The Social Network.

[starlady]

The Social Network, dir. David Fincher. 2010.

Wow, this was an excellent movie. I'd heard all the good things, of course, but I was surprised at how much I wound up liking it.

So yes, The Social Network rehashes the drama surrounding the creation of (The) Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University in 2003-04, and the lawsuits that eventually resulted therefrom. I was hugely amused to see that the valuation of the company given at the end of the film, $25 billion USD, is now widely thought to be too little by about half--after Goldman Sachs sold $1 billion worth of Facebook this month, the company is widely valued at $50 billion. Mark Zuckerberg remains, however, the world's youngest billionaire. Also, the site now has 600 million users instead of a mere 500 million. 

I think the screenplay wanted me to take a very different view of campus culture and of Mark Zuckerberg himself than the one I walked away with--none of the party scenes or the undergraduate or fraternity behaviour were particularly shocking to me, since they're more a difference in degree than of kind from the behaviour that went on even at my Midwestern Lutheran liberal arts college. (Nor is it the case that the infintesimally narrow slice of Harvard undergrads represented in the film encompass all of the Harvard undergraduate population.) Too, I know enough about Web 2.0 and social networking and coding, and why Facebook has been so successful (white space, among many other things) that I could follow Zuckerberg's dizzying net-speak monologues, which I'm sure left many of my fellow audience members confused, as they're intended to do, and furthermore, I laughed out loud when Zuckerberg tells his ex-girlfriend that she doesn't have to study because she goes to BU. Mean? Yes. True by Zuckerberg's lights? Absolutely. And for the same reasons Eduardo Saverin comes off as hopelessly naive and old media and Web 1.0 to me, and Larry Summers just hopelessly out of touch, even though a 20thC business model vindicates both of them. One thing the movie didn't do was focus too much on the experience of college students like me as Facebook was rolled out to our campuses--it was viral, and instantaneous, and highly addictive, and it's interesting that the screenplay has other concerns.

The other thing is that Zuckerberg is transparently portrayed as a nerd and vilified for being, by the standards of wider society, under-socialized, i.e. arrogant and rude. I'm not a coding genius or Web 2.0 visionary like Zuckerberg, and I didn't get a 1600 on my SAT (this is back when 1600 was the top score on the SAT), but I can sympathize to some extent with the frustration he obviously more or less constantly feels as the smartest guy in the room, the guy who's constantly having to explain to more or less everyone what to him is as obvious as water. And I can understand the connection he instantly feels to someone like Sean Parker, who does understand it, and understands him, even though it's eventually made clear that Saverin's reservations about Sean aren't entirely ill-founded. And the third thing is, I feel like Zuckerberg is to some extent being held to a higher standard by the movie--the screenplay is judging him by post-collegiate standards, when I think an important part of the residential college experience is that, quite frankly, most students are still learning how to be decent human beings. Personally, I don't feel like I really got within shouting distance of that until my junior year or so; I know, freshman and sophomore years, that I handled some of my relationships with other people pretty badly, and that at times I was, well, an asshole--and furthermore, not being an asshole is a continuing project that takes actual work. Throw a hell of a lot of money into the mix of being 20 and having a visionary idea, and yeah, things are going to get ugly pretty much instantly. For a lot of reasons, furthermore, I have zero starting sympathy for the Winklevoss twins, and the movie didn't get me to like them, either. Really, who does the movie want us to sympathize with? Because for the above reasons I didn't sympathize with Saverin, either, callous as that may sound. 

That said, though, the movie does portray Zuckerberg unflatteringly--at best he acted highly unethically, but of course the movie is framed around the settlements to the lawsuits that supposedly redressed that. Of course the movie is basically RPF, so ETA: see this TWC Symposium post on RPF, gender, and storytelling, no really, read it now /eta we only have Aaron Sorkin's interpretation to go on, but it's also an interesting study of the contrasts between the Northeast and the West Coast, New York and San Francisco, and having started to live that divide myself, I thought the movie got that brilliantly. I also thought the more or less rampant, if implicit, misogyny of the entire sphere in which the movie takes place seemed pretty accurate. The music, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is amazing, too. Indeed, the one off note for me in the whole thing is that Divya Narendra, an Indian-American from the Bronx, is portrayed by Max Minghella, who is white.

Comments

[holyschist]

I haven't seen this movie, but...yeah, college culture is in large part about learning to be a decent human being. Although I do think there are a lot of decent people that age, there are also a lot of people who haven't yet grown out of being an asshole (some, of course, never do).

From what I've read of the movie, the college culture would be foreign to me, but I kind of lived in a weird bubble in college.

[starlady]

I flatter myself that I was inchoately decent--like Mr. Darcy, I was given good principles, but was fuzzy on the execution. And I think that's true of the majority of people.

I think, even if you didn't participate in it, you might recognize it. Certainly my feeling was more recognition than recollection (my college doesn't have 'the Greek life,' thankfully), but I think there's a certain basic sameness to much college partying. They all partake of the Form of College Parties, to be Platonic about it.

[holyschist]

I actually never went to a college party, and the only dances I went to were drag balls and queer events. So...I only knew about college parties vaguely and forthhand.

Most of my friends were in their late 20s and 30s--I went to SCA parties, but those were quite different from college ones.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the thinky review — it will make my Netflix next month a more rewarding experience.

[starlady]

You're welcome!

[anime_babble]

I too had no sympathy for the Winklevoss twins. I'm not sure on what legal grounds they actually had a case against him. Of course, given that the lawsuit documents are sealed, I don't know all the facts, but if what was in the movie was the basis of the lawsuit? You can't copyright an vague idea that wasn't really what Facebook ended up becoming either.

The fact that they are still going after him now for more money doesn't help my feelings toward them.

[starlady]

In the movie they talk vaguely about intellectual property, and I suppose that's what they sued him for (as well as breach of contract and damages for good measure, I'd imagine); there's nothing else mentioned in the film, anyway, and they delayed for at least six months before deciding to sue, according to the movie.

And yeah, in the movie at one point Zuckerberg says that they're suing him because it's the first time in their lives that something hasn't gone their way, and I saw nothing in the movie to contradict that statement.

[troisroyaumes]

Heh, I keep waffling on whether to see this movie or not! Unfortunately, I couldn't take the trailer seriously at all; finals club as pinnacle of social aspiration? Hahahaha! But maybe I will try to catch it when it comes out on Netflix because everyone says such good things about it.

[starlady]

I'm not sure I saw that trailer--I saw the one set to the choral cover of "Creep" and that is the best trailer I've seen in years.

And it's not so much finals club as what it portends, for Zuckerberg, and it's swiftly eclipsed. Anyway, yeah, I liked it.

[troisroyaumes]

No, that's the same trailer as the one I saw. I think the trailer failed for me on multiple levels; it was hard to buy any of the assumptions that it was based on (that Zuckerberg was out of the norm among the students, that party life on campus actually ever managed to be that glamorous, etc.). But perhaps the movie subverts those assumptions? If the part of the movie that actually takes place on campus is short, then I think I will give it a shot.

[starlady]

…I'd say it's about 2/3 campus, 1/3 not. If memory serves that particular party (there's really just the one) is at the Phoenix society or whatever (I don't remember, I know there was a P at the beginning), which becomes a plot point later when Saverin is chosen to apply and Zuckerberg isn't.

…Whether Zuckerberg is out of the norm among the students, hmm. I think he's only out of the norm insofar as he's the one who invented Facebook (ETA: and pulled off the house look-book hacking stunt before that, but he used Saverin's algorithm for the facesmash site that he made out of it), but I'm not sure the movie really addresses that very much.

[troisroyaumes]

Oh, I'm not doubting Zuckerberg's intelligence when I say he's not out of the norm; obviously he had the vision to make Facebook into the success it is, and that takes a type of talent that I do think is out of the norm. It's just that the trailer played up his nerdiness and social awkwardness (plus the resulting rudeness and arrogance, as you said), and to be honest, everyone I met in undergrad qualified as hopelessly undersocialized, including me. (College was the first time when I was in an environment where I wasn't the most socially inept person in the room.)

[seichan]

I was also surprised at how entertaining this was. Got to hand it to the director, writers and production. :)

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

*blink* Isn't 1600 still the top score? I know they recentered the test so that the average was back at the midpoint, from which it had drifted - but did they change the range as well at some point?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

They added a writing segment to the SAT a few years ago--now it's out of 2400.

[louderandlouder.livejournal.com]

I was also really impressed by The Social Network, and I'll be mulling over your remarks in the hope that I will actually wake up later today and have thoughts to contribute.

Re: misogyny, Sorkin stacked the deck by omitting the character of Zuckerberg's partner, a Chinese-American medical student he met somewhere around the start of the film's timeline; they are still together today. This is a hypnotically weird move, especially given the film gets a lot of yuks out of the pair of airheaded, dubiously sane Asian women Sorkin obligingly dumps into Mark and Eduardo's laps after their first surge of success. I really don't know how I feel about the film's misogyny in light of this -- no idea what's happening, whose reality it reflects, or who to blame. All of which plays into the Rashomon plot, so somehow it still works. In general, The Social Network has a way of processing its storytelling weaknesses into thematic strengths. God damn it's good.

(I have never seen Rashomon.)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

If you haven't had a chance to follow the TWC link above, you totally should, because it gets way farther into truth, fiction, and gender than I did here. I'm still thinking about it, but both you and the post mentioned Chan--I was totally unaware that their relationship went that far back.

I was thinking about Saverin's girlfriend in the film again this morning, and the scene where she lights the scarf on fire, and I just don't even know what to do with that. Misogyny? Racism? Sexism? It's something, but I'm not sure what, and I don't know where to attribute it to on the production end, either. I think The West Wing is definitive proof that Sorkin frequently doesn't deal with women or gender well, but given what he cut out of the narrative here, he's obviously trying to make some sort of point. In the absence of my quite understanding what he wanted me to get out of it, I default to agreeing with the TWC blogger about Sorkin thinking that the anxiety of masculinity drives technological innovation. It's as good an explanation as any, but yeah, the film still works.

I also realized after I walked out of the theater the framing device of the two Ericas discussing with Zuckerberg whether he's an asshole at the beginning and the end, and their different answers; I thought that was witty.

[louderandlouder.livejournal.com]

I can't work out what he's trying to say, either, though I could go with the TWC writer's take; either way, the fact that he had to substantially fictionalize the story to say it leaves me a little wary of whether it's a point worth understanding. Sorkin has a history of that in West Wing, too.

I liked the two Ericas as well. I'm not sure I agreed with either, but I think there's space for that.

[louderandlouder.livejournal.com]

(If it's not clear, I am totally a long-term, dedicated Sorkin fan; I hung out on TWOP back when he had his idiotic "muumuu"/"LemonLyman" fracas with them. I just think that despising him sometimes goes with the territory.)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I just think that despising him sometimes goes with the territory.

As a huge West Wing fan, I'd have to agree.

[louderandlouder.livejournal.com]

I remember when the West Wing episode reacting to 9/11 aired. I had been talking up the show to a friend all summer, and we sat down and watched it. It was a little like being one of the fans who lobbied to save Star Trek, told all their friends about how much they loved the show, finally sat down with a couple of those friends to see the long-hoped-for third season, and what came on was "Spock's Brain."

Maybe it wasn't as bad as I remember.