In this culturally fractured moment, the buzz is suddenly about connection.
A Facebook film serves as a metaphor for political columnists while Jon Stewart uses a 1976 movie with half its title in calling for a Rally to Restore Sanity.
Is America “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” or a huge circle of Friends creating digital democracy and instant political giants? Or, if you look closer, something new and grotesque?
The original “Network” was a howl of pain by my classmate Paddy Chayevsky over a world in which human decency was disappearing down a media drain. His angry anchorman doesn’t start a revolution. He is milked for profit by an amoral corporation that then has him killed on camera when he stops delivering.
“The Social Network,” as befitting our times, is more complex. David Brooks notes that its protagonist is not “a bad person. He’s just never been house-trained…raised in a culture reticent to talk about social and moral conduct…becomes a global business star without getting a first-grade education in interaction.”
The picture, Maureen Dowd adds, “unfolds with mythic sweep, telling the most compelling story of all, the one I cover every day in politics: What happens when the powerless become powerful and the powerful become powerless?”
In this atmosphere, the nominal political bigwigs are toppled from thrones, only to be replaced by the same kind of faceless big-money powers behind them that pulled the strings in Chayevsky’s time.