Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #123 August (2008) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.

Since COVID-19 changed everything, and certainly not for the better, I’ve wondered how the entertainment of the future, and, for that matter, the present, will deal with the pandemic.

For better or worse, we have a blueprint for how Hollywood will handle a generation-defining tragedy creatively in the many films, television shows and books about 9/11.

With some notable exceptions, like Spike Lee’s masterful The 25th Hour, 9/11-themed art and entertainment serves mostly as an illustration of what not to do.

All too often movies about 9/11 end up like Austin Chick’s insufferable 2008 character study August, which crassly exploits the looming specter of the 9/11 attacks in an unsuccessful attempt to lend it gravity and heft it otherwise does not earn.

August makes the audacious choice to introduce hard-driving protagonist Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett) as a douchebag so unbearable you want to punch him right in his smug fucking face for the rest of infinity.

Tom embodies, in unusually pure form, the toxic arrogance of the dot com bubble. If the obnoxiousness of the dot com era attained sentience it’d probably look and act and talk a lot like Tom.

“You want bleeding-edge mission-critical cross platform robust scalable architectures?” Tom taunts a conference room full of suits who have earned his vitriolic contempt and seething hatred by wanting to give his useless start-up Landshark money and get in bed with him professionally.

“That’s so third quarter, 99!” Sterling sneers of these fools’ pathetic desire for bleeding-edge mission-critical cross platform robust scalable architectures.

Landshark doesn’t actually seem to do anything but that was not a problem for venture capitalists at the height of internet boom.

I should know. In 2001 I somehow found myself at the white-hot epicenter of the internet boom when I worked as a staff writer for The Onion’s entertainment side, The A.V Club, just after graduating from University of Wisconsin at Madison. .

At one point I had enough stock in the company that if The Onion had sold to Comedy Central for fifteen million dollars, as was apparently a very real possibility at one point, my stake in the company would have been worth almost a hundred thousand dollars.

Instead, we sold for an infinitely smaller amount of money to a hard-driving billionaire who insisted that he did not need to make money from The Onion and would run it like a fan. Then 9/11 happened, our salaries were slashed, our six week publishing hiatus disappeared and he ran The Onion like a business whose primary purpose was to make him money.

The world of August is consequently all too familiar for me.

The mere site of exposed brick offices overflowing with ambitious young people with nebulous jobs induced Pavlovian shivers of nostalgia, as did the curious combination of boundless, even delusional optimism and creeping dread that characterized the dot.com boom just before it went bust.

August follows Tom as he tries to save Landshark in August, 2001, the month before September 11th attacks. At the time, it seemed like the single most important event in the history of the universe. From the vantage point of 2020, however, it’s no big deal.

Three thousand Americans dead? That’s a bad Tuesday for COVID-19 but in 2001 it was difficult to even imagine a tragedy worse than the September 11th attacks.

August isn’t just a singularly annoying character study about a uniquely unbearable dot.com entrepreneur; it’s about a whole breed of dot.com CEOs who individually and collectively made the world a shittier place.

As Landshark bleeds money, Tom tries to keep up appearances by buying a Gulfstream jet for his dying business, the cyber equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

Of course protagonists do not to be likable to be compelling. Look at Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss or Christian Bale in American Psycho. But they do need to be engaging and Tom represents an unpalatable combination of obnoxious and almost perversely uninteresting.

I spent August waiting impatiently for the prominently billed David Bowie to show up and also for the universe to punish Tom for being the worst human being in the world.

I was overjoyed to discover that Bowie’s role in the film as cold-blooded corporate shark Cyrus Ogilvy is specifically to torture Tom on the audience’s and the universe’s behalf for being such a weaselly, deplorable pile of shit.

Bowie’s dazzling, crowd-pleasing cameo is the only element of the film that is not a crushing disappointment but his appearance is successful precisely because the rest of the film is such a failure.

Tom tries to pass himself off as a big swinging dick of a corporate mogul in the making when meeting the man he’s hoping will save him from himself.

But Cyrus immediately sees through Tom’s facade. Tom sees himself as a rock star of capitalism but in the presence of a genuine rock star like Bowie he can’t help but come off as a scared, silly little boy in desperate need of punishment and a spanking, literal, metaphorical or otherwise.

Cyrus doesn’t just heartily defeat Tom in negotiations: he straight up makes him chop off his own dick, eat it, then write a Yelp review about how yummy it was and how much he loves the taste of his dismembered penis.

I know Yelp did not exist at that point, but I like to think that Tom’s humiliation is so complete and so intense that it warps the fabric of time and space.

When Tom tries to big-dog Cyrus, he shuts him down cold. With malicious glee, the savvy businessman takes a verbal ice pick to Tom’s spine.

“To be quite honest, Mr. Sterling, we don’t like your style. We don’t like the way you conduct yourself. And though you seem to have fooled a lot of people, we don’t much like the way you conduct your business” the older man coldly informs our loathsome “hero”, succinctly articulating all of our feelings about this heinous waste of human life.

So Cyrus offers Tom a deal designed to destroy his Texas-sized ego: he’ll buy the floundering company but only on the condition that Tom not be a part of it.

To put things in Robert McKee terms, it’s an opportunity for Tom to behave in an utterly uncharacteristic fashion. A belligerent narcissist who has put his own needs and desires above those of the lesser souls around him all film long has an opportunity to sacrifice himself, Christ-like, for those around him.

Earlier in the film Tom comes back to Landshark’s head office to see his battalion of attractive young employees checking out a real-life website called Fucked Company.

Fucked Company cynically tapped into culture-wide schadenfreude about the ugly excesses of the dot.com boom by speculating endlessly on the imminent demise of any number of poorly thought out but much hyped internet projects.

Even by internet standards, Fucked Company was fucking disgusting and repellent and, in a neat bit of karma, was a buzzed-about website that went out of business itself in 2007.

August tries to humanize the kind of brazen Uber-capitalist lampooned on Fucked Company but it ultimately serves the same function as the much-hated website: the guilty pleasure endemic in watching the brutal, eminently deserved fall of an internet-age wunderkind you can’t help but root enthusiastically against.

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