Summary
Directed by David Fincher and with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, the 2010 film The Social Network opens with a scene at a bar on the Harvard University campus. It is October, 2003. Protagonist Mark Zuckerberg, a nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore, is talking over beers with his girlfriend Erica Albright. They move away from and return to topics quickly, including which all-male “final club” Mark has the best chance of getting into.
Mark gets defensive when Erica asks which of the clubs is easiest to get into, rather than the best one to get into. She accuses him of being obsessive about final clubs, and he says, “There’s a difference between being obsessed and being motivated.” He tells her that if he gets into one of the clubs, he’d bring her along and introduce her to the type of people she wouldn’t otherwise meet; therefore she should be more supportive of his ambition. She is insulted by the implication and tells him she is breaking up with him.
Mark asks her to stay and talk while Erica insists she has to leave to go study. Mark tells her she doesn’t have to study because she goes to Boston University. Erica grits her teeth and says she is sorry he isn’t impressed with her intelligence. Before leaving the table, she says he’ll probably be a “successful computer person” and will go through life thinking girls don’t like him because he’s a nerd, but the truth is that they won’t like him because he’s an asshole.
The opening credits to the film play over shots of Mark jogging through the leafy campus back to his dorm room. Mark wears a Gap hooded sweatshirt and carries his backpack with one strap. Ominous music plays under the sound of Mark’s footsteps. In his room, Mark posts to his LiveJournal blog, calling Erica Albright a “bitch” and saying her breasts are smaller than her bra size would suggest.
His roommate comes in. Mark posts to his blog about a plan to hack photo databases of different campus organizations’ “face books”—websites displaying short bios of staff or students alongside their photographs. Mark and his roommate want to compile the photos into a website where people can rate women’s attractiveness. Shots of Mark hacking databases and downloading photos are contrasted with shots of conventionally attractive people at a final club party. Mark’s friend Eduardo arrives and says he saw Mark’s blog, asking if Mark is alright. Mark asks for the algorithm Eduardo uses to rank chess players, explaining that they are “ranking girls” on a website he has set up called Facemash.
A montage follows showing men receiving the link and ranking the women. When women see it, their faces drop. Erica’s roommate tells Erica about Mark’s blog post. Eduardo sees the outrageous amount of web traffic and asks Mark if they should shut it down before they get in trouble. Later the same night, after 22,000 hits in two hours, the Harvard computer network crashes. Mark appears pleased.
Mark, Eduardo, and their lawyers have been sitting for three hours at a table in a boardroom, discussing what happened that night. A lawyer mentions Erica’s deposition, and Mark accuses Erica of lying. The scene cuts to the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, rowing down a river before dawn. Over breakfast, they discuss the news of Facemash and their friend Divya suggests that they’ve found their guy.
At an Administrative Board hearing, Mark is charged with having violating university policies by creating Facemash. Mark stands up and makes a statement, saying he has already apologized to the women who were harmed. He then says he deserves recognition for pointing out holes in the system’s security. He receives six months' academic probation. Outside, Eduardo asks how Mark keeps doing something where all the girls hate him.
Mark leaves a lecture and meets the Winklevoss twins in the hall. They introduce themselves and bring him to a members-only club, where their “partner” Divya is sitting with a laptop. They compliment Mark for creating CourseMatch, a website that shows you which courses your friends have signed up for. Mark says it was a no-brainer. Divya and the Winklevoss twins tell Mark they’ve been working on The Harvard Connection, a social networking website. They say, “Girls wanna go with guys who go to Harvard.” They say their network is different from MySpace because of its exclusivity.
Divya and the Winklevoss twins invite Mark to work with them by building the site and writing the code. They say he could redeem himself with women in the process. Mark says, “I’m in.” The scene then cuts to a boardroom in the future: lawyers ask Mark about that day and Mark answers that he doesn’t remember because it happened three or four years ago. They ask him when he went to Eduardo with the idea for Facebook; Mark says it was called The Facebook then.
Analysis
The opening scene of The Social Network introduces the audience to the fast-paced speaking style that will characterize most dialogue exchanges in the film. The film’s protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg, is arguing with his girlfriend Erica in a tense manner that establishes Mark’s arrogance and tendency to vie for power. Erica grows exasperated with Mark’s “obsession” with getting into one of the university’s exclusive all-male social clubs and his condescending attitude toward her.
Although he is trying to convince her to stay and talk with him rather than break up with him, Mark doubles down on his condescension by suggesting that Erica doesn’t need to study because she attends Boston University, considered a lesser-quality university than Harvard. In this way, Fincher shows how Mark has an impulse to self-sabotage that subconsciously ensures his alienation from others. Before she leaves, Erica responds with an ominous prediction about Mark’s future, telling him that women will dislike him despite his success because they will perceive him as an asshole. In this tightly packed opening scene, Fincher introduces most of the film’s major themes: aspiration, alienation, misogyny, genius, social acceptance, and power.
Fincher builds on the theme of alienation by showing the audience shots of Mark’s solitary jog across the campus, during which time he passes many people but engages with no one. Back in his dorm, Mark opts for the semi-anonymity of expressing himself by posting to his blog rather than talking through his feelings with his roommates. Fincher also builds on the theme of misogyny as Mark writes disparaging comments about Erica that involve judgments of her body and gendered insults.
Rather than direct his scorn at Erica alone, Mark develops a website with the misogynistic premise of ranking the attractiveness of women on campus using photos stolen from databases he hacks into. Following Mark’s launch of Facemash, Fincher juxtaposes images of men happily engaging with the site against images of women reacting with concern to seeing themselves and their friends objectified publicly.
In the aftermath, Mark makes a seemingly superficial apology to the women whose privacy he violated but does not show genuine remorse at the disciplinary hearing he attends. In an instance of situational irony, he says he deserves recognition for pointing out holes in the security of the campus computer network. In another moment that speaks to Mark’s subconscious impulse to self-sabotage, Eduardo remarks that he has done yet another thing that guarantees women will hate them.
Although Mark becomes a social pariah among women and receives a penalty of six months on academic probation, the creation of Facemash precipitates a fortuitous job offer from the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra. The theme of betrayal enters the film as Mark accepts the job of building their dating website just before Fincher cuts to a boardroom scene in the future.
In that boardroom, Mark sits through a deposition as part of the lawsuit Divya and the Winklevoss twins have launched against him. They want clarity about when exactly he brought his idea to Eduardo, trying to establish that it occurred immediately after they told him about their idea for the Harvard Connection. With this sudden cut to the future lawsuits Mark will face, Fincher signals to the audience that Mark will pay a price for his cavalier attitude as a college sophomore. In doing so, Fincher invites the audience to look skeptically upon Mark’s supposed genius. Fincher also asks the audience to act as a juror who must evaluate the testimony delivered at the depositions and decide whose account is more trustworthy.
