William Gibson - Distrust That Particular Flavor

I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn’t.

Or, to put it another way, they will not know “computers” as any distinct category of object or function. This, I think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing: the wired world. The wired world will consist, in effect, of a single unbroken interface. The idea of a device that “only” computes will perhaps be the ultimate archaism in a world in which the fridge or the toothbrush are potentially as smart as any other object, including you. A world in which intelligent objects communicate, routinely and constantly, with each other and with us. In this world, there will be no need for the physical augmentation of the human brain, as the most significant, and quite unthinkably powerful, augmentation will have already taken place postgeographically, via distributed processing.

You won’t need smart goo in your brain, because your fridge and your toothbrush will be very smart indeed, enormously smart, and they will be there for you, constantly and always.

So it won’t, I don’t think, be a matter of computers crawling buglike down into the most intimate chasms of our being, but of humanity crawling buglike out into the dappled light and shadow of the presence of that which we will have created, which we are creating now, and which seems to me to already be in process of re-creating us.

This was an attempt to as literally and as thoroughly as possible answer the sort of question which I had, by this point, been asked many, many, many times.

I’m glad that we continue to be, for the most part, products of unskilled labor.

BUILT IN THE LATE TWENTIES heyday of the early studios, the Château Marmont boasts a fine deep mulch of Hollywood psychogeography, a wealth of ghosts. It’s hard to imagine doing anything in one of these bungalows that someone hasn’t already done, but maybe we’re doing it tonight: We’re holding our own private festival of digital video, screening films that were shot without the benefit of, well, film.

First up: Dancehall Queen , a feature from Jamaica that we’ll watch with its co-writer and editor, Suzanne Fenn.

Suzanne was a member of Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group, circa 1970–71, where she functioned as the embodiment of Liberated Woman. Trained by the great documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, she cut Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven , all of Michael Tolkin’s movies, and films by Percy Adlon, Louis Malle, and many more.

Dancehall Queen , shot in the Jamaican ghetto of Standpipe, is an all-digital production, the result of Chris Blackwell’s initial moves toward creating a modern movie studio/industry in Jamaica, based on the way digital cameras and editing pare down and open up the filmmaking process. That is, the way they reduce costs to a point where films can be feasibly geared to smaller audiences, thus allowing the development of true indigenous cinemas. It’s the third-world version of what Americans call “guerrilla filmmaking,” extending the same vocabulary of techniques and strategies: on-the-fly street shooting, more nonprofessional actors, and so forth.

What becomes apparent, listening to Suzanne and then watching her film, is that Dancehall Queen couldn’t have been made without this technology. In a milieu of ambient squatters, working with conventional equipment and a large crew is virtually impossible. (There aren’t even any viable authority figures to bribe.) The technology opens up the world in a new and global way: If you can go there, you can shoot there. For all her Euro-film pedigree, Suzanne is not the type to be held back by nostalgia for an old media platform, and Dancehall Queen uses the new technology to great effect, plunging the viewer into the outrageous color, hypnotic energy, and desperate socioeconomics of the Standpipe ghetto and its club scene.

As the film ends I glance over at my daughter Claire, 16, and see that she’s excited, too, even though the movie’s dialog is in a variant of English that would send American video distributors running to the nearest subtitle house.

Suzanne tells us that her next feature, also shot digitally in Jamaica, is called Third World Cop . I tell her that’s the best title I’ve heard this year, and then we slot our second film, Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life . Featuring singer P. J. Harvey as Jesus Christ’s backpack-toting personal assistant, it was shot in Manhattan for French television on the proverbial shoestring.

On the final day of 1999, an immaculately suited Jesus and a Bukowskiesque Devil warily circle each other through a series of sleazy bars and chilly law offices, trying to cut a deal that centers on Christ’s PowerBook. This contains the biblical Seventh Seal: Unlock the file and the Judgment Day program will launch, and then all hell will break loose. Christ also unexpectedly finds himself on a quixotic last-minute mission to save the soul of a saintly waitress who has run afoul of the Devil’s negotiating skills. The film displays a fine nervous energy, heightened by loose-limbed camerawork, Hartley seeming to relish the so-called limits of digital filmmaking: His images smear, blur, judder, pixelate, and twist. It’s a weirdly compelling grammar he assembles, and the film is funny, tender, and vertiginous.

I check Claire again. I’m using her as a tunnel canary, those birds that miners employed to warn them of poisonous gases. If she goes comatose, we’re definitely off the track in terms of a crucial target demographic. Will this stripped-down mode of production hold the attention of a teenager raised on studio product?

It looks as though Hartley’s grabbed her, handheld and all, so now we’re ready for Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration , a Danish film, digitally shot, that won the Jury Prize last year at Cannes.

Vinterberg was proud to put The Celebration forward as an example of the principles codified in Dogma 95, a manifesto calling for location sound, natural lighting, and other new realities of digital filmmaking. The movie, staged in a very large and handsome chateau, explores the inner psychic recesses of the deeply troubled annual reunion of a very large and extraordinarily dysfunctional Danish family, and it seems… very long. After twenty minutes of Danish gloom I look over and see the tunnel-canary effect kicking in, big time. Claire’s about to opt for bed and a head-clearing hit of MTV.

The Celebration is triggering my own Joe Bob Briggs reflex, but maybe that’s because watching a triple feature is pushing it for me. Or maybe it’s because the movie is 105 serious minutes of what Variety calls “arthouse,” fraught with incest and repressed memories of child abuse. It definitely would’ve been a tough pitch in Burbank.

Still, though I may not be enjoying it tremendously, I can honestly be glad it exists. Vinterberg has probably made exactly the film he wanted to make — a lot of it, at that — and any technology that empowers this uniquely personal process is ultimately going to do some good.

So Claire goes to bed, The Celebration ends, Suzanne and my friend Roger depart, and I go out to the patio to smell the eucalyptus and think about dreams and platforms and how platforms affect dreams and vice versa.