Platform

Though distinct, the great modern poets of the cinema -- most of them from Asia -- tend to make films around the same ideas. Hou Hsaio-hsien makes observations about humanity through his focus on his country's turbulent history, while Apichatpong Weerasethakul does the opposite. Tsai Ming-liang and Wong Kar-wai focus not on the past but the present and projected future, Tsai in sociopolitical concern, Wong in Romantic uncertainty and fatalistic optimism. In Iran, Abbas Kiarostami couches his own humanism in the sweeping expanse of nature, the beaten dirt roads his characters always drive the most visible display of humanity in his pastoral canvases. Meanwhile, Edward Yang, rest his soul, used casts that could blot out his gorgeous Taiwanese settings and made the personality that much more visceral.

What links them most strongly, however, is the ontological preoccupations of their films. Cinema is the art form best suited to ontology, its ability to mimic reality to cater to more senses than any other art thus allowing it to screw with our perceptions more easily. Kiarostami is the reigning monarch in this regard, his blend of fiction and reality more tantalizing, unique and meaningful even than Herzog's experiments. And as I argued for his short film, Phantoms of Nabua, Weerasethakul can use his graceful movement to slip back and forth over various planes of being, embodying visual metaphors and seeing them through to the other side rather than leave them untouched as clues to be decoded by those who think guessing what a symbol means thus unlocks the emotional weight of an object.

Jia Zhangke seems to embody something of all of them. He has Hou's meticulous accuracy and glacial pacing with Weerasethakul's temporal ambiguity, Kiarostami's gift for space, Yang's gift for spacing out dense casts and Tsai's apprehension about changing times. He even has Wong's aching soul for missed opportunities, even if he doesn't capture the lost moments with the same visceral savagery that Wong used to flay your heart in tatters. Platform, Jia's second full-length feature, does not share the same open blend of documentary and fiction as his later films starting with Still Life, nor even does it rely on the cheeky reflexivity of The World's setting and devices. Yet it is the most ontologically complex of his features to date, questioning the state of being for people without a cultural identity.

Naturally, this story simply must be set in China. Were Jia an American, he would have had no other choice but to set the film in China. No other country, not even the United States with its incessant attempts to never ever look to the past, has a looser hold on its culture than China. Its vast size and wide range of geographies divide the country in greater extremes than the continental United States, and the use of various local dialects in Platform emphasize the lingual gaps among provinces.

More than that, however, the practices of the Maoist government have wrenched the Chinese population from identifiable ethnic trademarks. Mao himself believed in constant revolution, the embodiment of the Jeffersonian ideal of replenishing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. As such, the people of China, especially the rural farmers that still make up 40 percent of the workforce today, are disconnected from a linking identity. Mao may have led the closest thing to a people's revolt, but the various social upheavals since that time have placed all the ethnic trademarks of China into the museums, where artifacts do not show where modern culture evolved from but imprison that culture within walls. Jia's film is set during the '80s, before these museums and China's history became little more than a tourist industry, but the rise of capitalism is unmistakable.

Platform opens in 1979 as a state-funded theater troupe heads to a small provincial theater to sing propaganda songs eulogizing Chairman Mao. They sing of all the great advances made by Mao, yet when they get in their truck to head to the next village, the director chastises one of the actors for making an odd train sound, to which the poor soul responds that he's never seen a train before. Others in the troupe haven't either, but they've at least heard the whistle. Clearly, the people sent to spread the word of Mao's accomplishments have never experienced them firsthand; most of the actors came from the same farm hamlets where they now travel.

Caught between worlds, the actors have no real home. Cui Ming-liang (Wang Hongwei) shows up on his farm wearing bell-bottoms and immediately receives derision for them. His mother, busying sewing her own clothes, says that the cuffs are so big he could sweep streets with them, while another farmer asks if he can do any heavy lifting in the slim pants. Cui refers to himself as an 'artworker,' not an artist, and that's an accurate description: he doesn't have the liberty of performing anything he loves but is instead instructed to sing homilies to Chairman Mao. Still, he does not have to engage in the sort of manual labor that his family have performed for generations. He may not enjoy full artistic expression in his lifetime, but he's better off.

That is one of the positive sides of changing life that Jia notes, but the uncertainty and isolation that comes with being caught in the middle lends itself far more to more somber feelings. Rural workers mock the actors and only a few spectators ever stop to watch the troupe, yet one miner, the father of a dancer, quietly pulls the director aside when they visit and relays a message that his daughter should go to university and never return to this hard life. Everyone's trapped in an existential quandary because of the collective's emphasis on shared labor. A farmer must be a farmer not only for himself but for the good of the whole. So, the farmer and the miner tease their children for trying to rise above their station because all the know is their work, yet they secretly pray for their children to break free. The discrepancy between outer and inner personality is less a display of hypocrisy than the clearest display of the cultural disconnect of farmers who have not even fully moved past their feudal roots and are now facing the second great upheaval of their lives.

As he is making a film about generational and social change, Jia would have invited comparisons to Ozu Yasujiro whether he wanted to or not, yet he clearly took a page or two from the master. By comparison, the titling of one section of The World "Tokyo Story" and the inversion of that masterpiece seems but a pop culture reference. Jia shoots Platform in long, static takes at medium height. Each scene is precisely blocked, yet the actors, not the camera, do the movement. Like Ozu, Jia somehow arranges these actors to behave and move in such a way that the characters are given a human believability and spontaneity but the blocking never loses its compositional power and its metaphorical suggestion.

Cui routinely meets with his girlfriend, Ruijuan (Zhao Tao), in an abandoned fortress from one of China's great dynasties, and each meeting shows them drifting further apart, the empty space in the frame between them magnifying as the edges close in and trap them. In one scene, the mise-en-scène traps the two between a wall and a building, and one character disappears behind the wall on the left as the other moves out into visibility against the right fortification. The physical separation reflects the emotional isolation, and finally it depicts the full severing of ties when they break up. Jia handles the break-up with a subtlety that goes beyond the characters: Ruijuan insists she's the one who decided they don't make a good pair (something with which Ming-liang agrees), yet she mentions more than once her father's disapproval, and she says she must return home to care for the ailing man. At that moment, the seeming liberation of both Communism and the subsequent rise of capitalism that gives Ruijuan the freedom to reject her lover as her own person is undercut by classical Confucianism with its ideas of filial piety. It is Cui who gets to leaves the cramped frame by climbing out of it via a stairwell, but the camera stays with the woman as she waits for her ride home, and suddenly Jia frames her from above and farther away, stressing that, while they all feel a loneliness, women are even more isolated by these incessant changes.

The same is true for Zhong Ping, Ruijuan's friend and the girlfriend of Cui's buddy Zhang Jun. She gets a perm that attracts a great deal of attention from everyone, but when she tries to have a conversation with her equally Westernized lover on the streets, they're interrupted by a group of men marching through town chanting, "Long live birth control! One child's enough!" Later, Zhong Ping must abort Jun's baby, and authorities arrest the man because they're not married. Even with a state mandate for population control, women can still be shamed for being "sluts," and we get a brief glimpse of the horrible truth of life for a Chinese woman, in which both extremes are allowed to dictate what one does with her body. Eventually, she suffers a breakdown and leaves, and her desperate, inchoate rage can be seen as the result of not having the excuse to go home that Ruijuan had. Ruijuan may be returning to feudal servitude, but at least she finally has an identity. For poor Zhong Ping, whatever she tries to be will be considered wrong.

In this way, Jia explores the idea of identity and existence without ever relying on the self-reflexivity that marks ontologically curious cinema, even Jia's own filmography. By separating these people from each other on physical, lingual and socioeconomic levels, Jia asks who they really are and makes that question unanswerable even though he strips them to their essences. And when the state-controlled troupe begins to privatize and learn songs praising Deng Xiaoping's anti-Maoist, pro-Western reforms, what does the group mean anymore? Already they changed China's historical identity through their propaganda songs, and by turning into a pop outfit, they build on the sandy foundation of their fabrication. By rejecting the West, China ultimately came to match the identity of the United States, which has also tried to outrun its past: both Communist China and capitalist America, after all, would describe themselves as states for, by and of the people, and they'd both be somewhat justified despite their opposite focus on collectivism and individualism, respectively. Looking back from the present, we know China's efforts to globalize will successfully turn them into a world economic power, the world economic power, likely, once the dust of this recession settles, but at what cost? The Chinese may emerge triumphant, but as can be seen in these characters, they'll be so bewildered by the shifts that they won't even know they've won.

Most ingeniously, Jia uses sound to compound these questions of being. The troupe director yells at the man for not knowing the sound of a train, but when that whistle blares in the countryside later, the troupe knows what it is and runs for it, not simply to get to the next point but because it comes to symbolize freedom before anyone ever sees a train. Even those who have seen one think of a whistle or the chugging of an engine when the word is said, so can the physicality of the train be defined by its aural properties? Or its symbolic ones when you consider that the provinces the troupe travels are landlocked and separated by geographic and cultural barriers, even if they're all linked by the same sense of fatalistic inevitability that rolls through the streets like a tumbleweed. When Ruijuan says she must care for her father, Jia plays the sound of soldiers marching in the background, emphasizing the prison-like structure of both the mangled social system that can impose old rules even as it comes up with new oppressions as well as the crushing mise-en-scène.

Time moves imperceptibly in Platform, the only appreciable difference being the type of music the troupe performs. They start as the Peasant Culture Group of Fenyang and end the privatized All-Stars Rock 'n' Breakdance Electronic Band. In a way, they're playing a large game of Telephone (or, if you'll permit me, Chinese Whispers): tasked with delivering the joyous news of Mao's great accomplishments, they wind up singing pop after a decade on the road, completely disconnected from the original intent, which was itself a means to subvert and distort reality in a lazy attempt by the state to maintain rural obedience. Naturally, the troupe thus serves as a microcosm for China itself, pushed into acting like Mao's reign was a godsend before finally devolving into an "every man for himself" push for goals that are neither fully articulated nor understood. Consumerism won't bring happiness any more than Maoism did; it'll just create new ways for people to feel alone.

Beyond the message or any intellectual pursuit, however, the passage of time speaks more to a universal feeling among humans, of time moving at a glacial pace until you finally reach out to seize a moment, at which point it instantly slips through your fingers. "We are waiting, our whole hearts are waiting forever," read some lyrics to the song that gives the film its title, and it's that waiting that causes the most heartbreak. Only when the moment's passed do we realize we should have acted. We can spot the opportunities for Ming-liang and Ruijuan to reconcile and stop pushing the other away to chase some specter of perceived happiness, but could we spot such chances in our own lives? At times like these, Platform becomes more than a critique about the accelerated change in Chinese culture, albeit a sophisticated and meditative one. It becomes a film about life, as insightful and moving as Yi Yi. And who couldn't love the scene late in the film that shows Ruijuan, returned to Fenyang and working as a tax collector in an office that is as nebulously Communist/capitalist as anything in China, dancing to the radio? Zhao perfectly sells the moment, perking up when she hears the music and beginning to sway, stopping when she remembers that she left that life behind, and finally throwing caution to the wind and twirling in the dark, empty office.

Platform is an epic in length and thematic scope, but its execution and mise-en-scène roots the action in personal terms. The unwavering distance of Jia's camera suggests a critical objectivity, and that's certainly true, but only for the social concerns. When he strips away the commentary, he unleashes a wave of emotion. Nowhere is this more evident than the ending, in which the sound of a whistling kettle is matched with the deafening roar of a train, magnified to the point of discomfort. In that moment, we finally get inside these characters' heads, and we understand how overpowering the impulse to escape is. One day, China's globalization would replace trains with airplanes and text messages (as Jia would later show in The World), but they all represent the same thing: the possibility for an escape that never comes. Somehow, Jia Zhangke can build a two-and-a-half-hour underground film to this final message and not give in to despair. And until I figure out how the hell he can pull that off, I'll keep studying him. Fortunately for me, Jia makes this task so damn appealing.

Second Thoughts: The Social Network

[Warning -- This post contains massive spoilers.]

Apropos of the film's subject matter, The Social Network has inevitably resulted in an Internet firestorm, prompting various discussions about its themes, what great work to compare it to (I've fallen in line with the consensus with Kane and threw out The Godfather Part II, Jason Bellamy ingeniously traced Mark Zuckerberg to Daniel Plainview) and the inevitable argument that accompanies David Fincher's work, the question of what side the director takes with his characters.

The blogosphere, an incestuous love pit at the best of times, went into a cross-posting frenzy, and a number of my favorite bloggers did me the kindness of mentioning my own review. In an attempt to express my gratitude without devolving into the sort of back-patting that makes linkage such an empty gesture at times, I've decided to use these other reviews to aid my own desire to examine the film further, as it's yet to slip my mind.

I've now seen the film twice, and I've also gotten access to the screenplay and the soundtrack -- both of which, incidentally, I found through my friends' links on Facebook. With Sorkin's script at my side and some more vivid memories of visual touches, I'd like to focus on several aspects of the film that make it one of a gifted director's finest achievements and the most memorable mainstream film since Inglourious Basterds. Let's start at the top, shall we?

What is this film about?

It is the height of reductive pointlessness to say that The Social Network is a movie about Facebook, especially when that simplification is used as justification to avoid the picture. As Jim Emerson so masterfully put it, "What commenters think they mean when they say it's 'about Facebook' is not precisely clear. Is that like saying you don't want to see Chinatown because it's about public utilities?"

The Social Network is not about the "how," nor even, to be honest, the "why," but the "what." It is about Facebook itself, about its effects on the world via the microcosm of individual and group usage. Aaron Sorkin cares not for the accuracy of the founding of Facebook, almost certainly a mundane story even with the controversy that surrounded the site then and now. Instead, he uses a broadly fictionalized vision of Mark Zuckerberg to get at the heart of social networking. Mark is the brain behind Facebook, and Sorkin makes him into the soul of it as well, and what a rotten thing it is.

The real Zuckerberg does not, by any account, seem as single-minded and obsessive as his big-screen counterpart, but the two share a certain apathy for privacy rights. Zuckerberg continues to be plagued by privacy issues, and we see Eisenberg's Mark casually hacking into the photo databases of Harvard's dorms to create the precursor to Facebook. Sorkin's playwright style leads him to create a circularly charted movie, with the first major action of the film being a woman calling Mark an "asshole" and the final line coming back to that to say that Mark isn't one but is "just trying so hard to be one." It's a clunky move on Sorkin's part and not even Fincher can inject cinema into it, but the message underneath is relevant. As we've seen throughout the film, everyone's conflicting perspective has one common trait: Mark is the problem.

Social Parameters: A Digital Sheen on Old Codes

That Facebook created a social revolution is undeniable, having reached the 500 million user plateau this year in just over five years. Yet as Jim Emerson argues, The Social Network does not show how Facebook changes people so much as it simply gives them a new avenue to pursue old social and legal codes. Emerson's essay approaches the film from this perspective by starting on a line of dialogue in the initial flurry between Mark and Erica Albright. At one point, Erica desperately tries to steer the conversation out of the dark realm of Mark's insecurity and misreadings by saying "I'm not speaking in code!" Mark does not understand this because he always speaks in code, whether literally doing so as he describes programming Facemash and Facebook or attempting to navigate the social norms he cannot master. Erica speaks honestly with Mark, but he's trapped in a mode of conversation he thinks will impress, even when it clearly doesn't. Mark tries to project an alpha male mentality, mixing sexual supremacy and career ambition in a way that males have done for decades, if not centuries -- imagine a young Julius Caesar telling his first consort, Cornelia, that he was going to conquer the world someday to get an "in" with the people. When he fails, he creates an online world where he writes the codes, the codes that make the site work and the codes that dictate socializing.


Compounding this thread, the film revolves around two concurrent lawsuits, bringing legal codes into the narrative. Without even diving into the myriad of privacy laws Facebook has at least tested, if not outright violated, the intellectual property theft Mark uses against the "Winklevii" and the twisting, treacherous legalese he uses to force out his best and only friend structure the film's language in complicated jargon. One almost sympathizes with Mark when he arrogantly mocks phrases like "answer in the affirmative" and the spoken-aloud addition of simple figures meant to drive a point home.

To complicate matters even further, most of the action occurs in Harvard University, one of the oldest institutions in the country. Cameron Winklevoss understands and appreciates that legacy, and he initially refuses to let his brother and their business partner, Divya Narendra, sue Mark in court or smear him in the Harvard student paper. Yet he does exploit the almost aristocratic entitlement of his father's connections to win an audience with the Harvard president. "This building is 100 years older than the country it's in," warns a secretary before the twins walk in to a president who proves how well-suited he is to his job when he instantly dismisses their sense of self-importance. As the Winklevii play on monetary social codes to get their way, the president taps into Harvard's history to demonstrate how offensive it is for students to burden him and the people who run the school with minor squabbles.

Mark is right when he notes that the Winklevii are incensed less because their similar idea was appropriated and expanded into something far greater than they are indignant that they didn't get their way. At the same time, the twins are right to feel offended and wronged, and their legal action is justified even if the sum they seek borders on the absurd. But that action also leads to the amusing scenario of old men with decades of legal experience representing twentysomethings who use these depositions as means to sling crap at each other. They're not unlike the investors Mark offends so much that they end up being impressed by them. As much as all these young men like to consider themselves game-changers, they fit neatly into the expectations of the elders who cannot understand them. Mark Zuckerberg could buy out the Winklevoss' father and shut down daddy's pro bono work, so the lawyers have to treat a pissing match as a matter of court record. The investors, on the other hand, know that the real geniuses are the ones who, like Mark dress and act without any regard for social propriety; by showing up 20 minutes late to meet with Mark, Sean Parker convinces our protagonist that he's the real deal, and Mark's own lateness and rudeness to billionaire investment firms wins him serious backing.

Then, there's the matter of Facebook itself. Returning to Emerson's point, is the site "just one more (online) face that we display to our social network of contacts, family, friends and 'friends'"? The final addition Mark makes to the code of TheFacebook is the display of "relationship status" and "interested in." This makes researching any crush object easy, but as Mark notes, people have always tried to figure out whether people they like are taken. If college students pick their classes and seating arrangements to try to be closer to people they do not know, can Facebook really be blamed as a stalking enabler?

Regarding the darker side of Facebook as a tool for torment-- evidenced recently in the horrible case of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi -- older social codes can also be seen as the motivating factor in cyberbullying. Mark's drunken blog about Erica's breast size has boys coming to her dorm to mock, but the only difference between this an an analogue harassment is that Mark can be back at Harvard instead of gossiping among B.U. students.

Cyberbullying runs on rumor, which doesn't need the Internet to spread like wildfire. Look at the way the Harvard Crimson sparks discussion even as everything that makes the student paper is old news because it involves online events. In the film's oddest and cleverest subplot, Eduardo inadvertently embarrasses Facebook when he must care for a chicken to get into an exclusive final club. In the ultimate display of the dissonance in knowledge between generations, Eduardo is a business and math whiz but never bothers to figure out what chicken eat, so he feeds his bird tiny pieces of fried chicken, leading to charges of "forced cannibalism." That article later comes back as evidence in the suit between Eduardo and Mark, leading Eduardo to wonder if the story was planted, first suspecting the Winklevii and in retrospect fearing Mark. Late in the film, Parker and some Facebook interns are arrested for cocaine possession the night of a PR bonanza for the site, and a coked-out Sean tries to blame Eduardo for somehow alerting the cops.


Even if Sorkin himself doesn't spotlight it in his crabby old man mode, the clear implication of The Social Network is that Mark Zuckerberg never succeeded in doing anything more than he dreamed: he put socialization online, and in the process he made it possible for us to conceive just how terrible and conniving even the average, unassuming person can be. When Mark breathlessly tells Eduardo, "We don't know what [Facebook] can be," he's absolutely right, but that's because it fulfills its purpose so well that it must always evolve. For some, it's a way to extend conversation with friends; for others (including the movie's version of Mark), it is a way to re-frame reality on a more manageable level.

Facebook as Mark Zuckerberg's Tyler Durden

David Fincher loves doppelgängers, a natural outgrowth from his tendency to break his plots down into their parts and rearranging them back in order. John Doe provides an emotional foil for Detective Mills -- Doe is the embodiment of the lack of control bubbling underneath the detective -- and a moral contrast for Somerset, reacting to the same sense of nihilism by destroying the world Somerset seeks to save in spite of himself. The three characters who most pursue the Zodiac killer also play off each other, Graysmith's Eagle Scout attitude colliding with Avery's alcoholic disconnect and Toschi's exasperation. Benjamin Button is seen in the various people he meets in his travels, all of them providing glimpses of normalcy that seems so fantastical when seen through the eyes of an extraordinary man. And do I really need to go into the doppelgänger structure of Fight Club?

In The Social Network, the Mark's natural intelligence and earned wealth is contrasted with the Winklevii's "natural" wealth and earned intelligence. He envies their athleticism and physical attractiveness, but he knows that he can do things on a computer they cannot fathom. When he says under oath that he never used the basic code the Winklevii provided him, we sense he swears this not because he's trying to avoid being caught out but because he would sully himself with their feeble attempt at trying to indirectly compete with him on an intellectual level after besting him on a physical one. Fincher also pits Mark against Eduardo, who at least pretends to be more professional despite his own frat boy attitudes. Eduardo is gifted, but he's also a generation behind in his thinking and doesn't understand how sites work in the way that Mark does. Thus, when Sean Parker arrives to take the place of the tiny devil on Mark's shoulder, he successfully plies Zuckerberg by (accurately) pointing out Eduardo's flawed business plan.

The fundamental contrast in the film, however, is between site and creator. Facebook is Mark's Tyler Durden, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Mark Zuckerberg, indeed anyone who uses the site, is Facebook's foil. In restructuring society for the Internet, Facebook makes us define ourselves, and it adapts to the trends and shared interests that grow as more users join. And for everything we put on Facebook that isn't a completely accurate representation of ourselves -- even something as innocuous as "Liking" something you only marginally enjoy because someone you like is a fan -- the simulacrum of Facebook adjusts to the simulacra we feed into it, separating it further from reality even as the site's influence spreads to the real world. When "Facebook me" enters the lexicon, the symbiosis is complete. Old social codes inform Facebook, are then exaggerated by being online and return to reality stretched and distorted. It's almost like downsampling caused when one routinely rips mp3 files from CDs and then burns CDs from the lower-quality mp3 files than the original disc: each iteration makes a proper, physical copy from a digital compression, which is then blown back up in an inferior form. If Facebook has any real impact on social codes, it's that: it rerecords the tape so much that eventually all you hear is static and hiss.


Besides the doppelgängers within the film, Mark has already drawn comparisons to other figures. I've already discussed Charles Foster Kane in my original post and I would direct you to the Jason Bellamy piece I posted earlier to get a good sense of the Plainview comparisons. My new favorite comparison, though, is Jay Gatsby, not only because it allows one an even more tangible link to Fincher's previous film, the Fitzgerald adaptation, but because it's just so fantastically accurate. F. Scott Fitzgerald had a gift for digging under the partying side of society to show the rotting soul and aching loneliness belief. I was actually converted to liberalism by two things: the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and The Great Gatsby. His literature survives today because we continue to labor under the false image of prosperity given off by the rich while class gaps widen and average income plummets. The situation of his Jazz Age resurfaced in the '80s and it's here again, evidenced here by the incessant partying of the young elite that only just outpaces their sense of emptiness.

In The Social Network, Fitzgerald's influence can be seen as plainly as it is in the actual movie based on the author's work. Mark walks around in a hoodie and sandals, even to meetings with billionaires, and life is just one frat house social for him as the economy slouches toward Bethlehem in the film's timeframe. He ends up the youngest billionaire in the world, but his final act in the movie is to try to reconnect with the woman he never got over. But does that make Erica his Daisy? That brings us neatly to the following:

Is The Social Network sexist?

I had not originally planned to talk about this, but a significant outgrowth of discussion of the film has centered on the role of women. Jezebel, a magnificent feminist site, ran an almost embarrassingly reductive review that focused entirely on the subject. It charges the film with painting women as saints or whores and then shifts gears to become a much more readable and thought-out piece on the film's accuracy. I do not think the review is reductive because I don't agree: I just cannot fathom how they decided the film agrees with the male view of these women.

The review is entirely fair in objecting to besmirching Zuckerberg's name by painting him as a misogynist, but the film version is so vile that you cannot sympathize with his or any other man's view of ladies. Fincher and Sorkin emphasize that we're not supposed to pity Mark because he's a nerd, not only with Erica's scathing line at the end of the opening scene but with the magnificently edited piece that juxtaposes Mark coding Facemash in a drunken, misogynistic tear to one of the final clubs hosting a disgusting party-cum-orgy in which women are literally bused in to strip and screw. These men are all entitled and arrogant, and they all view women as the ultimate sign of their status, and Mark's violation of their privacy is no different than whatever violation might occur in a backroom of a frat house.

Let's focus on Erica for a moment. She doesn't fit the "saint" role because she's not in the film enough to be its moral compass. She's simply the splash of water to the face that comes along whenever we might start rooting for Mark. Interestingly, sex isn't as big a priority for Mark as it is for others, though he's certainly not above exploiting them. When two groupies take him and Eduardo into bathroom stalls, the camera stays with Eduardo, which A) shows that Saverin isn't a goody two-shoes either and B) allows Fincher to show Mark's mental state, especially when paired with the next scene. Outside the bathroom, Eduardo sports a shit-eating grin, but Mark sees Erica with some friends and moves to talk to her. He prioritizes her over the blowjob he just received.


I believe he does this less because he has a romantic or even sexual fixation on Erica but because he's dumped all of his insecurities into her. He always fears being inadequate, yet everyone treats him with reverence. For God's sake, lawyers have to answer to him. The Winklevii he feels so threatened by greet him initially with respect, only turning on him after he betrays them. But Erica is the one person we see to accurately see who he really is before he makes her miserable. Saverin and the Winklevii don't hate him until further down the road. And where Mark can convince himself -- with some truth -- that Eduardo and the Winklevii are just jealous, he has nothing to pin on Erica, no way to diminish the thought of her rejection. He certainly tries, and the fact that she's a woman allows him to vent his sexism, but she's no more the motivation for Facebook than Rosebud is the raison d'être of Kane's unhappiness. She, like Rosebud, is just the encapsulation of everything nagging the protagonist, the key not to the puzzle but the puzzle pieces.

What I find disappointing about the line of criticism from Jezebel and like-minded writers is how their arguments throw out so much context and analysis of the film itself. I think Jezebel is a fantastic site, and one that is desperately needed in the rank misogyny of the blogosphere, and this was a rare miss. Worse than their reaction, though, is the reaction to that reaction. I've seen the word "shrill" tossed around so many times I wonder if there's enough vomit in the world to convey my nausea over the sexist defenses of the film's non-sexism. In fact, I went to see the film again partially to re-examine the role of women in the movie because I was so embarrassed to even be tangentially related to the defenders. Even a second time, I could not see the women as any more flawed than the men, and while there are certainly gold diggers, that's only because these men seek out those women to prop up as trophies. As for Eduardo's girlfriend, she represents the dangerous side of putting relationships online, and her behavior brought nervous laughs of recognition from male and female audience members who either know couples engaged in this kind of behavior or have been in relationships that squabbled over similar matters related solely to Facebook and what significant others posted.

I will say that sexual dynamics are easily the least complex side of the film's script, and I do think that it's quite easy for incredibly intelligent and analytical writers to fall into the big hole Sorkin left that implies that everything in the film can be tied to sexual frustration. Ed Howard, one of my favorite film writers, argued for this reading, and I think it's valid even if I clearly disagree. I also think that Jezebel's argument -- that inventing misogynists out of seemingly nice men to vilify that misogyny is unfair to those men and potentially simplifying of the women involved -- is also an intriguing line of inquiry. I just find a lot of the arguments made to support it too simple and void of deeper readings of the movie. Were the defense stronger, I could quite easily throw at least partial support around the actual thrust of the argument. There is certainly sexism in the movie, but that's an outgrowth of the male characters, not a projection of the writer.

Man, those performances are really good, huh?

Moving away from the subtextual readings for a time, I'd also like to say that, with two viewings under my belt, even the surface elements of The Social Network are more enticing than they were the first time. My opinion of Jesse Eisenberg dramatically rose when I revisited Adventureland late last year, but his turn here is wildly unexpected even though he's shown a darker side before. As much as I loved his performance the first time, I needed to see it again to make sure Fincher wasn't doing the work for him. To be sure, Fincher helps Eisenberg's cold stares by shadowing his eyes when showing Mark at his most contemptuous, but Eisenberg's eyes cut through the shadow by being even blacker, as if his pupils emitted the darkness. I stand by my opinion that the film suggests Mark has Asperger's, because "suggests" is just a kind of saying "does everything but come right out and definitely 'answer in the affirmative,'" but there's something more sinister here. Eisenberg displays a remarkable ability to walk that line between an elitist asshole with pure contempt for everyone he considers his intellectual inferior (so, everyone, basically) and a softer, more regretful side of a man who, when he lets his guard down, looks as if he really doesn't want to be that jerk.


Mara, recently tapped to play the lead in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has a believable fire entirely separate from the spark Sorkin wrote in Erica. I've seen her in movies before but not focused on her, yet I was as transfixed in a way by her brief appearances here as Mark was. I still can't get over how much Andrew Garfield looks like a mid-1960s Jean-Pierre Léaud, but this time I focused on his brilliant naïveté. Craig Simpson mentioned Garfield had already showed this talent in the Red Riding Trilogy, but I was amazed by how well he got across not knowing what was going on without resorting to playing Saverin like a bumbling fool. Garfield instead focuses on what is almost a generation gap between two men of the same age, and he stresses how obsolete even the young can be in this new world. Armie Hammer might pick up an Oscar nod for flawlessly playing two characters (Fincher clearly retained a few things about digitally inserting heads that he'd used for Ben Button), but he'll have to face off against Timberlake's mesmerizing performance as Parker. Never before has Timberlake used his innate charisma in such a way that I was glad I couldn't take my eyes off him. He has Eduardo's charm and Mark's savvy, allowing him to seduce Mark more completely than any woman every could. The only time I ever truly felt sorry for Mark comes at the end when Sean gets busted for possession. As much as Mark was silly to let Sean manipulate him, you feel bad when Sean turns out to be the creep you know he is but still want to have around.

That score is pretty swell, also.

I have always enjoyed the "idea" of Trent Reznor more than his output. For a supposed perfectionist, Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails has always been remarkably inconsistent, filled with intriguing sonic arrangement and occasionally irresistible pop sensibilities but also meandering and the kind of lyrics that an adult man should really have outgrown.

Yet Reznor was the perfect choice to score the film, not only because his ambient, post-industrial material is well-suited to the atmosphere of the film (and even narrative touches like coding) but because of his own status as a pioneer of social networking and music distribution with his fans ties him to the subject matter. I don't have much to add to my original thoughts of his and Atticus Ross' phenomenal work, only to say that my appreciation has deepened considerably after playing it for nearly a week. If nothing else, it delivers on the unfulfilled promise of Ghosts I-IV, Reznor's ambient project, cutting the waffle and developing all those interesting musical strands that never followed through to satisfying, full arrangements. But it does a great deal more than work as a Nine Inch Nails album: Mark's life revolves around Facebook, around code, and the bubbling electronic hums could be the sound of his synapses firing, or the music of his electronic soul. So many ambient scores are, in cases good and bad, sparse, but what's most entertaining about Reznor and Ross' score is how busy it remains even when it fades back and lets the dialogue and visuals work.

The Social Network: Fincher in a nutshell

The yellow-green palette is certainly nothing new in Fincher's canon, but The Social Network softens the image just enough to allow for ambiguity. Fincher's other films are more meticulous, more analytical of the evils he captures in sick clarity. He's no less probing here, but the matters of intellectual property are much more vague than murder or fascism, so the film looks hazier than any other Fincher movie. The disconnect, however, remains. Fincher isolates characters in the frame even as he typically places multiple characters along the same plane. They're all in the same position, essentially, yet they're still so separated.

Strangely enough, his minimalism makes for a compelling and, most importantly, cinematic realization of Sorkin's stage-oriented writing. Fincher's a gifted enough stylist that he can streamline Sorkin even as he steps aside and lets the fantastic dialogue do its part. He flawlessly navigates the Rashomon-like structure, pointing out the inconsistencies of each perspective and never presenting one as the likely reading. He lets the Winklevii's petulance implicate them, Saverin's shame regarding his disappointed father taint his own testimony and Mark's ignorance of the world call into question anything he says not directly related to coding.

I was also amused to see how the occasional flash of color can stand out so sharply from the dulled palettes of Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography. Like those bright blue Aqua Velvas in Zodiac, the fluorescent green of the appletinis Parker orders for everyone make you snap to attention just to listen to drunken business talk. It's a lovely bit of mischief, which can be seen in all its naked glory in the rowing scene. In the comments of my first review, Craig Simpson referenced another writer who compared the sequence to one of Kubrick's own sense of peevish delight. Indeed, the electronic version of "Hall of the Mountain King" recalls the warping of classical music in A Clockwork Orange, and the sequence is brazenly unnecessary even as it's the most fun moment of the movie. Plus, it gives us one more chance to laugh at the Winklevii, which is always welcome.

Miscellanea

- Someone told me that in the shot where Mark puts up art photos on a Facebook account to cheat on an exam, he does so under a profile for "Tyler Durden." I tried to spot it the second time but missed the moment.
- I seriously love the scene with the Harvard president. At one point, he responds to a question of his business sense by pointing out that he was the Secretary of the Treasury, and I couldn't help but wish this guy took his job back from Tim Geithner.
-One of my oldest friends went to see the movie with her dad, who's currently working on his MBA and was interested in the film's depiction of entrepreneurship. While the film provides a pretty clear example of how not to behave ethically as a businessman, I too was interested to see how Facebook succeeded by avoiding traditional advertising for as long as possible and exploring newer options tailored directly to the web. With so many sites essentially being run out of pocket, and as someone who will enter a field currently in extreme flux because of the Internet, I wonder if other sites could follow Facebook's strategy and turn even a fraction of the profit.

Final Thoughts

I have my eye on some foreign films that will probably be my favorite of the year -- Certified Copy, Carlos, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives -- but The Social Network is easily one of the best mainstream American films in years. I worry about the overhyping, which I do believe has befallen the film even as I no doubt contribute to it. Do I for example, think it's on the level of Citizen Kane? No, you silly person. I simply see the narrative and thematic threads between the two and am curious to see how the social communication has changed. (It's no Gatsby, either). But I enjoyed the film even more a second time, both with the shaggy-dog thriller narrative and the more complex elements. Zodiac stands as Fincher's crowning achievement as a film artist, and Fight Club is his most thematically bountiful, but The Social Network strikes the balance between the two, of minimalistic visual analysis and thought-provoking subject matter. Not many directors could take a concept widely derided as a joke when announced and silence nearly all his critics, and Fincher's growth continues to excite and impress me.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

After spending nearly three decades in a creative wilderness, Walt Disney Pictures rebounded in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, ushering in the "Disney Renaissance," a period commonly accepted to have lasted through the release of Tarzan in 1999 (even a cynic would at least have to go as far as 1994's The Lion King). Yet nothing produced during the 10-year creative revival at the studio could match the power, beautiful simplicity and downright entertainment value of the two films that signaled Disney's return to prominence.

Beauty and the Beast could easily be seen as unnecessary, what with Jean Cocteau's magical adaptation floating around the ether for some 50 years before the creative teams in Glendale, Cali. and Orlando decided to finally get the twice-abandoned adaptation of the fairy tale. Yet it marks the pinnacle of Disney's style of animated filmmaking -- Broadway one frame at a time -- creating atmospheres not only romantic and lilting but intimidating and provocative. What's more, it's damn near the most subversive thing the animation studio ever put out.

Just consider the three main characters. Belle arrives in southeastern France as the daughter of an inventor, and the village folk immediately ostracize them. It would be easy, oh so easy, to point out the reductive, facile feminism of Belle, whose greatest single attribute for the first 10 minutes or so is the fact that she reads, the sort of character trait that is as much a cheap male fantasy as any of the passive homemakers in previous Disney princess movies. Yet Belle isn't a cardboard feminist, even if her only devotion is to her father; her loyalty comes off more a result of a mutually loving and supportive bond and a reaction to her discomfort with others than a sense of duty. As she walks through the village at the start of the film, everyone fixates on her bookish nature, ignoring her attractiveness.

Ironically, the only person who does notice how beautiful she is is the most boorish and pigheaded. Gaston, a muscly, self-absorbed man who makes me want to call up my old French teacher and ask, "Comment dit-on 'juicehead?'" is the most lusted-after person in the village. He's sort of alpha male that women want to be with and men want to be (to the point that they too seem to want to be with him). Where the other villagers are so rural that they don't see the point of reading, Gaston is so utterly stupid that he can't even process anything beyond physical attractiveness.

Ironically, he's one of the most brilliant characters in Disney history, because the animators and writers use him to subvert the image of the classical Disney prince. In any other movie, Gaston would be Prince Charming, wealthy, handsome and attached to the heroine, capable of improving her station beyond her wildest dreams. Here, however, he's a misogynistic tyrant who decides to marry Belle simply because she's the prettiest around and refuses to hear her opinion in the matter. Clearly, he's never not gotten his way, and Belle's polite but firm rejection is a threat to his masculinity that drives him to a murderous rage. What initial attractiveness the man might have is almost immediately dispelled by his nature, and there can be no mistaking his role as the film's villain.

Compared with the Beast, Gaston's rotted personality could set up an "inner beauty" fable on the level of Shallow Hal's fatuous nonsense. But that ignores the Beast's initial nature: he's as vile as Gaston, and his curse stems from his egotistical demeanor. There is no preferable choice for Belle's affections at the start, because she does not exist simply to give them away. She is not looking for love at all, only traveling to the Beast's castle because the monster holds her father prisoner. She asks to take her dad's place because she's young enough to spend time in a dusty, cold castle.

Fundamentally, that's the beauty of Beauty and the Beast. Rather than tell a story about separated soulmates (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, many, many more), the writers create a fairy tale that uses the fantastical elements of a castle populated by anthropomorphized objects and ruled by a demon lion/dog to tell a realistic love story. To be sure, the conceit of two antagonistic forces learning to love each other is a dead horse of a different color, but the characters don't fully realize their feelings until the last 10 minutes. Instead, Beauty and the Beast first plays as Pygmalion in reverse, a beautiful, refined woman breaking through the crude manners of a beastly male to bring out his gentler side. Only when the Beast finally ceases thinking of himself does he understand the feelings that nag at him for an hour.

From an animation standpoint, Beauty and the Beast does not quite measure up to its storytelling standard. Now, it does not want for visual imagination: rich colors and enticingly rendered characters bump against the emerging Computer Animation Production System used to handle backgrounds. CAPS allows animators to pull of shots that simply could not be done by hand, from rapidly canting angles of simulated motion to the majesty of the film's centerpiece, the ballroom dance set to the titular song.

The problem arises from time and budget constraints. Two months before the film premiered, the animators sent a workprint version to the New York Film Festival. However, that version had only 70% of the final footage, and one can see the two months' worth of cramming at times. Occasionally, secondary characters lack expressive animation, and backgrounds lose their detail in spots. When the CAPS animation sometimes jars with the 2D rendering, I can't help but wonder whether technological limitations or time issues are to blame.

What cannot be criticized, however, is the drawing of the main characters. Mark Henn, who would go on to make most of the best-drawn female characters in Disney history (he'd already co-drawn Ariel), makes Belle into someone who clearly grew up reading instead of doing chores, but she looks more ready for something bad to happen than Cinderella. And when he puts her in that yellow dress, he crafts the most stunning Disney princess since Aurora. Andreas Deja gives Gaston such a predatory stalk and evil leer that the animator clearly intends older viewers to identify a rapist mentality driving the character. It's not so explicit that children will either fail to understand Gaston's evil and thus lose interest or be scarred, but for once the creepy nature of a strapping man in a Disney film is intentional.

But nothing compares to Glen Keane's animation of the Beast. His finest creation, the Beast is first introduced in silhouette, taking on the likeness of the great demon Chernabog from Fantasia. In light, he resembles a hybrid of a lion and a wolf with demonic horns, capable of conveying terrifying, unstoppable animal force when on all fours and a comical yet believable humanity when he straightens his back. Almost as if to prove how great Keane is, the film positions the two ways of animating the Beast one almost immediately after the other (from Beast fighting off wolves to him making a buffoon out of himself learning etiquette) to demonstrate how fluidly Keane can transition between the two depictions.

The single greatest aspect of the entire film, however, more than the storytelling, more than the lead animation, is the songwriting. Howard Ashman revived Disney's tradition for great, memorable songwriting with The Little Mermaid, and his work is likely as big a reason that film succeeded and revived the studio's creative legacy as anything in the movie. Here, he ups the ante: with Alan Menken, Ashman crafts perhaps the greatest songbook to accompany a Disney film, and one of the best of any film of any kind. There are individual songs to match the hits here, from "When You Wish Upon a Star" to "Once Upon a Dream," but there isn't a single song that feels like a filler. Hell, I'm struggling to think of another Disney film that uses its songs so brilliantly not simply to adds some spice to the proceedings to but advance both narrative and character. Ashman's deliciously simple titles seem like afterthoughts but simply convey the essence of each song. "Belle" opens the film in pure opulence, creating a wave of cascading voices, some of which join into harmonies, others directly oppose one another. The effect perfectly establishes the character, whose lines are always sung the most softly and without anyone else joining in. "Gaston," meanwhile, inverts this, making the lines of all the other villagers hang off his every rhyme. "Be Our Guest" makes the opening seem tame in comparison, yet its explosion of extravagance is every bit as justifiable as "Belle": like that song, "Be Our Guest" establishes character in the midst of effervescent songwriting. The residents of the castle are all servants turned into the object they controlled, and they're thrilled to finally have a guest to wait upon once more. They are the ultimate depictions of existentialism, having literally become their jobs, so the opportunity to perform their duties simultaneously makes them feel alive once more.

As for the aforementioned title track, well, only "When You Wish Upon a Star" could possibly challenge it in my book, and I might still side with this. Sung in Angela Lansberry's beautifully soaring voice, "Beauty and the Beast" encapsulates the entire film's thoughtfulness on love, something that doesn't exist in fairy tales but in life; it's just harder to see out here. By my count, the song contains only 29 lines (including repeated ones), and all of them make an impact. "Barely even friends/Then somebody bends/Unexpectedly" starts the first stanza in earnest, and the subtlety of it has the ironic effect of being overpowering. Instead of making grandiose proclamations of destined love, Ashman goes for the truth, which is so much more romantic and rewarding: we don't know we're in love until we spend time with someone and unforced adjustments make the pieces fall into place.

Ashman died from complications from AIDS just before the film premiered, and he is beautifully (and rightly) eulogized in the credits as the man "who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul," and while Disney would make a number of fantastic films through the end of the century, Ashman's death left a hole that even the best of them couldn't fill.

Beauty and the Beast opens on a familiar sight in Disney fairy tale fiction: still images of folkloric artwork as a narrator introduces the tale. Yet compared to the storybooks of old, the animators treat us to depictions of the background on stained glass, suggesting either that this really happened or, like religious stories, it is such an inspirational tale that it deserves to be remembered even if you don't believe it. I still must choose Pinocchio for the agelessness of its dynamic vision, but Beauty and the Beast marks the pinnacle of Disney's work with fairy tales, and it's a shame Walt Disney couldn't have lived to see the purest example of what he wanted from his studio.

[Beauty and the Beast is now available on a stunning Blu-Ray from Disney. Picture and audio quality put to shame even other Disney restorations such as their sterling work on Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. I cannot urge purchasing it enough.]

John Lennon — John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

When the Beatles started crumbling in earnest around late 1968/'69, John Lennon vented his dissatisfaction with a few solo albums made with Yoko Ono. The three of them -- Two Virgins, Life With the Lions and Wedding Album -- allowed the two to experiment more fully with their experimental sides, and they will test the patience of even the most committed fan. The pair did, however, begin to move out of their tape-looping nonsense for a number of singles that showed Lennon's creative spark had not been diluted by disillusionment, singles like "Cold Turkey" and "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)."

Yet it was only when the Beatles finally collapsed that Lennon and Ono finally moved into producing albums worthy of the band John just left. The final years of Lennon's songwriting with the Fab Four revealed the direction of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band long before the lovers underwent Dr. Arthur Janov's Primal Scream therapy. Following his psychedelic sonic innovation on Sgt. Pepper's, his writing became starker, more impassioned, more given to self-evaluation, a great deal of it harsh. The only difference between the yelped pleading of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and the shrieks of JL/POB opening track "Mother" is that the last barrier was knocked down.

The Japanese release of the album translated the title John no Tamashii, meaning "John's Soul," and I can think of no better summary of the contents of the best album to come out of the Beatles' disintegration. While not quite as terrifying and bleak as some say, there can be no doubt that Plastic Ono Band is therapy put to vinyl, a purification by fire of everything on John's mind. The song titles -- among them "Isolation," "God," "Love" -- are as bare as the recordings, direct and honest to the point of bluntness.

What is surprising, though, is the range the album covers. The funereal bell that opens "Mother" establishes a heartbreaking song charting Lennon's feelings of abandonment, but "I Found Out" shows John dealing with the pain of the Beatles' downfall in much angrier terms. It trashes George Harrison's fascination with Hare Krishna and gurus, makes sardonic reference to Paul and generally mocks the idea of any of the Fab Four as rock or religious icons. That thread is picked up even more explicitly in "God," which throws out the rocking vibe of "I Found Out" for a piano lick that scatters into deep space as Lennon shouts his rejection into the heavens.

Meanwhile, "Well Well Well," which loosely ties together considerations of guilt, love, women's liberation and revolution, could stand with the proto-metal found in the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and "I Want You." Looking at the cropped hair Yoko and John sport on the cover, the bite of the song could easily be a reference to their bitter attitude not only toward the times but of the "revolution's" failure. That the Beatles were (and remain) the symbol of the '60s, the death of flower power only hurts Lennon more deeply.

When Lennon steps outside himself and his hangups, the results are beautiful, and in some cases no less forceful than his personalized rants. "Working Class Hero" never became the anthem it clearly wants to be, but only because it has the complexity of a well-considered social examination. Rather than resort to rah-rah, fist-pumping simplification, Lennon points out how badly the working class wants to be homogenized and tamed by the bourgeoisie. At the other end of the spectrum, "Love" points to the John Lennon who would emerge from this tumultuous album, a more centered individual who would finally find a balance in life between his creativity and his personal well-being. Like all the songs of the album, the lyrics are straightforward, childish in anyone else's hands, but John makes the adolescence of the lyrics the entire point: after two failed marriages -- one literal, the other a metaphorical bonding between his bandmates -- he finally feels that love he never felt even as a young man proposing to Cynthia, and certainly not with any of the groupies he would have inevitably slept with. The circumstances of his meeting Yoko are not ideal (certainly not to Cynthia), but anyone who felt that Yoko simply manipulated Lennon cannot justify that opinion in this face of this baby-faced expression of adoration without sounding like a spiteful fool.

In the first stanza of "God," Lennon sings "God is a concept/By which we measure our pain" but what sticks out is the following line: "I'll say it again." He wants to make absolutely clear what he is leaving behind with this album. What is darkly amusing about his denouncements is the way that he spends so much time attacking his iconic status that he ultimately enshrines the Beatles with all the religious and social figures he casts aside. He first created the comparison between the band and religion with the "Bigger than Jesus" comment, and he forces the juxtaposition again here by definitively rejecting both. He may be denying both, but he's placing them on equal ground in the process.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is one of those albums that some might feel obligated to cherish instead of enjoying. It's too ephemeral to be embraced as a statement of angst, but too demanding of the listener's attention to be pop. Yet the album is anything but arduous, and its sparsity gives Lennon the room to bare himself in a way few singer/songwriters have ever had the courage to express. By throwing it all out in a rasped scream of agony, he not only crafts his most beautiful and searing statement but cleanses himself to return to writing masterful pop tunes, which he would do with his next album. This isn't the sound of a man's descent into a personal hell, it's of a baptism.

Happy birthday, John. This place fucking sucks without you.

Community — Season 1

Community is the American version of Spaced. The magnificent pop culture explosion from Edgar Wright and co. was recently slated for unauthorized theft artistically viable re-imagining at the hands of McG, but vicious testing killed the pilot before it could infect the airwaves. Community doesn't recycle any characters from the Britcom, nor is the situation that forms the foundation of the situation comedy the same, yet it captures the spirit of Spaced like no other series.


The pilot focuses on Jeff Winger (Joel McHale, who turns the potentially deadly video round-up series The Soup into comedy gold), a star lawyer who is finally caught working without a degree and heads to Greendale Community College to quietly get a degree and get back to winning massive sums by routinely playing on the memory of 9/11 for such cases as DUI arrests. On the first day, he meets Britta (Gillian Jacobs), a late-twentysomething trying to get her life together. In an attempt to seduce her, he passes himself off as a Spanish expert and sets up a study group, only for her to guess his motive and invite several other students. They are: pop culture guru and potential Asperger's sufferer Abed (Danny Pudi), middle-aged divorcée and mom Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), bright but insecure Annie (Alison Brie), former high school football star Troy Barnes (Donald Glover) and Pierce (Chevy Chase), a half-crazed moist-towelette tycoon who seems to be here to live out a midlife crisis 20 years past due.

For the first part of the season, Community stays true to its concept, tackling the various stereotypes of a community college. The teachers seem to know barely more than the students, and they're about as imbalanced. Take Señor Chang (Ken Jeong), who routinely berates his students like a drill instructor despite a questionable proficiency with Spanish. Another professor ostensibly teaches accounting, only to throw out textbooks and impress upon students their need to seize the day.

About halfway through, however, the show, which boasts strong, fast writing throughout, evolves. Instead of a well-above-average take on the usual sitcom with usual tropes -- sexual tension between several pairs, goofy two-dimensionality -- it morphs into an absurdist mash-up of deconstructionist comedy and elaborate pop culture references. The Christmas episode plays as an anti-P.C. holiday rant that morphs into an embrace of various cultures that avoids sappiness by bonding characters over a huge fight that plays on the entire career of Anthony Michael Hall (who guests as a nerd-cum-bully who picks fights to outpace a sexuality apparent to everyone but him). Another episode finds the study group seeking easy-A classes, with some landing in a pottery course run by a teacher haunted by Ghost (the film, not the incorporeal beings with business left on this Earth), while others learn to sail...on a boat in the parking lot. They even act as if they're drowning when they fall off onto the pavement.

By the end of the season, episodes serve as full-on homages to other films and shows. The popularity of the cafeteria's chicken fingers launches a scheme that plays out as a farce of GoodFellas, complete with tracking shots and a pitch-perfect narration from Abed. Best of all is "Modern Warfare," easily the single best episode of comic TV since 30 Rock's "Rosemary's Baby." When the hapless dean sets up a campus-wide paintball fight to win priority registration, Greendale devolves into a collision of every action movie under the sun, from Die Hard to Battle Royale to John Woo movies. There's even a fantastic recreation of 28 Days Later's opening. The crash of Community's typical level of dialogue writing and incredible physical comedy is the best condensation of everything that's great about the show, even down to its unlikely sweetness.

With its postmodern metafiction, Community could very well have been smug and overly reliant upon other shows to make up for its own lack of writing (watch Glee and see how it continues to push the songs at the expense of character and even the human logic of sitcom characters). Yet the show, like Spaced, is so literate with pop culture that it knows just the right mixture of references to enhance its own characters, not set them aside. Also, the writers have an ace up their sleeve in Danny Pudi, who generally sets off each reference through Abed. He has such impeccable timing and such a remarkable ability to impersonate the various pop culture items Abed can flawlessly recall that he always gets a laugh. His take on Christian Bale's Batman brought me to tears.

Pudi's not the only terrific cast member. Ultimately, Community succeeds because its cast has the goofy singularity of an old-school sitcom and the effortless chemistry of Office-style comedies that rely on a believably level of interaction. The friendship between Troy and Abed is endlessly rewarding, never playing on the "Isn't it weird that a jock and a nerd could be friends?" angle but simply milking their shared silliness for endless laughs -- Community has easily the best, context-less closes of any show running, most of them playing on some game Abed and Troy play. Meanwhile, Shirley comes off as a close-minded Christian who projects her divorce onto her new "family," and both Brown and the writers know exactly where the line exists to prevent from mocking her beliefs and her issues or from playing on them for hollow sympathy. McHale proves a great straight man for the Abed/Troy variety hour and Annie's peppy inanity, and the openly acknowledged Sam and Diane relationship between him and Britta eventually finds a balance between sexual tension and a sort of bromance between the only two sane people in the group. It takes a united front, after all, just to deal with Pierce, who serves as the best outlet for Chevy Chase's straight-faced non-sequitur as anything he's done in about 20 years.

Occasionally, Community rests on old sitcom clichés without subverting them, but even at its most conventional, it's one of the funniest shows in years. When it goes a step beyond, however, it emerges at the top of the heap, ranking with Modern Family and Parks and Recreation as the next wave of great sitcom programming as The Office and 30 Rock overstay their welcome and shows like Arrested Development rest in the ground. It only gets better as the season continues, growing ever bolder with its pop culture mash-ups and more secure with its characters and pacing. What started as a way to poke fun at community college turned by the end into the perfect mix of old- and new-school comedy, one that follows NBC's strategy of packing a cast with supremely talented up-and-comers (many with writing experience) and inserting an established star in a dry spell (Chase is this show's Baldwin) to rehabilitate his reputation by essentially making a fool of himself every week. There's still room to grow, but that's good; peaking early has been a danger that's plagued NBC's other shows, and a refinement of both the movie parodies and the straight focus on community college could make a great show a classic. Either way, it's still streets ahead of the competition.

The Social Network

David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to find the good in life. He brought an old detective out of despair by ironically plunging him into the heart of darkness. He ruthlessly mocked the fascistic conformity of the emasculated male even as they supposedly rebelled against a false image, but Fincher managed to spare some sympathy for those who felt a sense of cultural disconnect.

In recent years, Fincher has not drastically altered his course so much as punched through to the other side of his bleakness. His stories are no longer stomach-churning but atmospheric and chilling, but the hearts of Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are essentially no different than that of Se7en: they are stories about people who are ultimately doomed but soldier on, because the alternative is even more terrifying. With The Social Network, "Fincher 2.0" develops this thread even further, and the greatest kick of the film comes from watching the preconceived notions of its two auteurs -- Fincher and West Wing maestro Aaron Sorkin -- completely invert. Here, Fincher is, for the first time, nakedly sympathetic to the ambition of a morally dubious man (though he's as critical as ever of Mark's actions), while the ever-optimistic Sorkin pens a critique of the entire idea of social networking. In fact, were a director without Fincher's confidence and commitment to his own vision attached to the project, The Social Network likely would have ended up as nothing more than the ramblings of a curmudgeon woefully behind the times.

The contrast brings out the best in both the script and the direction. Sorkin's pessimism checks Fincher's willingness to excuse some of Mark Zuckerberg's behavior, while Fincher's atmospheric direction adds layers of complexity to Sorkin's style, which relies upon people who speak like playwrights to make characters who are both abhorrently unrealistic yet bizarrely plausible and believable. His overly verbose style lends itself well to the Harvard boys who invent and squabble over Facebook: all of them put on airs, exploit family connections and ready themselves for lucrative futures that they pretend to work hard for so it doesn't look embarrassing when their trust funds mature. They believe themselves to already be the superior of everyone their age, yet they behave like the frat boys they are.

Fincher and Sorkin even manage to trace Facebook back to a childish, misogynistic stunt. We meet Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a date with a young woman named Erica from Boston University. Mark monopolizes the conversation, fixating on the reputable clubs that he wants to get into because the most powerful people in the world joined them in their college days. He talks so much and speaks so condescendingly to Erica that she finally calls him an asshole and leaves. In a huff, Mark returns home, drunkenly blogs about the breakup and subsequently hacks into the photo databases of Harvard's various dorms and creates a site where male students vote on the hotness of Harvard women. At four in the morning, the site gets so many hits that the university's servers crash.

The Social Network is structured around two separate lawsuits over the ownership of Facebook. One pits Mark against Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), wealthy, Olympic-level rowers who came to Zuckerberg after his stunt with an idea to create a social networking site for Harvard students. They intended it as a casual dating site, but Mark went home and set about making not "Match.com for Harvard" but a place that allows him to take all of collegiate socializing and place it on the Internet. A month later, Mark tells the Winklevoss brothers he cannot complete the assignment, shortly before he launches The Facebook in its infancy.

The other lawsuit finds Mark being sued by his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, looking uncannily like a young Jean-Pierre Léaud), who alleges that Mark cut him out of the profits even though he provided 100% of the start-up capital. The Winklevoss lawsuit pits two forces of equal arrogance against each other, but Eduardo's indignation during deposition meetings comes from a sense of personal harm.

Even so, none of these young men is any moral example. The Winklevoss twins come off as the sort of smug rich boys who will get cushy jobs in their father's law firm. When Mark launches Facebook, they pull strings to get an audience with the Harvard president to demand that the school shut down the site and expel Zuckerberg. When the president calls them out on their absurd sense of entitlement, the brothers looked shocked, as if anyone can bring a petty squabble to the head of the university. Saverin never shuts up about his own well-connected father, and his lawsuit for a portion of Facebook's profits seem less a matter of money than an attempt to win back his dad's approval. Saverin gets edged out of the picture by Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), whose smooth-talking victim complex suggests the late stages of a cocaine-induced breakdown.

Then, there's Mark. Fincher always keeps Eisenberg separate from others, and the actor never looks comfortable when forced to deal with people. His site opens up socializing, to the point that anyone has access to everyone, and young men and women begin behaving irrationally over the transparency of their lives. The irony of his own ability to connect with anyone should be lost on no one.

In telling Mark's story, Fincher clearly draws from Orson Welles' great Citizen Kane, the story of a young media mogul who grows old and dies alone. Like Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg is indisputably a prodigy, a man of ambition and focus who builds upon the suggestions of his guides until he no longer has to stand on their shoulders. And like Kane, he cannot find true happiness in his work. Eisenberg occasionally breaks off all attention from the world to stare into space, and his utter lack of social skills hint that Mark may have Asperger's. But social discomfort does not fully explain the open arrogance in Mark's dark smirk. When a lawyer suggests that Mark's behavior toward the wronged parties stems from his resentment of never being invited to join one of the big-time Harvard clubs, Mark snidely replies that he currently has enough money to buy them and make them into game rooms.

The empire Mark builds doesn't have the grandeur of Kane's newspaper supremacy, but its influence runs far deeper. Groupies line up to sleep with the founder of Facebook, and we see how quickly Facebook becomes a part of people's lives. Within weeks, "Facebook me" has entered into Harvard's lexicon, and couples devolve into major, terrifying arguments over how often a page is updated to match a relationship status. Fincher seems to draw from his own Fight Club at times, portraying Facebook as something that sets off a cultural revolution that cannot be contained. Not even Project Mayhem is as widespread as the site where everyone -- including yours truly -- goes to post menial BS that can be taken for so much more. With businesses willing to terminate or not hire someone based on photos posted online, the issues of privacy that Zuckerberg casually steamrolls over to be popular carry a weight he does not or cannot contemplate.

The more social networking links people, the bigger the barriers, physical and mental, are formed in the real world. When Mark moves out to Palo Alto on Parker's advice, Eduardo heads to New York to work as a finance intern and seek advertisers from traditional routes. The 3,000 miles between them enhances the schism between them, with Saverin pursuing a business model that's proven but won't maximize profits for this kind of venture and Zuckerberg falling further and further into Parker's clutches. The two friends share an awkward exchange when Saverin finally comes out to California, and though the subject is not directly broached at the time, they both know that Eduardo is out, and the fleeting moment of friendship between them won't reverse what's coming. The irony of Mark's disconnect is compounded by the workers he hires when Facebook grows rapidly: anyone updating the site for better usability and interaction is described as being "wired in" and cannot be spoken to as if in stasis. The levels of impersonality between people mere feet away is bewildering even though we're living in this changed world now.

Fincher and Sorkin make tension out of the ostensibly banal subject of website programming by depicting how empty it all is. Mark, Saverin, the Winklevosses, not one of them has enough personality to hang a hat on. These are the people who created a way for all of us to fit our background, current statuses and interests onto a single page, as if Facebook was just a way for everyone to look as dull as them. The twins host raunchy parties while Mark decides to find an intern by holding an elaborate drinking game where the player who codes properly while hammered gets the job. These are just boys, yet they play with levels of money most of us cannot fathom. Couched in the vicious fights for intellectual supremacy is the suggestion that these are the sort of people who control all the money, spoiled kids and broadly unethical wunderkinds who receive respect for breaking numerous laws simply because they look cool in the process. When Saverin jealously prods Parker for losing to the courts on Napster, Parker still claims victory. "You wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?" implying that he unleashed peer-to-peer file sharing to destroy the industry that would not work with him and recognize his talents.

Yellow-green dominates the color palette, as if someone finally got so sick with envy at the accomplishments of another that he finally vomited. The electronic/industrial score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross throbs and hums like a migraine headache, occasionally fading but never disappearing. Ominous without being ornate, the score captures the emotion of the film perfectly: cold but searching. It keeps looking for an outlet and finds none, always trapped by the insular attitudes of the characters, who only become lonelier as the film wears on. Its vaguely 8-bit sound deepens into more expressive tones, returning to motifs that suggest not just a thematic continuity but a personal stagnation on the part of young men who refuse to start acting like adults. Paranoia flecks their isolation, from Parker's obsessiveness over those who shut him down to the rumors that flame through instant Internet contact. It's almost funny how a student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, is seen as a deadlier social weapon than any of the national papers Kane's empire ran.

Much of the substance of David Fincher's films can be gleaned from his opening credits, something the great video essayist Matthew Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas are currently demonstrating with their pieces for the Museum of the Moving Image (part one found here). As ever, the atmosphere and character of The Social Network can be seen in its own opening. Rejected by Erica, Mark marches home as the camera glides over Harvard (or at least the shooting locations standing in for Harvard), showing all the interesting sights and people Mark could be interacting with instead of running home to blog. The score bristles with dark tones, and for all the camera's grace, you begin to fear that he might be planning something to hurt the girl. And, in a way, he does, insulting her online and subjecting her to verbal abuse from other misogynistic guys. It establishes Mark as a man who cannot let things go, and Erica manages to float around the back of his mind the entire film, as if he made Facebook solely to prove himself not an asshole rather than simply apologizing and acting more nicely.

Still, you never fully hate anyone in this movie, even if you want to give them all a good slap. Mark becomes the youngest billionaire in the world, but he has no one to enjoy it with, and his incessant invasions of privacy ensure that even the public that uses his site like a drug does not admire him. Like Facebook itself, The Social Network stays constant just long enough for you to get used to it before something changes, not in the narrative so much as the mood. Arrogance gives way to the insecurity motivating it, which in turn morphs into loneliness. When Mark sits by himself at the end, surfing his own website in that bizarrely fixated way of his, the chasm of darkness around him and the implication of his lawsuit with Eduardo make him resemble less Charles Kane than Michael Corleone. He's the most powerful man in the world -- just read any ranking of the most influential people -- and he has nothing to show for it and no amount of clicking 'refresh' will change that.

The American

If Anton Corbijn's The American has any clear directive, it is to mess with its audience. Ostensibly a thriller about a hitman/weapon maker, The American sets up every trope connected to these kinds of stories: the one last job, the killer hiding out after being compromised, a sinner's quest for peace and the battle for his soul. Then, Corbijn lets all of these stories drift away. Instead, the director returns to the existentialist territory of Melville's great Le Samourai, creating a star vehicle that dares Americans to line up for a film they will inevitably despise.

After a tranquil opening that places the protagonist, Jack (George Clooney) in an idyllic Swedish forest with a female companion, the film immediately throws a curveball when mysterious men start shooting. That Jack should encounter someone trying to kill him is of course totally unsurprising, but the measures he takes to conceal his identity are shocking and demonstrate that the James Bond type can be dangerous for lovers not simply because other people might shoot at them.

Having been discovered, Jack retreats to Italy and meets his boss, Pavel, who tells the killer to hide out in a nearby town until further notice. On the way, Jack suspects he might be driving into a trap and heads to another town in the vicinity. There we spend the next hour and a half, roaming the cobblestone streets and surrounding country roads of the gorgeous Castel del Monte. Jack poses as a photographer, a believable cover in such a pastoral village.

Practically nothing happens in The American, which is precisely the point but naturally does not console those going in hoping for some exciting ride with one of America's best A-listers. Jack befriends an old priest who speaks to our protagonist as if he knows what Jack really does for a living. Yet he never puts up a major fight for Jack's soul, and he even reveals parts of his own past that make him sound like an empathetic friend rather than a well-meaning but imperious holy man. When he tells Jack, "You must believe in a hell, because you live in it," he sounds not like a priest urging confession to ensure Jack a place in heaven but someone offering him a shoulder to cry on to make his life on this plane of existence more bearable.

Jack also spends time with a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido), and even she manages to fall for him in a way that adheres to the endless hooker with a heart of gold stories while digging into the cliché. Clara doesn't beg Jack to take her away, and Jack only once asks her not to go to work. By skirting any open, stilted conversations about love, the two craft one of the only convincing hooker-john relationships I've seen, one that works because it's treated more or less like a normal relationship and not some sort of validation for the prostitute (or the man who initially does nothing more than pay her for sex).

Corbijn keeps everything elliptical. Jack's assignment in hiding is to make a custom rifle for another assassin, and his most technical work involves making a suppressor to dissipate the sound of gunfire, making it impossible for anyone to tell where the shooter is located. Similarly, Rowan Joffe's script and Corbijn's direction scatter the elements of the hitman thriller so you can't trace the clichés back to their sources. The American embodies the genre even as it deconstructs everything it can with a fluid grace.

The American constantly rubs against a typical plot, only to cut back to the moments in-between the action. With its constant shots of winding mountain roads and contemplative car rides, you could almost call the film "Abbas Kiarostami's The Killer." Here is a thriller where the most exciting moments are teases, where the much-delayed payoffs are intentionally stark and cold. After testing his rifle with the assassin (Thekla Reuten), Jack can pause everything to watch an endangered butterfly fly around an untouched park. Even the other killer stops to watch, and the shared moment of regret between them, not sexual tension but an understanding of the game they cannot escape, is surprisingly moving. The protagonist knows that he's being sent into hiding just so his boss knows where to find him, and when the Swedes who sent people after him track Jack down, it's unclear whether they work for some rival or simply Pavel.

People know Corbijn from his Ian Curtis biopic Control, but even that subdued film cannot compare to the beauty of his style here, an atmosphere far removed from the music videos upon which he made his initial reputation. His background as a photographer serves him better here than it did with Control, which the director made partially because he photographed Joy Division in their brief history. Consider the opening credits, the best I've seen all year (even above the frenetic animation of Enter the Void). Jack drives through a tunnel so long that it requires lighting even during the day. The dark yellow of the lights casts Clooney in contemplative silhouette, the end of his other professional-in-hiding movie, Michael Clayton, shot from a different angle. When the camera shifts to the back seat looking forward, the world outside the car is blurred in shallow focus. Jack cannot see the road ahead. At last, he sees the literal light at the end of the tunnel, but it does not seem to draw any closer, remaining seemingly the same distance away even as the dot of light grows. Finally, Jack reaches the end and the screen fades to pure white. Is the symbolism obvious? Sure, but Corbijn does not place serious weight on the moment, letting it scatter as he does everything else, preserving the beauty lest it be endlessly dissected.

The general public reacted to The American as if George Clooney had personally come to each theater and splashed acid in everyone's face. In fact, had he done so, they might have at least been excited that something happened. I, however, was mesmerized. Deconstruction these days is de rigeur, something that every hip writer does to show that he's above something as vulgar as a genre film. Corbijn, however, truly examines: he breaks apart each cliché, studies it, and gently puts it back together in a way that looks different but works the same. In the process, he makes a work of art where so many strive to be "Liked" on Facebook. Clooney has been trying for the last decade to make a serious artist out of himself, and if he hadn't succeeded before (I would argue that he has), his willingness to alienate 95 percent of his American audience surely proves he's gotten his wish. That's the quiet hilarity of the film: the Italian characters routinely mention his nationality, as does the title, yet it could never play in the country its protagonist represents.