AMMC #2: WarGames
WARGAMES (1983)
This is the story of the time President Ronald Reagan watched three movies and then Ally Sheedy sent thousands of people to jail.
Reagan, a former actor, made time during his presidency to watch movies - including his own. A few times a month, Reagan would head to Camp David to watch a movie on Friday and a movie on Saturday. We know this because The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum keeps track. If you want to know how many Barbara Streisand movies the Reagans watched during the winter of 1984, the answer is there. If you don’t want to look, the answer is three - Yentl, Funny Girl and Funny Woman - but only because they waited until June to watch The Way We Were.*
Two movies in a weekend appears to have been his upper limit. This may have something to do with his also being the President of the United States. Reagan only watched three movies in the same weekend three times in all of 1983.
The second time, between Thursday, June 2 and Saturday, June 4, was one of the most consequential movie watch-a-thons in world history.
Reagan was so frightened of the third movie that weekend that, just four days later, he held a meeting with his cabinet and Congressmen to discuss its national security implications. The third movie would be screened in Congress to explain exactly why the United States needed laws to deter hackers. The third movie directly led to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main hacking law in the U.S. used against spies and teenagers alike for a quarter-century. If Russian spies are brought to justice, it will be in part because Ronald Reagan watched three movies in one June weekend of 1983.
The third movie was Wargames. The first and second movies were Return of the Jedi and The Star Chamber.
There is a universe where Ronald Reagan had a standard two movie weekend. I like to imagine it ended with the same cabinet meeting, the same panic in Congress carried to the same legislative conclusion.
This is the world where Ewoks are punishable by 3-5 years in prison.
We, however, live in the world where Ronald Reagan, pre-presidency, was friends with Lawrence Lasker’s parents. Lasker co-wrote Wargames and arranged a screening for the president during opening weekend.
When Reagan saw Wargames asked first the room and then his generals if the movie’s vivid depiction of a hacker starting nuclear war was possible. There’s a reason the answer he got was yes: Lasker and co-writer Walter Parkes had consulted with a RAND academic, the general in charge of NORAD, and a local hacker.
The CFAA passed in 1986. Without Wargames, it might have taken a little longer. That actually might have been a good thing. The CFAA passed before the invention of the web, before cloud computing, and before pervasive social media. It’s vague in ways a bill written post-MySpace would not have been. Courts have been inconsistent on whether violating a website’s terms of service should be considered violating the CFAA. That issue is currently in front of the Supreme Court.
There’s a lot in this movie. It does an incredible job for the 1980s of explaining cybersecurity, nuclear deterrence and particularly artificial intelligence. The ending of Wargames isn’t just the most dramatic Tic Tac Toe sequence committed to film. As a basic tool to understand the concept of machine learning in the 1980s, it’s pretty much unmatched.
Fun fact: In the opening sequence, one of them gets the launch code wrong.
What it doesn’t have - with some irony for a movie where one character tells another character not to act like a robot - is characters with depth or story arcs. They have big personalities, but don’t have inner lives driving them around. There’s a general who could only be described as “Texan,” parents who don’t go far past quirky, and Matthew Broderick’s ostensible main character who does rebellious things without the edge of rebellion Aside from a brief moment of panic where the Broderick realizes nuclear war would prevent him from taking swimming lessons, no one really learns anything about themselves or grows.
There are two exceptions. There’s Dr. Falken, who is mostly in the movie for its last three scenes. And there’s the real main character: Joshua, the computer.
Joshua is fascinating because he needs to be a computer in order for the movie to work.
There are a lot of artificially intelligent bad guys in movies: The Avengers have fought at least two of them (can you honestly remember all the Marvel villains?). Conversely, two Shia LaBeoufs fought Eagle Eye. But someone like HAL 9000 didn’t really computer his way into trouble. You could write a very similar movie to 2001 about a human captain who goes off the rails. Herman Melville did. The AI in Eagle Eye that schemes to kill the U.S. government because of a bad decision up the chain of command could easily be a general with the same motivation.
But the point of Wargames - the thing that Joshua as a stand-in for the audience is supposed to learn - is that humans intrinsically understand the difference between a war game and real life. War games assume someone has to make the first move, and that the situation will inevitably escalate. Functioning societies crave maintaining equilibrium.
Joshua is given control of NORAD’s nuclear weaponry because humans in the moment can’t be trusted to reliably pull the trigger. The movie ends with a general coming to the realization that the nuclear war the computer was showing him couldn’t be real because no real enemy could live with the consequences. Joshua can’t be a person because people know that the ruthless efficiency and worst-case scenario planning of a game doesn’t match the real world.
Wargames pins all character growth on the character that’s the most interesting throughout the movie. It wants the audience’s attention on the lesson it wants to impart and streamlines a lot of the other characters to do that.
All of this is a long way of saying that Ally Sheedy is great in Wargames. She’s given a simple love interest character in a movie of very simple characters and brings such puppy-with-springy-bones physical charisma and such chemistry with everything placed in her path that she ends up feeling more three dimensional than the rest of the movie she’s in.
There’s no documentation that says Ronald Reagan, movie watcher, was convening generals to specifically save Ally Sheedy. There’s also none to say he wasn’t.
When Congress and the media considered the issue, the AI problems were considered too far fetched, but both, like Reagan, were taken by the hacking premise. All three networks reported about the so-called “Wargames scenario,” even before teenagers reportedly inspired by the movie began getting caught hacking places like Los Alamos. “There’s no way you can play global thermonuclear war with NORAD,” said NBC, “which means the rest of us can relax and enjoy the film.”
There’s a universe sandwiched somewhere in between the one Reagan banned Ewoks and this one, where alongside a then-current threat, Congress saw Wargames and took a firm look at legislating machine learning. Would decades-out-of-date laws be better than none at all? Ask your favorite lawyer after the Supreme Court terms of service case comes back.
At 8:07 am, on Saturday, January 13, 2018, citizens of Hawaii were warned via cell phone message of an incoming nuclear ballistic missile. There was no missile. There also wasn’t any AI behind it. Human error can’t be solved with tic tac toe.
*It’s unclear which version of “A Star is Born” the Reagans watched in October and whether October should count as winter. I’m leaving it out.