The Social Network: The Man Who Sold the World

Since the advent of Facebook.com, the term “friend” has experienced an over-saturation not unlike what the word “love” has experienced since the 1960s.  It's nothing new to muse that this social media website connects us while at the same time denying us true intimacy, but a question might be raised about our intent: are we lost souls reaching out to one another through the cyber-sphere, longing for a meaningful connection we can never quite grasp?  Or are we hungry little capitalists in a masturbatory rat race, competing for popularity as a currency now easily quantifiable in little blue numbers?

This existential quandary is applied to one figure in The Social Network: a fictionalized version of the creator of Faceook himself, Mark Zuckerberg, as depicted by Jesse Eisenberg, written by Aaron Sorkinberg and expertly directed by none other than David Fincherberg.  The narrative of this Zuckerberg's life is, perhaps in parallel with the story of Facebook itself, one of a journey from failed search for real human connection to a successful accumulation of fortune and fame.  There are a couple of ways in which to trace this gradual transformation of Zuckerberg, through the film's relentless use of parallels.

First, there are the bookends of the movie, exemplified by the two most significant female characters – both of whom serve to function less as actual characters, and more as a mouthpiece for Zuckerberg's insecurities (Sorkin wisely toned down his attempts to write actual female characters in this script, perhaps on some level recognizing his greatest weakness as a writer).  At the beginning, Rooney Mara's fictional Erica Albright gets fed up with Zuckerberg's neurotic obsession with impressing the pretentious members of prestigious and exclusive “final clubs”.  Erica attends BU while Zuckerberg attends Harvard, and the gradual creep of Zuckerberg's sense of superiority, taking for granted that he is simply “better” than Erica, is what undoes the relationship.

So Erica utters the line that laid waste to all the social-conditioning groundwork of the John Hughes film era: Zuckerberg is not unsuccessful with women because he's a nerd, but because he's an asshole.  Now single and angry, and being the nerd and not an asshole that he is, Zuckerberg returns to his dorm, drunk-blogs about Erica's small breasts, and sets up a then-novel website in which images of the sorority girls of Harvard can be ranked against each other in terms of attractiveness by the male students.  It's an absurd overnight success, naturally – it's not hard to see why David “people are perverts” Fincher would gravitate towards this screenplay – and with it, Zuckerberg lays the foundation for his eventual internet empire.  One website, two lawsuits and billions of dollars later, Rashida Jones' lawyer character turns him down for a date, even though he is so rich and famous, and subverts Erica Albright's line from the beginning: Zuckerberg is not really an asshole, he's just trying to be one.  In a sense, both thesis and conclusion are true.  It's a matter of perspective.

This brings us to another parallel in the film, probably the most central one, in the form of Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker, the respective angel and devil on Zuckerberg's shoulders.  At the beginning of the film we only get the contrast between Zuckerberg and Eduardo – the former being almost robotically single-minded in his ambition while the latter supports him eagerly out of friendship.  The red flags are present right from the beginning.  Eduardo talks to Zuckerberg like a good friend, while Zuckerberg's treatment of Eduardo consists mostly of gaslighting him with regards to his intelligence and general value as a person, then asking him for startup money.  It's almost impossible not to anticipate Zuckerberg eventually discarding Eduardo like an empty bottle of Mountain Dew after a long night of coding.

The way in which this betrayal manifests, though, is undeniably cruel.  Zuckerberg abandons Eduardo not for a more serious financier, and not even because of his own self-obsessed mentality.  He ditches Eduardo for Sean Parker, the broke, drug-addled founder of Napster, purely because of Sean's pseudo-celebrity.  Eduardo is the neglected nice-guy nerd Zuckerberg thought he was, and he trades him out for the asshole he's trying to be.

Mark's hunger for success is apparent, right from the beginning.  He harbors a deep, angry desire to prove himself to people, not for their approval, but for their envy.  It flares up after his rejection by Erica, and ultimately leads him to become the world's youngest billionaire.  But the source of his downfall, if an intangible one, is that as much as he wants to pursue the concept of success, he has no idea what it truly looks like.  It's easy to see success in terms of numbers, but how should it feel and behave?  When Zuckerberg meets Sean Parker, he thinks he's seen it.  A website-founding rock star who parties and fucks all the time.

Here contrast Zuckerberg with the Winklevoss twins, whose plan for a Harvard-exclusive social media website is swept from under them and turned into Facebook, certainly more than they could have hoped to accomplish.  Where Zuckerberg is constantly grasping for a model off of which to base his image of success, the Winklevi were evidently born with one, passed down from their father and probably many generations before.  They were on a streamlined track to a very specific definition of what success means, and Zuckerberg delights in tearing down that framework.

Zuckerberg, of course, is horribly wrong when it comes to his own personal aspirations.  Sean Parker was no precedent to him.  As portrayed in the film he's a paranoid, coked-out douchebag who finds fleeting success purely based on maintaining a framed persona and can't hold onto his money.  He is nothing but the image he projects, an image that seduces Zuckerberg while inevitably setting him up for disillusionment.  So Zuckerberg winds up losing his only friend, Eduardo, and then losing his idealized image of Sean as a frame of reference for how that money should affect him.  The same geeky malcontent from the beginning of the film now sits atop a pile of gold coins, and he is lonely.

Why did you start using Facebook?  Probably, you heard a friend mention theirs or recommend it to you.  Maybe you created your account to keep in touch with them.  But as Facebook grew, so did your relationship with it.  The function of staying connected to friends might have become an afterthought.  Maybe you found the feeling of validation intoxicating when dozens of people pressed the Like button on something you posted.  Maybe it became a landscape in which to posture yourself as a person of value through this simple, quantifiable social capital.

The fictional Zuckerberg is not exactly a Citizen Kane or a Daniel Plainview.  The story of a man giving up interpersonal relationships in pursuit of fortune is an antiquated one in our times.  The oil and the gold has all been mined up and monopolized.  One resource which will never be depleted, as long as the human race exists, is attention.  It's the perfect currency.  It feels good to receive, and now, as YouTube celebrities make their fortune attracting views on their videos, its value is tangible as well.  But maybe as the latter becomes increasingly true, the former will become less so.  Maybe when we all become too caught up in seeking the largest quantity of attention, we will lose sight of what gives it quality.  As the final scene of the film suggests, to Zuckerberg billions of dollars may never fill the absence left by a single Erica Albright.

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"Eye in the Sky" and the 21st Century Fog of War

SPOILERS AHEAD:
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Last year “Inside Out”, Pixar's latest big hit in the world of children's animation, mined critical and financial success out of a novel high concept: what if we went inside our protagonist's head, and focused on the subconscious drives and emotions behind her choices as characters themselves?  It's a pleasing idea with a lot of potential, turning the average human being into a Megazord of sorts, with colorful figures like Joy, Sadness and Anger voicing their perspectives, conflicting over who will ultimately influence the main character's external decision.

This year, the most timely war movie of the 2010s was released.  Gavin Hood's “Eye in the Sky” finally answered the question of how to update this genre with the onset of drone warfare.  The filmmakers' answer was not to resist the drone, but to accept it as a new norm.  The resulting film, painstakingly documenting the process of the decisions that go into a drone strike, is not too far off from Pixar's aforementioned concept.

The “tough call” is a staple of the war movie.  It's a genre almost defined by its images of hard-eyed men confronting dilemmas of uncertainty, of equally unpleasant options, and deciding, typically with action rather than inaction.  In these films, the decisions occupy the seconds, maybe minutes, of screentime between the introduction of the choice, and the grunt's decision.  Sometimes this results in a horrible mistake, forcing the soldier to confront his own complicity in the brutality of war.  Sometimes it is simply taken as a necessary action in the face of the fog of war.  But these types of decisions are always condensed to individual set pieces, leaving the focus on the decision-makers face and trigger finger to let viewers fill in the conflicting voices inside his head.  Picture the fictionalized Chris Kyle in the scene which served as “American Sniper”'s trailer.

“Eye in the Sky” takes these voices and makes them tangible.  The film does not literally show us the different colorful characters arguing inside a soldier's head, but rather, shows us the bureaucratic network of government officials, from multiple countries, whose back-and-forth in the external world ultimately decides whether or not the trigger will be pulled to launch a destructive missile thousands of miles away, leveling a building and blasting fiery debris into the surrounding streets.

The first of these voices we meet is Helen Mirren's Colonel Katherine Powell, a staunch, calculating realist whose efficient quantification of human life into simple numbers, while jarring, is hard to argue with in any terms outside of pathos.  This soldier's callousness is showcased in the initial conflict of the first act.  Powell is spearheading a mission to capture a UK national turned high-ranking Al Shabaab member when a robot spy beetle sent into the target's safehouse – the kind of shit you would see in a James Bond or sci-fi movie twenty years ago – locates two potential suicide bombers with loads of explosives in another room.  Powell instantaneously changes her mission from “capture” to “kill” via drone strike.  Ready to authorize the strike is Alan Rickman's General Benson, surrounded by a less-enthusiastic cabinet of bureaucrats, who are reluctant to bomb a building containing a UK citizen and another US citizen, terrorists though they may be.  In light of what we see inside the building, these arguments seem almost superfluous, and I was surprised at how firmly the film seemed to land in Powell's corner during this early stretch.

But of course, this is all purposeful.  By the time Jeremy Northam's minister refers up (the first of many such actions throughout the film) and the US Secretary of State is contacted, perhaps the rest of the audience was feeling as fatigued as I was, relating most directly to General Benson's weariness at the tedious bureaucracy surrounding the pulling of a single trigger.  This made it especially jarring when the US Secretary gave his input – Powell has all the necessary permissions to launch, and the question is waste of his time.  He quickly hangs up, gives the phone back to his startled assistant, and enthusiastically resumes his game of ping pong like the conversation never happened.  Here, finally, is a bureaucrat who agrees with me, how obvious it is that action must be taken.  And yet, this approval from above is the film's first direct hint that it will not be so staunchly pro-strike for the rest of its runtime.  As frustrating it was to see the bureaucrats surrounding Benson argue against the strike, this was another thing entirely.  Monica Dolan's Angela Northman, the most vocal anti-strike advocate in Benson's cabinet, serves as an antagonist for this first stretch because she insists on a non-violent resolution without knowing first-hand about the tactics she's dealing with.  But here we see the US secretary, a man even further separated from the first-hand perspective, thoughtlessly declaring a death sentence on the targets.  Naivety as a villain is suddenly overtaken by inhumanity.

Sure enough, shortly after the US secretary provides us with his jarring two cents and Powell gets her go-ahead, the film's real, central conflict emerges.  A local young girl named Alia sets up shop on a vacant table, selling bread just feet away from the target structure.  Alia is an almost hamfisted plot device, though the film effectively buffers this cynical interpretation through intimate scenes of the girl with her family, learning math and playing with a hula hoop in secret, resisting the repressive influence of the “fanatics” her father describes living outside the walls of their home.  Nobody in the film wants Alia to die.  In fact, the only character who is willing to allow it without significant moral qualms is our erstwhile protagonist, Colonel Powell.

From this point on, the decision to launch or not launch grows increasingly fraught and crowded with arguments.  Steve Watts, the drone pilot (Aaron Paul, wisely cast after five years of experience grappling painfully with the immorality of seemingly utilitarian violence on Breaking Bad), has never launched a strike before, and refuses to pull the trigger unless he knows Alia has a solid chance of survival.  Powell does her best to bend the truth around this subject, because she has done the math, and is willing to sacrifice Alia to save dozens of potential future victims of a suicide bombing.

 Another bureaucrat in Benson's cabinet throws us a curve ball – if Alia is killed, Al Shabaab wins the propaganda war, whereas 80 deaths by suicide bomb will further villanize them.  Here even Powell's calculated quantification of human life is outmatched in terms of callousness, and Alia's survival is twisted even further into that of a pawn in the chess game of public relations.  For her part, Angela Northman's anti-violence position is unchanged, and even bolstered by the new circumstances – it may be a coincidence that she and Powell, the two most significant female players in the decision, are also the two who adhere to their respective, polar-opposite stances through thick and thin.

In contrast is Iain Glen's British Foreign Secretary, the most significant Pontius Pilate figure in a movie chock full of them.  He is the one who first refers up to the US Secretary of State, at the time with the reasonable excuse of food poisoning affecting his decision-making capacities.  He emerges from the bathroom later on, declaring that he feels better, and comes face to face with the Alia situation.  He looks at the live footage, hears the arguments of all parties involved, and makes the clear-headed decision to make no decision, and refer up yet again.

Ultimately, this was a film with four possible endings.  One: the strike is carried out, and Alia is killed.  Two: the strike is carried out, and Alia survives.  Three: the strike is called off, and the suicide bombers kill a market full of people.  Four: the strike, is called off, and military forces stop the suicide bombers in time.

Of these four options, the even numbers must immediately be tossed out by any storyteller with a spine.  To launch the strike without the casualty promised would be to immediately justify Powell's perspective as universally right, and toss out all the moral doubt raised by the situation, particularly by Watts.  And to stop the suicide bombers without a drone strike would demonize Powell and elevate Watts and Northman to crusading heroes.  In short, they would be miraculous Hollywood endings, each serving some hamfisted political agenda.

This leaves us with one of two options: Alia dies outside that house, or dozens of other innocents die in a market an hour later.  And of these two, only one could really end the film that had been playing out up to that point.  Earlier in this review, I described Alia as a plot device.  And to an extent that is true, in the way she throws a wrench into the planned drone strike.  However, when the film ends with her dying in said drone strike, she is elevated from that position.  Alia is the point of the film, a child sacrificed in a calculated decision after calculated deliberation by numerous adults.

We could have seen Alia go home and solve the math problems she was struggling with, while miles away Al Shabaab massacred dozens of other innocents.  But we had not just spent two hours with dozens of innocents, we spent them with Alia.  To spare her would let us feel a little bit positive about a decision that let many die.  Instead, we are left with an ending that leaves us with nothing but an intangible positive impact, an estimated number of potential Al Shabaab victims saved by the action, while we watch the very tangible Alia expire in a hospital.

So the strike killing Alia while successfully wiping out its targets is the only ending this film could have, because of its thesis: For all of the layered, careful, bureaucratic legal deliberation that goes into every action in surveillance-state warfare of the 21st century, the answers to difficult wartime questions are made no clearer.  The only man who gets to walk away without blood on his hands is the man on the ground, Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi), an almost classical hero in the midst of the murky ethical deliberation, who is only concerned with getting reliable intel and trying to get Alia out of the blast radius.  While he is the only character whose life is in danger, he is also the only character whose conscience is not.

Everyone else might as well have been inside a single soldier's head while he decides whether to take a risky shot, for all the moral clarity they got from the facts from their advanced intel-gathering technology, and all the legal and political context their quick access to higher authorities, provided them.  We live in a world where the military has access to supremely powerful technology, and simply has to decide what to do with it.  The modern fog of war is not a logistical one, but an ethical one.  It would almost have been cleaner if pilot Watts had to just make the call himself.  Instead, the reverberations of the choice echo up through an entire ensemble.  In the modern era, it takes a village to kill a child.