First Impressions: “The Social Network”

A movie can be like an acquaintance, you first impressions might be right, they might be wrong. But most importantly they change over time. In these post I publish my unfiltered first impressions of an in cinema movie.

Biopics are a very tricky genre. I once joked that the only succesful biopic that was ever pulled off was “Superman: The Movie”, simply because anyone who argued about inaccuracies between the movie and the accepted facts, were exposing themselves as nitpicking comic book geeks.

Though of course the point still remains that many of the facts that differed the movie from the established facts (mythology perhaps being a more accurate term – but lets look at it through the prism of the biopic, not the comic book movie.) were later adapted as established facts in the comic books. The biopic usurped the “truth” in a way.

Of course writing an accurate biography of the character of Superman is not really comparable to writing an accurate biography of a man like Mark Zuckerberg, mostly because of the ever-shifting nature of comic book canon. But what is a biopic about Mark Zuckerberg really supposed to teach us?

Zuckerberg himself said that he wished noone would make a movie about him as long as he was still alive, and I think this is a very fitting comment, espescially in the case of this movie.

This is a movie about a phenomenon as much as it is about a character. And that phenomenon, Facebook, is potentially in its infancy, as many characters in the film point out. There is the speed of new media and services against old media (like, oh, cinema) to consider of course, but the movie only occasionally attempts to say anything about how Facebook has changed the world.

Instead it dramatizes the innvator myth surrounding Mark Zuckerberg, and it does it damn effectively. As many have pointed out the synopsis of the film sounds as exciting as oat meal and milk, but Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher turn it into a movie that stylistically and formally works like a dream.

But in the process it falls into at least two major pits. Firstlyl it bookends the story with two scenes that heavily suggest that Zuckerbergs creativity is spawned by his desire to get back at, and ultimately reconcile with, his ex-girlfriend. It comes of too neatly wrapped, considering that this is a real person we are dealing with.

The second pit is the slightly heavy-handed irony of the programmer behind the worlds foremost social netowrk loses his “only friend” in the legal battle. This too is one of those places where dramatic conventions take priority over facts, I would imagine.

Oh, and Zuckerberg himself comes off as a slightly more bearable, though less hilarious, version of Sheldon Cooper of “The Big Bang Theory”. But I guess some conventions must be observed when writing nerds on screen.

Biopics are indeed very tricky, and not very easy to review either, especially when they circle around a living contemporary. And especially when it is about a phenomenon at it’s height.

Maybe a documentary is, on occasion, preferable.