Is ‘The Social Network’ the Best or Worst Movie of the Decade?
This decade in movie making is swiftly coming to a close. 10 years of sequels, prequels, and reboots. A decade of The Avengers and other superhero films leading into arguments about what constitutes cinema, anyway? Is Martin Scorsese right? Is he gatekeeping? Head on over to film Twitter if you’d like some ever exhausting arguments about what movies are good, which ones are bad, or even which ones are movies at all. What I’m trying to say is that in the last 10 years of movies there are very few things people are willing to agree on, but one of them is that The Social Network is great. Maybe even the best. As more and more people put out a plethora of “best of the decade” lists, The Social Network will surely top a fair few. Does it deserve such a rare consensus from the film community? Probably. It’s a fantastic movie. Not my favorite, but I can be an adult and begrudgingly admit that my favorite movie isn’t necessarily the best movie.
So, sure The Social Network may be the best movie of the decade… but could it be that it’s also simultaneously the worst? Not from a movie-making perspective, but from a catastrophic impact on culture and society kind of perspective. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Mark Zuckerberg is basically an evil super villain and Facebook is his ̶D̶e̶a̶t̶h̶ ̶S̶t̶a̶r̶ ̶H̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶D̶o̶o̶m̶ ̶M̶o̶r̶d̶o̶r̶ ̶C̶a̶s̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶D̶r̶a̶c̶u̶l̶a̶ Snake Mountain. A lair of his creation where he can have an extremely outsized and negative impact on the world around him. Do we blame Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher? Is their movie at fault? It certainly didn’t help.
So, let’s look at The Social Network from two different angles: As the best movie of the decade, and as the worst.
The Best
I love everything about movies. I love talking about them and thinking about them and dreaming about them and, well you get it. However, I am no more a movie critic than I am an astronaut. It’s truly rare that I have any interesting thoughts as to why something did or didn’t work for me. Instead, 90% of the time I come out of a movie the first thing I say is, “That was really good!” The experience is what does it for me, so even if there were aspects I didn’t love, seeing a movie will always be worth my time.
I say all that so you, the reader, don’t think I have any kind of official credentials to definitively say whether The Social Network is or isn’t the best movie of the decade. I’m not even going to try to convince you on one side or the other, I’m just going to point out a bunch of reasons why the movie is wonderful, and let others decide what movie belongs at the top of all those boring lists.
The Script
The script for this movie is incredible. I’m not much of an Aaron Sorkin fanboy as others, mostly because of a simple lack of exposure, but the writing for The Social Network is truly phenomenal. You’d have to fact check me on this but I’m fairly certain that there are more words packed into this script than there are in the entirety of the Bible. It truly feels like the actors are spitting out 10,000 words a minute for the whole 2 hour run time. Sorkin doesn’t just settle for quantity though–the words are quality too. One of my favorite moments in the entire movie is incredibly small, but made me laugh so much I had to rewind and watch it again 4 times.
There’s a scene where Mark and Eduardo are leaving a talk by Bill Gates when they are stopped by a trio of Facebook groupies who want to tell them how much they love the site. One of the trio embarrasses himself and his friends when he mentions Bill Gates, not knowing that’s who he had just watched give an hour long lecture. After Mark and Eduardo leave, the other two friends accost the dumb-dumb with one of them saying “What if I get a glock and kill you?!” The way it’s delivered is so fucking funny. The movie is worth a re-watch for that scene alone…
Another great thing that Aaron Sorkin added to the culture was Armie Hammer delivering the line “I’m 6’5”, 220, and there’s two of me” in reference to his large physique and twin brother. Armie Hammer is quite a good looking man, it’s kind of unfair that they just put him in this movie twice. The audacity.
Finally, Aaron Sorkin gave me Andrew Garfield using the phrase “Fuck You flip flops” and I’ll never be the same again.
Sorkin seems pretty dope, and not just because of the fuck you flip flops. The Social Network received plenty of backlash for a number of things including its historical accuracy and its representations of real life people. When criticizing the film, technology broadcaster Leo Laporte called the film “anti-geek and misogynistic.” To which Aaron Sorkin responded, “I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people.” I like him a lot.
Justin Timberlake
Oh Justin, one of my problematic faves.
Here’s the thing about Justin Timberlake: He kind of sucks. Whether it’s cultural appropriation, cheating on his wife, or not vaccinating his kids, there are plenty of reasons to dislike him.
Here’s another thing about Justin Timberlake: If you put him in a movie, I’m going to watch it.
Two movies that are not that good, but are actually fantastic, mostly because they star Justin Timberlake, are In Time and Runner Runner. His small appearance in Inside Llewyn Davis was also quite the pleasant surprise. There’s just something about him that makes movies fun for me, and what he is doing in The Social Network is peak JT. He shines as Sean Parker, the douchebag tech-bro founder of Napster. Justin plays smug asshole extremely well, and it’s easy for him to blend into the role of party-boy drug addict who probably likes his women way too young for him. Ok, I guess maybe he wasn’t acting?
Whether or not the portrayal of Sean Parker in the movie is historically accurate or not, the real Sean Parker recently had a 10 million dollar Game of Thrones themed wedding, so it’s safe to say he’s a real asshole regardless.
I don’t want to watch any other movies featuring Sean Parker. Unfortunately, I will watch more starring Justin Timberlake.
Performances
Everyone acting in this movie is fantastic. Rooney Mara does more with her little screen time than many actors do in a lifetime. It’s subtle and and I love her. Armie Hammer plays trust fund baby/crew jock like he was born for it… Twice! Justin Timberlake… well we already talked about him.
Despite all of that, only one performance from The Social Network was recognized at the Academy Awards: Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. Which is cool, I guess. He’s great, but I don’t know that he was necessarily playing Mark Zuckerberg. This will sound weird, maybe blasphemous even, but Jesse’s performance of Mark was too… cool. He just has this aura of confidence and snarkiness that I don’t think the real Mark Zuckerberg possesses at all. The real Mark definitely seems like a jerk, but not a cool jerk. More like a robot who’s robot mother never taught him robot manners, or how to properly interact with human beings. There is, however, a small scene where Mark is eating tuna fish out of the can which seems like the exact right choice of food for Mark to be eating. Only a robot or alien or lizard person would eat tuna out of the can like that. Maybe did deserve the Oscar.
What’s that? I forgot about Andrew Garfield?
I most certainly did not, I purposely saved the best for last. Andrew Garfield is perfect in this role. Don’t make me show you the “fuck you flip flops” scene again. He, if you ask me, is the protagonist of the movie. Eduardo is the character you’re supposed to sympathize with and Andrew Garfield does everything he needs and more to accomplish that. Not only should he have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor, he should have beat Christian Bale to take the statue home. It’s easily one of the biggest snubs of the decade, and dare I say, the millenium.
The Bad/Terrible/Republic-crumbling
It’s no secret that Facebook is bad. Unless you’re someone’s racist grandma who, in fact, thinks Facebook is super cool and a great source for news and information. Ah, but therein lies the problem. There are a lot of racist and ignorant grandmas, grandpas, and other older folks out there who do indeed get their information from Facebook. All of it. Now, that wouldn’t be such a big deal if Facebook hadn’t completely abdicated its responsibility to keep actual fake news off the platform. Not unflattering stories that Donald Trump doesn’t like, but actual, nefarious, evil, often Russian-backed, fictional news stories.
This was a huge issue during the 2016 presidential election, where Fake News™ spiraled out of control and Facebook flat-out refused to do anything about it. There are a lot of factors that led to Donald Trump being elected President. From a decaying moral backbone of the country, to “the silent majority” turning out to be raging racists who were actually never that silent but just needed a white nationalist at a microphone to get them to Get Out The Vote! All of these things were major issues, but none of them would have been if Facebook didn’t exist. With 244 million active Facebook users in the US Facebook obviously has an incredible (negative) influence on all of our lives. From Fake News™ to looking the other way while Cambridge Analytica pilfered all of our data without our consent (taking things without consent is on brand for Silicon Valley), Facebook’s sphere of influence has become nearly ubiquitous. Mark Zuckerbeg needs to be held responsible before his alien overlords realize how much damage their weirdest, dorkiest, member was able to cause on Earth.
What does all of that have to do with The Social Network? Well, the movie normalized Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. While it’s certainly not the reason Facebook was popular–it had already caught fire by that point– but it did make Mark Zuckerberg a household name, and even worse made him seem cool. He was the next Bill Gates! He was young and hip! Billionaires are cool and maybe we shouldn’t eat the rich! (James Harden eye-roll.gif). This tech bro was going to save the world, I guess. The movie provided a veneer of swag for a man with increasingly concerning power over the people of the United States.
Maybe without the movie the celebrity of Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have protected him from the scrutiny he rightly deserved. Maybe when the name Mark Zuckerberg started getting thrown around it would’ve been in conversations about throwing him in a gulag, not “Hey isn’t that the guy who turned a website about rating women’s hotness into a multi-billion dollar company? What a cool dude!”
Maybe The Social Network was the best movie of the decade. Maybe in 40 years when we’re living in underground bunkers eating radioactive rat sandwiches, our children will be studying the downfall of modern society with a chapter titled The Social Network. Maybe all of this is true at the same time. All I know for sure is that I’ll be wearing my fuck you flip flops.
To paraphrase Rashida Jones’ character in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg, you are an asshole, and you’re not trying very hard not to be one.
