“What did you pick?” asks my husband, passing me a bowl of popcorn as I toss down the remote and settle back on the couch.
“You’ll see,” I say mysteriously, silently acknowledging that absolute power does, in fact, corrupt absolutely.
My husband and I tend to have somewhat dichotomous tastes in film, and thus – after fifteen years and a learning curve – we instead take turns picking which film we will watch together after the children are asleep.
It is my turn, clearly, and though it may seem cruel, I am about to be blissfully happy for the next 107 minutes.
The screen lights up with the first still; then the film commences with a slow-motion sequence of dogs and Feds, raiding a house.
“What IS this?” he asks wonderingly, probably given that my taste in film does not typically include federal agents and firearms.
“Just wait for it.”
It takes until the scene in the courtroom for it to click for him, and then he groans theatrically.
“Oh, God, not this AGAIN!”
“Oh, yes,” I reply. “Hackers.”
###
It’s a rite of passage, I think, discovering Hackers. For me, it was my freshman year of college; it was in the basement apartment of someone special; and it included a completely unrelated descent into more BDSM than I had thought to anticipate. While that is a different story for a different day, it remains the fact that I now have strange and significant and scintillating sense memories associated with Johnny Lee Miller and Angelica Jolie as high school students, aching to bone and saving the world. And that, if you ask me, is exactly the tone for which this film was going.
There is a lot to love about Hackers.
First of all, it’s a redemption story. Zero Cool/Crash Override suffers forced digital abstinence for an entire decade before ascending like a phoenix to reclaim the terrain, battle the villain, and even ride off with the girl into the sunset at the end. He was sullied, marked as a federal criminal; he was an “other.” And, as all “others” intimately understand, there is no greater feeling of absolution than rising above everything that has always struggled to drag you back down.
Then there is the fact that the most beautiful human being on the planet is the female lead. Acid Burn is not just the love object, however; she is not just set dressing for the boys club that is “hacking” (the actual existence of “hacking” anywhere in this movie to be addressed in due course). She is an empowered, fierce, independent, formidable character, her gender identity be damned; she is probably the coolest portrayal of a computer nerd that has ever even dared to exist, and that’s part of the draw of Hackers as well.
And of course, there is the ragtag bunch of ruffians standing by by our heroes’ sides, filling Jungian archetypes in this fantastic landscape wherein computers seem to be magic. It is an ensemble that is greater than the sum of its parts, and it adds a degree of humanity to these beautifully-flawed characters and their adorable malarkey.
Plus…Penn Jillette. Full stop.
Need I say more?
###
“That’s not,” says my husband through gritted teeth, “what a computer does.”
He says this at the exact same point in the film, every time; and, in our fifteen years of marriage, we’ve certainly seen it more than once.
“I know,” I say soothingly. “But, look, isn’t the next part just great?”
Lights are shooting around as the innards of computers flash by on the screen, and I know the IT-savvy hemisphere of his brain is raising objections. But I am enjoying the spectacle immensely, as I do every time this movie comes on, ever since the first time and the rope and the butterflies and the bruises.
I have not completely dismissed the idea that my freshman year experience is at the root of my husband’s apparent hatred for Hackers, though he claims it is more of an ideological objection.
I say there is only one ideology with which either of us need be concerned:
HACK THE PLANET.
Nonetheless, we continue to watch, wisps of 2001 drifting through my mind, popcorn dwindling and the world growing still and the moon shining brightly outside.
“Oh my GAWD,” he comments again, after only a few minutes have passed. “Like, that’s not…this isn’t…it’s so silly that…”
I’m accustomed to his inability to finish sentences when it comes to describing the merit of Hackers, but I shush him anyway.
“Let’s just see what happens,” I suggest, as if I haven’t seen this movie dozens of times, as if I am truly concerned the Da Vinci virus is about to capsize an oil tanker.
“This is not,” he responds, “how the Internet works.”
###
What is even more fascinating to me, however, is the dialectic Hackers achieves between anachronism and trend, between excess and balance. In trying so hard to seem cutting-edge, it comes off as camp; in its campiness, Hackers is surprisingly authentic. That is, its cinematographic attempt to be progressive fails horribly at being progressive, inadvertently circling back around to progressiveness again.
Razor and Blade, for example, may or may not be part of the LGBTQIA+ community; they could exist at any point along the gender spectrum. They wear makeup; they are effeminate; they buck the system; they are painfully extra. You know what? Doesn’t fucking matter, one way or the other. They’re elite.
Or how about this? The supreme act of evil at the heart of this film is an attempt to create a worldwide ecological disaster; it represents the threat of advancing technology at the expense of our very delicate natural environment. Hackers offers a disturbingly-prescient foretelling of what we should have been worrying about, back when we had the chance.
The female protagonist has short hair and is still sexy AF; a single mother advocates for her son’s misunderstood genius; the smartest characters are the most diverse; the Establishment is the enemy; a creeping technological menage holds sway over all, a Sword of Damocles made from ones and zeroes. Though it was made in 1995, it echoes universal themes which are immediately understood by those who have always clashed with the powers-that-be.
At the end of the day, Hackers is pure hedonism, the appeal of cotton candy and pop music and cocaine-fueled debauchery. It is wholly entertaining, soothing in its portrayal of communal lived experience, satisfying in its victory arc. This movie hits a nerve, triggering something instinctual, a reflex deep within the limbic system that makes us – even as we recognize the absurdity of the subject matter – hope for a happy ending. After all, resistance has always tapped into something fundamental, something unique to higher consciousness and complex societies; and the stories of that resistance compel us to listen like few other tales are able to do.
###
Of course, let it not be said Hackers has no room for improvement. There are certainly some things to be said in gentle critique of this masterpiece; I am not blinded by my fondness of teenage rebellion and a good rumspringa enough to claim otherwise. The plot, for example, might have a few tiny holes; the subject material immediately dates itself. Such insignificant details as the writing, the direction, the costuming, the lighting, the score, and the performances could be a mite stronger, and I’m still not entirely convinced that “hacking” looks….well, anything like anything in this film at all.
Nonetheless, none of that is the point. The point is that Hackers, in falling back on a well-loved trope of the gang of young misfits challenging the status quo, did much more; it built a universe. It built a fictional Manhattan where viruses are literal 8-bit bugs that move like Pac-Man and thwart human intelligence. It set the stage for an epic battle, a meritocracy where evil is obvious and there is no question which is the side of Good. Hackers drafted a world in which all the “others” are able to flourish, and for all the “others” watching this film, that is no small thing, because representation matters.
And in Hackers, despite its many…many…cinematic flaws, we have something deliciously unique: A coming-of-age film in the magic realm of the future, a fantastic and awe-inspiring world waiting just out of reach, rife with possibility, rife with danger. And it is the youth leading the way.
Eerily insightful, if you ask me.
###
“Thank God,” comments my husband as the credits begin to roll. “That was painful.”
I smile, maxed out on hacking and hormones and high school shenanigans, and reach over to squeeze his hand.
“Your turn next,” I remind him, mentally preparing for Marvel or Mel Brooks or something George Lucas once dreamed up that was later butchered in the wrong hands.
“I know,” he responds, and we ascend the stairs to check the children and turn off the lights and prepare for sleep.
But as I begin to drift off, the part of me that delights in schadenfreude cannot help but speak up one last time.
“Penn Jillette says that’s EXACTLY how the Internet works.”
Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is the author of “Pray for Us Sinners,” a collection of fiction from Alien Buddha Press, and “More.”, a poetry collection by Wild Pressed Books. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Collective Realms, and elsewhere. Follow Shannon at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre.