I've had an addiction for roughly 4 years now. Unlike an addiction to drugs, shopping, alcohol, or even sex, there is no rehab for Facebook. I'm on the site regularly and it might be considered my number one extracurricular activity. It's a time to be weird and creepy (which I excel at) and to "reconnect" with those people who you see every day of your sad, sappy life. One of the funnier things about the site, though, is that I was invited by my friend to join as a sophomore in high school and can't really remember life before Zuckerberg's creation. Or rather the Winklevoss' creation that Zuckerberg manipulated and stole. See, on Thursday night or , more precisely, Friday morning I went to the midnight showing of The Social Network, the new movie out about the creation and development of Facebook which challenges all of our notions about where the site actually came from.
First of all, before that night, I'd never been to the Harvard Square movie theater, which is both a travesty and mystery given that I've been visiting this campus since I was wee. Somehow it was just one of those obvious things that I've never done (similarly, I'm a life long New York who's never been to the Empire State Building). But I finally got around to it in the most Harvardian way possible: I went with other Harvard students to a Harvard Square movie theater to watch a movie about Harvard students' shenanigans. How many times can I say "Harvard" in a couple sentences? The answer: many, many times. Anyhow, I thought the movie was absolutely fabulous.
There were clutch lines like "Mark, I have to study" to which Mark (played by Jesse Eisenberg) replied "No you don't. You go to BU" and the one where one of the giant, WASPy crew twins exclaimed, "I'm 6'5, 220 and there are two of me!!" I had a great time watching the movie's portrayal of the final club and social scenes on campus. I've seen many unfortunate things at parties here at school but I've yet to see girls in nothing but their underwear and heels at parties. Maybe I'm just not hitting up the prime spots on my Saturday nights. Part of the fun of watching the movie was dissecting which things felt realistic(like the social pressure placed on males to insinuate themselves into particular power circles) and which ones didn't (the buildings looked nothing like they do in real life).
I felt this way about the movie overall but there was one element of the film that got to me: Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. It's like when you go to H&M and you look from across the room at a really cute gray sweater. It's everything you've been dreaming of and you know it'll complete that outfit you planned to wear to dinner next Saturday. Then you walk up closer to it and all the detailing is fabulous EXCEPT for the random patch of rhinestones along the collar. The collar is obviously a central part of the top and it will be seen by all but it's just not quite right. That's exactly how I felt about Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg.
If you wanna play a slightly autistic person, inhabit the person's slight autism. If you wanna be relentlessly obnoxious, be relentlessly obnoxious. If you wanna play a pathetic person, act as a pathetic person would. But how could it be, Eisenberg, that Zuckerberg was all three of these things but still social enough to ever have any friends? Don't get me wrong: Harvard has more than its fair share of weird and unfortunate humans. However,Eisenberg's portrayal makes the Facebook creator seem less like a socially challenged person and more like a maniacally brilliant man-child. Without seeing the movie, it's hard to communicate the difference between being a tool and being other worldly (in a bad way) but to me, the story didn't make sense because if in real life Zuckerberg was as unpleasant as he appeared in the film, he would have no social contact to speak of.
The oddity of his demeanor was especially distinct and bizarre when compared to the other characters in the film. Andrew Garfield's portrayal of Saverin as an innocent but likeable bystander made sense in the context of someone who'd been ripped off and JT's depiction of Sean Parker (a man who made and lost millions by stealing music and offering it to people for free) as a sleazy individual seemed believable. Armie Hammer captured what the Winklevoss' must have been like. But there was just something about Eisenberg that felt too forced and too robotic to me.
Zuckerberg is clearly a smart or at least clever man who figured out how to create a social networking site that would, in a few short years, revolutionize the way young people interact across the planet. It's interesting that the movie tried to at once demonstrate his creativity and passion for this website and at the same time focused on possibility that he ripped off the Winklevoss' original website. Was he inventive and brilliant or was he merely a thief? The movie doesn't really answer the question.
At the end they do tell us that the twins won a $65 million settlement, which you'll know, even if you struggled with arithmetic in grade school, means that each twin got $32.5 million. And I've heard they're still trying to go back for more. I mean, it's true, $32.5 million is chump change at the age of 25. However, I do think it's enough to get by on. Like you can maybe get some ramen with that and take your girlfriend out to Denny's with that twice a year.
This movie to me was funny because it showed the intersection between money, creativity and white male identity. It reflected the motivations behind these people's actions and the complexity of power structures: the Winklevoss's had money and social power while Zuckerberg had the creativity and skills not only to make his own website but to capitalize on their idea. In America, it doesn't matter whose idea comes first. As "The Social Network" reveals, the ability to enact an idea and to figure out a way to monetize it is the only thing that counts. Whether Zuckerberg's character was as putrid and weasely as the movie insinuated, one thing's certain: he's made his mark (haha, get it, that's his name...Mark...ok I'll stop) on social affairs. Does this mean that I have to be as relentlessly unbearable as Zuckerberg to get ahead in life/start a social revolution? Is that my only option? What's up with that?
