What is cyberpunk?

The Matrix has been hailed as a cyberpunk movie. Is it? I don't think so. Now, of course one can call whatever one likes cyberpunk, just as you can call April Lavigne punk. In fact, a lot of punk is about calling others unpunk, and it should be admitted that cyberpunk bears a tenuous connection to punk as a musical gender, and even its connection to punk aesthetics isn't so tight.

Why isn't it? Because it's Star Wars - or Dune - with "virtual reality" added in. (Note- this is not a dismissal of the technical and scientific inaccuracies of the Matrix movies. Cyberpunk isn't "hard" science fiction, itself). Let's make a list of cyberpunkisms, and see if the Matrix fits



1 - Broken Dreams - Heroes come from the sprawl. Think Depression, rather than Dystopia. The world is not decaying, but decayed - and humans have been displaced by the gleaming chrome corporations. "Red Star, Winter Orbit" is before Year Neuro. Heroes glean hope from cockroach droppings - but it's still hope, and they still dream. The decadence is not just social, it's physical. Count the references to shiny stuff and the references to obsolete junk. Junk wins 4-1. (The Matrix is all about the slick, although the first movie retains this aspect by referencing "the desert of the real." No huge raves and togas yet, just slop. The chicken-tasting gruel is probably the cyberpunkest bit of the Matrix.)

2- Badassatron - In fantasy and science fiction (even cerebral fantasy and science fiction, usually) heroes are badasses. Conan, Fafhrd, or Mazirian could face on whatever their world had to offer and win. Molly, if she ever tried to tack Hideo head-on, would just die. And she knows that. She may be a competent razorgirl, but he is a "stone-cold killer from the vat up." Case may be smart, but there's always the nagging feeling that the grey-haired people who live a strange half-life, organic hearts for the corporations, are just toying with him - as is, definitely, the AI Wintermute-Neuromancer. (There's a half-hearted go at this. However, Neo is "the one." Messiahs aren't very helpless.)


3- Riding the Tiger - The sense of urgency should always be a big part of it. And a large plot device is the "artifact." Chrome is far better than the heores, but she has no chance aboutthe Russian icebreaker they use to burn her. However, using it is dangerous. Everything the heroes use is dangerous, and the bigger the target, the bigger the chance the weapon may be turned against them. If they chose safer weapons, or try to face the corporations with their own resources, they will wound, not kill. Hosaka helicopters coming for the cheap coffin-hotel. (They can stop to have a talk with the oracle. What urgency is there in the movie is of the action-movie sort - the hero, busy with something else, has only a few seconds - yeah, right - to save the world/girl/etc. There is, of course, no big break, since the hero is already The One, and just has to go through the standard Hero's Journey steps.)


4 - Cyber - The loss of humanity is everywhere. There are characters who are jacked full of circuits, but more important are the ones whose soul has been taken over by the corporations, described as the dominant life form on Earth. That's important; Man's enemy are not machines, but corporations. Machines are wonderful, strange, alien. Wintermute doesn't take over the world and quash humans, it doesn't change anything at all. Its concerns are not our concerns, it is perfect in its isolation. Human beings altered to be tools are a truer symbol of the genre. Hideo, not Neuromancer. Even the latter - in the form of a "Brazilian urchin" (heh - pivetes do America, c. 1984) has been shaped by the corporations to be a tool. Though, unlike our finite human heroes, it does transcend that society.


5 - Heroism - from holding on to your principles or your friends to saving the world - is a big part of it. It's just that the heroes are closer to Bilbo than to Conan.
Of course, Bilbo isn't slick; you'd never catch him in mirrorshades and trenchcoats. But he was Tolkien's Everyman. And everymen in the future-that-was of this particular cyberpunk don't use magic rings to become invisible, they use sendais to see the invisible world, that is, jack into the matrix. Surreal landscapes, four-dimensional and in a trillion different colour channels are the mode of hacking, not grubby keyboard-punching. For all of the punk in the name, the reference is not musical, but visual. (I suppose this one counts. But it comes, in the literature, as something that balances the other stuff. Case, the low-life ex-hacker, manages to be a hero of sorts. Neo is a hero, pure and simple, not Everyman who manages not to betray himself.)


All four aspects can be glimpsed at (the gruel, again) in the first movie. In the latter two things become downright camp, complete with the blandest sex in human history and the Big Ewok Rave. And the challenge whereby the hero has to kiss Monica Bellucci - and pretend to like it! (The next challenge, I suppose, would be eating through a wall of chocolate.)