Over the weekend I went to see The Social Network, and totally enjoyed it. Hurray, movies that glamorize angry nerds! My friend Alex asked me if it’s better than the classic Pirates Of Silicon Valley. Nothing could be better than Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates, but Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerburg is good too.
This is (mostly) a music blog, not a movie blog, so I won’t be doing much heavy criticism of the film, except to say that I thought it was an extraordinarily well-made work of art. I’ve heard all the complaints about how wildly inaccurate it is, and I do wish Sorkin had hewn a little closer to the facts. It would have made Zuckerburg a more complex character. My biggest problem was the one Jesse Walker points out, which is that Aaron Sorkin is a way bigger misogynist than any of the people he portrays in his script. Still and all, the movie is spellbinding in its writing, acting, cinematography, editing and so on.
A big part of the movie’s pleasure is the music, starting with the trailer. It uses a gorgeously unsettling choral arrangement of Radiohead’s “Creep” by a Belgian Women’s choir, called, incongruously, Scala & Kolacny Brothers. This song isn’t in the actual film, which is too bad because it nails its mood perfectly. (The trailer is mildly NSFW.)
The Radiohead original is loaded with angst, but it’s a particularly hard-rocking kind of angst. There’s a little too much swagger to convey the wounded feelings of a wallflower. Real Radiohead fans disdain “Creep,” ostensibly because it’s so popular, but I think really because it feels like a betrayal of the band’s basic geekdom. The choral arrangement feels more like a social anxiety sufferer’s inner life.
There’s a lot of tension and anxiety in the movie: class anxiety, social anxiety, the misery of former friends on opposite sides of a lawsuit. The score is tense and anxious too, but in a subtle and restrained way. It isn’t like the wild dissonant violins from a Hitchcock score. As befits a movie about technology, the music is heavily electronic, but it isn’t club techno like in Fight Club or the Matrix.
Most of the music is by Trent Reznor and his frequent Nine Inch Nails collaborator Atticus Ross. I’m no great NIN fan — I admire the craftsmanship but I’m just not angry enough to keep up. The Social Network score works great, though. It sounds like continuous loops of the quiet parts of NIN songs, which are always my favorite parts. Like a lot of heavy musicians, Trent Reznor is most powerful when his touch is lightest. “The Gentle Hum Of Anxiety” is both the title of a track and a perfect descriptor of his score’s mood. And by the way, huge props to SoundCloud for these groovy embeddable mp3 widgets.
This last track is my favorite. There’s a nice balance between the warm acoustic piano on the one hand and the icy 808 drum machine and unearthly synths on the other. It mirrors the struggle between the characters’ feelings of loyalty and the demanding logic of the tech business.
Here, by the way, is my Nine Inch Nails story. My late grandmother saw them on David Letterman at random one night. She was so appalled that she called me the next day to demand an explanation. I guess she thought of me as the cultural ombudsman for Generation X. She said, “When I was young, we had the Great Depression, a world war, the Holocaust. And yet, we listened to happy music: Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Artie Shaw. You kids have everything you could want and you’re so angry. How do you explain that?” I had to really think about it, and I still haven’t resolved the question fully for myself. Part of it is that we expect more emotional truth-telling from our popular music than the Greatest Generation did. That said, there genuinely does seem to be more anxiety floating around my age cohort than there was with my grandparents.
Anyway. There are two conspicuous pieces of music in The Social Network not by Trent Reznor. One is a semi-ironic electronic arrangement of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Reznor says that David Fincher insisted it be used to accompany the tilt-shifted regatta on the Thames. It’s the one really cartoonish moment in the movie. The Winklevoss twins are apparently that absurdly Wagnerian in real life.
The other major non-Reznor song in The Social Network is by the Beatles, and it plays under the final scene and credits. I won’t spoil the ending; suffice to say that the tune isn’t one of the best-known Beatles ones and it’s hilariously appropriate. The licensing must have cost a fortune. It was worth every penny.
Update: Zadie Smith reviews the movie at length in the New York Review Of Books. Well worth reading.
http://unfilthy.livejournal.com/267052.html
Both actually and apparently, the world today is more complicated. And youths grow up in it as individualists, even among their peers. Back then the togetherness was greater. Those who felt the world had to be changed for the better felt they could find support, mobilize people. Now it is all “me against the system”. Is it any wonder that there is more anxiety?
(This is the gist. It is glibly simplified.)
I think you’re absolutely right that we’re more atomized. My grandmother grew up in Brooklyn and they didn’t lock their doors at night. It seems like there was more “us vs them” but that she felt more secure within the “us.”
As you know, my opinion of the film is lower than yours. But I agree completely about the music. I think it may be the best thing about the film, and I’m not even a NiN fan.