Ten minutes into the film, I considered it a very likely outcome that I would just hate this movie. Following my rather negative attitude towards “Zodiac” and my drowning in the sea of bored when watching “Benjamin Button”, I considered it rather likely that David Fincher is just not making the movies I would be interested in anymore. I hated everybody I saw on screen: all characters are so full of themselves, so full of vacuousness, if that is a proper word, so busy filling their lives to the brim with nothing. It was like watching the opening dinner party of Cloverfield all over again, where the director went at great lengths to make you hate everybody so that you would feel kind of guilty when the monster kills them off later. I wished for a monster to get rid of these Harvard kids.
After half an hour, I was captivated, and still by the same thing: that there is this parallel universe of American universities that needs to create institution after institution, tradition after tradition to convey a form of customer satisfaction not to current students, but to graduates who the university needs to feel attached to those institutions and traditions as long as they live – and ideally into the grave, when the last will and testament kicks in and provides additional funding for the next “Finals Club” (I still don’t know what that is, really).
Contrary to what you would see in other movies, this is not about smart people caving in under the pressure of this kind of system, or rebelling against it, but about how smart people live in it and with it and use the system to create a laboratory of life, setting up companies and girl-rating websites and playing with codes of honour and a lot of money to practice their skills for their future life outside.
That life outside begins for main character Mark Zuckerman when the company structures her established for his Facebook adventure get eaten away by outside investors and consultants. Fincher lines them all up: the college boy turned into CFO, the VC suits with an edge for New Economy, the self-declared internet market revolutionary douchebag living off past achievements, the decorative and hysterical girls interested mainly in the money, the dope and the playstation.
I will not engage in the discussion on whether this was a true representation on what happened around the founding of Facebook, because honestly I don’t care. But it is maybe worth mentioning that the characters populating The Social Network are all credible. Is this what makes me come back to being friends with Mr Fincher again? That he is able to tell this story (that could easily be overwhelmed by the audience’s reflections on accuracy, authenticity, legitimacy…) as a gripping tale of conflict between humans. Nerdy, creepy, annoying, vacuous, etc humans, but humans nonetheless.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-social-network/
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