REVIEW: Social Network Brilliantly Explores the Facebook Frontier

In the amorphous world of pre-release online chatter, I've heard The Social Network being called Old Media's attack on the New. At the New York Film Festival press conference last week, both Sorkin and Fincher admitted that they don't use Facebook themselves, and in that New York Magazine article, Sorkin groused, in a good-natured rant, "I have to tell you, I don't feel like I had any trouble getting information before [the Internet]. Every morning two newspapers were literally thrown at my house. All I had to do was open the door and get them."

But The Social Network is anti-New Media the same way that, say, Philip Roth is anti-woman -- which is to say, it isn't. The Social Network is obsessed with New Media, turning over stone after quiet stone in parsing what it means in our world, and what we want it to mean in our world. I saw The Social Network at a New York Film Festival press screening, a place where you'd expect a degree of seriousness and good manners among people who are supposedly colleagues. But in the last 15 minutes of the movie, just as the picture was hurtling toward its somewhat abrupt and wholly effective ending, the woman next to me took out her PDA, set it alight and started scrolling. She'd done this earlier, briefly, and I'd kept silent. This time, I asked her politely if she'd please turn it off. She ignored me for 10 seconds before saying, flatly, "No."

I apologize to Fincher and Sorkin for missing 30 seconds of their movie, in which I leaned in very closely toward this woman (stopping just short of risking an assault charge) and began reading her screen over her shoulder: "Wow, that's really interesting," I said in something louder than a stage whisper. "Gee, what else you got going on there?"

She eventually turned the thing off, but the bitch had already made her point -- although inadvertently, she'd made Fincher's and Sorkin's points too. The Social Network is the first movie I've seen that really grapples, even indirectly, with the question of what we risk if we let restless online pursuits rule our lives. It's wrong and misguided to hold Zuckerberg responsible for too many of society's ills. (I don't use Facebook myself, but I know tons of people who find delight and pleasure in it. Plus, I've been making my living in New Media for nearly a dozen years.) But it's safe to say he's added yet one more distraction that threatens our ability to live in the moment. The Social Network makes one unconflicted demand: It asks you to be alive to what's in front of you for the space of its lean, wholly engaging two hours. One screen at a time ought to be enough, and the one you choose at a given moment says everything about you.

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