The Mind is the New Western

I have been going through my documents on this laptop lately, and I keep finding stray documents with provocative titles, and short text inside. This one is dated May of 2005. I may be interesting to see what I was thinking about 3 years ago, so here it is:

Many have likened the internet to the new wild west, often with calls for more stringent regulation of pornography and other modes of expression, but also with a more optimistic tone of lawlessness-as-freedom. At any rate, the battle over standards, copyright, access and freedom of expression does resemble the wild west in various ways – at heart it resembles a vast open space where corporations and individuals vie for their own stake, a plot of land, maybe some gold, or a space in which to live out their lives based on their own standards.

In Hollywood and elsewhere, the recent emergence of a new genre of films – mind films, where subjective experiences that take place partly or wholly in the mind – stage the mind as the new west. Consider, for example, the scene in The Matrix when Neo confronts Agent Smith in the subway, and they stare at each other across the length of the subway stop, low angle shots framing holstered guns as a newspaper tumbleweed rolls by. This generic borrowing is certainly not new in film, but the use of the western is especially apt when thinking not only about the internet but also these subjective films where minds are up for grab. (In many ways, the battle for mindspace can be seen as a motivating factor behind advertising, in film, tv and the internet, where pageviews and eyeballs matter as much as anything else). Legislation of the mind, the battle for subjective space, the exploration has turned from outward — land and then space – to inward, into the inner mysteries and working of the mind. This preoccupation with expereience and cognition accompanies a move to increasingly digital effects. As digital effects artist wrestle with ways to simulate visual experience and increasingly invisible effects make viewers question the reality of any particular film frame, the question of subjective reality come to the fore. More specifically, the relationship between the subjective and the objective becomes important, as does the relationship between film and reality. Does film simply relate, or does it create? If an experience is wholly subjective, does this make it any less real? The rise in phenomenological explanations of cognition in film attempts to answer these questions and to wrestle with the idea of film not just as recording but as creating a reality, and mind films stage this debate in subtle ways.

In order to discover how the Western figures into mind films as well as debates about the internet, we must first figure out how the 21^st century views the West and how the cinematic genre of the western relates to this. I suspect that the genre of the western by itself will suffice for this, as we are talking essentially about representations of the west and what they allow us to think about culturally. What does the western mean – what did it mean, how can we read it – and how do those readings apply today? Is Keanu Reeves the John Wayne of the 21^st century? Is mindspace up for grabs in more than an advertising space? Is this about legislation of the body, of the genome, as well as of expression, thought and sense of reality? Does this conflation of genre indicate an anxiety about film’s capacity to manufacture entire imaginative universes, and therefore ideologies? One of the main themes of these new films is that of conformity. Others include surveillance, mental illness (in which the others also appear), and addiction. Net/mind becomes a panacea for all of the issues of 21C. If I narrow down these films into what I could call netmind, the matrix, Strange days, Hackers, eXistenZ, Minority Report come to mind. I guess these are cyberpunk, but I like netmind as a term.

Search for: cyberpunk, western, genre, mindfilm

Update 5/2: how does this all relate to science fiction writing and cyberpunk novels? Is cyberpunk a unique genre in film as it is in lit?