Summary
In the boardroom with the Winklevoss twins, Mark grows angry with the line of questioning and admits to the lawyer that he does not have his full attention; he says he has more important things to think about. The scene cuts to the past: Mark and Eduardo are out with Christy and her friend Alice, who take them to stalls in the bathroom to have sex.
Afterward, Mark sees Erica at a table and approaches. He asks to talk to her, and she tells him she won’t go anywhere with him because of the things he said about her. Mark goes back to Eduardo and says he has to expand to Columbia and Yale. Eduardo suggests Stanford as well, saying it’s time for them to see this in Palo Alto.
During a recess in his deposition, Mark talks with Marilyn Delphy, an associate on his case. She says he must really hate the Winklevoss twins. Mark says he doesn’t hate anybody, and that they aren’t suing for intellectual property but because something didn’t work out for them for the first time in their lives.
The scene cuts to Divya informing the Winklevoss twins that Mark is trying to expand. They realize Mark is in violation of the Harvard Handbook rule saying you can’t steal from other students. They say they’ll demand a meeting from Harvard president Larry Summers.
Sean Parker, founder of Napster, wakes up with a Stanford student named Amy. When she goes to the shower, he opens her laptop to check his email and sees The Facebook. She says Stanford has had it for two weeks. She says it’s really awesome but “freakishly addictive.” Sean sends himself an email of the page and says he just needs to find Mark Zuckerberg.
The scene cuts to the Winklevoss twins meeting with Larry Summers. Larry Summers asks what they want him to do about it, saying he doesn’t see it as a university issue. They argue with him and Larry Summers tells them to start another project. They leave angrily. One of them removes the antique doorknob from his office door.
Eduardo and Mark go to New York to find investors. Mark is visibly reluctant to engage in the meetings, frustrating Eduardo. With Christy, they meet with Sean, who impresses them by knowing the waitress and ordering lavishly. While drinking a lot, they discuss Sean’s history with Napster and his next internet venture.
Eduardo reports the details of the meeting in the deposition, calling Sean paranoid and delusional. Eduardo says Mark had to come to California. Eduardo reports to Sean that they now have twenty-nine schools involved in The Facebook. Sean says they don’t want to sell ads yet because they don’t know what the website could be yet. He says they’re headed for a billion-dollar valuation. At the end of the meal, which Sean pays for, Sean advises Mark to “Drop the 'the,'” saying Facebook alone is “cleaner.” Eduardo tells the deposition that Mark was putty in Sean’s hands after that meeting.
The lawyers ask Eduardo if he did anything that would be considered grounds for termination. The lawyer brings up an article from the Crimson accusing Eduardo of animal cruelty. Eduardo responds with indignation, saying, “This isn’t happening.” The scene cuts to the past, as Mark reads the article in question: it covers Eduardo’s involvement in a Phoenix Club hazing prank that necessitated Eduardo having a chicken with him at all times. The article names Eduardo as one of the founders of Facebook. Mark tells Eduardo that animal torture is bad for business.
In the boardroom, Eduardo explains that the issue stemmed from him bringing the chicken with him to the dining hall, where he fed the chicken bits of cooked chicken being served that night. He says he didn’t know you weren’t allowed to do that, and that he dealt with the animal rights groups. Eduardo gets upset with Mark for telling his lawyers he tortured animals. Mark’s lawyer says they found the information themselves, and that Mark actually defended Eduardo when they brought the matter to him.
Analysis
Mark’s facade of steely indifference to the Winklevoss twins and their lawsuit against him momentarily breaks when he erupts in anger, claiming that their lawsuit is frivolous and he is too important a person to be troubling himself with it. With this reaction, Fincher reintroduces the themes of power and genius, showing how Mark thinks of himself as above the Winklevoss twins and Divya as the tech billionaire he has become. In this defiant show, Mark exhibits his unwillingness to admit he is nothing other than a solitary genius.
In the past, Mark and Eduardo are out with the women they met at Bill Gates’s lecture. Fincher builds on the theme of social acceptance when Mark spots Erica Albright at the same bar. He goes over to talk to her, but she is unwilling to engage with him after the horrible things he said about her on the internet. Even though he has created a website that is growing in popularity, Mark discovers that Erica still holds the upper hand over him. To her, he is still just a misogynistic asshole.
Mark responds to Erica’s rejection with an increased desire for power, immediately telling Eduardo that they need to expand The Facebook’s user base to other elite universities. With this detail, Fincher shows that the same vengeful, misogynistic drive that prompted Mark to create Facemash is still alive in Mark as he seeks to build an even more impressive product to get the better of Erica and anyone else who doesn’t accept him socially.
With the company’s expansion to Stanford University in California comes attention from Sean Parker, the internet wunderkind behind the controversial music-sharing platform Napster. Having seen the webpage open on the laptop of a woman he has just slept with, Sean immediately recognizes the potential in The Facebook and seeks to become involved.
In his first meeting with Mark, Sean’s display of ease and charm works to seduce Mark while simultaneously putting off Eduardo, who doubts Sean’s business acumen because of his past run-ins with the law. At the same time, Sean undeniably has a vision for the company, accurately predicting its billion-dollar valuation and having the good sense to recommend that it be called simply Facebook, a name he sees as cleaner than “The Facebook.” Ultimately, Mark is “putty” in Sean’s hands because Sean is exactly what Mark aspires to be: talented, respected, and attractive to women.
The theme of betrayal enters the narrative again when lawyers representing Mark bring up Eduardo’s campus scandal involving the mistreatment of a chicken. Eduardo refutes the accusation that he tortures animals and therefore warranted being removed from Facebook’s masthead, and he cannot believe that Mark would try to damage his reputation by bringing the matter to his lawyers’ attention. But in an instance of situational irony, Mark’s lawyer explains that Mark actually defended Eduardo when the lawyers discovered the newspaper article about Eduardo’s disastrous hazing ritual.
