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 person's life, than a cohesive tale of the minting of the wealthiest (allegedly awkward) individual under 25 in human history? Short of King Tut that is...
After all, The Social Network 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 some 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 person a dizzying success. Getting to success is not just being in the right place at the right time, nor simply having the most brainpower, nor just "nose to the grindstone" attitude and persistence.
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 applies equally to men and women. In fact, the notion of waiting and acceptance might be even more powerful a force toward success, if we are to learn the lessons of the Greek myth of Psyche.
Hamlet and Psyche Were Dorks, Too.
The Zuckerberg character is an inaccurately, negatively labeled man - "awkward" - rather than 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, 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.
And if Hamlet psychologically shows the struggle of a boy to wrestle with the Oedipal struggle to superced his father, then the feminine lessons of The Social Network would rest more in the story of a girl's rise to mature feminine life in the Greek myth of Psyche.
Wed to Eros (Cupid), the son of the goddess of mature feminine sexual potency (which includes the maternal nature), Psyche is tormented and tested by Aphrodite in a series of progressively difficult challenges. These will metaphorically prove that she has what it takes to live an effective life of a mature woman, with all the challenges and rewards inherent in that.
Aphrodite will only be satisfied with her skill once she has
1.) Sorted a million red seeds from white (the detail-oriented, discriminating ability of women to put resources in their places of most effective impact)
2.) Harvested the golden hair from the backs of some particularly vicious boars (the ability of women in the face of danger and conflict to accomplish goals around and despite the threats)
3.) Collect a cup of water from a precarious waterfall - a seemingly impossible task (the ability of women to take risks, creatively problem-solve, and strive for their ambitions even when the odds are daunting)
4.) And finally, to make a long trek down the River Styx to snatch the perfume of Persephone, goddess of the underworld, and return to the land of the living (for a woman to know her deep self so well, her instincts, reflexes, placing them in service of and sometimes having to delay or deny them for the sake of her life's purpose, whatever that may be)
In the first three of these tests, Psyche is horribly lonely, and feels hopeless and paralyzed with sadness and fear, when in the right time, the environment and nature around her come to her aid, if she will only let them.
In the first case, an army of ants sorts the seeds for her, in the second, reeds out of harm's way collect the golden hair, and in the third, the Eagle of Zeus (the father) is sent down to collect the water in a cup.
This training at attunement to the environment helps Psyche wait patiently, notice and use the natural resources around her in order to accomplish her given tasks in training for adult life.
In the last test, she is truly on her own, and like all men and women who leave childhood, she must refrain from the lesser impulses in order to accomplish her grand and final goal. She must forego the natural tendency to give her only bean cakes to the starving as she journeys through the Underworld, and hold on to the only two coins for the boatman, which if lost would either cause failure to even begin her journey, let alone return to the living.
If you imagined yourself in the Zuckerberg character's shoes, you'd find as a woman that some of these skills would serve you well - that the founding of his company could only be successful if attention was paid to the right timing and societal need for friendship that it provides assistance with. And while some see the Zuckerberg character as appalling in his ruthlessness, to the point of betraying friends for the sake of his business goal - you might also see that Psyche too, betrayed her instinctive drive to help others, and spread friendship on her journey.
Like Zuckerberg, if she HAD "shared" and "done the right and friendly thing," there would be no successful completion of the mission, and return to the world of the living.
Although it's a different gender and its instincts we are talking about, its interesting that there may be a deeper level to the need to disappoint friends for the sake of a great cause, and a salve for loneliness in that cause...
...because victory will bring the rewards that lead the lonely individual on a growth path to more friends than they can handle.
"Awkward" then doesn't really apply when we are talking about boys and girls on the path of growth to adulthood. It's not a static thing. More like the dynamic story of the Ugly Duckling.
That's Hamlet, had he succeeded in reaching peace and acceptance, and it definitely is Psyche, who does win adult life in the end.
The full range of the instincts of femininity and how to apply them are in the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program at:
==> www.womenshappiness.com/complete-feminine-empowerment
"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 initiation into adulthood - that juncture at which, faced with the confusing, threatening, beckoning woods, with their promise of adventure and death in equal measures - a child looks over his shoulder for the presence of a parent and does not see them, finds nothing there, and left alone with only dreams and ambitions, and 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 the adventure that the child was very much imperiled by all along.
Yet it doesn't matter that you were imperiled, in danger, if in the end, you WIN. You win over the man, 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 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 child, the adult, or whatever they are, in between, is an invader on nature. They "don't belong there," with every step becoming more an adult, and less lost.
Men and Your Purpose
In the Complete Feminine Empowerment Program at:==> www.womenshappiness.com/complete-feminine-empowerment
...I cover how it is that femininity depends on ones skill with men - attracting them, bonding with them, loving them and being loved - as well as progress on a purpose for your life, which can include a creative effort, having children, or starting a wildly successful business. You name it - it's the "rest of life" other than men...
This latter aspect, the "purpose for your life" is not something you decided upon any more than the adult's name the Native American elders gave a former child was by choice. It is "meant to be" and is observed to come out of the child's basic nature - their "soul" and in everything they do and are drawn to as they learn to become adults.
The same is true of you as a woman. Your purpose 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 people called "Dorks," the divine inspiration drawing them into a great devotion such as the arts and sciences empowers them - one of the two sources of femininity or masculinity.
Which then of course spills over into the other factor - their skill and access to the other gender.
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 people who seek to emerge from a troubled childhood, and into a full mature 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. And that lack of outer emotionality in the Zuckerberg character may not be something women can empathize with.
Even so,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 successful adult.
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 an emerging adult transcending being lost - not "I'm a creep," but rather the last phrase of the song: "I don't belong here."
For a child, "not belonging" is frightening and lonely.
But for an adult, "not belonging" is what must happen if we are to truly find ourselves with a unique identity. A Hamlet actually succeeding or a Psyche victorious over her challenges.
Then others will imitate you, follow you, and seek you out for as long as you live, because they don't want to "belong" either. They want to be unique, like you.
They want to matter by the very virtue of not belonging to the ordinary.
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