This past weekend many logged off from the internet, shut down their computers and walked into their local movie theater to watch the much-anticipated film, The Social Network. Based on Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of Facebook, The Social Network has been well-received by fans and top movie critics. It opened its debut weekend with $23 million, making it a success at the box office.
As a movie, critics praised the film for its dramatic storytelling and entertainment. Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times writes:
“The Social Network” is a great film not because of its dazzling style or visual cleverness, but because it is splendidly well-made. Despite the baffling complications of computer programming, web strategy and big finance, Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay makes it all clear, and we don’t follow the story so much as get dragged along behind it. I saw it with an audience that seemed wrapped up in an unusual way: It was very, very interested.
While sites like Slate and The New Republic found the film’s story line flawed.
Sorkin, too, bends truth to narrative. He adds anachronistic references to MySpace. He invents a scene in which early Facebook investor Sean Parker happens upon Zuckerberg’s rental house in Palo Alto, Calif., only after a zip line tears off the chimney. And Sorkin creates a climactic, computer-smashing confrontation between Saverin and Zuckerberg that I’ve been unable to find any reference to in the various Facebook lawsuits. Let’s accept petty deceptions like these as a necessary ingredient in a dramatized story. The problem is that Sorkin doesn’t gloss over facts to get at any truths about Facebook’s founding. He is trafficking in dramaturgy.
Lawrence Lessig of The New Republic also finds problems in Sorkin’s storytelling:
But the most frustrating bit of The Social Network is not its obliviousness to the silliness of modern American law. It is its failure to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story. In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows. This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite. Instead, we’re just shown a big explosion ($25 billion in market capitalization—that’s a lot of dynamite!) and expected to grok (the word us geek-wannabes use to show you we know of what we speak) the world of difference this innovation in bombs entails.
While, over at The Daily Beast, David Kirkpatrick, who wrote The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, picks apart fact from fiction in the film.
It’s also true, as the movie has it, that Saverin initially invested $1,000 of his own money. But the film implies that all the funding during Thefacebook’s first months came out of Saverin’s pocket. In fact, Zuckerberg, too, put in lots of cash.
As The Social Network heads into its second week at the box office, The Wrap points out that the film completely misses that Facebook “is ostensibly about the greatest communications revolution since moveable type.” Sharon Waxman concludes:
And yet viewers come away with no sense of how Facebook users actually do communicate. And so what was supposed to be a zeitgeist movie is, instead, a vehicle for elite Hollywood’s talents to blithely, if unwittingly, demonstrate how out-of-touch they are with what’s going on out there.
