This Is Running for Your Life (32 page)

Even if we don't always say it out loud, we have all done it or felt pinned under the weight of being unable to do it. Just in the past few days I have nailed down two matches between friends and celebrities that have been months in the making and, having done so, experienced the kind of vindication usually reserved for the foiling of rigged fairway games and landmark Supreme Court victories. The world, in all its sudden knowability, can feel impossibly opaque. The
Compare and Conquer
is often an involuntary response to that feeling, a crude mechanism that seems designed to maintain a sense of what's shared amid all this “sharing.”

Which is why it makes sense that social-media networks were quick to translate the reflex into a feature. As of late 2011, Facebook was closing in on a billion members, each with an average of 130 “friends.” Half of those members log in habitually, no doubt contributing to the 250 million photos uploaded to the site every day. Flickr, a personal photo-album site, now houses almost four billion photos, and Instagram, a social network that cut out the vernacular blubber to traffic solely in image statements, grew from one hundred thousand to twelve million members in the first year after its 2010 launch.

Of the many things one might then say about
that
, here I will only point out that (a) that's a shitload of faces; and (b) the way we look at photographs of friends or strangers or that new category of friend-strangers we've opened up has developed some key similarities with the way we look at celebrities.

The aptly named Facebook was the first to recognize and capitalize on these similarities. In 2007, Facebook introduced an application called FaceDouble, a facial-recognition algorithm that scanned users' faces with the purpose of matching them to a celebrity's. In a distant nod to Facemash—Facebook's progenitor, a program that paired the faces of Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates for snap hotness judgments—your friends “vote” on the veracity of the resemblance. Alongside this function was the option of using FaceDouble to scan inside Facebook's millions for your civilian “twin,” or twins. Though not as popular as the celebrity look-alike sites you now find all over the Web (weird: one of the biggest is found on the genealogy site
myheritage.com
), the “Facetwin” phenomenon is odd in the way that the trend of “friending” or “following” someone with the same name is odd: it literalizes social media's equation of connection with sameness.

All of this culminated, as so much of our culture now does, in a meme. “Doppelgänger Week” happened in early 2010, when all across Facebook users swapped out their profile pics for images of the celebrity they are said to resemble. Some upsold themselves as Robert Pattinson or J.Lo knockoffs; some went all the way downtown with Golem and Jabba. Others took the middle road of coy self-deprecation, unless posting a picture of someone like Ed Begley, Jr., actually represents a sincerely outdated frame of reference.

It must be said that I hear about these things secondhand. It must be said too that I don't have to ask. It became clear around 2007, when the site consumed my social circle like a Gila brushfire, that refusing to join Facebook was more of a gesture than a useful avoidance of its effects. In the weeks after old Jason Patric and I went our separate ways, I received updates about his Facebook-bound status (not yet “single”) and epigrammatic regrets (phrased in German for added pathos) against my will, from friends who seemed to think they were doing me a favor, like smuggling code out of (or would that be
into
?) the Kremlin.

How to accept this new information, or at least this old information in its new encryption? The experimental nature of Internet discourse has produced some novel and baffling sensations, if not full-blown feelings. There's a kind of protocol, for instance, to carry us through real-world rejections; the emotional immune system recognizes it and either attacks or succumbs. But the ephemeral, punk-ass rejection of being followed, say, on Twitter, by a person whom one “knows” but has never met, and then unfollowed by that same vaguely acknowledged entity a few months/weeks/hours later, feels like a virtual sucker punch in part because there is no established pattern for dealing with it. Can there be any accountability for such a rejection? As with separating the refracted perceptions of others from the reality of your face, it can be so hard to tell what counts as personal and what's just managing information.

*   *   *

When it comes to strangers on trains and pleased-to-meet-you's at parties, I have made a philosophical peace with the
Compare and Conquer
. But those who know me well—friends, boyfriends, health professionals—aren't much better, and I hear regularly of the faces and performances that sent up flags of referential familiarity. I'm still working on that one. I once tried listing all of the names I have heard but stopped at sixteen, with one woman by far the front-runner. The others, when considered in a gallerylike format, share almost no distinguishing characteristics, save for their utter, abiding whiteness.

I feel oppressed by the spectrum. It makes me feel lonely, the opposite of known. And yet, in the same way that previously unremarked resemblances are discovered and sworn to at family funerals, it would seem as though I'm being told something important, so I keep my eye out for these unlikely women. I try to see what my friends see, but it's impossible. It's most impossible, in fact, when I actually
do
see myself, briefly, in a laugh or a look or a pointy nose. It's just a weird feeling that's hard to describe.

One winter afternoon a couple of years ago I left my local supermarket feeling low after starting a fight between two stock boys. I became aware of it when I heard one loudly defending the honor of the former child star that the other had somehow seen in me as I was pricing strawberries. A stuccoed head of black hair peeked out from around the pasta display for a second look, then ducked back behind. “Naw, man—are you crazy?” he boomed. “That's my
girl
, that's my
chica
!” The other one stood his ground, hollering back. It was as though I weren't there at all.

This was 2009. Soon after the spaghetti-aisle incident I watched
The Girlfriend Experience
, Steven Soderbergh's moody neo-melodrama about call girls and the 2008 financial crisis. The film critic Glenn Kenny has a small part in the movie, and although I am on nodding and occasionally even speaking terms with Glenn when we meet on the howling heath of New York's screening rooms, not until I watched him in that uniquely uninhibited way—stripped to the image, a person projected outside himself—did I realize how profoundly he reminds me of another friend. A much closer friend. They look not a bit alike, and of course Glenn was playing a character, but on-screen it wasn't the image or personality of my friend that he captured but the
feeling
. I can't tell you how satisfying that two-toned ring of alarm and recognition was, that private zing of affirmation: There he is!
He lives!

That night I came home to an e-mail from a different friend. He wrote to say that an actress in a film he'd just seen had reminded him of me. He wouldn't tell me her name though, or the nature of the role, aware of my long history of being driven bananas by such things. But also, he wrote, “because I fear that you might be like: ‘Her?! Me?!?! NO WAY!' And then get mad at me.”

I didn't press, and I didn't get mad. I don't think I would have even if he'd told me. For the first time it actually made me feel kind of good.
She lives!

Soon after that night I made a trip to my local library. Passing through the revolving entrance doors, I noticed the security guard stationed at the turnstiles started to laugh when she saw me coming—not that unusual, I admit. But she kept smiling as I moved closer, prepping my bag for inspection. Waving it away, she asked if I'd forgotten something, then looked me right in the face. The security guard thought she knew me—had just seen me. I winked at her and slipped inside.

 

The San Diego of My Mind

The southwest corner of Scripps Ranch, a San Diego bedroom community named after the Midwestern newspaper baron Edward Willis Scripps, is a scrubby, dead-treed scab of land. This is more or less its natural state, though better living through irrigation, as signs posted around the area remind you, remains the California dream. When the twenty-one-hundred-acre parcel Scripps purchased for himself in the late nineteenth century was slated for residential development in the 1970s, vows were made to either preserve or parkify a majority of the land. Today the Scripps Ranch community, which numbers in the low thirty thousands, has a median household income of roughly 140 grand and includes what seems like a preponderant number of ex–professional football players.

A few more numbers: In 2003, a fire lit by a hunter lost in Cleveland National Forest consumed 350 community homes on its way to destroying upward of 3,000 buildings in the greater area. In late 2011, sixty-five Scripps Ranch homes, which begin at almost half a million dollars, were listed as having recently entered either foreclosure or default. Arguments among locals and armchair urban planners about whether Scripps Ranch can be defined as an exurb lead directly to arguments about the definition of
exurb
, which in turn lead nowhere, which seems fitting. The debate—diligently stoked and restoked across the Internet, like the Olympic flame—centers on issues of proximity. The qualifying distance between satellite community and mother city is under great and disgusted contention, as is the strength of the gravitational pull. Some measure from the city proper, others an adjacent corporate hub, still others from the nearest Starbucks. In being cradled by a chaparral moat, anyway, Scripps Ranch meets the most basic exurban criteria: exclusivity. In theory all that greenish space enhances property value and—though it might conduct a wildfire right to your door—keeps human unsavories at bay. Here history would like to note that Edward Scripps's turn-of-the-century, forty-seven-room Miramar Lake mansion—a health retreat built for himself and his rhinitic sister—was subjected to an epic and sustained looting as the first suburban frames went up.

I didn't know any of this on the late-May morning when I took a fifty-dollar cab ride from downtown San Diego to an industrial park clinging to what turned out to be the chin of Scripps Ranch. I just had an address and a rapidly aggravating sense of displacement. We were a disconcertingly long way from my room in a motel huddled in the Churrigueresque shadow of the El Cortez, the apparent destination of choice for nine out of ten San Diego prom-goers. It was far enough away that by the midpoint I had resigned myself, in an order I now forget, to both marrying and being murdered by my driver. It seemed implausible that two such disparate places could belong to one domain. But then San Diego seems determined to spread itself across as much space as possible; it's the young-male subway rider of the California coast. The city has a hard time filling it in: walking through the downtown during rush hour, an acoustic trick carries a laconic exchange between two Brink's guards across thirty feet of empty concrete valley and into your ear. New York City could jimmy five johns into the single-stall restroom of one of the city center's cavernous Thai joints, maybe a dozen more along the fifteen-foot runway and giant foyer that prelude it. Sprawl for sprawl's sake, weirdly, is crowding in the same way the bony, baggy-jeaned knees staked across three seats on the morning commute are crowding. We get it: it's big.

My instructions were to arrive at a tiny start-up marketing firm at 10:00 a.m. on a Friday. There I would speak to one of its founding partners about the future of focus testing and, if there was time, have my cognitive-response mechanism laid open like a morning paper. The outfit, called MindSign, claims to be home to the only privately owned, “market-friendly” functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine in the world. The plan, hatched in early 2009 by college roommates and film-school graduates Philip Carlsen and Devin Hubbard, was to defect across the notional border between moviemaking and movie marketing. At the time both men were battling early-onset disillusionment with their Hollywood jobs (at DreamWorks and Sony, respectively) and looking for a way out of the development grind.

Their decision was eased by the fact that Devin's father, a research neurologist who made his mint patenting a Botox-related drug, had recently purchased a three-ton, three-million-dollar Siemens 3T Tim Trio—the new centerpiece of neurotechnology—as a retirement present to himself. Terminally formative contact with
The Fountainhead
had led David Hubbard to major in philosophy at Yale, and he nursed a desire to capture, vivify, and decoct the mysteries of human consciousness across a career that includes an M.A. in counseling psychology and an M.D. with a specialty in neurology. Having met the facility and management requirements for housing an fMRI machine under the auspices of a charitable organization in 2007, Dr. Hubbard was free to use it as he pleased.

Around the same time, in the mid-aughts, something called “neuromarketing” was being pitched as the new silver bullet in the market-research world. The high-tech alternative to feeding focus-group participants a few doughnuts, asking how they feel, and figuring out how to exploit the character chinks and insecurities they have unwittingly exposed, fMRI testing would reveal the effect of a product or campaign on key clusters of the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear and anxiety.

If the entire film industry could somehow be wrestled into a Tim Trio, on a good day its amygdala might appear to be engulfed in flames. Diffusing audiences, the rise of the home theater, and a bankruptcy-pocked exhibitor infrastructure have peaked the pressure on Hollywood to earn out and then some, every time. That pressure has made finding a reliable algorithm for success—a guarantee beyond formula or genre—the Holy Grail of Hollywood filmmaking, a shift that has long been reflected in the trend toward movies as brand-merchandising opportunities. In recent years it has become almost as expensive to market a major studio film as it is to make one—for every dollar spent on production between fifty and sixty cents is spent churning out ads and swag. With hundreds of millions in play and a global audience to consider, major studios run like risk-management firms. Rather than the threat of a jowly mogul recutting their masterpiece into hot-buttered pap, today's filmmakers must reckon with the tyranny of audience testing.