The Social Network

I was actually surprised how compelling it was, although I could perhaps have done without David Fincher’s attempts to artificially spice up some crucial but rather uninteresting scenes with thumping basslines (supplied, apparently, by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor) that almost drowned out the dialogue – although I must say this was an interesting project for the thriller director, who seems to be getting increasingly experimental…at least until Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Telling the story of Facebook founding members Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, there’s no question that the story is dolled up for a Hollywood audience – the screenplay was after all based on a book written by a writer who openly admits he doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good yarn - but I’m sure that the prominence given to this story will ensure plenty of dry documentaries to come. Framed by the two major lawsuits brought against Zuckerberg – once by his erstwhile best friend Saverin, whose share in the company was lowered to 0.03% from an original 30% under the ridiculous guise of shares being devalued for him only, and once by the Winklevoss twins, who I first heard of when they were on this year’s losing Isis team at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, portrayed in the blurbs in a very different light from how they came over here – the story covers the growth of Facebook from dormroom joke to multi-billion-dollar corporation. It quite cleverly gives time to each of its major players – Zuckerberg, Saverin, the Winklevosses and Napster founder Sean Parker, played as a party-boy by a capable Justin Timberlake in one of the more obvious flights of fancy from the writers – and shows them in both a positive and negative light. Zuckerberg in particular is enigmatic, at first a likeable, rather stereotypical nerd, played by Jesse Eisenberg like a much less obnoxious, far-better acted version of Michael Cera’s signature character, but slowly unravels into the rather detached, merciless and selfish figure of the leaked ‘Fuck them in the *ear’ leaked chatlogs.

I was an early adopter of Facebook. I can more or less guarantee that nobody, or next to nobody, who reads this got Facebook before I did. I first heard of it in 2005, when only prestigious US colleges (I was told only the Ivy League, but I think that was a simplification), Oxford, Cambridge and apparently LSE had access. I resisted it at first, thinking it was some Myspace clone, but gave in sometime before October, when photos were introduced. Indeed, if people decide to look though my photos, they’ll see the first ones of me are from that month. When it became accessible to anyone in 2006, I left for a while, not wanting to end up having to add people I didn’t like from secondary school, but of course was eventually tempted back. Until perhaps a year ago, I held the impression that the programmers behind it were faceless Silicon Valley suits, not worth investigating or finding out about. So this film came as a bit of a surprise to me.

Nevertheless, there is a great shift just now in what is trendy, who is desirable and what defines ‘cool’ – albeit thankfully already a backlash against hipster posers. This fits in neatly, and it will be interesting to see how this sort of film is considered in fifty, a hundred years’ time.