Virtual Ripoff
What is the matrix? It's William Gibson's idea, dammit!
      by David Rosiak

Foolishly, I figured that Neuromancer script must've been a fluke, so I actually got a bit excited upon discovering an impending adaptation of Gibson's superb short story, Johnny Mnemonic. I can hear the audience shuddering now, but, in story form at least, it was tremendous. And Gibson was teaming up with conceptual artist Robert Longo, and they had a decent budget, and Keanu Reeves was gonna be in it and...Keanu Reeves? The man best known as the latter half of Bill and Ted was gonna be Johnny Mnemonic? Did Gibson and Longo have any idea of what they were doing, the fanbase they were toying with? Had they been virtually duped? Still, I did my damnedest to remain positive. I mean, this was a William Gibson story, y'know. How bad could they possibly botch that up?

So, like a chump, I plopped down my $7.50 and walked into the theater expecting the best. Of course, the fact that I was one of five people in the theater auditorium on opening day should've set off those internal warning klaxons, but I let it slide, the words "William Gibson adaptation" ringing in my then-naive ears. Trepidatiously, I sat down to watch. Keanu Reeves, okay, so he's looking a little pale and paunchy these days, but I can overlook that. All right, there's a guy with a detachable thumb that can kill people, mmm-hmmm. Uhm, hey, is that Dolph Lundgren and... and a dolphin? Let me outta here!

Strike Two, Mr. Gibson. So far, the literary battle he'd fought was a losing one when it came to world of the silver screen.

Strange Days: "Whattaya mean the plot's unoriginal? This is a Cameron flick!"

But Hollywood caught the virtual bug, and other cyber-movies were starting to get better. Along came Strange Days, a sci-fi opus written by none other than James Cameron, which dealt with the ramifications of buying memories on the black market and then using them for entertaining cinema. The idea was strikingly familiar. Gibson's second book, Count Zero, featured an invention called "Simstim," first-person movies that were recorded off brainwaves and that could be relived by the highest bidder. Featuring Ralph Fiennes as the prototypical cyber-loser who, having lost his job and his girl, found himself operating on the black market (hmmm, shades of Case, the hero of Neuromancer), the movie did a fair job of setting up its quirky little dystopic future, in spite of the fact that its key plot elements were not so original to geeks like me who'd been reading about them for ten years by then. Cameron was no stranger to the "borrowing" of storylines. His 1984 film, The Terminator, was an unacknowledged reworking of Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits story, "Demon With a Glass Hand," and he was later forced by a lawsuit to include Ellison in the movie's credits. Were Gibson's ideas given credit anywhere in the film? Was he even given an "inspired by" line? Is Cameron really the king of the world?

Of course, it wasn't just Gibson dishing out the "inspiration". Jan De Bont's 1996 film Twister, "conceived" by Michael Crichton, was a thinly disguised riff on Bruce Sterling's book, Heavy Weather, which followed a group of futuristic storm trackers as they researched a fabled F-10 tornado in a blasted, futuristic America. Crichton's version ditched the sci-fi elements and instead focused on romance among the two lead characters, but the method by which the group measured the inside of the tornado remained essentially the same -- a series of machines were injected into the tornado in order to map its idiosyncrasies. The only difference being that Sterling's novel didn't have them looking like Christmas tree ornaments. Though many would claim that neither De Bont nor Crichton ever had an original idea, this still represented a slight to the world of cyber-writers, who once again saw their ideas watered down and regurgitated by a system that continued to ignore them.

And then there was The Matrix. The brainchild of brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, this film more than any other defined cinematic cyberpunk. "What is the matrix," begged the ads, and many fans were quick to answer: "It's William Gibson's idea, you cheats!" The use of the word "matrix" for a simulated cyberworld finally brought basic science fiction concepts to the mainstream, but that description still belongs to Gibson. Truth be told, though, the Wachowskis freely admit to having been inspired by Gibson's ideas. Hell, they admit to having ripped off a plethora of other sources ranging from anime to Hong Kong action movies. And they did a fine job with it, winning Gibson himself as a fan. And in a true demonstration of their filmmaking prowess, they even instilled Keanu Reeves with a heretofore unseen degree of cool. It almost made up for Johnny Mnemonic. Almost. I suppose that, since a Neuromancer was never forthcoming, the Wachowskis figured "Why wait?" So The Matrix features a resident cyberjockey, groovy visuals that represent vast banks of computer data, and the discovery that the world is all one big simulated computer module. Nothing new there -- these are all prominent elements in Gibson's first two books, both of which ever seem destined to hit the screen. But at least the Wachowskis did it with style and grace. And they gave credit where it was due.

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