Cipher: The hacker who wanted the superpowers held to account, starting with her

In The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017), the eighth film of the saga, Dominic Toretto is on honeymoon in Havana when a woman approaches him and shows him something on a phone. She is Cipher, played by Charlize Theron, a hacker and cyberterrorist whom the intelligence services have been chasing for years. The film will reveal what she showed him: a photograph of Elena, the mother of a son Dom did not know he had, both in her power. From then on Dom works for Cipher against his own crew. In Berlin he steals a weapon for her; in New York she takes control of hundreds of cars at once to stop a Russian minister’s motorcade and take his nuclear launch codes; in the Russian Arctic she seizes a nuclear submarine. When Dom hesitates, Cipher has Elena killed in front of him. She escapes at the end, and she will return in later films.

// The theoryThinking errors

In the 1960s and 1970s the psychiatrist Samuel Yochelson and the psychologist Stanton Samenow interviewed hundreds of men committed to a hospital for the criminally insane in Washington. Their conclusion, published in The Criminal Personality (1976), went against the dominant view: the problem was not mainly in their environment or their emotions, but in how they thought. They described dozens of thinking errors that made crime seem reasonable to the person committing it. Among the most important are the power thrust (the need to control people and situations), the sense of uniqueness (I am different, the rules are for others), ownership—what I want is mine by right—and the victim stance—I am the one who has been wronged. Glenn Walters later turned these patterns into a questionnaire, the PICTS, with scales such as entitlement, power orientation and justification.

// The subjectThe judge of the world

Cipher’s speech is that of someone who believes she is the only lucid person in a hypocritical world. The superpowers possess weapons capable of destroying everything and are accountable to no one; she merely wants to force them to be accountable. It is an argument that contains a real criticism, and that is what makes it effective. But the cognitive approach looks at what the argument does for the person who makes it. It turns her into an exception: she can kidnap, kill and threaten millions of people because her cause is higher. It turns her victims into instruments: Elena and her baby are a lever, the cars in New York are tools, Dom is a weapon. And it places the responsibility elsewhere: if anyone dies, the fault lies with governments, with Dom’s disobedience, with the system. Samenow called this way of thinking a closed circle: whatever happens, it confirms that she was right.

// The crackHow we think does not explain where it comes from

The cognitive approach has a strong side and a weak one. The strong side is practical: thinking errors can be identified and worked on, and cognitive-behavioral programs based on them are among the treatments with the best evidence for reducing reoffending. The weak side is that it describes how an offender thinks without fully explaining why. Yochelson and Samenow went so far as to say that the criminal chooses to think this way from childhood, almost regardless of the environment, a claim much criticized for ignoring poverty, abuse and the social context. Their original sample was also very particular: men in a hospital for the criminally insane, not the average offender.

In Cipher’s case the film gives no origin at all: she has no past, only a mission. That makes her a pure illustration of the theory, and also shows its limit. Calling her ideas thinking errors does not answer whether her criticism of the superpowers is wrong. It answers something else: that no criticism, right or wrong, justifies holding a baby as a hostage.