6B — Thursday, December 5, 2019 Arts The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com While there’s no cut-and-dry definition of the best film of the decade, some measures are better than others. For me, a decade- defining movie must be more than technically, critically or commercially successful. Many films from the 2010s met all of these criteria, all competent, some more memorable than others. After all, even the most holistic and unambiguous appreciation is no guarantee that the product will persist in our collective conscious for years to come. So what makes the difference then? What sets apart the momentarily great from the transcendent? In a word, dynamism. How can art, film or otherwise, define its time unless it pulls off a magic trick of transforming and warping right before our very eyes? For a film to say something meaningful about its era is one thing. To still have an incessant voice, a stamp on culture several years after its release, is another thing entirely. With that broad metric in mind, there is a clear winner here. It might not even be a close contest — the best movie of the decade is David Fincher’s “The Social Network.” As both a wildly entertaining tragedy of deteriorating friendships and a diagnosis on the impending future of technological communication, “The Social Network” perfectly straddles the line between watchability and cultural dynamism in a way that no other film from the decade does. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin once admitted, “I’ve heard of Facebook, in the same way I’ve heard of a carburetor. But if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn’t know how to find it.” This information is important; Sorkin explicitly distinguishes his story from reality. Not once do the words “Based on a true story” appear across the screen. Yet that fact is what makes the film so compelling as an artifact of this decade. What Sorkin intended as a human drama with Facebook in its periphery ultimately speaks for itself about the woes, dangers and evils of the tech conglomerates that rule our lives. In this way, “The Social Network” is an unintentionally oracular statement more than it is a testament to Sorkin’s predictive instincts. “Gretchen, they’re best friends.” The collaboration of Fincher and Sorkin is perplexing on its surface — Sorkin is most concerned about the depth of his content where Fincher prefers a focus on structure and tone. Sorkin’s characters are snappy and shrewd where Fincher’s are idiosyncratic and futile. And yet the marriage of their work manages not only to retain the best qualities of both, but also adds synergy to them. Fincher is notorious for being a rigid perfectionist, so Sorkin’s esoteric, game-theoretic dialogue plays out with striking clarity. “But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you are a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole,” Rooney Mara’s (“A Ghost Story”) Erica Albright hisses at the end of the first scene. And the precision of those words stings. Moreover, Fincher’s attention to immaculate set design and tendency toward claustrophobically immersive camerawork never falters. In particular, the Henley Royal Regatta race is an adrenaline shot of a scene, depicting the athletes as vivid, imperfect figures amid blurry, dreamlike scenery. While every other scene in the film is essentially a conversation, Fincher never misses an opportunity to let his characters’ violent undertones rudely shift the camera, or their positions in the frame tell us something new. It’s an easy movie to direct with obvious choices. But Fincher’s direction takes more than enough risks to impress. “What sound is he making? Is that like a tsk?” A scrawny college student with a backpack and a hoodie is sprinting across campus. He weaves through arches and alleyways, a shortcut here, a sidestep there. His humility is present; several trios of piano notes that seem to float and hover in your ears. His rage is palpable too — it’s a sinister, soul-shaking hum in the background. Together, these sonic textures communicate the tender darkness of Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve studied to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar-winning score more than I’ve studied to anything else. It is a thrumming electronic abyss peppered with deeply comforting melodies. The industrial-techno beat of “In Motion” is followed promptly by the squeaking grittiness of “A Familiar Taste.” Hopeful chords can exist, if only for a fleeting moment, taken over by dissonance. Our characters chase their ambitions and only falter when those ambitions incite sour consequences. Dreams can reach only so far, long enough until that droning buzzy emptiness subsumes all, until friendships are only burdens. While Reznor and Ross have identified a style to their score compositions, they are probably better known for their work in Nine Inch Nails. But what I find most remarkable about the movie’s score is how little of a departure it actually is from the industrial rock band. Reznor is no stranger to writing depraved, lonely music. He has an uncanny ability to affirm one while dragging them further into his dark orbit. And that quality is precisely how he gives the score its lasting edge. Sometimes, we are all the kid behind the computer, fingers clacking furiously away into the void. “We don’t know what it is yet.” “The Social Network” imagines the beginnings of Facebook as a youthful, enterprising endeavor. “The Facebook is cool,” Justin Timberlake’s (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) Sean Parker says. “You don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool.” And for all the things that the real life Facebook has become since the movie’s release, “cool” and “ad-free” are certainly not accurate descriptors. In Sorkin’s optimistic imagination, the company was created by people who didn’t understand what it was. If anything, reality has affirmed this narrative; only since the Brexit vote and the Cambridge Analytica scandal has the world woken up to the actual extent of political and social power the site has. Actual events affect how we rewatch the film, but interaction goes both ways. Watching Jesse Eisenberg’s (“The Hummingbird Project”) real-life counterpart and his blabbering testimony on Capitol Hill is fascinating. He carries all the high- strung, geeky energy, but without the ease or the nonchalance of the character. He in every way has become the worst version of a lonesome coder who got dumped in a bar; more accurately, lonesome coder with his tendrils in control of global communication. It doesn’t matter that Facebook wasn’t started over a breakup at a Harvard bar. Whether we like it or not, Jesse Eisenberg’s performance has irreversibly shaped our perception of one of the biggest figures in tech today. *** What better way for this decade to end then for Sorkin himself to pen a New York Times opinion lambasting Mark Zuckerberg? “The Social Network” is a movie that has dramatically changed since its release. Its interaction with culture is a conversation, not a statement. How its impact will shift in the future is impossible to tell, so we need to keep watching it. But the actual experience of watching it isn’t boring, or a chore. It’s a delightful example of talented craftspeople working at the peak of their respective potentials. Our need for communication will never end. And, unfortunately, the deluge of creepy hacker tech figures might not either. “The Social Network” is a half-open window into the kind of loneliness that drives our desire to stay connected with each other. Sorry! My Prada’s at the cleaners: “The Social Network” ANISH TAMHANEY Daily Arts Writer Bro-country, a word that sends shivers down the spines of genre traditionalists, brings smiles to the faces of millions of loyal listeners and sounds like money to industry insiders. Coined in 2013 by Jody Rosen in New York Magazine, he pins down the subgenre as being “music by and of the tatted, gym- toned, party- hearty American white dude.” Whether you like it or not, this character (and his infatuation with trucks, beer and girls) defines the past decade of mainstream country music. Popular but polarizing, it’s worth acknowledging the best, or at least the most memorable, bro-country hits of the 2010s — if not for sentimentality’s sake, than to help us figure out where mainstream country music is headed in 2020. “Dirt Road Anthem” was recorded twice before it became the highest- selling record by a solo male country artist, so it’s significant that its success came with Jason Aldean. It was a glimpse into the future. In 2011, a rap- influenced country song had never broken into the mainstream before, that is until the mash-up was endorsed by Aldean, an already established artist. The popularity of “Dirt Road Anthem” offered just an inkling of the potential that its kind of sound and shallow themes might hold when given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience. Soon enough, everyone was trying to rap about “cornbread and biscuits.” “Baby you a song / You make me wanna roll my windows down / and cruise.” In the summer of 2013, with an added verse from Nelly, “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line was inescapable. And let’s be honest, the hook is probably in your head right now. But what is it even about? Literally, it’s about getting a girl to ride in your truck with you. But really, as the first country song to ever go diamond, it’s about country songs not needing to be about anything. That’s key. If the genre’s best-selling song was a heartfelt, acoustic story-song, then that’s what country radio would have been playing the past few years. But it wasn’t. Instead, we have hundreds of “long, tanned legs” copycats. Later that year, Zac Brown infamously called this song “the worst song (he’s) ever heard” and for good reason: “That’s My Kinda Night” by Luke Bryan can sound painfully cringe-y. “Little Conway a little T-Pain / Might just make it rain,” Bryan croons, which feels more like a threat than a welcome suggestion. If that wasn’t bad enough, an auto-tuned voice echoes the “make it rain” verse unironically. But as hard as it is to admit, I like it. I understand the song’s appeal. It’s insanely catchy, and, for a young woman from the suburbs, it’s fun to play pretend, to embody the swagger of a cocky, hypermasculine bro, if only for three minutes. “It’s gettin’ kinda cold in these painted on cut off jeans” Maddie & Tae sigh on their refreshing first single, giving country listeners a much-needed reality check. Even though “Girl In a Country Song,” released in 2014, is anti- bro-country, it absolutely is worth acknowledging as it proves that bro-country’s domination was met with some pushback from fellow artists. The song takes the perspective of the one- dimensional props used in all of the songs mentioned above, the girl, and finds out that being the bro’s muse isn’t as fun as they make it sound. It’s chock full of references to the songs it got played alongside on the radio, but twists their lyrics into funny one-liners to prove a point. “Can I put on some real clothes now?” they wonder. Although the song hit #1 and got the duo plenty of interviews, bro-country continued answering no. After bashing Bryan’s hip hop-infused country, Zac Brown decided to give the style a try himself on his 2016 album Jekyll + Hyde. “Beautiful Drug” is one of its standouts, exemplary of the way country can blend with EDM relatively seamlessly. It’s a glossy, highly produced, extended metaphor with a beat drop as irresistible as Brown finds his love interest. Because of Brown’s initial resistance to this kind of genre-bending, the song’s existence also demonstrates the overwhelming wave of experimentation country started going through in the latter half of the decade, something that sprouted from bro-country. If Zac Brown got on board, rest assured nearly everyone else in mainstream country music did too. Released in 2017, “Body Like a Back Road” is “Dirt Road Anthem” 2.0 which makes the genre’s dramatic evolution all the more evident. Unlike Aldean, Sam Hunt is open about his rapping influences. Instead of real drums, Hunt opts to rhyme against a snap track. And the narrative itself is different. The singer no longer meets the girl on the dirt road — in Hunt’s version, her agency has been cut down to the point that she is the dirt road. Hunt’s style had already struck up a conversation about the boundaries of country music, what’s borrowing and what’s appropriating, but ultimately the success of the song pushes all of those questions aside. “Body Like a Back Road” and Hunt himself suggest that anything can be country, so long as that’s what the artist calls themself. Throughout the past 10 years, country radio has been playing women less and less, bringing in sounds and artists from different genres more and more, and finding new ways to compare women to inanimate objects. But it wasn’t all bad. As Kacey Musgraves gets recognized for her instrumentally rich and witty style and traditional-leaning and Luke Combs starts to dominate the charts, it’s clear that the genre is preparing to start a new chapter. The 2010s raised questions fundamental to the essence of what country music is. For better or for worse, the next decade holds the answers. Bikinis, Bud Lights and the brazen rise of bro-country KATIE BEEKMAN Daily Arts Writer B-SIDE: MUSIC NOTEBOOK B-SIDE: FILM NOTEBOOK US AIR FORCE SONY MOTION PICTURES / YOUTUBE SONY MOTION PICTURES / YOUTUBE As both a wildly entertaining tragedy of deteriorating frienships and a diagnosis on the impending future of technological communication, “The Social Network” perfectly straddles the line betwen watchability and cultural dynamism in a way that no other film from the decade does. The popularity of “Dirt Road Anthem” offered just an inkling of the potential that its kind of sound and shallow themes might hold when given the opportunty to reach a bigger audience. Soon enough, everyone was trying to rap about “cornbread and biscuits.”