500 Million Friends (or The American Dream)

"Involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness." -F. Scott Fitgerald

             The Social Network is easily the critical darling of the year. Everyone talks about the technical genius, the screwball paced dialogue, and the performances, but an examination of the film's relationship to the audience has been largely lacking. I believe that the film's true genius lies in the way it updates "The American Dream" to the modern era. Everyday we see self-made millionaires like Zuckerberg and celebrities with no more claim to fame than being friends with Paris Hilton (or being Paris Hilton for that matter) and we have almost no choice but to think about how it could be us -- suddenly rich for some simple idea or for who we know. That may be "The American Dream" but it isn't "The American Story". That story can be seen everywhere, from works of art like Citizen Kane to real life melodrama like William Randolph Hearst's censorship of that same film. The American Story is broken dreams and the corruption of ideals and no film has better shown it recently than The Social Network.

 As I mentioned above, the film has been described as owing a debt to Citizen Kane first and foremost, yet there are many other comparisons to be made as well; for example, Ebert compared Zuckerberg to Bobby Fischer, the troubled Chess great. The truth is that this is a variation on the aforementioned 'American Story’ which in my mind goes back primarily, but not exclusively, to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The comparison is so obvious that everyone is overlooking it. All three (Gatsby, Kane, and The Social Network) feature a wealthy anti-hero who is seemingly the result of the American dream. Where Kane focuses on lost innocence, Gatsby is about lost love and delusion yet both are (like The Social Network) fundamentally about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and making a better life for yourself. Obviously, The Social Network fits a bit more neatly into the thematic box of Gatsby even as it seems a totally different story. The connection between Gatsby and Kane is well established, mostly by their historical nearness; the connection between Citizen Kane and The Social Network is also easy to see through the many similarities in story and style; but while the characters Gatsby and Zuckerberg are obviously more similar, their story seems less so. 

The connection can most easily be seen in the transition from Gatsby’s everyman to Kane’s journalist to The Social Network’s …well, I’ll get to that. Gatsby is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway, one of the most relatable characters in fiction. His observations could be our observations and in his voice we see our own, even after 85 years. Yet, there was more possibility in the idea of an incidental narrator than as a simple American archetype (not to diminish Fitzgerald’s novel, which may be the best ever written). They could have thematic import in and of themselves. For instance, in making his narrator an investigative journalist Orson Welles highlighted the duality in Kane, the stark contrast of his lost innocence and the truth of the corrupt man he has become. 

 Fincher and Sorkin take this idea and run with it in The Social Network. In my reading of the film it is the audience who is the incidental narrator. Sure, it is the lawyers that ask the sometimes dumb questions which prompt most of the action of the film but the camera betrays the filmmaker’s intentions. We almost always watch the depositions as if we are sitting at the table. This is more than just a psychological trick to make the audience feel more involved. We are the ones they have to answer to because we are Facebook in a real, and multi-layered sense.

Much of what happens in The Social Network is fictionalized, in reality mark Zuckerberg has had a steady girlfriend since his college years, but it rings true for our own personal stories of clicking refresh over and over. The girl who got away. The American dream of wealth and power. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg is unrelatable, some might even call him an asshole. The reason, though, that that question (whether or not Mark is an asshole) is such a large part of the film is because we’re really asking it about ourselves. When gender relations can be boiled down to a picture on the internet, and interaction to 140 characters… aren’t we all assholes?