The Chutry Experiment

Prominently displayed in New York Times Media Desk editor Bruce Headlam’s office is a French poster for Citizen Kane, perhaps the most famous film of all-time about a journalist. Although Headlam tells us that he loves the improbable graphics of French movie posters, it is impossible not to draw a comparison between Welles’ film about a newspaperman and the documentary we are watching, Andrew Rossi’s engaging and often humorous Page One: Inside the New York Times, which follows the work of several Times reporters working at the paper’s newly created Media Desk. The role of these reporters–including the perpetually boisterous David Carr and the energetic new media whiz Brian Stelter–is to document the changing state of the media industries, even while the Times itself, like other newspapers, is undergoing rapid change. Rossi and his production partner, Kate Novak, had incredible access to the work of Stelter, Carr, and Headlam, watching as they adapt to a range of new media tools, even while they seek to preserve the journalistic standards associated with their paper.

Rossi and Novak followed the Media Desk for approximately fourteen months, using a hybrid cinema verite and talking-heads style, and the film is essentially framed by the newspaper’s complicated attempts to engage with Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s notorious website where whistleblowers could post state secrets. As Stelter observes early in the film, Assange essentially sees himself as an activist working on behalf of radical government transparency, a goal that is vastly different than that of a journalist, but the exchange with Assange does illustrate the changed landscape when people can go public through Wikileaks rather than through a major newspaper like the New York Times, and the film spends quite a bit of time reflecting on the ethics of publishing Wikileaks documents, and later, on what it means that the Times partnered with Assange to release other documents about the war in Iraq.

Inevitably, the film spends quite a bit of time meditating on the changes to the Times’ business model as a result of the changes introduced by social media. To some extent these positions are articulated by Web 2.0 champions such as Jeff Jarvis claims in the film, that “newspapers are dead.” Page One also quotes Clay Shirky as stating that because “anyone can publish,” we have achieved something approximating a “revolution” when it comes to media. To some extent, Jarvis and Shirky come across (somewhat unfairly) as wild-eyed futurists, especially when paired with images of Arianna Huffington brusquely defending the practice of aggregating articles from other news sources. At the same time, Brian Stelter, in particular, defends the role of social media in gathering and sharing information (even the more traditional David Carr becomes a somewhat reluctant convert).

Ultimately, the film is at its best when it observes David Carr at work, talking with his father, or generally enjoying life. I’d never seen him speak before, and he has a raspy voice, one that conveys the many challenges he has faced–including drug addiction and being a single parent on welfare–and his toughness comes through very clearly, but he’s also incredibly funny and generous with his younger colleagues. In places, the film does feel a little like an advertisement for the necessity of The New York Times. The film, which must have been completed only very recently, mentions the Times’ decision to create a paywall that requires readers to pay after they have read more than twenty articles in a month, and I found myself contemplating paying for an online subscription. The Times newsroom is often romanticized, especially when we see Carr mentoring Stelter or when Headlam encourages one of his journalists to pursue a story.

But beyond that, the film is a reminder of the importance of an energetic and critical news media. One reporter remarks on the fact that most news services have cut back on the “press gaggle” that follows the President around the country because of the expense involved, while Stelter points out that despite our nostalgia for print, the crucial issue in saving newspapers is the importance of “original sources,” of gathering the information necessary to make sense of the world. To that end, Page One is a Participant Media film, and the “cause” identified with the film is “the importance of knowing the original source of the news you read, watch, hear and tweet and the difference between original reporting and commentary.” This is, no doubt, an easy message to sell at a festival dedicated to documentary, but I hope that Page One will have a wider impact, allowing us to reflect on the changing media distribution landscape and the ways in which that affects the practices of journalism.

A recent poll found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans believe that interracial marriage should be illegal, and although such a poll may only have limited implications, it does show that attitudes about race and sexual desire remain contested in contemporary American culture over four decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving vs. Virginia that state laws forbidding interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The arguments about interracial marriage have reverberated for decades, and it’s not too much of a stretch to connect those taboos to more recent debates about gay marriage, and while many of these present-day complications reverberate within Nancy Buirski’s documentary debut, The Loving Story, what Buirski offers is not a simple talking-heads exploration of the ideas that informed the debate but a more profound and poetic exploration of the people who were somewhat reluctantly at the center of this national debate: Richard and Mildred Loving, a white construction worker and an African-American and Cherokee woman, who were convicted, briefly jailed, and forced into exile, because they chose to marry.

Buirski takes the unexpected and striking approach of allowing home movies and other archival footage to do much of the “talking” in the film. Both Richard and Mildred Loving have passed away–in fact Richard was killed by a drunk driver only a few years after the Supreme Court case–so their voices seem to come from beyond the grave, with most descriptions of them being provided by their daughter. What emerges from the archival footage is a portrait of a gentle, affectionate couple, with Mildred quietly elegant and Richard appearing somewhat shy. Shots of Richard resting his head in Mildred’s lap at home or of the couple subtly touching each other’s hands while walking into one of many court rooms shows their affection for each other. Both emerge as relatively unlikely activists: Richard’s crew cut and his penchant for racing cars and Mildred’s reserve make them seem less political, but after Mildred write a letter about their situation to Robert Kennedy, who recommends that they contact the ACLU, they are thrust into the spotlight.

The lawyers who took the case, Philip Hirschkop and Bernard Cohen were also unlikely heroes. Hirschkop, in fact, had only been out of law school for a couple of years, while Cohen had been out of law school for three years. Watching them talk publicly about the case in the 1960s was also quite powerful, an contemporary interviews with Cohen and Hirschkop help to ground the film narratively. I’m still contemplating some of Buirski’s formal and storytelling choices, but I think the film reflects the quiet gentleness of the figures at the center of the case. When Cohen asked Richard Loving if there was anything he wanted to tell the Supreme Court, Cohen tells us that Richard said simply, “Tell them I love her.” Through the archival materials, gently interwoven with contemporary interviews, Buirski relates a powerful ove story that has left a powerful mark on American culture.

Given the polarized viewpoints associated with the issue of gun ownership, Barbara Kopple’s latest documentary, Gun Fight, which I caught at Full Frame but also happens to be playing on HBO, will almost certainly be misunderstood. Gun rights activists who have commented on the film suggest Kopple is using the Virginia Tech massacre to “push” a gun control agenda. Meanwhile, Spout blogger Christopher Campbell mistakes Kopple’s decision to interview several gun right activists as an attempt to conform to the tendency in non-fiction film to be “objective” by presenting all (or at least multiple) sides of the gun right issue. Both of these readings misunderstand the complexity of Gun Fight’s underlying arguments about the place of guns and gun legislation in the United States, and although the film stakes out a position that we do need stronger gun laws (and stronger enforcement of those laws), the film is at its best when exploring the complex psychological status of gun laws and ownership in the United States.

Kopple’s film opens with footage of the Virginia Tech massacre taken on a shaky cell phone camera, the gun shots echoing in the near distance, interrupted by frightened gasps and piercing screams. News reports remind us of the number of victims while showing us haunting pictures of Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who obtained all of his guns legally, despite his history of mental illness. The massacre is narrated by Colin Goddard, a student at Virginia Tech who survived being shot four times but witnessed several classmates getting killed. Goddard describes his wounds while expressing relief that he remembers very little of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and as the film unfolds, he becomes one of our primary guides through the debate. Motivated by the shooting, he becomes an intern and eventually begins working for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The other major interviewee is Richard Feldman, a former NRA lobbyist famous initially for publicly defending subway shooter Bernard Goetz. Feldman now has more recently moved on to lobby for the gun industry instead, in part because he has sought some middle ground with some sensible gun legislation, such as childproof locks on guns. Others discuss the traumatic physical effects of getting shot. A physician at the trauma center at UC Davis talks to a woman who still feels the effects of getting shot in the neck 40 years after it initially happened. We see a star high school football player who was shot several times after he was mugged, likely ending his sports career, positioning us to recognize the devastating consequences of gun violence.

Of course, to address these problems of gun violence, Kopple does allow gun owners to speak, possibly leading to Campbell’s mistaken observation that the film is trying to be falsely “objective.” A graduate student at Virginia Tech claims that if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus, Cho would have been stopped sooner, but Kopple answers this by showing a segment from ABC’s 20/20 that illustrates that having a student with a concealed weapon, even one that is adequately trained, likely would have led to more violence, not less. More crucially, Kopple shows how easy it is to obtain powerful guns without any background checks from unlicensed sellers at gun shows. In fact, Goddard goes into a gun show with a hidden camera and manages to conduct several transactions, even joking with one seller that he likely wouldn’t pass the background check.

To some extent, this is familiar territory. There have been discussions of closing the gun show loophole and of enforcing background checks ever since Columbine, calls that were recently raised again during the aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. To that end, one of the strengths of the film is its attempt to make sense of the power of the gun lobby in shaping the legislative and political process, and this is where the film seeks to explore the passions of gun rights advocates, a very narrow segment of gun owners. On a purely pragmatic level, Feldman speculates that Al Gore probably “lost” the 2000 election, not (just) because of Ralph Nader but because many labor Democrats were more worried about Gore taking away their guns than they were about George W. Bush’s record on labor (although it’s worth adding that the Supreme Court probably helped here). He also points out that even the threat of a Democratic president or of a law calling for restrictions on guns feeds the outrage machine of the NRA, allowing them to fundraise based on people’s fears.

To that end, Kopple draws from arguments raised by Scott Melzer in his book, Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War, which argues that the NRA’s appeals are rooted in an evocation of nostalgia for frontier masculinity and a very specific version of patriotism, one in which gun ownership is a means of holding the federal government in check. To explore this point, we see figures like Larry Platt talking about the importance of militias and gun rights rallies where guns are raffled off as a demonstration of spite against any federal regulations on gun ownership. Although these activists are far from representative of all gun owners–there are an estimated 80 million gun owners and 300 million guns in the United States–they often drive the passions of these single-issue voters. And although these groups are often rooted in white masculinity–both Melzer and the UC Davis doctor link the fringe of gun rights activists to Neo-Nazism and pro-Confederacy positions–we are also made palpably aware of how this culture of fear also permeates inner-city African-American men as well, when two young black men show us their apartment, which is stocked with a gun quite literally in every room.

Although the film offers some pragmatic legislative solutions, it also directs us to what seems like a bigger challenge, and that is: how do we engage with the politics of fear? During the Q&A, Colin Goddard acknowledged his own ambivalence about appealing to fear, while his father sought to redefine freedom not as the right to carry a weapon but as the right to move freely without fear of getting shot. In some ways, these responses aren’t completely adequate, and I think this is reflected in the reluctance of many Democrats, especially Obama, to take up legislation restricting gun ownership. I don’t think this inability to think beyond the “politics of fear” is a flaw in the film, as much as it is a potential limit in our current political imagination. Kopple’s film is likely to polarize. Gun right activists will surely see an “agenda,” while some viewers may share the film’s stance on “common sense” legislation, even while wishing for something more assertive in staking out an anti-gun position. What Kopple has given us, instead, is a film that shows that the politics of guns, are indelibly complicated.

Over the last two decades, thanks to scholars such as Henry Jenkins, the study of fandom has become an integral part of media studies. My own work on film blogging and YouTube remix videos was an attempt to engage with this scholarship, especially as it played out within the cultures of cinephilia. What Jenkins and other scholars have pointed out is that fan practices are far more complicated than they might appear to outsiders and that cultural forms, whether romance fiction or genre television, should not be dismissed as “low” forms, in part because of the cultural work they are doing. Because of that background, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with Julie Moggan’s Guilty Pleasures, the Opening night film at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a documentary that follows the lives of a carefully selected group of people whose lives are affected by their role in producing or consuming Mills and Boon romance novels.

The reading culture around Mills and Boon novels is massive. Pre-credit titles tell us that a Mills and Boon novel is purchased somewhere in the world every three seconds. Roger, an older male author who writes under the name, Gill Sanderson (because male authors apparently aren’t well received in the Mills and Boon audience), speculates that his novels have been translated into a dozen languages, while Stephen, the handsome but flighty male model, estimates that he has graced the cover of over 200 romance novels.

Meanwhile we are introduced to three readers, each from a different part of the world, and each with her own sense of emptiness that the Mills and Boon novels ostensibly fill. Shirley is a British woman who shares a life with her husband, Phil, who at the beginning of the movie, at least, seems to show more affection to his do-it-yourself guides and tool belts than he does to his wife. Hiroko reads her Mills and Boon novels on the Tokyo subway and fantasizes about being swept away by her ballroom dance instructor, while her somewhat impassive husband admits that he lacks the grace to sweep her of her feet on the dance floor. Finally, Shumita, an Indian woman reads the novels and longs to be reunited with her ex-husband who left her, in part he says, because she became a “militant feminist” for reading Erica Jong and Gloria Steinem. In some sense, reading the books seems to hold Shumita in an unhappy cycle: she longs for the happy ending and spends much of the film worrying about her appearance, getting facials and worrying about her weight, all for a guy who seems more fixated on his car than anything else in the world.

Thus, rather than really being about the culture of romance reading (or even romance writing), the documentary is really trying harder to be a ”real life romcom,” as Tanya Gold observes in her Guardian review, one that explores the cultural desire for romantic connections, while using the Mills and Boon books as a platform for exploring that. Thus, for people who are romance studies scholars, the  film will likely be a big disappointment. By looking solely at the Mills and Boon universe, the documentary misses out on literally dozens of other subgenres of romance, while also playing into practically every conceivable stereotype of romance readers. At one point, Moggan cuts to Shirley eating bon bons and sipping wine in bed while reading a Mills and Boon. Similarly, Shumita is often shown curled in bed reading, the books an apparent escape from her romantic solitude. Finally, the choice of two male figures, Roger and Stephen, to stand in as the producers of Mills and Boon novels seems odd given that virtually all romance writers are female. Although that is hinted at briefly when we see that Roger is the only male author at the Romance Writers convention, the lens for looking at this culture seemed a bit too narrow.

To be fair, Moggan seemed less interested in doing an anthropological study and more inclined to create a narrative involving each of the five major characters. At one point, Roger, echoing the recommendations of many creative writing teachers, remarks that all major characters must undergo a change by the end of the book, and Moggan seeks to follow the trajectories of Shirley, Shumita, and Hiroko, as they negotiate their domestic and romantic lives. Meanwhile Stephen, at the beginning of the movie comes across as charming but also narcissistic, obsessed with food and seeking out his “twin flame,” a partner who will be just as beautiful as he is. Roger, meanwhile, seems to have a quiet existence, just the opposite of what you might expect a writer of passionate romances to have.

But even these stories seemed to play into, rather than critiquing, the stereotypes of romance readers (and here, I do want to point out that Gold’s assessment in The Guardian of most of characters seems a bit harsh and ungenerous). During the Q&A Moggan commented that she was trying to explore the distinctions between appearance and reality through the characters. Roger is not the female author he claims to be. Stephen, far from having a glamorous lifestyle, tends to spend a lot of time at home in his relatively spartan apartment. Shumita desperately seeks out the happy endings provided in the romance novels, to the point that she is blind to her ex-husband’s shallowness. Hiroko reads about ideal worlds while riding the subway or while hanging out at home with her geeky husband who dreams of fathering an entire baseball team. It’s a familiar hook, but one that misrepresents romance readership, casting it primarily as a form of escape. Even so, some of the characters do make the effort to change, in ways I’ll avoid spoiling here.

To some extent, I think the documentary could have benefitted from some kind of meta-commentary, someone who could comment on the complications of romance readership. Moggan mentioned during the Q&A also that she had not been a reader of romance fiction prior to making the film, and I think that was evident in a couple of places, especially when she plays into the worst stereotypes of passive, wine-sipping female readers.

When I was in graduate schol, I did my dissertation on films about time travel, alternate realities, and other time-bending narratives, a project that grew out of a seminar paper on Twelve Monkeys and Strange Days. The project ended up not working quite as well as I would have liked, as I got lost in my attempts to classify films according to the direction of time travel. But I found myself thinking about that project last night while watching Duncan Jones’ Source Code (IMDB), a follow-up to his trippy debut film, Moon. In particular, I reflected on the degree to which the film’s plot device has been naturalized to the point that audiences need little explanation to grasp what is happening, and although I found the film to be somewhat flawed, it functions well enough as a psychological thriller that engages with questions of fate, destiny, and free will.

Source Code depicts the experiences of Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), a wounded Afghanistan War veteran who is sent back into the body of a passenger on a train bound for Chicago that is about to be destroyed in a terrorist attack. Stevens wakes up in the body of a high school teacher named Sean just eight minutes before the explosives are set to go off, killing everyone on board and must figure out the person who planted the bomb to prevent a later terrorist attack from happening. We are given a typical pseudoscientific explanation from the film’s mad scientist, Dr. Rutledge (a cheerfully excessive Jeffrey Wright). As Roger Ebert points out, the scientific implausibilities don’t really matter, because for the most part, it’s clear that the explanation serves a different purpose: we are given a set of narrative rules–Colton has eight minutes to solve the problem, in this case finding the bomber–and then watch as Colton attempts to complete the task he has been assigned.

As a result, Source Code seems to be the latest example of a series of films that follow what Alex Galloway, in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture,  has described as the “algorithmic form” of many contemporary narratives.* Although Galloway refers primarily to what he calls “films of epistemological reversal,” such as Fight Club or The Matrix, in which our existing understanding of how the world works is undermined, Colton’s quest in Source Code isn’t significantly different than the quest of completing a level of a video game, to the point that Colton, almost immediately, begins to identify specific patterns of repeated activity: a spilled soda, a conversation with the beautiful girl across the aisle. Even the logic of the behavior of the train’s passengers is constrained by how thy are already programmed. Given that the explosion “has already happened,” the train passengers are ostensibly dead, and therefore, Colton’s interactions with them don’t really matter. Much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, Colton begins to see the train as a system, one that can be manipulated by a skillful “player” or user. The film’s paranoid depiction of time and fate–and their relationship to crime prevention–also has affinities with movies such as Minority Report and Twelve Monkeys.

And this is where I think Source Code ultimately “cheats,” to use a gaming term [spoilers follow]. As we learn early in the film, Colton is being sent back in time by a mysterious military organization, one that Colton is able to trace back to a base in Nevada. He receives instructions from Dr. Rutledge and a more sympathetic assistant, Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who communicates to him through a computer screen. Colton is told that he is physically dead other than some mild brain activity, but during his visits to the past, he falls in love with a passenger, Christina (Michelle Monaghan as the pretty girl), and desperately hopes to keep her alive, even though he is repeatedly told that the attack has already happened. In one version of Colton’s “game,” he pulls Christina from the train before it explodes, believing he has rescued her, but that reality doesn’t really exist, so he is pulled back to begin the game anew. However, those who have seen the film will know that the narrative resolution “cheats” this logic of time or narrative rule. It’s a typical cheat of time-loop narratives, however: why does the time loop stop once the crime has been solved? Perhaps more telling, Colton is able to prevent the terrorist from ever committing a crime in the first place, which means that the military agency that sends him wouldn’t have any need to send him back, right? Although, I suppose it is entirely possible that the final sequence (when he does prevent the accident from happening) is entirely imagined.

These logical implausibilities don’t undermine the film completely. As Aaron Hillis observes, Colton’s compassion for the train’s passengers is seductive. Even if we are told (somewhat misleadingly) that the attempts to rescue the passenger are doomed, Colton’s “loyalty” make him a likable protagonist (a sense of intimacy that Manhola Dargis also recognizes in her NYT review). At the same time, it’s a film that succeeds in synthesizing a wide range of cinematic, video game, and narrative texts, one that recognizes the ways in which audiences engage with and accept the place of algorithms within cinematic narratives.

Update with Spoilage: One other point worth considering, raised in the comments of this Hollywood Elsewhere post, is that the film allows Colton to essentially take over the identity of Sean Fentress, the mild-mannered teacher/train passenger, whose body Colton inhabits when he travels back in time into the train. Thus, as the film ends and Colton continues to live in Fentress’s body, starting a new life with Christina, Fentress’s entire life history is effaced. Des he have a family? Friends? What about his students? The film can only do this, of course, by making Fentress basically a cypher with little actually personality.

* Another good reference here is Kristen Daly’s recent Cinema Journal article, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive Image.”

Although Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (IMDB) has been out for a few weeks, I finally caught it last night, thanks, in part, to the fact that the film won the Oscar for Best Documentary, and I’ll admit that while I found the film to be an exhaustively researched and carefully rational explanation of What Went Wrong with the economy over the last decade, I also found it to be incredibly frustrating at times. Part of this frustration may be connected to the complexity of the manipulative practices engaged in by the various captains of high finance. As A.O. Scott observes, the film feels like a “classroom lecture” at times, a history lesson with a pedantic purpose. That lesson is basically clear: we need tighter regulation of Wall Street, but the institutions that might serve to monitor Wall Street–the federal government and academia–are often complicit with those corporations. Many of the federal regulators, appointed and reappointed by both political parties, worked for Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms and stood to benefit tremendously from the lax oversight.

Ferguson’s film outlines–quite literally, in that Inside Job is divided into five chapters–how the crisis began, how it was allowed to continue, and in a far less convincing coda, what can be done to reduce corruption. The film itself is highly polished, with interviews taking place in the offices and interiors of the wealthy and powerful, far different, Scott also points out, than the hand-held camerawork that we typically associate with muckraking journalism (J Hoberman makes a similar point). But even while the film avoids the theatrics we might encounter in a Michael Moore fim, Ferguson’s anger at the absurdity of derivatives, credit default swaps, and other financial shenanigans is palpable. At one point, a Columbia professor states that he left a regulatory post to revise a textbook, with Ferguson reacting just off-screen, spitting out the words, “you can’t be serious?!” Many of the interviewees deny any wrongdoing, leaving Ferguson incredulous, although in places I found myself feeling resigned, almost restless, given the image of unchecked power that Ferguson had painted.

And that brings me to my first problem with the film: as Scott points out, Ferguson avoids any systemic explanations for the crash. Although he traces out a clear complicity between (mostly Ivy League) economics faculty, Wall Street executives, and government regulators, the film seemed to stop short of imagining any alternatives to the existing system. Power corrupts. Even some of the Wall Street executives he interviewed admitted as much. There is a vague suggestion that allowing banks to become “too big to fail” helped create the problem and that the coupling of commercial banks and investment banks also led to corruption. The film also tentatively spells out a “pathology” of sorts among the Wall Street executives, noting that many of them were highly-driven risk takers who spent their nights binging on cocaine and paying thousands of dollars for high-end prostitutes, but I think this form of risk-taking could have been spelled out more explicitly (although it echoes some of the conclusions reached in Alex Gibney’s Enron documentary).

The other aspect that I found mildly frustrating was the fact that it was somewhat difficult to develop a sense of identification with any of the people who were attempting to fight corruption. Although Elliot Spitzer offers some of the more trenchant critiques of Wall Street corruption, I often felt a little unmoored, even overwhelmed, by the film. Although Scott suggests that the film should not be at “fault” for producing this sense of dispiritedness, I found it difficult not to feel as if the economic system that produced this crisis–and the rising income inequality, unemployment , and poverty that goes with it–is inevitable (Kenneth Morefield makes a similar observation). That being said, I think the anger that Ferguson channels in Inside Job may, finally, be finding expression in the protests in Madison, Columbus, and state capitals throughout the country where workers are demanding that their collective bargaining rights not be taken away.

Watching John Wells’ The Company Men (IMDB) against the backdrop of the ongoing union protests was a fascinating experience. In addition to the week-long protests taking place in Madison, where workers are fighting to retain the right to bargain collectively, there were solidarity marches in all fifty states on Saturday. In addition, as Frank Rich notes, there have been threats of a government shutdown that would potentially cut off access to food stamps and Social Security checks, while Governor Scott Walker cheerfully chats with a reporter impersonating billionaire David Koch about laying off state workers. Although The Company Men was produced well before these more recent labor crises, it gave the film a startling timeliness, one that makes its relatively invisibility–I’ve seen little advertising for or discussion of the film–a little startling.

Like Up in the Air (my review), a film that has been a frequent point of comparison, The Company Men grounds its narrative in the historical world. While Up in the Air used talking-head interviews with actual unemployed workers interspersed with unemployed workers, The Company Men opens and closes with an audio an video montage of news reports on the unemployment crisis, the bank bailouts, and the stock market, drawing (perhaps overly obvious) connections between the experiences of its central characters and the corporate downsizing.  This conflict is addressed through the psychological experiences of three executives from GTX, an amorphous conglomerate that originated in shipbuilding but now seems to make nothing in particular, while pushing papers across desks in a furious attempt to bump up stock prices before an anticipated merger.  Each of the men belongs to a different class background and generation. The primary point of identification is Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), a youngish sales executive, who has a high salary, but has overextended himself, buying a McMansion, a Porsche, and paying for expensive country club dues; Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), who lovingly built the shipbuilding company and now watches cynically as it loses its manufacturing base; and Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), a man of working-class roots who rose from the factory floor to become an executive, although he experiences this status awkwardly, his graying hair and bland demeanor coding him as an outsider within the world of high finance.

All three of the characters are unceremoniously fired at various points, and the film traces their efforts to find work–and to regain a sense of lost dignity after being fired and falling short of their role as breadwinners. In this sense, the film becomes an exploration not merely of economic issues, but also of the masculinity crisis that  Bobby, Phil, and Gene face in various ways (a point addressed most effectively by Karina Longworth in her insightful reading of the film).  At first, Bobby is reluctant to allow his wife, a nurse, to take on more shifts and assumes that his job search will be brief. But as the search drags on, Bobby must give up many of the trappings of success and must endure a sometimes humiliating job search, a point underscored by Bobby’s experiences in a job placement firm where bossy (and emasculating) employment coaches direct him in goofy “empowerment” chants, while Phil is forced to endure a variety of humiliations: his wife demands that he not come home until 6 PM to keep up the illusion that he is employed, while a job hunter counsels him to omit any reference to any work before 1990.

At first, I was ambivalent at best about the fact that the film focused solely on the experiences of unemployed (but relatively wealthy) men and that the only prominent female workers were Bobby’s wife, Maggie, and Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello), a GTX executive responsible for carrying out most of the firings. Maggie’s work is generally undervalued–her status as a worker is rendered insignificant compared to her role as a wife and mother. And Sally is often just inches away from falling into the stereotype of the dominant female executive who has stolen power away from men (a la Demi Moore in Disclosure). But I think the film is trying to make sense of how these economic changes might be affecting us on a psychological level, and as Karina concludes, it “offers a multifaceted glimpse at what can happen when the connective tissue between a man and his source of income is cut, and rarely suggests that it could be anything less than excruciating to stop the bleeding.”

The film is also savvy enough to recognize that the economic challenges extend well beyond those who wear suits and ties to work. After some time, Bobby reluctantly accepts a job working for Maggie’s brother, Jack (Kevin Costner), a carpenter who hires Bobby as a laborer and then promotes him to carpenter, subtly overpaying him, even though his own business is in some jeopardy. As Andrew O’Hehir observes, the film risks romanticizing working-class production, both through its depiction of Jack as a crusty, salt-of-the-earth guy and through its celebration of the revival of manufacturing as a way out of the unemployment crisis, with Gene lamenting the days when GTX used to build things. But as the aborted stimulus package illustrates, there is some value in building and repairing “things,” in giving our aging infrastructure a much-needed boost, and although the film’s ending is somewhat trite (I won’t spoil the specifics here), it allows us to think about the sterile world of high finance in contrast to the gritty and grubby world of making stuff, a comparison that is spelled out sharply through Roger Deakins’s cinematography.

Finally, to some extent, the film seems to have been implicitly criticized for being “too televisual.” The director, John Wells, has a background in TV production, working for ER and The West Wing, and many of the narrative moves in The Company Men feel like TV storytelling. However, rather than treating this as a fault, I think Wells uses these techniques well in order to crosscut between the experiences of the three or four major characters, in order to build up a consciousness of how the unemployment crisis might be resonating on a psychological level. At the same time, watching the film in the midst of the events in Madison reminded me of the fact that none of the characters mentioned unionization or collective bargaining, and to a great extent, being unemployed becomes an individual, and not a collective, crisis. To be sure, Bobby and several of his friends at the job placement center begin to work together, but they do so for the most part by operating within a system they find to be corrupt without really questioning how that system should be changed.

The trailer for Blue Valentine (IMDB) features a scene in which Dean (Ryan Gosling) is attempting to seduce Cindy (Michelle Williams) by playing a song on a ukelele and singing along in a goofy voice and inviting her to dance along as he sings.  He has stopped her at night in front of a downtown storefront, where the interior lights perfectly illuminate her, and the scene, played out of context, seems like a sweet early moment in a relationship, as the couple begins to find each other’s inner beauty.  But there is also a hint of melancholia in the scene as Dean sings, “you always hurt the ones you love,” a sentiment that permeates throughout the film and of the ways in which Cindy and Dean will hurt each other.

But rather than telling this story of the dissolution of a relationship in chronological order, Blue Valentine, as directed by Derek Cianfrance, starts just as the relationship is about to end.  A gate has been left open, and their beloved family dog has escaped.  The couple’s daughter, Frankie, discovers this and first wakes Dean from the sofa, and later Cindy sleeping in their bed, a not-quite-subtle reminder that the couple has drifted apart.  The film then intercuts between the events of this final day (a school assembly, discovering their dog dead by the side of the road, a road trip to a nearby hotel for a weekend getaway) and the early days of their relationship when the couple first meets and begins to fall in love.

Dean is immediately enamored, while Cindy is tentative at first, before becoming seduced by his charms and by his willingness to support her through a personal crisis.  He works as a mover, and she sees him as he helps an older gentleman as he begins to settle into a nursing home, decorating his walls and seeking to make an older stranger more comfortable.  The intercutting between these two moments is effective, with the past shot in brighter colors, and Cindy’s hair longer and more freely flowing, while the later scenes typically rely on darker lighting.  The film is also relatively frank in its depiction of the couple’s sex life, shifting from the excitement the couple feels when it first meets to Dean practically forcing himself on Cindy during their last-ditch attempt to re-kindle things in the “sex hotel,” ironically in the “Future Room.”

In her review, Karina Longworth faults the film for providing the male character, Dean, with a rich interior life while denying any depth to Cindy, and I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that Cindy’s story is somewhat eclipsed by Dean’s.  Worse, for Karina, is the suggestion, during a scene at a women’ clinic, that Cindy may have been, to use Karina’s phrase a “tempestuous slut,” due to her past number of partners.  But I’d like to believe that our perceptions of Cindy were more subtle than that, and I found myself sympathizing with her frustrations with Dean and his inability to really understand his wife, with her recognition that things weren’t working and her attempts to hold things together, even during a chance encounter with an old flame.  I did find some aspects of the film to be a little forced.  Parts of the backstory with a violent old boyfriend and a judgmental father seemed contrived, as AO Scott observes.   But I appreciated how the film managed to navigate between the present and the past in engaging and thoughtful ways.

While we were watching The Fighter (IMDB) last night, I caught my fiancee, a native of nearby Quincy, squirming several times at the depiction of Lowell, Massachusetts, the depleted industrial town that boxer Micky Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg) called home.  The broken down cars, shuttered buildings, the trash-strewn streets, and even the big hair and sharp accents all reminded her of a town her mother warned her about, one that the film manages to capture relatively authentically, even down to the accents (though Melissa Leo and Amy Adams slipped a few times).  It’s that kind of hardscrabble realism that saves what might have otherwise been a somewhat hokey sports character drama.

Many of the town’s residents have fallen into hard times, and we learn that Micky’s brother, a local boxing legend, Dicky Eklund, has become a deeply deluded crack addict, one who is convinced that an HBO crew documenting his daily routine is planning a movie about his professional comeback–not his addiction.  Of course we learn, well before Dicky realizes it, that the film is High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell, a harrowing, and shockingly intimate, account of three Lowell residents who have developed addictions to one of the most powerful drugs out there.  The documentary is available through Snag Films, and it’s fascinating to watch, both for its depictions of addiction and for the documentary portrayals of the characters in The Fighter.

A look back at the documentary shows that Melissa Leo has perfectly captured the coiffed-up pretensions of Micky and Dicky’s mother, her ability to deny the fact Dicky is addicted, even while attempting to control the lives of her sons.  And Christian Bale’s gaunt features reflect the emptied out face of Dicky during the era when he was addicted.  For the most part, The Fighter avoids directly depicting the original documentary, instead re-enacting some of the scenes involving Dicky, but it’s fascinating to see the intertextual relationship between both films, to see how The Fighter revisits that earlier material.  This documentary subtext is reinforced through a storytelling device in the film, in which the filmmakers are ostensibly interviewing Micky and Dicky about their experiences.

This is one of those occasions where an Oscar nomination (or five) encouraged me to check out a film that I otherwise would have missed.  Boxing is a brutal sport, one that I don’t particularly enjoy, but the recognition made me just curious enough to watch, and I am glad that I did, especially after recognizing the relationship to High on Crack Street (which in many ways, is a far more brutal film).  It’s clear that the film struggled a little to work against sports movie cliches, especially given that Micky’s story conforms to many of those cliches, but as an attempt to construct a realistic depiction of Lowell, Mass, it’s fascinating little film.

Update: For the curious, here is an embed of High on Crack Street, the 1995 HBO documentary that plays a key role in The Fighter, courtesy of SnagFilms:

Watch more free documentaries

By coincidence, I happened to watch both True Grit and Winter’s Bone this weekend.  For a number of reasons, I’d procrastinated on seeing True Grit in theaters, and the Winter’s Bone DVD sat collecting dust in its little red envelope, its availability allowing me to delay watching it.  But thanks to a brief break in my writing schedule, I found a chance to catch up on these two films, allowing me to reflect on the similarities between the two films: namely that both films depict tough, even stubborn, teenage girls bent on addressing an absent father.  Mattie in True Grit seeks to avenge the death of her father; while Ree in Winter’s Bone takes on the task of finding her bail-hopping father to save her family’s home from being taken away.

Both films also entail classic wilderness motifs, even while tweaking those elements to genre and thematic concerns.  In True Grit, Mattie famously hires Rooster Cogburn, a tough, but weathered, U.S. Marshal to seek out her father’s killer in “Indian country,” and then insists on following him into the wilderness to see that the work is done.  To demonstrate her mettle, Mattie follows Rooster and oddly charming Texas Ranger LaBoeuf across a river–a classic threshold moment–and continues with her single-minded focus on tracking Tom Chaney, while Rooster and LaBoeuf are often reduced to petty bickering about who is a better shot (read: better man), shooting all of their cornbread in an improvised target shooting contest.  Their confrontations with various unsavory types–the boundaries between law and lawlessness become increasingly permeable outside the city–also mix in darkly comic elements.  We’re not sure in places whether to laugh or be horrified by Cogburn’s actions.

Unlike these darkly comic moments, the regional neorealism and southern Gothic elements of Winter’s Bone create a much different mood.   The film opens with Ree managing her household–her mother is either too traumatized or too strung out on medication to be of any help–when a sheriff approaches her to let her know that her father has put up their house as collateral for his bail.  Ree determines that she will find her father to ask him to turn himself in, and when it becomes clear that he may have been killed, to find his body.  Ree’s adventures take her deeper into a meth syndicate, one that seems to weave deeply into her family tree–everyone in her Ozark town seems to be a “cousin” of someone else–and one that doesn’t trust outsiders, especially someone who might get the police involved.  At the same time, Ree weighs any form of escape she can find.  Learning that joining the military could provode her with the money to save her meager home (and could provide her with an escape from her Ozark community), she visits a military recruiter, who politely rebuffs her because of her age.  Eventually Ree receives some support from her father’s somewhat estranged brother, Teardrop.  Like the Indian country of True Grit, the mountains and woods offer a wilderness where traditional rules may not apply and where an unhealthy patriarchy still holds (at one point, the wife of a local dealer insists that “no man” touched Ree when she gets beaten up).

I’m certainly not the first person to notice this coincidence. Aymar Jean Christian blogged about this several weeks ago, and argued that True Grit’s lighter touch–true to most Coen Brothers films, it contains some darkly comic moments–makes it the superior film.  Winter’s Bone, with its depiction of a rural, paranoid, meth-addicted Ozark community seems, Aymar implies, almost too unrelenting.  I’m not really interested in choosing which film is superior, but it probably is worth noting that two films with such similar plots seem to be resonating with audiences and critics alike.  I think that what makes Mattie such a powerful character is her unflinching view toward violence. During a public hanging of three criminals, she hardly blinks, accepting the violence as a normal, even necessary, part of frontier justice.

Ree, by comparison, seems focused on preserving some version of family normalcy in the face of poverty and isolation.  She teaches her younger siblings how to shoot, how to skin a squirrel, essentially how to survive.  She instructs her siblings not to ask for charity because “you shouldn’t have to ask.”  When a neighbor offers to raise one of the children–to “take over” as she puts it–Ree is horrified by the thought of breaking up the family.  This determination allows Ree to go deeper into the claustrophobic  Ozark landscape to seek out the location of her father.  And here is where I find myself disagreeing with Aymar a little.  Aymar argues that Ree’s situation (and especially the film’s lack of humor) “inspires pity rather than empathy,” but I’m not quite sure that’s right.  First, I think the film avoids caricaturing southerners.  All of the people Ree encounters are complexly drawn, their motivations shaped both by their need for survival and their recognition of Ree’s need to find her father. In fact, there are some moments of humor–Ree’s ability to challenge her friend  into manipulating her husband to loan her a car is one such moment–and although Ree lives in poverty, she also seeks to create a sense of normalcy for herself and her family.  Like Roger Ebert, I found Ree’s determination and decency to be a powerful antidote to her unrelenting environment.

Both films offer fascinating, determined, even complex heroines, and I’d take many more films like them.

Like many science-fiction films, especially those about virtual worlds, Tron: Legacy (IMDB) cultivates a carefully-observed ambivalence about the effects of technology.  In many of these films, virtual-reality technologies either enslave us through ideological spectacle (The Matrix)  or distract us from real social problems (Strange Days).  At the same time, the narratives of many of these films depend on digital effects that require extremely sophisticated technologies.  As Eric Kohn points out in his excellent review of Tron: Legacy, this seems to lead to a “paradox,” in which “a franchise built around the fetishistic obsession with cyberculture now preaches its evils.”  Although I think Kohn is correct, at least at the level of narrative (the main goal of the human characters is to leave the “grid” where Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has been trapped for two decades), the spectacular aspects of the film still embrace a kind of “techno-cool” that seems to be perfectly attuned to the legacy of the original film.

Although this tension between a technophobic narrative and technological spectacle is nothing new–Kohn and others have even identified intersections between Tron: Legacy and Chaplin’s Modern Times–Tron: Legacy’s unique status as a much-belated sequel positions it as an enticing case for talking about some of the challenges involved in transmedia storytelling, digital special effects, and especially what might be called technological nostalgia (although that’s not quite the right phrase).  

Nick Tierce’s Tron-ified Modern Times from Nick Tierce on Vimeo.

As I was watching Tron: Legacy, I found myself feeling acutely aware of how the film was working to establish a “new” media franchise for Disney. After my recent trip to Universal Studios, I could easily imagine a simulation ride based on the interior of the game world, and the movie itself was planned with a video game in mind (and apparently a sequel or two). As a result, in a few places, the film seemed to be straining to establish the parameters for the grid, with many of these “rules” (escapees from the grid must have a disc containing all of their memories with them when they leave) defying any kind of logical sense, as Roger Ebert observes in his review. At the same time, aspects of the framing narrative seemed readymade for the cultural logic of Disney: young Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is essentially orphaned when his dad becomes trapped in the grid, turning him into a “safe” rebel who races motorcycles through city streets (preparing him nicely for at least one of the games he is forced to play in the grid) and pulls creative pranks on the board of the corporation he inherited. The result is that the film, early on at least, seems to hang on to a number of cinematic cliches, and later, once we have reached the grid, the rules seem to change according to whims driven by the film’s plot. Essentially, Kevin tells us that when he designed the grid, he created a bot of sorts named Clu that would ensure that the grid remained “perfect.” Of course, what happens is that Clu attempts not simply to eliminate imperfections but to get rid of difference itself (the film renders this idea by turning him into a kind of fascist leader who spits out speeches to faceless masses).

The opening sequences also present another representation problem, in that they were filmed in 2D, while the grid sequences were filmed in 3D. Given the rapid movements within the game world, the use of 3D actually seems fitting. Although a pre-credit title tells viewers to wear their 3-D glasses throughout the film, (like Ebert) I removed mine during the 2D scenes simply because the dark glasses made those scenes too murky. But an even more engaging aspect of the early scene was the use of digital special effects to make Jeff Bridges appear to be nearly thirty years earlier. The scene reminded me of an internet rumor that George Lucas had purchased the rights to reproduce digital versions of a number of classical Hollywood actors in order to create new films. But it’s an uncanny match, one that makes his weathered appearance in the grid later in the film all the more powerful, given all of the time we know that he has lost (leading to yet another logical problem: why would a digitized creation “age” in the same way that organic bodies do?).

The tensions between the visual design of the “real” world and the grid are also worth noting. Someone among my Facebook friends suggested that the film resembles a “bourgeois Blade Runner,” and I can see that reading. Many of the spaceships and visual design elements seem to evoke a slightly cleaned up version of the shabby cityscapes of Blade Runner. To some extent, I think this is due to what I have decided to call “technological nostalgia,” the film’s attempt to evoke and update older fantasies of “the grid,” the matrix, cyberspace, or computerization in general. This nostalgia is suggested in part by the closed down arcade that serves as a portal to the grid. When Sam answers a page coming from his dad’s office, he goes to find the old classic games covered in dust, a somewhat “lost” model of gaming in the internet era, in which broadband connections and powerful graphics cards on personal computers make popping quarters into a giant box completely unnecessary. But it’s the grid itself that recalls earlier attempts at depicting the virtual (worth noting: this Indy Weekly article offers a solid history of the original Tron’s visual influence). But I think it’s also suggested in some of tech noir imagery, the spaceships that evoke some of Syd Mead’s work in the 1980s, and other visual imagery that seems to have given rise to the cyberspace imagination starting with Blade Runner and running through William Gibson’s Neuromancer into The Matrix and, later, cyberspace itself.

These thoughts are, I’ll admit, somewhat scattered. I think that’s due, in part, to the tension described by Kohn between the film’s use of computers to render a visually engaging virtual world and the technophobic narrative. But there is also a lost sense of whimsy in this Tron update. In the original Matrix, the film powerfully captured the excitement and novelty of digital media. Keanu’s recognition that he could defy the laws of physics suggested that he could “free his mind” and imagine that anything is possible. In Tron: Legacy, the film stills seems to hold out hope that digital effects can astonish us, but it’s far less optimistic about whether those tools will do anything other than leave us isolated and alienated from others.

Until checking its Wikipedia entry, I had no idea that Love and Other Drugs (IMDB) was based on a non-fiction book, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, by Jamie Reidy, who, like the Jamie Randall character in the film (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), worked as a pharmaceutical rep.  That detail provides a slightly clearer motivation for setting the film in the 1990s, an aspect of the film I found fascinating (and will return to momentarily).  I haven’t read the book, but it seems that its primary purpose was to blow the whistle on some of the more unsavory practices of the pharmaceutical industry.  Although there are a number of scenes that satirize Big Phrama, the film seems less assured when it so earnestly depicts the romance between Jamie and Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway) primarily as a means for Jamie to enter belatedly into adulthood.  Although Maggie is also depicted as vulnerable, the story seems in places to use Maggie’s diseased body as a means for allowing Jamie to discover his better self (he and his brother, who made millions off of  medical software, are both depicted as overgrown children).

The romance plot does have some nice moments.  Edward Zwick (thirtysomething, Courage Under Fire) has good storytelling chops.  The film uses Maggie’s artwork, including a video project where she and Jamie record their bedroom conversations, relatively well in order to explore the emotional vulnerabilities of the characters, but it was often difficult to see the characters as anything other than types: the haunted artist and the overgrown (but sensitive) playboy.

Instead, I found myself focusing on the treatment of the 1990s boom era.  Nearly a decade after Clinton’s presidency ended, it’s becoming increasingly possible to view “the nineties” as a distinct historical era, with its booming economy, based in part on the exploding dotcom and pharmaceutical industries.  Jamie’s brother is a software millionaire, and Jamie hands out favors–umbrellas, pens, even to the point of arranging sexual trysts–to doctors in order to entice them to prescribe his drugs rather than his competitors’.  Although Jamie recites the benefits of Pfizer drugs–fewer side effects, better results–it’s clear that he doesn’t really believe his own pitch and doesn’t especially care.  Jamie’s career is given a boost when he lands the opportunity to sell Viagra (it’s almost impossible to write a sentence about Viagra without at least one bad pun), and the film treats Viagra as a symbol of the excessiveness of 90s culture.  At the same time, aspects of that excess, including the wild parties that are fueled by the drugs and drug company profits, are enticing and energizing, with the result that the nineties become the object of ambivalent nostalgia for the film (this is expressed musically as well through the use of The Spin Doctors, among others).

The depictions of the pharmaceutical industry–and its cynical emphasis on profits over care–did resonate with some of the current debates about health care.  Although the pharmaceutical reps, driven by the drug companies themselves, are probably the chief “villains” in this equation, the doctors (including Dr. Knight, played by Hank Azaria) are usually depicted as complicit in the system itself.  I don’t have time to track it down now, but at least one review compared Love and Other Drugs to the similarly topical Up in the Air (my review) and that comparison seems about right, although I liked the latter film quite a bit more.  Both movies map aspects of romantic drama onto workplace settings that engage with, or at least anticipate, our troubled economic times.  Although Love and Other Drugs primarily tracks Jamie’s transition into an adult capable of unselfishly loving and supporting Maggie, it is also engaged with topical issues in a relatively thoughtful way.

Update: Another film that has this topical vibe is David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network.  For a sharp analysis of the film, check out Tama Leaver’s recent column at FlowTV.

I managed to devote a little more time than usual to movie and media consumption on screens big and small (and on a few canvases, too).  I’ll start with a quick pointer to an exhibit I caught at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, which featured a number of paintings, sculptures, and videos that explore the materiality of vinyl records and their role in audiovisual culture.  If you’re in the Raleigh-Durham area, it’s well worth the trip, with a great collection of experimental, avant-garde, and outsider art all focused on the ongoing cultural significance of vinyl in the era of digital music.  Some of my favorite bits included Mingering Mike’s fictive album covers that mock, imitate, and rework pop music album covers in innovative ways.  But the website for the exhibit offers a nice overview of all of the artists who are featured.

I also caught two movies this weekend.  The most visible one, Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter was, in some ways, better than I expected.  It followed three central characters, Matt Damon’s haunted psychic, George, a French journalist, and a young British twin, as they seek explanations and emotional resolutions to their brushes with the afterlife.  As usual, Eastwood is comparatively restrained and the cinematography is polished, evoking the classical Hollywood style.  But I struggled to accept some of the film’s logical implausibilities.  George’s brief romantic attachment to Melanie (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) seemed underdeveloped, and much of Melanie’s story, especially her interactions with a world-renowned scientist who asserts that scientific evidence exists for an afterlife, weren’t very believable (which makes me wonder if some scenes were left on the cutting-room floor). Eastwood’s a capable filmmaker, so it worked a little better than I expected.

Finally, I also caught Edward Burns’ latest, Nice Guy Johnny.  There has been a lot of discussion of Burns’ strategy to release the film via VOD and on iTunes, and for “small” projects like Burns’ film, I think it’s a sensible strategy.  But the film itself offered a relatively standard coming-of-age story, nothing that really broke through for me.  A “nice guy” named Johnny (hence the title) is prepared to sacrifice his dreams of becoming a sportscaster to satisfy his snotty fiancee’s middle-class ambitions, so he travels to New York to interview for a job at a box manufacturer (isn’t that what Milhouse’s dad does on The Simpsons?).  Then, of course, he meets the laid-back woman who encourages him to pursue his dreams.  They hand out on the beach by a bonfire at night and talk.  Complications ensue.

Several days after watching it, I’m still mulling Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, Waiting for Superman (IMDB), in which we are presented a number of claims explaining why our educational system is failing.  We are presented with apathetic teachers who casually read newspapers while students play a game of craps in the back of the classroom.  We are told that these apathetic teachers are protected by teachers unions and a tenure system that discourages innovative classroom performance.  After all, why do anything to improve student performance when you will not be rewarded with merit pay?  And we are told that students will be conditioned to do the bare minimum to get by, unless they are challenged to do more.  We get some righteous indignation from activists and teaching executives such as Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee, the latter of whom took on DC’s teachers unions. We are also presented with some of the most emotionally staggering images I’ve seen in some time as five students, of a variety of backgrounds and ages, wait to see if their name is selected in the lotteries designed to choose who will attend local charter schools.  All of this is grounded in Davis Guggenheim’s own experience both as a parent and as someone invested in improving (and supporting) public education.  Guggenheim even cites his past documentary work on public education, The First Year, which documents the experiences of five public school teachers.

However, despite the film’s alignment with Participant Productions, a movie producer that mixes films and activism, it is unclear to me after seeing the film what kind of response Superman is seeking to elicit. The website offers several actions that participants can take, including writing their local school boards to demand “better teachers,” while supplementing the film with statistical information about dropout and college attendance rates for individual states.  It also offers other forms of activism or involvement ranging from seeing the film (done that!) to attending school board meetings.  But within the film itself, we are presented with some pretty clear heroes and villains, as innovative educators are pitched against teachers unions in a struggle over how children will be educated.  As a result, Waiting for Superman has been embraced by a number of conservative bloggers and critics, as Patrick Goldstein documents.  Unfortunately, many of the films claims are misguided, at best, as Dana Goldstein of The Nation points out, listing off unionized school districts that do quite well in educating students, while pointing out that four out of five charter schools are no better than the public schools in their neighborhood.  I think it also gives a pass to some of the more harmful attempts to politicize education, most notably the introduction of intelligent design as an “alternative” to evolution in some science classes.

What seems significant about the film is that it seems to falter when describing the innovations that could be introduced to the classroom to improve student performance.  We see one teacher who makes learning fun by turning multiplication tables into a rap, but for the most part, actual classrooms are less prominent than the talking heads seeking to fix them.  At the same time, we are introduced to five children struggling to get a good education, including Daisy, a Latina girl who dreams of becoming a doctor or veterinarian, to help people.  We also get single mothers and grandmothers struggling to help their children get into a good college.  All of them seem to be banking on their local charter school lotteries, which amount to exercises in emotional cruelty, despite what appear to be their creators’ best intentions.  The five families wait, usually in crowded gymnasiums, watching and waiting for their number or name to be drawn, giving them a ticket to a better school, and presumably, a better life.  It’s implied that if Daisy doesn’t beat the odds–her chances of getting into the charter school are pinned at 1 in 20–she’ll face insurmountable odds in her dreams of attending medical school (a similar practice is depicted in the documentary, The Lottery).  Although Superman seems to imply that all five of these students–and others like them–all deserve the best education possible, I don’t think the film is critical enough of the charter schools themselves for offering this fantasy of escape in such a public format.

There are some things in the film that seem perfectly on target.  Canada’s anecdote about his childhood wish that Superman would come along and eliminate the slums and fix the broken schools in his neighborhood.  It’s a useful reminder that there is no Superman, but that the work of countless individual teachers, parents, executives, and students is needed to make a difference.  The film also argues for higher standards, for challenging students to improve, a position I essentially share.  In too many places, however, the film seemed to be offering reductive answers to complex problems.  I think it avoids the worst excesses of some anti-youth screeds–all of the five children depicted in the film are clearly very bright and ambitious–but by reducing its picture of public schools into something of a stereotype, it does a serious disservice to the work of countless public school teachers who are making a sincere effort to educate today’s students.  It also avoids addressing how we can truly engage students every day in order to instill the pleasures of learning (while also cultivating a better understanding of what we mean by learning).

Update: Via Craig Phillips on Twitter, a pointer to secondary education professor Mark Phillips’ column on Waiting for Superman.  For the most part, Phillips’ comments echo my own, but his post reminded me of another scene that bothered me that I’d forgotten about.  It’s an animated video showing a teacher pouring knowledge into students’ heads, until he/she reaches one unfortunate student for whom the teacher misses the hole, allowing knowledge to spill out all over the student’s desk.  It’s an oddly old-fashioned depiction of (rote) learning, one that Paulo Freire, in a slightly different context, would have called the “banking concept” of education.  Learning as a transaction.  Knowledge can be dumped into our heads, in much the same way that Neo is programmed to learn kung fu in The Matrix.  It’s a highly flawed view of how learning works.  Phillips adds a number of useful observations about how Guggenheim’s film simplifies a much more complex set of practices, so it’s well worth checking out his entire evaluation of the film.

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network (IMDB) is a seductive film, one that promises a kind of history of the present, one that seeks to contextualize our socially networked era and to deconstruct the cult of the dotcom wonder boys.  It is a film that is rich in details of place and period–Harvard final clubs, Hotornot.com–but one that seems more obsessed with exploring how the social ineptitude of Mark Zuckerberg (at least as he is depicted in the film) made possible the site that, for better or worse, now plays an important role in structuring, or at least shaping, social relationships.

Zuckerberg’s lack of social graces becomes apparent from the opening scene of the film when we see him arguing with Erica, a girlfriend who is preparing to dump him.  Jim Emerson reads this scene beautifully as an introduction to the film’s fascination with “code.”  Exasperated at Mark’s inability (or resistance) to communicate clearly, Erica remarks, “Sometimes, Mark — seriously — you say two things at once and I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to be aiming at…. It’s exhausting.”  Bitter about the rejection, Mark rushes back to his dorm room, and in a manic, and drunken, burst of code writing produces “facesmash.com,” a website based on the algorithm of Hotornot that allows Harvard students to rate their female classmates in terms of who is hotter.  It’s the first instance in which Zuckerberg begins to realize that people want to see their friends on the internet, and it’s also the moment that the film introduces us to (or participates in) the sexism that permeates the cultures of privileged elites at Harvard and, eventually, in Silicon Valley.  The fact that Zuckerberg finds time to write a drunken, misogynistic blog entry mocking Erica reinforces much of this anger.

Although Zuckerberg’s desire to create Facebook seems to be driven largely by his anger about being dumped, we are also reminded that it is rooted in his fascination with and resentment toward the culture of elitism symbolized by the final clubs that refuse to provide admission to a frumpy middle-class computer geek (one who also happens to be Jewish in a supposedly WASPy culture).  This WASPy culture of privilege is personified by the Wiklevoss twins–tall, blonde, muscular, and privileged beyond belief–who recognize Zuckerberg’s coding skills and invite him to work on a project that they’ve been entertaining, Harvard Connection, a kind of Facebook for elites, which they propose in the bike room of their Final Club, the only room Zuckerberg is allowed to enter.  It’s also suggested by the busloads of Boston-based coeds who seem eager to strip down to their undies and gyrate on tables and make out with each other for the visual pleasure of a bunch of overgrown trust-fund guys.  And it’s unclear whether Mark resents being excluded from the power and connections such final clubs promise or whether its the girls.  Later, of course, Zuckerberg, along with Sean Parker (played with seductive bravado by Justin Timberlake), who had “completely transformed,” as Parker himself brags, the music industry, heads to Silicon Valley, where Parker, in particular parties non-stop, doing coke lines off the stomachs of eager California co-eds.  The programming world of Facebook also seems to me an all-male affair, something that isn’t true of the actual website (as Salon reminds us).  This is where the film’s attempts at critique started to become muddled for me.  Why oversimplify the company’s (and Silicon Valley’s) gender dynamics?  Is the film criticizing the elite Harvard grad for his not-so-hidden sexism? Zuckerberg for wanting entrance to that world? And to what extent is it offering the dancing girls for “our” pleasure?  Although the film seems to be criticizing the culture of masculinity at Harvard and in Silicon Valley, in places, the film seems to be cutting both ways.

As the film unfolds, we become more deeply ensconced in the hubris that begins to drive Zuckerberg.  He clearly becomes seduced by Parker’s flippant anti-authoritarianism and his superficial charm, rejecting the loyalty of his roommate and friend, Eduardo (who becomes involved with a stereotypically seductive, but eventually incredibly jealous, Asian girlfriend).  In some sense, I think, the film can be read as a love triangle between these three men: Mark, the talented misanthrope who stumbles onto social networking because he is anti-social; Eduardo, the loyal friend who seeks to support a project he thinks will work; and Sean, the rebel who seems to provide Mark with a way of getting back at all of the wealthy and powerful people who have rejected him, putting together what seems like a political allegory of sorts.    This is where I begin to find Alex Juhasz’s critique of The Social Network as a “boomer morality tale” convincing.  Zuckerberg sacrifices friendship and loyalty out of a personal desire for revenge, but that desire seems to be deeply rooted in the class antagonisms and resentments in place at Harvard (at least as it is imagined in Sorkin and Fincher’s flashy moralism).

It’s clear that the film wants us to be ambivalent about Zuckerberg, but I found myself with little to no sympathy toward him.  Throughout the film, Zuckerberg is alone–often in isolating long shots and even extreme long shots–when his biggest achievements are reached.  While Parker and the co-eds pop champagne corks in Facebook’s tiny apartment office, Zuckerberg is outside beyond a sliding glass door in the dark.  Although The Social Network has been compared to Citizen Kane in its depiction of an idealistic young man turning sour due to sudden wealth, it was hard for me to believe that Zuckerberg, unlike Kane, could have been a “great man.”  Instead, he remains a victim, one who sits alone in a sterile office tower with glass walls, the kind meant to suggest openness and warmth, obsessively refreshes his old girlfriend Erica’s Facebook page after sending her a friend request.

The film carries us along at a breakneck pace.  Roger Ebert compares the rapid-fire dialogue to screwball comedy, and that sounds about right, especially if the romance is between Mark, Sean, and Eduardo.  And the film is framed around an elegant flashback narration set in various deposition rooms as lawyers shoot questions back and forth, fighting over whether Zuckerberg owes Eduardo and the Winklevosses any money.  To that extent, the film seems more obsessed with the trappings of money and power, and Facebook itself seems to matter little.  We rarely see anyone actually using Facebook and are not given any sense of its appeal, no matter how flawed.  Sorkin himself, it is widely reported, doesn’t really use Facebook (although he reads blogs, Ken Levine’s at least), and as Richard Brody seems to imply, this pushes Sorkin’s seeming distaste for the site and his unwillingness to engage with it except as a site designed by a couple of socially inept geeks.

Thus, The Social Network is a film about  a significant transformation in mediated culture (I’m not willing to call it a revolution) that does little to engage with what those transformations might mean. As Brody puts it, in response to David Denby’s review, “Sorkin and Fincher’s Zuckerberg didn’t dream of becoming a Facebook user; he dreamed of not being a Facebook user.”  As I watched the film, I found myself developing the dawning realization that Facebook, which now seems like a “natural” part of Internet culture has only been around since 2004 or so.  I recall setting up my first account when I taught at Catholic University, well before Facebook access was available to anyone with an “edu” address and certainly before it was available to everyone (and used by almost everyone).  It has fed into and shaped a rapidly evolving net culture, one in which conversation is less likely to take place on blogs and more likely to unfold in the rapidfire comments on Twitter or the protected spaces of Facebook, a change in the media ecosystem that Laura at Geeky Mom explained recently on her blog.  The Social Network touches on these themes, but seems to not quite know what to do with them.  In that sense, the film’s biggest resentments seemed not to be directed at the wealthy, WASPy clubs that excluded Zuckerberg–at points, even “the Winklevii” seem more sympathetic than Zuckerberg–but at the changing media culture that seems to be reshaping our relationship to an older audiovisual culture moment by moment.