A little help from his friends

The topic on many filmgoers’ lips these days: David Fincher’s The Social Network. Controversial as its catchphrase (“Punk. Genius. Traitor. Billionaire.”), it’s getting plenty of Oscar buzz already, not to mention viral online chat — though, apparently, not on Facebook itself, where links and film clips from the movie are verboten.

To say that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would find little to befriend in The Social Network is an understatement. It does depict the young billionaire (portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg) in an unflattering light much of the time, and plays loose with the facts for dramatic purposes (Zuckerberg complained to Oprah, “this is my life, so I know it’s not so dramatic”). But all in all, it’s actually sympathetic to the FB founder: you end up admiring Zuckerberg for creating the perfect beast, an all-consuming online mechanism that has transformed so many people’s social lives.

Director Fincher is firing on all cylinders here (after lackluster fare like Panic Room, the almost-great Zodiac and the Hollywood turn of Benjamin Button). You know he’s back in feverish, zeitgeist filmmaking mode in the first 15 minutes, during which Harvard undergrad Zuckerberg gets dumped, gets drunk, spews his hate onto a blog and starts hacking his way into the female dorms’ websites to post coed pictures online in a site he calls FaceMash. His stunt draws so much online traffic it crashes Harvard’s web server.

Did all of this really happen? Haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, so I don’t know if it’s faithful even to that nonfiction account. But Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay crackles with wit, tension, and danger. It’s Oscar bait for sure.

Tech geeks have cried foul at The Social Network, saying it panders to a public perception that most Net geeks are asocial stalkers who trawl for their wares online. But Fincher does something that makes it all the more disturbing: sure, he shows Zuckerberg, alone in his dorm room on a Saturday night, beer in hand, in front of a laptop, torpedoing the world of social relationships as we know it; but this is paired with scenes of young coeds eagerly lining up to play drunken games with the male “future leaders” of America in Harvard dorm rooms, scenes that quickly devolve to dropped panties and outtakes from Girls Gone Wild. You end up not being able to say who’s more depraved.

Fincher finds something dark and sinister in this double standard, and he’s clearly in Se7en or Fight Club mode here: the nightl is full of danger; the world is an ugly place. The opening sequence is a bravura display of where we’re at — or were actively heading — back in 2003 when Facebook was being born.

Framed around a pair of lawsuits against Zuckerberg, the film traces how FB came to be, but doesn’t really explain why. Conventional wisdom is that the Harvard student was less than socially skilled, and thought it would be a great way to connect more people online — with volunteered personal info, photos and posts, and the infamous “relationship status” button. Others say he did it to impress a girl who dumped him. It’s hard to believe that, for centuries, people went about dating and hooking up the old-fashioned way: bugging friends, asking around to see who was dating who. In one keystroke (more or less), Zuckerberg opened the books. On everybody.

Sympathy for the devil: Zuckerberg, Christy and Eduardo get the full Sean Parker Treatment in LA.

As a casual Facebook user, I’m still not really sure what makes his site so popular, compared to Friendster, MySpace or other social networking options. Perhaps the key word, which Sorkin manages to drop into the script, is “cool.” When Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) wants to solicit ads to keep the fledgling site going, Zuckerberg balks: “What we have going for us is, without ads, we’re cool. We don’t want to lose that.” Of course, the apparent disconnect between making a cool product everyone wants, and failing to be cool yourself, is a delicious irony best appreciated by billionaire geeks and nerds.

It’s interesting to compare this cautionary business tale with another recent movie, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. There are similarities. Both take place largely in conference rooms, where deals are made or depositions are taken. The action hovers around open computer terminals. And in both movies women play marginal roles. But whereas Wall Street 2 throws in a high-speed motorcycle race merely to keep the audience from slipping into a stupor, The Social Network doesn’t need action to spice things up. (Though it does have a dandy crew race on the Thames, a good display of Fincher’s cinematic flair.)

But when you cut to the chase, the world depicted in The Social Network is a deeply sexist one. The women are pretty much prey, there to be hunted, bedded, stoned and thrown away; they’re belittled and flamed on blogs, their images thrown online for comparison like a meat market; or they’re depicted as that double stereotype, the hot Asian chick who turns out to be a stalker (Brenda Song). The only one who remains above it all is Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), the girl who dumps Zuckerberg. She’s “The One Who Got Away” (a phrase with a certain serial killer ring to it). All this adds to the creepy tone of The Social Network, which reminds us why David Fincher was one of the directors to watch in the ‘90s, capable of injecting himself beneath the skin of a social zeitgeist like a renegade virus. There’s an underlying theme here about friendships — what they mean, how they mutate, how they refresh every few minutes like a Facebook page. Fincher digs deep into the mystery of human relationships without ever getting gooey or sentimental.

Kudos also to Eisenberg, who, while playing a variation on his usual persona, is gifted with whip-smart dialogue and a quizzical expression that seems to look straight through other human beings like they’re so much code.

Another surprise is Justin Timberlake, taking on the role of Satan Himself — or at least the movie’s version, Sean Parker, creator of Napster. His scene with Eisenberg, set in a smoky nightclub surrounded by eerie blue light, is perhaps meant to suggest the dark seduction of viral Internet fame: a chance to flash two big “Eff You” signs at the corporate world, the girls who rejected you in high school, the jocks who stuffed you into trash cans and pretty much the entire planet’s blind indifference to your genius. (This is contrasted with Eduardo’s long-suffering role as the levelheaded moneyman.) Armie Hammer meanwhile plays (through CGI magic) a pair of Harvard twins — Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — who grow outraged after their idea for a “Harvard Connection” website is usurped by the manic Zuckerberg (or so they contend).

There’s an interesting angle here about Facebook “never being finished.” It’s an ongoing project, Zuckerberg says at one point, “like fashion.” This is now pretty much clear to Facebook users who continue to adapt to the changing apps and appearance of their social network on a regular basis; like co-dependents in a relationship, they lob complaints and boo Zuckerberg whenever minute changes are made in their security settings. They stew and fuss, they threaten to delete their accounts. Yet they keep coming back.

It’s interesting, too, how people nowadays value their personal “privacy” so highly, yet continue to post things that would never pass the sobriety test in the light of day. The recent arrest of Carlos Celdran also shows us how rare concrete political activism has become — the simple tactic of getting yourself arrested for a good cause, which was so key to ‘60s politics, now seems like a novel move. But the truth is, most young people today would never follow suit, because… well, they don’t want an arrest appearing on their records or their résumé. Because of how it looks. Yet they freely allow the world a peek into their personal, less-than-pristine lives on the Internet via blogs and social networks. Weird, huh?

The music plays a strong supporting role in The Social Network: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide a soundtrack of eerie atmospheric wisps countered by pulsing industrial themes. But another musical surprise comes during the final scene: Fincher managed to land a big marlin by inducing the remaining Beatles to allow one of their tunes to appear on the soundtrack. He gets extra points for choosing Baby, You’re A Rich Man, John Lennon’s twisted look at wealth and fame (from 1967’s “Magical Mystery Tour”). After all, he could have gone with the much more obvious, sentimental choice: A Little Help From My Friends.