You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost

Each Day, A Film
January 11th 2012


Sometimes, films surprise you. 






Not often, but sometimes. Now, among the people I correspond with about films - which is, admittedly, not the widest circle in the world - Johnny Mnemonic is not universally loved, and it's partly because of the problem discussed in previous entries, i.e. that there are competing storylines that don't exactly mesh, somehow. Within this film, it's a little blatant; you have corporate espionage rubbing up against designer diseases apparently targetting the lower rungs of society, and into that you inject Keaun Reeves, who has a sharp dress sense and no memories. What could possibly go wrong?


As I believe I've mentioned before, I'm an avid fan of William Gibson, so I was half-sold on the film even though it's not specifically tied to anything other than a short story from Burning Chrome. I like cyberpunk, and always have liked it, but it's very peculiar in that it's very difficult to do on film but comparatively easy to do so in literature; it's easier to describe the kind of atmosphere the term provokes rather than visualise it. 


There's one point, for instance, that stands out as an intersection between Gibson-as-cyberpunk and Gibson-as-futurist; within the comparatively recent Blue Ant trilogy, the protagonist meets a character who trades in past-life technology, specifically curtas, antiquated calculators, who then leads her to a steganographer. The slightly strange intersection between old numeromancy and new codebreaking felt, for me, like Cayce Pollard had walked into a variant of the shop on the Bridge of the same-named trilogy, because while technology keeps advancing, it never exactly goes away. 


That's one of the fun things about Johnny Mnemonic; the size of the memory that he is able to take on seemed massive then but almost trivial now measured in, if I remember, gigabytes rather than, say, terabytes as now seem to be the norm in external hard drives - so any modern watching renders him antiquated while placed within a futuristic setting. Hence, cyberpunk. 


The film also features one of my favourite middle-class-breakdowns in cinematic history. Bear in mind that Johnny is a courier - nothing flash, nothing particularly special, but important - but oh, has Johnny developed tastes during his working life; when faced with the narrative he ends up injected to and a brief sojourn to a rubbish tip where people keep trying to kill him with burning scrap cars dropped from a height, he has a complete meltdown; 


Listen. You listen to me. You see that city over there? THAT'S where I'm supposed to be. Not down here with the dogs, and the garbage, and the fucking last month's newspapers blowing *back* and *forth*. I've had it with them, I've had it with you, I've had it with ALL THIS - *I want ROOM SERVICE*! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered... like they do... at the Imperial Hotel... in Tokyo!


Poor, poor Johnny. 


The film also has some strange tics, such as introducing Dolph Lundgren as a crazed street preacher who's more likely to beat the shit out of you than preach, or Udo Kier - looking oddly like Jean-Clade Van Damme, to me at least - as Ralfi, the wheeler-dealer-hustler with the high-end bodyguards. There's also Henry Rollins - Henry Rollins! - as a street-level doctor, and Ice-T as the leader of a low-tech gang that keeps a codebreaking dolphin wired to a satellite dish in their headquarters - so, no, not that low-tech. 


And then there's Takeshi Kitano. 


Let's move on, because Takeshi Kitano in a film like this is so intrinsically strange and yet awesome that to dwell on it feels a little curious. 


Another thing; representations of cyberspace within filmmaking generally suck. That's not a value judgement, it's more that trying to create a visual representation of a nonvisual medium basically equates to throwing bundles of money at a graphic designer and a visual effects supervisor and letting them do whatever the fuck they want. But within Johnny Mnemonic, they're curiously restrained; sure, there's the soaring through pillars of information, but it's still, after all these years, fairly fascinating to watch. 


Again, it's another film that if the narrative had discarded the notion that good has to always triumph utterly that things might have gone better; sure, it's nice that the cure for Nerve Attenuation Syndrome gets beamed to the world, but the world is clearly in such a shitty state already that this won't make the most huge amount of difference. At the same time, the corporations are now so huge that it won't really matter to them that potential workers, customers and clients are no longer dying in droves, so it's win-win for them - they lose the profit stream on the treatments for NAS and can't sell the cure, but there's always another targeted disease, right? 


Anyway, placed in the Keanu Reeves canon - and yes, ostensibly such a thing exists - the film is a strange but oddly jewel-like beauty. I hope that makes sense...