On Hollywood and the Portrayal of Computers

danmil asks: "After watching the disappointing Sandra Bullock vehicle 'The Net' last night, I thought to myself, 'Another damn movie with those ridiculous efforts to dramatize hacking' (and cracking, to be specific). Griping about this with my friend Chyld, we asked ourselves, 'Can a movie do a good job of making programming (and/or cracking) seem dramatic without being stupid?' Why not ask Slashdot!? I thought. And so I am." What do you all think? Is Hollywood ever going to portray computers (and the people who use them) in a light that's closer to reality? Or is our world just something that is beyond their comprehension?

"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?

Comments

Short answer: no.

[198348726583297634]

Long answer: also no. :)

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...

Other examples.

[nebby]

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 .. :)). Kyle (I think) then says "I'm going to try to bypass their security code" or something along those lines, typical Hollywood computer hacker line, and presses random keys and the huge "ACCESS DENIED" letters turn to "ACCESS GRANTED". Really funny.

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.

Metaphors and Subject Translation

[Crutcher]

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

Re:Metaphors and Subject Translation

[gad_zuki!]

Yes, it is dramatization and cinematography at work here and something completely different. Seemingly, screenwriters and directors just aren't aware of how *boring* it is to watch someone use a computer. It's like watching someone pee, to the pee-er its wonderful, to you its uninteresting.

Using my piss poor analogy you don't see many pee scenes yet you see tons of 'I'm sitting in front of my powermac scenes.' Literary-type devices are developed to make it work, like the programmer who talks to herself or a big countdown in the background till detonation/end of the world/widget-tension-builder. These are very condescending, and I'm sure non-technical people feel its cheesy too. "Hey my windows98 doesn't do that!"

The solution is to quit producing scenes watching someone use a computer for dramatic effect. Have the user in the background or off to the side and leave other characters talking about what she is doing, play with time lapse, and let computer use be assumed i.e. "I downloaded the virus last night when the movie was showing you getting away from the terrorists!" They are about as exciting and dramatic as a wrench, to the non-initiated. Thats why movies like Hackers are doomed to look cheesy. Computers only really look cool in alternate-type realities and in the future. Tron tries to play on both ordinary and extraordinary and does really well in one and really bad in another - you can guess which is which.

Wargames cleverly uses videogames and voice-synthesizing to make its computer fun and easy to comprehend. Take tick-tac-toe, global nuclear warfare and a creepy robot voice and you got yourself a great digital villian. Two points for using a war-dialer and one more point for not making it a dramatic element. Now compare this movie to the ridiculous computer scenes of Weird Science.

The problem isn't technical expertise vs. the lowest common denominator as much as failing at proper storytelling. Now that computers are 'mainstream-hip,' expect more of this from lackluster writers and directors.

Not that any of this is new, car chases and crashes still look bad, you can almost see where the wire is connected to the car to pull it away right after the collision and this is after almost 100 years of cars in cinema.

Who cares?

[Weramona]

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.

FreeLSD

[Joseph Vigneau]

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.

A buddy of mine coined this interface (as seen in Hackers ) "FreeLSD"... :^)

Right On! But can we keep pandering to audiences?

[Paradox]

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!!!
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