This is evident from the film’s very first scene, wherein eventual Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, terrific) and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) go from casually having a drink to fighting to breaking up over the span of seven or so minutes. The way Zuckerberg reacts to being dumped reveals the utter contempt he has for Erica even as he’s trying to continue sleeping with her. The scene itself is magnificent, one of the best openings I’ve seen in a long time (and all the more remarkable for only featuring two actors sitting across from each other having a conversation). But aside from being terrifically well-constructed and entertaining, it tells the audience everything they need to know about Mark Zuckerberg. He wants to get noticed. He wants people to pay attention to him. But at the same time he thinks just about everyone else is beneath him, especially the girl sitting across from him.
That bit of misogyny (among others) has prompted some critics to attack the film as being anti-feminist, citing as evidence the fact that there are only a handful of female characters in the film and that of those handful, almost all of them are bimbos, sluts, bitches or some combination of the three. That’s true, of course, but that’s the point. This is how the male characters in The Social Network see women. To Mark Zuckerberg and the people in his orbit, women are objects to be either scorned or desired, sometimes at the same time. They aren’t people; they’re commodities, something to be conquered or won. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, perfectly cast) says, while sitting next to his Victoria’s Secret model girlfriend, that he created Napster because he wanted to impress a girl. The film posits that Zuckerberg started on the road to Facebook because a girl broke up with him. These characters don’t see the women around them as equals. To them, women just aren’t on their level. And the film reflects that in a way shoehorning in a bunch of strong female characters couldn’t.
The scene where the Winklevoss twins (referred to by Zuckerberg as the Winklevii) meet with Harvard president Larry Summers is particularly revealing in this regard. The scene is, first of all, notable for featuring a woman who doesn’t conform to any particular stereotype. This is really the only scene (aside from the various deposition scenes) that takes place outside the social bubble these guys live in. That it features a smart, capable woman is no accident. That said, the scene itself isn’t all that important to the story The Social Network is telling. The Winklevosses go to the president of the university and ask him to do something about Zuckerberg possibly stealing their website idea. Summers says, ‘No.’ End of scene. That could’ve been handled in a couple lines of dialogue or dispensed with altogether and no one would’ve missed it.
But Sorkin and Fincher wanted to include Summers in the film because it allowed them to indirectly reference the fact that Summers would lose his job a couple years after the events depicted in this film for positing that the lack of women in the upper echelons of the sciences might owe to a lack of physical ability inherent to their gender. His presence in the film thus becomes vital, asking the audience to consider how entrenched and pervasive this negative view of women really is. If even the president of the university thinks women are less mentally capable than men, is it any surprise that attitude is also expressed by the students?
Besides their negative attitudes towards women, the other characteristic that unites the young men of The Social Network is their lust for recognition. You can’t imagine any of these guys doing anything anonymously. They want the whole world to pay attention to whatever they do. They want to be important, recognized as the first and the best, and they’ll do whatever they have to to achieve that. Basically, they think everyone should pay attention to them and if they have to behave like assholes for that to happen, then so be it.
As the central character of the film, it’s no surprise that Zuckerberg is the biggest and most self-centered asshole. He’s sort of king among assholes. The only thing that matters to him is proving that his outrageously inflated ego is justified. Even when he crashes the Harvard network with his nasty, vindictive website (that asked users to rank female students based solely on appearance), he wants the Administrative Board to give him some recognition for pointing out the holes in their security. When he wants the Boston University newspaper to write a story about Facebook, he tells his friend to offer them ten free hours of programming from Mark Zuckerberg, as if his time is so precious people will do anything to get it. He doesn’t care what’s going on with anyone else or what they might be going through. He’s all that matters. He’s the ultimate self-centered asshole in a film full of them.
Loathe as I am to make any sort of argument for The Social Network being the defining film of a generation, I do think it paints a fairly devastating picture of the sense of entitlement this generation has. Zuckerberg, the Winklevoss twins and their fellow students behave as if the world owes them something, as if they should be rewarded just for showing up. And when they aren’t, they get all pissed off, write angry blog posts, sue each other and break things. That the world doesn’t just hand you success is something the characters in this film have a hard time accepting. And in that regard (and only that regard), I think it’s an accurate depiction of this generation. All the stuff about social networking and the ways the digital world is changing how people interact is just backdrop and context. The film has nothing in particular to say about it except that it’s a fact of life and isn’t going away any time soon. To try and turn The Social Network into some kind of treatise on the new ways in which we communicate is a bit of stretch and feels a little critics trying to justify why they love a movie about such complete assholes.
And yet, despite the fact that everyone in this film is an asshole, it still remains enjoyable to watch. That’s a testament to the level of talent at work here. It’s almost embarrassing how talented everyone involved with this film is, whether they’re behind the camera or in front of it. The film is just spectacularly well made. As a fan of David Fincher, I’d like to give him all the credit, but I think here it owes almost as much to Aaron Sorkin’s script and the generally terrific performances. All these extremely capable people working at the top of their game is why, for me at least, the film is compelling even though it features almost no likeable characters. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if other people just couldn’t stand watching such terrible people.
Though the first scene of The Social Network is clearly its most impressive, the last scene is its most remarkable. It’s striking because it manages-- even after two plus hours of showing the audience how much of a dick Zuckerberg is-- to make the viewer feel a little sad for him. Lacking a real world climax on which to close the film (Facebook is, of course, still going strong), Sorkin and Fincher instead create a bookend scene that nicely mirrors the film's opening. In that first scene, Zuckerberg was unable to convince his girlfriend to stay with him when they were sitting across from each other in a bar. In the last scene, he’s unable to get her to accept his Facebook friend request. In the first scene, he’s being rejected in person. In the last, he’s being rejected in cyberspace. Different means of communication, same outcome. It’s a clever way of saying that as much as Zuckerberg might feel that he’s changed the world, it’s basically still the same place, a place where girls like Erica just don’t care about guys like Mark.
Zuckerberg’s stated goal in making The Facebook (as it was originally called) was to take the social aspects of college and move them online where he and the guys like him would be the final club members or fraternity presidents, the cool guys who ran things. The social aspects of life frustrated and angered them, so they decided to remake the world so that these interactions would take place on-line, a place they felt supremely comfortable. Leaving aside the massive hubris in presuming they could change the world, the fact is they did. They moved much of what had taken place face to face on-line. But, as evidenced by that last scene in which Zuckerberg waits anxiously for his request to be accepted, they prove to be no better equipped to deal with this new social order than they were with the previous one. They changed the world only to find that it’s more or less the same. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebeook to impress a girl, and twenty-five billion dollars and five hundred million users later she’s still not impressed
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