The Technician Is Hollywood’s New Villain

NEW YORK (AP) — “A toast to the disruptors,” says the tech billionaire played by Edward Norton in Rian Johnson’s Oscar-nominated film “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” Glass Onions”).

How about a toast? Sunday’s Oscars won’t hand out an award for Best Villain, but if they did, Miles Bron would easily win it (An excuse to cloud “No”). He’s an instantly recognizable guy we know well: a visionary (everyone says so), a social media narcissist, a self-proclaimed troublemaker who talks a lot about “breaking things.”

Miles Bron is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood’s favorite villains: The Technician. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the film industry has found one of its richest resources of big-screen antagonists since Soviet-era Russia.

The great villains of cinema don’t appear often. The “Top Gun: Maverick” Best Picture nominee, like its predecessor, was content to fight a faceless foe of unspecified nationality. Why oppose international ticket buyers when Tom Cruise vs. The one who works well?

But in recent years, the tech villain has proliferated on movie screens as a Hollywood villain. It’s a rise that reflects growing fears about the ever-expanding reach of technology in our lives and growing skepticism about the not always altruistic motives of the men (mostly men) who control today’s digital empires.

We had the devious CEO of Biosyn Genetics (Campbell Scott) in “Jurassic World: Dominion,” a franchise dedicated to the danger of technological misuse; Chris Hemsworth’s biotech overlord in “Spiderhead”; and Mark Rylance’s Earth-Maybe-Destroying Tech Guru in “Don’t Look Up” in 2021.

We also saw Eisenberg, once again, as the tech-type Lex Luthor in 2016’s “Batman v. Superman”; Harry Melling’s pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020s ‘The Old Guard’; Video game mogul breaking the rules by Taika Waititi in 2021’s “Free Guy”; CEO of Oscar Isaac’s search engine in “Ex Machina” in 2014; and the critical portrayal of the Apple co-founder in “Steve Jobs” in 2015.

Children’s films also channel parents’ concerns about the impact of technology on children. In “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” from 2021, a newly released artificial intelligence (AI) causes a robotic apocalypse. “Ron’s Gone Wrong” (2021) also used a robotic metaphor for smartphone addiction. TV shows have rushed just as aggressively to dramatize the mistakes of big tech companies.Recent entries include Uber’s Travis Kalanick on Showtime’s “Super Pumped;” Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos in Hulu’s “The Dropout” and Adam and Rebekah Neumann of WeWork in Apple TV’s “We Crashed.”

Some of these portrayals could be attributed to Hollywood jealousy over the rise of another epicenter of innovation in California. But these worlds merged a long time ago. Many of the companies that released these films are themselves disruptive, and neither is Netflix, distributor of “Glass Onion.” The streaming company has been persuaded to release Johnson’s sequel more widely in theaters than any previous Netflix release. Estimates suggest the movie grossed around $15 million in its old-school opening weekend, but Netflix executives said they don’t plan to make such theatrical releases on a regular basis. .

“In my opinion, he really is the most dangerous human being,” Rylance says of his Peter Isherwell. “He believes that we can master all the problems that nature throws at us. I think it’s the same kind of thinking that got us into the trouble we find ourselves in now, trying to dominate each other and all life to which we are intimately connected and dependent.”

Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars, “Glass Onion” takes the mockery of tech moguls to a new level. The CEO, played by Norton, is extremely wealthy, powerful and, given that he is working on a volatile new energy source, dangerous. But Bron is also, as Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc ultimately deduces, a moron. “A conceited jester,” said Blanc.

In Johnson’s film, the tech guy/Emperor gets by with lies, deception, and a bunch of made-up words like “default” and “inspire.”

Even though Johnson penned “Glass Onion” long before Elon Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover, the film’s release seemed almost timed to coincide with it. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was just one of Johnson’s real inspirations, but some took Bron as a direct parody of Musk. In a widely read Twitter thread, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Johnson described Musk as “a mean, stupid man”, which he called “an incredibly stupid theory, since Musk is one of the businessmen most prosperous in the world”. the history of mankind”. “How many rockets has Johnson launched recently?” he added.

Musk himself hasn’t publicly commented on “Glass Onion,” but he’s had plenty of grievances with Hollywood before, including his portrayals of guys like him. “Hollywood refuses to even write a story about building a real company where the CEO isn’t a jerk and/or evil,” Musk tweeted last year.

Musk will soon have his own movie. Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney announced Monday that he’s been working on “Musk” for several months, which the producers promise will deliver a “definitive, no-frills review” of the tech entrepreneur.

At the same time as the supremacy of tech supervillains has emerged, some films have sought not to satirize big tech companies, but to absorb some of the endless sprawl of the digital world. Phil Lord, who co-produced ‘The Mitchells vs the Machines’ and ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ with Christopher Miller, says the internet has deeply influenced his approach to movies.

“We legacy media are perhaps unconsciously reacting to new media,” says Lord. “We are all trying to figure out how to live in the new world. People’s behavior changes. It changes the way we find and experience love. Change our way of life. Of course, the stories we tell and how we tell them will also change to reflect this. “Into the Spider-Verse” certainly reflects having a lot of content from all eras in your brain at once.

The favorite in the best picture category, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” also reflects our multi-screen, media-bombed lives. Writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, whose film is up for 11 Oscars, say they wanted to channel the confusion and angst of living in the all-everywhere existence that tech moguls like Miles Bron helped create.

“The reason we made the movie is that this is what modern life looks like,” Kwan explains.

So even though Miles Bron won’t be going home with an Oscar on Sunday, he wins somehow. It’s your world. We all live there. ___ Jake Coyle is on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP