Hand Covers Bruise Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross... • The Automaton

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Hand Covers Bruise
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
The Social Network (2010)

After nine pages of an all but one-sided, high-speed conversation between the fictional Mark Zuckerberg and his date, the no less fictional Erica Albright, in the original screenplay for The Social Network, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin introduced Paul Young’s Love of the Common People and suggested it be used as the background music for the film’s post-cold open sequence and Mark’s post-breakup shock and denial. But Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and frequent collaborator Atticus Ross had a better song in mind to accompany Mark’s bruised ego and the film’s opening credits neatly set in Futura, with corners and edges as sharp as the antihero’s inward pain. It’s aptly called Hand Covers Bruise. Scattered throughout its continuously discordant strings whose nervous oscillations are jarring from the get-go are instances of doleful but more audible piano tritones — ambient dissonance coexisting with but not quite giving in to pulses of rhythm. Like its cousin, the self-descriptively titled penultimate track in the official soundtrack album, The Gentle Hum of Anxiety, it’s a troubled transmission of enlightenment as signal and angst as noise. Its signal-to-noise ratio, then, as in the synthesis of sounds within social networks online and off, is a variable uncertainty. Love of the Common People might have been more pronounced in its acoustic and semantic sarcasm, an effect which would not at all have been undesirable given the film’s powerful undercurrent of irony, but Reznor and Ross’s instrumental Hand Covers Bruise proved the wiser choice. That The Social Network was bookended by it and The Beatles’ Baby, You’re a Rich Man underscores its thematic import.

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