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in the medium of the film review. General as in universal about how we experience life, and about the ways of being that I've seen emerge and mature as I myself have matured. Showing that that can be done in a film review is the whole point for me, which really is all I've ever tried to do (this statement is broadly untrue)
"We live in the Information Age, and David Fincher has become its prophet. Increasingly, his protagonists engage foremost in pursuing and processing information, but even before that, his stylistic signature displayed a hyperawareness of information, reveling in virtuoso techniques and trick shots that lay out data with extreme precision. Even a deceptively minor film like Panic Room is notable for how thoroughly it maps its primary location’s layout, using cameras that travel through the ventilation system or zoom in to the filament of a flashlight. But what truly distinguishes his films is the philosophical framework from which they are made: Fincher understands better than virtually any other filmmaker today the central tension of the Information Age, the way our constantly expanding body of information nonetheless fails to necessarily increase our knowledge of the world and of each other. This tension was masterfully explored in The Social Network, a film less about the internet than the way Facebook tapped into our preexisting drive to reduce people to collections of data, and no matter how much information we possess about a person, this will never be the same as knowing them."
As I pointed out to Steve immediately after watching the film with him, the method of investigation through computers and the significance of old photos in the piece both echoes and realises in mundane, modern technology the promise of Deckard's 3D photo machine in 1982's Blade Runner. It's perhaps our most complete, mundane cyberpunk piece; cyberpunk in every particular, and everyday in every detail.
On New Year's Eve I tweeted something which I felt was incredibly telling. This.
Thank you and goodnight.
"We live in the Information Age, and David Fincher has become its prophet. Increasingly, his protagonists engage foremost in pursuing and processing information, but even before that, his stylistic signature displayed a hyperawareness of information, reveling in virtuoso techniques and trick shots that lay out data with extreme precision. Even a deceptively minor film like Panic Room is notable for how thoroughly it maps its primary location’s layout, using cameras that travel through the ventilation system or zoom in to the filament of a flashlight. But what truly distinguishes his films is the philosophical framework from which they are made: Fincher understands better than virtually any other filmmaker today the central tension of the Information Age, the way our constantly expanding body of information nonetheless fails to necessarily increase our knowledge of the world and of each other. This tension was masterfully explored in The Social Network, a film less about the internet than the way Facebook tapped into our preexisting drive to reduce people to collections of data, and no matter how much information we possess about a person, this will never be the same as knowing them."
As I pointed out to Steve immediately after watching the film with him, the method of investigation through computers and the significance of old photos in the piece both echoes and realises in mundane, modern technology the promise of Deckard's 3D photo machine in 1982's Blade Runner. It's perhaps our most complete, mundane cyberpunk piece; cyberpunk in every particular, and everyday in every detail.
On New Year's Eve I tweeted something which I felt was incredibly telling. This.
Thank you and goodnight.
