"The Center of the World"

Are computers turning geeks into sex-starved automatons incapable of meaningful connection?

By Janelle Brown

Apr 19, 2001 | You've got to give Wayne Wang credit: He nailed the geek details.

Within the first few minutes of "The Center of the World," the director captures a consummate geek moment: Richard (played by Peter Sarsgaard), a successful programmer, meets a cute drummer at a cafe and immediately offers Net-savvy advice. "You should get some MP3 files together," he earnestly tells her, his cellphone ringing in the background. "It's the right way for new bands to be heard." Napster's Shawn Fanning would be proud.

"The Center of the World" may be the first mainstream movie to seize the essence of geek life at the turn of the century -- from IPOs to online porn -- without collapsing into caricature. Filmed using a digital camera, and featuring a lonely programmer entrepreneur as a protagonist, "Center of the World" serves as a neat little study of the ascendant species of geek. This doesn't mean that techies come off looking rosy, though: "The Center of the World" is ultimately a warning about the isolation of life behind the monitor, casting a concerned eye at the troublesome sex lives of geeks. Richard may believe that "the thing about computers is that you're kind of connected to everybody and everything, it's like you're at the center of the world"; but in Wang's film, the final message is that geeks are connecting to nothing at all.

Richard is a socially awkward hotshot programmer in his early 20s; his company is days away from a public offering and he's already worth millions. He meets Florence (Molly Parker), a hipster drummer who pays the bills by stripping at the upscale club Pandora's Box, and offers her $10,000 to spend three days with him in Las Vegas. She agrees, though only on her own strict terms: no kissing on the mouth, no penetration, and she wants her own room.

Sound familiar? It should be: Essentially, "The Center of the World" is "Pretty Woman" with a geek and a stripper, but minus the maudlin garbage and happy Hollywood ending. Just like in "Pretty Woman," our protagonist falls for his hired date and she discovers that she has feelings for him too; one by one, Florence's "rules" are broken and their neat little business arrangement turns into an emotional disaster.

The subtext of the story is that both the geek and the stripper are so wrapped up in their own isolation that they can't really connect. Richard is so lonely and cut off from female companionship that the only way he knows how to relate to a woman is by offering to pay for the attentions of a stripper; Florence tries to live behind her seductive mask and in doing so cuts herself off from any real human connection.

Consider it a parable about loneliness in the age of sex and technology, an era when porn is the only online industry making a profit, when geeks glue themselves to Jennicam hoping for a glimpse of Jenni's breasts, and a nymphette with a digital camera can take pictures of herself giving blow jobs and become the toast of the art world. The world of computers has brought a feast of sexual delights within a mouse-click of armies of desk-bound geeks; their response, in turn, has been undeniably enthusiastic.

But it's a big leap from this fact to the larger assumption that geeks are too involved in this virtual world to be capable of real human interaction. The world loves to believe that geeks never get laid, discussing their mating habits as if they were exotic animals in a human zoo. Wang may have the details of geek life circa 1999 down pat, but his condemnation of the computer as a font of loneliness and alienation doesn't quite ring true.

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