The Social Network
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jesse eisenberg
You know, you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.
~ Mark Zuckerberg
quick fox: A- | Silver
winding dragon
On June 27, 2017, Facebook announced that it had reached an astounding two billion users. Thirteen years ago, nobody would have recognized the blue “F” logo (fun fact: Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, which is why the logo is blue). As the Washington Post put it, “if Facebook were a religion it would be the second largest in the world.”
The meteoric rise for the once-youngest billionaire in the world didn’t come without controversy, however. For one, the lawsuits over Facebook’s ownership has been well-documented and was dramatized in the critically-acclaimed 2010 film The Social Network. So in honor of the two billion threshold, I watched the movie for the first time.
From the first line, it’s obvious that director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 83rd Academy Awards) were hell-bent on casting Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) as a socially handicapped savant. Zuckerberg sits at a bar table with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) and says, “Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?” It’s a statement that demonstrates Zuckerberg’s obsession with corroborative intelligence, a running theme throughout as the Harvard student is relentless in his desire to prove he’s smarter than everyone. But Albright dumps him—the defining hammer in the nail being her line, “Dating you is like dating a StairMaster.”—and thus the path to Facebook has begun.
The story is told chronologically, with interludes of the two separate lawsuits against Zuckerberg by Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and the other by the Winklevoss Twins (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narenda (Max Minghella). The frenetic pacing of the dialogue and the techno soundtrack (also an Oscar winner) pulsing in the background parallel Zuckerberg’s rapid ascent. The same night of his break-up, he retreats to his security blanket—the Internet. In one night, he codes a website allowing Harvard students to rank the female student body (pun intended) based on “hotness,” comparing photographs for every woman.
In the aftermath, the campus is split between not knowing if they should respect or hate Zuckerberg (which seems to be Fincher’s own perspective on him), but everyone now knows his name. The Winklevoss Twins and Divya ask Zuckerberg to construct a website that would be an elitist (because everything on Harvard seems to be) dating platform, leading Zuckerberg to create his own social networking site. Zuckerberg purposely avoids letting them know of his intentions, and instead enlists his best friend Eduardo to help build TheFacebook (the original name for it) into a success. But as Zuckerberg soon learns, behind the glitz and glam of fame and fortune, it can be very lonely at the top.
One of the biggest controversies with the The Social Network is that many people the film depicts have come out against it for valuing entertainment over factual accuracy. Whether Fincher or Sorkin actually did care about potential misrepresentation or not, it’s clear The Social Network takes special delight in portraying an irony where the man who connected the world is the most disconnected from it. Zuckerberg’s rise to stardom is painted as a harsh portrait of a person whose vindictive streak seems to be the battery behind his charge.
But I don’t deny it’s a highly entertaining story. The fun of watching The Social Network is the rapid-fire script played out almost like a dark comedy of sabotage and broken loyalties. Fincher’s attention with the film is less about the founding of Facebook and more of a social critique on shallow relationships in an age where two billion people can interact without meeting face to face. In The Social Network, Zuckerberg’s biggest sin is thinking he’s the smartest person in the room, even when it’s clear in certain contexts he is the least competent. The biggest sin of everyone else is creating a society that rewards such pride.
The Social Network demands the audience’s attention—both out of enjoyment and necessity, as the lines blur past you faster than a running source code. I doubt it’ll bring you closer to understanding the actual Mark Zuckerberg, but at the very least it’ll give you an answer to “What’s on your mind?”