Movies are compelled to make statements about the times they were produced in. It’s only natural for movies to mirror the world around them, dating back to the days when The Great Dictator was a critique of Adolf Hitler’s depravity or even how pre-Hays Code pictures frequently represented the excesses of the Roaring ’20s. This makes it incredibly plausible to think that a lot of contemporary movies are trying to make a statement about how pervasive social media is and how other technological advancements, like podcasts, have become an integral part of people’s daily lives. There are innumerable examples of this occurrence in recent releases, two of which are Not Okay and Vengeance.

However, not every film that makes an attempt to be about social media succeeds. Can we develop decent movies about the social media era when so many of these types of movies have turned out to be tone-deaf and awful?

It’s crucial to keep in mind that movies have long struggled to accurately depict stories about the internet in order to comprehend the answer to that query. In truth, films have battled to figure out how to include the internet into their stories for as long as it has been a part of people’s lives. Numerous hacker movies from the 1990s were amusing in how little they appeared to comprehend about how the online world appeared to work even in 2008.

Movies frequently represent someone using the internet with a bombardment of rapid cuts and a zoom in to the interior of wires to indicate information going around the globe because simply sitting at a computer and typing isn’t very “cinematic.” As a result, movies often overcompensate. Unless you’re the opening scene of Three Colours: Red, these aesthetic qualities rarely succeed and only serve to highlight how difficult it has been for Hollywood to depict the internet on screen.

As it has become evident that typing on keyboards is not a passing trend, these issues have gotten worse. Today, it is a component of reality and, in many occupations, reality itself. By transferring numerous social issues to the virtual world, social media has made this predicament worse. So how

Going this method makes some conceptual sense because it avoids the need for filmmakers to alter their storytelling or visual aesthetic in order to take into account how viewers use the internet. They may simply adopt the narrative structure of any tale about someone 슬롯게임룰 becoming hooked to something (drugs, sex, violence, etc.), place someone absorbed in their smartphones in the place where the “bad thing” should be, and continue the story.

Unfortunately, films like Men, Women, and Children wind up receiving negative reviews due to, among other shortcomings, their clumsy handling of the social media era. Numerous grievances can be lodged against organizations like Facebook or Twitter. However, when discussing the prevalence of social media, concentrating almost entirely on “kids these days” isn’t enlightening or even helpful.

With this route, one can easily believe there’s just no way to properly depict the world of social media in film. It doesn’t help that these landscapes are changing constantly, just in technology let alone also in things like slang or in-jokes that people communicate in. By the time a movie goes from being an idea to a finished project, it could be commenting on a facet of social media that no longer exists. That concern is a weighty one and could, understandably, ward off people from even considering making movies that are about social media. Why make something that’s destined to become yesterday’s news before it’s even put in theaters?

However, that doesn’t exclude the creation of films that make blatant allusions to the preoccupation with social media that exists in the modern era. Just have a look at the 2021 film Zola by Janicza Bravo, which was inspired on a hysterical Twitter thread about a woman named Zola (Taylour Paige) remembering her chaotic weekend with “friend” Stefani (Riley Keough). Zola was inevitably going to be connected to the internet just by virtue of its source material, and Bravo doesn’t minimize that. This is particularly noteworthy when the film pauses for a digression during which Stefani breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience her version of the movie’s tale, which is based on a Reddit post by the real woman.

Stefani is consistently shown as an innocent victim in this narrative about Zola’s occurrences, while Zola is portrayed as a racial parody. In order to make a point, Bravo cleverly contrasts the distorted Stefani story in this part with how Twitter enabled the real Zola to tell her experience. She and scriptwriter Jeremy O. Harris are speaking specifically on how social media provides access to informational resources as well as the potential for the truth to be distorted. In contrast to other films, Zola presents social media in a more nuanced light. In contrast, Stefani’s portrayal of Zola shows how white people will make advantage of revolutionary technologies.

The 2010 classic The Social Network similarly makes advantage of contemporary social media to highlight inherently dangerous human habits. It was reasonable to worry that The Social Network wouldn’t hold up well after its initial release. But more than a decade after it first appeared, this tale of Facebook’s beginnings has only grown in relevance. For starters, Rooney Mara calling Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg a “asshole” exposes the very nature of the people who control the social media platforms that shape our world. These folks surely live up to their reputation for turning a blind eye to bigotry and prejudice blooming on social media as long as it benefits them financially.

However, the Social Network screenplay by Aaron Sorkin doesn’t merely rely on name-dropping Facebook and Napster in the hopes that it will somehow provide depth to the movie as a whole. Instead, Sorkin, drawing heavily from the source material for the film, spins a gripping tale about friendships turning to ash and ongoing betrayals in order for Zuckerberg to grow Facebook as much as possible. These are the dramatic elements that shaped the most complex plays by William Shakespeare, and they are all taking place in front of a backdrop of computers, servers, and individuals engrossed in a social networking app. The Social Network has such tremendous dramatic intensity because of its dedication to developing its characters’ psyches and how Facebook’s rise affects them. Despite not being a social media movie, it absolutely

The Social Network and Zola offer a terrific framework for how we may create outstanding motion pictures in the era of pervasive social media. It’s too simple to simply dismiss teenagers using their phones as lame or to cling to the archaic tropes of old movies about the internet. You need to be prepared to delve farther and consider the behaviors that the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are amplification—and, most importantly, how those behaviors didn’t merely emerge once MySpace was discontinued. 

People like Stefani and Zuckerberg are not particularly novel in this environment; rather, the social media era has made them more visible.