From: CTHEORY Editor [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 8:15 PM
To: ctheory
Subject: Article 91: Designing the Solipsistic City
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 1-2
Article 91 07-02-01 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Designing the Solipsistic City: Themes of Urban Planning and Control
in _The Matrix_, _Dark City_, and _The Truman Show_
=====================================================================
~Samuel Nunn~
~Solipsism~, the theory that only one mind exists and that what
appears to be external reality is only a dream taking place in
that mind. [1]
"We build the city based on peoples' memories of different cities in
different times," says one of the alien protagonists in _Dark City_,
a sci-fi treatment of film (very) noir. The cinematic result: a
classical palimpsest of the US city, circa 'take your pick' 1940s
through the 1970s, missing only daylight. Ironically, it appears to
be much like the cities that real urban renewal programs of the 1950s
and 1960s delivered to us. The real "city" in _The Matrix_, a film
about a world in thrall to an artificial intelligence, is a literal
nightmare of high rise, high tech pods, each one housing one of us,
but perhaps more nightmarish is the observation that urban planner
extraordinaire Le Corbusier (aka Charles Jenneret) designed and
promoted the same kind of city, filled with six-meter square
"machines for living," more than adequate to support the day-to-day
life of Corbu's urban dwellers. And in _The Truman Show_, the
"on-camera 24-hours a day" hero's fictional city was in reality
Seaside, Florida, an antiseptic, over-designed, ultra-high income
suburban pastiche of yesteryears' fictional neighborhoods that never
were (except in the minds of the husband and wife
architects/designers, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk), with
a lengthy layer of all too real restrictive covenants designed to
control where residents gathered, what they did, and how their houses
must look when they did it. What is the city, then, if not what we
make it in our minds?
These three cinematic cities share a common theme: complete and
unquestioned control over their urban inhabitants, a control
invisible and all-pervasive, as difficult to see as it is to shed.
It is a control centralized and concise, embodied in a few powerful
entities (a council, a machine, a director), content in their ability
to direct citizens as desired. When the intrepid citizens, dwellers
in an urban simulacrum, become conscious of this control, the
troubles start and the sparks fly. It is as if these fictional
cities, running smoothly and happily as long as the dreamers sleep,
are faced with their own versions of the LA riots: the abrupt and
stark recognition that those invisible, embedded mechanisms of
control built into the physical and social fabric of the city can
break down, leaving pandemonium and disorder in their stead. The
solipsistic city awakens, and liberation follows.
Whether planners admit it or not, the idea of control is never far
from the surface in planning thought and practice. Plans are made to
control, or at least direct actions toward an instrumental end.[2]
The history of planning is rooted in systematic efforts to control
sanitary conditions, human behavior, physical appearance, and
economic development.[3] This is not a dark secret of planning
theory. It is not hidden in the recesses of esoteric planning
events. The quest for control over various elements of urban life,
its chaos and disorder, is imprinted upon the major tentacles of
urban planning, from garden cities to the city beautiful to the city
efficient to the modernist city to the postmodernist new urbanism.
The garden city was an attempt to physically eradicate slum areas,
relocate the impoverished to a pristine exurban landscape, and
control regional land use and economic development.[4] The city
beautiful and the city efficient were both designed to control the
physical appearance of cities and in so doing introduce an element of
control over the behavior of the unruly urban masses.[5] The
modernist city of Le Corbusier was an effort to strictly partition
land use and to create highly efficient spatial arrangements of
residential and non-residential structures and, not incidentally, to
overlay a rationalized system for living on urban citizens.[6] The
new urbanism of ~Seaside~ and ~Celebration~ also has a major control
orientation --- stringently dictate the look, layout, and
distribution of buildings, and use it to shape human activities.
In all these planning sagas, the goal is the same: as planners think
things should be, so they should be. A useful metaphor here is
solipsism, the notion that the only thing that's really real is the
self, and that only what the self experiences can be considered real.
Whatever the solipsist thinks, so it becomes. But there's a twist
here:
solipsism must also postulate the existence of an additional
class of processes --- invisible, inexplicable processes which
give the mind the illusion of being in an external reality^E.thus
the solipsist's explanation of the world is in terms of
interacting thoughts rather than interacting objects.[7]
So, the paradox of the solipsist is that ~something else~ controls
the reality being experienced. Planners constantly seek to identify
and understand that "something else," and piddle with ways to control
and influence it, whether "it" be land developers, land reformers,
the poor, the rich, retailers, builders, politicians, legislators,
business owners, bureaucrats, criminals, or cops.
It is not surprising, then, that themes of control from planning
experience have crept into popular culture. Recently, three films,
ostensibly dealing with the proverbial tropes of human reality, free
will, and choice, have also provided food for thought about issues of
control in the 21st century city. _The Matrix_ proposes a future in
which an artificial intelligence (AI) dominates the world, subjecting
humans to an everyday virtual reality of 1996 that in actuality
confines them, ~in stasis~, to coffin-like pods in 2197 that extract
energy from them to run the AI's computers. _Dark City_ depicts a
planet consisting of a single huge metropolis run by aliens capable
of changing thought and the physical landscape as a means of
isolating and understanding human emotion. And _The Truman Show_
offers the ultimate ~cinema verite~ depicting the entire life of a
single person in a clean postmodernist suburb, televised live to the
rest of the world --- without that person being aware of it. If
examined in some detail, these films each provide provocative
insights into the planning and control of cities, as embodied, almost
unconsciously, in popular culture. Among other ideas are those
linked to electronic surveillance, the evolving power of information
technologies, the changing nature of virtuality in real life, the
identity and motivations of "planners" in charge of cities, and the
mostly unpredictable power of human thought and emotion to create the
future rather than to be victimized by it.
Men in black
------------
The hegemony of traditional political and scientific authority runs
rampant in all three films, establishing an undercurrent of
conservative control and anti-subversion. For example, in _Dark
City_, the use of the large group of gothic, dark suited elites,
known as The Visitors, seems to be a direct allusion to the use in
representative democracy of senators and representatives, typically
dressed alike, convened into large assemblages in which they discuss
policy and public initiatives. A perhaps unintended comment on the
US version of democratic governance is that The Visitors are actually
slimy, translucent little octopi-like creatures that inhabit the dead
bodies of humans ("our vessels," states one of the aliens). The dark
suited AIs in _The Matrix_ also play the role of ultimate arbiters of
"society's" wishes and are, in effect, the legislative body that
passes judgment on any proposed or potential changes desired by the
subversive elements living aboard the hovercraft, Nebuchadnezzar.
The video production technicians and their imperious leader, Cristof,
are literally on top --- within the faux moon that hovers constantly,
day and night, over Seahaven --- in _The Truman Show_. Similarly,
the role of technical expertise and scientific credibility is
occupied by the usual technocratic types who use their esoteric
knowledge to leverage power. The use of the doctor in _Dark City_ as
the prime conduit for "new" thoughts and ideas appears to be another
direct parallel to the use of scientists and engineers to fuel policy
debates, by providing information and technical knowledge about
particular issues. Further, the doctor is used to inject new
memories into the city's denizens, thus embodying the scientific fix
associated with traditional rationalistic planning; further, the
Visitors are essentially helpless to understand the behavior of their
'citizens' without the technician/doctor's medicinal memory
injections. In another twist quite like the debates about the social
construction of science, The Visitors (i.e., legislators) do not
completely trust the doctor (i.e., the technical expert), continually
threatening him (and having severely wounded him in the past),
believing that somehow he isn't sincere about his willingness to
"help" them. This is much like the frequent mistrust in technical
assistance and science in public policy debates, particularly when
the focus is on emotionally compelling personal anecdotes (much like
the personal memories that the doctor is able to inject into the
citizens of _Dark City_). And when _The Truman Show_ begins to
literally come apart, the real authority behind the show, capitalist
sponsors, exert their ultimate power to stop the program.
IT is us
--------
The literally transformative power of information technology (IT) is
another undercurrent in these films. If the use of IT is a
continuing theme in urban planning and urban policy to improve life
and the efficiency of all of life's subsystems like home/work/school
and so on, then the use of IT in _The Matrix_ is the ultimate
resolution of this theme: it demonstrates an evolutionary version of
IT that has the capacity to absolutely do everything in much the same
way that we currently conceptualize IT in the office, the home, the
school, the store, and everywhere else.[8] A literal form of virtual
grocery shopping is embodied in the machine's capacity to control all
human life, deliver everything it needs, but at the same time fool
humans into believing that they are actually experiencing life. This
is the ultimate irony of the potential of IT: it makes the practice
of everyday life more efficient while drawing one further and further
away from everyday life. _The Matrix_ exhibits this dystopian
potential of IT perfectly. The use of IT in _The Truman Show_ is
more subtle, yet is still there. The advanced video production
equipment and monitoring technology used to keep Truman Burbank under
the perpetual gaze is made possible by IT, as is the constant
communication between the video programmers and all the actors on the
set. In _The Truman Show_, the only person on the outside of the IT
loop is Truman. Only in _Dark City_ does there appear to be an
absence of pervasive IT. Instead, the aliens of _Dark City_ seek a
form of information through relatively primitive means ---
participation and observation --- that even the most advanced IT
cannot possess: human emotion. And in this regard, all three films
suggest that IT cannot really help its users to truly understand what
motivates citizens in their quest to shuck the shackles of control.
Using their methods, The Visitors were no more effective in fully
comprehending the impact of emotions than the AI in _The Matrix_ and
Cristof in _The Truman Show_ were in understanding the emotion-driven
behavior of their respective subjects. All the films imply that the
power of IT cannot overcome that of human will and emotion.
You are under my control
------------------------
Yet, despite this nod to the seeming power of human initiative, the
element of control is the dominant motif throughout all three films.
The idea is that some dominant group (planners?) can introduce
control of a wide variety --- an almost infinite variety, in fact,
because it basically encompasses all members of the rest of each
world --- of individual humans by means of, in one film, a drug
injected into their brains and, in another, by means of electronic
connections into an individual body. Thus, underlying each is the
idea of ultimate control, the same kind of control that classical
rationalistic, instrumental planning envisions. In two of the films,
though, the idea is unattainable. Only temporarily are the
planners/controllers able to exert perfect control over the citizens
of _The Matrix_ and _Dark City_. However, some members of both
societies are in fact permanently 'living' and therefore one reading
could be that the controllers are at least in part successful. After
all, this isn't surprising, because the controlling planners have
ideal tools with which to satisfy almost everyone's wants and needs.
Their 'policy instruments' consist of either fully electronic
programming of the virtual life or pharmaceutical tools that control
the mental and social circumstances of each citizen. The latter is
kind of a ~Brave New World~ of pharmacology while the former is the
exemplar of computer mediated virtual reality. Control in _The
Truman Show_ is of a completely different kind, non-pharmaceutical
and non-computerized. It is the control of the "spectacle" of life,
one that revolves around the one person in a city that doesn't know
it's a spectacle, Truman Burbank. It unfolds within an arena of
constant, all-encompassing surveillance. Like the denizens of _Dark
City_ and _The Matrix_, he only gradually awakens to the fact that he
is under complete and utter control on a 24/7 basis. One could
characterize Truman and Neo as doppelgangers of one another, both
slowly coming to the realization that their entire life has been a
charade, for one digital and for the other, analog. Neo was
controlled by the virtual, Truman by the real (well, not real
exactly, but virtually real).
The control theme is also embedded in past and contemporary urban
planning approaches, such as the use of video surveillance cameras
throughout UK and US cities[9] or the use of gated environments to
control access and egress in urban and suburban developments.[10]
The effort to have a central authority ~aware~ of everything that is
going on, able to control who comes and who goes and who is
identified as the perpetrator of social disorder is the
~raison-de-etre~ of systematic surveillance schemes, and one that
developers and the media frequently exploit with the use of routine
crime statistics. This motif of camera-on-the-spot is, of course,
entwined in _The Truman Show_, with its 5,000 cameras located in
buttons, pens, doors, car radios, boats, cranes, mirrors, curbs,
bridges, and every other conceivable place. Truman Burbank
epitomizes the surveilled subject, object of the gaze. The irony in
Truman's case is that the cameras are not "protecting" anyone one in
the classic sense of video surveillance, but instead keeping the
"authorities" apprised of where Truman is at all times in order to
recompose the sequential composition of (sub)urban life that
surrounds him. Whereas the system of control in _The Truman Show_ is
unleashed on ~one~ citizen, the systems of control in _The Matrix_
and _Dark City_ focus on ~all~ citizens. Control per capita is
simply higher in Seahaven, Florida.
But a continuing irony of planning is that the more authorities
attempt to control, the more disorder is likely to emerge, whether
the resulting disorder is due to the actions of one citizen only or
many who group together to rebel against the idea of complete
control.[11] In the first place, simply overlaying control
mechanisms on urban space implies the ~need~ for those mechanisms,
signaling residents and visitors that the area is dangerous --- why
else would the cameras be there? Secondly, using such mechanisms on
one space often simply shifts the elements of disorder to other areas
free of such controls. In _The Truman Show_, rebel elements
~outside~ the show often tried to inform Truman of what was truly
going on. Similarly, the presence of active police agencies in the
other two films suggests that, despite the obvious orientation toward
controlling the minds, bodies, and actions of citizens, there is
nevertheless an element of disorder that must be controlled by means
of the virtual police. In _The Matrix_, the police appear primarily
as SWAT teams interested in eradicating the rebellious virtual
visitors from the wasted underworld of reality. In _Dark City_, the
police are needed to solve crimes of violence and to locate the
subversive elements within the city that are not totally convinced of
the "reality" of their existence. In fact, _Dark City_'s crimes of
violence were perpetrated via The Visitor's own experiments, in their
own way similar to the escalation US murder rates during prohibition
and more recently during urban drug wars (both of which were driven
by US policy). [12] Thus, the films all imply a never ending
substructure of disorder that, even with the magic of cranial
injections, omniscient video surveillance, and the invincible
computing power of sentient super computers, cannot be controlled
completely. Further, as with the role of police in urban areas at
the turn of the 20th century, the allegiance of police actors clearly
is linked to the powers of capital or the purveyors of AI. The
police cannot be expected to support the rebels in _The Matrix_ nor
are they, with limited exceptions, likely to assist the few citizens
of _Dark City_ that question what is happening. While the police in
_The Matrix_ are evidently immune from any subversive thought, or
from any 'reform' programming, some of the police detectives in _Dark
City_ slowly discover the truth, or rather the absence of truth,
behind the reality they experience. For at least one detective in
_Dark City_, the revelation is too much to bear, leading to a
suicidal leap in front of a subway train. For one of the AIs
responsible for battling the subversives in _The Matrix_, a subway
train has no effect, suggesting that, in both films, the real
enforcers of order are the AIs and the aliens who have established
the shifting ground rules of societal control, and the means to
change them, in the first place. As in _The Matrix_, the cops in
_The Truman Show_ are simply lackeys of the program's controllers.
It all seems so^E.familiar
-------------------------
All three films contain ingredients traceable to the classical
applications of planning to urban development. For instance, the
archetypal urban renewal schemes, in which new commercial and
retail developments with spanking new high rises and antiseptic
parking garages took the place of grungy deteriorated disorderly
neighborhoods, were like the attempts in _Dark City_ to create whole
new buildings or move existing buildings from one spot to another as
well as to inject (literally) new forms of behaviors and memories
into individuals. The _Dark City_ is urban renewal on speed. The
constant tinkering of the physical structure of the city by The
Visitors, called "kuning" (sounds like tuning), is like that of
planners who believe they can "tune" cities to a perfect pitch.
Urban dwellings in _The Matrix_ --- the ~real~ urban dwellings
located in the wasted underground complex --- are the ultimate
realization of Le Corbusier's "machines for living," sterile high
rise units, mile high buildings, that literally house every human
being in the world in their small tidy life support units. As
described by Neo, the city of _The Matrix_ may have been a Le
Corbusier commission:
to either side he sees other tube-shaped pods filled with red
gelatin; beneath the wax-like surface, pale and motionless, he
sees other human beings. Fanning out in a circle, there are
more. All connected to a center core, each capsule like a red,
dimly glowing petal attached to a black metal stem. Above him,
level after, level, the stem rises seemingly forever. He moves
to the foot of the capsule and looks out. The image assaults
his mind. Towers of glowing petals spiral up to
incomprehensible heights, disappearing down into a dim murk like
an underwater abyss.[13]
In particular, as depicted in _Dark City_, the replacement of old
memories with new ones is directly parallel with the destruction of
the cities of memory that has been decried by Boyer, Sandercock, and
Hayden.[14] Basically, the past is constantly recreated and
redefined as the built environment metamorphoses into the latest
visions of property development interests:
in North America each new layer of civilization and development
erases rather than builds upon the previous ones, so that while
the history of [a city] can be told, it cannot be seen. the
cities of the future will not be distinctive as cities have
always been. ^EInstead of reflecting a unique culture, each
future city seems likely to consist of the same borrowed
fragments. [15]
By destroying the layered physical identity that is embedded in the
present array of urban structures, urban renewal projects in the past
and routine redevelopment projects currently play a role in
recreating or simply eradicating the past in exactly the same way
that reprogramming recreated the past and reformulated the present
for those in _The Matrix_ or new injections created new memories,
replacing those of the past, in _Dark City_. The present is
continually reinvented, especially in _Dark City_ so that no past
even exists for most of the city's denizens. Part of the urban
renewal irony of _The Truman Show_ is that its location was the real
postmodernist town, Seaside, Florida, with very real restrictive
covenants and architectural design constraints that had explicit
behavioral control objectives.[16] Seahaven, Florida, was a city
without memory, like Seaside, but even more like its leading citizen,
Truman Burbank, whose memories were real enough but reflected a
false, unreal cast of family and friends who were actually neither.
Postmodernist warnings about the loss of originality and the triumph
of the copy, the reproduction, and the simulation are just beneath
the surface of these films. The idea of a simulated urban
environment encapsulating all of everyday life (literally in the case
of _Dark City_ and _The Truman Show_), essentially within a physical
dome that demarcates the boundaries of daily existence, has roots in
both utopian thought and more traditional planning practices, or as
Zizek notes: "what lurks in the background is, of course, the
pre-modern notion of 'arriving at the end of the universe."[17] The
cities are real enough, physically speaking, but their "time" is out
of place, especially in _Dark City_, which reflects a layering of
different, earlier, eras such as the 1930s and 1940s. The city of
night depicted in _The Matrix_ is another amalgamation of middle 20th
century urban architecture and transportation, although in "reality"
it is the Chicago of 1996 juxtaposed over the wasted Chicago of 2192.
The original script by the Wachowski brothers describes it more
eloquently:
this is the Chicago you know. Chicago as it was at the end of
the twentieth century. This Chicago exists only as part of a
neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix... You
have been living inside Baudrillard's vision, inside the map,
not the territory^E.This is Chicago as it exists today: The sky
is an endless sea of black and green bile. The earth, scorched
and split like burnt flesh^E.'the desert of the real.'^E. the
ruins of a future Chicago protruding from the wasteland like the
blackened ribs of a long-dead corpse.
What people have known in the past must somehow be more comforting,
more acceptable, than a future that "no one" knows. As for the
"future," Seahaven represents the evolving postmodernist suburb
without a city, the Disneyfied theme park of absolute and constant
cleanliness and urban managerial efficiency. Like a gated community,
it's insulated from the outside "real" world, which makes it unreal:
how can it be actual urban life if it is not engaged in the
diversity and unpredictable drama of unregulated daily commerce and
chaos? Seahaven is programmed for Truman's sake and for that matter
for the entire viewing audience, no less so than the analog
programming of _Dark City_ by the Visitors for their "lab rats" and
the digital programming of urban life in _The Matrix_ by the AIs for
their power source. All are very effective simulations, real enough
to fool most of the denizens and citizens. Nothing, however, is
original, all are copies of bits and pieces from other times and
other places. This is the same concern that many urban analysts have
expressed about the direction contemporary urban planning has
taken.[18]
We can make you perfect, quickly
--------------------------------
Another motif barely under the surface of these films is the notion
of a continuing series of laboratory experiments to achieve desired
outcomes. _Dark City_ is home for thousands of "citizens" who are
the actual subjects of daily experiments. The ostensible objective
is for The Visitors to understand human emotions, but in effect the
ongoing experiments offer simply one opportunity after another to
alter the life circumstances of an individual and then trace the
results and impacts. Truman Burbank, under the gaze of total
surveillance, was also the object of frequent social experimentation,
particularly regarding his romantic life. His birth and life were
both a televised experiment, and his creator, Cristof, sought to
video tape the conception of a new life on the show. These film
examples are simply versions of the Deweyesque social learning
paradigm: the idea that public policies are simply temporary
experiments, to be tried over and over with different variables being
fiddled with until the proper results are obtained. Modern planning
theorists like Friedmann and urban analysts like Dunn have evoked
this kind of paradigmatic imagery of evolving social systems in their
explorations of contemporary planning and development practices. [19]
Projects are like experiments. What are the effects of new economic
development tax incentives? What measure could be taken of the
different variables at work like public investment, transport
networks, communications initiatives, or community development
efforts? The idea here, and the idea in _Dark City_, is to measure
what happens when some variables are kept constant and others allowed
to vary. To some extent, this is in contrast to the approach utilized
within _The Matrix_, where the electronic machinery in control of the
life support pods was interested almost exclusively in stasis, in
making sure that all variables remained constant at all times for the
organic life forms residing in the remnants of physical space in
order to keep the interior virtual life of the pod inhabitants in a
state of mental bliss and "stability" so that they would continue to
contribute electric energy and protein to the operation of the
societal machine:
we are, as an energy source, easily renewable and completely
recyclable, the dead liquefied and fed intravenously to the
living. All they needed to control this new battery was
something to occupy our mind. And so they built a prison out of
our past, wired it to our brains and turned us into slaves. [20]
Yet in this latter reading are parallels to contemporary planning
efforts that are designed to satisfy dominant capitalist interests by
providing fertile circuits of capital investment to fuel economic
revitalization, particularly after periods of crisis in the
capitalist system involving overaccumulation and overcapacity. From
this perspective, urban revitalization and renewal projects that are
designed to improve the physical environment of cities and, at the
same time, offer profitable outlets for capital investment and
improved commercial and residential opportunities for citizens, can
be conceived in the same way as the stasis-sustaining objectives of
_The Matrix_. Likewise, it's clear that the overriding purpose of
_The Truman Show_ was as an ongoing experiment to advertise
commercial products against the backcloth of "real" life, all of
which were for sale in the Truman Catalog. The city is a packaged
commodity, a spectacle designed to be consumed and "enjoyed," as an
opiate if nothing else:
People forget it takes the population of an entire country to
keep the show running^E. and since the show runs 24 hours a day
with no commercial breaks the staggering profits are all
generated from product placement^E.everything you see on the show
is for sale -- from the actors' wardrobe, food products, to the
very homes they live in. [21]
Another theme visible in the films is the changing effects of speed
on everyday life. [22] The idea that computer technology, or more
specifically the confluence of cybernetic-organic technologies, could
give humans the capacity for almost instantaneous learning of complex
fields of expertise is common to both _The Matrix_ and _Dark City_. In
_The Matrix_, the surviving members of the resistance force are able
to ask their handler back on the Nebuchadnezzar to download programs
to, for example, fly a helicopter or to learn various martial arts.
This is a direct descendant of Gibson's program straws inserted into
brain ports (_Count Zero_, _Neuromancer_) that allowed his
protagonists to fly jets or attack helicopters at a moment's notice.
[23] In _Dark City_, the memory injections allow instantaneous
receipt of new professional backgrounds such as police detective,
hotel clerk, singer, pharmacist, or poor man to rich man. These
ideas run parallel to the current popularity of distance learning,
web based instruction, and urban planning simulations. In all three,
the idea that time can be overcome is the key theme. In distance
learning, people are promised they can "learn at their own pace,"
which of course implies "fast" learning, or at worst learning that is
not 'burdened' by having to go to classes or wait an entire semester
to complete a course. Web based courses are offered with the same
implied promise --- learn as fast as you can, no doubt faster than
what a classroom has to offer. Urban simulations of proposed
planning projects also represent another version of the quest for
speed embedded in _The Matrix_ and _Dark City_. With virtual
depictions of urban development projects citizens can witness the end
state of what would ordinarily be a much longer evolutionary process.
But using simulations, interested parties can "see" into the future
now, instantly, and learn what a proposed project will (supposedly,
and within the parameters of the rules of the simulation) look like
when it's completed. _The Truman Show_'s approach to speed, however,
is in opposition to the other two films. The experiment in Seahaven
unfolds at the pace of life, day-in and day-out, year after year,
testing the patience of the "viewing audience" (not to mention the
actors) in a fashion similar to the afternoon soap opera. Things
evolve slowly because they have to, at least up until Truman has his
epiphany, and speeds the game up. Then, at least for Truman, things
can't go fast enough, and the machinery of control fights a losing
battle to keep up.
The big finish
--------------
In the solipsistic city, we're never quite sure who's dreaming up the
reality we experience. And at the end of these three films, while
our ostensible heroes move on to "the next level," it's anything but
certain that the reality they each experience --- their new urban
reality --- is any different, or any better, than what they had.
Truman steps through the door into the new (old) world, Neo flies
into the blue sky, and _Dark City_ becomes an oceanside resort.
Cities are transformed, miraculously, because ~someone~ wants them
that way. One version of reality is traded for another. Like the
latest shopping mall or urban theme park, the codified thoughts of
planners create new realities that replace what's gone before,
seamlessly and fast. The solipsistic city lives.
Notes
-----
[1] Deutsch, D. _The Fabric of Reality_. Penguin. New York. 1997.
[2] Beniger, J., _The Control Revolution : Technological and Economic
Origins of the Information Society_, Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 1986.
[3] Boyer, M. C. _Dreaming the Rational City_. Cambridge. MIT
Press. 1986.
[4] Fishman, R., _Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century : Ebenezer
Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier_, New York, Basic Books,
1977.
[5] Wilson, W.H., _The City Beautiful Movement_, Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins Press, 1989.
[6] Hall, P. _Cities of Tomorrow_. London. Blackwell Publishers,
1996.
[7] Deutsch, ~op.cit~., p. 83.
[8] See, for example, Mitchell, W., _The City of Bits_, Cambridge,
MIT Press. 1996; Gershenfeld, N. _When Things Start to Think_.
New York. Henry Holt. 1999
[9] Norris, C., J. Moran, and G. Armstrong, (eds.), _Surveillance,
Closed Circuit Television and Social Control_, Brookfield, VT,
Ashgate Publishing, 1998.
[10] Blakely, E. J. and M. G. Snyder. _Fortress America : Gated
Communities in the United States_. Washington, D.C. : Brookings
Institution Press ; Cambridge, Mass. : Lincoln Institute of Land
Policy. 1997
[11] Bodie-Gendrot, S. _The Social Control of Cities?_. London.
Blackwell Publishers. 2000.
[12] Gray, M. Drug Crazy: _How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can
Get Out_. London. Routledge. 2000.
[13] Wachowski, L. and A. Wachowski. _The Matrix_. Orignal
screenplay, available at
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Capsule/8448/Matrix.txt.
April 8, 1996.
[14] See, for instance, Boyer, M.C. _The City of Collective Memory_,
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994; Hayden, D. _The Power of Place: Urban
Landscapes as Public History_, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995; and
Sandercock, L. _Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural
Cities_. New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1998.
[15] Kaplan, R.D. _An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's
Future_. New York. Vintage Books. 1998.
[16] Audirac, I. and A.H. Shermyen, "An Evaluation of Neotraditional
Design's Social Prescription: Postmodern Placebo or Remedy for
Suburban Malaise?" _Journal of Planning Education And Research_ 13
(3): 161-173. Spring 1994.
[17] Zizek, S. 1999. "The Matrix, or, two sides of perversion."
From Inside the Matrix: International Symposium at the Center for
Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany. Distributed via <nettime>, a
mailing list for net criticism. http://www.nettime.org.
[18] Sorkin, M., (ed.) _Variations on a Theme Park: The New
American City and the End of Public Space_, New York, Hill &
Wang, 1992.
[19] See Friedmann, J., _Planning in the Public Domain_ Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987; and Dunn, Jr., E.S., _Economic and
Social Development: A Process of Social Learning_, Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins Press, 1971.
[20] Wachowski, L. and A. Wachowski, ~op.cit~., p. 47.
[21] Andrew Niccol, _The Truman Show_, shooting script, available at
http://plaza20.mbn.or.jp/%7Ehappywel/script/truman.html
[22] Gleick, J. "Seeing faster," _The New York Times Magazine_,
included in the series entitled "Old Eyes and New: Scenes from the
Millennium,"
http://www.ntimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m4/gleick.html.
1999.
[23] Gibson, W. _Count Zero_, New York, Ace Books. 1987; and
Gibson, W., _Neuromancer_, New York, Ace Books, 1994.
____________________________________________________________________
Samuel Nunn is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the
Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at Indiana
University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. His current research
focuses on the effects of high technology on economic development and
the impacts of law enforcement technology on urban life.
____________________________________________________________________
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