Very early in The Social Network, Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is dumped by his Boston University girlfriend. Subsequently, to alleviate the awkwardness, she proposes a platonic relationship, and his retort is surely amongst the most ironic pronouncements of our time: “I don’t want to be friends.” Zuckerberg, of course, would go on to create the foremost friendship enabler of the digital era — and yet, his utterance isn’t entirely inappropriate. It isn’t that he does not want to be friends; it appears that he cannot be friends. The issue isn’t so much one of choice as character.
Zuckerberg is the ultimate outsider, even to the events in his own life. When his fledgling company gets its first infusion of capital, his cohorts pop open the champagne — Zuckerberg, however, looks in silently from the outside, separated from the rest by a glass door, as if the celebration inside had nothing, whatsoever, to do with him. How did this solitary outsider enable the rest of us to get inside the lives of millions of others? Differently put, how did someone this asocial beget a social network?
At least one version of the answer is on display in David Fincher’s insidiously entertaining adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires. At one level, The Social Network is a fairly straightforward telling of what feels like corporate espionage in a collegiate setup. The events that resulted in the founding of Facebook — from imagination to implementation, and the ensuing litigation — are laid out within the latticework of a framing device that shows Zuckerberg embroiled in a couple of lawsuits.
Scene after quietly thrilling scene is awash, though not adrift, in minutiae. We learn, for instance, that Zuckerberg took his first steps towards immortality at 8:13 pm. In at least two scenes, Fincher slows down to show us the interval between cause and effect, thought and deed. After the breakup and, later, after a classmate makes an enquiry about the availability of a girl, Zuckerberg is inspired to actions that require him to be seated in front of his computer — but we don’t cut instantly to these sessions of programming. Fincher, instead, follows his protagonist through streets and corridors and staircases, as if to shine a light on the monomaniacal stewing of Zuckerberg’s genius mind between points A and B — and you begin to see why he isn’t as strange a choice of helmsman, as it once appeared, for this seemingly static story.
Accused of being obsessed, Zuckerberg argues that there’s a difference between obsession and motivation, and we hear an echo of the obsessed-motivated detectives from Fincher’s Zodiac, which was equally driven by procedural detail. Here, the detectives arrive in the shape of lawyers hell-bent on solving an admittedly softer crime: Did the shadowy Zuckerberg take a metaphorical knife to his partners’ throats?
The more interesting question, however, is why he did it — and that’s the other, altogether more fascinating level the film operates in. Why did Zuckerberg betray his sole friend and solitary sponsor, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, who expertly portrays superhumanly decency without crossing the border into saintliness)? And why did he think it was safer to hedge his bets with Napster co-founder Sean Parker (a wickedly amusing Justin Timberlake)?
At least with the handsome and moneyed Winklevoss twins — Cameron and Tyler (both played by Armie Hammer), who file one of the lawsuits against Zuckerberg, claiming that it was their idea that he stole; Saverin weighs in with the other lawsuit, after being nudged out of the company he co-founded — it’s not difficult to sense the “why.” They’re everything Zuckerberg is not, and his underhanded rebellion — if it was that — is the classic revenge of the nerd, fuelled by the irrefutable logic that the guy who builds a really nice chair doesn’t owe anything to everyone who’s ever built a chair.
As magnetic as these moral dimensions are, they don’t accrue into the juicy, emotionally satisfying morality tale hinted at by the plot points. There are facets of the Faust-Devil relationship in the tacit compact between Zuckerberg and Parker — but there is no tidy lesson at the end. You can even sight in Zuckerberg, now coming undone by his ambition, shades of Macbeth besieged by a Birnam Wood of lawyers — but there is no tragic comeuppance.
Perhaps comeuppances are meant for a more innocent age, with clear-cut lines between good and evil, and Eisenberg’s performance is the perfect embodiment of shades of grey. “What is he thinking,” we wonder throughout, and he constantly shuts us out. Even when he’s supposedly happy, we’re never sure when his lips realign into a diagonal shape — it isn’t so much a smile as a slash, and it never reaches his eyes. By the end of the film, we are no closer to solving the “why,” though the closing scene does hint that this is a man more sinned against than sinning. (Or in the film’s words, “Creation myths need a devil.”)
In this scene, which occurs in the room where the depositions are taking place, a junior member of the law firm walks in and finds Zuckerberg hunched over his laptop. The other lawyers have departed, and so have Saverin and the Winklevoss twins. In the film’s only moment of pure candour, Zuckerberg admits to her — after she advises him to settle — that he was angry and drunk and stupid when he blogged about his ex-girlfriend and started creating what would eventually turn into Facebook.
The lawyer leaves, and Zuckerberg finally shows signs of being a man and not just a programming machine. His attention returns to his laptop, and he is alone with his creation. A person of flesh and blood, who once sat across a table from him, is now a lifeless picture on a web page. Like an island-marooned castaway sending a message in a bottle, or like an apocalypse survivor hunting for signs of sentient life, he makes a “friend” request and waits, patiently, for a reply. A caption on screen reads, “Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world.” It may just as easily have read, “Mark Zuckerberg is the loneliest man on the planet.”
baradwajrangan@expressbuzz.com