Today In Bullshit

Probably the biggest downside to having professional training in psychology is learning to cope with the cringe response as mainstream news and opinion types contort the discipline in idiotic ways to support arguments that mostly aren't worth making. A sterling example of this is an article published today on Slate as part of an ongoing series on "how your unconscious mind shapes you" that attempts to explain today's heated political climate by comparing the collective partisanships of the left and right to a married couple seeking counseling. The author, Shankar Vedantam, draws on research on predictors of marital conflict and dissatisfaction (conducted by John Gottman, the biggest name in the marital therapy field) to enlighten us on the fact that the "right" is expressing anger toward the "left" while the "left" is expressing contempt toward the "right," which by the way, is provably more toxic to the health of a marriage, and therefore worse for society by the logic of Vedantam's incredibly tortured analogy.

The first point to make here is one that's so obvious that Vendantam acknowledges it himself in the second to last paragraph of his article: opposing political persuasions are nothing like a marriage. The point of marriages are to help facilitate bonds of love and support between partners, which can be threatened by an excess of disagreement and dispute. Politics is about disagreement and dispute. If it wasn't, there'd be no need for multiple political points of view.

I suppose Vedantam might make the argument that our political discourse today is uniquely marked by anger on one side and contempt on the other, and that the emotional tone is baked in unconsciously to one's political leanings (this may be the point that he's making in the article, but it's difficult to tell because it's such an incoherent piece of work). That doesn't wash, though, because political tone, like everything else in politics, varies dramatically based on who's in power and who's out of it. Think back to the bygone days of the 2004 election, when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches. At that time, the Democratic base was at the peak of a nearly decade-long angry fist shake at George W. Bush. Meanwhile, the Republican base was sneering at John Kerry for having the sheer balls to be a decorated Vietnam veteran. Do those emotions sound familiar?

The thing that really gets me about this article is that it pulls the old trick of analyzing our "political discourse" without actually much, if any, reference to those who hold political office. I suppose if your sample size for liberal thinking is a smattering of blogs and Keith Olbermann, you could make the argument that contempt for the right is a dominant emotion, but wouldn't it be a good idea to mention President Barack Obama, who ran on promises to pursue bipartisan compromise and has, with severely limited success, actually tried to do so? This "both sides are at fault" thinking has gotten almost comical in an age where Senate Republicans have filibustered close to a hundred bills in the past 20 months.

So, no, marriage counseling can't tell us anything about liberals and conservatives.

The Social Network review

As you may or may not have already heard, The Social Network is an enormous critical hit. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a movie that was so widely acclaimed, which is particularly impressive considering it's a feature length movie about motherfucking Facebook. It actually reminds me a bit of when Brokeback Mountain was announced and endured 15 months of gay cowboy snark before being rapturously received upon its actual release. Granted, Brokeback Mountain seems to have since had more of a shelf-life as a punchline, because making jokes about gay people never goes out of vogue, and maybe in five years no one will remember why everyone thought that a movie about Facebook was so great, but right now, it's a pretty big deal.

I saw The Social Network over the weekend. I liked it a lot, and I think it's a great movie. In the couple days since I saw it, though, I've been doing a lot of thinking about exactly why it's a great movie and I've found it pretty difficult to pinpoint. Part of the issue is that The Social Network is supposed to be a movie about the founding of Facebook, but it's not really primarily concerned with telling that story as a dramatic narrative. It's really more of a character piece that focuses tightly on Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. One of the most interesting things about the movie is the way it purposefully ignores depicting the larger context and effects of Facebook, even though the exploding popularity of the site is the major driver of the narrative. There's no montage of college students at their computers getting hooked into the Facebook phenomenon, or anything comparable to dramatize the network's broadening impact besides snatches of dialogue and other exchanges.

It's a smart decision, because no moviegoing audience in 2010 needs to be told that Facebook is a big deal. It also reflects the clear fact that nobody involved in the making of this movie gives two shits about Facebook. That's understandable, but where it really gets interesting is that The Social Network also doesn't seem to be terribly concerned with being about Mark Zuckerberg, insofar as Mark Zuckerberg is an actual human being, who actually exists, founded, and runs Facebook. Comparing The Social Network to Citizen Kane feels like somewhat of a cliche already, but thinking about The Social Network as something of a goof on the narrative structure of Kane is really the most useful framework I can conjure to discuss it. Both movies tell the story of the rise of wealthy men, but do so mainly through the perspectives of others. This latter fact isn't entirely obvious in The Social Network, mostly because Zuckerberg's character is alive and present during the telling of the story while C.F. Kane is dead, but it's clear that the framing device of The Social Network (two depositions regarding lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg) signals that the storytelling reflects the biases of the plaintiffs on key points, rather than objective reality. Basically, The Social Network has two main characters: "Mark Zuckerberg," an asshole computer genius who may or may not have screwed over other people on his way to creating a world-beating Internet company, and Mark Zuckerberg, an asshole computer genius who points out various flaws and inconsistencies about the story of the first character as it's being told.

The reason that I called The Social Network a goof on Citizen Kane's narrative is that while Kane  explores the flaws and complexity of its main character in an ultimately futile quest to arrive at a larger understanding of his identity, The Social Network doesn't really ask any questions about Mark Zuckerberg at all. Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg is a fascinating character to watch onscreen, but more because of his lack of complexity than because of the presence of it. The character can be essentially summarized by extremes of two traits: intelligence and self-absorption, and it's the latter that really seems to be of the most interest to the filmmakers. I think it's entirely fair to argue that The Social Network is about solipsism more than it's about anything else. The genius move is that the movie explores this by focusing entirely on the founder (s?) of Facebook while ignoring the users entirely. If Fincher and Sorkin explicitly said that social network addicts are disappearing up their own asses, The Social Network would probably have come off as reactionary bullshit. Instead, by weaving a creation myth by which Facebook was born out of a series of interlocking acts of self-absorption, they make the argument by proxy. The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg isn't really a person as much as he is an avatar of a perceived generational flaw. As arresting as the closing image of the film is, it struck me as more of a red herring than a character insight - I don't believe Fincher or Sorkin think they're explaining anything substantial with it; just like Charlie Kane's secrets weren't really unlocked by that sled. (It may be a similar added "fuck you" to the character's real-life counterpart, though: The Social Network is pretty blatantly drawing on shopworn computer geek stereotypes, and "Rosebud" was William Hearst's secret nickname for his mistress's vagina).

I realize that all of this was probably pretty incoherent if you haven't seen The Social Network yet, so here's a couple general sentiments about the movie itself: the acting is phenomenal, the composition and cinematography is stunning and doubly so considering it's an entirely dialog driven movie about computers, the score is great, and it features movie history's hands-down most convincing use to date of one actor playing both halves of a pair of twins. Go see it already.