The Social Network Movie You Won’t See
A major theme emerging from otherwise favorable reviews of The Social Network is the relationship between sexism and film gender relations and technology:
The underlying message in the film seems to be that if these guys just got laid more often we would never have had innovations like Napster and Facebook.
We have Facebook because some dude got dumped. I can believe that.
My favorite post on this theme comes from Laurie Penny:
The Social Network is an expertly crafted and exhaustively modern film, and one of its more pertinent flashpoints is the reminder that a resource that redefined the human interactions of 500 million people across the globe was germinated in an act of vengeful misogyny. Woman-hating is the background noise of this story. Aaron Sorkin’s dazzlingly scripted showdown between awkward, ambitious young men desperate for wealth and respect phrases women and girls as glorified sexual extras, lovely assistants in the grand trick whose reveal is the future of human business and communication.
The narrative whereby the nerdy loner makes a sack of cash and gets all the hot pussy he can handle is becoming a fundamental part of free-market folklore. It crops up in films from Transformers to Scott Pilgrim; it’s the story of Bill Gates, of Steve Jobs, and now of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a story about power and about how alienation and obsessive persistence are rewarded with social, sexual and financial power.
The protagonist is invariably white and rich and always male — Hollywood cannot countenance female nerds, other than as minor characters who transform into pliant sexbots as soon as they remove their glasses — but these privileges are as naught compared to the injustice life has served him by making him shy, spotty and interested in Star Trek. He has been wronged, and he has every right to use his l33t skills to bend the engine of humanity to his purpose…
The only roles for women in this drama are dancing naked on tables at exclusive fraternity clubs, inspiring men to genius by spurning their carnal advances and giving appreciative blowjobs in bathroom stalls. This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency.
Penny makes a sophisticated argument, but from what I know of FB’s origin story, I do think she gets that last bit wrong. He has his faults, but this deeply gendered script is very much the doing of Aaron Sorkin and David Finscher rather than Zuckerberg himself.
I haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires on which the movie was supposedly based, but peruse the first five chapters of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect and this narrative of unmitigated misogyny falls apart. FaceMash included hot or not lists for both sexes, not just women; and though it offended women’s groups on campus, Zuckerberg mended fences with the Association of Harvard Black Women by assisting them with their website – not quite the unrepentant jerk of the film version. Far from being a lonely nerd, Zuckerberg “was rarely without a girlfriend.” And the company culture was not completely hostile to strong, smart women: at least one who influenced the company from the start, Tricia Black, was written out of the story deliberately by the screenwriters.
Irin Carnon at Jezebel has more on the truthiness of these portrayals.
I’m not the first to point out that writers took license with the actual history, though this is irrelevant to most critics; nor will I dwell on whether or not this matters. But I will say it was a disappointment that such a finely written and produced film was so brazenly fixated on interpersonal relationships when its subject matter lent itself to so much greater political depth. Sure the emphasis on lawsuits makes for good drama. But the producers could have gone in several more interesting directions had they wanted viewers to really think about the relationship between technology, politics and society. I would have liked to see a version of this film that focused more on either one of the following:
1) The development and expansion of the ideology behind Facebook. Zuckerberg is not just the world’s youngest billionaire, he has at the forefront of a growing movement that includes other social entrepreneurs like Julian Assange. Its goal: to promote transparency and remove artificial barriers beween people; its motto: information should be freely available to all. His job description on the FB Site (“Founder, Master and Commander and Enemy of the State”) is at least as much about political ideology as it is about the sexual frustrations of high geekdom. The Facemash incident read through this lens become not a spasm of misogynistic creativity but an early signal of Zuckerberg’s disregard for extant privacy norms, mainstream institutions, and 20th century authority structures. This insistence on the company as a platform for spreading his message, through the architecture, to the ever-expanding user community explains Zuckerberg’s preference for being “cool” over being solvent. And his zeal for the message partly explains why he and Sean Parker insisted on and succeeded at maintaining absolute control over the company – rare among start-ups who obtain venture capital.
Yet to what extent did Zuckerberg start out with this view, and to what extent did he construct it through interacting with the global information economy through his platform? It’s not a little paradoxical that Facebook was, according to Kirkpatrick, originally designed as the anti-MySpace:
Where that service was wide-open, florid and unconstrained, Thefacebook was minimal, with limited flexibility and no decorative freedom. MySpace was unconcerned with who you really were. Thefacebook authenticated you with your university email, and you had no choice but to identify yourself accurately. On MySpace, the deault setting was the you could see anybody’s profile. On Thefacebook, the default allwed you only to see profiles of those who had explicitly accepted you as a friend. A degree of privacy was built in.”
Zuckerberg has said that if he could go back in time, public settings would have been the default. What does he understand how that he didn’t understand then? There are fascinating questions here both for those who love and those who love to hate what Facebook stands for. Yet the relationship between ideology, strategy and outcome is pitifully under-explored in this story.
2) The technology itself. Besides women, programmers and programming choices were completely eclipsed in the film. In my limited experience observing software startups, this is completely untrue to life. Design choices are path-dependent and intimately connected to both the social identity of the company and the interpersonal relationships between the programmers. In fact in real life Eduardo Saverin’s disconnect from the other founders was apparently based largely on their perception that he didn’t get this: as David Kirkpatrick writes in The Facebook Effect: “The product as it is engineered and programmed and designed is the business for an Internet company.” Yet we learn almost nothing about Dustin Moskowitz’s character or his pivotal role in the development of the platform by watching The Social Network. And although an occasional scene provides a social context for one or another Facebook utility – the relationship-status tool, for example – there is precious little emphasis on the evolution of the platform itself. As an admitted nerd, I am more interested in the genealogy of the Wall and news-feed, the original social meaning of the ‘poke’ or what factors the founders considered in settling on their peculiarly gendered range of “relationship status” choices than I am in whether or not Zuckerberg stole his ideas from some other, handsomer, better connected Ivy-League brats.
Of course, some would say that wouldn’t make good drama. Sorkin and Finscher dressed up a boring, nerdy story of hacking and coding algorithms with lies, law-suits and lap-dances in order to capture the non-nerd audience and win best film of the year – which they may yet if only for the film’s unstoppably stunning dialogue. But I would have liked to see them do better – because I think they could have succeeded at that as well. Writers who can make blogging look like an action scene have a shot at telling a compelling story about the extent to which new technologies are changing (or meant to be changing) our political and social worlds.
On this, Kirkpatrick is more forthcoming: “Facebook is bringing the world together.” And he believes this is a positive thing. In the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is more sanguine.
Subscribe for 650-294 dumps sessions to guarantee pass Pass4sure 642-813 exam. Also get free download link for the next PMI-001 exam, after getting success in 350-001 & 70-649, you can find a wonderful job.
It’s sexist to make a movie about a man who attracts women once he becomes rich? Because there are no appreciable numbers of women like that? And if there are, it’s men’s fault? Am I getting all this?
No. Not from this article. Try again.
Well then, just out of my own curiosity, what exactly is this article about?
I see people complaining about a movie where a guy makes a lot of money and thus is able to get women, but it’s only worth complaining about that if it isn’t true to life–and we all know that it is. You can’t call something “folklore” when it really happens.
Sorry – I was conflating Charli’s article here with the one she referenced by Irin Carnon at Jezebel. From Carnon’s article:
So my thinking was similar to Charli’s in that a more true-to-the-facts movie could have been just as fascinating, and less depressing. Your comment about assigning all blame to men for all eternity seemed to miss the point entirely. But I thought that based on both articles.
The whole thing reminds me of that old joke about a screenwriter and a producer who are lost in the desert, crawling across the dunes, desperately thirsty. Then they cross a dune, and right there, miraculously, is a table with pitchers of icy cold lemonade, and chilled glasses filled with ice. They drag themselves to the table, and the writer reaches for a pitcher, but the producer says, “Wait. First I have to piss in it to make it good.”
Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but my understanding is it covers the founding of Facebook, which doesn’t include Sheryl Sandberg who joined the company 2 years ago. I’m sure she has done a great job since then, but she didn’t help create the thing.
And what you’re missing is that it’s also about disruptive technology, which is likely one of the reasons it’s only white males who could be credibly cast in the role.
Name a counterexample. Just one. Ariana Huffington and Oprah obviously don’t count.
Let me help you out! Sergey Brin and Larry Page… check. Larry Ellison, check. Hewlett and Packard, check. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, check. Linus Torvalds, youbetcha.
Am I missing anybody yet?
Oh right Kevin whatshisname from Digg, check. The Slashdot guys, check. The guys who wrote World of Warcraft, Or Halo, or even Eve Online, or, hell, Yahoo or Amazon or Verizon or AT&T or Qwest or name your choice kiddo, they’re all white males. The guys who make South Park, check. The fucking fat kid with the mop in those starwars fan videos, you betcha.
So, yeah, as far as writing a script for a movie that people will actually be willing to believe, your casting choices are pretty limited.
Jerry Yang is a white male?
Well, to be totally fair, Yahoo! is pretty lame.
and *cough cough*
How about the eBay lady?
Well obviously she doesn’t count — she’s not a white male. Let’s try to focus here.
she also didn’t *start* the company. They hired her after it had been up and running for over 2 years.
Sure Whitman got rich in the IPO, but all she did was not totally f*** up an already-successful disruptive technology company that was conceived, created, and launched by (you guessed it) a bunch of white guys, which must have been pretty damn easy in the economic climate of 1998. They probably could have hired a teenage Sarah Palin to run eBay in 1998 and it still would have ipo’ed.
OK, granted, Pierre Omidyar is politically French and ethnically Iranian. But there are a lot of ethnic Iranians who don’t identify as Muslim, or even arabic for that matter.
I’m not quite sure what wishing the film had been a different film really accomplishes. This is a film that was authored by Aaron Sorkin. There is no other film in the offing; this is the one that there is. If you have any illusions that this film could have been about either of the other things you wish it had been, please listen to this audio: http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/09/social-network-sorkin-facebook
Either of those suggestions would have made horrible films; on the other hand, they’re sure to make excellent books and articles.
I’ll also say that I too fail to see exactly what the mystery about the nerdy-kid-becomes-sex-magnet-via-astronomical-business-success narrative really is. Penny’s examples of such stories seem to suggest it is more or less true to life in many cases, and it is certainly a conscious dream of many a nerdy kid, some of whom have taken exactly that trajectory. In other words, it’s a real enough phenomenon, and motivation in the lives of striving young kids (probably most but probably not all male). So the problem is just that Hollywood chooses to adopt the narrative in film? Or they do it too often? Or they don’t portray enough striving young women as motivated in part by all the “hot [anti-] pussy” they can get if they hit it big? I absolutely get the critique that there are simply too many stories of striving young men as compared with striving young women coming out of Hollywood, but I’m not sure what’s wrong with including that part of their motivation (whether men or women) that is libidinous or libido-related in those stories. I’ll buy that The Social Network overemphasizes that part of the narrative, but I don’t take Penny as saying this is just a matter of emphasis.
I’m not quite sure what wishing the film had been a different film really accomplishes. This is a film that was authored by Aaron Sorkin. There is no other film in the offing; this is the one that there is.
It’s called criticism and critics are allowed to point out what they view as shortcomings and wonder how the movie might have been made differently and better. Penny’s article is a little odd because she seems to be complaining that the movie is generally on target, not something reviewers usually beef about.
Since we’ve made some fuss on the site about spelling names correctly, I note that it’s Fincher, not Finscher.
L
Criticism is just that – criticizing the work. What did it set out to do, did it in fact accomplish, what meanings does it carry that were intended/un-, etc. There’s a line between that and simply wishing for a different movie (piece, etc.) that to be fair, a lot of critics do cross, but it’s step away from criticism and toward fruitless fantasy.
Aaron Sorkin addressed this very point in comments on ken levine’s blog
“believe me, I get it. It’s not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about. Women are both prizes an equal. Mark’s blogging that we hear in voiceover as he drinks, hacks, creates Facemash and dreams of the kind of party he’s sure he’s missing, came directly from Mark’s blog….More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people…”
Similarly, I wish that Jane Lynch would have gotten the role of Lt. Dave Toschi in Fincher’s Zodiac instead of Mark Ruffalo. Young women in Zodiac were reduced to being stabbing victims and police-wives.
From what I can infer it emerges from the fact that he has been challenged by privacy advocates at every turn over changes to the default privacy settings – he’s in the position of having to ask for permission to act in the best interest of the company, whereas had he not offered that level of privacy from the start his actions would be noncontroversial. Secondarily, a lot of content that might otherwise drive traffic to Facebook has been excluded from search engines.
It also allowed the filmmakers to introduce characters that were less sympathetic than (movie) Zuckerberg, which was important given that Zuckerberg was usually not a sympathetic character. Even if you didn’t like (movie) Zuckerberg, the movie was designed to let you take some pleasure in his caustic wit as directed at the “Winklevi”. Also, frankly, that lawsuit does shed some light on Zuckerberg as, had he simply said up front “I like your ideas, but I hate your concept – have a nice life,” any notion of a lawsuit would have been dead in its tracks – what motivated his decision to string them along? The answers implied by the movie may not be correct, but the question seems relevant to any dissection of Zuckerberg’s character.
Which is a shame, perhaps not dramatically but as a matter of personal interest, as it would be interesting to see a depiction of the genesis of that relationship. But as you have observed, once the film chose its point of view, it would have been too much of a disconnect to introduce that plot line.
Something worth mentioning is that the film includes some dialog that seems self-referential. Sean Parker, another character portrayed so as to be less likable than (movie) Zuckerberg, is depicted as going on an impliedly alcohol and cocaine-fueled, paranoid rant about how if you succeed as a dot-com entrepreneur people will turn over every stone in your life to look for ugly secrets to use against you and try to squeeze you out of your own company. (As they say, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t really out to get you.”) Similar sentiments came through in the context of the muck-raking at the depositions. That seemed to be the filmmaker winking at the audience – “And guess what we’re doing in this movie”.
Zuckerberg disregards privacy norms, huh? So if I’m having problems with Facebook I can just send that company an email asking for help? No, there is no such function. All you can do is enter some approximation of your problem into their automated help database and hope for the best.
I’m genuinely unsure of how the second question relates to the first. Why would someone who disregards privacy norms necessarily have an easy complaint and help function?
I’m just ticked at Facebook right now.
Nitpicking:
The narrative whereby the nerdy loner makes a sack of cash and gets all the hot pussy he can handle is becoming a fundamental part of free-market folklore. It crops up in films from Transformers to Scott Pilgrim;
Were we watching the same Scott Pilgrim movie?
And which nerd in “Transformers” made a sack of cash?
actually, i find all these “social network” sites terribly boring. filled with people living tragically dull lives, hoping against hope, to connect with someone who’s life is far more exciting than their’s. the problem: people who actually have real lives don’t waste their time on a facebook.
oh well.
…who gives a shit?
I just watched the movie and really liked it, but while watching it did notice the absense of any significant women characters. All the intelligent, rich, and powerful people were men. The woman in the movie were all minor characters: girlfriends, groupies, and a few lawyers.
[...] social network movie you won’t [...]
[...] I saw the picture this weekend, I thought I’d add some thought’s to Charli’s excellent post below. I should say at the outset that although I’ve been an Aaron Sorkin detractor since [...]
i actually needed that moncler cardigan with the at best time frame currently . how will i determine if its actual ? is this fact a proper moncler site
Nice site you have here ill be sure to bookmark and visit often.
Subsequently, soon after spending numerous hours on the internet at last We’ve uncovered an individual that surely does know what they’re discussing a lot of thanks a fantastic deal fantastic post