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I'm not one of the people who worship Chuck Palahniuk and I'm not that big a fan of the movie (I started liking David Fincher after Zodiac) but, credit where credit is due. Fight Club gave novels the same happy kick up the ass that Reservoir Dogs gave to movies. Here is Palahniuk talking about source material:

RH: Let me start by saying, and I mean this as a compliment, that you have a very twisted imagination.

CP: I wish it were just mine but it's really all of my friends. About eighty percent of Fight Club (1996) is received information. I can go to parties and say, "How many people have doctored food in the service industry?" and get their stories... people write the books for me; all I've got to do is remember everybody's stories and put them together. So, I can't take credit for most of it.

RH: So how did you first get interested in hearing these stories?

CP: I was always disappointed when I went to read anything. I'd go to the library and I'd pull fifty books off the shelf and none of them were anything I wanted to read. And I always thought, you know, I could do something better. And there's always stories that really stand out that make me laugh out loud when people tell them. People have fantastically funny stories. So I thought, why not collect these things instead of letting them be wasted, letting them go out in thin air. I collect them and put them together somehow and it seems to work.

Today's apropos of nothing

Quincy MD; Band à part; Miss Mosh; Sleepy Hollow. When I was flatting it was a good game to watch Quincy MD and take all the dialogue literally. The ep when Quincy yelled at someone 'Your father was my right arm!' was a particular hit. I'm always thinking Band à part. Miss Mosh who begat GaGa. A lot of Tim Burton's movies get better with age, which is interesting.

OK: day's a wastin'.

The F word

Sopranos creator David Chase interviewed by PBS presenter Jim Lehrer in 2001:

Q: Much is being made about the profanity in The Sopranos. How important is that to its success?

DAVID CHASE: It is important. I can't comment as to whether - how important it is to the success of the show - but it is important. I've heard people say, well, you know, they can do all that swearing on HBO. They can show all that violence; they can show all those bare breasts, and I don't believe those are the reasons that the show is a success. I believe you could do this show on a network. The only place you'd have a problem - because you could do it with less violence if you so chose to - you could probably do it with - you wouldn't need to have the Bing dancers be naked - that's not an absolute requirement, but it would lose something only in language, I think. I think language is important.

Q: So it wouldn't be the same program - wouldn't be the same story?

DAVID CHASE: It sounds crazy to say that if you can't say the "f" word it'd be different, but all I can say is that would be the one place where I would have trouble. I'd be writing stuff I thought wasn't accurate. And that I think would filter down - that language thing. I guess language is important to people. I think that language thing would filter down to other aspects of the show and kind of a creeping unreality would get into it.

The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

Complaining about a new seven-hour production / reading of The Great Gatsby, Time theater reviewer Joan Marcus mentions in passing that the novel is 49,000 words long. I knew there was a reason I liked it. I first read Gatsby when my brother was doing his first year of English lit at Auckland Uni. His secondhand paperback edition was a tie-in with the 1974 movie version with Robert Redford on the cover so I picked it up because I liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*. (My brother is seven years older than me, so I must have been around 12.) Anyway: in; out - bang. And that's the book. Whether or not it dates from that experience, I have always associated the form of the novel with concision. This puts me at odds with almost everyone nowadays but when I look back on my book collection (i.e. visualise it in its Kane / Raiders style storage warehouse) my favourite - or rather my most enjoyed - reads are the shorter ones. Why fuck around? You focus, You get in there, you get out. Travel light, etc.

I'm closing in on the final draft of The New Thing ™ and cutting left and right. Last draft was 90,000; this one is peeking under 75,000. I keep what's been cut in a dump file and review it afterwards; no matter how good it is, it's never good enough.

* Actually I liked Alias Smith & Jones on TV but knew it was a rip-off. Not a bad one, though. I remember watching M*A*S*H* on TV and thinking, 'This would make a really good movie...'

WIP

New draft, nearly there... I've gone into some sort of zone where the only thing I watch is Mad Men and the only things I read are old detective novels and the NYT. This is fairly normal behaviour for creative types; when Irvine Welsh was writing Trainspotting all he watched was Star Wars, over and over, although drugs may have been involved. And David Lynch eats the same thing for lunch every day - broccoli and a tuna sandwich, a quirk which drove Isabella Rosselini from his life. Good company, happy thoughts. Repetition is the mother of invention. When I was writing The Church of John Coltrane I only listened to Coltrane, of course - which drove the neighbours nuts. The soundtrack for the new thing is Sly and the Family Stone, Sticky Fingers... but hey, that's a whole other blog entry.

Bender

I've been taking blogging much too seriously lately, and I swore I'd never do that (again). But man, you need a distraction when you hit a bump. Bump being dealt with. Normal transmission to be resumed, etcetera, etcetera.

The Sweet Smell of Success

The Social Network benefits from a second viewing. Aaron Sorkin's script is so upfront you get all the main points the first time but re-examination turns up all kinds of gems: Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) putting out a fire while he's putting out an actual fire; the champion rowers beginning to lose from the moment they're interrupted in the practice tank; the very Citizen Kane arc of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) breaking into the frat party virtually, attracting and being surrounded by more and more people until he ends up being crowded out and as isolated as he was in the beginning; the Facebook blue that creeps into the edges of the sky until it's filled.

Sunrise and sunset are as one in this movie - it's on Fincher time - but the tone is very noir, The Social Network is really this generation's The Sweet Smell of Success, filled with talk and sleek urban treachery. Male bonds are more prized than male-female relationships and while there's much mention of money there's little evidence of it. The most direct expressions of wealth are crass and excessive; Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, a convincing shit) fusses over vintage whiskies in a droning nightclub and drives a humorous mom-mobile. Sex is likewise superfluous - the most fun women (girls) have in the film is with a bong. The real glitter is the chatter of keyboards.

Much has been made of how much Sorkin's Zuckerberg is like the real one. Jesse Eisenburg's performance certainly satisfies the stereotype of today's Asperger Kid (how time flies - it seems like only yesterday that all movie teens were bipolar) but it's more likely that the character has been reverse-engineered from the modern Zuckerberg as he appears in press statements and leaked online gloats. The audience is meant to to be appalled by his lack of empathy but an early scene in which he speedily constructs a site to insult every female on campus is undeniably cool: to object would be like criticising Robert de Niro for stealing in Heat. To be online is to be understanding of, if not actively engaged in, narcissistic stupidity. The character's actions are more of a caution: therebutforthegraceofgod-dot-com.

We live in a larger world now, something which Fincher telegraphs by shrinking the rest of it down to size. The Henley Royal Regatta is miniaturised in digital (i.e. faux) tilt-shift so it looks quaint, even petty; Harvard is a series of Roman-looking facades, like faded theater flats; a final decadent Los Angeles party is as squalid and domestic as the fraternity binges at the start of the movie. If TV, as someone once said, is about people walking in and out of rooms, the internet is about them being locked inside. Zuckerberg only physically exits locations a handful of times: trapped in a Last Year at Marienbad loop of opprobrium, he can't even leave his lawyer's office. His fate should be consolation for real people - Fincher compares them all to a caged chicken - but it's not. From the stupid girls to the repulsive boys, the stale arguments to the unsexy sex, The Social Network is a groovy place, and you want to be part of it.