The Social Network

The Social Network is a biopic on Mark Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook that attempts to be accurate to the reported events that took place, but utilizes falsehoods in order to make the story more dramatic and advance controversial themes. The film begins with Mark's girlfriend breaking up with him and his subsequent revenge by creating a site that asks visitors to rate the attractiveness of their female classmates. While this rating site did exist, in real life it allowed users to rate classmates of both sexes. This key difference shows the motive of the filmmakers in how they chose to characterize the Mark Zuckerberg character as inherently misogynistic. This misogynistic theme is carried throughout the film as the Facebook creators pick up groupies and one founder deals with a "crazy" girlfriend. The real Mark Zuckerberg defended himself from the misogynistic allegations in interviews by saying that he has had the same girlfriend since before he even founded Facebook.

Mark's rating site was shut down by the Harvard administration because he downloaded files from Harvard sites and without authorization uploaded them to his own site. This gave him notoriety on campus through the school's newspaper, which led him to the Winklevoss twins. These twins were interested in building a dating site for students on campus and they needed Mark's help to build it. Instead of building it, Mark went around their backs and built his own site, a social network called The Facebook. This obviously enraged the Winklevoss twins, who eventually decided to sue Mark for "stealing their idea". After Facebook had years of success, the twins eventually "won" the case and made a settlement for millions of dollars. No one will ever know if the "idea" that the Winklevoss twins had was really the same "idea" that became Facebook, but either way ideas in themselves have little value at all, it is the execution. The courts probably ruled the way it did because Mark interrupted in the "execution" of the Winklevoss's plan, but no one will ever no for sure. I enjoyed how this theme was explored throughout the film.

In my opinion, the most valuable idea that Mark might have stolen was the ability for a site to authorize new users by using a ".edu" email address. While social networks has been around for a few years, authorizing in that way is incredibly unique. Without this feature, Facebook would have never gotten off the ground.

The most important theme of the film was the concept of myth. In one of the final scenes, an attorney tells Mark, after he made a settlement, that "every creation story needs its devil". This single line addresses the fact that the entire film is a myth in itself and shouldn't be taken too seriously. Unfortunately, while this theme is great, it is also incredibly subtle and is missed by most reviews that I've read and people that I've talked to. Viewing the film through this lens greatly increased my appreciation of it.