By DAVID CARR
LOS ANGELES - “The Social Network,” a film about the tumultuous origins of Facebook, promises a story that is as sexy and clickable as a seconds-old status update . Then again, the film - written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher - deals in archetypes and conflicts as old as the Bible. Even while they trade on its currency, as headlines about Facebook’s astounding growth and problematic privacy issues keep coming, the makers of “The Social Network” prefer to dwell on its timelessness.
“We’re not fad hopping,” said Mr. Fincher . “There’s an ironic story behind this thing that’s about friendship and the need to connect. The fact that it was Facebook brought an interesting context for this simple drama of acrimony.”
“The Social Network,” which opens in October with various international release dates running through December, describes how Facebook, then “thefacebook,” created an alternative social hierarchy, first at Harvard University in 2004, then in the world at large. It is a battle among Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker, all founding fathers of a site that allows people to connect with old friends and new.
Once Facebook takes off, a fight for credit and lucre begins that ricochets from dorm rooms to depositions to impossibly fabulous parties. The film is set at Harvard and features Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, the film’s protagonist; Andrew Garfield as Zuckerberg’s spurned pal, Saverin; and Justin Timberlake, the music star, as Parker, the Internet impresario-genius-huckster. Using a variety of stand-in locations, Mr. Fincher draws the university as a coliseum as much as a campus.
Language, social status, study clubs are used as weapons, even as Mr. Zuckerberg introduces a new element ? technology ? as the ultimate equalizer. “I think the fact that it was Harvard is by no means irrelevant,” Mr. Sorkin said. “The genesis of the idea was exclusivity, of an outsider wanting to belong.” Mr. Fincher said genuine revolutions are frequently met with condescension.
“I know very subjectively what it’s like to be 21 years old and sitting in a room full of adults who are all talking about how cute your passion for your vision is, and how angry that makes you,” he said. “A certain kind of young person is going to respond by saying, ‘Let’s knock the walls of this thing down, set fire to the conventional wisdom and take the future for a test drive.’ ” Like Mr. Fincher, Mr. Sorkin is far from charmed by the potential of social networking - “I think the way we were communicating before seemed just fine” - but was taken by the phenomenon’s scale and its peculiar dramatics .
As depicted in the film Zuckerberg begins with a single actual friend, Mr. Saverin, and then sacrifices that friendship on the way to creating the largest engine of social interaction in the history of mankind. Mr. Sorkin called the story “awfully ironic,” noting, “These were people whose social lives blew apart as a result of what they were trying to do.
” After immersing the filmgoer in an eroticized, hierarchical Harvard, the film uses court depositions, both as a source and a device, to suggest that the players may all be sitting at the same table, but they are far from agreeing on what lies in the middle of it. When Scott Rudin, one of the film’s producers, looks at Facebook, he doesn’t see revolution or unprecedented business success, he sees an allegory.
“Facebook,” he said, “is something you can hold it up to the light and turn it to the right or left, and it becomes a metaphor for some very big things: The nature of communication. What is friendship? What is the nature of loneliness?”
