Cyberpunk – Subgenre or Trend?*

Ion Indolean

When I started doing research on this subject, cyberpunk meant just a branch of the science

fiction cinematography for me, nothing more. Although I was adamant about it being my

favourite subgenre, I can‟t say I knew it in detail; perhaps I did not even possess a superficial

knowledge of it. Indeed I had an idea about the topic, and was even fascinated by it, but I was

not able to anticipate its magnitude and visionary power, which I discovered only later. Is my

being fascinated by mise-en-scène and characters the reason I had never looked at it as a whole?

The more I deepened myself into the research, the more attracted to it I was, and at the same time

I felt how it incessantly grew and overwhelmed me.

The reason I am saying this is because I became aware it was more of a trend in cinema – at

times used involuntarily in some movies – and that many films contained cyberpunk elements,

without it being the intention of the production team. So the first logical question would be: to

what extent should a film contain cyberpunk elements – even percentage-wise – to be considered

part of this subgenre? Then something else crossed my mind: in fact, society has already reached

the technological level prophesied by the first cyberpunk authors – who started to disseminate

their ideas at the end of the ‟70s – the only thing missing from the current world system being

anarchy. So, could it be that the usage of cyberpunk elements in current films – such as various

gadgets or prostheses – had become a normal trend, spread with and due to this technological

evolutionary process? Because, if my theory is valid, it would mean that cyberpunk is one of the

few postmodern concepts that has become obsolete. Before answering all these questions, we

should take a look at the beginnings of cyberpunk, which, as many other movements, has its

roots in literature.

First of all, it is a postmodern genre – as I have already mentioned –, that focuses on „high tech

and low life”1. Therefore, the movies depict very advanced science on the background of social

disorder, and the plot takes place in a future relatively close to the present, on an anarchy-

stricken, dirty, squalid and troubled Earth, usually in the hands of a totalitarian leader. The stake

is usually centred on a conflict between hackers, artificial intelligence or mega-corporations. In

the cinematic works in question, the atmosphere or even the plot frequently contain shades of

film noir, because in many cases the story revolves around a character (with adventurous spirit)

who is searching for something, making use of various pieces of information, leads etc. The

* Translated into English by Ofelia Man. 1http://www.goodreads.com/genres/cyberpunk, read on the 21

st of January 2014.

protagonist is usually lonely; he lives on the outskirts of society and is faced with a peculiar

situation that he has to solve, as shown in the films discussed here.

These are all general features, applicable to all the fields where the aforementioned current

appears. A short, correct and comprehensive definition seems difficult to formulate, nevertheless,

I shall try to do so. One can say a film is cyberpunk, when it shows the underground, nihilistic

part of an electronised society. The “father” of this genre, William Ford Gibson proclaimed:

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.2 Judging by his anticipative intuition,

he is similar to Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, who, in different centuries, had also predicted events

that happened/became concrete up to a certain extent. Dani Cavallaro says the following in the

foreword of the book he dedicated to Gibson:

In contemporary western and westernized cultures, people are surrounded by an increasingly

wide range of tangible products that seem to impart a sense of solidity to their lives. Objects such as

mobile phones, computers, portable physiotherapy units, personal stereos, microwave ovens, video

recorders and fax machines (to mention but a few examples) are integral components of many people’s

everyday existence. Often, they are regarded not merely as useful tools for the accomplishment of

practical tasks but actually as defining aspect of people’s identities, lifestyles and value systems. They

thus become comparable to prostheses, the artificial supports used by medical technology to complete

otherwise lacking physical organisms.3

Gibson is considered the „noir prophet” of the cyberpunk genre, and boasts a series of

accomplishments. He coined the term cyberspace – used in Neuromancer (1984), the first novel

that went “triple” by winning the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Hugo Award.

He also foresaw the growing influence of the TV and of the virtual reality, present today in every

home. These media become companions for many people who otherwise lead a lonely life,

submerging more and more in their own domestic universe. He also devised different terms, now

entrenched, such as netsurfing, ICE, jacking in, neural implants, matrix.

Furthermore, several films are based on his writings, amongst which Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic,

Escape from New York. In 2008 when the cyberpunk genre was no longer current, and many of

his predictions had become reality, Gibson said this about himself: Visionary writer is OK.

Prophet is just not true.4. He was very aware of his limits and understood it was logic rather than

his genius that allowed him to make certain predictions. Thirty years before, he started his

2 http://www.economist.com/node/666610, read on the 21

st of January 2014.

3 Dani Cavallaro, „Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson”, Athenaeum Press

Ltd, Gateshead, 2000, Foreword, pp. IX-X. 4 http://www.actusf.com/spip/article-5710.html, read on the 21

st of January 2014.

literary career with a brief but significant short story entitled Fragments of a Hologram Rose

(1977). The story, just 4 pages long, was extremely unclear, partly just sketched. I shall continue

by giving some examples from this story, in order to highlight the characteristics of the

cyberpunk current.

Very abruptly, the story opens with the line: That summer Parker had trouble sleeping. From the

very beginning with a minimum of words, the time, the protagonist and the initial incident are

established. The framework has not yet been outlined, but it will be in the following paragraphs,

together with several avant-garde concepts: Parker, who hadn’t been able to sleep without an

inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible. The word inducer was still a novelty at the

time, and so were ASP casette, Delta, Delta ASP, parch cords, fast-forward.

Gibson continues his depiction with other details, describing the poverty, the misery, the

existence led at the brink of society and of law. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a

flashlight when you pour the boiling water (...) He was in New York with forged papers (...) Now Parker

is 30 and writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movement of the industry human

cameras.

A further detail that would perpetuate in the cyberpunk universe is announced in the following

fragments: Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned-out Tucson suburb, making love to a

thin teenager from N. Jersey (...) Many of the refugees were armed (...) Federal and state troops sent in to

sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search, a few men would fail to report

back. Some had sold their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband they had been sent

to find. (...) He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine; the right

pocket held 15 ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch-handled switchblade.

We are witnesses to a world collapsing due to a recently finished revolution, as a result of which

society is led with a strong, totalitarian hand. It is a militarised, technologised, interim regime in

which everybody survives making use of petty illegal tricks. The last sentence is as complex and

evocative as it can be. Speaking about misery, the word jacket is used, hinting at a particular

clothing style – and even if the look inspired by the punk bands is not pinpointed exactly, we

know, we feel that this is what he‟s alluding to –; drugs are also present as a commonplace

occurrence. Moreover, the fact that the drugs have been forgotten in the pocket for a very long

time only means they are no longer at the top of the list of things prohibited by law. The social

woes are much too burdening for a gram of drugs to matter. Survival is of utmost importance and

everything revolves around the worry for tomorrow.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose ends very meaningfully, I would even say prophetically, with a

quandary that Gibson places both in and outside the story: If the chaos of the nineties reflects a

radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from Lascaux/Gutenberg

tradition of pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with its

promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensor

perception?5

And indeed, what was in the cards for the people living during the ‟70s-‟80s in a society based

on printed paper? To what extent were holograms going to replace palpable material, and to what

extent was our sensory system going to change, even our manual handling of things and the way

in which we physically manipulate objects, if everything were to become projected? Reality

would merge with virtual reality and humans would merge with robots. The birth of the cyborg

was imminent, but very dangerous. This is one of the favourite subjects of this subgenre.

Consequently, we have another brief and correct definition: Cyberpunk is about expressing (often

dark) ideas about human nature, technology and their respective combination in the near future.6

Subsequently, I will speak exclusively about films and I will give six defining features – at least

in my opinion, based on researching other‟s points of view – of the cyberpunk subgenre, as

follows: the negative impact of technology on humanity; the fusion between technology and

humanity; the control of corporations over society; the focus on the underground world; clothing

with punk accents; omnipresent access to information.

It must be said here that pure cyberpunk films are rare, if not completely absent, but at the same

time it is difficult to find any movie to be part of only one genre/subgenre. However, there are

many films containing cyberpunk features, due to the inclusion (conscious, voluntary or not) of

one or more of the aforementioned characteristics. This, however, does not place them

automatically in this subgenre, it rather gives room for debate, for interpretation. Perhaps I would

not classify all the titles I chose as cyberpunk – I myself have reservations with regard to some

of them – but that does not mean that they would not make an interesting discussion topic.

It is a known fact that Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) is considered the film that opened the

cyberpunk cinematic „movement” in 1982, but there are also the so-called precursors: proto-

cyberpunk films which, employing one or more elements, anticipated this SF subgenre. Before

enumerating them, I‟d like to mention the fact that I myself carried out the selection of films and

it might be possible that some titles were left out and others rather forcefully included, due to

various reasons. The films in question are Metropolis (1927), The Creation of the Humanoids

(1962), Cyborg 2087 (1966), Alien (1979) and Heavy Metal (1981). Of course, one must not

5 http://ebookbrowsee.net/william-gibson-fragments-of-a-hologram-rose-pdf-d30702353, source for all the

paragraphs of Gibson’s book. 6 http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/what-is-cyberpunk/, read on the 21

st of January 2014.

forget about La Jetée (1962) together with Twelve Monkeys (1995). Terry Gilliam, who directed

the latter, said: „La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys are a perfect match. La Jetée is like acorn: small,

compact, perfect, whereas Twelve Monkeys is the oak tree stemming from the acorn, with

branches growing in all directions, bigger, more complex, more dizzy(ing). But at the heart, they

are the same thing‟7. In order to underline that these two films are “related”, I will present their

synopses, starting with Chris Marker‟s film: Time travel, still images, a past, present and future

and the aftermath of World War III. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and forth, in and out of

time, to find a solution to the world's fate8. And the other one: In a future world devastated by

disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that

wiped out most of the human population on the planet9. Beside the stories being very similar to

one another, one also notices the strong common cyberpunk elements: the apocalyptic future, a

recent nuclear catastrophe, a lead character living on the edge of the abyss, which brings about

the onset of an obsession.

Amid the other films preceding Scott‟s production, Metropolis (Fritz Lang) (Image 1), an

exponent of the German Expressionism, has the most distinctive artistic side. The subject can be

summarised as follows: in a futuristic megacity where the population is divided between workers

and rulers, the son of the supreme leader falls in love with a female worker. We have, therefore,

the topic of the totalitarian future, the division between classes, and the maniac robotisation. A

crazy scientist living isolated from the rest of the society in a sort of forgotten shed, creates a

kind of cyborg (the term didn‟t exist back then), which is, in the end, the element leading to the

uprising of the poor. The robot is the embodiment of Evil, whereas the leader‟s son is presented

as a messianic figure, the one who will bring peace on earth. Lang‟s film is extremely

sophisticated – especially if we consider its age – and acts on several levels: the scenography is

astonishing given the technical possibilities of the time, the idea of a hybrid man is more than

unusual, whilst the narrative part is overlapped by a philosophical-religious-social one.

Moreover, in his research10

, Siegfried Kracauer suggests a link between the “apolitical and

escapist orientation of the cinema under the Weimar Republic – where Metropolis can also be

included, even if the author points more in the direction of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert

7 http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/the-acorn-and-the-oak-tree-a-complimentary-pairing/, read on the 21

st of

January 2014, personal translation from English. 8 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056119/, accessed on the 21

st of January 2014..

9 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/, accessed on the 21

st of January 2014.

10 Gerald Mast – Marshall Cohen – Leo Braudy, Film Theory and Criticism (New York, Oxford University Press,

1992), pp. 21-37.

Wiene, 1920) – and the totalitarianism that ensued in Germany”. Kracauer quite rightfully

criticised the topics presented in Lang‟s film. The machines and the people formations – even

their placement, like little robots – having no personal conscience, only a collective one

subordinated to the supreme leader – are considered very meticulous by the author, and I allow

myself to add here they were so meticulous, that the common German adopted them as

something with which they could get used to. However, beside the two mentioned here, there

was an entire series of films that inoculated, to a certain extent, a certain feeling in the

population, that contributed to its “falling asleep” and, implicitly, to Hitler‟s coming to power.

Image 1

Heavy Metal (Gerald Potterton) (Image 2) is a special animation, in parts excellent, in

parts grotesque and bizarre, based on the eponymous French magazine. A green bright ball, the

personification of Evil in the Universe, bullies a little girl telling her stories about its victims.

The sexuality in this film exceeds the levels of the time, and at the same time, the story is

provocatively mystical. The animation was designed as a series of short-films and the cyberpunk

elements in the first part are the following: a disorganised society of the future, an introverted

taxi driver as lead character and possible hero, faced with an unusual situation.

Image 2

We have now reached the movie that brings legitimacy to the subgenre: Blade Runner (1982), a

cult film for good reason, it made the critics and the public aware that a new cinema species with

an enormous, not yet fully exploited potential– in my humble opinion – appeared. It is still

unclear for me why this has not yet happened, maybe it has to do with the lack of finances or of

inspiration. It is, perhaps, one of the films that came closest to being the most pure example of

cyberpunk cinema. Of course cinema remains a topic open to interpretation, but, as far as I am

concerned, all the six characteristics discussed so far can be found in extenso in this avant-garde

film.

It is, indeed, a film ahead of its time, both due to the clarity with which the story was told or the

technique used and to its complexity level. Scott manages to create a world that engraves into the

mind of the public, as George Lucas did with Star Wars, or as the Wachowski brothers would

accomplish with Matrix.

After this film that can be legitimately called a filmed cyberpunk manifesto, various productions

were released, having very different values. In chronological order, we have: Tron (1982) – the

first film in which CGI was massively used11,12

, The Terminator (1984), Brazil (1985) – an

11

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) ( /siːʤiːˈʌɪ/[1]) is the application of computer graphics to create or contribute to images in art, printed

media, video games, films, television programs, commercials, and simulators. The visual scenes may be dynamic or static, and may be two-dimensional (2D), though the term "CGI" is most commonly used to refer to 3D computer graphics used for creating scenes or special effects in films and television. They can also be used by a home user and edited together on programs such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. The term computer animation refers to dynamic CGI rendered as a movie. The term virtual world refers to agent-based, interactive environments. Computer graphics software is used to make computer-generated imagery for films, etc. Availability of CGI software and increased computer speeds have allowed individual artists and small companies to produce professional-grade films, games, and fine art from their home computers. This has brought about an Internet subculture with its own set of global celebrities, clichés, and technical vocabulary. The evolution of CGI led to the emergence of virtual cinematography in the 1990s where runs of the simulated camera are not constricted by the laws of

physics. Information taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-Generated_Imagery read on the 21st

of January 2014. 12

https://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/tron.html, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-12-16-newtron16_ST_N.htm, read on the 21

st of January 2014.

endeavour containing numerous distinct artistic and social features, Robocop (1987), Cyborg

(1989), Hardware (1990), Neon City (1991), Nemesis (1993) –; however, all these films have a

rather narrow vision, so I am not going to dwell too much upon them. These are followed by

Ghost in the Shell (1995) (Image 3), a coherent Japanese animation, fluent and articulated, and

Hackers (1995) (Image 4) – featuring Angelina Jolie in one of her first roles.

Image 3

Hackers is a film worth discussing, as it raises several issues, and very correctly, we might add,

thus managing to create its own momentum. The world it depicts is one in which programmers

become important pieces in the social hierarchy. With a good internet connection and a lot of

patience, we understand that coups can be staged, major irregularities of the public institutions

can be unveiled, and even countries can be lead. The film manages, thus, to draw attention to the

influence of this medium, which was new at the time, being, simultaneously, a social manifesto.

Children are no longer just children, since they have the capacity to change history – and I am

not necessarily saying they do so, at least not at the level discussed here, but they do possess this

untapped ability. Furthermore, the film brings out the idea that anyone can become a hero or a

terrorist, and this without even having to move from their own desks.

Image 4

Johnny Mnemonic (1995) (Image 5) is another fundamental example of this subgenre. A

different Neo in the foreground, Keanu Reeves plays his cards very well. His lack of expressivity

is carefully exploited by director Robert Longo. He‟s playing a man transformed into a robot by

his own profession, this being his most suitable role in the entire career. The story is intricate,

without any cracks, and presented in a coherent manner. In this regard, many of the other

productions discussed here are found lacking because of the amount of new information they

bring forth, at times without any style or clarity. Precisely because of this desire to display as

many novel elements as possible, they end up unable to explain them properly and calmly due to

time limitations, which leads to them overwhelming the viewers through excess. This is not the

case for this particular movie.

Image 5

Strange Days (1995) presents Ralph Fiennes in a rather unusual and unique part in his career. A

former policeman, he is currently a dealer of some sort of goggles that induce a very realistic

state of mind to the person wearing them. Everything revolves around entering the new

millennium, as the protagonist has to solve an overwhelming situation in a limited amount of

time. The cyberpunk features present here are doubled by a cold, dirty and heavy atmosphere.

The City of Lost Children (1995) (Image 6) is one of the few auteur13

films on the list. It

resembles Brazil as far as mood, rhythm and folly are concerned, but the background is

completely different. In a surreal society, a scientist kidnaps children in order to steal their

dreams, hoping he will manage to slow down his ageing. But the story is almost irrelevant. This

cinematic work is rather empirical, synonymous with a bizarre reverie, very similar to a film

made by the same two directors a few years before, Delicatessen. Even this orange-greyish hue

came to be a distinctive feature of their work.

13

Term originated from the French auteur.

Image 6

Gattaca (1997) is another milestone of the genre (Image 7). A complex work with regard to

mise-en-scène and subject, the film resorts to a neat presentation, which differentiates it from the

majority of films with cyberpunk features. At the same time, the film can be attributed to several

SF-subgenres, and interpreted at many different levels: social, political, artistic. Vincent Freeman

– a predestined name, chosen intentionally and perhaps a bit too obviously by director-

screenwriter Andrew Niccol – played by Ethan Hawke, is a man born by natural means in a

society in which conception is genetically manipulated. He is, therefore, an inferior human

being, destined to a marginal life and a quick death. He dreams of flying into space. The plot is

rich whereas the action – in which we see a metallically organized world –, contains no more

turnarounds than necessary. Gattaca is a film with pronounced Hollywood characteristics,

which, however, do not diminish its value.

Image 7

Pi (1998) is Darren Aronofsky‟s debut film. An incoherent work, it exhibits, nonetheless, the

germs of a style that the director would subsequently articulate more and more clearly. With its

topic, execution and ending, Dark City (1998) foretells Matrix (1999), reason for which these

productions have often been compared to one another. Actually, Equilibrium (2002), is also a

part of this trident, but it is rather „the younger, less talented brother”. The themes are pretty

much the same, and the narrative structures – especially regarding the lead character and the

journey he makes to discover his abilities – are very similar. Just one look at the posters (Image

8) is enough to discover almost annoying similarities.

Image 8

eXistenZ (1999) is a crossbreed between Matrix and Strange Days, but it has its own force due to

the fact that the virtual reality is transferred into a game. The junction and the merging between

reality and imagination are so well executed that one is no longer sure in which reality the

characters are; Avalon (2001), Minority Report (2002) and Immortel (2004) are the last on the

list. These are three very diverse productions. The first is a minimalistic Polish-Japanese SF, the

second displays a certain magnitude and has a weird topic that is coherently presented, but

nothing more, and the third is a pretentious French animation that does not manage to convince,

due to the lack of coherence.

In my opinion, approximately 20 years after its official debut, the cyberpunk genre didn‟t

manage to draw the public‟s attention anymore. Perhaps the idea of a world brought to disarray

by a worldwide disaster became redundant. I also suspect that video-games had reached a high

enough level to attract cyberpunk fans towards all kinds of simulators. That is to say, to “live

their dream”. Of course there were other productions that resonated with this subgenre, but I

have the feeling that they were made on a whole different level compared to what cyberpunk had

meant at its beginnings. They no longer had the initial naiveté and the characters had somehow

become too “proper” – at times the misery had been replaced by a far too prevailing order.

Most likely due to the passage of time, a different approach can be noticed; an approach that

alienates from what cyberpunk originally meant. As already mentioned, the films discussed here

are to a greater or lesser extent part of this SF subgenre. Some choices would certainly lead to

polemics, while others would be unanimously accepted, and this is why I believe cyberpunk was

more of an experience, a trend that many directors adopted because it served their vision and

purpose of creating dystopian worlds. They took an already existing formula and shaped it

according to their own wish. It is much easier to do so than to imagine a whole new dimension,

as, in this case only Fritz Lang (Metropolis), Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), Terry Gilliam (Twelve

Monkeys), the Wachowski brothers (Matrix), Marc Caro-Jean and Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost

Children), Chris Marker (La Jetée) and, partially Gerald Potterton (Heavy Metal), succeeded.

Cyberpunk started as a literary movement and then became a cinema subgenre, but I think it is

currently only a trend, at the most. The technological progress in the last thirty years has been so

significant, that many gadgets we saw in cult movies from the end of the 20th century today

seem toys compared to the offer of the real, tangible market we can access. Cell phones with

touch screen are now available everywhere; interactive goggles equipped with computer

features, possibly turning into future best friends to humans are on the verge of becoming a

reality; prostheses offering the crippled a normal life are nowadays so developed, that they allow

them to take part in athletic competitions14

, TV-sets weigh as much as a remote control did years

ago. What is next? Perhaps artificial intelligence, and who knows, a third World War, maybe

precisely against the metal rebellion!

14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius, accessed on the 21st

of January 2014.