Collateral attractions: Halt and Catch Fire

If you follow the Pace, or — as seems increasingly likely these days, see him out of the corner of your computer screen — it’s hard to avoid awareness of his new series on AMC, Halt and Catch Fire. It’s a show about the beginnings of the personal computer “revolution,” and the beginning of it focuses on the theft of the IBM BIOS and the beginnings of the move toward open architecture and portability.

I admit, I was skeptical. My dad was a mainframe cryptocomputer specialist from 1967-1970 (O Vietnam War, you influenced so many things, among others, the general upward class mobility of my family) and a systems analyst from 1970 till 1996, and I’d heard a lot more computerspeak in my childhood than I ever developed a tolerance for. (I remember swearing to myself as a tween that whatever I did, I was not going to work on computers myself or ever be in a relationship with someone who did. Tja.) To some extent the development traced in this drama led to his downsizing, insofar as his ongoing involvement with mainframes meant that he missed the personal computer revolution on a professional level. (We had several of them at home, including some of the machines you see in this program; he just didn’t love computers enough to go in that direction.) So although I remember the period, I didn’t have a real urge to see the show, and the fact that the cutesy title (which references a machine language error that hangs up a CPU) seems to be repeated in the episode titles (I/O; FUD) seemed just a little too precious to me. And historicizing shows based on technology are particularly vulnerable to stupid errors that matter most precisely to their target audiences.

Segue to Servetus in a motel room on Thursday night and no HGTV and channel surfing and seeing that episode 1 was being repeated. OK, OK. Wow — this is actually interesting. (The little kids have a Speak and Spell, pictured at left, because their mom works at Texas Instruments, and my cousins had one.) And I’m thinking, hmm, is this something I could watch with dad? But of course, I wasn’t watching for the subject matter, I was watching for the Pace.

My exposure to Pace’s work is limited. I’ve seen him in Lincoln and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and, as it turns out, in A Single Man, although I don’t remember him in that at all. In the first two of those pieces he plays very bombastic characters and while he’s a pleasure to watch, he does turn on the camp. I have to admit that that was my main reaction to the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire. Here we have another character who is indicating like crazy — and it’s a bit hard to tell, exactly, where the line between character and acting falls — is Pace overacting or is he playing a character who is overacting? It’s a bit strange to say that, because, in more or less the second scene we see him, he’s speaking to a class at a university (called “Austin Tech” in the show, which made me giggle) and the character makes the classic first body language move of a professor standing in front of a lecture room, one that I make myself all the time, which is intended to indicate both sincerity and bringing oneself down to the level of the students whom one is addressing (a move of abandoning authority that paradoxically enhances the speaker’s authority because of his voluntary concession of status). I’ve been especially fascinated lately by the notion of irony in acting and what seem to be Pace’s native modes (based on what I’ve seen of him) always raise that question for me.

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Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) addresses an information science class in episode 1 of Halt and Catch Fire. Source: AMC

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There’s an interesting first (sex) scene in the show that I thought said a lot about the character he’s playing, but I left episode 1 nonetheless a bit undecided or perplexed about Pace’s work. In comparison, I got way more excited about the subject matter than I thought I could ever be — and so tonight I suggested to dad that we could watch it together. Wow, he loved it. First, we watched episode 1 on my computer. He claimed to find an error in the script (to do with hex) and we had a fantastic talk about the early 1980s in his life and our lives and so on. And then we watched the second episode on television, and we were laughing about references to WordStar (which has been in the news recently as George R.R. Martin’s word processor of choice) and stagflation. Although the show does have a little too big of a tendency to tell rather than show (the script keeps pedantically reminding the viewer what a BIOS is and why they are stealing it), I think we’ll be watching more episodes of this as a father-daughter bonding activity.

And tonight’s episode really convinced me about Pace’s performance of this role. It still seems stagy to me — he has a tendency to fling his arms about that seems slightly unnecessary, particularly penetratingly in a scene where he visits a failing hi-fi store. But in tonight’s show the viewer realizes just exactly how much his character is acting, all of the time. Joe MacMillan is a manipulator — and Pace seems to be incredibly good at that. It gives the show a surprising bite.

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Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan in episode 2 of Halt and Catch Fire. Screencap edited from source: AMC

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One of the key scenes of episode 2 occurs when the three co-architects of the BIOS theft (MacMillan, a computer engineer he finds at the company he targets, and a female university student who’s supposed to be the coder) meet in a parking lot at a watershed moment, when it looks like the project and their working coalition are about to collapse, along with the company they’re working for. The two men get in a fight and MacMillan is revealed to have a heavily scarred torso. He gives an impassioned speech about his interest in technological developments, ending with the lines,  “I thought we could do this because we’re all unreasonable people and progress depends on our changing the world to fit us.”

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Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan in episode 2 of Halt and Catch Fire. Screencap edited from source: AMC

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What interested me about the scene up to this point is that as viewers, we’ve gotten more than enough evidence from the episode’s narrative that MacMillan is an opportunist of some sort. And yet. And yet. I watch this speech and find myself buying it hook, line and sinker. Only to discover (being vague here to get you to watch the show) that the next scene immediately undermines everything he says.

Pace says of the character he’s playing: “With Joe MacMillan, there’s a very thin line between reality and magic.” In that sense — not just as he’s scripted, but also as Pace plays him, with this constant tension around whether he can be believed, MacMillan seems to be a synedoche for the tech revolution in general — with questions about the character’s sincerity and his acting paralleling the problems in knowing what’s real in tech. He manipulates, pulls forward, and draws back in ways that those of us who engage with the computer world experience regularly from our machines and software — and as with MacMillan’s speech, we believe regularly even though we know or at least should realize that we are being manipulated. MacMillan is a character who can make us believe, can make us abandon our questions about irony, even though we know at every turn that we are being lied to. He’s a salesman, but more than a salesman, somehow — speaker for the computer revolution as modern type?

Pace has also said in a recent interview that he wants to play characters who won’t leave him alone. I’m intrigued by why MacMillan apparently preoccupied Pace, and I wonder if it’s for the same reasons that I find myself still thinking about him — precisely because of the way that the seductive face of the liar who can make us believe anything pervades our technological lives. Because what’s weird about all of this is, thinking back to the moving speech that I described above — there is something ultimately and paradoxically truthful about the lie. MacMillan feels as if he’s being real about something, even as he undermines everything he says and grins when caught in the act. There is something true in irony, as well, if we could only put our fingers on how the deception works — and if that thing is only (primarily?) pain.

You can watch the first episode of the show here for the next three weeks or so.

[ETA: typos corrected.]

~ by Servetus on June 9, 2014.