The Social Network

The Social Network is a really good movie. It's smart, entertaining, and funny. It's got great production design and cinematography, fantastic performances, and a fine script. And it's very ambitious, especially for a studio movie. It is definitely Oscar-worthy. But there were a few choices made that I think prevented it from being an all-time great movie, which is a bit of a shame because Sorkin and Fincher got so close and the source material is so spectacular.

Let me start off with the praise. The first thing you notice about The Social Network is that it nails the details. For instance, Mark wears a baggy sweatshirt and jeans and Tevas even on cold New England nights, and if you went to college in New England in the early to mid-00's, you know that this is a total Computer Science-major meme - these guys are so focused on abstract thinking that they disregard their appearance and even their physical comfort. Or when Mark and Eduardo go to a lame party at AEPi, the Jewish frat, it's a Hawaiian-themed party and there's a cheesy DJ - again, that is exactly the kind of party that smart, very nerdy people at elite colleges throw. Or when Mark drunkenly blogs after being dumped, he ends every paragraph with "

", the HTML tag for the end of a paragraph. These are all little details, but they add up to a realistic world that pulls you into the movie rather than pushing you away by making you think something like, "Only in a movie would this college kid live in a dorm room the size of a football field", as I thought to myself while watching The Skulls, another movie about an elite Northeastern college.

And the performances are phenomenal. Justin Timberlake is a revelation as Sean Parker, who weasels his way into the inner sanctum of Facebook by charming Zuckerberg with promises of sun, hot Asian girls and buttloads of money in Silicon Valley. Timberlake nails the charming salesman side of Parker, but also his dark side. For Parker is ultimately a complete snake, and Timberlake does a great job of showing this in the scene where he's just fucked Eduardo out of billions of dollars, Eduardo confronts his best friend Mark about it in a heated moment, and Parker dismisses Eduardo like he's a crazy person (Eduardo who was until five minutes ago number 2 at the company), immediately calls security and gets Eduardo kicked out of the building. Speaking of Eduardo, Andrew Garfield crushes that role, a smart, ambitious guy whose vulnerability and fundamental decency leave him in the dust when the Big Boys like Parker and the Venture Capitalists come into the picture. The hurt in his eyes when he realizes Mark has cut him out of Facebook - amazing! He just landed the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man and that's a great fit because young Tobey Maguire also had that vulnerability and sweetness to him. Armie Hammer is awesome as the WASPy Winklevii, cocky but also reasonably smart though not as smart as they think. As for Eisenberg, this is his best performance, a total reversal of his usual shy/beta self. He really runs with Zuckerberg as autistic which is an interesting take - though as I'll explain shortly, not exactly how I see the guy.

And this is without a doubt Aaron Sorkin's finest writing. Sorkin has a tendency to overwrite, making his words overshadow the characters and story and making the characters turn into an undifferentiated mass of smart-alecks who all sound like Aaron Sorkin. Sure, some characters in The Social Network sounded smarter than they might really be. But mostly I thought that Sorkin really brings these different characters to life, from the cocky swagger of the Winklevii to the smooth-talking Sean Parker to the sweetly optimistic Eduardo to the Aspergersy Zuckerberg, while still throwing in some great zinger lines ("It'll be because you're an asshole," etc.). And on a fundamental level, the structure of this story is so anti-Hollywood, which is great. When was the last time a major studio movie was ultimately a cautionary tale about losing your friends and your soul in the pursuit of success? Even Indies and Oscar Bait studio movies usually have at their core a somewhat hopeful message about being yourself or the importance of love or family. That final shot of Zuckerberg, alone, refreshing his Facebook Friend Request page - very dark, unconventional and cool. So kudos on all of this, which is no small feat!

That being said, on further reflection I had a few problems with the movie that I think have been lost in all the praise heaped on it by American film critics starved for quality movies. One big mistake was the use of the deposition framing device. If you want to have a non-linear structure in a film, you really have to nail it because it messes with the narrative momentum of the story, and I don't feel this deposition structure nailed it at all. There were so many times when I was enraptured in the story unfolding at Harvard or in New York or Silicon Valley, scenes which were so compelling, only to get jolted out of the story by the flat deposition scenes. The one thing gained by the deposition scenes was the tinge of sadness to Mark and Edaurdo's scenes in the main story because of the animosity they had toward each other in the deposition scenes. But Sorkin's main desire in creating this structure was to "give everyone's viewpoint", as in Citizen Kane or Rashomon (the films he's referenced in interviews). And in those other movies, it is very clear that a certain person begins speaking about events, and then we see his version of the events play out. Yet in The Social Network, the connection between who was speaking in the deposition and whose version of events was playing out was not clear at all - any time we were in the main story, it pretty much read as neutral objective reality as opposed to "This is how the Winklevii say it went down." So little was gained, but valuable screen time was wasted on these deposition scenes, time that could have been used to flesh out Mark as a character a little more. My friend Matt made the good point for instance that when Mark and Eduardo hook up with those two Asian girls in the bathroom, we see inside Eduardo's stall but only see Mark's feet. Why not show how Mark, this interesting borderline autistic character, handles the intense interpersonal experience of hooking up?

Another complaint I have has to do with the Winklevii. These brothers were funny, compelling characters and I'm really glad they were in the movie, and their world was interesting. But their storyline to me reads "sexed-up Hollywood" in a movie that in so many other ways nails the reality of 21st-century elite America. The basic Winklevii story told by Sorkin is that the Winklevii are these upper-crust WASPs who are members of one of the elite Finals Club that rule the Harvard social scene, and Zuckerberg the dorky Jew is jealous of them so he steals their idea for a website in the hopes of some day having their level of social status. Well I visited friends at Harvard in the early to mid-2000s and went to a pretty similar college during that time, and I can tell you that while the WASPy athletic kids had their own thriving social scene and felt like the Big Men on Campus (think SAE if you went to Yale), to most students they seemed like a brain-dead relic of an older time, and there were a ton of other social scenes with their own hierarchies going on, many of whose members felt equal in stature to the WASPy athletes, who by the way were no longer only East Coast WASPs, though they retained the dress and habits of East Coast WASPs. And the Winklevii, as smart and talented and ambitious as they are (they were Olympic rowers), just seem to not be nearly as smart or ambitious or talented as Mark Zuckerberg. Look at what they've done since - they built ConnectU, which was a total bust, and umm.... seriously, I looked into all the pages cited on the ConnectU Wikipedia page (click the link) and neither ConnectU (which was a poorly branded piece of shit) nor any other Winklevoss site is still active. I am willing to concede that Zuckerberg stole the germ of the idea for a social networking site at Harvard from the Winklevii, but the vision, details, and execution were pure Zuckerberg and in a world where Zuckerberg was smothered in the cradle, the Winklevii's HarvardConnection/ConnectU would not have spread like Facebook has, nor would they have been able to expand it like Zuckerberg did even if it had some initital success. So to me the story in reality is the old-guard WASPy Winklevii's bitter envy of this brash new Jewish genius outsider who has completely outsmarted and outshone them. This is actually a really interesting story that is basically the story of every major power center in America over the last 50 years, from banking to government to higher education to media - the WASP Old Boy Establishment has been replaced by hungrier, smarter, harder-working, brasher, more ruthless Jews, Catholics, Asians, women, Hispanics and African-Americans (look at the switch from Greenwich WASP Establishment George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama with his Kenyan goat-herding grandfather!). The Meritocratic Elite is very real, and it has made the WASP Old Boy Establishment into something of a vestigial tail in American society- sure, most of them can get some decent banking jobs and they still have nice exclusive Country Clubs and some money and look beautiful, but the East Coast WASP Establishment is not where the action is in America by any means, and they know it - Whit Stillman had a good scene about this WASP decline in Metropolitan. Hell, Sorkin himself (a Jew) is a member of the Meritocratic Elite, and not even with the help of an elite college as an entree as Zuckerberg and Obama had (Sorkin went to Syracuse), but rather through sheer talent, ruthlessness, and force of personality. But Sorkin unfortunately instead chose a more conventional Hollywood story of the dorky Jew who's jealous of the big jock WASPs on campus.

Which brings me to my final complaint, and it's a big one, for it focuses on the main character of Mark Zuckerberg. As Sorkin's written him and Jesse Eisenberg plays him, Zuck is a smart Aspergers-y guy, happiest coding in front of a computer and unwilling to suffer fools, dismissing them when he has to interact with them in person. He is very ambitious, but not in a really cutthroat way, more in the mode of a smart guy who wants to get his ideas out there. Now I don't actually know Mark Zuckerberg, but I had the chance to observe him in person recently when he sat next to me at a bar (granted he's older now) and I've read contemporary accounts of what Zuckerberg was like at Harvard and some AIM messages he sent a friend while the whole Winklevoss drama was going on. From my own observation of him, Zuckerberg is certainly not a naturally adept social animal, but he was more awkward than aloof (as he is in The Social Network), a smart and confident guy not on his most comfortable territory in social settings but giving it a try. Another aspect of his personality that shines through in venture capitalist Larry Cheng's account of meeting Zuck in 2004 is his raging confidence and alphaness when it came to the business of Facebook and its future success even at this early stage - Cheng writes, "Mark struck me as the alpha male. He had a profound confidence about him that exceeded his youth. He exuded killer instinct. He was not shy about sharing his aspirations of dominating the college market," and, "Mark also expressed his intent to leave school and move to Silicon Valley to lead Facebook full-time. Mark seemed deeply committed to it while Eduardo tried unsuccessfully to project the same confidence. I asked them if they had thought about how much the company was worth. Mark confidently articulated a valuation that some angels had given him. Eduardo stared, paused, and tentatively nodded in agreement." So from this, and Zuck's later actions, I gather Zuck is not just a technical whiz or even idea guy, but also has a side of him that's a cocky CEO-type with the swagger of a Big-Swinging Dick businessman. He did after all make business cards that say "I'm CEO... bitch" and used to end Facebook staff meetings with the chant "DOMINATE! DOMINATE!" The movie rightly shows Eduardo never having this kind of swagger, but wrongly shifts this kind of swagger about Facebook only to Sean Parker (and a little to Mark after he's met Parker), whereas it seems very clear that Mark already had this swagger before meeting Parker and had it in spades once he got to Silicon Valley. Finally, despite everyone saying how Zuck comes across as so mean and ruthless in this movie, The Social Network actually pulls some serious punches. The AIM messages he sent during the HarvardConnection Winklevoss drama reveal the ruthlessness and willingness to blow past the boundaries of acceptable behavior of an arrogant sociopath drunk on his own power, and yet these were barely touched on in the movie. Zuck writes about sharing the personal information of the "dumb fucks" who trusted him with it, describes how he's going to "fuck them [the Winklevii] in the ear," and literally writes, "I'll fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done." Now as I wrote before, the Winklevii are not that talented and their site was going nowhere, and Zuck himself wrote in another AIM message, "I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating - I think people are skeptical about joining dating things like HarvardConnection," but just the willingness to lie to get ahead and to violate strangers' privacy - crucial to Facebook's targeted advertising business model - are character traits lost in the film's depiction of Zuck.

In fact, this last point - the complete disregard for others' privacy - is a crucial one. Zuckerberg's take on the world, which is tied to the Aspergers-y part of his personality, is "Why is there this thing called 'privacy'? Why doesn't everyone know everything about everyone?" He doesn't care for the delicate social dance we all play and the way we shield parts of ourselves from certain people (which is why he's not on his firmest footing in real-life social gatherings). And if you look at how Facebook has developed, it's been a steady march in one direction - toward more sharing of information and less privacy. Sometimes Zuck overreaches and has to step back, as with Beacon, the feature that shared what you'd purchased online automatically. But mostly after some hemming and hawing about lost privacy, people have embraced all the new more public-oriented features, from the streaming front page of updates to allowing others to tag you in photos to having the default settings make as much information public as possible. Because there is a part of all of us that is like Mark Zuckerberg, and he saw that and created an outlet for it. Sitting in front of the computer, we all crave personal information on the guy we met at the party last night or the girl who we had a thing with last summer, or the friend from high school who we wish we kept up with more - photos, relationship status, updates! This is why Mark Zuckerberg's a genius - he looks at the boundaries that are currently in place and says, "Fuck this, we can blow past this boundary" and then he does it. In fact, this borderline autistic privacy-less worldview has enormously shaped the youth of today. Digital Natives think nothing of communicating a personal message with a friend ("U coming 2 my party 2nite u slut?") via the Facebook Wall, which is visible to all other friends - something that strikes adults as really strange and a violation of basic standards of privacy and social behavior.

To think that some conventional-thinking guys like the Winklevii would ever have the kind of influence Zuckerberg has had is folly. The poster for The Social Network reads "PUNK. BILLIONAIRE. GENIUS." This is apt, as the real Zuckerberg is a genius and such a punk that he makes his bold visions into reality, which has made him a billionaire. Yet the Zuckerberg of The Social Network was really lacking that killer instinct that makes him a punk and was portrayed as more of a technical genius than the combination technical/psychological/business genius that he actually is. The scene where his punk/genius personality really did shine through was the great sequence early on when he first steals all the Harvard photos for FaceMash in a frenzy of ideas and coding. Indeed, FaceMash is a perfect example of how Zuck's combination of arrogance and Asperger's (punk and genius) is key to his success - everyone thinks "this is so wrong!" but then can't stop reloading the site to vote on more girls - Mark was the only one bold enough to show us all our true natures.

Ultimately The Social Network is as I said a very good movie - smart, funny, entertaining, expertly crafted. But given the raw material available in the amazing character of Mark Zuckerberg, I think even more could have been done. The main storyline, a bromance love triangle in which Mark is initially tight with Eduardo but then is seduced by the charming Sean Parker, only to end up all alone with no one in the end, is an awesome one. And it was very well done. But I wish the movie had stuck with the punk, arrogant aspect of Zuckerberg more, because it would have further enhanced this storyline (not to mention jibed with reality). In the movie, when Zuckerberg arrives in Silicon Valley he's a wide-eyed kid seduced by the fame and fortune Parker promises while at the same time quietly focused on coding rather than the business end of things. Eduardo is pushed out by Parker, not Mark, and when Eduardo screams at Mark for cutting him out, Mark is thinking 'how did I let Eduardo be cut out, what have I let happen to this company?' until Parker pushes Eduardo out the door. But it seems to me that Mark clearly was a wildly ambitious businessman even before coming to Silicon Valley, and the cutting out of Eduardo was probably as much Mark's doing as Parker's. As the Larry Cheng interview I referenced earlier mentioned, Eduardo was never as committed to Facebook as Mark and had never contributed that much beyond seed money, and with Facebook taking off and Eduardo not willing to move to Silicon Valley from Cambridge, Mark (though certainly with Parker whispering in his ear) probably decided "Eduardo's dead weight." So what does that make the real story? Like the Clintons leaving their old Arkansas buddies in the dust or Sarah Palin ignoring her Alaskan pals from back in the day, it's the story of a young American on the rise who decides that he doesn't need an old friend, that his own success is more important than any human relationship. The crucial difference is that in The Social Network, the exclusion of Eduardo almost happens to Mark, with Parker pulling the strings, which makes Mark snap to and think, "What have I become?" Whereas in reality I suspect the exclusion of Eduardo happened at least partly because of Mark and he woke up one day and thought, "What have I become?" And another aspect of what Mark has become is wildly rich and successful, a fact that was not touched upon much, with Mark moping around at the depositions in the "present day". So the final shot of Zuckerberg refreshing the Friend Request Page in vain, which was a great idea and well-executed, in my mind should have incorporated the wild success Zuck's had rather than taking place in a staid deposition room. Imagine if the final scene took place the day in 2007 when Microsoft purchased a $240 million stake in Facebook (a valuation of $15 billion), making Zuckerberg a millionaire several times over. People are congratulating Zuckerberg, slapping his back. But soon Zuckerberg retreats to his office, where he refreshes the Friend Request Page in vain until we fade to black. In order to show the cost of success, you have to show the success.

Like George W. Bush did to Vladimir Putin, I looked into Mark Zuckerberg's eyes, and while I'm not sure I saw a good soul, I did see a real, feeling, vulnerable being, who probably does sometimes sit back and think about the people he's left behind. Because after all, Mark Zuckerberg may be a Punk, a Genius and a Billionaire, but he's also a human.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

Where the Wild Things Are has a great pedigree - based on a beloved children's book, written by McSweeney's founder and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers and directed by indie darling Spike Jonze (who also co-wrote the script). And yet it is a slow, flaccid mess of a film.

All of the technical work is solid - the puppetry is great, the soundtrack by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is beautiful, and the cinematography is top notch. The problem here is the screenplay. We begin with our young hero Max dealing with the problems of childhood. His divorced mother is spending more time with a new man than with him, his sister ignores him in favor of her friends, and to top it all off his sister's friends have destroyed his igloo, the one refuge he had from his problems. So he acts out in front of his mom and gets sent to his room. But instead of pouting there he runs away and hops onto a boat which takes him to a far-off island. So far, so good.

Then he gets to the island, and the trouble starts. The first scene on the island seems promising: one of the Wild Things (James Gandolfini's character) is destroying the other Wild Things' homes, and Max looks on from a hiding spot, somewhat scared. But Max soon reveals himself to the Wild Things and not only is he not particularly frightened of the Wild Things, but they are not particularly frightened of him. There is a brief moment of completely unconvincing menace from the Wild Things, but then Max tells them he is their king and they agree with him, and Max soon meets all the Wild Things.

This opening sequence on the island is completely and utterly mishandled. This should have been the time to portray the Wild Things as genuinely menacing creatures (as they seemed to me as a child reading the book). Showing only glimpses of them and having them do something scary and then almost discovering Max would have been a good approach to establish them as mystical, frightening beasts. After piquing the audience's interest and wonder, then you can show that they are actually more complicated and friendlier than they first seem, and the audience will appreciate this as a revelation. But the filmmakers' approach of making the audience and Max fear the Wild Things for about one minute and then deflating that fear by showing that the Wild Things are harmless is a complete waste of an opportunity and diminishes the audience's interest in the Wild Things.

Along these lines, it was a horrifically awful idea to have us meet every single Wild Thing in the first five minutes (except KW, who I'll get to in a bit). Have Jonze and Eggers ever seen a little movie called The Wizard of Oz? It is a good idea when you are meeting fantastical creatures in far-off lands to introduce them individually, at separate times. Not only does this make you remember each character better and give each a touch of specialness (like many reviewers, I couldn't tell the Wild Things apart), but each introduction of a new character becomes a plot point on our hero's journey. It would be one thing to meet a few Wild Things and then meet some more later, but literally we meet every single Wild Thing except one in this first five minutes.

And what a miserable crew of characters these Wild Things are. After one fun sequence in which the Wild Things and Max run around and play in a well-edited kinetic montage (the "Wild Rumpus" as you'll recall from the book), it's straight to the doldrums. They are named Wild Things, and yet there is nothing Wild about them at all, except for the occasional fit thrown by Gandolfini. Mostly these creatures just complain about how depressed they are and have minor squabbles and bickering, with the instigator of the argument ultimately apologizing for hurting anyone's feelings. Repeat. The supposedly more strong-willed KW is in fact nearly as much of a crybaby as these other Wild Things. Basically the Wild Things are 10-foot tall, furry, insufferable emo-hipsters. No one ever has any serious conflicts because everyone is so weak-willed that they back down at the first hint of argument, there are no enemies because no one can pass any truly harsh judgment, and no one feels any emotions other than ennui and depression- sounds like a Bushwick house party. And similarly no one does anything, except for one plot about building a fort that completely fizzles out.

The movie drifts along aimlessly, without a goal in sight or an enemy to vanquish, until Gandolfini decides that King Max hasn't delivered on his promises and throws a somewhat violent fit that includes ripping off a Wild Thing's arm. Even a character getting his arm ripped off doesn't generate a conflict by the way ("No worries dude, I'm sure it was an accident")! Then there is an actual tense moment where Max has to hide in KW's stomach because Gandolfini is on the war path. But of course, these characters all being complete pussies at heart, Gandolfini calms down and decides he shouldn't have gotten so mad at Max and actually likes him. Wow, that's quite a climactic scene there Jonze and Eggers...

Now Max goes back home, the Wild Things are still sad, and Max's mom hugs him and makes him some chicken soup. The End. And the lesson learned was??? Max basically played with some depressed toys, then got tired of them and went home, where his mom forgave him for his outburst for no reason.

Now WTWTA's defenders will say, "The Wild Things represent Max's tumultuous emotions and after playing with them, all of which actually goes on in his head, he goes home and can be a normal well-behaved boy again." Well this was the message of the book, but the movie has changed the Wild Things in an important and wrong-headed way. In the book, the Wild Things are genuinely scary right when we meet them ("they gnashed their terrible teeth and roared their terrible roars," etc.) whereas in the movie we are never scared of them. Then in both book and film Max becomes their king and has a Wild Rumpus with them. Then Max decides to leave and in both book and film the Wild Things say "please don't go," but then in the book the Wild Things again are frightening and menacing when Max decides to leave anyway ("they gnashed their terrible teeth," etc.).

Thus in the book, the Wild Things represented the strong emotions of anger and hatred that Max feels toward his mother, and the Wild Things remained angry and hateful as Max was leaving the island having conquered them. In the film, the Wild Things are never angry or hateful. Instead, they are depressed and filled with ennui, at one point existentially contemplating the death of the sun. So this is a movie about a kid trying to deal with depression and ennui? How many kids do you know with existentialist dread? And Max himself in the film is like the book version of Max, a rambunctious brat, not a depressed ruminator (though there is one incongruous scene where he learns about the aforementioned death of the sun in science class). This is very much the man-children Jonze and Eggers projecting their current feelings as 40 yr olds onto children. They could have at least made Max have more ennui/depression in the beginning or made clearer the transformation he was undergoing on the island to defeat those feelings, but even that would not have saved this film because it is simply insufferable to watch the middle section on the island where six depressive characters do absolutely nothing.

So why is this film getting such good reviews? Because the Wild Things remind the 40 year old critics of themselves and their social circle - depressed pussies. In all fairness I probably fall in that category too, but I go to the movies to avoid that side of my personality not to celebrate it!