I finally saw The
Social Network after joining the conversation about David
Fincher's latest movie, Gone Girl. I gave the former a miss
when it came out because I read Zadie Smith's scathing article on it in The New York Review of Books, where she describes how the
movie's central idea – that Zuckerberg created Facebook so that
socially inept, computer-loving nerds like himself could have the
illusion of having friends – was based on fabrications about
Zuckerberg. Specifically, whereas the fictional Zuckerberg is dumped
by a girlfriend in the first scene and starts down the path toward
creating Facebook as an act of revenge, the real Zuckerberg has been
with the same woman (now his wife) since they met at Harvard, where
she was a fellow student. If you google her, she's both accomplished
and gorgeous. Whatever trouble he may or may not have had making or
being nice to friends, Zuckerberg evidently had no trouble attracting
or maintaining relationships with women.
But then The Social
Network isn't about Zuckerberg, or about Facebook. It's about the
myth of the internet, and of a new masculinity that doesn't look much
like the old kind but has all of its problems anyway.
Angry Guys on the
Internet and Beethoven in a Hoodie
Remember all of those
pop sociology books that came out when the internet was exploding,
about how geeks had gone from being at the bottom of the social
hierarchy (and, it goes without saying, the hierarchy of masculinity)
to being the future of business, but without having learned any
social skills? Aaron Sorkin and Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is that
guy.
He's also, of course,
as Smith notes in her article, an irritable and irritating “autistic
genius,” which is how we've come to picture genius in the digital
era, although on TV this type has been associated with professions
ranging from medicine (House M.D.) to physics (Sheldon Cooper). The
ancestor of the type is Sherlock Holmes; Steven Moffat's updated
Holmes, the first series of which aired the same year that The
Social Network came out,
explicitly married the modern “autistic” Holmes to the idea of
the sociopath. I can't imagine what autistic people think about all
of this – but, to paraphrase Jerry Lewis, these are the tropes,
let's face it.
As Zuckerberg,
Eisenberg never smiles, a striking way of communicating the flat
affect and lack of social skills associated with autism. If you
google Zuckerberg, he's always smiling. He looks like a nerd, alright
– but like a kind of goofy dork, not like Beethoven in a hoodie.
Fictional Zuckerberg is
also “an angry guy on the internet,” as someone calls him at some
point (is it Rooney Mara, the dumping girlfriend?) in response to his
revenge-on-all-women move of inventing on online game in which
Harvard students can rate the attractiveness of their fellow – and
female, naturally – students. Already in 2010, way pre-GamerGate,
the internet is gendered, and way pre-Elliot Rodger, the world is
concerned about its presumed denizens: basement-dwelling young men
without social skills who are so desperate for sex and status that
they've turned misogynous.
This isn't my internet,
I hasten to add. I've been a non-angry, non-male internet user since
2004 or so, and in the early days, when I was thrilling to being one
of the settlers of the cyberwilderness, I was writing and reading fan
fiction, and, accordingly, hardly ever interacted with a male on the
internet, angry or not. I kept hearing in the media how it was mostly
men on the internet, but I couldn't have told you where they were, or
what they were doing.
None of this changes
the popular narrative, in which the internet is gendered male, and
women are either indifferent or even hostile to it (like Mara in the
movie, who is so uninterested in social networking that she sneers at
the newly popular Eisenberg, “Good luck with your video game, or
whatever”), or endangered by it. Watching The Social Network,
I felt the thrill that you can only get when your subculture is
recognized by mainstream media when Zuckerberg blogs on LiveJournal –
except that the movie associates LiveJournal with “online misogyny”
by making it an angry post about the girlfriend who just dumped him.
I knew LiveJournal as a fun, messy, transgressive place where women –
queer, straight, cis, trans, single, coupled, students, graduates,
moms – poured their guts out in journal posts and participated,
often raucously, in fan communities. The Social Network is so
committed to its message about masculinity, to fusing the tech nerd
with the internet user and making them both misogynists, that even
though the film is critical of masculinity and misogyny, it feels
like having my experience erased – which is no new experience for
women.
A Genius at What?
Our cultural concern about angry men is hardly anything new either; the internet just
provides us with a new angle. Fictional Zuckerberg is
hardly your angry guy on the internet stereotype, though. He's going
to Harvard, not playing RPG games in his parents' basement. As we
learn in the hilarious scene where the athletic, blond WASP twins use
their connections to get a meeting with some Harvard bigwig who finds
their request that he intervene to stop Zuckerberg from stealing
their idea ludicrous, Harvard is the breeding ground for the
entrepreneurs who will be tomorrow's leaders. While the scene itself
is comical, it's hard to know how seriously, or ironically, this
sentiment is supposed to be taken. Certainly, if the young men who
are either brilliant or privileged enough, or both, to be at Harvard
do not take advantage of the opportunity to make some kind of
cultural contribution, it's a huge waste. Zuckerberg, the business
innovator, is doing exactly what's expected of a Harvard man.
And I say “man”
advisedly, because despite the recognition that women are among the
students (their looks get rated, remember?), this is a movie about
the power plays of men. The men do some of the things they do for or
because of women, but even in the 21st century, women are
not imagined (neither by the movie nor by the men in it) as being
among those future leaders that Harvard churns out to justify its
existence. And in fact, there were no women among the key Silicon
Valley entrepreneurs: the names we know, besides Mark Zuckerberg, are
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; Google and Yahoo were founded by men (two
each).
The Social Network
is bookended by scenes between Zuckerberg and a women. In the first,
Zuckerberg is spurned by his girlfriend; in the second, he receives
some sympathy from a young female lawyer. We are meant to believe
that even the lawyer has “people skills,” by virtue of her
femaleness, and that Zuckerberg's achievements compensate for not
having the access to people that women have because of their people
skills or the access to women that he could have if he had people
skills. In his only other scene with Mara, the one where she
belittles his “video game,” he sees her at a table full of people
who are her friends – one of them a black man. Mara's black friend serves as a symbol of those effectively debarred from Harvard and
all it represents, despite its “diversity” (the WASP picture is
complicated by the presence of the twins' pal Divya Nirendra, who,
according to Wikipedia, is the near-perfect-SAT-scoring son of
immigrant doctors from India).
He is also a symbol of
those with no social capital, who are of no interest to fictional
Zuckerberg. In the first scene with Mara, he snobbishly puts down her
school and obsesses about the high-status clubs at Harvard while
making a strenuous effort to prove to her that he's smarter than she
is. The thing is – he sort of succeeds, although she does get in a
couple of good psychological diagnoses. (People skills. Women have
those. You got that, right?) The Social Network may critique
the White Male Genius archetype, but it doesn't question it. Only
this new White Male Genius isn't creating art, or adding to our
scientific knowledge. Ultimately he's a businessman, even if his
product happens to have changed the way human beings socialize. But
what's unique about the movie's Zuckerberg is that his story is not
one of becoming an all-powerful, Charles Foster Kane-style tycoon.
It's one of a new American dream/nightmare, exemplified by Facebook
and the way it forces us to be constantly social and visible: of
being a loser and becoming cool.
Nightcrawler: American
Nightmare
At the other end of the
socioeconomic spectrum is Jake Gyllenhaal's Louis Bloom in Dan
Gilroy's Nightcrawler. When we first see him, he's a lone,
violent thief who's having no luck getting legitimate work although
he's seemingly willing to do anything. We don't know anything about
his background or how he came to this state. He talks about
unemployment and the recession; presumably his employment was
precarious, he lost it, and now he can't cross back over to
legitimacy.
Bloom doesn't have
Zuckerberg's genius, although he does seem to share his “autism.”
Gyllenhaal plays him in that general mode, twitchy, odd, and clueless
about human interaction. He's given to rigid repetitions of
platitudes and long business-speak diatribes. At other moments,
flashing an oxymoronic creepy charm, he channels Anthony Perkins's
Norman Bates. We see him at first as a victim, possibly, albeit a
potentially dangerous one. Definitely, he's a desperate man, and if
one is able to identify with him, on the basis of his need and
vulnerability and Gyllenhaal's freaky charisma, one can't help but
hope that he'll succeed in pulling himself by his bootstraps. That is
the bait the movie holds out, I think; and if you take it, you are
put in a position of moral complicity as Bloom does what he has to do
to go from loser to success.
Lean, mean, and
misanthropic, like its protagonist, Nightcrawler is no more
interested in creating a complex sociological portrait of
contemporary urban life than Bloom is in saving the whore whom he
takes on as his “intern” – a young man who's lived on the
streets and whose only source of income, currently, as Bloom
understands right away, is turning tricks. Given Bloom's isolation,
alienation, and general oddness, I, too, like some critics, thought
of Travis Bickle (and I think we're supposed to in the one scene
where he lets out some animal rage, into a mirror), but Bickle has a
kind of innocence that makes his violence all the more horrifying –
because it's the expression of his innocence. Bloom has a
wide-eyed (saucer-eyed, in fact) credulity with regard to the
American religion and philosophy of business and success, but he is
no innocent. His credulity and sociopathy are one and the same: he
embraces this sociopathic philosophy of exploitation without a qualm,
believing in it with the faith of the hopeless, and it rewards him.
Nightcrawler is
less a new Taxi Driver than an American Psycho for
bust-phase capitalism, proving that you don't need money or power to
be a corporate psychopath. Whereas Taxi Driver is, I think,
really trying to understand urban male isolation and alienation and
how it leads to violence, Nightcrawler is a blackly comic
parable. The reason Bloom can't get sex isn't his oddness but his
lack of success. We only see brief glimpses of him going about his
domestic life in his tiny apartment, laughing at Danny Kaye on TV or
watering his plant, but it's enough. A man without money or prestige
can't get sex, which makes him doubly unmanned.
When we first see Rene
Russo's morning news director, she appears to be a ball-busting,
no-bullshit, empowered female boss who offers herself as a mentor in
sleaze to Bloom. When he makes a pass at her, the power seems to be
largely on her side: despite the fact that she's twice his age, as
she points out, she's an attractive woman of normal social skills
(when she's not busting balls at work) who seems to be in a position
of power, and he's a 30-year-old man who's socially inept and barely
starting a career. He's in no way sexually viable. The gender's on
the wrong foot, but Bloom is going to set that right. First, he
“negotiates” her into having sex with him by reminding her of the
things he's learned about her from his internet research (the same
way he learned business philosophy), which show that her employment
is precarious, and convincing her that his footage is the only thing
that's going to save her job. He doesn't persuade her into bed
based on these facts, mind you, since he lacks the social finesse for
that: he blackmails her into it by threatening to stop bringing her
footage if she doesn't comply.
The next time up, he
fucks up royally, and she chews him out in front of staff as he used
to watch her do to other men. Russo is great in this scene, her voice
cracking a little hysterically for the first time during one of her
harangues: she let him have sex with her and now if he doesn't “man
up,” as she puts it, it will all be for nothing. It's after this
emasculation that he briefly goes wild in front of the bathroom mirror. But once he deals with his competition, he makes
the next big opportunity he has really count. Russo is so impressed
with the results that she coos at him, submissive for the first time,
and it's hard to know whether she's just doing what he wants so that
he'll give her more of the same or if she's genuinely attracted to
him now that he's done what he's supposed to do to prove he's a "real man." Does she even know herself?
Scrounging for Survival
The point of the
movie's satire is not, I think, that the problem with corporations is
that they're staffed by individual sociopaths. It's that the fact
that Bloom is a sociopath makes him better at following corporate
principles than normal people who have ethics and empathy. The movie
isn't necessarily saying that all entrepreneurs are sociopaths, only
that sociopaths make great entrepreneurs.
In The Wolf of Wall
Street, DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort is another kind of sociopath –
one without any autistic traits. I
don't know about the real Belfort, but DiCaprio as Belfort has such
lust for life that he's fun to watch no matter how much you
disapprove of him. Gyllenhaal is fun to watch in a different way: for
me there's no way not to want him to succeed despite what it entails,
because the stakes are so great and so final every time. Nightcrawler
– in sharp contrast to both Wolf and Network –
shows exactly how difficult it is to not only make a living but get
ahead. The competition is incessant and terrific: Bloom's with other
freelancers to get and sell the footage; Russo's with other stations.
Every fuck-up makes a huge impact on his business – a word I want
to put in quotations, except that's what it actually is. It's not
much different from scrounging for survival as a thief, except now he
has a chance of eventually making big money and getting respect.
Because it's America.
The movie's third main
character, Rick, is, of course, in a precarious position as well. To
show the contrast between Wolf and Nightcrawler: when
Belfort meets his second-in-command, the man gives up his life to
follow Belfort, like a twisted Jesus, after hearing how much money
he's making as a penny stocks salesman; in Nightcrawler,
Bloom, who has nothing so far except for a contact at the
lowest-rated station in the city and his vision, tells the desperate
young man who's taken three buses to meet up with him in response to
his ad that he's got the job, and then announces, “It's an
internship.” The American dream, in Wolf,
is to be making more money than you know what to do with, right away
– by whatever means you can get away with. The American nightmare,
in Nightcrawler, is to be making no money at all for a long
time and still having to sell your soul.
For Rick, who has no
job history, the “choice” is between working at a dangerous job
for a madman for $30 a night (as he manages to negotiate) or going
back to the streets and prostituting himself. Actually, the latter
seems almost better, but the former is at least a real job with, he's
told, a future, even if it pays less than minimum wage. When Bloom
needs his help to do something both shockingly immoral and
dangerously illegal, Rick finally “mans up” and manages to demand
half of a large reward, and for a moment it seems as though Bloom
might want to be a mentor to him and make him a full partner. Maybe,
just maybe, homosocial dynamics will triumph, and a man will fare
better with Bloom than Russo's character did. Rick, however, makes
the mistake of thinking, like we do, that's he's done the thing
expected of him as a man, and can now speak to Bloom like they're
equals. Women can fulfill physical and emotional needs once they've
been made subservient (one of the most horrifying, and hilarious,
parts of the blackmail scene is that Bloom specifies to Nina that he
is negotiating for her friendship as well as her body). But men who
aren't subservient are merely competition. These are the laws of
capitalism and masculinity, and the profession of nightcrawler shows
them in about as naked a form as it can get – with no golden
parachutes or offshore accounts.
On High in Blue
Tomorrows
The reason that women
aren't Mark Zuckerberg is, possibly, that we're not Lou Bloom. The
entrepreneurial spirit has less to do with privilege or perfect SAT
scores, Nightcrawler says – both movies say, really – than
with being socialized to think that your identity depends on being
successful and having sex, with the latter dependent on the former.
But that doesn't mean that women can't or won't want to learn how to
be self-made like Lou, a point the movie makes when it includes an
eager-looking young woman the three new interns Bloom has hired as
part of his expanded business in the movie's final moments.
Another movie that one
can compare Nightcrawler to in its critique of the American
dream and the men whose identity depends on pursuing it is Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, in which the young Jewish protagonist, already
feeling suffocated by his new marriage, meets the WASP princess of
his dreams on his honeymoon and begins a pursuit of her that's all
the more relentless because he understands now that life is not worth
living for him if he can't get the things he's been conditioned to
want. The subversiveness of the script and direction lies in the way
that it's impossible not to want him to succeed even as you're
outraged by the things he'll do in order to do it, because he's doing
exactly what he's supposed to: he wants what he's supposed to want
and he's showing initiative and persistence in going after it. The
black comedy of Charles Grodin's performance resides in his
character's endless ability to justify himself as, like Lou Bloom, he
talks and talks and talks. Whereas The Heartbreak Kid ends
with a subtle hint that attaining his dream is a bit of a let-down,
however, Nightcrawler
suggests that today's entrepreneurs of tomorrow have their needs
fully met by the philosophy of business. After all, if your goal is
to eternally grow and expand, how can there ever be that moment of
disappointment when the dream doesn't live up to your dream of it?
