A masterpiece. A once-in-a-career film from a man whose entire oeuvre is filled with them.
I remember seeing this on opening night with an old girlfriend. It’s funny how some memories stick with you. She liked it, but she liked it the way people like flavours of bubblegum, which is to say that it was fine, but not extraordinary to her.
To me, I felt like I got punched in the face. Everything about Zuckerberg was repulsive to me at the time; I recall thinking the film felt kind to him. (As I’ve aged, I feel the film is far too kind to him; he is a parasitic leech and a power-hungry loser.) But despite that, I felt like the film captured the zeitgeist — the feeling that our lives were public now; in the eyes of the world, we were all suddenly living in Rashomon.
Although I hadn’t seen Rashomon yet (I can’t remember if I had seen Seven Samurai or not, let alone anything else Kurosawa made), I vividly recall the idea of this trial and our own private court scenes playing out amongst our peers, thanks to the record of social media, as a growing concern of 19-year-old me. (Yes, I was 19. Second year university student at the University of Waterloo.)
I still think Fincher and Sorkin tapped into something real here, although perhaps accidentally (as the best films do). Sorkin thought he wrote a film about a hero; Fincher believed the film was about an asshole. Sorkin was wrong; Fincher was right, but ultimately, it’s the contrast between the hero as written and the asshole as visualized that’s of interest here. The contrast between the two is fascinating to me: typically, we recognize Zuckerberg as the hero, but thanks to the private made public, we recognize him as unlikable, if not evil.
Add on top of that some of the best editing I can recall in a motion picture, as well as one of the all-time great film scores (I still maintain this is more interesting and has spawned more copycats than the Inception soundtrack, which beat it for best score at the Oscars that year), and you have one heckuva motion picture. I don’t know how many times I have seen this, but it is both less think I think and less than it deserves.
I recall the mockery before its release. People thought The Social Network would be a movie about coding. There is only one sequence about coding anything, and it’s about coding the Facemash website. There’s one mention of wget in the entire movie. The focus isn’t coding. This one sequence is technical, but in a way that normal people can complete ignore. While he’s working, Zuck drinks beer alone and blogs about his ex’s boobs. Fincher recognizes from the first moment of the movie that this guy is a loser, and that losers drink alone. It’s a masterpiece of recognition and analysis and foresight.
As far as David Fincher is concerned: Sucks to Zuck.