“I think he’d enjoy Hackers,” I say. “He’s old enough now and into computers.”
“That movie sucks,” my husband says.
So I load it up. I used to love this movie, but can’t remember why. I’m lying. It’s because of a twenty-three year old Jonny Lee Miller.
Right away I know this is still something special. It’s 1995 in Manhattan, and I point out the twin towers to our eight year old son. We have a short chat about terrorism and how I once flew London to NY with scissors, nail clippers and a box-cutter in my carry-on and how useful it was in opening my shrink-wrapped flight meal.
An angel-haired neon hipster appears on-screen. Angelina Jolie is gorgeous with an iconic pixie cut that a million women tried to emulate, to their absolute ruin.
“My God, she’s spectacular,” I announce.
“No she’s not,” my husband says. He’s lying. The eight year old is riveted, but with a suspicious expression.
Our hacker hero amazes us with his hacking skills and perfect jawline. He spray-paints his keyboard in camo, types very quickly and shouts “I’m in!” at random intervals. He wields his mastery of the internet through a public pay phone.
“What’s that?” asks our son.
“History. Watch the movie.”
Angelina is no slouch either. She has a set-up with a “killer refresh rate” and a pretty chip “triple the speed of a Pentium.” They crash and surf their illicit way through the back alleys of a nascent web in digital cityscape montages and traffic gamer aesthetic.
“I can’t take this,” my IT developer systems programming engineer solutions architect husband says. “Literally nothing works this way. I’m gonna throw up.”
This movie is brilliant, awesome and the height of coolness. Jesse Bradford is here, adorably baby-cheeked before he’d go on to be Kirsten Dunst’s crush in Bring It On. Matthew Lilliard is a hyperactive couch-surfing tech-head in plaits, as yet unbesmirched by that Scooby-Doo shit. They race around on skate boards with their keyboards under one arm. These kids are so cool, nobody would ever be a fraction as cool ever again.
Jonny Lee Miller does a quick draw with floppy disks. Floppies!!
“What are those?” asks our son.
“Like memory sticks. The later ones held 1.44 megs of data,” my husband says.
A single photo on my phone is 3.8 megs. That can’t be right.
“It is,” he says. “I used to do installs with twenty floppies.”
To facilitate the quick draw, Jonny has to wear a t-shirt that ends two inches above his navel. I am mesmerised.
“Why did he cut his t-shirt in half?” our son asks.
“It was the nineties, darling, we could do whatever we wanted.”
And we could. We could break into federal bank servers and criminal record databases like they were tins of beetroot and we were hyper-colored can openers. We could just dial up a gibson supercomputer, guess a password and hack the planet with our elite krump viruses and cyber-worms.
“This is not appropriate,” my husband says.
He’s right. Angelina is a sex-positive uber-feminist hacker and now she’s clearly not wearing underwear beneath her space-punk jacket. I’m even more mesmerised.
“I mean the programming,” my husband says. “I don’t want our kids believing they can use a computer in these bullshit ways.”
“I won’t,” says our son. He’s lying. Already I can see his tiny dreams of speed-hacking a school schedule to get out of nerd maths and into ultra cool kids gaming class.
On-screen, hackers unite and uncover the worm, avert a global environmental disaster and bring down the bad guys. They hack the TV satellites and broadcast their victory to the entire world, which is brought to its knees by their radical coolness.
“Who made the world wide web?” our son asks.
“We did, honey.”
“No, the world wide spider! It’s a joke, get it?”
“No, it was me. Gen X. We built it like we built pretty much everything while selling our kidneys to afford uni and housing and avocado and now we’re broke and really tired, so can you bring me a cup of tea please?”
Behind the closing credits, Jonny and Angelina are kissing in a pool in slow motion while their clothes magically dissolve and nothing will ever be this awesome ever again. This is the zenith of my generation. This is the dream we were given, and in a few short years it will be over.
I drink my tea.