The Anti-Social Network

The Social Network manages to conjure feelings of personal irrelevancy and motivation at the same time. It is a movie about the corners we cut and the lengths we’ll go to in order to impress others -- not so much ourselves. The characters exist in a world where friendship is an illusion masked by money and social capital -- who you know is more important who are you and how much money you have is more important than how you came by it. All the while, the people seem gluttons for their self-absorbed, self-conscious fears of not being ‘cool.’

Rather than seek salvation from predatory environments, they stay; they participate; more importantly, they create more predatory environments of their own. Mark and Eduardo seem doomed to be the same people they were before Facebook became their lives -- Mark, the lonely detached destructive workaholic and Eduardo, the trusting honest duped friend. How can it be that after 500 million friends and $25 billion that they have earned nothing and are still hoping for the same thing: acceptance?

Yet Aaron Sorkin has a masterful way of glamorizing the nonstop drudgery of long hours spent being religiously devoted to a cause. Whether it was in The West Wing, Sportsnight, A Few Good Men, An American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, or now in The Social Network, Sorkin characters are always the epitome of dedication. They maniacally lose themselves in their work. They sacrifice friends, marriages, and stable relationships for their careers.

Typically, their persistence is rewarded with achievement and reassurance that the world is a better place because of them. There’s an undeniable sense of optimism running through Sorkin’s entire oeuvre. Morose subjects like disillusionment and death are treated sincerely but tinged with passionate idealism. There is suffering in his fictive world, but the grim reality is always kept at arm’s length and dramatic conceits are surrounded by moments of levity. 

But in The Social Network, David Fincher manages to let Sorkin’s acerbically witty dialogue convey the mood but his darker, dystopian vision tempers provides a strong counterweight to balance the overall tone. The cinematic grandstanding of Panic Room and Fight Club are gone, but their washed out palettes remain; even California looks depressingly suburban and overcast.  We see a world of dark reds, browns, and earth tones that matches the documentary-like detail of  Zodiac. In an expressionistic touch, the environments reflect the character’s internal states. Despite all the talk about final clubs, colleges, and parties, we never get indications visually that these are places we want to be or people we want to know; instead, they are “wired in” to a digital interface but disconnected from school, family, friends, and life.  

In standard Sorkin fashion, the characters struggle to balance personal and professional lives and wind up with an uncomfortable, unsatisfying mixture of the two. Therefore, it is somewhat fitting that we see people who sacrifice social lives for a social network. With the brilliant final shot of a pitiful Zuckerberg compulsively reloading the page hoping for virtual acceptance from a real lost friend, the film declares that it wasn’t worth the payoff. It is a significant movie about insignificant people.