Anti-dystopian theories: Donnie Darko and teenage angst

To some extent, the plague was a period during which we all had too much time to do too much of everything. One of the things that I spent way more time on than I usually do was reading. It didn’t seem that the number of really good articles was any more than it usually was, so it wasn’t long until I started clicking on the Random Article on longform.org and I started reading all sorts of stuff that caught my attention. 

One of those articles was an old interview about this movie Donnie Darko, about how it was made, how it was one of the first movies to hook into the 1980s nostalgia (DD was made in 2001), and why it was such a favorite for so many people at the time. I saw it back in the days, but in all honesty I don’t remember that much of it beyond this notion that it was pretty good.

I remember the guy in the rabbit suit and that it was kind of lame, but most of all that the story felt visceral to an extent that’s hard to put into words. It was ‘what it was like’ and by that I mean that whole teenage-angst-what’s-out-there-sort-of-thing-and-no-one-understands-it. It also had the 90s written all over it, with a soundtrack that was sideways inspired by a sort of mix between Nirvana and Radiohead.

Then the rewatch

Back in the day I had it on dvd, but it must have gotten lost somewhere along the way. So I googled for a site to watch it for free. What I was after was to get an idea of what it was exactly that I had felt back then, to figure out why the story worked and where it fell short.

What I expected before sitting down was a certain energy, but also a good deal of loose ends. I expected some ideas to be there, but without the ‘heft’ to really get it across (if that makes sense).

I can tell you this much: the bunny is still lame and it still doesn’t add anything to the story. The characters don’t seem overly fleshed out, but that’s also besides the point, because as a teen you don’t really have an eye for the big picture anyway (you are too busy with yourself). The fictional work of non-fiction on time-travel is over-reaching, and it ultimately doesn’t state or add anything to the story, because it doesn’t clarify much. It just makes the whole notion of time-travel even more vague and ‘out there’. 

But at the same time: it’s still a great movie. 

When I was in my late teens it really felt like it was an iteration of ‘everything’, and at the risk of over-intellectualizing: it’s not just that this movie works because it maintained that fine balance between what’s said and left unsaid, or that it works mostly on a visceral level. It’s that, but it’s also something more: it’s anti-dystopian, even though a plane engine crashes through the main character’s house and he dies at the end. 

Those two tragic events are both over the top, but they hook into one of the main projects of our teen years: finding a way to accept that ultimate fate that life will end at some point in time, mixed with a notion of the possibility of an after-life.

At heart it’s all about teenage-angst and how you really don’t know what you really want out of life, while there’s basically one big shit-storm going on around you. And this is exactly where this story becomes anti-dystopian, because at that age it feels like the world will never end (even though you might be into groom, grunge and darkness). And in that whole ‘notion’ there’s this idea in some weird and twisted way that everything will work out in ‘some way’, even though we have zero idea of what and how and all that. 

Now the big question is: do we ever really know that? Do we ever really know anything? Or is just believing enough? The kind of belief of some bright or gloomy far off future that must be somewhere over the horizon, or at least at the far end of the night. 

Anyway, the movie didn’t suck as bad as I thought it would on a second viewing. You should check it out if you never had the pleasure, or when it has been a good while.

Key points

- Donnie Darko is both 1980s nostalgia and teenage-angst incorporated.

- 25 is a time of understanding jack-shit, and a time of loose ends.

- Donnie Darko works because it’s anti-dystopian, because it’s ultimately a story of hope in that ‘everything works out in the end’.

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Shrink (2009)
Under-rated movie on therapy, self-obliteration and ultimately life.


Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark
On the desert, The X-Files and scary stories.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.

Nostalgia: the one about snow

In psychology there’s this well accepted distinction between the logical brain and the emotional brain. The logical brain works like a computer (for lack of a better analogy; maybe quantum computer?), the emotional one works on the harder to define stuff. 

The emotional brain runs on your basic emotions like laughter and being thrilled, but also on the more complex ones that nurture in a whole other way. It’s one of those more complex emotions that we deal with here. 

Nostalgia really is an interesting emotion, because it’s a visceral trip down memory lane. It’s something that we can share in with others who are more or less our age. It links up to a whole array of other things like music, movies, food, drinks, friends, what we did to have fun, etc etc, but at the same time ------- how you really feel about something is hard to define. The closest might be this constant k (kierkegaard): ‘all that remains is a mood, a single color’. 

To some degree that’s how it works with memory: ask me about a movie in three years and I may not be able to tell you much about the story-line, but I can more or less tell you how I felt about it at the time. Assuming that this movie hasn’t become one of my favorites. 

That’s of course not even close to nostalgia, because for that you need to reach further back, to the years that ‘formed us’, to the time when there was still ‘good music’ by ‘real musicians’, movies ‘had story-lines’ and novels ‘turned your perception of the world upside-down’.

Which is also a bit besides the point. What isn’t besides the point is how it makes us feel now because how we feel at any given time will always be our sole frame of reference. If you have read any of my work, then you must have come across that notion of the narrative identity: it’s that whole idea of our personal histories as a narrative that we continuously rewrite over the years, until we have ended up with a story about ourselves that we can ‘live with’, but also one that makes us ‘feel good about ourselves’. And it’s exactly that last vault that nostalgia taps into. 

These vaults of nostalgia are exactly what it seems. This is what I tap into. Series: The X-files. Music: Nirvana, Radiohead, The Hives. Movies that scared me shitless: IT, Predator. Movies that somehow captured how I felt at a certain time: Hackers, Donnie Darko, The Dreamers, Shrink. Comedy: Tom Green. Computer games: C&C, Commandos.

What does this really tell you, besides that I grew up in the 90s and basically what most kids were into back then. In a way you might also say that these are more like cultural markers than anything else, but there’s a subtlety here: those markers mean something else from person to person. 

Nostalgia as a fictional device

Where nostalgia takes on a whole other dimension is where it’s being used as an intentional fictional device. And even if you know that it’s being used, the mechanism still works. Most notable works of fiction that have utilized this device are IT and The Body (better known as the movie Stand by me), the series Stranger Things, the novel The Prospector. The movie Donnie Darko, tapping into the 80s and that whole notion of teenage-angst. 

Out of all of those, I would still say that IT makes the best case of nostalgia in fiction (the horror-element is just the sauce to make the story more palatable). The nostalgia works because it makes that distinction between past and present very clear. 

Where it gets really interesting is where IT makes all these references to growing up in the 1950s, which is very unlike the 90s. I have no personal link with that kind of rock and roll, the struggles of that era or that unmitigated notion of the American Dream being just around the corner (if you just work hard enough). But the feeling of what it was like to be 12 years old ------- that’s universal, just like the extent of fooling around and all that stuff is universal as well. 

I really believe in this device, because it makes a distinction between a ‘now’ and a ‘before’. I tried to play around with this to a modest extent in The Entity with characters of different ages. In The Island I made the literal time-jump between a past when a group of friends (The Gang) was 12 years old growing up on an island, and the present where they are in their thirties and return for a reunion. In The Bird Man I used it to describe the coming of age in the footnotes of that story (but also to figure out what happens when things are really bad). In the upcoming The Caves I used it again with characters of different ages (and to figure out how things had gotten to be so bad in the first place). 

The only ‘problem’ here is that nostalgia aims backwards: before I turned 37 myself I never really had a notion of what it is actually like to be that age, but looking back I do understand what it was like to be 30, 27, 24, 19, 17, 12 and so forth. With that in mind, nostalgia might be more powerful the older you get. 

And it’s all good, because nostalgia is the sort of positive emotion that makes you feel good about yourself. It gives you an idea that there’s some sort of narrative going on in your life, that it makes sense, that it’s just and all of those things. 

What about the snow

The only real instance where it somehow reaches beyond let’s say the 90s, or the notion of what it was like to be 12 years of age is the time when there’s snow. If you live in a place where there’s snow every winter, you might not really get this ------- but where I live there’s no snow. Where I grew up there’s only a good bit of snow every 5-10 years for just a few days up to a few weeks. 

That’s the kind of snow that’s really special, and it absolutely is of the sort that there’s nothing quite like it. There are mostly fond memories around it with family and friends, because you will have to make the most of it -------- especially since it’s rare and only there for a short time. 

And that’s even though it literally gets in between everything. It literally disrupts. It changes sight and sound. It contracts time, because you will remember the last time that there was snow and things were so-and-so. 

Then you might say: why not go some place where there ‘is’ snow, but that just isn’t the same. It just doesn’t have the same quality, because then it’s something that’s always there. And what’s more: it’s not a collective memory that you share with everyone around you. 

Wrapping up

Maybe, when looking at it closer, it’s not actually nostalgia, because it’s recurring in exactly the same way every few years. What we usually consider nostalgia (90s, X-Files, Nirvana) is the stuff that has gone and it meant something to us at a certain time and place, and that’s the reason why it makes us feel a certain way when going back there and in some form remembering and reliving those days. 

A key distinction might then be that nostalgia is something that you can return to on and off, and not something that only comes around every now and then. Nostalgia is something to look for, and for good reason it’s sometimes that childhood is referred to as that ‘vast vault of memories’. 

Key points

- nostalgia is a sort of collective memory that brings us back to a certain time and place, and it makes us feel a certain way.

- nostalgia is a sort of memory that has gone through a sieve that has taken out all the bad pieces to bring us closer to a narrative about ourselves that we can live with.

- nostalgia is a powerful positive emotion that makes you feel good about yourself, it links back to simpler times, it gives you this notion that there’s some sort of narrative going on in your life and makes you feel that things somehow make sense.

Continue reading

Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark
On the desert, The X-Files and scary stories.


Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.

12 Monkeys: why we exhaust all alternatives before doing the right thing

I recently read an article that gave a lot of insight into 12 Monkeys (the movie, 1995), and by extension also into the series (2013) which follows much of the same story-line. The story in a nutshell: the world has been devastated because of a virus and it has caused global collapse in every possible way (famine, climate change, poverty) and it has forced people to live underground. The 12 Monkeys are a group that are believed to have released the original virus. Scientists figured out a way to travel back in time to retrieve an original sample of the virus in order to create a vaccine. 

Now that we have all been through something similar, although not to the extent that’s laid out in the 12 Monkeys ---- the story doesn’t seem so far fetched. Just imagine that the recent global tensions caused here and there caused a global war, in turn causing a complete collapse in the global supply chain ------ and not just a global unavailability of consumer goods, but also famine, throwing countries back ‘a hundred years’, withdrawing policies to mitigate climate change, nuclear missiles being launched here and there, accelerating not just climate change with rising temperatures, but a complete collapse. 

It’s a stretch to imagine that this would ever happen, but the reality is that we have never been so close since the beginning of the cold war, and since the global trend to have consumer goods produced at very low prices in countries with cheap labor (China), which in some way must have kept things together. Although, there might also be a good case to increase production at home through 3d-printing and highly automated factories, but that’s on a side-note. 

More about the monkeys

The article explores the back-story of the 12 Monkeys, chronicling what made it such a challenge to get the movie made, and also about cues in the world at large and the inspiration drawn from the personal lives of its authors. 

The idea to get an original strain from a virus was a current idea at the time and it was turned into reality as well: scientists actually retrieved a sample of the original Spanish-flu-virus out of the permafrost in Norway that had brought the world to its knees, some 70 years prior. 

The authors had also spend time working in a psychiatric institution, and during their time there were frequent protests by animal-rights-groups outside of this facility. This became the 12 Monkeys. Where the story works better than other time-travel-movies, is that they have this notion that the past already took place: their presence in it will not dramatically impact the future. 

I personally like the series more than the movie, because it has more suspense and it gives a better notion of the impossibility of the situation that they had found themselves in (plague, famine, nature collapse), but also that other small notion that even if time travel was possible, it might actually still be close to impossible to dodge what was about to come down inevitably. 

The idea of the whole story was to get a live strain of the virus, with the idea in mind to develop a vaccine based on that. It does raise the question though: how did it all end up in that place to begin with? Or to para-phrase it: how could it have gotten so far out of hand?

Exhausting every possible alternative

Some time ago I read this statement about the US government that they will always exhaust every possible alternative before doing what needs to be done in the first place. I’m not sure why it was related to the US government, because it seems to be a universal principle in the same vein as that in any organization the number of people who do most of the work can be estimated by the square root of the number of employees. 

It’s one of those instances where you might want things not to be so, but when it comes down to it: you can’t go much against human nature, not when it comes to the private, and not when it comes to the social. That’s why it totally makes sense to draw that comparison.

In an organization of 100 folks it’s about 10 folks who do most of the work. In an organization of 40 folks, it’s about 6 folks. The larger the organization, the bigger the chances are of just being able to coast by and not do too much of anything (or at least, not having to work too hard). 

When it comes to work, it’s hard to argue that this is ‘bad’, because there are different folks with vastly different skill-sets. Besides, most of us are okay with doing what is required and calling it George, because when it comes down to it: you work to live your life, right?

In much of that same vein; we have all been there when we started out with our first job: spending money and partying like crazy; and basically living paycheck to paycheck. It’s a lot of fun while it lasts, and you should definitely enjoy when you’re in a stretch like that, but at some point you start realizing that it’s pretty unsustainable. 

At first you may try to figure out how to keep up that life-style, you explore every possible alternative before doing what you should have done from the start: minimize debt, budget and invest. 

Where this instance is different is that there’s no way around that little fact that you have to do what needs to be done at some point in time. And that’s where it borders on that other notion of figuring out what you ultimately want out of life, which depends on your definition of ‘success’ and when you want to have accomplished in terms of ‘this-and-that’. 

The fact of the matter is though that there will always be some past that takes time to get undone, if it can get undone. If you amassed debt during those first few years, it will take you some time to pay it all back, but it can be undone. On the other hand; if you contracted, let’s say, some sort of chronic disease, or you destroyed a part of your body, then it’s a different matter entirely.

The personal, the social and the city-organism

In The Bird Man I played around with this idea how a city that has been sliding down in every possible way can create a breeding ground for a lot of bad stuff to happen. At the time it seemed to me that this was one of the big questions of 2020, not just because of the plague, but also because of Trump and the rise of right-wing politics in general.

This year it seems slightly less dramatic, with Biden elected and global politics having receded to the middle (although that might be temporary). That’s more or less how I shifted that notion in The Caves away from being in a situation where things are already bad, towards how things could have gone so terribly wrong in the first place. I believe that this is one of the big questions that has to be figured out when life is about to return back to normal. Which makes it more or less one of the big questions of 2021.

And this is where all of this ties back to the plague and how we ended up there in the first place. It’s so obvious that it’s almost silly to point out: not enough resources have been dedicated to controlling and defeating viral outbreaks on a global level. Despite the fact that a vaccine based on modified rna has been in development for over 20 years. Despite the fact that there were institutions that rolled out as soon as the word of the plague has come about. 

The whole point here is that it ties in to all those bigger issues: climate change, global waste and ultimately an unfair distribution of wealth. Ultimately it’s just another example of exhausting every alternative, before doing what needed to be done in the first place. 

But it gives some sort of twisted understanding of the other end: if you’re cornered and with your back against the wall ------ things seem different. Maybe that’s a whole other layer to the 12 Monkeys: a destruction out of which to rebuild, only then things got out of control. Maybe, when all was said and done, that is what those 12 Monkeys had on their mind even though they might not even have been aware of this themselves.

Key points:

- 12 Monkeys is a great story, especially the series because it has more suspense

- the plague could have been much worse

- ultimately you can’t go against human nature in the private, or the social

- in most organizations, most work is done by a small group of people (square root of total number of employees)

- exhausting every alternative before doing what needs to be done is a universal human tendency

Continue reading

Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark
On the desert, The X-Files and scary stories.


Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.

Two graves in the desert: stories to tell in the dark

It’s as they say: all at the right time. That’s more or less what I did, and also much of the reason why I didn’t really post anything in the last three weeks. 

Short update though: in the interim I finished the second draft of a novel that I plan to have out there in May of this year. Title: The Caves, sideways inspired by the plague of 2020. More about that at a later time (or click the link here if you’re interested to find out more).

On to the desert, two graves and scary stories

We’re not done with the desert as yet though; that vast unforgiving region, the locale of tall tales, folklore and legend. The territory of The X-Files, Westerns, prospecting and the closest resemblance to what life might be like in outer space: dry, dusty and miserably hot (depending on which direction you go, obviously).

There’s something about it though, about a place that’s intrinsically hostile to life in every possible way. A lack of water, a lack of fertile soil and a lack of a decent temperature. Basically: a lack of a lot of the comforts of our everyday lives. Hang out there long enough though and the thing that you had never expected actually happens: it gets under your skin. 

This isn’t so much because you get hooked on the hardship, because that never gives way. It also isn’t the incessant heat or the fine dust that gets in between everything. What does happen is that you start to live around corners. You take on a slower pace. You shift your attention towards different things. You take on more of a can-do mentality. That’s when things start taking shape of which you’d never thought it possible before. 

This is also where it ties in to our current times, where we need to do more legwork to redefine some of the things that made us who we are. Or those things that we always considered as a well established part of how we see ourselves in the greater scheme of things. 

That may sort of be what’s in the middle when a lot of unnecessary stuff just kind of falls away, and it’s then that you realize how little you really need to make ends meet. 

The X-Files, Westerns and all other fiction

That whole notion of the desert as a place to return to, on and off, may just be most of the reason why it’s so powerful as a base-line in many works of fiction. Having grown up in the 90s, it most notably ties in with Area 51 and The X-Files. It really was the show to watch back in those days with a new episode every Thursday night at 8.30 pm. 

The pilot of The X-Files starts in the Nevada desert, Area 51, at night, observing unidentified flying objects. It stated the whole dilemma of the protagonist, because he isn’t just obsessed with alien life, but he believes that his younger sister was actually abducted by aliens. That, and other unexplained phenomena like strange creatures that live here and there ------- all that gave more than enough room to play with and for things to be figured out.

That’s exactly where it ties in with that whole other notion of the desert, with wanting to find some sort of truth and all that stuff: it’s as much about what’s known as about what’s unknown. Much like life and such isn’t just about what’s at the surface, but it’s as much about what’s known and unknown, and all of that stuff that’s between the lines. And then it moved on, and it returned on and off.

Westerns are a case apart 

Then there are times when I watch a ton of westerns, or skim through, because that era was also one of pulp fiction, with some stories that were as thin as cardboard and a re-iteration of the same thing over and over, and with lines that never really stick. Except for something like this, maybe, “If you plan to take revenge Mr, you better dig two graves.”

On some level, I think that those stories are more about hardship as an idea, but also that other folks have it more rough than us. It’s also about a ‘before’ when things were simpler.

That’s to say that the desert can be a hard place, and not a place to work up a sweat over things that aren’t ultimately important. That’s at least one take on it, and that’s good advise for any time. It’s also a contradiction, because a desert can also be a place of vast riches when it comes to prospecting and all such things. But you have to know where to look.

The actual desert

The desert is also a place of campfires under a sky with more stars than the eye can count. It’s where those tall tales come back in and where we connect back to the ancients. In a way, that’s always something to look for: that link that ties us back to a distant past, not just because it helps us see our place in the greater scheme of things, but because it’s something that will always be there.

That’s the link and that’s the continuity, which is always one step behind, but it will always be more current than the most modern man-made structure, be it some great structure, or a prefab hotel where we spend a few nights when vacationing.

That’s where a campfire in the desert becomes a preferred place for stories that are best told in the dark, the kind of stories that have always been told around campfires, about rogue men or restless spirits that are out for revenge, sadistic murderers that lives in the hills or a group of folks that have come out to this very same desert, and it turned out that one person in the group started to have certain tendencies. If you go rogue anywhere, it might just as well be the desert, right?

That’s not the point though, and maybe it never was: even in a gore-horror-flick it’s never so much about all the bad stuff, but it’s more about a place that opens your mind to other possibilities. That’s where a monster isn’t just a monster----------.

In summary

- our current times tie into the desert, because we currently need to do more legwork to redefine some of the things that define who we are.

- the desert is interesting because it’s intrinsically hostile to life.

- a story told under the stars in the desert isn’t just a story, because the desert in itself is a place that opens your mind to other possibilities

Continue reading

Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.


Shrink (2009)
Under-rated movie on therapy, self-obliteration and ultimately life.

Blade Runner (1982) and 2049 (2019)

Back in the wayback I subscribed to a gaming magazine, mostly because it came with a free copy of the Blade Runner-game. I had heard good stories, and even though I hadn’t seen the movie back then: the game delivered by staying close to the movie.

What makes Blade Runner work is the mix of ideas (about a post-apocalyptic future) and atmosphere (about what it would actually be like). The main idea is that of replicants, basically bio-engineered humans that are made for dirty jobs, and that are programmed to expire after three years, to prevent them from going rogue. Some of them actually have gone sideways before that, and it’s the job of Blade Runners to hunt them down and to terminate them early. 

The atmosphere is that of a future that’s totally destroyed because of human activity. It takes place in a future Los Angeles where it always rains. The land outside of Los Angeles in one big waste land, and it’s basically uninhabitable. 

Back then in 1982 there was already a good bit of foreshadowing of how things would play out these days: those replicants are made by the huge Tyrell Corporation. It isn’t mentioned, but I can imagine that replicants didn’t come cheap, much like iphones, samsungs, Apples and Tesla’s also don’t come cheap. Fast forward a few years from now, and the blockchain assets might have widened the gap between the 1% vs. the 99%, or in terms of Blade Runner: those who can afford a replicant vs. those who can’t.

Trailer (1982)

The sequel continues where the first one left off with the speculation that the main character is a replicant himself. Then the story continues and replicants have evolved, they have overcome the expiry-date, they start giving birth to offspring and they have developed a God-image. 

The main character in this one is on a quest to find the main character in the original movie in order set things straight. 

Trailer (2019)

When to watch

- when stretched out thin and you feel like inhabiting a hyper-neon-super-cyberpunk-future for a few hours.

- when you want to see an example of great science-fiction that works, exactly because the actual story takes place on a visceral level.

- when you find yourself living in a hyper-urban-metropole and you want to have an idea of how everything can spin further out of control.

Continue reading

Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk
Why cyberpunk works and what keeps us coming back for more.


Shrink (2009)
Under-rated movie on therapy, self-obliteration and ultimately life.


90s: The X-Files, Blade Runner and The Matrix
Three movies that defined the 90s.

Loyalty to a region: gurps cyberpunk

There’s the novel, there are the movies and there are the games. The novel, Neuromancer, is singular in that it’s the one that ‘started it all’. And there’s something about it, because cyberpunk isn’t exactly a place where you might want to live, but it sure is a place where you might want to spend some time. 

Cyberpunk is the hyper-future, hyper-technological, hyper-urban, hyper-post-global-warming, hyper-neon, hyper-metropolitan, hyper-android-plague, hyper-cybernetically-enhanced, but at the same time it’s “a genre that’s defined by struggle, not by computers”. This angle was coined as such in a gurps-manual.

That’s an interesting angle, because when we look back, let’s say a hundred years or so, then it’s obvious that life was hard and that it was a struggle. At the same time, if you look at the surface of it, life was the same as it is now, be it that we have more technology and possibly a little more leisure at our disposal. 

That brings up a very interesting point: a future is always more technologically advanced, but what are you left with when you strip away all that technology? 

Future minus technology is life as we know it

Which links directly towards the things that we find most important in our lives. Most of us still enjoy our leisure time more than our work time. We work for vacations, a nice house, a nice car, and ultimately to secure a good life for ourselves and our families, but there are times when it’s tough, when it is stressful and all of that. Which how life simply ‘is’ from time to time as well.

That’s also what draws the distinction between good science-fiction and bad science-fiction, because if the underlying story isn’t about people overcoming obstacles and living their lives, then it doesn’t work. 

That’s much of the reason why the first ever cyberpunk-movie (Blade Runner) does work: we follow the work of a boozy detective who tries to make the world a better place by catching bad guys (replicants), while it’s palpable between the lines that he questions whether his contribution makes that much sense in the greater scheme of things. 

And that draws very close to a feeling that many of us have when it comes to our day job from time to time: does it really matter? And then we carry on because we need the paycheck and at some point that job has become just what we do, it has become part of our identity, and at that point it becomes very hard to shake it all off. 

And that’s one hell off a big feeling, and we all have it from time to time, whether we own up to it or not (or whether we’re aware of it or not). 

Neuromancer vs. Blade Runner

This is also much of the reason why Neuromancer (the first ever cyberpunk novel) doesn’t work: strip away all the technology and all the related terminology and the story falls apart. The story is ultimately about two halves of an AI that want to join together to create a real personality, which is a crime in this story. Of course there are characters running around that we can relate to, a little bit, but it simply doesn’t have that same guttural impact, because this future is too far out, it’s too implausible to be an actual future that we might end up living in.

Most notably, the original Blade Runner is where it’s at, with not just the right atmosphere, but also that story-line that works on a very visceral level. The follow up, Blade Runner 2049, which was released just a few years ago works to a lesser extent for exactly the same reason as why Neuromancer ultimately didn’t work.

The detective is an android himself, lacking any capabilities for emotion, and it turns out that the replicants have evolved into some sort of human species where they start delivering babies and start worshipping some sort of god. 

2049 is good in the sense that it’s technically good, but that’s the same kind of good as describing a story as being smart or inventive, which is just a polite way of saying that it didn’t grab you and wouldn’t let go. When someone starts calling you smart and inventive: watch out.

Good scifi versus bad

Let’s be honest here: an analysis like this isn’t hard. So why put out a story, or a movie, that isn’t all that in each possible way? This is actually one that I have been trying to wrap my head around for a good long time. 

Take for example one of my favorite authors who wrote such great works as IT, The Shining and Pet Sematary. He wrote over sixty novels and many more short stories. Out of that entire body of work there’s maybe ten percent that’s so good that it really does grab you, and it doesn’t let go. The other 90 percent? Garbage. 

I mean that in the most sincere, most respectful way that I can think of. In interviews King sometimes describes it as that he never knows whether a story is any good until it’s finished and until it’s out there. But I think that’s just an easy way out. 

I will admit that it’s sometimes hard to see the value of something when you’re too up close, when you have just created something and when you don’t know yet what others will think of it. There are two simple tricks though: store it in a drawer for at least half a year or ask someone that you trust to give their honest opinion. 

And then it becomes much simpler. Then it also makes sense why people create the kind of pulp that’s just not bad enough to stop watching: money. 2049 rode on the success of the original. Neuromancer rode on a hype that was created around it. King rode the hype that was created around him. That’s about the only way that I can manage to make sense of any of this. 

What about the gurp?

Or the bigger one: what inspires loyalty to a genre-setting such as cyberpunk, beyond what I have just laid out. It’s that feeling of that kind of future with neon, hyper-technological, hyper-urban and all that, but more than that it’s also a form of nostalgia. Most likely, you must have seen cyberpunk movies or played cyberpunk games at some point in time, and you have probably returned to that later on. 

It’s a well known fact that people tend to keep on listening to the music that they got hooked on between the ages of 15 and 30. It’s not a stretch that the same mechanism might work for a whole range of other things as well: movie genres, fiction genres, video-game-genres, food and drinks in all its forms, ideas of what makes a good person, ideas of what a just society looks like, and ultimately ideas of a good life. 

That’s a lot to take in, and it’s a lot to get excited about. That’s what the gurp relates to as well, albeit sideways: it’s a technical manual with requirements for creating a cyberpunk game. Personally I only recently discovered gurp, and I spent some time going through one of their manuals. 

It’s a little too exact for my taste to define life beyond the so-and-so, but at the same time: it’s an interesting endeavor and possibly one that will help you to look a system such as cyberpunk in a much more deterministic way. It doesn’t just consist of a so-and-so, but also of nuts and bolts and a whole range of other things that hold it together. It’s something else as well: loyalty, or as a play of words, the loyola. 

Key points

- cyberpunk is a hyper-future that works, because when all the technological stuff is stripped away you’re left with life as we all know it.

- cyberpunk as such also marks the distinction between good and bad science-fiction, and good fiction in general.

- the motive for putting out mediocre content: money.

- loyalty to cyberpunk might work because of the same mechanism that causes us to be hooked on the music that we were exposed to between the ages of 15 and 30. 

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Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow
On the desert as a refuge, a state of mind and a place of inspiration.


Dystopian theories: the social controversy of global problems in relation to social equity issues
On what dystopian science-fiction movies can teach us about the social dilemmas that we're facing right now.


Axis pandemic-recession: how to solve social inequalities
On the real problems that the recession has unveiled, and how we as a society might turn all of that around.

Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow

When the time is right, I’m a real sucker for those quirky low budget 90s movies, and Desert Blue is the latest one that I heard of but couldn’t find online. It’s one of those stories that doesn’t make sense on so many levels, which usually is a recipe for something really bad or pretty good. It’s all meta, because I haven’t seen it, but when it comes down to it: does it really matter?

The story takes place in the desert in town that has the largest ice-cream cone in the world. A woman passes through town and possibly some other lost souls. A dangerous chemical is spilled on the roads going in and out. The FBI is called in to investigate. People are locked in the town and that’s where much of the story takes place.

At heart it’s about a community that’s cut off from the rest of the world, which is magnified because it’s already a desert town. It hints towards Under the dome, which hints towards other works of fiction. It’s more than just that, because it’s also about the desert, that vast region, that vast nothingness, that empty space. There’s just something about the desert where it borders on an actual physical place and a state of mind, the place that’s most hostile to life, which then becomes much of the reason that people go there, or they cast themselves out to a place as such. 

This links back to Westerns, with some bad elements and a stranger rolling into town to set things straight. Who ends up in the desert anyway? Prospectors, maybe. Merchants selling picks and hoes, maybe. Misfits, maybe. On some level it’s all a variation on a theme, with the desert as a state of mind, a last refuge and all that stuff, but when you stretch that notion up: so is life, if you think about it. 

I’m currently reading The Dark Tower, I’m down to book 5. The story takes place in a desert where people from different places and eras have ended up. It’s a good enough story, but with most of King’s books, there are vast parts that can be left out without any harm to the overall story. In my opinion book 2 and 4 are completely skippable and are just not interesting. But that’s on a side-note.

Ulro, then, at least: my definition thereof

William Blake described the desert as Ulro, an empty place, a sort of last refuge. Ulro is a state of mind that comes down to being in a spiritual desert (one among many interpretations). This is where we should go to figure out our next move, and it’s where we should commit ourselves to the future and choose one thing over the other. 

And it’s all between the lines, it’s all things unsaid. It’s visceral, it’s hitting rock bottom and doing what seemingly comes as a flash of insight, but by the same token comes down to a sort of condensed instinct. 

On some level it has Nietzsche written all over it, where extreme nothingness will ultimately give you a sense of purpose and direction, where you strip everything away and then figure out what remains after all that. Is this existential? Very much so. Is this the material of the quarter-life or the mid-life? In some way. 

I recently started following this channel on YouTube: it’s about a guy who sunk all his life-savings into an abandoned mining town in California. That’s exactly this story, it’s the desert, it’s the nothingness, and the weekly 40-minute episodes narrate the process, the findingness, the nothingness, the everythingness, but also the direction and purpose in defining and figuring out a next move. 

All that lies in the desert, be it literal, be it physical, be it a state of mind, or the notion of a desert on some far off real or fictional planet. The desert is always there. It’s always vast. It’s always unforgiving. It might just be what we need from time to time. And we might get something out of it for a while, much like Cerro Gordo produced half a billion dollars worth of silver, and now and in its future history it’s a place of imagination, both because of the proximity of extreme physical hardship in a prior past, but also extreme riches.

We were somewhere around Barstow,

And this is also more or less where it touches on other works of self-obliteration and exploration, where Thompson drew up the rest of the line, and where Barstow spins off towards some bender, and a binging in that big desert town that used to be grand, and that has literally been emptied out since the plague came around in recent times. 

One of my all time favorite movies that I rewatch every now and then is Rum Diary. It’s one of Thompson’s stories and it narrates the lives of a group of misfits that have taken a job at a local newspaper in the turmoil of the sixties of Puerto Rico when it was colonized by the Americans. Somewhere after that time the official language seized to be English, the resistance is palpable, but it’s still a place of opportunity, but also self-obliteration, and at the far end of that, self-destruction. 

Rum Diary is a whacky story, and in a way that line that was slung out in a far-off desert applies to life on a small island as well, and also the notion of the weekend-junkie that plays a more prominent part in The Bird Man, in an attempt to understand how essential great places can fall through their knees, when guys with dictatorial tendencies take control, and a lot gets destroyed in the process. 

I still believe in that story, especially against the 2020-background, even though it isn’t literally mentioned, but it does go down that same hole, much in the same way as Rum Diary, much in the same way as that notion of Ulro, buying a mining town, the gunslingers from The Dark Tower, and all of such things. 

How it continues, that Barstow line: 

,on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

I guess that it was another place, another time, another era, and another notion of what was needed to hit that old rock and that old bottom. The location is spot on though, on the edge is where it is, because it might be solid advise to have one foot in each location, else you might just about loose your grounding. 

That’s why that channel of that guy in the mining town works: by documenting, by interacting, by building community, by creating a place that people will want to go to, he kind of has that bridge between those two places, where you can dig deep and strip everything away for a while, only to return. 

That’s why, ultimately, Rum Diary is a reminder of a time and place, but it doesn’t move beyond what it is, because it doesn’t connect to any larger narrative, be it literal, visceral or any other way. I believe that we always look for silver linings, that small sliver of hope that shines through, that makes us believe that we live in a just world, and a world that makes sense. That’s at least what I aimed for with The Bird Man, and on some level I think that’s what all good stories are all about.

The most recent confirmation of that is the most unlikely place to get any of that: a country-song by Tom Green. I used to be a huge fan of his comedy skits in the late 90s and early 00s, but it wasn’t exactly more than what it was: it was all at the surface. 

This song, Right now is the right time is one of the best songs that I heard in a good long time. Where did he find inspiration you ask: the draught and the dust, the nothingness and the everythingness after spending weeks on end traveling the desert in a van. 

Continue reading

Dystopian theories: the social controversy of global problems in relation to social equity issues
On what dystopian science-fiction movies can teach us about the social dilemmas that we're facing right now.


Axis pandemic-recession: how to solve social inequalities
On the real problems that the recession has unveiled, and how we as a society might turn all of that around.


Arecibo Observatory
A tribute to the soon to be demolished Observatory, and its importance in scientific and popular culture (Rum Diary is mentioned as well).