THE SOCIAL NETWORK: For Those Who Think Young

posted by Brandon Nowalk

You practically need Asperger’s to cut through the irrelevant pop-ups loudly obscuring David Fincher’s The Social Network, the erstwhile Facebook film turned sight-restoring cinemessiah. It’s misogynistic, racist, and homophobic, sing the delirious quota choir. It’s deeper than Kane, better than Network, bigger than Jesus, shout the blurb-whores. That’s not what happened, spit the eternal point-missers. Should we tell them it’s a movie?

The Social Network may not be Citizen Kane, but it ever-so-demurely calls attention to what a formal marvel it is, biting its lip and looking down just in time to play bashful at your compliments. The code: start with a deep, compelling performance of a puzzling antihero (a wildly successful Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook’s creator Mark Zuckerberg). Keep it simple, archetypal. For the coding scene, cue the math rock. For the regatta, the tight focus of tilt-shift. For the club, swoop over yet another party Mark benches and hit the seductive lighting, the better, Justin Timberlake smiles, to hear you with, my dear. Up the degree of difficulty with a seamless digital face transplant. Don’t hold back on the montages; this is about networking, after all. Masterpieces require centuries of interpretation, so dispute your own presentation (preferably invoking Rashomon), and voila: a delicately crafted monument, a colossus apart from the city, an objet d’art so blindingly beautiful you genuflect before the docent even takes your camera.

But what does it all mean, you shout at the silent silhouettes cavorting across the wall of the cave.

Haven’t you heard? It’s a portrait of loneliness, isolation in an age of ostensible global connection. It’s a titanic character study of a figure who, like it or not, is surprising enough not to fit in any boxes. It’s an age-old mythic rise to power and a postmodern treatise on truthlessness and a coming-of-age in the Internet age. Indeed, my good gaggle, The Social Network is a veritable chimera.

The more telling question is how interesting its cognitions and creative its translations. The essential premise—the loneliness bit—is corroborated by this micro majesty in the character of Mark Zuckerberg, our god-filter through which everyone else fades to mere type (the saint, the grifter, privilege personified), not that these husks are intractable. Fincher never misses an opportunity to juxtapose Mark the individual and the social gatherings that are his ostensible raison d’etre. But this interpretation is as obvious as it is easily rebutted: consider the reasons everyone goes home alone—Facebook has nothing to do with it. In fact, Zuck’s Harvard hotornot Facemash brings people together; its problem is unfeeling obliviousness (“That’s my roommate”). Which brings us full circle. Mark’s not an asshole (nor is he trying so hard to be, whatever that means). He’s a kid. His hamartia is immaturity, the unchallenged narcissism of not realizing other people are just as important as you (which is to say, being an adult). He’s a man alone, yes, but through no consequence of social networking. Play ‘er off, Larry Summers.

The stronger case resting on Mark’s youthful (which is not to say immutably millennial) narcissism is the film’s conception of a world increasingly dominated by juvenilia. There is Summers framing the Winklevi as little kids telling on their peer to an adult, yes, and entitlement pervades every alienated pore of this particular American dream where everyone’s looking for a status update, but there’s also the deposition’s running gag of babysitters waiting out a tantrum, taking a breath, and returning to grownup talk. By the end, we have a powerful corporation, one that not for nothing yields the world’s youngest billionaire (though I’ve got 17 months and a college degree, so watch out), run entirely by youngins. The office is a cross between a rave and a LAN party, the business cards are a puerile joke, the interns never knew a world without Internet. Hence the antics at the film’s staggering emotional climax. If this were your typical corporate battle film, say, Wall Street 2, you can be damn sure the heart-wrenching showdown would not be intercut with Dick-in-a-Box mugging and lines like “Seriously, what’s with the chicken?” Even our beloved angel Eduardo admits that his escalation was childish. It’s all, as Mark Zuckerblogs, kids’ stuff.

This strikes me as not only relevant but urgent in these antihumanist times. The Social Network is an intricate chapel ceiling, there’s no question, and maybe it’s a bit too tidy despite protesting its own record, and its obvious readings remain unmoving, but it’s got some honest to goodness trenchancy in its estimation of the imperial Internet pedocracy; join or die. So what if Fincher can’t resist framing the finale as an ironic inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life? Mark’s growing up; there’s hope for all of us, no matter how old.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 at 12:01 pm. It is filed under Blog, Brandon Nowalk, Comedies, Drama, Reviews and tagged with 2010, Aaron Sorkin, Andrew Garfield, class, David Fincher, Jesse Eisenberg, review, The Social Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.