The One That Got Away: Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby"

Writing about The Great Gatsby might be like making a film of it. I can hear Mickey Rourke in Body Heat telling me, “There are 50 ways to screw up when you’re doing Gatsby. Figure out half of those, you’re a genius.” And, though you don't have to rub it in, I’m no genius.

I do love F. Scott Fitzgerald and his heralded novel, though I’m not sure I love it for the same reasons a lot of other people do. Reviews of Baz Luhrmann’s new and mostly faithful adaptation of Gatsby are divided, sometimes condescendingly hostile, sometimes suspiciously defensive (they kind of sound like me talking about Godfather III). There’s an inconsistency to what works and what doesn’t, what Luhrmann should have done vs. what he did do, and a lot of it goes back to critics’ impressions of the novel. Did Luhrmann respect the text, or did he trivialize it? My conclusion is that he respected the plot and incidents, but a refusal to let the story breathe along with ignorance to the novel’s stinging ironies and textures has resulted in a gross, even insulting, trivialization.

The themes of Gatsby are repeatedly thrown around: the Jazz Age, class, lost love and lost time, the frenzy before the storm of the Depression, and “America,” whatever that is. Then there’s the iconic symbols and images like the Green Light, the Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, the Valley of Ashes, the new rich of West Egg vs. the old rich of East Egg, and the unforgettable description of Myrtle Wilson’s detached, floppy breast. There’s the familiar cast of Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), George and Myrtle Wilson (Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher), spread widely apart in a web of passion across New York and then tragically tied together in the final act. Fitzgerald’s novel carries intimations of transcendence while wearing the costume of hopeless romanticism. It’s about accomplishing aspirations and moving beyond the confines of a given identity, the hero as shape-shifter. It centers on the boy/man “child of God” who moves mountains to win the girl/woman he loves, while she embodies the fantasy anyone may have of being so loved that another would do anything to be with them.

Because of that, Gatsby is misinterpreted as a love story, a kind of Jazz Age Tristan and Isolde (which, with the novel’s references to mythic and medieval images, was probably on Fitzgerald’s mind) with the poor boy trying to win the rich girl, climbing high, grasping for satisfaction, and failing, the lovers foiled by the mores and structures long held in place. Certainly this is pertinent to the tale, especially when one thinks about The Great Gatsby as being set in a world of tribes dictating identity and what a person can legitimately accomplish, an American ideal that is nevertheless repulsive to the ruling class who seem transplanted from European nobility, and who’ve evolved alongside the infrastructures of power.

My assessment of the film might not be fair, because we’re judging something apart from the book, and whether it’s Kubrick’s The Shining, Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Davies’ The House of Mirth, or Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which addresses a similar point about remakes), the film must be ingested and processed by virtue of its own integrity and consonance.

The problem is that films don’t exist in vacuums, and Gatsby brings with it some great baggage as, um, one of the main contenders for The Great American Novel. Luhrmann relishes the big city verve and delectable vice while neglecting the significance and lost simplicity of the whole nation behind the extravagance — the place that all of these characters are from, and from which they’re running. Luhrmann is also telling a sincere love story, when Gatsby was undermining a love story. A number of critics have alleged that the fault of this film is that old tired trope of “style over substance,” but that’s crap. Even if Baz Luhrmann’s style never hits the right register for Fitzgerald, the problem is his calibration of the (quite) abundant substance.

Bluntly (and with apologies for the cliche), Luhrmann doesn’t know the music, but he certainly knows the words. The aforementioned films, most particularly The Shining (detested by author Stephen King), effectively built atop their source material to become  richly fascinating independent organisms, yet Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby refuses to free itself. The writing is literally scrawled out for us and several passages are spoken with Tobey Maguire’s sludgy narration as Nick Carraway — ironic, because Fitzgerald’s Gatsby could be interpreted as a story about the insufficiency of words, which we use to capture lost time in a script (Daisy must repeat Gatsby’s dictated words to Tom: I never loved you). The structure, even repeated flashbacks, is scrupulously in accord with Fitzgerald’s eight chapter chronology. Luhrmann fetishizes Fitzgerald’s particular details, such as the curtains at the Buchanan residence which blow through the room “like pale flags twisting…toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea,” while literalizing others, like when Nick says that he’s both inside and outside of the decadent world of New York, looking out over the city with the camera falling onto him looking up from the street. Luhrmann throws in most of the plot points, even some details and dialogue from other Fitzgerald stuff (such as “The Crack-Up,” selected letters, biographical data, and Gatsby‘s inferior early draft, Trimalchio) but he fudges with the nuances in between the incidents. It can perhaps be defended then as a dazzling auteur statement, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, but it’s rather infuriating when you consider how the filmmaker panders for an audience that indulges in blindness and illusion (and yet again — a postmodern reading here justifies this Gatsby entry, what with its 3D cinematography and the motifs of seeing and blindness taken from the book, even including Jack White’s cover of U2′s “Love is Blindness”).

Luhrmann’s made a Gatsby that’s more palatable for audiences, his renowned (or infamous) PG-13 Ken Russellfied visual audaciousness hushed by textual cowardice. The Great Gatsby becomes a Moulin Rouge! tempered love story, a big city tragedy with East Coast decadence doubling for the TMZ Kardashian madness of the 21st century where we’re pretty sure who to root for. The full story, framed by the original device of the now morbidly alcoholic and depressed Carraway writing his reminiscences of 1922 at a sanitarium months after the 1929 crash, warmly blankets the wounds of a crippled and hungover nation after its expired Gilded Age.  The titular Gatsby here is indeed, as the final moments emphasize, great — and not “great.” What would originally conclude with a hushed death rattle of wasted melancholic futility before the future, where longing leads nowhere, is now reverent and consoling.

The problems of the novel — the amoral character of Daisy, the ambivalent presence of Henry Gatz and Gatsby’s relationship to his origins, the symbiotic relevance of George and Myrtle Wilson in relation to the question of marrying for love, Nick’s questionable sexuality and how his adoration of Gatsby might be, as Tom Buchanan tells him, based on the same kind of blindness that’s trapped everyone else in the narrative — are worked out for us or ignored.

In the film, the love between Gatsby and Daisy is total and mutual, without her apathy, privilege, or his resentment that flows between the tenders of his affection. In truth, Gatsby doesn’t simply want to love Daisy, but he wants to control her, an adoring and adored puppet of flesh and blood representative of a world that’s been denied him because of his station. He lied to seduce her initially, and he schemed his way with a variety of other fronts to “earn” her as a wealthy man. There’s a lot of contempt for the object of desire in The Great Gatsby, and one might remember that Fitzgerald wrote it while nursing wounded pride, recently discovering his wife Zelda was having an affair with an aviator (he also apparently called his first love, Ginevra King, the primary influence for Daisy’s character, “an unprintable verbal insult” when they met again).  “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby says to Nick about Daisy in the novel, something carefully omitted by Luhrmann, a director who wants his (mostly) female audience to identify with her, when in fact her privilege makes her something of another species from the worry-laden lives of Gatsby and Nick — and us.

In the novel, Nick deducts that Daisy is turned off by Gatsby’s West Egg party with the wild outsiders who come without invitation (“She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village–appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand”). Not so in the film. Nick also believes that she’s responsible for Gatsby laying off his servants (“So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes”). Again, this trait which would make us feel differently about her is left alone. And while we know that it’s her behind the wheel, crashing Gatsby’s yellow car into Myrtle, not only does Luhrmann’s Gatsby plan on taking the fall, but he also verbally says in the film repeatedly, “It was my fault.” Luhrmann cuts to a flashback of the accident and amidst the confusion of the wheel, with Gatsby grabbing it away from Daisy at the crucial moment, we are invited to believe him. Luhrmann also gives her the benefit of the doubt that she’d be tempted to call Gatsby after the accident.  No longer does she show off her daughter Pammy as a plaything who is handled by silent servants, but Daisy attends to the child in her closing moments, carefully preparing Pammy for a journey the Buchanans will take. Luhrmann’s Daisy gets a free pass, and I call total bullshit.

The aspirant glory of the Green Light loses its magic for Gatsby when it appears he’s won Daisy back while Daisy, though not happy with Tom Buchanan, isn’t unhappy. She’s contented enough and electively vapid, devoid of responsibilities while suffering Tom’s infidelities. Her lack of concern for her daughter, who emerges as a plaything to show off to Gatsby, demonstrates a present weightlessness. Time isn’t a burden for her. The Daisy Gatsby loves is in those fading words and promises in Louisville, five years before, a ghost roaming the West alongside the diametrically opposed ghosts of the rejected father, Henry Gatz, in North Dakota and Minnesota. It’s a faint echo that tantalizes while refusing to materialize into clarity.

All this kind of makes me wish that, with Luhrmann’s pop soundtrack sensibilities, the filmmaker would have included Jarvis Cocker and Pulp’s “Common People” from the Different Class album, a song about a privileged girl who wants to walk with the bohemians and stragglers, but will never understand them. (I also can’t help but feel Arcade Fire’s Suburbs album, where the sprawl of youth becomes spoiled with passing time, would fit in better with Gatsby than Jay-Z, Fergie, Jack White and others on this soundtrack, but maybe that’s just my stupid taste). Class is more tribal than race, and just as there have been theories of Nick Carraway’s bisexuality, there are literary theories that Gatsby is black. I don’t necessarily believe it, but there is definitely a racial subtext in the book, beginning with Tom’s praises for eugenic pseudo-science which predicts the end of civilization with the ascendancy of African descendents, and images like the black individuals riding in a limo–driven by a white man. The implication is that anything is possible on this side of the world.

Later on at the Plaza Hotel, Tom relates a roughneck like Gatsby romancing Daisy to “intermarriage between black and white.” This is in the film, followed by some original dialogue where Tom differentiates Gatsby from everyone else in the room, based on his poverty, but Luhrmann omits something Jordan says after Tom’s insinuation: “We’re all white here.” It’s something she doesn’t have to say, obviously, or which the narrator Nick wouldn’t have to remember. But it’s there for a reason, and the irony of Jordan’s line – of which she’s probably unaware – is that for Fitzgerald, the rich are different from “us,” or as Warren Beatty points out in Bulworth (a film remembered this week because of political happenings in the Obama Administration), “Rich people have always stayed on top by dividing white people from colored people. But white people got more in common with colored people than they do with rich people.”  For a viewing audience, the world of the Valley of Ashes feels much more alien than the Buchanan residence. I’m also not sure how I feel about Luhrmann’s casting of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, which is partially a playful reference to deceiving fronts cutting across tribal boundaries, and has been admired by critics as a way of bypassing the perceived anti-Semitic stereotype Fitzgerald created in the novel, Wolfsheim being a stand-in for real-life gangster Arnold Rothstein (played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Boardwalk Empire and Michael Lerner in Eight Men Out).  But it also feels like another refusal of Luhrmann to confront the troubling aspects of Fitzgerald. Is Fitzgerald, who elsewhere seems so sensitive to racism in the book (two characters use the word “kike”: the intolerant Tom and decidedly unlikable Mrs. McKee), the anti-Semite, or is Nick? Or is Wolfsheim’s conspicuous Jewishness another tribal marker in the chaotic power-grab of Gilded Age New York, his illiteracy and barriers requiring him to use the “fine breeding” of Jay Gatsby as his front?

Making matters easier for us, Tom becomes a bigger jerk, less humanely drawn. Fitzgerald certainly doesn’t allot him much sympathy in the novel, but Tom is still unexpectedly grief-stricken when Myrtle is killed, and hurt when confronted with the possibility of Daisy never loving him. Such feeling isn’t afforded him in the film, certainly when the talented Joel Edgerton plays him like a cartoon. There’s a telling alteration in the story during Gatsby’s party, with Tom becoming entranced with a movie actress and following her inside Gatsby’s castle for some certain debauchery (earlier with Myrtle, he is quite loud and impolite with his lovemaking as Nick awkwardly sits and stares at the couple’s dog — in the book he’s more discrete). The scene is different in the novel, as a drunken and suspicious Tom stumbles apart from Daisy and Gatsby’s flirtations. It’s Daisy who has her eye on the actress, the only familiar face for her at the party, and instead of Tom salivating over her it’s the actress’ producer, whose gaze falls closer and closer on her, as if spellbound — and rendered ridiculous — by an obscure object of desire. It’s an image that would be so wonderful for a Gatsby film, reinforcing the story’s paradoxical themes of gazing and blindness, of moth-to-flame obsession with an ungraspable surface of beauty, like a celluloid screen gem or wealthy and beautiful person (Daisy to Gatsby, Tom to Myrtle). But no, obviously there’s still some ambivalence about Tom for Luhrmann, so he makes the hulking husband more of a douche.

And so, faded are complexity and ambiguity. The villain is made worse while the damsel in distress and her knight are made better. A token tip of the hat is given to expectation that the rich are assholes, while the devastating disparity between wealthy and poor remains unexplored. Our ideals of pure love (while it may be quashed by social mores) are validated and unquestioned.  Then there is an all-star cast, a pop soundtrack, the dynamic fast-moving rhythm, and clothes, clothes, clothes that set tabloid radio and TV talk shows afire with delight.  How are we not surprised that Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is adored by audiences and a solid hit in spite of its reviews?

It’s not that filmmakers can’t lick Gatsby. This new movie is well loved by some, and a commercial success — as was the listless and gauzy 1974 adaptation directed by Jack Clayton and starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Bruce Dern (who, despite his lack of physical similarity to the book’s Tom, gives an incredible performance that’s leaked into my subsequent readings of the book).  Sumptuously dressed and melodramatic, these two films aren’t Gatsby. They refuse to focus on the mystery of Gatsby and the distance of Fitzgerald, needing us to get close with Gatsby and Daisy through either lovely and romantic montages or scenes of awkward dialogue.  The filmmakers can justify this by citing Fitzgerald’s own dissatisfaction with the way he treats Gatsby too vaguely, and yet, if you read Trimalchio (which inspires the new Gatsby with a revealing scene between Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom), you see why the mystique of the final draft works.  Breaking through the walls to bring us closer to Gatsby, one wishes Luhrmann had completely reframed the story — which means taking it away from Nick Carraway. Luhrmann should have “betrayed the novel to be true to it,” as David Cronenberg repeatedly says of his adaptations, or as Milan Kundera simply told Philip Kaufman regarding the adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (another seemingly unadaptable book), “Eliminate.”

The truth is several filmmakers could probably give us the Gatsby Fitzgerald deserves, but if you look at my suggestions (Sofia Coppola, Terrence Malick, Terrence Davies, Andrew Dominik, David Gordon Green, Andrea Arnold, and considering the Before trilogy, particularly Before Midnight, Richard Linklater) it’s clear that — what I consider the appropriate sensibility anyway (excluding possibly Martin Scorsese, whose The Aviator with DiCaprio is a fantastic film about predestined apart-ness amidst the whirlwind of a luxurious in-crowd, so akin to Gatsby) — audiences wouldn’t bite and probably be turned off.

I also think of David Fincher’s most divisive of his recent films, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was deplored by many moviegoers and critics as overblown Oscar-bait courtesy of Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, humorously castigated on both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as a bore in December 2008 (meanwhile, both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been quite welcoming to Luhrmann’s Gatsby). Adapted from a Fitzgerald short story with which it has virtually no similarities other than the bare premise (Benjamin Button is born an old man and ages backwards), Fincher and Roth nevertheless were drawing from the author’s well, particularly Gatsby, the golden girl lead (Cate Blanchett) named Daisy, as the film is in tune with Gatsby’s desire to repeat the past.  Kent Jones writes about it, “Every second of Benjamin Button, every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect, is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.” He adds, “[It] is easy to imagine the film directed by someone else, anyone else apart from Fincher, and made into a poignant love story about two people who ‘meet in the middle,’ set against the backdrop of the American century. I’ve ready many descriptions of this phantom movie, Roth’s script as directed by Ron Howard or Nora Ephron. They are very far from the mysterious and troubling film Fincher has actually made.”

Fincher’s Button may have its flaws, but Jones is right about how it captures the passing of time, in addition to the “troubling” film Fincher has made. Like Fitzgerald, Fincher dresses up the film as an inspirational “poignant love story,” but reading the film closely reveals a journey toward entropy, about the omissions people make in their reminiscences and the lies they tell themselves in pursuit for an everlasting moment. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) moves into youth with the future, he throws off connection to the past. A masterly display of digital cinema, Fincher’s Button is about the digital, the posterboards of Citizen Soldiers and inspiration (“You can accomplish anything”) underwritten by the ghastly silence in the final images, a Hurricane swallowing the Blind Clockmaker (Elias Koteas) ‘s clock, alongside the the dissolved memories of Benjamin. As readers misinterpret Gatsby as a love story, so did viewers misinterpret the misanthropic Fincher’s film as inspirational woo-woo, labeling it a Forrest Gump retread.  His next film also seemed to cover Gatsby ground more effectively than what other Gatsby films have offered, as cyborg Mark Zuckerberg invents a virtual world after being rejected by a woman in The Social Network.

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Almost totally excised along with ambiguities about character is the memory of the “Middle West,” the haunting breeze of which gives the novel its wistful ache, a great tangible space that doubles for the prospects of a country and of a romance, though it’s empty with the echoes of what-could-have-been. “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” With that excision of space goes the sense of loss and longing, Luhrmann working on the more familiar and snazzy turf of the Big City, with which Luhrmann relies on a popular pastiche associated with Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. This Gatsby is more like one of those flapper parties local fashionistas organize than Fitzgerald’s novel. And in presenting us a party, Luhrmann also refuses to make us feel the downside of excess, like the incoherent drunks who people the novel, unable to walk or communicate, their resentments uninhibited. Luhrmann will give us “Owl Eyes,” the old man in Gatsby’s library, but he’s not the bewildered coot from the book, but a funny looking old man who wants to bathe us in the amazement of Gatsby: “He doesn’t exist,” he says in the film, while in the book “Owl Eyes” is overwhelmed by how this “theatrical production” is, in fact, real, as he inspects the volumes on the wall.

Behind the allure of decadent parties and modernity, though, is the Frontier, the hallowed thing around which the American Romanticism of Whitman and Emerson developed, or the river of Mark Twain, leading to a vast elsewhere of possibilities and freedom. With Gatsby, Fitzgerald not only prophesied the end of the time for which he was a sparkling representative (the Crash was four years after the novel’s publication), but, I think more importantly, he sees the end of that Frontier’s possibilities, the emptiness in a space that’s been conquered and canvassed by pilgrims who moved westward against midnight and exhausted themselves with dreaming before tidally curving back to the Eastern shores where they initially landed, or as Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway puts it so much better than I ever could, “I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither stood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The Great Gatsby is the death knell of American literary Romanticism.

The “green breast” the Dutch see parallels the Green Light Jay Gatsby associates with his much longed-for Daisy, a woman so disparate from his origins and temperament, yet the only person who can unlock his intimacy. Courting and making love to Daisy in Louisville is presented as a memory of religious significance, a consecration with the moon looking on in benediction, the woman compared to the “grail.” As a grail myth, we can wonder if Gatsby is the fool Parzival, suddenly conscious of himself and searching for the grail castle that’s disappeared from his view, or the Grail King Amfortas, who was overwhelmed with a dream of glory and triumph with the grail instead of humility. The grail is lost and, imprisoned in his own castle, he is maimed and permanently is discomfort, restless (Nick notes how Gatsby is always jittery, never at ease), the resultant world a “Waste Land” much like Fitzgerald’s “Valley of Ashes,” where George and Myrtle Wilson are used and forgotten — by the Buchanans, and by Baz Luhrmann. The rich display vicious negligence with the bodies and souls of others.  Romantic desire isn’t sentimental but amounts to corpulent selfishness and excesses of countless shirts, mistresses, servants, and opulence. The rapturous promise of new discoveries is married to some diabolical transgression. Fitzgerald’s epilogue reminds me of the prologue of Terrence Malick’s The New World, where the wide-eyed enthusiasm of Europeans and Native Americans at the Jamestown landing is scored to Wagner’s Das Rhinegold prelude, referencing the dwarf Albrecht’s theft of the Ring of Power, setting the Ring Cycle into motion, and soon later scores the recognition of love between John Smith and Pocahontas. It’s a dangerous and unquenchable love that can only exist in “the forest,” the magical Frontier. The toll of this enthusiasm will be, on a grand scale, thousands dead, and on an intimate one, broken hearts stirred to look both forward and back to a horizon that beckons silently.

The “green breast” is trampled upon and chewed up, and finds a gruesome parallel with Myrtle Wilson’s breast, “swinging loose like a flap.” A resident of the Waste Land, she also had aspirations for social climbing and was swept up in amorous feelings congruent to that goal.  Myrtle’s corpse is seen in the film, but the grotesque detail isn’t emphasized at all: yet it must be.  It’s another example of Luhrmann cowering to the challenge of Fitzgerald and to confront the corporeal reality of a suffering human being. Myrtle’s “mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.” The death visage recalls Nick’s thoughts after hearing Gatsby’s reminiscences of Louisville, where he’s “reminded of something–an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

The inability to fully articulate a feeling, a memory and longing, the failure of words (in such a well-written novel), connects to the novel’s unbearable ache, a paralyzing longing for something one can never have. The Great Gatsby isn’t simply Horatio Alger gone wrong, but is a wrenching siren song of restless hope writhing to its last breath and beat under the annihilation of hope, F. Scott Fitzgerald interrogating his own desires and appetites, much as he did in This Side of Paradise‘s Amory Blaine and would with Dick Diver in his more ambitious Tender is the Night. Gatsby and Dick Diver are Faustian figures, exposing a devil’s bargain etched into the rock of American dreams, played out in similar variations with Charles Foster Kane, the Corleone family, Noah Cross, and Daniel Plainview. Gatsby, surrounded by “child of God” references (for example, up to “his father’s business” much like Christ in Luke 2:49, the son of God having thrown off his biological parents), is also a Miltonic figure. He’s like the Satan who cannot abide his place in the scheme of heaven, and is resolute in committed and absurd defiance. The American Paradise is lost, and in lieu of a Frontier the American Dreamer (Gatsby, Kane, Plainview — or how about Jack Torrence?) encloses himself hermetically in a self-made compound, submitting to ungraspable dreams and staring out of a magic play-set castle. Out of space, they try to buy time, or “The future!” as Noah Cross puts it to Jake Gittes in Chinatown. Laced in with the dream is dismemberment. The rich don’t only silence the poor, but what Fitzgerald observes between disparate worlds is utter destruction, rapacious, repugnant, and dismembering: literally cutting off the fleshy Myrtle’s organ of enticement.

A defense thrown about for the film is that The Great Gatsby isn’t simply an adaptation, but is Gatsby himself, drawn up of the same imagination, hope, and enthusiasm he’s said to represent. The film’s best scene, the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, hints that Luhrmann has this in mind when Gatsby asks Nick of the abundant flowers he’s brought over the occasion, “It isn’t too much, is it?” The director is winking, asking us the same question. The film is as garishly affective and clothed as Jay Gatsby, and it’s true that with its opening moments as the green light reaches out to us in 3D that I felt stirred by the associations Fitzgerald’s novel has cemented into my mind over several readings of the book.  When Lana Del Rey’s theme song (which I admit, I kind of guiltily like) asks “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” I want to think it’s Gatsby asking, and not, as would be supposed, Daisy. His floating corpse is a blatant allusion to William Holden’s in Sunset Blvd, the dead narrating his story in the reflective palace of movie excess, quashed hopes, and faded glamor.

The film then is a glorification of weightlessness, an evasion from its source material as Jay Gatsby runs from James Gatz. Maybe that’s why Daisy comes off so well here, and Tom, his nemesis, so bad. Luhrmann is a filmmaker whose scenarios are hidden in theatrical curtains and art: the ballroom dancing of Strictly Ballroom, the modern stage of a television set that opens William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, the cabaret and written reminiscence of the poet in Moulin Rouge!, and The Wizard of Oz finding correlation with aboriginal Dreamtime and Rainbow Serpent mythology in Australia: love and war are safely enclosed in the filmmaker’s egg, his tools shamelessly on display. The Great Gatsby reminded me particularly of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of Dracula, a deliciously over-the-top extravaganza also in love with its artifice; interestingly, Luhrmann has said Coppola — who is credited as adapting the 1974 film — advised him on how to approach writing the Gatsby script.

The weightlessness, though, is aggravating when we consider Gatsby and Gatsby‘s origins, his quest to reclaim the past and fading away as Louisville drifts away into the prairie night from his train view, time and love moving quickly away as forgetfulness clouds the horizon. Luhrmann quotes most of Fitzgerald’s concluding words, “And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him–” but then he cuts the following passage, “–somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

Hope relies on the memory of something hoped for. Luhrmann’s sin is to remove that memory, those dark fields of the republic that bore James Gatz, a shape shifter not unlike Robert Zimmerman, and with the filmmaker’s omissions and emphasis on delight, his film can’t be defended as being “Gatsby.” The obsession he’s tried to dramatize is as thin as the paper on which the depressed Nick writes in the picture. The German author Thomas Mann, whose renderings of hopeless longing were so similar to Fitzgerald’s (The Magic Mountain was published within a year of Gatsby), had his bourgeois engineer Hans Castorp pursue the cat-eyed Clavdia Chaucat while saying “Love is an adventure in evil,” later observing in Joseph and His Brothers, “Too much evidence goes to show that [man] is headed straight toward ecstasy and ruin — and thanks nobody who holds him back.”   The haunting “disembodied face” that “floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” entreating the lover Gatsby to a Danse Macabre is now just a beautiful love story and unboring melodrama — and so the fascination and danger of desire isn’t there.

Post-Human: David Fincher's "The Social Network"

Considering that so many people use Facebook as a means for running discussions, it's interesting to think about how when the subject of conversation is "Facebook" and what it represents, we can perhaps be led beyond concrete topics such as social networking, the internet, tagging photos and the like, and into the abstract philosophical realm of human identity in the new millennium, involving our own essential human natures and its possible plasticity, love and sex, venality and animosity, and the colossal impact of evolving technology which gradually encapsulates our human-ness. Facebook is then about much more than Facebook; Facebook is a new entity, a concept signifying something immensely important, directly related to and working in conjunction with "the cause our souls" as flesh and blood creatures of Nature. It goes far beyond its basic function, its utility.

Much has been made about how David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network, a motion picture dramatizing the true-life events surrounding the inception, construction, and turmoils of the thriving online networking site Facebook, is an “era-defining” film, a true zeitgeist story about the modern age and how cyberspace has become ubiquitous. This is a film that works because it goes beyond the contours of true-life dramatization, the concrete details of the how and the what and the why, and is more intent on seeking how the post-human age it documents is weirdly alien to our own sense of the present. The Social Network is not merely a true life reflection, but is the grand fulfillment of Information Age Cinema, a genre born out of science fiction that became of increasing importance with the development of cyberpunk literature and films like Blade Runner in the 1980s, in addition to the works of philosophers like Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. It has accelerated to reflect the constant change of technological gadgets and media networks in the 1990s, as the world was becoming increasingly photographed, digitized, and stored on file. Human beings are becoming more like cyborgs, their brains adapting to and becoming dependent on the technologies nursing them from infancy and medicating them through life: as Fassbinder titled it in his own 1970s dystopian prediction, the world is on a wire.

This is a literary/cinematic perspective that is fascinated with the brave new world of compressed geography and time, just as it is weary of the increasing dependence on gadgets and cyberspace, which work to reduce the development of a reflective identity and ability to think abstractly. It is a consequently Romantic genre, where Nature and raw base emotions are struggling with the unceasing rate of change that grays the world with monitors, lasers, replicated digitized codes, and mass consumption. In my own criticism it has been a primary focus, as the filmmakers who have abounded and thrived around it may be creating out of either deliberateness, or an unconscious reflection of the real world. But the motifs are recurring enough that they may warrant more than the title of Interpretive Fallacy on my part. Because Facebook has become an abstraction, so too can its story, in the hands of perceptive artists like Fincher and Sorkin, become poetic, extending far beyond docudrama.

The world of The Social Network is a world moving too fast into the new frontier, the Internet. In the 1980s, William Gibson's Neuromancer invented the term "cyberspace" as the domain of addicted individuals in a mid-21^st century where the apocalypse never got around to happening; by the 21^st century, Gibson's novels had their setting shifted away from the Future and into the present, specifically the years before the books were published. "The Future is Now," Gibson has stated. It’s just not evenly distributed. As technology provokes most social and cultural change, because of things like the Internet, it could be argued that any serious work of art that seeks to deal with the present human condition is, oddly enough, science fiction. The terrain of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, or Aldous Huxley, brave new worlds or panoptical dystopias, where we have become roboticized and wired, is not unlike the Kingdom of Heaven described in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: it is right before us and men do not see it. The Social Network, and what more Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), is as stirring and direct a meditation on the Post Human condition of a contemporary science fiction landscape as has ever been made. As played by Eisenberg, Zuckerberg is such a haunting cinematic creation because he is something other than human. With his hard stare, puckered-in lower lip, and laser-like recitations of dialogue, Zuckerberg in this film (as distinct from real life) is an odd mixture of Jay Gatsby and the HAL-9000 computer from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, given a human body and speech upgrade, costumed with "a hoodie and fuck-you flip flops." And like Kubrick's HAL, when his steely veneer is betrayed by his insecurities – paradoxically all too human insecurities – he is driven to not only combat but to terminate his competition and expand his power. The heart of the whole film, its themes and exhortations, is contained in its opening scene.

You do not have to be a lazy, uncritical, lethargic, unprepared, and popcorn-fisted moviegoer to feel left behind by the dazzling blink-and-you-miss-it speed of The Social Network's blurry opening scene, where the words fly so fast that the construction of the scenario on the viewer's interpretive part may be necessarily incomplete. Set in a Harvard bar, The Thirsty Scholar, with the background beats of The White Stripes' Elephant album placing us directly in the autumn of 2003, this opening would seem to be a simple enough exchange between two students on a date, trying to figure out their lives, culminating in the girl dumping the guy. But the guy talks so fast, arranging so many concepts as his words fly like bullets, that we, like the girl, fall behind him and want him to slow down and clear things up. It's even more maddening considering that the speed of his speech is an insult to the viewer's intelligence quotient, our ability to retain a plethora of information. He is, after all, discussing intelligence.

This is masterful filmmaking, containing an excellence that will be replicated over the subsequent two hours just as it has the kernels for ideas that will be further dealt with over the course of time. It's quite extraordinary, not only how it's written as an exchange of fast, witty dialogue, but how it resonates with the viewer forced to hurry his mind to keep up. Within this opening discussion between Zuckerberg and his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), the backbeat of their stammering words reveals the heart of the entire movie. Fincher claims to have executed 99 takes of the scene, which does not only testify to his already notorious perfectionism, but also implies the scene's crucial importance in the anatomical structure of The Social Network as a whole.

The question that opens the scene is, "How do you distinguish yourself in an environment where everyone else is a genius?" Again, the setting is Harvard, the most elite of American schools, and yet to further warp a mid-American viewer's mind, Zuckerberg has the challenging anxiety of realizing that he still does not amount to something distinct unless he is able to make his mark in the exclusive pools of an already very exclusive East Coast Ivy League environment. Even the success and money that being a smart Harvard graduate promises doesn't compare to the "Coolness" quotient. Zuckerberg voices to Erica his goal to get into the best clubs and best inner circles of Harvard, along with his afterthought of how he's going to take her, the girl he's dating, with him, introducing her to the best people. But he becomes defensive when she asks him, "What's the easiest one to get into?" This is an insult to him being that it indicates he could only possibly get into the "easiest" exclusive club. He's more strangely alert when she insinuates that she is, in general, attracted to men who "row crew," athletes who seem to easily be in such clubs. She insists that it's harmless. Such attraction is general, the same way that women find cowboys attractive.

"You always say two things at once," she tells him, complaining that she can't decide which thing to focus on. "Dating you is like dating a stairmaster." This is a stinging piece of dialogue, being that Zuckerberg is being compared to a machine, and indeed Eisenberg's performance, again, reinforces this notion. He has a deliberate affectation to his speech and his posture that is not natural. It feels robotic. "I'm not speaking in code," she insists while he interrogates her opinions, which he is processing in his head as affronts to his self-esteem. Mark Zuckerberg, this scene establishes immediately, is a post-human individual, but he's also very class and gender conscious. The circumscriptions of his own being, as a geek with a beautiful girl, lead him to interpret the world around him at its most basic utility, very contrary to the humanistic Erica. As Zuckerberg notes, the only reason the two of them can slip into The Thirsty Scholar and drink is "because you slept with the door guy." It's not an insult to her that Zuckerberg is making, as if to say that Erica's a slut. Rather it’s the logic: it would only make sense to him that the relationship dynamics that would lead a doorman to allow a beautiful girl and her date into a bar is that sexual exchange is involved. Zuckerberg, as we will learn, is not foolish for thinking this. The Social Network has a very Freudian attitude about human beings, in how they approach other humans, and how they approach technology. The root, beneath every form of action, every piece of functionality, is sexual. "I didn't sleep with him," angrily snaps Erica. "He's a friend. His name is Bob." The counter humanistic position of nuance, that undercuts base utility, is again assumed by Erica, where true symbolic friendships can exist – and thereby an exchange of allowing an underage friend into a bar can happen – and the elements that Zuckerberg can only see as functional bits (people involved in exchanges) have names, identities, like "Bob."

Just after Zuckerberg lays out his plans for breaking into the exclusive world of row-crews and Finals Clubs, Erica drops a bomb on him. She tells him that they are no longer dating. "Is this real?" he asks, as if there were possibly something cryptic behind her decision. But the break-up is not a simulation. It's a sharp thorn in Mark's plans and a reminder that he may not be good enough – like a "cowboy row-crew" frat guy, physically as well as mentally blessed – in bagging a girl like Erica. He insults her intelligence and her history, talking down her Boston University education (as opposed to Harvard). She leaves him alone, pathetic, sunken, defeated, adding that it's not his geekiness that staves off women, which would justify a degree of spite. Rather, "it's because you're an asshole."

With the rejection, the story and Zuckerberg's laser-focus determination – derided by Erica as an obsession, though he insists he's just motivated – begins. Fincher cuts to Zuckerberg leaving The Thirsty Scholar, head down in the nocturnal autumn air of a busy Tuesday college town night. The electronic programming of Trent Renzor and Atticus Ross' score, a piano's emotional chords on what sounds like a sonic bed of needles, textures the credit sequence, and Fincher's amazing deep focus high-definition digital camera lens captures the immensity of a loud city of restless youth under a purple sky, contrasting with the insular presence of Zuckerberg, heading into the Kirkland House dormitory. Inside, he pops open a Beck's, goes to his Sony Vaio laptop, and blogs his grief.

"Erica Albright's a bitch," he spills his thoughts onto the keyboard, private matters published on the internet's hyperreal ink that instantly becomes public. He denigrates her brassiere size, and proceeds to launch into every possible weak attribute, such as is often the case with the dumped. He also mentions an idea he had, of taking digital photographs of girls and placing them next to images of farm animals, so that the two groups may be compared side by side. He resists this tempting and deliberately offensive prank, and instead hacks into the house accounts of every dormitory, constructing a website from the Harvard facebooks. He sets the photographs of the girls against each other – he calls it "Facemesh" – so that people who get access to the site can choose who is more attractive, clicking to either the right or left.

Zuckerberg's ingenuity gets ammunition from his spite, and his Geek Otherness. He's green with envy, and so his razor sharp counter offenses of contempt are symbolized by how he often seems to be holding, for no spoken reason, a green dart. This sequence, no less brilliantly executed than the opening scene, details Zuckerberg's insurgency against a world that has literally just rejected him – the world of beautiful women, who are so quick to be objectified by the successful in-groups of the Final House fraternities. Zuckerberg is so flourishing in his retaliation that he crashes Harvard's system, which lands him a six-month academic probation and instant infamy in The Harvard Crimson. He is despised as a misogynist by all the college women, rather than an ingenious and precocious troublemaker. A female classmate passes him a note – "u dick" – during a computer science class, his mindset synonymous with the worst kind of chauvinism.

But this sequence of events, given how Fincher constructs it, is not so simple. We pass judgment on Zuckerberg's revenge via the electronic immortality of the web, but Fincher cross-cuts Zuckerberg's hacking with the frat parties occurring at the same time. Beautiful women are bused in, lined up, and given special care as the fraternity brothers, holding positions for the oldest and most esteemed conglomerations of students at Harvard, wait eagerly to feed. The women are supplied booze, pills, and end up table-dancing in their lingerie. The surrounding men toast and salivate, like swine at a trough. These are the Beautiful People of the highly exclusive clubs, the pillars of the society from whence our leaders emerge. And because everyone seems to have a fine time at such debaucheries, though we may understand how someone may see them as decadent, we must also understand why a young man like Zuckerberg would be envious of them and eager to join with their comforts and possibilities. The film is here remarking a definite moral equivalency of the decadence in a real space, and decadence in cyberspace. One is something that happens every Friday night for all to see, and the other is covert on a computer; one has its roots in the most heralded houses at Harvard, and the other has its formula on a blog called "Zuckonit." Both are, ironically, saying the same thing as far as asserting masculinity and the objectification of women. It would seem that Mark Zuckerberg's Facemesh and his farm animals quip is perversely honest in its satire, set alongside the socially accepted behavior of the frats. Much has been made in pop cultural commentaries of The Social Network's sexism. What any careful analytical viewer realizes by examining the opening sequences is that The Social Network is hardly sexist, but is focusing on a culture that is sexist, and simultaneously blind to its sexism; just as it is classist, and not acknowledging, in the 21^st century of "great progress," the immense gaps in between rich and poor. The Social Network is scathingly telling us, just as Zuckerberg is with his stunt, "You believe in progress? You think the world has changed? Think again."

We are introduced to Mark's accomplice and best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who interrupts Mark as he's working out Facemesh. "I heard Erica broke up with you." "How'd you know that?" "You blogged about it." Information travels fast, and not from person to person, but from screen to person. "I need you," Zuckerberg says. "I'm here for you, man," Eduardo responds with humane warmth, and whether it's a gesture of sincere friendship or simply the obligatory performance of a friend, it doesn't matter when the context is immediately undercut by Zuckerberg's response. "I need your algorithm," referring to an algorithm that will apparently allow Zuckerberg to make Facemesh work. Again, the human means nothing to Mark. Friendship is simply about utility, functionalism. That's how he processes, and he is always processing. It doesn't really make any functional sense for Eduardo to be friends with Mark. Mark uses Eduardo for money, offers no emotional warmth in return, and ultimately gets all the women on campus to hate him, and by extension, keep women away from Eduardo (what are friends for anyway?)

Though it makes him infamous, Mark's prank does something in his favor. It gets the attention of three members of an exclusive House: Divya Narenda (Max Minghella), and the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler (both played by Armie Hammer), who are Harvard royalty, and who, we learn, row crew. The Winklevosses and Divya want to create an exclusive Harvard-only social network, and in Zuckerberg they see a programmer able to "write the code" for them, completing their idea and making it a reality. Zuckerberg asks them how this idea is different from other social networks, like Friendster and Myspace. "This is exclusive," the twins answer. And the reason for exclusivity is simple: again, it boils down to sex. Girls want to date Harvard guys. Zuckerberg says that he'll help and keep in touch. But we infer, from circumstances like Mark's possible envy of Eduardo's prospect of getting "punched" (auditioned) for the Phoenix House, or the fact that the Winklevosses can bring Mark into their house, "but not past the bike room," in addition to the legal scenes that frame the story, that Mark Zuckerberg has other plans. He puts off meeting the Winklevosses for weeks while he constructs "The Facebook" on his own, with Eduardo's financing, and thus making Eduardo Chief Financial Officer. Eduardo reflects on the brilliance of the Facebook. "In a world where social structure is everything, this was the thing."

But Zuckerberg, green dart in hand, needs one ingredient to make it work. He is almost catatonic in his cluelessness, until one of his programmer friends, Dustin Moskovitz (Joseph Mazzello), asks if Mark knows if one of his Art History classmates is seeing anybody. Mark has his eureka moment. The Facebook, like any social network, particularly an exclusive one, is all about getting laid. The profile page is given the ingredient of "Relationship Status." The Facebook goes live, or "It's alive," so to speak in the parlance of Frankenstein and other mad scientist myths.

And like Frankenstein, the creation brings detrimental effects with it. The Winklevosses, stunned that Zuckerberg, who had sent them cooperative emails since their first meeting, would lie to their faces (or email accounts) and steal their idea, have their lawyer send a Cease and Desist letter. Eduardo sees it ten days later, and asks why Mark never showed it to him. But Mark Zuckerberg is only capable of concrete thinking: "Because it was addressed to me." Abstractions don't matter to him, and after all, this is a wise legal defense. Ideas are ephemeral, but facts are concrete. The machine, Mark Zuckerberg, cannot believe the Winklevosses would think their idea – "Match.com for Harvard guys" – is his "The Facebook." Because the "code" is completely Mark's own. And that's all that matters to him, the concrete one-dimensional literalization of a thing. "Is any of the code in Facebook yours?" he asks them during a legal proceeding, insisting that he is the only person in the room with the intelligence to create Facebook. Zuckerberg cannot process the Winklevosses' claim: access denied, the file cannot be read or downloaded.

Ideas and Code – the abstract versus the concrete – then becomes a pertinent issue of discussion both regarding the meaning and social presence of The Social Network. For though the movie is perhaps more metaphor than fact – like any play by Shakespeare, the Bible, or Herodotus – critics of the film dismiss it outright because of how it strays from fact (e.g., the Zuckerberg of the film is not the Zuckerberg of real life). People cannot process the movie because its ideas and metaphors – the abstract quality – are different from the code of the literal, of the Real. But the film is only too aware of this irony. For one thing, it's Kane/Rashoman-like structure, revealing conflicting viewpoints of what happened and didn't happen, implies that what we the viewer saw in the first scene was simply the sworn written testimony of Erica Albright, to which Zuckerberg says, upon being told that it was spoken by Erica under oath, "Well, I guess that's the first time in history somebody ever lied under oath." There is also a scene involving Eduardo's fraternity prospect, where the nominees must name the three lies tied to the statue of the university's founder, John Harvard: the statue says 1638, but the school was founded in 1636; Harvard didn't found the school; and the statue is not of the actual John Harvard, but of a friend of the sculptor. This is to say that the highest center of American learning acknowledges how facts intrude on the poetry of myth. Zuckerberg does have a point in his defense of how he couldn't have stolen the idea for Facebook, because the code is his; but the lumpy abstraction of the idea, in addition to the inceptory paths and lines of communication, might make it hard for an abstract thinker not to believe that Zuckerberg owes some acknowledgment to others, in addition to some money. The Social Network, like any examination of real historical personages, particularly during a televisual internet era when everything is recorded, dwells in the abstract realm of ideas more than concrete facts, as it should. This is how human consciousness, at its best, works. As shared, metaphorical, and empathetic, as opposed to the linear, sociopathic, one dimensional brilliance of a machine, which some scientists tell us the internet is molding our minds to follow, thus compromising the depth of our familiar human identity.

The haunting science fiction quality of the significance of Facebook is revealed during his second scene with Erica. His success with the Facebook encourages a couple of fellow undergrads to approach Eduardo during a Bill Gates lecture. The girls take Mark and Eduardo into a bar restroom for sexual activity. Fincher gives the whole moment Eduardo's subjectivity, but disallows any audience identification with Mark, whom we hear, quite creepily, laugh as we see his pants fall from a floor-level angle. Eduardo too seems to be unnerved by the sexuality of his friend, because, after all, Zuckerberg is strangely sexless, just as he seems rootless (the only mention of family is in an email the Winklevosses read, where Mark says he can't see them because his parents are visiting, though this is surely a lie).

With his Asian American groupies nearby, Mark is struck then when he sees Erica sitting in happy company with her friends at the bar. He approaches and wants to talk to her, alone, privately. But she rebuffs him, rejecting him again, saying that it would be "rude" for her to leave her friends. She calls him out on comparing women to farm animals, on denigrating her physical appearance, on the sexism of Facemesh, and adds that the Internet is not written in pencil, "but in ink." He tries to explain himself, and maybe he would if they could speak privately. Maybe his new success at Harvard, he feels, has earned him the trophy of Erica Albright. Or maybe he sincerely wants to apologize. But she refuses, and tells him dismissively, "Good luck with your video game," insulting his entire class of character, once again so as to differentiate his geekiness from the Cowboy Row-Crew crowd of physically fit men that typically capture women’s interest.

Eduardo, the humanist, believes that Mark has apologized and pats him on the back. But Zuckerberg, like so many science fiction villains of moviedom's past, determinedly looks away and says, "We need to expand!" He marches out. The Entity, the Facebook, grows, moving out of Harvard and to other East Coast schools, but also to one school on the West Coast. The reason is to get the attention of another neuromancing online genius, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), creator of Napster.

We first see Parker waking up after what must have been an unequivocally agreeable evening, as a girl whom he barely knows climbs off of him and heads to the bathroom in skimpy tight boy-shorts. She turns around to playfully accost him – he probably doesn't even remember her name, for instance. On the contrary, he does, as well as details about her family and education. She asks about his major and occupation, but he answers that he doesn't have one – he's not even a student. He's a "broke entrepreneur," which she interprets as "unemployed." "No, I'm an entrepreneur." "In what?" He tells her that he created a free music download website. "You mean like Napster?" "I mean exactly like Napster." "What do you mean exactly like Napster?" "I created Napster." "Sean Parker?"

Indeed, he is Sean Parker, infamous hacker extraordinaire, creator of Napster, the free music download website that was so immensely popular at the turn of the new millennium that it changed the music business, driving it further towards digitalization in addition to, Parker adds, leading to his being sued by every artist who ever attended the Grammys, a line wryly delivered by Timberlake, being that he was exactly the kind of industry pop star that was in opposition to Napster (his then-girlfriend Britney Spears was one of the loudest opponents). Parker resigned from fighting the companies and is broke, but as evidenced by his behavior and the way those around him still hold him in veneration, he still holds large capital in Coolness. His introductory scene continues the sexist stance towards women in the film, with a slight twist. Though the attitude of the girl, Amy, is that she is the one who has been objectified by Parker, it turns out that she's the one who doesn't know his name, or anything about him, and upon learning who he is, she says, "I slept with Sean Parker?" as if she has bagged her own trophy for the evening. Such an attitude mirrors the girls eager to get into the Harvard parties, and is why Zuckerberg, automaton processor of human emotions and desires, believes that Erica would be warmed to hear that he would bring her with him to the exclusive parties once he got in them.

Parker discovers "the Facebook" on Amy's laptop, and immediately sees something of which he wants a piece. He meets with Mark and Eduardo, accompanied by their girlfriends (who seem to be already friendly with Parker), at a fancy New York City restaurant, where he charms them with drinks and wit. They discuss the future of the Facebook, namely whether Mark should allow advertisers on the site yet, which Eduardo wants because of the profit.

But advertising, Parker tells them, isn't cool. But the Facebook is. And the Facebook is growing. "A million dollars isn't cool," Parker says. What is cool is a billion. He knows the evolution of Cool, and how it pays off in the long run, just as he manipulates his own Coolness to tap dance on top of the energy of the forecasted brave new world of the 21^st century, broke but still able to buy rounds of Appletinis for underage coeds, winking at the Help while doing it. He also knows that more people will embrace the alternative digital avatars of a hyperlife and step onto the stage of the great public domain of the Facebook. "Private behavior is part of a time gone by," he soothsays to his disciples. He then adds the most important advice Zuckerberg will get. "Drop the 'the.' Just 'Facebook'."

Mark next encounters Parker in California. Zuckerberg is spending the summer in a house rented by Eduardo, building Facebook with Dustin Moskowitz and other interns. Parker takes Zuckerberg to a loud electronic music dance club where they sit on a balcony overlooking the frenzy of an enthralled and gyrating dance floor. This is another magnificently conceived scene, as Fincher consciously chooses not to hush the volume of the electronic music that swallows most of the words uttered in the dialogue between Mark and Sean. The structure of the scene acts metaphorically, reflecting the attitude of the movie, where human connectivity and the exchange of language are mostly absorbed in the growing technological noise of the Information Age. But we can make out enough to understand what is happening: Mark asks about Parker's familiar looking date. Parker begins a story about the founding of Victoria's Secret, which began because a man wanted to buy lingerie for his wife, but was embarrassed to go into a department store. A small catalog company, Victoria's Secret, was then born, and this newly successful entrepreneur sold the company off for $4 million. The name Victoria's Secret proceeded to grow into a multi-hundred million dollar industry; the founder, meanwhile, ends up jumping off a bridge. "Is that a parable?" Mark asks. "My date's a Victoria's Secret model," answers Sean, bringing the story back down to earth. "That's where you've probably seen her." Parker then says that he was driven to create Napster out of a similar motive. He desired a girl in high school, but she was dating the captain of the football team. He vowed that he would do something that would impress her, and enable him to flip the bird to all of the erstwhile successful men who had been running the universe. He immediately created Napster and changed the world, and now has everything he ever wanted. Sean then gives Mark a kind of motivational speech on how Facebook should grow, and how $1 billion is on the horizon for him. "Do you ever think about that girl?" Mark asks, as if he had been stuck on that subject throughout the whole of Sean's spiel. Parker shrugs that off as not being the point.

But that is the point. Through this marriage of mass technology and undulating female sex objects, like pearl before swine, whether at a dance club, a Victoria's Secret online catalog, or Facebook, the movie is stating again and again that the most earth shattering and seemingly advanced public concoctions are conceived and born out of the most private longings of our nature as procreating social organisms. As romance itself is a metaphor for sex, so associatively are the sentiments of art and then ultimately the development of organizations, which seize upon and exploit these same basic longings, be it in the construction of a brassiere, or a friend request on Facebook. But what gets increasingly lost in the noise, like words in the booming fuzz of techno beats, is the poetry, the humanistic Romantic core that would make it worthwhile, the artful construction of the Lie. We also see Mark's feelings become transparent here, revelatory of how deeply affected this automaton of a character was by Erica's rejections.

The disintegrating relationship between Eduardo and Mark is the key conflict of the film's last act, and the most pronounced irony, being that Facebook's social network is all about friendship. But they are virtual friendships, digital friendships, electronically coded instead of interpersonal. Eduardo, the human face in Facebook's hierarchy, suffers the most because Mark essentially lies to his face, as opposed to lying to an email account, like he does with the Winklevosses. As Sean and Mark build Facebook, Eduardo is neglected and kept out of the loop; he's abandoned at the airport, and his 30+% of stock shares are dwindled down to .03%, allowing new stockholders to buy in. Mark's excuse early on, as Eduardo berates him for not picking him up at the airport, is that the corporation, this Entity, Facebook, is growing. "It's moving fast, faster than we ever thought it would." Mark had just spent 36 hours coding non-stop, further reinforcing the design of his character as something more machine than human. It's the cold focus of Mark and Sean, completely without reflection yet fermented with cunning and strategy, that perhaps earns them the share of Facebook that is negated from the cautious Eduardo, whose heart, to be honest, does not seem to be as invested in the organization (though it's been fully funded thus far by his money). The employees of Facebook are all about functionalism, just as Eduardo's friendship to Mark is simply, as we remember from the beginning, about utility. Facebook's programmers are indeed forbidden to be human: "He can't hear you," Mark says of an intern. "He's coding." When Moskovitz hears the doorbell ring as he's programming, Parker tells him that he can't answer the door, "because you're coding." Eduardo is the moral human link in the apparatus, and thus must be squeezed out. He's not digital enough, mechanical enough. Even his marker of sexuality eschews the Information Age's digital binaries. His girlfriend yells at him, "Your relationship status says 'single'! Is it so you can fool around with the Silicon Valley sluts?!" He honestly never thought about changing his "Relationship Status" on his profile, because his profile isn't him, he's him, and he doesn't have to remind himself with technology that he's in a relationship. After all, in the real world, "those Silicon Valley sluts don't care what your relationship status is." He understands human behavior is more nuanced.

Yet in a digital landscape of computing, nothing is nuanced. Indeed, to print something in media means to make it fact – something understood by Zuckerberg, a misogynist "dick" because of Facemesh and The Harvard Crimson’s reporting. Similarly, the Crimson publishes a story on Eduardo, because as part of his Phoenix training he had to watch a chicken for a week, and ended up feeding the chicken cafeteria food that turned out to be chicken. He's guilty of animal cruelty in the eyes of society. "This is not good for us," Zuckerberg says. Parker too becomes a liability, and perhaps voluntarily parts company because of it (we don't know for sure, but he nevertheless still has 7% of Facebook's stock), after being busted at a celebration party with underage interns and cocaine.

To live on the internet then means to be on public display for scrutiny. There are no private moments in the brave new world where Big Brother is not a panopticon to be feared, as in Orwell, but a television show people clamor to see and be a part of. It's the efficiencies and feel-good gadgets that perhaps then do us real harm, insinuating that Huxley and Brave New World was perhaps more on the mark than Orwell and 1984. This is where Zuckerberg's Facebook, a visual informative drug, is taking us, and it's where he has offered us "the best you that you can be," to quote the deliberately cheesy remark of Erica to Mark at the film's beginning. "The true digitalization of Real Life," as Parker calls it, is to make time a hospitable prisoner to constantly recorded occurrence – which is to say a plethora of recurrences without an original occurrence. Experiences are not to be experienced as genuine moments unto themselves, but are recorded, posted, tagged, and then ceaselessly replicated forever on the web, the very definition of hyperreality, wherein an object is a clone without an origin, like a hotel room. There will be no more actual life in Facebook Land, in the frontier of the Internet. "We lived on farms, then cities. Now we'll live on the Internet," Parker says, while readying his interns for drugs, indicating that this is indeed a narcotic, a kind of chemical escape, and possibly unhealthy, however revolutionary.

This is the Geek's revenge on the Physical, on the Actual, akin to the Christian's revenge on Grecian or Roman culture. The physical body, of the row crew frat cowboy football captains with brawn and athletic talent, is futile. We see this during the Winklevosses' rowing competition in England, where their exertions in a too-close loss to the Dutch rowing team, seems akin to parody, the exploits of physical training amounting to, possibly, nothing. The music is appropriately a Reznor/Ross adaptation of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the opera of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, where the Troll King says, "Ice to your blood."

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"I don't hate them. I don't hate anybody," Zuckerberg says of the Winklevosses during one of his lawsuit proceedings. "Things just didn't work out for them this once, for the first time in their lives." There's a lot of envy in that remark, regarding the Winklevoss twins as physical specimens out of Mark's league, just as they belong to a class or race out of his league (one may possibly, though it may not be worthwhile, read his offense to them as a Jew's revenge on a very Aryan-looking pair of boys). But I also believe that Zuckerberg doesn't hate them, because he does not seem capable of hate, though he may be capable of grudges, jealousy, spite, and romantic longing. He doesn't hate the Winklevosses, because he really doesn't acknowledge them as equals. He regards no one as an equal. He is, to reiterate the point, an impersonal machine. And this returns me to my introductory point that The Social Network is an important part of the Information Age Cinema genre.

To know Information Age Cinema, we must acknowledge that like any genre, such as film noir, from which it derives many of its motifs, the movement wasn't conscious of itself necessarily while it was beginning, though the circumstances of culture have appropriately reflected on it to this point that it is perhaps now conscious of itself. The most significant literary works that anticipate the genre are the novels of William Gibson, whose Neuromancer was published in 1984. By looking at the variety of concepts in that book, repeated in subsequent Gibson books and elaborated on by other philosophers, writers, and filmmakers, we can see what we're looking for in "Information Age Cinema" as calling card motifs, and why The Social Network is perhaps the most appropriate fulfillment of a genre that was looking forward to an uncanny future when it began, and now, is reflecting into the past, telling us how the Future has already occurred. In Information Age Cinema, some of the main topics are the dichotomy between "Cyberpsace" – a term coined by Gibson in Neuromancer, representing the computer generated world of the web – and "Meatspace," or the concrete actual world comprised of atoms. Gibson describes cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operations, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity." Gibson's "neuromancers" are renegade hackers able to get into the cybernetic grid and in doing so, are akin to terrorists disrupting the corrupting manipulations of huge corporations. Immediately, we can recognize people like Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg (or Julian Assange) as being almost precisely the kinds of characters Gibson was writing about in the 1980s, the men he forecasted. They are addicted to this brave new world, less than human and more than human, but are yet not human, and seek to disrupt the order that outcasts them.

Another concept is the compression of Identity into the binary code, the hyperreal wavelength of cyberspace. Corporations rule in Information Age Cinema, and workers, like the interns constantly "wired in" in The Social Network, are not allowed basic human relationships and processes. Again, functionality is what determines usefulness, like Eduardo's algorithm to Mark, versus Eduardo offering warmth to a friend that's just been dumped. Facebook avatars are of course a compression of Self into the frontier of the Internet, where the best Self is molded, constructed of photos, videos, likes and dislikes.

We are in the terrain of the cyborg, where human beings are dependent on technology in order to thrive, as opposed to simply getting their hands dirty. We are not living an analog existence, but a digital one. Cell phones are a huge motif in Information Age Cinema, as are laptops and screens (examples being The Departed, Miami Vice, and the Bourne films). The cyborg's relationship to technology allows for greater plasticity of Identity; his function is to adapt accordingly with his technology, which readjusts identity, a trait the genre appropriated from espionage stories. If someone does not function any more, they are gotten rid of. Zuckerberg does not seem to have any biological root; he exists in a kind of vacuum, as opposed to Eduardo, who is concerned of how his father will feel about him. There is a conflict between the link to the past vs. the immediate digital replication and reformation of the present, ever occuring Now. For example, one of the things preventing the Winklevosses from fighting back is that one of the twins holds an antiquated belief that being "men of Harvard" means something. But in this hollow age, it doesn't. Zuckerberg has no naval, and so no attachments. He wins in the Post-Human world.

Information Age art has the motif of Zero History (actually the title of the newest Gibson novel). In a digital era, the present is not related to the past, as the Present is always the Present, and nothing has a historical context. The legacy of Harvard, like a "336 year old doorknob to the president’s office,” means nothing. History is rewritten, re-recorded, and re-blogged every second of the day. Nothing has any depth because Time has no depth. A good example of this is in Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men, where the statue of Michelangelo's David stands apart from any sense of its historical origin, and has thus lost any kind of meaning, which is the tragedy of an age when everything is cloned on a massive scale. Nothing possesses an aura. There's just the present moving into the present, into infinity at the speed of light. As the real world and real people are recorded and do not actually live anymore in meatspace, all history is futile. Nothing can be learned from this shallow history, which is the theme of this year's other great Information Age Cinema film, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer.

Finally, The Social Network is conscious of itself as it is a David Fincher film, and Fincher works with digital filmmaking and is himself a gadget geek. But here one should briefly note Fincher's own ideas about the internet, which are not necessarily positive. His previous film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, qualified as Information Age Cinema, and anticipates The Social Network. In Benjamin Button, he begins with a blind clockmaker constructing a rail station clock that moves backwards, so that all of the parents who lost their children during the Great War can hope that time will return the dead. The film then follows Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), born an old man who ages backwards, experiencing the whole 20^th century. But with the plethora of changes, Benjamin doesn't grow and become more sophisticated. Rather, he is entropied by the experience, becoming a child who doesn't want to be touched (much like Zuckerberg, who is "not a hugger," as Parker notes), losing his memory and getting rid of family photographs in lieu of generic pictures. By 2003, the Blind Clockmaker's analog clock that reaches back in time, its hands mindful of the past and history, has been replaced by a digital clock. The rail station has been decorated with "Citizen Soldier" posters, as the Iraq War, an event that evidences a certain lack of memory among a great populace, is beginning. In filming Benjamin Button, Fincher used the best state-of-the-art technology there was, but he also deliberately sought to create sequences – such as the Blind Clockmaker prologue, or the short snippets where an old man remembers each time he was hit by lightning – in antique filmmaking styles, as if to note that he, David Fincher, will use this technology mindful of cinema's past and its development as an artistic language, something that distinguishes Benjamin Button from the scallywag CGI fast-food junk mass-produced every week by studios.

The digital trickery of The Social Network also seems self aware; it is a digital landscape with too-perfect computer-generated breath, too-perfect computer generated snow, and even Armie Hammer's Winklevoss twins just seem too perfect to be twins; they're more like, well, sci-fi clones – which may indeed be the point. The Social Network also plays nicely against Fincher's 2007 Zodiac, his first film shot digitally (and with this picture, his other masterpiece). Zodiac is similarly about communication and we are meant to reflect, as we watch the opening credits with a mail courier going through the hallways of The San Francisco Chronicle, how much communication has changed in under 40 years.

Benjamin Button also has roots in F. Scott Fitzgerald, its concept taken loosely from a short story, but its themes of memory, time, to say nothing of the heroine named "Daisy," indicating a certain indebtedness to The Great Gatsby (the final image of the Clockmaker, rowing out to sea, vibrantly recalls the last sentence of Fitzgerald's book). The Social Network also seems indebted, in part, to Fitzgerald and Gatsby, as Zuckerberg is kind of a warped Jay Gatsby for the Information Age, his eyes on the prize of a lost lady love that he could not earn at one time, and yet with his (possibly ill-gotten) riches he remains alone. As the Beatles song indicates at the end, he is now one of the beautiful people, and yet there is something that still keeps him apart. He's even, it could be said, rejected again, as a woman on his defense team (Rashida Jones) chooses not to take up his offer on joining him for something to eat, though she bookends Erica Albright's insult at the beginning by saying, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one."

Mark Zuckerberg, Post-Human entrepreneur, one of the prime neuromancers of the New Frontier, is alone with his billions of dollars. He looks at Erica Albright's Facebook profile; she is part of his kingdom, willingly parading herself in his own Finals House, Facebook. He friend-requests her and clicks the refresh button, his eyes fixed on the object of his obsession like Kane reflecting on Rosebud, or like Michael Corleone in his isolation at the conclusion of Godfather II, each click of the refresh icon like Howard Hughes repeating "the way of the future" to himself as the blackness swallows him completely in The Aviator. In The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have constructed a masterstroke fictional character from the outline of a real-life person, pushing beyond the boundaries of fact and capturing the unnerving anxieties of an age seeking to disappear from the weight of the past, rootless and yet unconsciously refreshing, caught in the looping of Now, hoping for the solace of a primal warmth.