Review of The Social Network (2010) by Jeanrenoir — 05 Oct 2010

The Social Network is a good movie, not a great one. A great movie, a 10, is The Lives of Others, Tokyo Story, The Leopard--films like that. That said, a key reason The Social Network is so over-praised, and many viewers and critics are so thrilled by it, is because so many viewers and critics of the film, critics especially, are bi-coastal Jews who are thrilled by the film's story about a "meritocratic" Jewish "genius" at Harvard who screws the WASP Porcellian aristos, whose club he could no more join than jump over the moon, out of the profits for their own idea by stealing it.

It's the ethnic and class politics that make the film over-rated the way Sophie's Choice, a good but not great film too, also was. David Denby in The New Yorker even calls Zuckerberg a "hero." Of what? Moxie? Chutzpah? By that standard, Madoff was a super-hero.

At the same time, the film itself seems almost a critical meditative allegory of the way the battle for money and status in America that Jews have had to wage, by hook or by crook, against the once-dominant, anti-Semitic, and exclusionary WASP upper-class has warped some Jews and undermined the moral values of both the Jewish religion and secular Jewish humanism.

In fact, Zuckerberg in the film is the most negative image of a Jew in a mainstream American film I can recall. He's an arrogant, creepy, borderline sociopathic jerk, with no evident ethical principles at all.

He happily stabs his Jewish only friend in the back right along with the WASPs. He's a sort of Shylock of software, but much less ambiguous morally and humanly than Shakespeare's great creation. He makes Sammy Glick look like nothing.

Sorkin and Rudin seem deeply interested in the cost of the Jewish race for wealth and status in Madoff's America. A timely theme indeed, and one that must be especially pertinent for Hollywood insiders like them.

For unethical Jews from Madoff to Zuckerberg, America seems to have been closer to Babylon than Jerusalem, and this is a point well worth making in a film like The Social Network. Zuckerberg is a sort of book-end with Dustin Hoffman's breakthrough role for Jews in The Graduate forty five years ago.

That Mike Nichols film cheered, and we all cheered with it, as Ben stole Katherine Ross from the Berkeley WASPy golden boy at the Christian altar itself. It was about time that Jews won victories like that in America with hustle and character (vs.

the WASP's frat boy entitled vapidity). But instead of presenting a likable Jewish hero at odds with "plastics," The Social Network gives us a total jerk unredeemed by his clumsy geekiness, a thief who seems to personify the cost in corruption of forty years of endless, relentless striving by Jews on the make like Zuckerberg in Madoff's America.