Neuromancer The Movie
Novice director Joseph Khan has somehow earned the privilege of directing the screen adaptation of William Gibson’s quintessential Cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. I’ve mentioned before that Neuromancer is my favorite novel, so to gauge the potential calibre of a Neuromancer movie by this virtually unknown director, I looked up his credentials.
Khan directs music videos for Britney Spears.
I decided not to hold that against him, though. After all, David Fincher, who started out directing Madonna for the MTV crowd, has proven his big-screen directorial talent with such flicks as Alien 3, Fight Club and Zodiac. I felt it would be only fair to reference Khan’s filmography before lamenting his handling of Neuromancer.
Khan has one film credit to his name: Torque. Released in 2004, it’s been described as a motorcycle version of The Fast and the Furious. A quick visit to RottenTomatoes.com, where the majority of critics wrote off Torque as utter crap, confirmed my suspicions about that dubious comparison. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, declared Torque to be “A strong candidate for the most thunderingly stupid movie of the year.”
Now, indie producer Peter Hoffman is handing to the maker of said “thunderingly stupid movie” my favorite novel.
I don’t want to sound mean. Khan may achieve directorial greatness one day, but that day has not yet come. My frustration, therefore, stems from the realization that a sci-fi masterpiece is being entrusted to a novice. As one reviewer writes, Khan, like many music video directors, has “no clue how to tell stories (longer than 4 minutes).” Gibson’s novel engages readers for 271 pages, and has done so for more than 20 years. Any would-be director of Neuromancer should possess commensurate expertise with the motion picture medium.
If David Fincher was busy, I’m sure fans of the novel would have waited. I know I could have.
Home-grown
The phrase “home-grown terrorism,” which seems to describe acts of terror perpetrated by the offspring of newcomers to a country, suggests to me that those offspring have been somehow cultivated for such by their new country, just as a farmer raises crops to his liking. Ironically, there may be more truth wrapped up in that media-worthy catch phrase than most would care to acknowledge.
I remember reading Black Like Me, the memoirs of a white man who chemically tanned his skin dark enough to experience, first-hand, what it was like to be black in the American south. He observed that the southern blacks had been forced down by a white-biased system and, worse, blamed by that system for being down. The effects of such persecution on the psyche of the southern downtrodden was clearly segregative.
Today, a comparable situation exists for certain Western-based minorities who are, more and more, demonized by popular opinion and media sensationalism. Those whose skin is a little too dark or whose names are a little too Arabic tend to experience more than their share of persecution, these days. Some of the persecuted, naturally, seek refuge among those who profess to be like-minded. Sometimes, though, they wander into the company of those who prey upon their despair and channel it into acts of evil.
We are each responsible for our own actions, of course. I cannot blame another person or group for the actions I, myself, choose to take, no matter how much prodding towards those actions I endure. The decision is, ultimately, mine. At the same time, do we not have a responsibility towards one another to ease the prodding? Perhaps a smile in place of a frown might replace a bomb with a book. Naive? Fanciful? Maybe. But maybe not.
In the words of Kahlil Gibran, “Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self. You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who, though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.” As human beings living on one planet, tribal differences notwithstanding, we’re in this together.
We’re all home-grown. Each of us is the product of cultivation, and each of us become cultivators. The sweet flavour and ripe colour of the crops we raise are a reflection of the love we put into them, just as fields of disease and rot are signs of our neglect. Beyond ethnicity and countries of origin, beyond second languages and sacred customs, we’re each the product of the communities we create together. We’re all home-grown, regardless of what we call home. The only question is: What are we growing?
Faces of War
There are two faces of war. Which one do you see?
The first is wrapped in the cool-factor anonymity of modern war-making technology. It’s an impressive façade of Kevlar, tinted goggles, and desert camouflage. This is the face that inspires sanitized, Hollywood-style pop culture distractions. It is not so much a face, but a mask obscuring the horrifying truth of war’s consequences, a mask that speaks on behalf of those who insist, from the safety of climate-controlled conference rooms, that their states — recognized and not — have the right to pre-emptive “self defence.”
But strip away the mask of obscurity and censorship and beneath the layers of euphemism you find an altogether different face. The face beneath is that of a young child, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, whose facial flesh has been cut in half by the edges of a jagged metal shard. The purple, blood-encrusted seams of her flesh have been sewn back together with erratic black stitches. This is the face that bears the scars of other men’s furor, the face that must be hidden from other men’s followers lest the true cost of “righteous” ends render the means abhorrent.
There are two faces of war. Which one can see you?