NYFF 2010: A couple things about "The Social Network" (Special "Blogger's Wife" Cut)

“I just think it’s a shame that, hav­ing com­posed some­thing that’s so read­able and well-considered, you have to end by giv­ing people some­thing neg­at­ive to focus on.” —Claire Kenny, this morn­ing.

You’re going to be reading/hearing a lot of things about this pic­ture; hell, you’ve most likely already read and heard a lot of things about this pic­ture; I’m actu­ally going to be writ­ing about it at some length for an online ven­ue to be introduced/discussed here at a slightly later date; and you can ima­gine my exist­en­tial agon­ies as I try to con­ceive some sort of vaguely new “angle” from which I may exam­ine it that will actu­ally per­tin­ent and maybe even inter­est­ing when the time, which is short, comes. In the mean­while, it seems per­haps unfair to this blog and its read­ers that I should let my first view­ing of the film go unnoted here. So, a couple of things.

First off, it really is a fant­ast­ic­ally enter­tain­ing film that places a good deal of trust in its audi­ence and then pays it off in enjoy­ment. It is not, of course, dif­fi­cult in the way that oth­er New York Film Festival pic­tures I’ve dis­cussed here, such as Certified Copy and Film Socialisme, are dif­fi­cult. But it does throw you into the insu­lar but sem­in­al Ivy League world of its char­ac­ters pretty much head-first and then zooms along, and if you don’t get into the swim of it right away, you may get lost. I went to a state school in Passaic County in the late ’70s/early ’80s. I did­n’t know what a “final club” was then and I really don’t much know now. You may think that the film is ask­ing you to know what a “final club” is. It isn’t. It’s just ask­ing you on for the ride. Once you’re in and you stop wor­ry­ing, it does­n’t mat­ter. And then, once you under­stand what screen­writer Aaron Sorkin and dir­ect­or David Fincher are doing with the structure—it’s not as straight­for­ward as it ini­tially seems, chronology-wise—you’re ready for it, and it’s a pleas­ure to get it. And to switch meta­phors, and worse yet, to resort to a really hoary one, it’s like being in a super­charged Lamborghini on a clear road with an expert driver who just opens the thing up, and the shift to the high gear is the smoothest rush ever. Nice. 

I said it on Twitter and I’ll say it here: pro­claim­ing “I’m not inter­ested in this movie because I could­n’t care less about Facebook” is like announ­cing “I’m not inter­ested in All About Eve because self-absorbed theat­er people really turn me off.” I mean, we’re all grown-ups here, we’ve been around, we’ve seen a bunch of films, we all kind of know…what I’m try­ing to say here is, isn’t it pretty elemental…that a film isn’t really neces­sar­ily “about” what it’s about; no? This being the sort of obser­va­tion that allows the very gif­ted Mr. Sorkin to invoke Aeschylus at press con­fer­ences, because of the whole grand-human-themes bit. It may be pom­pous on his part, but it’s not entirely wrong. (For all that, there are some who believe that the film’s themes aren’t Sufficiently Something to make it a Really Significant some­thing; see, David Poland’s rather, by my lights, silly “Doesn’t say Big Theme to me” review.) Anyway, you might be won­der­ing what my lar­ger point is, e.g., do I actu­ally think this film is as good asAll About Eve, and, yeah, I do, maybe. Most likely, even. And it’s got snaz­zi­er visu­als that are going to wear bet­ter than 95% of the oth­er Snazzy Visuals of Our Time, too. (Godard, writ­ing on Joseph Mankiewicz in 1958, provides a pres­age of why a Sorkin/Fincher teamup is close to ideal, and why Sorkin is prob­ably smart not to try his hand at dir­ect­ing: “[T]he com­plaint one might make about Mankiewicz: […] he is too per­fect a writer to be a per­fect dir­ect­or as well. Basically, what is miss­ing from The Quiet American is cinema. It has everything—brilliant act­ors, spark­ling dialogue—but no cinema.” Fincher brings cinema to The Social Network in a way that Rob Reiner abso­lutely could not for A Few Good Men.)

Let me move the bar on this ques­tion, just for the hell of it: why would­n’t you be inter­ested in Facebook, any­way, except for the oppor­tun­ity to place your­self above it. There’s a com­menter over at Wells’ place who’s yam­mer­ing on about how Social Network is about “an essen­tially trivi­al social phe­nomen­on,” and in order for it to be really import­ant is should really be about “about Britain’s war for sur­viv­al” (every­body gen­u­flect!) or some­thing else that’s really elev­at­ing. Not only is this bleat clas­sic dumb faux-middlebrow breast-beating, it could also be wrong. Yes, Facebook is a “social phe­nomen­on,” but we don’t know that it’s neces­sar­ily trivi­al. The inter­net has, in its vari­ous per­muta­tions, been rede­fin­ing the concept of pri­vacy, which concept I suspect—I’m not entirely sure, mind you, I only sus­pect—is a cent­ral one in cer­tain corners of Western cul­ture. That, in itself, is poten­tially a very big deal for Civilization Itself, and Facebook is an inter­est­ing and apt cynos­ure from/at which to con­sider this cul­tur­al shift, I think. 

“And now I’m going to tell you about a scor­pi­on. This scor­pi­on wanted to cross the river, so he asked a frog to carry him. ‘No,’ said the frog, ‘no thank you. If I let you on my back you may sting me, and the sting of a scor­pi­on is death.’ ‘Now where,’ asked the scor­pi­on, ‘is the logic of that…? If I sting you, you will die and I will drown.’ So the frog was con­vinced and allowed the scor­pi­on on his back. But just in the middle of the river he felt a ter­rible pain and real­ized that after all the scor­pi­on had stung him. ‘Logic,’ cried the dying frog as he star­ted under, bear­ing the scor­pi­on down with him, ‘there is no logic in this!’ ‘I know,’ said the scor­pi­on, ‘but I can’t help it. It’s my char­ac­ter.’ Let’s drink to char­ac­ter!”  —Orson Welles as Gregory Arkadin in Mr. Arkadin a.k.a. Confidential Report, 1957