Slashdot Mirror
On Hollywood and the Portrayal of Computers
"Can a movie show a programmer who is not working on a Macintosh (Apple's product placement team should get a medal)? Can the exposition describing the virus/program/whatever not make me wince and/or laugh out loud? Can a programmer work without muttering under their breath to explain to the audience what they are typing? Can the breakdown of a system be indicated in some other manner than every screen in the room flashing in exciting patterns?
As a programmer, I recognize that part of the problem is that real programs rarely look cool when they work. Just about every one of my favorite programs has had pathetically uninteresting results to the uninitiated. "Look, it printed a 6 instead of a 3! That's so great!" Or, for the glorious day when the test suite is passed without errors, there's no response at all. I realize that this is not easy to make exciting on screen.
In the interests of research, we went out and rented "WarGames" and "Tron" last night. "WarGames" was just fantastic -- and the hacking was generally excellent, I thought. I don't have a phone phreak bone in my body, so I have no idea how silly that stuff was, but I enjoyed it all. "Tron" was boring and silly and we had to give up not a half hour in.
Any other votes/recommendations?"
My take? Hollywood just has problems fitting in the all of the non-verbal and cerebral aspect of compter use and falls back on the tried and true method of glitzing things up to make up for the shortcoming. What do you folks think?
If you think about it, Hollywood doesn't really portray *any* career correctly. Things have to be changed in order to keep the attention of the audience. Hospitals aren't always like "ER", Submarine XO's aren't always like Denzel Washington in "Crimson Tide". Although, if you want to see a movie where hackers/crackers are portrayed in a positive light, check out "Sneakers". Granted, the guys in that movie see more action than any shashdotter, the personality traits are almost dead-on.
Computers themselves are just plain boring. Say you're a mega-leet haxxor trying to break into some system... (not a skript kiddie, trying out one root kit after another; although that'd be boring too.) You're the real cheese, so what do you do? Pour over the source codes, look for holes, etc. Text terminals aren't interesting to look at to the public! Hell, they're not even interesting for me, and I have to write perl on em all day! ;)
And once you've broken into a system, what do you do? Transfer money from billg's account to yours? Copy the solaris sources to your own ftp server? Leave backdoors? Again, what on earth could possibly interest Joe Beer in that? Now if you had porn in the netscape window in the background...
If you are doing anything useful, they don't show you anything fancy on the screen. Despite what people say, the number one use of computers is still pushing around text. We don't have fancy 3d oses because there's no real need for one. How many of you program with just a bunch of xterms?
And cracking is another area that is even more internal to the computer, and has nothing to do with what's on-screen.
I've decided that computers will _never_ be portrayed correctly in movies, simply because people can't bear to think that most people still use _windows_, or worse yet some other WIMP interface like CDE. People see movies for something cool and fantastic, not what they see all day every day.
And what about _Sneakers_? They used a minimum of macs and flashy graphics and made cracking look cool!
They make it silly and overly dramatic, because otherwise, non-geeks would get bored... It's the same when they make movies about cops... I know a couple guys who are cops and they spend most of their time driving around in circles, and the rest is spent on paperwork, very little is spent chasing robbers or whatever else...
I think that it's just a fact of life that peopel don't go to movies to see mundane details of life (with some exceptions... mostly not mainstream films), people go to movies to see dramatized and crazy stuff... It's always been that way, and i think it'll probably stay that way for ever more, with computers, cops, etc...
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Hah! You've hit the nail right on the head. This is a trend I've noticed so much, and I can't seem to understand why they can't make things more realistic. I avoid computer-related movies b/c they just piss me off.
Independence day cracked me up particularly because of the way that they uploaded a "virus" to the alien "mainframe".. good thing those alien ships had serial interfaces, eh?
One of my favorites is the movie GUI. Anytime you see people using computers in the movies, the windows ALWAYS zoom, make neato swooshing sounds, the mouse clicks always are audiable (*click!*), etc. etc. Hollywood computers are the most audiable computers, even more than the Game Boy. Being a geek, this ticks me off for some reason. Hell, they usually do such a ugly mock up GUI, I find myself asking "Why don't they just use friggin Enlightenment, it's alot cooler looking than that!"
The South Park movie made a good joke relating to this, I'm not sure if everyone picked it up. When the kids are trying to look at the Internet porn of Stan's mom, it says in big red letters "ACCESS DENIED" (something you always see on computers these days
Also, it gets annoying when computers always talk to their users in movies with that oh so pleasant female voice.
I always love it when people staring at computer screens don't have just a glow over their face, but the letters on the screen are actually reflecting off their face! That's always funny. Usually this is used when a person is looking at random "code" or something (or even ones and zeros) flying by on the screen Matrix style.
The list goes on, but I'll let everyone else go off from here.
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The problems that we, as hackers (true sense), have with technical movies about hacking are manifold, but boil down to 2: technical inacuracies and overdramatization.
These problems are not, however, restricted to our little baliwick. And they are not caused by "writers/producers/directors who just don't care", though they are exacerbated by such people.
The problems are basic ones of the art of storytelling, and I guarantee you, that the further from mainstream experience something is, be it hacking, neuroscience, or astronomy, the more it will be altered in the art of storytelling.
This is not an evil, because storytelling is about emotion, and emotion is not about technical details. The flashing screens are there because they elicit the emotion in a non-technical audiance that the 5 character error message would elicit in a technical audiance.
They are called "metaphors", and the form the cornerstone of storytelling, and incidentally, learning. We start with what the people already know, and we add something.
So when you watch a technical film on a subject which you know something about, ask yourself this: "Was the metaphor of representation good, and did the audiance come away with a better understanding AT ALL of the subject?" If the answer is no, bitch away, but if it is yes, don't critasize the writer/director/producer for poorly explaining a subject in 90 minutes which took you 5 years to understand.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
I know this is grossly off topic, but I'm in rant mode... We geeks sure are a whinny group. Not all of us, of course. I'm just tired of people complaining about the EXACT same crap in 1/4 of the articles on /.
"The media is portraying us as something we're not." The media does that to everyone. At least everyone they cover, which discludes 90 percent of occupations. Techies get almost as much coverage as polititions. We should be proud.
"Non-tech people always use hacker instead of cracker. It makes me feel like crying" Once again, no one cares. The battle is lost, and it was a stupid, pointless battle in the first place. We don't have a copyright on the term, and it happens to be a slang term. In other words, it's meaning is decided by those who use it. And fifty million people are convinced that a "hacker" is someone who breaks into their computer, and causes icq to shit purple rainbows, or whatever the current myth is. Give up, go write some code. If you don't know how to write code, go learn. Stop complaining.
A buddy of mine coined this interface (as seen in Hackers ) "FreeLSD"... :^)
I read about an old exploit which actually did something a bit like this. I think it was a password hack for TOPS(?). I can't remember where I read about it, but here's the story, anyway.
The particular system had an OS call (or trap, or whatever) to change privilege levels. The call took a password string as an argument, and reported success or failure. The interesting thing about the routine was that it checked the password one character at a time, from left to right. As soon as it detected an incorrect character it returned a failure code.
To exploit this, the crackers allocated two consecutive pages of memory, and marked the second page as unreadable, so that a fault would occur if it was read. They installed an exception handler to catch the read fault. Then they stored a single character at the very end of the first page of memory, and passed its address in as the password to the mode change call. If the call failed, then it must have failed on the first character. If the call faulted, then it must have accepted the first character and tried to read the second character from the unreadable page.
Once you've determined the first character it's pretty simple to move the password back one byte and guess the second character, etc.
/peter
Hollywood stereotypes everything and everybody in a way that fits into the public imagination. For instance, have you ever seen a Middle Eastern man in a movie who was not a terrorist?
:) )
The same goes for just about every profession and group. The reason they do this is because if you suddenly deviate from the public image, you may end up confusing the dumbed down audience.
The safe money lies in following the beaten path.
Here, let's count the stereotypes:
1) Hackers: nerdy, unshaven guys wearing odd colorful clothes; often wear glasses; weird laugh; stumble and spill stuff. Or.... the opposite extreme - goth freaks with wild outfits and rapid typing skills.
2) scientists: mostly male, always wear long white coats, glasses. Talk technobabble and look thoughtful. If a scientist is a female, she has long legs which are revealed at some point, and the plot surprises us in the middle of the movie by showing how she is a repressed sexual tigress.
3) Politicians: sinister eyebrow action and lots of glaring, dark suits, depraved sick lifestyle.
4) Japanese: funny mannerisms, thick accent, lots of bowing. Skilled at gadgets.
5) Construction workers/truck drivers: If it's the hero, he's handsome, witty, and a dashing Romeo with the ladies (oddly, he has a sweet tender heart which is supposed to surprise everyone after the depiction of disgusting tobacco habits and prolific booze consumption). If it's not a hero, he's just disgusting and stupid. Lots of body hair, bad clothes. (And geeks think they have something to complain about unfair portrayal?
6) Women : 'nuff said.
OK, add your own. Maybe geeks get off fairly generously. Just imagine how much worse it could be if movies showed them as drunken child molesting perverts who live with their parents.
Oh, one excellent movie for portrayal was Contact - the female scientist (Jodie foster) was quite nicely shown as informally dressed, passionate about science, smart, etc., etc. Big win for astronomy geeks there. I liked this one a lot. It was surprisingly realistic in the dress code. Hardly any difference from Nova documentaries.
L.
OK, the first issue is knowledge. Most screenwriters today have at least used a computer, many of them use them regularly. Directors are likely to be less computer literate. Neither screenwriters nor directors are likely to be truly knowledgable about computers, they just have their focus in a different direction. The good ones will find a technical advisor that can help.
The second issue is screen presence. Any computer that is used for something real will have more information on the screen than is good for dramatic impact. The viewer needs to be able to quickly find and interpret the information displayed, and an 80x25 screen would just have too much text displayed too small for that (not to mention the 80x50 or 132x60 screens that some of us use). It always looks goofy when they make a computer display have huge characters in a proportionally spaced font, but that's something we're always going to have to live with.
The third issue is time. The director needs to have some things quick, so they don't get in the way, and some things slowly, to build suspense. This may contradict how long things really should take. For example, in the X-Files, they often will bring a photo to the FBI Imaging Lab; the viewer doesn't want to spend 45 minutes watching the technician line up the right region of the image and trying a few hundred filters on it to extract a good image; they bring in the photo, give the guy a few directions on where to look, and bingo, a clear zoom of a poorly developed area of the photo. On the other hand, in Wargames, when Joshua was trying to crack the code to launch the missles, it took a long time as it solved the problem digit by digit; nevermind that any code that you can solve that way is inherently weak; the ticking down of the digits were used to build the suspense, the climax of the movie just wouldn't have worked if Joshua used standard cryptographic procedures on a strong code.
The fourth is capability. Look at Max Headroom; they managed to encode an entire human personality, including emotions, into a (presumably digital) computer. If they have that level of computing power, they surely would be able to do other magnificent things with computers, but they generally can't.
Basically, computer use in movies has been (IMHO) steadily improving, but they will never be perfect. Most movies, even by the most knowlegable moviemakers, will run into a point where they have to decide between art and reality. I don't think I need to tell you that art generally wins, and for a very good reason, it's just more entertaining that way.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Few enough people understand enough about computing to truly understand what coding is. My mother still thinks I'm BS-ing her when I say I'm coding. Unlike the work she's seen done in visual basic (gag), I do my work in C, with editor du jour: Vi. She refuses to beleive I do work.
This is the sort of mentality is what movies have to appeal to. It's amazing how slowly people believe a dull truth, but how quick they are to take to a flashy generalization or outright lie.
Movies like Hackers and The Matrix are direct results of this. Hackers was a failure, because it was so generic that it lacked any informaition.
At least The Matrix had spirit, it had style, it made the admission that computer code is pretty much incomprehensible to people who don't know it. That much was ok.
I suppose we'll see more lousy movies in the future. Grit your teeth and educate.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
perl -e "print join q( ), split(q.z.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
personally, i think the general problem of misportrayl of geekdom in movies, while worse than most misportrayls, is part of a general underlying problem in hollywood moviemaking
;P) and i thought that was just absolutely PERFECT...it redeemed the entire movie for me...until she gets up and starts playing with a bird and the camera pans around to shoot her standing directly in front of the statue in the same damn pose as the statue. i very nearly threw up at that point. i don't understand hollywood's fascination with taking excellent moviemaking (that last scene up until the bit with the bird) and completely removing all the subtle emotive hints that make movies great and replacing it all with some moronic overblown in-your-face explanation of things that immediately sucks any and all life out of the movie.
;)
the problem, simply, is that they do not have a clue how to make a decent movie.
don't misread that. their technical knowledge is unparalelled and their ability to shoot and edit "correctly" is better than people generally can understand. my argument is with the general "feel" behind the movies they make. much like the train wreck that the latest star wars installment turned out to be, 99% of hollywood's movies are overly formulaic (sp?), dumbed-down (think jar-jar), and generally devoid of any kind of creative, emotional, or intellectual content.
a good example of this idiocy is the recent release "Stigmata". before i begin to lace into it, i'd like to state that i LOVED the idea behind the movie and i tend to enjoy the work of both patricia arquette and gabriel byrne. that having been said...there is a generic trick put into all horror movies that's fairly obligatory. you take the score, the dialogue, and all the incidental sound and slowly turn it down lower until there's barely any sound at all...and when the audience's ears have become used to the low volume make a REAL LOUD NOISE and everyone goes ACK! while this practice is, like i said, fairly obligatory...i do belive every horror movie should have at least one of these...stigmata had three of 'em and it got a little tired after the first one. a movie that had this much potential ingrained in the story and plot shouldn't have to resort to standard sophomoric moviemaking tricks to get a response from its audience.
another example, from the same movie, is the way they put together the references to st. francis. i believe he was first mentioned in the movie during the conversation in the church between gabriel byrne and the priest who had been excommunicated (i forget the character's name) then, at the end...when byrne brings patricia arquette out of the house wrapped in the blanket, they pass by a statue of st. francis which sits unobtrusively in the background (the statue of the guy with the birds, as st. francis is usually portrayed...we had a statue of him in front of the chapel of the college i went to
this is the same general problem that geeks have, only we're the only ones who know about it because nobody else picks up on it. how many of you who saw the movie knew that the statue was st. francis? it's the same general deal with geek stuff. what percentage of the population would know a unix shell prompt from a mac gui? while this annoys me...i would rather see hackers working on old unix or vax boxen (with real damn unix or vax interfaces, none of this gui crap) it probably won't happen anytime soon. what i'm really sick over is the rest of the problem...the utter lack of imagination, talent, and creativity in the moviemaking industry.
don't take this to be a complete generalization...there are quite a few movies that are absolutely perfect, but, for me, they are generally few and far between....most of the other stuff i can put up with as long as it doesn't really attempt to be creative, i can live with it being a stale rehash of some formula. movies like "12 angry men" which takes place entirely in the jury deliberation room during a trial, or any/all movies made by stanley kubrik or alfred hichcock who both knew exactly what to do, and more importantly, what NOT to do in a movie...these movies, in their perfection, are able to get their metaphors and subject matter across to the audience without beating them over the head with it, a practice which seems to be the recourse of every halfwitted hollywood director/producer/writer/marketing agent active in the movie industry today.
any spelling errors in the above are also the fault of the moviemaking industry, i swear...
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.