In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future II’s 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? It’s an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequel’s 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 film’s 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 Future’s 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 2015’s heavily pressed Back to the Future Day, David Ehrlich’s assertions in Rolling Stone probably rang true: The year 2015 of Zemeckis’s 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 we’d certainly already arrived at. However, to the ’80s-trained eye, Back to the Future’s 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 Marty’s “gee-whiz” skateboarding character having successfully wired postwar Pax Americana nostalgia and new-tech savvy to resolve the American Dream’s 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 Toffler’s 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 II’s 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? It’s an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequel’s 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 film’s 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 Future’s 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.
With aspirations for technology’s 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 owner’s 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 1987,1 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 Doc’s 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.2 Shatter’s 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.3 We might find such anxiety in Marty’s 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.4
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 Saenz’s “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.”5 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 4.6 By the second season in 1986, the roasting would include celebrity interviews and a joint airing between Cinemax and Channel 4,7 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.”8 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 Welles’s unannounced radio premiere of War of the Worlds. According to Bishop’s 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 he’s talking in German, and he’s telling this joke about lederhosen all in German, he’s 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 week’s 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 you’d woken up in Eastern Europe and turned the television on, and you’re watching some weird station that you don’t understand, and then it suddenly is cut off and gone.
In this case, Max Headroom’s 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.9
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 television’s 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 didn’t 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 team’s infiltration campaign of mainstream media as aspiring to “get away with things.” It likely didn’t 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. Bishop’s 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 Headroom’s corporate integration, its multimillion-dollar expense account used to “recreate props that we’d 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 didn’t “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].”
“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 cyberpunk’s 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 Welles’s 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 II’s 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 decade’s 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 Marty’s Pepsi (notice, not Coca-Cola) product placement order. It’s 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 O’Toole that captured a feverish paranoia of the pervasive conflation between media image and reality, exacted through the “god’s eye” control of the Hollywood director. Takayuki Tatsumi similarly identified this metafictional power of media circulation in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now!,10 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 Future’s future of 1989, then (a reference made all in good jest, as Spielberg was Zemeckis’ mentor and friend).11
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”12 – 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 generation’s popularized counterculture, rather than a speculative prediction waiting for us to weigh in on for accuracy’s 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. That’s something for us all to keep in mind as we stop what we’re doing to run out and buy that new iPhone – to replace that boring old “rose gold” one, of course.
SF writer Samuel Delaney argued in his “Black to the Future” interview with Mark Dery that cyberpunk’s 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 Gibson’s infamous phrase “The street finds its own use for things.” The reality, for Delaney, was that cyberpunk’s 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 Derrida’s “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 genre’s romanticized sociocultural as well as stylistic stasis. And so we find ourselves returning again and again to this historical moment in global media’s 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 Marty’s 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 haven’t reached. As Samuel Delaney points out, without romanticism we might not have the initiative to “explore what’s on the other side” of anything. Somewhere amidst the nostalgia, I’m sure, is the leakage of an updating social theory.
Overall, Delaney has made the case that science fiction is most effective when it’s not at the center of anything. It’s 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 Zemeckis’s quotations of the Safety Last! clock scene in the original and Spielberg’s Jaws in the sequel, to the hacking of his own film’s 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 you’re in on it, of course.
The shark may always “still look fake” in the emergent technology of the future, but there’s nothing quite like striving to create something new in this world.
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Bibliography
Bishop, Bryan. n.d. “The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom.” The Verge. Accessed January 7, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-history-80s-cyberpunk-interview.
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/.
Fisher, Mark. 2012. “Star Wars Was a Sell-out from the Start.” The Guardian, November 1.
Fisher, Mark. Vol. 66, No. 1, Fall 2012. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, 16-24.
Gerovitch, Slava. 2002. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. MIT Press.
Gillis, Peter and Mike Saenz. 2006. Shatter. A i T/Planet Lar.
Hansen, Miriam. No. 56, 1992. “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer.” New German Critique 43-73.
Heuser, Sabine. 2003. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Rodopi.
Hobson, Dorothy. 2008. Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy. I. B. Tauris.
Holland, Norman. n.d. “Richard Rush, The Stunt Man (1980).” A Sharper Focus. Accessed January 14, 2021. https://www.asharperfocus.com/
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.
Saenz, Mike and Peter B. Gillis. 1986. Shatter, No. 2. First Comics.
Tatsumi, Takayuki. 2006. Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Duke University Press.
Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. Random House.
Umpleby, Stuart. 1982; revised 2000. “Definitions of Cybernetics.” American Society for Cybernetics. Accessed January 8, 2021. https://asc-cybernetics.org/definitions/.
- Although Delaney noted a surge in literary cyberpunk’s popularity after a 1984 Rolling Stone article – and was courted into consulting with William S. Burroughs on an unproduced film adaptation of Neuromancer in 1986 – he claimed to not consume cyberpunk TV or film media and felt unqualified to make any assessments of cyberpunk’s popular culture diffusion. For all Delaney references, see Mark Dery’s book. [↩]
- The 2006 anniversary book on the Shatter comic explicitly states that the comic was initially made on a “first-generation Apple Macintosh,” though production may have upgraded to newer Macintosh computers that were available during the duration of the comic. For more info, see the 2006 A i T/Planet Lar publication, [↩]
- Stuart Umpleby quotes Andrey Kolmogorov’s definition of cybernetics in his “Definitions of Cybernetics” for the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), written in 1982 and revised in 2000. Slava Gerovitch points out on page 58 of their book From Newspeak to Cyberpunk that Kolmogorov was an acknowledged influence on Norbert Wiener’s branch of cybernetics as far back as 1960, and that they had both been “intensely aware of each other’s work” by this point). As Kolmogorov had been internationally formative in the discipline for decades before his death in 1987, it is likely this quote in “Definitions” was part of the pre-website 1982 edition that Umpleby wrote for the ASC. [↩]
- Simply put, this phrase of concern is quoted from the title of the Transactions of the seventh Macy conference held on cybernetics on March 23-24, 1950, and published in 1951. [↩]
- Though not mentioned, the Verge article “The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom” appears to include edited transcripts of oral history interviews that were included as bonus features on Warner Bros. Entertainment’s 2010 Max Headroom: The Complete Series DVD set. The set features episodes from the short-lived 1987-1988 ABC series. [↩]
- Bishop’s article makes clear that Cinemax was pitched to supplement Channel 4 production funding when the decision was made to create a character backstory telefilm alongside the Channel 4 music video series. Cinemax would eventually create its own Max Headroom show, a variety show called The Original Max Talking Headroom Show, that ran concurrent to the ABC series. [↩]
- Cinemax began airing the British Channel 4 television series it had funded, The Max Headroom Show, in 1986. However, Cinemax developed its own series, The Original Max Talking Headroom Show (a variety and interview show), when ABC developed their own series (Max Headroom) from the plot of the Channel 4 telefilm. This is detailed in a brief entry on “Original Max Headroom” by Robert Erler in the book Television Talk: A History of the Talk Show, and highlights the complexity of funding and intellectual property behind experimental independent production for Channel 4 programming. [↩]
- Bishop’s interview cited here mentions the simultaneous production of the Max Headroom telefilm and the Max Headroom Show television series for Channel 4. Frances Bonner further points out in her article that the backstory film was aired two days before the first episode of the series was aired. Bonner also notes that the telefilm Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future is also sometimes referred to as Rebus: The Story of Max Headroom, adding further to franchise confusion. [↩]
- For reading on Channel 4’s history, see Dorothy Hobson’s book, or Peter Catterall’s book The Making of Channel 4, published by Routledge. [↩]
- I use metafiction here as Tatsumi does in referencing the work of David Porush: rather than metafiction replacing reality, metafiction develops with the “rise of cybernetic culture”; “The more our society goes high-tech,” the more our reality (as “cybernetic culture”) and metafiction are interwoven due to the “defining characteristic” of “self-referentiality.” [↩]
- I am here comparing Norman N. Holland’s notion of the “god’s eye” of the film director in The Stunt Man to the action Marty and Doc take in directing reality as creative/knowledge “workers” of their own vision and destiny. In this sense, Back to the Future celebrates and extends the cinematic agency of the filmmaker to a kind of virtual reality that blurs with the (cinematic/reality) historical archive. Furthermore, both movie posters feature a protagonist who commands their tool of illusion/reality agency (a director with a camera and Marty with his Delorean) beneath a film clapperboard reference (and it is interesting to note that Adorno considered the perilous “illusionist self-identity of the moving image” to finally reach its potential in the synchronization of sound and image [See Hansen]). Likewise, in Apocalypse Now!, the terrifying metafictionality between Vietnam War journalism and war movies is given a critical, countering power of self-reflexivity by the fact that it is the actual film director, Francis Ford Coppola, leading the “camera crew” and “directing” soldiers to keep moving during the beach battle scene. [↩]
- Heuser notes that Gibson, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, is here describing Bruce Sterling’s notion of the slipstream genre. [↩]