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.
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