The Social Network’s most obvious asset is its context. It feels like overnight, the Facebook revolution happened, and a day later, there was a movie about it.
The Assasination Of Mark Zuckerburg By The Coward Mark Zuckerburg: The Social Network
It’s a commentary on how society works today. That whole instant-gratification thing that traditionalists lament about the new generation of consumers--the cultural phenomenon that’d allow for a Mark Zuckerberg biopic to emerge less than a decade after we first learned his name.
“Perspective? It’s been seven years! That’s like a millennium for the Millennials!”
But in this case, even the jaded traditionalists can’t help but marvel at the spectacle of it all. There’s the irony that Facebook connects us all, and it was borne from the mind of a kid that couldn’t connect to anyone. There’s the playful question left unsaid: are the rest of us really connecting? There’s the explicit meta-commentary at the end: the creator of Facebook uses Facebook, too. And the implicit commentary as you leave the theater: we’re all going to go home and talk about the movie on Facebook. And we’re watching a movie about our as the way we live in 2010 as we’re living in 2010.
A simple irony wrapped in a riddle about contemporary society wrapped in a box of meta commentary with a bow of immediacy tied on top. That’s The Social Network. How did we get here?
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Um, officially? A boy-genius got drunk one night in 2003, and the rest was history...
That’s what The Social Network asks us to believe. And with our mind blown by the irony of it all, it’s tempting to suspend disbelief and just go with it. To believe that Mark Zuckerberg was sexist, anti-social, brilliant, disloyal, tortured, etc. This idea that the harbinger of a new generation personified so much dysfunction; it’s a cool story.
But there’s a moment toward the end where the film gets a little self-conscious, and Rashida Jones (playing a lawyer) tells Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg) that, “Every creation myth needs a devil.” And that’s where it crystallizes. We’re dealing in myth here, with Zuckerberg’s devil invented to impart wisdom on the masses.
Dana Stevens highlights the movie’s lingering question here:
...the medium of our newfound global connectivity was invented by a guy with a total inability, or unwillingness, to connect. Does that tell us something about Mark Zuckerberg, or something about ourselves?
But it also leaves us with this: Can a theme resonate if we know the characters were shaped to meet the themes, and not the other way around? Or: If the cart’s before the horse, are we getting anywhere?
Because that’s the thing. Mark Zuckerberg may have felt slighted at getting jobbed out of a nomination for some Finals Club at Harvard, and he may have been jilted by an ex-girlfriend, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking he changed the world out of spite. That makes for an awesome story, leads to profound conclusions here and there, and lends a poetic irony to the tale of Facebook’s ascent to cultural ubiquity. But it’s just too good to be true.
Factual liberties aside (the movie’s facts debunked here, and a thousand other places on the internet), even within the much-celebrated script, the Zuckerberg character asks a lot of the audience. We’re supposed to believe that the obtuse kid stammering on about final clubs in the first scene is the same guy delivering withering retorts to lawyers during the depositions that anchor the rest of the narrative? Or that this wunderkind who was hardened enough to betray his best friend is suddenly vulnerable enough to listen to Rashida Jones analyze his character six months later?
Zuckerberg’s either the guy who consciously betrayed Eduardo Saverin or the guy that was too detached from reality to notice when venture capitalists like Peter Thiel muscled his friend out of the company. He’s not both, though. That’s asking too much.
But this movie had big ambitions, so Zuckerberg had to be supremely self-aware and completely clueless. And someone like Sean Parker had to be a conniving opportunist, not a complicated visionary from this month’s Vanity Fair. The Harvard Final Clubs had to be the Gateway to a Better Life, not some Old Boys’ sideshow that a majority of Harvard students ignore. Eduardo Saverin had to be a bright-eyed pawn churned up by Zuckerberg’s ego, not a casualty of his own conflicting vision for the future of Facebook.
The Social Network makes these choices on our behalf. And on top of all these contextual ironies underpinning it all, it really is a lot of fun to just ride this dream out to the end. Seriously. Go see the movie, because it’s entertaining, and better than Wall Street 2.
They could have put out some clumsy rendering of the past decade and the lessons it teaches--like Wall Street 2--but instead of a cookie-cutter blockbuster churned out to satisfy demand and moralize for us, we got a thoughtful, intricate rendering of a story that deserved to be told.
For that much, Social Network delivers a refreshing commentary. Not necessarily on the nature of Mark Zuckerberg and contemporary society, but that blockbuster movies can still be made with care.
But if we’re going to discuss it with the so-called Great Movies, we have to consider the context that bolsters its appeal, and remember: Where the writers didn’t over-simplify characters like Saverin and Parker, they gave us a Mark Zuckerberg that personified more than one man can. The Creator and the Devil in one body--because that makes for a more interesting lesson, doesn’t it?
Maybe. Some would say the larger truth obscures whatever facts might have been ignored. But I couldn’t get there. If the fable’s full of fake characters, should we really applaud the lesson?
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