When interviewing an actor or director I admire, I’ve made it a personal mission to avoid sycophancy: I’m there for something resembling a business meeting, not a fan convention. I’m not cold, far from it, but I’m also not about to invite Noah Baumbach for cocktails so I can ramble on at him about how The Squid and the Whale spoke to my inner child of divorce. I know my place and I know theirs. But there was one time, back in 2013, when I simply couldn’t help myself.
I was at the Gravity junket interviewing Sandra Bullock, stuck with a thankless conveyor-belt slot, shuffled in for less than 10 minutes after waiting for more than three hours. She was as charming as I’d expected, based both on rumblings from within the industry and from the fondness I’d had for her as a child, when I had VHS copies of Speed and The Net on rotation for a solid year.
While the former remains a sturdy favourite and inarguably the better movie, it was the latter that jimmied its way further into my life, and in that clinical hotel room 18 years later words tumbled out of my mouth before I had the smarts to stop them. Our time was up and, as I waited for the footage of our interview, I splurged out some nonsense about what an integral film it had been to my 11-year-old self. She was politely enthused to hear it (or convincingly acted that way), telling me that it was a film ahead of its time, and, as I was ushered out of the room, I yelled something in agreement, a dumb comment about how radical it had been to see someone order pizza on a computer. (It really had been, though.)
It was a lapse, from film journalist to fanboy, but it was because the film really had been a key part of my life, for reasons that haven’t always been clear to me. Watching it again, 25 years after its release, I was struck by the many things about The Net that didn’t work (with less far-fetched hokeyness, it could have been a more chilling thriller) but more so I was rewarded by seeing the many aspects of it that did. As Bullock told me years later, the film really was quite astonishing in its forward-thinking view of the internet’s perils.
In 1995, my awareness of an online world was vague, as it was for most people. My main source of information was the big screen and within the space of a few months, I had seen both The Net and Hackers. While the latter, starring a young Angelina Jolie, was far zippier and lighter, the messages were similar: be careful.
In The Net, Bullock plays systems analyst Angela Bennett who finds herself stuck in a Hitchcockian nightmare partly of her own making. In the nascent internet, Angela has found a place to hide, a way to justify her loneliness as optional, retreating into a digital community far more welcoming than the real-world one that’s pushed her away. But her lack of human ties makes her an easy target, and when she stumbles on a terrorist conspiracy, she struggles to convince anyone of its legitimacy. Angela’s identity is stolen while she’s on vacation after a holiday romance is revealed to be a sinister scam and her perfect, box-ticking suitor to be a fraud.
He’s been sent to kill her, and, after the pair have had sex, in the film’s most horrifying moment, he reveals that his seduction was based entirely on information she’d shared in a chatroom. It remains a powerfully invasive moment, naked and nasty; like many of the film’s cruellest strokes, it’s also one that’s gained relevance with time.
What’s perhaps most intriguingly prescient about the plot is that the group of online villains is revealed to have been in cahoots with big tech all along – a suitably sour endnote for a film charged with an aggressive distrust of digital culture. At one point Angela, exhausted and infuriated after her identity has been stolen, says to her lawyer: “They’ve done it to me and they’re gonna do it to you.” While few of us have had an evil group of cyber-terrorists try to kill us for knowing too much about their nefarious activities, many have had their debit card, and in turn their identity, stolen at least once?
I’d like to say that it was my equally progressive view of the dangers of tech that had me enthralled, but I think my enjoyment was far more simplistic. At that time, I hadn’t seen the many films The Net was shamelessly cribbing from at that age, so its tale of a woman caught up in a shadowy conspiracy felt fresh and involving, playing on a fury at the injustice of it all. I was also captivated by Bullock, a luminous star swiftly ascending to the A-list, who became a safe teen crush, an actor who I secretly just wanted to hang out with.
I avoided the Bullock-free “2.0” sequel and the barely watched the one-season TV show, but I’ve thought often about the original, for its entertainment value, its Nu Nostradamus thinking and, as rediscovered fairly recently, for what happened directly after my initial viewing. A few years back I found a diary I’d kept at the time, one that contained short, direct, businesslike entries mainly focused on media consumption. On the Saturday I saw the film, at the cinema with my mum, it read: “Saw The Net today which was really good but then came home and my rabbit died which was really bad.”
It’s either a credit to the film or a comment on my damaged psyche that it was The Net that left a more lasting impression.
