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Thoughts on The Social Network

JA November 04

‘Private behaviour is a relic of a time gone by,’ declares Sean Parker, erstwhile founder of Napster and entrepreneur at large in The Social Network. And so it is in David Fincher’s new movie on the founding of Facebook, which takes an unlikely premise and somehow, impressively, manages to turn it into a tightly-worked, thoroughly engaging drama about ambition, genius and loyalty in the digital era.

Mark Zuckerberg (played brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg, who I last saw in The Squid and the Whale), is a Harvard sophomore freshly dumped by his girlfriend, Erica Albright. Angry and drunk, he creates Facemash in the space of an evening, a site that asks users to ‘rate’ college girls against one another using their University profile photos. Predictably, he gets in trouble. However, he also gets noticed, most notably by Harvard uppercrust Divya Narendra and twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who ask him to help them create Harvard Connection, a dating site with the now familiar features of a profile, interests, photos and so on. Mark agrees, but instead goes on to work on his own idea for a network, named The Facebook, with help and funding from his best friend, Eduardo Saverin. The rest, needless to say, is history – but a history that Fincher cleverly undercuts with two subsequent lawsuits against Zuckerberg, one by Saverin and the other by ‘the Winklevii’ and Narendra.

This movie is a near-perfect equation. The script, written by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing is whiplash quick and full of quotable quotes. Fincher manages to make even the halls and walkways of Harvard, and later Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, look suitably grim and moody, which, when paired with a savvy score by Reznor and Atticus Ross, makes for a winning formula.

There are, of course, numerous nods to the notion of privacy, from outright hackathons to the ‘private entrance’ sign in the background when Zuckerberg first pitches the idea to Saverin. There is also a delicious layering in the fact that we are watching a very public movie about a rather introverted individual who has, in turn, make a billionaire of himself through a very public enterprise. Zuckerberg has been blunt about his campaign to ‘make the world a more open place’ and his belief that privacy is a ‘third rail issue’ (Facebook’s privacy functions were heavily criticised earlier this year). He reportedly wants nothing to do with The Social Network, yet this is a film that will only serve to make him more famous than he already is. However fame is clearly not something that Zuckerberg wants either. This from an earlier profile in the New Yorker:

… Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. Backstage at an event at the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, this summer, one of his interlocutors turned to Zuckerberg, minutes before they were to appear onstage, and said, “You don’t like doing these kinds of events very much, do you?” Zuckerberg replied with a terse “No,” then took a sip from his water bottle and looked off into the distance.

Sorkin describes Zuckerberg as character who ‘spends the first one hour and fifty-five minutes as an antihero and the last five minutes as a tragic hero’. Eisenberg plays him as the classic socially inept genius – unable to really express or retain affection, and brutally ambitious without the grace to soften it, or the charisma to make it sparkle. He is also, like most of the men (and they are all men in this fast-paced digital world), a bit of an a**hole, to quote Erica, to women. Yet, despite this unlikeability, he is utterly engrossing. As Luke Buckmaster of Cinetology observes:

Just watch Eisenberg’s face during the many scenes in which Zuckerberg is confronted by the people he is accused of betraying – its subtle swivels and contortions, the careful mix of contemptuousness and self-belief. This is the kind of cinematic performance that could never transfer to the stage; minute face expressions make the world of difference on the big screen.

Fincher clearly respects that many of the audience (500 billion in fact) are already on Facebook and have the benefit of hindsight. Just as we know in Mad Men that cigarettes are dangerous and that there is such a thing as a ‘magic machine that makes identical copies of things’, so too do we know here that Facebook will be a massive success. So when Harvard President Larry Summers tells the Winklevosses that they might be letting their imaginations run away with them when they predict Facebook could be worth millions, we can appreciate the joke. Sometimes, though, the formative lightbulb moments are pushed a little too heavily, such as when Zuckerberg comes up with the idea for ‘relationship status’, but that’s a small quibble in an otherwise great film about, in the words of Sorkin, a ‘socially dysfunctional people who created the world’s great social-networking site.’

 

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