The Social Network

Today has mostly been a succession of feeling stiff/achy/headachy/unwell, though I did begin by singing in a liturgy, and that was productive.

Last night I watched The Social Network, which is about the origins of Facebook, and then, back to back, Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars, an animated feature about a potentially world-destroying crisis that takes place in a global social network. I hadn't had the least interest in seeing The Social Network, but I've been hearing enough about it to be curious now that it's up for a Best Picture Oscar; and it seemed that the two films would be interesting companions.

That was a correct instinct. But sometimes I can review films at great length, and I'm not inclined to with either of these. TSN was extremely well-acted, well-directed, and well-organized, but left me unsettled, I think because I tend to avoid watching two hour films in which male privilege is the dominant storyline and impetus, and women are just sex objects. This morning, I found out that Aaron Sorkin had adjusted aspects of the history in order to make his narrative tight. At first I was supremely unimpressed, and then, chewing my lip, acknowledged that it was a very meta thing to do, to put tiny fragments of people's meetings together and make them into a story, which is driven in part by the way that other people perceive those fragments.

But more than one film review called the film "expressively Shakespearean" or a classical drama of betrayal and ambition, and that, I don't understand. Surely being about ambition, or containing a betrayal, does not thereby make a film Shakespearean? Nor does it make it classical drama. In fact, the film is largely driven by the jumping between time periods, and I know that Shakespeare doesn't hold to Aristotelean unities (except in The Tempest), but I also don't think he tells stories in pastiche mode, or even stories that work well, as pastiches of moments!

Defending it on Facebook, a friend of a friend identified it as one of the movies perfectly capturing the way we live now, and I suppose that's true for a lot of people. It didn't feel that way to me. I could tell you about BonC, which I joined as a freshman in college, while Mark Zuckerberg was just getting started programming. or the excellent Murrys v. Austins Alternate Superbowl post over at Phantom Scribbler's (comments, alas, gone due to Haloscan's disappearance). The latter took place before I joined Facebook, at the urging of a particularly bright class of composition students -- after which my account languished until the women I knew from blogging suddenly migrated.

Then, there were several months of throwing sheep, cows, leprechauns, and Helen Vendler, via the custom poking applications. I had no idea who Mark Zuckerberg was, or what "poking," as defined by a single button on people's profile page, was, and certainly no use for Facebook as a tool for dating or casual sex.

Facebook might have made social networking easier for many people to understand and take part in. But to see it as The Social Network is to erase the development that was taking place on blogs, on Livejournal; and which wasn't engineered strictly through the actions of the young teenagers looking for sex. I think that's what makes the film hard to accept/enjoy for me. To appreciate it as epic, I have to buy into several conventional views about programming as a male thing, and about the internet as a tool in which the young are the most innovative/creative. I can understand how those conventional views came to be held, but it feels bizarre to see them enshrined again in this film. Even though I can't deny the importance of Zuckerberg's creation, it feels inaccurate to watch the lives of Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker magnified to this scale, given the definitive article: The Social Network. Instead, it's a film that one watches with the feverish intensity with which one reads a particularly incendiary comment thread. And as huge as it seems, in terms of the development of social networks, I think it's just as insignificant. It's very well made, but it shouldn't be watched by itself.

I'll write about Summer Wars, which I think is excellently paired, tomorrow evening.

Sequiturs and non sequiturs: Fantastic Mr. Fox and Sherlock Holmes

Yesterday, for the first time in a year and a half, I went to see two films back to back. I've made it to very few films, lately -- in fact, only two since the quarter began at the start of autumn term. And usually I like to take more time in between films, in order to think about them more carefully. But part of my goal yesterday was to get out of the house in order to avoid going to bed at 4 as a result of MLA-related tiredness and jetlag. So the fact that Fantastic Mr. Fox and Sherlock Holmes were nicely bookended was awfully convenient. And they're both adaptations, so it seemed a good pairing.

Unfortunately, I have nothing positive to say about Fantastic Mr. Fox, other than that the animation isn't ugly. Wes Anderson seems to chosen to immerse himself even further in the McSweeney's comedy style, which I'm tempted to name post-coherence. I think post-coherence captures what Anderson and Baumbach seem to be trying to achieve: where the non sequitur is not only the ultimate joke, but the formula for the entire plot.

I do love a good non sequitur, but overuse is just painful. The final scene, given the "wild animal" theme running throughout, was flat as could be.

Sherlock Holmes was moderately more successful. Almost every review I've read has praised the UST between Holmes and Watson; what I liked in addition to this was that there was also chemistry between Holmes and Adler -- but the film isn't actually a romantic comedy, and so rather than being dissipated through any number of tired, stale script sequences, the UST simply hangs around, and it felt more interesting -- and utterly more watchable.

As for the plot, it suggested that Ritchie and his screenwriters, Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham, are much taken with the aesthetic of steampunk, and equally insecure about how to craft a plot that actually fits within the conventions of the genre, with its focus on mechanization and alchemy. This is to their detriment, because it meant that they also couldn't work out how to communicate the clues to the audience. I kept thinking about Franco Moretti's analysis, in Graphs, Maps, Trees, of how a plethora of authors writing detective stories and mysteries in the 1890s were forgotten, leaving only the few heavyweights that we know today, with Doyle first among equals. Moretti makes a clear case that success depended on making mystery stories solvable by their readers -- evolving from having no clues at all, to visible (but not decodable) clues, to finally, decodable ones. "The Red-Headed League" and "The Speckled Band" are decodable; "The Five Orange Pips" and "The Adventure of the Dying Detective" are not.

Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes was firmly in the visible-but-not-decodable branch of the tree. If frogs are dead, the viewer can't tell that they were paralyzed before death. A single shot of a leaf/flower in a lab is not decodable to anything but that someone was analyzing said object. Moreover, all the visible clues for the film were delivered in a single scene, which strikes me as shoddy organization. But in hindsight, I think this is part of the point of Ritchie's update to the characters of Holmes & Watson. Jude Law's Watson is great, and for the first time that I can remember, Watson is the character with whom the audience is meant to identify: lover, fighter, efficient pragmatist (he never forgets the gun). If Watson evolves into a hero, though, Holmes has to become a superhero: and by definition, he can perceive things that the rest of us simply can't. Non sequitur is the whole point. He has abilities that the rest of us don't have: one of my favorite scenes in the film was the sequence where Holmes disguises himself, very quickly, while in pursuit of Adler. It was not only completely canonical -- it made an aspect of the canonical Holmes more visible, and vibrant than he had ever been before in my mind.* However, he has to have clear weaknesses, too, lest the plot become a story about the inferiority of the normal human (think of Syndrome in The Incredibles).

This choice made sense to me. I can't help but think of Holmes in contrast with Christian Bale's Batman in The Dark Knight: he was interesting to watch, but I also felt as if Christopher Nolan almost painted himself into a corner, even without the complication of Heath Ledger's death. There's nowhere left to go for Batman, except to become an antihero. Ritchie has different plans for Holmes, I imagine -- and the more I think about it, the more I think that the combination of different strengths and weaknesses among Holmes, Watson, and Adler, in combination with the underlying sexual tension between them, could make for a series of fantastic ensemble-driven caper films. But the creators are going to have to come up with something a little more impressive than a remote control. (If that last sentence doesn't make sense, just see the film).

* And I've been a Holmes fan since age 8, and spent about half of 5th grade reading and producing book reports on the entire canon, and every adaptation that I could get my hands on. Thank you, Mr. Hagin, for allowing me to run amok. It was an utter delight.