Kings and Pawns: Internet 3.0 and Bujalski's Computer Chess

For those outside the academic world of cinema studies, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies is the super big sprawling academic conference for film studies in the world, featuring dozens of panels and hundreds of papers, and a good deal of drinking. This year's conference in Seattle was my first year attending, and I enjoyed many of the papers I heard, including one examining the special effects of Bringing Up Baby, the relationship between slow cinema and gallery spaces, and how data mining of scripts and trades can be used to improve narrative analysis and industry research.

I also got to present a paper, which was on a panel looking at how new media products were changing social and aesthetic precedents. My paper was somewhat of an outlier - focusing on Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess - so I changed it to look at how the film can be seen as a response to Internet 3.0. You can listen to the paper below.

Evidence and Processing: The Social Network and Computer Chess

       “This is our time!” screams Justin Timberlake at a pertinent moment in The Social Network, a moment meaningful within the context of the film, but also a moment many viewers latched onto for perhaps the wrong reasons. Do a Google search of reviews and think pieces and you’ll find countless words dedicated to how The Social Network is a film of its moment.  “It is a moment in time that befits our time in a way that no other film has achieved in a decade,” exclaimed one blogger. “A pungent examination of how it changed all of our lives overnight” is how another put it, while further resorting to a classic party line about technology by intoning, “The more connected we are technologically, the more disconnected we become in terms of actual discourse.” One couldn’t escape 2010 without thinking that no other film besides The Social Network spoke to “the way we live now,” without defining what that even meant.

        Computer Chess, the newest film from Andrew Bujalski, approaches “the now” through antiquated technology in a historical setting. It’s a film so psychologically manic and almost Lynchian in terms of its logic that on its surface, it might appear impossible to decode.  But it’s all there—the telling statements of computer vs. man (man as computer, really) and the changing role of technology in how we think. You want a movie of the now? Look no further.