Movie Recommendation of the Week: The Social Network

It always starts with a girl doesn't it?

How much is an idea worth?  How about a kernel of an idea? What about a friendship?  Those are just a few of the questions asked and to some degree answered in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network, a quasi-historical account of the founding of Facebook.

I was skeptical when I first heard about this project for a number of reasons.  First of all these events barely qualify as capital “H”-history since they happened just seven years ago and the true impact of Facebook remains unknown (although there is an interesting scene where Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s anti-hero founder, is attending a lecture given by Bill Gates where he talks about the challenges of creating BASIC and you realize that in the internet age, Microsoft hails from an entirely different epoch than Facebook; the difference between the two isn’t so much Ford and Toyota as it is the horse-drawn carriage and BMW).  Second: how do you effectively dramatize a bunch of kids coding in their dorm rooms and sniping at each other through lawyers over intellectual property theft?  The answer in cheeky hindsight is that you get Aaron Sorkin to script it and David Fincher to direct.

Somehow this was more compelling than watching a guy age backwards--go figure.

Sorkin, perhaps best known for his work on the much lauded The West Wing (which I’ve never seen--an admission liable to get my liberal-pass revoked), springboarding from Ben Mezrich’s book, “The Accidental Billionaires” has crafted a beast of a script.  All the characters speak with the type of wit and humor that generally comes to us long after a conversation has ended if ever.  He sort of inverts the rule of less is more: why say in five words what you can say in fifty?  Most of the actors employ a rapid fire "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" delivery that keeps the film humming.  This technique gives the movie a kinetic verve that's quite impressive to behold (keep an ear out during the first meeting with Sean Parker: pure fireworks).     

The opening scene is the aural equivalent of Saving Private Ryan's brutal Omaha Beach invasion.  Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg hanging out with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend speaks with growing ardency about the infamous Harvard Final clubs, places that only allow the elite-est of the elite.  It soon escalates into a verbal sparring match that culminates in both sides launching volleys of insecurity-seeking missiles.  Later that night, the jilted Zuckerberg in a drunken hissy-fit creates a website that inadvertently leads to the creation of Facebook.

The film's perspective comes mainly from Eduardo Saverin, the somewhat hapless but well-intentioned co-founder of Facebook played with dewy-eyed innocence by Andrew Garfield.  We watch as he gets slowly excised from the increasingly lucrative enterprise after providing the seed money for Zuckerberg to get it off the ground.  If the film has a weakness, it's that it doesn't really take the time to establish how close he and Zuckerberg were before impending fame and fortune tore them apart.  From the outset Zuckerberg just treats him with so much passive-aggressive vindictiveness, we wonder why Saverin is friends with such an obvious tool.

Granted there are ungodly sums of money involved in the dispute, but the film does an excellent job of conveying the idea that it wasn't ultimately about the money.  After a certain point, tacking on zeroes becomes like gaining the high score in a video game: you’re just looking to distance yourself from the competition and leave them in awe of your prowess.  None of the film’s characters' great-grandchildren will ever have to worry about money, specifically the litigants who felt Zuckerberg screwed them over.

No what these people are fighting over is something beyond money.  Zuckerberg believes he’s invented something that will profoundly impact life in the 21st century.  He’s not thinking jackpot; he’s thinking legacy: Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, men who left an imprint on the world.  He starts off as a kid determined to infiltrate the exclusive social circles of the world’s most prestigious university.  Mark wants entree into the inner sanctum of the wealthy scions and aristocratic jocks for reasons never fully explored (validation? recognition? coolest parties?).  As he begins to realize the potential of Facebook, he sets his sights higher, much higher. 

Jesse Eisenberg deserves a ton of accolades for his portrayal of Zuckerberg.  He just looks physically tight as if he finds the world itself a constricting and discomforting place.  He only ever relaxes when sitting in front of a computer monitor.  You believe him as this awkward genius who despite his verbal dexterity is unable to connect with people in a normal way.  The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Armie Hammer who with some technical wizardry plays...ah, I don't wanna spoil it, but it's a nifty trick.

The real revelation here is Justin Timberlake.  While he’s never embarrassed himself on screen (he had some decent turns in Alpha Dog and Black Snake Moan, not to mention his stints on SNL), he’s also never threatened to hijack an entire movie as he does with his portrayal of Napster co-founder Sean Parker, the erstwhile Silicon Valley prodigy turned flameout.  Timberlake delivers an atropine shot to the film every time he’s on screen.  His Sean Parker is possessed of an almost preternatural charisma that ropes in the audience as much as it does Mark Zuckerberg.  As my friend said on the way out, "One day this guy is going to win an Oscar."  In the words of Antoine Dodson, "You can run and tell that!"

Of course you can't do a movie about Facebook without showing it.  Kudos to the filmmakers for how smoothly they managed to integrate it into the film.  There are a few scenes that rang pretty authentic to me like this exchange:
"How come your status is single on Facebook?"
"What? That's what it was when I started and I don't know how to change it!"
"You're telling me you're the CFO of Facebook and you don't know how to change your status?"
"Yes, you should look at that as a sign of trust that I'd even admit that to you!" 

At its core, The Social Network is about class and the upheaval the Zuckerbergs of the world are creating in the upper stratosphere.  He doesn't just represent "new money," but a sort of regime change.  There's a particularly cutting line of dialogue in the film where Zuckerberg is telling his lawyer that the blue blood twins who are suing him are only doing so because, "for the first time in their lives, things aren't going the way they want them to."  Individuals like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, Sergei Brinn and Larry Page--they are the new masters of the universe.  They control the gates now and they're letting they're friends inside.  And the old elite can't stand it.  At least that's what the movie seems to drive at.

The Social Network makes a perfect bookend with another film about American capitalism: P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood.  In Anderson's film the ferocious oilman Daniel Plainview embodied the ruthless spirit of early 20th century capitalism.  Zuckerberg isn't the 21st-century equivalent of Plainview, at least not in this film.  But as depicted on screen, he does embody a new class of entrepreneur, one for whom ideas are the most valuable commodity one can possess.  After all, the difference in form and function between say Myspace and Facebook is a matter of degree, but one is worth about ten times the other. 

It should be noted that the real-life Zuckerberg is probably a far more fascinating character than the fictionalized one.  Here's a kid who at twenty-three had a cold enough pokerface to not even bat an eyelash when Microsoft's Steve Ballmer offered $15 billion dollars for his company in 2007.  One day I hope to see a movie about that guy. Until then, The Social Network will more than suffice.

Extraneous thought, tangentially related: As a Facebook user, I kept thinking how the application had become a part of my life and that of my friends.  I’m still not sure what it is.  It’s as pervasive as the cell phone at this point and has probably done more to shift an entire generation’s views on privacy than anything else.  When people talk about Facebook, it's an organic thing integrated into their lives like television or Starbucks.  Several times in the movie, Zuckerberg and company talk about how they've invented this "cool thing," but have no idea what it will/can become.  I think we're all still trying to find that out.