Review: The Social Network

Spoiler Alert: I will be discussing a number of plot points below. If you have yet to see the film and wish to go in fresh, proceed with caution!

As I am sure you have heard, The Social Network is an excellent film. I am not here to dispute that. Adapted from Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (2009), The Social Network tells the story of Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg’s creating of Facebook in 2004 and the subsequent legal battles he fought for its ownership. Director David Fincher of Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac fame did an amazing job per usual, crafting a tailored picture that couldn’t have told the tale better, and writer Aaron Zorkin’s dialogue was particularly phenomenal. Like I said, I have no quibbles with the quality of the filmmaking. What I do take issue with, however, is the film’s ideological representation of gender difference.

The world that The Social Network depicts is one in which men are brilliant geniuses, entrepreneurs and Olympic athletes while women, for the most part, are simply hot or not hot. The film opens with a rapid fire conversation at a Cambridge pub between Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and then girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), the latter of which proceeds to break-up with the former, calling him an asshole for his classist attitude towards her and her education and storming out. Zuckberg proceeds to get drunk back in his dorm room, blog about her elusively small breasts and create Facemash, a Harvard webpage where male coeds can vote on the attractiveness of female coeds when paired one versus another, essentially Kittenwar! but with female classmates (and I thought Kittenwar! was cruel). Before long comes Facebook, the social networking website, which, first exclusive to Harvard students and then other college students (and now everybody), would provide a new means of communicating and connecting with friends, colleagues and associates. Although far more complex, the project stemmed from a similar conception of simplistic interfacing, and, according to the film, was concurrently provoked to get back at the same ex of whom the protagonist cannot forget.

After saying goodbye to Erica and hello to Facebook fame, all the women to appear in Zuckerberg’s life via the film are there solely to pump he and his friends’ egos. Alice (Malese Jow) and Christy (Brenda Song), two attractive–and don’t forget Asian (a reoccurring fetish of the film)–coeds, without second thought quickly become sexual automatons, giving Zuckerberg and his best friend and Facebook CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) blowjobs in adjacent bathroom stalls, respectively, within hours of meeting the two. While Alice drops out of the film seconds later when Zuckerberg spots Erica at a table in the pub, the bathroom of which he just received oral sex, and crosses the room to confront her, Christy becomes Educardo’s semi-long-term girlfriend. Jealous and controlling, Christy quickly evolves into a classic femme fatale, accosting Eduardo as to his unchanged Facebook relationship status and lighting a gift of his on fire when his answers fail to meet her standards. Later, Zuckerberg, out on the town with Napstar co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), once again meets two stereotypically attractive Asian women, both of which in this case are supposed Victoria’s Secret models. While Zuckerberg, save the early blowjob scene, does not participate in the sexual and drug-related shenanigans that surround him, he is nonetheless just that, insulated within a subsection of the populace that commands young women to do bong hits till they’re high out of their minds and unbutton their blouses for others to do body lines of coke. He voices concern only once and then does so purely because the company’s reputation is at risk.

Previously, I have argued that in some cases representations of sexism and racism can serve as political critiques of the mistreatment they depict. One could claim that Zuckerberg and his peers’ objectifying of women and fetishization of Asian women in particular is presented in the film as in poor taste. The film is by no means casting Zuckerberg, never mind Parker, as an innocent angel. But in the end one must ask: are these trysts etc. depicted as deplorable or as typical and tolerable 20-something boy behavior?  My intuition says it’s the latter.

While it is ambiguous as to whether Zuckerberg came up with the idea of Facebook on his own or whether he took advantage of three other students’ proposition, the film makes it clear that the site’s eventual manifestation and success are, for the most part, due to his achievements as a programming mastermind. The financial and social rewards he receives for such work thus appear apropos. He is a complex protagonist with real character flaws, but these just make him all the more loveable. The scripting of Christy, Alice and other unnamed female characters, on the other hand, lack depth, sincerity and seriousness in their rendering. The two exceptions to the rule are Erica, “the one who got away,” and Marilyn, a law associate representing Facebook on whom Zuckerberg’s attention falls at the close of the film. Serving structurally as bookends to the picture, these two smart, witty and brutally honest brunettes are the two characters who truly give it straight to Zuckerberg and thus peak both his intellectual and erotic interest. Erica opens the film telling him to his face that he is an asshole, and Marilyn closes it by calling his bluff, stating that it’s not so much that he’s an asshole as that he’s trying so hard to be one. While these two women do provide breaths of fresh air in the film (in contrast to the metaphorical filth that fills the central 115 minutes), they essential come to form the quintessential paradigm of virgin/whore or unattainable/too easily attainable when paired with the other women that are highlighted across the film. They exist, for all reasonable purposes, purely as feminine ideals, out of reach to even those men as great as Mark Zuckerberg.

The Social Network trailer

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