"THE SOCIAL NETWORK"

Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Joseph Mazzello star in a scene from 'The Social Network.'

Since Monday, I've been putting off writing about the movie, then stopping and starting, partly because I will have to, you know, actually compose, write words of my own, and not simply copy, paste, and link, and partly because I have writer's block. I traveled to New Orleans to see the film, because the theater in the next town over is not showing the movie. I assume that the movie theater powers assume that we are too low-brow here in the boonies to appreciate a movie about internet wonks. Judging from the small audience in attendance in the New Orleans 'burbs, I assume that the folks there may also be too low-brow to appreciate a film about internet wonks, but it's difficult to be certain for an afternoon showing. In any case, only a very few of the, no doubt, large percentage of the population of the area, who are active users of Facebook, were there to see the movie about the founders of Facebook.

UPDATED NOTE: I've just now remembered that the theater scheduled two simultaneous showings at the time I went, so there was likely a full house in another theater on the site. My smart remark probably does not apply to the New Orleans 'burbs.

UPDATED NOTE 2: The movie is now showing at the theater in Houma, the next town over. I guess we're not too low-brow around here to see the film after all. It was just a little slow in getting here. But one never knows, because a good many movies that I'd like to see are never shown in my area.

I'd read Mike Scott's review in the Times-Picayune and David Denby's review in The New Yorker. Both reviewers gave the film smashingly good marks.

From Mike Scott:

If "The Social Network" was a Facebook page, I'd have no choice but to "like" it -- but only because there's not a "love" button, or a "totally gaga about" button.

David Fincher's smartly written, expertly told chronicling of the dawn of the Facebook era -- and, more subtly, of the impact it's had on the devolution of humankind as a social animal -- is just that compelling, that engrossing, that hard to resist.

Kind of like a certain website.

For the record, I don't find the website quite so compelling, engrossing, and hard to resist as others, actually 500 million active-user others, one out of 14 people in the world. I'm a not-so-active user of Facebook, but....

From David Denby's long review:

“The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. This brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie is built around a melancholy paradox: in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, invents Facebook and eventually creates a five-hundred-million-strong network of “friends,” but Zuckerberg is so egotistical, work-obsessed, and withdrawn that he can’t stay close to anyone; he blows off his only real pal, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a fellow Jewish student at Harvard, who helps him launch the site.

The movie is outstanding, engrossing, and irresistible. I walked out in a stunned state. Truly, I was that affected. I didn't recover my equilibrium for quite some time. The movie captures the breathtaking pace of the growth of Facebook from its founder's dorm room at Harvard. Zuckerberg is so intensely focused on his vision and his codes that he blows off those around him, including his lovely girl friend, and seems to have few doubts about knocking others out of the way and walking over them, if necessary, in pursuit of his goals. Zuckerberg's emotional development seems stunted, and his social skills are utterly lacking.

Although Zuckerberg appears amoral in the movie, I felt that, in a way, he was not entirely responsible for the hurt that he caused to those around him. For all his brilliance, he's missing a character or personality component that would move him to pause and reflect on possible consequences of his actions on others, especially those close to him, or to feel remorse, once he saw the oftentimes unfortunate consequences.

The film is superbly written and directed, and the actors do the material full justice. Seeing the movie was an extraordinary experience. I definitely want to see it again to know the effect on me of a second viewing. Since I don't want to do a spoiler review, I won't say much more about the film, except to say that one of my favorite scenes comes early in the movie, a scene with Zuckerberg and his girl friend. Watch for it.

Already there is controversy about the movie. Zuckerberg says the portrayal of his character is inaccurate.

In my stunned state, as I left the theater, I said to myself, "I'm getting out of Facebook. I must get out of there." Well, I haven't yet. We shall see.

A couple of weeks ago, I read the "Letter From Palo Alto" on Mark Zuckerberg by Jose Antonio Vargas in The New Yorker, which is a profile of Zuckerberg, based on interviews with the subject himself and others who knew him, along with background research on the Facebook website.

Before there was Facebook, there was Facemash:

Soon afterward, he (Zuckerberg) came up with Facemash, where users looked at looked at photographs of two and clicked a button to note who they thought was hotter, a kind of sexual-playoff system. It was quickly shut down by the school administration.

Okay, Zuckerberg was 19. He's now 26. One hopes he's matured.

And this:

Zuckerberg's business model depends on the shifting notions of privacy, revelations, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertizers.

My major concern with Facebook is privacy. To read this statement in the profile is surely cautionary to me. I don't know that using Facebook has, as yet, provided the online world or the great world out there with much more information than what has been revealed through my activities in Blogland, but what about the future Facebook?

Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet. Google and other search engines may index the Web, but, he says, “most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?” Zuckerberg was in middle school when Google launched, and he seems to have a deep desire to build something that moves beyond it. “It’s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what’s going on with the people around you,” he said.
....

For this plan to work optimally, people have to be willing to give up more and more personal information to Facebook and its partners. Perhaps to accelerate the process, in December, 2009, Facebook made changes to its privacy policies. Unless you wrestled with a set of complicated settings, vastly more of your information—possibly including your name, your gender, your photograph, your list of friends—would be made public by default. The following month, Zuckerberg declared that privacy was an evolving “social norm.”

The backlash came swiftly. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center cried foul. Users revolted, claiming that Facebook had violated the social compact upon which the company is based. What followed was a tug-of-war about what it means to be a private person with a public identity. In the spring, Zuckerberg announced a simplified version of the privacy settings.

In answer to the author's question about the privacy changes, Zuckerberg said, “We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.” Zuckerberg's answer to the question is why I think that now may be the time for me to remove myself from Facebook, rather than later.