Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook business card read, "I'm the CEO, bitch." It sums up nicely the impression that one gets about the youngest billionaire on the planet from this film. David Fincher's drama, his best and most sophisticated film to date, presents in detail the creation of the social networking site and the legal issues that surrounded it. Zuckerberg had to simultaneously fight two lawsuits against him. As the film's tag line so aptly states — you don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.
In the film's opening conversation, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, ZOMBIELAND) comes off as both arrogant and insecure to his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET). He's obsessed with making a name for himself at Harvard and after she breaks up with him that night, he goes home and does just that. He blogs terrible things about her and then hacks into the school network, steals the images of the female students and creates a website that randomly selects two pictures and allows the viewer to rank the hotness of each one. He did this while drunk.
The stunt draws the attention of school officials who put him of academic suspension. Zuckerberg wanted them to thank him for pointing out the vulnerabilities in their system. The site received over 20,000 in a few hours and brought down the Harvard network. This drew attention from elite Harvard club members Cameron (Armie Hammer, TV's GOSSIP GIRLS) and Tyler Winklevoss (Josh Pence) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella, SYRIANA), who went to Zuckerberg with an idea for a social network site exclusively for Harvard students. Zuckerberg agreed to develop it for them and then went straight to his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, NEVER LET ME GO) and asked him to invest in an idea he had, called The Facebook.
Irony abounds in this film, as the man who decided to bring the social environment of college online was a man without any apparent social skills of his own. Always laced with a tinge of jealousy, Zuckerberg has a snide comment every time Saverin has an update on his pledging the Phoenix Club. Zuckerberg wasn't asked to join any clubs after the girl-rating site made him a pariah to the female population on campus. Every person he meets he seems to be evaluating and assessing how much better he is than them.
As The Facebook spread to more college campuses, Saverin wanted to monetize the site with ads, but Zuckerberg was strongly against it, because ads would make the site less cool. Then came Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, ALPHA DOG), the creator of Napster. He was a kind of idol to Zuckerberg. As a fellow brilliant young entrepreneur, he made millions and thumbed his nose at the establishment. He showed Zuckerberg the flash life of big money and he had connections to venture capital. Saverin was reluctant to have Parker muscle his way in with his tainted image as a notorious partier.
The film is a multi-layered one. Fincher, working from Aaron Sorkin's wonderful screenplay based on Ben Mezrich's book, THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES, crafts a tale that represents Generation Y as a whole. Youth oriented society pushing forward at lightning speed with technology the older generation can barely turn on. Facebook represents a world where privacy is a thing of the past and what you write or other people write about you online can define who you more than who you really are. There is a great scene where Saverin's girlfriend confronts him about his relationship status and she can't buy the excuse that the CFO of Facebook doesn't know how to update it.
For Zuckerberg, his life represents the anonymity the Internet gives you. You can and do anything you want to anyone else with impunity. He was resentful of people like the Winklevosses, who came from money and rowed crew for Harvard. The success of Facebook was a direct stab at their world. He was smarter than them all and knew it and wouldn't let them forget it. And in the end what did it get him? Billions of dollars and his only friend suing him.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
