I wish there was an anti-mnemonic device I could use to forget this movie.

When I looked at the syllabus, I thought the only movie that would be ruined by its acting was Total Recall. I was so wrong. Johnny Mnemonic has far less than stellar performances by none other than the wooden man himself, Keanu Reeves, backed up by Ice T pre-SVU, and the always delightful Henry Rollins (this time playing a geeky doctor whose only costuming was a pair of glasses- I half expected him to turn into super man at one point).

As a whole, the movie has a lot of interesting aspects to it. Particularly that of its various moments of being a modern film noir. The seed for this idea is planted explicitly early on, right when Johnny is loading the data that would today simply fill an ipod into his advanced tech brain. The Pharmakom people are playing Humphrey Bogart in the background. There are then a series of canted shots throughout the film, creating a lot of unease, along with shots so dark they may as well often be in black and white and only accented with other colors. The clearest shot of this, though, is during the chase scene where Keanu says WHAT-ARE-YOU-DOING in the most robotic of ways, and he runs and you see first his shadow then him run in and out of the shot. Furthermore, the plot follows a noir story, with the expected result, twist, and then final twist.

The reading for last week was far more interesting and even touched on some movies I really like (or at least the stories they are based on, like Crash). As a whole, the article is a discussion of whether or not computers, cyborgs, etc ought to inherit the earth (a la Moravec) and how this has played out in most Hollywood movies. First of all, Moravec is insane. I agree with Deleuze and Guattari, that his ideals are based so entirely in the idea of capitalism, the free market, to the extent where the accumulation of spectacles becomes so great and the system is so determined to reproduce itself that even the consumers are consumed. But second, I think the argument about Hollywood is really interesting, and ties to the movie well. Springer writes, “Cyborgs in Hollywood films are often motivated by repressed human memories than by mere mechanical problem solving.” She then goes on to cite the examples of RoboCop and Eve of Destruction, as well as a slew of newer movies including Johnny Mnemonic.

And on this level I take real issue with the movie on a plot level. Johnny’s brain was removed. HOW ARE HIS MEMORIES FROM THAT PART OF HIS BRAIN REPRESSED? I just feel like they should be gone. Oh well. You can’t expect the plot of a movie with a drug-addicted hyper-intelligent dolphin and a Jesus-like assassin to make perfect sense, I suppose.