The Social Network

SPOILERS, DUH:

Yesterday I sat through The Social Network as a gesture of love and commitment to my boyfriend, who spent 10 consecutive days bringing up its very high Rotten Tomatoes score and reminding me that Justin Timberlake was in it.

Here is the very, very short version of my review: the movie is the best possible version of a film about Facebook one could make, and it only suffers because its entire subject, plot, and theme are either so un-notable they barely warrant a Wikipedia entry or have already been explored before, namely in Citizen Kane. The film ends with Mark Zuckerberg on his death bed calling for Rosebud…I mean, sitting in front of a computer, obsessively refreshing Facebook to see if the girl who dumped him back in Act 1, Scene 1 has accepted his friend request. Yes, really. I imagine that coming across this movie occasionally on TV in the future will feel like when you accidentally stumble on Chat Roulette in your browser history – that sense of, “Oh right, that was supposed to be important for 2 weeks. Adorable.”

And now, the very, very long version of my review: On the plus side, this is a movie directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s impossible for the movie to be actively “bad”. After the first scene, I’d pegged Jesse Eisenberg as a rich man’s Michael Cera, and I now wish I could retroactively cast him in Scott Pilgrim, because I’m pretty sure he would have sucked much less. The whole cast in general is actually very good, with Justin Timberlake stealing the show and taking the movie from “something that is happening to me” to “something I actually am now mildly interested in” when his character finally shows up.

I understand why a lot of people are calling for this to be nominated for various awards – the story structure is the kind of over-complicated, flashback-heavy, voiceover-narration shit that people who are of average intelligence feel delighted with themselves about for being able to follow. (That said, the people who are saying it’s Fincher’s best movie ever…h-have they seen Fight Club?) The script is solid Sorkin, and it feels like he had a particularly good time making up this story because it gave him the chance to write all of his dickishness into one character (Zuckerberg), and all of his charisma and drug abuse into another (Sean Parker aka Mr. JT). Also, I’m sure somewhere Sorkin is masturbating into a sock about how he created the Facebook of political dramas, back in the day, and so he understands this shit better than anyone else.

However, the structure of the story is two different days of Zuckerberg sitting through depositions for the two different lawsuits filed against him, with one of those days being the “present”, as those scenes sometimes have people breaking for lunch and having conversations that aren’t testimony. The *entire rest of the movie* is flashbacks narrated by the various characters being deposed. This makes it feel like basically the entire film is just back-story for a present-time story that we never get to experience.

Fincher’s direction is smart, moody, and overall the kind of shit you expect from David Fucking Fincher. I will say this film is the best representation I’ve seen of current technology and the way things move through the internet from person to person very quickly…which basically means there’s no 1990s-style montage with Mark Zuckerberg typing sweatily and bathed in the glow of a CRT monitor while ones and zeros scroll across his face. Fincher’s solution is not terribly done, it just feels kind of…quaint, to see someone trying to dramatize the act of forwarding a link or visiting a website. Also, Fincher’s style does not mitigate the whole “the film is trapped in amber and nothing is actually happening” quality, and I felt every single one of the 125 minutes sitting in the theater. But that is the sort of This Movie Is Very Important pacing that seems to automatically get at least nominated for Best Picture.

As I said before, the acting is rock solid across the board, but I’m pretty sure 90% of that is because not a single cast member has ever been in an Aaron Sorkin property before, and thus they aren’t burnt out on making some of his more ridiculously blatant and/or earnest lines work. Rashida Jones deserves to win an Oscar in the category of Most Straight-Faced Delivery of Ridiculous Dialog in a Film for managing to get out, “Wow, Bosnia…they don’t have roads, but they have Facebook.” without rolling her eyes. Eisenberg likewise somehow managed to deliver a useable take of the scene where he sends out links to Facemash to a select few and says, “The question now is…who are *they* going to send it to?” Actually, now that I’m writing this, I’m thinking that if you bring a flask, you could have a great time in an empty theater with this film and a, “take a shot every time you wish you could buy one for the actors on screen” drinking game.

All of that aside, it actually is a well-acted…narrated flashback. I can barely call it a film, or if it is one, it’s a short film that’s about 30 minutes long and takes place at the very end. Most of the movie is Zuckerberg Is An Asshole and there is no character development or emotional turn for him, ever. Well, that’s not entirely true – the scene where Zuckerberg and Parker meet for the first time, there’s a nice bit of camerawork where we can see Zuckerberg’s face looking up at Parker as Parker’s standing up from their dinner and pushing in his chair. The look is so starry-eyed and reverential that I could feel the category of “The Social Network – Slash – Zuckerberg/Parker” being created on fanfiction.net. Timberlake manages to outshine the rest of the cast almost by default, because he at least gets to display multiple emotions throughout the film while on-screen. Andrew Garfield, who plays Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s initial investor and only friend, has the most range to move through, but the climax of the movie – Zuckerberg and Parker going behind Saverin‘s back and issuing 24 million new shares in order to reduce Saverin‘s ownership from 30% to 0.03% — happens OFF-SCREEN. It is told, not shown, and all we see is the aftermath. However, even the fight that follows was good enough that it successfully made me feel an actual human emotion, and if one can criticize that it took 120 out of 125 minutes for the movie to get around to putting forth the idea that maybe making a lot of money and gaining notoriety at the expense of human connections is a bad way to live, at least it got there eventually.

Now the part you KNEW was coming, because it’s me – at my count, there were four speaking roles for women in this film:

1) Zuckerberg’s (totally fictional) ex-girlfriend, who is the motivation at every turn for Zuckerberg making and expanding Facebook (she delivers the well-known line about how girls don’t like him, not because he’s a nerd, but because he’s an asshole)
2) Eduardo’s groupie-turned-girlfriend, who is jealous, needy, and insane (she lights a gift he bought her on fire and almost burns his room down)
3) One of the attorneys deposing various characters and asking them questions (she makes disapproving faces at Zuckerberg and makes notes sometimes)
4) Rashida Jones, who is ostensibly part of Zuckerberg’s legal team, but who is really just there to be a nice lady who is impressed by the size of Facebook (and thus, to be sympathetic to Zuckerberg – she gets the last line of the film, which is, “You’re not an asshole, Mark…you just try so hard to be.”)

Women are consistently and universally portrayed as The Reason Men Make Things, and that attitude is not challenged by a single character in the film. (Then again, this is a movie that has Larry Summers as a character and he’s portrayed positively, so.) Zuckerberg’s girlfriend dumps him, so he makes a site that allows people (read: men) to vote on which of two Harvard girls’ ID photos is hotter. Also, he “blogs” about what a bitch his ex-girlfriend is and live-blogs his drunken coding process as he makes the site. This blog gets him fame/trouble and pushes him further along his path to “greatness”, wherein values of greatness are “creating Facebook.”

(I say “blogs” because he’s posting to Livejournal and…come on. Any movie, especially a movie about a site on the internet, that represents LJ as standard blogging site makes me feel like at any time, someone could come on-screen and start talking about the series of tubes. And yet, everyone’s like “I read your blog…” and it is just generally hilarious. Also, the posting interface on LJ circa 2003, good to see you again!)

Later in the the film, Zuckerberg runs into her at a restaurant and tries to talk to her, unsuccessfully, and realizes she’s never heard of Facebook, prompting a FIRE EVERYTHING-style, “We have to expand!!!!!!!!!!1!eleven!!!” motivation for him. (Aside: the exgirlfriend’s dialog is maybe the worst/best in the whole film – “You called me a bitch. On the internet. Mark, the internet isn’t written in pencil, IT’S WRITTEN IN INK.”) Through the whole film, she is his Rosebud, which, again, duh, blah, seen, done, etc.

There are other women in the film – lots of them. They’re dancing on tables in their underwear, they’re giving blowjobs to Zuckerberg in bar bathrooms because he invented Facebook, they’re wrapped around the arms of various men while the men deliver dialog at each other, they’re underaged and stoned and giggling in the background of many, many scenes. The film is almost literally wall-papered with women, so that by the time Parker is zonked at a party and people are doing lines of cocaine off a girl’s torso, it feels unremarkable to see a woman act as furniture while she sighs and laughs about taking off her bra.

Like every other theme in the film, this particular theme and motif are tired, I’ve seen it done and done more effectively in the past (what’s up, A Clockwork Orange), and I found it quite frankly unimaginative and boring. I’m not crying out about how sexist it is, but I am crying out about how stupid and limited Sorkin and Fincher are. It’s a shame Aaron Sorkin is so stupid he can’t make up some interesting women in an almost-entirely-fictional story; it’s a shame David Fincher is so stupid he doesn’t know how to use female actors as anything other than props in this movie. Moving on.

What is actually most troubling about the movie to me is that almost none of it is real. There was no girlfriend, there was no drive to fit in, there were a *few* investors and friends who all got screwed (one of whom wrote the book the film is supposedly based on). They literally invented a retread of Citizen Kane, and it isn’t even a very good one. It’s the second-saddest thing about this movie, that the message it’s trying to deliver is nothing less or more than the most common, popular, and already-understood American narrative of male-ness since Horatio Alger – be an individualist/asshole, disregard people who hold you back, make a lot of money, be dead inside, need a savior woman’s approval in order to really feel fulfilled.

…And the first-saddest thing about this movie is, obviously, that it seems to think Facebook is worthy material for any narrative, let alone this one. Facebook is something that has a large user base, and it’s a MySpace knockoff that is less annoying (in some ways). But the film compares it to Napster – something that legitimately changed the way everyone under the age of 30 interacts with music (and from there, one could argue, all media capable of being digitized). To have all of these characters running around preaching about a website that is big and currently popular as if that’s somehow permanently changing the way all of human culture behaves feels really sad. And deluded. If this was about cell phones or something, sure, maybe, but it’s basically a “documentary” about the early years of a big company – and a company that has since become known most for fucking up its’ privacy settings and as the home of Farmville and similar. The platform for Farmville is going to change the world forever? Really?

I said before I even went into the theater that I thought this was an unnecessary film that is trying to represent a subject that is still changing too much to create a meaningful story that will stand up longer than 3 months. This isn’t a contemporary drama the way The Best Years of Our Lives was – a WWII story made in 1946 about WWII vets returning home, but which actually covers the massive ideas of sacrifice, the effects of war on communities, patriotism and its dark side, and even the difficulties and meaningfulness of marriage. Plus it was telling a story about WWII from the perspective of “the war at home”, which was new at the time but continues to be one of our favorite ways to tell ourselves stories about WWII and wars in general.

Instead, The Social Network is a retelling of very recent events, but events that are so contorted that it’s really a narrated fiction, using names and cultural signifiers we all recognize. People/made-up characters are very clearly operating within understood narrative roles, and the narrative plays out just as you would expect from the very first scene. There are no larger themes, or at least no themes or ideas that expand on our current understanding of culture, success, or the way we value relationships. It’s not like the movie has the balls to try and argue that Facebook friends are more valuable than “real life” ones – instead it affirms every scare-tactic local news story ever produced about people using the internet as a social medium. (ie: there is something more valuable about the connections you make through location-based social groupings, I guess.)

As I said earlier, there is very little, if any, emotional transformation for anyone in the film – the good guys are clearly good, the bad guys are clearly bad, the anti-hero never breaks from form, and the ending plays out to deliver an emotional message capable of being understood by any kindergartner (Be Nice To Your Friends). It’s like someone took the events from a season of professional wrestling and turned it into a major motion picture. In short, I feel similarly about The Social Network as Martin Seay feels about Ke$ha’s TiK ToK (and if you have not read that article, drop everything and go read, now: http://bit.ly/KeshaEssay)

I wouldn’t claim it’s dangerous, but it is a film that seems designed for people who do not want to be surprised, or even particularly engaged. There is no excitement or suspense, there is no drama or particularly deep emotional relationship with the characters (especially if you’re a woman – who the hell is there even to relate TO?). The film exists to reaffirm old, and I would argue antiquated, ideas about human connections (namely those between an individual (but in this movie, “the individual” automatically signifies “Man”) and society, and those between men and women…I suppose if you’re a white male nerd who has been living under a rock and therefore unaware that the entire tidal wave of internet culture exists to appease you, The Social Network would speak to you – but even then, what the hell is it saying that’s worth listening to?

Conclusion: have a home movie night where you marathon Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Mean Girls instead.