The Social Network · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the laptops. In almost every interior of The Social Network, the brightest thing in the room is a screen, and the faces around it surface out of blue-grey shadow like objects developing in a chemical bath. Jeff Cronenweth lit the film this way on purpose — no warm fill, just the cold ambient glow of the machines the characters are building. Hold onto that image, because it tells you what kind of film you're watching before a word is spoken. This is a world where the source of light is also the source of the trouble.

Now the words. The film opens on nine unbroken minutes of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) talking to his girlfriend across a bar table, and the talk moves faster than thought is supposed to. He perceives everything — her tone, the social hierarchy of final clubs, the precise insult that will land — and he acts on all of it instantly, cruelly, without the half-second in which a normal person decides not to say the thing. Deleuze has a name for that missing half-second. He calls it the interval: the gap between perceiving and reacting where a living being weighs what it has taken in. Cinema's whole classical grammar — situation, then action that changes the situation — runs through that interval. Mark has almost none. He is sensory-motor circuitry at full power, and the breakup that ends the scene is the first sign that running a human being at that clock speed breaks something.

If the film were only that, it would be a brilliant character study. What makes it strange is the architecture around it. Fincher and editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall cut the dramatized past against not one but two legal depositions, conducted years later, in which the people who were there testify to what happened — and disagree. The Winklevoss suit says one thing; Eduardo Saverin's suit says another; Mark, deposed, offers a third, flatter, more evasive account. The film never tells you who is right. This is the device Deleuze calls falsifying narration: not a lie inside the story, but mutually exclusive versions presented as equally true, so that the question 'what actually happened' stops being answerable and becomes, instead, the film's subject. The deposition frame isn't a convenience. It's a claim — that the founding of Facebook is precisely the kind of event that cannot be told from one chair.

This is where the powers of the false earns its keep, because it explains why the film feels honest rather than evasive. There's an old contract in realist cinema — Bazin's intuition that the camera, pointed at the world, doesn't lie. The Social Network voids that contract on purpose. Every image we see of the past is testimony, spoken by an interested party under oath, stitched from incompatible sources. When a name spoken in a deposition room summons the image of the scene it describes — the cut led by sound before the picture follows — you are watching memory get manufactured in real time, composed and then overwritten by the next person's version. Deleuze calls those crystalline descriptions: images that build their object and then dissolve it, because there's no stable past underneath to anchor them. The film's coldness is the coldness of a thing that has given up on a single truth and decided that's the most truthful thing it can do.

And yet it isn't relativist mush, because one structure does hold across all the versions: the shape of a fall. Mezrich's source, Sorkin's script, Fincher's grading all bend toward the same downward slope — the friend cut out, the company won, the founder left alone clicking refresh on the profile of the girl from the first scene. Deleuze borrowed from Citizen Kane the idea of a man reconstructed after the fact through the contradictory accounts of people who knew him, each holding a fragment, none holding the whole. The Social Network is Kane's direct descendant in armature: replace the reporter chasing Rosebud with two sets of lawyers chasing a settlement, and the interrogative-testimony engine is identical. What Fincher adds is the friend-request as the new Rosebud — a refresh button instead of a sled.

Place it in the lineage honestly. The rapid overlapping speech comes down from His Girl Friday, the epigrammatic cruelty from Sweet Smell of Success; the faith that paper trails and procedure can carry a serious drama comes from All the President's Men; the incompatible-eyewitness structure is Rashomon's; the deposition-as-climax is Sorkin repeating his own A Few Good Men. None of that is theft. It's a discourse — film talking to film — and Fincher's specific invention is to run all those inherited instruments through a digital camera (the Red One, shot at 4K for that shadow latitude) and a synthesizer score by Reznor and Ross that pressurizes scenes without ever telling you how to feel. The score withholds sympathy the way Eisenberg's face does.

What did it do to filmmaking? It proved that the defining American story of its decade was a story about whose account you believe, and that you could build a hundred-million-dollar tragedy with no gun fired and no situation ever resolved — only litigated. The last shot is the whole argument in miniature: the most connected man alive, alone, waiting to see if one person will accept him back, refreshing a page that won't answer. The interval he skipped in the first scene has become the only thing he has left, and now it's endless. Watch it again for the light. Every face is lit by the machine that ate it.