It’s easy to imagine David Fincher not quite knowing where to go after The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The Fight Club and Se7en director has long reveled in his ability to move from world to world, maintaining a shocking level of consistency even as his subject matter shifts and evolves. After the good-not-great Benjamin Button, which came off the grim and gritty serial killer drama Zodiac, the pull of a straightforward story about people in the non-murderous (but non-fantastical) world became great enough to release an unlikely adaptation: The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich’s examination of the birth of Facebook, and the absolute shitheads at the center of it all.
The intersection of art and commerce has, in recent years, come to an ugly head with the occasional release of a film designed to humanize brands and products. You see this in feel-good Air Jordan origin story Air, the Argo-esque Russian intrigue of the birth of Tetris in Tetris, or even the insipid Cheeto-themed Flamin’ Hot — they’re good stories, sure, but it feels like you’re watching a 90-minute commercial, trying to convince you that the people who made the things you like are underappreciated and under-recognized saints, working behind the scenes in ways you could never imagine. The best of these movies, though, are the ones that run in the opposite direction, making it clear that the people who run these companies are absolute bastards — a lineage arguably started with 2010’s Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network, a film about one of the reigning kings of business bastards.
Without Fincher’s look into the rise of Facebook, it’s easy to imagine those feel-good films as some kind of preemptive damage control, an attempt to lessen the likelihood of their own Social Network coming out. As a result, the best of films birthed by it are the ones that show not just success, but abysmal failure. Last year was BlackBerry, a Canadian dramedy that showed a company ascending to the heights of ubiquity before fumbling the bag spectacularly, spelling nothing but doom. Many years earlier, we got Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc in 2016’s The Founder, the businessman who essentially stole McDonald’s from the burger brothers who actually started the company, or Michael Fassbender’s Steve Jobs (2015), a film depicting his colossal personal failings through the lens of his business successes. Though the soulless businessman who wishes to see himself as the next Kroc or Jobs and views films like The Founder as straightforward depiction of entrepreneurial success, the rest of us see them as cautionary tales about people making deals with business devils, selling their souls for nothing but greed and burning every possible bridge along the way.
If you run into someone who thinks Fincher’s look into Zuckerberg’s life during the birth and rise of Facebook makes its subject look like a cool, defensible, even aspirational figure, run, fast. Somehow, though, that was the response that greeted The Social Network on its release, with the media claiming it elevated Mark to the status of “rockstar,” and whose story will inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. Maybe that’s just the charm of Jesse Eisenberg, who depicts Zuckerberg as a supergenius who just can’t handle the pressures of being a human being. In the capable hands of Eisenberg, we watch Mark do things in nearly every scene that’ll make you want to throat-punch him through the screen on behalf of everyone around him. It goes beyond the realm of antihero — it’s easier to view him as the petulant antagonist in the stories of the film’s supporting characters. He’s a rampant misogynist who steals from people, belittles his friends, enables narcissistic sex pests, and cannot be bothered to give a shit about anyone or anything around him unless it’ll benefit him directly. In short, he fucking sucks. Where Eisenberg really shines is in the moments where he doesn’t suck, which allows some former light to peek through, letting you see why people liked him in the first place. It’s not enough to make him likable by any means, but it’s enough that when junior lawyer Marylin Delpy (Rashida Jones) tells Mark, “You’re not an asshole, Mark — you’re just trying so hard to be,” you almost believe her.
The film bounces back and forth in time, showing us the infancy of Facebook in the past, and the lawyer-packed depositions surrounding the lawsuits filed against Mark for stealing ideas from the Winklevoss Twins (or “the Winklevi,” as Mark calls them, both played by Armie Hammer) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). Are we supposed to view the film as a depiction of what happened, or as Zuckerberg’s recollection of what happened in a deposition? In a way, it doesn’t matter; while one might wonder how it could be the recollection of an unreliable narrator if it makes him look so bad, it’s important to remember that the Zuckerberg of The Social Network doesn’t seem to think he’s done one single thing wrong. He stares out windows, barks at the attorneys around him that they “have his minimal attention” when asked for his full attention and flaunts the fact that the yellow legal pad in front of him is covered solely in tiny doodles. Everyone else in the film plays perfectly off of Eisenberg, especially Hammer and Garfield, who play off Mark’s “nervous asshole genius” energy perfectly.
Then again, maybe the reason people in 2010 thought the Zuckerberg of The Social Network was so cool was just because of the everlasting bankability of Aaron Sorkin. The opening scene feels like it whizzes past our ears like a warning shot, an in medias res breakup scene between Mark and his girlfriend, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara, putting herself on course to play Lisbeth Salander in Fincher’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), where his arrogance and bitterness causes him to crater his relationship worse than you’ve ever seen. Their dialog crackles with the speed and intensity of the best West Wing walk-and-talks. The whole film follows suit, the world around Mark matching his slightly manic, detached delivery at all times just to keep up with him. The only people who don’t seem like they’re trying are the adults in the room, like the Dean of Harvard (who treats the Winkelvi like a pathetic nuisance) to the lawyers that surround Mark and Eduardo, a constant reminder that the intense people at the film’s center are still either students or still in their 20s.
Say what you will about Sorkin — and, indeed, The Social Network contains many of his quirks — but the flavor of his dialog is intoxicating, and for those who it works for, it’s impossible to resist. It’s hard to imagine many other screenplay writers capturing the balance of drama, jargon, and whip-smart humor that Sorkin was able to bring to the film. That humor is what makes it such an infinitely rewatchable movie. beyond the drama, beyond iconic lines like “Drop the ‘The,’ it’s cleaner” and “The internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.” 14 years later, lines like “I don’t know, but from the look of it, they want to sell me a Brooks Brothers” franchise” and Parker, straight-faced, telling a cop, “That’s not mine,” when caught with cocaine all over his hands are still good for a bitter laugh. It’s no wonder Sorkin won Best Adapted Screenplay at that year’s Oscars, over the likes of Winter’s Bone and True Grit.
Of course, since we’re talking about Oscar-worthy aspects, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the editing and score of The Social Network. It’s not as obvious on first watch, but when picking the film apart, you can observe a gradual upward slope not just in terms of tension and energy, but also in how it depicts the world around Mark. At the beginning, we get quiet glimpses of the Harvard campus, wide shots of the nighttime world he often inhabits. The more chaotic moments of his life — from the iconic nightclub scene (where Mark and Sean Parker) scream across a table at each other over pumping club music, to the Palo Alto party of the film’s penultimate scene — still have the kind of lushness, but it feels like a reflection of how stifling his world has become since the days of blasting his ex on LiveJournal out of spite. Even as the tension and pressure build, the camera feels weightless, gliding through packed offices and boardrooms with the same grace it floats through parties and the feverish, drunken code-off competition midway through the film.
Alongside it all is the gorgeous score by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Nowadays, the duo of Reznor and Ross doing a soundtrack almost feels as commonplace as Michael Giacchino or Ludwig Göransson, but at the time the duo’s involvement felt novel, even surprising. Yet, a few months later, the duo would be spotted in tuxes on the Oscar red carpet, and then later accepting the award for Best Original Score. They earned it; their rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” used for the infamous Henley Royal Regatta sequence took a month to create, and it’s worth it. It elevates an already excellent soundtrack into something truly special.
Today, The Social Network almost feels like a quaint relic, a throwback to a time when you could put a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep” in a trailer and people would think you were badass, and not cringeworthy. 2010 feels like a million years ago, and a mid-film scene in which Mark sees his ex again feels prophetic, with Erica eviscerating him and his ilk: “You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that’s what the angry do nowadays.” It was true then, and it has only gotten truer, thanks in part to the real-life Zuckerberg giving the angry a gigantic, seemingly endless space to write their snide bullshit, anytime and anywhere. People might see the film as a love letter to the spirit of free-market capitalism, but The Social Network remains a scathing look at the cruel beginnings of something that may have endured better than BlackBerry, but that has about the same amount of public trust today.
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