Tiny Life: Technology and Masculinity
in the Films of David Fincher
michele schreiber
I don’t know how much movies should entertain.
To me, I am always interested in movies that scar.
—David Fincher (Salisbury 83)
in the preceding quote david fincher
suggests that the best films penetrate and
sometimes arrest our senses to the degree that
they leave a mark on our psyche that persists
long after the film has ended. As we know, films
themselves can also be scarred. Whether the
scars are made deliberately or through the wear
and tear caused by transport, repeated viewing,
or faulty machinery, a film print sustains marks
that suggest the extent of the geography it
has traversed. In both of these cases, we (and
Fincher) assume that the scar is evidence of
the pricking of a fixed entity—whether human
or filmic. But how do we come to understand
this process differently when the very nature of
knowing and feeling bodies is changing? With
the turn from analog to digital film, and as our
own bodies are becoming increasingly inter­
twined with technology, we must ask now more
than ever, how do we “feel” and “know” when
scars have been inflicted?
Fincher’s comments are resonant when we
think about how changing conceptions of em­
bodiment—particularly those that accompany
rapid technological change—often coexist with a
longing for the security of known tactile surfaces
that can be marked and for bodies that can feel
and register those marks. Indeed, a certain anxi­
michele schreiber is an associate professor of
film and media studies at Emory University. She is
the author of American Postfeminist Cinema: Wom-
en, Romance and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh
University Press, 2014) and numerous articles on
gender, genre, and contemporary filmmakers. She
is currently writing a book on David Fincher.
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ety arises when the forward momentum of in­
novation is mixed with nostalgia for the certainty
of the past. This complex dynamic is central
to conversations about the digital era and the
degree to which its innovations are intertwined
with bodies: the bodies that labor to create this
technology, those bodies being replaced by this
technology, and the new (non)body of the tech­
nology that is being invented.
These concerns about the links between
technology and embodiment, specifically male
embodiment, figure prominently in Fincher’s
oeuvre. His preference for shooting on digital
film and inserting CGI techniques into dramatic
live-action narratives is not simply part of his
aesthetic signature but is inextricably inter­
twined with his films’ contemplation of the
connections between corporeality and identity,
feeling and knowing, texture and surface—con­
nections that come to a head in and through
his male characters’ journeys of self-discovery.
The following analysis will map out how these
intersecting issues flow in and out of Fincher’s
work by tracing how his diegetic and extradi­
egetic preoccupation with corporeal and digital
materiality corresponds with many of the most
compelling ontological questions discussed
in new media scholarship over the last fifteen
years and with the politics surrounding the
changing landscape of gender identity that has
accompanied these technological transforma­
tions. Although these concerns are present to
varying degrees in all of Fincher’s films, they
are most pronounced in Fight Club (1999),
Zodiac (2007), and The Social Network (2011)—
culminating, I will argue, in the latter.
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 Zodiac was the first film ever to be shot di­
rectly to a hard drive and uses CGI to explore
the ultimately futile investigative efforts of its
male protagonists, serving as a cogent exempli­
fication of many of the aesthetic and thematic
tropes on which The Social Network would later
expand. Fight Club—the director’s best-known
and most culturally influential film, made eight
years prior to Zodiac and eleven years prior to
The Social Network—points to how the increas­
ingly consumerist, technology-driven world of
the late 1990s chipped away at a sense of “au­
thentic” embodiment (both in and of the film),
yet the distinction between the corporeal and
virtual, the real and imitation, remained dis­
cernable. The Social Network complicates these
distinctions. Indeed, as I will discuss in the last
part of the analysis, it is the most exemplary
of this subgroup of Fincher’s films because its
story and its own status as a film raise crucial
questions about the virility and visibility of the
literal and figurative male body. It contemplates
the diverse and dissonant ideas of masculinity
circulating in the cultural discourse surround­
ing the 2008 recession, often referred to as
the “man-cession,” where male-dominated
industries based in physical labor, such as
manufacturing and construction, were under
threat by newer, more innovative, and more
efficient—usually technology-based—ways of
thinking and doing.
These preoccupations are evident in the
film’s plot, which offers a succinct represen­
tation of a conflict between two groups of
men—computer genius Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse
Eisenberg) and the old-line, athletic Winklevoss
twins (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence)—who
represent very different worldviews and skill
sets. However, The Social Network’s reflection
on these issues extends beyond the narrative
proper. The film’s most powerful manifestations
of this conflict happen visually: first, the way in
which these male bodies appear and behave;
second, the way formal elements including
cinematography and editing emphasize or
deemphasize their embodiment and embod­
ied conflict; and third, the very digital format
used to shoot the film, in which the very idea
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of a tangible body—both human and filmic—is
called into question.
Like Fight Club and Zodiac, The Social Net-
work’s exploration of the impact of the digital
(both filmically and culturally) and the film’s
function as a digital object itself reflects a
broader unease about what can happen when
the physically dominant (typically male) body
that has traditionally controlled events (and
narratives) is figuratively reduced to a flat on­
tological plane, made tiny and compact, with
little to no hierarchical legibility. In contrast to
what Lorrie Palmer has described as a hyper­
masculinized, hypermediated use of digital in
the contemporary action film (2), Fincher dem­
onstrates in The Social Network how the digital
also poses challenges to traditional hierarchies
of power wherein physically and socially domi­
nant male bodies are under threat of diminish­
ment and the intellectually driven bodies in
control of technology are gaining control. When
compared to Tyler Durden’s body in Fight Club,
the hard-bodied Winklevoss twins are made
tiny, grotesque, and laughable despite (or
perhaps because of) their muscular physiques.
Bodies that are “wired in” to technology “win”
in the end. However, this victory is marked by
a notably flat affect and is almost anticlimactic
despite our knowledge of Facebook’s (and
Zuckerberg’s) subsequent success. In short,
in The Social Network Fincher offers a striking
glimpse into the changing relationships be­
tween technology, gender, and embodiment at
the same time that he and the film perform this
change. More than any other Fincher film, The
Social Network both shows and enacts anxiet­
ies that dominate the contemporary digital mo­
ment.1
Fincher and the Digital
The rise of digital cinema practices—both pho­
tographing films in a digital format and insert­
ing digitally composed sequences into analog
films—has been a subject of vibrant discus­
sion in the film industry and among film and
media studies scholars in the recent past. This
is because the transformation of film from an
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 analog surface-based medium to a sequence of
numbers—from something that can be literally
felt to something that has no physical material­
ity—asks us to ponder the nature of cinema itself
and how it will be produced, distributed, and
exhibited in the future. The discussion of the
future that inevitably accompanies the digital
returns us to some of the questions asked by
film theorists in the medium’s earliest days,
particularly how and in what ways film differs
from other art forms such as theater and paint­
ing. In his seminal work What Is Cinema?, Andre
Bazin speaks at length about these distinctions,
particularly how the photographic arts are dis­
tinct from their predecessors. In “The Ontology
of the Photographic Image,” he famously writes,
“The objective nature of photography confers
on it a quality of credibility absent from all other
picture-making. In spite of any objections our
critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept
as real the existence of the object reproduced,
actually re-presented, set before us, that is to
say, in time and space” (Bazin 13).
As we know, digitally constructed cinema
often has no object to be “re-presented” in the
way that Bazin means, and further, it is itself
lacking true materiality. If cinema can no longer
be “felt,” how does that change our ontological
relationship to it? In other words, does tech­
nology change our way of feeling, seeing, and
knowing? As David Rodowick puts it, “[a] subtle
shifting of gears is taking place in our current
ontology, in our relation to the world and to
others, as mediated through technologically
produced images . . . we find ourselves pushed
to examine something new in this experience
that has already happened to us” (98). The
temporal no-man’s-land of which Rodowick
speaks—in which the viewer knows that some­
thing about the image does not seem “real”—is
a recurring trope in the discussion of digital
technology because the analog version of an
image, whether still or moving, reinforces its
“designative function with an existential claim”
(Rodowick 9–10). Or as Rodowick explains
while explicating Barthes’s Camera Lucida,
photography is an “‘emanation of the referent’
that testifies this thing was; it had a spatial ex­
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istence that endured in time” (10). If the viewer
knows that what he or she is seeing has no real
physical referent, no “this thing was-ness,”
then what does it “have”? And how do we know
how to look at it and know it?
Vivian Sobchack suggests that this new
mode of understanding the image “enables us
not only to see technological images but also
to see technologically” (Carnal Thoughts 139).
In other words, we have entered into a differ­
ent ontological relationship with the image
that affects how we physically understand it.
Sobchack argues that just as the media’s trans­
formation has been “objectively constituted as
a new and discrete techno-logic,” it has also
been “subjectively incorporated, enabling a
new and discrete perceptual mode of existen­
tial and embodied presence” (Carnal Thoughts
139). In other words, as Sobchack has argued,
if two bodies—the film’s body and the viewer’s
body—“must be acknowledged as the neces­
sary condition of the film experience,” these
technological changes have affected both,
altering how we perceive and feel images (The
Address of the Eye 25).
Fincher, a pioneering early adopter of digital
film, uses computers to render complete pre-
visualizations of his films’ shots in preproduc­
tion and uses CGI to create shots or add effects
in postproduction. His best-known computer-
generated sequences—such as the impossible
camera movement that weaves up and down
multiple floors of a brownstone and in and out
of a keyhole in Panic Room (2002) and the Fight
Club IKEA sequence that I will discuss in the
next section—play on physical and psychologi­
cal movement, or lack thereof, and seem to
deliberately evoke the new type of techno-logic
that Sobchack describes. This techno-logic blurs
the distinction between the real body and the
camera body, subject and object, but also the
distinction between past, present, and future.
As Lev Manovich has suggested, the logic of
digital cinema, or what he calls synthetic cin­
ema, is inherently temporal. He contends it is
“not an inferior representation of our reality, but
a realistic representation of a different reality.” It
“simply represents the future” (202). According
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 to Manovich, the digital can never look digital
because it is at risk of feeling “too perfect.” It
must always be made to look like the present
or the past, which are bound to photo-realism’s
idea of the “real.” He contends, “In other words,
if a traditional photograph always points to a
past event, a synthetic photograph points to a
future event” (203).
Fincher’s Zodiac, as Greg Marcks describes
it, “never existed on film or videotape” and
thus serves as a perfect example of digital
cinema’s uncomfortable collision between the
past, present, and future (8). The film has, as
Kent Jones describes succinctly, an “unusual
tense” (44). On one hand, it offers a meticulous
rendering of the real look and feel of the 1970s
through architecture, interior design, costumes,
and music that situate us firmly in the past, and
on the other hand, its digital sequences com­
municate a “real” that we comprehend but can­
not quite feel or place in time. The Thompson
Viper HD camera used in Zodiac’s production
is known for flaws such as noise in low-light
conditions, dead pixels, and ringing patterns,
so the film had to be put through a round of
additional digital enhancement by DTS Digital
Cinema in order to make it more “film-like”
(Kadner 88). In a description of DTS’s work on
Zodiac that would have read like a foreign lan­
guage to an optical printer technician or editor
thirty years ago, American Cinematographer’s
Noah Kadner writes,
Zodiac’s data-centric post workflow turned
out to be a perfect match for DTS. The film­
makers completed an offline edit using Ap­
ple’s Final Cut Pro in DVCPRO HD. The online
version was created by assembling the origi­
nal 1920x1080 10-bit 4:4:4 DPX raw data files
derived from the Viper using a custom con­
form application created by Andreas Wacker.
Opticals were created using Autodesk’s Fire.
The DPX files were run through the DI process
at Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI) and
delivered to DTS via hard drives. (88)
In order to make Zodiac feel “real” and au­
thentic, technicians needed to correct the digital
and make it feel more like analog. In other
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words, ironically, it is by relying on this extensive
series of digital processes that Fincher avoids
making the film look too digital. This demon­
strates that, as Stephen Prince has argued, “the
advent of digital grading in contemporary film
suggests that we now need to think of cinema­
tography, and even directing, as image-capture
processes” just waiting to be corrected and en­
hanced in postproduction (30).
The tension between past, present, and
future and stasis and movement is reflected in
a digital composite sequence about an hour
into the film that meditates on the manic yet
ultimately fruitless search for the Zodiac killer.
The sequence begins with quickly edited shots
of detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and
Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) physically
walking from location to location following nu­
merous leads, cut together with images of the
mounting visual evidence—from San Francisco
Chronicle headlines to the Zodiac’s letters—
that drives their investigation. However, toward
the middle of the sequence, the images of the
letters are not inserted in between the shots of
the detectives but become digitally imposed
on them. The interior spaces through which
the detectives move are filled with the Zodiac’s
characteristic handwriting.
The digital composite functions effectively
here to communicate that not only are the de­
tectives no closer to solving the case, but they
also literally cannot escape the case. Composite
replaces the montage, and as Steven Shaviro
has argued, citing Deleuze and Guattari, it “im­
plies a continuity and equality among its ele­
ments. The assembled images and sounds all
belong to a single ‘smooth space’ as opposed
to the hierarchically organized ‘striated space of
montage’” (77). To be sure, this aesthetic choice
amplifies and symbolizes the dramatic tension
that permeates the film. Toschi and Armstrong
are detectives, but unlike those who gener­
ally populate the detective genre, they wander
around the city of San Francisco and much of
California trying to make progress on the case
but get nowhere. Neither the case nor the film it­
self is moving forward; both remain in a smooth
state of immobility. The visual means chosen
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 to represent this uncertainty quite deliberately
blur the boundaries of space, time, and the real,
physical bodies of the men and the non-body of
the digitally imposed writing into which they al­
most collide. The male protagonists are deemed
no more significant than the images of the
Zodiac’s writing on the wall. Consequently, the
integration of CGI here aids in the film’s broader
thematic exploration of the finitude of the cor­
poreal body and embodied knowledge. This is
notable in a film genre that during its classical
phase consistently asserted the certainty and
capability of its hardboiled detective figures,
such as Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade, to
get somewhere and accomplish something.
Zodiac even shows its characters attending a
screening of Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971), the loose
film adaptation of the Zodiac case. The brief
scenes shown from Dirty Harry highlight the
vast contrast between Toschi’s actual ineffectual
job performance and Dirty Harry’s exertion, as
portrayed by Clint Eastwood, of what Pauline
Kael famously described as “fascistic” power
in triumphing over the Scorpio Killer, the film’s
stand-in for the Zodiac (191).
Zodiac’s composite scene is a compact
example of how Fincher’s use of digital aes­
thetics frequently serves multiple intertwined
purposes at once, a tendency that is even
more pronounced in Fight Club and The Social
Network. In particular, the sequence reveals
the contradictory dynamic that arises when a
director such as Fincher uses the “too perfect”
of the digital, which opens up infinite represen­
tational possibilities, to emphasize the limita­
tions of male ontology and corporeality. Return­
ing to Sobchack’s notion of how the objective
constitution of the film’s body has become sub­
jectively incorporated, we as viewers can sense
when a set of images is not a montage but a
composite, when particular camera movements
would be impossible for the analog camera,
and when a body is not a pro-filmic body.
Fincher has a keen grasp of how digital
aesthetics can influence the way an audience
experiences a film, and often his decision
about when to use them mirrors, and is mir­
rored by, the themes of the narrative in which
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they appear. When a male director chooses to
manipulate a film technologically in order to
explore how changing technology and inter­
personal and labor relations affect masculine
power and privilege, then how are we to read
Fincher’s male characters? Furthermore, how
do these issues brought to light by and in his
films reflect broader cultural shifts in gendered
labor and production for both the film industry
and the American workforce more broadly?
Produced as digital technology was gaining a
foothold in Hollywood, Fincher’s Fight Club illu­
minates the complexities of the transition from
the analog to the digital and how the “crisis of
masculinity,” as it was named in the decade of
the 1990s, became the “man-cession” of the
2000s.2
“We’re Still Men. Men Is What We Are.”
As many authors such as Michael Clark have
noted, Fight Club literally embodies Susan Fa­
ludi’s argument about the changing landscape
of American masculinity in her influential book
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, pub­
lished the same year as the film’s release (Clark
65). Faludi posits,
The culture we live in today pretends that
media can nurture society, but our new pub­
lic spaces, our “electronic town squares”
and “cyber-communities” and publicity mills
and celebrity industries, are disembodied
barrens, a dismal substitute for the real
thing. Where we once lived in a society in
which men in particular participated by being
useful in public life, we now are surrounded
by a culture that encourages people to play
almost no functional public roles, only deco­
rative or consumer ones. (34–35)
paticipated in which way?
Faludi’s observations about how the media
has replaced culture and public life and the im­
plications of these changes for men specifically
are reflected in Fight Club’s plot and dialogue.
They also can be traced in the film’s aesthetics,
demonstrating the degree to which the transfor­
mation of the figurative male body is intertwined
with the film’s body. Fight Club is shot on 35 mm
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 film, but as previously noted, Fincher uses CGI
in multiple sequences that make us aware of the
fluidity, the “future tense,” of the digital. Yet in
other sequences, he celebrates what is possible
in the “past tense” of the analog. Consequently,
Fight Club refers to the dirtiness and malleability
of the past while gesturing toward, and showing
the seductiveness of, the future’s potential for
efficiency and precision.
The film’s most explicit exemplification
of this coexistence is the scene in which the
film’s unnamed protagonist (Edward Norton),
sometimes referred to as Jack, tells us about
his friend Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt) night job
as a projectionist through direct address and
first-person voice-over narration. With our
protagonist in the foreground of the shot, ad­
dressing the viewer, and Tyler working in the
background, we learn how a circular imprint on
the film’s surface, called a cigarette burn, cues
the projectionist to begin the next reel. During
this explanation, Tyler points to the digitally
created cigarette burn that has appeared on
the film that we are watching to illustrate what
he sees when he is projecting a film within the
film. Switching the reel at the cigarette burn al­
lows the projectionist to create the illusion that
the film has unfolded seamlessly in front of the
audience. Viewers are not supposed to notice
that there is a person—a body—that makes this
seamlessness possible.
The scene illustrates that in the world of
analog, the human body—whether it is that of
an editor, an optical printer operator, or a pro­
jectionist—can physically alter a film and affect
the final product that is seen by an audience.
The splotches, scratches, and imperfections
of the film or the accidental inclusion of leader
in between reels affect what we see and how
we see. With most live-action narrative films,
such “scars” are usually a result of age, wear,
or unintentional misuse of the print as it is
projected. Of course, for formalist experimental
filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s such as Stan
Brakhage and Carolee Schneeman, “scars”
were intentional and an integral part of their
aesthetic. These techniques, as Jennifer Barker
argues, “make vision difficult and thus . . . in­
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vite the viewer to feel rather than see the film,
to make contact with its skin” (23).
Tyler’s ability to inflict a form of scar on the
film, by inserting split-second pornographic im­
ages into fare that is otherwise family-friendly,
is mirrored by Fincher’s own “scarring” of Fight
Club with omnipresent split-second images of
Tyler before he actually appears as a character
in the film. His image is digitally imposed in
early scenes in which the narrator feels the
mundaneness of his existence, such as when
he is making photocopies at the office. Like the
audiences in Tyler’s theater who feel they have
seen something offensive but do not really
know what they have seen (and who respond
emotionally—a child in the theater cries in
response to the split-second flash of a penis)
upon first viewing, Fight Club’s audience may
not know that they have seen Tyler. Only upon
repeat viewings of the film (typically in a digi­
tal format) is this knowledge solidified. Here
we are asked to think about the connection
between how Tyler’s body physically alters the
film within the film and how his physical body
has digitally infringed on earlier scenes.
It seems no coincidence that Tyler’s first
appearance in the film as a “real” character,
rather than an interstitial image, is cued by the
protagonist’s narration of his own temporally
and psychologically discombobulating travel
schedule. Our protagonist tells us through
his voice-over and a montage of images that
the airports, hotels, and airplanes that he tra­
verses create an aura of dislocation that per­
meates his life. He cannot quite place himself
in place, space, and time. His only points of
reference are airport names and the products
that he receives in these places that are not
really products, but tiny miniature versions of
products. As his voice-over tells us, his “tiny
life” can be accounted for in the “single-serv­
ing sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of
butter, the microwave cordon-bleu hobby kit,
shampoo-conditioner combos, sample pack­
age mouthwash, tiny bars of soap” that make
up his day-to-day routine. And he describes
the people he meets on the planes as “single-
serving friends.”
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 When Tyler appears at the end of this se­
quence as a fellow passenger who talks up our
protagonist on one of these many flights, the
film reveals its solution for the dehumanizing,
disembodying nature of the contemporary cor­
porate model. The distinctive, figuratively and
literally boundary-defying Tyler is the panacea
to the otherwise interchangeable male bod­
ies (such as those referenced by Faludi) that
are participants in such a system. In the later
scenes in which the fight club has been formed
and is meeting regularly, Tyler’s body becomes
the symbol of the social and political resistance
that the group represents. He might be said to
elicit what Jennifer Barker has called muscular
empathy. As Barker describes it, “the film and
the viewer are in a relation of muscular empa­
thy that is an oscillation between difference
and similarity, proximity and distance . . . the
film’s body and the spectator’s body exist in a
relationship of analogy and reciprocity . . . the
film’s body models itself on human styles of
bodily comportment, and the viewer’s body in
turn might mirror the muscular behaviour of the
film’s body” (75–77).
It may seem obvious to relate Barker’s
theories of musculature to a film that features
muscular bodies and shows a literal represen­
tation of muscles in flux, in conflict, and under
duress, with brutal skin-on-skin fighting scenes
that seem designed to elicit flinches and em­
pathetic twitches from their spectators. But
these scenes that depict the finite capacity of
the actual human body are not the only context
in which this muscular empathy takes place.
It is also felt, albeit differently, in the scenes
in which digital technology is used to create a
movement that is unavailable to the body.
In the most widely discussed CGI sequence
in Fight Club, we see a literal representation
of the lifestyle that our protagonist desires. He
describes himself as “a slave to the IKEA nesting
instinct,” and while sitting on a toilet with the
IKEA catalog in hand, he satisfies this instinct by
ordering furniture over the phone. The sequence
cuts to a medium long shot of him walking
through his apartment as it becomes a digital
composite image of an IKEA catalog, adopting
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the brand’s visual construction and typography,
with new furniture products appearing as he
moves through the space. Anticipating the afore­
mentioned projection booth scene, he surmises,
“We used to read pornography. Now it was the
Horchow collection.” Here the digital is used to
show how everything is a “copy of a copy” and
based on the ephemeral pleasure of consumer
activity that can be imagined visually but can­
not be physically inhabited. It also speaks of
the transference of physical sexuality onto an
empty act of consumerism. We may desire to
be projected into the meticulously designed
catalogs of home decor stores, but we can never
have this physical experience. In contrast, Tyler’s
appearance later in the film calls on the tactile
and the accidental of which Barker speaks. We
“feel” Tyler through his muscles, through the
camera movements that define his character,
and through his split-second appearance in the
frame.
The film begins in our protagonist’s monoto­
nous corporate life with transparently superfi­
cial surfaces and “tiny life” remnants and then
moves toward that which can be corporally
represented and understood by the audience.
Once we enter the Project Mayhem house,
the film begins to feel dirty, organic, and in­
fused with the unpredictability of the cuts and
bruises, which find a corollary in the scratches,
fuzziness, and compliancy of the film’s surface
to which the earlier projection booth scene
alludes. Tyler’s musculature hovers over the
film—peeking out in between frames and ap­
pearing to be outside of what Barker calls “the
safety net of narrative.” However, at the conclu­
sion of the film, we realize that his body has no
physical presence since he is a figment of our
narrator’s split psyche. When the film shows
us a flashback of the scenes in which our nar­
rator was interacting and fighting with Tyler, we
see that he was never there, and the narrator
engaged in these interactions himself. Just like
the digital filmic body, Tyler is present and not
really present at the same time. The visual cues
that something is not “real” in the “reel” we are
seeing translates to the cinematic body, as well
as to the heightened power of Tyler’s body.
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 However one might read and interpret Fight
Club—as a satire on hypermasculinity, an ode
to hypermasculinity, or a tale of homosocial
or homoerotic bonding—it reveals multiple
“types” of masculinity, whether they are as­
sumed or performed. The film’s aesthetics also
offer various types of materiality. Fincher’s
use of both 35 mm and CGI, the explicit visual
juxtaposition between the clean “tiny life”
corporate bodies and the dirty Project Mayhem
bodies and house, and the contrast between
“Big Bob Bitch Tits” and Tyler Durden point to a
spectrum of embodiment. The filmic “scar” of
the cigarette burn, or the split-second images
that Tyler physically splices into the film that
he is projecting, and the corresponding scars
and bruises experienced by the members of the
fight club indicate that there is still a body—a
referent—to be marked. Anxieties surround­
ing the increasingly “disembodied barrens”
of masculinity persist in The Social Network.
Although it was made eleven years later, the
hypermasculinity and musculature of both the
more recent film and the male characters’ bod­
ies, as well as hierarchies displayed therein,
have been challenged. Technology has become
the dominant (non)body.
“The Decline of the Endangered Male”
When The Social Network was released in De­
cember 2010, most critics’ reviews focused on
Aaron Sorkin’s highly verbose and attention-
grabbing, Oscar-winning screenplay. Fincher’s
more conventional approach, particularly the
film’s lack of technological fireworks, struck
critics as remarkable because it was so un­
remarkable. Roger Ebert wrote, “The Social
Network is a great film not because of its daz­
zling style or visual cleverness, but because
it is splendidly well-made . . . Aaron Sorkin’s
screenplay makes it all clear, and we don’t
follow the story as much as get dragged along
behind it.” In Daily Variety, Justin Chang wrote
that “it’s great to see the director engaging
the zeitgeist in a film that offers the old-school
satisfactions of whip-smart dialogue, meaty
characterizations and an unflagging sense of
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momentum.” He continues, “Fincher’s direction
is a model of coherence and discipline, relying
on the traditional virtues of camera placement
and editing to tell the story, and never resorting
to any of the stylistic gimmicks the subject mat­
ter would seem to invite.”
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times was
one of the few critics to mention the film’s
digital cinematography, noting that Fincher,
along with cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, a
veteran Fincher collaborator, “turns down the
lights and tamps down his visual style.” These
critics agree on the degree to which the film,
true to classical Hollywood norms, emphasizes
story over style. However, though Fincher is
abiding by the “old-school,” “traditional”
virtues of conventional narrative-driven film­
making (borrowed, we might assume, from an
analog model), his use of digital-production
and postproduction techniques adds another
dimension to the film’s narrative contemplation
of technology’s role in changing perceptions of
gender and gendered labor in the twenty-first-
century economic landscape. In fact, the film’s
very existence as a digital product evinces
that Hollywood is one of the many industries
in which labor practices have been radically
transformed by the growing prominence of
computer-based production models over the
last two decades.
To be sure, although The Social Network
is set in 2003, its production took place at
the height of the 2008 recession and clearly
reflects concerns that accompanied both the
influence of technology on the labor force and
the changing cultural status of the male laborer
specifically. The New York Times reported in
early 2009 that 82 percent of jobs lost during
the recession were in male-dominated blue-
collar industries such as construction and man­
ufacturing, with the female-dominated white-
collar industries taking less of a hit (Rampell).
In a 2009 Foreign Policy article Reihan Salam
argued that the “he-cession” signaled a
broader cultural shift—namely, “the death of
macho.” Salam claimed that the speculative
overconfidence that had led to the collapse of
the housing bubble was a macho policy that
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 “disguised the declining prospects of blue-
collar men.” And with women outnumbering
men in the workforce, men might be forced
to embrace a new type of masculinity. David
Zinczenko, who coined the term “he-cession,”
called this a “troubling trend” that “has been
going on for several years” and that is “further­
ing the decline of the endangered male.”
Hanna Rosin’s theories about “the end of
men,” which appeared as a series of articles in
Atlantic Monthly and then as a book in 2012,
are evidence of how this discourse became
enmeshed in age-old binaries that pit a mas­
culinity defined by physical strength against a
more feminized man who displays intellectual
or emotional intelligence. In a 2010 article,
Rosin writes, “The postindustrial economy is
indifferent to men’s size and strength. The at­
tributes that are most valuable today—social
intelligence, open communication, the ability
to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not
predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may
be true.” In short, these cultural critics who
have defined post-2008 America in gendered
terms suggest that not only should men be
concerned about the threat posed by other men
but also that the influence of women on male
culture is perhaps the biggest threat of all. Of
course, when seen in popular culture, this femi­
nizing threat is rarely represented by an actual
powerful woman but usually comes by way of
a feminized threat to the activities, habits, and
lifestyles that an individual man or men have
traditionally held dear.
This discourse found its way into multiple
Hollywood films that rehearse man-cession-era
concerns via plots that see an older genera­
tion of men’s corporeal and often tangible
conceptions of labor—building products and
establishing solid, mutually respectful business
relationships—in the process of being replaced
by a new modus operandi that is often techno­
logical in nature. Up in the Air (Reitman, 2009),
The Company Men (Wells, 2010), and Money-
ball (Miller, 2011), among other films, depict a
worldview in which the rise of technology goes
hand in hand with the increasing vulnerability
of established systems of power. Frequently,
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this threat comes by way of technology, as we
see in a film such as Moneyball; sometimes it is
by way of technology and a woman, as seen in
Up in the Air and The Company Men.
Notably, one of the significant alterations
that Aaron Sorkin made to the screenplay’s
source, Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction book The
Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Face-
book, is the addition of the fictional character
of Erica (Rooney Mara), Mark’s girlfriend. As I
will discuss in the next section, Erica’s rejec­
tion of Mark in the first scene of the film is the
impetus that prompts him to create Facebook.
This scene is paralleled in the film’s final scene
in which Mark, now the billionaire owner of the
popular social networking site, sends a friend
request to Erica and obsessively refreshes his
computer screen to see if she has accepted. In
other words, Sorkin transforms the “real” Zuck­
erberg narrative and turns it into a chronicle of
Mark’s smarts and entrepreneurial initiative but
also an account of his insecurities surround­
ing cultural expectations of gender. Women
are given a modicum of power in this narrative
but only in terms of how they help or hinder
the men at its center. Erica, who opens the
movie with Mark, and Marylin (Rashida Jones),
a member of Mark’s litigation team, stand on
the sidelines of this battle and offer what are
arguably the most intelligent insights about the
hollowness of the proceedings. Like Marla (Hel­
ena Bonham Carter) in Fight Club, these women
see through the men’s juvenile antics, but
along with the other women used as eye candy
throughout the film, they are never in control of
the technology over which the battle is being
waged.
Just as Faludi’s Stiffed offers a lens through
which to view Fight Club’s conflicts between
men, the degree to which the threat posed by
women and the rise of technology are inter­
twined with man-cession culture provides an
illuminating frame through which we can con­
sider The Social Network. The Social Network’s
story is quite similar to that of Fight Club. Both
films are about two different types of men who
are positioned in direct opposition to each
other. However, Tyler Durden’s bodily presence,
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 in which he inflicts dirt, scars, and wounds on
his body and the body of the films he projects,
is a thing of the past. Now the muscular body—
which was previously antiestablishment and
filled with mayhem and provocation—belongs
to the establishment bodies of the Winklevoss
twins, who are rendered ineffective and comi­
cal, the opposite of disruptive. Their power is
not exercised or felt through bodily or filmic
musculature. In fact, the film’s only notably
stylized scene echoes our earlier discussion of
Zodiac’s composite sequence in that it seems
designed to challenge such hierarchies of ex­
pression and feeling. In the pivotal Henley Re­
gatta scene, Fincher uses digital effects in order
to minimize the physicality of the Winklevoss
twins and the broader institutional power that
they represent. This is in contrast to the scene
that precedes the Henley sequence, in which
Mark and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) sit
idly with faces (literally) aglow discussing Face­
book’s domestic and international potential. In
order to understand the significance of these
two scenes, it is necessary to first look closely
at how the film introduces Mark and the Win­
klevoss twins and how their use of language,
their styles of comportment, and the film’s
aesthetics contribute to our understanding of
their psychology and the conflict in which they
engage.
“The Way a Girl Likes Cowboys”
The opening scene of The Social Network offers
a succinct encapsulation of how insecurities
surrounding hierarchies of masculinity drive
the film. The opening guitar riff of the White
Stripes’ “Ball and Biscuit” begins over the Co­
lumbia logo, and as the film fades in, we are in
a Cambridge pub called the Thirsty Scholar in
the middle of a rapid-fire conversation between
Mark and Erica. This scene plays out in a clas­
sic shot-reverse-shot and two-shot style that,
as the critics’ comments attest, is designed to
highlight Sorkin’s writing and the performances
of the actors. A May 28, 2009, working draft of
The Social Network screenplay includes a very
revealing initial description of Mark’s character:
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“a sweet-looking 19-year-old whose lack of any
physically intimidating attributes masks a very
complicated and dangerous anger” (Sorkin 1).
Indeed, this sequence, augmented by Jesse
Eisenberg’s understated performance, intro­
duces the contrast between the way that Mark
looks and the intellectual and technological
power that he uses to express his anger. David
Bordwell has written about the importance of
the face and facial expressions in The Social
Network and described this scene as introduc­
ing “Mark’s facial behavior.” He writes, “Above
those eyes and that mount sit those hooded
brows, almost never lifting or lowering. Which
is to say that Mark seldom shows surprise, and
his anger will usually be visible in the set of his
mouth (and in his words).” The scene’s dia­
logue brings Mark’s psychology into clear view.
Mark expresses his desire to do something
“substantial” in order to be noticed by, and
invited into, one of Harvard’s prestigious final
clubs. He is quick to note the clear difference
between himself and the men who have gym-
toned bodies and row crew who tend to get
invited into the clubs. Erica responds playfully
and ironically that she likes “the idea of a guy
who rows crew,” not unlike the “way a girl
likes the idea of a cowboy.” Indeed, revisionist
texts such as Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005)
notwithstanding, the figure of the cowboy in
man-cession culture still manages to evoke
a nostalgic and iconic position of confidence
even when said references are knowing and
self-aware. Erica’s comment reflects this
tone because she recognizes that this idea of
masculinity is just that: an idea. Mark, on the
other hand, who sits slumped in his chair in
a hooded sweatshirt and a half-finished pint
of beer, refuses to accept Erica’s assurance
that she was “just talking” and takes offense
at her comments and what he perceives to be
her commentary on his inadequacies. Subse­
quently, Mark interrogates and berates Erica to
such an extent (his verbosity marking a distinct
contrast to the silence that normally character­
izes the cowboy type) that she breaks off their
relationship and leaves him at the table by
himself.3 The diegetic White Stripes song is
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 silenced by the first sounds of the film’s score
by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which accom­
panies Mark’s exit from the Thirsty Scholar. The
score continues to play as the camera fluidly
follows Mark on his walk from the pub back to
his dorm room, with the opening credits accom­
panying his journey.
In the next scene, Mark angrily blogs on his
laptop about the breakup with Erica, while
simultaneously programming a website called
FaceMash on his desktop, in which a user sees
pictures of two young women side by side and
gets to choose which one is more attractive.
With a time stamp intermittently indicating
the passage of time from late night to early
morning, Mark programs the site while simul­
taneously blogging and carrying on conversa­
tions with his computer-savvy roommates and
friends. During the entirety of this sequence,
Mark remains sitting at his desk in front of his
two computers, but the film shows remarkable
movement by crosscutting between Mark, fel­
low tech geeks navigating FaceMash with rapt
attention, and all of the Harvard students to
whom they send the site’s link. In other words,
Mark’s power in stasis is demonstrated through
the number of people and places to whom his
work is transmitted in a matter of hours.
This sequence is also intercut with a series of
scenes that depict what happens (or what Mark
imagines to happen) at the final club parties.
Attractive women are brought in by the busload
for the opportunity to participate in this bac­
chanal with these prestigious young men, one
of whom could be “the next Fed chairman.” The
women take ecstasy pills, dance in their un­
derwear, play strip poker, and kiss each other
under the watchful and lustful eyes of the male
onlookers. Unlike Erica—who can match Mark
quip for quip—the women in the FaceMash/
final club sequence are there to be looked at
by men. The parallels are obvious. Just as Mark
perceives the final clubs’ sexual degradation
of women to be a hallmark of male power, he
too is enacting his own form of technologi­
cal degradation by creating a site that asks
members of the Harvard community to look at
and render judgment on the pictures of unsus­
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pecting women. This sequence soon becomes
intercut with scenes from the 2007 depositions
that serve as the film’s framing narrative, and
the dialogue reveals that FaceMash received
twenty-two thousand hits in two hours, crash­
ing the Harvard network.
After the FaceMash incident, the Winklevoss
twins and their partner Divya Narendra ap­
proach Mark to create Harvard Connection, a
Web site that will allow Harvard students to
connect to each other online. The screenplay
describes the “Winklevii” as “identical twins
who stepped out of an ad for Abercrombie
and Fitch,” and indeed it becomes clear early
on that their identities revolve entirely around
their social class and privilege, which is inter­
twined with Harvard’s “brand,” as well as its
crew team and its illustrious final clubs. The
scene where the twins find Mark outside of
his classroom and their subsequent meeting
in the lobby of the Porcellian Club constitute
the only sequence in which Mark shares the
same physical space with them in 2003. Like
the 2007 deposition scenes in which they are
on opposite sides of the table and are never
shown in the same shot, Mark rarely shares the
frame with Narendra or the Winklevoss twins
during the Porcellian scene. If they are in the
same shot, it is photographed from behind
Mark’s head. This creates a visual demarcation
between the adversaries and offers a strik­
ing contrast between Mark’s body, which as
Bordwell puts it, is “straightjacketed,” and the
Winklevosses, who are larger in stature but who
also “use their arms and hands freely.”
The differences in comportment and commu­
nication styles become even more pronounced
throughout the film. All of their communication
subsequent to the Porcellian scene is done
through e-mail, a medium in which the twins’
institutional and physical power loses its mean­
ing. When Divya remarks that Mark lied to their
faces about helping them create Harvard Con­
nection, one of the twins laments, “He didn’t
lie to our faces; he lied to our e-mail accounts.”
Their stature and financial status and even their
musculature have no technological corollary,
and thus they slowly find themselves to be at
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 a disadvantage in their dealings with Mark. In
this rapidly changing communication dynamic,
the only face that is important is the digital
face, perfectly exemplified by Facebook itself.
As the film progresses, it becomes clear that
Mark’s technological power is far more effective
than that possessed by the outdated institu­
tional powers as exemplified by Harvard. But
this is a decidedly twenty-first-century power
that is acquired not by building physical objects
or “things” or even commodities to be physi­
cally bought and sold, but by building a largely
intellectual and psychological infrastructure
that symbolically reduces and condenses a
person’s life and its accompanying complexi­
ties into a profile, a “tiny life.” Unlike in Fight
Club, where our protagonist longs for a real, full
life of feeling and empathy, in The Social Net-
work the “real” life and the “tiny” life are, for all
intents and purposes, one and the same. The
corporeal distinction between the superficial
and the authentic that Fight Club negotiates is
in the past. By contrast, the current digital logic
dictates that everything that you need to know
about someone can be reduced into the version
of themselves that can be found through a digi­
tal medium, which itself lacks a corporeal body.
Zadie Smith argues in her review of the film,
“Connection is the goal. The quality of that con­
nection, the quality of information that passes
through it, the quality of the relationship that
connection permits—none of this is important.”
The virtual identity that emerges from Face­
book’s “tiny life” is also reflected in Fincher’s
choice to have Armie Hammer’s face digitally
superimposed on the body of Josh Pence in
order for the Winklevoss twins to appear identi­
cal. This choice undoubtedly was prompted
by the difficulty in finding identical twin actors
who could play these roles. And like Fincher
demonstrated in 2008’s The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button, digital technology enables
a filmmaker to easily place one person’s face
on another’s body. Josh Pence’s body is the
real-life referent, but his face is completely
interchangeable with Armie Hammer’s face.
Even in the film’s digital construction, bodies
are replaceable, but faces are not. Fincher has
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JFV 68_1 text.indd 14
described this as wanting to “literally Xerox”
a performance, and it seems perfectly fitting
that in The Social Network this is done in the
service of cloning the Winklevosses, who, as I
will discuss later, are not unlike what our Fight
Club protagonist calls “a copy of a copy” (James
89). As previously noted, Sorkin’s description
of them is navigated entirely through the lan­
guage of brand consumption.
Missing by “That Much”
The degree to which The Social Network chal­
lenges previously established hierarchies is
best exemplified by examining the differences
in tone, style, and dialogue (or lack thereof)
between what are arguably the two most
pivotal scenes in the film—the San Francisco
club sequence featuring Mark and Sean Par­
ker (Justin Timberlake) and the Henley Regatta
sequence featuring the Winklevoss twins. The
striking contrast between the adjacent scenes’
use of lighting, interior and exterior space, the
face and the body, and digital effects demon­
strates the difference between bodies that are
at the height of their power and those that are
in decline.
The club scene begins with stock-photo time-
lapse images of the skyline of San Francisco
turning from day to night, with the city lights
and the thumping bass of techno music serving
as aural and visual transitions into the interior
of a nightclub. As the camera pans across the
cavernous space, we see club-goers dancing,
with scantily clad gyrating dancers positioned
above them. Mark and Sean sit with two attrac­
tive but dimly lit women on a second-floor bal­
cony above this action, sharing drinks, which
are illuminated by the light that emanates from
the table at which they sit. After the two women
excuse themselves, Mark tells Sean that his
date looks familiar. She is familiar because she
is a Victoria’s Secret model, but Sean does not
tell Mark this right away. Instead he launches
into a series of stories about men whose suc­
cess was predicated on their sense of inad­
equacy in relationship to women. First, he tells
Mark about Roy Raymond, the founder of Vic­
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 toria’s Secret. As Sean tells it, Roy founded the
store because he was too embarrassed to shop
for lingerie for his wife in a department store.
He made a significant profit off of the company
when he sold it to The Limited but not any­
where near what he could have made had he
waited until two years later, when the company
was worth significantly more. Underestimating
himself and the worth of the company that he
had founded caused him to commit suicide.
Sean then proceeds to tell his own story about
founding the music-sharing network Napster
because the girl that he was in love with in high
school was going out with the co-captain of the
varsity lacrosse team.
This sequence is shot in a shot-reverse-shot
style consisting of medium close-up or close-up
shots of Sean and Mark, with the light emanat­
ing from below them. It is pivotal because it is
the first one-on-one conversation the two have
in the film and because it sees Mark switch
allegiances from Eduardo to Sean. It is also
significant because it recalls and mirrors the
opening conversation scene between Mark and
Erica and the subsequent scene that crosscuts
between the creation of FaceMash and the final
club party. The dialogue recalls Mark’s feelings
of inadequacy when talking about cowboys,
guys who row crew, and guys who are in a final
club. Here, in a very short period of time, Sean
introduces and then subsequently dismisses
his unrequited high school crush’s influence
on his success, and we hear about a disap­
pointed business owner who commits suicide
all because he “wanted to buy his wife a pair
of thigh-highs.” However, now instead of being
intimidated or put off by the links between
masculinity, sexuality, and success, Mark is
enthralled by them. He seems to have recog­
nized his potential to far surpass Roy Raymond,
whose company sold sexualized images of
willing, nubile women, and Sean, who is with a
different woman in every scene, one of whom is
a model who sells this type of sexuality.
Unlike the White Stripes song that plays
in the background during the Thirsty Scholar
scene, here the club’s house music threatens
to infringe on Sean and Mark’s conversation.
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This music, along with the type of activity tak­
ing place at the club, recalls the final club party
scene. Now Mark is not quite participating in
the party (in fact, he seems to be more focused
on the architecture of the club than the scantily
clad women in it), but he is part of the world
of the party. Like that earlier scene, Mark sits
idly, but his and Sean’s faces glow from the
light below, much like they would glow in the
light emanating from a computer screen. It is
through Mark’s face that we see his slow recog­
nition of his potential to, as Sean states, even­
tually be able to say, “I’m CEO, bitch.” As if to
emphasize this point, after a long speech about
taking Facebook global, Sean says to Mark,
“Look at my face, and tell me I don’t know what
I am talking about.”
Per Bordwell’s comments cited earlier, we
see that the power dynamics at play in this
scene are communicated as much through
Sean’s and Mark’s faces as through Sorkin’s
dialogue. Bordwell is right in suggesting that
the evolving relationship between Mark and
Eduardo and the acting styles of Jesse Eisen­
berg and Andrew Garfield are the heart of the
film. However, this scene highlights the reason
Sean’s entrepreneurial, forward-thinking “face”
becomes preferable to Eduardo’s for Mark.
Although Eduardo provides Mark with the algo­
rithm to make Facebook work, Mark perceives
him to be too enmeshed in old approaches
to success (finding advertisers, joining a final
club, etc.). Sean, on the other hand, sits liter­
ally above the fray and is perpetually plugged
into, and literally basking in the glow of, the
technological future.
The club scene ends with a slow fade to
black. After the booming bass of the club
scene fades out, we begin to hear the early
notes of Edward Grieg’s “In the Hall of the
Mountain King,” a classical piece that con­
notes old-world tastes but becomes almost
unrecognizable as it is sonically manipulated
throughout the scene. After the insular dark
lighting of the club, the fade-in on a bright
exterior shot of green foliage, water, and boats
is striking, as is the intertitle that indicates
that we have been (abruptly) dropped into
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 the middle of the Henley Royal Regatta race in
Henley-on-Thames, England. This first high-an­
gle overhead shot, in which the boats and the
landscape appear disproportionately small,
sets the tone and style of the sequence, which
creates an almost symphonic juxtaposition
of the tiny and the immense. It is noticeably
fake. The long shots of the race photographed
through telephoto lenses make its proceed­
ings and its spectators look like tin-type min­
iatures, in contrast to the extreme close-ups
on the rowers’ faces, which make them look
grotesquely huge. There is no rapid Sorkin
dialogue here. The competitiveness of the
race and its ultimate victor are communicated
entirely through this quick cutting between
the rowers, in close-ups and long shots, and
the spectators and the scorekeeper. Recalling
Fincher’s work as a director of Nike commer­
cials, the building momentum of the music
and the elevation of the herculean Winklevoss
bodies throughout the film hint at victory. How­
ever, the Winklevosses lose this race, and their
defeated faces are punctuated by Reznor and
Ross’s digital distortion of the Grieg piece.
The Henley Regatta scene is as visually
exhilarating as it is deliberately excessive.
Its artificiality and uncanny exaggeration is
necessary in order to communicate the degree
to which the loss of this ninety-second race is
symbolic of the downfall of the Winklevii and
much of which they stand for. In his DVD com­
mentary, Fincher speaks of how this sequence
is meant to convey how the Winklevoss twins
“miss by that much.” Their imposing, muscular
bodies are strained and stretched to their limit
but just cannot succeed, in stark juxtaposition
to the previous, darkly lit, techno-thumping,
tequila-imbibing talky scene that sees Mark’s
immobile glowing face on the upswing of his
power. Digital effects are used in the regatta
sequence to merge visually the close-ups of the
rowers, which were shot at Eton, with the long
and medium long shots of the spectators and
the scorekeeper, which were shot on location.
What Fincher describes as the scene’s “faux-
swing and tilt or tilting lens board style” is a
result of still photographs that were matted in
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the shot to make the background of the racers’
close-ups look like they are in Henley (Fincher).
The scene provides an interesting compari­
son with Fight Club’s aforementioned IKEA
sequence. The digitally imposed catalog repre­
sents a wish or need to live a lifestyle that we
might not be able to afford. It is obviously con­
structed but still inviting because of its play on
the cultural desire to be physically immersed in
a consumer fantasy world. On the other hand,
Fincher’s use of digital effects in the Henley
Regatta scene produces an effect that is both
distant and impenetrable. This scene also
seems to be selling a worldview, but this time
we cannot enter it, nor do we want to. It is stag­
nant and renders the old-money institutional
hierarchy of years past foreign, artificial, and
strange at best and comedic at worst. Reflect­
ing on these connections, J. M. Tyree argues,
One of the problems of Facebook is that it’s
like that IKEA of the mind, rewarding users
who generate an endless flow of good news
and consumable tidbits of their own interi­
ority, a stream of faux-consciousness that
makes one seem more cheerful, more en­
trepreneurial, and more boring than anyone
that someone would ever want to befriend.
At issue is a deficit of mayhem that obviously
troubles Fincher as the other side of the
problem of corporate psychosis. (52)
If we consider Fight Club’s mayhem in aes­
thetic terms, we know that the dirty house and
the collision of bodies, not to mention Tyler’s
victorious musculature, make us “feel” a range
of sensations. In contrast, the grotesquely huge
surface of the competing Winklevoss bodies
is flat, resembling a moving cardboard cutout.
Neither do we feel these bodies nor can we
penetrate the film’s surface. Fincher makes The
Social Network and the digital and social net­
works that it realizes and depicts seem clean
and texture-less. Even the big feels tiny. In this
way, the digital’s lack of mayhem (both literally
and symbolically) turns even the most seem­
ingly hypermasculine bodies into flat, static,
and tiny bodies. Even when Mark “wins” and
achieves and finally gets his business card that
journal of film and video 68.1  /  spring 2016
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 reads “CEO, bitch,” his body does not change
or reflect any semblance of affect.
The final scene of The Social Network punctu­
ates how despite Facebook’s subsequent domi­
nation of the social media landscape, Mark’s
win over the Winklevosses is deemed almost
inconsequential. It lacks any of the visual flour­
ishes or triumphant music that would usually
accompany such a victory. Instead, Mark as­
sumes the exact same static, seated position
that he has maintained throughout the film
while he waits to see whether Erica will accept
his Facebook friend request. There is minor
physical movement in his repeated tapping of
the refresh button and the movement of the
computer screen in response. When compared
with the incessant tapping of computer keys
throughout the film, this action is significant.
Mark is reaching out to a specific individual,
one who has had a profound impact on him,
rather than grasping at a sense of community
among virtual “friends.” However, Erica is now
reduced to a small version of what she was at
the beginning of the film. We neither see her
embodied in the flesh nor hear her match Mark
in a battle of wits; rather, she is represented
through her tiny picture, immobile and fixed.
Mark’s emotions are not visible on his face or
on his body, and unlike the first scene, they are
not verbalized. They are inextricably linked to
the activity (or lack thereof) on his computer
screen.
The Social Network reinforces what Steven
Shaviro has argued is the post-cinematic mov­
ie’s flat ontology, “in which all media and all
processes of remediation have the same status
and the same degree of actuality” (104). The
Social Network, like the film Gamer (Neveldine,
2009), about which Shaviro’s essay is written,
shows “no hierarchy between what the film
depicts within its diegesis, and what the film
does as a media object in its own right. The di­
egetic simply replicates the extradiegetic, and
vice versa” (104). The reversibility and flatness
that Shaviro discusses and that we have seen
through our discussion of Fincher’s Zodiac,
Fight Club, and The Social Network takes us
back to the director’s discussion of scars with
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JFV 68_1 text.indd 17
which we began. All three films ask us to think
about Fincher’s strategic and controlled use of
digital cinema and how it affects the way that
we “know” and “feel” his male characters and
their conflicts, providing a glimpse into the
anxieties that underlie broader shifts in our
cultural conception of gendered embodiment.
These shifts, I argue, have implications for
the spectator’s own relationship with “real”
and “reel” bodies. They reveal how our con­
ception of scars—corporeal, emotional, and
cinematic—are in the midst of a fundamental
transformation.
notes
1. The scholarship on the changing landscape of
representations of masculinity in American cinema
history is plentiful and far too expansive to discuss at
length in this piece. See, for example, Cohan, Masked
Men; Cohan and Hark, Screening the Male; Gateward
and Pomerance; Gerstner; Jeffords; Lehman; Peberdy;
Powrie and Davies; Studlar; and Tasker.
2.  Fight Club is the only Fincher film to receive
substantial scholarly consideration. For work that
addresses the film’s representation of late-twentieth-
century masculinity, see Brookey and Westerfelhaus;
Gronstad; Ruddell; and Thompson.
3. The script’s commentary on the links between
the idea of the cowboy, verbosity, and the threats
of feminization has fascinating resonance with Jane
Tompkins’s argument in West of Everything about the
association of language with femininity in the Western
genre. She argues, “In a world of bodies true action
must have a physical form . . . In such a world, lan­
guage constitutes an inferior kind of reality, and the
farther one stays away from it the better.” She contin­
ues, “Men would rather die than talk, because talking
might bring up their own unprocessed pain or risk a
dam burst that would undo the front of imperturbable
superiority” (52, 67).
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