Social Network (2010)

I finally got around to seeing The Social Network last night and have to say that while it was a good movie, it wasn't anything earth shattering to me. The film was not particularly compelling from a visual perspective, the narrative structure was average and the acting was good but not great. In fact, it appears that the endless hype surrounding the picture had more to do with its covering of the topic on everyone's mind than the film itself. Certainly Facebook has become an almost nonpareil social phenomenon, starting in a dorm room at Harvard and expanding to being the most popular website on the planet. Some people spend hours on the site a day and now have a tacit control over their networks that once seemed impossible. The site is wonderful for communicating the mundane details of our lives to others, for reading the mundane details of others lives, for organizing parties, political action and online campaigns, for launching businesses (as a few of my friends have), for catching cheating partners and, really, for wasting time alone as if we were wasting it with others. It is clearly addictive, though I have found that addiction has waned to the point where I can go days without even surfing through the news of my "friends" lives. In any case, getting back to the movie, I wonder what the point of the film was. Are we to take away the point that Zuckerman just isn't that nice a guy? That he is our Revenge of the Nerds doppelganger for the new millenium? That he is redeemed in the end, because we all love facebook and he is the youngest billionaire in history? Or is this a tragic tale of a deeply-scarred asshole who is still in love with the girl who ditched him in college? There is, of course, a lot more going on in the film, and it certainly touches on the uber-competitive, backstabbing, success-at-any-cost world in which we live today -- and I imagine that was one of the themes the adept screenwriter Sorkin was attempting to elicit. And a further theme could be the ways that even technology meant to bring us together tends to alienate us from others and to treat them in instrumental (really inhumane ways). Yet one wonders how the film was received by viewers enamored with Facebook? Is Zuckerberg the anti-hero turned hero we learn to adore? Is he a cautionary tale on how success and money can't really erase the scars of social-exclusion? Or is he just a brilliant genius who should be forgiven for his shortcomings -- including screwing friends and enemies alike? In the end, I believe the film highlights the changing nature of social interaction in America today and the ways we have learned to embrace the new world order without really recognizing either its costs or ramifications for our collective future. But it was fun to watch ...