The Social Network

"You’re going to go through life thinking that
girls don’t like you because you’re a geek.
And I want you to know from the bottom
of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll
be because you’re an asshole.”

                                          -;  Erica Albrecht

The first scene of David Fincher’s The Social Network ends with a zinger -; Aaron Sorkin at his best -; delivered up like a bucket of ice-cold water over the head of a drunk man. In Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) face there’s a momentary softening, a glimpse through the black pupils of a detached young man. Eisenberg’s performance is one of utter unflappability, broken three times: this one, a later encounter with the same woman in a Cambridge bar, and a scene where he betrays his best friend, by proxy, from behind glass walls, via an oily, overweight, be-suited lawyer. Otherwise, he is logical, contained and brilliant. His answers skip steps. He gives no ground.  He is equally relentless with lawyers, school administrators, his business associates, friends and his adversaries. No one who has seen the film will forget his response to the question: “Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?”

Opposite Zuckerberg’s genius is a dynamo: Watch Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) fly up the stairs of Kirkland House to scribble an algorithm on the window in grease pencil. Watch him dance across the floor during Caribbean Night at the Jewish fraternity. Watch him try to juggle his cell phone as his maniacal girlfriend sets fire to his apartment. Watch him stalk out the Facebook offices, collar perfectly starched, turning swiftly on his heel to deliver a humiliating almost sucker-punch to Sean Parker’s (Justin Timberlake) baffled face. He is every inch the South American aristocrat: emotional, aggressive, committed and confident. His effort seems that much greater than Zuckerberg’s because it is so external, so when he is thrown aside we feel what he does: devastation - the death of a friendship.

Geeks and Assholes populate The Social Network, whether in the form of our protagonists, Sean Parker (founder of Napster, played by Justin Timberlake), Max Minghella’s Divya Narendra or most successfully in Armie Hammer’s Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss. They are precocious and arrogant. They are always ready with a sly response. They are the hope for the future of America, scions of the country’s best university, and they are all fully of witty repartee. The quality of patter is reminiscent of such well-worn examples as His Girl Friday, or more recently and relevantly, “The West Wing.” It is refined for our age: faster, smoother, more controlled and less overtly passionate. There’s no nostalgia here. It is a testament to the writer, director and editors of this film (as well as the actors) that the 162-page script, thick with dialogue, clocks in at just over 2 hours. We can appreciate that Fincher, one of our most celebrated “young” directors, has not thrown out Hollywood’s style, but uses the magnetism that attracts us to the multiplex rather than the art house and adapts it to our current culture. To whit, hear the Winkelvi (as Zuckerberg coins them), hulking, model-perfect, crew rowing twins with brains, when Tyler (the more aggressive of the pair) remarks on his desire to beat the crap out of Zuckerberg for stealing the idea for Facebook: “I’m 6’5”, 220, and there’s two of me.” That got a laugh in the theater.

There is a tremendous amount of comedy in the film: one-liners, excellent physical gags (See Zuckerberg accidentally smashing multiple beer bottles against the wall), shot drinking and barfing co-eds (always good for a chuckle), bored and boring academic administrators, and most memorably, a pair of scenes featuring a live chicken. The beauty here is that none of the comedy gets in the way. The chicken story begins as simple collegiate shenanigans. After we have laughed about it through a series of cutbacks, the chicken becomes the first betrayal in a series that turns simple jealousy between two friends into a billion dollar lawsuit.

And so we come to a question: Where is pivotal scene? Where is the moment where jealousy becomes betrayal? The actual moment (as in Shakespeare) is kept off-screen, but the setup is obvious. “It’s not a dish best served cold! It’s a
dish best served immediately and relentlessly!”

                                            -; Sean Parker

In the dark, crushing dance music plays illegally loud. The music beats inside your chest the way it only can if you’ve had three tabs of Ecstasy and about 100 drinks. The camera pans across Hot Box girls in silver lame pants up to a balcony. Instead of the music imperceptibly dropping back as we begin the scene, it stays in our faces and in our bodies as Eisenberg and Timberlake execute a perfect scene, placed in the center of this driving music, completely audible and infinitely more exciting for the sound around it. The lights of the club pink and purple on Parker’s devil face as he spins his Mephistophelean tale of poor, pathetic Roy Raymund, the founder of Victoria’s Secret who threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge after selling the juggernaut brand when it had achieved a fraction of its eventual potential. Again we’re reminded of Erica Albrecht, the engine of Zuckerberg’s discontent: “Do you ever think of that girl?” Zuckerberg asks. “No!” responds Sean Parker with a baffled, poor-you look on his face.

From here, we go simply and quickly to the inevitable. There is a misunderstanding: Saverin’s efforts to secure advertising in New York are looked upon by the Palo Alto crowd as irrelevant to the Great Work. Saverin’s reaction to freeze the company’s tiny bank account is a petty gesture. Parker had already secured half a million dollars of financing for the fledgling company. Freezing the bank account is both a threat and none at all. Saverin is simultaneously seen as irrelevant and counterproductive. It’s here that Zuckerberg turns. We proceed simply to the end of the film, friends split, checks written, life proceeding as in the newspapers.

There is an element of elevation that’s missing from the film. We see monitors clicking over to mark 1,000,000 members, but we don’t see a million people logging on. We hear about the progress of Facebook in Bosnia (“They don’t have roads but they have Facebook.”), but we have no understanding of its effect. The ending of the film is deflating: poor Mark Zuckerberg, in a dark conference room endlessly refreshing his browser in the hopes that his long ex-girlfriend will respond to his electronic advances. Where are the millions of people across the world connecting (or even one)? Maybe the filmmakers know that we are all too aware of the effects already. They may be right, there are currently 500 million members. This deflation is tied to a literary device: a constant questioning of magnitudes. Zuckerberg’s lawyer mishears 22,000 as 2,200. Sixty-five million dollars is referred to as a speeding ticket. When the lawyers question Zuckerberg about his jealousy of Eduardo’s being “punched” for the Phoenix, he responds with this:

Ma’am I know you’ve done your homework
and so you know that money isn’t a big part
of my life, but at the moment I could buy
Mt. Auburn St., take the Phoenix Club and
turn it into my ping pong room.

While the story may lack elevation (some would say pomposity), the filmmaking does not. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score is nothing short of perfection. The simple piano cue which follows the first scene of the film (as Zuckerberg flees his humiliation at the hands of Erica Albrecht) is simple and perfect. The arrangement of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” that accompanies the Henley Regatta is overblown and powerful with a sly sense of humor (like the Winkelvi). The score is lonely, yearning, exciting and carries momentum through the entire film, contributing to the editorial, rather than glossing over its mistakes (there are not many). The choice of these two artists is perfect. They are emotional, electronic and alienated: an apt musical analog to the quality of the film. Ren Klyce’s sound design is clear and aggressive: While the film takes place in banal locations (restaurants, bars, offices, conference rooms, etc.) Klyce’s design is transcendent. He complements Jeff Cronenweth’s flat lighting in the Harvard AdBoard with a tremendously aggressive fluorescent hum. It’s so present it actually pushes on your brain while you watch the scene. Klyce never backs down from coordinating competing elements: In the opening scene of the film and in the Ruby Skye scene mentioned above, he uses placement and clarity rather than volume to distinguish between the voices of the dialogue and the din of the background action and the music. More than any other film in recent memory, we feel like we are there.

A single actor plays the Winkelvoss twins. Armie Hammer deserves credit, but his performance is the work of two talented editors, a completely unseen actor (Josh Pence), an experienced director and expert visual effects artists. This a true expression of art through the use of technology, we’ve left the world of “Big Business” and will no longer be subjected to clumsy split screens of actors staring in each other’s general direction while they awkwardly talk to themselves. Instead, we have twin patter, elegant, funny, driving, well-played and specific to each. Visually, the only way to tell the two apart are their hairdos. Tyler is more aggressive: he tears the doorknob off the door of Larry Summers office. Cameron needs to be convinced by Tyler to take their gripe outside the sphere of the collegiate and into the courtroom. Such a feat could not have been executed without the work of artists like Fincher, Sorkin and Armie Hammer, but also by those we generally think of as “technicians.” All of the technicians on this film, Fincher and Sorkin, included are craftsmen working at the top of their game and that is where the success of the film lies. There are missteps to be sure (the last line of the film for one), but all the contributors to the film are Oscar contenders, and more importantly, they have made a good movie.

                                        Luca Borghese