"You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek, and I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true," a cute girl informs teen genius and social pariah Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), who she's breaking up with.
“It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
Dejected, Mark runs back to his Harvard dorm room against a hauntingly lumbering score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, where he hacks into every house on campus, steals girls' photos and creates a chauvinistic website that becomes so instantaneously popular that it brings down Harvard's servers in a matter of hours, all the while drunk and blogging sexist remarks about his ex and women in general on Livejournal. In a matter of days, Mark is the most hated guy on campus. And this is the beginning of a story that defines this decade.
There's a lot of press already on how much of the film is completely made up. Not just the dramatizations of the events—which we can already gather from the fact that real people don't have conversations as musical as Aaron Sorkin's really funny, rapid-wit dialogue—but even the events themselves are contested, not surprisingly, by Facebook, Inc.
There's a sort of fix in place for this in the movie, though. The creation of Facebook is told in flashbacks, as the film's "present" timeline is during the 2008 lawsuits against Zuckerberg by his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), as well as three fellow Harvard students who claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea. The framing of the story is his-word-against-another's (at one point, Zuckerberg even interjects on a flashback with, "Wait, did I really say that?"), which reflects the actual deposition at the time, and now the-movie's-word-against-Facebook's. Credit to David Fincher for handling the chronology so well. Being a very talky film with no set pieces, Fincher also steps back from being his usual visual-driven artist mode, really showing off how good he is at handling actors and weaving a dense but coherent story.
The film doesn't touch on recent pressing issues that have hounded the site like privacy concerns or the censorship debate, because it's not a new media cautionary tale so much as it is a portrait of what society looks like in a new era. The film Fincher and Sorkin have made is perfectly called The Social Network, not Facebook, because the events of the movie is more than just the origin of one website; it's the origin of a new 21st Century paradigm.
The total reinvention of social interaction.
That's the hidden landmine embedded in this techie rags-to-riches story, and why the inclusion of Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) in the story is an essential one, not just from a historical standpoint. After all, Paypal founder Peter Thiel, also a significant driving force in Facebook history, is only in the movie for all of three seconds. Parker, on the other hand, represents something more.
In their first meeting, Parker boasts to Zuckerberg and Saverin that he'd won against the music industry. Saverin, who takes an immediate dislike to Parker's aloof party boy charm, reminds him that the record companies won the lawsuits and left Napster bankrupt. Parker replies, "Let me ask you this. Do you still want to buy a Tower Records?" Trends change, upstarts come and go, bubbles burst; but once in a while one of them makes a lasting impact. Napster, despite its failure as a company, succeeded in putting digital music on public consciousness, thus changing the landscape forever. The Social Network makes the argument that Facebook did the same to relationships. For better or worse, whether you like it or not.
This impact is illustrated in the film, but humorously transferred to the founders. Saverin's unhinged girlfriend confronts him one night and berates him about the fact that his Facebook profile still lists him as single. It's a familiar fight to many of us who've lived in the Facebook age, but the excuses don't work here. "I don't know how to change it," Saverin pleads. The girlfriend snaps back, "You expect me to believe that the founder of Facebook doesn't know how to change the relationship status on his Facebook?!"
The sad part about this zany scene, though, is a theme that dominates the third act of the film. Saverin doesn't know how to change his status because he's been gradually slipping out of the loop on what Facebook is becoming, as Zuckerberg gets in deeper with Parker. This is how the movie makes a bunch of nerds coding a website not seem boring: every step of the site's history has a crushing depiction of the burden of relationships. What you hear is talks of expanding user base, but what you see is two best friends gradually becoming bitter enemies.
Zuckerberg's an interesting protagonist, more believable than likable, because he's distant and doesn't let us in on why he does the things he does. In the way Sorkin wrote him and Eisenberg brilliantly played him, Mark is not exactly an active asshole; only utterly clueless and disproportionate when reacting to things he doesn't like happening to him. We only get an idea of his actions being bad when the people around him suffer in his wake, and then we see the hurt in Mark's realization of it all. SPOILER ALERT—the movie ends with him sending a Facebook friend request to his ex-girlfriend. Given that it's his site and knowing his shaky ethics, he probably could've just made them Facebook friends himself, as he's done with everything else. But he doesn't. He waits, refreshing over and over to see if she's accepted, hoping for legitimate acceptance. /END SPOILERS.
It's a story of ruthless American turn-of-the-century entrepreneurship in new commodity, which mirrors There Will Be Blood in more ways than one. For a film concerned with relatively trivial matters like website development and college-age kids partying or breaking up with their girlfriends, the subtext of what's going on runs pretty dark. It concludes that human relationships are fragile, prone to changes that are almost as airy as the click of a mouse.
The invention of Facebook didn't cause it. On the contrary, Facebook exists because of it, both symbolically and literally, as Zuckerberg was motivated by pettiness. Vanity, longing and desperation bleed from real life into this online civilization, which in turn nurtures those traits further in the real one. Welcome to the new social network.
This film was reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival.
"The Social Network" opens October 1, 2010 and is rated PG13. Drama. Directed by David Fincher. Written by Aaron Sorkin. Starring Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Brenda Song, Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara.
