A Brief History of Slip and Failure: Cyberpunk and the Headroom for Nostalgia in Back to the Future – Bright Lights Film Journal

In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future IIs re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered rather a remix of the Back to the Future that notoriously played with our expectations of a sequel forever. What accrues over time as we look back on its archive, and how can we avoid nostalgia in this history? Its an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequels 1989 vision of The Future also contains a cultural critique that betrayed a very contemporary self-awareness of countercultural downfall since the date of the original films October 21, 1985 conclusion. Namely the rebellious cyberpunk movement that had mainstreamed by that year within the hopeful 80s spaces of science fiction communities, arcades, MTV, comics, graphic novels, and British public television had come to a grim demise. The fate of popular cyberpunk since Back to the Future can offer us something perhaps more precious: a modern-day lesson for our own failing technoconsumerist times. As the 2020 release of a cinematic cyberpunk video game starring Keanu Reeves illustrates continuing interest in and criticisms of the stagnation of the genre, revisiting the cyberpunk archive of Back to the Futures 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.

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For many who watched the film Back to the Future II for October 2015s heavily pressed Back to the Future Day, David Ehrlichs assertions in Rolling Stone probably rang true: The year 2015 of Zemeckiss film was uncannily prescient as an experience that tends to look a lot like the present by the time it arrives. His claim that the future in retrospect has always been that way refers to explosive cycles of new consumer technology, like the Model T and the iPhone, falling in step with internalized narratives of progress that always seem to become overcommodified, overblown, and boring for us in the future-realized. On to the next thing, then: the rose gold iPhone Rebecca Mead described (as perverse) in her New Yorker article that year, the real-life-fantasy pair of self-lacing Nikes, that temporary sense of social inclusion progress even for a price.

The half-life of journalism as a novelty itself is affirmed in just how swiftly the viral relevance of Right or Wrong predictions in a Blockbuster sci-fi film can slip into Who Cares territory. Ushering a vision of the future with tech-equipped, white-collar criminals, a deserved poverty loser narrative in the future McFly lineage, and 24/7 work telecommunications, one could argue (futilely) that Back to the Future II predicted a dystopian 2015 wed certainly already arrived at. However, to the 80s-trained eye, Back to the Futures hyperconsumerist future was more than just an uncanny prediction of what technocapitalism may always do to culture, or what cultures may always do with their technocapitalism. Back to the Future II was also a 3.5-year reflection when it was released. It picked up exactly where the 1985 original left off, with Martys gee-whiz skateboarding character having successfully wired postwar Pax Americana nostalgia and new-tech savvy to resolve the American Dreams meritocratic and global technology anxieties. In hacking time as an ultimate soft technology (to quote SF writer Ursula K. LeGuin), perhaps the original had repaired the accelerating, post-industrial rift in lasting relationships and generational connection emphasized in Alvin Tofflers then-popular Future Shock, and perhaps in this endless loop of rapid late-20th-century technological change and cybernetic threat the sequel could do it again.

In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future IIs re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered rather a remix of the Back to the Future that notoriously played with our expectations of a sequel forever. What accrues over time as we look back on its archive, and how can we avoid nostalgia in this history? Its an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequels 1989 vision of The Future also contains a cultural critique that betrayed a very contemporary self-awareness of countercultural downfall since the date of the original films October 21, 1985 conclusion. Namely the rebellious cyberpunk movement that had mainstreamed by that year within the hopeful 80s spaces of science fiction communities, arcades, MTV, comics, graphic novels, and British public television had come to a grim demise. The fate of popular cyberpunk since Back to the Future can offer us something perhaps more precious: a modern-day lesson for our own failing technoconsumerist times. As the 2020 release of a cinematic cyberpunk video game starring Keanu Reeves illustrates continuing interest in and criticisms of the stagnation of the genre, revisiting the cyberpunk archive of Back to the Futures 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.

ABCs Max Headroom series

With aspirations for technologys potential for redemption against the symptoms of late global capitalism, Sabine Heuser notes that cyberpunk works would typically pit the individual against [a] conspiracy of corporations and capital inflicting conformism, surveillance, powerlessness, urban ruination, and a loss of authentic culture in their world. Cyberpunk reached for a radical transcendence of this technology-assisted oppression through liberatory notions like cyberspace, bodymod, hacking, subversion, novelty, fragmentation, and hybridity. These creative notions superseded the concern for current technological limits. A cyberpunk scholar, Heuser writes:

Emerging from the stories is a typical do-it-yourself attitude when confronted with high technology. There are no owners manuals, no respect for the intended function of the technology. Technology is turned against its original design or its intended use, becoming a vehicle for creative (and sometimes crude) intervention.

Starting within a literary movement that Samuel Delaney called an SF dialogue that had run its course by 1987, this characteristic cyberpunk ethos of aspirational hacking through and beyond available technology also emerged throughout popular visual cultural productions of the 80s a sort of cultural leaking of social theory. Much like Docs difficulty finding fuel for his hacked DeLorean, cyberpunk imaginaries of technological change sometimes struggled in the real world for the means of their aspirational cyber-aesthetic. The cyberpunk comic Shatter by Peter B. Gillis and Mike Saenz, for example, became the very first comic drawn with a computer mouse in 1985. Interviews for the bound 20th-anniversary compilation of Shatter describe an innovative, tedious, and costly process of making computer-generated art for the comic on a first-generation Apple Macintosh, pixel by pixel, then hand coloring the black-and-white printouts from a dot matrix. Shatters plot went further down the necropolitical corporate media rabbit hole than even its 1985 cyberpunk fellow, Max Headroom; The Shatter comic featured an evil media corporation that rather than cyber-copying journalists is in the regular, profitable business of harvesting genetic-based talent through mercenary murder. Cybernetic threat against the individual was a palpable anxiety that pervaded popular cyberpunk, and concerned its own forms of the systems . . . capable of receiving, storing and processing information that 80s cyberneticists sought to study for control purposes. We might find such anxiety in Martys race to resist the erasure of his very existence through quick-witted action scenes, while the circular causal and feedback mechanisms Marty must continuously maneuver seem to make movie magic of the foundational concerns of postwar cybernetics.

You broke it! . . . Wow! Look at him go! Marty (re)invents skateboarding in Back to the Future.

Not everyone had the custom tech apparatus of Zemeckis in Hollywood to realize their creative vision (in this case, for his refilming technique), and the Apple Macintosh was it in 1985 personal computer technology. Shatter artist Mike Saenz made obvious efforts to loosen up the limited state of contemporary computer graphics in 1985, layering dynamic mouse-drawn compositions with visible mixed-media colorations of watercolor, pencil, pastel, and gouache. Customer feedback in the inside cover of issue No. 2 met a range of reactions. A self-professed computer hacker and comics collector offered appreciation for how excellent the computer art was for its time (and worth the expensive issue price). A lengthy complaint applauded Saenzs bold attempt to make art with the Mighty Mac, but criticized the primitive quality of the emergent graphics, and the unoriginal similarities to Blade Runner, as being a comics turn off for even a fellow Macintosh owner. For one reason or another, Saenz soon left the Shatter project to work on an Iron Man graphic novel. His valiant hacking practice for Shatter was abandoned by the replacement artist in favor of traditional comic art that was first hand drawn and then digitized an easier and more manipulable visual process at the time, but was it still a cyberpunk?

Hacking, hybridizing, fragmenting, struggling for a cyberpunk aesthetic beyond the technologically possible, these proto-digital qualities of cyberpunk showed up again in the once wildly successful and transatlantic Max Headroom media franchise that appeared in scenes of Back to The Future II. As documented by Bryan Bishop in his The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom, this pioneering transmedia franchise started as a UK cable Channel 4 movie on the politics of corporate media cyberspace what writer George Stone called the landscape of television. The satirical character Max Headroom, a computer-generated alter-ego entity reconstructed from the fragmented consciousness of a comatose journalist, would go on that same week to lambast media culture by hosting music videos on a regular show on Channel 4. By the second season in 1986, the roasting would include celebrity interviews and a joint airing between Cinemax and Channel 4, and thus began a wild rollercoaster of success for the franchise ending in a nostalgic, self-effacing flop in Back to the Future II.

In simultaneously making Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future and The Max Headroom Show, creators George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton realized that the graphics capacity needed to visually create their vision of the titular cybernetic character of the story was not only technologically impossible but years down the line. As a result, the hacking carried out to achieve the novel, computer-generated cyber-look of Max Headroom beyond 1985 computer art capabilities was a hybrid production including hours of makeup and prosthetics on actor Matt Frewer, fiberglass costuming, stolen rotating CGI background graphics from a milk commercial, and the non-digital, glitchy stutters and hiccups of the video editing room.

True to the avant-garde identity of cyberpunk described by Heuser, the premiere of The Max Headroom Show on UK cable Channel 4 featured a lack of credits and an immediate slippage between reality and fiction recalling Orson Welless unannounced radio premiere of War of the Worlds. According to Bishops interview with Max Headroom producer Peter Wagg:

There were no opening titles. There were no credits for anybody . . . it was just that satellite chssssssss, snow and buzz. And all of a sudden, Max was there. Like, bang! And hes talking in German, and hes telling this joke about lederhosen all in German, hes roaring with laughter during the whole thing, and then the first music video we played was a German music video. And then Max in English: And this weeks award for the worst TV commercial goes to . . . and a commercial break. We had no idea what the first commercial would be. . . . Then at the end, it just went chssssssss and to [static] again. It was like youd woken up in Eastern Europe and turned the television on, and youre watching some weird station that you dont understand, and then it suddenly is cut off and gone.

In this case, Max Headrooms fictional slippage into perceived Iron Curtain shadow worlds in Western media space and subversive cultural commentary marked a revealing glitch for the viewer, one that evaded the typically opaque programming of popular and political mainstream media. No doubt it helped that Max Headroom was premiering on Channel 4, a station of the later public media movement that aimed to provide an outlet for experimental, noncommercial content.

Penn & Teller perform magic on a Cinemax-only variety show concurrent to the 1987 ABC Max Headroom series.

Bishop notes that even after Max Headroom went on to be adopted as an MTV host and cyberpunk spokeshead for Coca-Cola commercials, and was appropriated to become U.S. network televisions very first cyberpunk series, the creative team employed guerrilla tactics with late scripts and copious ad-libbing at ABC to make sure edgy, countercultural satire about the media industry was still getting through. In fact, ever since Max Headroom had won a BAFTA for graphics in 1986, the joke had been on the larger industry as well, as it had all been a hack, a proud fake that used essentially no computer graphics to gain the critical acclaim. The fact that Max Headroom was hackwork didnt matter so much as achieving the aesthetic cyberpunk aspiration or maybe it did; amidst great commercial success, actor Matt Frewer describes the Max Headroom creative teams infiltration campaign of mainstream media as aspiring to get away with things. It likely didnt help pro-industry morale that the lead creators had been pushed out amidst lawyer battles as the wildly popular franchise moved to ABC, and that the show was soon given a graveyard slot.

The balance Max Headroom struck between a cyberpunk ethos and the massive budgets, corporate controls, and ratings obsessions of network media would not last long. Bishops oral history of the show tells of a swift downfall when the show was cancelled in mid-production of the second season. Perhaps the boundary pushing became vulnerable and public interest fell having sensed the obsolescence in Max Headrooms corporate integration, its multimillion-dollar expense account used to recreate props that wed found in skips and . . . in old junk shops and things (as original co-creator Annabel Jankel recalled). Perhaps the audiences attracted to big-budget productions didnt get it in the intersection where cult counterculture and corporate media had crossed the streams. Ultimately, the proud cyberpunk fake had become a commercial phony to network media, succumbing to a wider cultural phenomenon of cyberpunk and punk that Heuser calls fatal appropria[tion].

80s Caf scene in Back to the Future II

Sell-out is too strong a term. Pioneering analog-to-digital cyberpunk media of the 80s like Shatter and Max Headroom may have eventually appeared to fail in the ways they separated the cybersoul from commercial corpus and the franchise from founding vision, but this is because, as cyberpunk scholar Takayuki Tatsumi points out, the age of technoconsumerism and its global instabilities especially those perceived in the economic rise of 1980s Japan had already arrived. However globalizing media processes helped to popularize avant-garde art and social critique, it also chewed up a body of creatives that public structures like Channel 4 had aimed to support by prioritizing independent producers. The scenario highlights cyberpunks cyberlibertarian streak as a failed fantasy of freedom, one still unable to reconcile the weak position of cognitive and digital labor. Yet it also reminds us that, as with Orson Welless struggles to fund his work, the microhistories of cultural producers may have been altogether different if crowdsourcing platforms had been available to tip the balance of fatal appropriation. The question may be a timeless one: Can the technology that enslaves also liberate?

Back to the Future IIs version of 1985 is worth rewatching just to revisit a constellation of cutting-edge Max Headroom-style icons encapsulated in a deflating sense of the decades obsolescence. In the film, these animations play on tvs that no longer serve music videos or celebrity interviews, but instead service food orders in a sad 80s Nostalgia Cafe. This tired, commoditized cyberpunk is drained not only of its radical roots, but also of its appropriated commercial glamour. In a hilariously cutting scene, AI versions of Reagan and the Ayatollah battle furiously in cyberspace over screen control for Martys Pepsi (notice, not Coca-Cola) product placement order. Its politics and rapid technocultural overturn as usual, and why should the hypermediated icons of MTV fare any differently? Appearing two years after the cancellation of the Max Headroom series, this franchise cameo of sorts in Back to the Future II signals an already palpable and hungry, but bitingly sarcastic, contemporary nostalgia for itself a nostalgia for the techno-utopian zeitgeist of 80s counterculture that commercialism had gobbled up and cast aside by 1989.

Was this signaling intentional, or part of a machine built on metafictionality teasing another new and upcoming next best thing? Interestingly enough, the 80s nostalgia cafe pokes fun at a film franchise steeped in its own decade of hypermediated nostalgia, from cyberpunk film noir, to the classic Westerns that Mark Fisher saw recycled in Star Wars, to the postwar romanticism of Back to the Future itself. Consider the way the title graphics for Back to the Future recall those of The Stunt Man, a 1980 film starring Peter OToole that captured a feverish paranoia of the pervasive conflation between media image and reality, exacted through the gods eye control of the Hollywood director. Takayuki Tatsumi similarly identified this metafictional power of media circulation in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now!, which echoed the real-life entanglement between news coverage of Vietnam and the influence of Hollywood war movie nostalgia. On to the next umpteenth Jaws sequel in Back to the Futures future of 1989, then (a reference made all in good jest, as Spielberg was Zemeckis mentor and friend).

In this sense, The Future in Back to the Future functions as a film candidate of the slipstream genre, something between mainstream and science fiction that William Gibson described as works that play with representational conventions . . . not creat[ing] new worlds but quot[ing] them often out of context . . . turning them against themselves a commercial-countercultural War of the Worlds, indeed. Metafiction, as Cory Doctorow explains, is just one of the estrange[ment] tools in the arsenal of slipstream. Between MTV and arcade, these filmic cyberpunk quotations of the Mainstream of Recent 80s Past also mark the future year 2015 in Back to the Future as, in fact, a historical looking back, a virtual space for pondering what the heck had already gone wrong with their generations popularized counterculture, rather than a speculative prediction waiting for us to weigh in on for accuracys sake. And it does so successfully in a very tenuous space that Zemeckis continually asserts a right to occupy, in the space between the avant and the popular, before the demise into the consumer culture archive.

Nostalgia, a product of longingly looking back with a sense of present social loss or decline, comes to us as a fiction, the totalizing, dreamy flattening of a real and complex past that fails to capture all the ironies, the holes and inconsistencies, and the dreams deferred of that time period. Yet I suspect that viewers of Back to the Future II caught the cyberpunk joke, the hack, the proud fake of a disillusioned nostalgia, well recognizing the commodity failure of their not-yet-fully-realized counterculture of 1985 before its technofruition or maybe just understanding from the mainstream that it was all a great, big commercial phony after all. Perhaps the saddest, most dystopian thing about Back to the Future II is that the only counterculture cyberpunks left to be found are a bunch of annoying rich kids, sporting fetishized high-tech gizmos, and hanging around at a shopping plaza. Thats something for us all to keep in mind as we stop what were doing to run out and buy that new iPhone to replace that boring old rose gold one, of course.

Francis Ford Coppolas cameo in his own film, Apocalypse Now!

SF writer Samuel Delaney argued in his Black to the Future interview with Mark Dery that cyberpunks aspirations to subvert the official uses of media and technology could only fall short over time as a pervasive misreading of an interim period of urban technoculture. As our 20th-century relationships to the material hardware and inner workings of technology grew increasingly remote, our technology [became] more and more like magic; The spells and incantations of hacking and urban bricolage across consumer stuff could never amount to transformative agency in the production and flow of technological culture. Neither could cyberpunk maintain the naivete of ironic anger toward this power imbalance implied in William Gibsons infamous phrase The street finds its own use for things. The reality, for Delaney, was that cyberpunks DIY ethos could neither get inside the portable black boxes of its time, nor the white boxes of the computer hacker class.

The late Mark Fisher has pointed out in popular music how a decrease in access to viable cultural production has actually influenced nostalgic traces of lost futures in 21st-century music music that only sounds new because it emulates the still-possible sense of the future in the old. Derived from Derridas hauntology of media, these are the aesthetic traces of failed futures futures that, in fact, no longer feel like they could ever arrive; The future is no longer what it was. Perhaps this is why recurrent cyberpunk media like Cyberpunk 2077 invites repetitive criticisms of the genres romanticized sociocultural as well as stylistic stasis. And so we find ourselves returning again and again to this historical moment in global medias simultaneous emergent possibility and dystopian impossibility as if this time, enhanced with the latest graphics and social contexts, we might finally find that peripheral exit from its trajectory. Yet Martys kind of hyperactive, on-the-fly ingenuity, hopeful as it is of an unassimilable emerging creative class within the cyberpunk moment, seems as much a romanticism of something we havent reached. As Samuel Delaney points out, without romanticism we might not have the initiative to explore whats on the other side of anything. Somewhere amidst the nostalgia, Im sure, is the leakage of an updating social theory.

Overall, Delaney has made the case that science fiction is most effective when its not at the center of anything. Its unclear whether he meant science fiction as a social forum, art form, or vehicle for the speculative; The trouble with the center is that it allows no room for moving. From Zemeckiss quotations of the Safety Last! clock scene in the original and Spielbergs Jaws in the sequel, to the hacking of his own films iconic scenes through innovative technology, perhaps the Back to the Future franchise most asserted one thing in the face of fatal appropriation flops and rapid commodity turnover: the influence of the cultural archive, and the power of creative acts to endure and that the best part of the joke, the hack, is when youre in on it, of course.

The shark may always still look fake in the emergent technology of the future, but theres nothing quite like striving to create something new in this world.

This Time Its REALLY, REALLY personal.

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Bibliography

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Bonner, Frances. 1992. Separate Development: Cyberpunk in Film and TV. In Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, by Eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. University of Georgia.

Dery, Mark. 1994. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Ed. Mark Dery. Duke University Press.

Doctorow, Cory. 2006. Slipstream Science Fiction Anthology Defies Genre Conventions. BoingBoing, June 14.

Ehrlich, David. 2015. Back to the Future Part II: Welcome to the Present. Rolling Stone, October 21. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/back-to-the-future-part-ii-welcome-to-the-present-191700/.

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Holland, Norman. n.d. Richard Rush, The Stunt Man (1980). A Sharper Focus.Accessed January 14, 2021.https://www.asharperfocus.com/Stunt.html.

LeGuin, Ursula K. n.d. A Rant About Technology. Ursula LeGuin Archive. Accessed January 7, 2020. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html.

Mead, Rebecca. 2015. The Semiotics of Rose Gold. The New Yorker, September 14. Accessed January 7, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-semiotics-of-rose-gold.

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A Brief History of Slip and Failure: Cyberpunk and the Headroom for Nostalgia in Back to the Future - Bright Lights Film Journal