What do you do if you’re a computer genius with a massive inferiority complex? Well, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg then you lie, cheat, steal, manipulate and do whatever else it takes to rise to the top.
Just like the proverbial king of the mountain in a best friend’s untended backyard, he becomes the last man standing on a big, dirty pile of success. Such is the image portrayed of the world’s youngest billionaire in director David Fincher’s newest film, The Social Network. It’s the story of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his creation called Facebook but it’s really the story of how desire can override morals and how prosperity and popularity don’t necessarily equal friendship and satisfaction. It’s about success and the twisted route many take to get there, leaving wrecks of human carnage along the wayside. This is a tale of woe.
Facebook is a website that allows its members to set up personal profiles which can give as much or as little detail about their private lives as they want. It’s as equally reviled as it is revered, and many people find it unequivocally addictive even though it resides in an electronic world. This makes it as superficial as possible, yet some have found deep and significant meaningful contact through it.
Zuckerberg was an expert hacker and arrogant undergraduate at Harvard in 2003. Desperate for attention and social status, especially after getting dumped by his girlfriend, he first develops a kind of revenge site called Facemash that enabled people the ability to vote on which freshman female was more attractive than another. He did this in about four hours one drunken night, all the while blogging slanderously about his recent ex.
While this won him far more enemies than it did friends, it did gain him a lot of attention and notoriety, primarily from a small group of well-to-do students. They approached him to write code for a new website that was similar to MySpace but exclusive for Harvard. Zuckerberg agreed but instead walked — and then ran — away with the idea, eventually turning it into Facebook. Naturally this made him very popular but also turned him into the target of a lawsuit by those from whom he stole the idea. He then managed to become so egomaniacal that he squashed his friendship with Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the original investor and co-founder. This movie is about the legal wranglings and hurt feelings that occur when you don’t balk at stepping on people’s toes and backs to achieve fame and acclaim.
This movie is as brilliant as the shiny blue glow of a monitor but it suffers only slightly from being so immersed in the worlds of Harvard and computers that it occasionally sounds like an English foreign language film. Sorkin’s writing is superlative as usual, coming at you a hundred miles per second and Zuckerberg’s mouth moves as fast as his fingers type when he’s writing code. The actors play their parts well, adding pleasure to the experience of watching unpleasant people. It’s the kind of movie that doesn’t request your attention — it demands it.
This is a massive win for Fincher after the disappointing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s a refreshingly truthful look into a web of lies and should make you think twice about the meaning of the word ‘friend.’
