The Social Network
I’m watching this film and wondering how old Jesse Eisenberg is, because I don’t quite accept him as 20. He was born in 1983, one year before Mark Zuckerberg, whom he plays. Okay, I’m looking at a 27-year-old. It would have been nice if the filmmakers found an actual college-aged actor for this role, and for the entire cast. I’m okay with many of the liberties taken in altering this historical story, but to me, it is essential that this empire called Facebook was created by college kids.
Relationship status, favorite music/movies/books, how we look while drinking: these are things that college kids think define a person. The fact is that they don’t. When we fill out these boxes, we accept them as the things that make up a “profile”. What is a profile? Is it different than a person? Um, probably.
The internet is such a huge thing. So important and revolutionary and amazing, and yet, what do we do with it? We shop, read news, masturbate and say hi to friends. This medium, which has the potential to revolutionize society, to democratize every single piece of policy, to galvanize thought, to provide substantial information and insight into every thing that is a thing, is underachieving. Sure it’s great, but it could be greater. This film is like that.
The Social Network is good, not great. The subject matter is handled well enough, but why this subject matter of a deposition, of code, of business talks? I’m thinking of the trailer, which starts off superbly. Bittersweet, meaningful, epic. Choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep”, Facebook interface inter-cut with typical Facebook pictures. This trailer cuts to what is truly interesting about the story of Facebook: our cultural desire to belong is sabatoged by the very technology invented to facilitate it. We all want to share our lives with “each other”. But computers emphasize distance between us; a nerd’s idea of life, actualized as a website interface, hardly makes us closer.
Mark Zuckerberg (as portrayed in the film) is an fascinating character: he yearns for inclusion, yearns for popularity, and is crippled by asocial behavioral issues. He personifies the USA: wanting so badly to be loved around the world for who we are and what are constitution stands for, yet unable to stop fighting with everyone, unable to chill the fuck out. Mark Zuckerberg is a dick, and he doesn’t have to be. This film is about him, and his best friend/business partner, and what they did together. Frankly, I don’t think creating a popular website is that big of a deal. Nor do I think that being rich is a big deal. There are other ideas out there besides this holy sense of connectedness, bigger human questions beyond defining our individualities for and against one another.
There was another movie “about” Facebook in 2010 called Catfish, a docu-thriller that explored the grey areas between reality and fiction, and how elastic these things can be, how the ways we present ourselves may not be the ways we actually are. I didn’t see it because it just looked like a cheap, opportunistic B-movie, and secondarily because the ending was revealed to me by a friend. I plan to rent it, because its ideas seem more interesting than the ones brought up in The Social Network. Another movie came out in 2010 called Middle Men, also a seemingly cheap, opportunistic B-movie, which similarly explored a man creating internet traffic, grappling with morals and business decisions, like Mark Zuckerberg. Clearly, we want to know more about the internet, and how our culture is being affected.
Well, to that end: there’s something called net neutrality, which is an idea that suggests that all websites, all digital information, shall download at the same speed, shall have equal access to the people. This is in jeopardy. The internet in the USA (inventor of the internet, presumably?) is much, much slower than other parts of the world. Furthermore, have you noticed? When you go to a page, what downloads fastest? Ads. In fact, if you don’t have a fast connection, you might not be able to view anything, simply because there’s an embedded flash ad that can’t load before you look at your simple text. Additionally, the internet can be anything. That’s what’s so cool about it. There’s this, or this, or this. Not everything needs to be the same, to be regulated by mainstream business. We don’t have to have ads on the right side of every page we visit. We don’t have to have movies with three acts, with a traditional dramatic arc. We could have a revolutionary film about a progressive new medium, made by 20-somethings…
Instead, we have a very straight-laced talkie of a film made by distinguished 40-somethings. David Fincher is a craftsman of a director whose resumé I strongly admire, even love. Aaron Sorkin is an acclaimed writer with a substantial list of Hollywood credits, none of which interests me personally. I don’t think Aaron Sorkin is a visionary. His script plays things pretty straight. For that matter, I don’t think Zuckerberg is much of a visionary either. Granted, both Facebook and this film have achieved a sort of cultural zeitgeist-level of relevance, and the movie should be seen for this reason alone. Like Inception, or so many mediocre films in the past (Avatar, Star Wars Eps 1-3, Titanic, etc), some pictures are simply worth seeing so that you can feel connected, like you belong to something. But beware: few hyped and heavily-discussed films are great. Some are decent, many are awful. This one, at least, is good, if not very inventive. Like Facebook.
