I finally got around to watching the much celebrated ‘The Social Network.’ All through the movie I kept thinking about the irony of a socially awkward young man inventing a socially virulent online platform. It is so ironic that it becomes normal in a reverse sort of way.
Perhaps it is just as well that Mark Zuckerberg, as portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, displays a nervy antipathy towards friendship as a social necessity because without that he could not have created a platform for forced friendships.
There is no point reviewing the film just as there is no point reviewing any form of art. But in so much as they touch upon how Facebook has supposedly transformed the world of human interaction it might be a good idea to make a couple of observations about the film.
I do not know if Zuckerberg is anything like what Eisenberg portrays but as fictional characters inspired by real life people go the movie’s protagonist comes across as someone so cavalierly self-absorbed that if he does not watch out he could be a mild misanthrope. I am tempted to speculate that Zuckerberg invented Facebook to remedy some of his own inadequacies in social situations, but I will not because I know nothing about him. Also, I do not want him to remove my Facebook account.
Purely as cinema, what stands out in the movie written by the hyper-talented Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher it is a revelation that algorithms and discussions about them can be so watchable. I do not know of any other movie where freezing a bank account is used as a dramatic device. Fincher and Sorkin together create a piece that brilliantly highlights their keen sense of drama that would have attended the creation of Facebook without its dramatis personae ever realizing it.
Fincher does a terrific job of bringing alive the atmosphere of a campus like Harvard where those who may be there by virtue of their privileged background, namely the wealthy twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, (both played effectively by one actor, Armie Hammer) and those who are there on the strength of their merit, namely Zuckerberg and his money man Eduardo Saverin (an excellent Andrew Garfield), naturally come into contact and conflict.
Sorkin has a telling line in the context of the claims and counterclaims between Zuckerberg and Winklevosses about who invented Facebook. Zuckerberg tells the brothers with almost annoying conceit, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”