When I was young I didn’t understand why older people were so resistant to the idea of aging. Now that I am an older person, I get it. Or, at least I have a theory. Those of you who read my posts regularly will learn that I have a lot of theories. This one is about the brain. When we are younger and going through a massive amount of physical changes those changes include a lot of action going on in the brain. As we get older our brains solidify into a certain version of ourselves that our bodies swiftly no longer represent.
This also applies to culture. The culture in which we come of age is the one with the strongest and most lasting impact on our brains and therefore on who we are and how we see ourselves. The brain is changeable, even in our oldest ages we can grow it, add new pathways. However, it’s a lot harder. The more we do something the more difficult it is to alter those patterns. I like to think of it as a riverbed. The older the river, the more deeply it becomes entrenched into the earth. The Colorado River formed the Grand Canyon. The Amazon has created a whole ecosystem. That’s our brains. Deeply entrenched patterns with entire ecosystems of habits shoring them up. Which brings us to Altered Carbon. According to Wikipedia, the best pop culture source:
“The series takes place over 300 years in the future. In the future, a person’s memories can be decanted into a disk-shaped device called a cortical stack, which is implanted in the vertebrae at the back of the neck. These storage devices are of alien design and have been reverse engineered and mass produced. Physical human or synthetic bodies called “sleeves” are used as vessels that can accept any stack. Takeshi Kovacs a political operative with military skills, wakes up 250 years after his previous sleeve is terminated. He is given the choice to either spend the rest of time in prison for his crimes, or to help solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft one of the wealthiest men in the settled worlds. Takeshi was the sole surviving soldier of those defeated in an uprising against the new world order 250 years prior.” The show is based on the award-winning cyberpunk novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan.
In prepping to write this I read a few other reviews of the show. It seemed to me that the writers of a lot of the negative reviews I read were basing their reviews on only part of the season. It’s a Netflix show and the whole season dropped at once… Anyway, typical of the Netflix shows I’ve seen it starts slowly. This is in part because there is So. Much. Going. On. You’ve got flashbacks to the Rebellion and Kovacs’ tangled relationships, the intricacies of the case he is working on, and the complications of his current sleeve. A few episodes in and things really speed up. Almost too fast to keep up with everything that is happening.
That his current sleeve is a straight white guy is something a few reviewers pointed out as white washing. I don’t see it that way. For me white washing is when they cast a white person to play a character that was a person of color in the source material. Like Scarlett Johanson in Ghost in The Shell, Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia, or any film set in Egypt. It’s also the nature of the world of Altered Carbon. Race, gender, age, all of these have less value in this plane. Despite, or because of, this the cast is very diverse. Kovacs in his original sleeve is played by Will Yun Lee in many of the flashbacks. Mexican actress Martha Higareda plays Kristin Ortega, the police lieutenant dogging Kovacs’ every move. Her partner Samir Abboud is played by Waleed Zuaiteran, an American with Palestinian ancestry. Quellcrist Falconer, the leader of the rebellion, is played by Black American actor Renée Elise Goldsberry. Add this to the fact that characters, including the main one, are routinely sleeved into bodies that do not match their sex, gender, racial or ethnic background, or age and a straight, white, male lead with named Takeshi Kovacs doesn’t bother me.
Altered Carbon is full on cyberpunk. I like cyberpunk. Seriously, I do. Not as much as steampunk, but, you know, cyberpunk is cool. The look of the show is definitely Blade Runneresque and I wish it wasn’t so relentlessly so. Cyberpunk doesn’t always have to be grey, dreary, and wet. But it does lend a nice contrast between the world below and the one above, the one inhabited by Meths. Meths, like Laurens Bancroft, are those who can afford to live, well, forever. Meths have gratuitous amounts of money and power. They are the new gods. And if that sounds fucking frightening, it is.
The show touches onto lots of different philosophical questions, which leads us back to the human brain. Once the brain stops developing, something that happens for most of us in our early twenties, it starts to resist change. It’s why many of us become more conservative as we age, why the music of our youth is the best, and why we are so shocked when we look in the mirror and see our forty year old selves. Imagine that kind of resistance in people who can live essentially forever. Imagine those people having all the power. It is also the nature of human beings to categorize and separate ourselves into us and them. In the case of the Meths there are those who live forever and those who don’t.
I have a theory about fame. (I told you I have a lot of theories.) They say that fame changes you but I think that first fame changes the way others see you. The way others treat you. You change in response. Adulation creates the gods. Meths are the gods of this world. But they are gods without responsibility or empathy. They, like all of humanity, do have the ability to change. However, the older they get, the harder it becomes. And there is little motivation for them to do so. Instead they are limited by their petty humanity, trapped in worlds of their own making.
This is just the beginning of what Altered Carbon has to offer. There are layers of philosophy, questions about the nature of a human consciousness that can downloaded, the place of religion in such a world, and more. All touched on during what is essentially a murder mystery. If you like hard boiled detective stories, science fiction, cyberpunk, wanton amounts of violence and nudity, noir, and seriously high levels of production – this thing obviously cost millions, then check out Altered Carbon on Netflix. I think you’ll find it worth your time.