CHAPTER 5 . . . ANDREW M. BUTLER

“A NEW ROSE HOTEL IS A NEW ROSE HOTEL IS A NEW ROSE HOTEL”

NONPLACES IN WILLIAM GIBSON’S SCREEN ADAPTATIONS

There is a moment in an interview with William Gibson when he says, “Being a screenwriter was never part of my game plan, and I never would have gone after it; it never occurred to me that it was something people did or that I would be asked to do it.” ¹ Inspired by watching teenagers play arcade video games, Gibson had been writing about the realm behind computer screens, of colors and space, claiming that he “assembled [the] word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. . . . Slick and hollow—awaiting received meaning.” ² Cyberspace has no fixed identity, relationships, or history; it lacks authentic height, width, depth, and mass and can be thought of as an addition to the catalog of “nonplaces” of supermodernity identified by French anthropologist Marc Augé.

Elsewhere I have written that the outopia or no-place of cyberspace “exists at a different level of ontology to the ‘outside’ ‘real’ world of the narratives in which it features,” ³ lacking the Dasein or Being There of the real world, instead offering a Being-Toward-Death that in itself is “elsewhere.” For Sarah Chaplin, “Cyberspace can never provide that vital tactile haptic sense of ‘being there’.” ⁴ In the constructed space of the cyberpunk text—written fiction, films, TV programs—there is slippage between the levels of diegesis and metadiegesis. Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw argue that “the city is a space of flows, of flux, of translocation,” ⁵ and the same is true of cyberspace. Both are consistently shifting, being rewritten.

Gibson’s early scriptwriting included his attempts to adapt “Burning Chrome” (1982) for Carolco and “New Rose Hotel” (1984) for producer Ed Pressman and director Kathryn Bigelow; “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) had been optioned by Robert Longo, ⁶ who was cowriting a script with Victoria Hamburg. Several writers and directors had been attached to an adaptation of Neuromancer , the novel that cemented Gibson’s reputation in science fiction circles as the central writer of cyberpunk, and his commissioned script for Alien III had been rejected. The few previous films with a cyberpunk sensibility included Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), and Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), and action films featuring cyborgs. Frances Bonner suggested that “if the films by and large are unable to deal with [cybernetic concerns], then they should be identified by a different label.” ⁷ Hollywood seemed less interested in the cyber than the punk and did not really embrace the genre.

It was not until 1993 that Gibson’s work reached the screen: Tomorrow Calling (Tim Leandro, 1993), based on “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981); this was followed by Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995) with a Gibson script, and he went on to write two episodes of The X-Files . New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998) was eventually filmed, with a script by Ferrara and Christ Zois. Despite—or perhaps because of—the success of The Matrix (Wachowski siblings, 1999), a film much indebted to Gibson, Neuromancer remains in production limbo to this day. Despite the range of screenwriters and other crew members, Gibson’s sensibility survives enough in these films to feature a range of Augé’s nonplaces.

Augé distinguishes “nonplaces” from “places” as lacking identity, relations, and history. ⁸ The eras of industrial capitalism and supermodernity have erased distinctions between space and time, leading to the emergence of nonplaces such as: “the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself.” ⁹ While the traditional town was centered on a few specific economic, political, and cultural nodes—such as the market, town, or church square—the supermodern city sprawls across networks and toward other cities (compare the Sprawl or Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan Axis in the Neuromancer trilogy). Augé argues that the nonplaces are “formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and [by] the relations that individuals have with these spaces.” ¹⁰ These relations are constructed through texts and contracts.

The architecture of supermodern cities and the complex skein of cyberspace is hardly central to the Alien movie franchise. The haunted house in space of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and the war on an extraterrestrial planet of Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) do operate against the backdrop of the Weyland-Yutani Corp and space ships, but the latter’s crew have complex enough relationships to be places. Gibson had been brought in by producers Walter Hill and David Giler precisely to take the films in a new direction. Gibson had been interested in the dirty look of the films’ spaceships and had a sense that there was a world waiting to be revealed outside the two films’ frames. Working from a story by Hill and Giler, he “tried to open out the background of the first two, exploring things about the human culture you wouldn’t have expected but that didn’t contradict what you already knew.” ¹¹ He imagined the company in the first two films caught up in a cold war with the communist Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP), wishing to use the alien as a weapon. The UPP captures the android Bishop and an alien from the U.S.S. Salaco , while Ripley, Newt, and Hicks are transported to a vast space station, Anchorpoint.

For the recurring characters if not their occupants, Anchorpoint is a nonplace, a staging post on the way home, assuming they can survive. Ripley stays in stasis, as if dead, and Newt is speedily sent home to New Portland, Oregon, but Hicks barely has time to form relationships or establish his identity as he fights numerous aliens who are killing the space station’s crew. By introducing alien spores to the franchise, Gibson seems to be exploring what Brian McHale dubbed “biopunk,” ¹² where biology and genetic engineering took the worldbuilding role of cybernetics. The identity and DNA of the insect-like aliens is in flux, as if they inhabit a permanent nonplace: “[It is as] though the gene-structure had been designed for ease of manipulation.” ¹³ Gibson rushed to finish his script by December 1987 to avoid the Writers Guild of America strike, but the studio’s estimate that the film would require a $70 million budget suggested the script was unviable. Gibson produced another draft, reducing the number of aliens and characters, but Scott resigned from the project and the new director, Renny Harlin, rejected the new script. Despite a number of attempts to recuperate Gibson’s ideas, the fall of the Berlin Wall was felt to render its Cold War subtext obsolete. Several creative teams later, Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992) bore no relation to Gibson’s ideas.

This meant that the first screen adaption of Gibson’s fiction was Tomorrow Calling , which had been situated as the lead story in Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986). The paraspace invoked here is not so much cyberspace as the “semiotic ghosts” ¹⁴ of imagery from the science-fiction pulp magazines such as those edited by Hugo Gernsback and the impact this has on our perception of the world. Determined to identify cyberpunk as something revolutionary, Sterling insists that Gibson is “consciously drawing a bead on the shambling figure of the SF tradition. It’s a devastating refutation of ‘scientifiction’ in its guise as narrow technolatry.” ¹⁵ On the other hand, Gary Westfahl, a staunch defender of Gernsback’s importance, declares this a misreading and notes “the obvious knowledge Gibson has about this view of the future and the affection he displays for it—and its contents.” ¹⁶ The story’s nameless narrator has been commissioned to document the 1930s Art Deco architecture surviving across America and finds himself haunted by their imagery, with their hints of fascist and Nazi propaganda. The story advances a fascinated distaste for this prophesied utopia, as the narrator exorcizes such visions by “‘Watch[ing] lots of television, particularly games shows and soaps. Go[ing] to porn movies.” ¹⁷ He replaces one set of semiotic ghosts with another.

Tim Leandro, in writing and filming Tomorrow Calling , moved the setting to England and included Art Deco buildings such as the Hoover Building in London, Barkers in Kensington, cinemas at Rayners Lane, Acton High Street, and Ealing, as well as Blackpool Promenade. ¹⁸ Through the collapse of the present day into historic architecture, these places become nonplaces straight out of Gernsbackian visions, complete with futuristic airships, airliners, and refugees from Things to Come ( William Cameron Menzies, 1936). Bill, the now-named protagonist, temporarily occupies the nonplaces of the hotel—the Savoy, which admittedly lacks the “sleek, minimalist decor in the rooms, with everything in white or discreet pastels” of the luxury establishments Augé has in mind—and a car. Augé begins his book with an account of car and air travel, with a description of an advertisement for a Renault Espace: “One day, the need for space makes itself felt . . . The irresistible wish for a space of our own. A mobile space which can take us anywhere . . . Already, space is inside you.” ¹⁹ Bill takes his rented Nissan around the outskirts of London, onto the road network and its laybys, and to the liminal space of the promenade and the beach, suspended between culture and nature, ²⁰ but haunted by something unnatural and uncanny, a nested space within a nonplace.

Leandro’s title change replaces one set of semiotic ghosts with another, moving from science fiction history to Bryan Ferry’s song “This Is Tomorrow” (1977), whose lyrics invoke a motel, televisions, and trucks. Ferry was inspired by the This Is Tomorrow Pop Art exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (August 1956), which featured an installation cocreated by Richard Hamilton, John Voelcker, and John McHale, including the collage “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?,” Robby the Robot, an advertisement for Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), collages of space pods, and so on. Hamilton was one of Ferry’s art tutors at the University of Newcastle in the mid-1960s and, like Gibson, British Pop Artists such as Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi seem to have an ambivalent attitude to such iconography, blurring boundaries of high and low art and commenting on contemporary capitalism. Leandro’s film uses collage techniques in its editing strategy, intercutting locations and low-quality footage of porn and nesting a number of flashbacks in the narrative flow.

The next Gibson adaptation, Johnny Mnemonic , had a larger budget than Leandro had worked with, $30 million, thanks to backing from Elektra Records, Alliance Communications, Cinevision, and TriStar Pictures. This created the need to cast supposedly bankable names such as Keanu Reeves, Ice-T, Henry Rollins, and Dolph Lundgren, among others. Gibson claimed, “It’s phrased as an action-chase piece, but our real agenda is a little more serious than that.” ²¹ In contrast, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker argue that the film was already an obsolete version of the original story, as “80s cyberpunk metaphors don’t really work anymore in the virtual 90s . . . [The film’s] been normalized, rationalized, chopped down to image-consumer size, drained of its charisma and recuperated, as a museum-piece of lost cybernetic possibilities.” ²² The 1980s nonplaces already seemed dated. What had seemed a groundbreaking technology in 1981, implanted memories, already seemed old hat in the era of encrypted emails and the climactic use of a VCR to get a message to the rest of the world seemed positively primitive.

Johnny Mnemonic (Reeves) is a habitué of the nonplace, having jettisoned childhood memories (and thus his identity, history, and relationships) in favor of corporate rental space for data and a temporary identity. On one last job, Mnemonic has stolen data from the Pharmakom corporation in his memory, which may contain the cure for nerve attenuation syndrome, a worldwide plague caused by overexposure to technology. Pharmakom, the Yakuza, and Karl the street preacher (Lundgren) are pursuing him and the information through the mean streets of Newark.

Newark is the kind of nonplace cityscape that Blade Runner put on the map, “where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing.” ²³ Steven Shaviro observes how “luxury business hotels . . . look pretty much the same all over the world. There’s nothing to tell you whether you are in New York City, or Tokyo, or Rio de Janeiro.” ²⁴ The ideal hotel could be in any place, offering precisely the same menus, decor, and services. At one moment of despair in a ruined building, Mnemonic declaims: “I want ROOM SERVICE! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered . . . like they do . . . at the Imperial Hotel . . . in Tokyo.” This childlike solipsism is akin to being waited on by mother, his every need met, and since he has deleted his childhood from his memory, this is a service he must purchase.

In the meantime, he has hired Jane (Dina Meyer), a version of Molly from Neuromancer and the original story (presumably the intellectual property of the owners of the film rights to Neuromancer ), to navigate the nonplaces he can access. Jane carries “mace, throwing spikes, and a grenade, what every girl wants” in her handbag and is suffering from nerve attenuation syndrome. This might be why we never see her entering cyberspace, although in Gibson’s early work cyberspace is only jacked into by men. Cyberspace as matrix (Latin for mother or womb) or complex skein is a feminine (non)space or nonplace, “surrounding the computer user with its all-encompassing embrace. By enveloping the body, cyberspace recalls the powerful sense of unity with the mother experienced by an infant before the disruptive awareness of its own separateness intervenes.” ²⁵ Mnemonic can exploit the maternal virtual space because he has shed his memories of his mother and is finally able to liberate the data from his brain with the aid of a female ghost in the mainframe—his dead mother, Anna Kalmann (Barbara Sukowa): “The maternal ghost beams up out of the pharmaceutical corporation turned murderous incorporation or underworld, making her ghostly comeback on monitors of the media web to cheerlead on the efforts to make the cure public.” ²⁶ The mother dies again as it is erased and the Pharmakom building in Newark goes up in flames. Mnemonic is restored to full masculinity, embracing Jane and thus relationship, history, and identity. The heteronormative ending of the Hollywood blockbuster substitutes place for nonplace.

In contrast with Johnny Mnemonic ’s blockbuster appearance, New Rose Hotel ended up as more arthouse fare than Longo had originally planned. Gibson describes it as “a weird urban fable that takes place in Tokyo—or in some kind of Tokyo—oh, maybe ten years in the future. . . . It really takes place in an indeterminate time, in a dark place.” ²⁷ Ferrara divides the film into two uneven parts: first is a James Bond or Day of the Jackal– style caper where X (Willem Dafoe) and Fox (Christopher Walken) employ Sandii (Asia Argento) to persuade Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), a biologist, to defect from a Frankfurt-based research company, Maas Biolabs GmbH. This is followed by a more confusing section after Sandii has betrayed them and infected the scientist with a deadly disease. In this sequence, X is recalling the first part of the film—complete with repeated footage—in the nonplace of a capsule hotel near Narita International Airport. New Rose Hotel was “Notorious meets Death of a Salesman ,” also compared with Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) by Ferrara. ²⁸ Ferrara borrows the style of the estranging futuristic Paris of Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965). Tokyo, filmed in New York, has become a nonplace: it could be anywhere. Paweł Frelik suggests that the film “evokes an image similar to the vision of [German synth-pop band] Alphaville ’s ‘Big in Japan’ when he collapses geography and light with images of the future in his poetic description of his love interest [Sandii].” ²⁹ Shaviro notes that in the film, “recording devices and screens are everywhere, and much of the film consists of grainy, reprocessed video footage. Indeed, the important plot events are exclusively conveyed through blurry video fragments and off-camera telephone voices.” ³⁰ Hiroshi is only depicted on a screen within the diegesis rather than being directly portrayed. Shaviro notes how Ferrara’s filmic style puts X’s acts of retrospection and the memories on the same ambiguous level of (re)presentation as the actual events in the film. Ferrara resists creating the standard ontological space of film—avoiding establishing shots, eschewing continuity editing and matched eye lines, merging characters with images of the characters, thus erasing clear lines of relationship and identity.

Maitland McDonagh describes this as “a future in which computer culture hasn’t just brought the world together, it’s reduced everything to a common culture of swank hedonism at one end of the economic spectrum and miserable depravity at the other.” ³¹ Fox, X, and Mnemonic all aspire to elite status, but they are disconnected from the truly social. As Augé argues, “the passenger, customer or driver . . . is distanced from [worries] temporarily by the environment of the moment,” ³² and this is true of the hotel guest. X is deliberately obscuring his identity in a capsule hotel, an unintentional echo of the Heideggerean Being-Toward-Death or nonbeing that permeates cyberpunk; Fox kills himself. X is unclear as to anyone’s motivations, and even his personal history may not be as he remembers it. Augé claims, “Frequentation of non-places today provides an experience—without real historical precedent—of solitary individuality combined with non-human mediation (all it takes is a notice or a screen) between the individual and the public authority.” ³³ These characters’ identities, relations, and histories are called into question. Mnemonic may be able to restore his, and Bill may find new ones, but X and Fox remain in nonplaces.

As of this writing, Gibson’s latest screen credits are his two episodes of The X-Files , Chris Carter’s TV series (1993–2002, 2016–2018) that centered on FBI agent Fox Mulder’s (David Duchovny) investigation of paranormal and alien activity alongside his skeptical partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). The paranoia that permeates the series repeatedly calls into question the nature of the spaces the series is set in—are they what they seem?—and the nature of powers that regulate them. Three types of stories dominate: “procedural, conspiratorial, and self-reflexive.” ³⁴ Gibson cowrote the episodes “Kill Switch” (1998) and “First Person Shooter” (2000) with Tom Maddox, the author of the science fiction novel Halo (1991). Their episodes broadly fall into the first category, effectively the monster-of-the-week, liberating them from the need to dovetail with or complicate ongoing story arcs. There are postmodern self-aware nods to films such as Blade Runner and Tron , as well as to other cyberpunk texts, most obviously in the Pris-like eye make-up of the computer programmer Invisigoth (Kristen Lehman) in “Kill Switch.”

“Kill Switch” features a series of non-places as Mulder and Scully investigate the death by crossfire of pioneer programmer Donald Gelman (Patrick Keating) in a diner full of criminals. Mulder and Scully’s investigation lead them to the nonplace of a shipping container, identifiable by its seven-digit BIC Code, which is a technological mapping of time and space. Gelman has created and lost control of an artificial intelligence which orchestrated his death when he tried to shut it down. The AI also attempts to kill Mulder and Scully with a laser fired by an orbital weapons satellite. Scully and Invisigoth locate the destroyed home of Gelman’s friend David, while Mulder finds the trailer location of the AI’s computer processing, along with David’s corpse, still connected to his computer.

This nonmovable mobile home is the point from which Mulder involuntarily enters cyberspace, hallucinating himself as a quadruple amputee in a hospital. First Scully enters, attacking the blonde, seductive nurses, and then Mulder attacks Scully. As Bronwen Calvert observes, “Scully does not usually fight physically, and certainly does not show proficiency in kickboxing.” ³⁵ She temporarily changes identity in the nonplace of this virtual reality, becoming the kind of action heroine that had been popularized by the Lara Croft video game character in Tomb Raider (1996) and by the protagonists of Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). Even at the end of the episode, it remains unclear if the AI has been deleted, if there is a second AI in another trailer, and whether Invisigoth has joined David online. As they contemplate the nature of virtual existence, Mulder asks Scully, “What are we but impulses? Electrical and chemical, through a bag of meat and bones,” relocating reality as a complex skein of data.

“First Person Shooter” features a computer game of that name, which has largely been coded by male programmers who mediate the relationships of players and programmed avatars, with a malleable history created by the individual and collective experience of the players. First-person shooter games require one or more players at screens with controls, who identify with the viewpoint of the (sometimes invisible) on-screen avatars. As Sue Morris observes, “Although largely immobilised at the PC, players are engaged in much bodily movement, not just controlling the game, but also in response to it.” ³⁶ Players occupy two spaces at once, identifying with their virtual echoes, moving their bodies without conscious intention. “Kill Switch” also attempted to foreground the nature of the body in its virtual nonplace. The fictional First Person Shooter is like an augmented laser quest or paintball game; players move about in a bare white physical play space wearing full body suits. They—or we, as audience members—perceive a dark cityspace full of motorbikes and enemies with machine guns, which echoes some of the games space of the film Tron . First Person Shooter evidently provides that tactile haptic sense that Chaplin claims is missing from real-world virtual reality.

The game pits players against avatar Maitreya, who is seemingly undefeatable and kills the real-world players when she kills their avatars. Maitreya was constructed from a three-dimensional scan of a stripper, Jade Blue Afterglow (Krista Allen), although we later find she has been created by Phoebe (Constance Zimmer), the lone female programmer on the team, as a wish-fulfillment figure who feeds off the male aggression that surrounds her. Nevertheless, Maitreya is subjected to an objectifying, sexualizing heterosexual male gaze in the episode, and it should be noted that all the players are male. This is further emphasized when Jade is interrogated in an all-male police station, a scene that pays homage to the interview of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Mulder, largely breaking with the identity of the character in the rest of the series, is not immune to this lechery.

Maitreya’s acrobatics echo those of Pris in Blade Runner , although her costume seems to be a variant on Molly’s in Neuromancer and Trinity’s in The Matrix . For that matter, they echo the actions of Scully in “Kill Switch,” who risked being fetishized in the earlier episode. Mulder’s rare alpha male prowess in First Person Shooter causes him to progress to a further level of game play, an archetypal Western town complete with tumbleweeds. The episode walks a thin line between endorsement and critique of the male gaze, as Scully starts playing the game—a rare woman entering Gibsonian cyberspace—and they only win the battle against Maitreya with Phoebe’s intervention. Scully has been established as clearly critical of the testosterone-rich environments, but that does not protect her from being objectified, which cuts across her identity as a person with agency. Scully is transformed in the nonplace of the game “into the game player par excellence and then us[es] aspects of her physical self to create a new avatar-goddess.” ³⁷ Her face will eventually become the face of a new version of Maitreya. The nonplace and the rules of the nonplace are both malleable, with Mulder and Scully’s avatars as fine-tuned versions of their standard diegetic aspects.

The use of cyberspace in popular television such as The X-Files , decades after Star Trek: The Animated Series (the recreation room in “The Practical Joker” [1974]), Doctor Who (the Matrix, on Gallifrey, for example, from “The Deadly Assassin” [1976] onward), and Star Trek: The Next Generation (the holodeck, from the pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint” [1988] onward), shows how far Gibson’s ideas already fit in the popular imaginary. But the screen versions of Gibson’s fiction from the 1990s were either too obscure (Tomorrow Calling ), too action-oriented (Johnny Mnemonic ), or too art house (New Rose Hotel ) to have much influence on other film versions of cyberpunk. Gibson’s oeuvre clearly fed into The Matrix , to such an extent that a version of a film of Neuromancer is probably already obsolete. The wonders of cyberspace that Gibson envisioned on paper in the 1980s have become part of the everyday.

Protagonists Bill, Mnemonic, X, and Fox all find themselves in cities and other nonplaces they can no longer read or navigate, overwhelmed by the semiotics and forms of representation at odds with their identities, relationships, and histories. Each turns for succor and restoration to the nonplace of the hotel: “A paradox of non-place: a foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains.” ³⁸ They can assert temporary agency by renting a room and signing the registration book: “There will be no individualization (no right to anonymity) without identity checks.” ³⁹ They attempt to disavow nonidentity with signatures. Yet we do not actually know X’s name, and Fox and Mnemonic feel like assumed names—the latter may have lost the surname Kalmann. Their identities and locatedness are all fragile, their relatedness temporary. Mnemonic only enters back into relations, and thus identity, when he connects to Jane, but it should be noted that she lacks the identity, however problematic, granted by a surname. As Mark Bould argues, “We pay to see movies . . . to identify with loners whose success is figured in terms of social formation.” ⁴⁰ In the original story, Mnemonic and Molly go into business together—along with Jones, an augmented dolphin—and their corporate relationship turns nonplace into place for them. The same may be imagined after the ending of the film version.

The nonplaces identified by Augé are either corporate or state-owned; the individual is only temporarily located in them. The semiotics that haunt Bill oscillate between the intellectual properties of pulp fiction and mass media, permeated by capital. The new frontier of cyberspace might have been envisaged as a utopian free space, a new commons, but the digital domain is now battled over by multinational corporations who defend their ownership of data. Augé argues, “the non-place is the opposite of utopia,” ⁴¹ which is ironic given that the part origin of the word utopia in ou-topia or nonplace (alongside eu-topia or good place). The space of the nonplace is constructed through texts and contracts, just as the city is designed by architects employed by corporations in the context of planning laws and cyberspace is constructed by the intellectual labors of programmers.

In the X-Files episodes we have Mulder and Scully, two quasi-mavericks within a government agency, who try to regulate the law in a corporate world permeated with nonplaces. In Gibson and Maddox’s episodes, the programs seem barely controlled by their programmers—even when deleted, semiotic ghosts and back-ups may exist. The generic demands of ongoing television drama are such that Mulder and Scully regain their identities and relationships in both episodes, but the details of their history can be forgotten. Gibson’s location in The X-Files canon is only provisional until contradicted by the assertions of subsequent scriptwriters and showrunners. As a writer for hire, Gibson’s place is not assured, just as his Alien III script was effectively erased by the events of Alien 3 and his work on the script of New Rose Hotel gave way to Ferrara and Zois’s vision.

Film and television are collaborative media, with a range of co-creators—other writers, directors, producers, actors, cinematographers, and so on—so that it is already hard to pin down Gibson’s place in the work even if he wrote the words delivered by the actors. Nevertheless, the range of Augé’s nonplaces and his analysis of supermodernity can be seen in Gibson’s original works and the films and TV programs they have inspired. Despite the romanticization of cyberspace found in the critical reaction to cyberpunk, these adaptations show the ongoing alienation of the individual in the world (non)place of late capitalism and supermodernity.