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IP: In cybercinema the computer is the bad guy
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 1995 15:42:06 -0400
U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT, SEPTEMBER 25, 1995 WHO'S THE BAD GUY? IN CYBERCINEMA IT'S THE COMPUTER. BUT THAT DUMB IDEA COULD SOON CHANGE Does your computer dance around at night under the full moon? Perhaps you foolishly believe that beige box of chips and dip switches is nothing but a calculator, or a dumber-than-a-light-bulb appliance good only for dabbling in E-mail. But Hollywood knows better. If your computer behaved the way moviemakers portrayed, it might fall desperately in love with your significant other and zap you dead when you touched its keyboard. Or maybe your megalomaniacal Macintosh is whispering chirps and beeps through its modem to other computers planning world domination. In fact, judging by the latest flicks in the burgeoning field of cybercinema, computers might just be the most terrifying movie monsters since Godzilla duked it out with Mothra. VIRTUAL VILLAINS. The newest entry in the computer-as-spoiler genre is HACKERS, which arrived at cineplexes last weekend. In it, a scruffy but glamorous band of acne-free teenage computer outlaws thwarts a massive oil spill and makes the world safe for people who wear their baseball caps backward. It comes after a summer movie season that saw JOHNNY MNEMONIC, in which the eponymous protagonist stores digital data in his brain and almost loses his noggin to bad guys intent on lopping off his precious wetware; THE NET, whose heroine has her identity, bank account and fashionable clothing stolen by an evil cabal of computerists intent on world domination; and VIRTUOSITY, whose villain, a software-based multiple personality amalgam of 200 archvillains (exluding only Sen. Bob Packwood and Joey Buttafuoco), escapes into the so-called real world to wreak vengeance and seek--what else--world domination. More films about digital tech are coming this fall. One of the best, STRANGE DAYS, opens next month; it's a weird tale about the selling of digital ``clips'' of actual human experiences. ``Wiretripping'' on stolen dreams replaces sex and drugs. This cinematic insistence that computers are evil comes even as a third of Americans own computers--PCs are outselling TVs--and most people find the devices helpful, entertaining and, given the growth of the Internet, revolutionary global communication devices. So why does Hollywood keep churning out technophobic and antiscience hacker-cracker-ghost-in-the-machine movies? Films and the folktales and literature preceding them have always played on the fear of knowledge itself, says critic Roger Ebert. Many cultures have historically feared intellectuals, magicians and scientists ``who live cloistered lives with their secret knowledge--computer programmers fall neatly into that category,'' says Ebert. Film buffs can easily draw a line from Fritz Lang's 1926 silent classic, METROPOLIS, which featured Rotwang, a crazy scientist, to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction landmark, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, in which a demented computer, HAL 9000, murders most of a space crew and is ``killed off'' itself when the sole survivor shuts it down. Movies featuring computers almost invariably fall into several categories: good computers that turn out to be evil; good people who use good computers and end up doing bad (or comical) things; evil people who do bad things with computers; and bad computers that do evil things to good people. In almost every case, computers are unstable or untrustworthy. An exception is 1982's TRON, which depicts a computer's interior as an alternate world, a symbolic battlefield for good and evil. In DESK SET, the 1957 film that was the first ever to star a computer, the ``electronic brain'' is merely inept, not murderous. Confronted by the hulking EMARAC (Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator), nicknamed ``Emmy,'' Katharine Hepburn's character expresses a typical fear: ``Frightening. Gave me the feeling that maybe, just maybe, people were outmoded.'' Fortunately, Emmy melts down, unable to match Hepburn's ability to think on her feet. But that was in the relatively halcyon '50s. Later films such as COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT, WAR GAMES, WESTWORLD, TERMINATOR and JURASSIC PARK all featured computers that screwed up by either thinking in deadly absolutes or crashing at a crucial moment. Even worse, some cinema computers grew smarter than their carbon-based creators (a computer brighter than humans is by definition evil) and hatched their own plans to (oh, no!) take over the planet. For instance, Proteus IV, threatened by a shutdown in DEMON SEED, extends its temporal reign by impregnating its creator's wife and producing a formidable compubaby. The popular theme of computers taking over was depicted in George Lucas's 1971 claustrophobic cult classic, THX-1138, and Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 darkly funny ALPHAVILLE, in which Alpha 60 dominates a city--banning poetry and making illogical behavior a capital crime. ``You never understand anything,'' says protagonist Lemmy Caution, ``until one fine day you die of it.'' UNREAL WORLD. Computers generally wind up being used as the ``McGuffin,'' a term Alfred Hitchcock coined to describe a plot element that initially drives the action. But the movies almost always show computers doing impossible things. In both THE NET and HACKERS, for example, computer viruses are seen as wild, graphic displays, which never happens in the real world. HACKERS director Iain Softley says he purposely used dazzling effects as a metaphor for an exciting, colorful, sexy world. ``That's why young people are so excited by the digital world,'' says Softley. ``It's not just a flat screen with text on it. It's the new youth culture, and there are a lot of cultural references to a new tribalism.'' So don't expect to see many movies showing real computers doing real work, says magician Penn Jillette, who has a small role in HACKERS. The interaction between people and computers is cerebral, says Jillette, not visual. Making a movie about that would be like filming a novel about a character who thinks deep thoughts. There's no action. Writing an intelligent drama about a ``good'' computer would involve having the computer explain what it was doing, says Ebert, while ``bad'' computers can be explained simply by their effects. ``There isn't much of a screenplay about how an airline reservations clerk has life made easier because of a computer.'' What is especially ironic is that moviemakers use enormous computer power to make movies that essentially mythologize or demonize computers. What's lacking is a new breed of storyteller ``who might give the new medium its own aesthetic grammar and syntax,'' argues Kathleen Murphy, film critic for FILM COMMENT magazine. Scott Rosenberg, movie critic for the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, agrees and predicts: ``People who have grown up with computers will show a fuller and richer portrait.'' But for now, ``when somebody tells me they are going to make a really accurate movie about computers,'' says Jillette, ``I think, great--this is going to be two hours of zeros and ones.'' BY VIC SUSSMAN Copyright, 1995, U.S. News & World Report All rights reserved.
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