Media Meditation #3: SPOILER ALERT - Understanding The Social Network

I never go to the movies, ever. I'm almost always fine waiting for the movie to come to television or my friend's DVD collection. Every once in a while, though, there is a movie that is so enticing that I feel compelled to see it in the theater. Similar to the way I treat buying a CD, I hold these films on a very high pedestal, so they better live up to my expectations.

When I first saw previews for The Social Network several months ago, I was awestruck. The trailers were literally mind-blowing. I first saw the trailer in a theater and everyone groaned, half in anticipation, half saying "Really? A Facebook movie?" Well, it was only a matter of time before someone documented the social media phenomenon. This is the first trailer I saw, and the most powerful one that I've seen since:


The music is the first thing I noticed; a choir remake of "Creep" by Radiohead...moving. It captures the intensity of the movie beautifully and foreshadows the reasons why he created Facebook in the first place, a desire for acceptance and possibly because he was dumped by his girlfriend.

I finally saw the movie a few weeks ago. My reviews are mixed, but mostly positive. Here's one issue I had with the film - the CGI cold breath when the actors breathed in the "cold" Boston summer air (I assume it was not actually filmed in the winter). Apparently someone else shared my sentiments, because I found another post about the topic at MovieLine.com where they try to determine whether or not the CGI breath would ruin the movie's chances of getting an Oscar. It was so blatantly fake that I couldn't even take the cold scenes seriously; think Kevin Costner's blasphemous Boston accent in Thirteen Days...or Kevin Costner's accent in anything. It just cheapens the movie and takes you out of the experience. It was inexcusable for a movie that I thought should have been absolutely perfect.

Another critique I had was Justin Timberlake's role. I didn't get it. Whenever I thought of Sean Parker, I thought of a dumb guy, who happened to know how to program, but also took advantage of other people. I sort of got that from the movie (he tells a girl he's an elementary school dropout, which isn't true), but Justin Timberlake was just too damn cool to play Sean Parker. The movie led me to believe the viewer is supposed to like Sean Parker, but to me, he ruined the fun..or did he? Maybe he just gave great ideas. Maybe it's all Mark Zuckerberg's fault for trusting him all along. Maybe Eduardo Saverin's exclusion was his own fault for not staying involved in the project. Either way, Sean Parker/Justin Timberlake in general is an aspect of the movie that left me a skeptic.

Sean Parker looking like the
intelligent entrepreneur he is.

Credit: VentureBeat.com

The positives of the movie are not to be forgotten, though. One cool item of note, the Winklevoss twins are played by one single actor, named Armie Hammer. It seems like extra, unnecessary work to me to pick someone who looks more similar to the Winklevosses than just a finding a pair of twins that look somewhat similar.

I left the movie theater feeling 3 things:

1. I left feeling weird, which was a goal of mine. I wanted to have gone through a complete social phenomenon as I did when I created a Facebook account. I thought this movie was going to be one of the first times people stepped back to look at the unbelievable social revolution they have been so heavily invested in for years. I don't think the movie really captured what kind of effect Facebook had on the users (except for at the end when he goes back and friends his ex-girlfriend, Erica - nice touch), but it did a great job portraying everything else. Nonetheless, I felt weird.

2. I left feeling like everyone in the film was "in the wrong" so to speak, aside from a select few characters. I was compelled to feel bad for Eduardo Saverin, but I think he may have rode Zuckerberg's coattails a bit. I thought Sean Parker was a scumbag, plain and simple; how he still owns a piece of the company is beyond my comprehension. I also thought Zuckerberg came off in a totally negative light; even I thought he was an annoying asshole after seeing the film. What really surprised me was that I realized how astonishingly accurate Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal was of Zuckerberg upon watching YouTube videos of the real Mark Zuckerberg's speeches.

3. I left feeling like I wanted/needed to do something big. Mark Zuckerberg built a social network from the ground up with over 500 million users in a few weeks...as a 20-year-old...to get back at his girlfriend...

What have you done lately?