The Social Network
Although nearly all of the central characters in The Social Network are real, as are the major plot points, much of what fills in the rest of the plot was either exaggerated or just made up to make for a more compelling script. (Since it’s not pitched as a documentary, I don’t have a huge issue with this.) In the film, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is shown as a brilliant programmer, business visionary, and interpersonal doofus who is set on the path to start Facebook after he’s dumped (with cause) by a girlfriend after an insane conversation that more or less concludes when he tells her she doesn’t really have to study because “you go to BU.” After that point, the film uses two parallel lawsuits against Zuckerberg to structure the narrative through long flashbacks that follow the history of Facebook from its predecessor, facemash (a hot-or-not type of site featuring only coeds at Harvard), through his interaction with the Winklevoss twins (who may or may not have given him the idea for Facebook), to the startup phase of Facebook and eventually to the move to Silicon Valley and venture capital investments that led to a schism between Zuckerberg and his best friend, CFO, and seed-money source Eduardo Saverin.
The pace and intelligence of the dialogue in The Social Network are frenetic, reliant on actors who can deliver the lines credibly and time everything properly. It reminded me not of any drama or anything recent, but of one of my favorite classic films, the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a Cary Grant vehicle known for so much dialogue that its script had three times the pages per minute of a typical script of the era. The Social Network isn’t quite that frenzied – characters aren’t talking over each other as Grant and costar Rosalind Russell did – but just about every character speaks quickly, and there’s no mercy with the dialogue, not in vocabulary, in subject matter, or in pauses between scenes. This isn’t merely a movie about really smart people – it’s a really smart movie about really smart people, and it expects you to follow along.
Eisenberg earned plaudits and award nominations for his performance as Mark Zuckerberg, affecting disdain for most of the people around him and perhaps for social connections in toto, yet switching to fanboy mode when Internet rock star/bad boy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) shows up and talks his way into the company. Timberlake was just as good as Eisenberg in less screen time, playing Parker as more pretense than substance, untrustworthy but never grating. And Andrew Garfield, who’s about to become a huge star as Peter Parker in the next unnecessary Spiderman reboot, was incredibly affecting as Eduardo Saverin, who, in the movie at least, is squeezed out by Zuckerberg and Parker in the latter’s power play. (Saverin was the primary inside source for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires
I did enjoy the Harvard scenery and even some campus vernacular. The final clubs’ role in campus life may have been overstated; my sense at the time I was there was that they were very much on the fringes of the social scene, although to be fair I was never “punched” and so I don’t have first person experience to back that impression up. I did notice that Zuckerberg’s dorm room was a good bit larger than any room I ever had at Harvard, and less industrial-looking.
I’ve read some criticism of The Social Network for its portrayal of “nerds” as socially awkward or simply awful people, but I didn’t see that in the film at all. No one comes off worse than the Winklevoss twins, who appear as entitled upper class twits and are, in the script, probably the least intelligent of the central characters. Zuckerberg may be socially inept, but he also ends up getting stinking rich because of his intelligence and work ethic, and I think the portrayal of him as able to outsmart would-be competitors and to work wonders with a modest amount of coding both paint him in a better light than otherwise reported. He’s not depicted as a great guy, but the film’s central debate on his character – it’s bookended by women telling him he’s an asshole (beginning) or that he’s just trying to be one (end) – only covers half of what makes him compelling as the protagonist.
In a rather scathing review of the film’s underlying message, Harvard Law professor Laurence Lessig argued that the script ignores the fact that the Winklevoss’ suit, one of two central plot points, was basically frivolous. The film never mentions an NDA or non-compete agreement, and Zuckerberg says explicitly that he took no code from the Winklevoss’ efforts. So what exactly were the grounds for their suit? You can’t copyright an idea, and you aren’t supposed to be able to patent one (although there are these bogus “business method” patents, the film never mentions that either). Zuckerberg isn’t accused of stealing a trade secret. He settled simply to make the nuisance suit go away. Lessig argues that this is a pox on our economy, and I tend to agree. He also argues that the film omitted the power of the Internet to destroy barriers to entry into new or existing market spaces, which is undoubtedly true but tangential to the human story (real, fabricated, or somewhere in between) at the heart of The Social Network.