93, which more or less demands that its audience live through a doomed flight from take-off to crash, is the most therapeutic of these movies. The quintessential new disaster film, United 93 is explicit in its use of real time and designed for audience participation. New disaster is experiential and communal. Just as the now notorious trailer distilled the movie’s narrative arc (albeit without offering the final catharsis), audiences mimicked the action: having paid to see Inside Man, unsuspecting viewers had their attention “hijacked.” According to some descriptions in the press, the angry patrons at AMC Loews Lincoln Square banded together to yank the trailer.
Kinatay (the title means “slaughter” in Tagalog) is the most radical of these films. The movie is crudely shot from the perspective of a twenty-year-old police trainee who, moonlighting for extra money, finds himself trapped on behalf of the spectator, in a hellish world. Over the course of a forty-five-minute, more or less real-time sequence, and before his eyes, a young prostitute is abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, sodomized, murdered, and matter-of-factly dismembered. That these atrocities are murkily rendered on HD, more often heard than seen, serves to add insult to injury, even as Mendoza’s anti-technique amplifies the horrifying spectacle of relentless degradation. Kinatay is not a movie to be lightly recommended but it is something that must be endured to be understood.9
CHAPTER FIVE
SOCIAL NETWORK
Like The Passion, Kinatay draws on the lowest horror movie tropes in its grimly experiential representation of human suffering and depraved indifference. At a higher level of aspiration one finds a variety of self-reflexive attempts that use genre conventions to represent a new “social-real” of existential terror, cyber-globalism, viral images, digital will, and social networking.1
Further examples of this new social-real would include George Romero’s horror films Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007), and Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008)—the last of which, purporting to be a subjective camcorder documentation of a cataclysmic disaster, is notable for integrating the two poles of digital image-making: expensive CGI and amateur DV. More specifically, although each in its own way, Antonio Campo’s Haneke-influenced youth film, Afterschool (2008), Brian De Palma’s anti-war Redacted (2007) and Errol Morris’s investigative documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008) explore the implications of YouTube—of self-produced movies being uploaded to the web for a potential audience of tens of thousands.2
Jia Zhangke’s theme-park set The World (2004) and Joe Swanberg’s humorously scaled-down exercise in social networking, LOL (2006), are both revisionist versions of the globalistic melodrama, as is the more widely seen and highly praised David Fincher–Aaron Sorkin “Facebook” movie, The Social Network (2010). At once a form of neo-neo-realism and an attempt to make a contemporary new wave film, Swanberg’s low-budget production is characterized by primitive jump cuts and all manner of sound/image disjunction, as when a panicky voicemail message is heard over a montage of faces or when email messages function as silent movie intertitles.
Utterly classical in its film language, The Social Network addresses the origin and appeal of the motion picture’s latest rival. Like any form of entertainment, social networking succeeds to the degree that it successfully compensates people for something missing in their lives—a lost sense of neighborhood or extended family or workplace fraternity or class solidarity or even self-importance. As dramatized in The Social Network, the story of Facebook’s creation is not unlike that of any large corporation—megalomania rewarded, sweethearts trampled, partners buggered. Shoring up its own historical bona fides, the movie explicitly compares Facebook’s youthful founder Mark Zuckerberg to the media-mogul protagonist of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Zuckerberg’s real achievement, however, was something more mysterious than founding a newspaper or a twenty-first-century MGM or Standard Oil; his genius was to manufacture intimacy through the creation of a parallel, personalized internet: offering an ongoing second life in a virtual gated community.3
For its users, Facebook offers a sort of post-cinematic Total Cinema—it is the cyberspace equivalent of super-8 or video home movies, giving anyone the opportunity to be the star of their own ongoing online situation documentary. Objectively, however, Facebook creates a new sort of reification—a sphere in which everyone is a potential database self-defined by consumption. (In early 2011, certain movie studios—or rather media conglomerates—were studying the possibility of using Facebook as a platform by which users could rent movie downloads, a suggestive way of reconstituting the lost motion picture audience.) True to its moment however, The Social Network is less interested in mapping this new system of human interaction than in psychoanalyzing it as the projection of its quintessential user: Mark Zuckerberg. The key insight in The Social Network is that its imagined Zuckerberg—who is not particularly friendly and not at all prone to sharing—created his virtual community to address his specific situation.4
As Kafka’s self-starved Hunger Artist found his métier in his idiosyncratic nature (there just wasn’t any food he liked to eat) so The Social Network’s anti-hero invented Facebook in response to the psychic pressure of an individual quirk or character flaw, globalizing his own inability to connect with actual people. Ostensibly critical of Zuckerberg, The Social Network nonetheless proved to be a priceless advertisement for Facebook. As 2010 ended, the investment bank Goldman Sachs valued the worth of Zuckerman’s business at $50 billion; the firm invested $500 million in Facebook and was preparing to raise another $1.5 billion from their clients.5
The protagonists of Swanberg’s all but homemade LOL (its title is the online abbreviation for “laugh out loud”) are dutiful citizens of Zuckerberg’s world (even though, as the movie was made in 2006 and was thus all but instantly anachronistic, Facebook is not their social network of choice). Close to psychodrama, LOL stars its three main creators and was largely improvised by them. According to an explanatory extra included in the DVD release, the movie was “born out of ideas batted back and forth via computer, cell phone, etc., and then filmed in the same manner that people use webcams or their cell phones”—which is another way of describing its narrative. The opening shot is a computer screen with a moving mouse clicking on a file. Someone has posted his girlfriend’s private striptease on line. Her dance is cross-cut with close-ups of a dozen or more transfixed spectators, each occupying his own personal space and staring dumbfounded (and pants down?) at his own personal screen.6
LOL, in which every dysfunctional or imaginary romantic relationship is mediated by social networks, might have been titled, after Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride. So too, Pixar’s even more alienated, mega-million dollar, state of the art CGI spectacular WALL-E (2008), directed by Andrew Stanton. An unaccountably optimistic vision of human extinction, and thus a dialectical response to the new disaster film, WALL-E successfully vaults the uncanny valley that precludes audience identification with humanoid simulations to enlist as its protagonist a solitary robot trash-compactor who (or which) is single-mindedly organizing the endless detritus of an abandoned, implicitly analog world. (Whereas the ruined heart of a great city would once have invoked the specter of World War II, it now carries an unmistakable sense of New York City’s Ground Zero.) The spectacle of this devoted dingbot working alone to fashion a Grand Canyon out of neatly compacted garbage provides a breathtaking sense of eternity.
For much of WALL-E, its endearing, Chaplinesque hero—part Sisyphus, part Third World scavenger—is the earth’s last vestige of humanity. (A single plant and the trash-compactor’s cockroach sidekick are Earth’s only signs of life.) Utterly superfluous, the descendants of the planet’s former inhabitants drift through space in a giant, robot-controlled shopping mall known as the Axiom, too bloated to do more than slurp down Happy Meals and watch TV.
Pixar’s computer animation represents the epitome, thus far, of digital will. Even the indexical presence of a drawing or painted cel has vanished. Is this universally acclaimed motion picture then part of the problem or part of the solution? WALL-E satirizes the technology it deploys; it
