“I wanna have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul…”
- “Creep” Radiohead
An eerie cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” (by Scala and Kolacny Brothers), plays over he trailer for David Fincher’s The Social Network. The lyrics crooned by the choir sum up the motives of writer Aaron Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg. Fincher and Sorkin insist they made no effort to base their anti-hero off America’s youngest billionaire. Fincher even forbade Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerberg in The Social Network, from meeting the real inventor of Facebook. The resulting alienated hero stands as an icon for the “poke me” generation and tragic hero in the creation story of Facebook.
The Social Network tells a uniquely American tale. Rather than using Facebook as a means for a slasher to stalk unsuspecting, idiotic teens in a cheap thriller, or as a backdrop for the next ensemble romantic comedy as some feared when they heard “the Facebook movie,” the Sorkin-Fincher team crafted a tale about the founding of online social club. Their parable captures the American desperation to be connected to others in a modern, tech-savy world.
In the film, Zuckerberg creates Facebook in an angered drunk after being dumped by his girlfriend (in a scene Fincher claimed took 99 takes). His entire pursuit is to be included in Harvard’s “exclusive” social clubs. “They lead to a better life,” he insists. It’s precisely Zuckerberg’s wanting to be wanted and needing to needed that transforms him from an anti-hero to a tragic hero in the film’s two hours.
I have 636 friends on Facebook. Some are siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles. Others are ex-teammates or fellow students. Some are former teachers. Some are even friends. Most of these “friends,” I don’t reach out to, and never hear from. The irony of this, that Sorkin and Fincher tap directly into, is that a tool for bringing people together creates an illusion of connectedness, and actually pushed its creators apart. After all, how connected are we really when our contacts become further and further removed from face-to-face conversation and are replaced by instant messaging?
Sorkin’s voice fits right into its Harvard in 2003 setting. Though I counted zero walk-and-talks, his characters fire lines of dialogue and wield witty comebacks like sharp-edged weapons. Fincher’s knack for visual style works best when it’s restrained as it is here. He even casts aside his burnt brown tints in one the film’s finer scenes, portraying a rowing race as a metaphor for the story’s competition.
The performances are solid throughout the ensemble, led by career-best work from Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield. With his roaming eyes and his nervous twitches, Eisenberg shows he growing up the way his partner-in-deadpan crime, Michael Cera, refuses to.
The Social Network works as both a fine piece of filmmaking and a cultural critique. Like a great American novel, it’s at the same time an excellent exercise in craft and an effective embodiment of the date of its birth. Moreover, Fincher does his best work, bringing his meticulous and obsessive control to a perfect script. The last three minutes of the film are comically tragic, casting a sharp glance at our need to be accepted in the company of others. The Social Network explores to what lengths people will go to avoid loneliness, and it’s precisely because of this daring discovery that the film becomes relevant to our lives and times.
TJ Keeley likes this.
[Published in SLU's "U News"]
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