Thoughts on Snow Crash
I have to disagree with Tim about Stephenson’s sword fights: my favorite scene of the novel has to be when Hiro asks the Japanese businessman, “Didn’t anyone tell you that I was a hacker?” before “hacking” the guy’s head off with his sword. The dilemma of conveying death in the Metaverse brings up neat questions similar to the ontological crises we see in Philip K. DIck’s texts: how real is my world, or it’s real because I can die in it. Tying this idea to Snow Crash, it’s significant that the key event that undesirably reminds everyone that the Metaverse is simulated is when an avatar dies: death in the Metaverse is too hygenic, not wet and gooey enough. And of course even this real life/virtual life distinction is turned on its head with Da5id’s contracting a virtual virus that affects him in the physical realm too.
This all reminded me of the film Avalon (2001), which takes place in the future and is about a virtual reality game where its players (surprise, surprise) don’t know which world is real and which isn’t. Cinematically, the “game” world seems very realistic, that is, until a player dies without blood- just a gray fuzziness on the screen where the avatar stood, and then nothing. I particularly like when one of the characters says, “When one of us dies and that body doesn’t vanish, the other one will know,” in response to whether the game world is real or not.
Finally, in response to The Matrix films, I offer the Japanese film Casshern (2004): this is an amazing movie- think The Matrix meets Akira.
Hi Julie,
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good sword fight as much as the next guy. But my favorite scenes were actually kind of an inverse of your insightful remarks on death as the mark of the real. (Which it also is in that Matrix sometimes named Marx, of course, since dead living labor is, um, not labor/battery power anymore.) My fav scenes tho are the ones where YT zips through traffic to get to a phone to get info to Hiro, who is meanwhile yakking with the Librarian in the Metaverse while zooming up I5 to Oregon–where the whole game is to see whether bodies in real-time still move faster (or as fast) as information in virtual space. Kind of like how Die Hard is always a game of seeing whether an aging and increasingly irrelevant Bruce Willis can still kill people faster than hackers can type. Which means I think you’re quite right to point to death as the real real, in a certain sense–it is when matters of life and death hinge on the ability to navigate successfully between (if not simultaneously: Gargoyles, Ng, Hiro on his motorcycle) the virtual and the real, opacity and transparency, machine languages and graphical interfaces, that stuff gets really interesting. But now I’m giving away my last post–tho I hadn’t thought about the sword fighting/death connection, so thanks for pointing it out!
I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog, by the way–
Tim
Thanks for the comment. The hacker reference from the last Die Hard movie is so funny: of course when the end of the world comes, the last man standing is the fat hacker living in his mother’s basement and able to generate his own power sources (or a pushing-60 Bruce Willis, depending on your point of view).
My fascination with the sword fighting scene is actually less impressive than it sounds: in true cyberpunk fashion, I’m just a sucker for the clever pun, “hacker” and sword “hacking.”