Social Network movie analysis

Social Network

Movie analysis by Zulfi

4/5

            Mario Puzo’s novel godfather starts with the line by Balzac: ‘behind every great fortune, there is a crime.’

            And the fortune of facebook is around 50 Billion dollars as that is how rich Mark Zuckerberg is. He is the youngest billionaire and his treasure didn’t come without getting his hands dirty. The small journey, which he took from the starting of the social network, facebook, during his college days to now being the director and owner of the largest user networking site, had embittered many of his close friends against him. Under that success of youth’s crazy and frenzied modern addictions, many personal wars have been fought, dreams have been stomped, friendships have been broken, and loyalties have been swung.

            ‘Social network’ movie brought to light the importance of script writing. The real heroes of deftly moving movies, scriptwriters, haven’t been given their due as much as before Mark Zuckerberg’s movie biography. Aaron Sorkin was the person who was highlighted by every reviewer even though this was a David Fincher’s flick. The source material was taken from the book, ‘the accidental billionaires’ by Ben Mezrich. But Aaron Sorkin could be seen in every pulse of this highly throbbing real life drama. His writing plays the perfect spoil for the blabbermouth Jesse Eisenberg as the movie looks running at zillions of speed. The first dialogue between Mark Zuckerberg and his sophomore date, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), one of the first and few ones he had probably, shows Zuckerberg’s mindset as his talk is nerdish-ly flirty and histrionically outrageous. Though he doesn’t score with his date, he establishes with the audience as a techno geek of the highest order. His travel back to the campus dormitory after the failed date is filled with a mission to get back at her and the girls in general. But more than that, he shows off by creating a software program, facemash, which pops out images of any two girls of the university database he had hacked and the boys just need to click on the pretty one to play it. This program he creates within a few hours and releases it onto the masses of his varsity, who successfully makes the servers crash with heavy traffic. The scenes are presented in a pulsing background score making the events more dramatic.

            Of course there is another alternate thread of story, which has Zuckerberg as the centerpiece of two different lawsuits. He was sued by his close friend who did the initial financing and was slowly diminished in his share from a considerable figure to a bare decimal one. In one of the most heated scenes of the movie, when confronted by Eduardo Soverin (Andrew Garfield),Mark tells him that he doesn’t know the inner workings of company’s shares so much. But then again asks how he can trust the company in the hands of a person who couldn’t keep a close watch on a trivial issue such as this. This is the way a logical person deals with a sudden issue. There is another lawsuit with Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, played by the brawny and handsome Armie Hammer (physical double by Josh Pence) and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who approached him with the idea of social networking after the facemash fiasco. Taking the idea, he avoided these aristocratic and athletic rowers (who even competed in the Olympics) writing the whole program within a matter of a few weeks and floating it to instant success.

            Sorkin’s script succeeds when it highlights the curves the company made to even bigger revenues. Winklevoss twins are contemplating on taking legal action when their parents are throwing a big party owing to their sports’ success and one of his father’s peer unknowingly tells them of facebook’s growing popularity. This plunges their hovering indecision into firm action. Another great bit of writing is when Zuckerberg decides to expand after his muse (earlier failed date) mocks him by telling she doesn’t know what facebook is. These are of course many cinematic liberties taken from the real life events, but these bits of great writing transform the movie into the next stage of evolution.

            David Fincher runs this finely scripted material in an operatic way with a finely thrilling bit of racy background score and slo-mo’s when necessary. Jesse Eisenberg though plays him as a nerd, there are many persons in real life, who contest the opposite behavior of Zuckerberg. Justin Timberlake’s Napster is represented as a manipulative business shark and advisor behind the facebook presentation, whose one of the first contribution is stylizing the name by losing the article and who trims Eduardo from Mark. This was of course the cinematic version. Sean Parker however really formed many important decisions for Zuckerberg by making him retain majority in the company and making it a brand out of the college software product.

            But the thing which really leaves one wondering at the end is about the rights and wrongs of Mark Zuckerberg. The climax shows him devoid of his close friends and his hitting of the space bar for checking out if Miss Albright had accepted his request. His character might have been seen in a poor shade by his plagiarizing of the concept, but he had been a child prodigy. Even at school, he developed ZuckNet which connected all the computers from his house to his mother’s dental office. He created a lot of video games and he was a mine of info on Greek odysseys and its literature. He did some decisions and profited at the cost of some of his personal issues, but don’t we all? When once referred as a hacker, Zuckerberg said, ‘it’s okay to break things to make them better’. We may see him in poor light but at the end go check in our fb account what’s happening with our friends.