I Didn't Like the Social Network

I DIDN'T LIKE THE SOCIAL NETWORK

The Social Network is not an enjoyable film for me. It is a competent one though. It has a lot of fast cuts between Mark Zuckerberg fighting various lawsuits with different bodies juxtaposed to the ‘how we got here story’ to fill in the gaps of different bodies arguments. It is a well-shot film, lots of nice lighting and camera work. It has decent acting, including Andrew Garfield who I keep picturing as Spider-Man in Business school. Yet, overall there was nothing that grabbed me. Which sounds slightly strange considering that this film was up for a goodly number of awards and received a decent amount of praise.

None the less, here I am, about two hours older having watched the film and I am struggling to find something to say about it, or even distinctly memorable moments. I watched Mark burn most of his relationships over the course of a film before ending on him kind of voyeuristically refreshing his old girlfriends Facebook page to see if she friends him or not. I also watched some other people over the story be varying levels of jerks to each other and watched a website grow into the global force it is today. I don't really have much of anything to say about it. Which is frustrating, because I love to pick about movies. If I had to pick. I think it might have to do with this films sense of drama. Nothing in the story is unrealistic as such, it is based on actual events after all, and yet the entire narrative had this hyperbolic edge that I picked up early and couldn’t shake as I watched it. This, in turn, made me skeptical for the rest of the story, and this skepticism turned to apathy fairly quickly. For example, in the opening breakup. We watch Mark be a jerk for a few minutes by dismissing his soon to be ex-girlfriends concerns and intelligence before she breaks up with him and he runs across the Harvard campus in the snow while wearing shorts and flip-flops. As a basic concept, there is nothing wrong here, but it is filled with this artificial drama highlighted by the script and cinematography. Mark keeps asking if this moment is real over and over and eventually I am as well. I as an audience have two different avenues to consider at this point. I could buy into the drama that Mark is just this big of a jerk and cannot read even the tiniest bit of a room. If I do then I am already fairly uninvested in him as a person, aside from occasionally wondering why the film does not do a deeper dive of Marks reasons to be this obtuse. Is it a result of his repeated classism in the film? Was he raised to be this way? Is it possible there is something the audience is not being informed about that is causing these issues for Mark? Maybe there is even a factor that is beyond his control. The film does not give the audience much ground to form empathy with Mark, and for as for me at this point I don't much care what happens to this character unless and until he gets over his own ego. Option two is that I remind myself that this is a movie and the real event that happened to actual people involved in this and it likely had less snappy retorts and more awkward apologies and weird silences. I am reminded of my skepticism at the representations of these characters again at the end of the film. Mark is refreshing the webpage over and over again in the office of sadness alone. Maybe there is a source out there that can confirm that Mark sat in an office for an undisclosed amount of time refreshing his website, but I am inclined to doubt it. Do I think the film is lying about the general outline of Marks life, or even his character? Not particularly. At the same time, regardless of whether I believe that the creator of Facebook is that big of a jerk, I am not interested in what this representation has to say about the world at large.