The Social Network 

Hail to the Geek

By now you've heard enough about "The Social Network" to imagine it in your head even if you haven't seen the film yet.  

I was a bit worried going in that I was going to be getting a heaping spoonful of Aaron Sorkin banter^TM with some Fincher set dressing.  I admit I hadn't researched his work too well but it's only because the man's penchant for turning all of his characters into verbal machine-guns prevented me watching any more of his acclaimed TV show 'The West Wing' after one episode.  Personally I think there's only a few actors that deserve to deliver lines that fast (Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, Michael Lerner) and only two screenwriters that should be allowed to write them (Joel and Ethan Coen).  These preconceptions were all for nothing.  After some mildly irritating Sorkinized sparring between facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his fictional girlfriend, the film sets into a fast-paced but sensible rhythm, the perfect tone for the story of the inception of today's internet social networking.  I enjoyed this film a lot, in no small part thanks to David Fincher, whose distinct color palette gives the film a cozy if slightly foreboding air.

This is a biopic, but not of a person.  This central character of this film is not Mark Zuckerburg, but the new entrepreneurial school, the new digital marketplace supplanting the old, the internet's transformation from a playground into a fully perfected, aerodynamic profit machine.  Sorkin takes the boardroom of the settlement hearings as a meeting between generations, the privileged Winkelvoss twins, the darlings of Harvard and aristocratic old money, Eduardo Saverin, the victimized representative of old-fashioned, honest business and then Zuckerberg himself, the visionary symbol of digital progress.  Sorkin and Fincher are wise not to deconstruct Zuckerberg.  Some critics (most vocally Armond White) have called this a lack of serious critical reflection, and while I am sick of antiheroics and morally ambiguity paraded around by Hollywood as automatic intelligence, this film is an exception in my mind.  "We don't know what it is yet, we do know that it is cool."  Zuckerberg the prophet delivers this line in the film while trying to dissuade his CFO from slapping ads on facebook and turning a quick profit in favor of letting his website grow into its full generation-defining potential.  It serves also as a guard against the kind of moralizing White calls for.  Deconstructing Zuckerberg would be like deconstructing the internet itself.  I am not saying we can't or shouldn't hold the digital age and its priests accountable to certain standards, but in a time when the internet is still gaining momentum as the most important media outlet in the world, inevitability wins out over critique (and it's worth noting that Nazis felt much the same way about their country's rise to dominance).  Sorkin and Fincher on the digital age:  we will have to wait because we don't know what it is yet.  Good or evil, all we know now is that it is cool.

Much was made of David Fincher's likening the film to 'Citizen Kane', but after watching this film I realized that this is a humorous quip at best.  The full quote was that it was the "Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies". The Social Network does not 'define a generation' in the same way.  This is not an intimate character study of the soul of our times, but rather a portrait of the movement of our times.  This film is about business and money.  Who's on top and who got dumped and why.  There are only minor hints at a spiritual subtext and they seem a bit out of place.  The final shot was surprisingly heavy-handed (I smell Fincher all over that one).  There was simply too much story to tell here to dive into what it all means, though the film's cinematography and mood seems to suggest that the events do mean something terribly important for humankind beyond just the creation of the next giant corporation.  The film sticks with 'exclusivity' as facebook's main theme.  The dynamic of who is 'in' and who is 'out' being the driving force behind what made facebook what it is today is compelling but I think there must be more to it than that.  Interestingly, the film's trailer hinted at more eternal themes than the film itself.  Thom Yorke's lyrics sung by a boy's choir lilt over slow shots of nameless profile pictures and status messages "I don't care if it hurts.  I wanna have control.  I want a perfect body.  I want a perfect soul."  The biggest questions about facebook--of what we are actually doing to ourselves when we log on--is left untouched and though I think exploration of just that topic would have been the thing to elevate this film to Citizen Kane status, it also would have had to be a totally different movie to explore it (for more introspective theories about facebook, see Catfish also playing in theaters).  I think there is a desire to see ourselves in print and create a digital habiliment for oneself that transcends the frat boy desire to be involved in something exclusive.  Facebook sort of takes that scrapbooking desire to the next level.  It is a record of ourselves that changes as we change, that sets down the truth of what we are in permanent ink and then altered at will.  It allows us to be the masters of our own worlds

Zuckerberg is on record as calling this movie 'fiction'.  Which gets a big 'no duh' from me.  All biopics put their subject matter through a heavy filter of interpretation.  What makes this film unique is that it has the gall to do this to events that happened only a few years ago and people who are still in their youth.  'The Social Network' is a requiem for a group of folks who are still very much alive and kicking.  An article by David Kirpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect sets out to dismiss the film as such but only succeeds in disconfirming minor things like Zuckerberg not actually being as tormented as he is portrayed, or the creation of a fictional girlfriend character and the leaving out of another.  This film respects the actual events that inspired it much more than, say, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can.  The romantic subplot, which I regarded the weakest part of the film, also turns out to be the least accurate and but is also the least important.  Most of the other events are either accurate or comparable facsimiles to actual events.  The Winkelvoss twins are fairly pleased with the film's accuracy and Kirpatrick admits that Saverin's side of the story is fairly represented.  That leaves Zuckerberg himself.  As I've mentioned before, Sorkin's Zuckerberg is not really described in detail.  His portrayal is an opinion, not a tell-all.  Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is an enigma on screen and Sorkin and Fincher are content to keep it that way.  Mark Zuckerberg may not think of himself as a jerk but it's likely that other folks in his life see him differently.  The eclipsing reality here is that the Zuckerberg on screen is more of a figure than a person.  The film only bolsters the man's mythic status.  Zuckerberg needn't worry, at least not about the only thing a true businessman should worry about: irrelevance (though his anxiety about his image could have been the very thing that netted Neward Public Schools a cool $100 million).  When was the last time you saw a movie hero portrayed as anything other than just 'driven'?  Sorkin's Zuckerberg fits nicely into this category.  If he didn't do it then someone else would have.  I wouldn't call the film sympathetic to his character but I would also point out that the public doesn't value morality anymore.  We revere greatness over right and wrong alike.  It does not matter if he was a hero or a villain, the key point is that he was important.  He is both an asshole and a hero, a tragic figure, both great and small.  The film functions like Mark Zuckerberg's facebook profile.  It says little of substance about him as a human being, but adds gravity to his person.  I think this is what all of us covertly set out to do when we create our own facebook profiles.  What we are matters less than that we are.  We announce ourselves to the world and care nothing for anyone's approval.  Mark Zuckerberg could be a hero or a villain but the important thing is that he is set in stone.

The "A" I give this film represents the success of this film in proportion to its intentions.  The Social Network is a nigh-on perfect film for what the creators wanted to accomplish and the discussion they wanted to stimulate.  They wanted to tell us the story of facebook and tell us what they think it means.  It's a taught, intelligent film that will surely be widely appreciated for years to come.  It's also worth noting that for a film set entirely in the arenas of computer programming and IP litigation, this is one heck of a thrill ride.  Fincher moves things along at an even and exciting pace, sure to satisfy everyone from old folks to the overstimulated.  Does it define a generation?  Its lack of spiritual focus forces me to say 'no' (for a definition of a generation must also include a definition of the humanity within that generation), but it will surely launch us into an awareness of our own generation perhaps sooner than in any other.  Thanks to websites like facebook our self-awareness is accelerating.  Sorkin and Fincher have significantly reduced the turnaround time for a biopic and insodoing, have accelerated our conversations.  We no longer need to wait until all is said and done to be introspective.  We can comment on our own generation in real-time.  A few more 'up-to-date' films like this one and we'll all be as neurotic as Zuckerberg.