Wargames, Real Genius and Brainstorm

(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I came of age in the Reagan ’80s, and the political landscape was fairly bleak.  While some of my classmates joined the College Republicans, others simply wanted to make as much money as possible.

I was concerned with HOW we were to be making money and WHERE that money was coming from.  This didn’t make it easy to find a job, but, in looking back, while there are some things I regret about my younger years, my choices in employment are not among them.

The mathematician Paul Halmos published a book that I’ve seen recently at Powell’s Books called I Have a Photographic Memory.  It’s a collection of photographs of mathematicians from the mid-20th century.  One picture in particular stays in my mind.  It’s from (I believe) the 1968 joint meetings of the AMS and MAA, and it shows a mathematician holding a sign over his head that reads:

MATHEMATICIANS – CONSIDER THE APPLICATIONS OF YOUR WORK

Back to the ’80s movies.

Although I never thought about it until recently, the three movies in the title of this diary shaped my perspective on life in a profound way.  Technology plays a fundamental role in each of the movies.  And, in each movie, the Department of Defense is very interested in the uses of that technology for their own purposes.

The message in Wargames is not as direct as in the other two movies, but I watched it again recently and it remains a pretty emphatic statement against nuclear proliferation.

Real Genius has a number interesting aspects, but, to me, what really hits home is the look on Val Kilmer’s face when he realizes his work is part of a DOD project.  He’s been screwing around thinking everything’s a joke throughout the whole movie, but when he finds out what he’s working on he grows up a little.

Brainstorm is hard to find these days – my local store doesn’t have it and neither does Netflix.  I may hunt it down at some point, because it’s a very interesting movie.  It’s really the only one of the three that deals with technology that doesn’t really exist.  The researchers (Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher) are working on a technology to record brain waves.  And, of course, the DOD (Cliff Robertson) is interested in applications of the technology for mind control and torture.

I never really thought about this until just this past year.  I suppose that, living through the Bush years, it had been percolating around in my brain.  The propaganda level over the last eight years really was nauseating.

I think it was when I saw Wargames or Real Genius again on cable (or something) that I realized how different this perspective on technology and the military was and how I didn’t really see this in mainstream movies hardly at all anymore.  That was when I realized how much I had been affected by this perspective and how lucky I felt to have learned this.  I started thinking about this perspective more and if it was Wargames I had seen, I realized that Real Genius was very similar and rented it immediately.

It took me longer to come up with Brainstorm, because I haven’t seen it in so many years, but when I did remember it, I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget –

Wargames, Real Genius, Brainstorm.