Why did Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook? Put it down to his inability to make a girl happy.
That's the tack taken by The Social Network, the sardonic David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin film dramatising the events that brought Facebook into being.
In the opening scene, Zuckerberg's girl grows so weary of being hectored and patronised by her motor-mouthed boyfriend, she dumps him, complaining that being with him is like dating a Stairmaster.
In retaliation, he goes back to his Harvard dormitory and posts an insulting blog about her. He then becomes more ambitious, hacking into the university's databases and collecting photographs of most of its female undergraduates. Before the night's end, he's set up Facemash, a site inviting those who log on to rate the girls according to their looks. This ingeniously misogynistic enterprise gets so many hits, it brings down the system and is banned. Nonetheless, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is on his way. And so the world's most successful social network is spawned from its architect's lack of social graces.
At last report, Zuckerberg was doing his best to ignore the film. In some early behind-the-scenes tap-dancing, Sorkin's script was shown to Zuckerberg's colleagues but negotiations soon stalled – not surprisingly. The guts of it has been drawn from the memories of those who claim he cheated them on his way to becoming a billionaire. These reminiscences are backed up by transcripts from their lawsuits against him.
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So it's a shamelessly biased account, as well as a seductively plausible one, although you have to keep your wits about you to get the full effect. There's a lot of suing going on, with some potentially confusing intercutting between the courtrooms involved. And as you'll know if you're a fan of Sorkin's The West Wing, he does like his dialogue delivered express. Yet the wordiness is well leavened by the showmanship at work.
Sorkin and Fincher, the director, both revel in the chance to fashion eye-catching archetypes out of the story's main players, starting with Zuckerberg himself. A pale, slouching character, he's so eager to demonstrate the quickness of his intellect that he never becomes acquainted with the concepts of empathy and humour. Nonetheless, he does possess a strong sense of entitlement. Consequently, he's very intrigued when two of the university's glamour boys, the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), invite him to their club – Harvard's most exclusive – to elicit his help in setting up an on-campus social network site.
When Zuckerberg gets the better of them, listening to their idea before gazumping them with the creation of his own social network, their mingled frustration and wonderment at being outsmarted by such a lightweight inspires one of the film's most resonant lines. "I'm six foot five, 220 pounds and there are two of me!" trumpets one twin, as if there's value to be found in volume alone.
While it's a film conspicuously short of heroes, you are encouraged to sympathise with Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), one of Facebook's co-founders and a close friend of Zuckerberg's right up to the moment in which he learns that he's been brutally manoeuvred out of his previously significant role in the business. This move is orchestrated by Zuckerberg's new best friend, the flamboyant Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), co-creator of Napster. Parker comes across as the saga's nastiest character, which is no mean feat since the film is awash with contenders. The clincher is his devotion to the doctrine of "cool", which means that old-fashioned principles such as loyalty and fair-dealing tend to be crushed underfoot in his rush to embrace the edgy and unorthodox.
There are echoes of Citizen Kane here but they're a lot fainter than Sorkin and Fincher might like. Kane was the tragic hero of a story about idealism perverted by arrogance. But in this case, there's little idealism on show. According to the film's view of him, Zuckerberg is motivated only by an itch to be noticed by those he suspects of having much more fun than he is. Follow this theory to its inevitable conclusion and his business success is just a hyperactive example of showing off.
Towards the film's end, Sorkin and Fincher make a belated attempt to persuade us that he's human after all, leaving him looking a little shamefaced at the treacheries that have punctuated his progress. But the only hint of tragedy is the tragic irony at the story's centre – that an enterprise lauding the virtues of trust and openness should have been responsible for so many shattered friendships.
And there's another irony. Had Zuckerberg deployed some of this much-vaunted openness and agreed to talk to Sorkin, there's a chance he might have emerged from the film as a reasonably understandable individual. As it is, he remains the human Stairmaster of the opening scene.
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