An electrical charge crackles through the crowd. Heads turn, cameras flash, time stands still. Debbie Harry is in the building. A star guest at Rotterdam Film Festival this week, the Blondie singer looks sculpted and regal, her hair a gravity-defying platinum plume, her cheekbones weapons of mass seduction. She’s a living Pop Art icon, the Catherine Deneuve of punk, the missing link between Marilyn and Madonna. With, let’s be frank, just a hint of Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous about her these days.
Harry is in Rotterdam for the European premiere of her new documentary project, So Unreal, alongside the film’s creator, US indie director Amanda Kramer. A psychedelic, kaleidoscopic essay-film about how vintage science-fiction movies like Tron (1982), The Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999) helped predict our dawning age of AI and virtual reality, this sense-swamping cinematic collage is both celebration and cautionary tale. Harry serves as unseen narrator, but also appears on screen in clips from one Kramer’s primary reference points, David Cronenberg’s darkly prophetic VR thriller Videodrome (1983)
Working with Kramer, Harry tells The Film Verdict, was a pretty easy choice. “I said yes because I thought it was beautifully written,” she nods. “It’s a subject that I care about and have enjoyed for many years, and have actually participated in as an actor. So it seemed like the shoe actually really fit. Then we spoke on the phone, and it was painless.”
Harry is certainly a good fit as narrator for So Unreal. On top of acting in cult genre classic like Videodrome, she has a long history of using sci-fi imagery in her lyrics and videos, She worked with Alien (1979) production designer H.R. Giger on her 1981 debut solo album KooKoo, and even co-wrote a song with cult cyberpunk author William Gibson, now widely seen as a visionary prophet of the internet age.
“Yeah, Dog Star Girl, I love that song,” nods Kramer. “Debbie and I were talking about William Gibson last night. He was able to, in his moment, prophesy so far into the future. People would read his books and go: how strange! Computers connected to computers? But he was right. And we can only know that now. If you watch old Twilight Zone episodes, they seem so quaint, but I’m sure they scared the shit out of everyone watching them at the time.”
Harry uses a disembodied Siri-style voice for her So Unreal narration, soothing yet sinister, inkeeping with the film’s themes of digital detachment and ghosts in the machine. “I really had no direction as far as Debbie playing a character,” Kramer says, “because I knew she would create one, she would create the narrator of the film. It was so easy. There was no fussing, no digitising, everything worked.”
Harry has always treated acting as a side career to music, but she has amassed a respectable art-house portfolio working with directors like John Waters, Peter Greenaway, Isabel Coixet and James Mangold. The roles have become much scarcer in her later years, but she is still open to more. “I don’t say no because I don’t really get very many offers,” she shrugs. “I can’t really compete in the industry because of my age. But I would like to be M in James Bond, or something like that.”
Kramer loves this idea, Harry as Bond’s boss, bringing back a dash of campy fun to the increasingly sombre spy franchise. “Trust me, if I’m ever making a James Bond, you’ll be the first person I call,” she tells Harry. “And it wouldn’t be so emo! Why are they so sad now? They used to be so fun, and now they’re just depressing.”
Harry and Kramer may be decades apart in age, but they share a similar sensibility: pulpy and ironic, queer and arty, more grungy street sass than highbrow catwalk gloss. Punk with a twist.
“It’s funny, when I was a teenager listening to Blondie, I had friends that were like tried and true punks.” Kramer says. “They had glue in their hair, they had the pins and everything. But I felt compelled to Blondie at that point in my life, because it just had everything. Before everyone started to touch on the music of the world, global music, Blondie was there touching on reggae and pop and punk, and just doing it with such dignity and elegance and glamour. But still being gritty. Blondie still has, like, the city on it. So I felt like I didn’t have to pose as a punk rocker, which I wasn’t.”
Harry is not entirely sure about her own punk credentials, even in her pre-fame downtown NYC days. “Compared to a lot of the stuff that goes on now, we were kind of tame,” she shrugs. “But we were very sincere about what we did. Times change, tastes change, technology changes, you can’t do anything about that. But we did have a point of view. We never portrayed ourselves strictly as punk, but we felt like we had the attitude, plus a bit of humour about it. That was what I loved about the Ramones, everything that they did was so punk, but so fucking funny. God, it was great.”
Harry still lives in New York City, but concedes that the bohemian underground scene that nurtured Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads and dozens more legendary artists has long since gone, erased by spiralling rents and gentrification. She now looks back wistfully on absent friends like Johnny Thunders, Alan Ginsberg and Andy Warhol.
“We were all kind of lunatics,” Harry laughs. “The Beat Generation walking around the Lower East Side, I would just see Alan coming out of nowhere in his long white gowns and everything. We were really feeling that, we wanted to have a history with that somehow. I wish Johnny Thunders was still alive, I would love to hear what he’s writing now because he wrote such touching things. I’m just getting goosebumps thinking about it. It was quite an exciting era to be a part of.”
Our Rotterdam interview takes place just as news breaks about “deepfake” porn images of Taylor Swift flooding the internet. This kind of dystopian digital-age horror story seems pretty pertinent to themes that Kramer addresses in So Unreal, and to growing fears about the dangers of AI in general.
“I worry for everyone, especially people like Taylor Swift,” Kramer says. “The more famous you become, the ownership of yourself is all you have left. Debbie in particular, her voice is hers, and we don’t want computers competing with her voice by recreating it. But I do think working with AI is the next move, it is genius, and it is something musicians should invest their time in, because being technologically smart is important. The thievery is the other side of the coin. All technology is amoral, a programme means nothing, it does nothing, it’s just what human beings do with it. The technology to create Taylor Swift’s porn imagery didn’t create it, a person did. If there’s something terrible we can do with technology, we’ll figure it out. But if there’s something great we can do with it, we’ll do that too.”
Digital fakery has certainly been embraced by the music business over the last decade, with holographic simulations of Elvis, Roy Orbison, Tupac and more performing on stage. A virtual version of Swedish pop supergroup Abba is currently one of London’s biggest live attractions, still packing out a blockbuster residency after two years and counting. Blondie remain a busy touring band, with a string of summer festivals scheduled this year. But with Harry turning 79 in July, would she ever consider stepping down and letting AI avatars take her place?
“I don’t know,” Harry frowns. “We enjoy doing what we do, so why would we want to have a virtual thing? The object is selfish in a spiritual way, really, more than an economic way. It’s about surviving, making enough money to survive, but it’s also food in another way. I don’t see you getting that from avatars.”
