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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