As most sentient beings are probably aware, the movie tells the story of the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed rather unsympathetically as an angry, thin-skinned, socially inept loser who also happens to be a genius with computers and, through an embittered jealousy of those that were cool enough to be invited to one of Harvard's exclusive Final clubs, and to spite a girl that dumps him in the opening scene, invents Facebook, becomes a billionare, and along the way screws over his best friend and business partner, who winds up suing him for 600 million dollars. The story is told from the context of that lawsuit, and one other, through the depositions made by the now-ex-friends.
That story itself is somewhat familiar by now. As a Sophomore at Harvard, Zuckerberg was dumped by a girl and went on a now-somewhat-infamous drunken and misogynistic rant about his ex in particular, and girls in general, including such unflattering remarks as to the "false advertising" of her supposedly-34-C cup size (hurtful? no doubt. Unforgivable? probably not. Par for the course for just about any college student going through a nasty breakup? sad to say, yes). Simultaneously he and his friends whip together facemash, a web site that collected the online photos from Harvard's online "facebooks", and pitted photo against photo, ranking them using the same algorithm used for chess ratings. Very sexist and very illegal, the site accrued tens of thousands of hits in the few hours that it was up and managed to crash the Harvard web server.
So far, so good; much of the screenplay to this point is pulled straight from reality, including the near word-for-word text of Zuckerberg's now-mildly-infamous drunken blog. In justifying the rest of the movie, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has stated the following:
I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)
You see what he did there?
It must be nice, I have to say, to be able to extrapolate from a single night of angry, drunken blogging an entire raison d'etre for an enormous demographic.
The statement must be addressed, because it is central to my issues with "The Social Network".
First off: news flash for Mr. Sorkin: the nerds didn't give a flying fuck about the cheerleaders in High School. The Cheerleaders bored us. It's not that we're immune to the charms of a pretty girl entirely, it's just that we lose interest in the mundane so quickly. Yes, we can get jealous and bitter about the girls we could not have, but it does not mean that once we're old enough to correct our early mistakes and have women that are interested in us, we surround ourselves with tramps and bimbos. The goddess of Nerd World is, and has been for the past few years, a girl named Felicia Day. I'm not saying she's not pretty - she is - but if looks are your only barometer, she's not the one you're going to immediately single out in a crowd of Hollywood starlets (Day herself, I imagine, would be among those to acknowledge this). "Pretty" doesn't get you close to 2 million Twitter followers. The kicker is that she's actually interesting: a writer, producer, actress, and social commentator that combines a cute, shy geekhood with a sharp and unique voice.
That's why it's so grating, I think, to see the carelessly aggressive depiction of the early days of facebook, where the "wired-in" young men stare intensely at code for hours upon hours weiring oversized blaupuncht headphones while vapid, beautiful girls (perhaps of-age, perhaps not, it's rude to ask) lounge around in their underwear and trade hits from a (gigantic) bong. I didn't actually know much of anything about the details of Facebook's early days going in, but research after the fact has verified my suspicions: that the Zuckerberg of real life doesn't at all match up with his on-screen counterpart (though Zuckerberg has admitted that they got the clothes right), that he's not at all the bitter, angry nerd as depicted in the film but rather a shy, somewhat awkward, genius, that the early days of Facebook were basically just a boy's club with only a minimal female presence, with coding and design being the focus, and not some elaborate revenge scheme toward the clubs and girls that rejected them, and perhaps most telling of all, that Zuckerberg kept a long-term girlfriend for the entirety of that time, that he's still with to this day, and that is neither, by any account, a bimbo nor a bombshell.
It's an interesting story, still, but it's telling that Sorkin has managed to excise any details about the actual story that happened that don't coincide with the story he had in his head about what must have happened, and why, all while opining that his role is merely the messenger of unequivocal fact.
Not that I'm a purist, when it comes to biopics, except as is so often the case, to tell the story more realistically would have actually made it more interesting. Instead, the nebulous motivations of a computer programmer obsessed with the social power of the Internet gets boiled down to "he only wanted to reconnect with the girl," leading to a final scene so cloying and condescending that it actually started to trigger my gag reflex.
The film also needs a villain, it supposes, and so it finds one in Sean Parker, infamous for his creation of Napster, a complex man by all accounts, played by Justin Timberlake as a shallow, paranoid, revenge-obsessed egomaniac. He gives the Facebook guys some good advice - drop the "The" in "The Facebook"; move to California; seek out VC as opposed to begging for advertising - but also threatens to run them aground, splitting Zuckerberg from his friend and business partner Eduardo Saverin, and just in general being a douchebag. Again, a complex character is reduced, to the effect of making him considerably less interesting than he is in real life, for the purpose of simplifying a story that already needs complexity to be interesting at all.
I've focused on the negative here, I know, and that isn't really my intent; this is a good movie, and has the stuff of true generational significance. That's what makes it all the more frustrating that we're getting here the simplified, reduced version about a boy who just wanted his girl back (blech). I know that greatness can come from reducing a complex life down to simple motivations (Rosebud, QED), but that does not make them in and of themselves interesting lives, nor does it make them more entertaining than the characters that don't always abide to such simple maxims.
"The Social Network" is a good movie, but for me it will be most memorable, I fear, for what it's not.
Rating: ***
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