December 17, 2012 Issue

One of the many brilliant elements of David Fincher’s masterly The Social Network (2010) is the soundtrack. Alec Wilkinson’s excellent “Music from the Machine,” a profile of Trent Reznor, in this week’s issue, illuminates the process that created the movie’s cerebrally beautiful score. Wilkinson says that when Fincher asked Reznor to write the music for The Social Network, he told him he wanted “the sound of creativity.” That request strikes me as dauntingly abstract. But I’m not possessed with Reznor’s genius. Working in partnership with Atticus Ross, Reznor eventually “sent Fincher about forty minutes of music.” Wilkinson quotes Fincher as saying, “Of that forty minutes, I think we ended up using pretty much all of it.” Wilkinson’s description of the opening track is fascinating:

“Hand Covers Bruise,” the theme of “The Social Network,” and the first scored music in the movie, begins with a nervous drone that is Reznor bowing a cello as fast as he can, but the sound has been manipulated, Nine Inch Nails style – in such a way, that is, that it sounds like something else, in this case a vibration from a loose piece of machinery. A halting and melancholy piano line, twelve notes, in nearly identical phrases, descends just over an octave, from an F-sharp to the tonic D. 

Fincher’s initial response to this music, as reported by Wilkinson, is memorable: “‘I opened it on my computer, and I turned my speakers up loud, and it gave me chills,’ Fincher said. ‘How could something this simple be this profound?’” That’s my reaction, too. Like so many other aspects of The Social Network, its soundtrack is inspired.  

Movies and the Matter of Fact: Denby v. Lane

Does dramatic development trump fidelity to fact? David Denby has addressed this issue at least twice. The first time he appears to say yes it does; the second time – no it doesn’t. In his review of David Fincher’s The Social Network, he writes,

A debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun: Doesn’t the actual Zuckerberg have a girlfriend? Is it fair to portray him as arrogant and isolated? And so on. But Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created an irresistibly entertaining work of art that’s definitely suggestive of the way personal relations are evolving – or devolving – in the Internet Age. Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters, and that kind of accuracy can be created only by artists. The Zuckerberg of the movie is the Zuckerberg who matters to us because he’s become part of us. [“David Fincher and The Social Network,” Do The Movies Have a Future? (2012)]

Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters – this contrasts with what Denby says, in this week’s New Yorker, about Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty:

Yet, in attempting to show, in a mainstream movie, the reprehensibility of torture, and what was done in our name, the filmmakers seem to have conflated events, and in this they have generated a sore controversy: the chairs of two Senate committees have said that the information used to find bin Laden was not uncovered through waterboarding. Do such scenes hurt the movie? Not as art; they are expertly done, without flinching from the horror of the acts and without exploitation. But they damage the movie as an alleged authentic account. Bigelow and Boal—the team behind “The Hurt Locker”—want to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time, and the contradiction mars an ambitious project. [“Dead Reckoning,” The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012]

Denby’s appreciation of the importance of factual accuracy appears to be evolving. He now seems to be saying that “literal accuracy” does matter where the movie is claiming “the authority of fact.” I agree. The crucial question is that of the terms on which the movie offers itself. Christopher Ricks, in his “Literature and the Matter of Fact” (Essays in Appreciation, 1996), says, “The difference between Crime and Punishment and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is not that the latter is based upon a murder which happened but that it proffers itself as a record of a murder which happened.” Zero Dark Thirty proffers itself as an account of the C.I.A.’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. By proffering factuality, it enters into an obligation to be factually accurate.

In my view, Ben Affleck’s Argo, is similarly damaged. It proffers itself as a true story of the C.I.A.’s 1980 rescue of six Americans from Tehran. Yet, as Anthony Lane points out in his review of Argo, the climactic airport scenes are fabricated:

If you visit the C.I.A. Web site, you can read Mendez’s account of events in January, 1980. “As smooth as silk,” he calls the hostages’ passage through the airport, whereas Affleck, chopping up the action and spinning it out, insures that no nails remain unchewed. This is absolutely his right as a teller of tales, and “Argo” never claims to be a documentary. [“Film Within a Film,” The New Yorker, October 15, 2012]

Lane’s view that the tale-teller has a right to distort the real-life event that he purports to represent in order to tell a good story must be considered in conjunction with Denby’s opinion, as expressed in “Dead Reckoning,” that such distortions “damage the movie as an alleged authentic account.” My own view is that historical events such as the killing of bin Laden and the rescue of the six Americans in Tehran happened one way and one way only. It’s only their meaning that’s open to interpretation.

Credit: The above artwork is by Concepción Studios; it appears in The New Yorker (December 24 & 31, 2012) as an illustration for David Denby's "Dead Reckoning." 

David Denby's "Do the Movies Have a Future?"

David Denby’s “Influencing People” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010) is one of the best movie reviews I’ve ever read – where best means descriptive, analytical, artful, exhilarating. I blogged about it here, when it first appeared, in a post titled “The Social Network: Denby v. Smith v. Wood.” Now I see that Denby has included a version of it in his new book Do the Movies Have a Future? The book version is called “David Fincher and The Social Network.” Comparing it with the New Yorker piece, I note a number of interesting changes. Here, for example, is the New Yorker version’s tracing of the movie’s subtlety:

Yet, no matter how quickly the film moves, Fincher, working with the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, pauses within the fast tempo

and lets the emotional power of the moment expand. Relying on nothing more than tiny shifts of emphasis and inflection, the director, to an amazing degree, makes us care about the split between the unyielding Zuckerberg and Saverin, who’s a decent guy but unimaginative and perhaps a little timid.

Now here’s the book version:

Yet no matter how quickly the film moves, Fincher, working with the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, pauses within the fast tempo and, like a great opera conductor, lets the emotional power of the moment expand. The emotion is produced not so much by emphasis as by extreme precision – tiny shifts of inflection (a hesitation, a glance, a lowered voice); even the actors playing the lawyers add their bit of nuance to what might have been routine scenes of questioning and badgering. In the end, to an amazing degree, Fincher makes us care about the split between two college buddies, Zuckerberg and Saverin, tender friends who understood each other about as well as highly competitive young men ever do. Poor Eduardo! He’s a decent guy but unimaginative and perhaps a little timid.

Notice that the observation about the reliance “on nothing more than tiny shifts of emphasis,” in the New Yorker piece, has been reconsidered. Denby now says, “the emotion is produced not so much by emphasis as by extreme precision.” And he goes on to explain what he means by “extreme precision” – “tiny shifts of inflection (a hesitation, a glance, a lowered voice).” His commentary deepens my appreciation of the movie, as does his point about “even the actors playing the lawyers add their bit of nuance to what might have been routine scenes of questioning and badgering.”

Most of the changes that Denby has made to his great review are minor (e.g., to the line, “The truth, Fincher seems to be saying, is best approached with data, impressions, and interpretations,” he adds a semi-colon and says, “there’s no final way of knowing anything”). But there’s one passage that’s been substantially rewritten. It’s regarding the film's accuracy. Here’s the New Yorker version:

The debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art. Accuracy is now a secondary issue.

Here’s the book version:

 A debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun: Doesn’t the actual Zuckerberg have a girlfriend? Is it fair to portray him as arrogant and isolated? And so on. But Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created an irresistibly entertaining work of art that’s infinitely suggestive of the way personal relations are evolving – or devolving – in the Internet Age. Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters, and that kind of accuracy can be created only by artists.

I agree with Denby’s opinion that The Social Network is a work of art. However, I question his statement, in the New Yorker piece, that “Accuracy is now a secondary issue.” Painstaking accuracy is, for me, a hallmark of great art (think Vermeer, Nabokov, Scorsese). The fact that he deletes this remark from the book version of the review indicates he’s uncomfortable with it, too. But the statement he replaces it with – “Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters” – is no less problematical. I don’t want to sound moralistic about this, but it seems to me that a movie that purports to tell the life story of a real person should stick to the facts. As Pauline Kael said in her review of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, “There is no higher truth than respecting facts” (“Genius,” in her 1973 collection Deeper Into Movies). Denby’s distinction between spiritual accuracy and literal accuracy is slippery; it provides a rationale for biographical falsification.

The good news about the book version of Denby’s review of The Social Network is that it reproduces almost verbatim (there are a couple of minor tweaks) the brilliant passage in the New Yorker piece describing the movie’s visual style:

Despite the half craziness of the themes, the early Fincher movies have a visual distinction that makes them galvanic, irresistible. As critic Amy Taubin wrote, “No one comes close to Fincher’s control of movement in a frame and across a cut,” and I agree with that. Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them. Whatever locations he uses, Fincher brings out their special character. At the beginning of “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg runs across the campus to his room at night, and Harvard, its many enclaves lit with intellectual industry, looks glamorous, like an enlivened imaginary city. The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

That “while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in” is superb! It’s tonic to see it preserved intact in Denby’s excellent collection.

The Social Network: Denby v. Smith v. Wood

Just for fun, I want to compare three reviews of “The Social Network”: David Denby’s “Influencing People” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010); Michael Wood’s “At the Movies” (London Review of Books, November 4, 2010); and Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” (The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010).

I’ll be guided in my analysis by Anthony Lane’s view that “The primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture – not telling movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket” (from Lane’s Introduction to his great collection of New Yorker writings Nobody’s Perfect, 2002).

Denby starts his review excitedly, proclaiming “The Social Network” to be a “work of art.” He engages in some interesting interpretation (e.g., “‘The Social Network’ suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information”), and lays out an excellent overview of Fincher’s previous work. Along the way, he provides some wonderful, semi-abstract descriptions of the movie (“a tightly fitted mosaic of agitated fragments,” “a linear accelerator that breathes”). But it’s not until near the review’s end that his prose reaches its highest pitch, when he tries to get at what it is that gives Fincher movies their distinctive look:

Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then, in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them.

Denby’s insight – “we are meant to see the ugly poetry” – leads him to write what is, I believe, the most inspired line in his review:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.

Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” is not so much a review of “The Social Network” as it is a rant against the evils of Facebook. She argues that Facebook is reductive (“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility”). She contends that it’s degrading (“In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is degrading”). She claims it encourages pack mentality (“But the pack mentality is precisely what Open Graph, a Facebook innovation of 2008, is designed to encourage”).

Smith likes “The Social Network” because (1) it’s a recognizable portrait of “a computer nerd, a social autistic” (“Oh, yeah. We know this guy. Over-programmed, furious, lonely”), and (2) it satirizes Generation Facebook’s “celebrity lifestyle” vision of the good life. Smith’s description of this vision is one of the great pleasures of her piece:

Again, we know its basic outline; a velvet rope, a cocktail waitress who treats you like a king, the best of everything on tap, a special booth of your own, fussy, tiny expensive food (“Could you bring out some things? The lacquered pork with the ginger confit? I don’t know, tuna tartar, some lobster claws, the foie gras and the shrimp dumplings, that’ll get us started”), appletinis, a Victoria’s Secret model date, wild house parties, fancy cars, slick suits, cocaine, and a “sky’s the limit” objective: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?… A billion dollars.”

Michael Wood’s review is the briefest of the three pieces. Like Denby and Smith, he notes “the long, intense, information-crowded conversation before the credits,” but unlike the other two writers, he shows how the zinger that Erica scores against Zuckerberg in this early sequence (something along the lines of “You’ll go through life believing people don’t like you because you’re a nerd. This won’t be true. They won’t like you because you’re an asshole”) links with a line that a lawyer says to Zuckerberg near the end of the movie (“You know, you’re not really an asshole, you’re just trying so hard to be one”). Wood considers this linkage and says that it lends Erica’s line “a weird retrospective authority.”

Wood makes another illuminating point about the film’s structure when he says, “At the centre of the movie, with flashbacks radiating out from it, is the room where the depositions are being heard in the two cases.” This reminded me that my dislike of flashback shadowed my own response to “The Social Network” when I saw it a couple of months ago.

Denby admires the movie’s “ugly poetry”; Smith likes its satire; Wood notes its radiating flashbacks. And the Anthony Lane “recreation of texture” award goes to … David Denby for his felicitous “while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.”