The Circle is not getting good reviews, and I completely understand why. The execution of the film is flawed, the message is murky, and a lot of what I loved about it isn’t stuff easily picked up on. Having actually seen it with another person, I was also able to compare a different perspective and interpretation of the story after we walked out of the theatre. Once I heard how the movie had come across to them, I quickly realized why the general audience doesn’t care for this flik at all. Ambiguity in too high a dose just doesn’t work sometimes. The Circle was spending so much time trying to be Her, The Social Network, and Ex Machina all at the same time that it forgot to try and be The Circle.
It was almost like we had watched a different movie. I find it interesting when that happens. What gets interpreted so differently along the same path to the end of the story? Once I explained what I had seen however, my friend suddenly felt that the movie was a lot better overall. I went online and read the book synopsis, confirmed my interpretation was correct, and that it was most likely what the filmmakers were trying to do. Where they failed however, was that they left the story too up in the air, and they didn’t try to bring it back to ground-level.
There’s a multitude of brilliant (although entirely accidental) social commentary within The Circle and a hearty amount of great concepts that I personally enjoy. However, for them to work and for a viewer to pick up on them all, they have to connect all the dots and fill in all the blanks themself. That’s a lot of work that most viewers don’t want to do and shouldn’t have to. Your movie should coherently make sense in its message to at least some degree. I like thinking, I like filling in blanks, I like abstract anything, and I’m good at it too. Just because I happen to be skilled in figuring out stories and stringing together theories and tangents doesn’t mean everyone else is though. And the general audience member probably isn’t good at that.
Sometimes games feel like the developer never sat down and tried to play it the way an average player would. Sure they spent a lot of time perfecting game content, but they never tried to actually make sure getting through the entire game they made was accessible or made sense. That’s kinda the vibe I get from The Circle. It may make sense to a certain sort of person, and to the inner circle who pieced the film together, and to anyone who had read the book beforehand — but to everyone else it’s frustrating and convoluted. This doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means it’s very difficult to digest.
This piece contains spoilers, as you’ve probably guessed by now. Still, now is your chance to escape before I dissect even the smallest aspects of The Circle; what I loved, what I didn’t, and what could have been done better. For the record, I liked the movie. Not my favorite, and there were a lot of flaws but I enjoyed it overall. What I enjoyed the most about it was the complete bait and switch that I fell for. Walking in I thought I’d watch Emma Watson’s character — Mae — be the oh-so-special white brunette savior in another save the world story. Walking out I was fascinated with how I’d been fooled. Mae is no savior…she is the story’s true villain.
The movie starts with a somewhat more average and relatable protagonist that you might actually feel something for. Her father has Multiple Sclerosis and the family has nowhere near a good enough health plan for him recieve appropriate treatment and assistance. “Ah, don’t you love how depressing life is for most of America’s citizens?” I thought. It was nice to at least see a film acknowledge just how bad it is out here for many of us. The character of Mercer was introduced to us as well, and I really remain unsure about what the movie wanted him to be. In the book he’s the ex-boyfriend, and wow does that make a lot more sense than the ambiguous romantic interest/friendzoned brooder/anti-social media acquaintance. I would have liked for them to make that clear in the dialog between Mae and her parents. Even just something like “We tried being a couple, but we both agree we are better as friends,” could have done the trick. Instead they throw him in at random intervals and leave his character and writing as flat as a board, while also extremely confusing.
Then Mae gets The Job. Well okay, at first it’s just the interview, but we all know she’s going to get the job. It’s so easy to get drawn in by the enticing offers of more “elite” companies. As much as Mae is the badie in this story, part of me still feels like capitalism did much more harm than anyone else did. These original montages and scenes at The Circle Campus left me frustrated, because I originally thought I’d sat down to watch a film that was going to tell me “Social media is bad!”, “Technology is scary!”, and “Millennials have ruined everything with their need for tech-immersed lives!”. I was rolling my eyes and felt like I was going to have to sit through a pile of thinkpieces I couldn’t care less about. But I tried to focus. I still felt that somewhere in there, I was missing something.
Many of the ideals and aspirations of Eamon Bailey (the head and co-founder of The Circle) align very similarly to my own. I want activists to be safe, I want accountability, and I want those who need the most protection to know that those who might hurt them can’t get away with it. I want these things not to make a profit or to seem good but because I just genuinely want the world to be a better place. This is where Bailey and I differ; I think. You see, the movie never quite clarifies whether Bailey does what he does to make a profit, or if he’s altruistic and just unwittingly crossed some lines. It implies he wasn’t a Completely Good person once his emails become exposed and Tom Hanks says “We’re so fucked,” in the most bemused tone possible. But they never say what he did or if he did anything or why they’re fucked or what is even going on in the world outside The Circle Headquarters.
I felt very annoyed at first because it seemed the movie was saying these very basic original ideals were wrong. “How dare you! Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a marginalized individual who wants to be safe and treated equally?” is what crossed my mind. But that’s not what the film was trying to do. The whole motto is about how good intentions can go south with the click of a button (literally) and that capitalism and hypocrisy are the most dangerous substances society abuses as a whole. Would have been nice to see that spelled out a little more clearly. It’s no surprise to me that critics (the techy ones especially) hate this movie. Without careful dissection it comes across as a cruel criticism of tech culture and altruism without actually addressing the real problems that culture actually has.
Due to some help and possibly some influence from her higher-up friend Annie, Mae gets the job. She starts. She’s pretty good at what she does. She’s working hard but going home on the weekends to see her parents. It’s a job to her still…not her life yet. Mae is confronted by part the social profile team at The Circle who give her a very hard time and leave her insecure about her presence in the company community. This I feel is something completely fine to criticize about social media and tech culture. Sometimes people have lives outside of social platforms and that’s fine. You don’t have the right to everything about a person, and never will. We are never entitled to another person. But she leans in. She starts living on campus, starts trying to fit in, and starts trying to ignore the invasive procedures a good bit of this technology involves. All the while the camera occasionally pans over to an observant John Boyega and once again expects the audience to read everyone’s minds.
John Boyega plays a nameless character at first, but eventually you learn he’s Ty Lafitte — the guy who invented the social media platform that started this whole mess. His influence in Mae’s life is once more far too uncertain and the importance of his character is completely undermined by his ghost-like presence in the film. He doesn’t confront her enough about her becoming a part of the culture. He trusts her “goodness” too much. He thinks she “gets it” and puts his trust in the wrong person out of desperation. Sure they have a little underground get together where he tells her she should do something about The Circle, but he never says what. The explicit confrontations that this movie so badly needs almost never happen, and it can leave a viewer very confused. I wish Ty had been much more present overall, because it would have made the commentary about white capitalists, including a white woman, stealing a black man’s creation and ruining the world with it that much more apparent.
Then Mae almost dies. The only reason she survives is due to Circle technology: SeeChange cameras.
This is where the second act begins, and the bait and switch moves into action. Her near-death experience proves just how valuable and good SeeChange cameras can be. Bailey and the other co-founder, Tom Stenton, present her with a way to help the company, as well as her own career, in a packaged deal that’s meant to help others before all else. At the time you think it’s her guilt about committing a petty crime and almost dying that pushes her to agree. No one agrees to complete exposure of their life unless they feel they have to atone for something right? Not to mention, the special Circle healthplan is finally allowing for her dad to get treatment. Can’t lose this job, or you’ll be responsible for his suffering too. You feel bad for her…at first.
Maybe guilt did genuinely play a part of her initial choices, that makes complete sense and seems to be how she was feeling. But to me I just find that once you have the whole story continuing to assume Mae is well-intentioned and just happened to be in the right place at the right time is wrong and inaccurate. She succeeded in getting what she wanted (a world completely at her technological whim) by playing an innocent and good white woman. She had everyone fooled, including herself. I don’t think she ever sat awake at night plotting how to take over the world, but I absolutely think her sense of entitlement as a cishet white woman allowed her to believe everything she was doing was right, and her right.
Cishet people feel entitled to bodies and experiences that are not theirs. White people not only feel this entitlement towards the bodies and experiences of POC but they also appropriate them, if not try to pretend they’re non-white themselves. This is something both observed and experienced by me and others I know. It is privilege penultimate; second only to the inherent rights non-marginalized individuals hold above the rest. Mae is the personification of that privilege and those attitudes at their absolute worst and most powerful. In some ways, the world is already full of Mae’s…and many are doing very little to stop them.
I think it was extremely important to have a white woman protagonist turn out to be the villain the whole time. So often within the current spheres of feminism, there is a belief that because all women are inherently marginalized that there are not different levels one can experience due to marginalization. Among cishet women specifically, there is this misconception that a white cishet woman is just as marginalized as a cishet woman of color. This is extremely untrue, and is often not acknowledged in the very slim trend of films with actually decent female protagonists. Writers do not seem to understand why doing an okay job with having a white cishet woman as the main character is not good enough for most people. It’s because, like Mae, they often buy into the exact culture they criticize, and once they have enough power hurt those worse off than them instead of actually changing the system. White people of any axis of marginalization can just as easily become an oppressor whether or not they mean to.
I’m absolutely not giving Dave Egger credit for this. There’s little to no way he intended to have commentary this deep. Sometimes people are unable to appreciate the full potential of their own creation because of the limited lens through which they see the world. However, it was present enough for me to pick up on it in one viewing. Maybe I’m over thinking it, and there’s nothing more to say about The Circle except that it’s got great concepts that it didn’t utilize properly. Who knows! I’m just a big proponent of thinking a deeply about sci-fi and how we can make our stories better, but I’m also disappointed on the people writing off a very complicated film as just bad.
The Circle is an extremely nuanced film in a black and white world. I completely understand why people don’t like it, but a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes seems harsh. It’ll never be Ex Machina but that doesn’t mean it said absolutely nothing worth consideration.
Technology can and should be utilized for good. The people who need the most help in the world should be the ones technology currently works to assist. Marginalized people should be a part of these projects and platforms at the highest levels to keep the Mae’s in check. Workaholic culture shouldn’t push the Annie’s to their limit and forget them so hard that a film can’t even be assed to understandably portray the problem in any way I can coherently analyze. We shouldn’t silence the Ty’s, steal their creations, and then betray them when we give them hope. Healthcare shouldn’t be so difficult for us to access that getting any sort of decent plan (at the price of feeding data to scientists) influences life changing decisions. I promise I was rolling my eyes when Mae discussed all world citizens using “he or she” and then using a singular they right then. Not to mention to idiotic “legal name” policy that The Circle has for users that completely fucks over trans people. Why are the stories we are given so bland and oblivious to the big picture? Was it intentional in this case? Was it commentary on the oblivious way (white) tech companies forget everyone who isn’t remotely like them? I can’t tell you.
All I can tell you is that anyone can be bad. Anyone can be manipulative. When people feel entitled to others, those assumptions paired with even faint toxic behaviors can destroy the world. The book ends with Mae thinking about one day having access to people’s thoughts as she stares at her unconscious friend Annie in a hospital bed. Don’t let good intentions become warped by power-lust and capitalism, and learn to analyze and check yourself at all times in everything you do. Learn how to acknowledge privilege in the world around you, and learn how to keep that privilege from attaining too much power. The Circle does a great job at expressing that in admittedly convoluted and accidental ways, but completely fails in the original intention of its creators.
Vin can be found on twitter @hologramvin. You can donate to them here, and support their Patreon here.
