Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema

A. Tucker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137386687
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137386694
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

The Internet is the most terrifying and most beautifully innovative invention of the twentieth century. Using film theory and close textual analysis, Tucker offers an explanation of the Internet and a brief history of its portrayal on film in order examine how it has shaped contemporary versions of self-identity, memory, and the human body.

Chapter 1

The Cables under, in, and around Our Homes: “The Net” as Viral Suburban Intruder

Introduction: A Network of Perverts

The scene that perhaps best exemplifies the conflicting cinematic rhetoric behind the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s comes 49 minutes into the movie Pleasantville (Dir. Gary Ross, 1998), in which Joan Allen’s character, the black-and-white June Cleaver clone Betty Parker, masturbates in her bathtub, her sexual self-awareness paralleled by the introduction of color into her various bathroom objects, her orgasm overlapped with a tree outside the Parker home that literally combusts.

Betty Parker inviting a sexual awareness into her home ran alongside the public’s mass scale introduction to pornography via the popularization of the home computer and the GUI web browser in the 1990s. However, in Pleasantville, color doesn’t just correspond to responses and objects related to sexual awareness: characters gain color simply by being exposed to new knowledge and reacting in an emotionally expressive manner. What makes the visual metaphor of the injection of color so powerful is the way that it explains how objects (or people) are not changed outright by this knowledge but, are, in the movie’s view, enhanced, made more “real.” Five years earlier, the popular form of the Internet, likewise, was suddenly allowing a giant excess of information (sexual and otherwise) into private homes, flooding the suburbs with an invisible tide of facts and languages and strangers from around the globe, giving access to previously hard-to-get (or unpopular or dissident) information and contexts.

Yet, this celebration of the power of information made possible by the Internet was buried under a wealth of terrors surrounding, superficially, obscenity and pornography. Already the public perception of pornography was linked to unhealthy sexual appetites and consumption; as experts such as Zillman explained in his 1989 study (and further studies by Donnerstein, 1984; Malamuth, 1984, Zillman and Bryant, 1984),¹ the effects of watching pornography include (among others) an “appetite for more deviant and bizarre types of pornography” that manifest in “distorted perceptions about sexuality” (as quoted by Richard E. Drake, 101). In 1995, Marty Rimm’s study in the Georgetown Law Journal (“Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway”) built on these fears by analyzing 917,410 Usenet “pornographic files”; the study found:

Sixty-eight commercial “adult” BBS containing 450,620 pornographic images, animations, and text files that had been downloaded by consumers 6.4 million times; six “adult” BBS with approximately 75,000 files for which only partial download information was available; and another twenty-seven “adult” BBS containing 391,790 files for which no consumer download information was available. (1853)

More, these files contained large numbers of “paraphilic, pedophilic, and hebephilic” material (1854). The users of these virtual spaces were not couples using pornography as sexual aid, as 25 percent claimed they did (Munro, 43), but instead child predators engaged in illegal and exploitative behavior. The 1988 General Social Survey (GSS), a biennial US national survey that began in 1978, asked “Which of these statements comes closest to your feelings about pornography laws?”; an all-time high of 43.8 percent of respondents stated it should be illegal for all, with an added 51.2 percent saying it should be illegal for those under 18.² In particular, Drake’s later 1994 study surveyed 250 psychiatric nurse professionals to gauge their perception surrounding the consumption of pornography, adding “there was 62% agreement that there are potential hazards to the consumption of pornography”; further, “approximately 38% of all psychiatric nurses agreed that PC [pornography consumption] can stimulate consumers to commit sex crimes. The majority (53%) did not know whether PC would lead to committing a sex crime.” As well, “a large majority of psychiatric nurses agreed (78%) that there are risks for pre-adult consumers of pornography” (104). The research suggests a pervading view among healthcare authorities that while pornography doesn’t compel individuals not already being medically treated for sexual crimes to commit more, it is likely that easier (and earlier) exposure to pornography greatly heightens those offenders to commit another crime and with this comes an erosion of public safety.

Extrapolated out from this speculation, the Internet, as a networked distribution device, gave these previous offenders and sex criminals easy access to these urges and fantasies, a way to connect with other offenders and breed a further, larger population of deviants. To combat this growing fear, the Clinton administration introduced the Communications Decency Act (1996) that not only aimed to shut down all websites that produced and hosted such material but also severely limit the public’s exposure to (digital) pornography. The goal was to limit the material that was already in this dense network that was gaining exponentially more users each month, and also to contain the exposure to obscene materials to a general public and, more specifically, children under 18.³

It is this idea of exposure that begins to build a vocabulary toward the shifting treatment of the body surrounding cyberspace and its digital inhabitants. Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s was at the vanguard of discussing the transition from Literate Man into Retribalized Man. McLuhan pointed to Literate Man, using books and the phonetic alphabet as his main mode of communication, as isolated, alienated and alone in his/her act of receiving and producing information; likewise, her/his body was seen as a singular vessel that housed the soul and mind, the rest of the world was intrusively external and other. What McLuhan began to observe was that the shift back into a Tribe-like culture, as mediated and encouraged by electronic technology, created new, Retribalized bodies that valued interconnection and communal values/knowledge. Yet, these generational shifts were initially slow (to go from Tribal to Literate took thousands of years), but the speed at which the electronic technology was increasing (both in capabilities and popularization, from electronic telegraphs to phones, televisions and radios, digital computers) leaves large gaps between even single generations; it was this immense speed of change that McLuhan points to as the site of real and potentially overwhelming trauma.

As discussed in the Introduction, by the early 1990s, Haraway’s cyborg was competing with Moravec’s Mind Children to establish vocabulary and modes to engage with this new value system. But nuanced and academic discussion hadn’t quite filtered into the public consciousness. Instead, the Internet’s explosion in popularity and use in the early 1990s can then be seen through the eyes of Rimm, Drake, and later the Communications Decency Act as an epidemic rooted in the shifting value systems of the body, and, in particular, disease. Where Literate Man treated his body as the singular embodiment of identity, the Retribalized man (what Marc Prensky eventually calls a “Digital Immigrant”) was digitalizing that body, making it multiple and projecting it into cyberspace with an increasing amount of personal information and agency. McLuhan would refer to these as “extensions” or “doppelgangers” but a reader in 2014 would know them, very familiarly, as avatars. Yet this move, in the early 1990s, from the physical body as the most valuable and stable marker of identity to the digital body and avatar (Platonic “shadows”), couched itself in vulnerability, and given the atmosphere of the era, this digital body was already seen as tainted, infected by the mere contact with cyberspace.

This use of “epidemic” and “exposure” mirrors the language of illness that Sontag describes in Illness and Metaphor (1978) and later in AIDS and its Metaphors (1988). Sontag points out that the blame for illness begins to shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the carrier to the disease itself; using the modern idea of cancer, she points first to the metaphors of excess within the body (“the barbarian within” or a “destructive overpopulation”) that deteriorates health (61). The early popular Internet was maligned with similar treatment: it was the general fear of exposure to excessive information (pornography but also alternate cultures, language, experiences) and its consequences and also the idea of being “invaded” and taken over, by the different users in the network. The digital body was especially vulnerable to this conquering barbarian, susceptible to the invisible virus of the Internet. The public perception then, limited by the knowledge of Internet hardware and software, was that the user’s digital body, as Rimm insisted, was immoral just by merely associating in such a space.

But who or what was to blame: the Internet or its users? Sontag argues too that viruses have long been seen as reflections of their victims’ moral character (those infected with TB had “a defective vitality,” and later as the manifested punishment for immoral deeds [62]). Within the early history of computing, the computer virus and the metaphors attached begin to parallel Sontag’s observations about AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sontag states that the metaphoric language around and treatment of AIDS was a mix of what she sees as having a “dual metaphoric genealogy” (105) that combines the central language of the modern cancer (of invasion) with the older metaphors surrounding TB (of pollution). Adding to this early rhetoric was an insistence that it attacked “risk groups,” namely homosexual males, linking it what she calls a perception of “unsafe behavior that . . . is judged to be more than weakness. It is indulgence, delinquency,” to which she also adds “illegal” and “deviant.” This link between AIDS and deviancy and “weakness of will” were further attached to the stigma of homosexuality and its perceived “unnatural” lifestyle; more, a general misconception of the mid- to late 1980s was that “normal” heterosexuals couldn’t contract the disease. When heterosexuals began to be infected with HIV, the same stigma and obscenity that was attached to being homosexual was also transferred to anyone with the virus and the fear of being associated with AIDS rose alarmingly fast. Further ignorance perpetuated myths of contraction and suddenly made the panic of anyone being infected with the disease (from kissing, touching, associating) seem very real.

Though Marty Rimm’s report was later discredited,⁴ in 1995, this fear of perverse invasion into the private home parallels the perception of AIDS and the general distress that came with the popularization of home computers and the Internet. Spurred by Rimm, Time ran a cover story on the extremely pervasive nature of cyberporn, insisting “you can obtain it in the privacy of your home—without having to walk into a seedy bookstore or movie house” (40). The rhetoric around the access to pornographic material showed how the clearly demarcated spaces for pornography (and for the deviant consumers) had moved from public spaces of sale and, perhaps, surveillance and transparency, where a knowing customer had the added shame of having to potentially be seen entering these spaces, to the private home, an unwatched space where such perversion could fester and spread epidemically. As Literate Man’s privacy and isolation, as encapsulated by first the private body and then the home too, began to be invaded with the fears of AIDS and the “nonnormative values” attached, so too was the Internet infecting the private home and body with an invisible wave of perversion, causing an outbreak of already-ill avatars created in cyberspace. In reaction to this concern, a number of films of this period chose to deliberately set these fears within a suburban setting.

While American films have long expressed the fears that characterize the suburbs as an overly homogenized community that breeds violence, menace, and immorality (Blue Velvet [Dir. David Lynch], Invasion of the Body Snatchers [Dir. Don Seigel] just two quick examples), the enemies within those films are external and corporeal (aliens/communist spies, oxygen-sucking perverts). This then parallels what Sontag saw as the shift from the metaphor of disease (and cancer) to the virus (and AIDS). Deliberately then, the enemies of The Net and Hackers, both released in 1995, began to transform into invisible digitalized invaders with impossible infrastructural and ever-present omnipotence, undetectable strangers that would climb into a user’s computer and private life in the same way a prowler would climb in through an open window. The victims/protagonists within the The Net and Hackers struggle to keep the infection attached to their digital avatar from spreading to their physical bodies. Using the suburbs as a symbol of stability and familiarity, the two latter films grapple with the changing of an individual into a collection of discreet digital information; the enemy then was invisible, viral, able to manipulate or destroy that personal information. This accelerated killer was already inside the house and digital body, not in a closet or basement, but on every floor and in every organ simultaneously.

The Suburbs as Symbols

Ralph G. Martin opens his 1950 New York Times Magazine piece “Life in the New Suburbia” with a thought experience that transforms the Long Island suburban development from a view of “tractors levelling the land” and “unlandscaped mud” into the “new Suburbia”; he describes this vision as “a future park, all dressed up in thick trees and birds” and houses as encasing “cozy furniture arrangement around the fireplace” and “your wife busy in the kitchen making another fancy dessert, the crying of a brand-new baby” (14). This idealized projection was at the heart of American post-WWII development, a creation that was as much a project of actual physical buildings as of the post-war optimism, wealth, and healing that was the result of mass trauma and the created absences of husbands, fathers, familial units.

Sontag adds that moving into rural and suburban places was actually tied into how urban settings were linked to disease and that in order to “cure” the human body, the patient had to move to “the south, mountains, deserts, islands.” More, “the city itself was seen as a cancer—a place of abnormal, unnatural growth and extravagant, devouring, armored passions” later quoting Frank Lloyd Wright’s description of a big city as “a fibrous tumor” (73–74). In order to escape from these places, especially post-WWII, families began an exodus in hopes of curing the home from the ills of violence and depravity associated with cities. The suburbs then became a microcosm of conservative postwar value systems, a cliché that Robert Beuka in SuburbiaNation explains would backdrop sitcoms like Father Knows Best (1954–1960) and The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966), a set of mythologies and value systems that would center around G-rated perfect families, mildly living through familial and financial success. The value systems within these spaces were inherently conservative and traditional in terms of familial units and moral systems, slow to change and accept “intruders” or “outsiders.”

The suburbs then are a place to escape the sorts of moral diseases of the city and also a safe haven that promotes stability and well being of not just individuals but the American nation as a whole. Yet, the need to affirm certain value systems in these spaces implies the need to argue against and perhaps demonize the opposite of those values. Beuka argues that the representations of these suburban spaces reflect Foucault’s notion of heterotopias. To Beuka, the early representations of these spaces, in film especially, are projected ideals that “[emerge] as a place that reflects both an idealized image of middle-class life and specific cultural anxieties about the very elements of society that threaten that image . . . evidence of our culture’s uneasy relationship to a landscape that mirrors both our fantasies and the phobias of the culture at large” (9). With this approach, American film has had a long history of deconstructing these fanciful visions to showcase the potential violence and abnormalities behind the suburban façade to the point where in 2014 this “subversion” of the suburb is an overfamiliar television and movie trope itself. Still, Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), though unpopular at the time of its release, has gained in stature largely through its treatment of what Katrina Mann calls the subversion of “postwar hegemony” (49). The film explores the now overly familiar notion that suburbs, with their “cookie-cutter” replication of carefully measured housing/yards, create staunch homogeneity that mirrors the fear of Russian Communism. Sontag is quick to point to this film specifically as linking into communism into the metaphoric language of “the invasion of ‘alien’ or ‘mutant’ cells, stronger than normal cells” (68). Within the film, there is a need to distrust the familiar, the neighbors that are created by the homogeneous “equal” spaces of the suburbs. What makes Invasion a true horror film is that the mutation that emerges is a deformity of the value systems within the stable suburban environments, treating Communism as an illness “to impute guilt, to prescribe punishment” (Sontag, 82). To be Communist is to be antihuman, a mutant or alien (in the same way, she says, Trotsky described Stalinism as “a cholera, a syphilis, and a cancer” [82]). As Dr. Miles J. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) first finds the pods in a greenhouse he exclaims “somebody, somewhere wants this duplication to take place!” pointing toward some mysterious, unseen, outside force imposing itself upon the neighborhood. The clichéd version of the suburbs as a heterotopia becomes the perfect breeding ground for the real threat: the “infected” and reprogrammed citizens, controlled by “somebody, somewhere”; they are citizens completely swallowed by an outside force hell-bent on replicating and “equalizing” the American notions of the Individual (defined by hard work that is rewarded by material success) into oblivion.

Similarly, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) uses Jeffery Beaumont’s (Kyle MacLachlan) small town projections of “the American Dream—a comfortable, orderly, secure life” as a catalyst for a “moral e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Robot Historian and the Internet
• Chapter 1  The Cables under, in, and around Our Homes: “The Net” as Viral Suburban Intruder
• Chapter 2  The Evolution of the Web Browser: The Global Village Outgrown
• Chapter 3  Avatar in the Uncanny Valley: The Na’vi and Us, the Machinic Audience
• Chapter 4  Hacking against the Apocalypse: Tony Stark and the Remilitarized Internet
• Chapter 5  With a Great Data Plan Comes Great Responsibility: The Enmeshed Web 2.0 Internet User
• Chapter 6  Don’t Shoot the (Instant) Messenger: The Efficient Virtual Body Learns
• Chapter 7  The Reel/Real Internet: Beyond Genre and the Often Vulnerable Virtual Family
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index