you can't handle the veritas

8/8/2019 You Can't Handle the Veritas

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LIFE AND ART

You Can't Handle the VeritasWhat Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher get wrongabout Harvardand Facebook.

By Nathan Heller

Posted Thursday, Sept. 30, 2010, at 8:13 PM ET

Reliable sources inform me that there comes, inevery human life, a point of terminal uncoolnessthat uncomfortable moment when the music startsto feel too loud, the prime-time TV gets a little

baffling, Velcro seems brilliant, and the tastes of mainstream people sound like groupthink from adistant, maybe child-eating, place. I think I may have reached that point, this week, on seeing the newFacebook movie. The Social Network, by writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher, has beenwidely, roundly praised by critics I respect and frequently agree with. TheNew York Times' ManohlaDargis wrote about the movie as "a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale."David Denby, in The New Yorker, described a film that "pushes beyond simplicities," a report on "class,manners, ethics" that is Sorkin's "best work yet"a film, in short, that's "absolutely emblematic of itstime and place." On reading this, I felt sure it was time to take up boules, so out of touch with my ownculture did I seem to be. The Social NetworkI saw was a rote and deeply mediocre film, much weakerthan the best work of its writer or director. How could I, who should have been sucked deep into that on-screen universe (Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first people I met in college; we lived a couple ofrooms apart as freshmen), feel so impervious to the movie's "emblematic" pull?

The Social Networkwas made to provide Facebook's half-billion users with a kind of origin myth, andthat myth's luckiest feature, from a cinematic point of view, is its roots in the nation's most iconic ivorytower. People go out of their way to setmoviesatHarvard, because, like Vegas or Cold War Berlin,Harvard signifies. The things that Harvard signifies are the things The Social Networktakes as plotpoints: It is a movie framed to be aboutand here I'm quoting some unsubtle dialogue I scribbled downfrom the fifth row"a world where social structure was everything." Fair enough. What's troubling,

though, especially in a film that strives to capture a new 21st-century order, is the movie's totallyregressive concept of that structure.

Sorkin and Fincher's 2003 Harvard is a citadel of old money, regatta blazers, and (if I am not misreadingthe implication here) a Jewish underclass striving beneath the heel of a WASP-centric, socially draconianculture. Zuckerberg aspires to penetrate this world in order to make fancy friends andwell, do what,exactly? Wear madras? There were some kids at Harvard, in my era, with an interest in whatever gauntremnants of old-style affluence remained, but the impulse was nostalgic and theatrical more thanambitiouspeople who arrive in the Ivy League these days do not come from black-tie dinners andwood-paneled rooms, nor do they enter such milieus after they leave. The kids entering Harvard in 2002
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came largely from pressure-cooker public schools, dorm-room entrepreneurships, the cutthroat upperechelon of prep institutions, or, in my case, the all-weather-fleece-wearing wilds of San Francisco.Sorkin and Fincher's failure to discern the underlying culture of the place in the aughts may be why theirportrait of today's Cambridge, Mass., strivers felt so tediously stock and two-dimensional to me: Irecognized their Harvard, but only from Love Story and The Paper Chase, not my experience. To get theuniversity this wrong in this movie is no small matter. In doing so, The Social Networkmisunderstandsthe cultural ambitions, and the nature of Zuckerberg's acumen, that made Facebook possible.

I'm not complaining here about the movie's superficial liberties, of which there are plenty. JesseEisenberg's Zuckerberg is a withdrawn, wounded recluse who spirals across campus with his head lockeddown, answering questions in a quick, high-strung rodent voice. The Zuckerberg I knewnot especiallywell; we occasionally used to have lunch together in the dining hall before losing touch sometime in2003 or 2004was outwardly friendly, often smiling, confident, inclined, if anything, to talk at outdoorvolume. He was something of a geek, I guess, but at Harvard in 2002, this was not exactly a minorityposition. His room was on the first floor of our dormitory, where outgoing freshman seemed to be placedand he had his desk positioned such that if the door was open to the hallway, as it sometimes was, he'dface the other kids coming and going on their way to class.

Still, who cares now? Eisenberg's portrait of an oppressed, psychologically wounded mogul fits thiscinematic universe better than the real Zuckerberg would, and, anyway, it's beside the point to fuss overthe nitty-gritty of the movie's accuracy: The Social Networkis openly built according to the laws ofnarrative fiction, not documentary. What is notbeside the point, given the film's ambitions, is whetherthese various details converge to nail the real-world-zeitgeist target they hope to. They don't. The moviepaints a picture of a cultural world that is as black-and-white as it is outdated.

In Sorkin-Fincher Land, where character is mostly a function of vector and velocity, this is no meanproblem. The movie dwells at length on the university's so-called final clubs, essentially long-standingnonresidential fraternities that style themselves as faux-patrician, culturally retrograde social spaces.(They are unrecognized by the university after refusing to go coeducational in the 1980s.) In Sorkin's

script, the final clubs are a necessary gateway to proper social life and influence in collegewhich letsthe movie throw itself in line with, and fall back on, decades of cinematic ideation about the socialexclusivity of the Ivy League. In truth, those clubs were seen as basically vestigial curios, removed fromthe main artery of the school's cultural life: The notion that a crack Web programmer in 2003 would findhis future blocked off by their fusty gatekeeping is risible. So, for that matter, is the movie's much moregeneral implication that the Georgian halls, the snooty clubs, and the frequent semiformal wearcomposed an earnest ecosystem that Zuckerberg's own "social network" was vying with.

In point of fact, those old-Ivy brocades felt, to those of us who sometimes took them up, posed and falseSuites in dormitories that had once been built to house a single well-heeled Harvard man had long sincebeen reapportioned to hold as many kids as possible. Students based in these dowdy halls wouldsometimes explain, between cockroach plagues, that living there made them feel part of the tradition of"old Harvard." It has long been the university's business to cultivate a nostalgic impulse toward thisElysian place, "old Harvard," and my generation of students was by no means the first to land on campuswith a fixed and highly cinematic notion about what the Ivy League entailed. We may have been amongthe first, though, to have felt not much more than a summer-stock performer's intimacy with the script athand.

Facebook, in those days called the Facebook, didn't rise as a scrappy force trying to conquer a patrician


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culture. That culture was already dead. Its rituals were theater. Any paths that may once have existedwere now overgrown or paved and clotted with pedestrians all headed to the promised land. "Where isthis old-boy network everyone is always talking about?" I once heard a socially adept and pristinelycredentialed senior, trying for an internship, cry in a now-fluorescent-lit room in a hallowed building.The implication was that where it really mattered (mattered, at least, to the kind of hyperambitiousupstart whose identity is predicated on a plan to, for instance, enter the White House), Harvard'scinematic Ivy League-dom was a hollow promise. A young person in 2002 did not, I suspect, have to

attend a fancy East Coast college to come of age with a looming terror that the rites of high achievementwere becoming far more sacramental than significant. Attending a school like Harvard did, however,make certain things stand in relief. One thing that stood out for me, that first fall of 2002, was that thesong most often playing at the parties, the apparent soundtrack of our generation's independence, was ahit released 13 and a half years earlier, as a 7-inch single, by Madonna.

There was a sense in 2002 and 2003, in other words, that as a group of people on the verge of culturalmaturity, we had little of our own with which to lay claim to the momentbesides, maybe, the socialbonds and shorthand that arose from all being in this place together. That is the real beginning ofFacebook's rise and the useful measure of Mark Zuckerberg's brilliance. What's often overlooked inrecent talk of the Facebook founder's "robot" stiffness or bizarre, officious ideas about online privacy is

what a canny and receptive cultural reader he was. Zuckerberg visited many of those Madonna-scoredparties, too. Zuckerberg always seemed to be interested when you talked to him. Zuckerberg once told amutual friend that he was not, and would never be, the best programmer around but that he had a knackfor coming up with ideas that fit the moment and could carry. Which is to say that, in a class of some1,600 students largely trying to follow dutifully the paths of alumni who'd grown into great men andwomen,Zuckerberg was one of a few among us actually thinking like an intellectually mature, creativeperson in his moment.

Sorkin and Fincher get this at a surface level, but beyond that surface, their account of Facebook'sorigins and rise is maddeningly generic. We seem to be meant to think that Zuckerberg grew andadministered a global communications network in order to prove his power to a couple of blazer-wearingkids who cold-shouldered him once during college (or else, maybe, to get with the hot babes who, in themovie, frequent Cambridge and the tech industry as if a Miller High Life ad might break out anymoment). We are told that people liked Facebook because it took "the entire experience of college,"especially the exclusive final clubs, and transferred it online. This is a bit like saying books caught onbecause they put the whole experience of talking onto paper. What Facebook really gave us, for better orworse, was a new social and intellectual culture that we could claim, finally, as our own. During its earlyrise, the site allowed the social flavor of the Ivy League to include more than just playing dress-up andpretend. (We now played those games online, as our own.) These days, it's helped open a large,uncharted territory for a generation whose world first seemed, in many ways, competitively tighter andmore predetermined than ever. There is the story of a kind of revolution here. It's just a shame The Socia

Networktells it in the style of the old regime.

Nathan Heller is a Slate copy editor. Follow him on Twitter.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2269308/

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