The Social Network

[Brandenburger Toro]

The Social Network

Superb film, utterly cracking stuff.

Whoever was playing Larry Summers deserves an Oscar. That was just hilariously uncanny.

[Outside Agent]

The Social Network

Douglas Urbanski plays Larry Summers. And his part definitely goes to the top of the list of "Brilliant Five-Minute Appearances in Movies". He was just hilarious.

Loved the movie. The pace of the script was spot-on, and was so from the outset with the scene with Zuckerberg and his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend in the pub.

If it is true that Zuckerberg really didn't care about the money, Eisenberg was very believable portraying that. And his best moments were his occasional bouts of scathing sarcasm during the depositions.

[Guest]

The Social Network

I'm quite baffled at the praise this is getting, to be honest.

I went to see it because of the talent involved - Fincher, Sorkin - and for the shallow & obvious reason that I *really* fancy Jesse Eisenberg. I admit that I was rather expecting it to be showy and glossy and completely and utterly empty, on the basis of Fincher, but I do like his work and I did also want to like this more than I thought I would.

It looks fine. There's a few directorial flourishes, but it's not a show-off kind of film. It's solid and warm at its foundations - the campus - and at the edges it's glitzy and tacky - Palo Alto - or grey and dreary - Henley. While this is all very clever, it's also crashingly, well, obvious. It feels like a carefully crafted but utterly cliched painting.

Pacy - sorry, didn't get that at all. I thought it outright dragged in places. The structural device of telling the story in unreliable narrations intercut with flashbacks - sure that's a reasonable enough way to do it, but I can't say there was any feeling of urgency or narrative tension, for me. Yes, it's a film about the development of a website, so there needs to be a dash of snorting blow off an undergrad's tits and a good pinch of falling off the roof into the pool. But those pieces, they're so superficial, it's as if the film really doesn't care whether we believe in them or not. Look at the clubbing scene. There's not enough music to hinder their quiet, nuanced conversation. It's just flashing lights and pretty people and snapping your fingers and drinks appear. This slickness isn't just to facilitate the narrative. Because it snaps suspension of disbelief just too hard.

Maybe it's meant to feel like a dream, where everything's easy and people are beautiful and do not sweat. Even if so - even if all the blow jobs and the cocktails and the queasy hot-but-dim-Asian-chick stereotypes are just there to represent the dream life of the nerds, a sort of parallel to the 'reality - well, I couldn't exactly put that past Fincher, but it's a big disconnect with the rest of the film, and I think it'd be more successful and meaningful if he was doing it deliberately.

And the script is kind of clunky in places, I think. There's some really duff lines, bits of exposition that just don't work. Sure, there's some funny put-downs & bickering, and the Zuckerberg character is consistently amusing in his social inadequacy and bitter bitchiness, but that's the best I can say about the writing.

The biggest problem for me though is the relationship of the film to the facts. I don't mean I care about the historical accuracy of the events portrayed, or how true or false the representations of various real peoples' morals are. Not at all. But the fact that this film so clearly and explicitly fictionalises events to a great degree for me means that it could have told a much better story. A much better story.

I have to admit, the ending was really annoying. I don't think even the arsehole Zuckerberg character would have done that. He had a lot of pride. He wasn't even that into her. (And it's Friday evening. Why sit there pressing f5 when she might not even be online?)

But it's more than that, with the women. They left out the fact that the real Zuckerberg was & is happily attached. There's no reason to do that apart from specifically to give the character a story involving his relationship with a woman (or all women). But even if you want to believe that this is one big love story, that he did all this because he made a mistake and wanted to win Erica's approval - nothing else he did all the way through gave any hint at that.

But if you want to believe the character isn't into girls at all - then it all makes even less sense. His motivation becomes completely bizarre. The film suggests Mark has trouble even speaking to women - often, he ignores them altogether. They also probably thought it was really clever to show Eduardo getting blown in the bathroom and to make it clear that the same was happening to Mark but not to show him with his girl. We the viewer aren't to see him, because... because why? I can't work that out, still.

So yeah. I can see why him having a girlfriend wouldn't make the best story. But the film can't make up its mind what else it wants the character to think about women and this is the biggest sticking point of narrative dissonance and the biggest reason for me why the film doesn't really work.

And all this is of course without even mentioning the ridiculous exaggeration of the general misogyny. Girls: What can we do? Mark: Nothing. Scene after scene of stupid, beautiful girls falling over themselves to degrade themselves in the posh boys' clubs (I'm sorry, but the stripping? fuck's sake) or twittering off to the bathroom so the men can talk or trying to play a fucking video game & going all fluttery when they see what they perceive as a powerful guy - and, especially when it's Mark, being ignored by said powerful guy, which makes them try even harder... Argh. I find it bizarre that this is the explicitly created fiction of the film, not because it in itself is any less believable than any other, but because it is less interesting than most. And because while people are watching and thinking, gosh, no women at all except Asian sluts in this film, then that's what they're thinking about. It detracts. If that was the "real" Zuckerberg, there's be a point to it, but by all accounts, there isn't. Fincher and Sorkin are too clever not to know this, though, so I'm quite bemused by it all.

[Reed John]

The Social Network

But it's more than that, with the women. They left out the fact that the real Zuckerberg was & is happily attached. There's no reason to do that apart from specifically to give the character a story involving his relationship with a woman (or all women). But even if you want to believe that this is one big love story, that he did all this because he made a mistake and wanted to win Erica's approval - nothing else he did all the way through gave any hint at that.

I don't agree with you on the pacing and that stuff, but I do agree on this point.

The story of his relationship with his girlfriend and how she supported (or tolerated) him through all of this - including him fucking over his former best friend, apparently - would be an interesting story and she would be a very interesting character. But very little is known about her, so it wouldn't be an easy story to write.

By all accounts, Erica - who is really well played by the girl who is going to play Lisbeth Salander in the Anglicized version of the Millenium series - didn't really exist. She's just a composite, I guess, of failed relationships from Zuckerberg's past.

The story, as they tell it, is about trying to be cool. Of course, cool is vague and hard to grasp, which is a big reason the Zuckerberg character is having such a hard time with it. As far as that goes, it's a very effective story that says a lot of true things, even if it isn't exactly true about the people they're supposedly telling it about, if you catch my meaning. It may very well be a legitimate criticism to say that it's taken a completely different, albeit compelling, fictional story and shoehorned it into the partially hollowed-out shell of another true story.

I can see how the female characters would be taken as misogynist, but I don't think the film is misogynist per se, so much as it's trying to say that the pursuit of cool, as these guys understood it, can be misogynist in that getting BJs from random girls is one of the trappings of cool, but that the guys, Parker especially, doesn't really give a shit about these girls as people. Nobody, especially women with self-respect, should want to just be a trapping of somebody else's success, like a fancy car or expensive suit. But there's no doubt that they often are because men often treat them that way and a lot of women seem willing to be treated that way for reasons I don't really fathom. These kind of relationships are usually reserved for especially pretty girls and athletes and dudes in a band, so the film was pointing out that these nerds had figured out how to get themselves in that mix (although I didn't find either of the girls they hooked up with in the bathroom to be all that attractive). And, that's not just how it is in film. It's how it is on real college campuses. Exhibit A. It was even true at my college, where the total number of very attractive people (both genders) was probably 25 and almost everyone was uptight and neurotic in one way or another.

So yeah. I can see why him having a girlfriend wouldn't make the best story. But the film can't make up its mind what else it wants the character to think about women and this is the biggest sticking point of narrative dissonance and the biggest reason for me why the film doesn't really work.

I don't see that as a problem whatsoever. This dissonance - his apparent ambivalence toward women, was the point. His lack of clarity was very clear to me, I think. And I could relate to it somewhat.

The film was trying to say, I think, that Zuckerberg wanted more than just to be cool in the ephemeral way that gets one BJs from bimbos. Some of the other guys around him were into that, but he wanted more. He wanted to be cool enough to be respected by a high quality woman like Erica. He failed at that, because he's a condescending dick, so he consoled himself with the knowledge that even she had to begrudgingly respect Facebook (insofar as she joined).

So that's something. But it's a very hollow something and it reflects the tagline of the film about "one can't have x millions of friends without making a few enemies." The irony of Zuckerberg and Facebook is that a guy who created the social network that has triumphed over all others is not, in fact, a very social guy. Whether or not any of the film is true, that part is true. He clearly is a very weird dude who isn't much of a people person.

Perhaps, pushing it it a bit, the point of him finding Erica on FB like that was also meant to reflect the experience so many people have on Facebook (or online generally). As we talked about on that other thread, it creates kind of a simulcrum of a relationship or a connection that usually isn't anywhere near as good as the real thing, and that has a tendency, perhaps paradoxically, to make us feel more alienated than connected. At least, that's been my experience. I've got like 400+ facebook "Friends" and it has helped me keep in touch with some people and has faciliated some real connections, but just as often I find that looking at FB just brings up feelings of loneliness and isolation. That's not a universal experience, I suppose, but I'm sure it's not unique. So that scene was "true" in a bigger sense even if it wasn't true for him.

I'm not explaning that very well. That sounds unbelievably crap and like something a college student would write, but I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely wrong.

[Incandenza]

The Social Network

I'll need to think about some of the points raised here more, but I watched this last night and really enjoyed it. I'm happy that the dialogue in the rest of the film wasn't delivered as quickly as the opening scene. I thought the opening scene was great, but the different strands of thoughts overlapping and joining again, people firing off witty lines without having to think at all before they talk...I'm glad the rest of the film didn't come off as Sorkinish as the opening scene did.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The Social Network

Isn't this just a nicely put together film on the nature of friendship? What it is and what it isn't, who friends are and who they aren't. In the context of Facebook it's highly pertinent.

I take Lyra's point about the portrayal of the women but I think that was intentional and more than balanced by the characters of Erica and the young lawyer, who bracket the film. The only recognisably fully-rounded personalities in the story — it most definitely is a story — they function as our surrogates in a kind of Greek chorus way, "real-world" commentary if you will. They also add necessary gravitas and humanity. Without them the film would only be a couple of notches above other frat-boy flicks, and its quite a bit better than that.