Ten years in, The Social Network has held up infinitely better than the internet idealism running through so much of the criticism that was aimed at the film at the time. It sure did turn out to speak to the decade, though - which is why you should watch it with me this Friday, especially since it’s conveniently streaming on Netflix. Zuckerberg gave $100 million to Newark’s school system the day before The Social Network premiered, a supposed coincidence in timing that sure seemed intended to prove how little the film actually spoke to the moment. And Fincher does lean heavily on old Ivy imagery - the height being the double Armie Hammers as the impossibly WASPy Winklevoss twins - even as his film slyly undermines the power structures they’re meant to bring to mind. Sorkin has never made a secret of his contempt for all things online, elevating relationship dramas over details about the digital platform. The Social Network - directed by David Fincher and adapted by Sorkin from Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires - is not an especially accurate blow-by-blow of Facebook’s dorm-room origins, freely fictionalizing elements of Zuckerberg’s life in order to portray him as a 21st century Charles Foster Kane whose billion-dollar-empire was sparked by an act of impulsive misogyny. Facebook, he concluded, “helped open a large, uncharted territory for a generation whose world first seemed, in many ways, competitively tighter and more predetermined than ever.” Nathan Heller at Slate argued that the film’s version of Harvard’s social strata was similarly out of touch. “This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite,” he wrote. At the New Republic, Lawrence Lessig noted how little screenwriter Aaron Sorkin knew or cared about the internet. “Horrifically unfair,” decried Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick, who happened to have written a glowing account of the company’s early years called The Facebook Effect. When The Social Network opened in theaters on October 1, 2010, it was greeted with a lot of chin-stroking over whether it was too hard on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Head to Vulture’s Twitter to catch her live commentary, and look ahead at next week’s movie here.
This week’s selection comes from film critic Alison Willmore, who will begin her screening of The Social Network on June 19 at 7 p.m. Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin and Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network Photo: Columbia/Kobal/ShutterstockĮvery week for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting one film to watch as part of our Friday Night Movie Club.
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