Again, the focus is that records can easily be changed, or in the case of this movie, mimicked, to certain ends.
The black box has a similar power to malicious code in The Net. Redford’s character is basically a hacker, as was his friend Cosmo (who is the film’s villain) who was arrested and thrown into prison for computer crimes.
In the process, a team tries to steal the box back and one of the characters purchases blueprints from the county recorders office for $50.00, leading the movie to be cited as an example of “ the use and portrayal of records in film.” With the information from the county recorder’s office, and their own observations, they are able to break-in to the company of the villain and get the box, but before it is handed to the NSA of the characters removes the main processing chip.
The film focuses around attempts to create a black box which would crack American codes, allowing access to any American security system. There were some similar themes in the 1992 film, Sneakers, which starred Robert Redford. They put her on your computer with my thumbprint. They’ve done it to me, and they’re gonna do it to you…I’m not Ruth Marx. And there’s this little electronic shadow on each of us… just begging for somebody to screw with. Your DMV records, your Social Security… your credit cards, your medical history. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. They knew that nobody would care and it wouldn’t matter.” Later she adds to the inept court-appointed lawyer, who believes in the inviolability of the records in that they cannot be tampered with, to defend her from false charges:
At one point, she says that “our whole lives are on the computer, and they knew that I could be vanished. The partially inept villains are even able to kill a few people, like the Undersecretary of Defense by falsifying a report saying he has AIDS and a friend of Bullock’s character. Clearly there are inept secondary characters (police officers, nurses, and jailers), many of whom, like sole archivist Madame Nu in Attack of the Clones think that records are inviolable and cannot be changed. With this, the movie is a bit of warning that it is very easy for someone to be digitally erased with so much of our lives online, with which you don’t even have to spoil the ending. As she is about to go back into the country, after a record was changed that checked her out of the hotel, she is told to sign a temporary visa document which states that her name is Ruth Marx.Īs the movie goes from here, she realizes that her identity has been stolen by an imposter, with the change of records by the villains who want to make profits off their security technology and gain access to every system possible. She wakes up three days later in a hospital and the disk has been destroyed. This plan fails, however, as she realizes, after literally sleeping with him for some reason, that he wants to kill her, so she gets away in a dingy that crashes on rocks, knocking her unconscious. That all changes when she takes a trip to Cessna (before which there is a computer malfunction which screws with flights), Mexico, meets a man who basically seduces her in order to get control of a virus which is on a floppy disk, of all things.
In this film, Sandra Bullock plays an isolated middle-age White woman (Angela Bassett) who is a “program systems analyst from Los Angeles” who lives most of her life online, talking on chat rooms and ordering pizza. Let’s start with The Net, since it was the first of these films that I watched, computer with bulky hand-held phones and dial-up computers.
All of these films share a similar theme: the erasure and change of records (mostly digital), which has an increased relevance as archival institutions continue to digitize more and more of their records, although not everything, as I noted in my post about challenges of archival digitization in late April. In the past week, I’ve watched a number of 1990s Hollywood films, such as Sneakers (1992), Hackers (1995), The Net (1995), and My Fellow Americans (1996), where the “everything’s on the computer” state of records, as stated in passing in The Andromeda Strain (1971), has been reached. Gif of one of the scenes from Hackers (1995)