Day 6: Surges and setbacks.

Last weekend Ian and I had an extremely productive Saturday working on the portion in Watertown.  But alas, we still need to return one more time in order to completely finish the scene.  In the next two weeks we have five shoots scheduled and one more penciled in, allowing one week to edit and redub sound and a deadline of October 30^th by which “Podunk” must be in Utah in the hands of Anthony Tong for judgment.  It was nice knowing all of you; I’ll see you in November…

            Zach and I began working through the laborious process of editing last weekend.  We chronologically pieced everything together from three locations into the final scene.  After some clip trimming and decision on which takes to use and which to dismiss we watched the final scene and were very pleased with it.  My first short film may at times look exactly like what it is: a student film.  But I’ve learned a lot from this process, and given more resources (i.e. money and time) the promise it will display attests to its potential to be extended into an even more exciting feature. 

            I felt confident with the editing we had done.  It was an amazing feeling to actually sit and watch my own movie, as though my imagination was being projected before me.  Sadly, when I opened Final Cut Pro on Thursday I was frustrated to find that everything I had edited was gone.  My raw footage files were intact, but all the work I had done in editing was inexplicably deleted.  So, it must all be redone. Fortunately I have the time to do so.  Were this two weeks from now the-little-film-that-could would be on the bench until the festivals of next spring.  There’s always youtube. 

My original intention in this blog was to create a forum to discuss underrepresented works and to tout up-and-coming local artists.  However, I cannot keep myself from discussing David Fincher’s “The Social Network”.  This is the film I wanted to believe 2010 would give me but as of yet had not.  The fact that Fincher is in the director’s seat is fitting considering his professional upbringing in pop-culture and his contribution to contemporary visual media.  His 1998 film “Fight Club” in many ways served to retrospectively define the visual and pop culture of the ‘90s: a flippant erudition with trendy literature and sociopolitical ideologies, narratives which build up to a truly anticlimactic finale defused by a disappointingly simple if not unsubstantiated twist ending, and garishly in-the-moment fashion styles, however hip they may once have been.  His craftsmanship as a music video director was also on display in his early films. 

With “Network”, we see a revised culture in which youth are privileged enough to live beyond the means of an average young adult and are completely in synch with the technical and media landscape available to them.  They are as slick and efficient as the systems and machines they interact with, edgier and more refined.  Fincher is new as well, telling the story less with visuals and more so with well developed characters.  And as with “Fight Club”, in “Network” he again creates a film that touches upon a phenomenon at large.  Not necessarily contributing or advancing it  (certainly not with the latter’s case), but perhaps again recapping what was relevant in pop youth culture for the particular moment.

Eschewing his usual reliance upon canted or otherwise dramatic angles and gritty lighting effects (though they are still present, simply more subdued) to create mood and atmosphere, Fincher instead utilizes precise focal points in which characters move in and out of range, serving to disconnect and isolate the characters in otherwise socially unified environments (typically, unified against the character in focus) or to highlight their disconnect.  For example, consider the intern initiation scene in which the scene ends with a close-in shot of Saverin as he uneasily observes the event, or the close ups employed during the deposition scenes.

            He still tips his hat to his own cinematographic tendencies.  Consider the shot of Saverin and Zuckerberg outside the Caribbean party where the two stand bathed in a deep yellow light, or the rich texture illuminated in the air by the maglites of the officers in the party scene.  His use of editing to create energy by cutting from slow, deliberately moving objects to ones moving rapidly with a rigid end point in their range of motion is also present.  Consider the scene in which Zuckerberg first sits down at his computer to begin the “Facemash” website.  We see a close up of his hands move from just outside the focal range to deep within it and as his fingers type furiously; this shot is then followed by one of Zuckerberg’s face gazing pensively over the screen.  The scene alternates in this fashion.  Camera movement also plays a strong role in creating a kinetic energy throughout, with pans so slow they feel static while following objects moving unpredictably through the frame (consider when Zuckerberg runs frantically down the stairs, through the glass door and out into the snow)

            Much of the film was shot without overt regard to composition.  Objects are depicted in largely utilitarian fashion (especially in comparison to Fincher’s earlier films such as “Seven” and “Fight Club” which employed composition to such a degree almost to warrant it consideration as a character in the film) simply to explain who is speaking and to whom.  The machine-gun paced dialogue and tightly woven narrative instead take the forefront, fluidly moving from the present in which Zuckerberg is embroiled in several depositions and the past events and choices that brought him there.  Make no mistake, this is a beautiful film to look at, and though Fincher doesn't embellish his cinematography as much as he once may have, it is only because he has reached beyond the stepping stone created with 2007’s “Zodiac” into a more perfect harmony of narrative and visuals, no longer asking the imagery to fill in the gaps his stories once left.

The script, written in characteristically dense and flawlessly judicious detail by Aaron Sorkin, is one of the best this year, if not the best so far.  Jesse Eisenberg is effectively cast for his established screen type of an awkward and uncomfortable outsider, here as a cold and calculating Mark Zuckerberg, a performance that while successful in the film seems altogether unbelievable if not impossible in comparison to the few interviews available of the real Zuckerberg.  The tongue-in-cheek casting of Justin Timberlake as the seductively manipulative Sean Parker is just too good.  Rarely does an actor so successfully poke fun at his own celebrity while at the same time using that mockery to strengthen his celebrity status, and the irony that follows Timberlake from SNL to “Network” is deliciously palpable.    

Despite an ad campaign flashing buzzwords including “punk” the film itself is not punk.  It is as finely tuned and polished in its construction and as aggressively marketed as any other Oscar contender.  Indeed, on the latter point even more so due to the pedigree of its director and screenwriter.  And if nothing else, the film’s impact comes from riding the coattails of its source material’s notoriety.  However, the story it tells is about one of the most definitively punk movements in the last decade.  Individuals who are educated and informed coalescing in a uniform effort of disestablishmentarianism, here working simultaneously within an established business model while also subverting it, deconstructing its assumed timeline and yet simultaneously fortifying its promises for returns if faithfully executed.  The engine of the human minds/capital involved and the system they are driving are so symbiotic that it seems less like work and more like playful artistry (however tainted it may become by the end).  As with any good story, however, their system is not perfect and it is the (narratively convenient) element of Sean Parker that serves as the catalyst for their own dismantling at the base of Facebook’s unprecedented success and rapid global expansion. 

The accuracy of this story is completely irrelevant.  It’s not important that the viewer leave feeling somehow informed about Mark Zuckerberg, his friends or his enemies.  Those people were merely an inspiration for a narrative vehicle that could synthesize who we are and who we have the capacity to be in our milieu.  Mark Zuckerberg may very well be a nice guy (as his recent philanthropic gestures might suggest), or he may be a conniving thief, but you’d never know it from watching this film.

In my opinion, if only as a cult classic this film will stand out as one that is characteristically of our generation.  That is, the generation of teens and twenty-something’s in the 2000’s who want everything right now, feels unquestionably entitled to it, and depending on who you are, has the savvy, skill, and brazenness to go and take it.  The overwhelming message is clear: if you’re smart enough, you don’t have to follow the rules.  Much like 1987’s “Wall Street”, we see here that the end result of an unrelentingly rapacious push towards money, power, and most importantly, an increase in our own perceived social currency, is inevitably emptiness and loss.  Unlike Oliver Stone’s film, “Network” feels less like a condemnation of these characters and their aggressive attitudes and more so a frenzied celebration of their ingenuity, depicting the wake of social isolation in which the character of Zuckerberg finds himself as a mildly consequential afterthought.  Either way it’s one hell of a ride, and damn if everybody who’s watching doesn’t want to get on, too.


Andrew.