by Sean Collins-Smith

Near the end of The Social Network, after almost 2 hours of watching Mark Zuckerberg descend into a Shakespearean tragedy of a character, one beautiful young lawyer imparts a piece of assurance on the wearied 22 year-old billionaire: “Every creation myth needs a devil.”

Of course, she’s also talking to the viewers. It’s at once a means of calming Mark and warning the audience not to believe everything we’ve just seen, because a great majority of it is taken from eyewitness testimony. And that, the lawyer tells Mark, can be “85 percent exaggeration, 15 percent perjury”. It’s an interesting and tricky sort of contradiction, not to mention bold – The Social Network presents us with its version of the truth, just to tell us that, because of the human condition, most of it might not be true at all.

But this is, after all, Aaron Sorkin, quite possibly the master of seeming contradictions; his finest works have been exquisite rebuffs of tightly held stereotypes and beliefs. The prematurely cancelled but brilliantly written “Sports Night” took what could have been a repetitive, testosterone-filled premise – a male oriented nightly sportscast – and turned it into a weekly study of censorship and athletic morality (as if!), with, as the icing on the cake, two of the smartest, hardest-working women ever written for television.

“The West Wing”, conceived a year later, was even weirder: a show about politics that painted its players not as conceited and egotistical, but as ethical, loyal and trustworthy. At a moment in the 20th century when politics was arguably at its most tumultuous (then-President Clinton had just been impeached by the House of Representatives), Sorkin again pulled a complete 180, diving head-first into the world of politics without cynicism and mistrust as the motivating factor.

I’d say he’s done it again, but he really hasn’t. This is a completely different monster. In the past he used razor-sharp dialogue and strong characters to write for the present as if wishing the past had never occurred. He bravely bucked the times.

But here, he courageously defines them. Seen as a whole, this is a sharply written, fiercely paced examination of the last 20 years: an exploration of the quick-n-dirty tech start-ups, the pure vastness of the Internet, the illusion of online friendship, the unimaginable stupidity of putting everything about yourself on the web.  It’s funny, it’s entertaining, it’s blazingly fast. But, at it’s core, The Social Network is an unapologetic anecdote on the asinine and angry – not to mention anonymous – nature of the online world. (For just the latest example of how the internet brings out the very worst in people, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html)

It’s no surprise, really. Sorkin has said in the past that he absolutely abhors the internet, seeing it as nothing more than an annoying megaphone for people to use in order to spew hatred and misconceptions. It’s that mistrust, that anxiousness that makes Sorkin the prefect screenwriter to tackle a project that sounds as ridiculous as “The Facebook Movie” sounded to some three years ago. (In a recent cover story for New York magazine, he was quoted as saying “There’s just too much bad information getting out there, and I have to believe that’s mostly the fault of the Internet, which isn’t held to any standards of accuracy”).

His seething contempt for everything online finds its way into Network with deliciously clever lines like “The internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink”. And, in his most telling lamentation for better days gone by, Sorkin has a girl chastise Mark as someone who “writes his snide bullshit from a dark room, because that’s what the angry do nowadays.” His script flies by at a speed befitting internet-based subject matter: it’s the fastest 2-hour film you’ll ever see. Considering the potentially monotonous nature of the story’s intricacies, it’s no small feat: typing, talking, lawyers, depositions, lines of code. You name a boring element, this movie has it. But it’s all wrapped in an expertly written, fully realized package.

And who better to direct that package than David Fincher? This is the culmination of two decades’ worth of work, an amalgamation of nearly every film he’s ever done.  The psychological underpinnings of “Fight Club”, the fancy (albeit toned down) cinematography of “Panic Room”, the drained color pallets and eye for historic detail of “Zodiac”, the special effects mastery of “Benjamin Button”. Fincher takes Sorkin’s dialogue-heavy script and makes every conversation a duplicitous occurrence: each character is saying something while a visual element is saying something else. A door to a fraternity Mark isn’t a part of says “Private Entrance”, a shirt Mark is wearing says “GAP” (it’s the company, of course…but it’s also obviously something else). All of these things make The Social Network an astute marriage of Sorkin’s signature screenwriting bravura and Fincher’s penchant for unmitigated perfectionism.

The film opens in 2003 at Harvard, where Mark (played with supreme nerdy confidence by Jesse Eisenberg) is conversing with Erica about five different things at once. His ADD-riddled banter, a perfect reflection of our ADD-riddled web browsing, eventually leads to Erica dumping him, which sends him, with the help of his best friend Eduardo (a pitch-perfect Andrew Garfield), into a frenzy of writing code which would eventually be used to fuel Facebook. But for now it runs Facemash – a sleazy site that compares two woman at Harvard and lets the users pick the hotter one. As soon as the site goes live and becomes a success, we’re transported to a few years later, where Mark, now being deposed, is in the middle of two lawsuits – one with his best friend.

The Social Network’s structure is admirably intricate but easily understandable. At any given point there are a dozen characters doing a number of different things in varying timetables, though the action never gets overcomplicated. One particularly interesting feat of technology is how the film shows the Winklevoss twins, a set of brothers who are involved in the depositions to sue Mark Zuckerberg. Fincher used the same actor for both twins with the aid of a body double and multiple shooting angles. It’s a fantastic effect, so seamless that you can’t even tell it’s being done.

Confession time: there aren’t many likable characters in this story. But one of the likable ones is played by the aforementioned Andrew Garfield, an actor who is officially on the way to A-list stardom. His mixture of adoration, hesitance, and eventual disbelief for Mark’s tenacity is shown wonderfully throughout the film, and during the climactic confrontation, he not only breaks your heart but makes you hate Mark for doing so. Speaking of, Eisenberg shouldn’t have any problems discerning himself from his Hollywood-twin Michael Cera any longer. He oozes false self-confidence here, masking Mark’s awkwardness in one-on-one human interaction with pointed jabs that make everyone around him feel inferior. Justin Timeberlake, as Sean Parker (founder of Napster), is surprisingly deft as a businessman-cum-advisor who eventually turns Mark against his one true friend.

With this, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher have crafted a monumental achievement in zeitgeist storytelling. It not only entertains, it informs and infuriates. Taken by itself, The Social Network is a narrow story, but broadly, it’s undoubtedly a microcosm for the final decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. It’s a film that should stay in the national conversation for weeks and months, alluding to the mass what Sorkin and Fincher already know: for all the information it conveys, for all the people it connects us with, for all the money it generates, Facebook – and The Internet – are drawing us further and further apart.

Five out of five stars.

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