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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Cyberpunk & Steampunk - Week Eleven

I find stories/movies/tv about altered realities/alternative realities really interesting. It's incredibly fun to entertain the idea that, in an alternate timeline, there are people who are living out their lives as we are, but say, with Kaiju running around, or with the ability to enter people's dreams, etc. Both William Gibson's Neuromancer and Satoshi Kon's Paprika were a refreshing look into how humans can tap into a wireless network of both the internet and dreams.

Gibson's Neuromancer tells the story of Case (or Henry Dorsett Case) and his quest to find a way to hook himself back up to the global computer network that was ripped away from him when it was found out that he was stealing from his boss. Neuromancer's world is one of linking up to cyberspace via a virtual reality dataspace they call the 'Matrix' and its also one where, if you have the means, the connections, and the money, you can basically build your body from the ground up.



The thing that I liked most about Neuromancer, as illustrated by the book cover above, is that there are multiple layers of reality. Much like most stories where there is a Matrix of some sort there's always the "real world" the world of the Matrix and possibly (depending on how deep the creator wants to explore this idea of layers) multiple other worlds within the original context of the story (think Inception and all it's levels, Limbo included). It's a great way to explore narrative especially when your narrator is unreliable.

I unfortunately haven't gotten the chance to finish Neuromancer, but from what I've read it's a pretty wild ride. It moves pretty fast for a book written in the 80's, I think. We're in one location with Case and Molly, working for Armitage, the next, we're on a boat out at sea, the next we're somewhere else entirely. As was stated in class, Neuromancer doesn't take a whole lot of time to get from one place to another. It doesn't concern itself much with scene transitions or visible montages the reader can follow and that can be a little disorienting. Then again, the entire world of Chiba City can get pretty disorienting, especially if you're still able to freely access the global computer network; you're in, you're out, you're everywhere.

In much the same way Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon is a pretty disorienting film, simply because the world of dreams that the DC Mini allows us to access is expansive, and easily bled into the real world. Some people can't even tell when they've been uplinked to the dream world because the transition is so quick and seamless.



In a world where there is a machine (the DC Mini) that allows people to enter other people's dreams and record them for review, Doctor Atsuko Chiba uses the DC Mini to illegally perform psychotherapy on people outside of the research facility by assuming her alter ego Paprika to help them get to the root of their anxieties. It all goes wrong though as the world of dreams is taken over by someone with a god complex and they begin to meld the dream world with the real world.

What I really liked about Paprika was that Paprika wasn't just a created alter-ego for Dr. Chiba to use to protect her identity when psychoanalyzing patients. As the movie progressed and we learned more about the world of the DC Mini, Paprika became a full fledged character in her own right, even going so far as to save the world when it was really needed.

This movie had an interesting "Inception"-like quality to it, which I really enjoyed. It's always nice to see how media affects other media and this movie also demonstrated the different layers that Neuromancer provided, even blurring the lines of those layers. The watchers of this film are taken on an interesting and face paced ride of what it means to be lucid in this world and we're never really sure 100% what is real and what is dream.


"The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel" -Neuromancer

1 comments:

Ccurnow said...

A lot of what you say about the alternate reality I see in a lot of books, movies, etc. There always seems to be some kind of reality that is just like ours and functioning on its own. You also point out that the only difference in our realities is the crossover that happens from one reality to the other.

One thing that I also see in these, movies and books is that the main character, or whoever is trying to overcome their problem, will use the alternate reality to solve his/her problems either by going there or using it as a tool. Rarely will you see a part of the story take place in an alternate reality for no story specific reason, which goes along with "don't add something for the sake of adding something"

So a definition of alternate reality for literature needs to be kept in mind. When you say alternate reality, that could mean setting but doesn't always have to be. Yet it's always a place that us humans would love to travel to, given that it's not some human killing environment (though some people would still like to go).

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