Bloggers, as seen by Hollywood

I just saw a part of Made of Honor (2008)—couldn’t stomach the whole thing—which is a derivative romantic comedy that is nothing more than a vehicle for the “dreamy” Patrick Dempsey. I have been musing about the scene and how bloggers are portrayed in Hollywood, and when I searched the phrase “bloggers portrayed in recent films” I was actually taken to a post by Dave Winer that he wrote on the subject just yesterday. Serendipity!

And while he is focusing on bloggers as leading characters in films, the blogger in Made of Honor was a marginal figure who was pretty much a caricature (which goes along with the logic of the film as a whole). The blogger is portrayed as a fanatic woman who was stalking Patrick Dempsey with her blog because he was so beautiful. She was an office worker and basically framed as a geeky, social misfit who was infantile in her crush, and made blogs look like a bad leftover from the years of teenage crushes gone wrong. She was quite a pathetic character, and was interesting for me to see how such a sub-par film can so shamelessly take shots at the image of the blogger.

Adding to that, another film that deals with social media in far more comprehensive ways is George Romero’s Diary of the Dead. Blogs and video uploads are basically the framework for dealing with the zombie holocaust, which is very much in line with the previous Dead series, which always had at their heart a deep subtext about how the media frames the reality in which we live. I didn’t necessarily like Diary of the Dead for a variety of reasons, particularly the acting and aesthetic—it just seemed neither fish nor fowl. And while not a great a gripping film in my estimation, but interesting in the intersection of our cultural zombie fetish and social media.

Anyway, I love the whole idea of tracing bloggers, and even social media more generally, I Hollywood and on TV, and while no one does it better than Infocult for everyday life, I think re-framing blogging and social media in Hollywood would make a great fodder for a pretty fun presentation/mashup. Suggestions of some films besides those being listed in the comments of Winer’s post?

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7 Responses to Bloggers, as seen by Hollywood

  1. I only blog to fulfill my infantile crush on Jim Groom.

  2. Reverend says:

    I knew it, and I only blog to return to infancy.

  3. Brian Frank says:

    Do we count all the movies in which “The-one-person-in-the-world-who-can-hack-this-mainframe!” turns out to be sweaty guy who’s constantly nursing a Big Gulp and lives in his angry mom’s basement?

    Social media plays a big part of Never Back Down (guilty pleasure). One of the characters is always shooting video and posting it online — someone we see in a lot of movies about the Iraq War too. He’s always the most annoying person in the room.

  4. Reverend says:

    Brian,

    Absolutely, I think the best example of the hacker image with the big gulp was that film with Robert Dinero and Edward Norton “the Score.” The hacker was a loser in his mom’s basement, sweaty and processed food eating maniac. I do love that whole imagery from late 90s early 00s film. And it is even more interesting to me just how much the term hacker has morphed since the early 00s.

  5. I demand my hacking partners to be hotties sporting form-fitting leather. Trinity, to my Neo.

  6. Martha says:

    “I just saw a part of Made of Honor (2008)—couldn’t stomach the whole thing”

    Can’t you just admit you watched the whole damn thing and wept uncontrollably at the end?

  7. Hacker portrayals: what about the fat, stupid, cruel, failing programmer in Jurassic Park? Ah, the many ways to hate Spielborg…

    But you speak of bloggers in film. I’ve been looking mostly at their role in print, which seems more congenial in some ways (thinking text to text, and sustained texts). Hmmm:

    -Given the role of social media in the 2008 elections, have any suspense films, documentaries, etc. done much with bloggers?

    -What about general suspense thrillers? Blogs make a fun story in the odd novel _Execution Channel_, as a disinformation network, so maybe…

    -How’s tv handling this?

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