Conflicted Appetites: ‘The Social Network’ (2010)
This Mark character sure likes to talk. He likes to talk in a snappy and condescending manner, everything sped-up and supercilious. At the bar where we meet him, he asks his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), why she has to leave the bar and study — after all, she goes to BU. (Mark, you see, goes to Harvard.) And he brags about his perfect SAT score. He also lusts to be accepted into one of Harvard’s elite final clubs. By the end of this conversation, Erica will no longer be Mark’s girlfriend. Mark will go back to his dorm room, super-pissed, and begin coding a site to dominate the world. If this fast-talking, insufferable braggart did not exist, Aaron Sorkin would have to invent him.
Of course, Aaron Sorkin did invent Mark, although he’s based on a real person also named Mark, who has the last name of Zuckerberg. This person will hereafter be referred to as “Zuckerberg,” while the man on screen will be referred to as “Mark.” There are some well-known differences between the two, and some of those differences will be acknowledged in this essay. The differences have been acknowledged by Sorkin, The Social Network’s screenwriter, as well as by David Fincher, its director, and they do little to detract from the general veracity of the story.
Right now I want to talk about what happens when Mark leaves the bar alone. He runs through Harvard Square back to his dorm room, and it is not a brief scene. This is such a bravura move because Sorkin and Fincher had no time to waste. Given 120 minutes by the studio, not a minute longer, this wordless sequence is how they chose to use nearly three of them.
The dialogue is so rapid-fire, in that opening scene and elsewhere, not just because it had been Sorkinized, but because of the strict orders by Sony Pictures to keep the movie to two hours. The script was 166 pages long. When the studio expressed their concerns to Fincher before shooting began, Fincher recalled, “Aaron and I went back to my office and I took out my little iPhone and set it down and put the little stopwatch on and said, ‘Start reading.’” An hour and 49 minutes later, Sorkin was done.
Fincher brought the studio the news, but they were still skeptical (“You’re crazy,” is Fincher’s version), but Fincher assured them, “If we do it the way that Aaron just spoke it, it’ll be two hours. It’s up to me to have dialogue that pre-laps scenes, and to be able to establish places as quickly as possible.”
Fincher himself wasn’t entirely convinced until later, when he saw a video clip of Jesse Eisenberg auditioning as Mark, and “it was the first time I said, ‘We’re gonna be under two hours!’ He can just flat-out fly. And you can see in his eyes that he is searching for the best way to articulate something in the middle of articulating two other things; he’s processing where he’s going.”
So when this virtuoso opening scene of Eisenberg’s and Mara’s dialogue is finished, it’s followed by Mark’s lengthy walk-run across Harvard Yard back to his dorm room — a balls-out lengthy set piece that even in a more leisurely movie would qualify as a longueur.
But the scene serves a purpose, because it lets us see Mark stew and simmer as he angrily plots his revenge. It gives us time to feel what he’s feeling, and anticipate what he’s anticipating, as he moves to create a website to humiliate the female student body (and faces) of Harvard.
The scene’s mood-building is given a big assist by Trent Reznor’s score. Fincher knew Reznor was his man once he decided
that the synthesizer would be the perfect instrument for the world of the Internet — the hum of it, the drone of it, the pneumatics and the booting up, all this stuff with these weird sounds….It’s that kind of dead, irradiating feeling that you have, and I thought that the only guy I knew who could get that and understand synthesizers and make them operatic — and also understand the horniness of being the dweeb outsider — was Trent Reznor.
Famed frontman of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor had done film scores before, has done plenty since, and his knack for the form is certainly demonstrated here, eerie and premonitory in just the way Fincher first heard it in his head. In this early scene, the synth is accompanied by piano, both melancholy and menacing, and when you watch it for the first time, you’re left with no doubt that this gang of talent is going to do the seemingly impossible: make profound cinematic drama out of the Internet.
Sorkin would tell you, as he’s told so many, that The Social Network isn’t about the Internet, at least in his eyes. It’s about “friendship, loyalty, power, betrayal, class, jealousy — all these things that Aeschylus would have written about, that Shakespeare would have written about, a few decades ago Paddy Chayefsky would have written about. I was just lucky none of those guys were available, so I got to write about it.”
Of course it’s about all those things, but Sorkin himself would have to acknowledge that, at bottom, the movie has an identifiable subject, and that that subject is an Internet entity known as Facebook. We all know Facebook. You may have found this very essay through Facebook. You almost certainly have a profile there — some 2.6 billion of us do. Still, the tagline for the movie remains “You Don’t Get To 500 Million Friends Without Making a Few Enemies,” because the movie takes place in those earlier, less prosperous days. Facebook, at the start of our story, has just become a global behemoth, and two separate parties — the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin — are in a room with Mark and the lawyers giving deposition testimony that Mark has stolen their idea. Most of the action comes in the form of flashbacks prompted by these depositions.
We might chortle now at the days when Facebook had a sixth of its current followers and was being touted as an empire, but the real joke in the tagline, subtextually, is that this least sociable of people, this Mark, created the biggest social network of all time. (“And this guy doesn’t have three friends to rub together to make a fourth,” says the Winklevosses’ friend and partner when they learn that Mark has gone ahead and made a facebook without them.)
It’s Mark’s antisocial tendencies that serve as the very impetus and inspiration for Facebook, his unlikability that compels him to create a website that — if we can leave the frame of the film for a moment — refuses to feature a Dislike button to go along with its ubiquitous, world-famous Like button.
Fincher was initially worried that Eisenberg was too likeable to play Mark. He’d seen him in The Squid and the Whale (2005) and The Education of Charlie Banks (2007), and “felt I knew who Jesse was.” He also “felt that there was something about” — a pause — “his sweetness that I thought we could do without.” Fincher here gives a chuckle over the director’s-commentary track before continuing: “Not to say that Zuckerberg isn’t sweet, because I think, in some of the videotapes I’ve seen of him, he’s, you know, gregarious and charming. But I…was looking for somebody who could just come out of the gates and be relentlessly who he is.”
(Much later on in the commentary track, Fincher talks about the courage it takes for an actor to “be that guy,” because so many actors just want to be liked. And now Eisenberg regularly appears as Lex Luthor in the DC Comics movies, an opportunity that The Social Network surely opened the way to.)
Eisenberg had some concerns of his own. He was worried that playing this dialogue would rekindle his own neurotic tendencies — the very tendencies, the very neuroses, from which acting had first served as his escape in high school. And it wasn’t just Eisenberg whose least desirable characteristics were encouraged by this dialogue. At least one critic has written very eloquently of how The Social Network is “the rare example where Sorkin’s tendency for writing witty, whiny men with outsized intellect and poorly disguised narcissism serves as an advantage instead of a handicap.”
Of course, that doesn’t make the movie any more accurate. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wondered aloud “if the real-life Zuckerberg has ever physically said as many words as this in his entire life.” That’s pretty funny, accustomed as we are now to the stiff truculence, the defiant reticence, of Mark Zuckerberg the embattled public figure. To see him as a way-too-talkative embattled private figure is a little hard to reconcile.
Some of The Social Network is like that, and that’s okay. Most of its historical tamperings are inconsequential. For instance, Zuckerberg, unlike Mark, did in fact pick Eduardo up from the airport when he first arrived to stay at the house in California. And the Winklevoss twins did in fact have relaxed senses of humor. (They reportedly love the movie — they always have — and their one complaint about it seems to be that they do not in real life wear earmuffs.) And Sean Parker didn’t discover Facebook by checking his e-mail on the computer of a one-night stand, as depicted in the movie, but was told about it by the girlfriend of a roommate.
Fincher’s take on the Eduardo/Mark relationship is particularly nuanced, believing as he does that “they both betray each other — I never saw it as cut and dried as Mark pulling the rug out from under Eduardo [Andrew Garfield]. I believe that Eduardo has a failure of imagination. He can’t imagine that this thing could ever become anything or become profitable if he doesn’t sell advertising, and I think that was the crux of their fork in the road. That’s Eduardo’s failure of imagination.” The photo below shows Mark and Eduardo (along with Eduardo’s girlfriend, Christy, played by the stunning Brenda Song) before their initial meeting with Parker. They’re arguing — Mark against advertising just yet, Eduardo for. Meanwhile, neither of them is ordering food; both are going hungry for their conflicted appetites.
Although he was forced out of the company, Saverin, as a result of the lawsuit depicted in the movie — or one of the two lawsuits — came away with five percent of the company’s many billions, and, according to Steven Levy in his terrific history of the company, “forced Facebook to permanently confirm in its official annals that he was a co-founder.
He also enlisted an author [Ben Mezrich] to write a story about the betrayal from his point of view, with a movie — that movie — in production even before the book publication [of The Accidental Billionaires]. Saverin decamped to Singapore, reportedly for tax advantages, and is now known less for what he did or did not do for Facebook than for being the real-life character portrayed by a movie star in The Social Network.
If Saverin and Zuckerberg eventually reached a fork in the road, then the Winklevoss twins, according to Fincher, “never got out of the merge lane.” Still, one reason they may be laughing today is that they received from Zuckerberg — as a result of the other lawsuit that frames The Social Network — a settlement worth some $65 million. No doubt contributing to this settlement was an instant message Zuckerberg sent to a friend in which he wrote, “Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake ha ha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.” After “the facebook thing” came out, Zuckerberg wrote another IM, in which he bragged that he’s “going to fuck them, probably in the ear.” (Actually he wrote “year,” but we’ve all been there.) As Mark’s ex-girlfriend admonishes him in The Social Network, “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.” Anyone pissed off at the permanent nature of their own Facebook posts can take cold comfort in the knowledge that Zuckerberg himself has been embarrassed by the Internet’s same permanent ink.
What compounds all these ironies is that Facebook, in the beginning, was quite vigilant about protecting its users’ privacy. Privacy, in fact, was “the defining characteristic” of the site when it started in 2004, according to Levy. Back then it was called Thefacebook, and was only available to people with a valid harvard.edu address.
This way, Zuckerberg “ensured that people would be interacting on the site with their real identities, a built-in safeguard against misbehavior.” You could also control who saw what. All of this, Levy writes, means that “Thefacebook offered more privacy than any of the other social networks of its time.” Also, Zuckerberg assured the Harvard Crimson back then, “I’m not going to share anybody’s e-mail address.”
It’s easy to draw the line from there to Cambridge Analytica and marvel at the downward-sloping trajectory. And yet, some of us have found it hard to blame Zuckerberg and Facebook for much of what it’s accused of. Some of us find it hard to feel violated just because we receive ads targeted to our interests rather than ads that have nothing to do with our lives or concerns, even if it means our data is sometimes sold.
Zuckerberg has also been a one-stop source of wealth for opportunistic litigants with little to no proper claim to his hard-earned fortune — what Levy refers to as the “surprisingly large population of people who got enormously rich through Mark Zuckerberg.” Two lawsuits are depicted in the movie, but in reality there were many more to come out of Zuckerberg’s time at Harvard, a large number of them successful. These would comprise “a bonanza for members of multiple bar associations.”
There are two cast members who need to be mentioned for the way they really punch up The Social Network. The first, of course, is Justin Timberlake, who absolutely dazzles as Sean Parker. His soliloquy on the tragic fate of the man who founded Victoria’s Secret and then sold out too soon, and how he committed suicide, and how cold the water is under the Golden Gate Bridge, is a movie monologue for all time, as deep and chilling as the San Francisco waters themselves. Timberlake also does a terrific job communicating the zestful hubris of Parker, whose departure from the company was even more fraught than that depicted in the movie. After the drug bust we see in The Social Network, Zuckerberg would later testify, “I wanted him not to be president anymore,” and, in addition, “he freaked people out.”
“Sean’s hours were so irregular,” one Facebook employee told Levy for his book — and this is a friend of Parker’s, named Ezra Callahan. “You’d go days without seeing him. He was super flaky and unreliable and hard to get ahold of. When you needed him, he’d come in at the eleventh hour and save the day, but you couldn’t rely on this guy for anything.”
The other actor is Rashida Jones. I don’t know if anyone has done more for a movie with less screen time. She plays a junior member of Mark’s legal team named Marilyn, a soothing, nonjudgmental soul who, in a private moment of recess inside the deposition room, acts as kind of a balm to his burning psyche. She comes back from lunch early; Mark hasn’t left — he’s the only one still there.
“You don’t want any lunch?” she says in a friendly, concerned tone, setting her salad on the table.
“No.” Mark continues working the laptop on his literal lap.
“You’re welcome to some salad.”
“No, thank you.”
She tries to engage Mark in some small talk; is successful. Then the talk becomes larger. “You must really hate the Winklevosses,” she says.
“I don’t hate anybody. The Winkelvai’’ — he really leans into the latinized pluralization, as if correcting her — “aren’t suing me for intellectual-property theft. They are suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to for them.”
Marilyn looks at him for a moment, considering this, and then the movie returns to flashback mode (with the Winklevosses incensed that Mark is expanding his social network to colleges throughout the country). Much later, at the movie’s end, it’s nighttime in the deposition room, and Mark is alone at his computer. Marilyn gingerly enters to let him know they’re done for the day. She asks him what ever happened to Sean Parker; he tells her. Then Mark does something really weird — he says, “All you had all day was that salad. You want to get something to eat?”
She shakes her head in a regretful way. “I can’t.”
Mark, clearly disappointed, closes his laptop (it’s actually on the table this time) and says, “I’m not a bad guy.”
This scene is famous because of what happens at the end of it, when Mark sends a Facebook friend request to Erica and then keeps refreshing the page as he waits for her response. (In case we miss the irony, the Beatles are behind him asking how it feels to be one of those beautiful people.) But to me this scene will always be about Mark’s appetite — the way he’s locked in and antisocial, unwilling even to eat during the deposition breaks, and then, after the day’s deposing is done, wants to break bread and open himself up, with somebody who seems like she might really care.
He’s got a conflicted appetite, this Mark. The movie’s most subtly comical scene comes early on, when he’s first invited to meet the Winklevoss twins at their frat house. These guys are everything Mark’s not: rich, good-looking, popular, well-connected, athletic (they row crew), and able to handle themselves with interpersonal ease. They hand Mark a sub sandwich, in the spirit of friendship, and Mark, taken aback by this unexpected token of generosity, doesn’t know what to do with the sandwich, even attempting, briefly, to put it in his hoodie’s front pocket. Come to think of it, maybe Mark’s appetite isn’t so conflicted after all. Maybe he’s just a guy who understands that a little hunger’s good for a person, and you can always eat later, when the timing’s right, even if you have to do so by yourself.
