If I had not been a programmer for the past 42 years and a missionary
for Marxism on the Internet for the past 14, I doubt that I would have
found “Social Network” so compelling.
I can see the logic of my NYFCO colleague Armond White who, even more so
than me, has little use for such over-hyped movies:
Hollywood and the journalism industries—both cowed by the Internet
breathing down their necks—have perfected a method to curtail individual
response to movies, thereby dictating widespread enthusiasm for this
shallowly complicated film. To Fincher and Sorkin, Zuckerberg represents
a new cultural avatar who (like other snarky Internet avengers) must be
worshipped, not held to account. They inflate Zuckerberg’s story as a
“creation myth” (as one lawyer calls him), the better to concede victory
to a tycoon of new technology rather than apply normal social or
professional standards to his hostile relations with people. The Social
Network sucks up to successful, wealthy young powerbrokers.
Prairie Miller, my other favorite NYFCO colleague who is one of the
country’s sharpest radical film journalists, wrote:
And while the film is always about brains rather than brawn, The Social
Network is strictly guy territory with mental bawling providing the main
action, in a peculiar Harvard essentially sexed up and dumbed down. And
a main character spouting such an insanely intellectualized rowdy rap
minus the music, and seemingly psyching himself into a fast forward
run-on sentence karma of hyper-capitalist high, that any social logic to
this unfocused infomercial in biopic clothing, falls by the wayside.
Despite my alienation from the main characters, I found the movie to be
an extraordinary look into the process of software development with a
scrupulous attention to the technical details. After Mark Zuckerberg
(Jesse Eisenberg in a superb performance) gets the inspiration for what
would eventually becomes Facebook as a Harvard, he begins to cobble
together a web application using the same combination of programming and
database tools that I use at Columbia University for more mundane tasks,
like keeping track of the school’s billions of dollars. When I got into
the profession (a craft, really) 42 years ago, the programmer’s
workbench was a lot less accessible to the non-professional but with the
dissemination of personal computers and tools such as spreadsheets,
html, etc., it becomes a lot easier to identify with the main character
even if his personality traits are as off-putting as a bucket of phlegm.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/the-social-network/
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