Movie Monday: ‘The Social Network”
Dalton: Welcome to Movie Monday on Bingeable! Each week Sonny and I will be discussing the in’s and out’s of Andrew Garfield’s perfect performance in The Social Network. (Ok fine that’s just this week). Movie Monday will be a weekly post where Sonny and I discuss whatever movie we decided to watch that week. In honor of its ten year anniversary coming up, we decided to give The Social Network a re-watch for our inaugural post. So, Sonny, tell us a little more about what Movie Monday is going to be and get us started with your thoughts on The Social Network. In the meantime, I’ll be putting on my fuck-you flip-flops. (Unfortunately my Prada’s at the cleaners).
Sonny: Well Dalton, first and foremost I’d like to thank you for typing up this intro, and for agreeing to partner up with me on this Movie Monday project. In theory, I could’ve done this alone, but it’s just so much more fun to write with you. I promise you that when Movie Monday eventually becomes a ridiculously popular and profitable column, I won’t pull a Mark Zuckerberg on you and cut you out of the business as if you were Eduardo Saverin. Don’t even worry about reading those contracts we’ll be signing. My lawyers are your lawyers as well.
So you asked me to explain what Movie Monday is going to be, and I think Napster founder/Facebook President Sean Parker said it best: “This is a once-in-a-generation-holy-shit idea.” Sure, he said this about The Facebook, but there’s no reason it couldn’t apply to Movie Monday as well. Let’s go catch that three-thousand pound Marlin, my friend!
In all seriousness, Movie Monday is going to likely look a little bit different each week, but the gist of this little project is that Dalton and I will be picking one film each week, watching it, asking each other a variety of questions related to the film and seeing where the engaging conversations take us. We’ll have some recurring discussion prompts that we lean on week to week, but every edition should feel unique since the subject matter will be different from week to week..
As Dalton mentioned, our first movie up is David Fincher’s 2010 masterpiece, The Social Network. We’ve selected The Social Network as our first subject of Movie Monday not only because we’re coming up on the ten-year anniversary of it’s release, but also because, A) In my opinion, it’s the greatest film of the 21st Century, and B) The story that we watch unfold in The Social Network has arguably had a greater impact on our society than any other single cultural event in our lifetime. This leads me to my first question:
Given everything that has happened in the world — and specifically with Facebook — since the release of this movie, how necessary is a sequel to The Social Network?
DB: Yes there should absolutely be a sequel to The Social Network. So long as it portrays Mark Zuckerberg as the true villain that he is. (Shameless Plug alert: I wrote about this movie for Binegeable already, and you can read that here). I’m so sure that there should be a sequel to this movie that I already wrote the first page of the script:
Int. New York City Apartment — Day
Rashida Jones as Marylin Delpy sits on her couch eating a bag of chips watching her tv as a sweaty Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress.
Marilyn
“Alright I was wrong, this guy IS an asshole.”
End scene.
Boom! Cut the check Aaron Sorkin.
For real though, a sequel with everyone reprising their roles could be incredible in the right hands. I have complete faith in Jesse Eisenberg being able to go full villain/robot/lizard person Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t know how much a sequel would actually feature Eduardo, but I would absolutely need a shot of Andrew Garfield on a yacht wearing literal flip-flops that say “Fuck You” on them in the Facebook font.
All you really need to do is let David Fincher go full David Fincher depicting the fall of democracy at the hands of a Harvard dweeb turned billionaire Lex Luthor cosplayer. It wouldn’t be a fun movie, but it’s one we need.
What about you Sonny? Any thoughts on a potential sequel?
SG: I have lots of thoughts on a potential sequel, Dalton, and that’s mainly because if I ever found out a sequel to The Social Network was in the works, I literally wouldn’t know what to do with myself until the day it came out. There are a handful of individuals from the original that absolutely, positively need to be involved:
Director — David Fincher
Writer — Aaron Sorkin
Music — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Mark Zuckerberg — Jesse Eisenberg
Those are the five must-haves. No way around it. A sequel to The Social Network needs to include those five. It would be nice to get Rashida Jones back for something like that delightful intro scene you just gifted Mr. Sorkin. And to be honest, I don’t see why we shouldn’t expand on it:
Int. New York City Apartment — Day
Rashida Jones as Marylin Delpy sits on her couch eating a bag of chips watching her tv as a sweaty Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress.
Marilyn
“Alright I was wrong, this guy IS an asshole.”
Int. Boston Apartment — Day
Rooney Mara as Erica Albrecht Albright sits on her couch eating a bag of chips watching her tv as a sweaty Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress.
Erica
“I was right, this guy IS an asshole.”
Int. Palo Alto Home — Day
Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker lays in bed watching his tv as a sweaty Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress.
Sean (Proudly)
“Oh, he is so wired in!”
Ext. Charles River, Boston — Day
Armie Hammer as the Winklevii sits in a row bow, making good time, not even paying attention to what is happening with Mark Zuckerberg. Somewhere, Divya Narendra is fuming and regretting not hiring the Sopranos or some other mafia-adjacent family to beat the shit out of Mark with a hammer.
Ext. Yacht in the Marina Bay — Day
Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin sits on his Yacht in the middle of the Marina Bay in Singapore. He has his feet up (while wearing literal flip-flops that say “Fuck You” on them in the Facebook font), and he’s holding an iPad and watching as a sweaty Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress.
Eduardo
“All because he didn’t get into the fucking Phoenix Club.”
This is how we get Andrew Garfield back. This is how we get Armie Hammer back (x2). This is how we get Justin Timberlake back. And this is how we get Rooney Mara back. And then, after this opening montage, I think it’s appropriate that we move forward with an entirely new and necessary film that is the spiritual successor to the single best movie of the 2010’s.
Is The Social Network the most culturally significant movie of the 2010’s?
Late in 2019, you and I put together many decade-end top ten lists, one of which was best movie of the decade. To my surprise, you did not rank The Social Network number one. That leads me to the above question, and this is a twist on one of the categories we had discussed using as a commonly-used discussion prompt for Movie Monday.
DB: This is a good question, and I think you want me to say that yes this is the most culturally significant movie of the 2010’s. But I can’t do that.
It’s easy to look at what Facebook was in 2010 (500 million users) and what it is now (2.7 billion users) and think that The Social Network was prescient or somehow predicted the peril that Mark Zuckerberg would send the world spiraling into. That is not the case though. The movie actually takes it pretty easy on Mark and his creation, and if it was trying to say something about him, it wasn’t “watch out for this guy, he might ruin everyone’s lives forever.” It treated him more like an occasionally nefarious but mostly harmless nerd, almost stumbling his way star-struck through silicon valley on the fraudulent coattails of Sean Parker.
Speaking of Sean Parker, this movie does an amazing job of making sure the audience knows he’s a creep, even though Mark can’t see it. There’s the overt stuff like him asking his Stanford hook-up “Wait, you’re not like 15, are you?” There’s also the sneaky stuff, like when everyone is partying at the Palo Alto house and one of the girls says “I’m so high” and you can just barely hear Sean Parker off screen say “No you’re not.” Some great, but probably too great, work from Justin Timberlake in this movie.
Even though Facebook has changed our culture more than anything else on the planet in the decade since The Social Network was released, the movie didn’t, no matter how good it was/is, quite capture what was coming.
So no, it wasn’t the most culturally important movie of the 2010’s. To answer that question, what we really need to ask is culturally important to who? When it comes down to it, The Social Network is just another story about white people’s hubris fucking up the planet. To find real impactful cultural importance, we need to look later in the decade at Moonlight winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and Black Panther grossing 1.3 billion dollars in worldwide box office while also being nominated for Best Picture. Those two events felt like real signifiers of the beginnings of systemic change.
Is that a satisfactory answer? I hope I didn’t let you down.
SG: That’s a terrific answer, Dalton; an answer that looks at this question from a perspective that I wasn’t looking at it from, so I appreciate you evening out our collective approach to this question. I agree with you on some points you made; the well-deserved successes of both Moonlight and Black Panther are bigger and more culturally important events in film when it comes to diversity and inclusion and giving people of color the opportunity to show what brilliant work they are capable of bringing to the table. I’d even throw Parasite winning Best Picture into the mix as a moment that was a signifier that some much-needed systematic change could be on the way in Hollywood.
However, I think I look at The Social Network a little bit differently than you. Or perhaps, I’m just looking at the prompt differently than you are.
What happened in The Social Network, and what would happen over the course of the ten years that have followed its release, has impacted everybody around the entire world. Maybe the movie itself didn’t change the course of society or the way we look at the world, but it captured real-life events that actually did have that kind of impact, and it did so in a way that catapulted it into the best movie of the 21st century conversation.
No, this film doesn’t explicitly say “watch out for this guy, he might ruin everyone’s lives forever” but I don’t think anybody had any idea what kind of impact Facebook would end up having on our society as a whole. In fact, I’d argue that Fincher, Sorkin and author Ben Mezrich — writer of “The Accidental Billionaires,” the book that The Social Network is based on — more accurately forecasted what was to come than 99 percent of people who watched this movie could’ve before they saw it, simply because they saw this as a story worth telling. I think for a lot of people, The Social Network was a wake-up call that Facebook wasn’t just any ordinary website. Sure, Zuckerberg certainly wasn’t villainized to the extent that he should’ve been or would’ve been had this movie come out five or ten years later, but I’ll provide a wee bit of pushback when you say that the movie presented him as someone who was “stumbling his way” through the film. I present my evidence:
“No one man should have all that power.”
Granted, the song choice for a TV spot is not necessarily a spot-on indicator of the message of the movie, but in this case, I think it’s fair to say they nailed it, even if they didn’t know how true it was.
DB: Alright, you make a very solid point with that TV spot. I still stand by argument, but I’ll go ahead and take my answer off the air, thank you!
After that hearty debate, we should move into some lighter categories we have picked out for Movie Monday.
Who is the Underrated Star of the Movie?
DB: It’s Andrew Garfield, and I’ll fight you if you disagree with me. Every move he makes is perfect. He’s the emotional core of this movie and it doesn’t work without him. You have to have that foil to the stoniness of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. From defending his forced chicken cannibalism to his fuck-you flip-flops, there isn’t one low point in his performance. He wasn’t even NOMINATED for an Oscar, in a movie that got a ton of awards attention. It’s actually a crime that people need to be put in prison for. What is this world without accountability?
Andrew should’ve dropped in to the Academy with this energy:
SG: Please don’t try to fight me, Dalton. I agree with everything you’ve said about Andrew Garfield. Every single word. But I think ten years removed from The Social Network, Garfield’s performance is no longer underrated. I think at the time it was underrated and woefully underappreciated, but in 2020 I think most people realize that, A) It’s a crime that he wasn’t nominated for and/or win an Oscar, and B) He delivered the best acting performance in the film. Therefore, he was out of the running for me for Underrated Star of the Movie.
I’m going off-screen, and I’m giving some love to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for orchestrating one of the most captivating and on-the-money scores in recent film history. Now sure, they were nominated for an Oscar and they rightfully took home the trophies. But how often do we have in-depth conversations about the intricacies of film score? Maybe you and I have those kinds of conversations, I don’t think I’ve had a single discussion about it elsewhere.
To be completely honest, when I saw The Social Network in theaters, this score was what I was most blown away by. Reznor and Ross capture the ominous, tense and we’re-about-to-be-living-on-the-internet-and-I’m-not-so-sure-that’s-a-great thing-because-it’s-probably-a-way-more-dangerous-place-than-we-realize tone of the film so perfectly that it manages to become almost a living organism existing in the background of every scene. It adds so much to the movie, that in lesser hands, this becomes a clearly lesser film.
DB: I’m sorry but you’re not allowed to take someone from the movie who won an OSCAR and call them underrated. I won’t allow it.
What is the Best Shot of the Movie?
DB:
I’m partial to the shot of Mark’s business card here. It’s not even slightly subtle, but the way it comes right after his falling out with Eduardo makes it even more significant. He’s starting to transition fully to douche-bag Mark. He no longer has Eduardo to tether him to the earth. He’s the CEO, Bitch.
SG:
SG: We’re in the same neighborhood here, and I think these shots resonate with each of us for the same reason: this moment — when Eduardo is “Zuckerberg’d” by Mark Zuckerberg, thus giving life to the term “Zuckerberg’d”– is when it becomes crystal clear that Mark Zuckerberg is truly the villain of The Social Network. Even as he cowers in his computer chair after abruptly being removed from “wired in” status, his involvement in the conference room fuckery that all but severed the relationship between Facebook and Eduardo is made apparent thanks to some timely snide comments and constant running commentary from Sean Parker.
This image perfectly captures the kind of damage that someone can do while sitting in a computer chair on their laptop. In this confrontation, the man who smashed the laptop wasn’t the bad guy. He was the victim. He was the one whose life had been ruined by someone whose life would likely be inconsequential had it not been for the advent of the internet.
What lessons can be learned from this movie?
SG: I’ll lead the way:
-There are more people with genius IQ’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States … largely because we’re a bunch of dumb fucks.
-Become friends (or potentially even lovers) with door guys because they could get you into bars you wouldn’t normally be able to visit.
-Don’t get drunk and blog, because you’ll come off like a drunken dickhead if you do.
-Or do get drunk and blog, because it will lead to becoming a billionaire.
-I should’ve paid closer attention when I took Meteorology in High School, because if you can read the weather, you can predict the price of heating oil.
-We were wise to name our site “Bingeable” and not “The Bingeable”.
DB: Here are mine, in no particular order:
-Don’t buy your girlfriend a scarf if she doesn’t wear scarves.
-Never forget your Prada at the cleaners.
-Really think about that 10,000 business card order.
-Don’t trust someone with a name like Sean Parker.
-Don’t go to a Bill Gates lecture not knowing it’s Bill Gates speaking.
-Absolutely under no circumstances become friends with Mark Zuckerberg.
-Set your phone on fire and throw it in the ocean.
-Eat the rich.
-Ready the guillotines.
Most Interesting Thing Learned with an IMDB Deep Dive
DB: One of my favorite things to do after I watch a movie is hop on to the Internet Movie Database and read about said movie. This usually leads me down a rabbit hole of actors and movies where I learn some interesting things about them I may not have known before. In this category I will be taking our dear readers down the rabbit hole with me.
This week is actually a little anticlimactic because I didn’t have to go very deep. It’s more of a shallow snorkel than a deep dive. I started with The Social Network and decided to click on Max Minghella, where it jogged my memory that he played Nick Blaine on The Handmaid’s Tale. I find it interesting that Max played a character in the movie about the invention of the social network that is going to most likely lead us down the path to the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, his other big role. That would also have to be the first time that an actor played a role in a fictional dystopian world and then lived to occupy that world in reality as well. I think Max would much prefer he was just recognized with an Emmy or an Oscar.
Progression:
The Social Network > Max Minghella > The Handmaid’s Tale
Does The Social Network have the best use of flip-flops in film history?
DB: Yes. Without a doubt.
SG: I concur.
