JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The trouble with movies about computer geeks is that the image of pale creatures in hoodies staying up for 72 hours straight and swilling Mountain Dew in dorm rooms is not very cinematic. Ooh typing on keyboards, be still my heart. Gasp, did he just delete something? Nooh, he forgot to put a slash in the code!

David Fincher, working from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, has found a way to make the genesis of an idea the most thrilling thing in the world. The Social Network is the Citizen Kane of geek movies. Its chief protagonist Mark Zuckerberg revolutionizes human relationships by digitizing them, and the enduring irony is that he has no clue about how humans really feel or relate to each other. (Kermit suspects Asperger’s; he could be right.)

Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

Everytime I watch a David Fincher movie I want to say, “Somebody turn on the lights for chrissakes!” But the man operates best in the dark, in the unknowable pits of the soul. If there is a soul. Jesse Eisenberg has one of the most likable presences on the screen today—dorky, smart, insecure and sympathetic. You naturally root for him. He’s different as Zuckerberg: still dorky, smart and insecure, but he won’t allow you to feel sympathy for him. He’s closed off, sealed, unhackable.

And you still root for him. Fincher, Sorkin, and Eisenberg have created a character who taps into all the resentment you have ever felt at being an outsider. This is not a simple Revenge of the Nerds. This is a giant Fuck You to everyone who ever ignored you, condescended to you, didn’t invite you to their parties, made you feel unworthy, or didn’t know you were alive. You don’t even have to remember their names, they all fall under the category, They. And how do they react to this great big finger? They make you the youngest zillionaire on earth.

Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network.

I like to think that as a Marxist, Groucho wing (I refuse to be on facebook), I have a special perspective on The Social Network. The primary tenet of the Groucho wing is: I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member. In Zuckerberg’s case “club” is literal: the final clubs at Harvard such as Porcellian and Phoenix. To not get invited seems to be an insignificant slight, really, aren’t we above such shallowness. But if you are a bright, ambitious adolescent, and you know you’re smarter than all the jerks with invitations, but you also know that your personal merits can never override factors like background, family money, social success, it rankles.

High school never really ends.

It’s not enough for Them to accept you. You don’t want to be one of Them. All that stuff about honor and ethics and order—haven’t they twisted it to their own ends long enough (as the Larry Summers character points out, hilariously)? Sure they’re nice to you, because they need you and in time they’ll be afraid of you. The thought of being one of Them is disgusting. It’s not even the money—it’s a big deal to Them, to you it’s just fuel. You will go into Their world, not to destroy it—that would be too quick and easy—but to reveal its emptiness. You throw it open to everyone and it will look like democracy, but what it really is, is devaluation. You make Them Common.

You might never be happy, but you will be right.

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Lunch at a hawker center: Jon Morales (right) and Mark Chatting (left).

We got a counter-review from Jonny Morales of the Philippine national men’s rugby team. Jon was captain of the Brown University rugby team.

“Your review of the Social Network was interesting, though to be honest the movie strikes me as rather fanciful and with a pretty dated image of the Ivy League social scene. I actually knew Zuckerberg in college (he was high school classmates with an ex-girlfriend of mine) before Facebook was anything beyond this random new thing that only the Ivies had. I actually thought he was a bit of an ass, but that’s neither here nor there since he’s now the one worth a bajillion dollars and I sleep on a mat. On the floor. With an electric fan.

“But the idea that the social scene in the Ivies and at Harvard specifically is dominated by these elitist Waspy institutions like the finals clubs is really a bit obsolete, maybe 20 years ago it was like that but most people I knew at Harvard didn’t pay much attention to all of that anymore. The student body at places like Harvard and Brown are far too independent-minded, ambitious, and come from too eclectic backgrounds to put much stock in stodgy social institutions handed down from an increasingly irrelevant class of bluebloods.

“I was in a fraternity at Brown that was one of the oldest in the country and we certainly were a lot more ironic about our own group membership than to think we were some sort of social arbiters, and the people I knew who were in finals clubs at Harvard were the same. The ones who took it too seriously were generally mocked. But I guess for Hollywood’s sake that image of blazer-wearing ivory tower stuffed-shirt elites buddying about in brick buildings covered with ivy is more understandable to the general viewing public.”

Good point. Social class distinctions do make more more watchable movies and Fincher-Sorkin know what works. The Outsider: classic movie theme. And we like do looking at Winklevii. (I know a pair of Winklevii but they’re from here and they went to Harvard in the early 80s.)

If the movie Zuck is a faithful rendering of the real-life Zuck, then he probably was mocked by his contemporaries, which would stoke his rage some more.

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About our The Social Network as a series of status updates contest: THAT’S ALL YOU’VE GOT?

You get an excellent movie, and you give us bupkiss? Or has facebook really turned you into a horde of inarticulate nitwits?

We’re extending the contest until Friday noon because we do not have a winner and we need four.