Real People in a Virtual World: The Social Network

The most honored film of the 2010 awards season and the favorite going into the Academy Awards, "The Social Network" is ostensibly the story of how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and betrayed his friends and business partners on his way to becoming the world's youngest billionaire. But director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are less interested in how the website was created than in how a young arrogant genius with no people skills managed to deconstruct and reconstruct the social experience as a Web-based simulacrum, a club that even Mark Zuckerberg (or, rather, "Mark Zuckerberg") could thrive in. Jesse Eisenberg's self-absorbed portrait may or may not be an accurate portrait of the real Zuckerberg, but he is a fascinating character in a mesmerizing drama of people in the virtual worlds of money, success and digital communication.

That's what I wrote in my DVD column for MSN, but there's more to be said on the film and I tried to get at some of that in a piece for Parallax View:

The DVD/Blu-ray release of the week is without a doubt the much-lauded The Social Network, the favorite leading into the Oscar season. Directed with typical technical fastidiousness and textural richness by David Fincher from a verbally dexterous script by Aaron Sorkin, this story of the creation of Facebook is not really about Facebook but the people who created it and how relationships unraveled on its trajectory to becoming a national (and eventually global) phenomenon and multi-million (now multi-billion) dollar business. There’s been more written about this film than anything other American release this year (or so it appears from my unscientific survey) and Time magazine’s decision to name Zuckerberg the Man of the Year has only added to the attention. And I’m still fascinated by the film and Fincher’s exacting direction, jumping between the two separate depositions that he weaves through the flashback narrative, not so much muddying the record as revealing through the complexity of the story and the characters. I’m not sure I have anything new to add to the discussion, but there’s still plenty in the film worth talking about.

Continue reading on Parallax View here.