Movies in the Present Tense: All the President's Men and The Social Network

Movie Bernstein & Woodward, 1976

Movie Zuckerberg and someone irrelevant to him, 2010

Zeitgeist, n. German. the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling of an era. (From my trusty Random House College Dictionary. I don't know its year of pub -- my cat has ripped that page out.) From Wikipedia: The term zeitgeist is from German Zeit- 'time' (cognate with English tide and "time") and Geist- 'spirit' (cognate with English ghost, without being really translatable into English - this is why the German term is used).

In America, one of the things the 1970s came to be defined by was an event that occurred on June 17, 1972: a break-in at Democratic National Headquarters, located in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC. In the first decade of the 21st century, a social networking site launched in February 2004 achieved global membership of a million users only two years after its launch, and now has an estimated 600 million active users, worldwide, changing the way we communicate. "Facebook me" is shorthand the way that American political scandals have been given "-gate" suffixes since the 1970s.

Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men was released in 1976, a mere four years after the American history-altering newspaper story it depicts. David Fincher's The Social Network was released in 2010, seven years after its real-life storyline began. Both films were adapted from nonfiction books and depict events that have come to define the zeitgeist of the decades in which they were both set and made, doing so ways that are nuanced and visceral and which find the universal stories underneath the events. It is no easy feat to recognize the 'time ghost' when you are living inside it, but it's even more amazing to document it with the kind of verve found in All the President's Men and The Social Network.

All the President's Men is about the loss of innocence of the American voter. It's a different kind of loss than what the nation experienced with the Kennedy assassination, because the events were so cynically engineered by people who wantonly abused the trust of the electorate to maintain their power. That this may or may not have always been the case in American politics is not the issue -- this was the moment that the blindfold was permanently ripped off. These domestic covert ops were a secret held closely by the entire U.S. intelligence community (Deep Throat, Woodward's appropriated name for his famously unnamed source, was revealed in 2005 to have been the number two man at the FBI, W. Mark Felt). It took months of hard work and white-knuckle nerve to crack the story and it ended a presidency.

All the President's Men was adapted by William Goldman, considered to be one of the best screenwriters of his era (and perhaps of more than just that). He also scripted Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid prior to All the President's Men and The Princess Bride after it. Alan J. Pakula directed the darkly moody Klute in 1971 (the film that won Jane Fonda her Oscar) and The Parallax Viewin 1974 -- a taut, paranoid thriller with Warren Beatty playing a journalist trying to unravel an assassination story -- that no doubt served as a calling card for when Robert Redford was looking for a director.

The story has a Shakespearean arc, as one in power falls from grace (Tricky King Richard, the one without the hump), brought to justice by some lowly commoners (Woodward & Bernstein). All the President's Men plays as a highly suspenseful detective story, but in a world where being a detective, or a reporter, involved shoe leather, not Google. This was the fruit of collaborative work between two young reporters, Bob Woodward (portrayed by Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman), who are shown as bringing out the professional best in each other.

(Both Woodward and Bernstein inspired young people to pursue careers in journalism, a once-noble profession that has become yet another victim of the bottom line. "Woodstein" became celebrities themselves, Bernstein marrying and famously cheating on Nora Ephron, a tale brought to the screen in Mike Nichol's adaptation of Ephron's roman à clef novel, Heartburn, with Jack Nicholson playing Carl to Meryl Streep's Nora. Woodward remained with the Washington Post and is part of the Washington Establishment and has written breathlessly-close-to-power books about the last three presidents. The worm does turn.)

Although it depicts the lives of very young men, The Social Network is the collaborative work of older, creatively mature men, namely screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher. The Social Network has strong dramatic underpinnings, telling a story of betrayal, class warfare and cutthroat creation, with a complex barrage of dialog. A key difference between the two films is that although the script of The Social Network "feels" true, it is not dependent on facts, and finding factual truths is at the core of All the President's Men. In an excellent, in-depth article about the film published on Sept. 17, 2010 in New York magazine, screenwriter Sorkin came clean about his approach: "I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling."

The story is ostensibly about Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard undergrad who gets dumped by his girlfriend one night and goes back to his place and cooks up Facemash, an online site to rate real women at Harvard, a site that generates enough traffic to crash Harvard's server. Not much is known about the real Zuckerberg, who is famously unforthcoming, but Jesse Eisenberg manages real dimensionality with what could have been a flat, robotic Aspberger's poster child of a character. Movie Zuckerberg is a study in aspiration who wants to join the highest eschelons of Harvard without having been to the manor born. Turns out the best route was to plow right over them (and your best friend) and redefine success.

Aaron Sorkin is best known for his scripts of A Few Good Men (adapted from his own play), The American President and the television series he created, Sports Night, The West Wing, and an upcoming HBO show set behind-the-scenes at a news network. He is held as high in regard as William Goldman (higher, if you count his opinion of himself). The source material Sorkin loosely adapted The Social Network from was not even fully published when he began work on the script, so although the script contains elements of actual events, it seems best to regard it more as a work of pure fiction that shapes events into much neater arcs than they have in real life. (This is the technique "reality" television also uses, but with non-union writers and more gullible viewers.) This fictionalization didn't detract from the impact of the film for me, and I think that structuring it in the mode of Kurosawa's seminal Rashomon by using the framing device of multiple, contradictory depositions also bought a huge degree of wiggle room.

Director David Fincher began his career in music videos, something Alan Pakula never got around to before his death in 1998 (Fincher directed Madonna's "Vogue," among others). Fincher made his first splashy film directing Brad Pitt in 7even (although his debut was the third installment of the Alien franchise). Some of his other films include a killer adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Fight Club, and Zodiac, the story of the real-life serial killer in 1970s San Francisco. (David Shire, who composed the music for All the President's Men, was also hired to compose the score for Zodiac. I can't help but think that Fincher was looking for an authentic seventies sonic feel.) Fincher is known for being a very exacting director (aka a prick), but he is working at the top of his craft in this film and got outstanding performances out of all the cast and crew (Justin Timberlake -- who knew?), and the sparsely complex score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, layers on an aural ache to the proceedings. I now have very high hopes for Fincher's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, due to be released on December 21.

On the box office side of things, All the President's Men has made $70.6 million domestically, about $275 million in 2010 dollars if the calculator on this site is to be trusted, and The Social Network is about to cross the $100 million domestic mark theatrically, thanks to a strategically timed re-release to coincide with its Academy Award campaign. The film is already out on DVD, and it still made another $0.4 million last weekend on 367 screens. I can tell you anecdotally that a lot of older people who may have not been keen on (or aware of) the subject matter are coming to see The Social Network now that it's been nominated for Academy Awards.

All the President's Men won four of the eight Academy Awards it was nominated for in 1977 (Best Supporting Actor for Jason Robards as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay for William Goldman), and a collection of film critics prizes that seem to track along the same lines as The Social Network is for this year. I expect that Sorkin's screenplay will win, and I suspect the score and Fincher's direction will as well. With three weeks to go, it appears that The King's Speech is gathering momentum for Best Picture, and the Best Actor prize has widely been regarded as Colin Firth's to lose for months.

Not to knock any of the other nine contenders, but The Social Network is my non-voting choice for the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. But I won't lose my mind if it doesn't win: The 1968 award for Best Picture went to Oliver!, a musical adaptation of Oliver Twist, but the zeitgeist belonged to a film not even nominated, 2001: A Space Odyssey. History tends to correct the slights of today, even when those of vision can recognize their times in the present tense.