Not to give away the ending or anything, but the “message”
of Aaron Sorkin’s and David Fincher’s movie The Social
Network is pretty much flashed up in neon lights from the
opening scene and is devoted to what the New York Times
reviewer
calls “the conspicuous paradox that…
the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by
a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people
skills.” Except that it wasn’t. Not in real life, I mean. But the
question of how far real life matters anymore is one that the film
also raises and that is much more interesting than its ostensible
message.
It’s a given, for instance, that the actual founder of
Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, bears little resemblance to the
character of that name in the movie, who is played by Jesse
Eisenberg. But that no doubt piquant irony, mentioned above, of the
latter’s excruciatingly, pathologically poor people skills would
have been lost if they had portrayed him as he was. In short, they
created a different Mr. Zuckerberg because it makes a better story
that way. They are disarmingly frank about it too. Mr. Sorkin, the
screenwriter, was quoted in New York magazine as saying:
“I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to
storytelling.” The movie’s producer, Scott Rudin, went even further
— and in doing so suggested another message for the movie — when
he
claimed to Michael Cieply and Miguel
Helft of the Times that “There is no such thing as the
truth.”
Well, not in the movies anyway — or on Facebook, for that
matter. You might think that the real-life Mr. Zuckerberg would
have an open-and-shut case against the movie-makers for making up
stories about him that are bound to be taken as the truth by
millions of movie-goers, but the laws of libel in America, at least
as they apply to public figures more or less agree with Mr. Rudin.
The truth, in other words, whether there be such a thing or not, is
irrelevant to the question of libel or no libel. The only thing
that is relevant in the case of public figures is the malice with
which the lie is or is not told, and malice, though it undoubtedly
exists, is even harder to pin down than the truth. Besides, any
action on his part against the film-makers, even if it could
demonstrate that he was not the skunk they portray him as being,
would be bound to bring to light any skunk-like behavior of which
he actually had been guilty. And which of our lives could stand
such scrutiny?
It’s true that, as we are so often told, Shakespeare
adapted the facts of English history in the 14th and 15th
centuries, insofar as they were known at the time, in order to make
a better story. Falstaff was as much his own creation as the “Mark
Zuckerberg” of Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher, and Jesse Eisenberg is
their own creation. But it seems to me not an irrelevant
consideration that Mark Zuckerberg is a living person — the
fictional Falstaff and those who were said to have known him lay
nearly two centuries in the past when Shakespeare gave them what
life they ever had — and therefore a person who ought to have some
rights of self-defense against misrepresentations of himself. So,
for that matter, ought Harvard University, which is similarly made
more movie-genic with the help of Mr. Sorkin’s trademark clever
dialogue. But I fancy that Harvard might actually be pleased at its
depiction here as a bizarre community of hyper-intelligent and
insanely competitive sociopaths on the one hand and old-money snobs
on the other.
Indeed, the fictional Mr. Zuckerberg is probably meant to
be perversely admirable too. The appeal by his Waspy-jock
adversaries, the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer with
the help of body double Josh Pence), to the traditions of the
“gentlemen of Harvard” is seen as laughable, if not contemptible,
while Mr. Eisenberg’s version of Mr. Zuckerberg, who pretends to
work for them while he is really stealing their idea and making it
his own, appears admirably entrepreneurial in doing so. It is his
treatment of his (fictional) girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara) and
his supposed betrayal of his (real) best friend, Eduardo Saverin
(Andrew Garfield), which is meant to mark him out as, in the word
of the former, an a******. This is later modified by another
character who tells him, “You’re not an a******, Mark; you’re just
trying so hard to be one.” It’s kind of hard to see the
difference.
That Mr. Saverin is the nearest thing the movie has to a
hero may not be unrelated to the fact that the movie was based on a
book, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, largely
based on interviews with him. Along with the Winklevosses, he also
managed to extract a lot of money from Facebook, once it took off,
by legal action. Much of the story of the film and of Facebook is
told in flashback as this legal proceeding forms the foreground.
The fictional Mr. Zuckerberg is slashingly rude and combative to
his adversaries and their lawyers — there are those poor people
skills again — but we are meant to be left in no doubt that the
company would not have been there for them to shake down in the
first place if not for his vision and ruthlessness. Even Eduardo,
though always sympathetically treated by the movie, comes off as a
necessary sacrifice. He’s a quintessential nice guy, but his foil,
the slightly satanic Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), is there to
remind us where nice guys finish.
Success here, as perhaps in the real world, means that “We
have groupies,” as the sexually awkward Mark and Eduardo marvel at
one point, and that they get the chance to snort (like the film’s
version of Mr. Parker) a line of cocaine off the naked body of one
of them. If that’s what it’s cool to be known for, then Mr.
Zuckerberg might have a hard time proving defamation even if he
wanted to. It may be that he has not (so far) sued, as it is said
that the “gentlemen of Harvard” don’t do — though they eventually
do — not only because he would stand little chance of winning and
because he would have to expose too much of his private life but
because, also like Harvard, he’s not altogether displeased at the
film-makers for making him into what looks so much like a hero and
his story so much like a myth for our times.
But what about the rest of us? Being genetically
predisposed to side with the gentlemen of Harvard — or the
gentlemen of anywhere else for that matter — against boors and
prigs and social revolutionaries, I find it hard to view Mr.
Zuckerberg’s success story apart from the prism of honorable
behavior, which neither he nor the film-makers appear to have any
use for but which would once have been in the forefront of most
people’s idea of what to make of the man and his legend. Because
Facebook itself could hardly exist without the prior assumption of
non-judgmentalism (if that’s a word) as the animating feature of
our social intercourse, and because it is also a place where people
are invited to create their own legends without regard to truth, it
must be appropriate for the movie to give its creator this kind of
morally and factually agnostic biography.
At one point in the film, Sean Parker, the inventor of
Napster, says of the supposed Facebook revolution he helped to
promote that once people lived on farms, then in cities, but now
they will live on the Internet — which means living where there
really is no such thing as the truth. I’d be sorry to think that
that is the case, but it may be so. Yet I wonder if it means that,
50 or 100 years hence, Mr. Zuckerberg will have taken his place in
the national pantheon alongside such old-time capitalist heroes as
Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, or if his invention of yet another
form of the artificial life that our age mass-produces will have
been forgotten along with his (by then) ancient technology? I don’t
know the answer to this question, but if The Social
Network has anything to do with how he is remembered, it seems
unlikely by that time that anyone will care about Mark Zuckerberg
one way or the other.
