'The Social Network.' Directed by David Fincher.

Produced by: David Fincher, Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca, Ceán Chaffin, and Kevin Spacey

Written by: Aaron Sorkin. Based on ‘The Accidental Billionaires’ by Ben Mezrich.

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rooney Mara, Rashida Jones, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, and Joseph Mazzello.

Distributed by: Colombia Pictures.

Release date: October 1^st, 2010.

Run time: 120 minutes.

Budget: $40 Million.

Gross revenue: $203, 012,  320.

This is one of those movies where not a single lead character is really likeable. I interpreted it as a cautionary tale about the existence of a certain type of person in this world: The kind that subscribes to the philosophy that if you’re not actually making a profit, you’re not worth the time of day. I guess after completing my degree I sort of forgot about those people, but this movie really reminded me that they do indeed exist, and are in fact running the modern world.

In my poli sci days, I did a course on the social ramifications of modern advertising. Half the class were marketing majors, the other half social science majors. The arguments were frequent and serious, with the social science majors demanding that advertisers acknowledge that advertising has contributed to some horrifying social trends like alcoholism and smoking, and the marketing majors refuting with the typical “It’s not up to us to play nanny to the world” argument.

The Social Network seems to be populated with characters that are all marketing majors. These people usually have no experience of poverty or real emotional hardship and feel they shouldn’t be expected to consider what effect their ideas might have on society. They go through life in a type of constant tunnel vision, seeing only the next big thing, remaining oblivious to their privileged standing in life, and reluctant to do anything that doesn’t result in them making ‘bank.’ These are the type of people who misinterpreted Wall Street, claiming that Gordon Gecko was the reason that they got into stock trading.

I guess the key concern of the movie is the effect that Facebook has had on eroding our sense of connection with other people. Fincher is especially qualified for this: For many, his Fight Club was an introduction to nihilism and also the idea that consumer capitalism is not a sufficient method of personal identity formulation. The characters of The Social Network, specifically Zuckerberg, all end up rich and friendless, which is pretty ironic considering their invention was about social interaction. They are also cold characters, who you wouldn’t want to be friends with.

The first scene in the The Social Network depicts Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend and subsequently posting a derogatory comment on his blog about the size of her breasts. He just goes online and posts about her breasts as if he were writing it in his personal journal. She finds out of course and when he later tells her that he didn’t mean what he wrote and that he was angry, she says: “You called me a bitch on the internet. As if every thought you ever have is so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared.” This line pretty much sums up the character of Zuckerberg, and the audience knows that it’s all going to be downhill from here.

The internet was supposed to be this huge democratic medium where people could share ideas about social justice, science and philosophy, and instead it has led to a freaky kind of socialisation where all the awkwardness of meeting someone new is almost completely removed. It is no wonder that Zuckerberg blogged about his girlfriend’s breasts; his interaction with women up to that point in time probably consisted of pornography and chat rooms. He probably didn’t know that women didn’t like men talking about their breasts on the internet, because he never actually sat down and had a conversation with a woman before.

The Social Network is one of those socially relevant movies that the Academy tends to love. I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie won Best Picture and Best Director for Fincher. He certainly deserves the recognition. However, something about this movie didn’t really sit right for me. I didn’t get to sleep for hours after I finished watching it. The selfishness of all the characters was really disturbing. The movie is technically competent, and it does raise some interesting philosophical issues about how the internet has changed social interaction, but it’s not a nice movie. It’s a dose of medicine that is good for us, but that doesn’t stop it from tasting bad going down.

Four stars: