Generation Why.docx

1、Generation WhyGeneration Why?Zadie SmithNovember 25, 2010The Social Network a film directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Knopf, 209 pp., $24.95 How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerbergs generationthere

2、are only nine years between usbut somehow it doesnt feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvards campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebooks inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by

3、 fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfectlike the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerbe

4、rg, in the same spirit that everyone in 60s Liverpool met John Lennon.At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have differe

5、nt ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinel

6、y are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them

7、. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.In The Social Network Generation Facebook gets a movie almost worthy of them, and this fact, being so unexpected, makes the film feel more delightful than it probably, objectively, is. From the opening scene its clear that this is a movie a

8、bout 2.0 people made by 1.0 people (Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, forty-nine and forty-eight respectively). Its a talkie, for goodness sake, with as many words per minute as His Girl Friday. A boy, Mark, and his girl, Erica, sit at a little table in a Harvard bar, zinging each other, in that relen

9、tless Sorkin style made famous by The West Wing (though at no point does either party say “Walk with me”for this we should be grateful).But something is not right with this young man: his eye contact is patchy; he doesnt seem to understand common turns of phrase or ambiguities of language; he is lit

10、eral to the point of offense, pedantic to the point of aggression. (“Final clubs,” says Mark, correcting Erica, as they discuss those exclusive Harvard entities, “Not Finals clubs.”) He doesnt understand whats happening as she tries to break up with him. (“Wait, wait, this is real?”) Nor does he und

11、erstand why. He doesnt get that what he may consider a statement of fact might yet have, for this other person, some personal, painful import:ERICA: I have to go study. MARK: You dont have to study. ERICA: How do you know I dont have to study?!MARK: Because you go to B.U.! Simply put, he is a comput

12、er nerd, a social “autistic”: a type as recognizable to Finchers audience as the cynical newshound was to Howard Hawkss. To create this Zuckerberg, Sorkin barely need brush his pen against the page. We came to the cinema expecting to meet this guy and its a pleasure to watch Sorkin color in what we

13、had already confidently sketched in our minds. For sometimes the culture surmises an individual personality, collectively. Or thinks it does. Dont we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls. Sorkin, confident of his foundation myth, spins an

14、exhilarating tale of double rejectionspurned by Erica and the Porcellian, the Finaliest of the Final Clubs, Zuckerberg begins his spite-fueled rise to the top. Cue a lot of betrayal. A lot of scenes of lawyers offices and miserable, character-damning depositions. (“Your best friend is suing you!”) S

15、orkin has swapped the military types of A Few Good Men for a different kind of all-male community in a different uniform: GAP hoodies, North Face sweats.At my screening, blocks from NYU, the audience thrilled with intimate identification. But if the hipsters and nerds are hoping for Finchers usual p

16、yrotechnics they will be disappointed: in a lawyers office theres not a lot for Fincher to do. He has to content himself with excellent and rapid cutting between Harvard and the later court cases, and after that, the discreet pleasures of another, less-remarked-upon Fincher skill: great casting. Itl

17、l be a long time before a cinema geek comes along to push Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who plays Zuckerberg, off the top of our nerd typologies. The passive-aggressive, flat-line voice. The shifty boredom when anyone, other than himself, is speaking. The barely suppressed smirk. Eisenberg even chooses

18、 the correct nerd walk: not the sideways corridor shuffle (the Dont Hit Me!), but the puffed chest vertical march (the Im not 58”, Im 59”!).With rucksack, naturally. An extended four-minute shot has him doing exactly this all the way through the Harvard campus, before he lands finally where he belon

19、gs, the only place hes truly comfortable, in front of his laptop, with his blog:Erica Albrights a bitch. You think thats because her family changed their name from Albrecht or do you think its because all B.U. girls are bitches? Oh, yeah. We know this guy. Overprogrammed, furious, lonely. Around him

20、 Fincher arranges a convincing bunch of 1.0 humans, by turns betrayed and humiliated by him, and as the movie progresses they line up to sue him. If its a three-act movie its because Zuckerberg screws over more people than a two-act movie can comfortably hold: the Winklevoss twins and Divya Navendra

21、 (from whom Zuckerberg allegedly stole the Facebook concept), and then his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (the CFO he edged out of the company), and finally Sean Parker, the boy king of Napster, the music-sharing program, although he, to be fair, pretty much screws himself. Its in Eduardoin the actor

22、Andrew Garfields animate, beautiful facethat all these betrayals seem to converge, and become personal, painful. The arbitration scenesthat should be dull, being so terribly staticget their power from the eerie opposition between Eisenbergs unmoving countenance (his eyebrows hardly ever move; the re

23、al Zuckerbergs eyebrows never move) and Garfields imploring disbelief, almost the way Spencer Tracy got all worked up opposite Frederic Marchs rigidity in another courtroom epic, Inherit the Wind.Still, Fincher allows himself one sequence of (literal) showboating. Halfway through the film, he insert

24、s a ravishing but quite unnecessary scene of the pretty Winklevoss twins (for a story of nerds, all the men are surprisingly comely) at the Henley Regatta. These two blond titans row like champs. (One actor, Armie Hammer, has been digitally doubled. Im so utterly 1.0 that I spent an hour of the movi

25、e trying to detect any difference between the twins.) Their arms move suspiciously fast, faster than real human arms, their muscles seem outlined by a fine pen, the water splashes up in individual droplets as if painted by Caravaggio, and the music! Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, commits exquisit

26、e brutality upon Edward Griegs already pretty brutal “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” All synths and white noise. Its music video stuffthe art form in which my not-quite generation truly excelsand it demonstrates the knack for hyperreality that made Finchers Fight Club so compelling while renderi

27、ng the real world, for so many of his fans, always something of a disappointment. Anyway, the twins lose the regatta, too, by a nose, which allows Fincher to justify the scene by thematic reiteration: sometimes very close is simply not close enough. Or as Mark pleasantly puts it across a conference

28、table: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook youd have invented Facebook.”All thats left for Zuckerberg is to meet the devil at the crossroads: naturally hes an Internet music entrepreneur. Its a Generation Facebook instinct to expect (hope?) that a pop star will fall on his face in the cinema

29、, but Justin Timberlake, as Sean Parker, neatly steps over that expectation: whether or not you think hes a shmuck, he sure plays a great shmuck. Manicured eyebrows, sweaty forehead, and that coked-up, wafer-thin self- confidence, always threatening to collapse into paranoia. Timberlake shimmies int

30、o view in the third act to offer the audience, and Zuckerberg, the very same thing, essentially, that hes been offering us for the past decade in his videos: a vision of the good life.This vision is also wafer-thin, and Fincher satirizes it mercilessly. Again, we know its basic outline: a velvet rop

31、e, a cocktail waitress who treats you like a king, the best of everything on tap, a special booth of your own, fussy tiny expensive food (“Could you bring out some things? The lacquered pork with that ginger confit? I dont know, tuna tartar, some lobster claws, the foie gras and the shrimp dumplings

32、, thatll get us started”), appletinis, a Victorias Secret model date, wild house parties, fancy cars, slick suits, cocaine, and a “skys the limit” objective: “A million dollars isnt cool. You know whats cool? A billion dollars.” Over cocktails in a glamorous nightclub, Parker dazzles Zuckerberg with tales of the life that awaits him on the other side of a billion. Fincher keeps the thumping Euro house music turned up to exactly the level it would be in real life: the actors have to practically scream to be heard above it. Like many a nerd before him, Zuckerberg is too hyped