The Social Network (2010)

USA, 120 minutes

Director: David Fincher

Writers: Aaron Sorkin, Ben Mezrich

Photography: Jeff Cronenweth

Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross

Editors: Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Rashida Jones, Aaron Sorkin

Speaking of nerd macho, sometimes I think The Social Network might have something to do with creating the Mark Zuckerberg we have come to know and loathe, the wound-up libertarian incel hero seething with grievance and resentment and here turned unfairly (and wrong-headedly) into a small figure we can pity. He may be brilliant and rich, but he can't get the chicks. No wonder he's pissed off. At the beginning of the picture a woman tells Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), "You're gonna go through life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." At the end of it another woman, unrelated, tells him, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying to be." In between those two definitions, cowriter Aaron Sorkin seems to be suggesting, lies the truth. I'd feel a little hemmed in by popular perception too if I were Zuck.

What really had to hurt is that the movie is so darned good. Somehow I had forgotten that. You can't take your eyes off it. It's a dream collaboration between director David Fincher, Sorkin, and Eisenberg, powered by the fusillades of sparkling, cutting banter and confrontation that have made Sorkin famous. The Social Network is fast, barbed, hilarious, and utterly absorbing from its first minute. It lands punches over and over, not just on Zuckerberg. It has massive forward momentum, even though it's built out of biopic clichés, with a framing device of depositions in a law firm's tony conference room while pinballing flashbacks serve up the tech legendry raw in great meaty chunks. Bill Gates shows up at Harvard like Madonna french-kissing Britney Spears and all intentions are toward one goal: become a billionaire (because that's what's more "cool" than a millionaire).

Women don't actually play much role in any of this—perhaps the only place where Sorkin's and Zuckerberg's life views jibe—but Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) at least gets to pose briefly as the designated Cassandra. She's the one telling Zuckerberg he's an asshole at the start, and in a later heady cringing confrontation with him, at the narcissist's hour of greatest need (which of course is always), she neatly lays out what internet culture has become in this century: "You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that's what the angry do nowadays."

In the frame, Zuckerberg is being deposed for two lawsuits. One involves the comic figures of the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer, magically made into two by virtuoso editing and great lines like "I'm 6'5", 220, and there's two of me"). The other involves the tragic figure of Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the would-be Steve Ballmer in this great tale, except for his fatal flaw of a too-limited imagination for greed (not that he isn't greedy). In many ways this picture is on Zuckerberg's side, with the good-hearted Eduardo presented as someone who simply cannot keep up. He never understands the mammoth potential of the Facebook business model and is rapidly left behind like someone who lost everything in the flood one year. He is at least as pathetic as Zuckerberg, which is an interesting tell from Sorkin.

Rapacious business smarts is embodied in another of this movie's secret weapons, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the great Silicon Valley outlaw disruptor behind the original Napster (also note that Peter Thiel makes an appearance, though he wasn't quite the villain in 2010 he would become). Timberlake as Parker is both a casting coup and a great stroke of plot development. Parker's interaction with Zuckerberg resonates with the pilgrimage of Steve Jobs to Xerox to liberate the classic GUI graphical user interface. Napster was wiped out by legal problems but arguably (as indeed the cocky Parker argues repeatedly here) it changed everything. Zuckerberg, so far, has learned the lesson of changing everything without being wiped out.

But approximately here is where the movie has not dated well even in these 10 years. Sorkin's themes have always been about power (dominated of course by the shoe-leather stink of men), whether it's overtly political (The American President, The West Wing) or more celebrity/media-driven (Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). He obviously admires power. It turns him on. Eduardo Saverin may be a decent guy but he is a business fool. Zuckerberg and Parker may be assholes (or not, as per the woman at the end) but they are also winners. And when it comes to power the only thing that matters, as we all know, is winning.

It was fine and good, maybe, in 2010, when social media still came across as more like idle fun, one more killer app helping remove us from the surly bonds of the hours of the day. An incidental character sums it up about perfectly: "It's really awesome, except it's freakishly addictive." But we know now that Sorkin simply does not have Zuckerberg's pettiness right at all in The Social Network. He keeps trying to work up something about Zuckerberg's feelings of inadequacy as some poor dweeb who can't get a date and/or can't make the right fraternities when actually Zuckerberg's grievances are vastly more epic and malevolent, on Donald Trump / Fox News levels of scale. 

A title card at the end that feels more admiring than warning says, "Facebook has 500 million members in 207 countries. It's currently valued at 25 billion dollars." Those numbers now are more like 3 billion (or nearly half of all living human beings), with a valuation of $54 billion, along with a fresh new resume item in 2016 (and then 2018, and then this year) of systematically abusing its position to undermine a national US election and throw it in the direction it prefers. Sorkin's inability to anticipate or see this level of pure bad faith now feels at least as naïve about reality as Eduardo Saverin. I keep wanting to make co-screenwriter Sorkin the auteur of The Social Network because it feels like he is. But don't miss that director Fincher has turned the whole thing into an extraordinary entertainment. Also, it has another excellent soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Even in the true-crime horror context of Facebook as we know it today, The Social Network is worth looking at, and holds up as a remarkably fun ride.