Steve Ranger's Notebook: Hollywood fears the geek

Rejoice! Techies are now so feared by the public they are being cast as the master-villains in Hollywood blockbusters, says Steve Ranger. And that's a good thing...

For those of you that haven't seen Die Hard 4.0 - warning, spoilers ahead - the arch-villain turns out to be a computer programmer. Okay, a pretty trendy-looking one but undoubtedly a tech guy.

And why do I think this is good news for the IT crowd? Well - and here I resort to pub psychology - people find it easier to hate what they envy. So having a geek super-villain means Hollywood reckons a large proportion of the cinema-going public are now jealous and slightly scared of techies.

Which is why - I'd argue - they want to see one as the villain. So that he can be vanquished, and in the process dispelling the audience's own anxieties about such figures. Blockbuster as catharsis, if you like. Bad news for the villain in question but surely a good thing for IT people - a reflection of the move up the social food-chain for techies in general.

We Brits know a lot about this stuff. After all we used to be the main target of this Hollywood envy. There was a time not so long ago when if you were a British character actor pretty much the only job you could get in the movies was the role of evil genius (who after significant over-acting would be undone by their own arrogance in the final reel).

But now it's the turn of the geek.

Now maybe Thomas Gabriel in the new Die Hard isn't the greatest super-villain of all time. For one thing he doesn't really properly fight it out with Bruce (even worse he leaves it to his girlfriend). But it's nice to have a strong role model for the IT crowd for once, right?

Hollywood doesn't offer that many poster-boys (and even less girls) for impressionable techies. Looking back over the last 20 years of big screen entertainment I can't come up with more than a handful.

Hugh Jackman in Swordfish or Bruce Boxleitner in Tron? Or (scraping the barrel) Jonny Lee Miller in Hackers?

Having a super-hacker as the villain in Die Hard 4.0 means the average Joe is now envious and fearful of geeks (who knows, maybe it's their stock options, their iPhones, their... USB rocket launchers?).

As a result, Hollywood has grasped the idea that a battle between a geek super-villain and Bruce Willis's everyman John McClane will resonates with a popcorn-munching audience in a way that bashing the Brit super-villain used to.

Sure, it would be even more interesting to see the hacker as hero of a blockbuster - but it's better to have one as the villain than just the nerdy sidekick, for once.