Rewatching "The History Boys"

I just watched "The History Boys" on television. There are, I suppose, quite a few flaws in the film. The central conceit, that a portly history teacher with a fondness for giving rides on his motorcycles to his male students and then reaching for a grope during opportune moments, with the grudging acceptance of the boys might be offensive. A reviewer has noted what would happen if it had been an all-girls school. Would there not be outrage?

The eponymous "history boys" from which the film gets its names are from a British boarding school of all-male students. It appears to be 1980s England. The headmaster, balding and unimaginative, has one goal in mind, which is to get as many boys into Oxbridge as possible, and to this end, he's hired Irwin, himself an Oxford man, to coach the boys into writing clever essays that will draw the attention of the readers that admit these men into higher education.

The previous time or times I watched this, I was not teaching, so I didn't think of the film from a teacher's perspective. There is a strong streak of idealism in the film. The kids, with perhaps the exception of the jockish Rudge, all seem committed to their studies. In discussions, they challenge the teachers. When Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, shows up, he offers an alternative view of history than Hector.

Hector is the idealist. He wants students engaged in history because he has a passion for literature. He finds truth in the fiction stories of the great masters. But, he also doesn't want the reverence to literature to overwhelm the students with too great a level of respect. So, he has the students singing songs from musicals and watching classic movies, to make those stories, mass-appealing as they may be, as relevant as the classics.

Irwin, by contrast, is the pragmatist. He sees admission as a game. While his students are technically proficient--they know their history backwards and forwards, their essays are fact-filled and parrot back the books they've read. He challenges them to bring an unusual perspective, to make the essays interesting. The history boys seem keen on this, even as Hector bristles at the notion of history as game.

Mrs. Lintott provides the female voice of reason, counterbalancing the foibles of Hector who, despite his love of teaching, can't seem to abandon his infatuation for his students, with one notable exception.

If the movie uses Dakin as the ultra-hip guy who sleeps with secretaries and seems more than plenty bi-curious, it is Posner, the gay Jewish geek, who is the moral center of the film. Posner knows he has a crush on Dakin, and even Dakin knows this too. Dakin's a bit too cool to get involved, and he feels Posner is a bit too young.

There are perhaps three key scenes in the film. First, Posner has a discussion with Irwin and says that he is homosexual and that he has a crush on Dakin and he knows it can't be returned. In a way, this confession is about Posner, but it is also about Irwin. Irwin wants to sympathize, but he's afraid to reveal who he truly is to Posner, mostly out of deference to the teacher-student relationship. Posner has another discussion with Hector about a story he's read and Hector tells him that novels are compelling because sometimes you have a feeling, one you think is completely personal, and realize that such a feeling is there in written word by a man you've never met, and perhaps by someone long since dead.

Another key scene is Irwin and Hector talking in the hallway shortly after Hector has been told he's being let go because of his indiscretions. Indeed, Mrs. Lintott seems to feel that those indiscretions, as poor judgment as they may be, are perhaps not as severe as they could be, that as a teacher that cares about what he teaches, his contributions to a student's development more than offsets bad behavior. Hector understands that Irwin himself is attracted to the boys and even as the boys think of Irwin as cooler, he advises Irwin to restrain himself, in particular, in his infatuation with Dakin.

To up the ante, Dakin wants to fool around with Irwin, especially after he has found out (like many of his classmates) that he's going to a top-notch college. It's his way of saying thanks. Irwin is uncomfortable at the advances, and eventually gives in to the idea of meeting Dakin. This discomfort is well-acted even if the situation is contrived, but it does touch on potential situations a teacher might find him/herself.

I'll quickly go over the other guys. Akhtar is an Indian Muslim. His character is not fleshed out that much and his inclusion probably says as much about modern British society's diversity than anything else. James Corden plays portly Timms, but is also a character that isn't that well-developed. He's there as the token big guy. Apparently, the actor has gone on to be in a successful British sitcom.

Russell Tovey plays Rudge, the athlete. In a way, his view is the most honest. He doesn't care for book learning at all, despite being in a prep school. He plays the game somewhat, but thinks it's a waste of time. He dislikes the guile needed, and just wants to play sports.

Andrew Knott plays Lockwood, who is not given much of a personality, and is there, one imagines, to be good looking. One other character is the token African Brit, and like Akhtar, doesn't have that much of a personality.

Jamie Parker plays Scripps. He's the Catholic, and is considered a bit of a cipher by best friend, Dakin, who wonders what Scripps does with all this religion. It does seem the writing is a touch lazy for Scripps, and his Catholicism is played, if not for laughs, than not entirely seriously either. His religion is a novelty to Dakin and the film treats it as such.

The two boys that matter most are Dakin and Posner. Dakin, confident and outgoing, ambitious and willing to take chances, and Posner, scared and timid, not sure how to deal with his sexuality, and having a hopeless crush on Dakin. Interestingly enough, Hector never gives Posner a ride, the one guy who might truly be interested in Hector's advances, while the others consider his advances more a nuisance. Hector probably senses how conflicted Posner is and doesn't want the aftermath of any encounter.

The accident that ends the movie is something of a convenience. Because Hector takes Irwin for a bike ride, one that ends in Hector's death and Irwin's injury, Irwin and Dakin never get together for Dakin to "thank" Irwin.

If the movie works, it works at many levels. From a teacher's perspective, it's the total engagement of the students. So often, students are disengaged. They wonder why they are in classes, and they are unable to formulate good questions, take decisive stances. It's a level of maturity few students, even after four years, ever reach. To find such precocity as the students in this film must make teachers giddily happy, even as they recognize the fantasy aspects.

When Hector is going to be let go, he wants to make an announcement to his class, but the boys are trying to be clever and Hector is unable to get his pending firing out in words, and breaks down and cries, realizing the only thing he truly cared about--teaching, was going to be taken away from him. Mrs. Lintott is sympathetic. She sees the headmaster as a bean-counter, one who only worries about placements and test scores, and not about educating the person.

Although the film isn't strictly about Posner, his story is the link between Hector, Irwin, and the history boys. All three are gay. All three find hurt as they suppress their feelings (in a way, the film is old-fashioned, never seeming to take the viable stance that these people might find someone who is also gay to make them happy), infatuated by straight guys, and never able to find a relationship that works.

Of all the history boys, he is most like Hector, and becomes a teacher. And like Hector, he is fond of the boys he teaches, but he restrains himself, and as much as it hurts, he says he's not unhappy either. In a way, the film touches two aspects of teaching. One is the act of teaching itself, the inspiration and engagement to intellectual pursuits, and one is more the seedy underside, the idea that a teacher is in a position of respect and that students are at a challenging time in their lives and may be victims of untoward advances.

For its variety of flaws, so much of the film resonates, from its decidedly too-brainy kids, to the different views of how to teach students, to that idyllic time in life somewhere between high school and college where students are only asked to hang out and learn, and the responsibilities of a job seem so far away.

The Reality of The Social Network

When it comes to making a movie, film makers have some idea of what makes a movie work. They need drama, that is, they need tension. They need easy-to-understand motivations. They don't need things that are highly technical or highly abstruse. Such things would only put the audience to sleep with nary a sense of the deep issues that they are completely missing.

Facebook started with Mark Zuckerberg, but the reality is, like most endeavors, it's too tough to write code on your own. As prolific as Zuckerberg might be, he can only code so fast, and he eventually needs a team that he can trust to do things. The story of Dustin Moskovitz (shown in the picture) and Chris Hughes are untold because, frankly, it's more interesting to make this the story of a handful of people.

Thus, Eduardo Saverin, the business guy, is the guy that is the foil for Mark. Saverin is the conscious of the film, and yet, the film posits that he lacks the vision to make Facebook as successful as it could be, and eventually, either Zuckerberg or Parker or both chose to exclude Saverin (although apparently through lawsuits, he still owns a reasonable chunk of Facebook).

What about Moskovitz and Hughes? What about the other technical folks that were part of Facebook? How did Zuckerberg interact with them? Did they have a sense this could be big? Did they know what it would take to make Facebook big? What did they have that, say, MySpace didn't have? Why did it work? Ultimately, such questions are sidestepped because the answers are perhaps not so pat, not so simple. Was the success of Facebook due to its technical prowess, or was it due to something simpler? Perhaps having a good idea at the right time?

Facebook started a bit like GMail. It ran on exclusivity. But exclusivity isn't be enough. Zuckerberg had created other sites at Harvard and those sites would not have taken off the way Facebook did.

You need a reason to visit the site whether you are exclusive or not. It may be enough to bait the first few users, but honestly, that's far from enough. The site has to be good enough to keep folks coming back over and over. To be fair, many websites could have been great had they had enough users. They could have made great decisions, had there been enough people to start it up, and yet, there wasn't enough. Maybe HarvardConnection (or ConnectU) would have been great. But it's highly possible it would have fizzled.

The Social Network cared primarily about the relationship of Zuckerberg and Saverin and also to the Winklevoss twins (and Narendra). The technical team behind Facebook was mostly pushed aside because, as movie makers, Fincher and Sorkin would have been hard-pressed to make that side of the story compelling. And, did the folks who invented Facebook really understand what made it different and what made it work? Perhaps they did.

To me, the reason it worked was because it flipped the home page around. Instead of the home page being about you, it was about your friends. You could have 100 friends, but all you need is 3-5 really active friends to keep you coming back to Facebook. Once you could add comments or look at your friends pictures or what have you, you have motivation to keep coming back. If it was just about you, you would get bored of yourself. Other sites like MySpace failed to make it easy to notify you when your friends updated anything. It was a huge labor to find out what your friends were up to. And they took advantage of microblogging since real blogging was far too time-consuming.

So while I enjoyed the film, and enjoyed how Fincher/Sorkin told the tale, I know that it misses on a lot of the technical aspects that would have made it more interesting to me personally.

Review: The Social Network

When I first heard about The Social Network, I didn't think much of it. The commercial didn't seem that good. I knew almost nothing of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. What little I knew was something about how Zuckerberg "stole" Facebook from the original creators and made a fortune. I had thought he had been the savvy business type, a Steve Jobs that took over from lowly Steve Wozniak.

But then I heard David Fincher directed the film and Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. David Fincher has been a notable director, even if his name is not as widely known as, say, Steven Spielberg. Until Fincher directed his first feature, he was best known as one of the directors of Madonna's video.

Fincher got his start in that incubator of talent: the Aliens films. The first had been directed by Ridley Scott, known for his visual style. The second was a hyper-kinetic space romp directed by James Cameron. Fincher helmed the third film and Jean-Pierre Jeunet did the fourth (he also did Amelie). Fincher got notoriety in that most gruesome of cop buddy movies: Se7en about a serial killer who murders based on the seven deadly sins.

Fincher went on to direct other movies like The Game, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zodiac. Fincher is a technician, a director whose cool precision sometimes draws attention to itself. There is a certain detachment, a little like watching a Kubrick film, although Fincher seems more assured in how he wants a scene to look.

I found it a bit puzzling what would draw Fincher to this story. It doesn't seem to follow his usual brand of film, whatever that may be. This is a story of geeks that develop a social networking site that takes over the world.

The story begins at Harvard where Zuckerberg is a computer science major. The opening scene, which is made up for dramatic effect, tries to set the tone for the entire film. In it, Zuckerberg is telling his girlfriend that he wants to join one of the elite houses at Harvard. It helps to know something about how Harvard works.

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (I believe) have a house system. Typically, students enter their first year in the dorms, then they join a house where they will stay their remaining years. A house is perhaps more akin to Harry Potter's house of Griffyndor than, say, a fraternity. The house is co-ed and serves as residence, dining hall, and communal gathering place.

Beyond this basic living structure, there are also "final clubs" which are social clubs with eight all-male clubs and five all-female clubs. The all-male final clubs have been around for over a hundred years.

Zuckerberg wants to join such a club and tells his plan to his girlfriend. She seems intelligent. Both trade verbal jabs courtesy of Aaron Sorkin until it's revealed that this girlfriend goes to Boston University, and Zuckerberg has ambitions to work his way up the social hierarchy. He's dumped when she feels it's too much of a burden being his girlfriend and that he's basically an asshole.

Without this opening exchange, it's hard to read much into Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. Looking much like Michael Cera, he lacks Cera's huggable loser quality, but has enough of his geek to make it plausible that this guy could be the programming genius that starts Facebook.

Indeed, Eisenberg's face rarely registers any emotions. He never seems ecstatic, nor sad. His emotions are expressed more through words and he seems a bit emotionally detached, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, and yet, Zuckerberg is ambitious.

Although Facebook's creation is the result of computer programming, Fincher and Sorkin only touch on that aspect. They find enough computer consultants to keep certain parts reasonably accurate. Zuckerberg is shown blogging on LiveJournal. You can see his screen is filled with HTML, although of the most rudimentary sort. LiveJournal likely has a way to edit raw HTML, but most people don't use it (because they don't understand it), and one wonders if Zuckerberg would have edited raw HTML, because there's a bit of tedium to it. Even so, there's some accuracy to this.

There is some historical research that was done to create some of the sense of the early 2000s. I bought my first Mac around 2001 or so. The earliest power cords were round and glowed at the connection, unlike the new magnetic version that allows the cord to slip off without breaking. They were able to find a Mac circa that era in the opening scene when Sean Parker is introduced (who is momentarily unrecognizable, despite being played by Justin Timberlake).

At one point, Zuckerberg says that he's going to fire up emacs and edit the Perl code, and it does indeed look like Perl code, at least, from a cursory glance. Emacs is one of two Unix text editors in wide use (the other being vi or its successor, vim). Zuckerberg talks about keeping the servers up as well.

To show some of Zuckerberg's genius, he is shown sitting in a computer hardware course as the teacher is explaining details of how paging is done though the quantities he uses (256 bytes for a page) seems small. To increase the melodrama, the class is only 15-20 students seated in an auditorium meant for 100. As Zuckerberg leaves the class early to deal with some business related issue, the teacher notes that many students have gave up on the course. As Zuckerberg leaves, he identifies bits of a status register. The teacher makes an inane comment "That's correct--do you see how he got this?", when the answer is "he memorized it". There was nothing to infer. The status register was the way it was defined by the person or people who designed it.

Since this is a plot-driven story, there is a need to prune away enough characters that might otherwise distract from the storyline. There are roughly four main characters other than Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg is an emotional cipher, the everyman that we're meant to relate to is his best friend, Eduardo Saverin, who provides the money to help Zuckerberg, but is put down, even as he makes inroads to join one of the "final club", Phoenix. Saverin is shown as a big supporter of Zuckerberg, and is distrustful of Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, who eventually helps Zuckerberg grow Facebook.

There is a kind of genius picking Justin Timberlake to play Sean Parker. Timberlake, a ex boy-band pop singing sensation, has shown some acting chops. He must have liked the idea of playing an uber geek, but one reason Timberlake may have been chosen is because of his star persona. He can then play Sean Parker not only as a geek, but a cool savvy coding rock star, someone that Zuckerberg becomes enamored of. Perhaps echoing Wall Street (a sequel came out recently too), Zuckerberg must pick between the guy who takes him places or his best friend, and while Zuckerberg does side with Parker, the film leaves it ambiguous about his final feelings to Saverin.

The other two main characters are the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, both played by Armie Hammer. They look something like Nordic gods, and yet Sorkin/Fincher do something clever. Since they are both at Harvard, they are made out to be pretty smart guys (at least business wise). They work with Divya Narendra (played by director Anthony Minghella's son who does not seem to be Indian). Furthermore, the brothers act differently. The leader (I guess Cameron) is more worried about appearances and seems the more patient of the two, and the other is more impulsive, similar to Divya.

Sorkin, in particular, has some fun about the two being twins, making them more "twin-like", i.e., about how they mention they are brothers, almost as if the twins in the second Matrix films had intelligent dialogue.

Roger Ebert, in his review, notes that nearly all the women (except the girlfriend at the beginning) are Asian. Although Zuckerberg is almost seen as being uninterested in women (and for dramatic purposes, he is shown trying to friend the girl that dumped him at the start of the film), his to-be-wife appears as two of the groupie Asian girls that make out with Eduardo and Mark. Fincher uses indirect cues to get his idea across. Zuckerberg is showing wearing the Adidas flip flops into the next stall over from Eduardo, the same one shown during the hearings that interweave through the entire film.

Rather than show Bill Gates in focus, he is shown blurred, wearing a sweater, and a voice impersonator does the talking so unless you're paying attention, you might not know that it's Bill Gates being portrayed (although it's mentioned in a subsequent scene).

Fincher knows he has some difficult material to try to dramatize, and to this effect, he falls on an interesting crutch: music. Many scenes have music over it to add drama to the situation. Fincher also adds tension by cross-cutting time frames, from a hearing, and going back historically.

Fincher employs tilt-shift in a key crew scene, one where the Winklevoss team starts to close on the winning boat, but ends up short. This is a metaphor for how close these jocks came to perhaps creating the next Facebook (though probably not really).

Ultimately, although there are a lot of geek aspects to The Social Network, it is about the desire to be a mover and a shaker in the world, and not about why Facebook ultimately worked.

There are two or three theories that are posited in the film. The Winklevosses mention the first reason: the Harvard name makes the desirability of the social network rather high. Second, there's the idea of putting the social status (single, etc) on. The one real reason isn't given. Facebook inverted what the home page was about.

In LiveJournal, each person's home page is their blog. In Facebook, the home page is basically a feed of all your friends. What keeps you coming back to Facebook isn't what you are doing, it's what your friends are doing. It seems obvious, but many social networking sites didn't get that. To be fair, Facebook looks sleek and clean and not the dirty, gaudy clutter of MySpace.

There are two aspects of Facebook that The Social Network avoids. It doesn't try to explain why Facebook is so addictive. It merely states that it is. It also doesn't get into the group that helped create Facebook. Most of the coders are only in the background. There is a competition (that most likely never existed) where coders must take shots as they try to hack in somewhere.

Even the parties that are portrayed are sexier than reality, done to jazz up the reality that was. We understand, as movie goers, that drama is amped so that viewers don't get bogged down by the day to day mundane details that reflect reality. Zuckerberg is likely a far more personable person than the Eisenberg potrayal, but that isn't seem to be a problem for me.

Though the story is about Zuckerberg, it's Saverin we come to sympathize with. Zuckerberg is more enigmatic. In the end, he seems to worry if he is an asshole. There are few women in the film with anything more than a cursory personality. One is the lawyer that is shown to be on Zuckerberg's side. She reassures him that he is not an asshole, though he seems to be trying hard to be one.

As Zuckerberg stares as the business card that Parker helped him craft "I'm the CEO, bitch", he realizes that Parker is a bad influence and being the CEO, bitch, means he is ultimately responsible for Facebook's reputation. Saverin may have been right, but Parker was, in his way, also right.

The film focuses on the drama of how one person or a small group of people took ambitious steps to work to the most successful social network, and it's in this human drama that the film works, because it's hard to mine drama out of algorithms and code and to explain why social networking was so compelling to so many people.