It’s been a SOCIAL NETWORK week. It feels like the film is on everyone’s lips thanks to a theatrical re-release, its debut on blu-ray, and a few more awards in the last ten days. And with all of that came someone repeating something I first heard upon the film’s debut last fall:

“THE SOCIAL NETWORK is this generation’s CITIZEN KANE”.

No.
No it’s not.
Not even close.
Really, sit down now – you’re embarressing yourself.

The comparison has got my back up since the first time I heard it. So to put a dagger in it once and for all, I watched the two films back to back. And while there are similarities between the stories, those differences that set them apart are glaring.

Let’s begin by looking at what Mark and Kane do. With Facebook, Mark is out to distinguish himself by creating something big. His ultimate idea involves ingenuity, and relies heavily on being adopted by a larger collective. He isn’t interested in telling people what to do: He’s more interested in having them be able to connect with each other while they do whatever it is they were going to do. On the whole, Mark’s personality is rather absent from his contribution.

Kane on the other hand builds an empire that is all about ego. He is less an entrepreneur than a mogul. He is a man whose main outlet – his newspaper – gives him a soapbox to declare his opinions (for better or for worse). In fact, this channel is a dangerous in the hands of a man like Kane. This is after all a man who tells his reporter that if he provides the prose poems, that he can supply a war. In fact, Kane eventually quite bluntly states to his first wife, that people will think what he tells them to think.

Where Kane’s path further splinters hard from Mark’s is where his political aspirations come into play. In the course of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Mark never attempts anything so ambitious and grand. He does what he does to make a name for himself, but in the short window of time in which the film takes place, he never comes anywhere close to the power grab that Kane makes with his run for state governor.

This is a key difference, as it’s the scandalous failure of this run for office that really turns the tide on Kane’s legacy.


Let’s move to why Mark and Kane do what they do. The catalyst of Mark’s story is one part ingenuity and two parts venom. Mere moments after he is dumped, he trots across the Harvard campus, fires up his blog and publishes his angriest rantings about Erica for all to see. Seemingly resentful not only of Erica but of women everywhere, he creates The Facemash. It’s the roughest of drafts really, but it’s what gets him noticed, what gets him talking to the Winklevoss twins, what sparks the Facebook idea in his head, and what sends him down the road to a successful enterprise.

While Kane’s journey doesn’t start from such a bitter beginning, it is no less misguided. Kane is handed a fortune through his inheritance. His properties include oil wells, gold mines, and real estate, but none of that interests him (Why would it? He didn’t have to work to build it). When he comes of age and is allowed to actually take control of his holdings, he gravitates towards the newspaper only because he thinks “It would be fun to run a newspaper.” Mark is involved in Facebook’s every nuance because it’s his baby. Kane is merely is playing paddleball with his contribution to the world…all the while spending the money it brings him.

In a neat twist, both Mark and Kane are fueled by outside influences. For Mark, it’s the arrival of Shawn Parker who almost goads him into changing the world the way he did with Napster. For Kane though, it’s his estate’s custodian Mr. Thatcher…a man who stepped in as a parental figure when he was least needed. A man who ultimately asked Kane in his later years what precisely he would have liked to have been. Kane’s answer is cold and to the point: “Everything you hate.”

Mark might have been sparked by jilted feelings, but eventually he got over it and remorse crept in. Kane was bitter…about a lot of things…for a very long time.


Where the parallels of the two films really end is the ultimate fate of our heroes. As he sits alone in that deposition room, Mark makes another attempt to make amends with Erica. He sits there refreshing the web page over and over, waiting for his request to get accepted. A little sad sure, but not ultimately what he’ll go down in history for. Indeed, as the story ends Facebook is massively successful (“They don’t have roads in Bosnia, but the have Facebook?”). He is so rich that he can weather two separate lawsuits that will take millions out of his pocket – lawsuits that we’re led to believe he will settle. And as the final crawl tells us, his vision will still make him wildly rich. He got it all, except for that one girl.

Kane’s fate is far more tragic. As the newsreel tells us, the man outlived his power. At his peak, he was raking in a fortune, ran a news syndicate that was influential, and stood on a political precipice that included him being poised to be governor, with the American presidency within sight. He lost it all, because for Kane power wasn’t enough. He always felt some gaping hole that only love could fill, but it had to be love on his terms. So even with a dutiful wife at home and an adoring son, he gets brought down by a cute-but-talentless chanteuse…who at just the right moment in just the right way, gives him a glimmer of what he really wants. A glimmer that still doesn’t turn into the real thing for Kane.

Mark had everything, but still pined for Erica. Kane had more than everything (he made sure of that by buying what he didn’t have), but none of it was enough. He was pulled from a happy childhood and loving parents far too early, and it forever skewed his outlook on how to live and how to love. That, my friends, is a sad fate that Mark Zuckerberg comes nowhere near within THE SOCIAL NETWORK.


Indeed, both Mark and Kane achieved more that what most of us will do with our lives, but are still left incomplete. However, it’s only one facet in two very different stories. If we were going by the measure of never achieving “that one thing”, then one could say that Charlie Brown is like CITIZEN KANE. Linus spends every Halloween night waiting in vain for The Great Pumpkin, and Charlie Brown wants nothing more than to talk to the Little Redhead Girl. Neither one of them gets what they, want, but you don’t hear them getting compared to a cinematic masterpiece.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK is about the human drama that comes with building something up; CITIZEN KANE is about the tragedy that occurs when one doesn’t know what to do once it’s built. There are similarities – many more that I never got to – but for this vast difference in direction, and of course for the unknowable legacy THE SOCIAL NETWORK will have as it ages, it must be declared: the two films tell very separate stories.