Hacker Cinema
PCU
1994 · Film · 81 min
Directed by Hart Bochner
Nervous high school senior Tom Lawrence visits Port Chester University, where he gets a taste of politically correct college life when he's guided by fraternity wild man Droz and his housemates at The Pit. But Droz and his pals have rivals in nasty preppy Rand McPherson and the school's steely president. With their house threatened with expulsion, Droz and company decide to throw a raging party where the various factions will collide.
3 positive11 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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16 comments on Hacker News
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
Real Genius is a great film in many ways, marred only by the assumption that a military laser is a bad thing to be working on — I always thought that it would be neat to do. But the characters are great, a ton of the plot is great. It’s worth watching! In a lot of ways the later film PCU (also fun) ripped off a ton of the same plot points.
Now, where can one find the review the film deserves? This is definitely not it.
I genuinely enjoy that many people think PC culture started with BLM and woke language and what not in the 00's-10's.
There's literally a movie called PCU from 1994.
It started before that, at least in the 1990s. I remember a movie called PCU (for Politically Correct University) that pokes fun of this phenomenon. I agree these type of cultural politics is an intentional distraction for more pressing issues like healthcare and finance. One political party pitches a new wedge issue, the other party takes a swing, and that's all the news talks about .. for years. It all seems so coordinated.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110759/
I've been trying to understand why I got triggered by the comment(s). I was in college in the 90s and it was very similar to the movie PCU:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110759/
Back then, sexism was blatant and rampant. The ratio of men to women in my engineering classes was roughly 30:1. It was almost unheard of for women to reach prominent positions in tech or any other male-dominated field for that matter. Yet we all had a sense that sexism and racism were finally on the verge of becoming a thing of the past.
Fast forward 30 years and I can't believe what's tolerated today, especially in politics:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/states-have-added-nearly-100-restrictive-laws-scotus-gutted-voting-rights
On a personal level, bigotry may be lower today than in the 90s. But on the national stage it remains as polarizing as ever.
The saddest part about that for me is that it's creating division that was almost healed. Many women feel threatened after the Roe v. Wade rollback and countless other affronts, so masculinity is often portrayed as toxic. Then men, many of whom are struggling and unheard under patriarchy as well, feel like they are being lumped in with chauvinists and turn towards the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons and Joe Rogans of the world for validation. Which feeds their egos in ways that many women find insulting, creating a vicious cycle.
So when I see comments that being a woman has nothing to do with it, I think that sentiment feeds into the division. Whether it's true or not is beside the point, what matters is the intentional avoidance of empathy.
Unfortunately objective takes are given more credibility in these times than the subjective ones that I believe hold the insights. So even though this is a hill I'm dying on, there's no way for me to really win the debate. Which to me is the very essence of what the Harris/Trump presidential race is getting at.
The opposite problem of the name the band settles on in the movie PCU.
"Tonight, at The Pit: 'Everyone Gets Laid'."
> First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do.
Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me.
Of course I knew that some majors were more lucrative than others. Of course everybody else around me knew the same. Of course people my age at the time actively engaged in conversations about "what will you do with this degree when you're done?" Of course people who majored in less practical subjects thought about this (when they weren't actively trying to put it out of their mind).
A character (played by pre-hairplugs Jeremy Piven) in the movie PCU (released in 1994) ridicules a student for majoring in Sanskrit, saying, "You're majoring in a 5000 year-old dead language?" Everybody in the audience is supposed to get why that's funny.
And yet I keep hearing people say they had no idea that any of this was true. It strains credulity.
Frankly, people have been repeating this line about how they couldn't possibly have known all this for so long that kids in college today weren't even born yet when it started. Eventually people are going to have to admit that they did know (or should have).
The 1994 movie PCU lampooned the “wokeness” of the 90s. It was just called political correctness then.
I sympathize 1000%.
The last 20 years have been very hard on me as a software developer and environmentally/politically conscious person. I've watched just about everything not work out the way I had hoped for. I believe that we've hit an inflection point where enough people have realized that the emperor has no clothes that we have a real chance to start over and correct our course.
I don't know how to help with your specific situation, but I can share mine. I went to college from 1995-1999 and it was similar to movies like PCU, Hackers, Dazed and Confused. I got to watch the internet go mainstream, which I wouldn't trade for anything. Anyone could make money then doing web development, and I was working on a shareware game business. It was just such an alive time, vivid in my memory. The future was so bright we had to wear shades.
Then the DMCA. The Dot Bomb. Bush v. Gore. 9/11. The PATRIOT Act. Middle East wars. Who Killed the Electric Car. The death of research. Outsourcing. Privatization. 100,000 US factories closed. The student loan crisis/bankruptcy exception. The housing bubble. Underemployment. Wealth inequality. Clinton-Trump. COVID-19. Billionaires..
In the hangover of the early 2000s, I felt guilty for partying it up in the 90s and ended up moving furniture for 3 years to support my floundering shareware business. Which shook my faith in humanity and almost broke me. Then a good friend passed which gave me PTSD. I was in financial ruin by the 2010s. Worked a bunch of dead end jobs under continuous burnout and depression to survive. Almost found myself homeless a few times. I continued self-flagellating all the way until the 2020 pandemic, when finally the whole world seemed to break too.
Now a lot of people landed on either side of these issues and hundreds more. Half the people reading this won't share my context or conclusions. But as a whole, I feel that the last 20 years have been a textbook example of what not to do. They're the dying gasp of 20th century thinking. For a long time, I felt that they ruined my life.
But all trauma all the time is no way to live one's life.
I've been going through a healing and growth process due to some health issues, a spiritual awakening and a dark night of the soul.
Now I see:
Faith, hope and love. Service to others. The divinity of all living things. Communication. Boundaries. Mindfulness. Meditation. A forgiving and supportive inner monologue. Showing up for yourself so that you can show up for others.
I have my sights set on solarpunk, decommodification, basically lengthening my runway outside of the status quo because I no longer believe that tech as we conceive it now serves the human condition. Somewhat ironically, we've become slaves to idiology and dogma under this secular system.
My current approach looks like listening for anxiety when I'm troubled by a choice, and leaning into the choice that expands possibility. So many of our choices each day are in conflict with what we feel is our life's purpose. But I've found that when I make the choice aligned with my heart, reality reforms around me to support it. Now I look back and see that much of my suffering was due to my own attachments, that I held on too tightly and dwelled on the negative, and didn't see the miracle of life unfolding. I didn't know that we had the power to manifest our dreams.
When in doubt, it's good to turn attention from doing to listening for a calling. That's where I found my faith again.
It's been a hard two decades, I still get overwhelmed and exhausted sometimes, but I truly feel optimism for the future in spite of everything looming over us and the planet. Hope something in this helps you give yourself the permission we all deserve, to start over again and be here now in this moment together.
Probably. The historical origins are beyond me, but anecdotally I thought the 1994 movie PCU must've dealt a mortal blow to the political correctness movement because I stopped hearing about it and no one around me treated it as a real thing. In hindsight, the resurgence of mom jeans in the last decade should have planted seeds of worry in many a gen-xer.
If you haven't seen it, check out the movie PCU. It's from 1994 or so but could be written today.. it couldn't be made though.
I hate to remind everyone but PC culture is here to stay. We can all complain about but the fact is no one has a solution, except for staying off social media (which I generally have been doing, and I've never been happier).
Need proof? Go watch the movie PCU, made in 1994.
>This outrage culture is getting to be a bit much.
[HN user proceeds to post his outrage at outrage culture]
That’s awesome, reminds me of the movie PCU, where the students protest protesting.
Wow. I thought you were exaggerating until I read the whole article! Completely absurd. Reminds me of all the groups in the movie PCU. Everyone's a victim these days.
I suspect this discussion has now ceased to be useful to anyone. I'm more or less certain that you are now 'white knight' and 'question trolling'. I find it equally frustrating that you are 'concerned' about 'feeling' harassed, not 'being' harassed. I'm suspect you view me through a similarly narrow filter.
But hey, https://xkcd.com/386/
I did not say anything about 'what happened', I was speaking of 'belief' which was part of your sentence.
I'm not claiming I've been harassed, nor am I denying it. I find the term a bit vague, as it runs a spectrum from minor trolling which I think we've nearly all experienced (and perhaps committed), to real world doxing and stalking and physical violence. So let's pick something much more concrete.
Rape. Since even that has a somewhat ill defined colloquial use, I'll specifically restrict to a narrow and somewhat historic subset: The act of a man forcing coitus upon a woman.
There is recent precedent for this in the Tor community. I don't know enough of the specifics of that to claim my hypotheticals reflect any of the reality of that case, but I think it's a useful way to make this seem less abstract.
I don't believe that the Tor project had a specific 'code of conduct'. Despite that, they seem to have been able to report appelbaum's behavior as inappropriate, and remove him from the project. This suggests a CoC is not a requirement -- it is not necessary. Does anyone claim a CoC would have prevented those events from happening? -- it is not sufficient.
Let's imagine that there was a CoC. I don't think any of the CoCs I've seen specifically mention rape (nor murder or pedophilia - my original examples). I find it hard to believe that there was (or even could be) a woman who was ready to contribute to Tor, but due to previous experience with rape, and the lack of it being mentioned in the CoC, decided this was not an environment where she was welcome.
trigger warnings, safe spaces, and codes of conduct have all become strangely familiar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film) , but bland ways of marking some tribal identity. But they do not seem to actually achieve any of their stated goals.
I've previously been involved in organizing one tech conference, where a single member of the admin board felt it was urgent that we nail this down, and it became a time consuming and long recurring part of our calendar, which to my mind achieved little beyond bike shedding. None of us are strongly opposed to the core idea. We do want a healthy vibrant community. But if that's all we wanted, we'd have joined some other social forum, be it a book club, a sports team, or whatever suits you. Instead we joined a code base, a conference or some other technology focused community, and advancing that specific goal is actually priority #1. To the extent a community helps us to advance that goal, wonderful. But to the extent that certain members of that community actively hurt progress, we're glad to see them excluded. Sometimes we decide that exclusion is necessary due to social practices like criminal activity ( Hans Reiser ) sometimes it's due to some (race/sex/other)-ism which is taboo. But one of the great things about the way we do online collaboration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog ) is that I've gotten to meet and collaborate with a lot of people who are WAY outside my usual social bubble. And it's allowed me to build a tolerance and respect for people who I would otherwise have probably dismissed too early. Satanic polytheist -- have you seen his filesystem API? Blind transexual with a diaper fetish - built that 9 dimensional rubics cube app in 4k of assembly. CoCs set a dangerous precedent of deciding in advance who's one of us, and who is not, based on things other than tech skills. I've got enough of that in my corporate and real world life. This is the internet. 99.9% of the time the absolute worst that can happen is that you get your feelings hurt. To prematurely constrain it to prevent that, is a medicine more dangerous than the disease.
I think this older classic is far more relevant: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110759/