Geek entrepreneurs are everywhere in cinema from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to thrillers and biopics. Whether we’re talking Tony Stark or Steve Jobs, these people are usually depicted as heroes. They may be flawed, but the bottom line is that we need them to save us and to make our lives better. As we recently argued, such characters fuse the technological genius and suffering of geekiness with the disruption and innovation of entrepreneurialism. It is the version of masculinity embodied by geek entrepreneurs that today legitimates both male domination and capitalism. But despite this pivotal position, contemporary cinema also contains a few wildly unheroic geek entrepreneurs who use their powers for evil. In this post, Heather Mendick highlights four examples and discusses why they matter.
Liking the idea of a Top Five List, I wanted to call this post, “My top five cinematic evil geek entrepreneurs”. But unfortunately I could only come up with four examples. Before I get to them, one honourable mention and qualification. Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer character in Iron Man 2 is a rival to Tony Stark as another arms manufacturer CEO. He’s a great bad guy and my favourite thing in the Iron Man movies but there are two reasons that I haven’t included him in this list. First, the film’s real villain is the man behind Hammer. Actor Rockwell plays Hammer for laughs rather than portraying him as evil – though he is, like all good capitalists, utterly amoral. Second, the main tech entrepreneur in the film is obviously Tony Stark who saves us all with his genius and bravery. In the examples that follow (there will be SPOILERS) there’s no heroic figure like Stark to redeem the geek entrepreneurs. They are pure pathology.
In fourth place and perhaps the most unequivocally evil geek entrepreneur is Adrian Griffin from the 2020 thriller The Invisible Man. In this film, Griffin, an optics billionaire, whose wife, Cecilia, escapes their abusive relationship, fakes his own suicide in order to continue his campaign of harassment, abuse and violence against her. Being a geek entrepreneur, Adrian has both the money and the tech he needs to do this. He pursues Cecilia in an invisibility suit that he’s invented and murders her sister while attempting to kill others who are close to her, all to get her back and driven by a desire to control Cecilia and everyone else.
Next up, in this countdown of sociopaths, is Peter Isherwell (above), the billionaire CEO of the fictitious tech company BASH in the 2021 satire Don’t Look Up. Isherwell is not the only geek in this film but he is the only geek entrepreneur. Mark Rylance plays him as “the eccentric and shiny white-toothed Musk-Zuckerberg-Jobs-Bezos-esque billionaire tech savior”. While Griffin is driven by a pathological desire to control his wife, Isherwell is driven by greed. While Griffin kills one person, Isherwell’s actions destroy the whole planet. When he discovers that a comet that is scheduled to hit Earth is made up of rare and valuable materials, Isherwood uses the political influence he’s bought to abort the mission to destroy the comet. When he fails to disarm the comet and mine it for profit, almost the entirety of life on our planet is destroyed. Isherwell is one of a few who escape Earth before the collision and so he gets the happiest ending of any of the CEOs in this post.
Moving away from global devastation, we have runner up Nathan Bateman in 2014’s Ex Machina. This is the most nuanced portrayal of an evil geek entrepreneur. Bateman is the reclusive CEO of Blue Book which is, according to the film, “the world’s most popular internet search engine, processing an average of 94% of all internet search requests”. He lives in a high-tech home, alone apart from a series of increasingly-sophisticated AI women he’s created. He created them by stealing all of our private data. Bateman embraces the idea that his creation of artificial intelligence makes him not a man but a god. Like Adrian Griffin, he relishes the control he has over women, in his case those he codes into life. In a chilling scene that visually references the wife-killer fairytale BlueBeard, Bateman’s house guest Caleb discovers a room where the cupboards are filled with female AI corpses. Ultimately, Bateman’s most advanced AI escapes his control, as Cecilia escapes Griffin’s, and she kills him in her quest for autonomy.
Finally, my favourite geek entrepreneur is Steve Lift (above) from that rarest of film genres, the dystopian communist comedy, 2018’s Sorry to Bother You. Steve Lift is the pleasure-seeking, arrogant CEO of WorryFree Incorporated, a corporation that preys on poor people by offering accommodation and subsistence to workers in return for signing a lifetime contract to do unpaid labour. Not content with reintroducing slavery, Lift secretly drugs his workers to create human-horse hybrids or equisapiens who are stronger and faster than humans. His undoing follows from his attempt to recruit the film’s central character Cassius Green to go undercover among the equisapiens as a fake Martin Luther King figure. Instead Cassius helps kickstart a cross-species grassroots workers’ revolution. While not dead at the end of the film, Lift’s demise looks imminent.
So, having reached the end of this modest countdown. Why should we care about enlarging this small collection of evil entrepreneurs?
Thomas Frank in his book One Market Under God explores the contradictions of “market populism” which “decries ‘elitism’ while transforming CEOs as a class into one of the wealthiest elites of all time. It deplores hierarchy while making the corporation the most powerful institution on earth. It hails the empowerment of the individual and yet regards those who use that power to challenge markets as robotic stooges.” Market populism relies on an image of geek entrepreneurs as just like us: the CEO-next-door. Moving from market populism to a democratic politics relies on us recognising them as villains.
Mark Rylance, reflecting on the research he did for his role as Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up, said of geek entrepreneurs: “These people have very high-minded ideas about what they’re doing. They don’t think they’re bad people, quite the contrary. You get that impression from Elon Musk. They think they’re going to save humanity. I think they’re dangerous.” Most films support the self image of Musk et al as saviours. These films are “billionaire propaganda” in which the obscenely wealthy replace governments providing not just funding for healthcare, development, education and even military interventions but the policies that direct these.
Given the power that geek entrepreneurs have and the dangers they pose, we need more characters that disrupt that image. I encourage you to watch these four films and decide how far they manage to do that.