How to make 500 million friends...and alienate people.

 

So who exactly is Mark Zuckenberg?

If we learn anything from “The Social Network,” it is that there is no right or wrong answer.

Be it good or bad, “The Social Network,” certainly has caused extreme reactions.  Universal scepticism greeted its launch, which is a far cry from the Oscar buzz that now surrounds the film that has achieved a seemingly unattainable approval rating of 97% on the revered film review website “Rotten Tomatoes.” 

The movie follows Mark Zuckenberg, the only person in the world more socially awkward than the characters portrayed by Michael Cera, in the early years of what is now the most trafficked social-networking site on the internet. 

Aaron Sorkin, creator of “The West Wing” and “A Few Good Men,” based the screenplay for the film, in part, on Ben Mezrich's book “The Accidental Billionaires - The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”  Like the film, the book is a self-confessed fiction fest. 

The film traces the story of Zuckenberg and Eduardo Saverin, Zuckenberg's close friend at Harvard who was the sole investor in Facebooks’ infancy.  When the company began making serious money, Saverin was edged out by an offer he couldn't refuse.  The movie is centred on a series of legal proceedings and flashbacks that involve the company’s co-founders.  It is a dialogue-driven piece, sprinkled with a little humour about the worldwide phenomenon that is Facebook.

Zuckenberg is your quintessential nerd, known in his Harvard days for reciting lines in public from his favourite eight century Trojan war poem “The Iliad.”  Mark is a student of the classics and his personal motto is said to be Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, loosely translated as, “Maybe one day we’ll look back on all this shit and laugh.”  I believe Mark would do exactly that if he ever got a chance to see the film about his life that he half-heartily tried to stop it in production.  Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin doesn’t seem to have any affection for Mark as he paints him as an abnormal, off-colour, peculiar person that can’t seem to form a lasting relationship with anyone he meets.  Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckenberg, doesn’t seem to think much of him either, as he is being quoted as saying he researched Asperger's Syndrome, which is a form of autism where suffers have high levels of anxiety and confusion, for his portrayal of Zuckenberg.  Zuckenberg has never had any form of this syndrome and it was merely the actor taking creative license to make the actor more interesting and weird with little regard to the facts.

In one particular scene that annoys me, Zuckenberg is seen acting like a spoilt child, who was just told global warming destroyed the summer season, as he is sulking in a meeting with an ad executive and in another scene he is doodling with a scornful look on his face while he is being sued for millions by his best friend.  It should be pointed out here that this is the man who donated $100 million of his own personal wealth to Newark public school system, one of Americas’ worst school systems.  This is the sort of philanthropy that we normally only see from the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and certainly not form a spoilt brat; frankly, it’s great to see someone so young as Mark to have such a compassion for his fellow man.  The cynic here could point out that he made this donation a week before the release of the film as a smoke screen as the film doesn’t portray him in the most favorable manner. The donation could also be aimed at counteracting any negative stigma that could arise from his newly acquired lofty position of 35^th in the Forbes’s rich list.  Upon closer examination you will see that this donation was months in the making.  The only reason he went public with his donation was because the heads of the charity convinced him to do so in order for them to obtain a slot on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where she announced to the world, “You wanted to remain anonymous and we talked you into coming on here." 

What really frustrated me about this film was we were lead to believe that if these guys just got laid more often we would never have had innovations such as Napster and Facebook – both of which are depicted in the film as being the reaction / over-reaction of a nerds attempt to overcome some unrequited love or failed relationship.  It is true that Zuckenberg did set up the site facemash.com  following his girlfriend breaking up with him but it is entirely untrue that his motivation to set up facebook was to become popular so she would take him back. 

In fact, he had a new girlfriend during the entire timeframe of the film and he wasn’t the hopeless loser that was jealous of his best friend Eduardo Saverin love life.

Here she is...... not bad :P

I believe that even if Zuckenberg had cooperated with Sorkin in the making of this film that not much of this film would have been changed as people don’t want to watch a film about a socially normal person that is down-to-earth and has lots of friends.  I feel that no matter what he was going to portray him as a “human stairmaster”, a frantic mess of a human being, as his girlfriend described him the first scene of the film.

So it's a shamelessly biased account, as well as a seductively plausible one.  What do you expect from a film based on the memories of those who claim he cheated them on his way to becoming a billionaire and backed up by transcripts from their lawsuits against Zuckenberg.