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The Social Network.
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 coursethe 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.
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