Your Social Network Song of the Week
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – A Familiar Taste
This is my way of talking about The Social Network without dedicating a post to a pitiful attempt at being a film critic. I think this song is indicative of just how cool this David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin collaboration is. It’s a movie fueled by a fantastic soundtrack by Reznor and Ross, a non-stop script from Sorkin, and ingenious directing by Fincher. All the components come together to form the quickest two hours you’ll spend in a theater this year.
Yeah, Facebook is the backdrop for the action in the film, but it’s not what drives it. The movie is about a quest for importance — for coolness. It’s about a kid who was smart enough to take an idea and bring it to its inevitable end. Facebook almost does seem like an end, doesn’t it? If the end of the Cold War was the “end of history”, Facebook is the end of the anonymous internet — at least in the sense that neither is really true, but can easily be seen that way. ANYWAY…
Fincher brilliantly flips back and forth between the creation of Facebook and two depositions of the lawsuits it spawned, splicing together sentences, contrasting excitement with irritation, and chronicling the destruction of a friendship both in real-time and in retrospect. I haven’t even mentioned Jesse Eisenberg’s performance of Mark Zuckerberg, which will probably become the way most people imagine the youngest billionaire on the planet. It’s probably not fair nor intelligent to take the film as any sort of documentary, but it’s impossible not to be sucked in. Everything seems so damn believable, from Zuckerberg blogging about his ex-girlfriend (apparently actually true) while creating a website to rank Harvard girls in his spiteful mood, to the way he’s lured in by the magnetic personality of Sean Parker portrayed by Justin Timberlake*, to the arrogant way he dismisses any claims of wrongdoing.
It’s just an immaculately crafted movie, and the critics calling it some “defining movie of this generation” aren’t too far off. I never, ever thought I would say that going in. David Fincher is back.
*Seriously, Justin Timberlake’s performance was great. If you told me 10 years ago that some kid from N’Sync would be a good actor, and that Ben Affleck would be an arguably great director, I would have expected you to think a black dude was going to be president, too.
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