Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

and maybe the one thing it gets right

Even if it was usually just to have something on in the background while I was busy doing something else, I’ve watched a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 over the years. There are episodes I’d be just as happy never seeing or thinking about again, and ones I truly do love. The former tend to feature movies so anodyne that not even the silhouetted peanut gallery’s quips can make them enjoyable to sit through, while the latter are those episodes whose D-tier movies begin to make sense after a few viewings.

The majority of the movies Mystery Science Theater 3000 sends up are bromidic low- to mid-budget science fiction and horror flicks whose creators were either enacting genre conventions by rote or overenthusiastically imitating more competent films. Every now and then, however, one of the movies it showcases represents a genuine effort to bring an original vision to life. Once you perceive the threads of method strung through all the incoherence and ineptitude that made it eligible for the Mystery Science Theater treatment to begin with, you find yourself able to appreciate what it imagined it was trying to do, however embarrassingly it fell on its face and ate sand in the execution.

In this regard, the 1984 made-for-television movie Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is one of the best films to have been MSTifed. It is inarguably, as Mike Nelson sighs during the credits, a very bad and confusing movie—but it was a very bad and confusing movie ahead of its time. It was going for something. What we have here is a very, very early cyberpunk film that tries to imagine a future where avaricious multinational corporations compete to control the world, everything is networked via computers, body modification and the transplantation of consciousness are commonplace, and so on. It doesn’t do a very good job of it, but we can’t say that Overdrawn at the Memory Bank lacked ambition.

The movie was based on an eponymous short story by John Varley, originally published in 1976, one of several pieces set in a shared universe where the Earth has been made uninhabitable and humanity lives in high-tech environments dispersed throughout the solar system. (The interplanetary diaspora bit goes missing in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’s adaptation.) I’ve read the short story; it’s pretty good, and has some clever ideas. In Varley’s future, “disneyland” is a generic lower-case noun. Doctors (“medicos”) are as denigrated as any other type of laborer who works primarily with their hands. Installing one’s digitized mind in an animal body (“doppling”) and going for a ride in a nature preserve simulating the African savannah is a popular form of recreation.

The short story and movie are about a man named Fingal whose inert body goes missing during a doppling jaunt. A technician jacks his memory-cube (“identicube” in the movie) into a supercomputer to keep his sensory-deprived mind from caving in on itself while his body is sought out. His consciousness automatically creates a simulated reality for itself within the system, and his imaginary actions affect the outer world—usually in the form of equipment malfunctions. And so on.

Converting Varley’s 35-page story into an 80-minute movie entailed padding it out with new conflicts, antagonists, and plot threads. As it happens, most of these introduced elements are positively inane, while the artifacts of smart and imaginative bits from Varley’s fiction flare up randomly, seldom with contextual clues or explanations of their significance. The unawares viewer can’t but regard them as more dumb writing in a grimacingly awkward and tonally confused film.

There is, however, one movie-exclusive scene that’s genuinely insightful and even prescient. I’m fairly certain the idea behind it was pinched from some other area of Varley’s fiction, but the filmmakers are entitled to at least a few points for working it in.

Very early on, Aram Fingal (played by a young Raul Julia) gets caught watching YouTube (“scrolling up cinemas”) one too many times at work, and is sent to a psychotherapist (“psychist”) to have his bad attitude sorted out. He takes a seat across from her while she looks down at a computer terminal that displays information about her patient and cues her to ask him questions.

“Do you love your mother?” she blurts out at the screen’s prompting.

Next, the computer informs her what landed her patient in her office. “You’ve used your computer for unauthorized viewing of cinemas?” She has the aggressive but puzzled tone of someone suffering from dementia.

She asks him only these two questions, then quietly stares down at her console, apparently pushing buttons. Fingal leans forward to see what she’s doing.

Diagnosis of Fingal is now complete, the computer intones a moment later.

“You can trust my diagnosis,” the cheerful psychist assures him as she bids him farewell.

How did the computer arrive at its diagnosis and determine the treatment it prescribes? It’s a mystery to the viewer, and very probably to the psychist too. Like a cashier who makes change for a $20 bill without doing or seeing the arithmetic, or a student who copies what ChatGPT tells him about the reading assignment he skipped, the psychist initiates an opaque machine process and hands over the result without a trace of circumspection. She’s all self-assurance when she informs Fingal of his rehabilitation plan. If an input error on her part resulted in Fingal being diagnosed as a violent psychopath and necrophiliac who needs an incision down his corpus callosum, it would probably take a day in court with a vicious malpractice lawyer to bring her around to wondering if maybe she made a boo-boo.

At the risk of giving Overdrawn at the Memory Bank much more consideration than it deserves, the scene with Fingal and the psychist isn’t a one-off. One gets the sense that a lot of the specialists in the movie’s world don’t quite know what they’re doing. Society goes on functioning more or less smoothly because they’re capable of following the directions given to them, but each of them is like an Uber driver who doesn’t know and doesn’t need to know the mechanics of an automobile engine, the topography of the city, or the factors that cause the GPS to send them on one route instead of another. They do what the computer says, and the job gets done.

In so-called primitive cultures that used simple tools, subsisted on game and small-scale and/or forest agriculture, and communicated principally through the spoken word, there was vanishingly little specialization. Everyone performed more or less the same (sex-classed) tasks and commanded more or less the same practical knowledge. In a bronze- or iron-age society that has developed art and architecture, builds ships and aqueducts, and has a literate ecclesiastic or bureaucratic class, the cobbler has no understanding of the engineer’s business, nor the engineer the skill of the physician or astrologer. But up to a point, the goods they produce and services they provide remain fairly transparent, even to the non-expert. The carpenter might not be able to craft a saw or an iron hammer himself, but he certainly knows how they work. The merchant prescribed a medicinal diet by the physician has enough experience with feeling well or poorly after eating certain foods that he can guess at the basis of its efficacy. The mariner using a relatively sophisticated device like a quadrant might not be able to make one himself, and perhaps he hasn’t studied much geometry or astronomy in his lifetime, but he can probably guess at the principles which the device exploits when its use as a navigational aid requires him to look at celestial bodies, take measurements, compare angular distances, and so on.

The technology engirdling us today has become so complicated as to be wholly opaque to most everyone who uses it. If you happen to be reading this on a PC, get a screwdriver and open up the case. How many of the components can you put a name to? Do you know what most of them do, or how they do it? On the chance that I’m addressing this to a hardware engineer who isn’t impressed by the question—how well-versed are you in software development? What can you say about the manufacture of semiconductors? The extraction and refinement of silicon and cobalt? The governments and economies of the places along the supply chain..?

A global society that can routinely manufacture and distribute millions of smartphones as a quotidian matter of course must necessarily be segmented, specialized, intensely coordinated, and increasingly automated. The modernization of labor, administration, transportation, and so on (first with machinery, lately with digital tech) corresponds to an ongoing decrease in the individual agent’s comprehension of the overall process and their control over the part they play in it. The “cog in the machine” cliché (in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank it’s “byte in a computer”) became hackneyed through overuse precisely because it’s so damned apt. Somewhere out there is a person who earns a wage by copying numbers from a printout into a spreadsheet, telling Excel to perform a series of mathematical operations (whether he can perform them himself is unimportant), emailing the results to someone else, and waiting for the next printout to appear on his desk. He doesn’t have a role in society; he has a job, and it’s to behave as a single macroscopic synapse. We all execute the tasks and follow the instructions given to each of us inside our delineated circles of productive activity (however simple or specialized), and astonishingly, it all scales up into an apparently durable order of things.

It was a matter of popular belief among some thinkers of the “civilized” West that their far-distant ancestors from the primeval forests spent their lives in a perpetual state of bewilderment and panic—squatting and shuddering in the green twilight, besieged by creatures and phenomena they could never hope to understand, comporting themselves in a bent posture of “almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power,” as Engels imagined it. Unable to reckon with or control the pullulating, unknowable things of nature, our forebears turned to superstition and anthropomorphism to convert the world into something that could be negotiated with on more agreeable terms—or so the narrative goes.

It’s hard for us to know how well this description agrees with the actual facts of prehistory, but in some ways it’s certainly descriptive of the present. In expanding and consolidating out technical dominion over the Earth, we seem to have re-mysticized it. Most of the things that sustain us and enable our way of life—these surrounding congeries of exteriorized and apparently autonomous prosthetics—are as mysterious to us as thunder and lightning must have been to Homo neanderthalensis, even though we intuit something so plainly and congenitally human of them. This fact may be what preserves the mass of us against perennial and outright panic: we’ve learned through experience that this colossal and perplexing organism composed of metal and stone and people and light and wheels and symbols and cables and everything else usually doesn’t go on the attack or revoke its generosity as long as one keeps calm and does what it directly or indirectly instructs us to. It is incomprehensible, but not illegible. In a very limited way, we can reason with it.

One of the obvious historical ironies of a society built on high technology is that the people it comprises are progressively impoverished of the technical knowledge on which it stands the farther its development advances. Another is maybe less obvious: living in a high-tech society evidently tends to make all of us less scientific and more ritualistic in our mental habits and worldview(s).