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Jude Law is Bill Gates. Ed Harris
is Steven Jobs. War is the metaphor. Software is the reality. Whose
operating platform will rule the post-war electronic era, and dominate
not only the culture but the globe with its mandate of necessary
capitalist efficiency, is the question this film decisively answers.
Just as Umberto Eco showed us that the PC was Protestant while the
Mac was Catholic, the stakes in this ideological war are as high
as any crusade of national identity. Like the PC/Mac war, the Battle
for Stalingrad was, in its cultural context, the decisive battle
for the future of that country. Now that both the political and
the technological cold wars are over, it’s safe to tell the
story of one nestled snugly inside the technical details of the
other. The message of this movie is, like most movies these days,
"We’ve made the world safe for your consumerism. Don’t
stop shopping."
Enemy at the Gates is, of course, history told from the winner’s
side, and especially from the winner’s Public Relations department.
Taglined, "Some Men Are Born to Be Heroes," the film tells the story
of how close Steve Jobs came to beating Bill at his own game by
mimicking his moves, imitating his code, and stealthily planning
night ops for hostile morning takeovers.
Crucial to Gates’s success is the public relations machine
that pumps him up to heroic proportions in the country’s eyes
so that, despite his own cowering fear and deep internal insecurity,
he is forced to live up to all that the papers print about him.
In the film, Gates is represented by Sgt. Vassili Zaitsev, and his
public relations man is Commisar Danilov, who turns him into a hero
even though he knows he is anything but. Ed Harris, who plays Major
Erwin König, is the specialist sent in to take Zaitsev out,
only to be undone by a feat of loyalty played by Danilov, the devoted
PR man. The crucial fact is that both Zaitsev and König have no
reputable skill other than "sniping"—computer code for hacking—which
they do endlessly, annoyingly, measuring small gains against each
other until one of them finally wins a pyrrhic victory. If Apple
had won, or even thought they had a chance of winning, they would
have released the same film, but titled it Threatening Our Jobs.
If only Gates would do the same for critical reviews of his software,
we’d all be happier. The propagandizing rhetoric of this film
wants us to be glad that we chose Windows 2000 over Mac OS 9 (or
whatever version they’re up to). For Enemy at the Gates
is not so much a consumer-pleasing product placement campaign as
it is an anti-government film, relentlessly hacking away at the
federal government’s unfair ideological hypocrisy that seeks
to curtail the Microsoft monopoly while simultaneously creating
all its documents, internal memos, and e-mails on Microsoft code.
"Without me" Bill Gates is shrieking, "you people couldn’t
even prosecute this case!" And, in that regard at least, it is a
film that tells a deep truth.
The fantasy element in the film is the love interest. True, Bill
Gates did finally get married, but Melinda Gates is no Rachel Weisz,
and their initial tryst was nothing like the intense, passionate,
unavoidably erotic scene that the film gives us. Instead, Weisz’s
character is here used as a machismo-building device, to make us
believe that Gate’s romantic interests could conceivably cause
jealousy among other men. They can’t, and they won’t,
and we know it.
But let him have his fun, because after all, even this interpretation
of his PR department’s smear campaign film was composed on
a Windows-based machine, and the money I make on it will be used
to romance my very real, and very erotic lover.
Heh-heh . . . Suck it up, Billy boy.
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