Written at the time of the film's release...(although, here, outdated links have been deleted and more relevant ones have been inserted...and then, I'll post the thing on "Facebook"...which is so "Meta")
"Saving Facebook" ("Every Creation-Myth Needs a Devil") or "There's Somethin' Happenin' Here (What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear)"
"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in't!" (The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1)
Maybe it is too early to make a movie about Facebook (out of MySpace and Friendster) and the ramifications of our Brave New World of cyber-relationships.Maybe it is a little too "street-corner sage" to predict The End of the World As We are Sorta Familiar With it (But Not Really...More Acquaintances, Really). But, it is interesting to see a story about the Frankenstein behind the Monster, if only to see how each reflects the other. And even though we're secretly rooting for The Monster.
And, at this point in time, there isn't a better team to makeThe Social Networkthan Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher. Sorkin, the mad savant behind some of the better TV shows of the past decade and a half, has always written about people and their "issues," and how personality impacts policy. Fincher has matured from an ILM tech (who was happy to fly cameras through coffee-maker grips**) to an intricate observer of societal pressures on the psyche. For the two of them to make this particular story is a Friend Invitation made in Hollywood Heaven. "Accept" it. But, you can't "Ignore" it.
The movie begins with a date going badly between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, late of many movies with "...land" in the title) Harvard wall-flower, and Erica Albright (Rooney Mara—she'll play Lisbeth Salander opposite Daniel Craig in Fincher's big-budget version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), an acquaintance. Anyone familiar with the machine-gun dialogue that writer Sorkin is known for, had better duck for cover—or wait for this on DVD so you can...play...it...slooooowly—for he now has an automatic weapon for a word-processor, and a co-conspirator in Eisenberg who can milk every nuance out of a line, despite hyperventilating it at debate-competition speed. His Zuckerberg is a "no Dolby/no squelch" type of unreadable conscience, and Eisenberg plays it with a deadness behind the eyesthat interprets the world as a problem, if not necessarily a challenge. He's a bit too candid for a first date, and she stomps off, which sends him on a mission, simultaneously trashing her on his blog (LiveJournal) and culling the pictures of every woman on campus to create a "Who's Hotter" web-competitionthat becomes so popular so instantly that it crashes Harvard's web-infrastructure.
He becomes both famous and infamous for the stunt, guaranteeing he'll never get a date in college, and attracting the wrath of the college's board, and the interest of two preppies attempting to create an exclusionary social network on the web. He goes them several steps better, making a system open to everyone on campus that trumps their attempts, and as it gains "friends," expands throughout the college system.
Hindsight is 20/20, and Sorkin constructs the film as a series of depositions after the fact (of Facebook's success) as everyone who thinks they've been burned by Zuckerberg testifies to his vague promises and dealings under the table.***Of course, they have every right to sue—but they'd only sue if "The Facebook" was a success—and the underpinnings and double-dealings don't resemble a fight for satisfaction, or a Noble Quest, so much as resembling a snake eating its own tail.****
Which brings us back to Frankenstein and his Monster. The film itself is expertly done—it is a complicated story of hidden motivations and the presentation of masks before public faces—and Sorkin and Fincher manage to navigate us through the maze of the story, even though one feels there is no cheese at the end. The experience is a bit hollow, which may be a part of the point.
Because the Facebook experience is hollow, as well. As hollow as Zuckerberg, as portrayed in this film, is. While it is nice that one has the opportunity to "re-connect" with old friends in a virtual environment and satisfy everyone's need to (as one friend commented on blogging) "talk about what you had for lunch," one wonders why one has to re-connect at all...especially if the relationship wasn't maintained in the first place. Not enough time in the world to meet? Because a "real" relationship takes time, takes effort, "gets messy?" Facebook provides the illusion of "staying in touch," without actually touching. Like Zuckerberg's abortive "date," a lot of time is spent broadcasting, but not interacting.
There are, of course, exceptions. But the fact of the matter is Facebook's cyber-community is not a "Brave New World" at all. Just the opposite. It provides a substitute in lieu of commitment. A panacea in a life thought to be full to bursting and without risk. The most precious commodity we can give is time—slices of our lives and our selves. Facebook is a pacifier—a mass-Hallmark card that we can spend a few heart-beats picking out, and send away without a thought and not even sweat the cost of a stamp.
It soon becomes a numbers game—a collection, like the celebration of the 1,000,000th friend portrayed in the film. But who are those million people? Facebook doesn't know or care. It's just a number. A number of casual relationships, that may lead to something else, but probably won't. A collection, nice to look at, but more often, ignored. Trophies, and ones that don't need to be polished or buffed up.
It's a new world of blithely arrested development, in the image of its creator, where love and commitment do not compute, and the only thing close to it is "hope"—translatable as keystroke F5.
* Except for some dodgy freezing breath-work, the biggest special effect will be invisible to you until the closing credits. Nice.
** Personally, I'd like to get back all those hours spent on "ZooWorld."
*** An image that kept coming to mind every time I thought of writing this review, where it would subsequently be published...on B/C-L's's Facebook page.
Power Ballads, False Notes (Is This the Real Life/Is This Just Fantasy)
or Mercury Rising (Buddy, You're a Boy/Make a Big Noise/Playing in the Street/Gonna Be a Big Man/Some Day...)
They've been working on the story of the pan-sexual rock band "Queen," which is now calledBohemian Rhapsody, for quite a long time now, starting with a treatment by the amazing Peter Morgan (who also wrote THE Queen—maybe that's why they changed the name) and somehow being pureed into the Hollywoodized fairy tale that the movie ultimately becomes—a cautionary tale of all the trouble you can get yourself into by being yourself, no matter how brilliant and talented you might be. Harsh? Maybe. But, there are so many conveniently conventional falsehoods in the telling of the story that one wonders just what the agenda was here. Buttressed by scenes of Queen's appearance at Live-Aid—considered by many the greatest performance by a rock band seen by millions (and I've included it below because it IS amazing—I thought so when I saw it live oh-so-many years ago—but also to show some truth about just how good that band was/is), it tells, rather fictionally, how Farrokh Bulsara (played by a prosthetic-toothed Rami Malik) joined the rock band "Smile" and turned it into "Queen" and himself into Freddie Mercury, rock legend.
Not to disparage Malik—he does a damned good job in the part, despite being much too short and slight to play the part and, frankly, too odd looking, especially in the eyes, to really pull it off—and Bryan Singer's direction is competent, if a bit perfunctory for him (he was fired from the project and the reasons why are conflicting depending on who is asked and the film was completed by Dexter Fletcher*, who was attached to direct until Singer was hired) but, it's the story that's a let-down; it just didn't happen this way.
Really—does this look like Freddie Mercury to you?
Bohemian Rhapsody takes the easy (and dramatically quick) route out every time it comes to explaining any of the highlights in the Queen story, frequently portraying legend rather than fact in order to gin up conflict for a story of the price of fame and unconventionality that is...very conventional in terms of a cautionary Hollywood tale of getting everything you want "except *sob* happiness."
Bulsara did not just happen upon the band "Smile" on the very night their lead singer decided to quit for another band—he'd been following them for quite some time, was a fixture at their performances, and friends with the band-members, even with their turn-coat singer. In the film on the same night, he meets his "love of his life," Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) at the same venue during a chance meeting (the reality is it was anything but chance, she came into the band's circle when she was dating Brian May, but that is never mentioned). In the film, the fractures within Queen that lead to their break-up (which never happened) is blamed on Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), who, after being rejected by Feddie Mercury, makes himself useful as an assistant to the band, then just the lead singer, isolating him, driving a wedge between him and anyone Prenter sees as a threat, making him the "Iago" of the story.
Prenter is finally let go when Mercury finds out that he's been scuttling any chance of the band reuniting for 1985's Live-Aid concert, necessitating an unhealthy Mercury to clean up his act and get his voice back, risking disaster at the world-broadcast concert; In real life, he didn't need to, as the band had been touring for a year (August 24, 1984 to May 15, 1985) in support of their album "The Works." Then, of course, there is the tragedy of Mercury being diagnosed with AIDS before the concert, making it more like a triumphant swan song (or it would have been, except Mercury was diagnosed in April 1987, two years after the concert—still, it is a tragedy).
They (the film-makers) get the music right—they bloody well better—but the story is all false notes and in the wrong order.
All of this is like making a film about The Beatles and blaming the break-up on Yoko. Sure, it's in the zeitgeist (however trumped up it is), but it ignores the creative differences, the money issues, and just the fact that The Beatles were too talented to stay "The Beatles" after living together in conditions of "display-case isolation" for years. It may be true, but is it entertaining...and fun? Better to make Yoko a shrew.
And that is a shame. Queen should have a celebratory movie. They pushed boundaries across the board in their art and their manner, creating complicated music with ingeniously elemental, contagious hooks—I can't walk along these days without the bass-line of "Another One Bites the Dust" throbbing in my head—and Mercury's pan-sexuality was a bridge, of sorts, to bringing gay matters out of the shadows and into the klieg lights where they belonged and fabulously so. Their concerts were also known for being giant jam sessions between audience and performers, with a rhapsodic call and response that caromed between the two, enervating both.
And their message said "We Will Rock You" while allowing the audience to rock themselves.
