The Social Network (2010, USA)

The Social Network, like Zodiac before it (forgive me for skipping The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but I just couldn’t get past those sweepingly Epic-with-a-capital-E trailers), is a film that is ostensibly about real people, but which is curiously devoid of real feeling. It’s a bloodless film, full of bluster but little passion. The razor-sharp script by Aaron Sorkin might actually exacerbate this problem – Sorkin has no problem building a world full of hyper-intelligent people, but he sometimes lacks the ability to make us care about them. Coupled with Fincher’s obsessive nature (for a movie about computer nerds, it’s painstakingly and artfully filmed), the audience is often left wondering whether there is anyone in The Social Network - a movie based on real people, about real events - who actually resembles a real human being. Jesse Eisenberg is a terrific nebbishy, assholish Mark Zuckerberg, but his character starts to lean into caricature without a stronger director’s hand to pull him out again. Andrew Garfield fares best as Zuckerberg’s business partner and best friend, Eduardo Saverin, but he has the easiest and most naturally sympathetic role to play. The Social Network, for a movie that runs over two hours, is also strangely abrupt - Christy is suddenly crazy, Sean Parker is transparent to everyone but Mark, and the movie stops rather than ending.

Structural and conceptual issues aside, there's another point nagging at me, one that has been made already about The Social Network, but seems to be representative about the bulk of Fincher’s work. There are virtually no women in the cast of The Social Network - certainly no women characters of note, and only one that isn’t displayed as a crazy, or at least castrating, bitch. As pointed out in my Zodiac review, Panic Room and Alien3 are the only of Fincher’s films to date (again, please give me leeway for Benjamin Button, and feel free to point out any faults it poses to my argument) that feature decent female characters – or any female characters that aren’t either totally disposable or downright crazy (I’m looking at you, Marla). And even with these two somewhat notable exceptions, the female leads in Panic Room and Alien3 generally get the crap beat out of them and/or terrorized thoroughly – not quite to the extent of having their heads chopped off and sent special delivery, but homes invaded, children threatened, giant monsters bursting out of abdomens . . . you get the idea. These are also two extremely de-feminized portraits of the heroine – Jodie Foster’s female-ness in Panic Room is defined only by her mother-bear instincts, while Fincher’s installment in the Alien franchise transforms Ripley further into a super-soldier, including removing one of her most defining feminine features – her hair. (Though Fincher does let Ripley have sex – not that the encounter ends terribly well. In this way she seems almost like a praying mantis, just that Fincher flips it around so that the other bad-ass mommy present, not Ripley herself, does the post-coital killing.) The fact that Fincher’s next project is the troublesome – at least in a feminist sense – American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo only lends more credence to my growing belief that the man just does not like women, or at least female characters. They’re dangerous vixens (The Game, Fight Club, The Social Network), terrorized wives and mothers (Se7en, Panic Room), and most often have gruesome acts of violence perpetrated upon them (Alien3, Se7en, Panic Room, Zodiac, and, unless he’s putting in a lot more hugs than exist in the original Swedish version, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). I admire Fincher for his work as a stylist, and I still think many of his early films are excellent genre exercises, but this trend leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.