The Social Network

Tonight Heather and I went to a preview showing of The Social Network in Saint Louis Park. Movie theaters these days are doing this newfangled (old fashioned?) thing where viewers get assigned seats, so upon arrival they flipped around their computer screen and let us pick which two gray, digital seats we wanted to turn green. I felt like I was booking tickets for a flight. It was all very new and exciting.

Getting into the preview was a bit of an ordeal. The movie theater seemed extraordinarily worried about people pirating the movie, so we had to surrender our cellphones to brown paper lunch bags and concede to metal detecting wand searches before we were allowed into the theater. As we only arrived 15 minutes early we had the immense treat of sitting in the second row, which made it very hard to read any text on the screen without supreme effort AND made me, personally, hyper-aware of how much makeup characters were wearing for the first scene (until the storyline of the movie caught up to me and made me focus more on the action and less on how cakey people's faces looked.)

The Social Network is not a happy-go lucky adventure story of a college student who starts up a billion-dollar company and has a great time doing it. It is not an exciting comedy-romp based in nerd-dom that is dumbed down just enough for us poor, unassuming commonfolk, who are mastered by instead of being masters of technology, to understand and enjoy.

It's actually kind of depressing.

Zuckerberg, although undeniably funny, is so consistently a jerk that it is really hard to like him (and this is coming from a girl whose taste in males tends towards witty, intelligent assholes.) His best friend, Saverin seemed to be portrayed as the quasi-hero of the movie, which was odd, because he was clearly a secondary character and most of his screen time was spent with him blinking back betrayed tears. The most likeable character in the movie was one who we we weren't supposed to like: Sean Parker. The thing about Sean Parker, though, was that he offered an energy, a love for life, that no other character had. While Parker was enjoying life to its maximum (albeit while being a skank, yes I will call a dude a skank), Saverin and Zuckerberg were so lost in their personal life-drama that it was hard to ever see them as what they probably were most of the time: college students who, although angsty, enjoyed their lives and friendship. One of my favorite scenes was when the two of them realized they had groupies, because, for a moment, they looked like exactly what they were: a couple of kids who were overwhelmed by, but excited about, what they were in the middle of.

This is not to say the movie is bad, because it's not. In fact, it is very, very good. The script is tight, witty, and interesting (I just looked up the screenwriter, because I was so impressed with his work. Turns out he's pretty much just worked on the West Wing. Also Charlie Wilson's War.) The actors are believable and talented. (I cannot tell you how many times my heart broke for Saverin and how many times I snorted into my ICEE when Zuckerberg drolly let fly another rude, defensive, but oh so comical aside. Even relatively unimportant characters, like Amy, the Stanford panties girl, were natural and added significantly to the development of other characters.) The cinematography is solid (there were a few shots that stuck out in a bad way, but usually shots ranged somewhere between functional and slightly artsy, which was exactly where they should be for a movie like this one.)

I definitely suggest seeing the movie. If nothing else it explains where our number one addiction these days comes from and even for those who have no interest in facebook or the lawsuits brought against Zuckerberg, there is the story of a lovelorn boy wedged delicately somewhere in the middle, who never quite learns how to say what he wants to say.