The two cows revisit a more innocent time, when Facebook was just a silly site where people posted relationship statuses and the only concerns about it involved whether your mom saw that frat party photo your friend tagged you in. Is Sorkin overrated? Is this a breakup movie? Is it a movie about revolutions without ideals? What is Jesse Eisenberg like in real life?

Of course it would be a petty, anti-social, narcissist who develops the world’s most popular social networking website. What’s interesting to me is how the perception of nerds has changed in the decade since the release of this movie, and how Sorkin did kind of sort of get it right from the jump. Here, the “lovable, harmless, nerd” archetype from popular culture gives way to a sinister, soulless, toxic persona, whose felt entitlement for attention/sex because they are smart, meek, not jocks, etc etc, would eventually become an online rallying cry for incel culture. 

But Fincher/Sorkin also portray a changing society, as the American aristocracy whose families adorn on the walls of Harvard are forced to cede ground to upstart tech bros. The prescience here is impressive; remember: the iPhone debuted the same year as this movie. But the writing was on the wall all along. What the monied elites didn’t understand, but somehow Zuckerberg did, was that creating something “cool” was more powerful than creating something marketable. Blinded by their adherence to ancient codes, these elites (among them the Winklevosses and Saverin) couldn’t fathom why thinking in terms of bottom lines would be antithetical to your quarterly returns, something that proved to be their undoing. 

But elites don’t go away quietly, this being a system designed to make it very very hard to redistribute power and money anywhere other than among people already with a lot of it. Yet, in the end, for Zuckerberg this wasn’t about money or power or being cool or anything of that sort. What drives Zuckerberg is being right and a bewildering intrinsic devotion to a website whose purpose is to connect people but whose repercussions have been to drive people deeper into siloed echo chambers filled with misinformation.

On a first watch, this movie left me cold. I didn’t understand why anyone would make such a harsh, sneering, critique of a harmless nerd who just wanted to make a silly website. But from today’s vantage, in our post-Cambridge Analytica world, it’s easier to be receptive to the movie’s critical tone. // Blobcat

You are going to go through life thinking girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.

erica albright

                 

The two cows are joined this week by special guest Molly Moltario; together, they embark on an interstellar journey into the bureaucratic maze of academic funding. Join us for a discussion of aliens (where are they?), McConaughey vs. Fichtner (who best?), scrunchies (what do they signify?), our favorite first contact movies, and whether this is Robert Zemeckis’s masterpiece!

It’s an unusual combination of introversion coupled with a desire to not be alone that drives our SETI scientists’ search for extraterrestrial life, most prominently Foster’s character Ellie, who is so lost in the stars that she can’t see the people who love her here at home. Yet, home is also a place of incredible fraught, in this case mostly men who would scoff at Ellie’s ambitious projects, then take credit for her discoveries, and then gaslight her into recanting her experiences. Or, “Another day in the life of the modern woman.” 

What makes this Zemeckis’s masterpiece for me is its shatteringly ambivalent ending. Ellie stays true to her ideals and passions, her story a triumph of human intrepidness. Yet, the machinations of the collective are shown again and again to be treacherous and small-minded, and very much in control of the world and people like Ellie. It is, after all, only the blessings of a benevolent and eccentric tech bro that puts Ellie even in a position to continue her efforts. But that’s what I love so much about this movie: somehow, the clash of cynicism and idealism gives way to something deeply moving and seeming-real that resonates profoundly with me as an academic struggling for the breadcrumbs that allow me to continue researching topics no one else seems to care about. // Blobcat

How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?

Eleanor arroway

                 

The two cows go running with Tom Cruise and discuss the future as it was projected in 2002, the nature of middle knowledge, themes of blindness/control/justice, and give their top five Spielberg movies.

Cruise tries to outrun both his past and his future and ends up taking a second chance at life in a world where one has to literally blind themselves to escape the omnipresent gaze of capitalist overlords. If you thought you could prevent something that you were going to do, it’s probably a better idea to avoid the circumstances in which you are supposed to eventually do it rather than go looking for evidence you won’t actually do it. // Blobcat

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I’m sorry John, but you’re gonna have to run again.

agatha

                 

The two cows go back to high school to revisit this classic 90s teen comedy and discuss house parties, a real life Trip McNeely story,  and Siskel & Ebert’s rating scale. 

A gay man tries to get his buds to dump their girlfriends so they can spend the summer together, a lovelorn incel pines after a girl he’s never met but is convinced is fated to be with him, a nerd plots to drug and photograph his jock nemesis in a sexually compromised situation, and two social outcasts find themselves stuck together just long enough to realize they’re in love. 

Not quite capable enough to be about anything interesting, although it comes close in a few places: the inevitable frustration of defining your self worth through your relationships, the pathetic yet enviable mistaking of bromide for profundity, the unshakeable specter of high school that continues to shape our choices and understanding of who we are. // Blobcat

Maybe it’s like you said, that all this happened for a reason. 

preston

                 

The two cows take a road trip to discuss how a decade of bored contentment in America gave rise to both the Gen-X slacker and prank culture, laying the seeds for a generational conflict that takes center stage in this highly re-watchable 2001 John Dahl thriller.

Oh to be young and in college, destined for a life of contented mediocrity, financially and socially secure enough not to take anything too seriously. A period of American complacency (coming after the end of the Cold War and before 9/11), it’s not surprising that the nineties birthed both prank culture (think: Jackass, Tom Green, Punk’d) and alt-comedy, with its meta-ironic detachment from everything. To the boomer generation who either fought in, or against, the Vietnam War, these Gen-X slackers must have looked like nihilistic spoiled brats. 

It’s thus fitting that in a movie where two impish Gen-Xers humiliate a middle-aged truck driver, it’s with the weight of an entire generation that he enacts his revenge, in the form of a tractor-trailer possessed by the disembodied voice of Ted fucking Levine (Buffalo Bill himself, uncredited). My sense is that these themes of generational conflict are the result of the inner struggle of the film’s author, JJ Abrams, probably the Gen-Xer most in love with that ultimate boomer director, Steven Spielberg, as he grapples with finding new storytelling paths in the shadow of his idol. Homages to Spielberg are littered throughout (the very premise of the movie a nod to Duel, a man loses his Jaw, a corn field chase right out of ET), perhaps the subconscious reflections of Abrams’ creative struggles. // Blobcat

I need to find Candy Cane.

Rusty nail

                 

The two cows discuss time travel, religious themes, and the nature of sequels in this action-packed episode. 

It’s fitting that the best sequel ever made is a meta-reflection on dualities and copies. Here, the basic conflict of the first movie is transposed from human vs. machine to reproduction vs. original, as the humans fight against bureaucratic structures and their own drive to create in order to avoid destruction at their own hands, all while hunted by the ultimate reproductive machine and protected by a reproduction of something originally designed to hunt them. 

This is also a movie about cyclical dualities: man/machine, parent/child, creation/destruction, past/future. The immaculate conception closed causal loop of John Connor’s birth from the original is revealed to be just one side of the equation: Skynet’s own existence is due to a closed causal loop as well—their shared origins presaging their  intertwined fates. // Blobcat

I swear I will not kill anyone. 

Terminator

                 

The two cows go to confession with Martin Scorsese’s Boston crime drama. 

Two men from the same working class Boston neighborhood fall under the spell of false prophets and the promise of power, autonomy, and comfort that a life of crime or civil service offers. But spiritual salvation is not forthcoming when your boss is the devil, or a crass bureaucrat. It’s tough out there for guys with shoulder chips and low-T, but somehow I think they’ll manage. // Blobcat

Patriot Act, Patriot Act! I love it, I love it, I love it.

Cpt. George Ellerby