Recently in The Social Network Category

For many years, record producers and engineers have spliced together the best takes of pop vocals and orchestral performances to create the version that is finally released to the public on disc or download. I don't know why it never occurred to me that sound editors for movies wouldn't do the same thing with dialog, but I hadn't thought about it until I watched the extras DVD for "The Social Network" the other night.

Obviously, various takes of performances are cut together in editing, and the dialog is often looped in post-production for any number of reasons -- to smooth over the differences between takes, to change line readings, or simply to compensate for inadequate sound quality from the original recording. But the David Fincher editing team of Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall (recent Oscar-winners) and sound designer Ren Klyce (my new movie hero, alongside Skip Lievsay).

First of all, the editors get a lot of material to work with. But let's clear up the whole "99 takes" thing. It's not what it may sound like. Fincher did 99 takes during the shooting of the opening scene, for example -- but he didn't simply make the actors do the same thing 99 times in a row. As Wall and Baxter told Vanity Fair:

Take a look at all that's going on in the image above. Who is talking? What are the relationships between the characters? How much is packed into this one frame?

Since it came out last fall, I'd almost forgotten what an exhilarating information-overload experience David Fincher's "The Social Network" is. Cut and composed and performed with breathless, jittery speed, it's a movie that consists of virtually nothing but conversations in rooms (the attempted, missed, short-circuited, coded connections that struck me when I first saw it). It's action-packed -- enough to give you whiplash, watching all the elements interacting within the 2.40:1 widescreen frame -- even though there are no "action sequences" (car chases, shootouts, fist fights, acrobatic stunts, etc.); the filmmaking is charged with energy without falling back on today's routinely frenetic, handheld run-and-gun/snatch-and-grab camerawork (the camera is generally mounted on a tripod; when it moves, it's on a crane or a dolly -- often for establishing shots or a shift in perspective that brings a new element into the frame). Smart, quick, efficient.

The crunchy guitar riff starts over the Columbia Pictures logo and then the crowd noise comes up, the music drops down, and before the logo fades to black and the first image appears, we hear Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) speaking the movie's opening line -- a question that's also a challenge: "Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?" What follows is a blisteringly fast-paced screwball comedy exchange ("His Girl Friday" through a 64-bit dual-core processor) between Mark and his girlfriend (not for very much longer ) Erica in which nearly every line is a misunderstanding (intentional or unintentional), a sarcastic jab, a leap of logic, a block, an interruption, a feint, an abrupt shift in the angle of attack, a diversion, a retreat, a refinement, a recapitulation (I'm sure there are many fencing terms that apply to the various conversational strategies employed here)...

When Andy Samberg (as Mark Zuckerberg) asked Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg how he played Zuckerberg in "The Social Network" (shortly before the real Zuckerberg joined them onstage during the opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live"), he said: "I speak in short, clipped sentences and I keep my head very still."

David Bordwell has an ingenious look at The Social Network: The faces behind Facebook at Observations on film art that examines the film's direction and performances in terms of its emphasis on facial expressions and body language.

Anybody who's seen Eisenberg before (say, in "The Squid and the Whale" or "Adventureland") will recognize that his Zuckerberg is indeed a stylized performance. And anybody familiar the real Mark Zuckerberg will recognize that Eisenberg's work is not based on the actual Facebook founder, but on the character created in Aaron Sorkin's script. (In fact, Eisenberg and Zuckerberg had never met until Saturday. Watch how eager for approval Zuckerberg is, smiling and repeatedly turning to the audience in expectation of laughs during his backstage bit with Lorne Michaels. That is not something the movie character would ever do.)

The first thing that happens after Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in "The Social Network" is that he goes back to his residence hall. It's a long, long walk, even though Mark takes it at a clip that's closer to running. Why, after the rapid-fire skirmish in the opening scene, would the movie take so long to simply get Mark from the Thirsty Scholar, just off-campus, to Kirkland House?

Well, for one thing, it's an opportunity to roll the opening credits. But at one point this was envisioned as the most extravagant sequence in the picture -- and that's saying a lot, given that it was directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club," "Zodiac," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"). According to Michael Goldman's cover story in the October issue of American Cinematographer, the whole trek was designed to be accomplished in one long take, with multiple cameras stationed along the route. The footage (if you can still call it that, when the images are being captured on 16GB CF cards) would then be stitched together in post-production to create one seamless shot. There's even a satellite map of the course in the magazine.

Since I saw "The Social Network" Friday and filed my first post about it, I've had a chance to read what some other people are saying. Some most intriguing angles, and all of them more or less valid. My take was that it's a movie about codes of communication. At Time Out, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said he thought of it as a movie "about a guy who is an antihero for the first hour and 55 minutes of the movie and a tragic hero for the final five minutes of the movie." Matt Zoller Seitz offered a way of reading it as a horror film, and led me to Richard Brody, who compares it to "Amadeus" (with the Winklevii as Salieri) and interprets it as a new media tale of outsider entrepreneurs and Jewish assimilation, along the lines of Neal Gabler's book about the original movie moguls, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood." (That book is essential reading for lovers of American movies, by the way.)

Harvard Law professor and "free culture" advocate Lawrence Lessig comes at "The Social Network" from a legal perspective:

"When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect from them and what they may expect from him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him."
-- from "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" by Erving Goffman (1959)

Relationship status:
Interested in:
-- Facebook (2004)

The actual Mark Zuckerberg is said to have taken fencing when he was at Harvard. That's what the movie Mark Zuckerberg is doing in the opening scene of David Fincher's "The Social Network" -- only he's doing it with words and attitude, over a beer at the Thirsty Scholar, with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. The verbal thrusts and parries, feints and ripostes, zip by at 4x fast-forward. It's like a compressed version of an Aaron Sorkin screwball comedy dialog scene, written as self-parody. Only not quite. The speed and affectlessness is part of Mark's code, and part of his character's DNA.

Once you adjust to its breakneck tempo, the scene becomes a fascinating back-and-forth about communication in code, and the infinite ways it can misfire. "The Social Network" is about a lot of things -- notably the American social and economic system, built on class privilege, money, networking, sex, entrepreneurialism, self-presentation/self-promotion; and the age-old patterns of friendship, misunderstanding and betrayal between collaborators in any creative or business enterprise -- all of them forms of code, understood by insiders and incomprehensible to outsiders. Mark has a valuable insider's understanding of computer code, but is an outsider when it comes to most of these other areas. And yet he has an acute analytical intelligence that allows him to deconstruct these codes and notice elements that others who are closer to them might take for granted.

Since it opened the New York Film Festival Friday, David Fincher's "The Social Network" has set the movie blogosphere and comment sections all abuzz. But you needn't worry about encountering spoilers here because I haven't seen it, and won't until it opens theatrically this coming Friday, October 1. In the meantime, l'm also doing my best not to read about it, even though it's everywhere. And because the pre-opening coverage is ostensibly pegged to the film festival showing, I can't once again launch into my lament for the vanished civility of a time, not so long ago, when review embargoes were respected. But darn it's difficult and frustrating to avert your eyes every time see a mention of the movie on one of your favorite blogs or on Twitter or Facebook...

What I've noticed (in my peripheral vision, I assure you) is that some blogs and comments sections have virtually become Facebook over the weekend -- without the proprietary interface, of course. People are proclaiming to all the world (hear them roar!) that they simply do not need to see any movie that's about something as trivial as Facebook (not that they know what that means), or hyping it as the picture to beat for Oscar season, or speculating whether a certain D-list New York reviewer will maintain his reputation as a contrarian hack -- the only thing that's left of his reputation -- by ruining the movie's TomatoMeter rating.

Normally I don't like to watch trailers because they have come to consist of all the high points of the movie condensed into a big spoiler package. I don't recommend watching them for anything you might want to have the opportunity to discover for yourself. But this one (shown before "Inception" this weekend) is more than just a collection of clips from David Fincher's "The Social Network," about the founding of Facebook. The use of a choir singing Radiohead's "Creep" over images from Facebook pages is inspired: an angst-ridden, self-loathing (but aspirational) song about a self-described "creep" yearning to be accepted.* All of us tailor our identities for particular audiences (it's called "living"), and in its first 30 seconds or so this mini-movie encapsulates something poignant (and, perhaps, somewhat sinister) about that process in the era of the online "social network."

Also, instead of telling you the whole story of the feature film (much of which is already well-known Internet history), these two and a half minutes pack more emotion -- related to friendship (in several senses of the word), ambition, success, betrayal, rejection, revenge -- than most features. Rather than simply condensing the juiciest bits into a quick sales pitch, it poetically (and cinematically) suggests what the movie might be... something that combines an entrepreneurial success story with a legal drama and a portrait of a (sociopathic?) misfit who achieves... what? You'll have to see the movie to find that out.