Movie Review: The Social Network

The Social Network is a film by David Fincher and tells the true story of how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook between 2003 and 2004 while he was a college student at Harvard. For twenty-year-olds today, Facebook may not mean anything, but about 15 years ago it revolutionized the world of the Internet and was the first real social network as we know it today.

The first sequence of The Social Network sees Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) and Erica (Rooney Mara) having a lively conversation in a pub, over a beer that will not be drank. The dialogue, driven by the boy's cold wit, is so tense and cutting that neither of them can look away from each other for more than a handful of seconds, just like the viewer who is overwhelmed by the incessant flow of words, sarcasm and ambition.

"You exhaust me, going out with you is like doing a step class for an hour", says Erica shortly before the last cynical and (perhaps) involuntary thrust from Mark, who is not at all satisfied with the girl's level of education (she is enrolled at Boston, he is at Harvard).

The clash then heads towards the inevitable finale, with Erica definitively breaking off her relationship with Mark. While his face does not show any particular disturbance, the rest of his body betrays the suffering of the future founder of Facebook. After leaving the club, he begins a race against time to return to the university dormitory, passing through the various parks and neoclassical buildings of the campus.

David Fincher opens his eighth feature film in the most (post)classical way possible, with an uninterrupted sequence of shots and reverse shots that attempt to visually recreate the combative structure of Aaron Sorkin 's Oscar-winning screenplay.

When we see Mark walking briskly across campus, accompanied only by the small opening credits and the unforgettable soundtrack (also Oscar-winning) by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Denver filmmaker follows him from afar, creating a tension that even casual connoisseurs of his great filmography can easily recognize.

In fact, it seems that Mark is escaping from a hypothetical "crime scene", passing unseen among the people he (doesn't) meet on the street. Once he gets to his room, he turns on his computer, opens a beer (the first of a long series) and the chronological reporting of the various steps of the film starts, a slavish reconstruction of what will follow and which will be important for the courtrooms.

Flowing from one crime scene to another, Mark commits a crime himself: he exposes his relationship with Erica on his blog (LiveJournal.com), hacks into the Harvard network archives and invents in one night a site that compares the profile photos (in slang, Facebook) of the university's female students (facemash.com).

Fincher, the master that he is, treats the story like a real thriller with a non-linear time structure that jumps from the days when Zuckerberg (a perfect Jesse Eisenberg for the part) created the first version of the site to the trials that a few years later saw him named as a defendant by former university colleagues and various former friends, above all Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), and the Winklevoss brothers (Army Hammer and Josh Pence) together with Divya Narendra (Max Minghella).

We are basically witnessing how these (hateful) kids from wealthy families have become incredibly rich by exploiting our desire to make our private information public, which has become the norm in 2022, even if Facebook no longer seems to be the preferred means to do so, at least among the younger ones. Oh, to the group mentioned above we must add Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster, another name that will mean little to young people but that allowed us older ones to obtain so much beautiful music from 1999 onwards.

The Social Network has a breakneck pace, a steely screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires), beautifully directed actors by Fincher, and splendid music by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Atticus Ross.

"You don't make 500 million friends without making a few enemies" reads the official poster for The Social Network. From this sentence we can intuit the approach that David Fincher , fresh from his most important direction Zodiac (2007) and the pleasant Fitzgeraldian digression The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), has used to stage the funny but ruthless pseudo-biography of Mark Zuckerberg conceived by Aaron Sorkin.

Today one of the most important spiritual heirs of Alfred Hitchcock, Fincher mixes the genre that consecrated him in the American postmodern panorama (the neo-thriller) with the historical reconstruction of an event (the birth of Facebook) capable of changing forever the way we see and experience the world. Our gaze is in fact constantly mediated by a screen (computer or cell phone), our window onto the backyard through which we look out into the lives of others (the backyard is the social network).

Personally, this film made me feel a bit uneasy and also a bit angry towards the 25-year-old me who signed up to Facebook in 2007, which was normal and began sharing data and thoughts on a private platform owned by people to whom I wouldn't have trusted even a pen for five minutes.

Over time I stopped using the site and you won't find me on Instagram or other social networks of the sort, but I admit that I regret a bit having lent myself to this game in which the only winners are precisely these Harvard students that we see competing in Fincher's film. And the height of it all is that the founder of Facebook was a person with more fingers on his hand than friends!

In the case of The Social Network, the life spied on, dismantled and reconstructed, on which we cast our greatest suspicions, is precisely that of Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg. Guilty or not guilty? This is the question that arises as the story proceeds at a very fast pace (almost exhaustingly), divided into multiple temporal planes chosen based on the two legal cases that force him to sit at a discussion table full of lawyers (before the eventual trial, so it never becomes court drama).

The faster the film advances towards its conclusion, the more clues are scattered that are useful for unraveling the mystery (one could even say discovering the murderer).

Did Mark really steal the idea from the Cameron twins and Tyler Winklevoss (an amused Armie Hammer in a dual role)? Did Mark really betray the trust of his best friend, as well as Facebook's main financier, Eduardo Severin (a great Andrew Garfield)?

Mark is the great mystery of the film both because many will doubt the representation he represents (is this the real Mark Zuckerberg?) and because until the end the idea remains that the antagonist of the story is precisely its protagonist, exactly as will also be the case for Michael Fassbender's Steve Jobs in the 2015 film of the same name by Danny Boyle (also written by Sorkin).

In any case, we must not forget that the film does not report the facts as they actually happened, so we must try not to make hasty judgments about the people involved based on what we see on the screen. I have no doubt that Sorkin managed to reproduce well the personalities of all those who in one way or another contributed to the birth of Facebook, but he himself said that he took many liberties to make the story compelling.

In conclusion, as in one of those cyclical structures so dear to Aaron Sorkin, to fully understand the reason why David Fincher's film is one of the most important films of the 2000s, we need to go back to that initial discussion between Mark and Erica.

If Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) was a treatise on the act of watching and, consequently, on what it means to be a cinematographic spectator (who is the "voyeur" par excellence if not the spectator who intrudes into the "private lives" of the characters?), The Social Network should be understood as a premonitory nightmare that shows what we have lost and can still lose with an invention like Facebook.

Seeing Eisenberg's impassive mask, whose angular and immobile face perfectly matches the almost unrealistic idea of Fincher/Sorkin's multi-billionaire but evil genius, one cannot help but wonder what he is hiding, concealing, plotting, feeling in the face of the total disintegration of emotional bonds.

In this anxiety to know and understand the true face behind Mark's profile/mask, his "digital" body also plays a fundamental role, capable of moving fluidly (like the information that travels unseen on the Internet) in a cynical, conflictual, at times cruel universe, but made in his likeness.

For example, the character of the excellent Justin Timberlake, the slimy creator of Napster Sean Parker, seems more a product of his degeneration than a real human being (is everyone like that in Silicon Valley?).

Furthermore, this universe is such because, from a cinematic point of view, it benefits from the wonderful photography of Jeff Cronenweth, who had already collaborated with Fincher for Fight Club (1999).

As if he wanted to update the acid green tones of the Wachowski sisters' Matrix trilogy (1999), Cronenweth imagines a liquid world stripped of its brightest colours, in a mix of pale, almost faded greens and blues, which recall the inconsistency of digital; an intuition that he will take up again with Fincher also for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014).

From reflecting on the logic of observing and being observed, we have moved on to reflecting on the ways in which we interact through the computer, that is, without the physical presence of our person and sometimes at the mercy of illusion and deception (who is really behind this profile?). And the one who invented this new sociality of ours is condemned to be the loneliest person on this planet: this is his real crime, against himself (but not only).

In short, if Fincher's goal was to unsettle viewers, he succeeded with me. While watching the film, and even a while after, I thought a lot about how easily we all share confidential personal information on private sites without even trying to protect ourselves from any bad consequences. Is this why Quentin Tarantino considers it the best film since 2000? I don't know, but it's definitely worth a watch! Ciao!