I Hate Titles. This Post Says Enough.

So. I'm officially obsessed with The Social Network.

I talk about it all the time, and cried when I heard that Jesse Eisenberg was hosting SNL.

You'd think that as someone who knows every line and scene of the movie, it would be easy for me to answer the question: "What is it about the movie that you like?"

But.

The problem is, I have no idea how to answer that question.

I just get so caught up in my love for the movie that I don't leave enough time to really think about what makes the movie so amazing. (Besides the really cute actors.)

I recently figured out the answer: The movie isn't all facts. I thought it would be a movie that would spit out information and that was that.

I was wrong. DUH.

What the movie is about, based on my opinion, is the fact that fame and fortune can ruin everything for you, including the strongest friendship.

Mark and Eduardo were always there for each other, but Mark's fame turns him into a different person, a person who becomes blind to friendship, and only sees his and facebook's popularity.

Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877

More than the moment
when forty gringo vigilantes
cheered the rope
that snapped two Mexicanos
into the grimacing sleep of broken necks,

more than the floating corpses,
trussed like cousins of the slaughterhouse,
dangling in the bowed mute humility
of the condemned,

more than the Virgen de Guadalupe
who blesses the brownskinned
and the crucified,
or the guitar-plucking skeletons
they will become
on the Día de los Muertos,

remain the faces of the lynching party:
faded as pennies from 1877, a few stunned
in the blur of execution,
a high-collar boy smirking, some peering
from the shade of bowler hats, but all
crowding into the photograph.

At first, I didn't like this poem. I'm not a cruel person, but I really wasn't enjoying myself. I hated how frustrated I was feeling, and I hated how it ended. I was angry at myself for not realizing one of the biggest things that Martin Espada is trying to tell the reader.

What I think is so mind blowing, what is so "wow" about this poem is the fact that it's about more than the execution, it's also about the fact that two men are being killed. It's the sickening idea that all the spectators care about is the credit that they are going to get for being there. That they are being blinded by the celebrity of it that they can't see lives being taken right in front of them.

Why does that make sense? Does it? Is this what was making me so frustrated? That two people who were once living are now dead and all the people watching can do is care about the fame and applause they're going to get for being there?

And as much as I'm pleased that I've found a connection to the greatest movie of all time, I'm almost disgusted by the meaning of both the poem and the movie. Why does fame and celebrity make you blind to everything around you. Why does it make you throw away friendship, why does it change you? Why are you no longer affected by everything going on before you? Because all you can see and all you can think about is being able to say, "Yeah. I was there. Mhm."

It annoys me that that's who we become when we are faced with fame.

It turns us into monsters.

And the most frustrating part: That Martin Espada is describing only a few people being stunned. Hey, this is just me, but I know that I would be scared out of my mind to be in an environment where someone, two people, were having their lives taken away from them.

It wouldn't matter to me whether or not I would get credit for being there, or whether or not I would be in some useless photograph.

I would be watching someone die.

Does that mean anything to anyone?