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.

IT’S JUST LIKE DRIVING A REALLY BIG PINTO.

by Liz Shannon Miller

In most major metropolitan areas around the world, taking the bus is a natural part of life, with no stigma attached. In Los Angeles, though, taking the bus is seen by many as weird and dangerous; a last resort for those struck by the tragedy of being carless. So of course a movie about a bus gone amuck is set in this city, the bomb strapped underneath almost as dangerous a threat as the traffic. Of course this is the city where “You will believe — a bus can fly.”   

The 1994 movie Speed is a celebration of Los Angeles’s public transportation system, such as it is — incomplete freeways, buses crowded with random strangers, a woefully inadequate subway system.  (When people say, “Wait, L.A. has a subway system?” this is the movie to remind them of.) After a brief elevator-set overture, introducing a mad bomber (Dennis Hopper) and the cop he becomes obsessed with blowing up (Keanu Reeves), we’re trapped with Annie (Sandra Bullock) and her fellow passengers aboard L.A. Metro Bus 2525, which will explode if it drops below 50 miles per hour.  

That 50 MPH boundary is in theory the justification for the title — one of Speed’s great visual ironies is turning a clunky bus into a high-velocity instrument of destruction. It’s one thing to watch a Ferrari tear through the streets of Los Angeles, but the 33 downtown? That is not a vehicle you expect to see catch some air.   

The bus is only one major player in Speed; like many movies from the 1990s, the movie is lush with “Hey, it’s that guy!” moments. In the elevator at the very beginning — Robert Mailhouse, aka J.J. on Sports Night and a bunch of other things! Not to mention that creepy eyebrows guy from all those other things!  

Then, driving the Jaguar commandeered by Keanu on the freeway, is Glenn Plummer, who had a crazy two years from 1994 to 1996 with key supporting roles in Showgirls, Up Close and Personal and Strange Days, making him maybe the most 90s-ish minority actor of all time. 

Inside the bus, the tragically exploded Helen is played by Beth Grant, Hollywood’s premium portrayer of spinsters and cat ladies for the last twenty or so years (ironically, she’s married with a child). And there’s Alan Ruck, eight years post-Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — while the role of yokel tourist does not compare to his work as the beautifully aching Cameron, he still manages to find that same stunned pathos in the line “We’re at the airport. I already seen the airport.”  

Then there’s Keanu, not so much playing the daredevil cop the script hints at as he is playing Keanu Reeves on a bus. No matter how stiff he is or how monotone the dialogue comes out, it’s a classic movie star performance — no craft, no character building, but still a masterpiece of furrowed brows and stunt work and getting the girl. And the girl he gets is ever so slightly more than a damsel in distress; I miss this Sandra Bullock, feisty and fun, tough and vulnerable.   

The real unsung star of Speed, though, is the uncredited Joss Whedon, who was (according to the sole credited screenwriter Graham Yost) “responsible for 98.9 percent of the dialogue.”  

The WGA arbitration process that determines who gets their names on the poster is a tough one, pitting writer against writer in a tooth-and-claw battle for the most credit and, as a result, the most money (for another look at this process, read screenwriter Josh Friedman’s very funny tale of the WGA arbitration over War of the Worlds). Whedon got screwed (as much as a for-hire script doctor, knowing full well that this is what happens all the time, can be screwed) but his work on the film is now relatively common knowledge — and considered to be the best part of the film (bus jumping over freeway gap notwithstanding).   

I say it’s the best part of the movie, though Joss Whedon’s style of dialogue does not fare well when directed by non-native English speakers (c.f. Alien Resurrection), and while the Dutch Jan de Bont does his best, many moments feel out of key. The early banter between Keanu and his partner, played by Jeff Daniels, fares the best (due largely to Daniels’ talents and whatever camaraderie existed naturally between them) — exchanges like this… 

Harry: [drunk] Well, I’m gonna go home, have some sex.

Jack: Harry, you’re gonna go home and puke.

Harry: Well that’ll be fun too.  

…represent that classic sort of “show don’t tell” relationship building between bros. For the most part, though, throughout Speed there’s a blunt force to the way a lot of the dialogue is delivered, one that reminds me of Carrie Fisher’s classic George Lucas story about his only two lines of direction: “faster” and “more intense.”  

Oddly, though, that imperfection has over the years become precious to me, like typos in a beloved paperback. Of all the great dialogue in Speed — Sandra Bullock’s half-terrified patter, Dennis Hopper’s epic ranting — my absolute favorite line might be one bus passenger’s brutish exclamation of “Hey, man, I got a wife!” Second favorite line: “I got gum on my seat. Gum.” These are lines that echo in my brain, years later, that I chant along with the film a moment before Ortiz or Annie has a chance to say them on screen. I love them because of their flaws, because they’re ridiculous, because they’re familiar.    

Those moments of dialogue represent the bare minimum of characterization left from the pre-Whedon drafts; according to this AV Club interview with Beth Grant, Whedon’s draft was responsible not just for the film’s memorable dialogue, but a stripping down of character, including the transformation of Helen from a heroic friend of Annie’s to a meek and terrified bomb victim.  

“There was just more backstory for all of us,” Grant says. “It was kind of like The Poseidon Adventure, and very wisely, in this case, the studio said, ‘No, let’s just get on the bus and go.’ Joss had done that rewrite, so I teased him about it… He said, ‘Oh yeah, sorry about that.’ And I said, ‘No, thank God, because that’s why it was a hit.’” 

Was it a hit because the characters were reduced to quick quips? Because “Die Hard on a bus” was an easy sell for audiences? Or was it a hit because of Keanu? He’s compelling here in a way that today’s movie-star-wannabes — the Chrises and Ryans and Justins — can’t touch, a pretty face paired with blunt machismo and given free reign to scream profanities when the situation calls for it. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of how much he cares about stopping this bus, saving these people, stopping this psycho that makes him so watchable. Because when he cares, so do we. 

Liz Shannon Miller is a writer and pop culture enthusiast based in Los
Angeles. Surprise surprise, she is on tumblr.

by Edward Montgomery

“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophical wreck.”

-Immanuel Kant

The ocean only seems overt.

Though Heraclitus has been immortalized contemplating the quiet flux and power of a river over time, to me, the ocean still seems the bigger mystery. It is something that cannot truly be explored, regardless of our supposed mastery of it. (For all those who scoff at my use of the word ‘mystery’, I ask you to consider the following: would you call the movement of U.S. nuclear submarines along classified routes on the ocean floor exploration? control? a mastery of power? do you really understand how your blueberries from Central America made their way to your supermarket? to your kitchen? why they are always on the edge of spoil? can we do more than simply fear the way a single storm born in the depths of the ocean’s water can bring entire countries to their knees? do you actually understand how the world shudders and moves, shifting in such a way that John McPhee offers this single sentence as his summation of plate tectonics: “The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone”?).

It’s all ridiculous, isn’t it? The way we’re still stuck to the tides, the way we hang on to these routes hidden from the public; the way the world moves. You can commit yourself to the ocean’s mystery, or you can commit to the human law that pretends it has been solved. But not both. And with that said, for all its 1991 absurdity, its overblown acting, and its blatant use of time-everlasting Hollywood clichés, Point Break may be one of the better movies out there to showcase this basic dichotomy. The film’s two protagonists, Johnny Utah (Reeves) and Bodhi (Swayze), the champions of the world’s respective beliefs, will ultimately find that they are moving in the same direction: one a few thousand feet ahead the other, skydiving for a chance at life; the other chasing after, then holding a gun to the madman’s head, chute-less, and screaming for him to pull the ripcord, to show his secrets, even as they both fall at terminal velocity toward the desert.

In some ways this makes more sense than the blueberries.

Both the audience and Johnny fall under Swayze’s spell because he has the satisfied look of a man who has seen something that you have not, and who has been changed. (One wonders if Reeves will always be in love with such men.) Bodhi seems to hold the world and all its secrets in his gaze, causing us to keep glancing over our shoulder, wondering what it is we should be seeing. We live in a world of the individual—perhaps due to technology’s success or religion’s failure (the jury’s still out)—but spirituality nevertheless attracts us. Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves, whether it be the FBI or the ocean or the undercurrent of Gaia surging through the surf. Bodhi lives in this world: an individual set in the clay of a spiritual existence, that knows mud and water lay underneath. He is a man who seems to have found the set of rules to an other-worldly sense of being.

Paraphrasing what Roger Ebert said about Point Break, to question the motivations of these characters is pointless. One might imagine that our criticism ends there, that without a human story we have no story at all. But spirituality doesn’t work like that. It burns itself into a flame higher than all of us and attracts us in the same way that the bare bulb attracts the moth. The characters matter less than their ideas. Packed away in a buddy-cop thriller, meta-human realities operate beyond the clever detective work and well-disciplined bank robberies. Point Break becomes (in Ebert’s words) “ingenious” in its pursuit for a life that neither main character can fully describe, much less actualize.

Johnny Utah sees the law as moral system, but succumbs to the charisma of man. Bodhi is entranced by the mystery of the ocean, but doesn’t believe in it fully enough to escape the boy-hood rushes of delinquency. He mistakenly anchors his moral system in adrenaline and epicurean pleasure. Pseudo-spiritualism, wrapped in a hundred-dollar bill of bank-robbing thrill rides? Following the law for ninety seconds at a time and then bowing before the ocean’s strength? This makes sense for a man described as a “real searcher,” and we all envy his courage, even as his system falls apart, piece by piece throughout the movie.

A formulation that I developed many years ago, in the midst of my fading sense of religiosity and growing sense of skepticism was this: There is no such thing as a nihilist. It’s a made-up word, an imagined concept. To reverse this formulation and question someone’s belief in God is to miss the point in the most acute way possible. The real question everyone must be asked is what exactly do they believe in—what defines ‘right’ in their world? And neither Johnny nor Bodhi has an answer. They may not be nihilists in the simplest, Lebowskian sense of the word, but when asked to defend their beliefs in the extreme, neither would have the slightest chance of rationalizing what they do. A question that needs to be asked, then, is whether their inability to defend supposed beliefs is the same thing as having none at all?

Point Break’s attempt at an answer is something more easily described as a lesson in the form of nostalgia. Just twenty years ago, the world was a place where a materialistic and “rational” sensibility of life was easily defined by a mythical southern-California lifestyle. (It’s only in hindsight that our moral systems seem to make sense.) Our great question of meaning in the 90s was one to which surfing could speak. These were the days when the good life was not only made up of the wonderfully awful acting on the part of Reeves, but also when the collective ‘good’ included a belief in a world where technology would only take hold at a pace that we allowed. A belief that God or the ocean or another nameless force could still protect us from loneliness. It was a world where, perhaps, adrenaline existed less in terror and fear of the unknown than in chase-scenes filmed on foot without a single satellite to aid in the pursuit.

We want Johnny to defend the law, to defend this world, even as we know that doing so makes as much sense as chasing the world’s greatest surf for one last ride. The world changes, just as the oceans changes (or perhaps never changes); all the systems will crack or fail outright. The world was ending, at least for Johnny and Bodhi, and a new one was about to emerge. As Johnny tells Bodhi in the end, “You gotta go down” (take a moment to snicker, then finish your drink), but even he realizes they both are on their way toward oblivion.

And that, I believe, merits a mumbled “Whoa” by each and every one of us. We might, after all, be right there with them.

Edward Montgomery is a writer. He can be found here.

YOU MIGHT BE A KING OR A LITTLE STREET SWEEPER, BUT SOONER OR LATER YOU DANCE WITH THE REAPER

by Michelle Said

I assume that you are familiar with Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, they of metalheaded duncehood and the time-travelling phone booth. And I will assume that you may be in your 20s or 30s and you may have seen this movie and its predecessor as a child. I will assume it may have been several years since you saw this film and that it is most likely sitting on a shelf in your parents house or maybe your younger brother stole it for his own collection, you’re not really sure what happened to it but you did own it at one point. Maybe you bought a copy for $4 from the bargain bin at Target a decade ago and rewatched it over and over again. Maybe whenever you and your friends played 20 Questions growing up, you always started out with a tank as a warm-up.

I will assume, because I already went back in time and made all of this true for you so that even if you started out this essay without these concrete statements as fact for your own life, they are now true for you as they are true for me and we can all begin this piece on the same groundwork of utmost reverence and dedication to all adventures and journeys, whether they be excellent or bogus.

And if I were to tell you that this movie, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, this movie that is as light and frothy and fizzy as a root beer float, somehow was partially responsible for dissolving my paralyzing fear of death, would you believe me?

Let me explain.

I was an anxious child. Many things scared me — new people, old people, meeting new people, trying new things. I was very content to eat and drink the same thing over and over again because that’s what I knew and what I knew was fine. Beyond that, I was of the opinion that the world was terrifying and out to destroy me. My parents kept moving me around the country as a small child due to new jobs and new homes and I was constantly having to adjust to a new and unfamiliar way of life. I did not like it. It scared me.

Then my grandmother died when I was seven years old. One day she was out in the world, this sweet, lovely lady with a Southern accent who doted on me when we visited her at her home in Little Rock. The next, my mother informed me that we would be saying goodbye to her. Forever.

I wasn’t taken to the funeral but instead stayed back at my grandmother’s house with a family friend. Not realizing what was going on around me, I examined all of her possessions, unable to process how somebody could be gone but their things could still exist. Her television set was there, and there was her rocking chair, there was her cigarette ashtray and her refrigerator full of popsicles she kept for me whenever we visited. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

It didn’t really sink in until we had returned home to California. And, anxious little me, I sat in the dark with my hands up to my chin clutching my blanket, and realized that my mother’s mother had died. And so that would mean that my mother would one day die. And my father would die. And everybody I knew and loved on this planet would die.

This did not ease my childhood anxiety one bit.

I started crying. A lot. All the time. Eventually I began to cope with this realization and the crying subsided, but I still lived my days out with a cloud hanging over my head, the Charlie Brown of Agoura Hills, California. I wasn’t very fun during those days. My personal motto was: Everything is doomed, nothing is good, and we’re all going to die some day.

I was a big hit at parties.

But then I confronted death. Well, actually, Bill and Ted confronted Death. They played Battleship with him. And Clue. And Twister. And NFL Super Bowl Electric Football.

And suddenly, Death seemed like he was pretty okay.

He could play the stand-up bass and rap.

A little needy, maybe.

But overall he seemed like an okay dude. And if Bill and Ted could face him, then I could too.

I realize this is oversimplifying a very complex subject, but that’s the way children relate to the afterlife. It’s a terrible, terrifying concept. We tell children there is something beyond this mortal coil to cushion the blow, but none of us know the truth. I recently watched an episode of Happy Endings where one of the characters explains the great hereafter to her babysitting wards. “Everything in heaven is magical and perfect and amazing.” “Cool!” they say. “Let’s go die! How do you want to die?”

Putting a silly, happy face on something as petrifying as death was much-needed for me at that time. Humor has always been humanity’s way to deal with concepts that are beyond our comprehension. What happens to us after we die? There’s no way to tell. Is there a heaven or a hell? How do some people teeter on the verge of death and survive? If you can’t understand something, you might as well laugh at it. Remove it of its power. Look it in the face and laugh.

I credit William Sadler’s portrayal of the Grim Reaper with much of this turnaround. The version of death as seen in the movie was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which is pretty awesome source material for what is essentially a preteen movie. He enters the film much as he did in Bergman’s classic but quickly his dour and stern facade dissipates and he becomes an entity that is alternately a poor loser and a clinger-on, loyal and jealous, and always amusing.

So there I was as a kid, laughing in the face of death. All thanks to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Station.

Michelle Said usually gets sound psychotherapy from ’90s science fiction comedies. She tumbls here.

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER.

by Letitia Trent