Can't sleep. The cup of black tea before bed on top of the coffee and jelly babies earlier may have been a bad idea as my caffeine and sugar levels are now haywire. Hopefully I'm not keeping the whole house up with my typing.
Anyway, sleeplessness means I have time to type out some of my thoughts on 'The Social Network', which I recently got out of the wonderful Blandford Forum library for the princely sum of 50p. I had an inkling it was going to be a good film before I started watching it. While I hadn't seen any reviews, the general conversational buzz I've heard about it has all been positive. This was fairly extraordinary considering that at first glance it has the dullest premise in the world - students invent Facebook and get rich. However, they managed to make it infinitely more engaging than watching a group of Harvard entrepeneurs sit around coding and eating pizza in their free time.
The main strength of the film was the characterisation. From the first scene where Mark Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend and retaliates by hacking the entire Harvard computer network, you are gripped by the characters and really care about what happens to them. Zuckerberg's arrogance and single mindedness make him obnoxious but simultaneously and intersting character to watch as you want to see what he does next. The structure of the movie helps with this process of identification and audience attention grabbing. You know from the beginning that Zuckerberg ends up founding Facebook and being sued by both his best friend and the Winklevoss. This helps sustain the tension at the beginning of the film as you want to know how his childish initial actions lead to these monumental outcomes.
Jesse Eisenberg puts in a stellar performance as Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield is equally good as the unfortunate Eduardo. The Winklevoss brothers add some much needed comedy to a film that could have been a bit dry and business-minded-y. Their upper-class hatred of the much smarter Zuckenberg becomes increasingly obvious as the film goes on. Their pristine mask slips further and further into violence and incomprehension as they become convinced that Zuckenburg has stolen their idea and is snubbing them deliberately. Hilariously their clone-like physical similarities are compounded when they start using the first-person singular to describe themselves ("We can [beat him up] ourselves. I'm 6'5, 220 and there's two of me" made me chortle a lot). Justin Timberlake is better than I thought he'd be as the cool Napster founder who intrigues against Eduardo.
All in all a very good film with an extremely satisfying if slightly over emphasised ending. Zuckerberg is left mechanically refreshing his Facebook page to see if the girlfriend from the beginning of the film has accepted his friend request. This wraps up the theme that has been running through the movie, that, while he is a genius who achieves great things he is constantly let down in social relationships by his naked ambition and clear disdain for others less able than himself. The indications that underneath it all he really wants to be liked turn him into a much more likable character than he originally appears to be. A minor character sums it up perfectly by telling him that he isn't an asshole but he's trying damn hard to act like one.
Factual accuracy is highly questionable but as a morality tale for the driven and ambitious it works exceedingly well. If I had one problem with it it would be something that was mentioned in a Rotten Tomatoes review. Like a Facebook relationship the film is ultimately shallow and vacuous at everything above the personal level. Zuckerberg takes a few choice digs at his prosecutors but these are based mainly on the weakness of their claim that he has stolen their idea. There is no broader critique of the way a couple of rich kids can use their family lawyers to extort money on false grounds from a successful entrepeneur. The conflicts in the film are all scaled down to the personal level and there is little consideration of what this story can tell us about the vagaries of copyright law or the ability of vested interests in capitalist society to appropriate the work of others. However, it would have been very difficult for the film to keep its abundant charm had it ventured into these tricky intellectual concerns about technology and society.
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