Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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networking succeeds to the degree that it successfully compensates people for something missing in their lives—a lost sense of neighborhood or extended family or workplace fraternity or class solidarity or even self-importance. As dramatized in The Social Network, the story of Facebook’s creation is not unlike that of any large corporation—megalomania rewarded, sweethearts trampled, partners buggered. Shoring up its own historical bona fides, the movie explicitly compares Facebook’s youthful founder Mark Zuckerberg to the media-mogul protagonist of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Zuckerberg’s real achievement, however, was something more mysterious than founding a newspaper or a twenty-first-century MGM or Standard Oil; his genius was to manufacture intimacy through the creation of a parallel, personalized internet: offering an ongoing second life in a virtual gated community.3
For its users, Facebook offers a sort of post-cinematic Total Cinema—it is the cyberspace equivalent of super-8 or video home movies, giving anyone the opportunity to be the star of their own ongoing online situation documentary. Objectively, however, Facebook creates a new sort of reification—a sphere in which everyone is a potential database self-defined by consumption. (In early 2011, certain movie studios—or rather media conglomerates—were studying the possibility of using Facebook as a platform by which users could rent movie downloads, a suggestive way of reconstituting the lost motion picture audience.) True to its moment however, The Social Network is less interested in mapping this new system of human interaction than in psychoanalyzing it as the projection of its quintessential user: Mark Zuckerberg. The key insight in The Social Network is that its imagined Zuckerberg—who is not particularly friendly and not at all prone to sharing—created his virtual community to address his specific situation.4
As Kafka’s self-starved Hunger Artist found his métier in his idiosyncratic nature (there just wasn’t any food he liked to eat) so The Social Network’s anti-hero invented Facebook in response to the psychic pressure of an individual quirk or character flaw, globalizing his own inability to connect with actual people. Ostensibly critical of Zuckerberg, The Social Network nonetheless proved to be a priceless advertisement for Facebook. As 2010 ended, the investment bank Goldman Sachs valued the worth of Zuckerman’s business at $50 billion; the firm invested $500 million in Facebook and was preparing to raise another $1.5 billion from their clients.5
The protagonists of Swanberg’s all but homemade LOL (its title is the online abbreviation for “laugh out loud”) are dutiful citizens of Zuckerberg’s world (even though, as the movie was made in 2006 and was thus all but instantly anachronistic, Facebook is not their social network of choice). Close to psychodrama, LOL stars its three main creators and was largely improvised by them. According to an explanatory extra included in the DVD release, the movie was “born out of ideas batted back and forth via computer, cell phone, etc., and then filmed in the same manner that people use webcams or their cell phones”—which is another way of describing its narrative. The opening shot is a computer screen with a moving mouse clicking on a file. Someone has posted his girlfriend’s private striptease on line. Her dance is cross-cut with close-ups of a dozen or more transfixed spectators, each occupying his own personal space and staring dumbfounded (and pants down?) at his own personal screen.6
LOL, in which every dysfunctional or imaginary romantic relationship is mediated by social networks, might have been titled, after Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride. So too, Pixar’s even more alienated, mega-million dollar, state of the art CGI spectacular WALL-E (2008), directed by Andrew Stanton. An unaccountably optimistic vision of human extinction, and thus a dialectical response to the new disaster film, WALL-E successfully vaults the uncanny valley that precludes audience identification with humanoid simulations to enlist as its protagonist a solitary robot trash-compactor who (or which) is single-mindedly organizing the endless detritus of an abandoned, implicitly analog world. (Whereas the ruined heart of a great city would once have invoked the specter of World War II, it now carries an unmistakable sense of New York City’s Ground Zero.) The spectacle of this devoted dingbot working alone to fashion a Grand Canyon out of neatly compacted garbage provides a breathtaking sense of eternity.
For much of WALL-E, its endearing, Chaplinesque hero—part Sisyphus, part Third World scavenger—is the earth’s last vestige of humanity. (A single plant and the trash-compactor’s cockroach sidekick are Earth’s only signs of life.) Utterly superfluous, the descendants of the planet’s former inhabitants drift through space in a giant, robot-controlled shopping mall known as the Axiom, too bloated to do more than slurp down Happy Meals and watch TV.
Pixar’s computer animation represents the epitome, thus far, of digital will. Even the indexical presence of a drawing or painted cel has vanished. Is this universally acclaimed motion picture then part of the problem or part of the solution? WALL-E satirizes the technology it deploys; it bemoans yet celebrates the death of analog image-making, consigns old-fashioned movies to the trash heap, even while worshipping their fragments. Although Kubrick’s 1968 2001 is ruthlessly parodied throughout, a Hollywood movie made the very same year serves as WALL-E’s privileged artifact. An ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly (once the epitome of elephantine, retrograde movie-making), seen solely in terms of a back lot musical number, is the robot’s most prized possession. This fetish serves to instruct the (male-coded) machine on the nature of the human, providing a synecdoche for the entire cultural heritage of the pre-apocalyptic Earth.7
Celebrating (or embalming) an obsolete technology, WALL-E is the 2001 of 2008—a post-photographic film set in a post-human universe. The movie’s single human actor is the designated special effect. A clip of cheerful prancing on a long-lost Hollywood soundstage signifies the Desert of the Real, as glimpsed from within the Matrix of Total Cinema. In the context of WALL-E, the tape of Hello Dolly functions as an installation, the equivalent of 24 Hour Psycho. The movie includes one other example of analog cinema—the holographic image of the Buy ’n’ Large Corporation’s long-dead CEO whose pre-recorded instructions are periodically delivered to the Axiom’s captain.8
At once avant and pop, horrendously bleak and cheerfully cute, WALL-E may be considered the twenty-first century’s quintessential motion picture to date. It is not, however, the most elaborate evidence of the New Realness. That, along with the furthest advance of Total Cinema, may be found in the revival of 3-D movies that began in the mid 1990s with a series of documentaries to which IMAX projection added the dimension of size, notably James Cameron’s underwater, digitally shot Ghosts of the Abyss (2003).
Cameron’s voyage to the bottom of the sea was also something else—namely, the avatar of his 3-D Avatar. Announcing the advent of digital 3-D, it was produced shortly before the director embarked on a motion picture which, as the highest-grossing movie in history, would rival The Passion of the Christ as the early twenty-first century’s most influential commercial release.9
CHAPTER SIX
POSTSCRIPT:
TOTAL CINEMA REDUX
The most seamless cyber-fantasy is, of course, James Cameron’s prodigiously successful Avatar (2009), a technological wonder that is essentially a 3-D science-fictionalized cavalry Western along the lines of Kevin Costner’s 1993 hit Dances With Wolves.
After fifteen years percolating in producer-writer-director Cameron’s imagination, Avatar shows earthlings on a mission from their own despoiled world to strip-mine the lushly verdant planet Pandora and, not coincidentally, subjugate its materially primitive but spiritually advanced inhabitants, the Na’vis—cyborg creatures that, thanks to extremely sophisticated “image capture,” are played by recognizable, if distorted, human actors. As preparation for taking control of the planet, the Sky People, as the Na’vis call them, attempt to infiltrate the Na’vis by linking human consciousness to Pandoran avatars. The movie is, in effect, a metaphor for its own computer game. Avatar’s hitherto disabled protagonist finds himself inside a twelve-foot-tall, blue-striped, yellow-eyed, flat-nosed humanoid—and he can walk! Ensconced in his game self (or avatar), our hero explores a mad jungle populated by six-armed neon tetra lemurs, flying purple people eaters, hammer-headed triceratopses and leathery demon dogs—as does the spectator, experiencing this CGI fantasy world in total depth.
Although Cameron was a prophet, the idea of stereoscopic cinema is as old as the