Facebook: the heart in a heartless world

Rating: 10/10 (22 June 2012)

The great insight of David Fincher's brilliant The Social Network is that social inadequacy was the main driver of the Facebook juggernaut.
The film kicks off in 2003 with the nerdy, OCDish Harvard student and future Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) meeting Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) for a date. After Zuckerburg fails to impress with his rat-a-tat-tat of facts and feelings - think The Simpsons' comic book guy mashed with Stephen Fry - Erica torpedoes him with one of the film's many memorable lines: 'You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.'
Facemash, via a couple of posh, handsome, Harvard twin brothers asking Zuckerberg to help them build a social-networking site for students, becomes Facebook - or TheFacebook, as it was originally known, before the founder of Napster, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), made his enormous contribution to the project. 'Drop the "the"', he tells Mark. 'Makes it cleaner.' Initially a Harvard-based info-sharing site, Facebook, in Fincher's telling, is born directly from a student's need to hook up with people in some fashion, when so many of the traditional ways of doing so - meeting in bars, conversing face-to-face, joining clubs - are increasingly closed off to him. In this way, Fincher subtly yet profoundly captures what remains the lifeblood of the extraordinary Facebook phenomenon: not social inadequacy per se, but certainly social discombobulation.
Written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame and directed by Fincher of Seven fame, The Social Network focuses on the lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg in the mid- and late 2000s. With Facebook a household name and worth an estimated $25 billion (Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire ever), he was sued both by those posh twins, who claimed that he stole the idea from them after they asked him to construct a social-networking site, and by his best friend and the original funder of the Facebook project, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who is ruthlessly ousted by Zuckerberg as he gets closer to Parker the Napster maestro.
The Social Network taps into what has made Facebook so popular: the desire to carve out an identity, a life narrative, at a time when it seems increasingly hard to do that through real social relationships in the real world. 'People lived on farms and then in cities and now they will live on the internet', says Parker. He says it's no longer enough just to go to a party – you must 'go to a party with a digital camera and share the photos on Facebook'. Everything – from their job title to their interests, their relationship status to their religious beliefs, their social antics to their childrearing experiences – gets recorded and logged by the FB generation, as a kind of makeshift but also permanent personal narrative, which tells everyone who they are and what they believe.
This is what is really significant about Facebook starting off as a university phenomenon before spreading to the rest of society. At uni, people's cultivation of a personal identity is necessarily a bit forced. Lacking the social cachet that goes with having a certain kind of job, living in a certain kind of neighbourhood, and moving in certain kinds of adult social circles, students instead physically sign up for societies or join clearly demarcated and often caricatured social networks (the Rugby Drinkers, the Political Club) to demonstrate who they think they are. Today, in the absence of the old solidarities and the old informal networks of community and shared interests – that is, at a time of great alienation – that experience of needing fairly self- consciously to magic up an identity is repeated across society. So a fundamentally student site now has half a billion members.
Facebook is better understood, not as a country, but as a refugee camp for people who feel today's lack of identity-forging social experience. The scene in which Zuckerberg tries to befriend – or rather 'friend' – Erica on FB after their disastrous date and his pathetic apology, where he keeps hitting the F5 refresh button to see if she has accepted, is as painful a study of alienation as you are likely to see in the cinema this year. An intelligent, funny and humane exploration of society's new networks – if I were on Facebook, I'd definitely 'Like' this film.