Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Social Network
2010 · David Fincher · The Social Network on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at where the light on each face comes from. (light)
Jeff Cronenweth lets laptops, phones and fluorescent corridors do the lighting. There is almost no warm fill anywhere. Faces surface out of blue-gray shadow and the rooms stay underlit.
Payoff: The machines these people are building are the only thing lighting them, which is the whole film in one choice.
Listen for the word that carries you into the past. (cutting)
Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall move between the legal rooms and the dormitories by sound first. A name spoken in a deposition arrives over the scene it describes before the picture follows it.
Payoff: You learn the grammar inside twenty minutes: every scene of the past is somebody's sworn account. In the reading: falsifying-narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: sworn accounts that cannot all be true, and the film backs none of them.
Notice the score tightening without ever swelling. (sound)
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross work in synthesizer texture and processed piano. The music presses in and withdraws and never announces a feeling. No cue asks you to like anybody.
Payoff: The pressure rises while your sympathy stays unassigned, so you have to decide about these people yourself.
Notice how fast Eisenberg talks and how flat. (performance)
Eisenberg delivers Sorkin's lines at speed with almost no tonal shading. He never takes the half-second in which a person decides not to say the cruel thing. Garfield plays Saverin warm and readable beside him.
Payoff: That missing half-second is the character. Everything the film spends two hours litigating comes out of it.
Look at how neatly the party crowds are arranged. (staging)
Fincher blocks the Phoenix Club party, the dorm rooms and the Los Angeles clubs for geometry rather than noise. Every body sits where he put it. Nothing in the frame looks spontaneous.
Payoff: Social life is photographed here as a system to be read, not a place to be swept into.
Once you have seen it
Track which deposition a given scene is answering. (structure)
Two suits run at once and their versions overlap and contradict. The Winklevoss account, Saverin's account and Mark's flatter one never line up, and Fincher grants no account the final authority.
Payoff: There is no settled past under these images, only competing stories, and the film treats that as the honest answer. In the reading: crystalline-description. The reading calls these crystalline descriptions: images that build a past and then dissolve it, with nothing stable underneath.
Watch the two Winklevoss brothers share a frame. (camera)
Armie Hammer's face was mapped onto Josh Pence's body so one actor could play opposite himself. The Henley rowing footage is warmer and more burnished than any other passage in the film.
Payoff: The most old-fashioned images in the movie belong to the men who lose, and they look like another century.
Watch Mark click refresh in the last shot. (structure)
He sends a request to the woman from the first scene, then refreshes the page, then refreshes it again. The score keeps running. Neither lawsuit gets a ruling on screen.
Payoff: The film closes on the question it asked at the bar table and puts the answer in your hands. In the reading: the mental-image. The reading calls this a relation-image: the picture completes itself only through what the viewer is holding in mind.
Carry this in: Every scene of the past is someone's testimony. Watch who is telling it, and watch where the light is coming from.