Find Friends, Lose Friends

November 13, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Random thoughts on “The Social Network,” which I saw last night:

1. The central irony (which nobody could possibly miss): Facebook is hugely popular because it lets people create and maintain friendships of all sorts. Yet the person who created it, when it comes to personal relationships, is utterly inept. Compounding the irony is that the missing piece is “relationship status.” That isthe element  that, when Zuckerberg thinks of it and adds it to the template, finally allows him to put Facebook online.

2. Boys. The source of energy for most of what happens in the film is the adolescent boy mentality. What eventually becomes Facebook starts when Zuckerberg creates a tournament variant of Hot or Not but with pictures of Harvard female students.


Women are objects for boys to rate rather than people they might interact with as human beings. It’s what we might expect from stereotypical computer nerds, but they are not the only ones who prefer this version of male-female relationships. The hits so numerous that they crash the system come mostly from Harvard boys.  We see the same mentality at the Porcellian, the exclusive Harvard final club Zuckerberg can’t get into, where the upper-class boys bring in girls by the busload. No doubt, some of these rich boys were graduates of prep schools where a similar mentality reigned.  (See this earlier post on the Landon School.)

3. Sorkin. Nobody comes close to Aaron Sorkin in writing dialogue for really smart characters. He did it on the West Wing, and he does it here. In several places in the film, I had the feeling I was watching a chess match where one player was thinking three moves ahead of me, the other five moves ahead. As consolation, I prefer to imagine that each of those ten or twenty seconds of dialogue took Sorkin half a day to write.

4. Lonely at the top – something of a cliche in American films. At the end of “Godfather I,” Michael Corleone has defeated his enemies, he has climbed to the top. A door closes, with Michael on one side, his wife on the other. He is estranged from his family (those who are still alive). He has no friends, only courtiers bowing to him. He does not look happy.

At the end of “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg has settled accounts with his enemies. On the soundtrack, the Beatles sing, “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” Zuckerberg is at the top. But, like Michael Corleone, to get there he has made a pact with the devil (Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, shown in the inferno scene below), and he has screwed the person who had been his only friend. When Facebook logs its millionth subscriber, everyone else is celebrating, but Zuckerberg barely smiles.


5. Floor lamps? For your $45,000 a year at Harvard, you don’t get very good lighting in your room.

6. Capitalism. In the Wall Street Journal last June, Alex Tabarrok was muttering that “when it comes to the movies capitalism never seems to get a fair shake.” True, Hollywood does not turn out many pictures that show entrepreneurs creating, sustaining, and expanding a business.* And in most of these films, capitalists face moral dilemmas – if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be much of a story – and, like Zuckerberg in this film, they frequently make morally questionable choices in pursuit of business success.

As I noted at the time (here), I didn’t see why Tabarrok was puzzled, even dismayed, by this scenario.  Surely Tabarrok, an economist, would understand supply and demand.  Hollywood is supplying what the public is demanding. In seven weeks, “The Social Network” has grossed a very respectable $85 million – nowhere near “Jackass 3-D” of course, but several lengths ahead of “Secretariat.”

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*For my money, the best movie about business is still “Save the Tiger” (1973), which presents the moral and financial dilemmas of capitalism on a much smaller but probably more realistic scale.

Ashes and Allegories

November 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Firemen’s Ball,” (1967) was the last film Milos Forman made in his native Czechoslovakia. Many critics see the film as satire, a critique of communist society.  They credit Forman for his genius in being able to make the film at all, given the stodgy communist censorship that prevailed in the Soviet bloc at the time.

If the movie is allegory, it’s about the mistrust, dishonesty, cruelty, and above all incompetence built into the state bureaucratic system. The firemen, with their committees and bickering and attention to silly aspects of the ball, can’t seem to do anything right. At one point, there’s an actual fire at an old man’s farmhouse, but the fire engine gets stuck in the snow, and there’s no water pressure, and the house burns down. The only help the firemen can offer the old man is to suggest he keep warm by moving his chair closer to the fire. Then they thoughtfully turn the chair around so he doesn’t have to watch his house burn down.



I hadn’t thought about “Firemen’s Ball” in a long time, but my son e-mailed to ask if he should go see it when it was shown at his university’s film series.

Could there be a similar allegory about American capitalism? Socialist collectivism can lead to bad outcomes. But what about individualized and privatized systems? Could the rules of such a system result in a man’s house burning down while firefighters on the scene did nothing?



This incident happened over a month ago, and it got much coverage in the media and the blogosphere. But as far as I know, nobody saw a parallel with “Fireman’s Ball,” perhaps because Forman’s film was so different in one important respect. It was fictional.

If you see “Fireman’s Ball,” be sure to get the version with Forman’s own spoken introduction in English. When the movie was released in Czechoslovakia, he says, 40,000 firemen resigned in protest. So he explained to them that the movie was not really about firemen and that “the firemen in the film are merely symbols of the whole society.” This, he says, made the firemen “peaceful and happy.” Then Forman adds for the movie audience, “But the film is about firemen.”

Forman says this almost with a wink, so in the end you don’t really know if he intended the movie to be a simple story, poignant and funny, or whether he was going for  larger meanings.  Maybe it is, as he says, just a story about firemen. But as with the Tennessee fire, the intent of those who created the story has little to do with whether that story can serve as a more general commentary on the society.

Negative Thinking

November 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Supreme Court round-up:

Refused to overturn a lower court decision that failed to deny that government does not have the right to refrain from excluding unstated principles that do not have . . . .

OK, I’m exaggerating. But multiple negatives are confusing, as I’ve noted before (here). How else to explain Glenn Beck’s saying that Nouriel Roubini agrees with him about inflation (transcript excerpts and video here)? Despite a low rate of inflation, Beck insists that Weimar is just around the corner, especially with the Fed’s recent “quantitative easing” (QE2).

Prices are going through the roof. Basic cost of living, food, clothing, energy, is all going up. And there will be a QE3 and QE4. . . . Leading economist Nouriel Roubini, he tweeted this: . . . : “QE2 will be followed by QE3 and QE4 as QE2 will fail to revive the real economy and to prevent deflationary pressures.” There you go.

Beck seems to think that Roubini is saying that QE2 will lead to inflation. In fact, Roubini is saying just the opposite, but he phrases that idea with a double negative: will fail to prevent deflation. It’s possible that the negative connotation of deflation also added to Beck’s apparent confusion.

As for evidence about inflation, forget official indices, Beck says, and forget the experts (except those that Beck thinks agree with him). “When will we start listening to our own guts, and to common sense?”

I couldn’t fail to disagree with him less.

Boom Box Illusion

November 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Three-dimensional illusions can be public art and can even have practical uses.

This one – audio tape to boom-box tape player – is art, artifice, for art’s sake. No sociological content, but it’s just so cool.



A video with more detail on how it was done is here.

(HT: Richard Wiseman)