My mailbox purged forth two Netflix DVDs a bill and a statement as I opened it. Inside, the gag reflex for this mailus vomitus was a thicker-than-normal issue of Time Magazine, whose Person of the Year stared blankly at me as I wrestled the tightly would weekly from my bulimic mailbox. Green eyes stared blankly from a pallid face; a perfectly horizontal line between his lips limns an ambiguity between a smile, smirk, and frown, or maybe it exudes indifference. Either way, Mark Zuckerberg, you and your billion dollar company have encouraged me to waste numerous hours a day rationalizing why I am not a voyeur, merely a member of your social network.
As I picked up my mail, I recalled seeing The Social Network three months before, and then wondered why I never wrote anything about it. Overall, it was well put together, and it ought to be. The director and writer tandem of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin is sure to produce amazing results. Similar to his often dark, icy films like Seven and Fight Club, Fincher focuses on the alienation – whether it be self- or socially-imposed – of his characters, painting them as moving bodies with personalities so distant that they’re not even evident to their possessors. At the same time, Sorkin writes a machine-gun paced, intelligent, pithy script that illustrates characters – fictional or realistic is still in debate – ripe for this type of intellectual-property heist film.
In addition, Jesse Eisenberg – regardless of whether Mark Zuckerberg is anything like this in real life – gives a fine performance of a young man who is so socially retarded that everything he utters is a sometimes-passive-but-more-often-aggressive defense of his existence, merit, and worth of social standing. Prior to The Social Network, I enjoyed Eisenberg is films like Zombieland and Adventureland, but he came across as a one note character: the uncomfortable, introverted, nervous, jumpy good guy who covers his true feelings but is bound to get the girl at the end. Here, he is still introverted, but he’s not the good guy, he doesn’t get the girl, and he is so smarmy and sarcastic – but somehow in a controlled manner – that you repeatedly want to punch him, or, you want to punch him repeatedly, depending on the lines delivered.
That said, Eisenberg doesn’t over-perform. Sarcasm can go one of two ways. It can be subdued and subtle, which often drags the pillorying of your foil out a bit longer for personal enjoyment, or it can be blunt and immediate, which is often utilized for cheap laughs – in the world of film and the world of forms. In The Social Network, Eisenberg employs the former, and while you want to punch him, most often, you are impressed that he hasn’t been punched. Kudos!
Again, I come back to Zuckerberg’s visage and wonder, with all of these bright spots, how is it that I could find nothing to write about, and it hit me: there is really nothing to write about, and what I mean by this is that The Social Network gives us this group of self-indulgent, self-serving, mostly capital-driven characters, of which there are none you can really care about – until perhaps the third act when Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garflied) becomes the de-facto “hero” in a movie full of vilified counterparts. So, when I left, the first thing I thought was “this is well put together,” and it is, but it falls short of being, as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone has suggested, a movie that “defines a generation” (Source).
I don’t mean to take umbrage solely with Travers as I respect him as a critic, and my argument is more with how this statement became the main tag line for marketing this film. And, in part, I agree slightly with this sentiment in that the ubiquity of social networks and media have obviated “actual human contact, creating a nation of narcissists shaping their own reality like a Facebook page,” but I think there is too much merit applied to this film as if it has novel poignancy and is addressing an issue for the first time. An examination of narcissism and the ways in which we have and still imagine and re-imagine ourselves in the public eye are not phenomena solely impelled or directly tied to the internet. Some previous examples of this exploration can be seen in Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing), Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground), Poe (“The Cask of Amontillado”), Wharton (Custom of the Country), Dreiser (Sister Carrie), Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A Trilogy), and Ginsberg (America and Sunflower Sutra) just to name a few.
Additionally, I’m unsure what generation this film is supposed to define. Is it mine (X)? Is it my younger sister’s (Y)? Is it the newly named Generation I – the internet generation? My contention here is that it could be all three, and honestly, if we want to talk about self-indulgence, shouldn’t The Social Network be addressing The Me Generation of the 70s or even the Baby Boomers – the leaders in self-indulgence — and wouldn’t this place the blame on most well-known, mainstream movie reviewers who work for mass-publications?
In a sense, The Social Network serves as a placebo of guilt for previous generations and seems to be promoting curmudgeonry, building off of Traver’s additional assertion that “if the youth can’t see itself in this movie, it’s just not paying attention,” which is a wonderfully condescending indictment of the current generation (Source).
What’s more, The Social Network casts a dark pall over the last decade of human interaction, and while I agree that we’ve become a bit too comfortable with and dependent upon technology, this film often obviates any sense of humanity and imagines a world of apaths who are so self-absorbed and fame-driven that the last semblance of compassion evaporated around 1999. Don’t misunderstand me: I am the first to admit I am a cynic, and I’ve contemplated registering as a Pessimist prior to the next election, but to imagine a world where every relationship is apoplectic is rather hyperbolic, and quite honestly, short-sighted.
And, if this is where marketers were going when pushing this film, and if this is what is meant by The Social Network defining a generation, then I suggest perhaps these proselytizers take another look at Citizen Kane or read Upton Sinclair’s Oil (not Anderson’s very slightly inspired There Will be Blood: an amazing film, but not at all an adaptation) to trace these roots of narcissism to their origin, one that has led up to a state where, as Sherry Turkle asserts, “people have never been more connected – or more alienated.”
DYL MAG Score: 7
