REVIEW: The Social Network (2)

MAN OF THE TIMES

If ever there was a doubt about the importance of script and screenplay to cinema, David Fincher's The Social Network should be enough to dispel it. Breezy, powerful and riveting all at once, Fincher, a master of the thriller genre (Se7en, Panic Room, Zodiac) and expert at exploring twisted human minds, adds Mark Zuckerberg, the curiously almost sub-human founder of Facebook, to his list of specimen. Except, this one isn't entirely fiction. The idea of a dysfunctional genius, too obsessed with a machine and mathematical problems to connect with real human beings on a meaningful plane, and the exposition, of endless hours spent before the computer and of a boring deposition in a closed room may not seem ideal stuff for entertaining cinema. But only if you lack the intuitive creativity of Fincher and his writer Aaron Sorkin.

In their hands, the birth of Facebook and the murky lives of those who created it and brought the world even closer, (not necessarily in a more useful way), is a nail-biting tale of high drama and grand betrayal. Zuckerberg, superbly essayed by Jesse Eisenberg, doesn't display a likeable bone in his body. It is to the man's credit that he allowed such a film to be made in the first place -- but then again, he somehow doesn't seem to care about the world one way or another.

In the opening scene, he's in a pub on a date with a girl he presumably likes, but his cold forthrightness (or, more accurately, obnoxiousness) puts her off and she walks out on him. His revenge is shocking, yet, in the light of what follows, totally believable. He puts up gory details of her breasts and bra size in the most unflattering terms on his blog for all of Harvard to read. Later he pulls out photos of all the women studying on campus and puts them together for his mates to rate them on their looks. The programme becomes so popular, it crashes the Harvard server! And thus, Zuckerberg, who's unlikely to land a date anyway, obliterates his own chances, by delivering the ultimate sexist snub to all those who may never go out with him.

The treatment he later metes out to his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is almost identical, although in a different context. You hate the guy. You marvel at his lack of grace. You feel sorry for him. You even kinda like him. You barely get to know him. 

It was perhaps his acute lack of social skills that drove Zuckerberg to start a social networking site like Facebook. Yet, even that wasn't his own idea, but one he stole from rich twins on campus, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) who went on to sue him, as did Eduardo, for cutting him out while under the influence of playboy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) the founder of Napster. It's understandable why Zuckerberg took such a liking to Parker. He owned all the charm and guile Zuckerberg lacked, and yet was, in his own way, a genius. 

Facebook has now half a billion subscribers. Zuckerberg is sitting on unimaginable sums of money (the film suggests it doesn't interest him much). The cases against him have been settled (again for unimaginable sums of money). Underlying the fascinating tale of an eccentric genius and his creation is the idea of cold alienation, single-minded ruthlessness and a pursuit of ideas not necessarily beneficial for the race, but catchy and profitable nonetheless.

In a way, Mark Zuckerberg is the ultimate metaphor for his times.