KILL YOUR GODS! and more on THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Yep, it's more FIGHT CLUB wackiness!

Various and sundry thought after a second viewing of The Social Network, a brilliant film that continues to burrow its way into my thoughts:

*To my beloved doubters out there in the extended blogosphere, who questioned my Fight Club comparison in the previous entry, I point you to the scene in which Mark sets up a Facebook page to effectively cheat on his art final.  The camera opens with a wide shot of he and Eduardo talking, with the assigned paintings featured in an on screen panel in the background.  After a beat of dialogue, cut to a close-up of the screen.  The words on the top left corner of the picture panel?  “Tyler Durden’s Photos”.  HA!

*Okay, so I still haven’t convinced you.  Howzabout these apples:

-Tyler Durden is, essentially, homeless, squatting in the Paper Street house.  Sean Parker is, essentially, homeless, squatting in the homes of friends and ultimately Mark’s rental pad.

-Speaking of that rental house, much is made of the Facebook programmers being plugged into their system, hypnotically ensconced in the project’s hivelike atmosphere.  In Fight Club, much is made of the hivelike atmosphere of the Paper Street house once Tyler initiates Project Mayhem, an endeavor which demands its disciples to be figuratively plugged in to their work at all times.

-Social Network begins with the Mark/Erica Albright confrontation, which sets Mark on the path to his revolution.  One of the first lines in Fight Club is “Suddenly, I realized that all of this, the gun, the bombs, the revolution, had something to do with a girl named Marla Singer”.

-When Sean pushed Mark into pranking Sequoia Capital’s bigwigs (by attending their pitch meeting and saying “Sean Parker says ‘Fuck You’ “ to an old enemy), Mark is dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas…much like Edward Norton is dressed in a bathrobe and boxers at the climax of Fight Club.

Okay, okay, so that last point might be stretching things a bit.  So here are some other musings on various themes and subjects.

*If you do buy into at least some of the Fight Club comparisons, it’s intriguing to think about how the endings of these two films serve as summations of the national traumas of their respective times.  Fight Club’s final image (of the credit card towers collapsing) eerily prefigured the 9/11 attacks, in film that was about the rise of a guerilla terrorist organization.  The final trauma of Social Network (Mark’s betrayal of Eduardo) is far more intimate and personal, a corporate screw job that fits in perfectly with the massive chicanery of the 2008 financial crisis.

*The early cross cutting between Mark’s creation of Face Mash and the Phoenix Final Club party is a nice touch, as Mark is rising from his self-imposed ashes for the first of several times in the film, in this case from his epic flameout with Erica.

*I love how when Sean begs for Mark’s help over the police station phone (after he’s busted at the climactic frat party) he has to use his inhaler, that stereotypical nerd accessory.  For all of his pomp and bombast, Sean is still a computer geek at heart, and just as Mark figuratively assimilates and destroys Sean, so too does the film knock him off his godly perch. 

Seeing this section again, I was struck by Mark’s earlier comments about Facebook being an ever evolving project with no set end point.  If Sean’s downfall symbolizes Mark killing his (at least short term) god, it would figure that an endeavor stuck in constant beta-mode would be one which constantly sets up new gods, only to destroy each of them along the way.  Perhaps this is waxing too grandiloquently (or perhaps I’ve been watching Zardoz too much lately), but Facebook is, quite possibly, the leading propagator of the short attention span theatre that is our modern life. 

To wit, five months ago (after breaking down and establishing a FB page), I decided to create a story in which I had written an (obviously fake) book and was about to go on my promotional tour, only to have Facebook and a mysterious enemy jinx my deal with the publisher.  I posted this tale of woe on my profile, stating that in protest against this injustice I had decided to abandon my native language and speak (and write) only in German.  After just three posts en deutsch, I began to have friends post questions about why I was doing this, even though a two second scan through my posts would have told them why.  The Facebook wall is constantly setting up mini-gods in its posts, only to quickly kill them off, feeding the imperative of creating new content.  After all, how many times have you scanned several pages back on your friends’ walls?

*On a similar note, in Mark Harris’s New York Magazine profile of the film, he theorizes that Aaron Sorkin’s script might have created “a remarkable rarity in contemporary studio filmmaking: a movie that could recapture for Hollywood some claim to the national cultural conversation that has, in the last decade, been virtually co-opted by television.”  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  After all, so much of Facebook’s role is not to establish a lasting conversation, but to scatter it into soundbites, video links and picture tags.  Even a masterfully made film such as Social Network might have a tough time commanding the national conversation (at least on a short term basis) when its focus is that which debilitates national conversations. 

A better example of a film that has captured the national conversation is Christopher Nolan’s Inception.  Part of that film’s command probably lies in its less than illustrious company; after all, in a summer of increasingly banal fare, its attempt at challenging the audience even a bit made it look like a Russian novel by comparison.  But part of that film’s successful infiltration of the collective cultural consciousness can also be chalked up to the fantastical, abstract nature of its subject.  Mark Zuckerberg dreams of reinventing himself and striking back at his perceived enemies, but all the audience sees are the literal actions that he undertakes to do so.  Even though much of Inception’s action is based in action film parlance, its crew of dream pirates exist in an ever-changing world where reality is literally unstable.  Zuckerberg is haunted by Erica Albright, but Dom Cobb can’t escape the phantasmagoric image of his dead wife as he plunges again and again into her Inferno-like lair (and as she continually cameos in his dream missions).  In a modern society where mystery is stuck in its prolonged death throes, where Google and Facebook make answers that once required pondering available at the click of a mouse, our subconscious is still the Wild West, a seemingly infinite space and subject for discussion.

I Am Mark's Smirking Revenge: David Fincher's Nerd Revolution

The first scene of David Fincher’s The Social Network features future Facebook kingpin Mark Zuckerberg and his soon to be ex-girlfriend in a bar, arguing about their relationship…or, rather, features Zuckerberg waxing rhapsodic about how his potential entry into one of Harvard’s elite Final Clubs will allow him to introduce his soon to be ex-girlfriend to social levels far beyond her lowly Boston University background…or, rather, features Zuckerberg raining down abuse on his soon to be ex-girlfriend for digging vapid crew rowers and for supposedly sleeping with the schlubby doorman…or, rather, features Zuckerberg’s girlfriend trying to have a normal conversation while he brags about his 1600 SAT scores….or, rather, features all of the above, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, part screwball comedy, part fencing match.  It’s a bold opening salvo, one that automatically throws the audience off kilter and forces us to recalibrate our expectations for “that Facebook movie”.

Sorkin has long utilized this type of snappy dialogue, almost to parodic effect in some of his more recent efforts.  But this rapid fire verbiage is perfect for Social Network, which plunges us into the lives of young men whose only defense against the moneyed, the good looking, hell, the entire system itself is their steel trap brains and verbal assaults.  Burroughs’s theory of the word virus comes to mind as Zuckerberg and, later, Napster rock star Sean Parker mow down their various opponents with their intelligence, wit, arrogance and insouciance.  During Zuckerberg’s meetings with two sets of lawyers, he slices through their small talk and attempts at clever questioning with blunt answers and confrontational volleys.  He’s physically smaller than almost everyone in the room, and he’s dressed like a schlub in his tie and hoodie, but his mental intensity makes him a figurative giant. 

Credit here must be given to Jesse Eisenberg, who gives a burn down the building performance of a lifetime as the Facebook founder.  His Zuckerberg is a jumble of nerves, an inquisitive and condescending look forever plastered on his face.  His maintenance of that aforementioned physical weakness and timidity makes his incredibly aggressive and trenchant verbal missives all the more effective and damaging, like a flyweight boxer with a killer jab.  It’s a brilliant turn that is alternately inspiring and repellent.  Fincher plays the scenes where Zuckerberg verbally annihilates his enemies as riffs on classic payback scenes of the cinematic past, but they’re almost always followed by episodes of cruelty and betrayal.

The dialogue turns a film that largely takes place in sit down meetings into an incredibly violent affair.  But that shouldn’t be that big of a surprise, because Fincher has trod this ground before.

 

 

“You’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!”

-Marla Singer, Fight Club

“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be one.”

-Marylin Delpy, The Social Network

In effect, The Social Network is a remake and remix of Fincher’s end of the millennium classic Fight Club.  Both films deal with societal minions striking back against the system.  In Fight Club, it’s the waiters, the mechanics and the corporate drones who rediscover their lost lives before corrupting society with its own means.  Zuckerberg and most of his pals can’t get into the debauched high life of the Final Clubs, so they use their programming skills and savvy to create Face Mash, a fly by night site that invites all of Harvard to be judges in an elimination tournament for the crown of hottest girl on campus.  Like a combination of Fight Club and Project Mayhem, it’s a seemingly goofy prank that leads to the creation of a much bigger, much more revolutionary clique.  And like Napster before it, Facebook proves to be a covert revolution, spreading virally throughout the world and quickly assembling an international army of devotees.  Ultimately, everyone is looking for a cause; Fight Club and Facebook are there to fill that need.  Indeed, at several points in the film, various characters refer to Zuckerberg having a chance to reinvent his life through each version of the project, much as Edward Norton’s Narrator reinvents himself through Fight Club.  (It should be noted that Fincher plays a similar trick with Zodiac’s Robert Graysmith, a somewhat timid and not altogether likeable character who reinvents his life via his obsession with the Zodiac killer.)

Justin Timberlake is nearly the devil incarnate as the slick talking and amoral Sean Parker, but you could just cut to the chase and call him Tyler Durden.  Parker is everything that Zuckerberg wants to be, or as Durden so memorably puts it “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”  Sure, Parker is a real person, but it’s surely no coincidence that his first appearance in the film occurs shortly after Zuckerberg first creates Facebook…and it’s surely no coincidence that he appears post-coitus, halfway across the country with a Stanford co-ed, about to check his e-mail.  Social Network adds one intriguing twist in that the Winklevoss twins almost fill Tyler’s alpha male role better than Parker.  But if this film deals with the revenge of the repressed, it would make sense that Zuckerberg, frustrated with the knowledge that will never be “6’’ 5’ and 220 pounds” or as socially accepted as the twins, would create his own version of them…at least, metaphorically.

Timberlake is fantastic in the role.  Like Brad Pitt in Fight Club, he uses his good looks and natural charisma as a means to completely subvert them; you’re simultaneously drawn to and repelled by his non-stop patter and sly grin.  It comes as no surprise when Parker’s long hinted-at sexcapades and drug adventures catch up with him at the end of the film, much like Tyler’s radical Nietzschean ethos catches up to him when Fight Club’s Narrator reigns them in.  At the conclusion of the latter film, the Narrator finally assimilates Tyler into his own psyche, the future unclear; in a similar manner, the last mention of Parker in Social Network is Zuckerberg’s icy and cryptic admission that he still owns 6% of Facebook’s stock.  Mark has essentially internalized Sean, appropriated his cutthroat manner and web of industry connections.  The future?  Well...  

Like Fight Club, Social Network is dominated by male bravado and testosterone-fueled angst, while still acknowledging their homoerotic side.  The Winklevoss twins bicker like an old married couple, or (perhaps more appropriately, considering how most of their screen time is spent with each other) like a couple of veteran queens.  But the stronger corollary is with the triangle that forms between Parker, Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founder Eduardro Saverin.  Much like the Narrator/Tyler/Marla love triangle in Fight Club, Zuckerberg and Saverin see their relationship torn apart by the former’s adoration of Parker.  Although this comparison is not strictly of the A-B variety, it must be noted that Saverin is definitely the most of feminine of the three, and that Zuckerberg’s jealousy over Saverin’s prospective Final Club induction mirrors the Narrator’s jealousy over Marla’s advanced ease with her support group tourist life.  In a film about people working on a communications system who are torn apart by their inability to communicate with each other, it’s entirely appropriate.

After the gorgeous, yet ultimately hackneyed Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I began to lose a bit of faith in the David Fincher whose previous films had so entranced me, and when I heard about his upcoming Facebook project my enthusiasm waned even further.  But The Social Network marks a triumphant return to form for him.  It’s a stunning, haunting portrayal of the opening of a modern Pandora’s Box and the devastation wrought upon the lives of all involved.