DO Film Reviews: part 1

Blackhat, white pilled

By Patrick Fitzgerald @RizomaAt

Man is born free and yet everywhere he is in tweet threads. He is on message boards, he is in the replies. He was born and his mother named him, but now he goes by his username.

If this applies to you, fret not! You’re almost surely not in prison, serving a thirteen year sentence like Nick Hathaway. He is the subject of the first installment of the Doomer Optimism film review series, and protagonist of Michael Mann’s 2015 international cybercrime antihero’s journey of redemption known as Blackhat.  So feel good about that fact as we log on and witness Nick’s arc from hyperconnected-digital-genius-hacker-in-chains to something else–something more analog– a human being. 

Blackhat opens with a Chinese nuclear power reactor meltdown. A blackhat, la creme de la creme of criminal computer hackers, manipulates the software that runs the cooling for the plant’s core, and Fukishima 2.0 is underway in the People’s Republic. The precarity of those very things considered technological advances comes to the fore in the film’s first five minutes. But it’s not just the power grid that is at risk; next the trading software at Chicago’s Mercantile Exchange sends the price of soy skyrocketing. Not even our food–and our food’s food–is safe from this tenuously spun digital web. 

As the People’s Liberation Army and the FBI try to piece together a digital paper trail, we get our first glimpse at Nick Hathaway (played by Chris Hemsworth, who has ditched the hammer but is as Thor-jacked as ever) as he drowns out the ambient noise of his prison cell block with noise canceling headphones. Who can blame him? The free world is hard enough to cope with, but prison – from what I’m told – is worse.  Nick is locked up for hacking credit cards, but even in the joint he is making moves on a smartphone and adding credit to his buddies commissary accounts. 

As luck would have it, the PLA officer tasked with the investigation Captain Chen Dawai turns out to be one of the authors of the source code that the blackhat used to take down the reactor and commodities exchange. And as more luck would even more have it, the other author is Chen’s college roommate from MIT, genius coder Nicholas Hathaway! Thank goodness for that, because Nick gets a furlough from prison so that the Chinese and the Americans can work together with the now malevolent code’s creator to find out what the blackhat will attack next and try to prevent it. If Nick can help stop the crook, his sentence gets commuted. 

As the most luck would the most have it (I promise I’ll stop now) Chen’s very pretty and very smart sister Lien, comes along for the ride as an independent and trustworthy systems engineer, but by the end of the fun she will have engineered something even more significant with Nick. 

The blackhat’s trail leads the team, who is now chaperoned by two FBI agents, from L.A. to China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and finally Indonesia but what’s important is how and why of Nick’s emotional debugging and arrival back on the firm ground of positive human relations.  Early on after first meeting, when Nick shares with Lien that in prison you need to “work on your body and your mind,”  she responds that she believes “you’re a very strong man, very smart man.” And of course he is; he’s as good at inhabiting and manipulating the nitty gritty of the digital world as anyone…and what has that gotten him?  The subtext is clear; he hasn’t worked on his heart, he hasn’t worked on his soul, nor his real life, and he has therefore ended up in chains.  We learn that Nick’s fall from genius coder to convict started with a bar fight defending an old girlfriend’s honor and later ran parallel to his father dying of an illness. His personal relationships have been strained and marred by misfortune and loss; it is not a coincidence that his blackhat screen name is Ghostman. The virtual world disembodies and estranges; such a pity that the word connection was so readily co-opted into its lexicon. 

Lien is the humanconnection.exe command that Nick’s code was lacking. She understands his world, she is kin to his best friend, but most importantly; she is real. They fall in love. Nick is strong and smart, but with Lien he learns to allow himself to be strong and smart enough to be vulnerable. It’s wild that vulnerability has come to be synonymous with weakness in our time, because though that may be the case in the realm of cybersecurity, the social world–especially the intimate social world–demands strength through vulnerability. 

And so it comes to pass, after Captain Chen and the FBI agents are taken out by the blackhat’s armed henchmen, that Nick and Lien are left with only each other on whom to rely. Their mission morphs from self-interested/patriotic duty to vengeance. Though still in service of the greater good, taking down the blackhat turns into an act of love.  As the blackhat makes moves to flood Malaysian tin mines to game commodities prices once again, Lien and Nick work in concert to steal the hacker’s ill-gotten soy speculation cash, using it to lure him into an IRL meeting.  

Nick’s preparation for the meet up lays bare the full nature of his transformation. He abandons all things electronic with which to defend himself. Instead he goes fully analog, duct taping old magazines to his torso and wrapping a cotton towel around his neck as an organic shield. His weapons are a screwdriver (the simplest of simple machines) and a kitchen knife held down with rubber bands. No phones, no radios, no firewalls. 

Finding the blackhat and his team of villains among the primal torches of an Indonesian folk festival procession, Nick confronts his nemesis, who wants to negotiate, by declaring that “It’s not about money, not about zeroes or ones, or code.” That *was* what it was about to the old Nick– but life, and the movies– hath a way of making an antihero grow his way out of those things that confine, control and suppress the desire that we all have to love, to fight for what is good and what is worthwhile. A real life, embodied connection, vulnerable intimacy, and meaningful pursuits.  

Nick’s magazines and towel provide him just enough cover to take out the blackhat, avenge his friend, and become the Mann’s man that he was born to be.  Free from confinement, strong in his vulnerability, and wounded by his past but hopeful about the purpose that loving Lien–and allowing her to love him–has brought into his life, Nick is gonna make it. He is an antihero made doomer optimist, the screen name wooden puppet that became a real boy-man. 

Also, they keep the 40 million euros they stole from the bad guy, so that makes it a little easier to be optimistic.