Cyberpunk: ‘take off’

The opening music I recognized but couldn’t name and the style of the cyber hermaphrodite seemed to me to be deeply Slavic, Dostoevskian in outlook. The character is extraordinarily effective in its simplicity; a blank canvas on which to portay emotion. Of course the source is Russia so one might expect that yet the dark gloomy imagery reminded me of the Russian Orthodox churches I visited in the Ukraine, in Yalta.The music had that same deeply sad effect that Chopin always has on me; so the awareness of sound had it’s impact. The contrast between the realistic clouds in the sky and the cyborg in the green field on the one hand and the black, white and grey heaven/hell punctuated by painful accents of colour on the other set a dramatic background to the imminent journey into the dark recesses of the soul. The wish for ‘heaven haven’ is probably dormant within all of us; being awakened from time to time by events in our lives.

The living dead and maimed reminded me of Eliot’s  ‘Burial of the Dead’ from ‘The Waste Land’ :

'A crowd flowed over  London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.'

They of course were static while the cyborg dreamer climbed going in the other direction. The tree of life has been confined in the cathedral of life with imagery appropriate to this mechanistic/technological view of the other place. So the cyborg climbs to the promise of eternity which the poets and painters have expressed and finds the visual tempter threat there looming behind it but the senses become garbled and descent from hope to despair; the being literally out on a limb is justified by seeing as the mist clears nothing but a technological nightmare of high rises resembling stacked lit but empty screens. From this cyborgian dungeon its descent back to earth is inevitable. The film is like a funeral dirge for what should be joy for the inward eye.

Thus Blake:

‘ We are led to believe a lie

When we see not thro’ the eye…’