At a moment when a virtual queer
community is mourning the suicide of a promising young violinist whose final
Facebook page reportedly read, “Jumping off the (George Washington Bridge)
sorry,” an astonishingly perceptive American movie opens with clues as to why
the volatile cocktail of youth and the Internet is so capable of reinforcing
Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that “Hell is other people.”
David Fincher’s The Social
Network opens on a brutal breakup as a perceptive Boston University co-ed
tells off her irritating, self-absorbed boyfriend in a Harvard dining hall. The
character of the boyfriend – given a bravura spin, at times diabolically cruel,
with just the hint of a pity inspiring self-loathing, by the newest A-list star
Jesse Eisenberg – is ominously described in the stage directions of Aaron
Sorkin’s incendiary and at times darkly funny script.
“Mark Zuckerberg is a sweet looking
nineteen-year-old whose lack of any physically intimidating qualities masks a
very complicated and dangerous anger. He has trouble making eye contact and
sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s talking to you or to himself.”
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Humiliated by his ex (Rooney Mara)
Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg – attired in his patented dress down uniform:
T-shirt, hoodie and flip flops – beats a zany retreat through the snow to his
dorm room bear cave, where he finds his comfort zone, a powered up laptop. With
Erica’s use of the “A” word still reverberating in his head, this suburban
Westchester County boy, who’s started to feel awfully small in the huge pond
that is Harvard, launches an all-night vodka fueled
bout of cyber bullying, hacking into the school’s computers and posting hateful
comments about his ex. The blowback – over 22,000 hits from Harvard boys using
Mark’s photo shop mischief and algorithms to rate and berate Harvard girls –
will overnight inspire an insidious new social paradigm. As Mark succinctly
puts it, “People want to go on the Internet and check out pictures of their
friends, so why not offer a web site that offers pictures and profiles. I’m
talking about the entire social experience of college and putting it on-line.”
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David
Fincher, Aaron Sorkin
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Aaron
Sorkin – whose West Wing scripts so incisively plumbed the dark side of
power – astutely cuts between Mark’s eureka moment and the collateral damage of
dueling lawsuits filed by his soon disgruntled former collaborators.
The film’s genius
level collaboration becomes a volatile mix of Fincher’s curdled satire
bordering on nihilistic cynicism (Fight Club), Sorkin’s fascination with
how a party down generation can rock the world (Charlie Wilson’s War)
while providing a quartet of boyish studs the chance to refine their game:
Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale), Andrew Garfield (The Red Riding
Trilogy), Max Minghella (Art School Confidential) and Justin
Timberlake (Alpha Dog).
A casting
trick that allows us to endure the corrosive boorishness of Eisenberg’s Mark
Zuckerberg is the device of surrounding him with a gaggle of physically more
imposing and emotionally nimble young male co-stars. Andrew Garfield is
particularly able as the punching bag ex-best friend to give us an empathetic
surrogate for other victims of computer hedge fund capitalism.
While the
dueling depositions permit multiple viewpoints to every disputed story beat,
Fincher pulls off a parallel casting coup: expanding his digital paint box to
allow Armie Hammer to play both of Mark’s chief opponents: the rich boy twins,
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who feel Facebook was stolen from them by
Mark in the ultimate act of class war revenge. A neat scene has the Winklevoss
twins taking their grievance to an obnoxiously indifferent Harvard president
Larry Summers – a nimble mix of haughty attitude and astute social parody from
Douglas Urabanski.
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After
Mark has alienated his Harvard band of brothers, he sets himself up in a Palo
Alto house rental where code boy disciples work in physical chaos to give Mark
his ever expanding Facebook universe. Soon he strikes up a Faustian bond with
another dot com bad boy, Napster founder Sean Parker (Timberlake). The Web prodigies
have their man/crush moment over colored cocktails at a Silicon Valley club
that is a Web version of the Playboy mansion complete with bizarrely attired
waitresses. In a Fincher style hellish environment, these young faces age
before our eyes giving off an unhealthy bloated pallor. The cocky Parker for
once renders the caustic Zuckerberg speechless – Timberlake mesmerizes as a
strutting Darth Vader apostle of the new Web capitalism.
“It’s our time!
We run the universe! Do you live and breath Facebook every day?”
“Yes.”
“I know you do. I know the guys back at the house do. That guy’s eyes didn’t
even blink when a beer bottle smashed ten feet away from his work station.”
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Sources close to the real Mark
Zuckerberg -- who lives amongst us as the world’s youngest billionaire – have
called The Social Network “complete fiction.” But that, of course, is
the movie’s strength. Just as Orson Welles and co-screenwriter Herman J.
Mankiewicz intended their Charles Foster Kane to be far more than a movie clone
of press baron Hearst, and Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Paul Schrader
were out for bigger game than doing a docudrama on how a petty hoodlum, becomes
a ferocious gladiator, while displaying human flaws that transcend boxing,
the Fincher/Sorkin cruel account of how a supremely insecure genius
computer nerd overturned ancient rules of human intercourse, perhaps for the
basest of motives, is unfairly but truly more compelling than any account of
how the real Mark Zuckerberg created a network to allow ordinary, petty folks
to form a virtual posses to commit acts that may not even be crimes, but which
can have devastating consequences in tiny nondescript corners of the world like
the Rutgers University dorm, last home of promising musician Tyler Clementi.
Just as Mark Zuckerberg may forever
be linked with an unflattering portrait of the infinite possibilities for
revenge available at the touch of a keyboard, Sartre is perhaps unfairly tied
to his “Hell is other people,” wisecrack. But another Sartre quote is perhaps
more pertinent to assessing whether virtual acts are crimes or mere pranks.
“Man is condemned to be free because, once thrown into the world, he is
responsible for everything he does.”