Movie Review: "The Social Network"

A Generation Faced

Once upon a time we could go out, get drunk with our friends, fall on our butts on a dance floor, make out with whoever sat next to us in urban sociology class that week, and all we'd have to worry about the next day was nursing our hang-overs and avoiding eye-contact with said make-out subject. This was also the time when "tagging" was a word used to describe a childhood game where one child would chase another, photography was usually associated with pleasant memories, and "poking" was not something one did via the world wide web, as Betty White expressed when she hosted SNL.

And then there was Facebook.

I was a first-year student at Sarah Lawrence College visiting my friend at the University of Pennsylvania the first time I heard about facebook. Amidst an otherwise normal conversation between 18-year-olds, she asked me, "Are you on facebook?" and paused dramatically. I shrugged, "I don't know what that is," and was met with a glare. "It's like this online thing for colleges where you put a profile up and look at other people's profiles. It's so cool. You have to be invited to join. Maybe they don't have it at Sarah Lawrence yet," she said with less excitement, thinking that might be a bad thing. "Yeah, probably not," I replied almost condescendingly, "I don't think a school that small needs an online thing, everyone knows everyone, it'd be kind of stupid."

Of course I was completely wrong. I soon found out, through my roommate, that everyone I knew was on facebook, that I had to get on it, that I had to befriend at least 70 people (back then, that was a lot), that I had to join "The Drinking Department Has a Theatre Problem" Group, and that I had to check immediately if the guy I'd been seeing had changed his relationship status. Like most people who were in college at the time of facebook's invention, I followed suit and created a profile, for no other reason than because everyone else had one.

Snooping crushes, advertising events, bad-mouthing teachers, bonding with classmates, staying in touch with friends in other countries, finding out about parties; everything was suddenly frighteningly easy and instantaneous. The word "facebook" was soon a verb, a noun, and an adjective. Upon meeting someone new it was perfectly acceptable to say, "facebook me" instead exchanging phone numbers or email addresses. A flattering or funny picture could be described as "facebook profile worthy". Mass emailing was replaced by facebook status updates, album and link sharing, and group/event invites. Moreover, as far as my generation was concerned, high-school would no longer be left at high-school, we could now keep up with what everyone was up to and who they were becoming; every-day life was now documented and accessible to everyone, for as long as facebook lived.

So when I saw the trailer for the movie, The Social Network, about a month ago, I was not surprised that facebook's popularity had warranted a movie only a few years after the site was launched. Here was a movie that a great majority of people could relate to, because even if you're not on facebook, you know about it, you've probably seen it on someone's computer screen, and you understand the magnitude of its impact on society. It was sure to be a box office hit, I predicted.

Indeed, it has maintained first place status at the box office for two consecutive weeks, and I had to wait until its second weekend in theaters to manage to see it. The movie is certainly entertaining and produces an engaging, albeit clearly dramatized, depiction of Mark Zuckerberg and the beginning of Facebook. Aaron Sorkin, whose works include "A Few Good Men" and "The West Wing", wrote a captivating script, brought to life masterfully by renowned blockbuster director David Fincher and the cast, with particularly layered performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield. It was hard not to notice, however, that the movie adheres to college cliches and gender stereotypes, with female characters limited to college girls who will do anything (including stripping, dancing on tables, and making out with each other) to impress boys in prestigious clubs, groupies who blow boys they don't know in public bathrooms, phycho-jealous girlfriends, and cold lawyers- minus Rashida Jones, whose character is a sympathetic, though ambiguous, lawyer.

Meanwhile, the men in the movie are portrayed as being obsessively hungry for an elevated social status; their every action reflective of their desire for approval and admiration. The interactions between men and women are limited to gratuitous sexual adventures in typical party scenes, romantic relationships ending badly, and inconclusive lawyer-client exchanges. Rather than "defining a generation", I would say the movie successfully portrays intelligent young men in higher academia, outwitting their teachers, lawyers, and girlfriends, until they end up extremely successful and alone (and by "end up" I mean that's where they are at 26).

Facebook did not endorse the movie at all, but didn't make too much of a fuss over its (in)accuracies either. A smart move, considering it's common knowledge that Hollywood does what it has to do to tell sell a story, and the multi-billion dollar business that is facebook knows that people don't care and, if anything, this will just make facebook bigger. After all, people will sooner take the time to write on their walls, "updating facebook status while watching facebook movie lmao," than deactivate their accounts due to questions about who invented facebook.

While The Social Network succeeded in entertainment value, it missed an opportunity to truly expose a generation and explore the reasons behind facebook's lasting success, the losses of privacy and real human contact, and the evolving need for an online social network. Perhaps because Sorkin himself does not use facebook and has claimed to dislike internet networking as a main form of socializing, it is instead a well-written and solidly executed movie about a law-suit that wouldn't be interesting to anyone other than straight white Harvard males were it not about the one thing that over 500 million people have in common right now. Certainly an attention-grabber, but is it an accurate reference for the image of a generation and is it worthy of the Oscar buzz it's received?

I would say it's more indulging than inspiring, more fun than fact. Just like facebook.

Images from here.