Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

I know I probably say this a lot but I thought this movie was the shizznit when I was a kid. Hackers!?! Are you serious? I wanted to be a hacker! I wasn’t even exactly sure what a hacker was but they looked like cool people who used computers! I wanted to simultaneously use a computer and be cool! 

Ariana Richards as Lex in Jurassic Park proclaimed herself as a hacker but even as a kid I could tell she was kind of a poser and the interface on Dennis Nedry’s computer was just a bunch of movie magic.

But the people in the Hackers movie were the real thing right? RIGHT!?! I so wanted that to be right?

My dad bought a Mac when I was in middle school. I got pretty good at programming HyperCard. I couldn’t figure out how to make it take over tv stations or turn on only certain lights in a high-rise apartment building so as to spell out my cool hacker name: Lonmoor (pronounced Lawn Mower). 

Nevertheless, I decided despite my current lack of hacking prowess, when I got to high school I would be as cool as these people. Unfortunately, I was not Johnny Lee Miller nor Angelina Jolie, nor any combination of the two. At the time I counted this as a major disadvantage to myself and my coolness quotient.

Of course nowadays I understand that one’s coolness starts at 100% at birth and only diminishes with every effort to purposefully maintain or raise it above that point. Trying to be someone you’re not is always a step in the wrong direction.

Another disadvantage I had was that I was not 23 years old as a freshman. High schoolers are so old in the movies.

As an adult looking back on this film, I realize it was freaking weird and wildly inaccurate, and I have made this assessment now with what is merely common knowledge of computers and a unique knowledge of what truly makes a person cool.

This film was a cash-in on a supposed cultural phenomenon for its time, when the use and even abuse of computers was no longer solely the arena of guys in thick suits and thicker glasses, half-bald guys with huge sideburns, and neckties a foot wide at the bottom. But in the 90’s laptops only weighed about 10 pounds and you could plug into the internet at any phone booth! The future! Computers were becoming mainstream and edgy and these sensationalized edgy cool people called hackers were the underground heroes fighting the system and the narcs who ran the system. But as with most cash-in films, there were a lot of assumptions made about that culture (which probably never truly existed) and what its capabilities were at that time. In a word, the film doesn’t age well.

Primarily, it doesn’t age well because much of the depicted capabilities of the technology just wasn’t possible back then and everybody today knows it wasn’t. So we scoff. In retrospect I realize more than anything  I liked Johnny Lee Miller’s haircut and his leather jacket and I already had those when I got to high school. The whole hacker thing really didn’t turn into anything nearly as cool as this movie made it out to be.

Mr. Robot was much better and a little more knowledgeable in its subject matter I think. Now, if only I could be as cool as Rami Malek.