I mean based on the film, Mark Zuckerberg's character gives some credibility to the idea that, rather than drawing people closer together social networking sites and the internet in general, are further detaching us from reality.
I for example have friended several people on Facebook that I may only have met once or twice and fleetingly at that. And yes some I have had great discussions with on-line via Facebook's chat function and we talk about this we're both equally interested in, things that a lot of my family member like my Mum, Dad and sisters don't get. Like how great Firefly was as a TV series, how scary and intriguing it is that Brad Bird of all people is directing the new Mission Impossible instalment. Or exchanging views on artists we like, as I am right now with a girl called Amy. I telling how I discovered this guy James Chance who does awesome quirky, very inter-textual prints (Note reference to future intertextuality lecture.) crossing star wars characters with the main protagonists of Beatrix Potter's Winnie the Pooh stories, and how she should check them out and give me her opinion of them.
Despite all this interaction the person on the other end of the chat is still no closer to me than say my lecturers. I think it needs to be made clear that there is a real difference between a friendship and a relationship. A relationship only implies a connection, an association however minor that may be: lecturer to student, friend of a friend or familial links like cousins. A friendship is something else entirely, it's more than an association, it's an attachment to someone by feelings, by personal regard. I think this is something that gets lost in Facebook. As demonstrated in the film, there's a huge difference between knowing someone and being there friend.
The characters in the film despite being based on real people seem like caricatures. Exaggerated for the sake of making a script more interesting and engaging than the reality of the people involved in the creation of Facebook. Out of all the characters the only person that was actually involved with the book, the script and the creation of the film was Eduardo Saverin, which I find interesting as the film is far more focussed on the "genius" of Mark Zuckerberg in the creation of the website. And the film is heavily weighted towards this character's view of the story.
It is scripted to over-dramatise the events and after effects surrounding the creation of Facebook, merely to avoid creating a film about a bunch of uni students sat on their computers typing in code and eating pizza which, according to Zuckerberg and Saverin, is basically how it happened. It reminds me in some ways of a few other films about computer geeks such as 1995's Hackers or 2001's Swordfish, in that the film tries to find ways to glam up what should be a very boring task to see on screen.
It's interesting as this is the second film Fincher has directed based on real events, the first being 2007's Zodiac which was about the serial killings in Northern California in the late 1960's perpetrated by a figure identified to the press as the Zodiac Killer or simply Zodiac. Like The Social Network, there is a lot of myth surrounding the events of the Zodiac serial killings a lot of which can be dispelled by the limited amount of first-hand information today you can gather about the events. Unlike the events in the Social Network which are very recent, but due to the nature of the relationships obscured by prejudice and personal opinion. In making Zodiac Fincher obviously felt close to given that he grew up in San Anselmo, Marin County during the first Zodiac murders. This is reflected in it's indirect portrayal of the murders. Sometimes you see them first-hand through following the victims but a lot of the time they are merely discussed.
Much like The Social Network with Zodiac, Fincher apparently wasn't after a factual truth but rather an emotional one. According to his producer Bradley J. Fischer "David is beyond Zodiac being a reconstruction. He is interested in the progression of events that he can capture on film." This is what he did in Zodiac and in The Social Network, he didn't recreate the events in their exactitude because he isn't making a documentary reconstruction. He had to confine the truth of the story with the reality of constructing a film narrative that would make sense to the audience. And whilst there is truth to some of the conflicts used in the narrative of the Social Network, arguments over who gets profits for what etc. Fincher seems to add some honour and binary definition to what is essentially two parties, both of whom are all-ready rich, squabbling over money.
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