Hackers

The Legacy of (Zero) Cool

Coolness has always slain me. (Who adds the awkward “ness” to cool but the uncool?) No matter how much older I am, unruffleable youths in sunglasses constitute a crisis of difference for me. Will they hurt me? How can they pull it off? How do they not betray their bluff? How dare they? The answer, of course, is quite simple, and quite impossible for me to understand more than notionally: they’re not me.

So it’s not surprising that in middle and high school, when the above crisis was a daily occurrence, I became attached to a film that integrated coolness with the identity I held at the time...