Here's part of my review in Taki's Magazine:
In the Internet Age, an increasing fraction of media “content” is generated by young nobodies, much to the disgust of old pros, such as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin of TV’s The West Wing: “I am all for everyone having a voice, I just don’t think everyone has earned the microphone. And that’s what the Internet has done.”
Sorkin has teamed up with veteran director David Fincher (Fight Club) to strike back at Kids These Days by making a supremely accomplished bit of up-market razzle-dazzle, The Social Network, an enjoyably bogus hatchet job on 26-year-old zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.com. Hyped as The Film that Defines a Generation, The Social Network is more an entertaining compendium of the worries of the new generation’s upper middle class parents: elite colleges, IQ, money, the social status of their kids on the marriage market, and why young people never go outside anymore.
The Social Network asks: How could somebody who is extremely smart but not intuitively gifted at making and keeping friends ever figure out the logic underlying friendship well enough to program it into a computer?
Doesn’t that question answer itself? ...
There’s much debate in the press about how realistically the film portrays the tycoon. The obvious answer is that Sorkin is projecting onto Zuckerberg his own (perhaps not wholly undeserved) self-loathing over sex, drugs, class, and ethnicity.
Read the whole thing there.
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36 comments:
So the kid who plays the Teutonic rowers Zuckerberg stole the FB idea from is a Jew?
There was that whole issue with "ConnectU." Zuckerberg was hired by identical twin brothers at Harvard, the Winklevoss twins, who are WASPy Nordic rowers, to do the programming for a social network website they started called "ConnectU" that was like Facebook. Zuckerberg worked for them for a bit before leaving and releasing Facebook shortly thereafter. Zuckerberg allegedly copied their idea and illegally used source code intended for the website he was hired to create.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU
As you can tell this already reads like a typical Hollywood movie with the Jewish hero and WASP/Nordic villain, and this conflict between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins is part of the movie. It's not too surprising a movie was made out of this considering all the "pre-packaged" elements it has: the Jew hero, WASP villain conflict, a technology they want to promote heavily, a future oligarch they want to promote, etc.
Aaron Sorkin, the writer of The Social Network, the new movie about Zuckerberg and Facebook, says that by the end of the movie Zuckerberg is a "tragic hero" and that most people want to "give Mark a hug" at the end:
http://tv.gawker.com/5651081/aaron-sorkin-the-social-network-will-make-you-want-to-give-mark-zuckerberg-a-hug
Mark Zuckerberg’s Design Skills, Circa 2001
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/17/mark-zuckerbergs-coding-skills-circa-2001/
Armie Hammer's father Michael Hammer, who is the son of Armand Hammer, is a trustee of Oral Roberts University.
Like I said, the Hammer Family story has potential...
Armie Hammer also played Billy Graham in "Billy: The Early Years."
Steve, this is not said often enough. Thanks for your writing, it often brings a little bit of joy.
Thanks.
From socialist Jew to Evangelist Christian in three generations. There's one story arc for you. Then you can throw in Al Gore's zinc mine, the business with the Russians...
Maybe Armie Hammer could play three different generations of Hammers in an epic. Ralph Fiennes did that in a movie about a Hungarian Jewish family that spanned the time from the First World War to the Communist takeover.
The Social Network is causing enormous excitement on college campuses across the country. Here in Silicon Valley, we FINALLY got our due on the big screen. Applications to YCombinator are already soaring.
Fincher and Sorkin may or may not have intended it, but Zuck comes out as the pimp he is, just a man among boys when it comes to code. The movie bent over backwards to give them a sympathetic portrayal, but it's clear that Saverin and the Winklevii did nothing to contribute to Facebook's meteoric rise.
(And if you think it's easy scaling a site like that, you really have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. To give some idea of the complexity, recognize that for an app like Gmail, you can put user A on one server, B on another server, and so on, both because there is an expectation of some lag for mail delivery and because A is only checking his own email.
For Facebook, though, each page view is highly dynamic. When A looks at his page, he's pulling B's, C's, D's, and Z's content updates in near real-time. Sharding something like that is really hard. And now start thinking about doing a real-time pagerank on the friend graph to compute which messages you are more likely to see and like, read, and react to.)
The tech behind billion dollar businesses is complicated, fun, and lucrative.
Hollywood is usually busy at work demonizing corporations, but the stories of successful companies contain PLENTY of drama and real-life stress.
For instance, Google scaled its revenue from $1MM to $14MM to $86MM to $430MM to $1B+ in six astonishing years.
I don't think too many people have *any idea* of what doing something like entails. We are talking Rocky style montages of just pure wizardry, with millions of people around the world having their lives touched and altered by what you're building.
Zuckerberg should hire Mike Judge to lampoon Sorkin: A manic-depressive on crack who is passionate about push-button issue politics -- and for some reason he's successful. There's some real comedy potential there.
Most of the things you attribute to Aaron Sorkin (Zuck's supposed deviousness, the sex, Jewish fraternity as outsiders), are in the book the movie's based on: Ben Mezrich's throwaway The Accidental Billionaires.
I've become spoiled by Steve's movie writing, expecting to be provided with context that other reviewers didn't know -- or chose to omit. This week's serving of "The Social Network" doesn't disappoint.
For comparison, here's a fair-use quote from the beginning of David Morganstern's very-good review from last Friday's WSJ (link; subject to rot/behind paywall).
--- begin excerpt ---
Watching "The Social Network" is like getting a runner's high without a treadmill or sweat. This account of Facebook's founder, and of the website's explosive growth, quickly lifts you to a state of exhilaration, and pretty much keeps you there for two hours.
David Fincher's film is devastating as biography—an unfriending of epic proportions—and dazzling as contemporary cultural history. The biographical part takes liberties with its subject. Aaron Sorkin based his supersmart and superbly funny screenplay on a contentious book, Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires," so everything that's seen isn't necessarily to be believed... Yet Mr. Eisenberg's performance feels like revealed truth while you're watching it...
--- end excerpt ---
Morganstern's essay is well-written and useful ("Do I want to see this movie?"). Sailer provides the backstory and the insights.
I haven't seen the movie but that's a great review that throws off a ton of great points.
Why won't Taki switch to a more readable text?
“I am all for everyone having a voice, I just don’t think everyone has earned the microphone. And that’s what the Internet has done.”
Hahahahahahahaha! Haaa haaa haaa haaa haaa haaaaa!
"Me want bullhorn back!"
Car magazines that review new automobiles now publish the temperature and humidity on road test day.
Maybe movie reviewers should include the kind of venue and the characteristics of the audience.
Albertosaurus
Engaging review, but left me wanting more.
According to Wikipedia, Michael Hammer is the grandson of Armand. His only child, Julian Armand Hammer, is described as a 'disappointment', and was tried (and acquitted) for murder.
Fred,
He's as jewish as someone raised by a father who is on the board of regents for Oral Roberts U and a mother who is on the Board of Directors for Joyce Meyer Ministries.
In other words, probably not much.
I was wondering how Sorkin was going to handle the ethnic angle. The Social Network sounds a lot like The Farnsworth Invention: Jewish businessman rips off (arguably) gentile inventor(s). And since the actual invention in both cases is of dubious actual dramatic heft, it's tempting to make the ethnic/class struggle what it's *really* about.
In Farnsworth, the Jewish striving was explicit in the predatory businessman character--there's actually a scene where cossacks burn down his family's house, forcing them to flee to America--but then it could be because of when the story takes place.
I could tell Sorkin was tempted to do this again just by watching the Social Network trailers but I wondered how he would handle it given that this story, unlike Farnsworth, takes place in a time and place (Harvard) where the businessman's ethnic group is actually ascendant, if not hegemonic.
Because part of the story seems to be that Zuckerburg's sense of outsider status is his own invention or the result of his personality ("you're not really an a-hole, but you try so hard to be"), I thought Sorkin might actually be bold enough to have a character call Zuckerburg on his imagined outsider status on an ethnic level too.
But I figured it would more likely be the bizarre Gossip Girl style anachronism that Steve seems to describe here.
How many Wasps/North Europeans are there at Harvard anyway?
Correction, actor Armie Hammer is the great-grandson of Armand Hammer.
"Maybe movie reviewers should include the kind of venue and the characteristics of the audience."
It helps to see a movie with a paying audience rather than a free critic's screening. I could tell that "The Blind Side" was going to be a surprise hit because the Mexican ladies in the audience loved this story about a rich Republican lady and a black football player she adopts.
Conversely, "The Social Network," while it will be highly profitable, isn't doing quite as well as the press expected because it skews too upscale, which was evident at theater.
One advantage Facebook had in scaling up over previous social networks like Friendster was that they rolled it out by college rather than release it to the whole world at once. Friendster got so popular nobody went there anymore, literally, because the servers got overloaded. Facebook's early rollout limiting it to certain colleges let Zuckerberg estimate the number of servers he needed quite accurately.
It's not too surprising a movie was made out of this considering all the "pre-packaged" elements it has: the Jew hero, WASP villain conflict, a technology they want to promote heavily, a future oligarch they want to promote, etc.
I guess it's not surprising that the ethnic element is boiled down to Jew vs WASP. But is that the case?
What about Sean Parker? He's no Yankee. And before the DNA fundamentalists go scoping out the Parker family tree, I'm speaking within the context of the movie. He's also the movie's pivotal character, as in the movie pivots upon his appearance. Yet he doesn't get a mention in Steve's review. I think that's an unfortunate oversight.
Here's why: As Fincher mirrored the Winklevoss twins in the first half of the movie, he does the same in the second half with Zuckberberg and Taylor. Take notice of the striking physical similiarity between Eisenberg and Timberlake. That's no accident. Zuckberg, more than anything, wants to be like Taylor; he wants to be a rebel; he wants to be Justin Timberlake; he wants to be the new Elvis; he wants to be Tyler Durden; he wants to be cool.
Didn't your hear Zuckerberg's girlfriend say women love the idea of the cowboy? Zuckerberg certainly did.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Justin Timberlake, graduate of E.E. Jeter Elementary School, take home an Academy Award in March.
Does anyone else think that rather than being depressing, the ending is actually kind of cool.
No, Zuckerberg is mostly the villain, the gentile preppies are treated better than in most movies (their WASPy reluctance to sue is treated as admirable and their twinness is a source of delight), and the Brazilian Jewish rich kid (whose Jewishness is kept kind of vague) is the most sympathetic character. It's not the standard school movie ethnic cliche, but that doesn't mean it makes a whole a lot of sense or has much to do with what really happened.
Personally, my sympathies are pretty much in the opposite order.
I like Zuckerberg. In the interview videos I've seen, he's a good-looking kid with a big smile when he's joking around. When he gets serious and starts explaining something complicated, he stops try to charm the interviewer and just lets his face go neutral and stares into the middle distance while he concentrates on expressing his thoughts clearly. That's not good PR, but that is the sign of a single-tracking intellect. (That happens to me all the time, so I can identify.)
I haven't seen any videos of Zuckerberg sneering like Jesse Eisenberg does all the way through the movie. I like Eisenberg a whole bunch, but I thought his performance was silly, although that's almost certainly the fault of Sorkin and Fincher. Eisenberg should have been told to only let out the look of anger and suspicion in key scenes, not use it all the time.
"Take notice of the striking physical similiarity between Eisenberg and Timberlake. That's no accident."
At first, I had a hard time telling Justin Timberlake's character from either Zuckerberg or Saverin. He has Zuckerberg's hair and Saverin's slightness. I thought that was a flaw in the casting because it makes the movie even more confusing, but I can see the purpose in it.
What kind of name is Winklevoss anyway? I know this is a technicality, but it doesn't sound very WASP in the literal sense.
Drawbacks: I think the book was accused of inaccuracies as well. The chances Zuckerberg is a jerk are pretty high, but I wouldn't necessarily believe any specific claim in either book or movie. Apparently a rival pro-Zuckerberg book portrays him as a straight arrow, with line such as "There was a lot of pot smoked at that party. Zuckerberg didn't approve."
Is Fincher Jewish? He really is a maestro.
the Jew vs. wasp narrative is undermined by the fact that the third partner is an Indian guy, who is apparently a member of the exclusive eating club. welcome to the 21st century..
The Social Network is causing enormous excitement on college campuses across the country. Here in Silicon Valley, we FINALLY got our due on the big screen. Applications to YCombinator are already soaring.
... blah blah blah about technical nonsense ....
I don't think too many people have *any idea* of what doing something like entails. We are talking Rocky style montages of just pure wizardry, with millions of people around the world having their lives touched and altered by what you're building.
Wait, are you talking about Breaking Bad???
To the anti-Jewish comments on this board, did you watch the same movie as me? Marc Zuckerberg came off as being a bad guy in the movie and the Winklevoss' came off looking good. At the end of the movie, it stated that Zuckerberg paid $65m to the Winklevoss twins. So is Zuckerberg still the good guy? Also the idea the Winklevoss' had was simply for Harvard students and Zuckerberg expanded it exponentially and somewhat differently. Also there was no contract signed. Zuckerbeg likely settled to close out the matter and not let it drag on. The movie was not anti-WASP or Pro-Jewish. Nice try Jew haters. By the way Winklevoss is a Norwegian name.
Not a single mention of the WM/AF issue that's been burning up the mainstream sites. And you all call yourself HBD'ers. Tsk, Tsk.
I think the desire to make a negative movie about Zuckerberg was motivated primarily by jealousy. He's in his mid 20s and already a multi-billionaire. That fact alone makes most of the older mere millionaire Hollywood big shots feel like losers so they wanted to take Zuckerberg down a peg.
Why is it so hard to find out if Fincher is Jewish or not? I can't seem to find anything definitive.
"Why is it so hard to find out if Fincher is Jewish or not? I can't seem to find anything definitive."
Reminds me of the scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David gets accosted by another Jew on the street while humming a Wagner tune:
Other Jew (angrily): "Excuse me, are you a Jew?"
David: "Do you want to check my penis?"
my take is that Sorkin is in a lather about many things to do with Zuckerberg.
"sound and fury..."
'The Social Network', Sorkin, Facebook...
They're so 2010...
dudes - ride yer bike or whatever
I hope Zuckerberg spanks all his chirpers
Late posting but I just saw the "The Social Network" and I agree somewhat with your ideas about the film. The problem I had with the Zuckerberg character revolves around a couple of incidents in the film. The first incident involves Face-mash, frankly it is funny but cruel and I'm pretty sure I would have found it cruel when I was 22 though I might have voted anyway. The second incident involves his partners ownership going from roughly 34% to .03(?)%. I mean that is one nasty haircut even if the partner really didn't deserve to have a third of the company. The movie made me feel that Fanning(he gets completely trashed in the film) was actually more responsible for the second incident then Zuckerberg so I can see why you do have sympathies for him. I enjoyed the movie but perhaps my IQ isn't sufficient because like your compadres at the movie theater I got a little bored. The first half hour rocked and that was enough to carry me through the whole film.
My mistake(I confused my Seans or is it Shawns).. In the above post Fanning should be Parker and I'm not certain he(Parker) should have been trashed either.
Sharon Waxman, a reporter who covers Hollywood for the New York Times, says that Fincher is not a Jew.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/q_a_with_sharon_waxman_20050304/
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