HACK YOUR OWN BRAIN

by Elisabeth Geier

My brother was sitting in his usual seat. Glaring at his phone. I had a movie to watch. He had dibs on the living room.

“You wanna watch Johnny Mnemonic?” I asked.

“You wanna get stoned and watch Johnny Mnemonic?” he asked back.

I’m not one to get stoned and watch a thing, but I knew this movie sucked. Maybe it would suck less on drugs. Maybe it would suck more. Maybe I was just courting cliché. Then again: I had volunteered to watch a movie I knew to be terrible, possibly unwatchable. I didn’t want to watch it alone. What better sibling-bonding experience than to get stoned with my stoner brother and watch the unwatchable film?

My brother and I have been living together for the past two months. He’s 23, I’m 29. We are both a little lost. We argue all the time. Sometimes it feels like a sitcom: this week, on a very special “My Brother, My Roommate,” Elisabeth has an important phone call to make, and her brother has an important jam to jam out on the bass. Tonight on “My Brother, My Roommate”: my brother went out for milk and toilet paper, and came home with a skateboard instead. I’m exaggerating, of course. He’s a good kid, and I’m the bossy older sister who can only see him as “a kid.” The fact that we can’t escape these hard-wired roles is our main source of conflict. Sometimes the only way to avoid a fight is to shut up and stare at a flashing screen.

The first time I saw Johnny Mnemonic was on opening weekend, 1995. I was thirteen and in love. His name was Keanu, or “Cool Breeze over the Mountains,” or “someone laughing at my funny joke and maybe holding hands with me on the way to Taco Bell.” Like I said, I was thirteen. What I remembered from that first viewing of Johnny Mnemonic: how handsome Keanu Reeves is in a suit. How Henry Rollins is less scary in this movie than in the music video for “Liar.” Ice-T being Ice-T. Someone getting crucified in a hospital. Something about a robotic priest.

This was going to be rough. The only way was to get stoned.

* * *

The first screen is a long, scrolling hunk of red laser letters on a black background. It’s 2021. Corporations rule the earth. Johnny Mnemonic is a courier with a “wet-wired brain,” built to transport sensitive data in his head, willing to work for whichever side (corporations or rebels) will pay him enough. Johnny Mnemonic is based on a William Gibson short story of the same name—a story almost as unreadable as the text that starts the film. As it turns out, William Gibson wrote both.

After the words, we get Keanu, mostly-naked in bed. He wears black boxer-briefs in a film shot in 1995 – that’s how we know it’s the future. Another way we know it’s the future: everybody talks like a robot, including Johnny Mnemonic himself. Keanu is perfect for this part, as his natural speech pattern is robotic-surfer-who-just-woke-up. Johnny gets dressed, then heads out into Future Beijing to meet the guys who have hired him to transport info in his wet-wired brain. Make sense so far?

Here’s how the data-transfer goes down: Johnny plugs his head into a tiny computer and uploads the info from a tiny CD. Meanwhile, the guys who hired him randomly select three images from a TV, print the images onto a tiny strip of paper, and use a tiny fax machine to send them to the info-receivers waiting on the other end as a sort of passcode. Apparently, in the future, electronics are tiny and the transfer of information is needlessly complex. So complex, in fact, that Johnny Mnemonic gets a nosebleed. And yes, Keanu Gets a Nosebleed is remarkably similar to Keanu Freezes Bullets and Keanu Catches a Wave and Keanu Rides the Exploding Bus. I’ll say this for my number one junior high crush: he has a reliably wooden face.

I look to my brother for his reaction. He’s in the kitchen, pouring wine.

“I think you’re missing some important set-up.”

“What’s going on?”

“I can’t really tell.”

This is what happens next:

-Some cyber-thugs interrupt Keanu’s tiny fax transmission and try to kill him with a laser-whip.

-Keanu goes on the run to New Jersey.

-Keanu meets a techno-babe (Dina Meyer) who carries a pink grenade and agrees to help him protect his head.

-Ice-T, leader of the rebel army fighting to save humanity from the evil corporations, helps Keanu fight off more techno-thugs.

-Ice-T is the Ice-T-iest Ice who ever T’d.

***

“This is actually pretty entertaining,” my brother says, just after Ice saves Keanu’s life.

I mark the running time in my notes and write: “Keanu’s shoulder-sway walk-away is still the total ish.” Have you seen the man walk? I refer you to Point Break, when he fights that gang of surf-thugs on the beach; to Speed, when he saunters into that coffee shop near the beginning of the film; and finally back to 46:36 in Johnny Mnemonic, when Keanu’s shoulder-sway escape still makes me want to tackle that sleepy robot-surfer and let him lecture me about Hamlet over a chalupa and some cinnamon twists.

Keanu Reeves grew up without a father figure, moved from exotic locale to exotic locale with his mother, and has crashed his motorcycle more than once. His birthday is September 2^nd, 1964. These facts have been locked in my brain since the 90’s, and will likely stay there until I die. My brother has no such frame of reference. He has no opinion on Keanu at all. My brother’s indifference often infuriates me: the little things I care about (doing dishes, putting up Christmas lights, keeping pot paraphernalia out of the kitchen) are meaningless to him. The questions I struggle with (how can I learn to see my baby brother as a man? How can we resolve years of family dysfunction and live together peaceably in this house?) are a nuisance. He wants to live his life free and easy. I want control. He wants to sit back and enjoy being stoned and watching a dumb movie. I want to analyze every little thing.

It takes over half the film for us to learn why the data in Johnny’s head is important. With the help of a flesh mechanic named Spider (Henry Rollins, übersexy in a très futuristic pair of black hipster glasses), Johnny learns that he is carrying the only cure to the “black shakes,” a plague caused by information overload and fumes from all the old technology cluttering up the world. The corporations don’t want the cure getting out, lest the populace stop paying for treatment. The rebels want to burn down the corporations and save the world. Johnny just wants his brain back, and maybe to kiss the girl.

So:

-Ice-T and Henry Rollins introduce Keanu to Jones, a sentient dolphin kept in a tank as a high-tech weapon of intelligence.

-The entire plot hinges on Johnny Mnemonic using this dolphin to access the data in his head.

-A DOLPHIN IN A TANK.

-A high-tech, sentient, weapons-grade dolphin. Tended to by Henry Rollins and Ice-T.

* * *

At some point, my brother wandered into the kitchen to cook some meat.

“What’d I miss now?” he asked when he came back.

“There’s a dolphin.”

“This movie is weird.”

And at the end, just before Keanu grabbed his girl for the last time and looked out over the dark city in triumph, I saw in my brother’s face an expression that didn’t seem to belong there. It wasn’t satisfaction and it wasn’t relief. I think it was disbelief, stunned incomprehension mingled with pure aesthetic revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing – at what was happening on the screen. The film ended. The credits rolled.

“Wait, what just happened?”

“The rebels broadcast the information to everybody. Now everybody has the cure.”

There was a heavy pause, and then: “Communists.”

Elisabeth Geier lives with her brother on a farm in Oregon and would like to apologize to William Gibson fans worldwide.