The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so they say. That’s one explanation for my affinity toward the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s film The Social Network. Like any millennial capable of a smidgen of critical thought, I have a strong dislike for Mark Zuckerberg and everything he stands for, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Facebook and Instagram have had me in an absolute chokehold for almost two decades.
The movie came out in 2010, my final year of college when we were in the early yet irrefutably toxic days of Life Online. In the five years that I’d spent using Facebook, I’d watched friend counts replace friendships, “likes” suffice for self-esteem, and my news feed become an addictive tabloid rag featuring everyone I’d ever briefly met. Compared to the endless TikTok doomscrolling, Russian election bots, anti-vaxxers, and Elon Musk tweets on our present-day internet, this all seems like no big deal. It’s status quo. But at the time, many of us born pre-9/11 had the startling sense that the world was changing, and probably not for the better.
"In the five years that I’d spent using Facebook, I’d watched friend counts replace friendships, “likes” suffice for self-esteem, and my news feed become an addictive tabloid rag featuring everyone I’d ever briefly met."
Fincher’s film, with its snappy lil’ Sorkin script, tells the story of Facebook’s origins through two real-life lawsuits involving Mark Zuckerberg, one filed by FB co-creator Eduardo Saverin, and one by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Mark’s Harvard classmates who claim he stole their idea. Portrayed by Armie Hammer in spectacular Parent Trap fashion, the WASPY twins take on The Zuck as he lies and schemes and betrays his own friends, while skyrocketing to tech stardom. While we might ordinarily despise the Winklevii for their wealth, privilege, and general douchebaggery, here we kinda like them. Self-motivated as they may be, it feels pretty good to watch anyone attempt to expose the billionaire-behind-the-curtain controlling our lives.
But my fascination with the Winklevoss twins is more of a bizarre one, and not fully explained by the transitive property. The real Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are Hamptons-born, Connecticut-raised intellectual and athletic prodigies. They attended private school, then Harvard, rowed crew in the Olympics, and went on to become big-time investors and cryptocurrency juggernauts. They are, to put it simply, the least relatable people imaginable to a regular-shmegular girl like me, yet in this movie, I adore them.
If you know nothing about the twins in real life (and let’s be real, none of us did when this movie came out), they appear handsome, forthright, and boyish in the film. They’re also pretty damn naive, which makes them endearing. Watching them huff and puff about intellectual property theft and being “gentlemen of Harvard” is kind of sweet in a clueless big lug sort of way. They’re bros, richies, kings of the jungle, the devils we know, in a sense. They just happen to be underdogs in this one single situation where they find themselves out of their depth. It’s refreshing. It’s straightforward. In the age where chaotic incels rule the world, our predictable jock bullies seem a lot more sympathetic.
"In the age where chaotic incels rule the world, our predictable jock bullies seem a lot more sympathetic."
I’ll put it this way: imagine you’re in tenth grade, and you have a crush on the most popular girl in school. Which would hurt you more? Your crush going out with the captain of the football team, or your crush going out with your best friend who wears the same $9 Hanes hoodie and dirty Reef flip flops as you do? The villain who poses the greatest threat here is the one you trusted, the one who’s least obvious. He catches you with your guard down. This is the point the film makes about Mark Zuckerberg and prophetically, about every 2010s Scrappy Start-Up CEO. The Winklevii are never presented as more than a couple of trust fund brats, 20th century archetypes with a predictable set of chess moves. They’re infantilized by cliche, and this makes them more likeable. The twins behave exactly how we expect of the wealthy, so in a way, they’re protected by our lowered expectations.
And then there’s the Armie factor, which I can’t discount even if I want to, given his recent allegations of sexual assault and rumored interest in uh… cannibalism. The disgraced actor’s charm is a big part of what makes these characters so unforgettable. His pitched-down-sounding voice plops out Sorkin’s dialogue in a hilarious way that just sticks in your brain. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat mumbling “I’m 6’5”, 220, and there’s two of me” because I can’t get it out of my head. He’s also Disney-prince-attractive when the real Winklevii look more like if the Property Brothers starred in a remake of American Psycho. It’s ironic, given his own disturbing controversy, that Armie’s performance makes the Winklevoss twins more palatable than they actually are. But I’ll just chalk it up to good casting, and the fact that Armand Douglas Hammer playing two privileged, spoiled white dudes isn’t that much of a stretch.
"Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat mumbling "I’m 6’5”, 220, and there’s two of me" because I can’t get it out of my head."
Lastly, we must give credit to Josh Pence, the actor who played Tyler Winklevoss in body only making the film’s portrayal of the twins even more *cough* meta. Pence, unlike Hammer, had experience rowing crew, and even competed against the actual Winklevoss twins back in 2001. For what it’s worth, he’s also a handsome and talented actor. But in this film, one of the bigger credits of his career, he’s entirely faceless. His role involved impersonating the real Tyler Winklevoss while both elevating and matching Hammer’s portrayal of Cameron Winklevoss—a complicated feat no doubt—only to have all his distinguishing features obscured by a Hammer head in the end. This remains one of my favorite facts about the film, because in itself it’s a statement on life in the digital age: identity is malleable.
In general, the cast of The Social Network work so well onscreen that they’ve greatly influenced, maybe even replaced, our idea of the actual public figures. Jesse Eisenberg is apparently nothing like Mark but who cares, and Eduardo Saverin might as well be a canonized saint thanks to Andrew Garfield. It’s a perfect movie, that much is true, but I’m left with questions every time I watch it. What does it mean to “love to hate” someone? Is having a soft spot for douchebags just its own sadomasochistic kink? What about the story: Did it really happen this way? Does the truth even matter to me at all?
One of the themes of The Social Network is the conflict between how we think of people, how they present themselves to us, and who they truly are. It’s about the cognitive dissonance between the belief you have in someone’s character, and then seeing how they treat you when the shit hits the fan. As we speak, Mark Zuckerberg is pushing his Metaverse agenda while performing mass layoffs at his company. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are mired in a crypto scandal and owe investors $900 million. People fall off their pedestals. Everything is constructed. No one is as they seem. This is the way of Silicon Valley, it’s the way of Hollywood, and, as anyone who’s ever had a social media account can confirm, it’s definitely the way of the internet.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so they say. That’s one explanation for my affinity toward the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s film The Social Network. Like any millennial capable of a smidgen of critical thought, I have a strong dislike for Mark Zuckerberg and everything he stands for, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Facebook and Instagram have had me in an absolute chokehold for almost two decades.
The movie came out in 2010, my final year of college when we were in the early yet irrefutably toxic days of Life Online. In the five years that I’d spent using Facebook, I’d watched friend counts replace friendships, “likes” suffice for self-esteem, and my news feed become an addictive tabloid rag featuring everyone I’d ever briefly met. Compared to the endless TikTok doomscrolling, Russian election bots, anti-vaxxers, and Elon Musk tweets on our present-day internet, this all seems like no big deal. It’s status quo. But at the time, many of us born pre-9/11 had the startling sense that the world was changing, and probably not for the better.
"In the five years that I’d spent using Facebook, I’d watched friend counts replace friendships, “likes” suffice for self-esteem, and my news feed become an addictive tabloid rag featuring everyone I’d ever briefly met."
Fincher’s film, with its snappy lil’ Sorkin script, tells the story of Facebook’s origins through two real-life lawsuits involving Mark Zuckerberg, one filed by FB co-creator Eduardo Saverin, and one by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Mark’s Harvard classmates who claim he stole their idea. Portrayed by Armie Hammer in spectacular Parent Trap fashion, the WASPY twins take on The Zuck as he lies and schemes and betrays his own friends, while skyrocketing to tech stardom. While we might ordinarily despise the Winklevii for their wealth, privilege, and general douchebaggery, here we kinda like them. Self-motivated as they may be, it feels pretty good to watch anyone attempt to expose the billionaire-behind-the-curtain controlling our lives.
But my fascination with the Winklevoss twins is more of a bizarre one, and not fully explained by the transitive property. The real Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are Hamptons-born, Connecticut-raised intellectual and athletic prodigies. They attended private school, then Harvard, rowed crew in the Olympics, and went on to become big-time investors and cryptocurrency juggernauts. They are, to put it simply, the least relatable people imaginable to a regular-shmegular girl like me, yet in this movie, I adore them.
If you know nothing about the twins in real life (and let’s be real, none of us did when this movie came out), they appear handsome, forthright, and boyish in the film. They’re also pretty damn naive, which makes them endearing. Watching them huff and puff about intellectual property theft and being “gentlemen of Harvard” is kind of sweet in a clueless big lug sort of way. They’re bros, richies, kings of the jungle, the devils we know, in a sense. They just happen to be underdogs in this one single situation where they find themselves out of their depth. It’s refreshing. It’s straightforward. In the age where chaotic incels rule the world, our predictable jock bullies seem a lot more sympathetic.
"In the age where chaotic incels rule the world, our predictable jock bullies seem a lot more sympathetic."
I’ll put it this way: imagine you’re in tenth grade, and you have a crush on the most popular girl in school. Which would hurt you more? Your crush going out with the captain of the football team, or your crush going out with your best friend who wears the same $9 Hanes hoodie and dirty Reef flip flops as you do? The villain who poses the greatest threat here is the one you trusted, the one who’s least obvious. He catches you with your guard down. This is the point the film makes about Mark Zuckerberg and prophetically, about every 2010s Scrappy Start-Up CEO. The Winklevii are never presented as more than a couple of trust fund brats, 20th century archetypes with a predictable set of chess moves. They’re infantilized by cliche, and this makes them more likeable. The twins behave exactly how we expect of the wealthy, so in a way, they’re protected by our lowered expectations.
And then there’s the Armie factor, which I can’t discount even if I want to, given his recent allegations of sexual assault and rumored interest in uh… cannibalism. The disgraced actor’s charm is a big part of what makes these characters so unforgettable. His pitched-down-sounding voice plops out Sorkin’s dialogue in a hilarious way that just sticks in your brain. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat mumbling “I’m 6’5”, 220, and there’s two of me” because I can’t get it out of my head. He’s also Disney-prince-attractive when the real Winklevii look more like if the Property Brothers starred in a remake of American Psycho. It’s ironic, given his own disturbing controversy, that Armie’s performance makes the Winklevoss twins more palatable than they actually are. But I’ll just chalk it up to good casting, and the fact that Armand Douglas Hammer playing two privileged, spoiled white dudes isn’t that much of a stretch.
"Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat mumbling "I’m 6’5”, 220, and there’s two of me" because I can’t get it out of my head."
Lastly, we must give credit to Josh Pence, the actor who played Tyler Winklevoss in body only making the film’s portrayal of the twins even more *cough* meta. Pence, unlike Hammer, had experience rowing crew, and even competed against the actual Winklevoss twins back in 2001. For what it’s worth, he’s also a handsome and talented actor. But in this film, one of the bigger credits of his career, he’s entirely faceless. His role involved impersonating the real Tyler Winklevoss while both elevating and matching Hammer’s portrayal of Cameron Winklevoss—a complicated feat no doubt—only to have all his distinguishing features obscured by a Hammer head in the end. This remains one of my favorite facts about the film, because in itself it’s a statement on life in the digital age: identity is malleable.
In general, the cast of The Social Network work so well onscreen that they’ve greatly influenced, maybe even replaced, our idea of the actual public figures. Jesse Eisenberg is apparently nothing like Mark but who cares, and Eduardo Saverin might as well be a canonized saint thanks to Andrew Garfield. It’s a perfect movie, that much is true, but I’m left with questions every time I watch it. What does it mean to “love to hate” someone? Is having a soft spot for douchebags just its own sadomasochistic kink? What about the story: Did it really happen this way? Does the truth even matter to me at all?
One of the themes of The Social Network is the conflict between how we think of people, how they present themselves to us, and who they truly are. It’s about the cognitive dissonance between the belief you have in someone’s character, and then seeing how they treat you when the shit hits the fan. As we speak, Mark Zuckerberg is pushing his Metaverse agenda while performing mass layoffs at his company. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are mired in a crypto scandal and owe investors $900 million. People fall off their pedestals. Everything is constructed. No one is as they seem. This is the way of Silicon Valley, it’s the way of Hollywood, and, as anyone who’s ever had a social media account can confirm, it’s definitely the way of the internet.