The Social Standard
Life as We Know It
Directed by Greg Berlanti
Runtime: 112 min.
We cant pretend that anything is more important in film culture than the Internet humiliation-death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi taking place the same week as the media hype for The Social Network. After that human tragedy, the medias celebration of the Facebook movie (a cinematic calamity) shows an alarming disregard for how movies intersect with real life. The Social Network so glamorizes the destructive effects of Internet license and individual greed that its carelessness reflects upon Life As We Know Ita perfect dovetailing with the new romcom starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel that re-wires the argument about same-sex marriage into a tired screwball formula.
The distance between Life As We Know It and real life is the same prevaricating distance between mythologizing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs anti-social behavior and ignoring the actual hostility that his invention has made possible. (Clementi posted his suicide note on Facebook.) This should force any thinking moviegoer to question the medias explicit celebration of the Internet industry. How the movie ignores Internet incivility repeats the callous way our culture accepts all manner of Internet bullying. Thus The Social Network helps to glamorize the kewl ways that the Internet makes us less responsive to each other as human beings. The slippery slope hits the pits.
Life As We Know It also shows Hollywoods insensitive manipulation of real life issues. Director Greg Berlanti, who made his directing debut in 2000 with the amusing gay soap opera The Broken Hearts Club, refrains from what he seemed to know and has made a film that resembles the oversimplification and dramatic compromises that he learned worked on TVs Brothers & Sisters series. That artistic concession has led to gimmickry: Heigl and Duhamel play Holly Berenson and Eric Messer, not-soyoung singles in the whitest parts of Atlanta, Ga., that look just like Brentwood, Calif. Their careerism is interrupted by sudden, unexpected adopted parenthood. (Dont ask, the set-up is just plain morbid.)
Berlantis irrealityfollowing the cutesy script by Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinsonresults in a synthetic vision of life that is, essentially, an appeasement of the pre-fab, bourgeois status quo. He goes from the Broken Hearts Club of gay male experimentation and selfdiscovery to the Conformity Club of doing and thinking like others. The presumption of suburban heterosexual normality disguises sentiment for same-sex marriage in the very Doris Day-Rock Hudson template from which previous generations of gay people had recoiled. Life As We Know Its underlying feeling gainsays civil rights issues. Bad boy Messer, who Duhamel makes resemble Jackass star Johnny Knoxville, gets completely domesticated; his maturation turns personal choice (individuality) into conventionality.
Unlike François Ozons sexually unorthodox characters who seek to fulfill their humanity through procreation, Holly and Messers leap into parenthood capitulates to an unquestioned social standard. Not accidentally, Berlantis camera emphasizes the expanse and expense of the lavish abode Holly and Messer inherit along with an infant. Their progressivism is materialistic, not philosophical. Broken Hearts Club was a community made of others; this film is all about the house. Berlanati has moved from homo-liberalism to homogeneity. That could be commendable if only the storys process made it clearor maybe funny.
This unconscious capitulationcoming on the heels of The Social Networks media domination and the suicide at Rutgersfeels uncomfortably hegemonic. It illustrates unexamined social influence not much different from the license to harass that The Social Network condones and has subsequently proven disastrous in real life. The Zuckerberg characters seething envy of Harvard WASPs, and even of up-market hedonism, are casual forms of social pressure that Aaron Sorkins script ignores. Sorkin brags about the irony of anti-social Zuckerberg creating a socializing technology, yet he never questions how that technologywithout personal responsibility, regulation or a truly socializing impulse toward compassion can become a destructive, intimidating tool.
The Social Network advertises Internet wealth and power very similar to the luxuriously displayed class advantages in Life As We Know It. And the fawning mediawhat critic Prairie Miller astutely terms controlled mediaautomatically corroborates it. Exalting Zuckerbergs incivility and social ineptitude is part of the corroboration that encourages Internet snark by which other cyberspace miscreants following the Zuckerberg characters vindictive insecuritybash individuality. By targeting a gay classmate, the Rutgers bullies evinced the same homophobia that is repressed throughout The Social Network.
This callousness is also a form of capitalist collusion that carries its own idiotic mystiqueas when director David Fincher relates his multi-narrator film to Orson Welles Citizen Kane. If Fincher was intellectually agile and truly film savvy, his comparison would have extended to Welles The Magnificent Ambersons, where the auto-mobile inventor worried that his contraption may be a step backwards in civilization. It may be that they wont add to the beauty of the world or the life of mens souls. Im not sure. But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. Theyre going to alter war and theyre going to alter peace. And I think mens minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. And it may be that George is right. May be that in 10 or 20 years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldnt be able to defend the gasoline engine but have to agree with George that automobiles had no business to be invented. Seems the auto-mobile functions as a perfect synonym for the Internet.
Both Life As We Know It and The Social Network are equally glib. Film culture cannot go forward unless we recognize that these two movies evidence subtle, even uncharitable, change in mens souls.