ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: GAMER CINEMA
Spoilers for WarGames (1983) ahead. But first, a note from the editor: While recording our conversation for this edition of the Zone Film Challenge our recording program ceased functioning about 10 minutes into our conversation, meaning the majority of the recording was lost. We’ve taken this as an opportunity to experiment with the column’s format. The article you see here includes both the surviving transcript and a pair of mini-essays from us, zeroing in on what we found most interesting about John Badham’s cult classic. We thank you for your continued readership, and hope you enjoy the results.
John: Hello, hello, welcome once again to the Zone Film Challenge. This week we are looking at an 80s classic, one whose influence stretches far beyond the hour and fifty odd minutes of its runtime. I am of course speaking of 1983s WarGames, directed by John Badham and starring a young Matthew Broderick.
Alex: A pre-murder Matthew Broderick if you will.
John: Pre-Ferris Bueller at least. Pre-crisis Broderick?
Alex: I think being in Ferris Bueller changed his life less than having a man’s blood on his hands.
John: I’m not super cued in on this, what are you talking about?
Alex: Oh, in 1987 Matthew Broderick accidentally got into a vehicular manslaughter accident in Ireland and got away with it. He didn’t face jail time or anything.
John: Oh shit.
Alex: Well, WarGames is before all that. It’s set in the halcyon days of the height of the Cold War, 1983, and it’s a quaint little film. It’s…fun.
John: It’s also the early days of computers coming into our lives, coming into our homes, our schools, our video arcades. Right now at this very moment, Mr and Mrs America 1983, your child and the girl he’s trying to impress could be telling a government supercomputer to start a global thermonuclear war… so keep an eye on that and look for any irregular charges on your phone bill that may indicate your child “dialing in” with the shiny new PC you bought him.
Alex: They could be doing that or they could be hacking into the school’s grade database.
John: That’s the funniest part of this movie. That’s the inciting incident, Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy both get an F on their science test and to stay out of summer school, he hacks into the database, changes their grades and faces no consequences for this at all, it’s completely forgotten.
Alex: I don’t think the school ever realizes.
John: He literally gets his report card and his family congratulates him.
Alex: Well, I mean, there are worse things you can do…like starting a nuclear war. I love the way that this movie synthesizes the growth of the home computer or young kids’ interest in home computers with the arcade scene of the time. Now, home consoles had died or were on the verge of death in America but the arcade and home computer market in 1983 were doing much better. I think this movie’s a great window into that.
John: Yeah, this is one of the first examples of Gamer Cinema. Galaga is a recurring visual motif as are computer games in general. The way in which Broderick is able to accidentally access this military computer with a nascent AI is because he’s looking to try and break into iD Software or…whatever the computer game giant would have been in ‘83.
Alex: He’s trying to break into Broderbund, steal Lode Runner. I think it’s definitely one of the earliest gamer films out there if there exists a genre classifications. This and Joysticks, which is a sex comedy, those are some of the earliest films. This shows this funny idea that existed in Hollywood for close to thirty years that gaming possessed the ability to impart secret knowledge onto kids. You see this echo in Ready Player One, that being about finding Easter Eggs in a VR game but you mostly see it more literally with gamer characters being pro hackers. Some people get into programming through gaming and sure, there are pathways but very few of these people are charming All Americans like Broderick.
John: This is interesting because he is a hacker but the vocabulary with which we talk about computers and with which we talk about computer users hadn’t emerged yet. It hadn’t taken root, there are two stereotypical computer nerd characters here, but they show up for one scene and they’re not that different from your standard pocket protector 80s geeks. There’s not an assumed antisocial quality to people who are into games or computers quite as much.
Alex: Well there is the antisocial quality, the one guy says to Mandark, he tells him to shut up and reminds him that he had told him to tell him when he was being rude. It’s interesting that Broderick is the nicer softer version of these guys, it distinctly establishes that there’s MIT ARPAnet guys and then there is a new class of consumer computer user that has been gifted this new ability to change the world around them.
John: Right, and there’s this assumed illegalism that comes with that. Beyond just changing your grades at school, he’s defrauding the phone company to figure out how and dial into the software company.
Alex: You see it kind of meld with this other common 80s character which this -Reaganite is too simple of a description — but kind of a business minded teen that’s thinking about to hustle. You see it with Tom Cruise in Risky Business, these clean cut suburbanite kids who are trying to make some money on the side. It’s played as “oh you kids, you’re getting up to your scams again”-
John: John Hughes’ movies would employ a lot of this but it wasn’t monetary, it’s more looking for a good time. Looking for fun without paying for it.
Alex: Here the good times are provided by games; arcade games and the game of doing World War III with an AI simulator.
John: Yeah, he finds an early version of a Paradox Interactive game in this supercomputer
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Alex:
The arrival of WarGames is concurrent with the arrival of other variations on Science Fiction. Disney’s TRON used revolutionary computer graphics technology to tell a story about a computer programmer being sucked into his own game. Ridley Scott and Syd Mead repurposed a Phillip K Dick story into Blade Runner, a futuristic neo-noir about the fuzzy line between human and machine — and the cruelty of segregation. Meanwhile, William Gibson was developing his Sprawl world, first in short stories Johnny Mnenomic and New Rose Hotel, before releasing his masterpiece, Neuromancer, whose transhumanist and anti-corporate themes would serve as the lodestar for a new genre configuration, Cyberpunk. Despite its suburban exterior, WarGames exists in conversation with these works. WarGames is about our relationship with computerized automation more than it is about our relationship to the Soviet Union or the anxious climate of the waning days of the Cold War.
Beneath its Cold War plotting, WarGames presents a unique window into the burgeoning home computer market. Subtly working as an advertisement to get these newfangled devices into the homes of American consumers, WarGames shows the computer as both weapon and teacher. WarGames warns with one hand and beckons with the other; asking teens to picture themselves as David Lightman [Matthew Broderick] and imploring parents to keep an eye on their damn kids, lest they start a robocall scheme or worse, start World War III. Here, the film does the most to dovetail with its contemporaries. It is concerned with automation, a real worry for industry workers who found themselves out of a job when it was found out that buying a robot was cheaper than paying a salary. Here the worry is not about labor rights but about nuclear devastation, although the root cause is very much the same. The technocrats decided automation is cheaper and where costs are cut, corners are too. Like a cyberpunk story, it addresses the forced redundancy of the human worker, though its hopeful suburbanite posturing offers a new direction forward for this new tech native generation.
Arriving at nearly the same time as TRON and Greydon Clark’s Joysticks, WarGames also represents Hollywood’s first foray into understanding the gamer menace. Lightman is a Galaga junkie and hacker extraordinare who uses his fancy IMSAI 8080 microcomputer to hack into his high school’s grading interface, run robocall scams 2000 miles away, and nearly trick the US military into going to war with the Soviet Union. His expertise at arcade games translates to his hacking profiency. In the film’s logic, the two skills are directly transferrable. In truth, most gamers would not become world class hackers but what a pitch! The notion that arcade junkies might develop a whole new skillset just by purchasing a microcomputer was an intelligent feat of cross marketing. WarGames has the notion that the children of the 80s will grow up to be the wardens of technology. It was an apt prediction, though perhaps its notion that video games could impart secret coding knowledge was far-fetched then and even stranger now.
In spite of the milquetoast plotting and workmanlike directing, WarGames has endeared itself into the cultural memory. No doubt this was something to do with its headline-ready title but it is also that it arrived at the exact moment that it needed to. It captured a generational shift in attitudes, not only in regards to the Cold War, but in showing how the younger generation was embracing new technologies and how the microcomputer was set to change home life forever. Unlike the techno-horror films of the 1970s like Demon Seed or The Manitou, where computers were a hostile unknown, WarGames is a grounded thriller. Its HAL-9000 variant, WOPR, is not a malicious sentient AI but code that has been set in motion. The threat is there but it’s not random, it’s not a horror film. WarGames has an understanding of both technology and the generation that will inherit it that its predecessors lack.
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John:
Despite a career most would describe with words like “journeyman,” John Badham may have been the perfect director to take a premise like WarGames and craft an enduring cult classic. He’d already done it once before 1983, taking what could have just been a middling teenybopper drama about Disco Kids in Saturday Night Fever and making a serious meditation on modern masculinity and the pursuit of one’s artistic passions.
I’d argue that WarGames may have been the taller order on Mr. Badham’s part though, even if it’s the weaker end product (though that’s more due to Saturday Night Fever kicking all kinds of ass than WarGames being bad). We already possessed a cultural vocabulary for the values and excesses of the disco generation by the time Saturday Night Fever hit theaters. We didn’t have that for the home computer enthusiasts who saw themselves reflected in Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman. Which makes it all the more shocking how much Badham would get right about the script kiddies and keyboard cowboys who would rise to cultural prominence over the next decades.
Lightman is a decidedly All-American boy in that wisecracking 80s teen movie way, complete with big friendly golden retriever. But the viewer gets the sense early on that the suburban ideal he’s coming of age in has begun to curdle. David’s parents both work and don’t seem to have much time to keep an eye on their obviously gifted but academically underachieving son. One wonders how much they even understand about that fancy computer they presumably bought him for some birthday or Christmas.
David’s a latchkey kid. With that status comes freedom. With that freedom comes an easy distrust of and disrespect for authority. It’s not hard to draw a line between WarGames conception of emancipated youth further empowered by technology and the dedicated cyberpunk anti-corporatism of 1995’s Hackers. In fact I’d argue the line can be extended into the present day. In David’s casual cheating of the systems he feels treat him unfairly I see the mindset of the dozens of Twitch streamers, Podcasters, TikTok-ers, YouTubers, and SoundCloud rappers who’ve chosen to bet on themselves rather than engaging with the society and economic system they’ve seen make their parents broke, unfulfilled, and miserable.
WOPR was wrong. There is a winning move besides not playing the game. You just have to cheat.
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Zone Film Challenge will be on vacation until April 14th.
