Last time, the focus was on how an individual deals with tribal groups. And that covers a lot of drama — where would soap operas be without conflict between individual and family? It’s a theme that goes back deep in world literature, and no wonder.

A more recent development is a function of industrial society: the rise of the regulated state. Kafka wouldn’t have been able to spin his tales of the machinations of the state without working for an insurance company. The Trial and The Castle are idea-led stories, but there are more visceral narratives to come out of the conflict between individual and government.

Where would your average urban police thriller be without a shouty black captain trying to keep a maverick cop in line, said line being drawn by the assholes in City Hall? There’s a fundamental distinction between community and society, and it’s all about size. A community can regulate itself through subtle influence from its members against those who would take advantage of it. A society consists of communities rubbing alongside one another, needing a consistent regulatory framework to control the behaviour of all.

It’s an impossible task, of course. The subtleties with which a family or religious group deals with wayward members cannot possibly be codified into black and white. But that’s what happens, and the consequence is the emergence of narratives which celebrate the triumph of the individual against the system. Catch-22 is one famous example, and rightly so, Heller’s novel outlining how individuals can triumph against the insanity of the rules that seek to contain them in times of war.

In film, Cool Hand Luke is a classic story about a rebel with a cause, one man up against the bullshit that society throws his way. As societies develop, become more sophisticated, it’s no surprise that there’s a place for a new breed of hero who can stand up to the system. The rise of hackers as heroes is one interesting example — where they were baddies in an earlier generation of thrillers, and then edgy renegade characters akin to the counterculture good guys of Easy Rider, by the time of Firewall even respectable geezers like Harrison Ford get to defend their families by using hacking skills to turn the tables on the badasses who threaten his nearest and dearest.

Project that forward into science fiction movies, and the central metaphor of The Matrix is one of hacking: reality itself is a programme that the savvy can turn to their advantage. Hot damn: bet you wish you’d paid more attention to computing at school, especially since you can’t even use your iPhone properly. In the future then, you can play the system against itself — a trick exploited beautifully in Robocop when one of the bad guys is sacked from the board, so that the Ed-209 robot which has been protecting him can now make him eat hot lead death.

Alternately, you can learn to ignore the rigid strictures of The Man and just, you know, do your own thing. Which is where the ending of the original Star Wars film comes from: Luke eschews the use of the computer mounted in his helmet to take the Death Star down guided by The Force, mysticism trumping rules-based thinking. (At least until the second trilogy, with its turgid revelation that The Force is associated with midichlorians, which takes us all the way back to school biology lessons and rules-based guff.)

Thankfully, humans seem to win in these showdowns with the overly programmed. Another example comes in the interaction of the astronaut Dave Bowman with computer HAL in 2001. When HAL turns on the people it’s meant to serve, Bowman has to act against the machine in order to achieve a mystical union at the climax of the film. All of which confirms that, cool as machines are, you need your heroes to be even cooler for an audience to really be moved by your story.