Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:18 +0000

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:

I don’t care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so very special,
I wish I was special.

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:

Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t need friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

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.)

viz. - friendship

Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network