Director and writer Amanda Kramer (Ladyworld, Give Me Pity!, Please Baby Please) moves into the realm of cinema essay with So Unreal – a survey of cinema which coincided with the rise of computers in the early 1980s through to the millennium.
Narrated by Debbie Harry, So Unreal is an astonishing and poetic survey of music videos, early virtual reality, and screen culture coming to terms with what 14.4K modem future might look like – of course with that modem being able to hack the entire planet.
So Unreal gives the audience a potted history of cinematic anxiety in the broader cultural context. Golden Age crime narratives, fifties post war paranoia that became the place science fiction acted as a metaphor for the “other”. The Cold War world ending fears of nuclear annihilation in the sixties. The Watergate and other political scandals that saw conspiracy and surveillance being something people became increasingly aware of. Then we hit the eighties the threat of war is still in the American consciousness but it’s also now about distrust of America’s own institutions. A new technology arrives that is possibly about to liberate people but with all liberation comes a sense of possible enslavement.
Posthumanism and postmodernism collide in a work of incandescent intelligence.
Nadine Whitney had a chance to speak with Amanda Kramer and co-writer Britt Brown about the new and old gods, techno pessimism, and being haunted by the machine.
So Unreal screens at Revelation Perth International Film Festival on 7 July 2024. Tickets are available here.
You posit technology as a new god, but also a serpent. There is a spiritual through line in the documentary. Mary Shelley warned us never to usurp the creator (whatever godhead or force you believe in), yet as a society access to technology means we are constantly creating and destroying gods. We both desire the idea of something larger guiding us and also know we create our own destructive myths. Gods are feckless and punishing, or worse, indifferent. Is technology the most indifferent god?
Amanda Kramer: Yes, I believe so, but I’m often labelled a luddite, so my opinion isn’t quite educated. There’s no moral compass to virtual reality/cyberspace/artificial intelligence, the morality enters when humans fuck around with it. A tool to connect or disconnect isn’t bad or good; we are bad or good (to be reductive) and bend tech to our whims.
Britt Brown: Without being too heady about it, technology just IS humanity. Whatever we make is an extension of us. And we’re clearly cursed to hurtle forward endlessly without ever stopping to pause and consider what we’re building. Whatever can be done, will be done. Technology is just the manifestation of human nature – infinite, indifferent, dynamic, doomed. Technology ripples forward quickly, but nothing moves faster than fear. Dread is a world-building emotion. It maps realms that often don’t yet exist, but by envisioning them it helps usher them into being.
There has been something specifically gendered about cyber paranoia films. Women (apart from Sarah Connor, Mace Mason, and to an extent, Trinity) are either femme fatales, victims, or disposable. The proliferation of cyber porn and perfected bodies means that women become reductive avatars for male fantasy. Flesh is everywhere but also nowhere.
In EXistenZ and Videodrome Cronenberg subverts the woman lacking agency trope. Was it particularly interesting having Debbie Harry (considered by many a perfect woman) narrate about her own character and a director she worked with? Also, Debbie herself embraced a particular cyber aesthetic with her cover art by HR Giger.
Can you comment on why you chose Debbie?
AK: Debbie’s performance in Videodrome is so effortless, bizarre, silky. Choosing a narrator has so much to do with finding an iconic voice, and one that can deliver lines with an intonation that matches your theme/thesis. Debbie has that future ennui – she can veer into the inhuman while maintaining warmth. Perfect.
BB: Blondie was actually one of the concerts I attended in the womb while my mom was pregnant, so it felt like beautiful synchronicity that she was game to collaborate on this project. Her chic, icy, slightly disaffected voice is a perfect fit for the movie’s themes.
You call cinema a purple pill, a reference to mixing the red and blue pills of The Matrix. It does vacillate on whether man-made morality can overcome the machine. SO UNREAL sees film as being uniquely prescient about our now lived reality. We do freely give up data, we have long since expected privacy to be non-existent, we are living in many of the possible dystopias that film presented. Would you say the documentary swings towards technological pessimism?
AK: I’m bitchier about tech than Britt or Ben (our editor/producer). I’m constantly annoyed by phone or laptop updates, and I’m never interested in newer models of anything. It’s not because I want to live in some kind of old-timey, hokey, handmade bubble; it’s more because I find the topic dull and the reality fussier. Ironically, shit doesn’t work better or happen faster or get handled easier just because technology is involved. Plus, the treadmill of tech-jank is exhausting – newer versions of all my apple products and apps feel like pop-up ads to me at this point.
And I do think we’re all abusing the comfort, the ease, the ability to tune out IRL. But the film isn’t about how we feel society views or employs technology. It’s about cinema’s outlook on tech as drama, as plot point for suspense/horror/thriller/dystopia. And that will never wane, even as films become constructed purely BY tech.
BB: Being pessimistic about technology doesn’t feel negative to me, just realistic. All technologies have benefits, but the world worked just fine before Google Maps, no matter how convenient it is. I think Amanda and I share a certain fatigue with tech-positivity, of people being dazzled by small conveniences or cool gadgets or new reasons for less IRL interactions. The films of SO UNREAL extrapolate these anxieties to an extreme degree, but they nearly all touch a vein of truth.
Alexa probably isn’t going to actually murder you, but it’s pretty rational to wonder what it’d be like if one day she just didn’t do what you told her to. And from there, what could happen?
As an independent director with a very specific and non-mainstream voice are you concerned about your work being lost to content algorithms?
AK: I don’t mind being lost. I appreciate art that doesn’t quite align with its own time. I think most cineastes would agree with that. But sure, I’m not ecstatic about streamer glut or the insane timeframe of a film’s resonance. Remember Barbie? We’re all already so far beyond Barbie that we’ll likely never talk about Barbie until someone writes a scathing think piece about it in five years. Maybe ten. And that’s a mainstream film. What hope does a smaller piece of art have in that kind of box office toilet flush?
The hope lies in being found later. Fingers crossed the fatigue most of us feel about the tentpole films, the rush to get random shit onto Netflix only to bury it beneath other random shit within a week, the genre of “Background” (this is how some execs are describing content now – how fucking uncool), will manifest in purposeful curation. Maybe a return to cult and hidden gems is imminent.
If you could suggest just five essential films that you covered (except for The Matrix, TRON, and the mainstream puff of Hackers) as must see works which would you choose?
AK: D.A.R.Y.L., Strange Days, Electric Dreams, Arcade, Ghost in the Machine.
BB: Tetsuo is total madness and ripped my mind open in high school, but I hadn’t rewatched it since and had slightly forgotten quite how unhinged it is. Nirvana was the trippiest addition Amanda suggested that I had never seen or heard of before. And of course, Terminator 2, unfortunately for obscurists, remains perhaps the greatest movie ever made.