The Social Network (2010)

Back in 2010, a movie came out about the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the creation of that social-media phenomenon, Facebook. It's aptly titled 'The Social Network.' It was immediately a critical darling, who raved about it.

Here's its synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes:

"The Social Network" explores the moment at which Facebook, the most revolutionary social phenomena of the new century, was invented -- through the warring perspectives of the super-smart young men who each claimed to be there at its inception. The result is a drama rife with both creation and destruction; one that audaciously avoids a singular POV, but instead, by tracking dueling narratives, mirrors the clashing truths and constantly morphing social relationships that define our time. Drawn from multiple sources, the film captures the visceral thrill of the heady early days of a culture-changing phenomenon in the making -- and the way it both pulled a group of young revolutionaries together and then split them apart.

Revolutionary? Audacious? Definitive? Visceral? Heady? Um, Okay. It must be really good.  After all, it was nominated for 8 Academy Awards -- including Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture, Cinematography, Sound Mixing -- and it won three of them: Best Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing and Original Score.  So it must be amazing. I mean, movies like 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' and 'An American in Paris' were nominated for 8 Oscars. 'The Dark Knight,' 'A Beautiful Mind,' 'A Room with a View,' Platoon,' and 'Witness' were all nominated for 8 Oscars. It had to be good.

I didn't end up seeing it in theaters. I've never really been an avid user of Facebook and I wasn't really interested in how it got started. But in January 2011, I ended up bored on a flight to Brussels, Belgium, and it was the movie playing. So watch it, I did... and I was not impressed.

Don't get me wrong. Jesse Eisenberg knocked it out of the park as Mark Zuckerberg. Aaron Sorkin's blistering dialogue was superbly executed and David Fincher created a movie that was engaging, involving and kept my attention the whole time. I was never bored. But, I wasn't impressed. That's what all the hype was about?

It might have helped if I had *liked* the hero of the story, Mark Zuckerberg. But I didn't. He was an arrogant, condescending jerk who said whatever he wants, regardless of how rude, obnoxious or wounding it is. The minute you meet him, in a bar, out on a date with a girl, he's out to prove he's everyone's intellectual superior, including the girl who is just trying to keep up with his conversation. Not because he's speaking over her head, but because the conversation is 4-5 different conversations running at the same time.

When she points out a flaw -- that he's obsessed with finals clubs and that it's unhealthy -- he pointedly tunes her out by obviously looking at his fingernails and then proceeds to correct her calling final clubs 'finals club' with a tone that says what an idiot he thinks she is. I have to give her credit, though, this fictional Erica, because she seems to realize that Mark isn't a bad guy. Being a jerk is just who he is. He's oblivious to social cues and *is* the smartest guy in the room. So she doesn't react to his condescension, until he is "straightforward" with her and that she might want to be "more supportive." He tells her that dating him is going to allow her to meet a lot of people she wouldn't get to otherwise.

Since she's spent most of the conversation *being* supportive and understanding, this last bit of his jackassery reaches her limit. She blinks several times and sarcastically asks if he'd really do that for her. He shrugs, like he's starting to sense that she's pissed, for what reason he's not sure, and says that they're "dating." She's straightfoward, too, and says that they're not anymore. When he doesn't comprehend why she would possibly be breaking up with him and/or upset, he tells her to settle down (Like she's a child throwing a fit). After all, they're only able to drink in the bar because she used to sleep with the door guy (so not just a child but a slut).

Erica's done with his arrogance and suddenly, Mark realizes that she's not kidding and it's for real, so he apologizes to appease her. When she starts to relent, he declares his comments logical. Then he basically calls her stupid, by saying that she doesn't need to go study because she goes to BU. He adds that he's under some pressure from his OS class and they should order some food -- because that will make it all okay. But Erica is not swayed. Before she leaves, she clarifies, from the bottom of her heart, that the reason girls don't like him is not because he's a nerd, but because he's an (unpleasant expletive).

Sad music play as Zuckerberg runs back to his dorm. (Everyone else is walking but Mark is running in flip flops. I guess walking anywhere is just too slow.) He *finally* reaches his dorm, Kirkland House, and immediately grabs another beer and gets on his computer to blog on LiveJournal.com about what a bitch Erica is. It's 8:13 pm. He also insults her heritage, her college and calls her flat-chested. (His journal is Zonkonit. Really?)

About an hour and a half later, and several more beers, Mark is starting to feel bad that they've broken up. At that time, his dorm had a facebook, a website with head shots of its residents. A fellow Harvardian suggests that they post headshots from Kirkland's "Face Book" with farm animals and have people vote on who's hotter. Mark likes the idea and evolves it.

The music picks up and Mark starts hacking each house at Harvard to get pictures for his project. This is juxtaposed with a bunch of women arriving on a party bus to go to one of those final club's exclusive parties. (Most of the boys are wearing ties and ballcaps with their bills backward. Immediately we know that they're douches.) It's a juxtaposition that basically says that the final club's elite status and influence is about to be challenged by Zuckerberg's impending creation.

The hacking is easy for him and he documents it all on his blog page.  The only challenge is Dunster House, whose search engine Mark calls "weird" and leaves for later. At 2:08 am, his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) arrives home, just as Mark finishes collecting those pictures. "Perfect timing" since Eduardo will have the key ingredient. You immediately like Eduardo because (1) he follows his friend's blog, (2) knows about Mark's breakup, and (3) asks how Mark is doing.  When Mark says he needs Eduardo, Eduardo immediately sits down, ready to be supportive. All Mark really wants is Eduardo's algorithm that he uses to rank chess players.

Eduardo continues to ask how Mark is doing and questions whether Mark's project -- which ranks the women of Harvard -- is a good idea (because he's actually concerned with other people's feelings, rather than just what he wants). As Dunster House's party gets more hedonistic, Mark and his suite-mates declares that Eduardo's algorithm works and Mark sends "Facemash" off to a few people. After all, "who are they going to send it to?" Sounds innocent except for the sinister, knowing smile that sneaks onto his lips. Strip poker and gyrating girls versus emotionally-stunted geeks.

Quickly it spreads, even to Dunster, where one of the girls sees them rating her roommate. Soon, women are calling it pathetic and Erica's roommate has seen Mark's lovey post about her. (Ah, the wonders of the digital age.) As Mark watches all the traffic for his Facemash, Eduardo worries about them getting into trouble. Sure enough, it crashes Harvard's network. Mark only starts to think about the possibility of negative consequences when he sees Eduardo internally crap his pants.

We switch to a deposition for the legal battle over who owns and invented Facebook.

More flashbacks and we meet super-fast crew-enthusiasts, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. They're impressed at how he had 22,000 hits in two hours on a site he created in one night while drunk. (It is pretty impressive) They think that Mark is "the guy." We'll soon find out what they mean.

When Mark appears in front of the Ad Board, the University's disciplinary committee, he tells him that he's already apologized for any women he might have insulted in several of the University's student papers. He adds that the Board should give him some recognition, his props for how clever he was to be able to breach all that security. I literally laughed out loud at his audacity. When the Head of Security tries to use Mark's condescending tone to put him in his place, Mark answers with an insult at his competence. Mark gets 6 months academic probation.

As he leaves his hearing, Mark tries to figure out what went wrong. He shouldn't have written the part about the farm animals... He gets passed a note in class which says "U dick" and he's so bothered that he leaves class. It's then that he's approached by the Winklevoss twins. They head over to the Porcellian Club - the final club that Mark had called the best of the best. The Winklevoss twins are members, as is Divya Narendra, their partner. They propose that Mark collaborate on their project: HarvardConnection. It's different from MySpace and Friendster because of Harvard and the plan for the site to be exclusive.

Immediately, my opinion of the Winklevoss twins has diminished. We aren't really interesting, but where we go to school and being part of an exclusive school and its exclusive final club makes us important and superior. Also, they do this creepy thing where they complete each other's sentences.

The idea behind HarvardConnection is: you create your own page. Interests, bio, friends, pics. And then people can go online, see your bio and request to be your friend. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? They want him to build the site and write the code and they'll provide the money. It'll help rehabilitate his image. Their feelings of superiority over Mark is obvious but Mark agrees in a way that recalls Erica's sarcasm at his own condescension.

Lame party on campus. Mark finds Eduardo there and his mood is momentarily diminished by Eduardo's news that he's been invited to join the final club, the Phoenix. Outside, Mark talks about Facemash (as Eduardo freezes) and how it was so successful because the people looking *knew* the girls they were voting on.  Why not build a website that showcases someones friends, pictures, profiles, whatever you can visit... Not a dating site by the social experience of college put online, so that you can check get more information on the girl you just met at a party.

"It would be exclusive" since you'd have to know the people to go further. Like being punched for a Final Club. In the deposition, Eduardo says that he wondered why Mark approached him instead of his other roommates, who were programmers. Eduardo was going to provide the start-up cash for the servers and the website. A 70-30 split favoring Mark and Eduardo would be CFO.

Deposition and the Twins are fuming over Mark's comment (via Eduardo) that even his most pathetic friends knew more about getting people interested in a website than they did.

The Twins' lawyer starts presenting evidence to support their assertion that Mark stole their idea. Even as he was working on TheFacebook, he was telling them that he was developing the site. Emails promising results and Mark avoiding their phone calls. More of Mark working on the site, making excuses and cancelling meetings with them.  39 days after his initial meeting with the Twins and he still hadn’t completed work on HarvardConnection. But on January 11, 2004, he registered the domain name theFacebook via the Network Solutions website.

In the deposition, when Divya implies that Facebook was the result of their system, Mark asks if they see any of their code on his site. When Divya says that he stole their whole idea, Mark declares that it they were the inventors of Facebook, they would have invented Facebook. He's got a point -- but there is such a thing as intellectual property. And while one might argue that a site like Facebook would have evolved with or without Zuckerberg creating it, the fact of the matter is, Zuckerberg was the one to harness the idea and create that horrible code that his programmers keep tweaking to continually screw over its users by making it less user-friendly.

Someone asking about a girl's the relationship status gives Mark the idea of adding relationship statuses to the page and thus he declares it ready - because that's "what drives life at college. Are you having sex or aren’t you. It’s why people take certain classes, and sit where they sit, and do what they do, and at its center... that’s what TheFacebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually gonna meet a girl."

Mark persuades Eduardo to give him the listserv of the Phoenix -- which, in effect, screws Eduardo out of membership of a club that could have changed his life and made him hugely successful -- but that's the person that Mark is, someone for whom solving a problem and cracking a code is more important than anything and for whom human emotions are secondary to the might of his own logic.

The Twins and Divya discover Mark's betrayal when Divya's girlfriend pulls up the site during a Krokodiloes performance (the Kroks are Harvard's oldest acapella group). (I prefer the Din & Tonics, myself, because of their humor.) He's so upset he disrupts their singing and heads straight for the gym where the Twins are training. They immediately call their dad's lawyer. Here's a kicker -- only people with Harvard email addresses can join the site. So it's exclusive to people who go to Harvard... Again, sound familiar? Cameron comes across as the more idealistic of the twins, since he declares that they are "gentlemen of Harvard" who don't plant stories or sue people.

When the lawyer asks Mark why he got the money from Eduardo, rather the Twins and Divya -- honest question and it implies that the reason was so that Mark could steal their idea -- Mark answers that Eduardo was his friend and he wanted to him to be his partner. Eduardo was the president of the Harvard Investors Association.

Eduardo wants to monetize the site, but Mark doesn't want to, since TheFacebook is an ever-evolving entity. Eduardo sees a cease-and-desist letter and starts to freak out because it claims that Mark stole the trio's intellectual property. But Mark isn't worried, since it's only from the Twins's in-house lawyer, and while they had an idea, he had a better one. Afterall, a guy who builds a really nice chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who has ever built a chair. (Yes, but if there had only been stools and then someone proposes putting a back on it for more comfort and you've never considered doing that and agree to help build it, but you take the idea and add arms and a cushion to it while saying that you're figuring out how to add the back, that is stealing because you wouldn't have come with the idea if it hadn't been shared with you.)

Throughout the movie, Mark continues his obsession with his creation. He ignores any suggestion by Eduardo that isn't his idea and is seduced by the charm of Sean Parker. Sean's effortless interactions with people are what Mark longs for. Sean's version of reality gives Mark all the excuses he needs not to be bothered by his own failings. Sean was the most recent person they called a genius. Outshining him is too tempting for Mark to pass up. The friendship with Sean is the wedge that comes between Eduardo and Mark.

As I said before, Jesse Eisenberg knocked it out of the park with his performance. He was flawless in the so many non-verbals that informed his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. He was dead-on in how he delivered lines like:

I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall they have a right to give it a try. But there’s no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention--you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing. Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

By the end of the movie, you actually feel sorry for him as he waits for the answer to one of his friend requests.

Armie Hammer was equally excellent as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Hammer hadn't been in anything I'd seen, so I didn't even realize that the Twins were acted by 1 person until I looked at the credits. I'd seen Lindsay Lohan, Hayley Mills and Anne Heche all play identical twins, but Hammer's Cameron and Tyler felt like 2 different people. They carried themselves differently and reacted differently to things. He was 2 different people. As much as they are 2 guys you don't like because of that smugness that comes from being sons of privilege, Hammer makes them appealing and genuinely good guys. They're gentlemen of Harvard and certainly act like it.

Justin Timberlake also was good as Sean Parker. He makes a character that is a smooth-talking, opportunistic narcissist and makes him likeable, but not too likeable. He sells being the used-car salesman who everyone loves and thinks is amazing because he invented Napster. He's also extremely business savvy, because he knew from the moment he saw TheFacebook that it was his ticket to continue to ride Silicon Valley's wave. He knows how people work and uses that to his advantage. Timberlake's performance makes Sean's persona electric, magnetic, you can't help but look at him when he's in the room.

I think the most surprising for me was Andrew Garfield, whose subtle, emotion-laden performance of Eduardo Saverin is on par with Eisenberg's. In retrospect, I'm surprised that he's the same guy that played the Amazing Spider-Man, because I liked Eduardo but he made me intensely dislike Peter Parker -- and who can hate Peter Parker? But as Eduardo, he was the emotional heart of the movie. Intensely loyal to a guy who is Mark, rather than a founder of Facebook, Andrew Garfield never overacted his scenes. You felt his indignation and betrayal, that they were justified, and felt the pain over the loss of his friend. He could have easily emoted obnoxiously, but he didn't.

The movie review by James Berardine points out that the source material for The Social Network is a book whose primary source is Eduardo Saverin, which could account for events that are slanted toward his point of view. The inference is that it intentionally made Eduardo the good guy in all of it. But, I think that its because of Eduardo that we understand and not hate Mark as much as we could. It gives us insight into Mark's obliviousness to others' feelings, his cluelessness, the eventual regret when he realizes he's hurt someone, and his all-to-human desire to be liked and valued. Through the lens of the man who was royally, unapologetically screwed over, Mark Zuckerberg could have been demonized, but he isn't, and I think that's directly because of Eduardo's feelings toward his former friend. The movie shows two men who wish things were different but will never say so. Eduardo argues all along that Mark is a good guy, even when Mark gives you all the reason to think otherwise.


If I hadn't have rewatched the movie recently, I probably would have given the film a 5 out of 10. I hated the 'hero,' so I couldn't get behind rooting for him. But today, I'm giving it a 8 out of 10, because it's tightly-paced, smartly-dialogued, and excellently-acted. While I don't think it was as amazing as everyone said it was, it's a solid film that movie lovers will appreciate.

Links:

An excellent reference for understanding some of the nuances of the movie, since it's laden with Harvard lingo. It defines several terms and tells me that students at Harvard are Harvardians rather than Harvardites.
ArikHanson.com - 7 lessons from The Social Network you haven’t heard yet
Cinematic Paradox - 52 Things I Love About 'The Social Network'
Jeremy the Critics' Five Favorite Scenes from 'The Social Network'
Wikipedia page for the movie
Rotten Tomatoes page for the movie
IMDB page for the movie
A pretty accurate script for the movie on Sony's website

Here's some reviews:

The Rolling Stone -  4/4 stars

"Bracingly smart, brutally funny and acted to perfection without exception, The Social Network lights up a dim movie sky with flares of startling brilliance. Director David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven, Zodiac) puts his visual mastery to work on the verbal pyrotechnics in the dynamite, dick-swinging script by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), and they both do the best and ballsiest work of their careers. The Social Network gets you drunk on movies again. It deserves to go viral."

RogerEbert.com - 4/4 stars
"The Social Network" is about a young man who possessed an uncanny ability to look into a system of unlimited possibilities and sense a winning move... David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive. It hurtles through two hours of spellbinding dialogue. It makes an untellable story clear and fascinating.
ReelViews.net - 3.5/4 stars
Website development as a blood sport - that's what it comes down to. The Social Network shows that, when pet projects are at issue, nerds can get as nasty and dirty as the most skilled backstabbers and double-dealers. The film, which is a joint product of respected director David Fincher and equally respected screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, accomplishes its multiple goals: create a gallery of fascinating, fully realized characters; chronicle key events in the development and growth of today's most influential social networking site, Facebook; and explore the blurred lines that exist in the amorphous on-line environment where concepts like intellectual property are involved.
The Soul of the Plot - 4/4 stars

I believe The Social Network is one of Fincher’s best films. Great performances, great story, great characters, great soundtrack, and just overall great film. It’s exciting through Mark’s rise and makes you sympathize with him during his fall. Its flaws are few and far between, and it turned out to be much better than I could have ever imagined. The Social Network is about a lot more than just Facebook; it’s greatest strength is being able to capture the mystery of social interactions on film as brilliantly as it does.

Someone who hated the movie

My hopes were so high for this movie. I had read all the rave reviews, and I really like David Fincher. And liking David Fincher is the only reason I can now see for the rave reviews. (Or maybe because it’s a movie about the latest marketing strategy that no one seems to fully understand yet, so folks don’t want to get left behind?) It’s almost as if he can do no wrong in the critics’ eyes. And honestly, I almost got sucked into that, too…and then I stopped for a second about 20 minutes into the movie and went, ‘Wait a second…this sucks!’

NPR article - 'The Social Network' Is A Great Movie, But Don't Overload The Allegory
Taste of Cinema article - 10 Reasons Why “The Social Network” is the Most Relevant Movie of the 21st Century (So Far)