The first phase of our research looks at geeks and technology in cinema. We naively expected to be focusing on films mixing creative, entrepreneurial and illicit uses of computers and related tech. But the most common technologies in the movies are lethal weapons. In this post Heather asks why that is and what it’s doing to us.
Hacked off?
Computers can often be viewed in the background of scenes. Films like action horror The First Purge and scifi comedy Men in Black use glossy computers to convey a sense of state-of-the-art high tech and of important and scientific stuff happening. Even the thrillers The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Ex Machina, where computers are central to the narrative, only include fleeting moments of people hacking and coding. By contrast, in all these films, the camera lingers on violent uses of technology with often elaborate weapons and associated surveillance devices from bugs and CCTV to homemade drones.
A superficially obvious explanation for why we see so little coding action on the big screen is that watching people doing stuff on computers is boring. However, the clip above from The Social Network centres on Mark Zuckerberg sat at a computer creating the prototype for Facebook and explaining how he’s doing it. His voiceover establishes him as the central character and the intercutting connects the online and offline worlds. It shows how visually compelling computing can be. We also see this across the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as in the extract below from Iron Man 2. Speaking replaces typing and the workshop replaces the computer screen. In both films, dialogue opens up the programming process to us as viewers.
So computing doesn’t have to be dull, uncinematic or excluding. The idea that it is, like the idea that mathematics and science are, is a product of the society in which we live. So too is the idea that military technologies are thrilling, cinematic and popular. Part of the purpose of research like ours should be to question the assumed natural desire to watch violence rather than discovery, to ask how has this come about and what are its effects?
Gun crazy?
In 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the US about the growing influence of the military industrial complex. He pointed to how governments and the arm companies that supply them have developed an intimate relationship so that decisions to go to war are increasingly made in the interests of corporations and their drive for profits rather than of the people they represent and broader humanitarian concerns.
By analogy, I use the phrase the military cinematic complex to describe the inter-relations of government security services and the entertainment industry. Matthew Alford in his book Reel Power tracks how Hollywood movies present the US as a benevolent global actor motivated by compassion and justice. When things go wrong in war films, it is down to well-intentioned mistakes or a few bad apples rather than anything systematic.
The US Defence Department has long supplied locations, equipment and consultancy for films in exchange for control over the script. Often these collaborations go further. Captain Marvel had a celebrity screening for the forces depicted in the photograph below, with a caption supplied by the military. In cinemas, as Peter Bruno describes, the film was preceded by an ad, “Every superhero has an origin story,” the narrator proclaims. The music builds and crescendos, showcasing the flying skills of all women pilots as the narrator continues, “We all got our start somewhere. For us, it was the U.S. Air Force.”
The military needs Hollywood and Hollywood needs the military.
Real life military actions are presented as media spectacles, staged like reality television programmes, something even more obvious in the age of Trump as he uses social media to threaten and celebrate US bombings and assassinations. The imagery and language of targeted strikes draws on fantasies conjured for us by superhero and war movies. For example, in the scene below, tech entrepreneur Tony Stark in his first outing as Iron Man flies into a distant war zone, uses his superhero suit to identify who is a civilian before taking out the others, destroys their weapons and flies away unharmed.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, superheroes like Iron Man are needed to do what governments cannot. Similarly in Netflix’s recent offering 6 Underground, a renegade team led by a tech entrepreneur known only as One, stage a coup in a fictional Central Asian country, Turgistan. As Jim Hunter unpacks, this gang of mercenaries act in the name of democracy but without any accountability, providing ideological support for both regime change wars and the US outsourcing of such wars to private companies like Blackwater.
As Alford concludes these films can’t be explained as simply a matter of producers responding to consumer demand. “The decisive factor is that political and corporate forces drive a wedge through the relationship between artist and audience – being concerned with neither art, nor entertainment, nor democracy.”