Rags to riches story, but is someone's soul at stake here?

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2010)

Funny thing about The Social Network is that it started life as "that Facebook movie", even with Fincher's name attached almost anything that wasn't a string of facebook relationship statuses updated would seem like a knockout success, then people started pouring out of theaters in raving enthusiasm about how good it actually is, expectations were miraculously installed, and now I'm forced to write surreal things like "that Facebook movie is not that good". That Facebook movie is not that good! There's a scene early on that annoyed me. As a bunch of computer geeks huddle around a computer screen to find cool hackster ways to get back at girls for not giving them any, we see a busload of young college girls all dressed up to please unloaded at the doorstep of a very exclusive Harvard club. Once inside they dance on laps and strip and are excited to be pawed by spoiled rich kids. That's not to say either of the two parts of that scene don't happen in real life or shouldn't happen in a film, but the juxtaposition is jarring. It's almost like the film is saying those same girls deserve to be treated as pretty face fodder for online voting contests because they are sluts.
I had forgotten all the negative things I was hearing about "that rowing scene" until it came up on screen. What the hell was Fincher thinking? His visual style for the duration was so mute and perfunctory that when he decides to flex his muscles, like a recluse who hasn't talked to another human being for a week will speak in an awkward voice, the results are cringeworthy. I haven't scene more out-of-place mood killers since the time Pino Donaggio was scoring lame funky comic relieves for Brian DePalma in Carrie.
Which brings me to that style. I don't like Fincher's toilet-stain brown in anything but this is muted by another remove. The Social Network has all the visual imagination of a newspaper; which is not bad for it, because it's trying to be the newspaper. It's all fact and "he said that and then I said that", talky like a stageplay and I don't like talky films any more than I like the theatre, and even introduces a dual flashback structure that is more framing device because nothing meaningful happens within the flashbacks. I don't want to make claims for pure cinema because that would mean some kind of "impure cinema" exists as second-choice for those still apprenticing to reach a cinema of higher order, but I wish more of what goes on here was translated in visual means. Like the "happy days are over" metaphor of the shot of coming clouds casting a shadow over tall buildings.
I like these rags to riches stories to be Shakespearean, to end in tragic hopeless notes, to take me to heights as a means of plunging me to black depths of the soul from where a future can't be surmised. The Citizen Kane comparisons are not completely without merit, but CK ends with a panoramic shot of a huge warehouse filled with boxes of his things, memories of life ready to be carted away. Kane is not there but the loneliness of the image chills my bones. Zuckerberg is alone at the end of Fincher's movie, but he's alone at a business room, with a laptop, and an apprentice attorney offers to order something to eat for him. He's not spent and damned like Daniel Plainview, he f-cked up but he's only starting out. The final glimpse into the soul of a man who made it to the top and is alone there, is Zuckerberg refreshing a Facebook page. What I mean to say is that his damnation doesn't ring throughout eternity for me, I never feared for his soul. I can see an easy bright future ahead of this man who is young and rich and healthy, the fall is not deep enough and so the rise is equally irrelevant to me.