Review: ‘The Flying Luna Clipper’ Ascends!
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the initial lure of The Flying Luna Clipper for me was partially fuelled by a guilty taste for vaporwave, and all the gloopy aesthetics it gleans from recent historical works. In terms of that critical lens now routinely applied to vaporwave — of its ability to assemble emotion from the deadzones of early-neolib corporate aesthetics — The Flying Luna Clipper seems to float on a similar precariously-associated divide. Much of what is known of the film’s production is wrapped up in the idea of it being a corporate technological showcase. The film was built on the MSX — a now largely underdiscussed (but contemporaneously significant) home computer spawned from the unholy union of Microsoft and ASCII — by designer Ikko Onno. Nishi Kazuhiko — founder of ASCII — commissioned Onno personally to produce several digital works that showcased the MSX’s creative powers (Victor Navarro-Remesal details Onno’s own career in further depth here). The context can be read as quite familiar — a tech nerd, surrounded by the more superficial appeals of post-war counterculture, bringing those superficialities into the accelerated world of global capital. But intention is always largely speculative, and to watch TFLC is to flirt with creative notions that — even in the wild west of emergent video-game tech — may appear as an unruly presence in the spaces of Japanese-American commercialism.
‘Everything Is True In Your Dreams’ is proclaimed, sparkling electronics surrounding us, like the beginning of a team-building initiation video. Cut to a black embryonic orb — pulling out, we see it’s the eye of a golden pelican; blinking away somewhere above the midnight waters of the southern Atlantic Seaboard. A sedan is cruising the streets, its dense headlights searching through shacks and suburbs. It pulls into St. Petersburg, Florida. Ahead is a gas station with some great object perched atop it — a Martin M-130 flying boat. The sedan reports back to its superior somewhere far away: a bird-faced businessman named Blackwell, head of the company PHA. Exploiting the miracle of this flying machine, Blackwell turns the M-130 — our Flying Luna Clipper — into a grand vacationing spectacle. Merchandise is extravagantly flogged and adorned with its image, while its flights are elevated beyond mere transportation and into the realm of “dreams”. Its maiden voyage leaves from Hawaii, destined to soar across the Pacific. All dreamers are welcome on-board.
The easy assumption would be to equate TFLC’s dream-flogging as purely symbolic advertisement for the MXS — PHA’s flying machine as the great step-forward in “realising” our untapped human potential, as is par-for-the course when it comes to tacked-on sentiments for chunky soon-to-be-obsolete hardware. This reading, as apparently clear as it seems, does not entirely sit with me. Onno’s film commits willingly to an expansive level of context and visual control that appears antithetical to such a dismissal — visions entangled together, of form and story intertwined, that feel more artistically pugnacious than commercially subdued. Blackwell’s Flying Luna Clipper is implied to actually be the transformed body of a great pelican; perhaps even the yellow bird of the Hawaiian settlement legend broadcasted to the plane’s passenger. The film is replete with these Hawaiian-isms; cultural imagery bastardised and repurposed — but crucially, set within the context of Blackwell’s vacation empire. What isn’t thrown in as superfluous background adornment is thrust into the eye-sockets of its passengers as appropriated historical fact, so enamoured by the foreign spectacle as to gawk like the Othering anthropomorphic vegetables they are. This is America’s Hawaii — thousands of miles away from the continent, a space desperate to assimilate the culture as fundamentally American. The concept of a “dream” thrust upon it. The golden creature of legend, captured and defined in such a context.
Appropriate then that this Hawaii should be depicted through the artificial non-lens of computer-generated imagery. A Utopianism would engulf the discourse around the digital world’s eruption into the mainstream — from a stratified hegemonic vision to the radical subversions of Phreaks and Hackers — co-existing, of course, with its oppositions: mass surveillance, Y2K, Skynet, etc’. In TFLC, a snowman admires this marvellous plane from upon the docks, convinced that — in momentary shimmers — the plane is actually that great yellow bird. Soon enough, it evolves before him into a pelican, screeching and warbling. The pixels of this filmic world begin to expand—electronic reality obscured — but now the plane has begun to strobe bright white, only to zoom off into the distance. Its a moment that sums up how TFLC straddles this aforementioned divide — of one’s insatiable appetite for the magic of creative transcendence and its uneasy-but-inevitable relationship with the confines of techno-supremacy. There is no denying that this Martin M-130 is some object of great spiritual gravity, but there is equally no denying that it is one tied down by the fanfare of power. Colour and shape have no true master, but that does not make it a site without conflict. Onno’s digital kitsch — of flora-and-faunafolk wandering between the 2D liminal halls of an airport, waiting for a dream to take them away — is desperate for a sense of freedom. As the movie ends, our snowman boards the plane once again. The company flight attendant — a PanAm hostess banana — watches as the plane takes off without her. She ponders to herself:
“Does he know where he’s going..?
Oh, that’s okay. I think.”
There is, as I said, no denying this Thing’s great spiritual gravity. Technology changes but the principals and needs behind it remain the same — no one entity can lay claim to ultimate ideological ownership: no correct unified vision of how each cog must turn, how each pixel must be placed, how long one shot must linger. Onno’s MSX-constructed showcase of American-Japanese technocratic allyship is glorious in spite of it: a nonsensical and joyously-open universe that asks us to embrace the ever-changing landscape of creative technologies not because of self-imposed linear industrial definitions but because of its quirks and esoterica, of the ideas — fresh, familiar, or renewed — that we can bring to it as much as it may bring to us.
TFLC is viewable here on YouTube in full.
