A night at the movies with facebook

Watching The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher) last night definitely made facebook feel creepy -- not that we needed a movie for that. Of course the creepy feeling is about the history that is drawn in the movie of the site's original central concept being that of exclusivity, rather than privacy, as I'd previously believed. I suppose I was naive to believe that, since I was told that I needed a school address, which struck me as definitely creepy. I didn't make my own profile, it was done for me by some American friends who insisted that this was the only way to stay in touch when we were going back to our respective schools after a summer working together. I could have questioned it more initially, but I was being swept along. And my questioning probably wouldn't have mattered, since even my most politically engaged friends are on the site now.

What the movie didn't do was make fbook founder Mark Zuckerberg seem as creepy as I thought it would from reviews and a New Yorker profile of the man himself that conveyed that he was upset about the movie portrayal. Of course it could be upsetting because you could take it as pretty embarrassing. It shows someone very interested in class status. I think the class aspect is the issue because a lot of people are trying to reach a higher status in some vein, artists, musicians, actors, kids trying to make friends. It's particularly the status of stuff like private Harvard clubs that seems inane and pompous and generally idiotic, to me and presumably to lots of others. The movie has only one voice of reason on this topic: Erika, the B.U. student who breaks up with Mark in the first scene (or maybe technically you'd call it a third scene; the movie's a little spiced up but that's the scene the movie starts on and it's chronologically first).

Other than Erika all the characters are in some way buying into extremely superficial social markers. Then again all - ALL - the other characters are men or boys. In the first half or so of the movie that point is at least made, not by characters but by general thematic highlighting, for instance of the offensiveness of the prettiness comparison game Mark creates that only includes girls' faces. But the later movie was a total let down by Sorkin et al. (he's only a co-writer but he's the only one who's oeuvre I'm familiar with and he generally tries to come off as some kind of feminist which I appreciate even though I don't always like his brand of feminism). The movie stays with all-male action and has pretty girls draped around as accessories, but no longer includes any semblance of commentary about it, which it could so easily have done - or for instance at a minimum shown us one girl programmer, instead of only the female intern at the office whose main job is to have long blond hair and skinny thighs and to do coke at parties. Also, the only girl-accessory in the movie who gets promoted to girlfriend is an insane psycho who sets someone's apartment on fire out of unprovoked jealousy.

Oh wait, there is one other minor girl character whose sole function isn't to provide sex or the anticipation of sex (or say, to be the secretary outside the Harvard president's office). She's a second year associate with Mark's lawyers' firm who sits in on a deposition that is one of the splice-scenes throughout the movie. Her role is completely opaque to me. I'm guessing there was more of her that mostly got cut out in post-production. She offers Mark some of her lunch (at this point we don't know she's with his side and her friendliness looks possibly like a cheap attempt by the other side to get information by luring him into a friendly interaction with a pretty chick). So, she offers lunch, which he refuses, refuses dinner, which he offers, asks a question supposedly as personal curiosity but in fact to tie up a loose end before the credits roll. She also informs him (and us) that he'll be settling the case tomorrow. I don't know why they have her in there. Surely they could have used a simpler device to tell us about the settlements (actually they do use the simpler device, they do that thing that all based on real life movies do where they give each character a little write-up epilogue).

But back to Mark's character. The reasons he doesn't come off as a bad guy are: 1) he seems like he could be fairly high on the autism spectrum, which excuses a fair amount of what would otherwise be very callous and asshole-y behaviour. He has zero intuitive understanding of friendship or courtship. 2) one might, if so inclined, feel that he has some genuine intellectual passion, that if everything else is bitterness and status-seeking, he does at least love the computer and maybe other intellectual pursuits, which I add because he's quite clever conversationally, in a pompous-nerd way. Now, the talky cleverness is something I'm particularly positively disposed towards, so maybe it's biasing me and some of his character rehabilitation is unwarranted. But I think the people who made this movie are also probably biased towards talky cleverness, so I'm inclined to see it as intended positive character drawing. 3) he's motivated by resentments and a desire to be a big man, which is lame, but the thing is, those are not unusual motivations and aren't irredeemably gross as long as they're not your only motivations (which I'm arguing they aren't, see 2) above). The reason they seem so terrible in him is really mostly that he goes after revenge and chest-puffing in such unsophisticated ways, on which see 1) above. He's definitely not suave, but he's not worse than a lot of porsche-driving dopes. 4) beyond an initial mistake with the girl-rating site, which is gross but forgivable because he's so young and stupid when it happens, the movie's misogyny can't be imputed to him. 5) unlike many movie anti-heroes, the narrative here allows the audience to believe that Mark learns or grows towards the end of the flick. Maybe the character learns a bit about the value of friends and the foolishness of trusting bad guys. Maybe the reason this seems rehabilitating is that the character is so young. In other movies the guy learns when he's 50 and has killed people and dealt dirty drugs and alienated his family and is serving a life sentence in maximum security prison, at which point you feel the learning is something but not much, because he won't have lots of opportunity for acting better.

What I'm left wondering is, did the movie's creators intend to paint a very unflattering portrait with a few wrinkles without realizing how mitigating those wrinkles are, or did they intend to create a sympathetic though problematic portrayal. I suspect it's the first one, but that might just be because I like the idea of coming to a conclusion other than the one the heavy-handed movie execs intended. Their intention should be just as unimportant as the intentions of an author or other artist, but I'm curious about what it says about them rather than about the piece. 

P.S. I'd like to replace the words audience, viewer, reader and listener with some new word like ingester or interpreter (not really replace the words, just replace my use of them). Consumer might have worked but it's too negatively connotated now and also doesn't have the active interpreting role that I'm looking for. The only trouble with ingester is it sounds so stupid.