Film review: The Social Network

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Director: David Fincher
Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer
SONY

Review: Suzan Ryan

The Social Network is a movie about the Facebook phenomenon—the men who created it, the men who invested in it, and those along for the ride. It’s a story as much about how money clarifies who your friends are as it is about a cultural and technological watermark. Sure it’s based on self-aware narcissistic university students who believe they can change the world (and some of them do), but there’s nothing childish about the world of big business.

Directed by David Fincher from a script by Aaron Sorkin and based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie pulls no punches by trying to soften the abrasive persona of Zuckerberg, and why should it? Many self-made millionaires are narcissistic and socially awkward, in some ways this antisocial and non-empathetic behaviour is what allows them to take advantage of situations that others might not, and therefore come out ahead. Who would be shocked to hear that someone as famous as, say, Madonna or 1980s junk bonds king Michael Milken might be unlikeable or even ruthless? So what? The interesting aspect of the story is how a socially inept loner created the world’s most communal and unique social network couched in the question of intellectual property theft.

Says Sorkin, before making the film: “I had heard of Facebook in the same way that I’ve heard of a carburettor. But if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn’t know where to find it.” The Social Network presents Facebook as being almost as revolutionary culturally as that of the internet itself—it reveals rivalries, jealousy, partnerships, employment status, social life and even sexual activity in an interconnected social construct that brings the privacy of cliques into the public domain. It discusses the subjective idea of truth as perceived by various parties and as recorded from on-the-record statements from the law suits that involved Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is the Harvard tech prodigy who, after breaking up with his girlfriend, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) returns to his dorm to create a program, Facemash, which uses an algorithm supplied by his best friend and financier, economics undergraduate Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) tocompare the college’s female graduates, allowing students to rate one girl over the other in a “hot or not” style selection.

The website crashes the Harvard servers and its content makes Zuckerberg an object of derision amongst his fellow students and draws the ire of the academic board. But the site also draws the attention of twin students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) who had been searching for a talented programmer to create their own social media website, unique to Harvard students.

Dazzled by the 6-feet 5-inches all American students and Olympic rowers, Zuckerberg agrees to the premise and then secretly begins to build his own version of the same site—albeit with major digressions—over the next 6 weeks, launching the site as The Facebook and walking the road to his first major lawsuit.

The journey to 500 million users is paved with emotional immaturity and a youthful obsession with the new. Old friends are discarded for the new and lies and truths become increasingly hard to define. As director David Fincher says “no person is only one thing”; we all have our good and bad character traits, and The Social Network resolutely shows both in an equally bright light, as it does also with the many and varied conflicting narratives put forward by the warring parties.

The Social Network is also about how a small idea can change the world. Designed to get him enough attention to be accepted in Harvard’s Final Club, Facebook instead captured the zeitgeist, going on to make Zuckerberg a billionaire at 26 and CEO of a company worth an estimated 11 billion dollars—not bad for an undergrad entrepreneur.