The Social Network

We got around to seeing The Social Network tonight.

Look, it was fine. It was sort of television on a movie screen. Aaron Sorkin is good at getting a bunch of people to talk in a sort of believable way that is heightened, clever, etc. I don’t know. I find it quite distant from really being human.

Maybe he is drawn to writing about powerful people because it takes a certain removal of humanity to be powerful and he understands this for some reason or likes it for some reason.

It rubs me the wrong way. But I was engrossed. Like watching crinkly aluminum foil.

I experienced some nostalgia while watching this movie. I used to do some theatre stuff at Harvard in my early college days. Harvard was right down the street from my college and we had this cross arts thing going on. Harvard really was a clubby place filled with desperate nerds. I remember being in a play (Okay, Hair) and I had this strong feeling that every single woman in it wanted to be my girlfriend. They were a desperate bunch. Their ability to be subtle, socially, was simply not on the menu. It was almost as if one went after social encounters like one dove into everything else---full on with nothing in the way. It is actually kind of refreshing to think about it now. At the time, it was a complete turnoff. And not only because they were women.

It is fascinating that complete social retardation led to Facebook.

But that makes sense, too. A vacuum existed in this guy’s soul. So he filled it.

The movie kind of rambled on and on. It was the nerd-who-would-be-king story. Justin Timberlake, as the creator of Napster and Facebook seeder, came off as an odd duck and he wore too much makeup. Jesse Eisenberg, the lead, was basically a jerk, full-on, but in many ways played the true depiction of the on-the-edge-of-Aspergers types we have all known and loved. He did it very well.

The supporting cast was just fine. The twins were weird. Andrew Garfield was cute.
Fincher directed well.

You could watch this on television. Do so.