[Updated Below] Another title for Social Network, the new [2010] movie about the founding of Facebook, might as well have been Geeks Gone Wild! Not as much booty grinding and beer-sprayed boobs as in the Girls! version but plenty of shameless behavior you wouldn’t want on display at your house.
The driving force for the geeks wasn’t to publicly display their sexual attributes but their programming chops, as publicly as possible — as a way to power, status, and closely related, “chicks.” Whatever actually happened on the way to building Facebook (and Microsoft and Lotus and Intel, and Oracle…) the movie version is not very pretty. It was a bad week to watch it as well, with the election results showing a 61 seat swing to the GOP in the House, not very pretty either. We should have gone to a French sex farce instead.
Social Network follows at least in outline the known characters and events in the rise of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, [played by his spitting image, Jesse Eisenberg] while a freshman at Harvard, and steeped in hacker bonafides, created a social-networking program for friends and classmates. The idea took up earlier, similar ideas, from his prep school and likely from classmates at Harvard, which becomes part of the movie line.
A fundamental idea behind its creation was that people –especially young, unencumbered people– want to check out other people — and especially those in their own social circles. Harvard people want to know what Harvard people are doing — the good, the bad, and the sexual. Make this “knowing” a rare commodity and people are even more attracted to it. In order to sign up you had to have a Harvard.edu mailing address, or be invited by someone already on “The Facebook.” It’s hard to believe, 8 years later, as the number of Facebook users is over 500,000, but a big night of celebration and “proof of concept” was the night they registered 1,000.
The film seamlessly shuffles scenes of the boys in competition and at work and play, with those of the same cast of characters each with their own lawyers, around the settlement table, after greed, betrayal, adrenaline, wild parties, other lawyers, had blown up friendships and dreams – for everyone but Zuckerberg.
Sean Parker [Justin Timberlake], the founder of the music-industry shattering Napster, appears as a major force. He is already a geek god and a very wealthy man when Zuckerberg meets him. Against the cautious council of Zuckerberg’s best friend and CFO, Eduardo Saverin, [ Andrew Garfield] Parker promises him paradise.
“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”
Zuckerberg, with his CFO’s money but without the CFO, moves a small, intense team to Palo Alto. Parker shows up and Facebook takes off — and into the shape most of us know it as.
So it’s a pretty good movie. Good sound track, quick geeky repartee — thanks to the master of the art, Andrew Sorkin as screen writer. Well lit scenes, perhaps too much partying that doesn’t advance the plot, only the atmosphere of play as the genuine foundation of creative work. The women, by the way — with one strong exception– are given only eye-candy roles, and they play them with gusto. The film was originally rated R and was cleaned up to pull in a wider audience.
Both the Zuckerberg and Parker characters are done very well. Eisenberg has Zuckerberg as the fast talking, eye-darting techno-geek persona uncannily down. Two minutes into the opening scene as he tries to act out being a boyfriend to the only interesting woman in the film [Rooney Mara as Erica Albright] we’ve got it: Asberger’s syndrome. Big Time. This is a young man who needs daily drills in sociability. Parker, on the other hand, seems to be the uber-salesman – with the touch of techno genius that made him what he became. Smooth, slick, high-energy, able to sweep even the socially mistrustful Zuckerberg off his feet.
The problem with Social Network, is to decide whether the characters, based on real people, are closely or grossly drawn. Despite the usual admonition that “all characters are fictional” re-written to read that while the characters are real much has been created for dramatic effect, the presence of the names of actual people in the movie guarantees we see it more as history than as story. So is Mark Zuckerberg really an asbergerey genius with a real vicious streak, manipulable by the Sean Parkers and Venture Capitalists more savy and more power driven, or is he an asbergery genius with little interest in personal wealth, a benevolence that recently donated $100 million to Newark schools? Is Harvard the hot-bed of young creeps on the make, or are the creeps a small but world-changing minority? Is Sean Parker a brilliant internet seer or a corrupt and lucky libertine?
You’d have to do a lot more work than seeing the movie to know this. The book it was based on, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, [2009 by Ben Mezrich ] would have much more confirmable data, and likely an equally hard driving tale. Articles available on line will give you a quick take on the Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg those writers see.
Sucia in Spanish means dirty, or filthy. It’s certain you will come out of watching fictional Zuckerberg and his fictional friends, feeling so: slimed and appalled. You should not not go though. Go. It’s our world, afterall.
Of course the boys of Facebook, and the movie, are just newbies, even if super wealthy, to the vicious, slimy, cut throat, lawyered up world of those who really count: the Goldman Sachs, Banks of America, AIGs, the Dick Fulds, Robert Rubins, Hank Paulsons, Angelo Mozillas, Dick Cheneys –all those mega-moneyed types who buy and sell governments, send in the secret agents and high explosives to uncooperative countries to “fix” things to their liking. Contracts with hidden clauses, like that which ushered Saverin out of Faceboook are baby toys compared to the tricks, tools and time bombs these guys have.
Who cares? Wealth and fame in America, no matter how it is achieved, are equally celebrated.
Say it ain’t so.
Update: An interesting, damning long review in the New York Review of Books by Zadie Smith (White Teeth and more) who was on the Harvard Campus Fall of 2003, the year of Facebook’s birth and fictionally chronicled by the film. As with many NYRB pieces the film under review is a starting point for Smith to take on much larger issues — in this case, the motives, the world view and sense of self not only of Zuckerberg and his co-creators but of the entire Generation 2.0. It is these of which she is damning, not the movie per se.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format.
[Originally posted on 11/6/10]