Movie Review: The Social Network (2010)

The Social Network (2010)

Directed By:
David Fincher

Starring:
Jesse Eisenberg: Mark Zuckerberg
Andrew Garfield: Eduardo
Justin Timberlake: Sean Parker
Armie Hammer: Cameron/Tyler
Max Minghella: Divya
Rooney Mara: Erica
Rashida Jones: Marilyn

Rating:

The Dude Abides

It started with a girl. It always starts with a girl, unless it starts with a shattered snow globe, a whispered word in the locked room of a stately pleasure dome. For Mark Zuckerberg, for Facebook, for the internet as we know it, it started with an argument at a bar with a girl. Odds are that Facebook is open right now, a tab in your browser, refreshed on a minute-to-minute basis. Just think: Farmville, Mafia Wars, Big Brother style advertisements that know what you like and what to compare those things to…all of it started in one drunken night of computer programming, a lonely nerd crusading against the plight of all lonely nerds, the human element of human communication.

The Social Network’s Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg) is the sort of guy one is tempted to staple adjectives to. Those looking to take the film as fact will likely land on a variation of “sexist,” “misanthropic” and “autistic,” though it’s likely, hell, probable, that none of them are true. Taken as a character in a story, Zuckerberg becomes a scion for social awkwardness, naivety, and ambition. For those of us who don’t wear Ed Hardy and fist pump like champions, Zuckerberg is a sort of antihero, a technological Robin Hood who kinda-sorta steals from the socially and financially well off, but is knocked from the right path by the lure of superstardom.

But that’s not exactly fair to the Winklevosses, Cameron and Tyler (Armie Hammer), who sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing an idea they kinda-sorta hired him to code--The Harvard Connection, an admittedly elitist website that would have traded on the notion that chicks dig dudes from Harvard. Nor is it particularly fair to Facebook’s one time President, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who, as the creator and founder of Napster, will be remembered as the music industry’s one man Waterloo. And it’s probably too nice to Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who gives Zuckerberg the $19,000 he needs to start Facebook, smells Parker for the rat he is, and is unjustly suckered out of 31% of a company that’d quickly be worth $25 billion.

But The Social Network is not the origin story of Facebook. It is the interpretation of the hearsay surrounding the rumors around the litigation concerning the creation of Facebook. It is, in essence, one hell of a Facebook message about the founding of Facebook. Like the idiot who logs on the next morning with a hangover to tell the world that the party he went to last night was the cancer-curing, global warming-solving, gamechanging occasion the likes of which the world has waited for since the Italian Renaissance, The Social Network creates an alternate version of real events. Zuckerberg pounding away at his keyboard becomes Zuckerberg the distant, the obsessed, the acerbic. I realize that I’ve just described every movie that was ever Based on a True Story, but this isn’t The Blind Side and, with a sigh of relief, I can tell you that there is no cheap attempt at moralizing the story.

Unlike the frat guy and his post on the merits of Keystone Light, The Social Network has a larger purpose, which is to depict unchecked, nearly inhumane ambition. The difference between the Mark Zuckerberg of this film and Charles Foster Kane is that Zuckerberg, sitting alone after an endless series of depositions regarding the origins of Facebook, realizes as a young man that he’s screwed the pooch several times over. It's not like he's led his country to war under false pretenses or anything, but boy did that drunken night of computer programming change a lot about the way his species communicates, and man is it ever apparent that the truth is 100% relative, depending on who tells the story to what audience, given that audience's mood and their pre-existing conception of the truth. He's just lucky that his childhood iBook hasn't yet been haphazardly chucked into the incinerator.

The internet, as you’re probably aware, has the uncanny ability to change the world in the blink of an eye. As far as communication goes, the internet is probably up there with the printing press and the written word in terms of what it means for us as a society, and with Facebook, all of us are online and sharing things with one another, blissfully pretending that the markets are free and open, that nobody cares enough to listen to what we say to one another. That couldn’t be less true. Zuckerberg gets started on the whole Facebook thing by getting drunk in the aftermath of a disastrous date with Erica (Rooney Mara), who is less than taken with Zuckerberg’s accusations of sexual promiscuity and intellectual inferiority. She breaks up with him on the spot and he goes back to his dorm, where he blogs that Erica is a bitch and says that her bra size is misleading. He does this simultaneous to his true task: facemash.com, which asked visitors to click on the hotter of two pictures of Harvard undergraduates.

It’s amazing to think that Zuckerberg commits two sweeping acts of privacy invasion in one night, chilling considering the recent news of a Rutgers student committing suicide because his roommate committed the similar if more sinister and senseless crime of filming him having sex with another man and posting it on the internet. This is the world we live in now, where a momentary lapse of reason like playing Star Wars with a broom handle or posting pictures of last night’s sick kegger can lead to 10 million hits on YouTube or an instant evaporation of post-collegiate job prospects. Worse yet is that Zuckerberg’s Facebook is essentially a warrant issued to people you don’t know, who you’ve never met, to come in and learn everything you feel like shouting into a seemingly crowded room.

That is also the subtle beauty of Facebook, I suppose. Zuckerberg goes into a public space, drinks flowing and music blaring, and his eyes glaze over. Bars and frat parties are no places to make real, lasting connections with people. Take out the noise, the booze, the flashing lights, and the awkwardness of social contact and you get Facebook, where we send idealized messages to idealized photographs of one another, where we look at the name of somebody we haven’t spoken to since middle school and have fond, semi-fictionalized remembrances of years gone by, where we bemoan the ever changing privacy policy and bitch that the world is becoming less and less private, but where we spend an increasing amount of time because that’s where our friends are, that’s where we hook up, that’s where we talk, and we’re free to do so without stumbling over ourselves, if we so choose.


The Social Network is a brilliant return to form for David Fincher, who was last seen grubbing for an Oscar behind the camera of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This is the kind of whip-smart movie one expects from the director of Fight Club and, in its own way, The Social Network is just as subversive as that film, charting how quickly new language (“Facebook me!”) inserts itself into the public consciousness, how quickly an idea, even one as innocuous as a social networking website, can signal a cultural sea-change. While I believe in sharing, it seems utterly pointless to single out the creator of The West Wing for his ability to write a good script, so I won’t.

For a lot of people, I imagine that the depth Justin Timberlake shows as Sean Parker will register as the biggest surprise of the movie, and I can’t see a reason to argue with that. It is somewhat tempting to write Parker off as a one-note character, a jerk who is all swagger and false-bravado, but Timberlake brings an unsuspected edge to the role that distinguishes him from the ever-growing pile of generic bad boys. Here he is Icarus, on his third rematch with the Sun. Jessie Eisenberg is unexpectedly intense as the lead; for a guy so good at being the punchline, it's something else to see him deliver a tongue lashing. His various clashes with authority had the audience rolling.

Which, to come back to Aaron Sorkin for a bit, may be the film’s one failing. As “Facebook: The Movie,” this’ll likely be seen by everybody with a working internet connection, and the sardonic Zuckerberg at times comes across as folk hero, especially when it becomes clear that the only way he’ll get out of his particular pickle is by giving an already rich pair of brothers more money for something that they hardly had anything to do with. Few are likely to remember Zuckerberg sitting alone at his computer, waiting for a friend request to end in confirmation, in connection, and fewer still will wonder if he deserves it, if 500 million "friends" are worth the situation he puts himself in. The answer, of course, is 100%% subjective and reflects on nobody, save an idealized version of yourself, represented by an idealized photograph, as projected to the rest of us perfect internet people.