The Conspirator: History Lesson for Modern Politics

I’m a big history fan so I couldn’t resist seeing Robert Redford’s The Conspirator – about the trial of Mary Surratt, one of the accused southern conspirators who helped plan the assassination of President Lincoln and assist John Wilkes Booth's daring escape.

The movie starts out as any good historical drama should: on the battlefield, with union soldiers hunkered down in a bunker taking heavy artillery. One of those soldiers - Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) - protects his wounded buddy, Nicholas (Justin Long), while waiting for help to arrive.

I would have loved to have gotten more texture about the war, but this scene is meant for one purpose only: to establish Aiken’s bona fides as a war hero and Union loyalist. It lasts a few minutes and that’s all.

Next we’re swept forward to the evening of Lincoln’s assassination. Those who aren’t history buffs may forget that the assassination wasn’t simply the actions of a lone, disgruntled southern actor taking out his anger on the President. It was a carefully planned coup involving several players that targeted not just the President, but the Vice President and Secretary of State as well. The conspiracy is well underway and we get to see with great fanfare the re-enactment of that fateful evening, including Booth’s ill-fated leap to the stage shouting “Sic Semper Tyranus!” (thus always to tyrants) as well as that botched attempts on Vice President Jackson and Secretary of State William Steward. The evening of the assassination is fascinating, with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) taking control and closing off the city to hunt down the conspirators. This, it seems to me, is real drama.

Unfortunately, writers James Solomon and Gregory Bernstein only want to give us the barest bones of what happened, since their real interest is getting us as quickly as possible to Mary’s trial, and setting up Aiken as her reluctant defense attorney (just as we saw with the British in the HBO "John Adams" mini-series, Mary’s best defense is to have an unassailable paragon of the other side - a Union war hero - represent her, even if he’s at first loath to the task). Booth is hunted down and killed, but the other members of the plot are rounded up and tried. One of those members – John Surratt – can’t be found, so his mother (who runs the boarding house where the plot was hatched) is accused instead, and brought before a military tribunal to stand trial.

And this is where history ends and modern metaphor begins. The calamity that is the assassination of Lincoln and simultaneous Southernist attacks on the Executive Branch of US government is portrayed with all the terrorist coordination of 9/11 (even the idea of synchronizing the attacks for maximum terror seems thoroughly modern) – and the trial of Mary Surratt is clearly a stand-in for our own Guantanamo Bay and military tribunal of prisoners of war. The principals even get to argue the same great debate that we hear on our Sunday talk shows: should justice come swift and hard to rally a shocked and scared nation (Stanton), or must we hold to our values and the constitution even in the face of terrible crimes (Aiken)?

Though the trial of Surratt is factual and the situation a clear parallel, I sincerely doubt that any such discussion in 1865 took place with so modern a phraseology about constitutional values and travesties of justice. Putting the script into an archaic idiom would probably not have helped matters any, as the movie is singularly focused on examining this fine point of legal debate. Still, listening to this script, one cannot help but feel the words dovetail more with 2011 television than eighteen century dialect.

Aiken eventually turns around – no longer loath to represent a woman he believes to be guilty, he soon becomes her most ardent defender, even when it threatens to undo his reputation and end his relationship with his betrothed. This transformation is pre-ordained by the Sunday Schoolhouse nature of the plot, so little time is spent demonstrating Aiken’s change in attitude, it simply comes about when the script demands it.

What disappointed me about all this was how interesting the event itself was, and how thoroughly period the costumes (what I love about historical drama), and yet, all that is but background for what’s essentially a courtroom morality play. I would have loved to have opened up this story and really found out more about the conspiracy, the passion of defeated southerners, and the peculiarities of eighteenth century Washington. Instead we get a kind of "West Wing" in top hat and tails, and the metaphor for Guantanamo Bay and modern-day terrorist trials is all we can focus on.

Though clearly there are parallels between the plot to kill Lincoln and our own 9/11 (the movie points out all of them, even a kind of eighteenth century version of the Terrorist Alert system), I would like to point out to the writers that there are differences, as well. For one, Mary Surratt was an American citizen. For another, we had already been in a long war of brother killing brother that had resulted in the deaths of more Americans than anything since. For a third, the terrorists of today have at their disposal the ability to obliterate millions of people in the blink of an eye. In 1865, it was difficult for anyone to travel more than ten miles in a single day. I mention all these because the movie fails to really let us understand the peculiarities of its generational dilemma and let us draw the conclusions about today for ourselves.

I also mention it because, perhaps unintentionally, this movie has me sympathizing just as much with the older “hang-em-all” Secretary of War as the young man impassioned with constitutional values (perhaps you can also credit this to a gusto performance by Kline, who illustrates Stanton's hard-headed reasonableness all too well). In a way, it’s also an old man versus young man argument: young men can afford the luxury of preserving their ideals; old men have to be satisfied with merely preserving the peace. It’s no surprise if I tell you Mary Surratt’s eventual fate, but I have to say, I wasn’t even convinced by this movie that she was wronged.

Which to me speaks to the movie’s core problem. It wants to both be a historical intrigue as well as a cautionary liberal's morality tale about suspending the constitution in times of war. The lessons from one, however, aren’t as simple as the lessons from the other. I loved this movie when it surprises even itself with the messy, complicated character that history – when really understood – inevitably provides. But when it lapses into modern day liberal bromides, it’s as boring as a Sunday morning sermon.

Top Ten Computer Geek Films of All Time

What is a computer geek film? It's a movie about the most nerdy of professions - computer programming - and how the urber nerd either saves the world, nearly destroys it, or, perhaps, changes it completely. Clearly a genre that has only existed since the 1980's, the cyber-geek film enjoyed a hey-day of sorts in the mid-nineties, when all things cyber were hip as well as fashionable. That's why this list of top ten films contains four from 1995 (the dawn of the internet era), more than any other year. But with two films making the list so far this year, 2010 is shaping up to be another bonanza year for the computer geek. Perhaps this is a harbinger of another internet bubble about to come.

And so, without further ado, here are the top ten computer geek films of all time.

10. The Net (1995) – With the unlikely casting of Sandra Bullock as a computer programmer who stumbles across an online conspiracy, The Net defines a whole genre of films I like to call “get-the-disk” movies: it doesn’t really matter what’s on the disk, the point is there’s a floppy disk (or nowadays, flash drive) that everyone’s after. One of the first films to integrate the internet into its story line, it did so a bit awkwardly, but with panache.

9. Johnny Mneumonic (1995) – Based loosely on a series of short stories by cyberpunk founder William Gibson, Johnny Mneumonic is a triumph of casting over substance, with Keanu Reeves creating his signature role as a super geek (he can hold something like an entire terabyte of digital content in his brain, although at that volume it tends to leak). Henry Rollins Jr. is perfectly mid-Nineties period as a punked-out brain doctor, and there are enough Japanese stunt men wielding high-tech shurikens to put the Kill Bill movies to shame.

8. Virtuosity (1995) –The early nineties saw a wave of “virtual reality” movies, including the Gibson adaptation Lawnmower Man and the noir-inflected The Thirteenth Floor. The idea of virtual reality is that computer geniuses are able to program a reality that’s more convincing than the real thing – or at least identical. The genre didn’t lend itself to great drama, but Virtuosity, with Russell Crow as a virtual serial killer and Denzel Washington as the cop on his tale, is the best of these.

7. Middle Men (2010) – A loving story about who two horny guys who accidentally invented the online credit card payment gateway while trying to find a new way to jack off, and how the Russian mob moved themselves into the business. Based on some real internet history, the movie emphases gangsters over software code, but it delivers a great back story on the seamier side of the internet, without which none of our high-flying firms like eBay or Facebook would be possible.

6. Live Free or Die Hard (2007) – The fourth Die Hard movie casts Justin Long, of the Mac/PC commercials fame, as an unlikely geek who gets in the way of super-cop John McClane and ends up helping him save the world from a bad-guy hacker played by Timothy Olyphant. Exposing the vulnerable nature of our online digital infrastructure, this Die Hard makes geeks cool while weaving a healthy quotient of car chases and explosions into a story that’s essentially about a giant systems crash.

5. Hackers (1995) – This fun little flick staring an impish Angelina Jolie and a pouty Johnny Lee Miller (whose career, unfortunately, never really took off from here) escaped the notice of critics, but really captured the “hacker” generation like no other. Hacking was both a mid-Nineties cultural moment (a combination of spandex pants, anime, laptops, and roller blades, otherwise known as “cyberpunk”) and a test of programming skill and braggadocio, really a kind of geek-boy rap culture. The test was to break into some big, secure, computer somewhere (government computers always better) and leave your mark of harmless fun, your cyber “tag” if you will. Embodying the utopian, anti-corporate ideals of the internet revolution – the exact opposite of, say, Sorkin’s money-loving protagonists in The Social Network – organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation keep the hippie hacker spirit alive today.

4. The Social Network (2010) – Writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher have delved deeply into the Facebook creation myth, as well as the personality of its creators and founders: the uber-geek Mark Zuckerberg, the loyal Eduardo Saverin, and former Napster bad-boy, Sean Parker. The result is a kind of West-Winginization of a digital start-up, replete with hard-drinking coding contests, but a compelling story, nevertheless. Its implicit critique of this supremely a-social set may be harsh - unlike earlier generations of cyber heroes, the young Zuckerberg and Parker are clearly more enraptured with dollar signs than friendships - but most younger audiences will see these instant billionaires as heroes, not losers.

3. Tron (1982) – In 1982, Disney stumbled upon a kind of zeitgeist magic with this little fable about a video-game/programmer geek who accidently gets himself digitized into the guts of a computer. Turning programming lingo into a kind of Aesop's fable (with the “CPU” as the Wizard behind the curtain, or the Queen of Hearts, if you will), what really made this movie shine were the special effects – one of the first to use computers to achieve a look never seen before. In Tron, for the fist time, the visuals were the metaphor. The original effects have been far surpassed now, but it was a cinematic moment capturing the awe, magic and wizardry of the new world of computers that could only happen once in history (as the remake, fun as it is likely to be, will no doubt demonstrate).

2. War Games (1983) – The quintessential hacking movie, in War Games, a fifteen year old Matthew Broderick and his girlfriend (played by Ally Sheedy) break into a defense department computer and accidentally almost start World War Three. Makes us remember that the internet is an invention originally intended to help civilization survive a nuclear war, War Games also found that perfect dramatization of the power of computer programming, giving us a very simple programming task that could initiate Armageddon. Perhaps software and computers have become too sophisticated to ever capture a programmer’s drama in so satisfyingly a simple manner again; or perhaps our fears a no longer as straightforward as they were during the Cold War. Either way, War Games is one of the great computer fables of all time.

1. The Matrix (1999) – In 1999, the Wachosky brothers took that decade’s earlier cultural mix of cyberpunk, post-modern French philosophy, AI, virtual reality, computer hacking, and the net to concoct an entirely new world of artificial, computer-programmed reality, and a hero-hacker – Keanu Reeves' Neo – who must wake up from artificiality and do battle with deadly computer programs. A kind of Tron on steroids, with a good infusion of Baudrillard to boot, The Matrix introduced a whole new bag of special effects (including the now-cliché “bullet time”) and a whole new level of computer-saturated reality. Still the benchmark of computer geek movies, The Matrix may yet take another decade of RAM miniaturization to surpass.