Ungodly

Rating: Null/10 (15 October 2010)

David Fincher is competent, clean. The writer here does simple, clean, dialog-laden plots for TeeVee.
They decided to go for an economical story, something that we can walk into with all sorts of questions about the world and how it is changing and come out believing we understand it.
The facts are intimidating. Soon, Facebook will have a billion users. It is already the most visited site in history. As an entity, it already is on par with the the top tier tech companies: Apple and Google. But far beyond that, far, far more significant is the way that the world is changing. Until now, friendship was absolutely anchored in physical proximity. All media allowed that to be extended, but only if it were well established by actually being together.
Now, this notion is being replaced by an entire generation. The compact is no longer on mutual support and emotional needs, but simply being paid attention to. Life is flattened while the numbers get larger. Shared abstract thinking is reduced to whether something is "liked" or not. Political movements exploit this and we are getting into trouble faster than we can imagine. So we enter a theater with a film about this phenomenon with dire worries. Social networking is the successor to TeeVee as the next possible disaster in the social experiment.
The filmmaker and writer decided to make a movie about this simplification of the social fabric by taking a story that is necessarily rich and human, and reduce it to a cartoon. We liked it not because the thing is well crafted, though it is. We embrace it because it explains things. In fact, it simplifies things so much that we can feel superior in knowing that we would have made a (slightly) more rich version.
The story presented here is no secret: emotionally weak geek type, Jew, Harvard undergrad has trouble making friends. Each of these three stereotypes is exploited shamelessly in the service of an unambiguous narrative. This guy will do anything to make friends and elevate his social standing. But the only thing he can do is program, so he finds what he needs in a website he creates. There is a clear calculus of sacrificing real friends for virtual standing. It is not something he can do because he understands people; it is something he has to do because he doesn't.
Turns out is what others need is similar so the thing takes off. Advisors, investors and lawyers surround the thing. Simple. Our hero ends up alone. The story marginalizes women as a necessity, deliberately allowing us to see them as Zuck does. More stereotypes.
But what has been done here is a type of narrative fold. The subject is the flattening of the human relationship to the trivial. The movie itself is the similar flattening of the story to the trivial. It is what it shows and implicitly criticizes. We walk out "understanding," in that way we do after a political rally before we actually start thinking and seeing real people.
In the real world, what is interesting is not what happened with a girlfriend or some jock twins. What matters is the way that connection is changing, the way we form associations and indeed what an association means and what value it gives. This is not a fad. Facebook and Twitter may fade but something profound has started, perhaps changing the very nature of what it means to invest in societies. We likely are not yet past a tipping point in government and family units, but it is likely that we are well past the tipping point in narratives. We may never get richness back as a basic value. It will be relegated to a few who form a social network.
It is also interesting that Zukerberg, Dorsey, Canter, Mullenweg and Winer truly believe that what they are about amplifies life in all its dimensions. They believe they are doing good work. If this film is anything, it is evidence that the contrary is true.
And Zuck isn't cool enough to be an Emacs user any more, though he seems to have a genius in the opposite direction: finding the lowest common, scalable need.
(Written from the Starbucks two blocks from the original Facebook office.)
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.