I think about Max Headroom a lot.
I’m old enough to remember the first broadcast. I taped it on my dad’s VCR. We got a VCR years after all my friends. It was a big deal for us. My family never spent money, even if they had it. I always got the sense they were squirreling it away in case. If they spent money, it wasn’t on things – it was on visibility. They wouldn’t spend money on books, for example. They’d spend hundreds on throwing a Slava party for every Serb in the DC area.
So taping Max Headroom when I couldn’t watch it and reviewing it over and over imprinted it on my little cyberpunk brain.
And this episode is the big one. I could quote it by heart. You can see it here.
There’s so much one can quote from here. Blank Reg, played by the amazing W. Morgan Sheppard. His description of a book is the best thing in the world. “It’s a nonvolatile storage medium. It’s very rare. You should have one.” And it was in the middle of a story about money, privilege, and the value of a human life.
It also has this quote:
“Law? In the Fringes? Justice is cash flow, my son.”
This episode finds our hero, Edison Carter (a journalist!), trying to find a young girl who’s been kidnapped to be harvested for her organs. Who’s doing it? A wealthy man, insisting his mother must survive at any cost. He’s even blackmailing a member of the Network 23 board into making a digital version of his mother – the same technology that created Edison’s alter-egotist, Max Headroom.
Looking at it now, it is all about money and power, and who’s considered valuable.
The Network is motivated by money – corporate sponsorship in specific. They want a sure thing for ratings. They want Max. They don’t want their star reporter chasing after a nobody – especially when they need him controlling Max. The girl’s life is irrelevant in the big picture. Oddly enough, they share the same motivation as the amazing body bank ‘employees’ Bruegel and Mahler. “Business is our business.” They are motivated by cash. The world is transactional.
Not so for our unnamed power broker and his ‘mother.’ It was all about power. He lives in the richest part of the city. He demands his mother survive. He demands his blackmailed board member deliver immortality to his family. It’s a no brainer for him. His mother has more value than the homeless women he gets procured from the body banks. Another rich would-be noble would call them part of the ‘parasite class’ – even though his mother is literally the one draining the life out of people so poor they sell blood and tissue to survive.
In the end, there is a happy ending. Carter, his controller Theora, and even Max come together to help save this girl’s life. And they do so in a way the company can profit from. In the end, Carter can only bite the hand that feeds him so much. As long as he produces – he keeps getting ratings – he can continue to save these unimportant folks.
Justice is cash flow, my son.
The more time passes, the more I realize how much the production team behind Max Headroom got away with – and how prescient they were. Back then, I got into an argument with a family friend who said Max Headroom was ‘nonsense.’ I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why it resonated so much. Now, try and stop me from explaining why it’s so important. Her name is Janey. She’s not a body. She’s not a resource. She’s a person. And her life matters. When Justice becomes cashflow, only those with cash can get justice. What happens to the rest of us?
Biomechanoid Blues 