The Negative Reinvention of Cinema

Abstract

Hollywood has recently produced a cycle of films that take an extremely critical view of digital media. This essay tries to unpack the logic of cinematic cyberphobia in an era in which the film industry has consistently appropriated digital technologies for both production and promotional purposes. Cyberphobic films rehearse cultural myths that interactive media are intrusive and disruptive, thus providing an outlet for dissent (not to mention paranoia) regarding the institutionalisation of new media. However, cyberphobia can also be understood as a defence mechanism against the challenge to cinema's individuating spectator address that interactive media represent. The article reads films from The Lawnmower Man (1992) to The Truman Show (1998) as allegories of contemporary Hollywood's dialectical struggle to define itself: cyberphobia denies cinema's contamination by interactive technologies, while its engagement with digital myths displays interactive media's fading chance to engender alternative media publics, and recalls cinema's own early history as a distracted, emphatically public experience.