The Social Network (2010)

[A-] David Fincher’s The Social Network, adapted by the legendary Aaron Sorkin from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, is very educational. Being something between a documentary and historical fiction, the film is revolutionary. It is a rarity to find a film based on a true story that is so current. The film takes place from 2004 to 2007, from Mark Zuckerberg starting FaceMash in his Harvard  dorm, to two different lawsuits that were settled in 2007. Usually docudramas are about the rise and fall of something, The Runaways for example. But here Sorkin and Fincher are concerned about the rise, the erupting volcano that is Facebook, and the path of destruction it left in its wake. The story ends, not when Facebook has reached its peak, for the peak has not yet been met, but when people actually realized what Facebook was: the largest, most successful social networking website in the world.

Although Facebook is still rising, the story features plenty of closure- in the form of settled dust, tied up loose ends, and milestones. It’s about how Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire in history at age 23 in 2007. It’s about settling two lawsuits- primarily how co-founder Eduardo Saverin went from owning 30% of the company, to .03%, to 5% after the settlement giving Saverin a net-worth of 1.3 billion. The film features the first time Facebook got over a million members and, as the film’s poster indicates, 500 million members in 2010.

The film is a study of human nature, prodigies, and business. Zuckerberg is a unique character. Jessie Eisenberg delivers his strongest performance to date under Fincher’s entrancing direction. Mark is a prodigy. He lives and breathes codes and formula; he is obsessed with programming and won’t stop until it’s just right. It makes perfect sense that it takes someone as anti-social as Mark to make a social network. Motive is everything. Mark isn’t doing it for the money; he’s doing it to accomplish, to conquer. It may have started as a drunken rant against his girlfriend and a far reach to get into a high-rep Harvard club, but it became something far greater. Facebook as a world-wide obsession could only have happened through an obsessive personality. Mark sees code, writes code, and programs, and does it all with ease and speed. He is more comfortable in front of a computer than anywhere else.

All memorable stories can be told in unmemorable ways, but the fact that the film is so mesmerizing and captivating is a testament to the top talent that created this masterpiece. Fincher and Sorkin are both at the top of their game. Sorkin packs the story without ever rushing. Sorkin works best when writing about history, and The Social Network is a very unique piece of history. The typical eyes of present day nostalgia do not exist. Sorkin is reporting the facts in dramatic fashion and seeing if the audience is as impressed with Zuckerberg and Co. as he is. In some sequences, Fincher takes a break from dialogue. A rowing scene where the Winklevoss twins barely lose is filmed in slo-mo with the intensity of any war scene. Fincher paces and films with shadows and dark hues. He sets the mood by removing light and edits with voiceover like a true pro.

Things I learned: Websites must be interactive. In one evening, Mark created the interactive website FaceMash- students deciding which of two girls is hotter. Mark loves the numbers. He loves the hits and loves setting records. He doesn’t want to be friends with these people or even relate to them, but he does want to use them. For some business men, every person is a dollar sign. For Zuckerberg, every person is a hit and a potential forward.

Number 2: The hits are everything. Mark started by using the Phoenix list-server that he got from Eduardo (Jabberwocky, oh how original). From there he used other list-servers. The point wasn’t who got the link just that a lot of people did. The result was 22 thousand hits in one night. Anyone with a website, blog, or page needs to do the same thing if they want some traffic. Spamming strangers becomes less risky if you’re giving the people what they want. We all don’t have access to list-servers but we all have a personal network, and that network has a network, and so on.

The characters in The Social Network work because they are real. Sure they may not talk in Sorkin-speak, but the beauty of Sorkin’s dialogue is that he compacts a quantity of information into a conversation. The twins, Cameron and Tyler, are strong willed, vicious, and every bit compelling. Mark is a grey character in a grey world. There is no villain. There is only an underdog- a success story with multiple underdogs and those who fought a different fight. Andrew Garfield does an Oscar-worthy job as Eduardo, capturing the emotional essence of a torn man. My only complaint is how Eduardo freaks out when people accuse him of animal abuse. Eduardo, though, is a tortured soul with daddy issues, and a man who truly gets screwed when he goes from owning a chuck of the stocks to owning virtually nothing. The falling out between Mark and Eduardo is tragic.

Facebook is a testament to the power of “free,” and the idea that “cool” equals no advertising, aka no pressure, no catch. There’s nothing people hate more than a scam, being lied to, or mislead. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) knows this, and appeal of Parker as being everything Mark is not, leads Mark out of his social comfort zone and into the big lights. Like Facebook, Fincher and Sorkin succeed because they give the people what they want. Like Facebook, The Social Network is the little movie that could, the one that took everyone by surprise. How do you get someone hooked on drugs? The first few are always free, then the person becomes addicted, then the price goes up, and then the person is paying more money for less of a high. Hats off to you Social Network, easily one of the year's best.

Caleb S Garcia

October 6, 2010