Akira [Thoughts]

As I have said on the 'about' page, one of the functions I intended for this blog to fulfil was to be a place for me to record my thoughts on new cyberpunk and postmodern SF works as I watched/read them. Unfortunately my first few attempts at posts mutated into long thematically concerned essays, and I sort of forgot that I could write a sub-2000 word post. In an effort to correct this, my next few posts will be short[er] form treatments of some of the books and films I have recently enjoyed, lest I forget what it is that piqued my interest in them. First up is Akira, still fresh in my mind after being watched last night. Note: the reader will have to forgive the knee-jerk reaction and relative lack of critical substantiation in these posts - the aim after all is for me to record my own honest and often ill-informed opinion. 

Akira. Probably a good ten years since I first heard of the behemoth of anime, the one that brought the east to the west and jump-started the whole craze that as a young teenager I eventually became a part of. Criminally, though, despite me (and every other teen) going through the obligatory ‘anime phase’ at school, I never got around to watching Akira. In a way I’m glad. I don’t think my teenage mind would’ve fully appreciated Akira. I don’t think my adult mind fully appreciates it, for that matter; one viewing barely scratches the surface of all that this anime has to offer. I can, however, say emphatically that it is very, very good. 

At face value it’s an extremely slick piece of work. I won’t bother with plot synopsis here, but suffice to say that even watched purely for entertainment value the collision of ice-cool Neo-Tokyo biker gangs and sinister government-operated psychics makes for an incredibly satisfying visual spectacle. From the blistering, kinetically charged bike-mounted battle between Capsules and Clowns to the film’s climactic final act in the ruins of the Olympic stadium, the animation, pacing and direction of the film is spot-on. 

When the action lets-up and the pace slows, there remains an almost unbearable tension; a relentless uneasiness. Every scene points towards something rotten at the heart of Neo-Tokyo. Events play out against a backdrop of civil unrest; of rioting and looting and police brutality, of people tired and desperately clinging on to their belief in the saviour Akira. Neo-Tokyo is not the utopia it promises, rather it is burned-out, its inhabitants fallen back into the old dyad of oppressor/oppressed: the rich have become bored of development and gentrification and the poor are left waiting. Imagery of decay is constant. Fights play out knee-deep in sewage and on the periphery of every scene can be spied a homeless couple here, a burning car there. The desperation comes to a head with the arrival of Tetsuo: the underclass latch onto him as an embodiment of the saviour they have been praying for and against the convention for bystanders in an apocalypse scene, the onlookers rush towards Tetsuo, only to be cut down by a police force given the full reign of martial law.   

The film is rich with symbolism and thematic content and invites endless interpretation. Events in the film are shadowed by boardroom meetings and money-stuffed suitcases, and authority figures from the military to the teachers are portrayed wholly as corrupt and abusive of power. Apocalypse book-ends the film, suggesting (in a similar way to The Second Renaissance) that the events of the film are cyclical: the consequence of repeating mistakes already made. In this sense the film is a socio-political warning; one particularly resonant to a late-80s Japan struggling to find its place in modernity as it comes to the height of its technological dominance but remains fractured by the events of WWII: a country striving to rebuild itself without blueprints. 

Development - and how to best handle development - is arguably the overriding theme of Akira. Whilst externally Neo-Tokyo develops and science rushes headlong into the unknown, Kaneda and the gang and particularly Tetsuo develop internally too. There is a strong psychological and sexual undercurrent to the film. Tetsuo’s journey takes the form of an exaggerated puberty: he experiences both mental and physical changes, changes that give him new power but also scare him. He accepts these changes eventually; harnessing them and becoming incredibly powerful, but without guidance he is ultimately consumed. His reversion back to the physical appearance of a baby is symbolically powerful; Akira, father/messiah, represents for the orphaned Tetsuo a new security, and Akira in return gives Tetsuo a new playground in which to explore his new self. 

I’ve referred twice now to Akira as the messiah, which isn’t a wholly correct or fair characterisation. Messianic he certainly is in the eyes of the cultists desperate for a saviour, likewise Akira must represent to Tetsuo’s tortured longing a messianic figure of redemption with the ability to somehow relieve him of his pain. He doesn’t appear to Tetsuo because (bare with me here) much like Lord Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book, Tetsuo is not an innocent and his desire is impure - something already noted by Kiyoko - and he is therefore deemed unworthy of the Philosopher’s Stone/Akira. To the Espers, however, Akira represents healing and friendship and their invocation to him is selfless, thus he appears from the inanimate specimens that the scientists likewise couldn’t correctly apprehend, and saves Neo-Tokyo. There is a lot to fathom in this conclusion and it would take me many viewings of Akira to separate out the tangled strands of symbolism and myth that converge into that great ball of light and the haunting final words: I am Tetsuo. 

OK, so that still wasn't very short. Yet still everything I have talked about here I have barely touched upon, and I haven’t touched at all on so much more. I could have talked about the film’s dualities, instances of Eastern theology, evolution and reincarnation, but above are the things that most prominently impressed themselves on me during and immediately after watching Akira. I always meant for this blog to be a way for me to skim all the thoughts off the top of my brain before they dissipated, and this half-coherent mess is the result. But it has done the job. I’ve got a whole heap of stuff to think about now before I revisit Akira for a second viewing; and I have a feeling that that second viewing won’t be far away. 

SF Theory: 'The Snoozer Went Off At Seven'

A less formal post this time; something that will hopefully keep me motivated to work on the larger essay style posts. Life has a habit of getting in the way of blogging, especially when the only deadlines are those you impose upon yourself. The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of Bruce Bethke’s Cyberpunk, the short story that started it all. I’ve got seven points, see, and I wanted something slightly wittier than ‘seven things to think about’ as a title.  

So, the other day I bought some books. They are:

- Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment

- Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction

- Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives

They’re all multi-authored collections of essays (with a splash of reprints, extracts and short fiction too). As you would expect, they all focus on analysing cyberpunk and postmodern SF film and literature, though all in quite different ways and with their own unique perspectives. Storming the Reality Studio was published at the tale-end of the cyberpunk movement in the early 90s, and does a great job of throwing together contemporary critical work from people like Brian McHale with more established postmodern literary and social theory from - amongst others - Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. Beyond Cyberpunk is a much more recent publication and it takes a retrospective look at the initial cyberpunk movement and considers its legacy and relevance today, and Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk narrows the focus down to questions of transformation and transcendence of the body in cyberpunk. 

All three anthologies also have great introductions from their respective editors, which brings me to the crux of this post. As introductory pieces, these three essays all try to contextualise cyberpunk; to site it in the larger tradition of philosophy, technology, social theory and literary history from which it was born and with which it converses. My idea with this post is to take some of the points the three essays make and highlight them as things to think about and return to as I continue to examine individual works of cyberpunk literature and film. 

These are the three essays in question:

- ‘Introduction: The Desert of the Real’, Larry McCaffery, from Storming the Reality Studio

- ‘Introduction: The Sea Change(s) of Cyberpunk’, Graham J. Murphy and Sheryl Vint, from Beyond Cyberpunk

- ‘Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction’, Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, from Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk

And here are the seven things that piqued my interest:

GENRE: Just as pulpy noir crime rose to prominence in the age of high modernism, so cyberpunk shares its place in literary history with the avant-garde postmodernists. But noir and modernism maintain a relationship largely characterised by mutual disdain and/or ambivalence, whereas cyberpunk and postmodernism share a much more sociable - even collaborative - relationship. McCaffery calls cyberpunk a ‘synthesis’ of science fiction (SF) with the aesthetic tendencies and thematic impulses of postmodernism. Later he describes the same effect in reverse: how postmodernists (Pynchon, DeLillo etc.) are drawn to the modes of SF because of the genre’s ‘maximal level of artifice.’ McCaffery notes the ‘complexities’ of postmodernity and the rupture of postindustrial society, and suggests that traditional realism is ill-equipped to cope with the massive, destabilising changes that characterise postmodern life; thus postmodern writers wishing to explore this rupture and these changes are required by necessity to take on aspects of SF. 

Looking backwards, cyberpunk draws upon a number of genres as influence: most prominently felt is the influence of crime noir, but gothic horror (Alien, for example) and the cop formula and heist narrative likewise inform the genre. Cyberpunk takes a characteristically postmodern attitude to its influences; playing with, appropriating and creating pastiches of these genres with a self-awareness typical of postmodernism. Particularly interesting are the parallels between thematic influences of noir and cyberpunk. The development of the highway and the surrounding false-utopian metanarrative of the American dream - deconstructed by noir - bares resemblance to the new information superhighways and the initially expounded utopian possibilities of the internet, a utopia likewise sullied by the threats of cyber-fascism and cyber-terrorism that feature so heavily in cyberpunk writing.   

CAPITALISM: Featherstone and Burrows consider cyberpunk the ‘supreme literary expression […] of late capitalism itself.’ For Murphy and Vint, the ‘single uniform element’ under which all cyberpunk work can be collected is the ‘triumph of planetary capital.’ The trope of the evil megacorp is all pervasive; the inhumanly rich and the omnipresent multinationals dictate the lives of the ordinary dweller in cyberpunk’s many dystopian worlds. McCaffery invokes the economist Mendal, who theorises three stages of capitalism, with post-WWII society occupying the third. After market capitalism and imperialism comes the ‘postindustrial capitalism.’ Typified by its all-encompassing nature, Mendal notes the reliance of this form of capitalism on harnessing rapid technological development in order to compete and expand, and specifically to harvest and store data, and notes that rather than any physical resource, the new key global resource in this stage of capitalism is information itself. McCaffery characterises postmodern capitalism by the rapid expansion of three industries: information, advertising, and the media (or culture) industry; each typified by the practice of reproducing and commodifying human experience into a saleable product (more on this later). This is the state of postmodern society, and this is what the cyberpunks and the postmodernists alike must negotiate in their writing. 

POLITICS: An interesting note on the politics of cyberpunk: its rebellion is pre-emptive. Featherstone and Burrows call the genre a source of ‘prefigurative social theory,’ and ‘anticipatory opposition politics to coming cyber-fascism.’ Traditionally social theory and literature have been separate disciplines - one feeds into the other, but not vice versa. Cyberpunk’s extrapolative approach to the technological and societal developments its authors observe allows the genre to act recursively with social theory, creating fictional worlds which social theorists can observe and contrast with our own. More directly even than that is the influence the genre has on technology; prefiguring many technological developments (Gibson’s cyberspace informing VR development, etc.) Thus Cyberpunk can act as warning and agent of change, simultaneously predicting and redirecting the future.  

THE MIND: An interesting side-effect of rapid technological advancement, notes McCaffery, is the sudden tangibility - and urgency - of previously abstract philosophical problems. Questions concerning the nature of reality, death, consciousness and immortality, previously resigned to the firmly hypothetical, have been suddenly foregrounded by developments in medical technology, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The new practical relevance of these previously abstract problems require a new form capable of tackling them, and - as mentioned above - postmodern SF takes up this challenge. In terms of specific philosophies, one name supersedes all others: Descarte. Solipsism and the Cartesian mind/body duality absolutely permeates cyberpunk. At times the duality is transfigured into the human/machine - where the vestiges of the human mind (the ghost) fights for control of the machine body. Elsewhere the mind is divorced from the body, either by force (in The Matrix, for example) or as a choice, a form of transcendence from the limitations of the ‘meat.’ In both cases multiple realities vie for legitimacy, whilst all the mind can be sure of is itself. 

REALITY: The commodification and reproduction of human experience seems a defining feature of postmodernity. The technology of photography, motion capture and other forms of recording data have formidably impacted human culture and the self. Featherstone and Burrows characterise Gibson’s thematic preoccupation as one of ‘blurring boundaries,’ specifically the boundaries between biology and technology, natural and artificial, human and inhuman. The boundary between natural and artificial is a particularly interesting one and one problematised by the act of replication: memory of an event becomes memory of the recording of an event; memory is thus compromised and memory (as I've mentioned above) is held as a key facet of humanity in the face of the machine. The idea that an event may even foreground the process of capturing for later consuming over the initial experience itself is likewise an interesting one, and prescient to modern society’s obsession with photo-sharing and data recording. 

THE BODY: In their interrogation of the body Featherstone and Burrows quote Weiner, who theorises the effect of increasingly rapid scientific advancement on the perspective of the body: where once the body was considered a mechanical creature, whose primary function was the transference of heat energy, in postmodernity the body is instead a ‘communications network’ and its prime function is the transference of information. Note the similarity here to the changing beast of capitalism; the parallel shift from industry to information. Featherstone and Burrows construct a continuum of humanity, a spectrum beginning with pure human and continuing thus: first the aesthetically modified human, then the human with fundamental functional modifications, then the ‘wired-in’ cyberspace occupying human with avatar, and finally the AI in cyberspace (with no ‘real’ referent), which could also be the human who has achieved total transcendence of the body. Self-identity, they note, is no longer linked to physicality, and in cyberpunk the mind is vastly foregrounded in favour of a body that can be modified, reconstructed or disposed of entirely. Considering the spectrum, it is interesting to consider whereabouts we as species currently sit. Certainly aesthetic modification has been achieved, and functional modification - while experimental - is achievable too. With VR rapidly developing also, it would seem to me we have at least halfway crossed the line. 

THE CITY: The city plays a key role in cyberpunk. The physical city ties the genre back to its noir routes, but more interesting still are the new worlds cyberpunk creates. Featherstone and Burrows note that the transcendence of the body and the rise of the post-bodied or post-human man offers with it the possibility for entirely new environments; new realms of sensory experience with which to interface. Cyberspace offers this potential for the hacker willing to temporarily forsake the ‘meat’. Interestingly cyberspace projects itself as a simulation of the city, a city ‘redoubled’ through the architecture of its information networks. One can map the cyberspace city over the real city, and make visible the new phenomena of the ‘information ghetto,’ the shadow amongst the neon. The urban experience in cyberpunk is paradoxical: the city seethes with people, but the crowd is lonely, particularly to the fetal car-dweller divorced from his environment behind panes of glass. 

So there you have it. Seven things to think about. This post was very much - more even than the others - one for me to get down the thoughts rattling around in my headspace. These points I have made are neither revolutionary, nor have I explored them with anything even approaching depth, but they are a start.