Did the recent, eerie trailer for David Fincher's Facebook movie The Social Network make you feel bad about spending so much of your life in front of a computer? It's more than a little ironic, since Fincher clearly spends so much time in front of his.
He's just one of several filmmakers whose movies are often lavish, mega-budgeted, and filled with special effects, yet contain anti-technology themes that would seem to be at odds with how they're actually made.
To wit: Fincher got his bigscreen start with Alien 3, which asked us to root for heroes who had no money or resources -- a problem Fincher himself would rarely have again in his career. His most famous repudiation of material goods and wealth came in the expensive Fight Club, which invited the audience to reject a consumer-driven lifestyle that sold them products they didn't need. Still, perhaps his own message was lost on him, as Fincher helmed a Super Bowl commercial for Heineken six years later that ironically reteamed him with his Fight Club star Brad Pitt (a short time after the budget-busting Fincher was bounced off Lords of Dogtown when he demanded one needlessly expensive, $16 million set).
George Lucas, too, embraced something of an anti-technology ethos in the first Star Wars trilogy that seemed counter to the films themselves (and certainly was at odds with the CG-driven empire his Lucasfilm would eventually become). Throughout those three films, the side with the most technology is demonized and consistently defeated by scrappier, more organic rebels: In The Empire Strikes Back, the intimidating, high-tech AT-ATs are brought down through sheer ingenuity and tangled tow cables, while in Return of the Jedi, the primitive Ewoks defeated the well-equipped bad guys and were championed for their technological modesty. Tellingly, by the time Lucas recreated the parameters of the Endor fight in The Phantom Menace, where the Gungans band together to repel the robots of the Trade Federation, both the good and bad sides were rendered with expensive, glassy CG. There was no room for a practical character creation like the Ewok, and Lucas had stopped paying even lip service to the idea that technology could grow so cumbersome that it could actually be a millstone around one's neck (while, ironically, his prequels served as ample proof of the concept).
However, there may be no director whose themes are more schizophrenic than James Cameron, who constantly flips between worshiping grand technology and stigmatizing the kind of personality who employs it. In Avatar, as in Lucas's Ewok battle, the high-tech invading troops are laid low by organic fighters who have no need for electricity at all. In Titanic, just the idea of the incredibly expensive boat is held up as the height of hubris, despite the fact that Cameron himself was making the most expensive film ever at the time, and he's not exactly the first person you'd expect to scoff at hubris. The Terminator films vividly portray the apocalyptic future that results when technology is left unchecked, but Cameron is a constant innovator in those fields, consistently surfing a high-tech cutting edge and even inventing new technology himself in pre-production for his movies. (Tellingly, his undersea documentary Aliens of the Deep purported to show how natural ocean dwellers could be more amazing than any alien Hollywood could dream up, then climaxed with a superfluous ending that used computer graphics to depict those potential aliens on the moons of Jupiter.)
A certain amount of thematic hypocrisy may be par for the course in Hollywood; just think of the anti-drug messages in TV and film made by people who aren't exactly teetotalers, or the movies that end with a parent eschewing work and ambition to reconnect with their family (which are inevitably made by directors and actors who leave their children with a team of nannies all day). Still, if The Social Network makes you feel bad about using Facebook to enhance your life when you could be out living it, just remember that Fincher never shot a scene in real life that he couldn't run through the computer first for an artificial upgrade.