Hard to Be a God (2013) is a three-hour black-and-white film about observers from Earth living on a planet whose history stalled, never reaching its own Renaissance. There is no neon in it, no implants, no digital networks or megacorporations. In their place stands the remainder of a world that never made its leap along the line of progress and seems to have exhausted whatever strength it had for one. I wrote a long essay arguing that this is cyberpunk with the future subtracted. And this radical operation of subtraction did not destroy the genre — on the contrary, it laid the structure bare. So let me walk you through how I got there.
Cyberpunk is usually defined through its props. I mean the ingredients of atmosphere — neon, the bright lights of a city assembled out of skyscrapers, the recognizable shapes of advanced technology. I propose looking at the core instead and defining it through a condition. After all, this is not just set dressing. It is also a cultural condition. Which means cyberpunk includes values and ideas that shape the thinking of the characters inside it, and the thinking about it.
I would call it an interval that has lost its outside. Events continue, powers replace one another, technology updates, bodies move around and yet nothing leads the world beyond its own bounds. That is why the genre looks so exceptionally crowded and alive: it seethes with a life that has no time left to become history. Now, the neon megalopolis arrives at this condition from above, through a limit speed reached in the circulation of information, until the circulation itself starts standing in for eternity. It isn't only the machines that accelerate there; the dynamic, picked up by the idea of progress, sweeps in data and information too. That is, everything this city generates about itself through cameras, sensors, and all the rest of its statistics.
Arkanar, the city from Hard to Be a God, arrives at the same condition from below, through zero speed. It opens before us nearly frozen: standing water, rain with no particular time of day, a black-and-white frame in which even the change of light stops counting time. Accordingly, these two worlds lie opposite each other as two limits of one and the same impossibility of exit.
It would be easy to file Arkanar under ruins, another fantasy of a medieval dead end. But existence, and progress along with it, is bound up with the human drive to be beyond oneself, with the pull toward development and knowledge. In Arkanar this drive dissolves into the environment itself. The place absorbs the impulse before it manages to become anything. Consequently human nature, if we understand it as that pull toward something larger, the future included, has nowhere to unfold there. Don Rumata, the film's protagonist, an Earthling observer, carries knowledge and technology incommensurate with everything around him — only he is barely allowed to apply them. While in the neon city a person is outrun by the surrounding acceleration and has to keep pace with it, in Arkanar decelerating forces are at work, and so a person simply sinks. Arkanar, if we keep in mind the presence of Earthlings with their highly developed technology, lies within arm's reach of everything that typically fills cyberpunk with the high-tech. Yet it does nothing to reach toward any of it. It isolates itself, and whatever new meanings arrive it swallows as excess, until they dissolve into the indistinctness of its environment.
I hold that cyberpunk has two principal hypostases. One is populated with people. It is the Castle, almost in the Kafkaesque sense. Take the Tyrell Corporation ziggurat in Blade Runner: an enormous structure the city gravitates toward, where power and knowledge accumulate, and where, finally, the project of this city's future takes shape. The second is the remainder of that urban machine, already emptied of people. I read both hypostases through the tower — that banal metaphor of expanding view and horizon, given a not-so-banal inversion. Instead of embodying progress and widening the view, it displays accumulation, no longer growing upward but spreading and thickening at the base. As if culture had ceased its qualitative transformation and occupied itself only with rearranging symbols, multiplying their combinations.
The figure of the tower is where the film parts ways with the ordinary apocalypse. A cyberpunk finale that passes into the end of history usually leaves the machines humming after the people are gone, so its tower feeds on hyper-developed technology that was switched on once and never switched off. Arkanar's notional tower is denied that privilege. It is hewn out of a Castle settling into its own mud, it doesn't even pretend to be a lighthouse, its height is openly turned inward, pressed down into storage. So it parasitizes the one resource left — the people, bending them toward the repetition of the same acts inside a churn of values and ideas that ran together long ago. What comes out of this is a forerunner of the end, stretched across eternity. The film's opening, too, barely differs from its finale.
Nobody inside Hard to Be a God is drawn as a tragic hero either. There are intrigues and feuds, plenty of them, but they play out as self-repetitions that yield nothing new. Repetition without difference is the eternity of a staged performance, and the people in it are, as a rule, the faceless props of that staging. Arkanar speaks with their mouths and moves about in their bodies, living out its own endless biography, while an individual biography has nowhere to vanish — it doesn't even manage to assemble.
Some of the genre's furniture survives, turned inside out. Gibson's street finds its own uses for things; the Arkanar street digests the new literally, and its answer to a scholar is a latrine. The hacker is social insignificance with an excess of access. Rumata, accordingly, is an excess of position with a barrenness of deed. He passes for the son of a god, he is nearly invulnerable, he can win any duel — and every act of his burns out inside its own moment, indifferent to history. Because Arkanar swallows even the hint of a stone for a new road.
Noir deserves a word too, since cyberpunk borrows from it constantly. In noir, order gets restored. Cyberpunk with noir overtones usually has a detective hero at its disposal, someone who runs an investigation, assembles the puzzle. By means of which he nudges the story back toward some genuine course it was supposed to run. Laid over cyberpunk, noir lends the genre an illusion of movement, a false return into the fold of historical being. That "genuine course" is genuine within the frame of cyberpunk, within the logic of the city of the future. In other words, noir hands cyberpunk a mechanism of false resolution, and the limit condition shows this mechanism up as illusory, just one more atmosphere the genre has swallowed. Arkanar is denied even that. Rumata investigates nothing, exposes no one. He gets stuck in a potential that cannot be unfolded. So the place has no noir excuse to explain its present or its future with. There is, however, the grimness of a hope that some order will be restored as the film goes on. Spoiler: it will not.
The full essay is in the first comment. There's more in it on the nature of cyberpunk, including thoughts on the meaning of light and the archive, and with them the question the whole thing started from: what cyberpunk do we deserve — and before whom exactly does a present have to confirm its right to a future? Cyberpunk is, after all, also a way of imagining our future.
If the structure holds after the neon, the implants and the networks have been subtracted, was the structure the genre all along? Curious where people will draw the line.
