Taken for Granted

Last night I saw a rerun of the movie Sneakers, from 1992, with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley and several other well-known actors.   It reminded me that Hollywood is amusing whenever it  uses advanced technology as an incidental device, but it is even more amusing when the movie’s main focus is technology developers.

Almost all these movies feature a “MacGuffin“, a term popularised by Alfred Hitchcock and defined by Wikipedia as

a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.

(this definition itself quoted from “Wordnet 3.0″ from Princeton University).

One of the more famous MacGuffins in film being the statue in The Maltese Falcon.

In movies focused on tech or technology development, the MacGuffin is usually a magic box (hardware + software) or very commonly a magic piece of software, that can do totally amazing things, such as decrypt all known encryption schemes, allow you to take over any computer system anywhere, display computer-based systems on ordinary terminals with graphics better than anything in the real world – all with fewer keystrokes than it usually takes to login in the morning.   Sneakers had a magic  box; Disclosure had a virtual reality based three dimensional filing system like no filing cabinet you have ever seen; and The Net had a program that can edit every online bit of information about anyone and thus destroy them (this is a very common tech device).

These magic programmes that allow one to assume powers and abilities far beyond the capabilites of normal men and women also feature in thrillers such as The Italian Job remake (2003), where a few keystrokes gives the minor “tech” character complete control over the entire Los Angeles traffic system, and many others.

What else do we learn from Hollywood and its depiction of technology?

• From Sneakers, old hackers grow up to be Robert Redford (good) or Ben Kingsley (bad)
• From Disclosure, all engineering managers are Michael Douglas, and all executives are Demi Moore
• From movies as old as 2001, Colossus:  The Forbin Project, War Games, through the Terminator movies,  the Matrix series, and recently Eagle Eye:  Any computer that is sufficiently advanced will become self-aware (or very confused), and either want to destroy all humans or take them over for its own purposes
• From 2001′s Antitrust, there is a large monopolising software company set in “Portland” (viz, rainy northwestern US city), run by a gatesian CEO played by Tim Robbins, with a ballmerian executive, that (of course) will murder you if your MacGuffin is better than their MacGuffin – especially if you plan to make it available for free.

What are your favourite tech-related movies?  What lessons do they teach the world about technology?