Tagline:
You don’t get to 500 millions friends without making a few enemies

Wide Release Date:
October 1, 2010

Directed by:
David Fincher
Written by:
Aaron Sorkin
Produced by:
Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca, Ceán Chaffin

Starring:
Jesse Eisenberg
Andrew Garfield
Justin Timberlake
Armie Hammer
Max Minghella

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I was in college when The Social Network was in theaters. Its release date was on my birthday, in fact, and I can’t think of a better birthday present in 2010 than not watching this movie!

After an additional decade of Mark Zuckerberg still being “influential”, supposedly, to whom I have no fucking idea (plus a sufficiently long enough stretch of time since I’ve watched anything written by Aaron Sorkin), I had decided that I can be motivated to tolerate another two hours of Sorkin’s style while viewing a movie that depicts Zuckerberg in a timeless negative light! The window for this motivation wouldn’t have stayed open much longer. And here we are.

THE 350(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

The year is 2003. Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is on a date with his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), and she’s super tired of his awkward, robotic, sperglord bullshit. She understandably breaks up with him, possibly months later than she really should have! Mark gets mad and throws a lot of shade about her in his LiveJournal that evening. Still riding the high of his misogyny-fueled ambitions, Mark hacks into the college database and creates a HotOrNot ripoff website using photos of all the female Harvard students. It blows up overnight, crashing the servers.

Cool website you got there, fucking incels.

Rich, arrogant, WASP-y, rowing team twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) each channel their inner entitled pretty-boy James Spader and try to recruit Zuckerberg for work on the social network they’re developing with their friend Divya (Max Minghella): Harvard Connection. Zuckerberg accepts and immediately steals the idea, rounds up his rich friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) to help fund the development of Facebook. Divya and the Winklevosses spend months under the impression that Zuckerberg is working on Harvard Connection. We all know what happens next!

I assumed the whole premise of Zuckerberg and Saverin meeting up and getting involved with Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) was complete Hollywood sensationalism, but it turns out that this had also really happened. And indeed, they meet up with Parker, who is portrayed as a hyperactive cool guy visionary instead of, more likely, the complete nerd he actually is. Parker envisions Facebook to be a billion-dollar business. Zuckerberg is on-board. Saverin is skeptical. Saverin becomes gradually pushed farther and farther out of the partnership.

So that just leaves all the impending lawsuits! The Winklevoss twins, along with Divya, finally come to an agreement on suing Facebook over intellectual property infringement once they learn that its dominating presence had reached Europe.

Saverin, meanwhile, feeling salty about his lack of influence over the project, freezes the bank account in a petty move to get Zuckerberg’s attention. Zuckerberg secures an investment deal that cuts Saverin’s share of the company to .03%, so he’s mad about this and decides to sue Facebook as well.

Many of the interstitials of the story revolves around these two lawsuits. In both cases, Zuckerberg settled because he was advised he wouldn’t win on account of him being an unsympathetic, smelly robot that the juries would detest! And then the movie ends with Zuckerberg stalking his ex-girlfriend, the only person throughout this whole movie who didn’t kiss his ass.

Justin Timberlake is in this movie for some reason.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — Aaron Fucking Sorkin

I have a lot to say about this smug, crack-smoking Ivy League wannabe. I’ll probably write the exact same stuff whenever I decide to watch A Few Good Men. Or Moneyball. Or Molly’s Game. Or if I feel like writing about any season of The West Wing or Sports Night or The Newsroom. Or anything else he wrote ever.

I believe that there’s a half-life of enjoyment for anyone who takes to Sorkin’s writing style. When I first watched Sports Night in, like, 2008, I found his writing style fresh and engaging. Certainly, it was my first Sorkin experience ever. I was in college and I lapped that shit up like a dog. Then The West Wing was even better. Presidential advisors helping to run an entire country? It was the perfect context for that fast-paced, ultra-important, high-stakes banter! Studio 60 in the Sunset Strip was the start my cynicism with the style, but I stuck with that one. The Newsroom annoyed me and I didn’t finish the first episode.

Watch enough Sorkin and you’ll be able to recognize his trademark recyclable garbage from a TV three rooms away. You just need to hear two characters exchange two sentences in the middle of any random scene from ANYTHING he has ever written. He’s very good at writing characterizations for self-righteous narcissists who believe they can, and demonstrably succeed to, THROUGHLY OWN A PERSON during an argument with a very scripted, very overwrought monologue. He’s good at this because he is a self-righteous narcissist. And he himself is the embodiment of a scripted, overwrought windbag. It’s the easiest project in the world for Sorkin to develop a character who is a horrible, arrogant, friendless asshole.

And that’s why Aaron Sorkin jumped at the opportunity to write about Mark Zuckerberg.

Now son, I’m the law man here. I’m the law man and you’re the layman. *smirk* *smirk* *SMIRK*

TOPIC 2 — Mark Fucking Zuckerberg

This guy sucks balls and I’m pretty glad this movie didn’t aim to paint him too positively. Reportedly, the script leaked over a year before the movie was released to theaters, and that gave the twerp a brutal amount of time to squirm and stew about the fact that a movie was being made about him. That’s fantastic. It’s pretty telling that he obviously knew what to expect.

The funny thing is, knowing how the movie would portray his backstabbing idea-stealing real life self, Zuckerberg attempted to pre-emptively do a charitable thing one week before the movie’s release. Even funnier, this money was completely wasted! And he was criticized heavily for the poor timing of the action. It’s as if he has no self-awareness!

Sorkin is pretty fucking good at writing smarmy, confident characters. Jesse Eisenberg plays one of the most unlikeable protagonists you’ll find in cinema, and this is a compliment. His acting is phenomenal, portraying Zuckerberg exactly as the average person might picture him (exactly as the average person should picture him).

“I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive,” Zuckerberg said during an interview. Well, lol to that, sir, because not only did you get a movie made about you while you were still alive, but also while you were still in your twenties. You deserved it. I’m glad it made you uncomfortable.

Go back and cook your meth, Pinkman.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Natalie Portman revealed during “Newsweek’s 2011 Oscar Roundtable” that she gave a dinner party for writer Aaron Sorkin, while he was writing the script for this movie, to which she invited a bunch of her friends from Harvard. She wanted to give him the chance to listen to first-hand stories about the social life at Harvard University.
Yeah, and I bet Sorkin thought that this dinner party was actually going to be an orgy and he showed up to Portman’s house wearing a toga and smelling like horse pheromones. He had a flask full of mouthwash.

Mark Zuckerberg originally planned never to see this movie. He ended up taking several of his employees to see it. He later remarked that, despite some of the film’s inaccuracies, they got his clothing right.
I don’t know what’s better: the fact that Zuckerberg “planned never to see it” and then took people to see it, implying that he changed his mind completely while it was still in theaters, OR that he didn’t even have friends to go with. He took employees, who I imagine wouldn’t have bothered whatsoever if Zuckerberg didn’t pay them overtime for it.

Andrew Garfield came into rehearsal with a copy of Economics for Dummies. Inspired by that move, Jesse Eisenberg bought C++ for Dummies. According to Eisenberg, both he and Garfield read the introductions of their books and then put them down.
Method Acting for Dummies also remained unread, it seems.

We’re just a couple of fun dudes with a 40″ height difference hangin’ out at a party!

Jesse Eisenberg, who is diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), said in an interview that one of the hardest things about the role was having to deliberately speak and behave in a manner he had struggled against in his own personality his entire life.
Haha, oh my god, no kidding? So Jesse Eisenberg had to channel Jesse Eisenberg in order to accurately portray Mark Zuckerberg? That’s the saddest thing I’ve read in a long time.

After casting, David Fincher forbade principal actors from meeting their real-life counterparts until filming was completed.
“Do not meet Mark Zuckerberg! I demand that you stay away from Mark Zuckerberg! Don’t even think about it! Jesse, what did I JUST say! Stop it, Jesse! Stay away from him, Jesse! NOOOOOO!”

Aaron Sorkin directed the last shot of the film’s shoot. David Fincher announced he was leaving- Sorkin thought it was a joke until the production crew came up to him asking how to film it. It only amounted to a second’s worth of footage anyway, but Sorkin got to announce the final wrap at the end.
Immensely funny to imagine David Fincher going “fuck THIS shit” and storming out when there was exactly one second of shooting left for the film.

Armie Hammer was forced to eat a lot of junk food to keep his weight up. All of the rowing he had to do for the film would have made him lose too much weight otherwise.
This sounds like abuse to me, considering there was, at most, 40 seconds of footage of Armie Hammer rowing in the entirety of The Social Network.

The real Mark Zuckerberg had never heard of an Appletini before he had seen the film. After he tried one, he liked it so much he made the Appletini Facebook’s official drink.
Jesus Christ, dude.

Reminder that a bunch of women corroborated Armie Hammer’s cannibalism fetish. And now we have TWO of him??!

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

It depends completely on your ability to withstand Aaron Sorkin. Everyone gives decent performances, but they are VERY Sorkin-directed performances. And sometimes that makes me want to puke up all my vital organs. Other times it’s tolerable enough. I think being based on a true story helps here, so Sorkin didn’t have much wiggle room to cook anything up from his own cocaine-pickled brain.

If you’ve already gotten enough Sorkin saturation to last a life time, you can skip this movie. Just read about it on Wikipedia.