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Four tech billionaires walk into a mansion. It could be the beginning of a joke, but it also serves as the basis for almost the entire premise of “Mountainhead,” a bright but somewhat flippant new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of “Succession.” The film, which is streaming on HBO Max, is a chamber play of sorts, set in a modernist Utah castle — Mountainhead, as the title suggests — overlooking snowy peaks. The cast is a quartet of friends, or, more accurately, frenemies, who resemble an amalgam of real-life Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell stars as Randall Garrett, the group’s Peter Thiel-like mentor who, like the late Steve Jobs, is suffering from cancer that his doctor says is terminal. (“That’s not true,” he insists. He’s waiting to upload his brain to the “grid.”) Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo Van Yalck, the creator of a “lifestyle super app.” He owns Mountainhead and runs the meetup, but is by far the poorest of the team, worth just $521 million. Cory Michael Smith plays Venice (as in “Venice,” not “penis”) Parish, an Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg stand-in who runs the social media platform Traam. Ramy Youssef plays Jeff Abredazi, a slightly more lofty entrepreneur who created an AI-powered moderation tool called Bilter—a social media “fence,” as he calls it. In Armstrong’s universe, however, technology is never morally good, and its creators are no better than despots, often incompetent ones. Even any ideals they may have of acceleration eventually take a back seat to the goal of increasing their net worth, the only real area in which they seek to compete.
“Mountainhead” pokes fun at the trope of the heroic male entrepreneur, a Machiavellian archetype that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher may have inadvertently helped create with “The Social Network,” their 2010 film about Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook. (“How is Mountainhead ‘The Fountainhead’?” Jeff asks, pointing out the now-obvious Ayn Rand connection.) Armstrong noted that he was in a rush to get the film out there to capture the “time bubble” we find ourselves in, and given the urgency of his project, he had a tall order. Creating fictional tech moguls flamboyant enough to grab audiences’ attention is no easy task, especially when we’re bombarded daily with news about Musk, a distracted investor, avid gamer, and reportedly ketamine-abusing (he denies it) father of at least 14 children by multiple women. The foibles of the characters in Mountain Head — endless musings on Hegel, an obsession with cooking halibut, even a paranoid stalker of a girlfriend — pale in comparison. The film is stronger when it focuses on the current ideological tensions running through parts of Silicon Valley, an exotic mix of biohacking, transhumanism, fascist politics, and AI boosterism. (The film doesn’t have an equivalent of coder-troll-turned-far-right influencer Curtis Yarvin, but he could guest star as himself.)
Smith’s terrifying Venice, exuding a manic frat-boy energy while wearing skintight black and monochrome outfits over an optimized physique, is the villain of the group. At the beginning of the film, he introduces new features on Traam, including an advanced generative AI tool capable of creating “unfaithful” deepfake videos. When he goes away for the weekend, the rest of the world is plunged into chaos by his app’s viral misinformation, which has spiraled out of control. The fake videos lead to real-life terrorism, cult attacks, bank runs, and mass murder, yet Venice selfishly disdains the rest of humanity, asking Randall if eight billion other people can be as “real” as they are. The four billionaires watch the news headlines on their screens and argue over whether to turn off Traam’s tools. Their moral calculus is rational, in a twisted Sam Bankman-Fried vein: if unleashed, AI will eventually result in billions of augmented, virtualized, immortal human lives, so any temporary concerns about safety or ethics are just p(doom) levels gone haywire. Venice, as the one who opened Pandora’s box, is also a mirror image of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, except he’s more cautious.
“Mountainhead” morphs into a claustrophobic drama reminiscent of Ruman Alam’s 2020 adaptation of the novel “Leave the World Behind,” in which two families uncomfortably share a rented house while an abstract apocalypse unfolds outside their doors. It’s also a kind of 21st-century “Waiting for Godot.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
