And why not toast? Sunday’s Academy Awards won’t award the best villain, but if they did, Miles Bron would win in a row. (With apologies to the cloud of “No.”) He’s the instantly recognizable type we’re all familiar with: the visionary (or so everyone says), the social media narcissist, the self-styled nuisance who talks a lot about it. “broken things.”
Miles Bron is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood’s favorite villains: the tech bro. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the film industry may have found its richest source of big-screen antagonists since Soviet-era Russia.
Great movie villains don’t come along very often. The best picture nominated “Top Gun: Maverick,” like its predecessor, likes to fight with an enemy of unspecified nationality. Why antagonize international ticket buyers when Tom Cruise vs. Anyone else doing a good job?
But in recent years, the tech bro has thrived on the movie screen as Hollywood’s bad guy. It is an increase that has mirrored the mounting fear through technology that expands its reach into our lives and increases skepticism for not always altruistic motives of people – and it is usually people – who control today’s digital empire.
We have the CEO of Biosyn Genetics (Campbell Scott) in “Jurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the danger of technological overreach; Chris Hemsworth’s biotech overlord in “Spiderhead”; and the technology teacher who can destroy the Earth Mark Rylance in 2021 “Don’t Look. ” We have Eisenberg, again, as a tech bro-style Lex Luthor in 2016 “Batman v. Superman”; pharmaceutical entrepreneur Harry Melling in 2020’s “The Old Guard”; rule-breaking videogame mogul Taika Waititi in 2021’s “Free Guy”; search engine CEO Oscar Isaac in 2014’s “Ex Machina”; and a critical portrait of the Apple founder in 2015 “Steve Jobs.”
Children’s films, too, regularly channel parents’ anxieties about technology’s impact on children. In 2021 “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” a newly launched AI brings about a robot apocalypse. “Ron’s Gone Wrong” (2021) also uses a robot metaphor for smartphone addiction. And the TV series has just as aggressively rushed to dramatize Big Tech blunders. Recent entries include: Uber’s Travis Kalanick in Showtime’s “Super Pumped”; Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout”; and Adam and Rebekah Neumann of WeWork on Apple TV’s “We Crashed.”
Some of these depictions may fuel Hollywood’s jealousy as another California innovation hub emerges. But those worlds have long since merged. Many companies released the film as a distraction, itself – none other than Netflix, the distributor of the “Glass Onion”. The streamer was persuaded to release Johnson’s sequel in more theaters than any previous Netflix release. Estimates suggest the film grossed around $15 million in its opening weekend, the old-fashioned way, but Netflix executives said they have no plans to make that theatrical release.
And the mistrust runs deeper than the Hollywood-Silicon Valley rivalry. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 70% of Americans think social media companies do more harm than good. Tech leaders like Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg are sometimes viewed favorably by only 1 in 5 Americans.
As characters, tech bros – hoodie-wearing descendants of mad scientists – have formed an archetype: Masters of the universe whose hubris leads to disaster, social media savants who can’t manage personal relationships. Whether that vision of the future pans out or not, we’ll be living in his world, either way. He’s a villain who thinks he’s a hero.
“In my mind, he’s the most dangerous human being,” Rylance said of Peter Isherwell. “He believed that we can solve any problem that nature throws at us. I think it’s the same kind of thinking that causes the problems that we have today, trying to dominate each other and dominate all life that is related and dependent.
“The Glass Onion,” nominated for best original screenplay, features a new escalation in mockery of tech moguls. CEO Norton’s eminently punchable, with the name almost “Bro,” enormously rich, powerful and, considering that they are working on a new source of volatile energy, dangerous. But Bron is also, as Benoit Blanc Daniel Craig finally deduces, stupid. “A vainglorious fool,” said Blanc.
In Johnson’s film, the tech bro/emperor bro has absolutely no clothes. They just run around with lies, lies and a lot of unreal words like “predefinite” and “inbreathiate.”
Although Johnson wrote “The Glass Onion” before Elon Musk’s shambolic Twitter takeover, the film’s release seems almost preternaturally timely. The chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX is just one of Johnson’s true inspirations, with some taking Bron as a direct parody of Musk. In a widely read Twitter thread, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Johnson was dramatizing Musk as “an evil, stupid person,” which he called “an incredibly stupid theory, given that Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in human history.” He added: “How many rockets has Johnson launched lately?”
Musk, himself, has yet to publicly comment on “The Glass Onion,” but has previously had many complaints with Hollywood, including its portrayal of men like him. “Hollywood refuses to write even one story about a real company startup where the CEO isn’t a dweeb and/or evil,” Musk tweeted last year.
Musk will get his own movie. Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on Monday revealed his months of work on “Musk,” which producers promised would provide a “definitive and unvarnished examination” of the tech entrepreneur.
At the same time the supremacy of bro tech supervillainy has emerged, some films have sought not to lampoon Big Tech but to imbibe some of the boundless expanse of the digital world. Phil Lord, who with Christopher Miller has produced “The Mitchells vs the Machines” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, says the internet has had a huge impact on his approach to film.
“We, the legacy media, respond in a subconscious way to the new media,” Gusti said. “We’re all just trying to figure out how to live in a new world. It’s changing people’s behavior. It’s changing the way we find and experience love. It’s changing the way we live. Of course, the stories we tell and the way we tell them will also change and reflect that.” ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ definitely projects a lot of content from every era into your brain at the same time.
Best picture favorite “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” also reflects our multi-screen, media-bombarded lives. Writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, whose film went up to lead 11 Oscars, said they wanted to channel the confusion and heartache of life in all-everywhere existence that tech moguls like Miles Bron helped create.
“The reason why we make movies is because that’s how modern life is,” Kwan said.
So even though Miles Bron won’t be taking home an Academy Award on Sunday, he still won, in a way. It’s his world. We all just live there.