THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010): Are You on Facebook?
November 3rd 2010 09:40
Category: No Category
Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg get to test the limits of their friendship as Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of Facebook
First Mark vents online, calling Erica a bitch while drunk-blogging. Try explaining that concept to your grandmother. Then he proceeds to create Facemash, a forerunner to the later hotness feature, using the photos of Harvard’s female student body for multiple choice comparison purposes. The campus server crashes due to overload, Mark and best friend and later Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s (Andrew Garfield, Never Let Me Go, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) social rating soars and the rest is (quite interesting) history…
Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) faces some time with the lawyers in The Social Network (2010)
Incidentally, Saverin was Mezrich’s main source of information before his case settlement, which could account in part for the emotional authenticity captured on screen. Other of the film’s assets include Justin Timberlake who almost steals the company as infamous Napster founder Sean Parker, who can spot the real thing when he sees it, and Armie Hammer in a doubly delicious and humorous turn as model Ivy-leaguers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network (2010)
There is some debate in the media about the film’s alleged “overly sexist portrayal of women.” Well guess what? In reality, society and especially young and inexperienced adult males are, for the most part, overly sexist when it comes to women, and so are the institutions that happen to be portrayed in the film. See if you can figure out whether Harvard’s dean or the financiers the young entrepreneurs meet with are male or female and whether there are more male or female lawyers in any room at any point in time. This is one of the most admirable features of The Social Network – it does not shy away from portraying the unpleasant and underwhelming aspects of our contemporary life and culture which are normally non-PC to talk about. Not talking about an issue does not make it disappear, quite the contrary.
Like status consciousness for example – social, financial, power-based and present in Harvard and its elite Phoenix Club especially, is something that comes across as a seminal force – this is not only the mindset the boys buy into, but many girls do too. Mark and Eduardo are delighted with the initial results of their online feat, as it makes it so much easier to get laid and people start to automatically know their names. While figuring out how the world works you still need to work yourself out as well however, and that, as they say, ain’t easy.
Interestingly, the famous gen y “I want to be a billionaire” motto was not a driving factor in the Facebook project as much as a sense of perceived social exclusion. Communication is the topic, after all. Counter to its addictively frustrating and shallow raison d'ętre, at its heart The Social Network is paradoxically, about an inability to connect.
Review by Patricia Bieszk
© Copyright P. Bieszk 2010
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