"Friday’s Soldiers" - Masoud Kimiai (2004)

Friday’s Soldiers (Sarbaz-haye Jome, 2004), by well-known Iranian writer-director Masoud Kimiai (Gheisar, 1969; The Deer, 1974), offers another example of the popular revenge motif.  As is characteristic of the genre that helped make Clint Eastwood famous, much of the film depicts some gross and cruel injustices that are suffered by the protagonists, who then render a bone-crunching payback to the wicked perpetrators in the closing scenes.

This particular revenge story concerns the events around one particular weekend when some young Iranian soldiers get a weekend pass to visit the “outside”.  The story passes through five distinct stages: the introductory scene, three scenes that depict the poisonous state of their society, and finally the cathartic conclusion.

1. The Barracks.

We are introduced to three of the four principal protagonists in this scene.  Asef is a new recruit who chooses to install his belongings in the lower bunk of a bed, the upper bunk portion of which is occupied by Reza.  Reza resents the sent of Asef’s eau de Cologne (signifying Asef’s higher class status) and thuggishly challenges him.  A bloody fistfight ensues, after which the two are hauled before their gray-haired superior, the “sergeant”.  Despite the brutality of their fight, Reza and Asef dismiss the whole thing as a little macho-laden dustup, and soon they become friends.  Together with another conscripted soldier, Saeed, who wishes nothing more than to leave the army and the country altogether, they all decide to go on a weekend leave.  The sergeant also decides to join them, and they set off on their outing.  

2. Reza’s Place. 

Reza wishes to visit his ailing mother, but upon arrival he learns that she has already passed away and the mourning is already underway.  He learns that his elderly father had neglected and presumably antagonized the ailing mother by recently taking on a young sighe (temporary additional wife).  Reza’s sister has just murdered her abusive, drug-addicted husband and will face a cruel justice.  After the agony of much wailing and multiple revelations and recriminations, the four soldiers leave Reza’s residence and are joined by Reza’s brother. 

3. The Sergeant’s Place.  

The group now visits the sergeant’s home, where a young female family member is apparently suffering from epilepsy.  Asef watches the girl’s fit in horror and is evidently disturbed that the girl is likely doomed to be treated as a social embarrassment. 

4. Asef’s Place.  

After a stopover to observe Reza’s brother at a recording studio session, the group, now joined by Asef’s sister, Noghre, go to Asef’s luxurious family residence. The class difference separating Asef from his companions is clearly on display in this scene.  This sequence, the longest in the film, is centered around Noghre, a beautiful, educated woman who has recently descended into drug addiction.   Asef urges her to abandon drugs and return to a normal life, but she tells him that her drug addiction stems from despair over the murder of her beloved, a well-known professor famous for his knowledge of poetry and philosophy.  The professor was murdered, we eventually learn, by a jealous young gangster who lusted after the beautiful Noghre.  The depraved gangster then took advantage of the grief-stricken Noghre’s resulting weakness over her lover’s death and got her enmeshed her in drug addiction, his own professional specialty.  When our “Friday’s Soldiers” learn about this, they immediately commit themselves to taking revenge on the entire gang. 

5. Revenge at the Slaughterhouse. 

The four young men and the sergeant equip themselves with clubs and then get Noghre to guide them to the gang’s headquarters at the slaughterhouse.  As soon as they arrive, they start knocking heads, and the next two minutes of screen time show a blood-spattering melee, with the Friday’s Soldiers barely holding their own.  They eventually succeed in their mission, though, and they all head back to the barracks to get aid for seriously wounded Saeed.  However, the closing shots of the film show the soldiers’ return impeded by a political demonstration that is underway in the city, as the big city seems to swallow up the soldiers and their concerns as if they hold no significance.

Overall, Friday’s Soldiers has serious weaknesses, and yet there are some attractive features to it, too.  On the down side, the narrative lacks coherence, and the middle three acts to the film come across as random and disconnected.  The acting in the film also has serious limitations, with overwrought histrionics substituting for serious dramatics.  This difficulty is exacerbated by Iranian social custom, which is typically highly emotive in many social situations, such as during grieving periods after a family death.   Thus the emotional scene at Reza’s place, with all its crying and wailing, seems artificially overwrought, insincere, and unconvincing.

Despite the overall mess of the story, however, the over-the-top, impressionistic images presented here have their mysterious upside, too.  They turn the film into a weird impressionistic phantasmagoria that plays according to its own mad logic.  This is particularly effective in the lengthy fourth act, “Asef’s Place”, where Noghre’s half-crazed recounting of her tragic descent begins to take over the entire film.  Her story begins to infuse the film with an overall theme.  These soldiers, for various reasons dropouts from their particular social circumstances and from Iranian society as a whole, couldn’t deal with all the contradictions and dissatisfactions in their lives.  But once they hear Noghre’s story, they have had enough; they resolve to stay and fight for justice.

Although the word “Friday” in the title may merely suggest that this is the last day of their brief weekend pass, it can also can carry the connotation of the Islamic holy day, the day of peace and mercy.  These “Friday’s Soldiers” see a society around them that is in decay, and action must be taken to set it aright.  The expressionistic cinematography emphasizes their emotional turmoil by constantly inserting  reaction shots of the protagonists, as they watch and react to one horror after another.

Unfortunately, such a moral interpretation of Friday’s Soldiers is undercut by the final, violent action of revenge.  Thrashing and stomping on those who are judged to commit wrong will not solve the problems in society; it merely perpetuates the cycle of hatred and violent reaction. All revenge films suffer from this basic moral discrepancy.  Such violent "retribution" may supply some visceral satisfaction, but it is only a primitive, animalistic response.

One final word needs to be said, however, in appreciation of the haunting, moody musical score by Peyman Yazdanian, who also scored the music for The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Going By (2001), and Fireworks Wednesday (2006).  It’s so good that it alone elevates my rating of the film by half a star.
★★½

"Going By" - Iraj Karimi (2001)

Going By (Az Kenar-e Ham Migozarim, 2001) was the debut feature of writer-director Iraj Karimi, whose previous contributions were in the areas of short works, documentaries, and  film criticism.  It tells a fragmented story of four disconnected groups of people travelling by car from Tehran to the northern part of Iran.  The four groups traveling northward are

• A man and his young son of about eight or nine years of age.  The son appears healthy, but we are told that he will soon die of the same strain of cancer that killed his mother two years earlier.
• A man driving a hearse, with a passenger who is a peasant man in his forties.  Their cargo in the back of the hearse is the corpse of the passenger’s 92-year-old father.
• Two women in another car.  The driver is a young widow whose husband recently died of cancer one month earlier.  The passenger was the dead husband’s lover and was unknown to the widow prior to her unwelcome appearance at the recent funeral.
• A father and his two sons, one about 8 or 9, and the other in his late teens.  The father is concerned about the life prospects of both sons.  The younger one has just recently failed his year in school, and the older one has aspirations towards the not-very lucrative career of a film critic (Karimi’s original profession).

As the film proceeds, the viewer is naturally motivated to see what may connect the four groups. This takes time, though, because there is the oft-used technique of slow disclosure at work here, where significant pieces of information are only revealed in tantalizing bits and pieces during the lengthy car journeys (the film mostly consists of dialogue among the excursionists).

Given the serious life issues associated with the four groups and the likelihood that the journey will be a driving metaphor of the narrative, one looks for kind of allegorical overtones that often appear in serious Iranian films.  Indeed there appear to be affinities between this film and those of Abbas Kiarostami, for example, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), which also depicts travelers on something of a spiritual quest.  This connection is likely no accident, given the fact that writer-director Karimi wrote a book about Kiarostami, (Abbas Kiarostami, the Realist Filmmaker).

In fact in the early stages of the film, we see a film crew at work photographing a scene involving that same hearse (one of the four vehicles to be followed for the remainder of the film).  At this point the viewer may wonder if he or she is about to see the sort of reflexive narrative that Kiarostami sometimes uses to show the filmmaker at work making the very film that one is watching.  In this case, though, this filmmaking depicted early on in Going By appears to be part of the fictive story and not a direct diegetic reference to Karimi’s own filmmaking.  Nevertheless, Karimi’s narrative does seem to try to maintain a certain ambiguity about the narrative process throughout, with reflexive insinuations scattered all the way along.  There are continual references to filmmaking and film criticism in the story, and there are several discussions among the participants concerning the differences between realism and fantasy in both art and films.

There are also some clearly symbolic gestures in the film.  For example, an elderly man with a tire is occasionally seen along the side of the road, and he is sometimes seen attempting to hitchhike with it to some unknown destination.  At other time he is seen rolling the tire down the run and running along rapidly behind it.  Perhaps he represents the never-ending and mindless flow of time that drives us towards our fatal destinies, but one is only left to draw his or her own conclusions about what it all means.  In addition, the hearse driver serves as something of a Greek chorus in connection with the film’s assumed themes of fate and death.  At one point the driver philosophically remarks that there is a significant difference between the professions of acting and driving a hearse.  Acting, he says, inherently involves a degree of love and dedication; while hearse-driving is just a job.  This suggests that unless we are somehow passionately and lovingly involved in life, we are, each of us, just doing the routine "job" of driving our own hearse (that is, our own body), towards our own eventual funeral.  This, for me, was the one moment of revelation in the film.

With those various philosophical allusions and intimations always present, there is promising material here, but unfortunately, Going By doesn’t live up to its promising expectations.  There are a number of serious weaknesses. 

• For one thing the acting in the film has some serious limitations and inconsistencies.  Only the boisterous hearse-driver seems to project a real character.  The other actors seem woefully inadequate to the dramatic demands of their roles, which may reflect Karimi’s inexperience.  Other film directors who have used amateur and first-time actors have evidently restrained the narrative demands made on the performers so that the acting stayed within believable bounds.  But this was not the case for the players in Going By, many of whom are dealing with bereavement and other serious emotional concerns, and this leads to a disappointing dramatic result.  There are also some noticeable technical inconsistencies with lighting and editing continuity in the film.  These rough edges are unfortunately made more conspicuous by the explicit discussions in the film by some of the characters about techniques of sound dubbing, back-projection, and realism, which call attention to the technical details of the production.

• Of greater concern is the fact that each of the four groups should have its own narrative direction and movement.  But this doesn’t happen.  Each of those groups just drifts along aimlessly.  The man with the doomed son seems distracted, occasionally showing interest in his son or the young widow, and at other times drifting away into his own world.  The father-and-two-sons subnarrative is just a long argument littered with scatological dialogue. The hearse-driver subnarrative is not a subnarrative at all and goes nowhere.  Only the subnarrative of the two women shows some movement, but it’s all rather quizzical.  Why are we prevented from seeing the dead husband’s paramour for almost half of the film (she is frequently just out of frame)?  Why does the young widow run away and abandon her car to the paramour at the end of the film?

• The four groups do finally come together at a road café on their journey to the north.  But though there is some teasing interaction among the travellers, there are no serious connections made.  There had been a discussion along the way about the difference between landscape painting and portraiture, and this is explicitly brought to our attention at the café, but whatever point Karimi seems to be making on that score was lost on me. 

At the end of Going By, there has been no resolution made at the narrative level or at the thematic level.  It all just comes to an inconclusive ending when the final credits roll on the screen.
★★

“Japanese Girls at the Harbor” - Hiroshi Shimizu (1933)

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Minato no nihon musume, 1933) is a striking and atmospheric silent movie from director Hiroshi Shimizu, who had a long and successful career in Japan, but is relatively unknown in the West. Based on a story by Itsuma Kitabayashi, the film may at first appear to be a rather conventional romantic tale, but it manages to evoke nuanced considerations of love, jealousy, the challenges of modernism to traditional values, and also what I might call, “truth and revelation”.

The story of this film revolves around three girls in the port city of Yokohama who are all romantically attracted to a handsome young man in the area. The focus is on two best friends, Dora and Sunako, who are students at a Catholic girls school. The plot passes through three basic stages.

1. Sunako and Henry. After opening with some atmospheric but impersonal and distancing shots of Yokohama harbor, the scene shifts to Dora and Sunako, who walk home together across a hilltop every day. On this occasion the courtly young man Henry drives up to the hilltop on his motorcycle, to the evident delight of both girls. Henry is charming and chivalrous towards each of them, but Sunako is more assertive and succeeds in winning his attentions. Dora is crushed but swears fealty to her eternal friendship with Sunako. Soon, however, we learn that Henry likes to hang around the company of punk gangsters and is also seeing an older, more worldly girl, Yoko Sheridan, who seems to be experienced in the affairs of seducing and manipulating men. Dora reports this situation to Sunako, who is overcome with jealousy and, in a dramatic scene, confronts Yoko in the school chapel and shoots her with a gun.
2. Sunako’s Fall. The scene now shifts to new circumstances after some time has passed. Through a process of slow disclosure, the viewer gradually learns that in the smoky world of prostitutes and gin joints, one of these girls, now wearing the striking garments of a geisha, is Sunako. She has become a different person from the respectable schoolgirl seen in the first act. Meanwhile Henry and Dora are now married, revealing that Dora’s shy, conservative manner was ultimately successful in the game of love. By chance, Henry runs into Sunako in the city and is shocked by what has happened to her. Dora, still loyal to her old friend, seeks to help Sunako and urges her to come to their dwelling for visits. Both Henry and Dora feel called upon to get Sunako to return to a more respectable and virtuous life, but Sunako, presumably aware of the likely unforgiving nature of traditional Japanese society, feels trapped in her situation.
3. Sunako’s Redemption. Henry, trying to turn Sunako around, goes to visit her, but he also finds himself tempted by old feelings and is attracted to her again. Perhaps due to his conflicting emotions, Henry turns to drink and starts hanging out in bars until late at night. Although Sunako is also still attracted to Henry, she reawakens to her authentic self and insists on Henry returning to his wife, Dora. At the end of the film, Sunako departs from Yokohama on a ship, having done the right thing but unsure of what life has further in store for her.

There are several interesting aspects of the story of Japanese Girls at the Harbor that make it more interesting than might first appear, The focus of attention here is on women, not men. What we see is a sensitive portrayal of women and how they see and act from their particular perspective, and this portrayal is enhanced by generally subtle acting (despite the sometimes stylized gestures mentioned below) that reveals their depth. As with many of Kenji Mizoguchi’s films, the men in this story are generally shallow and weak. Henry is nice, but seems to have little spine or character. In addition, another personage in the story, the painter Miura, who is Sunako’s later companion in her fallen state, is a friendly but servile camp follower who follows Sunako around like a puppy dog. So the men here are relatively useless, and it is the women who drive the story. Of course, Sunako is an assertive women who takes actions throughout. But even Dora and Yoko Sheridan (who reappears as a chastened and doomed character in Act 3) are attention-drawing and rather complex characters who undergo change in the story. Sunako is the most interesting character and the action-taker. In Act 1 she asserts herself by claiming Henry. Later when Yoko comes to take Henry away from her, Sunako shoots her. In Act 2, Sunako has descended into prostitution, but she is still very much her own woman, making her own living and energetically dominating her hangdog companion, Miura. Finally in Act 3, Sunako is still the decisive character – she reunites Henry with Dora and then chooses to leave Yokohama for new territory. She is the agent that makes things happen in this story.

Getting back to that theme of truth and revelation that I mentioned earlier, there is this curious compulsion on the part of characters in the film to intervene by telling the “truth” as they know it. In Act 1 Dora goes to Sonako and tells her what she knows about Henry and Yoko. Yoko also reveals to Henry that she knows about his dallying with Sunako. In Act 2 both Dora and Henry attempt to intervene in Sonako’s life and get her back to a virtuous life. In Act 3 Miura intervenes and reveals what he knows to Henry. Also in Act 3 Yoko Sheridan, having reappeared as a quite different person, also attempts to straighten out Sunako. The sense of respect for the privacy of the individual was evidently less significant in this realm. All of these characters felt the need to establish a common objective knowledge in the society around them, even though new modernist tendencies were making such commonality even less achievable and also revealing that the depth of individual feelings were richer than can be known in the public space and that increased considerations for privacy were more desirable for individuals and public alike.

What makes Japanese Girls at the Harbor such a special experience and a must-see film, however, is not the basic story, but the telling. The moody, black-and-white compositions and long tracking shots are consistently evocative of the general feelings of longing and loneliness. In addition there is considerable visual symbolism throughout, often in terms of images that represent the challenges of modernism. A further visual attribute, and one that strikes me as more unique to this film, is the sometimes dramatically stylized gestures of the actors – I am not sure whether these derive from silent movie or perhaps Japanese dramatic traditions. Incidentally, although sound movies came early to Japan, with the first one appearing in 1926, it took some time for talking pictures to take hold – even in the year of this film, 1933, more than 80% of the Japanese productions were silent films. One curious aspect to the visual presentation was the many intertitles in the film. These numerous textual interruptions might be thought to interfere with the visual presentation – I was always taught that the best silent films were those that didn’t need any intertitles. And yet the brief intertitles in this film don’t seem to get in the way, and seem almost to provide a form of visual punctuation.

Overall, Japanese Girls at the Harbor is worth tracking down. In many ways I had the feeling as I watched it that I was seeing a Japanese version of a Josef von Sternberg film, where a simple narrative arc is graced by a leisurely, expressionistic cinematography that entrances the viewer.
★★★½ 

“The Social Network” - David Fincher (2010)

The Social Network (2010) is about one of the hot cultural topics of the moment, the massive move to computer social networking and the extraordinary rise of its primary platform, Facebook. So even a poorly crafted film would have attracted considerable interest from many quarters. But the public and the critics generally judged The Social Network to be top-notch entertainment, giving it thumbs up all round: it earned eight US Academy Award Oscar nominations and has grossed well over $200 million. Based on Ben Mezrich's book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the founding of Facebook, it is notable that this mainstream Hollywood production is not a product of the youth culture it examines, but is instead something of an examination from the outside of that sphere – it was directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, 1999) and scripted by Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, 1999-2006). In fact the clinical examination metaphor is made explicit in the production, since all the events depicted are seen from the framing device of two concurrent court depositions associated with lawsuits that were filed about the events depicted in the film: the law courts are trying to get at the truth of what exactly took place in 2003-2004 concerning the rise of Facebook

In fact the film’s viewers, too, are probably looking for some kind of truth, or perhaps many truths when they go to see this film. After all, in just a couple of years, Facebook has amassed 750 million users and is considered to be worth more than $70 billion. How did this thing that was started by a single 19-year-old programmer get so big, so fast? Depending on what part of society they are coming from, viewers probably wanted to know the real story, the truth, that could provide answers to the following questions:

• What made Facebook different from its other social networking competitors (Myspace, Friendster, Bebo, Orkut, . . .) and how did it come to dominate the market? Does it have special technical features, algorithms, or user affordances that make it so much better?
• How does the youth-dominated high-tech computer industry work and what is it like to be a computer hacker?
• Who is Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, and what lies behind his success?
• Did Mark Zuckerberg actually steal the idea of Facebook from some of his fellow students and cash in all by himself?

Amazingly (for a film that has satisfied so many viewers presumably looking for these answers), the film doesn’t provide definitive information for any of these questions. Although The Social Network is grounded in actual court testimony (much of the testimony in the hearings is taken directly from the court transcripts), some knowledgeable critics have even complained that the depiction of the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, has serious inaccuracies [1,2,3]. In particular they argue that the film shows Zuckerberg to be

• insecure – but they say he is not;
• being obsessed with gaining an invitation to one of the prestigious, upper-class Harvard Final Clubs – but Zuckerberg denies having had an interest in that;
• being a social outcast who could not find a girlfriend or relate to girls – but apparently he has had a steady girlfriend since 2003.

Besides the issue of whether the characterization of Zuckerberg is authentic or not, the film doesn’t even say much of anything about the experience of computer social networking or how the software that drives it was constructed.

Despite these criticisms concerning the film’s failure to reveal authentic and realistic information about its main subjects, though, I would say that the film does have its virtues. We just have to realize that this film is not about gritty reality, but is actually more of an expressionistic fable about characters that exist partly in our collective imagination. And on these terms, the film does convey something of an interest. So for the moment, let’s consider the fictionalized characters as shown, who may differ considerably from the real personages after whom they were fashioned.

First let’s consider the surface reality of the film. From the outset we are plunged into something of a dreamworld, or at least the dreamworld of TV dramas. What we see is not how real people really act, look, or talk. The pacing is too fast, filled with snappy and smart verbal comebacks to any remark. The girls, most of them Asian, are all slender, glamorous, and enticing. This is more the stuff of male fantasies than of the literal truth. At a social mixer party that takes place at a Harvard Jewish fraternity in the film, a male friend of Eduardo, one of the film’s main characters, remarks that he wants to develop an algorithm to explain the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls. Eduardo responds,

“I don’t think it’s that complicated. They’re hot, they’re smart, they’re not Jewish, and they can’t dance.”

I guess that just about sums it up.

But it is exactly this dreamworld that makes the film compelling. The story is not about social networks, but about a particularly bizarre social network, in fact the social network (as the title reminds us). In this case the social network concerns the principal characters, an odd pairing that fate and circumstance has thrown together:

• Mark Zuckerberg, the gifted and nerdy computer whiz who starts Facebook.
• Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian math major at Harvard and Mark’s roommate. Eduardo works as Mark’s early financial advisor.
• The Winklevoss twins, two studly and patrician Harvard upperclassmen who want to recruit Mark to work for their own fledgling computer company.
• Sean Parker, a West Coast entrepreneur who was part of the founding of two well-known computer startups, Napster and Plaxo. Sean entices Mark to move Facebook out to the West Coast.

The plot is crafted as a variant on the classical “hero’s journey” [4], an oft-told story of a dangerous and lonely passage into a mysterious realm in quest of a hidden treasure – but fraught with multiple temptations and dire jeopardy. An iconic example of the hero’s journey is The Wizard of Oz (1939), and in fact I was reminded of David Lynch’s expressionistic turn on that very tale, Wild at Heart (1990), while watching this story unfold.

The film narrative is divided into three acts, and each one features alliances, betrayals, and the confrontation of threats. In each case the protagonist Zuckerberg is faced with a test that he manages to pass through by means of a shaky and not altogether trustworthy alliance. All three acts are framed, as I mentioned earlier, in the context of the later lawsuit deposition hearings, so they represent selected flashbacks of key events during the period under examination.

1. The Harvard Startup.
In the first act we meet the Aspergerish Zuckerberg talking to his girlfriend, Erica, and manically maintaining two conversation threads with the same person at the same time. She eventually zones out of his narcissistic and insensitive ramblings and announces that she is dumping him. Bewildered, Mark goes back to his room and vengefully calls Erica a bitch on his Friendster blog page before turning away from the too-complicated human world and spending all night hacking up a computer mashup, called “FaceMash”, that enables Harvard students to rate and compare how “hot” the coeds are on campus. Although this computer application is immediately popular, it gets Mark in trouble and leads to his suspension. But the bravura exploit draws the attention of the Winklevoss twins, who, together with their classmate Divya Narendra, have decided to start a local blogging and social networking platform at Harvard called “Harvard Connect”. They offer Mark the job of programming their service platform, and Mark agrees to join them. But it’s clear that these guys are just out to use Mark and exploit his programming genius. He’s just a tool for these sophisticates, who dominate Mark by virtue of their being upperclassmen, their immense wealth, and their social status. Meanwhile Mark secretly decides to go off and develop his own social networking platform, and this activity delays his work for the Winklevosses. These are the key events associated with the subsequent Winklevoss lawsuit against Zuckerberg, which claimed that Mark had stolen their idea (their “intellectual property”) for Facebook. We never do get much of a feeling whether Mark meant to screw the Winklevoss twins from the outset and how much of his own venture, initially known as “thefacebook.com”, was his original idea. Actually, it turns out that even his original FaceMash application was not such an original idea, since something very similar had appeared at MIT a year earlier [5].

But somehow the issue of Mark’s originality doesn’t seem to matter in this story told on screen. We are basically on the side of this innocent, naive kid struggling against the super-confident giants that are always expected to win, because the deck is inevitably stacked in their favor. Although on the surface Zuckerberg appears completely outmatched by the Winklevoss twins, in the end it is Mark, like the mouse topping the cat in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, who dumps the Winklevoss twins and plows ahead with his own company.

2. TheFaceBook.Com
Zuckerberg and his roommate and pal, Eduardo Saverin, set out to build thefacebook.com (which will eventually become Facebook.com). Saverin is no slouch, by the way – we are told early on that one summer he made $300,000 investing in oil futures, and he becomes the Chief Financial Officer for the startup company. Throughout The Social Network, much of the action is seen from Eduardo’s perspective, and he is something of a narrator for this tale. This feeling of him being the narrator arises naturally from the fact that Saverin was Mezrich’s principal source for The Accidental Billionaires (Zuckerberg did not cooperate on the book or the film). So we are just getting Saverin’s side of the story all the way along. It is not surprising then that Saverin is the most sympathetic and human of the principal characters in the film. In fact only his role (played well by Andrew Garfield) and that of Erica (Rooney Mara) who come across as real, believable people. The rest of the roles, though well-acted, are heavily dramatized caricatures.

Anyway, in the context of this tale as its cinematically told to us, it is evident that Saverin’s sensitivity and humanity are necessary counterbalances to Zuckerberg’s disconnected and obsessive focusing on his own narrow goals. After some successes both with Facebook and with meeting girls, the two close friends meet up with the next turning point, the encounter with Sean Parker.

3. The Journey Out West
In a way, Parker (in an enthusiastic performance by Justin Timberlake) turns out to be the key pivotal figure to the narrative. He is a dazzling and seductive Mephistopheles, as he completely awes Zuckerberg with his glitzy familiarity with California showbiz-style entrepreneurship. The innocent and genuine Saverin is no match for this smooth operator, and he is easily sidelined by Parker’s almost demonic presence. In fact there is a scene in a San Francisco nightclub that summons up the images of the devil, himself, in the form of Parker seductively leading the ensnared Zuckerberg into a netherworld of forbidden rituals. It is certainly the “innermost cave” [4] of danger for the naive Zuckerberg. Parker represents a different kind of threat than the Winklevoss twins. While the Winklevoss twins were imposing and formidable antagonists, they were external threats – like powerful beasts of the forest. But Parker is even more dangerous – he appears to be attacking Zuckerberg from within and threatening to capture his very soul. And the horrified Eduardo is powerless to stop him. Parker soon engineers a semi-takeover of Facebook by landing some big-time investors to invest heavily in Facebook, thereby establishing Parker as president of the company and forcing Eduardo out of the picture (he would later Zuckerberg over this).

In the end, though, fate plays its hand and saves Zuckerberg from being completely taken over by Parker, as Parker’s fast-paced social life leads to a cocaine bust that removes him from the scene. In the film’s closing sequences, Zuckerberg is seen as having triumphed over everyone. He cam pay off the lawsuits and still be the world’s youngest and perhaps most powerful billionaire.

Many people have criticized the real Zuckerberg for being an ego-obsessed monomaniac, using his calm demeanor to mask a heartless arrogance that is willing to exploit anyone (and everyone, when it comes to people’s privacy) who stands in his way. Yet in this film, anyway, his character comes across as essentially innocent. He is the lone hero who pursues his dream to do it his own way. He spurns easy money and never lets distraction get in the way of his efforts to make Facebook into the what he had originally envisioned: a mechanism to connect people together. So as a drama, The Social Network works. Even though Zuckerberg’s relentless drive led him to move on from his friendship with Saverin, he does get what he wanted: the Facebook that can change the world.

But this victory comes at a price, and at the end of the film, Zuckerberg is still thinking about Erica and wishing that he could get her back. He has created the social networking behemoth, but his own social network is defunct.

This brings us to the larger issue, beyond the hero’s journey depicted in the film, concerning what Facebook really offers to us. Zuckerberg said that it was all about people making connections. When you can do that effectively online with Facebook, you can presumably find out what your friends are doing, eating, drinking, and watching. But the way Facebook works, subtlety and context are lost, and so, too, is privacy

In my view Facebook does not have a magic formula for social interaction. It was simply slightly better and slightly less bothersome than its competitors, and in the power-law economics of global electronic commerce, the leader, no matter how small its initial lead, will dominate overwhelmingly in the marketplace, whether it's in search engines (Google), operating systems (Microsoft), or social platforms (Facebook). And since Facebook is now so pervasive, the information that it has collected about everyone is enormously valuable to commercial enterprises, who will pay high fees to get at that information and make Facebook even more wealthy – a wealth that has been amassed by its acquiring and aggregating personal information from you and me. But we should not be seduced by mere size. As a social tool, Facebook is no more innovative than mass-market TV.

Facebook in fact is based on a reductionist, Objectivist view of reality – an impoverished perspective founded on a simplified and uniform ontology (mental model of the world). In terms of world modelling, it has always been the goal of the natural sciences to develop a universal model of reality, and we all know about the great advances in physics, chemistry, and biology towards this direction. But the complexity of human social interactions is well beyond the explanatory powers of the natural sciences. It is admittedly true that it is possible to employ simplified, quasi-universal ontologies that cover simple products and processes that we use for common and straightforward actions. But the human social world is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of complexity, and it is precisely that sphere of activity that will not succumb to such simplicity. In the social domain, everyone develops their own mental model of reality based on what they can learn from others and from their local contexts. To interact effectively in society, one has to have empathy: one’s mental model of reality must include the notion of other people who have their own, different mental models of the world – and they in turn have mental models that include guesses concerning what our own mental models may be like to them. We do this all the time, almost unconsciously, when we try to navigate in the social world, but in fact it is an extraordinarily complex mesh of multiple models within multiple models.

There are people, however, who have difficulty empathizing, the more extreme examples of whom may exhibit autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and ADHD. Since they don’t empathize and imagine the mental models of others, they don’t see a social world out there of multiple models. For them, the external world, including it social aspects, has only a single, universal model. It would be natural for such a person to come to the idea that the way to extend our understanding of that single, social model is to connect as many people as possible together so that they can all share what they know. This is apparently how Mark Zuckerberg, and people like him, thinks. That’s why the mere act of social connection was so fundamental to him and became his mantra. In this way of thinking, when a person connects with a “friend”, he is connecting with someone who is on the path to being mentally identical to him. They are just at various stages along that path towards comprehending the universal ontology.

But we should not let such empathy-challenged people wire us into a social system that diminishes the rich potential of our interactions. Deep down, we know, of course, that the idea of a “friend” is far more subtle than the way it has been defined in Facebook. In fact the real meaning of friend, just as the meaning of love, is actually so deep and context dependent, that it has forever challenged the world’s poets and artists. And each beautiful poem and work of art that has been produced on these subjects has been understood individually by each listener/observer in terms of his or her own meaningful local context. In contrast, Facebook, as it stands today as the product of Objectivist computer geeks, lumps every connection with another user as simply an unqualified and undistinguished “friend”. You may be electronically connected by this process, but these are often meaningless connections. As Zadie Smith reminded us [3], we need computer systems that empower us to be even more human, not reductionist-driven systems that only provide us with a fast, but barren, landscape of meaningless connections. Those better systems that we need will certainly come eventually, I am sure, and when they do, they will be produced by technically skilled teams that can go beyond reductionism and incorporate the poetry and empathic compassion of complex social interactions.
★★★½

Notes:

1. David Kirkpactrick, “What’s True in the Facebook Movie”, The Daily Beast, September 30, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/30/the-facebook-and-zuckerberg-in-the-social-network-arent-real.html.
2. Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook”, The New Yorker, September 20, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all.
3. Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?”, The New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?pagination=false
4. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, (1992).
5. Facemash was preceded at MIT by “Hot or Not” in 2002. See http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N69/69hotornot.69n.html.

Asghar Farhadi

About Asghar Farhadi:

• "Iranian Director Performs Difficult Balancing Act" (2011 article in Der Spiegel)
• "DP/30: A Separation, writer/director Asghar Farhadi" (2011 Interview, another link to this interview here)
• Saeed Kamali Dehghan, "Iranian film director Farhadi endorses Rouhani for president", The Guardian, (14 May 2017).

Films of Asghar Farhadi:

• Low Heights (Ertefae Past) - Ebrahim Hatamikia (2002)
• Beautiful City (Shahr-e-Ziba) - Asghar Farhadi (2004)
• Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbe Suri) - Asghar Farhadi (2006)
• About Elly (Darbarye Elly) -  Asghar Farhadi (2009)
• A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) -  Asghar Farhadi (2011)
• The Past (Le Passé) - Asghar Farhadi (2013)
• The Salesman (Forushande) - Asghar Farhadi (2016)