by Mark Dery
The Downward Spiral includes “The Becoming,” a suffocating song about someone who is gradually being colonized by a machine that functions like a parasitic organism: “the me that you know is now made up of wires.”28 As in so much science fiction, the invulnerability that comes with being borged (“all pain disappears it’s the nature of my circuitry”) is purchased at the price of the singer’s humanity (“even when i’m right with you i’m so far away”).29 Simultaneously, the metamorphosis of human into machine is mirrored by the transformation of dominant into submissive in the song’s S and M subtext: “I beat my machine,” declares the narrator as the song begins, but by the end he despairs, “i can try to get away but i’ve strapped myself in.”30
Incongruously, a religious motif also recurs throughout Reznor’s work. On Pretty Hate Machine he assumes so many messianic poses that he seems to be acting out the Stations of the Cross: “I gave you my Purity. . . i’m just an effigy to be defaced,” he laments in “Sin,” and in “Ringfinger” he accuses a lover of leaving him “hanging like Jesus on this cross.”31 There is more than a hint, here, of the union of sadomasochism and religious rapture epitomized by St. Sebastian, the Catholic martyr usually depicted as an androgynous youth in a loincloth, pincushioned by arrows.
All of the themes noted thus far come together, to shattering effect, in the controversial video for “Happiness in Slavery” (Broken, 1992). Shot in black and white by Jonathan Reiss, Happiness was banned on MTV due to its gore and nudity (a few brief glimpses of a flaccid penis). The five-minute video sits squarely in the tradition of cyber-horror pioneered by H. R. Giger, the British writer-director Clive Barker in his Hellraiser movies, and Skinny Puppy, whose songs about torture and vivisection echo with thumps and clangs and gurgles that sound like blood sluicing through hoses.
Set in what a press release describes as “a world in which people willingly submit to ritualized sadomasochistic relationships with devouring machines,” Happiness begins with blurry tracking shots of lush, labial foliage, intercut with flashes of grease-caked, phallic machinery, camshafts pumping manfully.32 Seated in a cage, Reznor shrieks about a slave “being beat into submission.”33 A gaunt young man in a suit, played by the body artist Bob Flanagan, enters a grim, decaying chamber that could be an abandoned basement, an S and M dungeon, a torture cell, or a gothic laboratory. Flanagan places a long-stemmed rose and a single white candle in a tiny shrine, undresses, and performs ablutions at a basin. The religious equations-candle + shrine = Stations of the Cross, ritual cleansing + fontlike basin = baptism-are underscored by the tattooed crown of thorns we see twined around Flanagan’s penis, in a fleeting close-up.
Happiness’s roller-coaster ride into the abyss begins when Flanagan climbs into the stylized chair in the center of the room and, without warning, the mechanized device comes alive. It is a La-Z-Boy recliner designed to Josef Mengele’s specifications: metal restraints snap over the armrests, pinning Flanagan’s hands in place, and sharp wires shoot out of them, burrowing into his flesh. He grimaces in agony/ecstasy as a three-clawed pincer rips a gooey, wormlike organ out of his chest while a drill arm bores a messy hole nearby. Flanagan’s blood rains down on the foliage seen in the opening shot; the garden’s fecundity is suggested by a tangle of fat, lively night crawlers. The victim’s entrails are processed by the thrusting, lubricated machines seen at the beginning of the video and, for the coup de grâce, the chair transforms itself into a heavy metal sarcophagus, sealing itself shut with Flanagan inside. A sphincter irises open on its underside, and a wad of offal-Flanagan’s remains, presumably-plops onto a mass of writhing worms.
On the most obvious level, Happiness concretizes cyberculture’s recurrent nightmare about the imminent obsolescence of humanity; in the song itself, the narrator is reduced to “human junk,” “just some flesh caught in this big broken machine.”34 But there is more here than the obvious. Happiness is also machine porn that literalizes the notion of masturbation as “self-abuse.” The castration complex-Freud’s theory that the infantile fear of losing one’s genitals is rooted in guilt over masturbation-is amply in evidence: The mechanical pincers and tongs that fondle/mangle Flanagan’s penis enact a symbolic castration, which is shortly followed by a shot of slick, wriggling worms, shown in a close-up that exaggerates their resemblance to severed members.
Happiness brings to mind the philosopher Georges Bataille’s theories about the primal darkness inherent in the sex act, its power to return us to the bestial carnality of a time before taboos. In Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille forged links between religious sacrifice and the act of love. The deathblow that elevates the sacrificial victim out of the mundane, into the sacred–“into continuity with all being, to the absence of separate individualities”–is closely tied, in Bataille’s eyes, to sexual intercourse, which briefly blurs our “separate individualities” through the near merging of our bodies, the borders of our selves.35 When, as in Happiness, a sacrificial victim lies down willingly with a lovemaking machine that is also the instrument of his destruction, sex and death come together in a transgres-sive act that embodies our love-hate relationship with the machine world.
Additionally, there is the symbiotic relationship between the garden and what Reznor calls the “room-machine”–that is, the torture chamber considered as a disciplinary mechanism. Together, they form a closed circuit: The carnivorous chair’s excreta fertilize the garden, which in some obscure way sustains the machinery, according to Reznor. “The idea,” he says, “was [that] this machine, this room, lent itself to being like a recycling process-the whole room may be an organism of some sort-where the waste of what was once Bob comes out of the metal sphincter and feeds the garden, which then keeps the room-machine alive in the process.” In keeping with the cyborgian logic of cyberculture, the boundary between biology and technology is constantly shifting: The room is a machine, but then again it “may be an organism,” just as nature, here, is part of a mechanical process. Moreover, even as the organic body of the human victim is being penetrated by machinery, the teeming vegetation is invading the “room-machine.”
The fantasies of cyborg empowerment that made his Six Million-Dollar Man doll one of Reznor’s favorite toys when he was little–“I would daydream about being bionic and kicking peoples’ ass[es] at school, you know?”–live on in some of his songs.36 Still, most of his music emphasizes an aspect of humanity’s Faustian bargain with technology that industrial culture would just as soon forget-namely, that while machines still serve our needs, we are increasingly bent to the demands of their implacable logic. In Erewhon (1872), a wary Samuel Butler wrote, “May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?”37 Over a century later, a sardonic Reznor snarls, “Take it from me, you can find happiness in slavery.”38
Origin Stories
Branca’s question–“What is the proper modern music to accompany cyberpunk?”–is a Mobius strip for the mind. In essence, he is asking what the objective correlative is, in music, of a literary genre that is itself profoundly informed by a sensibility first expressed in music, namely punk. Rob Hardin, who played synthesizer in the cyberpunk novelist John Shirley’s band Obsession, holds that cyberpunk “anachronistically embraced proto-punk, punk, and postpunk” and therefore “existed in music before it existed in writing.”
In their essay “Cyberpunk 101,” Kadrey and McCaffery offer a wealth of evidence for Hardin’s case, tracing the movement’s genealogy through The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), an album-long heroin nod troubled by dreams of cold turkey and rough sex with a “whiplash girl-child”; Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), the Sex Pistols’ declaration of total war in punk’s scorched-earth campaign against normalcy; and Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report (1977).
The widely held belief, reasserted by Kadrey and McCaffery, that cyberpunk “appropriated punk’s confrontational style, its anarchist energies, its crystal-meth pacings, and its central motif of
the alienated victim defiantly using technology to blow everyone’s fuses” is borne out in Neuromancer.39 Case’s mentor, the outlaw hacker Bobby Quine, is named after the protopunk guitarist Robert Quine, whose choked, apoplectic solo on Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” (1976) gave vent to the pent-up hostility that would explode soon thereafter in punk rock. Molly, who first appears in the short story “Johnny Mnemonic” as “a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag,” her black leather jacket “open over a T-shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and black,” is modeled on the sultry, sneering photo of the Pretenders’ singer-guitarist Chrissie Hynde, on the cover of the group’s eponymous debut.40 “The attitude’s all there,” notes Gibson. “I was just describing that face and giving it a body and fingernails.” In Neuromancer, Molly confides that she paid for her implanted mirrorshades, retractable claws, and catlike reflexes with money earned as a “meat puppet”–a prostitute whose software-controlled body functions as a sex machine while her semiconscious mind drifts in a twilight sleep that is “like cyberspace, but blank.”41 Gibson borrowed the epithet from the Meat Puppets, a psychedelic cowpunk trio from Phoenix, Arizona.
In Neuromancer, sly allusions to rock songs and musicians function as conceptual coordinates, locating Gibson’s novel in cultural space. The records Gibson listened to while writing helped not only to establish the book’s atmosphere but served as exemplars of innovation, emboldening him in his own experiments. “I needed music to encourage me,” he says, “music that suggested a certain world, music that had a sufficiently radical ambience to make me feel it was possible to write something in that direction. I was looking around for things that regular science fiction novels wouldn’t touch and I thought, ‘Okay, the universe of the Velvet Underground [is] about as esoteric as I [can] get in terms of what science fiction is attuned to.’ I was listening to the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, even Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen. I needed lyrical stuff, and Springsteen is keyed into a funny kind of folkloric America which I found artistically very useful for doing that book. I wanted something that would help me tie it back into American pop culture. Generally speaking, I use music in my novels as a touchstone to connect [an] imaginary future to our present world.”
In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Gibson confides, “I was going to use a quote from an old Velvet Underground song-‘Watch out for worlds behind you’ [“Sunday Morning,” The Velvet Underground & Nico]-as an epigraph for Neuromancer.”42 He later elaborated, “There are lots of references to Lou Reed [in Neuromancer]. Case’s girlfriend, Linda Lee, is a character from a Lou Reed song called ‘Cool It Down’ [The Velvet Underground, Loaded], and if you’re familiar with that song, you know more about the character in the book than if you [don’t] know the song.” A collective pop unconscious is presumed; the text is intended to be read through the accreted meanings of its intertextual references.
In this regard, Gibson, like the rest of cyberpunk’s fortysomething inner circle, is typical of the generation that came of age during the sixties, in a media landscape dominated by television, film, and rock music. The cyberpunks, maintains McCaffery, were
the first generation of writers . . . who had grown up immersed in technology but also in pop culture, in the values and aesthetics of the counterculture associated with the drug culture, punk rock, video games, Heavy Metal comic books, and the gore-and-splatter SF/horror films of George Romero, David Cronen-berg, and Ridley Scott.43
Of these influences, music looms largest. As Sterling asserts in Mirrorshades, cyberpunk “comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap.”44 Looking back on the October 1982 Armadillo-Con SF convention in Austin, Texas, when “the sense of a movement” crystalized in a fractious panel called “Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF,” Shiner remarks on the “common themes” that bound the writing of Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, and himself. Granting that the “hacker’s attitude toward technology” is a keystone of cyberpunk, he notes,
More important to me was what Gibson talked about in his introduction to Heatseeker: “Sometimes, reading Shirley, I can hear the guitars.” This rock-and-roll quality-the young, hip, protagonists, the countercultural attitude (symbolized by the ever-present mirrorshades), the musical references-defined the movement for me.45
Cyberpunks-the kind who live in science fiction novels, rather than the kind who write them-are a mythic hybrid of hacker and rocker whose Macs are their “axes.” Rock played an important role in the lives of real-life cyberpunks as well: Acid Phreak, a member of a New York cracker organization called the Masters of Deception, took his handle from acid house, a form of techno music characterized by bare-bones rhythm tracks, static harmonies, and samples lifted from other records; Pengo, a member of a German outlaw hacker gang called the Chaos Computer Club, conducted his Internet break-ins to the stiff, twitchy technopop of the German synthesizer band Kraftwerk.
Simultaneously, cyberpunk writers have invested themselves with a rock ‘n’ roll aura. In their introduction to the anthology Semiotext(e) SF, Rudy Rucker and Peter Lamborn Wilson imagine cyberpunk novelists as “crazed computer hackers with green mohawks and decaying leather jackets, stoned on drugs so new the FDA hasn’t even heard of them yet, word-processing their necropsychedelic prose to blaring tapes by groups with names like the Crucifucks, Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, Bad Brains . . .”46
Gibson, whose “obvious star quality” so impressed Shiner, told me, “I didn’t really think of [Neuromancer] as a book; I wanted to make a pop artifact”–in other words, a hit single. In like fashion, Sterling, who has sported an earring and a spiky, David Bowie-esque hairstyle, informed a Mondo 2000 interviewer, “I’ve got an album to do, as it were.”47 Asked what instrument he played, Sterling explained, “I don’t play anything. I just hang out. I talk rock slang, because it’s part of the gig.”48 In a Science Fiction Eye interview, he speculated that perhaps neither he nor Gibson was forthcoming about biographical details because
as cyberpunk writers, we consider ourselves in some sense pop stars rather than litterateurs. We want to guard our privacy. . . . Gibson . . . has that classic pop star cool. I also think of myself as being a pop star, rather than a writer with a capital “W.”. . . I’m not really interested in writing the Great American Novel. I mean, who cares? . . . It’s boring.49
Young turks with a fierce allegiance to pop culture, the eighties cyberpunks dreamed not of the urbane repartee of the Algonquin Round Table but of a speedmetal prose whose “visionary intensity” was the literary equivalent of “the sound of feedback blowing out the speakers: I’ll show you God” (Sterling).50
For John Shirley, “the Lou Reed of cyberpunk” (McCaffery), Sterling’s fantasies of “pop star cool” and feedback epiphanies are more than metaphor. The punkiest of the close-knit cabal that founded cyberpunk, Shirley dressed the part, in his earlier days, of a neon night crawler-snakeskin-snug black leather, earrings fashioned from transistors, and, of course, mir-rorshades. He “learned to shout rhythmically” and traumatized unprepared audiences in a succession of punk bands with names like Sado Nation and Terror Wrist.51 Later, he fronted Obsession, whose eponymous LP Shirley describes as “futuristic Funkadelic, but a little punkier.” As of this writing, he is in the San Francisco-based Panther Moderns, whose name is taken from a surgically modified teenage gang in Neuromancer.
But, while its internalization of the punk Zeitgeist made it faster and louder than its predecessors, cyberpunk was by no means the first SF genre to be galvanized by a jolt from the crossed wires of pulp fiction and electric guitars. The British New Wave movement of the sixties introduced rock music into science fiction by way of Michael Moorcock, whose picaresque Jerry Cornelius novels are routinely cited by the cyberpunks as a formative influence. Cornelius is a longhaired, pill-popping sybarite of questionable morality and ambivalent sexuality who inhabits a “multiverse” ruled “by the gun, the guitar, and the needle, sexier t
han sex.”52 A quantum-leaping superhero who lives in Swinging London, he battles villains whose James Bond redoubts are booby-trapped with LSD gas and throws parties that last for months.
In all four Jerry Cornelius novels, references to sixties bands and snatches of period songs intensify the books’ already oversaturated pop art colors in the same way that the brand name-dropping of Don DeLillo or Donald Barthelme lends their novels a hyperreal quality. The climactic scene of the second novel, A Cure for Cancer (1971), is a necromantic ritual involving a “chaos machine” that taps the life force of the living to reanimate the dead. Hooking the device up to his dead sister, Cornelius conducts a psychedelic resurrection:
Swiftly Jerry increased the entropy rate to maximum, preparing himself for the ensuing dissipation. . . . He began to flood through the universe and then through the multiverse, to the sound of the Beatles singing “A Day in the Life,” throbbing in time to the cosmic pulse. . . . Faster and faster flew the particles and Jerry hung on. . . . He looked about him and waited as “Helter Skelter” echoed through the infinite. . . . He felt a moment’s concern before the switch clicked over, Jimi Hendrix started to play “Are You Experienced?,” and things began to come together again. Soon he would know if the experiment had paid off.53
