The Facebook Movie
26/10/2010 Leave a Comment
Jesse Eisenberg
A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A Best Picture Oscar.
Oscar season. The whole year the studios flood the market with rubbish, keeping anything with potential carefully locked up. The only blips on the radar appear when the blockbuster summer delivers a movie that just accidentally happens to be good. Only at foreign festivals they carefully test what they’ve got in stock. Then, when the Toronto festival arrives in september, sounding the unofficial start of the race, the gates open. The studio flagships make their grand entrance premieres and are unleashed to chase the most precious metal in the industry: Oscar gold. This year, one of them has an unlikely subject: the creation of Facebook.
xkcd comic illustrating the distribution of internet activity. Click for a high resolution version
Much has already been said about how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed, the movie is often compared to There Will Be Blood. Indeed, the movie’s version of Zuckerberg is probably the greatest anti-hero since Daniel Plainview. Both have uncompromising ambition and after turning away from everyone around them, eventually succeed.
Daniel-Day Lewis’s character, however, isn’t where the most parallels lie in respect to Eisenberg’s character. There is yet another one. Most movies are most often compared to others playing in theatres at that time for box office competitive reasons. If a movie has potential, it will be compared to all other that year, to keep track on the Oscar race. The Social Network is however already being compared to a great movie from years back. Not just a great movie, a classic. Not just a classic, the ultimate classic.
Citizen Kane
Almost seventy years after its release, Citizen Kane is still widely regarded as the greatest film of all time. Professional film critics who evoke its name in any other review knowingly put their entire credibility on the line. So their mere mentioning of the movie attests to how highly The Social Network is regarded. Of course, I’m not a film critic. Most people go to the movies with a popcorn and a soda. Critics go to the movies with a pen and a note block. I let my friends finish my popcorn. True story.
The similarities between the two movies however, are more thematically and perhaps structurally, rather than stylistically. ‘Kane’ was simply revolutionary, for stylistic innovations like its low angles, deep focus, layered staging and even things very apparent in ‘Network’, like overlapping dialogue and ‘lightning-mix’ to tie together different timelines. ‘Network’ has hardly any innovative tendencies, so it will never even come close to the classic’s legendary status.
Structurally, both films heavily rely on flashbacks to tell their stories. They consist of different characters recounting their experiences, the Rashomon effect writer Aaron Sorkin says he was aiming for. But the most striking similarity of the two films is that they both end with their ‘Rosebud’, which is established somewhere in the beginning. This leads us to the thematic and social likenesses.
The protagonists in both movies are young (Welles was 25 at the time) media prodigies turning media tycoons, but most importantly, they’re both based on real men still alive and influential at the time of release, putting their real life counterparts in a not-so-positive light. What is interesting is their reaction on the production and release of the film. Hearst went to all-out war with the Welles masterpiece. He threw everything up to the kitchen sink in his efforts to keep the film from opening. As his political and financial influence was considerable, large parts of the film industry and press actually folded. Theaters and newspapers boycotted the movie, there was an offer that wasn’t meant to be refused of almost a million dollars (this was 1941) to destroy every single reel of the film. At the Academy Awards, Hollywood’s lair, where it was nominated for nine Oscars, every mention of the movie was received with a booing audience. In the end, it didn’t matter, the creative power of the movie far outranked any social reference and after Hearst’s death, the movie took a status of mythic proportions.
Mark Zuckerberg donating 100 million dollars to the Newark public school system on Oprah:
As Zuckerberg almost never puts himself out the public, especially with his personal life, he knows that what most people will think of him will be defined be the movie’s portrayal. He is kind of forced to do this, he’s called out to at least raise doubts about the movie’s characterization of him. I don’t think he cares about his own public image too much, and he’s known for even caring less about money. But any public image damage could directly hurt Facebook as a company and as a project since, more than any other company, and this is often emphasized in the movie, popularity is Facebook’s core business. This is why they’re also very concerned about all the rumors about their privacy policy. Quoting out of Sorkin’s script:
Even a few people leaving will reverberate to the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online and if one domino goes, the other dominoes go.
It’s hard to predict how much doubts the movie will raise, I think the people at Facebook are still waiting it out. Zuckerberg takes a careful position in most of his responses on the movie, he doesn’t shoot it out, but he clearly distances himself and his company from it. I doubt Zuckerberg has much to worry about. But hell, projects like Firefox and OpenOffice thrive on Microsoft hate and social networks are a fleeting business, hence the large graveyard of other social networking sites.
But of course, he can’t play innocent trying to out-charm the movie. What he did to the Winklevosses was a fine piece of backstabbing prowess, even made more clear by his famous leaked text messages.
FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?
ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them
ZUCK: probably in the year
ZUCK: *ear
He has stated though, that he regrets all those things. And like the film crew has admitted: Noone wants a movie to be made about the things they did when they were nineteen years old.
The person primarily responsible for the characterizations of everyone involved is of course writer Aaron Sorkin, who has taken up the unofficial role of spokesperson when concerning the non-fiction aspect of the movie.
While he may have meant to write an unbiased screenplay, he has very strong opinions about Mark, Facebook and the internet, that have seeped through.
It was a device that was meant to connect us, to bring us closer together. I think, and I know that I’m in the minority, that it’s pushing us further apart. Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
About the statistic that one in four Americans still believes Obama wasn’t born in the US:
There’s just too much bad information getting out there, and I have to believe that’s mostly the fault of the Internet, which isn’t held to any standards of accuracy.
About regulating the internet:
People say, well, there’s so much Internet content, how could you possibly do that? And the answer is, there would be a lot less Internet content! Thinning out the herd is a good thing. There would be a Darwinian falloff of people who think they can go out and just state anything they want as fact. [...] While everyone deserves a voice, not everyone deserves a microphone.
Make no mistake, the movie is neither nobody’s nor everybody’s version of the people portrayed, it is Sorkin’s version. He executed the Rashomon effect brilliantly, but only when concerning the events relevant to the lawsuits. The aspects he did make his own form the heart of the whole picture, since the movie isn’t really about Facebook or the lawsuits. What he saw in the movie, even before beginning his research, was the Greek tragedy. Note that Saverin consulted on Ben Mezrich’s book. Sorkin would’ve gotten his tragedy, even if the actual story didn’t turn out to be that way, which it didn’t. He made it into a story about a guy who ends up with both everything and nothing. But he forces this morality lesson by changing reality.
The real morality would be a completely different story. While Zuckerberg might be awkward, ruthless and a computer nerd, it’s got him to where he is now: rich, young, famous, without even caring for any of those things, living together with his long-term girlfriend and far from isolated. It would be a Randian fairytale.
Sorkin’s most striking use of creative licence is the elimination of Zuckerberg’s girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a Harvard med student he met before his Facebook success and helped him on the project of his life, which means she would’ve played a significant role in almost every event in the entire movie. It’s almost unthinkable to make a character study about a person without even mentioning their life partner. And he makes an uncalled-for jab at her, when, while addressing misogyny in the movie, writes:
More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80′s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)
But of course, she doesn’t fit into his dated view of the isolated, frustrated geek and especially his tragic anti-hero. She has to make way for the character Erica, who, together with the protagonist’s also fictional desire to enter the final clubs, is the reason for the main character’s extreme drive.
I think Sorkin is healthily counterbalanced by his other collaborators. Fincher, like most top-directors, does embrace technology. For directors, technology delivers the tools to realize their imagination. The most powerful and influential directors all have a very tight connection to technology and drive technology instead of being driven by it: James Cameron, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson… All a writer needs is a typewriter. Everyone of the young cast has pronounced their admiration of Facebook and both the real and fictional Mark Zuckerberg, with Eisenberg calling his character “entirely sympathetic”.
The fact that I’m now talking about the movie’s factual inaccuracies and about how it’s not Citizen Kane, all external issues that don’t directly have to do with the film as a separate entity, and I’m not alone in this, is of course because the movie in itself has no real flaws to write about. Sorkin justifies himself:
I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.
Of course, although with this way of thinking he does sound like his own main character, putting his project and passion above anything else, he’s absolutely right. The only thing that matters in a screenplay, is the screenplay. And it’s absolutely terrific. It has everything. In what was supposed to be a dull, geeky teenage courtroom drama, Sorkin creates a thrilling experience, by launching three timelines, that are finely woven together. He arranges one of those timelines to consist of conflicting versions of his characters’ testimonies. It all flows by lightning fast without ever being confusing.
Sorkin’s specialization is dialogue, the flow of dialogue, the sound of dialogue, and lots of it. An example is the scene in Charlie Wilson’s War where the characters of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks first meet. Apart from being really funny, what’s interesting is that both characters ask each other several important questions and PSH begins to tell a parable, but the conversation deviates naturally and in the end they both go their separate ways without any question having been answered nor the parable finished. Sorkin understands very well that real conversations don’t have a logical flow and he’s mastered how to bring thought processes to the screen. And in Mark Zuckerberg, a teenage genius, he’s found his ultimate puppet. From the very beginning he establishes this style of dialogue. Zuckerberg’s thoughts and words are all over the place, leaving his then-girlfriend trying to pick onto something, while the guy on the other side of the table is already babbling about something completely different.
Not only the flow of the dialogue is well thought out, the dialogue itself is also consistently extremely witty and often very funny without losing its weightiness, full of analogies and symbolic references. This, together with the mere amount of dialogue (the script is more than 160 pages), however, makes it a real challenge for the actors to speak the lines very quickly and make the wittiness seem natural. Luckily, Fincher’s methodology is tailored for this problem. Fincher’s very known for demanding tens of takes for each scene. The first scene was shot a whopping 99 times. This way the actors are able to make mistakes and little original peculiarities might make it into the movie. He also means to tire the actors, he sometimes only considers withholding takes after hours of shooting the same scene, after midnight. This way he prevents them from ‘acting’ and makes sure their entire surroundings seems comfortable to them when it’s supposed to be in the movie. It lends itself to Sorkin’s demanding script, and is very different from, for example, Eastwood’s one-take method, which only works with the best of actors, but is unforgiving to unexperienced ones (hence the obnoxious performances in Gran Torino).
David Fincher
Fincher’s also responsible for adding visual flair, what other talkies, say, In The Loop, are often lacking, while keeping it dark enough from becoming a Jason Reitman dramedy. As is obvious from his repertoire, with movies like Fight Club, The Game (I am so sorry), Panic Room and Se7en, he knows how to make a movie look slick. From the Facemash explosion over the ‘fuck truck’ arrival to the dinner montage, he makes the whole movie an extremely exciting watch. One could say however, that he almost overdoes it in staging the regatta race. While the heavily stylized scene surely grabs the viewer’s attention, the slow-mo race stands so much in stark contrast with every other hyper fast scene that it may take the viewer out of the movie, especially with the immediately recognizable track playing over it.
Why Fincher’s also a very good fit for this supposedly unbiased depiction of true events, is that he always stays clear of sentimentality, as one would expect from a director with an affinity for the psychopathic. He doesn’t like to sweeten the package for the audience, as one can witness in the beyond ice cold Lake Berryessa killing scene in Zodiac. His previous movie is also a good example of this. While he started out with a script from the writer of Forrest Gump with an extreme amount of similarities to that movie, that is often accused of cheesiness, Fincher’s cold treatment of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button resulted in it often being accused of being boring without an emotional core. I do have confidence in him readapting the Millenium films though.
His previous experience with attaching CGI heads to bodies in ‘Button’ certainly came in handy for ‘Network’, when he had to put Armie Hammer’s face on Josh Pence’s body for every scene. Poor Armie had to double the considerable amount of takes Fincher enforced, since he had to do every scene twice to establish the Winklevoss twins. Hammer’s very good, especially in the very funny scene with the Larry Summers character (who is now Obama’s chief economic advisor). I can’t describe his characters better than he does himself,
which is demonstrated here:
Taking these securities fraud allegations are true, although this behaviour is obviously not to be commended, dramatically, it’s absolutely beautiful. Even when settling Zuckerberg cheats the same people in the same way: by promising something he knows he’s not going to deliver. It’s a pity Sorkin didn’t put this into his screenplay. Although, he’d have ended up with a victorious Zuckerberg with a smug smile on his face, which would be entirely besides the point he was making.
The characters that tie the movie together are two women, much more respectable than all the others in the movie. It’s Sorkin speaking to the public through his classiest characters. The accusations of misogyny in the movie are ridiculous facepalm material, he even displays a certain reverence towards the female gender in writing these characters. Erica, acted by the new incarnation of Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara, plays the important albeit small part of key motivator to the main character and his deepest psychological complex. She is Rosebud. The heart-breaker. You definitely feel uncomfortable in Mark’s place.
You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that’s what the angry do nowadays.
This is definitely a frustrated and bitter Sorkin speaking, in what New York Magazine calls “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media”.
Rashida Jones plays Merylin Delpy, the law firm associate. Unfortunately, a lot of her lines come over forced, making it all too obvious why Sorkin has written her. She’s the Ellen Page in Inception, the exposition character, the newcomer whose experiences the public is supposed to share, the voice the public is supposed to agree with. She gets the final say about the main character. In the beginning, Erica throws a statement: “… you’re an asshole”. In the end, Merylin responds and concludes with her final line.
A highly publicized performance was of course that of Justin Timberlake, in his ironic role of Napster founder Sean Parker (“Who knew the music industry doesn’t have a sense of humor?”). He does a good job, but he can’t hold a candle to the two actors who surround him. The part had more potential than what he made of it. I also can’t describe his character better than how the real one demonstrates in this video:
Another ironic part is Disney’s Brenda Song’s feisty and sexy role as Christy, Saverin’s girlfriend. She plays vixen well, but it’s primarily the boyfriend’s reaction that adds to her role. Our brand new Spiderman (to the soon to be Golden Globe nominated Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy) Andrew Garfield is about to start his celebrity life with an Oscar nomination. He’s a large contributor to the ambiguous nature of the portrayal of the events. Garfield’s Saverin may be a likable, good-hearted friend, supportive of Mark and full of good intentions, he is also completely incompetent, petty, naive and nobody to give responsibility to in a business venture. And, when reaching for the sky, why would anyone ever judge someone based on his personality? He had to be cut off… right?
Adventureland and Zombieland star Jesse Eisenberg turns to the dark side from his usual reluctant, dead-pan line delivering, unlikely hero. He is absolutely magnificent. Sorkin’s lines seem to come natural to him. Even more, he seems to be thinking a billion other thoughts while saying them. He also understands that extreme arrogance can be tremendously entertaining. It’s hard to completely blame his character for everything he does to the people around him. He’s just a tunnel visioned, obsessed prophet with his eyes on the prize. No hard feelings. He’s also responsible for the massively powerful final ‘Rosebud’ scene and especially the final frames, giving a heart-wrenching meaning to the phrase “Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world”. I can imagine Sorkin must have leapt from his seat yelling “That is EXACTLY what I wanted!” when watching these few frames.
And that’s perhaps the most dangerous aspect for the real Zuckerberg. It doesn’t matter that there was a movie being made about him. Not even that it’s a big-budget Hollywood movie (40 million is a decent sum of money for a non-period piece, non-visual effects driven film without 20 million dollar stars. Even District 9, a Best Visual Effects Oscar nominee, did so with 30 million.). But that it turned to be a great movie, a movie that can and will go on to lead a life on its own, that’s something to be aware of. Its reputation might still stand strong long after Facebook is forgotten. A potential Best Picture Oscar might drastically grow the movie’s long legs and turn it into one for the ages, making it nigh impossible for Zuckerberg to clean up his public image.
But we’re far from there yet. It’s still about four months until the Academy Awards, in a race where momentum can change day by day and it already faces heavy competition. You can’t get to more than 5 Oscar nominations without making a few enemies. Its main competitors include The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, Toy Story 3 and to a lesser extent Black Swan and Cannes darlings Another Year and Blue Valentine. There are even hopefuls that nobody has seen yet. Whereas I don’t have too much confidence in The Fighter, the Coens are capable of anything, including spoiling the fun for Fincher with True Grit. With the aggressive strategic positioning of the movie for a Christmas release, within a week of the Oscar eligibility deadline, Paramount displays heavy confidence in forgoing the possible festival build-up and hoping to take everyone by storm. There may also arise competitors out of nowhere, someone might even take, what is unaffectionately called, a The Blind Side spot, a movie that’s not supposed to go anywhere near the category, but that, due to other factors such as raw box office numbers or raw star power, gets in anyway. To predict this, you don’t want to look at a movie’s quality, but at certain sensibilities of the 6000-headed voting body. After all, the Academy Awards are still in essence, like any other awards show, an industry reaching for the spotlight outside its borders for a self-congratulatory pat on the back. Those they want to promote, they will promote.
Left: Rooney Mara, The Social Network; Right: sister Kate Mara, 127 Hours
Best Picture and Best Director aside, where The Social Network has nominations locked and we’ll have to wait until the SAG and DGA awards to make a final prediction, the film also has serious potential in the other categories. A Best Actor nod for Jesse Eisenberg is guaranteed, but for a win he’ll need to beat James Franco and especially Colin Firth. He’d be the youngest ever to win the award (Adrien Brody was 28 when he won for The Pianist). In the Best Supporting Actor category, the film will do well, with a shoo-in nomination for Andrew Garfield and with terrible luck, even one for Justin Timberlake, which I would disagree with. For a win here, it’ll yet again have The King’s Speech as main contender, where Geoffrey Rush is the one to beat. Rooney Mara would’ve surely been in for the Best Supporting Actress prize if her part was any larger, but now, she’s a long shot, though her impressive performance and the importance of her scenes, basically providing the protagonist’s drive throughout the whole movie on her own in just a few minutes, make her scenes linger and may yet yield her an Oscar nomination. In Adapted Screenplay, I don’t see how Sorkin could lose. With such a challenging setup for a film, he did a brilliant job. It is said that for a movie to work, you have to limit dialogue to an absolute minimum, unless you’re extremely good at it. The last part applies to Sorkin.
A Best Editing nod is highly likely, in part for its ability to continually switch between several time frames and still deliver a fast paced and naturally seeming flow, and mandatory for a Best Picture win. As a movie that’s situated most of the time in deposition rooms, dorm rooms, offices, etc., it isn’t a traditional contender for the Best Cinematography prize and has no chance against the likes of Roger Deakins (True Grit), Anthony Dod Mantle (127 Hours) and Wally Pfister (Inception), all DPs on projects with the director(s) they most often collaborate with. Moving on to Best Original Score, Nine Inch Nails’s creator Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross delivered a score that is very dominant in a lot of scenes and thus very likely to get in. As Pixar never fails to get a slot here and Hans Zimmer did terrific work on Inception, it’ll be a tough nut to crack. Finally, the film has a small chance to get slots in the sound categories, but I always find those hard to get right anyway, except for the obvious nominations for Toy Story 3 and Inception.
Oscar buzz or not, The Social Network has been called a generation-defining film. Apart from the obvious presence of phenomenons like Facebook, Napster and the like, what’s more interesting to me is the people portrayed. Although the movie still depicts more geek than geekster as in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, it’s a rare movie about the Generation Y university graduates. It’s a generation their Generation X and babyboom bosses have a hard time dealing with. It’s a new wave of potential employees or entrepreneurs that aren’t motivated by money or a long-term career plan, but want to engage themselves project by project, company by company. They don’t attach too much significance to formal hierarchy, but expect a team-oriented work environment. As they don’t want their private life put into a corner and have problems with strict working hours, they may come over as undisciplined. But they’re also more likely to blur private and working life, and when passionate about a project, fully commit and deliver a tremendous contribution. It’s the first generation that is more technology-savvy than their bosses and are networking experts. Rather then being company-loyal, Generation Y has a more self-promoting attitude. They don’t fit well into the traditional company context, or the other way around. But companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google embrace this new mentality. Facebook used to have a policy that all software developers must be in college or just out. Zuckerberg justified it by saying
The job lends itself to people with raw intelligence rather than industry experience
Industries become more and more innovation-driven rather than experience-driven, although some of it is industry-dependent. There’s arguably nothing in the world that can’t be done better than it is being done right now. And experience often narrows the mind. The movie captures this modern dynamic spirit well.
About sixty years after Hearst’s death, Citizen Kane is far more famous than Hearst has ever been and has proved to be far more influential. Hearst’s legacy, with his achievements as a businessman, as a media powerhouse and in politics, has completely been rewritten by Welles and Mankiewicz. It’s a war Hearst has lost. Let’s see how Zuckerberg fares.
Johan Honggokoesoemo
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