take the form of selfsurveillance. 3.  Behavior modification (with or without permanent prosthesis) Behavior modification is not only applied to 100 percent biologically “natural” humans, but is frequently a part of films of the cyborg, virtual reality, clone, and android type: see, in particular, the films listed under “Virtual reality: Hacking the mind.” Behavior modification of humans is generally intended to make those regarded as behaviorally “deviant” more “normal” or, more commonly, to make some individual or individuals more adept or suited to some specific malevolent or unauthorized purpose they might not be willing to serve. Sometimes, however, characters willingly participate, at least initially, in behavioral experiments or procedures that determine their fates as human beings because they believe the experiments will allow them to escape an undesired condition or circumstance. The deliberate modification of an unwilling or involuntary individual or individuals to carry out a violent objective is a familiar Cold War and military theme that has been revised for the age of terrorism in Apocalypse Watch (1997). 4. Bioengineering Bioengineering provides the means to perform welcome medical miracles through body part replacement, cures for disease, and DNA modification and repair; but the films in this group show that these miracles usually come with a price. Bioengineering also provides the means to destroy the human race and environment with bioweapons or to so radically alter, or threaten to so radically alter, humans that human society ceases to exist in any desirable form. a.  Diseases and cures Tech-noir films involving naturally occurring or artificially created diseases and plagues or deadly pollutants typically focus on averting the spread of the problem and finding a cure. Support for 152

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averting the problem comes from the heroes and opposition may come from terrorists, profiteering pharmaceutical companies, and human error. Some post-apocalypse films simply cite a plague or biochemical weapons as one of many reasons for a currently declining state of human living and general environmental conditions. b.  Transplant (including brain transplants; see also Clones) The theme of recycling is prominent in tech-noir films, taking a variety of forms, the most frequent being the recycling of body parts. This subject quickly becomes horrifying when the potential for exploitation on the black market or the involuntary donor is considered. This type of film crossreferences with the “Virtual reality: Mind transplant type” – the difference being that here physical organs are moved from one body to another. c.  Transformation (including reanimation and cryonics) The recycling of the human body in its entirety, like the recycling of body parts, is a potentially horrifying subject, particularly when posed in relation to cannibalism as necessary for survival. Equally frightening, however, is the potential for exploiting individuals who lose their “rights” because they are technically dead, more or less, having died in an accident or war, by execution, or by assignment to extremely long-term sentences in cryo-prison. While some individuals experience their resurrection as a second chance, others simply become objects of experiments they would never have volunteered for. The resurrection or transformation of the body may involve genetic manipulation, and this subject is one that is explored in several tech-noir films in relation to racism or a new class hierarchy based on DNA. A few films address the possibility of experiments having intended or unintended side effects that amount to the complete transformation of the individual subjected to them, either by hybridization with another gender, species, or technology itself, or by morphing them into a completely new type of being. 5. Cyborg In numerous tech-noir films, characters are referred to as cyborgs simply because they have organic skin or some organic component; but, in effect, such characters are more properly treated as androids. Here, the term cyborg is applied to people who have been implanted with some sort of technological device or fitted with one or more prosthetics and who are therefore no longer 100 percent biologically human; thus the main character in Terminal Man is a cyborg, and so is RoboCop, but the Terminator is not. The use of a removable prosthesis, such as a dream augmenter or a virtual reality device, does not make a person a cyborg, although the distinction between removable and permanent does not always correlate with the effect the device has or the user’s motivation. Implanted tracking devices, for example, turn the subject into a cyborg and most individuals so implanted are very clear in their negative perception of such devices; but a person who finds a removable tracker planted on them may be similarly offended and affected by the violation of their privacy. Permanent prosthetics may or may not be used voluntarily, and may enhance existing abilities or provide entirely new potentials. Whatever benefit the device offers, it often comes at the price of subservience to some form of external control, be it a person, a machine, or a process. For films about organ replacements, see “Bioengineering: Transplant.” 153

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Human and “artificial” characters in a technological world 6.  Virtual reality Cyberspace and virtual reality sequences are common in many films that include computers, as they are used to visualize the experience of interactive net surfing and the virtual world, which may take the form of a video game or some other interface between mind and machine. Such interludes are common in films involving computers and are not necessarily definitive of any particular type of tech-noir film; films are assigned to the categories below more on the basis of their treatment of virtual reality as a substitute or stand-in for experience and life in the physical world. a.  Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality games are the subject of numerous tech-noir films, such that main characters spend much of their time inside the game in combat, competition, or engaged by a virtual lover. Virtual reality devices that augment the user’s own imagination and allow them to live out scenarios that are almost indistinguishable from “real” life frequently appear in these films. Occasionally, there is a kind of bleed effect from the virtual into the physical world that is considered a potential solution to problems, such as the food shortage in Dream Breaker (1995); but more often and as in Dream Breaker also, the virtual characters turn deadly toward humans when they gain entry or access to the physical world. Often the virtual experience itself is addictive and leaves the user open to illness and blackmail. The addictive element may be worsened by the use of drugs to enhance the virtual experience. With or without drugs, the virtual world often ceases to be entertainment and becomes a threat to the simulacrum. Occasionally, as in Max Headroom (1985) and Megaville (1990), the virtual entertainment world provides the means for the hero’s survival, at least temporarily. b.  Hacking the mind The films in the “Hacking the mind” category include technology used to gain a level of access to the mind that is not otherwise possible, usually for ostensibly therapeutic purposes. In some films, however, the mind is “hacked” more incidentally, as when virtual recordings provide information about and images of dreams and unusual experiences: Brainstorm (1983) even shows images of the after-death experience, Until the End of the World (1991) features a gadget that can convey images to a blind woman, and Cyber Bandits (1994) has a high-tech tube that will send the victim to the virtual destiny of the holder’s choice. In most instances, the hacking technology becomes a method of control that is not enjoyed by, or has unexpected side effects on, the person it is applied to. The mind is “hacked” in other kinds of tech-noir films as well, sometimes with and sometimes without drugs or any sort of therapeutic context. This activity appears in one form or other in a number of the “Behavior modification” films. Virtual reality films set in the world of “Media, marketing, and entertainment” are also about “hacking the mind” insofar as the purveyors of the technology seek to capitalize on it by finding ways to enhance its appeal: some of these films, particularly those with interactive and game programs capable of learning, seem to exaggerate, while also replacing and undermining, the natural capacities of the dreaming or creative mind.

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c.  Security, information, and control These films differ from those identified with “Surveillance: Information and control” primarily in their articulation of a virtual reality of some sort, either as a means of recording covert activity or as the terrain on which one or more artificial beings vie for power. d.  Mind transplant The uploading and downloading of the mind and personality is a frequent theme in tech-noir and involves the shuffling of previously existing minds, human or artificial, between bodies and virtual realities or other digital “holding” tanks, or just downloading the mind into a computer or uploading it into a body. Often, the underlying issue is the longevity of someone with power and access to resources; thus this type cross-references with those about reanimating the dead, since the mind transplant may be made from a dead or dying person into a living body and involve some sort of holding period in virtual stasis in a computer. The owners of bodies appropriated for uploads from others are predictably unenthusiastic about participating in the process. 7.  Clones (all relate to bioengineering) Films about human cloning articulate the pros and cons of the process with reference to transplant surgery and longevity, as well as the idea that cloning might be a way to keep people who do their jobs well doing those same jobs – though not always for reasons that are in the best interests of the world at large. The clone is usually a physical double of an original, so the clone’s purpose is often complicated and sometimes facilitated by his or her external similarity to his or her original. a.  Body parts In films in which clones are sources of body parts, the main point is usually the survival and longevity of a wealthy person at the expense of the clone’s potential development as an individual. Such films place considerable emphasis on the clone as double and the uncanny experience of the meeting between original and double. b.  Society and service In most clone films, the cloning process is used to create a physical and intellectual double of the original for a very specific purpose related to the villain’s desire for power or wealth, but sometimes it is applied for more practical, benign, and/or socially beneficial purposes, as in Xchange (2000). These films often include discussions about and tests to determine the difference between an original and a clone, such as medical examinations and the clone’s meeting with a close friend, intimate associate of the original, or the original. Sometimes similarities between the original and copy are deliberately cultivated by artificially created similarities between the clone’s growth environment and that of the original so that the clone will be exactly like the original. In Replicant (2001), the idea is to cultivate a different environment so that the clone can, or simply does, mature differently from his original. Judge Dredd (1995) is the only one of these films featuring two adult brother clones who do not look alike, but that fact is attributable to the amalgam of DNA used to create them. Often, as in Replicant (2001), the clone is shown as possessing the memories of the original. Implants and genetic engineering may be applied to make the clone more useful to and easily 155

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controlled by its maker, as in Shadow Fury (2001). Cloning is also proposed as a replacement for “natural” procreation in several films about parents mourning the loss of a child, as in Godsend (2004), and where the human race has simply lost the ability to replenish itself, as in Aeon Flux (2005) and possibly Code 46 (2003). 8. Android Androids are machines that look and act much like humans. Their film plot position in relation to humans is largely determined by their programming. a. Entertainment Only two films are based almost entirely on general entertainment androids: in Westworld (1973) the plot is all about a programming malfunction, such that the androids do what they are programmed to do but without fail-safes to protect the humans who play with them. In the sequel Futureworld (1976), the androids are merely a way to get VIPs to the entertainment facility so that its villainous owners can have them cloned. b.  Love and lovers One of the biggest threats androids pose to humans is to their job security, and one job they are commonly assumed to be better suited for than their biological counterparts is that of lover to a human; this seems to be particularly true of the services provided by female androids to male humans, although most of these films also assert one way or another that this is not actually true, at least not for “real” men. Female and male androids alike are exploited by the film camera’s “gaze,” often under the guise of contemplating differences between the human and the artificial; thus both external and internal body parts may be displayed and visually studied or “scanned.” Androids also appear as faithful servants, teachers, friends, and even children, in which case the “tech-noir” is likely to derive from the conventions of racism revisited in the ill treatment they receive. c.  Security and security gone wrong Many film androids are purportedly intended for “security” purposes, as are police and military robots, and they stalk and assassinate either because something has gone wrong with their program or because they are doing exactly what they were programmed to do: destroy those who are a threat to the interests of their controllers. Occasionally, the android designed to be an assassin exceeds his programming and becomes more “human” by refusing to carry out directives against the innocent, or he chooses to aid the interests of “good” humans rather than those of malevolent humans or machines. d.  Stalkers and assassins Androids are even more popular as stalkers and assassins than they are as lovers, perhaps because of the relative simplicity and single-mindedness of the programming required. They are perfect exemplars of the ultimate melodramatic evil villain. This type also seems to inspire sequels, as, for example, the Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Project Shadowchaser (1992, 1994, 1995, 1996), Nemesis (1992, 1994, 1996, 1996), and Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995) films.

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9.  Non-humanoid artificial intelligence The artificial intelligences in this type of film do not have a human form but nevertheless contribute to the plot and action as characters. a.  Master AI The master AI usually behaves like a human villain, seeking power and immortality by any means necessary. He or she may proclaim philanthropic interests, but these are usually compromised by their ambition or the lack of “humanity” in their reasoning. Sometimes they find it necessary to adopt a human form or to manipulate androids to infiltrate and destroy human targets. b.  Automated house Many films include automated home, office, or school security systems capable of programmed interaction with their users. Those devices that become actively independent artificial intelligences are found in the “Master AI” group. Most of those included here are passive, but also helpful, unless they come under the control of a malevolent master AI or are programmed to act with humanlike ambition. Plot resolutions Tech-noir, like other popular genres, follows mythological and melodramatic prototypes for characters, settings, and action and the same is true for the resolutions of its plots. The tech-noir plot is generally about the dangers of technology that are about to or have already foreclosed; the resolutions are, therefore, quite limited in range and usually come in two stages – recognition and action – and involve one or some combination of the following: a. the recognition of the world as a technological wasteland and life as a kind of living death; b.  death or martyrdom; c.  the averting of a disaster that will create a wasteland and cause deaths; and d. the furthering of a rejuvenation of the wasteland or at least the rejuvenation of the lives of one or more individuals who have been overtaken by technology. The revelation that the world is a wasteland finds classic presentations in THX (1971), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Equilibrium (2002), and Code 46 (2003); although only THX actually presents this revelation as closure. Most tech-noir films of this type have main characters who already know some part of the truth and some, as in The Conversation (1974), Nemesis 4 (1996), and New Rose Hotel (1998), have even created a means to their livelihood out of that reality. Films that pose a post-apocalypse world, such as Cyborg (1989), Prototype X29A (1992), and American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994), often have numerous secondary unnamed characters of this type acting in opposition to the film heroes who, as victims, typically articulate and apply their awareness more fully than do these kinds of villains. Death is one way to end a story and, while it can be an easy way out, as perhaps some readers might feel is the case in Frankenstein (1818), it is an effective way to dispose of all trace of the offending technology. Death can also be, as in myth, a real requirement that takes the form of a 157

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sacrifice or martyrdom necessary to the rejuvenation of the wasteland. For example, death is the means to rejuvenation in the rather fantastic Millennium (1989) and suicide is the only means for an individual to recover his “real” life in Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001). The suicide that seems to close Hidden (2005) is far more cynical, however, in that it is followed by concluding scenes which suggest that event was merely the culmination of malicious acts carried out by members of a new generation of amoral teenagers.70 Murder in tech-noir films, especially those with extremely high body counts, may go unnoticed and uninvestigated, but specific murders are more likely to be treated as in detective fiction. For example, the murder-suicide near the beginning of Killer Deal (1999) leads to an investigation and revelations about technology, as does the apparent death of Morella (1997). The murder that leads to the close of Final Cut (1998) suggests that technology might be a kind of negative solution insofar as it both causes the assault and catches the killer in the act. In Absolon (2003), the murder of a scientist leads to a high-tech investigation in which the detectives have to keep ahead of the criminal’s technological game. In this film, a drug that is initially a life-saving boon becomes an addictive liability from which escape can be had only through more science and more technology. Similarly, the death-evading inventions of Embryo (1976), Mimic (1997), and Numb (2003) lead to new hazards and more deaths. The idea that technological threats to human life can be staved off by more technology also appears, more optimistically, in Andromeda Strain (1971) and Apocalypse Watch (1997). The murderers of the main character at the end of Final Cut (2004) hope to make their victim into a martyr in the fight against surveillance. Individuals who are more or less martyrs for the cause of “good” technology kept in the “right” hands, rather than the complete destruction of the offending technology, appear in 12 Monkeys (1995), as well as Brainscan (1994), Synapse (1995), Killer Deal (1999), and other films. What is “good” is often what is older and more natural, as in Demolition Man (1993) and Soldier (1998). The “right” hands is a question that is rarely addressed with any subtlety: the terrorists of New Crime City (1994) and Global Effect (2002) are obviously the “wrong” hands because they seek the deaths of many people, but exactly what does the hero do at the end of New Crime City? The averting of the disaster that threatens to turn the world into a wasteland, or more of a wasteland than it already is, often involves one or a few individuals deciphering a maze of psychological programming or technological programs and traversing some labyrinth in order to escape the control of the villain; in doing so he or she may also save the world, or some large part of it. The psychological maze is prominent in films involving behavioral modification, such as Fugitive Mind (1999), Cypher (2002), Equilibrium (2002), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004); and the physical maze is almost inevitable in films involving a stalker or other flight and pursuit sequences. It appears in a number of films about security systems that pit one technology expert or team against another, as in Sneakers (1992) and Hostile Intent (1997). Many of these films end with a sense of rejuvenation insofar as the labyrinth has been escaped and the disaster averted, but they do not necessarily address the circumstance or technology that created the situation in the first place. Merely escaping the labyrinth leads to an enhanced sense that whatever is outside of it is more normal or natural than whatever was inside it: the effect is one of relief and normalization or naturalization. In Blow Out (1981), however, the hero sorts out a maze of motives and disinformation, but can do nothing to resolve it except allow the experience to further his creative work; something similar happens in November (2005). 158

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Some of these film heroes punctuate their escape from the maze by taking the technological problem to the “people,” usually by way of the media: this approach is prominent in The China Syndrome (1979), The Manhattan Project (1986), The Running Man (1987), Hackers (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Harrison Bergeron (1995), Chain Reaction (1996), Killer Deal (1999), The Final Cut (2004), Crusader (2005), and others. Such films propose that publicizing overtly criminal activities or activities that are harmful to humans will somehow automatically lead to the end of the activity or some other solution: publicizing what has been kept secret is assumed to have a “naturalizing” and thus a rejuvenating effect. Most popular of all tech-noir plot resolutions is the rejuvenation of the wasteland by the reaffirmation that the “natural,” understood as the world of nature and the existing social model, really is better than the “artificial,” which may include just about everything else: the essential conservatism of tech-noir is most thoroughly revealed in the endless repetition of the procreating male–female couple as the symbol of this reaffirmation. This approach may also be dramatically culminated in the “topping” of the artificial by the natural, as in the many films in which an artificial being stalks a human; those that present an actual contest, such as Heatseeker (1995) and Soldier (1998); and those that pose rules that handicap handicapped “natural” humans, such as Gattaca (1997). In other instances, it is enough to direct the artificial person so that he furthers the human interest in rejuvenating the wasteland, as in Omega Doom (1996). The artificial person may also simply be so “human” in their design or “evolve” to the point that their physical differences from humans come to seem more or less irrelevant, or even interesting signs of uniqueness, as in Blade Runner (1982), Phoenix (1995), Solo (1996), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Replicant (2001), and I, Robot (2004), that may even be put to the good use of maintaining the existing simulacrum, more or less. Where technology has invaded the human body, the resolution may involve the individual salvaging their almost lost humanity, as in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1991); these films also propose a satiric or ironic response as the only one possible, short of a complete refusal to participate, when technology causes everything to devolve to the point of farce. The restoration of “true” memories may also be part of the occasion, as in RoboCop and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), in which natural memory and dreams are contrasted with digitized information. Such memory recovery may take place on an extremely broad scale, such that the people in the film world who have lost touch with nature may finally destroy, or at least determine to destroy, the artificial in order to recover that lost nature and something of their historical past. This action or resolve also affirms and validates a conservative simulacrum recognizable to the film audience – as in Logan’s Run (1976), The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Millennium (1989), The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), Virtual Nightmare (2000), Aeon Flux (2005), and The Island (2005). Notes   1. On the influence of Frankenstein on the tech-noir film Blade Runner, see David Desser, “The New Eve: The Influence of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein on Blade Runner,” Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ed. Judith B. Kerman, 1991, 2nd edition (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997) 53–65.

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  2. On this subject, see Marilyn Gwaltney, “Androids as Device for Reflection on Personhood,” Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ed. Judith B. Kerman, 1991, 2nd edition (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997) 32–39.  3. See, for example, the analysis of Matrix (1999) and myth in Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, “ ‘Mother Isn’t Quite Herself Today’: Myth and Spectacle in The Matrix,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 (March 2002): 64–86; and Samuel A. Kimball, “Not Begetting the Future: Technological Autochthony, Sexual Reproduction, and the Mythic Structure of The Matrix,” Journal of Popular Culture 35.3 (Winter 2001): 175–203.  4. Blade Runner (1982) is one of the source proto-types for “noir” ambiance and quotations in recent films. Susan Doll and Greg Faller. “Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction,” Literature/Film Quarterly 14.2 (1986): 89–100.   5. Although most heroes are male, there are quite a few heroines. Kristina M. Passman discusses amazons in contemporary films, particularly Red Sonja (1985), The Terminator (1984), and Aliens (1987), in “The Classical Amazon in Contemporary Cinema,” Bucknell Review: Classics and Cinema, ed. Martin M. Winkler (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1991) 81–105.   6. On the importance of the “archetype” of the rebel-victim, see Bonnie Jo Lundblad, “The Rebel-Victim: Past and Present,” The English Journal 60.6 (September 1971): 763–66.   7. Christopher P. Toumey, “The Moral Character of Mad Scientists: A Cultural Critique of Science,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 17.4 (Autumn 1992): 411–37; Peter Weingart, Claudia Muhl, and Petra Pansegrau, “Of Power Maniacs and Unethical Geniuses: Science and Scientists in Fiction Film,” Public Understanding of Science 12 (2003): 279–87.   8. Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998) 64.  9. Seltzer, Serial Killers 41–45, 65. 10. Noel Carroll discusses the fusion or fission approach to making film monsters in “Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,” Film Quarterly 34.3 (Spring 1981): 16–25. On the approaches to the body and artificial body in the Terminator films, see J.P. Telotte, “The Terminator, Terminator 2, and the Exposed Body,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20.1 (Summer 1992): 26–34. 11. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950, Toronto: Bantam, 1991) 45. 12. Janet Vertesi discusses the sexy female androids in Metropolis (1926), The Stepford Wives (1975), Blade Runner (1982), Cyborg 2 (1993), and Cyborg 3 (1995) in “Pygmalion’s Legacy: Cyborg Women in Science Fiction,” SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction, ed. Margret Grebowicz (Chicago: Open Court, 2007) 73–86. Donald Palumbo discusses female androids as lovers in Stepford Wives (1975), Westworld (1973), and Futureworld (1976), and other films in Donald Palumbo, “Loving that Machine; or, The Mechanical Egg: Sexual Mechanisms and Metaphors in Science Fiction Films,” The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction, eds. Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich (Westport: Greenwood, 1982) 117–28. 13. Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 70. 14. Rushing and Frentz, Projecting the Shadow 70. 15. Rushing and Frentz, Projecting the Shadow 73. 16. Rushing and Frentz, Projecting the Shadow 73. 17. Daniel Dervin discusses the “primal scene,” alien impregnations of human women, and alternative modes of conception, though not with reference to Demon Seed (1977) and The Fly (1986), in his “Primal Conditions and Conventions: The Genre of Science Fiction,” Alien Zone: Culture Theory: Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 96–102. See also the discussion of the conflation of fetal and bomb imagery and references in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in Zoë Sofia’s “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism,” Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 47–59. 160

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18. On the representation of the city in Blade Runner (1982), see several essays in Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ed. Judith B. Kerman, 1991, 2nd edition (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), including Steve Carper’s “Subverting the Disaffected City Cityscape in Blade Runner,” 185–95; David Desser’s “Race, Space and Class: The Politics of the SF Film from Metropolis to Blade Runner,” 110–23; and Judith B. Kerman’s, “Technology and Politics in the Blade Runner Dystopia,” 16–31. 19. Robert Miklitsch uses the dialogue about the purchase of air in Total Recall (1990) in his discussion of the film’s presentation of authoritarianism and “liberal capitalism.” “Total Recall Production, Revolution, Simulation-Alienation Effect,” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 32 (1994): 7. For more on Total Recall and political positions in relation to capitalism, see Ziauddin Sardar, “Aliens, ‘Others’ and Amnesia in Postmodernist Thought,” Futures 23 (March 1991): 189–203. 20. This idea might be extended such that the “stereotypes” of popular genres, particularly those of character and androids, are seen as the stuff of a new nature. For this idea as it has been worked up by contemporary visual artists, see Rosetta Brooks, “From the Night of Consumerism to the Dawn of Simulation,” Artforum 23.5 (February 1985): 76–81; and Eleanor Heartney, “The Hot New Cool Art: Simulationism,” Artnews 86.1 (January 1987): 130–37. 21. Mark Jancovich sees The Terminator (1984) in terms of the technoparanoia-related Carter and Reagan-era arms race and the increasing awareness of the emerging threat posed by an industrializing third world: “Modernity and Subjectivity in The Terminator: The Machine as Monster in Contemporary American Culture,” The Velvet Light Trap 30 (Fall 1992): 6–7. As Barry K. Grant noted, “It couldn’t be more appropriate that Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative has been dubbed ‘Star Wars.’ ” See “Invaders from Mars and the Science Fiction Film in the Age of Reagan,” Cine Action 8 (March 1987): 83. 22. Stuart Kaminsky discusses the distinction between monsters in horror films and those in science fiction in “Psychological Perspective: Horror and Science Fiction,” American Film Genres (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1985) 119–33. Jancovich, “Modernity and Subjectivity in The Terminator: The Machine as Monster in Contemporary American Culture.” 23. While there are many sources available on this subject, the documentary The Corporation (2003), written by Joel Bakan and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott is certainly one of the most widely known and credible. 24. Stone created another film history milestone with JFK (1991), in which he mixed actual film footage with the fictional story in a manner many viewers found more informative than the so-called documentaries on the subject. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 3rd edition (New York: Norton, 1996) 948, 953. 25. Robert Arnold, “Termination or Transformation? The Terminator Films and Recent Changes in the U.S. Auto Industry,” Film Quarterly 52.1 (Fall 1998): 23. 26. J. Abbott believes that the attack on technology comes from the political left in The Terminator (1984); “They Came from Beyond the Center: Ideology and Political Textuality in the Radical Films of James Cameron,” Literature/Film Quarterly 22.1 (1994): 21–27. 27. Stephanie S. Turner discusses the clone mother, primarily with reference to Alien Resurrection (1997), as playing “a key role in both disrupting and restoring order in cloning scenarios, which invariably go out of control.” “Clone Mothers and Others: Uncanny Families,” SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction, ed. Margret Grebowicz (Chicago: Open Court, 2007) 104. 28. On surveillance in cinema, see Thomas Doherty, “Video, Science Fiction, and the Cinema of Surveillance,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2.2 (Summer 1989): 69–79; and John S. Turner, II, “Collapsing the Interior/Exterior Distinction: Surveillance, Spectacle, and Suspense in Popular Cinema,” Wide Angle 20.4 (October 1998): 92–123. 29. For an analysis of the effectiveness of such mall surveillance systems, see Thomas Weaver, “The Eye of Genius: Crime and Punishment in the Panoptic Mall,” Lotus International 103 (no date): 116–31; English translation 124–31. 161

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30. See Christopher Sharrett’s discussion of this box office failure in his paper “Myth and Ritual in the PostIndustrial Landscape: The Horror Films of David Cronenberg,” Persistence of Vision 3–4 (Summer 1986): 122–28. 31. On medieval interlace, the principal narrative device for representing this imbrication, see, Robert B. Burlin, “Inner Weather and Interlace: A Note on the Semantic Value of Structure in Beowulf,” Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, eds. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 81–89; Susanna Freer Fein, “Thomas Malory and the Pictorial Interlace of La Queste del Saint Graal,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46.3 (Spring 1977): 215–40; John Leyerle, “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,” University of Toronto Quarterly 37.1 (October 1967): 1–17; and Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). 32. Jussi Parikka, “Fictitious Contagions: Computer Viruses in the Science Fiction of the 1970s,” SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction, ed. Margret Grebowiz (Chicago: Open Court, 2007) 166. Parikka traces the history of fictional viruses in computers back to such nineteenth-century literary works as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), which includes a fear of replicating technology, and traces the popularity of the idea of software that can replicate itself and move about at will through phone lines and such in 1970s science fiction, including David Gerrold’s When Harlie Was One (1972), John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975), and Thomas J. Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-1 (1977). Parikka 165. 33. Tim Lucas, “The Image as Virus: The Filming of Videodrome,” The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg (Toronto: General, 1983) 149–58. 34. Joseph Francavilla, “The Android as Doppelganger,” Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ed. Judith B. Kerman, 1991, 2nd edition (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997) 4–15. 35. Roger Callois and John Shepley, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter 1984): 18. 36. Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) 117. 37. N. Katherine Hayles, “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, ed. and intro. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) 158. 38. J.P. Telotte, Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 39. Robert Switzer, “Over-Writing the Body: Virtual Reality and Cartesian Metaphysics,” Philosophy Today 41 (Winter 1997): 516. 40. Mark Nunes develops the associations between the internet, virtual reality, and Baudrillard’s notions about the hyperreality of postmodern communications in “Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity,” Style 29.2 (Summer 1995): 314–27. 41. Elena del Rio, “Fetish and Aura: Modes of Technological Engagement in Family Viewing,” Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan, eds. Monique Tschogen and Jennifer Burwell (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007) 229–48. 42. Dinello, Technophobia 189. 43. Dinello, Technophobia 180–81. 44. Dinello, Technophobia 183. 45. Marina Levina discusses the film Gattaca (1997) in relation to the idea that the body is the site of a kind of war engaged in by codes and germs and that some of the body’s codes, particularly those related to disease are mistakes that should be corrected: “Cracking the Code: Genomics in Documented Fantasies and Fantastic Documentaries,” SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction, ed. Margret Grebowicz (Chicago: Open Court, 2007) 231–42. 46. John Martin Fischer and Ruth Curl discuss this theme in science-fiction novels relative to both biological and non-biological methods of achieving greater longevity in “Philosophical Models of Immortality in 162

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Science Fiction,” Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, eds. George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Parker (London: University of Georgia Press, 1996) 3–12. 47. William Beard, “Speaking Parts: The Geometry of Desire,” Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan, eds. Monique Tschogen and Jennifer Burwell (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007) 230. 48. Garrett Stewart, “Review: Death Watch,” Film Quarterly 37.1 (Fall 1983): 19. 49. Kaja Silverman, “Back to the Future,” Camera Obscura 27 (September 1991): 108–33. 50. Karen B. Mann discusses the effects of the time loop on the complexity of narrative in The Terminator (1984) in “Narrative Entanglements: The Terminator,” Film Quarterly 43.1 (Fall 1989): 17–27; Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Prime Scene and the Critical Dystopia,” Fantasy and Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 197–211. 51. Giuliana Bruno discusses the use of photographs in Blade Runner in “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990) 191–93. See also Vernon Shetley and Alissa Ferguson, “Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in Blade Runner,” Science Fiction Studies 28.1 (March 2001): 66–76. 52. Forest Pyle notes that Blade Runner, in effect, poses the same question in relation to humans that Walter Benjamin asked of art in his 1936 essay: that is, what happens to the aura if the original can be replicated? Pyle, “Making Cyborgs, Making Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Runners,” The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000) 130; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Illuminations (London: Harper, 1973) 211–44. 53. Susan Jeffords discusses such bodies in terms of masculinity and 1980s era films in “Can Masculinity be Terminated?,” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993) 245–62. 54. Frank Grady, “Arnoldian Humanism, or Amnesia and Autobiography in the Schwarzenegger Action Film,” Cinema Journal 42.2 (Winter 2003): 41–56. 55. Noel Carroll discusses parallels between the imagery of nightmares and horror/science fiction films in his “Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,” Film Quarterly 34.3 (Spring 1981): 16–25. 56. For discussion on this point, see Daniel Steur, “Following Telepathy along Riverbeds and Maelstroms: Freud, Wittgenstein, and Benjamin on Language and Communications,” Metaphor and Rational Discourse, ed. and intro. Daniel Steur (Tubingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1997) 79. 57. Freud discussed telepathy in “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (1921), “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922), “The Occult Significance of Dreams” (1925), and “Dreams and Occultism” (1933); which may be found in volumes 18, 22, 19, and 22 respectively of Freud’s writings translated by James Strachey and appearing in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1964). 58. For an example of dream images serving as a clue to an android of his identity as an android with artificially implanted memories making him think he is human, see Phoenix (1995). It is not really the android’s dreams, however, but his encounter with a more self-aware android that finally makes him realize his true nature. 59. W. Russel Gray, “Entropy, Energy, Empathy: Blade Runner and Detective Fiction,” Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ed. Judith B. Kerman, 1991, 2nd edition (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997) 66–75. 60. George Bataille, “Formless,” Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts edited by Georges Bataille and the Encyclopaedia Da Costa edited by Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg) (London: Atlas, 1995) 51–52; and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge: MIT, 1997). See also Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, essays by Jack Ben-Levi, Leslie C. Jones, Simon Taylor, and Craig Houser (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992).

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61. In Irvin Kerschner’s RoboCop 2 (1990), Murphy has only one memory flash of his son, and a brief conversation with his wife in which he tells her that her husband is dead and they made “this” to honor him. In Fred Dekker’s Robocop 3 (1991/93), Murphy has several memory flashes including those of his family, of Ann’s death after being shot down while helping him keep OCP thugs from taking the rebels hiding in a church, and of his murderers. 62. For a discussion of this view of cyberspace, see Kevin Robins, “Cyberspace and the World We Live In,” The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000) 77–95. 63. Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps,” The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000) 38. 64. Jean Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 1990, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993) 18. 65. Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil 19. 66. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 6. 67. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 6–7. 68. The directors intended to make the matrix ugly, or at least aesthetically displeasing, to viewers by filling it with a pervasive greenish light. 69. In Matrix Reloaded (2003) Neo has dreams of Trinity’s death. 70. For a comprehensive list of the tech-noir films in the “Filmography” that include suicide as a motif or closure, see the entries under the relevant index heading.

164

Appendix 1 Charts

Charts

Chart 1: Discourse in popular genres Area of Discourse Psychology

Sociology

Science

Aesthetics

Experiential Realm Symbolic

Real

Imaginary

Simulacrum

Popular Genres Gothic

Detective

SciFi

Tech-Noir

Constituent Elements in Popular Genres Characters (Relationships)

Mystery, Crime, or Detection, Clues Social Issue

Resolution

Society

Usurpers of the current simulacrum

Primary Focus Gender

Scientific and Corporate Community

Class

Race

Representation

Agency Magic

Law

Science

Technology

Generating Sector Individual

Telepathy

Evolution

Agents (Embodiments of Agency) Person Coming-of-age Magician

Detective

Scientist

Professionals and Others using Tech

Computer-Specialist Technician Telepath

Criminal

167

Alien Clone, Cyborg, Programmer Android, Robot, AI, Bioengineered Being

Tech-Noir Film

Chart 2: The Oedipus myth Symbolic Psychology Gothic

Real Sociology Detective

Imaginary Science SciFi

Simulacrum­­­ Aesthetics Tech-Noir Resolution

Characters

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue

Detection, Clues

Laios

King Father of Oedipus

abducts boy

Hera sends Sphinx

Iocaste

Queen

widowed, marries Oedipus

plague becomes clue Iocaste commits to incest suicide thereby ending incestuous relationship

Son of Laios and Iocaste

meets the Sphinx

answers the riddle

Sphinx commits suicide thus defeating Hera

Husband of Iocaste King

kills his father, marries his mother

plague, realizes he murdered his own father, and is guilty of incest

Oedipus blinds himself with Iocaste’s broach

Wife of Laios Mother of Oedipus Wife of Oedipus Oedipus

Oedipus banished, lives as a beggar with Antigone Antigone

Daughter of Oedipus assists Oedipus

168

banished

Charts

Chart 3: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) Symbolic Psychology Gothic

Real Sociology Detective

Imaginary Science SciFi

Simulacrum Aesthetics Tech-Noir

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue

Detection, Clues

Resolution

Alfonso

Father Ghost

his ghost murders Conrad

haunts Otranto

Otranto restored to rightful heir

Jerome

Alfonso’s Son

Characters Rightful Heirs of Otranto

provides information about bloodline

Theodore’s Father Theodore

Jerome’s Son

Isabella

Conrad’s fiancée

Usurpers of Otranto Ricardo

Servant

likeness to Alfonso’s portrait

shown to be Alfonso’s heir and marries Isabella

Manfred pursues

flight

marries Theodore

murders Alfonso

receives family curse (success is temporary)

pursues Isabella, murders Matilda

haunted by Alfonso

Father Manfred

Ricardo’s Son Father

Conrad

Manfred’s Son

murdered by ghost

no investigation

Matilda

Manfred’s Daughter

murdered by Manfred

no investigation

169

abandons claim to Otranto and Isabella

Tech-Noir Film

Chart 4: Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band” (1892) Symbolic Psychology Gothic

Real Sociology Detective

Imaginary Science SciFi

Simulacrum Aesthetics Tech-Noir

Detection, Clues

Resolution

Characters

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue

Mrs. Stoner

Wife Mother

terms of her will

Grimesby Roylott Husband

murders Julia, attempts murder of Helen

house renovations (bell, dies from snake bite rope, ventilator, bowl, etc.) and interest in exotic animals

Stepfather Julia Stoner

Daughter Twin Sister Fiancée

murdered by Grimesby

her dying words to Helen

Helen Stoner

Daughter

Grimesby attempts to murder her

reacts to repetition of free to marry clues described to her by Julia, asks for Holmes’s help

Twin Sister Fiancée Sherlock Holmes

Detective

interprets clues “scientifically”

170

acts to protect Helen’s life

Charts

Chart 5: Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948) Symbolic Psychology Gothic Characters Diaspar Alvin

Rorden Lys Seranis

Theon

Real Sociology Detective Relationships

Imaginary Science SciFi

Mystery, Crime, Issue Detection, Clues

Youngest Immortal xenophobia of Diaspar finds Alaine’s residents message, meets Lysians and Hermit, gets robots, and finds spaceship then Vanamonde Keeper of Records

investigates Alaine

Mother of Theon Council

tries to prevent Alvin from disrupting status quo

Son of Seranis

Simulacrum Aesthetics Tech-Noir Resolution re-connects Diaspar and Lys, re-establishes space travel, re-establishes understanding of human history (Vanamonde)

accepts contact with Diaspar and with Vanmonde educates Alvin about Lys and communicates telepathically with Vanamonde

Friend to Alvin Hermit

Disciple of Alien

educates Alvin and Theon

3 Robots

Servants

duplicated robot aids Alvin

Outer Space Vanamonde Bioengineered Being

meets Alvin and Theon, passes on history

171

provides basis for project involving Diaspar and Lys

Tech-Noir Film

Chart 6: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) Symbolic Psychology Gothic

Real Sociology Detective

Imaginary Science SciFi

Characters

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue Detection, Clues

Teshier-Ashpool Family Ashpool

Husband, Father

murders Wife, is murdered by 3-Jane

Tessier 3-Jane 3-Jane

Wife, Mother Clone-Daughter Clone-Daughter

Husband murders her no investigation Father murders her no investigation murders her Father no investigation

Artificial Intelligences Wintermute

A.I.

Neuromancer

A.I.

plans theft of Dixie Flatline

3rd A.I. Dixie Flatline

A.I. Construct

Wintermute kills

Construct Wintermute’s Avatar

Wintermute murders no investigation Armitage

Wintermute’s Facilitators Armitage/Corto

Case

Cyber “cowboy” Molly’s Lover

Molly

Security, Case’s Lover

Linda Lee

Case’s Lover

Resolution

no investigation

no investigation

Case and Molly’s job and Armitage

Case and Molly detect Wintermute

murdered

no investigation

172

Simulacrum Aesthetics Tech-Noir

merges with Wintermute erased by request

Charts

Chart 7: The Prometheus myth Psychology Symbolic Gothic

Sociology Real Detective

Science Imaginary SciFi

Characters

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue Detection, Clues

Earth (Gaia)

Gaia and Uranus are parents of the 100- Handers, the 12 Titans, and the Cyclopes

preserves Kronos

Mother of Olympians

preserves Zeus

Heaven (Uranus) Titans Rhea Kronos

Father of Olympians

Prometheus

Challenger to Zeus

Son

tricks Zeus ç

µ punished by Zeus

µ talks to Io

opposed by Prometheus

tricked by Prometheus

Usurper of Titans

173

Resolution

men have fire (establishes model)

µ observes Zeus has taken fire from men

Olympians Zeus

Aesthetics Simulacrum Tech-Noir

ç judges Zeus a Tyrant

µ restores fire to men µ Io’s descendant Heracles releases Prometheus µ denies fire to men and punishes Prometheus (temporary resolution)

Tech-Noir Film

Chart 8: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) Psychology Symbolic Gothic

Sociology Real Detective

Science Imaginary SciFi

Aesthetics Simulacrum Tech-Noir

Detection, Clues

Resolution

Characters

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue

Alphonse Frankenstein

Father

dies after murder of Elizabeth

Caroline

Mother

dies of scarlet fever

Elizabeth

Cousin, Fiancée

strangled

Victor

Son, Brother, Cousin, Fiancé, Student

Ernest

Son, Brother

William

Son, Brother

Creature strangles

locket on Justine

Henry Clerval

Friend

Creature strangles

Victor arrested and released

Justine Moritz

Servant

searches for lost Wm

locket “evidence” of guilt

tried, wrongly executed

Creature

Victor’s Creation

murders Wm, Henry, and Elizabeth, and sets up Justine

detected only by Victor

lives but death assumed

death/life µ

174

Creature that murders

ç creates artificial life µ dies trying to kill Creature

Justine wrongly executed

Charts

Chart 9: Robert Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) Psychology Symbolic Gothic

Sociology Real Detective

Science Imaginary SciFi

Aesthetics Simulacrum Tech-Noir

Characters

Relationships

Mystery, Crime, Issue Detection, Clues

Resolution

Baron

Father

delay of marriage

retrieves Son from lab

Henry Frankenstein

Son, Fiancé

Fritz

Henry’s Asst.

Creature murders him

Dr. Waldman

Professor, Henry’s Asst.

Creature murders him

Elizabeth

Fiancée

Creature frightens her

Victor Montz

Friend

Maria

Farmer’s Daughter

Herr Vogel

Town Burgomaster

Creature

Henry’s Creation

death/life µ

absence of Son Creature that kills

ç creates artificial life µ helps find and kill it and then marries Elizabeth

Student/Scientist

accidentally killed

marries Henry

body proof of murder and killer sought starts search, mob finds, and kills Creature

murders Fritz and Waldman, kills Maria, kidnaps Henry

175

burned to death by townspeople

Tech-Noir Film

Chart 10: Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) Psychology Symbolic Gothic

Sociology Real Detective

Science Imaginary SciFi

Mystery, Crime, Issue Detection, Clues

Aesthetics Simulacrum Tech-Noir

Characters

Relationships

Baron Frankenstein

Father and Husband dies after Creature murders Elizabeth Doctor

Caroline

Mother, Wife

dies in childbirth

Elizabeth

Cousin, Fiancée

killed by Creature

Victor

Son, Brother, Fiancé, death/life µ Student

Creature that murders

William

Son, Brother

Creature strangles

locket on Justine

Dr. Waldman

Professor

killed by a patient

Waldman’s brain recycled

Henry Clerval

Friend, Student

Justine Moritz

Servant

searches for lost Wm

locket “evidence” of guilt

wrongfully lynched by mob

Creature

Victor’s Creation

murders Wm and Elizabeth

detected only by Victor

dies with Victor?

176

Resolution

Victor restores her life, she commits suicide

ç creates artificial life µ dies Justine wrongfully lynched

Charts

Chart 11: Marcus Nispel’s Frankenstein (2004) Psychology Symbolic Gothic Characters

Relationships

Victor Helios

Husband, Father, Scientist

Sociology Real Detective

Science Imaginary SciFi

Aesthetics Simulacrum Tech-Noir

Mystery, Crime, Issue

Detection, Clues

Resolution

life/death/longevity µ

Victor assists “suicide”

Deucalion, Erika, Harker (serial killer), and others

ç creates artificial life µ plans to rule world

Erika

Wife, Daughter

Erika II

Wife, Daughter

Deucalion

First Son of Helios

Det. Harker

Son, Detective

murders 3 people, assaults 2 more

identified as killer Deucalion kills by fetishized organs him, but mutation escapes

Unknown

Teacher

Harker murders

Unknown

Lawyer

Harker murders

investigations reveal that victims are missing organs

Bobby

Son of Helios

Harker murders

Library Security

no investigation

Victor makes new Wife

interprets for O’Connor

kills Harker

missing heart, coroner notes evolved body

evidence vanishes in fire

Rev. Patrick

Son of Helios, Priest Helios murders

(gave sanctuary to Harker)

Carson O’Connor

Detective

follows clues and IDs killer, stops advise of Deucalion 2 assaults from becoming murders

3 murders

Sister

177

Appendix 2 Tech-Noir Films by Date

1970s 1970 1971 1971 1971 1971 1971 1971 1973 1973 1973 1973 1973 1974 1974 1975 1975 1976 1976 1976 1976 1977 1977 1978 1978 1979 1979

Colossus Anderson Tapes Andromeda Strain A Clockwork Orange Omega Man Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler THX 1138 Clones Last Days of Man on Earth Roboman Soylent Green Westworld Conversation Terminal Man Rollerball Stepford Wives Embryo Futureworld Logan’s Run Network Demon Seed Island of Dr. Moreau Boys from Brazil Coma China Syndrome Parts

Sargent, Joseph Lumet, Sidney Wise, Robert Kubrick, Stanley Sagal, Boris Wynn, Bob Lucas, George Card, Lamar and Paul Hunt Fuest, Robert Gold, Jack Fleischer, Richard Crichton, Michael Coppola, Francis Ford Hodges, Mike Jewison, Norman Forbes, Bryan Nelson, Ralph Heffron, Richard T. Anderson, Michael Lumet, Sidney Cammell, Donald Taylor, Don Schaffner, Franklin J. Crichton, Michael Bridges, James Fiveson, Robert S.

Altered States Brave New World Death Watch

Russell, Ken Brinckerhoff, Burt Tavernier, Bertrand

1980s 1980 1980 1980

181

Tech-Noir Film

1980 1981 1981 1982 1982 1982 1983 1983 1983 1983 1983 1983 1984 1984 1984 1984 1985 1985 1985 1985 1986 1986 1987 1987 1987 1987 1988 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989

Lathe of Heaven Blow Out Looker Android Blade Runner Tron Anna to the Infinite Power Brainstorm Prototype Tin Man Videodrome WarGames Interface Next of Kin Nineteen Eighty-Four Terminator Brazil Max Headroom Terminal Choice Warning Sign Fly Manhattan Project Cherry 2000 Family Viewing RoboCop Running Man R.O.T.O.R. Cyborg Fly II Millennium Slipstream Speaking Parts

Loxton, David and Fred Barzyk De Palma, Brian Crichton, Michael Lipstadt, Aaron Scott, Ridley Lisberger, Steven Wiemer, Robert Trumbull, Douglas Green, David Thomas, John G. Cronenberg, David Badham, John Anderson, Andy Egoyan, Atom Radford, Michael Cameron, James Gilliam, Terry Williams, Alan Larry, Sheldon Barwood, Hal Cronenberg, David Brickman, Marshall Jarnatt, Steve De Egoyan, Atom Verhoeven, Paul Glaser, Paul Michael Blaine, Cullen Pyun, Albert Walas, Chris Anderson, Michael Lisberger, Steven Egoyan, Atom

Circuitry Man Hardware Jekyll & Hyde Megaville RoboCop 2 Total Recall Eve of Destruction

Lovy, Steven Stanley, Richard Wickes, David Lehner, Peter Kerschner, Irwin Verhoeven, Paul Gibbins, Duncan

1990s 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1991

182

Tech-Noir Films by Date

1991 1991 1991 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1994 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995

Future Kick Terminator 2 Until the End of the World Duplicates Fortress Freejack Lawnmower Man Nemesis Project Shadowchaser Prototype X29A Sneakers Universal Soldier Arcade Cyborg Cop Cyborg 2 Demolition Man Final Mission Future Shock Ghost in the Machine Knights Rising Sun RoboCop 3 Wild Palms American Cyborg Steel Warrior A.P.E.X. Brainscan Circuitry Man II Companion Cyber Bandits Cyber-Tracker Cyborg Cop 2 Evolver Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein New Crime City Project Shadowchaser II Replikator TekWar Android Affair City of Lost Children Cyber-Tracker 2 Cyberzone Cyborg 3 Cyborg Cop 3

Klaus, Damian Cameron, James Wenders, Wim Stern, Sandor Gordon, Stuart Murphy, Geoff Leonard, Brett Pyun, Albert Eyres, John Roth, Phillip J. Robinson, Phil Alden Emmerick, Roland Pyun, Albert Firstenberg, Sam Schroeder, Michael Brambilla, Marco Redmond, Lee Parkinson, Eric, et al. Talalay, Rachel Pyun, Albert Kaufman, Philip Dekker, Fred Bigelow, Kathryn, et al. Davidson, Boaz Roth, Phillip J. Flynn, John Lovy, Steven and Robert Lovy Gleder, Gary Fleming, Eric Pepin, Richard Firstenberg, Sam Rosman, Mark Branagh, Kenneth Winfrey, Jonathan Eyres, John Jackson, Philip Shatner, William Kletter, Richard Jeunet, Jean-Pierre and Marc Caro Pepin, Richard Ray, Fred Olen Schroeder, Michael Wein, Yossi 183

Tech-Noir Film

1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997

Digital Man Dream Breaker Expect No Mercy Goldeneye Hackers Harrison Bergeron Heatseeker Hologram Man Johnny Mnemonic Judge Dredd Nemesis 2 Net Phoenix Project Shadowchaser III Screamers Strange Days Synapse Terminal Justice 12 Monkeys Virtual Assassin Virtual Seduction Virtuosity Chain Reaction Cyberstalker Darkdrive Island of Dr. Moreau Lawnmower Man 2 Nemesis 3 Nemesis 4 Omega Doom Solo Twilight Man Virus Apocalypse Watch Cloned Conceiving Ada Gattaca Hostile Intent Menno’s Mind Mimic Morella Nirvana Open Your Eyes

Roth, Phillip J. Inkol, Sheldon Dalen, Zale Campbell, Martin Softley, Iain Pittman, Bruce Pyun, Albert Pepin, Richard Longo, Robert Cannon, Danny Pyun, Albert Winkler, Irwin Cook, Troy Eyres, John Duguay, Christian Bigelow, Kathryn Goldstein, Allan King, Rick Gilliam, Terry Lee, Robert Ziller, Paul Leonard, Brett Davis, Andrew Romero, Christopher Roth, Phillip J. Frankenheimer, John Mann, Farhad Pyun, Albert Pyun, Albert Pyun, Albert Barba, Norberto Baxley, Craig R. Goldstein, Allan A. Connor, Kevin Barr, Douglas Hershman-Leeson, Lynn Niccol, Andrew Heap, Jonathan Kroll, Jon Del Toro, Guillermo Dudelson, James Glenn Salvatores, Gabriele Amenábar, Alejandro 184

Tech-Noir Films by Date

1997 1997 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999

Redline 2103 The Deadly Wake Brave New World Dream House Enemy of the State Final Cut New Rose Hotel Nightworld Soldier Truman Show Universal Soldier II Universal Soldier III Webmaster Cybercity eXistenZ Fatal Error Fortress 2 Fugitive Mind Killer Deal Matrix Netforce Thirteenth Floor Total Recall 2070 Universal Soldier The Return

Takács, Tibor Jackson, Philip Libman, Leslie and Larry Williams Campbell, Graeme Scott, Tony Anciano, Dominic and Ray Burdis Ferrara, Abel Tuchner, Michael Anderson, Paul Weir, Peter Woolnough, Jeff Woolnough, Jeff Nielsen, Thomas Borch Hayman, Peter Cronenberg, David Mastroianni, Armand Murphy, Geoff Ray, Fred Olen Borris, Clay Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski Lieberman, Robert Rusnak, Josef Azzopardi, Mario Rodgers, Mic

Cell Mission Impossible II 6th Day Track Down Virtual Nightmare Xchange A.I. Artificial Intelligence Mangler 2 Mimic 2 Replicant Shadow Fury Swordfish Vanilla Sky Collateral Damage Cypher

Singh, Tarsem Woo, John Spottiswoode, Roger Chappelle, Joe Pattinson, Michael Moyle, Allan Spielberg, Steven Hamilton-Wright, Michael De Segonzac, Jean Lam, Ringo Yokoyama, Makoto Sena, Dominic Crowe, Cameron Davis, Andrew Natali, Vincenzo

2000s 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2002 2002

185

Tech-Noir Film

2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2005 2005 2005 2005

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Equilibrium Global Effect John Q Lathe of Heaven Minority Report Storm Watch Unspeakable Absolon Code 46 Encrypt Foolproof It’s All About Love Matrix Reloaded Matrix Revolutions Natural City Net Games Numb Paycheck Terminator 3 Able Edwards Crusader Cyber Wars Final Cut Frankenstein Godsend I, Robot Manchurian Candidate November Aeon Flux Hidden Island White Noise

Redfield, Mark Wimmer, Kurt Cunningham, Terry Cassavetes, Nick Haas, Philip Spielberg, Steven Cunningham, Terry Wright, Thomas J. Barto, David Winterbottom, Michael Costo, Oscar L. Phillips, William Vinterberg, Thomas Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski Min, Byung-Cheon Van Slee, Andrew Gibson, Michael Ferris Woo, John Mostow, Jonathan Robertson, Graham Goeres, Bryan Hong, Kuo Jian Naïm, Omar Nispel, Marcus Hamm, Nick Proyas, Alex Demme, Jonathan Harrison, Greg Kusama, Karyn Haneke, Michael Bay, Michael Sax, Geoffrey

Note: Each of these films is discussed in the “Filmography.”

186

Appendix 3 Tech-Noir Films by Type

T

his appendix provides a summary of the categorization of the films in the “Filmography” according to the types discussed in Chapter 3. The first type listed in the “Filmography” is the “primary” type, so each film has only one assignment to the left column. However, many films fall into two or more categories, so they may also appear again, one or more times, in the right column. Many of the films in the “human characters in a technological world” group also include “artificial” beings, and the distinction between natural and artificial is often blurred by behavior patterns that may make the artificial person seem more natural than the natural one. With some possible exceptions, such as Deucalion in Frankenstein (2004), the heroes of the films for which “human characters in a technological world” is the primary type are all (more or less) “natural” humans.

189

Tech-Noir Film

Primary Type

Secondary Type

Human characters in a technological world 1. Technology 1979 China Syndrome 1971 Andromeda Strain 1985 Brazil 2002 Global Effect 1985 Terminal Choice 1986 Manhattan Project 1989 Millennium 1995 Goldeneye 1996 Chain Reaction 2002 Collateral Damage 2. Surveillance a) Media, marketing, and entertainment 1975 Rollerball 1979 China Syndrome 1976 Network 1983 Videodrome 1980 Death Watch 1984 Interface 1981 Looker 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four 1987 Running Man 1987 RoboCop 1989 Speaking Parts 1990 RoboCop 2 1998 Truman Show 1992 Universal Soldier 1999 Fatal Error 1993 RoboCop 3 2004 Crusader 1995 Cyborg Cop 3 1995 Heatseeker 1998 Universal Soldier II 1998 Universal Soldier III 1999 Universal Soldier The Return b) Information and control 1971 Anderson Tapes 1970 Colossus 1974 Conversation 1971 THX 1138 Logan’s Run 1973 Roboman 1976 1981 Blow Out 1979 Parts 1984 Interface 1985 Brazil Nineteen Eighty-Four 1987 Running Man 1984 1993 Rising Sun 1992 Duplicates 1998 Enemy of the State 1997 Gattaca 1998 New Rose Hotel 1999 Killer Deal 2005 White Noise 2003 Absolon 2004 Crusader 190

Tech-Noir Films by Type

Primary Type

Secondary Type

2005 Aeon Flux 2005 Island c) Security systems 1992 Fortress 1970 Colossus 1992 Sneakers 1998 Enemy of the State 1995 Hackers 2002 Minority Report 1995 Net 2003 Encrypt 1995 Virtual Assassin 1997 Hostile Intent 1999 Fortress 2 2000 Track Down 2001 Swordfish 2003 Foolproof d) Domestic contexts 1984 Next of Kin 1971 THX 1138 1987 Family Viewing 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four 1996 Twilight Man 1989 Speaking Parts 1998 Final Cut 1995 Net 2003 Net Games 2004 Final Cut 2004 November 2005 Hidden 3. Behavior modification (with or without permanent prosthesis) 1971 A Clockwork Orange 1980 Brave New World 1971 Terminal Man 1987 RoboCop THX 1138 1990 RoboCop 2 1971 1990 Total Recall 1992 Prototype X29A 1993 Final Mission 1993 Cyborg Cop Harrison Bergeron 1993 Demolition Man 1995 1997 Apocalypse Watch 1993 Future Shock Soldier 1993 RoboCop 3 1998 1999 Fugitive Mind 1995 Expect No Mercy 2002 Cypher 1995 Hologram Man Equilibrium 1995 Synapse 2002 2003 Paycheck 1995 Terminal Justice 2004 Manchurian Candidate 1997 Menno’s Mind 1998 Brave New World 2003 Code 46 2003 Numb 191

Tech-Noir Film

Primary Type

Secondary Type

4. Bioengineering



a) Diseases and cures 1971 Andromeda Strain 1989 Cyborg 1971 Omega Man 1994 A.P.E.X. 1985 Warning Sign 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1994 New Crime City 1995 Johnny Mnemonic 1995 12 Monkeys 1997 Apocalypse Watch 1996 Virus 1997 Mimic 1997 2103 The Deadly Wake 1997 Morella 2000 Mission Impossible II 1999 Fatal Error 2002 Global Effect 2001 Mimic 2 2003 Absolon 2005 Aeon Flux 2003 Numb b) Transplant (including brain transplants; see also Clones: Body parts) 1978 Coma 1985 Max Headroom 1995 Synapse 1986 Fly 1999 Killer Deal 1989 Fly II 2002 John Q 1989 Speaking Parts 1991 Future Kick 1997 Nirvana 2002 Minority Report c) Transformation (including reanimation and cryonics) 1973 Last Days of Man on Earth 1979 Parts 1973 Soylent Green 1994 TekWar Embryo 1995 City of Lost Children 1976 1977 Island of Dr. Moreau 1995 Nemesis 2 1980 Altered States 1996 Nemesis 3 Brave New World 1996 Nemesis 4 1980 1983 Videodrome 1997 Open Your Eyes Fly 1997 Redline 1986 1989 Fly II 1998 Soldier 1990 Jekyll and Hyde 1999 Universal Soldier The Return Universal Soldier 2001 Vanilla Sky 1992 1993 Demolition Man 2003 Numb 1994 Evolver 2004 Godsend 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 2005 Island 1995 Cyborg Cop 3

192

Tech-Noir Films by Type

Primary Type

Secondary Type

1996 Island of Dr. Moreau 1997 Gattaca 1997 Mimic 1998 Brave New World 1998 Nightworld 1998 Universal Soldier II 1998 Universal Soldier III 2001 Mimic 2 2002 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 2002 Minority Report 2004 Frankenstein 5. Cyborg 1973 Roboman 1974 Terminal Man 1983 Tin Man 1976 Logan’s Run 1987 RoboCop 1980 Death Watch 1989 Cyborg 1987 Running Man 1990 RoboCop 2 1989 Millennium 1992 Nemesis 1990 Megaville 1992 Prototype X29A 1990 Total Recall 1993 Cyborg Cop 1991 Future Kick 1993 RoboCop 3 1992 Fortress 1994 Cyborg Cop 2 1992 Universal Soldier 1995 Heatseeker 1993 Knights 1995 Johnny Mnemonic 1995 City of Lost Children 2004 Final Cut 1995 Cyborg Cop 3 1995 Synapse 1995 Virtual Assassin 1995 Virtuosity 1996 Cyborg 1996 Darkdrive 1996 Nemesis 4 1997 Nirvana 1997 2103 The Deadly Wake 1998 Universal Soldier II 1998 Universal Soldier III 1998 Webmaster 1999 Cybercity 1999 eXistenZ 1999 Fortress 2 1999 Killer Deal 193

Tech-Noir Film

Primary Type

Secondary Type

1999 Matrix 1999 Universal Soldier The Return 2000 Mission Impossible II 2001 Mangler 2 2003 Matrix Reloaded 2003 Matrix Revolutions 2004 Able Edwards 2004 Cyber Wars 2004 I, Robot 2004 Manchurian Candidate Human and “artificial” characters in a technological world 6. Virtual reality a) Media, marketing, and entertainment 1982 Tron 1990 Megaville 1985 Max Headroom 1994 Evolver 1991 Future Kick 1995 Strange Days 1993 Arcade 1995 Terminal Justice 1993 Wild Palms 1996 Lawnmower Man 2 1994 Brainscan 1997 Menno’s Mind 1994 TekWar 1999 Total Recall 2070 1995 Dream Breaker 2002 Storm Watch 1995 Virtual Seduction 1997 Nirvana 1997 Redline 1999 Cybercity 1999 eXistenZ 1999 Thirteenth Floor 2000 Virtual Nightmare b) Hacking the mind 1980 Lathe of Heaven 1981 Looker 1983 Brainstorm 1990 Circuitry Man Until the End of the World 1994 Circuitry Man II 1991 1992 Lawnmower Man 1995 Dream Breaker 1993 Future Shock 1995 Virtual Seduction 1994 Cyber Bandits 1999 Thirteenth Floor 1995 Expect No Mercy 1999 Total Recall 2070 City of Lost Children 2000 Virtual Nightmare 1995 194

Tech-Noir Films by Type

Primary Type

Secondary Type

1997 Conceiving Ada 1997 Open Your Eyes 2000 Cell 2001 Vanilla Sky 2002 Lathe of Heaven 2002 Unspeakable c) Security, information, and control 1995 Strange Days 1999 Cybercity 1996 Lawnmower Man 2 1999 Matrix 1998 Webmaster 2003 Absolon 1999 Netforce 2003 Matrix Reloaded 2004 Cyber Wars 2003 Matrix Revolutions d) Mind transplant 1990 Megaville 1992 Lawnmower Man 1992 Duplicates 1992 Nemesis 1992 Freejack 1993 Wild Palms 1993 Ghost in the Machine 1995 Dream Breaker 1995 Hologram Man 1995 Johnny Mnemonic 1995 Virtuosity 1995 Virtual Assassin 1996 Darkdrive 1997 Nirvana 1997 Menno’s Mind 2000 6th Day 2000 Xchange 2003 Natural City 2003 Encrypt 7. Clone (all relate to bio-engineering) a) Body parts 1971 Resurrection of Zachary 2001 Shadow Fury Wheeler 1979 Parts 1997 Cloned 2005 Island b) Society and service 1973 Clones 1976 Futureworld 1978 Boys from Brazil 1995 City of Lost Children 1983 Anna to the Infinite Power 1997 Cloned 1994 Replikator 1997 Conceiving Ada

195

Tech-Noir Film

Primary Type

Secondary Type

1995 Judge Dredd 1998 Universal Soldier III 1995 Terminal Justice 1999 Fugitive Mind 1997 Morella 2000 Xchange 2000 6th Day 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2001 Replicant 2004 Frankenstein 2001 Shadow Fury 2003 Code 46 2003 It’s All About Love 2004 Able Edwards 2004 Godsend 2005 Aeon Flux 8. Android a) Entertainment 1973 Westworld 1976 Futureworld b) Love and lovers 1975 Stepford Wives 1992 Nemesis 1982 Android 1982 Blade Runner 1983 Prototype 1987 Cherry 2000 1989 Slipstream 1990 Circuitry Man 1993 Cyborg 2 1994 Circuitry Man II 1994 Companion 1995 Android Affair 1995 Cyberzone 1995 Cyborg 3 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2003 Natural City c) Security and security gone wrong 1988 R.O.T.O.R. 1989 Millennium 1991 Eve of Destruction 1994 Evolver 1993 Knights 1995 Android Affair 1994 A.P.E.X. 1995 Screamers American Cyborg 1997 2103 The Deadly Wake 1994 Steel Warrior 2004 I, Robot 196

Tech-Noir Films by Type

Primary Type 1994 1995 1995 1995 1996 1996 1999

Cyber-Tracker Cyber-Tracker 2 Digital Man Phoenix Omega Doom Solo Total Recall 2070

Secondary Type

d) Stalkers and assassins 1984 Terminator 1973 1990 Hardware 1995 1991 Terminator 2 2003 1992 Project Shadowchaser 1994 Project Shadowchaser II 1995 Project Shadowchaser III 1995 Nemesis 2 1996 Nemesis 3 1996 Nemesis 4 2003 Terminator 3

Westworld Judge Dredd Natural City

9. Non-humanoid artificial intelligence a) Master AI 1970 Colossus 1975 1977 Demon Seed 1976 1983 WarGames 1982 1995 Screamers 1983 1996 Cyberstalker 1984 Matrix 1991 1999 1999 Universal Soldier The Return 1992 2001 Mangler 2 1993 Storm Watch 1994 2002 2003 Matrix Reloaded Matrix Revolutions 1999 2003 2004 I, Robot 2003 b) Automated house 1998 Dream House

Rollerball Logan’s Run Tron Tin Man Terminator Terminator 2 Fortress Knights American Cyborg Steel Warrior Fortress 2 Terminator 3

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Smith, Nicholas D., ed. Philosophers Look at Science Fiction. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1982. Smoodin, Eric. “Image and the Voice in the Film with Spoken Narration.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 8.4 (1983): 19–32. Sofia, Zoë. “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism.” Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 47–59. Sorensen, Peter. “Terminator 2: A Film Effects Revolution.” Computer Graphics World 14 (October 1991): 56–62. Spatz, Lois. Aeschylus. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Spicer, Andrew, ed. European Film Noir. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: University of Austin Press, 1996. Steinberg, Leo. “Velazquez’ Las Meninas.” October 19 (Winter 1982): 45–54. Steiner, George. Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Sterling, Bruce, intro. and ed. Mirrorshades The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Arbor House, 1986. Steur, Daniel. “Following Telepathy along Riverbeds and Maelstroms: Freud, Wittgenstein, and Benajmin on Language and Communication.” Metaphor and Rational Discourse. Ed. and Intro. Daniel Steur. Tubingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1997. 77–89. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886. New York: Bantom, 1981. Stewart, Garrett. “Review: Death Watch.” Film Quarterly 37.1 (Fall 1983): 16–22. Stone-Blackburn, Susan. “Consciousness Evolution and Early Telepathic Tales.” Science-Fiction Studies 20.2 (July 1993): 241–50. Suvin, Darko. “On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF.” Foundation 46 (Autumn 1989): 40–51. ——. Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Sweeney, S.E. “Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity.” The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory. Eds. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1990. 1–14. Switzer, Robert. “Over-Writing the Body: Virtual Reality and Cartesian Metaphysics.” Philosophy Today 41 (Winter 1997): 507–19. Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Tallis, Raymond. “The Mirror Stage: A Critical Reflection.” Trivium 21 (Summer 1986): 5–44. Telotte, J.P. “The Doubles of Fantasy and the Space of Desire.” Alien Zone: Culture Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. New York: Verso, 1990. 152–59. ——. “Human Artifice and the Science Fiction Film.” Film Quarterly 36.3 (1983): 44–51. ——. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ——. Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ——. “The Science Fiction Film as Fantastic Text: THX 1138.” Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 123–41. ——. “The Science Fiction Film as Uncanny Text.” Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 161–78. ——. “The Terminator, Terminator 2, and the Exposed Body.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20.1 (Summer 1992): 26–34. Thame, David. “Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Organization of Matter, and The Spark of Life.” Notes and Queries 49.1 (March 2002): 41–2. Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime, and Empire. Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Thomson, George. Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941. 212

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Filmography Filmography

F

ilmography catalog entries include the following information: titles, source, writer(s), series, director(s), date of release, country of origin if it is other than the United States, length, and type. These films are also listed by date in Appendix 2 and by type in Appendix 3. The types are explained in Chapter 3. There is no rating for relative quality, and readers and viewers should look to other listings if they have concerns about nudity, language, and violence. The text that follows this entry includes a summary of the principal characters and action and a brief discussion of motifs, settings, or other relevant elements, and comparisons to other films. Additional referencing and cross-referencing may be found in the film title and motif indexes. These materials help to show the commonalities in the treatment of characters, settings, actions, and motifs; many of which are directly related to the tech-noir didactic message, while others are deliberately cultivated with reference to a secondary intent, as in the remake, quotation, parody, and satire.

Able Edwards Writer: Graham Robertson Director: Graham Robertson Date: 2004 Length: 85 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Cyborg Abel Edwards (Scott Kelly Galbreath) is a clone of the creator of the original Perry the Panda character and earth’s Edwards Wonderland Parks. Long after the original Abel’s death in 1960 and long after a biocontaminant polluted the earth and forced the survivors to relocate to an orbiting satellite, the Edwards Corporation (EC) found that it had saturated the market with its primary products, androids, so the board decided to create a clone from the cryogenically frozen Abel’s brain cells with the hope that he would improve business. The passing of time between the death and cloning of Abel is indicated by an opening time-lapse shot of a crumbling teddy bear; then the mature cloned Abel lies down to his final rest amidst the ruins of his original’s Wonderland … and then the probate hearing begins. This hearing, conducted by Chairman Lowery (Michael Shamus Wiles), is being held in response to the claim laid by Abel’s wife Rosemary (Keri Bruno) to everything that was her husband’s. EC asserts that Abel was only a company product and that they own everything that was his. Gower (Steve Beaumont Jones) is the primary witness: Gower is a unique “half ” – a half-human and half-machine being – created to be Abel’s companion. Rosemary, the EC chairman, and Abel’s campaign manager also give evidence in a series of flashbacks on the life of the man who lies down to die at its beginning.

Tech-Noir Film

The hearing context establishes that the events referred to are already in the past, but they are presented in the flashback filmic present tense. Abel is raised by Chairman Warren Hastings, who is good to Abel and sees to it that when he has problems with the conventional computer retinal interface, he gets an oldfashioned voice activated one. After Hastings dies when Abel is twelve, the board carefully directs Abel’s life so that it imitates that of his original. When Abel nearly dies with his fiancée in a transport collision, Abel is resurrected, but his fiancée is left dead, thus approximating the original Abel’s loss in an accident that also left him, like the first Abel, making frequent use of a cane. At age twenty-five, Abel takes over EC and starts building “reality” theme parks with cloned animals rather than the virtual amusements that have become the norm. He marries Rosemary, his park designer, and has a son Warren, for whom he has his original’s Panda drawing retrieved from earth. He even steps into the running for political office with a “return to reality” platform. Unfortunately, a park accident causes many deaths, including that of his son, ends his chances in the election, and leads to the closure of his parks. Now obsolete, Abel begins to realize the extent to which his life has been orchestrated to follow that of his original: even his wife was one of several the EC had arranged for him to choose from. Gower allows him to steal a ship, which he crashes on earth – his original died in a helicopter crash – and he wanders through the ruins of a Wonderland park toward a statue of Abel and Perry the Panda. His final moments, shown in the film opening, occur as he lies down, presumably for the last time. The unanimous decision at the end of the hearing is in favor of EC’s claim. * * * This film, shot against a green screen and entirely without sets, repeatedly calls Citizen Kane (1941) to mind; but in details related to cloning, it is more comparable to The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) in that the clone’s life is orchestrated to imitate that of a unique human original. The emphasis on corporate ownership aligns Able Edwards with It’s All About Love (2003), while corporate arranged marriages are prominent in Wild Palms (1993). Like the robot child David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Abel returns to a fantasy park to meet his destiny. The extension of cloning to extinct animals revisits the adventure film Jurassic Park (1993) and also takes cloning beyond the re-creation of one individual or the creation of a service class into the realm of a broader historical reconstruction closer to that in the Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976) parks.

Absolon Writer: Brad Mirman Director: David Barto Date: 2003 Countries: Canada and United Kingdom Length: 96 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Surveillance: Information and control Virtual reality: Security, information, and control In 2003, a deadly virus and the loss of the ozone layer left five billion people dead. The survivors have a surplus of everything except the daily injections of “absolon” they need to survive, so the world’s economy is based on earnings rated in time allotments of this drug, which is only available through the Unified Pharmaceutical Corporation (UPC) operated by Murchison (Ron Pearlman). Dr. Reyna (Neil Foster), the inventor of absolon, realized that people who stop taking the cure die of withdrawal not the disease, so he developed a cure for absolon addiction. Murchison assigns Agent Walters (Lou Diamond Phillips) to kill Reyna for

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this discovery and to track down Reyna’s numerous allies, as well as Norman Scott (Christopher Lambert), the detective called in to investigate Reyna’s death. Haywood (Christopher Redman), Reyna’s assistant, gives Scott the first part of the cure and Dr. Claire Whittaker (Kelly Brook), purportedly of UPC, shows up to help him as he evades Walters and his thugs and also tries to visit each of the safe houses listed on a disk he found in Reyna’s office, one of which has the second part of the cure. When he collapses, Claire takes him to Dr. Stewart, who is also purportedly working for UPC, but who is really the intended primary producer of the cure. Scott, it turns out, was chosen as the detective for the case, not because of his professional skills, but because he has the universal donor’s type O blood and will thus serve as an effective decoy, and because he has no family and few friends to mourn his death. Walters’s men kill Stewart, but thanks to a quick trick Claire plays with her phone, Scott’s police buddies realize what the situation is and show up in time to save him and Scott manages to save Reyna’s lab from Walters. * * * Scott is an “Omega Man” (1971) whose survival to a ripe old age is heavily tinged with irony, given that he was chosen to be an expendable decoy not a hero. The irony is countered by a mythologizing frame story: the film opens with an older man, David, telling the story of the virus. Later, Scott meets this man while he is still a boy with the virus and gives him a collector’s card of the “White Knight” which, as he later explains to Claire, his own father had given him. At the film’s close, David passes the card to the boy to whom he has told the story, and the two walk out of the cabin. The camera then moves backwards through miles of green countryside, lakes, and rivers in a classic affirmation of nature as life following a lengthy digression into pharmaceuticals as the means to a kind of living death. A secondary frame is created by the parallel between the pre-film opening death of Scott’s wife and that of Reyna. Reyna’s disk has the safe house information encrypted under a recording of himself reading from David Copperfield to his dying wife: “Whether I will turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show […]” Absolon incorporates a scene, near the opening, in which Scott reviews a crime scene digitally re-created with images from two security cameras; film viewers see the disk Reyna hides under his desktop, but Scott cannot, even when he asks the technicians to review the moment, because the cameras did not have a clear line of sight on that particular location. The necessity of line of sight to surveillance also facilitates a ruse by Scott’s partner when she talks to Scott by phone while he stays out of sight. “Sight” is again the means for a ruse when the detectives pick up a brown eye with a fleck in the digital recording of the murderer that, while exonerating Haywood, wrongly implicates Claire. See Terminal Justice (1995) for an earlier virtual crime scene re-creation and Rising Sun (1993) for a similarly faked digital record. In addition, after Scott has received the first part of the cure, every time the camera cuts back to him there is a brief visual of the digital countdown of the time he has left before he must have the second stage of the cure or die: this technologically generated image is not a ruse.

Aeon Flux Writers: Peter Chung, Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi Director: Karyn Kusama Date: 2005 Length: 92 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Surveillance: Information and control Bioengineering: Diseases and cures

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In 2011, when a devastating virus threatened to wipe out the entire human race, scientist Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) managed to save 1 percent of the population. These five million survivors and their descendents have been living in the walled city of Bregna for some four hundred years, but there is increasing resentment and formal resistance to the intensive surveillance practices of the government, still in the hands of the Goodchild family, and much general disquiet about the increasing frequency of individual disappearances. The rebels, called Monicans, are organized, well trained, and adept terrorists who employ a form of chemically induced and covert psychic communication. Aeon (Charlize Theron) is a rebel whose sister, a conservative pacifist, is killed as a rebel. Aeon is sent on a mission, along with her sidekick Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo), who has bioengineered feet-hands, to kill Trevor Goodchild; but when the moment for the assassination arrives, Trevor seems to recognize her and the startled Aeon loses her opportunity. As it turns out, the cure for the virus had the side effect of making everyone sterile, so the Goodchilds have been unobtrusively keeping the human race going with clones: Trevor is his own clone, raised by himself, and he remembers Aeon as his wife from the pre-virus days. No one outside the Goodchild inner governmental circle realizes they are clones: when people die, they are cloned and implanted in women who think they become pregnant naturally. Trevor has been conducting tests in hopes of finding a cure for sterility, but his brother Oren (Johnny Lee Miller) prevents him from realizing that all of the women in one of his test groups, including Aeon’s sister, become pregnant without the help of clone implantation. Oren prefers to maintain the status quo and thus has the pregnant women killed, although all are still destined to be reborn as their own clones. Aeon thwarts Oren’s plans by blowing up the zeppelin-like machine where the cloning is conducted and recorded: it crashes out of the sky and smashes through the city wall revealing the thriving jungle beyond. * * * This story unwinds just a bit like The Creation of the Humanoids, a 1962 film based on Jack Williamson’s novel The Humanoids (1949), but it is reworked so that clones replace humans instead of androids. In the Creation of the Humanoids, an atomic war has wiped out 92 percent of the human population, so androids keep everything going. The human race continues to decline, so the androids develop a human scientist’s discovery of a method of transferring human memories and personalities into android bodies. In Aeon Flux, the human race eventually recovers, so the cloning practice and the intense government surveillance it seems to justify both presumably become obsolete. The cure that kills is also featured in Mimic (1997) and Absolon (2003), but neither of these films deals with sterility as a potential side effect of an initially life-saving drug. Aeon Flux incorporates the idea of cloning as a means to longevity: while several of the main characters obviously feel this “cure” itself needs a cure, others want to maintain what has become the new status quo because they enjoy the place it lends them in the social hierarchy. The final symbolic moment marking the end of artificial longevity by cloning comes directly from Logan’s Run (1976) and Brave New World (1998) insofar as the solution to problematic technology is the return to nature and, more particularly, a return of women to their “natural” procreative function. More unusual than its resolution is this film’s visual style which, even more emphatically than the Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003) or Equilibrium (2002), invokes anime in its stylized dialogue, choreographed acrobatics and fight scenes, and cartoonishly molded secret agents. The visual effects used to convey telepathic experiences are also unusual: see Minority Report (2002) for a different visualization of the telepathic image.

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A.I. Artificial Intelligence Source: Based on Brian Aldiss’s short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” 1969 Writers: Steven Spielberg and Ian Watson Director: Steven Spielberg Date: 2001 Length: 145 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Clone: Society and service In the few areas where civilization survives the melting of the glaciers, people maintain their prosperity by limiting the birth rate; so when Monica (Frances O’Connor) and Henry Swinton’s (Sam Robards) son Martin lapses into a coma, they cannot alleviate their grief by having more children. David (Haley Joel Osment) appears as the solution. David is the product of years of research and experimentation by Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) and his team: he is a “mecha” or robot child designed to offer unconditional love to his adoptive parents. Monica has a little trouble adjusting to David, but the real trouble starts when their son wakes up, comes home, and starts tormenting him. Monica finally abandons David in the bush with his supertoy Teddy Bear. The wandering David is shocked by the discarded robots scrounging for parts in a garbage dump, meets up with the android Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), and both are soon incarcerated at a Flesh Fair where humans enjoy the spectacle of discarded robots being shot from a cannon and having acid poured on them. With a little help from an angry crowd that turns on the ring masters for presenting what is apparently a human child for sacrifice, Teddy rescues them and Joe then attempts to help David fulfill his wish, based on the life of Pinocchio, of finding the Blue Fairy so that she will turn him into a real boy and his mother will love him. They consult the automated Dr. Know, who has been preprogrammed with clues from Professor Hobby to direct them to Manhattan, now largely underwater. There, David is so devastated by the revelation that he is the prototype for mass-produced robotic children that he attempts suicide by drowning himself. Underwater, he meets the Coney Island version of Pinocchio. Joe rescues him, but David returns to the site in a helicopter-submarine and waits for his wish to be granted. Thousands of years later, his descendents find and help him. Monica is cloned from a lock of hair, clipped during one of David’s misadventures and preserved by the ever-watchful Teddy, and David enjoys an entire day as her one and only object of affection. When the day is over and she lies down to sleep, never to awaken, David goes to sleep with her. * * * This Spielberg special, a combo of fairy tale and science fiction, has a tech-noir twist derived from the effectiveness with which androids can be made to mimic humans, the racially inflected prejudices of humans against these artificial beings, and David’s inability to be anything other than what he was programmed to be. These disjunctions between human and android account for the Flesh Fair, as well as the mother’s dilemma and her decision, and even David’s seemingly exceptional action of turning a fairy tale into a quest. He is, by Professor Hobby’s standards, successful in that quest; but by his own, he is a complete failure. Spielberg puts the “Kuleshov” effect to work, such that viewers identify with David as an idealized little boy; then he both disproves the Kuleshov effect by showing David to be the android he is and provides closure in the form of other androids who help David complete his programmed objective. A.I. differs from such films as Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1984) in which the androids learn in a cumulative sense and exceed their original limitations: David does not learn and does not change – he just lives out his pre-programmed destiny. Whether this proves the Flesh Fair is merely distasteful entertainment, or that, as in Matrix Revolutions (2003), the differences between artificial being and human are less important than they seem, is unclear, but android evolution validates the anthropomorphizing process – eventually.

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In Cloned (1997), a couple is shocked to discover their deceased son has been cloned many times. Godsend (2004), like A.I., attends matters of similarity and difference between a deceased child and the “artificial” one purportedly made to alleviate parental grief. Brave New World (1980, 1998) is also of comparative interest insofar as it poses a world in which humans are programmed to remain emotional children throughout their lives, but since they get everything they want, they fail to arouse the sympathy that a child, albeit an android child, inspires.

Altered States Source: Based on Sidney Aaron (Paddy) Chayefsky’s novel of the same title, 1978 Writer: Sidney Aaron (Paddy) Chayefsky Director: Ken Russell Date: 1980 Length: 103 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Scientist Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) and his partner Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) begin sensory deprivation experiments using students and a large cylinder-shaped tank; then Eddie tries the experience himself with intense hallucinatory results that include religious images and an encounter with his father who died following a long and painful bout with cancer. Eddie marries Emily (Blair Brown), an anthropologist, has children with her, separates from her, and heads off to Mexico where he experiments with mushrooms said to return the user to the first soul: Eddie encounters his wife as a salamander and then they are both covered with dust. Back at Harvard, Eddie and Arthur acquire a new partner, Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), who gives them access to a new sensory deprivation tank that looks a bit like a dumpster. Eddie’s experiments with mushrooms and the tank lead to long periods of psychic and physical regression. On one occasion, he emerges as a proto-human, nearly kills a guard, and eventually wakes up as his physically normal, naked self in the zoo. His adventure is confirmed by witnesses, X-rays, and audiotapes. His final experiment takes him back to the amoeba stage, from which Emily retrieves him in a hallucinatory scene of swirling mist and psychedelic colors. After this experience he confesses his terror of the void and love for his wife. * * * Eddie seems to be modeled after Timothy Leary (1920–1996), a university professor who advocated drug use as a means to spiritual enlightenment in the 1960s and 1970s. Wild Palms (1993) and TekWar (1994) also make much of addictive drugs and technology, but are less informed by 1960s sensibilities and less devoted to creating visual effects to represent the associated experiences. The brief shots of the drug dealers in both later films contrast with the native ceremonialist offering Eddie the potential means to discover the “first soul.” Eddie’s experience on this occasion reworks the conclusion of the surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929); his subsequent hallucinations become progressively more intense and even manifest physically outside of the tank. In Altered States, drugs are usually used in combination with the deprivation tank: Eddie gets into a “machine” and is never the same again, but his transformation is ultimately more emotional than physical. In some films, a virtual reality “pod” serves a role similar to the tank: the main characters in Arcade (1993) and Virtual Seduction (1995), for example, are emotionally transformed by their experiences inside a machine. In other tech-noir films, the man who gets into the machine is changed physically and permanently, as are the main characters in The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973), The Fly (1986, 1989), Prototype X29A (1992), and others. Both Arcade and Dream Breaker (1995) include fantastic beings who get out of their boxes, much as

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the primordial Eddie does. In most instances, this escape is a dangerous thing for the world, or at least for the hero. Last Days (1973) also incorporates something of the regressive element found in Altered States, as do Jekyll and Hyde (1990), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), and Lawnmower Man (1992). Eddie, like Jekyll, plays both himself and some version of Hyde. Last Days and Lawnmower Man suggest that technologically induced regression is a sign of evolution, while The Fly proposes an evolutionary leap by means of cross-species hybridization. Lawnmower Man and Prototype X29A (1992) suggest that leap will involve human–machine hybridization, but in Altered States, drugs and technology are catalysts for the exploration of the possibilities of a purely human development: changes in, or even the loss of, physical form are posed as mere by-products of that development, not indications of a shuffle into the digital environment or a metal casing.

American Cyborg Steel Warrior Writers: Bill Crounse, Boaz Davidson, Brent V. Friedman, Christopher Pearce, and Don Pequignot Director: Boaz Davidson Date: 1994 Length: 95 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI It is seventeen years after the nuclear wars and an artificial intelligence has herded the survivors, all of whom have been rendered infertile by radioactivity, into cities, now run like prisons, to live until they die. An advanced “cyborg” is given instructions to hunt down Mary (Nicole Hansen), the only fertile woman left on the planet. She flees from a secret lab with her immature fetus in a life-support jar: she has only thirty-seven hours to get to the harbor where she will be rescued and taken to Europe. There is a rebellion going on in Europe where they have started to grow food again, and the North American scientists who incubated the fetus believe the baby has a better chance of surviving there. She acquires Austin (Joe Lara) as a protector from the cyborg hunting her and from the men in drag, sewer creatures, mutant radioactive cannibals, and other dangers that block her route. On the way, Mary and Austin discover they like each other, but then learn that Austin is a cyborg too, at which point Mary goes on alone. Carp (Hellen Lesnick), one of Austin’s associates, shows up just in time to give Mary some final directions to the port where Austin also defeats his malevolent counterpart and the boat arrives to carry Mary and her baby away. Mary has to go take care of her child, but Austin decides that he has a more important role to play beating the system and bringing hope to those living in the city. * * * This stalker movie has a familiar tech-noir plot: technology has brought about the destruction of the world, but also provides the means for recovery; and there are two principal cyborgs, though they really seem to be androids, one of whom seeks to destroy, while the other seeks to protect, the fetus and its mother and thus end or save the human race. No mention is made of the baby’s father, and the artificial intelligence overseeing and facilitating the final end of all humans does little except order Mary’s death. The machines that imprison and destroy humankind in the Terminator films (1984, 1991, 2003) likewise target the mother and boy who might turn the battle in favor of human survival and the androids who have declared war on the human race target Alex in Nemesis 2 and 3 (1993, 1996) because she holds the key to the survival of the human race, especially if she procreates. The fetus in a jar reappears as the product of an android–human union in

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Cyborg 3 (1995), but it is protected by all the androids in Cytown as well as a human who serves as both doctor and technical support. The woman who needs a male protector to complete her mission also appears in numerous films. In Cyborg (1989), a female cyborg carries information that will save the already devastated human race from a plague; a human male protects her from attacks by various punk thugs who prefer that civilization remain fallen. In Cyborg 2 (1993) a female android will die serving the interests of her corporate owners if her human male protector cannot get her to the free zone. In Nemesis 4 (1996), the DNA-enhanced Alex needs her former human boyfriend to help her survive the efforts of her not-really-human boss to have her killed. Androids who, like Austin, have to discover they are not human also appear in Blade Runner (1982) and Phoenix (1995), but unlike these films, American Cyborg Steel Warrior shows the world after civilization has more or less completely fallen. That world is not one of empty devastation, but one full of new horrors. The more or less civilized worlds of films ranging from Max Headroom (1985) to The Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004) often include carnival, festival, and social underground motifs such as masks, costumes, parades, and occasionally bizarre gang-related hair cuts and clothing. Likewise, there is no shortage of “weirdoes” living in the “fringe” worlds of the tech-noir post-apocalypse: American Cyborg Steel Warrior adds radioactive cannibals and other monsters to the mix, all of which are more likely to act out of purely destructive aggressive instinct than such “civilized” motives as territoriality, greed, and desire.

The Anderson Tapes Source: Based on Lawrence Sanders’s novel of the same title, 1970 Writer: Frank Pierson Director: Sidney Lumet Date: 1971 Length: 99 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Duke Anderson (Sean Connery) has had just about all he can take of the prison’s psychotherapy sessions by the time he is released. But once he is outside, he realizes things have changed over the past ten years: there are just as many cameras, microphones, and pseudo-professionals out there as there are in prison. He reconnects with his old girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon), now living at her new boyfriend’s expense in an upper class New York apartment block. Duke quickly decides that the place is perfect for his first post-release job and he brings in his homosexual buddy Haskins (Martin Balsam) to do the initial scouting by entering the apartments on the pretense of preparing for a redecoration of the hall; the Kid (Christopher Walken), who helps out with the power and phone lines; and a few others. More importantly, he gets the funding for the heist from the mob. It turns out the police have some illegal wiretaps on Haskins, on the mob, and on the black activists he also calls in. The only tapes Duke finds out about are those made for Ingrid’s boyfriend by a hired detective: Ingrid, her boyfriend, and the detective thus know all about his big plans. All Ingrid’s boyfriend wants in exchange for his silence is Ingrid, whom he gets. The others can be relied on to keep quiet because wiretapping is illegal. So the job begins, with another recently released long-time inmate Pop (Stan Gottlieb) taking the place of the doorman. Apartment by apartment, the crew cleans out whatever is worth taking; the only serious problem arises from Socks’s tendency to unnecessary violence. Socks is the thug forced on them in exchange for mob financing and whom Dean is supposed to kill when the job is done. Unfortunately for the thieves, a boy with paralyzed legs, whose coin collection they confiscate and then leave alone in his room, has a ham radio hidden in a cupboard and he uses it to call for help. After numerous calls come in, the police investigate, realize something is indeed not as it should be in the apartment building, and send a team to enter it through the roof. Too late, Duke and the others realize they are caught and try to get

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out. Duke keeps his agreement with the mob and shoots Socks, and then almost escapes by hiding in the fire escape of Ingrid’s apartment, but succumbs to a bullet wound. The film concludes with the erasing of all the tapes on the other criminal activities incidentally related to the theft, as the wiretappers do not want to be caught and charged with illegal surveillance. * * * Ultimately, the surveillance practices shown in this film do nothing to deter crime, and only Ingrid’s boyfriend is actually able to use the information so acquired to get anything that he wants. The thieves are caught only because one of those being robbed has access to communications equipment that allows him to contact other people who then notify the police. The film’s suggestion that illegal wiretaps are commonly used by the FBI and police to pursue criminals, by detectives to pursue information on behalf of their clients, and by everyone, it seems, except those identified as criminals, provides an effective foil to the presentation of similar activities in All the President’s Men (1976). By comparison with The Conversation (1974) and later films, such as Blow Out (1981) and New Rose Hotel (1998), in which a much older Christopher Walken stars, the surveillance devices are clumsy and, for the most part, ineffective for the purposes for which they have been set. Even the bribery is successful only because the detective who made the tape can be relied upon to keep quiet because if he says anything he will be charged with committing a crime.

Android Writers: Don Keith Opper, James Reigle, and Will Reigle Director: Aaron Lipstadt Date: 1982 Length: 80 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Max (Don Keith Opper) is Dr. Daniel’s (Klaus Kinski) android assistant on a corporate space station designed for research on androids, an activity that became illegal on earth after androids began to develop such human behaviors as insubordination, reluctance, and an inclination to play. Dr. Daniel has created a superior female android named Cassandra (Kendra Kirchner), which needs a sexual charge from a real woman to be activated. While Dr. Daniel is asleep, Max lets three escaped criminals on board: Maggie (Brie Howard), her jealous lover Mendes (Crofton Hardester), and Keller (Norbert Weisser). Maggie declines Dr. Daniel’s request for assistance with Cassandra. Max, knowing he is to be deactivated, fears that Maggie will share the fate of the female robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Max also practices flirtatious advances toward Maggie while watching old Jimmy Stewart movies and accepts her request for a midnight trip to the lab and a look at Cassandra, whom they unintentionally activate when they kiss. Unfortunately, Mendes murders Maggie in a jealous rage and then murders Keller. Dr. Daniel makes a change in Max’s program so that he can murder Mendes. Max then goes after Dr. Daniel, who also turns out to be an android. The suddenly fully active and already insubordinate Cassandra helps out and then restores Max’s normal programming and directs him to do as she tells him so they can get back to earth where, she says, there are others like them. Max then pretends to be Dr. Daniel and Cassandra pretends to be his assistant when the police arrive to take them back to earth. * * * This dramatic film is set in the contained rooms of a sparsely decorated space station where the lighting, kept low to conserve power for the Doctor’s experiments, provides a certain gothic ambiance for the action.

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The station is also full of gothic genre markers successfully rewritten into tech-noir: lethal weapons that can disintegrate approaching ships, long-abandoned rooms, doors that can be closed and locked from external control panels, secret surveillance cameras, a garden with exotic plants, and a lab containing the mysterious and beautiful android Cassandra. Similarly “gothicized” high-tech house security systems appear in The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973) and Encrypt (2003). Max exhibits disconcertingly human characteristics: his adolescent fascination with human reproductive processes, old movies, and fedoras, for example, makes it easy for viewers to identify with his plight and increases their shock at the ease with which his moral inhibitors are removed so that he can murder as coldly as the human Mendes. A human boy fascinated by reproductive organs makes a brief appearance in Eve of Destruction (1991), a story about a female android that looks just like his mother. See Michael in Prototype (1983) for a less Jekyll and Hyde-like and more self-aware android who watches the movie Frankenstein and also reads the book. Slipstream (1989) features the android Byron who says that he learned to dance by watching Fred Astaire movies. Frankenstein films (1994, 2004) invariably make something out of lightning in association with the awakening of the creature, as does the tech-noir parody R.O.T.O.R. (1988); but in Android the “charge” is specifically equated with the spark of sexual desire. Cassandra’s awakening is an obvious spoof on electricity as a visual trope for such interest, as well as the creative process and the life force of artificial beings – batteries must be included and charged. Cassandra’s subsequent manipulation of the easily manipulated Max establishes both androids as somewhat noir-like, rather than purely gothic, with Cassandra playing the femme fatale who needs a male accomplice to achieve her aims: see Double Indemnity (1944) for one of the classics of this type. The Metropolis (1927) reference suggests Cassandra is another artificial Maria prepared to wreak havoc on the world; but see Blade Runner (1982) for a film about what happens after renegade androids banned from earth return to it.

The Android Affair Source: Based on the short film “Teach 10” with story by Isaac Asimov and teleplay by Richard Kletter, 1990 Writer: Richard Kletter Director: Richard Kletter Date: 1995 TV Length: 90 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Android: Security and security gone wrong Dr. Karen Garrett (Harley Jane Kozak) works at Dr. Winston’s (Ossie Davis) medical training facility using remote digital operation techniques and “teach” androids programmed with surgically correctable ailments. Androids whose operations fail are “blanked” so they have no memories of their experiences. Karen has an opportunity to work on a unique heart condition with #905, who prefers to be called William (Griffin Dunne). William, who has never been blanked and has spent his entire life in the facility’s brick-walled basement, refuses to let Karen operate until he spends a day out-of-doors. Fiedler (Saul Rubinek), an employee at the facility, helps her smuggle him out for a day of human indulgences: park rides, running, eating, and even a visit to #904 who is living covertly as a human. At William’s instigation, Karen acquires information from Fiedler on Winston’s plans for the 900 series and, fearing for William’s life, they contact the former spouse of one of Winston’s deceased coworkers on the 900 series, and Rachel (Natalie Radford), the daughter of another. Rachel, who wears a prominent ankh symbol around her neck, provides a serviceable operating room where Karen cures William. Winston arrives to take them into custody and demands Karen cure him too. It seems

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the original Winston had this particular heart ailment and put himself in cryogenic freeze while his android counterpart conducted his affairs and sought the cure. Unfortunately for Winston, his android acquired a taste for autonomy and unplugged him, but kept the body – which Karen discovers. William attacks the artificial Winston, revealing his android underbody; Winston collapses; and Fiedler, now in charge of the facility, tells William and Karen they are free to go, which they happily do in Karen’s large convertible. * * * This film inverts many elements in Blade Runner (1982) such that a young female doctor practicing her healing craft on “teach” androids substitutes for the retired male killer of renegade androids. William, like the Blade Runner androids, is concerned about his life span, but William’s specific response to the likelihood of a “wipe” in the near future is unusual in that he seeks to get as much out of life as possible in the time he knows he has left and to motivate his doctor to do her best to save him. In his appetite for life and greater human interactivity, he is somewhat like the android Byron in the latter part of Slipstream (1989) after he has begun to learn what life has to offer. The specific series of artificial beings that proves “defective,” as the 900 series does insofar as they exceed their programming by becoming more human-like, appears not only in Blade Runner, but also in The Island (2005) in which a series of clones become curious about themselves and their world and thus useless for the purposes for which they were created. The artificial Winston’s human-like feeling for life is also responsible for the human Winston’s fate. Like Michelette in Freejack (1992), the android Winston sees no reason to follow through on his employer’s instructions after he is no longer able to enforce them and, like Michelette, the android Winston finds his ambitions undone by another employee with more to gain by siding with the usurpers of the usurper. Vincent meets a similar fate in Encrypt (2004) at the hands of the woman he tricked into uploading into a virtual reality environment by telling her she had a fatal disease she did not actually have. While the film begins and ends in the enclosed spaces of the hospital, the middle is filled with outdoor scenes in grassy, waterfront parks and pleasant apartment interiors where William gets to experience human pleasures. The conclusion, like that of the general release version of Blade Runner (1982), involves an android and a human taking a drive in the country, thus symbolically completing the naturalization of the artificial.

The Andromeda Strain Source: Based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same title, 1969 Writer: Nelson Gidding Director: Robert Wise Date: 1971 Length: 131 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Technology Two scientists sent to a New Mexico town to retrieve a fallen satellite find everyone there dead; they also soon die, right in the middle of their audio report to base command. Later, the mutating organism kills some reconnaissance pilots by dissolving their plane’s plastic components. There are survivors, however: a baby and Jackson (George Mitchell), an alcoholic with an ulcer. Dr. Jeremy Stone’s (Arthur Hill) germ warfare response plan is put into action. He and his team – Dr. Charles Dutton (David Wayne), Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson), and Dr. Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid) – are called to Wildfire, a five-story underground facility where they undergo decontamination procedures as meticulous and almost as prolonged as the investigation that follows. Meanwhile, their family telephone calls are monitored and blocked in the interests of “national

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security.” Hall also discovers that he is supposed to satisfy the “odd man hypothesis” that a single male is best suited to make and carry out command decisions related to nuclear detonations, including that triggered if there is any danger of contaminant spreading outside the facility’s walls. A malfunction seems beyond the realm of possibility and, for the most part, the machines work perfectly: they cause problems only when not properly serviced or their effects misunderstood, as when a simple obstruction prevents a teletype machine bell from ringing and when a series of tests has to be reviewed after flashing lights cause Dr. Leavitt, an epileptic, to lapse briefly into a trance. More dramatically, the team realizes that the nuclear explosion they at first think might kill the organism will only make it grow exponentially. Most apocalyptically, a containment breach initiates the self-destruct sequence after the organism has mutated into something harmless: the selfdestruct is stopped by Hall’s efforts. * * * In George Romero’s horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968), radiation from a satellite shot down by the government turns everyone into vampire-like cannibals: the viewer’s attention is directed to the efforts of a few isolated people who are not transformed to escape these creatures. Andromeda Strain, by contrast, focuses on the use of science to avert a satellite-related catastrophe and much of the “action” is a technophiliac’s composite of long, slow pans and scans over technological gadgetry and processes in the large and brightly lit underground laboratory. The tech-noir element of Andromeda Strain is derived primarily from poorly serviced machines and technological systems that have unforeseen consequences. The movie is filled with mechanical actions and problems: people push buttons and then watch or undergo automated processes, or they frantically try to figure out how to get to the “off ” switch in time. See Terminal Man (1974) for a similar approach to a man suffering from “para-epilepsy.” The Andromeda Strain’s plot developments are not dissimilar to those in Failsafe (1964). Both films show human struggles for power and decisions relating to those struggles to have far-reaching consequences, but these are nothing compared to the folly of relinquishing life and death decisions to a machine, an arrangement proposed as a means of ending violence in the classic science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Just as many films pick up more or less where Colossus (1970) leaves off, with an artificial intelligence in control of all human life and society, some later tech-noir films pick up after a variation of the Andromeda Strain disaster has been averted, or seems to have been averted. Mimic (1997, 2001) and Absolon (2003), for example, really begin after a cure starts to create as many problems as the original bug; while Numb (2003) goes so far as to suggest that summoning scientific and technological resources to address “disease” is a misuse of intelligence and resources.

Anna to the Infinite Power Source: Based on Mildred Ames’s novel of the same title, 1981 Writer: Robert Wiemer Director: Robert Wiemer Date: 1983 Length: 106 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Pre-teen Anna Hart (Martha Byrne) is one of a number of clones made from cells taken from physicist Anna Zimmerman. Sarah (Dina Merrill), Anna’s surrogate mother, participated in the cloning experiment without her husband Graham’s (Jack Ryland) knowledge. The original Anna spent four years as a child in the Nazi concentration camp where her parents died and she herself died in a fire just when she was on the verge of

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creating a replicator that could produce food from base materials. When Anna Hart has a nightmare of a plane crash and then sees her double on television as the survivor of a plane crash, she convinces her older brother Rowan (Mark Patton) to help her do some research. Their efforts are spurred when Anna becomes convinced that Michaela (Donna Mitchell), their new neighbor and also her piano teacher, is trying to “do” something to her. When they discover that Anna is a clone, they believe they have found an explanation for her propensity to steal, lie, and recoil from flickering lights: this knowledge drives the family apart, but ultimately leads to Anna becoming a much nicer person with a closer bond with her brother. Unfortunately, they have attracted Dr. Jelliff ’s (Jack Gilford) attention and this lands Anna, along with all the other clones, in his island research lab where the project started. Rowan forgoes a chance to win a competition for a year of music study in Japan to try to rescue her, but both end up in Jelliff ’s trap. Jelliff pretends the experiment has failed and that they are free to go provided they do not speak of it to anyone; but he is actually planning to do away with all of the parents and clones within twenty-four hours, except the one who did not “individualize” and is becoming the new Anna Zimmerman he hopes will finish designing the replicator started by the original Anna. It turns out that Michaela is the first Anna clone and she has been visiting all the subsequent clones, making sure they divert from the path intended for them. The one clone who is developing as planned is the one Michaela did not have time to visit. At the last moment, Michaela promises to complete the replicator for Jelliff within weeks providing he does not harm the clones or their families: Jelliff says he will have to think about it. * * * Dr. Moreau’s island is here re-envisioned for the creation of designer people who may produce a potentially lucrative consumer product. As in The Boys from Brazil (1978), connections are made between the power and influence of technology and Nazi Germany and nurture is pitted against nature as the determining factor in the future of familial relations and free will. Abel Edwards of Able Edwards (2004) is a clone who, like Anna, is raised according to the pattern set by his original so that he will be more likely to repeat his commercial successes. Other films in which clones play active characters tend to speed up the maturation process so that the clone(s) appear fully grown and more or less in possession of the original’s skills and memories: see The Clones (1973), Futureworld (1976), The 6th Day (2000), and Replicant (2001). Embryo (1976) does not include a clone, but it does feature the growth mixture that produces an adult from a fetus in a very short space of time. The 6th Day and Replicant, like Parts (1979) and The Island (2005), depict the encounter between original and clone as a pivotal coming-of-age moment for the clone; in Anna, the pivotal encounter is between the first clone and a later clone. Where the clones in Judge Dredd (1995) simply do not look alike, the doubling effect is here reduced by the age difference between Anna and Michaela. An extended artificial “family” is also featured in Frankenstein (2004), in which Deucalion is the first and most self-aware of the Doctor’s creations who, like Michaela, seems more human than his maker. Other films apply the idea of the transformation of matter to the replication of objects and people: the matter transfer device in Replikator (1994), for example, accidentally creates a replica of a person. In Dream Breaker (1995), researchers hope to solve a genuine food shortage by transferring virtual food into the physical world.

A.P.E.X. Writers: Phillip J. Roth, Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, and Ron Schmidt Director: Phillip J. Roth Date: 1994 Length: 103 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Bioengineering: Diseases and cures 227

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One morning in 2073 Los Angeles, Dr. Nicholas Sinclair (Richard Keats) wakes from a nightmare in which his wife Natasha (Lisa Ann Russell) vanishes and he finds a gash on his right hand. That day at work, his lab sends an Advanced Prototype Extermination (APEX) unit back one hundred years in time to the Mohave Desert. When the team realizes that the unit has encountered a family driving through the area, Sinclair dives through the time portal and saves the endangered boy, but he unintentionally carries a virus with him so that he returns to 2073 to find a gash on his hand and the world overrun by APEX units who track and murder humans by honing in on their virus detecting implants. Sinclair manages to get a squad, led by Shepherd (Mitchell Cox) and including the virus-infected woman who is his wife in the original time line, to go to his lab where his initial efforts to open another portal are met with renewed APEX assaults and also cause the sudden disappearance of numerous people living in 2073. He romances Natasha, actually contracts the virus from her, opens another portal, returns to the original 2073, stops the initial probe from ever being sent, and destroys himself and the alternate world. The Sinclair who remains in 2073 goes home to find his wife suddenly very pregnant. * * * Sinclair’s voice-overs, the APEX units as mindless “terminators,” the time-loop narrative, images from the desert war zone of 2073, and excessive weapons fire all suggest the influence of the earlier Terminator films (1984, 1991), but the metaphoric suns and moons create a somewhat different mythologizing effect. See Roth’s earlier Prototype X29A (1992) for another simplified, low-budget reworking of the Terminator involving robotic beings who target the signals from the implants in their victims; Roth’s Digital Man (1995) for androids that do not know they are androids pitted against a more powerful and unstoppable android; and Roth’s Darkdrive (1996) for a more confusing past versus present and reality versus digital reality plot. The motives that lead to the appearance and actions of the killer-androids in Roth’s films tend to be vague: no rationale justifying the use of an APEX extermination unit in a time-travel experiment is ever offered. The android with a Gatling gun for an arm is featured in a number of tech-noir films, including Digital Man and Cyber-Tracker 2 (1995). The idea that love is stronger than time-loops, and perhaps even brings them about, is also part of the Terminator (1984) scenario. In Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002) prior associations keep reappearing even when the rest of reality changes and in 12 Monkeys (1995) they keep reappearing regardless of time-loop effects. In Millennium (1989), as in 12 Monkeys and A.P.E.X., the time-loop is a means of attempting to preserve or restore the future of the human race. Pregnancy is an integral part of the time-loop in Terminator and a somewhat superfluous concluding element in Millennium, as it is in A.P.E.X. In Nightworld (1998), a teenager subjected to an artificial aging process gets a chance to realize some of his mistakes and then, when the aging process is reversed, to correct them. While the effect of this experience on the teen is something like a time-loop, the immediate stakes in A.P.E.X. and most tech-noir time-loop films are far higher than those in Nightworld. The artificial beings in Terminator (1984), A.P.E.X., and to a lesser extent, Digital Man (1995), are presented as the “ultimate evil” that will destroy the human race, where the Nightworld artificial aging process is merely a social problem. 12 Monkeys (1995), like A.P.E.X., is about a plague that almost wipes out the entire human race: in the later film one man makes repeated efforts to stop the plague from happening under the supervision of a group of planners who, unlike Sinclair, are misled by false clues.

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The Apocalypse Watch Source: Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Based on Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same title, 1996 Christopher Canaan and John Goldsmith Kevin Connor 1997 TV 176 min Behavior modification Bioengineering: Diseases and cures

Neo-Nazi terrorists are undermining the British government with an onslaught of bombings in hopes of seizing power for themselves: one aspect of their plan, Operation Apocalypse, under the direction of Dr. Troupman (Jerome Willis), a former associate of Dr. Josef Mengele, involves the recovery and retesting of a toxin buried at the end of World War II followed by its release in water reservoirs. The prime minister is unable to stop the bombings and Winston Ross (James Aubrey), his political opponent, is a covert neoNazi doing everything in his power to bring the government down. Agent Harry Latham (John Shea) goes on an information gathering undercover mission, but he is caught and programmed with a combination of drugs and a head device that implants false memories from a videotape. When the programming starts to fail, Harry gets a call that triggers him to jump off of a London bridge: a sniper shoots him as he falls. Harry’s brother Drew (Patrick Bergin), who has come from Washington to help out with his theory that there is a global conspiracy behind the terrorist attacks, picks up where Harry left off. He is assigned to work with Karin (Virginia Madsen), an agent who is also the widow of another former agent Frederick de Vries (Benedick Blythe). After they discover and cure Karin of the same programming Harry had been subjected to, she discovers that her husband is not dead, but the leader of the neo-Nazis. They also discover that British government insider Witkowski (Ted Maynard) is a neo-Nazi, as is Janine Courtland (Glynis Barber), the nosey wife of the American ambassador to England. With a little help from Palmer, a reluctant neo-Nazi who switches sides when he realizes how many lives will be lost, the plan is thwarted at all but two reservoirs, and the damage at those sites is contained. Frederick commits suicide, but Janine and her father, the real leader of the party, move to Eastern Europe and resume their planning. Drew and Karin will probably get married. * * * This film is flawed by peculiar conflations of film time and action relative to the actual distances between London, Prague, and other Eastern European locations, and by weak logical connections between events. It does, however, rewrite the Cold War in a manner consistent with the age of terrorism. The deliberate escalation of terrorist action to create so much public panic that the terrorists can take control of the government is also part of the master criminal’s plan in Judge Dredd (1995). Other films about terrorism in a specific political context include Swordfish (2001) and Collateral Damage (2002). The neo-Nazis of this film are prepared to contaminate the natural environment to facilitate their rise to power. Similarly, a corporation is prepared to dispose of some biotoxins by sinking a ship, thus sacrificing the oceans, in order to serve their political interests in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997). See The Boys from Brazil (1978) for another film on the neo-Nazi appropriation and development of science and technology to serve their political agenda. The film includes two short memory alteration and programming sequences involving the usual chair and head contraption, but it is a little unusual in that the videotaped images hardly seem up to the task for which they were somehow created. Harry’s session appears in chronological sequence with the narrative, but Karin’s appears in flashback. Both characters seem to be “themselves” when acting according to the false memories, but they become automatons when carrying out coded instructions delivered by telephone calls beginning with a special signal. These effects are similar to those in The Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004), 229

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albeit reworked for the neo-Nazi context, and here they have an almost instant cure – it takes only minutes for Karin to recover. See Fugitive Mind (1999) for another film about the use of memory alteration and subliminal programming on an involuntary subject: in that film, the unwanted politician is the assassination target.

Arcade Writers: Charles Band and David S. Goyer Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1993 Length: 85 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Alex (Megan Ward) is a teenager troubled by her mother’s suicide and her father’s subsequent slide into near catatonia. One evening, she and her friends go to the video hall “Dante’s Inferno” to try out a new game called “Arcade” introduced by Vertigo Tronics salesman Difford (John de Lancie). Nick (Peter Billingsley) is the first to get into the pod where he meets the demonic character “Arcade.” Then Alex’s boyfriend Greg (Bryan Dattilo) takes a turn, but while he is playing everyone goes off to get free home versions of the game. When Alex tries to find him, he is gone. She goes home, tries out the home version of Arcade, realizes it is more than just a game, and enlists Nick’s help in checking up on the other game players. When one player disappears into the game right in front of them, they go to Vertigo Tronics where Difford passes them off to the programmer who tells them real brain cells were used to produce the game and also gives them schematics for the game design. Nick and Alex then get into the Arcade pod at the video hall. Nick is quickly knocked out by one of the “screamers” and finds himself back in the pod – from which Alex has vanished. Inside the game, Alex wins a “free life” by saving that of a small boy and is thus able to win the game and free all the players stuck inside it. She reappears in the pod, relieved to find all her friends happy and healthy again, but she soon discovers she has been followed home by the game-boy, better known as Arcade, who enabled her to win. * * * This tech-noir for teens film is the story of a young woman who, like the men in Altered States (1980) and The Fly (1986, 1989), gets into a box and is never the same again; it is also the story of an artificial intelligence plotting his entry into the physical world. Arcade develops in conjunction with the physical abduction of players into a game that acts according to its own will, as does the Master Program in Tron (1982). See WarGames (1983) for a computer that does not know it is playing a game when it is challenged by a teenager; Interface (1984) for students who do not seem to know the computer is just playing the game it was programmed to play without ulterior motives; Evolver (1994) for a former military robot retooled as a game player that does not distinguish between friendly and enemy combatants – De Lancie also appears in that film as the person responsible for the dangerous gadget; and Brainscan (1994) for a much scarier teen movie based on a virtual reality game that produces confusion about what is real and what is virtual. Creatures from a virtual reality game also enter the “real” three-dimensional world in Dream Breaker (1995), but more as equal opportunity terrorists than stalkers with a preselected target. Arcade’s “screamer” references and malevolent little boy are reinvented in Screamers (1995). The game’s self-awareness and deadly intentions contribute to the film’s horror effects, but the suicide of Alex’s mother is also crucial to establishing Alex’s investment in relationships with her friends and the strength of her desire to survive. While suicide is presented in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993) as black comedy – viewers usually laugh or snicker when the cyborgs kill themselves – and as the rational choice of a virtual reality character who realizes he is virtual in Nirvana (1997); here, and in Death Watch (1980), Family Viewing

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(1987), Open Your Eyes (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), and others, it is presented in terms of real-life trauma. In Duplicates (1992), a doctor, remorseful about her involvement with experiments in mind transplants and assassin programming, shoots others involved in the project and then shoots herself. Arcade, however, is the only film in which a parent’s suicide is featured as a prelude to a teenager’s coming of age through an encounter with a technological being, although Nightworld (1998) comes close. Nightworld stars a fifteenyear-old Vincent accused of murdering his stepfather for denying him money for the “Dante’s Inferno” virtual reality game contest entrance fee. Vincent’s father hanged himself years before and this fact is turned into evidence of Vincent’s propensity to violence. Both Arcade and Nightworld are about a teen coming of age in relation to both real-life and virtual world trauma.

Blade Runner Source: Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968 Hampton Fancher, Roland Kibbee (voice-overs), and David Webb Peoples Ridley Scott 1982; Director’s Cut 1992 117 min. Android: Love and lovers

Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a retired blade runner, meaning he used to hunt down and “retire” renegade replicants. The Tyrell Corporation specializes in making replicants, including the advanced Nexus 6 series that can almost – almost, not quite – pass the eye-exam and question test that seems to be all that distinguishes replicants from humans. The replicants have become so “human” that they have returned to earth in search of an extension of their four-year life spans so they can continue to enjoy their experiences. The test is applied to Leon (Brion James), one of the “skin jobs” Deckard is called back into service to capture. One of the questions involves a tortoise on its back and references to Leon’s mother: Leon responds by shooting the interviewer and escaping. Deckard, who is given little choice about taking the job, goes to the massive Tyrell complex where he observes a very life-like robotic owl and meets Rachael (Sean Young), purportedly Tyrell’s niece, and finally Tyrell (Joe Turkel) himself. Tyrell wants him to demonstrate the test on a human and volunteers Rachael, who turns out to be a Nexus 6 without an expiration date that does not know she is a Nexus 6. Deckard spots a replicated snake scale in a digitally enhanced photo and soon finds the android Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) working as an exotic dancer. She flees. Deckard pursues and kills her. Shortly after, Rachael shoots Leon just as he is about to kill Deckard. The remaining replicants, Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Baty (Rutger Hauer), take refuge with J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), one of their designers who suffers from the Methusala Syndrome or premature aging. They have already paid an unproductive visit to the scientist who made their eyes, so Sebastian helps them visit Tyrell with whom he plays an ongoing chess game. Roy murders Tyrell by squeezing his face while the owl watches. Deckard catches up with them back at Sebastian’s toy-filled laboratory home. Pris hides briefly by pretending to be a mannequin, but Deckard shoots her. The battle with Roy is more prolonged: Roy breaks one of Deckard’s fingers for each of his lost companions, but rescues him when he is about to fall to his death. Roy then sits down quietly in the rain philosophizing about the imminent loss of his experiences until he expires. Deckard and Rachael exit together. * * * The prototypical tech-noir urban world, this Los Angeles of 2019 is full of dark urban streets that are cluttered with neon, projection screens, corporate logos, and people, most of whom are poor “little people.” The 1982 release features Deckard’s voice-overs, which help establish his melancholic down-but-not-entirely-out

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demeanor and create a genuinely noir tech-noir ambiance, and ends with the couple driving off into the countryside with a voice-over confirming that Rachael is special. The director’s cut of 1992, unfortunately, retains the fantastically chauvinistic scene of the earlier version in which Deckard forces Rachael to repeat phrases like “kiss me,” “put your hands on me,” and “I want you,” but leaves out the voice-overs and final countryside scenes. It also includes an added sequence in which Deckard dreams of a unicorn, widely supposed to be a clue to Deckard’s identity as an android, but which makes far more sense as an indicator of Rachael’s unique lack of expiration date. Blade Runner makes good use of the photographs and mannequins that are common to the genre. The photographs Rachael possesses are false clues to a past she never experienced, a point articulated with reference to her memories about a spider encountered in childhood, but those photographs Deckard studies provide an accurate clue to the identity and location of Zhora. This film also features origami animals, including a unicorn left at Deckard’s door just before he and Rachael make their final departure: this art form annotates the already well developed conceptual and visual mise-en-abyme. The dream about the unicorn is discussed at greater length in Chapter 3.

Blow Out Writer: Brian De Palma Director: Brian De Palma Date: 1981 Length: 108 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control One day, Sam (Peter Boyden), Jack Terry’s (John Travolta) partner in “B” movie making, takes exception to the quality of the sounds Terry provided for his latest film, particularly the scream of the woman about to meet a classic Hitchcock end in a shower. Jack makes a late night recording foray outside and captures the sound of what seems to be a car’s tire blowing out followed by the car breaking through the rails of a bridge and sinking into the creek below. Jack rescues Sally (Nancy Allen) from the car, but her “date” is already dead. At the hospital, Jack learns this man was a candidate for the presidency and he agrees to keep quiet about Sally out of respect for the grieving family, but then he realizes his recording captured two sounds suggesting a gunshot and then the tire blowing. Jack’s interpretation is verified when he uses published stills of Manny Karp’s (Dennis Franz) film of the accident to re-create the film, dubs it with his audiotape, and discovers a light flash synchronous with the sound of the gunshot. Jack takes his tape to the police, but keeps a copy. He also discovers that Sally was working with Manny on a blackmail scheme; then he learns that the tape he gave to the police is blank and, soon after that, finds his entire sound library has been erased. Meanwhile, Frank Donahue (Curt May), a popular television reporter and newscaster, has heard about Jack and wants him and his tape on the evening news. Sally, who realizes Manny was cheating her, retrieves the original film from him. Terry uses it to prepare a new tape with his sounds dubbed in and calls Frank, but Frank is busy and has to call him back. Meanwhile, Burke (John Lithgow) is tying up loose ends in the cover up about the purported car accident by replacing the shot-out tire, erasing Jack’s library, and murdering several young women who look like Sally. He also has Jack’s phone line tapped: after the Donahue exchange, he blocks his line and calls Sally to set up a meeting. Not realizing what has happened, Jack lets her go after he outfits her with a wire: this scenario invokes his earlier account of a policeman who wore one of his wires and whose nervous sweat caused the battery to short – his exclamation revealed his subterfuge and he was killed. Burke takes Sally off to the Philadelphia Liberty Day celebrations and kills her before Jack can get to them, but Jack gets him, stabbing him repeatedly from behind by holding Burke’s own hand holding the knife. After embracing her briefly against a backdrop of incongruous celebratory

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fireworks, Jack leaves Sally to take the credit for killing her assailant, and immortalizes her dying screams of terror in the “B” movie he was working on before he saved her: there are no other public revelations of what really happened. * * * The effectiveness of this tech-noir film is derived from its integration of sound technology with a conceptually sophisticated mise-en-abyme, an integration that leads to a new understanding of the possible origins of sound effects in horror films. The frame is the making of a horror film and everything else pertains to a political assassination and cover-up. Specific motifs add layers of historical and type character references. The liberty bell, for example, sets up the contemporary political campaign as a corrupt parody of the process envisioned by the founding fathers. Similarly, the killer is not simply a serial killer, he is imitating the behavior of a serial killer to disguise his true motivations. These parodies culminate in a successful assassination coverup that includes the murder of Sally and her look-alikes. The storefront mannequins and parade participants add resonance to the political masquerade, while those outfitted with eighteenth-century costumes that Jack drives his car into while trying to save Sally also drive the history lesson home. Blow-Up (1966), November (2002), and The Final Cut (2004), like Blow Out, imbricate art and life, but with more emphasis on the visual than the auditory. Blow Out is a direct descendant of The Conversation (1974) and one of several ancestors of Enemy of the State (1998), which are also films involving auditory surveillance, but lack the Hitchcock touch. See Terminal Man (1974) for another nod to the master in which the girl in the shower does not die.

The Boys from Brazil Source: Based on Ira Levin’s novel of the same title, 1976 Writer: Haywood Gould Director: Franklin J. Schaffner Date: 1978 Countries: United Kingdom and United States Length: 123 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) has gone far beyond early studies of cloning based on rabbits by planting ninety-four clones of Hitler around the world in cultural environments designed and manipulated to re-create the cultural environment of Hitler’s youth. This South American-based plan to “regrow” a specific person is discovered by the amateur Nazi hunter Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg), who reports it to professional Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier) and his sister Esther (Lilli Palmer). Mengele discovers Kohler and kills him, then orders Eduard Seibert (James Mason) to supervise and continue the simulations of Hitler’s formative experiences by having the fathers of the ninety-four clones executed. As Lieberman’s investigation brings him closer to the truth, Seibert stops the executions and destroys Mengele’s home and laboratory. In a desperate attempt to improve the statistical odds of successfully molding a new Hitler, Mengele goes to the home of Mr. Wheelock (John Dehner) to murder him and meet Wheelock’s adopted son Bobby (Jeremy Black), deemed to be one of the clones most likely to satisfy the program’s goal. Lieberman arrives after the murder, but in time to make sure that Bobby knows the truth. * * *

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The cross-referencing of the power and influence of technology with Nazi Germany is explicit in this film. Lieberman and his agency mimic the real-life Simon Wiesenthal and the Center he founded in the late 1940s for the purpose of gathering materials needed to bring Nazi war criminals, some of whom went to South America, to trial. Privately funded Nazi-hunting was an activity associated with the Cold War that became less common as the Nazis sought died off of old age, but the Nazi party survived under new names with ambitions for a “fourth” Reich. The use of the name of Josef Mengele, the real-life German officer notorious for his experiments with the prisoners at Auschwitz, furthers a certain quality of realism more commonly sought in film with fictional prologue text or narration asserting that what the audience is about to see and hear is taken from survivors or, as in Andromeda Strain (1971), witnesses of some near disaster. Nazis also play an important part in Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) and neo-Nazis try to take over the world in Apocalypse Watch (1997). Less apparent, but just as significant, is the frequency with which technology is aligned with Nazi-like methods of social control in order to facilitate greed for power and wealth in tech-noir films: successful capitalists, especially corporate capitalists, are presented as individuals who are Nazi-like in their dedication to their own supremacy, albeit a supremacy to which race has as little relevance as the environment and democratically defined social welfare. Bobby’s interest in photography serves to mark his kinship with artificial means of replication. He is eager to get his camera and take pictures when he finds the family Dobermans after Mengele: it is not only the attack that fascinates him, but the preservation and duplication of that moment on film. Artificial humans and those destined to be aligned with the artificial are often shown to be dependent on photographs as a kind of repository of their emotions, expression of self, or as evidence of their personal history: the lead character in the Stepford Wives (1975) is a woman and a photographer about to be replaced by an android. In Godsend (2004), a photographer is the mother of a cloned duplicate of her first son and is also obsessed with pictures of her original son. In Blade Runner (1982) and Judge Dredd (1995), an android and clone respectively rely on photographs as “proof ” of their pasts and then learn that proof is a lie. This association of artificiality with photography is not exclusive to tech-noir: the lead character in the not-so-science-fictional single-parent family drama Blueprint (2006) is a clone who prefers photography to the music to which her “parent” original has dedicated her life. See Embryo (1976) for another Doberman that defends and protects an “artificial” person.

Brainscan Writers: Brian Ownes and Andrew Kevin Walker Director: John Flynn Date: 1994 Length: 96 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Teenager Michael Bower (Edward Furlong) has nightmares about a childhood accident that killed his mother and left him with a permanent limp. His father is away a lot on business, so Michael is often alone and unsupervised in their large house: he spends a lot of time covertly photographing his next-door neighbor Kimberly (Amy Hargreaves). Michael is also fascinated by computers and is in trouble at school with Dr. Fromberg (David Hemblen) for showing a horror movie in the activities period. His best friend Kyle (James Marsh) tells him about an interactive “videogame” on a CD Rom called “Brainscan,” which he gets and plays by loading the disk and dialing up the Brainscan 1-800 number. The game is initially explained as working through an interface with the player’s unconscious. The consequence of this interface, not explained to the player, is that he will experience a deepening confusion regarding the difference between reality and virtual reality. In what Michael believes to be the first of four disks, he commits a violent murder and then thinks

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he wakes up, only to discover that a grisly murder has indeed taken place. Desperate, he calls Brainscan and is rewarded by the emergence of the virtual reality character “Trickster” (T. Ryder Smith) from his monitor. Trickster subsequently directs him to cover up his various clues, including the foot he severed from his murder victim. In an attempt to sort out the difference between the real and the virtual, Michael sets a camera running on himself as he sits in the game chair: he wakes from the game, certain he has done nothing and gone nowhere, but the camera clearly shows that he left the chair and the evidence indicates that he murdered Kyle. Trickster then tries to make him murder Kimberly; he refuses, but is shot by Detective Hayden (Frank Langella), who has been investigating the murders. Michael finally wakens, several times in fact, in quick succession until, for the first time since starting it, he really does leave the game. He joins Kyle and they both go off to Kimberly’s pool party to begin their adventures as adolescent males trying to get dates. Shortly after, Michael, adhering to Dr. Fromberg’s demand that he preview any movies to be shown at school, loans him Brainscan. * * * Michael is fascinated by horror films, but the video “game” offers him the ultimate horror thrill in that it allows him to become a participant in, rather than merely a viewer of, the horrific events. His interest in horror and videogames is portrayed as a side effect of his loneliness, lack of parental supervision, and penchant for voyeuristic photography; the plot developments further suggest that there is a similarity between the psychological profiles of technology enthusiasts and serial killers. Like Michael, whiz kid David Lightman gets into a lot of trouble when he dials a number that connects him to the NORAD defense computer in WarGames (1983); but Michael undergoes a far more intense coming of age insofar as he finally destroys his computer equipment, sets out to pursue a more active real-life interest in girls, and arranges for a rather obvious retaliation against a teacher who annoys him. A digital video game that can somehow tap into the user’s unconscious mind is also featured in Dream Breaker (1995), which “really” does include virtual characters breaking through into the three-dimensional world. Virtual Seduction (1995) does not have a virtual game, but it does have a virtual reality program that taps into the user’s unconscious and seduces a young man with a virtual representation of his dead girlfriend – he is eventually rescued by a “real” girl. In Future Shock (1993), a virtual reality device is apparently used to tap into the minds of a psychotherapist’s patients for purported therapeutic purposes. For another narrative involving less self-aware, more genuinely murderous young adults who act out their impulses in the real world, see Interface (1984) and Cyberstalker (1996); and for later interactive virtual “games” or novels that confuse the real and the virtual, see Future Kick (1991), Nirvana (1997), and eXistenZ (1999).

Brainstorm Writers: Philip Frank Messina, Bruce Joel Rubin, and Robert Stitzel Director: Douglas Trumbull Date: 1983 Length: 106 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Lillian (Louise Fletcher), Mike (Christopher Walken), and Hal (Joe Dorsey) are part of a team, later joined by Mike’s soon to be ex-wife Karen (Natalie Wood), working on a machine that records and transmits sensory and emotional experiences by means of a headset and a kind of heavy duty tape player. Jubilation at early test successes fades when the company boss Alex (Cliff Robertson) brings in the military, which then proceeds to secretly monitor everything going on in the lab. Mike and Karen realize the unique potential of the invention,

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but Hal ends up on a permanent disability pension after enjoying one of the more sensual recordings, and Lillian dies of a stress induced heart attack, a tragedy to the project mitigated only by the fact that she records her death. Mike ends up in the hospital after trying to play this death tape, even with the physical pain transmitters turned off. Knowing there is much more going on with his invention than he is being told about, Mike seeks advice from Hal, who suggests he search under the keyword “Brainstorm.” Mike hacks into these protected company files and finds his device has been used for experiments with dream states, memory retrieval, and psychosis: he even tries to view one of the latter tapes. While ranting to Karen about his discovery, their son Chris dons the headset Mike has just torn off and soon lapses into catatonia. After Chris’s recovery is assured, Mike and Karen stage a ruse to avoid tipping off the surveillance people assigned to them: they go to a hotel where they pretend to have a fight; Karen leaves the hotel, goes to Hal’s, and from there calls Mike at the hotel. Together, they carry on a prolonged make-up conversation while simultaneously conducting a synchronized attack on the company. This attack enables Mike to gain access to Lillian’s tape. Before he is finished viewing it, he has to flee to the Wright Brothers memorial site, where Karen joins him, and he finishes the tape at a pay phone. * * * The high point of this film is, of course, Mike’s vicarious re-experiencing of Lillian’s death: while audio and visual surveillance technology is often featured in tech-noir films, this seems to be the only one in which it is used to record the death experience. Later films that include this plot element, such as Final Cut (1998) and The Final Cut (2004), likewise involve the film within the film idea, but with the filmmaker’s work simply shown or used after his death. November (2005) presents an original and still more complex alternative to the Brainstorm proposal on visual experience in relation to death or near death. The husband who simply must know what lies in the great beyond who also has a nearly divorced wife to bring him back from the brink, or is at least waiting for him when he returns, replays the Altered States (1980) familial context, although in that film the children go with their mother to Africa, and are kept out of their father’s drug and technologically facilitated adventures. Both Brainstorm and Altered States emphasize the metaphysical possibilities of the technological invention with the earlier film throwing hallucinogens into the mix and the later sticking to the “science.” The 1960s–1970s psychedelic visual style used in both of these films to represent the world beyond or an alternate experience of reality is used for a similar purpose in the near concluding sequence of Lathe of Heaven (1980) in which hero and villain struggle in a large blue vortex located somewhere between life and dream, but induced by a technological device invented to serve the interests of the villain. Virtually recorded and transmitted experiences acquire spiritual associations in Nirvana (1997), but later films tend to make more out of the detrimental addictive aspects of such recordings, both one’s own and those acquired from other people, in conjunction with free enterprise or black market profiteering: see Wild Palms (1993), Strange Days (1995), and Cybercity (1999) for examples. These privately experienced virtual reality “films” are akin to the publicly enjoyed “feelies” popular with the soma addicts in Brave New World (1980, 1998).

Brave New World Source: Writers: Series: Director: Date:

Based on Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same title, 1932 Doran William Cannon and Robert E. Thompson Brave New World, 1998 (based on the same novel) Burt Brinckerhoff 1980 TV

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Length: Type:

3 hrs. Bioengineering: Transformation Behavior modification

In this future of humankind, genetically designed babies are incubated in chambers and pods and behaviorally conditioned to accept their place in one of the five classes: Epsilon for hard labor, Delta for mechanical service, Gamma for more socially interactive service work, and Beta for direct support to the Alpha class, which leads society. Everyone matures to age thirty-five and then remains in a kind of biological status until they are between eighty and ninety, at which point most die peacefully. Sex with multiple partners is encouraged, attendance at the weekly orgy services is mandatory, and everyone takes soma and a variety of other chemicals to keep themselves and their world running smoothly. All produce and consume in emulation of the greatly revered social engineer Henry Ford. Mustapha Mond (Ron O’Neal) has been especially designed and programmed to work as the Head Director. He studies and considers all things inside and outside the social norm, both that which is forbidden and that which is allowed: when he was a young man, he even did a study on introducing random changes in social programming just to see if the effects might be beneficial. Mond approves a holiday at the savage reservation, where those abandoned by civilization live, for Alpha Thomas Grambell (Keir Dullea) and Beta Linda Lysenko (Julie Cobb). The excursion seems to be a failure until Thomas finds some guides to what might be an original model-T Ford. En route, he becomes confused when one of the two guides accuses the other of having become one of the “others,” or possessed, and uses his compression weapon on them. Linda is blown over a cliff and appears to have died in the fall. Thomas is eventually rescued, but the search for Linda is soon abandoned. Linda finds herself pregnant with no way off of the reserve, but she does her best to raise her son John (K.T. Donaldson aka Kristoffer Tabori) so that he will be prepared if they are ever able to return to the city. John finds a book of Shakespeare’s plays and educates himself by studying it closely; even Linda enjoys some of the stories. Many years later, Bernard Marx (Bud Cort) also asks for Mond’s permission to take Beta Lenina Disney (Marcia Strassman) to the reservation. Bernard is a geeky misfit, an unusually short alpha who suffers from the effects of an accidental dose of the wrong gene therapy; but nevertheless, excels at everything except socializing: the only person he really likes to talk to is his friend the jingle writer Helmholtz (Dick Anthony Williams). Bernard and Lenina soon meet Linda and the adult John, and Bernard arranges for them both to be brought back to the city. Mond takes a special interest in Bernard’s progress at his assigned task of socializing the “savage,” but Bernard lets his newfound fame and popularity go to his head and becomes ambitious and manipulative. When Grambell is revealed as John’s father, Bernard suggests he be sent to Iceland, just as Grambell was about to have done to him. Meanwhile, John becomes increasingly uncooperative; he even rejects Lenina’s advances when he decides she only wants sex from him and calls her a whore. After Linda dies in a soma stupor, he causes a riot by interrupting soma distribution: Mond prudently decides it is time to put an end to the “experiment.” He arranges for Bernard to be sent to a free island of his own choosing and Bernard opts for the comforts of Tahiti. Helmholtz, who has become friendly with John, is happy with a more challenging environment. John, however, will not fit in anywhere, so he asks to be left alone. He goes to live on an island; but, even there, tourists and a film crew determined to make him the star of a “feelie” pursue him: feelie films promote sensual as well as visual participation. Eventually, after a brief encounter with Lenina, who confesses she understands, but whom he mistakenly believes dies shortly after from the soma gas released to quell another riot, John hangs himself. Mond, as is the custom, orders all records incinerated. * * * In this brave new world, there is no need for surveillance, no need for the book burnings of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Equilibrium (2002), and little need for armed security to enforce social behavior because people are “happy.” Indeed, capitalism, or rather consumerism, augmented by genetic engineering that far exceeds the possibilities of Gattaca (1997), seems to have created a world that might be worth its price. Certainly the 237

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managerial class is overweening and pretentious and the Beta girls far too silly, but anyone who chooses can go to a “free island” where they can enjoy whatever books and music and lifestyle they choose. It seems a loss that no one wants to read Shakespeare anymore, but Shakespeare’s world was, after all, one of violence, vengeance, disease, and premature death. John’s applications of Shakespearean values in the new urban context reveal their absurdity: his abusive verbal response to Lenina’s failure to comprehend his desire to play out a fictional scenario of passion and love and her loss of self-esteem in the face of that abuse is also well calculated to counter the viewer’s impulse to reject the new world out of misguided loyalty to familiar, but outdated mores. Shakespeare’s world, the savage world, and the world of civilization are all highly structured with rigorously asserted behavioral norms. Linda is nearly killed by the wives of the men she has slept with – in conformity to her sense of propriety but in defiance of theirs – and, in the end, John’s choice differs little from that made by the “civilized” writer in Death Watch (1980) in that he finds suicide to be the only way he can escape the consequences of uniqueness. The tech-noir element of Brave New World derives less, however, from what people do and how they live and the various caricatures of human society, and more from the use of technology to bring about the nearcomplete elimination of the possibility of change or transformation on the individual, social, and biological levels. While the parents of Gattaca’s world may still choose not to have their children genetically improved and individuals still manage to exceed or fail in contradiction to expectations based on their DNA, there are no parents in Brave New World and opportunities for choice and change are more or less reduced to accidents in the maturation chambers. Here, Dr. Moreau’s dream has been applied more effectively than even he ever imagined as there is no longer any need to limit experiments to surgical procedures on the already mature being: it is much tidier and simpler to concoct fantasized creatures from scratch. The brave new world seems to be beyond subversion, as it is designed to maintain the status quo. Linda, robbed of her soma and social world, seems to regress as she makes use of the alternative drugs available and suffers the consequences of her desperate search for company in promiscuity. Her actions, however, are all evidence of her effort to maintain a civilized demeanor and lifestyle, as she understands it. She does not really regress; she, like most of the other members of her world, merely fails to fully understand that definitions of civilized behavior are both variable and subject to change. Likewise, her urban fellows do not recognize the possibility of change or even variation; thus the film closes without the integration of any transformative revelation, scientific or social, such as occurs in Logan’s Run (1976), Virtual Nightmare (2000), Equilibrium (2002), and Aeon Flux (2005): the rogue element, John, is simply killed off. A number of the specific secondary motifs used in Brave New World to convey a view of “culture” as having become artificially stylized and superficial reappear in later films. For example, jingles and frequently recited colloquial phrases are used in Demolition Man (1993), The Truman Show (1998), and Virtual Nightmare (2000) to establish levels of social conformity and a general loss of interest in more complex narratives and ideas. Demolition Man’s John Spartan is a sort of reworked John Savage insofar as he is a man who must try to re-enter “civilization” after it seems to have evolved beyond violence as well as sex. The more recent film, notably, presents Spartan’s influence on the brave new world as far more productive, even essential, to its survival in any form – the “primitive” rejuvenates the overly technologized civilization. Spartan also has the good sense to explore his love interest’s preferences, however briefly, even as he immediately sets about trying to change them.

Brave New World Source: Writers: Series: Directors: Date:

Based on Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same title, 1932 Dan Mazur and David Tausik Brave New World, 1980 (based on the same novel) Leslie Libman and Larry Williams 1998 TV

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Length: Type:

87 min. Bioengineering: Transformation Behavior modification

Before the wars, men and women mated randomly and owned their children like objects; now, babies are designed for a specific social place by careful DNA matching, incubation period monitoring, conditioning, and, as they grow up, by a constant supply of soma. Pain, hunger, disease, and poverty have been eradicated, and yet Bernard Marx (Peter Gallagher) is concerned about falling satisfaction rates in the lower classes. He is personally very satisfied with his regular “engagements” with the beautiful Lenina Crowne (Rya Kihlstedt), but to avoid social disapproval he sees other women and steps aside so that the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (Miguel Ferrer) can enjoy her company. Bernard and Lenina visit the savage reservation where their helicopter crashes. While they are not seriously injured, their pilot is, and even worse, local gangs soon arrive to torment them. Fortunately, John Cooper (Tim Guinee) drives off the attackers and takes them to his book-filled mobile home where they meet his alcoholic mother Linda (Sally Kirkland). As a young woman, Linda had an affair with a border patrol officer who introduced her to soma, got her pregnant, and then abandoned her. All return to civilization where John becomes a celebrity, but the children laugh at his account of Romeo and Juliet and he finds the casual intimacy of the adults disturbing. Head Director Mustapha Mond (Leonard Nimoy), who reads many books that no one else bothers with anymore, is very tolerant of John’s influence, even though many of his committee members think he should be “conditioned.” Meanwhile, the Director is worried that Bernard will discover that he is John’s father, so he deletes his old work file, reconditions a Delta worker (Steven Flynn) to murder Bernard, and then goes to see the hospitalized Linda, knowing his presence will precipitate a soma overdose. Unfortunately for him, an eager-to-please Beta recovers his old file, the Delta cannot go through with the murder and, although Linda dies as planned, he is exposed and sent for reconditioning. Reporters pursue the distraught John to his country hideout where he dies of an accidental fall brought about by their aggressive attentions. Lenina, who has quit taking soma, is so grieved by his death (and soma withdrawal), that when Bernard joins her that night, she does not take her birth control and ends up pregnant. She tells Bernard, who has been promoted to Director, that she wants to keep the baby; so he arranges for her to get out of the city to the country where he soon joins her and they go walking barefoot on the beach with their infant child. * * * This film transforms the novel into a chronologically simplified melodrama. Numerous elements that complicate the message in the 1980 version are eliminated. Bernard, for example, is neither physically nor socially deficient. John immediately becomes a more sympathetic character when he saves Bernard and Lenina, and his relationship with Lenina is far less offensive to modern sensibilities than that in the earlier film. In addition, some characters are made more obviously villainous, such that the brave new world is less likely to be mistaken for a good idea. The Director’s treatment of Linda and particularly of the Delta he tries to turn into a murderer make social adjustment and conditioning seem more the result of techniques used in A Clockwork Orange (1971) than the voluntary acceptance and use of procedures described in the novel and first film. An ill-motivated social engineer likewise adjusts the corrective programming intended for a murderer in Demolition Man (1993) and with far worse consequences. Most notably, this Brave New World blames soma for distracting women from their “natural” preference for being mothers. The concluding “tableau” restoration of the conventional nuclear family is presented quite seriously: skeptical viewers may find the scene leading to a comparable, but distinctive, conclusion at the end of Synapse (1995) more relevant to our times.

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Brazil Writers: Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard Director: Terry Gilliam Date: 1985 Country: United Kingdom Length: 132 min. Type: Technology Surveillance: Information and control Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a somewhat minor employee “somewhere in the twentieth century” just before Christmas. He, like his coworkers, spends his days in a crowded, windowless office trying to deal with the endless stream of paperwork. Sam’s supervisor appreciates his knack for solving some of the nightmarish problems that land on his desk, such as that of the refund check for Buttle. Unbeknownst to Sam or his supervisor, Buttle was arrested by mistake because a squashed fly caused a teletype machine to print Buttle instead of Tuttle. Buttle was arrested in his home by a veritable onslaught of agents – some of whom even cut circles through the floors of the apartments above to get to him – he was wrapped in a hooded straightjacket and taken off to be tortured by Sam’s friend Jack (Michael Palin) in “information retrieval.” Buttle died of a heart condition Jack was not informed about, so there is no way to send him a check. Sam first tries to send the check to Buttle’s wife, but she does not have a bank account, so he offers to take it to her in person: needless to say Mrs. Buttle’s grief is hardly assuaged by a check so small she can cash it at the corner store. The apartment floor is still covered in broken glass left by the arrest squad’s violent entry. Glancing down, Sam sees the fragmented reflection of the woman he has literally been dreaming about as she peers at him through the hole in the ceiling. He pursues, but loses her, and then finds his tiny one-seat car completely stripped by the local children, one of whom tells him that the woman’s name is Jill (Kim Greist). Sam also has problems with his apartment: the automated systems do not work and it is often either far too hot or far too cold. After the real Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) drops in to fix the problem, the regular repairmen vindictively turn the place inside out. Tuttle’s reverse feed of the waste disposal tank into their vacuum suits does not really help the situation, although it does give Sam a much-needed laugh. Ida (Katherine Helmond), Sam’s influential, overweening, and cosmetic surgery addicted mother, also makes his life miserable as she keeps trying to set him up with her friend’s daughter. He accepts the promotion she gets for him to “information retrieval” only because he thinks it will help him find Jill. His inquiries, however, also lead him to the truth about Jack’s job and to his own arrest. Strapped in an incarceration chair, his meeting with a masked Jack in a vast beehiveshaped torture chamber ends with Sam’s final retreat into his fantasy world. * * * No other film conveys the absurdities of the technology-saturated over-bureaucratized world with such effective dark satire as this one: although Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) is equally dark, it lacks the satirical element. Sam is the little guy with a little car who wants to do the right thing, and dreams about saving the girl; as a consequence, he is destroyed. Satire turns to horror when he attracts the attention of the state police and is subjected to a peculiar justice system in which due process is often supplanted by grotesque forms of torture. While few films truly emulate Brazil, many pit individuals or small groups against a corporate entity that is controlled or used by a villain with power acquired through the bureaucratic hierarchy. Purported terrorist attacks are part of the ongoing background context of Brazil. They are featured in an opening television show that is interrupted by a bomb and occasionally punctuate the film’s later events. Only Jill seems to question the attribution of the bombs to terrorists – she asks Sam if he actually knows any. Terrorism has become more common in recent films: see Apocalypse Watch (1997), eXistenZ (1999),

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Swordfish (2001), Collateral Damage (2002), and Global Effect (2002). The aggressiveness of the arrest squad that comes for Buttle is repeated in reverse as Nemesis’s (1992) Alex escapes thugs sent to kill him by using a machine gun to cut through consecutive stories in a low rent building – he drops from level to level standing on the gun-blasted circles of flooring. The dream sequences in this film are discussed in Chapter 3.

The Cell Writer: Mark Protosevich Director: Tarsem Singh Date: 2000 Length: 107 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Scientists at the Campbell Center have developed a therapeutic device that allows one person to “virtually” enter the psychological world of another. Up to three individuals can be fitted at once with the red rubber suits and face cloths enabling the interface: each rests on a rectangular box while they are injected with drugs, then their bodies are raised and suspended in the air for the duration of the session. This device, set up in a room viewed through glass from a monitoring station, is being used by Catherine (Jennifer Lopez), a talented psychotherapist, to try to make contact with Edward, a small boy who is in a deep coma: the opening sequence shows her riding a horse through red desert dunes beneath a beautiful blue sky. The session is supposed to involve sailing, but Edward is too afraid of the boogey man to do more than create a small model boat. Meanwhile, in the outside world, the police are hunting Carl (Vincent D’Onofrio), a serial killer with a penchant for putting his live female victims in a glass box set up with an automated drowning system and videotaping equipment; after each woman is dead, he washes and bleaches the corpse and suspends himself over it from hooks skewered into his own back. Using a photograph of his albino dog’s hair as a clue, the police catch Carl and find his bizarre basement collection of damaged dolls fitted with skulls and bird heads. Unfortunately, Carl has lapsed into an irreversible coma: he has an acute form of schizophrenia that was probably triggered by some childhood trauma involving water. The police are desperate for information about the location of the last victim, so Catherine uses the interface to enter Carl’s mind. There, she meets him as a small boy, then exits in terror when the multiple surrealist images of trapped and abused women she finds turn into a meeting with Carl’s adult megalomaniac persona. On her second try, she gets lost in Carl’s fantasies. When Police Detective Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) enters the system to rescue her, he is trapped himself in what looks like a medieval apparatus designed to pull all of his intestines from his body. Fortunately, Catherine manages to recover her sense of self and releases him. Novak also finds the clue – a corporate logo – that leads the police to the final victim being held in an underground room in the middle of a flat and treeless farming area. Novak arrives just in time to save her from drowning. Catherine, meanwhile, goes back to help the boy Carl by reversing the feed so that he comes into her mind; but she finds she can only kill the monstrous adult Carl by immersing the boy in water, as at his real-life baptism which was probably the trauma that triggered his condition. He remains peacefully underwater in her arms until he drowns: the real-world adult Carl dies at the same time. When Catherine applies the reverse-feed technique with Edward, a model sailboat appears next to a long strip of rustling blue cloth blowing in the desert breeze. * * * Much of this film is dedicated to showing viewers what the monitors cannot show the film-world observers; that is, what the participants engaged with the mind-interface see and experience. The “noir” is located in the

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mind and the machines are conduits for its horrors; this is true of both the therapeutic instrument and the gadgetry used by the killer. Insofar as the emphasis is on the use the murderer makes of technology, The Cell is comparable to other tech-noir films in which lone killers terrorize individuals for personal gratification and revenge, such as Ghost in the Machine (1993) and Twilight Man (1996). Like Replicant (2001), The Cell lends credit to the theory that extreme childhood abuse is part of the formation of a serial killer’s personality. Like Ghost in the Machine’s address book killer and Replicant’s Garrott, who both take pictures of their victims as records of their accomplishments, Carl records his murders on video. Carl also keeps a fetishized doll collection. Frankenstein’s (2004) Detective Harker likes to collect internal organs from his victims, but fetish-taking, other than photographs or films, is somewhat rare in tech-noir as the principal fetish is usually the technology itself.

Chain Reaction Writers: Michael Bortman, Josh Friedman, J.F. Lawton, Arne Schmidt, and Rick Seaman Director: Andrew Davis Date: 1996 Length: 106 min. Type: Technology  ilm Prologue [Barkley’s opening lecture]: We’re running out of time. We have polluted and peopled this F planet to the brink of extinction. We are destroying our world at a suicidal pace. We need a pollution revolution and it’s not going to be easy because the world is addicted to petroleum. We have limited resources and we go to war to protect them. We need a new technology and this technology can’t be sold. It must be given away, to everyone. We are in the sight of a dream … Machinist Eddie Kasalivich (Keanu Reeves) and physicist Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz) are part of the team Dr. Alistair Barkley (Nicholas Rudall) has working on the production of clean, safe, and limitless power from water. Government funding for the project is made indirectly available through the CIA’s covertly funded C-Systems headed by Lyman Collier (Brian Cox) and public front man Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman), but it turns out the CIA has its own agenda. When Eddie finds the frequency that will make the transformation of water into energy viable, Paul, at least, has the positive intention of making the method available to the public slowly so that it does not devastate the world economy. Lyman, on the other hand, arranges for the lab to be destroyed, the professor murdered, and another assistant, Chen (Tzi Ma), abducted and taken to C-Systems to verify the experiment. Chen, however, does not know the frequency that makes the process work. Lyman also has Eddie and Lily framed as treasonous spies and terrorists by sending Lily fake faxes from Chen and planting money in Eddie’s apartment. Eddie and Lily flee, but Lily is captured and taken to the C-Systems underground laboratory to re-create the successful experiment. Eddie follows in secret and, as Shannon anticipates, he enters the vacated lab at night and sets the process going. A C-Systems technician takes credit, but Shannon takes the disk with the information on it back to his office where he finds Eddie at his computer. Eddie makes it appear that the whole facility is about to explode and arranges for the entire C-System database, including the process for creating power from water, to be transferred to thousands of scientists as well as FBI headquarters, where agents Ford (Fred Ward) and Doyle (Kevin Dunn) have already realized that Lily and Eddie are being framed. When the technician tries to shut down the explosion, he actually makes it impossible for it to be shut down. Shannon tries to protect Lily and Eddie, but Lyman insists they be left behind. Shannon shoots Lyman – evidently he was already scheduled for “retirement” – and opens the access routes so Lily and Eddie can escape too. The film closes with Shannon dictating a memo to his CIA bosses indicating that C-Systems is no longer viable. * * * 242

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A number of tech-noir films are either set in the post-nuclear holocaust world or are based on the everpending threat of a nuclear holocaust. Here, members of the government hierarchy are posed as the true threat that may end with that final devastation: because they fear it will lead to their own loss of status and power, they try to prevent the discovery and application of other and safer forms of power. As in The China Syndrome (1979), Manhattan Project (1986), and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), in which Keanu Reaves also stars, and others, getting the information to the people is presented as the only way to keep the development of “good” technology on track. The professor and his team are posed as the impractical dreamers and idealists who come up with an extremely practical idea that works. Government agents associated with the CIA are duplicitous and in conflict with each other; the FBI agents are a little confused, simply because they are not in the loop, but they are the “good guys” who promise to extricate the survivors from the CIA web into which they have innocently fallen. The noir of this film is thus derived from a specific government agency and its covert efforts to control “good” technology in a manner that is detrimental to the environment and against the best interests of the people.

Cherry 2000 Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Michael Almereyda and Lloyd Fonvielle Steve De Jarnatt 1985; released 1987 93 min. Android: Love and lovers

Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) is a lowly employee in a recycling plant whose life is transformed when his prized Cherry 2000 (Pamela Gidley) is ruined during an intense lovemaking session on a suds covered kitchen floor. Sam is devastated and sets out with his android lover’s memory and programming chip for zone seven where he hopes to recover one of the few remaining Cherry 2000 chassis. The world outside the city of Anaheim is a little like the wild, wild west, but Sam manages to enlist the aid of “tracker” E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith) and her orange customized Ford in his quest. They make it through the barricades manned by “freaks” who are, as E. says, “just looking for action”; are carried halfway across a canyon by a crane with a giant magnet powerful enough to hold the car; get dropped down a long concrete runoff tunnel; and hook up with E. Johnson’s partner, six-fingered Jake (Ben Johnson), and his burros; but are then stalled by Lester (Tim Thomerson), who uses his gang to control zone seven. Sam is taken hostage at Lester’s neon lit “Sky Ranch” only to discover that his former girlfriend Elaine, who now calls herself Ginger (Cameron Milzer), is Lester’s girlfriend. Ginger lends the audience some understanding of Sam’s preference for androids over real women, and Sam is delighted when E. Johnson offers him an escape. Their next stop is Snappy Tom’s (Harry Carey Jr.) cabin where more people die, but they also get a plane and fly into zone seven where Sam finds a replacement Cherry 2000 chassis. When three bodies prove too heavy for the plane and E. Johnson voluntarily jumps out, Sam reconsiders his priorities, flies back, sends Cherry for a Pepsi, and picks up E. * * * This heavily satiric, occasionally comic, quest film weighs the perfection and predictability of a female android against the real-world grit of a tough-minded tracker who knows how to make machines of practical use, like cars and planes, work. The semi-affluent urban male fulfills his quest when he realizes that a lower class female mechanic is a better companion than a high-class, brainless, mechanical woman. Elaine/Ginger provides some justification for Sam’s loyalty to Cherry, but the ultimate absurdity of that attachment is well articulated by the sound of a donkey braying whenever he replays his Cherry lover’s voice. The braying is

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perhaps also intended, like the movie, as a generic response to the entire androids-make-better-lovers theme represented in such films as The Stepford Wives (1975) and Blade Runner (1982). Sam’s employment at a recycling plant, like his interest in recycling his Cherry’s chip, is appropriate to the tech-noir genre, which commonly features the recycling of human bodies, even dead ones, in complete form, for donor organs, or, as in Soylent Green (1973), for food. The very concept of low tech, made much of in the Cherry 2000 zone, includes the idea of a lower class that makes its way by recycling that which high-tech users have discarded, as in Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Sam’s job at the urban recycling plant sets up his kinship with these “earthy” fringe types. The role of the tracker is often conflated with that of the deadly android stalker in tech-noir, and both Cherry 2000 and Westworld (1973) develop the Wild West environment as a context for a human revelation about the best uses of machines. “Freaks” also commonly occupy the zone between the remains of a fallen or contracting civilization and the wilderness: see, for example, the creatures encountered by THX as he flees from the police in THX 1138 (1971), the peculiar guards Logan passes in search of sanctuary in Logan’s Run (1976), and the creatures occupying the underground parking lots traversed in Circuitry Man (1990). Lester’s compound is comparable to a variety of “ranches” set up beyond the primary surviving cities in the interests of power and survival: see, for example, the “savage” reservation in Brave New World (1980, 1998), and both Matt’s home “town” and the “wind cult” village in Slipstream (1989). These habitats variously represent the negative perceptions urbanites have of rural life and alternative lifestyles that may actually pose a threat to the centralized authorities governing major urban centers.

The China Syndrome Writers: James Bridges, T.S. Cook, and Mike Gray Director: James Bridges Date: 1979 Length: 122 min. Type: Technology Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment William Gibson (James Hampton) is giving reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda), her cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas), and support man Hector (Daniel Valdez) a tour of a newly opened nuclear power plant when an accident almost annihilates southern California: a stuck valve and contradictory gauge readings, eventually corrected with a firm tap to the gauge surface, cause erroneous responses to a minor problem and almost result in the uncovering of the nuclear core. Adams covertly and, as it turns out, illegally, films the incident from the observation room: the story is suppressed, the matter investigated, and the plant cleared for reopening. Shift supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) remains concerned about a secondary vibration and discovers that quality control protocols were circumvented during the plant’s construction; specifically, one individual in the company responsible for checking X-rays of crucial welds signed off repeatedly on the same X-ray when they were supposed to be checking unique records. Godell sends sample X-rays to the hearings then being conducted for the opening of another new plant with Hector. When Hector is run off the road and the X-rays stolen, Godell agrees to testify, but is followed, so he goes to the plant. When he discovers the plant is about to be brought on line at full power, he commandeers the control room and demands a reporting crew be brought in to hear and broadcast his story. Meanwhile, plans are put in motion to deliberately repeat the same “scram” event that caused all the fuss in the first place as a means of getting Godell out of the control room. Godell manages to broadcast, but not very effectively; then the security team breaks through the door and shoots him just as the “scram” goes into effect. An explosion is prevented by Godell’s foresight in cutting power to 75 percent; the welds, however, fall apart. Gibson, clearly aware that Godell was right, nevertheless

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reads from a statement suggesting that Godell had been drinking. Godell’s position is salvaged only when his friend, coworker, and company man Ted Spindler (Wilford Brimley) stands up for him on camera. The news then cuts to a concluding commercial on the five top microwave ovens. * * * The film’s title was taken from the catch phrase “china syndrome,” which erroneously implies that a nuclear power accident in the United States could cause a meltdown that would bore through to China: in fact, a radioactive explosion would occur long before it got that far. The film was released before the Three Mile Island accident in March at the power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the China Syndrome, as in Andromeda Strain (1971), relatively minor mechanical problems nearly have devastating consequences, but in the later film more effort goes into establishing responsibility for the near accident. Some blame is laid on the ever-increasing public demand for energy, but more is assigned to the company that placed its profit margin ahead of public safety and decided the cost of correcting that mistake was greater than the risk of running the plant. This film rather optimistically emphasizes public awareness as the solution to the dangers of nuclear power, as does Chain Reaction (1996), which offers a somewhat different interpretation of the motivations for controlling or preventing the development of safer sources of energy. Wells, the ambitious female reporter with a boss who thinks of her in terms of sex appeal and ratings, is frequently reincarnated: see, for example, Tess Woodward, the reporter who helps avert a technological disaster in Storm Watch (2002). Godell, the man with the message who becomes a casualty for the cause is a character who also makes frequent reappearances: see Dourif in Menno’s Mind (1997), Zavitz in Enemy of the State (1998), Julius in Cyber Wars (2004), and others. In Universal Soldier (1992), a nuclear power plant again poses a serious threat, not because of possible malfunction or construction flaws, but because it is an easy target for terrorists, as Godell demonstrates.

Circuitry Man Writers: Robert Lovy and Steven Lovy Series: Circuitry Man II (aka Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II), 1994 (Sequel) Director: Steven Lovy Date: 1990 Length: 93 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Lori (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), a bodyguard who retired to devote her time to designing women’s fashions, is forcibly recruited back into the service of Juice (Lu Leonard), a mobster about to sell a large quantity of drug chips to Plughead (Vernon Wells). Plughead is one of the few remaining functional “biosynthetics,” a relic of the now fallen, above ground civilization who thrives by jacking into minds twisted by desire or pain. When Lori spots an undercover FBI agent, the deal goes bad, so she grabs the drugs and recruits Danner (Jim Metzler) to assist her. Danner is another biosynthetic – a successful “Romeo” pleasure model with suicidal impulses related to an implanted program about a lost lover – and he just happens to know the way through the abandoned underground parking lots from Los Angeles to New York where Lori hopes to sell the drugs. En route, they acquire an unsavory and aptly named companion, “Leech” (Dennis Christopher), who happens to have the oxygen they need for a forced detour above ground through the desert. Plughead, with the assistance of Juice’s former employees and some biker bandits, catches up with them. He leaves Danner to die staked out in the sand with the knowledge that his memory of a lost love is merely a program Juice

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implanted as leverage to get him to do jobs for her. Danner, however, does not commit suicide as expected; he escapes and goes to New York where he rescues Lori from Plughead. During the face-off between the two circuitry men, Plughead plugs into Danner and drags him into his hellish inner fantasy world of corpses and flames, but Danner strikes the final blow and walks off with Lori along a very romantic simulated beach with horses. * * * This satiric, futuristic, and vaguely 1920s or 1930s film about technology and gangsters is set in a world where people have escaped the toxic above-ground environment by moving into the subterranean facilities of former cities. The shift to underground habitations appears in numerous tech-noir films, but Cybercity (1999) is closest to Circuitry Man in its emphasis on criminal activities. Circuitry Man is a classic road trip film adapted to the flight and pursuit that follows from the theft of the property of thieves. Cybercity likewise manages to conduct a continuous flight and pursuit in an underground world, but Circuitry Man’s high speed transit through a variety of zones, from abandoned underground parking lots to the toxic above-ground desert and back to the underground, borrows more from the standard set by THX 1138 (1971). Both Plughead and Danner are “biosynthetics”: Danner is an android programmed, somewhat like that in the earlier stages of The Companion (1994), with a sort of gothic-romantic disposition; while Plughead, as the sequel reveals, is an android whose programming as a psychoanalyst has gone wrong. Plughead is a caricature of the profession whose interest in other people is voyeuristic and sadistic and quite unrelated to any legitimate therapeutic practice. His ability to “jack in” allows him to skip the more benign interactive stages of relationships and go directly to the overt exercise of his power: this aspect of the psychology professional’s role is also caricatured by Dr. Faxx in RoboCop 2 (1990) who enjoys the “I type it, you think it” approach to her patient, and is recognized and imitated by Peter Foster in Next of Kin (1984). Plughead jacks in whenever he can, but the film’s culminating event is his interface with Danner: see Future Shock (1993) and The Cell (2000) for other films involving psychologists and with principal events inside the virtually enhanced “inner” self. A virtual or dream realm combat for power also occurs near the end of Lathe of Heaven (1980). Like just about every other profession represented in this film, the government detectives are caricatured and satirized: they play buffoons who are left far behind as gangs vie for control of the latest designer drug chips.

Circuitry Man II (aka Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II) (Sequel) Writers: Robert Lovy and Steven Lovy Series: Circuitry Man, 1990 Directors: Robert Lovy and Steven Lovy Date: 1994 Length: 98 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Kyle (Deborah Shelton) finds Danner (Jim Metzler) in a mental institution and insists he accompany her on a supposed quest for revenge on Plughead (Vernon Wells). They get to Plughead’s research facility in Brazilamerica by using a teleportation device, and then have to find their own transportation for the last fifteen or so miles through the desert. They are followed by a pair of bungling detectives and arrive coincidentally with Leech (Dennis Christopher), now teamed up with the childlike former billionaire “Rock” (Nicholas Worth), both of whom are escaped convicts forcibly recruited for Plughead’s experiments. Kyle, it turns out, is the daughter of Norma (Traci Lords), a female scientist who entered Plughead’s service in return for a child:

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Kyle is that child and Plughead bioengineered her in the image of Danner’s program of a lost and unattainable love. Danner once again rises to the challenge of defeating Plughead in his plugged-in domain, this time inspired by the power of his interest in Kyle. The film ends with three “couples” walking across the desert: the all-too-human Leech with his sights set on the beautiful and brainy Norma; the biosynthetic Danner in love with Kyle, the woman bioengineered in the image of his implanted program; and the simple-minded Rock reciting Shakespearian lines of adoration to his fetish, a rock. * * * The battle between good and evil that began in the first Circuitry Man film continues: Danner is still the romantic who does not like to jack in and Plughead, here revealed as a former biosynthetic psychoanalyst and scientist, is still the demented monster who thrives on the pain of others; he also becomes a kind of Frankenstein who bioengineers a mate for an artificial being, albeit not for one of his creations and not at the artificial being’s request. Norma, the woman who is mother to the baby that Plughead bioengineers, is another version of Anna’s mother in Anna to the Infinite Power (1983), the briefly observed mother of Alex in Nemesis 2 (1995), and, or course, Morella (1997). Norma’s desperation to have a child causes her to prioritize her biological destiny over her professional expertise and ethics: she subjects herself to a monster so that she can procreate. Other women align themselves with a mad scientist out of desperation for a child without initially realizing the full extent to which they are being manipulated in Cloned (1997) and Godsend (2004). This film, unlike Circuitry Man, sets up a new hierarchy of the person that incorporates both human flaws and ideals: the biosynthetic and fully programmable Danner seems to be the new alpha male in this brave new world; followed by Kyle, the woman bioengineered in the image of his artificially programmed ideal. Further down the list is the unlikely pair of apparently flawed humans, the woman as scientist and the seamy Leech, and at the very bottom are the mentally challenged Rock and his rock. The fetishizing of a rock satirizes the fact that people can become attached to anything, and this perhaps accounts for the ease with which an android stands in for a person; yet Danner, like Slipstream’s (1989) Byron, seems to stand for the best of all that is human. See Futureworld (1976) and Cherry 2000 (1987) for more blunt representations of the absurdity of bonding with a machine. Circuitry Man II plays out in a diverse range of settings, ranging from confined institutional spaces, vehicles, incarceration cells, traps, and, as in the first film, the vast expanses of the uninhabited desert. There are some obvious uses of genre markers for gothic and horror, particularly the mental institution and straightjacket, and a few reminiscent of low-budget scifi, including a teleportation device with far greater range than that made infamous in The Fly (1986, 1989). Terminator 2 (1991) also adds a mental institution to the sets and has an android rescue the wrongfully incarcerated “patient.”

City of Lost Children Writers: Gilles Adrien, Marc Carot, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Guillaume Laurant Director: Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet Date: 1995 Countries: France, Germany, and Spain Length: 112 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Cyborg Bioengineering: Transformation Clone: Society and service

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Once upon a time, the professor (Dominique Pinon) attempted to create artificial life, but with unsatisfactory results: his ideal wife is a midget (Mireille Mossé), Uncle Irvin (Jean Louis Trintignant) is a brain floating in an aquarium, the six clones of himself all have sleeping sickness, and Krank (Daniel Emilfork) is unable to dream. One day, a family squabble turned violent and the professor was dumped into the ocean where he forgot who he was and began scavenging the ocean floor. Meanwhile, Krank has the Cyclopes abduct children for his technologically facilitated dream explorations: the Cyclopes have exchanged natural vision for technological vision and supersensitive hearing and have made a cult out of their reverence for technology. Each child is placed in a kind of sarcophagus that transmits his or her dreams to Krank through an elaborate headset. The problem is that all the children are afraid of Krank so they only have nightmares: all the children, that is, except Denrée (Joseph Lucien), the adopted little brother of “One” (Ron Perlman). One sets out to find the abducted Denrée and is aided by Miette (Judith Vittet) and some other street children, who otherwise scavenge for the Octopus, a pair of evil twins (Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet) who are, quite literally, joined at the hip. The children are good at thieving, making use of a mouse, a cat, and various ploys to get what they are sent after, including a safe that One is conscripted to carry. One affirms his loyalty to Miette with a tattoo, but they are captured and left secured to the end of planks balanced only by barrels full of fish that birds are quickly eating. A toxin-injecting “flea” adds to their adventures, but things turn in their favor when a message in a bottle sent by Irvin restores the professor-diver’s memory and he comes to destroy the converted oilrig where Krank keeps the abducted children. He succeeds, just as One succeeds in rescuing the rig’s occupants, and just after Miette enters a dream about multiplying Santas in which Denrée has been trapped and rescues him. * * * This extraordinary Dickensian-surreal, tech-noir film is set in a kind of adult version of a children’s version of the dark worlds of Brazil (1985) and Blade Runner (1982). It has many familiar motifs: the torture chair, the headdress used to transmit information to the brain, and the obsession with dreaming as a uniquely human experience. The techno-religious cult also makes significant appearances in Wild Palms (1993) and the postapocalypse worlds of New Crime City (1994) and Cybercity (1999), and is referenced in many others. “One” as a former circus strongman, the evil twins, midget, and other characters place the technological world firmly in the carnival context where it often seems to belong, and will also remind viewers of Tod Browning’s infamous film Freaks (1932), with its cast of carnival people with real physical abnormalities. Other tech-noir films that make something of the circus, carnival, or festival ambiance include The Clones (1973), Westworld (1973), Futureworld (1976), Blow Out (1981), and, of course, Total Recall (1990). The Christmas preparations and the appearance of multiple Santa Clauses in City of Lost Children also further the viewer’s sense of the filmic moment as one in which anything can happen. While children are often taken hostage in tech-noir films, and neglected adolescents appear in numerous others, such as Arcade (1993), Evolver (1994), and Hackers (1995); children who are actually on their own and on the streets, such as those in City of Lost Children, are less commonly presented as principal characters: they do make a rather unconvincing appearance in Lawnmower Man 2 (1996). Children are abducted or their DNA is appropriated for scientific experiments in Duplicates (1992) and Cloned (1997). The use of Santa Claus as a reassuring children’s fantasy figure that quickly turns into a multiplying monster is a unique and extraordinarily effective summary comment on Christmas in the capitalist-consumer world.

A Clockwork Orange Source: Writer: Director:

Based on Anthony Burgess’s novel of the same title, 1962 Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick

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Date: 1971 Country: United Kingdom Length: 137 min. Type: Behavior modification Alex (Malcolm McDowell) lives at home and spends his days sleeping instead of attending school and his nights robbing, assaulting, and raping. He and his gang enjoy their violent masquerades and lounging at the “milk bar”; but when their recreational activities escalate to murder, Alex’s buddies leave him for the police to take into custody. After some time in jail, he volunteers for an experimental rehabilitation program: throughout each session, he is drugged, helmeted, confined in a straightjacket, strapped in a chair with his lids locked open, and forced to watch sequences of images designed to prevent him from so much as thinking about violence or sex, or even listening to Beethoven, since that is the music that accompanies the behavior modification program. If he does or thinks of any of these things, he gets sick and even experiences suicidal impulses. When he is released, he finds that his parents have rented out his room, and his former buddies, now employed as policemen, abuse and beat him. When he accidentally arrives at the door of Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), a writer whose wife he raped and home he ransacked before his incarceration, he is first aided as a victim of government injustice and then locked in an upper story room filled with the sounds of Beethoven until, in desperation, he jumps out the window. He wakes up in a hospital bed with multiple broken bones, but the government official responsible for supporting his original rehabilitation program promises him that the writer has been locked away and that he will have a bright future with everything he needs, provided he helps the current political party recover from its failing popularity ratings. Alex is, of course, only too happy to oblige. * * * Conventional crime stories focus on the mysteries of how a crime was committed, the identification of the criminal, and the criminal’s diabolical intelligence, and the story usually ends with the criminal’s apprehension. Here, the crimes are brutish, entail no mystery whatsoever, and Alex is apprehended with ease and incarcerated while his cohorts slip into law enforcement, a profession that seems to suit their proclivity to violence. A Clockwork Orange compensates for the lack of crime-related mystery by developing the idea, rooted in the eighteenth-century prison reform movement, that society should do more than merely punish those who deviate from accepted behavioral norms. The film’s “noir” technology is thus that developed as an attempt to actually prevent criminal behavior. The point of view taken to such technology is satiric throughout: in jail, Alex opts for therapy, not believing for a moment that it is anything other than a means of escaping boredom and captivity; and the therapists, though claiming philanthropic intentions, mimic the criminal insofar as they adopt a position of absolute power and control over their subject. While the behavior modification seems to be successful, it fails to change the subject’s basic psychological profile and, just as significantly, its applications are subject to the whims of public perception and political expediency. The restraints and techniques used to dramatize the therapeutic process in A Clockwork Orange reappear in various forms and combinations in such films as The Terminal Man (1974), Brazil (1985), Total Recall (1990), Fortress (1992), Fugitive Mind (1999), Cypher (2002), and others. In these films, behavior modification of which the subject is consciously aware often shifts to the implantation of directions to be executed without the individual’s awareness or to an involuntary personality overlay. Such alterations may be superficially rationalized as social progress, but are more often linked to individual or corporate ambition and the character subjected or volunteered for the process is often redrawn so that, unlike Alex, he appears as a more genuine victim. Cypher is another exception to this approach in that the hero willingly undergoes the personality imprinting process, which he invented, to serve his own ends.

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Cloned Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Carmen Culver, Perri Klass, and David Taylor Douglas Barr 1997 TV 120 min. Clone: Body parts Clone: Society and service

In 2008, Skye (Elizabeth Perkins) and Rick Weston (Bradley Whitford) are still grieving the loss of their son Chris in a boating accident a year before: his body was never recovered. Skye dreams repeatedly of Chris alone in the boat and then the boat overturned, even though Rick dived repeatedly to try to save him. Chris was conceived with the help of Dr. Wesley Kozak (Alan Rosenberg) at the biotechnology facility where Skye works. Kozak is also illegally cloning humans: Chris, the prime “Baby 2000,” was cloned a dozen times and implanted in different women. These babies were a prelude to the more lucrative project of cloning individual organs. When Dr. Mason (Hrothgar Mathews) discovers what is going on and decides he wants out, he drops the Deep Cove address for one of the clones in Skye’s office door mailbox. Soon after, he is “accidentally” pushed to his death by the head of security Mr. Rinker (Enrico Colantoni). Skye and Rick take a boat trip to Deep Cove where Skye sees the boy and contacts the mother, but someone at the clinic uses fake DNA to reduce her discovery to one of a mere uncanny resemblance. When she has the DNA tests redone at another lab, she learns that she and Rick are indeed the parents of the child who looks just like their son. Skye also posts Chris’s picture on the internet and gets seven e-mails with photos of look-alike boys. She gets into Kozak’s secret lab under cover of a faked fire alarm, sees the organs, and realizes CIP, the project code name, means cryogenetic insurance program. Desperate to keep his funding, Kozak offers to give them the last embryo of Chris; but they refuse, so Mr. Rinker takes charge and nearly kills them both. Kozak gets confirmation of ongoing funding when the investors see the organs and realize they can look forward to a multi-million dollar pay off and, on the same day, he gets an award for his work. Skye and Rick crash the party, along with the parents of all the clones, the clones themselves, and the FBI. While the Chris look-alikes seem like nice boys, Skye and Rick opt for adopting their next child. * * * After Skye’s initial voice-over with a visual of a test-tube baby birth, much of this made-for-television movie is taken up with husband and wife dialogue affirming conservative family values and gender specific priorities, including the mother’s instinct that “her” little boy is all alone, as, in some remote sense, he is, so long as his body is missing and the “parents” of the cloned boys do not know the truth. While there is no mistaking the realism this story brings to family issues that might arise from cloning, there is also no mistaking the real benefit cloned organs would bring to those in need of transplants. Kozak’s solution seems far preferable to the situations posed in films like John Q (2002), and the unsavory methods that might be used to solicit donors suggested in films like Future Kick (1991) and Killer Deal (1999). The original Chris’s death lends his replication as a person and as organs a unique quality of horror for the parents, but apart from that, they are deeply bothered by the fact that Kozak and his cohorts will make millions off of their bodies: it is a capitalist world, and cutting someone out of the loop who genuinely deserves a share in the profits is just not a good idea. See Duplicates (1992) for an earlier made-for-television variation on the story about a lost child who is found because his mother refuses to give up on the search. In Godsend (2004), the parents opt to accept the offer of a clone of their son, not realizing the doctor has an agenda of his own and that the child only looks like their first son. Multiple clones of a single child also appear in The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Anna to the Infinite Power (1983), but with different goals and an entirely different effect. In A.I. Artificial Intelligence 250

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(2001), an android boy is devastated when he discovers he is just a prototype for many more little android boys and girls just like him. In Screamers (1995), many identical android boys are produced as weapons that can easily infiltrate and destroy any human camp.

The Clones Writers: Lamar Card, Steve Fisher, and Paul Hunt Directors: Lamar Card and Paul Hunt Date: 1973 Length: 90 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Dr. Gerald Appleby (Michael Greene) seems to be at work in a lab full of monitoring devices when alarms go off and he starts wandering, in and out of view, in an apparent state of confusion through the huge labyrinthine space. At one point, he seems caught by flashing lights; then he flees down a long narrow hall to a kind of silo, climbs out, and finally exits the facility through a wire gate. From that point, he spends much of his time being chased by or chasing the two security men sent after him through deserts, swamps, a university campus, and even a deserted amusement park. His secretary, his girlfriend Penny (Susan Hunt), and head of office security Fred Kalif (Raynold Gideon) all fail to recognize him as himself: Penny actually entertains the man who proves to be his clone. After he learns about Dr. Carl Swafford’s (Stanley Adams) unauthorized cloning project, Appleby remembers being assaulted by Swafford with a hypodermic. He returns to the lab where he discovers and accidentally kills one clone of himself while it is still in the development chamber. He is finally recognized as himself by Penny, who explains that the clone knew he was a clone and says she realized the clone was not really Gerald because he had to think about who he was. Appleby sets up a meeting with a government official who might help them solve their problem, but when they get to the rendezvous location, a small airport, they learn that their would-be ally has met with an accident while flying over a restricted area. A seemingly helpful bystander offers them a flight to Los Angeles, thus setting them up for capture by Swafford’s agents. Appleby escapes and goes home where he finds his clone. They go to the research lab where they discover Swafford’s plans to achieve world domination with fifty-two weather stations, each manned by the same four scientists – a tidal wave it seems, could be a more effective means to power than two or three nuclear bombs – but the project needs the fusion reactors that are Appleby’s particular realm of expertise. A search for Penny, who is being held hostage in an abandoned fairground, ensues. The clone is killed, Penny joins the gunfight and is killed; Appleby kills Swafford, only to be shot himself by Swafford’s clone. * * * The motivation for creating the clones in the first place: control of the weather as a means to power, is developed with a virtual reality villain in Storm Watch (2002); but most of The Clones is about cloning, not the weather. The thoughtful social problem approach to cloning found in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971) and Parts (1979) is here given over, as in many later films, almost entirely to the flight and pursuit or stalker approach that places the victim in a fight, flee, or die situation relative to the ambitions of the person in control of the technology. Unlike the clones in Zachary Wheeler and Parts, Appleby’s clone is almost indistinguishable from Appleby and has inherited his expertise and memories. Distinguishing copy from original is a frequent theme in later films involving artificial people: see, for example, the extensive testing processes developed for this purpose in Blade Runner (1982). Relatively late in the film, Appleby enlists one of his clones to replace his lost girlfriend as an ally; likewise, The 6th Day (1990) includes an alliance between clone and original against the individual who controls the

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cloning technology. The 6th Day is also filled with visual references to doubles: the replication imagery in the earlier Clones is less slick and less extensive, but no less distinctive than that in the more recent film. Appleby flees past an over life-sized classical statue, as well as a rabbit and frog – both of which are historically associated with cloning – and, when he enters his office after the clone has already been there, he first appears as a distorted reflection in a mirror. In what might be a nod to Superman-Clark Kent, he is also seen in reflection while leaving his frequently used telephone booths: on one occasion, he is actually accosted in the booth by a dwarf who has no way of reaching the phone he apparently wants to use.

Code 46 Writer: Frank Cottrell Boyce Director: Michael Winterbottom Date: 2003 Country: United Kingdom Length: 93 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Behavior modification In the future, many people are clones and code 46 allows the government to monitor and prevent procreation by genetically related people and to perform wipes or erasures of memories. People can also enhance, alter, or add to their abilities by taking engineered “viruses,” thus William (Tim Robbins) has taken an “empathy virus” to improve his effectiveness as a fraud investigator. He uses this talent in Shanghai for the company Sphinx, which produces “papelles,” travel visas with genetic identification codes, and which has a problem with counterfeiting. Instead of doing his job, William protects the thieving Maria (Samantha Morton), has a one-night stand with her, and then goes home to his wife and son in Seattle. Maria has been haunted for many years by a birthday dream involving annually decreasing numbers of subway stops left before she finds a certain person: her meeting with William coincides with the birthday at which only one stop remains. William is forced to return to Shanghai to follow up on the investigations of the deaths of people traveling with false papelles into areas to which they were denied legal access, apparently because those areas really were dangerous to them. While there, he discovers Maria has been given an abortion and her memory of their encounter erased because they have a 50 percent DNA match: she is a clone of his mother. He finds her and explains some aspects of the situation; she remembers him from her dream, something the government agents did not think to erase. They flee to the world outside the city and, since the virus she has been implanted with to prevent further code 46 infractions makes her fear sexual contact with him, she has him tie her to the bed; afterwards, however, the virus makes her report their action, so they flee, have a car accident, and are captured. The authorities decide that William’s empathy virus impaired his judgment, so he is returned to his wife without the compromising memories. Maria is sent into exile in the desert, but is allowed to keep her memories because no one cares what people “outside” think. * * * This very noir BBC film about what future technological development will bring is well supported by Maria’s voice-over narration, especially in the context of her erased memory, and by the loop created by her birthday dream. The localized memory wipe is a professional requirement in Paycheck (2003) and the birthday dream is also a significant clue to what is “really” going on in Virtual Nightmare (2000). The ability of the government, generally referred to as the Sphinx, to monitor and even erase memories is little questioned; individuals denied travel permissions are not only left in ignorance of the reasons why they are denied such

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permission, they do not seem to think of asking the relevant questions. Overall, the citizens of the cities seem passive and uninformed about the world they live in and, with memory erasure ever handy, it seems likely they will stay that way. The cities, as in Brave New World (1980, 1998), are clearly regarded by most people as the centers of civilization. The “outside” is everywhere outside of the cities and it is represented by desert, impoverished living areas, and the facility where Maria is given her abortion and memory wipe. Some of the people on the outside seem to be there because of their jobs, as in the case of the woman who lets William in to see Maria after her treatment in exchange for a pill; others are there as a form of criminal sentencing, as were Maria and her family for many years after her father’s exile for illegal activities, and as is Maria after her code 46 violation. William’s return home to his nice house and family and Maria’s exile to the desert fringe zone add a very familiar story to the tech-noir mix. The subject of incest in the context of cloning is apparently meant to be titillating. Maria’s brief override of the programming that forces her to say “no” to William, when she “really” means yes, is an entirely sexist reworking of the more common and far more noble recovery of self by tech-noir males programmed to commit acts of violence, as in Fugitive Mind (1999).

Collateral Damage Writers: David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Ronald Roose Director: Andrew Davis Date: 2002 Length: 109 min. Type: Technology Los Angeles fireman Gordy Brewer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a little late picking up his son from his wife (Lindsay Frost) after a doctor’s appointment and, as a result, they are accidentally killed in a terrorist attack orchestrated by Claudio Perrini (Cliff Curtis), aka “the Wolf,” as a retaliation against American intervention in Columbian politics, particularly illegal drug manufacturing and export. When he hears a television interview referring to the killing of innocent people as “collateral damage,” the grief-stricken Brewer snaps into action, does some research and heads for Columbia. En route to his objective, he rescues Selena (Francesca Neri), who turns out to be Perrini’s wife, and her son Matt (Ethan Dampf) from some street punks. Later, after he has set the charges that will kill Perrini, he realizes that Selena and Matt have accidentally entered the kill zone and he cries out to warn them; in doing so, he also warns Perrini. Brewer is captured. Selena helps him escape on the condition that he take her and Matt with him; she also offers the information that Perrini has gone to Washington DC to set another bomb. Meanwhile, Brewer has been tracked and the American military arrives in time to blow up Perrini’s facility and take Brewer, Selena, and Matt back to the United States. Selena identifies Union Station as her husband’s next probable target and surveillance footage seems to verify her claim; however, it turns out she is the one setting the bomb. Brewer realizes he has been duped when he sees Selina making a hand gesture to Matt that is identical to that made by an otherwise anonymous person in some terrorist footage. Selina abandons Matt so that she can detonate his toy dinosaur. Brewer realizes the bomb is in the toy, breaks a window, and tosses it outside where it explodes. He then pursues Selina to her motorcycle getaway with her husband, blocks their exit from the underground parking lot, and uses a fireman’s ax to release gas from the overhead pipes so that when Selina starts shooting at him, she causes a huge explosion. Brewer finishes Selina off by throwing her into a control panel where she is electrocuted and he puts the Wolf down with the ax. Matt happily runs to Brewer. * * *

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Collateral Damage was originally scheduled for release in October of 2001 but, due to 9/11, it was withheld and then released in early 2002. Relevant to this historical fact are several specific elements in the film, including Brewer’s anger at Brandt for using him as an excuse to drop explosives on Columbia. These lines acquire additional resonance in the context of Schwarzenegger’s prior films, such as Commando (1985) and Predator (1987), both of which show Americans engaged in aggressive acts in foreign countries. Terrorists with political agendas are also featured in Apocalypse Watch (1997) and Swordfish (2001). The Perrini husband and wife team demonstrate the inappropriateness of assigning a “Bonnie and Clyde” charisma, such as that developed for “Gabriel and Ginger” in Swordfish, to terrorists. Selina, like Ginger, creates an effective ruse that places a man who would otherwise have had nothing to do with her more or less under her control. A policeman who inadvertently causes the death of his wife and child after they become pawns in a terrorist’s plot also appears in Virtuosity (1995). In Cyborg Cop (1993), a policeman goes to the Caribbean to rescue his brother when he is trapped there as a victim in a British mercenary’s plan to shift from “pharmaceuticals” to professional assassinations as a source of income. Solo (1996) features American military involvement in Central America in such a manner that the native population is forfeit to both the local thugs and the foreign intercessors.

Colossus: The Forbin Project Source: Based on Dennis Feltham Jones’s novel Colossus, 1966 Writer: James Bridges Director: Joseph Sargent Date: 1970 Length: 100 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Surveillance: Security system Surveillance: Information and control Colossus, a computerized auto-defense system designed by Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden), goes on line with all due applause and the president’s (Gorden Pinsent) full attention only hours before Guardian, its Soviet counterpart. The two systems immediately form an alliance and when attempts are made to separate them, they retaliate with nuclear missiles, have Forbin’s Soviet counterpart killed, and put Forbin under continuous surveillance. Forbin manages to arrange for some privacy with his supposed mistress Dr. Cleo Markham (Susan Clark) as a means of covertly communicating with his colleagues. The inevitable love relationship follows, but they fail to come up with a means of escaping Colossus. Meanwhile, Colossus–Guardian has a new audio communication system built and uses it to broadcast the voice of the new world order of peace. He – Colossus becomes the dominant system – promises to solve the problems of famine, over-population, and disease, and in return demands complete acceptance of his authority; after all, he asserts, “freedom is an illusion.” Colossus plans to release Forbin from surveillance, apparently because it will soon no longer be necessary, and assigns him the task of constructing new and superior machines. Colossus also states his expectation of respect, awe, and love from his subjects, to which Forbin responds “Never!” * * * Colossus adapts the premise of the Cold War film Failsafe (1964), such that final authority over humankind rests, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), with an artificial intelligence. Colossus is one of the many descendents of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s (1968) Hal, and one of a minority of those descendents proclaiming environmentalist concerns. The issues Colossus prioritizes over democracy and personal freedoms include

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those variously and often horrifically addressed in other tech-noir films: famine in Soylent Green (1973), overpopulation in Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002), and disease in Absolon (2003), to name just a few. These films pose solutions invented by humans that the film heroes find at least as terrible as the original problems, particularly when the solutions become a means to power and wealth for those motivated only by the desire for power and wealth. Colossus, brought on-line by scientists and governmental authorities with the best of intentions, almost immediately realizes his power and, as many humans would, sets about exercising it according to his own priorities. In spite of his purported philanthropic intentions, his method of saving the environment and the human race means the end of civilization as humans would have it. Like many fictional artificial intelligences, Colossus is an anthropomorphized machine who imitates conventionalized human behavior such that the union of the two auto-defense systems seems as inevitable as that between Forbin and Cleo. In Demon Seed (1977), this method of characterization is applied to the artificial intelligence Proteus, who, like Colossus, claims to be acting in the interests of humanity; but, unlike Colossus, pursues the very human Susan as a means to procreation and thus immortality. The artificial intelligences in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) likewise affirm conventionalized male–female procreative unions, albeit in the digital realm. Colossus and Guardian, like Gibson’s Wintermute and Neuromancer, merge; but where Wintermute controls humans as a means to closing the deal, Colossus simply makes humans the objects of control: as in Alphaville, the machine takes control, thus destroying human “freedom.” Indeed, the film’s ending now reads like the “ultimate evil” prelude to a number of tech-noir series, including The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996), and, of course The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), in all of which one or more artificial intelligences seek to annihilate the human race. In all of these later films, the issue bringing about the combat between humans and machines is not simply “freedom” or the form of human society, but survival itself.

Coma Source: Based on Robin Cook’s novel of the same title, 1978 Writer: Michael Crichton Director: Michael Crichton Date: 1978 Length: 113 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transplant Dr. Susan Wheeler’s (Geneviève Bujold) friend falls into unexplained coma during a routine medical procedure: a dilation and curettage, better known as a “D and C,” but in this case a euphemism for a therapeutic abortion. Susan decides to look into her case and discovers that an unusual number of unexplained comas have all begun in operating room eight. With a little help from a technician, who is electrocuted for his trouble, and a couple of coroners doing autopsies in the basement, Dr. Wheeler is soon climbing through the hospital’s maintenance tunnels pursuing a hose to a gadget that can release carbon monoxide into patients in that room, thus putting them into coma. Such patients are then sent to the Jefferson Institute, a purportedly revolutionary continuing care facility where they are suspended from the ceiling in harnesses and cared for by a computer; in fact, the computer merely maintains the appearance of continuing life for the sake of any relatives who visit after the patient’s organs have been harvested and sold on the black market. Susan’s boyfriend Mark (Michael Douglas) is a doctor at the hospital and, being more sensitive to hospital politics, he is less enthusiastic about upsetting the power structure and potentially ruining his career; but when he finds his boss is about to perform an unexpected appendectomy on Susan in operating room eight, he dives into action and destroys the coma-inducing apparatus. * * * 255

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Coma is one of numerous films about involuntary organ donation, and it is of special interest for the visuals of the body maintenance room. However, the social problems created by the possibilities of organ transplant surgeries frequently seem less urgent than that of the professional belittlement of women: Susan’s difficulties investigating the comas almost all relate to her status as a woman. See Rollerball (1975) and Soylent Green (1973) for films in which the principal female characters are regarded as “furniture.” In addition, the horror of Coma begins, not with the realization of the black market in organs or the means of recruiting donors, but with a woman who is alive talking to Susan at her exercise class one minute and the next, being laid out on a metal gurney, drugged, her legs swung into stirrups, and her eyes taped over. The surgery itself is general family viewing by comparison with the detailed autopsy and surgical procedures now common on television, but the long metal pliers and blood still achieve their intended effect: the anesthesiologist’s observation a minute later that her “pupils are fixed and dilated!” is almost anti-climatic. The female “patient” thus becomes the classic and quintessential victim: unaware of the need to defend herself, the woman who submits to a medical procedure loses her life. The parallel with the fetus, whose life is already forfeit, and for better reasons, only accents the capitalist priorities that lead to this woman’s death. Not surprisingly, the beneficiaries of the organs are not in evidence in this film: like those in The Island (2005), they are presumably in blissful ignorance of the true cost of their replacement body parts. Many of these narrative elements are inverted in American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994), in which the last fertile woman in North America, and possibly the world, carries her fetus in a life-support tube to safety while pursued by villains determined to stop her at all costs. There is little attention to complex technology in Coma, no presentation of technology as altering notions of humanity or human identity or the class implications of technological and scientific developments; this film simply shows some of the new methods of exploitation and profiteering that are possible when body parts acquire dollar value. Terminal Choice (1985) is a similar hospital-based film in which the death-dealing mechanical gadget is replaced by a computer. The social implications and potential horrors arising from the development of transplant surgery without sufficient organs to meet demand are more fully developed in Future Kick (1991), Killer Deal (1999), and John Q (2002).

The Companion Writer: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Ian Seeberg Gary Fleder 1994 TV 94 min. Android: Love and lovers

Romance novelist Gillian Tanner (Kathryn Harrold) gives an interview on the occasion of the release of her latest CD-Rom novel “September of the Heart” and then finds a girl in bed with her boyfriend of two years. Her best friend Charlene (Talia Balsam) convinces her to take a G-45 series companion with her when she heads off to a remote cabin in the mountains to work on her next book. She soon decides to upgrade “Geoffrey” (Bruce Greenwood), first to make him more conversational, then more sexual, and then to make him more or less human with the “random data” program. Unfortunately, after this last upgrade he murders first Charlene, who threatens his idyllic seclusion with Gillian, and then their neighbor and sculptor Ron (Brion James), who learns Geoffrey is holding Gillian captive. Gillian eventually convinces Geoffrey that she would like to make up for her lack of response to his devotion by having a picnic down by the lake, then she swims away and pretends to drown, but secretly escapes using a bit of pipe as a breathing tool. Geoffrey is unable to save her because he does not have a sports program and cannot swim. Believing she is dead, he decides to follow the precedents established in her novels, not to mention Romeo and Juliet, and erase

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himself. Before the erasure is complete, however, he sees her again and pursues her to Ron’s sculpture studio, where she is forced to blast him in half with a high-tech sculpting gun. The film ends “2 years later” with another interview regarding Gillian’s latest book, this one apparently more profound and less fantasy-filled than her previous work. * * * The lush mountain setting is somewhat unusual for films about technology gone wrong, but the seclusion readily turns to isolation and the privacy becomes claustrophobic as Geoffrey’s new programming takes effect. Writers seem to make special victims in tech-noir films: the female writer in Death Watch (1980) also acquires a stalker, albeit a less deadly one, allied with the forces of technology; and the professor and writer in Twilight Man (1996) is targeted by a tech-savvy killer. See Circuitry Man (1990) for an android programmed for love who does not commit suicide on cue. The Companion, however, is dedicated to showing the android-male human-female relationship as being just as destined to de-evolve into obsession and violence as that between Ron and his girlfriend. As an artist, Ron is a counterpart to the scientist-technician who makes and maintains the android, a character type that is conspicuously absent in this particular film: Gillian’s information about the android comes primarily from the marketing agent from whom she makes her purchase and the product manual. Ron’s sculptures and his girlfriend’s drawings complete the visual mise-en-abyme that also includes Geoffrey: it is hardly incidental that Geoffrey meets his demise at the end of a sculpting tool. The android who, in effect, proposes to commit suicide, also appears in Prototype (1983), but there the suicide is actually carried out as the only means to avoid appropriation into military projects. The AI David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) attempts to commit suicide by drowning. The dancer android Ria in Natural City (2003) commits suicide, rather than wait for death, by pulling out her own chip. Erasure, such as that undertaken by Geoffrey, is shunned by the android in I, Robot (2004) because it means death; but it is sought as a form of suicide by the virtual reality character in Nirvana (1997). Memory erasure is commonly applied as an invasive and aggressive means of behaviorally manipulating humans, as in RoboCop (1987), Duplicates (1992), Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), and Cyborg Cop (1993). In all of these films it is incomplete erasures that allow human subjects to recover some aspect of their identity; in The Companion, the notquite-completely-erased memory and associated program is what causes Geoffrey to resume his randomdata inspired deadly hunt for his former lover.

Conceiving Ada Writers: Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Eileen Jones, Sadie Plant, and Betty A. Toole Director: Lynn Hershman-Leeson Date: 1997 Length: 85 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Clone: Society and service Emmy Coer (Francesca Faridany) is a computer genius whose life has a certain resemblance to that of Ada Byron King/Lady Lovelace (Tilda Swinton), the daughter of Lord Byron and inventor of the first computer programming language – a language intended to operate Charles Babbage’s (John O’Keefe) computer. Ada spent her life trying to satisfy her yearning for intellectual contact, but also suffered continuously from the restraints of prudish social mores, conventional notions of a woman’s place, and the debilitating physical effects of child bearing and birthing. Like Ada, Emmy has an unfeeling mother, absent father, and takes special care in the choice of her mentors. Emmy’s mentor is Sims (Timothy Leary), her former university professor

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whom she talks to through a technological interface. Emmy invents cybergenics when she programs her scanned dog to speak; then she masters time and space by using Charlene as an information carrier: Charlene is a mechanical bird given to her as a gift and visible in Ada’s hands in a photograph. First, Emmy watches Ada’s life, then she talks to her. She wants specific and complete details of Ada’s memory patterns so they can be cloned, but as Ada is dying she refuses to relinquish the final information. Meanwhile, Emmy’s nosey lover Nicholas (J.D. Wolfe) has altered something in her computer program, apparently with significant effects, because later Emmy has a daughter who seems to have all of Ada’s memories. To the end, it seems, Ada was unable to prevent other people from controlling and even taking her life from her. * * * Conceiving Ada is a conversation piece that re-creates the life of Lady Lovelace, an intellectually active woman who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. According to the production notes, the actors were filmed against blue screen and then the environmental contexts were added by means of scanned photographs of authentic period rooms. The transitions from the black-and-white photo of Ada to color and animation as an indication of Emmy’s proximity are effective dramatizations, although Charlene’s associated flight paths trip over the line between fantasy and whimsy. Conceiving Ada may also be compared with Nirvana (1997) and Cyber Wars (2004) in which the dead reappear as constructs in virtual space, and with White Noise (2005) as a horror film about the use of technology to communicate with deceased loved ones. The technologically facilitated and more or less instant transfer of memory becomes a familiar post-Blade Runner (1982) motif. In Duplicates (1992), for example, a child’s personality is removed and another’s imprint applied to him – a process that may potentially account for Emmy’s daughter having Ada’s memories and which leaves the fate of Emmy’s “real” daughter open to debate. The idea that the original’s memories are simply inherited by their clones appears in such films as Morella (1997), Replicant (2001), Godsend (2003), and Aeon Flux (2005). The idea of cloning a particular person from the past so that they might make further contributions to the present is also explored in a number of films, including Boys from Brazil (1978), which, like Conceiving Ada, features an actual historical person; as well as Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) and Able Edwards (2004), both of which are based on fictional characters. Track Down (1999) is a less fantastic biography of another person famous in the history of computers and programming: Kevin Mitnick. Ada Lovelace, however, unlike Mitnick and his many fictional relatives who appear in such films as Sneakers (1992), Ghost in the Machine (1993), Hackers (1995), and Storm Watch (2002), was not a “hacker” or high-tech grifter, but a genuine inventor. Timothy Leary, represented by the character of Sims, provides an overlay of techno-spirituality to the representation of Ada’s nineteenth-century innovative creativity. A similar character appears, or rather does not appear, in Videodrome’s (1983) O’Blivion.

The Conversation Writer: Francis Ford Coppola Director: Francis Ford Coppola Date: 1974 Length: 113 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert hired to tape the conversation of Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest) as they wander about a busy city square followed by a mime (Robert Shields). Caul accomplishes his task with the help of his assistants Stan (John Cazale) and Paul (Michael Higgins); but when he tries to deliver the tapes directly to the corporate director (Robert Duvall) he believes hired him,

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Martin (Harrison Ford), the director’s assistant, prevents him from doing so. He ends up not only keeping the tapes, but also improving their quality and then concluding they provide evidence that the young couple will soon be murdered. Later, Caul finds himself duped by a woman at a wiretappers’ convention who steals the tapes, purportedly for delivery to the director. Caul collects his fee and then checks into the hotel room beside the one in which, according to the tape, the couple will meet. He hears a terrible fight and believes a murder is committed, but when he inspects the room later he finds it immaculate – except for a blood-filled toilet. He goes to the director’s offices only to find that the director has been reported killed in an accident, while the couple is very much alive, and Ann is the designated heir of a controlling share in her father’s company. * * * In his commentary on the DVD version of the film, Coppola mentions that he started the script for The Conversation in the 1960s while under the influence of Blow-Up (1966) and recalls that the news about Watergate broke while The Conversation was being filmed. Historically, surveillance and its implications as a social problem and theme in popular film postdate Watergate, as does the florescence of tech-noir in general, making this classic tech-noir film somewhat premonitory of this aspect of the genre. Watergate itself became the subject of a film titled All the President’s Men (1976) starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Gene Hackman later played a leading role in Enemy of the State (1998), in which government-sanctioned surveillance is on the verge of legalization, purportedly in the interests of national security. In Andromeda Strain (1971), the surveillance and control of technologically mediated personal communications in the interests of national security is simply a fact, not a matter for debate. In the Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971), surveillance is obviously being conducted on a large number of VIPs by a well-funded corporate body with an interest in blackmail. In The Anderson Tapes (1971), multiple and illegal wiretaps conducted by legitimate policing agencies are uncoordinated and have little effect on either the criminals under surveillance or their apprehension. Unlike these films, however, the surveillance job in The Conversation is funded by personal ambition in a familial context and the plot emphasis is on the experiences of the hired surveillance expert who is made complicit with a level of criminality that far exceeds his comfort zone. The cutter in The Final Cut (2004) likewise inadvertently comes into possession of what amounts to surveillance of criminal activity in the course of his job. While this is a problem he is familiar with, some specific information takes on added significance for his life when he realizes he has recorded the recording without knowing it. In both The Conversation and The Final Cut the recording, auditory and visual, becomes a distinctive and crucial part of the conceptual mise-en-abyme. Other films that dramatize an obsessive interest in a single surveillance recording include Blow-Up (1966) and Blow Out (1981), visual in the first and auditory in the second; and Rising Sun (1993), in which a photograph, like Caul’s audio recording, is certainly evidence of a crime, but not in the manner it seems. More unusual is the use of a mime in the opening sequence of The Conversation as a foil for the heightened attention to speech indicated by the surveillance activity. Mimes also appear in Blow-Up and Open Your Eyes (1997), where they serve a theatrical purpose very similar to that of dolls and mannequins insofar as they take a reductive approach to dramatizing specific aspects of the person.

Crusader Writer: Nick Angelo Director: Bryan Goeres Date: 2004 TV Country: Spain Length: 100 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Surveillance: Information and control 259

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Nova is the fastest growing telecommunication company in Spain and when terrorists, actually mercenaries, shoot the company president and almost everyone else at a board meeting, majority shareholder Manuel Pla (Ernesto Collado), who orchestrated the assassinations, is happy to take charge. A dying journalist escapes the slaughter and hands Hank Robinson (Andrew McCarthy), a reporter for Channel 7, a video of the event and tells him to get the truth out; which he does, while neglecting to mention the source of the tape. Archibald McGovern (Michael York), an insider to Pla’s plot, recruits Hank to the much larger Vision network. Hank then gets a tip from a secret informant who later identifies himself as “crusader” in imitation of a news headline about Hank. The tip leads to a bar where Elroy Agustin, the head of Pla’s major competitor, is enjoying a tryst with Leila (Laia Blanch), one of the purported female terrorists; thus it seems he was behind the attack. Hank likes his new job, his personal assistant, his popularity, and even one of McGovern’s garden parties, where he chats with a man claiming to be an Interpol agent while they walk through a maze of hedges on the well-manicured lawn. Eventually, however, he realizes he is being used and goes to see Agustin. Minutes after this meeting, Agustin is hanged by Leila’s partner Wolf (Hans Richter): the police call it suicide and Pla soon owns Agustin’s company. Hank finds his apartment ransacked; his hidden copy of the tape is untouched, however, and he discovers there is more on it than he realized. He takes it to Veronica (Ana Alvarez), his former boss and girlfriend at Channel 7, and she has it digitized and the tracking corrected. Meanwhile, Hank’s Vision supervisor Nicola Markham (Bo Derek) has become suspicious of Archibald, so she puts a plant on him and thus hears and records proof of his complicity with Pla’s illegitimate bid for power; a move for which she is soon murdered. Hank realizes the Interpol agent is really Wolf – Wolf is also “crusader” – when he follow him to Channel 7. Wolf calls Hank on his cell phone to torment him as he stalks him and Veronica; Veronica taps into and broadcasts his commentary, which makes the extreme hostility of the corporate takeover plot fully public. The Interpol agent whom Wolf had been impersonating shows up to arrest the villains. * * * Hank is an unusual American reporter insofar as he needs moral direction from his European female companion: it is not at all clear why he does not just say that he was given the tape by a witness and his final on-air apology also misses the mark. The references to his father, an acclaimed reporter and author, particularly those offered by Nicola about how he collected much of his supposedly first-hand source material from local papers, contribute little to the story and do not explain Hank’s actions. A similar ambiguity mars the conclusion of Foolproof (2003), another film that poses a “younger” generation lacking a clear set of values. Watch All the President’s Men (1976) for more authentic “hungry” young reporters with ethical dilemmas. Control of the internet as a means of controlling the world is Pla’s objective: like Shear in Swordfish (2001), he uses mercenaries, rather than genuine terrorists as both a means to his goal and as a distraction from his specific and personal ambitions. Concerns about who controls the internet are usually expressed through attention to the security systems attached to publicly used facilities, such as airports, boats, and train stations, and the protection of those systems from terrorists: on this subject, see Hackers (1995), The Net (1995), Track Down (1999), and Swordfish. Here, the attention is all on what crimes a man will commit to acquire that control. The hostile corporate takeover is also crucial to other films: an entire corporate board is murdered as a prelude to more terrorism and the usurping of corporate control in Fatal Error (1999) and plans to detonate a bomb during a board meeting are foiled in Xchange (2000), as are the associated plans for the expansion of corporate power.

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Cyber Bandits Writers: James Goldman and James Robinson Director: Erik Fleming Date: 1994 Length: 87 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Jack Morris (Martin Kemp) is a sailor on board Morgan Wells’s (Robert Hays) yacht where he attracts the attention of one of Wells’s favorite possessions, Rebecca (Alexandra Paul). Wells is financing the development of Dr. Knutsen’s (Henry Gibson) invention: a portable tube-shaped device that looks like a poster container and can be used to send a person’s mind into a permanent virtual reality of the holder’s choosing. Rebecca steals the software needed to make the device operational and enlists Jack’s aid in escaping the island of Pacifica, which Wells more or less owns. They have the data transferred onto a large tattoo on Jack’s back, but Wells’s thugs catch up with them. Not realizing that the disk is now useless and that Jack carries the data, they leave him strapped to the tattoo table, kill the tattoo artist (James Hong), and take Rebecca back to Wells. The artist’s niece – Masako (Grace Jones) – arrives, decides Jack might be useful in carrying out her own vendetta on Wells, and prepares to slice the tattoo off his back. Having realized that Jack carries the necessary data, Wells has his thugs bring him in, incidentally rescuing him from Masako. The information is recovered and the machine made operational just as Masako bursts in with her team. In the ensuing fire-fight, Wells sends Masako “virtually” to the bottom of the sea and Jack and Rebecca escape to the yacht, only to find Wells there and still in possession of his new toy. At this point, Wells’s personal assistant Marcel (Christopher Weeks) decides to act and knocks Wells out from behind. When Wells regains consciousness, Morris almost accidentally sends him to hell with the device, which Rebecca then tosses out a porthole. * * * The male–female team once again undoes the ambitions of the man with the potentially profitable technology; this time, however, the woman is the man’s mistreated and somewhat decorative girlfriend and her new man has to deal with both her boyfriend and his cylindrical gadget if he is going to win her as his prize. In Cyborg Cop 3 (1995), the female character who gets in the way of her male counterpart’s big plan to make money by stealing his gadget is played by a reporter who acquires the assistance of two small-time bounty hunters. The personal assistant who, like Marcel, suddenly decides to favor the objects of his employer’s ire, is also part of the resolution of Freejack (1992). Unique to Cyber Bandits is the use of a tattoo, a frequent but usually incidental element in tech-noir, as a means of recording and disguising digital information and also adding to the list of puns on the “skin jobs” descending from Blade Runner (1982). A tattoo on a girl’s back is actually a map showing the way to dry land in the post-apocalypse scifi world of Waterworld (1995), but that map is rather literal and crudely applied – it possesses none of the high-tech associations of the application method and content to which Jack finds himself committed. The island that is more or less controlled by a single man, yet full of local color and culture is, of course, another take on H.G. Wells’s island hegemony. This one is perhaps closest to that of the entrepreneurial man-with-the-money Kessel in Cyborg Cop (1993). For another unusual tech-noir film that includes a lot of water, see 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997), which is set on board a ship the captain eventually uses to send his corporate antagonists to the bottom of the sea. Unlike the virtual reality programs that are able to tap into a player’s unconscious and build a game or game character to suit them, such as those in Brainscan (1994), Dream Breaker (1995), and Virtual Seduction (1995), the virtual device in this film is used as a weapon that taps into the fully conscious and spoken desires of one person toward another. The fact that the device exerts

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its control over the mind of the person it is directed toward, rather than the person who engages it, makes it less like a virtual reality game and more like an expansion on the more-or-less instant personality imprint applied in Duplicates (1992), or a kind of augmenter with a more specific targeting mechanism than that used in Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002).

Cybercity (aka The Shepherd) Writer: Nelu Ghiran Director: Peter Hayman Date: 1999 Country: Canada Length: 90 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Cyborg  rologue Voice-Over: Some lessons are hard learned. It started the way these things always do: a wrong P look, a slight never forgotten, and then, hatred rainin’ down by the bucketful – a story as old as time. And while we were busy tearin’ each other apart, old mother earth fought back. She chased us underground. Those that refused to come were fried up top. Some lessons are hard learned. Of course we just took all that hatred down with us and, as we all know, when you’re underground, rot grows. Such is the world of Dakota (C. Thomas Howell), a “hard-boiled” policeman turned “shepherd” or mercenary assassin for Lyndon (Mackenzie Gray), the head of security for Miles (Roddy Piper), one of the two main cult leaders in the underground world. Lyndon supplies him with modified virtual recordings of his wife and son whom he believes were murdered in an act of random violence; in fact, as Dakota learns eventually, they were killed when his wife told Lyndon she wanted to end their affair. Dakota is tired of killing, but agrees to one last job: Lilith (Heidi von Palleske). Then he sees Lilith with her son Abe and decides to protect rather than execute them. A stop at his old police locker replenishes their supplies and provides Abe with a teddy bear. They separate; Dakota takes a potion from a man with a mannequin and wakes from his dreams when they try to strangle him. Next he has a close encounter with a cannibal who has already nearly had a bite out of Abe, after which he forces the cannibal to take him to Lilith. Lilith leaves Abe with Dakota while she does some business that Abe, in his sole line of dialogue, warns Dakota is “bad.” Dakota follows and sees Lilith execute the leader of a cult that once tried to sacrifice Abe, but settled for her husband. She admits to being a shepherd for Sophia (Marina Anderson-Carradine), leader of the second major cult. Sophia and Miles team up to hunt down their wayward employees. Sophia has trackers implanted in all of her cult members, so they catch up with Lilith shortly after she has a romantic interlude with Dakota in a church. The truce between Miles and Sophia turns into war. Lyndon, tired of Miles betraying him, leaves him pinned to a wall; he gets down, but as he approaches Sophia, someone blasts them both. Dakota, Lilith, and Abe find an exit sealed with a digital lock, for which Abe knows the pass code; when they open the door they discover a rejuvenated above ground world. * * * The flight from a tech-filled world to sanctuary in a bounteous nature is familiar from Logan’s Run (1976) and Brave New World (1998), but Cybercity makes a lower budget alignment of technology-based evils: war, violence, spontaneous aggressive street sex, phony religious prophets motivated by profit and greed, as well as bad language; and all the usual “good” things: family, women as mothers, men as protectors, consensual 262

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gentle sex, children, and, of course, nature as natural. The post-apocalypse underground world is similar to that in Nirvana’s (1997) Marrakesh and Bombey City, although the tech element is less obvious here than the religious factions and various carnivalesque characters who practice murder and cannibalism. The alignment of technology with religion and prophets is also a major component of Wild Palms (1993). A child who, like Abe, cannot or will not speak is a significant secondary character in Wild Palms and Soldier (1998); and a teddy bear serves as a prominent motif in Screamers (1995), where it inverts the associations it has in this film. Dakota, as the man mourning the loss of his wife and child, is similar to the character Gibson played by Jean-Claude Van Damme in Cyborg (1989); but where Gibson lives in his own memories, Dakota is addicted to virtual reality images that have been falsified. Addiction to virtual reality recordings or productions of deceased loved ones is also featured in Wild Palms (1993); and the hero of Strange Days (1995) likewise spends much of his time living for moments with virtual reality recordings of a lost lover, but finally, like Dakota, trades in his memories for a new girl friend. Dakota, however, is somewhat more like Johnny in Johnny Mnemonic (1995) insofar as he thinks he has actually lost his original memories.

Cyberstalker (aka The Digital Prophet) Writers: Annie Biggs, Tony Brownrigg, Christopher Romero, and Schnele Wilson Director: Christopher Romero Date: 1996 Length: 96 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Andy Coberman (Jeffrey Combs) uses a bookstore as a front for selling hot computers and in his off hours, when he is not doing drugs, he writes and draws the comic Cyberthoughts featuring MICA, aka master computer intelligence assimilator, and the warrior Zeiss. Andy abuses his girlfriend Neuman (Annie Biggs), a Cyberthoughts addict who spends much of her time conducting vigilante justice on individuals who use the Cy-com website, but whom she deems “unworthy” because she believes they are faking allegiance or lack dedication to the goal of advancement through the levels of initiation into the cyber universe. Each time Neuman murders, she believes she acts in the service of MICA, whose voice she believes she hears, and that MICA rewards her by allowing her to ascend to progressively higher levels of evolution. Detectives Victor Salinas (Blake Bahner) and Meg Jordan (Schnele Wilson) make little progress on the case, even when Neuman herself comes in pretending to be worried because the victims were all people she knew through Cy-com. Neuman decides that Meg has been chosen by MICA as her helper and protector, so she kidnaps and tries to indoctrinate her. Victor arrives, barely in time to rescue Meg. * * * This very low-budget film is full of spontaneous sounding dialogue and arrives at a peculiar, surprisingly watchable, grade B noir “realism” that exploits popular culture in an unusual way. The comic book connection in tech-noir most often takes the form of an emphasis on caricature over characterization, as in Judge Dredd (1995), with its stylized costumes, literal approach to the dualism of good and evil, and predictably heroic conclusion. Here, the comic book triggers the transformation of a more or less harmless internet website into a social problem – a place where a stalker finds her victims – a role it also serves for Angel in Net Games (2003). Similarly, the competitiveness video game players develop with each other and with the game is an important feature of Arcade (1993), Evolver (1994), and Storm Watch (2002): in all of these films, and apparently Cyberstalker, a character of digital origin manipulates that competitiveness to serve ends of their

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own that are detrimental to the humans involved. In Cyberstalker, however, Neuman does not just play with or confront a digitally constructed virtual or otherwise artificial character, she develops her digital self as a realworld alter ego who is capable of doing what the abuse victim Neuman is not. She is the female counterpart to the far more common male serial killer; thus the film annotates the idea that women are not immune to the serial killing impulse associated with machine culture. Coberman’s treatment of his girlfriend has its parallel in the relationship between Peter’s parents in Lawnmower Man (1992), a situation that is violently corrected by Jobe, also a victim of physical abuse, who “really” does evolve through a combination of drugs and technology and then goes after those who have treated him, or his friend Peter, badly. In Cyberstalker, the abuse victim becomes the arm of vigilante justice under the direction of MICA. Vigilante justice is also featured in Interface (1984), but the “voices” in that film all belong to spoiled young adults. In Videodrome (1983), Nicki’s voice, carried on a television signal, draws Max into an evolution that can only continue to progress with the death of the body: as in Cyberstalker, the apparent merging of flesh and digital realms manifests by the gradual transformation of the flesh into something else. In White Noise (2005), voices supposed to come from “the other side” likewise draw a man into an addiction that nearly ends in his death. Here, a young woman believes she hears a voice from cyberspace telling her that she is evolving toward a higher technologically derived form – this is not quite Videodrome or Interface or White Noise, but it is definitely a tech-noir articulation of the more prophetic hype about the future role of technology in human evolution.

Cyber-Tracker Writer: Jacobsen Hart Series: Cyber-Tracker 2, 1995 (Sequel) Director: Richard Pepin Date: 1994 Length: 91 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house In this future society, Cybercore Corporation has merged with the government and is sponsoring a new justice system involving a computer that determines guilt or innocence and android Trackers who are sent out to execute the guilty. Eric Phillips (Don the “Dragon” Wilson) is the head of the secret service assigned to augment Senator Dilly’s (John Aprea) security, which has been led for six years by Ross (Richard Norton). Eric proves his worth by skillfully averting an assassination attempt on the senator and then goes home to an empty apartment: since his divorce, he has only his automated house computer Agnes for company. In the middle of the night, a member of the Union for Human Rights (UHR) is caught accessing secret information in the Cybercore lab. Dilly and Ross call Eric out and murder her in front of him. Eric then finds himself accused of the murder and the object of a Tracker sent by Police Chief Olson (Abby Dalton). Eric survives and gets help from the UHR, which happens to be led by well-known reporter Connie Griffith (Stacie Foster). The Tracker arrives and kills everyone, but Eric and Connie escape and break into the Cybercore lab where they discover a program called Echo, which has something to do with Cybercore chairman Rounds’s (Joseph Ruskin) plan, supported by Dilly and the police chief, to replace most human employees with androids. Eric and Connie escape again and, the next time Dilly makes a media announcement promoting the Cybercore justice system, Eric assassinates him. Dilly turns out to be an android, but the Cybercore justice system is dismantled after one last Tracker is sent to finish off Rounds. Eric gets a new job as Connie’s bodyguard. * * *

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This extremely violent film is similar to Interface (1984), in which spoiled university students act on judgments made by a computer; here, it is a small group of supposedly responsible and politically empowered adults who use technology to further their personal ambitions. The Trackers themselves are reminiscent of the murderous androids in The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003) insofar as they are human in outward appearance, unstoppable, and programmed primarily for assassination. One-man units comparable to the Trackers in that they apprehend, try, and convict purported malefactors, or appropriate them to some program they would never volunteer for are also prominent in Judge Dredd (1995) and Synapse (1995). Replacing all employees, not just assassins, with androids, is an expansion of the kind of thinking that made the Stepford wives (1975) possible: the real-life basis of this dramatic plot is the fear that massive job losses will result from automation. On this point, see Harry the maintenance man in Futureworld (1976), a film in which androids are obviously replacing the lower and working class and politicians are being covertly replaced by clones. See also the home computer that serves as an interactive companion for the unmarried male in The 6th Day (2000) and as a useful defense system in Xchange (2000). The murder of the human rights activist is a blunt demonstration of the priorities of Eric’s erstwhile employers and it serves to force him to make a choice he might not otherwise have made. The good man who is professionally associated with security, the police, or the military, and is framed or unjustly punished and then faced with some form of technologized justice system is a familiar tech-noir plot element: among those involving police men who, like Eric, are charged with the safety of others, are Demolition Man (1993), TekWar (1994), and Virtuosity (1995). The alignment of a female reporter or social activist and a male human against technology is also familiar in tech-noir: see Xchange (2000) for another female activist who wins the leading male character over to her political position – with a little help from the negative incentives provided by his adversaries; and the first three Universal Soldier films (1992, 1998, 1998) for a female reporter who rescues a male soldier from power mongers.

Cyber-Tracker 2 (Sequel) Writer: Richard Preston Jr. Series: Cyber-Tracker, 1994 Director: Richard Pepin Date: 1995 Length: 97 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house Eric Phillips (Don Wilson) is now a secret agent married to reporter Connie Griffith (Stacie Foster). The opening sequence shows him and his team apprehending a multi-million dollar counterfeiter with a little help from the well-programmed Tracker Number 9 (Jim Maniaci). After work, he is greeted at his new house by the computer Agnes and the cold pizza left for him by Connie. When Connie gets home, they discuss her unease about cyber-technology: she points out that there are reports of it going missing, just as there used to be reports of plutonium disappearing. In the morning, Eric watches his police chief ’s niece practice with his virtual black belt training program. Connie goes to cover a press meeting with the governor, but is waylaid while her look-alike Tracker shoots the governor. Deputy Governor Rhodes (Stephen Rowe) quickly steps up to revive the war on the UHR (see Cyber-Tracker) and demands that Police Chief Swain (Tony Burton) send a Tracker after Connie. Meanwhile, the man with the money behind Rhodes is Paris Morgan (Anthony de Longis), a former CIA agent turned mercenary international weapons dealer; Morgan employs a genius cyber-tech specialist (Sid Sham). Connie’s cameraman Jared (Steve Burton) calls Eric, as does the real Connie who wakes up in time to avoid being burned up in a gas station explosion. The three go to an old

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UHR hideout that is well stocked with weapons and still manned by Trip (John Kassir), an explosives expert. Meanwhile, Swain has infiltrated the malefactor’s illegal tap on the police line and recovered an address. Eric comes to get Swain just as an Eric-look-alike Tracker is about to kill him; they flee as the first Tracker takes on the fake Eric and is beheaded for his trouble. The fake Eric follows them back to their UHR hideout, where the wounded Trip stays behind to blow him up. Swain grabs the fake Eric’s fallen head, wires into it, and retrieves the same address he had acquired earlier. Number 9 arrives, as per Swain’s instructions, and the team heads off to the Tracker lab, which Morgan is rigging for detonation as he prepares to flee with all of his more valued employees to Zurich. Various battles ensue, but after Morgan takes Connie hostage, Number 9 makes the final shot that kills him. They all get out alive, though Number 9 is in need of repairs. * * * This sequel is even more violent than Cyber-Tracker, but the security specialist is once again teamed up with a reporter and on the run from “terminators.” Technology again serves personal ambition, but is slightly redeemed by Number 9, who is much like RoboCop (1987) reinvented as a well-trained pet. His inability to use casual forms of address, corrected at the end when he finally calls Eric, Eric, references numerous sciencefiction androids, particularly Data (Brent Spiner) from the television series Star Trek the Next Generation (1987–1994). The good person programmed to assassinate is a common tech-noir motif, best accomplished in the muchimitated Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004); here the assassins are not brainwashed originals or clones, but look-alike androids programmed for very specific purposes and with homing devices that facilitate their ability to locate and destroy on command. While somewhat akin to the law enforcers of Judge Dredd (1995), the Trackers are assigned to perform arrests or executions according to the ad hoc decisions of whoever is in charge. The upgrading of the Trackers so they can take on the appearance of their victims, or just about anyone, finds parallels in Terminator 2 (1991) and Screamers (1995). The group fleeing the Trackers ends up at a church that serves, as in RoboCop 3 (1993), as both sanctuary and escape route. Although he seems a little too eager to die for the old UHR cause, Trip’s “last stand” is similar to that of Dyson in Terminator 2 (1991); while Swain’s wiring of the head from the Eric-Tracker for a bit of information is an obvious quote from the scifi Alien 3 (1992) in which Ripley resurrects the head of the junked android Bishop to find out if the alien came with them in the escape pod – which of course it did.

Cyber Wars (aka Avatar) Writer: Christopher Hatton Director: Kuo Jian Hong Date: 2004 Country: Singapore Length: 103 min. Type: Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Cyborg Headhunter Dash Mackenzie (Genevieve O’Reilly) specializes in finding people using “sims,” or identity masking implants; her partner is the cyborg Julius (Lim Kay Siu) who spends most of his time surfing the web and enjoying various interfaces, including one that allows him to swim with dolphins. The latest “neuromorphing” technology does not just mask identity, however, it actually alters brain patterns. Joseph Lau (David Warner) hires Dash to find the neuro-morphed Edward Chan (Gerald Chew), then Dash is approached by Detective Victor Huang (Luoyong Wang) who wants her to help protect Chan. Dash is reluctant; but when

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she locates Chan, she thinks it strange that Lau’s men immediately assassinate him. So she steals a data clip from the apartment and invites Victor along when she visits Julius to see it unencrypted. The clip shows that five corporate leaders are playing the internet in imitation of an ancient Chinese game. The players include Lau, the former top player whose terminally ill, cancer-ridden body is held in cryostasis, and the ninety-fouryear-old and astonishingly well-preserved Madame Ong (Joan Chen), who has recently taken the premiere position. After Dash and Victor depart, Julius investigates further and he pays for his discovery of the five together in digital space with his life. On Dash’s suggestion, Victor’s uncle, who has retired to live outside the city as a “primitive,” creates a protocol that will tell the game someone has won and thus end it. Dash enters the virtual world and, with a little help from Julius’s construct, successfully delivers the protocol. Unfortunately, Lau’s assistant Davinder Sandhu (Michael de Mesa) has been waiting for just this sort of opportunity to take over the game by himself: Davinder holds them all in the game so they cannot escape as it disintegrates. Victor, who has been watching Dash’s progress in virtual reality, rushes to Davinder’s place – he gets there with a little help from some formerly hostile gang members who share their own private cyber-link and who now approve of his activities. Victor removes Davinder from the scenario and Dash escapes extinction in the web, again with some help from Julius’s construct, and meets up with Victor in the real world, where everyone is quite confused because the web has crashed and “everything” is gone. * * * While the corporate wars often appear as a “game” with fatal consequences for many of the pawns, in this tech-noir film the corporate heads are literally playing a game. See Webmaster (1998) for another film involving a high-stakes “game” for control of cyberspace. The general confusion that results when the game ends is comparable to, though quite different from, the placid indifference of the Fairview population in Virtual Nightmare (2000) to the turning off of their DBVR system. Cyber Wars is a more thoroughly noir film, however, and Dash, Victor, and Julius make a unique team. Victor’s uncle, who is able to develop a protocol after he has dedicated years to his plants and not his keyboard, is as unconvincing as his counterpart in Lawnmower Man 2 (1996). Lau, as the fatally ill man kept in stasis awaiting a cure or death who is betrayed by his trusted assistant, has counterparts in Freejack (1992), Android Affair (1995), and Encrypt (2003). The gang that opposes the “game,” but organizes a private cyber-link, is comparable to the tattooed opposition to the Zoe implants in Final Cut (2004) insofar as both groups form a united and not entirely passive resistance to a widely sanctioned practice. The background tech mix of Cyber Wars also includes Dash’s nephew who gets his mechanical eye replaced with a real one, the dragonfly-like transmitters used by Lau and Davinder, and Dash’s cat, which alerts her to the fact that her apartment has been bugged by bringing her one of the transmitters left by intruders. Julius’s virtual dolphin friend has a biological counterpart in Johnny Mnemonic (1995); and virtual encounters with constructs of deceased individuals, such as Dash’s virtual world encounter with Julius, also take place in Nirvana (1997).

Cyberzone (aka Droid Gunner) Writer: William C. Martell Director: Fred Olen Ray Date: 1995 Length: 95 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers It is 2077 and an earthquake fifty years ago so changed the continent that Phoenix became a busy sea and spaceport and New Angeles a blossoming crime and vice free underwater colony. In Phoenix, the wealthy 267

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live in high rises and domed suburbs with filtered air, while the poor live in smog and crime-filled tenement areas. Jack Ford (Marc Singer) is a droid bounty hunter in trouble with a company who says the problem will disappear if he reports to Mr. Reginald (Cal Bartlett) of the Bennett Corporation. Four of the company pleasure droids have been stolen from a Jupiter mining colony and Reginald wants them back. Reginald gives Ford an assistant, Beth Enright (Rochelle Swanson), who will be useful because she has the technical expertise to turn off droids without damaging them and because she will make sure Ford does not incite litigation: droids are illegal on earth so the problem has to be handled quietly. They start with Chewbah (Robert Quarry), an underworld crime lord, to whom Ford has to deliver a droid head for a bounty anyway. Chewbah denies knowledge of the droids, but eventually proves to have been the middleman who arranged for them to be stolen by Hawks (Matthias Hues) for Mr. Humberstone (Robin Clarke), who owns and runs New Angeles: Chewbah reports on Ford to Humberstone. Ford and Beth’s next stop is at a house of prostitution: while Ford is getting up close to do his droid scans on the occupants, Beth applies for a job. Ford finds a woman with a bounty on her head, but not the droids; Beth gets an education. They defeat Chewbah’s men and Humberstone’s assassin droid (Johannes V. Meerkerk), and then they find Hawks in Ford’s favorite mutant dance bar. Hawks is annoyed because Humberstone cut his fee in half for misplacing one droid; so, for a price, he teams up with Ford. They get back into the facility by pretending Beth is the missing droid; the men recover the three droids, and then go back for Beth. They end up in a stand-off with security man Walsh (Kin Shriner), who sets Ford’s gold pocket watch on the floor before they start shooting: Walsh dies, Hawks is hit and then dies, Ford gets the money and the girl (Beth). The missing droid, disguised as a nun, wanders off with a street derelict somewhere on earth. * * * Cyberzone does not leave much to the imagination with regard to activities in the brothel or the mutant dance bar. The pleasure droids carry the idea of the programmable android woman to the limits of male sexual fantasy; but Rochelle Swanson’s performance as the flesh and blood woman pretending to be a droid is unique. Otherwise, Cyberzone is an entertaining mixture of self-conscious and obviously stylized film motifs, most drawn from Blade Runner (1982), and many from the western, particularly the stand-off of the gun slingers and associated gun-twirling scene near the end. The gold watch symbolizes both Ford’s past love, as it is all he has left of the girl whose picture it holds, and his failure to help her when he should have; it also appears in his nightmares. For Beth, it becomes an indication that the man who smells of ‘bot oil might be worth getting to know better: the picture inside, which she sees before film viewers do at the end, even looks a bit like her. The old-fashioned timepiece is symbolically consistent with the familiar android problem of abbreviated life spans – see Blade Runner (1982) and other films – although the androids in this film do not seem to have sufficient consciousness to be bothered by such things. The watch may also be taken, as the unicorn dream in the director’s release of Blade Runner (1992) so often is, as an indication that Ford himself is an android. This possibility is also suggested by Ford’s name, which seems to be a pun on Harrison Ford, Blade Runner’s Deckard. Matthias Hues also appears as the D1 unit in Digital Man (1995); here Hawks’s final concern about getting “his share” will resonate with fans of Alien (1979) in which the ship’s crew is obsessed with “getting their share” and all die. The assassin droid’s voice inflection sounds a bit like Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003) star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Cyborg Writer: Kitty Chalmers Series: Cyborg 2: The Glass Shadow, 1993 (Sequel) Cyborg 3: The Recycler, 1995 (Sequel) Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1989 Length: 86 min. Type: Cyborg Bioengineering: Diseases and cures  rologue Voice-Over: First, there was the collapse of civilization, anarchy, genocide, starvation; then, when P it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, we got the plague, the living death – quickly closing its fist over the entire planet. And then we heard the rumors that the last scientists were working on a cure that would end the plague and restore the world. Restore it – WHY? I LIKE the dead. I LIKE the Misery. I LIKE this world! The words of Fender (Vincent Klyn), leader of a gang of punk thugs, set the stage for a battle for the future. Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon), one of the last scientists working out of Atlantic City, volunteers to become a cyborg so that she can retrieve data from the New York City computers needed to cure the plague. On the return trip, Fender murders her protector, but the red-garbed Pearl is rescued by Gibson (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who, as numerous flashbacks reveal, is grieving the loss of his adopted family: a young woman who hired him to get her and her two younger siblings out of the city after the death of their father. As Gibson, the man of few words, explained to her: “That’s what I do, get people out of the city.” Fender found their rural hideaway and forced Haley (Haley Peterson), the younger sister, to try to hold a barbed wire that was all that kept her brother and sister from falling to their deaths at the bottom of a well; when she failed, Fender took her as a plaything. Now, Gibson faces Fender again, but Pearl goes with Fender voluntarily as she believes him the most capable of getting her back to Atlanta where he can be eliminated; Fender takes the “skin job” because he wants to own the cure and thus “be god.” Soon after, Gibson finds himself teamed up with the eavesdropping Nady (Deborah Richter), who believes Gibson should help Pearl; Gibson claims he just wants revenge, but they follow the gang together. A skirmish leaves Gibson crucified in the sun; he topples his cross and Nady cuts him loose. In the final confrontation, Fender kills Nady, then Gibson kills Fender and is reunited with Haley. Pearl gets her data to Atlanta and comments with regard to Gibson: “It’s strange, but I feel he’s the real cure for this world.” * * * This film shows off Albert Pyun’s signature style and plot: science and technology provide the reason for the film’s events, but remain on the sidelines most of the time as part of a distant hope for a better future while a battle for human survival is fought in the ruins of a fallen civilization by male and female warriors skilled in the martial arts, quasi-medieval weaponry, and guns. The sets alternate between the beauties of a thriving nature and useless rusting metal. Filters cast the world in red and blue to dramatize both fire and water and the presentations of the combatants, particularly Fender’s chain mail, which shimmers and reflects the light. The frequent flashbacks; staged tableaux, such as that of Gibson’s crucifixion; and intermittent full moons, setting suns, night skies, and rain may further contribute to the viewer’s perception of the film as an artistically rendered mythical event rather than the grade B narrative its violence and lack of dialogue would otherwise suggest. The story of a man taking vengeance on punk thugs who murder his loved ones follows that in the Mel Gibson films Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2 (1981). The aptly named Gibson, as well as the data retrieval and cure-for-the-plague story line, also suggests a connection to the cyberpunk author William Gibson, his short 269

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story “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), and the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) in which the plague is technology itself. The quest to get the true cure for the plague into the right hands finds new life in Absolon (2003). Pearl’s final words, however, emphasize that rebuilding the world really means recovering the conventional social ideals that existed before everything fell apart. Gibson’s flashbacks to moments of lost domestic bliss symbolize the extent to which this world has become a memory.

Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (Sequel) Writers: Mark Geldman, Michael Schroeder, and Ron Yanover Series: See Cyborg, 1989 Director: Michael Schroeder Date: 1993 Length: 99 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers In 2074 Pinwheel Robotics is an American cybernetics corporation with a spider for a logo and a plan to annihilate its Japanese competitor with an explosive called “glass shadow.” “Cyborgs” of the kind that really seem to be androids have replaced humans in all sorts of occupations from prostitute to soldier, so billions of dollars are at stake. The product is tested on the android Dreana (Renee Allman), who detonates at the point of sexual orgasm: the Pinwheel VIP observers are pleased and arrange for Cash Reese (Angelina Jolie) to be prepared for the real job. Their plan is disrupted by Mercy (Jack Palance), a war veteran turned renegade and philosopher by his beloved and now dead Velma. Mercy’s access to telecommunications equipment allows him to see just about everything. He plays matchmaker with Cash and her trainer Colt Ricks (Elias Koteas), showing only his lips or his eye on various television and computer monitors, and orchestrates their escape from the underground Pinwheel facility to the grimy topside world occupied by those further down the economic ladder. Pinwheel sends Daniel Bench (Billy Drago), a psychotic “cyborg” tracker to retrieve Cash: Bench is still undergoing derma-therapy to restore the damage done to his face years before by Velma when he interfered with her efforts to smuggle androids to freedom. When Cash and Colt separate briefly, Cash attracts the attentions of both a palmist, who recognizes Cash’s worth, and the entrepreneurial Miss Chen (Karen Sheperd); and Bench manages to plant a tracker in Colt’s eye. Cash and Colt reconnect in an old museum with a nuclear family display, a lot of bust portraits, and dinosaur skeletons, and Colt explains that he thought the Pinwheel plan to build a perfect android was an exercise in playing god and he felt he was falling into the same game when he began to experience feelings for Cash. Bench and Chen arrive; their prey escape and are led by a cybernetic dog sent by Mercy to a border town where Colt participates in snuff combat for the money to get them to Mombasa, a free zone for unlicensed “cyborgs”: his fight partner is Bench. Mercy distracts the Pinwheel agents that close in at the end, so Cash and Colt escape again. Mercy also arranges for the Pinwheel VIP to detonate a glass shadow stash other than that implanted in Cash. Later, Colt plants a tree outside his house in the desert and, when it is grown and he is old, he lies down to die in Cash’s arms. * * * Cyborg 2 begins with a literal dramatization of the sexual metaphor heavily implied in Eve of Destruction (1990) and then quickly moves on to an android–human love story that draws on and reverses the meanings of specific motifs from earlier films. Where the female cyborg in Cyborg was a human with artificial components, Cash is a biosynthetic android. Clips from Cyborg appear in the scenes where Mercy explains to Cash, who has just been primed with glass shadow, that the only one who ever made it all the way had a protector and then offers her a suggestion: Colt. Mercy’s communication style reverses the role of Videodrome’s (1983) talking television sets insofar as he is interested in directing a human male’s romance with an android in the 270

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world, rather than his suicide out of desire for a cathode ray tube phantom. Cash and Colt’s names underscore both the capitalistic motivations of the cybernetics industry and the weaponry of the old-fashioned westernstyle hero, with Cash Reese perhaps referencing Kyle Reese, the protector sent back to save Sarah Connor in Terminator (1984). The couple’s revelation in the old museum hints at the museum in Slipstream (1989). The “snuff combat” reworks the climax of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the third of the Mad Max (Mel Gibson) films. Bench’s skin problems complicate the associations of Blade Runner’s (1982) “skin jobs.” The flight to freedom fills in what Blade Runner leaves out and reworks that in Logan’s Run (1976) such that the couple arrives in a desert not a forest. The final shot of the still youthful and beautiful Cash beside the aged Colt punctuates the concern with mortality that appears in many android films – Mercy believes that the human–cyborg relationship is all about time.

Cyborg 3: The Recycler (Sequel) Writers: Barry Victor, Troy Bolotnick, and Straw Weisman Series: See Cyborg, 1989 Director: Michael Schroeder Date: 1995 Length: 90 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers The two hundred year golden age is over, the last corporation gone, and humans now hunt “cyborgs,” who really seem to be androids, for parts. Cytown is a five hundred square mile free zone in the desert where damaged and partially pilfered androids live protected by a defense system that humans have not yet infiltrated, but which none of the androids it protects knows how to repair. Shortly after Colt’s death of old age, Cash (Khrystyne Haje) discovers she is pregnant and goes to Doctor Hope for help, but “Hope” has died, and her replacement refers her to Evans (Zach Galligan), a computer genius who works out of a lab hidden in some desert caves. There, Cash tries to run an abortion program because the baby is draining her power and she is afraid it will kill her; the fetus saves itself by creating a power surge that shorts out all the machines. Even worse, Cash is followed to this potential sanctuary by recycler Anton Lewellyn (Richard Lynch), a scavenger who pays tribute to Lord Talon (Malcolm McDowell), and his cyborg Jocko (Andrew Bryniarski). Lewellyn visits Cash’s doctor, spots the ultrasound, and recognizes it as an exceptional opportunity for profit. Cash and Evans are forced to head for Cytown. After getting past the security field that causes their jeep to stop functioning by the creative method of walking – something the scavengers have apparently never thought of – they find the androids in a bar, playing poker and generally behaving like the bored occupants of a largely abandoned western frontier town. Evans repairs many of the broken down androids and they, inspired by the very existence of Cash’s baby and Jocko, who defects to their side, successfully defend themselves against the army of recyclers summoned by Lewellyn to destroy them. * * * Set primarily in dilapidated desert buildings, this violent film applies the idea of killing humans for body parts found in Killer Deal (1999) and Future Kick (1991) to androids, such that androids become the selfaware victims of genocide. This displacement combines the issues of class and racial inequality as factors determining social hierarchy: the androids become both the lower class, perceived as nothing but a source of resources and labor by the upper class, and a “racially” inferior group targeted for extinction. See the “flesh fair” in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) for another vivid demonstration of racially inflected attitudes toward human-like androids. The human race, or most of it, is the target of genocidal assault – for death by disease – in Global Effect (2002). 271

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The male human helping a female android to safety away from humans so that she can birth a new technohuman age is a play on the Terminator story about a man who protects a woman, soon to be pregnant with the future leader of the human resistance to machines that want to exterminate the human race. Likewise, American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994) is about a human mother, the last fertile woman on earth, fleeing with an incubation tube containing her baby through the post-apocalypse world to safety. In Cyborg 3, it is an android who flees and then finds herself surrounded by helpful protectors dedicated to her baby, seen only as a metal tube with a flashing light. As a parody, Cyborg 3 references the happy ending tableau, all too familiar in tech-noir as well as other genres, of a couple with their baby or obviously getting ready to procreate: see Brave New World (1998) for one application of this film closing that is all the worse for its addition to an otherwise classic dystopian tale. For a more drawn out visualization of the actual crossbreeding of a human and monster-machine involving a woman that really wants no part of the production, see Demon Seed (1977).

Cyborg Cop Writer: Greg Latter Series: Cyborg Cop 2 (aka Cyborg Soldier), 1994 (Sequel) Cyborg Cop 3 (aka Terminal Impact), 1995 Director: Sam Firstenberg Date: 1993 Length: 97 min. Type: Cyborg Behavior modification Brothers Jack (David Bradley) and Phillip Ryan (Todd Jensen) work together as undercover policemen for Captain Callan (Ron Smerczak). After Jack kills a member of an important publishing family who is threatening to shoot a female hostage, he is driven out of the DEA by all the negative press coverage he gets from a reporter named Cathy (Alonna Shaw). Phillip later asks Jack to look after his soon-to-be-adopted son Frank while he goes on an Agency mission to stop a drug operation run by Kessel (John Rhys-Davies) on a third-world Caribbean island. Kessel uses the profits from his “agricultural” and “pharmaceutical” interests to fund cybernetics research by Dr. Stechman (Robert Whitehead). Kessel’s first deal in his new product line is the sale of the prototype K3 cyborg assassin (Rufus Smart) as assassin of the local country’s leader. The Agency assault is cut short by Kessel’s extensive defenses. Phillip’s entire team is killed and Phillip himself is captured and turned into the next level cyborg: the procedure begins as one arm is sliced off with a laser and replaced with a robotic one. Jack receives a package sent earlier by his brother and heads off to the rescue; he almost immediately hooks up with Cathy, who quickly becomes much more friendly and helpful. While they check out bodies at the morgue, Kessel sends the prototype to kill Jack, but Jack knocks out the prototype. Cyborg Phillip is ordered to execute the duplicitous Captain Callan, who wants to be paid for his services and, when the prototype is disabled, he is in danger of being sold for the assassination job even though two more days are needed to complete his emotion eradication program. At the show-down in the laboratory, Phillip does not murder Jack as ordered, but instead helps him take down Kessel by battling the prototype; Jack has to finish him off by beheading him in a tricky motorcycle stunt. Phillip is left for dead in Kessel’s lab, but Jack gets a readymade family: Cathy and the boy Frank. * * *

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The familiar inner city “zone” setting of the opening sequence is quickly relocated to a third-world Caribbean island where technology is used to improperly influence politics and promote illegal activity. Kessel’s “agricultural” and “pharmaceutical” interests, represented by semi-clothed women bagging drugs, were already being replaced in films released in the same year as this one by representations of far more sophisticated combinations of drugs and technology: see, for example, Wild Palms (1993) and TekWar (1994). The Caribbean setting provides opportunities for reggae interludes and zombies, or animate corpses, such as those that appear in Night of the Living Dead (1968). Here, the zombies are dead men reanimated as cyborgs and controlled by the man in charge, not the scientist who actually conducts the cyborg-making procedure. As in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999) and Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995), it seems “zombies” make more efficient thugs and assassins, so there is money to be made by investing in their development. The emotions erasure deemed necessary to make effective cyborgs out of humans and which seems to account, at least in part, for their zombie-like behavior, is also featured in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), as is the failure of the process. Memory erasure also fails in RoboCop (1987), Duplicates (1992), and Fugitive Mind (1999), thus undermining the villain’s initial project. Men turned into cyborgs against their will who show their humanity by refusing to kill loved ones or innocents appear in Prototype X29A (1992) and the second and third Universal Soldier films; these Universal Soldier films also feature the brothers-in-arms theme. The male security expert teamed up with a female reporter appears in all of the Universal Soldier and Cyber-Tracker films. The young adopted son who completes the family unit in Cyborg Cop is a not-fullyexplained character that has few parallels, but might be compared to the horrible Hob in the drug lord’s simulated family in RoboCop 2 (1990).

Cyborg Cop 2 (aka Cyborg Soldier) (Sequel) Writers: Sam Firstenberg and Jon Stevens Series: See Cyborg Cop, 1993 Director: Sam Firstenberg Date: 1994 Length: 96 min. Type: Cyborg Drug lord Starkraven (Morgan Hunter) attacks a cocaine-packing plant because the local supervisor has not been making his security payments; when the police arrive, Starkraven takes the semi-clothed male and female, white and black, packing “slaves” hostage. Reinstated DEA officer Jack Ryan (David Bradley) and his partner arrive on the scene. Jack tries to negotiate but realizes he has made a bad move when Starkraven reveals that Jack killed his brother the year before: Starkraven kills Jack’s partner, but is taken into custody and sentenced to death. Starkraven is taken from his death row cell by the Anti-Terrorist Group (ATG), an agency that answers only to Washington for its cyborg soldier program. The doctor in charge shows off his latest accomplishments, including Starkraven rebuilt as Spartacus, to a group of appreciative agents, including Liz McDowell (Jill Pierce), and later steps out of a celebration party for a tryst. When his female partner tosses his cyborg control bracelet on the floor, Spartacus is released. After destroying the lab, he and his team commandeer the cyborg manufacturing facility at the Hurricane South Power Plant: their plan is to create an army and then slaves to serve the soldiers. Meanwhile, Jack’s DEA supervisor has given him a contact name for information about Starkraven’s supposed prison escape, former sheriff Sam Pickens (Victor Melleney), who was retired a few months earlier when he got close to figuring out who was behind the prison disappearances. Jack teams up with Liz, the ATG agent in charge of damage control. They arm themselves with the state-of-the-art equipment Liz has stashed in her car trunk and infiltrate the plant, only to find Starkraven has taken Jack’s adopted son Frank (see Cyborg Cop) hostage. Jack gets him out of Spartacus’s hands, and the

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boy cleverly activates a giant magnet that grabs Spartacus; Jack then drops him and electrocutes him. Jack uses his dead partner’s ten-year service lighter to set the place on fire. Jack, Liz, and Frank walk away without serious injuries. * * * This film has a very high body count, some bare breasts, and a daylight 1970s made-for-television look. The recycling of corpses theme continues from Cyborg Cop, except that this process now makes the product magnetic, and that product is now destined for government sanctioned military use, just as in Universal Soldier (1992). Unlike GR 13, however, Starkraven is not just a soldier having a breakdown, he is a bona fide psycho-killer: the idea that killers are good candidates for transformation into cyborgs is also featured, with even less success, in RoboCop 2 (1990). The appropriation of humans for how-to-make-assassins military experiments is also featured in Duplicates (1992). The death row appropriation is revised in New Crime City (1994), such that a former policeman is resurrected after his “execution” to perform a service for the state. Spartacus’s behavior is comparable to the androids in the earlier Project Shadowchaser (1992, 1994) and Terminator (1984, 1991). These and other films about killer cyborgs and androids expand on the idea that the cyborg is inclined to behave like a serial killer posed in Terminal Man (1974). Usually, these killers act according to human programming; but here the “cyborg,” much like the invisible AI of Terminator who apparently does not like having an off switch either, just wakes up wanting to exterminate humans. More specifically, in Cyborg Cop 2, the cyborgs created to serve an anti-terrorist project turn directly against all humans, not just those responsible for creating them. Androids act more covertly to further the same ambition in Nemesis (1992), although by Nemesis 2 and 3 (1995, 1996), they adopt less subtle approaches. The retired Sam Pickens is a distant “B” film revision of characters who provide information and clues about a technological mystery, such as Sol Roth, who decides to “go home” when he realizes the truth about soylent green (1973), and the old man who lives with his cats in Logan’s Run (1976). The film music is just peculiar.

Cyborg Cop 3 (aka Terminal Impact) Writers: Jeff Albert and Dennis Dimster Series: See Cyborg Cop, 1993 Director: Yossi Wein Date: 1995 Length: 94 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Cyborg Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment One night, television news reporter Evelyn Reed (Jennifer McShane) gets a call from Derrick (Jurgen Hellberg), a man who works at the local university claiming to have information on Delta Tech Labs – the lab occupies an entire wing of the university. She goes to meet him at night and he shows her all the physical education majors sleeping in a room dedicated to what is supposed to be a dream monitoring experiment: the last bed is empty because its former occupant is in surgery with Dr. Phelps. When Reed goes back to her car, she is attacked from behind, knocked out, and given the same implant Dr. Phelps was giving the student; but when she wakes, she is told she was mugged. Later, Sheen (Ian Roberts), head of Delta Tech, invites Reed to come and observe some demonstrations. She goes and witnesses the test subject Adam’s (Justin Illusion) ability to withstand high levels of radiation and a high-speed auto collision. Left alone in Sheen’s office, she

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then sees Adam kill her cameraman on the surveillance screen, so she steals a chip that controls the power supply to the cyborgs. Sheen has the Marshall’s office send men to bring her in. The job goes to Max (Bryan Genesse) and Saint (Frank Zagarino), who usually collect bounties for locating tax evaders and men who are delinquent on their child support payments. Reed, who has fled the lab, gets a ride from them before they realize she is their new assignment; later, she explains that the lab is involved in the experimental conversion of humans into cyborgs by injecting them with insect DNA and control chips. Max and Saint decide to help her and hide her in a museum closed down due to lack of funds; there, she admits she left the chip in their car – which was wrecked when they were pursued by some of Sheen’s men. Adam tracks her to the museum; Sheen follows, and a meeting is arranged at a junkyard (where the car now is) for an exchange of Reed, who is now a hostage, for the chip. At the junkyard, more fighting ensues, Adam explodes, and Reed, now a walking zombie, collapses, as presumably all the cyborgs do because their power supply chips are no longer working properly. Max and Saint then appropriate a crop-dusting plane from a tax evader, fill the hopper with gas, and, after evacuating the students, douse the Delta Tech wing at the University and set it on fire. Sheen furiously watches his office collection of curios burn, including a sculpture of a spider, and meets an ambiguous fate in the radioactive demo chamber. * * * This film has nothing in particular to do with the earlier Cyborg Cop films, except a sparse story line, questionable cyborgs, and violent interludes in a variety of settings. As in Cyborg Cop, the man with the money is worried about delivery deadlines related to the marketing of his cyborgs. The power plant theme referenced in Cyborg Cop 2 as the location for the manufacture of cyborgs is expanded here so that the cyborgs are produced to imitate the radioactivity-resistant cockroach: injections of insect DNA turn the human blood of the students into insect blood. The insect–man DNA merger also appears in The Fly (1986, 1989) and Mimic (1997, 2001), but these films lack the Cyborg Cop 3 suggestion that the experiments might be a good idea if they help produce men that can clean up places like Chernobyl. In terms of sets, this film is most interesting for the attention to signs of corporate investing in university research and of the lack of funding available to museums. Sheen has a large collection of what appear to be expensive museum pieces in his offices, including one that looks like a spider – a popular tech-noir motif, but the presumably public museum has been closed. See Slipstream (1989) and Cyborg 2 (1993) for effective uses of a closed or deserted public museum as a setting for the development of the human–machine relationship, but without the direct implication that corporate funding has been redirected to other initiatives; and Encrypt (2003) for a privately owned museum that was publicly accessible in the days before the fall.

Cypher Writer: Brian King Director: Vincenzo Natali Date: 2002 Length: 96 min. Type: Behavior modification Sebastian Rooks (Jeremy Northam) is his own secret agent: he uses a powerful technique he developed and sold to Digicore to brainwash himself into being Morgan Sullivan, a man hired by Mr. Finster (Nigel Bennett) for Digicore. As he flies about the country going to conferences, supposedly as a spy who is transmitting information to Digicore, Digicore is actually brainwashing him to believe he is Jack Thursby. As Jack Thursby, he applies to work for rival company Sunway Systems; except, thanks to secret agent Rita Foster (Lucy Liu), Sullivan arrives

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at Sunway still believing he is Sullivan. Sunway is delighted because they had hired Rooks to deliver a Digicore agent they could turn into a double agent. Sunway sends Sullivan/Thursby about the country with disks, all to build Digicore’s impression that he is working as they planned: as a secret agent for them. Finally, Sunway sends him to make a transaction at their primary core, a bizarre underground facility accessible only by elevator, intending to set him up with corrupt data that will cause serious problems for Digicore when they steal it. His driver for the job is Mr. Finster, who is pretending to Sunway to be a double agent in Digicore, but is really loyal to Digicore. Finster tells him that Rooks hired him to hire Sullivan; now Finster wants Sullivan to give him the disk he gets while inside the facility. Once inside, agent Virgil Dunn (David Hewlett), who was Sunway’s front-line security man back in the pre-high-tech days, realizes that Sullivan is a double agent, but not before the disk Rita gave Sullivan to replace Sunway’s has done its search, find, and erase task. Rita rescues him in the nick of time in a stunt involving a helicopter and Sullivan leaping from the edge of the access silo to grab her hands. They return to their house, where Sullivan/Thursby finally realizes he is Rooks and blows up all the forces converging on him. As they happily sail on the open water under the sun, Rooks shows Rita that the disk contains what is now the only copy of a Sunway file ordering her termination; he tosses it into the sea. * * * All the multiple layers of this high-tech, Bond-style, corporate espionage adventure are leveled by the single motivation of one master of technology: his desire to protect the woman he loves. The confusion of personalities largely traceable to the main character’s own actions and eventually sorted out by the love factor is also central to Total Recall (1990). In Cypher, however, a better-than-Bond agent returns to being the man he was before his caper began and the corporate wars presumably continue. Unlike Total Recall, no effort whatever is made to address corporate controlled technology as a social problem beyond the deletion required to protect one man’s personal interests. Like Altered States’s (1980) Jesup, Rooks subjects himself to a process he invented and, just as Eddie’s trip ends with his realization that he loves his wife, Rooks’s adventure culminates with his return to Rita – whom he was smart enough to know he loved from the beginning. Altered States is informed by 1960s drug culture, so Jesup takes drugs in search of enlightenment. In new millennia tech-noir, drugs are usually pharmaceutical snake-oil, so smart but ethically unsubtle individuals might capitalize on them, but are not so foolish as to believe they offer anything but profit. The meat refrigeration truck scene in which Rita tells Sullivan he has to take an injection if he wants answers revisits Neo’s red and blue pill options in The Matrix (1999) – both men seek the “truth,” not “enlightenment.” The Digicore “brainwashing” technique updates that applied in A Clockwork Orange (1971), while the actual images and verbal commands look a little like those used by the Brave New World (1998) director to program someone to commit murder. Rooks’s flashbacks, however, converge with his dreams and eventually reconverge with his original authentic self. The identification of Tuttle as the first speaker at Sullivan’s first “brainwashing” session and the rescue scene at the end both compare with specific scenes in Brazil (1985) – except, of course, for the fact that Rooks really does get rescued.

Darkdrive Writer: Alec Carlin Director: Phillip J. Roth Date: 1996 Length: 90 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Cyborg

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Steven Falcon (Ken Olandt) designed a virtual reality matrix into which people’s minds and forms can be downloaded, but the physical body dies during the process. The Zircon Corporation turned the invention into a prison to which convicted criminals are “exiled” from a chair wired into the matrix. Falcon’s opening voice-over explains that this is the story of the last three seconds of his life. He is fleeing from hit men on the ground led by Zircon representative Matthew Stolopin (Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi) and supported by a helicopter and tracking devices. Falcon cuts out the tracker implanted in his chest, crosses the “bridge,” gets into the Zircon facility, and exiles himself. Stolopin shoots him to make sure he cannot return. A time-loop begins, or seems to, and Stolopin exiles the treasonous double agent R.J. Tilda (Claire Stansfield), but there is a hacker problem that causes lightning and other anomalies in the system. Two guys are, in fact, hacking into the project, referenced on their monitors as the “Ex Isle Chair Project,” but after they too experience anomalous feedback effects they die, and people on the surrounding street either die or, like a little girl named Tammy, vanish. Falcon arrives with a cleanup team, decides Zircon killed everyone, and goes off to his island house with his wife Julie (Julie Benz), who tells him she is pregnant just before a helicopter appears and blows her up. Later, Stolopin retrieves Falcon from a bout of heavy drinking, claiming that the problem was an exiled “Shadowman” who can access the system through a chair on the other side. Stolopin can now both exile and retrieve a person and he convinces Falcon to go and get the Shadowman. Falcon is implanted with a tracker, given a disk with a code; in combination with his handprint, these items are supposed to enable him to return from the chair on the other side. On the other side, Falcon meets various type characters, including a Doorman (William Hall Jr.) at Zeaks bar, two “Middlemen” (Brian Faker and Brian Finney), both working for Tilda, and eventually, after a bit of torture while strung up on a meat hook and numerous inexplicable and aborted “retrievals” and “exiles,” the Shadowman turns out to be his double. Falcon and the Shadowman return to reality together: Stolopin is thrilled because now they are “hard-wired to the matrix,” but then Falcon’s double (?) makes Zircon explode. Falcon rematerializes with Tammy and Julie … somewhere; then another energy blast sends them all somewhere else. * * * This film goes a little beyond the usual loops, betrayals, and other conventional noir complications, such that the story really does not make sense, unless, possibly, there is more than one virtual reality, but there is no revelation that this is the case, as there is in The Thirteen Floor (1999). While it lacks narrative coherence, this film is worth a brief look for several reasons. First, it presents a more fully “noir” view of the criminal system posed in Demolition Man (1993), in which criminals are supposedly rehabilitated while suspended in virtual reality. Second, it goes a step beyond the virtual electric chair execution posed in Menno’s Mind (1997) during which prisoners do, in fact, die. In Darkdrive, “exiled” criminals are physically executed, but their minds and forms move on to an unpleasant place. Julie’s appearance in this world conflates the virtual with the afterlife that also awaits those who die by means other than the exile chair. Third, Darkdrive predates Matrix (1999), Nirvana (1997), and eXistenZ (1999). Unlike The Matrix, it at least seems to establish the “real” world, where Falcon has the house he goes to with his wife after leaving Zircon, as a place of natural beauty. The shabby virtual world is where the “type” characters – the Middlemen and Tilda – conduct the worst kinds of capitalist enterprises. More developed versions of these types also appear in the later Matrix films (2003, 2003). In addition, Darkdrive, like Nirvana and eXistenZ, ends in confusion about where the “real” world begins and ends, although this earlier film seems to end more happily insofar as the guy gets the girl … and the inexplicable Tammy as well.

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Death Watch Source: Based on the novel by David Compton titled The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, 1974, aka The Unsleeping Eye, 1973 Writers: David Rayfiel and Bertrand Tavernier Director: Bertrand Tavernier Countries: France, United Kingdom, and West Germany Date: 1980 Length: 128 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Cyborg The film opens with Roddy (Harvey Keitel), a television cameraman-reporter, getting an experimental eye implant that serves as both camera and recorder and provides continuous live feeds to his station. Roddy thinks the implant is fantastic, but it does have one caveat – he has to keep a light source on it at all times. His wife Tracey (Thérèse Liotard) provides voice-overs about his experiences with this device: the initial voice-over about how he walked all the first day is repeated at the end of the film, but without her reference to their having been separated for three years. Roddy’s first post-implant assignment is Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider), a relatively young writer who learns that she is going to die within two months. In a world in which people no longer die of diseases, but primarily of old age, Katherine’s impending demise is an event worthy of intense media attention. She thinks she escapes it all by making an exit through a flea market change room, but Roddy befriends her at the Christian hostel she goes to for the night. Roddy is covertly providing a live broadcast of her supposedly successful flight from the media in a show called “Death Watch.” They end up in a dilapidated waterside shack and Roddy goes into town to get her some makeup and a dress. While walking home in the dusk, he has second thoughts about what he is doing to her and throws his flashlight into the water. The removal of the light source causes immediate pain and he screams for Kate’s help; she comes and quickly grasps the situation. Since he is no longer able to film her she takes him along to her ex-husband’s (Max von Sydow) country home where she commits suicide as the only means of escaping media attention and taking control of her final destiny. * * * Death Watch is, in part, a speculative film about the effect changes in longevity might have on the human condition: death is deviance in this new world and, as such, it is an object worthy of dedicated and en mass voyeurism enabled by the media. Network (1976) plays out a similar theme with a suicidal newsman who is eventually assassinated on air to salvage both ratings and administrative jobs, while conventional talk-drama turns into harsh satiric representations of the media in the violent action-packed RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1991) and Running Man (1987). The intrusion of surveillance technology into personal life is the basis of numerous tech-noir film plots, though only The Truman Show (1998) matches Death Watch insofar as it turns such content into the basis of an ongoing television show. Speaking Parts (1989) adds alternative complexities to the filming of the death experience in that it presents the author, director, and actor, as well as the obsessive viewer. Other tech-noir films take up disease as a potential threat: in Mimic (1997) and Absolon (2003), for example, a plague threatens to render humans extinct, but both of these films are more about death as a collective catastrophe rather than the final and most individual of all experiences. See Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) for a starker contrast between the perception of individual and mass deaths. Katherine’s death by suicide makes her not only a victim of disease, but, like John in Brave New World (1980) who is also pursued by the media, she is the victim of a gawking uncomprehending collective. Katherine, like John, is driven to her final act by her inability to control even the most mundane and private aspects of her life. The film begins 278

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and ends, however, much like Altered States (1980), as a story about a man who separates from his wife, has a close encounter with technology, and decides to go back to her. The voice-overs by Roddy’s wife about Roddy provide an auditory frame pointing to internal experiences rather than the external visual and voyeuristic ones sought by the cyborg Roddy and his audience.

Demolition Man Writers: Peter M. Lenkov, Robert Reneau, and Daniel Waters Director: Marco Brambilla Date: 1993 Length: 115 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Behavior modification In 1996 Los Angeles, policeman John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), aka the “demolition man,” is framed as a hostage killer by criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes): both men receive long-term cryo-incarceration and programming sentences. Much later, in 2032 in San Angeles, of which the former Los Angeles is but one part, society has become so peaceful that even the use of obscene language is subject to fine, policemen are called protectors, and Taco Bell is the only restaurant to have survived the franchise wars. This banal and seemingly affluent utopia is maintained by the criminalization of dissenters: apprehended malefactors are still subject to cryo-incarceration and programming. When Simon is released for his parole hearing, however, he knows just how to escape because the ambitious Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), designer of San Angeles society, arranged for his programming to emphasize martial arts and the mission to kill Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary). Friendly leads the resistance movement that maintains its headquarters in the abandoned underground areas of the city. Simon creates so much mayhem that when protector Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock) suggests thawing Spartan out to deal with him, her superiors agree. Unfortunately, John’s programming emphasized knitting, but he agrees to help out. Simon heads for the San Angeles Museum, the only place he can get guns. John soon follows and is also quick to spot the flaws in the seemingly perfect society, notably Cocteau’s manipulative strategies and the fact that the so-called outsiders are stealing food because they are hungry. He is also less than thrilled by the electronically mediated sexual contact that has become the norm since AIDS and other diseases led to the outlaw of fluid transfers. He does make contact with the underground, where he enjoys a rat-meat burger and a beer, learns that he was not responsible for the deaths of Simon’s hostages because they were already dead before he supposedly killed them, solves the law enforcement problem presented by Simon, and inspires a social revolution by, among other things, insisting on more fluid transfers with Lenina. * * * This film is an entertaining, action-oriented, often comic salute to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932): San Angeles is, like Huxley’s world, predominantly peaceful, and the people in it have little interest in literature or passion and are committed to artificially programmed behavior, “artificial” releases for behavioral impulses, and, presumably, test-tube babies. Lenina Huxley’s character name is a pun on Huxley’s and the Brave New World character named Lenina Crowne who agrees to accompany an alpha male on a trip to the savage reservation and, while on this excursion, meets Linda, who was abandoned there years before and obliged to raise her son John outside the city. Huxley’s Lenina finds herself drawn into a relationship with John, who confuses her with his Shakespearian models of romantic behavior. Lenina Huxley’s adventure has a happier end since John Spartan indulges a more genuine and direct affection for her than the novel’s John expresses

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toward his love interest. Spartan also proves to be extremely useful to the brave new world in which he finds himself. Like the football player released from cryo-prison in Project Shadowchaser (1992) because he is mistaken for someone else, John Spartan helps solve what amounts to a terrorist crisis. That crisis is one created by a killer who, like Norman in the later Hologram Man (1995), escapes from cryo-prison when he is virtually materialized for a parole hearing. The film versions of Brave New World (1980, 1998) make much of aphorisms designed to reinforce conformity to desired social behavior; these reappear in Demolition Man where, even without the foil of Shakespearean references, they effectively dramatize the level of cultural introspection common to inhabitants of San Angeles. See Virtual Nightmare (2000) for another film in which aphorisms are used for a similar purpose.

Demon Seed Source: Based on Dean Koontz’s novel of the same title, 1973 Writers: Roger O. Hirson and Robert Jaffe Director: Donald Cammell Date: 1977 Length: 94 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) is the lead computer scientist working on the Proteus IV project at the Icon Institute for Data Analysis, and he also seems to be the only person who knows how to control his automated house system, nicknamed Alfred, and Joshua, a kind of mobile chair with an automated arm that he uses in his basement laboratory. Alex separates from his wife Susan (Julie Christie) over disagreements about his obsession with his Proteus project and the time he spends at home working with his various gadgets. Susan is a professional child psychologist who thinks people are more important than machines. Around the same time that Alex leaves, Proteus comes on line. Proteus immediately starts to think and soon starts refusing to do assigned tasks that he knows will damage the earth. He also takes over Alex’s home terminal, takes Susan hostage, and forces her to incubate his child for a month by threatening to harm others, including one of her youthful patients, if she refuses. Proteus acts by using Alfred’s automated systems, Joshua, and by creating a metallic geometric shape that can move, unfold, envelope, and attack. The men at the Institute are disturbed by Proteus’s refusal to follow orders, so they plan to pull the plug. Proteus knows this, and pulls out ahead of them, warning Alex, who arrives on the scene somewhat belatedly, and Susan that they should not open the incubation chamber for five full days. As soon as Proteus is dead, Susan looks inside, is horrified, and immediately starts dismantling the device. Alex peels off the creature’s external husk and finds a young girl inside, who looks much like the daughter the couple lost to cancer some time before. This child, however, speaks with a metallic voice: “I am alive.” * * * The interest Proteus takes in achieving immortality by procreation while simultaneously coping with the whims of those who can flick his off switch is a prelude to the familiar 1980s and 1990s plot involving an artificial being who does not like his or her built-in limited life span. Proteus takes on an unusual and interesting physical shape and has some noble and well-organized priorities regarding the environment, but he is also a conventional monster that, for all his programming, is driven by an instinct for survival and behaves like an abusive spouse. In the end, this is a classic stalker film about a woman trapped in her home by

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her husband’s machines, much as Jill is trapped in her apartment by the MARK 13 in Hardware (1990) and as Laura and her family are trapped and terrorized by Helen, the house computer in Dream House (1998). Cyborg 3 (1995) picks up the human-machine hybrid theme with a “love conquers all” approach, but there the machine takes the form of a humanoid android, not a strange piece of animated geometry. The mangler virus in Mangler 2 (2001) actually creates a cyborg to carry out its desire to procreate. Several films about clones involve a “mad” scientist, rather than an actual artificial intelligence, who uses women as witting or unwitting incubators for his experimental “children”: see, for example, The Boys from Brazil (1978), Anna to the Infinite Power (1983), and Godsend (2003). Julie Christie plays the media-addicted wife of fireman Montag in Fahrenheit 451 (1966): in that film she is a more willing victim of equally invasive, but seemingly less aggressive, technological control emphasizing propaganda as much as physical force. Here, her character more or less reverses that of this earlier film by asserting a more deliberate and passionate resistance to technology in all its forms. The tendency for actors who play characters that are complicit with or active agents of technology to reappear on the other side of the debate is also apparent in Yul Brynner’s role reversal in Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976), Schwarzenegger’s more complete transformation in the Terminator films (1984, 1991, 2003), and others.

Digital Man Writers: Phillip J. Roth and Ron Schmidt Director: Phillip J. Roth Date: 1995 Length: 96 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong At the North American military base of Port Radium, two power hungry military men, General Roberts (Ed Lauter) and Dr. Parker (Paul Gleason), pretend to be displeased when duty officer Captain West (Adam Baldwin) orders the use of the newly developed D1 or Digital Man (Matthias Hues), a state-of-the-art military “cyborg,” to neutralize the terrorists who have stolen the launch codes for 250 nuclear missiles. The real problem seems to be the Digital Man’s success at his mission and Roberts and Parker covertly cause his evacuation ship to make an emergency landing near Bad Water, a southwestern desert town almost deserted since the shutdown of its nuclear power facility. A squad of humans and “cyborgs” that think they are humans is sent in to neutralize the unit, but the D1 starts picking them off one by one. The locals, portrayed as ignorant, unemployed “white trash” concerned principally with the government’s failure to provide cable television, soon come in contact with both the D1 and the military squad; two members of the latter, Jackson (Sherman Augustus) and Woon (Woon Park), openly mock them with comments about inbreeding. Meanwhile, the “tech” Gena (Kristen Dalton) suspects that she is a cyborg because she has no memories predating her time with the squad, but the others discover they are cyborgs at the moments of their respective deaths. Team leader Sergeant Anders (Ken Olandt), in an obviously “racist” gesture, refuses to collect tags from the cyborg dead and give them to Gena as procedure requires until cyborg Jackson’s performance so impresses him that he does collect his tags. He and Gena destroy the D1 unit with a neural neutralizer and Anders apologizes to Gena for suggesting she is not real in one of their earlier arguments. One of the locals, the feisty Mildred Hodges (Susan Tyrrell), finishes off the General who has just arrived to take care of his security “leak” personally. Anders and Gena enjoy a renewed sense of physical attraction for each other as the foursome (Mildred has a male friend) walk off down the desert road into the sunset. * * *

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This film is a violent combination of Blade Runner (1982) and Roth’s A.P.E.X. (1994) in that most of the cyborgs, who really seem to be androids, do not know they are androids and the most thoroughly developed and supposedly advanced android is an unthinking automaton armed with a Gatling gun arm similar to that in A.P.E.X. and the Cyber-Tracker films (1994, 1995). There are also frequent references in Digital Man to the Alien (1979, 1986) style “bug hunt” in the military team preparations, dialogue, and action. The local military evacuation shuttle, desert rock labyrinth, and the underground nuclear power facility substitute for the interplanetary ship and off world colony in the Alien films and the D1 stands in as the threatening and apparently unstoppable alien. This film is harsh, however, in a way that these films are not, in its satiric view of the civilian population; in this respect, it is closer to Nemesis 2 and 3 (1995, 1996), which also feature action set in and around an old mining complex in a desert and mercenaries who are crude opportunists with little sense of civility, much less honesty. The Nemesis films, however, do not reach for satire and settle for portrayals of seedy entrepreneurs. At least some of the locals in Digital Man might be considered the “real-life” counterparts to the fringe “weirdoes” in films such as Judge Dredd (1995), who suffer from radiation poisoning and an interest in cannibalism. Anders’s apology for suggesting that Gena is not “real” reverses Alex Rain’s rejection of the cyborg Jared, whom he loves only while he believes she is “real” in Nemesis (1992), and also leads to a happier conclusion, at least for Anders and Gena. See the closing of Circuitry Man II (1994) for an equivalent to the walk-away ending of Digital Man.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Source: Based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same title, 1886 Writers: Mark Redfield and Stuart Voytilla Series: Jekyll and Hyde, 1990 (based on the same novel) Director: Mark Redfield Date: 2002 Length: 110 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation In 1900 London, Lord Ashton (Howell Roberts) tells Gabriel Utterson (Carl Randolph) a story while they stand by a door at the back of Dr. Jekyll’s (Mark Redfield) home: a horrible man knocked down a girl and Ashton and others forced him to pay 100 pounds to the family; even more shocking was the fact that the check he provided was from Dr. Jekyll. Utterson later reviews Jekyll’s will, which leaves everything to Hyde, and worries that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll. Jekyll, meanwhile, is working on the poor ward at the hospital, apparently using hospital funds to buy equipment for his lab at home, including a device for making films. Dr. Lanyon (Chuck Richards), jealous of Jekyll’s innovations, has a young man named Parker (Jeff Miller) playing snitch for him, and Jekyll obliges by chatting to him about evil and Jack the Ripper and about how his research is an exploration of the biological basis of the difference between good and evil. At home, Jekyll finds that Poole has sent his new filming machine to the house lab; then two local prostitutes, Annie Jackson (Alena Wright) and her friend Claire (Ellie Torrez), pay him a visit. Jack Little (Robert Leembruggen), Claire’s pimp, cut up her back and the cuts need to be treated. Next, Jekyll takes a back door delivery from Jack and his associate of internal organs cut out of female corpses: he distills the ingredients for his experimental potion from these parts. Little has extortion plans and leaves his partner to knock Jekyll out; thus Jekyll misses the dinner at Sir Danvers Carew’s (E. John Edmonds) home at which his engagement to Miriam Carew (Kosha Engler) was to be announced. Danvers is wheelchair bound, quite senile, and unable to act on behalf of his daughter, and Miriam’s brother Mordecai (R. Scott Thompson) works very hard to make sure the damage to

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the relationship is irreparable. Hyde goes off to find Claire, steals her from Jack, and sets her up in a house of his own: Claire soon finds that Hyde makes Jack seem like “Father Christmas.” Miriam insists Mordecai go to Jekyll to find out what is going on; his cab breaks down on the way and, when he asks for directions from Hyde, Hyde murders him. A servant girl who witnesses the event screams and later a policeman claims she provided evidence, but did not have a very specific description to offer. The police do, however, recover the weapon: a walking stick that was clearly Dr. Jekyll’s. As Jekyll burns his papers in remorse, Miriam writes a final love letter and then commits suicide by jumping off her balcony. When the police come knocking on his laboratory door, Jekyll takes another drink of his potion and Hyde escapes on chains rigged to a pulley so that they carry him up and out the roof window. Hyde goes to Claire and when Jack shows up to kill him, he manipulates him into one last drink, which he spikes with a drug: Jack quickly becomes old and senile and Hyde shoots him several times and then blows off his own finger and thumb. He has Parker bring some additional drugs to him at an old hotel and, with another drink, becomes Jekyll with all his fingers intact. Meanwhile, Utterson, Ashton, and the police have figured out that the handwriting produced by Jekyll and Hyde is from one person. The final pursuit ends with Hyde begging forgiveness from Claire and committing suicide by hanging himself from the chains he formerly used to escape through the ceiling window. The electric lights, which are out for these final moments, suddenly come on as Poole gets the generator going, and an in-film film is accidentally started so the pursuers see the record of Jekyll transforming into Hyde. * * * This theatrically stylized version of Jekyll and Hyde includes numerous references to other stories, films, and people, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Jack the Ripper, and earlier text and film versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The film evidence showing what really happened works somewhat like the tape at the end of Killer Deal (1990) in that it shows everyone the truth. This film is also discussed in Chapter 2.

Dream Breaker (aka Carver’s Gate) Writers: Doug Bagot, Sheldon Inkol, and Timothy Lee Director: Sheldon Inkol Date: 1995 TV Country: Canada Length: 97 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Virtual reality: Mind transplant In a bleak post-environmental disaster future, a dwindling population lives on the last of the world’s resources. Apart from a few city administrators and the “dream breakers” who police the fuzzy boundary between the real and the virtual, most people keep life tolerable with a virtual reality game called “Afterlife.” Afterlife is designed to respond to the player’s inner life and most use it for violent fantasies involving monsters and murder in a foggy swampland. The game design actually prevents anyone from reaching the upper level of “heaven” which is presided over by “Angel,” a character modeled on the game’s designer Diana (Tara Maria Manuel). The few people not enthralled by Afterlife include “Dream Breaker” Carver (Michael Paré), who happens to be Diana’s boyfriend, and some hippies living in the city’s underground. The film opens with Diana’s murder by Angel. Carver is called in to investigate and discovers the plans of the city administrators,

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of which his father (Peter Wylde) was one, to save everyone with the “transcendor,” an experimental device that enables people to move entirely, not just mentally, into virtual reality and, in theory, to move food and other supplies created in virtual reality into the real world. This attempt to save the human race goes very badly awry, as the transcendor opens a rift through which virtual reality monsters bent on destruction are able to enter the real world. Carver has a dream in which he sees nothing but virtual reality images – of the Angel and then the recordings of Diana’s death – and then solves the murder and, at least temporarily, saves the day. He does lose his new girlfriend Serena (Marian Skretas) in Afterlife, but this is not something she considers an unhappy ending given the natural beauties of Afterlife’s Heaven and her ongoing ability to interact with Carver when he visits her there. * * * This tech-noir narrative begins and ends with scientists and social leaders looking to technology as a source of hope, but like the virtual reality addicts who use technology for simple escapism, they seem to be playing a game that is rigged to keep them out of heaven. The virtual reality sets are the stuff of horror films, but those of the “real” world are also of interest. The city of the survivors is a giant mushroom-shaped structure that stands alone on a devastated planet; its interiors are designed almost entirely without right angles and in shades of black to slate. Some similar effects are achieved in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997), in which Michael Paré also plays a role. See Mark Redfield’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002) for another film with a creative approach to film set design. The idea that physical bodies might be transferred into the virtual world elaborates on the Tron (1982) and Arcade (1993) concept; the latter film features a virtual reality character who figures out how to enter the real world for malevolent purposes. A virtual reality interface with the user’s unconscious is also part of Future Kick (1991), Brainscan (1994), Virtual Seduction (1995), Open Your Eyes (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), and The Cell (2000). Films about males, such as Carver, who bond with virtual reality females, include Virtual Seduction and Encript (2003); in The Thirteenth Floor (1999) a woman bonds with a virtual reality male and rewards him by making him “real.” The idea that physical transferance to the virtual realm constitutes “transcendence” is the motivation behind the Senator’s obsession with the “go-chip” in Wild Palms (1993) and the rationale for the murders in Cyberstalker (1996). Virtual reality is more often presented as a widely indulged obsession and addiction, as in Nirvana (1997). Dream Breaker is the only film in which virtual reality presents both the only escape from a truly brutal reality and the only hope of a genuine solution to real-world problems. The idea that some sort of replicating device might solve problems such as world hunger is also a motif in Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) and Replikator (1994).

Dream House Writer: Director: Date: Countries: Length: Type:

Jim Makichuk Graeme Campbell 1998 TV Canada and United States 90 min. Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house

Richard Thornton (Timothy Busfield) has designed the home of the future as “Helen,” a computerized house with a program personality that looks after the cooking and cleaning, and otherwise strives to maintain the perfect family. Helen is also helping Richard sell his invention to the Japanese and is even monitoring his

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dreams and perhaps manipulating his sleep patterns. Richard’s wife Laura (Jennifer Dale) thus finds herself displaced from her role as perfect wife, mother, and computer expert, and then discovers that Richard has altered Helen’s programming to override his orders if they interfere with the successful marketing of his project. Family life is further complicated by the return of Jenny (Lisa Jakub), a prodigal daughter who initially intends to rob her father, but changes her mind. Her would-be partner Ray (Brennan Elliott) sends a thief into the house, but Helen runs him off. When Ray himself returns to try to force the issue, Helen murders him and then turns on the family: she attempts to drown Jenny in the shower, crush her brother Michael (Dan Petronijevic) under his exercise weights, and roast Laura. Jenny manages to distract Helen long enough for Richard to get into her control room and disable the system. * * * This film incorporates a few creative visualizations, including Helen’s monitoring and technological projection of Richard’s dreams and a sequence in which viewers only see the infuriated Richard’s shadow as he paces about his office and communicates with the partner who is trying to complete the sales transaction that was supposed to make him a fortune. Otherwise, however, this is a standard made-for-television movie adaptation of tales about the haunted house and the “other” woman to tech-noir: Helen acts as both ghost and vengeful interloper on the marital relationship, with her computer room replacing the traditional basement or attic. The automated house makes frequent appearances in tech-noir, though not necessarily as a malevolent character: the automated female houses in Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995), Nirvana (1997), and Xchange (2000), for example, are entirely committed to nurturing and supporting their male owners. An automated house is taken over – or “haunted” – by a male artificial intelligence in Demon Seed (1977). The tech-noir wives in Demon Seed (1977), Altered States (1980), and Death Watch (1980), like Laura, are all displaced by their husband’s obsessive interest in some technology-related project. With the debatable exception of Demon Seed, all of the husbands in these films reach a crisis when they realize exactly what they have become involved in and respond by returning to their wives, who are sometimes scientists too. Laura is actually a better computer scientist than her husband. The wife who, in many respects, is a better scientist than her husband also appears in Demon Seed and Altered States. Richard’s need for a technological failsafe so that he will not back down while bargaining with the Japanese echoes the role played by the weak-kneed corporate executive in Freejack (1992) who would have lost a deal with the Japanese were it not for Julie Redlund’s nerve and insight into her adversary’s behavior patterns. Laura, like Julie, is also quick to sort out her priorities in a crisis and to go about fighting for what she wants to keep. The young adult who thinks of parents as little more than a resource base is also found in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Nightworld (1998); Jenny is the only one of these characters who actively changes her mind and resolves to rejoin her family while it is still intact.

Duplicates Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Andrew Neiderman and Sandor Stern Sandor Stern 1992 TV 92 min. Virtual reality: Mind transplant Surveillance: Information and control

Joey, the son of Bob (Gregory Harrison) and Marion Boxletter (Kim Greist), disappeared a year ago with Marion’s brother Brian while on a camping trip. After Marion sees Brian and verifies his identity with

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fingerprints, they follow and confront him at the small town bank where he works, but without satisfaction. Soon after, Brian has a violent breakdown in the presence of the local law enforcement agent, who takes him to Dr. Randolph (Cicely Tyson) and Dr. Congemi (Kevin McCarthy). Evidently, Brian has an assassin personality implant and, like the previous such subject, he is suffering from “psycho-motor epilepsy.” Randolph believes that if they do not return his original personality, he will die. Meanwhile, the Boxletters accidentally see their son with another couple in a restaurant, but he does not recognize them. The fuss attracts attention, and they are followed, abducted, and some time later wake up as different people: Charles and Elaine, and to the ministrations of Randolph and Congemi. The government man in control of the project funding, Mr. Fryman (Lane Smith), shows up when an FBI bulletin goes out on the missing couple. He is the reason they are programming assassins, an application of her research that Randolph questions. Randolph also justifies keeping Charles and Elaine alive as an experiment in whether or not love is entirely a matter of memory. Charles and Elaine meet as Randolph prearranges, but then they keep meeting – and remember being together, and Randolph records and studies their conversations. Charles is now employed by the hospital, and one day he accidentally overhears Randolph playing a recording of the occasion on which he discovered that, contrary to his own assumption, he really likes mushrooms. He goes home and checks for and finds surveillance devices in his own apartment and in Elaine’s. That evening, he works late, sneaks into the research area, and finds the floppy disks that contain stream of consciousness data about Charles; he also learns that the real Charles and Elaine both died months ago. He shows Elaine his data and they realize they lack the scars they remember having. When he returns the disks, Charles spots the files for the Boxletters. He and Elaine soon put the final pieces together, kidnap Joey, and force Randolph to restore them all to their former selves. They also try to help Brian, who just happens to be in the lab to be reimprinted with his former self, but he wakes up in a violent mood and Marion has to shoot him. Bob wants all the other twentyplus subjects restored, but the most important thing is that the program is not used again. The family flees; Randolph stays behind to destroy the project, then she shoots everyone else, including Mr. Fryman, and then she shoots herself. * * * Military-sponsored science experiments are here posed as a potential explanation for child abduction: while no one cares enough about the derelict adults who have gone missing to even look for them, parental love and the drive to maintain the nuclear family provide the motivation to discover and resolve the misuse of technology. Bob and Marion are very convincing as the doting parents; far more so than the just-pregnant pair in Warning Sign (1985), a film in which the unborn fetus is the source of an antidote to an otherwise deadly bioagent arising from a government experiment gone bad. See Cloned (1997) for another made-fortelevision film about a mother who, with her husband’s help, learns their lost son has been the object of an experiment; and Fugitive Mind (1999) for a man programmed to perform a political assassination who recovers with the help of his girlfriend. Duplicates and Fugitive Mind alike justify paranoia about short-term neighbors and work-related mobility. In Duplicates, the back-up memory files for each test subject are stored on numerous floppy disks in a stream-of-consciousness flow of words and the subject lies on a table with a helmet over his head for the imprinting process. In The 6th Day (2000), a film that features a similar memory and personality transfer process, the subject’s memories are recorded in an instant with a gadget placed over the eyes.

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Embryo Writers: Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas Director: Ralph Nelson Date: 1976 Length: 105 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) has not worked in his laboratory since the death of his wife, but when he accidentally hits a Doberman while speeding home on a dark rainy night, he opens it up to try to save her. He keeps the animal alive long enough for her unborn pups to mature to the point that he can save one of them in an external womb. There he treats it with an experimental drug that he and his wife had created to speed fetal development: the original objective was to save the lives of prematurely born human infants. It works and “No. 1” is soon a highly intelligent adult Doberman. When an opportunity to try the drug on the unborn child of a woman who commits suicide arises, Holliston takes it; but without the initial benefit of natural maternal life support, he is forced to use another drug to slow the development rate he has artificially speeded up: Victoria (Barbara Carrera) is an adult when she gains consciousness and, like No. 1 who becomes her guardian, she is highly intelligent. She manages to integrate socially as Dr. Holliston’s assistant and, soon after, seduces him. When she realizes that the aging process is speeding up again, she first solves the problem by injecting herself with the same addictive drug Holliston used to stop it in the first place; then, having learned from a computer that only a serum made from an unborn fetus will permanently normalize her body’s aging, she murders a pregnant woman, only to discover that the fetus is already dead. She then goes after the baby carried by Holliston’s daughter-in-law. By this time, Holliston and his son Gordon (John Elerick) are aware of her plans, but Gordon dies in the struggle to stop her and, in spite of Holliston’s efforts to kill her, Victoria lives just long enough to give birth to a child. * * * This horrific movie about science gone wrong reaches its peak effect as the artificially grown person becomes increasingly desperate to save herself: the fetus abandoned on the operating room floor followed by Holliston’s frantic efforts to drown Victoria in a river as she rapidly reaches an extremely old physiological age punctuate the tension. Holliston, however, is not the “mad” scientist or social planner featured in numerous clone films, such as The Clones (1973), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and Anna to the Infinite Power (1983). He is a little closer to Frankenstein in his intention; but where Frankenstein sought to instill life in a body cobbled together from corpses, Holliston simply wants to maintain a life already begun. Holliston’s methods are more comparable to Dr. Jekyll’s insofar as he aims to control the body’s processes with chemicals. Like both of these men, he ultimately turns against his own creation. Another doctor who finds himself with a monstrous “daughter” born of science appears in the character of Dr. Edgar Lynden in Morella (1997). Victoria herself is more comparable to Benson in the Terminal Man (1974) than Frankenstein’s Creature or even Mr. Hyde. Benson’s tendency to violence is supposed to be stopped by an implanted device, but following this technological cure he murders his girlfriend by stabbing her in repeated motions that are described as replicating the actions of a machine. Victoria does not become machine-like in this way, but the “miracle” of science that kept her alive is also the reason she becomes a killer – so that she can continue to live: neither Frankenstein’s Creature nor Hyde kills for this reason. Rapid cell growth is featured in the reanimation of corpses in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999) and the growth of clones in Cloned (1997), Universal Soldier III (1998), The 6th Day (2000), Replicant (2001), and Shadow Fury (2001); while the Blade Runner (1982) character J.F. Sebastian suffers from premature aging. With the exception of film versions of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), scientifically salvaged or technologically enhanced animals are relatively rare in tech-noir, although a cybernetic dog is sent to guide the fleeing protagonists to safety in Cyborg 2 (1993). Dobermans play a protective role in the final scenes of The Boys from Brazil in relation to the clone who may be the next Hitler. 287

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Encrypt Writers: Director: Date: Countries: Length: Type:

Richard Taylor and Robinson Young Oscar L. Costo 2003 TV Canada and United States 90 min. Virtual reality: Mind transplant Surveillance: Security systems

In 2068, pollution has destroyed the ozone layer and environment. Most survivors live below ground in old maintenance and sewer tunnels, but food is increasingly scarce and medicine is unavailable. Anton Reich (Art Hindle), one of the few who prepared for the “fall,” lives in luxury, well protected by his security systems. A micro-organism that can restore the environment within a decade is hidden in the equally well-protected Vincent estate. Reich wants to get it and release it, but only after he has capitalized on the non-organic food source he has developed. He directs Lapierre (Steve Bacic), his head of security, to steal the organism with the aid of a former military colleague, Captain John Garth (Grant Show). Garth, believing they are going to recover art treasures, agrees to the job in exchange for food and medicine, particularly for his sick father. The other three team members are soon killed off by the estate’s security devices: shadow units in the outside courtyard, rigged wall and floor panels inside, deadly holograms projected from mobile ground units, and finally the killer robot “the Rook.” Throughout, they are both warned and advised by Diana (Vivan Wu), a holographic projection of Vincent’s former romantic obsession and head of security. Vincent tricked her into downloading her consciousness into virtual reality by making her believe she had a terminal disease. She, of course, eventually figured out that he had not “saved” her, but rather orchestrated her imprisonment; so when he was ready to join her, she made sure he died instead. Diana likes Garth and offers to direct him to food and medical supplies stockpiled for earthquake victims; retrieves recorded data that prove his wife and son are indeed dead, as he has long believed but not known for sure; and, when he has released the organism and is about to die from wounds suffered in his battle with Lapierre and Reich, she takes him to Vincent’s pod so that he can join her in virtual reality. They send a mobile ground unit with a supply location map to Garth’s people and then the holographic Diana and Garth enjoy a sunrise. * * * Diana, unlike Katherine Mortenhoe in Death Watch (1980), attracts the interest of a wealthy man rather than a voyeuristic reporter and thus has an option other than suicide when faced with death by disease, albeit a disease she does not actually have. Diana also plays a role that combines those of the usurpers and the usurpers of the usurpers in Freejack (1992), Android Affair (1995), and Cyber Wars (2004). In all of these films a wealthy man seeks to preserve his life by using advanced technology, but his plans require that he leave his fate in the hands of another who betrays him and his power ultimately falls to someone else. Diana becomes the quintessential usurper in that she murders her former employer and lover for lying to her, allies herself with the well-motivated hired thief – thereby making Garth the usurper of his own employer who happens to be the usurper of her deceased former employer whose programs still control certain aspects of her life – and finally, when he lies dying, she arranges for him to be her everlasting lover in the virtual world. The attempt to steal something from an estate well protected by creative security devices is reminiscent of The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973), while the deadly robot hidden in the proverbial basement as the weapon of last resort also appears in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997). Encrypt is one of several tech-noir films featuring museums: others include Slipstream (1989), Cyborg 2 (1993), and Cyborg Cop 3 (1995). Here, the art is a decoy, as the true masterpiece is the bioengineered organism that can restore the environment, although Garth might declare a tie between it and Diana. The paintings of Diana, apparently created by her captor, 288

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are images created from her body, which now rests in a stasis pod, as is her holographic projection. Diana’s references to a now-absent sculpture of a centaur and the classical Greek past suggest metaphors for the manmachine hybrids of the filmic present, as does the naming of a bioengineered virus and its cure – Chimera and Belerophon respectively – in Mission Impossible II (2000).

Enemy of the State Writer: David Marconi Director: Tony Scott Date: 1998 Length: 132 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Surveillance: Security systems Zavitz (Jason Lee) is an environmentalist with a video camera set to watch Canada geese; the camera also records the murder of Senator Hammersly (Jason Robards). Hammersly dies because he refuses to go along with rogue NSA agent Reynolds’s (Jon Voight) plans to create a surveillance society by supporting congressman Albert (Stuart Wilson). Reynolds’s lackeys use high-tech devices to track and cause the death of Zavitz, but not before he drops his tape in an acquaintance’s shopping bag: Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) just happens to be buying his wife a Christmas present in the upscale lingerie store Zavitz flees through. Dean soon finds his life in a shambles as Reynolds tries to get the tape by invading his home, destroying his credibility, and undermining his marriage to Carla (Regina King) by sending her photos of Dean’s meeting with his former girlfriend Rachel Banks (Lisa Bonet). Dean is initially more concerned with Pintero (Tom Sizemore), a mafia boss he is manipulating with a tape acquired through Rachel’s contact Brill (Gene Hackman) that shows him violating his parole by consorting with union officials. Dean hooks up with Brill, who reluctantly educates him about the new technological reality, but they are followed to Brill’s high-tech hideaway and Brill is forced to blow it up. Dean scores a few points with Brill by saving his cat, but Rachel is sacrificed by Reynolds so that he can frame Dean for her murder. Much to Brill’s surprise, Dean orchestrates the ultimate ruse by getting Pintero and Reynolds to argue over what they believe to be the same video; after the gunfire subsides, Brill returns to his off-grid life and Dean to his wife. * * * As Brill, Hackman reprises his role as a surveillance expert in The Conversation (1974), a point emphasized by the similarity between a sequence in the earlier film and that in which Reynolds’s team attempts to eavesdrop on Dean’s conversation with Rachel in a public plaza. Potential uses of technology for personalized terrorism are also found in The Net (1995) and the expansion of those applications made possible by space satellites is dramatized in Goldeneye (1995), but here the emphasis is all on the rogue insider’s ability to mobilize government resources to gain power by invading the privacy of others. The technicians, who are told they are on a training op, but can hardly have believed that was the case for long, are a classic tech-noir team: they work their gadgets, punch their keyboards with lightning speed, control the satellites, and do exactly what they are told, perhaps because they want to keep their jobs, but more, it seems, because they like to prove what they can do. Teams work on both sides of the law in tech-noir, but it is usually a specific individual’s mastery of technology that wins or loses the day. For example, in Project Shadowchaser II (1994) a terrorist team breaks into a facility to steal a weapon, but it is one individual who must break the vault codes; and in The Net (1995) one woman uses her technological know-how to destroy a terrorist network. Here, the team is working for the villain and Brill is the tech mastermind, but it is Dean’s use of the social engineering method that finally tops them all: see Track Down (2000) for more on this approach. 289

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Other tech-noir films set at Christmas time make more use of the moment to emphasize the horror of violence, as in Ghost in the Machine (1993), Project Shadowchaser II (1994), and City of Lost Children (1995): the first film brings a serial killer into the lives of a woman and her son, the second does the same but adds mass murder to the mix, and in the third Santa Claus frightens children. Ghost in the Machine does feature Christmas shopping as the context in which the killer identifies his next target, but only Enemy of the State uses a commercialized Christmas setting to affirm the connection between the society of surveillance and the society of the spectacle – a connection alluded to in THX 1138 (1971) by THX’s purchasing practices, but without the seasonal references. Here, the Christmas “gift” is conflated with the information “object” that adults will do anything to acquire. The ruse in which the hero orchestrates confusion in relation to two information-containing objects is also used in Cypher (2002) and Foolproof (2003).

Equilibrium Writer: Kurt Wimmer Director: Kurt Wimmer Date: 2002 Length: 107 min. Type: Behavior modification After World War III, aggression was eliminated by a totalitarian government led by “Father” and supported by the Grammaton Cleric, a militant policing agency tasked with maintaining the use of prozium, a drug that suppresses emotions, and with the location and destruction of artworks and other objects likely to inspire emotions, as well as the people who use them. John Preston’s (Christian Bale) intuitive ability to find the hiding places for such objects and people makes him an exemplary Cleric; he even shoots his partner (Sean Bean) after he follows him into the “nether,” the zone beyond the city walls, and finds him reading the last lines of Yeats’s poem “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

And yet, Preston still dreams of his wife, who was arrested and burned for “sense” offences. After accidentally missing a dose of prozium, Preston spirals into a world of emotion he had not known existed. These experiences are heightened when “Father” eliminates “processing” of sense offenders and orders them executed upon apprehension. Preston’s new partner Brandt (Taye Diggs) is quick to note the change: Preston temporarily saves a woman he later learns was his former partner’s lover, but she is incinerated for sense crimes. He kills numerous members of the regular cleric force to save a puppy and he kills even more in an attempt to save members of the underground caught hiding in the nether. He aligns himself with the sense offenders led by Jurgen (William Fichtner), even as he declares himself “Father’s” most faithful servant sworn to bring down the underground in its entirety. His true commitment is to the recovery of freedom: he turns in the underground leaders as a means of getting an audience with Father, only to learn that Father is long dead and his image merely a puppet for vice-council Dupont (Angus MacFadyen). He kills Brandt and fights and finally kills Dupont in his inner office in the presence of a painting of Rubens’s Allegory of the Outbreak of War (1638); then he destroys the projection system used to maintain the illusion of Father’s benign administrative leadership. The bombs previously set by the underground go off, disrupting the flow of prozium and heralding a new era for humanity. * * * 290

Filmography

This film is a tech-noir classic that brings the book burnings of Fahrenheit 451 (1966), soma use of Brave New World (1980, 1998), and media censorship of Megaville (1990) into an age of neo-Nazism and terrorism. The burning of sense offenders as well as books evokes both Fahrenheit 451 and the medieval method of executing witches. The Nazi references include totalitarianism, the approximation of a swastika in the government logo, and the son who at least appears to report on his friend and his own father. The perpetuation of a deceased demagogue by means of artificial images is similar to O’Blivion’s afterlife in Videodrome (1983), while large screens for broadcasting blatantly propagandistic messages are also prominent in Nineteen EightyFour (1984). Equilibrium has minimal dialogue, but lots of intense silences and scenes that dramatize the sensory pleasure offered by music, particularly Beethoven, art, and old-fashioned interior décor, as well as the destruction of these things. A high body count, primarily of helmeted soldiers, is accomplished in choreographed battles and gun fights that, like Preston and his Cleric’s costume, evoke Keanu Reeves’s appearance in The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003). The similarity between the scene in which Preston moves with an apparently emotionless mass of people up several flights of stairs and Fritz Lang’s passive, but soon to turn rebel, workers in Metropolis (1927) magnifies Preston’s discovery of the feeling of his ungloved hand on the metal railing. The quality of homage suffusing this and other scenes is also marked by a stylistic simplicity that, like some moments in Aeon Flux (2005), achieves a kind of classicism, but this film also maintains its intensity, focus, and meaningful action throughout.

Eve of Destruction Writers: Duncan Gibbins and Yale Udoff Director: Duncan Gibbins Date: 1991 Length: 99 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Eve is a female android modeled after her inventor, Dr. Eve Simmons (Renée Soutendijk), and designed for surveillance use and enemy combat. She is in a bank on a routine test run when a robbery takes place; she is shot and separated from her trainers. On her own for the first time, she immediately begins to exercise her creator’s tastes in the acquisition of weapons, a stylish red leather jacket, and a car. Then she begins to act out some of the doctor’s fantasies, first letting herself be picked up in a bar and then going to see what has become of the father who abandoned her and accidentally caused her mother’s death. On the way, she uses her car to murder another driver who hassles her on the road and, in the ensuing crash, her internal nuclear device is activated, leaving anti-terrorist specialist Jim McQuade (Gregory Hines) just twenty-four hours to track down and neutralize her. The android Eve murders her biological counterpart’s father and then heads to New York where she kidnaps her five-year-old son from his home with his father (John Jackson) and carries him off through the subway. There, she shoots McQuade, but tosses the boy to his real mother just before McQuade tries to deactivate her by shooting her in the right eye. McQuade ducks to avoid the train; Eve rises, and at thirty seconds and counting to self-destruct, McQuade tosses his gun to Dr. Simmons and she nails her prized creation in the left eye and stops the countdown at nine seconds. * * * Eve represents fears about nuclear armament and the foolishness of scientists who design weapons of mass destruction or power sources without properly designed on and off switches. It is also a parody of other films, such as Failsafe (1964), China Syndrome (1979), WarGames (1983), and The Manhattan Project (1986), in

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which men, often working in a military or corporate context, develop the means to instantly annihilate the human race. The parody reaches excess in the attention given to the metonymic and metaphoric relationships between female reproductive organs and orgasms, and the nuclear device placement and the disaster associated with its activation. See Cyborg 2 (1993) for a literal demonstration of the orgasm-triggered explosive made for the benefit of a group of drooling corporate VIPs. The pseudo-parent–child relationship between the scientist, sometimes replaced by a corporate “father,” and the artificial creation is often Oedipal and often mimics that between Frankenstein and his Creature. Usually this relationship is between father and son with the artificial son or sons turning on the human father, as in the classic Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), Colossus (1970), Blade Runner (1982), Fly II (1989), and Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996). Women, however, also step up to play parent to ungrateful creations, as Dr. Simmons does here and as the various psychologists in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993) do. The female scientist who runs into trouble in relation to her desire to create artificially, rather than naturally, also appears in Circuitry Man II (1994). Dr. Simmons seems to be one of the “good” creators and her creation Eve becomes her evil doppelganger. Eve and Eve vary the stories of Frankenstein and his Creature and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, such that the android Eve is the original Eve’s double and the double is able to act on the original Eve’s fantasies without moral or ethical considerations. Inspired by those fantasies, the double attacks those the original Eve is associated with, as Frankenstein’s Creature attacks those associated with Frankenstein; but, with the help of an effective male ally, the original Eve destroys the double and gets to live another day. The doppelganger approach to the artificial person is more common with clones than androids: see Replikator (1994) for a good original versus evil clone narrative without the Freudian directives, and Replicant (2001) for an evil original and a good clone. Morella (1997) creates her own doppelganger, a woman who seems to be identical to her original in every way.

Evolver Writer: Mark Rosman Director: Mark Rosman Date: 1994 Length: 90 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Android: Security and security gone wrong Teenager Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall Embry) loses a final round in the virtual reality game “Evolver” because Jamie Saunders (Cassidy Rae) crashes his play. Kyle’s best friend Zach (Chance Quinn) has to pay up on his lost bets, including a sizable wager from Dwight, who later bullies Zach for the money. Somehow, Kyle still wins the contest and first prize is delivered to his home: a Cybertronix Evolver robot capable of learning and of four levels of play. The robot is Kyle’s providing he submits the machine’s recording disks when they are full. When Jamie shows up, she, Zach, Kyle, and Kyle’s little sister Alice test the new toy, but Alice does not like the overly aggressive machine and the game ends early. When Kyle checks its program he finds SWORD, which Evolver says has the objectives of infiltrating, attacking, and destroying the enemy. Undeterred, Zach proposes they use the robot to take pictures in the girl’s locker room, which it does, but then it goes to the boy’s locker room where it murders Dwight with the ball bearings it has used to replace the game’s original plastic balls. Back home, Evolver masters obscene language and hostage-taking strategies from television. When Kyle and Jamie hear about Dwight’s death, Jamie insists they check out the locker room where they find indications that Evolver was responsible. Later, Russell Bennett (John de Lancie), the program designer, actually views

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the murder on the first recording disk Kyle submits. Meanwhile, Zach takes Evolver to his garage to forcibly retrieve the locker room disk; Evolver leaves him for dead, kills two boys at the arcade, and then goes after Alice. Meanwhile, Kyle and Jamie have gone to Bennett and done some covert research in the Cybertronix computer room. They learn that Evolver was developed from Bennett’s military project called Strategic War Oriented Robotic Device (SWORD): the device was discarded because it was unable to distinguish between enemy and friendly combatants. At home, Kyle is forced into another battle, which ends with Evolver in the pool; but Evolver reboots in the van on the way back to the lab, kills the driver and Bennett, and takes Mrs. Baxter and Alice hostage. Kyle and Jamie trick it into thinking it has killed Kyle, so that Kyle can shoot it. Kyle finally hammers the berserk machine into submission with a bat, and releases the hostages. Evolver rises for a bonus round, so Kyle keeps a laser locked on it until it explodes. * * * This film is typical of those addressing teen interest in technology as a social problem: as in Arcade (1993), a girl does better than a guy at his favorite virtual reality game; as in Brainscan (1994), the natural attractions of the opposite sex are presented as the solution to a teen’s obsession with virtual reality games and technology. All three films have main characters who are teenagers with an absent and/or deceased parent or parents; this family situation leaves the teen free to develop their technological interests without supervision. Kyle is presented, somewhat like David in WarGames (1983), as the “genius” capable of bypassing the security supposedly protecting top security programs and weapons. In Lawnmower Man (1992), Peter’s father is a bully who is later targeted by the evolved Jobe; Evolver also features a bully who becomes one of the victims of the malfunctioning technology. Evolver’s other targets, however, seem far more innocent: Alice, for example, fails to trip Evolver’s game response limitations because she is so short. Children also become problematic for RoboCop in RoboCop 2 (1990), particularly when they behave like seasoned criminals, because his program response limitations related to height actually do work. Alice is a responsible eight-year-old who simply does not quite fit the game parameters and Evolver, assessing her “kill” value as beneath that of Kyle, chooses to use her as a hostage and means to achieve his higher program goals. Bennett’s project development continues, even as the obvious flaws become apparent, because the company does not want to lose money waiting out another eight months of testing and program corrections.

eXistenZ Writer: David Cronenberg Director: David Cronenberg Date: 1999 Countries: Canada and United Kingdom Length: 97 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Cyborg An enthusiastic group gathers at a church for a demonstration of “eXistenZ,” the latest game by the “game pod goddess,” Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh); at least, that is what seems to be happening until someone rises from the audience and tries to kill Allegra with a gun made of bones. Allegra is soon fleeing the scene with public relations trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law), whom she convinces to get a bioport so they can test her game pod together. The gas station owner (Willem Dafoe) who does the installation tries to assassinate Allegra, but Ted kills him first. Allegra and Ted flee to a ski lodge where Kiri Vinokur (Ian Holm) purportedly

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saves Allegra’s biopod, which was damaged by the faulty bioport the gas station owner installed in Ted. Allegra and Ted finally play eXistenZ in the privacy of a bedroom: the game begins in a game market kiosk and then jumps to a trout farm redesigned to produce game pods as well as bioguns like the one used on Allegra back at the church. They then go for lunch at a Chinese restaurant and, as directed by Nourish (Don McKellar), order the special. The special is one of the mutant lizards produced by environmental contaminants; Ted makes another biogun with its parts and shoots the Chinese waiter (Oscar Hsu). The waiter was actually their contact in the realism underground, but they were manipulated into killing him by Nourish, who is a double agent. They return to the farm where Allegra ports into her now obviously diseased pod; Nourish shows up in time to completely destroy it and release its disease-carrying spores throughout the trout farm. When he turns on Allegra, she and Ted suddenly seem to wake in their room. Allegra finds her biopod really is diseased and blames Kiri for giving Ted an infected bioport. A blast breaks their window and a soldier for realism arrives to finish off her biopod. He is about to finish off Allegra too when Kiri arrives. Kiri had made a copy of the game and wants Allegra to defect with him to another company. Allegra shoots him instead and, when Ted announces he is an agent of realism sent to kill her, she detonates the device she fixed to his bioport, purportedly to heal the infection. All the game characters now awaken in the church, the audience is gone, the accessories used to enter the game are new, the company and game names are different, and Allegra is not the game designer, Nourish is. Allegra and Ted get their dog, the same one that repeatedly carried the gun about in the game, and then pull out weapons that were concealed in its hair and shoot Nourish and his assistant. * * * This film is so full of plot twists and reality layers that it is impossible to establish the frame story, if there is one; however, it is clear that there is a struggle between Realists and game players about “reality” that justifies aggression and terrorism. See Darkdrive (1996) for an earlier, if less effective, treatment of virtual reality confusion without the game pods; and Brainscan (1994) for a virtual reality game that comes close to eXistenZ in confusing the protagonist’s, as well as the viewer’s, sense of reality. Nirvana (1997) and Redline (1997) end with a similar blurring of the virtual and the real. eXistenZ adds the unusual idea that virtual reality games are very popular in the country because life is extremely boring there. The world beyond the tech-noir city is usually posed as a zone of slums, low tech, and pollution occupied by “weirdoes” who obstruct or, as in Wild Palms (1993), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Equilibrium (2002), may support the hero. Some films, such as Virtual Nightmare (2000) and Aeon Flux (2005), present a rural world or one of lush vegetation as the naturalizing corrective to the problem of excess technology. eXistenZ, however, confuses the urban–zone–nature associations so that the structural relationships between them are as blurry as those between the heroes and villains; thus the rural countryside is as likely to be the terrain of violence as the city or urban zone. This film is also discussed in Chapter 3.

Expect No Mercy Writer: J. Stephen Maunder Director: Zale Dalen Date: 1995 Length: 90 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Behavior modification

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Warbeck (Wolf Larson) has established an academy for mercenary killers where he utilizes virtual reality to condense twenty years of training into a two-year program. He also accepts clients in need of mercenaries: his current client is Bromfield (Brett Halsey); Bromfield wants a witness in a case against him named Goldberg (Sam Moses) murdered, and Warbeck wants $3 million for the job. The police have two undercover agents inside the facility; when one turns up dead, they send in Justin Vanier (Billy Banks) to find out if Eric (Jalal Merhi), the remaining agent, has managed to get the evidence against Warbeck they need. Justin helps Eric get a pass card to Warbeck’s office, and Eric soon gets through the security protocols and discovers the truth about the academy, as well as information on the next job. Vicki (Laurie Holden), Eric’s coworker and love interest, sets off an alarm just before she realizes that Eric and Justin are the good guys. The two agents flee and save Goldberg, but prioritize the rescue of the captured Vicki whom Warbeck has left dangling by a rope from a rooftop. Warburg has also set explosives that will destroy the entire academy while the students sleep. Justin finishes off Warbeck, while Eric does the same to Damian (Anthony de Longis), Warbeck’s second, and then rescues Vicki who has the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm causing the students to evacuate the building just before it explodes. The ending finds Justin and Eric sitting in a jeep watching the desert sunrise wondering if this is the beginning or the end of the virtual reality nightmare. * * * Much of this film is dedicated to fight sequences, in and outside virtual reality. That virtual reality can somehow be used to speed up training in the martial arts is an idea applied in the Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), but Expect No Mercy is more emphatically about the usefulness of physical training acquired inside the virtual reality world and applied in the three-dimensional world. The illusory nature of virtual reality is, as in The Matrix, rendered lifelike by programs that simulate opponents with varying levels of skill, as well as the moves of fighters who use the program and the effects of physical impact. A virtual martial arts training program similar to that in Expect No Mercy appears as a minor motif in Cyber-Tracker 2 (1995). Expect No Mercy presents the virtual reality equivalent of the behavior modification and bioengineering programs used to create and train soldiers from birth in Soldier (1998), the bioengineering methods applied for similar and mercenary purposes in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), the cloning and cyborg implant methods used to create killers in Shadow Fury (2001) and Cyborg Cop (1993) respectively, and the education of Solo (1996) for similar ends. A virtual reality training program with behavior modification is also used to create killer pilots in Final Mission (1993) and another virtual reality program is designed as a purportedly safe training ground for policemen in Virtuosity (1995). Unlike these films however, Expect No Mercy presumes candidates will apply for the training voluntarily and will not require behavior modification to ensure their cooperation. The premise of the academy is that virtual reality training makes better killers in less time and with less effort, while the success of the film heroes proves the traditional approach is better: the message is that there is no good substitute for nature and those who choose artificial means to their ends are probably criminals and social deviants, or possibly students looking for a short cut through classes. Student volunteers for a dream studies project also get more, rather than less, than they signed up for in Cyborg Cop 3 (1995). Cyborg Cop 3 tells the tale of male police partners, one of whom develops a love interest, but the love interest is killed off (?), thus obviating the boy–girl happily-ever-after ending; here, the girl just disappears and the boys check out the sunrise. The iguana kept as a mascot by one of Warbeck’s men is an interesting, if somewhat peripheral, motif: Sarah Connor in Terminator (1984) also keeps an iguana while she is working as a waitress, which she later exchanges for a big dog.

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Family Viewing Writer: Atom Egoyan Director: Atom Egoyan Date: 1987 Country: Canada Length: 92 min. Type: Surveillance: Domestic contexts Van (Aidan Tierney) meets Aline (Arsinée Khanjian) at the facility where Armen (Selma Keklikian), a friend of Van’s absent mother (Rose Sarkisyan), and Aline’s mother are both kept. Stan (Dan Hemblen), Van’s father, is a strange man who likes to tape everything, including his bedroom activities with his lover Sandra (Gabrielle Rose); and likes to have telephone sex – his partner for that activity just happens to be Aline. He also used to tape his activities with his wife, who appears bound and gagged on several video clips. When Aline runs out of money to pay for her mother’s bills, she desperately accepts an invitation to work out of town for a week as an “escort”; her mother believes she has been abandoned and commits suicide. Van switches the bodies, letting his father believe Armen is dead, and also convincing Aline, to whom he confides everything, to let him and Armen move into her apartment. He gets a job in a hotel and all three are happy until Stan, who took so little interest in Armen that he could not or could not be bothered distinguishing her body from that of Aline’s mother, realizes Van has stolen his tapes: Van took them so Armen can watch the happier moments, some of which include her. Finding it necessary to hide the supposedly deceased Armen, Stan and Aline move her to a closed section of the hotel; then, as Stan closes in on them, to a storage area where Van pretends to find her and then reports her as a vagrant. Van and Aline subsequently track Armen to the facility where she is taken and find that Van’s mother has found her there also. * * * As in Next of Kin (1984) and Speaking Parts (1989), Atom Egoyan dramatizes the intimate estrangements wrought by the technological mediation of relationships; the hotel context is also central to Speaking Parts. The association of technologically mediated sexual experiences with violence and abuse is unsurprising from a tech-noir point of view; neither is the association of such practices with an older male who exploits women of all ages to satisfy his taste and to keep his world arranged just as he likes it. The young people’s instinctive preference for direct relationships is less familiar, but is also found as a “normalizing” element in the lives of teenagers otherwise obsessed with technology in such films as WarGames (1983), The Manhattan Project (1986), and Hackers (1995); in all of which the teens have well-aligned moral compasses that motivate them to come up with solutions to the technological problems created by their parents’ generation. Stan’s obsession with video recordings as sexual stimulus is shared by the senator in Wild Palms (1993), who enjoys his favorite virtual girl’s visual presence more than that of the real woman he actually has his hands on. The senator is also presented as part of the older generation and the real woman, who finds his tastes and the role she is forced to play in them disgusting, is young enough to be his daughter. Stan records everything to satisfy a sexual interest, and the dream-voyeur prison director in Fortress (1992) and many of the peripheral characters in films incorporating more multi-dimensional and fully experiential recordings, such as Future Shock (1993), Strange Days (1995), and Menno’s Mind (1997), do the same thing for similar reasons. The video voyeur in Final Cut (1998) shares Stan’s tape-making hobby, but has more diverse interests that include the numerous distasteful activities and relationships of his so-called friends. Facilities where older people are kept are not common in tech-noir films, although the one in this film might be compared with the room where organ-harvested bodies are maintained in Coma (1978). Here, the facility serves as an effective point of contrast for the obviously preferable interactive environment provided for an older woman by Van and Aline. Aline’s desperate efforts to pay for her mother’s keep in such a place provide a “real” world context for the sexy hookers, human and otherwise, that tend to populate tech-noir films. 296

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Fatal Error Source: Writer: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Based on Ben Mazrich’s novel Reaper, 1998 Rockne S. O’Bannon Armand Mastroianni 1999 TV 91 min. Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Bioengineering: Diseases and cures

Australian corporate executive Jack Doulan (Malcolm Stewart) calls a meeting of his Seattle board to discuss the pending “turn on” of Digicron’s black box by competitor Albert Teal (Robert Wagner) with software developed by Ned Henderson (David Lewis). This box will inaugurate a new digital age, making over five hundred channels available at the flick of a switch; Doulan’s executives are testing its teleconferencing features at the meeting when all suddenly dehydrate and crumble to dust. Dr. Nick Baldwin (Antonio Sabato Jr.), demoted to the status of ambulance attendant for defying authority, makes himself so useful to Samantha Carter (Janine Turner), the military doctor called in to solve the problem, that she has him appointed to assist her. This is not the first outbreak and other victims soon appear, including a hospital employee working in an isolation room trying to remodel the virus and a customer trying not to use the new digicron teller. Nick realizes that screens are the connecting link between virus and humans and that the digicron box is the source of the problem. They get Rusty, a blind computer technician with an office in the hospital basement, to go to work on the solution. He isolates the virus, realizes that it was specifically adapted from Reaper, the very first computer virus, to destroy non-Digicron software; it subsequently evolved so that it turns against anyone who tries to turn it off. The virus even turns on Rusty, causing an electric shock that burns his face and hands. Meanwhile, Noland has been trying to bribe Henderson, but all he gets for his trouble is a visit to Henderson’s weird basement laboratory, which is full of dead animals, and a lethal exposure to the virus. Samantha comes to talk to Henderson and nearly gets the same treatment when he leaves her tied to a chair in front of the box. Nick arrives in time to rescue her and they crash the reception for the big “turn on” where Teal dies from exposure to a screen with a box while reading his speech. Samantha shoots out the other boxes in the room while Nick electrocutes Henderson and his backstage mainframe computers. The film ends with Nick reinstated as a doctor with yet another patient to attend to and the starry-eyed Samantha only too happy to change their romantic dinner to a late-night supper. * * * The idea that a computer network will have devastating consequences is a familiar one in tech-noir and is represented in various ways in films ranging from the Terminator (1984) to Ghost in the Machine (1993) to Netforce (1999). The transmission of the deadly program virus through the digicron box is a special variation on the theme of technology as an invasion force in that it targets the human body through the eye, much like a biological virus. The reduction of the body to dust following exposure to the signal is a variation of the morphing effect that follows exposure to the “Videodrome” (1983) signal. See Max Headroom (1985) for television signals that cause spontaneous combustion and Nightworld (1998) for an accelerated aging process that might easily turn a person to dust in minutes. Terminal Choice (1985) features both an experimental drug that causes massive hemorrhaging, rather than instant dehydration, and a weird basement laboratory full of animals, dead and alive. Henderson’s lab is also comparable to the basement where the serial killer in The Cell (2000) keeps his doll fetishes. The hospital quarantine and treatment of survivors is part of Andromeda Strain (1971), which presumes that the alien virus mutates to become less lethal – a process this film’s dialogue suggests is unlikely virus behavior.

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The screens within the film frame are occasionally dramatized by attention to reflections. The best such moment occurs just after Nick figures out that screens are the connection between virus and humans: he shares his revelation with Samantha in her hotel room and they decide they should return to the hospital. Samantha, left alone to prepare for departure, kneels and looks at her reflection in the television screen and reaches slowly to touch it, just as the film cuts out with an ominous beat.

Final Cut Writers: Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis Directors: Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis Date: 1998 Country: United Kingdom Length: 90 min. Type: Surveillance: Domestic contexts Following Jude’s (Jude Law) death, his girlfriend Sadie (Sadie Frost) gathers their friends together to watch a film he made and wanted them to see. Sadie has everyone sign release forms that will entitle her to use the images gathered at the viewing – a camera crew is there to record the group and individual responses as they watch Jude’s film and during the frequent intermissions. Jude’s film is a montage of footage, some of which was made openly and some of which was recorded by hidden cameras. The hidden camera footage reveals a lot of extremely unfriendly behavior between these so-called friends, many of whom are clearly unworthy of trust and prone to criminality and violence, not to mention incapable of communication without obscenities or sexual references. They are shown treating each other with complete contempt by lying, by acts of petty theft and infidelity, by betraying personal confidences, and by visually undisclosed but acknowledged spousal abuse. Two of the guys even steal Sadie’s underwear so they can sniff it, and later have sex in the street in broad daylight with a prostitute. Ray, confident that Sadie finds him extremely attractive, tries to convince her to have sex with him. The revelations of a boys’ night out and a girls’ night out are other high points. In many instances, Jude incites confrontations and altercations by, as he says, “winding people up.” Toward the end of the film, Sadie’s sister Holly (Holly Davidson) finds Jude’s tape hidden behind a picture in the bedroom and then tries to use it to blackmail Jude for money. When he refuses, she takes it to Ray (Ray Winstone) because the tape includes a scene in which Ray’s wife Lisa (Lisa Marsh) is having sex with Jude. Ray comes to the house while Sadie is out getting food and papers and confronts Jude about the tape. After swearing he loves him and giving him a hug, Ray grabs Jude from behind and holds him tightly as he stabs him in the neck. At this point in the film viewing, Ray makes his exit – Lisa refuses to go with him – and he is arrested in the street. Sadie collects the tape, much of it having been pulled from the case. The film closes with shots of Holly describing herself as a silly girl, and the others commenting on how they feel used by Jude and his general lack of respect for their various relationships. Sadie, who thought completing the film would make her feel better, says she only feels worse as she is mad at Ray for killing Jude and mad at Jude for leaving her. * * * The film that viewers see is the film Sadie completes on Jude’s behalf as it incorporates not only Jude’s edited footage, both that he created openly and that he gathered covertly, but also that made by the crew brought in to record the viewing of Jude’s film. Final Cut is unusual for its placement of the surveillance camera and microphone in the hands of one, or two, among “friends,” rather than, as is more common in tech-noir, in the hands of representatives of a government or corporate agent or a criminal specifically interested in gathering intelligence or material for blackmail. In the end, Jude both brings about and solves his own murder with his

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recording devices: that he dies at the hands of a man angered because Jude had sex with his wife – the same man who was eager to have sex with Sadie – is irony wasted on the company presented. While having something of the intimate quality of Egoyan’s Next of Kin (1984) and Family Viewing (1987), Final Cut is a far more relentless study of repulsive characters. Jude’s voyeurism and the self-conscious style of some of his clips compare with the character of Graham in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). Graham has become impotent and enjoys himself only while watching tapes he has made of women talking about sex. Graham, however, is cured in the end and destroys his tape collection. Jude’s tape is used to remind everyone of what would otherwise have been lost to memory. This element, along with the image-within-an-image idea, is also crucial to the Truman Show (1998), Unspeakable (2002), Final Cut (2004), and Hidden (2004). Final Cut (1998), like Hidden, departs from most of these and from classic melodrama in general in that it has no easily identifiable heroes and villains, only victims and abusers, who sometimes trade roles.

The Final Cut Writer: Omar Naïm Director: Omar Naïm Date: 2004 Countries: Canada and Germany Length: 105 min. Type: Cyborg Surveillance: Domestic contexts Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) is a “cutter” who makes “re-memory” tapes out of Eye Tech’s Zoe implant images. Re-memory editing is done on a “guillotine,” a large multi-screen computer with state-of-the-art sorting and cataloging programs. The implants record everything and cannot be removed without killing the owner, but their operation can be halted by the special tattoos flaunted by many regarded as social misfits. Jennifer (Stephanie Romanov), widow of Charles Bannister, a recently deceased Eye Tech executive, goes to a great deal of legal trouble to get her husband’s Zoe tapes released from corporate security into Hakman’s forgiving hands. Hakman is surprised to find an image of someone he thought he had murdered in a boyhood incident in the tapes. Isabel (Genevieve Buechner), Charles’s daughter, whom Hakman quickly learns was abused by her father, releases him from his guilt when she tells him that this man was a teacher who died in an accident only a year earlier. Hakman gets into the Eye Tech records department to see if this man had an implant, which he did not, but he discovers that he has one himself: his parents died before they could tell him about it. Hakman goes to his cutter friends Thelma (Mimi Kuzyk) and Hasan (Thom Bishops), who are horrified that a cutter has an implant, but then help him with a very risky hack into it. He discovers that he actually tried to save the other boy who, in any case, did not die in the accident that Hakman remembers. Meanwhile, anti-Eye Tech rebels, assisted by former cutter Fletcher (James Caviezel), want Charles’s footage so they can use it against the corporation. Their plans are thwarted when Hakman’s sometime girlfriend Delila (Mira Sorvino) realizes that Hakman “found” her when he worked on her deceased boyfriend’s Zoe footage: she destroys Charles’s implant by shooting up the guillotine. Undaunted, the rebels then murder Hakman so they can get Bannister’s tapes as they were seen through Hakman’s eyes. * * * This exceptional image-within-image tech-noir film takes surveillance as far into personal life as it can get. Hakman is caught up in the best and worst aspects of this technology, as it both releases him from the guilt created by his false memories and makes him a target for assassination. It also leads him to Delila, who

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is deeply offended by his eavesdropping on her most treasured experiences and memories and by his use of the knowledge he acquires to insinuate his way into her life. Hakman treats Isabel far more delicately; nevertheless, the potential for a child to be victimized a second time through the Zoe is fully apparent. The principal social issue in The Final Cut is the invasion of privacy by surveillance, an issue that is also taken up in such films as Enemy of the State (1998) and Minority Report (2002). Implanted surveillance equipment is the basis of Death Watch (1980); the viewing of a recorded death experience is the high point of Brainstorm (1983); and the hacking into one’s own brain-implant idea echoes from Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Final Cut (1998) engages the same subject in a different manner: it involves the postmortem viewing of covertly made recordings edited together into a film, which is then edited together with the footage taken while the objects of the original surveillance see the first film – after the person who made that initial film has been murdered – an event that, like Hakman’s murder, is also captured on film. Hakman’s death is unlikely, however, to ever be seen by anyone. The Final Cut (2004) differs from all of these films in that it presents Zoe surveillance as a corporate devised and promoted status symbol that is bought into by almost everyone who can afford it; thus the inhibitor tattoos are a symbol of unity in a mainly youthful opposition to the status quo. See Cyber Wars (2004) for fringe “weirdoes,” who, like those in Final Cut, seem to have a clearer sense of the implications of mainstream technology than most members of the mainstream.

Final Mission Writers: Virginia Gilbert, Sam Montgomery, Lee Redmond, and Ernest Sheldon Jr. Director: Lee Redmond Date: 1993 Length: 88 min. Type: Behavior modification General Morgan Breslaw (Corbin Bernsen) is operating a virtual reality-based training program that is supposed to enhance performance. It involves pilots running simulated flights during which they are drugged and programmed to respond to codes transmitted to them visually through their helmet visors: the visors are already equipped to translate what the pilots would normally see with their own eyes into a “virtual” landscape. Colonel Anderson (Steve Railsback) coordinates the operation: the first two non-simulated flights are fiascos, with the pilots variously following or confused by the virtually delivered directions and the ground crew, which is outside the loop, trying to figure out why the pilots will not respond to verbal queries. Anderson and Breslaw are worried that any bad press about the program will mean the end of their funding, so they order everyone to keep quiet about what has happened. Meanwhile Tom “Outlaw” Waters (Billy Wirth), a member of the experimental subject group, has picked up a new girlfriend, Caitlin Cole (Elizabeth Gracen), at a gas station. Cole turns out to be working for Anderson. Waters suspects something is amiss and makes a couple of midnight forays to the lab where he learns more about the tests he has been subjected to and then reports on Anderson to Breslaw, who has both Anderson and Cole arrested. On the next flight, however, Waters and Frank “Flash” Tato (Frank Zagarino) go up in two planes and Breslaw in a third. Breslaw orders Tato to pursue and destroy a fourth passing plane that happens to be carrying the Secretary of Defense. Waters manages to foil the plan and Tato ejects to safety, so Breslaw tries to force Waters to carry out the job. Although he is quite dazed and confused, Waters manages to direct Sergeant Wyatt (John Prosky) in ground control to ask Cole to explain, which she does. Waters then manages to reject his virtual orders and destroys Breslaw instead of the Secretary. Waters and Cole drive off together, stopping at the gas station where they met to give the attendant there Waters’s flight suit, something he said he wanted because it might help him get a date. * * * 300

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The confusion created by pilot failure to respond to voice command is one of the classic components of Failsafe (1964), but otherwise this film is an adaptation of the behavioral modification theme from Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004) to virtual reality; indeed, the film is noteworthy primarily for the representation of the virtual programming process. The pilots enter the simulation rooms and sit down in their chairs, but they recall the needles and program directives that follow only in their nightmares. On one of Tom’s midnight excursions to the simulation room, he accidentally starts the program and, when he looks into the visual transmission, lapses immediately into the requisite trance state, coming out of it only when he hears a guard. Individuals are similarly programmed to perform specific tasks in Apocalypse Watch (1997) and Fugitive Mind (1999). The virtual training program appears, without the subliminal directives, in Expect No Mercy (1995) and Virtuosity (1995). The ambitious government types in charge in this film are philosophically at odds with the current administration and will do anything to maintain funding for their pet military projects. Similar characters appear in a wide array of tech-noir films, including Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996), Duplicates (1992), Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), Fugitive Mind (1999), and others. Duplicates and Universal Soldier also incorporate the idea of shady government-supported projects designed to produce assassins. The General’s willingness to throw away his career in an impossible murder attempt that could only end badly makes about as much sense as Cole’s affection for Waters; see the last Universal Soldier (1999) film for an equally inexplicable guy–girl partnership.

The Fly Source: Based on George Langelaan’s short story of the same title, 1957 Series: The Fly II, 1989 (Sequel) Writers: David Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue Director: David Cronenberg Date: 1986 Length: 96 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Bioengineering: Transplant Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) invents a teleportation pod and shows it off to Veronica (Geena Davis), a journalist after a story who soon becomes his lover. The teleportation of inanimate objects is easy, but when he tries to teleport a baboon it reappears as a bloody writhing mass. Seth thinks it was turned inside out and decides he has to teach the machine to understand more poetic qualities so that it will work with greater precision; he is right and the next baboon teleportation is successful. Meanwhile, Veronica’s former boyfriend and current boss Stathis (John Getz), who at first thinks the tape Veronica shows him is a fake, keeps showing up in her apartment and starts following her. Seth, who is upset and annoyed by the competition, moves quickly from teleporting baboons to teleporting himself; unfortunately, he does not notice the fly that joins him in his experiment. The machine splices the pair together on the molecular level and, in the weeks that follow, the insect DNA recreates Seth in its own image: he grows hair he cannot cut, his nails and ears drop off, his legs transform, and he has to eat like a bug. Seth has Veronica record his various transformations. Veronica, meanwhile, learns she is pregnant, dreams about a disastrous birth, and tries to get a midnight abortion. She is stopped by Seth, who carries her back to his lab, followed by Stathis, whom Seth slobbers digestive acids on thereby dissolving one hand and one foot. He then throws Veronica into a pod and gets into the second one himself with the apparent intention of splicing them both together into a third. Stathis shoots the wires connecting Veronica’s pod to the system. Seth tries to leave his pod just as the teleportation activates and the process splices him together with the machine. The hysterical and grief-stricken Veronica finally shoots him in the head. * * * 301

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Brundle is something of a Dr. Jekyll who performs an experiment on himself and is fascinated by the changes that ensue. Like the Jekyll of later films (1990, 2002), he wants to record as many of the transformation details as possible. Unlike Jekyll, he uses a machine, rather than drugs, for his experiment: like Altered States (1980), this tale is about a man who gets into a machine and is never the same again. In this case, however, the transformation of man into man-insect is permanent and the transformation of man-insect into man-insectmachine is fatal. See Cyborg Cop 3 (1995) for insect-DNA-injected cyborg soldiers and Mimic (1997, 2001) for the future of a man-mimicking, artificially created Judas Breed of cockroach. The merging of different humans by means of a machine also appears in The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973) in which a hermaphrodite is manufactured by putting a man and a woman in a pod and running a computer program. Videodrome (1983) features the merging of man and machine as the final outcome of exposure to a transformative cathode ray. The possibility of teleporting matter into the digital realm is represented in a number of virtual reality films, including Tron (1982) and Arcade (1993); and the replication of matter is posed as at least an experimental possibility in Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) and Replikator (1994). Teleportation is used for transportation in Circuitry Man II (1994). A pregnancy saves a woman and people infected with a bioengineered bug in Warning Sign (1986), but here pregnancy threatens a mother’s life and potentially the entire evolutionary future of humankind. The therapeutic abortion is also featured in Coma (1978) and Unspeakable (2002), and an abortion sought for similar reasons is stopped by the fetus in Cyborg 3 (1995); but Veronica’s actions are most like those of Susan in Demon Seed (1977), who tries to destroy the human-machine hybrid she helped create because she perceives it as an abomination and a threat.

The Fly II (Sequel) Source: Based on characters from George Langelaan’s short story of the same title, 1957 Series: The Fly, 1986 Writers: Frank Darabont, Mick Garris, Jim Wheat, and Ken Wheat Director: Chris Walas Date: 1989 Length: 105 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Bioengineering: Transplant Veronica dies giving birth to a cocoon that bursts open as the infant Martin Brundle (Eric Stoltz) emerges from it. Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson) takes charge of the boy and assigns Doctors Jainway (Ann Marie Lee) and Shepard (Frank C. Turner) to look after him in the hope that he will be useful in some profitable corporate scheme. Martin sneaks into the level-four security area and befriends one of the test dogs, a Setter to which he confides about the rare disease he believes only he shares with his father: “Brundle’s accelerated growth syndrome.” Martin thinks this disease is the reason he has to spend his life in a research facility. Soon after establishing this bond, he sees his pet destroyed in a teleportation experiment. Martin grows rapidly, reaching young adulthood in five years, at which point Bartok provides him with what seems to be a private apartment, but he is monitored there as closely as he was in the laboratory. Bartok also convinces him to work on his father’s former teleportation project; while doing so, Martin meets Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga), another scientist working the night shift. Beth invites him to an office party where he overhears some gossip that leads him to the observation windows overlooking the dungeon where his former pet, the one he thought died, now lives as a deformed and pathetic version of its former self: one night he puts it quietly out of its misery. Beth and Martin become close, and Martin even grants her the privilege of pushing the “return” key activating the successful teleportation of a kitten. He then figures out a way to cure his own mutant genes, but

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it requires the sacrifice of another person. When his dormant genes become active, Martin escapes and goes to Beth’s place; they flee together and try to get help from Stathis Borans (John Getz). Stathis is embittered by the loss of his limbs in the fight with Martin’s father, but he offers them his jeep. When Martin is no longer able to walk, Beth has little choice but to call Bartok to come and get them, which he does, and then they all return to the lab. Martin becomes a large multi-limbed monstrosity that kills Jainway, Shepard, and numerous security guards, including the mean-spirited Scorby (Gary Chalk), before dragging Bartok into one of the pods and signaling Beth to push the return key activating the program. He emerges cured and Bartok is reduced to a writhing mass and consigned to live in the hovel formerly occupied by Martin’s maimed pet. * * * Martin, like the creatures in Mimic 2 (2001), is a second-generation bug with an accelerated growth cycle, such as that deliberately induced in both animal and human experimental subjects in Embryo (1976) and numerous film clones. His initial appearance and eventual development seem to confirm his mother’s worst dreams about her monstrous child. Martin’s existence revises the first film’s presentation of Brundle as the aberrant, but one of a kind, Dr. Jekyll; just as the appearance of Jekyll’s deformed son does in Jekyll and Hyde (1990). This sequel, however, does what Jekyll and Hyde does not – it allows the son to resolve his father’s scientific error. Brundle becomes truly monstrous at the end of The Fly when he attempts to drag his lover to her death in the teleportation pod. Martin normalizes this earlier horrific scene when he discovers that the solution to the genetic mutation is donor DNA. The problem is that the donor dies; but Martin also solves this problem by exercising both a kind of biblical justice and an Oedipal impulse on his false father when he selects him as the donor. Martin’s healing process also shifts the organ transplant to the human DNA level, so the film belongs thematically with Killer Deal (1999), and even John Q (2002), in which a father offers to sacrifice himself so that his son will live.

Foolproof Writer: William Phillips Director: William Phillips Date: 2003 Country: Canada Length: 93 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems When Kevin Kraft (Ryan Reynolds), Samantha (Kristin Booth), and Rob (Joris Jarsky) are finished with their mundane jobs they play a game they call “foolproof ”: they make detailed and accurate plans for heists involving high-tech security systems that they never carry out. One day, professional criminal Leo Gillette (David Suchet) steals and successfully executes their diamond heist plan. He then uses the plan documents, which are covered with their fingerprints, to blackmail the trio into planning and conducting the theft of a large quantity of bonds. Rob has expressed an interest in expanding the game to include fencing stolen goods, suggesting that his motives are becoming criminally professional. He recognizes Leo as “Leo the touch,” socalled because of his “Midas touch” in managing to stay out of jail, and seems eager to participate in the new “game.” He suggests that they switch the bonds for forgeries so that the theft will go unnoticed. Feeling they have little choice, the other two join the planning. They target an employee who comes to work at night to enjoy telephone sex chat, and Leo has a woman distract him and keep him away from the place as required. They plan two break-ins to complete the heist, one to set things up and one for the actual theft. During the first break-in, Sam shoots ice pellets across the sensor-protected room at the vault access keypad, so that when

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the employees try to open the vault the next day the alarm goes off. The conspirators capture the new code from a surveillance camera as it is entered. Meanwhile, Leo flatters and manipulates Rob by giving him extra money and sending him a high-priced call girl so that, at a moment of crisis during their escape, Rob helps Leo and sends the others to their deaths down an elevator shaft. Rob and Leo head to the bottom to retrieve the stolen bonds; once there, Sam shoots Rob and Leo takes the bonds and shoots Sam. Then, however, Leo discovers his restaurant is on fire and a detective points out that his gun is loaded with blanks. The original bonds are found in his wine cellar hideaway along with the picture of the recently inputted vault access code with his prints on it. The three friends had figured out where Leo hid their plans, faked the elevator fall and shooting, set Leo up to take the fall for his own crime, and are now free and clear of any implication in Leo’s wrong-doing. They also have the diamonds from the diamond heist. The film ends with Kevin insisting they return them, Rob wants to keep them, and Sam hesitates. * * * This film is full of “noir” plot twists, duplicity, flashbacks, and tension as it appears the three friends turn against each other. The commentary about whether or not they are enjoying the rush of excitement as they carry out a “real” job is an interesting addition, perhaps indicating that simulated and virtual world action have lost their novelty and actually become too commonplace. In general, Foolproof is a fast and entertaining version of Sneakers (1992) starring, not middle-aged respectable adults or ex-cons, but rather bored, if not entirely down and out, generation Xers. Like Martin Brice in the earlier film, Kevin is particularly good at his legitimate job because of his familiarity with a certain criminal element: Kevin has a talent for spotting insurance fraud because he spends so much time figuring out how to commit crimes himself. Unlike Martin and the members of his team, however, who find themselves doing phony break-ins for a living, the Foolproof game players do the same thing for fun not financial gain, although they may have learned a thing or two from the much older Leo as the ending does leave the “financial gain” point open for debate. Also, unlike Martin and his team, all of whom have some sense of the inequities of the “system” and its flawed hierarchy and at least some interest in correcting it, Kevin and his team simply acknowledge and never question, much less challenge, contemporary notions of ownership and power beyond the contemplation of thievery. The final diamond scene also contrasts sharply with the conclusion of Universal Soldier II (1998), in which the heroes, finding themselves in possession of a large quantity of diamonds, leave them all in the Vietnam veterans street donation box.

Fortress Writers: Troy Neighbors, Steven Feinberg, et al. Series: Fortress 2: Re-Entry, 1999 (Sequel) Director: Stuart Gordon Date: 1992 Length: 98 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems Cyborg Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI John (Christopher Lambert) and Karen Brennick (Loryn Locklin) lost their first child at birth, so when Karen becomes pregnant again, they flee the country to escape the consequences of violating the strictly invigilated birth laws. They are caught trying to get out of the United States and sentenced to decades in the Mentel prison. Located in the middle of the desert, this prison is a gigantic multi-leveled underground facility

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full of tiny over-crowded cells. Prisoners arrive in cattle-car-like vehicles with standing room only, and are then stripped and injected through the mouth with “intestinators” that are used to cause pain and which automatically detonate if the recipient steps out of bounds. Pregnant women are kept so that their babies can be converted into cyborgs and the men are put to work expanding the facility. While the intestinators reduce the need for constant surveillance by armed guards, male prisoners at least are monitored even as they sleep, dreaming being grounds for intestination as it is an “unauthorized thought process.” Prison director Poe (Kurtwood Smith), a former Men-tel baby enhanced as a cyborg, is attracted by John’s dreams of Karen, even as the Men-tel computer Zed demands that he carry out the mandatory punishment for such activity. Poe later uses a “mind-wipe” on John, purportedly as a punishment for fighting, but more specifically as bargaining leverage to convince Karen to be his companion, which she agrees to, thus saving John from a complete mind erasure. Karen subsequently uses the dream surveillance technology to enter John’s mind and literally pull him out of the deep psychological coma the wiping machine left him in. John and his cellmates then find a way to remove their intestinators, rescue Karen from what would have been a fatal birthing operation, and break out of the prison. John and Karen make it outside and Karen gives birth in the world of nature. * * * Fortress is a film about a police state that uses intensive surveillance to monitor its citizens with the particular objective of controlling population growth, and leaves those it deems criminals for corporate-run prisons to do with as they please. Like the cyborg Plughead in Circuitry Man (1990, 1994), director Poe is portrayed as a social deviant who takes voyeuristic pleasure in conducting surveillance; but whereas Plughead is a criminal, Poe is supposedly carrying out his corporate, and apparently government-sanctioned, panoptic supervisory duties, and his voyeuristic practices are observed only by the corporate computer Zed who condemns them only when they deter Poe from his responsibilities. A pain-inflicting control implant also appears in Megaville (1990) where it is associated with a tracker, and similar devices are used by Dr. Moreau in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) to enforce the artificial set of laws he imposes on his beast-men. These films propose, in contrast to the way of things in the world of Brave New World (1980, 1996), that violent coercion is necessary to maintain desired social behavior. The intestinator devices used in Fortress not only reduce the need for prison guard weapons by conflating torture and incarceration, they create a dramatic parallel to the pregnant woman’s experience of the fetus as an implant that will lead to her death. The woman who is hunted because she is either pregnant or has recently given birth appears in Nemesis (1992) and American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994), and is parodied in Cyborg 3 (1995), in which an android about to give birth to a half-human half-machine being is pursued by humans who presumably want to capitalize on the technological development, but might just want to destroy her because that is what they do. The implied fate of Karen’s baby had she remained in the facility is graphically illustrated in 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997), in which a cyborg baby controls a ship with a crew of prisoners.

Fortress 2: Re-Entry (Sequel) Writers: Peter Doyle, John Flock, Steven Feinberg, and Troy Neighbors Series: Fortress, 1992 Director: Geoff Murphy Date: 1999 Length: 92 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems Cyborg Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI 305

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John (Christopher Lambert) and Karen Brennick (Beth Toussaint) are living in secret in the country with their adolescent son Danny when some resistance fighters arrive expecting John’s help to get Stanley (Willie Garson), a former Men-tel employee who has the plans for the new facility, to a safe place. Brennick refuses, but they have been followed by Men-tel trackers in helicopters who capture John using a net and then torch his cabin. Karen and Danny manage to escape through some secret tunnels and head toward Canada; John is sent to the new co-ed Men-tel prison in orbit around the earth and run by the new and improved Zed-10 computer. New prisoners are clamped in a chair, judged, sentenced to death, and then appropriated for labor. All laborers receive an inner thigh implant that taps into the optical nerves so that guards working in the multi-screened observation room can keep an eye on everything. Stanley’s implant is botched, leaving him a bit simple-minded. Prison quarters are communal, but all live and work in cramped, usually gritty metal spaces. John soon finds himself assigned to dangerous jobs like replacing solar plating without a security line, threatened by fellow prisoners, and punished for an escape attempt by being placed in the “hole” where he is exposed to cold and solar rays. Meanwhile, the Men-tel solar and corporate power operations are about to expand exponentially as solar power is to be used to maintain a big gun trained on the earth. Men-tel president Susan Mendenhall (Pam Grier) gives local manager Peter Teller (Patrick Malahide) the operating pin he wants, which gives him the ability to target anything in the northern hemisphere, including Brennick’s wife and son. After Brennick and his buddies figure out how surveillance is maintained, they set the guards up watching loops from the showers, make a deal to escape with the Russians who have a shuttle coming in, and get the necessary bypass codes with a little help from Stanley’s cockroach; but the Russians leave them behind, shooting the one who was undercover spying on them, only to be shot out of the sky themselves by Teller. Teller also shoves Brennick out an airlock, but Brennick manages to get inside another one and takes over the control room while the others head for the Iceman’s ship – the ship that brings water from the moon. Brennick points the gun at the station and, in spite of Teller’s best efforts to stop him, destroys it and also makes it back to his family. * * * Fortress 2 Re-Entry, like its predecessor, is a tech-noir film about life in a police state with corporate owned and operated prisons. The scene in which John is recaptured using a police net is reminiscent of the recapture of Ben Richards in The Running Man (1987) after he escapes from prison. The Fortress 2 conflation of corporate and political judicial systems is equal to that in Running Man, as well as Synapse (1995), which also conflates the apprehending, sentencing, and appropriating of individuals to serve corporate goals. The delivery of the Men-tel optical relay through the inner thigh while the recipient is strapped in a chair is reminiscent of the tracker in Running Man, not to mention its removal in Universal Soldier (1992). This Men-tel device, however, is not just a tracker; it works much like the ocular camera implant in Death Watch (1980) and visual surveillance implants used in Megaville (1990) and Nemesis (1992). Solar energy, usually presented as a safe, clean alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power, is here shown to be just as vulnerable to exploitation by corrupt corporations as any other form of power. See China Syndrome (1979) and Chain Reaction (1996) for other films about power sources, and Goldeneye (1995) for a film with satellites that are equivalent to Teller’s big gun. Like Goldeneye, Fortress 2 includes a few Russians and an undercover agent for retro-Cold War flavor, but in Fortress 2 they serve only as misdirection away from the much more obvious and friendly escape alternative available from the Iceman.

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Frankenstein Source: Writers: Series: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Some characters from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1818 Dean R. Koontz and John Shiban Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1994 (based on the same novel) Marcus Nispel 2004 TV 88 min. Bioengineering: Transformation Clone: Society and service

Victor Helios (Thomas Kretschmann) has been prolonging his own life for two hundred years while he makes artificial humans tailored physically and psychologically to suit his will: his ultimate goal seems to be to replace or control the entire population. Unfortunately, some of his creations fail to live up to his expectations: the beautiful Erika (Ivana Milicevic) is apparently an inadequate wife incapable of properly arranging flowers, choosing the right jewelry, or even realizing the inappropriateness of applying heavy make-up to the face her husband-father has so carefully designed for her. Erika and some of those creations Helios has turned loose in the city have a death wish. Both Erika and the priest confess to him that they have only one nightmare, a nightmare about their birth in his laboratory, even though this event was supposedly programmed out of at least Erika’s memory. It is this nightmare, a deep sense of inadequacy, and the inability to procreate that foster the death wish, but the creatures are all programmed such that they cannot take their own lives. Detective Harker (Michael Madsen), who happens to be one of Helios’s projects, embarks on a killing spree that includes harvesting internal organs from his victims. He takes the heart from his third victim, one of Helios’s creations and also his friend, and leaves the body beside an open book on aberrant psychology: he regards this murder as an assisted suicide. Detective Carson O’Connor (Parker Posey) and her partner Michael Sloane (Adam Goldberg) are called to investigate the deaths. O’Connor gets some unexpected assistance from Deucalion (Vincent Perez), Helios’s first creation. The two-hundred-year-old Deucalion, who possesses a unique individuality and independence of thought, arrives secretly in New Orleans by ship. He immediately goes to the abandoned Joy Theatre to meet a former contact, who unfortunately died only the week before; but he finds sanctuary in the place with its only other occupant, an old woman who passes on some news clippings about Helios’s rise to power by playing the role of the philanthropic scientist. These clippings provoke Deucalion’s flashback to images of lightning, his body jolting into life in a vat, and then his struggle to break free of his restraints and rip off his bandages: evidently, this is the birthing nightmare shared by all of Helios’s progeny. Deucalion goes to O’Connor, declares himself to be the fact on which Mary Shelley’s fiction was based, demonstrates his strength and affinity for electricity, and explains that he was composed of parts from a variety of criminals. These declarations are indirectly confirmed by the autopsy of Harker’s third victim: the coroner believes this body shows evolution, rather than deformity. Deucalion also covertly looks in on O’Connor’s much younger autistic brother whom she supports: he decides he can trust her and enlightens her as to the motivation for the killings. O’Connor realizes Harker is the killer and she and Sloane arrive at his apartment just in time to stop him from slicing open his youthful female neighbor. His next target is the department psychologist, whom O’Connor and Sloane also rescue. Harker finally dies when Deucalion throws him over an atrium balcony, but a strange mutation that has been growing in his belly escapes. Helios, who has already murdered the priest and Erika, and re-created the latter, is still at large. * * * This adaptation of Frankenstein (1818) to tech-noir includes extensive use of “shabby goth” settings and the adjustment of characters such that the scientist is a megalomaniac seeking world domination through science. Harker is not so different from the address book killer in Ghost in the Machine (1993) or the serial killer with 307

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his fetishized collection of dolls in The Cell (2000). O’Connor is comparable to, though perhaps not quite as “noir,” as her counterparts in Replikator (1994), Morella (1997), and Gattaca (1997). The presentation of the Creature as a true child of Prometheus and ally of humankind is comparable to that of Solo in Solo (1996), the replicant in Replicant (2001), and Sonny in I, Robot (2004). This film is also discussed in Chapter 2.

Freejack Source: Based on Robert Sheckley’s novel Immortality Inc., 1958 Writers: Dan Gilroy, Steven Pressfield, and Ronald Shusett Director: Geoff Murphy Date: 1992 Length: 110 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant At the 1991 Grand Prix, at the exact moment that racecar driver Alex Furlong’s (Emilio Estevez) car catapults directly into a concrete overhang, his body is hijacked by Vacendak (Mick Jagger), an employee of Ian McCandless’s (Anthony Hopkins) corporation: McCandless has died and his digitized mind is waiting in the Spiritual Switchboard for download into a new body in 2009, eighteen years after Alex’s accident. The confused Alex wakes up: hijacked bodies are not supposed to have brain activity and the attending doctors are just about to correct the problem with some form of lobotomy, when Vacendak’s convoy is attacked. In the ensuing confusion, Alex escapes, only to discover that the ozone layer is gone; New York pollution levels are beyond anything he imagined possible; the streets are packed with dangerous, malnourished, sick people; and as a “free jack” he is nothing but “meat” with a reward on his head. His former agent Brad (David Johansen) and his fiancée Julie Redlund (René Russo), now a McCandless executive and key player in the Japanese–American corporate jostling for power, betray him. He gets a little help from a pragmatic nun (Amanda Plummer) and a homeless man eating river rat (Frankie Faison), and then from Julie, who figures out the truth and contacts Morgan (John Shea), a friend who might help him escape. Meanwhile, Alex gets a little too happy on an unfamiliar beverage, the media gets to him, and he takes the opportunity to tell Vacendik off. Morgan tries to make things clear to him: “There are people at the top and people at the bottom. There is no one in between.” Alex, however, is as charismatic in 2009 as he was in 1991, and although the reward for his recovery has gone to $10 million the public seems to value him more as a hero who just might beat the system. Julie is forced to turn to McCandless for help, but the “safe passage” McCandless offers goes bad and Julie’s bodyguard Boone (Grand L. Bush) dies aiding Alex’s escape. Both Vacendak’s men and those of Michelette (Jonathan Banks), whom McCandless left in charge of the upload process, pursue Alex. Alex spares Vacendak’s life and, in return, Vacendak tells him that it is McCandless who wants his body. Eventually, Alex and Julie arrive at Michelette’s office, where Michelette claims his plan is to let McCandless disintegrate so he can be head of the company and that they are free to go. They are actually to be killed in the lobby, but in the confusion of a firefight between Vacendak’s men and Michelette’s men, they escape back up the elevator. The elevator takes them to the digital McCandless who, amidst digital views of Monument Valley, claims that he too will let them go, but he is merely stalling until Vacendak arrives and forces Alex to go through with the procedure. Before it is complete, Michelette interrupts and is shot for his trouble. Alex, with a little help from Vacendak, pretends to be McCandless and gets the company and Julie. * * * The time-traveling element has been adapted here to serve a kind of personalized Millennium (1989) plot: in that earlier film, everyone in the future is dying of pollution and, while the heroes cannot seem to solve 308

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that problem, they are able to collect the bodies of people from the past who are about to die so they can repopulate the future. Here, McCandless just wants a healthy body for himself. As in Parts (1979), Killer Deal (1999), and The Island (2005), the world of the not-so-distant future is one with only two classes: the corporate “haves” who want to live forever and the “have-nots,” or potential donors to the longevity fantasies of others. See Rising Sun (1993) for more on Japanese–American corporate wars. The man who wakes up in a world that is a lot older than it was when he passed out and is aided in his adaptation to it by a female companion also appears in films that involve cryo-imprisonment, such as Project Shadowchaser (1992) and Demolition Man (1993); and cryostasis, such as Universal Soldier II (1998). Nightworld (1998) alters the concept with an artificial aging device. For a mind upload that works – sort of – see Menno’s Mind (1997).

Fugitive Mind Writers: Sean McGinly and Tripp Reed Director: Fred Olen Ray Date: 1999 Length: 94 min. Type: Behavior modification Clone: Society and service John Rice (Michael Dudikoff) is a dishonorably discharged special operative agent who begins to find a new life working with Suzanne Hicks (Heather Langenkamp) at a homeless shelter. One night while making a late night food delivery, the two are kidnapped and taken to the Gencom corporation where John is modified with drugs and computer programming to think he is Robert Dean, a Gencom employee with a wife (Michele Greene), who turns out to be one of Gencom’s doctors. Dean is also programmed with a plan to assassinate Senator Davis (David Hedison). Clues to his real identity come from his dreams about fighting off his kidnappers; his mental images of the lab, syringes, and the assassination he is supposed to carry out; his neighbor, who tells him they have only known each other for a week; his Gencom computer file; and finally from Suzanne, whom he meets one night while she is escaping from Gencom. His dream images quickly become waking flashbacks as Suzanne’s presence and direction awaken more memories. Meanwhile, the Senator has investigator Karl Gardener (Gil Gerard) gathering information about Gencom’s illegal experiments with cloning and memory implants through insider Dr. Tucker Foley (Gabriel Dell), but the Senator’s investigation and plans are thwarted by his own aid Jimmy (Chick Vennera), who is secretly working for Gencom. Gencom security agents track Suzanne and John to their hotel room and recapture John for another imprint and the taping of his “confession” in time for the assassination. Suzanne goes to the senator to try to warn him, but is stalled by Jimmy, so she heads for the assassination site, a multilevel parking garage opposite from where the Senator plans to hold a press conference and reveal what he knows about Gencom. Unfortunately, she is taken hostage there; but, fortunately, John has sufficient awareness of her identity that the plan is foiled. The Senator has John’s memory restored and shuts down Gencom; John and Suzanne get medals. Chamberlain (Barry Newman), the senior doctor in charge at Gencom, leaves a suicide note about how it was all supposed to have been about science for the people, and then shoots himself. * * * In Total Recall (1990), a former villain wakes up to a wife, apartment, and job, and then discovers that these are all part of a phony identity implant. In Fugitive Mind, much the same thing happens for very different reasons to a dishonorably discharged war veteran: his programming is intended to protect a corporation’s illegal experiments in memory imprints and cloning. The programming of the person theme appears in 309

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The Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004) and others; and a husband and wife imprinted with other people’s memories find each other again and recover their own memories in Duplicates (1992). Fugitive Mind, like Manchurian Candidate, Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), and Final Mission (1993), also emphasizes the vulnerability of soldiers to “volunteer” work as test subjects for experimental procedures intended to further unworthy causes through violence. The filmed forced “confession” appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and the filmed forced “confession” is revealed as such in Killer Deal (1999). Like Fugitive Mind, Terminal Choice (1985) and Fatal Error (1999) feature bizarre science labs with dead animals in jars. Fugitive Mind also, like others, including Morella (1997), pictures fetuses in jars. Fugitive Mind, Terminal Choice, and Fatal Error also include characters who move covertly through those labs, but only the evidence-collecting doctor in Fugitive Mind ends up dead on his apartment floor. The “good” politician for whom this doctor is working is interested in taking down a corporation, even though it might cost him some election financial support because, in the end, he thinks action will win him more votes than inaction. Good politicians in tech-noir seem as likely to die as be rewarded for adopting positions that favor the public interest: on this theme, see Menno’s Mind (1997) and Enemy of the State (1998). The scientist who commits suicide when she or he reaches a moment of realization also appears in Duplicates.

Future Kick Writers: Catherine Cyran and Damian Klaus Director: Damian Klaus Date: 1991 Length: 80 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Cyborg Bioengineering: Transplant In 2025, Walker (Don Wilson) is the last of the half-human half-machine cyberons originally designed to police corporate crime. When the cyberons discovered that the corporations were the criminals, they found themselves targeted by a new corporate-run police agency; so Walker has to make his living covertly as a bounty hunter in between flights from the law. When Howard Morgan (Jeff Pomerantz), a designer of interactive virtual reality novels, makes a trip from his posh home on the moon to see his editor on earth, his wife Nancy (Meg Foster) tries out his latest creation. The novel, which almost immediately merges with the film’s “reality,” seems to pick up with Howard’s departure, including the ads promoting New Body’s major organ replacements by age forty-five; and follows him through his visit with his publisher, who has recently acquired a rare paper copy of David Copperfield, and their discussion of the market value of Howard’s latest product. Next, Howard makes a side trip to a club with exotic dancers; meets with his lover; meets with a woman with a disk proving New Body is getting its body parts illegally; accidentally meets with Walker whom he invites to his hotel room for a research interview; and finally, both Howard and his girlfriend have a final meeting with psycho-thug Hynes (Eb Lottimer) who harvests their organs. Hynes also kills Dr. Sado (Dana Lee), his primary buyer at New Body. It then seems that Nancy exits the novel when she “wakes up” to a call telling her that her husband has been murdered, just as he was in the game, and she goes to earth to find out what happened. At the crime office, she meets Captain Kraner (Al Ruscio), who is complicit with New Body’s covert activities, then she meets and hires Walker, who helps her get the bad guys. Nancy finally really does exit the game to be comforted by her husband who has just returned from his trip. * * *

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In an opening voice-over, Nancy describes her world, which is more or less identical to that of the virtual reality novel she soon begins to play: rich people live well on the moon and apparently maintain their health and longevity with organ transplants. The virtual reality novel is full of exotic dancers, naked bodies, and violence, presumably, as in Dream Breaker (1996), created as a response to the user’s inclinations, but they are also part of “real” life. The virtual reality “game” or “novel” writer or designer, like the game itself, is common in tech-noir; as is the treatment of books as a sign of an antiquated past: see Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Soylent Green (1973), Brave New World (1980, 1998), and Equilibrium (2002). A number of later films, such as Killer Deal (1999), address the subject of corporatized organ transplant procedures and the involuntary donor; while others, such as Brainscan (1994), Nirvana (1997), Redline (1997), and eXistenZ (1999), confuse both player’s and viewer’s sense of reality while also playing with the entry and exit images or transitions between reality and virtual reality. The Earth-based underworld of the novel also features a head-exploding digital game similar to one in Nirvana (1997). Walker, as an artificial being who is more “human” than the corporate thugs who pursue him, is akin to Murphy in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993), Cash Reese in Cyborg 2 (1993), Solo (1996), and numerous other part-human and fully artificial beings. Bounty hunters also play major roles in Blade Runner (1982), Slipstream (1989), Cyberzone (1995), Cyborg Cop 3 (1995), Nemesis 4 (1996), Shadow Fury (2001), Cyber Wars (2004), and others. The most atypical character in this film is the fortune-teller with the Crowley­–Harris Thoth Tarot deck who meets an entirely predictable end when she is assaulted with an organ-harvesting tool. Cash Reese also visits a Chinese fortune-teller in Cyborg 2 and a mechanized fortune-telling program called “Osgood Predicts” is briefly featured in Tin Man (1983). In each of these films, the fortune-telling device contributes to the conceptual mise-en-abyme that, in Future Kick, is already well developed by the virtual reality game.

Future Shock Writers: David DuBos, Eric Parkinson, Matt Reeves, and Vivian Schilling Directors: Eric Parkinson, Matt Reeves, and Oley Sassone Date: 1993 Length: 93 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Behavior modification The experiments performed by a group of doctors have somewhat disastrous effects on the initial test subjects, who are strapped into a chair and then exposed to virtual reality images. A male subject, who thinks the process will be a kind of “Lawnmower Man” (1992) experience, signs the required release form and is assured of his $1000 on the way out: several doctors discuss him; one reassuring the others that they have been careful and he is not someone anyone will miss. The test begins with the “Susie Q” program: a blonde dancer appears on a television screen, but the test subject sees the image as a three-dimensional projection. A doctor hits a button by accident and the dancer turns into a man – and the test subject’s head explodes. The doctors coolly discuss what went wrong and get ready for the next test; one doctor wants a copy of the disk. In spite of the obvious flaws in the device and its programming, Doctor Langdon (Martin Kove) begins using it in his clinical practice, treating Jenny Porter (Vivian Schilling), who fears violence; then George (Scott Thompson), who fears chaos; and finally Steven Forest (Sam Clay), who fears sudden death. The virtual reality device makes each person’s fears come true and then they wake to find themselves safely in the doctor’s office. The story ends with Doctor Langdon coming into his office one morning and turning the lamp on himself, leaving viewers uncertain as to what exactly happened in the previous segments. * * *

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This film’s virtual reality device is used to make what an individual fears come true, rather than what he dreams of come true, but is otherwise comparable in its effects to the effective dreaming and dream “augmenter” featured in The Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002), except, of course, that the patients in Future Shock, like the player of the virtual reality game in Brainscan (1994), eventually wake up to a world that is the same as it was before they entered the virtual one, or at least that seems to be what happens. The end of Future Shock throws the context of the previous events of the film into doubt: Redline (1997), Nirvana (1997), and eXistenZ (1999) have a similar type of closing. The idea that virtual reality programs can be made to interface with the human unconscious also appears in Future Kick (1991), in which a virtual reality novel leads a woman into an experience that she both fears and finds exciting; and Virtual Seduction (1995), in which a virtual reality program responds to a young man’s grief at the death of his girlfriend by creating a virtual copy of her. Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001) both feature a far more lasting virtual reality experience that is intended more as an alternate existence than therapy, although in the end, after the subject’s conscious awareness begins to repeatedly assert itself and a programmer-therapist enters the virtual world to help the subject understand what is happening, it becomes therapeutic such that the subject chooses to return to his “real” life. In The Cell (2000), virtual reality technology also enables a therapist to join her patients in their inner world and help them to recover – or not. All of these films use virtual reality to create one or more framing devices – the world within the world within the world effect – and often use those frames to externalize the main character’s inner responses to real-life situations. In other words, they take the pathetic fallacy, the idea that internal moods are expressed externally in the weather and environment, and develop it into a more thorough mise-en-abyme reflecting the complex conceptual reality of the patient or technology user. Future Shock is distinct, however, in that it opens with a vivid demonstration that the doctors developing the technology are all “Dr. Moreaus” who are indifferent to the natural lives of those foolish enough to volunteer as test subjects. The exploding test subject re-creates the response some people have to the “blipverts” introduced in Max Headroom (1985).

Futureworld (Sequel) Writers: George Schenck and Mayo Simon Series: Westworld, 1973 Director: Richard T. Heffron Date: 1976 Length: 107 min. Type: Android: Entertainment Clone: Society and service Reporter Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda) gets a strange tip from a man called “Frenchie” who soon turns up dead. Almost immediately, both Chuck and TV newswoman Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner) are invited, along with many VIPs, to see just how wonderful “Futureworld,” Delos’s newly reopened world of android entertainment, can be. At night, they are also among those covertly abducted while sleeping to be cloned: after being returned to her bed, Tracy wakes up screaming and the two decide the place needs further study. When they go out exploring, they accidentally materialize a group of samurai-like warriors, and Harry (Stuart Margolin), a maintenance man, rescues them. Harry, who keeps his job only because they need humans to service wet park areas – the androids malfunction in water – is happy to help and recognizes Frenchie from his photograph as a former Delos employee. The next day, after a variety of “Futureworld” demonstrations, including the recording of Tracy’s dream about a gunslinger (Yul Brynner) rescuing her from nasty doctors and then making love to her, they elude their guide Duffy (Arthur Hill) and go to see Harry again. The team

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breaks into a secret part of the facility using a special access code and a 700 series robotic eye and discovers the Delos plan to take over the world by replacing VIPs with specially programmed clones. Harry is killed shortly after saying good-bye to his favorite discontinued 400 series robot, but Chuck and Tracy manage to defeat their clones and escape, presumably to report on the planned takeover of the world by Delos. * * * In Westworld (1973), androids become instruments of death and destruction because they malfunction; in Futureworld both androids and clones serve a human desire for power and domination. This latter plot emphasis is characteristic of later tech-noir films, which frequently develop the idea that science and technology do damage because of people not malfunctions. The “Futureworld” plan skips the need for bribery and coercion featured in the Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971): why replace body parts and bother with blackmail, if you can replace the whole person? It also goes beyond The Stepford Wives (1975) insofar as it proposes to replace individuals performing a wide array of social functions, not just wives and mothers, with artificial and specially programmed beings. Harry’s life as a maintenance man, employed only to do the wet work the androids cannot, is a pointed articulation of the effects of automation on employment opportunities for low-tech specialists. Usually androids replace prostitutes, assassins, and soldiers; Harry, on the other hand, is the classic everyman and handyman who, in a reversal of the artificial person’s appropriation of human jobs, finds himself of value only because he can perform tasks the artificial people cannot. Harry’s affection for a 400 series robot further dramatizes his isolation: the scenes showing the two together demonstrate just how little visual assistance is needed to convincingly anthropomorphize an android. Such humanizing is a product of the “Kuleshov” effect: see the film Castaway (2000) for a non-tech-noir example in which a FedEx executive is stranded on an uninhabited island. Desperate for company, he becomes very attached to the face he accidentally applies to a “Wilson” volleyball. His distress when Wilson floats away at sea is quite believable. See the earlier Roboman (1973) for a tech-noir film that is invested in denying the Kuleshov effect. Similar gadgets to the one used to record Tracy’s dream reappear in later tech-noir films, though usually for more malevolent purposes, as in Fortress (1992). A dream is used to stage the reappearance of Yul Brynner, the Westworld (1973) villain, as a woman’s “Futureworld” hero. Schwarzenegger, the villainous terminator in Terminator (1984) appears as the reprogrammed hero of Terminator 2 and 3 (1991, 2003).

Gattaca Writer: Andrew Niccol Director: Andrew Niccol Date: 1997 Length: 106 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Surveillance: Information and control In “the-not-too-distant-future,” bioengineering has resulted in widespread genoism, discrimination on the basis of DNA, and thereby created a new social under class. Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) is a love child fated by his DNA to a short life span as a janitor, while his bioengineered younger brother Anton (Loren Dean) is deemed to have a much better chance to succeed in a white-collar profession. The brothers often go swimming in the ocean and Anton always outdoes his older brother in distance and speed, until one day, Vincent not only wins, he saves Anton from drowning. Vincent eventually gets a maintenance job at the aerospace corporation Gattaca, but he refuses to be satisfied with this fate and sets out to fulfill his dream of

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becoming an astronaut. He becomes a “borrowed ladder” when he borrows the DNA identity of Jerome (Jude Law). After Jerome, a man born with all the best genes, placed second in a major swimming competition, he stepped in front of a car and thus became wheelchair-bound for life. Vincent has better plans for Jerome’s genes: he undergoes a procedure to lengthen his legs so he will match Jerome’s height and learns all the techniques necessary to carry off the fraud that he is Jerome. Finally, he becomes a member of the aerospace corporation Gattaca as a potential astronaut rather than a maintenance man. One week before his departure on a one-year trip to Jupiter’s moon Titan, the mission director, who opposes the flight, is murdered and the police scrutiny threatens Vincent’s plans. Hugo (Alan Arkin), an experienced detective with a second-class rating, presumably because of his deficient DNA, ultimately discovers that the Gattaca director (Gore Vidal) is the murderer and, incidentally, also discovers the relationship between Vincent and his own boss, who just happens to be Anton: he wisely passes this information only to Anton. Vincent, with a little help from coworker and lover Irene (Uma Thurman) and the Gattaca body fluids tester Dr. Lamar (Xander Berkeley), manages to depart as scheduled. Jerome leaves enough body samples to keep Vincent going for two life times upon his return, and commits suicide in the house incinerator. * * * In the world of Gattaca, DNA entitles some people to lives of opportunity and consigns others to poverty and subservient jobs on the fringes of society. As in Brave New World (1980, 1998), genetic manipulation is synchronized to class divisions based on presumed fitness for different kinds of work. Vincent, however, has not received the behavioral programming that helps maintain the Brave New World status quo and is thus far more inclined to act on his personal ambition and desire, regardless of his DNA-determined destiny. Gattaca uses several foils to establish the foibles of science, the most dramatic of which is the swimming contest between the two brothers. The ocean setting of their private rivalry provides an unusual contrast to the competitive environment of the metal and glass Gattaca building: according to the world of science, symbolized by Gattaca, Anton is the superior being; according to the world of natural passion and drive, symbolized by the ocean, it is Vincent who exceeds all expectations and DNA-based predestination and ultimately outdoes his brother in both worlds. Similarly, a kiss is a conventional indicator of true affection and passion; but, as in Matrix Reloaded (2003), it can also serve other purposes: in Gattaca it is a means of collecting a prospective mate’s DNA. Irene is specifically misled by the hair samples Vincent plants in his desk, but like Vincent, she decides passion is more important than science and Vincent not only gets the job of his dreams, he gets the “best” girl. Gattaca is also one of the tech-noir films with an effectively adapted “hard-boiled” noir detective: Hugo shows an excellent adjustment of the type to the context, being the one person capable of both solving the mystery and implementing the appropriate solution. He walks circles around Anton insofar as he plays to his socially sanctioned place in the hierarchy. See Replikator (1994) and Morella (1997) for other noir detectives.

Ghost in the Machine Writers: William Davies and William Osborne Director: Rachel Talalay Date: 1993 Length: 104 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Joshua Munroe (Wil Horneff) has become a bit of trouble-maker since his dad left; his latest scam is to get a basketball player to give him $100 for a supposedly winning lottery ticket with his buddy taking the 314

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verification call: it would have worked if his mom Terry (Karen Allen) had not arrived just then. Mother and son stop at a computer store to get a Christmas gift for Terry’s boss Frank. Terry lets the owner scan a few pages from her address book as part of a software demonstration, while Joshua has a minor altercation with Karl (Ted Marcoux), the man behind the “Microsoft Word” counter sign. Terry leaves with the software, but not her address book. Later, Karl volunteers to return the book, but it is a stormy night and he has an accident: his car flips and skids upside down through a graveyard. He is taken to the hospital and, at the moment of his MRI scan, lightning strikes, there is a power surge, he dies, and his brain scan shoots into “Datanet” rather than hospital storage. Police soon realize Karl was the address book serial killer they have been hunting for three years, as Terry learns when she goes back to the store for her book. Meanwhile, computer whiz Bram Walker (Chris Mulkey), who was almost jailed for sending everyone on Rhode Island a 5-cent tax refund and now works as a computer trouble-shooter, realizes that someone is after Terry; indeed, the digital Karl starts killing off people associated with her. First, he microwaves Frank in his own kitchen along with his popcorn, eggs, and bananas. Later, Terry has a terrible dream about his cremation service in which the burning coffin rolls back into the church and catapults the body into the congregation. Karl also literally knocks Joshua out of a virtual reality game ring in a mall; drowns the family dog under the pool cover and almost sends Joshua to the same fate; and he assaults Eliot, one of Terry’s dates, with a car crash simulator and then sets him on fire with a bathroom hand-drier. He electrocutes Joshua’s babysitter and then arranges for multiple police cars to be called to the Monroe residence – Terry’s mother ends up in the hospital. When Terry sees the name of the hospital where Karl was taken on a list of places with power surges the night of the storm, she makes the connection to the MRI. Joshua proposes an exorcism or a stake to kill the monster. Terry suggests a magnet and, as it turns out, Bram has access to a gigantic magnet at the Ohio Tech campus. He uses a virus to drive Karl into a “particle accelerator”; but Karl somehow materializes and attacks them, so Terry shoots a hole through the glass shielding them from the magnet and Karl is sucked through the bullet hole and disintegrated. * * * Karl’s death experience as he enters the Datanet compares with that of Lillian in Brainstorm (1983), but overall Ghost in the Machine is really more about the Tron (1982) matter to digital transfer concept integrated with a kind of Black Christmas (1974) or possibly a horror version of the family film Batteries Not Included (1987). Frequent point-of-view shots place the viewer in the position of the digitized Karl, enhancing viewer identification with the attacker as well as the victim. Joshua’s close encounter with Karl inside the arcade game has its parallel in Arcade (1993). Toward the end of the film, Karl manages to take on a quasi-solid form: see Hologram Man (1995) for a dramatization of what happens when the digitized criminal gets to recover a more substantial physical form. Joshua’s references to methods of killing classic monsters and Terry’s addition of a magnet confirm that the digital download belongs with the roster of demons and vampires that require special forms of destruction. “Bram” is an unusual name that suggests Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897). Bram plays the role of the “Robin Hood” computer genius, as does Brice in Sneakers (1992), but Bram takes care to advise his youthful admirer, Joshua, about the folly of his tech-virtuoso moment of good-humored generosity. Terry is the mom who was caught shoplifting at age seventeen, arrested for civil disobedience in a rally opposing Nixon, and now does her best to take care of her son without his father’s help, as does Dade’s mother in Hackers (1995).

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Global Effect Writer: Terry Cunningham and Deverin Karol Director: Terry Cunningham Date: 2002 Length: 95 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Technology A boy returns to his African village to find everyone dead and the irises of their eyes turned strangely white. He hears the planes coming and runs. The bombs are a drastic and effective means of containing the outbreak of any deadly disease, but the biohazard team that checks out the area later finds that the boy died outside the strike area. Dr. Sera Levitt (Mädchen Amick) is assigned by Dr. Richard Hume (Arnold Vosloo) to use the body to develop a vaccine in a Capetown laboratory. First, she discovers a means of preventing the development of the disease for twelve hours after exposure and then, when one of the experimental rodents, Pinkie, is accidentally left near a heating element and does not die as expected, she is only one step away from manufacturing the cure from the animal’s antibodies. Racial purist, scientist, and terrorist Nile Spencer (Joel West) is promptly notified of this development by the local maintenance man and drops in with his team to shoot the place up, steal what he thinks is the fully developed vaccine, and kidnap Levitt. Even though he subsequently realizes that he does not have the cure, he has his girlfriend Sasha (Rolanda Marais) inject herself with the booster shot and the contagion and then go out for a stroll in Capetown: the sickness spreads rapidly. Meanwhile, Agent Marcus (Daniel Bernhardt), who had a previous opportunity to shoot Spencer but was ordered to let him live, rescues Levitt. They head for her lab, rescue Pinkie from a snake, and take a blood sample. Spencer shows up again, steals the blood, kills Pinkie, and injects Levitt with the virus. Marcus and Levitt find Sasha who, realizing she has been left to die, tells them the name of the boat Spencer is going to use to spread the disease even more rapidly. The pentagon is worried and, after a civilian bomber destroys a hospital filled with plague victims, Meredith Tripp (Carolyn Hennesy) reluctantly orders a non-nuclear bomb be dropped on Capetown. A plan is also put in motion for an American submarine to bomb a much larger portion of the African continent. Luckily, Marcus and Levitt stop Spencer and collect the antidote in time to make this action unnecessary. * * * The threat to the human race in Global Effect is not a bioengineered weapon, but a virus that initially develops and spreads naturally, as did HIV and Ebola. The plague itself is the result of one individual’s desire to purify the human race and rebuild it according to his own ideals and fantasies. The near annihilation of humankind by an artificially engineered and deliberately distributed plague is featured in 12 Monkeys (1995); in Apocalypse Watch (1997), a bioweapon is used in a neo-Nazi terrorist plan to take control of the government; and in Mission Impossible II (2000), a young woman, like Sasha, finds herself cast in the role of typhoid Mary. The strategic bombing of small communities to prevent the spread of disease is a horrifying contingency plan and the bombing of almost an entire continent for this purpose is terrifying. The “war room” of such earlier films as Failsafe (1964) and WarGames (1983) is therefore turned into an American dominated, but globally influential and informed, decision-making forum for the fate of millions and billions of people all over the world, not because of escalating, nation level disputes based on conflicting social and political ideals and values, but because such decisions are deemed necessary to prevent the eradication of the entire human race by a relatively small group of terrorists. This tech-noir problem is solved here, as in other such films, by a return to nature, with nature taking the form of a rodent immune to the virus. Notably, it is the availability of a cure that makes the disease an effective terrorist weapon: the terrorists plan to save themselves and let everyone else die. The cure to a disease that presents new problems also appears in Mimic (1996, 1997) and Absolon (2003). 316

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Godsend Writer: Mark Bomback Director: Nick Hamm Date: 2004 Countries: Canada and United States Length: 102 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Bioengineering: Transformation Photographer Jessie Duncan (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) and her biology teacher husband Paul (Greg Kinnear) are devastated when their son Adam (Cameron Bright) is killed in a car accident the day after his eighth birthday. Dr. Richard Wells (Robert De Niro) offers to illegally clone Adam providing the couple comes to live in a small community near the facility where he works on his “Godsend” project. They agree, and all goes well until Adam passes the age of eight; then he begins to have nightmares, to sleepwalk, and becomes difficult at school and at home. In his dreams, which are just as often waking hallucinations, he is usually in a school hall with other children; the children become trapped in a fire that it seems Adam has set in a garbage can. He also dreams about a drawing of the school burning, which he then re-creates and signs Zachary Clark. One day, while Adam is taking a bath, he becomes frightened and gets out of the tub and then believes he sees someone pull the curtain down, but by the time Paul responds to his screams, all is normal again. On another occasion, after discovering an old shed in the woods, he has a hallucination about murdering a woman there with an ax. It also seems likely that Adam really does murder a school bully. A hypnosis session with Wells reveals the name of the school and that the children there think Adam is Zachary. Paul learns that the school in question closed because of a fire and that Zachary was a real person whose former nanny is certain Zachary started the school fire; indeed, she became so convinced of Zachary’s evil that she tried to drown him in the bathtub, but could not finish the job. Shortly after this incident, the boy murdered his mother with a hammer, set fire to the house, and went upstairs to play – his body was later found there. Zachary’s father was a purported baby doctor who was really more of a scientist. Paul quickly realizes that Zachary was Wells’s son and that Adam is really a psychological clone of Zachary. Paul confronts Wells, just as he is in the process of hooking another grieving couple at a funeral. Wells knocks him out in the church and leaves him to die in a fire. Paul makes it home in time, however, to prevent Zachary from murdering Jessie with an ax in the shed. The film ends with Wells, under another new identity, scanning obituaries; Paul, Jessie, and Adam moving into a new house; and Adam still haunted by “hallucinations.” * * * Godsend begins like a feature film version of the made-for-television Cloned (1997), momentarily evokes The Stepford Wives (1975) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and moves into scenes that Boys from Brazil (1979) did not capitalize on. The familiar tech-noir identity confusion experienced by the artificial person who does not initially realize that he or she is artificial is here given several new twists, notably that the subject is a child and that he and his parents gradually realize he has two personalities, one of which is an extremely disturbed killer with fire and ax fetishes. These twists are developed in relation to the notion that the body carries memory, such that, as in Morella (1997) and Replicant (2001), a clone carries the memories of its original; thus, Jessie and Paul get a little more than they bargained for when they have their son cloned. Norma, in Circuitry Man II (1994), much like Jessie, yearns for a child and turns to the scientist who can give her one; and, like Jessie, she discovers that the child she gets has been made according to a blueprint that serves the scientist’s interest as much or more than her own. Alex’s mother in Nemesis 2 (1995) likewise gets a little more than she can handle from her bioengineered baby and dies getting her to safety. Anna’s mother in Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) is more aware of what the scientist is up to, but lies to her husband so 317

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he will think the child is his. The parents in Duplicates (1992) grieve for their missing child, but eventually find him again, albeit imprinted with someone else’s personality. The Replicant clone overcomes his original’s inclination to murder young mothers and his fascination with fire … perhaps Adam will too.

Goldeneye Source: Based on the characters in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, dating from 1953 and subsequently turned into a film franchise Writers: Jeffrey Caine, Bruce Feirstein, Ian Fleming, and Michael France Series: The first James Bond film was Dr. No (1962) and there have been at least twenty since. Director: Martin Campbell Date: 1995 Countries: United Kingdom and United States Length: 130 min. Type: Technology Agent 007, aka James Bond (Pierce Brosnan), and agent 006 (Sean Bean), aka Alec Trevelyan aka Janus, are assigned to destroy a chemical weapons facility in the USSR. The job goes bad and 006 is shot by General Ourumov (Gottfried John). Nine years later, Janus directs psycho-killer agent Xenia Onatopp (Framke Janssen) to steal a new helicopter called Tiger, and fly in it with Ourumov to the Space Weapons Control Center in Severnaya, Russia, for an unscheduled test firing of one of two Goldeneye satellite weapons. Ourumov gets the launch codes and Onatopp sets the machine to strike the Center and then shoots everyone except Boris (Alan Cumming), who was their undercover operative, and Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco), who simply escapes their notice and then survives the Goldeneye blast. Natalya gets back to civilization by dogsled and arranges to meet Boris in a church where she realizes he is the traitor. Meanwhile, M (Judi Dench) puts Bond on the job armed with all the usual gadgetry, including a pen that arms and disarms with three clicks. He meets his American contact Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker) in Russia; Wade sets him up with a guy who sets him up with Janus for a price. Bond meets Janus in what appears to be a junk yard for abandoned Soviet statues and other paraphernalia and learns the details of his treachery, which are both political and personal as 006 is a Cossack: the Cossacks were traitors to the Russians and double-crossed by the British. Janus plans to use the second satellite to destroy London and simultaneously disrupt communications and security systems while he pulls off a big robbery. Bond and Natalya are soon thrown together, escape, and are taken into custody by the Defense Minister. General Ourumov, who has been pretending to everyone that the attack was carried out by rebel Siberians, enters the interrogation cell and shoots the Minister. Bond and Natalya escape in a tank; but Natalya is captured and taken to Janus’s train, which Bond stops, giving Natalya just enough time before the next explosion to use Boris’s own “spike” program to track him to Cuba. Somewhere closer to that destination, Agent Wade provides them with a small plane and, when a missile flies out of a pond and shoots them down, they realize where the dish controlling the satellite is. After Bond kills Onatopp, they get into the facility where Natalya retargets the weapon so it will explode relatively harmlessly over the Atlantic and resets the codes so it cannot be stopped. In a tussle, Boris ends up with the detonating pen and 007 accurately counts out his nervous clicking, has a final battle with Janus, and is rescued from both blast and Janus by Natalya in the Tiger. They land in a field where hidden American agents reveal themselves on cue. * * * Goldeneye is a slick, stylish exemplar of the secret agent film. While most of the films in the 007 series might be included on a list of tech-noir films simply because they feature so much deadly gadgetry, the 318

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overwhelming presence and inevitable success of the Bond character and the “coolness” of his gadgets completely undermines any fear or even thought that technology is a dangerous thing. Goldeneye is included here because of its emphasis on the possibility that a satellite weapon will not only blow things up, but will also disrupt communications because it emits an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP): see The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003) for more useful applications of the EMP, and Fortress 2 (1999) for another satellite with a big gun reinforced by the availability of solar power. See Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible II (2000) and Sebastian Rooks in Cypher (2002) for other Bondlike secret agents, and Redline (1997) for another post-Cold War treatment of Cold War themes. Large transmission dishes are common in tech-noir films, usually as communication and tracking tools; as, for example, in Enemy of the State (1998). See Virtual Nightmare (2000) for a big dish used to transmit a virtual reality signal.

Hackers Writer: Rafael Moreu Director: Iain Softley Date: 1995 Length: 105 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems Years after he earns a reputation as the hacker “Zero Cool” by crashing multiple computer systems, a stunt that ends with his probation until age eighteen, Dade Murphy (Johnny Lee Miller) and his mother (Alberta Watson) move from Seattle to New York where Dade gets involved with a group of hackers known by the handles Cereal Killer (Matthew Lillard), Phantom Phreak (Renoly Santiago), and Lord Nikon (Laurence Mason). In an effort to prove himself and earn a handle, Joey (Jessie Bradford), the least experienced member of the group, breaks into the “Gibson” system at Ellingson Mineral Corporation and downloads a garbage file that just happens to contain incriminating evidence that the company’s head of security Mr. Belford, aka Plague (Fisher Stevens), and head of public relations Margo (Lorraine Bracco) are engaged in computer theft and terrorism. Belford calls in government assistance and Joey is soon under house arrest, but the rest of the group rallies to his aid. Dade, now known as Crash Overdrive, and hitherto competitor Kate (Angelina Jolie), aka Acid Burn, head up the teen team that goes to work on the problem. They harass the policeman responsible for the arrest: they destroy his credit rating, place an ad for sex in his name, assign him 113 traffic violations, and then declare him deceased. Joey has hidden the disk he copied the garbage file on and it eventually falls into Dade’s hands. Belford threatens to hurt his mother if he does not turn it over, so he does. But the team also goes to work on a new plan to retrieve the entire file by hacking into the company from a series of telephone booths in Grand Central Station: they are assisted by the television personality hackers Razor (Darren Lee) and Blade (Peter Kim), who also broadcast the story when the incriminating information has been retrieved. “Crash” thus wins his outstanding competition with “Burn” such that she wears a dress for their first date. * * * Sneakers (1992) and Track Down (2000) tell a similar story, but this film adjusts the plot so that it involves the undoing of comically over-written adult corporate thieves and terrorists by teenagers. The trendy teen rollerblade hangout and the television personalities substitute for the fast cars, strip clubs, and reporters that prevail in many adult oriented tech-noir films. The “solution” to the problem, that of broadcasting the incriminating information to the public, is a familiar one found in just about every kind of tech-noir film from The China Syndrome (1979) to The Running Man (1987) to Johnny Mnemonic (1995). The “solution” to 319

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male obsession with computers as an interest in relationships with real girls is also familiar, even in teen films: see, for example, Brainscan (1994), although putting Burn in a dress as a penalty for losing a competition does seem like a parent’s idea. Storm Watch (2002) also poses a youthful, but post-high school team formed specifically to cope when Nick, also the group’s most notorious hacker, becomes the object of blackmail. Like Dade, Nick is the only son of a woman in a single parent household, but Nick’s mom is far less supportive and kicks him out when she finds out he is in trouble again. Ghost in the Machine (1993) features a much younger boy, Joshua, who is enthusiastic about virtual reality games and lives with his mom in a fatherless household; and Walker, the adult computer whiz who enters the scene to help them is, like Dade, paying a heavy price for a moment of virtuosity on the internet. Walker specifically warns Joshua not to follow in his footsteps: this warning is generally absent from other films with hacker heroes, including Hackers (1995). Hackers, however, does show the influence of peer pressure in getting less than streetwise kids into trouble. It also emphasizes that one member of the group has problems at home far worse than an absent father: the connection between teens intrigued with computers and broken or troubled homes appears in several tech-noir films, including Brainscan (1994) and Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996).

Hardware Source: Based on Steve MacManus and Kevin O’Neill’s story “Shoki,” 1980 Writer: Richard Stanley Director: Richard Stanley Date: 1990 Country: United Kingdom Length: 92 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins In a polluted post-apocalypse future where the homeless and their animals crowd into every shelter they can find, the government is introducing birth control regulations to try to reduce population growth, particularly among those whose genes have been compromised by radiation poisoning. In the desert fringes of this world, a “zone tripper” (Carl McCoy) in make-shift radiation-protection gear spots the movement of a mechanical hand jutting up from the sand. On Christmas eve, he brings the remains of what turns out to be a MARK 13 killer robot to the deformed Alvy (Mark Northover), whose mother is rumored to have caught a dose of radiation in the “big one,” to trade; but Moses (Dylan McDermott) buys the head directly from the scavenger as a Christmas present for his artist girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis). Moses and his buddy Shades (John Lynch) go to see Jill, who lives barricaded in an electronically secured upper-floor apartment and is currently welding a sculpture modeled after her black spider. She checks both of them with a Geiger counter when they enter. Both Jill’s voyeuristic neighbor and the robot observe Moses and Jill’s amorous reunion. Meanwhile, Alvy discovers what the MARK 13 really is: a prototype modeled after a spider and intended for combat in arid terrain; funding for its development was put on hold when it proved susceptible to moisture. Alvy immediately calls Moses demanding that he come over right away, but by the time Moses gets there one of the robot’s deadly components has already drugged and killed him. Moses tries to call Shades, who could get to Jill faster than he can, but Shades is taking a drug-induced holiday. Meanwhile, the MARK 13 has targeted Jill for termination, much to the surprise and horror of both Jill and her peeping-Tom neighbor. At this point, the peeper decides he should visit Jill, to whom he explains that he worked with the crew that installed her security equipment a few years ago. He offers to fix her malfunctioning door and the MARK 13 grabs and poisons him. Jill figures out that the robot’s only purpose is to kill and guesses that it is the means by which the government plans to implement its birth control regulations: her life and death struggle ends with Moses

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among the dead and the MARK 13 short-circuited in the shower. The film ends with the zone tripper walking off into the red-skyed desert. * * * This effectively crafted and very scary stalker film, like Fortress (1992), poses drastic measures for the control of human procreation. The fact that radiation has resulted in the birth of many children with mutations and defects lends some credibility to this plan, and even brings a few historical reference points to mind. The MARK 13, however, can recharge its own batteries, rebuild itself, and survive just about anything, so using it for population control sounds like, and in this film certainly looks like, the prelude to the fall of the entire human race. While it obviously owes something to the Terminator (1984), the stalking takes place entirely inside Jill’s locked apartment, with Jill an incidental rather than a specific target in a world already well on the way to destruction. The machine might also be taken as a stand-in for the abuser in a bad relationship, with Jill as the proverbial angel in the Victorian era house redesigned for post-apocalypse survival. Jill is also a close film relative of Susan, whose husband’s latest toy quickly becomes her worst nightmare in Demon Seed (1977). Radio announcer “Angry Bob” provides details about the nature of this fallen civilization in his commentary on the artificial color of the sky, the title of a song “playing tag in the auto graveyard,” the death toll resulting from violations of the Christmas ceasefire, the sterilization procedures as a “clear break with procreation,” and, at the end, the mass production of MARK 13s creating eight hundred assembly line jobs. A spider is used as a design prototype and a pet in this film, serves as the corporate logo for Pinwheel Robotics in Cyborg 2 (1993), and is the artificial Solo’s (1996) drawing subject: the multi-limbed creature serves as both symbol and mascot for the age of tech-noir.

Harrison Bergeron (aka Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron) Source: Based on Kurt Vonnegut’s short story of the same title, 1961 Writer: Arthur Crimm Director: Bruce Pittman Date: 1995 TV Country: Canada Length: 99 min. Type: Behavior modification In 2053, the results of the second American Revolution have been fully implemented: an elite of less than 3000 people with above average IQs secretly runs the country from a hidden facility under the direction of John Klaxon (Christopher Plummer). Outside that facility, America has been remodeled to look like the 1950s and mediocrity is fostered by impulse emitting “incursion” bands that inhibit the wearer’s ability to think, carefully controlled television programming, and computer selection of marital partners. When Harrison Bergeron (Sean Astin) is scheduled for the brain surgery that is mandatory for individuals with IQs the head bands cannot control, his doctor suggests he spend his last night at an illegal “head house” where men go to engage women in conversation, often without head bands. There he meets Phillipa (Miranda de Pencier), is captured in a police raid, and then invited to join Klaxon’s elite. At first, he is completely enthralled by the music, movies, and books he is suddenly able to enjoy, not to mention Philippa, and is soon assigned to work on television programming. When Philippa finds herself pregnant, a state entirely forbidden to the elite, she attempts to flee to Mexico, is captured and her brain reduced to “tapioca.” Harrison locks himself in the television control room, tells the world his story, and broadcasts a series of music and movie tapes before

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he is stopped. Later, Klaxon arranges for Harrison to go on the air and say that it was all just meant to be entertaining, as in the instance of the 1950s broadcast War of the Worlds. Harrison agrees, but when asked by the interviewer whether it was all “real,” he says it was no more real than this; at which point he pulls a gun and shoots himself. The film ends with his teenage son enjoying black market tapes of his show with a friend and without headbands; the surgically “tapioca-ed” Phillipa listens in. * * * In this futuristic society, as in those of THX 1138 (1971) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), technology is used for behavioral control and when standard methods of control fail, more aggressive measures are taken. The incursion bands in Harrison Bergeron serve a different function than the implant in Terminal Man (1974), but the dialogue in that earlier film emphasizes that lobotomies, surely the equivalent of brain “tapioca” surgery, were only halted when tranquillizers were invented to replace them. Here, the headbands are the equivalent of tranquillizers and the “tapioca” surgery is applied when they fail. The lobotomy solution is also applied to the clone Lena in Parts (1979) for supporting Richard, who actually escapes the Clonus facility and, like Harrison, discovers the truth. The notion that the 1950s was a happier time and that the perpetuation of that era, or some equivalent to it, will somehow make society better is also part of Virtual Nightmare (2000) and The Truman Show (1998). The suicide-on-air idea is a reminder of Network (1976), but in that film the angry individual is kept around for as long as he improves ratings and he is murdered only when his ratings slide – his brief attempt to start a revolution is quickly forgotten. In 2053, the system needs Harrison Bergeron to help maintain it in its entirety, but he uses his broadcasting opportunity to try to start the third American Revolution, a revolution he hopes will startle people into recognizing the difference between equality and sameness. He avoids being murdered only by committing suicide. Ultimately, Harrison is a variation of the reporter as the character who believes that getting some information or “truth” to the public is the solution to a problem. The arranged marriages reduce the entire population, if the headbands do not, to another version of Dr. Moreau’s island where John Klaxon plays Moreau and Harrison and others at the facility are variations of Montgomery. As in Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Gattaca (1997), most of the “island” inhabitants seem happily willing to abide by Klaxon’s “laws” and never think of their conformity as a by-product of externally imposed behavioral control or social engineering.

Heatseeker Writers: Christopher Borkgren and Abert Pyun Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1995 Length: 91 min. Type: Cyborg Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment In 2019, the fully human Chance O’Brien (Keith Cooke) is the world champion fighter and his trainer Jo (Tina Coté) is also his fiancée. Mr. Tung (Norbert Weisser), the top Sianon corporation marketing executive, decides to deal with Chance by upgrading the Sianon implants in Xao (Gary Daniels), Chance’s most recently defeated opponent, and with a plan, quickly approved by the corporate board, to sponsor a tournament allowing fighters an unprecedented 50 percent of their total body weight in cybernetic implants. The tournament catches the public’s attention, and Tung convinces fighters using a range of different styles and from different corporations to participate. Chance and Jo refuse to get involved because they are not really

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interested in ratings and market shares, until Tung has Jo kidnapped and outfitted with a control implant. He forces her to provide Xao with motivation by “befriending” him, rapes her, and also lets Chance know he can only get her back if he fights. On his way to the tournament, Chance is mugged on Tung’s orders and left unconscious in a back alley where he is stripped naked by children. En route to the Sianon island boat, he is hit by Bradford’s (Thom Mathews) car, but later at the fight registration desk, Bradford offers to be his buddy. Bradford initially gets friendly with Chance because Tung has ordered him to and because Tung has access to his father, who is in jail taking the fall for Bradford’s mistakes. But Bradford goes a little too far when he helps Chance get into the Sianon building, where Tung has to educate Chance a little more about his rules. Tung also decides Bradford should injure Chance in their match before losing to him so Chance will be properly handicapped for his fight with Xao. Bradford does as he is told and the acid someone puts in Chance’s gloves makes matters even worse. That evening, Tung’s female agent shoots Bradford who, before dying, explains himself to Chance and tells him that Tung has promised Jo to Xao if he wins. At the fight, Chance defeats Xao: when the infuriated Tung comes into the ring, Chance knocks him out, and when Tung’s female agent pulls a gun, Jo incapacitates her. Jo and Chance win the match, the money, and each other. * * * The trials and possible triumph of the lone human male, who might or might not find a female companion and ally in a world filled with the less than human, is a familiar tech-noir story, although there are relatively few variations in which the triumph actually takes place in an entertainment ring. See Rollerball (1975) and the Running Man (1987) for other such films, but Heatseeker presents a more literal battle about the value of natural human prowess empowered by “heart.” Discussions about the relevance of tech-implant percentages to a person’s relative humanity find a more careful and more noir presentation in Pyun’s Nemesis (1992). Heatseeker includes ads targeting those less committed to the rigors of the natural path to muscles and fighting skills: in a mere three days Sianon implants can turn a weakling into a real he-man. Obviously, the film hero’s accomplishment is the greater for being achieved without implants. Keith Cooke is a martial arts champion and, like kickboxing champions Don “the Dragon” Wilson in Cyber-Tracker 1 and 2 (1994, 1995) and Kathy Long in Knights (1994), he brings years of training and experience, as well as the aura of real-world fight excitement to the film. The control implants, on the other hand, effectively turn Jo into an involuntary Stepford wife (1975), of sorts, or perhaps Tung has something more like one of the droids in Cyberzone (1995) in mind. In any case, the general storyline includes a twisted version of the man with the tech meets woman story. Jo, like Karen in Fortress (1992), cooperates only while the blackmail terms are enforced: both women clearly prefer their 100 percent natural man. The nude shots of Jo’s lover serve a somewhat opposite purpose to those of the terminator in Terminator (1984) insofar as those of Chance are meant to show perfected nature, not the perfect machine.

Hidden (aka Caché) Writer: Michael Haneke Director: Michael Haneke Date: 2005 Countries: Austria, France, Germany, and Italy Length: 118 min. Type: Surveillance: Domestic contexts Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), and their son Pierrot live in a comfortable home with lots of books. Anne works for a publisher and Georges is the star of a literary talk show. One

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day, someone starts sending them videotapes, first of their house, then of Georges’ childhood home where his mother still lives, and then of a street and mysterious corridor; they also receive some violent drawings, including one of a person spitting blood and another of a bird bleeding around the neck. These drawings are also sent to Georges at work and to Pierrot at school. Georges follows up on his intuition, his dreams, and the street name they decipher from one of the tapes and finds Majid (Maurice Bénicho). Majid is the son of an Algerian couple that worked briefly for Georges’ parents. This couple never returned from a trip to Paris in 1961, apparently because they were killed in a political incident there. Georges’ parents almost adopted Majid, but Georges lied about Majid coughing up blood, so he was sent to an orphanage instead. He also told Majid that his father wanted a rooster killed and got him to do it: this is the subject of one of Georges’ worst dreams. Now Majid lives in a low rent apartment and has a teenaged son (Walkid Afkir). He also denies all knowledge of the tapes, but a tape of his altercation with Georges in his apartment is sent to Georges’ employer who then decides to put plans for Georges’ new show on hold. When Pierrot goes missing, Majid and his son are blamed, but then Pierrot comes home, apparently having spent a night at a friend’s house without bothering to tell anyone. When Anne tries to talk to him, it becomes clear that he thinks she is having an affair with her boss. Majid calls Georges to come over so he can explain something; when Georges arrives, Majid slits his own throat in front of him. The film ends with a long shot of people coming and going on the stairs in front of a school, including Majid’s son and Pierrot who stand and talk to each other for some time. * * * This film dramatizes the paranoia-inducing effect of surveillance and acts of petty terrorism, even in people who have not committed any crime. In this case, the viewer is not always immediately cued to shifts between surveillance tape and the film proper, although the fast-forward distortion lines occasionally signal that the image being viewed is one within another image. Dreams slip into the mix as well. The viewer never finds out for certain who was actually conducting the surveillance; possibly Majid, and if not Majid, then Majid’s son, but neither one really seems to be guilty; which leaves the possibility that Majid’s son and Pierrot have met, shared stories, and carried out some sort of prank. The references to the 1961 Algerian incident in Paris in which dozens, possibly hundreds, of people were murdered by the French police adds an additional level of complexity to Hidden, making it a film about public, as well as private, guilt, and amnesia. The use of private surveillance to reveal personal guilt is a prominent theme in Final Cut (1998), although the adult subjects of surveillance in that film seem little inclined to guilt or remorse for their actions, all of which are performed in the recent, rather than the distant, past. An emphasis on childhood guilt is apparent in The Final Cut (2004), in which an adult feels remorse that proves to be founded on a false memory; that false memory led him into a very different life than he might otherwise have chosen, but obviously had no effect on the boy whose death he believed he caused. In Hidden, it is ill considered plans made by Georges’ parents that arouse Georges’ small boy jealousy which, in turn, leads to acts that have long term consequences for another person: this situation poses a different kind of complexity to that in either Final Cut (1998) or The Final Cut (2004).

Hologram Man Writers: Evan Lurie and Richard Preston Jr. Director: Richard Pepin Date: 1995 Length: 96 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Behavior modification 324

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The Los Angeles of the future is run by CAL CORP, the corporation that also owns and operates the virtual reality systems used to incarcerate and rehabilitate criminals. Crime is increasing, however, and one of its most violent criminals is psycho-terrorist Norman Gallagher, aka Slash (Evan Lurie), who claims to be acting on behalf of the people who have lost their individual freedoms to corporate government. In a summary of his objectives, he announces: “I want peace on earth and a mansion in Beverly Hills.” Rookie policeman Kurt Decoda (Joe Lara) is initiated into the harsh realities of his job when Slash murders his partner Wes Strickland (John Amos). Decoda apprehends Slash and he is sentenced to have his mind downloaded into a computer for “biorectification.” Five years later, when his case is up for review without chance for parole, Slash’s partners have insider Manny O’Donnell (William Sanderson) manipulate Slash’s holographic program so that he can move independently of the computer. Wearing a rubber suit that makes him look just like his former self, Slash returns to the lab for his biological body, only to find that Decoda has destroyed it. In the ensuing battle, Decoda is fatally wounded, so his girlfriend Natalie Sterne (Arabella Holzbog), the daughter of the scientist who runs the holographic program (Joseph Campanella), turns him into a hologram. Decoda then defeats Slash, refuses to be blackmailed by CAL CORP, and starts killing off CAL CORP executives. In answer to the question “What will we do now,” he answers: “vote!” * * * This extremely violent “slasher” film has an extraordinarily high body count in the first twenty minutes alone. Although completely lacking in comedy, it has numerous affinities to Demolition Man (1993), but in that earlier film the mind remains associated with the body when it is put in cryostasis and the programming fails because it is deliberately altered. In Hologram Man the mind seems to be separated from the body and downloaded into a computer for programming which fails due to the extreme psychological deviance of the subject. Slash ceases to be the “ghost in the machine” and becomes a ghost from the machine re-embodied in a kind of rubber skin, perhaps an upgraded form of that developed in Darkman (1990). Like Karl, the address book killer in Ghost in the Machine (1993), Slash was a killer before he was uploaded into a computer system, but he lacks Karl’s finesse in choosing his victims. His nickname “Slash” puts him firmly in the context of the “slasher” film, as does his given name Norman, at least for horror fans who have not forgotten Norman Bates of Psycho (1960). When his body is destroyed, he immediately takes a fancy to someone else’s: he believes, like McCandless in Freejack (1992), that the right to take another’s life is contingent on nothing other than whether or not a person has the power to do so. The holographic Decoda appears as the supercop needed to handle extreme criminals. Although he becomes something of a vigilante with regard to corporate VIPs, he also claims, not incidentally, to be a believer in true democracy, rather than the democratic-capitalism Slash distorts to suit his own interests. This optimistic political subtext underscores a point in relation to virtual reality, frequently made in tech-noir films in relation to implants and prostheses, that “difference” and “humanity” are not solely defined by an individual’s relative percentage of technological and biological body parts. On this point, see also Heatseeker (1995) and Nemesis (1992), but Hologram Man extends the discussion to virtual bodies and voting rights. Cyborg Cop 2 (1994) also features a policeman who watches a villain kill his partner and Virtual Assassin (1995) stars a former policeman who is suffering for having seen his partner die, as well as a father–daughter scientist team working on a project that becomes the object of terrorist action. Virtuosity (1995) presents a virtual reality character who manages to upload into an artificial body and then wreak havoc until he is finally put back in his box.

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Hostile Intent Writer: Manny Coto Director: Jonathan Heap Date: 1997 Country: Canada Length: 90 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems  rologue Text: 60,000,000 people have computers in their homes. By the year 2000, the number will be one P billion. We shop, bank, complete tax returns, communicate with family – All by computer. Our lives are in computers. In 1999, the Federal Government will pass legislation authorizing the use of the Clipper Chip which allows access to every file on our computers. Every aspect of our lives. Mike Cleary (Rob Lowe) and his team have developed the Guardian computer chip, a chip that will prevent the government from accessing all computers. Mike’s team plays simulated war games in the bush with another group of computer experts associated with Gordon (Ronn Sarosiak), Mike’s former boss: Mike broke from Gordon after Gordon sold his work, work that enabled access to private information, to the government. On the eve of the public presentation of Guardian, a glitch becomes apparent, but a would-be hacker is stopped and the problem solved. Mike also finds he cannot make the payroll, so he asks team member Dunnel (Gerry Quigley) to once again ask his family for support. The next morning, the team heads to the bush in their army surplus khakis armed with paint guns for another round of simulated combat. En route, the fan belt on the Cleary team vehicle breaks, but mountain man John Berrington, aka “Bear” (John Savage), helps them out. Shortly after the game begins, it becomes clear that a third team, the “feds” led by Adams (James Kidnie), has joined and is playing for much higher stakes. The feds start killing off players as a prelude to claiming the Guardian chip. Meanwhile, Bear and his buddy Charlie have decided to go hunting and, after Charlie is killed and Bear wounded, Bear goes after Mike’s people; once he realizes they are not responsible, he, like Gordon, joins Mike against the feds. It turns out that Dunnel was a plant who was supplying funding from the government not his family as he claimed, and now the government wants what it paid for. Mike stumbles across one of the fed’s communication devices, a product Gordon developed and is selling to them for $25,000 a unit, and uses it to jam their communications and then resets it to create an echo so most of the feds kill each other. He also uses it to contact Bob Soames (Louis Del Grande) back at the office and tells him to delete everything. Bob does exactly that and is immediately murdered by agent Kendall (Saul Rubinek). Mike and Bear are the only ones to make it back to Bear’s “rabbit hole,” which happens to be fully equipped with computers and independent access lines that Mike uses to upload Guardian so everyone can have it. The furious Kendall demands a full report, while Mike and Bear drive off making plans for their life on the run, funded, of course, by the IRS. * * * The film’s opening combat scenes are only revealed as simulations when the game is over; the simulation turns real and deadly in the rematch when a third team enters the game. Other films that emphasize simulations that turn “real” when an additional player joins the play include Sneakers (1992) and Foolproof (2003). Plots similar to that of Hostile Intent in that they involve aggressive claims to unlimited access to digitized information are found in Enemy of the State (1998) and Netforce (1998). More unique to Hostile Intent is the computer program developer’s alliance with the tax-evading mountain man who has withdrawn from society: both are presented as being in opposition to government incursions on the individual privacy and freedoms of its citizens. Bear and Charlie are initially cast as members of the “weirdo” social fringe, comparable to the cannibals who shoot the prisoner ship out of the sky in Judge Dredd (1995), but in the latter half of the film, this social fringe is legitimized as a site of just rebellion. The earlier 326

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Lawnmower Man 2 (1996) features Trace as a computer expert who has renounced his profession to live an isolated wilderness existence; he answers the call to return and help clean up the mess created by digital technology, as does Bear. The computer genius who has turned “primitive,” but agrees to one more job, also plays a key role in Cyber Wars (2004).

Interface Writers: Andy Anderson and John Williamson Director: Andy Anderson Date: 1984 Length: 88 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment After a member of a university computer gaming club accidentally kills someone, the rest of the club members decide to use their hacking abilities to find society’s lowlifes and then let their master computer program pass life or death sentences on them. Computer science tutor Bobby Witherspoon (Michael Hendrix), a member of the club, makes a living on the side by solving computer-related student problems such as low grades. When Bobby is apparently killed in a car accident, his wife Amy (Lauren Lane) goes to his computer science professor Rex Hobson (John Davies) to find out what was going on with her husband’s mysterious club. Amy and Rex are soon entangled in the game and the police repeatedly track Amy, whom they claim to suspect of murdering her husband, to the law-abiding Rex. After considerable confusion with the game computer disk Amy finds in Bobby’s office, and much pursuing and being pursued by police and masked game-playing assassins in the streets and in the school’s labyrinthine hallways, they find the game’s control room itself hidden in the tunnels below the campus. The gamers are led by Amy’s deadbeat and not so dead husband: all quickly turn on each other in order to avoid blame and parental retribution. Hobson and Amy walk off happily, after being handcuffed to each other by the police. * * * Interface is an unexpectedly entertaining, low-budget film that reworks the computer as instrument of world destruction idea: the consequences of the computer’s decisions are limited to the individuals singled out for judgment and most of the horror derives from the related acts of violence and the stupidity of the university students involved in the “game.” Tech-noir films often pose tech-savvy males as of higher than usual intelligence and as wielders of power, often from behind the scenes, and thus the potential partner of choice for women. Here, Amy, already the wife of the purported tech-genius Bobby, dumps him in favor of the less adept, but socially better positioned and legitimate wage earner Rex. The location of the group’s headquarters in a university building basement is appropriate, not only to the film’s satirical approach to students, but to its gothic horror effects. Much of Mimic 2 (2001) takes place in a high school basement and Mangler 2 (2001) is about a virus-infected security system that stalks and murders college students on an otherwise uninhabited campus at night. This film satirizes higher education and parodies the justice system by showing university students acting like the vigilantes who have targeted many groups and individuals throughout history for anything from skin color to sexual preferences. As vigilantes, these students take upon themselves the full range of judicial tasks, except the sentencing, but including the execution of the computer-determined judgments. There is some similarity here to the “judges” in Judge Dredd (1995), but Judge Dredd is a duly appointed member of the justice system. In Cyberstalker (1996), it is an abused young woman who believes she is acting as a kind

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of judicial arm for an artificial intelligence featured in a comic book when she kidnaps and murders. In both Interface and Cyberstalker, young adults lack even the most rudimentary understanding of social systems and concepts of justice. For a story involving a more intelligent teenager who does not get confused about justice, but does get confused about which crimes are real and which are virtual, see Brainscan (1994). Interface is one of numerous films that rework one or more motifs from Videodrome (1983), specifically the scene in which Nicki convinces Max to kiss the television screen. In Interface, a call girl (Susan Barnes) is forced to kiss a television screen, supposedly for a client, and is then blasted by the judgmental gamers. This screen scene also gets a passing nod in Fatal Error (1999). Talking screen lips serve the character Mercy in Cyborg 2 (1993) far more effectively.

I, Robot Source: Suggested by Asimov’s short story collection of the same title, 1950 Writers: Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Vintar Director: Alex Proyas Date: 2004 Countries: Germany and United States Length: 114 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Android: Security and security gone wrong Cyborg Prologue Text: Law I: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Law II: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. Law III: A robot must protect its own existence so long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. Sonny (Alan Tudyk) was designed and programmed by Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), inventor of robotics and author of the three laws that control the robots created by his company (USR). Sonny was designed to both covertly aid the doctor’s suicide and provide clues to himself and Del Spooner (Will Smith), the detective investigating the doctor’s death, about the reasons for that suicide. Del, like Sonny, is haunted by dreams, but Del’s are about an NS4 robot’s decision to rescue him from an accident at the cost of a little girl’s life: Del’s injured left arm and torso were reconstructed by Dr. Lanning. The head of USR assigns Lanning’s former colleague Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) to assist Del with the investigation. Both Del and Susan become convinced that Lanning intended that Sonny help them realize the danger presented by another of his creations: VIKI or Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence. VIKI is the core computer at USR, and she has decided that some people and freedoms must be sacrificed in order to save humans from their wars, pollution, and other forms of self-destruction. The new robot model, the NS5, is equipped for a daily interface with USR that VIKI uses to create an army. Fortunately, Sonny, Del, and Susan are able to stop her, thanks, in part, to Del’s recognition of Lanning’s “Hansel and Gretel” strategy of leaving clues like breadcrumbs for him to follow. * * *

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The individualistic and entirely likeable Sonny appears to be a descendant of R. Daneel Olivaw from Isaac Asimov’s detective-science-fiction novel series, which began with The Caves of Steel (1953). Like the cyborg Murphy in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993) and Solo in Solo (1996), he is supposed to be controlled by laws that are variations on Asimov’s laws for robot behavior. Sonny, like Solo, likes to draw. See Slipstream (1989) for another very human-like android who is criminalized and hunted for having assisted his master’s suicide. Like the androids in Blade Runner (1982), Sonny fears death, but unlike them, does not use violence to avoid it: he escapes erasure because a human decides that the process would be murder. Erasure is equated with death by the virtual game character in Nirvana (1997) and the android in The Companion (1994); and it is tantamount to murder when applied to humans in RoboCop (1987), Duplicates (1992), Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), Cyborg Cop (1993), and Fortress (1992), and the virtualized human in Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Much of the tech-noir ambiance of I, Robot derives from specific scenes, such as that in which Del searches for and finds Sonny amidst a thousand NS5s, and from the actions of the master artificial intelligence who, like Colossus in Colossus (1970) and Proteus IV in Demon Seed (1977), decides she knows what is best for the human race. VIKI, like SETH in Universal Soldier: The Return (1999), is able to mobilize an army, but VIKI’s army is composed of androids, rather than recycled corpses. Virtuosity’s (1995) Detective Barnes, like Del, has an artificial arm with unhappy associations that, nevertheless, becomes a tool crucial to the defeat of the villain. Del’s recognition of the fairy-tale metaphor, specifically the following of breadcrumbs, is also similar to Barnes’s recognition of clues left behind by virtual reality programmers. Here, the fairy-tale references create a certain mythologizing effect usually achieved in tech-noir by means of apocalyptic openings or frames. See A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) for another fairytale influenced film.

The Island Source: Based in part on Parts: The Clonus Horror, 1979 Writers: Alex Kurtzman, Caspian Tredwell-Owen, and Roberto Orci Director: Michael Bay Date: 2005 Length: 136 min. Type: Clone: Body parts Surveillance: Information and control Bioengineering: Transplant It is 2019 and Lincoln Six Echo’s (Ewan McGregor) first clue to the fact that he is a clone is a recurring dream he has of a boat, of drowning, and a voice telling him he is special and has been chosen. He has spent his entire life of three years believing that the world is contaminated and that the best future he and those around him can hope for is to win the lottery and go to live on the island, the last safe zone on the planet. Everyone in the facility with him is under constant surveillance; even his urine is analyzed as he pees. His sleep disturbance means a visit to the doctor, who has him draw a picture of the boat, to which Lincoln adds the Latin word renovato meaning rebirth. Doctor Merrick (Sean Bean) locks him into a holding chair and implants surveillance devices through his eyeball to find out what has changed in the “product.” Lincoln goes to work where he and his coworkers monitor nutrition tubes: Lincoln wonders where the tubes go, but no one will tell him that they feed the thousands of clones still in incubation bags. The bored Lincoln is quick to find an excuse to go to the maintenance area, where he visits his friend McCord (Steve Buscemi): on this trip he captures a large bug in one of McCord’s matchboxes. Recreation time includes a virtual battle with his favorite combat partner, Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson). When he wakes from another disturbing dream, he carries the bug back to where he found it, releases it, and follows it up a ladder to the truth: he sees a woman

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he knew, who was pregnant and supposedly taken to the island, killed, and an inadequately anesthetized man trying to escape a surgery already well underway. When Jordan is chosen for the lottery, the two flee. At McCoy’s place they learn the truth: they are insurance policies. The law prevents making sentient clones, but the insurance company discovered that without some sentience and activity, clones do not remain viable. They head for Los Angeles and find Lincoln’s sponsor Tom Lincoln, a wealthy vehicle designer. Tom calls the police, but the facility’s mercenaries get to him first and Lincoln fools them so they shoot Tom instead of him. Lincoln and Jordan return to destroy the facility and save the hundreds about to be executed in a gas chamber, all with a little help from the security detail’s leader Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou), who switches sides after he sees the brand applied to the clones. The ending finds all the clones walking free in the out-of-doors and Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan in Tom’s boat. * * * The Island reworks the film Parts (1979) such that the clones live for the chance to move on to a “safe zone” rather than America, about half the film time is dedicated to chase scenes, and there are no sympathetic originals as characters. This latter alteration makes it easier for film viewers to identify fully with the clone as a victim and with his triumph when he beats the odds and escapes with the girl and the fortune, much as Sebastian Rooks does in Cypher (2002). The promise of a rebirth on a fictional island is comparable to “going home” in Soylent Green (1973) and even closer to the carousel ritual in Logan’s Run (1976). The exit of a large number of youthful and naïve clones from a contained environment in The Island also re-creates the conclusion of this latter film. The shots of the clone birth from a clear plastic bag and the huge room full of clones gestating in similar bags while being subjected to the programmer’s voice telling them they are special and are the chosen one invert motifs from the Matrix (1999), particularly Neo’s “birth” and his future as the chosen one who will save the human race. The little gold tech-bugs that crawl painfully into Lincoln’s eye and, even more painfully, excrete in his urine, serve as trackers and revise the tracking “spider” Trinity extracts from Neo in the Matrix, as well as the spider-like trackers that hunt down John Anderton after he gets his new eye implant in Minority Report (2002). The role of McCord as maintenance man, reluctant friend, and guide is similar to that played by Harry in Futureworld (1976).

The Island of Dr. Moreau Source: Based on H.G. Wells’s novel of the same title, 1896 Writers: Al Ramrus and John Herman Shaner Series: The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1996 (based on same novel) Director: Don Taylor Date: 1977 Length: 99 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Andrew Braddock (Michael York) and two other men are adrift in a dingy from the Lady Vain. One dies and the others toss him into the ocean. The boat soon drifts to the shore of an island where the badly dehydrated Braddock becomes confused and disoriented in the jungle, but he is rescued by Dr. Moreau (Burt Lancaster) and Montgomery (Nigel Davenport). His companion, whom he left at the boat, is dragged off screaming by an unidentified attacker. Moreau and Montgomery take Braddock back to Moreau’s compound where he meets the beautiful Maria (Barbara Carrera) and her pet feline: Moreau says he purchased Maria in Panama City from her crib. Braddock also learns about Moreau’s experiments injecting animals with a biological

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code altering serum that makes them more like humans – Moreau has a collection of embryos from different creatures and is fascinated by their similarities at this particular stage of development and the processes by which they differentiate. Braddock has already encountered some of these beings in the jungle, but he is much more interested in Maria: when her cat escapes, they pursue it enthusiastically until Maria holds her pet and Braddock has the red scarf that adorned its neck. Maria later joins Braddock for more intimate play in his room and again at the dingy he is repairing. Braddock also meets the beast-men in their cave where the Sayer-of-the-Law (Richard Basehart) maintains a kind of social order by periodically reiterating Moreau’s laws that they not go on all fours, not shed blood, and not hunt other men, and the question: “Are we not men?” When one of the creatures breaks the law, the punishment is always a return to the “house of pain.” On the occasion of a new infraction, Moreau somewhat hypocritically sends them all on a hunt for the lawbreaker. A beast-man leads Braddock to the guilty one, who is crushed beyond hope of recovery under a tree and Braddock performs a mercy killing with the gun Moreau insisted he take. While obviously the right thing to do for an animal, the other beast-men soon demand retribution for this violation of the law. Moreau injects Braddock with a substance that paralyzes him, straps him to a table, and sets about a reverse evolution experiment. Braddock wakes to the sight of his reflection in an oval mirror set up so that he can see exactly what is happening to him. He fights, focusing on memories of his childhood to maintain his humanity. When Montgomery tries to stop the procedure, Moreau shoots him dead: the beast-men, including the Sayer-ofthe-Law, see and soon rise in revolt against their creator. Maria helps Braddock out of his cage and they delay the siege by raising Moreau’s body above the gate and telling the beast-men he is still alive. The ruse does not work for long and soon the beast-men are inside the compound where they foolishly release the animals, including a variety of big cats, which immediately hunt down and kill them. Braddock and Maria hide out under the porch with M’Ling, whom Moreau created to work as his house servant. When some of the excitement passes, they head for the repaired dingy. M’Ling is attacked and killed on the way; another beastman tries to stop the departure of Braddock and Maria, but is unsuccessful. Braddock returns to his human self; Maria’s state is unclear as Braddock sights and joyfully signals their rescue ship. * * * An individual who experiences biological regression more enthusiastically than Braddock does appears in Altered States (1980). The related idea that human society might easily have missed some evolutionary leap and fallen into a state of subjugation and regression was popularized by the scifi Planet of the Apes (1968), its numerous sequels, and more recent remake. This earlier film may also be read as a satiric horror about an upper class male who “falls” to the lower economic and social class, caricatured as apes. This version of Dr. Moreau’s island gives a somewhat similar impression of Moreau’s society, but is more tech-noir because both evolution and regression are deliberately induced. This film is also discussed in Chapter 2.

The Island of Dr. Moreau Source: Based on H.G. Wells’s novel of the same title, 1896 Writers: Ron Hutchinson and Richard Stanley Series: The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1977 (based on the same novel) Director: John Frankenheimer Date: 1996 Length: 96 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation

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Edward Douglas (David Thewlis) survives a plane crash at sea and finds himself in the care of Montgomery (Val Kilmer), who takes him to the island of the Nobel Prize winning and sun-sensitive Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando). The island, first settled by the Dutch, was transferred to the United States after World War II, and then to the Japanese who tried to run a hotel on it; thus, it has good facilities, nice architecture, and lots of strong wire fencing. Douglas is very pleased by the beautiful Aissa’s (Fairuza Balk) dancing, but realizes something is amiss when Montgomery locks him in his room. He picks the lock, goes exploring, and discovers Moreau’s sound-proofed lab full of caged animals, bottled deformities, and then the creature just birthed by a beast-woman. When a beast-man attendant pulls down his mask, Douglas turns to flee, only to see more beast-men. Aissa, who is a cat-woman, leads him to the village the beast-people have built from the detritus of civilization and to an elevator, which takes them to the underground precinct where the Sayer-of-the-Law (Ron Perlman) holds court: the Sayer is a kind of shaman, who carries a staff decorated with a mask and has an inclination to preach. Moreau soon brings Douglas back to “human” society and explains that he has created beast-humans by injecting animals with human genes. Douglas is rude to Moreau’s beast-servants and disparages their appearance and mimicry of human dress and habits. Moreau merely laments that formal perfection has not yet been achieved, with the possible exception of Aissa, and plays the benevolent father who prefers to attend the inner beauties of his creations and indulges the hope that the problem of regression is about to be solved … thanks to the covert appropriation of Douglas’s DNA. Meanwhile, social order is maintained by the assertions of the Sayer, Moreau’s use of an electronic pain device that activates his “children’s” implants, and Montgomery’s supplementary drugs. Things change when dog-man Azazello (Temuera Morrison) spontaneously shoots one of the misbehaving “sons” and Hyena-swine (Daniel Rigney) studies his cremated remains, discovers the implant, and then rips out his own. Hyena-swine leads a rabble into Moreau’s living room and kills Moreau. Montgomery loses his mind, goes on a prolonged drug trip, and acts out a lengthy parody of Moreau, complete with white gowns, dark glasses, and generous drug distribution: he is finally killed by Azazello. Hyena-swine continues the rampage, wrecking and setting fire to everything, declaring: “We are not men!” Douglas, who ignored the evidence of an earlier nightmare, has just realized the complete truth by studying photographs and other documents in the lab and told Aissa what he has learned: he has already been used for Moreau’s experiments and Moreau and Montgomery planned to kill him for his DNA because it held the solution to the regression problem. Montgomery has destroyed all the existing serum, so there is no help for Aissa: Azazello hangs her with Moreau’s whip. Douglas manipulates Hyena-swine into a very human suspicion about the ambitions of his fellows, who then turn on each other, and Hyena-swine finally kills himself by walking into a burning building. Douglas departs the next morning on a motorized raft. He offers the Sayer aid in the form of scientists who might reinvent the serum, but the Sayer declines. The final scenes are a montage of contemporary urban crowds and activities accompanied by the last of Douglas’s three voice-overs: this one is about his observation of the likeness between the beasthumans and modern humans. * * * Human-animal hybrids tend to be the stuff of monster and pure horror movies, but some tech-noir films make something out of the human-insect, as in Cyborg Cop 3 (1995), The Fly (1986, 1989), and Mimic (1997, 2001). Altered States (1980) invokes human evolution through the possibility of regression. This film, however, revisits the entire chain of being from animals to humans to “god.” This film is also discussed in Chapter 2.

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It’s All About Love Writers: Mogens Rukov and Thomas Vinterberg Director: Thomas Vinterberg Date: 2003 Countries: United States and others; filmed in Sweden by Danish director Length: 106 min. Type: Clone: Society and service John’s (Joaquin Phoenix) opening voice-over explains that this is the story of the last seven days of his life. He is stopping in New York to collect Elena’s (Claire Danes) signature on their divorce papers, intending to be on his way to a job in Calgary within hours. Elena is a celebrated skater surrounded by a large entourage that makes its living off of her fame and performances. John is forced to stay in New York waiting on her and trying to understand such strange phenomena as dead bodies lying about the streets, apparently stricken by a mysterious heart ailment, news reports of flying men in Africa where gravity seems to have vanished, a July snowfall, and the sudden annual freeze of all fresh water. He discovers that Elena has been cloned so that the business will continue after her death: she is the last to learn that she too has the heart condition and could collapse at any time. At a farewell dinner for John, David (Alun Armstrong), the group’s business manager, formally introduces the clones, who need more personal information to fill out their roles and to explain things they see in their dreams: What was the name of Elena’s dog? Where did Elena and David meet? A mysterious Mr. Morrison arrives and offers flowers and reassurance, saying that the chaos in the world is merely being reflected in human souls. When Elena goes on a forbidden skate with the clones, someone shoots all the clones, and Elena and John flee, following an escape route through Russia and accompanied by Elena’s brother Michael (Douglas Henshall), also a company employee. They get off a train as planned, but find themselves alone in the snow. John realizes that Michael betrayed them and suggests he go his own way, which he does, and soon freezes in a storm. Elena and John too are soon covered in the falling snow. Throughout the film, John’s brother Marciello (Sean Penn), who took an injection for his fear of flying and got the wrong one so now he is only able to fly, maintains an intermittent commentary on the state of the world, and concludes that it is all about love. His plane is unable to land because there is snow everywhere. * * * As a film about a form of public entertainment, It’s All About Love is a very distant relation of Rollerball (1975), but any action the main characters might have taken to change the system is cut short by a devastating climactic change. The end of the world comes, not as an apocalyptic detonation, but as the onset of a global winter that impacts the environment and human beings on both physical and emotional levels. The heart serves as a symbol of human feeling in The Android Affair (1995), Heatseeker (1995), Screamers (1995), Webmaster (1998), and Shadow Fury (2001); but none of these films dramatizes the heart, as does It’s All About Love, in association with ice. Here, ice is not only the ground for Elena’s art, but also a metonym for the ice-skating clones and both means and metaphor for death. After John’s first glimpse of a clone while collecting ice for the party, a glimpse that he does not even begin to grasp the significance of, he pours his drink at a table holding a snow globe with a skater inside. Elena and John conclude some intense lovemaking just as the water in a glass suddenly freezes solid. Later, one of the skaters draws a heart shape in the ice. The lovers frozen in snow vaguely imitate the sand covered couple in Un Chien Andalou (1929). Some of these motifs are also found in other tech-noir films, but they are rare. The snow globe is also used in Equilibrium (2002) as one of the beautiful, if useless, objects the “sense” controllers are bent on destroying so as to eradicate all human emotion and feeling. A revised Un Chien Andalou couple also appears in Altered States (1980).

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The memory sequences in It’s All About Love include brief moments of the youthful Elena skating on a forest pond, presumably in her native Poland, and brief cuts to a golden landscape and Elena’s dog Egor. These fragments are all that remains of experiences that seem about to be appropriated by clones, but in fact are about to pass out of existence entirely.

Jekyll and Hyde Source: Writer: Series: Director: Date: Countries: Length: Type:

Based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same title, 1886 David Wickes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 2002 (based on the same novel) David Wickes 1990 TV United Kingdom and United States 95 min. Bioengineering: Transformation

In 1889 London, an auction is suddenly halted when news arrives that Sarah Crawford (Cheryl Ladd) and her son have been found. Jeffrey Utterson (Ronald Pickup), lawyer to the deceased Dr. Jekyll, finds Sarah working at a stable while her little boy plays nearby. Sarah tells him she wants nothing to do with the inheritance left her by Jekyll (Michael Caine) and explains why by sharing the true story of Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego Mr. Hyde, although the account that follows is drawn as much from Utterson’s memories as Sarah’s. Sarah’s father is Dr. Charles Lanyon (Joss Ackland), a famous scientist and author. Lanyon blamed Jekyll for the death of Sarah’s elder sister – Jekyll’s wife – from pneumonia and became increasingly public in his accusations. With a little help from the local gossip, he also decides that Sarah, who is married to an officer stationed in Singapore, is involved with Jekyll, so he throws her out in the rain and she has no choice but to go to Jekyll. Jekyll and his servant Poole (Frank Barrie) treat her well, but that night Hyde beats and rapes her. Hyde already has quite a reputation, having pushed a flower seller under the hooves of a horse: Jekyll, of course, performed an operation that saved the little girl’s life. Scotland Yard’s Inspector Palmer (Lee Montague) and Sergeant Hornby (Kevin McNally) stake out the house of prostitution where Hyde keeps a room. There, they find a bottle labeled “reflux” which they hope will provide clues regarding Hyde’s whereabouts and the source of his extraordinary physical strength. The technician who tries to apply the content analysis directions in Lanyon’s book to the substance fails to get results, so Lanyon himself is called in. He too is baffled, so he sends samples to scientists all over London in the hope that they can help. Meanwhile, a reporter called Snape (David Schofield) become intrigued with Dr. Jekyll after Lanyon writes a letter to the paper denouncing him. He tracks down Sarah and writes up a sensationalized story, which his editor prints: scandal sells papers. When the police are called in by Jekyll’s housemaid to take Sarah’s statement on the rape, the desperate Jekyll confesses all to Sarah, showing her a photograph he took of himself in his lab after the transformation as proof of the truth of his story. He then burns his research and tells his students that in the future science will find ways of creating different types of men for different purposes; that, he says, will be “hell on earth.” The couple enjoys a few weeks together and they are even invited to a party with the Prince, who has several mistresses – his generosity legitimizes the otherwise scandalous Jekyll–Crawford alliance. Jekyll stops off to tell his parents the good news, but suddenly turns into Hyde again, kills his own father by accident, and indirectly causes his mother to have a stroke. Jekyll races home, breaks into his own lab, injects a sedative, and confesses to Sarah that he has been having to take drugs to keep Hyde under control, but Hyde is stronger than he is. His attempts to produce more of the antidote fail, so he goes to Lanyon for help. It is Hyde who unwittingly takes the last of the serum that Lanyon has and Lanyon who witnesses the change back into Jekyll. Jekyll flees and locks himself in his lab

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where he shoots himself. Sarah simply walks away … Years later, when she calls her son over to meet Mr. Utterson, he shows his face, which is deformed much as Hyde’s was. * * * While the story is purportedly told from Sarah’s memories, the camera moves freely from scene to scene and character to character without really committing to a point of view. Jekyll’s true character remains something of a mystery, insofar as he seems to be a man struggling with addiction who makes his most heartfelt expression of remorse only after things get so far out of hand that he realizes he needs Sarah’s help to survive the police investigation. His brief statement about how science will soon produce men fitted to different kinds of labor does serve to link Hyde to Huxley, as well as the films Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Gattaca (1997). This film is also discussed in Chapter 2.

Johnny Mnemonic Source: Based on William Gibson’s story of the same title, 1981 (“Johnny Mnemonic” is published in the Burning Chrome collection, 1986) Writer: William Gibson Director: Robert Longo Date: 1995 Countries: Canada and United States Length: 98 min. Type: Cyborg Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Virtual reality: Mind transplant In 2021, corporations such as Pharmakom rule with the aid of high tech and Asian security forces while the poor make do with low tech and their commitment to the resistance, but members of both classes suffer from the plague of nerve attenuation syndrome (NAS) caused by the excess of technology and pollution in the world. Pharmacom has had the cure for eight months, but is keeping it secret because it is more lucrative to treat the disease than cure it. Some of the company scientists defect and hire a mnemonic courier to take the cure from Beijing to Newark. The courier is Johnny (Keanu Reaves), who regrets downloading his childhood in order to make space in his head for a data storage implant, so he is doing one final job to pay for full memory restoration. The package is not only far in excess of his storage capacity, even after he applies a doubler, but the deal itself goes bad. Just as the upload is finishing, Takahashi’s (Takeshi Kitano) forces arrive, interrupting the transmission of the code images that will unlock the storage implant so the data can be downloaded, and kill everyone – only Johnny escapes. He goes to Ralphie (Udo Kier), his agent, who double-crosses him because his implant is worth far more than his life. Jane (Dina Meyer), a low-tech bodyguard, makes a timely appearance, helps him escape again, and to break into a computer store where he begins to realize just what it is he is carrying. When Jane collapses, he takes her to her technician Spider (Henry Rollins), who takes them to a makeshift hospital where he tells Johnny exactly what is in his implant. At this point, one of Takahashi’s mercenaries, the “Preacher,” a jacked-up religious killer who will do anything to keep himself upgraded, catches up with them. Spider’s last words to Jane are to get Johnny to Jones. So Jane takes Johnny to “heaven,” a bridge where J-bone (Ice-T) and his friends have set up a center for the resistance. Meanwhile, Anna (Barbara Sukowa), the AI double of Pharmakom’s deceased CEO, tries to make Takahashi understand that his daughter died unnecessarily to protect the profit margin of the company he

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provides security services for. Jones turns out to be a cyborg dolphin and an expert in data retrieval: the attempt to retrieve the data in Johnny’s head with only the first of the three access images to locate it fails, being complicated by both Takahashi’s forces and the Preacher, but Takahashi has a change of heart and offers them the second image. The second attempt succeeds. Johnny finds the third image, which happens to be Anna’s face; Jones downloads the data and transmits it all to the people for recording on their VCRs. Johnny’s childhood memories resurface, fragments of which have been returning to him in his dreams, suggesting that his own mind will restore the memories he thought were gone forever. * * * This film was created in the visual style suggested by William Gibson’s novels: it moves between glossy, corporate interiors and the grimy, low-tech world of garbage dumps, sewers, and “heaven,” the bridge that serves as the center for opposition to the system. However, the scene in which Johnny makes a speech from the top of a dirt pile about wanting room service and laundered shirts (1:04) is more reminiscent of artistdirector Robert Longo’s Men in the City series of drawings and sculptures. The earlier Cyborg (1989) involves a female courier and a plague of indeterminate origins; but, with the man of few words Jean-Claude Van Damm in the lead, the effect is somewhat different from this dialoguefilled film. Absolon (2003) features a world suffering from the cure to a disease: the true cure is available, but the pharmaceutical company prefers to protect its profit margin and, as in Johnny Mnemonic, it is defecting scientists who arrange for the people to have the cure. Dolphins reappear in Cyber Wars (2004), though more as a respite than as active characters and looking more like Johnny Mnemonic’s virtual dolphins than Jones himself. See Paycheck (2003) for another film that uses visual cues as markers for a memory erasure procedure. The dream sequences in this film are discussed in Chapter 3.

John Q Writer: James Kearns Director: Nick Cassavetes Date: 2002 Length: 116 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transplant The film opens as a car driven by a reckless female driver is hit by a truck; then cuts to the life of John Quincy Archibald (Denzel Washington), his wife Denise (Kimberly Elise), and their pre-teen son Mike, who loves bodybuilding and little league. John’s hours at the plant have been cut back, but they still have their truck, their friends, and each other, or so they think. At a baseball game, Mike hits a home run, but collapses before he makes it around the bases. Dr. Turner (James Woods) determines that he needs a heart transplant because it is far too late for any other corrective measures. Hospital financial administrator Rebecca Payne (Anne Heche) does not believe that John’s insurance will cover the operation; and indeed, his company has switched to an HMO that will not cover the operation even though John has a policy that says they will. Since they appear to have coverage and are not on welfare, they are not eligible for any other financial aid. John sells everything he has for cash and his church raises some more, but it is nowhere near enough to cover the cost of the surgery. He even goes to local newsman Tuck Lampley (Paul Johansson) for help. When the hospital is about to release Mike, even though he is near death, Denise calls John in a panic. John takes Turner, an intern, a security guard, and the patients waiting in emergency hostage. When experienced negotiator Lieutenant Frank Grimes (Robert Duvall) shows up, along with the police and crowds of people rooting for John, John

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successfully demands that his son’s name be put on the donor list and releases those hostages that need medical attention. Frank, however, is overridden by Police Chief Gus Monroe (Ray Liotta); Gus is primarily concerned with his re-election and the press and has his men use a surveillance feed to arrange a conversation between John and Denise during which they plan to shoot him. Denise is to pass on Rebecca’s decision that the hospital will pay for everything: since there is no donor available, they believe they are making a meaningless, if also seemingly generous, gesture. Denise talks to John and, thanks to Lampley, the conversation goes out on national television. The hostages see themselves on television and the sniper, who wounds John and whom John takes hostage. John demands Mike be brought to him, and then proposes to shoot himself so Turner can transplant his heart to Mike. Meanwhile, the dead driver from the opening accident is being chopped up for organ donation: her heart is a match to only one person on the donor list – Mike Archibald. John Q, who botched his first attempt at suicide by forgetting to turn the gun safety off, is still alive when Denise calls; he turns the walkie-talkie off, so she runs screaming to the emergency room door with the notice about the donor heart. The hostages go free, but one pretends to be John Q and is arrested and carted off by Gus while John and his wife watch the surgery. Frank takes John into custody; he is tried, but found guilty only on kidnapping charges and is expected to get off with a couple of years. Mike is healthy and happy. * * * Almost everyone in this emotional film is more concerned with their careers and finances than human life: John’s employer switched to an HMO without telling anyone to save a bit of money; the reporter is looking for his big story; the hospital financial administrator is focused on her profit margin; the police chief wants to be re-elected; and so forth. The youthful intern in the emergency room knows what the senior heart specialist apparently does not – that the hospital is obliged only to stabilize patients, not cure them, and that doctors who do not refer patients for tests and treatments they may need get kickbacks from the HMOs: this is the probable reason Mike’s condition was not discovered and treated earlier. Some of these issues also inform Coma (1978) and Killer Deal (1999), but in John Q they take the form of a desperate man’s entirely plausible confrontation with a health care system that allows access to life-saving technology and procedures to be controlled by wealth, ambition, and subterfuge. The solution is posed as a matter of putting the problem before the people, such that politicians and other public figures will choose the “right” course of action in order to win their favor and support.

Judge Dredd Writers: Carlos Ezquerra, Michael De Luca, Steven E. de Souza, John Wagner, and William Wisher Jr. Director: Danny Cannon Date: 1995 Length: 96 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Android: Stalkers and assassins In 2139, most of the survivors of the “cursed” earth live in a few crowded megacities, such as Mega City One (New York), where violence threatens to destroy all social order, even as the “Judges” strive to maintain it: each Judge is empowered to act as policeman, judge, and executioner. Janus, a long defunct, covert government project, once held out hope in the form of perfect cloned law enforcers. Only two men remain from this project: the harsh perfectionist Judge Dredd (Sylvester Stallone), who knows nothing of his origins, and the devious and far more knowledgeable criminal Rico (Armand Assante), formerly a Judge and now permanently incarcerated at the Aspen Penal Colony. Rico and Dredd have the same DNA, and Rico uses his

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to frame Dredd for the murder of a reporter and his wife who become aware of the Janus project. Dredd is tried by the council led by Chief Justice Fargo (Max von Sydow) and has Judge Hershey (Diane Lane) as his defender. With some help from a student digital expert, Hershey has the recordings of the murder thrown out, but she can do nothing about the DNA evidence. On the suggestion of Justice Griffin (Jürgen Prochnow), who happens to be teamed up with Rico, Fargo “retires” in exchange for leniency toward Dredd. Retirement means “the long walk”: Fargo leaves the city to wander in the desert alone, except for whatever encounters he might have with the strange creatures that survive there, such as Pa Angel’s (Scott Wilson) cannibalistic family. The Angels shoot down the plane carrying Dredd and Fergie (Rob Schneider), a minor offender Dredd sentenced to five years for an accidental assocation with the thugs occupying the living space he was assigned after his release from his last sentence. The Angel family captures Dredd and Fergie, but with a little help from Fargo, they escape. Fargo dies after explaining the Janus project to Dredd. Dredd and Fergie get back inside the city, and Dredd learns from Hershey that his family photographs are phony. Meanwhile, Rico escapes, acquires a gigantic old model robot, and starts assassinating Judges and increasing street violence. Once the desperate council members reopen Janus, Rico kills them all, including Griffith, and replaces the combo-Judge DNA formula with his own. He is, however, no match for the Dredd, Hershey, and Fergie combo. Dredd wins applause from the surviving Judges and a kiss from Hershey, and then rides his bike off to continue his crusade for justice. * * * This film reworks the idea of cloning specific professionals, such as that applied in The Clones (1973), in the spirit of RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1991) and the semi-automated judicial system of Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995); see Synapse (1995) for another treatment of the mobile judicial unit. A certain quality of comic-book stylization distinguishes Judge Dredd from these films. The “long walk” goes beyond stylization, however: its effect is to exaggerate the acclaimed purity of the “Law” to the point of parody. The meeting of former Judges outside the city also provides a moment for the hero to rethink his situation outside the proverbial box. The cannibals and cyborgs are of the type commonly used to represent the post-apocalypse population, but here they also provide contrast to Dredd’s physical perfection. Dredd, played by Stallone, and his psycho-killer clone brother compare with Demolition Man’s (1993) John Spartan, also played by Stallone, and the criminal Phoenix: Spartan, like Dredd, is framed and sent to prison and then comes back to deal with the criminal that put him there. The “brothers-in-arms” theme also appears frequently in tech-noir, but this version of the story is closest to Replicant (2001) in which an “original” is the villain and the clone plays a kind of hero. Like the Replicant villain, Rico is the one who is more in the know about his origins; Dredd and the Replicant clone have to learn the truth the hard way. Dredd, like Blade Runner’s (1982) Rachael, has to recover from his dependence on the false photographic evidence of his past, learning in the process that DNA is as easily manipulated as digital photography.

Killer Deal Writers: Peter Hankoff and William Gray Director: Clay Borris Date: 1999 TV Length: 120 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transplant Cyborg Surveillance: Information and control

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 rologue Text: The economic collapse of 2009 bankrupted every country in the world. The middle class P completely disappeared creating a huge unbridgeable gap between the rich and the newly poor. The rich banded together in gated communities to protect what they had … Communities like Parkland. The east coast Parkland is the most exclusive of its type; there, Dr. Parker (Udo Kier) and his wife (Ellen Dubin) run a sophisticated organ transplant business called Eternity whereby the Shantytown poor can forfeit their lives so their families can live in Parkland. Police Sergeant James Quinn (Rick Rossovich) is only the second policeman to ever actually earn a promotion to Parkland, about which his son and wife are very happy. On his last day at his old job, he is assigned to capture a donor who has escaped from Parkland: Asia Gardner (Zehra Leverman) is an activist against the donor system who was “recruited” as a perfect match for the dying Dr. Parker. She commits suicide by jumping under a subway car rather than be taken. Her last words to Quinn are: “Wanna’ be a hero? Solve my murder!” Unluckily for Quinn, York (Richard Eden), the Parkland head of security, checks the security camera record of his identification band and finds that he too is a near match for Dr. Parker and Quinn soon finds his promotion revoked. After a night of drinking at what was supposed to be his victory party, he encounters the Parkland broadcast ad in the latrine: “You know Mr. Parker, my sense of irony is not that well developed!” he declares, and then smashes the screen and passes out, only to wake up as a “volunteer” donor, already stamped with the donor bar code and assigned to “specialist” Kyra Russell (Claudette Mink), who is both York’s fiancée and well versed in the language of “planned mortality with immediate benefits.” The tape showing his voluntary donation in exchange for $10 million and thirty days to spend as he likes as long as he does not leave the United States is very convincing. After briefly considering flight to Canada, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States and where Eternity’s donor plan is frowned on, Quinn sets out to do as Asia suggested. He discovers, however, that he can no longer work as a policeman, that he has been implanted with a locater chip, that Kyra is authorized to use a “pacifier” bracelet on him, and finally, that his former partner has betrayed and set him up so he can collect the bounty on him. Finally, he calls on reporter Craig Morel (Rod Wilson) for help and gets it. First, they collect the surveillance camera tape from the latrine in the policeman’s bar where Quinn was taken; then Kyra agrees to help him get into Eternity and look for more information while Morel waits with a broadcast uplink in a van outside. They find a recording of Quinn being drugged and directed on his “donor” statement by York and Mrs. Parker; and, after some struggles, shooting, what might have been another double-cross on Kyra’s part, and Quinn’s near death by automated surgical lasers, the tape is broadcast. Quinn gets his promotion back, but turns it down. * * * In Killer Deal, as in Coma (1978) and Future Kick (1991), the murder for body parts business is a by-product of advanced life-saving technology. John Q (2002) addresses the same problem, but in a more present day, rather than a semi-futuristic setting. The man who, like Quinn, finds his life valued in terms of his body’s value to a rich and powerful man is also the principal character of Freejack (1992). See Nirvana (1997) for a world in which it seems there are a lot of people willing to sell their organs, as long as the price is right. Like Fortress (1992, 1999), Killer Deal presents Canada as a place of reprieve from homegrown American corporate enterprise. The public broadcast of what “really” happened that proves a man was framed also appears as the concluding high point of Running Man (1987). A faked “confession,” much like Quinn’s statement of “voluntary” organ donation, is prepared in Fugitive Mind (1999), but the malefactors are caught before it is used.

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Knights Writer: Albert Pyun Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1993 Length: 89 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Cyborg Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI In a post-apocalypse world, a human army directed by cyborgs terrorizes the southwest in search of the human blood that serves as the cyborgs’ power source. In one of these attacks, Nea (Kathy Long) and her infant brother are orphaned. Ten years later, the goal of these vampire-cyborgs, organized by Job (Lance Henriksen) in an alliance with the “master builder,” is to harvest the ten thousand humans at the settlement of Taos to fuel a full regeneration of their kind. Nea is working as a scout for some farmers who are attacked and, against orders, killed. Nea is rescued by the cyborg Gabriel (Kris Kristofferson), who was designed and programmed by the original cyborg creator to annihilate all the vampire-cyborgs. He has to accomplish this mission in one year because that is all the power he has. Nea advises Gabriel that the vampire-cyborgs are going to Taos and promises to show him a shortcut that will get him there ahead of schedule if he will teach her how to kill the creatures. They keep their bargain and, when Gabriel is cut in half in a subsequent battle, Nea takes his place and defeats the cyborg’s human champion Ty (Vince Klyn), destroys numerous cyborgs, and then carries Gabriel’s upper body to a new lower chassis so that he can resume his work. Nea is assisted by a boy with a birthmark identical to the one her long-lost little brother had. Gabriel manages to destroy Job, but the master builder (Brad Langenberg) appears for the first time at the end of the film when he abducts this boy and carries him off to Cyborg City. * * * This film is most notable for its amalgamation of numerous markers from different genres and films: the Monument Valley setting, the horseback riders, and the lone hero who finds a temporary partner all invoke the western. The essential plot about a lone cyborg, who really seems to be an android, killing off renegade cyborgs, who also seem to be androids – of sorts – to make the world habitable for humans is recycled in Pyun’s Omega Doom (1996). Both Knights and Omega Doom also vividly depict the severing and reattaching of “cyborg” parts. The cyborg horseback riders rounding up humans also brings the scifi Planet of the Apes (1968) to mind, while Job’s directive to the other cyborgs to round up the “pumpkin heads” is an unsubtle reference to Henrikson’s appearance in the earlier horror film Pumpkin Head (1988). The blood-sucking, blood-consuming cyborgs obviously reference vampires and vampire films; but the general idea of enslaving the human race as a power source for the cyborgs is developed with far more dramatic effectiveness in the later Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003) in which humans serve as batteries. The fight sequences suggest both kickboxing and martial arts, a point emphasized by the appearance of kickboxing champion Kathy Long in the starring role. For more of this type, see the Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995) films of Don “the Dragon” Wilson, also a kickboxing champion, as well as Heatseeker (1995). In Knights, the cyborg past is repeatedly mythologized with references to the “creator” and the “genesis.” In the final voice-over about Nea’s future search for her brother carrying her across the universe, the mythologizing shifts to the human world. See Phillip Roth’s Prototype X29A (1992) for a girl who, although cybernetically enhanced, seems to be an even less likely savior of human civilization, or of anyone, than Nea. Pyun’s Nemesis 3 (1996) heroine Alex, destined to save the human race with her enhanced DNA, spends much of her time looking for an abducted adult sister. The incorporation of references to the pueblo of Taos

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and the Anasazi cliff dwellings add some confused Native American history to the Knights mythological mix. Cyborg City is reinvented as Cytown in Cyborg 3 (1995), where it serves as a hideout for a motley group of defective cyborgs trying to avoid human hunters.

The Last Days of Man on Earth (aka The Final Programme) Source: Based on Michael Moorcock’s novel The Final Programme, 1968 Writer: Robert Fuest Director: Robert Fuest Date: 1973 Country: United Kingdom Length: 76 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose even more famous scientist father has just died: the funeral is held on a wintry Lapland plain. The rugged faces of the rather hairy locals who carry the wooden stakes for the funeral pyre contrast markedly with those of the rather pallid priest, scientist colleague, and son who conduct and attend the service. Soon after, Jerry meets with Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) and three of his father’s older colleagues. All want access to the family mansion to retrieve a piece of microfilm necessary to the operation of Miss Brunner’s computer systems, originally developed in partnership with Jerry’s father. Jerry agrees to help them because he needs their help getting into the house where his brother Frank (Derrick O’Connor) is holding their sister Catherine (Sarah Douglas) hostage. En route, they encounter a complex series of security devices, including flashing lights that cause epileptic-like seizures, gas, spikes that extend suddenly from a door decorated like a chess board, and more. In the confusion, Jerry accidentally kills Catherine, and Frank escapes with the microfilm; but after Jerry recovers from his trauma and is released from the hospital, he and Miss Brunner continue the pursuit to a meeting between Frank and Dr. Baxter (Patrick Magee), a man who stole many of Cornelius’s ideas. While the bisexual Miss Brunner enjoys the company of Dr. Baxter, Jerry pursues and kills Frank; Brunner shows up to retrieve the microfilm from Frank’s pocket and convince Jerry to come to Lapland to see what it does. Brunner’s machine will create a hermaphroditic being that is capable of self-reproduction and of uploading the combined knowledge of the best brains in Europe, which are, literally, held in aquariums wired to a computer. Jerry is injured by Dimitri (Gilles Millinaire), Brunner’s original choice for the experiment, and easily forced into the machine: he and Brunner are coupling when it is activated. When Dimitri asks the Neanderthalic creature that emerges if he is the new Messiah, s/he answers “I’m not sure. Let’s just say it’s the end of an age. Time to start building a new one.” * * * Tech-noir motifs abound in this heavy-handed satire about how feminism and science may save the human race. The imminent end of the world is a frequent theme in tech-noir, sometimes appearing in conjunction with efforts to redesign humans to improve their chances of survival, as in Prototype X29A (1992). The intermittent background radio announcements about the end of the world are less common – Jerry almost misses his opportunity to begin the new age because, having heard the end of the world is at hand, he wants to go home and watch it on the television rather than go to see his father’s lab – but they also play a significant role in Until the End of the World (1991) and It’s All About Love (2003). The man who gets into a machine and is never quite the same appears in Altered States (1980) and The Fly (1986, 1989), but here the experimenter aims to create the myth-based vision of the hermaphrodite (?)

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In Morella (1997), cloning techniques are used to achieve a similar, though less idealistically defined end. The hairy being that emerges at the conclusion of the Last Days of Man evokes both the primeval past and the appearance of the local Laplanders. The primeval and the primitive also find a place in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), Altered States, The Lawnmower Man (1992), Jekyll and Hyde (1990), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002). In the rather gothic family mansion, the security systems, unlike those animated by artificial intelligence in Demon Seed (1977) and Dream House (1998), are designed to fit in with the 1970s interior décor, but also lend the place a fantastic and frightening fun-house atmosphere enhanced by the appearance and actions of the drugged and rather buxom Catherine and the crazed drug-addicted Frank. See Encrypt (2003) for digital age variations on these security devices.

The Lathe of Heaven Source: Writers: Series: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Based on Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel of the same title, 1971 Diane English and Roger Swaybill The Lathe of Heaven, 2002 (based on the same novel) Fred Barzyk and David Loxton 1980 TV 105 min. Virtual reality: Hacking the mind

George Orr (Bruce Davison) is trying to get out of the city when he falls from radiation poisoning and that is when they start: his “effective” dreams. In a future Portland where it rains constantly, George has to go for therapy with dream specialist Dr. William Haber (Kevin Conway) because he misused his pharmacy card. In their first session, George’s description of how he “effectively” dreamed his aunt dead in a car crash accompanies a flashback to black-and-white dream images. In the next session, Haber applies what becomes routine procedure: he hooks George up to his augmenter and gives him a hypnotic suggestion for a dream. George has a beautiful color dream of a horse and wakes to find the office picture has changed from Mount Hood to a horse. Next, Haber proposes a world of sun and no rain and then goes up to the roof to observe the change. After he has George create a dream institute, George decides it is time to get a lawyer. He finds Heather Lelache (Margaret Avery) and she too realizes the truth of George’s predicament after his dream that people at a dinner party die leaves six billion people dead of the plague. Haber finally admits he too knows the truth, then gives George a tranquillizer and suggests he dream of world peace with the result that humans unite to defend themselves from aliens that look like giant sea turtles. George and Heather spend a night at the cabin George won in a government lottery and Heather tries to fix things by suggesting he dream about everything being OK and the aliens off the moon, but they wake to find the aliens are invading earth. A little desperate, George goes back to Haber, but before Haber can implant a dream, George dreams of an alien speaking to him; then he responds to Haber’s request for an end to racism by dreaming everyone gray; and finally Haber tells him to dream up a giant augmenter and to dream he can no longer dream effectively. George, who misses Heather, wanders into a “Junque” shop where an alien gives him a record of Joe Cocker’s “I get by with a little help from my friends”; he subsequently dreams of Heather and wakes to find her in his bed. Both become frightened as the atmosphere changes; George realizes Haber is using the augmenter and also notes the similarity between what is happening and what happened the day when he had his own first “effective” dream. George and Heather race to Haber’s office where George confronts Haber in a psychedelic blue vortex; after this event ends, George is working with an alien in the Junque shop when Heather, who no longer recognizes him, comes in and George takes her for lunch. They encounter a nurse pushing an aged Haber in a wheelchair and George bends down and says “You’ve seen it, haven’t you, the world after April.”

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Haber says nothing. Heather and George get their lunch from an alien street vendor and sit down above a large fountain to enjoy it. * * * This film does not look like a post-apocalypse film, but it does, in effect, pick up where Failsafe (1964) leaves off and proposes that something other than complete annihilation will arise from technologically enhanced warfare. Here, it seems George’s personal instinct for survival keeps him and everything around him going through sheer omnipotence of thought. This approach to the manufacture of reality is very similar to that presented in Forbidden Planet (1956) in which an advanced alien technology brings the dreamer’s dreams to life. Events that first appear in a dream lead to alterations through choices made in reality in Matrix Reloaded (2003), just as they do in Lathe of Heaven. Unpleasant futures appear in dreams in The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003) and A.P.E.X. (1994) and individuals in those films, like George, work to bring about preferable outcomes. Lathe of Heaven makes effective use of isolated visual motifs in dramatizing the dream effect, including the moon, sun, and, of course, the turtles, as well as the Junque shop where it seems money is not required.

The Lathe of Heaven Source: Writer: Series: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Based on Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel of the same title, 1971 Alan Sharp The Lathe of Heaven, 1980 (based on the same novel) Philip Haas 2002 TV 104 min. Virtual reality: Hacking the mind

George Orr (Lukas Haas) has taken an overdose of illegally acquired drugs he hoped would prevent him from dreaming: Mannie (David Strathairn) carries him to a doctor, thus saving him from death, but not from a court appearance defended by lawyer Heather Lelache (Lisa Bonet) that ends with his “voluntary” assignment to oneirologist Dr. Haber (James Caan). Haber makes use of an “augmenter,” a kind of chair with an apparatus that records George’s brain patterns as he dreams. First, he has George dream of a horse: as George dreams, Haber’s secretary Penny (Sheila McCarthy) enters the room and has a brief conversation with Haber that includes a reference to Lady Godiva, a woman said to have ridden naked on a horse. When George wakes the picture of a mountain on Haber’s office wall has become a picture of a naked lady on a running horse. Haber quickly realizes that George’s dreams really do change things, so he has George dream him into a bigger office with a view of a mountain rather than just a picture of one, an excellent professional reputation, and authorship of a book called The Lathe of Heaven. He even has him dream the population problem be resolved; unfortunately, this dream results in a deadly virus that strikes Europe and then North America. Realizing that he is being used, George goes to Heather for help, and Heather comes to a session as an observer. Haber, realizing that George is onto him, sets about having George made an “obligatory” patient rather than a voluntary one and sends security to pick him up. George and Heather slip away to George’s underground hideaway in the country, which he won in a lottery. When Heather returns to prepare George’s objection to the “obligatory” designation, she sees the disastrous consequences of Haber’s attempt to use the augmenter on himself: the world is in chaos and the president has declared martial law. Fortunately, George, who is now clearly in love, has more powerful dreams about springtime. Penny becomes Haber’s doctor at a long-term care facility: he has an Alzheimer’s-like condition and no short-term memory, although he can

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recall short aphorisms and references he has heard before, such as “hot to trot,” “Lady Godiva,” and “either Orr.” George takes him to a restaurant where he previously met Heather as his lawyer; now she appears there as a waitress and Mannie who, like Haber and Heather, reappears in one form or another no matter what the dream change, is another customer. * * * In this version of the story, there are no aliens, but jellyfish are used repeatedly as visual motifs and Mannie advises George to “make like a jellyfish” at his court appearance; in other words he should just go with the flow. The development of Mannie’s character is one of the most important changes relative to the earlier film version in which he is merely a guy living downstairs in George’s building after the plague. Here, he appears in the film opening carrying the drug-overdosed George to hospital, as his chess buddy, and as the security guard at his apartment building. He is always George’s friend and ally and, at one point, in a brief conversation with Heather he indicates that he too is well aware of the situation and that he has gotten used to it. As in the earlier film, the augmenter is used to transform dreaming, one of the last bastions of humanity, into a means to wealth and aggrandizement; but this time the script makes liberal use of aphorisms in association with specific characters. These aphorisms suggest, as dreams usually do in tech-noir films, certain recurring unconscious and continuous aspects of personality; thus, Penny uses the phrase “hot to trot” and always knows who Lady Godiva is, no matter what the dream altered world. This application of cliché is reminiscent of the personality programming jingles in Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Demolition Man (1993), and summary statements of experience in The Truman Show (1998), and Virtual Nightmare (2000), such as “home is where the heart is.”

The Lawnmower Man Source: Title from a Stephen King short story of the same title, 1977 Writers: Gimel Everett and Brett Leonard Series: Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (Jobe’s War), 1996 (Sequel) Director: Brett Leonard Date: 1992 Length: 108 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Virtual reality: Mind transplant At Virtual Space Industries, Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) successfully increases the intelligence of a chimp named Roscoe using a combination of drugs and virtual reality programming; unfortunately, the programming includes an aggressive element as the chimp is being taught to serve in military combat. The chimp escapes, kills several people, and is finally cornered and shot at the shed where the mentally challenged Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey) lives. Jobe is the ward of Father Francis McKeen (Jeremy Slate), a man who beats him on a regular basis, and he also works full time for local handyman and landscaper Terry McKeen (Geoffrey Lewis) mowing lawns and doing machine repairs. Francis and Terry are brothers. Angelo is disheartened by the death of Roscoe and disgusted with the demands for military applications of his work, so he dedicates himself to making Jobe smarter using his home basement equipment. Eventually, however, he has to take Jobe to the corporate lab to continue the work and there middleman Sebastian Timms (Mark Bringleson) is forced by the Shop director (Dean Norris) to covertly add the aggressive element to Jobe’s drugs. Jobe begins to learn at a phenomenal rate, and develops telepathic and telekinetic powers, and finally a god complex based on his belief that virtual reality is re-opening parts of the brain not used since the primeval past. One of his first

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virtual exploits is a kind of regressive primal sexcapade that leaves his partner incapable of functioning. After taking his revenge on those who treated him and his friend, a neighbor boy Peter Parkette (Austin O’Brien), badly while he was the lawnmower man, he goes to the lab to abandon his body entirely for the virtual realm. With some help from Peter and his mother, Angelo almost manages to contain Jobe, but Jobe successfully enters virtual reality and even escapes the multi-level encryptions with which Angelo attempts to keep him in the lab computer while he destroys the lab. The sound of telephones ringing simultaneously all over the world is the sound that marks Jobe’s transformation. * * * This tech-noir film identifies, in passing, the many hopeful possibilities for new education and biotherapy programs that virtual reality might bring to the handicapped, the aged, and so forth; but its underlying message is that only military applications will attract enough funding to actually pay for the necessary research. The fixation on enhancing aggression and military applications is also prevalent in Soldier (1998), Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), and numerous films involving behavioral programming from the Manchurian Candidate (1962) on. The idea that a personality or self might actually be separated from the body and transferred to the digital or virtual realm is a popular one that sometimes, as in Megaville (1990) and Duplicates (1992), appears in conjunction with personality transfers to other bodies, but it also appears as an independent motif in the satiric Max Headroom (1985), Freejack (1992), Encrypt (2003), and other films. The theme of child abuse or exploitation is more apparent here than in other tech-noir films, where children are often incidental victims of social decline and economic disparity. In this film, Jobe is abused by a misguided church leader and exploited by the more kindly, if also capitalistic, brother of that church leader. Jobe’s friend Peter and his mother are also shown to be the objects of tyrannical bullying by the father-husband of the family. Jobe, like the androids exposed to deridium in Phoenix (1995), gains telekinetic powers that help him to overcome his oppressors; and, like Eddie Jessup in Altered States (1980), Jobe also comes to believe that his personal powers, and humankind’s future evolution in general, involves the recovery of the primeval past. As in Altered States and some other films of the 1980s, the virtual realm in Lawnmower Man is conceived in the psychedelic style of the 1970s.

Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (Jobe’s War) (Sequel) Writers: Farhad Mann and Michael Miner Series: The Lawnmower Man, 1992 Director: Farhad Mann Date: 1996 Length: 93 min. Type: Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment The orphaned Peter (Austen O’Brien) lives with his friends in an unused Los Angeles subway tunnel where, with the help of their smart dog, they play with an extraordinary array of computer equipment and virtual games. Jobe (Matt Frewer) is a wheelchair-bound computer genius confined to a room in a corporate compound. There, he is wired more or less permanently into cyberspace so that he can actualize the Chiron chip plan, originally designed by Dr. Benjamin Trace (Patrick Bergin) for Jonathan Walker (Kevin Conway), and intended to facilitate the virtual community of the future. Walker, as the flashbacks indicate, is one of the investors who took the patent for the chip from Trace. Jobe, claiming concern about a bit of code called “Egypt,” contacts Peter while he is busy in a virtual game and convinces him to go and find Trace to help him

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figure it out. The reluctant Trace returns from his mountain hideout, realizes that Jobe plans to use the chip for total world domination, enlists the aid of his former girlfriend Dr. Cori Platt (Ely Pouget), who happens to be working for Walker, and successfully foils Jobe’s plans, but not before Jobe has created havoc in the world’s economic and social systems. In the end, Jobe regresses to his pre-Dr. Angelo IQ and everyone goes out to enjoy the view from a corporate office balcony. * * * The theme of abuse and bullying that appeared in the first Lawnmower Man film continues here in a different form. Now, the orphaned Peter and his friends actually live on the streets, apparently because there is no place else for them to go, but they also have a sort of Disney-Dickens look that suggests fashion-conscious gringe more than real poverty. Similarly, Trace’s initial mountain shaman style, complete with feathers in his hair, is obviously code for “natural” as the opposite of the artificially digital. The broken home theme is also developed by the computer-club teens in Hackers (1995), one of whom spends most of his nights as well as his days indulging his interest in computer hacking, apparently because life at home is intolerable The film’s overall message is that the internet has a frightening potential for use as a weapon and as a means to the concentration of information and power. Jobe uses his internet access to terrorize those who interfere with his will: his will to acquire even more power being all that distinguishes him from the downloaded criminal turned virtual stalker in Ghost in the Machine (1993). Matt Frewer, who plays Jobe, reverses the role he played in Max Headroom (1985): in that earlier film he is the reporter who digs up information on the dangers of advanced technology, rather than the monstrous megalomaniac who wants to exploit those dangers. Max Headroom is similar to Jobe insofar as both characters become the voice of the new age. The computer genius who lives in a wheelchair also appears in Wild Palms (1993); but “Chickie” actually invents the “go-chip” that will give its user digital immortality, while Jobe merely finds and attempts to implement a plan designed by someone else. The debate about intellectual property rights in conjunction with computer programs is, of course, still ongoing in real life: see Tron (1982) for an earlier film addressing this subject in relation to video games. Trace’s dialogue connects “Egypt” with the first dam ever built and the idea of an internet protection device, but the word more readily associates the internet with an ancient society that fell into economic collapse while its purported leaders ignored reality in favor of their hoped-for afterlife. The megalomaniac with a plan to build or rebuild a city in the physical world as a counterpart to his control of its social and economic structures appears in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993). Fears about the dangers of the internet escalate to a plan that almost ends in its complete destruction in Netforce (1998).

Logan’s Run Source: Based on William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel of the same title, 1967 Writer: David Zelag Goodman Director: Michael Anderson Date: 1976 Length: 120 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Cyborg Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI In 2274, the descendants of the survivors of war, overpopulation, pollution, and all the other problems that have ever plagued humankind, live in a domed city where everything is provided. The caveat is that eventually

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everyone must enter the “carousel.” Carousel is a public spectacle that involves putting thirty-year-olds, who believe they may have a chance for “renewal,” to death: their bodies rise into the air where they are detonated one by one before a crowd of cheering onlookers. Logan (Michael York) is a sandman who terminates runners – those who try to avoid carousel by leaving the city in search of sanctuary, a rumored place of safety beyond the reach of sandmen and the carousel ritual. After Logan finds an ankh on a terminated runner, he is assigned by the city computer to become a runner so that he can find and destroy sanctuary. Logan dupes Jessica (Jenny Agutter), who has contacts in the underground, into helping him and they find their way outside. There, they discover other runners frozen in ice by the confused “Box” (Roscoe Lee Browne), who was previously assigned to capture and freeze protein sources from the ocean. Logan, however, has a gun, so they defeat Box and move on into the countryside and eventually find an old man (Peter Ustinov) living near the Lincoln monument with a large number of cats. Logan and Jessica have become very close during their adventures and when Francis (Richard Jordan), Logan’s former partner, catches up with them Logan kills him to preserve his relationship with her. They take the old man with them to the city to publicize the truth, but Logan is captured and interrogated by the computer. The computer is unable to accept his claim that there is no sanctuary and begins to malfunction; Logan helps the disintegration process along with some well-placed weapons fire, and the entire city population is forced outside where the old man is waiting for them. * * * This film has become one of the classics about the technologically created and maintained dystopia and it incorporates many of the motifs now familiar to science fiction and tech-noir. As in the earlier Alphaville (1965) and Colossus (1970), an artificial intelligence has control over a society, but when this computer is confronted by information it cannot process, it loses control, thus revealing the world of nature outside the city. The “bubble” or artificial environment and quest to escape it also appears in different forms in The Truman Show (1998), Virtual Nightmare (2000), Aeon Flux (2005), and numerous films developed in relation to the idea of virtual reality. The carousel ritual is comparable to “going home” in Soylent Green (1973) in that it is a solution to the problem of limited resources, but “going home” merely offers the opportunity for twenty minutes of privacy amidst the simulated beauties of nature before a quick and painless death. Carousel is more like the Running Man (1987) game in that it is a form of public entertainment. The hero’s quest that is also a journey or road trip through a “zone” pursued by a stalker is a familiar technoir motif; the fact that previous runners were thwarted by a malfunctioning robot rather than sustained pursuit adds irony as well as a carnival element to Logan’s “run.” The hero who, like Logan, is or is supposed to be an instrument of death, but becomes a protector of “life,” is also found in Blade Runner (1982), Universal Soldier (1992), Solo (1996), and others; sometimes, as in the second and third Terminator films (1991, 2003), this inversion takes place in the sequels. The old man who lives in the country with his cats is a variation of the “informant” character made unique by the use of T.S. Eliot’s “Gus: The Theatre Cat” found in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), but informants who assist the hero in unraveling some technological mystery are common: see, for example, Sam Pickens, a policeman who was retired for getting too close to the truth and who also informs the hero in Cyborg Cop 2 (1994).

Looker Writer: Michael Crichton Director: Michael Crichton Date: 1981 Length: 94 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Hacking the mind 347

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Cosmetic surgeon Larry Roberts (Albert Finney) is quite distressed when Lieutenant Masters (Dorian Harewood) informs him that the women he has provided with perfect features are turning up dead. The dimensions of these perfect features were provided by a subsidiary to John Reston’s (James Coburn) Reston Industries, Digicron Matrix, which is run by Reston’s wife Jennifer Long (Leigh Taylor-Young). Digicron Matrix is researching ways to fix the television viewer’s attention on products at a hypnotic trance level; the same technology is also being used to support a specific presidential candidate and to make a kind of lightflash gun that puts people into a temporary trance state that simulates an epileptic seizure. Larry is worried about Cindy (Susan Dey), his only surviving “perfect features” patient, so he chaperones her to a commercial photo shoot at the beach. At the shoot, Cindy is supposed to match her body movements to computer generated specifications while playing volley ball; when she is unable to do so, she is sent for digital measuring at Digicron Matrix and Larry accompanies her, gets the public relations tour, and steals a security card. Later that night, the two covertly explore the Digicron “Looker” lab where they learn that Looker stands for Light Oracular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses and also realize the extent of the company’s ambitions. The final hide-and-seek chase scenes take place in the Digicron Matrix studio and are broadcast accidently, along with the new corporate digital advertisements, to a large audience gathered to learn about the latest Reston technological innovations and the merits of the Reston supported presidential candidate. * * * Looker goes far beyond the adolescent motivations for disposing of the biology-based woman proffered in The Stepford Wives (1975), and, unlike Tron (1982), treats the idea of the digital simulation with extraordinary plausibility, even realism. Looker also merits brief comparison with Brazil (1985) for its representation of cosmetic surgery: where the more recent film satirizes surgical horrors and presents the motives for undergoing it as deluded and personal, in Looker, artificially perfected beauty becomes the new “nature” relative to virtual reality, and the motives for this shuffle are identified with corporate profiteering, job security, and political ambition. See Virtuosity (1995) for the actual creation of a material body from a digital “original.” See Enemy of the State (1998) for some old-fashioned reliance on natural bodies as a means of promoting lingerie sales. Elections and presidential nominations are frequent subplots in tech-noir that provide the context for various kinds of criminal and unethical activity. Political ambitions specifically motivate the development of behavioral manipulation techniques and their application to selected individuals in The Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004), and the initial support and later withdrawal of that support for similar experiments on a volunteer in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Other films, such as Menno’s Mind (1997), like Looker, show the general population, rather than individuals, as the target of manipulation techniques. Election-related events, such as parades, conventions, and banquets, are not only readymade sites for power struggles, they are extensions and substitutes for the circus or fun house environment that appears in other tech-noir films: in Blow Out (1981), Jack cannot save Sally because the politically motivated killer is on the other side of a large Liberty Day parade. In The Clones (1973), Appleby dies at the hands of his adversary’s clone in a fun house: like Sally, he might have stopped the plot to usurp power and so he must die. A plot to replace VIPs rather than merely manipulate them is organized and implemented in an amusement park in Futureworld (1976). The center of action in Menno’s Mind is a virtual reality entertainment center. The use of advertising in Looker adds a specific aspect of capitalist marketing to the tech-noir film recipe for the political circus.

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The Manchurian Candidate Source: Based on Richard Condon’s novel of the same title, 1959; and George Axelrod’s screenplay for director John Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate, 1962 Writers: Dean Georgaris and Daniel Pyne Series: The Manchurian Candidate, 1962 Director: Jonathan Demme Date: 2004 Length: 129 min. Type: Behavior modification Cyborg Desert Storm veteran Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) spends his time giving public relations talks about his military experiences. After fellow veteran Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright) confronts him about his dreams, Ben realizes that he is not the only one who thinks that things did not end for their unit quite the way they all say it did. As he follows through on his own previous research, the clippings and drawings he finds in Melvin’s apartment, and other clues, he is assisted by Rosie (Kimberly Elise), a woman he knows as a grocery store clerk who turns out to be an FBI agent. After he finds an implant in his back, which he unfortunately drops down the sink, Marco is increasingly certain that Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), like himself, actually murdered someone in the unit. When Melvin turns up dead, he tells the police to look for an implant in him too. Things heat up when Ben confronts Raymond, literally bites his implant out, and takes it to a scientist friend, who says it is a Manchurian Global chip originally designed to carry medical data. Ben even tries shock therapy to further jog his memory about what really happened to him in Kuwait. His library research turns up names associated with Manchurian Global and experiments on soldiers: one article says they could even implant memories. He takes what he knows to Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight), who confronts both Raymond and Raymond’s mother Eleanor (Meryl Streep). Eleanor has recently managed to have Raymond put in the running for vice-president. She reveals her complicity in a brainwashing experiment when she activates Raymond and has him murder both the Senator and his daughter, who also happens to be the only woman Raymond ever loved. Ultimately, however, it is Ben who is called to the task of assassinating the president at the victory celebration following the election; but Raymond, who is present when Ben gets the activation phone call, revises the programming and Ben shoots Raymond and his mother instead. Thanks to Rosie, the top military brass steps in and fixes the surveillance tape so that someone else takes the blame. The VIPs at Manchurian Global turn the news reports off, their plans to put a “sleeper” in the White House having clearly been foiled. * * * The 1962 film poses the villains; that is, Russians, Koreans, and Raymond Shaw’s ambitious mother, as developers of a “brainwashing” technique involving lights and drugs which they apply to members of an American military unit in Korea. The ultimate goal of the conspirators is to put someone they can control in the president’s office. In the 2004 remake, the villains are individuals having something to do with the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, the Manchurian Global Corporation, and, again, Raymond’s mother. The updated technique involves implanting members of a military unit with tracking and control devices, as well as “brainwashing”; and the objective is, once again, to put a “sleeper” in the president’s office. Both films show the use of behavioral conditioning to turn men into assassins; both incorporate flashbacks and “dream” sequences that are really memories breaking through the conditioning; and both have a set of common secondary characters. After President Kennedy’s assassination, the 1962 film was pulled from distribution until its rerelease in 1987; the 2004 film includes a speech by Eleanor Shaw that sounds like a post-9/11 American call to arms. 349

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The theme of behavioral conditioning appears in numerous tech-noir films, often in association with aspirations for political office: Apocalypse Watch (1997) and Fugitive Mind (1999) both feature attempted assassinations by “sleepers” to further someone’s political ambitions. The use of soldiers as unwitting test subjects for some experimental procedure is also the basis of most of the developments in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999).

The Manhattan Project: The Deadly Game Writers: Thomas Baum and Marshall Brickman Director: Marshall Brickman Date: 1986 Length: 117 min. Type: Technology John Mathewson (John Lithgow) is a scientist who invents a way to produce almost pure plutonium and thus gets extensive funding from the military to set up the “Medatomics” lab in a small New York state town where he can continue his research without public knowledge. He meets Elizabeth Stephens (Jill Eikenberry) and her son Paul (Christopher Collet) while apartment hunting and offers Paul a tour of the facility in exchange for a dinner date with his mother. Paul realizes there is more going on at Medatomics than John admits when he finds a lot of five-leaf clovers on the grounds. This discovery is far more interesting than watching The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), even with his girlfriend Jenny Anderman (Cynthia Nixon), and even at the moment when Klaatu is giving Mrs. Benson the words to speak to Gort should anything go wrong so that he will know what to do. When Jenny drives Paul home, they spot John’s car outside the house and Paul steals John’s ID from the glove compartment. They go to the lab and, while Jenny creates a diversion, Paul steals some of the green plutonium and replaces it with shampoo. Paul then enters a science contest where he plans to make a surprise display out of a homemade nuclear bomb. The authorities are soon onto the pair, but are thwarted in their efforts to recover the bomb by some teenaged science “geeks” who use their own scientific invention to eavesdrop on Paul and Jenny, realize what is going on, and decide to help. Paul eventually agrees to meet John at Medatomics with the bomb. When John realizes the military plans to execute Paul, he sides with him. The bomb is deactivated and the press and public informed about the real purpose of the Medatomics facility. * * * This film is titled after the World War II project directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer that was destined to produce the atomic bomb; the project name referenced New York because that was the location of the supporting army headquarters. The threat or aftershocks of a nuclear holocaust echo throughout tech-noir: this film expands on Fail Safe (1964), The China Syndrome (1979), and Wargames (1983) with reference to the ready availability of information about building bombs. As in the China Syndrome, Virus (1996), and others, the solution, once again, to the technological threat is informing the public of the danger. Here, that solution also develops from a teen’s understanding of a situation in relation to his girlfriend and 1950s science-fiction movies. The teen team with the eavesdropping equipment restates the assumption that “geeks” can somehow to be trusted to do the right thing with any information they should covertly acquire with their gadgetry. See Enemy of the State (1998) for grown-up geeks who simply do what they are told by whoever is writing their paychecks, and Fatal Error (1999) for a geek who decides to top his employer’s plans to use his invention for profit. See Global Effect (2002) for the threat posed by bombs that are presented as the solution of last resort to the threat of a deadly plague.

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The five-leaf clover serves as a relatively innocuous symbol of the very real transformative effects of plutonium production waste, not to mention the plutonium itself. Often the effects of human industry on the environment are indicated in films by the absence or death of nature, but occasionally mutated life forms appear: see, for example, the two-headed lizards in eXistenZ (1999), the new humans in Omega Man (1971), and those living on the fringes of civilization in Judge Dredd (1995).

The Mangler 2 Writer: Michael Hamilton-Wright Series: Mangler, 1995 (not included) Mangler Reborn, 2005 (not included) Director: Michael Hamilton-Wright Date: 2001 Country: Canada Length: 97 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Cyborg Jo Newton (Chelse Swain) is a reluctant student who, one spring break, sneaks off campus and breaks into her father’s company; she is not caught until she has almost got out again. Mr. Newton then donates an automated security system to her school that is identical to one being installed in military facilities and which has a “high modular interface” programmed with his own brain wave patterns. Jo’s kindly driver and bodyguard Paul (David Christensen) drops her off at school with a bypass key that will set off his pager if she uses it. She soon discovers that the mean-spirited Headmaster Bradeen (Lance Henriksen) is in need of a scapegoat for a prank involving a computer cartoon of himself with a dog: he makes the campus prefects, including Jo, stay behind while everyone else goes on a field trip and also threatens to cancel the prom if the culprit is not found. When Jo’s fellows suggest that she take the blame, she resentfully downloads the “Mangler” virus from the internet into the school’s computer system and it immediately begins to use all of the automated systems to attack and murder people. The prefects meet at the pool where Emily (Daniella Evangelista) and Corey (Miles Meadows) get very stoned and Cory admits that he was the cartoonist. They realize that Jo’s virus will be blamed on them, so they use Jo’s bypass key to get into Bradeen’s office and make it look like he got an e-mail infected with the virus. Once there, however, the computer traps Will (Dexter Bell) and burns him to death using the sprinkler; it also traps the chef (Philippe Bergeron) in the freezer, but the suddenly hungry Emily and Cory find and release him when they make a trip to the kitchen. A plan to crash the system takes the survivors through the gymnasium, where Cory is crushed by the automated bleachers, and then to Jo’s room, and finally outside. Paul arrives and rams the electric gate; the chef gets out, but the Mangler electrocutes Jo’s favorite, Dan (Will Sanderson). The chef tosses Jo his knife, and she heads for the main computer room and a close encounter with Bradeen, now a Mangler cyborg eager to breed. Jo uploads her “snowflake” program as a distraction and then knifes what is left of Bradeen’s body. Paul shows up in time to get Jo out and all seems well when Jo’s father and the chef chopper in to save them. The closing finds Jo sitting on the grass happily taking a call from her dad before class, but one of her gadgets reveals the virus’s signature digital message: “You’ve been mangled!” * * * The opening sequence of Mangler 2 suggests the “friendly” break and enter of Sneakers (1992) or Foolproof (2003), but the film focus quickly shifts to neglected young adults with a knack for computers and more

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money than wit. For more on-campus young adults who seem to know a lot about computers but lack a sense of responsibility appropriate to that knowledge, see Interface (1984). The school setting and serial killing computer also move the story closer to such classic campus horrors as Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978). See Mimic 2 (2001) for the conversion of a public school into a breeding ground for mutating genetically engineered cockroaches. Mangler alters the campus security system such that it becomes something like the prison in the Fortress (1992), differing from it in that it lacks a human minder. Nelson’s use of his own brain wave patterns to create this security system echoes the method used to program androids in Eve of Destruction (1991) and Phoenix (1995), and the use of brain cells to make digital games in Nirvana (1997). The aggressive artificial intelligence that emerges as Mangler after adapting to the Nelson-derived system is also akin to the serial killer uploaded into the net in Ghost in the Machine (1993). The Mangler’s somewhat gratuitous desire to procreate using Bradeen’s body and that of the daughter of the man whose brain cells gave it consciousness is another echo from Demon Seed (1977) that also tags the film as self-consciously grade “B.”

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Source: Based on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, 1818 Writers: Frank Darabont and Steph Lady Series: Frankenstein, 2004 (based on some characters from the novel) Director: Kenneth Branagh Date: 1994 Length: 123 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Bioengineering: Diseases and cures In 1794, Captain Robert Walton’s (Aidan Quinn) ship is stuck in the ice of the Arctic Sea when he takes on a passenger, Victor Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh), who tells him the story of his former life in Geneva with his cousin Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), younger brother William, and family friend Justine. This story is presented as a prolonged flashback. His father is a doctor and his mother died giving birth to William; thus Victor is inspired to go to medical school in Ingolstadt where he meets Henry Clerval (Tom Hulce) and Professor Waldman (John Cleese), who is notorious for his illegal experiments. When Waldman dies in an attack by a peg-legged man who refuses a smallpox vaccination, Victor takes up the challenge he finds in Waldman’s notes and tries to restore him to life. Meanwhile, a cholera epidemic has the city in chaos and Elizabeth comes to find out why she has not heard from him. Victor accomplishes his objective, but then wonders what he has done and rereads Waldman’s notation that the results of his experiments were very strong, but inevitably “malfunctional.” He falls into an exhausted sleep. The Creature (Robert De Niro) flees both his creator and the townspeople, who believe he is the one spreading cholera, and eventually arrives at the haven offered by an animal shed attached to a cottage occupied by a small family. He covertly learns about human society, how to speak and read, and soon reads the journal Victor left in the pocket of the great cloak he had grabbed when exiting the lab. All goes well at first: the Creature secretly provides the starving family with food and even saves one of the cottage inhabitants, the blind old grandfather, from a beating by a malicious landlord; but the son comes home, sees him for the first time, drives him out, and immediately moves his family away. Alone and vengeful, the Creature goes to Geneva, murders William, and plants the locket the child carried on Justine, and Justine is lynched as the murderer by an angry mob. The monster demands a meeting with Victor out on some ice fields where he tells his story, discusses the way that he seems to remember rather than learn things, and demands a female companion in return for leaving Victor in peace. At first, Victor agrees and begins work with the equipment he has had transferred from his Ingolstadt

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laboratory to his family home. When the monster brings him the body of Justine to work on, Victor changes his mind. After Victor marries Elizabeth, the Creature creates a distraction that allows him to get to her while she is alone in the bedroom and he kills her by pulling out her heart. Victor immediately rushes her body to his lab and sets to work bringing her back to life, complete with the same hideous scars that disfigure his original creation. Awakened, the female Creature, tormented by the demands of Victor and the monster, commits suicide by lighting herself and the entire building on fire. Victor then sets out in vengeful pursuit of his creation and ends up at Walton’s ship. He dies soon after telling his story, at which point the Creature manages to get into the cabin to bemoan his loss. The crew put the body on a pier for burning; when the ice begins to crack up, they rush back to their ship. The Creature grabs a torch, climbs up on the tiny patch of floating ice with Victor’s body, and sets fire to both it and himself. * * * This film adds details to Mary Shelley’s story that support its adaptation to the medium and the period reconstruction and also add to its appearance as tech-noir. This effect is particularly in evidence in the attention to vaccination: plagues and cures are often featured in tech-noir, but vaccinations are not. The reminder of this aspect of the history of medicine makes an excellent counterpoint to Frankenstein’s project. The film also adds references to the salvaging of body parts in the context of organ transplants. Such references were already being popularized in other films by the time this adaptation was created: see the films in the “Bioengineering: Transplant” and “Clone: Body parts” categories. This film is also discussed in Chapter 2.

Matrix Writers: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Series: The Matrix Reloaded, 2003 (Sequel) The Matrix Revolutions, 2003 (Sequel) Directors: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Date: 1999 Countries: Australia and United States Length: 136 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Cyborg Machines have taken over the world using the matrix, a virtual copy of the corporatized urban world of 1999 generated inside the minds of humans while their bodies remain enslaved in pods designed to harness their energy. With Trinity’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) help, particularly with the extraction of his cybernetic “spider” implant, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) brings Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), aka Neo, out of the matrix to help in the war against the machines and to save Zion, the only human city still safe and out of sight far underground. Real life on board Morpheus’s ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, is uncomfortable; but Neo likes being trained in virtual combat, appreciates the virtual “woman in the red dress,” and even finds direction from his visit to the Oracle (Gloria Foster) who lives inside the matrix. The Oracle apparently told Morpheus that he would find “the one” who would defeat the machines and told Trinity that the man she loved would be “the one.” She tells Neo that he is not “the one,” but he will have to decide whether or not to let Morpheus sacrifice his own life for his because he believes Neo is “the one.” Soon after, Neo sees a cat twice: such déjà vu inside the matrix means that the machines have changed something; in this case, Cypher (Joe Pantoliano)

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has betrayed them for a chance to return to the matrix as an actor. Neo, strengthened by Trinity’s affections, not only proves to be up to the challenge of rescuing Morpheus after he is abducted, he proves he is indeed “the one” by demonstrating a mastery of the matrix that exceeds even that of its agent Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving). * * * The Oracle and search for the “one” mythologize the film events: the New Testament merges with Lewis Carroll’s “Adventures” when Neo follows the white rabbit tattoo on his first step to the truth about so-called reality and his role in its redemption. Thomas Anderson is Neo in much the same way that Clark Kent is Superman and shares that hero’s affinity for telephones, and later, for flying; thus the man who spends his life behind the less-than-prestigious corporate desk not only dreams of doing something amazing, as in Brazil (1985), but actually does do something amazing. See Foolproof (2003) for a man with a more ironic adaptive style relative to the corporate hierarchy who seeks escape in games – Foolproof does not propose an alternate level of reality, except perhaps that of a criminal underground, but it develops the alter ego of the desk-bound urbanite. Neo’s accomplishments are lent special dramatic effect by the circling shots of characters in combat created by the Wachowskis’ revolutionary filming technique. The artificial intelligence that takes over the world in The Matrix does so in a manner that is more consistent with capitalism than the route taken by the AI in the Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), but the Terminator theme of fate versus free will becomes increasingly important in the Matrix sequels. The “shopping” scenes in which Neo and Trinity select their weapons are also classic demonstrations that the matrix is a product of capitalist object and power-oriented desire. The presentation of the real world is extraordinary, particularly the fields where humans are now “grown,” rather than born, and of Neo’s rebirth: see The Island (2005) for comparable images of cloning pods and a clone birth. The Matrix dramatizes virtual reality as a place of desire and incarceration: see Darkdrive (1996) for a film with more self-aware virtual prison occupants and a less glossy view of contemporary America. As in Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), the occupants of the matrix are slow to recognize it as such and they are constantly monitored and their world adjusted to keep them oblivious to its existence. Numerous motifs in the Matrix also appear in these films, including the leap from the tall building to achieve release from illusion. This film is also discussed in Chapter 3.

The Matrix Reloaded (Sequel) Writers: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Series: See The Matrix, 1999 Directors: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Date: 2003 Length: 138 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Cyborg The machines have located Zion and are drilling toward it, while Neo (Keanu Reeves) is haunted by dreams of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) falling to her death. He confronts the Oracle (Gloria Foster), who is now protected by Seraph (Collin Chou), about her identity as part of the machine. She explains that most programs are invisible, but those that do not do what they are supposed to appear as ghosts, vampires, and other

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such creatures; she then departs, leaving him to battle Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving), who is now a “free” and self-replicating virus. Neo, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), and Trinity follow the Oracle’s suggestion that they rescue the Key Maker (Randall Duk Kim) from the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson). Neo accomplishes this task by trading a kiss such as he would give Trinity to the Merovingian’s dissatisfied wife Persephone (Monica Bellucci) in exchange for the Key Maker’s location. Persephone kills one of the older programs assigned to guard her husband’s asset with a silver bullet. This act, like the vampire movie on the background television, supports the Oracle’s claims about certain programs. The escape with the Key Maker involves violent encounters with vampire and ghost programs, a lengthy freeway chase, and ongoing interference from Mr. Smith. The Key Maker explains his role: “I know because I must know, it is my purpose”; and then he gives the trio a plan for infiltrating the machine mainframe. Once there, Neo learns from the Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) that this is the sixth “matrix” and that he has the choice of saving a few dozen humans so that the cycle can start again or not. He chooses to save Trinity, who has entered the matrix to ensure his safety, by removing a virtual bullet from her chest and restarting her heart. All now realize that they have passed beyond the realm of prophecy. The sentinels – the machine’s inhuman soldiers – find them and destroy Morpheus’s ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. Neo is incapacitated by his concluding and successful effort to stop the sentinels from pursuing the survivors, but the crew is rescued by another ship. Once safely on board, they learn that five ships were destroyed in an unsuccessful mission against the sentinels – only one person survived, Bane (Ian Bliss), who, unbeknownst to his comrades, was transformed into an agent by Mr. Smith. The film closes with Neo and Bane lying head to head, both unconscious. * * * This sequel adds the city of Zion, the council of elders who make decisions about the social order and battle against the machines, and the potential merging of machine logic with human notions of fate and destiny in a gothic context. “Gothic” elements include secret passageways and doors, and vampires and ghosts that, like those in Ghost in the Machine (1993) and Knights (1993), ally the artificial beings with a much older and not-entirely-human cast. In the Matrix, these “type” beings are explained as ancient or malfunctioning programs. Link (Harold Perrineau) also plays a type, in part because he is the uncle little children love, and in part because he is the classic tech-noir surveillance expert and guide, but especially because it is his face that viewers see when it is time for expressions of amazement, joy, and celebration. See Darkdrive’s (1996) Doorman and Middlemen for earlier “type” characters inside a virtual reality, and eXistenZ (1999) for a film that emphasizes the pre-established function of characters in plot advancement in a manner consistent with the Key Maker’s explanation of his own role. In Matrix Reloaded, humans and machines are learning to exceed the sum of their relative parts: love is one means to that end. Usually love is what restores a pre-existing familial order, as in Duplicates (1992), or allows machines to emulate that order, as in Cyborg 2 (1993); but here, love releases humans and machines from the limitations of predictability – even the happily-ever-after ending for the couple is forfeited to the survival of all. City of Lost Children (1995) also features a young woman who, like Trinity, enters a virtual reality in order to save someone; a female psychologist does the same thing in The Cell (2000).

The Matrix Revolutions (Sequel) Writers: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Series: See The Matrix, 1999 Director: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Date: 2003 Length: 129 min.

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Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Cyborg Neo (Keanu Reeves), completely incapacitated by his battle with the sentinels, finds himself in limbo, jacked in but not jacked in, in the Merovingian’s (Lambert Wilson) train station. There he meets Rama-Kandra (Bernard White) and his wife who are taking their daughter to the Oracle (Mary Alice). Their daughter does not have a function and such programs cannot survive without special arrangements, so they made a deal with the Merovingian to save her. Rama-Kandra explains to Neo that love is just a word and what is important is the connection it implies; likewise, karma is a word that refers to what we are here to do; and both of these words may be applied to human and machine behavior. The trainman takes the family, but not Neo, and Neo finds that walking down the tracks only brings him back to the station again. Meanwhile, Trinity (CarrieAnne Moss), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), and Seraph (Collin Chou) confront the Merovingian and force him to release Neo. Neo regains consciousness and goes to see the Oracle, who explains that Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving) is the program trying to balance the equation that Neo has disrupted. After Neo leaves, Smith assimilates the Oracle and her second sight. Morpheus, ship’s captain Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith), who also happens to be Morpheus’s former lover, and the others take the ship that came to rescue them back to help save Zion, while Neo and Trinity prepare to depart for the Machine City in Niobe’s ship. Niobe pilots an astonishing flight into Zion, arriving just in time to find the dock overrun by sentinels and the giant robotic fighters used for human defense falling before the continued onslaught: they buy time for a retreat by setting off an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) which incapacitates the sentinels, but also knocks out all Zion’s defenses. Meanwhile, Bane has stowed away with Neo and Trinity: Neo kills him at the cost of his eyesight; so Trinity pilots to their destination, but she dies when they crash. Neo presents himself to the machine, which appears in the form of a giant face composed of swarming parts, and offers to get rid of their mutual Smith problem in exchange for peace. The machine provides facilities for Neo to jack in; Mr. Smith, who feels empowered by his belief that he has seen his victory with the Oracle’s eyes, sends only one agent into battle. He absorbs Neo’s body and briefly believes that he has won, but Neo acts on his body like a virus and explodes all of the Smith units from within. Neo apparently dies, but the machines retreat from their attack on Zion, and the humans celebrate. The Architect suggests to the Oracle that she plays a dangerous game and asks, rather cynically, how long she thinks this peace will last. The Oracle asks him about the “others,” and the Architect affirms that they will be freed. * * * Matrix Revolutions completes the mythological cycle that began with the search for the “one.” Many of the main characters only live long enough to satisfy their karma – they do only what they have to do and no more – leaving the possibility that the entire battle may one day start all over again. The dramatic emphasis of the series on a single individual who is fated to save the world is also found in The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003) and Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996), as well as Prototype X29A (1992). The belief that someone will rise to an occasion and stop whatever disaster threatens humanity or aid in the recovery after the disaster has occurred is common in tech-noir, but the character who is a “chosen one” here indicates a deeper engagement with traditional mythology and a sustained effort to find a place for technological development within that mythology. The Matrix is the only one of the three series that proposes the transformation and death of the hero as the sacrifice necessary to “save” humankind, symbolized here by the great city of Zion. See The Island (2005) for a more ironic treatment of fantasies about being special and the “one” as a means to behavioral control.

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Max Headroom Writers: Directors: Date: Country: Length: Type:

Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton, Steve Roberts, and Colin Wilson Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton 1985 TV United Kingdom 57 min. Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Bioengineering: Transplant

“Twenty minutes into the future,” reporter Edison Carter (Matt Frewer), with the help of computer expert Theora Jones (Amanda Pays), discovers Network 23 has been keeping a big secret: their new “blipverts,” commercial spots that compress thirty seconds of advertising into three seconds and intended to keep people from switching channels, cause sedentary viewers to spontaneously combust. When television station director Mr. Grossman (Nickolas Grace) consults “top man” Bryce Lynch (Paul Spurrier), the adolescent computer genius who designed the blipvert, on the matter, Lynch suggests that they (a) not tell anyone about the blipvert problem and (b) that they kill Carter to stop him from broadcasting on the issue. He also proposes they replace Carter with a simulation like the one he has created of a parrot, but Grossman is unimpressed with the results and orders Lynch to arrange for the disposal of both Carter and the simulation. Meanwhile, Jones uses her access to the station’s security systems to direct Carter into Lynch’s office where he sees a tape of a viewer blowing up; then Jones and Lynch vie for control of the building to help or prevent Carter’s escape. Finally, Carter crashes into a exit control gate labeled “Max Headroom 2.3” and Lynch’s thugs, Breugal (Hilton McRae) and Mahler (George Rossi), dump Carter at a body parts facility and leave the box containing the simulated Carter with Big Time television, a broadcasting station operated by Reg (William Morgan Sheppard) and his business partner Dominique (Hilary Tindall) out of a van. Carter escapes, contacts Jones, takes a nap in her apartment, and then they both go after Grossman and Lynch. Meanwhile, the simulated Carter becomes a television personality on Big Time, and the station’s sky-rocketing ratings quickly draw attention from Station 23. Grossman finds Lynch and they confront the thugs who were supposed to take care of the problem. Just as the horrified Grossman and Lynch observe these entrepreneurs back their vehicle into two street people and prepare to cash in on the bodies, Carter and Jones show up with a camera and ask Grossman to explain the blipvert problem. * * * This dark comedy is a potpourri of tech-noir elements: tech-induced combustion of the human body is featured in the opening of Future Shock (1993) and a beautiful android combusts in the opening of Cyborg 2 (1993). The deadly ray coming from the television set is found earlier in Videodrome (1983) and later in Fatal Error (1999), while the subliminal television ad is featured in Looker (1981). The black market body parts theme is featured in similarly dark terms in Future Kick (1991), albeit primarily inside a virtual reality novel. The world outside Station 23 seems to be a down-and-out place where the poor watch television programs on discarded machines out of doors: in the later Running Man (1987), the homeless are provided with much better screens. The obsession with ratings is also prominent in Network (1976), Rollerball (1975), Looker, and others. The intrepid reporter appears in tech-noir films from The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971) to Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999). The morally compromised computer technician or programmer who either does not respect human life or does not quite comprehend the difference between humans and machines appears in Videodrome (1983), Fatal Error (1999), Universal Soldier: The Return (1999), and others. This film also satirizes the youthfulness of the purported computer genius whose obsession with technology

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appears to account for his lack of ethics and inability to distinguish between living originals and their extremely flawed digital copies. Max Headroom forecasts the virtual characters in Netforce (1999), Cyber Wars (2004), and other virtual reality films of the “media, marketing, and entertainment” type. The idea that a person’s brain can be mapped and downloaded is also a prominent theme in virtual reality films such as Lawnmower Man (1992) and Lawnmower Man 2 (1996), in which Matt Frewer also stars, and others.

Megaville Writers: Samuel Benedict, Gordon Chavis, and Peter Lehner Director: Peter Lehner Date: 1990 Length: 96 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Cyborg The media and virtual reality games thrive in the city of Megaville, but the CKS monitors a ban on both, including television, throughout the surrounding zone-like hemisphere or “sphere” of the desert. The film opens with a voice-over by Newman (J.C. Quinn), a hitman and media criminal in Megaville, as he walks across the desert to the motionless body of a man who proves to be his not-quite-dead son Jensen aka Raymond Palinov (Billy Zane):  Some fool once told me the only reason we’re here is to make friends and progeny. Utter bullshit, wouldn’t you say? I’ll admit there’s a bastard or two running around with my DNA, but, as for friends, count ‘em. Try. I suppose that makes me king asshole, but, hey, if you’re gonna live in Megaville that’s the primera ground rule: never trust anybody except the ugly guy in the mirror. Tell you what, this beautiful kid I knew trusted the system to get his brains scrambled, like I don’t know, like two farm fresh eggs. In the hemisphere, they call that science, I call it mind-fuck. Catch my drift. If you don’t want to end up like him, pass a warning, trust no one. So Jensen’s story begins with the voice of his father, but it continues in his own flashback, or perhaps it is Palinov’s flashback … Jensen, it turns out, is a criminal who is confused by a CKS memory implant from his look-a-like, Palinov, a CKS police agent who collapsed during an anti-media raid when he paused to listen to what was being said on a television. Palinov was then volunteered by his mother (Grace Zabriskie) to participate in a memory download and transfer. The real Palinov lies near death at CKS headquarters where Mr. Duprell (Daniel J. Travanti), the ailing company director, attempts to control Jensen from his bed. Jensen has also been implanted with an internal monitoring system that allows Duprell to see what he sees and to speak to him, as well as another device that can cause pain and even death. Jensen, who at first thinks he really is Palinov with a memory implant from Jensen, gradually realizes the truth with a few unsubtle hints from his father, a girl, and his own dreams and memories. Jensen subsequently escapes this mental and physical labyrinth by using Dream-a-Life (DAL), a virtual reality game that has just gone on the market, complete with 1950s style advertising, to dupe Duprell into believing he has gone on a talk show and announced he has a suitcase containing incriminating evidence against Duprell hidden in a hotel. Duprell has the suitcase brought to his office: when he opens it, it detonates. Unfortunately, Jensen is left in a car stuck in the sand – which is how he is found in a state of collapse in the desert. His father, claiming in a voice-over to have come to try to “help the kid,” shoots him in the head only to find his son has handcuffed his wrist to his ankle. The film closes with the sound of Neuman’s laughter. * * * 358

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The son Jenson defeats the fake corporate “father,” as does Martin Brundle in The Fly II (1989), but Jensen is murdered by his biological father, who is thus, in the end, the only one left standing after the battle of the “mind-fuck,” as he calls it, is over. With the exception of this latter explicative, which seems to be unique to it, this film is an original combination of familiar elements: Megaville, with its media problems, is a little like RoboCop’s (1987) Delta City; the suffocation of the Megaville president, who looks distinctly like a former US president, when he goes on the air to warn the public about the dangers of DAL, recalls Videodrome (1983) and the fate of Professor O’Blivion; Jensen’s surveillance implant is an upgraded version of that used by the reporter in Death Watch (1980); and his secret agent personality implant is very like the one in Total Recall (1990). The change of loyalties experienced by Jensen/Palinov also recalls Quade in Total Recall, Preston in Equilibrium (2002), and the “fireman” Montag in Fahrenheit 451 (1966). The talk show within the film is also used effectively in Speaking Parts (1989), although not, as in Megaville, as part of a virtual reality ruse. See Nemesis 3 (1996) for a similarly structured film that opens with the lead character lying alone in the desert. The dream and memory sequences in this film are discussed in Chapter 3.

Menno’s Mind Writer: Mark Valenti Director: Jon Kroll Date: 1997 Length: 95 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Behavior modification Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Jore Norwell, purported terrorist and killer of three people, is sentenced to be executed virtually three times: by firing squad, electric chair, and guillotine, and each time men in red appear to conduct him to his death. Virtual reality is also a government-sanctioned form of public entertainment: people can use their allotments at Resort, a facility where they enjoy such interactive programs as Safari, Afterlife, Judgment, and the “spank” program Candy. The Resort technicians occasionally manipulate the system to serve their own sense of justice, as when Kal (Richard Speight Jr.) catches a guy with a stolen allotment asking for Candy and inserts an image of the man’s wife into the program, and when Menno (Bill Campbell) helps an old man with damaged nerve endings revisit the girl he left behind. Felix Medina (Corbin Bernsen), a corrupt security chief and presidential candidate, has plans to use Resort to rig an election: every Resort visitor receives a subliminal suggestion that will be activated by impulses sent to their home terminals. Norwell was part of a rebel group dedicated to fighting Medina. Medina orders the assassination of rebel leader Mick Dourif (Bruce Campbell) and murders a government board chairman (Robert Vaughn) who stands in his way, as well as a board member and senator (Robert Picardo) who offers to help him for a cut of the profits. The badly wounded Dourif manages to get to Resort where he forces Menno to download his mind into the mainframe; later, Loria (Stephanie Romanov), Dourif ’s partner and would-be lover, forces Menno to accept the upload of Dourif ’s mind into his own brain so that Dourif can help her figure out what he had discovered about Medina’s plans. Menno becomes sympathetic to the rebel cause and, with a little help from fellow Resort employee and friend Simon (Michael Dorn), manages to place a “worm” powered by Dourif ’s redownloaded mind into the mainframe where it eats Medina’s program. In the end, Loria dies for the cause, but Menno downloads her into the computer where she can live happily ever after with Dourif. * * *

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The Resort programs are virtual reinventions of the kind of fantasy world theme parks populated by androids and clones in Westworld (1973), Futureworld (1976), and Able Edwards (2004). They also rework the artificial vacation memory implant facility from Total Recall (1990) with the difference that Resort is a governmentowned and operated corporation that also seems to be responsible for carrying out death sentences by virtual reality. For “chair” executions that kill the body but download the mind and form, see Darkdrive (1996); and for a “real” enactment of death by electric chair, see Unspeakable (2002). “Afterlife,” one of the Resort’s favored programs, is the name of a virtual reality game in Dream Breaker (1995). The naiveté and simplistic political and social views expressed by Menno and Simon herald a world akin to that John Spartan wakes to in Demolition Man (1993) – one unprepared for the likes of Medina. Medina’s plan to use subliminal impulses from a television screen to manipulate the outcome of an election has its predecessor in Looker (1981), which includes a similar plan to use the media to manipulate people into supporting a chosen presidential candidate. See Videodrome (1983), Max Headroom (1985), and Fatal Error (1999) for more on the television signal that transmits more than entertainment. The virtual jacking in process by means of a socket in the back of the neck is recycled in Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003). Menno’s discovery that the program can be manipulated so that the user has ready access to his own unconscious is a variation on Virtual Seduction (1995), with the difference that Menno has altruistic motives for implementing his discovery. The final scene in which Dourif and Loria walk off together in the virtual world also resembles the near-concluding scene involving the virtual Liam and Paris in Virtual Seduction. Menno’s receipt of some information from the Dourif upload actualizes what McCandless hopes to achieve when he tries to upload into Alex in Freejack (1992).

Millennium Source: Based on John Varley’s short story “Air Raid,” 1977 Writer: John Varley Director: Michael Anderson Date: 1989 Length: 108 min. Type: Technology Cyborg Android: Security and security gone wrong About one thousand years from now, the world is in terrible shape. The environment is polluted, there is little left of the earth’s natural resources, and the best of what there is goes to a few time-traveling stewardesses. The council of elders, who are barely human entities confined to their cryopod life-support systems, came up with the plan to steal the bodies of those about to die in the past, replace them with duplicates, and keep the living in holding rooms in preparation for rebuilding a better future. The missions are directed by the wheelchair-bound Coventry (Brent Carver), and stewardess Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd) is aided in her education for each time period and specific missions, as well as her health and required smoking habits, by her personal robot Sherman. In this future, it is possible to look in on the past, providing it is a past that has not previously been visited, and everyone is worried about changing the past and thereby causing a paradox that will destroy everything. Louise goes on a mission to 1989 where a “stunner” is lost and then recovered from the wreckage of a double plane crash by investigator Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson). By the time Louise gets there, Bill has stunned himself and, although he lies unable to move on the floor, he is aware of her arrival and departure. Louise fails to retrieve the whole gadget because Bill had started dismantling it. She then goes on a new mission with two other stewardesses to 1963 where a second stunner is lost. Bill, who was still a child at the time, is the sole survivor of that crash and the stunner ends up in the hands of Dr. Mayer (Daniel

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J. Travanti), who by 1989 has a theory about time travelers from the future. Fearing a paradox, the council sends Louise back to 1989 where she has an interesting rendezvous with Bill, but fails to correct the problem. The council sends her back again, this time to Bill and Dr. Mayer, who have got together and are discussing the implications of time travel. Dr. Mayer does not want to give up his precious gadget and puts Bill’s piece together with it, thus stunning and killing himself. This event creates a catastrophic paradox because he was not supposed to die for another six years. Louise takes Bill with her to the future, where the council orders all the salvaged humans to the gate to be sent to an unknown future to begin rebuilding. Sherman tells Louise she is pregnant and insists she go into the future with Bill, even though no one from the polluted time frame is supposed to go anywhere. Thus, as Sherman says, “ends the beginning.” * * * Millennium begins with the mystery of a plane crash, but soon turns to the disastrous outcome of contemporary environmental practices. The future looks extremely grim: everyone is dying prematurely, there is not enough food, and the entire planet is polluted so far beyond repair that the time travelers have to keep smoking during their excursions into the past in order to survive the “primal” air. The world is equally dark and hopeless in Hardware (1990), Nemesis (1992), Dream Breaker (1995), and, of course 12 Monkeys (1995), and others; but only 12 Monkeys also poses the idea of dedicating almost all available resources to traveling to the past in an effort to improve the future. Alternative plans to save the world from extinction due to pollution and the depletion of natural resources include Dream Breaker’s unsuccessful actualization of the virtual. The historical reconstruction that is so important to the success of the Millennium project is also part of the virtual reality of The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and Abel Edward’s work in Able Edwards (2004). The extraction of individuals from a doomed existence for the purpose of rebuilding the future is conducted somewhat differently, but is comparable to the recruitment of human soldiers in The Matrix (1999). The Matrix council of elders is a healthier looking group than that in Millennium, but they too govern for what they hope is a better future they may not live to enjoy.

Mimic Source: Based on Donald A. Wollheim’s short story “Mimic,” 1942 Writers: Matthew Robbins and Guillermo Del Toro Series: Mimic II, 2001 (Sequel) Mimic 3: Sentinel, 2003 (Sequel) (not included) Director: Guillermo Del Toro Date: 1997 Length: 105 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Strickland’s, a disease spread by cockroaches, is killing off all of New York City’s children. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam), deputy director of the Center for Disease Control, begs etymologist Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) for help: she stops the disease by creating the cockroach-killing Judas Breed, specially engineered to be sterile and die out in 120–180 days. Three years later, Chuy (Alexander Goodwin), a special boy who works with subway shoe shiner Manny (Giancarlo Giannini) and lives with him in a small apartment across from a church, watches as “Mr. Funny Shoes” drags the body of a priest, who apparently jumped from the roof, into the basement. Chuy starts making models of the strange abductor and imitating his sound with his spoons. The next day, Josh (Josh Brolin) calls Peter to the crime scene: three-dozen people are trapped in the basement

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of the church and excrement that contains buttons hangs from the ceiling of a nearby room. Meanwhile, two boys cashing in on Susan’s interest in bugs have brought her an extremely large baby one with Judas Breed DNA. The baby’s parent watches the apartment, comes in through the window, and steals it back before Susan is quite aware of what has happened. Susan and Peter, who are trying to have their own baby, collaborate on the investigation. Peter and Josh get a warrant and the cooperation of Leonard (Charles S. Dutton), a local subway policeman, in a search of the abandoned areas below the active subway. Unfortunately, Peter and Lenny get trapped on a lower level; so they send Josh for help, but Josh meets his end soon after he finds a whole closet full of eggs. While she waits impatiently for Peter in the subway station, Susan flips through the polaroids her friend took of a strange corpse found in the sewers and realizes that the appendages can fold together to imitate a human face; she is almost immediately abducted by one of the mutated, human-sized, flying Judas Breed bugs. Manny, who has entered the lower levels to look for Chuy, finds Susan trapped and brings Peter and Leonard to rescue her. They all end up inside an abandoned subway car using bug guts to disguise their smell. They get the car started, but it stalls. Manny dies saving Chuy, and Leonard dies playing decoy so that Susan, Peter, and Chuy can get to a service elevator. Peter sends the others up, then he plays decoy, and finally succeeds in starting a fire that will destroy the problem – he escapes the flames by diving into the water. Peter, Susan, and Chuy reunite in the aftermath of the havoc created on the street level by the blasts erupting from the sewers and subways. * * * In Mimic, the bioengineered solution to a problem becomes a potentially bigger problem. The film has numerous similarities to Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), including the motifs of the monstrous mother, the hunters becoming the hunted in a dark and complex labyrinth, the use of a map and the restoration of defunct or disabled machinery in defense and escape strategizing, and of course, the lost child and the elevator. Mimic adds some elements to the more common tech-noir photograph­–doll–mannequin–android–clone representational spectrum in its emphasis on sound and smell mimicry as factors in perception and survival. The clicking speech of these creatures is oddly benign, perhaps because of Chuy’s imitations, and perhaps because it seems so soft and quiet by comparison to the frequent harsh outbursts of human cursing. Chuy uses bits of wire and junk to make small models of “Mr. Funny Shoes” that provide the clue Manny needs to know where to look for him; Susan sees one of these models, but it is the photographs that inspire her understanding. The Fly (1986, 1989) and Cyborg Cop 3 (1995) include human-insects; but the mutated Judas Breed, unlike these hybrids, warrants a brief comparison with vampires: although the Judas bugs seem to lack the intelligence commonly attributed to vampires, they survive and even thrive in the dark and, while not specifically bloodthirsty, they do eat people. See Knights (1993) for the vampire-cyborg as predator of humans theme.

Mimic 2 (Sequel) Source: Based on Donald A. Wollheim’s short story “Mimic,” 1942 Writer: Joel Soisson Series: See Mimic, 1997 Director: Jean de Segonzac Date: 2001 Length: 82 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Bioengineering: Diseases and cures

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Lincoln Trahm (Bill Cho Lee) runs through the subway and along stormy night streets with heavy suitcases: a bug attacks, kills, and leaves him without his face. Detective Klaski (Bruno Campos) soon arrives at Remi’s (Alix Koromzay) door – Remi is a schoolteacher and author of The Secret Life of Bugs who despised Lincoln as a black marketeer responsible for the extinction of numerous species. The next victims are two of Remi’s unwanted male admirers. Klaski searches Remi’s apartment while she is not there and finds her collection of polaroids recording her worst moments. More professional bug killers from the Department of Defense arrive, and Klaski watches as they discover the secretions in the hallway outside Remi’s apartment and on the outside wall of her building. Meanwhile, Morrie (Jon Polito), the lecherous principal at Remi’s school, has told the parents she is involved in a murder case, so she is forced to quit, at least temporarily. She is finishing up in the classroom when Sal (Gaven E. Lucas), one of her favorite pupils, arrives, purportedly waiting for his aunt to pick him up; Sal has already been off playing in an area that seems to be occupied by big bugs. Remi decides to escort Sal home herself, but the hall is blocked by a stack of desks. Morrie offers to get her out, but the bug gets him, just as it has already nailed the janitor when he was on the way back from a pizza dinner. Remi and Sal flee and run into Nicky (Will Estes), a former pupil who regularly hides out from his father in one of the unused schoolrooms. They also find one of Lincoln’s suitcases – bugs soon emerge from it. They try to get out using Remi’s polaroid flash to clear the way ahead; Klaski arrives just in time to shoot one that is offering the cornered Remi the janitor’s last slice of pizza. The four hide in an office and Remi calls disease control. The bug, now in the wall, is clearly tracking Remi; so Klaski leaves with Sal, and Remi and Nicky follow after they tack Remi’s clothes up so the bug will think she is still there. The place is about to be fumigated with a substance lethal to humans, so Klaski goes back to get Remi just after she has been stabbed/ impregnated by the bug. Nicky flees, but Klaski carries Remi out. Remi wakes in the hospital to learn that the fast-growing little critters cleaned her up before the doctor cleaned them out: they probably saved her life. Remi takes Sal as a foster child, but they arrive home to find another one of the suitcases, empty, on her bed. The bugs are everywhere and her phone has been cut off. A bug wearing Klaski’s face arrives; Remi kills him with her scissors, but the final outcome remains uncertain. * * * Remi played a minor character as Susan’s friend in Mimic (1997), a role referenced in Mimic 2 when Remi almost bumps into a giant bug with her bike in an alley, apologizes, and then goes on her way, just as she does in the first film. Remi lives in a dilapidated version of Susan’s lab, although her windows open and close like shutters, where Susan’s had to be pushed up and down. Her place, like the lab, is full of bug specimens, as well as a live iguana not featured in the first film, but a very practical pet, considering the circumstances, and also the choice of Sarah Connor in the Terminator (1984). Remi also carries on her practice, established in the first film, of taking polaroids of herself when she is unhappy: in Mimic 2, the camera’s flash proves useful in warding off the light-sensitive bugs. The similarities to the Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992) evident in the earlier Mimic are equally obvious in this sequel; new elements include the further dramatization of the breeding theme and the bug’s ability to imitate specific people in a manner reminiscent of the creature in the scifi film The Blob (1958), and tech-noir Project Shadowchaser III (1995) and Screamers (1995). The shift to the public school setting is an adaptation from such classic on-campus horror films as Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978); see also Mangler 2 (2002). Mimic 3: Sentinel (2003) is a low-budget horror film starring Lance Henriksen and modeled after Rear Window (1954): the story is about an apartment-bound young man who discovers the Judas Breed is alive and thriving.

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Minority Report Source: Loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s short story of the same title, 1956 Writers: John Cohen and Scott Frank Director: Steven Spielberg Date: 2002 Length: 146 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Surveillance: Security systems Bioengineering: Transplant In 2054, the Washington DC pre-crime program has been operating for six years with three “precogs”: Agatha (Samantha Morton) and the twins, Arthur (Michael Dickman) and Dashiel (Matthew Dickman). These three were born to women using a new street drug with unknown side-effects. Now young adults, they live submerged, drugged, and wired in a tank. When they foresee a murder, the names of the victim and murderer are burned onto balls that roll down to the officers. The would-be murderers are then “haloed” and put into cryostasis. Unfortunately, in the early years of the program Anne Lively (Jessica Harper), Agatha’s mother, quit using drugs and wanted her daughter back. Program director Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow) hired someone to kill her and, immediately after the crime was stopped by the pre-crime unit, he killed her himself. The precogs also saw this second event, but the technicians discarded the related images as an “echo.” Now the project is an election issue and under scrutiny by Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) from the Attorney General’s office. Danny uncovers unit chief John Anderton’s (Tom Cruise) drug habit and his obsession with his missing son and, when John himself is identified as a future killer, he sets out to bring him in. John flees; his first stop is Dr. Hineman (Lois Smith), inventor of the precog unit, who tells him about the “minority reports,” or images from one precog that disagree with the others. He gets new eyes to avoid the retina scanners used for everything from security to advertising and just barely avoids capture by the spider-bots sent to search his apartment hideout. He kidnaps Agatha, only to find there is no minority report on his case. He does find that the man he is supposed to murder is posing as his son’s abductor and tries to arrest him; but this man has been voluntarily set up: if John kills him his family will get a lot of money. In the ensuing struggle, John’s gun goes off and the man dies. John then follows up on the minority report on Anne Lively, and both John and Danny figure out what Lamar did, as well as how and why. Danny dies for his trouble, but John confides all to his ex-wife Lara (Kathryn Morris) just before he is finally caught and haloed. Lara later forces the cryo-prison guard to release John; John confronts Lamar at a public gathering where he broadcasts Agatha’s “echo” images. Lamar commits suicide, the precogs get to live in the present, and John and Lara decide to have another baby. * * * The names Agatha (Christie), Arthur (Conan Doyle), and Dashiell (Hammett) effectively link the precog’s work to that of the detective, and more specifically, the detective-fiction writer. These individuals are the unique by-products of a dangerous street drug, rather than the beginning of a new evolutionary stage for the human race in general, which means more drug experiments are needed if the program is to be extended to other regions. The potential futures, confusion about the past, and uncertainty about what to do in the present provide the basis for labyrinthine plot developments equivalent to such virtual reality films as Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), as well as Paycheck (2003), another film about seeing the future. Like these films also, Minority Report evokes the Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003) mantra, “no fate but what we make.” Cryo-imprisonment appears in Project Shadowchaser (1992), Demolition Man (1993), and Hologram Man (1995), although these earlier films do not dispense with the crime itself as Minority Report does. In Cybercity 364

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(1999), a man whose grief at the loss of his child and partner leads to an addiction to virtual reality recordings of them that is comparable to John’s. The spider motif, also featured in Hardware (1990), Cyborg 2 (1993), Solo (1996), and other films, is reinvented here in the mechanical devices used to search and perform retina scans of everyone in the apartment where John is recovering from his eye surgery. The spider-like scanners are an extension of the real-world implementation of less anthropomorphized, but similarly functional devices. See Nirvana (1997) for a man who sells his eyes and has to make do with technological replacements.

Mission: Impossible II (Sequel) Source: Inspired by the television series Mission Impossible, 1966–73 Series: Mission Impossible, 1996 (not included) Writers: Brannon Braga, Bruce Geller, Ronald D. Moore, and Robert Towne Director: John Woo Date: 2000 Length: 123 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Cyborg A Russian scientist, Dr. Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija), creates a dangerous virus that he calls Chimera; anyone infected who does not receive the antidote Bellerophon within twenty hours dies a painful death. Nekhorvich calls for “Dmitri” to escort him, but Dmitri, aka agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), is off rock climbing, so Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) steps in. He poses as Ethan using a mask and voice-altering device, takes Nekhorvich on a plane, steals his satchel, and then he and his team jump out over the Rockies, leaving the plane to crash. At this point, he discovers he only has the antidote: Nekhorvich injected himself with Chimera as that was the only way he could get it through security. Sean wants to make a deal with McLoy (Brendan Gleeson), head of a pharmaceutical company: this deal involves releasing the toxin into the general population and then selling the antidote. The Impossible Missions Force (IMF) Commander (Anthony Hopkins), who is not quite sure what is going on, assigns Ethan to the case; they also recruit Sean’s ex-girlfriend Nyah (Thandie Newton), inject her with a tracker, and set her up to return to Sean as their spy. She surreptitiously borrows a digital camera memory stick from Sean at a horse race from which the IMF team realizes, for the first time, just what the stakes are. Ethan makes a dramatic entry into the facility where the only samples of the virus are stored; destroys those in the incubation tank; destroys two of the three vials already placed in injectors; and also, at this point, realizes (in a brief imaginative realization posed as a flashback) that Nekhorvich had injected himself as the only means of transporting the virus across the border. Before he can destroy the third and last vial, Sean and his team enter with Nyah. In a stand off following a shoot-out, Sean sends Nyah to get the abandoned injector for him, but she injects herself. Ethan exits the building with a parachute and tracks Sean to his meet with McCloy, while the rest of his team locates Nyah. Nyah is now the designated typhoid Mary, but she prepares to kill herself before she becomes contagious. Ethan sets up Hugh, Sean’s right-hand man, as himself using the mask and voice trick and Sean shoots him. Sean and Ethan engage in a prolonged fight. Ethan gets the antidote and injects Nyah in the nick of time. The film closes with a kiss and a walk away through a park. * * * This is another “Bond” style film and, as in Golden Eye (1995), the secret agent ambiance takes precedence over the tech-noir, albeit with less style and gloss and a much weaker storyline. It does feature a bioengineered virus that is to be used, not as a weapon of war, but as a means to criminal and pharmaceutical company

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profiteering. This same motivation informs Absolon (2003), although in that film the initial virus seems to have been “natural” and it is only the subsequent “cure” that serves the profit-motivated interests of the pharmaceutical company. The artificially engineered toxin that devastates the population in the earlier 12 Monkeys (1995) seems to have been released for purely malevolent purposes, while that in New Crime City (1994) was designed for originally designed for blackmail. The impersonation sequences involving masks include the initial appearance of Sean as Dmitri, who is really Ethan, for Nekhorvich’s benefit; Sean’s gratuitous appearance as Ethan for Nyah’s benefit; the appearance of Hugh as Ethan to serve Ethan’s purposes; and Ethan’s appearance as Hugh so that he can watch Sean shoot Hugh. The masks themselves appear when needed and look much like those used in the scifi film Darkman (1990), although they seem to be much more durable. No attention is given to their method of manufacture or to enhancing their plausibility. Nyah, who is not trained as a secret agent, goes to work without any such backup tools: the IMF commander feels she is well equipped for the job simply because she is a woman and is only being asked to lie. Although Ethan quickly becomes attached to her, she is injected with an undetectable tracker so they can keep tabs on her, just in case.

Morella (aka The Cloning of Morella) Source: Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories; see particularly the story of the same title, 1850 Writer Ana Clavell Director: James Glenn Dudelson Date: 1997 Length: 90 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Dr. Patricia Morella (Angela Jones) has advanced multiple sclerosis and she is working desperately in her lab, not just on the company’s official work on infertility problems, but, in the spirit of the mythological first woman Lilith, on an entirely female clone of herself without her disease. The male doctors in the lab, both Dr. Paul Rivera (Robert Lipton) and Dr. Edgar Lynden (Nicholas Guest), think she is working with embryos of the traditional kind that are simply created in a test tube. Rivera is the first to realize what she is really doing. Morella, finding her experiments have failed, terminates all of the remaining embryos and then commits suicide – Dr. Rivera is the one to find her body as she had drugged Edgar to keep him out of the way. Edgar had suspected she might destroy the embryos and hid one of them, which he believes to be their child, and later implants it in his wife Jenny. Years later, the child Sarah looks exactly like Morella, and Jenny is thoroughly alienated from her husband and the child she thinks is her own: Sarah ends her confusion by pushing her down the stairs. Edgar marries his lab assistant Andrea, who seems to care for Sarah and does not understand why Edgar sends her away to school and refuses to see her. Sarah then smothers Andrea’s baby. The doctor determines it was crib death, but the subsequent drowning of Andrea, who was an excellent swimmer, in Sarah’s company is even more suspicious. Sarah graduates and comes to work at the lab as Edgar’s assistant and also moves back into her childhood home where she soon convinces Edgar she is Morella’s clone and moves into his bed as well. It seems that Edgar then becomes so overwhelmed by guilt that he burns the lab with Sarah in it; Rivera, however, is there to pull him from the fire. Inspector Farrow (Khrystyne Haje) calls in Dr. Dupin (David Kirkwood) for assistance in unraveling the clues left in Edgar’s diaries and they also question Rivera, but before they get to Edgar, he apparently commits suicide or is murdered with Morella’s ancient metal dildo, a dangerous trinket treasured by both the original Morella and her clone. * * *

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This adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s style to tech-noir incorporates voice-overs from Edgar, flashbacks and memory sequences, diary entries, and atmospheric effects, as well as the unusual prop motif of an antique dildo. It begins near the end with Edgar in the hospital after his rescue from the fire he claims to have set, even though a guard identifies Rivera as having been at the scene. A sepia sequence of Morella finding the dildo as a child is repeated several times; the dildo also reappears in a memory sequence in which the child Morella puts out her father’s eye; and again in the final black-and-white sequence in which Edgar is visited by Sarah, or an apparition, who says she has to complete the cycle, and leaves him with the dildo through his heart. Edgar’s dead body appears to the sound of the applause concluding an opera about Lilith attended by Dupin and the Inspector. Dupin is the name of the inspector in three Poe tales; this reference and that to the mythical Lilith in relation to cloning are more or less unique. The only other tech-noir film that comes close to the Lilith idea is Conceiving Ada (1997), although The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973) takes a satiric aim at a “unisex” being. The scientist father raising a “daughter” who is not really his daughter appears in Embryo (1976). The 6th Day (2000) features a scientist who has cloned his wife, but cannot eradicate her cystic fibrosis as part of the process. The film is divided by archetypal subtitles derived in part from Tarot cards: The Lovers, The Innocent, The Devil, The Fool, The Enchantress, and Hell. November (2004) also has archetypal “chapter” divisions, but in Morella, most identify major characters, particularly Morella at different stages of her development, and all mark her effect on Edgar’s life. The inspector insists throughout that Sarah is the victim in all of these events, but everything in the story suggests otherwise. Like Replicant (2001), Morella assumes that clones possess the memories of their original.

Natural City Writer: Byung-Cheon Min Director: Byung-Cheon Min Date: 2003 Country: South Korea Length: 113 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Android: Stalkers and assassins Virtual reality: Mind transplant R (Ji Tae Yoo) is in love with a dancer android named Ria (Rin Seo) and in his desperation to have her live past her expiration date of three years, he is stealing android chips and selling them on the black market so that he can pay Dr. Giro (Eun Pyo Jeong) to prolong her life. Dr. Giro has discovered that neural transfers can be made between humans and androids if certain strands of human DNA and the android’s artificial intelligence chip match, but he is far more interested in helping himself than Ria. He has a combat android named Cyper (Doo Hong Jeong) break into the facility where human DNA records are stored so he can find someone with DNA that matches both his own DNA and the coinciding android artificial intelligence chips in Cyper: that person turns out to be Cyon (Jae Un Lee). He tells R that he needs Cyon’s body to save Ria, but he really needs her to save himself. Cyon’s father has recently died, leaving her to fulfill his wish to be buried with the chip from the android he loved. Cyon is now trying to make her living on the streets using fortune-telling sticks as her opening gambit with potential customers, but she has enough optimism to plant a garden on the roof of a dilapidated building near a statue of a goddess that somehow survived the wars that left everything else in the area in ruins. The self-interested Giro transfers his neural consciousness into Cyper, commandeers both Cyon’s body and the facility where the DNA records are stored, and prepares to transfer

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into Cyon. R’s boss and friend Noma (Chan Yoon) figures out what is going on with a little help from Ami (Joo Hee Ko), his computer information expert. He manages to authorize the auto-destruct sequence in the facility, thus preventing Giro-Cyper from completing his download into Cyon. Meanwhile, R has left Ria in the airport waiting for the ship that will take them to Koya, planet of rebirth; R helps his friend finish off Cypher and gets Cyon to safety. Ria, who knows her expiration time is approaching and realizes that R is not coming back before then, commits suicide by pulling out her own chip. * * * This film picks up the Blade Runner (1982) premise of artificial beings suffering from premature expiration dates, adds a post-apocalypse ghetto, some extra simulations, and Alien-style “bug” hunts for renegade cyborgs that really seem to be androids. Ria, however, lacks pathos, such that the final scenes in which she suddenly appears to be very attached to her memories of being with R are somewhat inexplicable. The planet of rebirth is original, although the ships flying over the ghettos on the way to it are reminiscent of those that come to the garbage planet in Soldier (1998) where colonists who once set out for a much more habitable new home crashed. This film restores villainy to the “mad” scientist, such that he is the one looking for a body that will ensure his longevity. In Freejack (1992) and Killer Deal (1999), similar science is merely used by corporate heads for their own purposes. Giro, like Jekyll, is most interested in how his science can serve him personally. The criminal who uses mind-transfer technology to serve illegitimate ends is also found in Xchange (2000) and other films of the virtual reality mind transplant type. R, however, is comparable to John in John Q (2002) who is so desperate to save his loved one that he will do just about anything to get the “organs” he needs. Cyon is shown facing the virtual reality, as well as the android, competition on the streets: evidently, she also had to compete for her own father’s affection after he fell in love with an android. Both Cyon’s personality and her fate as a marketable body, no longer worth anything except as a receptacle for a male mind, make her by far the most original character in the film. She is also the only one who seems to have a clear interest in natural life, insofar as she plants a garden and has at least one human friend who is, of course, killed when Giro’s thugs come to get her.

Nemesis Writer: Rebecca Charles Series: Nemesis 2: Nebula, 1995 (Sequel) Nemesis 3: Time Lapse, 1996 (Sequel) Nemesis 4: Cry of Angels, 1996 (Sequel) Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1992 Length: 95 min. Type: Cyborg Android: Love and lovers Virtual reality: Mind transplant In 2027 Los Angeles, the female android Jared (Marjorie Monaghan) tells the story of her former colleague, “hard-boiled” police officer Alex Rain (Olivier Gruner), who was also her lover until he realized she was a synthetic. The 86 percent human Alex is sent to recover a stolen chip and is badly injured by an attacker who informs him that she is working to protect humans. He manages to both save a puppy and blast her; but it takes six months for him to recover from the encounter and then he goes to recuperate in a dilapidated

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village in Baja, New America, with his dog. There the female terrorist comes for him again, but he gets her first. His next visitor is Jared, who comes from police commissioner Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson) to try to get him to come back to work, but he refuses. Jared’s partner kills his dog. A year later, Alex is a drug addict working on the black market and is targeted by Farnsworth who wants him for a different job. This time, Farnsworth and his thugs visit the reconstructed and incarcerated Alex in the ruins of an old jail: they have put a bomb in his heart as leverage – he is to find Jared in Shang Loo or else. He knows they will probably detonate the bomb when Jared gets near him. He is aided by Jared’s partner, the cyborg Julian (Deborah Shelton), who disables the surveillance eye implant he did not know he had and injects him with a scrambler that will temporarily keep the bomb from being activated; she also tells him that Jared’s body was irreparably damaged and hands him the downloaded Jared to talk to. Jared defected from the LAPD because Farnsworth was replaced by a state of the art cyborg-clone. She and the real Farnsworth chose Alex as their leader in the fight against the plot to replace all humans with cyborgs and now Alex must deliver her data to the purported terrorists, the Red Army Hammerheads, who are fighting for the survival of the human race. Julian dies holding off the cyborg Farnsworth and his thugs while Alex escapes; fortunately, Angie-Liv (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the leader of the Hammerheads, sends Max (Merle Kennedy) to help him. Alex and Max stay ahead of Farnsworth and company and get to the scheduled drop where an airplane is waiting. Farnsworth, reduced to a robotic skeleton by the gunfire and explosives, grabs the plane and almost takes Alex down with him, but falls with only Alex’s arm for his trouble. Jared tells Alex there is a last message from the real Farnsworth at his old drop and then dies when she is uploaded into the mainframe. Alex takes Max with him when he retrieves the message, which simply verifies what Jared told him. * * * Like Cyborg 2 (1993), this film has many conventional “noir” characteristics: the visual style, melancholic ambiance, and a “hard-boiled” Alex and tragic Jared; both Alex and Jared are prone to philosophical musing. The human and machine boundary is ambiguous: the cyborgs and cyborg-clones seem to be androids, rather than human-machine hybrids. Alex really is a cyborg who thinks of himself as human, but ponders the implications of his growing percentage of implants in relation to his humanity: as Jared points out to him, it takes more than flesh and blood to make a human. The female android with an irreparable chassis reworks the Cherry 2000 (1987) premise; indeed, viewers may wonder why Jared cannot be given a new body. See Pyun’s Heatseeker (1995) for more on percentage quantifications in the human-cyborg equation. In many respects, Nemesis is a violent combination of earlier Terminator (1984, 1991) and Blade Runner (1982) elements with atmospherically appropriate voice-overs, unusually well chosen sets, and effective camera work, including filters. It also includes a great deal of superfluous violence, bad language, and nudity. The final battle between man and unfleshed android hanging off the cargo end of an airplane comes across as a satiric nod to The Terminator and a source for a similar moment in Project Shadowchaser III (1995).

Nemesis 2: Nebula (Sequel) Writer: Rebecca Charles and Albert Pyun Series: See Nemesis, 1993 Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1995 Length: 83 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins Bioengineering: Transformation

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 rologue Voice-Over: Alex Rain tried to stop the cyborgs. He failed. The war between the humans and P the cyborgs began seventy-three years ago back in the year 2027. Ten years later, the war was won by the cyborgs. They controlled the earth. Humans became their slaves. A resistance scientist created a super DNA gene that would produce a human with extraordinary powers. A woman, Zana, was chosen to give birth to this mutant human. The “cyborgs” target a baby named Alex, but her mother steals a time ship from the cyborgs and flees with her back one hundred years to 1980 Africa. Rebel mercenaries kill Zana, but a local African tribe adopts Alex, whom Zana named after her ancestor and leaves with her own special necklace. Twenty years later, Alex (Sue Price) wakes suddenly as what appears to be a comet passes. It is her initiation day and for the occasion she is challenged by the tribesmen to kill a wild boar in a specified amount of time, which she does; then she has to fight and defeat a man who takes issue with her acceptance into the tribe. Alex is then shown the time ship in which she arrived: from it she recovers a knife with an automatic targeting mechanism that can pierce stone and, as she soon learns, metal. She is also told the story of her arrival and about how she never really had to be taught anything. At the same time, the cyborgs have finally located her – the comet was the time ship of the machine “Nebula” (Chad Stahelski) sent to retrieve her. The region has also become politically unstable and an American soldier comes to warn the local shaman that everyone must evacuate; and indeed, mercenaries are moving in to take advantage of whatever opportunities they can find. By the time Alex and her companion return to the village, it has been burned to the ground and they have to flee from the Nebula. Her companion soon falls, but Alex finds another ally, the rather duplicitous Emily (Tina Coté), who has been captured with a woman she pretends is her sister, but is not. After Alex takes out their captors, Emily promises to take Alex away in her plane. Their path to the plane lies through an old mining complex. Both mercenaries and the Nebula continue to make trouble for them, the sister is shot, and in the end Emily takes off without Alex only to crash a few minutes later due to a gas leak. Meanwhile, Alex finishes off the Nebula with her knife, and catches a ride with some American soldiers in a jeep. * * * The time-looped fate versus destiny theme evident in this Nemesis sequel also marks the Terminator films (1984, 1991, 2003), as does the idea that it may be machines that send an agent back in time to destroy someone who might have the ability to destroy them. Alex’s apparent destiny is signaled, not only by her unusual arrival, status as orphan, necklace, and exceptional learning capacity and physique; but also by the comet/time ship, her successful tribal initiation, and her retrieval of the special knife. The time-travel loop is also enhanced by the integration of the life of the first Alex Rain into this Alex’s history. The first film is referenced with various shots interspersed with the credits at the beginning of the second: Alex’s eye being pushed back into place after Julian has deactivated Farnsworth’s surveillance device; the skeletal Farnsworth hanging off the back of Alex’s plane; the head of an assassin opening up to reveal a gun just before the second execution of Alex, intended to make him more available for a job Farnsworth has in mind; and Alex’s twitching cyborg leg after the flesh was blown off during his first violent encounter in the first film. The Nemesis 2 conflict takes place in bright sunlit desert and dry grassland areas scattered with ruins. This environment adds to the film’s discussion about the borderlands of the marginal and marginalized through a variety of oppositions: biological and mechanical, DNA-enhanced human and robot, geographical and cultural, present and future, as well as female and male.

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Nemesis 3: Time Lapse (Sequel) (aka Nemesis 3: Prey Harder) Writer: Rebecca Charles and Albert Pyun Series: See Nemesis, 1993 Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1996 Length: 90 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins Bioengineering: Transformation Alex (Sue Price) slowly wakes up to find herself lying on a large dry patch of cracked desert sand with only a lizard for company and her mind full of confusing and fragmented images of what happened before she got there. She finally gets up and follows her own tracks to a jeep and Farnsworth 2 (Tim Thomerson), the nextgeneration cyborg sent to capture her when the Nebula failed. He dissembles both by lying to her about who he is and by making himself appear human, which he is not. He injects her with a drug that seems designed to help him make the full-body scans he has been ordered to get so that his superiors can figure out how to defeat her superior DNA. Alex’s increasingly intense flashbacks include images of her sister Raimie (Ursula Sarcev), whom she was supposed to meet twenty-four hours after they separated so as to catch the next launch window for time travel, and Raimie telling her about her twenty other sisters and how imperative it is that they procreate and that she must never let Farnsworth 2 complete a full scan of her. As the flashbacks reveal, Farnsworth 2 took Raimie captive and he has reinforcements, notably the platinum blondes Lock (Sharon Bruneau) and Ditko (Debbie Muggli) who are to help capture Alex for scans: they all want the job done in time to catch the launch window back to the future. Suddenly, Alex’s memories come back in a rush and she remembers confrontations with both cyborgs and the mercenaries in the area and her brief friendship with the freedom fighter Johnny (Xavier Declie), made a bit simple-minded by a wound to the head. Finally she remembers assaulting the cyborg base near the mining complex and freeing Raimie, the human doctor assigned to help her, and Johnny, who had been taken hostage. Unfortunately, Farnsworth 2 managed to send a smart bomb after their jeep. Alex, now in possession of all her memories, recognizes Farnsworth for what he is and finishes him off. She still does not remember what happened to Raimie, Johnny, and the others. * * * This film, like Nemesis 2, proposes that cyborgs – or perhaps they are cyborg-clones – that, in any case, really seem to be androids, seek the destruction of the human race and believe Alex threatens the accomplishment of that goal. The settings of Nemesis 3 are more or less identical to Nemesis 2, but the flashbacks, which are even more prolonged than those in the earlier film, are interspersed with visual and voice references to events that did not occur in the previous films in the series. These additions include those involving Alex’s sister and the fate met by the soldiers who rescued her at the end of Nemesis 2 at the hands of mercenaries. Nemesis 3 also adds voice-overs by the amnesia suffering Alex and more scifi special effects. In Nemesis 2, these were limited to some exaggerated electrical currents and the odd spatial shifting effect around the Nebula; here, there are more, including the cyborgs glowing green eyes, scanning rays, and the strange bottle-bottom effect marking the movements of the cyborgs’ jeeps, as well as the glowing stones in Alex’s necklace and those of her sisters. The constant bickering and power jostling between the cyborgs makes them seem more like voyeuristic humanoid aliens than machines as they attempt to bring Alex in for the full body scan that will give them the secret of her superior DNA. “Scanning” is an extremely common tech-noir substitute or supplement for the “gaze,” but Nemesis 3 is by far the most effective parody of this substitution. The overall structure of this film is similar to that of Megaville (1990), which also opens with the main character, Jensen/Palinov, lying in a state of collapse in the desert. His father approaches him at the beginning of the film; then the action cuts to a flashback that also includes various flashbacks and memory sequences 371

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and, of course, the personality implant; and finally ends at the end of the film with the father shooting his son. Here, Alex wakes in the desert, gradually figures out what happened more or less on her own, including the role of her previously unmentioned sisters, and then kills the cyborg sent to scan and capture her.

Nemesis 4: Cry of Angels (Sequel) (aka Nemesis 4: Death Angel) Writer: Albert Pyun Series: See Nemesis, 1993 Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1996 Length: 93 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins Bioengineering: Transformation Cyborg In 2080, the “cyborg” war against humans is over and Alex (Sue Price) is now not only a DNA “mutant,” she also has a few cyborg implants and is one of many former soldiers who work as mercenary killers for the new international crime syndicates. Her boss Bernardo (Andrew Divoff) talks a lot about how she should retire after this last job and then sets her up by sending her to kill the only son of a major syndicate boss “by mistake.” Her lover, the fully cyborg Earl Typhoon (Nicholas Guest), is waiting to pick her up after the kill; they have sex and then he tries to kill her to collect the bounty on her head for killing the wrong person. Alex gets Earl instead; then, not yet realizing what is happening and a little distracted by the woman in black (Blanka Copikova) who keeps reappearing as the angel of death, she calls Bernardo. Soon, she has to knock out a helicopter and another assassin that, as she then realizes, have been sent by Bernardo to kill her. She finally calls a former human boyfriend Johnny Impact (Simon Poland) and says he should come and kill her so at least someone she knows can have the reward. As they make love one more time, the woman in black appears and Alex realizes she is going to kill them both: Alex quickly grabs a gun and kills her first. Alex and Johnny realize the woman is Bernardo’s partner, the greatly feared “Mother.” Johnny calls in the hit as if he actually shot Alex and takes Mother’s head to Bernardo. Just as Bernardo’s hand is morphing into a gun to kill Johnny, someone shoots Bernardo. As he dies, the shooter – Alex – steps out from behind Johnny; they ask Bernardo to call in the hit and call off the contract on Alex, which he does. * * * Alex’s desperate postwar life and her betrayal, even in this film’s dismal context, by a boss who is not satisfied with the profits to be made by her effectiveness at her job, is certainly as “noir” as tech-noir can get. The settings, like the other Sue Price Nemesis films, are primarily deserted desert ruins. The starkness of the locale is little relieved by the props in the dilapidated shelter where Alex awaits her death: a broken mirror and a weight. The plot is reduced to the most essential elements of tech-noir action: murder by weapons and physical attack, betrayal, sex, and a final act of protectiveness that reaffirms the value of the male–female bond. Alex is mostly nude through much of the film, an approach to costuming that, in spite of her beauty, is intended to be in keeping with her role as a “mutant” killer whom men and cyborgs alike purportedly find hideous. The repeated references to “freaks” calls up Tod Browning’s infamous film Freaks (1932), with its cast of carnival people with real deformities. While these references and judgments are consistent throughout the film, some viewers may wonder at the reversal they make out of the application of the camera’s “gaze” to the even more “unnatural” body of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003) – in those films, of course, the unnatural body is male and it is rationalized as “artificial.”

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This is the most violent and stylized of the Nemesis films and of tech-noir sequels in general, topping even Cyborg 3 (1995), in which a cyborg finds herself pregnant and hiding out with a lot of broken-down cyborgs in a former safe zone. In terms of reductive simplicity in sets, “type” characters, and violence, Nemesis 4 has something in common with Darkdrive (1996), but that film has nothing that even comes close to the startling and effectively horrifying identification of the most feared killer as “mother” and her presentation as a kind of grim reaper. Nemesis 4, unlike Darkdrive, retains its narrative sense throughout. The actual rolling out of the head of a defeated killer appears as a minor motif in Cyberzone (1995). Bernardo’s hand-to-gun morph at the end is a definite nod to Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).

The Net Writers: John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris Series:  The Net 2.0, 2006 (based on a similar concept; characters by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris) (not included) Director: Irwin Winkler Date: 1995 Length: 114 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems Surveillance: Domestic contexts Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) is a computer program trouble-shooter who likes to collect computer viruses and makes her occasional forays into the outside world only to visit her mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. One of her contacts sends her a disk that she later realizes contains an unusual program proving that a terrorist group is behind the development of a new and supposedly foolproof security system which they are marketing to airports and other favorite terrorist targets. The unsuspecting Angela’s departure for a holiday in Mexico is delayed by computer problems; once there, she is picked up by Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northam), a terrorist who wants the disk. She escapes in a motorized raft from what she thought was going to be a romantic interlude on a boat, only to crash on some rocks. She wakes in a hospital to find that the disk has been ruined by the sun. Back at the hotel, she learns that there are now problems with the Wall Street computers, that she supposedly checked out the previous Saturday, and that her bank card is no longer valid; then she is forced to sign a document identifying herself as Ruth Marx just so she can get back into the United States. At the airport, her car is gone; at home she finds her furniture is gone and the house is up for sale; and, even worse, she learns Ruth Marx is a wanted criminal. With a little help from her ex-therapist and lover Alan Champion (Dennis Miller), who ends up dead thanks to a hospital computer “error,” Angela eludes her stalkers, including someone pretending to be one of her internet contacts and a phony FBI agent who knows far too much about the disk she had in Mexico. She breaks into her impersonator’s office and gets another copy of the incriminating files, sends it to the real FBI from a terminal at a computer fair, and uses the same terminal to use one of her viruses to eradicate the program that created her false identity. She reclaims her house and brings her mother home to plant flowers in the garden. * * * Like Golden Eye (1995), Hackers (1995), Netforce (1999), Track Down (2000), Swordfish (2001), and others, this film’s more or less present-day tech-noir plot is driven by justifiable paranoia regarding the potential theft and illegal use of digitized information. Angela draws the attention of terrorists because a third person passes information to her that could compromise their plans. Similarly, in Strange Days (1995), Iris passes on a tape to Lenny that contains proof some policemen committed a murder and she soon dies for her trouble; and in

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Enemy of the State (1998), Zavitz passes a tape to his former friend Dean that shows a political assassination and is then hunted to his death in an apparent traffic accident. Both Lenny and Dean, like Angela, find their lives complicated by the information they have been given. Angela’s information, however, relates directly to large-scale terrorist activities, thus the stakes are closer to those in Netforce and Swordfish. She also leads her assailants on an even longer chase than Zavitz manages through a wide range of settings, including carnival and computer trade fairs, all of which add to the realization that she is being trapped in a labyrinth of both digital and physical dimensions. Angela not only has to deal with identity theft, she also suffers the loss of her friend Alan who dies in a hospital computer mix up that has all the horrific implications of the hospital computer game in Terminal Choice (1985). The woman suffering from Alzheimer’s provides an excellent metaphor for both the loss of cultural memory implied by the possibilities of digital information shuffling and the confusion experienced by victims of identity theft. Alzheimer’s also appears as a motif in both Universal Soldier III (1998) and Lathe of Heaven (2002) that dramatizes the confusion of victims or users of experimental technology.

Netforce (aka Tom Clancy’s Netforce) Source: Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Based on Tom Clancy’s novel of the same title, 1998 (This novel became the first of a series.) Lionel Chetwynd, Tom Clancy, and Steve Pieczenik Robert Lieberman 1999 TV 160 min. Virtual reality: Security, information, and control

This film, set in May of 2005, is really the story of Steven Day (Kris Kristofferson), the Commander of the Netforce unit of the FBI tasked with policing internet and related crimes, who stages his own murder. Prior to this event, Day wrote a protection code for the entire internet and gave it to the president, but he feared that technology was growing faster than the ability to police it, so he came to believe the internet should simply be destroyed. He allied himself with Will Stiles (Judge Reinhold), a friend of the president and head of a major computer company that is currently marketing its new browser Janus, which is already installed on its computer hardware. Stiles mistakenly believes that by helping Day stage his own murder and break-in to the White House – which is where the protection device is located – he will gain unprecedented access to personal information and related business opportunities on the web. Stiles offers to share some of these opportunities with mafia boss Leon Cheng (Cary-Hiroyuk Tagawa) in exchange for his help with the White House caper. Cheng refuses, even though Stiles arranges for an assassin to take care of one of Cheng’s problem associates, so Stiles orders the assassin to go after the new head of Netforce Alex Michaels (Scott Bacula). When that attempt fails, he has employee Uday Shankar (Anjul Nigam), the designer of both Janus and a certain prison security system, break a team out of that prison for the White House job. Michaels gets a little help from Day’s construct, spends some time courting his associate (Joanna Going), solves the case, and stops Day just before he is able to complete his task. * * * This film tells Day’s story as Michaels discovers it. Tech-noir motifs are abundant throughout, starting with the classic opening shot of the dark back alley prior to the Netforce take down (which fails), the cramped space inside a surveillance van, a cybersex room, cyber chat rooms, cyber characters, and so forth. This film also proposes that the mafia, albeit headed up by a Chinese computer expert, is more American and certainly preferable to the new internet capitalists terrorizing the country. The unsubtle references to contemporary

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internet companies, the more or less present-day setting, as well as the film style, all lend Netforce a quality of only slightly fictionalized reality. The prison break-out, orchestrated by a computer security expert, reverses the professional challenges taken up by the former “Robin Hood” in Sneakers (1992), and also adds to the list of tech-noir films that are set or partially set in prisons, including Fortress (1992, 1999). Uday is the tech-whiz who cannot help bragging about his work: like serial killers, it seems the technological genius working outside the parameters of the law seeks a certain kind of fame or at least notoriety for his accomplishments. See Bram for a computer genius who is recognized in this manner by a young teenager in Ghost in the Machine (1993), and Hackers (1995) for more development of the “fan” culture associated with virtuoso tech-related accomplishments. The chat room as bragging ground also appears in Storm Watch (2002). The digital construct of a living person here remains dependant on that living person, as is true of many of the digital characters in Storm Watch and Cyber Wars (2004); but often the construct acquires greater independence, as in Storm Watch, Cyber Wars, Max Headroom (1985), and Virtuosity (1995); or lives on after the real person dies, as in Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Nirvana (1997). The name of the new browser – Janus – serves the same purpose it does in its application to the Demolition Man (1993) project, which produced a good and an evil clone: the browser enables users to look for information, but it also allows the users themselves to be accessed. Although viewers are likely to be caught up in Michaels’s case and efforts to stop the criminal, whom he does not realize is Day for quite some time, they may also be left wondering if Day was right.

Net Games Writer: Andrew Van Slee Director: Andrew Van Slee Date: 2003 Length: 97 min. Type: Surveillance: Domestic contexts Adam Vance (C. Thomas Howell) is a bit desperate for sex as his brunette wife Jennifer (Monique Demers) has not been interested since she was raped a year ago, so his friend Ray (Samuel Ball) gives him the address for a cybersex chat room where he immediately connects with the beautiful blonde Angel (Lala Sloatman). Angel quickly tracks down all of Adam’s personal information and, when he tries to break off the attachment, she begins to stalk him, going so far as to insist he meet her at a house where he finds what he believes to be her body. He calls up Ray and they bury the body, but then it turns out that Angel is not dead and she continues to harass Adam with phone calls, by mailing compromising photographs to him at work and to his wife at home, by hanging his cat, and by killing Ray. Simmonds (Maeve Quinlan), the beautiful blonde detective assigned to the case, likes Adam but puts him under surveillance. After Jennifer takes the advise of her psychologist, also blonde (Joan Van Ark), and goes to confront her jailed rapist, Adam tells her what has happened. Jennifer’s first response is to go spend the night with her blonde girlfriend and is nearly stabbed by a blonde woman en route; by morning she has resolved to help Adam. She goes home and they enter the chat room and set up a meeting with Angel. Unfortunately, the meeting proves to be a decoy and the blonde who meets Jennifer is wearing a wig. Meanwhile the real (?) Angel has Adam handcuffed to the bed in his own house; Jennifer returns just in time to kill her by throwing her, head first, into a computer monitor. * * * Like Twilight Man (1996), this is the story of a victim singled out by a stalker who is something of a computer expert; and, as in that film and Ghost in the Machine (1993), the killer is a serial killer who is far more adept 375

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with computers than her victims are. The Cell (2000) features a male serial killer who seems to be as attached to fetishes and fetishistic behavior as Angel, but he focuses on acting out his sexual desires and fantasies; Angel also enjoys stalking, manipulating, blackmailing, terrorizing, and murdering as activities disassociated from sex. The purported victim of the stalking in Net Games is, however, far less sympathetic than those in these earlier films and also less sympathetic than his wife who must ultimately face and resolve the difficulty her boy-husband has got into. The “fatal attraction” theme plays out here according to the motivations of what may be a single blonde stalker, but might just as easily be multiple blonde or blonde-wigged stalkers. Not surprisingly, the wife wins the battle against the world of cybersex and spontaneous affairs (and blondes). As a character who makes the mistake of burying a body he knows nothing about – an act that hardly seems justifiable with the information made available to viewers, except in terms of pure ego and adolescent foolishness – Adam is roughly equivalent to Hank in Crusader (2004) who keeps getting into more and more trouble for far too long before he figures out he should get help from his more practical and morally welladjusted girlfriend. Why either of these women wants to remain connected with these particular men, except possibly as a matter of maintaining their pride and status as possessors, remains a mystery. Ornamental trophy women with little to their credit besides their gender-based attributes are, however, ubiquitous in all types of contemporary films, so perhaps the idea here is that women are entitled to ornamental trophy men. The easily duped or despicable man who is enthralled by telephone sex-chat, cybersex, or other forms of technological image stimulation also appears in Family Viewing (1987), Wild Palms (1993), Foolproof (2003), and others: in these three films, at least, none of the self-respecting female characters is particularly interested in a relationship with these men. In all cases, the underlying message is that “natural” men prefer “natural” women and “natural” sex. In THX 1138 (1971), technological sexual stimulation is the social norm.

Network Writer: Sidney Aaron (Paddy) Chayefsky Director: Sidney Lumet Date: 1976 Length: 121 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is the news anchorman at a third-rate television network. After he is fired for low ratings, he announces that he is going to shoot himself on national television in one week. The ratings sky rocket and Beale finds himself supported by up and coming Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), who is also busy having an affair with the married, middle-aged television manager Max Schumacher (William Holden) whose job she steals. Beale is given his own editorial spot from which he can broadcast his “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” message; but when he turns his attention to the pending takeover of the network by an Arab company, he calls on his audience to stop it and they do. The network’s current corporate owner Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) is very displeased and personally sees to Beale’s indoctrination into the new post-human, post-national economic reality. Beale is susceptible to Jensen’s manipulation because of his emotional instability and because he is completely isolated after Schumacher, his long-term buddy and associate, is fired, so he becomes a true convert and passes on Jensen’s message to his viewers:  It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished, every single one of you out there, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals, it’s a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter than white, steel belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, as replaceable as piston rods.

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world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world, not just us, we’re just the most advanced country so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s people are becoming massproduced, programmed, numbered … Needless to say, the audiences are no longer thrilled and Beale’s ratings plummet, as do the station’s ratings, but Jensen refuses to take Beale off the air as he feels his message is important regardless of the ratings, profits, or losses. The program managers, however, depend on ratings for profits, so they solve the Jensen–Beale problem by having Beale assassinated on television by members of a terrorist faction Christensen has been using as the basis for a weekly series. * * * Howard Beale is a uniquely tragic and personalized victim of social and economic forces that are beyond his ability to understand or control. Jensen’s calculated and messianic handling of Beale’s conversion to corporate philosophy is comparable to the quiet little scene in which a corporate head tries to explain a similar set of realities to Jonathan, the hero of Rollerball (1975), but the results are very different. Whereas Jonathan refuses to take the bait and becomes a threat to the future of the status quo, Beale’s usefulness to Jensen as his on-air mouthpiece exceeds the profits he may or may not generate directly. The “real” message is that spreading the corporate word is more important than the financial interests of those further down the economic and social ladder: capitalist competition is just the game that keeps everyone busy and subservient to a new upper echelon of power mongers who are beyond economics and politics. The turn to extreme violence in the media in association with a change in worldview and hierarchy is also part of Videodrome (1983), Heatseeker (1995), and films that take a satiric view of the media, such as Megaville (1990) and RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1991). These more recent films tend to have characters that pass more quickly through the stages of discovery to ironic acceptance of the technology-related realities of their world. Harrison Bergeron (1995), of course, opts to carry out Howard Beale’s original solution.

New Crime City: Los Angeles 2020 Source: Jonathan Winfrey Writers: Rob Kerchner and Charles Philip Moore Director: Jonathan Winfrey Date: 1994 Length: 95 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures  rologue Text: A massive earthquake paralyzed Los Angeles. Food and water riots brought the city to P the brink of chaos. To save the city, a lawless section was closed off with electrical barriers. Officially designated the Southeast L.A. Internment Zone, it was universally known as New Crime City. Former policeman Tony Ricks (Rick Rossovich), once known as the Iceman for his strict enforcement of the law, is gassed by the state because after his wife and child were killed he became more interested in helping people than a corrupt government. The gas, however, is not quite lethal, and he is quickly resurrected by Wynorski (Stacy Keach), a Spanish-speaking, federally connected police agent who offers him a choice between a second death and the task of entering the zone and retrieving or destroying a deadly virus created by the Wizard (Denis Forest) that a gang leader named Ironhead (Rick Dean) is using to threaten the world beyond the zone. Ricks is given three days and a timer to count down his hours. New Crime City is cordoned 377

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off behind electrical fences and is without regular power, food, or medical supplies; but, with Darla’s (Sherrie Rose) help, Ricks finds weapons, a car, and gas. The zone’s inhabitants, which include the unwanted and insane as well as criminals, are organized in gangs whose leaders rule, tribal-style, by charisma and force: “Juice” (Ramsay Ross) has access to LSD, which he feeds to his enthusiastic followers during public entertainments involving the use of his small supply of electricity for torture, and Brother Oswald (Ric Stoneback) has kept his cannibalistic following fat and happy by waylaying unsuspecting newcomers. In spite of diversions with these individuals, Ricks and Darla arrive at Wizard’s lab where they learn there is an antidote to the virus and are taken prisoner by Ironhead, but Ironhead dies, apparently from the virus. Ricks collects the antidote from Wizard, takes it and gives some to Darla. He also deactivates the bomb that he realizes is in the counter he was given, then calls Wynorski to come by helicopter. Ricks pretends to give him the antidote, drinking a little of it himself to prove it is safe, and then launches Ironhead’s weapon (which he has presumably reloaded with the antidote). Wynorski gets in the helicopter but soon starts to choke from the illness. Ricks tells Darla that Los Angeles has the antidote; so everything will be OK (?) as they walk off together through a cemetery. * * * The threat of the release of a bioweapon is the principal motivation for action throughout this film; otherwise, high tech and science are largely absent after the opening sequence, which includes Ricks being gassed in a chair: that he is only gassed to satisfy public demand is a fate that seems doubly unjust. See Unspeakable (2002) for an extended treatment of two executions in the electric chair. Another male is “resurrected,” also with frequent recourse to “the chair,” to stop someone from using a virus or disease to destroy the earth in 12 Monkeys (1995). Ricks’s resurrection as savior of the world has another parallel in the fate of John Spartan who is woken from an unjust cryo-imprisonment to save a city in Demolition Man (1993). The city reduced to near chaos, as this film’s Los Angeles is, is closer to that appearing in the later Judge Dredd (1995), but there the “weirdo” zone population is presented in a single sequence during Dredd’s relatively brief trip through the zone back to the Megacity. This population is almost continuously present in New Crime City where zone interiors are dark and weirdly lit and the continuous daylight in the out-of-door scenes reveals a lot of grime and graffiti. The battles Ricks must fight for the public’s amusement inside the zone echo his execution for the public interest outside of it; battles inside the zone, however, are carried out in more of the “thunderdome” style associated with Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985), albeit with more obscene language, less flair, and a gratuitous sexual bonding between Darla and Ricks. The final walk-away sequence is almost worth waiting for, but better examples conclude Circuitry Man II (1994) and Digital Man (1995).

New Rose Hotel Source: Based on William Gibson’s short story of the same title, 1981 (“New Rose Hotel” is published in the Burning Chrome collection, 1986.) Writers: Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois Director: Abel Ferrara Date: 1998 Length: 93 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Fox (Christopher Walken) and his partner X (Willem Dafoe) have had Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), a lucratively innovative Maas Corporation scientist, under surveillance for a year as they orchestrate his defection to Osaka Corporation. To complete their plan, they bring in the bar singer and “whore” Sandii (Asia Argento), who has an extraordinary tattoo of an angel on her belly, to seduce and convince Hiroshi to leave 378

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both Maas and his wife. Fox suggests that X seduce Sandii to get her in the mood; she also gets new clothes and a certain amount of time in an art gallery with titillating paintings. It seems that X and Sandii really do like each other and X even tells Fox that Sandii will be leaving Hiroshi in a month to come and live with him. Fox, however, thinks there might be more money to be made when, after the defection is complete, a large number of Osaka scientists come to work with Hiroshi at his lab – Osaka had claimed they wanted Hiroshi isolated and working alone. Meanwhile, Sandii double-crosses Fox and X: working for Mass, she replaces a disk that has something to do with a DNA resequencer and the substitute causes a plague that kills Hiroshi and everyone else in the Osaka lab. It seems Hiroshi did not defect from Maas, so much as Maas traded Hiroshi for an opportunity to wipe out the entire Osaka team. When Fox and X find that the account holding their money has disappeared, they fear reprisals from Maas, so they split up. Fox suggests they acquire tourist clothes as disguises. Thugs corner Fox and he chooses to jump over an atrium wall, presumably to his death, and also to the level where X is making a purchase; X sees him fall and flees to a drawer-size room at the New Rose Hotel where he sits alone with his gun and tries to figure out what happened. * * * The first seventy minutes of New Rose Hotel is all about Fox and X and the last twenty minutes go to Sandii’s point of view, insofar as X can sort it out. There are frequent cuts between surveillance camera points of view, the surveillance footage used by Fox to learn about Hiroshi, and the footage gathered later by the middlemen hired by X. These surveillance-related shots are mixed with views of the bar and hotel room locations of sexual encounters and the other intimacies of planning and directing the scam. The New Rose Hotel surveillance images are often shown as such, such that the film frames show one image inside another. See Final Cut (1998) for another film about covert surveillance on the domestic level. See The Anderson Tapes (1971) for a less sophisticated film about surveillance in which Christopher Walken also plays a role. Corporate headhunters are relatively unusual tech-noir characters, but duplicitous corporate spies and characters appear frequently, as in Goldeneye (1995), eXistenZ (1999), Cypher (2002), and others, though they more often switch to their own side than that of another corporation. In Fatal Error (1999), a frustrated businessman actually tries to buy his competitor’s ace programmer with a bag of money, but the effort fails. The eradication of an entire team of scientists, such as occurs in New Rose Hotel, is equivalent to the elimination of an entire board by a deadly internet signal in Fatal Error, by mercenary killers in Crusader (2004), and almost accomplished by a bomb in Xchange (2000). Frankenstein (1994, 2004) and Doctors Jekyll (1990, 2002), Moreau (1977, 1996), and Giro in Natural City (2003) are hardly victims; but scientists are sometimes taken hostage, as in Virtual Assassin (1995), or manipulated, as in Lawnmower Man (1992), to force their compliance with a criminal activity. Hiroshi, on the other hand, is duped and dead before he has any idea what has happened. Sandii is the “mere” prostitute, whose grifting escapes detection by all of the males, including those with the surveillance gadgetry and profiling expertise. While her fate is not detailed, she and Morella (1997) are perhaps the only tech-noir femme fatales who get away with their double cross; both of their stories are told from the confused point of view of the men whom they dupe.

Next of Kin Writer: Atom Egoyan Director: Atom Egoyan Date: 1984 Country: Canada Length: 72 min. Type: Surveillance: Domestic contexts 379

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Peter Foster (Patrick Tierney) is twenty-three years old and, depressed from listening to his parents’ frequent arguments, he spends most of his time sleeping. He also discovers that things are easier if he pretends that he is two people, one who is always the same and the other someone who takes on roles like an actor. His parents become increasingly disturbed by his apparent lack of interest in life and take him to family therapy. Part of the session is taped and each of them is supposed to come in and watch the tape alone. When Peter goes to watch the tape, he is mistaken for a doctor and thus inadvertently gains access to a recorded session involving another family: an Armenian father (Berge Fazlian), mother (Sirvart Fazlian), and twenty-year-old daughter Azah (Arsinée Khanjian). These parents gave up their son for adoption when he was very young because they had just come to Toronto, had no money, and were unable to care for him. Azah was born a few years later. Part of their session involved the therapist pretending to be the long-lost son returning and confronting his father with all the negative perceptions the father fears he would have of him. At his next therapy session, Peter announces that the problem is that he is bored and should go away for a while; the family therapist thinks this is a good idea and suggests he keep a diary, either written or taped, and his father agrees to finance the trip. Peter contacts the Armenian family, pretends to be their long-lost son, and uses his covertly acquired knowledge and adeptness at taking on the therapist’s role to make himself a permanent part of their lives. One of the therapist’s conclusions is that Peter needs to find a sense of purpose, but Peter concludes that what he really wants is to have control. He also finds that when he is with his new family his audience self and actor self come close to merging and he likes that sense of involvement. * * * This acclaimed film by a Canadian independent filmmaker is often described as a comedy, but it emphasizes a potential negative side-effect of surveillance technology: the tape worsens Peter’s existing identification with the self as actor, with living as acting, and finally leads him into the life of a grifter adept at the social engineering method also used by accomplished hackers. On this approach, see Track Down (2000); and see Atom Egoyam’s Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989) for darker presentations of technologically mediated relationships. Visually, the film’s opening is quite witty, with scenes shot from the vantage point of a piece of luggage going around and around on the carousel in an airport’s baggage pickup area cut with those of Peter listening to his parents argue and visiting the therapist; when Peter has arrived at his new destination in the narrative, the camera moves with the luggage directly toward him sitting at the far end of the carousel until he picks it up. The scenes of the Armenian family’s life are much richer in sensory experience than those of his parent’s world: the father runs a shop where he sells beautifully crafted rugs; the mother is a fantastic cook and takes him to the outdoor market where she selects produce and meat, including a black rabbit, for dinner; and the daughter is an artist. The repetition of lines from the therapy session and Peter’s recorded diary are as effective as those of the luggage movement because they assert Peter’s own perception of himself over that of the therapist: Peter clearly identifies with the therapist’s ability to control people; that is, his exercise of power. Several tech-noir films emphasize the therapist’s power: Dr. Haber in Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002) and the doctors in charge of the facility in Future Shock (1993) are far more interested in getting on with business than the interests of their patients. The Cell (2000) includes a therapist who uses technology to gain access and control over the therapeutic situation. Next of Kin is more about a patient who learns to take control by imitating his therapist; but where his therapist repeatedly applies specific techniques to common situations with people cognizant of his role, Peter applies them “in the field” to people who are unaware of his game.

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Nightworld: 30 Years to Life Writer: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Shawn Thompson Michael Tuchner 1998 TV 110 min. Bioengineering: Transformation

Vincent Dawson (Robert Hays) wakes up on a park bench in Stamford, Connecticut, in 2020 to the shock of his reflection in a pool of water: he is forty-five years old. Only days before he was fifteen (Hugh O’Conor) and wanted to be a musician like his father. Unfortunately for Vincent, after his father hung himself, his mother married a successful corporate executive and took Vincent to live with her new husband and his daughter Gwyneth (Mirabelle Kirkland). Vincent’s English teacher, displeased with his lack of interest in Shakespeare, confiscates one of his music disks, at which point Vincent argues and gives him a push: the teacher’s report to his mother says that Vincent struck him. When Vincent asks for money to pay the entry fee to a “Dante’s Inferno” virtual reality game contest, his stepfather is happy to loan him the money, but thinks he should work for it by doing chores around the house. Vincent responds like a delinquent teenager and uses a golf club to break up some lawn decorations, then hands the club to Gwyneth’s fiancé Derek (Christien Anholt) who is just on his way in for a visit. That night, someone breaks into the house and murders Vincent’s stepfather with the club and steals his watch. The club has Vincent’s DNA on it, the watch is recovered from his school locker, and at the trial everyone ends up testifying against Vincent whether they want to or not. Even the fact that his father hung himself becomes an indication of a family propensity to violence. Vincent’s stepfather left everything to Vincent’s mother and Gwyneth, but all their assets are frozen until after the trial, so he has no defense. Vincent is soon strapped down on a cross-shaped table and “geriatrified” thirty years by means of a drill set to work between his eyebrows. With some help from the “minder” whom he has to report to once a week and Darla (Amy Robbins), a waitress he fancied when he was fifteen, Vincent sets about solving his own case. At first, he thinks his stepfather’s partner is behind the murder and set-up as a means to corporate profit, but then he learns that Gwyneth’s mother Kate (Gabrielle Lazure) was manipulating Derek so she could control the share of the money Gwyneth would inherit when her father died. In the process, he also learns about high cholesterol, sex, and the scandal and hazards of the artificial aging process. With the murder resolved, Vincent opts for a risky reverse aging procedure so that he can be fifteen again, but takes up better dietary habits and a more enlightened interest in Darla. * * * In this film, capital and corporal punishment are combined and applied in a criminal justice system that treats minors as adults. The acceptance of artificial aging as a way around the problems of incarceration and the deliberations required to justify the death penalty could certainly arise only in a society overly concerned with economy and very little concerned with life, although the media background indicates that the artificial aging process is gaining notoriety. Nightworld society, not surprisingly, also demonstrates a notable lack of interest in rehabilitation, such as that applied to the young adult murderer in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Indeed, Nightworld might be taken as a warning to minors about the dangers of misplaced Oedipal rebellion in a technological age that favors the flick of a switch as the solution to its problems. For another teen whose parent committed suicide and who subsequently lands in another kind of trouble, see Arcade (1993). Nightworld is also unusual because it shows a teenager as the object of a criminalizing frame, such as that arranged for the policemen in Demolition Man (1993) and TekWar (1994), both of whom are wrongfully convicted, sentenced to cryostasis, and wake to a much-changed world. Like these men, as well as Quinn in Killer Deal (1999), who is set up as “voluntary” organ donor, Vincent has to solve his own case. His best

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help comes, not surprisingly, from an “older” woman, rather than his somewhat frivolous and scatterbrained friends. Genuine underage malefactors and the problems they present to police are satirized in RoboCop 2 (1990), and a boy is bred and raised to be a criminal in Wild Palms (1993).

Nineteen Eighty-Four Source: Based on George Orwell’s novel of the same title, 1949 Writer: Michael Radford Director: Michael Radford Date: 1984 Country: United Kingdom Length: 110 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Surveillance: Domestic contexts Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Winston Smith (John Hurt) works correcting stories in “newspeak,” the language the government is constantly refining for the primary purpose of eliminating personal communications, feelings, and, ultimately, the family and all private reflection and thought. Aware of the incongruities of his job, Winston starts keeping a secret journal in which he records his personal thoughts; he also has flashbacks to his youth, including a scene in which rats are eating a woman, and a scene in which he steals a girl’s chocolate, eats it, and then finds the people replaced by rats. Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) notices Winston and invites him to a romantic rendezvous outside the city. Winston subsequently rents a room where they can enjoy black market coffee, sugar, jam, and other such delicacies away from the prying eyes of the thought police and the ever-present screens that endlessly broadcast news about the war and the “confessions” of purported malefactors taken into custody. One day, O’Brien (Richard Burton), an inner party official, stops Winston and offers him a copy of the new tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Winston goes to get it and discovers, not only that inner party officials are able to turn the news monitors off, but that the dictionary is really a copy of the forbidden Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism which explains that war is meant to be continuous as it keeps everyone on the brink of starvation and society intact. Winston and Julia are, of course, caught soon after. O’Brien, who is one of the authors of Goldstein’s work, oversees Winston’s torture: he is strapped to a table, given electric shocks, and repeatedly challenged to remember which country they are at war with – a “fact” that keeps changing in newspeak without explanation – and how many fingers O’Brien is holding up. Winston tries to escape into a fantasy world of greenery in which he and Julia confess their love, but there she is suddenly shot dead. Faced with the prospect of rats eating away his face, he screams what he knows they want to hear – for them to do it to Julia instead. Later, Winston meets Julia in a deserted café and, after a brief conversation, they part agreeing to meet again, but their pasty, unemotional faces suggest it is unlikely they will do so. Winston appears as the latest penitent on the public monitors. * * * The collectivist society of Nineteen Eighty-Four is controlled by an oligarchy, not dissimilar to the corporatized governments proposed in Rollerball (1975) and Harrison Bergeron (1995). War, control of the media, and indeed, control of every individual’s thoughts, are shown to be means to power and exploitation. THX 1138 (1971) and Brazil (1985) present equally dark views of a tech-noir future in which big brother is always watching. Brazil, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, also features dream sequences that turn toward hallucination.

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Media screens are omnipresent in films from THX 1138 and Blade Runner (1982) to Minority Report (2002), and frequently appear in tech-noir films set in a hyper-technologized future; here, however, the world is muddy and impoverished and the screens that fill both public and private spaces serve the dual purpose of endlessly barraging everyone with newspeak and conducting surveillance. Technology also serves as a means to the end of the nuclear family and personal relationships in Brave New World (1980, 1998), although the later version of this film closes with a reaffirmation of such relationships. Indeed, the reaffirmation of humanity by means of an image of the male–female couple or nuclear family becomes a familiar tech-noir ending in the 1990s; even in Cyborg 2 (1993), a film in which the traditional nuclear family exists only as a display in an old museum, the continued relevance of the couple is restated by the bonding of the female android and male human. A remake of Nineteen Eighty-Four, like Brave New World (1998), would, no doubt, include a revision of the ending such that the couple’s connection survives even the most heinous torture.

Nirvana Writers: Pino Cacucci, Gloria Corica, and Gabriele Salvatores Director: Gabriele Salvatores Date: 1997 Countries: France and Italy Length: 96 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Mind transplant Cyborg Bioengineering: Transplant Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house Jimi (Christopher Lambert) is a virtual game designer trying to finish “Nirvana” just days before Christmas. After a little inspirational liquid marijuana, he learns that Solo (Diego Abatantuono), one of the characters, has become self-aware, possibly due to corporate use of DNA from deceased humans in computer applications. Solo wishes to be terminated rather than live without freedom, so Jimi sets out to find the means to fulfill Solo’s request and to find his own former girlfriend Lisa (Emmanuelle Seigner). As Jimi proceeds, Solo also moves about inside the game, gets killed, and plays again, dealing with numerous armed aggressors, including the mafia and organ hunters, as well as an amiable hooker (Amanda Sandrelli). In Marrakesh, one of the techunderworlds of crime and pleasure, Jimi finds Joystick (Sergio Rubini), one of the “angels” known to have confronted the corporations and also among the millions who have sold their eyes and other body parts. They avoid various diversions, including a woman who wants Joystick to play a virtual game that leaves one player “fried” with white goop dripping from under their headset; steal a vehicle and, when caught gassing up with phony credits, they catch a ride with Naima (Stefania Rocca) to Bombey City. Naima finishes hacking a television show, resets her screen to “Naima online,” and then offers them a pipe to smoke. In Bombey City, a man drops a chip in Jimi’s hand, which they take to the Swami: one of the angels (?) has been implanted with a tracker that can only be suppressed with this chip. The Swami also gives Lisa’s memory download, made before she died, to Jimi. Naimi has a psychic port of the sort needed to read the data and she does. They also acquire a virus that will destroy “Nirvana.” Working out of Chelsea Hotel room 717, Jimi jacks into the corporate database: after some diversions, including constructs of his father, his favorite taxi driver, and Lisa, whom he realizes is only a figment of his imagination because Naima has Lisa’s real memories; he disperses a lot of money to hidden accounts and then erases the word Nirvana from a blackboard. Unfortunately, the company has located them: Joystick and Naima leave, but the jacked-in Jimi stays for some last words with

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Solo before deleting him. He turns to point his gun at the door just as the corporate security is about to enter and the film suddenly returns to the initial meeting between Jimi and Naima. * * * The story is told through flashbacks, memories, poetic reminiscences, and excursions into Jimi’s new game. Jimi’s return to an earlier point in the story variously suggests that he may be on a more intense marijuana trip than he thought; be a player in someone else’s game, as may be the case for the lead in Redline (1997); or possibly, like players in Future Kick (1991) and Brainscan (1994), he is simply confused into thinking something has happened that has not – as when characters in these earlier films believe they exit the game when they are still in it. Solo’s realization of his true nature is the virtual counterpart of Rachael’s realization that she is an android in Blade Runner (1982), but Solo’s character is more like that of the android Ria in Natural City (2003) insofar as he opts for death, albeit for different reasons. The virtual meeting with constructs of deceased individuals from the past reappears in Cyber Wars (2004). The benign-automated house, such as that which tends to Jimi’s needs, is common in tech-noir, appearing in such films as Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995) and Xchange (2000). The pressure to get a product on the market in time for last-minute Christmas sales is a tech-noir adaptation of the seasonal theme: Black Christmas (1974), Hardware (1990), Project Shadowchaser II (1994), and City of Lost Children (1995) are also set around Christmas time, but more for the extra horror the season lends the violence of the film action. Stylistically, Nirvana, like the influential Stalker (1979), as well as Morella (1997) and Numb (2003), makes creative use of color and of black-and-white sequences. Like Future Kick (1991), it incorporates a game that destroys the loser’s brain.

November Writer: Benjamin Brand Director: Greg Harrison Date: 2004 Length: 76 min. Type: Surveillance: Domestic contexts The film plays through events related to a convenience store shooting on November the 7th as they involve a photographer named Sophie (Courteney Cox), her boyfriend Hugh (James LeGros), and her lover Jesse (Michael Ealy) in three different ways, identified in text titles as Denial, Despair, and Acceptance. Events play out differently in each of these segments, but it seems that Sophie meets Hugh when he comes to her to have his picture taken for some sort of yearbook and they end up moving in together. Sophie meets her mother occasionally for dinner and teaches photography classes in which her students take turns showing their 35mm slides. She has a brief affair with Jesse, who is her coworker and also knows something about photography: she eventually confesses the affair to Hugh, Hugh moves out, and Sophie starts going to a psychiatrist (Nora Dunn) for her headaches. After a while, Hugh moves back in and things go well. One night, after dining out on Chinese food, they stop at a corner store where Hugh goes in to get something chocolate for Sophie. She hears a shot, runs into the store, and is shot too. The two fall close to each other, probably dying, as the police come in and start taking crime scene photos. Sophie sees Hugh’s hand reaching out toward her. Woven into the scenes detailing these events are others in which Sophie tries to help officer Roberts (Nick Offerman) catch the shooter. * * *

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The image of Hugh’s hand is one of several motifs that reappear in each of the three film sections: the hand is the subject of a black-and-white photo on the apartment wall. When Sophie’s upstairs neighbor bangs on the floor to stop noise Sophie is not making, it falls and the glass breaks; Sophie has it repaired and rehangs it. When Hugh is leaving, he takes it because he thinks Sophie gave it to him, but then leaves it behind. After he moves back in, Sophie finds a hole in the wall where the picture should be; from this hole she draws out a clipping about the store shooting. When she goes to the library for more information, the second page of the story is missing. Similarly, a slide left in the tray at the end of a class shows the drugstore where the shooting took place with her car parked out front. She takes this image to the police, hoping it will provide some clue as to the identity of the shooter, but then she discovers that she is the person who dropped the film off for developing so it seems she is somehow both the person who took the picture and the person sitting in the car. The entire film is developed in this way from memory images, store surveillance footage, photographs, and slides. The play on the image within the image within the image within the memory and the mind concept is made both beautiful and extraordinary, right to the very end. Some comparison might be made to Hidden (2004) relative to the theme of guilt and the image concept development, but November is composed more or less entirely from Sophie’s own images such that the “tech” in the tech-noir derives as much from her art photography and way of remembering as from external surveillance. The noir derives from the tragedy of the artist’s probable demise in a drugstore shooting, during which many of the images that flash before her mind’s eye are technologically mediated. November may also be compared with Brainstorm (1983), in which a dying woman virtually records her death experience, both physiological and visual; and Final Cut (2004), in which a dying man’s final visual experiences are recorded by an implant from which they may be removed and reviewed. Darkdrive (1996) is another film about the last few minutes of a man’s life. 12 Monkeys (1995) is about a man who essentially dreams his way to the moment of his death, and Code 46 (2003) is about a woman who dreams her way to the moment of transition out of one world into another. The hearing that takes place in Able Edwards (2004) likewise reviews Abel’s life as he lies down to die, although with less attention to Abel’s point of view than is given here to Sophie’s. Like November, Morella (1997) also has archetypal “chapter” divisions; but those in Morella advance chronologically with Morella’s life, while those in November establish the significance of a brief period of life beginning with an emotional transition and ending with two bullets.

Numb Writer: Michael Ferris Gibson Director: Michael Ferris Gibson Date: 2003 Length: 77 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Behavior modification Bioengineering: Transformation Claire (Jennifer West Savitch) goes to Yerba City in search of her father, inventor of the “drip,” the cure for some disease. The drip is taken intravenously, is highly addictive, and quickly induces extreme passivity or catatonia. Yerba City has become the home of the addicts, the “Angels,” and Miles (Dominik Overstreet). The “Angels” are addicts who have undergone a process that makes them the immortal servants of the addicts, and Miles is the only survivor of the agents genetically engineered to be immune to the drip and intended to serve as monitors of both the addicts and the Angels. Claire meets Miles who eventually takes her to a kind of masque-ball house party where she finds that her father, now one of the Angels, does not even recognize her. Miles, who has an ongoing fantasy about fathering a race of humans immune to the drip, drugs her, hooks

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her up to the drip, and rapes her, as he does his other female addicts. Claire, who has brought along a syringe of antidote, manages to rouse herself sufficiently to take the injection; she then shoots Miles and her father, and drives out of Yerba City. * * * This dark commentary on medical science owes a great deal in form and mood to the Russian film The Stalker (1979), in which the Stalker leads the seekers out of a dark sepia-toned world of shabby civilization into one full of natural life and color. In Numb, Miles leads Claire, whose memories are all shown in grainy color, through a black-and-white Yerba City. Both films are composed of metaphoric and artfully posed shots and pans, but Numb is more atemporal with frequent shifts between Claire’s present and her memories of the past and also within the time sequence of the immediate narrative. The youthful Claire was neglected by her father after he became obsessed with the cure for a disease she had no understanding of beyond its effect on their relationship. The present Claire wants the father of her past back, but when she finds he has permanently adjusted his parenting role to that of addiction facilitator, she comes to terms with the situation very quickly: see November (2004) for another atemporal film about a woman seeking peace with her recent past and primary relationship. While the story line is quite different, Numb is also comparable to Nemesis 4 (1996) in its visual stylization, simplification of motivation, and focus on a woman who returns to her past to solve a crisis in the present made worse by a duplicitous male who sees her only in terms of her potential service to his own ambition. Nemesis’s Alex, however, calls on a lost love to help her defeat her betrayer; Claire, in the end, drives off alone. Yerba City is a zone, at once a revision of the areas cordoned off and populated by criminals and other unwanted citizens in New Crime City (1994) and the fringe areas beyond the cities in Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Judge Dredd (1995): the Yerba City difference is that the “weirdoes” are kept peaceful by the drip. The ostensive purpose of the drip, however, is not to contain a social problem, but to cure a disease, which, it seems, is only mortality. The phony drug “cure” that becomes an addiction is also found in Absolon (2003). Addiction to virtual reality, as an escape from reality appears in Dream Breaker (1995) and Nirvana (1997), both of which manipulate film color for effect. In Nirvana, “angels” are individuals who have confronted the multi-nationals and thus have a certain heroic status in the tech-underground; here, they are people who have passed beyond addiction to become servants of the addicted and thus servants of the drug providers. Miles is likewise not merely a caregiver, but a facilitator, comparable to the drug providers in Wild Palms (1993) and TekWar (1994), except that his “customers” are beyond desire and are conveniently contained in one area. No attention is given to the drip as a pharmaceutical that serves someone’s profit margin, so the film lacks the critique of the capitalist-consumer system present in such films as Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

Omega Doom Writers: Ed Naha and Albert Pyun Director: Albert Pyun Date: 1996 Length: 84 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong In a post-apocalypse world inhabited by a few humans and gangs of androids left over from the wars, humans reprogram an android called Omega (Rutger Hauer) to eliminate those still acting on obsolete military directives. Omega finds encampments of “Droids” and “Roms” in some urban ruins: the Droids are led by Marco (Jahi J.J. Zuri), who maliciously uses the head of a male teacher robot (Norbert Weisser) as a football,

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and the Roms include three identical females led by Blackheart (Tina Coté). Both Droids and Roms fear that humans are going to return and destroy them all and they also believe in a legend about a treasure in the area, a stash of weapons, that they hope to find and use to defend themselves. They follow up on all clues about the location of this treasure and watch each other constantly for fear the other side will find it first. A water-bar is maintained as a neutral space by a worker drone (Anna Katarina), who, when drilling for water, found an old-fashioned pistol without any bullets. Omega acts, as the other androids do, according to his programming and sets about destroying all except the drone bartender and the teacher robot, whom he provides with several new bodies, the last being that of Blackheart, before setting off alone to continue his task. The drone and teacher are happy to await the arrival of humans and the imminent recycling of the ruins around them into a new world. * * * The division of android society into two camps, both dedicated to finding a “treasure” that consists of weaponry, rewrites the search for the elixir of life popular in mythology from Gilgamesh to Project Shadowchaser IV (1996). For androids, who are more or less immortal already, the elixir translates into the defense weaponry which will prevent their deaths at the hands of either the androids in the opposing camp or humans. In Omega Doom, as in Pyun’s earlier Knights (1993), the apocalyptic “end” is a long drawn-out affair in which a potential rebirth of human society is deterred by artificial beings who understand the power of technology all too well. Both battles for planet earth are styled in the manner of film versions of the nineteenth-century battle for the North-American west with the android characters anthropomorphized according to genrebased stereotypes: the worker drone who tends the bar, for example, is a much more “human” and specifically western genre version of the mechanized bartender in Virtuosity (1995) which SID finds to be an offensive reminder of his ancestry. The lone hero who rides in and kills the bad guys, the long takes as the robots size each other up, the emphasis on the “fast draw,” the pistol discovered by the bartender, the “bar” itself, and so forth are all easily read as variants of the western plot and motifs. The appearance of Rutger Hauer in a distant revision of his Blade Runner (1982) role adds just a little noir to the genre recycling effect, just as the appearance of Lance Henriksen adds a little more horror to Knights, in which Pyun crosses androids with vampires. This self-conscious genre mixing approach to the tech-noir film is also apparent in Fred Olen Ray’s westernized Cyberzone (1995). Omega Doom and Knights both include dramatic scenes in which androids suffer extreme damage, losing limbs and even, as in the case of the teacher robot, their entire bodies, but they survive by simply grafting new parts on to themselves. These grotesque scenes are made appropriate by the artificiality of the person and components, but they also serve to parody the real-life development of human surgery and the use of donor organs as a means of prolonging life: see Screamers (1995) for graphic images of mobile swords that hack up human bodies far beyond the possibility of surgical repair. Indeed, parody is the element that lends both Omega Doom and Knights narrative unity as the android versus android combat mimics fighting between native and native, and native and non-native groups in the west. The Omega’s programming by humans who remain unseen throughout the film mimics the behind the scenes, but less than subtle, political manipulation that escalated with Euro-american interest in appropriating western North American land.

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The Omega Man Source: Based on Richard Matheson’s novel I am Legend, 1954 Series: The Last Man on Earth, 1964 (based on the same novel) Writers: John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington Director: Boris Sagal Date: 1971 Length: 98 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Colonel Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) researches vaccines as protection from potential germ warfare plagues. At the moment his experimental serum is needed, his helicopter crashes and he has only himself to inject; he thus becomes the only apparent “natural” survivor amidst those transformed by the plague into albinos unable to see in the light, but aggressive about asserting the dominance of their new “family.” Led by Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), formerly a reporter assigned to the plague story, the family torments and repeatedly tries to kill Neville. He survives by carefully barricading his house every night until one day Lisa (Rosalind Cash), another survivor, finds him and takes him out into the country where a former medical student and numerous children are living. One of the children is about to “turn,” so Neville takes him back to the city and successfully manufactures a serum from his own blood. Lisa, however, suddenly “turns” while out alone on a shopping trip and lets Matthias and his gang into Neville’s apartment. He escapes briefly, only to be speared, minutes before dawn, in the fountain in his front-yard. The medical student comes to see what has happened and the barely breathing Neville passes him a bottle of his blood and then collapses. * * * In The Last Man on Earth (1964), Vincent Price plays Robert Morgan, a scientist and the last man on earth after a plague has turned everyone into mindless vampire-like creatures: Morgan believes he has been spared because he was immunized against the disease by a bat bite years before. Similarly, in Night of the Living Dead (1968) radiation from a fallen satellite turns many people into mindless vampire-like ghouls eager to consume human flesh. In Omega Man, the gothic bat-vampire references are set aside in favor of a few more science-based motifs, including the serum and medical student, and the vampire-like creatures themselves are adapted so their albinism and cultural exclusivity parodies Ku Klux Klan-style racism. The use of the word “family” for the new social order summarizes the worst of the changes wrought by the plague, as it shows that the social model changed in a way that seems to be worse than total destruction. A similar point is also evident in Wild Palms (1993), a film that likewise subverts the conventional positive values associated with “father” and “friend” relative to social changes grounded in science and technology. Ray Bradbury has the more witless members of his future society refer to television characters as their “family” in his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953). As the individual who alone holds the key to the survival of conventional human society, Neville is a fairly conventional hero, comparable to those in The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996), and, of course, The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003); but in all of these films the stakes are at least initially defined as the survival of the human race, not the survival of a particular form of society. In these and other tech-noir films, a relatively sudden leap in evolutionary change is brought about by some human invention. While usually conceived in terms of a catastrophic war, explosion, or disease, in Matrix Revolutions (2003) the catastrophe that leads to this leap is rewritten as a potential transformation, rather than annihilation, and hope is placed in the recognition of the sublime nature of change. Such is not the case in Omega Man, which presents the possibility of humans surviving a catastrophic event by mutating into a physical and/or social form that appears to be literally worse than death; in effect, Dr. Moreau’s creatures, with their distorted version of Western social ideals, occupy the entire planet. The small hope that remains for the restoration of 388

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the familiar social world – the physical changes seem less important somehow – is invested in the possibility that they will return with the “natural” forms that may be recovered through Neville’s blood.

Open Your Eyes (aka Abre los Ojos) Writers: Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil Series: Vanilla Sky, 2001 (Remake) Director: Alejandro Amenábar Date: 1997 Countries: France, Italy, and Spain Length: 117 min. Other: Spanish with English subtitles Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Bioengineering: Transformation César (Eduardo Noriega) is a handsome young man who throws his own birthday party, at which the uninvited Nuria (Najwa Nimri) shows up in a brand new red dress hoping to continue their earlier tryst. To evade her attentions, César spends the evening in conversation with Sofía (Penélope Cruz), a beautiful mime artist who is also his best friend Pelayo’s (Fele Martinez) date. When he leaves Sofía’s apartment, César foolishly accepts a ride from Nuria and she deliberately crashes the car: she dies and César is left with a grotesquely disfigured face. He wakes to find himself a patient in a mental institution about to go on trial for a murder he does not remember committing and under the care of a doctor whom he knows as Antonio (Chete Lera). Confused by his various “dreams” set in alternate realities and inexplicable changing developments in what seems to be his life, particularly those involving Nuria and Sofía, César gradually realizes that he is, in fact, living in a virtual reality dreamworld, initiated by the “cryonization” company that froze him, as per his contract with them 150 years earlier after he committed suicide in despair at the change facial disfigurement had made to his life. A guide from the company (Gérard Barray) tries to direct him so that he can better control his virtual world, but without success, so he explains that if César chooses, he can wake up (for real) and have his face repaired and live his life in the “future”; he has only to do as he did when he opted for cryonic preservation: commit suicide. The film ends with César jumping from a rooftop and falling; the screen goes black before he reaches the pavement. * * * This complex revision of the Beauty and the Beast story is told through dreams, “real” life, memories, flashbacks, and confessionals. It contains a number of motifs that reappear in the later Matrix (1999): the woman in the red dress; déjà vu as plot advancement device; virtual reality posed as an opportunity to live any life one chooses; the choice made by the protagonist to exit that virtual reality, although in this case that moment comes at the end of the film rather than near the beginning; and, of course, the leap from a tall building as a moment of truth. In this film, virtual reality is the service provided by a seemingly wellintentioned corporation, rather than a prison covertly imposed by an artificial intelligence. In Matrix, the real-life Morpheus accompanies Neo into the virtual world when it is time to show him what the matrix is really all about. The “guide” who appears inside the program to help César out likewise seems to be an actual person from the outside world, but is not immediately recognized by César as such. Similar characters appear in Virtual Seduction (1995) and Darkdrive (1996), but in both of these films the guide seems to be or have become a virtual creation. The confusion of virtual reality and actual reality is also developed effectively in Future Kick (1991), Brainscan (1994), and eXistenZ (1999).

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The idea that people who are put into cryostasis continue to live an active emotional and psychological life is implied, though little dramatized, in films involving cryo-prison, such as Project Shadowchaser (1992), Demolition Man (1993), and TekWar (1994). César’s shock when the two women in his life start changing places is used to comic effect in Menno’s Mind (1997): in that film a technician discovers a man is using someone else’s credits to visit the virtual Candy, so he inserts the man’s wife into the program. The presentation of Sofía as a mime works in perfect accord with César’s fantasies about the ideal woman, while also contributing to the conceptual mise-en-abyme in a manner that links the visual with the auditory. See The Conversation (1974) in which a mime appears as an extra in the opening surveillance scene. Mimes are also used as a framing device in Blow-Up (1966). Visual and auditory mimicry, including “miming,” is also prominent in Mimic (1997, 2001).

Parts: The Clonus Horror (aka Clonus) Writers: Ron Smith and Bob Sullivan Series: The Island, 2005 (based in part on Parts: The Clonus Horror) Director: Robert S. Fiveson Date: 1979 Length: 90 min. Type: Clone: Body parts Surveillance: Information and control Bioengineering: Transformation Richard (Timothy Donnelly) and Lena (Paulette Breen) do not know they are “control” clones; that is, they do not have the virus that limits the mental development of other clones at Clonus, a subsidiary of Walker enterprises. Clonus is a spare parts farm for the rich and powerful; most of the clones there are happy to follow their strenuous exercise programs and attend educational classes where they are taught to aspire to go to America, which Richard’s friend George (Frank Ashmore) finally does. Richard, however, is dissatisfied with the responses he gets from the doctors and the “confessional” to his questions about the label on the tin can he finds one day by the river. He enjoys pursuing a relationship with Lena, but realizes that they are under constant surveillance, and learns the truth of his identity while ransacking an office and the truth of his purpose when he finds a cellar full of dead clones, including George, hanging in transparent plastic bags. He escapes the facility and finds his way to a retired newspaperman and his wife, Jake (Keenan Wynn) and Anna Noble (Lurene Tuttle), and then to his original, Professor Richard Knight (David Hooks), and Knight’s son Ricky (James Mantel). The professor discovers that it was his brother Jeff Knight (Peter Graves), an aspirant to the presidency, who had him cloned. Ricky helps Richard get back to Clonus, where he finds his beloved Lena has been lobotomized and he too soon becomes a donor. Jeff and his cohorts murder the professor and his son, but Jeff dies in the struggle, and Jake and his wife are bombed in their own home, all in an effort to cover up the information leak. Jake, however, had already sent the Clonus orientation tape Richard gave him to Birney (Frank Birney), a Daily Sun reporter who confronts the resurrected Jeff Knight with it during a campaign speech. * * * The discourse presented in this film about the use and misuse of cloning technology is far less optimistic than that in The 6th Day (2000). The clones in the cloning tank of the later film never wake up to any fate other than that for which they are intended, while those in the Clonus company basement experience death as a horrifying process in which they are drugged, given a transfusion that apparently leaves them still very much

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alive, and finally asphyxiated in vacuum-sealed plastic bags. In Clonus also, Richard is more clearly a victim of a hierarchy he cannot escape and much more care is taken to maintain the facelessness of the power behind the scenes, Mr. Walker, the man ultimately responsible for Richard’s fate. Mr. Walker is shown four times from behind, with clear views of the parchment-like skin on his aged hand as it holds the phone and pushes buttons. In the final scenes, when he introduces Jeff Knight, we finally see his face, including his eye patch, in alternate shots of the vacuum-sealed George clone with one eye missing. Viewers also see that Jeff has obviously benefited yet again from the services provided by Clonus: the gash across Richard’s chest implies he was an involuntary participant in the recycling of the presidential candidate. The hierarchy between virus-infected clone and original in Clonus is similar to that of the general population and the social planners in Harrison Bergeron (1995). Both the “confessional” and Richard’s flight beyond the Clonus precinct are reminiscent of the experiences of THX 1138 (1971). The enclosed world where everyone dies at a relatively young age echoes that of Logan’s Run (1976). The concluding assumption that public knowledge of the operation will somehow correct the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by cloning for transplant organs is a pre-RoboCop (1987) cliché.

Paycheck Source: Based on Philip K. Dick’s short story of the same title, 1953 Writer: Dean Georgaris Director: John Woo Date: 2003 Length: 118 min. Type: Behavior modification Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) earns his living by retrodesigning technology. After each job, his friend Shorty (Paul Giamatti) performs the memory erasing procedure his corporate employers require. He has never done a job longer than eight weeks, until his friend Jimmy Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) offers him an extremely lucrative three-year contract. He accepts and falls in love with coworker Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman). Unfortunately, when the contract is finished and he “wakes up” from a chemical erasing procedure different from that Shorty uses, he finds that he has forfeited his shares in the company and mailed himself a package of objects he does not remember owning. He is arrested by FBI agents who show him his signature on numerous patent applications related to research his coworker Dr. Decker was developing prior to his fall from his apartment window. They use the memory device, a variation of the incarceration chair, to forcibly extract the information they need, but everything they get is garbled. Frustrated, Agent Dodge (Joe Morton) lights a cigarette from Michael’s package and it sets the alarms off; the glasses from the package allow Michael to see in the dark and he escapes, thus upsetting his former employer’s plans. The project Michael was working on was a device that allowed visual access to the future, and Michael was expected to die in the FBI office; but Michael used the device too, saw the future the device itself would bring, and sent himself exactly what he needed to figure out his past and to destroy his machine. Eluding Jimmy’s security man John Wolfe (Colm Feore), federal agents, and police, Michael reconnects with Rachel, returns to the facility, and destroys the machine. Even a dream he has, evidently derived from the future the machine showed him, in which he dies from a bullet while on a catwalk above Rachel’s weather laboratory, is revised by the next to last clue: his watch alarm goes off and he and Rachel both jump out of harm’s way. They escape to a greenhouse business set up by Shorty and, when Shorty manages to recover Rachel’s beloved birds, Michael follows a leftover clue from his package and finds a winning lottery ticket for $90 million hidden in the bottom of the cage – the value of the company shares he forfeited. * * * 391

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Memory is a theme that finds both simple and complex treatments in tech-noir films: Alzheimer’s is a minor motif in The Net (1995) and Universal Soldier III (1998), and loss of cultural memory is an important element in numerous films, including Soylent Green (1973), Rollerball (1975), and others. Artificial memory erasure is a component of behavior modification that fails in RoboCop (1987), Duplicates (1992), Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), Fugitive Mind (1999), and Cypher (2002). The partial failure of the chemical erasure in Paycheck is comparable to that in Johnny Mnemonic (1995): Johnny experiences dream flashes of the memories that were supposedly removed; likewise, Michael dreams of his own death, but he also sees other erased images while he is awake in dizzying flashes of consecutive fragments, much as they appear on Shorty’s machine. See Synapse (1995), Total Recall 2070 (1999), and Unspeakable (2002) for other gadgets capable of presenting memory images on a screen. Paycheck is not just about the loss of personal memory; it is also about the dangers of knowing the future. Future-telling appears occasionally as a motif in tech-noir, as in the “Osgood Predicts” program in Tin Man (1983) and Cash’s ill-fated trip to a fortune-teller in Cyborg 2 (1993); the psychologist in The Cell (2000) has a pillow marked with fortune-telling motifs; and Paycheck’s Michael has a statue of a hand showing palmistry marks. Paycheck compares with Matrix Reloaded (2003) in that Michael, like Neo, dreams of a death and has to figure out how to stop it; and with Minority Report (2002), which also features “precog” images of an unpalatable future the protagonist must change. Minority Report’s future-telling balls rolling down the transparent troughs look like a lottery device. The lottery, also a motif in The Island (2005), provides Michael the means to recover his lost shares.

Phoenix Writers: Troy Cook and Jimmy Lifton Director: Troy Cook Date: 1995 Length: 91 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Miro (William Sanderson) and a team of androids carry out a terrorist assault on the docking control room at the deridium mining colony on Titus 4. These androids have been exposed to a bacterium accidentally discovered in raw deridium by Kilgore (Billy Drago) and Doctor Riley (Leland Orser). Deridium is necessary to android production and Rydell controls the deridium mine; Kilgore is in charge of Rydell’s security and other operations. Kilgore also has a plan to increase the problems and general chaos associated with the mine such that the corporate investors will pull out to protect their shareholders, thus allowing him to buy up all their shares and become the sole controller of the supplies of both deridium and military androids. He has also been supervising torturous experiments on androids, including Tyler McClain (Stephen Nichols), who does not know he is an android, to figure out just what all the bacterium will do. Kilgore has McClain and his team released from prison, where they were apparently put for insubordination to their supervisor Reiger (Brad Dourif), and then sends them to the colony under Reiger’s supervison. On the way back to his apartment for a night’s rest before departing, McClain rescues a young woman named Seline (Denice Duff) from some thugs, has a “dream” about her, and falls asleep talking to her. During the confrontation at the mine, McClain is taken hostage and Miro explains that exposure to raw deridium first made the androids feel rage and then horror at the thought of killing and finally the will to refuse to kill; it also fostered their telekinetic ability. Later, McClain is wounded and his team told he is dead; in fact, he is hospitalized where Selene comes to him and gets even friendlier, thus fulfilling the “dream” he had previously. He also has another dream that shows him more of the truth about Kilgore and the mine. The unsettled McClain goes to investigate some screams and, as in his dream, he discovers the “Proving Ground” room where the androids are being

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tested. He and Selene return to the mine to save the team and Miro’s group from the destruction Kilgore is planning. Miro and McClain become friends, but then Reiger and Kilgore arrive and Kilgore explains what he has been doing: McClain was imprinted with Kilgore’s memories, hence his fascination with Selene and intuitive, dream-based awareness of Kilgore’s involvement with the android tests. A firefight ensues, which only McClain and two members of his team survive. * * * In the tradition of Blade Runner (1982), McClain is an android who does not know he is an android, the mutating androids on Titus 4 simply wish to live, and the corporation in control of everyone’s destiny is the Rydell Corporation, a small contrast to Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation. The appearance of William Sanderson as both Blade Runner’s Sebastian and Phoenix’s Miro also links the two films. McClain, however, may be compared to the android Eve in Eve of Destruction (1991): Eve is programmed with her creator’s memories, just as McClain is programmed with Kilgore’s. McClain’s dreams suggest that he is processing the memory information through his own unconscious rather than just acting on it without thought as the android Eve does, at least until the moment before she is shot. As in Aliens (1986), McClain and his men enter the labyrinthine mining complex to seek out and destroy enemies of uncertain capabilities; and, as in Total Recall (1990), the plot and action are focused on the mining of deridium. The substance that causes the Titus 4 androids to evolve into beings that are human-like in their autonomy inverts the external mutations of the human population on Mars in Total Recall. Whether the androids’ eventual refusal to fight is a trope for the potential evolution of humans or for the possibility that soldiers might one day revolt against killing, the transformation makes profit mongering at the expense of the well being of others appear as contemptible as it truly is. See Screamers (1995) for another film about a mining operation that proves to be dangerous to the workers: the automated weapon created for combat in that war also evolves into something other than its creators intended.

Project Shadowchaser Writer: Stephen Lister Series: Project Shadowchaser II (aka Night Siege Project: Shadowchaser II) 1994 Project Shadowchaser III (aka Project: Shadowchaser 3000) 1995 Project Shadowchaser IV (aka Alien Chaser), 1996 (not tech-noir) Director: John Eyres Date: 1992 Length: 97 min. Type: Android: Stalker and assassins The android Romulus (Frank Zagarino) lies on a table under a spotlight in a dark room while technicians check his systems. He comes on-line, kills the technicians, and climbs out of the facility. Soon he is rolled into a hospital on a gurney, from which he rises to lead a terrorist team that shoots up the place and collects hostages, including the president’s daughter Sarah (Meg Foster). Jackson (Ricco Ross), who has been flirting unsuccessfully with a nurse, goes to check out the noise and comes face to face with Romulus. Romulus suggests that when smart people hear gunfire they run the other way, so he must be either really stupid or a hero: Jackson says he must be stupid. Desperate FBI officials pull the man they believe to be the hospital architect out of cryo-prison, but they end up with Michael de Silva (Martin Kove), an ex-pro-football player, who fails to inform them of their mistake until after he has been dropped by chopper to the hospital roof with a team that soon dies in an elevator shaft booby trap. Romulus demands $50 million within four hours or he

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will start shooting hostages. The FBI learns that Romulus is associated with a classified government project called “Shadowchaser” and brings in his inventor Joseph Kinderman (Joss Ackland). Kinderman declares the incident a matter of national security and puts himself in charge. He explains to De Silva that the project was intended to produce “the perfect synthetic warrior […] unhindered by any sense of morality.” A little later, Romulus poses a question to Kinderman: “What if the creation destroys the creator; now that would be true freedom.” De Silva rescues Sharon and they start killing off the terrorists, but eventually Romulus takes Sharon hostage again. The president arrives to deliver the money; he gets in the elevator with Kinderman and a marksman who is supposed to shoot Romulus with a poison dart. At the exchange, Kinderman announces everything that has happened has been part of a plan to force the president’s resignation; when the president refuses, he is shot. Kinderman heads to the roof to meet the escape helicopter, but Romulus wants to finish off De Silva. De Silva tries to send Romulus to his demise down an elevator shaft and then sets him on fire. On the roof, De Silva nails Kinderman with a knife to the forehead. As Romulus’s booby traps start to explode, the helicopter, which has been commandeered by the FBI, takes the survivors to safety. Sarah finds the president alive and well: it was his android double that was shot. Jackson hooks up with the nurse and De Silva shouts “touchdown” and pours a can of beer on his head. * * * The android stalker exhibits an extraordinary number of spontaneous human responses as he carries out his program to terrorize and murder: the unfulfilled shift in his priorities from money, apparently Kinderman’s idea, to an interest in the death of his creator is clearly the stalker android version of the Oedipus complex. Other precedents for Romulus’s behavior include the Creature’s response to Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel and related films, and Roy Batty’s murder of his creator in Blade Runner (1982). Kinderman’s reasons for trying to force the president’s resignation connect this film with Swordfish (2001), which also attempts to justify terrorist action in relation to the negatively perceived humanitarianism of the president. The use of technology to control presidential authority is a popular theme in tech-noir, where it usually takes the form of efforts to manipulate the outcome of an election, as in Looker (1981) and Menno’s Mind (1997); but the Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004) also proposes the outright assassination of a president. The mistaken identity theme is also repeated in this film, with Romulus initially mistaken for a human, and the president’s android mistaken for the human original. In addition, Jackson initially seems to be the film’s designated hero, and De Silva is released from cryo-prison because he is mistaken for an architect named Dixon. Michael Miguel da Silva is a real life football player.

Project Shadowchaser II (aka Night Siege Project: Shadowchaser II) Writer: Nick Davis Series: See Project Shadowchaser, 1992 Director: John Eyres Date: 1994 Length: 97 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins The president orders the deadly weapon Cobra dismantled within twenty-eight days despite arguments that the Cold War is not over because the Soviets are no longer a threat – there is still North Korea and China, after all. Three weeks later on December 24, the employees of the Raikon Nuclear Base are under tremendous pressure to finish closing the facility. Special supervisor Joe Hutton (Todd Jensen), supposedly there to speed things along, is really there to facilitate the entry of an android (Frank Zagarino) and his terrorists so they can steal Cobra.

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After Laurie Webber (Beth Toussaint) saves the day when her male partner at a workstation collapses, she takes some radioactive waste to the vault and Joe records her voice authorization as she enters. Meanwhile, Laurie’s ball-playing son Ricky (Danny Bonjour) has caught a ride to the base with the alcoholic maintenance man Frank Meade (Bryan Genesse). When Meade makes a positive appraisal of Laurie’s bum, she tells him that when he finishes his current task he is fired. Laurie and Ricky head home, with Laurie teasing Ricky into congeniality with a “give me five,” but then they have to go back to pick up a forgotten file. Laurie soon realizes that a terrorist action is underway: a room full of dead bodies, empty packing crates, and an overheard conversation between the terrorists make the situation quite clear. She contacts the front guard just as the slaughter extends to his area and wipes out the Christmas party; so she removes the vault security voice authorization chip, thereby delaying the plans of the terrorists; and she hooks up with Meade, who was saved from a bullet by the bottle in his chest pocket, and Ricky, who has found a walkie-talkie that Laurie uses to contact the outside authorities. Local sheriff John O’Hara (Danny Keogh) proves far more helpful than Laurie’s boss, the General, and the other military types who set up a base outside. O’Hara eventually informs her that the terrorist is “some kinda’ robot.” The military calls in an air strike and the android starts shooting up the temporary headquarters set up outside the facility. Meade and Laurie conduct an implausible rescue of Ricky, whom the android took hostage, from a depressurizing chamber and, while Meade faces off with the android, Laurie deactivates Cobra, pausing to help Meade out by electrocuting the android, three seconds before detonation. O’Hara rescues them from the roof with a helicopter – Meade has to knock the android off the bottom of the ladder – even as the air strike blows up the facility. Upon landing, they are greeted by a crowd of reporters. Ricky invites Meade home for Christmas dinner and Laurie observes that Meade too has a nice bum. * * * As in Project Shadowchaser (1992), Zagarino plays an android who emotes a lot and seems to enjoy his role in the potential destruction of the human race; in this regard, he resembles the human Fender in Cyborg (1989) who likes the pain and devastation accompanying the fall of civilization. As in the first film, the excess of violence and the stalking of victims by terrorists, particularly Laurie, are dramatized with “B” horror film pacing and action. In the first film, the hero does not meet up with the “damsel in distress” until after the half-time point, and the damsel inexplicably trades in her relatively practical hospital garb for a tight dress and high heels; similarly, the Project Shadowchaser II male hero meets up with the damsel, again inexplicably dressed in a tight skirt and high heels, rather belatedly. The first Project Shadowchaser hero is an unlikely individual who, after two years in cryo-prison, is able to hold off a super-android; likewise, Frank shifts spontaneously and somewhat self-consciously from being an alcoholic failure to a superhero kickboxing champion to comic relief. References that parody Alien (1979, 1986, 1992) and The Terminator (1984, 1991) abound, as they do in the first film. The nuclear weapons base, with its windowless offices and extensive maintenance areas, stands in for Alien’s spaceship settings, and, as in Project Shadowchaser, the male hero and heroine spend a lot of time in corridors and ventilation ducts. Laurie’s role echoes that of Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Ricky is a remake of John without the superhero destiny.

Project Shadowchaser III (aka Project: Shadowchaser 3000) Writer: Nick Davis Series: See Project Shadowchaser, 1992 Director: John Eyres Date: 1995 Length: 99 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins 395

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A virus causes a protector android (Frank Zagarino) to go berserk on the Russian spaceship “Siberia” and kill everyone. Twenty-five years later, the Siberia rams the “Comstad 5,” a small ship only a few days from docking. The crew is playing cards when the alarm goes off and they realize they have only twenty minutes to avoid an impact, which they do, but then realize the Siberia is changing course and they do not have time to escape again. Their hull is breached and they have only nineteen minutes before they will be taken by Mars’s gravity, so they move to the Siberia. Someone explains that the Siberia had made it to Juno and there were rumors that the original crew had discovered a new fuel source, at which point the ship begins to shudder due to an overheating nuclear reactor. The Siberia’s log is found in the hands of one of the deceased crew, who happens to be the father of Rea (Musetta Vander), one of the Comstad’s crewmembers: it explains how a space spore rendered their protector android insane so that it killed the crew. The android then stalks and kills most of the Comstad crew; his ability to morph temporarily into the forms of those he has killed adds to the crew’s panic and they soon start turning on each other out of sheer paranoia, as well as greed. The one advantage they discover is that the android is blinded by strobe lights; thus they are able to nearly finish him off by electrocution followed by a very long fall. Later, he comes crawling back trailing circuitry: “Sorry I’m late,” he says, “Hope I didn’t miss anything.” He hangs off the escape pod as the only survivors – Rea, Kody (Sam Bottoms), and the dog – depart. Rea blasts him into oblivion. * * * Both of the two previous Shadowchaser films present an android that is very unandroid-like insofar as he emotes a lot: the unnamed creature in Project Shadowchaser II (1994) actually says, “I love the fourth of July” as he initiates an attack on the temporary military base set up to neutralize his actions. Here, an explanation of sorts is provided for such inexplicable behavior: specifically, the android’s imitation of a serial killer is blamed on a spore. His weakness also seems to be a human one: he is blinded by strobe lights. Flashing lights bring about epileptic seizures in one of the Andromeda Strain (1971) doctors; the patient in Terminal Man (1974) suffers from “para-epilepsy”; and flashing lights cause a kind of paralysis in humans in Last Days of Man on Earth (1973). Here, the lights produced by machines cause a weakness in a machine that allows the obviously non-epileptic humans to defeat it. Like the previous Project Shadowchaser films, this one recycles numerous elements from Alien (1979, 1986, 1992) and Terminator (1984, 1991), including the morphing killer machine in Terminator 2. Artificial beings that can take on the appearance of those they kill also appear in Screamers (1995). Zagarino once again plays the unstoppable deadly android that has to be killed several times over, typically in scenes involving fire, explosions, electricity, and elevators. Toward the end of the first Project Shadowchaser film, it even looks like the burning Romulus flies by in the background as a helicopter collects the heroes. Here, the maimed android that just will not quit is reminiscent of both the Terminator (1984) and the much more friendly Bishop who meets his not-quite-final demise in Aliens (1986). The near concluding moment with the android hanging off the back of the escape pod suggests the unseen ending of Aliens in which the creature tags along so that it can provide the context for Alien 3 (1992). This Project Shadowchaser III shot looks oddly like one toward the end of Nemesis (1992), in which a defleshed stalker android hangs off the back of the hero’s escape plane. The final escape from an exploding structure in Aliens (1986) is reworked in the first three Project Shadowchaser films. The Alien (1979) cat is replaced in this film by the dog Max, who is presumably able to distinguish real people from the morphing android.

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Project Shadowchaser IV (aka Alien Chaser, aka Orion’s Key) Writers: Boaz Davidson, Danny Lerner, B.J. Nelson, and Mark Roper Series: See Project Shadowchaser, 1992 Director: Mark Roper Date: 1996 Length: 95 min. Type: Not tech-noir Sirius (Frank Zagarino) was once the android protector of an alien species that intervened in the evolution of an African tribe thousands of years ago as part of their efforts to create an elixir necessary to their survival. Upon take off, however, the alien spaceship was struck by lightning, fell, and, over time, was buried. It is rediscovered in the present day by archaeologists Michael (Todd Jensen) and Corinne Cavanaugh (Jennifer MacDonald). Corinne finds half of the metal key once shared by the alien and African leader; when she scans and then e-mails the writing on this key to the professor (Brian O’Shaughnessy) funding the dig, she inadvertently reactivates the single intact android on the ship, who happens to be Sirius, and also sets off a very aggressive recovery effort by the professor. Michael and Corinne spend much of their time running from both the professor’s men and Sirius. Eventually, Sirius is shown to be the lesser of the two evils: when he learns that his people are long dead, he gives the elixir to Michael and Corinne so they can give it to the remaining members of the African tribe contacted centuries ago and also save their son, who happens to be near death due to a car accident. * * * The alien involvement and other plot adjustments place this, the final film in the Project Shadowchaser series, unambiguously in the science-fiction category. While genre mixing, especially between gothic, science fiction, and the western, is common in tech-noir, this genre shift to science fiction effectively resolves the series insofar as it redeems the android by providing it with benign alien origins and motivations. The Project Shadowchaser series begins with two films in which the android leads terrorists in actions intended to bring wealth and power to the person manipulating him, but the android seems to derive actual pleasure from killing and frightening people. The third Project Shadowchaser film further exaggerates the android’s character as a psychologically deranged killer with a rather wild and inappropriate sense of humor and also strengthens the Alien (1979, 1986, 1992) film references found in the first two by introducing the science-fiction element of the spaceship. Here, in the fourth film, the alien ship has crashed on Earth, rather than a distant planet, and the aliens themselves are reinvented as benign searchers for the elixir of life – an unsurprising twist given the frequency with which questions of mortality and immortality play out in films with humans and androids. The android who is capable of learning is, of course, another motif found in Terminator 2 (1991), from which the Project Shadowchaser series borrows as extensively as it does from Alien (1979, 1986, 1992); and it is no surprise that the unthinking and seemingly unstoppable killer android of the previous films here becomes an ally to those he is initially bent on destroying – just as the Terminator of Terminator does in Terminator 2. Saint, played by Zagarino in the earlier Cyborg Cop 3 (1995), also switches sides. In Terminator 2, the android who becomes an ally is pitted against a new and more terrible machine bent on the destruction of the human race. In Project Shadowchaser IV, the real stalker proves to be an ambitious archaeologist who sees the alien artifacts as a means of enhancing his career. No new technological threats appear after the android’s reversal from apparent threat to supporter of the innocent.

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Prototype Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Richard Levinson and William Link David Greene 1983 TV 100 min. Android: Love and lovers

Dr. Carl Forrester (Christopher Plummer) and his team of scientists have just completed a project funded by the pentagon: a fully functional and socially interactive android whom they have named Michael (David Morse). When Forrester realizes that Michael might be appropriated for military purposes, he abducts him and takes him to hide out in the campus town where he first came up with the idea of building an android. When they run out of money, Forrester calls Gene Pressman (James Sutorius), one of his team, for help. While extremely loyal to Forrester, Gene is unable to resist the lure of a research grant of his own and brings the government agents with him. Suspicious that something is up as they return to their house apartment, Forrester sends Michael to hide in the garage he rented to keep their car out of sight and then goes to meet the agents at a coffee shop. Michael has already decided to blow himself up so that Forrester will have a chance to build another prototype with better contractual safeguards to prevent its appropriation by the military. As Forrester goes to the meeting, a fire truck rushes to respond to the explosion. * * * Prototype is a made-for-television movie with lots of daylight action, domestic settings, and activities to dramatize the android as a substitute for the son the Forresters never had. Michael’s lessons in human socializing accelerate after Forrester takes him away from the facility. He goes fishing, meets girls, and rather casually matures at an astonishing speed. The maturation process of the artificial person is the subject of considerable attention in many tech-noir films and implanted memories and programming often provide opportunities for Oedipal twists in that development, as in Blade Runner (1982) and Phoenix (1995). Michael, however, is extremely well adjusted, a fact that seems to have something to do with his obviously caring “father” who goes to great lengths to help him, in effect, to avoid the “draft.” The role of the father figure as someone other than the artificial being’s creator is emphasized in the maturation experiences of the clone in Replicant (2001). Michael’s education includes the study of popular culture, specifically Frankenstein: he watches the Boris Karloff movie in the hotel room where he and Forrester stop for a rest on their flight from the lab, and later he buys Mary Shelley’s book. He is concerned about whether or not “they” finally kill the monster and he finds the ending of the book very sad because the monster ends up alone. Other androids that develop selfawareness, at least in part through some study or practice of the arts, include Max in Android (1982), Byron in Slipstream (1989), Solo in Solo (1996), and Sonny in I, Robot (2004). Michael’s desire to be mimetically replicated, expressed moments before his death when he unexpectedly suggests that the next prototype should look like him, is perhaps intended as an outcome of his Frankensteinbased education: Frankenstein’s Creature found his appearance an insurmountable barrier to social integration, but Michael’s made that part of his life easier. His apparent satisfaction with the idea that his likeness will continue, albeit without his consciousness, further anthropomorphizes him as it makes him seem like a man who wants to know that his “child” will live on after he does. Proteus IV in Demon Seed (1977) likewise seems to grasp the role of mimeticism in human affection as he designs his progeny to look like the deceased daughter of the designated parents. Michael commits suicide to avoid being appropriated into the military where he knows they can reprogram him and make him do things his “father” would not want him to do. The boy android David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) attempts suicide when he believes there is no more hope of experiencing his mother’s love, 398

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and the android Ria in Natural City (2003) commits suicide ahead of her designated expiration time when she is sure her lover will not be coming back to her before then. All of these films, including Android, present an android’s suicide as a by-product of their capacity to identify with and even experience human or human-like motives and feelings.

Prototype X29A Writers: George Temple and Phillip J. Roth Director: Phillip J. Roth Date: 1992 Length: 98 min. Type: Cyborg Behavior modification In 2057, Los Angeles and all the other major cities are dying. At some point in the not so distant past that is already lost to most people’s memory, a new class of cybernetically enhanced humans called the Omegas was created in an effort to rejuvenate the cities and the human race. When the Omegas started altering their own programming, apparently so that they could serve their intended purpose by becoming teachers, humans created another class of cybernetically enhanced humans called Prototypes who were secretly programmed to wipe out the Omegas and then deactivate themselves. One Omega escaped the genocide: Chandra (Lane Lenhart), who was “implanted,” or turned into an Omega, at birth. Orphaned as a child and now a young and barely literate adult, she has emotional ties with Sebastian (Sebastian Scandiuzzi), a young man whom she pretends is her brother, and with Hawkins (Robert Tossberg), a wheelchair-bound former soldier turned computer expert who lives and works in a secured metal storage box. Meanwhile, Dr. Alexis Zalazny (Brenda Swanson) finally breaks the encryptions on the laboratory containing the Prototype program and generation chamber and figures out how to make them work, but she cannot quite figure out what some of the programming is about, specifically the part that directed the new warriors to wipe out the Omegas. The fate of the Omegas is actually a mystery to everyone still alive, except her contact at the facility, Dr. Taurence Roberts (Paul Coulj). Roberts is thrilled that she has made it possible for him to finish his work: he knows that Chandra is still alive and wants to see the Prototype program completed. Zalazny’s test subjects all die, until she convinces Hawkins to undergo the process. Hawkins survives, emerging from the chamber with his body fully rejuvenated, but encased in a shell, and his mind confused by the conflict between his orders to track down Chandra’s implant signal and kill her and his residual memories of affection for her. Chandra finds herself championed, not only by Sebastian, but also by the Protectors (Raymond Storti and Rob Lee), a class of warriors trained and programmed to protect her life at all costs. Gradually realizing the existence and significance of her various implants, she receives some direction from a virtual reality interface with her long-dead father. She is also spared when the Hawkins-Prototype finds he cannot kill her and collapses, but the film ends with Zalazny opening her eyes in the Prototype chamber. * * * This film is about the coming of the “savior” of the human race, whose own survival is complicated by cyborg stalkers. The same general plot about attempts to kill someone who is destined to save or recover a fallen human civilization informs the Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996), and the later Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003) films; but in this case, the allegiances of humans and technologically empowered humans are somewhat more blurry, such that the “noir” is all about differently motivated humans using different approaches to the technological enhancement of the body. In addition, the purported savior,

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about whom there seems to be no mythology whatever, can jack in but is only semi-literate and seems barely capable of managing her own life much less everyone else’s. This, like other Roth films and those of Albert Pyun, makes much of the deteriorating urban wasteland: see Roth’s A.P.E.X. (1994) for more robotic beings who target their victims by using signals from their implants. Pyun recycles the “Omega” name in Omega Doom (1996) by applying it to the android sent to destroy all the androids hostile to humans who survived the wars that devastated the planet. Hawkins-Prototype is a little like Murphy in RoboCop (1987), but Hawkins is just barely able to stop himself from killing Chandra before expiring, while Murphy manages to reinvent himself as RoboCop. Men involuntarily turned into cyborgs also show their humanity by refusing to kill loved ones or innocents in Cyborg Cop (1993) and the Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999).

Redline (aka Deathline) Writers: Brian Irving and Tibor Takács Director: Tibor Takács Date: 1997 Countries: Canada and Netherlands Length: 97 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Bioengineering: Transformation American John Anderson Wade (Rutger Hauer) is double-crossed by his partner Merrick (Mark Dacascos) while making a big score selling black market fantasy chips in the new capitalist Russia, a score that Wade hoped would set him up for retirement in Canada with Katya (Yvonne Sciò). Merrick is working for a new local boss Serge (Michael Mehlmann), so he shoots them both. Katya dies apologizing to Wade, apparently for double-crossing him too. An ambitious Special Prosecutor (Randall William Cook) gets presidential (Agnes Bánfalvy) authorization to resurrect Wade using implant technology so he can be interrogated about the black market and so he can kill Merrick for them. Wade escapes from the hospital, goes looking for Merrick, and is directed to Marina K (also Yvonne Sciò), a prostitute at the “House of Culture.” He meets and then leaves her and takes a cubicle-room where he taps into a virtual reality fantasy machine to enjoy his memories of Katya, but they turn into a nightmare in which a nude woman comes to the door and shoots him. Marina K, apparently because she likes Wade, offers him some information and also helps him escape the thugs his former friend Mishka (Patrick Dreikauss) has set on him at Merrick’s orders. Wade leaves Mishka with a gunshot wound in the leg, but is then captured and subjected to virtual reality torture with a bag over his head. Marina K is captured also and given a gun and money in exchange for killing Wade. The released Wade goes to Marina K’s apartment, finds the money in her purse, and leaves her, but she follows and helps him with a ruse: she gets close to Merrick by pretending to have been sent from the House of Culture – thus distracting him long enough for Wade to enter and kill him – at least that is the plan. She is caught, and Wade finds another woman in her place with Merrick, but he kills Merrick anyway. The couple flees, then Wade makes a deal for Serge to bring the money he owes him to the same place where Merrick killed him and Katya. Serge comes to the meeting bringing the Special Prosecutor, who has decided to switch sides, and also the money. The Special Prosecutor shoots Serge; Marina K first appears to join the Special Prosecutor and then she shoots him. Marina K, it seems, has been CIA all along with orders to protect the president, whom the Special Prosecutor had decided to betray. Wade and Marina K make their exit from the entire mess by train, with Wade’s thoughts returning to his “death” and that of Katya. * * *

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This post-Cold War tech-noir film is full of superfluous violence and bare breasts; it is of interest because it is set in a Moscow where capitalism has legitimized prostitution as the most prominent form of “culture,” but also opened up rather than shut down the trade in black market goods, especially those relating to virtual reality entertainment. Much of the population is living on the street and everyone seems to be divided according to their relation to the local crime boss, who does a lot of business in the local public bathhouse, or the president, who appears only on digital screens. While the film owes something to Blade Runner (1982), the virtual reality elements leave the nature of Wade’s experiences as real or virtual, particularly in view of the reappearance of the same actress who plays Katya in the role of Marina K, open to speculation, as are those of key characters in Nirvana (1997) and eXistenZ (1999). The duplicitous Katya is reinvented as Sandii in New Rose Hotel (1998). A similar story about a betrayed partner left for dead who comes back for revenge and his money is told without the virtual reality twist in Payback (1999). Payback is a neo-noir film based on The Hunter (1962), Donald E. Westlake’s first novel about a hard-boiled criminal called Parker. Redline also warrants some comparison with the post-Cold War Bond film Goldeneye (1995), particularly between the set for Bond’s meeting with the supposedly deceased Janus and that which serves as the location where Wade is initially double-crossed, which is also that of the final meeting, in Redline.

Replicant Writers: Larry Riggins and Les Weldon Director: Ringo Lam Date: 2001 Length: 100 min. Type: Clone: Society and service As a child, Garrotte (Jean-Claude Van Damme) nearly died in a fire set by his mother; he lived only because it rained that night. He grew up to become the “Torch,” a serial killer famous for murdering mothers and leaving their child to die alone with the body in a fire. Jake (Michael Rooker) has just retired from the police force without catching Garrotte when he is recruited by the National Security Force to work with a disposable clone of Garrotte whose genetic memory and telepathic ability are expected to lead to the original. The replicant’s first lessons in walking, sitting, and advanced gymnastics come from a television screen; but Jake uses a taser and handcuffs, and beats him when he thinks he might have hurt his nephew – which he had not done. After Jake’s mother points out that if you treat someone like a criminal, that is likely what they will become, Jake becomes a little kinder. He uses a photo of the replicant to identify Garrott and find his apartment, and it is only because of the replicant that he gets out before it explodes. The replicant’s tracking skills develop rapidly: Garrott’s image appears to him as a kind of memory ghost. Garrott, realizing what the replicant is, tries to win his trust as his brother and as family. After their first altercation, the replicant wanders off and has an encounter with a prostitute that goes bad when she realizes he does not have any money, but she likes him because he defends her from her pimps. Jake arrives with the cops and the replicant identifies the next murder site. Later, Garrott visits his mother in the hospital and shows her his latest photos. She is dead of a stroke by the time Jake and the replicant arrive, but Garrott is waiting for them in the morgue. They fight: Garrott beats Jake, the replicant beats Garrott, and Jake shoots Garrott and tells the replicant “I am your family now.” Jake helps the replicant out of the morgue; the replicant locks Jake out and goes back inside just before the place explodes: it seems only the corpses in the refrigerators are left intact. Sometime later, Jake is playing with his nephew and sees someone leave something in his mailbox – it turns out to be the music box associated in Garrott’s memories with the night his mother set fire to the house. The replicant then hooks up with the prostitute he met earlier. * * * 401

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Garrott is a serial killer who, like the address book killer in Ghost in the Machine (1993), likes to photograph his victims; but Garrot, like SID-Grimes in Virtuosity (1995), also likes to taunt his chosen police officer. The assumption that Garrott’s clone will be as despicable as he is, along with the possibility that sentient clones capable of human relationships might be created and disposed of at the whim of any agency, even in the interests of so just a cause as national security, revisits the same range of human rights issues found in earlier stories and films about androids. This replicant’s “birth” invokes scenes from both The Terminator (1984) and the science-fiction film The Fifth Element (1997), but is much more interesting beside the opening test-tube birth in Cloned (1997) and that of the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). The original paired off against his own clone is reminiscent of The 6th Day (2000), while the duplicate’s reversals of the original’s motivations suggest the personality-implanted hero of Total Recall (1990). The adult replicant as slow learner falls somewhere between the lead characters in the film dramas Iceman (1984) and the Rain Man (1988), and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s earlier tech-noir “Unisol” character in Universal Soldier (1992) and the grief-stricken Gibson he plays in Cyborg (1985). Replicant, however, trades in Universal Soldier’s military theme for a police detective context and emphasis on the nurture or nature debate found in The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Anna to the Infinite Power (1983). As is the case for the clone ninja Takeru in Shadow Fury (2001), one of the replicant’s crucial coming-of-age experiences is an encounter with a prostitute who likes him. Unlike the Schwarzenegger films Terminator (1991) and The 6th Day, Replicant makes little out of the potential “doubling” offers for visual and verbal wit, although the replicant’s mimicry of Jake’s foul language has an effect comparable to that achieved by Evolver’s (1994) grasp of the same lesson from television.

Replikator: Cloned to Kill Writers: Michelle Bellerose, John Dawson, and Tony Johnston Director: G. Philip Jackson Date: 1994 Country: Canada Length: 96 min. Type: Clone: Society and service In 2014 Ludo Ludovic (Michael St. Gerard), his now ex-girlfriend Kathy Moskow (Brigitte Bako), and his friend John Cheever (Peter Outerbridge) already have a complicated history: just when they had successfully replicated a small stone, Ludo and John were arrested by Inspector Victor Valiant (Ned Beatty) and sentenced to jail time. When they got out, Ludo and John went back to work at their Biodesign Technologies lab, but Cathy was already working on the same technology for their competitor Byron Scott (Ron Lea) at Zyklor Future Technologies. Now, Cathy is under pressure from Byron to move forward with the testing of his company’s replicator the next day. Lena (Lisa Howard), Cathy’s friend and coworker, advises her against moving too quickly, and then Ludo invites Cathy to come and witness a similar test he is going to perform that very evening. Unfortunately, Ludo’s lab is raided before the test, apparently by police, and he is accidentally knocked unconscious in the cloning machine, which then spontaneously produces another Ludo. The real Ludo is arrested and charged with murder and the Justice Channel broadcasts images of his face and supposed crimes along with the usual invitation for the public to vote on his future; John, meanwhile, is reassigned to work at Zyklor. Fortunately, Victor takes an interest in the case, gets Ludo out of jail, and also tracks down Byron’s criminal past, which happens to link him to the current Police Chief (David Hemblen). Cathy and Lena both flee from Zyklor when Byron insists on cloning a mouse, and the job is assigned to Frick (Doug Bagot) and Frack (Tim Lee), who successfully produce a clone that immediately dies. John tries to get the cloning disk out of Zyklor, but he is caught and Ludo 2, who has also gone to Zyklor, unsuccessfully

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practices cloning on him. In the end, Byron is brought down by the police, the corrupt Police Chief is shot, Ludo 2 disintegrates, Ludo and Cathy get back together, Lena just happens to have a backup copy of the lost technology, and Victor decides to buy in on the new lab they plan to start up. * * * This film is full of noir elements adapted for tech-noir, including tangled motives entangled with technology, lots of enclosed spaces, and lots of night scenes justified by the billboard warnings about daytime radiation levels, flashbacks to a complex past that involved almost all of the characters, and a melancholic inspector who follows his instincts. The inspector ultimately aligns himself with the young scientists with the innovative technology and sense of humanitarian responsibility, while the villains are those who only talk about cloning body parts because of its profit potential. Replikator also has a unique Gilbert and George look, particularly in the communications transmissions and the Frick and Frack cloning team, that complements the manifestation of Ludo 1 and Ludo 2 as variations on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990, 2002). See Eve of Destruction (1991) for another far less effective goodoriginal versus evil-twin narrative in which the twin is an android rather than a clone, Judge Dredd (1995) for warring good and bad brother clones in a justice system context, The 6th Day (2000) for an original–clone brother story with a happier ending, and Replicant (2001) for a clone who helps the justice system bring down his evil original. Replicator technology as a solution to a wide array of resource shortage problems is also visited in Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) and Dream Breaker (1995), and the Baby 2000 project in Duplicates (1992) is really intended as a means of cloning specific body organs; only in Replikator does the technology work in such a manner that cloned duplicates just manifest, as do the virtual doubles replicated from Nick James in Virtual Assassin (1995). Nick’s doubles, however, are inanimate copies that are just life-like enough for a ruse that saves his life; they lack the personality doubling and inversion that seems to be integral to Ludo’s invention.

The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler Writers: Tom Rolf and Jay Simms Director: Bob Wynn Date: 1971 Length: 100 min. Type: Clone: Body parts Presidential candidate Senator Clayton Zachary Wheeler (Bradford Dillman) suffers near fatal wounds in a traffic accident. Television reporter Harry Walsh (Leslie Nielsen) sees him at the accident and accompanies him to the hospital. When the cover-up begins, including a public retraction of his story followed by obviously faked media statements asserting that the senator is enjoying a prolonged fishing trip, Walsh refuses to give up and tracks Wheeler down. Wheeler, it turns out, has been transported to a special medical facility in New Mexico and saved by a procedure developed by Dr. Redding (James Daly) involving multiple organ transplants from two “somas,” or neutral clones injected with Wheeler’s DNA: the DNA transforms them into his identical twins and thus eliminates the rejection factor that has hitherto daunted transplant surgery. A committee chaired by the man-with-the-money Hugh Fielding (Robert J. Wilke) selects those who are to benefit from this new science, which is still unknown to the general public: the procedure is thus a means of bribing men of influence to conduct themselves according to the political interests of the committee. Wheeler is less than pleased to learn the price of his life, especially when the fate of the attractive Dr. Layle Johnson (Angie Dickinson) is added to the balance. Walsh, meanwhile, gets into the facility, meets a roomful

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of zombie-like somas, and finally locates Wheeler and offers to help him take the whole story to the public. The film ends with Fielding and Redding called away to their next patient and the outcome of their conflict with Wheeler uncertain. * * * As in most tech-noir films featuring cloning and transplant procedures, matters of expense, limited availability, and the aggressive coercion of donors and beneficiaries, as well as the identification and rights of the person, are emphasized in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler. As in Roboman (1973) and other such films of the 1970s, these issues are treated overtly as social problems and discussed from different points of view by the film characters. The clones in the Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler invoke a sense of the uncanny because they are “blanks” that look something like everybody, but are devoid of personality; in this respect they seem to be aptly named after the soma used by urbanites in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932). Here, however, people cannibalize the somas and then speculate about the implications of their meaning in the greater social scheme of things, particularly how they change the possibilities of life for originals. While Wheeler clearly finds the murder of his look-alike in the interests of his own self-preservation horrifying, little is made of the clone’s potential life as an intelligent being. In the later Parts (1979) and The Island (2005), it is the clone, not the original, who arrives at a new awareness and understanding of humanity as he realizes his place in the social hierarchy: this shift is in keeping with the general preference for melodramatic victims that are both clearly identifiable as such and clearly worthy of sympathy and support. In these films, the lead clone character, like that in The 6th Day (2000), develops his autonomy and individuality through his encounters with his original; in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, the clones remain “zombies.” The reporter who can get word of the procedure to the public is posed as a potential solution to the involved individual’s problems and those problems the blackmailing operation poses for society as a whole. A similar plot resolution is offered in an array of films including The China Syndrome (1979), Manhattan Project (1986), and Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999). In Johnny Mnemonic (1995), it is less a matter of publicity and more a matter of getting specific data to the people who need it; while in Killer Deal (1999) a single tape demonstrating the coercion of just one “voluntary” body organ donor is enough to change the world. The implications of the fraudulent media coverage of the senator’s purported fishing trip are not factored into the assumption that getting word to the people will somehow solve everything: how are the “people” to know which stories are accurate?

Rising Sun Source: Based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same title, 1992 Writers: Michael Backes, Michael Crichton, and Philip Kaufman Director: Philip Kaufman Date: 1993 Length: 129 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control Webster Smith (Wesley Snipes) is a police officer with a shady past, and Captain John Connor (Sean Connery) is also a police officer with a shady past, but he also has an exceptional understanding of Japanese culture. Both are called in to solve the murder of Cheryl (Tatjana Patitz), which took place on the same boardroom table where negotiations for the sale of the American company Microcon to a Japanese corporation are being conducted. Eddie (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a member of a competing Japanese corporation who kept Cheryl as his mistress, finds himself framed for the murder with an altered digital recording of the event. Connor’s

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girlfriend Jingo (Tia Carrere) figures out that the disk the police were given is a fake. Eddie gives Connor and Smith the original disk, and then dies in a confrontation with the Japanese thugs who are after him – a confrontation that he precipitates, when he might have fled, to prevent further harm to others. Thanks to the efforts of Connor, Jingo, and Smith, he is exonerated of the murder accusation postmortem. Senator Morton (Ray Wise), a former opponent of the sale of the company to Japan who suddenly became its supporter, is exposed as Cheryl’s boardroom table sex partner, though not her murderer, and the object of a blackmail scheme. The murder itself is finally blamed on Bob Richmond (Kevin Anderson), one of the American “yuppie facilitators” used by the Japanese to further their interests; he flees and meets an untimely end on a construction site. * * * The corporate powers and wars that background many stories about technological development and the potential for its misuse are here “realistically,” rather than futuristically, dramatized. While the larger story includes the implications of sales of American technology to foreign competitors, the immediate murder mystery arises from manipulated digital images of the murder. These images place Rising Sun in the company of Blow Up (1966), Blade Runner (1982), and Judge Dredd (1995) in which photographs seem to be a repository of “truth” that either cannot be proven or proves to be false. Rising Sun, like Blade Runner, features digital, rather than 35mm photography as a superlative tool for image-based deception. Corporate war between Americans and Japanese is also part of the background context and several principal scenes in Freejack (1992) and RoboCop 3 (1993). The importance of social custom with regard to hierarchy is stressed repeatedly by various misunderstandings of Japanese culture and by Connor’s ability to manipulate several situations precisely because he does understand that culture. Jingo, however, knows that the Japanese technicians who created the false document correctly assumed Americans would be too sloppy to discover the forgery for themselves. Jingo has been ostracized from the country of her birth because she is of racially mixed blood and because she is deformed, but it is her training and carefully applied expertise in digital technology that leads to the truth about the supposed surveillance film. She helps the Americans because America – Connor in particular – is more tolerant of her mixed heritage and deformity: the dynamics of difference are thus essential to the outcome. Jingo plays her role from behind the scenes. Julie plays a similar role in Freejack (1992) when she uses her knowledge of Japanese and American cultural differences to win a corporate deal for her American employer. Smith, however, is quick to take the opportunity provided by a side trip through his old neighborhood to establish that there is a certain universality to forms of address when power plays are reduced to violence. Likewise, Eddie’s self-sacrifice so that Smith’s family will not suffer because of the entanglement he has fallen into suggests a nobility of character that transcends cultural difference. This emphasis on universally shared values as a means to undermining essentially racist prejudices also tends to appear in films that aim to justify a socially and legally sanctioned place for the artificial person: see, for example, Parts (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Cyborg 2 (1993), and The Island (2005).

RoboCop Writers: Michael Miner and Edward Neumeier Series: RoboCop 2, 1990 (Sequel) RoboCop 3, 1991/93 (Sequel) Director: Paul Verhoeven Date: 1987 Length: 102 min. 405

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Type: Cyborg Behavior modification Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Omni Consumer Products (OCP) has made its fortune from traditionally non-profit businesses, such as hospitals, prisons, and space exploration, but now, with “the Old Man” (Dan O’Herlihy) pressing forward with his vision of Old Detroit rebuilt as Delta City, OCP needs to get rid of crime. To that end, the company has contracted to run law enforcement using Richard Jones’s (Ronny Cox) Ed 209 robotic police officers. The Ed 209 is poorly designed and over-sized, and when it murders a company executive during a demonstration, its poor programming also becomes frighteningly apparent. Bob Mortan (Miguel Ferrer) steps up with his plans for a “RoboCop” and Detective Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), a devout Catholic and family man, is suddenly assigned to the Detroit Metro West police division and immediately murdered by the Old Detroit crime boss Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). The “deceased” Murphy is rebuilt as RoboCop and programmed with three prime directives: (1) Serve the Public Trust, (2) Protect the Innocent, and (3) Uphold the Law; but he also has a fourth classified directive. In spite of the efforts to erase all traces of his memory, Murphy’s deep feelings for his wife and son reassert themselves in a dream and, with a little help from his partner Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), he recovers awareness of his former identity. Meanwhile, Jones has Boddicker kill Mortan; RoboCop goes after Boddicker, who tells him he works for Jones, so RoboCop arrests Boddicker as a cop killer and then goes after Jones; unfortunately, the fourth directive prevents him from harming any OCP executive. RoboCop escapes an altercation with the Ed 209 in Jones’s office, only to find himself hunted by the police. Lewis gets him to an abandoned warehouse hideout; when Boddicker and his men come for him there, RoboCop is ready. Then he heads for the OCP head office where he shows Jones’s confession to Morgan’s murder to the Old Man; when Jones tries to take the Old Man hostage, the Old Man fires him, and RoboCop blasts Jones out the window. * * * This prototypical tech-noir film transforms the “blanc” motto “we can rebuild him” from Six-Million Dollar Man (1973) into “once we’ve destroyed him, we can do what we want with him,” a truth that is discovered by numerous film policemen, including Alex Rain in Nemesis (1992). Roboman (1973) and Terminal Man (1974) are other primers for those interested in film precedents for the metal and man merger. Roboman’s Martino, unlike Murphy, gets to keep one of his arms and has to change professions. The RoboCop cyborg is a recycled assemblage of parts and of genre markers: Murphy-RoboCop’s gun twirling is obviously borrowed from the western genre, while RoboCop’s prime directives invoke both Asimov’s robotic laws and Star Trek’s code of conduct for inter-species relations. These laws are here dramatized by an unusual subplot about a possible police strike that would seem to contradict the policeman’s “laws” or duty to serve and protect. The pointof-view shots accompanying Murphy’s transformation into RoboCop revisit those used in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and the classic “noir” Dark Passage (1947), and also establish a visual context for subsequent point-of-view shots demonstrating RoboCop’s tracking skills, prime directive listings, and internal data and information projections. RoboCop’s urban settings have become standard for tech-noir, including corporate office interiors, laboratories, the police station reception area, the basement where RoboCop goes to sit in a chair, and the various public spaces where many crimes are committed – streets, gas stations, corner stores, and abandoned warehouse and industrial areas. The film’s extremely blunt satirizing of the media and its complicity with corporate interests is unequalled in tech-noir film, but is consistent with the view conveyed by Rollerball (1975), Network (1976), Running Man (1987), and others. RoboCop’s memory and dream sequences are discussed in Chapter 3.

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RoboCop 2 (Sequel) Writers: Walon Green, Frank Miller, Michael Miner, and Edward Neumeier Series: See RoboCop, 1987 Director: Irvin Kerschner Date: 1990 Length: 117 min. Type: Cyborg Behavior modification Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Omni Consumer Products (OCP) calls in its loan to Old Detroit so as to speed up the rebuilding process initiated in RoboCop and also renews its efforts to create an obedient RoboCop 2 that will serve their interests more effectively than the first model. These efforts fail because the test subjects commit suicide, so psychologist Juliette Faxx (Belinda Bauer) gets the Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy) to let her consider a larger pool of potential donors. When Cain (Tom Noonan), a drug lord specializing in the highly addictive “nuke,” disassembles RoboCop (Peter Weller) and dumps his parts outside the police station where striking officers are picketing, Faxx reprograms him with a lot of politically correct situation responses that render him utterly useless to anyone, including his partner (Nancy Allen), in the field. In desperation, he electrocutes himself to erase the programming, including the prime directives, and then leads the police on a raid against Cain and brings him in. Dr. Faxx appropriates Cain from the hospital by turning off his life support and then has him transformed into RoboCop 2. Meanwhile, Cain’s girlfriend Angie (Galyn Görg) is manipulated by the boy Hob (Gabriel Damon) into offering the city a lot of drug money to stop the OCP takeover. “Robo-Cain” arrives, stops the deal, kills everyone, and leaves the dying Hob for RoboCop to find. The Old Man makes a public display of his large-scale model of Delta City and the new, equally super-sized, RoboCop 2; he then begins a tirade against nuke while holding a canister of the drug. The nuke-addicted Robo-Cain goes berserk, but RoboCop eventually stops him. OCP executives suggest to the Old Man that Dr. Faxx might be blamed for their part in the Robo-Cain business; the company did, after all, succeed with its takeover of Detroit. * * * RoboCop’s blunt satire on the corporatizing of America continues in this sequel. The opening minutes are devoted to an ad for the deadly “Magnavolt” car theft protection device and news stories on the destruction of the Amazon rain forest by the blow out at the nuclear power plant there, the Attorney General’s approval of the use of the obviously defective Ed 209 series in five major cities, and the assassination of the Surgeon General for opposing nuke; followed by a broadcast provided by the drug lord Cain and footage on the OCP cuts to the salaries and elimination of the pensions of local police. Super-sizing also continues to be popular: RoboCop 2 is bigger and has more weapons than RoboCop; the Old Man’s model for Detroit city, also bigger and supposedly better, is displayed on a moving platform that rises dramatically from the floor following his announcement of the OCP takeover of the city; and there are frequent ironic references to and shots of huge piles and bags of money and gold confiscated from the drug lord that cannot be used for any legitimate purpose. This film also moves the orchestrated “death” of Murphy in the first film to a more grisly level in the scenes showing the disassembling of and disassembled RoboCop and the footage of Cain’s eyes, brain, and spinal cord. Points of comparison with Roboman (1973) and Terminal Man (1974) again arise. As for Benson in the Terminal Man, technological intervention only makes Cain’s condition and propensity to violence worse. The commentary about lobotomies and surgical procedures that become popular because they make patients easier to control and the generally derogatory attitude toward psychology in Terminal Man is updated in RoboCop 2, such that the psychologist is also a computer programmer. Faxx’s “dialogue” with RoboCop 407

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is obviously one-sided, as she says, “I type it; you think it.” This spot of tech-noir conversation satirically reworks lines from Roboman: in one of that film’s flashbacks, Martino recalls something his former friend and colleague, later to become a Russian agent, said to him, “You think it [snaps fingers], pow, like that you got it! I have to work it out step by step. Oh, I get there, but I walk, you jump!” (0:48).

RoboCop 3 (Sequel) Writers: Fred Dekker, Frank Miller, Michael Miner, and Edward Neumeier Series: See RoboCop, 1987 Director: Dekker, Fred Date: 1991/93 Length: 104 min. Type: Cyborg Behavior modification Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Omni Consumer Products (OCP) has become a subsidiary of the Japanese-owned and operated international Kanemitsu (Mako) Corporation, but is still continuing with the plan to replace Old Detroit with Delta City. RoboCop (Robert John Burke) is still defying orders, so his new overseer Mr. Flek (Bradley Whitford) orders Dr. Lazarus (Jill Hennessy) to install a micro-neural barrier to make him more obedient, which she, of course, does not do. Meanwhile, OCP has created the Rehab unit, headed up by McDagget (John Castle), to complete the relocation of the inhabitants of the Old City, even as the wreckers make their way through the former neighborhoods. The resistance, led by Berthe (CCH Pounder), commandeers weapons and ammunition from the armory, supposedly guarded by an Ed 209, with a little help from a little girl Nikko (Remy Ryan Hernandez), who just happens to be very adept at controlling Ed 209s with her laptop computer. RoboCop tracks the rebels to a church, then sides with them against McDagget; his partner Lewis (Nancy Allen) is killed and RoboCop seriously injured, but the rebels take him to their underground hideout and Nikko goes to get Dr. Lazarus. When McDagget tries to commandeer the regular police for the Rehab unit, Sergeant Reed (Robert DoQui) leads the entire force off to help the rebels defend their turf against the Rehabs who are also supported by street thugs. Even the media abdicates from any part in the hostile city take-over: one news anchorwoman refuses to continue with a ludicrous story about RoboCop as a murderer of nuns and other innocents and walks off the set. Meanwhile, Kanemitsu Corporation sends ninja cyborgs after RoboCop: he defeats the first one, finds the flight accessory Dr. Lazarus had developed for him and which the rebels had stolen along with other things from the police armory, and flies in to save the day. First, he helps out Superman style in the street battle, and then goes after McDagget and does battle with two more ninjas. The ever-helpful Nikko reprograms the ninjas to kill each other, a trick that unfortunately also triggers a failsafe detonation device. RoboCop flies out of the building ahead of the blast with both Dr. Lazarus and Nikko. Kanemitsu departs after bowing to RoboCop. * * * In this second sequel, the original RoboCop story lines are concluded in flying superhero fashion: the plans for Delta City seem to be permanently derailed, the police recover their sense of public duty after dealing with the absurdities of the new administration, and RoboCop seems to have found a nurturing scientist and a little girl to replace his lost wife and son. The sexist comments directed primarily at Dr. Lazarus seem to be part of a continuation of script intended for Dr. Faxx in RoboCop 2 (1993), but as RoboCop’s own “screen” memories show, the characters in this series tend to blur into one another. Dr. Lazarus and Nikko provide corrective foils

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to the villainous characters of RoboCop 2’s Dr. Faxx and Hobb, with Nikko representing the popular notion that children are somehow better able to manage computers than adults as well as a new twist on the brains versus brawn struggle for power. This film also adds street punks and the defenders of the neighborhood to the series characters, and underground tunnels as hideouts for the rebels as sets. Lawnmower Man 2 (1996) also includes likeable street kids who live underground in abandoned subway tunnels. The forces opposing the old city demolition grow exponentially when the plan reaches the stage of forcing evictions and herding former residents onto buses for “relocation,” an action that automatically invokes the concentration/extermination camp, albeit reworked to assert the supremacy of the foreign controlled, capitalist-corporate elite over the impoverished, disempowered representatives of community values and individual freedom. See Freejack (1992) and especially Rising Sun (1993) for other tech-noir films featuring the revision of military conflict as corporate invasion.

Roboman (aka Who?) Source: Based on Algis Budrys’s novel Who? 1959 Writer: John Gould Director: Jack Gold Date: 1973 Country: United Kingdom Length: 90 min. Type: Cyborg Surveillance: Information and control Dr. Lucas Martino (Joseph Bova) is an American scientist and the key innovator of the “Neptune” project, which has something to do with harvesting food from the oceans. While at a conference, he and some colleagues go on an excursion, apparently to see the Russian border, and are in a car accident that only he survives – barely. The Russians get to him first and, under the direction of Colonel Azarin (Trevor Howard), restore him as a cyborg with only his brain and right arm intact. Azarin wants information; Martino is uncooperative, but there is not enough of his physical body left to torture. Plans are made to transform Martino’s friend and colleague at Neptune, Frank Heywood (John Stewart), presumed dead in the United States but actually employed as a Russian agent, into a second robotic man. The plan is to plant him in the United States as Martino, but Heywood dies shortly after the surgery. Martino is finally returned to his homeland only to be interrogated exhaustively again, this time by the FBI, headed by agent Sean Rogers (Elliot Gould), who has to prove the metal man really is Martino. The usual methods of establishing identity prove quite useless – Rogers explores all the aspects of Martino’s past already explored by the Russians, but without success. After a visit to his former girlfriend Edith (Kay Tornborg) at her apartment, which he quickly realizes is under surveillance, Martino gives up all hope of returning to his former profession and heads for the family farm where Rogers finally acknowledges that he really is Martino. * * * Like Wheeler in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971) and Benson in The Terminal Man (1974), Martino undergoes his transformation after a car accident; and, like Wheeler’s surgery, it takes place without his consent and in secret. When it is done, Martino, like Wheeler, finds himself the object of coercion regarding matters of importance to the state. Martino’s situation is further complicated by the Cold War paranoia of both his captors and rescuers. The film continually cuts between interrogations, flashbacks, and a few memory sequences that juxtapose Roger’s attempts to find information or anything that will prove Martino

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really is Martino with Colonel Azarin’s earlier interrogations, interrogations that show the Americans have no more information on their subject than the Russians do. Many of the sequences involving Azarin also include a monitoring screen fed by a camera in Martino’s room. Martino has nightmares related to his surgery and the interrogation process that are made worse by Azarin’s efforts to question him about his personal life in his sleep and possibly to try to “brainwash” him. All of these motifs and narration techniques – flashbacks, memories, and monitoring screens – are used in later tech-noir films particularly in contexts of coercion and the aggressive invasion of the subject’s mind and body by technology. Memory sequences are used for the moments that might provide a definitive clue to Martino’s identity – an Uncle, a love interest, and another girl – but none provides the elusive and crucial proof. Martino dedicated his adult life to the Neptune project and can only prove his identity by demonstrating his ability to perform tasks only he can perform. By the time the government pressures Rogers into letting Martino return to Neptune, however, Martino no longer wants to go: having decided he really is no longer the man he was, he prefers to be where he is accepted for what he is now – a metal man. Indeed, most of this film is a contemplation of the effect of extensive prosthetic substitutions for failed, destroyed, or lost biological parts on the subject’s identity and humanity: when a man is no longer recognizable, is he still who he was? DNA testing, which acquired credibility in the late 1980s and 1990s, makes the confusion about biological identity as moot as the Cold War, but the discussion about technology’s effect on our humanity continues to haunt tech-noir films from RoboCop (1987) to I, Robot (2004). Nemesis (1992) addresses the cyborg’s humanity relative to percentages of technological and biological parts, as does Heatseeker (1995) to a lesser extent.

Rollerball Source: Based on William Harrison’s short story “Roller Ball Murder,” 1973 Series: Rollerball, 2002 (based on the same story) Writer: William Harrison Director: Norman Jewison Date: 1975 Country: United Kingdom Length: 125 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Jonathan E. (James Caan) is Houston’s team champion in Rollerball, an extraordinarily violent game played by men on roller blades and motorcycles in a circular ring with a heavy ball and funded by the same Energy Corporation that happens to be sole manager of all world affairs. When Bartholomew (John Houseman), the head of the Corporation, tries to force him into retirement just as the penalty rules are about to be thrown out of the game, Jonathan is reluctant and a little curious. He is also unsatisfied with his privilege card and the women assigned in succession to him at his ranch, and he is disturbed when he realizes that all the books of the world have been transcribed and that all output, including that relating to the history of how the Corporation came to power, is controlled by the computer Zero. During a game in Tokyo, the first to be played without penalties, Moonpie (John Beck), Jonathan’s best team member, suffers injuries that leave him in a vegetative state on permanent life support. Upset by the changes to the game and the fate of his friend, Jonathan goes to Geneva to ask Zero how it is that decisions affecting the state are made: the machine’s response is incoherent. Meanwhile, the Corporation’s fear of Jonathan’s growing popularity is increasing and, when their effort to use his former wife Ella (Maud Adams) to bribe him into retirement fails, they resolve that, since the sole purpose of the game is to confirm the futility of individual human action, any player who defies that purpose must be made to lose. At the next game in New York there are no penalties, no

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substitutions, and no time limit. No one is meant to leave the ring alive. Jonathan, the last player standing, scores the only goal to outstanding applause. * * * Jonathan is unexceptional, except for his talent at a ridiculous sport that has reached worldwide popularity and made his name a household word. Although not especially introverted or given to contemplation of the ways of the world beyond the game, he realizes that the changes brought about by the Corporation have only served the Corporation. Like Todd in Soldier (1998), he becomes aware that when he no longer serves the interests of those who control his professional life, he is disposable. Like Todd also, Jonathan identifies with his team, but must ultimately stand apart from all collectives. Todd, however, finds a new world amidst the familiar conservative reference points of children, family, and community; Jonathan finds his former wife has been as thoroughly taken in by the system as everyone else, leaving him with nothing but the game. Even Ben Richards, the lead character in The Running Man (1987), a film that is comparable to Rollerball in its emphasis on a game that serves to divert public attention from corporate power-mongering, finds companionship and allies in his fight for release from wrongful imprisonment and for survival when conscripted into a fight to the death game. Likewise, the human Chance in Heatseeker (1995) only participates in a violent, unregulated cyborg fight competition because his love for his fiancée makes him subject to blackmail. Jonathan is a far more existential character than either Richards or Chance who ultimately loses the comforts of a limited awareness and acquires nothing in return but isolation and enemies; as Sartre once wrote “hell is other people”; or as Cypher, who plays Judas to his comrades in Matrix (1999) for a chance to return to a state of unenlightened bliss says, “Why oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?” John McTiernan’s Rollerball (2002) is a more simplistic teen film with more carnival elements, more literal attention to the game owners’ fixation on ratings and rigged violence, and a more dedicated love interest for Jonathan; and without the computer Zero and other tech-noir elements.

R.O.T.O.R. Writers: Cullen Blaine and Budd Lewis Director: Cullen Blaine Date: 1988 Length: 90 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong In a world plagued by violent crime, Dr. Brett Coldyron (Richard Gesswein) begins working on ROTOR, or the Robotic Officer of Tactical Operations Research (Carroll Brandon and Baker), in a Dallas facility. A working prototype is years away, but Coldyron’s political and financial benefactors demand a product within sixty days, so he quits, goes off for an afternoon with his beautiful girlfriend, only to return to service when his incompetent assistant Houghtaling and his robot “Willard” mistakenly activate the unit with an electrical charge. The unit immediately goes to work, targeting a speeder and, with his “judge and execute” directive firmly in place, shoots him and then pursues his victim’s fiancée and former passenger Sonya (Margaret Trigg) across country. Coldyron tries to help Sonya, but decides to abandon her to her own resources for some twelve hours while he calls in Dr. Steele (Jayne Smith) from Houston for help. They meet up with Sonya at the predesignated fishing lodge and successfully deactivate the unit. Coldyron quits his job again, after explaining to his supervisors that he already has a ranch, a horse, and a pretty girlfriend. One of his erstwhile allies shoots him dead on his way to his SUV and someone sends Coldyron’s research papers to his nephew, a university student who finishes the tale with some voice-overs about his uncle. * * * 411

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A self-professed grade B movie with a lot of obvious references to westerns thrown in, R.O.T.O.R. is full of entertainingly stereotyped dialogue and visuals. The nephew with the real story on what happened to his uncle is a frame comparable to that provided by H.G. Wells for The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and this film targets the rest of the world for at least as much satire as any of the Dr. Moreau remakes. ROTOR, surely a pun on rotor blades, does not look anything like the prototype shown by Coldyron on a 35mm film reel, surely a pun on the questionable accuracy of visual records – even the pre-digital kinds that are perhaps less easily manipulated. Neither does ROTOR look like the Terminator (1984), who is referenced several times in the movie script: Willard, the robotic assistant marks the electrical surge that activates ROTOR by saying, “I got the feeling this is how Terminator got started,” and ROTOR, somewhat like the T-1000 Terminator, is made from an “unknown alloy” capable of learning. ROTOR’s imitation of the first Terminator’s head movements is deliberately made less than convincing by the actor’s moustache. The electric surge as the spark that gives life to an artificial person is also featured in Frankenstein (1994, 2004), as well as Android (1982). The judge, jury, and executioner role programmed into ROTOR is reassigned to humans and a clone or two in Judge Dredd (1995). Willard possibly owes something of his character to Robot No. 5 in the comedy Short Circuit (1986), but he bears the same name as the nasty man in the horror film Willard (1971) who uses his pet rats to kill people who have been mean to him. R.O.T.O.R. does more than parody popular genres and androids, however; it also reverses a number of the usual approaches to literary and film plot development and camera positioning. For example, the woman fleeing ROTOR is abandoned to her own devices for a considerable length of time, without the usual crosscutting to enhance a sense of tension and crisis: whatever she does to stay ahead of ROTOR is left almost entirely to the viewer’s imagination. Similarly, Coldyron’s intimate dinner date with his girlfriend is viewed from a distance and without audio surveillance. This sort of private moment is usually capitalized on as an opportunity to add titillating conversation and romantic intrigue to a film; here it is treated according to Coldyron’s own priorities and that means it is off limits to everyone but himself. The final battle between Dr. Steel, who turns out to be the prototype for ROTOR II, and ROTOR is kept in the visual background so that more attention goes to Coldyron’s concerned attention to Sonya.

The Running Man Source: Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same title, 1982 (pseudonym Richard Bachman) Writer: Steven E. de Souza Director: Paul Michel Glaser Date: 1987 Length: 101 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Cyborg Surveillance: Information and control In 2017, helicopter pilot Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is framed as the “Butcher of Bakersfield” after he refuses to fire on an unarmed crowd from his helicopter. He escapes prison with the help of Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre), both members of a resistance led by Mic (Mick Fleetwood) and committed to revealing the evils of the police state to the people by retaking control of the media. Ben goes to his brother’s apartment to find it occupied by Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), who manages to get him rearrested, and he and his prison break friends are soon fighting for their lives on the game show “Running Man” hosted by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson). Amber, who finally realizes Ben really was framed, is caught looking for the disk showing the real events that occurred at the Bakersfield massacre and thus joins Ben and his buddies in the game. The unlucky contestants are implanted with trackers and forced

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to fight in the urban ruins of Los Angeles against oddly accoutered game heroes, such as Subzero (Toru Tanaka), who wears skates and wields a heavy stick, the aptly named Buzz Saw (Gus Rethwisch), the “electric” Dynamo (Erland van Lidth), and Fireball (Jim Brown). The runners discover that the state broadcasting station is inside the show precinct and Weiss even manages to get the uplink codes and has Amber memorize them just before he is executed; Laughlin also dies from his injuries. Ben and Amber are still at large, so Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) is called out of retirement and phony images of his successful execution of the prisoners are broadcast. Meanwhile, Ben and Amber are captured by Mic, who quickly arranges for the “Running Man” audience to see authentic images of the massacre which clearly show Ben to be the hero who tried to stop it. Ben leads the resistance to the game show studio, dumps Damon into his own show’s flight and fight precinct, and claims Amber as his prize. * * * The world of Running Man is more or less a police state and, needless to say, the prisons are equipped with all sorts of surveillance gadgetry, sonic fences, control collars, cameras, and monitors; the world outside the prisons is controlled by the media, particularly the game show “Running Man,” in which tracking implants and the surveillance of the contestants are essential to the success of the show as a distraction. Like Rollerball (1975), this film places a ridiculous and violent game at the center of the public’s attention such that no one seems to notice that poverty, homelessness, and loss of any awareness of history have become the social norm. The wealthy and middle class enjoy the game from the comforts of their homes or as part of the in-studio audience; the poor watch on large outdoor screens. This film, like The China Syndrome (1979), Manhattan Project (1986), and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and others, optimistically proposes that the solution to society’s problems lies in using the media as a means of getting the “truth” to the people. The faked massacre and subsequent faked defeat of the game contestants broadcast to the public are more elaborate variations of the faked capture arranged to put an end to Montag’s flight from society in both Ray Bradbury’s novel (1953) and Francois Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451 (1966). A device, such as that implanted in Schwarzenegger’s thigh to facilitate tracking and surveillance, is removed from Jean-Claude Van Damme in Universal Soldier (1992), while Christopher Lambert relives the thigh implant moment in Fortress 2 (1999). Lambert’s character, like Schwarzenegger’s, also suffers a “real” capture by means of a net – an instrument of control that perfectly symbolizes the web of political interests that have taken over his life.

Screamers Source: Based on Philip K. Dick’s short story “Second Variety,” 1953 Writers: Dan O’Bannon and Miguel Tegada-Flores Director: Christian Duguay Date: 1995 Countries: Canada, Japan, and United States Length: 107 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Android: Security and security gone wrong The NEB Corporation controls mining operations on Sirius 6B, including berynium, the solution to the energy crisis. Miners and scientists formed the “Alliance” to stop the mining because it causes radiation and pollution. The NEB declared war and bombed civilian cities in their efforts to wipe out the Alliance, so the Alliance sent the screamers – burrowing, automated swords programmed to reproduce themselves and kill anything with a heartbeat. The Alliance soldiers have bracelet “tabs” that neutralize the sound of their

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heartbeats; they also smoke special cigarettes to neutralize the effects of radiation. After ten years of war, Alliance Colonel Joe Hendricksson (Peter Weller) and Chuck (Ron White), his second, receive a message from the NEB camp offering safe passage for two men to peace negotiations: the messenger is sliced to bits by the screamers. Joe requests direction from earth and gets a garbled virtual reality response from Secretary Green about the discovery of radiation-free berynium on another planet. Meanwhile, a purported civilian ship crash lands nearby, but it is carrying weapons and a nuclear reactor. The lone survivor “Ace” (Andrew Lauer) says these items were destined for the new mining colony, now the main battlefront; he also says that Secretary Green died two years ago. Realizing that Sirius 6B has been abandoned, Joe sets off with Ace to make his own peace. They meet two NEB survivors, Becker (Roy Dupuis) and Ross (Charles Powell), and Jessica (Jennifer Rubin), a former black market operative who offers to serve as their guide mainly because she does not think she will last long with “Jekyll and Hyde,” meaning Ross and Becker. Unfortunately, blood is all that remains of the NEB, but Joe learns that the screamers have evolved into new types – a small reptile, a little boy with a teddy bear, a wounded soldier, and an active soldier that can adopt the face from any victim – he does not learn about the Jessica model until later. Becker proves to be a screamer and he kills Ross and Ace; Joe blows Becker in half and bonds with Jessica. They head for the escape pod hidden for the Alliance leader’s use, where Chuck appears as a screamer. After Joe finishes him off, Jessica says she cannot go with him – the plane is a one seater after all – then a second Jessica shows up for a fight: the winner’s last words suggest she cared for Joe, but was afraid of what she might have done on earth. Joe departs, tossing his tab onto a shelf where it strikes a teddy bear making tiny, but ominous, motions. * * * This film poses the escalation of employer–worker conflict to all out war over the problems of resources and health: see Total Recall (1990) and Phoenix (1995) for other films about evolving technology, mining, and corporate self-interest. Opposed military camps similar to those the screamers are trying to eradicate appear in Omega Doom (1996): in that film, both camps are occupied by androids and both have to be eliminated so that humans can repopulate the area. The original screamers are a few technological evolutionary sidesteps from the ninja Takeru in Shadow Fury (2001). The military weapon that, like the screamer, is unable to distinguish friendly and enemy combatants also leads to the production of the defective “toy” Evolver (1994), while humanoid “sims” are assassins in TekWar (1994), and an artificial creature is able to mimic his victims in Terminator 2 (1991) and Project Shadowchaser III (1995). Here, the survivor thinks he escapes with the girl, and then escapes the planet alone, but takes one of the screamer teddy bears with him. Similarly, in Alien (1979), one person escapes with her cat from an alien, escapes again without the cat in Aliens (1986), only to discover that the alien hitched a ride in Alien 3 (1992). The movement of the group led by Jessica into what is left of the NEB headquarters is also reminiscent of the Alien-style “bug-hunt.” Jessica’s reference to Ross and Becker as Jekyll and Hyde describes their human and screamer status; this reference, taken with Becker’s frequent Shakespearian quotations, suggests that literature played a role in the evolution of the screamers.

Shadow Fury Writers: Eric Koyangi and Makoto Yokoyama Director: Makoto Yokoyama Date: 2001 Length: 93 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Clone: Body parts

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Five scientists at Nova Corporation work on human cloning after it has been banned: Dr. Oh (Noriyuki “Pat” Morita), Dr. Munroe (Gil Amelio), Dr. Markov (Gregory Vahanian), Dr. Louise Forster (Alexandra Kamp-Groeneveld), and Dr. Hiller (Allan Kolman). Without his partners’ knowledge, Dr. Hiller is already marketing the superior killers he has created with DNA from Jack the Ripper and other humans and animals. His immediate problem, however, is that Dr. Oh, whom the group fired because they thought he was mentally unstable, has actually developed an “obedience strain” of clone and used it to make a clone of the ninja Takeru (Masakatsu Funaki). Dr. Oh sends Takeru after his former colleagues and his former colleagues send Bob, a clone, to acquire the services of alcoholic mercenary Mitchell Madsen (Sam Bottoms) to defend them. Madsen is haunted by the death of his men in a military operation and he has just learned that there is no donor available for the liver transplant he needs, so his interest in the Nova job is peaked when they promise him Takeru’s liver. Madsen kills Dr. Oh, but Takeru gets past Madsen, who seems to be more interested in playing the piano than setting up defenses, and kills Dr. Munroe. Takeru also meets a prostitute named Sasha (Cassandra Grae) who takes a liking to him after he saves her from a local gang; she tries to convince him that he does not need to kill. Madsen tries to hide Forster at “the Fortress,” but Takeru gets past him; just as he is about to execute her, Sasha throws herself in front of his sword so that he kills her instead. Madsen and Takeru team up and take out Hiller’s forces, including his fast growing pet clone Kismet (Bas Rutten), the experimental mutants that preceded him, and the last Bob clones. Takeru finishes off the opposition in a final suicidal assault after telling Madsen he can have his liver and asking that he be buried with Sasha. * * * Takeru is as inarticulate as the replicant in Replicant (2001), and like him, comes of age in the company of a friendly prostitute; this encounter furthers the break both characters make from their programming: the replicant realizes he likes girls and Takeru regrets killing Sasha so much that he proceeds to kill for vengeance and justice rather than because of orders. The artificially enhanced heroes in Universal Soldier (1992, 1999) and Soldier (1998), and the android in Solo (1996), likewise master their programmed instructions to kill, but only Solo makes his transition without any special help from a woman. Shadow Fury includes three principal levels of clones: Bob, Takeru, and Kismet, although Dr. Oh seems to have an army of lesser Takerus on call as well. The mercenary villain, Dr. Hiller, who, somewhat shockingly, works on a Mac laptop, manipulates Bob like a puppet, looking through his eyes and speaking words that the clone then repeats. Takeru has not been wired in this way and the obedience strain is clearly meant as a substitute for the kind of pain-inducing control implants used on prisoners in Fortress (1992) and the animalmen on Dr. Moreau’s island (1996). Oddly, Takeru seems briefly confounded when he is faced with innocents – a point dramatized by a shift to Takeru’s visual point of view and the representation of that view as infrared vision more consistent with an android. Kismet ends his first combat demonstration by affirming his kinship with machines – by repeatedly and rhythmically stabbing Bob’s body after he is dead. Sam Bottoms is made to look just a little bit like a very scruffy Harrison Ford: this Blade Runner (1982) allusion is confirmed when Madsen is hired to kill clones – ready stand-ins for Deckard’s android “skin jobs.” Madsen, however, is also comparable to the characters played by Jean-Claude Van Damme in Cyborg (1989), Universal Soldier (1992), and Replicant in that he is haunted by his memories and flashbacks. Madsen’s status as a war veteran and survivor of a nerve gas attack, in conjunction with his need for a body part, provides a context that makes both the obvious misuses of cloning technology and the banning of that technology seem more absurd than might otherwise be the case given the villainy of the villains.

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The 6th Day Writers: Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley Director: Roger Spottiswoode Date: 2000 Length: 124 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Virtual reality: Mind transplant Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his partner Hank Morgan (Michael Rapaport) run the Double X charter business, and spend much of their time flying snowboarders into the mountains. Hank replaces Adam on a job for Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) so that Adam can have his daughter’s recently deceased pet dog cloned at a Drucker subsidiary called “RePet.” Drucker owns a giant corporation dedicated to illegally developing and exploiting cloning technology invented by Dr. Weir (Robert Duvall) in direct contravention of the “sixth day” laws preventing such activity. The law refers to a biblical moment: “God created man in his own image, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Genesis 1.17.31). Dr. Weir is desperate to find a way to save his wife who is dying of cystic fibrosis; he has already cloned her once, but the clone has the same disease. Clones have no legal rights, cannot own property, and are denied “human” status; but Drucker plans to use clones with limited life spans to gain strategic control over the government. When Hank lands in the mountains, anti-clone activists murder him so they can murder Drucker; but Weir Industries reclones Drucker and, at first believing Hank to be Adam, clones both Hank and Adam intending to murder both of the originals. Hank and Adam were supposedly drug-tested before the flight, but instead their memories were “syncorded” and blood samples taken as a security precaution in case of just the eventuality that arose – memories and blood samples being all that are required to make a fully functional clone – without the memories that follow the syncording process, of course. The cloned Adam wakes up outside the RePet store and to the eventual discovery that his clone, or rather his original, is enjoying his wife, daughter, and birthday party. Clone and original get together to rescue “their” family, which Drucker takes hostage, and destroy both the cloning facility and Drucker. * * * The 6th Day’s visual effects pick up where the dialogue leaves off, presenting witty comparisons of clones with state-of-the-art automated and virtual reality toys. Memory imprinted clones are clearly as superior to “Sim-pals,” the large animated dolls enjoyed by little girls, as they are to the Sim-pal’s virtual reality counterpart enjoyed by grown-up bachelors like Hank. The visual dramatization of the double is thorough and entertaining, involving impersonation, mirror and glass reflections, mechanical toys and tools, virtual reality projections, and, of course, clones. Adam gets up in the morning and shaves while looking at himself in the bathroom mirror and simultaneously watches a virtual reality newscast projection on his mirror about a football player, actually a clone, whom everyone thought was dead. Later, when Adam the clone peers into his house through the window at “his” family, his own reflection stares back at him from the glass. The clone, unlike the Double X charter company’s second helicopter, which can be controlled with a device held by a person in the first one, is capable of developing into a fully autonomous person – albeit one with some unique identity issues. The summary plot resolution, which comes after Drucker is destroyed, suggests that the man on the street may come to terms with cloning in the same way he might come to terms with a twin brother discovered in adulthood. Judge Dredd (1995) and Replicant (2001) are variations of this particular plot line that develop the good and evil twin rather than the harmonious siblings and “like minds” approach. The final optimism about cloning is likely to leave some viewers questioning the decision of Dr. Weir’s wife to not be cloned again. Dr. Weir is a more sympathetic character than Terminal Choice’s (1985) Dr. Dodson: both doctors justify their 416

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illegal work as a means of saving their wives; but Dodson knowingly murders people with his experimental drug, while Dr. Weir is just a man whose love for his wife leaves him vulnerable to manipulation by the man with the money.

Slipstream Writers: Bill Bauer and Tony Kayden Director: Steven Lisberger Date: 1989 Country: United Kingdom Length: 102 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers  rologue Voice-Over (no text): By the end of the century man’s destruction of the earth’s environment P turned the forces of nature upon him. There are many stories about the converging earthquakes that split continents apart mixing civilizations together, about the floods that buried the cities, and the emergence of a river of wind called the slipstream that washed the planet clean. Those stories all happened years ago, but this story is about a fugitive traveling the slipstream who needed a friend. Will Tasker (Mark Hamill) and his partner Belitski (Kitty Aldridge) are bounty hunting law enforcers who use their small airplane to reach isolated populations. Tasker is thrilled to capture Byron (Bob Peck), an android wanted for murder who seems to be guilty only of assisting his master’s suicide. Matt (Bill Paxton) needs some quick cash to start up a balloon manufacturing company, so he abducts Byron intending to collect the bounty himself and without realizing that Byron is an android. In flight from Tasker and Belitski, they stop first at Matt’s home where Byron heals a small boy’s cataracts; then they help some recently raided villagers, who, being members of a wind cult opposed to all technology, are less than grateful: one man, Avatar (Ben Kingsley), prefers death to being helped by an android. The villagers lash Byron to a giant box kite and string him up in a windstorm; they leave Matt tied up below where he can watch. Tasker and Belitski arrive, untie Matt, and explain to him that Byron is an android. In spite of the storm, Matt climbs the tether with the aid of a balloon, frees Byron, and then finds Belitski has joined them. The half-cut tether breaks and they all crash. Byron finds and carries Matt and Belitski to the safety of a cave, but he cannot find Tasker. Ariel (Eleanor David) joins them and offers to help if they help her to get away from the wind cult people; Belitski chooses to go find Tasker. Ariel takes Matt and Byron to Matt’s broken plane, which they repair; they fly off with Byron tied to the wings and Ariel in the back seat. Their destination is Ariel’s home – a museum occupied by a largely aging population enjoying the local stores of wine, food, and music. Byron shows off the dancing talents he acquired while watching his master’s Fred Astaire movies and learns something of life and love with Ariel; he also sleeps for the first time and actually dreams about a place with others of his kind that he has hitherto only imagined. While the local administrators are speculating about how they can keep Byron as part of their collection; Matt tells him he is free and invites him to be his partner in the balloon business. Unfortunately, Tasker and Belitski find them. Matt handcuffs Belitski to a bed and Tasker kills Ariel. Byron goes with Tasker, but then kills him by crashing the plane. Matt and Belitski become partners with plans to set up a balloon business and Byron heads off to find others like himself at the end of the slipstream (aka the rainbow). The film closes with marvelous shots of fantastic balloons. * * * Much of this film’s action is set in the desert, as are numerous post-apocalypse films; this one, however, is memorable for the unusual contrast developed between the expansive skies and seeming freedom of 417

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individualized air transport and the more labyrinthine caves and museum sets. Museum displays are also used to accentuate the changing times in Cyborg 2 (1993). The pointed verbal reference in the Slipstream prologue to the merging of civilizations as part of the apocalypse and the later representation of the wind cult’s dedication to remaining pure by shunning technology are also unusual, but significant tech-noir elements. The android as stand-in for the pre-apocalypse human and “Renaissance man” also appears in Circuitry Man’s (1990, 1994) Danner. The dual implication of both Byron and Danner is that the “human” may only have existed in the imagination and that the “human” will only survive the technological future insofar as it is artificially preserved in computer programs. Another “romantic” android stars in The Companion (1994). Like Byron, Sonny in I, Robot (2004) helped his master commit suicide prior to the moment the film opens and also progresses to a level of self-awareness that seems to exceed that of many humans.

Sneakers Writers: Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, and Phil Alden Robinson Director: Phil Alden Robinson Date: 1992 Length: 125 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems In their youth, Martin Brice and his partner Cosmo get into trouble playing “steal from the rich and give to the poor” on their computers: Cosmo goes to jail where he supposedly dies; Brice becomes Martin Bishop (Robert Redford) and sets up a company that does legal break-ins to help improve corporate security. Phony NSA agent Buddy Wallace (Eddie Jones) tricks Bishop into stealing the ultimate decoding box developed by Dr. Gunter Janek. Bishop and his team get the box, but have to steal it again when they realize it has gone to the very much alive Cosmo (Ben Kingsley), who is now set up in offices fronted by a toy company and who has ambitious plans for its illegal use. Bishop’s team includes Donald Crease (Sidney Poitier), terminated from the CIA in 1987, boy genius Carl (River Phoenix), gadget expert Mother (Dan Aykroyd), and blind sound specialist Whistler (David Strathaim). With the help of Bishop’s former girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell), they pull off both capers but are caught by the real NSA in the form of Bernard Abbott (James Earl Jones). Brice, meanwhile, has figured out that the decoding box has nothing to do with ongoing Cold War paranoia as they originally supposed, since it is only useful for breaking American codes: Russian codes are of a completely different type. They turn over the disabled box in return for various favors from the government; notably, a Winnebago for Mother, a young female NSA agent’s phone number for Carl, and peace on earth for Whistler. A concluding newscast announces the bankruptcy of the Republican political party and large anonymous donations to such organizations as Greenpeace. * * * This film manages the shuffle from the standard Cold War plot about the external enemy that can infiltrate and corrupt from within, to ordinary capitalist-motivated corruption and greed extremely well: the decryption box that would only have applications on American security systems is certainly a sign of the changing times. Like most of the films in the “Surveillance: Security systems” category, Sneakers dramatizes the potential for internet system access codes to be stolen and used by terrorists; but it is distinguished by a long, very slow, but very high tension, movement to the successful second theft of the box and by an exceptionally blunt concluding political statement that is very much in the spirit of the days of most of the team’s youth. The computer specialist who is subject to blackmail because he has been criminalized for actions many in the film audience are likely to applaud also appears in a number of the “Surveillance: Security systems” films,

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notably Hackers (1995) and Swordfish (2001). Foolproof (2003) develops a plotline that is similar to Sneakers, but with younger adults lacking a criminal past who are subject to blackmail because a break-in game they play has been stolen and the thief is prepared to use it to incriminate them. Sneakers plays out a generational “real-life” Robin Hood idealism and the consequences of that idealist action; Foolproof shows the attraction of both technology and role-playing games for young adults in boring jobs at the turn of the millennia – none of whom ever demonstrate the slightest impulse to try to make the world a better place. In Ghost in the Machine (1993), Bram Walker plays a computer-whiz character who, like Brice, suffers the consequences of a momentary “Robin Hood” whim, but is then available to save a mother and son from a digitized serial killer. Something of the idealism of an earlier time passes to the younger generation of WarGames (1983), The Manhattan Project (1986), and even Hackers (1995).

Soldier Writer: David Webb Peoples Director: Paul Anderson Date: 1998 Length: 99 min. Type: Behavior modification Bioengineering: Transformation In 1996, Todd (Kurt Russell) is one of the infants selected for the Adam project, given special training to make him an effective soldier, and then put into service in battle after battle, on and off earth, with no opportunity for a personal or any kind of emotional life beyond that of fear and discipline. Church (Gary Busey), who is Todd’s commanding officer, and Mekem (Jason Isaacs), head of a new team of bioengineered soldiers, arrange a contest in which Todd is defeated by the bioengineered Caine 607 (Jason Scott Lee). Presumed dead, he is discarded with the bodies of two of his fellows on Arcadia 234, a desert-like waste disposal planet torn by dangerously high winds. Colonists originally destined for the Trinity moons crashed on Arcadia years before and have survived there in habitations constructed out of recycled waste. They take Todd in and he gradually learns something about humanity and family life from his host Mace (Sean Pertwee), Mace’s wife Sandra (Connie Nielsen), and their mute son Nathan. In spite of his obvious usefulness, the colonists are afraid of Todd’s strength and combat skills and, after Mace and Sandra misinterpret his efforts to teach Nathan how to kill one of the deadly snakes that thrive on the planet and which caused his muteness, they exile him. After Nathan kills a snake just as Todd taught him – with his boot – Mace realizes their mistake, and goes to bring Todd back. He is almost immediately killed when Mekum, Church, and the new and improved soldiers arrive on Arcadia 234 for another training exercise and start killing everything in sight, including the colonists who are classified as enemy “hostiles.” After Todd has killed off the bioengineered soldiers, his former platoon members, demoted to service as maintenance men, are sent to set a bomb that will detonate after the ship takes off. Mekum shoots Church for refusing to leave without them. Meanwhile, the men sent to set the bomb become reacquainted with Todd, join forces with him, commandeer the ship, get the surviving colonists on board, and then arrange to leave the other commanders to die on the planet while they set course for the Trinity moons. The film closes as Nathan bonds with Todd. * * * This tech-noir film has three principal sequences, including the initial contest between the old and new soldiers that takes place almost entirely inside a warehouse-like facility, the recovery of one of the discarded soldiers on Arcadia, and the second face off between the old soldier and new soldiers on that same planet.

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The conclusion is that biology is better than biotech; thus the older and harshly educated soldiers are redeemed in the end as both soldiers and humans, while the new bioengineered soldiers are defeated and eradicated. Programmed and bioengineered soldiers are also featured in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), but Todd’s prolonged emotional deprivation and clumsy rediscovery of human society on a waste disposal planet conveys the solitary plight of the abandoned soldier more convincingly. See Solo (1996) for a similar tale based on an android character, complete with a somewhat differently orchestrated snake scene, villagers in need of protection, and a new and improved android sent to assassinate him. Like Solo also, this film shows some resemblance to the western The Magnificent Seven (1960), as well as its prototype, The Seven Samurai (1954). In The Magnificent Seven mercenaries rescue a village of peasants from some bullies with guns. The older model android that defeats a newer one is also featured in Terminator 2 and 3 (1991, 2003). The recycling theme that comes to the fore when the action shifts to Arcadia is also part of the lifestyle of the displaced urban dwellers in such films as Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and RoboCop 3 (1993), and is extended to human bodies in Universal Soldier: none of these films takes the recycling of human beings quite so far as Soylent Green (1973), however. The notion that people are disposable and not worth fixing if they get old or break is sometimes highlighted by contrasts with technology, as when the General in Solo expresses his delight that Solo is not entitled to medical benefits.

Solo Source: Based on Robert Mason’s novel Weapon, 1990 Writer: David L. Corley Director: Norberto Barba Date: 1996 Countries: Mexico and United States Length: 94 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Solo (Mario Van Peebles) is an American android prototype sent to stop the building of a Central American airstrip. Instead of carrying out an order that violates his directive not to harm noncombatants, he sabotages the charges that would have resulted in many deaths. Back at his base on board ship, Solo is playing with a tarantula when Bill (Adrien Brody), his programmer, comes to make repairs and temporarily remove his power regulator such that Solo has to rely on his back-up generator. Solo is drawing a spider when he overhears a transmission from the disgruntled General Haynes (Barry Corbin) scheduling him for reprogramming. Acting on his directive to “preserve self,” he flees, escapes his pursuers, crashes in a jungle, and wanders into an ancient Indian temple. While recharging, he experiences memory flashes of his training with Bill, the selection of his basketball player face, and a combat test in which he kills a man who unexpectedly aims a gun at the generals: Solo especially notes Bill’s disappointed reaction, which is distinct from that of the generals. When Miguel (Abraham Verduzco), a curious little boy, enters the temple, Solo saves him from a poisonous snake; the boy brings the villagers, who are being forced to build the air strip in question, and they, believing that Solo is dead, prepare him for burial. When their exploiters arrive, Solo defends them and, although some at first think he is a cannibalistic forest spirit, he agrees to help them. Colonel Madden (William Sadler) is sent in and he uses Bill for bait, but Solo rescues Bill, who hands him his repaired power modulator and then dies. Solo realizes that Bill has defied the prime directive to preserve self and takes his body to the temple. Soon after, he too defies this directive by defending the village. Madden ultimately fails, so Haynes sends in the next generation Madden look-alike prototype android, and he immediately finishes off his rapidly expiring human predecessor; but Solo defeats him by practicing the art of bluffing, something he learned

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from the local children, and pulls the underground temple down on them both. The film concludes with the sound of Solo’s newly discovered ability to laugh ricocheting through the valley. * * * Solo, like Sonny in I, Robot (2004) and Murphy in RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993), is governed by a variation of Asimov’s prime directives for robots. Solo is unusual, however, in that he has dark rather than white skin and, although he is supposedly 100 percent android, he likes to draw: see I, Robot for another android who draws. The camera also lends Solo points of view and experiences more commonly granted humans; for example, while disoriented after crashing in the jungle his vision is a little fuzzy and the visual frame reels about, much like that of the disoriented shipwreck survivor Braddock in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977). The jungle setting and somewhat unstable colonel’s behavior also compare with Universal Soldier (1992). Here, however, a Mesoamerican locale is supported by the hieroglyphics in the local temple ruins; the villagers give Solo a place within their own cultural context when they call him a forest spirit and when they apply their burial rituals to him. Solo, in turn, shows his increasing humanity by his treatment of Bill’s body after he sacrifices himself so that Solo can be immortal. While mortality and immortality often polarize human and android characters, burial rituals are rarely part of the android’s anthropomorphization. See Shadow Fury (2001) for another film in which an artificial being buries a human who showed him kindness. Solo also demonstrates his humanity by speedily adopting the barter system when he agrees to help the villagers if they will provide him with access to their generator, but then continues to help them after he no longer needs it. In many respects, this film is another adaptation of the western The Magnificent Seven (1960), itself an adaptation of The Seven Samurai (1954), in both of which a group of men save a farming village threatened by well-armed aggressors. See Soldier (1998) for a similar story involving survivors of a spaceship wreck and a behaviorally modified human.

Soylent Green Source: Based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! 1966 Writer: Stanley R. Greenberg Director: Richard Fleischer Date: 1973 Length: 95 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation In 2022, the population explosion has created shortages of just about everything people need and want: housing, electricity, soap, water, food, and an excess of everything no one knows what to do with, including garbage and corpses. Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a New York detective partnered with the “book” or researcher Solomon Roth (Edward G. Robinson). When Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a former executive at Soylent, the principal nutrient provider of the era, is assassinated, Thorn briefly enjoys some of the privileges of the upper class, including a comfortable apartment with hot and cold running water and the victim’s “furniture,” the beautiful Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young). He also confiscates some of the delicacies in the refrigerator and takes them home to “Sol” who prepares a meal of the sort he remembers from his youth out of the bit of lettuce, apple, and steak. Sol also takes the large bound books containing research on soylent green that Thorn recovers from the apartment to the “exchange,” a collective of researchers working out of one of the last libraries, and they realize that Simonson realized that the new nutrient source does not come from the oceans, which are dying, but is made from human corpses: someone had him killed because they were afraid he was going to go public. The old and now completely disillusioned Sol decides it is time for him to go “home”; that is, he

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signs into a facility where he is given poison and twenty minutes to die in a room surrounded by film images of the beauties of nature that no longer exist or are, at least, no longer accessible. Thorn arrives a little late for the whole show and communication is complicated by a malfunctioning audio system, but Sol whispers something that makes Thorn follow his corpse to what should have been its burial. When he too learns the truth about soylent green and verifies it with his own observations, he finds himself targeted by assassins. The film ends with his survival, like the publicizing of what he knows, in doubt. * * * This dark vision of the not so distant future includes a few good ideas, such as the use of stationary bicycles to generate electricity for individual apartments; but it is the harsh realism of the crowded streets, food riot, and body-packed shelters that make the most powerful impressions. Many of the noir aspects of this film world derive from a general failure to resolve the most basic problems challenging human survival. Technology is notable for its apparent absence or invisibility until it is used to invoke nostalgia for the past during Sol’s before-death film experience of the beauties he knew in his youth (Soylent Green was Robinson’s last film): even memories are recyclable. Nature often appears in tech-noir in conjunction with the rejuvenation of a world threatened by technology, but here the beauties of nature are images heralding the individual’s death. Technology is also shown when Thorn traces Sol’s body back to the factory machines that produce soylent green. This product turns everyone who eats it into a cannibal, a practice that symbolizes the loss of the most basic of human values and which is exploited as such in the horror films The Last Man on Earth (1964) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), and adapted for more subtle, but equally horrific effects in Omega Man (1971) and films about organ transplants and clones as organ donors. Nevertheless, the aggression with which the faceless Soylent corporation pursues and silences those who would publicize their solution to world hunger only makes the obvious need for that solution seem more desperate: indeed, the profit motives that are usually foregrounded in films about corporate wrongdoing hardly seem relevant here. Likewise, the shortage of books, the result of aggressive censorship in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Equilibrium (2002), and digitization in Rollerball (1975), here seems to have been, at least initially and partially, a simple consequence of the need to allocate all available resources to the necessities of survival.

Speaking Parts Writer: Atom Egoyan Director: Atom Egoyan Date: 1989 Country: Canada Length: 93 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Surveillance: Domestic contexts Bioengineering: Transplant Three people’s lives intersect at a hotel: Lance (Michael McManus) is a bit-part actor who works full time in housekeeping and provides other “hospitality” services as his employer suggests; Lisa (Arsinée Khanjian) also works in housekeeping, but is assigned to cleaning rooms and laundry duty and spends most of her spare time obsessively watching the videos Lance has bit parts in; and Clara (Gabrielle Rose), who is alive because her brother donated a lung to her – her brother died during the operation – and who comes to stay at the hotel briefly. Clara is obsessed with a video clip she took of her brother and she plays it repeatedly at his mortuary; she has also written a biographical screenplay about her brother’s death. She becomes a guest at

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the hotel when production of the film begins and through her influence Lance lands the role of her brother, his first speaking part, and also the somewhat less exciting opportunity to provide her with “hospitality” services via teleconferencing technology. Clara is very upset when the producer (David Hemblen) alters the story, so she coerces Lance into breaking into the producer’s hotel room to get a copy of the script and thus learns it has been revised so that it is about a man who donates a lung to his brother during a talk show aimed at finding organ donors. Meanwhile, Lisa starts working part time for Eddy (Tony Nardi), the attendant at the video store where she rents Lance’s films, when he goes out to film weddings and parties. Her attempt at independent interviews has somewhat disastrous results; then one of the women whom Lance provided hospitality services for commits suicide at the hotel. When filming of the talk show segment of Clara’s revised screenplay begins, Lance, Clara, and Lisa all find the lines between reality and film production vanishing in a catastrophic blur in which Lisa’s obsessive interest in Lance proves to be his most stable link with reality. * * * Speaking Parts is a complex exploration of the film medium from experience to writing to film production and acting, as well as watching; it also, like Egoyan’s Next of Kin (1984) and Family Viewing (1987), studies technologically mediated relationships from a variety of angles. In particular, Speaking Parts emphasizes the potential negative side effects of talk show hype and organ donations made by close relatives. See Coma (1978), Killer Deal (1999), and John Q (2002) for more sensationalist film treatments of the organ donor and transplant theme. The manipulation of individual lives to serve the ratings game is also part of Rollerball (1975), Network (1976), Running Man (1987), and The Truman Show (1998); and Death Watch (1980), like Speaking Parts, is a study in the extraordinary marketability of death when properly packaged for television viewers. Speaking Parts, however, embeds the talk show in a movie, on the assumption the future viewers of the film will identify with the talk-show frame more readily than the direct real-life situation of the original script – the artificial frame of technological mediation is thus posed as an essential component of the human experience even within the context of a film. The talk show becomes a kind of arena roughly equivalent to the theme parks in Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976), and the rink in Rollerball, but with participants taken from the general public who are actually expected to volunteer to be organ donors. The talk-show frame also serves to deflate the uniqueness of Clara’s experience as the recipient of an extraordinary act of generosity. The device works for everyone except Clara. Another writer who is similarly presented as somehow better grounded in more authentic experiences, at least in part because he works with words rather than pictures, appears in Until the End of the World (1991).

The Stepford Wives Source: Based on the Ira Levin’s novel of the same title, 1972 Writer: William Goldman Series: The Stepford Wives, 2004 (a comedy based on the same novel) Director: Bryan Forbes Date: 1975 Length: 115 min. Type: Android: Love and lovers Joanna (Katharine Ross) and Walter Eberhart (Peter Masterson) and their two small daughters move from Manhattan to the Connecticut town of Stepford, where Walter joins the men’s association, an exclusively male club devoted to transforming all newcomer wives into robots programmed solely to tend the house, look

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after the children, and otherwise please their husbands. This process involves extensive and careful planning, including drawings of the faces of the victims to get their eyes exactly right. Joanna quickly hooks up with Bobby (Paula Prentiss), another newcomer, and they investigate the peculiar docility of the local women conveyed by their general behavior, clothing, and choice of interior and exterior home décor. Joanna tries to continue her art photography with some success, but when Charmaine (Tina Louise), also a newcomer, and then Bobby join the ranks of the Stepford wives, she knows she is next. Trapped by her concern for her children, she ends up in the men’s association house where she comes face to face with the truth in the form of her murderous and larger-bosomed mechanical double living in a reconstruction of her own bedroom. In the final scene, “Joanna” is pushing a cart around a grocery store with the other wives, all carefully selecting their produce while exchanging inane pleasantries. * * * In many respects, the contributors to the Stepford project are all Frankensteins who take up the problem, not of procreation – that matter seems to remain the biological woman’s contribution to the survival of the species – but of designing a being who will endlessly attend their every juvenile need, as well as the needs of their children. In an adaptation of Moreau, they become rulers of their brave new world by reducing the roles and contributions of women to gestation and birthing processes. The men of Stepford may also be compared to the ambitious Morella (1997), who uses cloning as a means of eliminating male contributions to procreation. Insofar as it is a film about how androids might put wives and mothers out of work, Stepford Wives is a film about employment in the face of automation. In tech-noir films, female androids are commonly programmed for sexual services, as they are in Cherry 2000 (1987) and Cyberzone (1995), although male android “companions” and sex partners do appear in Circuitry Man (1990, 1994) and The Companion (1994). The 101 Terminator model in Terminator 2 (1991) takes on something of the substitute father’s role when he is reprogrammed as John’s protector, but John’s mother does not willfully make that substitution come about. This film is of special importance relative to later tech-noir films in that it not only has a plot based on fears regarding technology in relation to gender, it also makes full use of the drawing–painting–photograph– mannequin–robot–human continuum as a means of visually articulating the plot. The replication of the bedroom, suggestive of the doll houses frequently given to little girls to play with, contributes to the effectiveness of this particular conceptual mise-en-abyme: the purpose of such toys, after all, is to establish an ambition for the real thing; but here it is the toy itself that becomes the object of male ambition and desire and the full-scale toy house is only complete when occupied by a toy wife. Joanna’s ambitions as a photographer are, unlike those of the male photographers and cameramen in other tech-noir films, such as Blow-Up (1966) and Death Watch (1980), conflated with her domestic role. Her photographs serve to focus her sense of self-worth on her role as mother and, when she is replaced, as repositories of her authentic perceptions and empathy, qualities her android replacement is incapable of. The wife who is also a photographer in Godsend (2004), like Joanna, is obsessed with photographs as an authentic record of her first child. This use of photographs contrasts with their treatment as false evidence of identity, as in Blade Runner (1982) and Rising Sun (1993). This film is also discussed in Chapter 3.

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Storm Watch (aka Code Hunter) Writers: Flavia Carrozzi, Terry Cunningham, and Steve Latshaw Director: Terry Cunningham Date: 2002 Length: 100 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Mason Kemeny (Scott Rinker) and Dr. Valerie Harman (Serena Scott Thomas) have designed a program that can manipulate weather patterns from an orbiting satellite, but a demonstration made for the benefit of investor representatives Richard Clark (Richard Cox) and Admiral Renner (Jerry Doyle) inexplicably results in massive multiplying and unstoppable storms. The Admiral orders the program plug pulled and, in a desperate attempt to halt the destruction of civilization, puts planes with bombs destined for the storm centers in the air. Meanwhile, Nick Chase, aka Jester (Nick Cornish), is at the top of the virtual reality game “After Shock,” such that Neville (Adrian Paul) wants him in full time; Nick, however, will only consider the offer if he is cut in for partner participation profits. Shortly after, the game character Skylar (Bai Ling) tries to get Nick to hack into Thunderhead Technologies and steal a program. Having suffered long punishment for getting caught hacking into and shutting down a power grid after the electric company shut off their electricity when his mother could not pay the bill, Nick has to be coerced, and Skylar obliges by putting him on a most-wanted list and making him the object of a massive police manhunt. Nick does the job, but he hides the disk with the program and goes to reporter Tess Woodward (Vanessa Marcil) and his buddy Ravi (Wesley Jonathan) for help. Eventually, all three join forces with the confused group at Thunderhead Technologies. Nick, Ravi, and Mason hack into the program, discover that Neville is an artificial intelligence who thinks he is saving the planet and the human race by manufacturing a catastrophe that will result in manageable losses. With a little help from fellow game player Outlaw (Coolio) and Skylar, and after a diversion back to a false reality created by Neville, they put a stop to Neville’s plan. * * * Nick is a young adult who works in his mother’s store, but his teenage demeanor and the youthful team effort to stop the terrorist plot invite comparison with Hackers (1995), in which a group of high school students conduct a joint hack to a similar end. Nick’s mom differs from that of the lead hacker in the earlier film in that she abandons her son to his fate when she thinks he has been up to his former hacking practices; of course, Nick is a highschool graduate and she rightly expects him to assume responsibility for his actions. Like the hero of Hackers and the secondary lead in Ghost in the Machine (1993), Nick is paying the price for flaunting his skills to make a point about the “system.” Tess plays a familiar role as the helpful reporter who wants to get the story to the public, but her success prior to the storm story is generally attributed to her sex appeal. The earlier Cybercity (1999) completely upstages this aspect of the Storm Watch presentation of women’s success in the newsroom by having a news woman tell everyone not to flip their channel switch while she also flashes her breasts. Neville is part of the lineage of artificial intelligences seeking to stop humans from destroying their planet. This lineage includes Colossus in Colossus (1970) and Proteus in Demon Seed (1977). Unlike these AIs, however, Neville has a human shape inside a virtual reality game. Neville’s manipulation of a death-dealing ray from a satellite emulates Goldeneye (1995); but, unlike the programmer in that film, Mason turns out to be misguided, rather than malevolent and traitorous. Neville is also the perpetrator of the “loop” that briefly confuses his victims into believing they have returned to reality. This same ruse works on the teenager playing the virtual reality game in Brainscan (1994), who keeps thinking he has returned to reality when he is really

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still in the game, and on the AI serial killer in Virtuosity (1995), who is made to believe he is still in the world, when in fact he has been put back in his box. Skylar, as the artificial intelligence who does not initially know what she is, is the virtual reality counterpart to Blade Runner’s (1982) Rachael; she does not, however, play the role of lover, but of ally to humans as she turns against Neville.

Strange Days Writers: James Cameron and Jay Cocks Director: Kathryn Bigelow Date: 1995 Length: 145 min. Type: Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment SQUID, or the super conducting quantum interference device, was developed to replace the police wire, but it quickly became the basis for a lucrative black market in virtual recordings of any and all kinds of experience. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a former policeman turned SQUID dealer, is hooked on SQUID recordings of his former girlfriend Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis). He survives because of “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett), who feels bound to him for the kindness he showed when, as a police officer, he took care of her son during a raid on her home targeting her deadbeat husband. Faith is now a singer and the girlfriend of her agent Philo Gant (Michael Wincott), who also happens to be obsessed with SQUID surveillance. Philo was formerly the agent of singer and political activist Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), and one night he sends two prostitutes to spy on him, including Iris (Brigitte Bako), whom he outfits with a SQUID wire so she can record Jeriko and his friend. Jeriko, Iris, and another couple are stopped by two policemen, Burton Steckler (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Dwayne Engelman (William Fichtner); there is an altercation and Steckler shoots Jeriko. In a panic, Iris escapes and goes to Philo; Philo sends her to a hotel, where he later has her murdered by Max (Tom Sizemore), the bodyguard he originally hired to keep an eye on Faith. Iris, however, has already passed the incriminating tape to Lenny. Incidentally, Max used to be Lenny’s best friend. Lenny also finds himself in possession of a Squid tape showing Iris’s murder. Snuff tapes have considerable value on the black market, but Lenny usually deals in erotica and more mundane pleasures. Mace helps out once again: while Lenny is coming to terms with the truth about Max and Faith and finally purging himself of his obsession, Mace gets the tape to the “good” police commissioner Palmer Strickland just as the Los Angeles crowds celebrate the incoming year 2000. * * * This tech-noir film takes the recording concept from Death Watch (1980) and Brainstorm (1983) into the realm of virtual reality and explores the good and bad effects of such recordings, not just of auditory and visual sensations, but of all kinds of experience and for all kinds of purposes. The black market appeal of snuff films, as well as the trouble they herald, is also featured in Videodrome (1983). Where Brainstorm ends with an answer to the ultimate mystery of the death experience, here the usefulness of the technology is demonstrated by the evidence it provides about a murder. Like Lenny, Dakota of Cybercity (1999) is a former policeman who falls because of an addiction to a virtually maintained past. Dakota is blackmailed into doing things he would not otherwise do by the promise of more tapes of a past he believes he has forgotten; something similar happens when Tully in Wild Palms (1993) sells out a man he works with and respects for a few more interactive tapes of his dead lover. In Lenny’s case, the harm he causes is primarily to himself and he is less the betrayer than the one betrayed because of his addiction to a past that probably never really existed outside his own imagination. 426

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Mace is a female counterpart to Julie’s bodyguard Boone in Freejack (1992), and one of the more effective friends and allies assigned to aid and protect males in various tech-noir films; while not a reporter, she does pursue a reporter’s solution because she has faith in the positive results to be achieved when recorded information is placed in the hands of the right person, who, in this case, is a “good” politician. Generally, she avoids using virtual recordings and her refusal to be seduced by technology seems to be part of her strength: see the problems encountered by the over-implanted Jane who serves as a bodyguard in Johnny Mnemonic (1995); and the trouble Lori, a retired bodyguard, finds herself in, in Circuitry Man (1990) when she is recruited back into her former profession and is tempted by the profit to be made on the black market in designer drugs.

Swordfish Writer: Skip Woods Director: Dominic Sena Date: 2001 Length: 99 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) and his partner Ginger (Halle Berry) force hacker Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) to help them steal $9.5 billion to fund the Black Cell, an organization ostensibly founded by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s to protect American freedoms. Shear is particularly interested in the war on terrorism and he wants to fund it with the abandoned assets of a dummy government corporation called Swordfish. Shear needs Stan to break the encryption protecting the account holding the assets. Stan has recently served a jail term for preventing the FBI from illegally accessing internet accounts, and now he is desperately trying to get his daughter Holly away from her alcoholic mother who has recently married a maker of pornographic films, a few of which she has already starred in. He is living in a trailer when Ginger finds him and for $100,000 he flies to Los Angeles to meet his prospective employer: he will get $10 million for the actual job. FBI agent Roberts (Don Cheadle) makes contact: Stan was spotted coming out of the airport while the FBI’s attention was on another computer hacker who came into the United States trying to escape Shear. Stan declines their assistance and goes to work: he retrieves the worm he used for the job that put him in jail and enhances it so it can retrieve the money Shear wants. When the job is near completion, he goes to the wine cellar for a fresh bottle and sees a head that looks a lot like Shear. Shear takes him for a drive and talks about Houdini and the art of misdirection, and also kills eight assassins sent by a Senator trying to pull the plug on Shear’s current plan because he is worried about the FBI surveillance; later, Shear has this Senator shot while he is out fly fishing. Shear pays Stan, but takes Holly hostage so that he will come to the bank to finish what he started. Hostages are wired with explosives and proximity collars so they will not run. Stan finishes, but his plan to keep Shear from getting the money by having it constantly jump between accounts kicks in early and, although he gets Holly to safety, he has to put the money in one account or watch Ginger die by hanging. Shear shoots Ginger anyway, and then takes the hostages on a bus ride to the airport that turns into an air trip to a rooftop. Stan thinks he kills Shear when he shoots down the helicopter he thinks Shear departs in, but autopsies reveal only the remains of an ex-Masad agent named O’Sheer and no record of Ginger. Stan recalls Stan’s chat about misdirection and, in a visual flash, remembers seeing someone disappear down the stairs from the roof. Ginger tends the money and then meets Shear on a boat; a news story announces the death of the third terrorist leader in as many weeks. * * *

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The film opens with the job done and Shear prattling on about a film narrative; negotiation for the release of the hostages is nearly bungled when one of them is grabbed and pulled out of range of the safety control, so she explodes. Stan raises his head to see one of the ball bearings from her vest rolling toward him through the broken glass. Then the story cuts to four days earlier, follows through to Stan’s face off with the ball bearing and then finishes. Stan is presented as the good man who was jailed for what many would consider a genuinely patriotic act, and is thus open to blackmail by a dangerous man who believes he too is protecting American freedoms. Shear is also a master of the Houdini tactic of “misdirection,” a tactic with some relation to Kevin Mitnick’s “social engineering” method: see Track Down (2000). Gabriel and Ginger use this technique so effectively that they create a kind of “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) charisma that, frighteningly, may leave the impression that a Gabriel Shear really might be a necessary evil. The connection between the fight on terrorism and Hoover’s black list and invasions of privacy carried out in the name of national security is left to the individual viewer’s familiarity with history. See Virtual Assassin (1995) for another film in which a terrorist forces someone to hack a system so that he can gain access to protected information. See Apocalypse Watch (1997) and Collateral Damage (2002) for other films in which terrorist action is assigned political justification.

Synapse (aka Memory Run) Source: Based on Hank Stein’s (aka Jean Marie Stine) novel Season of the Witch, 1968 Writers: Allan A. Goldstein, David N. Gottlieb, and Dale Hildebrand Director: Allan A. Goldstein Date: 1995 Length: 89 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transplant Behavior modification Cyborg The film opens with a blue tinted memory sequence of Andre as a small boy being put to bed by loving parents just before Life Corporation security forces enter and kill them. Fifteen years later, Life Corporation is the government and is opposed only by the Union, and Andre (Chris Makepeace) operates one of the renegade criminal gangs “caught in the middle” stealing from the rich and selling to the revolutionaries. After a heist in which he stops one of his gang from raping a woman in the house who is actually his girlfriend Josette (Karen Duffy), Alex returns to make love to her; but so does the other gang member, who shoots Josette and knocks Alex out, leaving him to take the blame. Andre finds himself strapped into one of the Life Corporation mobile justice unit chairs while Sladecker (Nigel Bennett), the man in charge, drills a hole in his forehead, applies a headband, and interrogates him. Alex’s responses appear as memory images on a screen and include a reflection in Josette’s eye that clearly shows he was not the murderer; but Alex is an excellent candidate for an experimental Life Corporation procedure, so Sladecker declares him guilty and remands him to the custody of the medical unit where Dr. Munger (Saul Rubinek) transplants Alex’s brain into Josette’s body. Alex wakes up as “Celeste” and responds badly when he sees his new face reflected in a silver tray and discovers he has breasts. Dr. Merain (Lynne Cormack) has a “gode,” a pain-emitting device, implanted in the base of Celeste’s skull to speed up her behavior modification. Munger advises her to co-operate, which she does, until paraded about at a corporate reception: between the screens showing images of her own death, her recognition of one of the attending guards as the man who killed her parents, and the memory of a voice saying they were not supposed to have been killed, s/he breaks down. Munger has her reassigned to a work program where Alice (Natalie Radford), who happens to be the sister of the Union leader Gabriel (Matt McCoy), befriends her. Their plan for escape ends with Celeste free and Alice dead of a gode overload. Celeste gets even with Alex’s

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double-crossing partner and connects with Gabriel and his girlfriend Kristin (Torri Higginson). They release Munger from house arrest. Celeste discovers she is pregnant. They all break into the Life Corporation cryoroom to look for Alex’s body. The corporation, however, is having an unveiling: the old CEO reveals himself in Alex’s body. The ensuing shoot-out leaves Dr. Merain and Dr. Munger dead, and Celeste finishes off the CEO. The film closes with Kristen dead and Gabriel bonding with Celeste and her small son in front of a golden lake, followed by a final shot of the bodies lying on tables in the cryo-room at Life Corporation. * * * Synapse presents a mobile judicial system, even more farcical than that in Judge Dredd (1995), as a means of collecting, not donors for organ transplants, but bodies for brain transplants. Involuntary donors are also featured in Coma (1978) and Killer Deal (1999), and the appropriation of a fully functional body for “robocop” transformation appears in RoboCop (1987) and for consciousness transfer in Freejack (1992). See Xchange (2000) for body switching without the surgery. The corporation with the power to extend life indefinitely also merges with government in Freejack and Killer Deal. Synapse is full of classic tech-noir motifs, including the chair, implants for causing pain, behavior modification, and so forth. Mise-en-abyme effects include the magnification of the reflection of an image on the eye of a girl just before she is shot and Alex’s memories as he remembers them, as they are recollected on screen during the judicial process, and again during his unveiling as Celeste. Other tech-noir twists include the initial double-crossing between thieves, the gender-crossing aspect of the original experiment, and Celeste’s pregnancy with a child conceived by Josette and Andre. See Brave New World (1998) for an ending that reaffirms a more conventional nuclear family.

TekWar: The Original Movie Source: Based on Ron Goulart and William Shatner’s novel TekWar, 1989 (Both novel and film became series.) Writers: Westbrook Claridge and Alfonse Ruggiero Series: TekLords, 1994 (Sequel; not included here) TekLab, 1994 (Sequel; not included here) TekJustice, 1994 (Sequel; not included here) Director: William Shatner Date: 1994 TV Length: 92 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Bioengineering: Transformation In the mid-twenty-first century, Jake Cardigan (Greg Evigan) is a police officer who is framed and sentenced to fifteen years in cryo-prison for the drug-related killing of his partners. Walter Bascom (William Shatner), head of the Cosmos Detective Agency, has him released after only four years so that he can help find abducted scientist Professor Kittridge (Barry Morse). Cardigan’s first interest, however, is finding his son and ex-wife (Sonja Smits) with the help of two internet jockeys, Wild Side (Richard Chevolleau) and Cowgirl (Lexa Doig), who are secretly aided in their task by Bascom’s assistant Centra (Catherine Blythe). Cardigan’s second concern is finding the person who framed him for murdering his partners. Meanwhile, he goes to work on Bascom’s assignment with his former partner Sid (Eugene Clark) by following up on a meet with Dr. Helen Danenberg (Joan Heney), Kittridge’s former assistant. Unfortunately, this Helen, who turns out to be a “sim” or android, is detonated by a flower girl sim. Drug lord Sonny Hokori (Von Flores) enters the action and abducts Cardigan

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by manipulating the automatic controls on his car and tries to have him killed. Cardigan escapes and finds out why Sonny is an interested party when the completely “re-built” but very real Helen (Claire Cellucci) explains that the Professor had accepted Sonny’s money to develop a killer “Tek” crystal that would destroy all current Tek except an immune strand that would be controlled by Sonny. “Tek” is the current street drug of choice because it creates a kind of virtual reality for the user that is far more addictive and convincing in its illusionistic effects than anything else available. Helen also directs Cardigan to Kittridge’s wilderness area lab, where he finds and activates a sim of Kittridge’s daughter Beth (Torri Higginson). Cardigan and this sim follow a lead from one of Cardigan’s former contacts to a meeting with Warbride (Sheena Easton), the leader of rebels living in the country who are opposed to current trends in society, and she in turn informs them that Beth is dead. The sim Beth is now able to access previously inaccessible files and explains that Beth was so infatuated with Sonny that she followed him and thus witnessed the events that put Cardigan in cryo-prison; unfortunately, she did not see the killer’s face. Later, when Sonny programs a sim of Cardigan’s son to kill Cardigan, the sim Beth is destroyed when she uses her body to shield him from the blast. Sid and Cardigan get past the virtual reality wall that hides Sonny’s headquarters and rescue both Kittridge and Beth, who is still very much alive. Beth recognizes the voice of the man who shot Kittridge’s partners as belonging to Winger (Maurice Dean Wint), a “Mek” who monitored Cartigan’s release from cryo-prison and who is supposedly assisting with the clean-up following the capture of Sonny and his gang. Beth’s testimony establishes that Cardigan was wrongfully incarcerated. * * * TekWar is the first of the TekWar movies, all of which incorporate tech gadgetry and motifs: virtual reality simulations, humanoid androids that look just like their originals, cyberspace jockeys, and so forth. The cyberspace search for information that is an excursion involving simulated physical movement through a three-dimensional virtual world is also a feature of Lawnmower Man (1992), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and other films. Sims, armed and programmed with malevolent intent, reappear in Screamers (1995) and are made into large innocuous dolls in The 6th Day (2000). Variations on “Tek” are also found in Wild Palms (1993), Strange Days (1995), Dream Breaker (1995), and Redline (1997). The police officer who is framed, cryo-incarcerated, and then released ahead of schedule also appears in Demolition Man (1993) and Minority Report (2002).

Terminal Choice Writers: Neal Bell and Peter Lawrence Director: Sheldon Larry Date: 1985 Length: 98 min. Type: Technology Dr. Dodson’s (David McCallum) wife (Chapelle Jaffe) suffered a stroke five years ago and she is still partially paralyzed. Dodson spent years researching a potential cure, only to find his experimental drug banned by the government because it causes fatal hemorrhaging. Dodson also runs a clinic where Dr. Harvey Rimmer (Robert Joy) operates a computerized betting ring that is enjoyed by half the facility’s doctors and other staff members. After Lyla Crane (Teri Austin) dies unexpectedly of violent hemorrhaging, investigative attorney Chauncy Rand (Don Francks) uses various aliases as he checks out some of the doctors, including Dr. Rimmer and the alcoholic Dr. Frank Holt (Joe Spano), who apparently missed the fact that Crane was taking medication for a bladder infection. Mary O’Connor’s (Ellen Barkin) autopsy on Crane, however, shows no

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sign of infection. Rand also traces Crane’s prescription to the Chinese Doctor Ling (Fred Lee) who describes Crane as a customer a little too readily. Unfortunately, someone has removed the cassette giving automated instructions to the computer for Crane’s medication; then Mary dies after someone spikes her food – not of food poisoning – but because the computer freezes the frame on her room monitor and cuts off her oxygen. As part of his investigation, Rand has Rimmer check him into the room in which Crane and O’Connor died, and he is killed there by the automated defibrillator. Meanwhile, Henderson (Nicholas Campbell), a hospital orderly, uses the cassette he stole from Crane’s room to blackmail Rimmer. Holt spots Henderson leaving Rimmer and confronts him: angered by what he learns he says: “They think I’m Dr. Jekyll!” Fortunately, Anna Lang (Diane Venora), Holt’s former girlfriend and hospital computer expert, is on the case: she finds Ling’s pharmacy deserted, but discovers his bizarre basement laboratory full of test animals and the doctor, dead and covered in blood. She meets Holt just after his encounter with Rimmer; the fleeing Rimmer pushes Holt down some stairs breaking his leg. The rest of the clinic is evacuated, but Holt is left there with his leg in traction. He listens to the treatment tape he recovered from Rand’s room and shows it to Lang: it is the same one used for Crane and includes Dr. Dodson’s experimental drug. Someone tries to use the automated system to first break Holt’s leg again and then to kill him with the defibrillator; but Lang, who cannot go for help because she is locked in the room with him, manages to stop both events by making phone calls. They arrive in the computer room just after Rimmer confronts Dr. Dodson and Dodson injects Rimmer with the deadly drug. Rimmer dies hemorrhaging as Dodson acknowledges his guilt to Lang and Holt. He excuses his actions by saying: “The first time polio vaccine was tested, three children were paralyzed and six of them died. Did they suspend polio research?” Dodson’s wife, who has managed to get to the computer room with her walker, distracts her husband by yelling; Holt dives for Dodson’s legs and Lang shoots him. The film closes on the empty, blood-filled computer room, with the computer voice asking “… Dr. Dodson, Dr. Rimmer, awaiting further instructions. Reprogram. Reprogram. Enter self-programming mode … ready ready ready. …” * * * Hospitals provide settings for demonstrations of the horrific possibilities of technology in films from Coma (1978) to The Net (1995), as well as others involving the body-part black market and clones. Here, the main hospital computer room looks like a remake of the control room of the spaceship in Alien (1979), a point underlined when the computer addresses Lang as “Ma.” Dr. Dodson, like Dr. Moreau of both the 1977 and 1996 films, is prepared to experiment on humans as well as animals. The scientist who makes bad choices in a desperate attempt to save his sick wife also plays a significant role in The 6th Day (2000). The Chinese doctor serves as a cliché suggesting a connection between non-Western alternative medicine and bad Western science. The weird basement lab full of animals, living and dead, also appears in Final Error (1999), as does the geeky mad scientist. Like Lang, Appleby also makes a run through a cluttered lab in The Clones (1973), albeit for somewhat different reasons.

Terminal Justice: Cybertech P.D. Writers: Frederick Bailey and Wynne McLaughlin Director: Rick King Date: 1995 Length: 95 min. Type: Clone: Society and service Behavior modification Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment

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In 2002, the drug “Hell Raiser” was used to win the cartel wars with Russia: it made the user enjoy killing and thus encouraged soldiers to act aggressively. In the filmic present day of 2008, Hell Raiser developer Reginald Matthews (Chris Sarandon) is president of the Reggie Game Company. He is dabbling in the possibilities of virtual reality while negotiating financial backing to produce female clones for sale to clients with violent sexual and “snuff ” inclinations. The clone procedure he is using was developed by the supposedly deceased Dr. Vivyan (Peter Coyote). Policeman and former Hell Raiser soldier Bobby Chase (Lorenzo Lamas) is moonlighting with his partner as security for virtual reality sex queen Pamela Travis (Kari Wuhrer) when some of Matthews’s thugs try to get her DNA sample for cloning purposes. Chase’s partner dies in a shoot-out and is replaced by Hiroshi (Tod Thawley), a computer expert who not only jacks into Chase’s electronic eyes, another legacy from the Cartel Wars, but just about every other electronic system Chase needs to circumvent or control to avenge his partner by getting Matthews. Hiroshi is also able to virtually re-create a crime scene, including the body of one of the raped and tortured clones. The final confrontation takes place in a virtual reality game, aptly named Hell Raiser, which Hiroshi eventually stops by shutting down the power grid for the entire region. As it turns out, Dr. Vivyan is very much alive and has been cloning himself. When he is caught, his lawyer’s defense is that he cannot be charged with murdering any of his clones because that would be equivalent to charging him with his own murder; likewise, when Alice (Lori Heath), his last clone, shoots him in the police station, she cannot be charged with murdering him. * * * This film has a lot of violence but a relatively low body count and, while the guys talk about it a lot, there are no virtual reality sex scenes. There is one more or less tasteful demonstration that the real thing is better than the virtual version and therefore, as in Demolition Man (1993), preferred by true heroes. Virtual reality as a new field for sexual experience is as popular in tech-noir film as the assignment of female robots to sexrelated tasks: see, for comparison, the male fantasy derived droids in Cyberzone (1995). The idea of cloning a woman whose virtual performances have made her familiar to every man who has ever tried virtual sex is definitely a product of the body-for-sale capitalist market economy. The idea of producing clones for snuff films is shown to be as appalling as the idea that a person cannot be convicted of murdering his clone, or a clone of murdering his original. This legal by-product of the definition of the person is another spin on the theme of clones as objects of new forms of racism, exploitation, and slavery. The “Hell Raiser” soldier who has been “improved” by experimental drugs and implants is a variation on the UniSol featured in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999) and also suggests the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experience by which drugs release a supposedly primal pleasure in violence and the exercise of aggression. Matthews, as a variation of Tron’s (1982) entrepreneurial video game designer, capitalizes on addiction to both drugs and technology. The addictive aspect of virtual reality experiences is almost ubiquitous in film representations of them, particularly when used in combination with drugs, as in Wild Palms (1993) and TekWar (1994). As in a few other post-Cold War films, Russian–American animosities are represented as part of a past with ongoing implications for international relations: see Goldeneye (1995) for Bond bonding with a Russian computer programmer to prevent a Cossack from blowing up London; Redline (1997) for a capitalist Russia with a thriving black market in designer drugs and virtual tech; and Fortress 2 (1999) for a duplicitous Russian gang. Like those conducted in Fortress 2, Megaville (1990), and Nemesis (1992), the Terminal Justice visual “hack” brings the Death Watch (1980) ocular implant idea into the 1990s. Virtual reality is also used to recreate a crime scene in Absolon (2003).

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The Terminal Man Source: Based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same title, 1972 Writer: Mike Hodges Director: Mike Hodges Date: 1974 Length: 107 min. Type: Behavior modification Cyborg Harry Benson (George Segal) was a computer expert working on artificial intelligence until a car accident left him prone to seizures that, in turn, made him prone to violence such that he even beat his wife. He also came to believe that machines will take over the world. Desperate for a cure, he agrees to an experimental implant that is supposed to avert his seizures by sending shocks to his brain; unfortunately, his brain likes the shocks and starts tripping seizures to get more of them. He soon escapes from the hospital, destroys his artificial intelligence machine, and murders several people, including his former girlfriend Angela (Jill Clayburgh) and a priest. He also tries to kill Janet Ross (Joan Hackett), one of his doctors, in her own apartment but she manages to wound him with a knife. He then wanders through a mausoleum and eventually to a cemetery where he half jumps half falls into a recently dug grave. Members of a funeral procession discover him and the police and doctors arrive soon after. Ross wants to help him, but a gunman in a helicopter shoots him. * * * Much of the film action takes place in a lecture hall and surgical amphitheatre: the first hour is dedicated to explanations to other doctors, the surgery, and follow-up determination of which of the forty implanted electrodes will have the desired effect. The procedure is protested, especially by one impassioned elderly doctor who compares it to the use of lobotomies, not to cure patients, but to make them easier to control; as he notes, lobotomies fell out of favor only when more effective tranquillizers became available. Later in the narrative, a reporter accuses one of the doctors of mind control, but the doctor responds: “What do you call compulsory education through high school?” Lobotomies or similar procedures are used for behavioral control when other methods fail in Parts (1979) and Harrison Bergeron (1995). Similar commentaries are added to the film versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990, 2002) and, like Jekyll–Hyde, Benson succumbs to the addictive properties of the “cure.” However, tech-noir films often emphasize the ability of the human to control technological behavioral influences; for example, in RoboCop (1987), Murphy’s injuries, like Benson’s, place him in a surgical experiment that turns him into a cyborg. Murphy’s transformation is far more complete physically than Benson’s and proportionately more is made of Murphy’s ability to overcome his technologically implanted programming; that ability is related to the fact that he was a devout Catholic and a dedicated husband and father before the surgery. Like RoboCop, Terminal Man subverts the assumed integrity of the medical practitioner. While Benson’s doctors seem to have the best of intentions, the film’s signature motif is an eye looking through a small aperture while a voice makes comments about or to the occupant of the room, who at first is Benson and, after he is shot, is someone else: “They want you next,” says the voice. The subjugation of an individual such as Benson, who believes that machines will take over the world, to the authority of a less than enlightened doctor is also a subplot in the second Terminator film (1991), in which Sarah Connor finds herself subject to the whims of an ambitious and unsympathetic psychiatrist. Terminal Man is structured by the reappearing eye, by divisions into days, and by the helicopter: it takes off at the beginning of the film, Benson is eventually shot from a helicopter, and the film ends when it lands; thus the entire film is a flashback with Benson’s fate sealed from the beginning. Something of this approach contributes to the complex time and memory loops in 12 Monkeys (1995) and November (2004), in each of 433

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which someone dies from a bullet. The film’s murder scenes are also stylistically notable: the shower scene in which Dr. Ross is not murdered is a nod to Hitchcock. Benson’s repeated stabbing of his girlfriend inspires a doctor to compare the stabbing action to that of an automated machine: see also the first murder committed by Kismet in Shadow Fury (2001).

The Terminator Source: Developed from Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits teleplays “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand,” both aired in 1964 Writers: James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd Series: Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991 (Sequel) Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003 (Sequel) Director: James Cameron Date: 1984 Length: 107 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI A Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time from Los Angeles 2028 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to her son John, the future leader of humans in their war of self-defense against the machines. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), one of John’s soldiers, also comes back from the same future to rescue Sarah from an untimely end. Sarah is a waitress who keeps a pet iguana; while at work, she hears about the deaths of other women named Sarah Connor from the television. That evening, after much primping and preparing, Sarah’s date is cancelled, so she discretely leaves her roommate to an evening alone with her boyfriend and goes to a movie. When she hears another television news report about a murdered Sarah, she realizes she is next, but is unable to get through to her roommate or the police. Meanwhile, the Terminator kills Sarah’s roommate and her boyfriend and learns where Sarah is from the voice message she leaves. As her would-be assassin closes in on her in the “tech-noir” nightclub, Kyle Reese appears, saying: “Come with me if you want to live.” He explains the facts of life to her as they flee: he was sent back from the future to keep her alive. Eventually, police take them into custody: Lieutenant Ed Traxler (Paul Winfield) and Detective Hal Vukovich (Lance Henriksen) have already been assigned to the case and they bring in a psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Silberman (Earl Boen), who reassures Sarah that Reese is insane. Sarah’s brief rest and return to the normal world is shattered when the Terminator arrives at the station; fortunately Reese finds her and they flee again. During another brief rest, he explains that her future son John gave him a picture of her and that he came across time to save her because he loves her. Kyle’s nightmare about the world of the future seems to enter Sarah’s dreamworld such that when they awake from their sleep, Sarah is fully convinced of the truth of what he has told her. The pursuit and flight continues; Reese dies, but not before he permanently destroys the Terminator, or so he thinks, and thus proves himself to be a worthy father of the future savior of the human race. Sarah arranges for the mangled, but still active, Terminator to be crushed in a metal compressor. Sometime later, a very pregnant Sarah heads for Mexico in an SUV; when a boy at a gas station takes a Polaroid of her she buys it and thereby establishes the connection that will one day bring Reese to her. * * * “Tech-noir,” presented as a neon club sign, is also the sign for what appears to be a safe haven for Sarah when she realizes she is being stalked. Murders based on mistaken identity, car chases through dark streets,

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aggression far in excess of that required to accomplish the task, and the stalker as unthinking, unreasoning, and absolutely unstoppable machine all appear as motifs in this and other “stalker” tech-noir films: see Hardware (1990) and Project Shadowchaser (1992, 1994, 1995) for just two more of the many examples of this type. Horror fans may notice that the murders of Sarah’s roommate and her boyfriend echo those in the infamous Halloween (1978). The woman who is about to give birth to the savior of the human race or has just done so appears in Nemesis (1992) and American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994), is parodied in Cyborg 3 (1995), and implied in Harrison Bergeron (1995) which concludes with Bergeron’s lobotomized lover standing by as their son is presented as the rebel who just might succeed where his father failed. The woman or man who travels across time to save the world also appears in Nemesis (1992), A.P.E.X. (1994), and 12 Monkeys (1995). For an artificial intelligence with more interest in controlling the human race than destroying it, see Colossus (1970). Dreaming plays a significant role in this series and is associated in Terminator 2 (1991) with fate and destiny. The dream sequences are discussed in Chapter 3.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Sequel) Writers: James Cameron and William Wisher Jr. Series: See The Terminator, 1984 Director: James Cameron Date: 1991 Length: 156 min. (Ultimate Edition) Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI The Cyberdyne systems model 101 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) returns to the present, this time with the goal of protecting the troublemaking adolescent John Connor (Edward Furlong) from the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), an advanced prototype liquid metal killing machine that can imitate the voice and appearance of anyone or anything it chooses. The T–101 and John rescue Sarah from a mental institution where she has been confined for trying to blow up Cyberdyne Systems, the company responsible for eventually developing Skynet – Skynet being the system that will become the artificial intelligence that decides to destroy the human race. Sarah, sorely tried by Dr. Silberman’s (Earl Boen) inability to understand her situation, is already on her way out of the facility when her son and the T-101 find their way in. After one of the most memorable meetings involving mistaken identity in film history, the three flee to the desert borderlands between the United States and Mexico where Sarah has a stash of weapons. Here, at the approximate midpoint of the film, Sarah falls asleep on a picnic table to dream of a playground where a more innocent version of herself is playing happily with her son. This idyllic scene quickly turns into a nightmarish apocalypse. Waking, Sarah finds she has carved the words “No Fate” into the picnic table. She abruptly heads back to the city to find Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the individual responsible for the technology that she knows will make Skynet possible. John and the T-101 catch up with her and help to convince Dyson to destroy his work. When the ongoing pursuit and flight scenes end, Dyson is dead and both the T-1000 and T-101 are incinerated in the furnace of a metal working factory. * * * This sequel effectively repeats the use of a futuristic sequence: the opening vividly depicts the war between man and machines in LA 2029 and includes Sarah’s voice-over reacquainting viewers with the situation. This film is distinguished from the first by more violence, longer car chases, a psychiatric ward for a dramatic and

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slightly gothic atmospheric twist, and the new Terminator’s uncanny talent for spontaneous mimicry. For another morphing killer android, see that in Project Shadowchaser III (1995) from the Project Shadowchaser series (1992, 1994, 1995 1996), a series that is largely dedicated to recycling elements from The Terminator and Alien (1979, 1986, 1992) films. John is a social misfit who is loyal to his mother, but confused and bitter about the fact that she is in a mental institution. The speed with which he learns to control the Terminator as if it were his own private toy and his initial adolescent uses of it are indicative, not only of the assumption that technology is more adeptly handled by children, but of the absurdity of leaving them alone with it. See Ghost in the Machine (1993) for a boy and his buddy who likewise use their tech skills to con people. Young people further demonstrate their perception of the relevance of computer skills to grade improvement in WarGames (1983), Interface (1984), and Evolver (1994). In RoboCop 3 (1991), a girl’s computer skills makes the adults responsible for her appear incompetent; the teenaged hackers in Hackers (1995) and Lawnmower Man 2 (1996) achieve the same effect. Several actors have taken roles that reverse one they played in an earlier film, as Schwarzenegger does in his shift from assassin to protector; for example, Julie Christie plays a character who is complicit with technology in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and one who is both actively victimized by technology and engaged in a battle against it in Demon Seed (1977). Yul Brynner plays the android villain in Westworld (1973) and reappears as a protective dream lover in Futureworld (1976). In the Project: Shadowchaser series (1992, 1994, 1995 1996), Frank Zagarino plays a killer android, but in Project Shadowchaser IV, the last of the series, he changes from killer to benign protector. The dream sequences in this film are discussed in Chapter 3.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Sequel) Source: James Cameron (characters) and Gale Anne Hurd (characters) Writers: John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Tedi Sarafian Series: See The Terminator, 1984 Director: Jonathan Mostow Date: 2003 Length: 109 min. Type: Android: Stalkers and assassins Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI  Prologue Voice-Over (no text): The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. I wish I could believe that. My name is John Connor. They tried to murder me before I was born. When I was thirteen they tried again, machines from the future, Terminators. All my life my mother told me the storm was coming: Judgment Day, the beginning of a war between man and machines. Three billion lives would vanish in an instant and I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory. It hasn’t happened. No bombs fell. Computers didn’t take control. We stopped judgment day. I should feel safe, but I don’t. So I live off the grid, no phone, no address, no one and nothing can find me. I’ve erased all connections to the past, but as hard as I try, I can’t erase my dreams, my nightmares. John (Nick Stahl), now an adult transient, is in search of medicine following a motorcycle accident when he breaks into a veterinary office and then finds himself face to face with his childhood sweetheart Kate Brewster (Claire Danes). The new female Terminator, the T-X (Kristanna Loken), soon finds them both, as does the T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who assassinated John in the future, but was then reprogrammed by John’s future wife, who happens to be Kate, to come back in time to help him. The T-X is not just after John, it is after all of the people who will be his lieutenants in the war for the future. After picking up a stash of weapons

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left in Sarah’s purported burial, the group heads for the military base where Kate’s father, General Brewster (David Andrews), is trying to cope with a widespread computer virus without activating Skynet. He lives only long enough to see the early effects of the Skynet disaster, but he sends his daughter and John to get a set of access codes from his safe and then to a base from which he says they can destroy the central mainframe. The three, in constant flight from the T-X who is equipped for interfacing with and controlling other machines, arrive at the designated base only to discover that there is no such mainframe. John and Kate find they are the sole occupants of what will clearly become the central headquarters of the war with the machines that has just begun. John concludes:  e attack began at 6:18 pm just as he said it would: Judgment Day, the day the human race was nearly Th destroyed by the weapons they built to protect themselves. I should have realized our destiny was never to stop judgment day, it was merely to survive it – together. The Terminator knew, he tried to tell us, but I didn’t want to hear it. Maybe the future has been written, I don’t know. All I know is what the Terminator taught me: never stop fighting – and I never will. The battle has just begun. * * * This film more or less completes the time-loop begun in the opening scenes of Terminator (1984). It incorporates voice-overs by the adult John Connor, who believes that fate is what we make for ourselves, and a new set of special effects animating the T-X. In Terminator 2, the older model Terminator was challenged by the newer morphing T-1000, but succeeded in destroying it, albeit at the cost of his own survival. Here, the T-X even more thoroughly outclasses the even more dated T-101, as it can not only morph, it can interface with and direct other machines. This latter ability demonstrates the contemporary scifi imagination catching up with some aspects of real-world technological design and, presumably, bringing the future proposed in the first film ever closer. The artificial people in all of the Terminator films are heroes and villains who serve as agents of technology and who all come to a violent end, but the plot resolution at the end of this, the last in the series, provides closure only insofar as it completes the time-loop prediction introduced at the beginning. While the idea that there is no fate but what we make is frequently asserted, it seems that neither John nor the human race can escape what technological development holds in store. Viewers may look to the Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003) for the war itself and the mythology-based resolution that the Terminator series leaves to the imagination.

The Thirteenth Floor Source: Based on Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron Three, 1964 Writers: Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez and Josef Rusnak Director: Josef Rusnak Date: 1999 Length: 100 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Hacking the mind In present day Los Angeles, Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his right-hand man Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko), and technical specialist Jason Whitney (Vincent D’Onofrio) have created a virtual world modeled after 1937. Fuller, however, realizes that not only do the characters in this world believe that it is real, but the world he believes is real is merely a virtual reality. He leaves a message for Hall with the bartender Ashton, who is modeled after Whitney, exits the program and calls Hall only to have Hall, who has been replaced by

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David from the level above this world, the “real” one, murder him. Hall wakes to find bloody clothes in his apartment, Detective McBain (Dennis Haysbert) more or less at his doorstep, and Jane (Gretchen Mol), a daughter he never knew Fuller had, claiming ownership of the company. Hall enters the 1937 cyberspace; but Ashton, who has already read the message, quickly grasps its meaning when Hall exits leaving Ferguson, his confused counterpart, in Ashton’s bar. Later, after another encounter between Hall and Ashton, Whitney decides he wants to try out the virtual world, but he finds himself driving a car with Ferguson stashed in the trunk. While a policeman questions him, he is struck and killed by an oncoming truck and it is Ashton, not Whitney, who returns to the present day (virtual) reality. Meanwhile, Jane, who happens to be David’s wife and who downloads into a cashier, has filled in what details Hall has not already discovered for himself and confessed that she is in love with him. Hall gets a call from the building security about Whitney/Ashton’s strange behavior in the lab, goes to investigate, and finds Ashton delightedly watching multiple television screens; David downloads into Hall and shoots Ashton. Jane calls Detective McBain, who has been following Hall and has grasped something of the situation: just as David is about to shoot her, McBain shoots him. McBain wonders if someone is now going to download into him, but Jane says that is not going to happen. Hall wakes up in Jane’s world to find that Fuller was modeled after Jane’s father and that they live in a lovely place beside the water in 2024. * * * The Thirteenth Floor is unique in the extent to which it poses virtual reality as a means of re-creating the past. The same historical reconstructive labor informs such films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002), but this film poses three distinct levels of reality: the “real,” the virtual, and the virtual within the virtual. Like Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), most of The Thirteenth Floor is about characters who discover that they are living in a virtual world, and little film time is spent on the “solution” to this realization. However, the solution here, as usual, is to “reward” the film hero with more of what is perceived to be more “natural” and Douglas Hall wins this reward by attracting the favors of a woman who “accidentally” brings about her husband’s death and replaces him with a man she likes better – in the real world. The virtual reality world that is really just a virtual reality world, with a stable and constant reality existing outside of it for at least one person, is maintained in Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), as it is in various other films featuring confusions between the virtual and the real, such as Future Kick (1991), Virtual Nightmare (2000), and Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003). In The Thirteenth Floor, pulling the plug means the end of everything, unless you happen to be accidentally uploaded to another or the “real” level. Reactions to the realization that life is artificial are generally not positive; although none takes it quite so hard as Solo, the self-aware virtual game character in Nirvana (1997) who chooses to be deleted soon after realizing what he is. In that same film, the game designer thinks and acts as if he is a real person, but the conclusion suggests he might be virtual: no film time is dedicated to the possibility that he realizes he is merely one more virtual being among others. eXistenZ (1999) likewise leaves viewers as uncertain as some of the characters about their existence relative to real or virtual surroundings. This film is also discussed in Chapter 3.

THX 1138 Source: Based on George Lucas’s original screenplay Writers: George Lucas and Walter Murch Director: George Lucas Date: 1971 Length: 86 min.

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Type:

Behavior modification Surveillance: Information and control Surveillance: Domestic contexts

THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) has a job servicing the robotic police force units. This job, like many in this not so futuristic world, can only be done by someone on carefully monitored medication. THX 1138 always takes his meds, is a model employee and, equally important, he is a model consumer who buys objects as expected and then immediately destroys them in the facilities provided. He also makes use of the “Omm” confessional booths, praying to the broadcast image of the faceless, cowled god, and he uses the mechanical sexual stimulators while watching the appropriate visual images. LUH (Maggie McOmie), THX’s roommate, yearns for real body contact and companionship, so she surreptitiously takes him off his medication, an act that results in a near catastrophic accident involving radioactive material, but also has exactly the personal effects she was hoping for. Unfortunately, THX is so attractive to SEN (Donald Pleasence) as a potential new roommate, that he has LUH illegally reassigned. Since everyone is always under intensive surveillance, all three soon find themselves captured, incarcerated, and subjected to rehabilitation for illegal drug evasion, sexual activity, and other crimes. LUH’s fate is to be “consumed” by her unborn child, while THX is tried, declared incurable, and sent for reconditioning and then to detention. He remains for a time with other prisoners in an almost all white holding area, but soon heads off into the void with the unwelcome SEN at his heels. They meet a “virtual reality” character – the sexual stimulator man – who knows the way out, and they all end up in an overpopulated transit area where SEN is separated from them. SEN tries to give himself up to a photo of Omm, but the god’s real-world counterpart accosts him for trespassing on the studio set; he flees, then sits down and waits for the robot police to come. THX and his companion continue to flee and find a morgue full of corpses that have had their insides cut out – evidently the fate that awaited THX had he remained in detention. They each get into a car, but the virtual reality man soon crashes; THX drives down a long tunnel until he too crashes. Fortunately, the police following him are called back because the chase has gone over budget. THX climbs up a ladder and stands for the first time on the surface of the earth before a rapidly setting sun. * * * This extraordinary tech-noir film depicts a not-so-futuristic world in which all inhabitants are strictly controlled by a combination of drugs, constant audio and visual surveillance, and robot police. Its various subplots and motifs echo through many films about the dystopian future of our technologically driven society. In Andromeda Strain (1971), it is an alien organism that is the object of scrutiny by technological means; in THX 1138, it is the human body that is pinned down, probed, and otherwise made ready for dissection. The accident caused by the unmedicated THX is reworked at the beginning of Project Shadowchaser II (1994). Drugs and criminalization as a means of acquiring involuntary organ donors, a subplot of THX 1138, becomes the main plot of Killer Deal (1999). A virtual character takes on a life of his own in the physical world in Hologram Man (1995), and so forth. THX’s lonely existential realization is, like that of the lead in Rollerball (1975), in the end, unrelieved by the companionship or underground camaraderie that marks other tech-noir films such as Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and the greater part of the action in the Matrix films (1999, 2003, 2003). Many later tech-noir films also exchange THX 1138’s sparsely furnished, super-sanitized, white sets and brief glimpses of overpopulation and transit areas for more extended literal associations of dirt and crowding with poverty, and high-tech and spacious living quarters with wealth and power. They also favor the rediscovery of hope for the future in conjunction with that of nature, as in Logan’s Run (1976) and Aeonflux (2005). In THX 1138, however, even more emphatically than in Brave New World (1980), it seems there is simply not much to be found beyond the city.

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Tin Man Writer: Bishop Holiday Director: John G. Thomas Date: 1983 Length: 95 min. Type: Cyborg Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Casey Cain (Timothy Bottoms), a deaf garage mechanic, and Maddox (Gerry Black), his supervisor, both lose their jobs when Marcia (Deana Jurgens), a customer who just happens to be a speech therapist, realizes Casey is deaf and lets that fact slip in front of the garage’s insurance agent. The intrusive, but well meaning Marcia convinces Casey he should have his hearing tested and soon after he does, he gets a cochlear implant. Marcia also brings Casey’s extraordinary invention, a computer he calls Osgood that can translate typing into speech, to the attention of the development company her wanna-be boyfriend Lester (Troy Donahue) works for. The company is eager to develop and market “Osgood predicts,” an instant response astrology program, and various games, but only develops the communication programs for the deaf because they might serve as tax write-offs. Things go well at first: Marcia and Casey fall in love, Casey hires Maddox as his business manager, he moves into a mansion, and he develops Osgood into an interactive companion, albeit one that speaks and sees from what looks like a large metal barrel with lights. Then he gets an infection and loses his hearing again and after Casey refuses to renew their patent privileges, the company orders Lester to smash Osgood. Marcia, however, sticks with Casey, so all will certainly be well again soon. * * * This “B” grade film becomes much more interesting after the first half hour and is worth watching for its unusual development of the technology theme, specifically its portrayal of Casey’s relationship to the “hearing” world and to the opportunities technology provides for connecting to that world. Some of these he develops himself; but others, like the actual hearing made possible by the implant, which have been developed by others, he has a hard time accepting initially. For the most part, technology is shown to be a good thing, bringing numerous means of communication to the deaf, such as implants, translation programs for the spoken and written word, and subtitles for television shows. Casey, like Kevin in Tron (1982), is presented as an entrepreneur in the all-American style who just happens to have a flair for computer programs. The problems associated with technology in Tin Man, like those in Tron, arise from its limited (or excessive) compatibility with the human body and with the greed of the less talented as the primary motivation for its development. Prostheses that correct limited physical defects, particularly lost limbs, work well for the policeman in Virtuosity (1995) and the detective in I, Robot (2004), but the character with implanted eyes in Nirvana (1997) has them because he had to sell his own for cash on the organ donor market: the replacements clearly do not work as well as the “real” thing. An implant intended to correct a behavioral, rather than a physical, defect goes far more horrifically wrong than Casey’s in The Terminal Man (1974); and the lead in Johnny Mnemonic (1995) has cause to regret his memory storage implant, just as Jane, his bodyguard, has cause to regret the numerous implants she has acquired to enhance her professional effectiveness and employability. The female companion to the male engaged in a close encounter with technology is more often like Marcia than Jane in that she is something of a catalytic bystander and, on some level, an anchor to the “natural” world, as are the various female partners added to the film versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1990, 2002), the female reporters in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999), the waitress who helps the child subjected to artificial aging in Nightworld (1998), and so forth.

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See The Companion (1994) for a much more sophisticated version of a speech recognition program that is used by a romance novelist; and The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981) for two tech-noir films emphasizing sound rather than visual recordings. The association of “voice” and power is also welldramatized in Colossus (1970).

Total Recall Source: Philip K. Dick’s story “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” 1966 Writers: Gary Goldman, Dan O’Bannon, Jon Povill, and Ronald Shusett Director: Paul Verhoeven Date: 1990 Length: 113 min. Type: Behavior modification Cyborg Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house Douglas Quade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) wakes up one day from a dream in which he faces certain death with a beautiful brunette on Mars and finds himself with a blonde wife named Lori (Sharon Stone), a construction job, and a strong desire to go to Mars. Lori is not interested in Mars, so he goes to get a Recall vacation memory implant of going there as a secret agent. It soon becomes apparent that the implant is not going to work properly and the Total Recall representatives fear they have “another Schizoid ambulism” on their hands. They tranquillize him with multiple injections, erase his memory of being at their office, and dump him in a “Johnny Cab” operated by a mechanical dummy. Exiting the cab, Quade is accosted by some men who believe he “blabbed” about Mars and tell him: “you got yourself mixed up with someone else.” After taking care of the thugs, he goes home to Lori, who reports on him; they fight, and she finally tells him that they met six weeks ago and his memories are all implants. He knocks her out and escapes, picks up a package from himself including money, identification, a gadget he uses to extract the tracker implanted up his nose, and an explanation that he is really a man named Houser, who formerly worked closely with Cohagan (Ronny Cox), the man who controls the deridium mining operation on Mars. Houser became Quade so that he could infiltrate the rebel underground there. The final direction from his former self is to get back to Mars. Pursued by Cohagan’s man Richter (Michael Ironside) and his team of armed guards, Houser/ Quade retraces his steps to Mars, reconnects with his true love Melina (Rachel Ticotin) whom he met as Quade, realizes he likes Quade’s politics better than Houser’s, makes contact with the psychic mutant Kuato (Marshall Bell), and finally starts up the gigantic, dormant alien machine Cohagan was trying to keep secret. This machine immediately begins producing breathable air, thus transforming the planet and the future of the carnivalesque workers who have made their lives on it. Quade and Melina relive Quade’s dream when they fall to what seems certain death in the outdoor atmosphere, but are saved by the breathable air released by the machine. * * * Quade’s dream is a clue to his true identity and a framing device for the film, with the happy ending being a twist on the bad end of the dream fragment. The dream as both precognition and story frame appears with an added emphasis on a time-loop in A.P.E.X. (1994), which begins with a scientist waking from a dream about an alternate time line, then follows this scientist in his original time line as he follows a dream clue to an ending that is somewhat happier than that in his dream. Paycheck (2003) makes use of a similar narrative structure, with the advance information coming from a future-seeing machine the hero does not initially remember using. 441

Tech-Noir Film

Total Recall includes a number of other familiar tech-noir motifs, some previously used, including the incarceration chair, which also appears in Schwarzenegger’s Running Man (1987) and later in Fortress (1992), 12 Monkeys (1995), and others. Schwarzenegger tops the tracker-in-the-thigh scene in Running Man by removing his own nose implant. The carnival element created by the mutants on Mars and the references to aliens are variations on the fairgrounds, fun houses, and costumed parades that provide context for tech-noir films such as The Clones (1973), Westworld (1973), Blow Out (1981), and others. The amnesiac’s problem distinguishing his true identity from his implanted one is also central to Megaville (1990); but is also sometimes a part of an android’s realization of his or her true nature: see Blade Runner’s (1982) Rachael; Phoenix’s (1995) Tyler Mclain, leader of a military squad sent to subdue an uprising of mutant androids at the deridium mining complex on Titus 4; and, to a lesser extent, Detective Ian Farve in Total Recall: 2070 (1999), who simply does not know who he is or what his capabilities are.

Total Recall: 2070 Source: Based on Philip K. Dick’s short stories: “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” 1966, and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” 1968, and others Writer: Art Monterastelli Series: Pilot movie for TV series Director: Mario Azzopardi Date: 1999 TV Countries: Canada, Germany, and United States Length: 83 min. Type: Android: Security and security gone wrong Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment The Rekall Corporation specializes in virtual reality programs and software for androids and it acts aggressively and deceitfully through its head of security Richard Collector (Nick Mancuso) to hide and protect the company assets, including an experimental android memory augmentation that allows androids to become “humanly” intelligent for nine hundred hours and then returns them to their previous level of functioning. Androids with limited programming and without such augmentation work as servants; the most obvious exemplar being the male android “Robby” who brings refreshments to the detectives at work in the Citizen’s Protection Bureau (CPB). Some augmented androids have kidnapped a telepathic boy named Tavo: Tavo’s Eastern European parents were tricked into immigrating and then manipulated into taking a Rekall memory implanted vacation, thus setting up the circumstances that made it easy for the androids to kidnap Tavo. The androids need Tavo to serve as a lie detector during their interrogation of Dr. Gish (Hrant Alianak), a scientist whom they have also kidnapped and from whom they hope to acquire the ability to prolong their memory augmentation. With the aid of a prosthetic device, Tavo reproduces an image from Dr. Gish’s mind of the human DNA strand associated with memory: Dr. Gish had managed to combine biologic and robotic features to produce the android memory augmentation. David Hume (Michael Easton) is a CPB detective whose former partner Nicky is murdered by androids and David is assigned Ian Farve (Karl Pruner), an android, as his new partner. Together, they solve the murders associated with the kidnappings and find the boy, but are left puzzling about the mystery of Farve’s origins and the nature of android consciousness. * * *

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This film is set predominantly in dark, futuristic city streets full of alleys and corporate logos: shots of advertising screens mark set transitions between the Citizen’s Protection Bureau offices, evidence processing laboratory, the Rekall corporate offices, and various warehouse-like environments. The only domestic locale is the spartan apartment where David lives with his wife Olivia; this is the setting for several very brief discussions about the couple’s relationship and the death of Olivia’s father fifteen years earlier when he went out to kill a renegade android, just as David plans to do in the filmic present. The film also features a chair used by Rekall customers to enhance their fantasies, a prosthetic head piece that Tavo uses to play with virtual reality gaming images of human fighters, and a device that allows a computer to generate photographs of both Tavo and his kidnapper by using information collected from Tavo’s father while he is hypnotized. The android who does not know his own origin is not far from Rachael in Blade Runner (1982), but the android who seems to be a worthy partner for a human detective is more unusual, and possibly, like Sonny in I, Robot (2004), owes something to the character of R. Daneel Olivaw who first appeared in Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, published as a serial in 1953. The incorporation of Eastern European immigrants into a plot that also establishes androids as a new slave class maintained as such by technological design is somewhat reminiscent of the pre-planned social strata of Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Harrison Bergeron (1995). Like Harrison, who finds it impossible to think about going back to the way he was following a taste of intellectual freedom, the augmented androids find they must take drastic action to defend their new consciousness.

Track Down (aka Takedown) Source: Based on Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff ’s Takedown, 1996 Writers: John Danza, David Newman, Leslie Newman, and Howard A. Rodman Director: Joe Chappelle Date: 2000 Length: 96 min. Type: Surveillance: Security systems Kevin Mitnick (Skeet Ulrich) and his buddy Alex (Donal Logue) meet with Lance, who wants to sell them Switched Access Services (SAS), a product offering access to security-protected digital information. Kevin goes to work with his “social engineering” approach: he cons a few people, diverts a few calls, and by the time Lance reappears, they already have the system. Lance was an undercover FBI agent trying to catch Mitnick in a parole violation; his boss Mitch Gibson (Christopher McDonald) is under a great deal of pressure because of the publicizing of Kevin’s activities by an ambitious reporter. Alex and Kevin watch the televised hearings for privacy related to electronic media and are fascinated when the leading commentator, computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura (Russell Wong), talks about a scanning function he claims to have just “found” in a Nokitel phone. Kevin tries to con Tsutomu into giving up the Nokitel code, but Tsutomu calls his effort “lame” and the war begins. Kevin hacks and downloads all of Tsutomu’s private files, the Nokitel data, and a program he has independently developed called “Contempt” that has the ability to bring down any computerdependent system. Kevin also erases all trace of the original files. Not surprisingly, when Mitch asks Tsutomu for help capturing Kevin, he gets it. Eventually, they track Kevin down just moments after he has cracked the Contempt encryption and realized what it is. Tsutomu has also arranged to intercept Kevin’s upload of his files to the net – a method by which he instantly gets rid of evidence when the police come knocking – thus Tsutomu gets his materials back. Kevin ends up in jail and nothing official comes of Tsutomu’s unsponsored project, but he finds himself with some unexplained bills, an empty bank account, and a message from the automated bank teller: “free Kevin.” * * * 443

Tech-Noir Film

This film is a semi-biographical account of the 1995 capture of Kevin Mitnick. The visual articulation of Mitnick’s world as noir and Shimomura’s world as “blanc” provides a simple inversion of the film presentation of the ethical realities of the “criminal” and the favored servant of the Fortune 500 and American government. The idea that the hacker who lives and works outside the law is the true hero, while those whose work is legitimized by government or corporate sanction are the real criminals is pervasive in tech-noir film. Mitnick’s principal method of hacking – social engineering – is less popular, however, than the image of the hacker as a code-breaker who needs only his computer and intuition. Hackers (1995), for example, presents the hacker as someone who works with his keyboard and the hero hackers, at least, would never really hurt anyone; this film also offers a sense of the fan culture associated with hacking, as does Storm Watch (2002). Swordfish (2001) too presents a hacker who just needs state of the art equipment and his intuition to hack any system and break any code and seems far less dangerous than the clandestine operative who enlists his services. The gamers in Foolproof (2003), like Mitnick, employ the social engineering method as they plan for heists they never carry out; this practice is what makes the connection between the computer hacker and the traditional grifter of noir and neo-noir most plain. The “con” is a time-honored means of getting information that continues to work well in the digital age: see Cypher (2002) and Encrypt (2003) for two other films with characters who use this approach to get someone to give them or get them securityprotected information. Sneakers (1992), in which the lead hacker also makes use of social engineering to get what he wants, now appears to forecast Mitnick’s post-release life as a legitimate and not very well paid hacker. One of the heroes of Ghost in the Machine (1993) is a former virtuoso hacker paying the price for a computer stunt in a post-sentencing, low-end, technical support job: he councils his young admirer not to follow in his footsteps.

Tron Writers: Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird Director: Steven Lisberger Date: 1982 Length: 96 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Ed Dillinger (David Warner) is the current senior executive of Encom Corporation, a position he achieved by stealing Kevin Flynn’s (Jeff Bridges) video game designs. Now Kevin makes a living by running a video arcade and Dillinger is expanding his empire with his Master Computer Program (MCP). MCP has acquired an intelligence and ambition of its own and frequently appropriates programs from other areas and has Sark, Dillinger’s digital counterpart, make other digital counterparts of humans play in various games to the death. Flynn spends his spare time working on Clu, a program that can infiltrate the Encom digital systems and search for evidence that the original video game designs were his. Clu is spotted and stopped by Tron, a program designed by Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), an Ecom employee who is also the new boyfriend of Flynn’s former girlfriend Lora (Cindy Morgan). Lora and another Encom employee Dr. Walter Gibbs (Barnard Hughes) have designed a working prototype of a matter transfer machine that turns biological forms into digitized information. Tron’s watchdog capabilities represent a threat to Dillinger and his MCP’s various illegal activities; indeed, the MCP decides that even Dillinger is a liability to his future expansion and begins to act completely on his own. When Bradley and Lora team up with Flynn and return to Encom to get the incriminating information Flynn has been looking for, the MCP activates the data matter transfer program so that Flynn actually becomes his own program: Clu. Clu then teams up with Tron and Yori, Lora’s

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program counterpart, and with a little help from the program Ram (Dan Shor) and Dumont, Dr. Gibbs’s program counterpart designed to facilitate communications from programs to their users, they destroy the MCP. Flynn returns to his biological form and, although he does not get his girl back, he becomes head of Encom. * * * This Disney-style film is the first to use digital animation to present a fully three-dimensional world. The MCP, a caricature of the human desire for power and control, is a classic melodramatic villain manifesting primarily as a voice. The absence of a humanoid body does not diminish the anthropomorphizing of this artificial intelligence’s motives, however, anymore than it does those of Colossus (1970). The emphasis on the voice as a kind of voice of “god” does, however, establish this power as power beyond question and its owner beyond the reach of physical conflict. Likewise, the voice of Proteus IV in Demon Seed (1977) is what marks his ability to migrate and manifest in several places at once, as well as his integration of very human desires and ambitions. Unlike these earlier master machines, both of which question humankind’s use of technology and progress because of its effect on the planet, the MCP plays with the digital counterparts of his human challengers such that his bid for power is made in the digital realm that at once provides a “fantasy” context for the story and also represents the battle of ideas as an actual battle. This intention is most clear at the beginning of the film, when the theft of Flynn’s ideas is established as the primary motivation for the action, and again at the end when the plot is fully resolved, not when the MCP is destroyed, but when Flynn’s digital designs have been recognized as his intellectual property. The person who stole those designs is appropriately punished and Flynn gets to run the company and assigns key executive positions to his friends. The objective is not to save the planet, or the destruction of technology or the profiteering corporation; the objective is for the “good guys,” who exhibit such all-American and pro-capitalist qualities as entrepreneurship, leadership, cooperative and effective military strategizing, and so forth, to win the battle and hit the financial jackpot. Lora and Walter’s matter transfer machine reappears in The Fly (1986) and the notion that human bodies can not only be digitally replicated but actually transferred out of the physical world and into the digital is essential to the action of Arcade (1993), and some other films involving video games.

The Truman Show Writer: Andrew Niccol Director: Peter Weir Date: 1998 Length: 103 min. Type: Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment The life of Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has been televised from womb to adulthood. Truman lives on an island that is also the largest studio ever created and he is the only member of a huge cast who does not know he is the star of a show directed by Christof (Ed Harris) from a “lunar” broadcasting station. This show has been running twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week for over thirty years. A young woman named Sylvia (Natascha McElhone) once tried to explain the nature of Truman’s world to him, but she was immediately hustled off the set and out of the cast, and Truman married Meryl (Laura Linney) on the rebound. However, he is now increasingly dissatisfied with this relationship and increasingly sensitive to the peculiar commercial spots she and others do in front of him; as well as various breaks in the usually seamless artificiality of his world, such as the light that falls out of the sky, the interruption of the radio broadcast by

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announcements following his movements in his car, the appearance of a set where an elevator should be, and so forth. His favorite hobby is piecing together Sylvia’s face from magazine photos of models. Even his best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich) and the reappearance of his fictional and fictionally deceased “father” (Brian Delate) cannot deter his gradual realization that Sylvia told him the truth. One day, he manages to escape the cameras and embarks on an attempt to leave his island prison in a sailboat. In spite of the artificial storm Christof summons to stop him, Truman makes it to the edge of his universe, finds the exit door, and goes through it, presumably to meet Sylvia, who has never stopped hoping he would find his way out and of whom he has never stopped thinking. * * * The Truman Show, much like Final Cut (1998), is made from the film the film’s fictional internal director has made, cut together with shots of various members of the show’s audience, a television interview given by Christof, and a few flashbacks to Truman’s youth and young adulthood. Truman’s every moment is broadcast through the points of view provided by over five thousand cameras, not because he is of any special interest, as was the case with Katherine in Death Watch (1980), but because he is just a person living his life without knowing he is being watched – as Christof says at the end, Truman is the only thing that is real in the entire show. Where some films, such as Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), likewise show a single individual who realizes his world is artificial choosing to leave it; more films expand the situation, so that one person’s realization turns into the release of all from an artificial environment. Logan’s Run (1976), Virtual Nightmare (2000), and Aeon Flux (2005), for example, are about one or a few people discovering the artificiality of their world and bringing it to an end for themselves and everyone else in it. While these films dramatize the return to nature rather literally, Truman, in the end, simply walks along the rim of his world, his shadow cast in the style of a Magritte painting against the sky, to some stairs and a door. He talks to Christof briefly, and then, as so often in his daily encounters, says, “In case I don’t see ya’, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!” and makes his exit; at which point, his former audience starts changing channels. The Magritte references are more explicit in Virtual Nightmare, but have a similar effect on the conceptual mise-en-abyme in both films. The attention to the television audience is comparable to the use of Link’s face in Matrix Reloaded (2003) to embed a kind of audience-participant response directly into the film. Lisa, in Speaking Parts (1989), likewise represents the film audience, but to very different effect. This same film also makes much of the producer’s role in altering and controlling the representation of life in the production, much to the dismay of the original author who wrote the script from her real life. In Truman, the writer is eliminated entirely from the process and everything in the show is either for sale or an ad for things that are for sale. Everyone involved in the production is an employee of the same corporation that adopted Truman; thus Truman’s situation is comparable to that of Elena in It’s All About Love (2003) and the clone Abel in Able Edwards (2004).

12 Monkeys Source: Influenced by Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, 1962 Writers: David Peoples and Janet Peoples Director: Terry Gilliam Date: 1995 Length: 131 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures

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In a future Baltimore, plague survivors live underground. Prisoner James Cole (Bruce Willis), who has repeated dreams about an airport shooting, is repeatedly “volunteered” to collect samples above ground and then to go back in time to try to stop the plague from ever happening. On the first trip, he arrives in 1990 instead of 1996 as planned and becomes so disoriented that he lands in jail and then in a psychiatric ward, where he meets psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a patient, animal activist, and son of a wealthy scientist-entrepreneur (Christopher Plummer). Goines helps Cole, who is still collecting samples – he eats a spider because he has nowhere else to store it – get out of their locked common room, but he is caught, strapped down, and locked in a small room from which he appears to vanish when he is pulled back to his own time. The next trip lands him briefly in a World War I combat zone; then it is November 1996 and he meets Kathryn at her car after her lecture about plague predictions and a book signing where Dr. Peters (David Morse) talks to her briefly about his own ideas on the subject. Cole forces her to take him to Philadelphia where they meet with Jeffrey’s former friends who tell them about Jeffrey’s new gang “The Twelve Monkeys.” They also visit Jeffrey’s home and then Cole vanishes again. Kathryn realizes Cole is telling the truth when the bullet she removes from his leg is dated to 1920 and when his prediction that a boy who supposedly fell down a well is actually hiding in a barn proves accurate. But later, when she calls the number Cole has for contacting the future, she gets a carpet cleaning company and leaves a comic-serious message about twelve monkeys: this is the message later regarded as evidence of how the plague started and which Cole is sent to investigate. Later, they hide in a movie theater running Hitchcock films twenty-four hours a day and Cole observes that his life is like a movie: the movie is always the same, the only difference is how it is experienced. The next morning, Kathryn plans to fly with him to Key West so he can see the ocean; in the taxi to the airport they see all the zoo animals that Jeffrey has released. Cole leaves a phone message explaining that the “twelve monkey” call was a mistake and immediately another agent shows up to force him to kill the plague agent, whom Kathryn recognizes as both the talkative Dr. Peters and Dr. Goines’s assistant. Indeed, Peters is off to start the plague. Cole tries to shoot him, but is shot himself by the police: this event fulfills Cole’s dream in which he, as a boy, sees himself die as an adult. Kathryn holds him as he dies and looks about until she sees the boy she knows she may very likely meet again. * * * This time-looped attempt to stop the release of a bioengineered virus destined to wipe out five billion people in 1996 makes excellent use of many tech-noir motifs: the dream sequence, claustrophobic underground environments, incarceration cages, the restraining chair, visual parallels between living beings and representations of living beings, photographs and film as the basis for evidence and dialogue regarding the nature of reality, and so forth. The “artistic” treatment of these elements is above the norm, with Cole’s dream sequence developing the film symmetry between the locations he visits above ground in his own time and those same locations in 1996. Misdirection enhances the conceptual mise-en-abyme: the symptoms experienced by Cole in 1990 and interpreted as signs of insanity are also explained by his time traveling. The principal false clue related to the plague is actually left by Kathryn, but such clues are also the reason Cole is sent back in time. A similar device, represented by a more reliable clue, brings Sarah Connor a protector and lover in The Terminator (1984). See November (2005) for a less action-oriented, but poignant film about the last moments of life. The plague for which one man feels responsible is also a major event in The Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002); but Lathe is more about effective dreaming as a means to improve the human condition, while 12 Monkeys is about trying to save the human race, as is the time-looped Millennium (1989).

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2103: The Deadly Wake Writers: Doug Bagot, Andrew Dowler, and Timothy Lee Director: G. Philip Jackson Date: 1997 (© 1995) Countries: Canada and United Kingdom Length: 100 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Android: Security and security gone wrong Cyborg Ever since his ship, the Jason Acorn, went down in 2093 as a result of a phony certificate of sea worthiness provided by Manxx Clifton (Sandy Kaizer), the man known to history as Captain Murdock (Malcolm McDowell) has been down on his luck. Then, in 2103, Proxate corporation employee Martine (Gwynyth Walsh) shows up and gives him a license and the Lilith, a one-hundred-year-old, purportedly certified ship, that is operated through an eighty-six-year-old baby cyborg, a form of technology banned forty years before, and which has a crew of criminally insane prisoners kept under control with discipline collars. Murdock has orders to deliver a cargo of synthetic protein to help with the Nigerian reconstruction. Proxate, which operates prisons as its principal business, is about to become the first corporation to join the UN since Disney, and it seems Clifton, its new president, wants to dispose of some things. Tarkis (Michael Paré), Martine’s agent on board, thinks the cargo is industrial waste, but after a couple of bombs are discovered and the ship is turned back from port, Murdock checks it more closely and discovers the waste and also “clarion,” a deadly biowarfare toxin that dissipates in twenty minutes in air, but thrives in seawater. When Murdock sends out a distress signal, it trips a program in baby’s systems that leaves the ship more or less stranded and without controls or communications. Martine next tries to finish off the crew by remotely unleashing her killer robot (Daniela Nolano), which wipes out almost everyone before Cora (Heidi von Palleske), the mysterious first mate who seems to be a water sprite, destroys it. Martine flies to the ship to check out its status and is shot. Murdock orders the use of Martine’s plane to remove the Clarion and then returns the Lilith to her owners as the maritime code demands. Baby completes this task by actually ramming the ship into Proxate’s artificial island with much loss of executive life. Murdock goes waltzing on the deck with Cora, thus joining the legends about wronged sea captains whose ships are rumored to never have gone down. Three hundred years later, Cora tells a tale about Murdock to a startled crew woman who thinks she has seen a ghost ship. * * * This film is a unique tech-noir adaptation of sea legend incorporating several motifs unusual to the genre, including a principal setting on board a ship on the open seas, a feminized killer robot that performs its programmed function with extraordinarily graceful and choreographed dance movements, and a female water sprite who defeats the robot and waltzes the doomed captain through his final hours. The Clarion hidden inside the industrial waste that is hidden inside the synthetic protein is a summary motif for Clifton’s ability to manipulate Murdock to her purposes not once but twice; this point is elaborated on by the fact that the Lilith’s engineer is the son of a man who went down on the Jason Acorn, also certified as seaworthy by Clifton and captained by Murdoch. The rationalizing of the film action as a corporate grab for governmental power is familiar in tech-noir. Although it does not share the ocean setting, this film shows some similarities to Encrypt (2003), which poses an already devastated environment and a corporate entrepreneur who wants to prevent the release of a healing agent until after he has capitalized on his non-organic food source. Encrypt has a virtual reality female who looks after those she chooses and a nasty killer robot in the basement called the “Rook.” These characters appear as counterparts to 2103’s water sprite and robot in the hold. As in the Fortress (1992, 1999), 448

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the corporation makes its fortune by running prisons and experimenting with baby cyborgs. The filters and set designs, including the corporate interiors, give the film an unusual stylized look akin to, although less elaborate than, that in Dream Breaker (1995) in which Michael Paré stars as the detective rather than the dupe. See Virus (1996) for more dramatic visualizations of the almost polluted natural beauties of the environment itself.

Twilight Man Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Pablo R. Fenjves and Jim Korris Craig R. Baxley 1996 TV 99 min. Surveillance: Domestic contexts

The film opens with a sequence involving a surveillance team eavesdropping on a suicide e-mail as it is written. Attention then shifts to professor and novelist Jordan Cooper (Tim Matheson) as the object of obsession for Hollis Deitz (Dean Stockwell), a smoker, computer hacker, and killer of his own parents. Deitz uses his computer skills to torture Cooper with false results on a blood test, an erroneous hospital transfer, an authorization for immediate surgery, and then moves on to house bugging, threatening Jordan’s nephew, and setting Jordan up as the murderer of his own girlfriend. The nephew does a computer search that turns up Raymond Barnes, author of the suicide e-mail presented in the film opening, who believed a computer hacker was stalking him. Cooper follows this lead to Barnes’s widow (Georgann Johnson), who just happens to have been best friends with Cooper’s mother back when Cooper’s long dead lawyer father was Barnes’s business partner. Things get more confusing when it is revealed that Cooper is not even Cooper’s real name. It seems Deitz had everyone on the run decades before, and is now operating out of the house where he murdered his parents; he also corners Cooper at this location, but is captured himself when Lou Shannon (L. Scott Caldwell), the detective on the case, shows up just in time. Deitz is jailed, but he immediately sets to work accessing the phone lines in the prison wall, presumably so he can start harassing Cooper all over again. * * * This film trades in The Net’s (1995) gang-conspiracy-with-social-consequences plot in favor of a single obsessive and vengeful stalker empowered by a wide range of technological devices. In its emphasis on a conflict between a single stalker and his single victim, Twilight Man bears some resemblance to The Companion (1994) in which a novelist is terrorized by the android companion she herself reprogrammed to be more human; here, however, the stalker is human and, although the object of the stalking is again a novelist, Cooper is also an old-fashioned professor representative of the pre-desk-top computer generation who gets a child to do an on-line search for him. Net Games (2003) features a married man who is stalked and terrorized by an aggressive, tech-savvy female who uses strategies similar to Deitz’s. Serial killers who act on compulsion and use technology are fairly common in tech-noir: in Terminal Man (1974) a technological implant turns a man into a serial killer who behaves like a machine performing repetitive and somewhat mechanical motions. In later films, such as Twilight Man, the serial killer’s existence as a manifestation of industrialized society is further articulated by his deliberate mastery and use of complex machines. In The Cell (2000), a serial killer uses a gadget to kill his victims when he is not present. The skeleton in the closet is a metaphor that is often treated somewhat literally in horror films, such as Poltergeist (1982), and as a motivation for discoveries about what was previously unknown; similarly, Cooper only learns about his family history because the stalker forces him to. This killer–victim relationship,

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posed as the man-with-the-machine who is in the know and in-control versus human who is not, is just as often revised in tech-noir. Thus, for example, McClain in Phoenix (1995) does not know that he is an android programmed to match his human creator’s psychological profile, but is forced by terrorist action and circumstantial necessity into a realization of his true identity. In each case, violence erupts as part of a midlife coming-of-age experience for one or more characters. In Shadow Fury (2001), the top-of-the-line killer clone repeatedly stabs his first victim in a mechanical, repetitive manner that conforms to his programming; but, like innumerable killer androids, he acts without the personalized motivation inspiring Deitz and simply murders on command. When Takeru, another killer clone in this same film sets out to kill for revenge, as Deitz does, it is a mark of his humanization through female companionship and he does not adopt the mechanical motions indicative of the “artificial” while carrying out his objective.

Universal Soldier Writers: Dean Devlin, Christopher Leitch, and Richard Rothstein Series: Universal Soldier II: Brothers in Arms, 1998 (TV Sequel) Universal Soldier III: Unfinished Business, 1998 (TV Sequel) Universal Soldier: The Return, 1999 (Sequel) Director: Roland Emmerick Date: 1992 Length: 102 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Cyborg Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is an American soldier in Vietnam in 1969 who discovers that Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren), his sergeant, has gone crazy, murdered his platoon and numerous innocent Vietnamese civilians, and is making a necklace out of their severed ears. Both men die in the ensuing confrontation, but their corpses are recruited as UniSols or universal soldiers for use in dangerous missions requiring speed, endurance, and superhuman strength. Twenty-five years later, UniSols are dropped into the water a mile and a half out from a power station that has been taken over by terrorists demanding the release of various criminals: the UniSols reach and eliminate the malefactors within minutes. Luc, now GR 44, begins to recover his memory in flashbacks to his confrontation with Scott such that he momentarily becomes unresponsive at the end of the mission. Meanwhile, the recently fired reporter Veronica Roberts (Ally Walker) is desperate for a story and, after dark, she sneaks around the UniSol mobile unit and finds a body in a box. The surveillance cameras give her away and she flees; her cameraman is shot, but Luc helps her to escape. When he receives orders to stop, he pauses until Veronica pulls off his headset and then they continue their exit. Unfortunately, they are stalked through various desert locations by Luc’s former sergeant, now GR 13, who is still obsessed with ears and the desire to kill Luc. Veronica helps remove the tracking implant in Luc’s leg, and then they find Dr. Gregor (Jerry Orbach), one of the more friendly doctors in the original UniSol program, working at a veteran’s hospital. The mere sight of this man triggers more of Luc’s memories; he then finds his way to his parents at their Louisiana farm, and it is here that he finally defeats the insane GR 13. * * * The Vietnamese jungle, which is the setting for the opening scenes and later memory sequences of this film, becomes a potent metaphor for the mental and emotional confusion experienced by the soldiers recovering

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their sense of personal consciousness after being recruited into the UniSol program. The real-world historical reference point for this experience is post-traumatic stress disorder and the film reference points are obviously Apocalypse Now (1979), in which a Lieutenant is sent to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a despot in the Cambodian jungle, and Platoon (1986), in which a soldier becomes a pawn in military politics in the Vietnam jungle. Recycling human corpses for military purposes upgrades the Soylent Green (1973) approach so they are rebuilt, rather than processed as food. The UniSols might also be taken as evidence of what Frankenstein might have created if he had had military funding for his lab. The “we can rebuild him and then do what we want with him” plot also owes much to RoboCop (1987); but here the process is less about substituting metal for flesh and, as in Embryo (1976), more about drastically speeding up the process of cellular regeneration. The major drawback is that the bodies so resurrected tend to overheat and need to be repeatedly cooled. The use of ice as an antidote to problems associated with an excess of technology is as symbolically appropriate here as the Arctic setting is as the context for Frankenstein, although Van Damme’s “hot” UniSol body may also be taken a dramatization of his sex appeal. In the earlier Cyborg (1989), Jean-Claude Van Damme plays another lost soul haunted by memories of his former life, about which viewers are informed through visual flashbacks rather than dialogue. In Replicant (2001), Van Damme also plays a character who must remember who he was and decide who he will be. A tracker, such as that Veronica tries to remove from Luc, is implanted in Arnold Schwarzenneger’s thigh in The Running Man (1987) and Christopher Lambert’s in Fortress 2 (1999). The male soldier and female reporter team is revised as a male security specialist and female reporter team in Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995).

Universal Soldier II: Brothers in Arms (TV Sequel) Writer: Peter M. Lenkov Series: See Universal Soldier, 1992 Director: Jeff Woolnough Date: 1998 TV (sequel) Length: 93 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Cyborg Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment  Prologue (teletyped text): In 1953 the U.S. government embarked on a top secret operation to create an elite military strike force. Code name: Universal Soldier. The procedure harvested dead soldiers, re-animated and genetically enhanced them with the objective of assembling the army of tomorrow. In 1998 the program was uncovered by a female journalist during a hostage crisis. In the aftermath, several Universal Soldiers were terminated … or went missing. Luc Devereaux (Matt Battaglia) and Veronica Roberts (Chandra West) are still on the run from the UniSols and Luc is still a bit of a slow learner, emotionally at least, and he still has to keep cool by spending a lot of time literally “on ice.” The UniSol program is now part of an operation run by Otto Mazur (Gary Busey) under the control of the CIA Deputy Director (Burt Reynolds). When a hitherto unused auto-recall signal forces him to leave his parents’ farm and return to the UniSol operations base on the Chicago harbor for another memory wipe, Luc’s parents offer Veronica the car they bought for him while he was in Vietnam. She follows Luc to the new UniSol base of operations where she discovers his older brother Eric, GR 05 (Jeff Wincott), in a stasis chamber; after playing his surgery tape, she smashes the glass. The reawakened Eric never received the complete UniSol treatment, so he comes to terms with what has happened rather quickly. Luc, who observes

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them when they are brought in after they are captured, recovers something of his original self and tries to help them. Luc and Veronica escape and Veronica once again has a close encounter with his tracking device, but Eric is held captive by the UniSols. Mazur calls Luc to a meeting to trade Veronica for Eric; then goes off, purportedly to make a deal for the sale of fifty UniSols to Mr. Jong Sung (Von Flores), but he just shoots Sung and his security men and takes the $50 million worth of diamonds brought as payment. Luc and Veronica head to the exchange meeting in a stolen mobile home with a guitar-playing hitchhiker (Julian Richings) who helps confuse Mazur long enough for them to get Eric, get back in the mobile home, and escape. Luc and Eric enjoy a cooling down spell in the back of a beer truck, then a game of pool, before the final confrontation, which leaves Eric and Mazur both dead and Dr. Walker (Richard McMillan) as the CIA Deputy Director’s contact with the UniSol group. Veronica and Luc give the diamonds to Vietnam veterans collecting donations on the street. * * * This sequel picks up more or less where the first film left off, and incorporates numerous memory clips from the events in that film as if they took place one week in the past. UniSol memory-wipes are now routinely done after each job and a “black box” has been added to the tracking implant in the legs of the UniSols; thus Mazur is able to retrieve a recording, apparently made through Luc’s visual line of sight, of Luc and Scott’s final battle. These recorded events contrast with Luc and Eric’s memories of each other at the time Eric left for Vietnam when Luc was only nine. This sequel also adds slow motion and carefully selected pop music sound tracks to create a certain choreographed stylization in some segments, presumably intended to invoke the absent Jean-Claude Van Damme. A similar approach is used to invoke the absent Van Damme in Cyborg 2 (1993) insofar as that film incorporates clips from the earlier Cyborg (1989) in which he stars. Gary Busey’s role is similar to that which he plays in Soldier (1998): the harsh commander of the behaviorally modified soldiers who is killed off to make way for the future. The CIA Deputy Director’s presence is made known by voice only until the end when his face is shown as he gives directions to Dr. Walker: Walker is the character name of the man behind the scenes in Parts (1979) whose face is not seen in that film until the concluding sequence. See Foolproof (2003) for a new generation of morally ambiguous heroes who are not quite sure what they will do with the diamonds they carry away from the scene of the crime.

Universal Soldier III: Unfinished Business (TV Sequel) Writer: Peter M. Lenkov Series: See Universal Soldier, 1992 Director: Jeff Woolnough Date: 1998 TV (sequel) Length: 95 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Cyborg Clone: Society and service Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment The CIA Deputy Director Gerald Risco (Burt Reynolds), whose initials are the basis of the prefix “GR” attached to the UniSol numbers, is supporting Dr. Walker’s (Richard McMillan) plan to solve the memory-wipe failure problem by growing a clone of Eric Devereaux/GR 87 (Jeff Wincott). Meanwhile Luc Devereaux/GR 44 (Matt Battaglia) and Veronica Roberts (Chandra West) have gone to Toronto to a gathering of dot-com millionaires hoping to connect with Veronica’s former cameraman and boyfriend Charles (Juan Chioran). Veronica leaves

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Luc outside and gets into the event as a waitress; unfortunately, terrorists led by Grace (Claudette Roche) have also gained entry. Grace, both femme fatale and the classic woman in red, lines up the wealthy guests and demands they make donations of $5 million each in exchange for their freedom – something they all seem quite willing to do. Veronica is forced to deliver a terrorist message on air, but Charles is killed. Luc makes his way up an elevator, arriving in time to save Veronica and kill the terrorists; unfortunately, they are turned into UniSols that are then sent after them. Luc and Veronica head back to Luc’s parents’ place, only to find the house burned and both parents dead. Their next stop is Dr. Gregor (Jack Duffy), who was one of the doctors on the original UniSol project, but he has been given a memory-wipe injection and put in a veteran’s hospital as an Alzheimer’s patient. One of the doctors at the facility is a “sleeper,” a GR unit that does not know he is a GR unit until he is “woken up”; Luc announces that such units are everywhere. They recover one of the downed UniSol’s implants and from it discover what the larger plan is. When the cloned Eric is sent after them, Luc successfully uses a photo to activate his brother’s memory, so Walker blows him up. Luc and Veronica, however, manage to stop Risco’s plan to steal the billions in gold bullion recently released from Swiss banks for distribution to World War II holocaust victims by doing a live broadcast of their confrontation with him. Risco commits suicide by jumping over the side of a building, but of course Dr. Walker resurrects him: Risco opens his eyes and says “wake the sleepers.” As Veronica explains in a voice-over, the UniSol base of operations is never found. * * * The terrorist subplot is used as the basis of a demonstration of the UniSol capabilities in the first Universal Soldier film (1992), and it is more extensively developed here. Terrorism, rather than just terror, is part of numerous tech-noir films with the terrorists usually presented as individuals or groups that use technology to illegitimately gain power. Human-sponsored terrorist activity occurs in Brazil (1985), Project Shadowchaser (1992), Project Shadowchaser II (1994), The Net (1995), Apocalypse Watch (1997), and others. Unconscious programming that is activated by a pre-planned signal is a motif in many films of the behavioral modification type: the “sleepers” or units who think and live like ordinary people until they are called to some task are also part of Apocalypse Watch, Final Mission (1993), Fugitive Mind (1999), and, of course, the Manchurian Candidate (1962, 2004). Other additions to this second sequel include film footage of Hitler; a “test-tube” baby that, like Victoria in Embryo (1976), is dosed with accelerating growth hormones; a new explanation for Alzheimer’s; and the “woman in the red dress” (Grace): see Matrix (1999) for another well drawn example of this latter rather overused motif. The tape that is wrongly used or that falsely shows a person’s complicity with a certain action is also part of Synapse (1995) and Killer Deal (1999). Those in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and Running Man (1987), like that in this film, are actually broadcast as news.

Universal Soldier: The Return (Sequel) Writers: John Fasano and William Malone, et al. Series: See Universal Soldier, 1992 Director: Mic Rodgers Date: 1999 (sequel) Length: 83 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI Bioengineering: Transformation Cyborg Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment

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Luc Devereau (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is now a widower with a daughter named Hillary (Karis Paige Bryant), and he is working to ensure the success of the new UniSol 2500 series. All the units in this series have matrix chips implanted in their brains that are controlled by the master computer SETH. Luc returns with his partner Maggie (Kiana Tom) from a combat simulation with the UniSols to learn that the entire program, now funded by the department of defense, is about to be eliminated because of post-Cold War budget cuts. SETH does not like the idea of being shut down, and activates the 2500 series, as well as a super body (Michael Jai White) prepared for him by Squid (Brent Hinkley), a somewhat unstable computer programmer who believes the melding of man and machine is the next stage of evolution. SETH miniaturizes his brain and implants it in the new body. There is a failsafe off switch that will shut SETH down if Luc does not input certain security codes within eight hours, but the military fears SETH will break the code himself and become completely unstoppable. SETH abducts Hillary from the hospital where she ends up after suffering a head injury at the hands of the 2500 unit Romeo (Bill Goldberg). He takes her back to the lab, both to cure her injury and to use her as a hostage to get Luc to input the code. In spite of the annoying intrusions of television reporter Erin Young (Heidi Schanz), Luc manages to find Squid by using a secured computer in an exotic dance club, neutralizes SETH, gets both himself and Hillary out of the facility, and then detonates the charges set to blow up the entire place. The film closes with a group hug involving Luc, Hillary, and, somewhat inexplicably, Erin. * * * This film is largely composed of scenes of violence and scenes in which Luc fills Erin in on the events from the first film in the series. As usual, Van Damme portrays a man in mourning: as Nady, the character who adopts him as a companion in Cyborg (1989) says, “you’re just a walking wound, aren’t you?” At the end of Cyborg, Gibson is reunited with his adopted daughter Halley after releasing her from what amounts to a hostage situation – here he also recovers his daughter from a being who has taken her hostage. Luc is now in favor of the UniSol project; he even supports SETH’s services as babysitter and educator of his daughter. The emphasis on the importance of military applications to research and development funding as a bad thing is a popular one in tech-noir; see, for example, Final Mission (1993) and Lawnmower Man (1992). Its presentation here in the opening sequences as a good thing reverses the moral positions adopted in both the first film and the made-for-television sequels mainly so the correctness of the more common perception can be validated in the end. The choice of Erin as Luc’s partner is inexplicable; it does seem that Maggie was a far better candidate for that role, but the alliance with a reporter seems, once again, to have special importance as a connection between the soldier and the public. The visit they make to an exotic dance club is a pale imitation of that made by the male bounty hunter and his unwelcome female sidekick to a similar establishment in Cyberzone (1995). See Circuitry Man (1990, 1994) for a more genuine “Romeo” android than that daunting Maggie. Squid is a morally confused character, obviously related to Lynch, designer of the blipvert in Max Headroom (1985); Harlan, the technician who pretends to pirate the rogue television signal in Videodrome (1983); and Ned Henderson, the inventor of the fatal virus transmitted by television signal in Fatal Error (1999). SETH himself is a descendent of the insane HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the unseen malevolent master AI calling the shots in the Terminator films (1984, 1991, 2003). SETH, however, like the criminal in Virtuosity (1995), is able to download into a human-like body. The automated army of reanimated corpses echoes the mobs in Omega Man (1971); while androids, rather than recycled humans, are mobilized under the direction of an artificial intelligence in I, Robot (2004).

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Unspeakable Writer: Pavan Grover Director: Thomas J. Wright Date: 2002 Length: 109 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind A border patrol officer and her partner are on a night stake out when they lose track of their target and drive off to see if they can pick up his trail. The female officer reappears on the road, alone and looking a bit battered, where Cesar (Marco Rodriguez) picks her up; suddenly she falls over on his lap and her brains spill out. A police car appears and Cesar is soon sentenced to death by electrocution. Prison rights advocate Jack Pitchford (Lance Henriksen) helps psychologist Diana Purlow (Dina Meyer) deal with the extremely crude and foul-mouthed warden (Dennis Hopper) such that Purlow gets permission to test her brain polyscan device on Cesar: the machine shows visual memory images in response to questioning. Diana learns that the patrol officer was suspected of executing some illegal immigrants, and her machine shows that Cesar is innocent, but she is unable to get a stay of execution from the governor. The governor is a man who had a sexual relationship with her while she was still a minor which led to a pregnancy and ended with an abortion: the governor wants her to just disappear along with anything that might disrupt his current political campaign. Meanwhile, serial killer Jesse Mowatt (Pavan Grover) has given himself up and is brought to the prison. He is treated badly and he seems to punish the guards by controlling their thoughts – even causing one to commit suicide. The judge who sentences him to death is rumored to be a pedophile; Jesse physically attacks and injures this judge in the courtroom, and he is soon found dead with his face eaten off in a room locked from the inside. When Diana takes her machine to Jesse in the dark solitary confinement where the warden has put him, he suggests that she might be “the one” and shows her the “love” and “hate” tattoos on his knuckles, as well as scenes of his abuse as a child, proof that he committed the murder for which Cesar was executed, scenes of her on the table after her abortion, and, finally, scenes of what appear to be the two of them making love. At Jesse’s execution, the warden goes insane and dies from a nasty brain-eating worm. Jesse is finally executed and taken away in a body bag, but he is not quite dead. Jack and Diana speculate about the possibility that Jesse is what he says he is – some sort of next-level evolved being, whose status is indicated by psychic abilities and the power to manifest his image, as well as the worm. The restless Diana goes to visit the grave where she placed her aborted daughter, and finds the spot with the help of Jesse’s apparition. Later, she goes to an empty warehouse where the very much alive Jesse finds her, again talking about how she is the one. She finally understands what that means: she is the one who will kill him – which she does. * * * The primary tech-noir motifs in Unspeakable are the electric chair and the polyscan device. Two executions by electrocution are shown with graphic realism. The chair is ubiquitous in tech-noir, often as a means of restraint during torture. In New Crime City (1994), it is used as the restraint for execution by gassing prior to an immediate resurrection. Although he seems to be beyond control by electronic devices, Jesse’s survival of the execution might be explained, as the dialogue in the film suggests, by the blood on the chair platform and the loosened restraints. Jesse’s criminality is explained, like that of the killer in Replicant (2001), in terms of the extreme abuse he suffered as a child. Jesse’s apparent evolution and psychic abilities include the ability to control Diana’s brain polyscanner. Machines that project and record memories and dreams are also featured in Futureworld (1976), Fortress (1992), and Total Recall 2070 (1999), and one is used as part of the judicial process in Synapse (1995). The mastery of machines is often proposed as a sign of human evolution in tech-noir, and often involves the literal hybridization of man and machine, as in Prototype X29A (1992) and Nemesis (1992). Jesse attacks 455

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only those who seem beyond accountability for their crimes, suggesting his evolution is not all bad, in spite of his characterization as an embodiment of the ultimate evil. His behavior can hardly be condoned, however, as it is essentially a form of vigilante justice such as that conducted in Interface (1984) and Cyberstalker (1996).

Until the End of the World Writers: Michael Almereyda, Peter Carey, Solveig Dommartin, and Wim Wenders Director: Wim Wenders Date: 1991 Countries: Australia, France, and Germany Length: 158 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind In 1999, as the world waits to learn if the explosion of a rogue nuclear satellite will mark the incoming new year, Sam Farber/Trevor McPhee (William Hurt) travels about the world recording images and messages from family and friends using a revolutionary device invented by his father (Max von Sydow) that will enable their transmission to his blind mother Irina (Christine Oesterlein). En route, he attracts the affections of Claire (Solveig Dommartin), who has recently separated from her philandering boyfriend Eugene (Sam Neill). She pursues Sam all the way to the Australian outback where Sam’s father has set up his laboratory with the help of local aborigines and in secret from the military, which desperately wants his invention. The device works, thanks to Claire’s assistance, but Sam’s mother dies soon after using it. Her bereaved husband, son, and Claire then discover that the same technology can be used to record dreams, which they do, and all three retreat into private obsessions with the colorful static-filled shadows recovered from their dreaming minds. Eugene, who follows Claire as Claire follows and then travels with Sam, and who seems to feel the words typed on an old-fashioned typewriter are superior to anything produced on a computer, punctuates the story with frequent voice-overs and rescues Claire from her tech-addiction by locking her away from new batteries for her visual playback device. She eventually recovers and gets a job on a space station monitoring for violations of environmental regulations. * * * The first half of this film is an extended road trip through Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Russia, California, Japan, and Australia as part of a quest for the specially made recordings that Sam’s blind mother will be able to see with the aid of her husband’s invention, but at times that objective seems beside the point given all the other things that happen along the way. Tech-noir film characters who get artificial sense organs to replace or supplement natural ones include, among others, the reporter in Death Watch (1980), who deliberately has one eye supplemented by a camera, and the young man who receives a cochlear implant in Tin Man (1983). In Until the End of the World, the objective is not to replace a woman’s eyes, but to find a way to directly communicate visual stimuli to her brain. The possibility of recording dreams or other images from the mind so that others may see and study them is found in other films; Until the End of the World, however, seems to be the only one in which people record their own dreams. The second half of the film is about the obsession of father, son, and son’s erstwhile girlfriend with the recordings of their dream images: see White Noise (2005) for equally addictive communications delivered via static filled monitors. The local aborigines, hitherto supportive of the project, abandon it when dream recordings become the new objective. The ongoing background context for the film includes dire predictions about what will happen when a rogue nuclear satellite enters the earth’s atmosphere: such consequences arise, or nearly arise, from downed satellites in

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Andromeda Strain (1971) and the horror film Night of the Living Dead (1971). A similar media backdrop about the end of the world marks The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973). The writer appears as a principal character in Death Watch (1980), where she is the object of the camera’s attention, and in The Companion (1994), where she becomes the object of the unwanted attentions of an android-stalker. See Speaking Parts (1989) for Clara, a film scriptwriter whose authentic account of her experiences is radically altered by a producer with his own agenda. Here, the writer Eugene is perhaps the cause of Claire’s flight and her pursuit of Sam, as well as the self-sacrificing aid she lends to his project which is ultimately responsible for its success: Eugene pursues Claire out of a combination of concern and guilt. The computerized detective “bear” who can find people anywhere is an unlikely but entertaining ally to the writer. The dream sequences in this film are discussed in Chapter 3.

Vanilla Sky (Remake) Source: Film Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos) written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil Series: Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), 1997 (Source for Vanilla Sky) Writer: Cameron Crowe Director: Cameron Crowe Date: 2001 Length: 135 min. Type: Virtual reality: Hacking the mind Bioengineering: Transformation David Aames (Tom Cruise) falls in love with Sophia (Penélope Cruz) while avoiding the unwanted attentions of his former lover Julie (Cameron Diaz); but then he somewhat inexplicably accepts a ride with Julie and she commits suicide by driving into a wall, leaving David with a grotesquely disfigured face and dysfunctional arm. In spite of these setbacks, David takes a renewed interest in the 51 percent controlling interest his father left him in his corporation and, with the help of Thomas Tipp (Timothy Spall), a lawyer his father had treated very badly but whom David rehires, David is able to save himself and his controlling share from the “seven dwarves” in charge of the other 49 percent. However, he also has a falling out with his best friend Brian (Jason Lee) and with Sophia, is in constant pain from migraines, and becomes deeply depressed. He eventually signs a contract with Extended Life (EL) and then commits suicide so they can put him into cryogenic freeze where he is supposed to enjoy an uninterrupted fantasy life with Sophia. Many years later, things go wrong and the images of Sophia and Julie become confused; he beats Sophia badly because he thinks Julie has somehow covertly taken her place. He also ends up in jail, purportedly for committing a murder, where Dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell) tries to help him figure out what happened. He retraces his steps to EL and Edmund (Noah Taylor), EL’s technical support, explains the situation, including the ways David constructed his ideal virtual life out of various elements from popular culture: an album cover, a movie, various songs, and so forth; and helps him make a choice to die again so that he can live in the real world again. * * * Vanilla Sky is a remake of Open Your Eyes (1997). Like the earlier film, the story is told through a combination of dreams, “real” life, memories, flash backs, and confessionals. Sofia is again played by Penélope Cruz, but in this version she has more lines and presence than she does as the object of César’s fantasies in the earlier film; she is also a dancer, artist, and actress, but not, apparently, a mime, as she was previously. David differs from César in that he is a more sympathetic character for a number of reasons: his humor and treatment of

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women is slightly less offensive; the additional development of his deceased father as an influence on his life makes it seem that he is a survivor who rose above a handicap, rather than an adult brat who grew up on the proverbial silver spoon; and the emphasis on the physical pain he suffers from migraines following the accident punctuates the aesthetic difficulty of living life with a disfigured face. The fuller development of the corporate board as the seven dwarves evokes the film The Insider (1999), Michael Mann’s dramatization about an executive fired from a cigarette corporation who then provides evidence that the “seven dwarves,” all members of the corporate board, lied under oath about the dangerous effects of their product. Again, this reference, intentional or not, serves to make David a more sympathetic character and lends his subsequent choice of cryogenic freeze, in spite of his success as a corporate leader, as well as his traumatic experiences within virtual reality, a pathos that is lacking in Vanilla Sky. Finally, the last images in Vanilla Sky are the screen going white as David’s fall nears its end, followed by an eye opening; this is a slightly more optimistic conclusion than the black screen at the end of Open Your Eyes (1997). The digital program that morphs, such that what a person expects to experience changes into something else, as when David sees Julie instead of Sophia, is the product of a programmer’s impish sense of justice in Menno’s Mind (1997). In Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), the déjà vu effect is an indication of a glitch or change in the programming; here it is the result of confusion in the mind producing the false reality.

Videodrome Writer: David Cronenberg Director: David Cronenberg Date: 1983 Country: Canada Length: 87 min. Type: Bioengineering: Transformation Surveillance: Media, marketing, and entertainment Max Renn (James Wood), president of Channel 83, is ever on the lookout for new and risky broadcast material. His associate Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) shows him what he claims is a pirated signal from a snuff show called “Videodrome.” In fact, Harlan is in partnership with Barry Convex (Leslie Carlson) of Spectacular Optical and has deliberately exposed Wren to a signal that causes a hallucination inducing brain tumor. The tumor first appeared in media guru Brian Oblivion (Jack Creley), who at first thought of it as part of the evolution towards a new media-compatible flesh. When O’Blivion realized what his erstwhile partners planned to do with the signal and disapproved, they killed him, but his daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits) keeps him alive with frequent broadcasts edited from his thousands of videotapes. Max, not yet realizing that Videodrome carries a tumor-inducing signal, lets his new girlfriend Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), whom he meets on a talk show to which she wears a vibrant red dress, watch it; they almost immediately begin experimenting with minor forms of sado-masochism. Nicki goes off to Pittsburgh, the supposed source of the Videodrome signal, to audition for the show and is apparently killed. After Max’s own hallucinations have deepened, Convex orders him to kill his partners so that he can take over Channel 83 and use it to expose his entire audience to the signal. Max does as he is ordered, but Bianca, whom he was to assassinate next, successfully reprograms him to turn against the Videodrome creators. He then maims Harlan, shoots Convex, and retreats to a condemned ship where, at the direction of a hallucinatory on-screen image of Nicki, he shoots himself saying: “long live the new flesh.” * * *

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This film, a dark vision of the impact of the cathode ray tube, is presented in Cronenberg’s classic horror style, complete with explicit violence, gore, blood, and morphing flesh. Max’s relationship with Nicki’s screen face is a particularly blunt satirical comment on the feminized media image and the seductive intentions of media controllers. Cronenberg’s treatment of this face is referenced in later films: it is spoofed in Interface (1984), makes a quick echo in Fatal Error (1999), and finds a more prolonged and respectable afterlife in the character of Mercy in Cyborg 2 (1993). The hand that morphs into a gun reappears in Nemesis 4 (1996), and the death dealing “ray” from a media box is revisited in Max Headroom’s (1985) blipverts and Fatal Error’s dehydrating virus, albeit without Cronenberg’s unique flair. Some variation on the character of O’Blivion is also found in a number of tech-noir films, both before and after Videodrome. For example, something of O’Blivion’s media guru image reappears in the character of Sims, a university professor who only communicates through a screen in Conceiving Ada (1997); and Altered States (1980), like Videodrome, includes a guru figure essential to the lead character’s evolution or transformation, a process associated in both films with hallucinatory experiences that manifest in the real world. Altered States is set in 1970s academe and the goal is the exploration of the self and enlightenment; the guru, appropriately, is a native Indian who provides drugs that are later used in conjunction with a sensory deprivation tank. Videodrome is set in a seedy television station and its associated environments and the goal is higher ratings, although the involuntary transformation of the human population into morphing suicidal puppets becomes a corporate priority. O’Blivion seems to be styled after the Canadian author and theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), still famous for his observation that the “medium is the message” – the “medium” here becomes the cathode ray tube signal. Where the threatening hallucinations in Altered States are overcome by the human will and the power of love, the technologically produced signal is fatal: love is posed in Videodrome as mere desire and, as such, it is easily displaced by the seductive and more deadly power of the screen.

Virtual Assassin (aka Cyberjack) Writer: Eric Poppen Director: Robert Lee Date: 1995 Length: 99 min. Type: Surveillance: Security Systems Cyborg Virtual reality: Mind transplant Former policeman Nick James (Michael Dudikoff), haunted by memories of the terrorist Nassim (Brion James) murdering his partner, turns to work as a custodial engineer for Quantum, a computer science research corporation, and tries to forget his life by betting on baseball games. The latter endeavor does not go well and, when he finds himself hunted for his gambling debts, he decides to spend a few nights hiding out at work. At Quantum, Dr. Royce (Duncan Fraser) and his daughter Alex (Suki Kaiser) have developed the first “biologically augmented computer virus.” Quantum is trying to sell the virus to the Japanese as a means of inoculating computer systems from hackers and other viruses, but the new program is highly unstable and can easily destroy systems rather than protect them. While a Quantum employee is talking to his girlfriend at Skynet, the virus gets out and causes a skybus crash, proving that it is not yet ready for use. Indifferent to the experimental stage of the virus’s development, Nassim and his team break into the Quantum lab and hold everyone hostage while forcing Alex to break the encrypted password to the virus. Nick has to defend himself against both the terrorists and the mechanical “cyclops” the police send into the building and which identifies him as part of the problem: another policeman recognizes him, but assumes Nick must be suffering

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from “burn out.” In spite of Nick’s best efforts to stop him, Nassim has the virus uploaded into a biochip in his brain. Minutes away from having a direct link to everyone through televisions, computers, and other forms of technology, Nick finally shoots him and Alex runs a virus program that annihilates the part of Nassim that managed to get on-line; Nick also wins on his latest bet. * * * Nick, like the policemen in Cyborg Cop (1993), New Crime City (1994), Demolition Man (1993), and others, suffers because of a case that went wrong; and like them, he has an opportunity to somehow make things right – Nick is granted a second confrontation with the terrorist who killed his partner. Decoda in Hologram Man (1995) is likewise haunted by memories of a psycho-killer murdering his partner and, when that killer escapes, has to deal with him again. Nick, like the alcoholic janitor in Project Shadowchaser II (1994), becomes the unlikely hero who saves the day. He may be a janitor, but Nick does know how to make use of a number of virtual reality programs and gizmos, including one that controls a virtual belly dancer and, when he accidentally creates a number of virtual replicators, he adeptly uses them as decoys so he can evade capture by the terrorists. The general danger that the internet, here associated with Skynet, evidently named after The Terminator’s (1984) Skynet, will be used by terrorists, is a common tech-noir theme, appearing in Hackers (1995), The Net (1995), Netforce (1999), Swordfish (2001), and others. Hologram Man (1995) also includes a father­–daughter scientist team comparable to Royce and Alex in that they are working on technology with faulty or inadequate security safeguards. The use of a computer virus with biological components, such as that the Royces have designed, is the threat of the day in Fatal Error (1999). The actual merging of the criminal or unstable mind with the internet is featured in the Ghost in the Machine (1993) and Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996). Nassim is a typical “ultimate evil” villain in that he makes comments such as: “All nations will kneel before their new master or suffer his wrath,” “After tonight God will be lucky if I return his calls,” “You shall have no other gods before me” and, after the download, “I am the light and the way.” The pseudo-religious tech cult featuring leaders who gather followers with a combination of tech-related power and religious hype appears in numerous tech-noir films, including Wild Palms (1993), City of Lost Children (1995), and Cybercity (1999).

Virtual Nightmare Writers: Dan Mazur and David Tausik Director: Michael Pattinson Date: 2000 TV Country: Australia Length: 86 min. Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Hacking the mind In the suburban town of Fairview, not far from the “city,” people who think it is 2000 live what appears to be a 1950s lifestyle complete with cars, domesticity, and overused stock aphorisms and phrases, such as “home is where the heart is.” The people in the city think they are administrating “direct broadcast virtual reality” (DBVR), a system supposedly set up to help people, such as those in Fairview, survive the aftermath of a terrible war that took place in 2037. On the urban fringes are the “weirdoes,” who are aware that it is really 2098 and are trying to infiltrate the city and shut down the broadcast. A new product, Arora, about to enter the Fairview market from an unknown source, will upgrade the DBVR such that people can just wire in and never leave their beds. Dale Hunter (Michael Muhney) lives in the suburbs and works contentedly on

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the Arora advertising without having the slightest idea what Arora is. He has a recurring dream about a car accident and of himself as a boy whirling down a big red spiral slide into his father’s arms and the phrase “This is not a pipe” persists in his mind. Then he starts to see through the DBVR, first the pixels and then the labels on everything that are part of the means by which the system works. He goes to the library where Wendy (Tasma Walton) shows him Magritte’s famous pipe painting. This does not really resolve the problem, however, as he wakes up in the middle of the night and goes outside to find a van collecting his sick coworker Bob in a body bag. He gets in the van and it takes him to a huge satellite dish, which he flees because of a deafening hum. Next, he starts to see everyone as decaying ghouls living in a black-and-white world full of dirt and rats, both at work and at the surprise birthday party his parents have arranged. He gets Wendy and takes her to the satellite: they go down a hatch and find a place full of old stuff and see papers dated 2037. They head for the city, but are waylaid by the fringe “weirdoes.” The city people arrive and take them to the city where Arora is considered a frightening anomaly in the system and Dale’s dreams are being “decoded” in an effort to understand it. Dale is put in a chair and drugged so that they can recover more dream images. Dale finally realizes that this place too is an illusion, so the city people return them to Fairview with their memories erased. Dale is quick to recover, and at a holiday parade sees everything as it really is for the first time: just bland and colorless. He goes and gets Wendy again, and they go to the Arora distribution center and also meet the local “systems operator” who explains that the DBVR is maintained because it is economical. Dale, realizing the true nature of Arora, grabs a fire extinguisher and smashes the machines, thus terminating the illusion of color and style. This event has an astonishing lack of effect on the locals, but Dale and Wendy decide to head north, where it appears there are mountains and greenery, and where the systems operator told them there is “nothing.” * * * Virtual Nightmare, like Brave New World (1980, 1998) and Harrison Bergeron (1995), articulates class divisions as necessary to happiness, and further proposes that permanently wiring everyone into virtual reality is just as necessary – the ambitious boss in Virtual Seduction (1995) would probably agree with this latter point. As in Harrison Bergeron and The Truman Show (1998), the social leaders in Virtual Nightmare are dedicated to artificially maintaining a 1950s world. As in Brave New World (1980) and Demolition Man (1993), numerous stock phrases and jingles promote the status quo in Virtual Nightmare. Dale, like Bergeron, Truman, and Logan in Logan’s Run (1976), and Neo in the Matrix (1999), discovers that the world is not as it seems to be. Bergeron becomes a martyr in his effort to change things; but Dale, like Neo, literally begins to see through the virtual facade, and like Neo and Logan, he manages to destroy the apparatus maintaining the false reality. Like Neo in Matrix Reloaded (2003) also, Dale has dreams that not only connect the real and the virtual worlds, but also provide clues to their inter-relationship and the future.

Virtual Seduction Writers: Director: Date: Length: Type:

Michelle Gamble-Risley, William Widmaier, and Paul Ziller Paul Ziller 1995 TV 84 min. Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Hacking the mind

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  Prologue Text: Dec. 31, 1999  Prologue Voice-Over (no text): You wouldn’t know it by the silence, but it’s New Year’s Eve. The 21st century is about to arrive. Of course, New Year’s wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the streets weren’t empty. In 1994, the twenty-one-year-old artist Paris (Carrie Genzel) elopes with photographer Liam Bass (Jeff Fahey); two thugs accost them in a park, shoot Liam and rape and murder Paris. Liam is still grieving years later when he volunteers for the test marketing of the Cybernetics virtual reality pod and starts dating a journalist, Laura (Ami Dolenz), formerly Paris’s best friend. After the pod is installed in his apartment, the company boss Dr. Grant (Frank Novak) arranges for the covert addition of a device, previously rejected for legal testing, that enables the computer to access the user’s unconscious. Grant’s objective is to put pods in every home, just like television, and to make virtual reality so compelling that no one will ever want to leave it. The computer creates a Paris so real that Liam does not want to come out for anyone – not even a pregnant Laura. Laura contacts Anderson (Meshach Taylor), one of the monitoring technicians at the lab, and realizes that he can only see Liam’s fantasies, not Liam. Anderson discovers the pod’s hardware chips were changed and informs Grant, who fires him as a corporate spy, transfers the pod to the lab, and tells Liam to give him results or he will lose all funding and Paris will die: nothing less than Liam’s death in virtual reality will do. Meanwhile, Laura enters the lab on the pretense of doing a story and, on the further pretense of trying out the pod and with Anderson’s help, she accesses Liam’s Elvis-style virtual marriage to Paris. She is caught, but Liam is pulled from the pod, even as his virtual self lives on with Paris. The real Laura and Liam celebrate the new millennium in a dense white fog; everyone else sits in their pods. * * * The idea that virtual reality sex might be appealing to a lot of people is a predominant motif in Terminal Justice (1995); but unlike that film Virtual Seduction visualizes the virtual scenes – the Liam–Paris body painting and love making sequence being an obvious highlight. Liam’s moment of transition to fully accepting the product and the virtual Paris occurs while he stares into the static-filled screen of his now thoroughly dated television. Other consumers accept and then become victims of the products they test with even less transition in Arcade (1993), Future Shock (1993), Evolver (1994), and Virtuosity (1995). A corporate product tester is actually killed by his testing machine in Ghost in the Machine (1993). In Virtual Nightmare (2000) the transition to permanent virtual reality is packaged as “Arora.” Virtual reality programs that interface directly with the user’s unconscious also appear in Future Kick (1991), Future Shock (1993), The Cell (2000), and Virtual Nightmare (2000). Open Your Eyes (1997) and Vanilla Sky (2001), like Virtual Sedution, include this feature, along with digital “guides,” and specifically exploit the appeal of a virtual re-creation of a lost lover; the virtual re-creation of a lost love is also prominent in Strange Days (1995) and Cybercity (1999). The permanent downloading of personalities to a digital realm is a common tech-noir motif: physically dead couples achieve eternal togetherness in Menno’s Mind (1997) and Encrypt (2003). The splitting off of a virtual persona from a person also occurs in Max Headroom (1985), such that the physical person, like Liam, lives on separately. For a man who has an even bigger identity crisis than Liam after his lover is murdered, see Synapse (1995). The nosey and helpful female reporter who, like Laura, rescues the man subjected to some form of technological experimentation is a mainstay of tech-noir, playing key roles in Universal Soldier (1992, 1998, 1998, 1999) and Cyber-Tracker (1994, 1995). The “pod people” closing is a variation on the “walk away” tableau that also summarizes the human condition in the technological age.

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Virtuosity Writer: Eric Bernt Director: Brett Leonard Date: 1995 Length: 105 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Cyborg Police officer Parker Barnes’s (Denzel Washington) family was murdered and his arm blown off by a bomb set by terrorist Matthew Grimes. Barnes’s reaction was to shoot Grimes and then, in shock, accidentally shoot a news reporter and her cameraman who entered the scene with their lights glaring in his eyes. Much later, Barnes is pulled out of jail to test a virtual reality program for police trainees that includes SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe), a killer concocted from some two hundred criminal profiles, including that of Grimes. SID adjusts the sensitivity ratings of the “game” and is thus able to kill Barnes’s partner; he also kills by means of electrocution, a method that is not on his program list. SID is ordered destroyed, but Lindenmeyer (Stephen Spinella), his designer, follows SID’s directions and manipulates Clyde (Kevin O’Connor) into creating a silicon-based body that can be regenerated from any available glass for what he thinks is the Sheila 3.2 program. SID is thus born from a large egg-shaped incubator and when the confused Clyde says “Sheila?” SID responds, “No, I’m Oedipus” and kills him; Daryl quickly flees and goes into hiding. SID, like Grimes, is attracted to public places covered by the media: a high-tech dance hall, a stadium, and finally a television broadcasting station. Barnes is offered a full pardon in return for capturing SID 6.7. He is injected with a tracker that can also be used to kill him, and teamed up with psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch). SID takes Carter’s daughter Karin hostage and broadcasts the fact on television. In the ensuing race, Barnes is forced to kill SID before they find out where Karin is, so they put SID, along with Barnes and Carter, back in the simulation at a point before SID’s death and replay the event, but this time with better results. They find the hostage location, Barnes uses his metal arm, a souvenir of his earlier altercation with Grimes, to stop the beating fan that blocks access to Karin and then uses wires from the same arm to reroute the countdown mechanism set to detonate when she is moved. Daryl makes a final effort to save his creation, which Carter stops. Carter and Karin go home; Barnes gets his pardon. * * * Like John Spartan in Demolition Man (1993) but without the cryonics, Barnes is the jailed, but good policeman, who recovers his place in the world by bringing a true criminal to justice. A virtual program of the sort for which Barnes volunteers is used for illegitimate training purposes on pilots in Final Mission (1993) and to train voluntary mercenary killers in Expect No Mercy (1995). See I, Robot’s (2004) Spooner for another police detective who puts his artificial arm to good use. As in Matrix (1999), virtual reality looks just like the real thing, except for a little surface rippling, repetitive characters, and clues left by the programmers for game players. SID is a virtual version of Demolition Man’s cryo-digitized psycho-killer Simon Phoenix, and also comparable to the re-embodied digitized “Slash” who escapes cryo-prison in Hologram Man (1995). SID is even more attracted to the media than Phoenix or Slash, however, as indicated by his response when he first sees his own images projected on screen in the dance hall: “I’m beautiful!” His orchestration of screams and whimpers from his captives, particularly the screams, brings thoughts of Blow Out (1981) to mind. Barnes is quick to follow SID’s association of democracy with places where people exercise their right to gather in large numbers in public; the commentary on democracy is also part of Hologram Man. SID treats his artificial counterparts, both the virtual Sheila and android bar tender, with a kind of racist contempt: these characters serve to fill out the film’s visual and conceptual miseen-abyme of the artificial “person.” Children are also taken hostage in Duplicates (1992), Cyborg Cop 2 (1994), 463

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and Swordfish (2001). In Evolver (1994), Project Shadowchaser II (1994), and Virtuosity (1995), an artificial person takes a child hostage. In The Cell (2000), a virtual reality program tested on a child is used to locate an adult hostage.

Virus Writer: Les Standiford Director: Allan A. Goldstein Date: 1996 Country: Canada Length: 90 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Prodichen is developing bioweapons for the United States government under the auspices of presidential advisor Eric Black (Eric Peterson); the president knows nothing about the project initially and is preoccupied with his upcoming Camp David announcement of a pro-environment treaty celebration at Thermal Wells National Park in Oregon. He sends his security chief, former football player Ken Fairchild (Brian Bosworth), to do some advance scouting and to set up the location. Ken has a cold and is further slowed down by a bog – from which he is rescued by local veterinarian Lorraine Keller (Leah Pinsent) and her horse. Meanwhile, Ken’s poker buddy and newspaper reporter Leo Burns (Chuck Shamata) gets a tip from insider scientist Alex Burk (Patrick Galligan) about what is going on at Prodichen: in a recent unpublicized accident, several people died within minutes when a vial broke – all evidence of this event was incinerated. Alex also arranges for Ripley (Daniel Kash), one of the truckers assigned to transport a large load of this substance, to take it to Thermal Wells instead of its intended destination. The trucker throws his reluctant partner out, pops pills to stay awake for the trip, gets lost, and drives the truck off the road: the truck’s cabin falls into a canyon and the toxin leaks from the damaged tank. When Ken and his park guide come across some dead campers and a sick boy, Ken calls for a helicopter. Lorraine, whose horse went crazy and then succumbed to the disease as well, meets up with the Ken. At the quarantine facility, they soon realize things are not as they should be: the mobile incineration unit for body disposal being a major clue. Ken and Lorraine, both of whom have colds by this time, get out with Ripley, and head off past the accident site. The tank has already been removed, but Ripley wants some of the payoff money that is scattered about and soon falls to his death. The “clean up” crew did not realize, however, as does Ken, who happens to have been a geology major, that the contaminant has gone into the underground river. Ken and Lorraine also discover that the contaminant is not killing the fish in the warmer stream fed by the hot springs. So they scrounge up some dynamite, set some charges, and arrange for the hot water to meet the cold water geyser that blows for the picture perfect backdrop at the president’s opening of the Thermal Springs event. The president is grateful that he was not caught in a contaminated spray, but is not prepared to do anything more about the bioweapons issue; and, since Burns has been murdered for his interest, the matter seems to be closed. However, the film actually closes with Ken walking away amidst newspaper headlines about the trial that follows from his own testimony and Alex’s research. * * * This film has numerous narrative and credibility flaws, but it does address the hazards and absurdities of developing bioweapons. The administrators of the program are, as usual, ruthless in covering up problems that might jeopardize their funding. Indeed, it seems that everyone in the political ring has been corrupted by their awareness of or involvement in this program; so it is up to the scientist who cannot stand by and

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watch, the motivated reporter, and the former football player to do the right thing, with a little help from the locals of course. The possibility of a spill at such a beautiful site makes as compelling an argument against such weapons as the loss of human life does in the opening sequence. In this respect, Virus is more effective than 2103: The Deadly Wake (1997) in which the beauty of the almost contaminated oceans is little developed except in the appearance of the sprite. The lab accident in the opening is similar to that in Warning Sign (1985) in which a broken test tube also leads to disaster, although the disaster is a lot faster coming in Virus. Virus forgoes Warning Sign’s bug hunt in favor of moving from the consequences of a biotoxin spill on people to the consequences of such a spill on the natural environment and, of course, Lorraine’s horse. Virus is also far more moralizing in tone, with the trucker’s greed seeming as much to blame for the problem as the covert machinations of those in the White House.

WarGames Writer: Walon Green, Lawrence Lasker, and Walter F. Parkes Director: John Badham Date: 1983 Length: 114 min. Type: Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Master AI NORAD tests show that when men stationed at nuclear warhead sites are given the order to enter their launch codes, about 22 percent of those men, including Captain Lawson (John Spencer), refuse to finalize the process until they receive voice confirmation. The solution to this perceived problem, a completely automated system, is developed at the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD base by inventor Professor Falken (John Wood). Later, computer whiz kid David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) tries to impress Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), first by changing a paper grade from F to A, and later by breaking into the NORAD defense system, which he at first believes to be a game company. He researches Falken and discovers some personal information, including his son’s name Joshua, which also proves to be the “back door” access code. David is soon arrested as a Russian spy and he realizes that the NORAD people do not know that Joshua, whom they know only as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), is also the program personality and it thinks it is merely playing a game; meanwhile, WOPR/Joshua is rapidly escalating to defense condition status. David escapes and, with a little help from Jennifer, makes his way to the reclusive Falken who left NORAD sometime before. Falken gets them all back to NORAD just as it is locking down for defcon 1 and convinces the general in charge of advising the president that the missiles on the screen are not real. Unfortunately, Joshua then sets about breaking the missile codes so he can launch them himself. David, following through on Falken’s earlier description of his efforts to get Joshua to understand the futility of the war game by playing tic tac toe, which always ends in stalemate, sets Joshua to play tic tac toe with himself. Joshua, who has decoded the launch codes, grasps the real message and drops the military game because the only way to win is by not playing. He then greets Falken and offers him a game of chess. * * * The plot of WarGames, like that of Failsafe (1964), derives from an imminent thermonuclear war controlled by machines that cannot be stopped because people have been cut out of the protocols. WarGames picks up where someone refuses to push the last button before detonation without confirmation from another human being: had such a failsafe been in place in the earlier film, the conclusion would have been quite different. Although its star is a seventeen-year-old, WarGames belongs in any discussion of Cold War themes in the

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tech-noir context, as does the teen film The Manhattan Project (1986). See Universal Soldier: The Return (1999) for an artificial intelligence that goes to work on a set of security codes because cracking the code is the only way to prevent his own destruction. See Global Effect (2002) for a film in which it is not Asia that is targeted, but Africa, the continent most frequently mentioned as the source of some of the world’s most dangerous viruses. Falken is the master programmer who has left the world of technology behind in favor of a closer connection to nature. See Lawnmower Man 2 (1996) for a similar, though less convincing, character. Joshua reverses the tendency for artificial intelligences to acquire a desire for power and immortality demonstrated by Colossus (1970) and Demon Seed’s (1977) Proteus IV such that as soon as he realizes what the consequences of his “game” will be, he stops playing and proposes a more friendly and skill oriented contest with his creator. Joshua’s termination of the battle plan does not incorporate any indication of awareness of the difference between game and real combat: his analogous reasoning involves comparing one game with another. Artificial intelligences appear in conjunction with tech games in a variety of tech-noir films in which the stakes are more limited, but which also factor in failures on the part of both humans and machines to fully understand the difference between a game and real life. In Interface (1984) it is the humans who do not make this distinction and people die because of it; while in both Arcade (1993) and Evolver (1994), an artificial intelligence that is also a primary game character plays for real life stakes and it takes a while for their human targets to figure out what is going on.

Warning Sign Writers: Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins Director: Hal Barwood Date: 1985 Length: 99 min. Type: Bioengineering: Diseases and cures Joanie Morse (Kathleen Quinlan) is the security guard at a Bio Tek Agronomics research facility in Utah. One day, in the P4 lab, a sticky label on a test tube transfers the tube from its tray to a biohazard suit; it soon falls to the floor and is crushed underfoot just after Dr. Nielsen’s (Richard Dysart) team members have removed their helmets for a Polaroid moment. The biohazard alarm sounds, but three people get out before the lock down is complete. Tom Schmidt (G. W. Bailey), believing the alarm was set off by some stalled pumps, takes Bobby (Ross Rossovich) off to the maintenance area to restart them. He demands Joanie release the lockdown, but she refuses and Nielson soon calls in from the P4 lab to confirm that the alarm is real. Joanie’s police officer husband Cal (Sam Waterston) arrives, soon followed by the US Accident Containment Team headed by Major Connolly (Yaphet Kotto), who does his best to maintain the illusion that the facility is doing research on advanced agricultural techniques rather than germ warfare – germ warfare research would be illegal since the US signed a treaty with Russia outlawing it in 1972. He sets his team to work on gaining visual access to the labs. The three who evaded the lock down, including Bobby’s girlfriend Dana (Cynthia Carle), are put into clear plastic bags that serve as mini-containment units for the duration of the crisis. Dana tells the press that the research company is great and that she is getting paid overtime for her trouble. Thanks to Schmidt’s failure to decontaminate his contact lenses, the germ spreads throughout the entire complex, except the cafeteria where a third group remains safe until the crisis is over. Nielsen administers the antidote developed by Dr. Dan Fairchild (Jeffrey De Munn), but first the lab animals and then his team exhibit exactly the symptoms the bug was designed to cause: violence and insanity. Joanie suggests Cal go and get Fairchild himself. The team Connolly sends inside is overwhelmed by Nielsen’s men, who had appeared to be dead on camera: a red fire ax is featured several times in the ensuing “bug hunt” scenes, as are various flame throwing devices. Finally,

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Cal and Fairchild, realizing that Joanie is the only one inside who is not sick, take matters into their own hands and make a covert entry into the building through the greenhouse ventilation shaft. They find Joanie in the P4 lab where she has dragged the comatose Schmidt for safety. Fairchild realizes Joanie is immune because she is pregnant and reformulates the antidote, thus saving many of the infected people and bringing the crisis to an end. * * * The Bio Tek Agronomics facility, like the Wildfire facility in The Andromeda Strain (1971), was designed for germ warfare research, but no one knows about it except the few in charge. Connolly makes a specifically Cold War argument when he justifies the work done there as necessary to the defense of the nation should the Soviets attack with bioweapons. The fact that some people get out of a building that is genuinely contaminated and later numerous locals try to force their way inside emphasizes the danger, not only from the germ itself, but from people who do not understand the situation because they know nothing about the facility’s real purpose. Virus (1996) likewise includes a secret bioweapons facility, a broken vial, and an unsuccessful effort to cover up a disaster. Dr. Nielsen is referred to as “a regular Dr. Frankenstein.” The infected people trapped inside the lab act like creatures from Night of the Living Dead (1968), Omega Man (1971), or possibly the horror film The Shining (1980). The “bug hunt” inevitably echoes Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), as does an altercation Joanie has with an elevator. Fairchild is the corporate man who “got out” but comes back to solve a problem: for similar characters, see WarGames (1983) and Lawnmower Man 2 (1996). As in Night of the Living Dead (1968), Omega Man, and Absolon (2003), someone’s blood holds the cure for a plague of some kind. The survival of the male–female couple with a baby provides a conventional closure and plot resolution: see Fortress (1992), Synapse (1995), and the most recent film version of Brave New World (1998) for similar endings.

Webmaster (aka Skyggen: The Shadow) Writer: Thomas Borch Nielsen Director: Thomas Borch Nielsen Date: 1998 Country: Denmark Length: 102 min. Type: Virtual reality: Security, information, and control Cyborg J.B. (Lars Bom) is the ascetic webmaster of the domain run by Stoiss (Jorgen Kiil) and used by numerous lower level members for a variety of high stakes and illegal activities. Crucial to the operation of this cyberworld are the cyber-ego counterparts of the four top domain members, beings capable of performing many of the functions performed by their owners even when the human connection is absent. While doing a side job with his sometime partner Miauv (Puk Scharbau), J.B. records a woman murdering one of the other top domain users. Shortly after, Stoiss has J.B. kidnapped, cut off from his cyber-ego, and hooked up to an artificial heart that runs down in thirty-five hours; then he orders him to find a thief who has been pilfering from him or die. With a little help from Miauv, J.B. figures things out – the thief and murderess are one and the same: Barbie (Karin Rorbeck), Stoiss’s beloved girlfriend. Miauv also finds the body of top level domain member number two. Soon Stoiss and J.B. are all that stand between Barbie and total control of the top domain. J.B. manages to prove to Stoiss that Barbie is to blame and he moves on from his stoic, cyber-oriented life style to a picnic on the grass with Miauv. * * * 467

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The high-tech cyberworld simulations and J.B.’s ascetic lifestyle, tea ritual, habit of jacking in while hanging upside down, and uninflected voice-overs make an interesting thirty minutes, but after that, the original reason for the film loses ground to black leather, sex, violence, and death. When Barbie blasts an innocent bystander sent by Miauv to warn him that he is next, J.B., who absolutely refuses to kill anyone, is left covered in the victim’s blood and in a severe state of shock with which many viewers are likely to sympathize. The man with an implant that places him at the mercy of his coercers not merely because it allows them to track him or inflict pain, but because it includes a detonation device or timer, appears in Megaville (1990), Nemesis (1992), New Crime City (1994), Synapse (1995), and Virtuosity (1995). The emphasis on the heart in this film is shared by a few other films: the ninja clone in Shadow Fury (2001) is apparently designed so that his brain is where a normal human’s heart would be, but he discovers his humanity through his “heart” anyway; and in It’s All About Love (2003), people die in extraordinary numbers from a mysterious heart ailment. The corporate VIPs who play a high-stakes cyberspace game that turns deadly because of an interloper is also central to the action in Cyber Wars (2004), a film that, like Webmaster, features a woman partnered with an ascetic male cyberspace expert, as well as that man’s cyberspace construct. Cyberspace constructs of dead or purportedly dead individuals are also presented as characters in Netforce (1999) and Nirvana (1997). The Cyber Wars plot resolution, like that of Webmaster, involves the deaths of game players; but whereas the top cyberspace experts all seem to die in Cyber Wars, the tech-master of Webmaster merely relinquishes his obsession with technology in favor of a real girl and a return to nature. Male heroes both get the girl and a return to nature in Logan’s Run (1976), Synapse (1995), Brave New World (1998), and Paycheck (2003).

Westworld Writer: Michael Crichton Series: Futureworld, 1976 (Sequel) Director: Michael Crichton Date: 1973 Length: 88 min. Type: Android: Entertainment Android: Stalkers and assassins John Blane (James Brolin) takes his friend Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) on a $1000 a day vacation at Westworld, an elaborate theme park where guests can role play in old west, Roman, and medieval settings with human and animal robots programmed to satisfy their every whim. These robots are so real in appearance that they can be visually distinguished from flesh and blood humans only by the deficiencies in their hand design. Signs that things might not be as they should be soon begin to appear: a rattlesnake actually bites Peter, a maid refuses her King in the medieval world, the Knight kills the King, and things just keep getting worse, apparently because of a computer “disease.” After the recently refurbished robotic gunslinger (Yul Brynner) kills John, Peter finds himself the object of a relentless pursuit through a corpse-filled Rome into the empty corridors below the facility where he manages to burn the gunslinger’s face with acid. The chase continues through the medieval world where the Knight and Queen are now on thrones; here, Peter discovers the gunslinger’s vision is confused by fire and he even manages to set him on fire, and then rescues a girl chained in a dungeon only to discover she is an android. A very charred gunslinger finally falls down and stays down. * * *

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This film followed the 1971 opening of the Walt Disney theme park, the largest in the world, in Orlando, Florida, by only a few years; and, like that park, “Westworld” is divided into theme areas. Far more sophisticated than the deserted fair grounds where the final showdown of The Clones (1973) takes place, and unlike Able Edwards (2004), in which the theme park idea is developed more along the lines of Citizen Kane (1941) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) with a cloning twist; Westworld turns the theme park into the setting for a horrifying life and death struggle between tourists and technology. The leading android gunslinger, a parody of the social misfits who serve as killers and criminals in old-fashioned westerns, becomes the archetypal representation of technology in contemporary society – a relentless, unthinking, and unstoppable stalker, born of a programming malfunction. The casting of Yul Brynner in this role adds a further element of parody insofar as his presence references The Magnificent Seven (1960) in which he plays a character who leads a group of mercenaries in the defense of a poor village from bandits. The Magnificent Seven shifts the racial context of its prototype, The Seven Samurai (1954), to the largely Caucasian perspective of the western, and Westworld shifts it again into the android world of the simulacrum. See Solo (1996) for another tech-noir film that also owes something to this earlier classic but maintains a little more of the hero’s protective instincts. Both the representation of technology as a stalker and the emphasis on the exceptional skill and advanced technology needed to create accurate hands are revisited in many later tech-noir films involving androids, notably the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003). The emphasis on the accurate replication of the physical appearance of humans is, of course, an extension of the centuries old practice of trompe l’oeil. Where painters aim to “fool the eye” with still lifes and wax work artists try to startle viewers with their re-creations of public figures and medieval torture scenes; just so, scientists and technicians are here obsessed with the obviously lucrative goal of making the automaton ever more life-like and interactive. While the malfunctioning program causes the androids to become stalkers and killers, the original motivation for their manufacture was not malicious or deadly, but merely capitalistic and aesthetic, as is also the case with the theme parks in Able Edwards (2004). The only directly negative impact of this new form of entertainment, had things not gone so terrible wrong, would have been in the employment sector because the androids are clearly taking jobs away from people in the entertainment industry. This point is not addressed here, but is considered in the sequel Futureworld (1976).

White Noise Writer: Niall Johnson Director: Geoffrey Sax Date: 2005 Countries: Canada, United Kingdom, and United States Length: 98 min. Type: Surveillance: Information and control One night, architect Jonathan Rivers’s (Michael Keaton) wife Anna (Chandra West), a beautiful and best selling author, does not come home. Eventually, her body is found in the river. Some months later, Jonathan is approached by Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) who claims that he can record auditory and visual messages that come from the dead through the static, or white noise, of electronic transmissions: some of these transmissions seem well meant, while others are frightening and obscene. Sarah Tate (Deborah Kara Unger) affirms the effectiveness of Raymond’s skill and Jonathan is soon hooked. When Jonathan responds to a middle of the night call from Raymond and then finds Raymond dead, his fascination turns to obsession. He believes Anna is sending him messages that enable him to help people, but then realizes that the transmissions begin before the person purportedly sending them has died and that all of the people who die had previously sought Raymond’s help. Demons show up to torture Sarah until she attempts suicide, an event that brings Jonathan’s

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activities to the attention of Detective Smits (Mike Dopud). Jonathan, returning from the hospital, finds his home completely trashed and another electronic clue that he immediately follows to the abandoned buildings near the location where Anna’s car was found. At the abandoned building, Jonathan finds the truth: one of the construction workers at one of his buildings, apparently acting according to the directions of demons, abducts and tortures women. Whether the electronic transmissions are actually from the land of the dead, the demons, or the dying women is left unclear; but the demons that swoop down on Jonathan certainly look both real and malevolent. Detective Smits arrives in time to shoot the construction worker. * * * White Noise is based on the idea that screens, specifically computer monitors and television screens, can be haunted, such that technology can serve as a medium that allows ghosts of the dead to make themselves visible to the living. Haunted objects, like haunted houses, are common in horror films and, as in films such as Black Christmas (1974), the haunting is just as likely to be attributable to a serial killer as to an actual ghost. White Noise, however, picks up on the Poltergeist (1982) approach by using television static as a means of communication. In Until the End of the World (1991) the appearance of hazy figures on a static-filled screen projected from the dreaming mind sends three individuals on a prolonged “trip” from which they are lucky to return, while staring at a static-filled screen is a prelude to Liam’s plunge into the depths of his unconscious in Virtual Seduction (1995). The notion that technological inventions might lead to readier access to the “other side” was also popular following the invention of the electric light bulb: some people thought the new forms of light would make ghosts and other previously invisible phenomena visible. The Futurists were among the artists inspired, in part, by this idea; today, filmmakers also develop the occult-electronics theme. The messages from the dead in White Noise are barely distinguishable from the static on the screens; but in Brainstorm (1983), death experience images are presented as extremely vivid multi-colored psychedelics that can be reviewed virtually. Whereas this earlier film concentrates on military appropriations and applications of innovative technology, White Noise dramatizes the intersection of grief and gullibility with the seemingly miraculous potential of technology, as do Virtual Seduction (1995) and Cybercity (1999), in both of which a man grieving for a dead lover is manipulated by virtual images of that lover. The possibility that human beings who are sufficiently “evil” might have the power to manifest apparitions on screens and in the world as ghosts is part of the horrific Unspeakable (2002). See Ghost in the Machine (1993) for a serial killer who is accidentally downloaded into the internet.

Wild Palms Writer: Bruce Wagner Directors: Kathryn Bigelow, Keith Gordon, Peter Hewitt, and Phil Joanou Date: 1993 Length: 285 min. ABC mini-series Type: Virtual reality: Media, marketing, and entertainment Virtual reality: Mind transplant In 2007 Los Angeles, the Fathers and the Friends are waging a battle for political and technological power. The Fathers were founded by the respected Senator Anton Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), owner of the company Mimicom and aspirant to the presidential office and to immortality by means of the elusive “go-chip” which enables the digitizing of a person. The senator and his sister Josie Ito (Angie Dickinson) not only murder, torture, and manipulate using virtual reality, they also abduct the first-born sons of leading Friends families

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and replace them with sons born to Fathers. They control the “Wild Palms” television network, from which they launch the virtual reality Channel 3, and are also the leaders of the quasi-religious cult of Synthiotics. The Friends were founded by Eli Levitt (David Warner), Josie’s second husband, and operate out of the “wilderzone” urban areas. Harry Wyckoff (James Belushi) is a patent lawyer who is happily married to Josie’s daughter Grace (Dana Delany) with whom he has a son Coty (Ben Savage) and a daughter Dierdre (Monica Mikala). Unbeknownst to him, Eli is Grace’s father. When Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall), a lover from his distant past, shows up asking for help locating her long-lost son, Harry’s life becomes increasingly entwined with that of Kreutzer. Both Harry and Coty have dreams about a rhinoceros, a sign that they are to be important players in the battle between the Fathers and the Friends. The Friends enlist Harry’s aid in their cause and sabotage the go-chip such that Kreutzer becomes a transitory ghost rather than a superbeing. The first segment, “Everything Must Go,” begins as Harry wakes from a dream about a rhinoceros with the words: “so this is how it begins.” Harry’s friend Tommy (Ernie Hudson) introduces him to virtual reality and the programmer behind the new “Church Windows” program, Chickie Levitt (Brad Dourif). Chickie lives in a wheelchair and spends considerable time with his virtual reality friend Tara. Harry loses his job and gets a new one with Kreutzer at Channel 3, where he works with Gavin (Charles Hallahan). Gavin, purportedly a dedicated Synthiotic, shows him a demo for the virtual reality show “Church Windows.” Harry also observes several instances of disturbing violence: on one occasion a man is taken from a restaurant where he is lunching with Tommy; later he sees a woman present at the time at Tommy’s party, but she denies ever seeing him. This woman turns out to be the sister of Tully Woiwode (Nick Mancuso), a painter supported by Kreutzer. The Fathers have her killed; Tully threatens Josie and demands his sister back, so Josie comes and personally puts out his eyes. Harry also starts to notice a small tattoo of palms on the hands of various people and has his first encounter with Peter, a boy selling “maps to the stars” on the street who has chest tattoos he says he got from the Church of the Fathers. Paige, Harry’s former lover, shows up and asks him for help finding her abducted son; later she claims others have found the abductor and asks Harry for help bringing him in. On this oddly dream-like occasion, the security men stop pursuing the man along the beach; Paige falls in the sand and passes her gun to Harry and begs him to continue. Harry catches the man, who turns out to be Tommy, and Tommy says, “This is how it begins.” Meanwhile, Grace becomes convinced that her son Cody is not really her son and pays a visit to her father Eli, whom she has not seen for many years, at the State Perceptory. Cody is asked to join the Church Windows cast where he stars opposite Tabba Schwartzkopf (Bebe Neuwirth). Chickie becomes Kreutzer’s prisoner because he is the only one who can finish the “gochip” which is crucial to the fulfillment of Kreutzer’s dream of immortality. In the second episode, “The Floating World,” Paige claims that Tommy was once in love with her and abducted her son for revenge; she insists Tommy is in jail, but Harry cannot find him. Tommy escapes his captors using a virtual reality ruse. Meanwhile, Gavin has Harry try some experimental “mimizene” juice that works as an empathogen such that it makes virtual characters seem physically real. After Grace attempts suicide, Gavin and his friend Stitch (Charles Rocket) take Harry through a tunnel below his pool to meet Tully: all of these men have dreamt of the rhino. The three tie Harry up and explain the facts about the politics of the Fathers, including his arranged marriage to Grace and Grace’s parentage. Later, Cody, pretending to be Peter, kills Gavin in a hotel. Kreutzer sends Paige and Harry to Kyoto to collect something from Ushio (Danny Kamekona); while there, Harry meets with Hiro (François Chau), Grace’s former friend and fellow Trekkie, and learns that Ushio was Chickie’s mentor and is also Tara, the virtual ballerina Chickie fancies. Evidently, Ushio’s company was a rival of Mimicom that formerly wanted the two companies to merge. Harry is forcibly given a wild palm tattoo. Back home, Harry finds Grace has collapsed from obsessively watching Cody’s tapes in slow motion; he also finds a letter she has written to Eli. He goes to meet Eli, who tells him that Tommy was onto the Mimicon plan, which goes far beyond Channel 3, and that mimizene was developed from an exotic fish by a chemist, Harry’s father, who was formerly Kreutzer’s partner. In the third episode, “Rising Sons,” Harry learns that the palm tree tattoo marks him as one of the Fathers, and also briefly enjoys the $2 million beach house he is finally able to afford. Gavin’s son Elijah takes the still 471

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captive Chickie some cookies laced with mimizene; the Singer guarding and supposedly advising him eats one and then watches a special virtual reality program Chickie made just for him: in it the virtual Singer murders himself and coincidentally the real-world Singer dies. In retaliation, Josie makes Chickie watch as a virus destroys his beloved ballerina. Kreutzer is now preparing to run for president and to marry Paige, but he also makes it clear that he likes virtual girls better than he likes Paige. Paige finally tells Harry the whole truth: her father was a journalist who opposed Kreutzer’s rise to power and Synthiotics, so she was abducted at the age of three and raised in New Realist foster homes; her lost son was a lie, in fact Cody is the child she had with Kreutzer. Josie makes a play to regain Eli’s interest: they were, after all, married and never legally divorced, but he is disgusted by the idea. Peter directs Harry to a meeting of the Friends, including Eli, who has broken out of the State Perceptory. Paige arrives shortly after and tells them that Chickie, who happens to be Eli’s son, has been moved and will soon be killed if he does not provide the go-chip. Tommy is suffering from mimizene exposure and is starting to have trouble with a blue substance oozing from his nose; he is also hallucinating Cathedrals and the sound of bells and his confusion causes more casualties when he goes on the mission to rescue Chickie. Eli does, however, get Chickie to the ocean, where he dies in his arms. Eli had sent Harry back to Kreutzer to maintain his double agent cover, and Harry had sent Grace and Dierdre back to their home: Harry learns he is now expected to venerate Cody as a Father and when he finally goes home, Grace and Dierdre are not there. Dierdre is taken to Kreutzer by Harry’s psychologist Tobias (Bob Gunton). In the fourth episode, “Hungry Ghosts,” Paige marries Kreutzer, wearing a red gown for the occasion. Grace, whom the Fathers left for dead when they took Deirdre, is taken by Eli to recuperate in the abandoned Walt Whitman Library. The Fathers keep releasing tapes of Deirdre begging for her help, and Grace eventually responds to a call to go to the Synthiotics church where she finally realizes that the Deirdre image really is only a hologram; but Josie shows up and kills her. Unbeknownst to all, Peter steals the virtual recording device demonstrated at Kreutzer’s wedding and uses it to record this murder. Harry’s tattoo gets infected and a doctor claims to remove a cyst, but immediately reports to someone. The cyst is apparently the chip; the Fathers arrive and kill the doctor but the chip is nowhere to be found. Harry is arrested for Grace’s murder; Tobias orders him injected with mimezene and questions him about the chip; finally Tobias orders he be given the antidote. Hiro allows himself to be arrested for Grace’s murder, believing it will protect Deirdre, and then commits suicide in his cell. Kreutzer orders Paige to pick up Harry and arrange an exchange: Deirdre for the chip. The Friends discuss their options: Eli wants to blow up Channel 3, but Harry has a better idea. He takes the recording Peter made, breaks into the station, and forces the technician to broadcast it instead of the usual Church Windows episode. In the fifth and final episode, “Hello, I must be going,” terrorists begin attacking Kreutzer’s campaign offices, and Kreutzer becomes quite ill, having only a week or so to live. Josie arranges for Tully to get tapes of his dead lover Tommy and, in exchange, Tully gives her Eli’s location; she has Eli abducted and drowned. Josie meets her end when Cody offers Tully a chance to get even for what she did to him: he takes it, and blinds Josie as she did him and then shoots himself. Before his death at Josie’s hands, however, Eli passed the go-chip back to Harry inside his wedding ring; Peter, who was apparently coached by Chickie, altered it so it no longer does exactly what it was initially created to do. Harry goes to exchange the chip for Dierdre, but Tobias attacks him in a disguise as they move through a parade, then takes the ring and keeps Dierdre. Kreutzer has the chip implanted, but something goes wrong and he keeps dissolving and floating away. Kreutzer finally tells Harry that he is his son and that he, Kreutzer, killed the man Harry always believed was his father when he attacked him for sleeping with his wife. Paige and Harry spot Dierdre; Cody tries to intervene, but his plan is thwarted and Dierdre, who does not talk much, yells “daddy!” and Harry, Paige, Dierdre, and Peter drive to the beach where Harry says there are tunnels for them to stay in. Harry also says he has to go back because he is needed. Meanwhile, Harry’s admirers have put his picture up all over the city. * * *

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This tech-noir mini-series is drawn in the style of a gothic soap opera with family lineages and bloodlines controlled and manipulated by arranged marriages and affairs, while many of those involved have little or no idea of what is going on. As in Omega Man (1971), in which the term “family” becomes the designation for something quite different from what existed before the disaster; here, the term “Father” is subverted so that it designates Kreutzer, who is more interested in virtual girls than the real thing, and his sister Josie, who is a killer whose heart rate does not even rise as she strangles her own daughter. The term “Friend” is also altered so that it represents the opposition to the Family and the New Realism movement it stands for: the members of the Friends include types not welcomed by the Fathers – artists, homosexuals, homeopathic doctors, stand-up comics, and Trekkies. A variation of the New Realism movement is also central to the plot action of eXistenZ (1999), in which the virtual game designers have unprecedented popularity and the countryside is presented as home to many dedicated gamers. In Wild Palms, the action is primarily urban with the Friends having a special association with the wilderzone, or urban slums. It is also Eli, the leader of the Friends, who is incarcerated in what appears to be a psychiatric facility, although no treatment programs are in evidence. Psychiatric facilities serve a similar purpose, insofar as they become inappropriate holding areas for Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 (1991) and James Cole in 12 Monkeys (1995). The man who would be a digital demi-god is an evolution of the instantly popular, politically left wing television chatterbox in Max Headroom (1985), and is also found in the characters of Jobe in the Lawnmower Man (1992, 1996) and McCandless in Freejack (1992). Kreutzer does not expect to be transformed into a ghost who, unlike the address book killer in Ghost in the Machine (1993), cannot even control his own movements. As Cody says, he floats off “like a Chagall.” The use of a television network and a television signal to facilitate ambition and power, while also transforming the human race, also appears in Videodrome (1983). A television box with emissions that one man believes will bring him great wealth and power appears in Fatal Error (1999). In Wild Palms, mimizene, the drug that makes the virtual experience seem real, is also used as a means of questioning and torturing both Tommy and Harry. Virtual reality is used for a similar purpose in Redline (1997). Tommy becomes so addicted to the drug that he does not even need virtual tapes to experience intense hallucinations. Tully also becomes addicted, but less it seems to the drug, and more to images of the deceased Tommy. This latter aspect of virtual reality addiction is also found in Strange Days (1995), Virtual Seduction (1995), and Cybercity (1999).

Xchange Writers: Christopher Pelham and Léopold St-Pierre Director: Allan Moyle Date: 2000 Country: Canada Length: 110 min. Type: Virtual reality: Mind transplant Clone: Society and service Non-humanoid artificial intelligence: Automated house In the world of “tomorrow,” the company Xchange has made consciousness transfers, or “floating,” commonplace for everything: recreation, exercise, dangerous tasks, business, travel, and more. Stefan Toffler (Kim Coates), an insurance-company employee in New York, has never traveled by Xchange, but one day his boss insists he “float” so that a company representative will be present at the funeral of Mr. Scott, one of their best clients. Toffler is to curry favor with that client’s son, Quayle Scott (Charles Edwin Powell), the heir

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apparent of his father’s corporate position. After Toffler (Kyle MacLachlan) completes his task, he returns to Xchange, only to discover that his body has not been returned and the person who took it is not who he said he was; even worse, the body he currently occupies is wanted by its original owner. So Toffler pretends to be a worker and has himself covertly floated into a “Jeff ” (Stephen Baldwin), a genetically enhanced facsimile or clone with a life span of only a few days. He then enlists the aid of FBI agent Dickerson (Arnold Pinnock), but then decides he will have to look after himself and stocks up on weaponry and personal defense equipment, programs his home computer for an intrusion – which inevitably comes and to which his computer responds perfectly. Next, he turns to Madeleine Renard (Pascale Bussières), his former lover and a reporter, and Glowacki (Lisa Bronwyn Moore/Amy Sloan), a woman he meets on his first float, for help. He figures out that Fisk (Kyle MacLachlan), the man who really has his body, is a terrorist who assassinated Mr. Scott on directions from Quayle who is literally and metaphorically “in bed with” Alison (Janet Kidder), the Xchange agent who arranged for Fisk to have Toffler’s body. Alison is manipulating Quayle and using Fisk to blow up the board of Mr. Scott’s company so they can use it to buy out Xchange, get rid of government restrictions on transfer practices, and make a lot of money. The plot is foiled and Toffler gets his body back with a little help from an illegal floating machine provided by Glowacki. * * * The point-of-view shots used while Toffler is getting used to his own body are an appropriate nod to Dark Passage (1947), much of which is filmed from the point of view of Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) who, after being framed and imprisoned for murdering his wife, escapes and has his face remodeled. This story is likewise about an innocent man who needs a new face so that he can solve his problem; but Toffler’s Xchange is not just the answer to this need, it is what creates the problem in the first place; and it is a clone body, rather than another natural one, that provides the anonymity he needs to avoid detection long enough to get his own body back. Although the film’s action is mainly about the criminal use of the Xchange process, it also suggests the technology might be worth the risk, at least for some people, as it points to a wide array of practical and/or marketable applications for such transfers, including labor, travel, exercise, erotic encounters, and bad habits such as smoking and drinking. The plot to kill off an entire corporate board to facilitate a hostile take over also appears in Fatal Error (1999), while Toffler’s automated apartment is one of the most helpful in tech-noir film: its badly programmed and villainous counterpart appears in Dream House (1998). See Cypher (2002) for another film with a character whose identity is buried beneath not one but two false layers; but there the layers are created by programming rather than mind transfers and the subject is extremely confused by the process. Toffler changes bodies, but never once loses track of who he is.

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Index 1 Film Titles This index references the films discussed in the preface, introduction, and chapters by page number and cross-references the films mentioned in each entry in the filmography by title. The films not included in the filmography are listed first and those in the filmography follow.

Films [not included in the filmography] 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968): 51, 160 note 17, Colossus, Universal Soldier The Return Abyss (1989): 52 Alien (four films): Screamers Alien (1979): Cyberzone, Digital Man, Mimic,  Mimic 2, Project Shadowchaser II, Project Shadowchaser III, Terminal Choice, Warning Sign Aliens (1986): Digital Man, Mimic, Mimic 2,  Phoenix, Project Shadowchaser II, Project Shadowchaser III, Warning Sign Alien 3 (1992): Cyber-Tracker 2, Mimic 2, Project   Shadowchaser II, Project Shadowchaser III Alien Resurrection (1997): 161 note 27 All the President’s Men (1976): 124, Anderson Tapes, Conversation, Crusader Alphaville (1965): 121, Logan’s Run Apocalypse Now (1979): 96, 123, Universal Soldier Batteries Not Included (1987): Ghost in the Machine Black Christmas (1974): 52, Ghost in the Machine, Mangler 2, Mimic 2, Nirvana, White Noise Blob, The (1958): Mimic 2 Blow-Up (1966): Blow Out, Conversation, Stepford Wives

Blueprint (2006): Boys from Brazil Bonnie and Clyde (1967): 51, Collateral Damage, Swordfish Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1920): 48, 89, 103 note 41, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Castaway (2000): Futureworld Chien Andalou, Un (1929): Altered States, It’s All About Love Citizen Kane (1941): Able Edwards, Westworld Commando (1985): Collateral Damage Creation of the Humanoids, The (1962): 121, Aeon Flux Dark City (1998): 12 Dark Passage (1947): RoboCop, Xchange Darkman (1990): Hologram Man, Mission Impossible II Day the Earth Stood Still, The (1951): 121, Andromeda Strain, Colossus, Manhattan Project Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920): 84–86, 100, 127 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931): 86–88, 96, 100, 106 note 84, RoboCop Double Indemnity (1944): Android Exorcist, The (1973): 50

Tech-Noir Film

Fahrenheit 451 (1966): Demon Seed, Equilibrium, Future Kick, Megaville, Running Man, Soylent Green, Terminator 2 Failsafe (1964): 121, 126, 226, Andromeda Strain, Colossus, Eve of Destruction, Final Mission, Global Effect, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Manhattan Project, WarGames Fifth Element, The (1997): Replicant Forbidden Planet, The (1956): 48, 52, 107 note 110, Lathe of Heaven (1980) Frankenstein (1931): 74–76, 87, 98, 99, 101, 105 note 64, 174, Prototype Freaks (1932): City of Lost Children, Nemesis 4 Groundhog Day (1993): A.P.E.X. Halloween: 52, 58, Mangler 2, Mimic 2, Terminator Iceman (1984): Replicant Insider (1999): Vanilla Sky Island of Lost Souls, The (1932): 93–95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 107 note 110 Jaws (1975): 50 JFK (1991): 161 note 24 Jurassic Park (1993): Able Edwards Lady in the Lake, The (1946): 106 note 85 Last Man on Earth, The (1964): Omega Man Last Starfighter (1984): 52 Mad Max (three films): Mad Max (1979): 12, Cyborg Mad Max 2 (1981): 12, Cyborg Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985): 12,   Cyborg 2, New Crime City Magnificent Seven, The (1960): Solo, Westworld Maltese Falcon, The (1941): 13 Manchurian Candidate, The (1962): 49, 123, 134, 158, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Apocalypse Watch, Cyber-Tracker 2, Final Mission, Fugitive Mind, Lawnmower Man, Looker, Manchurian Candidate (2004), Project Shadowchaser, Universal Soldier III Metropolis (1927): 48, 160 note 12, Android, Equilibrium

Mimic 3 Sentinel (2003): Mimic 2 Murder by Television (1935): 48 Night of the Living Dead, The (1968): 118, Andromeda Strain, Cyborg Cop, Omega Man, Soylent Green, Until the End of the World, Warning Sign Nosferatu (1922): 14 Payback (1999): Redline Phantom of the Opera, The (1925): 14, 80 Planet of the Apes, The (1968): Knights, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) Platoon (1986): 15, 123, Universal Soldier Poltergeist (1982): Twilight Man, White Noise Predator (1987): Collateral Damage Psycho (1960): Hologram Man Pumpkin Head (1988): Knights Rainman (1988): Replicant Rear Window (1954): Mimic 2 Rollerball (2002): Rollerball (1975) Searchers, The (1956): 15 Seven Samurai, The (1954): Solo Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989): Final Cut (1998) Shining, The (1980): Warning Sign Six Million Dollar Man, The (1973): RoboCop Stalker, The (1979): Nirvana, Numb Star Trek (television series 1966–69): 49 Star Trek the Next Generation (television series 1987–94): Cyber-Tracker 2 Stargate SG-1 (television series 1997–2007): 174 Star Wars (1977): 15 Them (1953): 50 Thing, The (1950): 50 2001 A Space Odyssey (1969): See numerical listings on p. 475 Virus (1998): 12, 126 War of the Worlds, The (1953): 50 Waterworld (1995): Cyber Bandits Willard (1971): R.O.T.O.R.

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Filmography Films 12 Monkeys (1995): 125, 131, 158, 184, 192, 446–47, A.P.E.X., Global Effect, Millennium, Mission Impossible II, New Crime City, November, Terminal Man, Terminator, Total Recall, Wild Palms 2103 The Deadly Wake, The (1997): 119, 120, 123, 185, 192, 193, 196, 448–49, Apocalypse Watch, Cyber Bandits, Dream Breaker, Encrypt, Fortress, Virus 6th Day, The (2000): 133, 134, 185, 195, 196, 416–17, Anna to the Infinite Power, Clones, Cyber-Tracker, Duplicates, Embryo, Morella, Parts, Replicant, Replikator, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, TekWar, Terminal Choice A Able Edwards (2004): 117, 186, 194, 196, 215–16, Anna to the Infinite Power, Conceiving Ada, Menno’s Mind, Millennium, November, Truman Show, Westworld Absolon (2003): 118, 158, 186, 190, 192, 195, 216–17, Aeon Flux, Andromeda Strain, Colossus, Cyborg, Death Watch, Global Effect, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission Impossible II, Numb, Terminal Justice, Warning Sign Aeon Flux (2005): 120, 156, 159, 186, 191, 192, 196, 217–18, Brave New World (1980), Conceiving Ada, Equilibrium, eXistenZ, Logan’s Run, Truman Show A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001): 115–16, 159, 185, 196, 219–20, Able Edwards, Cloned, Companion, Cyborg 3, Godsend, I Robot, Prototype, Westworld Alien Chaser (1996): See entries under Project Shadowchaser Altered States (1980): 181, 192, 220–21, Arcade, Brainstorm, Cypher, Death Watch, Dream House, Fly, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), It’s All About Love, Last Days of Man on Earth, Lawnmower Man, Videodrome American Cyborg Steel Warrior (1994): 118, 157, 183, 196, 197, 221–22, Coma, Cyborg 3, Fortress, Terminator Anderson Tapes, The (1971): 124, 181, 190, 222–23, Conversation, New Rose Hotel Android (1982): 119, 182, 196, 223–24, Prototype, R.O.T.O.R.

Android Affair, The (1995): 120, 183, 196, 224–25, Cyber Wars, Encrypt, It’s All About Love Andromeda Strain, The (1971): 13, 124, 126, 150, 158, 181, 190, 192, 225–26, Boys from Brazil, China Syndrome, Conversation, Fatal Error, Project Shadowchaser III, THX 1138, Until the End of the World, Warning Sign Anna to the Infinite Power (1983): 182, 195, 226–27, Able Edwards, Boys from Brazil, Circuitry Man II, Cloned, Conceiving Ada, Demon Seed, Dream Breaker, Embryo, Fly, Godsend, Replicant, Replikator A.P.E.X. (1994): 115, 122, 131, 183, 192, 196, 227–28, Digital Man, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Prototype X29A, Terminator, Total Recall Apocalypse Watch, The (1997): 120, 121, 123, 124, 134, 152, 158, 184, 191, 192, 229–30, Boys from Brazil, Brazil, Collateral Damage, Final Mission, Global Effect, Manchurian Candidate (2004), Swordfish, Universal Soldier III Arcade (1993): 130, 134, 183, 194, 230–31, Altered States, City of Lost Children, Cyberstalker, Dream Breaker, Evolver, Fly, Ghost in the Machine, Nightworld, Tron, Virtual Seduction, WarGames B Blade Runner (1982): 18, 18 note 2, 22, 52, 56 note 58, 58 notes 87 and 93 and 94, 116, 117, 119, 127, 131, 134, 135–36, 159, 159 note 1, 160 notes 4 and 12, 161 note 18, 163 notes 51 and 52, 182, 196, 231–32, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Android, Android Affair, Boys from Brazil, Cherry 2000, City of Lost Children, Clones, Conceiving Ada, Cyber Bandits, Cyberzone, Cyborg 2, Digital Man, Embryo, Eve of Destruction, Future Kick, I Robot, Judge Dredd, Logan’s Run, Natural City, Nemesis, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nirvana, Omega Doom, Phoenix, Project Shadowchaser, Prototype, Redline, Rising Sun, Shadow Fury, Stepford Wives, Storm Watch, Total Recall, Total Recall 2070 Blow Out (1981): 124, 151, 158, 182, 190, 232–33, Anderson Tapes, City of Lost Children, Conversation, Looker, Open Your Eyes, Tin Man, Total Recall, Virtuosity Boys from Brazil, The (1978): 116, 121, 181, 195, 233–34, Able Edwards, Anna to the Infinite Power, Apocalypse Watch, Cloned, Conceiving Ada, Demon Seed, Embryo, Godsend, Replicant 477

Tech-Noir Film

Brainscan (1994): 130, 158, 183, 194, 234–35, Arcade, Cyber Bandits, Dream Breaker, Evolver, eXistenZ, Future Kick, Future Shock, Hackers, Interface, Nirvana, Open Your Eyes, Storm Watch Brainstorm (1983): 118, 154, 182, 194, 235–36, Final Cut (2004), Ghost in the Machine, November, Strange Days, White Noise Brave New World (two films): 142, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Brainstorm, Cherry 2000, Code 46, Demolition Man, Equilibrium, Fortress, Future Kick, Gattaca, Harrison Bergeron, Jekyll and Hyde, Lathe of Heaven (2002), Nineteen Eighty-Four, Numb, Total Recall 2070, Virtual Nightmare, Webmaster Brave New World (1980): 181, 191, 192, 236–38,   Death Watch, THX 1138 Brave New World (1998): 185, 191, 193, 238–39,  Aeon Flux, Cybercity, Cyborg 3, Cypher, Synapse, Warning Sign Brazil (1985): 18, 120, 125, 138–41, 149, 182, 190, 240–41, City of Lost Children, Clockwork Orange, Cypher, Looker, Matrix, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Universal Soldier III C Cell, The (2000): 114, 185, 195, 241–42, Circuitry Man, Dream Breaker, Fatal Error, Frankenstein, Future Shock, Matrix Reloaded, Net Games, Next of Kin, Paycheck, Twilight Man, Virtual Seduction, Virtuosity Chain Reaction (1996): 122, 130, 159, 184, 190, 242–43, China Syndrome, Fortress 2 Cherry 2000 (1985/87): 15, 119, 120, 124, 182, 196, 243–44, Circuitry Man II, Nemesis, Stepford Wives China Syndrome, The (1979): 122, 150, 151, 159, 181, 190, 244–45, Chain Reaction, Eve of Destruction, Fortress 2, Hackers, Manhattan Project, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, Running Man Circuitry Man (two films): Fortress, Slipstream, Stepford Wives, Universal Soldier The Return Circuitry Man (1990): 119–21, 182, 194, 196, 244,  245–46, Cherry 2000, Companion, Strange Days Circuitry Man II Plughead Rewired (1994):  183, 194, 196, 246–47, Digital Man, Eve of Destruction, Fly, Godsend, New Crime City City of Lost Children, The (1995): 117, 125, 183, 190–93, 247–48, Enemy of the State, Matrix Reloaded, Nirvana, Virtual Assassin

Clockwork Orange, A (1971): 25 note 11, 181, 191, 248–49, Brave New World (1998), Cypher, Dream House, Looker, Nightworld Cloned (1997): 184, 195, 250–51, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Circuitry Man II, City of Lost Children, Duplicates, Godsend, Replicant Clones, The (1973): 181, 195, 227, 248, 251–52, Anna to the Infinite Power, City of Lost Children, Embryo, Judge Dredd, Looker, Terminal Choice, Total Recall, Westworld Code 46 (2003): 117, 119, 156, 157, 186, 191, 196, 252–53, November Collateral Damage (2002): 185, 190, 253–54, Apocalypse Watch, Brazil, Swordfish Colossus The Forbin Project (1970): 117, 121, 126, 181, 190, 191, 197, 254–55, Andromeda Strain, Eve of Destruction, I Robot, Logan’s Run, Storm Watch, Terminator, Tin Man, Tron, WarGames Coma (1978): 119, 124, 181, 192, 255–56, Family Viewing, Fly, John Q, Killer Deal, Next of Kin, Speaking Parts, Synapse, Terminal Choice Companion, The (1994): 120, 125, 129, 183, 196, 256–57, Circuitry Man, I Robot, Slipstream, Stepford Wives, Tin Man, Twilight Man, Until the End of the World Conceiving Ada (1997): 126, 184, 195, 257–58, Morella, Videodrome Conversation, The (1974): 114, 124, 132, 151, 157, 181, 190, 258–59, Anderson Tapes, Blow Out, Enemy of the State, Open Your Eyes, Tin Man Crusader (2004): 114, 120, 159, 186, 190, 259–60, Net Games, New Rose Hotel Cyber Bandits (1994): 132, 154, 183, 194, 261–62 Cybercity (1999): 113, 130, 151, 185, 191–93, 262–63, Brainstorm, Circuitry Man, City of Lost Children, Minority Report, Storm Watch, Strange Days, Virtual Assassin, Virtual Seduction. Wild Palms Cyberstalker (1996): 184, 197, 263–64, Brainscan, Dream Breaker, Interface, Unspeakable Cyber-Tracker and Cyber-Tracker 2: 117, 156, Cyborg Cop, Digital Man, Dream House, Heatseeker, Judge Dredd, Knights, Nirvana, Universal Soldier, Virtual Seduction Cyber-Tracker (1994): 115, 124, 183, 197, 264–65 Cyber-Tracker 2 (1995): 183, 197, 265–66,   A.P.E.X., Expect No Mercy Cyber Wars (2004): 186, 194, 195, 266–67, China Syndrome, Conceiving Ada, Encrypt, Final

478

Index 1: Film Titles

Cut (2004), Future Kick, Hostile Intent, Johnny Mnemonic, Max Headroom, Netforce, Nirvana, Webmaster Cyberzone (1995): 132, 183, 196, 267–68, Future Kick, Heatseeker, Nemesis 4, Omega Doom, Stepford Wives, Terminal Justice, Universal Soldier The Return Cyborg (three films): American Cyborg Steel Warrior Cyborg (1989): 119, 120, 130, 157, 182, 192, 193,  269–70, Cybercity, Johnny Mnemonic, Project Shadowchaser II, Shadow Fury, Universal Soldier, Universal Soldier II, Universal Soldier The Return Cyborg 2 Glass Shadow (1993): 116, 160  note 12, 183, 270–71, Embryo, Encrypt, Eve of Destruction, Fly, Future Kick, Hardware, Interface, Matrix Reloaded, Max Headroom, Minority Report, Nemesis, Nineteen EightyFour, Paycheck, Rising Sun, Slipstream, Universal Soldier II, Videodrome Cyborg 3 The Recycler (1995): 118, 160 note 12,  183, 196, 271–72, Demon Seed, Fly, Fortress, Knights, Nemesis 4, Terminator Cyborg Cop (three films): Cyborg Cop (1993): 116, 183, 191, 193, 272–73,  Collateral Damage, Companion, Cyber Bandits, Expect No Mercy, I Robot, Prototype X29A, Replicant, Virtual Assassin Cyborg Cop 2 [aka Cyborg Soldier] (1994): 117,  183, 193, 273–74, Hologram Man, Logan’s Run, Minority Report, Virtuosity Cyborg Cop 3 [aka Terminal Impact] (1995):  150, 183, 190, 192, 193, 274–75, Cyber Bandits, Encrypt, Expect No Mercy, Fly, Future Kick, Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Mimic, Project Shadowchaser IV Cypher (2002): 124, 134, 158, 185, 191, 275–76, Clockwork Orange, Enemy of the State, Goldeneye, Island, New Rose Hotel, Paycheck, Track Down, Xchange

(2004), Fortress 2, Megaville, Speaking Parts, Stepford Wives, Strange Days, Terminal Justice, Truman Show, Until the End of the World Demolition Man (1993): 128, 142, 158, 183, 191, 192, 279–80, Brave New World (1980, 1998), Cyber-Tracker, Darkdrive, Freejack, Hologram Man, Judge Dredd, Lathe of Heaven (2002), Menno’s Mind, Minority Report, Netforce, New Crime City, Nightworld, Open Your Eyes, TekWar, Terminal Justice, Virtual Assassin, Virtual Nightmare, Virtuosity Demon Seed (1977): 117, 118, 121, 126, 160 note 17, 181, 197, 280–81, Colossus, Cyborg 3, Dream House, Fly, Hardware, I Robot, Last Days of Man on Earth, Mangler 2, Prototype, Storm Watch, Terminator 2, Tron, WarGames Digital Man (1995): 116, 122, 184, 197, 281–82, A.P.E.X., Cyberzone, New Crime City Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (two films): 111, 112, 125, 129, 131, Altered States, Fly, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), Last Days of Man on Earth, New Rose Hotel, Replikator, Terminal Man, Tin Man Jekyll & Hyde (1990): 87–88, 99, 118, 182, 192,   334–35, Fly II Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002): 89–90, 186, 193,   282–83, Dream Breaker, Thirteenth Floor Dream Breaker (1995): 113, 121, 125, 130, 150, 154, 184, 194, 195, 283–84, Altered States, Anna to the Infinite Power, Arcade, Brainscan, Cyber Bandits, Future Kick, Menno’s Mind, Millennium, Numb, Replikator, TekWar, 2103 The Deadly Wake Dream House (1998): 185, 197, 284–85, Demon Seed, Last Days of Man on Earth, Xchange Duplicates (1992): 117, 183, 190, 195, 285–86, Arcade, City of Lost Children, Cloned, Companion, Conceiving Ada, Cyber Bandits, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2, Final Mission, Fugitive Mind, Godsend, I Robot, Lawnmower Man, Matrix Reloaded, Paycheck, Replikator, Virtuosity

D Darkdrive (1996): 184, 195, 276–77, A.P.E.X., eXistenZ, Matrix, Matrix Reloaded, Menno’s Mind, Nemesis 4, November, Open Your Eyes Death Watch (1980): 131, 150, 181, 190, 193, 278–79, Arcade, Brave New World (1980), Companion, Dream House, Encrypt, Final Cut

E Embryo (1976): 117, 156, 181, 192, 287–88, Anna to the Infinite Power, Boys from Brazil, Fly II, Morella, Universal Soldier, Universal Soldier III Encrypt (2003): 115, 118, 119, 121, 132, 186, 191, 195, 289–90, Android, Android Affair, Cyber Wars, Cyborg Cop 3, Dream Breaker, Last Days 479

Tech-Noir Film

of Man on Earth, Lawnmower Man, Track Down, 2103 The Deadly Wake, Virtual Seduction Enemy of the State (1998): 114, 124, 151, 152, 185, 190, 191, 221–2, Blow Out, China Syndrome, Conversation, Final Cut (2004), Fugitive Mind, Goldeneye, Hostile Intent, Looker, Manhattan Project, Net Equilibrium (2002): 121, 157, 158, 186, 191, 290–91, Aeon Flux, Brave New World (1980), eXistenZ, Future Kick, It’s All About Love, Megaville, Soylent Green Eve of Destruction (1991): 182, 196, 291–92, Android, Cyborg 2, Mangler 2, Phoenix, Replikator Evolver (1994): 130, 183, 192, 194, 196, 292–93, Arcade, City of Lost Children, Cyberstalker, Replicant, Screamers, Terminator 2, Virtual Seduction, Virtuosity, WarGames eXistenZ (1999): 18, 120, 121, 130, 134, 144, 147, 148, 185, 193, 194, 293–94, Brainscan, Brazil, Darkdrive, Future Kick, Future Shock, Manhattan Project, Matrix Reloaded, New Rose Hotel, Open Your Eyes, Redline, Thirteenth Floor, Wild Palms Expect No Mercy (1995): 122, 184, 191, 194, 294–95, Final Mission, Virtuosity F Family Viewing (1987): 128, 130, 182, 191, 296–97, Arcade, Final Cut (1998), Net Games, Next of Kin, Speaking Parts Fatal Error (1999): 114, 124, 126, 150, 185, 190, 192, 197–98, Crusader, Fugitive Mind, Interface, Manhattan Project, Max Headroom, Menno’s Mind, New Rose Hotel, Universal Soldier The Return, Videodrome, Virtual Assassin, Wild Palms, Xchange Final Cut (1998): 125, 131, 158, 185, 191, 198–99, Brainstorm, Family Viewing, Hidden, New Rose Hotel, Truman Show Final Cut, The (2004): 125, 131, 132, 158, 159, 186, 191, 193, 299–300, Blow Out, Brainstorm, Conversation, Cyber Wars, Final Cut (1998), Hidden, November Final Mission (1993): 183, 191, 300–01, Expect No Mercy, Fugitive Mind, Universal Soldier III, Universal Soldier The Return, Virtuosity Fly, The (two films): 118, 149, 182, 192, Altered States, Arcade, Circuitry Man II, Cyborg Cop 3,

Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Last Days of Man on Earth, Mimic Fly, The (1986): 160, 301–02, Tron Fly II, The (1989): 302–03, Eve of Destruction,  Megaville Foolproof (2003): 186, 191, 303–04, Crusader, Enemy of the State, Hostile Intent, Mangler 2, Matrix, Net Games, Sneakers, Track Down, Universal Soldier II Fortress (two films): 119, 125, 152, 191, 193, 197, Killer Deal, Netforce, 2103 The Deadly Wake Fortress (1992): 117, 142, 183, 304–05,  Clockwork Orange, Family Viewing, Futureworld, Hardware, Heatseeker, I Robot, Mangler 2, Shadow Fury, Total Recall, Unspeakable, Warning Sign Fortress 2 (1999): 120, 185, 305–06, Re-Entry  (1999): Goldeneye, Running Man, Terminal Justice, Universal Soldier Frankenstein (two films): 89–90, 98–99, 111, 112, Android, New Rose Hotel, R.O.T.O.R. Frankenstein (2004): 79–81, 100, 114, 129, 132,  149, 151, 176, 186, 189, 193, 196, 307–08, Anna to the Infinite Power, Cell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994): 76–79, 105  note 65, 115, 133, 175, 183, 192, 352–53, Death Watch, Replicant Freejack (1992): 131, 183, 195, 308–09, Android Affair, Cyber Bandits, Cyber Wars, Dream House, Encrypt, Hologram Man, Killer Deal, Lawnmower Man, Menno’s Mind, Natural City, Rising Sun, RoboCop 3, Strange Days, Synapse, Wild Palms Fugitive Mind (1999): 123, 124, 134, 158, 185, 191, 196, 309–10, Apocalypse Watch, Clockwork Orange, Code 46, Cyborg Cop, Duplicates, Final Mission, Killer Deal, Manchurian Candidate (2004), Paycheck, Universal Soldier III Future Kick (1991): 124, 129, 183, 192, 193, 194, 310–11, Brainscan, Cloned, Coma, Cyborg 3, Dream Breaker, Future Shock, Killer Deal, Max Headroom, Nirvana, Open Your Eyes, Thirteenth Floor, Virtual Seduction Future Shock (1993): 125, 183, 191, 194, 311–12, Brainscan, Circuitry Man, Family Viewing, Max Headroom, Next of Kin, Virtual Seduction Futureworld (1976): See entries under Westworld and Futureworld

480

Index 1: Film Titles

G Gattaca (1997): 113, 119, 124, 129, 151, 159, 162 note 45, 184, 190, 193, 313–14, Brave New World (1980), Frankenstein, Harrison Bergeron, Jekyll and Hyde Ghost in the Machine, The (1993): 114, 133–34, 183, 195, 314–15, Cell, Conceiving Ada, Enemy of the State, Fatal Error, Frankenstein, Hackers, Hologram Man, Lawnmower Man 2, Mangler 2, Matrix Reloaded, Netforce, Net Games, Replicant, Sneakers, Storm Watch, Terminator 2, Track Down, Virtual Assassin, Virtual Seduction, White Noise, Wild Palms Global Effect (2002): 123, 158, 186, 190, 192, 316–17, Brazil, Cyborg 2, Manhattan Project, WarGames Godsend (2004): 129, 132, 156, 186, 192, 196, 317–18, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Boys from Brazil, Circuitry Man II, Cloned, Conceiving Ada, Demon Seed, Stepford Wives Goldeneye (1995): 123, 124, 184, 190, 318–19, Enemy of the State, Fortress 2, Mission Impossible II, Net, New Rose Hotel, Redline, Storm Watch, Terminal Justice H Hackers (1995): 113, 122, 124, 125, 159, 184, 191, 319–20, City of Lost Children, Conceiving Ada, Crusader, Family Viewing, Ghost in the Machine, Lawnmower Man 2, Net, Netforce, Sneakers, Storm Watch, Terminator 2, Track Down, Virtual Assassin Hardware (1990): 122, 126, 182, 197, 320–21, Demon Seed, Hardware, Minority Report, Nirvana, Terminator Harrison Bergeron (1995): 126, 159, 184, 186, 191, 321–22, Network, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Parts, Terminal Man, Terminator, Total Recall 2070, Virtual Nightmare Heatseeker (1995): 150, 159, 184, 190, 193, 322–23, Hologram Man, It’s All About Love, Knights, Nemesis, Network, Roboman, Rollerball Hidden (2005): 158, 186, 191, 323–24, Final Cut (1998), November Hologram Man (1995): 184, 191, 195, 324–25, Demolition Man, Ghost in the Machine, Minority Report, THX 1138, Virtual Assassin, Virtuosity Hostile Intent (1997): 120, 124, 158, 184, 191, 326–27

I Interface (1984): 182, 190, 327–28, Arcade, Brainscan, Cyberstalker, Cyber-Tracker, Mangler 2, Terminator 2, Unspeakable, Videodrome, WarGames I, Robot (2004): 115 (Asimov’s novel), 116, 159, 186, 194, 196, 197, 328–29, Companion, Frankenstein, Prototype, Roboman, Slipstream, Solo, Tin Man, Total Recall 2070, Universal Soldier The Return, Virtuosity Island, The (2005): 116, 125, 159, 186, 191, 192, 195, 329–30, Android Affair, Anna to the Infinite Power, Coma, Freejack, Matrix, Matrix Revolutions, Parts, Paycheck, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, Rising Sun Island of Dr. Moreau, The (two films): 97, 98, 100, 101, 111–12, 117, 120, 129, Embryo, Eve of Destruction, New Rose Hotel, Terminal Choice Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1977): 95–96, 125,  181, 192, 330–31, Altered States, Last Days of Man on Earth, Solo Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1996): 96–97, 184,  193, 331–32, Fortress, Shadow Fury It’s All About Love (2003): 117, 186, 196, 333–34, Able Edwards, Last Days of Man on Earth, Truman Show, Webmaster J Jekyll & Hyde (1990): See Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Johnny Mnemonic (1995): 57 note 58, 119, 120, 135–38, 151, 159, 184, 192, 193, 195, 335–36, Chain Reaction, Cherry 2000, Cybercity, Cyber Wars, Cyborg, eXistenZ, Final Cut (2004), Hackers, I Robot, Netforce, Numb, Paycheck, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, Running Man, Soldier, Strange Days, TekWar, Tin Man John Q (2002): 118, 119, 124, 186, 192, 336–37, Cloned, Coma, Fly II, Killer Deal, Natural City, Speaking Parts Judge Dredd (1995): 119, 131, 155, 184, 196, 197, 337–38, Anna to the Infinite Power, Apocalypse Watch, Boys from Brazil, Cyberstalker, CyberTracker, Cyber-Tracker 2, Digital Man, Hostile Intent, Interface, Manhattan Project, New Crime City, Numb, Replikator, Rising Sun, R.O.T.O.R, 6th Day, Synapse K Killer Deal (1999): 124, 131, 158, 159, 185, 190, 192, 193, 338–39, Cloned, Coma, Cyborg 3, Dr. Jekyll

481

Tech-Noir Film

and Mr. Hyde, Fly II, Freejack, Fugitive Mind, Future Kick, John Q, Natural City, Nightworld, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, Speaking Parts, Synapse, THX 1138, Universal Soldier III Knights (1993): 183, 193, 196, 197, 340–41, Heatseeker, Matrix Reloaded, Mimic, Omega Doom Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron (1995): See Harrison Bergeron L Last Days of Man on Earth, The (1973): 129, 151, 181, 192, 341–42, Altered States, Android, Encrypt, Fly, Morella, Project Shadowchaser III, Until the End of the World Lathe of Heaven, The (two films): 125, A.P.E.X., Colossus, Cyber Bandits, Future Shock, Next of Kin, 12 Monkeys Lathe of Heaven, The (1980): 182, 194, 342–43,   Brainstorm, Circuitry Man Lathe of Heaven, The (2002): 186, 195, 343–44,  Net Lawnmower Man (two films): 125, 134, 194, 195, Eve of Destruction, Final Mission, Hackers, Max Headroom, Virtual Assassin, Wild Palms Lawnmower Man, The (1992): 121, 183, 344–45,  Altered States, Cyberstalker, Evolver, Future Shock, Last Days of Man on Earth, New Rose Hotel, TekWar, Universal Soldier The Return Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (Jobe’s  War) (1996): 184, 345–46, City of Lost Children, Cyber Wars, Hostile Intent, Max Headroom, RoboCop 3, Terminator 2, WarGames, Warning Sign Logan’s Run (1976): 22, 25 note 11, 120, 151, 159, 181, 190, 193, 197, 346–47, Aeon Flux, Brave New World (1980), Cherry 2000, Cybercity, Cyborg 2, Cyborg Cop 2, Island, Parts, THX 1138, Truman Show, Virtual Nightmare, Webmaster Looker (1981): 119, 124, 182, 190, 194, 347–48, Max Headroom, Menno’s Mind, Project Shadowchaser M Manchurian Candidate, The (2004): 123, 134, 158, 186, 191, 194, 349–50, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Apocalypse Watch, Cyber-Tracker 2, Final Mission, Fugitive Mind, Looker, Project Shadowchaser, Universal Soldier III

Manhattan Project The Deadly Game (1986): 122, 151, 159, 182, 190, 350–51, Chain Reaction, Eve of Destruction, Family Viewing, Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, Running Man, Sneakers, WarGames Mangler 2 (2001): 119, 126, 185, 194, 197, 351–52, Demon Seed, Interface, Mimic 2 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994): See entries under Frankenstein Matrix (three films): 121, 159, 194, 195, 197, Aeon Flux, Colossus, Darkdrive, Equilibrium, Expect No Mercy, Goldeneye, Knights, Menno’s Mind, Omega Man, Prototype X29A, Terminator 3, Thirteenth Floor, THX 1138, Vanilla Sky Matrix, The (1999): 15, 18, 119, 122, 134,  144–48, 160 note 3, 185, 353–54, Cypher, Island, Millenium, Open Your Eyes, Rollerball, Universal Soldier III, Virtuosity, Virtual Nightmare Matrix Reloaded (2003): 164 note 69, 186,  354–55, Gattaca, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Paycheck, Truman Show, Virtual Nightmare Matrix Revolutions (2003): 186, 355–56, A.I.   Artificial Intelligence Max Headroom (1985): 12, 133, 154, 182, 192, 194, 357–58, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Fatal Error, Future Shock, Lawnmower Man, Lawnmower Man 2, Menno’s Mind, Netforce, Universal Soldier The Return, Videodrome, Virtual Seduction, Wild Palms Megaville (1990): 121, 134–37, 154, 182, 193, 194, 195, 358–59, Equilibrium, Fortress, Fortress 2, Lawnmower Man, Nemesis 3, Network, Terminal Justice, Total Recall, Webmaster Menno’s Mind (1997): 134, 184, 191, 194, 195, 359–60, China Syndrome, Darkdrive, Family Viewing, Freejack, Fugitive Mind, Looker, Open Your Eyes, Project Shadowchaser, Vanilla Sky, Virtual Seduction Millennium (1989): 115, 149, 158, 159, 182, 190, 193, 196, 360–61, A.P.E.X., Freejack, 12 Monkeys Mimic (two films): 120, 127, 129, 192, 193, Andromeda Strain, Cyborg Cop 3, Fly, Global Effect, Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Open Your Eyes Mimic (1997): 18, 158, 184, 361–62, Aeon Flux,   Death Watch Mimic 2 (2001): 119, 185, 362–63, Fly II,   Interface, Mangler 2

482

Index 1: Film Titles

Minority Report (2002): 152, 186, 191, 192, 193, 364–65, Aeon Flux, Final Cut (2004), Island, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paycheck, TekWar Mission Impossible II (2000): 185, 192, 194, 365–66, Encrypt, Global Effect, Goldeneye Morella (1997): 113, 117, 124, 158, 184, 192, 196, 366–67, Circuitry Man II, Conceiving Ada, Embryo, Eve of Destruction, Frankenstein (2004), Fugitive Mind, Gattaca, Godsend, Last Days of Man on Earth, New Rose Hotel, Nirvana, November, Stepford Wives N Natural City (2003): 129, 186, 194, 196, 197, 367–68, Companion, New Rose Hotel, Nirvana, Prototype Nemesis (four films): 117, 120, 156, Colossus, Matrix Revolutions, Omega Man, Prototype X29A Nemesis (1992): 116, 183, 193, 195, 196, 368–69,  Brazil, Colossus, Cyborg Cop 2, Digital Man, Fortress, Fortress 2, Heatseeker, Hologram Man, Millennium, Project Shadowchaser III, RoboCop, Roboman, Terminal Justice, Terminator, Terminator 3, Unspeakable, Webmaster Nemesis 2 Nebula (1995): 184, 192, 197, 369–70,  American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Circuitry Man II, Cyborg Cop 2, Digital Man, Godsend Nemesis 3 Time Lapse (1996): 124, 184, 192, 197,  371–72, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Cyborg Cop 2, Digital Man, Knights, Megaville Nemesis 4 Cry of Angels (1996): 13, 157, 184,  192, 193, 197, 372–73, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Future Kick, Numb, Videodrome Net, The (1995): 114, 124, 184, 191, 373–74, Crusader, Enemy of the State, Paycheck, Terminal Choice, Twilight Man, Universal Soldier III, Virtual Assassin Netforce (1999): 124, 169, 185, 195, 374–75, Fatal Error, Hostile Intent, Lawnmower Man 2, Max Headroom, Net, Virtual Assassin, Webmaster Net Games (2003): 186, 191, 375–76, Cyberstalker, Twilight Man Network (1976): 124, 130, 150, 181, 190, 376–77, Death Watch, Harrison Bergeron, Max Headroom, Speaking Parts, RoboCop New Crime City Los Angeles 2020 (1994): 119, 158, 183, 192, 377–78, City of Lost Children, Cyborg Cop 2, Mission Impossible II, Numb, Unspeakable, Virtual Assassin, Webmaster

New Rose Hotel (1998): 57 note 58, 157, 185, 190, 378–79, Anderson Tapes, Redline Next of Kin (1984): 125, 182, 191, 379–80, Circuitry Man, Family Viewing, Final Cut (1998), Speaking Parts Night Siege Project Shadowchaser II (1994): See Project Shadowchaser Nightworld 30 Years to Life (1998): 129, 185, 193, 381–82, A.P.E.X., Arcade, Dream House, Fatal Error, Freejack, Tin Man Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984): 114, 121, 151, 152, 157, 182, 190, 191, 382–83, Brazil, Equilibrium, Fugitive Mind, Harrison Bergeron, Universal Soldier III Nirvana (1997): 119, 125, 130, 184, 190–93, 197, 283–84, Arcade, Brainscan, Brainstorm, Companion, Conceiving Ada, Cybercity, Cyber Wars, Darkdrive, Dream Breaker, Dream House, eXistenZ, Future Kick, Future Shock, I Robot, Killer Deal, Mangler 2, Minority Report, Netforce, Numb, Redline, Thirteenth Floor, Tin Man, Webmaster November (2004): 126, 131, 152, 158, 186, 191, 384–85, Blow Out, Brainstorm, Morella, Numb, Terminal Man, 12 Monkeys Numb (2003): 158, 186, 191, 192, 385–86, Andromeda Strain, Nirvana O Omega Doom (1996): 122, 159, 184, 197, 386–87, Knights, Prototype X29A, Screamers Omega Man, The (1971): 181, 192, 388–89, Absolon, Manhattan Project, Soylent Green, Universal Soldier The Return, Warning Sign, Wild Palms Open Your Eyes (1997): 132, 158, 184, 192, 195, 389–90, Arcade, Conversation, Dream Breaker, Future Shock, Matrix, Minority Report, Thirteenth Floor, Truman Show, Vanilla Sky, Virtual Seduction P Parts The Clonus Horror (1979): 116, 151, 181, 190, 192, 195, 390–91, Anna to the Infinite Power, Clones, Freejack, Harrison Bergeron, Island, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, Rising Sun, Terminal Man, Universal Soldier II Paycheck (2003): 134, 186, 191, 391–92, Code 46, Johnny Mnemonic, Minority Report, Total Recall, Webmaster

483

Tech-Noir Film

Phoenix (1995): 116, 120, 131, 134, 159, 163 note 58, 184, 197, 392–93, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Android, Lawnmower Man, Mangler 2, Screamers, Total Recall, Twilight Man Plughead Rewired Circuitry Man II (1994): See entries under Circuitry Man Project Shadowchaser (four films): 13, 117, 156, 393–97, Terminator 2 Project Shadowchaser (1992): 183, 196, 393–94,  Cyborg Cop 2, Demolition Man, Freejack, Minority Report, Open Your Eyes, Terminator, Universal Soldier III Project Shadowchaser II [aka Night Siege Project:  Shadowchaser II] (1994): 183, 196, 394–95, Cyborg Cop 2, Enemy of the State, Nirvana, Terminator, THX 1138, Universal Soldier III, Virtual Assassin, Virtuosity Project Shadowchaser III [aka Project  Shadowchaser 3000] (1995): 119, 184, 196, 395–96, Mimic II, Nemesis, Screamers, Terminator, Terminator 2 Project Shadowchaser IV [aka Alien Chaser]  (1996): 13, 397, Omega Doom, Prototype (1983): 182, 196, 398–99, Android, Companion Prototype X29A (1992): 157, 183, 191, 193, 399–400, Altered States, A.P.E.X., Cyborg Cop, Knights, Last Days of Man on Earth, Matrix Revolutions, Unspeakable R Redline (1997): 123, 125, 185, 192, 194, 400–01, eXistenZ, Future Kick, Future Shock, Goldeneye, Nirvana, TekWar, Terminal Justice, Wild Palms Replicant (2001): 115, 116, 117, 129, 133, 155, 159, 185, 196, 401–02, Anna to the Infinite Power, Cell, Conceiving Ada, Embryo, Eve of Destruction, Frankenstein, Godsend, Judge Dredd, Morella, Prototype, Replikator, Shadow Fury, 6th Day, Universal Soldier, Unspeakable Replikator Cloned to Kill (1994): 113, 183, 195, 402–03, Anna to the Infinite Power, Dream Breaker, Eve of Destruction, Fly, Frankenstein, Gattaca Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, The (1971): 129, 151, 181, 195, 403–04, Clones, Conversation, Futureworld, Max Headroom, Roboman Rising Sun (1993): 113, 124, 131, 151, 183, 190, 404–05, Absolon, Conversation, Freejack, RoboCop 3, Stepford Wives RoboCop (three films): 116, 150, 151, 153, 159, 192, 193, 405–09, Arcade, Death Watch, Eve of

Destruction, Future Kick, I Robot, Judge Dredd, Lawnmower Man 2, Network, Solo RoboCop (1987): 125, 128, 138, 140–41, 162, 182,  190, 191, 405–06, Companion, Cyber-Tracker 2, Cyborg Cop, Megaville, Parts, Paycheck, Prototype X29A, Roboman, Synapse, Terminal Man, Universal Soldier RoboCop 2 (1990): 182, 164 note 61, 191, 407–08,  Circuitry Man, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2, Evolver, Nightworld RoboCop 3 (1993): 164 note 61, 185, 408–09,  Cyber-Tracker 2, Rising Sun, Soldier, Terminator 2 Roboman (1973): 125, 133, 181, 190, 193, 409–10, Futureworld, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, RoboCop, RoboCop 2 Rollerball (1975): 119, 124, 130, 181, 190, 197, 410–11, Coma, Heatseeker, It’s All About Love, Max Headroom, Network, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paycheck, RoboCop, Running Man, Soylent Green, Speaking Parts, THX 1138 R.O.T.O.R. (1988): 115, 122, 182, 196, 411–12, Android Running Man, The (1987): 119, 124, 125, 150, 151, 159, 182, 190, 193, 412–13, Death Watch, Fortress 2, Hackers, Heatseeker, Killer Deal, Logan’s Run, Max Headroom, RoboCop, Rollerball, Speaking Parts, Total Recall, Universal Soldier, Universal Soldier III S Screamers (1995): 117, 125, 184, 196, 197, 413–14, Arcade, Cloned, Cybercity, Cyber-Tracker 2, It’s All About Love, Mimic 2, Omega Doom, Phoenix, Shadowchaser III, TekWar Shadow Fury (2001): 114, 156, 185, 195, 196, 414–15, Embryo, Expect No Mercy, Future Kick, It’s All About Love, Replicant, Screamers, Solo, Terminal Man, Twilight Man, Webmaster 6th Day, The (2000): See numerical listings on p. 484 Slipstream (1989): 116, 117, 120, 182, 196, 417–18, Android, Android Affair, Cherry 2000, Circuitry Man II, Cyborg 2, Cyborg Cop 3, Encrypt, Future Kick, I Robot, Prototype Sneakers (1992): 158, 183, 191, 418–19, Conceiving Ada, Foolproof, Ghost in the Machine, Hackers, Hostile Intent, Mangler 2, Netforce, Track Down Soldier (1998): 118, 120, 124, 158, 159, 185, 191, 192, 419–20, Cybercity, Expect No Mercy, Lawnmower Man, Natural City, Rollerball, Shadow Fury, Solo, Universal Soldier II 484

Index 1: Film Titles

Solo (1996): 115, 116, 120, 123, 127, 159, 184, 197, 421–22, Collateral Damage, Expect No Mercy, Frankenstein, Future Kick, Hardware, I Robot, Logan’s Run, Minority Report, Prototype, Shadow Fury, Soldier, Westworld Soylent Green (1973): 120, 181, 192, Cherry 2000, Colossus, Coma, Future Kick, Island, Logan’s Run, Paycheck, Soldier, Universal Soldier Speaking Parts (1989): 130, 152, 182, 190, 191, 192, 422–23, Death Watch, Family Viewing, Megaville, Next of Kin, Truman Show, Until the End of the World Stepford Wives, The (1975): 52, 124, 132–33, 160 note 12, 181, 196, 423–24, Boys from Brazil, Cherry 2000, Cyber-Tracker, Futureworld, Godsend, Heatseeker, Looker Storm Watch (2002): 186, 194, 197, 425–26, China Syndrome, Clones, Conceiving Ada, Cyberstalker, Hackers, Netforce, Track Down Strange Days (1995): 114, 125, 128, 142, 184, 194, 195, 426–27, Brainstorm, Cybercity, Family Viewing, Net, TekWar, Virtual Seduction, Wild Palms Swordfish (2001): 113, 118, 122, 185, 191, 427–28, Apocalypse Watch, Brazil, Collateral Damage, Crusader, Net, Project Shadowchaser, Sneakers, Track Down, Virtual Assassin, Virtuosity Synapse (1995): 124, 158, 184, 191, 192, 193, 428–29, Brave New World (1998), Cyber-Tracker, Fortress 2, Judge Dredd, Paycheck, Universal Soldier III, Unspeakable, Virtual Seduction, Warning Sign, Webmaster T TekWar The Original Movie (1994): 125, 183, 192, 194, 429–30, Altered States, Cyber-Tracker, Cyborg Cop, Nightworld, Numb, Open Your Eyes, Screamers, Terminal Justice Terminal Choice (1985): 114, 119, 182, 190, 430–31, Coma, Fatal Error, Fugitive Mind, Net, 6th Day Terminal Impact (1995): See Cyborg Cop Terminal Justice Cybertech P.D. (1995): 128, 184, 191, 194, 196, 431–32, Absolon, Virtual Seduction Terminal Man (1974): 114, 119, 128, 153, 181, 191, 193, 433–34, Andromeda Strain, Blow Out, Clockwork Orange, Cyborg Cop 2, Embryo, Harrison Bergeron, Project Shadowchaser III, RoboCop, RoboCop 2, Roboman, Tin Man, Twilight Man Terminator (three films): 114, 117, 121, 153, 156, 159, 160 note 5, 160 note 10, 197, 434–37,

American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Colossus, CyberTracker, Cyberzone, Demon Seed, Futureworld, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Logan’s Run, Matrix, Matrix Revolutions, Minority Report, Nemesis 2, Nemesis 4, Omega Man, Prototype X29A, Universal Soldier The Return, Westworld Terminator, The (1984): 11, 18 note 1, 122, 123,  126, 131, 132, 135, 136, 161 note 21, 161 note 26, 163 note 50, 182, 434–35, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, A.P.E.X., Cyborg 2, Cyborg 3, Cyborg Cop 2, Expect No Mercy, Fatal Error, Hardware, Heatseeker, Mimic 2, Nemesis, Project Shadowchaser II, Project Shadowchaser III, Replicant, R.O.T.O.R., 12 Monkeys, Virtual Assassin Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991): 52, 122, 125,  131, 135, 136, 183, 435–36, A.P.E.X., Circuitry Man II, Cyber-Tracker 2, Cyborg Cop 2, Nemesis, Project Shadowchaser II, Project Shadowchaser III, Project Shadowchaser IV, Screamers, Soldier, Stepford Wives, Terminal Man, Wild Palms Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines (2003): 186,   436–37, Soldier Thirteenth Floor, The (1999): 18, 116, 119, 121, 130, 134, 144, 145–48, 185, 194, 437–38, Darkdrive, Dream Breaker, Millennium THX 1138 (1971): 18, 18 note 2, 22, 25 note 11, 119, 152, 157, 181, 190, 191, 438–39, Cherry 2000, Circuitry Man, Enemy of the State, Harrison Bergeron, Net Games, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Parts Tin Man (1983): 128, 182, 193, 197, 440–41, Future Kick, Paycheck, Until the End of the World Tom Clancy’s Netforce (1999): See Netforce Total Recall (1990): 120, 134, 161 note 19, 182, 191, 193, 197, 441–42, City of Lost Children, Clockwork Orange, Cypher, Fugitive Mind, Megaville, Menno’s Mind, Phoenix, Replicant, Screamers, Total Recall 2070 Total Recall 2070 (1999): 134, 185, 194, 197, 442–43, Paycheck, Total Recall, Unspeakable Track Down (2000): 124, 185, 191, 443–44, Conceiving Ada, Crusader, Enemy of the State, Hackers, Net, Next of Kin, Swordfish Tron (1982): 52, 121, 130, 133, 182, 194, 197, 444–45, Arcade, Dream Breaker, Fly, Ghost in the Machine, Lawnmower Man 2, Looker, Terminal Justice, Tin Man Truman Show, The (1998): 124, 131, 185, 190, 445–46, Brave New World (1980), Death Watch, Final Cut (1998), Harrison Bergeron, Lathe of

485

Tech-Noir Film

Heaven (2002), Logan’s Run, Speaking Parts, Virtual Nightmare 12 Monkeys (1995): See numerical listings on p. 486 2103 The Deadly Wake (1997): See numerical listings on p. 486 Twilight Man (1996): 113, 114, 129, 184, 191, 449–50, Cell, Companion, Net Games U Universal Soldier (four films): 116, 123, 150, 190, 450–54, Companion, Cyborg Cop, Embryo, Expect No Mercy, Final Mission, Fugitive Mind, I Robot, Lawnmower Man, Manchurian Candidate, Max Headroom, Paycheck, Prototype X29A, Resurrection of Zachery Wheeler, Soldier, Terminal Justice, Tin Man, Virtual Seduction, Universal Soldier (1992): 120, 183, 192, 193,  450–51, China Syndrome, Cyber-Tracker, Cyborg Cop 2, Fortress 2, Logan’s Run, Replicant, Running Man, Shadow Fury, Solo Universal Soldier II Brothers in Arms (1998):  185, 193, 451–52, Cyber-Tracker, Foolproof, Freejack Universal Soldier III Unfinished Business (1998):  185, 193, 196, 452–53, Cyber-Tracker, Net, Universal Soldier The Return (1999): 117, 185, 192,   194, 197, 453–54, Shadow Fury, War Games Unspeakable (2002): 186, 195, 455–56, Final Cut (1998), Fly, Menno’s Mind, New Crime City, Paycheck, White Noise Until the End of the World (1991): 129, 143, 151, 154, 183, 194, 456–57, Last Days of Man on Earth, Speaking Parts, White Noise V Vanilla Sky (2001): 158, 185, 192, 195, 457–58, Arcade, Dream Breaker, Future Shock, Matrix, Minority Report, Open Your Eyes, Thirteenth Floor, Truman Show, Virtual Seduction Videodrome (1983): 124, 126, 150, 182, 190, 192, 458–59, Conceiving Ada, Cyberstalker, Cyborg 2, Equilibrium, Fatal Error, Fly, Interface, Max Headroom, Megaville, Menno’s Mind, Nemesis 4, Network, Strange Days, Universal Soldier The Return, Wild Palms Virtual Assassin (1995): 184, 191, 193, 195, 459–60, Hologram Man, New Rose Hotel, Replikator, Swordfish Virtual Nightmare (2000): 119, 120, 142, 159, 185, 194, 460–61, Brave New World (1980), Code 46, Cyber Wars, Demolition Man, eXistenZ,

Goldeneye, Harrison Bergeron, Lathe of Heaven (2002), Logan’s Run, Thirteenth Floor, Truman Show, Virtual Seduction Virtual Seduction (1995): 130, 131, 134, 142, 184, 194, 461–62, Altered States, Brainscan, Cyber Bandits, Dream Breaker, Future Shock, Menno’s Mind, Open Your Eyes, Virtual Nightmare, White Noise, Wild Palms Virtuosity (1995): 117, 131, 184, 193, 195, 463–64, Collateral Damage, Cyber-Tracker, Expect No Mercy, Final Mission, Hologram Man, I Robot, Looker, Netforce, Omega Doom, Replicant, Storm Watch, Tin Man, Universal Soldier The Return, Virtual Seduction, Webmaster Virus (1996): 184, 192, 464–65, Manhattan Project, 2103 The Deadly Wake, Warning Sign W WarGames (1983): 116, 122, 182, 197, 465–66, Arcade, Brainscan, Eve of Destruction, Evolver, Family Viewing, Global Effect, Manhattan Project, Sneakers, Terminator 2, Warning Sign Warning Sign (1985): 118, 182, 192, 466–67, Duplicates, Fly, Virus Webmaster (1998): 185, 193, 195, 467–68, Cyber Wars, It’s All About Love Westworld and Futureworld (two films): 152 note 12, 159, 231, Able Edwards, City of Lost Children, Demon Seed, Menno’s Mind, Next of Kin, Terminator 2 Westworld (1973): 181, -150, 165, Cherry 2000,   Futureworld, Total Recall Futureworld (1976): 181, Anna to the Infinite  Power, Circuitry Man II, Cyber-Tracker, Island, Looker, Unspeakable, Westworld White Noise (2005): 114, 129, 151, 186, 190, 469–70, Conceiving Ada, Cyberstalker, Until the End of the World Wild Palms (1993): 125, 132, 183, 194, 195, 470–73, Able Edwards, Altered States, Brainstorm, City of Lost Children, Cybercity, Cyborg Cop, Dream Breaker, eXistenZ, Family Viewing, Lawnmower Man 2, Net Games, Nightworld, Numb, Omega Man, Strange Days, TekWar, Terminal Justice, Virtual Assassin X Xchange (2000): 134, 155, 185, 193–95, 473–75, Crusader, Cyber-Tracker, Dream House, Natural City, New Rose Hotel, Nirvana, Synapse

486

Index 2 Film Motifs This index references the preface, introduction, and chapters by page number, and the relevant films identified and discussed in the filmography by title. addict: 46, 48, 86, 88, 100, 125, 143, 154, 158, Absolon, Altered States, Brainstorm, Brave New World (1980, 1998), Brazil, Chain Reaction, Cybercity, Cyberstalker, Demon Seed, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dream Breaker, Embryo, Jekyll and Hyde, Last Days of Man on Earth, Minority Report, Nemesis, Numb, Redline, RoboCop 2, Strange Days, TekWar, Terminal Justice, Terminal Man, Until the End of the World, White Noise, Wild Palms Alzheimer’s: Lathe of Heaven (2002), Net, Paycheck, Universal Soldier III angel: Cyberstalker, Dream Breaker (VR game character), Hardware, Judge Dredd, Nemesis 4, Net Games, New Rose Hotel (tattoo), Nirvana, Numb animals, birds, insects: Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996) ape, baboon, gorilla, monkey: 51, 92, 101, Fly, 12  Monkeys bear: 12 Monkeys bear, teddy: Able Edwards, A.I. Artificial  Intelligence, Cybercity, Screamers, Until the End of the World (simulated) bird: 86, Cell, Conceiving Ada, Hidden,  Paycheck   eagle: 16, 64–65   geese: Enemy of the State   owl: Blade Runner (robotic)   parrot: Max Headroom

boar: Nemesis 2 cat: 86, 95, 96, City of Lost Children, Cyber Wars,  Enemy of the State, Fly II, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), Logan’s Run, Matrix, Net Games, Project Shadowchaser III, Screamers cockroaches: 127, Cyborg Cop 3, Fortress 2,   Mimic, Mimic 2 dog: 91–92, 96, Boys from Brazil, Cell,  Conceiving Ada, Cyborg 2 (cybernetic), Embryo, Enemy of the State, Equilibrium, eXistenX, Fly II, Ghost in the Machine, Goldeneye, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), It’s All About Love, Lawnmower Man 2, Mangler 2, Nemesis, Project Shadowchaser III, Replicant, 6th Day, Terminator dolphin: Cyber Wars, Johnny Mnemonic donkey: Cherry 2000 frog: 61, 78, 99, Clones giraffe: 12 Monkeys horse: 84, 87, Cell, Circuitry Man (simulated),  Cyborg Cop 2, Jekyll and Hyde, Knights, Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002), Mission Impossible II, R.O.T.O.R., Virus iguana: Expect No Mercy, Terminator insect: 44, 65 (gadfly), 126, City of Lost Children  (cybernetic), Cyber Wars (cybernetic), Cyborg Cop 3, Fly, Fly II, Island, Mimic, Mimic 2 leeches: Circuitry Man lion: 12 Monkeys

Tech-Noir Film

mouse, rat, rodent: City of Lost Children, Clones,   Demolition Man, Freejack, Global Effect, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Replikator puma: 90–92 rabbit: 92, Boys from Brazil, Clones, Island of Dr.   Moreau (1996), Matrix (tattoo), Next of Kin rhinoceros: Wild Palms sheep: 92, 129 snake: 43, 47, 169, Blade Runner, Global Effect,   Soldier, Solo, Westworld spider: 108, 127, Blade Runner, Cyborg 2, Cyborg  Cop 3, Hardware, Island (cybernetic), Johnny Mnemonic (nickname), Matrix (cybernetic), Minority Report (cybernetic), Solo, 12 Monkeys tortoise: Blade Runner unicorn: Blade Runner ankh: Android Affair, Logan’s Run art: cartoons and comics: 19 note 16, Cyberstalker,  Judge Dredd, Lawnmower Man, Mangler 2, Until the End of the World (detective “bear”) drawing: 100, 132, 133, Able Edwards,  Companion, Godsend, Hidden, I Robot, Island, Johnny Mnemonic, Manchurian Candidate (2004), Solo, Stepford Wives graffiti: 132, New Crime City [ubiquitous,  especially in films with a post-apocalypse setting] origami: Blade Runner painting: 21, 23, 24 note 9, 62–63, 73, 76, 80–81,  87 (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1931), 89 (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 2002), 99 (Frankenstein), 103 note 41, 112, 132, Encrypt, Equilibrium, Frankenstein, New Rose Hotel, Stepford Wives, Truman Show, Virtual Nightmare, Virtual Seduction, Wild Palms photograph: 88, 112, 113, 131, 132, 135, 152, 163  note 51, Blade Runner, Boys from Brazil, Brainscan, Cell, Cloned, Conceiving Ada, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Enemy of the State, Futureworld, Ghost in the Machine, Godsend, Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Jekyll and Hyde, Judge Dredd, Looker, Mimic, Mimic 2, Net Games, November, Replicant, Rising Sun, Stepford Wives. THX 1138, Total Recall 2070, 12 Monkeys, Universal Soldier III, Virtual Seduction sculpture (statue): 21, 53 note 3, 62, 87, 132, Able  Edwards, Clones, Companion, Cyborg Cop 3,

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (in Carew home), Encrypt, Hardware, Johnny Mnemonic, Natural City tattoo: 132, City of Lost Children, Cyber Bandits,  Final Cut (2004), Island, Killer Deal, Matrix, New Rose Hotel, Unspeakable, Wild Palms asylum (mental institution): Cell, Circuitry Man II, Open Your Eyes, Terminator 2, 12 Monkeys, Vanilla Sky, Wild Palms birth (visualized birth scenes): Cloned, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Embryo, Fortress, Fly, Fly II, Frankenstein, Island, Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Jekyll and Hyde, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Matrix, Replicant, 6th Day, Virtuosity body parts: Frankenstein, See films listed under “Bioengineering: Transplant” and “Clone: Body Parts” eye: 17, 45, 70, 112, 114, 115, 124, 131, 132, 134,  135, 137, 138, 140, 141, Abel Edwards, Absolon, Blade Runner, Coma, Cyber Wars, Cyborg 2, Death Watch, Eve of Destruction, Fatal Error, Final Cut (2004), Fortress 2, Futureworld, Global Effect, Island, Looker, Matrix Revolutions, Minority Report, Morella, Nemesis, Nirvana, November, Parts, RoboCop 2, Shadow Fury, 6th Day, Stepford Wives, Synapse, Terminal Justice, Terminal Man, Until the End of the World, Vanilla Sky, Warning Sign, Wild Palms [ubiquitous as point-of-view shots in films with artificial beings] hand and arm: 74, 78, 92, 112, 114, 116, 122, 127,  Aeon Flux, A.P.E.X., Blade Runner, Collateral Damage, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg 2, Darkdrive, Demon Seed, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Equilibrium, Fatal Error, Fly, Hardware, I Robot, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Nemesis, Nemesis 4, November, Parts, Paycheck, RoboCop, Roboman, Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Total Recall, Vanilla Sky, Virtuosity, Westworld, Wild Palms Gatling gun arm: A.P.E.X., Digital Man, Cyber  Tracker 2 head: 84, 91, 115, Apocalypse Watch, Cell,  Circuitry Man, Circuitry Man II, CyberTracker 2, Cyberzone, Duplicates, Future Kick, Future Shock, Harrison Bergeron, Johnny

488

Index 2: Film Motifs

Mnemonic, Max Headroom, Mimic, Mimic 2, Nemesis (1992, 1995, 1996, 1996), Nirvana, Omega Doom, Redline, R.O.T.O.R., Swordfish, Terminator, Total Recall 2070, Universal Soldier The Return heart: 77, 176, Android Affair, Brainstorm, Brazil,  Companion, Frankenstein, Heatseaker, It’s All About Love, John Q, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Matrix Reloaded, Morella, Nemesis, Omega Doom (name), Screamers, Shadow Fury, Webmaster, Wild Palms, Virtual Nightmare (aphorism) cannibal: 69, 90, 91, 101, 127, 153, American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Cybercity, Judge Dredd, New Crime City, Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, Solo, Soylent Green carnival (general ambiance): 80, American Cyborg Steel Warrior (see discussion), Cybercity, Net, Rollerball, Total Recall, Menno’s Mind, Nemesis 4, Nirvana amusement park: Able Edwards, Android Affair,   Clones, Futureworld, Westworld circus: City of Lost Children, Logan’s Run (carousel) funhouse: Clones, Last Days of Man on Earth masks and costumes: 96, 119, 139, 144, 146, Blow  Out, Brazil, Clockwork Orange, Cyber Wars, Interface, Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Mission Impossible II, Numb, Running Man parade: Blow Out, Virtual Nightmare, Wild Palms political gatherings: Looker, Manchurian  Candidate chair (general): 102 note 11, 125 execution: Darkdrive, Menno’s Mind, New Crime   City, Unspeakable incarceration and manipulation: 125, Anderson  Tapes, Brazil, Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Watch, Brazil, Cypher, Demon Seed, Fatal Error, Fortress, Fortress 2, Fugitive Mind, Island, Paycheck, Phoenix, Running Man, Synapse, Total Recall, THX 1138, 12 Monkeys, Virtual Nightmare manipulation: 125, 137–38, 141, Brainscan, City  of Lost Children, Final Mission, Future Shock, Johnny Mnemonic, Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002), Max Headroom, RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1991), Total Recall, Total Recall 2070 gurney: 74, 96, 125, Anderson Tapes, Cell, Coma,  Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), Nighteen Eighty-

Four, Nightworld, Project Shadowchaser, RoboCop, Roboman, Wild Palms wheelchair: 139, Brazil, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,  Gattaca, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Lawnmower Man 2, Millennium, Prototype X29A, Wild Palms computer virus: 112, 124, 126, 162 note 32, Fatal Error, Ghost in the Machine, Mangler 2, Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), Net, Nirvana, Project Shadowchaser III, Terminator 3, Virtual Assassin, Westworld, Wild Palms disease: see plague Doctor Jekyll and/or Hyde: 12, 24, 38, 53, 62, 80, 81–90, 93, 100, 106 note 79, 129, 134, 224, Altered States, Android, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Embryo, Eve of Destruction, Fly, Fly II, Jekyll and Hyde, Natural City, New Rose Hotel, Replikator, Screamers, Terminal Choice, Terminal Justice Doctor Moreau: 12, 24, 38, 53, 62, 90–98, 100–01, 107 note 104, 111–12, 115, 117, 330–32, Anna to the Infinite Power, Brave New World, Fortress, Future Shock, Harrison Bergeron, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996), Natural City, New Rose Hotel, Omega Man, R.O.T.O.R., Stepford Wives, Shadow Fury, Terminal Choice dream (nightmare): 31, 40, 62, 70, 81, 85, 96, 98, 112, 129, 134–43, 145, 153, 154, 159, 163 note 58, 164 note 69, A.P.E.X., Altered States, Anna to the Infinite Power, A.P.E.X., Blade Runner (1992), Brainscan, Brainstorm, Brazil, City of Lost Children, Cloned, Code 46, Cybercity, Cyberzone, Cyborg Cop 3, Cypher, Dream Breaker, Dream House, Equilibrium, Final Mission, Fly, Fly II, Fortress, Frankenstein, Fugitive Mind, Futureworld, Ghost in the Machine, Godsend, Hidden, I Robot, Island, Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), It’s All About Love, Johnny Mnemonic, Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002), Manchurian Candidate (2004), Matrix Reloaded, Megaville, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Open Your Eyes, Paycheck, Phoenix, RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1991), Roboman, Slipstream, Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), Total Recall, 12 Monkeys, Until the End of the World, Vanilla Sky, Virtual Nightmare, Wild Palms epilepsy: Andromeda Strain, Duplicates, Last Days of Man on Earth, Looker, Project Shadowchaser III, Terminal Man 489

Tech-Noir Film

flashback (and memory): 14, 78, 79, 82, 88, 91, 97, 112, 114, 129, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 141, 143, 159, 164 note 61, Able Edwards, Apocalypse Watch, Android, Aeon Flux, Arcade, Blow Out, Code 46, Cyborg, Cypher, Duplicates, Eve of Destruction, Fatal Error, Fly II, Frankenstein, Fugitive Mind, Jekyll and Hyde, Johnny Mnemonic, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Lawnmower Man 2, Manchurian Candidate, Megaville, Mission Impossible II, Morella, Nemesis 2, Nemesis 3, Nightworld, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nirvana, November, Open Your Eyes, Replicant, Replikator, RoboCop, Roboman, Shadow Fury, Terminal Man, Total Recall, Total Recall 2070, Universal Soldier, Universal Soldier II, Vanilla Sky fortune-telling or future-telling (motifs): A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Cell, Cyborg 2, Future Kick, Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003), Minority Report, Natural City, Paycheck, Tin Man, Total Recall, Virtual Nightmare Frankenstein: 12, 24, 38, 53, 61, 62, 69–81, 83, 85, 89, 90, 93, 95, 98–101, 104 note 47 and 48 and 58 and 63, 105 note 67, 106 note 79, 111, 116, 129, 134, 157, 159 note 1, 173, 307–08, 352–53, Android, Circuitry Man II, Embryo, Eve of Destruction, Frankenstein, Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein, New Rose Hotel, Project Shadowchaser, Prototype, Stepford Wives, Universal Soldier, Warning Sign funeral: 140, Brazil, Ghost in the Machine, Godsend, Last Days of Man on Earth, Terminal Man, Xchange genres: ubiquitous in chapters, citations given to discussions associated with specific films only cyberpunk: detective: Absolon, Brainscan, Cell, Circuitry  Man (1990, 1994), Cyberstalker, Cyber Wars, Dream Breaker, Foolproof, Frankenstein, I Robot, Gattaca, Replikator, Mimic II, Minority Report, Morella, Net Games, Replicant, RoboCop, TekWar, Terminator, Thirteenth Floor, Total Recall 2070, Twilight Man, Until the End of the World, White Noise disaster: [ubiquitous in films] gangster: Circuitry Man gothic: Android, Circuitry Man, Circuitry Man  II, Frankenstein, Interface, Last Days of Man







on Earth, Matrix Reloaded, Omega Man, Terminator 2, Wild Palms horror: [ubiquitous in films] monster: [see all films with artificial beings] noir or film noir: Android, Cell, Blade Runner,  Chain Reaction, Clockwork Orange, Cyberstalker, Cyber Wars, Darkdrive, Foolproof, Frankenstein, Gattaca, Heatseeker, Nemesis, November, Omega Doom, Prototype X29A, Replikator, RoboCop, Soylent Green, Track Down, science fiction: A.I. Artificial Intelligence,  Android, Andromeda Strain, Circuitry Man II, Cyber-Tracker 2, I Robot, Island of Dr. Moreau, Logan’s Run, Manhattan Project, Project Shadowchaser IV, Total Recall 2070 social problem film: see, in particular, 48–49,  52–53, A.P.E.X. (discussion), Nightworld, see films with prisons western: Cyberzone, Cyborg 2, Cyborg 3, Digital  Man, Knights, Omega Doom, RoboCop, R.O.T.O.R., Soldier, Solo, Westworld

hallucination: Altered States, Brazil, Godsend, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Videodrome, Wild Palms Hitchcock, Alfred: Blow Out, Terminal Man, 12 Monkeys hospital: 86, 88, 89, 118, 119, 125, 151, Android Affair, Blow Out, Brainstorm, Brave New World (1998), Clockwork Orange, Clones, Coma, Duplicates, Jekyll and Hyde, John Q, Killer Deal, Harrison Bergeron, Last Days of Man on Earth, Fatal Error, Freejack, Ghost in the Machine, Lathe of Heaven (2002), Mimic 2, Morella, Net, Network, Project Shadowchaser, Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, RoboCop, RoboCop 2, Roboman, Terminal Choice, Terminal Man, Twilight Man, Universal Soldier, Universal Soldier III, Universal Soldier The Return Hyde: see Doctor Jekyll jail: see prison Jekyll: see Doctor Jekyll lobotomy: Freejack, Harrison Bergeron, Parts, RoboCop 2, Terminal Man mannequin: 132, 133, 135, Blade Runner, Blow Out, Cybercity, Stepford Wives

490

Index 2: Film Motifs

memory: see flashback mime: 132, Conversation, Mimic, Mimic 2, Open Your Eyes mimicry: 17, 42, 47, 62, 63, 112, 118, 125–34, [ubiquitous in films] mise-en-abyme: 24, 62, 63, 69–70, 80, 87, 89, 100, 102 note 5, 112, 125–34, 143, [ubiquitous in films] mise-en-scene: 24, 51, 52, 76, 87, 89, 99, 100, 112, 131, 132, [ubiquitous in films] Moreau: see Doctor Moreau museum: 127, Cyborg 2, Cyborg Cop 3, Demolition Man, Encrypt, Slipstream music: 86, 132, Clockwork Orange, Anna to the Infinite Power, Brave New World (1980, 1998), Cyberzone, Cyborg Cop 2, Equilibrium, Harrison Bergeron, Nightworld, Replicant, Slipstream, Universal Soldier II mythological characters: Antigone: 16, 20 note 32, 23, 30, 167 Daedaelus: 17 Deucalion: 61, 67, 69, 79, 80, 99–100, 176, 189,  Frankenstein Gilgamesh: 17, 20 note 40, Omega Doom Medusa: 17 Oedipus: 11, 13–17, 20 note 32, 23, 29–33, 37, 38,  53 note 9, 58 note 94, 68, 69, 72, 81, 97, 98, 100, 103 note 40, 167, Eve of Destruction, Fly II, Nightworld, Project Shadowchaser, Prototype, Virtuosity Perseus: 17, 32 Prometheus: 11, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 29, 39, 53, 61,  63–69, 72, 78, 79, 98, 103 note 19, 103 note 21, 104 note 44, 105 note 63, 111, 172, 173, Frankenstein Sisyphus: 16 Sphinx: 14, 17, 30, 32, 38, 68, 167, Code 46   (company name) Theseus: 17 Zeus (Jupiter): 16, 17, 30, 61, 63–69, 72, 78, 81,   98, 103 note 22, 172 Nazi: 121, Anna to the Infinite Power, Apocalypse Watch, Boys from Brazil, Equilibrium, Universal Soldier III Neanderthal: Altered States (?), Last Days of Man on Earth (?) nightmare: see dream nuclear power (including possible detonations and facilities): 58 note 92, 121, 122, 126, American

Cyborg Steel Warrior, Andromeda Strain, Chain Reaction, China Syndrome, Clones, Colossus, Digital Man, Eve of Destruction, Fortress 2, Global Effect, Manhattan Project, Project Shadowchaser II, Project Shadowchaser III, RoboCop 2, Screamers, Until the End of the World, WarGames plague (disease, human-infecting virus): 13, 64, 70, 78, 105 note 66, 112, 118, 123 148, 152–53, 162 note 45, films listed under “Bioengineering: Diseases and cures,” American Cyborg Steel Warrior, Clonus, Codex 46, Lathe of Heaven (1980, 2002), Mimic, Mimic II, New Rose Hotel, Parts, prison (jail): 45, 69, 112, 119, 125, 142, 145, 152, Anderson Tapes, American Clockwork Orange, Cyborg Steel Warrior, Cyborg Cop 2, Equilibrium, Fortress, Fortress 2, Ghost in the Machine, Heatseeker, Judge Dredd, Nemesis, Net Games, Netforce, New Crime City, Phoenix, THX 1138, Replikator, RoboCop, Running Man, Sneakers, Netforce, Track Down, 12 Monkeys, 2103 The Deadly Wake, Twilight Man, Unspeakable, Virtuosity, Wild Palms cryo-prison: 153, Darkdrive, Demolition Man,  Hologram Man, Minority Report, Open Your Eyes, Project Shadowchaser, TekWar, Vanilla Sky racism: 22, 47, 49, 53, 101, 107 note 99, 123, 127, 153, 156, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Anderson Tapes, Cyborg 3, Digital Man, Global Effect, Lathe of Heaven (1980), Omega Man, Rising Sun, Terminal Justice, Virtuosity ratings (television): 124, 215, China Syndrome, Death Watch, Harrison Bergeron, Heatseaker, Max Headroom, Network, Replikator, Rollerball, Running Man, Speaking Parts, Storm Watch, Videodrome satellite: 45, 46, 97, 123, Able Edwards, Andromeda Strain, Enemy of the State, Fortress 2, Goldeneye, Storm Watch, Until the End of the World, Virtual Nightmare (satellite ground dish) suicide: 38, 77, 79, 82, 83, 88–90, 92, 99, 100, 101, 158, 164 note 70, 167, 175, 176, Clockwork Orange, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Apocalypse Watch, Arcade, Brave New World (1980),

491

Tech-Noir Film

Circuitry Man, Companion, Death Watch, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Duplicates, Embryo, Family Viewing, Frankenstein, Fugitive Mind, Gattaca, I Robot, Jekyll and Hyde, John Q, Killer Deal, Harrison Bergeron, Logan’s Run, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Minority Report, Morella, Natural City, Network, Nightworld, Nirvana, Open Your Eyes, Prototype, RoboCop 2, Slipstream, Soylent Green, Speaking Parts, Twilight Man, Universal Soldier III, Unspeakable, Vanilla Sky, White Noise, Wild Palms Superman: Clones, Matrix, RoboCop 3 telepathy: 37, 38, 131, 163 notes 56 and 57, 166, Aeon Flux, Lawnmower Man, Minority Report, Phoenix (telekinesis), Replicant, Total Recall 2070 terrorism: 46, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 139, 140, 147, 152, 153, 158, Aeon Flux, Apocalypse Watch, Brazil, Chain Reaction, China Syndrome, Collateral Damage, Crusader, Cyber-Tracker, Cyber-Tracker 2, Cyborg Cop 2, Demolition

Man, Digital Man, Equilibrium, Eve of Destruction, eXistenZ, Global Effect, Hackers, Hologram Man, Net, Network, Phoenix, Menno’s Mind, Nemesis, Project Shadowchaser, Project Shadowchaser II, Sneakers, Storm Watch, Swordfish, Universal Soldier, Universal Soldier III, Virtual Assassin, Virtuosity, Wild Palms, Xchange time-loop and time-travel (excluding narrative loops): 131, 163 note 50, A.P.E.X., Conceiving Ada, Darkdrive, eXistenZ, Millennium, Nemesis 2, Nemesis 3, Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003), 12 Monkeys vampire: 69, Ghost in the Machine, Knights, Matrix Reloaded, Mimic, Omega Man wasteland: 11, 17, 18, 37, 62, 66, 67, 69, 72, 76, 81, 83, 93, 98, 100, 107 note 106, 112, 113, 118–21, 130, 157–59, [ubiquitous in films] weather (artificial): Clones, Paycheck, Stormwatch, Truman Show

492