Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.
    Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he'll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.
    Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny's system, there's one that puts high-rez, highly expressive dog heads on all of the characters. He doesn't know that this setting is based on a once-popular Edwardian folk motif of poker-playing dogs, but that's okay; he's not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the system would tell him. You get complete breed selection, too, with the dog-head setting, but that was all something he enjoyed more when he was still a little kid.
    But later in the afternoon he's run across something called
The Hours
, and he's not much into it at all, but then he wonders how these women would look if he put the dog heads on them. And actually it's pretty good, then, with the dog heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest. . . .
    And what has happened, here, in this scenario, is that our ancient project, that began back at the fire, has come full circle. The patterns in the heads of the ancestors have come out, over many millennia, and have come to inhabit, atemporally, this nameless, single, nonphysical meta-artifact we've been constructing. So that they form an extension of Johnny's being, and he accesses them as such, and takes them utterly for granted, and treats them with no more respect than he would the products of his own idle surmise. But he's still a child, Johnny, and swims unknowing in this, his culture and the culture of his species. He'll be educated (likely via this same system he plays with now, in a more pedagogical mode--and likely, without his knowing, it's already doing that, in background as it were). It may be that he'll have to be taught to watch films, in the way that we watch them (or watched them, as I think DVDs are already changing that, not to mention changing the way you approach making them). He may need something akin to the sort of education that I needed in order to read novels--to appreciate, as it were, a marginalized but still powerfully viable media platform.
    I can only trust that Johnny's entertainment system, and the culture that informs it, will be founded on solid curatorial principles. That there will be an ongoing archaeology of media product in place to ensure that someone or something is always there to categorically state, and if necessary to prove, that
The Maltese Falcon
was shot in black and white and originally starred Humphrey Bogart.
    Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and atop the heirloom IKEA bureau, the one that belonged to his grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a freshly extruded resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of Johnny's entertainment system.
    It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.
    It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in
The
Hours
.
    She has the head of a Chihuahua.
    This is one of many re-excavations of the material in "Dead Man Sings."
    Note how blithely I skip, whistling, past any possibility whatever that the digital might do anything to (cough) the book, or to the means of the book's publication and distribution. Oh dear. I had my suspicions even then, but I seem to have been mainly bent, that day, on causing Hollywood directors the greatest possible anxiety.
    Why on earth would anyone ever want to do that?

"IT'S LIKE AN ENTIRE COUNTRY run by Jeffrey Katzenberg," the producer had said, "under the motto 'Be happy or I'll kill you.'" We were sitting in an office a block from Rodeo Drive, on large black furniture leased with Japanese venture capital.
    Now that I'm actually here, the Disneyland metaphor is proving impossible to shake. For that matter, Rodeo Drive comes frequently to mind, though the local equivalent feels more like thirty or forty Beverly Centers put end to