The first strand of our research uses films as a window into contemporary geekdom. We started by watching lots of movies that feature technology to get an overview of their characters, images and storylines. Now we have to focus on just six to analyse in painstaking detail. In this post, Heather Mendick who is leading on this research strand discusses how she selected what to watch and how we’re narrowing the long-list down to just six films.
Creating a geek film archive
In creating a geek film archive, I’ve watched 70 films that cover a range of technologies – from AI to outer-space, from medicine to coding, and of course many featuring military technologies and transport – mostly planes and fast cars but also a surprising amount of time travel.
To keep things doable, I decided to concentrate on films released between 2009 and 2019 but I’ve included key examples from before that like The Matrix trilogy, 1984’s original Ghostbusters and 1995’s Hackers. I’m also trying to keep up with any new releases that seem relevant.
I’ve focused on mainstream US films which have a global reach but included some arthouse and indie hits like communist comedy Sorry To Bother You and some from other parts of the world like quirky Icelandic climate crisis drama Woman at War. A lot of mainstream films feature stereotypical geeks and hackers but we’re more interested in the emergent figure of the tech entrepreneur and in black and female technologists who go against the norm. So that’s guided our choices.
I’ve tried to be systematic by identifying key films, characters and trends but inevitably there’s a lot of serendipity at play. So sometimes I watch things because of recommendations from friends and colleagues or because of what I discover while browsing Netflix UK. And sometimes I’ve added films to my archive that I just happened to see at the cinema which I didn’t anticipate being relevant. For example, I went to see the The Invisible Man because I enjoy thrillers and was surprised to encounter a billionaire genius tech entrepreneur who fakes his own death and uses an invisibility suit he’s invented to tyrannise his wife.
Shortlisting six films to analyse
Having watched 70 films, it’s tough to chose just six to look at in detail.
As I said, we’re especially interested in tech entrepreneurs who seem to be a new model of geek replacing the socially-awkward high school students of 80s US films such as Revenge of the Nerds. And we’re interested in black and female technologists who break the white male geek clichés.
For geek enterpreneurs, we’ve shortlisted The Social Network, which tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook, and Iron Man, which centres on a weapons tech entrepreneur turned superhero. But should we also include Ex Machina or Sorry to Bother You which feature fictional tech entrepreneurs and have more radical gender, race and class politics than the two mainstream movies?
For black and female geeks, we’ve shortlisted Black Panther and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The first is another superhero film and the only one so far in the extensive Marvel Cinematic Universe to have at its heart black male and female technologists and to include debates about the racial politics of technology. The second is a Swedish film, which is appropriate as our empirical data collection is happening in Sweden and its eponymous character is a queer hacker. But should we add Hidden Figures, Men in Black, Gravity or something else?
You can’t know in advance what spending a day or two looking in detail at a film will reveal. So it’s hard to decide which ones to choose. If you have any thoughts on what films we should be analysing or if you want to see the full list of the 70 I’ve watched so far, you can tweet us @gatekeepergeek or email us at techequitystudy@gmail.com