Neuromancer Part 3 Close Reading Analysis
Personal Response
Chapter 11
Question 9: What “events” provide insight into urban space? How do these events structure the city?
In the beginning of chapter 11, Case, Armitage, and Molly are in Le Restaurant Vingtime Sicle, a restaurant where Riviera has his audition. Later Case gets out of the building near lake to ease his stomach. Case observes elegant rosewood railing along the lake and a French coupld trying to get on the boat to go to casino located across from the lake. When Case goes back to the restaurant, he observes that it's a nice restaurant with balcony and candles on the ceiling. Around the hotel that Case and Molly stays has expensive shops such as Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, and Liberty. The hotel, casino and the shops show that the city is very wealthy, maybe tourists' place for people all around the country and world. This is the opposite of the previous settings that Gibson described earlier in the previous chapters. However, later when Case chases after Molly, who disappeared after Riviera's show, he ends up at cubicles, a whorehouse for men and women. Along the way, Case first enters a nightclub to go to cubicles downstairs. The doors are numbered and the places is hidden from the outside. the corridor lights are blue and and the hallways reminds Case of an expensive clinic. Each doors are locked with magnetic locks, like Cheap Hotel. Foreign girls who are on "automatic pilot", unconscious and not in control of their body, waits their customers. It reminded me of the scene from the movie "Taken", where girls were kidnapped and drugged to work as prostitutes. This is two different parts of the city where two different social classes inhabit. Usually wealthy and high ranking classes can visit such restaurants, hotels, and the stores described in the text, and some socially and economically lower classes, like Molly, choose to work in cubicles. In this chapter, cubicles perhaps is the one of the few places where two classes meet, low class as the worker and the high classes the client. For high classes, the city fulfills their greed. They can stay at a hotel with expensive stores right across the street, and go to a restaurant like Vingtime Sicle and watch Riviera perform an illusion piece made from his own sexual desire. It also fits Gibson's definition of semi-ruined city, where the wealthy and the poor coexist in one city.
The city offers both classes something to do- gambling, shopping, working... but this chapter seems to depict everyone in pseudo reality or hyper reality. The city is the place where what is not real is shown real and what is real is shown as not real.
1. Luxurious lifestyle: gambling is for people who are looking for an instant big fortune and visiting cubicles is to look for false love or just simply for fulfilling sexual desire. Both casinos and cubicles are the place to go to console what people feel they lack. The wealthy class try to fill their emptiness with money, and put false hope and waste time.
2. International: The row of international stores in one city explore and shop at the best stores from the selected countries. The boundaries and distances between the countries are meaningless. The foreign stores can even make us forget where we are and sometimes put us into thinking that we are in another country.
3. Cubicles: The girls in the cubicles are not in control of their body. Their mind is not connected with their body and their body serves their clients as "meat puppets". For the girls who stays in their own room all the time, their mind does not encounter the reality.
=> The city stands as an escaping place from reality. Whether they are there for their own will for other's will, the people who reside in the city physically stays in the city but they do not exist or inhabit in the city(their reality).
Critical Question:
1. Does the inclusion of Riviera's performance in the restaurant has any relationship to Molly's past?
2. How does Riviera's performance tell us about the audience in the restaurant and the city as a whole?
Class Discussion
Chapter 11
15. How alterations of the body fictionalized in Neuromancer provide insight into the everyday world of its inhabitants? What kinds of alterations are made? How does this affect the embodied habitation of the city? How does this affect the experience of the body as a map of self?
Body Modification: Riviera - map of himself through his hologram
Molly: glasses and night sensitive lens, Molly came back
-Riding experience- would that be Molly's reminiscence of when she used to be a prostitute?
Technology as extension of body
P.143-144: Molly waking up in the middle of her service and observing the blood splattered surroundings.
Who's the real Molly? Was the part that Molly does not remember still a part of her?
Drugs and cyberspace- limiting geographical space, the body is altered to static meat that is not necessarily necessary.
Chapter 10- Rue Jules Verne
Question 13. What does social life look like in Chiba City? How are relationships structured? Mediated?
Beverly Hill-like- tanning is popular, hangliders
p.124 Aritage had a book found...'lotta money.' - rich teenagers
Chapter 11
Question 9: What “events” provide insight into urban space? How do these events structure the city?
In the beginning of chapter 11, Case, Armitage, and Molly are in Le Restaurant Vingtime Sicle, a restaurant where Riviera has his audition. Later Case gets out of the building near lake to ease his stomach. Case observes elegant rosewood railing along the lake and a French coupld trying to get on the boat to go to casino located across from the lake. When Case goes back to the restaurant, he observes that it's a nice restaurant with balcony and candles on the ceiling. Around the hotel that Case and Molly stays has expensive shops such as Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, and Liberty. The hotel, casino and the shops show that the city is very wealthy, maybe tourists' place for people all around the country and world. This is the opposite of the previous settings that Gibson described earlier in the previous chapters. However, later when Case chases after Molly, who disappeared after Riviera's show, he ends up at cubicles, a whorehouse for men and women. Along the way, Case first enters a nightclub to go to cubicles downstairs. The doors are numbered and the places is hidden from the outside. the corridor lights are blue and and the hallways reminds Case of an expensive clinic. Each doors are locked with magnetic locks, like Cheap Hotel. Foreign girls who are on "automatic pilot", unconscious and not in control of their body, waits their customers. It reminded me of the scene from the movie "Taken", where girls were kidnapped and drugged to work as prostitutes. This is two different parts of the city where two different social classes inhabit. Usually wealthy and high ranking classes can visit such restaurants, hotels, and the stores described in the text, and some socially and economically lower classes, like Molly, choose to work in cubicles. In this chapter, cubicles perhaps is the one of the few places where two classes meet, low class as the worker and the high classes the client. For high classes, the city fulfills their greed. They can stay at a hotel with expensive stores right across the street, and go to a restaurant like Vingtime Sicle and watch Riviera perform an illusion piece made from his own sexual desire. It also fits Gibson's definition of semi-ruined city, where the wealthy and the poor coexist in one city.
The city offers both classes something to do- gambling, shopping, working... but this chapter seems to depict everyone in pseudo reality or hyper reality. The city is the place where what is not real is shown real and what is real is shown as not real.
1. Luxurious lifestyle: gambling is for people who are looking for an instant big fortune and visiting cubicles is to look for false love or just simply for fulfilling sexual desire. Both casinos and cubicles are the place to go to console what people feel they lack. The wealthy class try to fill their emptiness with money, and put false hope and waste time.
2. International: The row of international stores in one city explore and shop at the best stores from the selected countries. The boundaries and distances between the countries are meaningless. The foreign stores can even make us forget where we are and sometimes put us into thinking that we are in another country.
3. Cubicles: The girls in the cubicles are not in control of their body. Their mind is not connected with their body and their body serves their clients as "meat puppets". For the girls who stays in their own room all the time, their mind does not encounter the reality.
=> The city stands as an escaping place from reality. Whether they are there for their own will for other's will, the people who reside in the city physically stays in the city but they do not exist or inhabit in the city(their reality).
Critical Question:
1. Does the inclusion of Riviera's performance in the restaurant has any relationship to Molly's past?
2. How does Riviera's performance tell us about the audience in the restaurant and the city as a whole?
Class Discussion
Chapter 11
15. How alterations of the body fictionalized in Neuromancer provide insight into the everyday world of its inhabitants? What kinds of alterations are made? How does this affect the embodied habitation of the city? How does this affect the experience of the body as a map of self?
Body Modification: Riviera - map of himself through his hologram
Molly: glasses and night sensitive lens, Molly came back
-Riding experience- would that be Molly's reminiscence of when she used to be a prostitute?
Technology as extension of body
P.143-144: Molly waking up in the middle of her service and observing the blood splattered surroundings.
Who's the real Molly? Was the part that Molly does not remember still a part of her?
Drugs and cyberspace- limiting geographical space, the body is altered to static meat that is not necessarily necessary.
Chapter 10- Rue Jules Verne
Question 13. What does social life look like in Chiba City? How are relationships structured? Mediated?
Beverly Hill-like- tanning is popular, hangliders
p.124 Aritage had a book found...'lotta money.' - rich teenagers