The Invisible Counterpoint

The most interesting thing in Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" hadn't anything to do with technology. It was that he seemed to take a "manifestation" concerning how humans relate to one another that bubbled up in production of his previous work, "Hologram for a King," and gave it full extension here. Specifically, in "Hologram for a King," while writing to his daughter, the principle protagonist, the salesman Alan, makes reference to himself as once akin to Hitler's Youth or Khmer Rouge, in that, once having found out his parents were hypocrites, he "lorded it over them," did the emotional equivalent of "shooting the adults in the rice paddies." In the novel "The Circle," Mae Holland has parents who, no matter what she does, always ostensibly know just a bit more than she does. They are always a bit her moral superior. They keep around them her ex-boyfriend, Mercer, who, too, feels he's much better m...

I think there are two key moments in the movie when Emma Watson offers us the pleasure in seeing what the latest, most self-empowered female Disney character, is capable of. Early in the film she is assisting her father, whose trade is as a clockmaker, and presents him, twice, with exactly the part he next requires... but ahead of him realizing that this is the exact piece he is searching for. She, at this point, is leading him... and could presumably just as well be doing what he is doing, if such was her foremost interest. Basically this is a doctor-nurse situation where the routine, "nurse -- scalpel!," is played out to invert the patriarchal paradigm and presume genuine authority to the "nurse," but without the labour strife or mean gotcha: here, the father couldn't care less is his daughter was one hundred years ahead of him in ability and he, mostly put in the position of assisting her. He knows she's got him beat in many, many ways, and is just d...