Is Mark Zuckerberg an asshole? He appears as one in David Fincher's mesmerising new movie, The Social Network (2010). Playing as the founder of Facebook, Jesse Eisenberg turns the other side of the coin of what might look like a calm and cool Zuckerberg into a chatty computer geek, who proclaims that he doesn’t need friends. Fincher’s job is to put him inside a realm of conflict on nasty politics, business and dark humour. It's not just a movie about Facebook, it's about the invention and the evil that lurks behind it.
Apparently, The Social Network takes the actual names of the people involved in the creation of Facebook, though no real contacts or agreements made with them. Aaron Sorkin was the man who masterfully transforms Ben Mezrich’s book called The Accidental Billionaire, into an astonishingly smart screenplay. In two hours, we would watch how the most influential person of the Information Age intermingles with his computers, friends, and enemies. With a tinge of thriller, of course.
The Dramatic Invention
It was one bad night for Mark, who just broke up with his girlfriend over some petty debate. Being called an asshole, he went to his dorm in anguish, took a couple of beers, and turned on his computer. He blogged about how slutty his ex-girlfriend was, put heavy traffic to Harvard Internet network, walked out of classroom as he wished. He didn’t care of anything, but his ’11-inch Vaio laptop, hoodie jacket and a pair of Adidas slippers. He’s a kind of guy whom you’d like to give a lovely punch in the face and he’d ask for more.
There he showed off his hacking skills and continued a half-way project on comparing the pictures of Harvard undergrad girls side by side, to be chosen which was 'hotter' over the other. This site became
instantly popular among (male) students who got invitations to try. Unstoppable page bandwidth requests eventually crashed the network and the next day Mark was dragged into university hearing. He was charged with a 6-month probation out of his study, though, we would later learn that he had been intending to drop out of Harvard, instead, and concentrated on building Facebook.
Fortunately, this “free” time gave him full opportunity to develop the girl-pairing adolescent site, which was initially named “Facemash”, into something more engaging: “Thefacebook”. The holy plan is to put all students’ social life into an Internet platform. However, the twin Winklevoss brothers (both played by Armie Hammer) accused him of stealing the idea of creating the social network from the Harvard Connection project, which they had, in fact, been doing as a team. Mark ignored them and along with his roommates, particularly the Brasilian Eduardo Saverin (played so dramatically by Andrew Garfield), promoted “Thefacebook” outside Harvard, for the most part to other top US universities, such as Stanford, Yale and Columbia. There was a nostalgic moment when Mark wondered how this site could compete with Friendster or MySpace that were already established companies
The tension grows stronger when Mark, in the long run, clashed with Eduardo upon deciding to find the sponsors for “Thefacebook”. Later we learn that capitalism plays its essential part that changes the nature of the site forever; from a merely Harvard exclusive site, into a global company which is now worth at least $25 billion. It was the Napster founder, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who came apart the two best friends. Eduardo was threatened by Sean’s manic approach towards Mark, who was deliberately impressed with the same vision he shared with Sean. The Napster boss even suggested that they should remove the “the”, so it remained “Facebook”. “It’s cleaner..”, he said. Whilst Eduardo, still thinking that he was the true CFO, went to New York to find some
investors. But it was when the disaster rolled up. Back from NY, Eduardo discovered that his shares in Facebook had been intentionally cut into 0.03% by some appalling conspiracy. He felt betrayed, and in rage, smashed Mark’s laptop on a big quarrel. Tired of the situation, he left the new Facebook cube office in Palo Alto in a dreadfully sad moment, that I was sure the audience would flood him with sympathy.
There’s actually nothing so new about the theme of The Social Network, so to speak. It’s essentially filled with jealousy, friendship, loyalty, social status, even betrayal. Many beautiful minds have, in previous generations invented telephone, television, digital camera, or desktop computer. Today, it is the social network. “People have been living in villages, cities, now we live in Internet!”, yelled Sean Parker to convince Mark. Conspiracy, power, sarcasm build the tension. In the production note, Sorkin does admit that the themes “are as old as storytelling itself. It’s a story that if Aeschylus were alive today, he’d have written; Shakespeare would have written; Paddy Chayefsky would have written.”
We can debate whether this movie lack of accuracy (Sorkin does his own research, too, though) mostly on Mark’s portrayal, misogynistic attitude towards women, or the life of Harvard students which might appear so un-Harvard in most of people’s perceptions. But The Social Network deserves a critical acclaim since it gives a contextual picture of what most people of this digital age have taken for granted: the connectedness brought by the new media technologies. We hardly value what we consume everyday; something that we call social network, e- mail, blog, online forum, that bring us together. For free. As for Facebook, it has now reached 500 million users who literally put all of their lives in there. But this great film reveals the sordid journey that goes with the process of invention, success, and companionship. And with so little knowledge on what has happened behind the production of
