“Every origin story has to have a devil”
by Jack Kentala
What’s unexpected from The Social Network: That, even in the midst of everything, and once the smoke clears, Zuckerberg comes out clean. He’s not some megalomaniac asshole – that role is convenientally filled by Justin Timberlake’s Sean “Napster” Parker – or straightjacketed in a ward for paranoid schizophrenics. He’s a brain in a vat that was put into a human body. He has no inner censor, and having that perceived total lack of empathy ends up ruining more than one relationship. Saying he’s not very social is the understatement of the day. It’s more like he’s this little bubble floating through society and very, very rarely interacting on any more than a superficial level.
And yes, it’s a movie about people, and it’s far more a movie about Facebook than all this nonsense, left-field Oscar buzz (who the fuck started that?) would have you believe. I don’t think anyone over forty would get this movie the same way us hip kids do. I still get chastised at work if my boss catches me on Facebook, even if I’m computing something work-related in the background.
Zuckerberg, clearly at the movie’s center, acutely speaks about this generation gap. During his multiple depositions, he’s adrift, aloof, but probably thinking about a way to improve Facebook. There are some choice lines during such scenes – such as whether or not a lawyer has Zuckberg’s full attention, of which he clearly does not – that were spoiled in the trailers. But during all this lawyering, all these depositions, all these cease-and-desists and workarounds about IP law is a bunch of garbage – implied by Zuckerberg – when really he just seized on an idea at the right time and bet on the right horse. (Well, he built the horse.) It’s like those people who correct you when you say Bell invented the phone and they say nuh-uh it was some Italian guy. In the movie, when defending his Facebook, Zuckerberg says, “If you build a chair you don’t go out and pay everyone who’s ever made a chair before.”
Everyone knows the story of Facebook and Harvard Connect / ConnectU. What’s unfortunate about that is the beefy brothers who tried to start the latter end up as total buffoons, and only when they wield the cudgel of the justice system do they actually have to get down in the dirt and figure out what was Zuckerberg, what was Harvard Connect, and what was just floating out in the ether, ready to be snatched.
That’s a lot of the first part of the film: like how Zuckerberg marries the idea of separate dorm house facebooks into one giant facebook; or how a friend asking if Zuckerberg knows whether or not a girl is dating somewhere jumpstarts the whole idea of adding relationship status onto profiles.
There are a lot of scenes of Zuckerberg running, usually to his room to hammer out some new code. It also serves as a pretty blatant visual metaphor: Zuckerberg always, always running past throngs of people and students, all socializing, showing that he’s the lone genius, the loneliest man atop the mountain. And that’s part of the allure of his character. That’s why we’re drawn to reclusive or troubled or eccentric or socially-stunted geniuses; why we’re fascinated with J.D. Salinger, Terrence Malick, Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, and, in an extreme form of the latter, the real-life Rain Man.
Being a writer/director myself, I definitely know that feeling of catching lightning in a bottle, of having this absolutely genius idea and greedily knowing it’s all yours. It’s bliss. It’s intoxicating. But at some point you have to release it into the wild, and sometimes it’s not ready. And it’s usually terrifying when you uncork that bottle.
A bit about the direction. From Alien 3 through Zodiac, Fincher dealt only with action or thrillers. Then with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button it seems he made the career move to only make Prestige films. This ties in with my earlier assessment that The Social Network was, first, scoffed at; second, thought Too Soon in the vein of Stone’s W.; third, buzzed as Pretty Good; then magically, considered in a horse race for Best Picture. But anyhow, what I wanted to say is, with just two films, Fincher has become a chameleon; he could make any kind of film short of a costume drama or musical. Other than looking at his filmography, it’s totally unpredictable what he’ll do next. It’s his mid-stage renaissance of sorts, sort of like Darren Aronofsky coming back after three heady, heavy films and making The Wrestler.
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