The First Supercut Is The Deepest

So I have been kind of gradually formulating a manifesto? About creating video content? I don't know. I might be on the verge or making some kind of Dogme95 type declaration. Here's where it started:

"I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION DESTROYED BY SUPERCUTS"

And then:

CLARIFICATION 1: Question From Dangokuken

CLARIFICATION 2: Question from anonymous

"DIGGING DEEPER"

But here's the gist, if you'd rather: The current internet economy favors effort over creativity--a breathtakingly completist supercut of a TV show over an original idea of any kind. And the reward one gets for say, watching 80 hours of a TV show and editing together a three minute web video, is already subject to steeply diminishing returns. A year ago it would have gotten you a job at a pop culture blog; six months ago it would have gotten you millions of pageviews and Tumblr followers; now you can win a contest. But it's still better than NOTHING, in terms of compensation, which is why so many people do it instead of creating something new. And that's bad.

But maybe this is the most visible symptom of a disease that has spread or maybe always existed among content creators. Maybe effort over creativity has always been an issue. I started to think about the way I feel about my own work, which is that I have always been happier figuring things out for myself rather than learning the "right way." I have always resisted learning to mic and light my shots the way I was "supposed to." And even though that has never been the financially sound path, it has always been creatively fulfilling. Most of the time, and maybe this is  only in retrospect, it has helped me create work that is, to my mind (and a few others!), distinctive and at least approaching original. Which is why I am happy with my modest web presence and interesting (and creative in their own right, in many cases) fans and friends (fanfriends? Can that be a thing?). 

And yeah, so this is a dynamic that has ever been thus in terms of entertainment--slick blockbusters make vastly more money than weird, alienating (but deeply original) smaller films. But this is the Internet, a place where all of those former structures were supposed to break down and die. Instead, the norms have just perpetuated and even become more acute. Which is a drag.

But anyway, if you are a content creator frustrated by your lack of e-success, at least know that I, Zac Little, think you are probably doing something right. 

The best creative lesson I can give anybody is this: don't learn anything from anyone. Not even me. Don't even listen to this! Just go fuck around in your basement with a camera for a couple years. Burn your local film school (?) to the ground. (OK: I learned a lot of the basics from a wonderful man named Peter Pijoan at a Public Access TV station in Wolfeboro, NH. You should learn about as much as I did. From him, preferably. But if he is not available, go to film school for ONE YEAR. And then burn that fucker to the ground when you're done.) As Bobcat Goldthwait recently said: "Success is for creeps." At least for now. Maybe we can do something to correct this effort and creativity imbalance. Maybe stop clicking on supercuts of people saying "supercuts" in different movies or whatever. At least as a start. 

Aaron Sorkin's Script For The Social Network Was Smarter Than You Thought

The Social Network was controversial--among nerds, mostly--when it was released, for its, let's say assholish, portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Nolo contendere there, but amid all the bluster and blog posts, I don't think a lot of people noticed that the movie was perfectly aware what it was doing. What I mean to say is: Not only is the negative portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network deliberate, but so is the suggestion that the negative portrayal might be too harsh. Rather than attempt to be objective, The Social Network makes a Rashomon-esque joke about the very idea of objectivity. After all: Mark is not telling his own story. That's more important than many seemed to think. Bear with me for a second here.

The movie opens with that long, weirdly compelling scene in the bar. Jesse Eisenberg and Lisbeth Salander break up. Then The Zuck walks back to his dorm, and we're put in geographical and chronological context for the first (and, significantly, the only!) time--Harvard 2003 or whenever. The story goes on from there for a good long while--including the world's first (and, significantly, the only!) realistic blogging and coding montage. And suddenly we jump ahead to a courtroom. Zuckerberg's Facebook isn't a fledgling idea now, suddenly, it's the billion-dollar enterprise we know and loathe. It's a rather jarring flashforward, right? That's not all it is.

Now, Aaron Sorkin frequently plays around with chronology in his scripts, usually for fairly simple storytelling purpose: President Bartlet takes a bite of a madeline and remembers the last time he took a bite of a madeline, during his campaign. So now we get to see some campaign scenes! And for a few viewings I took the structural complexity of The Social Network at that basic face-value. 20 minutes is as long as Aaron Sorkin can stand going without a courtroom scene, that's all. But after the fourth viewing or so, I picked up on a key moment: There in the courtroom, when everyone else is talking about Mark crashing Harvard's network, Mark instead is referencing his conversation with Erica at the bar--that very first scene of the movie. Here's how it looks in Sorkin's original screenplay:

What we're meant to understand, therefore, is that everything we've seen leading up to this moment is testimony from one or both of Mark's ongoing legal proceedings. The court scene isn't a flashforward, it is the only objective reality of the movie. Everything else we see is just a visualization of what people are saying.

This may seem like just an overcomplicated phrasing of the way you already understood the time-shifting. But what I'm saying is there are two different kinds of capital-T Truths at play in the movie. The Truth of whatever moment you happen to be in (Mark and Eduardo in the dorm, the Winkelvoss twins in England) and then the Overall Truth perspective of the movie (every non-courtroom scene is the depiction of various folks' depositions). And most of the criticism I've read of the movie acknowledges the former and not the latter.

And the confirmation of the film's overall perspective happens in the final scene, when Mark talks to Rashida Jones's character. She tells him that she assumes most testimony is, in so many words, hearsay and bullshit. That is what we have been watching for the last two hours: the unreliable, emotional bullshit being pushed by the Winkelvi, Eduardo and their associated council. It doesn't vindicate Mark so much as admit that we--you, me, Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher, Justin Timberlake--don't know the truth about anything that happened. All we have is the public record, which is no more true than anything else.

That's the same idea behind Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, which I suggest you seek out immediately if you haven't already seen it. But while Rashomon takes the lack of true objectivity as cause for despair, The Social Network seems to revel in it, a little. So what if this is all hearsay and bullshit? It's fun, right?