“You’re gonna go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And l want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. lt’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
A movie about the development of a social media platform that helped shape and change the internet, in the first ten minutes we are pulled into a world of things we now have given labels to: Toxic Masculinity, Cyber Bullying and Slut Shaming. The 2nd sequence intercuts Brett Kavanaugh’s world of “boys will be boys” with a new internet-based form of the same.
“You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that’s what the angry do nowadays.”
Mark Zuckerberg was written by Aaron Sorkin as a complicated figure driven by his own personal insecurities, but ten years later he’s become much more like Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort where his skill puts him above moral responsibility, and he freely uses his money and success on petty revenge against those who slighted him.
“When you go fishing, you can catch a lot of fish, or you can catch a big fish. You ever walk into a guy’s den and see a picture of him standing next to 14 trout?”
I’m not saying Sorkin and director David Fincher could predict the future, but it is eerie how well this story resonates today. Perhaps it shows the depth of their research that the character motivations that fill out dramatic events were very plausible choices, and all of this is on top of the usual memorable dialogue and smart direction that exists in any other writing about The Social Network, all of which still hold up.
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