animal liberation - film - 2011 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt

Twentieth Century Fox

2011

105 min

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably among the top movies of the last two years and it is undoubtedly better than all of the nominees for Best Picture for 2011,along with The Muppets. It was certainly better than The Artist. The film provides the backstory to the “classic” sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes which Rise also far outshines. It is essentially a story of animal evolution propelled by human technology, resulting in armed revolution by animals against humans.

The story begins with a research scientist who conducts studies on chimpanzees pertaining to an alzheimer's treatment that may not only restore the subject’s brain functioning but even increase intelligence. This scientist has an ailing father whose suffering drives his son’s urgency to achieve success in his research.  One of the first successful test subjects, a chimp called Bright Eyes by the research team, goes on a rampage in defense of her infant son, and is killed right at the moment when the scientist is presenting his research to a corporate board meeting. The scientist then takes care of the infant chimpanzee, whom he names Caesar, and subsequently realizes that this young ape had inherited the superior intelligence of his mother.

The scientist administers the chimp-tested treatments to his father, whose condition improves. The father, Cesaer’s adoptive grandfather, shows the most emotion and concern for Caesar, and his quality of life, out of all of the film’s human characters. The elder man and the young ape experience their life changes at the same time, and at the moment when the grandfather relapses into alzheimers, Caesar is put into an ape refuge, a moment that comes after Caesar had defended his elder from a bullying neighbor. The moment of the grandfather’s death is also the moment where Caesar becomes that refuge’s alpha male.  This kind of pattern is interesting as it also charts the rise of the ape - as, of course, Caesar inevitably becomes a leader of an ape uprising, first against their refuge handlers, and then against law enforcement - against the decline of man, who, by film’s end, die out as a virus that the apes are resistant to spreads across the world along international flightpaths.  

Earlier in this post I referred to The Artist, and I think it is important to note that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is just one example of a movie that effectively carries the silent film, in part, into the present era. Rather than being some corny pastiche of 1920s era Hollywood, Rise shows the animals behave in often intensely expressive ways without verbally communicating. The emotions and meanings expressed by the apes are clearly conveyed by facial and bodily gestures, and the actions of the apes are clear as well. Whole tracts of the film are gripping in their portrayal of animal suffering without any words being exchanged or even human characters present to speak on their behalf.  

The uprising of the ape’s is a great scene. First, it includes aspects of revolutionary activity which are often neglected in other representations. For example, the apes have a symbol for their movement, the design of the windowframe from the attic of the scientist’s house where Caesar grew up. There’s a whole motif of looking through windows and glass in this film that may provide the base material for a film studies student’s course paper someday! Furthermore, the apes in revolt almost immediately find a revolutionary hero-martyr in the gorilla of the refuge who hurled himself at a helicopter machine-gunner - bringing down the aircraft even though it killed him. Meanwhile, Caesar is the quintessential revolutionary leader (with strands from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces), who fearlessly fights his enemies with whatever means are at hand while unfolding brilliant strategies to defeat the San Francisco Police Department with limited manpower and weaponry. It seemed as though the apes won their fight against well armed and armoured men with few casualties and little effort. Finally, Caesar also feels intensely for his people, as shown when he cradles the body of the fallen gorilla after the battle had ended.  

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably the great film of animal liberation, imagining a fantasy of the animals liberating themselves at the same time that humanity falls, never to oppress or exploit apes again.

zines - zine - 2008 - My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930s Science Fiction Fanzines

My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930’s Science Fiction Fanzines
Christopher Todd
2008

My Time Annihilator is a zine I procured for a dollar from Microcosm Publishing distro.  This zine takes as its focus the phenomena of science fiction fanzines that were published by proto-nerds of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  These publications were perhaps one of the more immediate ancestors to the practice of zine production of the 1980s and 90s (with radical pamphlets, avant-garde art journals, and the underground press as more distant predecessors in either time or in practice).  
According to the author, Christopher Todd, the science-fiction fanzine emerged as a kind of distributed message post to enable communication between sci-fi fans about their favorite genre of literature when few fellow fans existed in their immediate environs.  

The writing in My Time Annihilator, like the writing in most zines, is far less formal and much more personal than most other forms of published material.  Christopher Todd’s opinions about his subject matter are casually expressed through the zine, letting the reader know that even though he considers sci-fi fanzines to be interesting as a broad topic, he found that the particular content of each publication was boring.  Furthermore, the zine describes Todd’s experience of conducting research into the fanzines, where he gained access to an archive of fanzines held at Temple University in Philidelphia through the using a found student ID.  Todd also gives his opinion on zines in general, and despite his efforts as a zine producer, he primarily sees the amateur publications as disposable and unworthy of widespread attention.

Todd’s zine focuses on three aspects of the fanzines, their content, formats and methods of production.  Of these aspects, content is specifically science-fiction related, which Todd describes in broad generalizations.  According to the author,  fanzines were made up of book and event reviews, letters and responses, and criticism of other fanzines.  Todd claimed to find many zines difficult to read as they developed their own linguistic forms and sets of inside jokes, thus bringing up issues of cultural capital as Todd relates these language issues to analogues found in the jargon deployed in many modern punk zines.  Todd also briefly describes methods of printing production in a pre-xerox era (1930s-1950s), including the spirit duplicator and the more popular mimeograph technologies.  Most interesting was Todd’s discussion of formatting ideas that have been lost in current self-publishing practice, such as the fanzine printed on a single postcard.

Books about zines, such as Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture do mention the science-fiction predecessor to the zine phenomena.  With that being said, Christopher Todd’s short zine about the early fanzines is the most attention that I have seen given, in print, to that material.  Todd also includes in his zine an appendix featuring a number of covers of old fanzines, and some examples of text, to give the reader some idea of the materials he discusses.  Some of his examples look as though they could be contemporary zines rather than 1930s artifacts.

beats, piracy - book - 1991 - Ghost of Chance

Ghost of Chance
William S Burroughs
Serpent’s Tail
1991
56 pages

Ghost of Chance is a short fictional work that surveys many of the ideas that Beat writer William S Burroughs was working with through the 1980s (and also through much of his career).  The core idea of Burroughs work from this era was to bring figures from outlaw history into his literary concerns of drugs, disease, language and authority.  Ghost of Chance returns to Burroughs exploration of the terrain of pirate utopias (c.f. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes by Peter Lamborn Wilson) the he first traversed in his 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night, with legendary Captain Mission returning as a primarily character in this novella.

The only textual account of Captain Mission is from A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book by Daniel DeFoe that essentially serves as a reference guide to the golden age of pirates.  According to DeFoe, via Burroughs’ afterword, Mission was one of the first pirates to establish a short-lived libertarian community.  In Ghost of Chance, Mission appears as a leader of his community, and as a man who communes with the indigenous population (and their customs) and with the animal population as well.  He cares greatly for the lemurs of Madagascar (where his community had settled) and keeps one that he called Ghost as a pet.  

The Captain Mission narrative eventually dissolves into Burroughs ruminations on Christ and a surrealist vision of bizarre disease (referred to as ‘the hairs’ in the text, a disease where hair-like organisms consume a host-body and spread to other hosts by contact), as well as devastation and incompetent authority in the contemporary period.  In some ways this book is a short glimpse into the things that concerned Burroughs around the time of writing, including a turn towards a fondness for animals that continued until the author’s death, and an interest in the environment.  The Captain Mission character is a central site for the interrelated spheres of Western anarchism, indigenous life, and the natural environment.  Mission is an embodiment of some of Murray Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology, and members of his community are expected to show respect to plant and animal life as they show respect to their fellow pirates.  The pirate captain represents the opposite of the European colonists who overrun and destroy Madagascar and its natural environment, which sets a pattern of force meeting counter-force that carries through the short book.

This book may also be a tribute to Burroughs close friend, Bryon Gysin, who died in 1986, a few years before this volume’s publication.  Burroughs and Gysin developed a number of ideas together (the cut-up, the dreammachine) that were intended to break down our perceptions of reality and by extension its apparatus of control.  Captain Mission was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of political and social organization.  Gysin, in collaboration with Burroughs, was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of language and sensory perception.  Burroughs makes a number of references to insights Gysin had through his text.  Furthermore the book is rife with black-and-white representations of uncredited abstract paintings of the kind Gysin (a painter who was, at one time, a member of the Surrealists) produced.  

abstract calligraphic work by Bryon Gysin

Ghost of Chance is probably one of Burroughs most accessible texts.  It is not fully linear, although it is also not oriented around cut-up text fragments and choped bits of narrative like many of his other novels are.  His rewriting of the Captain Mission story recalls the work Jorge Luis Borges did rewriting fragments of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York and other texts, although Burroughs pushes Mission into an extreme that extends well beyond the figure’s textual origins.  This short book may serve as an entry point into Burroughs heavier Cities of the Red Night that covers some of the same ground via Captain Mission.

survivalism - book - 1985 - The Postman

The Postman 

David Brin 

Bantam Books 

1985 

321 pages

    The Postman is an acclaimed science fiction novel that is now well known for inspiring a film adaptation that is considered one of the unloved movies of the 1990s.  The film was directed by, and starred Kevin Costner, and its notoriety as a three hour long waste-of-money is probably only exceeded by his previous film, Waterworld.  With that being said, the novel that provided the film with its source material is an interesting speculation on a post-apocalyptic America without industrial or electronic technology, that struggles to find a foundational myth upon which to rebuild.  With THAT being said, and having read the novel, I am now interested in viewing the film adaptation regardless of how bad its supposed to be.  

    David Brin, the author of The Postman,  is an astronomer and science-fiction novelist whose work is identified with an emphasis on ‘hard’ science in fiction.  He has won a number of prestigious awards for science-fiction writing, including the Hugo award and the Nebula award.  The Postman received the John W. Campbell award and the Locus Award for Science Fiction.  Brin also writes a blog wherein he comments upon the political and cultural uses of science and technology, and maintains a speaking schedule where he gives talks on such matters.

    The Postman is one of a number of science-fiction novels wherein the United States has experienced an apocalyptic collapse of their high-tech infrastructure, rather than the millennial singularity of a technological mediated Heavenly Jerusalem predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil.  Other novels that carry similar themes to Brin’s text are Hello America (1981) by JG Ballard, a post-apocalyptic parody of American culture, and the more recent World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler.  While Kunstler’s novel is primarily focused on the details of an ecological collapse and the day to day life of its survivors, Brin’s novel appears focused on survival via cultural myths.  In both Kunstler’s and Brin’s novels the characters do not know exactly what caused collapse, or what the state of the nation is, but it is presumed in both novels that former official forms of governance have been decimated and lawlessness and danger are the prevailing order.

The protagonist of Brin's novel is Gordon Krantz, a nomadic, reluctant hero. Following an ambush by bandits who took his clothes and belongings, Krantz stumbles across the skeleton of a postman in an old USPS van.  Krantz took the uniform and mailbag off of the skeleton and began posing as a postman for the Restored United States.  For Krantz, his new profession was simply a ruse he developed so that he could better survive the treacheries of long distance foot-travel and gain leverage in dealing with dangerous town officials.  Krantz skillfully escapes many dangerous situations and that, in combination with his consistent posturing as a postman, establishes him as a trickster. This role for Krantz recalls in a distant although not unconnected manner the character of Nicho, the (actual) postman who transforms into a coyote (a trickster animal), from Miguel Ángel Asturias’ novel, Men of Maize (1949).  Krantz pretends to be founding post offices in various towns across the northwestern United States and he finds that people are eager to assist his work because of their desire to believe that the United States may be restored.

The bane of existance for Krantz and everyone he meets are the ‘hypersurvivalist’ followers of an ultra-Macho philosopher named Nathan Holn.  These men are referred to as Holnists and through their devotion to Holn’s philosophy, believe that they are superior human specimens and that the conditions of the collapse will reshuffle the social order so that their natural abilities and will-to-violence will place them on top.  In The Postman, encounters with Holnists are a recurring problem, and fighting with them is the theme of the second half of the novel, however it is also clear that many communities have already driven away Holnist groups.  This representation of macho survivalists as a threat to communities is the result of fairly astute observation of actual far-right survivalist groups.  Rebecca Solnit, in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, suggests that when collapse or disaster occurs, most people consolidate community bonds and build mutual networks of support.  The converse side to this  behavior is that individualist survivalists who consider the accumulation of weapons to be rule number one for post-disaster continuity are inevitably threats to such altruistic social networks.  

The Holnists are, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect to The Postman.  They preach a perverse gospel of Übermenschianism, and to emphasize their ethos, two of their leaders are, in fact, artificially augmented as the results of a pre-collapse military experiment.  Their adherence to the text of a distant philosopher recalls the real-life survivalist-terror group, The Order.  In the early 1980s, The Order was a small group of violent white power nationalists who drew inspiration from the writings of William Luther Pierce, a former physics professor who became the leader of the white power organization, National Alliance.  The Order lived in the wilderness of the American Northwest (rural Washington in particular, and incidentally some of the filming for The Postman was done relatively close to The Order member’s homesteads) and launched attacks on sites in nearby cities.  Some statements issued by Holnists are inflected by concerns about race, although they are not explicitly racist, and there is some resemblance between the fictional survivalists and the real white nationalist cell.

Fundamentally, The Postman is about cultural myths; how they compete for dominance or possibly merge with others into a foundation for national development.  The Holnist myth was persistent but already dying before the events of the novel.  A group of women, working as assassins but posing as submissives, exploit the macho ideals of the Holnists to get close to them in order to kill them off.  Krantz reflects on how this event created a new myth, one that may pose similar dangers to that of the Holnist philosophy.  The novel thus thrives on a tension between negative cultural myths of violent destruction and inherent group superiority, and positive myths of community building and social advancement.  For much of the novel Gordon works with a group of people who maintain a myth that an artificial intelligence called ‘Cyclops’ is in command of the social order, ironically so that people do not give up on the idea of the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress.  Finally, the novel ends with Krantz reflecting on one of his postmen doing the work to perpetuate the myth of a postal system until the myth is no longer necessary.  Krantz imagines the possibility that his illusory postal system will become real, and in becoming real, unify the states into the actual Restored United States. 

philip k dick - book - 1993 - I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick

I am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick
Emmanuel Carrère
1993
Metropolitan Books
336 pages

Emmaunel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter, and director who has, apparently, achieved some reknown in his native France.   He has also written a fictionalized account of the life of American science fiction author, Philip K Dick (1928-1982).  Dick was a north California based author whose work, which often explored the relationship between illusion and reality, reflected the countercultural scene of the 1960s and 70s to which he was an adherent.  
Currently Dick is probably best known as an author whose work is frequently mined for film ideas by Hollywood.   When Carrère’s 1993 biography was originally published, only two films were based on Dick stories, Blade Runner and Total Recall, both of which altered the titles of the works they were based on.  Blade Runner - 1982, was based on the Dick novel Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? and Total Recall 1990 was based on the short story We Can Remember it for you Wholesale.  Since 1993, a number of other movies have been produced from Dick’s writing, including the 2011 film, The Adjustment Bureau.

Carrère creates the image of Philip K Dick as a working class writer who was prolific because that was the only way to make a living as his work was relegated to the poorly-paid genre-ghetto of science fiction.   Dick’s writing has received literary acclaim in North America, and academic recognition, although such accolades were posthumously bestowed upon the author. During his career Dick won the Hugo award (a major award for science fiction literature) for his 1963 novel The Man in the High Castle, but that only marginally raised his status as a writer.  Dick did find critical acclaim and acceptance within his own lifetime in Europe, and particularly in France, although the famed Polish sci-fi author Stansislaw Lem was also a proponent.  While Carrère’s biography first appeared in France in 1993, where Dick had long been recognized as a great writer, this bio did not appear in English until 2003, after Stephen Spielberg directed The Minority Report (based on a Dick story) and revived Dick’s oeuvre as a mine for film concepts.  

Carrère’s biography was an early effort in what is now a crowded field of books about Philip K Dick.  As a novelist, Carrère fictionalized aspects of Dick’s life, alluding to states of mind that are impossible to know, and conversations that were never recorded.  Carrère focuses on Dick’s relationship with women, and the processes of thought and labour, or the influencing interests on the writing of Dick’s best known works.  Dick’s Potboiler works (a slang term for genre novels written primarily to garner income) like Our Friends from Frolix 8 or The Zap-Gun were not mentioned.  Rather, Carrère focuses on the now widely known texts such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, and a few others, and suggests indirectly that these novels were the axes around which their author’s life revolved.  Carrère constructed a narrative of Dick’s life wherein his actual situation was consistently written into his science-fiction.   When Dick was writing one of his major works then it meant the relationship he was in, his current political attitudes, the books and music that most interested him then, and other aspects of daily life were all intimately connected to Dick’s text of the moment.  

I Am Alive and You are Dead does have a lot of connective tissue between the parts that describe the events that produce each novel.  These in-between bits often focus on the state of Dick’s family life and his constantly shifting relationships with women.  Furthermore, his unraveling mental state was a frequent subject for Carrère.  Along with Thomas Pynchon, Dick is regarded as one of the great authors of paranoia, and Carrère is sure to find numerous examples of this state of mind in his personal life.  Furthermore, Dick was a writer who’s work, mostly focusing on the illusory nature of reality, fit well into the zeitgeist of 1960s northern California.  Hippies appreciated Dick’s exposure of a world behind the apparent world, while Dick appreciated the Hippie’s hallucinogenic drugs.  

Probably one of the most interesting aspects of Carrère’s biography of the troubled sci-fi writer is his telling of Dick’s conversion of his bungalow home into a hippie commune.   Dick allowed runaways and drugged-out kids to stay at his home for a time during the early 1970s.  This also was a time when the writer’s paranoia was most acute, and in Carrère’s telling, he occasionally entered paranoid, drug induced, manic phases where he looked for evidence of federal infiltration of his him.  Meanwhile, his house had become well known as a crash-pad for runaways to the local police.  

Carrère also goes into great detail about Dick’s gnostic experience, in which God came to him in the form of a pink light for short a period of time.  This experience succeeded Dick’s life with the runaways, as the first published mention of this mystic encounter by the author was in his 1977 work, A Scanner Darkly; the novel in which Dick describes those years when his home was also a drug commune.  The experience of touch with the divine was profoundly transformative for Dick, and when God’s presence withdrew from his life, he attempted suicide as a result of his failure to cope with that loss.  Following his failed attempt to take his own life, Dick began to manically make notes on the experience.  These notes contributed to Dick’s final works, his spiritually focused VALIS trilogy, wherein Dick attempted to comprehend his contact with the divine through science-fiction.

Carrère’s fictionalization of Dick’s life is interesting because it highlights questions about authenticity that pertain to all biographical writing, but with Dick it also presents his life in a manner that connects to the work of the subject.  The representation of the untrue, to supplement the true, as a theme of this biography serves to demonstrate the relevance of Dick’s lifelong project in imagining the unreal in the real (and vice-versa).  Dick’s literary ideas have vast implications for contemporary culture, as theorized by figures such as French philosopher of real and simulation, Jean Baudrillard, who made direct reference to Dick in his seminal essay collection, Simulacra and Simulation.  By admitting that his biography of Dick is part fiction, Carrère is using a biography of a writer of simulacra to highlight the seemingly realistic yet fictional nature of all biography.

computer hackers - film - 1982 - Tron

Tron
Disney 
1982
Director: Steven Lisburger
Writer: Steven Lisburger
96 minutes

Hello everybody in cyberland!  Here’s my first “blog” post on the compu-net.  I hope the good netizens of the world approve!

I borrowed Tron from the Toronto Public Library.  In 1982 there was a popular sense that the personal computer had opened a new frontier for outlaw activity.  But because computers are essentially office equipment, there was little about hacking to make it into an exciting source of cinematic action.  Wargames, released in 1983, portrayed computer hacking as a pursuit for disaffected, underachieving teenagers.  Matthew Broaderick played high-school hacker David Lightman whose exploits plunged him into a cross-country fugitive adventure with cold war era Nuclear-apocalyptic overtones.  The post-cold war film, Hackers, released in 1995, maintained the teen-aged outlaw portrayal of hackers although the film bestowed upon them roller-blades and mid-90’s club kid style and attitude.  Both Wargames and Hackers represent computer hackers as mildly malevolent kids who possess a knowledge of the weaknesses of contemporary technologies and infrastructure that gets them into, and out of, tense situations.  Tron predates these films and charts a unique path among hacker movies, where the hacker enters the computer and conquers its internal landscape.
  
Tron is unique because its basic narrative revolves around anthropomorphized computer programs. The programs are represented as men who fight with each other for survival.  Much of the movie takes place inside of a computer system that is being hacked by former programmer and current arcade owner, Kevin Flynn.  Flynn seeks the evidence that his video game designs have been stolen from him by Ed Dillinger, the film’s villain who is currently an executive of the company Flynn used to work for, a software development firm called ENCOM.  While Tron’s hackers are grown-up software industry professionals, Flynn exists in a state of perpetual adolescence.  He is first alluded to by Alan Bradley, a former colleague, in conversation with Lora Baines, also a former ENCOM colleague as well as an ex-girlfriend, as a programmer who wastefully used his considerable talent to program games.  He first appears in the film as the centre of attention, surrounded by enraptured kids, achieving a high score on a game machine in his arcade.  That scene recalls a time when the video arcade was a space where heroes were made.  I suspect that this brief scene, displaying the handsome and fun loving Flynn, surrounded by girls that are amazed by his gaming abilities, provides the model for the nighttime fantasies of the sad subterraneans who populate the King of Kong and Chasing Ghosts documentaries.   

Flynn at the arcade.

Video game great, Robert Mruczek, is featured in the 2007 documentaries The King of Kong, and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade.

This film quickly progresses from displaying Flynn’s hacking efforts, where he types at a keyboard, to zapping him into inner-space of the computer via some kind of transmogrifier.  While the computer interior should probably be a domain under the MCP’s  complete control, it is actually a chaotic realm subject to the same unpredictable shifts in power as any other landscape populated by people of divergent interests and motivations.  Dellinger’s avatar within the computer, Sark, is Tron’s Darth Vader.  He is a military leader who orders his red guard around.  The Red’s are Fascistic foot soldiers that seem to take computer programs hostage and force them into armed combat with one another.  The film’s title refers to a network security program, designed by Alan Bradley, that is essentially a powerful hacking tool.  In the computer realm, Tron is a figure who is preternaturally skilled at overcoming any of the challenges Sark throws at him, and is such a powerful new program that he is essentially destined to succeed in destroying the MPC, which, of course, happens in the end.  Similarly, Flynn is not an avatar but is rather a user materially transported into the machine.  Computer users are regarded as godlike entities by the anthropomorphic programs in Tron, and therefore Flynn is considered a power previously unseen in the space.  Within the computer realm, hacking is game-playing, and Flynn’s honed game skills put him on par with Tron in terms of breaking through Sark and MPC’s security systems.  

Tron has succeeded in finding a way of representing hacking as adventurous in a way that is interesting to cinema.  In most hacker films, the scenes in which the hacking being done are the least interesting, generally, and the inevitable post-hacking run from the police or whoever is where the action is.  Of course, Tron succeeds at this by removing anything that resembles actual hacker activity and turning the whole enterprise into an adventure quest, but so what?  Tron’s aesthetic is also really great, as the whole computer world is a light-blue monochrome against a black sky, and every character glows red or blue.  The evil Master Control Program is represented as a spinning glowing monolith that speaks, and for a film villain, is genuinely intimidating (although by 1982 Disney has long mastered the hero vs villain quest formula).

  

Tron is probably one of the first cinematic representations of the computer as a space to be explored, rather than a tool to be utilized.  Furthermore, the film presents the hacker as an outlaw hero whose knowledge of technology allows him to undo the wrongs of the powerful.  This mode of thought about hackers continues today where hackers such as Julian Assange of Wikileaks, to name a single example, claim to use their technological acumen in ways which appear morally questionable, but are vindicated when they achieve a moral good.  Flynn’s infiltration of ENCOM computers and the ultimate destruction of their property is vindicated by his discovery of proof that Dillinger stole his game code.  In the film, Flynn is detached from any hacker subculture, but the model he provides is identifiably present throughout the actual hacker world.