The Social Network
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
The Social Network is an excellent piece of filmmaking. It is absolutely an Oscar contender, and rightfully so. You may not like the characters, but they get under your skin and make you angry and even sad. When it comes down to it, The Social Network is not a story about the founding of Facebook; it's a story about the destruction of a friendship.
Aaron Sorkin is one of my favorite writers. I appreciate his talent all the more for making me care about Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, or at least their fictional counterparts. These are not the kind of guys I would choose to befriend in my own life, but they feel real. Zuckerberg is a class-A jerk, and he's both condescending and self-righteous. Yet I got the impression that he really wanted to be genuinely liked and accepted. I thought he deserved neither, I will hasten to add. Still, though, he wasn't entirely a black-hearted villain. My favorite characters have layers (hi, Zuko!), and while Mark Zuckerberg of The Social Network will never make the list, layers he did have. My sympathies lay far more with Eduardo (who is also not the type of person I would hang out with; rich frat boys who have meaningless casual sex with girls they just met in bathroom stalls are not particularly endearing to me), which to be fair was probably the filmmakers' intention. For some reason, he saw something in Mark that no one else did. The first time we see him, he hurries up to Mark's dorm to ask if he's okay after a break-up. Eduardo the character seems to me to be a good person who was just in over his head, and whose best friend ultimately cared more about fame and fortune (and proving to his ex that he's the better person, which he absolutely isn't) than he did about him. There is clear hurt in his face during his deposition scenes with Mark; he's trying to understand why things turned out the way they did. Mark isn't really his enemy, but he stomped all over their friendship, and now there's a lawsuit and things between them will obviously never be the same again. It's a fascinating character study if nothing else.
My one huge beef with the movie was its portrayal of women. Apart from Mark's ex-girlfriend Erica Albright and Rashida Jones's character, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any examples of smart, capable female characters in The Social Network. Mark's sexism is particularly rage-inducing. He sees himself as superior to Erica. He talks down to her, tries to impress her with his vast knowledge, insults her school, and calls her a bitch on the internet when she breaks up with him. He then proceeds to hack into the webpages of each of Harvard's dormitories, steal girls' facebook pictures, and put them on a website for guys to compare their hotness. In what universe is this okay? Ours, apparently, but that's beside the point. Most of the rest of the women in the film are limited to being groupies or drunken partygoers. Eduardo dates Christy (after hooking up with her in a bathroom stall), who turns out to be utterly psychotic. Facebook is a boys' club; there are no women among its founders, and the one female intern who is given dialogue is treated only as a sex object by the male characters. It bothered me, and what's worse is that the film seemed to be implicitly condoning it. No. Just no. Women are people, not sex objects, and they're just as intelligent as men, thank you very much.
So, my verdict on The Social Network? Well-written, well-acted, well-scored, with some troubling sexist attitudes. Go see it - and then talk about it. I do hope it wins Aaron Sorkin an Oscar. And I really hope Mark Zuckerberg is not really that big a jerk in real life, because I use Facebook far too much and I don't want to financially support a misogynist.
8.5/1o.
