Internet on film: A kludgy relationship

The most dated aspect of “The Net,” the 1995 thriller in which freelance software engineer Sandra Bullock’s entire life is erased by malicious corporate hackers, is not the dial-up accounts, or the floppy discs sent via Fed-Ex, or the almost nostalgia-inducing TCP/IP status windows which tell us: “Router engaged... Establishing link... Connecting... DONE.” No, the most dated aspect is a verb. Trying to fathom how the bad guys discovered such personal information about her — favorite foods and movies and men — Angela Bennett (Bullock) suddenly has an epiphany. “They must have watched it on the Internet!” she cries.

Watched it on the Internet? As if the Internet were the new TV. “What are you doing tonight, honey?” “Oh, I think I’m just gonna stay home and watch some Internet.”

Press control/shift
“The Net” was one of two films that year which directly exploited the growing interest in and fear of this relatively new communications system — which means Hollywood became fascinated with the Internet about the same time Bill Gates did. Not bad.

New technologies generally provoke fear — everyone’s got a bit of a Luddite in them, and most of us assume that what we grew up on should be good enough for anyone — and the Internet, a publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks, couldn’t help but provoke fear and fascination. It’s a small step from “Wow, you mean I can be connected to anyone?” (think: Madonna) to “Crap, you mean anyone can be connected to me?” (think: Jeffrey Dahmer).

But “The Net” didn’t exploit this fear so much as a general fear of computers. If all of our information is on computers, its logic went, then that information can be erased, and thus our lives can be erased, just as Angela’s mom’s life has been erased by Alzheimer’s. The Internet simply made it easier to gain access to these computers. Of course the evil corporate forces could only do what they do because no one knows Angela. She’s a computer shut-in, and that may be the film’s greater fear: that even if we’re as attractive as Sandra Bullock, we’ll wind up lonely and dateless and waste our time in chatrooms with Iceman and Gandalf and Cyberbob, who chant, in homage to Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” that Angela is “One of us... one of us...”

This is the true terror the film exploits. The Internet? You get floppy discs in the mail which take you to Web pages which, if you click on a Pi icon while control/shifting, will make everything go haywire and on its own take you to top secret Web sites. Yeah, you don’t navigate there; you just kind of wind up there. Why be scared of the Internet? It’s a magical, magical fairyland.

Waka waka
The first time the New York Times used “Internet” in its modern usage was on Nov. 5, 1988, in an article about Robert T. Morris, Jr., the son of an N.S.A. computer security expert, who released a replicating program in the Department of Defense’s Arpanet that eventually infected 6,000 computers “or 10 percent of the systems linked through an international group of communications networks, the Internet.” Although Morris was a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student at the time (and is now a professor at M.I.T.), he became the inspiration for Dade Murphy, the 11-year-old Seattle boy who, going by the online moniker “Zero Cool,” crashes 1,507 computers nationwide in the beginning of 1995’s other big Internet movie, “Hackers.”

“Hackers” and “The Net” may have come out the same year but they are at opposite ends of the fear spectrum. The Internet doesn’t isolate us in “Hackers”; it brings us together into groups of elite geeks who hang in hip cyberclubs and play giant video games while rollerskating to a throbbing techno beat. Not sure which vision is scarier.

There are two kinds of hackers in this world: the adult kind, represented by “The Plague” (Fisher Stevens), who tries to dump oil tankers in the ocean to cover up his embezzlement schemes; and the youthful kind, represented by “Zero Cool/Crash Override” (Jonny Lee Miller) and “Acid Burn” (Angelina Jolie, sporting a Vulcan haircut), who prevent the oil tankers from spilling in the ocean. Sure, the youthful kind may play online pranks; but even when Crash Override hacks into a local TV network, he simply removes a Rush Limbaugh-like fascist from the airwaves and replaces him with a classic episode of “The Outer Limits.”

Of the two films, the high-tech language in “Hackers” is probably more accurate, but this merely demonstrates the problem of accuracy in computer movies. At one point the boys crash Acid Burn’s room and they’re all over her computer. “Check it out, guys!” one cries. “It’s insanely great. It’s got a 28.8 kbps modem!” Yesterday’s elite hardware is today’s Smithsonian artifact.

During the final hacker showdown, of course, all nods towards accuracy are lost in favor of gee-whiz graphics (an eyepatch-wearing Pac-Man) and layman’s language (“I’ll head ‘em off at the pass!”). I’ve never launched a virus personally but according to this you just access the “Virus Launch Panel” on your computer — with LAUNCH, INFECT and GROW options — and wait for Pirate Pac-Man to start eating someone else’s computer data. Waka waka. Waka waka. Yep: a magical, magical fairyland.

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