BUT IS IT TRUE?

From the New York Times:

Millions of the moviegoers who made “The Social Network” the top box-office draw of the weekend saw an unflattering portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook.

To many viewers, Mr. Zuckerberg comes off as a callow, socially inept schemer who misled fellow students who had wanted to build an online social network at Harvard and who also pushed out a co-founder of the company. With only a few exceptions — girlfriends and a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm — the names have not been changed to mask identities.

The film’s truthfulness, however, has been strongly questioned in forums like Slate, the online magazine, and The New Republic.

According to the articles in Slate and The New Republic, the movie is inaccurate in its portrayal of Zuckerberg, Harvard, and the founding of Facebook. People who know Mark Zuckerberg personally agree.

And that raises a question: how can filmmakers take liberties with the story of a living person, and does that person have any recourse if the portrayal upsets him? After all, many movies run a legal disclaimer in the credits that says, “Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”
....

When it comes to public figures, lawyers say, appropriating someone’s life story for a movie is not so different from telling such details in a news article or printed biography. Politicians have grown used to harsh onscreen treatment, having learned that there is a degree of latitude for inaccuracy and strong protection against libel suits.

Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, said that if Mr. Zuckerberg sued and was declared a public figure, he would then “have to show that the filmmakers knew the statements were false, or were reckless about the possibility of falsehood.”

In the Slate article, Nathan Heller, who attended Harvard at the same as Zuckerberg and was acquainted with him, is disappointed in "The Social Network":

The Social Network I saw was a rote and deeply mediocre film, much weaker than the best work of its writer or director. How could I, who should have been sucked deep into that on-screen universe (Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first people I met in college; we lived a couple of rooms apart as freshmen), feel so impervious to the movie's "emblematic" pull?

Of Zuckerberg, Heller says:

There was a sense in 2002 and 2003, in other words, that as a group of people on the verge of cultural maturity, we had little of our own with which to lay claim to the moment—besides, maybe, the social bonds and shorthand that arose from all being in this place together. That is the real beginning of Facebook's rise and the useful measure of Mark Zuckerberg's brilliance. What's often overlooked in recent talk of the Facebook founder's "robot" stiffness or bizarre, officious ideas about online privacy is what a canny and receptive cultural reader he was.

Heller should know. And my concerns about online privacy at Facebook are antediluvian, if not worse. And here I thought I was one of the elders who was keeping up. Good-bye to all that.

Lawrence Lessig, at The New Republic says:

In 2009, Aaron Sorkin (“Sports Night,” “The West Wing”) got (yes, the same word) the idea to write a script for a movie about this new social network. Here’s the important point: He made it. As with every one of his extraordinary works, Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”

Was I so affected by the movie because I share somewhat in Sorkin's self-congratulatory contempt of Facebook? Because I view the website through the eyes of the old?

Why am I giving so much time and thought to the movie? Why do I continue to bang on about it on my blog? Am I obsessed? I confess that I don't know. I know one thing. I'm still a presence on Facebook, but I don't quite approve of my being there. The website is useful for keeping in touch with family members and friends, but there is something that I truly dislike about Facebook, and seeing the movie played into that antipathy.

And it's a little disturbing for me to find myself out of sync with 500 billion people, with 1/14 of the population of the entire world.

Photo of the real Mark Zuckerberg from Wikipedia.