Whenever we see something in the movies that's pure nonsense, we should relegate it to the movies-are-fantasy portion of our consciousness, but this is often tough to do. When my wife the lawyer watches a courtroom drama that flagrantly ignores some of the most basic tenets of courtroom protocol, she just can't enjoy the surrounding plot. When my friend the doctor sits through a medically impossible story, he ends up dismissing the entire movie. I assume this is true for most of us whose profession gets mangled by a simplistic screenplay. But let's be fair here. How can we expect the writer to be aware of every nuance and fact about every profession that's portrayed in his plot? Sure, he can do his homework and get into the nitty-gritty details when the bulk of the story calls for such realism. Most movies can get by without such detail, if the rest of it (acting, story line, direction) keeps us from latching on to the faux pas. We can forgive the ignorance of writers who didn't go to law or medical school. As you might expect, I often get ruffled by the idiotic depiction of personal computers.

I can't let this pass the way I can forgive ignorance of the law or medicine. Because so many of the public have and use computers regularly, and know to a certain extent what's ridiculous or implausible, I expect screenwriters to be better informed in this arena. Most screenplays are probably developed on a computer. Many writers use word-processors, email, the internet, and if not, then at least have friends or family who do. (There are exceptions, of course: some die-hards are tied to their typewriters (manual or electric), like the James Caan character from Misery. I think these guys are not likely to write a screenplay that focuses or depends on computers anyway.) A good example of a screenplay that depends on computers but goes a bit overboard can be seen in Independence Day, which includes, among others, an astonishingly versitile laptop.

My ten-year-old daughter wanted to know if a PC really could communicate with aliens, the way the Jeff Goldblum character did in ID4. "Science fiction", I replied, "with extermely strong emphasis on the fiction." Soon after, a friend asked me "Can you send viruses into remote computers like he did?" "Sure," I answered with a happy lilt. "Every host system simply allows you to send programs to it that will not only be received but will be executed immediately. Especially alien systems, which of course use the same machine code we use. You know - a byte's a byte, whether from some distant star system or 'Carmen Sandiego'. And not only can we transmit viruses to other systems this way, but we can tell when they're running. We can figure out how long they'll hang around, too. We'll know in advance that the remote computer will be screwed up for only a few minutes. Hey man - don't you know anything about PCs? Didn't you upgrade to windows '95 all by yourself?"

Okay. I guess I'm stuck in the branches and not enjoying the beauty of the forest. Fiction is fiction. If I'm going to accept the aliens, why not the computers? Everyone bought it when the boy in War Games managed to trigger a thermonuclear international war. And no one seemed to mind the notion of a global computer network becoming self-aware in Terminator. I suppose I'll just have to leave my profession at the door, sit back in the dark, have another Twizzler, and enjoy the uplifting and wry notion of defeating the alien invaders with a computer virus. But I just can't help thinking that it was much more realistic when the martians in War of the Worlds were defeated by a biological virus...

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