Jeremy’s Tophunder №3: The Social Network

12 min readMay 13, 2020

I saw The Social Network when I was in college, around the time in my life when I found it really annoying when people would act like some movies just have inherently deeper meanings, with massive amounts of subtext layered in by writers and directors, that bordered on hidden, subliminal messages. It’s the same reaction I had to English classes in high school, when my teachers would talk about how someone like Hawthorne would (literally) agonize over (literally) every single word choice in The Scarlet Letter, and I would sit there thinking “you’re just making all of this shit up.”

Then I saw The Social Network.

And don’t get me wrong, I still feel like there’s a lot of literature and film analysis out there that goes waaaaay past the realm of rational thought worthy of merit. Like, there’s a whole documentary about the alleged hidden meanings behind The Shining, including one theory that the whole movie is just a two-and-a-half-hour Easter Egg where Stanley Kubrick subliminally tells the audience that he directed the “fake” footage of the Apollo 11 landing. And like, this documentary is near-universally well regarded by film critics. Shit gets weird out there, and I’m not always here for it.

But The Social Network, and the discussion around the movie over the last 10 years, genuinely makes me think (at least to some extent) “Oh, I get it now.”

Fundamentally, the movie is about relationships, about communication, about acceptance and social standing, about obsession, about motivation, and about change. It takes all of these themes, stirs them up into a cocktail, and serves them back to the audience in an impeccable fashion.

The core of the movie surrounds the dichotomy that exists in the relationship between Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). Zuckerberg is decidedly an outsider. He has (basically) no friends, and no way to climb the social ladder. He decides to exit the existing social structure, and take on a project that will (in his eyes) change the world and gain him recognition. And if he gets to work with his friend(s) in the process, that’s even better. But that delineation of priorities is important, because it’s exactly the opposite of Eduardo’s. Eduardo wants to work on a project with his friend. That’s his first priority. Success is secondary to the relationship. To Mark, the relationship is expendable in the furtherance of his personal and professional goals. Eduardo is motivated by the relationship — at first in an effort to be a good friend to Mark, then to get Mark’s attention, and finally to exact his revenge on a former friend that betrayed him. And that’s ultimately why Eduardo is one of the few likable characters in the movie.

Mark isn’t likable because he doesn’t really change. He opens the movie as an asshole, and he ends the movie as an asshole. Whether or not that’s his intention doesn’t quite matter — he’s mostly static as a character. The Winklevoss Twins don’t really change either. They start the movie as entitled bullies who use their father’s connections, and end the movie as entitled bullies who use their father’s connections. Divya Narendra is kind of along for the ride with them. Sean Parker is the same way — Eduardo pegs him as delusional, paranoid, and untrustworthy after meeting him once, and the last we see of him, he’s checking all of those boxes at the same time. The characters we like, and for the most part experience the movie through, are Eduardo and Erica, who are the only ones to stand up to Mark and actually make him feel something.

But this runs into one of the movie’s key internal conflicts — none of the narrators are reliable. And the movie tells us this several times. In one of the final scenes of the movie, Rashida Jones’ character tells Mark, “When there’s emotional testimony, I assume that 85 percent of it is exaggeration. [The other 15 percent is] perjury. Creation myths need a Devil.” There’s also the scene where Mark tells Eduardo’s lawyer that Erica lied in her deposition. When he’s told that she was under oath, Mark retorts, “I guess that would be the first time somebody’s lied under oath.”

The movie doesn’t employ an unreliable narrator the way that Fight Club and American Psycho and a host of other movies do. It just presents three distinct different points of view (Mark’s, Eduardo’s, and the Winklevoss’), but passes no judgments and makes absolutely no steps towards establishing any as true or false. It tells you these three stories in half-truths and lets you decide for yourself where everything fits together. All three of the points of view are trying to convince you of a self-serving narrative, but they’re so (a) conflicting, and also (b) transparent in their self-service that they can’t possibly all be true. All must be treated with skepticism. This plays to Mark’s disadvantage for the most part, because he’s just not a very communicative character. The only time we really see the “real” Mark is in the hacking/blogging scene, and that’s because he’s drunk and angry (and because I believe most of the voiceover dialogue is ripped straight from Zuckerberg’s actual blog that he actually wrote that evening). All of Zuckerberg’s other “cool” moments are in the depositions, when he undresses the Winklevoss twins or their lawyer, but that’s not the “real” Mark. That’s a front he’s putting on in order to advance his narrative — that he’s the sole creator of Facebook and deserves 100 percent of the credit. We never get the “full” story from his angle, because he never tells it to us. All we can do is piece it together the best we can from what the people suing him tell us, which isn’t exactly the most reliable way to get information. Do we think Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy? Probably not. But we can’t pretend like the reasons why we think that are irrelevant.

Mark Zuckerberg’s “arc” (if you can call it that) is one of obsession. He’s obsessed with being recognized. First by the Final Clubs (as outlined in the movie’s first scene), then by one of his idols (Sean Parker), and finally by the world at large. He has high aspirations and an obsessive drive to meet his goals, but was always considered an outsider. In a sense, then, it’s absolutely perfect that this movie was made by similar people.

Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are considered among the best of their craft in Hollywood. But they’re somehow both still kind of outsiders. Fincher is considered an uncompromising perfectionist who will refuse projects if his proposed budget isn’t met. He’s been fired from projects for refusing to compromise his vision, and on The Social Network, became famous (or perhaps infamous) for filming 99 takes of the opening scene in the bar before deciding he was satisfied. He’s incredibly well-respected, and actors and fellow filmmakers find him to be a pleasure to work with, but it’s widely rumored that studios enjoy the process far less. Sorkin, meanwhile, is similarly well-respected by actors and peers, but studios often push back against his scripts. Here, for example, he wrote a script some 30–40 pages longer than the studio was expecting (which often means a movie 30–40 minutes longer), and the studio expected him and Fincher to work to cut the script down to an acceptable length. They both refused, and were able to convince the studio that the length of the script was simply due to the staccato-like nature of Sorkin’s dialogue, and that when filmed, the movie would be an acceptable length. The studio finally relented, and then they delivered a film with a run time to the minute of what they promised the studio.

The uncompromising nature of the filmmakers helped to highlight the uncompromising nature of the characters, particularly Zuckerberg. Just about every time Mark speaks, it becomes very clear that he knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to get it. And even in scenes where he isn’t talking, his posture and body language tells you everything you need to know about his character. Everything is there on the screen if you know what to look for.

One of my favorite hints in the movie is immediately following the opening scene, when Mark jogs through Harvard Square and Harvard Yard, back to his dorm after Erica dumps him, while the opening credits and titles run, and the score starts to kick in.

I love the music in this scene. It mirrors everything so perfectly. Mark just had his ass handed to him by his now ex-girlfriend, and he’s some combination of lonely, sad, and pissed off, but still has all of the motivations he had five minutes ago — to do something to get noticed. And the music? It has the loneliness and sadness and “I just want people to notice me and like me” in the soft, melancholy piano melody, but underneath that, is the bubbling anger and obsession in the grating dissonance underneath it. And how is Mark moving from Point A to Point B? He’s jogging in flip-flops. So we know that he has some vague sense of urgency, but also that his desire for respect stems from his intellect, not his outward appearance. Everything about Mark’s motivation for the following scene (the hacking scene, linked here again) is established beautifully in two minutes that at first glance just seem like an easy way to get through the opening credits.

I really can’t say enough about the music in this movie. I remember at the time not really noticing it, and then being bummed out when it beat Inception at the Academy Awards for Best Original Score. Now, it’s one of the first things that I notice whenever I watch it. Obviously there’s that opening scene, and the music is also great in the hacking scene (especially over the shots of the party at the Final Club), but there’s also the amazing piece in the Henley rowing scene (which also utilizes some really cool tilt-shift photography, which might seem out of place given the rest of the movie, but is just so damn cool that I can’t be mad).

I love the acting in this movie. I think literally everyone that shows up on screen gives an amazing performance. Eisenberg is great. Garfield is great. Even Justin Timerblake is great. Rooney Mara is spectacular in just two scenes. I love, love, love Zuckerberg’s lawyer and the Winklevoss’ lawyer, I always love Max Minghella and don’t understand why he’s not a bigger star, and maybe my favorite performance in the movie is Douglas Urbanski as Harvard president Larry Summers, who absolutely kills his only scene.

The last thing I want to touch on here is the really nice parallels between the opening scene and the final scene. The movie opens on Mark and Erica at a bar, having a fast-paced conversation that is at some points rather hard to follow. And there’s a reason for that.

The beautiful thing about this scene is how it uses ambient noise to set up a key component of the movie — the dialogue. From the opening scene, everything is driving your attention to the dialogue. It’s two people in a bar, talking, but there’s enough ambient noise that you really have to pay attention in order to catch everything. For a few minutes, you’re sitting in Erica’s chair. You can’t completely follow everything Mark is saying, because he’s bouncing all over the place and because the bar is rather boisterous. It’s telling you to pay extra close attention to what’s being said, because that’s where most of the story is going to happen — in the space between whomever happens to be in the scene. This is the scene that Fincher needed 99 takes, and you can kind of see why. Not only does Erica’s final few lines help drive Mark’s motivation for just about the entire movie, but you need to feel Mark’s pompous self-importance for the several minutes leading up to it in order for that moment to feel worth it. If this scene isn’t executed perfectly, the righteous comeuppance Mark receives at the end will feel more like an overreaction, and the impetus for the next dozen scenes will be askew. But they nail it.

And even beyond that, the opening scenes also serves as the scaffolding for the narrative structure of the entire movie. Mark and Erica have an exceedingly strange conversation, where seemingly half of the lines of dialogue are referring to a something said five lines ago, and it seems like they’re somehow having three different conversations all wrapped up in one. In doing so, Sorkin’s script is telegraphing how the movie will be told through, again, multiple different conversations, here referring to the various depositions across at different points in time, with cuts and flashbacks to the action and events that those depositions are in reference to. It’s just an unbelievably cool master stroke from one of the best screenwriters of the last 30 years, executed brilliantly by one of the best directors of the last 30 years.

In the movie’s final scene, Rashida Jones’ character tells Mark kind of what he wanted to hear all along — that he’s not an asshole. She might be right, she might be wrong. But that brings us full circle. We open on Mark and Erica, and then we close on Mark and Erica’s Facebook profile. Did Mark learn anything over the course of the movie? I really don’t know. I’d like to think he did, and that’s why he’s reaching out to Erica, but we don’t quite know for sure. It doesn’t totally feel like it — he seems to still think that Eduardo and the Winklevosses don’t deserve anything to come from these lawsuits, and he doesn’t seem to show much remorse for cutting his best friend out of the company. So why is he reaching out to Erica? Is he just looking for more confirmation that he’s not as bad of a person as he suspects he is? If so, I’d say that he ends the movie exactly where he started — trying to be noticed by people he’s envious of.

I have a pretty good grasp on what my favorite movies are. I haven’t put as much thought into who my favorite writers and directors are. So it’s entirely possibly that David Fincher is my favorite director, and that Aaron Sorkin is my favorite writer. The Social Network blends their work brilliantly, which wasn’t always a guarantee. Prior to The Social Network, Sorkin had never really written a cynical take on a story. He was best known for A Few Good Men and The West Wing, where men in white hats stand up for what is right and just and end up winning more often than they lose. His work here was exceptional, mostly because it was so different than anything he had done before. He played around with the timeline, made the focus of the movie an anti-hero, and gave us very few characters to relate to. This being right up Fincher’s alley, he took it and ran with it.

Like most Fincher movies, the trailer is almost as good as the movie itself. The music choice is perfect and needs no further exploration, and every conflict in the movie is laid out just enough to tease it and not enough to give away anything of consequence. I knew right away that I was going to love this movie, and I did. Over the last 10 years, I’ve only grown to enjoy it more. It’s the only movie I’ve watched so far that has made me think I might have made a mistake with the choice at the top of my list. I’m not quite ready to call it a mistake yet, but there’s a very strong argument to be made that this should hold the №1 spot. For now, it’s just going to be №3.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11