and the geek shall inherit the earth.

The Social Network
Directed: David Fincher
Starring: Jessie Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake
Columbia Pictures, Rated PG-13, 121 minutes

The Social Network is the kind of film that is so “about something” that it’s really about everything. That something is the creation of Facebook. That everything is the post-millennial existential dilemma: are we truly connected? Or, as Mark Zuckerberg asks in screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s cold and flawless opening scene, “Is this real?” Many are entering The Social Network with the expectation of it “saying something” about us, about now, about everything that always happens and all the stuff that never seems to anymore. But what it really serves as is a stirring digital parable. What are we willing to sacrifice for everything? People? Even if the profit is the people?

It may be about new money and the young billionaires who made it, but The Social Network delivers an old message: people with power like to stay in power. But where films such as Citizen Kane or There Will Be Blood use their backdrops (the print industry and the oil boom, respectively) to better present their subjects’ internal decay, director David Fincher’s intentions lie elsewhere. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation isn’t just a meditation on his own disconnect — it’s a meditation on ours. This is a tale of power, but what grants the power is, here, connected to more than just the powerful. This is what makes Facebook interesting. This is what makes the film interesting.

Fincher has made a name as a pre-apocalyptic filmmaker. He gave us the post-capitalist wasteland of Fight Club and the horrors of the devout in Se7en. His work always hovers on the cusp of annihilation, chronicling the people who teeter most heavily. The Social Network may be his first foray into the shell-shocked days after social collapse. The End of Times, Fincher shows us, was started in a dorm room by a heartbroken boy in flannel and flip-flops. Jesse Eisenberg infuses Zuckerberg with just enough of himself to remind us that we were right to see something in him in the first place. This is the role Eisenberg was meant to embody, which usually means he won’t be able to escape it anytime soon. But why should he? Through him, Zuckerberg goes from begrudging geek to digital messiah in what feels like a nanosecond, and though we’re trained to hate the people that leave those who helped them behind, Eisenberg’s blank and fearful eyes give him soul, choice, an awareness.

But he has no heart. That organ is reserved for Eduardo Saverin, whose doe eyes are given life by British born Andrew Garfield. Garfield is the kind of understated talent that needs to be overshadowed in order to eventually be highlighted. He’s a whimper in a mosh pit. His gradual disillusionment — his ability to play naive and ignorant at once — is the perfect foil to Zuckerburg’s perfunctory meneuvers. When Eduardo gets punched (an Ivy League term meaning Sought Out By A Fraternity), he exudes pride and guilt simultaneously. He dreads a storm that he knows is brewing. And when Zuckerburg writes the achievement off coldly (“You should be happy if you don’t get any farther than this,” he snaps), Garfield waves his jealousy away. As Zuckerberg’s only friend, he is the man our hearts tug for. It’s his equation that puts Zuckerburg’s first project into action. It’s his investments that get The Facebook rolling. It’s his concern that shakes us initially. But he is devoid of imagination.

It’s Sean Parker, the co-creator of file sharing site Napster, who brings the Big Picture forth, and he is something of the villain. But he is an enticer, not an instigator. He dangles the power of the future in front of Zuckerberg, tapping into the excess that he so longs for. Parker was one of the first founders of the information age, and he knows the route we’re going. “We used to live on farms,” he blares, “then in cities, and now we live online.” Parker, a devil in a three-piece hoodie, is a visionary, but his vision is knowing what people want before they want it. He foresaw our digital immersion, the contradiction of wanting to be more easily connected but from a distance and through an artifice. But most importantly, he saw Zuckerberg’s real desire: not money, not respect, but the cool.

Timberlake is lifeless, delivering lines in the hopes that they qualify as acting. By and large he’s perhaps better than he needs to be, but not as good as the film thinks he is. Parker’s written as allure personified, a man who sees what Eduardo can’t. His imagination is his greatest strength: he foresees success. But Timberlake plays him like a con man with a credit card, using free drinks and cufflinks to sell himself as the person who should sell Facebook. So is he brilliant at business or at bullshit? Does the film want him to be clairvoyant or a con man?

Fincher’s strength is rhythm; Sorkin’s, pace. Together, they craft a film that flows. Fincher’s camera is always moving, and when it’s not, Eisenberg’s mouth is. Zuckerberg, an antihero whose apathy serves as a battle cry, was a man who didn’t understand the basics of human interaction, so he created an algorithm to explain it. He became a billionaire by digitizing relationships, and it all started because he couldn’t have one. The irony is obvious; the film doesn’t dabble in it too much. At times the film feels heavy-handed: an elongated rowing sequence, played to Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” all but shoves the pains of second-place down our throats. But when it’s confident, The Social Network follows in Zuckerberg’s indifferent shadow: there is nothing to learn here. Perhaps that’s because our current moment is so the direct result of Zuckerberg’s work that to preach a message would be to miss the point all together. And the point is this: we are all Zuckerberg, in one form or another. Sean Parker believed this; this is what makes him a villain. But Sean Parker was also right; this is what makes him complex.

Parker recognized Facebook as the 21st century’s great equalizer. It is, at its core, an exercise of a classic American philosophy: everyone has the same thing because everyone wants the same thing. What makes Facebook so crucial is that it taps into the basis of what we collectively desire, which is connection. Zuckerberg knew this better than the rest of us, so he did was what every computer does: he created a simulation. Director of photography Jeff Cronenweth knows this as well, so he drenches the film in iced hues, monochromatic and fiercely distant. That distance is rooted in the trauma that comes with simulation: that it’s a creation built on nothing but an idea. And this is the battle of the entire film: claiming ownership over the idea, receiving recognition for it. But Fincher recognizes this as the inherent flaw in what his characters are searching for. Zuckerberg is fighting for his idea, and is thus alienated when the rubble has cleared. All that’s left is the Facebook.

This is why the film’s final moment, with Zuckerberg sitting lonesome in a sky high office, pressing the refresh button on his own Facebook page, waiting to see if a friend he has just requested has added him back, is perhaps the film’s most overwhelmingly powerful. As his computer screen’s ambient hum fills in the silence left behind by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s tense score, he presses refresh again. Then again. And again. The film continues onward, and its scope is simplified: this is a film about the technological space inhabited by flesh. It’s a shame then that its final seconds are interrupted by Paul McCartney cooing “Baby, You’re A Rich Man.” It leaves the moment feeling cynical when it should feel desolate. Irony be damned; Zuckerberg already is.

Nineteen Ninety Nine.

I sit at the tail end of the new millennium’s first decade. A perfect cultural perspective, divided in half: my childhood growing up observing the decadent excess of the 1990s and my formidable years in the blatant reality of the new millennium – fleeting, promising, disappointing, redefining. A harsh reality, dumped like a brew of molded dangling carrots and ice-cold rancor.

What did my cinema see? It saw everything and nothing; the disillusionment of the people – the spectator, the mother – and the photoplay itself. It began with the unease of the unknown – a stench of fear that has emanated from the cultures of yesteryear: the ticking collapse of the stock market plummet; the echoing tick of doomsday clock’s minutes to midnight. “Reality! Reality!” they shouted, humming a prayer that only those with skin can offer. But the culture evaporated when the zeroes returned with comrades. The 2000s hit us in every realm – what did the cinema capture?

The machine. The device, the apparatus itself. Us in transit, now stalled permanently. The dripping jail cell rot of the mirror stuck to Neo’s finger as he pulled back in The Matrix. He digests the silver, delivering a scream echoed out by the bloodcurdling ambience of a server disconnect. He is agonized, tortured, but free. The apparatus was the allure of the organic in the light of its barren scope -- the green tilt of nature now replaced with the neon glow of a digital code. Reality, thus, was the scarcity, and the machine was our artificial prevention from the ‘real’. To feel the natural and the return of the organic we must unplug ourselves and face the chrome-covered intensity of actuality.

A warning. A sincere hope that the pratfalls of the horrorshow before us would never mimic the world that watches. We attempted to refuse. Now in 2009, the scaled blue skin of the Avatar in James Cameron’s titular film, offers the same sense of ‘real’. The artificial digitations of the organic, and our complacent stupor with which we watch, all rested in 90-degrees with glasses the sizes of the reel itself gazed appropriately on the screen.

Avatar preaches the beauty of the organic and the desperate need to preserve its natural allure, yet it is a plea made through the machine, the inorganic preaching the power of the tangible. Those in the Matrix pods are depicted as victims to the development of the real, and we truly do succumb to its ease: “it’s not organic, but it’s close enough”. Now, we watch the cinema not for how it reflects reality, but how it resembles it. The goal is to force the unreal to mimic until it reaches secondary existence, a sort of doppelganger to the substantial – the cluster of starspark freckles scattered along the electric blue flesh of the Na’vi’s, looking as if it mimics the ‘real’ feel of Cameron’s cat-smurf blanket of skin.

We are watching the birth of the matrix. We aid in the disintegration of reality itself. I watch with disbelieving eyes as the people lay within the pods in an electronic embryonic state of being – electronic replaces umbilical, our eyes sag because we’ve never used them before. I laugh disbelievingly, nodding my head in faux-critique posture until days later I am transfixed like a saucer eyed cub at the artifice of reality on a screen that preaches disconnect as a virtue: “look at your size in comparison to your creation – the machine has surpassed you”.

I am hell bent to experience the experience. I arrive an hour before the electro-cinematic rolls tape. I am eager to become the pod, allowing the cinema of attractions to continue onward. I sit back and am presented at. The fetal positions that humans-turned-batteries find themselves in within the hollowed human grapevine looks comforting, and I slowly find myself crossing my legs a little closer than before, until I find both legs atop my cushioned theater seat, feeding the machine (both the cinematic, that, in the wise words of Christian Metz, doesn’t exist until I watch it, and the industry machine itself).

How have we gotten here in only ten years? The shift from the warning of 1999 to the complacent and subtle transformation in late 2009; we face extinction on a mass level, and I return to my fetal position for another fix of the fantastical, larger, brighter, closer to both reality and the audience. I am blinded, and worst of all, I am becoming the very thing I shook my head at so confidently. In the era of the nines, I rallied against the necessitation of the plug in. Now my cinema depicts the organic as only achievable through the process – Jake Sulley feels more alive within the electronically accessed natural world – and through the spectatorship. The nines are over; we are at the tail end of the zero decade, and our warning to ourselves went unnoticed, resigned simply as spectacle, not statement.

The Promise of the 'More'

Dear James Cameron,

There is something between an artist and a ringleader – the same way there is something between a speaker and a politician – that is a far better suited title for you and your cinematic cohorts. You don’t quite pillage our cultural landscape as much as you promise to. But we’ve seen what you’re capable of: taking the purposefully melodic horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, and transforming it into a wartorn battlefield epic in Aliens, a film whose differences from its predecessor transcend simple pluralization.

What have we done to deserve this feast for the senses, devourer of the spectacle? A punishment for our culture’s abundant love of excess, perhaps – the equivalent of the parent who, one finding you smoking a cigarette, forces you to finish the whole pack. But we haven’t smoked just one in years. We’ve fallen for the desire of more, the desperation for more, the drug-infueled fix for the senses, the shutting down of the brain and the vicarious orgasm of the external: my eyes, my ears, but not my mind. Stimulation on a mass level; I feel dirty.

A marketing campaign built entirely on meaningless bombardment – first of the visual, then of the narrative. You have promised us this, and only this: we haven’t seen this before. But we have, just as much as we haven’t. So I ask you, rather bluntly: what the fuck is Avatar? What is it really? Not what it should be, or what it was 14 years ago. But what is it now? What do you want it to be/hope it to be/need it to be – not for you, but for us.

Because what would have simply entertained nearly a decade and a half ago is now left as more an analysis of us, our culture, our desire. You’ve produced something that you felt we needed before we needed it – a choice of your own accord. Now, we’ve seen it all, but we are still immersed in an industry, a society, that tells us ‘we’ve seen nothing yet!’

Progress. We do nothing but progress, but to no secure endpoint. Oneupsmanship on a grandiose level; I fear for the worst. Above all, I fear you, Mr. Cameron, are a puppeteer of this ambiguity. There is something larger – necessary even – in what Avatar seems to be presenting to us. But I know that it’s aware. Christian Metz speaks of the voyeur within the cinema, that film is not aware that we watch it, but needs us to in order to exist – it doesn’t want to know that it is being viewed, yet demands it.

Its one spoken word – “this is great” – is all we need as viewers. We watch, and the film demands that we care. And, perhaps most importantly, we are in the last legs of being able to pretend we have a choice. At 20, I stand at a point of reflection. Half of my consciousness inhabits the last half of the Twentieth century, while the other half persists through the first part of the Twenty-First.

“We have evolved! I swear it!” And what better place for that false promise – accusation, even – than through the photoplay, the cinema itself. You have taken on a debt of reflection, promising to show us things we’ve never seen before, and things that we can never see again. Because what film does is transcend the spectacle and capture the moment of evolution – on a cultural level, a mechanical level, and an internal level.

But what the early Twenty-First century has shown us is that there is no separation for film to document. The cultural landscape has become externalized, mechanical in nature, and absent in objective spectatorship. We watch to feel on a personal level – our only moments of internal solitude in an age of constant accessibility and expected voyeurism. And so there is your film, which comes to us mere weeks before we embark on the unknown, and continue down the already downtrodden new millennium’s second half.

These weeks of apparent anticipation should be looked at with a nervous eye – one that asks us all to make a decision as to which way we will go: the route of the tangible, the internal becoming externalized, and our cinema reflecting that. Or a refusal. A refusal to heed the promise of the ‘never-before-seen’, avoiding at all costs the empty, and, instead, demanding something more: something to hold on to; something that is not as fleeting as the memory of the moment the cinema showed us something, but the cinema itself.

We’ve disregarded the tangible ages ago; even the romantics, with a tendency to hold on for too long, have traded the photobooth strip of pictures for Apple’s Photo Booth album. We don’t touch anything. And so a film – about humans being transported into the body of a ‘non-human’ creature – begs the question of what it is that Avatar is doing? Depicting us, perhaps, exactly as we are: desperate to be submerged in the mechanical, loosing touch, but gaining power -- or a secondary sense of it. We are placed into the Avatar, and we loose ourselves as we gain a notion of 'our selves'. That is what the Avatar does, but what is it that Avatar is doing?

The answer is nothing and everything: it is progressing us, but without the tangible, without realism or motion on our part or its creators. So, instead, I await, with befuddled enthusiasm for subject matter which neither interests me nor intrigues me for its actual value, but instead for its zeitgeist defining prowess, its ability – or audacity – to claim refuge in the neither-regions of our cultural consciousness, as something surpassing cinema or experience, becoming both and neither in the process. This is not film.

Sincerely,

Rod Bastanmehr

C-SPAM.

When I was a kid, I wanted to know things.

I wanted to know things so badly that I would beg my parents to buy me every available book on whatever topic was my current weekly indulgence. As a result, I was left with enough literature on UFOs, the Titanic and the birth of Hershey's chocolate that my room doubled as a library of culturally significant texts. 'Culturally significant' in this case means 'important to an 11-year-old' and 'texts' means 'whatever was available at our elementary school's book fair'. But their were numerous works that I would force my family to buy, building myself a collection that slowly began to detour from what the goal originally was: to know things.

I became so overly pre-occupied with having every available piece of information that, somewhere along the line, actually learning that information become somewhat secondary. (Note: this is true for all cases except my obsession with UFOs. That I was all about. It got to the point that I would recite the three different types of 'Close Encounters' with UFOs to anyone willing to listen. Sadly, at the age of 11, every adult near you is considered 'willing to listen'. On the bright side, if there is ever an alien attack of any sort, most of Marin County's adult population should know what to do. You're welcome, America)

The other day, I was speaking to my uncle about politics, which, after college and sports (the latter of which is never a topic I care about discussing - I call football soccer, and war crimes football) is the default conversation for any adult and a 20-year-old. He began to tell me of his apprehensiveness in regards to discussing politics in this day and age - that apprehensiveness was nowhere to be found at around minute 45 of our 'discussion' (read: monologue). He began to recount the days in which politics was more than just a topic, it was a national pastime. A president's speech was the highlight of the year's telecasts; a news anchor would speak to the country, becoming a one-man explanation of all things too heavy to comprehend; the passing of a public figure was accompanied by an anticipated remembrance speech.

But these days, a president's speech is all but forgotten about, until the next day's inevitable "Oh yeah, I heard about that"'s. The anchors are divided by ideologies, with one making you feel scared, and the other making you feel guilty. And did anyone notice President Obama's farewell speech to Sen. Ted Kennedy just this past week? Anyone? Bueller?

But what struck me most was my uncle's belief that the people don't care about politics (if that's even true) because they aren't being told anything. It's a lack of access, he claimed, that is responsible for the apathy of two generations: one that use to throw rocks and now sit in the corner offices making the same decisions they lamented, and one that reads about those very hypocrisies, and uses it as leverage in their overwhelming decision to stay stagnant.

At first, I agreed. As I've stated many times, we'll start caring about the world when there is a world being passed down worth caring about. That, or just let us know what the hell is going on.

Then, the other day, a couple friends and I were dissecting the goal and disposition of our 24-hour news networks: FOX News, the loud mouth conservative base; MSNBC, the loud mouth liberal younger brother, just screaming louder so that other people will notice. CNN, the more grounded and middle-minded of the networks. And then we got to a little diddy I always manage to forget about: C-SPAN.

What the hell. Is up. With C-SPAN?

It suddenly came flashing back to me. 2o years of living - 10 of cultural consciousness - later, and I suddenly remembered how often I would be skipping through channels only to hit C-SPAN and always, I repeat, always, wonder what the fuck I was watching. It was either a never ending frame of the White House lawn or a fountain, or a blue screen that scribbled programming that I swear they never played, all acompanied by a far too sultry and slightly too sleepy female voice, reminding me that, if I was ever to forget, I was watching C-SPAN.

Oh, and it would also stream non-stop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs. So the other day, when reminded that C-SPAN existed, I made a point of watching it. And it struck me in a completely different light. Here it was: constant access to the events taking place behind closed political doors. No, not total access to everything, and no, not all interesting (although watch long enough and you're bound to catch some screaming - it's like the Real Housewives of D.C.), but it was there. We were given access to watch the more minutia heavy moments of public politics and cultural discourse take place.

And no one gave a damn. Not my uncle, not my friends, not even me.

In the Bay Area bubble, where to play any game that deals with counting the number of Prius' you see will end in numbers too high for comprehension, it's easy for me and others to forget about the reality of our political landscape. Adults preach, kids bitch and we all just slap some quasi-funny-but-not-really bumper sticker on our hybrids that make some sort of pun out of Dick and Bush (apparently, Marin also doesn't believe in upping its humor quotient - maybe it's due to our President finally being a badass).

But that belief, that to remain apathetic to any sort of political consciousness is logical because we're constantly kept in the dark, is, I'm sorry to say, bullshit. Because we are no longer in the dark ages. But we're also not in the Enlightenment age either. We're in the information age, where everything we need to know is feasibly at our fingertips. The death of the single broadcaster, the printed press, the need to be knowledgeable is not due to apathy, but excess. With so much information, we've devalued what it means to be informed. The same way broadcasters don't deem it necessary to divert from the shock doctorate. The same way that my friends and I find it satisfactory to label the outlets with what they produce as opposed to provide.

The same way I forgot to read about all the books I bought as a kid. It's the same mentality: the desire to have and to consume overtakes the desire to learn and comprehend. Maybe it's a mix of both of distraction and procrastination. Our desire to be up-to-date has more to do with the source of the information than the information itself. The latest blog to be in-the-know about holds more panache by the watercooler than any of the facts the blog posts. But it's also the knowledge that the facts are there, and there's no rush to get to them. They won't disappear if we don't buy them from the newsstands - they'll be archived. They won't go unseen if we don't catch the broadcast - it'll be on youtube. But in the time between 'wanting to know' and 'taking the time to learn', there is indifference, unfulfillment, annoyance.

The uncles of the world complain about no longer being in the know, even though we're now, more than ever, able to access information at dizzying speeds. What it now takes is the willingness to spend time. Because there is a disconnect that has inevitably grown in the Internet age, and it's deteriorated any cultural center of discourse, leaving no singular stream of information. We're on our own, because we wanted it that way. We made our bed, and now we have to let the C-SPAN lady's voice doze us into sleeping in it.