NEAR FUTURE: WILLIAM GIBSON, Abel FERRARA AND TWO NEW ROSE HOTELS By Justin LaLiberty (New Rose Hotel, 1998, Cinématographe)
- Jul 5
- 5 min read
1998's film adaptation of New Rose Hotel, with its barrage of histrionic outbursts from the three leads, lo-fi locales, and pulsating sexuality is clearly the work of later-career Abel Ferrara. The film meshes near perfectly with the video art-forward, similarly performance obsessed The Blackout from the year prior—offering an aesthetically (perhaps spiritually) tethered double feature about men in positions of power. But the oft-ignored, or at least less celebrated, author of New Rose Hotel is cyberpunk progenitor William Gibson, and it is his source that provides Ferrara with the framework for his singular brand of provocation. New Rose Hotel began its life as a short story in July of 1984, published in the sci-fi magazine Omni, which was notable in certain circles for being co-founded by Bob Guccione, most well known for publishing Penthouse. Not unlike Neuromancer, Gibson's breakout novel from the same year, New Rose Hotel is set in a non-descript "near future" in which corporations run the world. Where Neuromancer (and its sequels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) is largely concerned with the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of high-tech crime in its world qua hacking, New Rose Hotel is about people and, in particular, their inherent worth. The future of New Rose Hotel, which in many ways mirrors that of Neuromancer and its sequels, posits a global society where workers are heavily protected by the corporations that they work for, some more than most. The job market as it exists in our reality is a thing of the past. Instead, career changes are often plotted in secret and require careful planning and, often, violence to execute. This ultimately sets the stage for the plot of New Rose Hotel, as labyrinthine as it is. The crux of New Rose Hotel, both the short story and film, concerns two men: Fox and X (played by Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe, respectively), who are hired to lure a Japanese scientist away from the German company he currently works for and bring him back to Japan. In order to make the offer more attractive, they secure the services of Sandii (played by Asia Argento) to seduce the scientist. In typical neo-noir fashion, Sandii is not to be trusted, and things fall apart from there. Presumably, anyone reading this has already read the short story or seen the film or, perhaps, both. But in the interest of avoiding spoilers and also letting the pleasures of untangling New Rose Hotel's often confounding plot remain potent, analysis of the narrative beats will stop there. What's most important about New Rose Hotel, in both iterations, is less what happens than who it happens to and who is doing it. Synopsizing the story is really an exercise in futility; despite the fates of certain characters, all ultimately feels inconsequential, which is arguably an overlying reality in both Gibson and Ferrara's bodies of work. Gibson's story (as well as Ferrara's film), has no traditional hero. Even the identity of the lead is questionable. In written form, the narrator is X, but the protagonist could arguably be Fox or even Sandii. In the film, Sandii is the focal point, and it's not hard to see why. Argento towers over New Rose Hotel and adorned various posters and video releases domestically and internationally, often in her underwear. There are narrative reasons for this, to be sure, but it's fair to say that she is the film's driving femme fatale, as Sandii is in the short story. While the genre for New Rose Hotel is broadly science-fiction and more specifically cyberpunk, it functions in many ways as a noir. It may lack the hard violence beats of a traditional crime story, but it is ultimately about deception, both in regards to the futuristic corporate espionage at its crux and the events that unfold as a result. Gibson is as much a crime writer as he is a sci-fi writer; the Neuromancer trilogy is rife with the hallmarks of hardboiled fiction, but with the setting transported from the streets of any inner city to "cyberspace". New Rose Hotel isn't all that different. While its crimes are more nebulous, as are the reasons behind them, the characters of New Rose Hotel are, fair to say, all acting in their own best interests. It's a story propelled by ill intentions, the likes of which have dire consequences, even if those consequences aren't exactly rendered (particularly in Ferrara's film). Beyond its characters, the most intriguing thing about Gibson's story is its conceptualization of the future. As Gibson didn't explicitly define the story's year, or even era, beyond its "near future" setting, it's hard to tell how removed Ferrara's world is from what Gibson envisioned. There's a geographical role in the short story that isn't necessarily mirrored in the film, with events taking place throughout Europe and Asia, whereas the film is more nebulous. It's safe to assume that an Abel Ferrara film made in the late 90s wouldn't have the budget to be a globe-trotting affair, and the film was largely shot in Ferrara's stomping ground of downtown New York City. This honestly serves the material well—a string of dialogue heavy scenes that take place in non-descript interiors, a sort of "anywhere city" that vibes with the arguably inconsequential plot of the proceedings. Despite its budgetary constraints and the source story's lack of a defined time period, New Rose Hotel as a film feels vaguely futuristic, at least in comparison to other Ferrara films, particularly the aforementioned The Blackout. Ferrara litters the frame with monitors, allowing the film to ebb and flow between the sturdy look of 35mm film stock and hazy video, predicting the turn-of-the-millennium influx of HD tape formats that would be printed onto film for distribution to multiplexes. It's an inspired, forward thinking aesthetic that manages to be simultaneously lo-fi and hypermediated. Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel may be more faithful to William Gibson's New Rose Hotel than people expected it to be in 1998. Cyberpunk had, at the time, had its moment on cinema screens, including the 1995 big screen adaptation of Gibson's short story Johnny Mnemonic, which featured a screenplay written by Gibson himself. New Rose Hotel is an often ignored entry in the cyberpunk cannon, both on page and screen. Perhaps that's due to the lack of a coherent narrative, the non-specific setting, or its sleazy chamber drama intentions, but it's an important piece in the careers of both Gibson and Ferrara—an end of the millennium scream into a CRT monitor void, where people are capital and every company is your worst enemy. --- Justin LaLiberty is the Curator/Producer for Cinématographe and the Director of Operations for Vinegar Syndrome sister company OCN Distribution. He regularly writes for Screen Slate and Letterboxd.
Comments