Why The Social Network is the best film of the year

Or the decade.

For the simple reason that Facebook---or pisbuk, as some of my colorful acquaintances lovingly call it---has taken control of every aspect of your life.

Even Friendster---that archaic incarnation of all things revolving around the spectrum of social networking has not conjured the kind of rabid following and dependence from people not unlike substance abuse and chain smoking the way Facebook did. I joined it with no real intention of actually spending any time toward it but MY HEROES ABILITY happened and it was all downhill from there. Underestimate the site at your own risk.


Even networking peers like Twitter and MySpace haven't successfully tapped into the collective sensibilities of all types of social strata, culture, and interests of the entire planet. Which makes the guy who came up with Facebook one of the most creative geniuses the human race has ever produced. A broad generalization, but I'm sure many will agree.


And that is what the entire movie was all about. But it was as much a story about Facebook's inception as that of highly talented individuals willing to sell their soul and screw each other over for profit. It's no more than a movie about Facebook than "SAW" is about a handyman tool.


Mark Zuckerberg is not a very likable person; at least if the way he was portrayed in the film and popular media is to be considered. But like most visionaries and innovators, a generous heaping of talent and imagination is apparently balanced by, well, let's just say being a 'people person' is not part of the package. 'Asshole' was a generally agreed-upon trait the guy's detractors were fond of throwing at his direction; and the real person the movie was based upon even went on record with a surprisingly civil statement about only wishing the filmmakers hadn't done a picture about him while he was still alive. Who could blame him? While the movie obviously painted a very 'human' side of the guy, pretty much everything else successfully painted him as an unfeeling and calculating manipulator capable of rivaling any reptilian entity in the planet.


David Fincher (SE7EN, Fight Club) managed to pull off an ambitious subject matter that would have been abysmally catastrophic had it fallen into the wrong hands. That it's a film where dialogue and a few shots of those rare 'Eureka!' moments Zuckerberg had in starting off the soon-to-be gigantic site, his Machiavellian strategies, and his different lawsuits are the only foundations to keep you interested and engaged instead of the kinetic action sequences, sappy teenage love scenes, toilet humor and CGI eye candies that are the staples in crafting movies for an audience who is increasingly devolving into a mass that's adapting the attention span of a housefly.

Another big revelation was Trent Reznor's involvement in the project. Another artist who I am confident can't do anything wrong. From ear-splitting anthems like 'Happiness In Slavery', the eerie soundscapes he did for the sound design of iD Software's Quake, to the gentle and ambient tunes off 1999's The Fragile and 2007's Ghosts I-IV, the guy is a walking incarnation of a modern musical renaissance man. He and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross created the music that enhanced the film's potency. Not that the NIN frontman is a relative newcomer to the film scoring scene; some of the early remixes of songs  from The Downward Spiral was also used in Fincher's SE7EN. And now it looks like Reznor is going to be nominated for the Oscar for this recent project.


Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg, while clearly played to suit the celluloid medium and probably a million times as obnoxious as well as interesting as the real deal, comes off as one of the best anti-heroes to have come out of the last decade. Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is up there with the likes of Travis Bickle, Gordon Gekko and Tony Montana.

Asshole? You bet. 

But he's still a billionaire, and he's the CEO bitch.

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