Remembering Johnny Mnemonic

When Johnny Mnemonic premiered on May 26th, 1995, I was pretty excited to see it. I didn’t know much about cyberpunk, or the fiction of William Gibson. But I was a huge Star Trek fan, and loved Alien, Aliens, Batman, Blade Runner—big, immersive fantasies stuffed with over-the-top production design and special effects. I also liked computers, and Speed had made me, like so many people, a Keanu Reeves fan. Plus I’d somehow heard that this Gibson fellow was writing Alien 3. If memory serves, my friend Philip and I went opening day, buying our tickets and settling in, expecting to see our new favorite film.

Instead, we hated the movie—loathed it. There’s a moment, late in the picture, when a Yakuza member picks up a rocket launcher and starts firing it at the base where our heroes are hiding, screaming expletives until Ice-T’s character fells her with a crossbow. I remember turning to Philip and saying, “She wants out. She’s trying to blow up the film.”

In the years that followed, I got more and more into cinema, branching out into foreign movies, experimental art films, classic Hollywood productions. I also remained a fan of the geekier genres, enjoying movies like 12 Monkeys, Star Trek: First Contact, and Starship Troopers. But I mostly forgot about Johnny Mnemonic. If it ever came up, which rarely happened, I found that those who’d seen it felt the same way that I did. The movie was garbage, a total joke. Even William Gibson agreed.

Recently, a friend and I were discussing cyberpunk movies, trying to figure out how massive walls of TV screens had become a cliche of the genre. Some google searches brought me back to Johnny Mnemonic, whose imagery intrigued me. Curious, I glanced at the movie’s Wikipedia page, where the cast list stood out: besides Keanu and Ice-T, the film stars Takeshi Kitano, Dolph Lundgren, Henry Rollins, Udo Kier. Twenty-three years ago, I didn’t know who they were, but I sure do now. What’s more, I learned that the director, Robert Longo, was a visual artist who, back in the ’70s and ’80s, used to pal around with Cindy Sherman, Rhys Chatham, and the late Glenn Branca. (One of his artworks was used on the cover of Branca’s album The Ascension.) And before he made Johnny Mnemonic, Longo directed the music videos for New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” and R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.”

I like those videos, I thought. So I found myself wondering if my memory could be faulty. Maybe Johnny Mnemonic was good? I had to find out.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that Johnny Mnemonic is a great film, because it isn’t. But it is much better than I’d remembered. Your mileage may vary, but I found it painless to sit through—indeed, I found myself entertained. Consider the following ten points:

1. Udo Kier is his usual eccentric self, maintaining a sassy pout while cavorting villainously with two striking bodyguards.

2. Dolph Lundgren branches out, gleefully hamming it up as a cyborg religious zealot armed with a crucifix knife and a shepherd’s crook. He also keeps a two-way video screen inside a holy book.

3. The special effects bedazzle the viewers with depictions of the internet and computer hacking that have aged deliciously poorly.

4. The film routinely alludes to other SF and fantasy movies, including La Jetée (more on this in a little bit)…

…The Shining & Don’t Look Now…

…Blade Runner…

…and Ghost in the Shell.

(As luck would have it, two decades later, Takeshi Kitano turned up in the live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell.)

5. The movie also features this cheerful fellow (below), who’s clearly Ratz, the bartender with the prosthetic arm whom we meet at the start of Neuromancer.

6. The movie sneaks in a funny parody of monster movie endings. Long story short, Dolph Lundgren’s bionic preacher winds up getting burned to a crisp—

—only to then seem to come back to life, presumably by means of his abundant cybernetic implants. As the happy score turns sour, we see a closeup of his hand twitching, then his head.

Our heroes wheel about, startled, only for Ice-T to say, “Just garbage! Get that out of here!” At which point a wider shot reveals some people using a pulley to hoist the charred remains.

7. Speaking of endings, much of the movie’s climax takes place inside a computer, replete with sparkly digital dolphins, an evil mainframe, and laser beams.

8. Let’s linger here, because this sequence is worth digging into. There’s more going on than mere CGI kitsch. As Johnny descends into the virtual reality, his avatar bends and contorts—

—becoming an updated version of director Robert Longo’s earlier art, in particular his Men in the Cities series. Those were graphite and charcoal drawings that he derived from photographs—

—which were supposedly inspired by a shot in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The American Soldier:

Another influence, presumably, was the ending of Chris Marker’s classic SF film La Jetée (I told you we’d make our way back to that):

What’s more, the CGI avatar imagery is intercut with closeups of Johnny grimacing while strapped into a fancy cybernetic headset—

—which recall La Jetée‘s time-travel scenes.

So this climactic sequence—which is admittedly very corny!—was nonetheless directly inspired by Chris Marker and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Which means it’s almost as if Marker and Fassbinder directed Johnny Mnemonic! And that’s not all. Supposedly, Longo originally planned to shoot his movie with a much lower budget and in black-and-white, as an homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s foray into SF, Alphaville.

9. In addition to all that good stuff, Johnny Mnemonic is always visually engaging, churning through a mishmash of styles:

10. Finally, it’s reasonable to conclude that if Keanu hadn’t starred in Johnny Mnemonic, he would not have been cast as Neo in The Matrix. The Wachowskis were watching.

So why did I hate this film as a teen? Well, for one thing, I wasn’t very hip, and I didn’t get many of the references noted here. I also didn’t know that much about art, or how movies are made. I don’t know where I thought they came from.

Back then, I watched geeky movies and TV shows because I wanted escapism—to get swept up in them, and the fantastic realms they contained. As such, I wanted my artworks realist and never-ending, expansive worlds unto themselves without apparent cracks or seams. I had little tolerance for any sign of artifice or contrivance that would jolt me out of the experience. (I write more about this desire in my book on Star Wars and geek culture.)

Johnny Mnemonic is the opposite of seamless. It’s a fairly ramshackle film that lurches from artiness to camp and back again, being less concerned with realist world-building than it is with filling the screen with colorful characters, outlandish imagery, and allusions to other artworks. Watching it now, I get the impression that, more than anything else, Robert Longo wanted the movie to be striking.

In that, he certainly succeeded. Johnny Mnemonic may not be great, but it is good fun. It’s a movie worth remembering.