The Winter of Our Disconnect

The Social Network (2010)
D: David Fincher
S: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake

Just how much—or how little—of director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s cinematic version of the crucial founding years of Facebook is true is any truth-obsessed moviegoer’s guess. Clearly, their version is a semi-biographical drama film, not a documentary like “the other Facebook movie,” Catfish, so an estimation of the ratio of fact versus fiction found in their film is more or less fascinating but ultimately irrelevant. Fincher and Sorkin’s film is based on Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, a book with a title-subtitle pairing so garish it’s almost a warning label indicating that the book is possessed of tabloid sensationalism rather than professional journalism. For the record, it is. The former, gratuitous -ism that The Accidental Billionaires has in spades may be seen as something of an artifice concocted by Mezrich to make up for his own failure to secure an interview with unarguably the most significant figure in the history of Facebook, its founding CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. What Mezrich had no trouble getting, though, was the cooperation of a good many anonymous sources and that of Eduardo Saverin, a co-founder of Facebook who used to be a business partner and close friend of Mark—the operative phrase here being “used to be.” It’s no surprise then that in Mezrich’s book speculations about the important events that led to the creation and incorporation of Facebook are plenty and Mark is portrayed in a less than flattering light: a tech nerd who is nonchalant at best and conniving at worst.

Perhaps it’s this juicy tale of friendship gone wrong behind an Internet company that thrives on friend requests and connections that prompted Kevin Spacey, who starred in an adaptation of Mezrich’s previous book about a group of blackjack-playing MIT geniuses, to produce a film version of The Accidental Billionaires, and with the help of some good old Hollywood cronyism, the director of Fight Club and the writer of The West Wing were soon invited and signed up for the project. And we’re all the better for it.

Where Mezrich has difficulty keeping his narrative engaging by rewriting conversations, condensing chronologies, and exaggerating events—tactics that are of questionable use in a book that’s categorized by its author and its publisher as nonfiction—Fincher and Sorkin manage to keep things interesting in their emphatically loose adaptation by, oddly enough, cleverly employing the self-same techniques toward creating a film that is both hugely entertaining and quietly enlightening. Factual accuracy be damned.

Case in point: the film’s opening scene. It’s one of the many liberties taken by the filmmakers with their source material and, by extension, with reality, but more importantly it is also one of the film’s many pleasures. With speed of speech and thought such as only Jesse Eisenberg—he of Adventureland and Zombieland relative fame—can convey on screen, Mark engages in increasingly dizzying conversation in a campus bar with his soon to be ex-girlfriend, Erica, played by the soon to be Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Rooney Mara. “What’s on your mind?” asks the persistent question found today on the status fields of Facebook, the Web site whose groundwork is yet to be realized by Mark mere hours after his date with Erica ends on a sour note, and “What’s on your mind?” is what Mark seems to be answering as he talks to Erica about how important it is for him to get into one of the exclusive Harvard final clubs. From that topic he eventually veers into saying a couple of tactless and patronizing remarks pertaining to Erica, whereupon she decides to dump him and leaves him with one of the most satisfyingly severe parting words ever delivered on film or elsewhere: “You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Ouch.

Not quite a successful computer person yet but apparently already an asshole, Mark later posts an insulting blog post about Erica and comes up with the idea for a Web site where pictures of girls are placed beside pictures of farm animals. But he’s wise enough not to push through with this initial idea; in a scene that mentions a slew of computer programming terms but amazingly overflows with feverish excitement, Mark hacks into Harvard’s online student photograph directories, also known as facebooks, and creates a less misogynistic but still very controversial site that rates the photos of female students against one another. It’s called Facemash, it’s an instant hit, and it’s less a prototype of Facebook than an antecedent of the many legal battles that Mark is about to face as both a successful Internet venture founder and an established asshole.

Directed by someone who is no stranger to unconventional narrative modes, the film fluently moves backward and forward in time as the origin story of Facebook and Mark’s alleged history of deception are told through the depositions taken in line with two of the lawsuits filed against Mark at the height of the site’s novelty among users and appeal among investors. In this oscillation between flashbacks and flashforwards that is often so quick as to challenge the Facebook-era audience’s ever diminishing attention span, Mark is seen as a sort of Shakespearean antihero, a passionate if self-assertive person unfazed by his missteps and his social ineptitude. As it happens, the film is rooted in the irony that is Mark Zuckerberg: a guy who is hardly sociable, one who apparently doesn’t know how to handle and value relationships, friendly or otherwise, is behind today’s largest Internet social networking site—and is being sued by several of his schoolmates and his former best friend. In one of the depositions the plaintiffs are twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and an Armie Hammer-faced Josh Pence) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella); they insist that Mark stole the idea for Facebook from them, having proposed to Mark an outline for a dating site exclusive to Harvard students months before he launched what was then called Thefacebook. In the other is no less than Eduardo, who took legal action after being kicked out of the company he helped establish.

At first Mark and Eduardo’s partnership appears to be a lasting one even as the former seems resentful of the latter’s acceptance to a prestigious final club, but their almost brotherly relationship is endangered with the entrance of Napster creator and all-around bad-boy Web entrepreneur Sean Parker. Played with just the right amount of Fincherian subversion by Justin Timberlake (yes, that Justin Timberlake), Sean practically assumes the role of Mark’s shoulder devil who goads him toward fulfilling his ambitions for Facebook even at the expense of others, not the least of whom is his tolerant shoulder angel, Eduardo. But even a true friend can only be tolerant for so long.

Mark and Eduardo’s complicated relationship effectively propels the film’s narrative. As such their dynamic is played out well, thanks in large part to the two actors that portray them. Eisenberg, with his sternly pursed lips and ability to project cockiness while wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of slippers, proves that he can choose to have a lot in common with the real-life Mark beyond the last syllable of their surnames and their reluctant jewfros, while Andrew Garfield is pitch perfect as Eduardo, a reliable person who eats, sleeps, and breathes business and always wears a three-piece suit. Their nuanced depiction of the pair’s friendship and eventual falling-out is what makes the film uncharacteristically compelling. Here the only physical collision is between a laptop and a startup office’s floor and the only explosion happens within Facebook’s user base, but coinciding with Mark and Eduardo’s climactic confrontation they all but exceed the dramatic effect of any well-executed car crash or bomb detonation scene.

By film’s end, Mark emerges as—or is reduced to—a modern-day Citizen Kane, and the paradox of isolation that is experienced amid the countless ingenious means that make connecting and sharing with other people easier today is made apparent. While the film may state that Mark is the youngest billionaire in the world, the film is not a success story but rather a parable that shows several instances of how, as Tyler Durden once said, “the things you own end up owning you” as well as bringing home the more urgent matter of how we live now. The simple title of the film cuts more than one way: ostensibly The Social Network is a fictionalized account of the founding of a popular social networking site, but it’s actually an analysis of all-too-real human interactions. It just so happens that this otherwise tedious exploration bears the sheen of a character-driven tale of individuals who are caught in a web of sex, lies, and Turing’s tape.

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