You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount.

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2013)

"The more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook, the more convinced I become that the software currently shaping this generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better." - Zadie Smith
"Citizen Kane" with Wi-Fi, David Fincher's "The Social Network" watches as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg (Jesse Eisenburg) moves from hot-shot hacker to head of a sprawling media empire. Like Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles' classic, Zuckerburg makes enemies, loses friends, and becomes increasingly isolated, even as his globally successful social-networking empire grows and blooms. Like "Kane", the film then ends with its own "Rosebud" moment, a sequence designed to "explain" the inner motivations of its lead. Here Zuckerburg sits at a computer, refreshing an internet page in the hopes that he's "liked" and "befriended" by Erica Albright, the one girl who got away.
Written by Aaron Sorkin, a writer renowned for his rapid-fire dialogue, "Social" plays like a slick, topic-of-the-week TV movie. Sorkin's style is meant to conjure up the works of Howard Hawks, and classics like "Sweet Smell of Success", "Ace in The Hole" and "Force of Evil", but the result is something else; more Coppola's "Tucker" or Scorsese's "Aviator", big biographies that don't realise how thin they really are.
Much of the film watches as Zuckerberg clashes with the Winklevoss twins, two wealthy Harvard students who hire Zuckerberg to create a social media site. Other scenes see Zuckerberg feuding with an ex-girlfriend (Rooney Mara), the girl who spurs him to hatefully create Facemash, a website which allows male students to rank and compare female students.
"Social's" script was based on a bit of revenge fiction by Eduardo Saverin, a book which left out facts and was designed to both defame Zuckerberg and portray Saverin as a buddy betrayed. Fincher's film is kinder, but tells the same lies. It portrays Zuckerberg as a loner and Harvard outsider (and Autistic robot?), when the opposite was true. It portrays him as being a middle class guy amongst rich snobs, when Zuckerberg's family was fairly well connected. Strangely, the film completely removes all traces of Zuckerberg's Jewishness, and ignores how Jewish work ethics, support networks and familial bonds influenced and spurred him. Zuckerberg's isolation and woman troubles are also fudged; he's been with girlfriend/wife Priscilla Chan well before Facebook and the film's Erica Albright character is a complete fiction. Unsurprisingly, the film opts for a kindly portrait of Saverin. He's sketched as a poor kid who's frozen out of eventual profits, but the real Saverin partied money away, defaulted on loans and forced Zuckerberg's parents to put up the cash to float Facebook and pay for servers.
Why ditch reality? Probably because Sorkin is determined to boil his tale down to what he thinks is a clever irony: the kid who created a social network and who dreamt of connecting and fitting in, is left without friends and connections. Sorkin's telling the archetypal tale of the Jewish outsider who feels worthless, wants to fit in with rich gentiles, but never quite can. "Did you like being nothing?" Fincher's Zuckerberg yells, "Did you like being nobody?!" Elsewhere he complains about not being athletic like Harvard's WASPish alpha-males, about not getting into Harvard's exclusive Porcellian, Phoenix and boating clubs, and insults Albright for attending the "lowly" Boston university.
But again, the truth is almost the complete opposite. Zuckerberg didn't care about social status, was on fencing and boating teams, in elite fraternities, came from a prestigious private school, 20 percent of Harvard students are themselves Jewish, and the head of Harvard at the time (Lawrence Summers) was himself a Jewish oligarch and US Treasury chieftain. The film thus manages a weird juggling act: a film about a Jewish outsider who wasn't an outsider and which is ashamed of perpetuating Jewish stereotypes and so avoids all Jewishness.
The film's villains are the Winklevoss twins, archetypal Masters of the Universe who say things like "you don't have to school me in the importance of getting there first, I'm a competitive racer!" before coming second in both boat races and product roll-outs. Fincher, a graduate of music videos and corporate commercials, uses his trademark, burnished, yellow-green colour scheme throughout the picture. Elsewhere the dolly-in through a nightclub sign in "Citizen Kane" becomes a crane shot through a dance club's CGI handrail, a cool tracking shot follows Zuckerberg to his isolated laptop (the only place he feels at home) and the film diligently flips the analogue world of Fincher's "Zodiac". The rest of Fincher's plot plays like a feature length version of Chumbawamba's "Add Me", or maybe "The Fountainhead" for coders, Zuckerberg hell-bent on protecting his "property" from people who he believes didn't do much to "earn it". Capitalism 101: claim all collective labour as yours alone.
What does the film say about social media? Zuckerberg is offered as internet generation exhibit A, desperate for connection, status and love. Here, people and their emotions are nothing but commodities to be traded, technology breeds isolation, and personal skills decline in lieu of cyber networking, severe inferiority complexes and narcissism. Ironically, as art the film is as flattening and reductive as Facebook, and everything about it itself embodies the poke-me-now neediness and depthlessness of generation Tweet. But the flip-side is also true: humans have been superficial and putting on false facades long before cyberspace. The self has always been a fiction, people are always inherently alienated, Facebook connects as much as it estranges, it is as warm, powerful and communal as it is vapid and humans have always been narcissistic and petty. While Facebook may be a Cause, it also merely amplifies biological and sociocultural conditions which routinely breed Little Eichmanns in the first place. The film co-stars Justin Timberlake as Justin Timberlake.
7.5/10 – See "The Paper Chase", "Afterschool", "Catfish" and "Demonlover".