The Misrepresentation of Facebook in The Social Network

Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network tries to present a speculative account of the creation of Facebook, but instead glamorizes the Digital Age’s dominance of gimmicky gadgetry over the humans they are hypothetically programmed to serve. The film misrepresents the role of Facebook in the Twenty-first Century by attempting to evoke sympathy for unsympathetic businessmen and their promotion of technological short-term gratification over humanistic principles. This is demonstrated in the film’s compassion for the character Eduardo Saverin who fails at capitalizing from male chauvinism to the degree of business partner Mark Zuckerberg, the promotion of Facebook and other digital communication technologies over communication itself, and the objectification of women in the tangible world that is inherited by the male characters’ desire for the short-term gratification provided by Facebook. By examining these issues of identity, Fincher and Sorkin’s misguided attempt at providing an origin story for Facebook is revealed to be a largely unintentional microcosm for the blind worship of communication technology that has escalated over the past decade, due in large part to this creative team’s speculative approach to a real life event.

Aiming to provide sympathy for Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) when he is allegedly swindled out of the Facebook empire by Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), Fincher and Sorkin stress that Saverin ends with less capital than Zuckerberg to show for the capitalization of his electronic male chauvinism. Thus, the filmmakers have created a misguided sense of morality in the film that actually promotes capitalism’s mantra of indiscriminate desire for wealth. Saverin is presented as a shallow opportunist who helps finance the Facebook venture upon the insistence of Mark Zuckerberg. When Zuckerberg informs Saverin during the preliminary stages of Facebook that the site’s purpose is to “rank girls”, Saverin is keen on the idea of capitalizing on this chauvinism, enabling fellow males to exercise their dominion over females by dictating how women on the site should look. As the film progresses, Saverin and Zuckerberg work to design Facebook to create a sense of male exclusivity so that, in Saverin’s words, “the male users can get laid”. But, by the end of the film, only Zuckerberg is vilified for this demonstration of capitalist because he is left with more profit than Saverin, but not for the chauvinism aspect of their creation. Therefore, the implicit message that Fincher and Sorkin are projecting is that it is ethical to profit from objectifying women, and that if a businessman is better at the exploitation than another, the weaker salesman is to be pitied. According to Teresa de Lauretis’ view on feminist semiotics in film, “The object of narrative theory, redefined accordingly, id not therefore narrative but narrativity; not so much the structure of narrative (its component units and their relations) but its work and effects” (de Lauetis, 105). In other words, a film is not only about the surface plot points or dramatic arch, but the signs embedded within the work as a whole. Fincher and Sorkin try to emulate the clichéd plotline of “greedy businessmen cheating fellow greedy businessmen” to take artistic short cuts in their presentation of the story’s events, but fail to ensure that their method mirrored the underlying thematic content. In Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, for example, Charles Foster Kane begins his newspaper business with admirable intentions to capture the voice of the common man, but is ultimately turned into a soulless, bitter man. Ironically, the characters in The Social Network begin where Kane ends in terms of their psychological development and do not deviate from this mentality in static fashion. Therefore, by sympathetically portraying Saverin as a victim for losing this capitalist competition of exploitation, the film promotes the electronic objectification of women in the service of male chauvinism.

Glamorizing Facebook and its speed as values that dominate the communication itself, The Social Network’s employs numerous rapid montages of people using various communication technology devices to use Facebook. For example, there is a lengthy montage sequence preceding the heavy partying montage at Harvard that exits solely to create visceral momentum and to showcase the electronic devices being used to access Facebook. During this montage, each new mini-scene consists of a group of students staring into a computer or cell phone screen. In each case, the backside of the electronic device is facing the audience and is in the foreground, whereas the characters staring at the device’s luminescent face are behind in the midground or background of the frame. Furthermore, David Fincher makes gaudy use of Trent Raznor’s bombastic score, consisting entirely of electronically produced noises, to accompany this montage of people staring into screens. The overall effect implicitly conveys the notion that Facebook and its associated technologies are more important than the communication taking place, and no effort is made to analyze the quality of the communication transpiring in the first place. Donna Haraway contends that, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily relalities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (Haraway, 154). But the cyborg other that is Facebook and its associated hardware does not create infinities in the film but outright dominates them. Additionally, The Social Network is not a Marshall McLuhan satire of “the medium is the message”, but rather a glorification of electronic surface gloss over substance. Instead, the montage of screens is used earnestly to demonstrate the capitalistic success that Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg are having with Facebook. The goal of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin is to demonstrate the value of Facebook, so that the magnitude of Saverin’s faux-betrayal by Zuckerberg will be significantly increased. They have once again sacrificed social commentary for a clichéd storytelling technique to create a shallow tragedy for Saverin.

Mirroring the glorified objectification of women on Facebook, the male characters are portrayed as chauvinists who treat women as objects. Aside from the montage of girls being ushered into a Harvard club to dance for the male students, the filmmakers use minor female characters as prizes for the capitalistic efforts of the business partners Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg. This is best exemplified by the two Asian girls who are portrayed as one-note groupies without personalities and literally throw themselves at Saverin and Zuckerberg. The scene where, accompanied by Trent Raznor’s rhythmic soundtrack of pulsating noises, the Asian girls take the boys to a restaurant bathroom and have sex with them is played to evoke a male chauvinist fantasy. This is further confirmed by the scene that directly proceeds, in which a grinning Saverin turns to Zuckerberg and gloats in a gratulatory manner, “We’ve got groupies.” In fact, Fincher and Sorkin portray this casual chauvinism as solidification of the boys’ friendship. Saverin and Zuckerberg’s bonding begins with making money off objectifying women on Facebook and reaches the apex when they are able to obtain tangible women in the form of sex-hungry objects. As Theresa de Lauretis notes in regard to sexism in film narratives, “the boy has been promised, by the social contract he has entered into at his Oedipal phase, that he will find a woman waiting for him at the end of his journey” (de Lauretis, 133). The difference between The Social Network and other films that fall into these fixed gender roles is that Fincher and Sorkin go out of their way to depict women as objects and glamorize the Saverin and Zuckerberg’s lifestyle, essentially using it as a cheap characterization of the boys’ privileges. Once again, the filmmakers have sacrificed a prime moment for social commentary to over-dramatize Saverin’s falling out of the loop by the end of the film, thus evoking a greater sense sympathy that did not warrant existing in any denomination from the onset.

The Social Network fails as a speculative account of the creation of Facebook, opting instead to glamorize the dominance of superficial communication technology over their human uses. The film projects a false representation of Facebook’s place in society through the evocation of sympathy for characters undeserving of such emotional response and trumping technology over people. This is illustrated in the film’s compassion for the character Eduardo Saverin despite his less-than-admirable intentions, the support of Facebook and other digital communication technologies against communication itself, and the objectification of that is translated from their treatment on Facebook. By examining The Social Network’s misguided ideas of identity, Fincher and Sorkin not only demonstrate their inability to internalize of the film’s thematic content, but their lack of overall understanding of Facebook itself.

Works Cited:

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149-181. 1991, New York, Routledge.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Desire in Narrative” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, pp. 103-157, 200-211. 1984, Indiana University Press.

The Social Network. Dir: David Fincher. 2010. Columbia Pictures, DVD.

In Defence of the Old Steven Spielberg (who used to be young in all the right ways)

While I have some criticisms of the role Steven Spielberg has taken within the film community over the last decade, I have nothing but admiration for his artistic process and resulting films of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

Forever young at heart, I think the Spielberg of those three decades captured the ineffable sense of awe and magic that the cinema evokes, particularly from a child’s point of view. At their best, Spielberg’s films function as unadulterated manifestations of this gut-reaction that people with a predisposition to fantasy often have. The terror and excitement of the shark attacks in Jaws (1975), for example, equate to pure cinematic ecstasy. In that classic thriller, the breakdown of events that emulates both Alfred Hitchcock and the essence of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, John Williams’ brooding score, the performances, and the overall composition mesh perfectly together to create genuine thrills. No heavy-handed allusions are made to what dishonest, pompous academics would classify as “higher-minded” art. And so Jaws accomplishes what it wants to do. For a little over two hours, it subjects the audience to a series of extreme-but-always-genuine scenarios designed to draw out equally authentic emotional responses. From this perspective, the establishment-branded “low brow” goals of Jaws are actually more artful than the establishment-branded “high brow” intentions of “arthouse” directors.

For example, I would argue that many European directors lauded for their intellectualism, like Bernardo Bertolucci, have muddled-at-best intentions. Take his Oscar-winning The Last Emperor (1987), which chronicles the turbulent reign of China’s final monarch Pu Yi through several revolutions and wars, as well as boyhood and manhood. It has truly stunning cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, but the characters seem to be lost in a very different movie. In other words, Bertolucci cannot get his visuals to complement the performances of his actors. Nor can he come up with his own philosophical views on the subject matter (in that regard, was 1970’s The Conformist authored by Bertolucci or Plato?). Spielberg, on the other hand, gets all of the cinematic components working in unison to sculpt a richer, multilayered mise-en-scene. His Empire of the Sun came out the same year as The Last Emperor, and deals with similar themes of a child’s coming-of-age during wartime. Empire’s main character, Jim Graham, is the equivalent of Emperor’s Pu Yi. However, Spielberg’s masterpiece effortlessly works as a cohesive whole, capturing a poetic, expressionistic child POV that Bertolucci strains to evoke (especially in his characters’ more intimate moments, which unfortunately become dominated by the travel brochure-style imagery).

So, how does Spielberg manage to beat out a more overtly artsy – at least, in the eyes of the critics – director like Bertolucci? Because Spielberg knows what he is doing, choosing to rely more heavily on his emotions rather than ideologies. And while it would be ideally best to work on emotional and cerebral impulses simultaneously, artists who cater to emotions always have the upper hand because emotions don’t lie the way abstract thoughts so often do. Emotions, like Jim’s desperation after being separated from his parents in Empire of the Sun, are ineffable feelings that do not need to be intellectualized to be fully experienced. Therefore, when one tries to comprehend Jim’s emotions by channelling one’s own, there are simply less layers of abstractions to delve through before arriving at the essence of the experience in question.

Do I think that Spielberg is as great as filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, and Jean Renoir? Maybe not, but he’s right at their heels. The aforementioned filmmakers operate more evenly on both emotional and cerebral terms. But Spielberg is just as honest an artist as those greats from yesteryear. And honesty, or authenticity, is the rarest quality among artists today; not just within the realm of film, but all artistic mediums. That is why a great Spielberg popcorn movie like Jurassic Park (1993) that captures the wonderment of dinosaurs can be a better achievement overall than a misguided “art film” like Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which preaches the ludicrous message that people should not do any work to become successful and instead wait for money to fall into their laps. I like movies that have something to say and know what they want to do, which explains why sometimes great entertainments can surpass serious works of art (of course, Spielberg has also succeeded in making prestige pictures like Empire of the Sun, 1993’s Schindler’s List, and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan). It all depends on how well the film in question accomplishes what it sets out to do.

It also seems to me that many of Spielberg’s harshest critics, like David Thomson, are far less honest at their respective roles within the film community. Because while Spielberg has miraculously maintained the instinctual wisdom of imagination that comes from childhood innocence, many of the critics writing for corporate-minded publications have long-since surrendered their integrity and personal autonomy to the harsh whims of the Company Man. By growing up so thoroughly, critics like Thomson have lost some of childhood’s purity in favour of the superficiality required to mindlessly fulfill a 9 to 5 job. Thomson’s recurring criticism of Spielberg – and I’m succinctly paraphrasing – is his need to dramatize. I, for one, appreciate a filmmaker who finds his inner poet and captures the truth of the world through exaggerated metaphor; essentially, creating an alternate world in order to explore or critique the essence of the “real” world.

In this way, I consider Spielberg to be a more upbeat version of Nicholas Ray, who also sided with his childish rebels. Spielberg, like Ray, understands that “childish” is not strictly a negative quality, as the capitalist machine that is modern society wants us to believe. To be childish is to see the external world the way it registers emotionally, which is, as I’ve mentioned before, often more true than false. The negative aspect of being childish is the occasional lapse in judgment that comes from an underdeveloped sense of self-consciousness. It is this later quality that seems to have turned “Spielberg The Artist” into “Spielberg The Packager Of Expensive, Glossy Products Posing As Art” (however, I don’t think it has ever affected the quality of his art).

How could the Spielberg who directed Schindler’s List (1993) produce the Transformers movies? How could the Spielberg who produced Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) produce Eagle Eye (2008)? My proposed answer is rather tragic. The same childishness that gave Spielberg The Artist and his fans pleasure, made the studios megabucks. When the studios started to become systematically taken over by non-art-related businesses, the art of Spielberg’s eternal youth was exploited to reduce his genuine emotions into the lowest common denominator of emotional manipulation. For shame. This corporate greed triggered the negative qualities of Spielberg The Boy, who now unconsciously lives for the thrill of raking in large quantities of dough. He has forgotten the magic of those wonderful moving images up there on the giant theater screen. And so, the artist who was once so authentic in the creation of his own work, now promotes the grossly artificial drivel of untalented hacks like Michael Bay.

As a young man who has always felt old, I miss feasting on genuine Spielberg productions (and art in general).