Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  A casting director working for British docu-drama director Andrea Arnold spotted Mia – or, rather, the girl who plays her, Katie Jarvis – on a platform at Tilbury railway station. She was shouting, arguing with her boyfriend. Arnold, who had already won acclaim for her equally excellent debut film Red Road, made the angry girl the star of her second movie. She had never acted before. Had no idea she wanted to. Hasn’t since, despite being nominated for awards and signing to a hotshot agency.

  Katie – or rather, Mia, the girl she plays – lives in a shitty flat in a bleak council estate in East London. Except this isn’t real East London. This is the no man’s land between city and suburb that is Havering, or something like it. She only wears vests and grey tracksuit bottoms, and she’s wire-thin. She dances to classic hip hop . . . it’s the only thing she likes to do, and she thinks she could maybe do it professionally. Her favourite seems to be ‘Juice (Know The Ledge)’ by Rakim, which was the theme to a teen movie called Juice starring Tupac Shakur. Everyone dances on her estate. They make life where it doesn’t exist.

  Mia sees horses and tries to free them. The travellers who have this particular horse tied up catch her and try to molest her. But a third boy with a dog rescues her. Mia lives with her mother Joanna (Wareing) and her little sister Tyler (Griffiths). We don’t know where Dad is. Her mother looks barely old enough to have a teenage daughter. She has parties where everyone gets drunk and women get fingered in the kitchen and no one cares that Mia and her funny, foul-mouthed sister are there.

  Joanna has a boyfriend. He’s a handsome Irish rogue who has loud sex with Joanna. But, while Joanna can’t wait to get rid of Mia at every opportunity, Connor (Fassbender) seems to like Mia’s company. When she tells him he’s a dick he just laughs. He takes liberties, like spanking her. He invites Mia and Tyler out on a drive to a river, and Mia feels the sun in her eyes and the wind in her hair, and he plays Bobby Womack’s version of ‘California Dreamin’’ at top volume. He shows Mia how to catch fish without a rod. He dances with her to James Brown in a pub car park. But Joanna ruins it. And Mia walks away, with purpose, to who knows where.

  Mia begins to turn up at Wickes, the DIY warehouse where Connor works. But she also hangs out with Billy, the boy who rescued her. She hangs around while he scavenges through car scrapyards. He’s a friend but Connor makes her want to compete with her mother. He asks her to smell his cologne and time moves slowly.

  She practises her dancing. She posts a letter.

  One night, Connor can’t sleep after sex with Joanna. Mia joins him in the lounge and tells him that the letter was an application for a dancing job. She wants to show him her audition piece, a dance to ‘California Dreamin’’. For once, the stark light outside the window is romantic. The dance is not great, but it is poignant, and vulnerable, and it does what it sets out to do. Connor breaks laws – the official one about the age of consent, and the bigger, unofficial one about not fucking your girlfriend’s daughter. The next morning he dumps Joanna. ‘Did I tell you I almost had you aborted,’ Joanna mumbles. ‘I even made the appointment.’

  Now Mia has a real purpose. She finds Connor’s address. She marches down a dual carriageway. Billy tries to attract her attention but you can’t interrupt Mia once she gets something into her head. She walks all the way to an altogether different kind of housing estate. Here, there are new houses and grass verges and birds sing. Connor is home. He won’t let her in. He drives her to Tilbury station where her alter-ego accidentally shouted herself into a new life months before. But she doesn’t get on the train. It isn’t over. She walks back in the rain to Connor’s house.

  There is no answer so she breaks into the garden. She has a purpose. She breaks into the house. She finds a digital camcorder. She pushes a button and there is a little girl singing, and a woman kneeling proudly next to her. For a second, Mia is lost for a purpose. But it doesn’t take long. She pisses on the lounge carpet. She is almost caught by the singing girl and the proud woman, but leaps over the garden fence.

  But she can’t leave. It isn’t over. She spies on the loving nuclear family from a few doors down. The little girl rides past Mia on a scooter. Mia has a purpose again. When the little girl rides by again, she calls her name, ‘Keira!’ The little girl talks to the nice lady who wants to play a game. And of course she goes with her. The nice lady has a purpose . . .

  The way Arnold suddenly switches a slice of life into every parent’s worst nightmare, and trusts that you will not completely despise the battered Mia, is one of the most brave, shocking, heart-stopping things I’ve ever felt in a cinema. It isn’t over, of course. There is worse to come . . . and then something that struggles towards better, and the possibility of new life. And that dance audition is exactly what you thought it would be. But Arnold still manages to use women dancing together as an image of reconciliation between people who can’t talk about their feelings.

  Mia Williams, even though she is flawed beyond belief, even though she has no smartarse high school dialogue or trend-setting hipster slang, is one of the most complete and sympathetic characters in teen fiction. Andrea Arnold’s casting director found a real girl that day at Tibury station, and Arnold built something around her that contained elements of so many stars of this book . . . the accusatory ball of chaos Antoine Doinel (see The 400 Blows, here); the parentified dreamer Jo (A Taste Of Honey, here); the broken child who sees wild life as freedom, Billy Casper (Kes, here); the relentless precocious loner Juno MacGuff (see Juno, here); the hip hop-informed lost sink estate boys of Le Haine (see, here); the endless running towards nothing of Colin Smith (The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner, see here).

  While the majority of verité directors seem content to find dull people, make them do terrible things, and then expect us to watch them instead of whipping ourselves with sticks, Arnold keeps her Fish Tank swimming with ideas and strangeness and beauty and grimy comedy, as well as scenes that go beyond ‘reality’ into horror, and are filmed with a horror master’s touch.

  Most of all, though, Fish Tank discovered someone, in Katie Jarvis, who seemed to symbolise much of what we fear is wrong with working-class Western youth without creating a stereotype, or leaving the viewer with an absence of hope. Ms Jarvis was much praised for her performance, but has not appeared in anything else yet. She did become a mother in 2009, a little before her eighteenth birthday.

  THE SOCIAL NETWORK

  2010

  Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song

  Dir.: David Fincher

  Plot: The geek shall inherit the Earth.

  Key line: ‘You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re 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.’

  I think most of us who love film fantasise, occasionally, about doing it. No, not directing; that looks like really hard work. And screenwriting . . . well, yeah, I suppose, if you can write. But it doesn’t have that Top Of The World, Ma buzz. How many screenwriters can you name? They’re the bit at the Oscars where we go for a piss.

  By doing it, I mean acting. Sixty-foot-high face on a huge screen. Immortality by default. Lots of dinner party stories about spending three months in Guantanamo Bay to research my motivation and how much fun it was to work with Marty, Quenty and Chow Yun Fatty. Groovy. I mean, I was the lead in the school play a couple of times – my Selfish Giant was very highly regarded – and Russell Brand can do it, so how hard can it be?

  But there’s one aspect of acting that terrifies me. Not fight scenes or hanging off buildings engulfed by fireballs . . . that’s what stunt doubles are for, right? Getting me kit off? No problem. I fix Clea DuVall with my best seducto eyes, rip my shirt off . . . and they CGI in the body of David Boreanaz and everyone’s a winner. No, there’s just one recurring acting dream that wakes me up with cold sweat
s and the sneering taunts of Martin Sheen still ringing in my ears.

  I walk on to a set for my first big break. Someone hands me my lines. Alison Janney and Matthew Perry and Jesse Eisenberg wish me luck, but exchange knowing looks. I look down at the script, and it says, at the top, in fancy lettering that looks like it’s been written by way of quill dipped in the blood of failed actors: ‘Written by Aaron Sorkin’. High-pitched violins shriek. But only I can hear them.

  Suddenly, the director yells action and Janney, Eisenberg and Perry are all talking really quickly, without pausing. Every word I can make out sounds like an especially high-falutin’ newspaper column, complete with relevant stats, 18-syllable words, obscure acronyms and a final gag that allows each of them to smile wryly for exactly 0.0047 seconds before the next speaker finds the perfect riposte, without blinking or breathing. I think they’re talking about the Middle East or quantum physics or Dick Chaney’s poll ratings, but it could be about which of Haydn’s 104 symphonies has the most sophisticated harmonic counterpoint. And it goes on. And on. And on, and suddenly . . . they all stop. And look at me. It’s my cue. Time stops, turns inside out, expands to the size of John Goodman before contracting to one-millionth of the circumference of Paris Hilton’s single brain cell. I sweat, and giggle, and then wet myself. A stain spreads across the crotch of my white trousers (I’m playing a sailor). A Japanese girl with unfeasibly long, straw-like black hair climbs out of a camera and crawls towards me, grinning. And Russell Brand is standing behind the director, laughing manically and stroking a white cat . . .

  I’ll stop now. What I’m saying is that Aaron Sorkin writes scripts comprising lots of very clever words which, no matter which director is in charge, are required to be said very quickly in endlessly overlapping conversations, and where the actor in question is still required to be charming and funny. It’s like Howard Hawks directing the thoughts of Groucho Marx, Gore Vidal and Stephen Hawking simultaneously. The West Wing was entirely made up of this, as if Sorkin was attempting to give the viewer a complete history of every US Presidential dilemma since Lincoln while looking impatiently at his watch and juggling apples. It’s heady, intimidating stuff.

  When it doesn’t work – see Sorkin’s awful TV exec drama Studio 60 On Sunset Strip – it makes for smug, alienating viewing. But when it does – the glory of The West Wing – it is a profoundly inspiring celebration of intelligence and reason and their part in any admirable moral compass. The West Wing restores your faith in politics. But The Social Network does . . . something else.

  The presence of Fincher’s modern classic at the very end of this book is a happy accident. Submarine came out after this, but turned out to be shit. But that was a lucky break because The Social Network really is the perfect finish.

  We began, 57 years ago, with a boy in sexy clothes riding a motorcycle around America and causing trouble. His life is entirely exterior. Girls adore him. He is rebelling against everything, including language, as he is barely able to mumble anything beyond ‘fire bad, tree pretty’. He has no money, no home, no future, and he is thrilling and shaggable for those very reasons. The film he is in gave a name to the biggest musical group of all time, changed fashion, transformed acting styles, invented teensploitation and gave a prescient face and shape to the ‘children’s crusade’ that was the 1960s. But critics hated it and still do, unable to look past its exploitation agenda and camp melodrama, unable to relate to a hero who is all action and no words – except, of course, for the two words (is ‘Whaddya’ one word or three?) that shook the whole of Western culture.

  Fifty-seven years later, and the hero of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed teen movie of his day has no interest in style. He sits in a small dark room in a university, stares at a computer screen and taps away on a keyboard. His life is entirely interior. Girls reject him. He is so articulate that one can barely keep up with what he is saying, yet he is socially inept. He is every bit as arrogant and contemptuous as Wild Johnny, but Johnny’s inner confidence is based on knowledge of his sex appeal and capacity for violence, whereas Mark Zuckerberg’s inner confidence derives entirely from his IQ and his understanding of what young people really want.

  The major thing the two have in common is independence. Parents don’t appear in their story. They’re an irrelevance. They are lone frontiersmen with no use for adult mentoring or intervention.

  But Johnny is, in economic and political terms, a born loser. A trophy for second place in a race taunts him . . . and he had to steal that. There is no place for him in the real America. You can imagine a future for him where he gets used by various women for sex before they marry someone with prospects. Spends a few months here and there in jail. When his looks and energy finally go, he’ll be a school janitor or a fat, drunk mechanic, reminiscing about his glory days when he led a gang and people who now own his ass once trembled in fear.

  Mark is the proof that all the people who tried to lecture Johnny about staying in school and getting off his bike and looking for work were right. He is the physically weak and aesthetically challenged nerd that every teen movie that Johnny inspired insisted was a loser, for no other reason than young people wouldn’t want to watch him, or be him, or fuck him. But, after 50-plus years of the corporate world hard-selling youth, endlessly questing for the next big (young) thing, inventing technologies that only kids truly understand, the nerd is now The Master Of The Universe. The modern world has been created for him to exploit. Our terror of the young is contrasted with our awe of them, and no one asks if the kid has enough experience any more, or makes him make the tea, doff his cap and pay his dues. So he sits in his dark and lonely room, and invents the modern world by pushing buttons (we used to think he would destroy the world by pushing buttons; see WarGames, here), and acquires the kind of money, power and glory that people three times his age can only dream of. So much so that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher make films about him, and millions watch them, and wish they were him, even though he’s a wanker.

  It’s a teenager’s world now, whether they’re inventing the way we communicate or firebombing our house. They just allow us to live in it.

  So Fincher applies his art of darkness to a true-life get-rich-quick story that should not push our thrill buttons. A boy (Eisenberg) invents a misogynist website as revenge for being dumped. It’s a hit. Twin Harvard rich boys employ the boy as a programmer for their Harvard-only dating website. The boy accepts, but develops the idea into something called Thefacebook and persuades his friend (Garfield) to invest money and partner up. Thefacebook is a hit. While the twins decide whether to sue the boy for stealing their idea, the boy is introduced to the flash git (Timberlake) who invented illegal music file-sharing site Napster. He suggests dropping the ‘the’ and they expand Facebook’s reach. It’s a hit. But Napster Git is slyly manoeuvring the boy’s mate out of the picture and spending the money on drugs and loose women, and everything collapses into lawsuits and home truths about greed and ambition.

  This doesn’t stop social networking on computers becoming the biggest cultural hit since rock ’n’ roll. And everyone goes home with big bags of money. So why the fuck should we care?

  Well, Sorkin’s corking screenplay, Fincher’s sepia tones and coolly detached camera, and an extraordinary young ensemble cast led by Eisenberg, Garfield and the big happy shock of the annoyingly talented Trousersnake have plenty to do with it. But once you cut through the film’s terribly modern sense of ironic distance, visual integrity and lack of traditional melodrama, it plays one of the oldest Hollywood tricks in the book: the capitalist comfort-food trick.

  You know the one. You’ve spent your last pennies entering the cinema. All you can think about is your shit job and whether you can afford the mortgage and your kids’ new shoes this month. And the next couple of hours of pictures puts an arm around you and tells you what you need to hear in order to just keep going until someone finally pays you a pitiful pension and consigns you to final years of vis
iting stately homes and being horrible to your family. It tells you that The Rich aren’t happy. That they’re not as nice as you. That the reason that they have everything and you have nothing is actually because they’re not as nice as you. And this one has real legs, because it’s about real millionaires who are still alive and didn’t sue anyone when they were portrayed as bitter, greedy, elitist, misogynist asswipes. So it must be true. Ergo, the reason you must accept your lot and play the game is because people don’t get money and power in this world unless they are soulless monsters. So accept your place, and like it. Because you’re nice.

  It’s pretty funny that the teen movie, of all genres, has finally come to this. The settings and the characters’ attitudes to class, money, ambition and gender in The Social Network are almost identical to the comically fascistic WASPs in National Lampoon’s Animal House (see here), way back in the punk era. Hell, the Winkelvoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer with the assistance of CGI and body double Josh Pence) even look, dress, talk and glare down their noses like all-rowing versions of Marmalard and Neidermeyer. What was revenge comedy exaggeration is now presented as serious docudrama. Rather than contesting their lawsuit, Zuckerberg should have just thrown a toga party and attacked the twins with golf balls.

  I’m not knocking; 100 Best is what the cover says and The Social Network enters that list with ease. It’s by some way the most mature and unlikely thriller made out of teenagers coming of age. It’s just amusing that it is seen as a more substantial film than, say, Teeth or Kidulthood because there are long shots of skies and buildings, because everyone talks really quickly, because its colours are muted, because it’s not ‘genre’, because there’s no physical action and because its lead protagonist doesn’t show emotions. Some things have not changed in 57 years and movie critics are among them.