The Social Network and The New York Review of Books

In the New York Review of Books,  The Social Network, Zadie Smith is supposed to writing about the recently released film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, but in broaching the topic, she is entirely absorbed with herself. She is, we are informed not only of the same generation as Mark Zuckerberg, but she was at Harvard with him. She taught writing there while he was an undergrad. Despite her generational and cultural proximity to Zuckerberg, Smith finds herself recoiling at his technophilic conception of impoverished connections. She is horrified by her students' reactions to French experimental fiction. Smith declares herself a young fogey, devoted to privacy and secrets and rich, nuanced, textured relationships, (or so we imagine). As she ponders Greeks and Romans through the "richness" of her cultural and literary associations around Zuckerberg's relationship to antiquity, she seems to be assuring her readers and herself, that yes, there is a better world out there of high cultural connections that make our lives more meaningful and more substantial. In this world, EVERYONE has a print and digital subscription to the New York Review of Books.

In all of her self-assertion, she forgets to mention something about the film that one would expect a writer with her pedigree and her sensitivities to be of note -- the degrading and degraded role of women in Sorkin's screenplay and Fincher's film. Yes, Erica Albright gets to be cast as the muse of negative capabilities in the film's origin myth, but almost every other female character is represented as eye candy, pole dancer groupie, sex toy, jealous harridan or surface from which cocaine might be snorted. Zuckerberg may in fact have a steady Asian-American girlfriend in real life, as Smith helpfully points out, but in Fincher's cinematic Harvard those perfect SAT scores seem to be an Asian-American girl's calling card for bathroom quickies.

I dislike the call for "positive representations of minorities" as if that would cure any of our society's ills, but The Social Network's casual racism and misogyny and its complete obtuseness about hypersexualization of Asian-American women cries out for a harsh 1990s style identity politics spanking. The film does capture some of the intoxicating energy that fuels life on line: but its inability to think through richer inter-racial and inter-subjective relationships is simply sad. Smith is so preoccupied with sorting out whether she is young (like Zuckerberg) or old (like Sorkin, Fincher, Jared Lanier and me) that she fails to be anything more than descriptive and tendentious in her review of the film.

In fact, Smith's self-absorption seems to founded on her sense of self-importance. One condition of social networks is that they have dislodged and decentered the authority of critical/aesthetic/cultural judgment. I am therefore less worried what "people" will or won't think of The Social Network because they've read The New York Review of Books. Smart, young women of all races will find their way through the labyrinth of the culture's present fantasies of the roles they play and don't play during moments of technological and social change without the help of the NYRB or Zadie Smith. Meanwhile, the romance between Jewish-American computer geeks and Asian-American smart girls waits to be written.