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...

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

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.