William Gibson, as many Chronicle readers will know,
is the author of Neuromancer, one of the most influential novels
published in the last 20 years and the definitive cyberpunk text. His vision of
out-of-control multinational corporations and runaway technology has filtered
down to nearly every level of society: cyberspace, a term he coined to describe
the immense vistas of information inside the computer, has become as
commonplace as hi-fi was in the Fifties. Gibson’s latest project is the
screenplay for the film Johnny Mnemonic, based on his short story. I
talked with him at his home in Vancouver.
n
Austin Chronicle:Bill, I saw your film last
night.
William Gibson: Did you like it?
AC:Yeah, I did. I think the crowd liked it,
too.
WG: Well, I’ve never gotten crap from the press like
this before, and it’s kind of making me think maybe I did something right.
These reviews are like what I expected to get for Neuromancer. The bad
ones seldom came along, and then there would be the odd one that was sort of
enraged and pissed off by it. You know, with my early fiction I was trying to
create something that was aggressively out there and went against the grain of
what it was supposed to be, so I assumed from the beginning that I’d get
squashed.
AC: Well, you’ve been really lucky up to now; I
can’t think of too many bad reviews for anything you’ve done.
WG: Yeah, I know, and I always thought that was
strange.
AC:So who’s panned it so far? The New
York Times….
WG: The New York Times, The Hollywood
Reporter, Daily Variety, more or less both Vancouver dailies…
that’s all I’ve seen.
AC:Even the home court’s against you.
WG: Yeah, but one of them had problems with the look
and feel of the film, but said that it was a very hip, postmodern story and
quite funny.
AC:Yeah, I was impressed with the film’s
details, and how gritty everything looked outside of the luxury hotels and
corporate boardrooms. I assume you made a real effort to get that
feeling.
WG: Oh yeah, some of those sets are incredibly
elaborate pieces of art. They’re so well done that they look real, so you don’t
get that feeling of “Wow, that’s a hell of a set.” You take it for granted.
AC:The rioting in the streets of Beijing
looked pretty cool.
WG: That riot was the first feature film scene that
Robert Longo had ever shot in his career; that was his first working night as a
director. That really impressed me that he could do that. That was like 300
actors and these big cranes; the full nine yards. I saw it at the sneak preview
here [Vancouver] last night and one thing I like about it is its
Manga-like quality. [Manga is the title of a Japanese comic
book.] That was something we were really shooting for. We wanted it to be like
a Japanese comic book, like a foreign comic book, from another planet. I think
the weird thing with criticism is… when I read negative criticism I always
try to construct a mirror image from it of what would be perceived as the
adequate or satisfying work, and I’m really having trouble doing that with some
of this criticism. I don’t quite get what pisses them off about it. That’s what
I find kind of interesting about this: They’re flaming it, in effect, they’re
not just saying “Oh, boooring,” which is what they’re saying about some of this
weekend’s other new films, just kind of shrugging with disinterest.
AC:Well, what is it that forces them to have
this strong reaction to it?
WG: I suspect that we may be taking the backlash
for the last couple of years of Internet and infohighway hype.
AC:You mean taking the blame for all the
cybercrap out there?
WG: Yeah. I think that this film flagrantly identifies
with that and becomes a target.
AC:So, if it had come to the screen five or
six years earlier there wouldn’t be this reaction?
WG: Very possibly. I mean, a lot of people who aren’t
enthusiasts or participants in the Net are, I’m sure, thoroughly fed up with
hearing about something that they don’t know about and feel outside of. I can
empathize with that to an extent and I can certainly imagine what that would
feel like. It’s a tone that’s familiar to me from the historical cyberpunk
versus humanist period. Some of these reviews remind me strongly of the
humanist attacks on cyberpunk.
AC:It’s like their whole way of life is
being threatened.
WG: Yeah, it may actually be a scary movie for some
people. Perhaps they’re not admitting it.
AC:Hell, it has a happy ending.
WG: It has a conventionally happy ending. I sort of
enjoy that. It has a kind of sweetness or goodheartedness to it.
AC:Yeah, and it ends with a multinational
corporation tower in flames. What more could you ask for?
[Evil laughter.]
AC:Bill, I couldn’t quite figure out what,
if anything, the dolphin was actually saying, or if he could speak at
all.
WG: Oh, when Johnny says, “Has the fish done this
before?” the dolphin says “Nooooo,” in this strange kind of dolphin voice. I
had argued at one point for giving the dolphin some kind of vocorder equipment
so it could speak and I had written some lines for it. But nobody wanted to go
for it. When they were doing the Foley work they put in a little one-liner, a
single word from the dolphin.
AC:I noticed there were elements from your
other work in this movie: The bartender has a prosthetic arm, and the LoTeks
live on a bridge like the one in your recent book, Virtual Light….
WG: It’s a different use of the bridge. The Virtual
Light bridge is a community built on the deck of the San Francisco Oakland
Bay Bridge, which is then sort of wrapped in plastic. I always thought of the
LoTek environment as being much more like a hornet’s nest or a congeries of
tree houses. The LoTek heaven in the film is like one of those gomi collages [gomi is a Japanese term for junk] that I’ve always had in my
work and I always go back to: It’s like big gomi, it’s 50-feet high and
as long as football field.
AC:It’s a wonderful, truly postmodern
assemblage of found objects and junk. This future is not a clean future as
portrayed in so many major science fiction films. I guess the first really
postmodern science fiction film was Dark Starby John Carpenter, with
its trashed-out space ship and bearded hippies. I hate those movies where
everything is shiny and clean and everything is explained to you.
WG: Well, that sort of science fiction film is
historically an aspect of what you might call the modern project. Those films
are modernist and, I think, starting with the Thirties spaceship aesthetic,
well, that’s the beginning of a genuine postmodern aesthetic. I don’t mean like
putting Chippendale tops on modernist skyscrapers, that sort of thing, but I
think that’s a significant change, and it also has to do with the future as a
sort of historical concept; the idea that there’s a future where it’s all
different and all new, that’s very much like post-war American modernism.
AC:It also harks back to a Thirties
Utopianism, with the Frank R. Paul illustration for Amazing Stories….
WG: Yeah, the New York World’s Fair and all of that.
The real change in science fiction in my lifetime has been the shift toward
that idea of the future as cumulative. I think it’s actually a much more mature
way of looking at futurity. In a film like Johnny Mnemonic the future
you’re seeing is cumulative; it’s made up of all our junk, and the junk behind
that and…
AC:…and future junk.
WG: And future junk, which is exactly the world we live
in today. The Europeans have been hipper to this sort of thing, I think, but
that’s because they have, in a sense, perpetually inhabited their own ruins.
AC:And even that’s been accelerated, because
with the ascendance of the American consumer culture they have all this new
junk to contend with, and contrast with theirs, so they had to come to grips
with it.
WG: Yeah, the idea of retrofitting is still kind of
novel to Americans. Europe is completely a retrofit. You say to a European,
“Oh, they’ve retrofitted this castle and turned it into a shopping mall,” the
European doesn’t get it. That’s just what you do.
AC:What do you consider the first postmodern
science fiction novel?
WG: That’s a good question. I’m not that much of an SF
historian. I think [Alfred] Bester’s novels, The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, those are the ones I would point to. Henry
Kuttner, had he lived, might have come to producing something very akin to
Bester or [Philip K.] Dick. Or [William] Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
Postmodernism is about cross-genre pollination.
AC:One of the defining moments of the film
is when Johnny is having his moment of doubt and pain and starts screaming “I
want room service!” It seems like the real Gibson is coming out in
that.
WG: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I wrote that scene in longhand
at 4:30 in the morning in a hotel in Toronto after having a conversation with
Keanu on the set the day before. He said there was kind of a dead spot in the
script, and he said right there, could I do something, and I went back and I
wrote that. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite scenes. I also like Henry Rollins’
initial rant, that feels very good to me whenever I see him do that.
AC:What’s next for you, Bill? You’re working
on a new book, right?
WG: Yeah, I’m gonna crawl into the basement and work on
my new novel. The new book is set in the world of Virtual Light. Most of
it takes place in that weirdly transfigured post-earthquake Tokyo that is sort
of hinted at in the background of Virtual Light. Someone is sent from
Los Angeles to Tokyo to try to get to the bottom of a bizarre situation in
which a sort of aging and enormously wealthy but still functioning non-Japanese
pop star has announced that he’s fallen in love with and is going to marry the
most popular of the Idoru. The Idoru are what Variety has taken to
calling synthespians. The Idoru are virtual pop stars, performers who are
entirely the creation of information designers. In the book, they’re the most
popular thing going in Japan. People worship them, people commit suicide to
honor them. And here’s this rich pop star saying I’m going to marry one onstage
in the Tokyo Dome when I come through at the end of my tour here. So his
management is going apeshit, like how can this be? So they send this typically
screwed-up Gibsonian detective figure with a checkered past to Tokyo to try to
suss this out and assess the situation. Simultaneously, a very young girl, 12
or 13 years old, has arrived from Seattle, Washington as the agent of the rich
pop star’s fan club, global Internet fan club. She’s been selected and sent on
essentially the same mission, ’cause they need to know if their hero and the
object of their obsession is really in love with this nonexistent Japanese
computer thing. What’s going on?
AC: Does a lot of the action take place in
the world of the Idoru, where these constructs actually live?
WG: Not so much. I don’t want to blow the surprise.
I’ve come up with something rather different. The nano-technology riffs that
run through Virtual Light get turned into a sort of different kind of
cyberspace. I’m also working on an X-Files script, which I can’t really
talk about. I really identify with that show. Sometimes it’s as close as
American pop television’s gotten to Kafka. One of the things I enjoy about the
show is the gleeful delight in appropriation. They love to assemble these
familiar things often in kind of odd ways. n
This article appears in June 2 • 1995 and June 2 • 1995 (Cover).