In 2010 The Social Network stylishly presented the history (of sorts) of Facebook. Since then, plenty has changed – not Facebook’s social media dominance, but an ever-increasing series of woes and scandals. Tim Batt logs on to take a fresh look at the film in light of recent events.
It’s the perfect time to re-watch 2010’s most-awarded film The Social Network, the excellent David Fincher-directed origin story of Facebook. This year (2022), founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a confusing rebrand of the half-trillion-dollar-company from Facebook to Meta. This month, the business lost more value in a single day than any corporation in human history. Last week, news stories abound that Facebook has, for the first time since its launch in 2004 had daily user numbers decrease for the quarter.
This new era of people finally realising Facebook might be a bad place to invest their time and money comes hot off a raft of recent scandals. Most notably, a Facebook product-manager-turned-whistleblower leaked internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified to Congress about Facebook’s core business model and practices creating enormous human harm. That triggered two new Security and Exchange Commission complaints that Meta now faces.
First things first about this movie though—documentary, this ain’t. Aaron Sorkin has taken a lot of liberties in crafting a neater narrative of Zuckerberg and his posse’s days at Harvard. He’s stretched the history of what happened so far that what’s presented as an ostensible Zuckerberg biopic borders on apocryphal. However, that doesn’t take away from it being a top-notch narrative, made all the more compelling by relaying the broad story of the most significant and potentially damaging invention of the century as it launched.
Sorkin’s take on Mark Zuckerberg is a computer genius proto-Incel, played perfectly by the always dark and viciously cutting Jesse Eisenberg. Driven by the desire to impress his way back into the good graces of his college sweetheart Erica (Rooney Mara), the 19-year-old gains early on-campus notoriety by drunk-coding a website ranking student’s attractiveness that is so popular, it immediately crashes Harvard’s internet servers.
This early brush with success leads him down the road of Facebook’s creation, which involves draining the finances of best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), swindling the entrepreneurial and demi-God psychiqued Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer) and moving to LA to live with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the creator of the internet’s original music piracy app Napster. The story is woven through a legal deposition of Zuckerberg, who sits bored, lonely and donning a hoodie at a mahogany table, as lawyers for Saverin and the Winklevosses attempt to sue him for the GDP of a small nation.
Movies about technology usually have a shorter lifespan than a half-charged iPhone but shockingly, that the only things that reveal the age of The Social Network are the inclusion of accused cannibal Armie Hammer on the cast and I’m-not-sure-how-I’m-legally-allowed-to-describe Kevin Spacey as an Executive Producer. Every part of this film is so well executed that I did have to look up when it was released afterwards and honestly was taken aback that it’s been 12 years since I saw it on the big screen.
Its brilliant cast, director who rarely misses, great cinematography, and truly captivating source material for its raw story ingredients form a potent combo that was then given just enough Sorkin sauce to bring it together. And then there’s my very favourite part of this production: the soundtrack. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar-winning foreboding minimalist electronic score has been on regular rotate on my Spotify for years. It is up there with Daft Punk’s Tron soundtrack as an Original Score Hall of Famer.
Reflecting on the story of Facebook’s genesis, there is a depressing truth that the film depicts but doesn’t take a lot of time to consider. With the exception of Sean Parker, the entire story is about boys from Harvard throwing money and lawsuits at each other. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a conniving loner in the film but he’s also lauded as the ultimate symbol of American ingenuity in the 21st century. He’s a weird kid who managed to build the ultimate communication platform, through sheer force of computer-coding will.
Anyone could have done it but he built it better and first, and thus, the free market of American capitalism rewarded his ingenuity by turning him into the youngest self-made billionaire in history. This is the true power of the internet age; America’s meritocratic credo of Anyone Can Make It has come true. Thanks to computers, anyone can become a business God—if you’re smart enough.
But the real Zuckerberg wasn’t (as the film presents him) a random horny loser who happened to be good with code. He attended highly selective schools since birth, had an upper-middle class upbringing and predictably landed at Harvard. Harvard, an institution that requires connections to America’s elite and hundreds of thousands in tuition fees to attend. It has produced more presidents than any other college. It has educated over half of the currently serving US Supreme Court. It is the most obvious symbol of centralised American financial and political power that exists. A club that rich people send their kids to learn how to keep running the world, so after they collapse one day on the 18th hole, they know the American empire is in safe hands.
At The Social Network’s conclusion Zuckerberg is a 23 year old billionaire in 2007. Now it’s 2022 and this Harvard boy isn’t an American President or deciding federal law. He’s seeking to use his unimaginable resources to create an entirely constructed reality for humanity to live in, the Metaverse. Unfortunately, it’s the same old arseholes running the show as it’s ever been. The only thing that changed is the show got a lot bigger.
Great movie though! 5 stars.
