Ready Player One Theory: Halliday Is Really George Lucas
The big secrets of Ready Player One are the secrets of OASIS creator, James Halliday. But is the inspiration for the film’s reimagined take on the character the biggest secret of all? Is Halliday really George Lucas?
Love it or hate it, Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One is novel not simply comprised mainly of nostalgic nerd-culture references set mostly in a virtual world comprised of the same; it’s a story about nostalgia and our relationship to the people who make the things we’re nostalgic for – and that means it’s ultimately a story about Halliday himself.
Interpreted by many as a (more) eccentric imagining of Steve Jobs (with hefty helpings of Howard Hughes and Richard “Lord British” Garriott), one who never left the world of game design for hardware development and eventually pioneered the world of virtual-reality social media, he’s at once the foundation, inciting-incident and driving force of the story despite having died many years before it begins: literally, the deus ex machina (ghost in the machine).
HALLIDAY IN THE BOOK IS STEVE JOBS
In the novel, the Jobs parallels are especially clear in the backstory: Halliday is a big-idea guy who makes his initial major strides in partnership with a less quixotic, more down-to-earth partner named Ogden “Og” Morrow (aka Steve “Woz” Wozniak in Apple lore) only to part ways on poor terms over differences in vision (but really, we ultimately learn, over a woman – sort of). Like Jobs, he subsequently becomes a larger-than-life public symbol of his creation whose death leaves many feeling more work was yet to be done. But whereas Jobs’ legacy is both celebrated and criticized for the way he used his absolute control of Apple’s insular, controlled product line to “enforce” his personal stylistic, aesthetic and technical preferences upon the breadth of the user experience, Halliday’s bizarre legacy is to effectively freeze the world in the amber of his own nostalgia.
In Ready Player One’s dystopian 2045, Halliday’s death unlocks a game within the OASIS promising to bequeath his fortune and control of the virtual world itself to the winner. Since the game and the challenges within it involve finding and completing challenges based on the 1980s movies, music, video games, comics, cartoons and nerd-ephemera the socially-awkward (it’s suggested that he was on the Autism Spectrum, though not confirmed) Halliday had escaped into as a child and continued to immerse himself in as an adult, those same narrow obsessions take over the entirety of Oasis (if not global) popular-culture as everyone tries to become an expert in order to win the game. The challenges themselves involve not just knowledge but memorization: Playing reflex-heavy retro video games to perfection, reciting cult-classic movies word for word, etc. In the novel (less so in the film) it’s implied that the whole of popular-culture otherwise has somewhat ground to a halt.
This is supposedly meant to teach the eventual winner, Wade Watts, a lesson about how much of one’s life has to be sacrificed in order to “become” James Halliday and how ill-advised it is, although one of the most consistent criticisms of Cline’s Ready Player One book has been how little some critics feel he seems to “believe” in his own ending. The book itself taking so much uncritical joy not only in its indulgence of 80s geek nostalgia but in the chance to demonstrate the author’s own authentic familiarity therewith that, to some, the cautionary moral arrived so abruptly that it rang hollow.
More difficult to argue is that the novel’s version of Halliday (if not the inherent premise itself) doesn’t come off as an embodiment (if not outright endorsement) of so-called “gatekeeping” in geek-culture. Once viewed through a relatively harmless lens (trivia as passwords to convention spaces, “every real fan knows ______,” etc;) the idea has taken on sinister connotations in the years since Ready Player One’s original publication with the rise in reports of harassment movements in online spaces in fandom – these days, arguments over what constitutes a “real fan” (and who gets to decide what that even means) aren’t just something to laugh off for many. Yet it’s the entire pretext of Halliday’s “Easter Egg Hunt” and the novel built around it: Wade is the archetypal King in Waiting who wins the game (and the girl, and the money, and control of The World in more than one sense) because he knows all the “right” stuff the “right” way, and the digital ghost of Halliday more or less confirms that this indeed was basically the point (but that he could probably also stand to get some sun, too).
All of which, plus the other details we’re eventually given about his life (visionary, risk-taking but only when it comes to technology, mercurial temper, paradoxically extreme-intelligence crossed with childish outlook, off-putting self-centered personality) paints a picture of the novel’s Halliday as a quintessential example of the “Big Tech” Geek Billionaire Hero archetype that Silicon Valley loves to project about itself and the rest of the culture alternately co-signs or cautions against. But while such a figure (and the quest to become more like him) may still “fly” uncritical in certain spaces of online geek and gaming culture, it was long clear that a feature version of Ready Player One was going to have to do something very different with Halliday… and with everything else. But it’s possible that Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation goes a step beyond merely “different” into more divergent (and personal) territory.
HALLIDAY IN THE MOVIE IS GEORGE LUCAS
If Steven Spielberg’s version of Ready Player One (and, more specifically, it’s vision of James Halliday) isn’t necessarily about Steve Jobs anymore, who might it be about? It could be argued it doesn’t need to be about anyone, contemporary or otherwise – the eccentric billionaire is tried and true enough a trope in its own right, and even without the allusions to historical figures the character and scenario of the novel bears more than a passing scenario to Willy Wonka to begin with (not for nothing was an orchestral arrangement of “Pure Imagination” playing over the film’s trailers.) But sharp-eyed fans of Spielberg’s own ouvre, including his later-career penchant for reflecting on the very idea of artistic legacy, may find themselves thinking about another famous dreamer world created an escapist fantasy world that – to hear some tell it – he came to feel engulfed by: Star Wars creator (and one of Spielberg’s oldest friends in the business) George Lucas.
To call Ready Player One a “loose” adaptation of the source material is an almost absurdly conservative description. It’s more like a tear-down-rebuild. The general concept, character names and broad outline are retained, but the details – the important parts, the pieces, the guts, how they all fit together and their meaning – have all been rearranged, replaced or completely disposed of. Spielberg has been likened to an expert pearl-cutter in the context of past literary adaptations, polishing densely-bloated beach books like Jaws and Jurassic Park to lean, shiny blockbuster finish, but Ready Player One at times feels more like an inter-authorial debate, an attempt to wrestle the story into a form he can get real perspective on (likely not as easy task, considering it’s very much a story about growing up in the post-Spielberg popular culture) and the key seems to have been how he came to view Halliday – which in turn becomes the “real” point of the Easter Egg Hunt in his version of the story.
The film certainly changes a lot: Wade is very different, much less unpleasant main character (less “Comic Book Guy meets Sam Witwicky,” more “Mikey from The Goonies meets Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man”), Art3mis gets more to do and a fuller backstory in her own right. The story has been trimmed of its diversions and sidequests into a straightforward good-versus-evil treasure hunt race. But the biggest and most meaningful change has been a complete reworking of the challenges that make up Halliday’s game itself – still grounded in obscure gaming trivia, movie references and knowledge of the creator’s own life story, but rather than rote memorization the key to finding the Easter Egg turns out to be looking for deeper meaning within the stuff.
To win the game, the film’s Wade must ultimately understand the film’s Halliday. One challenge involves working out a literalized metaphor for nostalgia itself (which unlocks, along with the key, a view of how the OASIS “works”) another requires the heroes to play through a The Shining. Finally, Wade comes face to face with Halliday himself, and what he finds is a quiet, haunted figure with a faraway disposition, occupying a recreation of his own childhood bedroom: proud of his own creation, but also more than ready to hand it off. The final exchange (which only Spielberg could possibly get away with playing straight) even seems to imply that this isn’t just a pre-programmed bot Wade is interacting with, but Halliday’s literal ghost – that by leaving the OASIS in the hands of someone “like himself” but who won’t make the same mistakes, a restless spirit can now move on.
In that respect, it’s hard not to think of Lucas if one is given to try and attach a real-world inspiration to this oddly-specific reworking of a character who didn’t necessarily need to be presented as more than a vague ideal in more straightforward adaptation (especially since the first most-obvious – and yet completely ill-fitting – suspect is Spielberg himself). And the seeming incongruity of Lucas’ demeanor (shy, averse to the public celebrity scene, quiet and contemplative with a voice often described as almost sad regardless of circumstance) compared to boisterous, up-tempo action/adventure films he’s known for making. He’s also unique among his generation of filmmakers for recognizing and investing in the potential of video games early on through LucasArts.
Actor Mark Rylance’s sudden late-career shift into Steven Spielberg’s current favorite secret weapon performer has been one of the more unusual but welcome developments in the film world in recent years. His turn as both Halliday himself (seen in flashbacks at various ages, “in person” at the very end and as his programmed game avatar Anorak The Wizard) recall his prior roles in Bridge of Spies and as the title character in The BFG: playful and understated, but also invested with a constantly sense of melancholy and omnipresent sadness. He speaks in half sentences, diction stilted, constantly distracted; and whatever it is that’s distracting him isn’t making him very happy. It’s easily the best performance in the film, communicating through relatively limited screentime a fully-formed sense of suffocating loneliness that you can’t help but sympathize with but also understand others not wanting to spend much time in the company of to begin with.
It’s a kinder, gentler version of the “awkward nerd genius” character than the one in the book; less similar to real-life Tech Bro archetypes than it is to (perhaps inevitably, in retrospect) the previous generation’s preferred incarnation of the trope that’s long fascinated Spielberg in particular: The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up (Spielberg also, famously, changed Jurassic Park’s John Hammond from the book’s cynical greed-monster to Walt Disney-like whimsical grandpa figure). There’s definitely a modern, realistic push at suggesting actual nuerodivergence in Rylance’s performance as well; Halliday doesn’t seem to like making eye contact in conversation and reaches for objects to handle when he’s uncomfortable; but in temperament he’s a classic Spielbergian Peter Pan figure – a small boy in an adult body for whom the OASIS was the equivalent of staying safe indoors with his favorite toys and whose adult romantic frustrations are described simply as being afraid to kiss a girl.
That’s not to suggest that Spielberg set out to reveal some kind of secret tragic knowledge about his friend through a big Summer movie. But personal touches come from a personal place and the reimagining of Halliday is easily the most personal-feeling element of what otherwise feels to have been more of a technical exercise than a meaningful storytelling challenge for the history’s most accomplished blockbuster filmmaker; and it’s not hard to imagine seeing something of Lucas (and, specifically, his troubled relationship to Star Wars) in the idea of an artist who becomes stifled/imprisoned when a world he creates as an escapist pastiche of his own dreams and memories turns out to be a place the entire rest of the world wants to escape to as well.
STAR WARS, THE OASIS, AND WHAT THIS MEANS
At one point, we see a younger Halliday arguing with Morrow about how he’d rather make worlds than rules, and wishes they could go back to when it (the OASIS, the company and maybe many other things in his life) was just a game to play around in. Even if the connection between the two men never consciously occurred to him otherwise, it’s difficult not to think that Spielberg might have been able to relate to the sentiment; having been around to watch firsthand as Lucas (who always, it seems, preferred to tinker and experiment with filmmaking than produce full-scale features) mused about wanting to return to independent, smaller work but felt constrained by public demand for more and more Star Wars.
What that says about the ending of the film, of course, is a whole other set of subsequent questions. If Halliday is George Lucas, is Spielberg himself Morrow (played by Simon Pegg in the film as a fairly distinct departure from the more direct Wozniak-y of the novel)? Is Wade, this analogy, Kathleen Kennedy (or J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson)? Does that make IOI (the evil mega-corporation that wants to take over the OASIS and turn it into an ad-driven profit machine) the Disney, and thus we’re living in the “bad version” of the story already?
Of course, it’s very possible that no allusions to actual people were intended – or were even actively avoided; in much the same way that the film opts to downplay references to Spielberg’s own filmography (although a T-Rex, possibly from Jurassic Park, did appear); leaving the 80s-obsession mainly to Halliday and Wade while imagining the rest of the OASIS as populated by a broader cross-section of familiar and obscure avatars.
Regardless, what’s clear is that Spielberg (who is almost always heavily involved in plotting out the stories for his films), screenwriter Zak Penn and Cline himself keyed in on a much different take on Halliday in crafting the film; and that change seems to have informed the whole of the adaptation: a less cynical, less outwardly-dystopic take that trades nerdier-than-thou smugness for introspection as to the nature of why we feel nostalgia in the first place – and what we might gain by sparing a thought for the very real (and, often, somewhat fragile) humanity of the people who create the things we love, identify with and come to feel nostalgic for.
Few people are better equipped than Steven Spielberg to understand that side of the experience – but also to have seen (through more than one friend) what happens when people forget.
