As we keep discussing Hollywood's destruction of some of the books we've read, I feel like I should mention that there's apparently a movie being made of Neuromancer, starring everyone's favorite emo-Jedi, Hayden Christensen, as Case, and directed by Joseph Kahn, who has offered us such masterpieces as Britney Spears' video for "Toxic". Hooray.

I bring this up because as I was rewatching Children of Men, I started thinking that the approach of Cuaron and his cinematographer is exactly what I would want in a film adaptation of Neuromancer. Children of Men is one of the most subjective movies I've seen in recent memory--essentially every scene is built around Theo and our understanding of the scenes is as complete or limited as Theo's own. The world is minutely defined , yet the overwhelming detail and description with which it is given often makes it almost incomprehensible. At times, it recalls our world, yet at others seems incredibly foreign, and is immersed in an environment of despair and hopelessness that it feels oppressive at times. I don't think it's much of a stretch, though, to say this summarizes Neuromancer as well as Children of Men.

To begin, the construction of the world in Children of Men resembles Gibson's own approach. Much of the world is seen briefly or peripherally, and we are not always given a complete explanation of what we're seeing. In Children of Men, I was struck by the fact that the special effects, which so many movies love to focus on, are here relegated to the background or seen so briefly as to be almost pointless. They are used not to call attention to anything, but are rather submerged in the deluge of visuals. When used in this way, they serve not as a means of forcing the audience to accept the reality of the world on the screen, but to transition between our world and the movie. The opening scene is an excellent example of this "transition"-based use of special effects (and the long single-shot that is used a lot in this movie). We begin in a coffee shop indistinguishable from the modern day, see from the date on the screen that we are in fact in 2027, and then as Theo steps outside, we see double-decker buses and whole buildings covered with enormous television screens. As he walks down the street, we are given such a deluge of visual information that this world is "different" from our own, that we aren't fully capable of defining each individual part, and simply accept it as a whole (Granted, this may just be my experience of the movie, but it's my post, so there). Then, an explosion, acting almost as a period at the end of the sentence, calls attention to the transition that we have just undergone in a single shot that's less than a minute long.

This is almost exactly how Gibson offers his cyberpunk world to the reader--in the background or in fleeting glimpses. Consider descriptions like "Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball mushroomed overhead." (17), or "Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb." (102). Gibson clearly uses the fringes of the environments that he creates to distinguish them from our world, and while it may seem odd to try and say that a literary and visual style are similar, I do think that Children of Men and Neuromancer share an approach to establishing a world (I think those two descriptions of Gibson's could just as easily be descriptions of deleted scenes from Children of Men, for instance).

Feel free to disagree, as I'm sure some people found the movie boring, needlessly artsy, show-offy, or lacking plot and a conclusion (all things my friends have said about it). But as we wait for the Neuromancer trailer to no doubt give us a blistering techno soundtrack, incredible special effects that make the Matrix come alive, fun one-liners that sound great even out of context, and other such standards of sci-fi adaptations, I'm going to stick with Children of Men for a while.