ABSTRACT

In 1995, Hollywood released four major feature films dealing with “cyberspace” in one form or another that featured African Americans in either significantly supporting or lead roles: Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers, Virtuosity, and Strange Days. The race of these characters involves more than just progressively inclusive casting, for their race itself plays a significant role in each film’s narrative presentation of networked technology. Sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly, the characters’ blackness intermediates between the representational conventions of narrative film and the “new technologies” that those films depict. The one helps make the other visible, so to speak. How this is done varies from film to film; but by examining these, along with the 1986 film Jumpin’ Jack Flash (which, despite its earlier release, shares many qualities with the later films), I will show how blackness functions to authenticate—and envision—oppositional identities and ideologies associated with cyberspace. Moreover, this authenticating function negotiates between the networked communication of cyberspace and the “reality” diegetically framed in cinematic space. I could say that blackness is the medium that makes the mediation real; but the reality, as we shall see, is not so neat.