Somehow I've managed to have some kind of movie-watching convergence in the last couple of weeks. Evan and I went to see "The Social Network" and were impressed by the film's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg as a brilliant, arrogant, determined nerd with a definitely flawed understanding of the people around him. We spent lots of time afterward picking apart the details of the story (the lawsuits, what might have actually happened, the portrayals of the other characters), but we couldn't help talking about the drive for power that seemed to grow out of social rejection (and how someone with minimal people skills could have started an internet phenomenon that ultimately is concerned with social interaction). We also thought about how paranoid Facebook (and Zuckerberg) really is in a way, with all that emphasis on "friend" counts and what your "friends" are doing at any given moment and where -- are you being left out of the party?? -- and various other cyber-stalking elements.
The next morning, I went to see Das Rheingold -- the Metropolitan Opera's performance in HD, which can be seen at movie theaters around the world these days (and I highly recommend the experience). The sets built for the new Ring Cycle at the Met are truly amazing. I haven't been able to find much that is useful on the internet that really shows them in their best light, but here are some photos of them as well as a YouTube video.
I did love one comment I read somewhere that the set is so slick and modern that it makes it seem as though the Vikings had alit on a space station, but my point in writing isn't really about whether the sets work for the story. I was the only person under 50 in the movie theatre, and other than being unable to open the plastic wrap on my nanaimo bar (they have them here!) so that it melted in my pocket - thankfully all within the wrap -- I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I've seen Das Rheingold before, in Seattle, and this second time it seemed equally obtuse and strange, while also seeming, particularly in the parts involving Alberich, oddly familiar. I was thinking as I left the theatre about the character's vanity, duplicity and avarice, and I couldn't help thinking that there was some connection I needed to make between the opera I had just seen and the movie I had seen the night before. And then it came to me. Maureen Dowd had written a column a few weeks earlier, which I read, that linked Das Rheingold (she seems to have seen it live at the Met) with the Social Network. Her basic point was that from an 1854 Wagner opera to “The Social Network,” the passions that drive humans stay remarkably constant. The scariest line she wrote, and one I have been thinking about a lot with the recent rise of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party was: "It unfolds with mythic sweep, telling the most compelling story of all, the one I cover every day in politics: What happens when the powerless become powerful and the powerful become powerless?" Wagner, it seems, was writing about the excesses of the capitalist system (he was a socialist). The magic helmet, Tarnhelm, that Alberich has the Nibelung forge, was meant to symbolize a businessman's top-hat (according to George Bernard Shaw, whose work includes a lot of music criticism) and was designed to respectably disguise his exploitative behavior. Wagner's commentary on the triumph of mammon is hardly disguised at the end of Das Rheingold. As the gods, puffed up with pride and a false sense of security, strut across their bridge into Valhalla, where (they think) they're the lords of creation who have happily escaped the consequences of the evil they've let loose in the world, there is a telling exchange between Loge and the lamenting Rhinemaidens below (in German):
Loge:
You there in the water, why wail to us?
Hear what Wotan wills for you.
No more gleams the gold on you maidens:
henceforth bask in bliss in the gods' new radiance!
Hear what Wotan wills for you.
No more gleams the gold on you maidens:
henceforth bask in bliss in the gods' new radiance!
Rhinemaidens:
Rhinegold, Rhinegold, purest gold!
If only your bright gleam still glowed in the deep!
Now only in the depths is there tenderness and truth:
false and faint-hearted are those who revel above!
If only your bright gleam still glowed in the deep!
Now only in the depths is there tenderness and truth:
false and faint-hearted are those who revel above!
The Social Network tells us this same story of ambition, greed, and casting aside loyalties to others via one of the current power elites - a "new" power based on databases and media. However, despite the ultimate come-down of the privileged Winklevoss brothers in that story, the same narrative goes right along with more traditional sources of power - those controlling the bulk of the riches (CEOs, money managers, and yes, an increasing number of those whose wealth is not earned at all, but inherited). Of course, in The Social Network, Zuckerberg, instead of discovering his authentic self, builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul, although I'm not sure that really lets Zuckerberg off the hook for his various betrayals. And I'm still not sure how I feel about Facebook, despite the fact that I use it. At some level, I suppose it is just another tool to enslave people and keep them from actually looking beyond the end of their own noses (or belly buttons more like) and seeing what is going on out there in the world.
So although it doesn't directly follow from the movie, or the opera, watching both of these stories of heartless loners turning their backs on the world and building destructive forces (in that Facebook starts off as an angry, misogynistic, woman-rating site) that bring them great power and wealth, shifts my focus to the increasing wealth inequality statistics from the U.S. I've read a lot of good articles about this, including a short but depressing column by Nicholas Kristoff, and a piece in Slate by Timothy Noah called The United States of Inequality that provides a lot of statistics. Maybe Kristoff would approve of setting Das Rheingold in a Banana Republic, with Alberich playing a peasant in rags begging outside a grower's opulent villa, until the peasant steals a never-ending supply of coca, enslaves the peasants to process it for him and turns the ruling classes (Wotan would be dressed as a military dictator) into cocaine addicts . . . . Oh, but maybe not, because as Kristoff (and many others) points out, the income inequality in the U.S. is now more pronounced than in many of those countries. Well, I suppose I digress, and I'll end this entry with the hope of writing about something more uplifting next.
Oh, but I can't end here. Because there is one quick piece of my movie convergence that I've so far left out. This is only really meaningful if you have any idea how FEW movies Evan and I watch. And I don't mean in the movie theater. I mean at all. Netflix was definitely making money off of us, at least since Ari was born, and even here where we theoretically have much less to do at night, we seldom rent movies, although we are getting better. In any case, we don't watch many movies. But after Ari broke his arm the other day, I was at the video store collecting some movies for him to watch, and I was wanting to hurry home, so I was quicky trying to decide on a movie for Evan and me as well. After scanning the shelves for a while without finding anything that wasn't a new release (so we could keep it for more than a day), I turned to the "Festivals" shelf, which is where they have a bunch of flicks that have won awards at various film festivals, and grabbed The Squid and the Whale, thinking that I'd heard something good about it, and anyway I like Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels. So Evan and I watched the movie a couple of nights later and afterward I said "OK, what have we just seen recently with that kid who plays the older son?" Since we see so few movies, Evan was convinced I was just hallucinating, but of course, thanks to Google and the iPhone, within a minute we knew that we had just witnessed another great performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg so incredibly well. A fun "aha" moment at least.
By the way, apparently Alex Ross, in his blog in the New Yorker online, came up with the same link between Social Network and Rheingold that Dowd did - he just didn't flesh it out. For fun, here's his entry from October 2, 2010 (minus the great picture of Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, wearing a hoodie and sitting in front of a whiteboard full of equations - he could certainly be starring in a math-oriented Lord of the Rings if not Rheingold):
So although it doesn't directly follow from the movie, or the opera, watching both of these stories of heartless loners turning their backs on the world and building destructive forces (in that Facebook starts off as an angry, misogynistic, woman-rating site) that bring them great power and wealth, shifts my focus to the increasing wealth inequality statistics from the U.S. I've read a lot of good articles about this, including a short but depressing column by Nicholas Kristoff, and a piece in Slate by Timothy Noah called The United States of Inequality that provides a lot of statistics. Maybe Kristoff would approve of setting Das Rheingold in a Banana Republic, with Alberich playing a peasant in rags begging outside a grower's opulent villa, until the peasant steals a never-ending supply of coca, enslaves the peasants to process it for him and turns the ruling classes (Wotan would be dressed as a military dictator) into cocaine addicts . . . . Oh, but maybe not, because as Kristoff (and many others) points out, the income inequality in the U.S. is now more pronounced than in many of those countries. Well, I suppose I digress, and I'll end this entry with the hope of writing about something more uplifting next.
Oh, but I can't end here. Because there is one quick piece of my movie convergence that I've so far left out. This is only really meaningful if you have any idea how FEW movies Evan and I watch. And I don't mean in the movie theater. I mean at all. Netflix was definitely making money off of us, at least since Ari was born, and even here where we theoretically have much less to do at night, we seldom rent movies, although we are getting better. In any case, we don't watch many movies. But after Ari broke his arm the other day, I was at the video store collecting some movies for him to watch, and I was wanting to hurry home, so I was quicky trying to decide on a movie for Evan and me as well. After scanning the shelves for a while without finding anything that wasn't a new release (so we could keep it for more than a day), I turned to the "Festivals" shelf, which is where they have a bunch of flicks that have won awards at various film festivals, and grabbed The Squid and the Whale, thinking that I'd heard something good about it, and anyway I like Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels. So Evan and I watched the movie a couple of nights later and afterward I said "OK, what have we just seen recently with that kid who plays the older son?" Since we see so few movies, Evan was convinced I was just hallucinating, but of course, thanks to Google and the iPhone, within a minute we knew that we had just witnessed another great performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg so incredibly well. A fun "aha" moment at least.
By the way, apparently Alex Ross, in his blog in the New Yorker online, came up with the same link between Social Network and Rheingold that Dowd did - he just didn't flesh it out. For fun, here's his entry from October 2, 2010 (minus the great picture of Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, wearing a hoodie and sitting in front of a whiteboard full of equations - he could certainly be starring in a math-oriented Lord of the Rings if not Rheingold):
Facebook as Rheingold
At the New Yorker Festival last night, I saw The Social Network, aka the Facebook Movie. It's a mesmerizing, acutely unsettling film, one that makes you want to wind back time. Maybe I have Wagner on the brain, but about fifteen minutes in I said to myself, "It's Rheingold." A social outsider, spurned in love, purloins from the beautiful people and forges a device that casts a spell on millions and gives its creator unimaginable wealth. Except that in this case Alberich is not so bad-looking and gets to keep his ring, if not his true heart's desire. Justin Timberlake is Loge, siding with the dwarves rather than the gods.
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