This blog post is about the surgery Johnny Mnemonic gets in the short story by William Gibson. The Johnny Mnemonic Master Blog Post is here.

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Do you remember Johnny Mnemonic as the typical white guy played by Keanu Reeves in the a bad movie from 1995? You must not have read the book. Because in the book he’s a “Caucasoid” with Asian eyes. That’s a little different from the typical 1990s movie star look. The movie completely ignores that, but in the original short story it is a critical detail.

The Plot So Far

Our hero is Johnny Mnemonic. He has a silicon chip installed in his head that can be used for data storage. At the beginning of the story, he has information stored in his head that he needs to get rid of. But he doesn’t have the password. His boss does.

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In addition to his cyber augmented brain, Johnny has a new face. He has a meeting with his boss to offload the stored data and get paid. But the information happens to be stolen information – stolen from the wrong corporation. That causes a problem for his boss, and his boss actually wants to kill Johnny. Johnny arranges to meet his boss under a fake name and he needs to show up to the meeting with a fake face to complete the ruse.

Would You Get Plastic Surgery At Under The Knife?

He gets the plastic surgery done at a place called Under The Knife. Under The Knife isn’t some hospital. Under The Knife is just a random business that happens to do plastic surgery, like some businesses happen to sell flowers.

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In this world, there are no licensed medical doctors, because the medical field, like all other fields, have been deregulated away. So who does Johnny’s surgery? Not a surgeon but just the “girls at Under The Knife.”

The Girls At Under The Knife

The use of the word “girls” is significant. It isn’t “I got my new face at some shop in mall.” Gibson emphasizes that is the nameless “girls at Under The Knife” who perform the surgery. This shows what happens when something becomes deregulated.

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In the world of Johnny Mnemonic, ANYONE can just take hang a shingle and become a plastic surgeon. It need not be someone with education and training. It need not even be an adult. It can be just some girl, like some girl who works as a hair dresser – except in real life, the hair dresser actually has a license and works in a profession that is more regulated than the girls at Under The Knife.

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These girls at Under The Knife like eyes with epicanthic folds – that’s the skin in the corner of the eyes Asians have. He can’t resist the girls suggestion of the Asian eyes just like he couldn’t resist getting the memory implant in his brain so he could charge high storage rates. So Johnny gets the Asian eyes.

What Do The Eyes Represent? Why Are They Asian?

It’s worth commenting on why the eyes have to be “Asian” eyes. In a lot of Gibson’s early cyberpunk, we see an Asian dominated world where some nameless MegaCity on the eastern seaboard of what is now the USA looks like Hong Kong. This is a reaction to the dominance of Japan in the early and mid 1980s. Japan doesn’t really dominate anything anymore, so it can be tempting to dismiss some of these Asian elements.

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But don’t confuse the cyberpunk Asian aesthetic with what’s going on under the surface. The point Gibson makes over and over in these early cyberpunk stories is deregulation breeds a soulless anti-human corporate dystopia. That’s still true whether or not Asia is currently dominate.

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So Johnny Mnemonic’s Asian eyes tell us that he lives in a world where getting a new face is just as easy as getting a new haircut. That could be do to advances in technology. Maybe that’s why some random girl can perform the surgery because the surgery is so easy now with advanced technology. Gibson doesn’t spell it out, but that’s one possibility.

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But it doesn’t really matter how everything got deregulated. Only that it did get deregulated and what are the consequences of that deregulation. Here the consequences are that Johnny easily get a new face with new eyes.

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It is important to realize that Gibson focuses on the eyes and not the rest of the face. With eyes being the window to the soul, Gibson is saying that such a deregulated world inevitably causes us to lose our soul because we are forced to sell our soul if we are to successfully compete in this deregulated, borderless world.

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So, Johnny’s new eyes represent the effect of living in a world without any borders or rules, where the only objective is to maximize your earnings – even if that means losing part of your body and soul.

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It is amazing that Gibson can convey this in only a few paragraphs.

The Last Blonde

I wrote a cyberpunk short story that tackles similar issues. Except instead of have the main character slide head long into artificial body parts, he resists any artifice at every chance. The story is called THE LAST BLONDE. See how it works out for him at www.blackflagliterature.com

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