Hive Like

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I was tempted to write this review in binary code, the zeroes and ones adding up to more zeroes and ones. No twos! No fourteens! On a poetic level that appealed to me at least. It's a film that's mapped itself out onto a molecular level - there is no corner here where light or sound can escape. A sealed up little vacuum space of dimly lit dorm-rooms and wood-paneled lawyer's offices and the pulsing blue screens that give them a vague but false hint of life. When Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg turns to the window in the middle of a deposition, his mind having wandered, and notes that it's started to rain I couldn't help but laugh - has the sun ever shone? The Social Network gives us a place that's as murky and overcast as it was on the streets and in the haunted bedrooms of John Doe's Se7en - even the big and beautiful rowing teams of Harvard can only cut a swath through water as gray as a goose, where the early morning mist blurs the horizon from the sky.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I love a cold movie about cold people told with little love in its heart, and this one echoes out from a central notion: that revenge is a dish best served in zeroes and ones. The programming code for a website, the numbers on a check (so many zeroes), the well-spaced clusters of awkward folks camped out in their cubicles, or a face mirrored onto two separate but equally blond and gigantic bodies. It's like a Morse code rattled off each characters tongue - a rhythm, a staccato hum of mechanical bleeps and bloops set into Trent Reznor's hypnotically abrasive soundtrack. It's the jerk of simultaneous elbows and paddles slicing through the water, as if Leni Riefenstahl's having a really fantastic disco industrial nightmare.


It's one character sitting across from one character sitting across from one character sitting across from one character. It's a wall of faces facing off. Each tendril connecting millions, billions, is individual. The lattice-work of a global spider's web, simultaneously wrought of nothing and of something, of ones and of zeroes. We hum together, hive mind.

The Mark Zuckerberg of The Social Network turns himself into the ringmaster of this spider's circus. He sees through and dissects humanity down into this billions-high pile of individual specks; he sees where this is going, he gets there first, and he does a little dance. A dance it must be said that's bought with a whole lotta money built on the tombs of those less imaginative souls that he dents and dings and devours along the way.

I love the propulsive thrust of this movie. I hesitate to call the character we see on screen so sharply defined by Jesse Eisenberg (I like him now!) The Mark Zuckerberg, because he seems more a Daniel Plainview-esque totem of modern American can-do (and will do, to you if must be, with violence of many sorts, mostly verbal) than he does seem... well, entirely human. He is more human than human, if you'll allow me a little White Zombie - he is both much bigger and much much smaller. He is zero and one.

But to get back to my point, like this movie's Zuckerberg the movie itself has rockets tied to its boots, and if you can't keep up then you and your doe-eyed Andrew Garfield of a self needs to step out of the way. It made my head spin, so it's taken me a couple of days to think how to sort out my thoughts. On my blog, on the internet, beside all the farm animals and pretty pretty girls. The cord to my mouse is an ever-shrinking noose, but my head just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger...
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