Patty Ahn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include critical histories and theories of U.S. television, transnational media studies with a regional focus on the Pacific Rim, gender and sexuality, and sound and popular music. She has been published in Spectator, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Discourse, and is currently serving a two-year term as co-chair of the SCMS Queer Caucus.
Notes on Contributors
| April 7, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 22 - Number 2 - January 2012 |
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Secret Agency in Mainstream Postmodern Cinema
| January 30, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 18, Number 3, May 2008 |
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Neal King
Interdisciplinary Studies
Virginia Polytechnic and Institute and State University
nmking@vt.edu
Among the most studied films of the last few decades are those that descend from the mid-century fiction of Philip Dick and his contemporaries, including Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch). These authors wrote during the Cold War scandal of the apparent “brain-washing” of U.S. soldiers by communists. In medical journal articles, Biderman and Lifton reported that military men had been coerced into confessing atrocities, and they helped to raise the specter of mind control, crystallizing fears of Big Brotherly rule that had been solidifying since the world war. As further news leaked of the Central Intelligence Agency’s baroque attempts to counterprogram double-agents, sci-fi writers wove mind-control plots into parodies of spy novels. The agents in such tales believe their own covers and think that they are ordinary men until evidence of violent pasts disrupts their lives in colorful ways. In the most subversive stories, protagonists never know who they were or whom they might attack next.
The setup, in which normal life masks one’s status as a spy–a sort of hardboiled play on the monomyth–has drawn several filmmakers, who spin it into social satire. Consider a 1983 release by writer-director David Cronenberg. Tired of the banality programmed by the television station he runs, Max searches for “something harder.” He samples recordings of torture called “Videodrome.” The footage turns him on, and Max watches until he hallucinates a blend of video display, sex, and violence. But he soon learns that “Videodrome” is a mind control tool, wielded by fascists who induce Max to kill. He loses his grip on reality, appears to torture women, draws a gun from a hole in his gut and shoots men at work–all on orders from those who control him. At the end of Videodrome, Max blows his own brains out, television having poisoned his mind. In Max’s postmodern story, local governance gives way to conspiracy, certainty to schizophrenia, and narrative realism to surreal subjectivity. The heroic agency sustained by Hollywood’s classical alignment of spectators with successful, heterosexual protagonists is displaced by the penetration of bodies and minds. Max discovers that his status as agent-in-training has been kept so secret that neither he nor the audience knows about it until late in the film. He is a postmodern pawn.
Ordinary-seeming citizens turn out to be unwitting secret agents, terrorists, and assassins in a series of North American films released over the last quarter century, including Blade Runner (1982), Videodrome (1983), Total Recall (1990), Naked Lunch (1991), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Conspiracy Theory (1997), Dark City (1998), eXistenZ (1999), the three-film Matrix cycle (1999, 2003; see Figure 1 below), Imposter (2002), and A Scanner, Darkly (2006). In these movies, bourgeois protagonists discover secret lives of violence, engage with rebel groups, and then threaten and sometimes kill their own lovers. They escape ordinary routines and wrestle with over-socialization, media saturation, hampered agency, intensive surveillance, and the soul-draining effects of consumer capitalism. By discussing such films, I intend neither to nominate a genre nor to use them as reflections of the social world, but rather to consider the functions that production of and commentary on such films serve filmmakers, scholars, and perhaps others as well. The storytelling, which the 1950s brainwashing scandals indirectly inspired, have allowed filmmakers, analysts, and audiences to reconsider the status of authorship and agency in a postmodern world–in which subjects are commodities to be redefined for profit and prestige.
| Figure 1: Scene from The Matrix. Postmodernity taken literally, as body and agency compromised. © Warner Bros., 2008. Image from the author’s personal collection. |
There is no way to draw a clear line around the films named above. Scholars have included several of them in such overlapping sets as “mindfuck films” (Eig) and “puzzle films” (Elsaesser, Panek)–in some cases, claiming that Hollywood has undergone a large-scale, postmodern change. I have chosen the core of mind-job films simply by selecting those in which protagonists serve as unknowing agents of espionage. I study the derivation and correlates of this conceit in order to trace the origin of a postmodern segment of popular culture. Mind-job cinema engages postmodernity on the thematic level, and contemporary films result from an industrial context that has changed since the classical studio era of the 1930s and 1940s: for example, authors sign on to specific projects rather than to long-term employment by studios. One might thus presume that depictions of postmodernity in post-classical film arose with shifts in production–new modes of filmmaking (multinational hegemony, short-term contracting, the breakdown of genres and realism, etc.) and new patterns of storytelling. Indeed, the appearance of art-film styles of narration in mainstream, English-language feature film has led several scholars to posit a new narrative era, in which Hollywood’s commitment to coherent, character-centered narrative drive has weakened. The general argument in such literature is that contemporary films are more likely than before to fracture their narratives into opaque spectacles, with thrills aplenty but scant import.
For instance, a book-length study argues that postmodern cinema results from “a revulsion against tightly structured, formulaic, narrowly commercialized methods traditionally linked to the studio system” (Boggs and Pollard 7). That mode of production, of “classical Hollywood cinema” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson), includes attention to probabilistic and historical realism; coherent, clear plots that turn on decisions of white, heterosexual heroes; and editing/cinematography meant to disguise the artifice of narration and thus intensify emotional response. Critics have suggested that such cinema conveys “status quo ideals and messages” (Boggs and Pollard 5), and that the postmodern shift entailed critique and rejection of the modernity shored up by such ideology (6).
Analysts argue for recent shifts in Hollywood storytelling, with the advent of the “psychological puzzle film” (Panek 65), with its (initially) unclear means of distinguishing protagonists’ hallucinations from diegetic reality; of “post classical narration” (Thanouli), with its art-cinema trappings and addled protagonists; of big-budget action spectaculars (Davis and de los Rios), with their noisy set-pieces that crowd out character development; and of postmodern cinema (Beard, “Crisis of Classicism”), which recuperates cheery Hollywood from the pessimistic 1970’s auteurist rebellion. Elsaesser also argues that “puzzle films” combine contemporary themes of psychic pathology (paranoia, schizophrenia) with the unreliable narration typical of post-classical film, and emerge from an industrial context in which filmmakers wish every film to provide “access for all” by meaning anything to anyone (37). Thus several analysts suggest that North American films have struck a sort of postmodern grand slam. In the postmodern era, these scholars argue, a significant chunk of storytelling has grown ambiguous in meaning, perhaps the better to serve the interests of the conglomerates that abjure widely shared critical views. These analyses suggest that especially fractured or polysemic storytelling also depicts elements distinct to postmodern life, grappling with the very forces that produce it: imbrications of virtual and real, electronic and fleshy, robotic and agentic; the inducement of disorientation and schizophrenia by corporate control. Thus might postmodern film be postmodern in all ways at once: in origin, in theme, and in narrative form. To assess the extent to which these forms coincide, I study the mind-job films from those angles.
Mind-Job Plotting
Analysis of structure reveals patterns in the plotting of secret-agent films. Mainstream artists, whether screenwriters or editing teams led by directors, tend to employ a four-act structure to feature film, in which regularly timed pauses emphasize protagonists’ goals and/or changes of direction, in order to clarify unfolding plots (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson).[1] Mind-job movies mostly use this structure to emphasize heroes’ departures from normal life, confusion over identity, and crises brought by combat and isolation.[2]
The Matrix and Total Recall, for example, both begin with a disaffected worker open to a new, more rebellious life. Each ends its opening act with the hero’s break from the mundane: one unplugged from the titular “matrix” that imprisons his mind, the other driven from his home by a woman who turns out only to have posed as his wife (“your whole life is a lie,” she tells him in Total Recall). Both heroes are rudely awakened to the fact that they have been brainwashed, their apparent normalcy all lies. Both begin to search for truths about their origins. The films’ second acts introduce complications: one hero may be the foretold savior of the last colony of humankind, unplugged from the brainwashing matrix in order to free people from parasitic machines; the other may be a spy, also implanted (with false memories and a sham marriage to make the subterfuge more convincing) into a proletarian rebellion. These second acts end on moments of tension in which heroes wrestle with the competing possibilities that they are superhuman saviors, brainwashed dupes, or both (“What a mind job,” says a skeptic of the savior prophecy, in The Matrix). The films’ third acts play these possibilities off against each other as the oppressive rulers raise the stakes of the conflicts. Comrades and authorities provide competing testimonies, thus keeping heroes confused about who they really are. As is typical of Hollywood melodrama, third acts end on moments of crisis. In each case, a rebel mentor is captured or killed by an oppressive ruler; and it turns out that the deluded heroes were being used by secret police. “That’s the best mind fuck yet,” says the hero of Total Recall, who must escape another brainwashing in order to realize (what might be) his destiny. The hero of The Matrix must rescue his kidnapped mentor to fulfill his own. The fourth, climactic acts test heroes in the combat that suggests who they, and what their destinies, are. Both rescue people they love and appear to be foretold saviors after all, but both also know they were programmed by others to work their miracles. They may be heroic, but are hardly free in any liberal sense. Brainwashed to do good is brainwashed nonetheless; and they do not know which identities might be all their own, or whether there is such a thing. Indeed, the Matrix cycle saves its final revelation of the hero’s purpose for the climax of its first sequel; then, as in Total Recall, he learns the dispiriting truth that his savior status was manufactured by oppressors to subvert rebellion (see Figure 2).
| Figure 1: Scene from Total Recall. Crisis ends the third act and leads to the climactic battles of the film. All appears to be lost as the hero sees double, confronted by the oppressive state with evidence that his personality is a scam implanted to manipulate him and destroy rebellion. © Lion’s Gate, 2006. Image from the author’s personal collection. |
Thus can mind-job films feature plots that are both parallel and clear: revelations of brainwashing inspire departures from normal life; competing hints at origins heighten confusion; escalating conflicts with oppressors lead to crises; and final combat allows heroes to rescue comrades and stake claims to destinies. Such plotting trains viewer attention on the characters’ goals and their ongoing revision of and attempts to meet them. Though these stories depict confusion, they employ classical means to prevent it among viewers (at which both appear largely to have succeeded). Films with this plotting also released during the 1990s include The Long Kiss Goodnight and Dark City.
As other examples of parallel plotting, consider two drug-novel adaptations, those of the Philip Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Both concern addicts assigned to spy on loved ones. Though only one ends its first act with a traumatic event (Bill, the hero of Naked Lunch, gets high and accidentally shoots his wife), both end with heroes undercover, newly assigned to surveil drug peddlers. The second acts complicate assignments by hinting to the confused heroes how closely watched they are, without clarifying who they are. The protagonist of Naked Lunch shares a flat with an insectoid handler who directs his espionage. He makes new friends who are dead ringers for old ones and for the wife whom he has killed. His handler orders him to spy on those people but doesn’t reveal how he came to spy in the first place. Who might pull the strings he cannot guess. The main characters of A Scanner Darkly share a house fitted with cameras and microphones that capture their drug use. We see the government’s brainwashing process, by which the hero’s mind is split and made to work for police so deep undercover that he does not realize that he is also one of the addicts who live there. He thus spies on his friends and on himself without realizing it. Both films end their second acts with newer, more focused assignments: One character is to spy closely on a woman who resembles his deceased wife, and the other resolves to spy more intently on the alter version of his own self.
Thus, while the first acts disrupt ongoing routines with new missions, second ones complicate and then focus those missions on especially intimate spying. Third acts develop the goals clarified by the second acts without allowing heroes to meet them; the spies pursue questions of identity but find no final answers. In Naked Lunch, his handler breaks it to the hero that he was brainwashed and pre-programmed to kill his wife, who the handler claims was a counter spy (“An unconscious agent is an effective agent,” he reassures the outraged hero). When friends try to talk him back to his normal life, this hero sends them away and drinks himself into a pit of despair. In A Scanner Darkly, the hero is troubled by the thought that a narc might live among his friends, but cannot see that it’s him. Worried that he has lost his family forever and that betrayals abound in the drug war, he slips into an existential funk just as deep, staring into the camera at the end of the act. Thus do both films end third acts on notes of crisis. Heroes have tried but failed to learn who they are or where they are going, and fear that they will lose everyone they love. Those dark moments set up climactic pursuits.
Fourth acts twist plots with final betrayals, send heroes into drug factories run by double agents, and foreground their lasting alienation and confusion. The narcotics agent of A Scanner Darkly winds up incarcerated in a drug-rehab center that serves as an illicit factory for drugs. He is so thoroughly brainwashed that he lives as a prisoner there without understanding that he’s still being used to collect evidence of larger conspiracy. He secretes the blue flower that his handlers programmed him to obtain as evidence of drug production; but the film offers little hope that his mind will clear or mission end. The spy in Naked Lunch also visits a drug factory run by a man who pretends to cure addictions but instead fosters them for profit. There, the hero rescues the woman who resembles the wife whom he’s killed, but then shoots her by accident as well. His story ends with a sense of ongoing tragedy and malaise. In neither film does the hero see a way out of the loop of loss, betrayal, and addictive madness. These stories are bleak, and they dwell on drug-addled, brainwashed confusion. But they both use Hollywood’s four-act formula to keep mind-job stories as clear as possible (though neither sold many tickets). Heroes accept missions in their brainwashed states, later focus their spying on those closest to them, then become troubled by their lack of love and agency in those positions, and finally fail in their struggles for independence.[3]
Other films with brainwashed spies that feature different plots also employ the Hollywood four-act structure to keep stories clear. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the 2004 remake offer minor variations on the same script. By the end of the second acts, heroes have learned that they were brainwashed. At the crisis-points that end third acts, delusional assassins murder women they love. Suicide, matricide, and salvation close both films. A more mainstream play on those parodies, Conspiracy Theory (1997) focuses on the romance and the danger that the brainwashed assassin poses to the woman he loves. Sunnier than the film it lampoons, Conspiracy Theory features no disturbing murders by heroic characters, but only the threat thereof. It ends happily for all but conspirators.
We see more such classical structure if we look to the periphery of mind-job cinema. The obverse of the brainwashed-spy conceit is the story of a man who deludes himself that he is a spy when he (probably) is not. In A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) (both based on biographies), young professionals dream of stardom and sex. Heroes of these films perceive themselves to be recruited to Cold War espionage (code-breaking in one film, assassination in the other), both of them responding to their insecurities with women. In the second acts, both heroes mix their public lives as professionals (mathematician, game-show producer) with clandestine spying. In their third acts, both heroes try to square their delusions with cohabitation, and fail. Only in the climaxes do they forswear their lives as spies and attain some normalcy and romantic bliss. These films are more focused on professional and romantic success than are those in the mind-job core.[4] Other films that feature deluded operatives include Fight Club (1999) and Memento (2000), both of which offer narrative puzzles (what is diegetically real? what is a hero’s hallucination?) and solve them in conventional fashion (climactic exposition specifies mental illness and the difference between hallucination and diegetic reality). Both rely on conventional four-act plotting to maintain clarity (see Bordwell [80] about the plot structure of Memento). The films neither mention spies nor draw from the stream running from the Condon/Burroughs/Dick novels, but they do suggest both the patterns that deluded-terrorist/detective stories can take, and their maintenance of conventions of clarity. The narrative shifts in these films do not make them postmodern.
Indeed, claims about the postmodernity of shifts in storytelling may overstate the case. For instance, most of the elements of postmodern film noted by Boggs and Pollard (16) characterize decades of cinema rather than a postmodern period only: mass marketing, moral quagmires, film noir, and savage disorder–all present in Hollywood product since before World War II. Though mind-job films and other crime/sci-fi/horror cinema depict the immoral and insane, often in terms of deliberately puzzling narratives (such as whodunit detective stories that save revelations for last), mundane Hollywood storytelling remains as clear as ever. Intentional exceptions to the rule of narrative clarity in English language features are few. U.S. theaters have long showed European and Asian art films, with their own non-narrative modes; and Hollywood features have long depicted mentally unbalanced characters in ways that drew audiences to question lines between diegetic reality and hallucination (see, for instance, 1939’s The Wizard of Oz). Examples of such cinema from the last two decades do not indicate postmodern shift in Hollywood cinema.[5]
In any case, the plot patterns in the mind-job core suggest a common lineage, as though adapters of Condon, Burroughs, and Dick watched and read each other’s works and developed the templates typical of generic production. It also suggests a commitment to classical Hollywood storytelling and the consumer-friendly clarity of plotting that it emphasizes, even if the protagonists tend to hallucinate and by doing so challenge audiences to learn each film’s distinction (if any) between fantasy and diegetic reality. Most mind-job films supply viewers with enough information to arrive at plausible interpretations of plot events. (Exceptions come only from Cronenberg, whose screenplays, though generally clear and classically structured, leave open the possibilities that heroes never wake from their dreams.) Even when hallucination and reality blend, hegemonic conventions keep mind-job films from lapsing into the abstract self-consciousness of art-cinema narration. Those conventions are professional guides that filmmakers continue to take pride finding new ways to follow (Bordwell 51, 107). And viewers who hope to identify with heroes continue to demand that stories follow them as well (Eig).[6] Thus mind-job cinema is not particularly post-classical in its narrative form, though it is concerned with elements of postmodernity as themes.
Mind-Job Themes
Fredric Jameson identifies “a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature, which one is tempted to characterize as ‘high tech paranoia’, in which the circuits and networks of some putative global computer hook-up are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind” (80). Jameson roots conspiracy myth in the complexity of late capitalism, in which the growth of conglomerates (ruled by Byzantine legal codes but no obvious morals), breakdown of communities, and collisions of worldviews inspire general confusion. Industrial production has given way in the most developed world to consumer capitalism, as merchants pursue the unfettered advertisement and exchange that can most fully valorize their capital. Multinational corporations effect, via their intensive advertisement, “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas [leading to the] colonization of Nature and the Unconscious” (78). What might have been “a space of praxis” becomes a no-man’s land of disconnected places and times, or a set of ideas inserted into consciousness by powerful organizations. Jameson notes that forces of late capitalism control the very circuits of information that people use to imagine their worlds, blinding us to what we might learn from the stories that we tell. As an economic order, defended by the military that it mocks in its pop-culture parodies, the postmodern culture industry has shown that it can turn even criticism of rebellion against it into a commodity (56).
One might expect characters to confront such a world in contemporary cinema, a world in which powerful but poorly understood forces govern the minds of high-tech professionals in the most subversive and intimate ways imaginable. Indeed, modernity appears as a theme in mind-job films, as protagonists’ fears of being just like everyone else and too little the individuals of professional-worker ideals. Postmodernity in Hollywood cinema appears as the consumerism of urban renewal, in which old neighborhoods are plowed up and turned into ad-saturated consumer havens by shadowy conglomerates (the omnipresent advertising of Blade Runner–see Figure 3 below–and Total Recall, the manufactured communities of Dark City and The Matrix), only to be destroyed as heroes’ mind-warps externalize in spectacular violence. Postmodernism also appears in the schizophrenia induced in Hollywood heroes, who decide that behind façades of shopping centers lie conspiracies too vast to comprehend. The tightening disciplines of postmodern life leave them feeling impotent, so they wade into public bloodbaths to redeem themselves. These films use the surrealist language of contemporary film to present schizophrenic, penetrative combat, suggesting a postmodern aesthetic of cyborg unreality.
| Figure 3: Scene from Blade Runner. Postmodernity appears as theme in this confusing, ad-intensive cityscape. © Warner Brothers, 2008. Image from the author’s personal collection. |
Three elements of postmodernity as theme thus bear brief discussion: blinkered perception, bodily violation, and hampered agency. Deluded about their pasts, mind-job heroes cannot trust their senses. As they buckle under psychic strain, the movies draw from sci-fi and horror cinema’s arsenals of lurid imagery to convey confusion. In some cases, the environments around heroes alter as though with their moods. The Matrix films render fantasy in photo-realistic terms and shuttle characters through spatial displacements that make the architecture around them as confusing as any postmodern spaces. Total Recall features serpentine shots of vast interiors, viewed as if from the inside the hero’s mind. The skyline of Dark City reshapes itself as buildings rise and fall, changing size and appearance in seconds. Though much of the style of mind-job cinema fits the model of “intensified continuity” in narrative film identified by Bordwell, and thus simply makes more frequent use of the most dramatic compositions, camera moves, and editing strategies of classical Hollywood, some hallucinatory scenes go further still, into the generic turf of science fiction. They execute virtual camera moves across vast spaces and through walls (as in the Matrix cycle and Total Recall), toying with the imbrications of electronic media with actual and psychic spaces. Sudden space-time displacements convey the heroes’ fractured states of mind and the fall of the walls they have kept up between fantasy and reality. The Cronenberg films Videodrome, Naked Lunch, and eXistenZ offer prosthetic flesh-machines with erotic overtones, and symbolize fissured minds with penetrated bodies. Their heroes find themselves in new places without having traveled there by obvious means; they talk to strangers who seem to know them. Editing and physical effects allow audiences to share the heroes’ queasy disorientation, one generally linked in the stories to the violations and bodies and minds.
The most obvious aesthetic development in mind-job cinema renders new relations between mind, flesh, and machine as penetrative violation. The hero of Videodrome develops a vaginal slit in his belly; he and other men slide videotapes and guns into the orifice and pull them out again, transformed but still deadly. The titular character of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) receives new programming through a needle into his brain; inhabitants of Dark City receive new personae through large syringes between their eyes; those of The Matrix do so through ports at the backs of their skulls. Inside the matrix, one has a “bug” crawl into his navel to keep track of him; and later a villain takes over the minds of other characters by plunging his virtual hand into their chests. The players of eXistenZ have ports of their own at the bases of their backs through which penile implants insert new worlds and identities.
The penetrative tendencies of action cinema are realized most fully in scenes of mind-job combat. Shot by a “flesh gun,” a villain in Videodrome dies by splitting from head to toe, organs exploding as his blood spouts. The brainwashing conspirators of Dark City die when their heads crack open and the insects within wriggle forth to expire. The colonialist of Total Recall loses his eyes to the vacuum of space as his head slowly pops. In Imposter, a cyborg assassin screams as cops eviscerate him and pull a weapon from his heart. Much of this assumes a sexual tone that implicates postmodern manhood. Others have written of the penetrative violence and wordplay of such mind-job films as eXistenZ and The Matrix (Freeland), Total Recall (Goldberg), and Videodrome (Beard, Artist as Monster; Shaviro), in most cases linking the bodily penetration to postmodern fantasies of compromised manhood. In his analysis of other science-fiction films, Byers suggests that allusions to male intimacy can play on a “pomophobia”–the sense that moral and physical perversion infiltrates the solid male subject of modernity (7). “The homophobic’s paranoia about homosexual rape [expresses] a fear of violation of the masculine body that, in a heterosexual economy, sees itself as inviolable, as hard and sealed off rather than soft or opened” (15).[7]
As mind job becomes “mind fuck” (as in Total Recall), men open their bodies and penetrate each other, claiming a perversely gendered space far from mundane life. Their domestic lives are phony set-ups and fall to violence and betrayal as battles compromise their bodies. Heroes are bound and/or brainwashed in the torture scenes of Imposter, The Matrix, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Manchurian Candidate, Dark City (see Figure 4), Videodrome, Conspiracy Theory, and Total Recall. Most retaliate with penetrative assaults of their own. Some heroes escape with mere bullet wounds, beatings, and broken limbs, but the violation of a hero’s body is nearly as foregone a conclusion as the mortification of a villain’s.[8] These scenes involve face-offs between heroes and those who challenge their senses of themselves, burdening the violation with mind-job metaphors.
| Figure 3: Scene from Dark City. Posthuman conspirators prepare to inject a controlling, collective personality into the skull of the bound hero. © New Line, 2008. Image from the author’s personal collection. |
Heroes, and the conspirators who mold their minds, direct much of the threat of violence against lovers. Brainwashed protagonists kill wives and (at least former) lovers in both versions of The Manchurian Candidate, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Naked Lunch and Total Recall, and eXistenZ, and have been programmed to do so in The Matrix and Dark City. Even in cases where heroes resist the urge to savage their families, they direct the violence elsewhere. The brainwashed hero of Dark City learns that he has been implanted with the impulses of a serial killer of women by the strangers who control him. But he claims, in the name of his love for the woman programmed to be his wife, a sense of personal autonomy. That formerly secret agency then manifests in mind-job form by laying waste to a city and slaughtering the strangers who have implanted their thoughts.[9]
Entertaining an ideal of possessive individualism, with its promises of status and freedom, heroes seem to suffer the effects of pacifying surveillance, seductive advertisement, demanding romance, burdensome families, rule-bound employment, and addictive routine. They could seem to respond with violence as moral hygiene, as if to flush from their brains the codes of faceless conspiracies that govern their minds as well as their worlds. So does violence become one of the principal expressions of agency in mind-job cinema, rooted as it is in an apparent revulsion from intimacies of any kind. We should not presume that these films valorize agency of a modernist ideal, however. The thematic depiction appears to be more complex.
For all of the fighting that heroes do, agency in its ideal form seems out of reach for most. Even the most professionally successful hero (of the peripheral film A Beautiful Mind) must learn to live with his phantoms, unable to will them away. Neo cannot save his world by fighting in The Matrix Revolutions. Asked why he endures beating after beating, knowing that he must die, he claims, “Because I choose to”; but only by relaxing and allowing his opponent to penetrate and kill him can Neo help to destroy his enemy, in a plan authored not by him but by the computer program that has directed his movements. His passive acquiescence, rather than a choice to stand tall against attack, saves the day. Dark City‘s John also triumphs in battle, but only after being programmed to do so by an ally with a syringe full of lethal thoughts. And the new world that John creates (including the name “John”) is based not upon a life lived before his brainwashing but on the implanted programs instead. So must the hero of Total Recall worry about the possibility that he has won a battle by implanted design rather than by his own choosing. As protagonists shoot each other in eXistenZ, they must also wonder where virtual reality begins and ends, and thus whether the satisfying combat is of their own authorship or not. Other heroes kill themselves on the orders of implanted programming in Videodrome and Imposter. A testament to heroic agency, mind-job cinema is not.
So mind-job films depict postmodern conditions, classically plotted. The remaining question bears on their origins. Does a movie that makes postmodernity its theme also arise from its unique mode of production?
Mind-Job Production
Mind-job cinema issues from a small group of mainstream filmmakers (in the U.S., Australia, and Canada) who work with Cold War fantasies. Canadian writer/director Cronenberg has been the most prolific translator, having drafted a screenplay for Total Recall from one of Dick’s stories, adapted Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and made two other films featuring the same elements (Videodrome and eXistenZ). In his study of Cronenberg’s cinema, The Artist as Monster, Beard celebrates this authorial lineage:
Cronenberg has always expressed his allegiance to the romantic-existentialist-modernist idea of the artist as heroic and transgressive explorer--explorer especially of the inner sources of transgression. His admiration especially for William Burroughs has always been expressed in these terms, and his attempts to emulate Burroughs have led him to create works which seek a direct, oneiric connection with unconscious instincts and associations. Videodrome is, along with Naked Lunch, certainly the best--most extreme and virtuosic--example of this phenomenon. The film's absolutely un-objective plunge into the realm of bodily disorder, identity chaos, bewildering transformation, and abjection signals a new commitment by Cronenberg to this principle of blind truth to the imagination, an embrace of fundamental disorientation as the price for a direct connection with the unconscious, and a discovery of a new path to the goal of artistic honesty. (123)
Videodrome
This testament to the work that Cronenberg has done to adapt Burroughs raises the question of auteurism. A humanist theory of the origin of film narrative, auteurism has expanded from a friendly critical perspective to a corporate marketing pitch and the posture of many filmmakers who wish to build renown. The theory was invented by aspiring French filmmakers who celebrated the genius of the Hollywood directors (Hawks, Hitchcock, and Ford prominent among them); it explained how great films could be made within a profit-oriented industry. Decidedly modernist, auteurism celebrated the single artist’s measure of control over work in the factory-like conditions of corporate Hollywood. It has also become the logic of block-buster era marketing. Distributors have found that writer-director, and producer-director “hyphenated” talent can make successful films, in part because the most popular names serve as product-differentiating brands in genre-film marketing (Baker and Faulkner, Flanagan). Auteurism’s popularity has also grown with the development of the free-agent process of film-by-film deal-making among artists, which favors those authors who call attention to their skill at manipulating and pleasing viewers. The hope is that producers will hire an auteur as a safe bet to make a successful film. Thus do many parties maintain respective interests in the lauding of auteurist control over storytelling in film.
The irony of auteurism as a scholarly theory of postmodern culture is that postmodernity as usually theorized undercuts the formations upon which auteurism depends: the stability of authorial subjects, the metaphor capacity of texts, and the shared meaning of mass cultural products. Consider the case of Blade Runner (1982). Adapted from a Philip Dick story, and making vivid the urban decay and corporate corruption of its setting, Blade Runner has assumed “the oxymoronic status of a canonical postmodern cultural artefact” among scholars (qtd. in Begley 188). The film tells the story of a cop assigned to slaughter renegade androids who have had human memories implanted so successfully that their corporate creators can market them as “more human than human.” Fans of the film have long toyed with the notion that the cop is yet another android, brainwashed so thoroughly that he’s bought his own cover as human and knows not what drives him. The film seems to hint at this with a momentary gleam in the hero’s eye (and, in post-release versions, his dream of unicorns). At the end of the story, he takes an android as a lover and flees. Begley points out that scholars have embraced the metaphorical significance of Blade Runner‘s story in a way that works against their own theories of postmodern opacity. That is, some analysts interpret it both as a product of a dissimulating culture-industry and as a rich object for interpretation. On this conflict, Begley suggests that “it seems strangely mimetic to suppose” that a film such as Blade Runner “both represents and exemplifies postmodernism” (191). The argument that a film results from post-industrial shifts is a social-scientific one, usually paired in postmodern theory with the argument that films have lost much of their metaphorical import. This coheres as far as it goes, though it may exaggerate the change in Hollywood production (Bordwell 16, 189). Nevertheless, to argue in addition that Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and his screenwriters have achieved a vivid representation of the postmodern condition is to make a very different point, one in apparent conflict with the first. Those who analyze postmodernity as the decomposition of meaning, who also adhere to the modernist author as creator of metaphors that spectators may interpret, may be having their cake and eating it too. “Can narrative film mimetically reproduce postindustrial relations?” Begley asks rhetorically of such analysis. “Is Ridley Scott the author of postmodernity?” (191). Indeed, in view of the fracturing of meaning and authorship in postmodern theory, who would find value in such a claim to authority?
Commentary celebrating the metaphorical significance of postmodern film is not hard to come by: on Dark City (Tryon); Terminator 2 (Byers); Videodrome (Beard, Artist as Monster 125), Memento and Conspiracy Theory (Boggs and Pollard).[10] Consider Boggs and Pollard on Blade Runner, among other films:
While such movies do not fit conventional Hollywood formulas, they nonetheless stand at the critical edge of contemporary film culture today; their "postmodernity" equates with their graphic illumination of fundamental social and intellectual trends. (249)
This film’s critical illumination of postmodernity, the authors argue, occurs in “the media-saturated public sphere” in which postmodern cinema in general “both appropriates and caricatures the antipolitical mood of the times while trivializing the major social problems that dominate the lives of ordinary citizens” (247). They thus provide the double argument typical of commentary on Blade Runner: it provides critical illumination, but also results from a production process that tends to diffuse the meaning of film. As Begley points out (191), the exceptional objects in such analysis tend to fit the eclectic standards of elite culture (high modernist in aesthetic, the work of reputable authors, and none too successful with the masses). The double status of such postmodern film is such that it both stands as product of an anti-political culture machine and (in some cases) allows for intensive interpretation of its insight into the postmodern condition.
What might have made this selective auteurism so popular? Begley suggests that such “postmodernist appropriation of Blade Runner rests on an ideal spectator who is very nearly an academic critic” (190).[11] I move beyond Begley’s suggestion by adding that auteurist celebration of postmodern culture can also come in handy for filmmakers, whose careers might flourish if they can be branded auteurs. If the ideal spectator, in the celebration of postmodern culture, is nearly an academic critic, then perhaps the ideal filmmaker has the authority of a scholar. Ridley Scott has embraced the notion of the provocative, postmodern mind-job at the heart of the film he directed. He argues, in commentary attached to the pointedly labeled “Ridley Scott’s Final Cut” home-video release of the film (2007), that Blade Runner‘s hero is indeed a replicant, programmed with the memories and skills of a human cop. By aligning with the notorious inference of the hero’s nonhuman status, and taking credit for the implication, Scott asserts control over the film and the fans’ responses. He dons the mantle of visionary that mimetic interpretation ascribes. Thus presented as intervention, not mere consumer product, Scott’s work can seem both to result from and to provide critical commentary on the postmodern condition.
The stories that filmmakers tell about making the films foreground authorial lineage and control. Jacobson and González chart the Hollywood development of The Manchurian Candidate in the wake of the success of Condon’s novel. Cronenberg has stated that Videodrome was first inspired both by the career of Marshall McLuhan and by Cronenberg’s experience watching late-night television (Cronenberg and Grünberg). It turned toward more political matters as he crafted his story for the science fiction and horror genres in which he works. On his DVD commentary, Cronenberg tells of the paranoia of Videodrome‘s star, who worried that a faceless, controlling “they” would destroy the film and its makers. Cronenberg says that he reassured those on the set that he, as writer/director, was in control. Thus might auteurism come in handy across a range of circumstances. On their DVD commentaries, production personnel note connections between these various works. The star of Videodrome connects it to the writing of Philip Dick; another actor, successful after starring in the Matrix films, provided the clout needed to get A Scanner Darkly made by agreeing to star in it; a screenwriter of Dark City notes (with distaste) resemblance between his story and the work of Cronenberg. Thus does a chain of storytelling connect Cold War jitters to Hollywood careers and craft. A small group of filmmakers, who work within their international, industrial network to exchange ideas and tell provocative stories, have mined postmodern ore from public interest in the brainwashing of soldiers and spies. The late-1950s appearance of reports of false confessions by U.S. soldiers raised discussion of “brainwashing.” Several novels on the topic, popular films, and a stream of science fiction followed. Cronenberg and others read the novels, saw potentials for provocative filmmaking, and made a series of films that influenced other artists, resulting in more Philip Dick adaptations (Imposter, A Scanner Darkly, etc.) and parodies thereof (Conspiracy Theory and Shane Black’s script for The Long Kiss Goodnight). The cyberpunk line of fiction influenced Australian Alex Proyas (Dark City) as well as the Wachowski brothers in the U.S. (The Matrix cycle). Copycatting of provocative stories became popular among filmmakers at the turn of the century, adding a more concrete motive to the larger trends postmodernity has wrought (e.g., widespread suspicion of intertwined corporate media and individual perception) (Wilson 93).
Bordwell shows that filmmakers have long employed attention-getting devices within the framework of clearly-told stories (17) and do so today in part to demonstrate their virtuosity (51). They work in a distribution process so crowded that “product differentiation” serves studios and storytellers (73):
Films aren't made just for audiences but for other filmmakers . . . a filmmaker can gain fame with fresh or elegant solutions to storytelling problems. . . . Prowess in craft yields not only professional satisfaction but also prestige, and perhaps a better job (107).
This appears to have worked for such well-known filmmakers as Frankenheimer (a television director who gained a reputation as a feature-film director with such early 1960’s Cold War films as his 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate), Cronenberg, the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), and the authors of such peripheral films as A Beautiful Mind (which won Academy Awards) and Memento (which secured writer/director Christopher Nolan’s status as a potent auteur in Hollywood, such that he now makes summer blockbusters). Thompson notes that, while the break-up of the monopolistic studios left artists to seek work on film-by-film bases rather than in long-term contracts, the day-to-day organization of the job remains largely the same–“coordinated from development to post-production via the use of a numbered continuity script [which guides the work of people who] still have a set of craft assumptions inherited from older generations” (346). Thus filmmakers flaunt plot twists and violence for the same reason they cleave to classical principles of storytelling.
In this loose network of artists we find the most immediate and concrete agency behind mind-job cinema–a group of filmmakers invested in tricky but clear storytelling, about heroes whose agency is hampered by the filmmaking beneficiaries of modernist celebration of authorship. Using the classical Hollywood model, filmmakers can boost their own status as auteurs by puncturing the delusions of the heroes whose stories they tell. Just as agency manifests in mind-job films as agonistic violence, often against loved ones, so does authorship appear as the showy mutilation of the traditional hero’s subjectivity. These filmmakers play one agency off against another and show they are really in charge.
Mind-job cinema may very well result from larger postmodern change; I note merely that we need not resort to theories of the collapse of Western narrative, the death of authorship, a fragmentation of mundane storytelling, or collective schizophrenia in order to explain the appearance of these stories. We have sufficient reason in the mundane workings of artistic networks in English-language, feature-film production. The root of mind-job cinema thus may or may not be postmodern production. But, either way and following Begley, I urge against having it all ways in our analyses. I do not see how mind-job movies can be both post-classically ambiguous and metaphorically clear, or be apolitical and bear insight into postmodern conditions. Indeed, the imputation of meaning to the mind-job movies, by their scholarly critics, by their fans, and by the filmmakers themselves (however career-serving those imputations might be), lend credence to the notion that storytelling by the international, Hollywood-dominated film industry is more classical and more modernist than not. For all of the schizophrenia and conspiratorial brainwashing depicted onscreen, these stories tell, in reasonably clear fashion, stories of people with postmodern problems. They slight neither clear progress nor character development for vapid nostalgia, violent spectacle, or brainwashed hallucination. Nor does such storytelling appear to respond to uniquely postmodern demand. Though a generation will have grown up on video screenings of Fight Club and The Matrix, mind-job films are not otherwise hits. These visions of compromised agency and restless violence seem unlikely to indicate mass sentiments or to shape their courses. The small size of audiences for most of these films suggests that we look elsewhere to explain patterns in the storytelling. Likewise, though Cronenberg tells stories that never specify diegetic reality, he is alone in that respect among makers of mind-job cinema, and does not indicate a larger trend. Postmodernism in Hollywood’s storytelling may be sharply constrained by its commercial impulses.
Changes in mass culture issue from the practices of (consumer capitalist) organizations, by the artists both employed and selfishly motivated to push cultural boundaries with “edgy” entertainment, loaded as that might be with nutty assassins and their mind-blowing violence. By splintering the psyches of their protagonists, filmmakers tout the reliability of their own craftsmanship, in service of careers in a labor market that maintains wholly modernist ideals of authorship.
Notes
1. Analysts (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson) have demonstrated that large numbers of Hollywood feature films adhere to classical principles of character-driven drama. Thompson shows that such films break their stories into sets of acts (usually four per 90-150″ feature, rather than the three claimed by Syd Field in his famous 1979 text), which emphasize character traits at their conclusions. Filmmakers use stylistic flourishes to mark end points of dramatic acts, to inspire moments of contemplation, to emphasize changes of direction, and thus to clarify the unfolding stories and maintain viewer interest. By having characters redirect the courses of their action at such points and provide the audience with moments of reflection, feature films privilege those decisions as defining characteristics.
2. I use the term “hero” not as approbation or affirmation of agency but as shorthand for the character on whom the camera and story dwell. A hero is the character who spends at least as much time on screen as any other and whose personal trials receive as much attention as those of any other, and may not be the principal agent driving the plot.
3. This is not to say that all stories are equally plot-focused. The adaptation of A Scanner Darkly includes a few scenes that illustrate character rather than advance the surveillance plot or depict changes in those characters. The writer/director wishes not to be known for “by-the-book storytelling” (Johnson 340). In his commentary on the home-video release of the film, Linklater recounts studio pressure to cut the static scenes.
4. In a different direction, a peripheral cycle such as the Jason Bourne series (2002, 2004, 2007)–based on Robert Ludlum’s spy novels–involves brain injury and amnesia, and a brief sequence during which a hero discovers that he was trained to do violence. But it does not depict the intrusion of spy memories into normal life, because the hero never has a normal life. Cop action movies with mind-job elements include the Robocop cycle (1987, 1990, 1993) and Demolition Man (1993), in which cop heroes are electronically brainwashed in order to prevent them from challenging lawless oppressors.
5. Berg excludes art films and the science fiction genre from his survey of “alternative” plotting because the former are defined as those primarily aimed at formal experimentation (12), and the latter “provides the motivation for and naturalizes” breaks in continuity (11). He rightly suggests that the best test of change in Hollywood storytelling comes from mainstream feature films outside of those sets.
6. Volker argues that reports of the death of traditional, reliable narration in mainstream feature films are greatly exaggerated. He advocates that we distinguish stories that merely confuse their audiences from those in which main characters mislead by narrating delusions or lies. By his standard, a film such as Fight Club has an unreliable narrator, whereas a hallucinatory film such as Naked Lunch does not. By its conclusion, as its narrator’s head clears, Fight Club more rigidly distinguishes between the protagonist’s hallucination and diegetic reality than Cronenberg ever does. Cronenberg has stated (in DVD commentary for Videodrome) that he does not mark hallucinations stylistically, because “they feel real” to those who experience them. But Cronenberg is alone in this approach among mind-job filmmakers. Eig suggests that a film that was postmodern not only in theme, but in narrative form as well, would do without the classical storytelling typical of films such as Fight Club.
7. Much of mind-job cinema violence follows the trend of contemporary crime movies, in which gory, penetrative combat accompanies puns about homosexuality and homosocial bonding. But these intimate violations transcend even the liberal standards of cop action bloodshed. In the cop movies that are peripheral to the mind-job cycle, sexual violence between men marks a space where men admit to their madness and love of antisocial action (King). So too, in mind-job cinema, where heroes join anarchic quests and revel in rebellious destruction.
8. The least violent film is A Scanner Darkly. It features the explosion of a man’s head by gunfire but little other bloodshed. It is also the most depressive of the set, leaving its dazed hero incarcerated in a nearly somnambulant state at its conclusion, as if to suggest that, without violence, mind-job heroes cannot wake.
9. Peripheral films include such romantic comedies as True Lies (1994), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), and War, Inc. (2008). The heroes are not deluded about their work as assassins, but their loved ones are, and heroes get stressed trying to integrate their lives. The films play with the threats that confused heroes pose to their lovers as they flee the constraints of consumer life. For instance, Grosse Pointe Blank arranges names and dialogue to represent the hero’s anomie: his name is Mr. Blank; he repeats the schizophrenic’s mantra (“It’s not me”) when he kills, hides behind dark glasses, and extorts psychotherapy with mocking threats of violence.
10. Consider this scholarly commentary on The Truman Show, a cousin of mind-job films in which an apparently ordinary man only realizes in middle age that his life has been choreographed by a television producer. The commentary demonstrates links between the purposes of film critics, postmodern scholars, and marketers of mainstream film:
While my own critical response to the film's artistic merit is no different than most critics' appraisal of it as a powerful indictment of rampant technology and rote consumerism or as a "thought-stirring parable about privacy and voyeurism" (Guthmann www.aboutfilm.com), the real critical value of The Truman Show lies in the boldness of its central concept and its self-reflexivity which provides an apt metacommentary on the New Hollywood situation.
In the context of Kokonis’s larger argument that Hollywood film has subordinated narrative and critical commentary to spectacle, this is a remarkable assessment of a postmodern film. The showy self-reflexivity of so many Hollywood authors serves in such analysis, paradoxically, as evidence that claims of hampered agency/authorship are valid. I suggest not that the makers of The Truman Show lack the insight that Kokonis attributes to them, but rather that such intensive interpretation undercuts his own larger argument about postmodern, postclassical Hollywood, and the way in which its storytelling has sacrificed its critical, interpretable edge.
11. Boggs and Pollard discuss the fate of film authorship in postmodern Hollywood, concluding with the paradox that recent change in production “simultaneously elevates and diminishes the status of auteur” (23), endowing them with “the aura of (postmodern) critical public intellectuals” (21). This is because directors can attain celebrity status and work as free agents but must submit to increasingly tight corporate control in order to have their projects funded.
Works Cited
- Baker, Wayne E., and Robert R. Faulkner. “Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry.” The American Journal of Sociology 97.2 (1991): 279-309.
- Beard, William. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 2001.
- —. “The Crisis of Classicism in Hollywood, 1967-77.” S: European Journal for Semiotic Studies 10.1-2 (1998): 7-23.
- Begley, Varun. “Blade Runner and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration.” Literature/Film Quarterly 32.3 (2004): 186-92.
- Berg, Charles Ramirez. “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying The ‘Tarantino Effect’.” Film Criticism 31.1/2 (2006): 5-61.
- Biderman, Albert D. “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 33.9 (1957): 616–25.
- Blade Runner. Five-Disc Complete Collector’s Edition. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford. 1982. Blu-ray. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2007.
- Boggs, Carl, and Thomas Pollard. A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
- Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California P, 2006.
- Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
- Byers, Thomas B. “Terminating the Postmodern: Masculinity and Pomophobia.” Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995): 5-33.
- Cronenberg, David, and Serge Grünberg. David Cronenberg. London: Plexus, 2006.
- Dark City. Director’s Cut. Dir. Alex Proyas. Perf. Rufus Sewell. 1998. Blu-ray. New Line Home Entertainment, 2008.
- Davis, Robert, and Riccardo de los Rios. “From Hollywood to Tokyo: Resolving a Tension in Contemporary Narrative Cinema.” Film Criticism 31.1/2 (2006): 157-72.
- Eig, Jonathan. “A Beautiful Mind(Fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity.” Jump Cut: A review of contemporary media 46 (2003). July 2008 <http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/text.html>.
- Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Mind-Game Film.” Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Ed. Warren Buckland. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. 13-41.
- Ferenz, Volker. “Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos: The Scope of Unreliable Narration in Film.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 3.2 (2005): 133-59.
- Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New York: Dell Pub. Co., 1979.
- Flanagan, Martin. “The Hulk, an Ang Lee Film.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 2.1 (2004): 19-35.
- Freeland, Cynthia A. “Penetrating Keanu: New Holes but the Same Old Shit.” The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Ed. William Irwin. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. 205-15.
- Goldberg, Jonathan. “Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger.” differences 4.1 (1992): 172-204.
- Jacobson, Matthew Frye, and Gaspar González. What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
- Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.
- Johnson, David T. “Directors on Adaptation: A Conversation with Richard Linklater.” Literature/Film Quarterly 35.1 (2007): 338-41.
- King, Neal. Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.
- Kokonis, Michael. “Postmodernism, Hyperreality and the Hegemony of Spectacle in New Hollywood: The Case of The Truman Show.” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 7.2 (2002).
- Lifton, Robert J. “Chinese Communist ‘Thought Reform’: Confession and Re-Education of Western Civilians.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 33.9 (1957): 626–44.
- The Matrix. The Ultimate Matrix Collection. Dir. Andy and Larry and Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves. 1999. Blu-ray. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2008.
- Panek, Elliot. “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film.” Film Criticism 31.1/2 (2006): 62-88.
- Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1993.
- Thanouli, Eleftheria. “Post-Classical Narration: A New Paradigm in Contemporary Cinema.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 4.3 (2006): 183-96.
- Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.
- Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Perf. Arnold Schwarzenegger. 1990. Blu-ray. Lion’s Gate Entertainment, 2006.
- Tryon, Charles. “Virtual Cities and Stolen Memories: Temporality and the Digital in Dark City.” Film Criticism 28.2 (2003): 42-62.
- Wilson, George. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.1 (2006): 81-95.
The Steorn Exploit and its Spin Doktors, or “Synergie ist der name of das Spiel, my boy!”
| January 23, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Uncategorized, Volume 18 - Number 3 - May 2008 |
|
John Freeman
Department of English
University of Detroit Mercy
freemajc@udmercy.edu
ex.ploit (ĕk´ sploit, ĭk-sploit´) n. An act or deed, especially a brilliant or heroic one. See Synonyms at feat.
tr.v. (ĭk-sploit´, ĕk´ sploit) ex.ploit.ed, ex.ploit.ing, ex.ploits
- To employ to the greatest possible advantage: exploit one’s talents.
- To make use of selfishly or unethically: a country that exploited peasant labor.
See Synonyms at
.
- To advertise; promote.
Middle English, from Old French esploit, from Latin explicitum, neuter past participle of explicāre, to unfold; see explicate.
–Wikipedia
Given the long, inglorious history of alleged perpetual motion devices, the failure of the Irish technology company Steorn to demonstrate its heavily self-promoted device, the Orbo, might seem to warrant little fanfare. Whatever excuses offered for Orbo’s no-show, it was clear no laws of thermodynamics on the conservation of energy (CoE) were to be broken that day (or any other day, for that matter). If anything, a long-standing but informal law was upheld. As Popular Mechanics editor Clifford B. Hicks noted almost a century ago concerning proofs offered of perpetual motion devices: “There never was . . . indeed there never is, a convenient examination for such devices. This is almost another law of physics” (Ord-Hume 181). Several elements of the Steorn saga suggest, however, that some profit might yet be derived from writing on Steorn rather than from simply writing it off as a complete loss. The Steorn enterprise, in every sense an exploit, began in July 2007 with a £75,000 ad in the Economist.[1] Here, the company claimed to have discovered an anomaly in magnetic properties that allowed it to exploit the laws of thermodynamics and derive more energy from the system than it had put in. Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, claimed several unnamed universities had privately tested its device, but the testing was “always behind closed doors, always off the record, and [the device] always proven to work.” Steorn positioned itself as a guerilla corporation involved in an asymmetrical battle with establishment institutions. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker characterize such resistance as an “exploit,” a viral intrusion into the interstices of various systems as “a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert the dominant political [and, I would add, scientific and economic] diagram” (21). Enlisting the aid of what Tiziana Terranova labels the “outernet,” Steorn challenged the traditional business model. Selecting its own jury to test the Orbo, the company also resisted the normal scientific validation process.
The Steorn Exploit has become a textbook case study for viral marketing techniques. Of course, exploitation cuts both ways, and viruses not only spread but also mutate. In noting that on-line social networks often originate in “techno-events,” Geert Lovink cites Alain Badiou’s contention in Ethics that “There must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot be calculated, predicted or managed” (Recession 9). True to form, Steorn’s failed quest has resulted in some unexpected encounters, not all of them favorable to the company. Its on-line forum has morphed into a webmind that evidences some of the emergent properties of a loosely collective consciousness. Increasingly unmanageable, this forum displays a mind of its own, at times even working to hack into and deprogram its host’s agenda. Moreover, both Steorn and its forum have had to do battle with another counter-exploitive element, this time appearing in the inhuman machinations of Herr Doktor Mabuse, a nightmarish perversion of Steorn’s original vision. Weathering the elements that have brought down similar social network enterprises, the forum has thus far managed to be self-sustaining. Whether or not it endures depends paradoxically on the very spirit of contestation that often drives its operations.
The Business Exploit (Mixing it Up with Science)
The process of valorization (the production of monetary value) happens by foregrounding the quality of the labor that literally animates the commodity. . . In particular, the Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor intensive.
–Terranova (47)
The “killer apps” of tomorrow won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices. The most far-reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that the infrastructure makes possible.
–Rheingold (qtd. Lovink, Recession 9)
As both a business concern and an ersatz scientific enterprise, Steorn constitutes what Terranova describes as a “mutation,” a term she applies to free labor and its own ambiguous standing between such oppositions as “the Internet as capital and the Internet as anticapital” (53). Although Steorn’s challenge was physics-oriented, it is telling that it was published in a respected business journal. Exploits such as Steorn’s generally occur in the gaps between or within disciplines. Our current techno-event arose when the Economist published a claim usually reserved for the pages of the National Enquirer. In an age that Jodi Dean characterizes as distrusting traditional authority, the conspiracy of silence alleged by Steorn against the scientific establishment banked on people’s willingness to believe in the improbable, to have distrust for the arbiters of what Kuhn labels “normal science.” Steorn portrayed itself as a campaigner against modern day absolutism in all its forms: the absolutism of the State, Big Oil, Capitalism and even the absolutisms of Thermodynamic Laws and experimental procedure, foundational elements of traditional science. Steorn offered in the form of a world-altering perpetual motion device a “fantasy of a powerful, unifying knowledge” (Secret 31). As a business exploit, Steorn succeeded in the pre-demo days in perpetuating the fantasy by persuading many to suspend their disbelief. Of course, a stroll through the virtual Museum of Unworkable Devices demonstrates just how long-running a fantasy perpetual motion has been.
Even in the face of its failed demo, Steorn has succeeded in establishing what Terranova describes as an “outernet,” that “network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that crisscrosses and exceeds the Internet––surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power” (53). A small company with modest resources, Steorn has set up an unorthodox business model in the very middle of this internet/outernet divide. The Steorn Private Developers Club (SPDC, or SPUD in some members’ parlance) was established as a means for some members to investigate the “Orbo-effect” and find applications. Steorn thus took advantage of the testing and development skills of various subsets of members, again with a very modest outlay of investment. Interest in the initial SPDC was so great that a second one was established to accommodate the surplus. In its recruitment and enlistment of the free labor of its forum members, Steorn worked within the digital economy to create its own version of what the Italian autonomists label “the social factory.” Terranova describes this post-Fordist phenomenon as “a process whereby ‘work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine'” (33). Citing Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! as examples, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser demonstrate the growth of “interoperability,” the willingness of internet entities to open up their “service to third-party developers” (229).
Purportedly established as a means of educating interested parties and disseminating news about the Orbo, the forum, according to McCarthy, was opposed by many in the company as an unnecessary distraction. Still, in plugging so many people into the company’s development, advertising, and marketing strategies, McCarthy has taken advantage of a labor force that has been indefatigable in the energy it has expended on behalf of the enterprise. Some forum members offer highly technical discussions of magnetic properties, describing openly their own experiments with magnetic properties as well as their speculations about what constitutes the Orbo effect (if anything at all!). Other threads are populated with people very knowledgeable about the Free Energy movement and its various claimants; when Steorn released images of its Orbo, they were able to speculate about how closely it resembled earlier so-called “free energy” devices such as the Perendev motor. Still other threads deal with related issues such as global warming, alternative energies, and breaking news stories concerning all manner of technological innovation. A net trolling through the vast dataspace of the cybersphere, the forum gathers into itself information. Terranova points out that such capturing of knowledge goes beyond enlisting the free and voluntary services of web-designers and multi-media specialists–and even inventors–to include “forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters, and so on” (33). While members do not design Steorn’s website, they have kept the forum going by spinning an impressive number of threads. Alive with energy, the forum threads proliferate, giving proof positive of Steven Johnson’s analogy of the web to “an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest” (97).
Particularly in reference to the technologically savvy members of the forum, Steorn has enlisted a cadre of specialists in what Lawrence M. Sanger characterizes as “shopwork.” Within the context of software design, Sanger defines shopwork as “any strongly collaborative, open source/open content work.” The word is a portmanteau constructed from “shared open work, and it arguably has the advantages of suggesting collaboration in both the original meaning of ‘shopwork’ (which implies something constructed or fixed in a shop, perhaps by several workers together) and, with its parts reversed, ‘workshop’ (which implies participatory learning)” (89). Some have speculated that Steorn had not been able to explain purported anomalies in the Orbo’s operation and had set up the forum and jury panel in the hopes someone “out there” might come up with an answer. If some conjectures about the company’s incomplete understanding of the Orbo effect are correct, then this enlisting of experts has allowed McCarthy & Company to tap into–at bargain basement prices–the expertise of knowledgeable forum members and the pool of jurors in coming to understand the alleged effect. Perhaps now that the Orbo is apparently at a dead end, Steorn is maintaining the forum in the hope it can claim proprietory ownership of any members’ discovery. This restriction holds especially true for jurors and members of the SPDC, who have had to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) and to allot Steorn a proprietory interest in any discoveries stemming from their investigations of the Orbo.
While Terranova and Sanger characterize what is a virtual “factory,” Steorn’s own factory model exists not only in the cybersphere but also in scores of the basements or garages of various tinkers and committed inventors who have applied an impressive array of skills either to replicate Steorn’s experiments or to set up their own versions of a perpetual motion device. Moreover, the compartmentalization that often separates the designer from the engineer or, more generally, management from labor in the typical business venture does not hold sway here. Steorn’s own social factory, a “truly complex machine,” converts the traditional production line into an impressive array of production links that users can employ in their investigations. A designer tinkering in his or her home workshop may post a display of the magnetic configuration in question on YouTube, other forum members giving instant feedback, critiques, and suggestions for improvement. Discussion is often wide ranging. Participants give engineering advice on the placement of magnets, stators, and rotors and offer formulae for momentum, rate of attraction, etc. This shopwork has been a natural progression from the early days of the forum, when videos of Steorn’s own set-ups were displayed and members worked collaboratively to figure out their design features, construction, and operation as well as to speculate about the theoretical limits to their operations. All in all, Steorn has created a basement mechanic chic, particularly among members of the SPDC, by promising to allow them to experiment with Orbo technology. As Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume attests from personal experience in Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession, there is magnetic drawing power to perpetual motion as a generative master narrative: “Talk perpetual motion for a while to the ordinary person and, sooner or later, the chances are that he will come up with a scheme of his own” (222). Ord-Hume writes that the quest for perpetual motion holds a particular appeal to the American sense of individualism and the ethic of DIY–“Thousands may have tried and failed, but I want to see for myself.”
Although Sanger characterizes shopworks as “perpetual; they have no endpoint” (90), one might have predicted the forum’s demise with the advent of the failed demo. Surely the idea of staying around to rearrange the deck chairs on the S.ean S.teorn Titanic would not appeal to many forum members. But the forum and SPDC persist. Against the expectations of many, Steorn still maintains both. Steorn may have discovered one of what Terranova describes as “new mechanisms of extraction of value” in a gift economy. After all, why not keep the complex mechanism it has set going in perpetual motion? Although forum “workers” have been alienated from the company itself, many remain active in the forum. As Terranova writes, in such situations “the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalienated means of production” (36). Forum member alsetalokin, for example, has garnered a great deal of interest from forum members with his own device, the whipmag. Left to its own devices, the forum has proven to be self-sustaining. Even were Steorn to close up this part of its shop, many members are prepared to set up their own shopworking/workshopping site. Alienation, once the bane of the worker, here takes on a new meaning as the workers’ “alienation” leads to a self-sustaining mode in which workers have the power to “disincorporate” themselves from the sponsoring institution and strike out elsewhere in the cybersphere.
This disaffection and striking out on one’s own are not always the fate of the “peer production” model that Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams investigate in Wikinomics. Calling such infrastructures “weapons of mass collaboration,” these authors point out the benefits of the innovation and value such enterprises can produce (11). This “uberconnected, amorphous mass of self-organized individuals” has the potential to allow a company to enlarge its operations even as it downsizes its core labor force. Tapscott and Williams argue traditional companies that fail to tap into these virtual “Ideagoras” will suffer an increasing competitive disadvantage. Citing Coase’s law that corporations will keep operations in-house as long as the transaction costs for outsourcing them are unfavorable, they point out that the internet allows corporations not only to outsource a growing number of their operations but also to invert this law: the internet makes outsourcing transaction costs much more favorable than sustaining in-house costs. In a striking example of the returns to be made here, Tapscott and Williams tell the story of Rob McEwen, CEO of Goldcorp, Inc. When it seemed that his company had prospected all the gold from a field in Red Lake, Ontario, he directed his head geologist, in essence, to open-source all the company’s geologic data–a seemingly insane idea in a highly secretive, highly competitive industry. Enlisting the aid of over a thousand “virtual prospectors,” he catapulted “his underperforming $100 million company into a $9 billion juggernaut” (9). Of course, such outsourcing requires letting go of proprietary knowledge. The authors cite Wind-up Records as one innovative company that initially created an outernet workforce of music fans who used their home computers “to synchronize Japanese animé art with popular music tracks.” Unwisely, the company later “squandered a brilliant opportunity to engage their customers as evangelists for their artists” by removing all their meticulously wrought videos from its site (53).
From Tapscott and Williams’s viewpoint, Steorn’s creation of an SPDC falls somewhere between the models devised by Goldcorp and by Wind-up Records. Certainly there has been an enlisting of experts, although the SPDC is not fully open-sourced (thus, the “Private” in its title). There have been hints, vaguely set forth because of NDAs, that the company has not been entirely forthcoming in sharing its proprietary knowledge. While the forum itself has remained open, moderators have on occasion used their power of censoring/”sinking” threads and banning members. If the bane of dot-coms is poor business planning, the bane of network societies is a failure of moderation, whether that failure is expressed as under- or over-restrictive moderation. Hybrid enterprises like the one the forum is based upon run particular risks. Monetary capital and human capital are not always easily synchronized. Commenting on the failure of his Electric Minds magazine/web conferencing site, Rheingold sums up his own “dotgone” experience: “Venture capital, I concluded, might be a good way to ramp up a Yahoo or create a market for a kind of technology product that never existed before. But perhaps it isn’t a healthy way to grow a social enterprise” (qtd. Lovink, Dark 7).
Steorn has pursued “a kind of technology product that never existed before” at the same time it has sponsored a decidedly lively social enterprise. Indeed, now that the commodity is in suspense, social interactions have become far more operative than magnetic ones. To reverse the old General Electric motto, process may be Steorn’s most important product. In this vein, a more skeptical analyst might conclude that Steorn’s goal all along was not to perfect a perpetual motion device but to achieve a different form of “overunity.” Thus, as a website-producer, Steorn has found the perfect means to keep its product in play, a product that may be nothing more than an advertising of its ability to garner hits and participation from a worldwide audience. As Terranova indicates, the liveliest sites are those that create multifunctional modalities: “Users keep a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations, and sometimes making the jump to collaborators. The objective is to have you consume bandwidth” (49). Harnessing the desire and drive of the forum, the Steorn Exploit draws on it to provide, in Terranova’s terms, “the labor that literally animates the commodity” in a post-Fordist world.
This animation takes a variety of forms, some of them parodic.[2] Shortly after the demo fiasco, the forum broke out in a chorus of limericks concerning the Orbo and the Steorn Exploit. These limericks operated like viral intrusions upon the Steorn Exploit, serving as running, gunning commentaries on issues, controversies, claims, and arguments that have arisen in the forum threads. At times, they have also functioned as micronarratives of the forum experience (such as The Schrödinger Cat Cycle and The Adventures of Orby Cycle). That Steorn by and large allows such postings on its website might seem surprising; however, they serve in their own way to keep Orbo in play. After all, if forum members’ amusing “theory” about the London demo failure is valid, Steorn may very well need a replacement for its “power source failure”:
Now Orby was the hamster ideal, The best of his breed on the wheel. To London he went For the Steorn event But escaped out the door with a squeal.
The proliferation of limericks on the forum supplies yet one more level to the social enterprise. They keep their numerous writers occupied, the human equivalent of a hard-driving “hamster work force” supplying Orbo and the Steorn Exploit new spins. As long as there is buzz, the source of generation is no great matter; indeed, as long as they’re caged, they’re engaged. Terranova characterizes late capitalism as “the field that both sustains free labor and exhausts it” (50). As McKenzie Wark might note, the company can harness this energy as long as it maintains “a surplus of desire and the scarcity of the desired object” (para. 309). Paradoxically, even suspicions about the company’s motives have served to drive the system along. As equal opportunity “co-conspirators,” forum members are encouraged to create threads and spin out queries. “Make links, search for truth,” as Dean would put it (Secret54). The production of linkages, moreover, is perpetual: “Action is postponed until a thorough study is undertaken, until all facts are known” (162-63). For Dean, such postponement “is a permanent deferral,” a depoliticizing, de-activating strategy, since the search for facts is endless and, worse yet, generates even more facts (163). For Steorn, it is exactly the kind of spin-doctoring that keeps the Orbo a going concern. No word from Steorn’s anonymous and sequestered Jury? There’s the consolation of a “memo” intercepted from one of its members and forwarded to us:
We're reporting in this memo, Sean, On Orbo's bizarre stop/go motion We've found only pre-Copernican Models capable of furnishin' Steorn's eccentric and retrograde notion.
Lest one get the notion that forum members simply serve as an ant-colony of dispensable laborers for the Steorn Exploit or spend all their time crafting limericks, we should note several members have turned into financial analysts and investigative reporters in researching the company, particularly since its failed demo. In a blog entry entitled “Steorn and free energy: the plot thickens,” Eric Berger points out that Steorn started out as an e-business company “that saw its market vanish during the dot.com bust.” He speculates that Steorn’s current campaign is simply a “re-tooling” of itself as a Web-marketing company. In this scenario, Steorn is “using the ‘free energy’ promotion as a platform to show future clients how it can leverage print advertising and a slick Web site to promote its products and ideas. If so, it’s a brilliant strategy.” Steorn may have thus avoided the fate of what Lovink describes as “Dotgone entrepreneurs [who] lacked patience to work on sustainable models . . . . The rule was: become a first mover, spend a lot of money, build traffic, get a customer base, and then figure out how to make money” (Dark 355). The company can certainly show potential clients it has the ability to create a buzz, garner endless hits, generate an impressive e-mailing list, and engage a virtual workforce to do its bidding (and even unbidding). As many firms realized in the waning of the dot-com boom, there is a “hard-core logic of the digital age: attract users, or become toast” (Dark 161). As Terranova indicates, “the best Web site, the best way to stay visible and thriving on the Web, is to turn your site into a space that is not only accessed, but somehow built by its users” (48). Generative, the forum weaves discussion thread after discussion thread in building up its own elaborate, labyrinthine structure. While many might object to the ethics of the Exploit, from the perspective of bandwidth consumption and the advertising of its own personalized widget, Steorn has proven a remarkable success.
Quoting an IBM billboard–“Bad ideas don’t get better online” (Dark 348), Lovink observes that “The Internet has been a gift to charlatans, hypemeisters, and merchants of vapors” (350). Initially, at least, Steorn evaded such characterizations, as it seemed to be “marketing” altruism more than any product, particularly since the Orbo was as yet unnamed. All we knew until shortly before the demo was that its dimensions measured “bigger than a breadbox.” Steorn’s promise to allow Third World countries unlimited access to its technology (and others to employ it at a modest licensing fee) situates it firmly in the gift economy, the realm of “nonmarket relations” existing outside the neo-liberal state and its vested interest in the capitalist enterprise.[3] Client companies desirous of a strong web presence might be impressed by Steorn’s legerdemain. Protean, Steorn has simply resurrected its former self as “an expert in the field of technology risk management.” Thus, in its 2001 website, Steorn noted how many companies in this field suffer cost overruns, “with almost a third of projects being cancelled before completion.” Steorn offered its services to those who do not want “to fall prey to a combination of poor management, unrealistic expectations, unclear objectives, technology incompetence and lack of planning.” What greater risk to manage than an enterprise promising a technological breakthrough supplying an endless source of energy? Given the millions of Euros invested thus far in the company, an advertising budget of ₤75,000 is certainly modest, considering the amount of publicity and interest it has generated for the company. When one throws in whatever value-added profit Steorn has garnered from the free labor of SPDC members, cost management appears in an even more positive light.
Speculations about what might be going on in the company add further spins to the Exploit. Alsetalokin,[4] for one, has speculated that the company may be a victim of an internal scam. However some forum members had a problem imagining the whole company falling under the spell of one person. Wouldn’t one whistleblower have stepped forward during these four years of “development,” if only to save the company from ignominious demise? (especially given that the whole project had been spun off Steorn’s efforts to develop a micro power source for an ATM fraud-detection device). As csblinky queried: “If the ship was sinking don’t you think one of the employees would have come public? How could a whole organization suffer from mass psychosis?” An answer from popular culture comes to mind. Janine, the Ghostbusters’ secretary, is interviewing a job candidate for the much overworked team:
JANINE: Do you believe in U.F.O's, astral projection, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, full-trance mediums, telekinetic movement, black and/or white magic, pyramidology, the theory of Atlantis, the Loch Ness Monster, or in general in spooks, specters, wraiths, geists and ghosts?
WINSTON: Not really. However, if there's a semi-regular paycheck in it I'll believe anything you say. (Ramis and Aykroyd)
Still other members, following alsetalokin’s Hamsters-on-a-Wheel Theory, explored the possibility that Steorn’s enterprise has all along been a disguised social experiment, the forum members mere unwitting subjects for a future documentary (or, more likely, a mockumentary). Csblinky, however, pointed out some drawbacks to this theory: “If the subjects are the forum members, and who else is there, nobody that I know of has been questioned to find out how his socio-economic level and psycho-sexual Kinsey Index correlates with his reaction to each misstep, or whatever it is they look for in such studies; so it’s hard for me to see how that works.” Actually, one does not need a psycho-sexual Kinsey Index to delve into the psyches of many forum members, as they display few inhibitions. For example, shunyacetas writes:
My darling, I want you to see A way to surpass Unity: We'll just thrash about Slow in and fast out We're two--in nine months we'll be three!
Even the more risqué examples probably would not register all that high on the Kinsey Index, as only someone whose daily work attire includes double-breasted pocket-protectors would fully appreciate the eroticism of “object relations” entailed in this limerick from Evolvealready:
Said Orbo to diode array "You're fun and a very good lay. The sex was so hot That my sticky spot[5] Won't be sticky the rest of the day."
Whether scientific breakthrough or social documentary, the Steorn Exploit will never want for spin doktorsto keep it going full tilt. Of course, there is even an outside chance McCarthy & Company might still win validation and fame; after all, as cloud camper points out:
Sean McC has nothing to worry about. Thomas Edison and the celebrated British physicist Lord Kelvin both agreed that Nikola Tesla's ideas were the work of the devil himself. They later apologized after AC electricity was proven and practical.
Rumors have even surfaced that members of the SPDC have been shown a video of a famous physicist extolling the virtues of Steorn’s device. In one thread, “Could MIT’s Walter Lewin be a Juror?” fatspidr links the forum to one of his lectures, in which he gives both a mathematical and practical demonstration of some spooky effects that seem to defy the logic of CoE. To complicate matters, Steorn seems to have attracted millions more in Euros from several new investors. This fact immediately lit up several query nodes on the forum, which resulted in several investigations into who was investing in Steorn and what might have led people to make such investments in the face of Orbo’s failure.
Even the worst-case scenario, utter and ignominious disgrace, may not require any “face-saving” gesture, at least in cstru4’s estimation:
They don't have to skip town weighed down by bags of ill gotten booty and book in for a long and arduous session of Brazilian plastic surgery. They can say sorry, but it was a legitimate endeavour and anyway, we virtually TOLD you not to believe us.
Indeed, even utter and ignominious disgrace may have been part of Steorn’s long-range plan. For example, in a thread entitled “When was the last thing you saw/heard from Steorn?” Big Oil Rep advances the theory that the Steorn Exploit may have been all along a “‘Producers’ type tax relief scam . . . . The Orbo could be the equivalent of ‘Spring Time for Hitler’–something that’s so ridiculous it’s bound to fail (or so the plan goes) and still leave investors better off.”
The Psychological Exploit: Cogito ergo sum(us)
Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous company: say that, like Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face of hissing incredulity; but so is the contriver of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the spirits by this sort of test . . . . Shall we say, “Let the ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth”? Why, we are the beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just judgments in separate human breasts–separate yet combined. Even steam-engines could not have got made without that condition, but must have stayed in the mind of James Watt.
–George Eliot (Daniel Deronda 451)
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
–Homer Simpson
In Aliens in America, Dean finds that alternative sciences such as Ufology and paranormal investigations “insert themselves into the interstices of medicine, psychology, biology, religion, astronomy, and ecology” (to name just a few realms; 6). Not surprisingly, Steorn’s own alternative science, its challenge to the status quo, initially was inserted into the interstices of the scientific and business enterprises. Inadvertently, Steorn’s Exploit has unfolded within yet another interstice: that gap between the technological and the biological. The forum has taken on a life of its own, a hybrid existence, as it were. In the course of the last few years, Steorn’s forum has begun to operate like the psynet described by Ben Goertzel in “World Wide Brain: Self-Organizing Internet Intelligence as the Actualization of the Collective Unconscious.” Part of the larger webmind system, psynet “is a self-organizing network of information-carrying agents” (314). An artificial information storage and processing system linking servers on the Internet, the psynet manages “mobile agents” whose job is to create new links and provide feedback. It thereby fills in gaps in its own knowledge base and attains to a sense of introspection by “querying itself” about its deficiencies and even swapping sections of its memory with other servers (316). For example, not long after one forum member thought that s/he remembered Sean making a particular claim about Orbo at some point in the past, other members became activated, supplying a link to the comment and thereby initiating a new connection in the communal cyber-neural circuitry. At one point, members feared that Steorn might erase the hundreds of threads constituting the forum’s “past,” the hardware of its archival memory. Not to worry–one forum member already had designed a bot to make its way through the forum’s labyrinthine archive so that it would be recorded for easy recall and placed elsewhere on the web, out of Steorn’s proprietory reach. Like any biological entity, the mindshare composing the forum operates in ways to maximize its survival.
The psynet can be flexible and adaptive because, as a stochastic system, it “is allowed to discover its own structure, within given constraints, rather than having structure imposed on it by rigid, preconceived rules” (314). Cross-referencing its own processing of information with that of other psynet units, a particular psynet operates by “an algorithm drawn by mathematical models of human social interaction” (316). Because of the relatively random nature of these operations, psynet displays the emergent properties of self-organization associated with the operations of “chaotic” systems. Traditional divisions of communication–human to human; human to machine–are breached here. Within the larger Webmind system, Goertzel finds a “gradation between ‘social’ and ‘intra-brain’ interaction . . . opposed to the rigid division between individual and society that we experience as humans” (316). Describing a “symbiosis” between humans and machines, Goertzel demonstrates how the system’s ready access to nonproprietory information allows it “to nudge the information at the readiest disposal of individual humans and divisions in certain directions, based on its inferences and its own emergent understanding” (317). As Marc A. Smith explains to information society sociologist Howard Rheingold, such arrangements–like that of text messaging–make it “possible for more people to pool resources. And ‘more people pooling resources in new ways’ is the history of civilization in…’ Pause. ‘…seven words'” (Smart Mobs 31).
A massive parallel processing center, the forum has evolved in some respects into the Webmind described by Goertzel. An important proviso: This single brain does not operate like a Cartesian theater, with some localized operator managing its inputs, a model Robert Hassan opposes in associating it with “‘the school of guru interpretation'” (46):
The idea of the network as a "global brain," even as analogy, does not work because it suggests a centrality, a unity and an overall coherence, that simply does not exist. Nevertheless, the notion that the network represents in some new way the living, technologized expression of hundreds of millions of people is useful as a framework of analysis. (46-47)
As Ray Kurzweil explains, such “singularity” is comparable to the “apparently intelligent design of termite and ant colonies . . . [which] Despite their clever and intricate design . . . have no master architects” (151). Admittedly, “what fires together wires together,” in both neurological, entymological, and computer models. The result is far more interesting and adaptive than some Cartesian “ghost-in-the-machine” working from a central command center. Roger Beaumont, author of War, Chaos, and History, criticizes similar “big picture,” rigid command-control-communications models that “create a false sense of the high echelon’s ability to exercise rational control over a vast range of complex combat dynamics” (9). Confronted with what William James described as the “blooming, buzzing” confusion of the world, the human brain can never exercise full control over so much constantly shifting input, no matter how much it prides itself on its “high echelon” status. In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett maintains that the single brain processes information more along the lines of a Multiple Drafts Model: “at any point in time there are multiple ‘drafts’ of narrative fragments at various stages in various places in the brain” (113). These drafts keep the brain in what William Calvin labels a “scenario-spinning” mode (Dennett 114). The individual “mobile agents” of the forum, linked through discussion threads constituting query nodes, their connections boosted and enriched by the electronic medium, have begun to display properties of Dennett’s multiple drafts model. This webmind tries to make sense of reality through a narrative it must continually draft and re-draft: “Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial revision'” (111).
The information that Steorn’s Exploit was a failure at the physics level caused the forum to coalesce more than ever into that complex pattern of query nodes and specialty neural circuits that Dennett uses to describe the brain’s functioning:
In our brains there is a cobbled-together collection of specialist brain circuits, which, thanks to a family of habits inculcated partly by culture and partly by individual self-exploration, conspire together to produce a more or less orderly, more or less effective, more or less well-designed virtual machine, the Joycean machine. By yoking these independently evolved specialist organs together in common cause, and thereby giving their union vastly enhanced powers, this virtual machine, this software of the brain, performs a sort of internal political miracle: It creates a virtual captain of the crew, without elevating any one of them to long-term dictatorial power. Who's in charge? First one coalition then another, shifting in ways that are not chaotic thanks to good meta-habits that tend to entrain coherent, purposeful sequences rather than an interminable helter-skelter power grab. (228)
These coalitions consider almost every topic imaginable, including the possibility of their own singularity. In a thread entitled “Will you live to witness the singularity?” this Webmind considers the possibility of immortality. Evolvealready argues “it won’t be possible to sustain life, because even the electron / neutron / proton won’t hold together.” Even assuming we can overcome the entropy problem, he notes: “With finite mass in the universe there’s only a finite number of states. I’m not sure living forever really counts if you’re caught up in a giant loop.” Conceding that entropy might be reversible, he points out that unfortunately “the other side has an old gravy stain and is in an ugly plaid.” Mr. Flora thinks he has found a way out of dissolution: “The solution is for us to create a new universe via the Big Bang principle, then figure out some way to transfer ourselves (or our consciousness, anyway) into this new universe.” Evolvealready quickly responds, “We’ll get a man right on it!”
The crisis brought on by the failure of the Orbo has served to accelerate the forum’s multi-track editorial processing functions. Thus, in its efforts to make sense of its situation in a post-Orbo reality, the forum has begun a process of scenario-spinning to reorient itself to this changed reality that no longer answers to its expectations. This process is reminiscent of Francis Crick’s “searchlight” function for the thalamus, which works by “differentially arousing or enhancing particular specialist areas [of the brain], recruiting them to current purposes” (Dennett 274). For the collective of the forum, incoming data and “sense impressions” now have to be processed and reality tested. When faced with feedback contradicting its sense of the world out there, the forum can rely on various internal and external agents to reassess its position. For example, Dr. Mike, the eyes, ears, and even legs of the forum, was delegated to go to London to inspect the Orbo during its July 5th demo at the Kinetica Museum. Supposedly, Dr. Mike would have the opportunity to test the Orbo and “hit it with a hammer” if he wanted, as per the promise of unlimited access from Sean McCarthy, Steorn’s leading spokesman.[6] Like a savvy fight promoter, McCarthy had been spotted just a day or two earlier sporting a t-shirt boldly announcing the upcoming bout between his company and the laws of physics–“CEO vs. CoE.” Members of the forum were worked up to a fever pitch. It seemed that the secret truly would be made public. Translucency at last!
Dr. Mike returned without having had a chance to inspect the device. After the hype about Orbo stopped and the lights went out, forum members were left with nothing but a “container for the fantasy of [over]unity” (Dean, Secret48). HedyL, invoking the decoherence principle of quantum theory, suggested a scientific explanation for Orbo’s no-show:
They say Orbo owes half its existence
To a function of quantum resistance.
From a cloud it appears
When anyone nears--
Whereupon it spins nobody knows whence!
Without reference to the quantum realm, Dr. Mike summed up his own findings in this Final Report:
My conclusion after going through all this is that Steorn is neither hoax nor scam. It is delusion. The reason it seems surreal is because it is surreal--we are the real part of someone else's imagination.
External (in)validation soon came from another source. Reporting for the BBC, Professor Sir Eric Ash was able to interview McCarthy soon after the failed demo. McCarthy, he argued, had convinced himself that scientific “dogma” such as the First Law of Thermodynamics could be challenged and overturned in the same fashion as religious or political dogmas. Sir Ash’s diagnosis? “I believe that Mr. McCarthy is truly convinced of the validity of his invention. It is, in my view, a case of prolonged self-deception.”
While some members criticized Dr. Mike for weighing in beyond his expertise by offering a psychological rather than a physics diagnosis of Steorn’s failure, his linking of McCarthy’s state of mind to the forum’s own collective consciousness merits consideration. If nothing else, the demo’s failure has led to a focusing of the forum’s attention both on McCarthy’s motivations and on its own role in the unfolding of the Steorn Exploit. As the most salient spokesperson for Steorn, the pre-demo McCarthy was the locus of the forum’s attention; he was ever-present, loquacious, a mentor and guide in our deliberations. (The word “Steorn” translates as “mentor.”) The post-demo McCarthy has all but disappeared from the forum, driving its members to question both his motives and their own complicity as “the real part of someone else’s imagination.” One might ask, for example, “Why have we followed–and many of us still follow–the stop/start ‘progress’ of Steorn’s fantastic story?” But, then, how does one emerge from a narrative that has incorporated one as a character in its script? To be written voluntarily out of that script is a form of suicide or at least a difficult withdrawal from an addiction. Several members discuss the difficulties of such withdrawal. Speccy remarks: “I ‘quit’ this forum last year after asking Crank [a moderator] to disable my account. Within an hour I emailed her to reinstate it, I couldn’t help myself.” Crastney admits: “I’ve tried to quit before as well . . . soon as I’m having my first coffee at work I end up back though.” Maryyugo, another “quitter,” sums up the attraction: “How’s that old saying go? Everyone likes a train wreck?”
Under stress, the forum’s communally oriented mind threatens to break down, showing itself subject to the individual psyche’s lapses into paranoia, as when Grimer speculates that mrsean2k might be “a Steorn employee, and if there is some kind of scam or deception you could be part of it.” With its own captain having “jumped ship,” the forum has had to fall back on its own resources to chart a new course on now unfamiliar waters. Threads initiated by any one of numerous “virtual captains” attempt to reframe the Steorn narrative to coincide with the new data and “impressions” that contradict the earlier worldview. The consensus has veered toward the notion that McCarthy was well meaning but self-deluded into thinking Steorn had discovered the Holy Grail of Overunity. As one forum member observed, the closer any perpetual motionist comes to 99.9% efficiency, the easier it is to convince oneself that just a little tweaking here and there will push the mechanism over the hump. Cyrilsmith has come forth with a step-by-step scenario as to why the demo failed, suggesting that what had been presented as tangible and real might have more properly qualified as a thought-experiment all along. He concedes that Steorn believes what it has is real, but it “doesn’t exist as a product, merely as a number of curious scientific experiments.” Steorn’s claims of efficiency are merely “extrapolations” for an as-yet-to-be-built working device. Rather than display the early models, which “all used intermittent motion, stop-start, fast-in slow-out” principles, Steorn decided to use a more transparent, “lash up” device designed by the SPDC. While this device allegedly ran for eight hours in the lab, Steorn did not test it long enough to be rigorous. Once Steorn’s engineers arrived in London and set up their equipment, they could not get the device to operate continuously. Against McCarthy’s expectations, it failed. “Irreplicable” damage was done. Predictable disarray ensued. Statistical anomalies that seemed to favor the device’s output earlier now turned against it with the inevitability of friction and gravity. Citing forum member Paul Lowrance, cyrilsmith sums up: “‘If you don’t know why it works you don’t know why it fails.'”
For some, haunted and undaunted, the forum has become a psychic staging place for their own efforts to replicate Steorn’s “results” or perhaps to succeed at their own formulations. Overconfident offers a Sleepwalkersversion of how he spent a few months working from “a couple of blurry photos appearing on the net,” as he tried to understand McCarthy’s discussions of “magnetic viscosity, mumetal, fast in/slow out” principles:
So I started gathering a bunch of these little puzzle pieces and attempted to fit them together into a bigger picture that might make sense. Still the skeptic, but I was determined to figure out what was behind all this. I even signed up as a forum user so I could start interacting. One day, waking from an afternoon nap, I had a vision (dream, daydream, hallucination, whatever you want to call it). I saw 2 magnets, and could visualize their interacting fields as they approached each other in a variety of configurations. In light of this vision, I went back over some of the puzzle pieces (clues) and several of them suddenly seemed to fall into place. I posted a couple scenarios here, back in the January timeframe. I had a couple positive comments, but mostly I was criticised or ignored. But that was OK. I was still pretty skeptical myself.
Factuurexpress responded to Overconfident’s thought-experiment in blunter terms: “The problem with your vision Overc. is that you fail to see the difference between things you move around in your head and things generated by the VR logic engine.” These distinctions overlap VR logic with the logic of a perpetual VR machine where, as Dean suggests, one can escape a dubious “reality” many times over by “don[ning] the glove and goggles” (Aliens 109). Although “cobbled together,” the forum does exercise a self-correcting function, a reality principle in a sense. Overconfident can find consolation in the fact that “Devil’s sonatas,” the snake-tailed benzene ring, and new printing processes have all emerged from the respective dreams of Giuseppe Tartini, August Kekule, and William Blake.
While the forum Webmind is self-generating in many respects, Steorn has had a hand in determining elements of its overall parameters. One could find no better instruction manual for diagramming the Steorn Exploit than Dean’s Publicity’s Secret.Arguing that publicity “requires the secret,” Dean cites Slavoj Žižek’s identification of ideology as the “‘generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and the non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as changes in this relationship'” (qtd. 17). There is almost a quantum dimension here. As one forum member, loreman, opines in a thread devoted to limericks:
The Orbo exists like the cat of Schrödinger, its stunning éclat lies betwixt and between the unseen and the seen So Sean keeps it tucked under his hat!
In retrospect, it is clear that Steorn has been exploiting elements of Žižek’s generative matrix. For example, Steorn published its “findings” in a business journal, findings that should have more properly been submitted with documentation to a peer-review science journal. Here, Steorn invoked the visible/non-visible dimensions of that matrix. Strangely enough, a company that claimed no academic would risk his or her career by publicly affirming the existence of a perpetual motion device then proceeded to select a pool of twenty-two jurors from over one thousand qualified applicants, refused to identify who they were, and then required them to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements concerning any observations, favorable or unfavorable, made in the course of what has turned out to be a lengthy, no-end-in-sight investigation. Thus, after the initial splash of publicity, apparently designed to draw in the maximum number of forum participants, Steorn imposed a veil of secrecy on the project. Jury deliberations were supposed to be released by the end of 2007, but the “perpetual” element of the Orbo seems to refer more to a perpetual deferment than to any sort of motion towards an end.
The “sutured” social network that Steorn created evidences an ambivalence arising in the gap that Dean locates between publicity and the secret. Citing Bentham, she finds three social divisions operating here. The lower two are a public-supposed-to-believe and a public-supposed-to-know. What props up these two classes is a “judging class” whose judgment is “constant and certain, but . . . suspended” (Secret 20). This judging class allows the other two classes to indulge in the amusement that arises from publicity. True to Dean’s instruction manual, Steorn has split its audience into three more or less similar divisions. The anonymous jurors, working in sequestration, constitute Dean’s all-important judging class, and while we are assured they are highly credentialed and impartial, we know little of whatever (if any) judging process they have undertaken; in fact we might very well qualify their judgment as suspended. Certain Steorn insiders and censors, such as babcat, Magnatrix, and crank, claim to have seen Steorn’s device in operation, thereby occupying the position of a public-supposed-to-know. We should include here as well the SPDC, whose members allegedly have been given information about Orbo but who also have signed NDAs not to reveal what, if anything, they have found out in the process. Beyond and below the twenty-two jurors, two hundred or so SPDC members, and a handful of censors and sympathizers, is the public-supposed-to-believe. Cobbled-together, the elements of Steorn’s forum not only perform the continuous “multiple drafts” of Dennett’s model of the brain, they also try to arrive at Eliot’s “just judgments [made] in separate human breasts–separate yet combined.”
Steorn has followed Dean’s instruction manual almost to the letter. Focusing on Reinhart Kosselleck’s discussion of Masons and their lodges, Dean notes that “lodges were secret inner spaces within the absolutist state, spaces that were separated from the political by the very mysteries whose protections enabled the lodges to serve indirectly as a counter to the state.” Practicing “ritualized enactments of nonfamilial, nonmarket relations outside of the state,” the lodges “provided forms of association and experiences of connection beyond those delimited by absolutism” (25). As in Dean’s discussion of the Enlightenment novel’s engendering of reading circles and salons, the internet has allowed for “new forms of association and experiences of connection” among forum members eager to discuss their views. The SPDC has an aura of Freemasonry, where “Private people came together as a public in secret” (30), here as a challenge to the “absolutism” of thermodynamic laws. Those who have pursued Steorn’s Orbo narrative would recognize their quest in Žižek’s description of drive, which
stands for the paradoxical possibility that the subject, forever prevented from achieving his Goal (and thus fully satisfying his desire), can nevertheless find satisfaction in the very circular movement of repeatedly missing its object, of circulating around it. (Dean 116)
Even the company’s CEO became caught up in a logical entanglement of his own devising. In a follow-up report on the failed demo, Physics Worlddescribes McCarthy & Company as
Undaunted . . . Steorn plans to rebuild and defeat physics another day, although McCarthy does take one consolation from this apparent setback. "If I were in the business of doing tricks," he says, "then the demonstration would have worked." (Schirber 9)
In a system of twisted logic, the proof of Orbo’s authenticity can only be evidenced by its failure! Like Polonius trying to figure out Hamlet, McCarthy has created an endless tautological loop, leaving his audience somewhere between “Suspend” and “Perpend”:
Mad let us grant him then, and now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause:
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.
Perpend.
—Hamlet (Act 2.2: 100-105)
As the myth of perpetual motion historically has stirred up the desire for power and control, it was only a matter of time before one of the most malevolent of spirits was summoned forth from the depths of the forum’s collective unconscious.
The Abduction Exploit: Enter Herr Doktor Mabuse
The interesting question for me is not whether a global brain is developing. It clearly is. But will this growing global brain turn out to be sane or insane?
–Peter Russell (qtd. Goertzel, 321)
Dr. Mabuse recommends that you seek medical attention at his offices soon. You have delusions of competence!
–Doktor Mabuse (resident forum shrink and advice columnist)
If the Webmind would troll long enough, there is no telling what it might catch. Witness, in the world of fisheries, the occasional capture of the “extinct” coelacanth. No doubt, the virtual world is populated by a congeries of creatures whose activities at times defy all description. Paul D. Miller, alias DJ Spooky, notes the positive elements of the breakdown of prescribed social identity boundaries on the net: “creating this identity allowed me to spin narratives on several fronts at the same time and to produce persona as shareware” (13). In many ways, such “shareware” guarantees a free flow of information and anonymous risk-taking that make internet communication exhilarating. Sometimes, however, one of these identities becomes so disinhibited as to spin out of all control.
In late April of 2007, at the height of the forum’s enthusiasm for Steorn’s project, a vile, malevolent avatar appeared in the figure of Herr Doktor Mabuse. Actually, we can more properly speak of the reappearance of Dr. Mabuse, as he was originally the creation of novelist Norbert Jacques, whose pulp-villain was later taken up by Fritz Lang in his very popular film Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler or “the Gambler” (1920). A master of manipulation bent upon world conquest, Mabuse has powers of hypnosis, often duping his victims into unwillingly doing his bidding. As his Wikipedia entry explains, his “plans are foiled only because he himself interferes with them, as if he is trying to bring about his own downfall.” This self-destructiveness confirms the opinion of those who see his name as a pun on je m’abuse.Like some contemporary film villains, Dr. Mabuse seems indestructible, often turning up in new contexts and a disguised form, but with the same modus operandi and goals. Exploiting Steorn’s own Exploit, Mabuse is both viral and alien in his operations. He represents a contemporary refinement on the concept of the exploit in that he seeks to exploit the exploiter’s own vulnerability:
exploit n. [originally cracker slang] 1. A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the network. The Ping O' Deathis a famous exploit. 2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an exploit in sense 1.
—Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001)
Jargon File
Like the threads of viral, parodic limericks and reprogrammed folk and pop songs occasioned by Orbo’s failure, Doktor Mabuse attacks his host, deprogramming its agenda and its code. The Orbo has been stolen, replaced by a fake. Dr. Mike has been abducted. Steorn itself suffers an identity theft, reprogrammed from world savior to world conqueror and annihilator.
The forum’s own reincarnation of Mabuse plays remarkably true both to Jacques’s and Lang’s realizations. An oracle on the scale of a small-town newspaper advice columnist mixed in with a megalomaniacal dictator, Dr. Mabuse began by firing off a dire threat against Dr. Mike:
Dr. Mike. . .
. . . this is Dr. Mabuse. ARCH CRIMINAL!
Do you not recognize one of my brethren? Sean McCarthy is the PIED PIPER OF FREE ENERGY!
He shall destroy your mind!
You are forbidden TO GO TO IRELAND OR THE U.K.!
Remain in your country . . . remain in your OBJECTIVE SCIENTIFIC PARADISE!
Or you will face my WRATH!
Initial responses to the appearance of Dr. Mabuse were quite negative, as when Skeptical exclaimed: “Oh no… the loonies have started to arrive!” or when MassiveAttack lamented: “This is a physics issue? What a waste of bandwidth.” Of course, consumption of bandwidth, as Terranova points out, is essential to maintaining a website as a going concern. Babcat, the most loyal of Steorn’s believers (and the most naïve according to some), fired off an immediate reply to Mabuse’s megalomaniacal ramblings:
Dr. Ma-Screw-Loose,
Well, Steorn already knows that after Validation Day there will almost certainly be competition with other companies that will produce overunity devices. However, I have a feeling the collective intelligence of you and your associates could not figure out how to put together a model plane much less a free energy device. Steorn has nothing to worry about from your effort to "corner" the free energy market!
Soon, however, other members began to find themselves ineluctably written into Mabuse’s twisted narrative. In a thread that appeared shortly after the failed Demo ominously entitled “Mabuse, you soulless evil bastiche!” N4Apounding revealed that s/he had been hot on the nefarious Mabuse’s trail:
Once again, you have orchestrated an incomprehensibly complex plan designed to cause maximum pain and suffering to people everywhere.
I nearly caught up with you in Chile last week, when you were draining that lake (<www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/04/lake_mystery_cracked>). But of course that was only a diversion for your main plan in London executed the last couple of days! The candle goes to you this time, Herr Doktor, but one day...
(BTW, I demand that you release Dr. Mike and allow him to make his report. And no replacing him with a robot/clone either! The net is closing in on you Mabuse, cooperate while you still can.)
Later, in a reply addressed to “Meine Kinder,” Dr. Mabuse claimed that it is he alone who controls “das Orbo.” Asserting that he had pilfered the real Orbo, the malevolent Doktor indicated that the July 5th failed demo had been a plot of his all along:
My demo was an earth-shattering success, the likes of which will haunt the nightmares of the dear American Pudding Head Herr Doktor Mike for all eternity. He is so warped from the experience that he actually believes my stooge McCarthy is the sick one. Speaking of which, pay no attention to my Capo McCarthy. . . he merely did as he was told.
Calling the Doktor’s perceived bluff, Overconfident asked if he would “kindly send me that Orbo you pilfered from Kinetica last week? There are a couple tests I want to run.” Not to be outdone, Mabuse replied: “Certainly, herr confident. How many supermodel whores have you for collateral? And it shall be a loan signed with a contract in blood, you understand.”
Mabuse may well serve as a necessary corrective to our private technotopia, drawn as we have been into what Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein describe as cyberspace’s “seduction of empowerment” (123). Like the prize-winning, frenzied shopper filling up a cart on a seemingly endless free-shopping spree, the members had taken Steorn’s offer of a blank free-energy cheque at face value. Doktor Mabuse provides an extreme example of that Other, a Morlock preventing the forum from descending into an Eloi-like love-fest. The totalizing vision of a world without scarcity powered by perpetually functioning generators threatened to abstract our virtual community from stubbornly persistent real world conditions (although some speculated that the heat generated from such devices would become a serious problem in itself). Michele Willson identifies a tendency for virtual communities to suffer “a ‘thinning’ of the complexities of human engagement to the level of one-dimensional transactions and a detaching of the user from the political and social responsibilities of the ‘real space’ environment” (655). Too many forum members had bought into Steorn’s branding of itself as another instance of the Irish saving civilization. Mabuse reminded us that Prometheus could just as well be a megalomaniac, and the Orbo just one more product in the long product line of philosopher stones. Now we are forced to face the possibility that utopian fantasies in the virtual domain may simply express the desire to get something for nothing. Perhaps we too must submit ourselves to the principle of the Conservation of Psychic Energy.
Apart from being the fly in the ointment, Mabuse offered the forum some humorous diversion, a kind of tragicomic relief. In a new development, forum member breter started a thread entitled “Ask Dr. Mabuse: Unauthorized.” He argued that Mabuse was one of the more interesting recent phenomena appearing on the forum, someone whose “views on world domination and social upheaval can bring us insight upon the human condition.” More adept at addressing inhuman conditions, Doktor Mabuse dispensed advice with the tenderness and empathy of someone sprinkling cayenne pepper on an open wound. For example, 007 asked: “Can you do something about Ellen DeGeneres?”–only to receive the following response: “Du Dumme Sau. Your fragile MI6 ego could not get past this man-woman who refused your bangers und masch.” When Dirty Teeth asked “What should/can I do to reduce future stupid acts? . . . . . Other than visiting this thread I mean,” Mabuse’s reply was “Swallowing a cyanide capsule works just fine.” Threatening to employ a cheese grater to rap repeatedly the knuckles of one forum member, Mabuse scoffs at any forum member’s expression of morality: “I assure you, lust and desire for power transcend all your petit bourgeois so-called moral spectrums.” He signs off, “My best wishes on your suburban prison existence.”
Forum members began to speculate about the identity of Herr Doktor Mabuse. Was he a past member, perhaps banned from the forum, resurfacing now in the guise of a deranged avatar? Was he a rogue Steorn engineer thrown off-kilter after realizing the “magnetude” of Orbo’s upcoming failure? Was he a mere proxy for Steorn, already preparing the forum for the Orbo’s failure and beginning to plant the idea in their minds months before the demo? At least one forum member, gaby de wilde, had earlier felt the ocular influence of Mabuse, noting: “I couldn’t help but feel under your influence while watching camera 4 and the spinning London Eye prior to the demo. What subliminal message did you program into me? I’ve had several lapses in memory lately and can’t account for my time.” Denying nothing, the Doktor reveled in his method: “Mabuse’s hobby is to break down the so-called ‘reason’ of der volk. You should know this, Herr Gaby. Especially since yours was gone long, long ago. Mabuse begrudgingly gives his respects.” In retrospect, the four cameras trained upon the no-show Orbo recall the last version of the Mabuse saga: The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1959), in which the reconstituted villain employs four cameras to spy on his prey. The movie’s locale is the Hotel Luxor “built by the Nazis in 1944 as a potential stopping place for foreign diplomats, and . . . equipped with hidden television cameras in every public and private room” (Greenspun). The penetrating, hypnotic gaze of Dr. Mabuse is everywhere.
Perhaps Doktor Mabuse can be explained as an upwelling of the darkest part of the forum’s collective unconscious. For example, in a thread entitled “How many of you have had dreams of Steorn/’Orbo’?” Zante discusses an excursion into dreamland in which s/he saw a tank and a tractor, both bearing the Orbo logo: “I saw the tractor as a symbol for the potential of agricultural use and the tank for one of war.” Sadly, the perpetual motion device that members turned over in their heads and dreamed about for a good year seems to have faltered, slowed down, and congealed into an idée fixe now darkly manifested in the baleful figure of Doktor Mabuse. At any rate, members soon learned that any attempt to probe the psyche of this Teutonic Marat Sade should only be undertaken while wearing a hazmat suit. Baiting him only stirred up the muck, as when Probus asked: “How was the malorca koma-trinken, herr doktor? had some fun? how many not-so-innocent teens did you vernaschen there?” Never at a loss for words, Mabuse was quick with a rejoinder: “Meine dear probus, please, Mabuse has better things to do. There are Orbos to counterfeit, Republicans to have coffee with, Spice Girls to reunite and iPhones to program with malicious subsonic instructions. Mabuse is a very busy evil genius! Hedonism is far down meine list at the moment.” Efforts to solicit the Doktor’s help in contacting McCarthy have not borne fruit. Exasperated, MassiveAttack asks: “Why will Sean not give us a video. At this point I would accept home movies from the last time he went on vacation. Anything!!!!!” Mabuse apparently confiscated some materials from the missing McCarthy: “If only you knew what was in the footage McCarthy surrendered to Mabuse, Herr Attack. Leather features prominently, I assure you.” Passing up a golden opportunity, MassiveAttack, demurred: “ok I changed my mind. You can keep those videos.” Calling himself “the Raskolnikov of der frei energie!” the Nietzschean Mabuse is beyond both good and evil: “as I have explained ‘evil’ ceases to have any meaning when all that is left is a pure lust of will to control and despoil the Earth and its vermin humanity.” After a few weeks’ absence, when asked to explain the “oddity” that he, the Doktor, is more missed on the forum than is McCarthy, he replied:
What oddity?
McCarthy is meine stooge, toadie...Herr Doktor Mabuse lets him out to further torment the denizens of this accursed forum when they begin salivating again about the so-called "frei energie," while I keep the one and only true Orbo and fleece the world!
Of course you will not miss McCarthy as much as meine bad self. This is only natural.
Breter, I know you are deficient in many ways, but even with your broccoli-brain you must notice how this forum has diarrhea and spastic fits whenever McCarthy makes an appearance. Herr Doktor sits back, watches this chaos, and then swoops in to offer my own delicious remedies, akin to strychnine. Synergie ist der name of das Spiel, my boy.
Some have speculated that Mabuse and McCarthy are one and the same. In this scenario, Doktor Mabuse is McCarthy’s literal brain-child, the dark side of a short-circuiting psyche pushed over the edge in its thwarted quest for perpetual motion. At this stage at least, McCarthy’s ill-advised public demonstration of the Orbo fits Dr. Mabuse’s profile as someone contributing to his own downfall. As one critic points out, “The master of illusion becomes the dupe of his technique as soon as he stops producing the show” (Greenspun). The failed demo was certainly a show-stopper. Moreover, Ord-Hume indicates many failed perpetual motionists “underwent changes of character as a result of their unfulfilled dreams” (14). A few even went mad. Thus, the thwarted desire to save humanity by harnessing the energy of perpetual motion may have devolved into its flip side: Mabuse’s view of humanity as vermin to be destroyed. In this scenario, like the Forbidden Planet‘s Dr. Morbius, Mabuse/McCarthy haunts and stalks himself (as well as us). Perpetual motion, the ungraspable, tantalizing object of his quest, plays itself out in familiar cinematic terms:
The pathos of Mabuse's position is like the pathos of every mad impotent movie genius who cannot hope to possess the girl anesthetized on his diabolical operating table, or embrace the world whose future bubbles ominously in his laboratory retorts. (Greenspun)
McCarthy has not been the only victim of Mabuse’s efforts at manipulation and mind-control. Forum member HedyL also fell into his clutches, a story for another time.[7] In order to sort out the complexities of McCarthy’s psyche, Spanky attempted to demarcate the borderline between delusion and insanity. In a thread entitled “What Does It Mean for Us?” he muses:
I was thinking about the difference between delusion and insanity this morning. Dr. Mike has insisted that a person can be delusional without being crazy, and that this is SMcS's case. But I think there is an important distinction which makes the Steorn-delusion theory problematic.
When a person is delusional about something, it tends to be about something that can not be immediately tested. Say, for instance, one is deluded about one's ability to become a popstar, the testability of which lies in the future; or about oneself being dead sexy, which would only be testable by being able to see through other's eyes...
But here we are talking about something more fundamental: it is a case of whether something exists or not. Sean asserts that an apparent magnetically powered over-unity device has been in existence in his recent experience. He has touched and seen it. To be deluded about that is to be deluded about material reality, which I think really would come under the definition of hallucinatory mental illness.
And yet everything else about SMcS bespeaks an objective and genial intelligence that just doesn't jibe with this. It's the tension in this and other apparent contradictions that makes the Steorn show the best show in town right now. One doesn't need to believe anything one way or the other. My advice is to groove with the uncertainty and wait and see what happens next.
Here, Spanky describes McCarthy in terms not all that different from those employed by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack in describing UFO abductees’ fervent accounts of their experiences. Mack comments on the subjects’ genuine belief, their seeming sanity and normalcy in all other areas. All this bewilderment is compounded by our current state of affairs that Dean sums up in another context as “the problem of judgment . . . if the knowledge we need to make a judgment stems from shared experiences, what do we do when experiences are reconstituted so radically that we can’t tell if we, or anyone else, actually has them or not?” (Aliens 109). (Recall gaby de wilde’s attribution of lapses in memory to the machinations of Doktor Mabuse.) Infiltrating the normally staid pages of the Economist, McCarthy is offered as an “abductee” with an extraordinary tale to relate. Undecidability, the postmodern condition, reigns. Are we delving into fact or fiction? Sightings/citings on both fronts come to mind. For example, in Yesterday’s Tomorrows, science fiction writer Fred Hoyle describes “a young Cambridge mathematician of 1970 [who] investigates the activities of an industrial group in Southern Ireland, I.C.E. (Industrial Corporation of Eire), based on a new prime mover which enables industrial material to be obtained from water, air, and fairly common rocks” (qtd. Armytage 113). They turn out to be aliens!
Perpetual Notion, or “Hoax Springs Eternal”
“Community” is then produced as an ideal rather than as a reality, or else it is abandoned altogether.
–Willson (645)
This would appear to me to be nothing more than a deserted fairground from which the hucksters have long since departed.
–ex-forum member Basil
Our long wait has taken its toll even on the most hardy. The language of optimism and the philanthropic impulses that once flourished on the forum now must contend with the cynicism and vulgarities spewed by this mad scientist. Failed utopian idealism, a sense of technological breakdown and betrayal, the rantings of Dr. Mabuse–it is a wonder the forum is still halfway afloat at this point. Postmodern versions of Vladimir and Estragon, we put in our time, Waiting for Orbo. Ananda Mitra identifies the lack of closure of the Internet text as a problematic feature in the analysis of text-based virtual communities. In the face of such lack of closure, how does one come to conclusions? Worse yet, how does one live through such a lack of closure?
With a lot of time on our hands recently, the forum has been discussing the notion that the universe is itself a simulation controlled by some joy-stick-toggling deity. We are simply avatars, unwittingly going through the motions of a carefully scripted “reality.” And yet, some members of the forum are still holding out hope. Admittedly, with the failure of the Orbo we’ve entered a long pause in its stop/start mode. Having been swept up in the Steorn-sponsored dataspace, an information state DJ Spooky well might describe as “a delirium of saturation” (29), we wonder now what is keeping us going. But, as this master of rhythm science proclaims, “Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together…” Just as Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern amuse themselves by tossing coins and playing word games, so forum members while away their own time, with threads such as “Last Poster Wins” (with over 16,000 entries) and “The Thinking Man’s Word Association.” Fondly referred to as “Orbituaries,” the forum limerick thread has ballooned into several hundred five-liners on a number of topics. At the very least, such mental exercises keep us in continual practice; after all, as in Stoppard’s play, “someone might come in,” although McCarthy’s one comment, “Brilliant,” is about all that we have had to go on these last several months.
Other diversions occupy forum members’ time and keep up the spirits of those remaining. As Emily Noelle Ignacio observes concerning similar network societies, even humor serves as a bonding mechanism in establishing for them “a common underlying history” (182). Indeed, the ability of the forum to laugh at itself and satirize its host is also essential. In a thread announcing the founding of the Overunitarian Church, HedyL expostulated:
Since faith revolves around the substance of things not seen, it seems high time to dedicate a church denomination to the Steorn enterprise. I don't mean this to be in competition with Knuckles' Church of Orbology, although any schism is welcome at this point. We already have our Doubting Thomases and zealots such as Granthodges and babcat as a core group of disciples.
Forum members made up their own commandments, such as “Thou shalt not witness false bearings.” Evolvealready added a Hebrew Bible twist: “And the forum readers became impatient of Moses McArthy coming down from Mt. Innovation and built themselves a golden diode array which they did worship.” To which HedyL added:
And Moses McCarthy, coming down from the mountain, saw his people engaging in much idolatry and revelry, whereby he did break the Orbo and the tablets whereupon were written instructions for its operations, saying: "Thou art a wicked people with no faith. Thou deservest not my innovation. Thou art a stiff-necked generation, not worth a quaff of my Guinness!"
We even have time to set to memory the simplified versions of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, as known to most second-year physics majors. Bob Pease summarizes them as “the gambler’s lament”:
Rule 1: You can't win.
Rule 2: You can't break even.
Rule 3: You can't get out of the game.
Even contestation does not necessarily equate to failure in such enterprises. Willson emphasizes “the importance of the Other for self-constitution, and the importance of relations between self and Other for the functioning of community” (653). In order for individuals to define themselves in the virtual community, a certain amount of “rubbing against each other” is necessary to make things real, a quantum decoherence principle on the human social scale. Cogitamus ergo sum/Cogito ergo sumus. And round and round it goes. Citing Jean-Luc Nancy, Willson valorizes the relational aspect of the virtual community:
Nancy argues instead for community to be understood as the incomplete sharing of the relation between beings. For him, being is in common: it is the in where community 'resides'. Community is to be 'found' at the limit where singular beings meet. The danger is in prescribing or categorizing an essence or form for both community and the beings that it involves. (651)
Galloway and Thatcher point out that the networks most vulnerable to viruses (electronic ones) and disease epidemics (biological ones) are those that are overly standardized. Paradoxically, they “work too well.” One thinks of genetic engineers striving to create forests of lignin-free cloned trees for ethanol production but not considering how such lack of diversity leaves them particularly vulnerable to massive die-outs. Situating networks somewhere between our ability to control them and their operations beyond our control, Galloway and Thatcher find them both “entirely coincident with social life” but also carrying “with them the most nonhuman and misanthropic tendencies” (Exploit 6). The Steorn forum encompasses this range of tendencies. Thus far, it has managed to maintain a balance among them. In that respect, it constitutes Dean’s “zero institution,” that is, “a paradoxical combination of singularity and collectivity, collision and convergence” (Secret 167). This fairground will not close as long as the bumper cars careen against each other in perpetual overdrive.
Postscrypt: Back from the Dead?
Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.
–“How Orbo Works,” Steorn website
3. Apparatus and method for generating a time variant non-electromagnetic force field due to the dynamic interaction of relatively moving bodies.
–Luke Fortune, “UFO How-To“
Time variance is the ability to remember historic perspectives.
–“Time Variance,” Wikipedia
An Update on the Steorn Exploit.
For a month or so in mid-2008, Steorn actually shut down public, non-member access to the forum. Some forum members predicted its/their imminent demise. Against such an eventuality, many members now share time between Steorn’s site and another, “shadow” site: FizzX. Lately, reassurance about the survival of the forum has come from McCarthy himself, who emphatically noted the forum would continue: “Close this forum – never!!!! That would be like getting rid of an itch that you can never quite scratch…☺ Lately, things have been heating up in the forum, with a feisty McCarthy turning up on a number of fronts. In a thread started by ebswift and entitled “Steorn Forum Future (given latest events)?” forum members apparently got McCarthy’s Irish up by speculating Steorn only had enough funds left to last two months or so. Responding to forum member calculations, McCarthy replied: “Well if he[‘s] right I guess that I will be turning off the lights in here pretty soon … wait and see big fella.” To which blueletter responded: “You still pay for lights?” Howling with virtual laughter, Big Oil Rep promptly nominated blueletter for the Poster of the Month Award, his prize being “a billion dollars worth of Steorn futures.” Never one to be outdone, Dr. Mabuse popped in with his own assurances: “Fear not. I shall continue to subsidize der forum through meine blood money. Mabuse gets far too much enjoyment watching you wretches squirm.☹” To McCarthy’s credit, exchanges such as this demonstrate that Steorn has by and large kept its promise to maintain the forum for “the open, unregulated exchange of ideas, thoughts and opinions about Steorn and Orbo.” Websurfers entering the forum site are warned, though, that “There may be threads concerning pseudo-science and suppositions on conspiracies and deceptions relating to the company.” Fair enough. After all, visitors should be put on notice that there are a lot of wild claims in the cybersphere by people whose inventions have been suppressed by traditional science and thus have had to be advertised and marketed in unconventional ways!
True to the stop/start motion of its Orbo device, Steorn has started up again recently after a long hiatus. In late January of 2009, having promised a major announcement by February, Steorn replaced its website with an image of a curtain with the following written below: “February 4, 2009.” When the curtain was lifted on this date, the public was treated to a slick ten-minute video/infomercial. It began with a printed disclaimer: “All views and opinions expressed by participants who are not Steorn employees are their own and do not represent Steorn, its management or employees.” Since the views of the three non-Steorn engineers testifying here all support Steorn’s claims in one fashion or another, it is strange that the company would have felt the need for such a disclaimer, particularly since it has complained all along of not being able to induce anyone from university engineering and physics departments to go public with their own (alleged) positive findings. The video also features CEO McCarthy, who states that the company has brought the technology along “as far as a business can bring it.” Noting that Steorn is in “the licensing business” anyway, he is now seeking to enlist three hundred engineering companies and/or individual engineers whose task will be to figure out how to implement the technology. They will be given the necessary tools to do so, as well as access to “learning modules.” McCarthy goes on to announce the formation of the SKDB (Steorn Knowledge Data Base): “a learning and knowledge base designed to explain, employ and expand the science, engineering and intellectual property comprising Orbo technology.” This “suite of video and flash e-learning modules,” Steorn claims, will provide “the key steps and skills required to test, build prototypes and utilise Orbo technology.” There is no mention of the fate of the two SPDCs–rather peculiar, as many of these were the very opportunities promised to them long ago. McCarthy also announces that Steorn will be touring university engineering departments around the world to enlist engineers on a global scale. First stop on the tour? The Middle East. Advertisements for Steorn’s ZeroF (Zero Friction) bearings, USB Hall Probe, and Magnetic Torque Measurement System are also prominently displayed. Interested readers can visit Steorn’s site to hear the testimonials given by Phil Watson (electrical engineer), Liam Fennelly (instrumentation engineer), and John A.M. Rice (consultant). None appears to be a Jury member. All appear level-headed and claim to have approached the project with a healthy initial skepticism.
Not long after the appearance of this re-invigorated homepage, forum members began weighing in on the presentation. Babcat, 007, and Crastney–long-time defenders of Steorn– responded with “We told you so!” Many members, however, were less than impressed. Big Oil Rep pointed out that none of the “Three Wise Men” were “physicists or from universities.” On the way to hoisting them on their own petard, he quoted their own words:
[for] the experiment that we saw, in the scale that we saw, there appears to be more energy coming out of the system than is actually being put in. They [Steorn] apparently have a way of producing mechanical energy, a rotational energy which will drive something else, which will be able to generate electricity.
Big Oil Rep rejoined: “‘for the experiment that we saw’ is the key phrase. They didn’t even set up the experiment…appears…apparently.” My_pen_is_stuck added: “I think all 23 Steorn hand picked jurors coming to the same conclusion would be more convincing than 3 unknown bozos picked out of a pool of how many?”[8] Josh points out that no test procedure is described and no results displayed. He sums up: “The video is nothing but promotion. It contains no science.” Knuckles O’Toole delves into the psychology of what he has come to view as one more shuffle in a confidence game:
All of this is just confidence boosting without data. Nice guys, testimonials, sincerity: all the hallmark of cons. You have to ask yourself this question: If Steorn were a con how would they act differently than they already do? And if they are not a con why would they act like they are?
What Steorn has accomplished here with an admirable adroitness is to shift the onus of testing, building prototypes, and product development to an anticipated three hundred engineering concerns. The company will even be kind enough to sell those engineers equipment for such purposes. On the off-chance anything comes from their efforts, Steorn will still hold intellectual property rights. In the event of failure, a graceful exit awaits. How could a small company with modest resources have succeeded where three hundred engineers failed? Remember the video’s disclaimer, which already established some distance between the company and any non-Steorn employees.
In the absence of any news of the two SPDCs and the Jury, the establishment of the SKDB, and the recruitment of a cadre of engineers, Steorn is looking more and more like Dean’s description of freemasons and cabals, where “Private people [come] together as a public in secret” (Secret 30). Cult-like behaviors and language have been appearing lately among die-hard Steorn supporters like Crastney, babcat, and 007. By their testimony, the second SPDC has been granted more privileged information than that accorded to the first one (causing some members to label them Spud-Lite and Spud-Deluxe respectively). These staunch supporters of Steorn have taken lately to referring to the second SPDC as “the Other Side,” claiming there is even more convincing proof of Steorn’s claims there, proof withheld from all but the privileged few initiates. Ironically, they may be closer to the truth of perpetual motion than even they realize. As Dean puts it in the context of publicity: “The answer is the secret, or more precisely, the secret is the answer” (Secret 21). For the believers, the rest of the world lies outside of their tautological loop, where even Orbo’s failure can be explained as a deliberate feint to protect intellectual property rights or–with paranoia setting in–to throw those Men-in-Black off Steorn’s trail.
Listed as Number 10 in Wired Magazine‘s “Top Ten Vaporware Products for 2007,” the Orbo is indeed the most translucent of “products” (Calore). Even its image suggests pure translucency.[9] Rather than evaporating or vanishing, however, the Orbo presents with quantum properties uniquely its own. Vacillating between “the unseen and the seen,” it resists all proof, all logic. Steorn could profitably market Orbo on the basis of its quantum properties alone, as a truly twenty-first century novelty item. Providing information overload in the form of USB Hall probes and magnetic torque measurement systems, e-learning modules and infomercials, Steorn nonetheless leaves us–or hopes to leave us–with “the paradoxical sense that everything we need to know is right in front of us, but still we don’t know” (Dean, Secret 48). A modern physics version of the classic shell-game, this one is conducted with “time variant magnetic interactions” amid shifting timeframes. Steorn’s gambit is a sleight-of-hand trick to shuffle past the invariance principle enshrined in Noether’s Theorem. But time variance also entails “an ability to remember historic perspectives.” Those who forget are in for a long night at the table.
Notes
1. Steorn has made three claims for its technology:
- The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
- The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
- There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).
2. For on-line parodies of Steorn, go to the following by derricka: <http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=x6is2c&s=5>. For a feature on Orby, go to the following (supplied by Trim): <ttp://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22103/>. A more exhaustive display of parodic materials is found at <http://steorn.go-here.nl/>.
3. Insinuations were made that Orbo-powered pumps were already being installed somewhere in Africa to supply water to drought-stricken villages. Forum member qqqq “forwards” the following company statement of its business methodology:
Our company runs in reverse. What others do last, we do first. That's how we got the jump On our African pump (Though the concept is still in the works).
4. An anagram of the famous inventor’s name: Nikola Tesla.
5. In physics, the “sticky spot” is the point of resistance that a perpetual motion device must overcome in achieving overunity.
6. Dr. Mike’s predicament was summed up in the limerick below:
Dr. Mike left the demo with nary A clue from Steorn's chief visionary. What gives him night terrors? Steorn sealed Orbo's errors And marked them: "Proprietary."
7. I have been writing another article on this issue: “‘Bearings and Nothingness’: The Viral Unmarketing of Steorn.” The first part of the title comes from an exchange between two forum members after the failed demo. In a thread optimistically entitled “Next Demo,” Knuckles O’Toole finds solace in Steorn’s sponsoring of a demo; however, another forum member, Tilde, caustically responds:
Yeah Knuckles, it [the Orbo] was there, but it 'failed'. 'Failed', as if they just have to fix a small issue. It didn't fail, it wasn't at all.
The word 'failure' was used by Sean to reduce the having of nothingness into having a broken machine. Good marketing 'newspeak'.
Knuckles chimed in: “Didn’t Jean Paul Sartre write about Bearings and Nothingness?
” Tilde then suggested this as the title of a documentary/exposé on Steorn. My own mockumentary deals with such events as HedyL’s abduction by Dr. Mabuse and her later banishment from the forum. The first event began when, suffering from the sheer mental exhaustion of keeping up with the wildly proliferating nature of the forum, she dropped out of the forum, checking into Limericks Anonymous for a cure. Unfortunately, she fell into the hands of Dr. Mabuse. He made a botched attempt to cure her of her rhyming propensities. His Report on HedyL, forwarded by an assistant sympathetic to her plight, reads as follows:
While excising her rhyme from her reason, My surgeon's hand started seizin'. There's many a slip 'Twixt the Broca and the hip- pocampal medial regions! The procedure's now over, and I'm Sure we've zapped her penchant for rhyme. There's just one small matter: Brain scan read-outs, though flatter, Show neurons still firing to limerick time: ̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́ ̆́ ̆̆́ ̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́ ̆̆́
Fortunately, with the help of this assistant, she was able to escape Mabuse’s clutches. She quickly recovered the relatively few faculties required for composing limericks (although demonstrating with a few personality disorder traits, doubtless the result of Mabuse’s incompetence). Returning to her former antics, she was soon banned from the forum by the moderator Crank for writing limericks in the guise of McCarthy’s therapist. In her defense, and in defense of free speech and unfettered critique, several members protested. Unfortunately, Crank’s wrath was not to be appeased, as reflected in the limerick below:
Hot blood through Crank's veins surged and coursed. "Hedy's banned! All verses will now be outsourced! Our software censors in China Will reprogram line-by-line a New limerick code--Strictly Enforced!"
8. Actually, there are 22 jurors–somewhere!
9. In a leaked “memo” from Steorn to its investors, Sean explains Orbo’s delays:
Our product development line Has fallen a bit behind. We'll still market Orbo And a new Irish Bordeaux, Premiering 2039.
Works Cited
- Armytage, W.H.G. Yesterday’s Tomorrows: A Historical Survey of Future Societies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968.
- Ash, Sir Arthur. “The Perpetual Myth of Free Energy.” BBC News Report. 9 July 2007. 29 July 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/6283374.stm>.
- Beaumont, Roger. War, Chaos, and History. London: Praeger, 1994.
- Berger, Eric. “Steorn and free energy: the plot thickens.” Blog entry. SciGuy. 19 Aug. 2006. 4 Aug. 2007 <http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/08/steorn_and_free_1.html>.
- Calore, Michael. “Vaporware 2007: Long Live the King.” Wired Dec. 20 2007. 22 Feb. 2008 .
- Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.
- —. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002.
- Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1991.
- “Doctor Mabuse.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 12 Feb. 2009. 15 Aug. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Mabuse>.
- Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005.
- Fortune, Luke. “UFO How-To: Electrogravitics.” UFO How-To. 2 Feb. 2009 <http://www.ufohowto.com/By the book page 2.htm>.
- Galloway, Alexander R. and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
- Goertzel, Ben. “World Wide Brain: Self-Organizing Internet Intelligence as the Actualization of the Collective Unconscious.” Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 309-335.
- Greenspun, Roger. Review of Les 1000 Yeux du Dr. Mabuse. Les 1000 Yeux du Dr. Mabuse. Dir. Fritz Lang. 1959. DVD. Elan Film.
- Hassan, Robert. “Network Time.” 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society. Eds. Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2007. 37-61.
- “How Orbo Works.” Steorn Ltd. 2009. Sept. 2007 <http://www.steorn.com/orbo/technology/>>.
- Ignacio, Emily Noelle. “E-scaping Boundaries: Bridging Cyberspace and Diaspora Studies through Nethnography.” Critical Cyberculture Studies. Eds. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 181-93.
- Jahshan, Paul. Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.
- Johnson, Steven. “Why the Web Is Like a Rain Forest.” The Best of Technology Writing. Ed. Brendan J. Koerner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
- Joinson, Adam N. “Disinhibition and the Internet.” 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society. Eds. Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser. Stanford, California; Stanford UP, 2007. 75-92.
- Kroker, Arthur, and Michael A. Weinstein. “The Theory of the Virtual Class.” Electronic Media and Technoculture. Ed. John Thornton Caldwell. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2000. 117-36.
- Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.
- Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Human Transcends Biology. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
- Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
- —. My First Recession. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003.
- —. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
- Mitra, Ananda. “Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet.” The Cybercultures Reader. Ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 644-57.
- Ord-Hume, Arthur W.J.G. Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.
- Palfrey, John, and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
- Pease, Bob. “What’s All This Perpetual Motion Stuff, Anyhow?” Electronic Design 48.7 (April 2000): 163-65.
- Ramis, Harold, and Dan Aykroyd. Writers. Ghostbusters. SciFiScripts.com. 2005. Sept. 2007 <http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/Ghostbusters.txt>.
- Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Perseus, 2002.
- Sanger, Lawrence. “Why Collaborative Free Works Should Be Protected by the Law.” Information Ethics: Privacy, Property, and Power. Ed. Adam D. Moore. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.
- Schirber, Michael. “Harsh Light Shines on Free Energy.” Physics World (August 2007). 2 Sept. 2007 <http://www.nasw.org/users/schirber/bibliography/pdfs/PWAug07_steorn.pdf>.
- Spooky, D.J. Rhythm Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004.
- Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Penguin, 2007.
- Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2 (Summer 2000): 33-58.
- “Time Variance.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 25 Nov. 2008. 15 Aug. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_variance>>.
- Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
- Willson, Michele. “Community in the Abstract: A Political and Ethical Dilemma?” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 644-57.
- Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1994.
Bomb Media, 1953-1964
| January 17, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 18, Number 3, May 2008 |
|
Tristan Abbott
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Northern Iowa
tristan.abbott@uni.edu
About halfway through Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), a stool pigeon named Moe (Thelma Ritter) is about to get shot. She knows it, too; she had been warned that the man who just forced his way into her room is a communist agent who is willing to kill in order to find the whereabouts of a pickpocket named Skip. Moe, who had sold out Skip for fifty dollars earlier in the film, refuses to give the agent Skip’s location even after he offers her five hundred dollars. The agent threatens her, and Moe tells him that she is not going to sell Skip’s location to a bunch of “commies.” The man asks her what she knows about “commies,” and she replies with the most famous line of the film: “What do I know about commies? Nothing! I know one thing, I just don’t like them.”
The plot of 1954’s Kiss Me Deadly likewise involves faceless but boundlessly evil communists bent on taking over the world. Based on the popular Mickey Spillane novel of nearly the same name,[1] Kiss Me Deadly is a part of Spillane’s critically reviled Mike Hammer series. Spillane was a conservative and virulent anticommunist, and his character, Hammer, has been rightfully criticized as a “right wing vigilante” (Gallafent 240), a symbolic celebration of violence, nationalistic jingoism, and misogyny.
Considering the pedigree of these films, it is easy to understand their initial reception as examples of the kind of pro-government media that was pervasive between the end of the Second World War and the middle 1950s. Indeed, even someone with a decent grasp of history but little knowledge of film criticism could well think that the messages of these films were of the standard, anti-communist and pro-American variety. Propaganda scholars Sara and James Combs describe postwar Hollywood as getting caught up in the nationwide “Communist hysteria” (84), having fallen under intense government scrutiny and wanting to prove itself free from any trace of Soviet influence. According to the authors, the political attacks against Hollywood alarmed the industry so much that it “did a kind of political penance to appease its political attackers and reassure the larger political community… that the movie capital’s political heart and mind were in the right place” (85). The “attackers” to whom Combs and Combs refer are a variety of government agencies including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the CIA, and the FBI: groups that were so paranoid about the communist threat they felt that Hollywood represented that they classified any film that did not perfectly adhere to the messages promulgated by the government as subversive.[2]
Coming as they do from such a political climate, it is no surprise that Kiss Me Deadly and Pickup on South Street both brim with anticommunist sentiment. However, as the scholarship on these films has clearly shown, their anticommunist sentiment does not itself make them examples of the kind of “Red Menace” pap that Hollywood offered up to save itself from governmental scrutiny. Expanding upon this established research, I hope to show that these films were early entries in an interesting give-and-take system of nuclear discourse, and then to delineate the progress and explain the effects of this system. In this system, antinuclear films operate as very postmodern-seeming pastiches, usually falling well short of parody, that ape the stylistic presentations and subject matters of Civil Defense films in a way that subverts the intentions of those films. Of course, subversion is always difficult to define and establish clearly, especially when it comes to popular American culture (and especially film)–is it a matter of text’s intent, for example, or of its reception and/or measureable effect? Within the dialogue that I sketch out, however, it is clear that these films criticize to varying degrees the morals, messages, and intentions of Civil Defense media. And as Civil Defense films were made at the behest of and released under the authority of the United States federal government, I feel it fair to say that the films that weakened the arguments and assertions proffered by Civil Defense media were therefore subversive, at least in a general sense, at least to some degree.
The effect of this subversion varies from the comparatively minor liberalization of nuclear discussions accomplished by the earlier films to the palpably effective demonization of nuclear rhetoric that was accomplished by later films. In order to explain how this subversion took place–indeed, in order to explain how it can rightfully be considered subversive–I first discuss the U.S. Civil Defense program in some historical detail, focusing on issues that have not much factored into the more theoretical discussions of nuclear discourse and (anti)nuclear media. It is often overlooked how explicitly political the U.S. government’s use of nuclear war as a concept was, how much control over the flow of all nuclear information the government wielded, and the great extent to which this control shaped nuclear discourse. I leave it up to the reader to figure out the sometimes obvious parallels between the officially promulgated discourse that brought to life the cold war, as well several very bloody proxy wars (and nearly destroyed all life on earth, to boot), and that which has helped effect all of the death, destruction, and general stupidity that is our current, Terrorism-defined geopolitical landscape. My point is that the shape and scope of the controlling media may have changed, but its effect has largely stayed the same. Such media–that which is patronizing, designed to control through fear in spite of its pretentions towards safety and preparedness–is, for reasons I will outline, still best countered through pastiche media that is just incendiary enough to affect discourse without being so confrontational or controversial that it is dismissed or ignored. These reasons will be given in the form of three lessons taken from my analysis of subversive, anti-nuclear films, lessons that are general enough in scope and applicability to be still worth learning.
Historian Paul Boyer notes that “[t]he politicization of terror was a decisive factor in shaping the post-Hiroshima cultural climate” (By the Bomb’s 66), and nowhere is that more noticeable than in the overtly political creation of the United States Civil Defense Administration (USCDA). According to military historian B. Franklin Cooling, there was a significant call for the establishment of a civil preparedness program at least as early as 1935, out of concern for the possibility of an Axis air strike against United States civilians and a widespread belief that “the Army had an inescapable responsibility to the civilian population in the area of air attack” (7). In such a context, the establishment of a Civil Defense program, one that would equip citizens with the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to survive a prolonged or large-scale attack, was a pragmatic goal that was nobly predicated upon the best interest of the United States citizenry.
The proposal was rejected on political grounds. According to Cooling, politicians repeatedly refused to address the concerns of military officials because they were afraid of upsetting the public’s perception of the strength of the government and the military. Even as war with Germany became imminent–in fact, especially as war with Germany became imminent–the government focused on the imagethat the implementation of a civil preparedness program would produce. This is clear in the following memo from 1940, sent to President Roosevelt from his Secretary of War, Harry H. Woodring:
It is my belief that an appeal to the public at this time for the organization of local defense committees would needlessly alarm our people and would tend to create the erroneous impression that the military forces of the nation are unprepared to deal with any likely threat to our security. Even an intimation that such a condition existed would be seized upon by political opponents of the Administration. (qtd. in Cooling 8)
Throughout the Second World War, the topic of civil preparedness was not addressed significantly in public.[3] It was only after the war, when the country’s lack of an adequate defense program was brought up in a political context, that the program was begun in earnest.
JoAnne Brown discusses the use of schoolrooms as the main venue through which official Civil Defense materials were disseminated, the process of which highlights the decidedly political nature of these films. In “A is for Atom, B is for Bomb,” Brown explains that school administrators saw that the alignment of curricula with the federal government’s Civil Defense goals could not only lead to an increase of federal funding, but could also help deflect claims of subversion that might have been levied against the public school system. It was therefore necessary to allow the dissemination of Civil Defense materials, as it prevented schools from risking the destruction that came with being labeled subversive; as Brown explains, “[c]ritics indicted ‘Progressive’ education as ‘REDucation’ and teachers as ‘little red hens’ poisoning young minds with communistic ideology” (71). Allowing this dissemination also secured federal funding for public schools. Showing Civil Defense films in public schools was therefore a decidedly political act, according to which neither the government agencies that produced and distributed the films nor the schools that screened them had in mind the ostensible interest of the films. Civil Defense film, which by the fifties was concerned strictly with nuclear war, was never meant to help children survive a potential nuclear attack. Its motivations, like the circumstances surrounding its production and dissemination, were entirely political.
It is essential to understand Civil Defense media in this historical context. The government did not have good intentions in releasing the media. Its explicit motivation for releasing this media is not clear (there is no memo in which a government official suggests scaring people in order to control them, to my knowledge). However, a reading of a representative handful of these films appears to suggest that their intent is generally be to instill fear in their audience, and then to exploit that fear or to ready that fear for future exploitation. Take for example 1951’s Atomic Alert, a short film that was produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films at the behest of the USCDA. The film combines montage images (consisting of mostly stock footage) with stiff, monotonous narration and a few crudely shot original scenes in order to convey a wide array of inaccurate information regarding nuclear war. The schoolchildren who watched this film were told, for example, that the basement of an average home contained walls thick enough to shield them from a nuclear blast. The spread of a nuclear blast was also wildly underplayed. In one scene, an animated cutaway shows an overhead view of an atomic bomb falling on a city. After the bomb drops, an area around ground zero measuring just a few square blocks is cartoonishly blackened, and the narrator’s dull voice assures the viewers that, in the event of a nuclear war, “the chance of your being hurt by an atomic bomb is slight.” Such a downplaying of the actual danger of nuclear war–which presents nuclear air strikes as if they were comparable to the air raids suffered by Europe in the Second World War–was common in Civil Defense films. This is particularly evident in 1951’s Duck and Cover, which features a cartoon turtle who ducks into his shell in order to survive the blast of a nuclear weapon. The actions of the turtle were meant to show what the film’s viewers should do to survive nuclear war. Of course, humans do not have shells, but that is no huge problem, according to the film. Children are encouraged to “duck and cover” wherever they can: under a school desk, against the curb of a road, or even underneath a newspaper.
One of the most obviously exploitative films is Our Cities Must Fight, also from 1951. Cities features two official-looking government employees (who are white men with stern jaws, of course) who while away an evening by sitting in an office and complaining about things. The men spend most of the film bemoaning the “cowards” who belong to the “take to the hills fraternity”–people who say that they would run away from the certain death of crowded metropolitan areas in the event of a nuclear attack. Cutaways to stock footage relate the perils faced by European civilian populations in World War Two, once again underplaying the realities of nuclear war by asserting its comparability to traditional war. When the less-informed man asks his more intelligent companion what dangers might linger during a nuclear war after the initial blast, the question is met with dismissive laughter. The audience is then told that there will be no significant lingering danger, and that radioactive fallout will only pose a threat lasting around a minute and a half. The film’s ending outrageously features one of the men taunting the audience, telling them that the inhuman “commies” behind the iron curtain think that Americans do not have the “guts” to stand up to a nuclear attack. Then, in the fashion of a World Wrestling Entertainment monologue or a fever dream, the man turns to the camera and asks plainly, “have you got the guts?” as triumphant orchestral music swells.
The misinformation presented in all three films is so egregious that I have trouble believing that it was not intentional. Even if it was not, the scientific accuracy of these films and their potential to serve any actual good as far as preparing the public for nuclear war were both of secondary importance. It is clear that the films were intended to accomplish the following goals: first, to keep the public aware of the constant danger of nuclear war (“Tony knows the bomb could explode any time of year, day or night” [Duck and Cover]; “We must realize that in modern warfare city dwellers find themselves right in the front lines” [Our Cities]); second, to underplay the actual danger of nuclear war in order to make it look survivable and manageable. The final goal is to present cooperation with the government as the only route through which survival and safety could be achieved. Cities accomplishes this final goal by insisting that attempting to escape a crowded city center is futile and, most notably, by taunting the viewer to evoke patriotism and shame. Out of necessity, Pickup and Kiss Me Deadly do not attack these intentions directly; rather, they work within the mindset created by the applications of these intentions and, in doing so, erase a key moral distinction that had enabled these intentions.
I mentioned earlier a staunch but mindless dismissal of communism by Pickup‘s most likeable character. His comment is considered emblematic of Fuller’s personal feelings, as the director’s anticommunism had been so loud that early critics dismissed Pickup on South Street as “a McCarthyist tract” (McArthur 139); the film went overboard even in 1953, at the height of the “anti-Red” movement. But, as Colin McArthur points out, “while [Pickup] is, indeed, an anticommunist film, it is much less opportunistically so than . . . these critics will allow” (ibid). This is because the film itself was not seeking to curry the favor of the United States government while sending an anticommunist message, as were many other films of the time. About the film Fuller said that “I wanted to take a poke at the idiocy of the cold war climate of the fifties” (Fuller 10). This sets Pickup apart from its typical anticommunist contemporaries, which were made in acquiescence to McCarthyism; Fuller’s film was instead a mockery of McCarthyism.
The subversion of Pickup comes, principally, from the film’s muddy moral climate. In Our Cities Must Fight, two government employees tell the audience to stay put during a nuclear war, and to have faith in the government to see everyone through any crisis that might arise. Most Civil Defense films were geared towards children and typically relied on the childish primacy of the “mental hygiene” genre of classroom films while using fear, and fear alone, as a qualifier for their statements–children were apparently expected not to question advice that they believed their lives depended upon. The more “adult” Our Cities, however, derives its authority both from fear and from the virtue of the inherent goodness with which all actions of the United States were implicitly endowed. This goodness is due to the fact that the United States is not the U.S.S.R. and is therefore not evil. Without this distinction, the moral authority of the United States melts away, and so goes its government’s ability to tell its people what to do by using the rationale that disobedience is immoral and treasonous. Pickup erases that moral distinction.
The plot of Pickup is fairly simple–it starts with a woman named Candy (Jean Peters) getting her wallet stolen by a “cannon” named Skip (Richard Widmark). Unbeknownst to Skip, Candy’s wallet contains some microfilm on which are printed nuclear secrets that Candy was unknowingly about to deliver to Soviet agents as a favor for her ex-boyfriend, Charlie. The bulk of the film follows the police and the Soviet agents as they try to get the secrets back from Skip, who refuses resolutely to hand them over to either side. The confused moral status of both the police and the Soviets comes from the strikingly similar methods both sides employ while trying to find the missing microfilm. Both use Candy as if she were a mule. Both also attempt to bribe Moe, the stool pigeon, in exchange for information about Skip and the microfilm. When Moe is first interviewed by the Police, she hesitantly gives up Skip, in spite of the fact that Skip is a personal friend of hers. She does so only out of self interest, and when Skip finds out about it later in the film, he forgives her without hesitation. After being informed of the details of the crime with which Skip is involved, however, Moe turns down a much larger bribe and refuses to cooperate with the communist, which leads to the exchange cited at the beginning of this essay. Moe may be willing to sell out a friend for money, but she balks at doing so when it entails her involvement in a communist plot–not just because she hates communism, mind, but also because she knows that the communist agents will kill Skip.
I do not feel that this moral confusion is all too subversive. The police in Pickup may not be angels, but they are shown in an unquestionably better light than are the communists. Recent critics, such as Margot Henriksen, focus not on the loose moral equivalence of the police and the Soviets but rather on the superiority of the moral code of a third group, the film’s heroic criminals, pointing out that “[t]he criminals sacrifice themselves for one another and they will not cooperate with the communists, yet they remain immune to the security mindset and ‘patriotic eyewash’ of the cops” (Henriksen 63). The focus here is not on the fact that Pickup‘s criminals refuse to work with Soviets, per se, but that they refuse to engage in the fight being presented to them by their own government, which may be morally superior but is still reprehensible. As Jack Shadoian notes, in Pickup “[i]t is not our lack of an opposing political philosophy but our lack of human value in the life we lead that leaves us poorly defended” (188) from both the cold war and the threat of communism. The only humane characters in the seedy underworld of South Street are Candy, Jack, and Skip, and their basic human decency is explicitly attributable to the fact that they are outsiders, all operating outside of the plane of the cold war. Fuller himself describes these three characters as “individualists, trusting no one, beyond politics, changes in governments, intellectual labels, and fashion” (8). Here, heroism–and survival¬–are not found in blind obedience to authority, or in engaging in a fight against an enemy that audiences had been told to hate simply for the sake of hating. Survival is instead achieved through an incredulous pursuit of self-interest. By setting the plot of Pickup on the same plane as those of Civil Defense media, Fuller manages to completely subvert the typical message of such films. He achieves it most prominently by questioning indirectly the authority upon which the U.S. government made its declarations. This lack of moral clarity is brought to light when the film’s heroes find salvation by refusing to cooperate with crooked government officials, an act that serves to spoil the government’s assertion that blind cooperation was the only path to survival.
Kiss Me Deadly, released a year after Pickup, continues to use nuclearism as a McGuffin,[4] but it also works to subvert more directly the first two goals of Civil Defense media in spite of being one of Mickey Spillane’s ultra conservative Mike Hammer series of detective books and films. As Edward Gallafent explains, director “Aldrich took [his chance to make the film] as an opportunity to express his disgust for Hammer and the politics of Spillane” (241). The film expresses disgust for Hammer by showing the exaggeratedly selfish cruelty its character exhibits. A far cry from the suave ladies’ man heretofore portrayed on screen, Ralph Meeker’s Hammer oozes creepiness. In Deadly, Hammer is not a criminal investigator, as was his wont; instead, he is a sleazy private eye whose main source of income is divorce cases. Even more noticeable is the shift of McGuffin between the film and the novel: in the book, Hammer is chasing after a cache of stolen jewelry. In the film, he is after a suitcase full of deadly nuclear material.
The plot of Deadly is complex. Hammer nearly hits a girl after she runs out into the road. She is obviously shaken and looks as if she has escaped from a mental institution. He intends to take her into town, in spite of her insistence that they probably will not make it and, cryptically, she makes Hammer promise to remember her. She is soon proven correct–Hammer’s car is run off the road, Christina is killed, and Hammer is comatose for days. Hammer awakes and is convinced that Christina was hooked up in something big, something so big, most likely, that if he could manage to get to the bottom of it he would stand to make a great deal of money. His search leads him to a gigantic conspiracy involving the group of people who had been around Christina around the time of her death. There are a dozen twists and turns to the plot, and the direct role of every player in the conspiracy is never made clear. At the film’s end, the case full of nuclear materials is in the hands of Carmen, Christina’s double-crossing roommate (or, rather, a woman pretending to be Christina’s roommate), who has played for fools both Hammer and Hammer’s mysterious nemesis. At the end of the film, she kills Hammer’s nemesis and then, against his dying declaration, opens the nuclear suitcase, which causes her to be engulfed by flames. Hammer escapes the blaze moments before he too would have been engulfed, and ends the film gazing helplessly up at the house from which he had just escaped as it burns to the ground.
Like Pickup, Deadly focuses on the muddy moral climate of the era, and this is where the indictment of the genre and its relation to nuclear rhetoric both come into play. Andrew Dickos goes so far as to say that the picture is “one of the definitive films of the 1950s because of the peculiar, yet uninterrupted, line it follows from the classical figure of the private eye as seeker of truth to the complications that follow when the language of truth is no longer recognizable” (133, italics mine). This is made very clear in the film. Hammer’s secretary/love interest/cheap floozy Velda often quizzes him about what is exactly the point of his quest and about his self-destructive need to participate in the search for “the great whatsit,” pointing out that his irrational, indecent chase for the nuclear mystery is bringing about his demise. More strikingly, before Hammer loses Christine, she recites to him a piece of Christina Rossetti’s verse: “But if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that once we had,” encouraging him to remember her as a representative of purity presumably spoilt by the corruption of the system around her, the system he explores so determinedly.
It is also worth noting that Deadly paints a more realistic portrait of danger than those presented in the Civil Defense films. However, my main concern is with the way Deadly manages so effectively to turn the nuclear arguments propounded by Civil Defense on their respective heads. Like Pickup, Deadly annexes the government’s manipulation of the public’s consciousness of nuclear war. But Deadly goes much further than does Pickup, indicting directly the rhetoric and secrecy surrounding nuclear defense propaganda as being the cause of damage and death, and pointing towards the conservative, “macho” players in such a system–particularly Hammer–not as heroes, but as agents that serve only to further the destructive capabilities of that system.
Lesson One: When times are tight and dissidence seems all but impossible, do not get yourself arrested, blacklisted, or fired. Instead, say what is already being said, only twist things around a little bit.
After the releases of Pickup and Deadly, nuclear subject matter was suddenly fair game for Hollywood. However, most of the new nuclear-themed films were distinctly non-subversive. The only real change was that nuclear McGuffins were suddenly presented clearly. Until fairly recently, most critics have taken these movies–movies like It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)–as signs that nuclear-themed popular media was relatively angst-free until the high angst of the Kennedy administration. Several critics, including most prominently the aforementioned Margot Henriksen, have argued against this. Henriksen has attempted to refocus the issue pragmatically, much as I do here, by realizing that, up until the release of the noir films, overt mentions of The Bomb were more or less verboten except in very specific, government-approved circumstances. Even after the release of the noir films, Hollywood was generally unwilling to do anything that would have upset the government–direct nuclear angst and antinuclear sentiment had no avenues for popular publication.
Jerome Shapiro, among others, takes a different route, arguing that horror films that use nuclear themes as McGuffins (often buttressed with shoddy moralizing) are evidence of the public’s continual and all-pervasive nuclear angst, which is only nominally different from the other apocalyptic fears that have influenced art and expression throughout the recorded history of thought. While I think that Shapiro is right in principle–at least regarding the overlooked nuclear focus of films of the mid to late fifties–I think that his interpretation “wags the dog,” so to speak. It was not the public’s mindset that influenced nuclear films; rather, it was nuclear films that were influencing the public mindset. Clear references to nuclear matters in post-noir films were still largely mindless and non-subversive, only they (as well as the Civil Defense films that followed) had been influenced by the standards set by the noir films, which were themselves influenced by early Civil Defense media. Each of these forms of media–the governmental and the subversive–were influenced by the other, fed off one another in a recursive system. The means of argument–subject matter as well as presentational style–which were laid down initially by Civil Defense media were redefined by the noir films and were redefined yet again by the later Civil Defense and nuclear-friendly films, which sought more than anything to normalize the notion of nuclearism and the threat of nuclear war, to make them into easily exploitable agents that were only feared when a fear of them was beneficial.
Before going any further, I wish to make it abundantly clear that I do not intend this essay as a piece of nuclear criticism, nor do I wish to read any of these films strictly in their relation to nuclear criticism. Simply put, these films do not have much of a place in the realm of nuclear criticism; as counterintuitive as this may seem, nuclear criticism very rarely deals with explicitly nuclear texts. In fact, the 1984 issue of Diacritics that was dedicated to nuclear criticism does not contain a single discussion of any explicitly nuclear texts: no books, no movies, no scare films, no Civil Defense manuals. However, it is impossible to engage in an informed discussion of nuclear media without at least touching on, and borrowing a few things from, the field. I feel that theory-driven nuclear criticism–and by extension much of the scholarly discussion that has come about in response or relation to nuclear criticism–has been singularly concerned with theory. Many interesting points, including the political nature of nuclear discourse, have gone largely unexamined.[5]
The nuclear question is one of discourse, as Jacques Derrida points out in his seminal “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” in which he lays the foundation for nuclear criticism by pointing out that nuclear war was “fabulously textual, through and through” (23). This fabulous textuality is due to nuclear war’s being without precedent, having never happened and existing only as an intangible, envisioned threat–“a signified referent.” This imagined threat of war, Derrida realizes, led to a reality (consisting of nuclear stockpiles and weapons systems and people who were, conceivably, willing to use them) that legitimized the imagined threat upon which their existence was predicated. Derrida focuses on nuclear war’s threat to completelyannihilate not just civilization and not even just humanity, but the referential archive according to which all of everyone’s understanding of everything is based. It is because of this unique ability to annihilate the archive that nuclear war is, according to Derrida, the only “real” referent:
If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If . . . nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive . . . it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all others. [It is] the only "subject" of all possible literature, of all possible criticism. (67)
This concept is the primary concern of Derrida’s piece and of the bulk of nuclear criticism that followed. That is why most nuclear criticism does not focus on texts that deal with explicitly nuclear subject matter. Really, such observations might well have been made about any other imaginable context that would have involved the destruction of the referential archive.
The purpose and function of the nuclear critical field was never agreed upon. Nearly all pieces of nuclear criticism, however, feature some discussion meant to criticize, debunk, or mock the pitiful self-feeding false logic of deterrence through mutual destruction that marked the officially promulgated nuclear discourse of the 80s, hoping to “renounce the alarmism and moralism that contributed to the escalation of rhetorical stockpiles” (Luckhurst, 90) that in turn gave currency to the threat of nuclear annihilation. This is what I would like to borrow from nuclear criticism–this valuable, undeniable realization that nuclear war is a phantom, something that became an actual threat only after being conjured up as an abstraction and that becomes more of an eventuality the more it is debated and discussed. Once this textuality is realized, its importance in shaping both nuclear discourse and the realities (a/e)ffected by that discourse are undeniable, as is its importance regarding texts that aim to prevent nuclear destruction. It is only after these realizations have been made that one can attempt to weaken the legitimizing power of nuclear rhetoric.
It is my assertion that the noir films, as well the explicitly antinuclear films I will soon examine, were effectively and palpably subversive in that they helped to disrupt the legitimizing discourse of nuclear war. The noir films were illustrative of (and participated in the dialogue that helped to further) a shift of public consciousness away from a naïve belief in the absolute moral superiority of the United States government, but that alone did not serve to sever the government’s claim to moral or scientific authority over nuclear matters and their resultant exploitation of such authorities to strengthen their power (regardless of the fact that such means legitimized the threat of nuclear war). In this new, especially McCarthyist era of Civil Defense films, the justification for authority was never offered–it was assumed, not open to potential questioning. The prime focus was instead placed on downplaying the actual danger of nuclear war, and it was from this basis that most post-noir Civil Defense films took their cue.
The “most fabulous” example of this is the outrageous The House in the Middle, a film that was a cooperative effort of the USCDA and an agency called the “National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix Up Bureau.” Cleanliness and fresh paint have everything to do with national security, according to House in the Middle. Near the film’s beginning, its stark narrator booms that “a house that is neglected is a house that may be doomed in the atomic age.” The film then takes viewers to the Nevada Proving Ground, where they are shown how fresh-painted, clean houses hold up to nuclear blasts for a full one quarter of one second longer than do dirty, run-down homes. The film is a treasure trove for scholars–its contempt for the poor and their implied role in actually causing nuclear war is especially evident, as the narrator often talks of the dirty houses as ones that a viewer might find in “slum areas,” with a strong tone of disgust used to punctuate the word slum. All I am concerned with, however, is the fact that the film continues to achieve the primary goals of early Civil Defense films–the creation and maintenance of exploitable fear that is small enough to avoid uncontrollable (and unexploitable) panic but still large enough to remain persistent–and that it does so through distraction. This government-produced film tries to use the threat of nuclear war to scare people into keeping their lawns clean; its ridiculousness is remarkable even by the U.S. government’s own formidable standards. This film serves as clear and unmistakable evidence that the government was trying to downplay the threat of nuclear war, and was exploiting such a move as a means through which they could control their citizens.
The foundation upon which this control is predicated is the perceived manageability of nuclear war. On the Beach (1959) uses this foundation and subversively turns it on its head, annexing the government’s strategy of making nuclearism all-pervasive. The film’s subversion does not stop there; it also annexes the presentation of the de facto pro-nuclear popular films of the time[6] by presenting its stark message in a manner that can only be described as traditional, expected, and–were it divorced from its subject matter–unexceptional (which, as it is used to convey its subject matter, makes it quite exceptional). Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and even Fred Astaire all appear in the film: these are big Hollywood stars, and On the Beach is a big-budget Hollywood melodrama. Only it happens to deal with the complete and total annihilation of mankind after a nuclear war. In the film, Peck stars as an American submarine captain who was fortunate enough to be under water during an all-out nuclear war between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Everyone in the world dies in the blasts and the ensuing fallout, except for the people of Australia, whose fortunate geographic placement has granted them a reprieve of four or five months before wind patterns cover them with deadly dust. The film more or less follows its cast of characters as they prepare for the death that is moving quickly towards them.
On the Beach is more of a traditional “movie” than the other films considered in this essay. Its dialogue is simple and melodramatic. Its characters fit into common molds: Peck is a grizzled seaman, Anthony Perkins a young, wide-eyed Private, and Gardner a floozy seeking redemption. There is even a run of the mill romantic subplot involving Peck and Gardner. Some critics, like Shapiro, point to the film’s “hollow characters [and] obvious directorial machinations” (Shapiro 92-93) in order to deride On the Beach as little more than a nuclear-themed “weepie.” I feel, however, that the power of the film comes from the fact that these generic, predictable aspects are contrasted with some eerily horrific scenes. The most striking of these is a scene near the film’s end in which a viewer is presented with a man who stands at a street corner before a doctor and two Red Cross nurses. The man gives his name, address, and the number of people in his household. It is up to the viewer to realize that he is picking up his family’s allotment of suicide pills; just as this realization is being made, the camera pulls back to reveal the man standing at the front of a line of several hundred people that extends for blocks.
At the time of its release, On the Beach was a commercial and critical success, and its message helped to shift public consciousness regarding the threat of nuclear war. The actual dangers of nuclear war were finally being aired openly, to large audiences. The misinformation spread in the old Civil Defense films was now more widely revealed as laughable. This segued conveniently into the heightened tensions of the early 60s: the public’s perception of nuclear war had changed from an abstract, somewhat unlikely, and reasonably survivable potentiality to something that was not only likely but would also bring about the complete destruction of all life on earth. It was at this juncture that subversive nuclear dialogue came into full focus, stopped holding back, and began to indict nuclearism directly.
Lesson Two: Reinforce existing public concern. Do not question firmly held beliefs until you can afford to do so; instead, strengthen righteous mistrust.
Of course, many other factors also contributed to what appeared to be a fairly sudden liberalization of free expression, but so far as Hollywood was concerned it is safe to assume that On the Beach‘s success (and the government’s lack of significant reaction after its release) helped usher in the unprecedented mainstream filmic dissidence that soon followed. This is not to say that On the Beach marked a sea change of governmental policy regarding film. It is just that no one was blacklisted for participating in On the Beach. It may not have caused the liberalization of filmic dissent, then, but it certainly was a sign that filmmakers could get away with more than they perhaps thought they could. It is because of this that I can say that, were it not for pieces of subversive media such as On the Beach, much of the era’s later dissent would never have come into being. Although the films of 1964–Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove–were concerned primarily with the destruction of official nuclear discourse, including that which was presented in Civil Defense films, these subversive films were nonetheless influenced by all Civil Defense films, and were concerned particularly with the Civil Defense films that were released between 1959 and 1964.
A-Bomb Blast Effects (1959) and About Fallout (1963) are both typical of post-On the Beach Civil Defense media, in that each is concerned with pseudo-scientific diversion. That is, diversion away from danger, undertaken in such a way as to bolster authority through a more “honest” presentation of the inner workings and potential effects of nuclear war. A-Bomb Blast Effects is a silent film strip that shows pictures of early nuclear tests. It was meant to be played with accompanying narration that explained the effects felt by soldiers who were very near a blast. Of course, these effects were downplayed, but the film’s sparse, documentary-style presentation lent it an air of credibility missing from the melodramatic or cartoonish presentations of older Civil Defense films.
About Fallout is more obviously pseudo-scientific, and goes so far as to begin in a laboratory in which a scientist dressed in a lab coat holds towards the camera a glass plate on which pieces of actual radioactive fallout are sitting (they look like little rocks). The film then resembles many other non-Civil Defense classroom films, featuring a loud-voiced narrator, shoddy animation, pictures of outer space, and orchestral music that vaguely recalls the theme from The Jetsons. The film clearly–and, amazingly, correctly–details the creation of radioactive fallout, and explains in no uncertain terms that fallout is indeed deadly. Against this backdrop of seeming respectability, the film cleverly continues the Civil Defense tradition of downplaying the danger of nuclear war, only instead of lying outright, as did the earlier films, About Fallout uses tricks of rhetoric to undermine the danger. At one point, for example, the film shows a cartoon clock and a big purple dot (meant to symbolize the radioactive power of fallout) to explain that fallout retains only “one one-hundredth” of its initial radioactive strength a mere forty-eight hours after it is created. The purple dot shrinks to a minuscule size and the viewer is left to feel quite safe, but the film fails to mention that fallout is still immensely deadly months or possibly even years after a nuclear explosion.[7]
At the film’s end, the wondrousness of the USCDA’s realistically-ineffectual fallout shelter program is stressed, and the viewer is made to believe that he or she is being led by a competent and caring government. This was a lie, of course; even government-sponsored Civil Defense literature said that the best possible outcome of widespread shelter use would see projected death tolls fall from about 170 million to about 110 million in the event of a 10,000 megaton nuclear exchange (table 1). This very hopeful figure not only undermines the probability that a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would most likely see blasts that were much larger than a mere 10,000 megatons, but also assumes ideal wind conditions and nearly universal compliance with suggestions for taking shelter, downplays the lingering danger posed by fallout, and completely ignores other potential effects of a full-scale nuclear war. So then, even ignoring actual dangers and assuming that everything worked according to plan during a nuclear exchange, by the government’s own projections more than half of the United States population would be wiped out in the first few days of a nuclear war. In spite of this, About Fallout suggests that compliance with government instructions is a realistic route to survival.
| Figure 1: (Congress of the United States, Effects 3) |
Although the means of presentation had to be adjusted to answer the forms of subversive media that had appeared since the introduction of Civil Defense media, the main goals of such media were very much the same as they had been all along. About Fallout still makes its viewers acutely aware of the potential for nuclear war, still underplays the actual danger of nuclear war, and still presents cooperation with the government as the only way to survive a nuclear war.
Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe annexed the pseudo-scientific, documentary presentation style of these later films and, like the earlier subversive films, turned this presentational style to their own ends. By this time, however, it had become clear that the very discourse of nuclearism (antinuclear or otherwise) was contributing to the nuclear threat. What was needed in order for a new generation of subversive media to really succeed, then, was not to address directly the claims made by Civil Defense media–not to question the authority of the government or to point out the inaccuracies of their invalid claims–but to so demonize nuclear rhetoric itself that it would render such discourse unprofitable. And, due to the liberalization signaled by On the Beach‘s success, films no longer needed to ape the strong anti-communist rhetoric of the Civil Defense films. Still, the antinuclear films that followed did borrow some of the presentational aspects of the later Civil Defense media.
The first of these films was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Strangelove is one of most critically revered films ever made. The film shifts between three locations, an Air Force base, a high-altitude bomber plane, and the Pentagon’s ultra-secret “war room.” It begins with the obviously insane commander of the Air Force base, General Ripper, putting his base on lockdown and ordering the bombardiers under his command to break into Soviet airspace and commence a nuclear attack. The film then segues to the government’s “war room,” in which the fictional president, his cabinet, and various high-ranking officials, including the Soviet ambassador, try desperately to prevent the attack. Their desperation increases with the Soviet ambassador’s revelation that his government had created a “Doomsday” device. Designed as a deterrent to war, the device automatically and without exception will release a flurry of nuclear missiles if the USSR is under attack. These missiles have been specially designed to create a fallout so intense that it will last for nearly a century, meaning that a nuclear strike against the USSR would guarantee the destruction of all animal life on earth. Eventually, the men in the war room manage to issue the recall code that had been kept secret by General Ripper, and all the planes pull back before dropping their bombs. That is, all of the planes except one, a plane led by Major Kong (Slim Pickens) that has suffered a radio malfunction after nearly being shot down. The plane’s crew work together quite brilliantly to overcome a number of obstacles in order to bring about the end of the world.
Strangelove‘s popularity, social import, and easily perceived socio-sexual subtexts have occasioned many critical works, but there is no “typical” or common reading of the film, nor is there a popular argument about the film’s intentions or reception. As such, I limit my sources to just a few more recent pieces, written after the fall of the Soviet Union and the effective end of the cold war.
Tony Perrine says that both Fail Safe and Strangelove “give cinematic articulation to widely shared but largely unvoiced anxiety about the irreconcilable absurdity of life in the nuclear age” (126), an absurdity that the film makes credible in spite of its slapstick nature, due to its believable presentation. As Perrine notes, the film–like the Civil Defense films released before it–assumes the authoritative, almost objective feel of a documentary, using “a documentary-style voice-over narration” (123) at certain points, and recreating “documentary-style combat footage” (ibid) with its occasional use of shaky handheld cameras. This observation is important, as it showcases Strangelove‘s subversion–its ability to annex the supposedly authoritative narrative presentation of government media and to use it towards a subversive end. This authority allows Strangelove to present a serious message in spite of its being comically absurd. Jerome Shapiro points out that, “behind [the film’s] humor lies an intense seriousness: the characters and events are not real but the neuroses seem plausible” (144).
Shapiro discusses Strangelovemainly as the film relates to his argument about the apocalyptic vision common to nuclear films, and so he does not focus directly on the film’s subversive aspects. However, Shapiro’s observations regarding the duality of the film–its being both comically absurd and deadly serious–is of interest here. Shapiro notes that
on the one hand, the film is a burlesque; all the characters and institutions are lampooned. One source of humor is that each character is familiar, a cliché, a stereotype taken to the point of unbelievable exaggeration. On the other hand, the characters are so tightly constructed that they are credible, real. (144)
Strangelove manages to bring to light the constructed nature of its contemporary nuclear discourse. Arms races, official casualty approximations, bomb shelters, The House in the Middle, McCarthyism, and Khrushchev banging his shoe against the table at the UN: all of it was play-acting. The whole shebang was as formulaic as a romance novel, as absurd as a Keystone Cops serial, and as dependent upon the proper reception by its audience for the continuation of its own existence as any hackneyed, third rate, unfunny television program. It was a joke, and the people who manufactured it were clowns. Only those clowns could have ended the lives of every single thing in the whole, wide world.
The importance of bringing to light the absurd, constructed, and theatrical nature of nuclear discourse is perhaps better explained by Stanley Kramer’s venerable Fail Safe, a film that came out months after Strangelove and was largely ignored by both audiences and critics. This lack of attention was no doubt due primarily to the poor timing of the film’s release. Not only is Fail Safe less enjoyable (really, what film is more enjoyable than Strangelove?), but it shared with Strangelove a very similar structure; most of the film’s action segues between three different settings, and its characters are overblown caricatures meant to resemble the real-life promulgators of nuclear discourse. The clichéd characters Shapiro mentions in Strangelove all have rough counterparts in Fail Safe. Strangelove has its insanely paranoid army-man-with-his-finger-on-The-Button in General Ripper, who launched the war that would destroy mankind because he feared that fluoridation was a Communist plot that had robbed him of his sexual potency. It had its cowboy-blind-with-moronic-patriotism in Major Kong, who, in perhaps the most iconic scene in the history of western film, rides a nuclear warhead between his legs as if it were a bucking bronco, cheering wildly and waving his cowboy hat in the air, proud to be ending the world. It had a bumbling, ineffectual president, a military strategist who regarded the deaths of tens of millions of people as an acceptable loss, a Wernher von Braun-type of crazed, ex-Nazi scientist, and a Russian ambassador who, in spite of knowing full well that the world has effectively ended, persists in taking spy pictures of the pentagon’s war room at the film’s end.
All of these characters are, in Strangelove, overblown to comic effect that is so dismissive of the absurdity of these characters that, were it not for the film’s subject matter, I might consider it unfair or even mean. In Fail Safe, these characters are treated less derisively, and are allowed to speak their parts as they would in the popular press. Perrine notes that, “[i]n Fail Safe, the nuclear dilemma is personified in the character of various military strategists and advisors who overtly represent various viewpoints in the nuclear debate” (123, emphasis mine). Ironically, it is Strangelove‘s over-the-top derision that apparently divorces its characters enough from their real-world counterparts to allow for outward, and effective, criticism. When the same criticism was made about similar characters in Fail Safe, it was ignored.
Fail Safe also produces its authority-effect by aping late Civil Defense films and presenting itself as a science-y pseudo-documentary, including the character of a hapless-but-curious Senator who serves little narrative purpose aside from letting the film’s “scientist” characters explain the strategy behind nuclear air attacks. The Senator spends most of the film (as do all of the other major characters) speaking, arguing his point against the peaceniks who believe that there are no winners in nuclear war, the political scientists who think the focus should be on “winning” a nuclear war, the supposedly-objective hard scientists, the citizens who are concerned for their own well being, and the paradoxical peaceniks who believed that armament and war are the only paths to peace. Each of these characters had direct, real-life parallels, and the rhetoric used by each character may well have been taken from the popular press of the day.
Focusing on the film’s presentation and criticism of these obviously representative characters misses the film’s rather pronounced and self-explanatory point, a point that most critics and reviewers only mention. Michael Wollscheidt, in his largely negative review/critical essay of the film, goes so far as to call this the film’s “premise,” the idea that “[a]n accident similar to the one depicted in Fail Safe is mathematically inevitable” (70). This accident is a computer glitch. It is that simple. A computer designed to monitor United States airspace bugs out and sends out an attack signal to U.S. bombers. The bombers receive the signal, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop them. This happens in the very early scenes of Fail Safe and the remaining hour and a half or so consist of the different viewpoints bickering. It is made clear that this bickering, this debate between the many different characters, has led to the mathematical inevitability of nuclear war. Fail Safe does not take the side of any character, does not say that if one man’s viewpoint is followed then nuclear war can be limited or avoided. It insists instead that it is the talk of nuclear war that has made nuclear war a possibility, and that the continued talk of nuclear war will make nuclear war an inevitability.
Lesson Three: Once the problem has been made obvious, go in for the kill.
The promulgators of nuclear dialogue could not counter the arguments epitomized in the 1964 films. Nuclear dialogue itself had now been demonized; it could not argue for its own necessity because even making such an argument would have constituted a continuation of itself and therefore a continuation of a serious risk of full-scale nuclear war. Between 1964 and the Reagan administration, widespread, popular opposition to nuclear armament shifted focus; while there was still a strong resistance to all things nuclear, the resistance was not as passionate or wide reaching as it was in the late 50s and 60s. Anti-nuclear sentiment existed and still exists to this day, of course, as does sentiment regarding the potential tactical use or necessity of nuclear weapons and all of the other parts of nuclear discourse that, were they ever again allowed to control public consciousness as they were at the height of the Cold War, would make nuclear war an inevitability. However, the resistance seems to have peaked in the early 1960s.
There was a small-scale revival of nuclear discourse during the fear-mongering heyday of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s reigns. In the U.S. there was Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s “fabulously textual” disavowal of the infamous “Fiscal Year 1984-1988 Defense Guidance” document, which said that the U.S. planned to “prevail” in the event of a nuclear war. Derrida mentions this document specifically in “No Apocalypse,” where he writes that the inclusion of a single word, “prevail,” caused a firestorm of righteously angry media coverage. In particular, New York Times national security correspondent Leslie H. Gelb used the inclusion of the word as the base from which to launch an attack against Reagan’s poorly conceived foreign policy, noting correctly that an insane belief in the possibility that one nation would prevail in a nuclear war could, if left unchecked, “induce some leader some day to think he could risk starting a nuclear war because he would be able to stop short of a complete catastrophe” (qtd. Derrida 25).
More generally there were Reagan’s many invocations of Armageddon. When discussing anything related to Reagan, one must keep in mind the man’s epic capacity for both hypocrisy and unintentional self-contradiction. So, even though it is technically true that Reagan did at times deny that he was preparing the country for Armageddon, he insisted at other times not only that he believed that the End Times would occur but that there was a good chance they would occur in his lifetime. Take the following passage from the 1984 presidential debate, for example:
Mr. Kalb, I think what has been hailed as something I'm supposedly, as President, discussing as principle is the recall of just some philosophical discussions with people who are interested in the same things; and that is the prophecies down through the years, the biblical prophecies of what would portend the coming of Armageddon, and so forth, and the fact that a number of theologians for the last decade or more have believed that this was true, that the prophecies are coming together that portend that. But no one knows whether Armageddon, those prophecies mean that Armageddon is a thousand years away or day after tomorrow. So, I have never seriously warned and said we must plan according to Armageddon. Now, with regard to having to say whether we would try to survive in the event of a nuclear war, of course we would. But let me also point out that to several parliaments around the world, in Europe and in Asia, I have made a statement to each one of them, and I'll repeat it here: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And that is why we are maintaining a deterrent and trying to achieve a deterrent capacity to where no one would believe that they could start such a war and escape with limited damage. (Reagan, italics mine)
Such ambivalence worked well enough to allow Reagan to bring up (and therefore exploit) the general public’s fear of nuclear war while still covering himself against accusations of warmongering and/or threatening directly to launch or otherwise needlessly participate in a nuclear exchange.
The lack of high angst in response to Reagan’s incautious talk of nuclear war is explained, oddly enough, in the quote above; there was no need for subversives to counter any government lie regarding the survivability of a nuclear war–the government already did that for them. What came about during the Reagan era–and it has continued since–was a refined exploitation of nuclear fear, one that through outrageous self-contradiction managed to insulate itself from direct critical dialogue and place the U.S.S.R. on edge not because of its adversarial nature but rather because it appeared to emanate from the mouth of a man who was at best unstable and at worst insane.
From the Reagan era to the present day, the mechanisms of exploitation have been diverse and complicated enough to preclude a dangerous over-reliance on nuclear rhetoric. Newer fears, ranging from the spread of the “homosexual agenda” to “Islamo-fascism” to the “culture wars,” are being used to frighten, perturb, and ultimately to control the American people. Our ability to resist these means of control remain contingent upon our abilities to recognize and counter the enabling rhetoric that creates and perpetuates these fears, and our ability to do so in a way that is acceptable enough to reach a large audience. The parallels between the enabling discourse of nuclearism and that of our present fears do exist, even if they are not always direct, and future subversive media still needs to heed the basic lessons laid down by those of nuclear subversive media if it is to succeed.
Notes
1. The novel is titled Kiss Me, Deadly, and the film’s omission of the comma has lead to much confusion among both readers and critics. Since I do not discuss the book any further in this essay, however, I do not address this topic further.
2. Perhaps the most notable–and infamous–of these “subversive” films was Frank Capra’s amazingly innocuous It’s a Wonderful Life. Offense was apparently taken at the fact the film’s villain, Mr. Potter, was a successful capitalist.
3. The Office of Civil Defense (OCD), a precursor to the Cold War’s USCDA, was established by executive order in May of 1941. However, its creation came with little press coverage and its functions were hardly adequate to meet the danger of air raids, or chemical or biological attacks.
4. “McGuffin,” a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock, is simply an interchangeable plot device.
5. I respect the field and do not intend for this essay to make any contentions against it. Derrida, and Baudrillard in his “The Anorexic Ruins” (1989), speak of nuclearism as an all-pervasive state that encompasses all literature, all texts. Derrida’s argument hinges on nuclear war being the one thing capable of completely destroying the archive. It is therefore the “ultimate referent,” the destruction of all symbolic and referential order against which all things that depend on such order (which is to say, everything that can be understood) are based. Other critics have already discussed this concept at length, and I do not argue against either its theoretical feasibility or its general merit as a lens through which to interpret texts.
6. These were mostly horror films, like the aforementioned It Came from Beneath the Sea, in which nuclear war or nuclear byproducts typically create a monster of some sort. These helped the government by keeping the issues non-pervasive and also by making the threat of nuclear war seem manageable, since the monsters were almost always defeated handily.
7. Minimal exposure to the radioactive fallout at Hiroshima, for example, produced a significant death rate increase years after the city was bombed. According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, some 80,000 US cancer cases were caused by fallout emanating from highly controlled (and supposedly safe) open-air nuclear tests. A full-scale nuclear exchange would produce fallout levels that would dwarf either of these. According to a report filed by Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment in 1972, the residual cancer deaths that would result from a single series of surface burst attacks aimed only at U.S. oil refineries would number between one and five and one half million (113), and that is assuming an adequate shelter program is used for an extended period of time. In the case of a full-scale nuclear conflict, death by fallout would be inevitable for all those not killed in the initial blasts.
Works Cited
- A-Bomb Blast Effects. United States Civil Defense Administration, 1959. 10 Oct. 2006 <http://www.archive.org/details/a-bomb_blast_effects>.
- About Fallout. United States Civil Defense Administration, 1963. 10 Oct. 2006 <http://www.archive.org/details/AboutFal1963>.
- Atomic Alert. Encyclopedia Britannica Films and United States Civil Defense Administration, 1951. 10 Oct. 2006 <http://www.archive.org/details/AtomicAl1951>.
- Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
- Brown, JoAnne. “‘A Is for Atom, B Is for Bomb’: Civil Defense in American Public Education, 1948-1963.” The Journal of American History 75.1 (June 1988): 68-90.
- Combs, James E., and Sara T. Combs. “The Postwar Agenda.” Film Propaganda and American Politics: An Analysis and Filmography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. 81-104.
- Congress of the United States Office of Technology Assessment. The Effects of Nuclear War. U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1972.
- Cooling, B. Franklin. “U.S. Army Support of Civil Defense: The Formative Years.” Military Affairs 35.1 (Feb. 1971): 7-11.
- Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Phillip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20-31.
- Dickos, Andrew. Street With No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002.
- Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens. 1964. Videocassette. Columbia, 1999.
- Duck and Cover. United States Civil Defense Administration, 1951. 29 Sept. 2006 <http://www.archive.org/details/DuckandC1951>.
- Fail Safe. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Perf. Walter Matthau, Henry Fonda. 1964. DVD. Columbia/Tristar, 2000.
- Fuller, Samuel. “Don’t Wave the Flag at Me.” 2002. Pickup on South Street. Liner Notes. Criterion Collection, 2004.
- Gallafent, Edward. “Kiss Me, Deadly.” The Book of Film Noir. Ed. Ian Cameron. New York: Continuum, 1993. 240-46.
- Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: California UP, 1997.
- The House in the Middle. United States Civil Defense Administration’s National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix Up Bureau, 1954. 10 Oct. 2006 <http://www.archive.org/details/Houseint1954>.
- Kiss Me Deadly. Dir. Robert Aldrich. Perf. Ralph Meeker. 1955. DVD. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2001.
- Luckhurst, Roger. “Review: Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism and Anachorism.” Diacritics 23.2 (1993): 89-97.
- McArthur, Colin. “Samuel Fuller.” Underworld U.S.A. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972. 138-149.
- On the Beach. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Perf. Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire. 1959. DVD. MGM, 2000.
- Our Cities Must Fight. United States Civil Defense Administration, 1951. 10 Oct. 2006 <http://www.archive.org/details/OurCitie1951>.
- Perrine, Toni A. Film and the Nuclear Age: Representing Cultural Anxiety. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998.
- Pickup on South Street. Dir. Samuel Fuller. Perf. Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter. DVD. Criterion, 2004.
- Reagan, Ronald. Response to question. 1984 Presidential Debate. League of Women Voters. Kansas City, Missouri, 21 Oct. 1984. 10 Oct. 2006 <http://www.debates.org/pages/trans84c.html.>.
- Shapiro, Jerome F. Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. New York: Routledge, 2002.
- Wollscheidt, Michael G. “Fail Safe.” Nuclear War Films. Ed. Jack G. Shaheen. London: Feffer and Simons, Inc., 1978. 68-75.