Movie Review: The Social Network pt. 1

The Social Network (2010)

Directed by David Fincher

9/10

As you can see by the title, this movie is a biographical film on how the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg came to be. When I first decided to watch this movie, I had predicted that it would most likely appraise the figure, as biographical films often do with the protagonist. But I was rather confused while I was trying to interpret the point of this movie. I’m not sure if I’d failed to realize the hidden meaning of it, but it seemed that this movie was actually criticizing its protagonist rather than appraising him. It was either that, or trying to show that in reality, you can only succeed financially in life by ‘making a few enemies’ along the way as the movie poster implies, but I find the latter unlikely, as there was nothing in the movie that said the protagonist had ‘no choice but to act the way he did’.

From beginning to end, you can see the protagonist unwilling to listen to anyone who has a different opinion from his. He merely ignores their words and continues with his, only listening when he agrees with a person. This is constantly indicated by the way Mark kept his headphones and blocked out everything else while being ‘wired in’, even more so due to Shawn encouraging the action. To me, this seemed like Shawn encouraging Mark to block out everyone else and only listen to and care about himself, which led Shawn himself to become ‘delusional’, as Eduardo points out. It’s also shown when Mark stares out the window and says, “It’s raining,” while someone is talking to him in a serious situation, Mark himself saying that the person doesn’t have his attention.

You can also see the protagonist working alone, despite having agreed on working together with other people. This is first seen with the Winklevii, Mark only taking what he needs and giving nothing back, completely ignoring the agreement made. This is also seen later on with Eduardo. Even though Eduardo is a co-founder of Facebook, he has no involvement in decisions, only knowing about them much later after they’re made. Which was why I thought that when Eduardo admitted that he didn’t know how to change his status on Facebook, he was telling the truth; a line to show the irony of the whole situation. And as Mark comes to think that Eduardo is no longer ‘useful’ in the development of his company, he quickly moves on to relying more on Shawn, trying to discard him by putting a news article about Eduardo’s animal cruelty in the paper (though I’m not completely sure that this really was Mark), and setting him up.