Bildungsroman for the generation that can't communicate

Part 7 in a weeklong series on The Social Network.

By Mike Cavalier | October 16, 2010

That's the dumbest line in the whole movie. It's not even literally true. The Internet is not written in ink at all; it's written in ones and zeros (or something).

The sentiment is also false, but in a weird way, that's sort of okay. Erica is never wholly correct in what she says, and never wholly wrong; in fact, all the characters in this movie simply represent opposing viewpoints, and you get to pick and choose at every point in the plot whose side you're on. In the case of Erica, she presents a distinctly negative way of thinking about Mark and Mark's vision. She says things like,

Ouch. But then the movie ends with Erica's foil (the superhot lawyer Marylin Delpy, played by real-life Harvard grad Rashida Jones) giving Mark the exact opposite appraisal:

Which one is it, Sorkin?? The answer is both. One of the things that makes The Social Network truly great is this deliberate ambiguity. For instance, you can't really say that Mark is portrayed as entirely villainous in the film; there's always room for the exact opposite interpretation. Maybe Mark planted the story in The Harvard Crimson about Eduardo and the chicken. Maybe not. The film neither confirms nor denies either interpretation, and Sorkin takes great pains to not show us too much of his hand.

But if that's the case, then what is this movie ultimately about? Is it really just the boring origin myth of Facebook's dubious founding — a tiny courtroom drama about rich guys fighting over intellectual property? Is it the small story of Mark and Eduardo's disintigrating friendship, set against the epic backdrop of the early 2000s? And what are we to make of that rosebud moment at the end of the film, which hints at a profound loneliness in Mark? Take it seriously, or just a red herring?

My answer would be: this is the Internet. Go write your own damn interpretation. It's sort of up to you, and whichever part of the movie you found most resonant. In most cases, that would be a cop-out of epic proportions, but one of the reasons The Social Network got near universal critical acclaim was that it's rich enough to be about many things at once.

However, this much is clear: it is not the movie Rolling Stone says it is.

Peter Travers oversold the movie in his four-star review for Rolling Stone, which you probably already knew from the pullquote on the poster. He ends his gushing praise by talking about "a generation of users... sitting in front of a glowing screen pretending not to be alone." Similarly, this roundup of Rolling Stone's top 12 must-see fall movies makes reference to "a generation that can't communicate despite its obsession with social networking."

These are some truly condescending assumptions at play here — that millennials are uniformly socially retarded, and that Mark was supposed to be interpreted as an avatar for his generation (cuz, you know, we're all autistic billionaires). Now, I'll cop to the "obsessed with social networking" charge, since I'm Facebooking as I type this, but it's a little disingenuous to call The Social Network a movie about the Loneliest Generation.

In fact, this is exactly what I feared this movie would be like: adults handwringing about tech-savvy youngsters, kids sneering that parents just don't understand; I thought by the second act, the movie would devolve into a bunch of badly-written college kids sitting around and moaning about how hard it is to connect in this craaaazy new media landscape, a hideous love-child between Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming and anything by Diablo Cody.

Thankfully, the film is nothing like that. It's much more sophisticated, and doesn't stoop to beating the dead horse of "the Facebook effect," exploiting our anxieties around social networking (if you want something like that, look no further than Catfish, one of the best movies of the year). And get this: people hardly even use Facebook in this movie. We see Mark programming it, and Sean Parker discovering it, and a few characters telling each other to "Facebook me," but there aren't a lot of scenes of people actually using the site — let alone people pontificating about the deeper philosophical implications of doing so. So despite what Travers and others would have you believe, it's simply not a movie with Big Ideas about The Way We Live Now. It's something better.

Mike's been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated—God, he's sophisticated! He's the editor of the Junior Varsity.