I’ve had a Facebook account since July 21, 2005, when it was still called Thefacebook, it was only for college students, and it had fewer than 5 million users as opposed to the over 3 billion it has now. I graduated college on June 12, 2010, just a few months before this movie’s October 1 release. (Incidentally, with the August 13 release of Scott Pilgrim it was a good time for the Cera/Eisenberg nebbish duo). I rented it in 2011 and liked it a lot, but haven’t seen it since(I haven’t re-watched things nearly as often since I graduated college as before), and with everything that’s happened in real life since I figure this would be a good movie to re-watch.
Things definitely weren’t good at the beginning of October 2010, not with unemployment nearly at double digits, but in retrospect they were bad in a weirdly low-stakes way. There were hints of what was to come(coincidentally, just days later Trump first announced he was considering running in 2012) but there wasn’t a feeling like the bottom was about to fall out of democracy. (Also coincidentally, the first week of October also saw Instagram go online).
This movie was a comeback of sorts for Aaron Sorkin after the high-profile failure of Studio 60. I think the subject matter is rather ironic for him since he’s always been kind of a fuddy-duddy. It’s weird that the guy who thought a Gilbert and Sullivan parody would be the height of hip comedy managed to write a relevant commentary on social media less than a decade after it became mainstream.
It’s well-known that this movie takes plenty of liberties with the facts, which Sorkin was totally up front about(and Facebook appears to have taken a similar approach in its fact-checking). However, I think the central criticism of the movie, that it was too hard on Mark Zuckerberg, hasn’t really aged well in that Mark has seemingly spent the last 15 years trying to prove the movie’s critics wrong. One central detail of the story that isn’t based on real life is the idea that Mark was prompted to create Facemash after his girlfriend dumped him, whereas in reality he’s been in a relationship with Priscilla Chan since 2003(they’ve been married since 2012). I think, though, that in a way that makes him less sympathetic than in the movie. It reminds me of the revelation at the end of In the Company of Men that Chad was in a relationship the whole time and how that knowledge makes his actions seem arguably even more diabolical than if he’d been turned bitter due to rejection as he’d claimed.
Despite the liberties taken with the facts, I think the themes of the movies are still relevant. One such theme is the internet allowing nerds to take over the culture. That theme, however, has taken on a less positive connotation with time as the “The nerds are finally taking over!” optimism has been replaced with a “new boss, same as the old boss” resignation as we realize how our new nerd overlords aren’t the saviors we hoped for. Also, as Mark has showed, this new brand of nerd bullies is perfectly fine with collaborating with old-fashioned bullies like Trump if it suits them.
As they make note of in the movie, the Winklevii are a pair of jocks straight out of an ’80s movie. That said, their attempts to combat Mark are remarkably restrained, partly out of fear of looking like jocks bullying a nerd but also out of old-school gentlemanliness. It reminds me of all the old-school politicians who still haven’t figured out that a strongly worded letter isn’t going to stop Trump, who seems to be applying the “move fast and break things” ethos to politics.
Another theme of the movie I think is relevant is the dichotomy between populism and elitism. At the beginning we see Mark’s desire to get into prestigious Harvard social clubs, which makes it all the more ironic that his biggest triumph is expanding Facebook out into the world when it was just intended to be for Harvard students. This is another area in which I see parallels with Trump and his ilk, being torn between the desire to be accepted by the “elites” and the impulse to thumb their nose at them. And just like we’ve seen with Trump, populism can be driven just as much by prejudice and irrationality as by common decency, as Facebook has also shown with its ability to spread misinformation.
15 years after it came out(I’m torn between going “It’s already been 15 years?” and “It’s only been 15 years?”) I think The Social Network is still a great film. Sorkin’s in top form(if you can overlook some of his writing tics) with witty dialogue galore and “You have part of my attention” being one of his most memorable speeches. And, remarkably for a movie that got a 96% RT rating and a Best Picture nomination, it’s continued to appreciate in value because of real world events. Ironically for a guy who’s always seemed a bit behind the times, Sorkin managed to be ahead the curve on something that had a lot of upward mobility ahead of it.
Final thought: with all that’s happened since the movie there’s been talk of a sequel, and I have two ideas for the name: a) The Social Ne2rk, because of the lucky coincidence that “network” has “two” in it, and b) Social Network, as in “Drop the ‘the.’ It’s cleaner.”