Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network
We’ve had a Netflicks DVD of The Social Network hanging around the house for months. My wife watched it ages ago, by herself, but because I’m so dependent, I’ve been pressing her to watch it again, with me. Last night I almost got her to do it, till she frowned and said she found the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg “anti-Semitic.” Well then I was bound and determined to see the movie. I took it over to a friend’s house, and watched it there.
My wife is on to something. The portrait of Zuckerberg in the movie is repulsive, and it ends up being generic, a portrait of the new striving American Jewish meritocratic billionaire. Given that this portrait was brought to us by a production team that included Jews– writer Aaron Sorkin and mega-producer Scott Rudin among others–I relate it to my own disaffection with the new Jewish establishment. Watching the film, I remembered that I’m not the only one who goes around counting my people in the news, and not the only one ashamed of what the winners look like. Am I self-hater? No. Just a little disgusted.
It’s really hard to believe that Zuckerberg is as bad as he’s made out to be. He’s a soulless anti-Gatsby, clamoring for inclusion, and clamoring for hedonism, but without any affection. The joyless Jewish Harvard social milieu from which Zuckerberg springs are a crude caricature in this film– and certainly misrepresent Harvard in 2003. I don’t think Zuckerberg really cared about getting into a WASPy club; besides, those clubs weren’t even WASPy anymore. But the social divide the film captures was certainly true of Sorkin and my generation: we felt ourselves to be confined to a grind community built around law and guilt, and wondered about how much wild fun those goyim were having with girls and drugs. We wanted a part of that; and the desire to be at the fun party is what drives Zuckerberg in this movie. The movie uses Phillips Exeter, the fancy private school Zuckerberg went to, as a rapier against him: he’s continually shown wearing PE t-shirts.
Yes, all the WASPs are caricatured here. The Winkelvosses are a vicious joke about gentile privilege. But I’m not interested in the WASP caricatures, I’m interested in what my wife gleaned in the Zuckerberg portrayal. The character played by Jesse Eisenberg only cares about elites and the big score. He has no friends, because he fucks everyone over, beginning with the first scene when he disses the girl who just dumped him on a blog by talking about her bra size. He screws the Winkelvosses and the math whiz on whom he depends for a crucial algorithm to build his website, Eduardo Saverin. And yes Saverin is Jewish, from Brazil, but he doesn’t really relieve the picture of Jewish piggitude. That picture is filled out by Harvard President Larry Summers, who looks like a pig (as played by Douglas Urbanski) and crudely tells the Winkelvoss twins that they are wrong to be demanding relief from Harvard for the fact that Zuckerberg stole an idea from them.
The Winkelvosses are a WASP joke because they are following an entitled American code of honor in pursuing Zuckerberg through the Harvard hierarchy, but if they’re a joke– their lawyer is called Hotchkiss– Zuckerberg and Summers are the new ugly breed of success. I spent a lot of time with Scott Rudin once and know he has a great sociological mind; I can just see him and Sorkin sitting around laughing about how Jews have taken over the Establishment, the same thing I often write about here. And let’s show the world how they’re doing it– ugly.
Is the Zuckerberg picture anti-Semitic? Well it comes close. I started thinking about Zuckerberg’s recent facebook pictures, including the one below, and thinking, well
Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan
he can’t be that much of a dick. Still, this movie strikes me as a landmark in a great tradition, the Jewish literary hatred of money. From I.L. Peretz’s short stories about the Polish ghetto to Philip Roth’s viciousness toward the Patimkins in Goodbye, Columbus, there is a Jewish tradition of afflicting the reverence of wealth in our community.
Kafka put it best in his undelivered letter to his father of 1919, upbraiding him for the Jewish “materials” he had tried to give him:
This was the religious material that was handed on to me, to which may be added at most the outstretched hand pointing to “the sons of the millionaire Fuchs,” who attended the synagogue with their father on the High Holy Days. How one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as fast as possible, I could not understand; precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoted action.
I remember that outstretched hand of reverence in my life. I remember being told to worship the Blaustein family in Baltimore (he of Standard Oil and the famous dialogue with Ben-Gurion about, we ain’t moving to Israel) and bridling. And I put this film in that category: hatred of the millionaire Fuchs. A fine tradition, but it made this film hard to watch.
paranoid nonsense.
You should download a copy of ‘pirates of silicon valley’ and consider the rather negative portraits of bill gates and steve jobs. Even the title tells you where the film-makers stand. Then you should try to argue that that the portrait of Gates is ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘anti-Congregationalist’, or that the portrait of Jobs is ‘anti-Buddhist’ or a slur on adopted people. Your arguments would make make as much sense as those you’ve made about The Social Network.’
The world doesn’t revolve around Judaism, any more than it revolves around Congregationalism or Buddhism. The portrayal of Zuckerberg in the movie has nothing to do with his religion or ethnicity.
Hmmm… Pictures are deceiving. There is something wrong about seeing a bunch of unhappy young people at the bar snapping pictures pretending to have fun and then immediately turn into zombies as they upload them to their facebook via their smartphone. Those pictures are telling a lie. Maybe the above Zuckerberg photo is also telling a lie. Like how the media always runs photos of Pollard looking all sensitive. I could be wrong. IMO, Zuckerberg in all likelihood is probably just a dick. That’s it.
Zuckerberg, Jewishness aside, came from a well-off family and went to Harvard. If you can’t be successful given those circumstances, you’re doing it wrong.
Perhaps Phil is on to something though. Producers are pretty darn important in Hollywood in terms of getting the film they want, however, the director is the main person that ultimately translates this to film via their vision. David Fincher, the director, is not Jewish.
Fincher has been fighting against the Hollywood system since his very first film, Alien 3. He pretty much disowns Alien 3. The studio hacked his version of the film into an incoherent mess. When he made The Game, the studio forced him to tack on a ‘happy ending’ he wasn’t crazy about. And when he made Fight Club, the studio hated it and and no idea how to market it. Since Fight Club is intended for a male audience, Fincher was opposed to exploiting Brad Pitt’s likeness in advertising as the studio wanted to do. Perhaps that’s why the initial posters has a pink bar of soap. Pink washing?
I don’t think this is anything new really. Hollywood and the studio heads are predominantly Jewish. Somebody told me that they won’t watch Harry Potter because the goblins who control the gold are antisemitic caricatures. Are they? They might be. And some say that George Lucas was also frustrated with the studio system and Jawas (phonetically similar to Jews) and Watto (prequel character with allegedly antisemitic caricature features), who are both dishonest merchants, are apparently a jab at them. If true, it’s probably just a joke. Spielberg is one of Lucas’ best friends, so he can’t be antisemitic.
The movie portrayed Zuckerberg as an awful individual. But, the first commentator is right it had nothing to do with his ethnic heritage. Nowhere ever does the movie suggest that Zuckerberg and Summers are awful people because they are Jewish. They are simply portrayed as awful people (rightly or wrongly) and their ethnicity is never even hinted at in the movie. Compare this to the huge number of movies portraying Arabs or Muslims or Germans as inherently evil because they are Arab, Muslim, or German.
Good topic, but sometimes a film character is just a film character. I don’t doubt that the movie’s Zuckerberg isn’t exactly the real Mark Zuckerberg. Liberties were taken both to make the story more dramatic and to include the film makers’ own preoccupations.
The obsession with final clubs was Aaron Sorkin’s. Maybe you can go to Exeter and Harvard today without taking much interest in old WASP institutions and rituals, but you can’t write an Ivy-related success story and escape the influence of Fitzgerald and Gatsby. If Zuckerberg had been preoccupied with making Porcellian or Fly or Spee, he wouldn’t have invented Facebook (or whatever it was he did that got him all that money).
But anti-Semitic? No, a film portrayal of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates might have been similar, stressing the nerdish, anti-social aspects and ruthlessness, without being anti-Arab or anti-WASP.
The Summers’ portrait, though, was interesting. It didn’t look entirely believable. How accurate was it? Has Harvard ever had a president like that before?
phil should read kafka’s “jackals and arabs”
A better question might be, “Is Mark Zuckerberg an anti-semite” because, according to the conventional wisdom here, every act by a Jew, is directly related to his jewishness. I for one think this is nonsense. Z’berg is probably just a dick. Like most kids who went to Exeter…. haha.
And instead of crying about anti-semitism – think about how far we have come. It’s a movie about a jewish kid who actually PRODUCED something ( he may have ripped off some ideas etc) but the kid actually produced a product – which is radically different from the traditional role jews play in cinema, namely the guy who takes 5%.
Ari Gold on Entourage is waaaaaaaay more anti-semitic than Zuckerberg in social network