societal Anxieties
Movie villains have always reflected societal anxieties. Turtlenecks and hoodies are the hallmarks of today’s sinister supervillains. Prior, movie villains were easily identified by their facial scarring, malevolent laughs, and weirdly high collars.
Take Rian Johnson’s Oscar-nominated Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which centers around the murderous gray T-shirted CEO, Miles Bron.
Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham, writers of ‘Ron’s Gone Wrong’ admit it was concern about their own children’s tech use that inspired the film.
The computer-animated comedy is about B-bots, robot companions for children that help them make friends via algorithm. When one B-bot, Ron, malfunctions, Bubble CEO Marc Wydell is intrigued, while executive Andrew Morris wants to destroy Ron and use the other bots to spy on kids for profit.
Sarah Smith said, “We sort of saw them as the two faces of Mark Zuckerberg”. “We saw it as the idealist who says, ‘I want to connect the world, I want to create something amazing that will bring something together and the other part, which is …” Baynham helpfully finishes her sentence: ‘I want to rule the world!”
Peter Baynham says they included both a good guy and a bad guy tech executive precisely because many tech bros don’t see themselves as villains. “They think they’re on a heroic mission to make the world a better place,” he says. “They’re not an evil person, they’ve got blinkers on.” Visually, good guy Marc is more of a Zuckerberg figure (hoodie), while baddie Andrew resembles Steve Jobs (turtleneck).
Why is this happening, and why now?
The mad scientist has evolved into the mad disruptor.
“My daughter used to say to me, ‘Mom, we need to buy that washing powder because it makes everything smell so fresh!’” Smith says.“One of the reasons for making the film is that we’re not really talking to kids about this. Screen time is the thing that’s most fraught in every single household every single day, and yet we don’t really have ways of sitting down and having a conversation about what it is we’re scared of, what the dangers are.”
Before writing the film, Smith and Baynham were alarmed by children’s naivety around Big Tech agendas.
“Kids’ films ought to actually deal with what’s going on in their lives, and this is the biggest thing that’s changed in the raising of children that any of us can remember,” Smith says. “It’s really super important to find cultural ways to provoke the conversation.” Even if they have to do it on another screen.
“We leaned into the tropes, we leaned into the Steve Jobs outfit,” Smith says, “What you’re trying to do is sum up in a few broad, simple strokes the kind of motivations and people that are working inside that industry.”
Sarah Smith notices that technology has extraordinary power to change the world but argues that the ideology behind the tech often also has the power to harm.
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