All My Stars (11)

By: Joanne McNeil
March 17, 2016

One in a weekly series in which Joanne McNeil recommends books, films, exhibitions, and more. You can also subscribe to the All My Stars newsletter here.

The first time I saw The Net, I remember thinking that Angela Bennett, Sandra Bullock’s character, had a pretty good life. She had a nice house in Venice, online friends, a good job. A quiet life, but a good life. Watching it again this week, about twenty years later, now closer in age with the character, I thought the same thing. She had a good life. “Kept to herself mostly,” as her landlord says, but that’s not a bad thing, and the filmmakers don’t make it a thing.

This is part of the reason I’ve dreaded revisiting the film. I know it’s corny. I know it is a preposterous representation of hacking and security and does not hold up under the faintest scrutiny. The most realistic thing, tech-wise, is when she runs down the street in San Francisco and there just happens to be a tech conference to hide from the bad guys around the corner. But can I just have this: The Net is one of the best representations of an introverted woman I have ever seen in film.

Everything that’s good about it is due to Sandra Bullock. I keep hoping Buzzfeed or somewhere else will put together an oral history about the making of this film (knowing perfectly well that they would only do so for an excuse to make fun of it), because it’s possible she was cast before Speed had even come out and made her a star. They could have gone with someone in neuroatypical drag ratcheting up the drama, but Bullock plays it cool.

Low-key beautiful, low-key powerful, always trusting and open, never brittle, no chip on her shoulder; there’s no weight of cliches about people in STEM on Bullock’s shoulders in this performance. Angela Bennett is good at her job. She’s a good person. At one point I thought wardrobe dressed her in something purposefully dumpy — a big sweater and mid-calf length dress — but no, that was just ’90s style. When I first saw the movie, I was fascinated that she had plans to go on vacation on her own (“just me, a beach, and a book”). And watching it again this week, I noticed how there were no attempts to justify how alone she is, and nothing to suggest she is lonely, no Bridget Jones guff. It’s very straight forward and real. She’s busy with work and has a parent with Alzheimer’s. When things let up, she’ll probably end up volunteering at an animal shelter or taking yoga classes or whatever, but now she just kinda happens to be on her own. This seems like it should be a corollary to the Bechdel test: is there a woman alone, and is she OK with it or weeping to her cat and a chocolate cake?

It is only the second time I’ve watched The Net, but it made such a mark on me before. I’ve thought about it many times in my life, as something cautionary: if someone ever steals your identity, you do not want to be stuck in a situation where the only person who can identify you is an ex-boyfriend as annoying as Dennis Miller.

I would love to see the film recut so it’s low on what’s on the screen, low on the thriller elements, and instead plays like a character study of a woman’s life (like the kind that Kristin Wiig has been doing lately in Hateship Loveship, Girl Most Likely, Welcome to Me, etc.). Better yet: a reboot. With Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett again, of course.

Regrettably, I missed the Walid Raad exhibition at MoMA over the winter. But the good news is: the show is on tour. So not only did I get the chance to see it at the ICA in Boston this week, but I hope to return for one of the Walkthrough performances. It’s up until May 30th, before heading to Mexico City.

From a review in Hyperallergic: “We indulge the silliness of the fictions in Raad’s work because the lattice of paranoia he erects is grounded upon the major blind spots, repressions, and acts of self-censorship endemic to the production and reception of art. The art world’s foremost repression, one could call it, is economic inequality. Raad’s work probes the tendency of the wealthy to treat art production as a speculative market, but also their power to determine the outcomes of events — artistic ones, like the careers of artists, as well as socio-political ones, like elections and wars — in order to boost their influence and affluence.”

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