The Social Network [Media Notes 35]

I was certainly aware of this film when it came about in 2010 but, for whatever reason, didn’t go out to see it. It went on to win a slew of awards, including three Oscars. Now that I’ve streamed it I must say I don’t get it. Good? Yes. But not that good. Perhaps it got all that credit because it’s about a boy, our boy billionaire, the youngest ever.

Who knows?

The Social Network tells its tale by cutting back and forth between depositions in two law suits – one brought against Zuckerberg by the Winklevoss twins, the other by his business partner, Eduardo Saverin – and the actions that gave rise to them. I didn’t find it all that compelling – though perhaps it’s just me, as I’m still coming out of my annual melancholy phase. So we have something of a Rashomon redux, three versions of the same story. Which one is true?

To be honest I didn’t really register the fact that the movie offers us three versions of the tale until I read about it in the Wikipedia entry. Ah! that’s right, said I to myself. I’d noticed discrepancies, but had just chalked it up to ordinary everyday tricks of memory of now particular epistemological significance. Those disparities aren’t central to the film. They’re just a gloss on the story.

Do I care?

The fact that these people worked very hard doesn’t compensate for the fact they are rather obnoxious (self-important jerks chasing money), though the Wikipedia entry does suggest that, in reality, it wasn’t as bad as all that. Maybe the Zuck's really a decent person.

The ending struck a false Citizen Kane note, with the Zuck, his lawyers having settled the suits, attempting to send an email to the young woman who had dumped him (for being a jerk) at the beginning of the film. Are we are supposed to conclude that he did it all in compensation for that? I don’t buy it. The thing is, when Welles asked us to believe that Kane’s career was an attempt to compensate for a lost childhood, symbolized by that Rosewood sled burning in the flames, at least Kane had had a lifetime of striving and accomplishment. Not so with Zuckerberg, who got his billion at the beginning of his career. The young people I worked with at MapInfo worked as hard as the Zuck and may well have been as smart, but they didn’t happen to be situated such that the world has been willing to shower them with a billion bucks. Where’s their movie? I’m sorry, but racking up a million users, in that networked world (that is, our world), isn’t worth a billion bucks. And the film is utterly lacking in the kind of irony that could have redeemed it from that false valuation.

Charles Foster Kane, needy and driven though he may have been, wrestled with the world to achieve his wealth. Racking up a million users isn’t wrestling with the world; it’s just bringing in the harvest. Worthy, but not worth a two-hour film. What Zuckerberg and Facebook are now facing – the way Facebook is being abused at the expense of civic comity – that’s wrestling. And perhaps one day we’ll get a film about that.

Note: Um, err...Yes, I realize that Charles Foster Kane is fictional, albeit inspired by William Randolph Hearst, while Mark Zuckerberg is real.

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David Bordwell looks at the treatment eyes in the film. Very interesting.

From the end of this analysis, which includes screen grabs that I've not snatched:

But in a climactic face-off, we come to see a different Eduardo.

Eduardo’s quiet testimony about whether anyone’s share but his was diluted (“It wasn’t”) affects Mark more deeply than the bluster of the Winklevoss brothers. The words are delivered without the usual sidelong glance, kinked eyebrows, or head ducking that has defined Eduardo earlier. His brow is smooth, his brows level. This is man to man, and it’s Mark who breaks off eye contact.

You could nuance this transformation by tracing it scene by scene, and contrasting it with the body language displayed by other characters. For today I simply wanted to sketch the broad development that I think is at work in this core relationship. The drama of domination and betrayal is played out in eyes, eyebrows, mouths, mutual gazes, and the like as much as it is in the dialogue and incidents.

There is no art, Shakespeare’s Duncan says, to read the mind’s construction in the face. He’s right about the reading part; we grasp expressions fast, intuitively, and often reliably. But there is art in the performer’s construction of the face, and of the director’s cinematic shaping of it.