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Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network
Submitted by Rachel Schneider on Mon, 2010-10-18 11:58
Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube If you’re a member of the so-called “Facebook generation,” it’s probably been pretty hard to ignore the recent coverage of David Fincher’s The Social Network, the movie that purports to tell the story of Facebook’s founding in a Harvard dorm-room circa 2003-4. Websites like Jezebel have critiqued the movie’s treatment of women, writers on Slate have criticized the movie’s portrayal both of Harvard, and others have questioned whether it accurately represents the website's creator Mark Zuckerberg. When I saw the movie, I was more struck by the ways in which Sorkin uses conventional tropes of class and gender dynamics to ask questions about how Facebook has potentially rewritten these issues, as well as changing identity, social interaction, and the idea of the public sphere. I’d like to decode here for viz in the ways in which it not only pictures a different kind of class warfare, but also helps visualize friendship in its competing images of Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the (fictional) Erica Albright. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, the story is pretty simple: Mark Zuckerberg, a borderline Asperger’s Harvard sophomore, is rejected both by his girlfriend Erica and the final clubs to which he longs to belong. When two WASP-y brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, ask him to help them create a dating website called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg decides to create a different website based around social interaction: “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? … I’m talking about taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online.”
What follows is his quest to make this dream a reality, while fending off lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and his co-founder/friend Eduardo. The movie risks portraying Zuckerberg as unsympathetic, but watching the trailer above helps viewers find points of connection with him. As it begins, we see what look like screenshots from Facebook of its users sharing pictures of their tattoos, their parties, and their children, commenting on their friends’ profiles, overlaid by Scala and Kolacny Brothers’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” These images eventually dissolve into a picture of the man who links all these profiles together, Mark Zuckerberg, who appears just as the vocal track angelically sings, “You’re so very special.” The juxtaposition of image and word here creates an eerie effect—the Facebook users and Mark are all linked through the lyrics that describe them:
While perhaps this opening distinguishes between the users longing to be perfect and the “special” Zuckerberg, the rest of the trailer draws the two together. Zuckerberg here is presented as an outsider without real friends. The movie opens with him struggling to have a conversation with his girlfriend Erica; she has trouble keeping up with him as he jumps between topics:
However, the scene concludes when Erica finally gets mad at Mark for implying that she’s slept with the bar’s door guy and that she goes to an inferior school. Her words to him closing the scene, implies Sorkin, motivate Mark for the rest of the movie: “Listen. You’re going to be rich and successful. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Viewers spend the rest of the movie following Mark and his actions, left to judge at the end along with Rashida Jones whether or not Mark is an asshole, or just trying to be one. Is Mark—and is the viewer with him—a creep? How are we to read Mark, and how is Mark left to read the social codes surrounding him?
Image Credit: Screenshot from The Social Network The movie helps us do this in part through its costuming and visual rhetoric, setting Mark against both his friend Eduardo and the Winklevii. Mark dresses throughout the movie in something like a uniform: exchangeable grey hoodies or North Face black jackets, jeans or shorts, and ever-present t-shirts. His cluelessness about how to talk to Erica is visually mirrored by shots of him running through the snow in Adidas sport sandals, unaware of the cold. His hacker-mentality appears in the pajamas he wears to a meeting with a venture capital firm. His clothes mark him as young, but still advertise an educated background; he appears in Phillips Exeter Academy shirts several times (the prep school the real Zuckerberg did attend).
Image Credit: The Social Network The Winklevoss twins, on the other hand, visually represent the traditional Harvard elite. They wear suits so dressy that Larry Summers jokes that they’re trying to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise. Armie Hammer’s bland good looks complement both his pastel tie and the wood-paneled rooms of the Porcellian in which he stands. He looks like the kind of “gentleman of Harvard” that Cameron Winklevoss claims to be. While Zuckerberg has similarly elite connections that separate him from many of the movie’s viewers, the costumers make the Winklevoss twins look different enough to set up the binary between the two groups. Eduardo’s suits throughout hint that while he might want to be Mark’s friend, ultimately he’s closer to being the enemy. This visual dynamic plays over into the characters’ interactions in the script: not just how the friends are visually portrayed, but the way in which The Social Network pictures friendship at large. Competing visions of friendship are offered by Mark, Eduardo, and Sean. Mark’s friendships with these two men play out homosocially (which helps explain why the women seem so unnecessary at times), and their abilities to relate to Mark drive the website’s development. When Eduardo first appears in the movie, he’s ready to comfort Mark after reading Mark’s LiveJournal entry that describes his breakup with Erica; what Mark wants from Eduardo isn’t emotional support, but the mathematical codes that will help him create the website Facemash.
As Eduardo is punched by the final club The Phoenix, Mark derides him at every turn in (apparent) envy at not being included. Eduardo’s vow to protect Mark from what he sees to be Sean’s bad influence leads him to sign the stock restructuring agreement that effectively phases him out of the company, ending his friendship with Mark. Yet Mark warns Eduardo that he might be left behind if he doesn’t come out to Palo Alto to help out with the company’s development there, a warning Eduardo fails to heed. Sean seduces Mark over drinks and a shared vision for the company, but he gets forced out when caught snorting coke off Facebook interns at the end of the film. While the movie makes frequent use of classic Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles, the movie’s energy primarily emerges from Mark’s continued and ongoing attempts to keep a friendship with the one person in the movie who rejects him constantly: Erica Albright. At three points in the movie Mark confronts Erica with friendship on the line. When she breaks up with him, they have a heated exchange:
Mark here rejects the idea of needing friends, but when he spots her again in a bar he feels compelled to go up to her to try and have a conversation. She refuses to follow him, explaining, “I don’t want to be rude to my friends.” Finally, the movie closes with him finding her profile on Facebook and sending her a friend request; the screen fades to black on the image of him refreshing the page over and over to see if she’s responded yet. Mark has helped to redefine friendship through Facebook—where users call relative strangers and close companions alike “friends”—but the viewer is left to feel superior to Mark because the one friend he wants is the one he never can have. Facebook allows its 500 million users to join groups, make friends, and establish a public identity for all to see, but it also creates the kinds of out-groups with which Mark identifies in the end. If Zuckerberg and Facebook potentially allow for the breaking down of certain kinds of class through technology, both also work to reify classes of users and non-users, people with access and those without. I think a part of the reason I left the movie feeling a bit disturbed was because while I might feel a certain schadenfreude in Mark’s failed friendships, by making friends with Facebook back in 2004 I helped to create the monster. (Not that it stopped me from going home and posting my reaction to the movie on Facebook.) |
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Prepster darkness
To add to the points already made, I also wonder about the degree to which the film merely brings a millenial update to the genre of dark, upper-crust boarding school/college dramas in which two best friends (one of them usually having a better chance of advancing himself socially) turn against each other or crumble under aristocratic pressures. I'm thinking of Class, Rich and Famous, The Chocolate War, Dead Poets Society, The Skulls, etc. as examples of this genre. How much does The Social Network play into the country's continuing fascination with preppy culture as shown by the renewed popularity of The Preppy Handbook, Take Ivy, and Whit Stillman films? Surely, an affinity with these other cultural phenoms is part of The Social Network's mass appeal and underscores how much many of us continue to be fascinated with the vulnerability of rich, young, white men.
Whit Stillman!
Elizabeth, I almost name-dropped Whit Stillman in my review but ended up leaving him out. I think this movie definitely plays into that interest, but also highlights the way in which Silicon Valley is becoming another mythologized space (in movies like The Pirates of Silicon Valley, for example). I think the movie wants to understand class in a different way: as a competition between fading class systems (embodied in the final clubs, the Winklevoss twins, etc) and something like an intellectual class (those with information verses those without). I can see this in moments where the kids approach Zuckerberg after a lecture and note that the speaker commented that "the next Bill Gates might be in the room"--but are ignorant that the speaker was Bill Gates. Zuckerberg might not fit into the former system, but is master of the latter.
(It's also interesting that you mention Whit Stillman movies because Stillman is always writing about the failure of the preppy; preppy nostalgia, if you will. I think The Social Network has a certain amount of preppy nostalgia in it, even though we might side with Zuckerberg against the preppy's presumption of privilege.)
What do you mean by "class"?
This is a really interesting reading of the movie, but it doesn't really seem to be a reading of what I understand as class - that is, socioeconomic standing. You do a fine job on the "socio-" part, but I'm not seeing the "economic." From what you're saying, it seems all the characters come from the same upper-class background - Phillips Exeter isn't exactly known for being economically accessible, and even in terms of being culturally an "outsider," I don't think being an Exeter grad qualifies you as an outsider within Harvard social realms. Zuckerberg may be portrayed as an outsider, but I'm not following your reasoning for how that is about his socioeconomic background, rather than about a lack of social abilities occasioned by "borderline Asperger's" (or being an asshole). It's possible that this is made explicit in the movie - I haven't seen it yet - but I'm not getting that connection from your otherwise interesting analysis.
Interesting question
You're right, I don't really do an adequate reading of the economics of the movie. I think that actually the Phillips Exeter shirts signify that while he may not have as much money as his classmates (like the Winklevosses, whose father has an in-house council, and even Eduardo, who made 300K in oil futures), he certainly counts as bourgeois due to his education. I wonder if his coding abilities mean that he has control over the means of production (with his computer as the means through which he can code and produce vast sums of wealth)?
I was actually wondering while watching the movie if it doesn't indeed try to make us redefine how we think of class because it suggests the rise of a new class of programmers who can control more wealth than even those from more traditional moneyed backgrounds: the Zuckerberg as hacker/programmer set against the Winklevosses. Zuckerberg's control of vast sources of information has not only been judged to be worth lots of money by venture capitalists, but it also makes him the master of a kind of panopitcon. We go onto Facebook and post lots of private information; we assume that we can use privacy controls to choose what we share, but ultimately we share it all with Facebook and its owners. What makes it even more scary is that we are in fact enabling the panopticon by giving our information over freely. Even though that doesn't fit within traditional socioeconomic descriptions of class, there's definitely power in controlling information, and money too.
Very thorough reading
Rachel, I think you do a great job of bringing out the tension between the potentially sympathetic aspects of Zuckerberg’s characterization as a social outcast and the schadenfreude that the audience could feel toward a social climber who betrays his friends and colleagues. I'm also glad you brought up the complicity many viewers would have in Facebook’s almost unbelievable success. In a way, the film seems to play with our identifications. While viewers may find Mark unlikeable and his obsession with Facebook off-putting, his fixation on technology as a solution to his chronic social difficulties likely mirrors the points of view of many Facebook users who use the website to maintain relationships that they feel incapable of sustaining otherwise or to ward off even momentary isolation by maintaining near constant contact with friends they have IRL. If Facebook users created Facebook and therefore, according to the film, an obsessed and isolated billionaire who is also somewhat relatable, then there seem to be arguments about accountability, what we do to ourselves with Facebook, etc.