Film Notes: Hackers

Come see Hackers on 35mm(!) with us this Friday at the Paramount Theatre. Tickets here.

Beneath the steaming, wet city streets pulses an invisible force. It jettisons through the ether like electricity, thumping and throbbing in a synesthetic kaleidoscope of strobe lights and house music, altering consciousness and setting off sexual awakening. Those who can harness it hold in their hands powers infinite and unknown. Power to reshape society as we know it and wreak chaos on the physical world.

Behold! The internet! The great democratizer, the revolutionary fuse ready to be lit, the calling to the masses to wake up from their slumber and seize not only the means of production, but the vast vaults of human knowledge and redistribute them so that all can be truly free.

If only. But in 1995, when the internet was still in its infancy, it certainly seemed like a possibility. It would be years before corporations mined the landscape and achieved complete commercial penetration into every intimate breath of daily existence. Given how inversely things turned out, it makes sense that Hackers is often remembered for how it got the internet wrong. In hindsight, it is naive, almost sweet.

The film portrays cyberspace as a wild west, uncolonized and full of possibility. It is in the spirit of the Hacker Manifesto, written in 1986, which screenwriter Rafael Moreu references multiple times in the script. “We explore... we seek after knowledge… we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us… and yet we’re the criminals.” Such are the ideals of the band of cyberpunk teens at the center of the film.

Hackers opens with the trial of Dade Murphy, a hacking prodigy who crashed 1,500 computer systems and felled the New York Stock Exchange at age 11. He is forbidden by the court from using computers (and touch tone telephones) until his 18th birthday, which is when the story picks up. Recently relocated to New York, he is legally unleashed on the web, but also on the big city and a new school full of attractive teens, notably Angelina Jolie (in her first major film role). He quickly falls in with the local cyberpunk cohort and a sexually charged coding rivalry with Jolie ensues. Their exploits mostly involve benign pranks and one upmanship until the crew’s youngest member happens upon the supercomputer of a nefarious oil company and they become tangled in its plot to siphon cash and cause an ecological disaster as a diversion and must unite to use their talents for good to thwart it.

The average American’s understanding of the internet was pretty foggy in 1995, and anxiety around the mystery of its trajectory spawned a spate of techno thrillers, including The Net, Johnny Mnemonic, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days. None of these films were particularly well received, and only The Net was a box office hit. Hackers was dismissed by critics as having an uninspired plot, inaccurate portrayals of technology, and over the top acting. It was written off in cultural memory as a joke.

But the things that Hackers got panned for are all the things for which it’s worth remembering. Its portrayal of tech is a mix of well researched and completely ridiculous. The scope of the hacks is actually quite realistic, but far more indelible is the way the film constructs the internet as a physical place. That there are human security guards who monitor the internet in a room where strings of code fly around holographic columns of data in a space which must be physically surfed in order to retrieve them. Navigating folders and files in the film feels like searching through rooms of houses. The computer graphics are on par with what was possible in 1995, but the manner and situations in which they appear make little sense. But this is all a function of a fundamental problem of a visual art. Realistic computing is not terribly compelling to watch. Call it egregious artistic license, call it farcical, but don’t get hung up on it; it’s better than watching someone typing alone in a room. It’s fine that the reflections from the computer screens don’t exactly comport with the physical properties of light. Occasionally the laws of physics can be disregarded for the sake of a good visual.

What is confounding in retrospect is that anyone took Hackers so seriously in the first place. Enjoying the film is predicated on a little bit of abandon, and there’s a lot of fun to be had. The ‘90s club kid techno fashion is fabulous. The gang’s cyberpunk after-school hangout is completely fantastical. The performances are outlandish, particularly from Matthew Lillard and Fisher Stevens, but Lorraine Bracco also delivers self-aware camp. And the film fully shifts genres twice, turning into a neo noir about halfway through and then morphing into a heist caper in the third act. That the kids’ primary mode of transport is rollerblading tracks with the era, but to have the middle-aged villain use a skateboard to traverse a medium-sized room suggests that everyone is in on the joke. Oh, and there’s also some of the most conspicuous and ironic product placement in cinematic memory. One scene about the evils of capitalism ends as a McDonald’s commercial. It’s no wonder Hackers has been revitalized as a cult hit.