In 'Artificial,' Luca Guadagnino Thinks We Are All Pretty Much Screwed, And Here's The Guy Who Did It
There will be a lot of comparisons of Luca Guadagnino's Artificial (which had its world premiere Monday night at the New York Film Festival) to David Fincher's The Social Network. This makes a lot of sense. Both movies are about tech and both movies star Andrew Garfield. But whereas The Social Network was about technology that allows us to connect to others, Artificial is about the technology that will, in theory, make us all obsolete.
Fincher had an almost reverence for the Mark Zuckerberg we saw in The Social Network. He wasn't presented as a good guy, but he was presented as human. Focused, to a fault, and motivated by how others regarded him as lesser. In that regard, Artificial did not remind me of The Social Network. If I had to make a comparison, it reminded me a lot more of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street.¹ Only instead of the dirtbag party boy being in charge of a scummy brokerage house on Long Island that only affected its unsuspecting clients, the dirtbag party boy is in charge of the future of humanity.
¹To this day I still have mixed feelings about The Wolf of Wall Street. The debate when it was released was that it made its protagonists look cool, with many critics arguing that it obviously did not and they were all obvious losers and the message is a dishonest life doesn't pay. I don't know, for most of the movie they are all dancing around on yachts. The real Jordan Belfort got to be in the movie. Leonardo DiCaprio did an advertisement on Belfort's behalf. At least, to me, this doesn't really feel like the movie is really "sticking it to him." And, today, I kind of think it might even be a more powerful message in that film that, yes, these people just get away with all this stuff.
The effects of OpenAI are everywhere, whether you use it or not. I'm fairly certain I don't have a full time job anymore² (unless this newsletter counts; it certainly feels like it sometimes) because of OpenAI. This will continue to get worse. And Artificial does a great job of explaining who these people are, what motivates them, and how we all wound up here in the first place – with the centerpiece being Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield...
(The reaction to me publishing my review for the Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes doc, You Can See Everything, here at the newsletter was very positive. So, again, with another hot festival title, instead of shopping it around, I'm just keeping it here for the readers of this newsletter. It's a free post, but, again, I am hoping karma leads to new paid subscribers so I can continue to afford writing this newsletter for you.)
