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Jamaluddin Bin Aziz, "Future Noir", continued

The Doppelganger : Psychoanalysis and Cyborg Imagery

One of Haraway’s theorizations of cyborg imagery places it outside the Oedipal paradigm, which for her, enables feminist critics to perceive the image as free from ‘forced signification’, divorcing the body from its cultural identity.Nonetheless, this conception proves to be problematic as it fails to explain or even to take into account some cyborg imageries that do exist within the psychoanalytic paradigm. The idea of a cyborg figure existing within the Oedipal trajectory is accountable for many doppelganger narratives, explaining the curious affinity a cyborg figure has with patriarchal value system. According to Freud, the idea of a doppelganger explains the uncanny, in which ‘experiences happen when once-repressed infantile complexes are somehow revived or when once-discarded primitive beliefs seem suddenly to be in operation’.1 In Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass, a clandestine cyborg invented by Avram, named Yod, calls ‘his’ inventor ‘father’ in a desperate attempt to ‘establish a bond that may preserve me. How do I know he won’t decide to scrap me?’ (p.127). Though Yod needs training in social skills, reflecting his lack of cultural identity, his survival instinct to try to be accepted by his ‘father’ resembles the infantile struggle into the Symbolic. While training Yod to be socially apt, Shira realizes his uncanny physical and psychological resemblance with a human. Yod is also a surrogate ‘romantic’ figure taking the place of the protagonist’s (Shira) ex-husband, Josh (‘I already communicate with you better than I did with my husband. Oh, Shit!’ (p.139)). Yod’s increasing resemblance to a human collapses the binary between a human and non-human, but it does not enable him to escape from the Oedipal paradigm.

    One of the effects of doppelganger narrative is the fragmentation of the female subject, resulting in what Lee Horsley termed as ‘seeing double’2, which gives or carries a prominent psychological tone to Duncan Gibbin’s film Eve of Destruction (1991).The portrayal of the female character as fragmented, usually by the use of two female characters antithetically juxtaposed with each other, is nothing new in the noir tradition.In a classical noir film like Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror (1946), twin sisters are used to reinforce the two main types of female characters, the good girl and the femme fatale. In the context of the film, the image double is used to show the duplicity of one of the twin sisters. TheDark Mirror encapsulates the idea that opposing or antithetical personalities can easily be compared if they are in two physically identical bodies (both sisters are played by Olivia de Havilland), highlighting film noir’s connection with psychoanalysis. In such a narrative, the ‘evil’ sister is usually shot as a reflection in a mirror, foregrounding her ambiguity, duplicity, and fatality. The image or reflection in the mirror in effect is often associated with both the mental state and the darker side of the female character. More recently, the visual trappings of the femme fatale as an image in the mirror can also be seen in Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female (1992). In the publicity poster for the film, Herdy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is shown staring menacingly at the audience – to portend fatalistic obsession- while Allie (Bridget Fonda) looks in the other direction pensively but vulnerably, an indication of her victimisation. Their images, placed next to each other, separated by the leaf of a door, are the iconic representation of women in a noir and neo-noir film.

   The reworking of the theme of ‘seeing double’, buttressed by the use of the mirror image, is also employed in Eve of Destruction; the idea of a duplicated identity is highlighted at the outset of the film when Eve VIII appears on the screen looking at the mirror.It is apparent that her appearance on screen is for ‘an audience’, which the audience (in the cinema) then learns that Eve, in turn, is watched by Dr. Simmons, after whom she is modelled. This, in noir tradition, evinces the double-sidedness or fragmentation of Simmons’ humanist being or subjectivity, epitomised by the cyborg that she builds and implants with her own memory (Both Eve and Dr. Simmons are played by Renee Soutendijk). The act of seeing is phenomenological as it is often associated with the sight organ, the eyes, through which the female character’s consciousness is literalised or apprehended. In the context of the film, the right eye of the cyborg functions more than just an organ of sight; indeed, it is the main switch that can shut Eve’s motor activities. Together, the implanted memories and faked eyes mean that Eve is a technological construct that defines her fragmented subjectivity.

   The film’s use of doppelganger narrative is also an attempt at dismantling the whore and angel dichotomy. As the cyborg Eve turns into a female destroying machine when her system is shot by a bank robber, she ‘retrieves’ the life of Dr. Simmons, signifying Eve’s role as an embodiment, which in turn alludes to ‘the return of the repressed’. Eve VIII, as a technological construct, becomes a sympathetic character who has no other choice (noir determinism) but to follow her own programmed system. Ironically, the more violent Eve gets, the more personal and intimate are the revelations is made about Dr. Simmons’ life and past, since what Eve does is a sheer reflection of Dr. Simmon’s repressed desire. This figuring of feminine desire with a cyborg running amok has an ironic element to it. Dr. Simmons, in an effort to disavow the cyborg’s physical resemblance to her, declares that ‘She is more human than machine’. By declaring Eve’s ‘human side’, Dr. Simmons hopes to place the blame on the cyborg figure, and exonerate her ‘memory’ or desire (“We are not exactly alike”). However, the film refuses to exonerate Simmons by almost instantly and systematically constructing Eve as the Other, when after hitting a guy who abuses her on the road (She detests being called a bitch), the camera slithers inside Eve’s body through her throat to reveal her robotic make up. Ironically, as Eve’s violence intensifies, the more sympathetic a figure she becomes as she knows that she will doomed at the end. Consequently, the division of angel and whore is blurred as Eve’s irreversible actions reveal Simmon’s internal guilt and fantasy: one by one, the elements of her guilt and fantasy are acted out by Eve. It is called a double-edged subjectivity when the sympathy lies with the Other and not with the human female character, which effectively dehumanises her too.  In other words, the more dangerous the cyborg turns out to be, the more threatening it becomes, especially to Dr. Simmons herself as she knows that her personal image is turning into a public discourse. Due to that, her angelic image of a caring mother is overshadowed by her teenage sexual fantasy. In effect, the doppelganger narrative is used to destabilize Dr. Simmons’ identity, culminating in the annihilation of Eve. 

   Memories installed in Eve’s system, as Silverman observes in her analysis of Rachel in Blade Runner, ‘work less to control than to construct her as a subject’.3 In Eve’s case, the memories implanted in her, viz., her teenage sexual fantasy, her revenge against her abusive father and her responsibility as a working mother, are straight from feminist psychoanalysis textbooks. In other words, Eve’s being a cyborg does not enable her to escape from the whole Oedipal history. Her teenage sexual fantasy is related to the female castration complex - the  ‘discovery of the anatomical distinction between boys and girls, and the subsequent reading into that distinction of sexual difference’.4 Therefore, the fantasy ends with the brutal murder of her fantasized subjects. When she goes back to ‘her’ father’s place to take revenge on him, she declares, ‘I saw you. I saw what you did!’ In this case, she ‘sees’ not through her eyes but through her memory, that is, the repressed past that resurfaces.

   Her identification with her abused mother brings to attention the negative infantile identification with the Mother as manifested by her refusal to be separated from her, thus turning her father into the hated figure instead. This hatred is transformed into the guilt of not being a good mother herself. Therefore, she tries to compensate for the lack that her mother represents by associating with ‘her’ son, Timmy, on the pretext of wanting to take care of him. In the end, when her vision, that is the metaphor for her ‘memory’ is fading, Eve allows herself to be annihilated by Simmons herself. The death of Eve at the hands of Dr. Simmons is symbolic of the usurpation of her subjectivity by another subject. Therefore, doubly victimizing her. As Dr. Simmons is her inventor, she can be seen as the mother who inculcates patriarchal value systems to her daughter. Since the relationship between Dr. Simmons and Eve represents the negative Oedipus complex, the mother has to kill the daughter who refuses to be subjected to patriarchy.

   In Albert Pyun’s low budget film Cyborg, the three female characters, which include a Cyborg called Pearl Prophet, are symbolic of the past, present and future of the male protagonist, Gibson’s (Jean-Claude Van Damme) apocalyptic world. Cyborg tries to represent twenty-first century America in which an incurable plague is killing people, and a violent anarchist is malevolently trying to prevent the data of the possible cure from reaching its destination. Combining the science fiction and martial arts genre together, the film uses the three female characters as the milestones of the narrative: Haley (Haley Peterson) as his connection with the past, Nady (Deborah Ritcher) as his present and Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haydon) as his future; thus reducing them to mere symbols within the narrative.

   Haley, as Gibson’s past, represents the motivation for his actions, that is, revenge for the brutal killing of his girlfriend and her youngest brother. The locket that she wears is used as a proof that she once belonged to Gibson’s nightmarish past. As a past, Haley is passive, only able to ‘look’ when Gibson is tortured. In the end, when Gibson leaves Pearl safely in Atlanta, he walks away with Haley. This represents a closure, or the end of his revenge, which in a way suggests his reconciliation with his past. Nady, as an active female character, represents his struggle in the present time. She is strong willed and insists on their need for each other. At one stage she questions Gibson’s attitude towards her, “Do you think that a woman is still not worth saving?” This can be taken as her way of saying that the present world or time is still worth saving by Gibson. As the present is morbid and malevolent, it has to end, which is signified by Nady’s death.  Pearl, half human and half robot, is a cyborg that is responsible for carrying the much sought after data of the remedy for the plague. Leaving her with no choice, she agrees to carry the data because according to her, “Plague is a choice so much. We lost our humanity.  We lost our purpose […] there’s no meaning in this world. I want to change that”. This theme, in which the cyborg is more ‘human than human’, is also discussed by Susan Doll and Greg Faller in their discussion of the film Blade Runner. As the symbol of the future, she needs to be helped, but she declines his offer, believing that she is safer with the anarchists. In all situations that she is in, Pearl does not seem to want to ‘fight’, and in this sense, she is a passive character. Even at the end of the film she admits that, “It’s strange, but I think he is the real cure of this world”. As this final note actually comes from a female cyborg celebrating a masculine character, it evinces the idea that it is generally accepted that patriarchy is the saviour of the world. This film’s apparent closure is a reflection of its lack of noir mood or conventions.

 

Revisiting Female Desire and Fatal Sexuality: A Real Trip in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality5 is often associated with computer technology, that is, with the advent of computer imaging software and the Internet. ‘Mapping cyberspace, or the landscape of a virtual world,’ argued P. Chad Barnett, ‘is difficult because like the multinational capitalist system that it is an extension of, Virtual Reality cannot be completely known’.6 Paul Cobley in his study of narrative discusses the development of computing technology by looking at how computer images are able to influence the ‘active nature of narrative readership’7, and in so doing problematises the concept of authorship that ‘seem[s] to encourage interactivity and a “participatory culture”’.8 A computer simulation game, for example, allows a player to escape the real world to partake of a virtual world where s/he has a certain degree of control. In addition to that, the ability that internet technology has in transferring information at a supersonic speed virtually everywhere, via the World Wide Web (WWW), has created a new kind of anxiety, relating to the alteration of the kind of experience people have with regard to their own understanding of the world. The new computer technology, in effect, creates a kind of verisimilitude that allows the formation of a virtual world, that is, a computer-generated reality. 

   This section seeks to establish how the loss of agency and individual autonomy are linked with cyberpunk’s use of virtual reality as the metaphor for a female body and desire, associating women with nature. In addition to its focuson therepresentation of the female characters and femaleness, the analysis will also concentrate on visual metaphors surrounding virtual reality itself, and its intersection with noir sensibilities and conventions.  The need for such an investigation arises, as argued by Joan Gordon, since ‘feminist science fiction has veered away from these activities, all of which allow us to shape and manage our futures rather than escape them’.9To begin with, the section is further divided into two sub-sections: (i) a brief look at the exegesis of virtual reality, especially pertaining to the wider issue of the impact virtual reality has on the male protagonists and the relevance this has for the female characters, focusing on the debate surrounding the loss of agency and autonomy; (ii) an analysis of female-authored texts, namely, Kathleen Bigelow’s Strange Days and Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers. This is to investigate whether or not these female authors have succeeded in reforming, parodying or appropriating the cyberpunk sub-genre in an effort to liberate the female characters.

Virtual Reality and the Loss of ‘Male’ Agency or Autonomy.

 The advent of virtual reality highlights and engenders the shift from the science fiction genre’s interest in the Other to the ontological questioning of a human, as the discourse of science and technology is more visceral than ever. Seen as one of the ramifications of science fiction’s interest in ‘soft’ science, cyberpunk’s affinity with the visceral is achieved by constructing a techno-based reality that can be both emotively and psychologically attached to a human physical body. The shift in the thematic concern of the cyberpunk sub-genre is demonstrated in Gibson’s fiction, which, observes Carol McGuirk10, ‘turns from technology’s impact on human destiny to examine at a closer range its power to gratify human desire’.William Gibson introduces characters who ‘jack in’ through wires connected to their brains to experience the ‘consensual hallucination’, an out of body experience within the matrix, so that for example in the male protagonist’s (Case’s) case (in Neuromencer) he is able to escape the constraint of the ‘meat’. The severance from the ‘meat’ is an effort, as discussed by George Slusser11, to breach ‘The Frankenstein Barrier’, a term used ‘to create an antinomial relationship between terms like machine and organism […] [whereby] the curious inversion occurs, in which it is now the thingness of the organic itself that rises up to block the attempts of technology to make things in general’. Gibson’s Case seamlessly blurs the distinction between human and machine, allowing ‘The Frankenstein Barrier’ to be breached.

      Case’s departure from ‘The Frankenstein Barrier’ is synonymous with his refusal to follow the linear history of a human body and to allow human specificity, highlighting his status as a posthuman hybridised ‘body’, where ‘the past and future lived as present crisis’.12  According to Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston in Posthuman Bodies, the posthuman is a condition whereby ‘singularities ceased to anchor the ways in which we think’13, advocating the plurality of the body. This crisis is one of the main contributory factors to the major anxiety that implicates the human body in postmodern narrative. In her study of future noir texts, Lee Horsley14 asserts that:

The sources of anxiety in fantasies of this kind are most often to do with external control (socio-political fatality) rather than inescapable inner demons (psychological fatality). The boundaries between inner and outer worlds are breached, producing fragmentation and the dissolution of a coherent self and raising radical questions about the nature of beings (what is the essence of the human?). The intersection with the noir thriller, however, is more evident in the way this metamorphosis into the ‘posthuman’ foregrounds the issue of agency, bringing the protagonists to wonder, not without cause, whether they retain free will and individual autonomy.

Although I agree only partly with Horsley, her observation points to the need to re-think the agency and autonomy of the ‘posthuman’ characters in the new spatial and temporal conditions created by technological advancement, usually embodied in virtual reality. This demand on the posthuman is derived from a new and intolerable situation arising out of the ‘antihuman evil’, whereby ‘either the promise of an apocalyptic entrance into a new evolutionary synthesis of the human and the machine, or an all encompassing hallucination in which true motives, and true effects, cannot be known’.15 My view point differs from Horsley, as I will argue that the sources of anxieties in fantasies of this kind also stem from the old Western adage of male fear of female power and independence – the inner demon that she is referring to. One may ask, if the ‘loss of control’ is a conception that is applicable to male noir protagonists, since Horsley’s analysis is primarily based on  male characters like William Gibson’s Case in Neuromancer and Rudy Rucker’s Cobb Anderson in Software, how is this relevant in the context of female characters? To answer this question, I will frame the analysis of the female characters by situating it within the context of the male identity to arrive at the argument concerning the function of the female characters in virtual reality.

   To begin with, Scott Bukatman16 defines virtual reality as ‘a cybernetic paraspace comprised of real-time interactive data’ that ‘significantly extends the sensory address of existent media to provide an alternate and manipulable space’. His definition, while foregrounding the shift in spatial and temporal significance in cyberspace, when linked or compared to Horsley’s analysis of future noir, intersects at the emphasis on ‘the loss of autonomy’ in virtual reality. Despite the ‘manipulable space’, not only does virtual reality fragment the essence of self but it also makes invisible human actions; it therefore contributes to the dissolution of a human and its ‘power’ or agency. Actions are no longer kinetic but psychological, involving layers of consciousness. The over-reliance on the psychological, as opposed to the kinetic, allows for the transference of experiences within virtual reality to be exhibited or exteriorised to others through the sharing of cyberspace, rendering the characters more vulnerable than they thought they were as ‘the regulator of experience (ego? Self? Spirit? ) can no longer accept any experience as worth more than any other. The only standard is thrill’.17 George Slusser conceptualises this change:

All our present boundaries fall, and observer and observed become part of a same network, bid now to “interface” instead of merely to interact. But with these changes the boundaries between illusion and reality also fall.18

In a nutshell, consciousness in cyberspace as embodied in virtual reality is no longer private, but public - shared in a network of information.  

   In some cases, the ability to access virtual reality can also be used to enhance one’s quality of life. Through the link of his mind to cyberspace, Gibson’s Case connects with others including his contacts and sources in the underworld, thus allowing him, to some extent, to free himself from the prison set by the ‘meat’. In some instances, virtual reality also has medical value, as the mentally retarded Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey) in The Lawnmower Man19 is cured by drug-enhancement and virtual reality, empowering him against the people who bully him. The advantage of accessing virtual reality can also be seen in the female characters’ freedom of movement, transcending physical and cultural boundaries. In Body of Glass, the free city of Tikva protects itself from the Corporation by establishing its own security devices in the net. Virtual reality in cyberspace is important in The Body of Glass especially for Malkah, Shira’s grandmother, who is physically weak because of old age, as it provides her with the opportunity to form personal and professional relationships, enabling her to continue to protect Tikva. Malkah also uses cyberspace for sexual gratification and liberation, tying relationships with men, women and the cyborg called Yod, which would not be possible outside of the realm of virtual reality.

   Besides its advantages, accessing virtual reality is not without its repercussions, either mentally or physically. The protagonist, having accessed cyberspace, puts him or her self at risk of an unwanted intrusion. The transfer of consciousness entangles the protagonist in a web of information that exposes him or her to every possible kind of threat, which in some cases can cause the death of the physical body.20 This kind of threat is often found in the narrative of mental invasion, a narrative employed by Pat Cadigan in Mindplayers and, to an extent, in Warchowski’s The Matrix. In Mindplayers, mental invasion is experienced by the female protagonist, Allie, who is eventually admitted to hospital after she is ‘attacked’ by one of her patients. The theme of mental invasion is also prominent inThe Cell21 where a psychotherapist, Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), is implicated (in his mind) when the serial killer’s damaged personality tries to overpower her in the virtual world, putting her life at stake. A variation of this theme is also explored by Allan Moyle in X-Change,22 a film sets in the not so distant future, when consciousness swapping is used as a means of transportation. The male protagonist in the film has to race against time to find his body that has been stolen by a terrorist, and failing to do so will result in the death of his body. In Neuromancer, which is dubbed as the quintessential cyberpunk text by Bruce Sterling, the protagonist, Case, faces unprecedented loss of his ability to be reinvigorated, resulting in him being galvanized into actions outside of the realm of virtual reality. In this desperate time, Case is warned by Armitage that:

You have time to do what I’m hiring you for, Case, but that’s all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without the sacs. Then you’ll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you’re back where I found you. (p. 60).

In the tradition of sci-fi horror films, Jobe Smith, the human guinea pig in The Lawnmower Man23 metamorphoses into an evil-like creature due to the drug-enhancement and virtual reality experimentations that are carried out on him. 

    In many cyberpunk texts that deal with the need of the characters to jack into cyberspace, these characters are usually physically altered with added body parts, namely the deck, to connect the mind with the computer technology; breaching the binary opposition between human and machine that results in the foregrounding of the irrevocable interface. Mutated and fragmented, resulting in the production of a hybrid subject, that is, a posthuman, this interface amalgamates science fiction’s speculative and noir’s extrapolative traits together, raising epistemological and ontological questions about the constitution of a human. The focus on the posthuman produces a new rhetoric that treats the body as a site where, according to what a feminist theorist, Zoe Sofia, calls ‘the collapse of the future onto the present,’24 it is concomitantly consigned to the role of the Other. Posthuman characters are transgressors who are usually iconic figures in noir texts – functioning as mirrors of a destabilized self and a corrupted world. Body of Glass foregrounds these functions by gradually breaching the difference between human and cyborg, alluding to epistemological and ontological references regarding the human itself. By the same token, Cronenberg’s Existenz carries the transgression a step further with the use of a deck called a ‘bio port’, that is attached to the ‘metaflesh game pot’ to jack into the virtual world, an extension that is both organic and infantile as the port resembles an umbilical cord and feeds the character into the virtual world. Having been ‘reborn’ in the virtual world, that is, through the replication of their humanistic selves, the characters sense of a unified self is thus disintegrated.

   Virtual reality therefore can be seen as a new symbolism that informs the fragmented self as a commodified body, within a late capitalist or post-industrial Western society. The replication of the body and mind, a recurring theme in the narrative of virtual reality, signifies the malleability of self in the late capitalist sensibility. A variation of this theme is prominent in Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor in which the male protagonists suffer from a kind of amnesia and are implicated in a crime that they may or may have not committed, trapping them in the labyrinth of a vertiginous journey into the unknown. Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor foreground the theme of alienation through their use of radical visual imageries which are influenced by Gothic’s visual feast - Dark City with gothic structured buildings and The Thirteenth Floor with modern skyscrapers that are glorified with spectacular camera movements, giving a certain eerie monstrosity to them. These visual images have two functions: one, as a metonymic visualization of the paranoia generated by the virtual landscape, signifying the lone investigators’ hermetic journey into the world or environment that they cannot understand; two, as a symbol of phallic supremacy, an extension of the late capitalist state. In both instances, the narrative devices involve the duplication of phallic symbols usually embodied in the skyscrapers or high-rise buildings. The use of this kind of imagery also ‘convey[s] a deep sense of confusion, uncertainty, and excess’.25 Gothic’s fascination with excess is materialised here through replications.

   The theme of replication runs through the narrative of both films, amplifying the characters’ conflicts, which lie both inside and outside themselves. In Dark City, the image of the buildings mushrooming within a matter of seconds reinforces this theme: buildings are duplicated, forming a fabricated world that threatens the male protagonist’s subjectivity. He becomes more alone and alienated as the buildings keep surfacing in a manner resonant of the multinational capitalist system’s mass production that reduces the unique role and existence of individuals into what McCaffery categorically calls ‘ “tangible products” […] that are essentially reproductions and abstractions – images, […], information, […], memories, styles, simulated experiences, and copies of original experiences’.26 The narrative device of the film hinges largely on Gothic imageries, making it hard to ignore the symbolism of the aliens as inner demons, literalised by the science fiction genre. Likewise, in The Thirteenth Floor, the male protagonist’s subjectivity is at stake upon the revelation that he is actually a ‘tangible product’, a replicated self whose existence is neither physical nor metaphysical, negating and dissolving the history of his own body and self. The different layers of the virtual world that he inhabits and ventures into are also truncated, limited, simulated and deadly. The fabricated world brings together noir’s moods of alienation and determination, leaving him alone to make sense of his surrounding. 

   Virtual reality posits the question of what is real and what is not whilst simultaneously negating its binary, putting the existential dilemma of the noir protagonist in the loop of indefinable human characteristics and experiences - anaffinity that cyberpunk has with the tradition of noir narrative. Barnett asserts that ‘being inside it [virtual reality] means being part of a technological sublime that can be conceived but not represented or known’.27 Cyberpunk, with its affinity to the science fiction genre, uses technology to give this ‘reality’ a definition, as when Morpheus in The Matrix opines, ‘If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain’. Trapped within the not-knowingness (noir determinism) and the curiosity to comprehend the unknown (noir fatalism), Neo has to first realise ‘the difference between knowing the path and walking the path’ to be able to insert his own agency and autonomy in the world that he inhabits. However, his inability to quantify the ambivalence further fragments the subjective nature of his being. Neo and many protagonists in the virtual world know that the world they inhabit is fragmented, but they have no power or control over it. Their existential dilemma alludes to the nature of their autonomy, embedded in a detective/lone cowboy narrative, where an individual journey takes place to find the missing piece of the puzzle in an effort to quantify their hermetic sense of incompleteness. Like Neo, Murdoch in Dark City and Douglas Hall in The Thirteenth Floor are seduced into trying to solve this dilemma, becoming submerged deeper and deeper in a hole of darkness, suggesting a spiralling paranoia that virtual reality can generate. None the less, the moment Neo comprehends what Barnett calls the ‘postmodern sublime’28, he is able to fight the Sentient Agent. Similarly, when Murdoch and Hall realize the technological sublime that they are in, they begin to comprehend and transcend the boundary of this virtual world. However they are not fully liberated, as building on Hollinger’s theorization, Barnett argues that ‘if virtual reality becomes the primary reality, then the body is at risk of being absorbed into its own technology […] and the subject, as it is known in contemporary reality, may be lost forever’.29      

    The omnipresent ontological and sociological uncertainties are the raison d’etre of cyberpunk’s important iconic figure, an anti-hero protagonist who transgresses the real and the virtual reality to survive the collapse of law and order that the post-apocalyptic world of cyberpunk often embodies. An anti-hero figure mirrors a refusal to be part of the commodified world, a lone struggle with the power structure, and more importantly, ambivalence towards the sense of what is universally right or wrong, regularly working within the paradigm of what Bruce Sterling calls ‘counterculture’ and ‘antiestablishment feelings’.30For instance,Gibson’s protagonists are largely cyberspace cowboys whose job is to hack the net, like Bobby and Jack in Burning Chrome. Carol McGuirk31 observes that ‘Jack’s prosthesis is emphasized […] as the visible sign of the wounded humanity’, qualifying him as a transgressor that mirrors the collapse of the society, reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective figures in Hammett and Chandler’s novels. In a world where laws are increasingly precarious, the only moral values or ‘the truth’ that the protagonists adhere to are their own. The rebel characters in Wachowskis’ The Matrix – Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, et al., - are computer hackers. Only through hacking do they realize the difference between the real and the matrix, a very complicated concept that Morpheus tries to explain not through words, but through being in a matrix himself. The characters in Body of Glass turn into cyberspace hackers to protect Tikva after they themselves are being hacked and attacked by the corporation. The inter-changeability of roles from the hunted to the hunter, and vice versa, is omnipresent in many noir texts, not only to give agency to the protagonists but also to add complicity to their actions. A sense of complicity adds a certain moral dimension to their existential dilemma without them necessarily trying to resolve it, which consequently reflects and intensifies the status of these protagonists as transgressors in the noir world. The dynamic of the symbiosis between the protagonist’s moral struggle and the collapse of his surrounding is where the intersection between virtual reality and noir conventions is most palpable.

    Pierce argues that films like Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor use a detective structure ‘as the framework of activity in the material world within which the greater struggle takes place’.32 Along with the ‘greater struggle’ that these male protagonists have to endure, which is related to both the material world that they are in and the investigation that they have to carry out: what Horsley calls ‘external control (socio-political fatality)’33, is the essence of a conflict that lies within themselves:  what Horsley refers to as ‘inescapable inner demons (psychological fatality)’.34The interweaving ofboth themes constitutes noir’s brooding and ominous atmosphere, reflecting the films’ affinity with the gothic tradition of creating a dehumanised environment.  Fred Botting aptly observes:

The loss of human identity and the alienation of self from both itself and social bearings in which a sense of reality is secured one presented in the threatening shapes of increasingly dehumanised environments, machinic doubles and violent, psychotic fragmentation.35

In Dark City, the identities of the characters, perhaps except for the male protagonist, are fragmented as the aliens shift their roles based on the concoction of different memories that they have gathered in order to understand human nature. The male protagonist’s (John Murdoch) main struggle is in trying to make sense of what is happening around him, the existential dilemma prominently inherent in noir’s protagonist. Informed by Gothic imageries, his investigation is a symbolic examination of himself: the contest between good and evil as represented by his ‘fight’ with the reigning aliens is the literalised battle within himself or his own psyche. In effect, the battle between good versus evil is one of many Gothic conventions being assimilated into the science fiction genre that helps to characteristically define ‘future noir’. Noir narrative, however, problematises the binary with the employment of an anti-hero protagonist, rendering absurd the question of right and wrong. Meanwhile, The Thirteenth Floor poses a different kind of ontological question: What happens when the virtual character assumes his/her own agency? The film demonstrates the complexity of such a question by centring the subjectivity of the virtual subject, a non-humanistic human, allowing him to transgress the boundary of the world that he inhabits. Douglas Hall’s reaction towards his ‘fictional’ status as a being signals his subjectivity and agency, yet it lacks the dynamic of individual autonomy.  The different layers of reality in this film also radically question the credibility of reality, creating a paranoid vision of the world the protagonist inhabits. So does its use of technology as metaphor for the alienation that he gradually experiences. The revelation and discovery that he is part of the virtual world created by a ‘human’ establishes the fact that there is something beyond the investigation itself, posing a different question concerning human subjectivity, agency and autonomy. The film’s answer to this question reflects its ambivalence towards both the notion of what is real and what is not, as well as what is a human and what is a non-human, culminating in the conflict between the human and the virtual subject. The result is a devastating ending with the death of the human, as the replicated self takes over his world, and in this case, his life with his wife.  

    The technology of virtual reality in both films reinforces the theme of transcendence, a predominant theme that, argues Veronica Hollinger, points ‘cyberpunk back to the romantic trappings of the genre at its most conventional’.36 Building on the investigative narrative structure, the immediate requirement is for the male protagonists to find out the truth about the crimes they are accused of, subsequently leads to the discovery of their ‘true’ identities. The palpable solution to this inherent conflict mainly lies in the male protagonists’ ability to transcend the boundaries being presented to them, and in so doing they need female figures, that is, their love interest, to provide both a romantic closure and a sense of stability. In other words, at the centre of this conflict and investigation is a female character who functions as a symbol of stability that the male character is looking for. The main female character in Dark City, Emma Murdoch/Anna (Jennifer Connelly), for instance, has postmodern sensibilities and paradoxes written all over her, recalling the image of both a femme fatale and a redeemed woman, a symbolic and literal representation of Murdoch’s struggle. At the end of the film, when she is finally united with Murdoch, in spite of her different memories, she still provides the hope that he is longing for. The meeting scene is fully romanticized so as to reinforce this idea, reflected by the familiar view of crystal clear sea water that highlights her pivotal role as the centre of stability, and consigns her to the traditional role of a redeeming woman. Moreover, the romantic interest in The Thirteenth Floor comes straight from the femme fatale mould of the classical noir films: desirable yet duplicitous. Jane Fuller (Gretchen Mol), as the central female character, generates a sense of mystery that needs to be solved by the male protagonist, a common narrative trajectory in noir’s generic treatment of women as a male fantasy. In this sense, her role is, in essence, very conventional, that is, as the love interest for the male protagonist. Female characters like Emma Murdoch and Jane Fuller epitomize the deep-seated anxiety embedded in noir narrative with regard to the function of the female characters in virtual reality. 

   Noir anxiety concerning the female figure is carried into most cyberpunk texts especially via their use of virtual reality, staging the infantile fear of a woman’s power by using a more subtle rhetoric to camouflage the apprehension she generates. In other words, through cyberpunk, the essence of a human is dissolved and fragmented; the culprit for causing this fragmentation and dissolution, however, is found in female figures and desires, continuing and reinforcing the long-lived Western binary system. One way of surviving the threat that a female figure generates is to divorce nature from the industrial, or sometimes to fragment nature with the use of technology.  The inexorable intermingling of natural and mechanical in Neuromancer creates not only amusing visual imagery, but also, importantly, underlines a departure from human kind’s need for nature. Case’s addiction to cyberspace is a formidable sign of his effort to disassociate himself from his body/nature which serves as a feminine symbol that he needs to get rid of to reclaim his masculinity. Unlike his body, the matrix, that is, the technological, enables him to resume his agency, and in an amplified desire to feel his existence, he makes love to his physically dead girlfriend. Cyberspace for Case is profound, and nature is rendered obsolete. Cyberpunk’s portrayal of the human body through virtual reality is atavistically and intimately related to technology, so that it can be presented not only as a threat to the male protagonist’s masculinity and life, but also treated as a rather dispensable subject.

   What Neuromancer exemplifies is cyberpunk’s consistent reference to the binary of machine and organism in its discourse of virtual reality.  Along with cyberpunk’s interest in a human body, this association is resonant of science fiction’s preoccupation with associating women with nature – emotional, irrational, duplicitous and dangerous. In an electronically ridden world, a female identity is also informed by cyberpunk’s interest in breaching the binary of the organic and mechanical, resulting in a farrago of visual metaphors. The perplexing metaphor is a reflection of not only the genre’s ambiguous treatment of a female body and sexuality but also its ambivalence towards them. The ambiguity and ambivalence are enabling factors for permitting female or feminist cyberpunk writers to re-conceptualise the metaphors surrounding the virtual world itself, infiltrating into cyberpunk’s conventions to foreground the issues related to feminist struggles.   

   Some female authors and directors of cyberpunk texts appropriate this convention by looking at issues that are germane to feminist concerns, like privacy and security. Central to the breach of privacy is the collapse of one’s security. Cyberpunk’s strategy in ‘responding to the […] challenge of a new information driven world’37 exposes the fragility and vulnerability of one’s privacy, germinating a kind of anxiety that, in a few instances, represents a threat to the constitution of a human. In William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, Chrome’s security is breached through the net, that is, cyberspace, by the narrator, Jack, and his associate, Bobby, who are cyber hackers aiming to destroy Chrome’s Home of Blue Light, leaving her in financial ruin. Johnny in Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic laments:

We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified […] (1988, p.30)

Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers also raises the issue of security with the portrayal of a female protagonist who is a reluctant ‘mindplayer’ who believes that ‘reality affixing’ is a ‘mindrape’ (p.15), ‘like a perfect crime – the locked room, no way in or out, but somehow, someone gets in anyway, looks at every single thing in the room and gets out again’ (p.17).  The rape rhetoric is also prominent in Cadigan’s ‘Rock On’ in which Gina, a sinner, is forced into sharing her ‘rock ‘n’ roll visions straight from the brain’.38 Whereas Gibson’s concern is solely at security level, Cadigan adds another dimension to it by associating the issue of security with one of the major concerns in feminism, that is, rape. This issue will be further discussed later.

      One starts to ponder then, whether virtual reality always has to be purely about metaphors for technology in a multinational capitalist system? My analysis of some cyberpunk texts reveals that similar to the narrative in many noir texts, it is about investigating female desire and sexuality, the very essence of noir building blocks. To put the case in motion, I will look at Cronenberg’s Existenz to demonstrate that the visual metaphors in virtual reality can also be analogous to a female body and sexuality. In Cronenberg’s Existenz, the collapse of the boundary of the real and virtual obdurately refuses to reconcile with the characters’ understanding of their world. Existenz does not offer any recuperative reading of the difference between reality and the virtual, giving the world that they inhabit a more definitely dangerous, primal, and dark noir quality. This boils down to the fact that the game is designed by a woman, the film’s narrative trajectory and mise-en-scene exposing her vulnerability, inner thought, desire and sexuality. Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) may have designed the game, but she does so at the expense of her own privacy and security. As signified by the ending of the film when the role reversal takes place, the hunted becomes the hunter in two conflated ‘realities’, the audience and the characters alike are left confused and disorientated.

   One of the reasons why the characters in Existenz fail to transcend the technological sublime is because of the nature of the virtual world that they are in. The Cronenbergian nightmare world is infantile, primal and organic; with visual symbolisms that evoke both science fiction’s preoccupation with associating woman with nature and noir’s omnipresent trope of ‘woman as the construction of a male fantasy’, consigning her into the role of the castrated Other. The weapons are made of organic materials, like bones and teeth; the events take place in archaic buildings and surroundings (old church, country gas station, abattoir-turns-laboratory, forest), evoking the primal fear often associated with gothic horror imageries; the animals, like the sinister two-headed amphibious mutations and the whimsically exotic dish in the Chinese restaurant, signal the return of the repressed, the animalistic desire that is hidden by Allegra’s shy and taciturn characterization. More importantly, the game bioport, the product of Allegra’s invention, is biologically and organically constructed, a metaphor for giving birth. As in many other Cronenberg films such as The Fly, Crash and Videodrome, the narrative surreptitiously exposes and constructs female desire and sexuality by referring to their instinctive nature, undermining their subjectivity. This dangerous desire and sexuality, as in the tradition of the femme fatale, are a male protagonist’s perdition that will suck him into the spiralling paranoia landscaped in noir nightmare.

    Ted           We are both stumbling around together in this unformed world,

                      whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly

                      indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the

                      verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.

 

   Allegra      That sounds like my game, all right.

Ted’s (Jude Law) observation likens virtual reality to a female body and sexuality in noir tradition: mysterious and exudes the kind of threat and ambivalence that both seduce and entangle the male protagonist. As in Existenz, virtual reality takes precedence over the real world, fragmenting the essence of the self as it is eventually absorbed by technology. Allegra’s desire, as literally manifested in the world within the game called Existenz, is synonymous with the desire of the femme fatale in classical noir texts - duplicitous, dangerous, and fatal. And there is no way out of its fatality, as many noir protagonists in classical noir texts finally find out, and are doomed, as it is too late to do anything. The virtual reality in Existenz is the technological manifestation of this fatalistic female desire, trapping the characters and audience alike. As a result, it is impossible to discern which reality is the real one:

 

   Ted               It’s none of your business who sent us here! We are here and 

                        that is all that matters … God, what happened! I didn’t mean

                        to say that.

   Allegra          It’s your character who said it. It’s kind of a schizophrenic

                         feeling, isn’t it?

But which reality one is in does not really matter since once one is enticed by it one is already doomed. Ted’s allowing his body to eventually be penetrated defies his previous claim that ‘I have this phobia about having my body penetrated’. This penetration suggests that the game is a threat to his masculinity, and him succumbing to it can be fatal, reflecting that his subjectivity is being usurped by the very technology that he is involved in. He survives the ordeal due to the fact that he has feminised his body and desire, harmonizing with that of Allegra. 

   For that reason, virtual reality as a metaphor maps out the journey in the Oedipal paradigm, a transient stage before venturing into the Symbolic Order.Virtual reality is then used by the authors and directors to construct a repudiated figure, using the female characters as the means of achieving this motif. In Gibson’s Neuromancer, Case’s journey in the Oedipal stage is to assist Molly and the artificial intelligences, Neuromancer and Wintermute. His identification with these characters takes him into the ‘consensual hallucination’, enabling him to submerge himself within the boundary that represents the female self, identifying himself with the ‘mother’. In the matrix, the identification with the ‘mother’ puts Case’s masculinity at stake, intensified by his dissolving self. Originating from the latin word mater, matrix can mean both mother and womb, which in Lacanian terms extends ‘the thrill of metaphoric escape into the comforting security of our mother’s womb’.39 The happy ending in which he is united with Molly reaffirms his masculinity and heterosexuality. In the Oedipal paradigm, the mother has to be repudiated so that the male child can gain a more healthy relationship with the father, and to embrace the law of the father. The mother is therefore seen as a duplicitous figure - powerful, and destructive – like a bird of prey. Carol McGuirk aptly observes:

Gibson’s female characters often use high technology to create a new image or an alternative self (the lens implants of Molly Millions and Rikki Wildside; the AI afterlife that Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool fashions for herself). Gibson’s men often use technology to recover parts of a lost self: Case’s psychological dependence on union with the matrix in Neuromancer; Automatic Jack’s myoelectric arm in “Burning Chrome”.40

McGuirk’s juxtaposition is illuminating as it underlines the very binary that cyberpunk has been purportedly trying to eliminate between male and female. By associating women with ‘a new image’, ‘an alternative self’, the ‘AI afterlife’, and ‘the lens implant’, McGuirk evokes the image of a fabricated female self often associated with the dangerous, ghostly, false, cunning, domineering and deceitful mother who preys on her son. On the other hand, the images associated with Case and Jack are of phallic significance, reinstating their masculinities. Castrated in virtual reality, these male characters are in dire need of reinvigoration.

 

 Mindplayers and Strange Days: Is It The Same Old Story?

In the fatalistic universe of film noir, personal choices (however limited by hazardous circumstances) are all that matter. Disoriented by an ever-changing present, fleeing from a terrifying memory or dreading what may come in the onrushing future, a man has no foothold beyond his freedom to make decisions, judgements that are true or unfaithful to his beliefs.41

Bob Stephens’ idea about personal choices helps to conceptualise a noir protagonist’s existential dilemma and survival either in a morally collapsed world, on a dark mean street, or in the underbelly of criminal society. In neo-noir texts, personal choices raise the alarming need for immediacy in actions, foregrounding the issue of individual autonomy and agency often fragmented in postmodern narrative. Morally, spatially and temporally transgressive, neo-noir texts recognize the fatalism experienced by the protagonists due to the mobility of these elements. This fatalism is exacerbated in the texts that deal with the technology of virtual reality, where space and time are crushed into one another until they reach the point of no return. Bob Stephens’ observation on the predicament of the male protagonists in (classical) film noir also directly points to a lack of critical interest in the transgressive female characters, especially the ones appearing in female-authored texts.

   For that reason, I will be looking at two female-authored texts to see how virtual reality is used to represent views on technology and the way the female characters are presented within that technology.Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days42 deal with the use of virtual reality in a totally different context to that of male authors’, and it is appropriated to suit their purposes as females. My own view is that the texts represent the two extreme ways in which the two female authors deal with the ambivalence of cyberpunk, particularly in terms of its representation of the central female characters’ attitude towards virtual reality. Whereas Bigelow handles Strange Days in a manner that is similar to that of many male directors, that is, by focusing on the ‘egalitarian toughness’ of a male dominated world, Cadigan’s Mindplayers concentrates on virtual reality at a very personal level, equipping her female character not with physical strength to deal with violence, but the ordinariness that, observed Joan Gordon, ‘represents no female principle, just a human coping mechanism’43.  Bigelow’s physically strong female character is evidence of a feminist agenda that according to Martin Priestman, ‘has been to challenge repressive gender stereo-typing by putting a woman into a role usually thought as archetypically masculine, and showing her succeeding against the odds’. On the contrary, Cadigan’s hardboiled female character is reminiscent of a hardboiled male protagonist whose deadpan attitude also ironically reveals his vulnerability. Cadigan’s Allie in Mindplayers is evidence of a post-feminist view of addressing ‘female weaknesses as human’.44 Though they may have different ways of representing the female characters, both texts reveal a significant similarity especially in terms of their attitude towards virtual reality itself.

   Virtual reality in Strange Days is not only an extension of the real world, but it is also a provocative detailing of events in the near future world of urban nightmarereminiscent of the mean streets of classical noir.  Bigelow’s noir world is chaotic at both levels – personal and public – and its fusion mirrors the blurring of privacy and publicity. Strange Days uses virtual reality to deliberately blur this binary opposition, provoking an anxiety that is related to technological intervention into someone’s private experience through a gadget called SQUID (an acronym for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), which records full sensory personal experiences straight from the ‘cerebral cortex’. Bigelow captures this visceral experience with jarring camera movements, resulting in a sleazy visual narrative that treads a very fine line between parody and extrapolation, reflecting the film’s critical view towards the technology of virtual reality. This attitude finds its apt expression in one of the most disturbing scenes of the film in which Iris (Brigitte Bako) is forced to watch her own murder. The radical shift of point of view from the perpetrator to the victim destabilises the narcissism and voyeurism often associated with what Laura Mulvey calls ‘visual pleasure’, calling into question the nature of spectatorship with regard to possible pleasures created by virtual reality. Exemplifying one of the major treatments of female characters in noir films, i.e., as victims, the shift in point of view highlights Bigelow’s effort at reworking the genre’s conventions. Bigelow, moreover, represents this structured anxiety by producing images that challenge the viewers’ (including Nero’s) sense of stability, and continues with the bombardment of similar images to create a nauseating and gruesome experience. This she manages, breaching the boundary of privacy and publicity, by creating a more intimate viewing proximity, creating a sense of disgust at the act of watching itself, rather than at the murdered female body.  In my view, Bigelow’s main intention is for the audience to be forcefully drawn by this proximity to carefully think about their position, as their willingness to infiltrate the private will make an extraction from the whole incident more impossible, leading them to feel complicit in the murder itself.

   Bigelow is consistent in reminding the characters and audience alike of the difference between virtual reality and the real world.Strange Days relies heavily on this distinction to create an appropriate distance that is needed to ponder its prominent thematic concern, that is, that the sharing of one’s personal reality will only be made possible by one’s willingness to let go one’s own. Csicsery-Ronay opines that ‘the distance required for reflection is squeezed out as the world implodes; when hallucinations and reality collapse into each other, there is no place from which to reflect’.45 The movement inward is analogous to the spiralling paranoia caused by the level of intimacy in the visual detailing of events that makes the viewer feel complicit, if no distance is allowed. Instead, for Bigelow, granting audiences the distance at which they have the vantage point means that they are therefore constantly reminded of this by the characters, as exemplified when Mace (Angela Bassett) tells Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes):

This is your life, right here, right now! It’s real time, you hear me? Real Time! Time to get real, not playback. You understand me!

This effect is important in order for Strange Days to work as a cautionary tale at a level above the usual narrative of a murder mystery. When audiences are constantly reminded of their act of watching, and feeling complicit with the act of, for example killing itself, they become unwilling witnesses, distancing and disorienting them from the voyeuristic pleasure of the female body. By the same token, having made the audience complicit with the narrative while simultaneously making them aware of the difference between the two realities, the narrative calls into question what is private and what is not, focusing and relying on the camera’s ability to provide a voyeuristic view of the first only to be negated at the end. 

   Strange Days uses the fusion of privacy and publicity, which is made possible by virtual reality to challenge the concept of a coherent self, that is, a conception that regularly occurs in the exegesis of the theorization of gender oppression.  In the post-industrialised world where everything including the body and mind is ‘commodifiable’ for public consumption, changing human meaning and subjectivity along the way, the characters’ agency and autonomy are at stake. Donna Haraway theorizes that:

For Westerners, it is a central consequence of concepts of gender difference that a person may be turned by another person into an object and robbed of her or his status as subject. The proper state for a Western person is to have ownership of the self, to have and hold a core identity as if it were a possession. That possession may be made from various raw materials over time, that is, it may be a cultural production, or one may be born with it. Gender identity is such a possession. Not to have property in the self is not to be a subject, and so not to have agency.46

     When Lenny offers a male client a selection of someone’s memories, he also offers him someone’s reality, regardless of gender, cultural or sexual orientation. The sharing of someone else’s memory or reality poses two important questions: what happens to the subject whose memory or reality is traded? And what happens to one’s self when sharing another person’s reality or memory? The answer to the first question alludes to the dissolution of the self. On the other hand, the answer to the second question refers to the multiplication of the self. Both, nevertheless, refer to the posthuman condition that produces what Bruce Sterling calls ‘hopeful monsters’.47 Either dissolved or multiplied or both, the humanist self is deconstructed or constructed by technology to the extent that it has lost its autonomy and agency. In Lenny’s case, though he sells people’s memories or realities, he is addicted to his own ‘recorded’ memories, a drug-like substance that he regularly uses to escape from the ‘real’ world where he is a broken hearted man. We can see that in the virtual world that he is addicted to, a recorded image of his ex-girlfriend, Faith (Juliette Lewis), displays a certain form of sexual submission that reinserts and reinforces Nero’s masculinity. What this full sensory recording does is to reveal his inability or failure to feel and recall his own experiences, relying on technology to reinstate his ability as a human who can ‘remember’, but memories made tangible deny him a monolithic linear history of his body and life. Like his fragmented memory, his inability to control his real world alludes to the postmodern subjectivity in which a fragmented subject loses his/her autonomy and agency.

   Bigelow overtly models her two central female characters, Faith and Mace, after the two types of female characters in film noir. Her reliance on tradition and convention alludes to the postmodern situation of concentrating on the surface48 rather than depth. This dichotomy is inherent in this film especially when referring to both central female characters. As argued by Hollinger, ‘surface is content’49, an anxiety inherent in postmodern conditions. Faith evokes this postmodern concern for surface: her history is told from Lenny’s point of view, signifying her as a body with no real history. The fact that her image on the screen is a duplicated image from an already duplicated source consigns her character to a multiple fragmented self. The narrative trajectory, furthermore, relies heavily on Lenny’s obsession with her image, signifying his fragmented self and its affection for the surface. If in the virtual world Nero still ‘possesses’ her, in the ‘real’ world, she steadfastly and incessantly tells him that ‘IT’S OVER!’ between them. Her very condition as a fragmented self that inhabits the surface underlines the anxiety of a cyberpunk text. On the contrary, Mace’s character is a three-dimensional character with memory (history), life (present) and a plan (future). Mace’s history is told from her own point of view, granting her an identity; hence a unified self. Perhaps for that reason, she refuses to take part in Lenny’s SQUID. She also exhibits physical and psychological strength, demonstrating and exerting her autonomy in the chaotic world.

   The victimization of female characters in the noir tradition is paradoxical, often alluding to the idea that active female sexuality (usually embodied in femme fatale figures) challenges the male’s passivity, a recurring theme that Bigelow tries to foreground here. Nero is reminiscent of the male protagonists of the classical noir films, like Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past,50 whose obsession with the femme fatale culminated in his fatal ending. Frank Krutnik in his analysis of masculinity in Out of the Past concludes that:

This is not so much the story of a transgressive femme fatale as it is that of a ‘tough’ hero who causes his own destruction through a willing abnegation of his ‘responsibilities as a man’ […] What is important here, then, is not so much Kathie, and her status as a machinating woman, but rather the problems engendered by the conflict between Jeff’s desire to escape his responsibilities and the power of patriarchal law which decrees the acceptable positioning of the identity and desire of the masculine subject.51

Krutnik’s observation is relevant to how Nero is represented by Bigelow. His obsession with his ex-girlfriend, Faith, signals his willingness to abnegate his responsibilities as a man. Therefore, although Faith is seen as the object of his desire, or the victim of his voyeuristic desire, she also signifies his lack of control. Nero’s lack of control is his existential dilemma that develops into his main motivation to explore the virtual world where he can still have what he cannot get in the real world. When these factors turn into an obsession, they overtly mark his ‘masochistic fantasy’52 towards Faith, a noir cliché that is used by Bigelow to empower Faith, and subsequently negate Nero’s masculinity. In one of his encounters with Faith, she concedes that ‘I like the feeling of someone watching me’, which subjugates Nero’s virility by challenging even his gaze at her.  Bigelow’s main aim is to represent masculinity as problematic and divided, the antithesis of the unified masculinity often represented by a tough talking noir protagonist like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

   Faith’s association with the surface, a postmodern condition that can be empowering to her characterisation, along with Mace’s ability to demonstrate her autonomy and agency, represent not only Strange Days’ ambivalent attitude towards technology but also Bigelow’s ability to appropriate the genre. By juxtaposing the humanist with the anti-humanist’s view of the subject, Bigelow manages to highlight the adverse effect of technological intervention into one’s self, culminating in the fragmentation of self; hence, the loss of autonomy and agency. However, Bigelow’s reliance on pastiche and on the postmodernist tradition of inverting conventional noir representations of the female characters succeeds in liberating them from both the virtual world and the genre itself. The final scene where Lenny and Mace end up kissing each other in the crowd is a typical Hollywood happy ending, signifying her role as a redeeming figure for the picaresque male protagonist. Perhaps Bigelow’s commercial interests held her back a little, but this is nothing new as this can also be found in many classical noir films that finish with such a ‘soft ending’.

     The existential dilemma faced by Allie, the female protagonist in Cadigan’s Mindplayers 53, is related particularly to her ‘unique brain organization’ (p. 12). Importantly, Cadigan establishes this relationship in the early part of the novel to prefigure the sense of noir determinism at play, the organic forms of visual imagery that she employs in the virtual world, i.e., the world inside Allie’s mind, and the postmodern irony that is lurking at every corner of the narrative. Allie realizes that the event that started with her thrill seeking attitude (‘I did it on a dare’ (p.3)) turns into an intractable ‘Mistake Time’ (ibid.), signalling her journey into a more profound level of her being. Cadigan structures the sequence of events in such an order so as to found Allie’s characterization in a tradition similar to that of an alienated noir protagonist whose life is a struggle between making sense of his surroundings and deciding what is morally truthful to himself. Cadigan, on the contrary, reverses the fate of her protagonist by de-alienating her from her surroundings, allowing her to function in the realm that she has become increasingly familiar with.

  Allie’s ability to venture beyond the limitation of her skin into the realm of her psychic, a virtual world created and shared with her clients, marks the ultimate interface between her body and the machine that makes the journey possible. To a certain extent, the connection made in the virtual world means that her mind is also exposed to other people, and this exposure of her mental space ostensibly signals her increasingly vulnerable condition, depriving her of her agency and autonomy. Allie’s mind is portrayed as a data space where social interactions and activities take place, functioning as plot devices that, as Carol McGuirk observes, ‘magnify character vulnerability by increasing the possibility – and consequences – of serious psychic damage’.54 At the beginning of the novel, her loss of autonomy, therefore, can be seen as the result as well as the reflection of the social malaise that she is in, where she loses her control over her own mind due to her initial thrill-seeking attitude and reluctance to cooperate with the agencies of law enforcement, the Brain Police. However, as Scott Bukatman notes, ‘to become substantial, one must become insubstantial: one must enter the cyberspatial realm’55, a postmodern irony that Cadigan employs in earnest to liberate her female protagonist without making her larger-than-life as a character. Allie’s reaction to ‘mindplaying’ is indeed a typical human reaction, if one were put under similar circumstances. And like any of us, Allie’s major concern is her own privacy and safety, a recurring theme that dominates Allie’s refusal to have her reality affixed.

    The novel foregrounds the theme of mental invasion to highlight Cadigan’s concern with the blurring of privacy and publicity in Allie’s life.The theme of mental invasion, one of the most prominent themes in cyberpunk narrative, is dominant in this novel since its female protagonist ‘lead[s] an awfully mental life’ (p.11), locating the narrative, most of the time, in her mind.  For that reason, Cadigan underlines the issue of mental invasion with the right to privacy for her protagonist, a punk attitude to reflect Allie’s anti-establishment mentality, that is, her refusal to let her brain to be accessed by the Brain Police or affixed by Segretti, her attorney. ‘Okay. But I am not willing. I just want to make sure you’re clear on that’, evinces the fact that in principle, she refuses any invasion into her mind. Allie’s deadpan attitude does not stem from her refusal to have technology intervening into her mind, as she is already a user of such technology, but the fear that she has ‘of going naked mind to naked mind with someone’ (p.17) in a place that she regularly refers to as ‘home’, a private space. This fear generates a further conflict of interest between herself and the authority, which she finally has to succumb to: ‘The choice is really no choice at all’ (p.39), but with consistent resistance: ‘mandatory reality affixing still went against my grain as much as it had the day Paolo Segretti had told me I had to go through it with him’ (p.197). This is emblematic of a noir determinism that typically sends a noir protagonist into a world that gradually engulfs him or her. Indeed, throughout the story, Allie is aware of the degree of openness of her personal life, thinking at one point that, ‘I had no doubt the old fox could have wormed his way into my personal data; most employers can’ (p. 229). My view is that Allie’s experience with technology that enables her to be a mindplayer echoes Cadigan’s personal view on technology, when in an interview, she reasons that ‘I believe that any tool is only as good as the people that use it’56, putting the responsibility on the human and not the technology that it embraced. 

     Cadigan’s view of technology, hence, is expressed through how she portrays Allie’s refusal to yield to any sign of vulnerability, permitting her to feel ‘alert but calm, no longer burdened with a physical body’ (p.19), comfortably ensconced in the virtual world. The strategy of harmonizing Allie with the realm of virtual reality is used to reinforce and privilege her autonomy. By locating the events of the novel mostly in the realm of the virtual, Cadigan allows Allie to find a new form of liberation and empowerment. Allie is not overwhelmed by the experience in the inside of her head, i.e., her psyche, as for her, her newly found self has been a positive and enriching revelation and discovery. She concedes that the experience creates a surface tension that strengthens her

Allieness, the container that was me and the me that the container contained, and which materials went into the container and which into the thing contained – it was the most powerful sense of identity I’d ever had in my life.  (p.20)

The newly constructed identity in the virtual reality formed in her head, consequently, signals her reclamation of her lost of autonomy and agency. The ‘Allieness’ is the visual manifestation of the essence of her being, showing her reconciliation with her own self and the technology that she inhabits and embraces, which is important for her to survive the uncertain and fragmented world.

         Suggesting female harmony with nature, the metaphors of virtual reality in the novel are organic and archaic. The visual atmosphere employed by Cadigan is not definitively noir, but is an amalgamation of noir atmospheric darkness and science fiction’s wonder: ‘The inside of the headhole was dark and pleasant smelling, like a field after a light spring rain’ (p. 19), setting up a mood of adventure, inviting, mysterious and potentially fatal. Her subsequent exposure inside her mind allows her to see a

Perfectly ordinary blue sky (maybe with a hint of the depth of that midnight blue behind the light day color); the field went as far as I could see in front of me. Behind me was more countryside but it was different, unbounded, grass grown up freely, the land rolling, the horizon obscured by haze.  (p. 21)

In other words, Cadigan celebrates nature, indicating her apotheosis of women’s association with nature.Since the association with nature is considered Allie’s ‘point of departure’ (ibid.), her response to events in virtual reality significantly shows how comfortable she is to the extent that she ‘behaved as though I were in real reality’ (p. 57).  When she grows more familiar with her mental surroundings, she conjures up the image of a cathedral, an image that is familiar and sacrosanct, signifying her journey into a more private part of her mind, a more pure essence of herself. Her encounter with the portrait of her great-grandmother is a symbolic milestone of her journey home, into her motherland, which in Freudian terms represents our ‘earliest heim’.57 These symbolic representations of her inner thought, along with her meeting with the ‘Alerted Snake of Consequence’ – a sign that she has to be alert in her mental state - are indications of the organic nature of her virtual reality. The sense of familiarity that she develops towards her virtual reality also helps to de-alienate her from her surroundings, producing a sense of community that assists her in understanding her capability. Unlike the classical noir protagonist, Allie is a protagonist for whom the sense of community is important, as organically represented by a pool, a mental landscape jointly constructed by a number of minds, where her interactivity with others regularly takes place.

   However, the effect of technology is quick to catch up with Allie, dissolving her humanist subjectivity whilst creating a new posthuman subjectivity. After the first session with her attorney she is left with an aftertaste. Then, when she goes through the process of dream-feeding, she develops a phobia related to space, or claustrophobia. Left with no choice, she has been warned that ‘once you have taken the trip, you’re never the same again’ (p.39). However, she is also quick to take charge of her own life: ‘If I have to dream my life away, I might as well be in the pilot’s seat. Or at least the navigator’s.’ (p. 91) The desire to be in charge can be taken as her willingness to leave her humanist subjectivity, and allows her fragmented self to form a new subjectivity of multiple selves within the realities that she inhabits. In other words, Allie’s desire to be in charge constitutes her agency and autonomy, yet it also gives her independence a veneer of desperation. She realizes that ‘I had a past but everything in it seemed to be receding from me faster than the speed of light.’ (p.109) Her realization points to her body politics, to the need to recognize the history of her body, regardless of whether it is important anymore or not. This is an element of postmodern pastiche that requires the association with the past and future to represent the present conflict.   

   The ending of the novel highlights both its attitude towards technology that Cadigan tries to present, and also Allie’s status as a noir protagonist.While treating one of her clients, Allie is tricked into his reality through his trying to merge with her. It is her subjectivity that is dissolved, resulting in the destruction of the coherence of her mind. As Glass-Skull announces: ‘You’re transformed. You’re polluted, stained, dyed, altered. And you will never be the same’(p. 266). Ultimately, she experiences a total fragmentation whereby, as she herself regretfully declares, ‘I didn’t know anything at all, outer, inner, or in between’, bringing her into a moment of ‘post-mindplay depression’ (p.275). George Gella associates ‘ “the moment of depression” of “the hardboiled detective” with his alienation and essential loneliness’,58 a natural fate of a romantic hero’s doomed solitude. Yet, Allie also realizes the importance of recognizing ‘The Alerted Snakes of Consequence’, the fact that she has become ‘the accumulation of everything [she has] done’ (p.268), a postmodern hybrid self. What this gloomy end represents is reminiscent of the ubiquitous ending in many noir texts. Martin Priestman asserts that:

This closing sense of having become sullied by an alien set of values is not at all that different from Marlowe’s reflection at the end of The Big Sleep: ‘Me, I was part of the nastiness now’.59

And in the tradition of a noir protagonist, her experience is cathartic, reconciling her own moral code with her existence: ‘You are not the Allie you were. But you are Allie just the same’ (p. 275).

   Sections:      1        2

1 In Joseph Francavilla, ‘The Android as Doppelganger’, Retrofitting Blade Runner, Judith Kerman, ed., 1991, p.5

2 Lee Horsley uses this phrase to, among others, analyze some noir texts that deal with the ‘fragmenting of identity’ (2001, p.137). Her analysis includes Siodmak’s Dark Mirror in which she argues that the ‘creation of pairs’ is used to represent ‘opposing female types’ (ibid., p.138)

3 Kaja Silverman, ‘Back to the Future’, Camera Obscura, 27(1991), p. 120

4 ibid.

5 This phrase was coined by Jaron Lanier in the late 1980s to refer to ‘an environment in which reality is simulated through computers and in which the body can experience artificially generated data as though they were coming from the real world’ (in Danni Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, p. 27)

6 ‘Reviving Cyberpunk: (Re)Constructing the Subject and Mapping Cyberspace in the Wachowski Brothers’ Film The Matrix’, p. 367.

7 Narrative, 2001, p.206.

8 Ibid., p. 208.

9 Joan Gordon, ‘Yin and Yang Duke It Out’, in Larry McMaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio, 1991, p. 199

10 ‘The “New” Romancer: Science Fiction Innovators From Gernsback to Gibson’, in  George Slusser and Tom Shippey , eds., Fiction 2000, 1992,  p. 113

11 ‘The Frankenstein Barrier’, ibid.,  p. 49.

12 Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, ‘Introduction: Posthuman Bodies’, in Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies, p.4.

13 ibid., p.8

14 The Noir Thriller, 2001, p. 231.

15 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., ‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism’, in Larry McCaffery , ed. , Storming the  Reality Studio, p. 191.

16 In Terminal Identiy, pp.186-187.

17 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., , ‘Cyberbunk and Neuromanticism’, in Larry McCaffery,. Ed., Storming the Reality Studio, p. 191.

18 ‘Introduction: Fiction as Information’, in George Slusser and Tom Shippey , eds., Fiction 2000, p.1.

19 Dir. Leonard Brett, 1992.

20 Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity differentiates this by calling the ‘real’ body an  ‘objective body’ and the projected image the ‘phenomenal body’, p. 187.

21 Dir. Tarsem Singh, New line Cinema, 2000.

22 Trimark Pictures, 2000.

23 This film is based loosely on Stephen King’s book. But King was reportedly not involved in the production of the film.

24 In Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., ‘Futuristic Flu, or, The Revenge of the Future’, in George Slusser and Tom Shippey, Fiction 2000, 1992, p.27.

25 Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, 2000, p. xx.

26 ‘Introduction: The Desert of the Real’, in Storming Reality Studio, 1991, p.4

27 ‘Reviving Cyberpunk: (Re)Constructing the Subject and Mapping Cyberspace in the Wachowski Brothers’ Film The Matrix’, p. 368.

28 Ibid., p.369

29 Ibid.

30 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., , ‘Cyberpunk and Neuromenticism’, ibid., p. 183).

31 ‘The “New” Romancers: Science Fiction Innovators from Gernsback to Gibson’, in George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds., Fiction 2000, 1992, p. 113.

32 A Literary Symbiosis, 1983, p. 211.

33 The Noir Thriller, p. 231.

34 Ibid.

35 Gothic, 1996, p. 150.

36 ‘Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism’, in Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio, 1991, p. 206.

37 George Slusser, ‘Introduction: Fiction as Information’ in George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds., Fiction 2000, 1992, p.9.

38 Pat Cadigan , ‘Rock On’, in Storming the Reality Studio, p. 53.

39 Claudia Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, in Jenny Wolmark , ed., Cybersexualities, 1999, p.37.

40 ‘The “New” Romancer: Science Fiction Innovators from Gernsback to Gibson’, in Fiction 2000, George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds., 1992, p.113

41 Bob Stephens, ‘ “Out of the Past”: Timeless Noir’, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/e/a/1997/09/05/WEEKEND12865.dtl  , 07/04/03.

42 The screenplay of Strange Days was written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. The first is Bigelow’s erstwhile husband.

43 Joan Gordon, ‘Yin and Yang Duke It Out’, in McCaffrey, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham and London: Duke U.P., 1991, p. 199)

44 in Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present, 1998, p. 56.

45 Ibid.

46 ‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism’, p.190.

47Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991, p.135

48 in Veronica Hollinger , ‘Cybernetic  Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism’, p. 206.

49 In an interview with Larry McCaffery, William Gibson acknowledges his fascination with Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and the possibility of Hammett’s turning him on ‘to the idea of superficiality’ (Storming the Reality Studio, p. 269)

50 Dir. Jacques Turner, 1947.

51In a Lonely Street, 1997, p. 106.

52 Ibid., p. 109.

53 This is Cadigan’s debut novel.

54 ‘The New Romancer’, in George Slusser and Tom Shippey, Fiction 2000, p. 119.

55 Terminal Identity, p. 195.

56 Miss M,  ‘An Interview with Pat Cadigan’, www.t0.or.at/pcadigan/intervw.htm (07/04/03)

57 Claudia Springer, ‘Pleasure of the Interface’, in Jenny Wolmark, ed., Cybersexualities, 1999, p. 37.

58‘The Hardboiled Detective Novel’, in Robin W. Winks, ed., Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1988, p.110.

59Crime Fiction From Poe to the Present, 1998, p. 58.