The Social Network: Denby v. Smith v. Wood

Just for fun, I want to compare three reviews of “The Social Network”: David Denby’s “Influencing People” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010); Michael Wood’s “At the Movies” (London Review of Books, November 4, 2010); and Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” (The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010).

I’ll be guided in my analysis by Anthony Lane’s view that “The primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture – not telling movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket” (from Lane’s Introduction to his great collection of New Yorker writings Nobody’s Perfect, 2002).

Denby starts his review excitedly, proclaiming “The Social Network” to be a “work of art.” He engages in some interesting interpretation (e.g., “‘The Social Network’ suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information”), and lays out an excellent overview of Fincher’s previous work. Along the way, he provides some wonderful, semi-abstract descriptions of the movie (“a tightly fitted mosaic of agitated fragments,” “a linear accelerator that breathes”). But it’s not until near the review’s end that his prose reaches its highest pitch, when he tries to get at what it is that gives Fincher movies their distinctive look:

Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then, in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them.

Denby’s insight – “we are meant to see the ugly poetry” – leads him to write what is, I believe, the most inspired line in his review:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.

Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” is not so much a review of “The Social Network” as it is a rant against the evils of Facebook. She argues that Facebook is reductive (“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility”). She contends that it’s degrading (“In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is degrading”). She claims it encourages pack mentality (“But the pack mentality is precisely what Open Graph, a Facebook innovation of 2008, is designed to encourage”).

Smith likes “The Social Network” because (1) it’s a recognizable portrait of “a computer nerd, a social autistic” (“Oh, yeah. We know this guy. Over-programmed, furious, lonely”), and (2) it satirizes Generation Facebook’s “celebrity lifestyle” vision of the good life. Smith’s description of this vision is one of the great pleasures of her piece:

Again, we know its basic outline; a velvet rope, a cocktail waitress who treats you like a king, the best of everything on tap, a special booth of your own, fussy, tiny expensive food (“Could you bring out some things? The lacquered pork with the ginger confit? I don’t know, tuna tartar, some lobster claws, the foie gras and the shrimp dumplings, that’ll get us started”), appletinis, a Victoria’s Secret model date, wild house parties, fancy cars, slick suits, cocaine, and a “sky’s the limit” objective: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?… A billion dollars.”

Michael Wood’s review is the briefest of the three pieces. Like Denby and Smith, he notes “the long, intense, information-crowded conversation before the credits,” but unlike the other two writers, he shows how the zinger that Erica scores against Zuckerberg in this early sequence (something along the lines of “You’ll go through life believing people don’t like you because you’re a nerd. This won’t be true. They won’t like you because you’re an asshole”) links with a line that a lawyer says to Zuckerberg near the end of the movie (“You know, you’re not really an asshole, you’re just trying so hard to be one”). Wood considers this linkage and says that it lends Erica’s line “a weird retrospective authority.”

Wood makes another illuminating point about the film’s structure when he says, “At the centre of the movie, with flashbacks radiating out from it, is the room where the depositions are being heard in the two cases.” This reminded me that my dislike of flashback shadowed my own response to “The Social Network” when I saw it a couple of months ago.

Denby admires the movie’s “ugly poetry”; Smith likes its satire; Wood notes its radiating flashbacks. And the Anthony Lane “recreation of texture” award goes to … David Denby for his felicitous “while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in.”