America, Online.
By Nick Pinkerton
Pinkerton explores the internet-obsessed films of the mid-90s and their variously accurate visions of a digitally networked near-future.
"If you were to nominate a single movie as the archetype of clunky net novelty cinema, you could do a lot worse than having The Net as your candidate. (The title, I might mention, is a double entendre.) The movie opens with a primer in the incredible efficacy of new technology, and the possibilities it presents for total social immuration and isolation. Sandra Bullock, playing a systems analyst who works remotely for a software company in San Francisco from her cozy redoubt in Venice Beach, lives through her computer in much the same way we’ve become accustomed to doing and are now forced to do by government regulation. She orders dinner via , checks into her flight for a planned vacation online, and socializes via a chatroom, where the first thing we hear is a text-to-speech voice belonging to someone named IceMan, pronouncing “No one leaves the house anymore. No one has sex. The net is ultimate condom.”
"Both films play with the same basic premise: The ease with which identity can be erased or compromised in a world where all information is online, or, as a frayed Bullock puts it: “Think about it, just think about it, our whole world is sitting there on a computer.”
"Hackers, it’s worth noting, was released in the same year as Larry Clark’s Kids, and takes place in approximately the same milieu, that of a diverse group of New York City high schoolers living rich, independent lives that are largely hidden from their parents and are grounded in subculture participation—skateboarding in Clark’s film, hacking in Softley’s—though two films couldn’t be any more tonally dissimilar otherwise. "
"The belief that a certain long-gestating underground aesthetic was getting ready to surface in the mid-‘90s was widespread. This aesthetic had no single author, but seemed to, like Pop Art, be shaping up in several places at the same time—while in the weeds writing Neuromancer, William Gibson was put into a mess of self-doubt by the sudden appearance of Blade Runner, the production design of which seemed to anticipate in near-entirety the world he had been privately and obsessively developing. Around that same time, in the beginning of the ‘80s, the first works were appearing from manga artist Masumune Shirow, whose 1989 Ghost in the Shell would be adapted six years later into a feature anime by Mamoru Oshii. Shirow was, seemingly independently, working along parallel lines to his approximate contemporary Gibson, whose work didn’t appear in translation in Japan until the mid-‘80s. Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell film in turn became an international cult item straightaways, first in Japan and then in the U.S., where it was released in spring of ’96, and was to be namechecked in due time by the likes of James Cameron and the Wachowskis. "
"Strange Days (1995), an end-of-the-century movie fairly splitting at the seams with ideas, executed with power and passion, and a work which increasingly looks like one of the most inspired American pictures of the 1990s."
"Strange Days is a far more penetrating and troubling investigation into the permeation of game logic into everyday life. Bigelow’s fin-de-millennium film straddles the divide between the 20th century, the century of cinema, and the digital future."
[https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/jun/23/america-online/](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/jun/23/america-online/)