William Gibson - Distrust That Particular Flavor

What do the films we’ve been watching have in common? A technology that facilitates motion capture and assembly, and does indeed put the tools of production into the hands of just about anyone with a serious hankering to make a film. But that’s a simple observation, rather like saying that anyone with Microsoft Word can produce a book that looks, well, exactly like a book.

“Digital is an inexpensive way to make films,” my friend Roger decides, as we watch the onedotzero3 cassette, a compilation from a recent digital-film festival at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, “but it’s a very expensive way to do club graffiti.”

We’ve come out to Roger’s place to access his multiformat VCR, our English tape being in PAL, but now there’s a problem with the tape, or with the VCR, or with how the two interact: The imagery, a lot of which resembles clip art, is in black and white. It’s supposed to be in color.

I feel guilty watching it this way. This is grossly unfair to the filmmakers, although it does seem to underline the idea that most of what we are watching here has been created either as a background for serious clubbing or as neurologically specific tools for the appreciation of proscribed substances, or both. If we could crank these images up to wall size, with full Dolby, I’m sure they’d jangle a few synapses. But largely abstract content, in monochrome, on a standard-size monitor, is simply an exercise in design.

The tunnel canary isn’t comatose, but she’s not watching, either. She’s teaching herself to juggle with three large lemons from the tree in Roger’s front yard.

Sleep eludes me. The Garage Kubrick is muttering, keeping me awake. Does anybody really need him? Will he ever happen?

I remember the people I’ve heard complain about the very texture of digital images, filmless film: how it lacks richness, depth. I’ve heard the same thing said about CDs. Someone once told me that it was Mark Twain who turned in the first typewritten manuscript, and this was generally thought to be a Bad Thing: Work composed on a machine would naturally lack richness, depth.

But surely, says a very American part of me, things (if not people) can get better, and what the early stages of one technology take away can be restored in a later stage, or by a newer technology piggybacking on the first.

And my Garage Kubrick wants full fractal richness. He wants to control the very texture of the dream, down into its finest grain, its tightest resolution. He wants to build his characters from the ground up, from the inside out. He thinks not in terms of actors but in terms of models for motion capture. His medium is entirely plastic, to a degree that has never been possible before. And isn’t, I remind myself, possible today.

But it might be eventually. It seems to me, really, that it must be one day.

Digital cinema has the potential to throw open the process of filmmaking, to make the act more universally available, to demythologize it, to show us aspects of the world we’ve not seen before. In that sense, it will be the “eyes” of the extended nervous system we’ve been extruding as a species for the past century.

To think in terms of entertainment, or even of art, is probably to miss the point. We are building ourselves mirrors that remember — public mirrors that wander around and remember what they’ve seen. That is a basic magic.

But a more basic magic still, and an older one, is the painting of images on the walls of caves, and in that magic the mind of the painter is the mirror, whatever funhouse twists are brought to the remembered object. And that cave is also my Kubrick’s garage, and whatever he’s driven to cook up in there will simply be another human dream. The real mystery lies in why he is, why we are, willing, driven, to do that.

Some of us will use digital film technology to explore all of those places, all of those people, in the world we’re still trying to discover. If the Standpipes of the world cease thereby to be invisible, out of sight and out of mind, it will have all been worth it right there.

And others, like my own Garage Kubrick, will use the same technology to burrow more deeply, more obsessively, more gloriously, into the insoluble mystery of the self, even as the Château Marmont outlasts the media platform and the studio system that gave it birth.

I fall asleep imagining someone building a virtual Marmont, and in one of the bungalows, a character is falling asleep….

My novel Pattern Recognition was gestating, as I wrote this, the “Garage Kubrick” morphing from protagonist (or antagonist, or possibly just agonist) to MacGuffin, though I didn’t know it. Pattern Recognition would eventually manage to be published just ahead of the launch of YouTube, a very good thing considering certain of its plot points.

In a world with YouTube, it’s probably much more difficult to induce a magazine to put you up in the Marmont to watch digital films, so that was good timing as well.

Over a decade later, digital cinema seems to be going where I thought it would, though with the paradoxical problem that lack of broad theatrical release is still taken to mean that your film didn’t really happen. Unevenly distributed future, that; the towering edges of the footprint of the previous media platform… I imagine the true Kubricks to be going about their business regardless.

A CLEAR COLD Monday midmorning in Toronto, February 1994, and I’m standing beneath the dim high ceiling of a brick Victorian factory on Lansdowne Avenue, perhaps a foundry once for steam engines, more recently a General Electric plant. This room is vast, and in it are built other rooms, ceilingless, lights slung above. Here’s a hotel suite, Beijing, early twenty-first century, realized in the most fastidious detail (though the faux Philippe Starck chairs have recently been riddled with explosive fléchettes, setting goose down to play across the wonderfully ugly carpet). Here’s the back room of the Drome bar, with grease-stained duct-work to rival Gilliam’s Brazil . And here, in a propman’s plastic Ziploc bag, looking like a cross between some fetish queen’s jewelry and the business end of a Roto-Rooter, is a weapon of a sort that has never before existed anywhere in the human universe. Except, that is, behind my forehead. Why we spent however many mornings driving to Century City in some rented car, with the windows down and the air-conditioning on, as if, thereby, we were stealing something from this system that so effortlessly, so seamlessly, so consistently refuses us….

I’ve become an intimate of Sunset Strip hotels, moving over these four years from Bel Age to Le Reve to the St. James, and finally to the Château Marmont, that historied pile, where the ghosts of Jim Morrison and Gram Parsons (who didn’t actually die there, though they certainly served their time) sit around the pool at night with the ghost of John Belushi (who did). There I learned to stay in the “9” suites: 39, 49, 59, 69. These have balconies running the length of the building, facing the Strip, and more rooms than you can ever quite discover during a given stay. Like vast 1920s Hollywood apartments, their original fixtures and fittings strangely intact. Huge white gas ranges, deactivated dumbwaiters, cedar-lined closets with fold-down ironing boards. A place fraught with mysteries. Mysteries and intriguing-looking European tourists, who stand around the front desk complaining of irregularities in their wives’ rented cellular service. Complaining of strange voices, speaking as from the very well of time. Of a madman on Frau X’s pocket Motorola, muttering that the severed finger joint of one particular and long-forgotten Fifties starlet languishes this very day in the locked drawer of that odd brown piece of furniture in the hallway of Suite Sixtysomething — but the precise location is always lost, awash in that ferocious garble of Russian cab-static, up off the crawling Strip, where the cabbies, mainly Vietnamese when I began my term of service (four years ago? five?) are now mostly from Vladivostok.