The Social Network: a Study in Brilliance and Nerd Fashion

The 26-year-old billionaire Mr. Mark Zuckerberg has received his share of media attention as of late. There’s his $100 million donation to Newark, New Jersey public schools and the persistent rumors of a Facebook phone. There’s overseeing one of the most influential websites in the world. And, of course, there’s the movie.

Zuckerberg, the notorious media hermit, wavers between condemning David Fincher’s The Social Network, (“I just think people have a lot of fiction,” he told ABC News in July), and more recently merely dismissing it as “fun”.

And the movie is fun and, indeed, fictionalized—because the book off which the movie is based, The Accidental Billionaires, is fictionalized. Movie Zuckerberg is a brilliant coder and hacker and an easily distracted, socially graceless stiff. He wants nothing more than to sit at a cool-kid Harvard lunch table—one of the school’s elite invite-only social clubs which is hardly more than the average fraternity, complete with hazing and discriminative cliquishness. He is approached by three members of one of these ratherish-frats who want to create a Harvard-only online social network with the help of Zuck’s coding skills. Movie Zuck accepts.

The film’s fiction is presumably within the collegiate antics, and within Movie Zuck himself, carelessly Livejournaling blogs that later come back to haunt him, a nod to the poor fools who have later been haunted by posting incriminating evidence of their own shenanigans to the good Book. But it’s clever, believable fiction that’s very likely rooted in fact. Movie Zuck’s wardrobe choices—North Face fleece, slide-on Adidas sandals, and general refusal to wear anything but jeans—and rapid vernacular, for instance, are characteristics we have witnessed from Real Zuck.

Movie Zuck is Jesse Eisenberg, very arguably born to play the part. He’s ambitious, constantly on-edge, and incredibly protective of the site. When it comes to his sometimes-best-friend Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s sugar daddy/co-founder, he is ruthless. Regarding Sean Parker, partial owner of the company, he is a devoted fanboy, in awe of the Napster founder’s internet swagger. (Andrew Garfield as Saverin is exemplary; Justin Timberlake as Parker is decent to a degree that he will probably not make music again, ever—because he doesn’t want to, not because we necessarily want to see him in more films.)

In many ways, The Social Network is a film the Facebook juggernaut deserves, mirroring the site and its creator in dexterity and media contention. And really, Real Zuck shouldn’t worry—it’s unlikely anyone will delete their Facebook account because his fictionalized self comes off as slightly abrasive.