1. The Social Network – review
From the first sentence, the first word,
the first nervily in-drawn breath, this
compulsively watchable picture
announces itself as the unmistakable
work of Aaron Sorkin. His whip-smart,
mile-a-minute dialogue made The West
Wing deeply addictive on TV, and after
uncertain works such as Charlie Wilson's
War and the strange,
small-screen drama Studio 60 on the
Sunset Strip – in which Sorkin's
distinctive, faintly martyred seriousness
was bafflingly applied to the backstage shenanigans of a fictional television comedy – this writer is
triumphantly back on form. He's found an almost perfect subject: the creation of the networking website
Facebook, and the backstabbing legal row among the various nerds, geeks, brainiacs and maniacs about
who gets the credit and the cash.
Part boardroom drama, part conspiracy thriller, the story is adapted from Ben Mezrich's non-fiction The
Accidental Billionaires. There appears, however, to be nothing accidental about it. The film version perfectly
displays Sorkin's gift for creating instantly believable sympathetic-yet-irritating characters, and the chief of
these is Facebook's driving force, Mark Zuckerberg, played with exemplary intuition byJesse Eisenberg. He
is a borderline sociopath, never smiling, never raising his voice, never conceding an argument, driven to
create his masterpiece through the unforgettable pain of being dumped in the movie's opening scene. What
perfect casting Eisenberg is. (I couldn't help remembering, incidentally, his character's disparagement of
Facebook in the movie Zombieland: jeering at idiots with status updates like: "Limbering up for the
weekend.") Sorkin gives everyone great lines. It's pretty much a non-stop fusillade of put-downs, insights
and zingers. I wonder if the real-life Zuckerberg has ever physically said as many words as this in his entire
life.
David Fincher's direction creates just the right intensity and claustrophobia for a story that takes place
largely in a stupefyingly male environment at Harvard University in 2003, shown in flashback from various
acrimonious legal proceedings. Here, computer-science student Zuckerberg has the same sense of
entitlement and self-congratulation as everyone else, but combined with social resentment about being
barred from snobby fraternities and clubs. When his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with him, the
director shows how the emotionally wounded Zuckerberg embarks on a retaliatory campaign not far from
the sinister world of Fincher's serial-killer films Se7en and Zodiac. He blogs vengefully about Erica and, in
an evil-genius frenzy, creates Facemash, a spiteful and misogynistic site that invites the guys to rate campus
girls against each other. (Slightly leniently, the movie explains it away a little by emphasising that
Zuckerberg has had a couple of beers.) It is from this beginning that the smilier, friendlier Facebook

2. emerges. But we have been cleverly shown the site's nastier, more paranoid origins: a clue to its unspoken
world of friend-number envy, cyber-stalking and anxiety about having no friends at all.
Zuckerberg gets investment from fellow geek Eduardo Saverin, played byAndrew Garfield, of whose
marginally superior social success he is jealous and whom he later betrays by cutting him out of the action
in favour of web entrepreneur Sean Parker, smoothly played by Justin Timberlake. Wealthy alpha-male
twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) plan to launch their own site,
called The Harvard Connection, and try to recruit Mark as their tame techie-nerd; initially dazzled by their
cachet, Zuckerberg plays them along, fatally delaying their launch while secretly getting his own up and
running. Shrewdly, Sorkin and Fincher show how the Winklevosses are afraid to sue, because that's not the
action of an effortlessly superior Harvard man.
Probably conceived when Facebook was at the top of the heap, the movie now arrives in cinemas at a time
when Twitter has overtaken it in zeitgeisty importance: a lesson in how fast-moving internet trends can be.
It would be great to see a movie about an ageing Australian-American media mogul trying to stay with-it
and hip by tragically investing in MySpace – what tremendous scenes of rage-filled incomprehension there
could be as the great man rants in front of downward-trending graphs. Or perhaps a Made in
Dagenham-type British comedy about that once whiter-than-white-hot phenomenon Friends Reunited, run
by a blameless couple in a spare room of their Barnet home: a dark destroyer of marriages, a reopener of
school-day wounds, far more toxic than Facebook could ever be.
The success of The Social Network lies in capturing the fever of Facebook's startup, while subversively
implying that it created money and ephemeral buzz, but not a whole lot else; there is very little about the
interconnectivity and creativity that its evangelisers often claim. With its fanatical rivalry, envy and
preeningly clever half-wits butting heads, the film reminded me a little of the BBC's excellent TV play Life
Story from 1987, the story of Francis Crick and James Watson and their ill-tempered race to discover the
structure of DNA before anyone else. (Sam Mendes and Pippa Harris are reportedly developing a remake.)
Yet that was a story with something substantial at its close. This has … well, what? At the end, all is
loneliness. This is an exhilaratingly hyperactive, hyperventilating portrait of an age when Web 2.0 became
sexier and more important than politics, art, books – everything. Sorkin and Fincher combine the excitement
with a dark, insistent kind of pessimism. Smart work.