ABSTRACT
While best known for its time as a groundbreaking MTV interview show, Max Headroom’s origin—BBC Channel 4’s film Max Headroom Twenty Minutes into the Future—functions as a fascinating example of cyberpunk aesthetics. The film deploys traditional cyberpunk elements such as a bleak, industrial landscape; a tonal palate drawing heavily from film noir; and a world reliant on advanced technologies that seem cobbled together from leftover parts, all in the service of a larger argument about media consolidation and influence in the modern world. In the end, Max Headroom Twenty Minutes into the Future functions as a cyberpunk media critique by exploring various western anxieties about the union of the human and the technological, but the film’s primary thrust is media criticism, and this marks it as a fairly extraordinary example of cyberpunk aesthetics.
