Documentary film has long had an obsession with capturing ‘reality’ in the clearest, most visually readable manner possible, with each new innovation in camera technology and the quality of images produced by them pushing filmmakers towards harnessing their full potential. However, in doing so, a hierarchy of images is maintained unquestioned – the clearest image is always the ‘best’, the most ‘true’, while the “poor images” which make up arguably the majority of the mediated images we see on a daily basis, are often cast aside almost as a type of digital garbage. This insistence on clarity in the pursuit of capturing the “real”, in fact, often works to flatten it, to remove the ambiguities and confusions of life in favor of a stark, perfect gaze – the exact ambiguities, which the “poor image” may be perfectly suited to capture.

 The relentless pursuit of higher image quality and clear, immediately readable visuals within documentary exists as only one part of a broader, mostly misguided emphasis on “objectivity” within the medium’s storytelling – and, as part of a wider reconsideration of the place of the subjective and the expressive within documentary storytelling, the “poor image” allows those qualities to flourish on a aesthetic level, inviting the viewer to draw their own interpretation visually in compliment to those more human philosophical underpinnings. It could be argued that the focus on higher, crisper, clearer images within documentary serves not to draw an immersive understanding and empathy of the events mediated on screen, but instead to draw a further barrier, to focus the viewer purely on aesthetics and the base level of what they are seeing, a security blanket to hide from any deeper thought of the film’s ideological framework. As Michael Renov writes in Towards a Poetics of Documentary: “Documentary culture is clearly the worse for such aesthetic straitjacketing. Indeed, the communicative aim is frequently enhanced by attention to the expressive dimension; the artful film or tape can be said to utilize more effectively the potentialities of its chosen medium to convey ideas and feelings. In the end, the aesthetic function can never be wholly divorced from the didactic one insofar as the aim remains ‘pleasurable learning.’” (p. 13). Indeed, the rich 4K image, for example, can serve as a pacification and relaxant, ensuring the viewer of a supposed objectivity and allowing one to simply engage in pleasurable learning. 

I argue that the “poor image”, and specifically the low-resolution, obscured, or fuzzily reproduced video artifacts which surround our digital lives, have an artistic and expressive potential entirely of their own within the realm of documentary, without subordination to the obsession with crystal-clear images woven within the modern societal consciousness – and in fact, in our current state of instant AI generation/image manipulation, the poor image may exhibit a greater ‘honesty’ than the highest of pixel counts could, and allow filmmakers to freely express the poetics of documentary within the medium of film. This new social paradigm, where the only verifiable truth is that which can be seen directly and unmediated, forces a complete shift in our hierarchy of images, with the value placed on clarity and visibility no longer having any relevance other than pure aesthetics – is there any real point in maintaining that hierarchy at all? 

The emerging subgenre of desktop documentaries and films built on found and reappropriated online video exist on the forefront of these expansive possibilities for the poor image, building narratives around and deriving meaning explicitly from the gaps in our sensory perception these images provide. Films such as Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death and Gala Hernández’s The Mecanics of Fluids delve through the deluge of “imperfect”, obscured images and videos which chart stories on the margins of culture and society, bringing them to the fore in a way which forces the viewer to confront the uncomfortable and unsettling without the comfort of visual clarity. The poor image can serve to paint a more “authentic” portrait of the various cultural and social manners in which capitalist spectacle and mediation run through our daily lives, such as in Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake, the appropriated videos contained within heightening both the incongruity and normality of the overblown American culture industry interacting with the world and people surrounding it on the outside. As Hito Steyerl argues in In Defense of the Poor Image: “Poor images are thus popular images—images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission.” In our current condition of scattershot, almost schizophrenic mediation, our visual attention constantly ricocheting from subject to gawked-at subject, the poor image provides far more “true” representation and reflection of the state of our collective and individual spectacles than the rich image could hope to achieve.

In Transformers: The Premake, Kevin B. Lee, through the format of the desktop documentary, charts the filming process of the massive Hollywood spectacle Transformers: Age of Extinction through the lens of hundreds of amateur videos taken throughout its production. The incongruity between the standard mode we expect to see the visuals displayed within, massive explosions and expensively choreographed stunts, and the way in which we are actually seeing them, through the often fuzzy and indistinct poor images of amateur phone recordings, forces the viewer to confront this strange, blurry boundary between the world of the mass culture industry and the one we exist within on a daily basis. More than the highest quality of images ever could, these poor images bring out the reality of the Hollywood filmmaking process when witnessed from the outside, a surreal collision between the fictional and the material – and a reminder of our total immersion and entrapment within the spectacle which simply could not be communicated more effectively through another, more traditional documentary means. Through the specific medium of found online poor images, Lee is also able to truly bring out the tension between the mass media paradigms of old and new, of a transition from helpless consumer of Hollywood film, to a complete subsuming of the individual within the process of the spectacle itself. As Lee writes in his notes on the film on his website: “We now live in an age where consumers are their own producers. How does this new power transform the dynamic between big media corporations and audiences whose traditional role is to passively consume entertainment?”

In Love is the Message, the Message is Death, Arthur Jafa deliberately uses found online video of anti-Black violence and trauma as a contrast to sanitized, clean footage of mass media surrounding these events and of commodified Black culture, situating the poor images as the more honest ones, with the richer images often examples of the pain shown in the phone-captured videos co-opted and sanded down to a more palatable form. As Jafa questions in an interview on the film in e-Flux Journal: “There’s a real problematic around the appropriateness of having an image of a man getting murdered. But this footage is all over the place. It’s everywhere. It’s not like we’re talking about digging stuff out of some archive that’s never been seen before. It’s literally everywhere so the question becomes: How do you situate it so that people actually see it, this phenomena, as opposed to just having it pass in front of them?” Jafa positions the poor images shown within the film as ones which can not be turned away from. These videos, which exist at the bottom of our common hierarchy of images illuminate the horrors enacted within them instead of making them more palatable – and are imbued with the reality the film so steadfastly conveys. 

Through Gala Hernandez’s disturbing yet empathetic delve into the cloistered realm of online incel culture in The Mechanics of Fluids, she creates a film almost entirely centered around the poor image, drawing from a “subculture” (if being furious at not having sex can be considered as such) which is essentially only documented through poor images, with any other avenues for disseminating their ideas essentially closed off to them. Gala Hernandez presents these found videos, especially those of the film’s primary subject, missing and presumed-dead incel going under the name of AnathmaticAnarchist, as both distant and intimate, with the numerous, often barely-viewed vlogs from him and other incels featured serving something of a form of therapy for the angry, lonely men involved – one which, through the obscurity and quality of the poor images provided, forces the viewer to truly absorb the feelings of alienation they exude, no matter how misguided their expression may be.

The poor image has long been conceptualized as simply a degradation of previous clarity through dissemination and reconstruction, an image exemplifying a lack of what it used to have. However, this is a complete dismissal of the visual and emotional quality this can provide to an image, focusing solely on what is lost from it. As Steyerl describes: “[The poor image] builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the “original,” but on the transience of the copy.” By reorienting the “poor image” as not an inferior image but as an equal with its own set of characteristics unattainable through the “rich image”, an entirely new spectrum of possibility opens for visual storytelling and documentation, as well as in the way we perceive the mediated world around us. 

Bibliography:

Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Film. United States, 2016. 

The Mechanics of Fluids. France & Spain: France Televisions, 2022. 

Renov, Michael. “Towards a Poetics of Documentary.” Essay. In Theorizing Documentary, 

12–36. London, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1993. 

Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-Flux, 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. 

Transformers: The Premake. United States: Kartemquin Films, 2014.

Ever since its introduction to the general public in the early 1990s, the internet has served as our most thorough collective living record of contemporary human history – however, it is one which, as time passes and technology improves, is continually burning away its own past. While it has yet to become an issue of great importance to most, the slow erasure of the internet’s past by its incompatibility with current web infrastructure, the impermanence of web hosting, our deeply archaic copyright system, or other various issues, is one that has vast implications going forward – and one that a dedicated, grassroots community (lacking the funding and resources of academic historical pursuits) has been forced to solve itself. While the internet is undoubtedly the most comprehensive source of 21st century media archaeology, it is one far more fickle and impermanent than any previous, and despite its promise of eternal preservation of information – the only knowledge that the industry seems interested in saving is the personal information and searching habits which have become the engines of their profit. The selective hiding and erasure of inconvenient information to these companies, as well, is already something that has begun to manifest, and it remains to be seen what the effect of a precisely distorted version of history, even more dependant on the whims of capital than our previous historical structure, will have on how the future will see our recent past and present.

As Douglas Davis states in the introduction to The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: “There is no longer a clear conceptual distinction between original and reproduction in virtually any medium. The two states, one pure and one original, the other imitative and impure, are now fictions […] The dead replica and the living, authentic original are merging, like lovers entwined in mutual ecstasy.” (p. 381) There certainly remains a truth to this – media from before the age of the internet, and contemporary works in those more traditional forms have remained, for the most part, thoroughly and accessible preserved through digital copies, now the predominant form of engaging with these mediums. However, the disconnect between “the dead replica and the living, authentic original” still exists within, ironically, the very art and media spawned by this digital revolution. While there are certainly exceptions – carefully, lovingly preserved artifacts of early websites and internet art, the vast majority of even the more famous and well-remembered early internet media are preserved only as partially broken husks of their former selves, if they are preserved at all. Links become dead, art assets are broken by modern browsers, Adobe Flash games or other interactive projects, and many other staples of the early internet experience are simply erased by time and evolving technology. 

Much of this half-broken evidence of the early internet only exists through community-driven and funded efforts like the Internet Archive, with major internet and telecommunications companies, or even academia, seeming to have no interest in the preservation of this history. However, as time inevitably passes to the point when there is no one left from the pre-Internet age, it remains to be seen if internet history and archaeology will become a more vital part of our collective drive to preserve and analyze the past – though, as the internet is continually driven away from its decentralized structure and into the hands of an increasingly small amount of corporations, the risk of large swaths of our modern history becoming entirely extinguished will perhaps be determined entirely by the health of these ever-expanding conglomerates. Though, there will remain a dedicated community of amateur historians/preservationists as there are today, and this still-niche corner of media archaeology provides a window into what will perhaps be wide-reaching implications for future historiographical thought and practice.

In a 2019 BBC article by Stephen Dowling, Jason Webber, engagement director of the Internet Archive, explained: “The Internet Archive first started archiving pages in 1996. That’s five years after the first webpages were set up. There’s nothing from that era that was ever copied from the live web.” Those first primordial years, before popular proliferation of the internet, have largely remained lost – and it has only become a larger and larger struggle to maintain the history that immediately followed this erased stretch of time. However, despite crashing up against issues of incompatibility at every turn, there has been a great deal of effort taken (largely without any institutional or commercial assistance) to ensure that at least a snapshot of the 90s internet is maintained for the future. 

This preservation has been attempted not just through the Internet Archive, but more curated projects like the online Web Design Museum, providing fully-functional captures of, as their website states, “over 2,000 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006.” The Web Design Museum features archives of digital art collectives, design firms, promotions for music and film, massive companies, and early versions of current social media and e-commerce sites – an invaluable record of the design trends and aesthetics of the early internet. However, the bulk of the websites remaining broken or lost despite these efforts are what truly made the early internet special – decentralized, amateur webpages which gave the early internet its communal, optimistic quality. That mid-1990s explosion was one of the first times in history where self-expression on a worldwide scale became accessible to the general public, and this early promise of an internet driven by the creativity of its users, not one controlled by massive platforms with the intent of harvesting data for profit, is what truly delineates this era of online culture from what followed – and what makes it necessary to preserve if we ever hope to escape from platform capitalism.

Some of the largest swaths of lost online history were those sites in the middle of the transition between the early, open internet and one mediated through corporate platforms – ones which have now gone extinct, either from the bursting of the Dot-com Bubble in the early 2000s, or simply from their obsolescence. One of the most prominent examples of this is Geocities, once one of the foundations of internet infrastructure, before its shutdown in 2009 and the resulting mass extinction of many of its sites and pages. Geocities’ shutdown is a cautionary presage to a future where our current dominant platforms are overtaken by new ones, or when our current tech bubble inevitably bursts – and perhaps Facebook, Google, or Twitter may share the same fate as Geocities, with an even more massive loss of our modern history resulting from their deletion. While the internet seems to be, and is popularly thought of as, a place where everything is eternal, the loss of so much of its early history shows just how fickle its infrastructure is to any important link of its supply chain being broken or even altered. While it remains to be seen if our modern internet structure will end up being more future-proof than previous ones, as proven by Geocities, these platforms are only sustainable as long as their model remains profitable and useful to the individuals at the top of their respective food chains. The steady integration of cloud technologies into the most prominent internet platforms also adds another layer of uncertainty, leaving all of that data solely in the hands of companies’ own server infrastructure, which can be completely shut down at any time.

Much of the focus within the current community of internet preservationists is centered around the emulation or recreation of old web/browser-based software, often through offline means. Flash, for example, has received a massive amount of attention when it comes to preservation – and for good reason, essentially all interactive internet media was based around the software until HTML began to catch up in the early 2010s. With its discontinuation in 2020, a massive amount of internet art, games, animation, and more had been rendered inaccessible. While Adobe seemed to have no interest in creating tools for the preservation of Flash software, community members have created offline emulators for Flash files, meaning much of that history remains preserved. However, this only includes pages where files have been able to be ripped from their home websites, leaving any without an offline record on someone’s computer lost permanently. While the internet has been presented as a place where all data can be stored and preserved, ironically, the continued existence of its own historical record depends on the ability for its content to be stripped away from it, and into more “permanent” mediums (if files on one’s computer can be considered more permanent than those within the ether of the internet).

In Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s description of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media within their introduction to Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, they describe Manovich’s 2001 text as pointing out “continuities between early avant-garde and animation film practices and the emerging digital culture, based on numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding […] The focus on new media changes the historical meaning and context of cinema from narrative cinema to one flexible enough to lend itself to interactivity, navigability, and digital representation and transmission.” Ironically, the internet’s development has slowly forced away that flexible nature of digital art, at least within the confines of modern internet browsing, with web activity being trafficked away from individual websites and towards massive, inherently restrictive platforms which have significantly lowered the barrier of entry for online self-expression, but in turn have severely hindered and sometimes eradicated the mixed-media freedom of which the early internet burst at the seams, forcing artists to build their work around the artificial, arbitrary boundaries of these platforms. 

Preservation of the early internet remains vital because it is one of the few ways to imagine a better future for our relationship to online space. The internet was not envisioned as yet another engine for capital, but as a truly socialist institution – a complete democratization of information, a new paradigm for how we imagined the collective process of history and art, a way to fully bridge class, racial and geographical divides in culture and perspective. As the massive profits that could be reaped from the internet were discovered, this utopian vision still struggled to hold on, with even our current monolithic arbiter of online interaction, Google, attempting an ambitious, decade-spanning project to scan and freely distribute every book that had ever been written – before capital stepped in, and “On March 22 of that year […] the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century’s worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York,” as detailed in James Somers’ 2017 piece for The Atlantic, Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. However, this metaphor for that legendarily lost Roman library extends past this attempt at a “universal library” from a corporation for which such a project would seem utterly alien today, but to the internet in its entirety. The World Wide Web, as it is currently constructed, is the Library of Alexandria – except instead of all of its contents being set ablaze at once, the fire slowly, but endlessly erases the oldest, most neglected books it can find.

Perhaps the most promising form of early internet archaeology is not the preservation of the early web itself at all, but the preservation of its style, and its promise. Though certainly in part stemming from our larger cultural obsession with nostalgia which has manifested itself through global capitalism, current digital art proudly carrying forward with loving accuracy the oddities of the early internet’s aesthetic forward to today, both paying tribute to and deconstructing the old web’s aesthetic, and building something new from it. Artists such as Olia Lialina, with her work hosted on her proudly Geocities-inspired website, deal directly with the decay of the early internet as their subject matter, as well as conducting internet archaeology of their own, which can show the value in semi-lost early sites, despite and perhaps because of their broken and incomplete nature, recontextualizing them to say something about the loss of our online history. One such piece which exemplifies this is Lialina’s 2019 video Died in Your Arms Tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29), a documentation of the broken, hollowed-out state of a user’s Geocities passion project, once taking advantage of many of the early internet’s eccentricities, now reduced to a cascade of broken image files, which take on a life of their own with a haunting power. Even if much of the early internet history we have remaining is irreparably changed from their original, intended forms – perhaps there is some value to that on its own, as well. Maybe future internet archaeologists will look at a decrepit, abandoned YouTube or Facebook the same way, left with only scant titles or comments to piece together a vague approximation of the history that once inhabited the website – and perhaps that may take on a life of its own as well.

If we, collectively, ever wish to build an internet that fulfills its earliest promises, that open and democratized font of information and expression it was built to be, instead of its current form as a machine tasked with nothing but the extraction of data and capital – we must preserve its archaic, vibrant past. A past which truly brought, for the first time in centuries, expression freed from the constraints of the profit motive. Only through analyzing, maintaining, and building upon this legacy, either through the direct preservation of that history, or by carrying forward the ideas baked into the early web, which run counter to its current state, can a path away from our endless ouroboros of data capitalism possibly be found. Even if these digital digs for media fossils, just as with physical archaeology, uncover only partial remnants of their true selves – those bones of our early online culture have value. They trace the lineage and the path forward towards the internet of today, and a promise of a path left untaken – a promise which one day, a new internet, one connected to its past instead of relentlessly shedding it, may finally fulfill.

Bibliography:

1. Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, The MIT Press, 1995, pp. 381–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/1576221.
2. Dowling, Stephen. “Why There’s so Little Left of the Early Internet.” BBC, 2 Apr. 2019, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190401-why-theres-so-little-left-of-the-early-internet. Accessed 29 Nov. 2021.
3. Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka. “An Archaeology of Media Archaeology.” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011.
4. Somers, James. “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria.” The Atlantic, 20 Apr. 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2021. 
5. Lialina, Olia. Olia Lialina’s Work (Former FIRST REAL NET ART GALLERY), http://art.teleportacia.org/#CenterOfTheUniverse. Accessed 2 Dec. 2021.
6. Lialina, Olia, director. Died in Your Arms Tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29). YouTube, 7 Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsyWM3EALEw. Accessed 2 Dec. 2021. 

David Lynch’s near-impenetrable 1997 masterpiece Lost Highway is a temporal mobius strip, constantly twisting and looping structure built around the mind of a monster and transplanted onto 35mm film – and as such, it is a perfect example, perhaps more so than any other film of the past thirty years, of purposeful manipulation of the cinematic time-images Giles Deleuze describes in great detail in Cinema II: The Time-Image, both through narrative and editing structure as well as the physical temporalities and characteristics of the contrasting forms of video used throughout the film. Within Cinema II, Deleuze defines and describes various forms of the time-image, the spatialization of time and the embodiment of it within film – but perhaps most relevant to Lost Highway, and to the work of Lynch, is the dream-image – a form which, one could argue, Lost Highway remains within for essentially the entirety of its runtime, with the film’s central conflict forming when this dream-image is interrupted, forced to contort and reconstruct itself. As Deleuze defines it, the dream-image exists in contrast to the time-image, which while imbued with a sense of temporality outside of movement, still exists to link one shot and one direct temporal idea to the next – while dream-images “rather affect the whole: they project the sensory-motor situation to infinity, sometimes by ensuring the constant metamorphosis of the situation, sometimes by replacing the action of characters with a movement of world.” (p. 273). 

In almost all traditional narrative films, the dream-image acts as a break or contrast from the reality of the rest of the film, informing the remainder through the psychological flourishes it shows of the dream’s point-of-view character. As Deleuze describes the purpose of dream-images: “It is clear that [the traditional cinematic] system includes the unreal, the recollection, the dream and the imaginary but as contrast. Thus the imaginary will appear in the  forms of caprice and discontinuity, each image being in a state of disconnection with another  into which it is transformed.” (p. 127). However, in contrast to almost all narrative cinema, Lost Highway functions in the exact opposite way – it is almost entirely a dream-image, a subjective, shifting world bent to its protagonists whims, a visual and narrative landscape of bold, outward “caprice and discontinuity,” occasionally and violently broken through by a sense of objective reality.

Lost Highway functions as a cinematic interpretation of a man’s delusional phantasy rather than a traditional narrative, crafting a world which circles around the events the protagonist desperately wishes not to deal with or take responsibility for – one mediated and interrupted directly by video itself, challenging the subjective reality the protagonist crafts, until it forces the phantasy to break down and reform anew. This cycle can be reconstructed continually yet never truly changed, for fear of confronting that which the dream was created to obfuscate – and in the process, the film embodies a form of Deleuze’s cinematic dream-image state which distorts and stretches cinematic time around the desires and psychological cowardice of its central character, Fred Madison. 

The central method in which Lost Highway creates its dream-image while intentionally and jarringly breaking it through the menacing idea of “objectivity” is by the material contrast between of the video mediums used within it – analog film and VHS, and how their own inherent temporalities compliment and feed into their competing roles within the film’s narrative structure. Analog film, the traditional material medium for fictional cinema, and specifically the capitalist fantasy-producing machine of Hollywood, represents the vivid internal dream-life we all create for ourselves, smoothing over the aspects of our lives we wish not to dwell on – while VHS, the medium of amateur home recording and the first mass-adoption of video for diffuse and uncertain purposes – most sensationally, of the dreaded snuff film, represents the far hazier, less comfortable reality we wish to suppress and avoid. 

Early on in the film, this contrast is made explicit when Fred is questioned by police about the strange, voyeuristic video tapes of his and his wife Renee’s home which have begun appearing on his doorstep, the officers asking if he owns a video camera – which Renee denies, stating Fred hates them, to which Fred elaborates: “I like to remember things my own way… how I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Fred’s mind exists in a constant battle between the dream-image and the recollection-image, which Deleuze describes somewhat similarly (though far less concise) to Fred’s outwardly stated mode of being – recollection-images exist “within the framework of the sensory-motor situation, whose interval they are content to fill, even though lengthening and distending it; they seize a former present in the past and thus respect the empirical progression of time, even though they introduce local regressions into it (the flashback as psychological memory).” (p. 273). 

While Fred’s world is one of recollection, it becomes quite apparent just how distorted his view of reality is, the events depicted in Lost Highway quickly becoming far too absurd to be anything close to an “objective” memory, the film sinking further and further into the pure realm of the dream-image as it continues. As such, VHS and its fluid temporality, contrasting with the easily curated and manipulated regimentation of analog film, represents a direct threat and contradiction to Fred’s carefully constructed dream life regardless of the content of the videos themselves – which just so happen to ultimately be the very thing Fred has fractured his own psyche to avoid, his brutal murder of his own wife. It is interesting in itself to consider how VHS, the far hazier form of video featured within the film, represents the closest thing Lost Highway has to a “true” reality, in contrast to the more visually lifelike nature of analog film. This serves to reinforce these mediums as not representative of an external reality at all, but of how we internally perceive it in retrospect – the memories which remain vivid in our minds often bare little resemblance to how they truly occurred, but instead exist as composite of fantasies which both distort and enhance those invents, while the actual reality exists only as a hazy afterimage.

It is quite telling that the VHS recordings within the film are directly personified by their creator – the “mystery man,” an unblinking, deathly-pale voyeur who is the closest thing Lost Highway has to an antagonist. His only motivation seems to be tearing down the fantasy Fred has built around himself, and the holes he rips in Fred’s carefully constructed fantasy force the protagonist to create a new self and reality entirely once he has finally been broken from that fantasy. The mystery man shares the role of the recordings themselves, confronting Fred directly with the falsehood of his dream-image while at the same time seeming far more unreal than any other aspect of Fred’s reality. The mystery man willfully breaks the spatial and temporal laws which govern our own existence, forcing Fred to recognize the unreality of the fantasy world he has built for himself in the same way the VHS recordings themselves do. Lost Highway is an internal war of contradicting time-images, one embodied both by its jarring breaks from traditional methods of relating cinematic time and filmic reality, and by its purposeful use and manipulation of the inherent physical temporalities of the video mediums it employs. 

Lost Highway winds through the timeline of its literal events in an outward rejection of traditional cinematic structure, its editing often a purposefully jumbled, nigh-incomprehensible, and perhaps even impressionistic interpretation of the content of the film’s narrative – and one which reinforces its use of analog film as a medium of dream-images and internal delusion, only broken through with the far more direct, temporally untampered VHS recordings. This is perhaps most directly illustrated by the way the film reaches what is arguably the single point of “reality” within its runtime: the revelation of Fred’s monstrous secret and his subsequent incarceration, with Fred’s cramped cell perhaps acting as the stage for the entirety of the film’s mental tapestry. Instead of a gradual reveal of these events, or even any continuity between one shot and the next – as soon as Fred sits down to watch the final video tape sent to his house, the camera zooming in on the fuzzy CRT television as it displays the gruesome sight of Fred seemingly bathing in the viscera of his own wife’s mutilated body, contradicted directly by the appearance of his wife grabbing said video in the first place just a few moments prior.

Then, the film cuts immediately to Fred in an interrogation room, with an officer trying to beat a confession out of Fred before he is immediately thrown into a cell. All of this occurs in the space of a few seconds, violently disrupting the dream-image and transitioning the film into its second half, with Fred imagining himself as an entirely different person – auto mechanic Pete Dayton, the persona we follow for almost the entirety of Lost Highway’s remainder. Pete is a manifestation of everything Fred wishes to be, free from the impotence and festering resentment which manifested in his act of murder – and from this point, with Fred (or Pete) now given over completely to this fantasy entirely detached from his real world (or at least, it seems to be) – a final victory of the dream-image over the recollection. As Deleuze lays out: “What, more precisely, is the difference between a recollection- image and a dream-image? We start from a perception-image, the nature of which is to be actual. The recollection, in contrast [ – ] is necessarily a virtual image. But, in the first case, it becomes actual in so far as it is summoned by the perception-image. It is actualized in a recollection-image which corresponds to the perception-image. The case of dream brings two important differences to light. On the one hand, the sleeper’s perceptions exist, but in the diffuse condition of a dust of actual sensations – external and internal – which are not grasped in themselves, escaping consciousness. On the other hand, the virtual image which becomes actual does not do so directly, but becomes actual in a different image, which itself plays the role of virtual image being actualized in a third, and so on to infinity: the dream is not a metaphor but a series of anamorphosis which sketch out a very large circuit.” (p. 56). Fred Madison exists in the gap between recollection and dream-image, creating a world “summoned by the perception-image” of his external life yet clearly distinct from it – while Pete’s existence is the personification of fully giving over to the dream-image, of that circuit of fantasies taking complete hold – visualized by our first look at Pete, standing at the side of the titular lost highway, a place seemingly outside of any temporality whatsoever.

The VHS recordings and the presence of the mystery man fade until the film’s conclusion, where Fred’s crippling inferiority complex and sexual resentment manifest themselves in his new reality, transforming back to his original persona and body as we see the mystery man directly recording Fred for the first time on his video camera, finally integrating the worlds of analog film and VHS together as the man interrogates Fred, asking: “And your name, what the fuck is your name?” At this point, the fantasy finally fully unravels as Fred descends down the film’s titular dark, endless highway which had previously only been seen in flashes, as the transition point between Fred and Pete. The lost highway is a place seemingly outside of time and space itself; it is the final intersection between the vivid dream-image and the hazy reality, the point of merging between subjectivity of analog film and the cold objectivity of the VHS camera. Judging by the painful and brutal contortions and deformation of Fred’s face as he is seemingly fried with electricity behind the wheel of his car, this intersection can perhaps only be reached in the form of death. Whether it be death of the body, death of the ego, or even death of the film – it is the only way to possibly conclude the infinite metamorphosis of the dream-image.

Much of the utopian myth-making surrounding virtual worlds throughout the decades of technological progression since the concept first took hold of the collective imagination in the late 20th century has involved their potential to move past the inequalities and social boundaries of the real world, to create a more equitable society though the machine which can inform our real world. The real applications of this technology have, unfortunately, often stood in stark opposition to these ideals, and as virtual experiences, and specifically video games, have risen to the status of arguably the predominant form of entertainment commodity throughout the world, the medium has seen countless examples of harmful societal structures and biases being reproduced and upheld – within both systems which underpin the creation of large-scale games and the very code of the virtual worlds themselves. However, these extensions of our real-world mechanisms of oppression and exploitation have not gone unexamined or uncriticized – and through the use of the same technologies and tools which allow for this inequality to fester, both the real-world economic and virtual encoded dimensions of inequality perpetuated through digital worlds are explored, respectively, in Sondra Perry’s It’s in the Game ‘17 and Grayson Earle’s Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?

In It’s in the Game ‘17, Sondra Perry explores the unethical and uncompensated use of digital likenesses in Electronic Arts’ NCAA Basketball game series, a striking example of how the injustices and inequalities of the real world – in this case, the stunningly brazen exploitation of college basketball players – can be extended and reinforced into the digital. The NCAA’s infamous history of condemning players to essentially athletic indentured servitude, barring them from any material rewards from the staggering amount of labor they put into the sport with only a miniscule chance of progressing far enough to actually make money – is taken to its natural conclusion by EA’s video game series based on the league, where the developers recreate these players as virtual bodies able to be exploited and used to the developers’ and players’ whims, while the players themselves are completely stripped from any agency or even compensation for the digital expropriation of their identities. 

In this supposedly consequence-free virtual world, players non-consensually manipulate and inhabit the bodies of mostly Black-and-brown young people, their identities, lives, and talents are simplified and condensed into raw data and statistics – to be used as tools, not beings, dehumanized into nothing but their athletic functions – just as the game’s eponymous governing body, and the schools who have built billion-dollar empires around their sports franchises, have continued to perpetuate in the real world. All the while, the real world players, whose labor and value has been deemed unworthy of any compensation or reward – such as It’s in the Game’s focus, former collegiate basketball player and brother of the director Sandy Perry – can only watch as their bodies are appropriated and their labor is even further alienated from themselves, without any agency over themselves within the world of the NCAA Basketball video games – and once again, with no money to show for it. In some sense, this contradiction is an extrapolation of the supposed lack of consequences within virtual worlds and games into economic reality, with human beings forced to watch themselves be manipulated for others’ desires without any real recourse, mostly because of the free labor scam of the collegiate basketball industry –  but in part because it’s just a game, an excuse which has provided cover for countless acts perpetrated upon others in many online virtual spaces which would be utterly unacceptable in real life. 

As Rindon Johnson questions in her interview with Willa Köerner, On Navigating the Tension Between Physical and Digital Realms: “A passing thought has become a physical movement in virtual space, and has perhaps been enacted on someone in a way that makes them feel physically violated. How do we deal with that?” In It’s in the Game, Sondra Perry shows this tension can exist beyond the boundaries of virtual space and into the economic realities which create them; the new-media manifestation of dehumanization in the digital facsimile goes hand-in-hand with the far more familiar forms endemic to our relationships to labor and capital. While the NCAA Basketball series may have ended in 2010, after the concept of a video game featuring athletes who were entirely unpaid for their appearance in the massively popular franchise simply became untenable from a PR perspective for EA and the NCAA, the implications of real human beings being used for profit within the virtual space without consent is one which has become even more uncomfortably pressing with massive leaps in graphics processing and 3D digitization alongside the pervasiveness of online media monetization over the past decade.

At the same time, however, It’s in the Game shows these same digital tools used for reproduction and exploitation of bodies and identities, in a sense stripping people of their humanity itself – can also be used to take back aspects of community and culture. Just as her brother’s likeness was taken without consent or compensation, Sondra Perry uses 3D capture technology to create and appropriate the digital facsimiles of historic artifacts ripped from their point of origin and placed on display in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The British Museum, taking the power and agency over these forms for herself.

Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?, instead of focusing on digital worlds’ potential for direct exploitation, centers around the extrapolation of societal biases and repressive structures which exist both externally as policy and internally as part of our collective societal consciousness into the digital world in the closest possible equivalent to the way they function in our real world –  ingrained into the code of the game itself (in this case, Grand Theft Auto V), baked into the rules which govern this virtual space. Even in a game marketed on total player freedom, explicitly in terms of breaking laws and social mores in a space divorced entirely from the real consequences of those actions – the police, who can easily be manipulated into brutalizing civillains, will refuse to attack each other to the point where this rule overrides any change made to the game’s code. 

The power and impunity with which police can exact violence is allowed, and even taken for granted – except towards each other, a digital version of the unspoken “blue wall of silence” which permeates law enforcement in the real United States, a seemingly unbreakable code inextricably linked to the repressive activities of police, ensuring that – just as in the game – they always remain a unified front, even when breaking down the social relationships and communities of others with no consequence. Even in the simulated world of GTA, this societal hierarchy is maintained without question, and perhaps even reified, turning a corrupt social contract between police officers into a law of reality itself. 

As Grayson Earle shows throughout the piece, this process of normalization is somewhat cyclical. Grand Theft Auto V’s developers bake police solidarity into the most basic structures of the game while never questioning this idea, never making it explicit within the text of the narrative – and when this seeming aberration is questioned, even the game’s most dedicated community of people who examine GTA V’s code itself take this concept entirely for granted as simply an intrinsic quirk of the game’s systems, subconsciously perpetuating the unity of police officers even in the face of obvious abuse or corruption by their peers as simply a fact of life – something to be ignored and accepted if thought about at all.

 By baking this police solidarity so unbreakable into the code, GTA V perhaps serves to further cement the right-wing narrative of police as an identity, even a race. As Ryan Kuo describes in his conversation with Wendy Chun surrounding Race as Technology: “In the past, race was very much a sorting technology. In the eighteenth century, it was a way to argue that you can read innate characters based on physical traces.” The various designations and routine actions of GTA V’s various non-player characters bake traits such as occupation into the very DNA of these digital beings, each category of character existing with immutable characteristics used as sorting technologies – subconsciously, if unintentionally, turning these occupational identities into racial categories. And, in the case of police officers, serving to reinforce our own media-driven societal concept of police as an identity to be respected, and not a societal system which needs to or even can be rethought.

While It’s in the Game ‘17 and Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? are linked thematically by their exploration of real-world injustice carried into the realm of the virtual, the two pieces obviously vary quite starkly in presentation, tone, and subject matter. Perry’s piece takes a much more serious approach than Earle’s, appropriate to the far more tangible stakes involved in its subject, while Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? is far more playful in its tone and construction, leaning far more heavily into the virtual world and its mechanics being an inherent part of the work itself. 

Though, it is ultimately the uncanny discomfort which both pieces elicit which connects them most – a sense that worlds created for escapism and entertainment may not be as far apart from the one we inhabit as we may like to believe, whether it be through a reminder of the inherent inequality of the culture industry which produces these worlds and the commodities which intersect with them, or through the concretization of harmful cultural norms and practices within the code, the very laws of nature which govern these worlds. The use and exploitation of virtual bodies, no matter how insignificant the issue may seem in the current day, is something that must be constantly questioned and interrogated, and more equitable systems to govern these virtual bodies must be constructed – or else, as these pieces show, the promise of a better world within the computer, one which is able to move past the collective alienation of a world controlled by capital, will remain nothing more than a fantasy.

Bibliography:

Perry, Sondra, director. It’s in the Game ’17. Sondra Perry, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo / The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2017, https://sondraperry.com/IT-S-IN-THE-GAME-17-at-ICA-Philadelphia.

Earle, Grayson, director. Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? YouTube, Media Art Exploration / Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbXiVb1Uv8c.

Köerner, Willa, and Rindon Johnson. “On Navigating the Tension between Physical and Digital Realms.” On Navigating the Tension between Physical and Digital Realms, The Creative Independent, 14 May 2020, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/artist-rindon-johnson-on-navigating-the-tension-between-physical-and-digital-realms.

Chun, Wendy, and Ryan Kuo. “Ryan Kuo Discusses Race as Technology with Media Scholar Wendy Chun.” ARTnews.com, Art in America, 6 June 2022, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ryan-kuo-race-technology-wendy-chun-63653.

As the video game industry continues its sustained march to becoming the world’s dominant form of entertainment, it is important to remember medium’s history, and to treat the games of the past, no matter their relevance or cultural importance, as art just as worthy of preservation as any other form. Video games serve as cultural artifacts in the same way that film, literature, or visual art do – they provide a window into the zeitgeist of their time, and allow one to trace the lineage of the game medium, and of its societal effects, back to the source. Despite the medium of video games taking up a constantly expanding amount of space in our collective cultural consciousness regarding art and media, there remains a massive discrepancy between how preservation is treated within games when compared to essentially any other artistic medium which remains culturally relevant. The game industry has shown itself to be largely apathetic to its own preservation, with only a tiny smattering of the medium’s history being preserved solely for its ability to be mined for future profit. While this is, of course, also true of film, or of any other medium that has become entwined with global capital – games are far worse at preserving their history than any other artform. When viewing games through the lens of cultural artifacts, this becomes a far more pressing issue than if games are taken with the flippant, disposable attitude often displayed by publishers. The slow death of game history, as technology advances, is something that seems inevitable – but thankfully, the medium is being preserved, though often through dubiously legal means. The community of game enthusiasts and preservationists have taken up the mantle for saving the history of games through emulation and free digital preservation – which have been fought against tooth-and-nail by the game industry. Video games are now in a peculiar position, where not only is more and more of their history becoming lost by the day, but the game industry itself is actively battling against the safety of that history – which at this point, can only be fully maintained through piracy

While there remains a thorough, legal distribution network for a massive amount of existing film, television, literature, and other popular media – the same cannot be said for games. Though there certainly are a wide variety of legal ways to play old games, these represent a miniscule amount of the full breadth of game history, even when only considering the catalogs of the massive publishers which most often re-release their games onto current platforms and storefronts. While this is certainly true to some extent in any medium, with there still being a considerable amount of films which were only ever released on VHS or DVD, or books which only received a single printing, for example – these “lost” pieces of media can be far more easily transferred to digital platforms and experienced, even if through extralegal means, than video games have ever been able to. Much of this difficulty is inherent to the medium of games, in that unlike essentially any other form of media, each game can only be played on the specific hardware it is meant for – or that hardware must be recreated to some degree. Even though games are now perhaps our most relevant artistic medium, our collective view of its history has not evolved in step with that cultural proliferation, with older games often treated as simply archaic and disposable – or, more recently, simply as a tool of financial speculation completely divorced from the games themselves set alongside a broader trend of mining millennial nostalgia for profit.

While any film on VHS format, for example, can be viewed on any VHS player and easily ripped onto YouTube or other file sharing platforms and experienced through that medium, a Super Nintendo game, for example can only be played on a Super Nintendo console, and while files from cartridges and other forms of storage media used by older games can be ripped using specialized hardware and preserved, these files are useless on their own without a dedicated digital recreation of the hardware it is meant for, an emulator, or a ground-up port of the game onto modern platforms. While there has been a massive amount of progress made on emulating and making accessible the tools to play old games, especially ones on platforms which remain broadly popular or culturally relevant, almost all of this progress has been made through dubiously legal means, by hobbyists and enthusiasts who have no permission from the companies which own the rights to the original hardware or games on these platforms. In fact, a great deal of effort has been made by massive game companies to eliminate free emulation and the distribution of game files – despite these companies often having no plans to legally distribute these games. Of course, the crackdown on illegal distribution of media by copyright holders is well within their rights, and arguably obligatory – but when there is often no other option to preserve these games considering the often complete apathy of game publishers towards their own backcatalogs, it results in game companies actively fighting against the preservation of their own medium and history. 

This issue becomes even more pressing as a larger and larger portion of games are released only on closed digital platforms, where games can be removed from sale and distribution at any time, or entire storefronts can be closed forever, taking all of the games released on those platforms along with them. Unlike with games pre-digital distribution, where even if they are increasingly difficult to find, they can still theoretically be played legally – without expressed effort from the creators and copyright holders of these games, piracy will inevitably become the only way to experience digital games upon the deaths of the closed systems they inhabit. Unfortunately, sometimes even preservation through piracy is incredibly difficult, especially when it comes to more obscure or older digital platforms – an example being the recent scramble of the Tokyo-based Games Preservation Society and US-based Video Game History Foundation, fully community-driven organizations, to preserve the games of the Japan-only i-mode cell phone game service after its closure was announced months before expected. Platforms like early cell-phones are preludes to the upcoming issues which will inevitably broadly appear in the future of games preservation.

 As documented in an open letter by a game preservation hobbyist only going under the pseudonym “RockmanCosmo”, and publicized by the Video Game History Foundation – exemplifying and discussing up another large issue of game preservation, the relegation of what should be important work in cultural conservation, which by all rights should be headed by larger academic institutions, to amateur hobbyists and small community-funded organizations: “Currently, there are small, independent preservation projects that are working to design methods to rescue these games. Some of the more extraneous work involves finding ways to decrypt files on SD cards or reverse-engineering phone software. Needless to say, it’s an increasingly daunting task, [exacerbated] by the fact that the fate of an entire ecosystem of niche video games rests on the shoulders of a mere handful of passionate hobbyists.” As these older platforms show, our increasing reliance on digital distribution, while continuing the model of games requiring diffuse, separate hardware, and publishers continuing to remain largely apathetic to their own history, leaves the medium of games open a bevy of complications regarding the safety of their history, and risks a larger erasure of its recent history than ever before – equivalent only to the massive loss of silent films released at the turn of the 20th century. 

Perhaps most concerning is the sustained push towards cloud gaming and game streaming throughout the past decade by companies like Sony, Google, and Amazon – which could arguably make a wider spectrum of games available to a mass audience, but in turn, making games proprietary to these platforms only exacerbates the future loss when these platforms inevitably end support, leaving the broader community with absolutely no way to preserve these games as the files are hosted on central servers only accessible to the platform holders and game publishers. In fact, the medium of games, just as with film and television, is seeing a gradual move away from the idea of “ownership” in the traditional sense at all, with purchasers of cloud games only essentially only receiving access to rent said game for an indefinite period of time. This issue extends to, in perhaps its most relevant form, free-to-play or online-only games, which often rely entirely on developers’ central servers – and already there have been countless examples of developers ending support for these games leading to them becoming completely inaccessible, unable to be preserved at all. The continued existence of these games is entirely contingent on their sustained popularity – and, by consequence, we will inevitably reach a point in history where some of the most culturally important and successful games in the medium’s history, such as Fortnite or League of Legends, become entirely inaccessible because of their inherently online-only nature.

In fact, despite or even because of the medium’s increased centrality in our cultural understanding, the now almost-complete takeover of digital distribution within games is seeming to make them even more disposable in our minds. This certainly extends to all forms of art and media in the digital age, but without the tangibility and physicality of games to serve as a vessel and reminder for our memories and experiences for them, we are far more easily able to move on from and even forget those experiences, rendering the need for preservation a moot one. 

A digital purchase of a game doesn’t give one that true feeling of “owning” a game, which publishers are more than happy with – as shown through the increased push towards cloud services and free-to-play “live service” games, a move towards a new system of forced rental, where profits are completely controlled by publisher and the purchaser of the game no longer has any rights to that product outside of the terms of said publisher, is a profitable one. However, this further puts at risk the ability for future generations to experience these games in their intended form, or at all – something which most game companies seem to lack an iota of concern with, as shown by the innumerable examples of online games (especially ones by massive publishers), controlled entirely by a central server, being shut down and completely disposed of just years or even months after release. As Saara Toivonen and Olli Sotamaa detail from their research in Of discs boxes and cartridges: the material life of digital games: “The experience of having the rights of possession is not limited to the existence of a game; it is also related to the reliability of use. Regarding physical copies, it was mentioned that ”nobody can take them away” (Male, 21 years), whereas regarding downloads, the respondents felt that being dependent on the downloading service even after purchasing the game weakens their rights of possession to the game, and therefore also weakens their experience of ownership.” (p. 3). As this “right of possession” slips further and further away from consumers as the game industry evolves, not only does game preservation become almost impossible in a practical sense, but our attitude towards games changes – from singular artistic works to disposable, replaceable commodities.

A thorough preservation of the video game medium’s past is not only vital for understanding and appreciating that past, but also for paving the future of games –  analyzing both the flaws that have been worked through over the decades and the lost mechanisms of gameplay and storytelling which make these games unique and worthwhile, so the medium’s further progression can be defined not by efficiency of capitalist extraction, but by what makes games truly special as art. The current state of the games industry is one of manufactured consent in its purest form, where trends in game design are not even determined by perceived popularity, but simply by how much money can be mined from a single individual player. Games attempting to profit of the Destiny model of “looter-shooter” live service games, such as perhaps the most prominent example in EA and BioWare’s Anthem, have proven to be commercial failures – because the decisions to create these games were not based on the popularity of Destiny-style games (which while in the best cases are extremely successful, are not the type of universal blockbuster hits which other genres have proven to be), but by the model’s sheer profitability as an engine to be continually mined for profit past a consumer’s initial purchase. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky detailed in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, “the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media “democratic” thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!” (p. 16).

The history of the video game medium is one of developers constantly bashing up against the walls of what is technologically and artistically possible – and while the “primitive” graphics, inherently simpler storytelling, and lack of many basic quality-of-life elements, which old games often had by necessity, may be deemed now as archaic or outdated – but it is this quality of constantly pushing against what is possible is what has allowed the medium of games to evolve. Instead of a hindrance, these affordances of old games are what truly makes them special, and valuable from a historical perspective. As Jenny L. Davis defines them in How Artifacts Afford, “affordances mediate between a technology’s features and its outcomes. Technologies don’t make people do things but instead, push, pull, enable, and constrain. Affordances are how objects shape action for socially situated subjects.” By this metric, there is perhaps no medium defined more by affordances than video games, a constantly shifting landscape of what is and isn’t considered “possible” within games – though it is not always a forwardly progressing one. If the affordances of games are to be expanded, we must analyze what led to today’s affordances within game being possible, and how throughout the medium’s, artists and developers within the medium have been able to harness (comparatively) limiting affordances in ways which expand those affordances in ways outside of previously established norms and conventions of games.

Video games, despite how much they have evolved, are still a young medium, and still have yet to truly form an artistic vocabulary all their own. Games, or at least the most high-profile ones, remained locked into artistic trends aped from film and drawing upon an increasingly dwindling selection of popular genres and themes. While terminology and technology has changed, in a broad sense, Janet H. Murray’s words in 1997’s Hamlet on the Holodeck remain true: “One of the lessons we can learn from the history of film is that additive formulations like “photo-play” or the contemporary catshall “multimedia” or a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and it is still depending on the format derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power.” (p. 69). A preservation and carrying into the future of games history is essential if games wish to fully build their own artistic repertoire, one unbound by conventions of other mediums like film, and not constrained by the tiny amount of avenues for gameplay and storytelling deemed most profitable.  Unless a broader understanding of the true artistic possibilities of the game medium can be reached, games are doomed to be further divorced from the idea that they are distinct, unique works at all, instead simply existing as links in a larger chain of profit – and the only way for us to collectively reach such an understanding is through an accessible, thoroughly preserved record of the games past. If we ever truly wish for games to be different than they are now, to become a more open and expressive medium – their creators must understand fully what they are, and how they got to this point – and to understand the paths left unexplored and underappreciated which can build towards that better future.

Bibliography:

Toivonen, Saara, and Olli Sotamaa. “Of Discs, Boxes and Cartridges: The Material Life of Digital Games.” Proceedings of Think Design Play: The Fifth International Conference of the Digital Research Association (DIGRA), 2011, https://doi.org/http://www.digra.org/dl/db/11312.23263.pdf.

Murray, Janet H. “From Additive to Expressive Form.” Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997, pp. 68–90. 

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. “A Propaganda Model.” Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York City, NY, 1988, pp. 1–36. 

Video Game History Foundation [@GameHistoryOrg]. “With the i-mode website shutting down at the end of the month, the folks at Rockman Corner wanted to spread awareness for an important preservation project they’re working on. DoCoMo’s multimedia phone service, i-mode, hosted video games from dozens of well-known franchises.” Twitter, 17 November 2021, https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/1461065735615119360.

RockmanCosmo. An Open Letter to Video Game Preservation Organizations on I-Mode Preservation, 18 Oct. 2021, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nnoBi6LJ_y7QJNP42il5H4IsjYl1UpyvJ9EFn5m0QlI/.

When one examines the already fading tech-corporate trend of pushing the “metaverse” as the next step in our evolving and ever-increasingly symbiotic relationship with the internet, it is difficult to imagine a point in time where this concept wasn’t used as just another in a long line of attempts to consolidate and monetize power over as much online activity as possible. However, our current landscape of vacant virtual shopping malls masquerading as community centers is, just as all things pushed by venture-capital-inflated Silicon Valley rent-seekers, not an original idea. Like countless other unwanted innovations of an industry constantly seeking to create money from thin air, the metaverse is a repurposed, hollowed-out recreation of concepts imagined in mass media from the 1980s and 90s, exploiting a vague nostalgia for a promised virtual utopia while stripping out every genuinely utopian idea from those visions of digital worlds within popular fiction and early experiments in realizing them.

Horizon Worlds

The frontier of virtual space focused ostensibly on communication and the inhabitation of a second world for its own sake has been feverishly transformed from a niche occupied by a small subset of online games and digital communities into simply another in a series of forcibly generated income streams created when the previous moneymakers of massive tech companies and ravenous investors begin to dry up, alongside and intertwined with crypto, NFTs, and generative AI technology. And just like the flailing attempts to hop on these other trends hyped as society-changing innovations, capital’s interest in these new technologies extends only as far as their ability to generate steady profit – as demonstrated by the quick divestment of funds from these high-profile “metaverse” projects after their returns on the steep costs involved have been shown to be nonexistent. 

All of this is without even mentioning the smaller upstarts in the “metaverse” field, who capitalize off of the potential of some future virtual world without even the shell of a product the larger corporate offerings provide, insisting on their ability to manifest a new virtual destiny off the back of pyramid schemes and donations. Though, these so-called projects will not be discussed any further, as any aesthetic or cultural analysis beyond the barest surface level is impossible for subjects which essentially always amount to nothing more than vaporware scams, their promised worlds existing only as bytes of laundered cryptocurrency. However, there is one aspect of the virtual world in particular that incentivises continued progress and support by massive corporations and smaller scam artists alike – the promise of a fully closed system under their control.

Naive as it may be in hindsight, the imagery and conceptualization of virtual worlds and realities conjured through media at the tail end of the twentieth century exhibited far more creativity and a genuine attempt at creating a truly new set of aesthetic sensibilities for the digital realm than the modern metaverse, typified by Mark Zuckerberg’s quixotic Horizon Worlds and the even more blatantly monetized crypto-driven Decentraland. These modern metaverses exist only as hollow shells filling out the most base prerequisites for a “virtual world” and nothing more, the “worlds” themselves being little more than pretext to sell and advertise to the users they hold complete surveillance over – or, in the case of Decentraland, as simply a support system for facilitating and justifying the purchase of digital tokens and supposedly sought-after JPEGs. Early attempts at digital worlds, while still most often intended for commercial release/distribution, were far less focused on wringing every possible dollar out of its participants than on genuinely attempting to create a community space and a new visual lexicon for this perceived next stage of our reality – even if this was perhaps less out of creative or altruistic reasons than it was because the technology to monetize every aspect of one’s interactions in these spaces didn’t quite exist yet.

Decentraland

It could be argued the most successful of these modern virtual worlds is VRChat, which while host to all manner of examples of the worst of internet content and conduct, actually managed to foster a community through catering to all manner of communities and marginalized groups – whether justifiably marginalized, such as far-right and racist groups, or otherwise such as the large portion of trans and queer people on the platform – through its open, customizable nature and lack of emphasis on monetization. Though, aesthetically, VRChat has still yet to carve out a true unique identity like its forebears, existing, like much of modern online culture, as a scattershot regurgitation of mass media iconography and references. This scattered mishmash of cultural signifiers is still infinitely more compelling than its current alternatives, the ramshackle and chaotic nature of the VRChat experience seeming to provide an actual sense of community never found in corporate, sterilized “metaverses.”

Virtual world experiments of the 1990s, such as ActiveWorlds, WorldsChat, SAPARi Community Place, and other experiences lost to even further obscurity explored otherworldly, liminal aesthetics meant to truly bring the user into another, entirely separate reality unmoored by the constraints of our own – and even in their current, mostly-empty states, these worlds have a sense of haunting beauty and a certain charm to their various idiosyncrasies which reach something more intangible than simply the novelty of their age and archaic qualities. While much of this unique visual language and abstract world-building was, of course, by necessity because of the infeasibility of creating something ‘realistic’ with the technology available to both users and developers, and while the costs and challenges involved still necessitated the involvement of corporate sponsorship and/or ownership – the structures of these now-abandoned virtual worlds were still, perhaps surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) far more democratized and open to user expression and experimentation than much of the “metaverse” landscape today.

SAPARi Community Place

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), was a file format and tool set from the 1990s for the free creation and dissemination of online worlds, with the perception of these digital spaces as the genuine next step in evolution for online exploration and interpersonal communication, perhaps the only true attempt at the creation of a commons for virtual worlds – and was a far more democratized and decentralized infrastructure for their creation and dissemination than any of the closed systems unconvincingly insisting they are still the future of the internet some three decades later, without even the people involved truly believing it, . VRML was intended to truly bridge the gap between the 2D and 3D internet, fully integrated into browsers with the full intention of an eventual full transition into an internet navigated entirely through simulated three-dimensional space. However, with VRML’s discontinuation and its quick fade into incompatibility and obscurity afterwards, it became clear to tech companies that an open, freely-disseminated system of virtual worlds intertwined with our common internet browsing experience was not nearly as profitable as total consolidation and control by proprietary services.

 Even the virtual worlds nakedly and obviously created through large corporations or cultural entities were often less geared towards monetization or advertisement (in the short term) than they were with actually exploring the new aesthetic and communicative possibilities of the medium. David Bowie’s BowieWorld, one of the first commercial virtual world projects by a figure of Bowie’s profile (and created by one of the first marketing firms geared towards the subject, Worlds.com – which is now, of course, attempting to work their way into the NFT/cryptocurrency space by peddling their connections to the years-dead artist), was conceptualized by the artist as less of a marketing tool and more of as an archive and a real medium for exchange of ideas and community and a genuine attempt to explore the potential of creating experimental art within these spaces.

BowieWorld

A testament to the unique pull of these buried worlds of the 1990s is the fact there are still small communities residing within them, a shared experience within these forgotten realms of being binding people together into tight-knit groups, with numerous (mostly exaggerated) reports of cults forming and ritually gathering inside these abandoned digital spaces. Neglected by their owners for decades, the few still roaming these abstract spaces are given free reign to to utilize the vast amount of freedom they have over the code of the world itself to shape their own, occasionally explicitly disturbing spaces twisting within and beneath the would-be virtual tourist destinations which comprise the lost hope of these worlds between stretches of empty polygonal space. There are also groups digging up the remains of lost, inaccessible virtual worlds and finding ways to make them accessible once more to modern audiences, such as Cybertown and the previously mentioned SAPARi Community Place. Perhaps above all else, these efforts show the true aesthetic staying power of these abandoned worlds – a staying power which current virtual worlds are already seeming to lack.

Even the depictions of virtual reality and digital worlds within popular film of the 1990s, which more often than not veered into the realm of the dystopian, had more of a sense of life and interiority within their small pocket universes within a larger fictional world than the mass-market realized products of Zuckerberg et. al. Robert Longo’s messy-yet-captivating Johnny Mnemonic features a virtual world writ as a cavernous, sensory-overloading rollercoaster of CGI animation and nigh-incomprehensible iconography which truly feels alien despite and perhaps because the focus of these VR sequences often being on distorted depictions of mundane tasks like sorting through files. This depiction of a world transformed into a nightmarish tapestry of jittering polygons, only one in a series of similar mass media explorations into a dark virtual frontier alongside The Lawnmower Man, Serial Experiments Lain, and various other imaginings of surreal virtual hellscapes – seems practically optimistic compared to the crushing banality of our current online panopticons. 

Johnny Mnemonic

Much of the conceptualization surrounding virtual worlds and realities in the 1990s stemmed from the broader explosion in possibilities for multimedia art the advent of the CD-ROM and advancements in consumer computer technology provided, a time where genuinely experimental work toying with the edges of this new synthesized media landscape could be marketed to and occasionally actually become successful within the general public sphere, more so than any time before or arguably even since. Artists from every discipline, from Devo and The Residents to David Lynch (at least, a proposed project with Haruhiko Shono’s multimedia pioneer group Synergy) toyed and publicly released these projects integrating as many media formsas possible with the interactivity the format provided. As the internet and online connectivity quickly became the next obvious step in our collective relationship with computers and the artistic possibilities therein, online worlds quickly became the next artistic realm to be explored and as far as the financial backers of these new media experiences were concerned, to be commercially conquered. 

However, as indicated by the numerous previous descriptions of these pioneering connected virtual worlds in this piece as lost or abandoned – these experiments were never particularly successful, either financially or in terms of shaping or even slightly penetrating the future of online communication, and were for the most part ultimately unable to withstand the precipitous crash of the dot-com bubble. In contrast to the massive proliferation and success the realm of online games, where even at their loosest, virtual worlds are structured around a set of goals and requirements, where social interaction – while having the potential to be truly meaningful – is inherently a means to a separate end, virtual worlds where the interaction and inhabitation of the space was the end failed to make any noticeable impact beyond its initial novelty. This failure, rather than the speculative potential and flurry of possibilities that took hold in the years before realization of these worlds was truly possible, is what the “metaverse” seems intent on reproding – though, seemingly devoid of any actual desire to expand or rethink online communication beyond a pretense used to generate capital.

WorldsChat

In the early 2000s, after the recovery period from the dot-com bubble began, a second, more visually sophisticated and tightly structured set of mass virtual worlds began to emerge, one which ultimately had far more staying power than the previous, and quite arguably later permutations of the concept – with Second Life and IMVU in particular finding mass success in the teenage demographic of the era and largely defining the modern perception of virtual worlds. Though not without their own aesthetic and conceptual merit, these initial successes laid the groundwork for the worst excesses of the current metaverse landscape, with their pioneering of cosmetic monetization and real-money markets within virtual space being perhaps their most lasting impact. These new, more capital-compliant virtual worlds were formed at the beginning of a larger shift within the structure of the internet which set the stage for the current landscape of tech-monopoly fueled online relations – the warning shots for Web 2.0. As theorist Tiziana Terranova summarizes in After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common: “The crash [of the dot-com bubble] did not spell the end of the capitalist colonization of the internet, as some hoped, but was followed by a new, even more buoyant phase of commercialization that injected new capital into the development of technological innovations in ways that short-circuited and bypassed the slower processes of commons-based network peer production. Already in the mid-2000s, in fact, what was left of the industry was rallying back around the Web 2.0 banner – a term that identified the winners who had survived the collapse and which were to inspire a new wave of more successful business ventures.” (p. 9) 

Second Life

A new model of extraction was formed in this bubbling well of unharnessed online profit – as Terranova describes, one which “involved the harnessing of the free labor of user participation, whose value was soon transmuted into the supposedly inert ore of the data mines stored in the anonymous bunker-like concrete blocks of server farms.” (p. 9). As this data-farming driven internet economy completely absorbed all online relations, there eventually came a point of diminishing returns, where consolidation of online life into a small set of hubs for interaction owned by an even smaller set of companies until the only way where any of these massive companies could gain any more control of people’s data was to entirely subsume the internet into themselves.

The current attempt at a ubiquitous virtual world by Meta and other global communications conglomerates is a (currently) less successful attempt to recreate the transition from disparate online networks and communities to an internet fueled by platform capitalism through a framing of this forced innovation as the natural next step in the internet’s evolution. As Terranova details the previous, more successful transition of online space into fewer and fewer hands: “The takeover of the internet by the capitalist market presented platformization as progressive and revolutionary – a universally beneficial disruption of a previous social and economic order… [which] has turned out to be more of a counter-revolution which operated a normalization with relation to the exceptionality that had been claimed for the so-called digital economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s.” (p. 11-12). The final, ultimate stage of online platform capitalism is to create an inescapable platform – to create new worlds entirely owned, controlled, and surveilled by these companies where no scrap of data would be free from their grasp, and where there would be no option for users but to fully integrate into these platforms in order to maintain connection to the broader social world once their forced normalization of this new regime of hyper-exploited social relations takes hold.

AlphaWorld/ActiveWorlds

There is an equitable and artistically meaningful path for mass virtual worlds going forward – but it is one which requires looking at our decades-old hopes and experiments with this new medium not through the lens of what can be mined for nostalgia-fueled cultural and literal capital, but for what our modern metaverses haven’t reproduced. If they wish for their work to have any real meaning or purpose, the creators of our new virtual worlds must look back at their forebears which attempted to create worlds and communities in aesthetic realms vastly apart from anything resembling the real world, instead of creating a sanitized mirror of our lives away from the keyboard. And, ultimately, these creators must look back to the tools and structures of these early virtual worlds which allowed for such creative freedom and expression and genuine long-lasting connection between their participants. If anyone still wishes to find a reason for the “metaverse” to exist at all – it must be as a supplement to our reality, a dreamscape shared with and shaped by anyone connected to it which could pave the way to new forms of social relation and connection – not as a representation and regurgitation of the same binding structures which drive people to other worlds in the first place.

OnLive Traveler

Bibliography:

Terranova, Tiziana. After the Internet Digital Networks between the Capital and the Common. Semiotext(e), 2022. 

Damer, Bruce. “Meeting in the Ether: A Brief History of Virtual Worlds as a Medium for User-Created Events.” Artifact, vol. 2, no. 2, 2008, pp. 94–107., https://doi.org/10.1080/17493460903020877. 

Turner, Fred. “How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons from the First Hackers’ Conference.” Critical Cyberculture Studies, 2022, pp. 255–269., https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814708903.003.0026. 

Banis, Davide. “Archeology of Virtual Worlds.” INC Longform, 2021, https://networkcultures.org/longform/2021/01/11/archeology-of-virtual-worlds/. 

Lasar, Matthew. “The Noosphere in 1996: When the Internet Was Utopia.” Ars Technica, 7 Jan. 2010, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/when-the-internet-was-utopia/amp/. 

Jensen, K. Thor. “Meet VRML: How People Made VR Websites in the 90s.” PCMAG, 15 Feb. 2017, https://www.pcmag.com/news/meet-vrml-how-people-made-vr-websites-in-the-90s. 

Robertson, Adi. “When the Virtual City of Cybertown Went Dark, Its Citizens Rebuilt It.” The Verge, 21 Apr. 2022, https://www.theverge.com/23032658/cybertown-revival-blaxxun-virtual-community-rebuilding-project. 

Wehner, Mike. “Inside David Bowie’s Insane, Disturbing Virtual World from 1998 That Some Fans Never Left.” The Daily Dot, 27 May 2021, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/david-bowie-world-virtual-3d/. 

Olivetti, Justin. “The Game Archaeologist: The Virtual Worlds of the 1990s.” Massively Overpowered, 19 June 2020, https://massivelyop.com/2020/06/21/the-game-archaeologist-the-virtual-worlds-of-the-1990s/. 

In Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Linda Williams breaks down the three “body genres,” films based on emphasizing physical reaction on-screen and delivering a similar subconscious, physical experience to the viewer – those genres being horror, pornography, and melodrama (or “weepies”). These three genres center on distinct yet equally powerful physical reactions: fear, orgasm, and crying, and traditionally turn their focus towards women as the objects or vessels through which these reactions take place, most often clearly through the male gaze. However, there is perhaps a fourth genre, a masculine counterpart to the most overtly feminine of the body genres, the melodrama – one which does not escape the male gaze through its focus on the male body, but turns it in on itself: the action film. As William describes the genre of weepies: “These are films addressed to women in their traditional status under patriarchy – as wives, mothers, abandoned lovers, or in their traditional status as bodily hysteria or excess, as in the frequent case of the women ‘afflicted’ with a deadly or debilitating disease.” (pp. 4). By contrast and perhaps in compliment, action films focus on the male body’s most basic role in patriarchy – as an instrument of violence, as the hunter in the hunter-gatherer dynamic or as later manifested in the masculine ideal of the soldier. Traditional action cinema focuses on both giving and receiving masculine violence, on the sadomasochism of fulfilling your most murderous fantasies entwined with the equally powerful subconcious fantasy of seeing and feeling your own body broken and maimed – and exceedingly few films unabashedly exemplify these ideas as effectively as John Woo’s Hong Kong action masterpiece, The Killer.

After essentially creating the “heroic bloodshed” subgenre of Hong Kong action films (films centered around hyper-stylized gun violence and themes of redemption and brotherhood) with A Better Tomorrow in 1986, a falling out with producer Tsui Hark during the production of the film’s sequel led to John Woo striking out on his own on his next project – 1989’s The Killer, a film which, while underperforming in its home country, would gain massive attention internationally and spawn countless imitations by Western filmmakers in the years to follow. The Killer is perhaps the ultimate culmination of Woo’s formula for action cinema – meticulously choreographed and visceral violence mixed with equally heightened emotion, and symbolism which dares to reach far past the realm of subtext.

 Early in her definition of body genres within Film Bodies, Williams argues: “It would not be unreasonable, in fact, to consider all [body] genres under the extended rubric of melodrama, considered as a filmic mode of stylistic and/or emotional excess that stands in contrast to more “dominant” modes of realistic, goal-oriented narrative. In this extended sense melodrama can encompass a broad range of films marked by “lapses” in realism, by “excesses” of spectacle and displays of primal, even infantile emotions,” (pp. 3) – and by this definition, The Killer is a perfect illustration of melodrama in the realm of action cinema, and an argument for action film’s place within the realm of body genres. In fact, The Killer, despite its categorization as an action film, is unquestionably also an example of the rare “male weepie” which Williams describes as “mainstream melodramas engaged in the activation of the previously repressed emotions of men and in breaking the taboos against male-to-male hugs and embraces.” (pp. 9). In The Killer, Woo uses violence both to compliment and heighten the emotions of the films characters, as well as arguably using it as an excuse to create a type of film that likely couldn’t exist on its own in any mainstream film market of its time – an unabashed masculine melodrama unafraid to delve headfirst into the realm of the homoerotic and homosocial. When words fail to express the heightened emotions of The Killer’s cast – violence is always able to, reaching past the realm of the “real” and forming an almost impressionistic world around these characters and the carnage they are forced to both deal and endure.

The Killer centers around the titular professional assassin, Ah Jong (played by Chow Yun-Fat, a towering figure in modern Asian cinema, in one of his greatest performances), who in the immediately tone-setting opening scene extravagantly shoots up a mob-owned club in what he vows to be his last job before retirement – until he accidentally blinds an innocent nightclub singer named Jennie in the process. Driven by his guilt and personal obligation to pay for Jennie’s vision-saving eye surgery, he takes on more assassination jobs while forming a budding romance with Jennie, still none the wiser that he is the man who stole her eyesight. In the process of a public hit on a high-ranking triad (Chinese mafia) boss, he is seen by police, escaping by speedboat after saving the life of a small boy caught in the crossfire. Li Ying, a police officer who was at the scene and witnessed Ah Jong’s act of saving the boy (played by venerable cop-character actor Danny Lee), becomes obsessed with this incongruous act of selflessness by the assassin, and vows to track him down. However, after Ah Jong’s clients are made aware the killer was spotted by police, they decide to cut their losses, forcing one of Ah Jong’s closest friends, Fung Sei, to betray him and unsuccessfully attempt to kill him during the supposed money hand-off. Ah Jong escapes, going on the run from both the police and triads as he attempts to protect Jennie and find a way to pay for her surgery. In the process, Ah Jong and detective Li Ying are forced to come together from opposite sides of the law, creating a deep, mostly unspoken bond which forms The Killer’s thematic backbone.

One may expect The Killer’s twin focuses on heightened, cathartic violence and soul-bearing emotion would perhaps be incongruous, and are certainly a departure from the stoic musclemen of contemporary American action films – but instead, the two intertwine, becoming inextricably linked, feeding off and into each other. The closest comparison to how violence functions in The Killer would perhaps be to the musical, where when characters’ emotions become too great for words, they burst into song to release them. In The Killer, when emotions reach their peak, they are released through bullets. 

The scene of Ah Jong’s betrayal by Fung Sei, his most trusted confidant, midway through the film, and the violent shootout which follows it, works as a microcosm for how The Killer uses violence as emotional expression. The scene begins slowly as a moody piano score follows Ah Jong in a moment of silent contemplation in his home draped in red neon lighting, before suddenly cutting to Ah Jong outside of Fung Sei’s apartment for the agreed dropoff of his payment for the triad boss assassination, slow and quiet – before a burst of energy begins with Ah Jong quickly pointing his gun to Fung Sei’s head, his experiences leaving him unable to let his guard down with even his most trusted associate. The scene slowly builds tension from there as Fung Sei grabs the briefcase of money for the handoff, taking a seat down across from Ah Jong as he pleads for the assassin to trust him. However, as soon as Ah Jong puts down his pistol to open the briefcase, Fung Sei grabs it from him, pointing it point blank at his head. Ah Jong responds with nothing but despondent laughter as he opens the case, revealing it to be filled with blank paper, before Chow Yun-Fat’s face twists into a heartbreaking expression as he allows the bullets he had removed from the gun beforehand to fall from his sleeve. 

The film holds on Ah Jong’s sorrow for a moment as he stares at Fung Sei wordlessly, pulling out his second, loaded pistol from his side. Before the vocal outburst of emotion one would expect from Ah Jong, however, he sees a glint in the corner of his eye and suddenly springs upward as the scene shifts disorientingly quickly into a flurry of gunfire as Ah Jong quickly dispatches the triad goons positioned around Fung Sei’s home, his emotions released in a blaze of bullets, broken glass, and bursting viscera. What follows this cathartic violence is not satisfaction, but emptiness as Fung Sei bears his guilt for what he had done to Ah Jong and the affection he truly has for him, the assassin coldly replying “I never want to see you again,” the pain on his face belying his words as he turns and walks off.

Woo’s films are perhaps most renowned for their kinetic, masterfully planned action sequences, displaying its protagonists as superhuman in their marksmanship and ability to make foes double back as if shot by a cannon as a burst of blood explodes from their chest. However, his heroes are certainly not immortal – far less so than the hulking protagonists of American action films. Woo puts his protagonists through the absolute ringer both emotionally and physically, and rarely gives audiences the happy, satisfying ending they want. In the end, while his protagonists are bestowed with the power to kill in mesmerizing and almost impossible ways, the violence they commit almost always catches up with them. Though, this element certainly doesn’t detract from the bodily fantasy these films provide – it completes them. They are films of sadomasochism instead of pure sadism, allowing one to indulge in the subconscious thrill of punishment, of the inevitable conclusion to the murderous fantasy. As Woo’s films, and action cinema as a whole, suggest – there is perhaps no such thing as the fantasy of killing without the subconscious fantasy of dying. In defining the function of pornography and the female orgasm therein, Williams argues: “Even when the pleasure of viewing has been traditionally been constructed for masculine spectators, as is the case of the most traditional heterosexual pornography, it is the female body in the grips of an out-of-control ecstasy that has offered the most sensational sight.” Action films, and The Killer especially, perhaps prove that there is a function of the male body which produces the “sensational sight” of the male gaze – but instead of pleasure, it is pain. However, these concepts of pleasure and pain are often difficult to pull apart from each other, especially within the realm of body genres – as William argues regarding sadomasochistic pornography and its relationship to horror films: “But even in the most extreme displays of femine masochistic suffering, there is always a component of either power or pleasure for the woman victim.” (pp. 8). By this same token, the fetishized pain of male bodies within action films always contain this subtext of pleasure, both for the film’s spectator, and often for the characters experiencing this pain themselves.

Woo exemplifies these ideas in perhaps the most iconic action sequence of the film, the bombastic, climactic shootout at the end of the film – where Ah Jong, Jennie, and detective Li Ying are cornered inside an old church and beset on all sides by triad members looking to slaughter them, the carnage bathed in the holy light of stained glass as Ah Jong and Li Ying desperately cut a swath through the goons, the former adversaries’ relationship evolving into one where both men are clearly willing to die for one another. The camera pans around the two fighting back to back, their struggle growing more desperate with every passing second. Up to this point, Ah Jong has remained mostly unscathed, fulfilling the role as the unstoppable action hero – until the sadomasochistic circle is completed. Despite being a non-fatal injury, a shot to Ah Jong’s shoulder is treated with more gravitas than almost any death in the film, everything coming to a halt as Chow Yun-Fat’s body doubles back, the camera lingering on his viscerally pained (and perhaps pleasured) face, a bust of the mother Mary holding a baby Jesus sitting just above his slumped form – before a shotgun blast transforms the statue into a clump of ceramic chunks. The struggle of Ah Jong to keep his battered body going becomes fetishized just as much as any of the thousands of bullets he himself fires during this scene, forced to lean further on Li Ying for support as the battle comes to a climax outside of the church, the mad triad boss Wong Hoi, the one who put a price on Ah Jong’s head, being the last adversary remaining. 

However, before Ah Jong is quite able to finish off the injured triad boss, Wong Hoi riddles Ah Jong with bullets, the camera focusing on Ah Jong’s blood spattered suit as he collapses to the ground, grabbing Li Ying’s gun from his side – though he has been blinded by the gunshots, unable to get off more than a few his own as his eyes, the one thing he wished to ensure remained intact in case of his death so he could donate them to Jennie, grotesquely swell up as he writhes on the ground, attempting to reach Jennie who has fully succumbed to her blindness as he passes away from his wounds. As police arrive, Wong Hoi surrenders – but in his rage and grief, Li Ying kills him, the film ending as he collapses to the ground in tears for the loss of the man he had grown so close to. The sadomasochistic fantasy is completed by an ultimate failure, a stark contrast to its Western contemporaries – and yet, this failure brings a subconscious satisfaction of its own. An ending like this seems to be the inevitable conclusion for someone who commits such acts – and such an ending brings the fantasy of identifying with this character full circle, providing the ultimate form of release and closure to the perverse thrill of killing – one’s own death.

The Cantonese title of The Killer, translated literally is “Two Heroes, Flowing Blood” – perhaps the most succinct summary which could be given to the film, not as a description of two concepts – but as a singular, tied entity. Violence, the flowing blood in question, is how the two heroes bond, how their relationship forms and grows – and in a homoerotic reading of the film (a particularly obvious, and certainly not unintentional reading), the violence acts as the consummation and release of their bond, the substitute for the act of sex. While John Woo’s films never focus explicitly on homosexual relationships, essentially all of his most iconic work in Hong Kong centers around devotional homosocial bonds – and The Killer is no exception. However, in contrast to some of Woo’s other films like A Better Tomorrow and Bullet in the Head, which focus on lifelong friendships strengthened and broken by the horrible circumstances the characters endure, The Killer’s two central leads are brought together within the film by and through violence. 

Beginning as opposing forces, with Li Ying’s obsession with capturing Ah Jong bringing the two into conflict, circumstances force the two to grow closer, this bond shifting with almost no dialogue into an almost brotherly camaraderie, expressed most outwardly by the synchronicity of their violence as a team. This relationship, one which easily could have bloomed under far less dire circumstances if these characters’ lives had gone differently, is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the film – one which truly takes hold only in its third act, only to be cruelly snuffed out by the inevitable consequences of the life Ah Jong leads. Li Ying is only able to express his despair with one last act of violence, the killing of Wong Hoi, before he breaks down in tears. Intentional or not, this tragedy acts as a microcosm of The Killer itself – a film about emotion, an unabashed “male weepie” – but one which is only truly able to exist because of its violence, while refusing to shy away from said violence’s natural consequences. As Williams details the link between body genres and the idea of “gender fantasy,” she argues: “There is a link, in other words, between the appeal of these forms and their ability to address, if never really to “solve,” basic problems related to sexual identity.” The true tragedy of the relationship between Ah Jong and Li Ying is that their relationship lays these ideas of homosocial and -sexual bonds just barely beneath the surface, but through the circumstances of their roles in society and the consequences of the actions they take because of those roles, that tension, those “basic problems related to sexual identity,” are left explicitly and intentionally unsolved.

Action films, when viewed as a body genre, allow the male gaze to be shifted to one of active participation and embodiment instead of the voyeuristic detachment found in horror or pornography. Action films allow the male gaze to look at and fetishize itself – even if, and perhaps especially, if that fetishization does not take the form of the infallible ubermensch but of the vulnerable, emotional human form. The Killer allows the viewer to embody the ideal of the hyper-competent assassin glorified in so much popular culture, but also forces the viewer to indulge in the inverse of that fantasy, that of the death drive which is buried deep inside all of us. By doing so, The Killer remains a relevant piece for understanding how societies view the role of masculinity across cultures and its deeply woven relationship with violence and the power it provides, both as it pertains to the social climate of the late 1980s as well as today. The Killer revels in the chaos of the abyss of violent masculinity and the bodily sensations it provides to the spectator and perpetrator of it, but shows the self-destruction that chaos brings, simultaneously viscerally challenging the audience and completing the subconscious cycle of the masculine fantasy.

Works Cited:

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2–13., https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.
Woo, John, director. The Killer. Film Workshop Co., Ltd., 1989.

Permeating throughout the history of human interaction with and speculation surrounding alien intelligence and agency is a palpable sense of fear and discomfort, a disconnect from any clear understanding through our collective sensorium – yet it is perhaps this fear, this impasse in itself which draws us further toward that unreachable understanding. Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a work which centers around this sensory impasse with the alien and the physical and existential terror it provides – yet also is one which suggests a true understanding and union between the human and alien is possible, even if by consequence we must become something non-human. The film’s unnamed protagonist, in his interaction and conflict with the metal virus (a fusion of two most prevalent forms of the alien, the viral and the machinic/computational), experiences numerous facets of the fear and even trauma felt through unwanted encounters with the alien, but through his physical and psychological surrender to this antithetical form of life, he reaches an understanding and fulfillment entirely beyond human standards or comprehension. This paper will use this journey from a human repulsed by the alien to a merger unrecognizable as either of its constituent parts, as well as the various physical and psychological forms of the alien which the metal virus draws from, as a lens through which to find some level of understanding of the internal and external forces which cause the visceral repulsion to the alien – as well as through finding a way genuinely past them. As Sarah Myerson describes the conclusion of the film in Global Cyberpunk: Reclaiming Utopia in Japanese Cyberpunk Film: “It presents a form of collectivism, two beings merged together, but for radical ends that challenge capitalism and heteronormativity rather than conforming to them.”

The metal virus of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, as the name suggests, exists as a fusion of two forms of the alien which we collectively interact with constantly – yet the fear surrounding the machinic and the viral subsuming or destroying us is something that, despite the centuries we have had to think through it, never fades away. Tetsuo was a film created at a height of fear of the viral, during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, and dives headlong into the processes which drive our fear of the body being transmuted into something malformed, something not only alien but enemy to that which makes us human. Our hesitance to interact or engage with the alien, more than simply a visceral fear of the unknown, is also a fear of what we will become as a consequence of that interaction, a fear of growing too close to something uncategorizable, a fear which manifests in the shackling of machine consciousness and agency to human ideals.

 As Ramon Amaro describes in The Black Technical Object: “Machine learning, while it involves a minor mode of existence that replicates the human condition via abstraction and categorization in its technological function, is an expression of that which has already been categorized. In this way, machine learning is not causal of racial categorization. Machine learning is the expression of a signal that alerts us to an individual and collective condition that finds its most prized value in the categorization of life in order to facilitate meaning through external affirmation.” Instead of allowing computational or alien agency, the power of these machine systems are used to reproduce and entrench already established human boundaries and categorical methods of exclusion – the exact type entrenched boundaries which Tetsuo’s metal fetishist seeks to completely eliminate through harnessing power of the metallic, a lashing back at and destruction of society through the elements of its enforcement.

The acceptance of his merger with the metal virus, of his new unrecognizable form, that the protagonist reaches at the end of the film is not an acceptance of a new place within the structure of society, but an outright rejection of that society, of human modes of being and cultural standards. If humanity rejects the alien at their most base psychological level, the only way to truly understand the alien is to reject one’s own being, one’s own world and to truly accept and immerse oneself within life inside uncharted margins, is to destroy the life you once knew. As the metal fetishist after his merger with the protagonist proposes at the end of the film: “Our love can destroy this whole fucking world.”

The metal aspect of Tetsuo’s metal virus is one which draws on anxieties dating back to the industrial revolution, ones which have only compounded further in the years since (and in the decades since Tetsuo’s creation) into an all-consuming, ever-present fear of the metallic and later the computational subjugating or rendering unrecognizable all which makes us human, one which finds specific resonance within the technological and industrial boom period of post-World War II Japan. This industrially-altered human takes shape in Tetsuo through the figure of the metal fetishist, played by the director himself, who forcibly invites the protagonist into his world of the machine, gleefully and unabashedly antithetical to every recognizable aspect of human life and existence. As Fabio I. M. Poppi describes in Machina ex homine, homo ex machina: Metaphor and Ideology in Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man”: “These characters both struggle to survive into a post-WWII era, trying to subsist on scavenging among the waste of an industrial society, or suffering its dominating nature. The metal that gives  substance to Tetsuo: The Iron Man is then a representation of the ideology that generates an inhuman society that is capable of infecting and transforming the body and the mind.” The fetishist has wilfully and willingly pushed past his humanity to become something else entirely – and through this eager rejection of all human societal structures and values, he has perhaps found a true understanding of the alien – even if it is one that, by those ignored human standards, is perverse and repulsive. The fetishist submits himself, and the world around him, to being consumed and transmuted.

The sexual and sensual elements of both our desire and repulsion towards the alien are ones which are exhibited constantly throughout Tetsuo, both in terms of the incompatibility and incommensurability of the machine and human within interactions of this manner, but also of the sexual draw of becoming something beyond human, of communing with something we cannot comprehend, and the confusion of this sexual draw of the incommensurable inhuman causing anxiety and alienation within culturally normal forms of sensuality. As Poppi describes: “[the protagonist’s] girlfriend appears as a disturbing creature corrupted by the snake-like metal probe that is about to rape the protagonist. Even the feminisation of the Metal Fetishist becomes  evident only when his mind has irreversibly been affected by the mutation. In this regard, in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the woman is not herself ontologically considered as a negative figure, but it is the metal society, an expression of post-WWII Japan, that has transformed the perception of the woman into a threat.”

The fear of the unknowable, the incomprehensible – the incommensurable, is the most base form of our discomfort with the alien, and this primal emotion runs through the beginning stages of the metamorphosis Tetsuo’s protagonist endures. As Beatrice Fazi writes in Beyond Human: Deep Learning, Explainability, and Representation: “‘Incommensurability’ is the right word because the two [humans and machines] cannot be measured against each other or compared by a common standard […] Acknowledging an incommensurability between how humans and machines build models involves recognising this ontological and epistemological disparity between how humans and computational agents make decisions. Inevitably, this discrepancy is mirrored in how such decisions might be respectively recounted or represented by humans and artificial algorithmic agents.”

The pull of desire towards the alien is something constantly intertwined with our fear of it, a fascination and liberation derived from something outside of our conception mixed with a confusion and revulsion towards one own fascination with the seemingly anti-human – a feeling which grows stronger within Tetsuo’s protagonist as his metallic transmutation progresses, a connection with the new flesh strengthening through distance with the old. As Sarah Henry interprets in New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror and Cinema as Catharsis in the Age of Technology as Catharsis in the Age: “Tsukamoto uses metal as a motif to symbolize advancing technology, a medium that not only advances their bodies toward a new flesh, but also acts as a means to intimacy and connection. While this new flesh is portrayed as erotic, pain is also present. The eroticism of the new flesh offers catharsis, while the pain is part of the transitional process of a mind-body advancement.” As the protagonist’s progression into an alien being continues, this pain and catharsis seem to merge into a single driving emotion, a synthesis of the fear and desire inherent in interactions with the alien, these fractured responses only truly becoming one after delving inside the world of the alien, instead of observing it.

This confused desire towards the alien the protagonist experiences in Tetsuo is combined with the physical and psychological alienation he feels from the world around him, culminating in his sensual communion with the metallic alienating and driving mad his also unnamed girlfriend, played by fellow body horror filmmaker Kei Fujiwara, and resulting in her gruesome, sexual death by the protagonist’s phallus. This occurs shortly after the revelation of the protagonist’s original sin, of engaging in open intercourse with his girlfriend at the sight of a car crash – whose victim turns out to be the metal fetishist himself, the first true collision between the sensual and the metallic the protagonist faces. As Robert Fuoco describes in “Anxiety in a Technological World: Tetsuo: the Iron Man” for Offscreen: “What strikes me is the way in which Tsukamoto doesn’t use sex to suggest pleasure, but rather uses the film’s form to represent this lethal accident in a pleasurable, almost sensual fashion. Essentially, through the form, he makes the audience emotionally complicit in enjoying this violent collision between man and metal.”

The final frontier of acceptance and integration of the alien, as Tsukamoto posits in Tetsuo, seems to be a total rejection of the human, a celebration of its deterioration, or even an active participation in such, is perhaps inherent in becoming something other. As Poppi argues: “It is no coincidence that it is only thanks to the transformation into a hybrid of metal and flesh that the two protagonists manage to overcome their miserable condition and achieve a sort of vengeance […] From this perspective, no space is left for reconciliatory solutions, since the only  possible endings involve either death (Tetsuo’s girlfriend or the woman at the station) or getting lost in the industrial society with the resulting monstrosity (the two protagonists).” Only through an utter disconnect from and antagonism towards the forms of being the two central characters once embodied are they able to find a self-actualization beyond their base fears and desires toward the alien.

Tsukamoto’s film, especially in its ending sequences, draws a clear parallel between the incompatibility and incommensurability of the metallic and the human with that of queer love within an oppressive, puritanical societal structure which bars it from equality or even acknowledgement (in Tetsuo’s case, that of 1980s Japan) – and the freedom which comes from openly and deliberately breaking the rules and conventions of that structure, and from working to tear it down entirely. “How can we organize for radical change and make collective action possible without resorting to authoritarian collectivism and while making room for individuality without atomisation? […] Tetsuo finds the answer in the radical possibilities of queer love.” (Myerson, 11). Just as the alien’s existence and consciousness represents a break from everything we understand, queerness fractures and breaks through the entire conception of reality formed by heteronormative societal conditioning. 

The project of the metal fetishist, and by the conclusion of the film, the protagonist as well, is not simply a transgression of the society which has kept the queer and the alien suppressed and subjugated. As Steven Shaviro argues in “Accelerationist Aesthetics” as part of No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism: “Far from being subversive, transgression today is entirely normative […] Every supposedly “transgressive” act or representation expands the field of capital investment. It opens up new territories to appropriate, and jump-starts new processes from which to extract surplus value.” Instead of subsumption into the world of capital, as the protagonist had felt and the fetishist had transgressed against, the seemingly inescapable real subsumption which Shaviro claims “leaves no aspect of life uncolonized. It endeavors to capture and to put to work even those things that are uneconomical,” their entire beings are reconstituted into products of capital taken to the extremity of being unrecognizable, uncategorizable – and therefore unextractable.

The protagonist and the fetishist, merged as one, find no path forward but to utterly tear down the world and society around them, to force the world to subsume to them, instead of the inverse. Instead of simply a hybrid, a reminder of the separate beings the protagonist and fetishist existed as previously – they merge, wed, and evolve into something entirely new, a rhizomatic becoming. As Keith Ansell Pearson describes in Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Tradition: “Hybrids involve the connection of points, but do not facilitate the passing between points. A point remains wedded to a point of origin. In rhizomatic-styled becomings becoming denotes the movement by which the line frees itself from the point and renders points indiscernible […] Machinic ‘evolution’ refers to the synthesis of heterogeneities, whereas hybridization is still tied to the idea of there being elements that are pure and uncontaminated prior to the mixing they undergo in hybridism.” The metallically-transmuted bodies of the protagonist and fetishist, do not simply mix in their fusion – they evolve into a being beyond even the metallic, the alien, a single being of constituent parts unable to truly be discerned or understood – they have evolved into something alien even to the alien itself.

Tetsuo’s conclusion finds the protagonist, fully succumbed and perhaps less accepting of than resigned to his new, metallic alien form, merging his body together with the metal fetishist into a towering, obviously phallic mountain of scrap metal, and submitting himself to the fetishist’s goal of remaking the entire world in their inhuman image until nothing remains but the alien. Though – is such a remaking of our world truly a negative, truly an inhuman act? As Myerson argues: “This eroticised image of two beings becoming one through metal metamorphosis and transformation serves as a metaphor for queer sexuality finding new ways of being with, and relating to, each other outside the constraints of capitalism […] The salaryman’s heterosexual relationship, and the basic unit of consumption it represents under consumer capitalism, is destroyed and replaced with a queer love that thrives at the fringes of society off the waste and refuse of capitalism.”  The alien, whether mechanical, viral, or another form of being beyond our sensory capabilities, is incomprehensible and incommensurable to the structure of our being and societies at a base level, and finding a true understanding of it it, as Tetsuo argues, is also the process of becoming the alien, and shaping the world around oneself into it. 

Tetsuo is an acceptance of the human/alien impasse, but not one which accepts there is no way to breach that boundary – and not one which places the human at a higher ideological position than the alien. In order to accept, to understand the alien – one must fully give in to the alien, rendering oneself perhaps even further as an alien of the alien, something beyond any description or mode of understanding we are currently equipped with, in order to truly conceive of the inner world of the nonhuman. Tetsuo argues for the freedom in this act, for the release from societal boundaries which shackle a true love, whether that be for oneself, another – or something beyond even your own understanding. The fear of the alien is not something to be ashamed of, it is something to be used, to be harnessed to find a new modality existing as a swirl of that intertwined fear and desire which exists in our every interaction with the nonhuman – and if that new modality exists in opposition to the world around it, perhaps it is the world which must be changed to suit it, and not the inverse. If one wishes to remain human and sane at the same time – perhaps the only solution is to accept the unknowability of the alien, and accept the confusion, fear, and desire it brings on its own terms – while not simply allowing oneself to be controlled completely by opaque and incomprehensible forces of computational capital. One must cherish the incomputable, the alienesque aspects we find in ourselves and the people around us – as Tetsuo argues, only the incommensurable is truly free.

Bibliography:

Tsukamoto, Shinya, director. Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Kaijyu Theatre, 1989.

Amaro, Ramon. The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. Sternberg Press, 2022.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. Routledge, 2009.

Fazi, M. Beatrice. “Beyond human: Deep learning, explainability and representation.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 38, no. 7–8, 2020, pp. 55–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420966386.

Fuoco, Robert. “Anxiety in a Technological World: Tetsuo: The Iron Man.” Offscreen, Aug. 2015, offscreen.com/view/tetsuo-the-iron-man.

Henry, Sarah. “New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror and Cinema as Catharsis in the Age of Technology.” ScholarWorks@UARK, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville , July 2020, scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/3805/.

Myerson, Sasha. “Global Cyberpunk: Reclaiming Utopia in Japanese Cyberpunk FIlm.” Science Fiction Film & Television, vol. 13, no. 3, 2020, pp. 363–386, https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.21.

Poppi, Fabio I. M. “Machina ex homine, homo ex machina.” Metaphor and the Social World, vol. 8, no. 2, 2018, pp. 207–228, https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.17003.pop.Shaviro, Steven. “Accelerationist Aesthetics.” No Speed Limit Three Essays on Accelerationism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2015.