Jane and I saw The Social Network last night, finally. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay was for the most part very good--snappy, although sometimes too snappy. (Sorkin's Mark Z., cleaned up a bit and given at least a little bit of social/political sense, would do well in the West Wing. Which is perhaps just another way of saying that Sorkin makes all smart characters sound like Toby Ziegler.) But I despised the overwrought pathology (girl dumped him and so....the rest is history) that gives the movie a nice, nice, neat, very neat arc (yuck), and offers a reductive psycho-motivation when surely this person's motives are extremely complex. Can't a movie in 2010 (this far into the genre's history) permit a character extremely complex motives?
Saturday, November 27, 2010
the social network
Jane and I saw The Social Network last night, finally. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay was for the most part very good--snappy, although sometimes too snappy. (Sorkin's Mark Z., cleaned up a bit and given at least a little bit of social/political sense, would do well in the West Wing. Which is perhaps just another way of saying that Sorkin makes all smart characters sound like Toby Ziegler.) But I despised the overwrought pathology (girl dumped him and so....the rest is history) that gives the movie a nice, nice, neat, very neat arc (yuck), and offers a reductive psycho-motivation when surely this person's motives are extremely complex. Can't a movie in 2010 (this far into the genre's history) permit a character extremely complex motives?
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
