Masculine Lessons of "The Facebook Movie"

Ah, it's not easy being a Billionaire, and you can be just as much a man as them...
Why is it that actor Jesse Eisenberg seems to look more like Mark Zuckerberg than Mark Zuckerberg?
And why is it that the film, The Social Network, looks more like an abstract painting of a brilliant man's life, than a cohesive tale of the minting of the wealthiest (allegedly awkward) man under 25 in human history?
After all, it has a beginning, a middle and an end - the jigsaw rise of a company like many companies, and like just as many failed companies, begins with a concept for a website...
...with the ensuing (and suing) drama of the tenuous and conflict-ridden nature of boys'-nay-men's friendships with each other. I think the answer is that it is a linear narrative with an emotionally chaotic, impressionistic smattering of what it is that makes a man a dizzying success: more than either being in the right place at the right time, or a prodigious collection of brainpower, or simple "nose to the grindstone" attitude and performance.
It's that sometimes even "when you do everything right," and "by the book," nothing comes of it.
There's something more to star success than that - something far more like what is so often said of love: that it "finds you when you are NOT looking for it." That personal miracles happen not just by persistence and patience, but by standing where you are, BEING, not LOOKING.
This is certainly true, if not of Mark Zuckerberg, then certainly of his fictionalized version. It's hard for us to know which of them is more real, more inspirational, or more universal to the experience of men.
 
Hamlet was a Dork, Too.
Much has been said of the juxtaposition of Zuckerberg's character as a "dork" or socially awkward or backward boy-man, versus the denial of the real man of it's authenticity. The character is reminiscent of another dramatized genius in Russell Crowe's characterization of John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind. The scene where he asks Jennifer Connelly whether she would be up for "exchange of bodily fluids."
I think it's likely closer to the truth to see the Zuckerberg character not as yet another negatively labeled man - as "awkward" - but as simply "lost." THe complex cluster of emotions in a boy thrust into a man's life by the fates - it's Hamlet, NOT Revenge of the Nerds. That's the look in his eyes - the worry and confusion amidst of the emotional chaos of matriculating at college (I remember it well, and maybe you do too), and against the backdrop of outwardly "better men" or more refined men who seem to have it so very easy socially, yet prove very ordinary if not inadequate on the inside...
...save perhaps, the noble, Horatio-like Savarin to what amounts to Eisenberg-Zuckerberg's Hamlet.
 
"Socially Awkward," Versus "Lost in the Woods"
In David Whyte's book on the meaning of poetry in the workplace, A Heart Aroused, he analyzes the poem, "Lost." In it, we see a boy becoming a man not unlike the "hero-story" of Zuckerberg:

Lost
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows
Where you are.
You must let it find you.
 
An old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner, in The Heart Aroused - Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996.
The poem is the moment of a boy's initiation into manhood - that juncture at which, faced with the confusing, threatening, beckoning woods, with their promise of adventure and death in equal measures - a boy looks over his shoulder for the presence of his father and does not see him, finds nothing there, and left alone with only his dreams and his ambitions has a choice:
To crumple under the weight of the fear, and the responsibilities - more than anything at first, for the self, and then for friends, and for community and eventually, family - or instead to dive headlong into the confusion, the danger, the wild, never stopping to realize in the excitement of his adventure that he was very much imperiled all along.
Yet it doesn't matter that you were imperiled, in danger, if in the end, you WIN. You win the woman, win the game, win the career conflict, or win the attention of the world, and billions of its dollars.
You WIN.
And it wasn't as if along the way, the boy, like the Zuckerberg character, was not paying attention to his surroundings. Not "awkward," but observant, not qualifying for the ranks of the petty elite, but not ignorant of the dynamics of their minds.
Any "accidental billionaire" or stunning success of a man must have this experience of being "willingly lost," while observant of the branches and birds of the woods - the opportunities to hang your hat on, and in some cases, "really make a killing."
With each step through the woods, lost, not belonging, the boy, the man, or whatever he is in between is an invader on nature. He doesn't belong there, with every step becoming more a man, and less lost.
 
Women and Work
In the Mature Masculine Power Program, I cover how it is that masculinity depends on ones skill with women - attracting them, bonding with them, loving them and being loved - as well as progress on a career mission.
This latter aspect, the "mission for your life" is not something decided upon any more than the man's name the Native American elders gave a former boy was his choice. It is "meant to be" and is observed to come out of his basic nature - his "soul" and in everything he does and is drawn to as he learns to be a man.
The same is true of you as a man. Your mission in life is not something you enroll in as we do in college. It is something that WILL NOT LET YOU GO.
For many of us, and like the Zuckerberg character, it emerges in the woods, the choas of making one's way in the world socially and vocationally.
For those men called "Dorks," the divine inspiration drawing him into a great devotion such as the arts and sciences empowers him - one of the two sources of masculinity.
Which then of course spills over into the other factor - his skill and access to women.
I don't think Zuckerberg the real man worries much about attracting women now. His life has done so.
 
Creeps
In preparing to see the movie, I saw the trailer like millions of you, but the one which captured me had played a chorale version of the Radiohead song, Creep, as its score.
I'm playing it as I write this too you. It's haunting and appropriate for the film, for all "Dorks," and carries the wish of not only the Dorks of the world, but all men who seek to emerge from a troubled boyhood, and into a full mature masculine life. The awkwardness label neither fits, nor is acceptible to any man. We may not readily emote on the outside - like the Eisenberg depiction of Zuckerberg, it's all in the eyes.
The fear soothed by dreams and ambitions, the exclusion from the pretty-boy club transcended by the dream slowly brought to bear in the realization as a true career, the disdain of the monied class superceded by the fruits of this labor of becoming a man.
Where the money surely follows.
The beauty of the song associated with The Social Network is not that it's a drama about Nerds getting revenge, but a boy transcending being lost - not "I'm a creep," but rather the last phrase of the song: "I don't belong here."
For a boy, "not belonging" is frightening and lonely.
But for a man, "not belonging" is what must happen if he is to truly find himself a unique identity, a man.
Then others will imitate him, follow him, and seek him out for as long as he lives, because they don't want to belong either.
They want to matter by the very virtue of not belonging to the ordinary.

The Mature Masculine Power Program shows you how to harvest these lessons directly from stories, films and art of all stripes.