The Business of The Social Network
The greatest “oops” moment in the history of liberal Hollywood may be the “You can’t handle the truth” moment that was made so electrifying by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Nicholson was supposed to be writer Aaron Sorkin’s bogeyman, but Sorkin and Nicholson made Col. Jessup’s entirely correct remarks about how “you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall” so convincing that they defined the movie. Today nobody remembers anything said by Sorkin’s supposed liberal hero, the crusading Tom Cruise character, whose next step after prosecuting Jessup seems likely to have been a campaign to get Marine companies to convene mandatory therapeutic discussion groups to assuage any hurt feelings before launching an invasion.
As Sorkin turns from the Cold War to business, his latest project, the acclaimed Facebook movie The Social Network, is starting to look like the great liberal “oops” movie of this decade.
The movie amounts to an attack on the character, motivations, and sheer rudeness of its central figure, the Facebook founding genius Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), said to be the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
Yet Sorkin’s evident disgust with Zuckerberg as a person is not what is really registering with younger audiences. The way they see it, Zuckerberg is a hero — a programming visionary who had an idea and ran with it, all the way to the end zone. Who cares if he clotheslined a couple of people who got in his way? Isn’t that part of the fun?
Scott Rudin, the movie’s producer, told the New York Times, “Older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure … while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.” Eisenberg added, “For a lot of people my age, the message is that technology allows you to create something that can change things from a single computer. You don’t need a secretary, you don’t need an office building and you don’t need employees.”
Sorkin puts so much energy into Zuckerberg’s alleged personality flaws that he places in the background the aspect of the story that is most dazzling to you or me — that a college student made something virtually by himself that would be worth billions in a few years. Zuckerberg is repeatedly seen in a state called “wired in” — ignoring the outside world as he pushes himself through Herculean all-night coding sessions to realize his dream.
The lawsuits, some chatter about getting into the right club at Harvard, and girlfriends are important to Sorkin, but not to Zuckerberg. He has discovered a world of pure capitalist freedom about which Ayn Rand could barely have dreamed. Without greasing politicians, mollifying unions, placating the press, or even obeying routine OSHA standards or minimum wage laws (Zuckerberg and his friends initially work for nothing), the hero is at liberty to build his idea as high as it goes.
The Social Network celebrates not only entrepreneurship, hard work, and capital investment (a $500,000 injection by venture capitalist Peter Thiel helped power Zuckerberg’s success) but also delayed consumption.
Aaron Sorkin is a tremendously intelligent man and a highly skilled writer.
You really think all those examples are “may not realize,” “oops” and “unconscious” depictions?
He’s giving you a wink and a nod. Just as Mamet was giving you a wink and a nod and a “say no more.”
I just hope you haven’t damaged the career of one of America’s finest conservative dramatists.
This guy sounds a lot like a NYC asshole to me. Human beings live in societies (family, religion, race, religion, culture, language) in which members are defined by acceptance of common goals and values. Those who refuse to accept these values are, by definition, non-members of the society. Read “The Jungle Book”. Living ‘Without the Law’ is not a good plan in the long-term. Ayn Rand was a freak, who refused to be bound by any social values in her personal life. Whatever her stated philosophy, she shared the typical Leftist’s view of human nature as being non-existant. In fact, her elevation of the individual’s (especially her own) ‘right’ to unrestricted freedom is not juvenile, but infantile. This is Hobbe’s life in the State of Nature — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If you could find 5% of any population willing to live according to a Randian prescription, I’d be amazed. But the reason Randians need to be removed from America isn’t their personality defect, but the fact that they spend every waking minute trying to destroy the society around them. We tolerate beneficial bacteria in our guts, but E. coli we have to eliminate with meds, because they are dangerous to our health. The Enlightenment’s error as regards Human Nature leads to idiocies such as ‘the marketplace of ideas’ where Truth will magically prevail based on lively purely-rational debate. How low does your IQ have to be before you can believe that? The Global Warming goombahs have to support their theory by claiming the the Medieval Climatic Optimum (now known as the Medieval Warm Period, for propaganda reasons), which is recorded in historical records all over Europe as well as by archeological digs in Greenland (get it? Greenland!), did not occur. Are these frauds being laughed out of respectable scientific societies? How about social scientists who claim that differences in intelligence do not exist and that IQ tests are meaningless?
Based on your real-life (sorry to introduce that ugly term) observation, does this conform to your experience? How about those who claim their are no non-superficial differences between men and women — that all observed differences are culturally determined? Even as a thought-exercise, I can’t figure out how anyone could believe this (and modern brain-science disproves it anyway). Reason is a valuable tool that men can use in achieving their goals and avoiding trouble, but those goals are determined by emotions. Why those Enlightenment types thought living as robots would be a good thing, I don’t get; but it doesn’t ultimately matter, because Homo sapiens is not born as a tabula rasa, and will not exist as a reasoning machine.
Was that a satire?
Yes, and this kid accomplished all that without any Federal grants, bailouts, incentives (like “Cash for Clunkers”), special Federal laws being passed, or any new Federal regulations being imposed. And he certainly didn’t need any union workers. Funny how well the free market works when you leave it alone.
Maybe that’s why Sorkin thought he was the villain.
I enjoyed Social Network, and liked Zuckerberg’s character. True, getting along with such a person would be almost impossible, but he has accomplished a very useful platform for socializing.
Even the legal situation puts Zuckerberg on the side of the angels. His final step of paying off the Winklevoss brothers, and his ‘best friend’ was because it was safer for him than going to a jury trial (think Conrad Black!)
I didn’t get why Eduardo ‘deserved’ such a huge slice of Facebook; going his way would have limited Facebook’s future to a few American universities. Also, knowing a couple of algorithms had nothing to do with creating Facebook. And, this great Harvard business major signed a pile of legal documents without his own lawyers (’cause he was Zuckerberg’s ‘only’ friend??)
The Napster guy, on the other hand, may have been a drug addled loon with a taste for interns, but he hooked Zuckerburg up with the Paypal guy and got real financing started with $500,000. So, even if the guy was fired for drug stuff, he completely deserves his 7% slice of Facebook (in my opinion, based on the movie).
Zuckerberg’s confrontation with the lawyers was great: so, if someone makes a great chair, does he then owe money to every other chairmaker?
And I am not a youth. But I was in business for a long time, and understand that you don’t whine when you screw up!!!
I hate to break it to the craven Mr. Boot, but Mssr.s Sorkin, Fincher and Rudin are without a doubt aware of every single implication built into their work. It’s just that they wouldn’t necessarily articulate those implications in the thoroughly twerpy, I-heart-Ayn-Rand terms you choose. But hey, man, if it helps your head, you go right on thinking you’ve discovered that magic subtext. You won’t profit from it the way that its creators have, but given your philosophy I don’t suppose you’ll complain about it, right?
I did not care very much for this film so I will hit the key points of my afterthoughts….
I just finished watching The Social Network at my local cineplex, and I was greatly disappointed. At first, I did not want to see the movie because I truly had no interest in seeing how facebook came into being. But each trailer I watched made me believe more and more that this was a movie about friends, greed, betrayal, and facebook was only a backdrop of these emotional complexities. I should have stuck with my gut instincts. A good portion of this movie is filmed in an office with our main characters accompanied by their lawyers. We (the audience) were well aware of the betrayal between the characters long before we cared about them. Why should we care about them turning their backs on one another if Fincher never gave us a reason to care about his characters in the first place. This movie was about friends, greed, and betrayal, which are great themes for any movie but not if we don’t care. I also didn’t care for the fact that half of the movie was set in an office of uncharismatic characters going through litigation. It was well written and the dialogue was great, but for a movie about humans and the social experience, I feel it lacked any emotion. I believe this movie could have been great. The cast was great. It had what seemed to be a great script. The one thing it was missing was a director to bring it all together and make me feel any sort of emotion for his cast. Im sorry, David Fincher. If you’re movie The Social Network friend requests me, I’d ignore it. It’s time to put on Fight Club so I can remind myself what you’re capable of.
The old movie the “Front Page” had a very similar origein by a leftist that wanted to critizixe the media for not walking in lock step. They remade that movie three times. I hope this movie has a simalar history.