cyberpunk’s deemed dead, again
Every now and then the corpse of cyberpunk is being dragged and flailed around a wee bit more, now Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle gives head to to the Krokerian cock saying that the genre’s death owes a lot to Longo’s 1995 release of Johnny Mnemonic. Getting back to that point is such a bore, really.
Like all great literary and cultural movements – edgy, forward-thinking, smart, and mean – cyberpunk died a thousand deaths, not least of which was the arrival in theatres, in 1995, of Robert Longo’s film adaptation of William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic. Any genre codified in the flesh by Keanu Reeves – no matter how good the story – is doomed or, at the very least, clumsily embodied to the point of ridiculousness. You could, of course, make the argument that Reeves, who went on to play two of the most nuanced and socially relevant cyberpunk roles – Neo in The Matrix series and Bob Arctor in Richard Linklater’s recent buzz-kill A Scanner Darkly – helped keep the genre alive in the minds of the Great Unwashed far longer than it would have lingered otherwise. But the final, single-tone, flat-line truth of the matter is that you simply don’t hear cyberpunk-the-term being bandied about all that much anymore. (via)
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The television skies of Chiba City branded his brains in 1992. He hasn't recovered fully since. Re-wired his brain with a few years of FastTracker, hosted radio shows on the first .hu netradio for 4 years, went on to broadcast radio for another two. Worked on the absurd radio series Kónuszék, that actually led him to become a script writer for the multiple-award winning, New York Times-acclaimed animation Nyócker.
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firstly, A Scanner Darkly is cyberpunk? really?!
secondly, I’ve always considered The Matrix a book-ending of sorts for cyberpunk movies.. since they pretty much threw everything in there, what else is left?!
Bladerunner -> The Matrix.. Neuromancer -> Snow Crash. that’s how it plays for me.
but then, I also consider Heat to be the best cyberpunk movie.. seriously, the plot could’ve been one of Gibsons’s 80′s era short-stories.
all of which isn’t to say the genre is dead, just different now. biopunk? being the new cyberpunk (cyberpunk 2.0 even?!)
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