JOHNNY, REMEMBER ME [437]

There is no point in listing how the 1995 film “Johnny Mnemonic” incorrectly predicts the world of 2021 – CRT television screens, Concorde remaining in flight, 320 GB storage capacity being a large number – as not all science fiction is speculative fiction, although I was amused by Johnny (Keanu Reeves) explaining that the encryption code for the information downloaded to his mind should be sent by fax to its destination. My focus should be on it story, which is good, but I don’t think it is told well:

“Second decade of the 21^st century. Corporations rule. The world is threatened by a new plague... its cause and cure unknown. The corporations are opposed by LoTeks, a resistance movement risen from the streets...The corporations defend themselves. They hire the Yakuza... But the LoTeks wait in their strongholds, in the old city cores, like rats in the walls of the world. The most valuable information must sometimes be entrusted to mnemonic couriers, elite agents who smuggle data in wet-wired brain implants.”

A sure-way to turn my attention off from a film is by starting with a text crawl setting the scene. The most egregious example I personally came across was “Broken Blossoms” a 1919 film written and directed by D.W. Griffith that, while a silent film, betrays the visual talent of someone known as the progenitor of much of the language of film we use to this day, the copious inter-title cards reading like chapters from a book, chapters I am required to read.

With “Blade Runner” having influenced the cyberpunk genre over a decade before the release of “Johnny Mnemonic” (1995), adapted by “Neuromancer” author William Gibson from his own short story, audiences would be familiar enough with this dystopian, corporation-run, neon-drenched world of rainy nights for it to be taken as written, but without needing to write it – everything else can be given its portrayal when we reach that stage in the plot.

There are more characters in this film than Gibson’s story, but it feels like this is to move Johnny, the central character but also the MacGuffin whose brain holds what everyone needs, around the film – more than once is it made clear that only his head is needed, and the intentionally robotic acting of Reeves doesn’t make him endearing, like his mention that he had to delete his childhood memories to have more, well, drive space, is to make him a tragic figure.

The film was originally to have been a lower-budgeted production in the vein of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville”, a science-fiction film noir story set amongst contemporary Paris that I have talked about previously. The casting of Keanu Reeves, hot from the success of “Speed”, as Johnny gave it a higher profile, production budget and expectation, making it the blockbuster film it was never intended to be. Director Robert Longo since re-edited and released a version in black and white, bringing closer to his original intention, but the story could still be adapted again.

“Johnny Mnemonic” today seems to exist as the bridge between “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix” – indeed, the Wachowski sisters told the “New Yorker” magazine in 2012 that they used the film to sell their story, perhaps as shorthand for the cyberpunk genre that Sony, releasing the film through TriStar, hoped to capitalise on. For one thing, “The Matrix” had daylight at times...

ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER [435]

The Wachowski sisters’ film “The Matrix”, the wildly successful and thoughtful cyberpunk science fiction action blockbuster, was released in March 1999, long enough ago for my first copy of the film to be on VHS, bought from no less than Blockbuster Video. It was the widescreen release, reducing the picture resolution to only about a hundred lines – it was “letterboxed” as in like watching it through next door’s letterbox. No wonder I swapped it for a DVD at the first opportunity, and later a Blu-ray boxset of what had become a trilogy. 

 

I like “The Matrix” for the same reason I say that Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” is my favourite film: it has everything in it. It is visually vibrant and innovative, densely plotted, filled with action, and it stays with you after the end, withstanding repeated viewings. It was like the nature of what a blockbuster film could be had changed, something which didn’t bear fruit much beyond its own three sequels.  

 

The comparative box office failure of 2021’s fourth instalment, “The Matrix Resurrections”, may have put pay to the chances of the original film’s twenty-fifth anniversary being officially recognised, but it remains important to me. The anniversary cannot be marked by the US Library of Congress adding it to the National Film Registry for future preservation, because that already happened in 2012, when it was inducted alongside “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “Dirty Harry” and “A Christmas Story”. 

 

Cyberpunk was a subculture still current in 1999, but also nearly twenty years old, and the combination in “The Matrix” of technology, music and fashion, with added martial arts and gunfire, may have redefined that term in the mainstream, the nature of “the matrix” as a simulation and distraction of the real world of the film prepared its audience for when the World Wide Web would become exactly that. The Wachowski sisters’ innovation of “bullet time”, freezing action to move around it before continuing, has been copied endlessly, as has the “digital rain” of phosphorous green code and text on a black background, itself inspired by the 1995 anime “Ghost in the Shell”.

 

Much was made at the time of the use of postmodernist philosophy in the story of “The Matrix”, either to put the film above the action-fare characterised as mindless, or to say that it was too complicated for audiences to understand. The Wachowskis issued copies of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book “Simulacra & Simulation” to the cast and crew. Baudrillard himself said the film had nothing to do with this work, which was more about the breakdown of distinctions between reality and simulation until the latter takes precedence, but then again, it is also about the implosion of meaning in the media... well, at least that sentence appears in my copy of his book.

 

I will admit I had problems following “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” when they were in cinemas, but the epic nature of the story allowed you to get lost in it. Having already been used to the layering of references and meaning in “The Simpsons”, to be uncovered as your knowledge increased, I thought “The Matrix” will be the same. Only in August 2020, when Lilly Wachowski said that she and Lana had written and directed a trilogy with implicit transgender themes, my thoughts were, in order, (a) I wish they said that at the time, (b) how did I miss that, (c) 1999 may have been too early to say explicitly, and (d) that makes the films so much easier to understand, what with Keanu Reeves’ character Neo being alerted to their true nature, as well as that of the world around them, along with the villain Agent Smith only referring to Neo by the name the Matrix gave them –this would also apply to Trinity, Morpheus and so on.

 

When I saw “The Matrix Resurrections”, I took issue with criticisms of its internal commentary, and replaying of scenes from the original film: “To make a new ‘Matrix’ film is to comment on what has happened to our representation of the world in the last eighteen years, because that is the only acceptable way to do it.” It is my favourite film of the now-tetralogy, just as my favourite film of the “Back to the Future” trilogy is the second one.

 

We are now at a point where cyberpunk may now be understood as a historical period in popular culture, just as the dystopian worlds depicted in its literature and films resemble reality greater than they ever did. With “the matrix” now being misappropriated for personal gain by whoever Andrew Tate thinks he is, and “taking the red pill” being used as by right-wing groups as a term for “freeing” themselves from what they believe is a simulation of the world created by liberal ideology, a celebration of “The Matrix”, and what it really is about, couldn’t be timelier.

 

I now need to square how a previous film that also starred Keanu Reeves, the critically derided “Johnny Mnemonic”, came to influence “The Matrix”.

I WANT TO BE WITH YOU EVERYWHERE [388]

I should have realised that, when “The Shape of Water” won in 2018, a truly original genre-based film like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Picture. This year, I was worried that either the remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front” or “The Fabelmans” would win because they fit the stereotypes of films that perform well at award ceremonies: important dramas about the human condition, and/or a paean to the art of filmmaking. 

Centred on an unconventional romance, inspired by “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, “The Shape of Water” was the first fantasy film to have won the Best Picture Oscar since “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” in 2004, but if you classify it as science fiction, then “The Shape of Water” is the first sci-fi winner of the award. 

For me, “Everything Everywhere All at once” winning Best Picture felt like if “The Matrix” had won in 2000, or “Back to the Future” in 1986, but neither film was even nominated – the films that won in these years were “Gladiator” and “Platoon”, with nominations including “Children of a Lesser God”, “The Mission”, “Chocolat”, “Erin Brockovich” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, when foreign language nominations for Best Picture were still very rare.

I have never been convinced by those that said “The Matrix” was too complicated to follow for a mainstream blockbuster film, especially when “Inception” received a Best Picture nomination a decade later, and the success of productions by the Wachowski sisters and Christopher Nolan proves there is a wide audience for blockbuster films that make you sit forward, rather than sit back, released by their genres rather than trapped by them. 

Sci-fi, horror, fantasy or other genre-based films have rarely won Best Picture, to the extent that I said to myself this year that, wow, a comedy has won, albeit one that has inhaled most other film genres in its representation of alternate universes. It is like “drama” has become the default in fictional film, instead of a genre in itself.

When I saw “Everything Everywhere All at Once” in May 2022, I wrote in my diary that it “was absolutely brilliant, perhaps the most imaginative science fiction film since ‘The Matrix’, and the kind of film I am not likely to see made again in a long time.” I like that I managed to successfully summarise the plot: “Michelle Yeoh [stars] as a laundrette owner who must save the world by accessing the ‘multiverse’ to harness the powers of alternate versions of herself.” It’s like baldly describing “Back to the Future” as someone trying to unite their parents before they cease to exist.

I also wrote “it has stayed with me too”. The resonance among its audiences over the choices we make, and lives not led, must have turbocharged the word of mouth that carried this film through the rest of 2022. Then again, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is far more my sort of film than franchises like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water”.

Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis deserve their Oscars based solely on the acting range they had to display across different roles and genres, while the film’s triumph for Asian representation in Hollywood means Stephanie Hsu will have her chance again soon. I am sure I didn’t think of this aspect at the time due to being caught up in the story, and my tastes in cinema not being centred in Hollywood.

What I like the most about “Everything Everywhere All at Once” winning the Academy Award for Best Picture is that it now shows there is an appetite for breaking the boundaries of what a mainstream film is, and those that break it will now be rewarded for it. This also guarantees that the next film to cause this much excitement may be just as original. Whatever that may be, I will have more of it please.

DO YOU WANT TO FEEL HOW IT FEELS? [351]

On the Saturday after the first Covid-19 lockdown was lifted, in June 2020, I went straight to a shoe shop and bought a pair of Converse hi-top trainers, with rainbows emblazoned across and under them. I have only now had to throw them away because I wore them out, a hole opening between the canvas and the sole.

Meanwhile, the Dr Martens 1461 shoes I wear to work every day are stitched together in the colours of Gilbert Baker’s original gay rights flag, with a flag embroidered on each shoe – they were half the pride of a standard, black-stitched pair because I bought them in October, and not June. I need to replace the insoles.

I was not trying to make a point in buying or wearing wither pair of shoes, especially  but Converse and Dr Martens definitely were, and it plays to my advantage. If anything, I am appropriating the corporate message of inclusivity by making it outlast the limited time they were intended for sale, making them back into standard pairs of shoes – my shoes. Pride Forever, basically.

Pride Month marked in June because it commemorates the protests that took place at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, lasting over six days from 28^th June 1969. In the United Kingdom, this is then followed by our Pride March in London, itself first taking place on 1^st July 1972 because it was the nearest weekend to the anniversary of the protests.

There is no set time to run a Pride parade – one UK city, Southampton, will hold this year’s march on 27^thAugust, with the nearby town of Eastleigh waiting until 10^th September. This is just as well, as establishing monthly or weekly observances includes having to work against only observing them for that period of time, particularly if, like Pride Month, rainbows are added to seemingly everything, until they are removed again, until next time.

This Pride Month, I wrote an article for my company’s newsletter about coming out as trans at work, which took place years ago. In hindsight, I spent longer on it than the lifespan of a newsletter warranted, but I wanted what it said to last beyond that short time, and I wanted to share the trepidation I felt as a closeted person arriving in a new workplace. What I wrote was a sentence I feel proud for writing, as not only did I find a way, it made people laugh: “An apt description of this time is that I was still getting used to not living in the Matrix anymore – something wasn’t making sense, but once I gained the ability to describe it, the world changed.” 

REMEMBER WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID [325]

On Monday 27^th December 2021, I watched “The Matrix Resurrections” at my local cinema, eighteen years after going there to see “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions”, and over twenty years since buying “The Matrix” on VHS cassette. Not only was “Resurrections” the film we deserved in this particular moment, but it symbolised why I have named this new year “Twenty Twenty 2: This Time It’s Personal”, before the “My Brother, My Brother and Me” podcast names it officially. 

On the surface, “Resurrections” can be viewed as a cynical sequel and reboot exercise by Warner Bros. to exploit their dormant intellectual property and catch the nostalgia of its audience, much as they did with “Space Jam: A New Legacy”, a film in which “Matrix” characters also appeared [link]. The “Matrix” of the original trilogy is portrayed as a video game, developed by Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) based on memories of himself as Neo, that Warner Bros. is also to be rebooted, either with or without the involvement of its original creator, a situation that mirrored real life before “Resurrections” entered production. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is Tiffany, a married mother with no connection to Anderson, but was unknowingly the basis for the character. 

 

At this point, we are meant to believe this is the “real world” outside of the “story”, such as stories can be real. “Resurrections” begins with an on-screen “modal error”, referencing both the “modal” Anderson is using to test an element of a game he is programming, but also the philosophical concept of a “modal error”. Anderson’s explanation for his newly recurrent flashbacks to the events of “The Matrix” is because he is in it, but the world he is in is one where that proposition is the least attractive – it is one where the actual answer is to keep taking the blue pill, to keep him where he is. We can see where the error is, but the subject is kept in a place where they can only be wrong. It’s the kind of world where conspiracy theories work most easily, and people can spout about the system being “rigged”, because it is in their interest that the best explanation for why a proposition is possible or necessary must always have the opposite power.

 

I read a bizarre review of “Resurrections” in “The Times” newspaper on Christmas Eve 2021, describing the action as being “frequently muddy and dull,” “littering” the film with flashbacks “as if [director Lana Wachowski] has no faith in the film’s narrative power,” with a screenplay that “mistakes self-referentiality for sophistication.” What was new in the original “Matrix” trilogy has become the standard in any blockbuster film that wishes to add any level of thoughtfulness to its relentless action, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the works of Christopher Nolan. To miss the psychological and philosophical arguments over consciousness and representation of the original trilogy, then dismiss the same being done in “Resurrections” as “oddly preachy and [warning] audiences not to be ‘programmed’ by society”, is maddening, as it also skips over how audiences, with time, have become more used to more complex concepts being explored in mainstream cinema. To make a new “Matrix” film is to comment on what has happened to our representation of the world in the last eighteen years, because that is the only acceptable way to do it.

 

What begins as Neo and Trinity being recaptured in the Matrix, despite the end of “The Matrix Revolutions”, becomes crystal clear by the film’s end. Despite the peace between humanity and the machines, the Matrix was rebuilt, producing more power than ever if humans are kept running high emotionally - the fact that Facebook opened for business in 2004, the year after “Revolutions” was released, was not lost on me. Neo and Trinity were resurrected by the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) for study, finding they allow the Matrix to work most efficiently when they are kept close, but without their memories. 

 

I then remembered a certain incident on Twitter in May 2020. Elon Musk said, “take the red pill”, a major “Matrix” motif misappropriated by alt-right fascists. Ivanka Trump pipes in with, “Taken!” Lilly Wachowski, her work having been misread, replied, “Fuck both of you.” “The Matrix Resurrections” feels like a remake of that Tweet on a budget of $190 million. Its plot came from a dream Lana Wachowski had in response to the death of both her parents and a friend. Lilly Wachowski also revealed in August 2020 that the films were an allegory for being transgender, amid the sisters’ own personal journey: "I'm glad that it has gotten out... That was the original intention but the world wasn't quite ready.” I wish it had been. They may not own the intellectual property of “The Matrix”, but to make a “Matrix” film without either of its creators would be unacceptable.

 

“The Times” gave “The Matrix Resurrections” one star out of five. I will just recommend that you see it, because you will leave the cinema wanting to delete all your social media accounts to take back control – whether you follow through on that is another question.

 

I had already co-opted the tagline from “Jaws: The Revenge,” titling the new year as a sequel, “Twenty Twenty 2: This Time It’s Personal”, because it came from an anxiety that, culturally, the 2020s have not yet begun, and I need to get the decade underway for myself, so it feels like we are making progress of any sort.

 

“Cultural decades” never started on time: the 1950s only got started with rock ‘n’ roll in 1954, while Beatlemania and the Kennedy assassination began the 1960s in 1963-64. Civil unrest and the Beatles’ breakup start the 1970s pretty much at 1969-70, while the New Romantics and the rise of home computing, the fall of the Iron Curtain and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the World Trade Center attack, the Arab Spring and quality for LGBT+ people caused successive decades to begin culturally around a year or so after the calendar marked it.

 

Right now, it feels like we cannot move forward culturally, kept in a holding pattern by events that need to be resolved: the COVID-19 pandemic, the culture wars, and political deadlock. These will eventually pass, particularly when the end of the pandemic makes meeting people in person, and not through the mediation of the online realm, less of a strange experience. I have no idea what the cultural moment that properly begins the 2020s will be, but it won’t be found through social media, or through a Zoom or Microsoft Teams call. As much as you can create in isolation, or recycle what has been proved to work, that human connection will show you where to go next, and I’ve always preferred talking to someone in person.

 

Until then, it feels like we are in our own Matrix, and we are fine with it - but it all feels a bit too 2010s for me.