The Social Network

It's been another week since my last post - sorry about that. One of the problems with this schedule is when I do write about films, I do it after I have been reading about them on the web, blogs, the media, etc. for a week or more - when there is a lot of conversation about a film, sometimes the discourse around the film can start to seem more compelling that the film. The Social Network has been out a couple weeks now, and sparked lots of discussion, on film blogs, beyond film blogs, and it's been too interesting to ignore. It's a fine film, I should say up from - 12/15 in my little rating system - but I find myself thinking about all kinds of things, beyond the film itself....

Like - how is Facebook different than MySpace or Friendster? I never used Friendster, so I can't answer that part - I poked at MySPace, so I have some ideas there. MySpace was an ugly affair - too easy for people to doll it up with color and music and blinking text - Christ, it's the internet ca. 1997. (Ah - how is Facebook different than AOL? ca 1996 - I mean - there are all kinds of blandly factual answers to that one, but the fact is - somewhere in the mid-90s, AOL took off with much of the force that Facebook has the last 2-3 years. Enough to allow it to screw around with Time Warner before they were done. One might see the future of Facebook there - an unstoppable force! that in a year or two will be replaced by something else, which is not so much a replacement as a refinement.... Anyway - to go back a question or two - the tautological answer to how is Facebook different from MySpace or Friendster is that everyone I know who is online is on Facebook. (As one of my cousins said on the site itself - "I have an account on Facebook, I didn't on those sites.") It pushes the question along a step - why are so many people, from old hands at this internet thing (I got Prodigy and AOL in 1990, myself - well after a lot of people I know) to utter newbies, young and old. I have aunts on Facebook, the parents of friends - if my mother had been well the past few years, she might well have ended up using it. How did that happen? I've always been a bit skeptical of Facebook, but the fact (especially compared to other social networking sites) is that it is better designed, more elegant, simpler to use and navigate, more secure (you don't get the malware threats you heard about with MySpace all the time) - and also, more expandable, more flexible, better integrated with the rest of the web. It's surprising to think about it this way, but in the end, it's simplicity and elegance might be the real answer to its success.

All right then - the next question is - how would you make a film about elegant design? For that matter - how do you make a film about privacy settings? I could probably answer the second, something about some poor devil's life ruined by internet identity thieves - but that's not really the problem with Facebook's attitude toward privacy. Facebook's privacy issues are more intimate and pervasive, usually not so dramatic, more a question of what happens when your coworkers find out your opinion of Sarah Palin than when some hacker gets your social security number. And I suspect this difficulty is partly why The Social Network doesn't latch onto privacy as its main concern, but does latch on to misogyny. It's easier to show. It may even be true, to some extent (though not necessarily) - and you won't have any trouble getting audiences to accept it - everyone knows computer guys are asocial nerds who resent the jocks who get the girls, especially at Harvard, where nothing has changed since 1636 (or 1638)....

Perhaps I exaggerate. In fact, the film is perfectly believable on most of these things - maybe not "true" but certainly something like the truth (and since it's fiction, that works.) It is a film about college kids, after all - college kids certainly act up, even at Harvard. And complaints about the women in The Social Network being prizes understate the ways that everyone in the film is a prize or an obstacle, or at least, in some way, found wanting. Eduardo is out of date before he starts.... the Winklevii are inbred rich monsters with dull ideas and a clever friend... Sean Parker is an aging teen band star, trying to stay cool (and every bit as much a prize as any of the women, really).... Larry Summers is a clown, former secretary of the treasury who doesn't recognize the value of Facebook when someone lays it in his lap... the attorneys are attorneys, the girlfriends are all crazy except the One Who Got Away. Only Zuckerberg is above it all - and claims to the contrary in and out of the film, he is not so much a nerd or an asshole as he is smarter than everyone else, a visionary, who tries them all and finds them all wanting. Though of course Sorkin betrays him in the end - that final scene, while certainly admirable from a structural perspective (echoing the opening scene, a woman walking away from Zuckerberg with a variation on the same line), is completely false, a complete cliche, overwritten and pat. Sorkin wants his cake and to eat it too - to marvel at genius in all its amoral wonders, and to click his tongue...

All right - that's what I mean about the discourse overcoming the film. The film itself is a thing of beauty. It does have issues - almost all of them from the script, I'd say. Given the script, what Fincher does with it is remarkable. The film is fast moving and slick, yet always clear, what is going on, who is saying and doing what, the performances tight and exciting, the words and visuals all made to pop out at you. I'll refer you to Jim Emerson for more comment on the filmmaking - I particularly like his remark about how Zuckerberg is "out-of-synch with his physical environment." It's true - Zuckerberg is consistently pulled out of his environment, consistently separated from the people around him - physically as well as emotionally, socially, intellectually. (Physical isolation standing in for the inner states. Expressionism lives!) The phenomenon extends to the partying, too - there is lots of it around him, but other than a couple scenes where he is drunk, Zuckerberg is apart from it, watching - thinking...) It's a superbly made film. There was a time when David Fincher's films drove me mad - he had obvious chops, but they were so inane, his talent in the service of such obvious claptrap (I mean, Fight Club, in particular.) But now, I am convinced - he has become something extraordinary. He benefits, as he usually does, from superb work by the actors. All the principals are wonderful - Eisenberg completely sells this portrayal of Zuckerberg - he plays intelligence as well as anyone, especially slightly dishonest intelligence... And the others - Garfield, Hammer, Timberlake - more than hold their own. Yes - a treat.

Though I can't let go of the script - and maybe, just maybe - the overall conception of the film. It is striking - going back to Emerson, talking about the credit sequence, and Zuckerberg's alienation from his environment - it is worth noting that the film has cut Somerville (and residential Cambridge) out of the picture. The Thirsty Scholar (which is clearly seen and named in the film) is a mile away from Harvard Square (and nowhere near BU - Zuckerberg really blew it there, that girl must have really liked him, to go all the way to Inman Square - nowhere near the subway and on the opposite side of Cambridge from BU - for a drink with him), but that mile disappears. I tend to think the film (Sorkin?) is a bit too enamored with Harvard - impressed by the fact that this was a Harvard kid - not another MIT or Stanford nerd - inventing Facebook. (Or Northeastern - that's where Shawn Fanning invented Napster.) So we get constant reminders that it's Harvard, 370 years of History... which I'm not sure is really there, except when they're giving tours. (Which rather undermines the Final Club initiation scene - every tourist and prospective student who goes through there knows that's the Statue of Three Lies.) I don't know if this is Sorkin, or maybe Saverin (who seems to be the source for the book it was based on) - either way, it feels a bit off. Especially when taken as being about Zuckerberg - it makes it seem to be more about Saverin, or Sorkin....

Anyway - it is a fine film - it is not history, but over time, I'd guess its worth as a film will take precedence over the historical questions.