IP: In cybercinema the computer is the bad guy

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

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.