What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 2010. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
I would not have the career I have now without Facebook. Social media was a part of my journalism school curriculum from Day 1 at TCU. My student newspaper used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope and Meerkat (remember those?) in college to help spread the news. Once I got to my first professional newspaper, I was the youngest in the room by a good 15 years. As such, I was the one who used social media the most. My second job out of college was working on social media accounts for Texas’ second-oldest newspaper. Then I worked at the Austin American-Statesman, where my main job was posting on and monitoring social media traffic for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit.
And had a sad, drunk Harvard student not hacked into his school’s face book directory in 2003, those jobs wouldn’t have been invented. At least, that’s according to “The Social Network.”
The 2010 film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher isn’t really the truth, but it is, in a way. It’s a courtroom drama “Citizen Kane” for the 21st century.
It’s a myth, an origin story about an American invention that has permanently changed how we all interact with the world. It’s a creation story, as one character points out at the end. And Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg is both God and the Devil.
Sorkin’s script paints Zuckerberg as a horny, lonely computer expert who only created Facebook prototype FaceMash that night at Harvard in order to get back at a girlfriend who had just dumped him and called him an asshole. The first scene in the movie, the breakup, is Sorkin at his best, full of witty comebacks normal people would think of minutes after a conversation ended. Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is obsessed with class and with becoming popular, being exclusive. The movie ends with him sitting alone with his computer, his only friend, endlessly refreshing the friend request he just sent to the woman who dumped him at the beginning of the movie.
Is that a little simplistic? Sure, but all creation myths are. God said don’t eat the fruit, Adam and Eve ate the fruit, now we have sin. Bill Gates built Microsoft in his garage and so did Steve Jobs with Apple. Over time, the nuances of each situation are removed from the legend to create an overarching simple truth that can easily be told again and again.
Sorkin’s script is adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires.” Mezrich isn’t well-known for his fact-checking skills (he wrote the book the card-counting movie “21” was based on, which also treads in muddy waters of truth) and the real Zuckerberg has denied many of the events described in his book. But the point of a myth isn’t to get everything right. It’s to illustrate truth by using fictitious means.
My opinion on Facebook as a tool has changed a lot over the years. I opened up my account behind my parents’ backs in 2007 because I wanted to talk to my friends on the service. This was back when you could still “poke” people and “graffiti” each other’s “walls.” We moved a lot, and it was a fun way to reconnect and keep in touch with old friends. In college, it was a lifeline to home and to the social climate of school — this was in the weird in-between period right before everyone had iPhones, but most everyone I knew had a Facebook account. And, obviously, it was the tool that I used the most at my first few jobs out of college.
But then, as Facebook got bigger and its influence grew, my relationship to it changed. Since so many papers and news outlets relied on it for traffic to their websites, they were often at the mercy of Facebook when ti came to content decisions. Facebook’s 2016 findings, later discovered to be false, that video was the next golden era of content, resulted in a “pivot to video” trend that cost thousands of journalists their jobs. Later in 2016, it would decline to take down erroneous statements during the ramp-up to the presidential election, and suddenly everyone knew what an “echo chamber” and an “algorithm” was. Facebook could now feed you only the information you wanted, surrounded by people who parrot that same information back at you.
Later, in 2020, the social network was slow to take down false information about the coronavirus, possibly resulting in many people taking it less seriously than they should have.
Facebook now allows you to be in control of your own truths. “The Social Network” did that back in 2010.
I always thought that social media wasn’t a net good or evil, it was just a tool to be used. And we are only as good as our tools when it comes to computers, and I’ve always thought that the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber, especially when you can select who to be surrounded by. But now, with the release of a new Wall Street Journal report about how Facebook knows its products (now including Instagram and WhatsApp) cause harm, but haven’t done anything about it, I think Facebook has done more harm than good.
I realize the catch-22 that puts me in. I’m going to share this post on Facebook when it publishes and I still need a Facebook account for work. I use the platform less and less, but it’s hard to ignore the company’s influence on everything online.
“The Social Network” knew all of this 11 years ago. It predicted the rise of bro tech culture becoming the dominant entrepreneurial group. It predicted the continuing and ongoing litigation against Facebook and its increased growth.
And the movie itself has become as important a cultural artifact as Facebook itself, following a similar trajectory. The original Facebook was a small, exclusive college directory that went on to influence entire elections. “The Social Network” was initially mocked — “They’re already making a movie about Facebook?” — before giving us so many cultural touchstones. The choral piano version of “Creep” in the trailer started a genre of movie trailers that’s still being used today. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is iconic. The “drop the ‘the,’ it’s cleaner” line from Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker. The memes from the Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) scene at the end. The general cultural perception of Zuckerberg. It lost to “The King’s Speech” at the Oscars, but I’ve never met anyone else who’s actually seen that movie.
“The Social Network” is probably the signifying work of the 2010s.
Up next: “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s 2011 celebration of cinema.
Letter of Recommendation
That score, again, is fantastic.
That’s all, folks. If you liked what you saw here, click that subscribe button (promise I won’t send any annoying emails) and tell all your friends!
This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer, yadda yadda yadda.
If there’s anything you want to see covered in a future newsletter, let me know!
You can find me in other corners of the internet as well, if you so choose. There’s my personal website (which focuses on pop culture, faith and my journalism clips), a Twitter account and a Letterboxd account. Subscribe away.