A lot of people have been comparing The Social Network to Citizen Kane and Rashamon. It’s difficult to tell if they’re commenting on quality or storytelling style. I’m not going to jump to any conclusions about whether or not The Social Network is a new classic for the ages. Time is such a deciding factor for things like that. For all of its strengths The Social Network is an icy production, and I imagine it will suffer from the same type of backlash that Inception did once people figure out that they can’t relate to these characters at all. Not that I think a movie being hard to relate to is a bad thing, mind you. There are plenty of great movies whose characters are kept at arm’s length. The Social Network is one of them.
Citizen Kane and Rashamon are good touchstones for the storytelling style, though. The Social Network is told through a series of flashbacks. Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the founder of Facebook, gives depositions in two different lawsuits. His accusers in one case are the identical ultra-monied Wilklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), who claim that Mark's idea for Facebook was stolen from their idea for a website called The Harvard Connection that they enlisted Mark's help on. On the other side, Facebook CFO and Mark's former best friend Edwardo Severin (Andrew Garfield) sues after being frozen out of the company. The story is played out in flashbacks as these players give their depositions. Alan Sorkin’s script is both simpler and more complex than either Kane or Rashamon. Unlike those movies, distortion of the facts doesn’t seem to play a big part here. The audience is never given the impression that these testimonials and flashbacks are untruthful. If anything, each conflicting point of view offers only a different emphasis. Knowledge of specifically selected facts and events effect our allegiance as much as any manipulation or lie could, and in this way, The Social Network treats the idea of the same tale told from 3 different points of view much more subtly than its predecessors. On the other hand, the aggressive, non-linear crosscutting between Mark’s deposition for Edwardo’s lawsuit, Edwardo’s deposition for his lawsuit, Mark’s deposition for the Winklevoss’ lawsuit, the Winklevoss’ deposition for their lawsuit, and finally Edwardo’s deposition as a witness at the Winklevoss’ lawsuit will make your head spin. Mine is spinning just typing that last sentence, yet screenwriter Sorkin makes it work.
The acting in The Social network is uniformly great. The actors excel equally as individuals and as an ensemble. Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg is not world’s apart from the other nerd-chic roles he’s known for, but the audience sympathy he usually feeds on is drained dry here. It’s disconcerting to witness the social misfit as a shark. Armie Hammer disappears into his dual roles as both Winklevoss twins so convincingly that I didn’t even realize it was one actor until after the movie. Justin Timberlake is the scene stealer as Sean Parker, the controversial, forward-thinking party animal cradle-robber behind Napster. He acts as a dual foil for the movie's two leads. He's the social butterfly to Mark's uptight workaholic, and the tech business visionary to Edwardo's small fry plans for financing Facebook through advertisements. As obnoxious and dangerous as he is, Sean is the only one who dreams big enough to realize Facebook’s full potential.
There are great moments scattered throughout the history of movies where a character delivers an extended monologue gratuitously spelling out that character’s personal mantra. It’s not a very subtle technique and tends to stops a movie in its tracks. However, there is a pantheon of movies that manage to make this flourish work. In Seven Samurai, for example, when Toshiro Mifune's character accidentally reveals his peasant upbringing in his emotional defense of the villagers. Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview does it in There Will Be Blood, in the campfire revelation of his general hatred of all people. Though I can’t think of the specific example off the top of my head, I’m sure Charles Foster Kane does it at some point. Here, at a table in a crowded San Francisco nightclub, Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker celebrate the expansion of the Facebook empire. A wild-eyed, coked-up Sean exclaims that now is their time, that power is theirs to reach out and take. Unlike in other great monologues in cinema, Sean has to almost scream at the top of his lungs to be heard over the booming bass and drum electro, as intense neon green and pink lights wash over his face. Our era, the Facebook era, is loud, fast, and scary, and this, The Social Network’s best scene, illustrates this point viscerally. When the movie can’t even stop the speed and noise to give a character half a minute to monologue, you know we’ve arrived in a brave new world.
There are great moments in The Social Network where we start to see these guys’ lives profoundly effected by the Frankenstein’s Monster of their own creation. At first they’re conscious of it. When some girls tell Edwardo to "Facebook them" so they can hook up later, he and Zuckerberg are just as excited about the fact that they’re using the verb "to Facebook" as they are about the proposed hook up. But it’s soon out of their control. Edwardo’s girlfriend freaks out at him because his facebook status says that he’s single, leading to their breakup. Even more poignantly, the movie ends with Mark’s futile attempts to find emotional connection in the program he himself designed to simulate emotional connection. He’s trapped in a madness of his own invention. When Facebook develops a life of its own outside the intention of its creators, it’s not told through cheesy montages of people Facebooking, but rather through the way it specifically effects Mark and Edwardo’s lives.
Although I think The Social Network is fantastic, I’m still not necessarily singing the praises of David Fincher. His direction is solid and the movie turned out amazing. There’s something to be said to his credit even for source material selection alone, not to mention casting and general guidance. But from Alien3 to Fight Club to Benjamin Button to The Social Network – which for the record blows those other movies out of the water – I’m still not convinced that Fincher is one of the greats. He’s a very capable, no-frills ringleader of a crazy, crazy circus. I’ve heard that people are reading some symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome into Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. Part of me wonders if we shouldn’t be diagnosing Fincher instead. Though his movies are technical marvels and often extremely exciting, he seems just as baffled by human emotion and interaction as his protagonist here. Thank god The Social Network’s plot and snappy dialogue clip along at such an exciting pace that we don’t have time to wonder at the emotional arm’s-length the audience is kept at in this movie, and really in all of Fincher’s. His most ‘emotional’ work, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is stale, false, and cardboard. Fincher has many, many strengths, but don’t expect any revelations about the human experience. I suppose that makes the director a perfect fit for the material. This is not a criticism of The Social Network, just an observation. I’ve been trying to figure out why this movie works better than Fincher’s other recent efforts, and I think that’s it. Rashida Jones has a line toward the end of this movie that I think is supposed to be some sort of thematic revelation about Mark Zuckerberg. You'll know it when you hear it. It makes no sense, and if this is really how we’re supposed to feel about Zuckerberg, it just illustrates how emotionally tone deaf Fincher is. Luckily, The Social Network is not about emotional revelation, but rather the opposite. It’s about the emotionally stunted people who have THE POWER, and how they got it. With that in mind, it’s a masterpiece.
-Ben