THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS & THE SOCIAL NETWORK

​It is a truism of sorts that David Fincher’s movie The Social Network has parallels with the Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane. Easy to see. Both have multiple narrators. Both involve megalomaniacal media giants. Both have their Rosebuds at the end. Fincher has even directed a movie involving Citizen Kane and the media giant who inspired that movie.

Recently I watched the next movie that Welles made, The Magnificent Ambersons. I had recorded it from TCM not knowing if I was really ready to watch it again, but it is one of those movies that once I watch a few minutes of I can quit watching. And lightning struck. I began to think about the Fincher movie and how much it also resembles Ambersons.

The first thing that struck me was that both movies involve a technical advances and the effects that each has on society, both for good and bad. In Welles’ case the automobile (this is even more apparent in the Booth Tarkington novel on which it is based). In Fincher’s case the internet and particularly Facebook.

Both have central characters who are obsessed with social position. In Ambersons it is with inherited social status and the desire to keep it. In Social Network it is with the lack thereof and the desire to attain it. Both men in their monomaniacal ways pursue their goals with total disregard for those around them: families, friends, lovers, innocent bystanders.
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Both men receive their comeuppance of sorts, most explicitly in the Welles movie. Both men end up definitely sadder and I think in each case just a bit wiser. George Minafer (his mother was an Amberson) when brought to his knees does seem to express a certain responsibility for his late father’s sister, also impoverished. He actually gives up a possible law career in order to take a dangerous job paying more and immediate money to finance her life in a boarding house. 

​Mark Zuckerberg ends up with his millions turning into billions in spite of the result of the lawsuit that forms the core of the movie, but at the end, all alone in the hearing room, he does seem to show just a bit of regret.

​A big difference between the 2 movies: The Social Network happears to be exactly the movie that director Fincher and write Aaron Sorkin intended to make. For e is it one of the most perfect movies ever made. The Magnificent Ambersons, on the other hand, was recut by the studio, shortening the movie by nearly an hour and adding a happier ending (which oddly, does reflect the ending of the novel where it seems just as fake). Bravura camera movements in single take were snipped up to shorted the sequences by a few seconds. In spite if all, it remains for me one of the most wonderful movies ever made.
For me, that wonderful movie ends with the voiceover of Wells as narrator: “Something had happened. A thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town, and now it had come at last; George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance. He got it three times filled, and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.”
I can watch the rest without gagging, but the rest is definitely not Welles.

{It is a surprisingly good novel!]