On the Relevance of Punk

I guess I’ve been partial to “pulp” plays for a long time now…ever since I first saw Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman’s Cyberpunk adaptation, William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, at The Next Theatre in Evanston.  I was still an undergraduate at the time, and in love with all things that seemed to challenge traditional ideas of what art should be.  As a card-carrying sci-fi geek, the prospect of presenting an icon of pop-culture as high art was just too great a temptation to pass up.

The Poor Players’ Guild, the campus predecessor of what would one day become Idle Muse Theatre Company, acquired the rights to and performed Burning Chrome in the Spring of 2000.  Three years later I would stage that same play again as my graduate thesis, using the production as a sort of personal barometer to gauge how much I had learned in the interim.

I like pulp literature, like Sherlock Holmes, because it serves as sort of modern mythology. To borrow a bit from my thesis, Cyberpunk stories, like Burning Chrome, Blade Runner (adapted from Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and The Matrix take place in a dystopian future—a sort of out-of-control information age, in which nations and economies have faded away in favor of the only true remaining currency: data. 

Generally, in Cyberpunk, these forces give rise to some sort of all-encompassing social and technological system that is in direct conflict with the human.

In any narrative, relationships are a kind of mirror in which various aspects of the protagonist are reflected.  But when those relationships become so numerous and complex as to be overwhelming, one cannot be distinguished from another. One’s sense of self is lost in the maelstrom of collective identity. There is no self distinct from the group, no unique identity, only a machine-like producer-consumer of the master system.

The fact that Cyberpunk characters are criminals makes them rebels against the rules of their society, which is the force of dehumanization. Humans in Cyberpunk are turning, metaphorically and literally, into machines. Against this setting, the punk becomes a symbol of the human struggle against the forces of dehumanization that we fear exist even in our own information-driven world today.

So, why all these words about Cyberpunk in a blog dedicated to a play about Sherlock Holmes? More on that in the next post…and a look at something called Steampunk…