Sunday, October 31, 2010
TED talks
I have never heard anybody say this, and it seems like a lot of people I respect like these TED talks, but I think that TED talks are basically crap. The whole thing is just designed to make you feel a certain way -- like you are learning, like technology is cool and exciting, that these people and ideas are reshaping the world -- and there are a few TED talks that contain some interesting information, but basically these are just hokey schmaltzy propaganda. The model for this seems to be Steve Jobs' Apple presentations.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
What we talk about at parties
The Social Network is a well-crafted film, but are there people who actually _enjoy_ watching it? I found it exhausting. It was missing the soul of what Sorkin used to be interested in, and so it became just another exercise in writing for him.
Sorkin used to relish in his characters; the central device for doing which was self-announcement. It's the key to all his best work.
The climax of his "American President" is Michael Douglas' (re-)discovery of his sense of himself, announced at a press conference beginning with "Being president of this country is entirely about character" and ending with "My name is Andrew Shepard and I am the president." The rest of the speech is basically all forgettable bs.
The climax of the pilot episode of Sorkin's "West Wing" has Martin Sheen being introduced to us as the president for the first time by walking into a room un-announced and declaring "I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other Gods before me." It happens at 7:40 of this clip which can't be embedded.
In "A Few Good Men" he used the same formula to build the whole film as he did in "American President" (require a character to decide whether announcing himself to the world is worth the costs to his career). In this case, it works even better because he made the character an asshole, so our enjoyment of the announcement was more complex -- revulsion and delight at once. There is something really sublime in Nicholson finally coming out with "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!"
For Nicholson, he is announcing himself, and it was his desire to do so that Cruise is manipulating in order to win his case, but the part of his announcement that we are interested in is less the truth about himself than it is about us ("Deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall!"). And this is a fact he wants us to be troubled by as he is troubled by it (that we cannot recognize him for who he is). Curiously, we are not troubled by it. The function of his speech is to exorcise us of whatever guilt we may feel for disliking him so that he can be carried off by the authorities. The fact that he accuses us of not recognizing him is perhaps what we find most contemptible about him -- his pointing it out stops us from having to feel the pain of our failure. On the other hand, Shepard draws up all sorts of accusations against his enemies in his speech, none of which is that they haven't understood him. Because he doesn't say so in as many words, when he finally says "I am the president" we _feel_ this as his correcting the record about himself, and so we accept without having to acknowledge that this is somehow a fact that we previously failed to recognize about him. The lesson here is that being recognized and asking to be recognized are at odds with one another.
So how does the Social Network carry the theme of self-announcement forward in Sorkin's work? Mark Zuckerberg actually has no self-understanding whatsoever, and Sorkin wanted to more or less portray him as he is, so we get a character who cannot speak about himself. Since Sorkin only knows one way to make a movie climax -- which is to have someone come to an understanding about himself -- here we have a movie without a climax. As a result, it is just a series of diverting conversations -- people telling the sort of stories you tell at parties to be entertaining, and stories being told that are of the sort you might tell at a party to be entertaining (Did you know before facebook, Zuckerberg crashed his dorm's internet with a website he designed in a single night that got 20,000 hits within 2 hours?)
Sorkin tries to make up for the fact that he has a character who has no self-understanding and develops no insight about himself in two ways. One, he has Rashida Jones make this remark "You are not an asshole, you just want to be." It's the last line of the film. So we are meant to feel we've gained some access to Mark's character: he is avoiding himself. That much is true. But the remark is unintelligible on its face. It feels too generous in the context because, other than perhaps the fact he defended his friend about the chicken story, the story we have just been told about Mark does not have this as its message: the Mark we see in this film is just without any redeeming characteristics. Eisenberg could have communicated some kind of alternative possibilities regardless of the failure of the script to do so if he had used his face, but he plays the whole thing straight autistic jerk. I take it Sorkin meant to make us feel that his destiny was to be with this attractive, smart, honest girlfriend, something the film ends with him half-assedly pursuing, but it all just feels like pop-psychological bullshit. Nerds become nerds because they can't get the girls they want. It might have worked, again, had Sorkin allowed us to see what Zuckerberg's interest in this girl actually was -- to see him delight in her, share himself with her, care about her interests. Instead, we know only the fact that he wanted to be in a relationship with her. But it doesn't strike us as a real possibility for him because we have no evidence that he is so much as capable of having a relationship with another human being.
Aside from the fact that Rashida's little remark appears not to be supported by the events of the film, and appears not to make any sense (Isn't wanting to be an asshole a sign that you are, in fact, an asshole?), it is also a problem that she seems not to be in a position to speak about this man's character. Unless, that is, we are meant to believe or to learn that the truth about us is accessible to anyone at all in our presence, but, again, there is nothing in the film that would set us up to receive that message. Our assumption going in, which Sorkin uses to great effect in previous films, is that the people who can speak about us are special to us and that this fact about them binds them to us. These people are hard to find, and important to hold onto; our knowledge of each other is the mark of our sharing a common destiny. Having this random woman, who Sorkin has said is a character he invented as a representative of the viewer of the film (so, not someone in Mark's life), speak the supposed truth about Mark feels inappropriate.
All of what is unfortunate in the end of the film could have been rectified with a simple change. Sorkin could have made Emily's breakup speech the end of the film instead of its beginning. We _do_ naturally believe she has some authority to speak about Mark's character because she is his girlfriend and because it was she who set him on the life-course that he follows in the film.
The film could have started with him typing his drunk, hateful messages about his ex-girlfriend and so on, and then ended with a flashback to the breakup itself in which she gives her whole analysis of his character. In the immediate context of such a flashback, in the final shot we would read on his face something like an acknowledgment that she was right about him, and this could be taken to serve two functions. It would both establish the otherwise missing reason he wants to be with her (because she has the unique ability to show him the truth about himself) AND give us a sense of what the purpose was of taking us through the story of his life with facebook (to bring him to the point where he could recognize about himself that he did want to be with her and that what she said about him was true). If it came right before that final scene, we could feel the power of his sitting there friending her and re-freshing the page as an authentic ending to the film, the message of which would then be that everything in Mark's life (and therefore everything in the film) was only a distraction. That would have rung true for me, because it is how I emphatically felt while watching it.
Of course, on my way of doing things, we would still have two hours of distracted amusements (and they are amusing), but the distractedness of the film and of Mark's life would be redeemed at least to the extent that it does lead _somewhere_. We would feel at the end that something else actually is possible or even necessary for Mark, which I suppose was Sorkin's intention in the first place, and we would have the opportunity to respond to Mark's recognition of this fact in a way that I, at least, did not the way the film actually does end. In fact it isn't particularly clear to me that Mark does acknowledge the truth in what Rashida says. If it were done my way, we could take the film to be a study of what lessons there are to be learned by refusing to learn one's lesson. The message would be about the futility of trying to lead a meaningless life, of running away from the meaning of one's life. What we have instead is just a movie about a meaningless life, which is to say: a meaningless movie.
PS "Charlie Wilson's War" is somewhere in between Social Network and American President/A Few Good Men in that the climactic speech is not by Wilson, who doesn't understand himself, but by P S Hoffman's character, and the purpose of the speech is to say: all of this has been a distraction, even though we won the war, our doing so will not solve the problem we actually face, which we do not understand yet at the end of the film any better than we did at its beginning. If Sorkin had already developed this technique for dealing with protagonists who don't have character, I don't know why he didn't use it to better effect in Social Network. Maybe I am missing something.
Sorkin used to relish in his characters; the central device for doing which was self-announcement. It's the key to all his best work.
The climax of his "American President" is Michael Douglas' (re-)discovery of his sense of himself, announced at a press conference beginning with "Being president of this country is entirely about character" and ending with "My name is Andrew Shepard and I am the president." The rest of the speech is basically all forgettable bs.
The climax of the pilot episode of Sorkin's "West Wing" has Martin Sheen being introduced to us as the president for the first time by walking into a room un-announced and declaring "I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other Gods before me." It happens at 7:40 of this clip which can't be embedded.
In "A Few Good Men" he used the same formula to build the whole film as he did in "American President" (require a character to decide whether announcing himself to the world is worth the costs to his career). In this case, it works even better because he made the character an asshole, so our enjoyment of the announcement was more complex -- revulsion and delight at once. There is something really sublime in Nicholson finally coming out with "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!"
For Nicholson, he is announcing himself, and it was his desire to do so that Cruise is manipulating in order to win his case, but the part of his announcement that we are interested in is less the truth about himself than it is about us ("Deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall!"). And this is a fact he wants us to be troubled by as he is troubled by it (that we cannot recognize him for who he is). Curiously, we are not troubled by it. The function of his speech is to exorcise us of whatever guilt we may feel for disliking him so that he can be carried off by the authorities. The fact that he accuses us of not recognizing him is perhaps what we find most contemptible about him -- his pointing it out stops us from having to feel the pain of our failure. On the other hand, Shepard draws up all sorts of accusations against his enemies in his speech, none of which is that they haven't understood him. Because he doesn't say so in as many words, when he finally says "I am the president" we _feel_ this as his correcting the record about himself, and so we accept without having to acknowledge that this is somehow a fact that we previously failed to recognize about him. The lesson here is that being recognized and asking to be recognized are at odds with one another.
So how does the Social Network carry the theme of self-announcement forward in Sorkin's work? Mark Zuckerberg actually has no self-understanding whatsoever, and Sorkin wanted to more or less portray him as he is, so we get a character who cannot speak about himself. Since Sorkin only knows one way to make a movie climax -- which is to have someone come to an understanding about himself -- here we have a movie without a climax. As a result, it is just a series of diverting conversations -- people telling the sort of stories you tell at parties to be entertaining, and stories being told that are of the sort you might tell at a party to be entertaining (Did you know before facebook, Zuckerberg crashed his dorm's internet with a website he designed in a single night that got 20,000 hits within 2 hours?)
Sorkin tries to make up for the fact that he has a character who has no self-understanding and develops no insight about himself in two ways. One, he has Rashida Jones make this remark "You are not an asshole, you just want to be." It's the last line of the film. So we are meant to feel we've gained some access to Mark's character: he is avoiding himself. That much is true. But the remark is unintelligible on its face. It feels too generous in the context because, other than perhaps the fact he defended his friend about the chicken story, the story we have just been told about Mark does not have this as its message: the Mark we see in this film is just without any redeeming characteristics. Eisenberg could have communicated some kind of alternative possibilities regardless of the failure of the script to do so if he had used his face, but he plays the whole thing straight autistic jerk. I take it Sorkin meant to make us feel that his destiny was to be with this attractive, smart, honest girlfriend, something the film ends with him half-assedly pursuing, but it all just feels like pop-psychological bullshit. Nerds become nerds because they can't get the girls they want. It might have worked, again, had Sorkin allowed us to see what Zuckerberg's interest in this girl actually was -- to see him delight in her, share himself with her, care about her interests. Instead, we know only the fact that he wanted to be in a relationship with her. But it doesn't strike us as a real possibility for him because we have no evidence that he is so much as capable of having a relationship with another human being.
Aside from the fact that Rashida's little remark appears not to be supported by the events of the film, and appears not to make any sense (Isn't wanting to be an asshole a sign that you are, in fact, an asshole?), it is also a problem that she seems not to be in a position to speak about this man's character. Unless, that is, we are meant to believe or to learn that the truth about us is accessible to anyone at all in our presence, but, again, there is nothing in the film that would set us up to receive that message. Our assumption going in, which Sorkin uses to great effect in previous films, is that the people who can speak about us are special to us and that this fact about them binds them to us. These people are hard to find, and important to hold onto; our knowledge of each other is the mark of our sharing a common destiny. Having this random woman, who Sorkin has said is a character he invented as a representative of the viewer of the film (so, not someone in Mark's life), speak the supposed truth about Mark feels inappropriate.
All of what is unfortunate in the end of the film could have been rectified with a simple change. Sorkin could have made Emily's breakup speech the end of the film instead of its beginning. We _do_ naturally believe she has some authority to speak about Mark's character because she is his girlfriend and because it was she who set him on the life-course that he follows in the film.
The film could have started with him typing his drunk, hateful messages about his ex-girlfriend and so on, and then ended with a flashback to the breakup itself in which she gives her whole analysis of his character. In the immediate context of such a flashback, in the final shot we would read on his face something like an acknowledgment that she was right about him, and this could be taken to serve two functions. It would both establish the otherwise missing reason he wants to be with her (because she has the unique ability to show him the truth about himself) AND give us a sense of what the purpose was of taking us through the story of his life with facebook (to bring him to the point where he could recognize about himself that he did want to be with her and that what she said about him was true). If it came right before that final scene, we could feel the power of his sitting there friending her and re-freshing the page as an authentic ending to the film, the message of which would then be that everything in Mark's life (and therefore everything in the film) was only a distraction. That would have rung true for me, because it is how I emphatically felt while watching it.
Of course, on my way of doing things, we would still have two hours of distracted amusements (and they are amusing), but the distractedness of the film and of Mark's life would be redeemed at least to the extent that it does lead _somewhere_. We would feel at the end that something else actually is possible or even necessary for Mark, which I suppose was Sorkin's intention in the first place, and we would have the opportunity to respond to Mark's recognition of this fact in a way that I, at least, did not the way the film actually does end. In fact it isn't particularly clear to me that Mark does acknowledge the truth in what Rashida says. If it were done my way, we could take the film to be a study of what lessons there are to be learned by refusing to learn one's lesson. The message would be about the futility of trying to lead a meaningless life, of running away from the meaning of one's life. What we have instead is just a movie about a meaningless life, which is to say: a meaningless movie.
PS "Charlie Wilson's War" is somewhere in between Social Network and American President/A Few Good Men in that the climactic speech is not by Wilson, who doesn't understand himself, but by P S Hoffman's character, and the purpose of the speech is to say: all of this has been a distraction, even though we won the war, our doing so will not solve the problem we actually face, which we do not understand yet at the end of the film any better than we did at its beginning. If Sorkin had already developed this technique for dealing with protagonists who don't have character, I don't know why he didn't use it to better effect in Social Network. Maybe I am missing something.
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