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Film

Drive and Determination of Zuckerberg and Gekko

Jesse Eisenberg, right, with Andrew Garfield, left, in “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher.

THE great virtue of Facebook — as articulated early in “The Social Network” by Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard student who was one of that site’s founders — is that it is “exclusive.” This may sound counterintuitive, given that one of the seductions of Facebook in the real world is that it is open to everyone. Far from exclusive, the network seems to have the potential to become universal.

But of course what the fictionalized Zuckerberg means is not that access to his nascent network is limited (though at this point in the story it exists only within the already restricted pool of Harvard students), but rather that the people who enlist can choose the company they keep. The film’s viewers, even those who have resisted the charms of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, will recognize the logic, both human and mathematical, that has turned the word “friend” into a transitive verb with a newly formed opposite. Every Facebook user, friending and unfriending at will, can travel freely in intersecting circles of his or her own design.

In the utopian version of this resulting horizonless network, status is not something inherited or enforced by others or even earned: it is something you can change, update and revise according to your own whims. You are who you say you are, and what you want to be — a citizen of a perfect Emersonian republic of self-selection and self-reliance.

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Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.”Credit...Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Except that the mood of “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher from a script by Aaron Sorkin, is dark, sinister and paranoid. The disjunction between Facebook’s sunny communitarian promise and these ambient tremors of unease — the paradox of a deep loneliness in a world of friendship — is summed up in the character of Mark Zuckerberg himself. In the film’s view, this young man, brilliantly and twitchily embodied by Jesse Eisenberg, is able to construct Facebook not only because he is a computer genius, but also because he is morbidly obsessed with status and exclusivity.

Zuckerberg — perhaps we should call him Mark to distinguish the character from the real person — does not really understand how to make friends, or to keep the one real buddy he has, Eduardo Saverin, who winds up suing Mark after being forced out of the company. Long before that, Mark is consumed with envy when Eduardo, in their sophomore year, is punched by a Final Club.

It is worth noting that Mark knows what the phrase “punched by a Final Club” means, a fact that already signals his membership in the decidedly not-virtual social elite of Harvard students. Nor is he a scholarship boy, shut out of the residual networks of old-fashioned privilege that still exist in the 21st-century Ivy League. Mr. Eisenberg appears at one point in a Phillips Exeter T-shirt, a nod to the prestigious New England academy where Mr. Zuckerberg went to prep school. As Manohla Dargis noted in her review of “The Social Network” in The New York Times, he is not poor.

All of which is to say that “The Social Network” is not, except perhaps metaphorically, a movie about class. (When was the last time you saw one of those? Chinese documentaries don’t count). But it is nonetheless a movie that fastens onto some of the contradictory ways Americans — and American filmmakers — are used to thinking about that knotty matter.

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Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Mr. Stone’s movie is not really about Wall Street, and Mr. Fincher’s is not really about Facebook.Credit...Barry Wetcher/20th Century Fox

The resentment of elites is an axiom of political discourse and popular culture. So is the celebration of the self-made man, an outsider turned world-beater who rises to a position of titanic power and influence. And yet even though it is our habit to admire such people, our envy of them has a way, especially in movies and in older novels, of mutating, conveniently and reassuringly, into pity.

More than a few critics writing about “The Social Network” have invoked “Citizen Kane,” both to indicate their extravagant admiration of the film and to highlight some of its themes. Whatever the ultimate merits of the comparison, the brash young geniuses at the center of these two films share an unmistakably tragic dimension. Charles Foster Kane, the great newspaperman, ends up unable to communicate, much as Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of a great engine for sharing, schmoozing and keeping in touch, is defined by his failure to connect.

This pathos is perhaps too good to be true. We learn from a recent New Yorker profile that the real Mr. Zuckerberg (who just gave $100 million worth of Facebook shares to help the Newark public schools) has had a steady girlfriend for most of the time covered in “The Social Network,” something that is not simply left out of the movie, but treated as a categorical impossibility. This is more than just a matter of nerd stereotyping. Mark’s inability to engage with women, in spite of his sometimes juvenile fascination with them, is his Rosebud, the primal wound or deficiency from which all of his ambition and accomplishment flows. You could no more imagine him with a romantic partner than you could picture Gordon Gekko with a heart.

Or a grandchild. Or a sweet, idealistic daughter with whom he hopes to reconcile. And yet Gekko, returning for a second tour of greedy duty in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” has all of these things, at least to some extent.

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Shia LaBeouf in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”Credit...Barry Wetcher/20th Century Fox

In the first “Wall Street,” 23 years ago, Gekko was Mephistopheles to young Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), an eager young trader whose soul was not so much sold as shorted. In the sequel, however, Gekko, a side player in the central drama of global financial crisis, is Faust to his own devil. The issue is not his new protégé’s moral standing, which is never really in doubt (partly because he’s Shia LaBeouf, the nicest kid in your eighth-grade geometry class). Instead, Gekko’s own status is at issue. Will he prove himself, at long last, to be human? To have feelings, decent instincts? A conscience?

“Wall Street” vacillates quite a bit on these questions, allowing Mr. Douglas to explore the gray areas of the role even as it distracts the audience from more urgent topical matters. Mr. Stone’s movie is not really about Wall Street, any more than Mr. Fincher’s is really about Facebook. “The Social Network” does not delve into the impact of social networking as a phenomenon, glancing only obliquely (and not always convincingly) at the existential conundrums of identity on the Internet. (The problematic documentary “Catfish” goes farther down that particular rabbit hole.) It is more centrally a movie about business, the story of a great fortune being made and fought over.

Mr. Stone’s film, for its part, is not even really about business, even though several fortunes are contested and lost in the course of its hectic narrative. It is more about the profound and fragile obligations of loyalty and family that serve as a counterweight to unchecked avarice and blind materialism. (Moviegoers who want a forceful, detailed, indignation-arousing account of the crisis of 2008 will have to await the release, in a few weeks, of Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job.”)

In their different ways, Mark Zuckerberg and Gordon Gekko are monsters of drive and determination, alienated from basic human values by their single-minded ambition. One is an outsider who dreams of finding a way in. The other is a disgraced insider scheming to find a way back. Their motives and methods are not the same — Mark is not motivated by greed, and Gekko has always been more of a smooth talker than a number-cruncher — but what they lack is what unites them.

Quite a bit of the detail in “The Social Network” and “Wall Street” is drawn from reality, from the names in Mr. Fincher’s movie to the thinly veiled events in Mr. Stone’s. But both protagonists are, finally, allegorical figures, and the films work most powerfully as morality tales. As such, they dispense both comfort and cautionary wisdom, and enact a symbolic revenge against the powerful and the very rich, who, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “are not like you and me.” They are sadder, lonelier, experiencing the very success that makes them the objects of our envy as a kind of exile. What they really want is to be like everyone else. So who is excluding whom?

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Status Update: It’s Lonely at the Top. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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