The rich, coked-up Facebook investor Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) seems to show up, as though summoned, wherever there’s a party, but he’s also too paranoid to trust anyone. At one point, Tyler Winklevoss declares, “I’m 6-5, 220, and there’s two of me,” as though his twin were only a clone and not an independent being. The Winklevoss twins, peers of Zuckerberg who sue him claiming that he stole their idea, are eerily depicted as though they’re one person, which is underscored by casting Armie Hammer in both roles. The social domain of the film, after all, is remarkably small each character seems as isolated as Mark is.
And yet, for me and many friends who still use the site, it seems to highlight our isolation more than connection, and we’ve lost our trust in it.įincher’s film unknowingly pointed to how the site would manipulate personal data - Mark uses code to transcribe students’ information from one platform to his new one, without their consent - and how solitary it could actually make users feel.
Now Facebook users number in the billions. In the movie (available on Netflix), there is a big celebration when Facebook reaches a million users.
I had known Myspace in high school, and, despite my initial resistance, Facebook felt novel and cool (a quality that Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with in the film) my peers spoke about it as the “new Myspace, but for college kids.” It ate up my free time. But then I was on constantly, tracking friends’ posts, looking for guys I liked. I was in college then and had my own Facebook account, which I made grudgingly - I was tired of missing party invites and notifications from friends. Facebook was still in its infancy, far removed from what it would eventually become. In 2010, “The Social Network,” with its egomaniacal antihero, seemed overdramatic, too pessimistic in the way it examined the birth of one of the biggest social media sites. Seen now, “ The Social Network,” about the founding of Facebook and the lawsuits that followed, feels grimly prescient and perhaps representative of how the past few years since the movie premiered - and the past few months of the pandemic - have changed our relationship to social media and each other.
Ten years ago, the director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin gave us a deliciously scored origin myth to one of the defining online institutions of this generation - and the man (portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg as a fast-talking, sandal-wearing incel) behind it.