In Shopgirl, the book, the leading male character is a retired computer programmer. The Hollywood experts decided that the American public couldn’t possibly care about the barren inner life of a computer programmer and the source of the character’s wealth is obscured as well as his occupation. In Shopgirl, the movie, which we watched the other night on DVD, the nerd has been transformed into a “logician”.
4 thoughts on “Shopgirl, the movie, obscures the computer nerd”
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Well we give Hollywood a certain license and will suspend our disbelief to a reasonable amount, but once they cast the female lead they had a problem: who would accept a computer programmer getting Clarie Danes?
Are you keeping track of all computer programmer-references in popular culture? Have you watched Antitrust?
Allow me to summarize it for you (um, SPOILERS):
* Programmer/hero has an attractive girlfriend. It turns out: she’s a hired assassin.
* While employed, programmer/hero meets an attractive female programmer coworker.
* Twist: attractive female coworker is in fact, NOT a programmer, but is, you guessed it, a hired assassin.
So what have we learned? Two things:
* If you have an attractive girlfriend, chances are 100% likely she’s an assassin.
* If you meet an attractive female programmer, chances are also 100% likely she’s an assassin.
Stay on your toes!
Mark: In the novella, the retired computer programmer was able to attract a young beautiful woman. Steve Martin was a little confused about programmer lifestyles because he had the guy living a very sophisticated rich guy lifestyle (my own experience with guys who get rich in middle age is that they don’t change their lifestyle too much; the folks who buy the designer clothes and know which restaurants to eat in are the ones who were rich starting much younger, e.g., investment bankers).
He wasn’t *just* a logician, he was a *symbolic* logician. Cue the laugh track.