I Am Mark's Smirking Revenge: David Fincher's Nerd Revolution

The first scene of David Fincher’s The Social Network features future Facebook kingpin Mark Zuckerberg and his soon to be ex-girlfriend in a bar, arguing about their relationship…or, rather, features Zuckerberg waxing rhapsodic about how his potential entry into one of Harvard’s elite Final Clubs will allow him to introduce his soon to be ex-girlfriend to social levels far beyond her lowly Boston University background…or, rather, features Zuckerberg raining down abuse on his soon to be ex-girlfriend for digging vapid crew rowers and for supposedly sleeping with the schlubby doorman…or, rather, features Zuckerberg’s girlfriend trying to have a normal conversation while he brags about his 1600 SAT scores….or, rather, features all of the above, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, part screwball comedy, part fencing match.  It’s a bold opening salvo, one that automatically throws the audience off kilter and forces us to recalibrate our expectations for “that Facebook movie”.

Sorkin has long utilized this type of snappy dialogue, almost to parodic effect in some of his more recent efforts.  But this rapid fire verbiage is perfect for Social Network, which plunges us into the lives of young men whose only defense against the moneyed, the good looking, hell, the entire system itself is their steel trap brains and verbal assaults.  Burroughs’s theory of the word virus comes to mind as Zuckerberg and, later, Napster rock star Sean Parker mow down their various opponents with their intelligence, wit, arrogance and insouciance.  During Zuckerberg’s meetings with two sets of lawyers, he slices through their small talk and attempts at clever questioning with blunt answers and confrontational volleys.  He’s physically smaller than almost everyone in the room, and he’s dressed like a schlub in his tie and hoodie, but his mental intensity makes him a figurative giant. 

Credit here must be given to Jesse Eisenberg, who gives a burn down the building performance of a lifetime as the Facebook founder.  His Zuckerberg is a jumble of nerves, an inquisitive and condescending look forever plastered on his face.  His maintenance of that aforementioned physical weakness and timidity makes his incredibly aggressive and trenchant verbal missives all the more effective and damaging, like a flyweight boxer with a killer jab.  It’s a brilliant turn that is alternately inspiring and repellent.  Fincher plays the scenes where Zuckerberg verbally annihilates his enemies as riffs on classic payback scenes of the cinematic past, but they’re almost always followed by episodes of cruelty and betrayal.

The dialogue turns a film that largely takes place in sit down meetings into an incredibly violent affair.  But that shouldn’t be that big of a surprise, because Fincher has trod this ground before.

 

 

“You’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!”

-Marla Singer, Fight Club

“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be one.”

-Marylin Delpy, The Social Network

In effect, The Social Network is a remake and remix of Fincher’s end of the millennium classic Fight Club.  Both films deal with societal minions striking back against the system.  In Fight Club, it’s the waiters, the mechanics and the corporate drones who rediscover their lost lives before corrupting society with its own means.  Zuckerberg and most of his pals can’t get into the debauched high life of the Final Clubs, so they use their programming skills and savvy to create Face Mash, a fly by night site that invites all of Harvard to be judges in an elimination tournament for the crown of hottest girl on campus.  Like a combination of Fight Club and Project Mayhem, it’s a seemingly goofy prank that leads to the creation of a much bigger, much more revolutionary clique.  And like Napster before it, Facebook proves to be a covert revolution, spreading virally throughout the world and quickly assembling an international army of devotees.  Ultimately, everyone is looking for a cause; Fight Club and Facebook are there to fill that need.  Indeed, at several points in the film, various characters refer to Zuckerberg having a chance to reinvent his life through each version of the project, much as Edward Norton’s Narrator reinvents himself through Fight Club.  (It should be noted that Fincher plays a similar trick with Zodiac’s Robert Graysmith, a somewhat timid and not altogether likeable character who reinvents his life via his obsession with the Zodiac killer.)

Justin Timberlake is nearly the devil incarnate as the slick talking and amoral Sean Parker, but you could just cut to the chase and call him Tyler Durden.  Parker is everything that Zuckerberg wants to be, or as Durden so memorably puts it “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”  Sure, Parker is a real person, but it’s surely no coincidence that his first appearance in the film occurs shortly after Zuckerberg first creates Facebook…and it’s surely no coincidence that he appears post-coitus, halfway across the country with a Stanford co-ed, about to check his e-mail.  Social Network adds one intriguing twist in that the Winklevoss twins almost fill Tyler’s alpha male role better than Parker.  But if this film deals with the revenge of the repressed, it would make sense that Zuckerberg, frustrated with the knowledge that will never be “6’’ 5’ and 220 pounds” or as socially accepted as the twins, would create his own version of them…at least, metaphorically.

Timberlake is fantastic in the role.  Like Brad Pitt in Fight Club, he uses his good looks and natural charisma as a means to completely subvert them; you’re simultaneously drawn to and repelled by his non-stop patter and sly grin.  It comes as no surprise when Parker’s long hinted-at sexcapades and drug adventures catch up with him at the end of the film, much like Tyler’s radical Nietzschean ethos catches up to him when Fight Club’s Narrator reigns them in.  At the conclusion of the latter film, the Narrator finally assimilates Tyler into his own psyche, the future unclear; in a similar manner, the last mention of Parker in Social Network is Zuckerberg’s icy and cryptic admission that he still owns 6% of Facebook’s stock.  Mark has essentially internalized Sean, appropriated his cutthroat manner and web of industry connections.  The future?  Well...  

Like Fight Club, Social Network is dominated by male bravado and testosterone-fueled angst, while still acknowledging their homoerotic side.  The Winklevoss twins bicker like an old married couple, or (perhaps more appropriately, considering how most of their screen time is spent with each other) like a couple of veteran queens.  But the stronger corollary is with the triangle that forms between Parker, Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founder Eduardro Saverin.  Much like the Narrator/Tyler/Marla love triangle in Fight Club, Zuckerberg and Saverin see their relationship torn apart by the former’s adoration of Parker.  Although this comparison is not strictly of the A-B variety, it must be noted that Saverin is definitely the most of feminine of the three, and that Zuckerberg’s jealousy over Saverin’s prospective Final Club induction mirrors the Narrator’s jealousy over Marla’s advanced ease with her support group tourist life.  In a film about people working on a communications system who are torn apart by their inability to communicate with each other, it’s entirely appropriate.

After the gorgeous, yet ultimately hackneyed Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I began to lose a bit of faith in the David Fincher whose previous films had so entranced me, and when I heard about his upcoming Facebook project my enthusiasm waned even further.  But The Social Network marks a triumphant return to form for him.  It’s a stunning, haunting portrayal of the opening of a modern Pandora’s Box and the devastation wrought upon the lives of all involved.

Joaquin, Are Ya Goofin' On Tony?

One of my more anticipated flicks for this coming fall season is Casey Affleck's directorial debut I'm Still Here. For those of you who have been living under the proverbial rock for the last few years (or who just don't give a damn), Affleck has spent that time chronicling the sudden career change of his brother in law Joaquin Phoenix from sensitive, brooding actor to rap star/self-destruction artist.  The film purports to offer an in-depth examination of Phoenix's supposed lost years...except for the fact that most pundits have been crying fraud since near the beginning of this whole escapade.  Shortly after Phoenix began appearing in his newly bearded and weight-padded guise (with his brother in law constantly in tow, camera in hand), word began to spread that the whole thing was a publicity stunt.

If this was true, Phoenix did his best to dispel the rumors with his now semi-legendary appearance with David Letterman.  Ostensibly appearing to promote his then new project Two Lovers (recommended, by the way), the sunglasses-wearing former heartthrob barely mentioned the film, briefly discussed his retirement from acting, and acted generally evasive for the entirety of his segment.  Letterman has usually received kudos for frying Phoenix alive, but Joaquin actually served up a fairly stinging repudiation of Dave's condescending manner (albeit in a much less palatable manner).



After that appearance, Phoenix continued on his tour of small clubs, rapping to often befuddled audiences, while Affleck continued to shoot his every move.  But the general hubbub over his bizarre behavior seemed to die out fairly quickly.  The general consensus was that the stunt was cute for a minute, but that it had now grown self indulgent and tiring.

Which leads me to ask: could Andy Kaufman have survived in the modern world?  And is Joaquin Phoenix actually the long lost son of Tony Clifton?

During his all too brief stay in this friendly, friendly world, Kaufman’s trompe le monde attitude turned failure and self-destruction into high art.  Bored with the success of his Foreign Man character (which he later modified for his Taxi's iconic Latka Gravas), Kaufman slowly began to amp up the antagonistic parts of his stand-up act.  During college tours, he would stick it to rowdy audiences in search of his easily marketable impressions by reading long sections of The Great Gatsby to them.  For an extended period , he indulged his love for the dialectic moral aspects of pro wrestling (and his lust for rubbing up against women) by declaring himself the Intergender Wrestling Champion, grappling with willing female antagonists during his act and on talk shows and culminating in his infamous feud with Memphis's King of Wrestling, Jerry Lawler. (For more on this period, check out this excellent compilation of real applications from women who sought to wrestle Andy: http://www.amazon.com/Dear-Andy-Kaufman-Hate-Your/dp/1934170089/ref=pd_sim_b_8.

But Tony Clifton was his crowning creation, an opportunity for Kaufman's id to run wild. While Andy's benign moon face and childlike glee tempered many of his more confrontational bits, Tony Clifton's massive boiler, roadkill hairpiece, sagging jowls and nasal twang worked just as well to alienate audiences.  Kaufman would often have Clifton open for him, baiting the audience with his horribly off-key standards and sub-borscht belt riffs.  Seeing Kaufman's antics afterward was a relief.  The joke, of course, was that Kaufman and Clifton were the same person.  Kaufman would appear as Clifton in public, denying any knowledge of his supposed alter ego; he even famously wrote Clifton appearances into his Taxi contract, mystifying cast mates by appearing in full Clifton regalia on those shooting days and annoying the hell out of everyone.  But eventually, word of his true identity leaked out, so Kaufman's partner in crime Bob Zmuda began to portray Clifton, often appearing on stage with his pal to further spook the skeptics.  Back then, the general public had no idea who Zmuda was, so the ruse worked.

The apex of the Clifton character was to be a feature film (The Tony Clifton Story) which would tell the tale of his illustrious and depraved life.  The climax of the film was to feature a pullback shot in which Kaufman would appear as himself to explain that Clifton later died of lung cancer at Cedars Sinai hospital.  The film was never produced, as (in a darkly ironic twist) the generally clean living Kaufman later died of lung cancer at…Cedars Sinai hospital.

So look at the stories of Andy Kaufman and Joaquin Phoenix.  Could Kaufman have pulled off Tony Clifton for any amount of time in today’s mystery-deprived world?  Would he have been dismissed as a sham within a day or so of Clifton’s first appearance?  Is Phoenix actually paying tribute to Kaufman/Clifton with this latest venture?  Or has the former heartthrob stepped all the way through the looking glass and truly embraced his new career?  It’s possibly instructive to note that one of Kaufman’s defining mass media appearances was his confrontation with Jerry Lawler (following the King’s supposed breaking of Kaufman’s neck) on…Late Night with David Letterman. 

"I'm an American!"

"That's right, Jack. The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad. Oh, yeah. He's dying, I think. He hates all this. He hates it! But the man's a...He reads poetry out loud, all right. And a voice...he likes you because you're still alive." -The late, great Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.

It's intriguing to look back at George Clooney's career and think that much of his original appeal (and a sizable portion of his continuing appeal) was based on his Cary Grant-esque killer looks, his old school romantic panache and his steely leading man demeanor. Sure, his humanitarian work has come to define a large part of his public persona, but there’s a reason why the Ocean’s 11 films (even the unloved middle child that is Ocean’s 12) are some of the most profitable films on his resume. If you’re in that particular groove, there’s an undeniable vicarious pleasure in seeing Clooney as the coolest player in the game, deftly leading his rogues gallery through labrynthine twists and turns. Always winning, always coming out on top.

What makes this aspect of his persona so fascinating is how it bumps up against what he has seemingly always done well, if not to greater acclaim. Over the course of the last fifteen years, Clooney has become a master of cinematic regret. Those same steely good looks and insouciant charm have come to double as effective pieces of a mask that many of his characters wear, one which hides seeming oceans of suffering and existential angst. The world weary protagonists of Michael Clayton and Up in the Air are perhaps his most heralded recent turns in this vein, but he also mined similar territory in the 2005 double whammy of Good Night and Good Luck (his Fred Friendly a downtrodden idealist in the CBS corporate machine) and Syriana (as the Clayton precursor and black ops specialist Bob Barnes). He pines after a dead wife in Soderbergh’s Solaris reboot and punctures his own gold lusting bravado in Three Kings. Hell, even From Dusk ‘Til Dawn’s Seth Gecko is stabbed with regret at that film’s conclusion as he sends Juliette Lewis on her way to freedom, the realization of his true fate in El Rey (Tarantino’s callback to the grisly, and unfilmed, conclusion to Jim Thompson’s The Getaway) slowly, horrifically dawning on him. And the driving force behind Danny Ocean’s drive in the aforementioned Rat Pack revamps? The loss of his beloved wife to a sleazy hotel magnate.

Clooney’s mastery of the art of regret is on full display in Anton Corbijn’s outstanding The American. His veteran hitman/weaponsmith has made a career of keeping the world at a distance with an icy veneer, although as the film’s opening scene intimates, said veneer is beginning to crack (and I don’t just say that because the action opens in snowy Sweden). One of Clooney’s main strengths as an actor is his ability to underplay, to let long stares tell more than any dialogue could. It’s a technique that he uses extensively through The American, his rampant (and justified) paranoia forcing him to stare down each corner, each situation, each budding human relationship for their potential danger (his precautionary murder of a female companion in those opening moments haunts him for the duration of the narrative). His Jack/Edward (it’s never made clear if either is his real name) has senses so finely tuned to their surroundings that he has difficulty truly enjoying any of them. Corbijn spends most of the film building up the gradual breakdown of this defense system. Clooney slowly befriends the town priest (Paolo Bonicelli), playing against stereotype by not giving in to easy confession, but still forming an altogether different bond with the old man, who has his own wellspring of regret with which to deal. During his second sexual encounter with local prostitute Clara (the luminous Violante Placido), Clooney methodically moves through several sexual positions, but it’s her initially denied kiss that is the stunning apex of their coupling. When, in a moment of genuine happiness, he cracks a smile near the film’s end, the cumulative effect is explosive.

For the most part, the formula is nothing new, especially in the hitman genre. But Corbijn knows this; he’s more concerned with how the tale is told, and this is where The American really shines. Last week, on the heels of seeing the aggressively stupid Piranha remake, I decided to cleanse my palate by finally watching Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, which I’ve had on DVD for years. It was such a pleasure to see Vilmos Zsigmond’s expertly composed cinematography, to see shots that told a coherent, yet still bold, daring and interesting visual story. In the same manner, Martin Ruhe (who also lensed Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control) uses the full extent of The American’s scope frame to let the visuals do most of the storytelling. Beginning with the opening credits, words, objects and people are often deliberately filmed off center, almost pushed aside by the inky darkness of the credit roll, the lush Italian mountains and the desolate, eerie interior of a village café. Much as Carlo Di Palma turned the back of Monica Vitti’s head into a sensuous and erotic tumble of amber waves in Red Desert, Ruhe focuses on shooting Clooney from behind, or in Leone-esque extreme closeups. This latter method is explicitly referenced midway through the film when Jack/Edward sits in a café where Henry Fonda’s brutal initial appearance in Once Upon a Time in the West plays on the television screen behind him. But Ruhe also peppers the film with very formal compositions; I can’t remember the last time I was this intrigued by so many side profile shots. At the same time, he shrewdly uses expressionist color fills during the night scenes to lend a palpable sense of forboding (as the late Robert Krasker would tell you, night filming on cobblestone streets is one of the best cheap visual effects you can find). It’s a visual tour de force, a triumph of control and form in a cinematic landscape too often littered with haphazard visual hack work.

So what of the Dennis Hopper quote from the opening of this essay? Upon some reflection, I was struck by the (probably unintended) parallels between Clooney’s Jack/Edward and Hopper’s famous Apocalypse Now cameo. Both men pose as American photojournalists; although Coppola later claimed that the Photojournalist was based on the real life journalist Sean Flynn, there have also been anecdotes about early plans to have Hopper’s camera be empty, his true profession and motivation left in doubt. Both Jack/Edward and the Photojournalist are reaching the end of their tenures, both burnt out by the insanity of their respective businesses. Although the aforementioned quote is Hopper describing Brando’s decaying Kurtz, it could also be an accurate read of Jack/Edward: a romantic, poetic soul falling apart from the madness of a lifetime of killing, a man constructing the means of his own destruction. Hollow men, indeed.

But even if that comparison falls somewhat short, it doesn’t take away from the power and excellence of The American, surely one of the finest…um, American films of the year.

the 2008 Incredible 2-Headed Marathon!

There Will Be...More From PTA

This was reported a few weeks back, but here's a teaser for Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming THERE WILL BE BLOOD, his first feature in five years.