FILM THE SOCIAL NETWORK DIRECTOR DAVID FINCHER
‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making
a few enemies’: The Social Network (2010)
‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making
a few enemies’: The Social Network (2010)
The Social Network follows two politically irrelevant but interesting civil lawsuits: in the first, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Chief Executive, defends an ownership dispute filed on behalf of the Winklevoss twins (Tyler and Cameron) and Divya Narendra; in the second, breach of contract, partnership and fiduciary duty claims are brought against Zuckerberg by Eduardo Saverin: best friend, company co-founder and principal investor. The film turns to both early on, after a gripping introductory segment that encompasses Zuckerberg’s dorm, Kirkland House, the Phoenix Club and the entire nine House system of Harvard College. In this sequence Zuckerberg, dejected because his girlfriend unceremoniously dumped him at a Boston bar in the Fall of 2003, attempts to validate his existence by taking revenge: first by venting his anger explicitly at Erica online, then by inventing a viral website that ruthlessly objectifies Harvard’s women and becomes an instant hit with Harvard’s men.
Zuckerberg is reprimanded by the Ad Board but earns the respect of three Harvard students (the Harvard Connection team of Narendra and the Winklevosses) who are in the market for either a prodigy, or a programmer, or both. Accepting their pitch for an online community site, Zuckerberg agrees to help (which may or may not entail creating their code), ditches that idea, rents a server, expands the original programming and algorithms which he devised to run his Facemash viral, ditches the Harvard Connection, single-handedly codes a centralised community site for Harvarders, registers the name with his web provider, and launches the site in its original incarnation as TheFacebook.com in the first week of February 2004 — his investor Eduardo in tow. The arrival further down the line of Sean Parker, the here thoroughly carnivorous co-founder of Napster to whom the film eventually gravitates in the cheery milieu of Palo Alto, gives Zuckerberg a taste of what it is that he should aim for — the chance to build in the Valley a company with the power to enhance connectivity and revolutionise the popularity of the internet on a global scale.
Zuckerberg is reprimanded by the Ad Board but earns the respect of three Harvard students (the Harvard Connection team of Narendra and the Winklevosses) who are in the market for either a prodigy, or a programmer, or both. Accepting their pitch for an online community site, Zuckerberg agrees to help (which may or may not entail creating their code), ditches that idea, rents a server, expands the original programming and algorithms which he devised to run his Facemash viral, ditches the Harvard Connection, single-handedly codes a centralised community site for Harvarders, registers the name with his web provider, and launches the site in its original incarnation as TheFacebook.com in the first week of February 2004 — his investor Eduardo in tow. The arrival further down the line of Sean Parker, the here thoroughly carnivorous co-founder of Napster to whom the film eventually gravitates in the cheery milieu of Palo Alto, gives Zuckerberg a taste of what it is that he should aim for — the chance to build in the Valley a company with the power to enhance connectivity and revolutionise the popularity of the internet on a global scale.
Piranha Club: Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg)
in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010)
in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010)
In Zodiac, director David Fincher’s enthusiasm for illuminating the historical record with a Pakulaian eye was compelling: his interest seemed to be primarily in the collation and synopsising of materials/people/testimony/imagery/theory, and in the clashing of historical methodologies. The Director’s Cut DVD edition, now a favorite in my household, established an authorial directness and stylistic tone that is very familiar in The Social Network . . . but this latest film is less enjoyable than Zodiac. As the subject of Jesse Eisenberg’s astonishing portraiture, Zuckerberg emerges here in ghastly shape: he is at once a brilliant ambition, a marvel at computer-science with an astonishing directness and clarity in his thinking, but at the same time an impressionable blackguard, vindictive, sociopathic and fiercely opportunistic. The introductory scene with Zuckerberg’s then current girlfriend, the fictional Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), is perfection. Sorkin’s dialogue — thoroughly self-indulgent and at times magnificent — presumes a character that is inexperienced with women and very obviously conflicted about one woman; he swoops and dives to unpick Erica’s sentences, bitterly trying to determine their meaning, but he is clearly lost in a distorted world of his own. The crisis of confidence that Eisenberg projects at the end of the scene hints at the character’s self-loathing, but it also sets in motion the Facemash viral episode, a savage Revenge of the Nerds sequence which makes for very uncomfortable viewing.
On the other side of the casting spectrum, Justin Timberlake seems to thrive as the playboy with a certain vulnerability, and Andrew Garfield makes a likeable though helpless Eduardo, the obvious objection being that the latter doesn’t quite pull off the budding businessman hell-bent on putting his specialist knowledge (hence, the meteorology/oil distribution thing) and acumen to use, although his charm, resolve and eventual disquiet all feel precisely on-point. Mara, as already noted, is tip-top, likewise Armie Hammer, whose marvellous interplay with his imaginary self and body-double (Josh Pence) provide the Winklevosses with a memorable Addams Family flair. The film’s other women — Brenda Song as the group’s trophy plaything and Rashida Jones’ junior lawyer Marylin Delpy — are less well portrayed, their wild and cyclical (respectively) trajectories magnified in this particular edit.
The film is enriched by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthetic score, but more than this the inclusion over the final credits of The Beatles’ original Baby You’re a Rich Man, which suspended the film on a floating high in my memory as I dashed off abruptly to catch the L.F.F. screening of Miike Takashi’s 13 Assassins (2010), inspired further for me a sense of kinship with the director or with the writer or whosoever shortlisted this, one of the band’s most enjoyable in my opinion, for approval.
The film is enriched by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthetic score, but more than this the inclusion over the final credits of The Beatles’ original Baby You’re a Rich Man, which suspended the film on a floating high in my memory as I dashed off abruptly to catch the L.F.F. screening of Miike Takashi’s 13 Assassins (2010), inspired further for me a sense of kinship with the director or with the writer or whosoever shortlisted this, one of the band’s most enjoyable in my opinion, for approval.
Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) in the film’s showcase opening scene
Sorkin’s characters (the hateful neurotic and innocent charmer, the opportunistic girlfriend and humiliated ex-girlfriend, the vainglorious entrepreneur) seem altogether less aggressive and excitable than when they appeared in previous incarnations (A Few Good Men, Malice, The American President and Charlie Wilson’s War, visceral works looking for visceral responses in their audience), yet the archetypal character trajectories weaken the overall accomplishment. Could Sorkin find no way in which to foster a more critical examination of the company’s progress? The traditional argument is that general audiences neither desire nor expect to see a film with a high (near-documentary) level of factual accuracy or character complexity. My argument is familiar but sincere: we still have the eye and the heart for mainstream works that overcome cinematic and story rhetoric, for works that do so in favour of less traditional representational forms. That Sorkin’s tale, Fincher’s film, is ultimately a conventional drama with stereotypical ciphers bugs me. On occasion I fell to wondering, as clearly as Lawrence Lessig evidently, if Aaron Sorkin knows how to write about the internet, or the route Facebook took to an equitable future. Is he himself fully integrated into a broadband online environment? The film pays no more attention to Facebook usage than it does to preparing audiences for the sudden manic turn of Brenda Song’s Christy Lee (and seriously: where the heck did that character switch come from??). Given the calibre of interview Sorkin has been providing on the publicity circuit — for the internet he shows not the slightest respect — it seems he does not care. The suggestion that the inventor of a social networking site with 500 million users plus is the loneliest soul on earth fulfils a screenwriter’s need for a sort of classical symmetry in narrative.
Brenda Song as Christy Lee
So there is something of an artistic mismatch, which saddens me as I value highly Fincher’s approach to filmmaking. The dominant register is Fincher’s own, his table-level eye documenting things coolly and without surreal invention, but the film’s story, arcs, and meaning are vintage Sorkin: gratuitous and sleazy, like artefacts on Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull.
Yet I like it, and I’m encouraged that I want to and will see it again shortly. What Sorkin’s Zuckerberg makes of Facebook in the final outcome is most clear in the film’s grim parting image. In the scene that frames it, Zuckerberg cuts a solitary figure, the key accidental billionaire of Ben Mezrich’s title left to tend to his affairs alone in a high-ceilinged, low lit and virtually soundless office space. There, he intermittently taps refresh on his laptop having sent a friend request out into the ether. It lasts only a minute (give or take), but it is like experiencing, again, perfection. In all this, there is the sense that he has found a way of communicating without harming those around him — the internet has given a home to Mark Zuckerberg.
Yet I like it, and I’m encouraged that I want to and will see it again shortly. What Sorkin’s Zuckerberg makes of Facebook in the final outcome is most clear in the film’s grim parting image. In the scene that frames it, Zuckerberg cuts a solitary figure, the key accidental billionaire of Ben Mezrich’s title left to tend to his affairs alone in a high-ceilinged, low lit and virtually soundless office space. There, he intermittently taps refresh on his laptop having sent a friend request out into the ether. It lasts only a minute (give or take), but it is like experiencing, again, perfection. In all this, there is the sense that he has found a way of communicating without harming those around him — the internet has given a home to Mark Zuckerberg.
24 October, 2010
0 comments:
Post a Comment